About the Author


Coming Soon: 100 Facts About Gerard Van der Leun. A breathless world awaits. March, 2006

SIDELINES

How exactly do we know, from the photo, that she is on the political left rather than right?  Seriously.  Here is her blog and profile.  Here is her Twitter feed.  How do we know?  And that we know — should it make you less confident in your own political beliefs?  WWRHS? -- Assorted links -- €” Marginal Revolution

Kenneth Boehr, Clara Lazen's science teacher, handed out the usual ball-and-stick models used

to visualize simple molecules to his fifth-grade class. But Clara put the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms together in a particular complex way and asked Boehr if she'd made a real molecule. Boehr, to his surprise, wasn't sure. So he photographed the model and sent it over to a chemist friend at Humboldt State University who identified it as a wholly new but also wholly viable chemical. -- | Popular Science

No fool like an old.... etc. A Day With Warren Buffett Offers Wealth of Photo Opportunities

The ritual ends with a photo shoot. Each student gets to take two pictures with Mr. Buffett. The first one is a serious shot, the second is a funny pose of their choosing.

Would the ritual ended with sepaku for the hilariously named "Sage of Omaha."

Obama: 'I have fallen on my knees with great regularity' - Investors.com

No, that's not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month!

So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation. -- | ZeroHedge

To all Roman Catholics who voted for Mr Barack Obama: SUUUCKERS! -- | John C. Wright's Journal

Re: The Planned Parenthood Paroxysm --

It is a fresh reminder that the left fully absorbed and adapted the Brezhnev Doctrine: once they capture an institution, they aren'€™t giving it up.  How dare a private foundation stop coughing up the dough.  It explains why "diversity" means conformity to liberal views in newsrooms, college faculties, and Hollywood studios.  It's why the left reacts with howls of outrage every time you propose reducing taxpayer funding for NPR and PBS, even as the left disingenuously argues that NPR and PBS receive only a "tiny"€ amount of tax subsidy.  It should also remind us how the left will fight every battle to shrink government like it was Verdun.  Which suggests one obvious conclusion if you're an incoming Romney Administration: go big.  Go after everything at once.  -- | Power Line

An hour's worth of C-SPAN Q&A: Diana West, Syndicated Columnist, Universal Uclick - YouTube

Diana West, discusses her weekly online column syndicated in over 100 newspapers nationwide. She writes about cultural and political issues from a self-described conservative viewpoint. She talks about some themes in her columns, including the spread of Islamic law throughout formerly non-Islamic areas of the western world and her opposition to the war in Afghanistan.

a scared mother of four on food stamps, or her selfless Community Activist advocate.

No one champions the simple strivers, those who take care of themselves and in the process alleviate society of one more charity case, and along the way create wealth via 'gains from trade' implicit in market transactions. A simple prosperous mensch who does not hypocritically claim he primarily works for others is off the radar, implicitly insulting to any intellectual making considerably less than him. The kind of change Murray is talking about will not happen until productive, successful people again feel pride in their distinguishing learned characteristics, including the willingness to shame people who do not have them. -- Falkenblog: Charles Murray Reiterates Willpower

As for Romney and his disregard, real or putative, for the poor,

I would suspect he has actually done more for the poor than anyone else in the presidential sweepstakes, by virtue of the tithes he has paid to his church and the whopping taxes he has actually paid. While we might carp and squeal about his tax rates, the actual amount of cabbage he has forked over in his career to the federal government must cover a sizable acreage indeed, and we assume that even given the spectacular ineptitude of that same government in distributing assistance to the needy without leakages of Mississippi dimensions into various private spillways and sluice gates, a fair amount of Mitt's earnings must have found its way into the pockets of the deserving. -- | The Daily Cannibal

Obama's After Lunch Schedule as given by a commenter on: Just What Does Barack Obama Do All Day @ The Daily Caller

2:00 PM: Golf with Plouffe
5:00 PM: Dinner with the wookie
6:00 PM: Sneak a cigarette
6:15 PM: Watch Oprah on Tivo
8:00 PM: Smoke a joint and have sex with a male campaign staffer
8:05 PM: Done with sex
8:10 PM: Watch the wookie scarf down everything in the White House refrigerator
9:00 PM: Hold the wookie's head as she "purges" her snack
9:30 PM: Watch Ray Maddow fantasize about sex with him
10:00 PM: Pass out

I rarely encounter men I feel immediately threatened by.

The ones I do are 1) really big-ass black guys with hardcore street cred, 320 pounds and a lot off tattoo chatter on their arm, 2) Mexican psycho dudes with tattoos on their face. See the commonality? Once you etch shit in your face you are telling the world that you have ceased belonging. This is a clear signal of danger. Animals use subtle aromatic spear to ward off predators. Man now uses skin ink. Heavy skin ink. -- Men in East L.A. that scare me ｫ An Unmarried Man

The formal statement of Anathema goes like this:

Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth, we deprive Barack Hussain Obama himself and all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, we separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth, we declare him excommunicated and anathematized and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church; we deliver him to Satan to mortify his body, that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment.

That would pretty much work for me. What about the Catholics among us?

Ben Greenman’s Graphs About Charts and Charts About Graphs: Graph #20.

I can't stomach the fact that something designed specifically to help us know things

has exactly the opposite effect. At best, it only helps us think we know things. Doubtful knowledge. Or doubtable knowledge. Which is a hell of a lot worse because that makes us want to hurry up and make a whole bunch of other people think they know it, too. --How Dead Do I Have to Be? « The Dipso Chronicles

"There is of course a slight lack of smell and taste," sniffed Frerk Feldhusen,

from the office of agriculture, food safety and fisheries in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. However, "all in all, given its level of freshness and its material composition, the product is assessed as satisfactory," Feldhusen said, adding it would stand up to today's definition of being fit for the dinner table. --PhotoBlog -

Republicans think it's all about the bad economy. It is. But Barack Obama is going to do something his opposition wouldn't think possible.

He's going to take ownership of the American economy. Not the real one, but the one he's just made up, "the economy built to last." It won't last long, but long enough. You'd think the best and the brightest would be beyond Mr. Obama's crude populist pitch. You of course would be wrong.... A speech that flopped among Washington's policy sophisticates is soaring out in the country. Republicans had better figure out why. --Henninger: Obama's Maddening, Winning Speech - WSJ.com

“With 34 percent unemployment and the price of goat so far out of range

of most working families that they have been forced to switch to chicken, it is time that our opponents stopped dodging the issues and took a serious look at the economic consequences of their policies,” Bashar Mohammed Hussein Al-Hamdani, said during a campaign stop at a HalalBurger in Peoria, Illinois. -- by Daniel Greenfield

The 200-ton content-compiling device, developed by Greek multimillionaire and site co-founder Arianna Huffington,

sucks up original articles from around the web with its massive rotor assembly, re-brands them with the Huffington Post name, and then spits them back out on the company's home page. Workers said that when the machine ground to a halt at approximately 11:30 a.m., Evers reached inside to dislodge a particularly thoughtful 700-word Christian Science Monitor essay on the unrest in Syria that had become jammed. Apparently unprepared for the aggregator mechanism's quick restart, Evers was gruesomely dismembered by its rapidly spinning blades, which soaked the room in blood and unprocessed news content. -- America's Finest News Source

I’m sure Obama is smarter than this. He can’t be an executive who spends his days checking boxes,

accepting the choices presented by his aides, never reaching outside them through unconventional channels or reaching unconventional thinkers, never throwing over the framework with which he is presented. .... He’s asked to check a box saying whether he wants to fund his “child nutrition agenda” out of the money for community colleges. … He’s asked about including medical malpractice reform in his health care bill, and writes (“in his characteristicaly cautious and reasonable style”) that “we should explore it.” … He’s presented a plan for a watered-down tax on multinationals or a very watered down tax. He writes “worth discussing.” --What Does Barack Obama Do All Day ? New Yorker | The Daily Caller

neo-neocon -- Cheeks are the new breasts

Cheek implants and fillers were originally designed to offset the ravages of age, when the cheeks can lose subcutaneous fat and droop. But now even the young have them, especially if in the public eye, and the additions are so noticeable and generally odd-looking that they give their bearers an alien yet almost-familial resemblance to each other.

The Persistence Of Memory | Wired Science | Wired.com

The typical neural protein only lasts for a few weeks, the cortex in a constant state of reincarnation. How, then, do our memories persist? It’s as if our remembered past can outlast the brain itself.

Make that "46 hours to go" Attention: Get off the stage before the lights dim. P.S. No, you are not going to be Sarah Palin,2012.

"€œWhat are you doing?" Truman implored. "€œThink of history."

"Oh, I have," she said, and went on adding to the pyre. 

--€ Review : The New Yorker

5: Use children. Don't be afraid to exploit children because you are SAVING THE PLANET! For the children. So, show images of blowing the kids up, running them down, hanging them and drowning them. Make them scared, or angry. They'll get over being used, when they grow up and realise you were SAVING THE PLANET!" -- The CLIMATE SCEPTICS

Let's all get together and show each other our support for the candidate of our choice in civilized fashion,

Democrats and Republicans alike. If you support the policies and character of the Republican party, please drive with your headlights on during the day. If you support Obama, please drive with your headlights off at night." --Curmudgeonly & Skeptical presents Boned Jello

Rihanna's tattoos include a music note tattoo on her ankle,

a Pisces sign behind her right ear,[ a Sanskrit prayer going down her hip, a star in her left ear, the word love on her left middle finger, an Arabic phrase meaning "Freedom in Christ" on her ribcage area, a trail of stars going down the back of her neck, a skull with a pink hair bow, the phrase "shhh..." on her right index finger, the date 11.4.86 in Roman numerals on top of her left shoulder, a henna-style dragon claw including hibiscus flowers, a handgun under her right armpit, the phrase on her chest "Never a failure, always a lesson" (tattoed backwards because she wanted to be able to read it in the mirror, it is her "motto in life for everything" and the phrase "rebelle fleur" on her neck, which means "rebel/rebellious flower" in French. --Rihanna - Wikipedia

We all know it’s true, and we try to bury the truth deep down in all sorts of logical fallacies.

The most attractive and appealing among these is to compare the impressive feats of a selected female champion against the efforts toward the equivalent by an average male…think of Mia Hamm engaged in a one-on-one against an average middle-age guy, let’s say one who luxuriates on a couch watching mens’ soccer games and was caught saying something disparaging against womens’ soccer. She’d clean his clock, of course, and all the usual suspects would smirk until their smirkers got tired…but…how fast can the fastest guy run? How much can the strongest man lift? Can the gals compete? No, not only can’t they, but we know they can’t and we customize the athletic efforts and competitions accordingly. -- House of Eratosthenes

These phrases, of course, sound really heavyweight and important. But I am not fooled. Nobody knows what those words mean. The only purpose is inform me that the sender is among the elect glitterati who get invited to the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos. -- Clueless in Davos | Prestowitz

In order to weaken and eventually destroy the existing industrialized nations,

we must devise an ecological "crisis" so severe that only voluntary economic suicide can solve it; and if this first crisis doesn't materialize as planned, then devise another, and another, even if they flatly contradict our previous claims. -Zombie » The Coming of the New Ice Age: End of the Global Warming Era?

From The Looking Spoon

Sound historians Patrick Feaster and Stephan Puille have managed to pull the sound of Otto von Bismarck,

the first chancellor of the German Empire, off of a century-old wax cylinder onto which it had been recorded on October 7, 1889. Additionally, they have also recovered audio from two cylinders holding the voice of German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke, who was nearly 90 at the time. According to Puille, "These are the only recordings of a person born in the eighteenth century which are still audible today." -- - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology - The Atlantic

From Oxygen'€™s "€œBad Girls Club -€” Las Vegas":

Bad Girl One:  "€œI can say whatever I want to her -- €” free speech, right?  It's in the Bill of Rights!"

BG Two:  "No, that the Ten Commandments."

BG Three:  "€œUh uh -- the Ten Commandments is like -- Sloth."

The story behind Make Love Not War "In March 1965," Rosemont says "we wanted to do a button.

The slogan we thought of first was the old Fellowship of Reconciliation [the interfaith peace movement founded in 1915] slogan 'Make Peace, Not War' but it seemed too tame for the 60s. Several of us together at Solidarity Bookshop - myself, Franklin, Bernard Marszalek and Tor Faegre - thought about this and what we came up with finally was 'Make Love, Not War'. The button was printed at a shop above Krocks & Brentano's Bookstore on Wabash Avenue.

The Daffy Duck test, by the way, is are they smarter than Daffy Duck and are they not named Obama. --Ann, Read Your Books - Ricochet.com

The family of Martin Luther King asked national park police to get 32 Occupy Wall Street protesters to leave the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change minutes ahead of a scheduled press conference on Sunday. The protesters had marched 880 miles from New York City to Atlanta. --« Don Surber

What Kilmer Knew, What Sagan Never Dreamed « The Anchoress

I fell in love once again with the land—with meandering streams and farmers' €™ fields gone fallow, with mountain vistas and fog-shrouded meadows.  As one mile stretched into another, I gazed at the reflection of God in the verdant forests of pocosins and loblolly pines.  I imagined His handprint in the brick-red South Carolina mud, and in the sprawling wisteria, fragrant blooms drooping from boughs of sweetbay and willow oak.  The beauty, the mind-numbing variety, the creativity-- Well, I couldn't stop looking.

"Had that portion of the decline in the labor force participation rate since 2007

that is attributable to neither the aging of the baby boomers nor the downturn in the business cycle (on the basis of the experience in previous downturns) not occurred, the unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of 2011 would have been about 1ｼ percentage points higher than the actual rate of 8.7 percent" -- | ZeroHedge

"Brownell flutters her fingers, touches her hair, snorts through her nose and throat,

and shouts “Hey, hey, hey,” seemingly without control. On Christmas Eve, doctors diagnosed her with Tourette’s Syndrome. Now, however, her symptoms have another name: conversion disorder, or mass hysteria. Since Brownell first passed out last summer, 14 other upstate New York students—13 girls and a boy, most of them students at LeRoy Junior-Senior High School—have come down with similar symptoms. --Mass hysteria in upstate New York - Slate Magazine

"I don’t know what the right number is but for the sake of argument if we had a hunting season in which you could bring in unlimited number of Burmese pythons for $50 per pound, my hunch is Burmese pythons would be erecting memorials to the great snake genocide of 2012." - Jonah Goldberg @ The Corner

"After that, all you have to do is disarm the lever with four counter-clockwise turns,

re-arm it with five clockwise turns, and then release the hatch by pulling the lever towards you. The slides will deploy and you should board the escape pods quickly, but calmly." -- McSweeney’s Internet Tendency Monologue.

No tyrant looks in a mirror and sees an oppressor.

Tyrants are always protectors of the people. And our own American Tyrants are equally certain that they are the protectors of a people who would otherwise run off cliffs, throw lawn darts at each other, tear the tags off mattresses, make racist jokes, open pill bottles too easily, have inappropriate opinions and reinforce the oppressive heteronormative patriarchy which they have thoughtfully replaced with a vast echoing bureaucratic state in which everyone is free to be different in the same way. -- Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish

"Your kind were useful idiots just as thoroughly as Western "liberals" have been.

You were incompetent at propaganda, fixated on silly irrelevancies like who was putting tab A in sexual slot B, and addled by religious particularism. You destroyed your own credibility with Chicken-Little ranting over porn, rock music, and games. Thus, when the Gramscians did their long march through academia and the media and Hollywood, you saw the danger well enough but you failed to stop them. You conservatives had just one duty that mattered: to conserve, to be Western civilization's antibodies -- and you blew it. The wages of that failure is that the U.S. has a sitting President who spews Marxist propaganda tropes as though they were the laws of nature, and neither he nor far too many Westerners can any longer tell the difference." --Armed and Dangerous, Through a mirror, darkly

On Facebook Snoop gives the love: Snoop Dog because i said so

At 10:00pm, the Ceremony of the Keys would ensure the final lockdown at the Tower. And tonight, after more than twenty years, it will signal the end of John Keohane's tenure. "The Tower is closed now and my day is over." --| Spitalfields Life

So far the infinitely evil plastic clamshell packaging leads the long list of terrible designs over @ --Really Bad Design @ Quora

My personal favorite? The pull handle on the push door.

Wrong finger

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