I’m sure you’re as shocked as I am to learn one of the closest cronies of the Clintons is under FBI investigation for public corruption associated with the Clinton Foundation.
What’s interesting about this is the fact that this is one of the charges that the FBI is investigating against her.
…acted in bad faith on immigration, and has finally gotten a comeuppance for it:
These accusations aren’t even the most audacious aspect of the court’s 28-page order. In a decision that will be studied in legal-ethics classes for decades to come, Judge Hanen placed many of the lawyers at the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. — known as “Main Justice” — under his personal supervision. This relief is reminiscent of federal courts that placed recalcitrant school districts under supervision to ensure compliance with desegregation orders. Or more recently, this relief is akin to judges who placed deficient police departments under federal oversight to ensure they reduce police brutality or other offenses. What is remarkable here is that Main Justice will now be required to report to Judge Hanen’s authority for the next five years to improve its ethics.
Of course, when has this administration ever acted in good faith? It just usually gets away with it. “Improving their ethics” would seem to be an effort in futility.
I have to say, I learned absolutely nothing from this, and one of the things I “learned” is wrong. It used to be that the earlier you chose seats, the better your choices, but that is no longer true. American is now charging extra for “premium” (read window or aisle, or more leg room), and if you are early, and want one, you have to pay for it. One trick I have learned, though, is that they open up for free at check-in time if passengers have canceled. When we flew back from Miami last week, we managed to change our previously assigned center seats to windows the afternoon before flight, without having to pay the $34 they had asked previously.
It is beyond boondoggle:
they build a boondoggle to nowhere in the middle of a sparsely populated area and expect people to ride just for the thrill of it?
The politicians responsible for this disaster — including Governor Jerry Brown — should go to jail for misuse of taxpayer funds.
Instead, they’ll be reelected, because idiots now have a majority among California voters.
Thoughts on the degeneration of crony socialism.
Thoughts from space anthropologist David Valentine on a couple contrasting photoessays.
Is it computable?
Nicolelis is in a camp that thinks that human consciousness (and if you believe in it, the soul) simply can’t be replicated in silicon. That’s because its most important features are the result of unpredictable, nonlinear interactions among billions of cells, Nicolelis says.
“You can’t predict whether the stock market will go up or down because you can’t compute it,” he says. “You could have all the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t create a consciousness.”
I’m personally an agnostic on the issue.
Some interesting (and surprising) observations from Glenn Beck:
It was like affirmative action for conservatives. When did conservatives start demanding quotas AND diversity training AND less people from Ivy League Colleges.
I sat there, looking around the room at ‘our side’ wondering, ‘Who are we?’ Who am I? I want to be very clear — I am not referring to every person in the room. There were probably 25–30 people and a number of them, I believe, felt like I did. But the overall tenor, to me, felt like the Salem Witch Trial: ‘Facebook, you must admit that you are screwing us, because if not, it proves you are screwing us.’
What happened to us? When did we become them? When did we become the people who demand the Oscars add black actors based on race?
Good questions. I agree that Facebook should do whatever it wants to do, but that it should be transparent.
[Update a while later]
A review, from Elizabeth Lopatto.
I’m sure that you’ll be as shocked as I was to learn that he probably greatly exaggerates it. This is a great end quote:
“A fellow asked me that once and I said, ‘I don’t know,” Nelson Bunker Hunt once told a congressional panel grilling him about his net worth. “But I do know people who know how much they are worth generally aren’t worth much.”
Similarly, people who are always bragging about how smart they are generally aren’t that bright.