The more we learn about Earth ...

In a story about Earth's permeability, a researcher commented: “There may be really complex interactions that we don't appreciate."

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/02/11/New-map-charts-a-leaky-Earth/UPI-40671297476986/#ixzz1Dmt4AKE3

That pretty much works for everything else about Earth.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/02/new-map-shows-the-leaks-in-our.html

Central Arkansas is a land of hills. In making the land more acceptable for transportation, people have cut into the hills. In winter months, ice forms on bare rocky faces of the cuts, the ice from water seepage inside the rocks. Before seeing the ice, I had never known there was that much water flowing through rocks. Also, do a search on “atmospheric rivers.” There is, scientists say, water vapor flowing through high air, the vapor containing enough water to bury Maryland. We keep learning more about Earth, but still fanatics among us claim to know everything. Earth heals, Earth abides.

It's not my fault!!

Of course it is.

Skinny, fat, paranoid, Democrat, book reader, opinionated , bad drive, murderer – Maybe you've fallen for the idea there’s a gene for that. Well, probably not.

http://www.docmercury.com/rainy/do-these-genes-make-me-look-fat

Same people, different description

Nixon got a lot of blue-collar votes. Reagan got more. In our earlier lives, Democrats represented the working man. Republicans were for the rich. So why is it that Republican working voters are often styled racist and ignorant by Democratic candidates? Aren’t they the same people (or from the same families) who were OK when they voted Democratic?

‘Does the GOP Need the Educated Class?’

“In the aftermath of the Republican disaster of 2008, some conservative writers hoped that the party could gain support from elite demographics—'the educated class,' as David Brooks calls it, meaning not so much 'everyone who graduated from college' but more like 'the kind of people we knew at school.' The results of the 2010 election, hugely encouraging for Republicans, indicate that the party’s gains came from almost all parts of the electorate except the elite demographic. I think it is extremely risky in a period of what I call open-field politics to make straight-line extrapolations from the results of one election to the next. But I also think that those conservatives aiming their pitch at their fellow Ivy League graduates, etc., are aiming in the wrong direction.”

http://www.american.com/archive/2010/december/does-the-gop-need-the-educated-class-1

Linked from maggiesfarm.

Doesn't matter whether you want it

The government says you will have it.

“Because of the nature of supply and demand, Plaintiffs’ choices (not to buy health insurance) directly affect the price of insurance in the market, which Congress set out in the Act to control.” – U.S. District Judge Norman K. Moon, in suit filed by Liberty University against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009, explaining why an individual’s act of not buying something is under the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution of the United States.

http://aca-litigation.wikispaces.com/file/view/District+Court+opinion.pdf

Moon cited Wickard v. Filburn, 1942, a unanimous decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that farmer Roscoe Filburn was incorrect in believing he could grow as much wheat as he wanted on his land, when the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 gave the federal government power to say how much wheat farmer Filburn could grow, even though Filburn did not sell any wheat outside his local area. Charlie Flagg faced the same bureaucracy in Elmer Kelton’s The Time It Never Rained.
http://orderinthecourt.org/Cases/Wickard-v-Filburn/
Linked from: http://volokh.com/2010/12/02/why-not-purchasing-health-insurance-isnt-an-activity/

Perspective

“In many respects the Vikings were the medieval equivalent of organized crime,” says Simon Keynes, a professor of Anglo-Saxon history at Cambridge University. “They engaged in extortion on a massive scale, using the threat of violence to extract vast quantities of silver from England and some other vulnerable western European states.”

“Certainly the Vikings did all these things, but so did everyone else,” says Dagfinn Skre, a professor of archaeology at the University of Oslo. “Although admittedly, the Vikings did it on a grander scale.”

Also: Dublin, one of the largest Viking cities in the British Isles, became a major European slave-trading center, where, historians estimate, tens of thousands of kidnapped Irishmen, Scotsmen, Anglo-Saxons and others were bought and sold.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/A-Viking-Mystery.html?c=y&page=1

One thing leads to another thing and that to another and first thing you know, William of Normandy is king.

‘Napolitano Eyes Tighter Security for Trains, Ships, Mass Transit’

Nobody saw this coming, right?

"I think the tighter we get on aviation, we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime," she said. "So what do we need to be doing to strengthen our protections there?"
But a Homeland Security official told Fox News that the use of such full-body scanners is not under consideration, saying they "would not be feasible in a system with hundreds or thousands of access points."
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/11/25/body-scanners-headed-trains-ships-mass-transit/

Nah, they’ll never put those full-body scanners anywhere but at airports. Never.

Wanna cut government spending?

Larry Elder says its easy. Sell federal land, AMTRAK, the postal system, Hoover Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority. And do a bunch of other things.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/elder120210.php3