The News Thread

[Dak]

https://qz.com/1190154/trump-in-dav...listless-address-to-the-world-economic-forum/

When it was time for him to speak, Trump mostly read the 20-minute speech in a flat monotone. The night before, economic advisor Gary Cohn, a long-time investment banker before he joined the White House, said that he wrote the address. It was, in essence, Goldman Sachs with “America First” characteristics.
.....................
“Better than I expected,” said Ishmael Sunga, a South African union leader outside the Congress Hall. Instead of “bashing things up” he tailored his message to the crowd, he said. It was the performance of a “mark-to-market president,” said a financier who was in the crowd. “It was the most scripted speech he’s ever given,” remarked another delegate within earshot.

My favorite quote was "Regulation is stealth taxation".

 

[Dak]

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...ing-link-between-sugar-and-alzheimers/551528/

"Startling". Who doesn't realize, at this point, that sugar is generally not good for you?

 

[rms]

me, i can't stop eating cookies

 

[Einherjar86]

I only consume fermented sugar.

 

[Dak]

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n02/gavin-francis/the-untreatable

Enough flu virus was recovered from the lungs to be sequenced, and the results, published in Nature in 2005, suggested that the 1918 virus was avian in origin, but that a mutation had rendered it fatally adept at infecting mammals. When the reconstituted virus was given to mice under barrier conditions the mice lost 13 per cent of their body weight and produced forty thousand times more infectious particles than mice with ordinary seasonal flu. Six days after infection, all the mice were dead. The virus is currently held in a high-security facility in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2016, around 1.7 million people died from tuberculosis, around a million from HIV/Aids, and around half a million from malaria. Computer modelling suggests that if the 1918 H1N1 virus were to break out of the facility in Atlanta it would cause around thirty million deaths.

 

[Dak]

Trump will be re-elected before the economy tanks after being super-charged.

This is highly probable if the economy doesn't tank first, but that has little to do with Trump. The Fed has to "unwind" the trillions in QE, and the market is addicted to the QE juice.

 

[Dak]

http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/27/teacher-says-military-lowest-of-our-low/

Three profanity-laced videos surfaced on Facebook Friday of Salcido declaring to his students that members of the military are dumb people who joined because they were poor students and that they are the “lowest of our low” of the country.

“They’re the frickin’ lowest of our low,” Salcido can be heard saying.
.......
Throughout the three videos, Salcido can be heard using vulgar language to describe the military as failed students with no other options but to serve. “We’ve got a bunch of dumbshits over there. Think about the people who you know who are over there — your freaking stupid uncle Louis or whatever, they’re dumbshits. They’re not, like, high-level thinkers, they’re not academic people, they’re not intellectual people, they’re the freaking lowest of our low. Not morally, I’m not saying they make bad moral decisions, they’re not talented people,”

Yes, it's the fuckin Daily Caller, so we can get that out of the way. I have an issue with this opinion, not because there aren't plenty of dumbdumbs in the military, which there most certainly are. But calling military personnel "the lowest of the low" is idealogical, not rational. Somehow all of his students that go on to die in a gang or live on the welfare state or whatever, are above persons who make an honest attempt to move up and out. It's true that many people enlist in the military because of a perceived lack of economic options, but that in no way indicates poor intellectual depth. Of course, the purpose of junior enlisted personnel isn't to be intellectuals, and they are still just kids in this society anyway, no differently than the kids sleeping or Netflixing in so many undergraduate classes.

There's some irony in a high school teacher attacking someone for not being an academic or an intellectual. I suppose he considers himself one.

 

[Dak]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nf...audience-a-wsj-nbc-news-poll-finds-1517569200

Adults who report following the NFL closely have dropped 9% since 2014, the poll finds. Just 51% of men aged 18 to 49 say they follow the NFL closely, down from 75% four years ago.

That's a huge drop in the core audience. I'd include myself in that drop.

 

[Dak]

Trump wants a military parade

I'm not at all surprised, but how incredibly stupid.

 

[rms]

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/aquarium-accident-may-have-given-crayfish-dna-take-over-world

 

[tagradh]

Trump wants a military parade

I'm not at all surprised, but how incredibly stupid.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a guy that did his best to avoid the draft and later criticized others for getting captured and tortured in war demanding a military parade.

 

[Dak]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a guy that did his best to avoid the draft and later criticized others for getting captured and tortured in war demanding a military parade.

I don"t even care about that. It's a huge, impractical waste of resources that accomplishes no positive outcomes. It's an all negative event.

 

[CiG]

Early Britons had dark skin, 'Cheddar Man' research indicates.
Some of the first modern settlers of Britain from 10,000 years ago had dark skin and curly hair, according to new analysis of a historic skeleton.

The "Cheddar Man" fossil was discovered in 1903 in a cave in the village of Cheddar in Somerset, southwest England. He is the oldest complete skeleton to have been discovered in Britain, and would have been part of the last wave of immigrants to populate the region after the ice age. Today's white Britons can trace their roots back to descendants of these people, and it was initially believed that "Cheddar man" had fair hair and skin.

Now, after cutting-edge DNA analysis and facial reconstruction by a team of scientists from the Natural History Museum and University College London, it is believed he had blue eyes, "dark brown to black skin" and "dark curly hair."

 

[no country for old wainds]

uh oh. i am what i most loathe.... a curly-haired skeleton...

 

[CiG]

And the GoD becomes the nig nog.

 

[rms]

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a15895746/bust-big-tech-silicon-valley/

supposed to be a good one

 

[Dak]

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/12/1...-contemporary-theory-of-engaged-followership/

Stanley Milgram’s experiments in the 1960s – in which ordinary volunteers followed a scientist’s instruction to give what they apparently thought was a deadly electric shock to another participant – have been taken by many to show our alarming propensity for blind obedience. Milgram’s own interpretation, his “agentic state theory”, was that we readily give up our own sense of responsibility when following instructions from an authority figure.

Focusing for now on the obedient participants, Hollander and Turowetz say that they offered four main reasons for why they continued to the end of the experiment.

Just under 60 per cent of these participants said at least once that they had been following instructions, which provides some support for Milgram’s agentic theory. Around 10 per cent said at least once that they had been fulfilling a contract: “I come here, and yer paying me the money for my time“. The most common explanation was that they believed the person they’d given the electric shocks to (the “learner”) hadn’t really been harmed. Seventy-two per cent of obedient participants made this kind of claim at least once, such as “If it was that serious you woulda stopped me” and “I just figured that somebody had let him out“.

 

[Einherjar86]

I imagine there are differing opinions on this, but what an idiotic and completely expected move (that's my opinion):

https://www.neh.gov/news/press-release/2018-02-12-0

Today the Trump administration released its comprehensive budget for the Federal government for FY 2019. The White House has requested that Congress appropriate approximately $42 million to the National Endowment for the Humanities for the orderly closure of the agency.

 

[Dak]

That endowment appears to be relatively inconsequential in terms of the US budget, so from a "cost cutting" perspective it's hardly mentionable. OTOH, I see no reason for the government to be in the business of propping up the art world even minimally. It's a department that disproportionately improves the lives of the already well-off, so in terms of addressing inequities closing it is a social justice win.

 

[Einherjar86]

Yeah, I figured that would be your response (both the "inconsequential" but and the "good riddance" bit). Needless to say it's not worth arguing over.

Additionally, it's a budget proposal and almost certainly won't pass.