Saturday Morning Link Extravaganza
Amorous Ephemera
Athletic Discharge
Aural Discharge
Big Health and Hygiene
“As businesses and families face insurance renewals, the cruelest disappointment of all will be that not only will the results of this so-called reform fail to meet expectations, but the costs to families, businesses and jobs will far exceed even critics’ projections.
“I would have my medical license revoked if I practiced orthopedic surgery with this same level of reckless arrogance. For doctors, results are what patients live with for the rest of their lives. For politicians, results are the stuff of talking points, not fact but fiction. Today’s failure, it seems, is only a changed subject away from being tomorrow’s success.”
Cold Lonely Places
Deep-Fried Dystopia
“The 84-year-old former Cuban president published an article Wednesday that used three of the only eight pages in the Communist Party newspaper Granma to quote — largely verbatim — from a 2006 book by Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin.
Estulin’s work, ‘The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club,’ argues that the international group largely runs the world. It has held a secretive annual forum of prominent politicians, thinkers and businessmen since it was founded in 1954 at the Bilderberg Hotel in Holland.
Castro offered no comment on the excerpts other than to describe Estulin as honest and well-informed and to call his book a ‘fantastic story.’”
“…also known as fire whirls or fire devils, are rare and depend on certain air temperatures and currents to create a vertical, rotating column of air. In 1923, a fire tornado ignited by the Great Kanto earthquake in Tokyo grew to the size of a large city and killed 38,000 people in 15 minutes. At the time most of the buildings in Japan were made from wood and fire spread from house to house, destroying the city.”
“The anti-war movement was a sham; a cover for violent anarchists. It wasn’t actually anti-war; it was mostly anti-draft, and nothing more. It was over-indulged white males who didn’t want to be conscripted. It would never have happened if there hadn’t been a draft.”
- I can never figure out what drives the anger behind the anti-Christopher Hitchens site Hitchens Watch. The contributors write well, and it’s nice that they douse some skepticism on the man typically revered as a skeptic par excellence. But their tone strikes me as bitter, and I wonder if there’s more animating their “watchdog” role than “the pursuit of truth.”
“Hollywood stars hence feel that there is something arbitrary about their success — that their personal merit does not warrant their revered status. While they may be pleased at this outcome, they can’t help but feel that the system is unjust because their status is undeserved. They watch people in the lower rungs of society struggle and become overcome by a deep sense of guilt for holding the winning ticket in the lottery of life. They distrust capitalism for the seemingly unfair inequality it produces and thus favor redistribution.
“However, what Hollywood fails to realize is that markets allocate rewards not based on individual merit but on the value individuals produce for others.”
Divine Illumination on Demand/Esoteric Sentience
Local
“…Guido Rahr, president of the Wild Salmon Center in Portland…spotted Atlantic bluefin tuna on the menu at Sinju Restaurant’s Pearl District location while having lunch, and proceeded to do exactly what groups like Seafood Watch, Environmental Defense Fund or Blue Ocean Institute encourage: he politely spoke up. And as a result, got himself banned from the restaurant. That’s right, according to Rahr, they said he was no longer welcome at Sinju and would refuse to serve him.”
