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Picking the Liplocks of the Labyrinth

Peter Duke Photography – World Class Images For Discriminating Clients

Siberian mystery: In 1908 the most powerful explosion in documented history flattened millions of tree  Regardless of the absence of details, scientists have managed to reach a sort of consensus: any remnants from the stellar body that penetrated into Earth’s atmosphere disintegrated to dust within the turbulent collision process. This probably happened 10 miles above the ground, maybe little less or more than that. The collision of the object with the atmosphere of our planet had been so engaging that it instantly resulted in intense heat and shockwaves, all felt miles away from the impact point. Airburst subsequently dispersed on the ground, which is when the trees in the area ended up flattened.

New York Minimum Wage Increase Gives Birth to the First Fully Automated Bar & Grill   For starters locales across the country have hiked – and continue to raise – the minimum wage. The rate is expected to top out at $15 an hour in New York state in the next few years.It’s already jumped $2.50 the last two years to $7.50 an hour for servers working at L.I. Pour House. The self-service technology used by the restaurant has helped keep operational costs in check. “If you needed five or six servers on a normal night, now you need four,” Pallino said. He estimates that an electronic server saves thousands of dollars a year.  In addition, the technology serves as something of a buffer against worker shortages that recently have plagued fast casual and quick service restaurants around the country. When staff vacancies exist, kiosks and other self-service solutions can be difference-makers in preventing significant operational disruptions.

Butter shortage is a ‘major crisis’ in Europe   The shortage in Europe is so severe that the European Commission’s Milk Market Observatory says that butter stockpiles across the continent have been decimated by 98%.

Sherlock Holmes Investigates Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Her Rogue Computer Technicians   “Democrat Media Privilege,” Holmes said evenly. Responding to my puzzled face, he explained. “American Democrats operate with an unrestrained presumption of media favoritism. So-called objective American media prefer to ignore Democrat wrongs, or, that tactic failing, attempt to justify the offences. It echoes The Adventure of Silver Blaze, good fellow.”The dog did nothing in the night time.

Store serves edible Japanese rhinoceros beetles, apparently pairs well with beer 

Can you hear us NOW?    They don’t “cherish our history”; they lie about it, rewriting it at every turn to suit their insidious totalitarian agenda. They don’t “love our flag”; they stomp, shred, and burn it, and vociferously denounce every principle, every sacrifice, every drop of patriot’s blood that it’s supposed to represent. They are not “proud of our country”; they hate and despise it, and declare it not a beacon of hope and inspiration but the source of all the world’s ills. And they are not “proud of who we are”; they are contemptuous of us, and draw stark lines of separation from us in both word and deed.

“My fellow Americans”? These treasonous termites, who wrap themselves in flag and Constitution only when it suits them, and have instead worked diligently and underhandedly for almost a century to destroy us? When Hell freezes, Mr President. They are one thing, and one thing only: the self-declared, implacable enemy of every decent man, woman, and child who cherishes the uniquely American values of liberty, independence, and limited government interference in our lives, upon which the first two absolutely and eternally depend.

 How Tesla’€™s Elon Musk became the master of fake business |   Today’s fake-industry leader is Tesla, the electric car developed by subsidy entrepreneur Elon Musk, who also heads SolarCity and SpaceX, other government darlings. Musk’s genius is primarily in the subsidy-seeking realm — by 2015, U.S. governments alone had given his companies US$5 billion through direct grants, tax breaks, cut-rate loans, cashable environmental credits, tax credits and rebates to buyers of his products. Counting subsidies from Canada and Europe, the government bankroll could be double that. Counting indirect subsidies — such as electric-vehicle-friendly infrastructure  â€” the subsidies soar ever higher.

The Deadly Grizzly Bear Attacks That Changed the National Park Service Forever   The day after the deadly attacks, Gildart and Landa headed to look for the suspect bear at Trout Lake. Gildart spotted it at 4 a.m. when he stepped outside of the patrol cabin where the men were spending the night. He called for Landa to bring a gun. Within minutes, the bear charged at them and both men fired, killing it. A forensic investigator came to collect the bear. “They had a big knife,” Gildart recalls. “They slit the stomach of this bear, and a big ball of blonde hair came out.”

Is the American Empire Worth the Price? –   Now, assume the best: We get through this crisis without a war, and Kim agrees to stop testing ICBMs and nuclear warheads. Does anyone believe that, given his youth, his determination to drive us off the peninsula, and his belief that only an ICBM can deter us, this deal will last and he will abandon his nuclear program?

On Leaving the SJW Cult and Finding Myself – Thoughts And Ideas   I see seemingly reasonable people wishing death on others and laughing at escalating suicide and addiction rates of the white working class. I see liberal think pieces written in opposition to expressing empathy or civility in interactions with those with whom we disagree. I see 63 million Trump voters written off as “nazis” who are okay to target with physical violence. I see concepts like equality and justice being used as a mask for resentful, murderous rage.

A League of Her Own: Minor League! Megyn Insists ‘Ratings Were Fine,’ Throws First Pitch –   “I thought the ratings were fine,” Kelly said in Chicago earlier in the week before throwing out the first pitch at a Durham Bulls minor league game on Thursday evening. Kelly is on a promotional tour for her new morning show that will debut in September as NBC is spending heavily to minimize the chances of her damaging the network’s Today show brand even more than she already may have.

James Damore is what most people think of when they imagine a Google employee. A brilliant original thinker with interests spread across the scientific and technological spectrum. But Danielle Brown is what Google actually is: a Hillary Clinton supporter who handled diversity at Intel and Google. Google is a search engine monopoly that makes its money from search ads. It began with a revolutionary idea from young engineers much like Damore. Then the engineers became billionaires. And the company that began in a garage hired a Vice President of Diversity to get rid of the brilliant young engineers. The idea that made Google some twenty years ago was PageRank. It was ahead of its time in utilizing social technology to rate the relevance of a page. The idea has since been cannibalized as Google’s search algorithm favors its own products. And increasingly it also favors its own political views.    Sultan Knish: The Google Gulag

What draws people to anarchy? Left-wing extremism and smashing stuff but mostly smashing stuff   Ashraf, 52, owner of Virginia-based Nationwide Chauffeured Services, watched on television as his limo was engulfed in flames. The vehicle was a total loss. After insurance payments, it cost him $60,000 out of pocket to replace, he said. “When that car becomes a source of your livelihood, it becomes a part of your life. I don’t know if the protesters understand that when they destroy something — the way I felt when I saw my car burning, it really hurt me deeply even though it’s just a car,” he said. “Six months later, I still want to know, did that accomplish anything?”

The Surprising Origins of Kotex Pads   For their time and place, the advertisements are almost shockingly explicit–although, like many modern ads for menstrual products, they never explicitly state their use. “All feature a single woman or a group of women in active, yet decorative poses,” Mandziuk writes in her study. The first ad to run in Good Housekeeping describes Kotex sanitary napkins as the key tool for ensuring “summer comfort” and “poise in the daintiest frocks.” But it also describes details like the size of the pad and how to buy them, although the pads were never actually pictured in the ads. The ads also promised they came “in plain wrapper.”

 

Sense of Events: Cable TV competitors and Theodore Levitt  My wife and I moved to a new-construction house two months ago. It took forever for our address to validate and propagate through databases, especially Comcast’s. They connected us only two weeks ago, insisting until then that our house didn’t exist. We had been using DirectTV Now to fill the gap, watching it on TV using an Amazon Fire stick with our smart phones’ wifi hotspot turned on. (Thank goodness for unlimited data plans.) When I was finally able to get Comcast to agree I existed, I became so disgusted at the continual TV upselling the customer agent was doing, and the endless fees and additions, that finally I said bluntly, I want internet only and if I can’t get that then AT&T will take my call, too. Of course, AT&T does the same thing.

Face the HalluciNation: Real News, Fake News, & Unreal News   Is Trump as dignified as I would like him to be? No. But in these times, it is sufficient that he provokes the left to new depths of auto-debasement, thus revealing what they are. To be precise, there is “what they are,” and “what they really are,” and Trump miraculously exposes the the latter. This is not the face the left wishes to present to the world, but they obviously cannot help themselves. They really are what they really are. Which is true of everyone, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

You Heard It Here First: NY Times Editors Deny Reading Their Own Newspaper |  [T]he Complaint alleges that the allegedly false statements of fact that are the subject of the Complaint were contradicted by information already set forth in prior news stories published by the Times. However, these prior stories arguably would only evidence actual malice if the person(s) who wrote the editorial were aware of them. This is information peculiarly within the knowledge of defendant; but on it arguably depends the reasonableness vel non of inferring actual malice.

So, as I predicted, the Times won’t admit that its editors read their own paper. Judge Rakoff’s order requires the Times to produce for depositions all people who were involved in writing the editorial, so that Palin’s lawyer can ask them under oath whether they knew about the paper’s reporting on Jared Laughlin’s crime. The interrogation will take place in front of Judge Rakoff, who may ask questions of his own.

Here’€™s the Memo That Blew Up the NSC    The full memo, dated May 2017, is titled “POTUS & Political Warfare.” It provides a sweeping, if at times conspiratorial, view of what it describes as a multi-pronged attack on the Trump White House.

Trump is being attacked, the memo says, because he represents “an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative.” Those threatened by Trump include “‘deep state’ actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans.”

Thoughts on James Damore   We do not live in an ideal classical liberal society. The United States turned off of that dusty road quite a long time ago. The government intervenes and with the full force of the law gets to tell that Christian bakery that the humble cross-bearers who own it must bake rainbow cakes. With this situation in mind, I have to concede that we live in a society where identity politics rules the roost. In this kind of competition there is no sense in being fair to one’s enemies since it will only cede more power to them in the long run.

As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People –  The higher you get up the ladder, the more important those preferences become. Anyone of reasonable intelligence can be coached to sit at a help desk and talk users through basic problems. Most smart people can be taught to build a basic workstation and hook it up to a server. But the more complicated the problems get, the more knowledge and skill they require, and the people who acquire that sort of expertise are the ones who are most passionately interested in those sorts of problems. A company like Google, which turns down many more applicants than it hires, is going to select heavily for that sort of passion. If more men have it than women, the workforce will be mostly men.

Really Fake News   I saw the photo in the Featured Image above (without the caption). I’m not sure where, guessing Twitter. When I saw it, my thought was something along the lines of “that’s not a good look for Trump, feeds the anti-Trump narrative about Russia.” I didn’t pay it a lot of attention, but I distinctly remember it and my reaction. It turns out it’s a fake. Here is the original Getty Images photo (via Evan McMurry on Twitter)

It turns out that supertankers and cruise ships have valets. They’re called maritime pilots, and they’re among the most elite ship handlers in the world. So where does one go to learn how to park the largest ships in the world? To the Maritime Pilots Institute in Covington, La. There, they use mini-versions of the behemoth boats to teach the basics. All aboard!

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  • ahem August 15, 2017, 5:07 AM

    1. ‘Is the American Empire Worth the Price?’ Buchanan has no imagination, I prognosticate–you heard it here first—that one day in the not-too-distant-future we will be hearing of a trade deal between North and South Korea that ‘opens the door to a new era of prosperity and cooperation’ and, ultimately, helps to improve the lot of the North Korean people and free them from that concentration camp they call home. See, Kim will no longer use the nuclear threat to extort money from us as Trump and Tillerson will reward his compliance with a way to prosper that saves his face, helps to reunite Korea, and profits his people. Mark my words.

    More business majors should go into politics.

  • Larry Geiger August 15, 2017, 6:20 AM

    Rented a 52ft houseboat on the St. Johns River and took some Scouts on a week long “adventure” trip. More like a vacation. Three bedrooms, two baths. Generator. A/C. Gas grill. Anyway, we let the guys pilot the boat. It usually took about an hour for them to stop over steering. They wanted to drive it like a car. Can’t do that. We had to be especially careful at the bridge abutments. As usually happens, one or two of them got pretty competent and they ended up piloting the last couple of days. The other guys didn’t like it as well. Fun trip. Highly recommended. Call Holly Bluff Marina…

  • BillH August 15, 2017, 7:32 AM

    In and out of Panama CZ a lot in the ’50s-60s. Lived there for three years. Got to know several Canal Co. pilots. All relaxed guys who never missed a thing. It got so I could sense if a guy was a pilot within a few seconds of meeting him, much like I could with other air transport pilots.