"If 'pro' is the opposite of 'con' what is the opposite of 'progress'?" - Paul Harvey
Hydrocarbons accounted for half of Russia's GDP growth since 2000, according to a May report by Leon Aron, resident scholar and director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Russian reserves have enabled them to virtually dictate pricing. But American fracking success threatens to undermine Russian economic success.
The origin of the word "Russia" comes from "rus," an Old Norse term for "the men who row," the main method of navigating the rivers of old Eastern Europe. The name Rus' seems to have the same origin as the Finnish and eastern European names for Sweden. The Norsemen were everywhere.
Tweeter Home Entertainment Group Inc. (TWTRQ) was up 684.62%, apparently because people confused it with Twitter.
Theodore Dalrymple has an article on boxing with some interesting observations. On stereotypes he says, "The man without stereotypes is like the man who steps out into the world stark naked; the man who sticks to his stereotypes despite evidence is like the man who dresses the same whatever the weather." While he feels he would never need to see a second match he says, "but personal taste is not necessarily a good guide to public policy." And as to the qualities of boxing he says there is something ennobling in seeing bravery and chivalry. "Rational utility ," he concludes, "is not the measure of all things, and is not the only guide as to what to permit and what to prohibit."
40% of poor Americans own a dishwasher and 82% have air conditioning — more than twice the 1970 rate of 36% for all Americans. All Americans. One wonders what Carter meant about the middle class being worse off now than in the '70's. I wonder if he meant we are losing our distinctions?
"Average people talk about people, above average people talk about events, superior people talk about ideas." Did the guy who said that realize he was talking about people?
In China, electric bikes sell in the tens of millions each year.
Before writing "Robinson Caruso" Daniel Defoe was committed to debtors prison because he was more than 17,000 pounds in debt. That was a lot of money for the time. Some of his investments included underwriting marine insurance, importing wine from Portugal, buying a diving bell used to search for buried treasure, and investing in some seventy civet cats, whose musk secretions were prized for the manufacture of perfume.
London's notorious Marshalsea Prison, a debtors prison on the south bank of the Thames, had a parliamentary committee report in 1729 stating that some three hundred inmates had died in a three-month period, mainly of starvation.
Later Defoe became England's leading crusader for bankruptcy reform through his newspaper, A Review of the State of the English Nation.
Golden Oldie:
ObamaCare — which revolutionizes one-sixth of the economy, regulates every aspect of medical practice and intimately affects just about every citizen — passed without a single GOP vote. Is that a good idea, to have a revolutionary bill of this scope passed in such a partisan way, without discussion, options and compromise?
"Stylometry" is the software used to identify J.K. Rowling as the author of The Cuckoo's Nest. It has recently been applied to a suspected Poe story. It will be interesting to see what happens when the Shakespeare heretics get it.
Who was....... Wendell Berry?
The Danube River is the second longest river in Europe --the Volga is the longest, begins in Germany and flows to the Black Sea. Ancient Greeks called this river Ister. It was also called Danu by the Celts after the goddess Danu, a motherly protector of the Indo-European world. When Roman fleets patrolled it roughly 2,000 years ago, they Latinized the Celtic name to Danuvius. In 1066, when the Normans conquered Europe, the river took on the French version of the Latin name, Danube.
Tim Worstall, a fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, wrote in Forbes in June that "the typical person in the bottom 5% of the American income distribution is still richer than 68% of the world's inhabitants."
A vaccine has been developed that prevents breast cancer in mice. This will raise questions again about whether the FDA is a protective or merely obstructive organization. The Food and Drug Administration approval process takes abut 10 years and costs billions. The Cleveland Clinic has formed a company called Shield Biotech, to develop and commercialize the drug. The vaccine has proven to be both safe and effective in preventing breast cancer in mice, including mice bred to have a genetic predisposition for breast cancer. The research was originally published in Nature Medicine in May 2010.
The vaccine activates the immune system against proteins, including the prototypic protein alpha-lactalbumin, expressed only in breast tumors.
Before Josef Djugashvili became Josef Stalin and an editor of peoples, he became an editor of newspapers.He was, like a plastic surgeon, a shaper of things. He worked at two papers in Baku and then as editor of the first Bolshevik daily, Pravda. He was, apparently, quite good at it. He eventually ordered, and edited, a short history of the Revolution and Russia but much of his considerable contributions were edited out later by Khrushchev.
AAAANNNNnnnnddddddd..... a graph:
