“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.” --H.L. Mencken
The spectacular Lindsey Vonn has announced that she will not be representing the President in the Olympics. Did someone think she was? Or is this just bold posing, answering questions that were not asked?
Who is...Leandra English?
From Charen: In 2003, a genetics paper revealed that one in 200 men alive in that year was a direct descendant of Genghis Khan (1162-1227).
Genghis Khan is thought to have left more corpses in his wake than any other invader. The Mongol hordes earned their fearsome reputation. Khan sent emissaries to the city of Merv in Turkmenistan demanding tribute and the pick of the city's most beautiful women. The Seljuk Turks refused and killed the messengers. Khan's army returned three years later. The city's leaders, perhaps having heard of Khan's ferocity in the interim, surrendered, but Khan's wrath was not assuaged. He ordered the entire city to be annihilated. Each soldier was to behead 300 civilians. Merv, which contained libraries, gardens and palaces, was razed and made uninhabitable for 100 years. The Mongol conqueror is supposed to have said:
"The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms."
Roughly 800 years later, his Y chromosome is to be found in 16 million men."The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms."
See? A good man is easier to find than you thought.
An essayist frets about the "worrying possibility is that we’ll reach the limits of what our brains can grasp. There might be concepts, crucial to a full understanding of physical reality, that we aren’t aware of, any more than a monkey comprehends Darwinism or meteorology. Some insights might have to await a post-human intelligence."
Ah, evolution.
"The Republicans' tax legislation is built on economic projections that are as confidently as they are cheerfully made concerning the legislation's shaping effect on the economy over the next 10 years. This claim to prescience must amaze alumni of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, which were 85 and 158 years old, respectively, when they expired less than 10 years ago in the unanticipated Great Recession." Despite this cynical opening, George Will thinks the tax cut worth the gamble.
A telling line from a British Newspaper: "...[a hate crime]...can take any shape and is not always illegal behaviour, officers say."
A telling line from a British Newspaper: "...[a hate crime]...can take any shape and is not always illegal behaviour, officers say."
Reuters (12/7, Hirschler) reports there are now more than 2,000 immunotherapy treatments in development, and researchers are rushing to enroll patients in clinical trials, according to a study published in the Annals of Oncology. The researchers concluded, “The field is very promising and has the potential to deliver many breakthroughs to change the standard of care of many cancer types. However, it is also very crowded, fragmented and uncoordinated with significant duplication.”
The NYT ran a nearly full-page “Style” section profile of black-clad antifa thugs. The Times made them sound fashionable and fun as they punch people who aren't looking for any physical fight, just spouting their beliefs.
The headline: “What to Wear to Smash the State.”
The Times explained what a stylish vandal wears: “Black work or military boots, pants, balaclavas or ski masks, gloves and jackets, North Face brand ... makes it easier for saboteurs to take the offensive against storefronts ... .”(from Stossel)
More than $70 million worth of bitcoin was stolen from a cryptocurrency-mining service called NiceHash following a security breach, causing the company to halt operations for at least 24 hours.
New archaeological evidence has undermined elements of the so-called "Out of Africa" theory, the widely supported model that maps the migration of the earliest humans from Africa. Scientists now believe humans departed Africa as early as 120,000 years ago—60,000 years earlier than previously thought. This is important, if true. One interesting element seems to be the emergence of Chinese scientific efforts and what is being found that has, historically, not been of interest to them. The "interbreeding" question is new as well but pretty hard to make sense of.
From Reuters: "Attorneys for Leandra English, the deputy director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), on Wednesday filed fresh paperwork challenging President Donald Trump and his pick to lead the consumer watchdog. A judge rejected English’s emergency filing to install her as the agency’s leader, but Wednesday’s new filing sets the stage for her to continue the legal fight in higher courts.
Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s top budget official, is leading the CFPB on an interim basis and a federal court has endorsed his right to hold the position for now.
English has challenged Mulvaney’s right to lead the agency, citing her endorsement by former CFPB director Richard Cordray who stepped down two weeks ago."
Now, am I reading this right? Is this woman demanding that the CFBP has autonomy, the right to pick its own employees and govern itself? No one with any sense of this country's nature would tolerate that.
Tunch Ilkin on the violence in football: I don't want to see anybody get hurt ... but it's almost like we have got to a place where people try to vilify football, and I don't get it. I didn't have any problem with the shot George Iloka put on AB. That's a tying touchdown, and he's trying to separate him from the ball. That used to be an every-Sunday occurrence when you go across the middle.
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2015/10/sunday-101815.html
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steeleydock.blogspot.com
In today's gospel, Christ answers the apostles' questions of a hierarchy among them. Jesus summoned the twelve and said to them, "You kn...
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In a Quinnipac poll, 60% of women and 20% of men said they’d been sexually harassed. Something called "Opinium" reports 20% of women vs. 7% of men. YouGov poll in Germany finds 43% of women and 12% of men. The overall rates vary widely depending on how the pollsters frame the question, but the ratio is pretty consistent. The data on perpetrators is less clear. An Australian study says that 21% of harassers are women. The German poll finds it’s 25%.
The wonder of the economist's mind:
"Becker's theory of rational addiction proposed that an addict does not enjoy his addiction per se, but that it helps him face pre-existing personal problems that would otherwise be even more difficult to support; which is to say, it provides utility." This appeared in the writings of an economist who also wrote: "...individuals also generate negative externalities. Some may rejoice at somebody else's death. Albert Einstein provided fabulous new knowledge, but people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki got negative externalities."
In Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), the administrative and political center of the Ottoman Empire, about a fifth of the population consisted of slaves in 1609 - many of whom came from Caucasus, Eastern Europe, and Africa.
Expect an Erdogan Apology Tour in Europe soon.
A picture:
Expect an Erdogan Apology Tour in Europe soon.
A picture:
The Los Angeles Times (12/7, Netburn) reports researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego “have demonstrated another use for the CRISPR complex: changing what genes are expressed without altering the genome itself.” The researchers, for the first time with a live animal, “were able to use CRISPR to activate beneficial genes in live mice suffering from muscular dystrophy, Type 1 diabetes and acute kidney injury,” according to a study published in the journal Cell. The Times said, “In more than 50% of test cases, the animal’s health improved following the CRISPR intervention.”
This is a big advance as it allows the manipulation of gene expression without altering the germline cells, egg, sperm and zygote cells that could influence the genetic line by handing down basic changes. Or so they think.
One out of every twenty statistical analyses you do will be positive at the 0.05 level by pure coincidence. So if you give people ten tests, you’ve got a pretty good chance of getting one positive result – at which point, you trumpet that one to the world.
"That we should foreswear all principles or “isms” in order to achieve greater mastery over fate is even now proclaimed as the new wisdom of our age…. If I am not mistaken, this fashionable contempt for “ideology” or for all general principles or “isms” is a characteristic attitude of disillusioned socialists who, because they have been forced by the inherent contradictions of their own ideology to discard it, have concluded that all ideologies must be erroneous and that in order to be rational one must do without one." --Hayek
I don't know if this is true but it is funny. According to The Independent, James Howells, a British IT worker, began his fascination with cryptocurrency in February 2009, and through his computational expertise, he mined 7,500 Bitcoins in the preceding years.
(By the way, an editorial called the Bitcoin craze a redistribution of income event as more adventurous younger people take a chance on the coin where the older population will not.)
One out of every twenty statistical analyses you do will be positive at the 0.05 level by pure coincidence. So if you give people ten tests, you’ve got a pretty good chance of getting one positive result – at which point, you trumpet that one to the world.
"That we should foreswear all principles or “isms” in order to achieve greater mastery over fate is even now proclaimed as the new wisdom of our age…. If I am not mistaken, this fashionable contempt for “ideology” or for all general principles or “isms” is a characteristic attitude of disillusioned socialists who, because they have been forced by the inherent contradictions of their own ideology to discard it, have concluded that all ideologies must be erroneous and that in order to be rational one must do without one." --Hayek
I don't know if this is true but it is funny. According to The Independent, James Howells, a British IT worker, began his fascination with cryptocurrency in February 2009, and through his computational expertise, he mined 7,500 Bitcoins in the preceding years.
However, there was a woman in Howells' life and, as Gizmodo reports, his girlfriend got fed up with the noise of his block-mining hardware and made him stop. At the time, it was not a big loss he notes, bitcoin was worth next to nothing.And so buried deep below thousands of tons of garbage on a Welsh landfill site, lies a hard drive with bitcoins potentially worth more than $100 million.
"After I had stopped mining, the laptop I had used was broken into parts and sold on eBay. However, I kept the hard drive in a drawer at home knowing it contained my Bitcoin private keys, so that if Bitcoin did become valuable one day I would still have the coins I had mined," he told the Telegraph.
Then "in mid-2013 during a clear-out, the hard drive was mistakenly thrown out and put into a general waste bin at my local landfill site, after which it was buried on site."
(By the way, an editorial called the Bitcoin craze a redistribution of income event as more adventurous younger people take a chance on the coin where the older population will not.)
Unfunded pension liabilities at the state and local levels have quintupled in the last decade to roughly $4–$6 trillion. The combined state and local revenues total around $2.6 trillion per year.
AAAAAaaaannnnnnddddd......a graph:
Source: Geopolitical Futures
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