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's good to be back in the land of Dunkin Donuts. The Scots are tea-drinkers. Well, tea, ale, and whisky drinkers. You can't get a cup of coffee until, at the very earliest, 7:30. Utterly unacceptable. Europeans do not seem to be early-risers.
Many thanks to our occasional (too-occasional) contributor Roger de Hauteville, the one-time Viking King of Sicily, for his unique morning links over recent days. Roger has a gift. Now back to my usual.
Seriously, when I read the transcript of Trump’s speech yesterday, I thought it was pretty ordinary stuff. The American president saying Western civilization is good and worth defending? This is controversial? And as I’ve said a couple of times in this space, it’s eye-rolling to hear Donald Trump talk about the importance of strong families and strong values. Still, if you’re going to go to pieces every time a politician says something hypocritical, you’ll never be able to get out of bed in the morning.
I need a funny quote about Saturday. I have to paste something in here. You fine readers deserve more than just a few links to digital fishwrap. You merit inspiration. You're worthy of something stimulating. The day itself warrants an attaboy.
Quotes about Saturday are thin on the ground, however. It's the day of rest of days. Saturday is for putting on go to hell pants and painting the fence. Mucking out plugged gutters off rickety stepladders. Going to the dump. Wags and deep thinkers alike have given Saturday a pass. The Saturday sojourn of sol across the firmament just doesn't move the apothegmatic meter.
I say no! Saturday must get its due. Let's see what we can find to tickle our Saturday intellect, and send us to the transfer station with a spring in our step:
Most of the time you're too busy to think about it. But every now and then you say, "I work at 'Saturday Night Live,' and that is so cool. -- Tina Fey
No, it isn't.
Satire is what closes on Saturday night. -- George S. Kaufman
See: Fey, Tina.
I'm blessed by the fact I only need five hours of sleep on a daily basis. I do tend to regard Saturday and Sunday as work days. -- David Rubinstein
David strikes me as the kind of person who mentions his SAT scores to everyone he meets, even though he's 54. I don't know about you, but I'm not inspired by this quote. I don't want to add any weekend toil to the good, solid, fourteen hours of work I perform during the week. Let's move on.
Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath. -- Lyndon Johnson
Oh, dear. Old Lyndon Baines wasn't exactly Cicero, was he? I get the impression that this quote is an adulteration of a quote from Lady Bird Johnson, "Lyndon, every man has a need for a Saturday night bath, whether he's president or not."
I enjoy Saturday night racing. -- Dale Earnhardt
Sorry Dale, but by Friday afternoon, I feel as though I've hit a wall.
Wait, that came out wrong. Never mind. Forget the whole thing. Here are the Saturday links. You're on your own for inspiration:
More good dad goodness. Now that I think of it, Saturday is a dad kind of day. I can guarantee that this dad gets comped at Disney five times over. The video is more viral than the doorknob at an Ebola clinic.
A worthy topic, and the article isn't entirely fanciful or stupid. There's no way the surveys aren't skewed to the boneheaded side of the ledger. This fellow seems to think Generation Z are all Bernie supporters, face painters, and sign holders. Not hardly. Let me sum up the generational divide from my personal experience. Millennials have wasted their useful working and reproductive lives with childish agitation and untenable social and work situations. They're already toast if they haven't cashed out their failed startup stock options. Generation Z has learned to be circumspect, won't answer surveys, don't like Millennials, and will make Eisenhower look leftist.
Anecdata: I was in the phone store on Wednesday. I had to choose a phone to go along with my new plan. I said, "Anything but Apple." Clerk said, "Everyone says that now."
By gad that webpage is a nightmare. Self-playing video that follows you around. Sidebar picture of a woman who got her makeup done at a funeral parlor hectoring you to change three sentences on your LinkedIn page to go from dumpster diving to six figures, and Jeff Bezos smiling or having a stroke, I can't tell the difference with him. You have to wade ten paragraphs in to find out anything important:
Those considered out of the labor force declined by 170,000 to 94.8 million while the labor force increased by 361,000 to 160.1 million.
People who have been shut out of the labor market since Nancy Pelosi hove into view are getting jobs again. It makes me happy to hear of it.
Everyone pretends to be angry at the airlines, but it's the TSA they hate, but don't have the nerve to confront. Making people who fight with flight crews and police into celebrities encourages more of that sort of thing. This guy probably thinks he'll be on Oprah next week, sitting next to Gloria Allred, and clutching big checks from the airline and the company that makes Ambien. I have my doubts.
DeVry University has agreed to a $100 million settlement in connection to ads federal officials said misled students about their job and earning prospects.
Oklahoma City Police Department reports show that Whyte and another man were in the living room of an apartment in the 1400 block of NW 16 Street when they began arguing if Star Wars or Star Trek was better. The victim told police he became frustrated and stated "You're just a trick" before walking back to his room.
Surprisingly, the combatants weren't pasty, obese neckbeards wearing trilbys and My Little Pony tee shirts.
The Maggie's Farm editor ate my homework. It does that once out of every five tries or so. It keeps me guessing in the most piquant fashion. The Maggie's Farm computer console is hooked up by a leather strop to the hub of Bird Dog's Farmall, and sometimes, if the humidity is high, the belt slips. Oh well. You'll have to skip my scintillating insights for today, and just read the boring old newspapers:
But aren’t there any supercomputers that don’t require this much energy to run? Indeed there are: The human brain is a great example – its processing power is estimated at about 38 petaflops, about two-fifths of that of TaihuLight. But all it needs to operate is about 20 watts of energy. Watts, not megawatts! And yet it performs tasks that – at least up until now – no machine has ever been able to execute.
Your brain is 2/5ths as powerful as the most powerful computer ever built. It's not your brain's fault you use it to watch pro wrestling and worry about vaccines and autism. You could be doing something useful with it.
This is an instance not of judicial activism, but of judicial populism. It is, albeit in clotted legal language, a pandering to popular, or at least very common, notions of causation, such that where two notable events take place in close temporal proximity, it stands to reason that the first must have caused the second. We are not far from the Azande belief that no death is natural, and each death is caused by malign witchcraft.
Theodore Dalrymple is one of maybe five intelligent persons currently writing for the internet.
The GPS measurements in the Taupo volcanic zone reveal that it is widening east-west at a rate of 6-15 millimetres per year - in other words, the region, overall, is expanding, as we anticipated from our previous geological understanding. But it was surprising to discover that, at least for the past 15 years, a roughly 70-kilometre stretch is undergoing strong horizontal contraction and is also rapidly subsiding, quite the opposite of what one might anticipate.
Real scientists observe things and ask questions. Fake scientists make pronouncements and ask for edicts. This is real science.
In the interview Eno confesses that “Roxy Music was an aberration in my life” and also intriguingly asserts that he has never owned a copy of the Velvet Underground’s third album because he does not want to spoil it by overplaying it. But the most startling portion of the interview comes towards the end, when he describes an illicit art adventure he experienced three years earlier, in 1990, when he decided to pee in Marcel Duchamp’s famous “ready-made” from 1917, a urinal with the title “Fountain” bestowed upon it.
So he stopped his car, pulled out his medium-format camera, and took a few photos using color Fujifilm. Those brilliant greens and pure blues were totally unedited when O’Rear uploaded them to Corbis, a stock photo and image licensing site founded by Bill Gates. A few years later, he got a call from Microsoft asking to use his shot of Sonoma County as the default background for its newest operating system.
How a grape blight resulted in the most famous photograph of all time.
High-end consumers are shifting toward fresher items with fewer processed ingredients while cost-conscious shoppers are buying inexpensive store brands. The makers of staples including Chef Boyardee canned pasta and Hamburger Helper meal kits failed to spot the threat and didn’t innovate in time.
Got that? Hamburger Helper is too hoity toity for poor people now.
Dramatic photos showed helmeted officers battling to keep order after 100,000 protesters poured into the city for their 'Welcome To Hell' protest against the meeting of world leaders. Police say they repeatedly asked a group of demonstrators to remove their masks and hoods but instead officers were hit with bottles and bricks - breaking the window of a riot van.
It's agitprop. Posing. The police pretend to police while the rioters wreck stuff. The world has raised an entire generation of Wild Ones: What are you protesting? What have you got?
The Hawaii Attorney General's Office noted after the ruling that the district court did not address the substance of either party's arguments and instead focused on the procedural question about which court is the appropriate forum to decide the issue.
The nonsensical rulings are over. Not because the judges have gotten religion. They just know they'll be overturned and they'll look like fools. To paraphrase Jennifer Cavalleri, Gorsuch means never having to say you're sorry.
Called the Panda Power Plant, it will be able to produce 3.2 billion kilowatt-hours of solar energy in 25 years, according to the company. That will eliminate approximately million tons of coal that would have been used to produce electricity, reducing carbon emissions by 2.74 million tons.
Goofy projects deserve a goofy design, I guess. If arithmetic isn't your strong suit, coal costs maybe $40 a ton. It cost 55 million dollars to build a solar array to avoid buying 40 million dollars-worth of coal.
She said: "When you use antibiotics to treat infections like a normal sore throat, this mixes with the Neisseria species in your throat and this results in resistance." Thrusting gonorrhoea bacteria into this environment through oral sex can lead to super-gonorrhoea.
Super Gonorrhoea? They'll probably make him into a Marvel superhero in the next edition.
After making contact with the woman, Devine loaded the scooter in his patrol car and gave her a ride home. Vehicles such as Amigos cannot operate on the expressway safely since they are unable to maintain the minimum speed limit of 45 mph. Most mobility scooters cannot travel faster than 5 miles per hour.
It was kind to help her out instead of citing her.
The four teenagers “will not be arraigned for at least six months,” Judge Robert Welsh III said on Wednesday. He agreed to delay the arraignments while the four attend a program for first-time offenders.
First-time offenders? What does that mean? They were all virgins? There's a program? Back in my day my friends just slapped me on the back and said attaboy.
The world is moving strongly into a period of hostile takeovers.
For the purposes of our discussion, a hostile takeover is the subversion of an existing power structure from its current owners without shooting. I'll skip questions of merit. Deserve's got nothing to do with it, according to William Munny, the famous philosopher. Of course that line is a hostile takeover itself, from Lawrence of Arabia:
Lawrence: Tell the politicians to burn their paper now.
Allenby: Fair enough.
Lawrence: Fair? What's fair got to do with it? It's going to happen.
Sexual harassment lawsuits in the tech industry are a minor form of hostile takeover, for instance. Tech businesses were founded on circumventing established laws and customs by simply putting an http in front of your name. It worked for a while. They created nothing. They were hostile takeovers of existing power structures. They ignored laws and customs to get between the customer and the providers of goods and services they desire, as surely as Paulie in Goodfellas did to the restaurant and the patrons. Tech titans don't understand business much. That's why they're in charge of great affairs, but still sitting through TED talks about the productivity gains they'll enjoy by sorting their intellectual crayons by color. Their businesses are now big and established enough to be pillaged in turn, however, and the lady lawyers will have them, easy. They looked at my client funny, your honor. Make her CEO. You wouldn't look at Joe Pesci funny, and he's a walk in the park compared to any given woman in an office setting. I don't care. Uber run by Yahoo management doesn't bother me.
On a larger scale, shooting wars don't accomplish much anymore. Assad fights because he's weak, not because he's strong, for instance. If you order your affairs correctly, opportunities for plunder fall in your lap. People who are fighting are generally proxies of obscure power syndicates. For the most part, the world is a being ruled by syndicates. Gangster states. China is a syndicate. Russia is a syndicate. Their outward forms do not reveal their inner power structure. You simply watch what they do to identify what they're driving at. Russia wants a port on the Black Sea. They will keep the Crimea. That's not fair, say the Ukrainians. Fair? What's fair got to do with it? It's going to happen.
It appears that America is being run by a syndicate. There was a hostile takeover by an outsider who understood a proxy battle. The in crowd is attempting to put humpty dumpty back together again by any means they can muster. Looking for a head for this hydra is a waste of time. They do not need marching orders. They simply understand, as a group, that power is slipping away from them, so they might as well go all in, because if they don't, they'll be on the outside. You know, in the dreaded private sector.
They believe they deserve to run the United States, and signal their merit to rule by a series of categorical blandishments they swap with each other. They're a fraternity without Greek letters on the front. They don't think it's fair that they devoted their lives to the nomenklatura career track, only to have their skillset made superfluous by an outsider.
What's fair got to do with it? It's either going to happen, or it isn't.
The article's author inexpertly tries to flip the script back to: No one went to Trump's inauguration. He's not popular. There's 2500 words of foot stamping, and then a very interesting item I'd missed:
A White House official confirmed on Tuesday that part of Trump's globally televised speech will focus on energy issues, a reference to the Three SeAs Initiative meant to unite a dozen central European countries in a north-south economic alliance that will weaken Russia's regional power.
If that map at the top of this page looks like a nothingburger to you, you're not paying attention. I have found myself, completely by accident, doing business with businesses in three of the green countries, and the Ukraine, too. That's where the action is. Trump knows where the action is. His wife is Slovenian, after all, and she looks like she's still ready for action.
I think it is telling that most psychologists don’t seem to be able to recognize data patterns that are too large to be caused by psychological mechanisms. There are simply no plausible psychological effects that are strong enough to cause the data pattern in the hungry judges study. Implausibility is not a reason to completely dismiss empirical findings, but impossibility is.
Ah, statistics. Did you know that 94.73 percent of statistics are made up on the spot?
An empire like Byzantium does not last for a thousand years without its own share of political intrigue. Here are three accounts of murder told by medieval chroniclers in vivid detail, in which the plot did not go as smoothly as the conspirators hoped, but in end resulted with a new emperor on the throne.
Kathy Griffin and James Comey seen furiously taking notes.
Independent analysts told History the photo appears legitimate and undoctored. Shawn Henry, former executive assistant director for the FBI and an NBC News analyst, has studied the photo and feels confident it shows the famed pilot and her navigator.
Ooh. Independent analysts. I love those. They're better than anonymous sources. Did they prove that Amelia refused to show up for her physical in the Texas Air National Guard, too? I'm asking for a friend. Alright, alright, I'm asking for Dan Rather.
Davila said that plaintiffs could have taken steps to keep their browsing histories private, for example by using the Digital Advertising Alliance’s opt-out tool or using “incognito mode”, and failed to show that Facebook illegally “intercepted” or eavesdropped on their communications. “Facebook’s intrusion could have easily been blocked, but plaintiffs chose not to do so,” said Davila, who dismissed an earlier version of the five-year-old case in October 2015.
"Can" is not le mot juste. Does, and will be allowed to continue to do so, is more like it. The judge's reasoning is piquant: Did you see the way the plaintiff was dressed online? They were asking for it.
Volvo will only offer electrified powertrains in models that it launches starting in 2019, a move that signals its intention to phase out the internal combustion engine from its lineup, the automaker said Wednesday.
Younger people increasingly want more egalitarian relationships in which men and women can both pursue their careers and share household duties. But career pursuits have won the battle for the last decade or so, while starting or growing families has taken a backseat on a mass scale.
I see the kamikaze ethos is alive and well in the land of the rising sun.
“They’re not hard to pick out at the end stage,” Dr. Zabel said. “They have a vacant stare, they have a stumbling gait, their heads are drooping, their ears are down, you can see thick saliva dripping from their mouths. It’s like a true zombie disease.”
I could never figure out if Christopher Plummer was any good. He's been a fixture in movies I like to watch for a long time. He wouldn't get carved into any cinematic Mount Rushmores or anything, but he was always hanging around. He's more important than a That Guy in the movies, but I have trouble picturing people plunking down the shekels because his name was above the fine print on the poster.
He was Kipling and Arthur Wellesley and Rommel to good effect. He flounced around as Commodus pretty well in The Fall of the Roman Empire. The Sound of Music was approximately the most successful movie ever made, so it looks good on a resume, but he was just a bright moon in Julie Andrews' orbit in that one. The Battle of Britain is movie worth rewatching, but he's hardly the star of it. And no one pays any attention to anyone else when Peter Sellers is eating the scenery, so his turn in the Pink Panther series is also a secondary one. He and Cato have to fight it out for second place.
I got the impression he takes himself pretty seriously. Or, perhaps, wants us to take him seriously. That can be deadly. It leads to Charlton Heston trying to do Julius Caesar (shudder). Plummer has also declaims Shakespeare, but only in places where Canadian pigeons act as critics, so I have no idea to what effect. He's Canadian himself, and they ladle awards and titles all over him, but I don't know if that matters. They give statues out at random these days, based on a virtue-signalling order I can't bother to figure out.
So I get this movie Barrymore. It's a more-or-less one-man-play set to celluloid. Plummer is John Barrymore, a famous actor you never heard of if you're under the age of 93. Anyway, it's Barrymore ten minutes before his liver became an insuperable sea anchor. Washed up, bank account hoovered by Hoover and alimony. A man who made a bundle in bad movies, got serious about his work, and became a formidable Shakespearean stage actor. The movie is just Barrymore, wandering an empty stage with a reader offstage to give him cues. He wants to do Richard III, one last time, but he has to prove to some backers that he can still find the lines in the fog of his alcoholism. He still needs the work, every which way.
So Plummer plays Barrymore, a man born to a stage family, who works in Hollywood for dough and entree to the high life, but who wants to be taken seriously. Plummer has a chair or two, a drinks cart, a rack of costumes, and a basket of swords and flyswatters to work with, and a man in the canyon of the curtains to yell something back when he yells LINE! That's it. Plummer has to conjure up a man, bigger than life, then make him small, and somehow resurrect the greatness in fits and starts. He has to cook envy and pity for the audience on a hobo stove while they wait.
Identity thieves don't honor HIPAA rules? And an obese clerk with Mary Tyler Moore clothes and Post-It notes all over her monitor isn't good at safeguarding your medical records? I'm shocked. This is my shocked face.
I have no desire to mock our British brethren on Independence Day. They are required by their circumstances to live on a pile of rocks and peat in the North Atlantic. We got the amber waves of grain. No sense rubbing it in. I'm not sure they'd acknowledge the slight. I imagine the reaction in Old Blighty at the occasion of the original Brexit was a shrug. The who, with the what now, where, has declared independence? Does that mean Lord Cornwallis will be back for the season in London? Jolly good!
The very idea that the United States would hold a grudge against England over the War of Independence seems odd to the modern American. There are plenty of European countries in line for mockery before we skip on down to the Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Scots-Irish-Welsh-Cornish-Manx-Chav conglomerate. Personally, I'd heap derision on, oh, I don't know -- Luxembourg -- before I'd mention Merry Olde. I mean, honestly, Luxembourg is a zip code, not a country. Their navy is a joke. Britain's navy has never been a joke. England expects that every man will do his duty, and they know how to get it out of him. In Luxembourg, mentioning Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash just means that Claus von Bulow is invited to your cocktail party.
Canada burned down the White House back in the day. Forgive and forget, I say. England shot Congreve rockets at Andrew Jackson. Water under the bridge, if you ask me. The Welsh may be swearing at us, but there's no way to tell by listening to them, so it's pointless to take offense. Australians do punch Americans with amazing regularity. But they punch everybody, so nobody takes umbrage. The United States is celebrating its 241st birthday today, and in the spirit of a guy who landed on his feet, I hereby invite the nation-state version of our crazy ex-wives, ne'er-do-well brothers in law, and illegitimate children to the barbecue. Happy Independence Day to one and all!
Watch a hyperlapse of the world's oldest commissioned warship the USS Constitution "Old Ironsides" entering dry dock for a planned multi-year restoration. The critical restoration work will allow her to continue her mission for years to come.
The USS Constitution is interesting as all get-out. It's made more interesting by the fact that it's basically a Ship of Theseus at this point. The United States is a Ship of Theseus. All the parts have been replaced a few times, but it's still basically the same thing.
Using a combination of traditional and modern tools and techniques in keeping with the ship’s original construction, Mystic Seaport’s shipwrights are helping to preserve the art of shipbuilding.
I've been on that boat. It's basically a studio apartment with wood paneling you can drown in. People used to be brave.
The “legendary” Moshulu is indeed the world’s oldest and largest square rigged sailing vessel still afloat. She is in fact the one and only restaurant venue on a Tall Ship today in the World. Built by William Hamilton & Co., Port of Glasgow, Scotland in 1904 for the G.J.H Siemers Co. of Hamburg, Germany as the four-masted barque Kurt. This “state-of-the-art” sailing ship was the finest and latest of man’s achievement in the world’s shipbuilding industry for the construction of bulk or packaged cargo sailing ships.
All male humans know the Moshulu is the boat packed with immigrants that cruises past the Statue of Liberty in The Godfather Part II. We also know that Han shot first. We don't know much else.
The U.S.S. Massachusetts was the worst battleship ever made. That has a lot to do with why it has spent the last 95 years rusting on the seafloor just outside the mouth of Pensacola Bay. Today, the ship is an Underwater Archaeological Preserve managed by the state of Florida. The rusting hulk is considered the oldest battleship still in existence. Scuba diving among the fish swarming over the steam-era wreck provides a portal to another time, when the nation's fledgling Navy was first beginning to flex its muscles.
Oh, THAT USS Massachusetts. The one they have in Fall River, Massachusetts is easier to visit, but it's just as rusty, I think. They have a submarine, too. It's basically a studio apartment with metal wallpaper you can drown in.
As the numbers dwindled of those who actively fought, focus turned toward others who had some sort of connection to or memory of the war. In 1868, the Anderson Intelligencer reported on an African-American man known as Old Father Robinson living in Detroit. Robinson had been born on the plantation of a Colonel in 1753 in Maryland. When the Colonel went to serve in the Revolutionary War, Robinson served alongside him as his bodyguard and was present for Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown which ended the war.
One of the Founding Fathers, John Adams, predicted that Independence Day would become America’s greatest holiday. This is what he wrote to his wife Abigail on July 3rd 1776: “(This) the Second Day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Adams got the day wrong, though. Congress voted for independence on July 2nd 1776, but didn’t approve the text of the declaration until the Fourth.
Men who fought in a real, live shooting war weren't afraid of sparklers.
Don’t put accelerants on bonfires? Says who? You’re not my real dad. You’re not my supervisor. Who died and put you in charge? Yeah, well, you and whose army is going to stop me?
As Sam Adams used to say, "Hold my brandy smash and watch this!"
Due to their lust for drink, early Americans came up with a baffling variety of proto-cocktails from their slim culinary arsenal of rum, cider, ale, cream, sugar, molasses, eggs, spices and citrus. Some of the drinks they consumed—such as shrubs and hard cider—are again on the ascendance behind the bar; others, such as Whistle-Belly Vengeance (bits of stale bread dropped into warm, sour beer, then sweetened with molasses) might deserve to stay lost to history.
Goes to show what I know. I thought "Whistle-Belly Vengeance" was a reference to the Taco Bell drive thru. Silly me.
The Department of Historic Foodways was created in 1983, with the purpose of researching and recreating the foods of the 18th century. The department currently operates daily in the Governor’s Palace kitchen and the Armoury Kitchen.
Pro Tip- Don't stick your knife in the salt cellar. Old Muttonhead gets sore if you do. Viz:
As a young schoolboy in Virginia, George Washington took his first steps toward greatness by copying out by hand a list of 110 'Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.' Based on a 16th-century set of precepts compiled for young gentlemen by Jesuit instructors, the Rules of Civility were one of the earliest and most powerful forces to shape America's first president, says historian Richard Brookhiser.
George Washington is the greatest man who ever lived. I mean it. He refused to become the king of America, though it was offered to him. When he turned over the reins of government to John Adams, it was the first peaceful transfer of real power by election in the history of the world. Many of his rules of civility still are intelligent, actionable advice for today's world. For instance:
Utter not base and frivolous things among grave and learned men, nor
very difficult questions or subjects among the ignorant, or things hard
to be believed; stuff not your discourse with sentences among your
betters nor equals.
Apparently, the internet needs to be abolished. George said so.
Happy Independence Day to Maggie's Farm readers, and all the ships at sea!
Well, it's a nothing sort of Monday. Tuesday's a holiday, and everyone had Friday off, too. By the time the 4th rolls around, everybody's going to be too sunburned and hung over to blow their fingers off with off-brand fireworks properly. We're working in shifts here at Maggie's Farm, though. Bird Dog is still having his blood swapped out at the Peter Thiel/Keith Richards clinic, but the rest of us soldier on. We're not as interesting as Bird Dog, but we always tell the truth as we see it. We all wear really thick intellectual glasses, however. It makes us see things funny.
For instance, I'm not even sure that Donald Trump is Hitler. I know, the science is settled on that one, and I try and I try, but I can't see it. I squint and hold him at arm's length, and lift my lids real high, then rub my eyes, but I just can't picture it. He doesn't even look like Ernst Roehm to me. There's not even a hint of Admiral Raeder about him. I can't even gin up a resemblance to Roderick Spode, the amateur dictator. As far as I can tell, the body politic got tired of having Billy Ray Valentine as president, so we elected Thornton Melon. Meh. On to the links!
The family welcomed John to their home on April 30, 2015 and were even more surprised when they found they would be expecting their third biological child. Seven months later, the DHS contacted the family and asked them if they wanted to foster John's sister Paizley who was born while in jail. He said: 'We literally picked her up in the hospital the next day when she was a day old and brought her straight home.'
The White House usually picks a photo of the day. On June 28, the image they chose showed two girls from Nigeria who were abducted in 2014 by Boko Haram but managed to escape: Joy Bishara and Lydia Pogu. They're flanked by President Donald Trump and his daughter, Ivanka Trump. The photo had been taken the day before. (via The Instapundit)
It is actually rare for a marine mammal to "drown," as they won't inhale underwater; but they do suffocate from a lack of air. Being born underwater can cause problems for newborn whale and dolphin calves. It is the touch of air on the skin which triggers that first, crucial breath. And necropsies sometimes show that an animal never gets to the surface to take its first breath of air.
There has been one arrest following April's disastrous Fyre Festival event, as the Southern District of New York US Attorney's office announced the arrest of Fyre Media founder William McFarland. He's charged with wire fraud for allegedly lying to investors about how much money the company was making from artist bookings. According to Assistant Director-in-Charge William F. Sweeney Jr., "McFarland truly put on a show, misrepresenting the financial status of his businesses in order to rake in lucrative investment deals."
Slowly but surely, it's bound to start dawning on Millennials that the internet is not a magical place where regular old laws don't apply.
Everything about the painting — from the subject matter (a Caucasian man between the age of 30 and 40) to his clothes (black, wide-brimmed hat, black shirt and white collar), facial hair (small mustache and goatee) and even the way his face is positioned (facing right) — was distilled from Rembrandt's body of work.
If Rembrandt was a clapboard, this is vinyl siding.
Her appointment was a victory for the women on the Hill. Though women were integral to the success of the Manhattan Project—scientists like Leona Woods and Mary Lucy Miller played central roles in the creation of the bomb—none occupied leadership positions. In this respect, Serber stood alone. As the head of the scientific library, she became the Manhattan Project’s de facto keeper of secrets, a position that soon saw her targeted for an FBI probe—and almost ended in her being fired from the project.
The quest to portray secretaries as more important than their bosses rolls on. Because girlz.
The new controlled folder feature is designed to protect against viruses and ransomware from locking machines out of certain folders. Ransomware has hit the headlines recently as WannaCry and Petya wreak havoc on older Windows machines worldwide. Microsoft is also including exploit protection into its Windows Defender software in Windows 10, which should help prevent viruses and malware from exploiting vulnerabilities in the first place.
As is usual, the article is refreshingly information-free. It sounds similar to always running Windows as a user, and reserving the administrator role for nothing but recovering an earlier image of your computer if things go south on you.
“Although it hasn’t been tested in a kangaroo-specific environment, there was an instance where black swans were interfering, and so they had to build into the car the ability to recognise animals,” Amy Kaa said. Volvo plans to release its first autonomous cars by 2020 and has pledged zero fatalities or serious injuries from all its cars by that time.
I'm confused by the term "kangaroo-specific environment." What about vaguely kangaroo-ish environments, like bars at closing time?
For the entire video, the camera captures him slowly pedaling by numerous tents under the Hairball, as people congregate near their belongings in the narrow bike path. Shopping carts, recycling bins and more sit in the path. The number of people living in tents is near constant through the video. Waddling described it as “impressively depressing,” when he sent it to the San Francisco Examiner.
As usual, the answer is, "Something must be done." Since this is San Francisco, that means something must be done by someone else, at great expense, to assuage your guilt as you pedal past the poors. The policeman in Oklahoma in the first link shows you what "something" really means, virtue signallers. Get busy.
”Since our work is theoretical and computational it must be still verified experimentally, before it can become a standard model of light in a transparent medium. Measuring the total momentum of a light pulse is not enough but one also has to measure the transferred atomic mass. This should be feasible using present interferometric and microscopic techniques and common photonic materials”, researcher Mikko Partanen says.
I'm not exactly sure, but wouldn't that mean that Tired Light is in, and the Red Shift is out? So Einstein was confused, and the universe probably isn't expanding? Other than that, this isn't big news. I wouldn't worry about it. The scientist is obviously a loon. Look at that quote:
"Since our work is theoretical and computational it must be still
verified experimentally, before it can become a standard model of light
in a transparent medium."
Theoretical, computational work needs to be verified experimentally? Hold on there, Poindexter. That kind of approach doesn't fly in climate science, so I don't think we should pay attention to it in physics, either. Hey, Mikko, just say that because of Republican obstruction, light will keep getting slower and slower until you can catch it with fielder's glove. You'll get a big grant, and the science will be settled.
Well, we're in Day Two of: Gee I miss Bird Dog, and who is this feckless replacement serving up links in his absence? I admit I can't hold a candle to Bird Dog's link output. He reads the whole internet every day, just looking for links for you. Interestingly, he prints the entire internet out on a tractor-feed printer before he reads it. He likes his stories to alternate between white and light green, I guess. I don't know how he does it. I can't manage to read the whole internet every day. My lips get real tired.
For all the Maggie's Farm faithful, I offer that snapshot of Bird Dog relaxing at the day spa while he's away on sabbatical. I hope it tides you over until he returns. I don't want you to get the wrong idea about his reading material, however. He assured me that he was just checking the spelling and grammar for a friend. He's wearing his NSA-proof reading faceguard, of course. He doesn't want the boys at Foggy Bottom, the FBI, the NSA, or Mika Brzkini, er, Brzerker, er, Bazouki, or what ever her name is, knowing what he's thinking while he's reading. Speaking of Mika, I hear she has a tight face and a foggy bottom, too. Normally, Bird Dog wears a tin-foil homburg when he reads instead of the faceguard. Unfortunately, he used the tin foil for cooking during the pig roast, and had to go with his backup.
Anyway, here are the links that Bird Dog would have offered, if he was on duty, and slightly deranged:
The protest, dubbed a 3 p.m. “collective coffee break” by the Guild, began with workers exiting the Times’ Renzo Piano-designed headquarters on Eighth Avenue through a door on 40th Street. The protesters then walked to Eighth Avenue, up to 41st Street and finished the walkout by entering through doors on 41st Street.
But over the last decade a radically different picture of Viking life in Greenland has started to emerge from the remains of the old settlements, and it has received scant coverage outside of academia. “It’s a good thing they can’t make you give your PhD back once you’ve got it,” McGovern jokes. He and the small community of scholars who study the Norse experience in Greenland no longer believe that the Vikings were ever so numerous, or heedlessly despoiled their new home, or failed to adapt when confronted with challenges that threatened them with annihilation.
Conjecture and evidence of Norsemen in the Americas and the North Atlantic keeps piling up, but there's one constant: Jared Diamond is an idiot.
A Viking sword from the 9th or 10th century was discovered in pagan boat grave at Dysnes in Eyjafjörður, North Iceland. It had metal hilts and some organic material such as leather, which has broken down. Boat grave is a burial in which a boat is used either as a container for the dead and the grave goods, or as a part of the grave goods itself. This was common among Vikings but didn’t seem to catch on in Iceland, only around 10 graves of this kind have been found here.
Has anyone asked Jared Diamond to be wrong about this discovery yet?
Less than 24 hours after collecting $300 million in its initial public offering, Blue Apron Holdings Inc. faces the reality of needing more cash -- and soon. The unprofitable meal kit-delivery company, which touted its growth prospects to potential investors on its IPO roadshow, has leaned on its marketing strategy to build a customer base. That outreach eats up a fifth of the company’s total spending.
This tells you all you need to know about the moronic state of IPOs in the "Tech Sector." It's laughable to call a grocery delivery business a tech company just because they have a website, but hey, I don't make the rules. Anyway, "In its IPO prospectus, the company warned that it may never be profitable, adding that it anticipates that “operating expenses and capital expenditures will increase substantially in the foreseeable future.” Got that? In print, it tells you they're not even trying to be a real company. It's free beer tomorrow, forever. Mr. Ponzi to the white phone!
He began his career at Paramount Pictures, serving as production manager on five Hitchcock films: “Rear Window” (1954), “To Catch a Thief” (1955), “The Trouble with Harry” (1955), “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956), and “Vertigo” (1958).
An astonishing body of basically anonymous work. There are much worse epitaphs than that in that town. Ask Lupe Velez.
Back in the summer of 1962, the U.S. blew up a hydrogen bomb in outer space, some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. It was a weapons test, but one that created a man-made light show that has never been equaled — and hopefully never will.
Good thing that H-Bomb didn't wreck the Earth's Van Allen belt and suspenders.
Despite the embarrassment of rich, beautiful storytelling on TV, many of
us indulge in exactly this sort of time-wasting habit: hate-watching
has reached new heights. Fed by almost endless options for shows to
watch, bolstered by the snark contest that social media has become,
viewers now regularly revel in finding plot holes and analysing
awfulness just as much as they delight in quality programming.
For forty years, I've been listening to people, male and female, highbrow and lowbrow, explaining that they don't really like the soap operas they watch religiously. The author would be happier if she admitted she was shallow and not too bright.
The whole premise of the Internet is the connecting of disparate networks. It started out by only connecting computer networks. But today it connects networks of vastly different sorts: computers, yes, but also financial networks, distribution networks, road networks, water networks, power networks, communication networks, social networks. It truly is “Inter” now. As we rush towards putting more and more things “in the cloud,” as we rush towards an Internet of Things with no governance beyond profit motive and anarchy, what we’re effectively doing is creating a massive single point of failure for every system we put in it.
My experience with computing and the internet is very extensive. I feel as though I have seen enough to form an overall opinion: It was all a big mistake. The entire tech sector should be rolled back to Microsoft Office and land lines. We'd all be happier, and any important stuff would still get done. Of course, a company that occasionally delivers cardboard boxes filled with wilted arugula couldn't IPO for a third of a billion without the internet, but no plan is perfect.
Well, Bird Dog is worn out. He's weary of finding fascinating links every day. He's gone off to get his groove back. He's going to get his covfefe sharpened. Er, I mean, he's getting his covefefe trimmed. That is to say, his covfefe needed a world class overhaul. Bigly. He's left me in charge of finding a Yuge set of morning links for the Maggie's Farm morning roundup. I'm Haile Salassie to help out.
I found it amusing that everyone in the reglar media pretended that they didn't know that covfefe was simply a typo of the word coverage. In context, it couldn't mean anything else. They like to cast Trump as a vicious bumpkin, so it had to be gibberish, not fat thumbs. And unlike all the misspelled words I see on the internet, covfefe really was just a typo. Everyone claims that they made a typo when they misspell a word, or more usually, use one word when they mean another. Mis-keyed words you're trying to spell correctly are typos. Misspelled words, because you don't know how to spell, aren't.
Back when I was in school, and Galileo used to cheat off me, the teachers instructed us that if you can't spell a word, then you don't know what it means, and you shouldn't use it. I can spell covfefe. I know what it means. It means you're an idiot if you think a sentence fragment typed with your thumbs delivered via mass email is an actionable piece of information. Covfefe away, you Twits!
Using data from dozens of different sources and techniques from a wide range of technologies and disciplines including computer vision, natural language processing, statistics, machine learning, network science, topology, architecture and urbanism, we constructed a new partitioning of the city that resonates with our contemporary moment — 5 boroughs for the 21st century.
Bird Dog claims to like New York City. Me? I think it's a trailer park with a subway. The yokels there marry their own relatives (Hi Woody!), are all tattooed and drug-addicted (Xanax is a drug), and mostly piss outdoors. They can reassemble their five deck chair burrows, er, boroughs, any way they like. It's their covfefe.
The European Union has decided to fine Google an unprecedented $2.7 billion after a years-long investigation into the company’s comparison-shopping product found that it unfairly favored itself over competitors.
The persons in charge of all large internet companies are idiots. They have no idea how they ended up with all that cash. Not one of them can get a repeat success no matter how hard they try, because they ascribe to genius what was dumb luck. They build up huge cash hoards overseas, occasionally fritter them away on pointless boondoggles, refuse to pay taxes so they can distribute them to shareholders, and then childishly think that socialist governments will let them keep it.
Sleeping on the job is one of those workplace taboos — like leaving your desk for lunch or taking an afternoon walk — that we’re taught to look down on. If someone naps at 2 p.m. while the rest of us furiously write memos and respond to emails, surely it must mean they’re slacking off. Or so the assumption goes.
Yes, by all means, take productivity and career advice from the New York Times. I'm fairly certain that the monthly federal unemployment numbers is no longer issued in percentage form, and consists solely of a list of the names of people laid off from the New York Times, and the occasional FBI director.
Awareness and education are key tactics to protect the public as well as the animals. Research from the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, Atlantic White Shark Conservancy and the National Parks Service about the biology and behavior of these sharks has helped inform seashore staff and beachgoers about best practices to stay safe.
Awareness and education? Look fellas, let's be reasonable, huh? This is not the time or the place to perform some kind of a half-assed autopsy on a fish. And I am not going to stand here and see that thing cut open and see that little Kintner boy spill out all over the dock.
In DC, D.C.’s massive Woodner apartment building has lived many lives—from fancy hotel to one of the last bastions of affordable housing in a gentrifying neighborhood. Now, it’s on the brink of another change.
Low wage jobs are not meant to be living wages. They are entry-level. Higher min wage laws drive jobs out of the country, or just close businesses. Wonderful only for unions who peg wages to min wage.
How the media was able in a matter of hours after the election to rebrand Democrats as anti-Russian hawks and Republicans as colluders with Putin is one of the strangest and yet most successful political fabrications in recent history.
...
The media fed off the hysteria. In its fusion role with the Democratic Party to delegitimize Trump, journalists saw collusion as the most effective way to create a sort of national madness directed at the Trump presidency.
Who are these pussified idiots? If kids don't break an arm, get poison ivy, get stung by bees, fall off jungle gyms, light firecrackers, eat bugs, and do all sorts of stupid things, then they aren't kids
If they weren’t trying to destroy the president, Democrats would have to focus on an agenda most Americans don’t support.
...
The point is that somewhere between 2006 and 2009, Bill Clinton’s formerly competitive Democratic party aged and then evaporated. It was replaced by a hard-left coastal coalition, a pyramidal party — ethnic-identity groups at the base and wealthy elites on top, all united by a mutual disdain for the half of the population that covers 85 percent of the geography.
There is no Russia threat. Obama and Hillary tried hard to cozy up to Putin. Russia is a pathetic country, but no danger to the US at all. This whole thing was started by the Clinton campaign. From now on, I will ignore it all.
I was lukewarm about Trump, but I figure I felt like the Hillary supporters did - it was a rotten character but preferable to the other one. I never expected Trump to have a chance.
"...All the nice cutesy little ethics that used to get talked about in journalism school you're just like, that's adorable. That's adorable. This is a business."
CNN producer John Bonifield. If anybody doubted Trump's accusations of fake news...
... it is just infuriating. We have people come down here saying ‘please don’t take my property’, and because they’re just an ordinary person we take their property. But this guy’s rich enough to fight us for years and so he is gunna win. It’s just so maddening”
The guy says he has a "permissive" view of speech. "Permissive"? Americans do not need permission. "I am almost absolutist about speech, but..." Permission from whom? Students must be protected from provocative speakers?
Their behavior is so insane, their on-command ability to jump on anyone or anything who deviates from the now-current party line so absolute, their arguments so ridiculous, it took me a while to realize what they’re doing is the equivalent of Mao’s brigades of aggressive young people fanning out to rural areas to teach the peasants how to think and what to do.
But they’re not teaching us anything, you’ll say. Mostly they’re ridiculous idiots, who never spent enough time outside a university.
You aren’t wrong. Thing is if you’ve read about the Cultural Revolution – yeah, I do a lot of depressing things – those too were a bunch of ignorant kids, taught only Maoism, and completely ignorant of what the peasants needed to do to survive and grow food.
Our civic debate and the intellectualism surrounding it has become boring. We all know the prism through which Charles Blow (racism), Thomas Friedman (globalism), or any left leaning publication will present its view. Everything the Left does is predictable.
Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods is a big deal in the supermarket sector, but its’s also deeply ironic and instructive for those familiar with the business philosophy of Whole Foods founder John Mackey— that business can and should operate on a higher moral plane, striving to manage itself in ways not just profitable but also that would serve some of the purposes of traditional philanthropy.
For you Maggie's newcomers, I blogged on this site about every other day for five wonderful, tumultuous years. This was through the heady election days of 2008 and 2012, so there was obviously a lot to talk about.
Then a bunch of things happened.
I:
- Helped with the construction of four 2-bedroom cottages — built from kits, no less — in a Colorado forest, as well as installing a large wind & solar installation to power them all. I was there for over two years.
- Helped birth a baby and whelped four litters of puppies.
- Lost my beloved to a brain aneurysm.
- Had a heart operation.
- Bought an extremely cool sports car that I didn't even know existed until an hour before I handed over the bread.
- Have lived in four states since the last time I blogged here, surrounded by champion show dogs.
Busy, busy, busy.
I'll relate the whole story below the fold, but for now I wanted to give a shout-out to a number of old friends who I see are still here.
Texan99 - My wonderful Texas belle.
GoneWithTheWind - Always one of the great voices of reason on this site.
Zach - Dude, you're the very definition of fortitude.
Dr.Torch, mudbug, Gringo, jma, bob sykes, Assistant Village Idiot, Sam L, JTW, rhhardin, JC, IdahoBob, Apple Pie, Clovis, Agent Cooper, Old Codger, BillH, Dorf, The Distributist, Claritas, Ben David, SgtBob, NJSoldier, faculty wife, Ken in NH, JLawson, BillH - Hey, doods and doodettes! It's nice to be back.
Side note: Boy, imagine how ol' Zach's going to feel when I pull out my (hold on a sec: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5...) 213 anti-AGW links. It won't be pretty!
And, of course, my best bud, feeblemind - By the way, guy, I noticed that some of your recent comments have actually made lots of sense. We'll have to work on that.
Bird Dog, Barrister, News Junkie, Gwynnie, Dr. Bliss, Bulldog - I'm honored to be back among such distinguished peers.
If you're curious, my main web site is here. The whole mess is comprised of 1,204 posts, 1.1 million words, 2,856 pics and 640 vids.
Dr. Tim Ball's new book: 
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