“Apparently, it’s a kind of a ‘honey is sweet, but the bee stings’ situation: they want IS to weaken Assad as soon as possible to make him leave somehow, but at the same time they don’t want to overly strengthen IS, which may then seize power."--Sergei Lavrov on U.S. policy
"Ladies and gentlemen, the shadow of one word has impended over me all this evening, and the time has come at last when the shadow must fall. It is but a very short one, but the weight of such things is not measurable by their length, and two much shorter words express the whole round of our human existence.... Ladies and gentlemen, I beg to bid you farewell - and I pray God bless you, and God bless the land in which I leave you." This was Charles Dickens' farewell speech in New York the day of his last reading of his tour. The crowd cheered and wept. He died two years later in England.
According to the CDC, there are 110 million cases of sexually-transmitted disease in America today, and another 20 million STD cases are added to that total every year. The United States has the highest STD infection rate in the entire industrialized world, and more than half of all Americans will have a sexually-transmitted disease at some point during their lives.
Obama spoke at the Paris global summit and said, apparently shamed-faced, that he had "come here personally, as the leader of the world's largest economy and the second largest emitter, to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem; we embrace our responsibility to do something about it."
Another thing we have to be sorry for. It is not that the U.S. has been stagnant on this theoretical problem. U.S. carbon emissions are lower than they were in 1996, and this decline came despite an 18% increase in population and a 51% climb in the nation's real gross domestic product. Per-capita emissions of CO2 have steadily declined, to the point where they are a third less than they were in the early 1970s and 16% below 1990 levels. The amount of CO2 the U.S. emits per dollar of GDP is 30% lower than it was in 1990. But guilt is guilt, especially when something is disliked.
Davy Jones's Locker: in: A euphemism for death at sea and refers to the bottom of the ocean, where drowned sailors lie. Many theories exist as to where the name “Davy Jones” stems from, but while its origins are unclear, its meaning is not; sailors use the term when referring to the devil of the sea. Jones was described by one 18th century author as having 3 rows of teeth, horns, a tail, and blue smoke coming from his nostrils.
The poet Shelley's body washed up on the beach at Viareggio (his copy of Keats's poems in his pocket), and was burned in an ad hoc funeral pyre, the remains delivered to the cemetery in Rome where Keats was buried. Something, though not the heart, or something looking like it was plucked from the fire by Leigh Hunt, and it was given to Mary Shelley, and found in her belongings at her death, wrapped in a manuscript sheet of "Adonais."
Jordan says it has taken in 1.4 million Syrians fleeing the war there since it broke out in 2011, but the UNHCR puts the figure at 600,000.
At least 250,000 people have died in more than four years of conflict in Syria.
Supreme Court Justice writes in a new book that the court should look abroad for guidance on some decisions because about 20% of cases have something to do with what happens outside the U.S.. Our thinking, even legal thinking, should be more inclusive. Underlying this is the idea that America has nothing unique to offer its people or the world. If that is true, we need a real sitdown. America is a very tough place to live with incredible personal demand and responsibility. If that has no great value, we need to hit the reset button. What we will get, I do not know.
In 2012, the Los Angeles city council unanimously approved a resolution that all Mondays in the City of Angels will be meatless.
Golden oldie:
The number of men and women age 65 and older cohabiting outside of marriage nearly doubled between 1990 and 2000.
Government is typically a bad entrepreneur not because some economists or political philosophers deem it to be, but because the conditions under which it operates are radically different from those facing private entrepreneurs. Market-driven economies are dynamic; they have to be to survive. State-driven economies, or what Nobel laureate economist Edmund Phelps (2013: 127) calls “social economies,” are “fatally lacking in dynamism.”
OPEC sees Brazilian oil production plateauing as soon as next year. That is a pretty significant development considering the fact that, not too long ago, Petrobras thought output would continue rising rapidly through the rest of the decade.
The big American drug company Pfizer Inc. plans to merge with a Dublin-based company called Allergan PLC and set up headquarters overseas, thereby legally becoming an Irish company. Who benefits? If the merger goes through, Pfizer will keep paying U.S. corporate taxes for money earned here. It will get a new deduction opportunity, however, and will not have to pay U.S. taxes on foreign-earned money shipped back to the states.
This so-called corporate inversion will be a public plus for an obvious reason cited by Pfizer: The firm will have more cash to spend in America on investments that habitually sprout opportunities. Who benefits? And who does not? It is a measure of the problem in this country that many will say the people will benefit from Pfizer's greater ability to invest more money and the government--who should be the people--will lose money to waste.
Who is....Malthus?
For the head of Planned Parenthood to self-righteously complain about the “politicization” of women’s health care as her organization receives hundreds of millions of dollars annually in government subsidies – money forcibly extracted by government from taxpayers and then given to Planned Parenthood – is an astonishing feat of hypocrisy. No one who is ethically mature demands money from Smith and simultaneously complains when Smith expresses opinions about how that money is spent.
Thomas Robert Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population,Malthus first published in 1798, proposed the principle that human populations grow exponentially (i.e., doubling with each cycle) while food production grows at an arithmetic rate (i.e. by the repeated addition of a uniform increment in each uniform interval of time). Thus, while food output was likely to increase in a series of twenty-five year intervals in the arithmetic progression 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and so on, population was capable of increasing in the geometric progression 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and so forth. This scenario of arithmetic food growth with simultaneous geometric human population growth predicted a future when humans would have no resources to survive on. To avoid such a catastrophe, Malthus urged controls on population growth.
There is an interesting counter for the theorized Malthusianism pressure of growing population. Nothing is a resource – not petroleum, not iron ore, not trees in a forest, not fish in a lake, not even land – until and unless human ingenuity discovers a way or ways to use, at low-enough cost, that material to satisfy human wants. So that the real resource is the human mind. The human mind is a creator and a developer of resources before it is a consumer.
Penury: n: 1: a cramping and oppressive lack of resources (as money); especially : severe poverty 2: extreme and often niggardly frugality ety: c. 1400, from Latin penuria "want, need; scarcity," related to paene "scarcely." This is sometime used figuratively.
The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.--Smith
AAAAAaaaaaaannnnnnddddd .....a video of sunset at the Golden Gate with a "green flash:"
In the recorded time-lapse sequence, unusually warm air created by bridge traffic refracts sunlight toward the Earth, causing a superior image of the top of the Sun to form. This image will disappear -- marking the first "sunset" -- only after the main image has dipped below the deck. All the while, boats pass in the foreground, cars pass over the bridge, and clouds reflecting sunlight drift by in the distance. The scene ends with Earth's turbulent atmosphere itself creating a path that only higher-energy visible sunlight can traverse, making the last glimpse of our home star appear to flash green.
