Now here's my plan. The Koch brothers will secretly underwrite a version of the traditional "Junior Year Abroad" with a strong Peace Corp component. Have students live among the locals, on small stipends, eat their food and so on. University credit will be given and everything will be totally free, including transportation. Meanwhile, there will generous "supervision" fees (i.e., bribes) to the university and professors. For a start, send out perhaps a hundred students from each of the top 25 universities.
...
We'll use a seductive name--"Promoting Economic Justice, One Village at a Time" or "Peace Through Understanding." ... Locals, including the wise village elders will teach the courses with lots of hands-on experience working in the fields harvesting crops, clearing brush and similar Peace Corps-like activities (recall the early 1960s glory years of helping in the Cuban sugar cane harvest was the ultimate liberal status symbol). For pedagogical purposes, illnesses will be exclusively treated with traditional, natural remedies (no Big Pharma pills, no greedy doctors!) while all disputes will likewise be settled in accord with indigenous customs. Critically, students will be told that they are there to learn, not proselytize Western values, and so if men beat their wives, don't criticize; try to understand. The model is participant-observer anthropology, not the Western missionary.Once the graduates of the new program return and start raising uncomfortable questions in class about the evils of American society and the socialist paradise on other shores, Weissberg has an even more brilliant and cost-effective plan for dealing with the outraged professors.
Jeff Bezos has a public e-mail address, jeff@amazon.com. Not only does he read many customer complaints, he forwards them to the relevant Amazon employees, with a one-character addition: a question mark.
When Amazon employees get a Bezos question mark e-mail, they react as though they’ve discovered a ticking bomb. They’ve typically got a few hours to solve whatever issue the CEO has flagged and prepare a thorough explanation for how it occurred, a response that will be reviewed by a succession of managers before the answer is presented to Bezos himself. Such escalations, as these e-mails are known, are Bezos’s way of ensuring that the customer’s voice is constantly heard inside the company.
...
Amazon employees live daily with these kinds of fire drills. “Why are entire teams required to drop everything on a dime to respond to a question mark escalation?” an employee once asked at the company’s biannual meeting held at Seattle’s KeyArena, a basketball coliseum with more than 17,000 seats. “Every anecdote from a customer matters,” Wilke replied. “We research each of them because they tell us something about our processes. It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers. We treat them as precious sources of information.”
Accessorizing your otherwise inconsistent or incoherent story-based argument with pieces of science is a profitable rhetorical strategy because references to science are crucial touchpoints that help readers maintain their default instinct to believe what they are being told. They help because when readers see "science" they can suppress any skepticism that might be bubbling up in response to the inconsistencies and contradictions. I believe that most of Gladwell’s readers think he is telling stories to bring alive what science has discovered, rather than using science to attach a false authority to the ideas he has distilled from the stories he chooses to tell.Malcolm Gladwell's name inexplicably tends to take up the space that more properly in reserved in my memory for Matt Ridley, an excellent author who deserves considerably more attention. (My favorite popular science writer, however, remains Nick Lane.) This Slate review also suggests to me that a better use of my time than reading Gladwell's latest ("David and Goliath") would be to read the reviewer's own "The Invisible Gorilla." The title refers to a video experiment many of us probably have watched, in which viewers are asked to count the number of passes in an excerpt from a basketball game, and uniformly fail to notice a man in a gorilla suit who runs through the players in the middle of the action. The book is about our deceptive intuitions concerning our powers of attention and memory.
"Don't screw this up."He was responding to the brash decision of the Mayor of D.C. to walk across the lawn and horn in on Sen. Reid's press conference to demand that the Senate pass the House's measure to fund D.C. during the government shutdown. Sen. Reid walked off in a huff, leaving the Mayor and another flack to try to pour a little oil on the waters. What did he think Reid meant by "Don't screw this up"? He couldn't imagine.
But our so-called liberals are committed Hobbesians. Argue for a reduction in taxes, or a more restrictive interpretation of delegated powers, or allowing the states to take the lead on health care and education, and they’re sure that the next step is a Hobbesian hootenanny in which all of our rump roasts are crawling with bacteria, somebody snatches Piggy’s glasses, and, worst of all, there’s no NPR to ask what it all means. Like Hobbes, they believe that you hold your property at the sufferance of the state, and that you should pipe down and be grateful for whatever you are allowed to keep. But the American creed is precisely the opposite: The state exists at our sufferance, not the other way around, and while few of us actually hold the beliefs that Senator Reid attributes to us and long to abolish the state as a general principle, more than a few of us are interested in making some deep changes to this state. We may not want to shut it down entirely, but we aren’t sure we want it to load another few trillion dollars in debt onto us. We aren’t throwing bombs, but we aren’t going to give it everything it demands, either. Not 40 percent of the last dollar, not a dime to subsidize abortions, not control over our children’s educations or our own consciences. Hobbes wrote about subjects. We’re citizens.It might be more accurate to say we have a tradition of aspiring to be citizens, which has never been universally honored among us and is not guaranteed to survive if we persist in agreeing to act more like subjects in return for physical security and our share of the plunder.
When the government was shut down during the Clinton administration, Republican leaders who went on television to tell their side of the story talked about “OMB numbers” versus “CBO numbers”—as if most people beyond the Beltway knew what these abbreviations meant or why the statistics in question were relevant to the shutdown. Why talk to them in Beltway-speak?
When Speaker Boehner today goes around talking about the “CR,” that is just more of the same thinking—or lack of thinking. Policy wonks inside the Beltway know that he is talking about the continuing resolution that authorizes the existing level of government spending to continue, pending a new budget agreement.I've worked with way too many lawyers like this: addicted to meaningless acronyms. Would it kill Boehner to get in the habit of calling it a "blank check" instead of a clean CR?
[Scalia:] I am something of a contrarian, I suppose. I feel less comfortable when everybody agrees with me. I say, “I better reexamine my position!” I probably believe that the worst opinions in my court have been unanimous. Because there’s nobody on the other side pointing out all the flaws.
Really? So if you had the chance to have eight other justices just like you, would you not want them to be your colleagues?
No. Just six.
That was a serious question!
There is lingering confusion over the limits on the Senate regarding budgets. It’s true that the House has to originate bills that raise revenue (Article I Section 7 of the US Constitution), but either chamber can originate spending bills. Since the debt ceiling is not a tax, the Senate can originate it.This seems a bit odd, as if increasing the federal piggy bank by borrowing were not "raising revenue" in the same way that imposing taxes is. It's plausible, perhaps, given the Founders' probable inability to imagine that the U.S. would become the world's reserve currency and gain the ability to borrow seemingly unlimited amounts, right up to the point where the currency collapses. I found what seems to be a thoughtful Constitutional website, with this to say:
In Federalist 66, for example, Alexander Hamilton writes, "The exclusive privilege of originating money bills will belong to the House of Representatives." This phrase could easily be construed to include taxing and spending. The Supreme Court has ruled, however, that the Senate can initiate bills that create revenue, if the revenue is incidental and not directly a tax. Most recently, in US v Munoz-Flores (495 US 385 [1990]), the Court said, "Because the bill at issue here was not one for raising revenue, it could not have been passed in violation of the Origination Clause." The case cites Twin City v Nebeker (176 US 196 [1897]), where the court said that "revenue bills are those that levy taxes, in the strict sense of the word."
However, the House, it is explained, will return a spending bill originated in the Senate with a note reminding the Senate of the House's prerogative on these matters. The color of the paper allows this to be called "blue-slipping." Because the House sees this as a matter of some pride, the Senate is almost guaranteed not to have concurrence on any spending bill which originates in the Senate. This has created a de facto standard, despite my own contention (and that of the Senate) that it is not supported by the Constitution.That's an interesting issue if we're wondering about how to think of Obamacare, by the way, which originated in the Senate, now that the Supreme Court has explained to us that it's a tax, not a penalty, sort of. In fact, there's a new challenge mounting to Obamacare on just that point, which may eventually turn on whether the revenue raised by the tax is incidental rather than direct. Now that taxes no longer are viewed primarily as revenue-raising tools but as carrots and sticks, it's very hard even for smart Supreme Court justices to work out what "taxes, in the strict sense of the word" is supposed to mean. So much effort is spent publicizing goodies in each new entitlement program, that our Congressional leaders are quite adept at obfuscating what a tax is. Even if that confusion were to be cleared up any time soon, I'm not aware that the Supreme Court has ever tried to help us understand the fine Constitutional gradations of meaning that separate "raising revenue" from "borrowing great huge pots of money in order to facilitate an endless avalanche of increased spending."
Vinson, of San Jose, will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy, while Waschura, of Portola Valley, will cough up almost $10,000 more for insurance for his family of four.
. . .
"Of course, I want people to have health care," Vinson said. "I just didn't realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally."
Until the late 20th century, traffic cones were not thought worthy of scientific study. It is the Society's mission to counteract these centuries of neglect. By preserving and studying these "Helpers of Humanity," we hope to allow future generations the opportunity to enjoy these magnificent creatures in their natural habitats.Not a moment too soon. The sturdy traffic cone has exploded onto the public scene as the pointy end of the spear in our government's attempt to educate the public about what happens when they get uppity. That's not to say that all of the public is taking its lesson in the proper spirit: some citizens are embracing outright anarchy.
The Automobile Age was a time of profound and rapid change for Conus. Burgeoning road construction attracted cones, and most left the valleys and the fields to live on the new roads. They flocked to construction work sites, potholes, and other road hazards. Unfortunately, these new environs did not favor all cones. Species of grey and black cones that had previously flourished were rendered almost extinct, as automobiles were much less likely to see them upon the asphalt. Nature began to favor only the brightest and most visible of cones, which tended to be red, yellow, and orange.Some traffic cones are less tangible. The Dept. of Justice briefly concluded, for instance, that it would be a good idea to shut down its Amber Alert website as "non-essential," while keeping open the federally-owned golf course favored by our President. It didn't take long for someone to realize what a bad idea that was, and now the DOJ has crawfished. In order to make up for the tax expenditures, however, the Dept. of the Interior announced that it would officially withdraw its permission for Old Faithful to operate.
The National Park Service placed cones along highway viewing areas outside Mount Rushmore, barring visitors from pulling over and taking pictures of the famed monument.
The cones first went up Oct. 1, said Dusty Johnson [South Dakota] Gov. Dennis Daugaard's chief of staff. The state asked that they be taken down, and federal officials did so with some of them. The state was told the cones were a safety precaution to help channel cars into viewing areas rather than to bar their entrance.
"I think reasonable people can disagree about that," Johnson said.
The cones were down again [three days later] as a blizzard hit the Black Hills and plows needed access to the roads, Johnson said. He said the state would be monitoring to see whether the cones are put back along viewing areas. "Once the snow's off the ground, we're going to be keeping an eye on how the cones go up," Johnson said.
"Naturally, after 25 years, one expects to find many changes, but to find that one’s University had become so Hebrewized was a fearful shock. There were Jews to the right of me, Jews to the left of me, in fact they were so obviously everywhere that instead of leaving the Yard with pleasant memories of the past I left with a feeling of utter disgust of the present and grave doubts about the future of my Alma Mater."Naturally, something had to be done. One approach would have been overt discrimination against Jews. A more subtle approach was to emphasize "legacy students," which is an easy way to claim you're not basing admissions on race even though you're basing them on family descent. It's a good trick, and it's still being used today to keep Asians from unfairly swamping the admissions process by kicking everyone's butt academically. Other useful techniques are to hide the admissions policy altogether, and to refuse to discuss it on the ground that it's a "wedge issue." (I've always loved the "wedge issue" gambit. "Unfair! This issue is so damaging to our position that it's likely to sow internal dissension in our ranks!")
"People complain of having to stand in line for hours, often in vain, and many are losing patience with the government's explanation that unsavory conspirators are to blame for the nation's problems," reports the New York Times. But enough about Venezuela. Let's talk about ObamaCare.All is not lost, however, despite reporters' increasing and almost fruitless urgency to find someone, anyone, who has successfully signed up for Obamacare via a federal exchange. (Apparently some of the state exchanges are doing rather well.) As Taranto points out, it should have been more or less a no-brainer that the feds could set up a successful feeding trough. The real trick will not be getting impoverished people with expensive illnesses to sign up for subsidized coverage. The real trick will be getting young, healthy people to sign up in droves in order to foot the bill for all the largesse. Taranto happily points to a Hartford Courant article that's being trumpeted by "a senior ObamaCare publicity agent" as success, in the form of a 30-year-old law student who managed to navigate a website and sign up for health insurance. Before we get too excited about bringing that federal deficit under control, though, it's helpful to note that the young student was already paying several hundred dollars a month for coverage, and now will pay nothing at all: the site informed him that he was eligible for Medicaid.
So the great success story of ObamaCare's first day is the transformation of a future lawyer who was already paying for insurance into a welfare case.Well, I've always said that uninsured people who already have an expensive medical condition don't need what we've traditionally called "insurance." Their risk is no longer unquantifiable; it is known. What they need is either income or charity. Charity's a great thing, when it takes the form of people giving up their own resources to help others in need. It's an ugly thing when it's merely disguised theft. It's not just that it's dishonest to arrange things dishonestly, though that's bad enough. It's that dishonesty, by more or less successfully blinding some or all of us to reality, prevents our doing anything to solve a problem in a sustainable way. The cost of good things doesn't go away because we rob Peter in order to indulge in unearned self-congratulation for our charity to Paul. It costs real-world time and resources to provide medical care to people who can't afford it. If it's our duty and desire to do so anyway, it's time we quit pretending it was somebody else's job to pay for it.
According to Anna Eberly, managing director of the farm, NPS sent law enforcement agents to the park on Tuesday evening to remove staff and volunteers from the property.
“You do have to wonder about the wisdom of an organization that would use staff they don’t have the money to pay to evict visitors from a park site that operates without costing them any money,” she said.Ace posted a copy of her letter, which concludes:
In all the years I have worked with the National Park Service, first as a volunteer for 6 years in Richmond where I grew up, then as an NPS employee at the for 8 very long years and now enjoyably as managing director for the last 32 years - I have never worked with a more arrogant, arbitrary and vindictive group representing the NPS.
I deeply apologize that we have to disappoint you today by being closed but know that we are working while the National Park Service is not--as usual.As someone else commented today, next they'll be throwing tarps over Mt. Rushmore.
Some studies conclude that color blind people are better at penetrating certain color camouflages. Such findings may give an evolutionary reason for the high prevalence of red–green color blindness. And there is also a study suggesting that people with some types of color blindness can distinguish colors that people with normal color vision are not able to distinguish.When I was a child, my sisters and I were fascinated with the little book of Ishihara color-blindness tests that were on my father's shelf. They're available on the Internet now, of course:
-- Approximately every 500st handshake is between two colorblind people.
-- It is almost sure (probability: 94%) that at least one member of a football team is colorblind.
-- If you pick out 100 persons, the chance is very low (about 1.5%) that none of them is colorblind.If that link doesn't work, the free download can be triggered from here.
Beckett wrote “unenjoyable” books, says Martin Amis. Paulo Coelho believes Joyce’s Ulysses caused “great harm,” while Roddy Doyle doubts any readers are “really moved by it.” “Shabby chic” is the Financial Times’ verdict on modernist architecture. You hear it often these days, this grousing about difficult, pretentious modernism: Woolf, Kafka, Stein, and Picasso come in for it too. The emperor has no clothes. The flight from modernism—we know the names but skirt the works—may be a sign of the cultural times, a symptom of our special mix of fatigue, cynicism, and complacency. And then, of course, the art can indeed try your patience and stamina. Its demands are relentless; these are creations that decline to traffic in reassurance or open themselves to clicks and scans.It's the opening of a book review on works produced in 1922, when modernism was still a rising force. But I wonder if the real problem isn't the one the critics append. Maybe it wasn't that the art was so challenging, but that it wasn't beautiful. The True and the Beautiful share a link that somehow know at basic levels of our being. We work hard for the beautiful because we can see its value, we know there is something of worth that deserves the work. Even when it is beyond us, as Kant said of the sublime, we try to grasp its truth though we are doomed to fail.
And yes, boys can be taught to act weak and much like the sob sisters. The problem is they aren’t. Not even when they’re raised to act that way. The end result is that they don’t know how to express their strength and they’ve never been taught to modulate it. Men who have only been taught to “act sensitive” but have no other discipline, no other moral, no other idea of what it means to be a man, will in fact hoist the pirate flag. Whenever a memoir surfaces from the sixties, the thing that always strikes me is how these men who were considered champions of women were in fact nasty little petulant creatures, taking advantage as much as possible. Say, the story of Ayers raping a girl and then making her sleep with someone she had no interest in, by bullying her with the idea that not to do so would be unenlightened.This is really the problem, isn't it? Generally I don't have any problem with women I know who self-identify as feminists: in fact, usually I like them, as I usually like tough-minded people who will argue with me.
berenjenaza, f. blow with an aubergine.
buzcorona, f. playful buffet to head of one who is respectfully kissing the hand.
candileja, f. oil receptacle of a lamp.--pl. foot-lights of a theatre; (bot.) willow-herb, deadly carrot.
cartapel, m. memorandum filled with useless matter.
cascapiñones, m. one who shells hot pine-nuts and cleans the seed; pine-nut cracker.
cascaruleta, f. (coll.) noise made by the teeth when chucked under the chin.
casiller, m. in the royal palace, servant who empties the close-stools.
casorio, m. (coll.) inconsiderate marriage; informal wedding.
cejijunto, ta, a. having eye-brows that meet.
celia, f. beverage made of wheat; a beer.
centÃmano, na a. (poet.) having a hundred hands.
cigoñal, m. well-sweep.
cimillo, m. flexible twig on which a decoy-pigeon is tied.
cinca, f. any infraction of the rules of the game of nine-pins (ten-pins)
cisque, (coll.) to besmear, to dirty.--vr. to ease nature
coche parado, balcony over a street full of persons.
codal, a. cubital, one cubit long: palo codal, stick hung round the neck as a penance.
codazo, m. blow with the elbow; a hunch.
cogotazo, m. slap on the back of the neck.
cojitranco, ca, a. nickname for evil-disposed lame persons.
cola de boca, lip glue.
colear, va. (Mex.) in bull-fights, to take the bull by the tail, while on horseback, and, by suddenly starting the horse, to overturn him; (S. Amer.) to fell a bull by twisting his tail.
colillero, ra, a. person who gathers cigar stubs for a trade.
colmillada, f. injury made by an eye-tooth.
cominear, vn. (coll.) to meddle in trifles or occupations belonging to women.
componte, secret order by which an obnoxious person is done away with.
consentido, a. applied to a spoiled child; applied to a cuckold by his own consent.
The National Rifle Association was first chartered in the state of New York on November 17, 1871 by Army and Navy Journal editor William Conant Church and General George Wood Wingate. Its first president was Civil War General Ambrose Burnside, who had worked as a Rhode Island gunsmith, and Wingate was the original secretary of the organization. Church succeeded Burnside as president in the following year.Got that? The NRA was founded by Civil War Union military leaders who recognized that northern prowess with rifles was lacking in the late war with more-rural Southerners. The purpose of the organization was to train potential soldiers in case it became necessary again to suppress a Southern independence movement.
Union Army records for the Civil War indicate that its troops fired about 1,000 rifle shots for each Confederate soldier hit, causing General Burnside to lament his recruits: "Out of ten soldiers who are perfect in drill and the manual of arms, only one knows the purpose of the sights on his gun or can hit the broad side of a barn." The generals attributed this to the use of volley tactics, devised for earlier, less accurate smoothbore muskets.
Recognizing a need for better training, Wingate traveled to Europe and observed European armies' marksmanship training programs. With plans provided by Wingate, the New York Legislature funded the construction of a modern range at Creedmore, Long Island, for long-range shooting competitions. Wingate then wrote a marksmanship manual.
This week, I returned to Washington for the House Foreign Affairs Committee's special hearing on Syria. This was the opportunity for Secretary Kerry, Secretary Hagel, and General Dempsey to make President Obama's case for why we should pursue military intervention in Syria. As I said at the time, I left that room with more questions than answers, and I don't believe they made their case.I've said what I have to say about it at BLACKFIVE.
You can see video of my questions in that hearing here, but tomorrow night, I want to hear your questions.
I'm holding a telephone town hall meeting to talk about Syria on Monday night. The call will start at approximately 7:25 PM, and you are welcome to call in if we don't call you first. The phone number is877-229-8493 and the passcode you'll need to enter is 111377.
[A] friend of mine directed me to a site called The Duffle Blog, which is a military satire site. It's dedicated to churning out such articles as "US Praises Massacre Of Syrian Civilians Without Use Of Chemical Weapons" [and] "Admin Error Sends Bradley Manning to Death Row, Nidal Hasan to Gender Reassignment Surgery." Even the title is funny.The article about Hasan and Manning was filed by one of the Korean Airline pilots, apparently. New since Bookworm's post: John Kerry Announces Protest of Syrian Conflict As Soon As He Finishes Starting It.
