Kinder, a Republican who is Missouri's second-ranking executive, sought Monday to discourage participation in the health insurance exchanges that form the centerpiece of the 2010 Affordable Care Act signed by President Barack Obama.
"I would hope there would be active resistance to this law — that people would not sign up," Kinder said Monday.
This state continues to drift slowly towards becoming a place that would be unrecognizable to my ancestors, and mystifying to my offspring, and shameful to me.
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/09/23/4503629/kinder-mo-residents-should-skip.html#storylink=cpy
Took a break from Missouri news and political news for a few weeks... I poke my head back into it for a second and get this:
A clown wearing a President Barack Obama mask appeared at a Missouri State Fair rodeo this weekend and the announcer asked the enthusiastic spectators if they wanted to see “Obama run down by a bull.”
Sam Mellinger puts up a few random facts about the Royals current awfulness. Here are a couple of my favorites:
The Royals last hit two home runs in the same game on May 10. Forty-three players have done it since.
Royals are now 2-5 (.285) when allowing exactly three runs. The rest of baseball, entering last night, was 158-99 (.615).
I would add to what he has listed that the Royals are even bad by their historical standards, which is bad. They are currently on pace to hit 84 home runs this year. That is 36% less than last year when they tied for last in the American League. Brutal.
Complex dynamics had flourished in Parisian mathematical circles in the early twentieth century, but it soon led to geometrical forms that were far too complicated to be visualized, and the subject became frozen in time.
Mandelbrot saw a way to unfreeze it—through the power of the computer. At the time, computers were pretty well disdained by mathematicians, who “shuddered at the very thought that a machine might defile the pristine ‘purity’ of their field.”
So, when one of your relatives tells you they don't understand or like these newfangled computers just keep in mind that even the most brilliant mathematicians in the world felt the same way at one time. And if they could come around, certainly your uncle can too.
Here is an incredible map of American English dialects. It's interactive and includes sound. Depending on how much of nerd you are, it could be a serious time suck.
What I do want to call attention to, however, is that both of these charts plot income on a logarithmic scale. That's to say that a $5,000 increase in per capita GDP will generate a lot more happiness for a poor country than a rich one. And by the same token, a $5,000 increase in income will generate a lot more happiness for a poor family than for an affluent one. This is a key grounds for believing both in the importance of economic growth and in the importance of concern about the distribution of that growth. To be a little crude about it, halving the income of a millionaire will let you double the income of many poor households.
If you are willing to accept that an economy exists to allocate resources, and that an economy works best when it is most efficient, then you pretty much have to be willing to accept that resources have more utility when they go to people with less of them than people with more of them. That is, of course, pretty simplistic. And you can certainly make an argument that in the real world the model changes due to a ton of outside influences and complexities. But it becomes pretty difficult to imagine that continuing to concentrate resources in the hands of a few creates a useful and productive economy.
Aside from maybe Artificial Intelligence and sustainable energy, no piece of technology stands to change our lives like 3-D printing. So, this is pretty cool.
Davis makes no attempt to conceal the crass commercial motivations behind his creation of Garfield. ... [Davis] carefully studied the marketplace when developingGarfield. The genesis of the strip was "a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character," Davis told Walter Shapiro in a 1982 interview in theWashington Post. "And primarily an animal. … Snoopy is very popular in licensing. Charlie Brown is not." So, Davis looked around and noticed that dogs were popular in the funny papers, but there wasn't a strip for the nation's 15 million cat owners. Then, he consciously developed a stable of recurring, repetitive jokes for the cat. He hates Mondays. He loves lasagna. He sure is fat.
I suppose I should have seen this coming. But still, that time that Garfield, Jon, and Odie all got rolled up in a window shade... that was really funny, right? Right?
8) The Moon is farther away from Earth than you think. As an analogy, if the Earth were a basketball, the Moon would be the size of a tennis ball 7.4 meters (24 feet) away.
So blog contributor bigsmithdude just watched the Pearl Jam 20 documentary and is having a resurgence of interest. As a lifelong fan, I view this as a development to be encouraged. So, here are a few classic Pearl Jam performances for Friday Song Day.
This first one is actually a warm up from Saturday Night Live around 94 I believe. One of the things I love about this is that Pearl Jam were never really cool even when they were cool. You can totally see that in PJ20, but you can also see it here in the fact that Stone Gossard is wearing awesome sandles.
Then there is this performance I remember watching on Letterman in 1996. Letterman always clearly loved Pearl Jam. Also, Stone continues his run here by looking like a candy corn or something, and McCready is wearing a silk shirt.
And finally here their 1993 MTV Music Awards performance with Neil Young. I don't know how this post became about Pearl Jam not being cool, but Neil Young is clearly the coolest dude on this stage. PJ have always had good rock idols though, and this is one of my favorite of their covers of those idols.
Depending on your source, the Royals payroll is up somewhere between a little and a significant amount over 2012. It is still near the bottom of the league, however. Just something to keep in mind when you see the new Forbes piece about MLB team values, and you learn that David Glass has made somewhere on the order of $361 million owning the Royals just in the increased value of the team. They also made $16.3 million dollars last year in operating income. Just something to keep in mind.
These people are elected by a vote... of real life other people!
A few Tennessee lawmakers apparently inquired whether a new sink at the state capitol designed for custodial use was a sink for Muslims to wash their feet in before prayer, theAssociated Press reported Monday. The lawmakers were reassured that it is simply a "mop sink."
“I confirmed with the facility administrator for the State Capitol Complex that the floor-level sink installed in the men’s restroom outside the House Chamber is for housekeeping use,” Legislative Administration Director Connie Ridley wrote in an email. “It is, in layman’s terms, a mop sink.”
In example 37,867,045,983 of why I believe the major difference between conservatives and liberals is that liberals have an ability to imagine what life might be like for someone other than themselves, here is Senator Rob Portman on why he no longer opposes gay marriage:
"I'm announcing today a change of heart on an issue that a lot of people feel strongly about," Portman said. "It has to do with gay couples' opportunity to marry. And during my career in the House and also last couple years here in the Senate, you know, I've taken a position against gay marriage, rooted in part in my faith and my faith tradition. And had a very personal experience, which is my son came to Jane, my wife, and I, told us that he was gay and that it was not a choice and that, you know he, that's just part of who he is, and he'd been that way ever since he could remember."
I don't know if Rob Portman has any other kids. If he does, and it just so happens one of them is an illegal immigrant, a single mother, not wealthy, or has a pre-existing condition, he might just end up becoming a Democrat.
![[Kansas City, Missouri, business section]](http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/pan/6a34000/6a34500/6a34526r.jpg)
