Overnight Open Thread (1-31-2016)

Quote of the Day

In the last ten thousand years - an instant in our long history - we've abandoned the nomadic life. We've domesticated the plants and animals. Why chase the food when you can make it come to you?For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game - none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band's, or even your species' might be owed to a restless few-drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.

Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: "I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas..."

Maybe it's a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds - promising untold opportunities - beckon. Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.

-- Carl Sagan

European Refugee Roundup:

EU Leaders Insist There is 'NO LINK' Between the Migrant Crisis and New Year Sex Attacks in Cologne

Minutes state: 'As far as the crimes in Cologne were concerned, he [Timmermans] said that these were a matter of public order and were not related to the refugee crisis.'

They also suggest officials want 'the unconditional rejection of false associations between certain criminal acts, such as the attacks on women in Cologne on New Year's Eve, and the mass influx of refugees'.

But the officials simultaneously do not want to 'downplay' the problems.

Move along citizen - nothing to see here.

Dutch Authorities Attack the Real Problem: Dutch Citizens Complaining About Immigrants on Social Media

Daily Mail Articles on Migrant Murder of Alexandra Mezher Being Censored in Sweden

Swedish Police Reveal They Have Dealt With 5,000 Incidents Involving Migrants Since October

6' Tall, Bearded, 14 Year Old "Unaccompanied Minor" Refugee in Sweden Raises Questions

Mass Migration Will Give Sweden a Male Gender Imbalance Worse Than China

Hundred-Strong Group of Masked Men Rampage Through Stockholm, Beating Up Refugees and Handing Out Anti-Refugee Leaflets

No doubt that they're part of some unsavory group but this is exactly what you get when political leaders abdicate their most basic responsibility: protecting the people they claim to represent. Based on the paths of other countries if these legitimate safety concerns are left unaddressed, you will eventually start seeing the appearance of death squads either with the tacit approval of local police or drawn from the police themselves. Note that this is all foreseeable. And avoidable.

The Naked Truth: On Nude Statues and Civilization

Renaissance thinkers blended Classical ideas with Christian thinking: man could be seen not as just a fallen creature in a vale of tears but as the foremost of God's creations, whose good in this life was important to the Almighty.

Art helps make these otherwise high-minded notions into something publicly accessible. When the Florentines put Michelangelo's monumental, nude David in the center of their city in 1504, it said something important in a way that even an illiterate manual laborer could understand. Later, the Florentine sculptor would design the buildings of the modern Capitoline to house a collection that Pope Sixtus IV had donated to the people of Rome;in 1734, Pope Clementine XII would declare the Capitoline open to the general populace, making it the world's first public art museum.

Humanism, moderation, an appreciation for our common humanity, and the humane treatment of even those we disagree with on matters of the highest import-so much of what separates us from Iran's brutal regime is on display to anyone walking through the Capitoline museum.

Note that as a married man of nearly 50 years and a former member of the military Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is no doubt quite familiar with the naked female and male forms.

 

Bernie Sanders: The Incompetent Bum Who Wants Your Money

It wasn't as bad as he says. His family managed to send him to the University of Chicago. Despite a prestigious degree, however, Sanders failed to earn a living, even as an adult. It took him 40 years to collect his first steady paycheck - and it was a government check.

"I never had any money my entire life," Sanders told Vermont public TV in 1985, after settling into his first real job as mayor of Burlington. . . .

Sanders took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him. Penniless, he went on unemployment. Then he had a child out of wedlock. Desperate, he tried carpentry but could barely sink a nail. "He was a shi**y carpenter," a friend told Politico Magazine. "His carpentry was not going to support him, and didn't."

Then he tried his hand freelancing for leftist rags, writing about "masturbation and rape" and other crudities for $50 a story. He drove around in a rusted-out, Bondo-covered VW bug with no working windshield wipers. Friends said he was "always poor" and his "electricity was turned off a lot." They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment - and this is what his friends had to say about him.

The only thing he was good at was talking...non-stop...about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off. "The whole quality of life in America is based on greed," the bitter layabout said. "I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation."

So he tried politics.

New Mandatory Diversity Training For Students At Mizzou Focuses On Taco Costumes

Well taco costumes are simply the worst.

Alumni Threaten To Withhold Millions in Donations; Oxford Cancels "Completely Barking" Mad Decision to Remove Rhodes Statue

BDS Watch: White House Orders Israeli Products Made in the West Bank, Gaza To Be Specially Labeled

Moe Lane Reviews Rumfeld's Churchill Solitaire

Can Alzheimer's Be Passed From Person to Person?

Granted the conditions are unusual but it is suggestive that there could be a prion-like component to the disease.

Olympic Committee Makes All Female Events de facto Coed

Men will allowed to compete in women's events as long as they regard themselves as women and their testosterone levels have been in the female range for a year. No surgery is required.

NFL Player Just Accepted to the Math PhD Program at MIT

Baltimore Ravens player John Urschel may have to juggle his spring training schedule a bit to fit into MIT's class schedule.

The 6'3", 305-pound offensive lineman will begin a PhD in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this year. The Hulk-like math geek, who graduated from Penn State with a 4.0 grade point average, will study spectral graph theory, numerical linear algebra, and machine learning.

...In 2015, Urschel played in the NFL playoffs for the Ravens while simultaneously (pdf) working on a paper on graph eigenfunctions. (What have you done lately?) The paper, entitled, "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fielder Vector of Graph Laplacians," is available online.

Here Urschel explains why he plays professional football when he regards himself as a mathematician:

"What my mother and a great majority of my friends, family, and fellow mathematicians don't understand is that I'm not playing for the money," he wrote. "I'm not playing for some social status associated with being an elite athlete."

"I play because I love the game. I love hitting people."

Welcome to 2016: 'Reverse Dog Porn'

The Beneful Dog Food Ad

I wonder how many engineers and dog trainers were involved in this.

A Cautionary Tale For the Morons: Pantsless Man Killed In Crash Was Fapping to Porn On His Phone

Chinese Company Gives Sex Dolls To Single Male Employees For Annual Bonus

And based on the pictures not the good Real Doll kind either. I've got to believe this is either a joke or corporate social pressure for the single men to get married.

Weekly Commenter Standings

Top 10 commenters:
1 [550 comments] 'J.J. Sefton' [77.21 posts/day]
2 [432 comments] 'Christopher Taylor'
3 [416 comments] 'Bruce With a Wang!'
4 [408 comments] 'rickb223'
5 [404 comments] 'Ricardo Kill'
6 [396 comments] 'Harry Paratestes'
7 [375 comments] 'Mike Hammer, etc., etc.'
8 [374 comments] 'Misanthropic Humanitarian'
9 [357 comments] 'Lauren'
10 [356 comments] 'L, Elle'

Top 20 sockpuppeteers:
1 [143 names] 'D. Trump' [20.07 unique names/day]
2 [73 names] 'The Political Hat'
3 [49 names] 'Yip & 2 Corinthians'
4 [38 names] 'Cloyd Freud, Unemployed'
5 [37 names] 'Blue Hen'
6 [37 names] 'Count de Monet'
7 [36 names] 'Ready For Hillary!!11!!'
8 [34 names] 'Bertram Cabot Jr.'
9 [34 names] 'angela urkel'
10 [32 names] 'Prince Ludwig the #Problematic'

The group. Banned on 12 universities.

Where it's at - the Twitter

Tonight's post brought to you by Marilyn in Korea, 1954:

Notice: Posted by permission of AceCorp LLC. And the usual stuff.

posted by Maetenloch at 11:16 PM

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