People can command, dictate, and legislate; however, people cannot consciously create law any more than people can consciously create human language. Genuine law, like language, evolves; each is the result of human action but not of human design.--Bruno Leoni
Geisel (Dr. Seuss) was rejected twenty-seven times before his first book was published. The details are worth relating. Geisel says he was walking home, stinging from the book's twenty-seventh rejection, with the manuscript and drawings for Mulberry Street under his arm, when an acquaintance from his student days at Dartmouth College bumped into him on the sidewalk on Madison Avenue in New York City. Mike McClintock asked what Geisel was carrying. 'That's a book no one will publish,' said Geisel. 'I'm lugging it home to burn.' McClintock had just that morning been made editor of children's books at Vanguard; he invited Geisel up to his office, and McClintock and his publisher bought Mulberry Street that day.
The NY Times reports that a US “retreat” from the world order that it has largely shaped was the unspoken topic de jour at this year’s spring meeting of the IMF and World Bank in Washington.
The NY Times reports that a US “retreat” from the world order that it has largely shaped was the unspoken topic de jour at this year’s spring meeting of the IMF and World Bank in Washington.
Smoking tobacco emerged from religious ceremonies in the Americas and was probably initially restricted to only shamans, priests, and medicine men. Both in ancient America and in sixteenth-century Europe, "holy smoke" from tobacco was thought to help cure illness and drive out evil spirits.
The Americans in Yemen: Although many other countries evacuated their citizens, India most notably ferrying out around 5,000, the United States has said it is too dangerous for them to directly evacuate American nationals.
The MESSENGER spacecraft is the first to orbit Mercury, since 2011. MESSENGER has conducted scientific explorations, including extensive imaging of the Solar System's innermost planet. Running out of propellant and unable to counter orbital perturbations caused by the Sun's gravity, MESSENGER crashed on Mercury last month.
Paranoia alert: The New York Fed is moving a lot of operations to Chicago because of concerns about what a “natural disaster” could do, the federal government is buying 62 million rounds of ammunition commonly used in AR-15 semi-automatic rifles for “training” purposes, and NORAD is moving back into Cheyenne Mountain because it is “EMP-hardened”. In addition, government authorities have scheduled a whole host of unusual “training exercises” all over the nation. So are the elite doing all of this in order to prepare for something really BIG, or should we just chalk up all of this strange activity to rampant government paranoia?
Paranoia alert: The New York Fed is moving a lot of operations to Chicago because of concerns about what a “natural disaster” could do, the federal government is buying 62 million rounds of ammunition commonly used in AR-15 semi-automatic rifles for “training” purposes, and NORAD is moving back into Cheyenne Mountain because it is “EMP-hardened”. In addition, government authorities have scheduled a whole host of unusual “training exercises” all over the nation. So are the elite doing all of this in order to prepare for something really BIG, or should we just chalk up all of this strange activity to rampant government paranoia?
Who is....Robert Heinlein?
In the fall of 2001, following the 9/11 attacks, a series of anthrax mailings occurred which killed five Americans and sickened 17 others. Four anthrax-laden envelopes were recovered which were addressed to two news media outlets in New York City (the New York Post and Tom Brokaw at NBC) and two senators in Washington D.C. (Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle). The killer anthrax in the letters had a very high-tech anti-static coating so that the anthrax sample “floated off the glass slide and was lost” when scientists tried to examine it. Specifically, the killer anthrax was coated with polyglass with each anthrax spore given an electrostatic charge, so that it would repel other spores and “float”. This was very advanced bio-weapons technology.
In the fall of 2001, following the 9/11 attacks, a series of anthrax mailings occurred which killed five Americans and sickened 17 others. Four anthrax-laden envelopes were recovered which were addressed to two news media outlets in New York City (the New York Post and Tom Brokaw at NBC) and two senators in Washington D.C. (Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle). The killer anthrax in the letters had a very high-tech anti-static coating so that the anthrax sample “floated off the glass slide and was lost” when scientists tried to examine it. Specifically, the killer anthrax was coated with polyglass with each anthrax spore given an electrostatic charge, so that it would repel other spores and “float”. This was very advanced bio-weapons technology.
Golden oldie:
The science fiction writer Robert Heinlein had a suggestion for how to deal with the moral quandaries of genetic engineering — what’s now called the "Heinlein Solution:" Allowing couples to select which naturally produced sperm and ova they want to combine into a child, but forbidding them to actually alter the natural human genome.
Ben Affleck requested that the PBS documentary series "Finding Your Roots" not reveal he had a slave-owning ancestor, according to emails published online by whistleblower site WikiLeaks, and the information never appeared on the program. This sounds trivial but is not; it is indicative of our current Old Testament mentality of inherited guilt where the child is branded by his father's sins. Guilt is apparently genetic and transferrable in a sort of epigenetic way. So it is on a national basis: Jews killed Christ, Germans ran death camps, the United States was created by men who owned--or knew men who owned--slaves. The sins of the father--or, in Affleck's case--great, great grandfather......
The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
There are so few people (vs. machines) working at the New York Stock Exchange that they closed the cafeteria.
The author of a dozen novels, three short story collections and four non-fiction books, Bram Stoker is known almost exclusively for Dracula, published in 1897. Waves of vampire hysteria swept Europe throughout the 1700s, and by the time Bram Stoker took his turn with the legends they had been worked by Goethe, Coleridge, Byron, Southey, Dumas and others. The first English novel in the bloodsucking line was John Polidori's The Vampyre, written in 1819, from a fragment of a story developed by Byron, to whom Polidori was personal physician. (Polidori's story is most memorable as the answer to one of the classic questions in games of literary trivia: What was the other horror story which had its genesis in the Lake Geneva literary evening shared by Byron and the Shelleys?)
The 27th Infantry Regiment, nicknamed the "Wolfhounds", is a unit of the United States Army established in 1901, that served in the Philippine-American War, in the Siberian Intervention after World War I, and as part of the 25th Infantry Division ("Tropic Lightning") during World War II, the Korean War, and later the Vietnam War. More recently the regiment is currently deployed to Afghanistan for the second time, following two deployments to Iraq.
IMF update: Prosecutors in Spain ordered a search of the home of former International Monetary Fund head Rodrigo Rato as part of an investigation into allegations of money laundering. Mr. Rato, who has been charged with fraud, embezzlement and forgery in another case, denied wrongdoing in both cases.
Elisa Gabbert on poetry: "You come to understand meaning-resistant arrangements of language as having their own kind of meaning" She calls upon the poet John Keats and his definition in a letter. Keats describes "negative capability" as a concept which prizes intuition and uncertainty above reason and knowledge. She continues, "Negative capability, as described by Keats, is rather delightfully poetic in itself, a form of imitative fallacy in criticism, a mental onomatopoeia. It seems clear enough by his own definition: 'when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' But it’s so often badly paraphrased, in conversation and in print; Wikipedia defines it as 'the capacity of human beings to transcend and revise their contexts.'”
Atticism: n: 1. concise and elegant expression, diction, or the like. 2. the style or idiom of Attic Greek occurring in another dialect or language. Atticism comes from the Greek word Attikismós which means "a siding with Athens" or "an Attic expression." Since Attic was the language of the Greek capital Athens, it also came to be associated with fine speech. Another word with ancient Greek origin is "laconic:" adj.: "concise, abrupt," 1580s, probably via Latin Laconicus, from Greek Lakonikos, from Lakon "person from Lakonia," the district around Sparta in southern Greece in ancient times, whose inhabitants were famously proud of their brevity of speech. When Philip of Macedon threatened them with, "If I enter Laconia, I will raze Sparta to the ground," the Spartans' reply was, "If."
There is a sideline to the new book, "Clinton Cash," which asserts that foreign entities who made payments to the Clinton Foundation and to Mr. Clinton through high speaking fees received favors from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department in return. Major news organizations including The Times, The Washington Post and Fox News have exclusive agreements with the author to pursue the story lines found in the book. So the book opens inquiry that is exclusive and can be sublet. That sounds very peculiar.
Frequency modulation, or FM, radio was patented in 1933. But its days are clearly numbered. According to a 2012 Pew Study, while over 90% of Americans still listen to AM/FM radio at least weekly, more people are choosing to forgo analog radio for Internet-only services each year. Norway’s Minister of Culture announced this week that a national FM-radio switch off will commence in 2017, allowing the country to complete its transition over to digital radio. It’s the end of an era. Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) will provide Norwegian listeners more diverse radio channel content than ever before.
AAAAAnnnnnnddddddd......a picture of Venus and the v-shaped Pleisdes:
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