Today's image from People's Cube
Poor teeth - If you have a mouthful of teeth shaped by a childhood in poverty, don’t go knocking on the door of American privilege
My own teeth are a disaster, and I was never really poor except temporarily. Just bad luck and bad genes
This isn’t a culture anymore. It is a freak show.
The New Sneaky Tactic Gun Control Advocates Are Embracing
A Conservative case for New Urbanism: Conservatism for the City - Beauty, streetcars, and dual codes are the right ideas for urban policy.
Nikon 1200-1700mm Helps French Photogs Capture Hostage Situation from a Safe Distance
Mankind Tired Of Having To Remind Itself Of Good In World
We Don’t Need No (Free) Education - Ultimately, Obama's plan is a bad deal for America, because it will hurt people’s employment opportunities and cost too much.
Dalrymple:
Among the many thousands of my patients, I do not recall one who demanded to know the source of the good aspects of his character. This might be because virtue does not know, or at least proclaim, itself. And, indeed, if someone were to ask the origins of his own good character, we should suspect him of being a Tartuffe or a Pecksniff.
This is not all there is to it, however. We are not inclined to demand an explanation of other people’s goodness, either. For every such enquiry, we ask a thousand times about the origins of other people’s malignity. Our enquiries about the origins of our own malignity are perhaps less frequent, but they are incomparably more frequent, even infinitely more so, than our enquiries about the origins of our own goodness.
On population growth and decline (a reader found this somewhere) - correction, it is from Alan Macfarlane, ‘The Invention of the Modern World’ -
Alan
Macfarlane, ‘The Invention of the Modern World’ - See more at:
http://www.joannejacobs.com/2014/08/dumb-and-dumber-2/#sthash.WvW1G8Hh.dpuf:
Putting it simply, in an embedded peasant economy, when the unit of production and consumption is the family household, it is sensible to have as large a family as possible, to work the land and to protect against risk in sickness and old age. To increase reproduction is to increase production. Yet as Jack Caldwell and others have shown, when the individual becomes integrated into the market, when wealth flows down the generations, when the cost of education and leaving for an independent economic existence on an open market occurs, children become a burden rather than an asset. In other words, capitalistic relations combined with individualism knocks away the basis of high fertility, and if this is combined with a political and legal security so that one does not have to protect oneself with a layer of cousin, the sensible strategy is to have a few children and to educate them well.
A low-pressure demography means that a society avoids the situation where extra resources are automatically absorbed by population expansion. As Malthus argued, the only force strong enough to stand against the biological desire to mate and have children, was the even stronger social desire to live comfortably and avoid poverty.
Some people are surprised that Raùl Castro would act to precipitately in cracking down on Cuban freedom advocates. But why the surprise?
House passes 40-hour workweek for Obamacare; Dems buck Obama veto threat
The U.S. Marines' 5 Most Lethal Weapons of War
We Are Not All Charlie - It is easy to express solidarity with murdered cartoonists, but it is difficult to live as bravely as they did
Not so difficult if you are armed
Boko Haram massacres 2,000 in Nigeria
The Examiner on The NYT:
Elsewhere, in separate statement to Politico, Baquet explained that the New York Times is also trying to avoid offending its Muslim readers: “[L]et's not forget the Muslim family in Brooklyn who read us and is offended by any depiction of what he sees as his prophet.”
“I don't give a damn about the head of [the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] but I do care about that family and it is arrogant to ignore them,” he said
In 1999, the New York Times republished an image of Chris Ofili's “The Holy Virgin Mary,” a painting “with a clump of elephant dung on one breast and cutouts of genitalia from pornographic magazines in the background,” Politico reported.
Nobody is afraid of Christians
Tracked: Jan 11, 09:41