We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
It may come as news to the #MeToo generation, but women have sexual power over men. It's so potent that in some societies (Muslims et al.), it is brutally reined in. This sexual power has to be acknowledged and respected, and it is precisely what civilization arose to hold in check. We're not talking about some playful, casual one-off, but rather the volcanic energies surging deep within the human psyche. As with all powerful natural forces, it can engender great beauty in addition to great savagery.
As a teacher of undergraduates, Ms. Paglia despairs at how “bad it is for young people, filled with fears, to be raised in this kind of a climate where personal responsibility isn’t spoken of.” Since her own youth, she says, college students have devolved from rebels into skittish supplicants, petitioning people in authority to protect them from real life. Young adults are encouraged to look for “substitute parent figures on campus, which is what my generation rebelled against in college. We threw that whole ‘in loco parentis’ thing out.”
All of the candidates’ plans would gut the US economy and lead to soaring energy prices, which would impoverish all of us. In return, their plans would have no measurable effect on the world’s climate. Zero. Nada. Zip.
Cortez’s Svengali-like former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, took an expansive position when discussing the Green New Deal. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” he asked. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
Democrats Blame Global Warming on Meat, Air Travel, and Business at CNN's "Climate Crisis" Town Hall, and Then CNN Airs Ads F the Decline of the Episcopal Church?
A Democrat president inherits a full blanket of media protection that acts like air superiority protecting that president from any effective attack. Entertainers and professors bring in supporting fire like artillery from the hills, ensuring that everyone understands both the Democrat president's greatness and how terrible are his foes.
A Republican president starts on day one with a disloyal bureaucracy, a hostile media seeking to destroy him, and relentless fire from the entire cultural heights. Every day of his presidency is like Groundhog Day when it comes to this dynamic. Instead of his morning starting with "I Got You, Babe" blaring on the radio, it starts with incendiary headlines and stories screaming his villainy.
Within this context, President Trump's counterpunches are a real act of courage.
Inspector General’s Report Exposes Another ‘Collusion’ Myth - The Michael Flynn “thing” President Trump discussed with James Comey in 2017 wasn’t Russian collusion. It was the bogus Logan Act claim.
Mr. Kronman comes down on the side of addition, not subtraction—for building new memorials, not toppling old ones. He’d like more context. But essentially he asks: Why erase history? Why not face it? Are we really “disfigured by emblems of unrighteousness”? Must everything be leveled and scrubbed clean?
He quotes Milan Kundera ’s “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”:
“You begin to liquidate a people by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was.”
"European pride or European self-consciousness depend on the rejection of European history and European civilization! We want nothing to do with the Christian roots and we absolutely want to be perfectly welcoming to Islam".
'I'm Radioactive' - Journalist Jonathan Kaiman is one of the least famous, least powerful men to be brought down by the #MeToo movement. A year later, the fallout continues.
And yet somehow I can still buy a 50" television for $180. There seems to be a disconnect between the reporting and the reality on this topic. Can't imagine why.
Netflix thinks spending lots of cash will result in good entertainment. Disney thinks having good entertainment will result in lots of cash. I know which way I'd bet.
Internet wags make jokes about the NSA spying on everyone. There's a hint of whistling past the graveyard in the humor. If you sense a dreadful thing nearby, but can't quite see it, your mind runs a bit wild, and you resort to nervous laughter to break the spell. The average computer programmer is a mental patient about online tracking, for instance. They're constantly touting the privacy benefits of Linux, whenever they can get their computers to work enough to type a sentence. Microsoft is sending telemetry! I don't know what telemetry is, but it sounds bad! Then they load forty apps on a homing beacon, AKA a smartphone, and pay for everything with it. They follow it up with a demand to be anonymous on their Twitter account.
Everyone's mistaken, or lying, on the internet, sometimes both. There's only one real fear here. People are whistling past the graveyard of obscurity, not Warhollian panopticontroversy. The nameless dread they hold is the fear that the NSA, and every other two-bit news or data aggregator for that matter, doesn't care if they're alive or dead, never mind what they're doing online at 2 AM. Their life is like a children's game from the fifties: Look at me, look at me, look at me, DON'T LOOK AT ME! One, two, three, GREEN LIGHT!
Don't get me wrong. Someone, or more accurately, many someones are tracking your movements, purchases, and daily interests, no matter how trivial, ephemeral and chaotic they are. It goes into huge hadoop hoppers and gets sifted and sold hither and yon to anyone who will pay. It shouldn't happen, but no one ever asks me what should happen, so place the blame somewhere else. Yell your dissatisfaction with tracking into your Amazon Echo, or your Nest thermostat, or your doorbell, or I don't know, maybe your refrigerator.
And what good is all that info? Not much. I know absolutely everything about myself, for instance, but I have no idea what I'm going to do tomorrow. What chance does Acxiom have at figuring it out?
The photo at the top of this post is real, and the subject of the photo really wrote that on the margin, as nearly as I can tell. It's from a fairly notable book of photographs from a fellow named Jim Goldberg. You can find out all sorts of things about Jim Goldberg on the internet, and I think you can still buy this book of photos and captions, even though it was originally published 35 years ago. Look up Countess Viviana de Blonville. All you'll find is see Jim Goldberg.
Is dying alone, unmourned, and unloved made better if it's posted to Facebook? I am beset by doubts. On to today's news!
According to Die Wahrheit über Hänsel und Gretel (The Truth About Hansel and Gretel), the two siblings were, in fact, adult brother and sister bakers, living in Germany during the mid-17th century. They murdered the witch, an ingenious confectioner in her own right, to steal her secret recipe for lebkuchen, a gingerbread-like traditional treat. The book published a facsimile of the recipe in question, as well as sensational photos of archeological evidence.
People believe hoaxes because hoaxes are more interesting than real life. It's voluntary behavior, really. Just a smidgen of reality mixed in with the bosh is all you need to dupe most folks. I've seen fistfights over the last donut in the break room, so killing a crone for a gingerbread recipe wouldn't strike me as far fetched, either.
On Tuesday of this week, one of the more popular underground stores peddling credit and debit card data stolen from hacked merchants announced a blockbuster new sale: More than 5.3 million new accounts belonging to cardholders from 35 U.S. states. Multiple sources now tell KrebsOnSecurity that the card data came from compromised gas pumps, coffee shops and restaurants operated by Hy-Vee, an Iowa-based company that operates a chain of more than 245 supermarkets throughout the Midwestern United States.
If you collect and store sensitive info, you should be required to protect it. Make companies that hoard data take out bonds and insurance to cover all potential liabilities. You need to post bonds to undertake real world construction projects in many cases. Want to build a database instead of a strip mall? What's the difference? Can't wait to see what the number at the bottom of the policy would be for creepy stalkers like Facebook.
Mr. Byrne said in a separate interview that he had met Ms. Butina at a libertarian convention in Las Vegas in 2015. Over the course of their relationship, he said, Ms. Butina spoke increasingly about meeting or seeking to meet people involved in the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, President Trump and others. That, he said, had made him wary. He eventually began communicating with the F.B.I. about his interactions with her.
Remember when CEOs wore short-sleeve dress shirts under their polyester suits and did boring things like turning a profit? Now they're all android people on booster seats in congressional hearings, new-age gurus, and old short-bus James Bond here.
I think male human beings are required by both law and custom to watch the Bullitt car chase at least once in each calendar year, or risk revocation of their man card. Of course you don’t have to watch the whole movie. I can’t even remember what the movie’s about. For all I know, the guys in the Mopar jalopy are Jehovah’s Witnesses, trying to catch up to Bullitt to give him a pamphlet.
" Jalopy" is an entirely underused word. I'm going to go out of my way to say "jalopy" today. Go forth, brethren, and spread the word of jalopy! And watch Bullitt.
In every example, product designers thought they understood the demands of the older market, but underestimated how older consumers would flee any product giving off a whiff of “oldness.” After all, there can be no doubt that personal emergency response pendants are for “old people,” and as Pew has reported, only 35% of people 75 or older consider themselves “old.”
I bought a piece once as a birthday gift for a friend, the actor Paul Newman. Paul had been a 20-year-old rear gunner on a two-man Navy torpedo bomber, training for the invasion of Japan, when the second and third atomic bombs after Trinity exploded over Japan and did their part to end a war that killed more than 60 million human beings. “I was one of those who said thank god for the atomic bomb,” Paul told me ruefully.
Now that's some weapons-grade name dropping. BTW, Fat Man and Little Boy is a good movie, in the parts Paul Newman is in. The parts he isn't in are still technically a movie, I guess. Leslie Groves was the genius in that bunch. Except for Von Neumann, the rest were just really smart plumbers. And Von Neumann isn't in the movie.
An eastern suburbs couple have avoided jail after feeding their toddler a vegan diet that caused her to become so malnourished she didn't have any teeth. NSW District Court judge Sarah Huggett sentenced both of the parents, who also didn't vaccinate the now-three-year-old, to 18-month intensive corrections orders, saying full-time custody would deprive their three children of an "important bond".
The top image is from a 2018 wildfire in Sweden; the bottom is of a wildfire in Montana on August 6, 2000. The most heartbreaking photos being shared are the charred remains of animals, or animals attempting to escape wildfires. Blogger Nathalie Muñoz posted a series of photos about the Amazon rainforest fires. The photo of the monkey crying, holding a smaller monkey, isn't in the Amazon. It was taken in Jabalpur, India, by Avinash Lodhi sometime in April 2016. And the photo of the burned rabbit is from the 2018 wildfire in Malibu, California.
I expect a photo of the charred remains of Hansel and Gretel's victim to show up soon.
The jury’s still out on how the brain really works. But Sarkis Mazmanian, a medical microbiologist at Caltech, thinks the answers to many of the questions we still have about the brain may actually lie further south — in the gut, where trillions of bacteria live. There, these “good” bacteria live peacefully, helping us to break down fiber and absorb nutrients. They are referred to collectively as the gut microbiome. Despite the presence of the blood-brain-barrier (BBB), a tightly regulated border between the brain and circulating blood, the gut and the brain are in constant communication, either through incoming and outgoing nerves, or through small molecules that can pass through the BBB.
When my gut bacteria talks, my wife listens and leaves the room.
Apple updated its support webpage this week to warn customers that some fabrics, such as leather and denim, could cause permanent discoloration to the Apple Card. That damage won’t wash off. Apple also advises against placing the card in a wallet slot that already has a different credit card, so it doesn’t get scratched. And the company says customers should not store their Apple Card in a pocket or bag with loose change, keys or “other potentially abrasive objects.”
Attention Apple users: farting through silk is now mandatory to use their products, not just to afford them.
Starbucks has around $1.6 billion in stored value card liabilities outstanding. This represents the sum of all physical gift cards held in customer's wallets as well as the digital value of electronic balances held in the Starbucks Mobile App.* It amounts to ~6% of all of the company's liabilities. This is a pretty incredible number. Stored value card liabilities are the money that you, oh loyal Starbucks customer, use to buy coffee. What you might not realize is that these balances simultaneously function as a loan to Starbucks. Starbucks doesn't pay any interest on balances held in the Starbucks app or gift cards. You, the loyal customer, are providing the company with free debt.
Hansel and Gretel committed a murder over a coffee and crumble. They were pikers compared to Starbucks
When I was younger, I discovered stoicism. At first I was put off by their slogan, Amor fati, because hey, no fat chicks. Then I dug a little deeper. I got out my Rosetta stone, and translated from Latin into Greek, and then into Demotic, and back into Latin because my cuneiform is pretty rusty, and finally back into English. That's when I discovered Amor fati only tangentially refers to dating plus-size girls. A closer reading of the texts resulted in a truer meaning: "Sh*t happens." I decided right then and there that this was a worldview I could get behind, if not walk behind.
So I'm a stoic now. I'm in good company. Shakespeare said that there was nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Or maybe it was Rodney Dangerfield. In any case, there are a lot of us stoics out there. For instance, often I'll say something extremely stoic, if that's even possible, and people will remark that stoics are really out there.
To get you in the stoic swing, I've decided to invite the granddaddy of all the stoic scribblers, Marcus Aurelius, to weigh in on today's news items.
The film, which may represent Mr. Scorsese’s grandest statement yet on the intersection of organized crime and American politics, is expected to be a strong contender in the 2020 Oscar race. He took his $159 million movie, with Robert De Niro in the lead role, to Netflix after his home studio of recent years, Paramount Pictures, balked at the budget. The full extent of the theatrical rollout remains up in the air. Where, exactly, moviegoers will be able to see “The Irishman” won’t be clear until the discussions between Netflix and select major theater chains end.
"The man who has a house everywhere has a home nowhere"
This year so far, scientists have recorded more than 74,000 fires in Brazil. That's nearly double 2018's total of about 40,000 fires. The current surge marks an 83% increase in wildfires over the same period of 2018, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research reported. The largest state in Brazil, Amazonas, declared a state of emergency on Monday.
"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."
As of August 16, 2019, satellite observations indicated that total fire activity in the Amazon basin was slightly below average in comparison to the past 15 years. Though activity has been above average in Amazonas and to a lesser extent in Rondônia, it has been below average in Mato Grosso and Pará, according to the Global Fire Emissions Database.
"The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject."
A study published in the Journal of Affective Medicine showed that the placebo effect was twice as strong in clinical trials of antidepressants in 2005 when compared to those in 1985. And a similar trend has been spotted in anti-psychotics.
"If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it."
Musk’s greatest skill is in raising capital, but in the past five years that new capital—in excess of $20 billion—has led to greater losses and a much, much more levered balance sheet for Tesla. No value is being created for Tesla shareholders. It’s just a sea of red ink and constant dilution of shareholders and additions of new creditors.
"Never act without purpose and resolve, or without the means to finish the job."
The school, formally known as The Ohio State University, is seeking a trademark on the word "THE" for use on clothing and hats. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the filing was made Thursday. University spokesman Chris Davey confirmed the school had made a trademark submission, saying it was necessary to protect the brand.
"Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, THE ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial"
“It is important for elderly people, who might not be able to do much moderate-intensity activity, that just moving around and doing light-intensity [activity] [will have] strong effects and is beneficial,” said Ulf Ekelund, a professor and first author of the study at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences.
"A wrongdoer is often a man who has left something undone, not always one who has done something."
He has plenty of other problems with Darwinism. The last one he brings up is the (neo-)Darwinian belief that “gene mutations driv[e] macro-evolution.” These can explain changes in existing forms, but not the development of new forms. The mutations are fatal, and the organism dies before it can reproduce. There are no examples of mutations that are not fatal. This Georgia Tech geneticist John F. McDonald calls “the great Darwinian paradox.”
"Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life."
Brissette and Sullivan were found guilty of conspiracy; Brissette was also found guilty of extortion, for illegally pressuring a concert producer to hire members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees union, which supported Mayor Marty Walsh during his first mayoral run. The effort to get a city permit played out during the summer of 2014 — the first year of Walsh’s first term. The concert took place in September 2014. Three days before it took place, concert organizers hired eight union laborers and one foreman, and finally got the permit they needed.
In June, John Donovan, AT&T Communications CEO said their AT&T TV service would “radically reshape what your concept of television is.” This week, the company finally unveiled the service, which was thought to be a streaming version of their DIRECTV service — a fat bundle addressing the market of those who wanted DIRECTV, but couldn’t get the service because there was no line of site. What they unveiled though was everything that people hate about cable and satellite companies — hidden fees, contracts, teaser pricing, channels they don’t need — with the similar bundle that you would get with a $50 Live TV Streaming Service.
"...if a man comes to his fortieth year, and has any understanding at all, he has virtually seen - thanks to their similarity - all possible happenings, both past and to come."
It has more billionaires per capita than anywhere else in the world, but it also has a homeless problem so severe that it rivals some third-world nations. On any given day you can see souped-up Lamborghinis and blinged-out trophy wives in one part of the city, then walk over a few blocks and see piles of human feces, puddles of urine and vomit caked on the sidewalks. The misery of homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction hits deep in San Francisco and has turned parts of a beautiful city into a public toilet.
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Have a modestly successful Thursday, everyone, whether you want to or not. That's how stoics do it. I hope you enjoyed Ol' Mark's take on today's news. Remember, don't get down in the mouth about today's events. To quote the two most famous stoic philosophers:
"Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so." -Marcus Aurelius
"They don't think it be like it is but it do." - Oscar Gamble
The internet used to be sort of useful. I don't think it is anymore.
Maggie's Farm is like the old internet. I loved it. People bored with the usual tripe on TV and the radio could find all sorts of new and interesting viewpoints and useful information on the web. There were a lot of blogs, many of them superb. Politics was way in the back. It's weird, because at this point you can watch a livestream of a skanky girl getting her bumhole tattooed on the internet, but I am here to testify that no one reveals much of anything anymore. People are really guarded about saying anything about themselves. Well, pleasant, sane people are. If you look at an Instagram "influencer" account, there are pictures posted every few minutes, but they're all a put-on. The pictures are ads for a life that isn't being lived, i.e., fake. Everything is search engine optimized, not written. Social media is a list of what other people want you to think they think, like virtual coffee table books no one actually reads.
The internet died when it shifted from desktop computers to phones. Well, that put it on life support. Google killed it dead when they said the only search engine that matters wouldn't rank anything but the mobile version of a website. So the internet became a television broadcast with innumerable bad cable stations, projected on the same porthole-sized screen my grandmother had to watch Uncle Miltie. Ads took the place of all the entertainment, and cradle to grave stalking of the users took the place of ads. And since everyone brings their phone in the bathroom with them, you're even being spied on in there now. Even Nielson families didn't put up with that.
Bird Dog is away at doggie daycare, getting his nails clipped, so you're stuck with me. I hope you all appreciate him when he returns, because he's guarded this friendly little oasis of the old web from all comers, and that is quite an undertaking.
Everything taken together hints at a completely unaccountable executive looting a company that is running as quickly as it can from massive losses that may very well be fatal whenever the next recession hits.
That quote is from a very detailed and incisive analysis of the possible upside of the WeWork IPO. Newsgathering outlets suck at this sort of reporting and analysis now, if they were ever good at it. The linked blog is like the old internet. Filled with useful information and savvy analysis.
In the three months I have had this magical little robot, I’ve collected dozens of videos of underwater wonders… most of which were filmed right off my stern here in the marina, though I use a friend’s dinghy as well as the little Nomadling trimaran to dive in a few other places near Friday Harbor. I’ve gotten to know some of the critters who populate these waters, including the festive Alabaster Nudibranch (“garden slug in drag”), Giant White-Plumed Anemones, and of course Dungeness crabs and shrimp.
My friends and I had an underwater exploration kit. We went out on a skiff, and we shined a high intensity light on the ocean floor as we puttered along. I've heard rumors that you can find lobsters that way, and net them. Of course they would be undersized for the catch regulations, so you would never do such a thing, and then boil them on the beach and eat them. Say, what is the statute of limitations on fishery infractions? I'm asking for a friend.
Software developers, physical therapists and physician assistants crop up frequently among the highest-paid and fastest-growing jobs in every U.S. state, according to a new analysis by CareerBuilder. The site analyzed government data to project the careers most likely to be lucrative and in demand. Most of these jobs require some level of college education.
Scroll down the list. Keep scrolling. Software, nurses, physical therapists, software, nurses, physical therapists. Keep scrolling. Keep scrolling. Ah, Oklahoma. Rotary drill operators. Then back at it; software, nurses, physical therapists, software, nurses, physical therapists...
Gallup’s State of the American Workplace Report found that 43% of employees work remotely at least some of the time. And among those who work remotely at least part of the time, the percent of employees who work remotely 100% of the time is now 20%, up from 15% four years prior. People are increasingly attracted to remote jobs, with 37% saying they would switch to a job that gave them the ability to work off-site at least part of the time.
I was surveyed for this report, but my answer was misconstrued. They asked me if I liked working remotely, and I told them I wasn't remotely working. English is hard.
The NFL and Pluto TV have reached a deal to launch the NFL Channel, a curated library offering, on the ad-supported streaming service. Because Pluto is available free for consumers, much of the programming on its 150-plus networks approximates but does not duplicate what pay-TV subscribers get via the traditional bundle. That means the NFL Channel will not mirror the NFL Network, which has evolved into a well-distributed staple in the league’s media portfolio. Instead, according to the official launch release, the new initiative will be dedicated to “celebrating the NFL’s iconic and classic moments spanning over a decade of past seasons.”
I'd rather watch old football games than new ones anyway. Football players have gotten tiresome.
According to local Hong Kong media reports, Beijing authorities asked Hogg to hand over a list of Cathay Pacific employees who had taken part in the recent anti-extradition bill protests in Hong Kong. Instead of betraying his employees and endangering their safety, he only provided a list of one name -- his own.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is leadership. He lost his job, by the way. Bet he finds another one.
But while some members of MI5, Britain’s counter-espionage service, were whiling away their spare moments in May 1944 by doing the Telegraph Crossword, they noticed that vital code-names that had been adopted to hide the mightiest sea-borne assault of all time, appeared in the crossword. They noticed that the answer to one clue, ‘One of the USA’, turned out to be Utah, and another answer to a clue was Omaha. These were the names given by the Allies to the beaches in Normandy where the American Forces were to land on D-Day. Another answer that appeared in that month’s crossword was Mulberry. This was the name of the floating harbour that was to be towed across the Channel to accommodate the supply ships of the invasion force.
Minorly fascinating story about the perils of coincidence. I'm trying to picture what would happen to the crossword author nowadays. What's a ten-letter word for a detention camp, starting with "G" ?
By now, accumulating evidence suggests that in many mammals, Lyme bacteria can persist after treatment with antibiotics—leading more scientists to wonder if the bacteria can do the same in humans. In 2012, a team led by the microbiologist Monica Embers of the Tulane National Primate Research Center found intact B. burgdorferi lingering for months in rhesus macaques after treatment. Embers also reported that the macaques had varying immune responses to the infection, possibly explaining why active bacteria remained in some. The study drew criticism from figures in the IDSA establishment; in their view it failed to prove that the bacteria remained biologically active.
You know, if keep writing articles about persistent Lyme disease, it might eventually be more popular with internet hypochondriacs than Morgellons, vaccine-induced autism, and fibromyalgia put together.
Tesla has installed solar panels at more than 240 Walmart locations, but lawyers for the retailer write in the complaint that “the occurrence of multiple fires involving Tesla’s solar systems is but one unmistakable sign of negligence.” Walmart alleges in the suit that Tesla didn’t ground its systems properly, that the solar panels installed at Walmart sites were defective, and that Tesla didn’t keep proper documentation of the systems.
Tesla builds cars in a tent. You bought solar panels from them. Negligence? A pointed finger often identifies two malefactors.
Capitalizing on the zigzagged signals from those decades-old nuclear explosions, John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Southern California, now has the latest estimate for this rate. In a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters, he reports that the inner core likely inches along just faster than Earth’s surface. If his rate’s right, it means that if you stood on a spot at the Equator for one year, the part of the inner core that was previously beneath you would wind up under a spot 4.8 miles away.
If you stand on a spot on the Equator for one year, you're the one doing something weird. Leave the Earth out of it
King has been married eight times to seven different women, including Alene Akins, whom he married and divorced twice. In addition to his sons with Shawn, the veteran TV and radio host has three other children.
With this many people involved, under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988, I believe Larry needs to provide a 60 calendar-day notice of any layoffs.
An outbreak of coffee leaf rust, caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix, hit the celebrated coffee-producing region in 2012, and by 2014 it had infected the entire farm. That year El Valle harvested a meager 28,000 pounds of coffee, an 80 percent drop. The next harvests were even smaller. With the lowest coffee prices in a dozen years, reviving the farm has been deeply challenging.
So, prices are too low, because there's a coffee glut. But coffee rust will ruin harvests, which will lower supply, so prices will rise. Well, I've solved that problem. I'm going to use my great big invisible hand to make a pot of joe now.
Sometimes I think that the impression the newspaper is trying to give you is the opposite of reality. There's all this stuff right out front in the news, but the shadow of reality is visible if you squint really hard. The newspaper is what they want you to think. Well, it's Tuesday, and I don't feel like thinking much at all, which is fine. All the bad news that they don't want you to talk about is released on Friday afternoon, late-ish, and all the made up news they wanted to gull you with is released on Monday in the AM, so we're all clear today. We can talk about trivial stuff, like popular music or vice-presidents. The Guardian is cooperating nicely with our Tuesday timetable with their listicle The 30 best films about music, chosen by musicians.
Hmm. The Guardian isn't shy about putting scare quotes on regular nouns used by their political opponents, but they missed an opportunity to put them around the word "musicians." I assume their longer, first-draft title, Crabby Opinions About Pop Culture from the Only "Musicians" Who Were Awake Before 4 PM and Replied To My Last-Minute HARO Bleg, was too long for proper search engine optimization. The author of this list seems to think we've entered "an uncommonly busy period, if not a flat-out golden age" of "movies about musicians, whether biopics, fictions or documentaries." I don't think so, and their list backs up my opinion, not theirs. It's a bad list, and they should feel bad.
The good news: This Is Spinal Tap is on the list. The bad news: So is a documentary about Wham! I guess even a blind squirrel finds a nut from time to time. The rest of the list is awful, and incoherent, in a very particular, modern way. Any pop culture list is bound to linger on recent things, but the list isn't limited to the last decade. If you say "best," you should know a little history. To the target audience, history began when they were in Pampers. Everything before that was a dark time, when everyone's behavior was suitable only for apologies and reparations. One hardy soul takes a stab at history by mentioning the Woodstock movie, but that's likely because they've heard there's a Woodstock movie, not because they've seen it. Sha Na Na played at Woodstock. That's all you need to know about the event.
Right off the top of my head, why wouldn't someone mention:
A Hard Day's Night
Coal Miner's Daughter
The Harder They Come
Standing in the Shadows of Motown
Muscle Shoals
The Blues Brothers
Love and Mercy
Gimme Shelter
Bah, I'm arguing with fools. Feel free to add any I've forgotten to comments section. On to the news!
“What makes a solid tech stock?” may be one of the most important questions an investor can answer. Over the last decade, tech companies started to penetrate the top ten list of global companies by market cap. Today, tech dominates this list with Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Alibaba. Not all tech stocks are winners, of course, with IBM and Yahoo flatlining over the past decade and Cisco unable to reclaim its valuation from nearly twenty years ago.
IBM and Yahoo had something in common besides dismal performance. We're not allowed to notice it, however, so we won't.
Between 1975 and 1995, the National Liberation Front of Corsica struck Corsica’s electrical system on multiple occasions, according to a report issued by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. In the Philippines, the Communist New People’s Army, the Moro National Liberation Front, and the Abu Sayyaf group all attacked the electrical grid. And in South Africa, a military wing of the African National Congress carried out multiple attacks on electrical stations during the apartheid regime.
The National Liberation Front of Corsica? Corsica had terrorists? Corsica has electricity?
Carmakers are now hoping to use the same subscription service model that tech firms use. They supply you with access to a new car, and take care of insurance, maintenance, and mileage. Some services will let you swap one car for another on a regular basis. These subscription deals may appeal to a new generation of drivers who aren’t used to owning much of anything. They’re accustomed to paying for lots of things like housing, transportation, communication, and entertainment on a subscription basis. Why not cars?
Seem more like the subscription service model used by Rent-a-Center for crack house couches than SaaS for useless chat apps. Anyway, for some reason, I'm reminded of Johnny Cash's song One Piece at a Time.
WeWork, which says in the offering document that its corporate mission is no less than to "to elevate the world's consciousness," is on track to lose $2.7 billion this year from its operations, up from nearly $1.7 billion last year. The company's revenue in the first six months of the year nearly doubled from last year's first half, to $1.5 billion. The company said its losses rose just 10% from a year ago, but that includes a $470 million non-operating, and likely non-recurring, gain. Exclude that, and losses from the We Company, which says it will trade under the ticker symbol "WE," rose 60%.
All tech IPOs are now Ponzi schemes being palmed off on the stock market before the music stops. This one is especially silly. And stop comparing them to Amazon, article writers. Amazon made a profit right away, but dumped the money back into expansion continually, mostly to avoid taxation. Borrowing money over and over isn't the same thing.
Washington University paleoanthropologist Erik Trinkaus and his colleagues studied fossils, digital scans, photographs, and other archaeologists' reports from 77 Neanderthals and Homo sapiens who lived in Europe and Asia during the Pleistocene. Based on this sampling of remains with preserved inner ear bones, a surprising number of Neanderthals were running around Pleistocene Eurasia with swimmer's ear.
This is a question that's been on my mind for a long time, said no one ever.
Le Mans is one of those races that people who have never seen an auto race know about. It’s been immortalized in a bunch of movies. It’s always nifty to see the cars pass through the Dunlop rubber rainbow, and dodge the regular traffic and bicycles on the road on a non-race day. Driver Mike Hawthorne strapped on about a hundred pounds of microphone to give us some idea of what it’s like to buzz around the track.
It was my first time living in America, and like many people who move to a new country, I found that my perception of the United States didn't exactly line up with reality. As it turned out, several aspects of US culture, from food to transportation to nightlife, were different than I had imagined. And in some cases, those differences left me disappointed.
Oh dear, we've disappointed an aesthete from an prisoner-organ-harvesting paradise. A more even-handed appraisal than the headline sounds. And of course even patriotic souls like me have to acknowledge that the United States is the worst country in the world, except for all the others.
Few men in America are as popular among American men as Joe Rogan. It’s a massive group congregating in plain sight, and it’s made up of people you know from high school, guys who work three cubicles down, who are still paying off student loans, who forward jealous-girlfriend memes, who spot you at the gym. Single guys. Married guys. White guys, black guys, Dominican guys. Two South Asian friends of mine swear by him. My college roommate. My little brother. Normal guys. American guys.
I can explain it. He's just a Rush Limbaugh who votes straight Democrat on the way home from the Crossfit gym.
The Bugatti Centodieci goes from 0 to 62 mph in 2.4 seconds. It can reach 186 mph in 13.1 seconds. That’s thanks to a W16 engine (basically two V8s) that produces a chest-thumping, spine-bruising 1,600 horsepower. Bugatti electronically limits its top speed to 236 mph, because it doesn’t want you going too crazy. After all, this car costs $8.9 million—before taxes.
Well, it's a bad day all around. For you, I mean. I'm swell. You have to face the work and worry that Monday brings with it, and you have to face it without Bird Dog. He's at the vet again, so you're stuck with me, Roger de Hauteville. We get Bird Dog de-wormed every year, because we love him so, and love to take care of him. Of course we don't bring him to be de-wormed until after fishing season is over, because worms are expensive. We're not made of stone, but we're not made of money, either. On to today's links.
In the early twentieth century, a horse named Clever Hans was believed to be capable of counting and other mental tasks. The psychologist Oskar Pfungst confirmed that Clever Hans was in fact recognizing and responding to minute, unintentional postural and facial cues of his trainer or individuals in the crowd.
Do tell. File this one under: Educated persons discovering common sense by accident. Hasn't anyone in academia ever heard of the effect of a shill before? They seem to understand the concept just fine when they're disrupting televised town hall meetings. Hi, I'm just a concerned citizen...
So I designed an elaborate, weeklong wedding proposal that included a writing class, rock climbing and a party at an urban winery. After Ilse said yes, she moved into what is now our condo, bringing her cat, Dori, who became fast friends with Dusty, napping together and sharing food. My goal was to marry in June so Ilse could reclaim that month with a fond memory. I asked Dusty to be in my wedding party. “Maybe he can tie my tie,” I thought. Ilse and I registered for small appliances and dishes. Everything changed.
In case you're wondering, Dusty is a dog. The New York Times new slogan should be: All the solipsism that's fit to print.
Archaeologists have uncovered a trunk at Pompeii containing a vast variety of fascinating objects that may have been part of a 'sorcerer's treasure trove'. The objects include crystals, amber and amethyst stones, buttons made of bones, beetles from the orient, amulets, dolls, bells, fists, a tiny skull - and even miniature penises. Experts say the objects may have been used in rituals for fertility, seduction, or to seek good omens for a birth or pregnancy, although they stress that this is just a theory.
Ah, the Daily Mail. The newspaper put that last word in their headline in all caps, not me. Like a good fisherman, they know how to jiggle the bait. But I doubt that the miniature trouser snake angle will prove out in the body of the article. I've read Under the Tuscan Sun, and several other books about women with turkey necks moving to Italy, and it's not the miniature kind they're looking for, or discovering there. Try farther east.
Scientists are still analysing the data to confirm the exact size of the two objects, but initial findings indicate the very strong likelihood of a black hole enveloping a neutron star. The final results are expected to be published in scientific journals. "Scientists have never detected a black hole smaller than five solar masses or a neutron star larger than about 2.5 times the mass of our Sun," Professor Scott said. "Based on this experience, we're very confident that we've just detected a black hole gobbling up a neutron star.
I knew a man who liked to tell people that they weren't really sitting on a chair, when they sat on a chair. He'd exclaim that the matter in their body and the matter in the chair repelled each other at the atomic level, so in reality, they were actually hovering above the chair, not sitting on it. I threw an apple at his head once, to remind him that only Isaac Newton matters to regular people. I wonder if I want to throw an apple at Professor Scott?
Adding to an already ridiculously long list of complaints, now Facebook’s content moderators say a higher-up asked company-appointed counselors to share information from their sessions, according to a new report from the Intercept. Numerous investigations have described this workforce as notoriously underpaid and overworked in crappy working conditions that require them to scan through some of the most disturbing posts the internet can offer. You know, all the things it might behoove someone to see a therapist about.
At the bottom of this article, you'll find a handy Facebook tracking beacon, er, I mean share button. You know, for your convenience.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX also plans to launch a constellation of internet-beaming satellites, as does Amazon. There may eventually be more than one satellite network competing to offer broadband internet around the world this way. The impact this could have on employment is staggering.
The author is an Elon Musketeer, so I have my doubts. Especially since I understand that the intent and effect of the internet, however delivered, is to turn ten good jobs into one crappy one. Or one good job into ten crappy ones, if you're Uber. It's a fair tradeoff though, because instead of any silly benefits like a retirement fund or health insurance, there's foosball and smoothie bars in the WeWork office for the winners.
SoftBank Group is leaning on its employees, including Chief Executive Masayoshi Son, for cash as the firm rushes to raise an ambitious technology fund amid volatile markets. The Japanese company plans to lend up to $20 billion to its employees to buy stakes in its second giant venture-capital fund, people familiar with the matter said. Son may account for as much as $15 billion of that amount, some of the people said.
Hmm. This is quite the development. Why back in my day, you whippersnappers, we kept our money laundering to ourselves. Now they issue a press release.
Family members have previously revealed to DailyMail.com that Griffin has a history of drug abuse and drug addiction, and had recently been panhandling in New York to survive. Jason Griffin, his brother, explained to DailyMail.com that the 26-year-old had been homeless and mentally ill and believes his actions may have been 'a cry for help'.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. And the going is most definitely getting weird.
A majority of economists predict that the economy will lapse into a recession either next year or in 2021. In a survey set to be released Monday by the National Association for Business Economics, 38% respondents said they believe the country will face a recession in 2020 and 34% said they think the start date for a recession will be a bit later, in 2021, the Associated Press reported.
For some reason, this reminds me of the signs you once saw painted on the walls in tawdry barrooms: Free Beer Tomorrow
Twitter has caught itself in a propaganda war after it was found running ads from China’s state-backed media outlet Xinhua News attacking the Hong Kong protesters. The promoted tweets (aka ads) — which were captured on social bookmarking site Pinboard — talk about how the escalating violence in the territory has “taken a heavy toll on social order,” while some others were about Hong Kong citizens allegedly calling China is “our motherland.”
When will people learn that social media is only for fake viral propaganda, not paid propaganda. The ads are strictly reserved for selling T shirts with anti-Trump slogans. Sheesh.
Well, that's the news roundup for Monday. Don't let current events get you down. Go about your business, and have a nice day. But if I were you, I wouldn't bring any rice cookers onto the NYC subway today. The bomb sniffing dogs are bound to be getting unintentional postural and facial cues from just about everyone, not just their handlers today.
Some time ago, I noted the irreconcilable difference between the Left and the rest of America: the majority of our fellow citizens believe America is an inherently good nation that continues its pursuit of a more perfect union; the Left believes America is an inherently evil nation that must be transformed fundamentally into an oppressive socialist state—at best.
For the Left to win this existential argument, it must distort and revile America’s history to destroy the truth of American Exceptionalism. If the past is evil, the present has no choice but to reject America’s history and its defenders; and to embrace the dishonest leftist ideology and the agenda of those who loathe America.
Does guzzling diet soda 
Photo from a friend in Denver 
Photo: Mile 8 of Gwynnie's 11 mile driveway in the Sierras this week
AVI: 
