Politics and science, humor and hypocrisy. METANOODLE
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| President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner unveils new money. |
"The financial world is beset by sovereign debt in nearly all corners. (This is) reshaping the investing landscape (to a degree)unprecedented in human history. Central bankers exacerbate this debt bomb by expanding central bank balance sheets, pressing interest rates to the floor, and trying to quantitatively ease the global economy back to widespread prosperity."
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| Digital edition is more common now Handy to your pillow. |
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| Not what you expect in a little village and another like it just down the road. |
"The trick to bitcoin might be that it doesn't have to be a currency at all. Maybe cryptocurrency’s fundamental value is as a security protocol—a safe, anonymous, hack-proof network that decentralizes trust and democratizes power. ... Online voting in its current form— is very vulnerable to fraud, cyberattack, and government corruption. The theory is that the bitcoin security protocol matched with anonymizing software and a totally open source voting infrastructure would solve for a lot of these problems. Like a bitcoin transaction, the entire process is recorded in the blockchain public ledger, repurposed to verify votes and avoid voter fraud. So instead of placing your trust in a central authority like, say, the ballot counters tallying up hanging chads in Florida, the network is anonymous but transparent, and audited by the crowd.From the source of the source at New Scientist:
"Just replace a coin in your head with a vote, and run it the exact same dynamic," (Link to story at Motherboard.)
(Researchers) "at the University of Waterloo, also in Ontario, realised they could convert a message - for example, a list of codes that securely link voters to their votes - into a Bitcoin address. Sending a tiny fraction of a bitcoin - a small transaction - to that address would allow the holder of that list to store it in the public record without revealing its contents. When they later publish the message for verification, anyone can repeat the conversion to a Bitcoin address and confirm its age by checking the public record.
Faking Bitcoin's public record would be very difficult as you'd need more computing power than the rest of the Bitcoin network combined - a feature that ensures the currency's security".
"It looks as though the many sacrifices that we and our allies made to overthrow Saddam Hussein and establish a semblance of a modern democracy in Iraq will be in vain. It is tempting, and maybe correct, to blame the Obama administration for Iraq’s descent into chaos. But after the surge, Iraq had a good opportunity to build a functioning society, a growing economy, and a legitimate, self-governing country. American troops could not forever be the guarantor of relative peace in Iraq.The Genesis forecast that there would always be trouble with Abraham's Arab kids by his Egyptian wife, is tempting to believe, although a sober review of the text de-emphasizes that.
In my view, the Iraq war was fought, in part, to answer a critical series of questions. The first was, are Arabs capable of self-government? A further question was, will helping Arab countries to build modern, normal, self-governing societies be enough to destroy the appeal of radical Islam for young Arabs? The effort, in my opinion, had to be made, and Iraq was the logical, if not the only, place to begin. At this point, however, it is hard to be optimistic about the results of that effort. Arab culture is deeply dysfunctional. Expansionist, homicidal Islam is the most potent ideology in the region".
(Ishmael) “He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers” (Genesis 16:12 NIV).
“His descendants settled in the area from Havilah to Shur, near the border of Egypt, as you go toward Asshur. And they lived in hostility toward all their brothers” (Genesis 25:18).
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| Great link bait photo used by The Independent in its story. See link. |
The researchers found that bones that suffer the highest rates of fractures in fights are the same parts of the skull that exhibited the greatest increase in sturdiness during the evolution of our early human relatives. These bones are also the parts of the skull that show the greatest difference between males and females in both australopiths and humans today.
"In other words," Carrier said, "male and female faces are different because the parts of the skull that break in fights are bigger in males. Importantly, these facial features appear in the fossil record at approximately the same time that our ancestors evolved hand proportions that allow the formation of a fist."
From an NYT story: Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, asks potential customers in Massachusetts about genetic testing — and stipulates that refusing to share results could lead to a declined application or an extra premium. Jean Towell, a spokeswoman, says applicants are told “out of fairness” that insurers have the right to decline coverage if any medical information is omitted. .... 12 other companies ask no explicit questions about genetic testing. But when Dr. Green asked company executives why not, he said, “at least one of them has told me, ‘We would do this, but we don’t want to be the first.' ”
Officials and national security analysts believe that the Knights Templar and the Zetas may have reached a “tipping point” in sources of income. The cartels may be making more money from non-narcotics related criminal operations. The Knights Templar and Los Zetas both make a lot of money in mining (Templars extracting iron ore, Zetas in coal). Both run extensive business extortion operations.Davidson and Rees-Moog make the case in The Sovereign Individual that the opportunity costs and benefits of violence explain much of society. Government and banditry, in their view, are on a continuum. At the low end, life is cheap and everyone poor. At the high end, few people own the right to use violence and rewards are widely distributed to crony players and to civil servants but the size of the pie is so big that the insider who gets a small slice has more than the old time warlord who got all of his local little pie.
The Robber Barons details the history of a small class of men who arose at the time of the American Civil War and swept into power. They were aggressive, and in important crises, nearly all of them tended to act without those established principles associated with the common people of the community. At the same time, many of them showed qualities of courage. These robber barons, as were their medieval counterparts, were the dominating figures of an aggressive economic age.
In their hands the renovation of American economic life proceeded relentlessly: large-scale production replaced the scattered, decentralized production; industrial enterprises became more concentrated, where they had been purely individualistic and wasteful. To organize and exploit the resources of a nation upon a gigantic scale, to regiment its farmers and workers into producers, and to do this only in the name of profit—is the great contradiction whence so much disaster, outrage and misery has flowed.
Matthew Josephson illuminates the story of industrial concentration in the United States, which is here pursued through the study of the major financial events and personalities between 1861 and 1901. This book also focuses on establishing the manner in which the country’s natural resources and arteries of trade were preempted, its political institutions conquered, and its social philosophy turned into an economic one, by the new barons. This is, by all odds, a classic study of the culture of American capitalism.
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| Crater, page 20 of Chesapeake report. |
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| These maps are modern history since the last ice age. The old landscape has been re-charted under the mud of the North Sea and many artifacts of early settlement turned up.
Give me a gigantic break from THE-SEA-IS-RISING-THE-SKY-IS-FALLING alarmism. How sea and land levels alter is a good topic of study and may even someday be well quantified. That day is not yet.
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Paul Mirengoff at Powerline supplies the headline.Paul adds about Bergdahls: Appeases a deadly enemy, makes like more dangerous for an ally we are about to abandon, disregards American law, and does it on behalf of jihad sympathizers. That warm hug with Obama was beyond inappropriate and topped off with Islamic praise in the Pashto language, the language of an enemy to whom Bergdahl fils apparently gave bomb making instruction.
"Any country might do a prisoner swap, even if it meant freeing very bad people. But only an exceptional country would swap five leading terrorists in exchange for a deserter.
Any second-rate county might screw up in providing medical treatment for its veterans. But only an exceptional country would do so while at the same time providing a sex change operation for an ex-soldier who betrayed his country.
What Obama really believes in, of course, is his own exceptionalism. This belief is fully justified.
President Obama believes in American exceptionalism — his own version, in which American does things so perverse that no other country in history would even contemplate them."
It was also discovered, quite by accident, that the troop habit of playing violent video games, in between bouts of real combat, reduced combat stress. Mental health practitioners tested the use of violent video games for their PTSD patients, and found out that it worked.
Scientific examination of the subject has found that as the use of porn increases, the rate of sex crimes goes down. (From "The Scientist").
While I was convinced in the past that viewing sexual parts and activity promoted lascivious behaviour that threatened marriages, it also seems likely that dispersing the sex drive into play in a never-never land, reduces the drive to engage in appropriate and inappropriate sex with live partners. 
