Month: September 2019

 
From Infidel753:

North America, too, once teemed with elephants, camels, lions, giant sloths, mammoths, and other huge creatures. After thriving for millions of years, they too suddenly became extinct around 12,000 years ago. It’s been suggested that this had something to do with the end of the last ice age, but these animals had come through many previous ice ages just fine. 12,000 years ago also happens to coincide with the arrival of the first humans in the Americas. In this case we actually have, for example, mammoth skeletons with spear-points embedded in them, suggesting the real reason for the mass extinction.

Why were these animals so easily killed off by primitive hunters, while their Sub-Saharan African counterparts were not? The evolution of human intelligence, and thus of highly lethal weapons and strategies for hunting, was a slow process spanning millions of years. As proto-humans gradually grew smarter and more dangerous, the animals of Sub-Saharan Africa had time to adapt. To a lesser extent the same was true of animals in southern Asia and the Mediterranean world, who coexisted with proto-humans for up to a million years.

The native animals in Australia and the Americas had never needed to adapt to this danger, which did not exist in their environment. Then, just 40,000 and 12,000 years ago respectively, they were “suddenly” (relative to evolutionary time-scales) confronted with a fully-developed threat for which evolution had not prepared them. They probably felt no fear of the puny-looking new creatures. Long before evolution had time to breed that fear into them, the little newcomers wiped them out.

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From The Propaganda Professor:

I first heard the term sky hook at age 19 when I worked briefly in a hardware store. As a hazing stunt against new employees, it was the custom for another employee to call the department where the newbie was working and, pretending to be a customer, ask about the availability of sky hooks (“in a brass or bronze finish”, my co-worker Joe specified when he called me). Never having heard the expression before, I assumed it was just a colorful term for some kind of hardware I was unfamiliar with; I did not assume that it was an item that bolted directly into the sky — which was indeed the idea. (After placing Joe on hold and figuring out I was being had, I picked the phone back up and said, “Sorry, sir, we have no brass or bronze — only raspberry.”)

The term sky hook originated among pilots in the early Twentieth Century as a tongue-in-cheek reference to some imaginary hook in the sky that held planes up and enabled them to maneuver under difficult circumstances. Metaphorically, then, it came to mean any theoretical concept that “held up” other concepts. (Subsequently, the label has been applied to other ideas, and even to real mechanical devices.) Or more broadly, any unsupported presumption that becomes the basis of policy or dogma. For example, the belief in a flat earth could be deemed a sky hook; from it was suspended the perception of how the entire cosmos looked and operated, and false notions about the limits of navigation. This is an example of top-down thinking; and it’s a good illustration of why it’s so counterproductive. (Still, top-down thinking has its uses in some circumstances; many people, for instance, who become very successful in their chosen field begin with a dream of where they want to end up and then figure out how to get there.)

The ultimate sky hook, of course, is God.

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From News Corpse:

However, there is a common thread that weaves through much of the hallucinatory fallacies that clutter his emotionally and intellectually stunted brain. He has an all-consuming fetish with his perceived popularity. Crowd size seems to be a stand-in for his virility. And often his craving for attention is manifested in his obsession with polls. But unfortunately for him, they mostly reflect how bitterly despised he is by most Americans. Even polls from Fox News and his favorite ultra-biased pollster, Rasmussen, show him in dire straits.

But polls are just the political equivalent of a mode of survey that Trump has had much more exposure to: The Nielsen Ratings. His fourteen years as the host of a reality TV game show has permeated his world view. And it is the prism through which he sees everything related to his life and presidency. This contorted mindset produced a Sunday morning tweet attacking sitcom star Debra Messing:

Here Trump is renewing his competition with other celebrities while also wholly inventing their alleged admiration for him. (I’d bet the limit at the Trump Taj Mahal that Messing never called him “sir”). He’s also demonstrating that he gauges his self-worth by his comparison – not to other presidents – but to other Hollywood luminaries. That’s his benchmark of approval. What’s more, he measures the value of news media by the same criteria. It isn’t insight or knowledge or experience that validates the media. It’s ratings.

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From jobsanger:

This shooting, like those before it, makes a few things very clear:

• There are too many guns in this country (more guns than people).
   
  
• Guns are too easy to get by people who shouldn’t have them (criminals, terrorists, the dangerously mentally ill, etc.).
   
  
• Young white homegrown men are far more dangerous to the public than immigrants (yes, this shooter was a 30 year-old white man).
   
  
• Republican legislators think guns are more important than the lives of their fellow Americans.

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From Tommy Christopher:

On Saturday morning, between retweets of Hurricane Dorian updates and convincing professions of love for Tiffany Trump, Trump extended a piece of an olive branch to Fox News by praising those on the network whom he still feels are “fair” to him.

“Has anyone noticed that the top shows on @foxnews and cable ratings are those that are Fair (or great) to your favorite President, me!” Trump wrote, adding “Congratulations to @seanhannity for being the number one shoe on Cable Television!”

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

Once again, the president is trying to use his office to enrich himself.

It’s hardly a surprise at this point that Donald Trump is using his presidency for personal profit. In the most recent example, he’s been floating the possibility of hosting the Group of Seven summit at one of his golf clubs next year, complete with high-profile presidential endorsements of the supposed virtues of the site. As Greg Sargent says, this is the “one bedrock principle, one unshakable constant in Trump’s conduct, from which he will never waver.”

That Trump is using the presidency for personal gain is bad. That he’s willing to at least encourage the appearance of flat-out bribery – suggesting that he’ll favor those who stay at his hotels and otherwise enrich him – undermines the idea of constitutional government.

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From Dave Dubya:

By May of 1945 the German Nazi Regime was defeated, but racism and fascism would continue to simmer in the dark souls of white nationalists. After the Second World War Bertolt Brecht warned:

“Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!

Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,

The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

Eighty years after white nationalist Nazi aggression spilled blood across the planet, the same evil has risen again.

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From Iron Knee at Political Irony:

Most Americans who have health insurance get it through their employer. I have started several companies and served as a CEO, and I can assure you that if a company didn’t have to spend the time or money providing health insurance — something that is a huge distraction and money sink from the company’s core business — then that company could easily afford to pay their employees a significantly higher salary. In fact, typically enough to more than offset the extra taxes that people would have to pay to support universal single-payer health insurance.

And there are other benefits that most people don’t even realize. For example, I have lived in three countries that have single payer systems, and in those countries insurance for your car is a small fraction of what it is in the US. Why? Because the biggest cost of car insurance is liability insurance to cover health care costs for you, your passengers, and other parties when you are involved in an accident. But if everyone’s health costs are covered by a single payer system, then there is no need for that insurance.

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