Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference. Voltaire (1694 - 1778)
Much of the public debate is over the identification of the ISIS guys as Muslim. There is this righteous posturing that all Muslims are not involved. There is implicit in this position that some sort of intolerance is present in the West that is either feeding the madness or simply unseemly. I have seen the charge that all Muslims are ISIS guys in fact or in spirit only in radical mass email throwaways and have no idea why the debate should be focused upon this straw man. Perhaps because it is simply an easier and more righteous position.
We have a really good opportunity for a little experiment I would love to run on wackos who hope to become important. Apparently some grown men, taking their cue from Occupy Wall Street, have decided for some reason to occupy an abandoned building, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in Oregon. My solution? Ignore them. No pictures. No names. No local TV outside. No concerned interviews with friends, neighbors or family. Ignore them.
The Challenger Deep is the deepest known point in the Earth's seabed hydrosphere, with a depth of 10,898 m (35,755 ft) to 10,916 m (35,814 ft) by direct measurement from submersibles, and slightly more by sonar bathymetry. It is in the Pacific Ocean, at the southern end of the Mariana Trench near the Mariana Islands group.
The death rate of middle-aged American whites — more particularly, working-class middle-aged American whites — is rising, while that of all other Americans continues to fall. A study by Princeton economists Angus Deaton (the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics) and Anne Case documented the number of deaths by suicide, alcohol use and drug use among working-class whites ages 45 to 54 has risen precipitously since 1999 — so precipitously that the overall death rate for this group increased 22%. That is a staggering change, epidemic-like.
Who is.....John Hanson?
Studies indicate that putting on a happy face actually makes you happier. It seems that the simple act of a physical smile, authentic or not, tricks your brain into thinking you're actually happy. Smiling also triggers us to think back to joyful memories, further improving mood. In addition to lifting mood and reducing stress, other research has shown that people who smile are thought to be more friendly and likeable, and smiling actually makes those around you cheerier as well.
The share of blue-collar jobs in the U.S. economy declined from 28% in 1970 to 17% in 2010. The Economic Policy Institute reports the real median hourly wage for white men with no more than a high school diploma declined from $19.76 in 1979 to $17.50 in 2014.
Kipling’s only son John was killed in WWI at the age of eighteen; his father's patriotism was always blamed as he lobbied for his son's commission although he was physically unfit. Kipling had lost his only daughter at sea and this was his only son, for whom he had written "If," perhaps his most famous poem. ("You'll be a man, my son.") Kipling was devastated and wrote the heartbreaking My Boy Jack which starts,
"Have you news of my boy Jack?'
Not this tide.
'When d'you think that he'll come back?'
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide."
New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had sex with prostitutes, meanwhile publicly declaring that sex work was “modern-day slavery.” He then signed a law that increased penalties for people caught doing it. When Spitzer was caught, he resigned. He's a felon, but he managed to avoid jail.
Golden oldie:
Mars, the red planet named for the Roman god of war, has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, whose names are derived from the Greek for Fear and Panic. These martian moons may well be captured asteroids originating in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter or perhaps from even more distant reaches of the Solar System. But Phobos orbits so close to Mars - about 5,800 kilometers above the surface compared to 400,000 kilometers for our Moon - that gravitational tidal forces are dragging it down. A recent analysis of the long grooves indicates that they may result from global stretching caused by tides -- the differing force of Mars' gravity on different sides of Phobos. These grooves may then be an early phase in the disintegration of Phobos into a ring of debris around Mars.
Dogs can see in color, though they most likely see colors similar to a color-blind human. They can see better when the light is low.
Voltaire's talent was for writing, and his temperament was towards toppling rather than upholding authority. At age twenty-one he was exiled from Paris for five months, having stepped on the wrong toes with some satiric verses about the decadent life at Versailles. Six months later he was arrested again for similar offences, this time put in the Bastille.
The deadliest natural disaster in the U.S. was the Galveston hurricane of 1900, which killed between 8,000-12,000 people.
The controversy over whether bisphenol A, a component of plastics and can linings, is dangerous to humans is now in its 17th year. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on research by the US and other governments around the world. “In a new study of Cincinnati-area kids, girls exposed to higher levels of bisphenol A before birth had more behavioral problems and were more anxious and over-active than those only exposed to small amounts of the chemical,” said Reuters Health. But the study began with a sample of 468 but analyzed only 237 or 239—it is not clear how many were actually analyzed from their data section in the results. Regardless, the sample is roughly 50 percent of their original sample. We never know (from the authors) how much the missing data contributed to the results.
John Hanson, the first president of the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation, is sometimes called the first president of the United States, but this is a misnomer, since the presidency did not exist as an executive position separate from Congress until the federal Constitution created the role upon its ratification in 1789.
Lassitude: n: 1. weariness of body or mind from strain, oppressive climate, etc.; lack of energy; listlessness; languor.
2. a condition of indolent indifference: the pleasant lassitude of the warm summer afternoon. ety: Lassitude stems from the Latin term lassus meaning "weary." The suffix -tude appears in abstract nouns of Latin origin.
Nathanial West wrote his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, about disgruntled characters inside the Trojan Horse. Only 500 copies of the book were printed when it was published in 1931.
While hardly definitive, this is a fascinating study, more for its conclusions than its substance: Older black men who have surgery for prostate cancer may have more complications and pay higher out-of-pocket costs than white men, a U.S. study suggests. Study author Dr. Quoc-Dien Trinh of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston said, “My interpretation is that all this talk about blacks having more biologically aggressive disease and hence worse survival may in fact be more of an access to care or access to treatment problem.” So any variation from the mean is suspect? These non-scientific pronouncements are common in the lay press but are getting more frequent in sciece where funding is so important. No scientific thinker would run to a block in a city that had seven cases of lymphoma with the thought that there was a local reason for the high rate--or would never have done so in the past. But now....
AAAAaaaaannnnnddddd.....a graph:
