The opening sentences of an editorial that appeared in a provincial
Irish newspaper in the fateful year 1914. It read: "We give this solemn warning
to Kaiser Wilhelm: The Skibbereen Eagle has its eye on you."
American author Lydia Davis was awarded the Man Booker International Prize, worth about $90,000, at a ceremony Wednesday in London. Davis is renowned for her works of short fiction. Very, very short fiction. One story, "Samuel Johnson Is Indignant," reads in its entirety: "that Scotland has so few trees." Another, called "Certain Knowledge from Herodotus" says, "These are the facts about the fish in the Nile:" Sir Christopher Ricks, chairman of the judges, is quoted in the official announcement: "Should we simply concur with the official title and dub them stories? Or perhaps miniatures? Anecdotes? Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts? Aphorisms, or even apothegms? Prayers, or perhaps wisdom literature? Or might we settle for observations?"
American author Lydia Davis was awarded the Man Booker International Prize, worth about $90,000, at a ceremony Wednesday in London. Davis is renowned for her works of short fiction. Very, very short fiction. One story, "Samuel Johnson Is Indignant," reads in its entirety: "that Scotland has so few trees." Another, called "Certain Knowledge from Herodotus" says, "These are the facts about the fish in the Nile:" Sir Christopher Ricks, chairman of the judges, is quoted in the official announcement: "Should we simply concur with the official title and dub them stories? Or perhaps miniatures? Anecdotes? Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts? Aphorisms, or even apothegms? Prayers, or perhaps wisdom literature? Or might we settle for observations?"
In the 58 years from 1954 to 2012, there have been 20 years that have had 50 or more F3 or stronger tornadoes. But from 2000 to 2012, there were just 2 years with 50 or more F3 tornadoes.
Goldman Sachs recently said that the conditional approval the U.S. Department of Energy granted to the Freeport Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) terminal in Texas is significant evidence that the push to allow the export of liquefied natural gas is gaining momentum. If the U.S. begins to export large quantities of LNG, while the price would reach global equilibrium -- a benefit to natural gas companies -- the push to shift to LNG as a primary energy source in the U.S. might be in jeopardy.
While theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and, later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought social institutions could be rebuilt on the basis of a set of principles, for Edmund Burke, institutions are the basis of our knowledge of society. they have grown because they are a true reflection of us and, therefore, they work. For him, principles were abstractions constructed from practical life, which meant participation in institutions. Giving priority to abstractions is inherently destructive because it gets things the wrong way round: principles have no authority aside from practice, he believed. So honesty is the best policy?
Government is the only entity that expands when its policies fail.
Evgeny Morozov has a new book, To Save Everything, Click Here, and in it attacks the Internet culture, particularly his notion of "solutionism." Solutionism is the belief that all problems can be fixed through reason and quantification. It is reductionist, worships efficiency and utility, and abhors ambiguity and complexity, which is to say un-human. Solutionism is a distortion of the Enlightment and includes the Soviet planners’ dream of “engineering human souls” to produce a workers’ paradise.
Who was.... Maj. Charles Sweeney?
Samuel Morse, the inventor of the single line telegraph and co-inventor of the Morse Code was primarily a painter, a well regarded one, who put aside his art for his technical inventions. He was a Nativist, a fierce anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant.
Diaspora: first entered English in the late nineteenth century to describe the scattering of Jews after their captivity in Babylonia in the fifth century B.C.E. The term originates from the Greek diasporá, meaning “a dispersion or scattering,” found in Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible (Deuteronomy 25).
According to the New America Foundation, the CIA and U.S. military have killed 3,364 militants and civilians with drones over the last decade. Although the number of noncombatants killed is not known, the dead have not all been "highest level" terrorists.
Health insurers will charge 25-year-olds between $142 and $190 per month for a bare-bones health plan in Los Angeles. A 40-year-old in San Francisco who wants a top-of-the-line plan would receive a bill between $451 and $525. Downgrade to a less robust option, and premiums fall as low as $221.
They say the competition in the "exchanges" is working. It has been published, however, that a lot will be given up in these bargain systems and some have deductibles as high as $5000.
The Fourteenth Annual White Privilege Conference (WPC14) from April 10 through April 13 was held in Seattle this year. Back in 1999 the main focus of the White Privilege Conference had been on race. Recently, though, the categories of victims of white supremacy have grown to include such overwhelmingly white groups as feminists and the “LGBT community”—or “LGBTQ community,” “LGBTQQ community,” and “LGBTQQIA community”—all acronyms used by White Privilege participants at various times (the two “Q’s” stand for “queer” and “questioning,” the “I” for “intersex,” and the “A” for a conventionally heterosexual “ally” of all of the above). 120 different workshops included “Talking Back to White Entitlement,” “Follow the White Supremacist Money,” and “Engaging White People in the Fight for Racial, Economic Justice.”
The resignations of senior editors at the literary magazine and publisher Granta has finally been explained. Editor John Freeman, who recently announced his departure, said in The Guardian that owner Sigrid Rausing "decided a while back she wanted to run the magazine and books on a very reduced staff," and that he "didn't want to be part of that change."
For those who (still) think Tesla is a loser, it paid off its DOE loan of 485 Million dollars (but not with profits, with money from a stock sale--made possible by profits.)
From the Department of unbelievable posturing: Sen. Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts will write a book about "fighting for the middle class," or so her publisher says. Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin also plans to publish something we need to know.
In December 1919, Franz Boas, the German-born academic widely recognized as the father of American anthropology, published a letter accusing four of his American colleagues—whom he did not identify—of having used their research positions as cover for engaging in espionage in Central America during the recently concluded war. To what extent has Western anthropology been fatally compromised by its associations—direct and indirect, public and covert—with a "violent and imperial foreign policy"? In several books, the anthropologist David Price has cataloged the substantial sums of money funneled from the military and intelligence community to academic anthropology over the years. Most recently, ethnographers have joined the Army’s Human Terrain System program, designed to aid military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan by decoding the nuances of local culture. It is interesting the academic world finds this suspicious. But there is little anxiety over the effect the academic interventions have on these cultures.
On the Micronesian Yap island they use big round stones with holes for money and many years ago a wealthy family hired a handful of men to make the journey two islands over to carve out a large stone and bring back. As luck would have it, the sea was too rough, the primary canoe capsized and the stone sank before it got home.
The stone (still at the bottom) was still usable, since the men who did the work and saw it go down, could confirm it so it was a done deal. The family could still purchase and borrow with it.--from the book, "Money Mischief" by Friedman
Almost all of the increase in the world's per capita income, a 37-fold increase, has happened in the last 250 years. (From The Origin of Wealth by Eric D. Beinhocker)
AAAAAAaaaaaannnnndddddd......2 graphs:
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