Freckles, they are good.

Cabin Porn

Where I'd rather be.

Bears like milk, almost as much as honey.

Did someone say milk?

Like people have to be told to join a pig club

I actually know a guy who raises a couple of shoats every year, then has them slaughtered when they reach the right size. Nothing like a freezer full of pork and bacon to make you feel ready for TEOTWAWKI.  If you have the room, it's a great idea.

George H W Bush shaves his head in support of the son of one of his secret service detail who has leukemia and has lost his hair to chemo.

 I think the Bushes were both poor presidents, but there is no arguing the fact that they are first class human beings.

   "When George H.W. Bush — aka “Bush 41” — was president he famously gave out awards for his “thousand points of light” as a way to recognize people doing noble volunteer work.

And now that the ex-president has shaved his head in solidarity with a 2-year-old leukemia patient, Patrick, maybe he should give himself one of those points of light.

Patrick is the son of a Secret Service agent, Jon, who is assigned to Bush’s security detail in Kennebunkport, Maine.  (Their last names were withheld at the family’s request.)

Recently, other members of the security unit started to bare their domes in support of Patrick, and they started to raise money for his treatment.

The 89-year-old Bush and his wife, Barbara, took notice. They had lost their second child, Robin, to leukemia 60 years ago in October at the age of 4."

A cold Pabst Blue Ribbon, or some of this

Ok, some of this!

Space, the final frontier...

The indispensable Peter Grant has tipped us off on this movie, which looks to be something well worth seeing.  I'm always up for a space movie. Watch the video full screen and enjoy.



I've posted this before, but it would be appropriate to repost here.   Keep watching, the views of the rings from the surface are mesmerizing.

Swedish researchers accidentally discover a new substance previously thought to be impossible to make.

Nothing like discovery via serendipity. 

"Called upsalite in honor of the university where it was discovered, the material features a surface area of 800 square meters per gram. It's got the highest surface area measured for a synthesized alkali metal carbonate. And in addition, upsalite is filled with empty pores all having a diameter smaller than 10 nanometers.

This means that it can absorb — or more accurately, adsorb — more water at low relative humidities than the most advanced materials currently in existence.

Unlike absorption, where fluids permeate or are dissolved by a liquid or solid, adsorption involves the adhesion of atoms, ions, or molecules from a gas, liquid, or dissolved solid to a surface. And it does so as a consequence of surface energy (similar to surface tension).

Once refined, upsalite could significantly reduce the amount of energy required to control environmental moisture in electronics and in drug delivery. It could also be used in hockey rinks and warehouses. Perhaps more crucially, the material could be used to suck up toxic waste, dangerous chemicals, and oil spills."

Not bad.  Sounds like a very useful item.   Next, those crafty Swedes can work on creating a new Superman by accident, or was that Spiderman?

Green Fly Geyser, Nevada.

The story:

Back in 1916, a shaft was drilled in hopes of striking water to turn part of this desert area into farmland. A geothermal pocket of water was struck resulting in a geyser of boiling water which turned the area into a desert wetland. Decades later in the 60's, the underground boiling water found a weak spot in the ground and a natural geyser was born. Recently, yet another new geyser has formed attesting to the ever-changing forces below the earth's surface. For unknown reasons, the original geyser no longer spouts. Perhaps the later geysers have robbed the original of its boiling water or perhaps it has simply gone dormant, waiting to spout again on its own schedule.

Fly Geyser is located in the Black Rock Desert region about 20 miles north of Gerlach, Nevada. These hot springs are sited on Fly Ranch, which is private property. Unfortunately, Fly Geyser is not open to the public.

Picture via Ninety Miles From Tyranny.

Freckles, they are good.

Brown hair and freckles - mmm, mmm, mmm.

A dolphin is fascinated by a cartwheeling girl.

Via American Perspective.

Studies now show home schooling produces far superior results than public school.

From the study:

  "Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute, compared home schoolers and public school students on the results of three standardized tests — the California Achievement Test, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Stanford Achievement Test — for the 2007-2008 academic year. With public school students at the 50th percentile, home schoolers were at the 89th percentile in reading, the 86th percentile in science, the 84th percentile in language, math, and social studies.

Socio-economic factors may have a lot to do with why home schoolers do so much better. Virtually all have a mother and a father who are living together. Nearly two thirds of fathers and 62 percent of mothers have a bachelor’s degree or higher."

In contrast to that, unions have become so powerful that the public schools are basically run for the benefit of the unions, and the schools themselves, as normal students flee, tend to become focused on kids with dysfunctional backgrounds.

A relative of mine works in a big California school district, and you would blanch at the stories she can tell of the political infighting among administrators who pull down enormous salaries, as well as the amazing problems that her district has to deal with from students coming from broken homes, who can't speak English, or who themselves have some sort of drug problem.

On the front lines, the teachers themselves have to deal with all that, while watching "administrators" battle each other in vicious political games with huge pay as the reward. It's no wonder that the teachers themselves usually send their own kids to private school, if they can. 

In the worst cases imaginable, like this example, one wonders whether the whole idea of public education needs a complete overhaul, separating perhaps the normal kids from intact or involved homes, from those who can't learn, don't want to learn, or who shouldn't be in the country at all. 

Karl Denninger makes a no varnish call on why Detroit and every other public pension plan is de facto kaput.

There is no diplomatic way to speak the truth on this, so why not simply say it?


  "The common rubric was that 8% or even 10% returns would be "modeled" and used to "compute" the contributions that are required for all those cops, teachers, school administrators and firefighters.
This might work for a while -- in an expanding credit environment it can.  Indeed, isn't it funny that this almost-exactly matches the credit expansion in rate over the last 30 years?

But a pension plan is a forward, indefinite-duration thing because new employees come in to replace the ones who retire.

As such the claimed "return" that is embedded in to the promise is impossible to provide because it grossly exceeds the real return of the economy over any long run period in history.  Leverage expansion returns can run in this range for a few decades but not permanently because leverage expansion is predicated on stealing purchasing power from the people on a continual basis. 

The people eventually run out of marginal income that you can steal and ends -- it mathematically must because the alternative is that everyone starves!

Any and all such plans are thus scams.  The people on both sides of the table either know or should know that this is the case.  Those who argued for it and those who agreed to "pay" those amounts are equally at fault for either demanding or agreeing to give that which is impossible over the long run. 
So in addition to the financial scam of these pensions that are spread far and wide in the United States we then add the physical crime of thugs thinking they can, without consequence, victimize the people who produce in a given area and they'll keep producing and paying into the government so they can not only be thugs but receive various forms of welfare and subsidy besides.

That sort of thought process goes beyond dumb -- it's criminally insane.

The pension promises of all of these "public" employees across the United States must be repudiated as fraudulent from inception and thus void.  Transfer the balance of whatever is in there now into a separate fund, appoint someone to manage it to pay current beneficiaries and whoever is "vested" in ratable proportion to whatever is there, and let it run off until it's gone.  Done.

Next, get the Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police out into the streets.  Explain to the residents that they have two choices -- stop acting like thugs and find a way to be industrious in a lawful and reasonable fashion or they will starve.  Start tapering the "welfare programs" in all forms at 5% a month from today's baseline until they're gone in less than two years.  Keep hammering it -- vote for whoever you want, but this is how it's going to be because you're all there is and you're not, at present, earning any money to fund the services you want!

At the same time drop all the regulations that prevent private charity from running soup kitchens and similar, if they're willing to do so.  Some churches and other organizations will do so provided they're not getting shot at.  Whether they get shot at is up the residents.

You can't force people to stay, you can't tax someone who's not producing and those who were "promised" rich pensions that have payouts exceeding economic progress will not receive them because the promises were impossible to fulfill at the time they were made."

Whales nearly devour two hapless divers off the California coast

I like how an instant before they surface, the herring froth out of the water.  Note to self: if when swimming in the sea, suddenly thousands of little fish leap up out of the water, swim for boat immediately.