Gates, Buffett set to dine with China's richI read Gates, a word that looks a lot like buffet, and dine in the same sentence and I think something wonderful has happened. Turns out it's just two old rich guys having a dinner function. Damn.
Jimi Heselden, the owner of the Segway company, has died after riding one of the two-wheeled machines off a cliff and into a river.And second:
The body of a sailor who disappeared off Jaws Beach – on an island where one of the "Jaws" movies was filmed – has been found inside the stomach of a shark.Also coincidentally, I just watched part of Jaws this weekend.
"The last decades of the past millennium are characterized again by warm temperatures that seem to be unprecedented in the context of the last 1600 years."Yeah, but who cares about that stuff anymore?
Now the company (KFC) is advertising its bunless Double Down non-sandwich on the bottoms of sweatpants worn by female college students. Besides wearing the branded sweatpants, the women recruited to market this stuff will pass out coupons to fellow students.I think the Dollars and Sense blogger has let their own personal social preferences eclipse their business sense here. I mean, I don't have the market research, but I would imagine (having once been one) that college males are easily the best target demo for a sandwich in which two pieces of fried chicken form the bun of a bacon and cheese sanwich.
The United States' economy is currently struggling to emerge from a severe recession brought on by the financial crisis of 2008. Was that crisis brought about by income inequality? Some economists are starting to think it may have been. David Moss of Harvard Business School has produced an intriguing chart that shows bank failures tend to coincide with periods of growing income inequality. "I could hardly believe how tight the fit was," he told the New York Times. Princeton's Paul Krugman has similarly been considering whether the Great Divergence helped cause the recession by pushing middle-income Americans into debt. The growth of household debt has followed a pattern strikingly similar to the growth in income inequality (see the final graph). Raghuram G. Rajan, a business school professor at the University of Chicago, recently argued on the New Republic's Web site that "let them eat credit" was "the mantra of the political establishment in the go-go years before the crisis." Christopher Brown, an economist at Arkansas State University, wrote a paper in 2004 affirming that "inequality can exert a significant drag on effective demand." Reducing inequality, he argued, would also reduce consumer debt. Today, Brown's paper looks prescient.The last time inequality was this high in the United States was just before the Great Depression. We spent the next 40 years after working on the problem, and then spend the last 30 making it worse again. Perhaps we need to think again.
If you needed any more evidence that it was a great year for the Royals, here it is: Five of the 15 first-team all-stars figure to one day wear Kansas City blue...
C Will Myers
1B Eric Hosmer
3B Mike Moustakas
SP John Lamb
RP Tim Collins
Even if it were possible for bats, birds, and pesticides to eradicate them all—which it isn't—wholesale mosquito slaughter would not be a great idea. Their huge numbers of larvae feed small fish, and those small fish feed big fish, and those big fish are the primary source of protein for much of the developing world.I had really been on the "let's just destroy every mosquito on the planet" bandwagon, but I always figured there would be some awful unintended consequence if we did. Welts are here to stay.
The "burnt end" is, after jazz, Kansas City's most important gift to civilization. Some great Kansas Citian of the past realized that the ends of a barbecued brisket were the fattiest, saltiest, smokiest chunks of meat on God's own Earth. Every barbecue joint in KC—and practically nowhere else—sets aside its burnt ends, chops them up, and serves them with a little sauce. It is a profound experience to eat them.Here, here!
"We needed to have the press be our friend," Angle said in an interview that aired on Fox over the weekend.What you think it says about Nevadans probably depends on how cynical you are.
"Wait a minute. Hold on a second. To be your friend?" said a disbelieving Carl Cameron. Before Angle could fully answer, he added: "That sounds naive." Apparently this was too much for even him.
"Well, no," said Angle. "We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported."
August is the vast sandy wasteland of American culture. Publishers stop releasing books. Movie theaters are clogged with the egregious action movies that studios wouldn't dare release in June. Television is all reruns (or worse—new episodes of Sex and the City). The sports pages wither into nothingness. Pre-pennant-race baseball—if that can even be called a sport—is all that remains. We have to feign interest in NFL training camps.There is quite a bit more they have to say about crime and dictators and heatwaves. I guess my one counter would be that without August we would have far less county and state fairs. And that means far less corn dogs and fried Snickers. Long live August!
The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the multiple is above 300.Read the whole thing. It'll be worth your while.
Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.Read the whole article. The biggest question it brings up in my mind is that if life success is correlated with kindergarten success but high school test scores are not, what does that say about the usefulness of high school test scores?
"Now, you could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, way of life, cult whatever you want to call it," Ramsey said. "Now certainly we do protect our religions, but at the same time this is something we are going to have to face."Nationality?
But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”This finding is fine, though there seems to be no indication that being in 4-H has a causal relationship with getting into a school, but to expand this out into an idea that kids from red states don't go to Ivy League schools because of bias against future farmers seems patently ridiculous.
It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of life on the Earth than gravity, from the moment you first took a step and fell on your diapered bottom to the slow terminal sagging of flesh and dreams.If gravity might not exist, what isn't possible?
But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?
So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.
93. An idea whose time has come: Halve and grill peaches, nectarines or apricots. Brush with barbecue sauce or, if you want to be sophisticated, a mixture of bourbon, sugar and mint, or simple syrup laced with basil.
The Raytown farmer who posted a sign on a semi-truck trailer accusing Democrats of being the “Party of Parasites” received more than $1 million in federal crop subsidies since 1995....See, it's all about being a producer in the free market. So there.
Jungerman said he put up the sign to protest people who pay no taxes, but, “Always have their hand out for whatever the government will give them” in social programs.
Crop subsidies are different, he said. When crop prices dip below a certain point, the federal government makes up the difference with a subsidy payment
This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable. And just as in love, the one-sided reminder of dependence is experienced as an injury. All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved. However, in political life, unlike love, there are no second marriages; we have only the one partner, and although we can rework our relationship, nothing can remove the actuality of dependence. That is permanent.Bernstein goes on to argue that the Tea Partiers are really nihilists on the grounds that they seem to want nothing. I think he is mistaken about that; they seem to want everything. He acknowledges as much in the beginning of the piece. The problem with the Tea Partiers is that they want everything. They don't want to pay taxes, but they want their Social Security checks.
Debrahlee Lorenzana made news this week with the unusual civil rights claim that her employer, Citigroup, has discriminated against her because she is a hottie... According to her lawsuit, Lorenzana is so smoking hot that her co-workers couldn't concentrate on their jobs. Her bosses eventually demanded that she revamp—or, rather, de-vamp—her wardrobe: They banned tight pants, pencil skirts, high heels, and clingy turtlenecks. When Lorenzana pointed out that other women in her office wore more revealing clothes than she did, Lorenzana says her bosses replied, in essence: "Yeah, but they aren't as hot as you are." And when Lorenzana came to work, still looking just as jaw-droppingly sexy as ever, Citibank fired her.
But to be fair, a good deal of the other party’s opposition to our agenda has also been rooted in their sincere and fundamental belief about the role of government. It’s a belief that government has little or no role to play in helping this nation meet our collective challenges. It’s an agenda that basically offers two answers to every problem we face: more tax breaks for the wealthy and fewer rules for corporations.
The last administration called this recycled idea “the Ownership Society.” But what it essentially means is that everyone is on their own. No matter how hard you work, if your paycheck isn’t enough to pay for college or health care or childcare, well, you’re on your own. If misfortune causes you to lose your job or your home, you’re on your own. And if you’re a Wall Street bank or an insurance company or an oil company, you pretty much get to play by your own rules, regardless of the consequences for everybody else.
Now, I’ve never believed that government has all the answers. Government cannot and should not replace businesses as the true engine of growth and job creation. Government can’t instill good values and a sense of responsibility in our children. That's a parent’s job. Too much government can deprive us of choice and burden us with debt. Poorly designed regulations can choke off competition and the capital that businesses need to thrive.
I understand these arguments. And it’s reflected in my policies. After all, one-third of the Recovery Act we designed was made up of tax cuts for families and small businesses. And when you think back to the health care debate, despite calls for a single-payer, government-run health care plan, we passed reform that maintains our system of private health insurance.
But I also understand that throughout our nation’s history, we have balanced the threat of overreaching government against the dangers of an unfettered market. We've provided a basic safety net, because any one of us might experience hardship at some time in our lives and may need some help getting back on our feet. And we've recognized that there have been times when only government has been able to do what individuals couldn't do and corporations wouldn't do.
That's how we have railroads and highways, public schools and police forces. That's how we've made possible scientific research that has led to medical breakthroughs like the vaccine for Hepatitis B, and technological wonders like GPS. That's how we have Social Security and a minimum wage, and laws to protect the food we eat and the water we drink and the air that we breathe. That’s how we have rules to ensure that mines are safe and, yes, that oil companies pay for the spills that they cause.
Now, there have always been those who’ve said no to such protections; no to such investments. There were accusations that Social Security would lead to socialism, and that Medicare was a government takeover. There were bankers who claimed the creation of federal deposit insurance would destroy the industry. And there were automakers who argued that installing seatbelts was unnecessary and unaffordable. There were skeptics who thought that cleaning our water and our air would bankrupt our entire economy. And all of these claims proved false. All of these reforms led to greater security and greater prosperity for our people and our economy.
So what was true then is true today. As November approaches, leaders in the other party will campaign furiously on the same economic arguments they’ve been making for decades. Fortunately, we don't have to look back too many years to see how their agenda turns out. For much of the last 10 years we've tried it their way. They gave us tax cuts that weren’t paid for to millionaires who didn’t need them. They gutted regulations and put industry insiders in charge of industry oversight. They shortchanged investments in clean energy and education, in research and technology. And despite all their current moralizing about the need to curb spending, this is the same crowd who took the record $237 billion surplus that President Clinton left them and turned it into a record $1.3 trillion deficit.
So we know where those ideas lead us. And now we have a choice as a nation. We can return to the failed economic policies of the past, or we can keep building a stronger future. We can go backward, or we can keep moving forward. And I don't know about you, but I want to move forward. I think America wants to move forward.
"Extreme Greenies:see now why we push"drill,baby,drill"of known reserves&promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR? Now do you get it?"
"[L]et's not forget," she wrote, "that while Interior Department bureaucrats continue to hold up actual offshore drilling from taking place, Russia is moving full steam ahead on Arctic drilling, and China, Russia, and Venezuela are buying leases off the coast of Cuba."
"On Mark Critz"
A Democrat, he won!
He was pro-life, pro-gun!
Anti-Obamacare,
And he won there!
In a district where
Democrats outnumber Republicans—two to one!
—Fox News Sunday, May 23, 2010
"Blue Dog Peekaboo"
Blue-dog Democrats
Peeking under the tent.
You know …
and finding out,
WHAT IS THIS MOVEMENT ALL ABOUT?
And Holy Geez! I'm scared!
—Interview with Tea Party Nation questioners, CNN, Feb. 6, 2010
Let's see, who has really consistently been wrong? You know, Dick Cheney would be a good interview. I'm sure he'd be wide open to talking to you.
A lone thief broke into a Paris museum last night and stole five paintings possibly worth hundreds of millions of euros, including masterpieces by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, French police said today...Broke a window? Smashed a padlock? Took the time to carefully remove the paintings?
... The burglary was discovered just before 7am. A single masked intruder was caught on a CCTV camera taking the paintings away, according to the prosecutor's office. A window had been broken and the padlock of a grille giving access to the museum was smashed. The paintings appeared to have been carefully removed from their frames, rather than sliced out.
In my talks with voters on the campaign trail today and yesterday, the idea that the Republican Party is as complicit as the Democratic Party in what ails the country is something I heard again and again. I made a point of seeking out registered Republican voters, and the frustration with Mitch McConnell, Kentucky's senior senator and the Senate Minority Leader, seemed indistinguishable from--or perhaps better to say, "was a large part of"--the general frustration with Washington. "Republicans in Washington, D.C. are just playing 'follow the leader,' Janice Cox told me at a rally in Paducah earlier today, to which she'd brought her daughter, grandchildren, and a jumbo-sized American flag. "We need a true constitutional conservative."I always knew that Mitch McConnell was a socialist.
If you were to make a Venn Diagram of the issues Tea Party members care about, and the issues Tea Party members are confused about, you'd only see one circle.Thanks to My Brain is Made of Things Made of Gold for bringing the quote to my attention.
Juror #10: Six to six... I'm telling you, some of you people in here must be out of your minds. A kid like that...
Juror #9: I don't think the kind of boy he is has anything to do with it. The facts are supposed to determine the case.
Juror #10: Don't give me that. I'm sick and tired of facts! You can twist 'em anyway you like, you know what I mean?
Juror #7: You a Yankee fan?
Juror #5: No, Baltimore.
Juror #7: Baltimore? That's like being hit in the head with a crow bar once a day.
“It was bad to interfere with Charles, bad to endure Cromwell, bad to punish James, bad to put up with William. The House of Hanover was bad. All interference with prerogative has been bad. The Reform Bill was very bad. Encroachment on the estates of the bishops was bad. Emancipation of Roman Catholics was the worst of all. Abolition of corn-laws, church-rates, and oaths and tests were all bad.The meddling with Universities has been grievous. The treatment of the Irish Church has been Satanic. The overhauling of schools is most injurious to English education. Education bills and Irish land bills were all bad. Every step taken has been bad. And yet to them old England is of all countries in the world the best place to live in, and is not at all the less comfortable because of the changes that have been made. … To have been always in the right, and yet always on the losing side; always being ruined, always under persecution from a wild spirit of republican-demagogism – and yet never to lose anything, not even position, or public esteem, is pleasant enough.”
Although the recent dust-up was blamed on a controversial political deal with former master state Russia, I have a different theory.Tom Izzo, invited to Kiev to represent his hometown Iron Mountain, MI in a sister-city cultural exchange, is unable to control his emotions after a junior member of the parliament creates an obvious procedural gaff despite repeated reminders about the rules of order. A word to the wise Ukraine, when Michigan State Head Coach Tom Izzo starts talking to you about Robert's Rules, you better listen!
When Wall Street is not mentioned, net public support (percentage in favor minus percentage opposed) for banking reform legislation is +3 points, but when it is mentioned, net support is +14. [...]Why exactly do Republicans find "Wall Street" so much more worth reforming than "large banks and major financial institutions?" Why don't Democrats have the same reaction? What do Republicans think the difference is between the two? Why do horses wear shoes? Are there horse socks?
On both questions, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to support banking reform. Seven in 10 Democrats favor the proposed new federal regulatory powers, regardless of the wording. By contrast, Republicans show greater support for reform when “Wall Street” is invoked than when it is not (35% vs. 22%).
I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s.Via Kevin Drum.
....A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.
“When your brain detects a potential threat, it narrows your attention,” Dr. Gottfried told me in a telephone conversation. “You don’t need to know that a dangerous food has a hint of asparagus and sorrel to it. You just get it away from your mouth.”I used to dislike cilantro, but I have grown accustomed to it. I think I associate with Latin American food and Vietnamese food, both of which I love. I never knew that spring rolls were all I needed to eliminate a perceived threat.
It is Pica's belief that understanding quantities in terms of estimating ratios is a universal human intuition, due to the fact that ratios are much more important for survival in the wild. Historically, faced with a group of adversaries, we needed to know instantly whether there were more of them than us. When we saw two trees, we needed to know instantly which had more fruit hanging from it. In neither case was it necessary to enumerate every enemy or every fruit individually. The crucial thing was to be able to make quick estimates of the relevant amounts and compare them; in other words to make approximations and judge their ratios.I had no idea that children were born counting logarithmically rather than linearly. I am now informed.
In a statement, Mr. Green said: “The ‘Star Wars’ universe is so dense and rich; it’s crazy to think that there aren’t normal, mundane everyday problems in a world so well-defined. And it’s even crazier to think of what those problems might be, since it’s all set in a galaxy far, far away. What do these characters do when they’re not overthrowing Empires?”I happen to be a Star Wars nerd, so I'm looking forward to it.
