Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Wild Hoss]

Hoss is full of natural gas..

Chipolte yesterday, Grinder's Pizza today...damn tootin' I am. (See what I did there?)

[Dr. Strangelove]

Deeply critical Op-Ed about Trump from the Murdoch-owned WSJ

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-presidents-credibility-1490138920

Yet the President clings to his assertion like a drunk to an empty gin bottle, rolling out his press spokesman to make more dubious claims. Sean Spicer?who doesn?t deserve this treatment?was dispatched last week to repeat an assertion by a Fox News commentator that perhaps the Obama Administration had subcontracted the wiretap to British intelligence.


That bungle led to a public denial from the British Government Communications Headquarters, and British news reports said the U.S. apologized. But then the White House claimed there was no apology. For the sake of grasping for any evidence to back up his original tweet, and the sin of pride in not admitting error, Mr. Trump had his spokesman repeat an unchecked TV claim that insulted an ally.

[AlabamAlum]

When I die, bury me in straight laced shoes,
A box backed suit and a Stetson hat
Put a 20 dollar gold piece on my watch chain;
So the boys'll know I died standin' pat.

[The Oracle]

CHARTER SCHOOLS!!!!! I'm sure this is an isolated incident, right Sleeze?? But yes, let's pay teachers $8/hr so the ceos can continue to do this. Fits right in with the swamp draining by your boy. Tools.

http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-celerity-response-20170321-story.html

[Da Geezer]

To the Geezers of the world, it is harmless and banning it is bad for business.

The US virtually eliminated malaria with the use of insecticides, most prominently DDT. There is no reason it couldn't have been used in other countries to do the same. DDT is the cheapest and one of the most effective insecticides, that is just a fact. When used as directed, it has never been shown to negatively affect humans.

What the LATimes article and the anonymous blog do show is how pervasive the "education" or indoctrination of the general citizenry is. Who gives a rats ass about thin egg shells compared with two million deaths every year. At the very least, students should be given the other side of the story. That never happens any more and we are left with a regurgitation of the party line.

[Dr. Strangelove]

New AP report shows Paul Manafort was paid $10M a year from 2006-2009 by an Oligarch close to Putin to 'advance Putin's interests" in the US and former Soviet Republics. Manafort has previously claimed to have never worked on behalf of Russian interests. He's now saying "oh I meant Russian political interests". The AP says they have business records.

I would guess the White House got a whiff that this was coming when they tried to paint Manafort as being a very minor player in the campaign.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/03/22/paul-manaforts-plan-greatly-benefit-putin-government/99483224/

[Dr. Strangelove]

Just yesterday too it was revealed that he's hired a "crisis communications firm"

http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/lobbying-hires/325053-former-trump-aide-manafort-hires-crisis-communications

[hack]

It would be so fascinating to have seen how the conservation movement would have matured if it weren't born of ideology, but was just driven by facts. That would have been an opportunity to present important ideas without the values and ethics angle that pissed off opponents. But I don't know that it gets off the ground without that sense of outrage against greed.

[hack]

Oh, but it does eventually. Free markets have a very heavy element of political incorrectness and harshness to them that requires courage to defend. You have to be willling to look like a meanie. You have to accept that free markets will mean that not everybody is special. Not everybody is equal and not everybody is happy. You have to be willing to attack sacred cows. Republicans are always unable to do this. They have always framed everything with an "a rising tide lifts all boats" approach, which isn't true 100% of the time. Mitt Romney backing out on his totally defensible 47% remark is a great example. I look forward to more taboos being broken over the next 20 years or so, as young Alt-righters get into positions of leadership in both business and politics and start questioning the empty platitudes of Political Correctness.

Your comment about a black female name being at the top of your resume is probably true. It certainly would be true in my field. That is not the free market at work. It is a combination of lawsuit avoidance, bad PR avoidance, and the Stockholm Syndrome that comes after years and years of beatdowns. To restore the free market to that situation, you have to be willing to have the courage to break the taboos that enable it.

If I'm not mistaken the way Ayn Rand would say that is that the ``rational interests of men do not conflict''. IOW, any loser in the marketplace accepts and appreciates the better product offered by his competitor, and then goes and finds another way to compete in the marketplace. Hurt feelings have no business here. That, to me, is a misreading of human nature on par with Marx's assumption that greed would be a thing of the past in his communist utopia. This is never going to happen. You can't find an example in human history of it happening, so you cannot ask for it to be restored. This idea of how markets work is a fantasy that is too fragile to exist in reality. And it ignores the actual reality that where you don't have governments and processes, you have warlords.

My personal opinion is that this anti-PC stuff is just another way for white people to blame brown people for their problems. PC language is annoying and dweeby, but it serves a larger and valuable purpose.

[Hannibal]

It was originally driven by facts but like many well meaning movements of the past century, it was corrupted and poisoned. The same goes with feminism. Which at one point earned women the right to vote and to not be beaten by their husbands but has now evolved into this:

[youtube][ame]https://youtu.be/zH_ZryBfCtU?t=24s[/ame][/youtube]

[froot loops]

Trump Campaign Chair Paul Manafort is also wanted in Ukraine for questioning. There were some hacked texts from his daughter alleging he has had people killed.

http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-manafort-daughter-text-messages-ukraine-2017-3

Seems like a good guy, the kind of guy you want to steer the nation because you are fed of with political correctness.

[hack]

People go to extremes. In the basketball thread, I understand the frustration of people who want to note some program shortcoming and are met with "OMG BEILEIN RULES U KNOW NOTHING I KNOW EVERYTHING". In the world, I get that people are going to take facts and blow them up into indefensible ideological extremes. Like radical feminists, or believing that political correctness has anything to do with economic growth. You can't implement any idea or ideology without human involvement, and going too far with it is just simply what humans should be expected to do when handed an ideology.

Which is why the country needs Michael Bloomberg. He would be an exceptionally data-driven president. The flaw would be that his comapny's fortunes are directly tied to the number of eyes on screens in the financial sector, so we may not get the financial reform we so badly need, but at least we'd restore a culture data-driven decisionmaking.

[Jeff Buchanan]

I've read quite a bit about it, too.

Whether it is good or bad, causes thinning of shell or causes other damage to birds and wildlife apparently depends on who you believe and your political view.

To the Geezers of the world, it is harmless and banning it is bad for business.

For rational thinking people,;) it causes many problems, potentially many others and is thankfully banned.

I think talent's point is that the Carson activism over chemical pesticides, as well placed as it might have been, tended to convolute the decision making process about banning DDT, among other chemical pesticides.

There is probably a good deal of cost/benefit analysis undertaken to develop regulations and then pass legislation to implement them. Problems typically start when politics come into play and to that extent, GVT, you are correct that outcomes in this regard are obtained by persons looking thorough a particular political lens ..... good science may or may not be involved at this point.

In the case of environmental regulations what I think we tend to do in this country is let politics and emotional attachments thereto, unduly influence the regulatory environment. Instead of coming up with good regulations based on the established science, our legislators tend to allow other factors influence their positions.

Here's a case in point that I follow closely in Atlanta: Lake Lanier, a man-make reservoir built in 1957 for the purpose of generating Hydroelctric Power across Buford Damn, is a part of a larger river basin that feeds water interests in both FL and Alabama. As Atlanta grew, so did its water consumption. Down river and in 1990, FL and AL felt that the original legislation passed in 1946, did not allow for GA to take as much water from Lanier as was being taken to support growth in metro Atlanta. They filed suit in that year over unequal distribution of the water supply from the river basin that violated the contents of the original 1946 legislation.

The case affirmed the duty of the Corps of Engineers (COE) to determine which states got what from the river basin system. The three states are still arguing over this matter ..... 26 years later.

The point is that the latest legal maneuvering, introduced jointly by FL and Alabama is that by the COE reducing water flow down stream from Buford Damn to maintain acceptable water levels in Lake Lanier they are endangering the population of Sturgeon and certain Mollusks downstream in FL and AL and violating the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969.

Besides the fact that how endangered these two creatures are by low water levels down stream has never been conclusively determined (i.e., the science is not good in this case), the sides are deadlocked and it is unlikely that otherwise intelligent people are going to sit down and figure out how to fairly divvy up the water supply form this important river basin.

This Lanier circumstance is an excellent example of how activists, using questionable science to designate two creatures as endangered, are bludgeoning the COE, lawyers and legislators with it.

These guys are doing nothing more than trying to develop water regulations that are fair for the involved states but the introduction of the concept of endangering wild life by reducing water flow as a legal means to affect outcomes has created the current impasse.

Other examples abound.

[Hannibal]

You can't find an example in human history of it happening, so you cannot ask for it to be restored.

I can't find an example in history of employers not making gender and skin color the #1 priority in their selection of candidates for employment and promotion?

You are confusing free markets with "lack of the rule of law".

[entropy]

So in Chicago a 15 yr old girl is raped while live on FB. According to police 40 people watched the live stream but nobody called 911. Police had to ask FB to take the video down


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