Reverie

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.

~Alexander Tytler, historian

Less than a year before Richard M. Nixon’s resignation as president of the United States, Spiro Agnew became the first U.S. vice president to resign in disgrace. The same day, he pleaded no contest to a charge of federal income tax evasion in exchange for the dropping of charges of political corruption. (He was selling positions when he was governor.)

The Vice-President of the United States!

The stats of taxpayers are informative. The amount of taxes paid by the lowest 70% of taxpayers--taxpayers--is exceeded by the amount paid by the top 1020 taxpayers.

What is ....a symbiote?

Throughout the 19th century, farmers used guano (i.e., the accumulated excrement of seabirds and bats) as highly effective fertilizer due to its exceptionally high content of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium - nutrients that are essential for plant growth. But by the beginning of the 20th century, guano deposits started to run out, and the price of the fertilizer began to increase. If a solution to the depletion of guano hadn’t come soon, famine would have followed. German Nobel Prize-winning scientists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch created the “Haber-Bosch process,” which efficiently converts nitrogen from the air into ammonia (i.e., a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen). Ammonia is then used as a fertilizer to dramatically increase crop yields. The impact of Haber and Bosch’s work on global food production transformed the world forever.

After their revolutionary contribution to human progress, the two scientists worked to help Germany during World War I. Bosch focused on bomb making, while Haber became instrumental in developing chlorine gas.

Factor V Leiden is a variant of human factor V, which causes an increase in blood clotting. With this mutation, protein C, an anticoagulant protein, is not able to bind normally to Factor V, leading to a hypercoagulable state, i.e., an increased tendency for the patient to form abnormal and potentially harmful blood clots. Factor V Leiden is the most common hereditary hypercoagulability disorder amongst ethnic Europeans. It is named after the Dutch city Leiden, where it was first identified.

The moon turns red because, as the Earth blocks the Sun's rays, any sunlight reaching the moon has to travel across the edges of our planet. Most of the light with shorter wavelengths — blue, violet and green — is scattered away by the atmosphere leaving only lights of longer wavelength — the red, orange, and yellow colours — to dimly illuminate the moon.

This process also causes the reds and yellows at sunrise and sunset.

Golden oldie:

https://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/02/oscars-entertainment-and-sharing.html

In 1918, the influenza pandemic took the lives of more people than World War I, the most devastating epidemic recorded in world history.

It infected 500 million people around the world, including people on remote Pacific islands and in the Arctic, and resulted in the deaths of 50 to 100 million.

Five of the ten wealthiest counties in America are in the Washington D.C. area. What a coincidence!

A symbiote is an organism living in a state of symbiosis. It is not a parasite--which only takes--but rather it gives and receives. (No government symbolism, please.) The mitochondria, the energy source in our own cells , is believed to be a symbiote, an organism picked up in our earlier genetic adventures and incorporated into our cells' living mechanism.

The mitochondrial genome looks simple. These bacterial symbiotes have only 37 genes in circular plasmids, somewhat like woven bracelets. This is far smaller than the approximately 20,000 protein-expressing genes in our central genomes.

It’s smaller even than the free-living bacteria found in nature, which may have more than 7,000 genes.

Vulgerian: a vulgar person, especially one whose vulgarity is the more conspicuous because of wealth, prominence, or pretensions to good breeding.

The Latin noun vulgus (also volgus) meant simply “common people, general public”; it also meant “crowd” and usually had a derogatory sense, but there was nothing of the flashy, tacky nouveau riche in the noun itself or its derivative nouns, adjectives, and verbs, e.g., vulgāre “to make available to the public,” vulgātus ”popular, common, ordinary,” vulgāris “belonging to the common people, conventional.” The Romans claimed to have invented satire, i.e., the genre did not exist among the Greeks. The Romans also created the (literary) type of the current sense of vulgarian “a vulgar person whose vulgarity is the more striking because of wealth, prominence, or pretensions to good breeding.” The first example is Trimalchio, a character in the Satyricon, a Latin novel dating from the mid-first century a.d. written by Gaius Petronius (died ca. 66 a.d.). Trimalchio and most of the Satyricon are familiar nowadays from the movie Fellini Satyricon (1969) by the Italian director Federico Fellini (1920–93). Vulgarian entered English in the early 19th century.

A $40 million yacht owned by the family of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was set adrift by vandals at a dock in Ohio last weekend, causing thousands of dollars worth of damage to the vessel, according to the Toledo Blade.

It is always a dangerous step when criminal acts are viewed as political.

Lessons in patience:

"The caroms of trade aggressions and retaliations call to mind an experience Gulliver had when his travels took him to the grand academy of Lagado. There he met a man who had worked "eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers." To those who say that this is as plausible as trying to produce prosperity with protectionism — correctly likened to pursuing wealth by blockading one's own ports — today's trade warriors respond: Have patience. Given sufficient time, protectionism will pay.

But as the comedian Steven Wright says, everywhere is walking distance if you have the time." (will)

MIT economist David Autor and his colleagues, among others, have shown that boys raised without fathers suffer even more than girls do. They compared fatherless brothers and sisters in Florida and found that the boys were less likely than their sisters to graduate from college, have ambitions for their futures or be employed as adults.

Kimberly Guilfoyle’s departure from FOX was initially billed as her decision, but it looks like it may be a significant expansion of women into the sexual harassment field. As HuffPost first reported last week, multiple sources said she did not leave the network voluntarily. They said Guilfoyle was informed her time at Fox News was up following a human resources investigation into allegations of inappropriate behavior including sexual misconduct, and that her lawyers had been involved since the spring. Six sources said Guilfoyle’s behavior included showing personal photographs of male genitalia to colleagues (and identifying whose genitals they were), regularly discussing sexual matters at work and engaging in emotionally abusive behavior toward hair and makeup artists and support staff.

Who are these people? What a cathouse.

But this is even better. HuffPo wrote this as an explanation of their sources, as if this were reasonable: "This story is based on interviews conducted over the past year with 21 sources inside and outside Fox News and 21st Century Fox. All sources spoke to HuffPost on the condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak to the press, did not want to raise Guilfoyle’s ire or have signed nondisclosure agreements that prevent them from speaking to others about their experiences."

What?

The nation’s leading gun safety groups are asking a judge to block an online company’s plan to publish downloadable blueprints for 3D-printed plastic firearms, information that they say would open the door for people to secretly produce fully functional, untraceable weapons. The problem was temporarily solved by the guy escaping a warrant on some abuse charge.

Facebook lost 19% in value in one trading day but for some reason you really had to look hard for news on it it.

The news is filled with debates over the implications of overturning Roe v. Wade, which is a lot like debating the impact that trading for Aaron Judge would have on the Pirates.

In 1868 the 14th Amendment, which had been passed by Congress in 1866, was  ratified. The amendment resolved pre-Civil War questions of African American citizenship by stating that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States…are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside.” The amendment then reaffirmed the privileges and rights of all citizens, and granted all these citizens the “equal protection of the laws.”

AAaaaaaaaaannnnnnnddddd.....a Graph: