The big thieves hang the little ones. -Czech proverb
A National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health study took 111 samples at 11 sites in 5 states, including Pennsylvania. The results find that silica levels at all drilling sites exceeded safe levels and were as much as 10 times the safe level at some locations.
We know that a lot of synthesis goes into Obama's decisions. Who will pick the new Fed Chairman?
Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Ft. Hood murderer, is a Virginia-born army psychiatrist and a recipient of the Pentagon's Global War on Terrorism Service Medal.
There is a lot of academic excitement over the word "so" in English usage. In English, the word "so" is polysemous; it can be used as an adverb, a conjunction, a pronoun, an interjection, or an adjective. You could argue that the sentence-initial "so" is an interjection, but sometimes "so" resembles, and might be best described, as a coordinating conjunction.
In his 2000 translation of "Beowulf", the poet Seamus Heaney uses "So" as a translation for "Hwaet," usually translated as 'lo', 'hark', 'behold', 'attend' and - more colloquially - 'listen.' 'So' operates as an expression that eliminates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention. It replaces the focus. Sooo:
"So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns."
18 to 34-year-olds are buying cars at a much lower rate than previous generations.
A group of California consumers are suing Lance Armstrong over his books. They say the books were deceptively marketed as nonfiction and that they would not have bought them had they known Armstrong was lying about his use of performance-enhancing drugs. So in telling his own story, does Armstrong have the right to lie? Is he any worse than those reporters who made up interviews and were so readily forgiven?
Chile has 40 percent of the world's astronomical observatories and $6 billion worth of projects are currently underway. In 2020, Chile will hold 70 percent of the world's telescopes.
The President has decided not to implement part of the Affordable Care Act. That unilateral decision is not exactly legal. Article II, Sec. 3 of the Constitution mandates the president to faithfully execute the law and courts have consistently ruled that presidents have little discretion about it. Obama can't pick and choose what parts of the Affordable Care Act he enforces and when. It appears that he feels he has some sort of overriding moral authority here, kind of a "moral veto."
Douglas Bruster of the University of Texas at Austin says the handwriting and spelling in the "added lines" in Thomas Kyd's play The Spanish Tragedy, the so-called additional passages of some 325 lines inserted into the play after Kyd's death, are consistent with Shakespeare's writing.
The USA, the world's number 1 natural gas producer, has only 1,240 natural gas fueling stations.
Financial records in England used to be recorded on branches shaved down and written on called "tally sticks." These sticks were actually used as receipts. An Act of Parliament of 1782 officially abolished tally sticks as the main means of account-keeping at the Exchequer.
Tempera painting was the primary medium used in the ancient cultures of the world. The paint was created through a combination of minerals, egg yolk and water. The egg yolk was used chiefly as an adhesive substance while the minerals varied greatly based on what was available and the color desired. Tempera painting is the oldest type of painting in visual art. It is the technique used in cave painting and continued into the Middle Ages when it was replaced by oil-based paint.
Who is....Lionel "Buster" Crabb?
The first English-language bookstore in Cuba opened last week, according to The Associated Press.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently released its "State of the Climate in 2012" report, which states that "worldwide, 2012 was among the 10 warmest years on record."But the report "fails to mention [2012] was one of the coolest of the decade, and thus confirms the cooling trend," according to an analysis by climate blogger(!) Pierre Gosselin."To no one's surprise, the report gives the reader the impression that warming is galloping ahead out of control," writes Gosselin. "But their data shows just the opposite." While manipulation of data should always be noted and discouraged, it is hard to argue that a year or a decade of temperatures constitute any tendency other than the tendency to tout your own political position.
tergiversate means "to change repeatedly one's attitude or opinions with respect to a cause, subject, etc.; equivocate." Origin, Latin tergiversātus: to turn one's back.
In the backwash of the Snowden revelations the President has declared that he believes there has been no wrongdoing with regard to national intelligence gathering. Nonetheless he has decided to appoint a high-level committee to investigate the doings of the intelligence community. He has appointed James Clapper to head the investigating committee. So James Clapper, who is Obama's director of national intelligence and who integrates and oversees all national intelligence, will run the group examining what all national intelligence does. Is this like Holder and the Justice Department investigating the Department of Justice' involvement in selling guns to Mexican drug cartels? Any odds on whether Mr. Clapper will confirm Mr. Obama's opinion?
Golden Oldies:
'[C]harity is the national error of Englishmen'. This is the first sentence of an editorial in The Economist in November 1845 about the proper British response to the Irish potato famine. It appears in an assessment of the British financial thought of the time and argues that Adam Smith's scientific approach to the economy allowed "science to trump morality." The famine killed one million and caused another one million to emigrate; Ireland lost 25% of its population. It might be debatable that "charity is the national error of Englishmen" but it certainly is charitable to blame England's inaction on Smith and academia. There might have been more malice involved. It was Nassau Senior -- the Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford and one of the government's chief advisers on Irish economic policy -- whom Benjamin Jowett, the great Master of Balliol College, Oxford, had in mind when he said years later: 'I have always felt a certain horror of political economists since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good."
Stratfor is sometimes insightful, sometimes mundane. Here is their summary of the Obama foreign policy problem: "The world is a tough place. To wit, complex, populous and strife-torn Islamic societies are not amenable to American grand conceptions. But in every era there must be a specific moral and geopolitical logic that governs America's approach to the world. And that logic must be built out of what Washington will do, and can do, not only built out of what it won't do."
AAAAAaaaaaadddddd.....a composite of the orbits of potentially dangerous asteroids:
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