A.M. Links: Obamas Hold Assets Worth Up to $7 Million, Nintendo Faces Patent Lawsuit, Jupiter Storm Shrinking

-
NASA/ESA According to financial disclosure forms, President Obama and the First Lady hold assets worth between $2 and $7 million, mostly in Treasury bonds.
- Philips is suing Nintendo over alleged patent infringements and seeking to get sales of the Wii U banned in the U.S.
- Donald Sterling threatened to sue the National Basketball Association if it doesn't rescind a lifetime ban and $2.5 million fine levied against him.
- In India's elections the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won decisively, setting up Narendra Modi to be the country's next prime minister.
- Researchers at the University of Reading blame increasing thunderstorms on climate change high-energy solar wind.
- New images from the Hubble Telescope show Jupiter's Giant Red Spot shrinking.
Follow Reason and Reason 24/7 on Twitter, and like us on Facebook. You can also get the top stories mailed to you—sign up here.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
New images from the Hubble Telescope show Jupiter's Giant Red Spot shrinking.
In its defense, it's really cold out there.
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE
Who gave them the authority to say that?
Warty Hugeman, timecop.
If our Zombie horde hadn't starved to death, I'd unleash them on you.
And someone complained about all the empty graves, so SoNAR now needs volunteers for necromatic research. Anyone got spare corpses? No Virginians, they don't animate too well.
speaking of ol' Warty, what happened to SugarFree? I haven't seen his, er, presence lately - not that I'm on here all the time.
I hope he's just concentrating on his, um, novels.
Work, work, work.
He's getting his dungeon remodeled.
He went to town to blow his moonshine earnings on meth and hookers and gold-plated gutbuckets. He'll be back once he spends what's left of his $47.
The guys who bought Jupiter. What, you think we own it, sitting on Earth, shooting a few probes at it? No, galactic property law is clear--you have to take possession.
All Uranus are belong to us
+1 iceball
Uranus, home world of the Klingons
That's why the Enterprise is like toilet paper.
I blame global warming.
Clearly this is the fault of the Kochs.
Man in bulletproof vest says 'shoot me,' is killed
That'll learn him not to use USDA body armor!
Except it was a flak vest, not a "bulletproof" vest.
Bet he's taking some flak for that mistake.
Anderson County deputy coroner Don McCown said Wardell asked Taylor Ann Kelly to "shoot me," the TV station reports.
That was directly following his statement, "Here, hold mah beer."
Famous last words in that there part of the woods....
According to financial disclosure forms, President Obama and the First Lady hold assets worth between $2 and $7 million...
But they're the good one percent.
Their assets also include Vanguard retirement funds and college savings plans.
What? Isn't the government taking care of all of that, for everyone?
ED!! My man!
First Nations get their mask of STEVE SMITH back
That mask is raaaaaacissssstttt
SURPRISE! 'Gluten Intolerance' Is Likely Bullsh*t!
For most people, although there is a small percentage of people that really does have celiac disease.
Yeah, the article isn't talking about people with actual diagnosed celiac disease.
The article does specifically mention that celiac sufferers are most decidedly not bullshitting.
That totally explains why my son tests positive for gluteomorphins in his blood.
Not.
In fairness, there are probably a bunch of people who think they have gluten intolerance who are really hypochondriacs.
My takeaway from that is: while it might not be the actual gluten that's giving a lot of people problems, eating gluten-free will actually help people with IBS because of the other stuff that's eliminated at the same time, and a lot more people have IBS than celiac's disease. Did I read that wrong?
People with Crohn's disease are very, very gluten intolerant.
SURPRISE! That article is likely bullsh*t!
Many people have a mild to serious intolerance to a particular food or food additive. It's not a big deal. The idiocy comes when the average person with no intolerance thinks that because he is buying something that is "gluten free" he is doing something specific and serious about his health.
The test is this: go 30 days without any wheat and see if something that has been bothering you gets better or goes away. People do this test with other foods all the time with success.
Yeah, I'm sure all the benefits I've reaped from ditching grains are in my head. This new intensified backlash ridiculing us can rage on--won't change a thing for me & my family.
There are a ton of benefits from ditching grains...they may have absolutely nothing to do with gluten however.
And yet the societies with the longest life spans (Japan, France) eat a shit ton of grains-- wheat & rice.
There's a lot of factors to longevity besides nutrition. And even when you drill into nutrition, pointing out correlations is easy, figuring out the causes is a little harder.
This. Fucking food hipsters.
"The test is this: go 30 days without any wheat and see if something that has been bothering you gets better or goes away."
Holy shit you're an idiot.
Why can't you just say "bullshit"? The * isn't necessary.
What I can't figure out is why people seem so obsessed whether other people eat gluten or not.
If you are in anyway connected to the "fitness industry" or the "nutrition industry" then you are probably surrounded by these people. But, to your point, I don't care who eats what and I think talking about diet is incredibly uninteresting.
Not sure exactly where you're coming from on this, KK. My beef with the non-Celiac, non-Crohn's gluten-free people is this: Basically they're creating a food panic and enabling the behavior of those who think they have a food allergy (but don't really) or who are knowingly falsely claiming to have a food allergy. While I have total sympathy for the Celiac's and Crohn's people, the posers are a major PITA for food-service people.
Plus the "gluten-free" options at many restaurants are not really gluten-free; IOW my friend with Crohn's can't do the "gluten free" pizza at a local restaurant.
Also this.
Eh, same reason non-smokers obsess about smokers, fitness nuts obsess about fatties: some combination of not minding their own business and trying to share what they "discovered".
In our early days as a paleo family, we were guilty of it. It's hard to resist if you see the changes first hand, not to want to preach. (hence the frequent cult descriptors)
It's all in your head.
The funny thing is the sudden surge of posts by you on this subject, it shows who is and is not obsessed with it, and that all of your posts are lame ass defenses of your preferred cargo cult make it even worse for you.
Occasionally faddie food trends aren't entirely bullshit.
Being angry that other people are happier not eating the same shit as you is pretty goddamn petty.
good observation. The glee of the article, and the reaction to it, is a bit over the top
It wouldn't be if you losers didn't spend so much time lying about your "illness".
Mad genius creates fully functioning Wolverine claws
Awesome. Now humans finally stand a chance in Australia.
Because now EVERY man can be Crocodile Dundee
He'll poke his eye out!
Needs moar regulations
Valerie Jarrett: 'We Have a Commitment' from Boehner on Amnesty This Year
Absolute bullshit.
"I think we have a window this summer, between now and August, to get something done,"
Weren't they saying this last Fall? Windows, perpetually on the verge of closing...
"""""Addressing attendees at an event described as conference where "investors and elite political donors" along with "hedge fund managers, political and business leaders and celebrities" """
So the grass roots of the Republican/Democratic Party is in favor of it.
I'd vote for Voteman! Danish election cartoon. Maybe NSFW
I thought they were worried about inequality. Oh, they only want other people to give up their shit. Typical proglodytes.
Well they do have their investments in Treasury's...so, you know, they are invested in US
According to many of the Peanuts those Treasuries are worthless thus they are really broke.
Don't lock eyes with 'em, don't do it. Puts 'em on edge. They might go into berzerker mode; come at you like a whirling dervish, all fists and elbows. You might be screaming "No, no, no" and all they hear is "Who wants cake?" Let me tell you something: They all do. They all want cake.
I would love to be so broke. And fuck you SHreek for typically jumping to their defense.
A python kills a kangaroo
"Oh man, this is the best party ever!"
'Last year, I had a baby goat and a snake ate it under my home.'
Wow, at this rate, next year's party will be *awesome*!
If they need alligators or pythons, I know a guy...
Florida Man?
AGW. Is there anything it can't ruin!?!!
I caught a cold this weekend. I blame global climate event change warming.
This was my first thought. As if one planet weren't enough we have to ruin other planets too! Humanity is poison, a plague upon existence. We must pay for our sins against this world and others.
AGW. Is there anything it can't ruin!?!!
It's almost as if there were some massive force in the solar system that affects all the planets and their climates. hmm
Yup...SUVs
HERETIC!
Corporations?
Nation's Biggest Dominatrix Convention Hits Los Angeles
Everybody has something the rest of us would consider a kink.
"I have often had people leaving a session in tears, saying, 'Thank you, thank you, no one ever understood that about me before.'"
"I, of course, responded with 'Shut up, you sniveling *worm*!' and a good lashing."
Pro Lib, call your office. We need pythons stat. The alligators
Shit. I guess I fucked up the tag. The alligators are working for the cops.
I'd love to help, but we're working on a new lionfish appetizer.
Louisville, Kentucky, has a Goat Man. I wonder what his H&R handle is.
ifh, I see you've been up to your shenanigans (or whatever it's called over there) again!
Yeah, but most Queenslanders were too drunk to notice 🙁
Wouldn't the Aussies in other states be drunk too? Except for NT, where OMG THE ABORIGINALS HAVE A DRINKING PROBLEM!!!111!!!
Aborigines have the most wonderfully vivid name for welfare - "sitdown money". A major cause of dysfunction in remote communities right there.
Interestingly, remote communities have communal land tenure, which has worked about as well as you'd expect. The Territory Government (headed by an Indigenous man) has just introduced individual freehold
That individual freehold thing is a good thing, right? At least until the 99-year lease runs out and the state grabs the land back including all improvements.
Sorry, my bad, yes it's leasehold (Queensland is passing a bill to enable freehold). The highest form of land tenure in the Northern Territory or the ACT (neither of which is a State) is a 99 year lease. Pretty sure the NT, like the ACT, recognises equity in improvements and would compensate (in effect, non-renewal of the lease would be like akin to eminent domain, as you would call it)
"Hey guys, watch this!"
Oops, that was supposed to be an upthread reply to JW.
Since I already posted here, let me just say that at least Australia has states for internal divisions, instead of provinces or counties or shires or whatever other British crap you'd expect from people who have that lady on their cash.
"State" meaning government at any level, not just the state- and territory- level governments.
Also, thanks for the clarification.
"State" meaning government at any level
Thankyou, I understand this rather basic fact. I capitalised State in my post to indicate the difference between States and Territories (and their land tenure) in our system.
Jesus, did I just post on a dead thread?
Pan calling on line one.
Lives under the trestle...makes sense.
This is what happens when billy goat meets jane troll.
Glenn Greenwald loves Sony, now that they've bought the rights to his Edward Snowden book
That's disappointing.
I'm going for the MCSE certification and want to track down some free practice tests.
I can't seem to find any via Google or Pirate Bay.
Can one of you lot who doesn't believe in IP point me to some pirated Microsoft content? I don't want to spring for the certification tests until I know I'll pass.
Lamprey!
I like eels,
Except as meals.
And the way they feels.
So, you like them as bait?
And pets!
And as musicians
Hah, very nice.
Can one of you lot who doesn't believe in IP point me to some pirated Microsoft content?
Conspiracy to commit piracy? Captain Phillips would like to have a word with you.
Captain Phillips is kind of a pussy without SEAL snipers backing him up.
^True!
Examcollection
Ok, now does anyone have an ExamCollection ID I can steal?
Brooklyn love shack: A Bushwick brownstone is being gutted and repurposed as a haven for the "sex-positive community," according to Open Love NY, a group dedicated to the polyamory community, which encourages consensual romantic relationships with multiple partners.
They tried that in Oneida. All they did was found a silverware company before they realized that human nature gets in the way of idealism. (Jealousy destroyed them)
Wasn't Oneida one of the Iroquois tribes? I had no idea they practices polyamory. Neat!
Wrong Oneida
No, they produce lots of potato products.
Ummmm....that's Ore-Ida.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1850397/?ref_=cs_ov_tt
Looks interesting.
Is it called "Shortbus"?
China violated sea code with construction activity, DFA says
I kinda enjoy how ballsy China is. They do what they want, and fuck you if you don't like it.
It is nice to see the "international community" blatantly ignored time and time again. I wonder if the soft power idiots will ever get it through their mushy heads just how useless soft power is.
Laugh if you must, Virginia, but China just continues to isolate itself more from the rest of the world.
*Virginian*
*** leaves for coffee ***
Virginia works too, as in "yes, Virginia, there is a power that ignores the rest of the world."
It's not so nice for Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, and others, though.
(Not that the US should be their protectors, of course.)
Vietnam told us to go away.
Taiwan says "don't go, please".
and I think the Philippines are ambivalent towards us now.
The US was carrying out joint exercises with the Filipino navy last week.
I wonder if the soft power idiots will ever get it through their mushy heads just how useless soft power is.
They always seem to forget that diplomacy will only work if there's an "or else" behind it if it fails.
Clinton Allies Send Davis To Set Up Spin Operation Outside Gowdy's Committee
This tells me that there is a 'there' there.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tra.....ounge.html
What was the inflation adjusted cost of airfare then?
A lot more than a Jet Blue ticket, that's for sure.
It was expensive. That's why you didn't have riff-raff on the planes back then.
I'd rather have the cheaper flight and go to a nice restaurant when I land.
Speaking of, has anyone been to Budapest?
Yes. Great city to visit.
Do you have a recommendation for a hotel for good local flavor?
No. It's been ten years since I was there. I'm sure it's changed quite a bit. Just stay near the river and plan on doing a lot of walking.
---"Speaking of, has anyone been to Budapest?"---
I spent four months working there. Amazing city/country.
This was in the late 90's, so it may have changed some, but I doubt that the "culture" of the city has changed a lot. Just more chain stores and shopping malls. It was VERY inexpensive when I was there, don't know about now. There are ruins of the Roman town of Aquincum just inside the city limits. The commuter trains stop right near them. Same cheap ticket as the city trams.
WARNING---The transportation Dept is very aggressive in sniffing out fare avoidance. It's simpler to just make sure you have a valid ticket. Every morning/afternoon on my commute, the ticket police would get several people without a ticket. They make you get off of the bus/tram/subway at the next stop and fine you on the spot. Don't know where the money goes.
If you are going to be there more than about 5 days, get a pass.
I go there all the time. Since my trips are for business, my hotel choice is more aligned with convenience to office than anything else. I haven't stayed at a boutique hotel.
If you are planning on seeing a lot of the city, You might consider a hotel right next to a tram/Metro stop. Novotel Budapest Centrum that is pretty nice and next to Blaha Lujza ter station. There is a more boutique hotel near same station but I forget the name.
If you want to be in the middle of tourist action, you could stay at Marriot Millennium court which is near Vaci utca. There are many other hotels near that area, boutique and chain.
If you are staying for any length of time, get a one-week or two-week transport pass. It is "all you can eat" for all forms of transport. Taxis are better now in Budapest that 2-3 years ago (less cowboys), but still more expensive and less convenient than transport.
I could go for some quails in sarcophagus right about now.
I've seen that one. So very, very Danish. Everything is gray.
There were 4 types of champagne available on the Concord when I flew on it in 1991.
I'm jealous.
The Daily Fail strikes again: "Fancy a new plane? Stinson advertises its new jet in 1947."
...is the caption on an ad for the Stinson 108-3...which quite obviously has A PROPELLER driven by a PISTON ENGINE.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new.....-case.html
Albuquerque AGAIN? WTF. That place needs a massive houseclean.
Nuke it from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new.....ecies.html
Is as if the never heard of the "Rent is too damned high!" guy
Donald Sterling threatened to sue the National Basketball Association if it doesn't rescind a lifetime ban and $2.5 million fine levied against him.
That's not supposed to happen. What about those who are outraged? OUTRAGED I TELLS YOU!
Oh man, it sucks when you piss off a rich guy who decides he doesn't give a fuck. The NBA is going to regret this.
The NBA is going to regret this.
They'll screw Sterling with their magic johnson!
/ducks, runs away
They will take the fine out of their next revenue sharing check
Oh, the NBA get the money. They might even win a suit. But just wait until Sterling's lawyer starts soliciting all the other racist stuff (by black and white NBA employees) that hasn't resulted in the same punishment. All of a sudden, the player's union is going to decide that a donation to the right causes is going to be penance enough.
Perhaps. I think his real fight is going to be with his wife who suddenly doesn't want to be married. That divorce will tie up the assets and make the team impossible to sell for maybe a few years. I don't think the owners want him around because they have a good deal with the nbpa now and it's up for negotiation in a few years.
I think you misunderstand. The NBPA is going to be possibly even more excited than the NBA to not go through discovery and a lawsuit. You think Sterling is bad, wait until they start bring up the greatest hits of geniuses like Ron Artest and Allen Iverson. This is what happens when an organization makes business decisions with both eyes on publicity. The ban should have been indefinite and conditional on a bunch of bullshit that would take not less than two years to complete.
Yeah, I don't think the NBA is going to enjoy the discovery process in this lawsuit.
He doesn't just not give a fuck, he kind of lives for this shit. He's the poster boy for rich old litigious bastard.
So you're saying he fucks sheep then?
Rihanna, the cyber bully.
unbelievably, the singer tweeted out a composite "Who Wore It Best"-style photo of Alexis and herself wearing their jumpsuits and captioned it simply with an emoticon of a sad face. Then she tweeted yet another photo of the high-schooler alongside the Wu-Tang Clan's lookalike logo (which was later retweeted by Busta Rhymes). Not surprisingly, Alexis was devastated.
It's repulsice how much the definition of "bullying" has been degraded by making everything bullying.
But check Alexis' response - her Instagram background was changed to a picture of Chris Brown
🙂
Or even repulsive.
Girls everywhere need protecting from Islamists
If 300 American cheerleaders had been abducted by religious fanatics, World War Three would have started last Tuesday
It's like a bad rightwing parody of a liberal President's foreign policy.
One interpretation of Hastag Diplomacy.
Bring Back Our Balls
SFW
I doubt that Abubakar Shekau is having many sleepless nights over the hashtag campaign, #BringBackOurGirls.
I don't know about that. Persistent giggles can be quite disturbing.
Aren't we already fighting WW3? That's basically what the War on Terror is.
Aren't we on WW6?
WW3 was the Cold War
WW4 was the Zombie Invasion
WW5 was Warty's Anal Revenge (coming soon to a theater near you)
If 300 American citizens were kidnapped, that would be our fucking business, not Nigeria's. That's the kind of thing our military is supposed to be involved in.
DC Schools: $29,349 Per Pupil, 83% Not Proficient in Reading
These are the government schools in our nation's capital city ? where for decades politicians of both parties have obstreperously pushed for more federal involvement in education and more federal spending on education.
To be fair, I'll wager most of those *politicians* have no idea what "obstreperously" means, either.
If they give me $3 million and assign me 100 random kids of the same grade level, I promise to get 75% of them proficient at reading.
I work with some inner city, poor kids in a literacy project. Many of these kids come from some 'seriously messed up' home and community situations. It is incredibly difficult to overcome that.
So, Bo, if we gave you $30 grand per and turned you loose, how many of those kids could you have reading in a year?
The kids from the very bad situations? I am not sure much can be done at all about that. I can't give them new parents.
Well with 30 grand a year you could set up a boarding school where you could reward achievement instead of sloth.
The issue is that these kids in the inner city are now coming from a third or even fourth generation of welfare parasites. Nothing in their home, family, or community life (such as it is) shows the rewards of thrift, discipline, hard work, or education. Perverse incentives create a perverse set of ethics.
I mean, you're talking about a place where the only entrepreneurs they're likely to see on a daily basis are drug dealers.
All true, especially the third and fourth generation comment.
^This is the thing. I was a teacher/librarian for a dozen years. Most of what determines a kid's future happens either before you get them or at home when you are not around.
You can help the self-motivated to improve; that's about it. Sorry.
All the more reason to end the welfare state. Without that support their parents would either have to shape up and get a job or their quality of life would fall far enough to warrant taking them from their parents. Either way everyone would be better off.
So, you'd be in favor of booting those kids from the system and giving them certificates of terminal educability?
When I was a kid my mother did this. She did two classes over the course of a school year, one each semester. At the end every kid was reading at grade level at least.
She used the music room behind the auditorium in the school and got paid nothing.
All the kids were poor inner city projects kids.
It was past of the DISTAR program.
Well, the first thing I would do is triage them. The 25% of kids I knew would never read would get no resources devoted to them.
I would then segregate that 25% away from the others so they couldn't disrupt the education of the others. I'd spend $50 grand on a security guard to make sure those 25 kids never left their holding area.
That leaves me $2,950,000 to educate 75 kids.
I'd get it done.
I'm voting Fluffy for Board of Ed.
"The 25% of kids I knew would never read would get no resources devoted to them."
That's the thing though. As much as I would prefer no government schools I have to say this, they are charged with educating that 25%. You know, 'No Child Left Behind.' They are constantly being called on the carpet 'what is up with these 25%, why are they doing so bad?' They can not do anything with them so naturally they say 'well, maybe if we had more money.'
Actually, my Swiftian example was meant to illustrate the folly of mass public education.
Privatized education would naturally separate the people who wanted to be educated from the people who don't want to be educated.
If it turns out (and I think the odds are high that it does) that attempting to educate that 25% in the presence of the other 75% damages the education of that 75%, public education must fail.
Why would Fluffy-style private education "work"? Because it would set itself tasks it knew it could achieve, and would not set itself tasks that it knew it could not achieve - and that would wreck everything else it was trying to do.
"If it turns out (and I think the odds are high that it does) that attempting to educate that 25% in the presence of the other 75% damages the education of that 75%, public education must fail."
This is the dilemma of public education in a nutshell, except worse: the public demands not only that we keep the 25% alongside the 75%, but that we educate each and every one of the 25% (NO child left behind).
With rhe result that only 17% are getting educated.
With rhe result that only 17% are getting educated.
One day the true potential of socialism will be achieved and that number will be 0%. Everyone will be equal.
I'm not sure that the public as a whole demands that, Bo. I know that the education community demands that because they need to keep their enrollment figures up, don't want to admit failure, etc. Also, a certain vocal, victim-obsessed segment of the public tries to link the problem of uneducable students to racism.
Good luck. You'd be dealing with a mean IQ around 80.
Dude, there's no way the mean IQ would be 80 after I threw out the lowest 25%.
The whole point of the triage is to raise the mean IQ.
But you're starting with random DC students. They've already been stunted enough that you'd be lucky to find even 10 kids with above 100 IQ. I mean, only 17% of them can read adequately and you don't need a 100 IQ to be able to read.
Not necessarily. Some of those uneducable kids are of average or above intelligence; they are simply too fucked up to want to or be able to learn.
There are some stupid kids who are normally adjusted and want to learn within their limits. These kids are the ones who are worst-served by having to share classroom space with the kids who don't want to be there and who are incapable of learning.
I'm reminded of a comment Neil Degrasse Tyson made that he thinks its odd that when teachers want to demonstrate their success, they point to the "Straight A" students, when by definition those are the students who are capable of learning regardless of who is teaching them, and thus provide zero information on the relative quality of a particular teacher.
Yep, and a culture which is so utterly hostile to learning. I had to quit tutoring the poor black kids. It was too much fucking heartbreak. I had one kid who I got up to reading at grade level, who started enjoying it and borrowing books from the little library the church had stop all of a sudden and bring all the books back. Because his older brother had called him a pussy and accused him of "acting white".
Especially for the boys, it's a constant wave of poisonous bullshit from their friends, family members, sometimes even teachers.
I never got the 'acting white' thing, just the 'parents forgot to bring the kid for sessions regularly', kid not fed for hours before session and kid stayed up all night before session a lot.
Yeah -- very hard to "fix" bad parenting in the schools. My wife volunteers at our twins' elementary school, and even in our relatively prosperous rural/exurban district, see sees some real tragedies. (Probably nothing like in the urban districts, though.)
One thing teachers bitch about that they are completely right about is the expectation some have of them that they can reverse a shitty home life, poverty, a horrible culture of depravity and indifference, neglect, abuse, etc. with their allotted six hours a day, five days a week.
And we are to believe there isn't a cultural problem other than white privilege.
Oh, I bet a lot of the cultural problems can be traced back to some type of racial oppression. People, entire groups, do not just get up and choose to be shiftless and irresponsible. If you were a slave or sharecropper you have no incentive to develop a value system based on initiative, education and responsibility. It is like that passage in Malcom X's autobiography where he goes to the white school and does well and the teacher tells him 'well, you might be a good carpenter one day.' He replies he wants to be a doctor and the teacher says 'well, you can't be that, be realistic.' It's easy to see how when faced with that you stop believing in basic virtues and stop teaching your kids them.
FIFY
Most racial oppression that mattered was backed by the government. I think racial hucksterism is more of result of that too (when you are held down you don't develop many good leaders and you have heightened sense of groupthink).
The problem with this explanation is that Malcolm X's generation faced vastly more discrimination and oppression than the current generation, and descended from generations that had been treated even more brutally, but their value system had survived intact.
A value system that had survived Jim Crow, progressive racism, the "robber barons", the Great Depression, etc., fell apart in two generations following the Johnson administration.
"but their value system had survived intact."
What's your evidence of that? To take the example at hand, Malcom X's biography describes a black community value system that already was in terrible shape.
Malcolm X looked at the black community of the 40's and saw moral decay...because he had no idea what was coming after the Great Society.
Malcolm X looked at the black community of the 40's and saw moral decay...because he had no idea what was coming after the Great Society.
I am totally stealing that. Someone needs to carve that quote in stone for future generations.
I would not steal it, because I don't think it is true.
One of the cases we read this semester was Hunter v. Underwood, where the Supreme Court invalidated Alabama's provisions disqualifying people convicted of certain crimes of 'moral turpitude' from voting. The Court found that states like Alabama that wanted to keep blacks from becoming a voting bloc for the Republicans identified crimes that blacks committed and were convicted of far more than whites and just put those in the list. The crimes were things we tend to associate with the black underclass today, things like bigamy, adultery, fornication, wife abandonment. That's exactly the kind of thing black writers like Malcom X, Richard Wright and Baldwin describe going on in the black community far before the Great Society.
It is totally true Bo. Look at the number of two parent black families in 1945 compared to 1970 and now. The Great Society did what slavery and Jim Crow for all of their evil couldn't; destroyed the black family. I don't think even the Klan was evil enough to have wanted to do to blacks what the Great Society did in the name of helping them.
Bingo, John. I believe black illegitimacy has hit around 70% or more.
You are just looking at the out of wedlock numbers. Of course the numbers were lower 'back in the day' because there were criminal statutes that were applied to 'knocking up' women back then.
More blacks were in poverty before the Great Society. The murder rate for blacks was higher in 1950 than it is today (see table 1, here http://www.columbia.edu/~rs328/Homicide.pdf). These cultural issues go back a long ways.
You can see the poverty data here:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www...../list.html
Better one is here, Table 2.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/povert.....eople.html
All the way back to Scotland, if Sowell is right.
That story makes no sense, as there were black doctors when he was a youth.
Not many. It is true we have a chronic black underclass after the 'Great Society,' but we also had a significantly growing black middle and upper class or professionals.
Here is your answer for the poor performance of kids in school: Too many single mothers.
If you worked with these kids I think you would agree with me that the last thing these kids would need is to have the fathers they have around more. Many of these fathers are incredibly terrible people.
Yes, they have a decision between two terrible options. Either a shitty home life with a mother who doesn't give a shit. Or a shitty home life with a mother and a father who don't give a shit.
Oh, I bet a lot of the cultural problems can be traced back to some type of racial oppression.
Yes. But, the institutionalized racial oppression has vastly diminished during my lifetime. At some point it is incumbent upon people to stop playing the historical oppression card and stand up and take responsibility for themselves. Society has done the heavy lifting for decades, it's now their turn to put up or shut up.
It is like that passage in Malcom X's autobiography where he goes to the white school and does well and the teacher tells him 'well, you might be a good carpenter one day.' He replies he wants to be a doctor and the teacher says 'well, you can't be that, be realistic.'
To me, this seems more that the teacher might have been trying to diminish Malcolm X's expectations of her teaching performance rather than his own abilities. I've seen this a lot throughout my adolescence and I'm as lily-white of a honkey as they come. Whenever you hear a teacher say, "Your child is a bright kid. He or she just isn't applying him or herself," the underlying message is, "Your child poses a particular challenge to me that I have no intention of accepting as it is above my pay grade and skill set."
Was it Newt Gingrich that suggested such kids be placed in orphanages? Absent that, what chance do these kids have to escape the culture in which they are immersed?
Yep, and a culture which is so utterly hostile to learning.
^This. But if you say that they shout you down as a racist. Truly an intractable problem.
Some problems money cant fix. And its 99% of the problems in education.
This.
*Many of these kids come from some 'seriously messed up' home and community situations*
More "messed up" than living on the prairie without shoes or running water? These kids have every advantage over people just ONE generation back, let alone six, but for some reason can't learn.
Thus, attention and blame HAS to fall on the educators.
Silly Rich, Didn't you listen to Sir Humpherey Appleby? Schools aren't there to educate students, they're a jobs program for the teachers.
And administrators and union officials.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeF_o1Ss1NQ
29 grand, by the way, is enough to pay for a tuition at a very good private school.
I remember when 10K a year was considered shocking (and highest in the country) - and not very long ago either.
Let's do an experiment: In one school, we'll pay union teachers their union wage. In another with similar performance in similar school systems, we'll pay non-union teachers who will be fired if they don't deliver satisfactory results (defined by a committee of parents and teachers). The catch is, the non-union school can allocate its payroll however they want to find good teachers and staff, and there will be no requirements on number of administrative staff.
A question: there are obviously a lot of very poor people in DC. Why? I understand that the cost of living in DC is very high, so how do you get so many poor people in such a place? Were they there to begin with?
About 1/4 (a little more now) of DC is wealthy.
About 3/4 (a little less now) of DC is uninhabitable.
Morlocks and Eloi
There were a lot of slaves in DC prior to emancipation; many of the current-day poor are the descendants of those slaves. Remember that Maryland was a slave state with a plantation economy.
Living in the area, The poor have always been there and only now are beginning to be pushed out towards Maryland due to how valuable the land is. When the section 8 contracts run out the property owners are redeveloping and pricing out everyone except the highly overpaid cronies. Gentrification has always occured but with the amount of money that is pouring out of Washington now its happening at an unprecedented level, due to the huge demand and lack of supply of quality places to live in DC. Washington socioeconomic composition has radically changed the last 20 years.
There's nothing wrong with big-city public schools that more funding can't fix. I know this because the right-thinking people, including one current candidate for Governor of Maryland, have made it an article of faith, and we know how readily articles of faith bend to mere evidence. Big-city school systems are just one funding increase away from success and have been since the seventies.
Every pol sees every problem as one that can be fixed with money, that way they can pay off more supporters.
Fucking magnets - how do they work?
er... magic?
Even after several college level physics classes, this is essentially my understanding of magnetism.
I had to take one course on electricity and magnetism. Man, that course was brutal. Fortunately, it was sophomore level so a lot of the retards who weren't cut out for engineering weren't weeded out yet, so there was a generous curve.
I admit the higher-level physics weeded me out from EE and made me run into Computer Science.
"An electron come in from infinity and strikes a plate"
Of course having a prof who had us doing triple integrals - when only Calc I was a pre-req - didn't help.
Yeah, this was Comp Sci. We had to take 2 physics courses: newtonian mechanics (easy), and electricity and magnetism (oh god why). That was as far as I wanted to go.
E&M sucked, but it was a lab class for us, so we got to do tons of fun experiments. Signals and Systems was sooooo much worse. I did worse in Aeromechanics as well, but that may be because I didn't attend class after October 1.
My grad level EM course was given completely as class-taken notes. No text. It was a brutal exercise in penmanship and cramped fingers.
I took a year of grad level E&M. Brutal doesn't even begin to describe it. "Virtually impossible" is the only thing that comes to mind. The integrals get to the point that you have no hope of doing them on your own. Instead you have to pour through a massive tome of solved integrals compiled by some poor Soviet bastard during his long Siberian exile.
My grad level EM final exam had 5 problems. We were allowed to solve them any way we saw fit with any resource including other students.
I spent at least 24 hours working those 5 problems and solved all but one. I finally exhausted all my resources trying to perform what looked liked a simple integral but was seemingly impossible. I went to the prof and asked him for a hint, anything that might help. He said, don't you have a copy of "Abramowitz and Stegum"? He reaches over to this esoteric tome of math references, turns to page 288 and shows me the solution to the integral which had been someone's PhD thesis or life's work, I don't know which.
http://www.amazon.com/Handbook.....0486612724
I'm reminded of my Diff-Eq final. There was a problem involving a vibrating string under tension that if you actually tried to solve would have been hideously difficult, but if you noticed the starting conditions listed in the problem was that the string was in the "rest" position, you could by intuition tell the answer was just "f(x,t) = 0". The half of the class who noticed that finished the test in half the allowed time, meanwhile the other half was scribbling out pages and pages trying to solve it in an increasing panic.
Reminds me of high school math competitions - I used to have that kind of intuition but 20 years later I can barely add 2 + 2 in my head.
But do you know how magnets work?
But do you know how magnets work?
I always thought it had to do with chakra.
"Chakra, when the walls fell."
His eyes opened!
Presumably you mean permanent magnets and not magnetic fields induced by current. Then the answer is unpaired spins and orbital angular momentum.
Magnetism is much more intuitive if taught from the solid state perspective instead of Amperean currents. Magnetic charge looks just like electric charge substituting H and B fields for D and E fields(constants change too). The only difference is that there's no such thing as free magnetic charge (monopoles). That doesn't stop you from using all of the same equations to describe it without any of that weird cross product nonsense.
Of course all of the undergrad texts teach Amperean magnetism instead, just like physicists like to torture themselves in the time domain instead of the frequency domain.
Gravity, duh. You see, the Earth projects a gravitational field. Magnets are dug out of the ground, so they each have a little bit of gravity in them.
^that's good
By putting iron rings and studs into your genital piercings
EU officials plotted IMF attack to bring rebellious Italy to its knees
Behold: Artisanal Toast
Between the pretension and the carb overload, I want to be sick
We're doomed.
When the big economic collapse finally comes, I admit I will take some pleasure in watching people like this starve.
It's a good thing sloopy's not on this thread to see this, because he'd have an aneurism.
SOCONZ!1 Girl, 17, on verge of becoming youngest lawmaker in West Virginia's history just a week before graduating high school after running on pro-life, pro-gun platform
Seventeen-year-olds who will turn 18 by the November election can vote in West Virginia's primary.
Soft-spoken and on-message, Blair is a churchgoer who says she is pro-life, pro-family, pro-gun rights and pro-business.
She has my vote. Oh, I can't vote. Well, that never stopped Obama before! Oh, but she's GOP.
Oh, well.
Somehow I bet "I ran for and won a seat in the State Legislature" won't buy her many points on her college application. It might right up until they admissions people see that she is a racist tea bagger.
They'll say,
"The goal of our program is to help train women to be leaders in today's society. Since Saira has already been co-opted by the patriarchy, she clearly doesn't need our help."
This hasn't been on the US News shows that I have seen. Imagine if she were a pro abortion, vegan, young feminist who had won a seat at 17. I am pretty sure GMA and the Today show would be engaged in a bidding war to see who got her on first.
I mean she is pro-life, obviously this means she supports rape culture.
Jezzies seem oddly silent about that. I guess when you don't tow the progtard feminazi line, then you either get ridiculed or ignored.
Poster child for the proverbial low info voter.
I'm all for voting out incumbents, but her life experience is what exactly?
This seems to fit:
Tim Cavanaugh: On Top of Piketty
The new Marxism has nothing to offer us but chains.
How likely do you think Marx's most ardent supporters read anything he ever wrote, besides some quotes plucked here and there out of convenience?
OT: Police beat a man to death in Washington because A) he was harmlessly crazy and b) they could.
http://www.komonews.com/news/l.....=video&c=y
Not goin to stop, guys, until we start taking scalps...
Fucking animals
Witness: "You beat this man to death, and we caught you!"
Police: "Like that matters. And oh, you are under arrest for obstructing official business".
Other Officer: "And we'll be confiscating your smartphones as 'evidence'"
The medical examiners is already doing his part to help cover this up: "There were no blows to Hilstrom's head."
Wow. Maybe this crazy guy killed himself and a there's a citizen conspiracy to blame the brave first responders?
Any medical examiner not stupid or corrupt would know that blunt force trauma to the torso can be just as lethal as cranial strikes.
They, officers all that were there, are all on paid administrative leave while we review it and look into it and determine what happened.
Well, they got paid vacations, so there is that. And I assume they all went home safely, which is the most important thing.
Two meals a day 'effective' to treat type 2 diabetes
Only eating breakfast and lunch may be more effective at managing type 2 diabetes than eating smaller, more regular meals, scientists say.
Just because
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVJInwekSl4
hah! Blue Oyster Cult is in concert nearby this weekend. I wonder if they get tired of playing this song after 34 years?
They probably do. But hopefully they have enough perspective to realize that 1) it is a great song, and 2) while it is their only great song, it is one more great song than most bands ever write. There are worse fates than making a good living being the "Don't Fear the Reaper" nightly jukebox.
But the link is to the other great song -- Godzilla 😉
I like Godzilla. That is a good song. I am not a fan of Burning for You. It is okay but every time I hear it I just think "why aren't they playing DFTR or Godzilla if they want to play a BOC song?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGKNaIXtBZQ
Of their discography, only "Godzilla" made my collection. I'm not sure what people see in 'Reaper'
I'm not sure what people see in 'Reaper'
Cowbell.
explore the space.
It is the cord progression and the hypnotic riff that runs through the song. It is an inferior song, but there is a little bit of Give Me Shelter going on in Reaper. They both have this same driving and kind of hypnotic chord progression.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUlNMSTAges
The Beautiful South
Don't Fear the Reaper
Burnin' for you wasn't too shabby either.
NEEDZ MOAR COWBELL
They shouldn't even bother playing more than three songs. Play your hits, encore with the hits, go pick up some trampy old ladies. It's a good life.
I saw them in concert about 10 years ago.
They seemed to have fun with it.
Do they get tired of eating?
Has the right wing lost its marbles?
Ann Coulter mocking the effort to help hundreds of schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria. Rush Limbaugh spending days bloviating that climate change is a left-wing political conspiracy and has nothing to do with science. Karl Rove ? paging Dr. Rove ? who has diagnosed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with brain damage.
How is it that anyone takes them seriously?
Facts don't matter, science doesn't matter, reason is swept aside. And others follow suit.
Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/pundi.....z31svFoJE0
Follow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook
Great article, dipshit. Exactly the type of leftist gibberish trolls like you think of as "thoughtful". God, you're such a sad sack of shit and your breath smells like Obama's unwashed ballsack...
Its the modern GOP - nothing but greasy-ass Creationist rednecks.
Why are you defending them anyway? I thought this was a libertarian board?
So why are you on it, you fucking statist turd? Oh, that's right - to be a fucktard. And I'm not defending them - I'm calling you a liberal statist Obama-fellator, as you are too fucking stupid to figure that out. Isn't there some Christian you can throw eggs at somewhere,pajama boy?
Re: Peter Caca,
Laughing at your cynical attempts of introducing liberal retardation into our wonderful intellectual space is not the same as "defending Rush Limbaugh," Caca. The phony outrage displayed by the hysterical blogger to which you link is funny by itself. Having fun at its (and your) expense does not mean Ann Coulter is our high priestess.
Re: Peter Caca,
Oh? You mean, that effort is serious?
#BringBackOurGirls
THERE'S A HASTAG DEDICATED TO IT, OM.
A HASHTAG!
A hash tag is a slip of paper that shows the price of marijuana. That is a pound sign.
Opiated hash - mmmmmm. That's all we could get one summer in the early 80's. Had a quarter pound - was all we could get. No weed. Just opiated hash.
We never thought we'd say, "GOD, I'm tired of smoking opiated hash!"....but we did.
"I wish I could get just some....weed!"
What were we talking about?
Well, yeah! I mean, like Michelle held up a piece of paper while making a sad face! How much more serious can you get?!? Huh? Why do you hate black people?!?
I thought she was posing for a sad-face clown velvet painting or something!
She's not trying out for ICP?
She should. He already has
"I thought she was posing for a sad-face clown velvet painting or something!"
Damn fine work, sir. Damn fine.
+1 #ChristFag
Well, that's rich, because every time the true believers (like Bill Nye, for instance) are confronted with the facts that temps have not risen even close to the estimates indicated in all the models, the true believers start accusing the skeptics of wanting their children to die. No, really, that is what Nye implied on The Independents not many moons ago.
Look. You obviously don't understand.
You see, human activity must be harming the planet because it must. Therefore global warming is real, because human activity must be harming the planet. Therefore human activity is harming the planet. See? It's airtight circular logic.
The 25% of kids I knew would never read would get no resources devoted to them.
Oh, the humanity!
It's always better for the 75% of willing and able students to be forced to plod along at the pace of that 25%. That's what social justice looks like.
I'm gonna guess you were one of the "smart kids" in school. I was. School was HELL - constantly being forced to slow down. I was a year and a half ahead in math in elementary school - did it on my own. They MADE me stop - wouldn't give me the books any more.
I'm 52 and I STILL resent that.
Then wondered why I was a fucking JD all through high school. Although some of the teachers who were coache let a couple of us teach the others (while the teachers figured out batting averages, starting lineups, etc), so we were less bored than we'd have been otherwise.
School is pretty much hell for everyone but maybe the 15 or 20% of kids who fit the exact profile they are teaching to. Education is more than anything a totally individual specific endeavor. The reason why home schooled kids do so well is not because their parents are geniuses or gifted teachers. They do so well because no one knows a kid and how they learn best better than their parents. There is no substitute for an learning plan that was built for you individually by someone who really understands you and how you learn.
Which is the advantage of having a full range of private schools with various teaching models.
Even so, homeschool would still work out better for most.
Exactly Rob. That is why vouchers would be such a miracle. It would create the demand for private schools that taught in ways that public schools, since they have to teach anyone who walks in the door, can't.
My parents put me into private schools until they divorced and the money ran out, that would be around seventh grade. Then it was off to public school hell. I was so bored that I didn't bother to do any work, so they tried to stick me into special ed. Took some serious lobbying by my mother before they went the opposite way and put me in advanced classes which were marginally interesting, so my grades improved. Teachers were baffled.
I have known so many smart but maybe screwed up or just cantankerous people who got stuck in special ed. Special Ed is really just the class for "any kid the regular teachers just don't like".
Now the speds are cash cows. The schools have an incentive to put as many kids in sped as possible, and keep them there, because they get more funding.
Completely. And it is also a cash cow for teachers since getting a SPED certification is a ticket to higher pay.
Ever listen to t he old Bill Cosby routine about getting put in class with the slow kids? It is hysterical.
I was fortunately that my (public) elementary school, when they discovered that I could already read when I got to kindergarten, essentially turned me loose in the library for three years. I spent most of 1-3 grades just reading the World Book Encyclopedia (and all the Newbery Medal winners)
Yeah, the best part of my elementary school years was being in the gifted and talented program. It was all reading, science experiments and field trips. I don't think they have it anymore because FAIRNESS!!!
I don't think they have it anymore because FAIRNESS!!!
TAG made stupid kids feel bad about themselves, so it had to go.
Strictly speaking, gifted education is special education. So you were actually in a special ed class. It's just your school actually cared and was using the extra money they got because you were defined special ed to educate you, rather than just throwing you in holding and treating you as a revenue source for the rest of the school.
I still have problems with adverbs/adjectives, though.
Don't feel bad, I learned all my grammar skills in SC. Which is to say everything I write professionally gets edited at least 3 times.
My daughter is four, and she's trying to read. Gotta love Dr Seuss. Those books are perfect for that.
My experience was the opposite. I pretty much just coasted into high school then went to boarding school where I excelled. My last year of public school my class was divided into "problem kids" and everyone else. Funny, the "problem kids" were all smart but incredibly bored.
I went to a public school - luckily it was middle class and well-funded. In junior high I got to go to a program for gifted (ha!) children while in HS I got to take AP classes.
My own son is going to a very nice public school - it's in one of the most expensive part of the town. Some 99% of the HS graduates go on to college - of course their parents are college graduates (and most of them are wealthy) too.
Same. Teaching children is the very last priority for public schools.
Is this monocle appropriate for libertarians?
for any fans of Vincent Price or old-time horror stories, I've been listening to these (mostly) 1970s radio productions from the BBC:
http://oldtimeradiodownloads.c...../index.php
Thanks, man. I love Vincent Price's voice. My parents had this record when I was a kid, called "Vincent Price Tales of Witches, Ghosts, and Goblins". I would play it over and over. It was amazing. I found them uploaded on youtube. There's a story called The Smoker that still blows my mind.
You know, I think we had that. It sounds familiar.
Just listened to "The Smoker" - very good.
The BBC Radio production of I am Legend is great. If you can get hold of it give it a try.
Donald Sterling threatened to sue the National Basketball Association if it doesn't rescind a lifetime ban and $2.5 million fine levied against him.
"Litigation is the sport of kings."
According to financial disclosure forms, President Obama and the First Lady hold assets worth between $2 and $7 million, mostly in Treasury bonds.
Good for them. You can't accuse them of insider trading and they certainly are willing to put their money where they believe.
Nah. If they put their money where their mouth is, they would have just donated all that money to the Treasury.
Hmm... Maybe all politicians should be paid in straight annuities based on current dollars? It might align their interests with ours a bit more.
That is a really good idea. Pay them in T-Bills and maybe a annuity that is not adjusted for inflation.
I would also make every member of the fed surrender convert their entire investment portfolio and make them earn say 1% on it the entire time they are on the board. Maybe give them some personal incentive to worry about the value of the dollar.
It's really going to suck for them though when the bond bubble collapses.
According to financial disclosure forms, President Obama and the First Lady hold assets worth between $2 and $7 million
Pikers. Get back to us when they have the third comma.
Hell, I have a net worth between two dollars and 7 million too!
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: It gives light to the administration's claim that this had nothing to do with the election, nothing to do with targeting opponents of the administration. The BOLO, the be on the lookout, here's who you target, specifically says that these are groups where you can find statements in the case file that are critical of how country is being run. That's the definition of the president's opposition. These are the people that you target. This is a major abuse of power. They covered up for two years and now they say, 'hey, dude, two-year-old story so it's old news.' Let's see if the mainstream media will treat it as old news or what it really is new news of misleading America and covering it up.
http://www.realclearpolitics.c.....s_ago.html
It is an old media/Dem Jedi mind trick. Lie about something for as long as possible and then when you can't lie about it anymore say "that is old news".
John, for FUCK'S sake - two words:
Phony. Scandal!
You teafucking ratbaggers need to get off this stuff. If the do-nothing, Obstructican Congress? would just...get out of the way, we could get The Country? on the road to another Summer of Recovery?.
But no. Just one diversion after another to get The President, because RACIST!
And you know I'm right...
You forgot, "those damned Tea Baggers should have been audited. That is dirty money we are talking about."
That's. Different.
Do people in law school not get any sort of oratory or speech training? Because there were a couple of idiots sitting behind me on the train this morning talking about law school, and not only did they insert "like" after every word (in one sentence, the male of the pair used "like" three times in a row. He literally said "Like like like"), but they both talked in that kind of stoned, breathy voice as if their vocal chords were being crushed.
I'm really glad I don't have to take mass transit. Between guys like that, shit-caked bums, and assholes spoiling for a fight, I would go insane.
I think it's a city problem. Commuter trains lack those issues since they're populated by professionals trying to sleep, get work done, or have a few beers after work.
I haven't encountered that on the train I take. It's all tourists and professionals buried in their Kindles or smart phones. In fact, 99% of the time nobody is talking - it's completely silent. Of course, today I had to be subjected to those two maroons, who were the only people talking on the whole car.
today I had to be subjected to those two maroons
Racist!!
Quick question:
Has anyone ever hit on you on the train?
I'm just gathering data.
Sure they have, but I'm probably the least receptive to overtures in that environment. One guy offered to piggy-back me up the escalator, which I thought was funny and cute.
Sure they have
Really?
Wow.
OK, so that's one for "Yes".
I have never been hit on as a guy, but I hit on few girls when I was in college and took the metro. I was even successful with one and got her number and went out with her a few times.
I always counted getting some cute and fairly normal girl to give me her number after meeting me on a train to be just about my greatest accomplishment as a single guy.
One of the situations with an ex that annoys me the most involves her getting picked up on the train about a week after we broke up, so it does happen.
Were they upspeaking? Using question marks and tones to make declarative sentences? I totally hate that?
Canadian Women (at least in Ontario) are the WORST about the UPtalking? I've noticed it for about 20 years? Now that I've quit playing in pipe bands over there, it's even more noticable when I run into Canuckistaners in SE MI??
OMG - YES.
The short answer is "no, they don't."
The longer answer would include that law schools are now filling seats with the least qualified students ever, because anyone with half a brain is running from law like the Three Stooges.
"Law Schools - the new Teachers Colleges - a report at 11"
The local law school - third tier - that's located downtown has seen enrollment drop like a rock. I've heard rumors of it being sold to my old Alma mater and an eventual name change.
The day I decided against going to law school was the happiest day of my life.
Seriously. I had been working for a law firm in DC and saw how it ripped out your soul, Bates labeled it and filed it away in a bankers box. So. Crushingly. Dull. So many 1st and 2nd year associates crying in the bathrooms. So many temps with JDs making $10/hour and $80,000 law school debts.
From the little I could comprehend of their inane conversation, they seemed to be under the impression that law school grads make a lot of money. Poor little dears.
And the female of the pair was talking about some dinner with some law firm bigwigs that she had been invited to. I really hope she uses her best Valley Girl-upspeak-stoned voice at that dinner.
The other day we were discussing the distribution curve for law school graduate salaries here. Just a few at the top make a lot of money. (Fortunately, it appears that my eldest may be one of these.)
The problem is that you have to actually be good at what you're doing. The law job i'm moving to (as a 1L) is a 85% raise over my current engineering job. Why? Because I'm at a top tier school, I have expertise that other students don't have, and I have more experience interviewing people than most law students have being interviewed.
Law is a great career path for about 10% of the people in law school. The other 90% are all chasing the big checks the aforementioned 10% will be getting.
Not really. You get a trial advocacy class if you choose to take it and that is about it. Worse still, most law students are assholes who think they are good speakers and have no idea how hard doing it well actually is and thus have no idea how bad they actually are.
I had the pleasure last week of going to a lunch where a litigation attorney was the speaker. He has an outline he looked at twice - once to read a quote word for word, the second time to get exact statistics. But he's been doing trials since 1976.
That is the result of years of experience and work. The thing that I wasn't expecting about real trial work is how, unless you are really experienced and sometimes not even then, every single thing that goes on in court is harder than it looks and requires preparation. You can look foolish reading a document or trying to hand something to someone. You cannot take any detail for granted or it will bite you in the ass. Most trial attorneys who suck suck because they are lazy and don't do the detailed preparation necessary to be good.
Litigators are a special breed. *Very* organized. Very polished and well put-together.
I worked for other partners who weren't litigators. They were a nightmare.
This is very true. We had a moot court competition required at the end of our 1L year, and it was amazing how many students would start arguing with the appellate court judges. I had experience in the style of competition from "We The People" in high school, so I knew at the very least that you don't argue with appellate court judges.
It wasn't my best performance, but I still got awarded with a speaking prize simply because I knew in what tone to address the court.
Remember, KK, you're in DC. So most of the lawyers are working for regulatory agencies, doin doc review, etc. IOW, you're not seeing the best and the brightest, you're seeing the people who couldn't get clerkships, didn't get hired by the big firms and didn't have the talent/drive to make it as sole proprietors.
You can't swing a dead cat in DC without hitting someone with a JD. They may not be a lawyer, but they have the degree.
California consumers say duped by Blue Shield's limited Obamacare plans
If you like your doctor, you can sue to keep your doctor. Period.
School was HELL - constantly being forced to slow down. I was a year and a half ahead in math in elementary school - did it on my own. They MADE me stop - wouldn't give me the books any more.
I was bored out of my fucking skull. I was lucky; I had a few teachers who would let me go to the library and read because they knew I'd be a big disruptive influence if they tried to force me to sit there and wait for the slowest kid to catch up.
I graduated from high school in three years (in New York), because I didn't want to waste another year in the public school system. I figured out I could satisfy the Board of Regents graduation requirements by taking junior and senior English at the same time. The administrators couldn't really figure out how to legitimately keep me from doing it, even though they obviously wanted to.
I wish I could have tested out of high school. I could have gone to college at least a year and probably two earlier. Other than playing football and losing my virginity, I can't tell you a single thing I did worthwhile my last two years of high school.
Lot of us around here. I HATED school & quit essentially after 9th grade. Got my GED by taking the test, and with the SAT, went right into a 4 year school.
My experience was just the opposite. The required courses in freshman and sophomore year were boring and worthless. I did shitty work in those classes because I wasn't even slightly engaged.
The good years were Jr. and Sr. AP Chem was a beast, but the teacher was amazing! Ended up getting a 5 on the exam simply because he was such a good teacher and drilled it into us. AP Bio was fun! I nearly became a genetic biologist because of that class. Our recombinant DNA experiment with the bacteria and the luminescent jellyfish DNA was seriously one of the most fun things I've ever done. AP Government was fun because it was effectively 5 weeks of class and the rest of the time was prep for the "We The People" competition. I took a few semesters of computer science, which taught me enough to make the first year of college a breeze. Robotics class was amazing, and we just spent half the semester prepping for regional robotics competitions.
However, i don't delude myself into thinking that this was normal for public school. Our district prided itself (and still does) on being one of the best in the state and having tons of options for smart kids. It just so happens that the basic requirements for graduation get in the way of having that kind of fun for 13 years instead of just 2.
I was watching Fox and Friends while I was getting ready for work and they were interviewing this family with ten kids of which six started college at the age of twelve. Yes, they were all home-schooled. I faced my wife and told her that school is not meant to educate children but to provide an expensive jobs program for underachieving bureaucrats.
My kid hates school. I can see the frustration in his eyes, because I know he is getting bored of being treated like a retard. I remember spending hours a week in 4th grade (this was in Mexico) writing pages of words - you know, to learn the correct spelling of all those "h" words where the "h" is mute - while the young lass we had as a teacher could go to union meetings. It was disgusting as it was a waste of productive time.
My school district figured out how to put the kibosh on people compressing their time as revenue sources - they took all the manditory courses and schedule them in overlapping time slots so that it was impossible to not have to take four years to get through the requisites.
Oh god, that's pure evil. It's bad enough in university, where it's a product of the ridiculous number of courses, but on *purpose*?
I only spent three years in high school. With as many AP credits as I had, Cornell didn't give a fuck whether I had the diploma or not, so neither did I.
I may be one of the few people who has an MS degree but not a high school degree.
I have an MBA and a GED. Does that count?
I really wish I hadn't been as ignorant of financing as I was in high school. When I got to grad school at Cornell I was talking to a senior who had a full ride (from financial aid, not scholarships), and her mom made $30k more than both my parents combined.
So Richmond is overrun with cycle nuts, who now think we should spend millions arranging the traffic patterns to suit them. Because "sustainability!"
And as an evil car owner, you should pay a mileage and a fuel tax to fix the roads to let them ride on for free. And you should always yield the right of way to them as well.
I know a lot of good people cycle. Sadly, a whole lot of pretentious, ignorant assholes do as well.
"I know a lot of good people cycle"
I don't.
I don't either. I didn't say "I knew them" personally. I was just trying to give them the benefit of the doubt and pretend they exist somewhere.
Fuck you guys! 🙂
OK, maybe one.
I don't know a lot of pretentious, attention-starved recumbent bike people, fortunately.
I want to swerve to hit those types.
http://wikimapping.com/wikimap.....3YftPldW3G
That's a wikimap of proposed improvements, which has been slathered by the bikenuts with "add this" green lines. Apparently the city should add a buffered bike lane to every freaking street, right now, all at once, and cost be dammned.
I'm actually not opposed to a sensible project to add a major East-West bikeway. It does make a lot of sense. I'd even go so far as to close one of the streets to thru cars, and leave a lane for bikes the whole way.
My ex was a bike messenger. He once showed me a clip of an interview he did with some dude making a documentary about bike messengers (how many bike messenger docs do you think there are? I'd say 1000s). Anyway, he came off looking like such an arrogant prick, from his language, to his posture, to his clothing. I laughed and laughed and laughed. I really wish I could find a copy of that.
Kristen, you seem like such a lovely woman. Why were you with a bike messenger?
I am so glad you moved up to your current boyfriend who actually has a pair of balls and owns a proper motorcycle.
Rather a bike messenger than a suit, any day. But that bike messenger went on to make a nice living as the operations manager for the company he messengered for. Until his being a complete wastrel of a drunk caught up to him and he lost his job, me, and his life all within a year.
Hey, you leave guys in suits alone. Just because you suck it up and take a job to make money, doesn't automatically make you a douche bag.
It is not what someone does for a living so much as whether they let that define who they are. I say this as someone who spent too much time allowing that to happen. What usually makes someone an asshole is someone who lets their job define them. If your entire view on life is "I am cool because I am an attorney or bike messenger or whatever", you are probably an asshole.
I'm not opposed to dating suits, it's just that I generally don't notice guys in suits as much as I do guys in jeans and work boots. If a guy in a suit were to approach me and he was interesting and funny, then I would definitely give him the time of day. It's just that there are so many of you around, I tend to tune y'all out!! 🙂
I love that bike to work day was washed out.
I thought bikes are supposed to replace cars. Why didn't these assholes put some rain gear on and tough it out? If they are not willing to ride in the rain, I really don't want to hear about what a great alternative biking to work is. Last I looked it tends to rain sometimes in most of America.
I dunno - all I know if that the local weather forecasters were saying "don't bike to work on Friday! It's DANGEROUS!". Heh.
That attitude pisses me off. If you are in good shape, not injured, the weather is good, you don't need to go very far, you don't need to carry much cargo or any passengers and the bike has no mechanical problems, then a bicycle is a great device to commute with.
As a hard-core cyclist, I rarely experience a week where I commute to work by bicycle on four or more days. If the kid has a doctor's appointment in the afternoon, it's a car. Black ice because of the freezing rain last night? Car. I have to deliver a bunch of records to my lawyers office? Car. I need to show up in a suit? Car. A pothole bent my rim? Car. Mystery reader day at my daughter's school? Car. Going to spend the night at my girlfriend's house? Car.
Shit, I have all weather gear and have ridden in temperatures ranging from 100+ to well below freezing, and yet one day out of five, I still won't ride because of the weather conditions.
It pisses me off too. Motorcycles are not practical as a daily driver. They are really fun toys. The same is true of bikes.
I think the bike obsession is part of the general loss of adulthood in this society. People who don't have the responsibilities of adults are the ones who think that bikes are somehow a replacement for cars.
Grand Rapids did this to our downtown - taking perfectly fine 2-lane streets and turning them to 1-lane congestion. And there aren't that bikers here at all - it was part of a government idea to make the city more attractive to the hipster younger generation.
*that many
Huge surprise, some of the first people to request a Google history wipe in the EU include a politician and a pedophile
Google should fuck them over somehow. They could do the thing they do with DMCA takedown notices:
Oh hey, we had to hide some results because #NAME OF PERSON# requested we do so. Click here for the list of results they asked us to remove.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/d.....eft-487632
Looks like Florida's program of deputizing alligators is starting to pay dividends.
I've already started a python werewolf program to neutralize these agents of the state.
The Ukrainian version of a Koch bro has basically told his employees that work at his steel factory to take back the streets from pro-Russian separatists. Masses of steel workers have already taken Mariupol and have a presence in other cities like Donetsk. They aren't armed (yet) but they will get a uniform. A rich guy can use his employees to press for freedom and peace. Isn't this awesome?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com.....e18711105/
Maybe I am naive, but I think breaking off a piece of the Ukraine is not going to work out so well for the Russians. It is just going to be one big pain in the ass and money suck. You watch.
You mean a jobs program for soldiers and a way for nationalist Russians to get their patriotic rocks off? Sounds good, depending on one's point of view.
So I've figured out why I've not been able to get an apartment. Apparently my credit report is full of bad things. Great. Awesome.
So you could be homeless because of a credit report that is likely not even correct. Isn't it great?
The biggest cause of real homelessness, people who are homeless and don't want to be as opposed to mental patients and degenerates who would just rather beg than work, is because of the landlord tenant laws. It is a horrible example of "unintended" consequences. Progressive idiots thought they would help poor people by making it hard for evil landlords to evict bad tenants. All that did was make landlord risk adverse and demand good credit and huge deposits from their tenants. So if you are a working person and get in a pinch, say your asshole boyfriend kicks you out or you lose your job and get evicted and then get another job and try to get a new place, you are totally fucked. No one will rent to you and even if they will, most lower middle class and poor people don't have two months or more rent laying around to make the security deposit. So you end up in your car or on someone's couch if you are lucky or in a shelter if you are not.
In other words, I hope Progressives rot in hell.
Yeah I got cash. That's the maddening thing. Last place I went to they rejected me, I asked why, they said credit. So I said I'd pay three months of a six month lease in cash on move in. They said no.
That's fucking retarded, straight up. Apparently it's illegal (no idea if that's true, just something I heard) to take cash up front for an apartment rental. I don't know if that is true, I'm not a laywer, but if it is true, I bet you it's some retarded War on Drugs bullshit. Because only drug dealers pay in cash.
Use credit cards like a good little debt slave. Fuck I am livid right now. Because I've never used credit to pay living expenses, now I'm fucked when the credit bureau screws up.
I don't know but I bet they are not lying to you and it is illegal to take cash up front.
So you can't get an apartment without having a bank account and being able to write a check for the deposit. But you can't get a bank account without proper ID and a confirmed address. A PO box won't do. That is a great system they have set up.
Oh, and it is totally racist and evil to require someone to have an ID to vote, yet it is just fine to make it impossible to have a home without having a bank account because we can't let evil drug lords rent apartments and sell crack to our children or something.
Are they real?
One student loan, one civil judgement. The loan is real, the civil judgement is absolutely fake.
Oh, and the fucking credit bureau has had me on hold for a half hour. Fucl.
I know banks need information to lend money and be able to properly evaluate risk. So I see the reason for the credit bureaus. That said, there has to be a better way than this. Those places are utterly incompetent and seem to do nothing beyond mistakenly fuck innocent people.
I assume they're liable for their fuckups. I should probably call back and tell them they have until Monday to fix it or I'm filing suit.
I wouldn't be surprised if they are not. Those bureaus have a lot of political power and God forbid anyone be held responsible for anything.
My credit score is (now) nearly perfect, but they still ask me about my ex's bankruptcy, almost 20 years ago, the one she declared to avoid paying me the money she owed me after we divorced and after I sued her.
When I bought my car this spring, they dinged me because of a single late payment on a credit card a couple of years ago. One month the bill either didn't come or we accidentily threw it away with the junk mail.
Understand, this was the third auto loan I had taken out with USAA. Each time I had never missed a payment and twice paid off the loan early. In addition to that, I have over the course of the last 20 years ran up and paid off a ton of credit cards. I don't have a dime of credit card debt. And I also have paid off my student loans.
And yet, they wanted to hassle me and raised my interest rate a fraction over a single late payment on a card that currently has a zero balance. And it was a secured loan for less than the blue book value of the car.
The whole thing is just fucking retarded.
What's really absurd is that the wife-unit paid both the mortgage and my credit card bill late, 2 months in a row, about 5 years ago. They fucking jacked my APR on the credit card for about a year as a result.
I've never been asked about that and when I bough a new car a few months back, I was six points off the maximum score. There's no rhyme or reason to their methods.
If you're under 30 days late, they don't report it.
I had bad credit a few years ago and I was able to get a place to live by renting a house from a family who had moved out of state and still had the property. They didn't check my credit, just references and employment. I think small-time landlords like that are more lenient.
yeah I'm looking for a property owner now, the corporate places have no flexibility.
Well, rent in the ghetto, then?
Elimination of simple carbohydrates.
Which your gut bacteria love, but your gut may not, according to the article. Gut fauna is probably the biggest unresolved question for me in digestive health problems. Up to and including Crohns and UC.
How many times do we need to say "Correlation is not causation" on reason threads?
My doc puts it thus: "All people are different. We use general guidelines to help fine tune a diet."
Her uses GI and GL and monitors blood changes. He is a proponent of the Metabolic Syndrome theory which takes simple carbs, insulin, and other factors into account when discussing the unhealthy aspects of a patient. Essentially our body is all connected to ourselves.
They don't do it around here. Doesn't get any special funding.
I blame Hop on Pop for my lower back problems.
That's funny because I read Hop on Pop to her last night. Her favorite is Fox in Socks, but I let mom read that one. Gets me tongue tied.
BTW, The Lorax is really about the tragedy of the commons. The last Truffula tree is saved because someone actually owns it, as symbolized by the wall around it in the last picture.
Yeah, but I get a distinct different reaction to reintroducing wheat vs any other carbs, and I'm not really low carb anyway.
But robc brings up an outstanding point: if you just cherry pick a single factor of a larger issue to build your strawman around, it doesn't disprove the larger issue. It appears in every anti-GF, anti-paleo argument out there right now.
The one thing I saw that was sensible was changing the layout of the street. So instead of the traditional sidewalk, parking, bike lane, car lanes it went sidewalk, bike lane, parking, car lanes. No more bikers getting doored or having to ride with their elbows right next to traffic. No more bad drivers slowing to a crawl, afraid to pass a cyclist when they have plenty of room.
We have bike lanes aaaand now the city is about to open "super Speed" bus lanes (the stops are elevated so the buses won't have to slow down). How is that going to work when there's a bike in the lane? I have no idea.
Cambridge blew a significant chunk of change upgrading the bike lane along Concord Ave. It's very nice, and I love riding on it. Very safe too.
They elevated it above the curb as a safety measure. Awesome.
Except that the automated garbage trucks can't pick up trash cans that are too far away from the curb. So all the property owners put their garbage in the bike lane on garbage day. So on that day, I am slaloming garbage cans and pedestrians because I would be killed if I got out on the narrower Concord Ave with its irritated drivers trying to negotiate the congestion caused by Belmont's anti-commuter road layout.
So do people have to jump in when the bus is flying by or something? o.O
Doesn't really solve the problem of bikers passing on the right when a car is turning and getting nailed, but otherwise seems pretty good.
Top Men of Cambridge didn't work out all the niggling details of a societal ideal? There are unwelcome and unforeseen scenarios?
Shocked! I say.
I like to get my wife to read it after she's had a couple drinks. Damn entertaining.