New York Times columnist John Tierney has an incredible Independence Day essay on how we’d be better off if the confederacy had won the Civil War and become independent. He says he sides with an ecomonmist who believes, “[P]eople in both countries could have been richer and freer because of smaller national governments.”
Oh, there is that slavery thing, but it would have gone away.
Happy Birthday America.
“Mrs. Clinton has introduced a bill that, in addition to raising the minimum wage to $7.25, would link Congressional pay raises to hikes in the minimum wage. Under the bill, the minimum wage would be increased automatically by the same percentage as any increase in Congressional pay.”
As reported by Bob Herbert in today’s New York Times
View your iTunes albums as a virtual stack. Click to browse, double click to play. Terrific (and free for now).
Click screen image (from NewMexiKen’s iMac) to learn more about CoverFlow.
Print This Post
NewMexiKen has really liked my current physician. He’s exceptionally pleasant, very thorough, patient, responsive to questions, has a wonderful sense of humor and is seven months older than me — which is good, because he tends to not fall back on the “you are just getting older” diagnosis so much.
But I have been reading Daniel Yergin’s great history of the oil industy, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power. Yergin writes about an Armenian, Calouste Gulbenkian who — to a large extent — brokered the deal in 1928 that led to the allocation of middle eastern oil among Royal Dutch/Shell, Anglo-Persian (now BP), the French and New Jersey Standard (eventually Exxon). For his efforts, Gulbenkian took 5 percent.
Nearing 60, according to Yergin, Gulbenkian lived at the Ritz in Paris or the Ritz or Carlton in London “attended by a succession of mistresses, at least one of whom at all times, on the basis of ‘medical advice,’ had to be eighteen years or younger in order to rejuvenate his sexual vigor.”
Where does one find a doctor who will dispense that sort of “medical advice”?
But this service isn’t going to go through the interent and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.
Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
…They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.
It’s a series of tubes.
And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Senator Ted Stevens (third in line to the presidency by the way) trying to talk about internet neutrality legislation the other day.
But then again NewMexiKen has never liked Ted Stevens since he almost ran me over in a crosswalk in 1973.
Transcript via 27B Stroke 6.
Print This Post
Having failed on July 2 to turn either of Meade’s flanks (Culp’s Hill and the Round Tops), Lee decided on the 3rd to assault the Union center. James Longstreet, who would command the attack, wrote later that he told Lee: “General, I have been a soldier all my life. I have been with soldiers engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions, and armies, and should know, as well as anyone, what soldiers can do. It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.” But Lee had made up his mind — and he had already issued the orders. Two divisions from A.P. Hill’s Third Corps and one — Pickett’s — from Longstreet’s First Corps were to make the advance. It’s known as Pickett’s Charge, but more correctly it is the Pickett-Pettigrew-Trimble Charge.
To prepare for the assault — to cripple the Union defenses — Lee order a massive artillery strike. The 163 Confederate cannons began firing at 1:07 PM. The Union artillery returned fire with nearly the same number. The Confederate aim was high and smoke curtained the targets. Little damage was done to the Union infantry. After a time, Union artillery commander Henry Hunt ordered his guns to cease firing — to save ammunition, cool the guns, and lure the rebels forward.
Forward they came, 14,000 men in a formation a mile wide, moving across open fields for three-quarters of a mile. The Union artillery opened on them with shot and shell and ultimately canister (shells filled with metal). At 200 yards, the Union infantry on the Confederate front opened fire, while other Union units moved out to attack both sides of the charge. Of the 14,000 in the advance, perhaps 200 breached the first Union line before being repulsed. Of the 14,000, half did not return.
Lee was defeated and withdrew from Gettysburg. While the war lasted 22 more months, the brief moment when the 200 reached the Union line was considered the high-water mark for the confederacy. Gettysburg totals: 25,000 Union casualties; 28,000 Confederate casualties.
“[Pickett's Charge] was a magnificent mile-wide spectacle, a picture-book view of war that participants on both sides remembered with awe until their dying moment—which for many came within the next hour.”
James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom
… when I tell them about the New Mexico whiptail, so I thought I’d publish this again. (It first appeared here a year ago.)
How come having a New Mexico whiptail lizard in the utility sink in NewMexiKen’s garage is so much more pleasant than say finding a tarantula or mouse there would be? I scooped her (and they are all females) into a coffee can and released her outside.
A single female New Mexico whiptail, all by herself, quite efficiently and handily produces entire populations of lizards without dads: offspring that are genetically identical to her in every detail (except for very rare mutations). All are striped and streamlined, and all are healthy females that, except for mating, enjoy doing the usual lizard things, like basking in the sun. The entire species is a thriving girls club; no sperm allowed.
This bizarre method of reproduction is known as parthenogenesis, a Greek word meaning “virgin birth.”
The New Mexico whiptail (Cnemidophorus neomexicanus) is the official reptile of New Mexico.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Powered by WordPress.
1 Comment