Meeting on the Egyptian crisis in two pics. Was there a second meeting, or did Obama and Hagel decide to dress a bit more formally? Or is there an airbrush involved?
In any case, look at the body language, especially the one with the President in a golf shirt. No wonder he has a reputation for detachment. We wanted cool, we got it. Me? I prefer earnest in a case like this.
MIT and Google team up for a great online resource for would-be developers.
They teach you a language for free as you repay the favor by helping to translate the web. An interesting proposition. AND they have apps for the mobiles...
Looking at the correlation among marriage, divorce, and birth records it is clear that more and more children are the "step-children" of more and more adults. They are not orphans, exactly. But sorta.
I was thinking of St. Joseph the Worker and how the system of Saints could be seen as a series of iconic right-brain anchors for important basic truths (like that the workers as well as the founders build any business) when it dawned on me that Jesus was a step-child, too. If you know a kid in foster care, let them know.
In his lecture against reduction-ism, relativism, and nihilism called "Men Without Chests (1943)," C.S. Lewis worries that “Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.” I know what he means, as do those in Europe in the "backlash" against the European Union. Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Brussels ...not that many people running things--even if we count their corporate cronies and their courtiers and lackeys.
Meantime, in the Islamic world the Islamists want to impose sharia law, which seems to require quite a lot of coercion of the backsliding populations. So there again it comes down to a very few ruling the many.
Is our future to live either under a bureaucratic, technocratic, corporate state or a theological terror state with inquisition and torture the norm?
The "revelations" that records are kept of electronic transactions and phone calls and that they are available to the security services of modern nation states have shocked many but should not have, really. Because our enemies are not arranged in conventional armies, the current war is an information and media war (including the usual fellow-traveling hirelings on both sides). If you don't want to get blown up, you want the government to be looking for the bad guys. Since there is so much data, your "privacy" consists of the fact that no one much cares about you. Every keystroke on the internet is there, after all. And apparently it does require a warrant to go into the content of phone calls. Only which numbers called which numbers and when is constitutionally available to the government. Since there is no expectation of privacy when sending messages through a third party (Verizon, etc.) according to our Court, it is not a constitutionally prohibited search to ask for meta-data.
Still, there is nothing here inconsistent with Lewis's description of where we seem to be heading--absent some upheaval.
Now this man looks fierce. The Sardinians are an island people, and therefore very interesting. This music is "a ballare a ballu sardu" di T. BONU. I believe there is some improvisation involved, though one must imagine dancers, too.
Let us suppose that instead of being slow, extravagant, inefficient,
wasteful, unadaptive, stupid, and at least by tendency corrupt, the State
changes its character entirely and becomes infinitely wise, good, disinterested,
efficient, so that anyone may run to it with any little two-penny problem and
have it solved for him at once in the wisest and best way possible. Suppose the
state close-herds the individual so far as to forestall every conceivable
weakness, incompetence; suppose it confiscates all his energy and resources and
employs them much more advantageously all around than he can employ them if left
to himself. My question still remains -- what sort of person is the individual
likely to become under those circumstances? --Albert Jay Nock, author of Our Enemy, the State.
OH, WHAT A LUCKY MAN HE WAS: Tony’s ‘good fortune’: Behind Weiner’s consulting gigs. “Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, recently disclosed some $500,000 in joint income for 2012 — most of it, they said, accruing from Weiner’s ‘consulting’ activities. Nice work if you can get it — but, alas, so few can. It’s certainly an arrangement that needs a long second look, given subsequent disclosures that Abedin provided ‘consultant’ services to private-sector clients while a publicly paid top aide to then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
Even in disgrace, the machine takes care of its own. Makes ‘em less likely to talk.
Posted at 10:06 am by Glenn Reynolds 
[Weiner, of course, was the Congress critter who tweetet out pics of his pects, etc.]
.@BreitbartNews: Cost of Complying with U.S. Regulations Higher Than Canada's GDP