Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Reverie


The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness, and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock. -Margaret Halsey, novelist (13 Feb 1910-1997)





What I seek to rule out here, or at least for a sufficient number of interacting persons in the social order, is the ‘arrogance of ignorance’ as exercised through ill-advised collective actions.  The perfectibility [of human understanding] threshold for the viability of classical liberalism requires that persons eschew romantic ideals about the potential perfectibility of society itself.  In other words, the viability of classical liberalism depends critically upon persons ‘keeping their feet on the ground.’ --James Buchanan



There is a new academic field of study called "Critical Whiteness Studies." Save yourselves.


Almost 19 percent of people 65 or older were working at least part-time in the second quarter of 2017, according to the U.S. jobs report released on Friday. The age group’s employment/population ratio hasn’t been higher in 55 years, before American retirees won better health care and Social Security benefits starting in the late 1960s. A number of factors are keeping older Americans in the workforce. Many are healthier and living longer than previous generations. Some decide not to fully retire because they enjoy their jobs or just want to stay active and alert. Others need the money.


Fresh data published on Tuesday by Ebay shows the number of million euro businesses selling on Ebay grew to 1,095 from 731 in Germany last year since 2013 while million pound-plus businesses rose to 663 from 443 in Britain over the same time period.


Who is.....Fei Yan?


The tendency to treat everything Trump does as an emergency, without distinction, will make true emergencies more difficult to recognize. And if the press gets it wrong, hyping something that isn't especially unusual, it makes it easier for Trump to dismiss future criticisms or unflattering reports as "fake news."--Antle from an article called "The Resistance that cried Wolf"


Uh oh. University of California has published a list of biased "microaggression" statements students and faculty are to avoid. One of them is "There is only one race, the human race." Read that again.



Beauty may be only skin deep but apparently so is your nature. It can be complicated--imagine multi racial individuals--but fear not: We have "intersectionality" to explain it. Created words are usually a tip-off but ngram shows it older than you would think, mid-80s.
Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the theory of intersectionality to feminist theory.
And here you thought the only people who had cosmetic identity were blonds, Germans with dueling scars and guys with facial tattoos.



In their final days in Mosul, Islamic State militants dispatched dozens of suicide bombers—including women with babies in their arms—and searched homes for young boys they could force into battle, said Iraqi commanders who led the fight and residents who survived. (wsj)
Scorched earth is not a means to their end, it is their end.





“last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.”--promotional blurb from Democracy in Chains. I just love this.

American Bakari Henderson was killed by a group of as many as 15 men because of an argument over a selfie at a bar on a Greek island, police said. A confrontation began after Henderson, who was vacationing with friends, asked to take a picture with a waitress, and quickly escalated into a fistfight involving other customers and two bar employees, Greek police spokesman Theodore Chronopoulos told The Washington Post. Video surveillance shows that the 22-year-old recent graduate of the University of Arizona was fatally beaten in a span of just 30 seconds, Chronopoulos said. “They kicked and punched him to his body and his head,” he said. “His death came from hits in his head.”
No one is safe.

 Golden oldie:
  http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-implications-of-novelty.html


Australia, the world’s No. 2 seller of liquefied natural gas abroad, holds so little in reserve that it can’t keep the lights on in Adelaide—a cautionary tale for the U.S. as it prepares to vastly increase natural-gas shipments abroad. (wsj)


An Army inquiry has found that a small but lethal amount of sarin nerve agent has gone unaccounted for.


The famous Harvard Grant Study shows supportive, loving relationships are the key to happiness and success. Don’t ignore the daily interaction with your family and friends.



Interesting. Fei Yan, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 31-year-old Chinese citizen, was arrested by federal authorities on Wednesday on insider trading charges. Mr. Yan searched Google using phrases  such as "how sec detect unusual trade" and "insider trading with international account." He also allegedly read an article titled "Want to Commit Insider Trading? Here's How Not to Do It," according to the U.S. attorney prosecuting the case.
Minority Report?


 


Kaspersky is a cybersecurity firm from Russia with a large presence in the world's cybersecurity community. It was a major factor in the Stuxnet investigation. According to a recent article, it had grand plans. It set up a U.S. subsidiary, KGSS, in Arlington, Virginia that would be focused on winning U.S. cybersecurity business. Kaspersky sponsored flashy conferences with high-profile speakers --including Michael Flynn, who was briefly President Donald Trump's national security adviser -- sought to join U.S. trade groups and even underwrote programming on National Public Radio. All of this was done to burnish Kaspersky's image and help it become an accepted vendor for the U.S. government despite its Russian roots, according to people familiar with the strategy. But Eugene Kaspersky was never able to overcome lingering suspicions among U.S. intelligence officials that he and his company were, or could become, pawns of Russia's spy agencies.





Just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, according to a new report.
Comments from black writers Roxanne Cox and Reni Eddo-Lodge (in a review of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race)  on "Girls," a TV show I thought was supposed to be entertaining and fun when indeed it was the source of angst and symbolic of the international gender/race conspiracy:
"Both Gay and Eddo-Lodge give a damning critique of the all-white first series of Lena Dunham’s Girls, which first aired on HBO in 2012. Gay says it “disturbs and disappoints”. For Eddo-Lodge, it was hard to take commentators seriously when they insisted it was “the most feminist television show in decades”. White feminists, “women espousing feminist politics as they buy into the politics of whiteness”, are a particular bugbear; she is exasperated by those who acknowledge the patriarchy but “struggle to understand whiteness as a political structure in the very same way . . . . My blackness [is] as much a part of me as my womanhood, and I [can’t] separate them”. For black women intersectionality is a lived experience, not a feminist theory."

Obviously if anyone conspired in advance with another to commit a crime – such as hacking the DNC – that would be criminal. But merely seeking to obtain the work product of a prior hack would be no more criminal than a newspaper publishing the work product of thefts such as the Pentagon Papers and the material stolen by Snowden and Manning.   Moreover, the emails sent to Trump Jr. say that the dirt peddled by Veselnitskaya came from “official documents.”  No mention is made of hacking or other illegal activities. So it is unlikely that attendance at the meeting violated any criminal statute.--Allen Dershowitz!
 
AAAAaaaaaaannnnnddddd..... a graph:
==========================================

Virus-free. www.avg.com

No comments: