Reverie

The tricky thing about separating church and state is that the state is a kind of church.--Richman 

The word "Satan" in Hebrew means "adversary."

An ice-free corridor between the Americas and Asia opened up about 12,500 years ago, allowing humans to cross over the Bering land bridge to settle what is now the United States and places beyond to the south. History books have conveyed that information for years to explain how the Americas were supposedly first settled by people, such as those from the Clovis culture. At least one part of the Americas was already occupied by humans before that time, however, says new research on the skeleton of a male youth found in Chan Hol cave near Tulum, Mexico. Dubbed the Young Man of Chan Hol, the remains date to 13,000 years ago, according to a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE. How he arrived at the location remains a great mystery given the timing and the fact that Mexico is well over 4,000 miles away from the Bering land crossing. For the new study, Gonzalez, Stinnesbeck, and their colleagues dated the Young Man of Chan Hol's remains by analyzing the bones' uranium, carbon, and oxygen isotopes, which were also found in stalagmite that had grown through the pelvic bone. The scientists believe that the resulting age of 13,000 years could apply to at least two other skeletons found in caves around Tulum: a teenage female named Naia and a 25-30-year-old female named Eve of Naharon. Gonzalez said that the shape of the skulls suggests that Eve and the others "have more of an affinity with people from Southeast Asia." He and his team further speculated that the individuals could have originated in Indonesia.

Who is....Gertrude Stein?

I sat next to her..[Stein]... and she said to me early in the afternoon, What is the answer? I was silent. In that case, she said, what is the question? Then the whole afternoon was troubled, confused and very uncertain, and later in the afternoon they took her away on a wheeled stretcher to the operating room and I never saw her again. (The last paragraph of What is Remembered, Alice B. Toklas' autobiography--and life of Gertrude Stein)



The International Sun/Earth Explorer 3, abandoned by NASA in an orbit around the Sun in 1999, was the subject of a partially successful attempt to rehabilitate it in 2014 as the first “citizen science, crowd funded, crowd sourced, interplanetary space science mission”. The project was run out of a disused McDonald’s on the campus of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.


The two most expensive handbags in auction history were both sold at Christie’s, and are both rare diamond.

An exceptional, matte white Himalaya niloticus crocodile diamond Birkin 30 with 18k white gold & diamond hardware. Hermès, 2014. Sold for HKD 2,940,000 on 31 May 2017 at Christie’s in Hong Kong

 
Will the States Rights people of Texas decline Federal help for their flood damage?

Flood damage in Texas from Hurricane Harvey may equal that from 2005's Hurricane Katrina, the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, said an insurance research group on Sunday. . . . Hurricane Katrina resulted in more than $15 billion in flood insurance losses in Louisiana and Mississippi that were paid by the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), a federal program that is the only source of flood insurance for most Americans. One quarter of southeast Texas is under water. That is in the range of Lake Michigan in size.


Bill Maher is distressed at Trump's executive actions and wants strict written rules applied to the actions of the executive. Read that again.

Good news: Equality is achievable. A historian from Stanford named Walter Scheidel has written a book on inequality and its cures. The theme of his book is that the cures for social/economic inequality are war, violent savage revolution, plague and social collapse.
So egalitarianism is absolutely achievable......... 


So there are more people at a 600 student high school football game on Friday night than in the Klan and the "alt-right" white supremacist groups combined. So 200 masked morons are worth all the news time at 6:00. So, now that we have restored a good national perspective, what do you think about the shoes Melania wore to the flood?

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has sent more than 1,000 big rigs to hard-hit areas and evacuation centers, with most carrying water.

Republican plans to scale back corporate interest deductions stand to push more borrowing overseas, eroding benefits of the mammoth U.S. bond market.

Large U.S.-based companies like Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. routinely borrow billions in U.S. markets even as they retain billions of dollars in cash, knowing that interest payments will lower their local tax bills. Any U.S. limits on interest deductibility would break with the policies in many other rich countries and likely prompt companies to shift some borrowing to places where deductibility would still be in effect, say analysts. (wsj)

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-power-of-free-association.html

The Power of Free Association steeleydock.blogspot.com The drift towards tyranny is always with us; like gravity, there is always some man or idea spreading an attracting field. Energy is alw...

Ethnic cleansing, executive centralizations, and police-state impositions are part of the mix....[of fascism].... More fundamentally fascism rejects and resents the whole social trajectory of freedom, which is always about emancipation of people from all forms of power, social control, and material deprivation. Fascism is one form of revolt against laissez-faire while socialism is another. So similar are they in practice that history has given us violent hybrids such as the National Socialism of the Nazi Party itself. --Tucker
The problem here is that most people accept central power if it benefits them


Furedi is a professor emeritus in England and author of "What's Happened to the University?: A Sociological Exploration of Its Infantilization." Writing in The American Interest, he cites a warning issued to Oxford University postgraduate students about the danger of "vicarious trauma," which supposedly results from "hearing about and engaging with the traumatic experiences of others." This, Furedi says, is symptomatic of the "medicalization" of almost everything in universities that strive to be "therapeutic." Universities are "promoting theories and practices that encourage people to interpret their anxieties, distress and disappointment through the language of psychological deficits." This generates self-fulfilling diagnoses of emotionally fragile students. They demand mental-health services on campuses that are replete with "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces" to insulate students from discomforts, such as the depiction of a musket. What academics perceive as "an expanded set of problems tracks right along with the exponential growth of the 'Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.'" (will)


In 1939, Germany invaded Poland. They had signed  a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union on August 23, 1939. In a secret clause of the agreement, the "ideological enemies" agreed to divide Poland between them. But, as always, the "ideological differences" was only who had the right to kill whom.


In 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statisyics, “consumer units” (which include families, financially independent individuals, and people living in a single household who share expenses) spent more on average on federal, state and local taxes ($10,489) than they did on food ($7,203) and clothing ($1,803) combined ($9,006).
The average tax bill for American “consumer units” increased from $7,423 in 2013 to $10,489 in 2016, according to data released this week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.


The remarkable productive achievements of the market system are the result of its ability to gather vast amounts of detailed, continually changing information and to disseminate it quickly to precisely those persons who want it.  That won’t happen unless people respond in their actions to the signals that prices emit and those prices are in turn allowed to respond to people’s actions.  The impersonality of the market system that so much disturbs us is an essential feature of that system. We cannot have the benefits of a market system if we are at the same time determined to prevent that system from operating in an impersonal manner.--Heyne
 
In 1933, Gertrude Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her account of her salon life as seen through the devoted eyes of her companion. This ventriloquism allowed her to be Boswell to her own Johnson. (King)

Last month two of the country's biggest and best-regarded coding bootcamps closed. "Computer programming is highly specialized work; it can't be effectively taught in an intensive program," wrotes Inc. magazine's contributing editor.

 

I met a farrier recently. He works out of his truck where he has a coal forge. He has a coal forge over his gas tank. If you ever see a farrier truck, give it wide berth.

 

AAAAAaaaannnnnddddd.....a graph: