Palestinian terrorist kills U.S. presidential candidate: Remember Sirhan?

Sirhan Sirhan, the American Palestinian shooter, was briefly in the news asking for parole the fifteenth time.  Looking back at accounts of the time, I see nothing has changed.  Despite his repeated statements that he planned the shooting with acknowledged malice aforethought, planned because Robert Kennedy spoke in support of Israel and supported selling bombers to Israel, officialdom denied it.   Like the Fort Hood shooting and all the others, he was treated as a kid gone wrong showing bad behaviour with a gun.   The judge wouldn't let him confess.  Sirhan wasn't a Muslim jihadist, so there's that.  The rest fits the discredited narrative that Trump may, hopefully, bury.

From Wikipedia:

In 1989, he told David Frost:
"My only connection with Robert Kennedy was his sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to send those 50 bombers to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians". Some scholars believe the assassination was one of the first major incidents of political violence in the United States stemming from the Arab–Israeli conflict in the Middle East.                 The interpretation that he was mostly motivated by Middle Eastern politics has been criticized as an oversimplification that ignores Sirhan's deeper psychological problems. During his trial, Sirhan's lawyers attempted to use a defense of diminished responsibility, while their client tried to confess to the crime and change his plea to guilty on several occasions. Sirhan testified that he had killed Kennedy "with 20 years of malice aforethought". The judge did not accept this confession and it was later withdrawn.

To see all Physics in a glass of water

Ask the right questions while observing a glass of water and you can come across most of physics, discovering the nature of light, of electricity, of gravity, and more.  You could have beat Newton to discovering the composition of light with a prism.  Your curiosity could have been piqued by the meniscus curve a couple millimetres up the side of the glass caused by surface tension involving a layer of nearly free electrons.  You could wonder why bubbles form out of a liquid and why they cling to some surfaces and why they rise at a certain speed and what triggers these changes. You could wonder where the beads of water on the outside of the glass came from.  You could wonder why the glass doesn't drift off the table and why the water doesn't fly away and yet disappears slowly over time.  These observations are triggered by activity at atomic and subatomic levels.  You could look at specks on the water and wonder why they float.  You might be curious enough to see if you could float a pin and then wonder why the pin slowly turns to a north-south direction.  It's all there if you have eyes to see and a good question or two to ask.

Blake wrote of this in Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour.

Democracy is a means, not an end

From the comments at Instapundit:

Democracy is not the end state.  It is a process to establish and maintain rights-respecting governance.  "Ritchie the Riveter"

Don't feed the kids what Mom fed you. They'll be fatties.

2500 calories daily for a man and 2000 for a woman was gospel fifty years ago and a recipe for fatness today.  Don't bemoan the temporary surge in obesity.  You're looking at a feature, not a bug.  We expend less energy to prosper, find shelter and work and to socialize.   Humans will prevail better.  Now de-program two generations that grew up on Mom's serving sizes and still think that's the norm.  We get the results we want in life for less effort and that means fewer calories IN and more surplus time and energy for OUT.  Blaming people for sitting around is to miss the point.

"Modern lifestyles ... have allowed people to become so inter-connected that they barely need to leave their desks or sofas to work, socialise or shop.
Recommended calorie counts, which have been about 2,500 for men and 2,000 for women since the First World War, were set at a time when people naturally moved far more in their daily lives. But the new study suggests those counts may now be too high and researchers say that people need to stop eating the way their parents taught them.
Trade deals between countries have also caused food prices to tumble, creating virtually unlimited access to unrestricted calories for most people, while on-tap entertainment through television, smartphones and personal computers has replaced many traditional hobbies and activities."  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/26/meals-parents-made-now-calorific-modern-lifestyles/

Are we one? Thought experiment to prove it.

In three dimensions, everyone is clearly separate except for an umbilical moment at birth.  In four dimensions, adding time, everyone has physical continuity to others at some moment. The key is to see humans have two kinds of body.  Like insects we have a metamorphosis of our own.  Most of our life is spent as passionate bipedal mammals but we also transform into gametes made from our own body with our DNA.  The gametes are sent out into the world (sperm) and strategically placed (ova) to build new bipedal mammal nodes in the net of human life.   They occasionally meet and merge and where they do there is always physical continuity.  Brief, over-looked until pregnancy occurs, but real.  There is no gap.  The gamete human is pretty simple compared to Homo Sapiens but is clearly "us" and can be transformed into H Sapiens or created from H Sapiens.  This may stretch your brain to consider having two life forms which metamorphose into each other.

Imagine viewing your body from a fixed viewpoint in space.  From this point picture seeing all of it at all times since you "began" until today.  Picture this as a series of snapshots, moments apart, over the years and add a corkscrewing corkscrewing corkscrew motion to represent your spin on the world's surface and the spin of the world around the sun and maybe a little supplementary motion from galactic spiralling.  From time to time there are spider threads of continuity between you and other people.  (Viewing this as a 3-D corkscrew helps because it gives enough "space" to display lifetimes.)

I've searched the internet before and found no image close to a triply spiralling spiral.  The closest I've found is this short segment of a curve with a spiral following it.  These various spiralling spirals are touching at certain spots.  If you think of the paths as electrical circuits, a signal can be sent from any person to any other person, just not at the same time.

Funny snack sign at the bowling alley: Socks $2.00 Hot chocolate $2.00

A juicy sock well-stewed



       might have helped Charlie Chaplin with his shoe.
(Scene from "The Gold Rush" available free on line).

Mobbing Ivanka: Four reasons elections have gone feral.

Designers brag they will never dress her.
Others want us to know they will shun her line of designer clothes.
Artists posture that she must take their paintings off her apartment wall right this minute.
She's flying coach and a guy boasts on twitter that his husband is going to harass Ivanka because she's on the same flight.  "Your father is ruining this country" "Why are you on this flight, you should be flying private".
She wasn't on her Dad's ticket, for heaven's sake, and Donald isn't even president yet!

I see four reasons for this uncivil meltdown:

1.   Government has been plus-sized and embiggened until it's such a large part of the economy and our personal lives that to win an election has more consequence than in years past.
2.   The Politics of Identity is the antithesis of a republic.   The latter is a rule of law under which all citizens have equal standing.  The former I despise, but it prevails.
3.    The speed of news has picked up.  The uncivil can gang up on others in minutes when formerly they'd hear a snippet of news long after the opportunity to brag in front of cameras had passed.
4.    Civility is undervalued and under-taught.   What sets us above beasts if not manners?

Is Donald Trump Your President?

Flow chart points out the obvious but somehow undetected fact:

Is Socialism Caused by Climate? Voting Democrat and Global Warming

Interesting maps to compare:  One shows where people have experienced the most record high temperatures.  These people are likely to believe in Global Warming as unassailable fact.   The second map shows the Democrats' "Archipelago" where the most socialist voters are found.  Kind of similar.

Darker grey is where the most people believe most in Global Warming.  Red dots are where the most record high temperatures have been recorded. (Science Daily News)

The Clinton Archipelago describing the Clinton vote in 2016.

Bigger brains go with shorter guts, say Scientists

Brain is expensive tissue to maintain and hogs oxygen.  This is paid for with a trade-off  in smarter food harvesting which in turn means you can get by with less gut to digest the high value food you eat.   Science Daily News gives the example of some large brain Mormyrid fish (3% of body mass) compared to other Mormyrid fish with smaller brains.  (For comparison, human brains run 2.0 to 2.5% body mass.)  The same connection was found in a study of 30 species of frog and toad.

Illustration from the linked article

Bitter Clingers at the White House (Cartoons)

h/t Powerlineblog



h/t powerlineblog

The Media Hating on Donald will put them under the same shower of gold that funded Jill Stein

The media will be happy whinging about The Donald for the next 8 years.  Paycheques will be covered and reporters will feel needed.
When Jill Stein can pick up way more cash trying to dump Donald that she ever saw sight of for herself, you know it will be good.

Update from NY Times:

"Mr. Carter seized the moment with a red home page banner calling Vanity Fair “The Magazine Donald Trump Doesn’t Want You to Read” and imploring visitors, “Subscribe Now!”
Lo and behold, subscriptions spiked a hundredfold over their daily average, the magazine said, bringing Vanity Fair’s parent company, Condé Nast, the biggest number of new daily sign-ups in its 116-year history. (The tally had hit 42,000 by Sunday.)
in the weeks since the election, magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair; newspapers including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post; and nonprofits like NPR and ProPublica have been reporting big boosts in subscription rates or donations."

"Bug Bounty": Markets will protect us from hackers.

The US Army is eliminating the middle man and offering cash rewards direct to successful hackers.  "Cheaper and usually generates better results".  This could be applied to digital voting too.  It makes sense because generating useful data is a big investment while stolen data sells for pennies on the dollar.

  From Strategy Page:

"The American Army has recently launched the “Hack the Army” campaign. This is a bug bounty program in which the Army will offer cash rewards to hackers who find vulnerabilities in some selected systems and websites. This “Hack the Army” is a direct successor of previous "Hack the Pentagon" program launched earlier this year with the support from HackerOne, an organization dedicated to making the Internet a safer place for users. The program has brought many surprising discoveries when it comes to government websites. It was even commented by U.S. Defense Secretary who emphasized that this way is cheaper than the use of traditional penetration tests and tiger teams (which require a lot of expensive contractors). Moreover offering bug bounties, as many commercial software firms have discovered, is a lot cheaper and usually generates better results. As a result many even some of the biggest software companies, like Google, Microsoft or Facebook are using “bug bounty” programs because of these advantages." 

Media Ignoring Major Trump Statement On Trade

The Donald tweeted, of course.  The press weren't called in to filter the news.   In Canadian terms, this is Justin Trudeau saying we will abolish interprovincial trade barriers, halve the corporate tax rate but if you leave Canada after we get off your back, we'll tax the heck out of anything you sell back.

Here's the statement in full, extracted from six consecutive tweets this morning:

"The U.S. is going to substantially reduce taxes and regulations on businesses, but any business that leaves our country for another country, fires its employees, builds a new factory or plant in the other country, and then thinks it will sell is product back into the U.S. without retribution or consequence, is WRONG!  There will be a tax on our soon-to-be-strong border of 35% for these companies wanting to sell their product, cars, A.C. units, etc., back across the border. This tax will make leaving financially difficult, but these companies are able to move between all 50 states, with no tax or tariff being charged. Please be forewarned prior to making a very expensive mistake!  THE UNITED STATES IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS."

Source: https://mobile.twitter.com/realdonaldtrump?lang=en  December 4th 2016.
This will surely be misrepresented.  Trump says the first move is the government's move, to reduce tax and regulation.  The companies will face punitive tax only if they reject freer trade at home and only if their foreign plants target the U.S. for sales.

The statement is rough-and-ready but not hard to parse.
The culture in which CEO's make choices has been altered as well.

FORD Robot taxis in sixty months

Ford is going head to head with Uber and Lyft, Bloomberg reports.

"The carmaker has promised to put 100,000 robot taxis -- without steering wheel, gas or brake pedals -- on the road in five years."

Your beefs about turn lanes, signals,  crazy men, women and kids behind the wheel, about weaving vehicles, tailgaters and honkers, will trend to irrelevant.  The interface between safe robot vehicles and dangerous people ones will be the cutting edge.  Persuading men in particular to let go of the steering wheel, rethinking everything you ever knew about insurance, and the elimination of driver licences as a rite of passage are  almost upon us.  A car becomes a leisure space and communication hub, if you bother to own one.

The rate of change of the rate of change is going up.

On Trump: "When the officer class fails, the warrant officers and sergeants have to take over"

Your time will be rewarded reading Barrel Strength's two views:  That of his eloquent officer class friend who is dismayed that Trump has advanced and his own eloquent riposte.

Ethnic map of USA

The largest group is "other" since the Daily Mail figures add up to about 240 out of 317 million Americans.  Some 20 million now consider themselves simply "American", many of these formerly of "English" extraction.   Heritage in order of size by millions:
German (49)   Afro-American (41)    Irish (35)      Mexican (32)     English (26)   "American" (20)    Hispanic/Spanish (18)     Polish (10)     French (9)

The map is coloured by "most named" heritage for every county in the U.S.  It's astonishing how Germans, who never had a New World colony, are geographically represented the most.  This doesn't mean in the majority in each county, just the most common.  Also noteworthy are Black Americans in two northern cities and a band across the south.

People are surprised? "Romney for Secretary of State"

Didn't something like this happen once before in recorded history?  Obama picked Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State.

See what I mean about horses?

Harper Worse Than Trump? US Civil Service Faces Pruning By The MRHIBBX Donald

MRHIBBX = Mysognist Racist Hater Islamophobe Bully Bigot Xenophobe.
Trump's people have a plan for the US Civil Service.  As the Washington Post say, "They won't like it".

“Hiring freezes, an end to automatic raises, a green light to fire poor performers, a ban on union business on the government’s dime and less generous pensions — these are the contours of the blueprint emerging under Republican control of Washington in January.”

Compare The National Post 2014:

Canada’s Conservative government has wiped nearly 37,000 people off the federal payroll and reduced key services for Canada’s veterans and the unemployed and budgets for food safety in the “rush” to pay for its promised tax cuts, according to a new report.

And, "Is Harper The Worst Prime Minister In Canadian History". (National Observor)