I grew up in a conservative family. The people I talk to most frequently, the people I call when I need help, are conservative. I’m not inclined to paint conservatives as thoughtless bigots. But a few years ago, listening to the voices and arguments of commentators like Shapiro, I began to feel a very specific deja vu I couldn’t initially identify. It felt as if the arguments I was reading were eerily familiar. I found myself Googling lines from articles, especially when I read the rhetoric of a group of people we could call the “reasonable right.”

These are figures who typically dislike President Trump but often say they’re being pushed rightward — sometimes away from what they claim is their natural leftward bent — by intolerance and extremism on the left. The reasonable right includes people like Shapiro and the radio commentator Dave Rubin; legal scholar Amy Wax and Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic who warns about identity politics; the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt; the New York Times columnist Bari Weiss and the American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, self-described feminists who decry excesses in the feminist movement; the novelist Bret Easton Ellis and the podcaster Sam Harris, who believe that important subjects have needlessly been excluded from political discussions. They present their concerns as, principally, freedom of speech and diversity of thought. Weiss has called them “renegade” ideological explorers who venture into “dangerous” territory despite the “outrage and derision” directed their way by haughty social gatekeepers.

So it felt frustrating: When I read Weiss, when I listened to Shapiro, when I watched Peterson or read the supposedly heterodox online magazine Quillette, what was I reminded of?

Electric vehicles are everywhere now. It’s more than just Leafs, Teslas, and a wide variety of electric bikes. It’s also trains, busses, and in this case, gigantic dump trucks. This truck in particular is being put to work at a mine in Switzerland, and as a consequence of having an electric drivetrain is actually able to produce more power than it consumes. (Google Translate from Portugese)

This isn’t some impossible perpetual motion machine, either. The dump truck drives up a mountain with no load, and carries double the weight back down the mountain after getting loaded up with lime and marl to deliver to a cement plant. Since electric vehicles can recover energy through regenerative braking, rather than wasting that energy as heat in a traditional braking system, the extra weight on the way down actually delivers more energy to the batteries than the truck used on the way up the mountain.

Oh yes, very clever.

What are you going to do when you've carried all of the mountain's top down?

Where's your fancy perpetual motion dump trunk then, smarty pants?!

Trump on Crimea and Russia...

And the other was in Ukraine, having to do with a certain section of Ukraine that you know very well, where it was sort of taken away from President Obama -- not taken away from President Trump, taken away from President Obama. President Obama was not happy that this happened, because it was embarrassing to him, right? It was very embarrassing to him, and he wanted (INAUDIBLE) Russia to be out of the -- what was called the G-8, and that was his determination. He was outsmarted by Putin.

He was outsmarted. President Putin outsmarted President Obama. Wait a minute. And I can understand how President Obama would feel. He wasn’t happy and (INAUDIBLE) for that reason.

...

I know you like President Obama, but it was annexed during President Obama’s term. If it was annexed during my term I would say, ‘Sorry, folks. I made a mistake. Sorry folks.’ President Obama was helping the Ukraine. Crimea was annexed during his term.

Now it’s a very big area -- a very important area. Russia has its submarine. That is where they do their submarine work and that is where they dock large and powerful submarines, but not as powerful as ours and not as large as ours, but they have their submarines, and President Obama was pure and simply outsmarted. They took Crimea during his term. That was not a good thing. It could have been stopped, it could have been stopped with the right, whatever. It could have been stopped but President Obama was unable to stop it, and it’s too bad.

This is where the scene cuts to a shot of Trump on the couch, holding a 1/2 empty bottle of vodka and giving the camera that "KnowWhatIMean?" look.

Ramon Torres had been a U.S. citizen for nearly ten years when he was detained for four days on an immigration hold – despite having a U.S. passport, a Louisiana driver’s license, and a Social Security card, and despite that fact that a court ordered his release.

Torres’ ordeal began in August 2018, when he was pulled over and arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. Torres, a naturalized U.S. citizen since 2009, was carrying multiple forms of identification, including his driver’s license and other security credentials. Torres was booked at the Ascension Parish Jail, and the next day the Parish Court ordered his release.

But Torres wasn’t released. Instead, the Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office placed an “immigration hold” on Torres on the suspicion that he was unlawfully present in the United States.

The basis for this suspicion? He had a Latinx name and brown skin. Staff at the sheriff’s office explained that they had a policy of detaining all Latinx people for immigration review.

cleek and the two go to bed.

The following morning they come to the lake and discover that it is now completely full. The man says: "We must have got something wrong after so long". He goes away, and Kneale and Rimmer return to the bridge. On the bridge there is a small hut where the two watch a small boy playing. Rimmer and Kneale decide to investigate further, and they discover that the boy is a man, but that Kneale is the first of the women to speak to him. The others follow and hear Kneale asking the boy for her hand. He accepts her hand and the three have a peaceful meal together.

They are then taken somewhere by Rimmer. It is a strange place. There is a strange fountain of crystal (or rather, the water at the fountain is crystal) where they see the image of the man who made the bridge. After seeing it Kneale decides to get back and asks Rimmer and Kneale to stay back. They return to the bridge where Rimmer sees a woman approaching Kneale and asks her if she wants to sleep with him. He says yes, though...

Source: Talk to Transformer

Today I learned that there's a world where types of houseplants go in and out of style.

That is not a world I have time for.

The vivid red-purple of fuchsia, the color, comes from fuchsia, the flower, which is in turn named for 16th-century German botanist Leonhart Fuchs. (His last name, by the way, comes from the German word for "fox.") And if you think fuchsia and magenta are the same color, you're closer than you might think: Magenta was originally an aniline dye named fuchsine, named after the fuchsia flower. The name was changed in 1859, the year it was patented, in honor of the French victory at the Battle of Magenta. That apparently helped the dye become a stunning success.

The sheriff’s office declined to provide additional information on the alleged assault, including motive. But Taylor Hennick, who attended the event, told local news outlets that she overheard the attack near the Mineral County Fair and Rodeo’s entrance, just as the national anthem began to play.

The woman said she heard a “pop,” and turned to see the boy writhing on the ground.

“He was bleeding out of his ears, seizing on the ground, just not coherent,” Hennick told the Missoulian. As startled spectators closed in on Brockway, Hennick said he offered a simple defense for his actions.

“He said [the boy] was disrespecting the national anthem, so he had every right to do that,” she added.

----

Oh, look:

The attorney for a 39-year-old man charged with assaulting a child who didn't take his hat off for the national anthem says his client, compromised by a traumatic brain injury, believes he was acting on an order from President Donald Trump.

Stock markets in the U.S. will face major pains if President Donald Trump fails to win a second term in the White House, widely followed investor Mark Mobius predicts.

Holy crap! Eek!

Surely this prediction is supported by data? Surely you can just tell by looking at a chart of daily Dow Jones closing values and see a clear difference between the Trump era of awesomeness and the Obama era of failure?

Not seeing it.

Guess that's why I'm not a money manager.

Google has a new programming language called "go".

You'd think Google would know better than to name something with an essentially unsearchable name.