"We human beings always seek happiness. Now there are two
ways. You can make yourself happy by making other people unhappy--I
call that the logic of robbery. The other way, you make yourself happy
by making other people happy--that's the logic of the market. Which way
do you prefer?"-- Zhang Weiying
I am rarely optimistic about the political world; I expect things to gradually deteriorate until they are reset at a higher bar to deteriorate again. But the French demonstrations were truly uplifting. Dramatic and hopeful.
There was a wonderful American/political correct moment in the broadcast. The international Christiane Amanpour was talking with an American broadcaster who was trying to explain her broader and more educated vision to the idiot Americans and she said "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité." The American helpfully explained to the idiot Americans, "Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood." Then he froze and quickly clarified. "And 'Sisterhood. Sisterhood."
I am rarely optimistic about the political world; I expect things to gradually deteriorate until they are reset at a higher bar to deteriorate again. But the French demonstrations were truly uplifting. Dramatic and hopeful.
There was a wonderful American/political correct moment in the broadcast. The international Christiane Amanpour was talking with an American broadcaster who was trying to explain her broader and more educated vision to the idiot Americans and she said "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité." The American helpfully explained to the idiot Americans, "Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood." Then he froze and quickly clarified. "And 'Sisterhood. Sisterhood."
The Ghost Dance spiritual movement in the 1890s taught that Indians had been defeated and confined to reservations because they had angered the gods by abandoning their traditional customs. Many Sioux believed that if they practiced the Ghost Dance and rejected the ways of the white man, the gods would create the world anew and destroy all non-believers, including non-Indians.
Osiris was the wise ruler of mythological ancient Egypt and Isis was his twin sister and wife. They had a son, Horus. But they also had an evil brother, Set or Seth, the god of the desert and sand storms. The jealous Set brings a coffin to a party for the gods and all the gods tried the coffin out. Cinderella-like, it fits Osiris perfectly. Set slams it shut and escapes with it to the Nile where he drowns Osiris and, after, dismembers him. He is eventually spread throughout Egypt to fertilize the land and becomes the Lord of the Dead, with some rebirth qualities. The tears of Isis for her husband form the flood that gives life to the Nile.
It is said that Jim Webb, one of politics more interesting guys, is considering running for president. He is a tough customer, a former marine, a fiction writer, a former senator and always called the smartest guy in the room. He has diverse positions and is hard to pigeonhole. But Hillary is taking him seriously. The week before Thanksgiving, staffers of Philippe Reines, Clinton’s longtime communications guru, pitched talk radio producers on the racy, sexually charged writings in Webb’s novels, according to a source at the U.S.News.
Captcha: a recent noun, meaning a test used to make sure that a human is using a system, not a computer program. The test typically involves reading distorted text. An acronym of Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. The Turing test is named after Alan Turing, a mathematician and computer scientist, who proposed that a computer could be considered intelligent if, while interacting with a human and a computer, someone could not tell which is which. A captcha is a kind of reverse Turing test. Earliest documented use: 2001.
We receive ads picked for our taste. All our Internet information refines the data-generated picture of us. So it is with information we seek. "Most of us assume that when we 'google' a term, we all see the same results -- the ones that the company's famous Page Rank algorithm suggests are the most authoritative based on other pages' links. But since December 2009, this is no longer true. Now you get the result that Google's algorithm suggests is best for you in particular -- and someone else may see something entirely different. In other words, there is no standard Google anymore." (Pariser) This is what author Eli Pariser calls 'the filter bubble' which serves to reinforce the beliefs we have with information more friendly to those beliefs.
Who is....Cynthia Ann Parker?
The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 ended the Thirty Years War, originating in a conflict between Catholic and Protestant factions after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. It is said to have created the State as the primary institutional agents in an interstate system of relations and to have ended attempts to impose supranational authority on European states. This has some interest in where religion fit. Is there, for example, independence in an Islamic state from outside influence? This is called by some "the charter myth of the sovereign nation-state system" and writer Karen Armstrong writes that such a separation of religion from politics is, historically, brand new and perhaps impossible.
She writes: "The Oxford Classical Dictionary
firmly states: 'No word in either Greek or Latin corresponds to the
English "religion" or "religious." ' The idea of religion as an
essentially personal and systematic pursuit was entirely absent from
classical Greece, Japan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, China, and India. Nor
does the Hebrew Bible have any abstract concept of religion; and the
Talmudic rabbis would have found it impossible to express what they
meant by faith in a single word or even in a formula, since the Talmud
was expressly designed to bring the whole of human life into the ambit
of the sacred."
So, best of luck with Islam.
The activist Louis Brandeis was the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court. Whenever Brandeis spoke in judicial conference Wilson's first appointee, Justice McReynolds, was known simply to rise and leave the room. He went so far as to avoid official Court pictures because he did not want to be photographed with a Jew.
Democracy works everywhere: According to The Independent, Argentina's president, President Christina Fernández de Kirchner adopted a boy named Yair Tawil as her godson so that he would not turn into a werewolf. It's actually part of a longstanding tradition in the country that dates back to a folk story in the country:
According to Argentinian folklore, the seventh son born to a family turns into the feared "el lobison". The werewolf-like creature shows its true nature on the first Friday after boy's 13th birthday, the legend says, turning the boy into a demon at midnight during every full moon, doomed to hunt and kill before returning to human form.As well as feeding on excrement, unbaptized babies, and the flesh of the recently dead, the lobison was said to be unnaturally strong and able to spread its curse with a bite.
Because some people actually believed this hundreds of years ago, they
started killing the seventh son babies. So, to stop that from happening,
presidents starting adopting the seventh born boys of families.
Golden oldie:
There
is always a dissenting view: "In the last 80 years, as CO2 emissions
have most rapidly escalated, the annual rate of climate-related deaths
worldwide fell by an incredible 98%. This means the incidence of death
from climate is 50 times lower than it was 80 years ago." (Alex Epstein,
founder of something called the Center for Industrial Progress)
More
and more we are seeing news sources eliminate the "comments" sections
of pieces. In 2013, Popular Science magazine ended comments on its
stories, calling them “bad for science.” A Sept. 24 post on the
magazine's site said that research had found “even a fractious minority
wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story.” This
deserves some thought and some worry.
The
new “myRA” fund rolling out from the Treasury this month is a form of
Roth Individual Retirement Account that allows people to save after-tax
dollars and watch them grow tax-free until retirement. The new myRA
offers a single investment option: Federal debt. It is a private version
of the G Fund that is available to federal workers and has lately been
delivering annual returns of about 2% on its portfolio of Treasury
securities. Interestingly, while such plans are legislated, this one was
created by executive order.
Mr.
Gruber is back. Gruber said that Obamacare had no cost controls in it
and would not be affordable in an October 2009 policy brief,
presented by The Daily Caller. Gruber also said that the only way to
control costs is to effectively deny treatment.
“The real substance of cost control is all about a single thing: telling patients they can’t have something they want. It’s about telling patients, ‘That surgery doesn’t do any good, so if you want it you have to pay the full cost.’”
“There’s no reason the American health care system can’t be, ‘You can have whatever you want, you just have to pay for it.’ That’s what we do in other walks of life. We don’t say everyone has to have a large screen TV. If you want a large screen TV, you have to pay for it. Basically the notion would be to move to a level where everyone has a solid basic insurance level of coverage. Above that people pay on their own, without tax-subsidized dollars, to buy a higher level of coverage.”
And despite the president’s pitches to the contrary, Obama also knew that his health care bill was unlikely to control costs, Gruber said.
The point here is not that they lied; all these people lie. The point is that this was seen by the creators as very different from Hillary's plan, which was aimed at decreasing the total cost of medical care through limiting what could be legally spent.
“The real substance of cost control is all about a single thing: telling patients they can’t have something they want. It’s about telling patients, ‘That surgery doesn’t do any good, so if you want it you have to pay the full cost.’”
“There’s no reason the American health care system can’t be, ‘You can have whatever you want, you just have to pay for it.’ That’s what we do in other walks of life. We don’t say everyone has to have a large screen TV. If you want a large screen TV, you have to pay for it. Basically the notion would be to move to a level where everyone has a solid basic insurance level of coverage. Above that people pay on their own, without tax-subsidized dollars, to buy a higher level of coverage.”
And despite the president’s pitches to the contrary, Obama also knew that his health care bill was unlikely to control costs, Gruber said.
The point here is not that they lied; all these people lie. The point is that this was seen by the creators as very different from Hillary's plan, which was aimed at decreasing the total cost of medical care through limiting what could be legally spent.
AAAAAaaaaaannnnnndddddd.........a newspaper article, perfectly British:
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