I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. -Michelangelo Buonarroti, sculptor, painter, architect, and poet (6 Mar 1475-1564)
Scott Anderson is a wilderness guy who adopted a bear, Brutus. Never forget Travis the Chimp.
The biggest war of the 19th century was not the Napoleonic war, nor the American Civil War, it was the Taiping Rebellion in China, which started in 1850, when a failed scholar named Hong Xuiquan had a vision from God that he, Hong, was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, and that he had a divine mission to establish the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace on Earth, and to solve all the problems China had as a result the coming of the British and of modern industry. He started the rebellion, and millions followed him. According to the most moderate estimates, 20 million people were killed in the Taiping Rebellion, and it was 14 years before it was suppressed.
Who is....Elisha Gray?
I saw some seven man rugby recently; a rough game with huge fast men, many looking like Bettis. Australian rugby star Jarryd Hayne has just signed a deal with the 49ers.
Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. With the help of Thomas A. Watson, a Boston machine shop employee, Bell developed a prototype. In this first telephone, sound waves caused an electric current to vary in intensity and frequency, causing a thin, soft iron plate–called the diaphragm–to vibrate. These vibrations were transferred magnetically to another wire connected to a diaphragm in another, distant instrument. When that diaphragm vibrated, the original sound would be replicated in the ear of the receiving instrument. Three days after filing the patent, the telephone carried its first intelligible message–the famous “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you”–from Bell to his assistant. Bell’s patent filing beat a similar claim by Elisha Gray by only two hours.
More money was spent last year in restaurants than in grocery stores.
"I think that many of these science fiction scenarios, that computers will be like humans, are wrong. Computers are very, very, very far from being like humans, especially when it comes to consciousness. The problem is different, that the system, the military and economic and political system doesn't really need consciousness. It needs intelligence. And intelligence is a far easier thing than consciousness." (Harari)
Bubbles arise if the price far exceeds the asset’s fundamental value, to the point that no plausible future income scenario can justify the price.
Bubbles arise if the price far exceeds the asset’s fundamental value, to the point that no plausible future income scenario can justify the price.
Jan Masaryk was born in 1886, the son of Czechoslovakia’s first president. After World War I, he served as foreign minister in the new Czech government. Later he served as the Czech ambassador to Great Britain. During World War II, he once again took the position of foreign minister, this time with the Czech government-in-exile in London. After the war, Masaryk returned to Czechoslovakia to serve as foreign minister under President Eduard Benes. It was a tense time in Masaryk’s native country. The Soviet Union had occupied the nation during World War II and there were fears that the Soviets would try to install a communist government in Czechoslovakia, as it had in Poland, East Germany, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Masaryk, however, was skillful in dealing with the Soviets, assuring them that a democratic Czechoslovakia posed no security threat to Russia.
In 1947, when the United States unveiled the Marshall Plan—the multimillion-dollar aid program for postwar Europe—Masaryk indicated Czechoslovakia’s interest in participating. When he informed the Soviets, they absolutely refused to give their approval. This was quickly followed, in February 1948, by a communist coup in Czechoslovakia. President Benes was forced to accept a communist-dominated government. Masaryk was one of the few non-communists left in place.
On March 10, 1948, the Czech government reported that Masaryk had committed suicide by jumping out of a third-story window at the Foreign Ministry. I'll bet.
Deregulation is a staple of the Right. Yet the only deregulation the Rube-publicans ever did was Banking and Finance. Democrats deregulated trucking, telecom, airlines, rails, and many others... as well as the greatest deregulation in human history, the Internet. Clinton deregulated GPS (over GOP opposition). It appears that Internet regulation is going to be a step in a different direction.
Golden oldie:
Siberia – the Asian part of Russia, east of the Ural Mountains – is immense. It takes up three-quarters of Russia's land mass, the equivalent of the entire U.S. and India put together. China has huge investments there and also has a historic/genetic interest.
Women in North Korea make up 49% of the work force. Women receive five months’ paid maternity leave, and if a woman has three or more children, she receives eight hours of pay for six hours of work per day. In the 1990s, there were more Korean women holding government positions than there were American women holding comparable positions in the U.S.
After criticizing Rome’s transition from a republic to an empire, the famous philosopher/rhetorician Cicero was murdered and had his head and hands displayed on the Rostra in the Forum Romanum. It is rumored that Fulvia, the wife of the influential Roman politician, Antony, pulled out Cicero’s tongue and stabbed it repeatedly with her hairpin. Now that is political conflict.
The Supreme Court issued a ruling in 1841, freeing the remaining thirty-five survivors of the Amistad mutiny. Although seven of the nine justices on the court hailed from Southern states, only one dissented from Justice Joseph Story's majority opinion. Private donations ensured the Africans' safe return to Sierra Leone in January 1842.
The events leading up to the decision began on July 2, 1839, when Joseph Cinqué led fifty-two fellow captive Africans, recently abducted from the British protectorate of Sierra Leone by Portuguese slave traders, in a revolt aboard the Spanish schooner Amistad. The ship's navigator, who was spared in order to direct the ship back to western Africa, managed, instead, to steer it northward. When the Amistad was discovered off the coast of Long Island, New York, it was hauled into New London, Connecticut by the U.S. Navy. President Martin Van Buren, guided in part by his desire to woo pro-slavery votes in his upcoming bid for reelection, wanted the prisoners returned to Spanish authorities in Cuba to stand trial for mutiny. Slaves being tried for mutiny! The U.S. government eventually appealed the case to the Supreme Court. Former president John Quincy Adams, who represented the Amistad Africans in the Supreme Court case, argued in his defense that it was the illegally enslaved Africans, rather than the Cubans, who "were entitled to all the kindness and good offices due from a humane and Christian nation."
$36.8B were paid for living in 30,000 Assisted Living facilities by over 1 million residents. 65.8% of this amount were direct payments by patients and their families, and 2.6% private long term care insurances.
There are 33,000 home care and hospice providers, along with the more than two million nurses, therapists, and aides they employ. Caregivers provide vital services to some 12 million patients. Annual expenditures for home health care were $72.2 billion.
The federal report on Ferguson has come out and declares law enforcement in Ferguson has a "disparate impact" on blacks and is "motivated" by "discriminatory intent." The "disparate impact" observation continues to be used as if it is prima fascia evidence of discrimination; in essence it is a statistical disproportion. More black guys are arrested, more black children are disciplined in school. But such disparity is evident everywhere where it clearly is not discriminatory. Statistical differences in pay by gender, in representation on sports teams or the military, in engineering schools and spelling bees, in disease rates--all of these distinctions might well be statistically disproportional but the leap from the observation to cause and effect is, or should be, difficult.
But not in the world of The Plausible.
When the Price sisters, IRA activists, were imprisoned in England, thieves stole the Vermeer painting “The Guitar Player” from a museum in Hampstead, and, in ransom notes, threatened to burn it—“with much cavorting in the true lunatic fashion”—if the Price sisters were not moved to Northern Ireland.
France has some extra-marital dating sites and some people are beginning to object. The most recent is Gleedon, a site for married women. A campaign by Ashley Madison, another extramarital website, featured President François Hollande and his three predecessors with smudged lipstick on their faces. “What do they have in common?” the ad asked. “They should have thought of ashleymadison.com.” When the ads were introduced, several were removed by the police, the company said.
Gleeden, launched in 2009, has a million subscribers in France, and 2.4 million globally, who can anonymously trawl profiles for lovers.
Realpolitik: noun: 1. political realism or practical politics, especially policy based on power rather than on ideals. Realpolitik comes directly from the German word of the same spelling which means "politics of realism." It emerged in English in the 1910s.
Realpolitik: noun: 1. political realism or practical politics, especially policy based on power rather than on ideals. Realpolitik comes directly from the German word of the same spelling which means "politics of realism." It emerged in English in the 1910s.
AAAaaaaaannnnnnddddd........a picture of Anderson, his new bride and the best "man:" (may not work)
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