"As the saying goes, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Community organizers like Huerta don't teach anyone how to fish: they teach activists how to steal their neighbors' fish. This is what Huerta and her ilk call social justice." --Matthew Vadum
John Stewart and Stephen Colbert dominated the late-night ratings among 18-to 34-year-olds for most of the last five years. That is, that demographic got most of their understanding of political events from comedians.
"Vantablack" is a material made by the British company Surrey NanoSystems that sets a world record by absorbing all but 0.035% of visual light. It's made of carbon nanohair that is 1,000 times thinner than the average human hair. The tubes are small enough to prevent light from entering them and packed so tightly that the light which makes it between the tubes bounces between them until it's absorbed.
Who is....Patty Hearst?
Regarding America's leadership and their need to confess America's, and the West's, past sins: Once you've discounted your own moral authority, you cannot lead. It would, indeed, be wrong to do so. Chaos.
An interesting idea that the "public," the notion of "the masses," no longer exists. There is no public army, no mass production. And this has come with the price of fragmentation, the loss of a general quality among people. So the vision of uprising and outrage--on a "masses" level--has been reduced in size, intensity and meaning to special groups and subsets. High-minded revolution reduced to bickering.
Golden oldie:
The remains of a man and woman - who are said to have died in their twenties - have been uncovered in the Diros Caves in the Peloponnese region of Greece, the two of them in an embrace.
An archaeologist leading the excavation of the ‘underworld’ cavern described the find as ‘stunning’ and said it is possibly the oldest grave ever found in the country. Experts believe hundreds of people lived inside Alepotrypa before the entrance collapsed burying everyone alive 5,000 years ago.
Astonishing fact in several ways: Leprosy can be transmitted to humans by armadillos.
Judge Laurence Silberman, co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week that essentially nobody in the Washington intelligence community doubted the major report that Iraq had an active WMD program in 2002. The National Intelligence Estimate delivered to the Senate and President Bush said there was a 90 percent certainty of WMDs. Democrat George Tenet, the Clinton CIA director who continued to serve under Bush, said the case for WMDs was a “slam dunk.” John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Joe Biden all looked at the intelligence and voted to authorize force. Sen. Jay Rockefeller argued strongly for the war.
Something was very wrong about the decision process here but it does not appear to be lying. That is just too simple.
A University of Arkansas study found that 2% of college-aged women have osteoporosis and 15% more have such low levels of bone density that they are at high risk for developing the disease in the near future.
The sainted Partisan Review began as a youth-club publication of the Communist Party’s New York bureau. From 1934 to 1937, the editors championed Soviet dictates for proletarian writing, and the house tone bore the weight of party cant. A 21-year-old contributor went on maternity leave, and the editors praised her effort "to produce a future citizen of Soviet America."
Bad news. A recent Atlantic article writes about ISIS as if it is a serious, thoughtful, heartfelt outgrowth of Islam, a jihadist wing of a branch of Sunnism called Salafism, after the Arabic al salaf al salih, the “pious forefathers.” These "forefathers" are the Prophet himself and his earliest adherents, whom Salafis honor and emulate as the models for all behavior, including warfare, couture, family life, even dentistry. In essence, the writings in the Koran are literal blueprints for adherents to follow. The Caliphate, slavery, crucifixion, immolation--all of these grand old institutions are being brought back for a reason. So when a masked executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious and historical belief, not just because he's nuts. Or hungry.The caliphate has continued to embrace slavery and crucifixion without apology. “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” Adnani, the spokesman, promised in one of his periodic statements to the West. “If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.” Oh, well.
"Waltzing Matilda:" The unofficial national anthem of Australia. Auf der walz means to 'go on the tramp' or hit the road, used in Germany to describe traveling workers or soldiers on the march; a Matilda came to mean those women who followed the soldiers, to 'keep them warm.' Eventually the soldier's greatcoat or blanket was a Matilda. The song was written by A. B. ("Banjo") Paterson, the Australian bush poet who was actually a lawyer. The tune is a version of the "Craigielee March," which was itself taken from a century-old Scottish air called "Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielee." The story in the song is that of an actual event involving a criminal arsonist and cannot really be understood without an Australian slang dictionary. (swagman: drifter, swag: bedroll, billabong: waterhole etc..)
The U.S. expects to quadruple the number of Syrian refugees brought into the country.
Democratic-Republican Jefferson defeated Federalist John Adams by a margin of seventy-three to sixty-five electoral votes in the presidential election of 1800. When presidential electors cast their votes, however, they failed to distinguish between the office of president and vice president on their ballots. Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr each received seventy-three votes. With the votes tied, the election was thrown to the House of Representatives as required by Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution. There, each state voted as a unit to decide the election.
Still dominated by Federalists, the sitting Congress loathed to vote for Jefferson—their partisan nemesis. For six days starting on February 11, 1801, Jefferson and Burr essentially ran against each other in the House before the tie was broken.
Gridlock in 1800.
Still dominated by Federalists, the sitting Congress loathed to vote for Jefferson—their partisan nemesis. For six days starting on February 11, 1801, Jefferson and Burr essentially ran against each other in the House before the tie was broken.
Gridlock in 1800.
Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul.
Starting this month, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst will no longer allow Iranian nationals to matriculate as graduate students in many of its programs in engineering and the natural sciences, including physics and electrical/computer engineering. U. Mass claimed its restriction was based entirely on US government sanctions on visas granted to Iranian nationals seeking specific kinds of graduate programs. (I think this edit was reversed.)
The most sought after book in 1914 according to Bookfinder was On the Psychology of Military Incompetence by Norman F. Dixon (first published in 1976. This book surveys 100 years of military inefficiency from the Crimean War through World War II). The usual leader is Sex by Madonna.
Heiress, temporary anarchist and erstwhile gun totin' babe Patty Hearst is the co-owner of a dog - a shih tzu called Rocket - that was picked as the top toy dog at the Westminster Kennel Club show in New York on Monday. Now that is a serious recovery.
People are upset by the Atlantic article mentioned above.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that France “is at war with terrorism, jihadism and radical Islamism.” This does raise the question, as many have, what are the French fighting for? There is an interesting opinion in Buchanan that derives from T.S. Eliot:
"T.S. Eliot said, to defeat a religion, you need a religion.
We have no religion; we have an ideology—secular democracy. But the Muslim world rejects secularism and will use democracy to free itself of us and establish regimes that please Allah.
In the struggle between democracy and Allah, we are children of a lesser God. “The term ‘democracy,’” wrote Eliot, “does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike — it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God … you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”
Germany used democracy to bring Hitler to power. Given free elections from Morocco to Mindanao, what kind of regimes would rise to power?
And what does a mindless West offer as the apotheosis of democracy?"
The financial-services technology company surveyed 4,000 consumers in October and found that 51% of them said they had never heard of a chip card or EMV. The latter is the technical name for the cards that use a unique code for each transaction, reducing the chance that stolen card data can be used to make counterfeit plastic. (That stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa –which set the global standard.)
For the first three years of that war, the West lost battle after battle in both Europe and Asia. France collapsed and surrendered after just six weeks of fighting, and few expected the British to survive the blitzkrieg Hitler unleashed on them from the air. Americans were defeated by the Japanese in the Philippines.
When the British finally won the battle of El Alamein in North Africa in November 1942, it was their first victory, more than three years after Britain entered the war.
AAAAAAaaaannnnnnddddd......a graph:
When the British finally won the battle of El Alamein in North Africa in November 1942, it was their first victory, more than three years after Britain entered the war.
AAAAAAaaaannnnnnddddd......a graph:
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