…and the sugar content of Trix. An eclectic Bleat today.
I have no recollection of the Bugs/Trix interaction. But it’s amazing in retrospect how much sugar I ate in cereal as a kid, and didn’t get fat. Though I think we were more active than a lot of kids today.
It’s a good one to have.
I’d suggest returning it to the taxpayers with a reduction in sales or property tax rates. Show the rest of the country what a virtuous, and opposed to vicious cycle looks like.
…and how it’s affected by color.
…and the self that remains when memory is lost.
This is the concern of cryonicists: what is the nature of identity?
If you don’t have any recollection of your own past, are you still you? If you forget who you are, but have maintained a record of your life, when you go back and read it and refamiliarize yourself, are you “you” again? If so, why wouldn’t anyone who read it become “you”? And if that is “you,” then why not just clone yourself and educate the clone with your memories? Intuitively, it feels like it might be someone else who thinks it’s you, but it’s not really you. Of course, Star-Trek-like teleportation has the same problem — is the person who stepped out of the transporter you, or a physical copy of you with the same memories? Is that continuity sufficient? How does it differ from the you that went to bed last night and woke up this morning (or in my case, the several mes that woke up repeatedly during the night)? Is that the same continuity, or one different in kind?
I’m sure that I’ve told this story before, but years ago, at the California Science Museum in Exposition Park, there was a display on health and medical ethics and it had various questions to poll the visitors. One of them was:
You have an inoperable brain tumor. If a donor became available because their body had failed, would you accept a brain transplant to save your life?
An astonishing number of people said “yes.” Which means they apparently had difficulty with the concept.
We’re betting that this news won’t dent greens’ self-confidence. They will still insist that unless they are put in charge of the entire world economy we face disaster. The sad truth is that the more power they get, the more damage they do.
They don’t care about poor people. They don’t care about people at all, except themselves.
The FBI is years away.
Well, the head of the agency doesn’t even know how to use a computer.
…and yes, we are stupid (at least those of us who voted for Obama):
Since World War II, the world has survived and prospered to a remarkable degree under U.S. leadership. Nazism was defeated, followed by the downfall or reformation of equally murderous communist regimes.
Barack Obama’s deepest intention — emotionally and ideologically — is to change all that.
Forget objective reality. As Dinesh D’Souza demonstrated in his book and film, Obama’s psychological makeup — his heart — is influenced to a significant degree by a belief that America is a dangerous colonial power, that world leadership must be shared.
Yet “leading from behind” is a euphemism. There is no such leading.
Our near-certain next secretary of State, John Kerry, our only slightly less certain next secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, and our next CIA director, John Brennan, hold the same views as Obama, or are close enough to those views to be easily manipulated.
Besides the obvious expected policies, such as pushing Israel to make self-destructive concessions for a two-state solution the Palestinians have shown no evidence of wanting, this triumvirate will support Obama in undercutting numerous formerly bipartisan policies. Including, perhaps most significantly, the gutting of the defense budget.
They also will continue the administration’s bizarre Middle East policy that has resulted in the rise of Islamism everywhere from Mali to Egypt and beyond. And no matter the rhetoric we will most likely hear at confirmation hearings, Iran will get the message that serious American power is in actuality “off the table” when it comes to interdicting the mullahs’ march to nuclear weapons.
Outside of the usual Middle East hotspots, Russia and China are watching.
It’s feeling a lot like the thirties in ways other than the continuing sick economy.
[Update a couple minutes later]
…our concerns in respect of Senator Hagel aren’t about his views on the Jews. And we appreciate the fact that he served as an enlisted man in Vietnam, an experience we tend to credit (although neither is it dispositive). But we’ve been covering his antics for years, and where we’ve come out is that he’s just over his head in terms of policy. So he’s emerged as a shill for Israel’s most implacable foes. It doesn’t take a genius to comprehend what the mullahs in Iran are going to make of this nomination.
The same thing they made of Obama’s reelection. Plus this:
It looks like Mr. Hagel’s anti-Israel record is the very raison d’etre of the nomination. It looks like the nomination is about the President’s determination to block Israel from going to its own defense against a regime that, in Iran, is preparing, by its own account, an attempt to annihilate the Jewish state. Imagine what Mr. Hagel would be like if he actually did have a problem with the Jews.
Yes, imagine.
…since the Republic was founded. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that it accelerated about the time we abandoned the Constitution.
[Update a few minutes later]
Paul Krugman, economic soopergenius.
…and he still drove away.
It is not the government’s decision how we should defend ourselves from criminals. There is no more fundamental human right than the right to self defense.
Stop abandoning and abusing boys:
For boys, the road to successful manhood has crumbled. In many boys’ journey from a fatherless family to an almost all-female staff elementary school such as Sandy Hook, there is no constructive male role model.
Adam Lanza is reported to have gone downhill when divorce separated him from his dad. Children of divorce without enough father contact are prone to have poor social skills; to struggle with the five D’s (depression, drugs, drinking, discipline and delinquency); be suicidal; be less able to concentrate; and to be aggressive but not assertive. Perhaps most important, these boys are less empathetic.
When I mentioned after the shooting that it might have been prevented with more male teachers and school employees, it wasn’t just about whether or not they’d be better able to defend — it was also about the terrible atmosphere and war on boys in the schools, in which the mostly-female education establishment tries to make them act like girls, to the point of drugging them to change their behavior. Particularly if you have a son, it seems that more and more, sending kids to public schools is a form of child abuse.
I’m willing to bet that this issue won’t even be discussed in Biden’s post-Newtown recommendations, though. Doesn’t fit the anti-gun narrative.