AdamSmith

And again, last time we meddled in Iran, we got rid of their elected leader and gave them the Shah. Which eventually got us the Ayatollah. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_%28intelligence%29

One dare not wonder what effect the Holy Prepuce would have. ...According to an unconfirmed 19th-century source,[9][10] in the late 17th century the Vatican librarian Leo Allatius wrote an unpublished[11] treatise entitled De Praeputio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Diatriba (A Discussion of the Foreskin of Our Lord Jesus Christ), claiming that the Holy Prepuce ascended, like Jesus himself, and was transformed into the rings of Saturn... http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Prepuce

Netanyahu Feeling Like Trip To US To Start World War III Went Pretty Well NEWS IN BRIEF Politics Politicians ISSUE 4839 Sep 28, 2012 NEW YORK--Following his speech to the United Nations General Assembly this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Friday that he is "pretty satisfied" with his trip to the U.S. to instigate World War III. "All in all, I think I accomplished my goal of pushing humanity toward the brink of complete and utter annihilation," said Netanyahu, adding that his implicit calls for international military action against Iran, which would ultimately escalate the conflict to an Armageddon-level of death and destruction, went "fairly well." "I think I did a good job laying the groundwork for a nuclear holocaust that will kill billions of people and eventually end the world as we know it. Sounded like everyone really liked it, too." When reached for comment, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told reporters that he was "equally happy" with his own efforts to nudge the world slightly closer to a full-blown apocalypse. http://www.theonion.com/articles/netanyahu-feeling-like-trip-to-us-to-start-world-w,29732/

Pretty good research. Goes well beyond the parade of standard hits that usually makes up this kind of article. Gives credibility that the author is knowledgeable about the old standbys and does acknowledge them. As with Connecticut, where Louie's Lunch in New Haven gets mentioned but another place gets the prize. In Maine I don't know the place he picked, but out of proud ignorance about his choice I would argue instead for... http://www.wildwillysburgers.com/

There’s a Scientific Reason Why Indian Food Is So Delicious By Hilary Pollack March 3, 2015 / 10:30 am When I die, bury me inside a vat of saag paneer. Indian food is categorically delicious: its flavors are complex, oscillating between sweet, savory, and spicy; its textures meld creamy sauces with doughy breads and tender meat and vegetables to make the slop of dreams. It’s a divine synthesis that is aromatic and sophisticated without being bougie. Hell, you can get a better-than-decent plate of it for nary more than the cost of a deli sandwich. But what is it that makes Indian food so endlessly rich and tasty? Scientists were wondering, too, and recently performed an analysis of 2,500 recipes to find out, as first observed in the Washington Post. Researchers Anupam Jaina, Rakhi N Kb, and Ganesh Bagler from the Indian Institute for Technology in Jodhpur ran a fine-tooth comb through TarlaDalal.com—a recipe database of more than 17,000 dishes that self-identifies as “India’s #1 food site”—in attempts to decode the magic of your chicken tikka masala or aloo gobi. Sure, there are commonalities in seasoning that run through Indian cuisine as a whole, but just how varied are they? The answer is more complicated than you might expect. While many Western cuisines attempt to pair ingredients that share “flavor compounds”—the minute timbres that indicate something like types of sweetness or sourness or spiciness—Indian food’s signature is that it combines ingredients that don’t share these qualities at all. “We study food pairing in recipes of Indian cuisine to show that, in contrast to positive food pairing reported in some Western cuisines, Indian cuisine has a strong signature of negative food pairing,” the researchers wrote. “[The] more the extent of flavor-sharing between any two ingredients, [the] lesser their co-occurrence.” For example, if you find cayenne in an Indian dish, you’re unlikely to find another ingredient that shares the same compounds—though you may find other spices that have complementary, but not identical, attributes. This is true across the eight different types of sub-cuisines studied, from Bengali to Punjabi to South Indian. A total of 194 unique ingredients were identified in the recipes, and subdivided into 15 categories: spices, seeds, herbs, meats, etc. But—rather unsurprisingly—the spices, and their methods of pairing and combination, emerged as the character-defining attributes of Indian cuisine. That like flavors should be combined for better dishes—an unspoken but popular hypothesis stipulated by recipe-building in North American, Western European, and Latin American cultures—is an idea essentially reversed in Indian cuisine. In the words of the study, “Each of the spices is uniquely placed in its recipe to shape the flavor-sharing pattern with [the] rest of the ingredients, and is sensitive to replacement even with other spices.” In other words, each spice serves a very specific role in the dish it inhabits, from the warm sweetness of ginger to the slight bitterness of tamarind to the zingy freshness of cilantro. And it is the combination of many of these components—a typical Indian dish can incorporate a dozen different herbs and spices—that creates the flavor fingerprint that we’ve come to associate with a good plate of chana masala. So while instincts may say to pile sweet on sweet or hot ‘n’ spicy on even more hot ‘n’ spicy, keep in mind that opposites sometimes attract with delicious results. http://munchies.vice.com/articles/theres-a-scientific-reason-why-indian-food-is-so-delicious

Not too surprising. If they outright said the thing is from the 13th century, they would piss off a lot of viewers. "Fair and balanced!"

One hypothesis that fits with the radiocarbon dating to an origin in the late 1300s was that it was created for use as a prop in one of the Easter Passion pageants popular at the time.

Well, this gets interesting. Alabama judges halt gay marriages State supreme court spurns previous federal rulings and says it is obliged to uphold state law, which defines marriage as between a man and a women http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/04/alabama-judges-halt-same-sex-marriages

No doubt!

Henry Kissinger, I've been missin' yer You're the doctor of my dreams With your crinkly hair and your glassy stare And your Machiavellian schemes All right, so people say that you don't care But you've got nicer legs than Hitler and bigger tits than Cher Henry Kissinger, how I'm missin' yer And wishing you were here ODE TO HENRY KISSINGER

Tedious prophet, quoting from the Book of Cyril: 'There shall, in that time, be rumours of things going astray, erm, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things... with the sort of raffia work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock.' THE LIFE OF BRIAN

Pontius Pilate: 'I will not have my fwends widiculed by the common soldiewy. Anybody else feel like a little... giggle... when I mention my fwiend... Biggus...' [A guard sniggers] Pontius Pilate: '...Dickus?' [More sniggering] Pontius Pilate: 'What about you? Do you find it... wisible... when I say the name... Biggus...' [sniggering] Pontius Pilate: '...Dickus?' [both guards snigger] Pontius Pilate: 'He has a wife, you know. You know what she's called? She's called... Incontinentia... Incontinentia Buttocks.' THE LIFE OF BRIAN Python's 25 Funniest Quotes: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/comedy/comedy-news/10463680/Monty-Pythons-25-funniest-quotes.html

The Aunt Annie Special Edition

Putin's net-worth is $200 billion says Russia's once largest foreigner investorCNN’s FAREED ZAKARIA GPS features an interview with Bill Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, formerly Russia's largest foreign investor, and a once supporter of President Putin. He also describes the dynamics between power and wealth in Russia, claiming that during “the first eight or 10 years of Putin's reign over Russia, it was about stealing as much money as he could. And some people, including myself, believe that he's the richest man in the world, or one of the richest men in the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth that was stolen from Russia.” TEXT EXCERPT On Putin’s networth: “I believe that it's $200 billion. After 14 years in power of Russia, and the amount of money that the country has made, and the amount of money that hasn't been spent on schools and roads and hospitals and so on, all that money is in property, bank - Swiss bank accounts, shares, hedge funds, managed for Putin and his cronies.” On Putin and his cronies: “These guys killed Sergei Magnitsky, my lawyer, for money. They all got rich, they all got bank accounts and villas and cars. Why should we allow them to come to America, travel to America, keep their accounts here, spend that money?” On his relationship with Putin: “So he became a business partner and then my - all of my activism became very inconvenient. At that point, I was not going after his enemies, I was going after his own financial interests. And so when I arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport in November in 2005, after living there for 10 years, I was stopped at the VIP lounge. I was taken down to the detention center of the airport. I was kept there for 15 hours, deported and declared a threat to national security. What I didn't realize then, and it's become absolutely plain and obvious to me now, based on my experience, is that Putin wasn't above it all, Putin was intimately involved in it all, and it wasn't like he was restraining the oligarchs - he was the biggest oligarch. And everything that he's done since then has come to prove that." On power in Russia: “The power is very simple in Russia - whoever has the power to arrest people is the person in power. And so what Putin does is he has a bunch of guys around him who have the power to arrest people. And so it doesn't matter how rich you are, if you can be arrested, put in jail and have your money taken away, the guy who can do that to you is the most powerful person in Russia.” FULL INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST: To understand what motivates Vladimir Putin, we decided to call in a man who once helped him get rich. Bill Browder went from being Russia's largest foreign investor to being blacklisted from that country. The CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, Browder was once a supporter of President Putin - that is until he was expelled from Russia in 2005 after being considered a "threat to national security." Browder writes about his experiences in his terrific new book "Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice." He joined me recently to tell me what he learned about how the Kremlin works. ZAKARIA: So you begin the book by - with this incredible story. You're the largest foreign investor in Russia. Your fund has returned 1,500 percent returns. You're managing $4.5 billion in capital at a time when that was real money. And you get to the airport and they put you on a plane and throw you out. What had you done that so pissed off the Russians? BILL BROWDER, AUTHOR, "RED NOTICE": Well, I wasn't just a regular investor. I was what’s - what they - what's commonly referred to now as a shareholder activist. I started out being - just buying shares of Russian companies. Then I realized that the oligarchs and government officials were stealing all the profits out of these companies. And so I thought the only way that I could run a sort of moral and profitable business would be to try to stop it. Basically, we'd research how they did the stealing and then we'd share it with the international media. And for about four years, this naming and shaming of Russian companies actually worked, because my interests coincided with Putin's. He was fighting with the same guys I was fighting with. The oligarchs were stealing power from him and they were stealing money from us. And so every time I would publicize a scandal, Putin would step in and fix it. And so my profits went up. The company's profits went up. And I was feeling like the - I was feeling like the best guy in the world, because I was making money and doing good at the same time. ZAKARIA: But then Putin makes a deal with all these oligarchs. And at that point, things start to change for you. BROWDER: He arrested the richest oligarch in the country, then said to the other guys, if you don't want to be arrested, you need to share your money… ZAKARIA: Right. BROWDER: - with me. ZAKARIA: Right. BROWDER: So he became a business partner and then my - all of my activism became very inconvenient. At that point, I was not going after his enemies, I was going after his own financial interests. And so when I arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport in November in 2005, after living there for 10 years, I was stopped at the VIP lounge. I was taken down to the detention center of the airport. I was kept there for 15 hours, deported and declared a threat to national security. What I didn't realize then, and it's become absolutely plain and obvious to me now, based on my experience, is that Putin wasn't above it all, Putin was intimately involved in it all, and it wasn't like he was restraining the oligarchs - he was the biggest oligarch. And everything that he's done since then has come to prove that. ZAKARIA: Do you think Putin is about power or about money? BROWDER: Well, let's say the first eight or 10 years of Putin's reign over Russia, it was about stealing as much money as he could. And some people, including myself, believe that he's the richest man in the world, or one of the richest men in the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth that was stolen from Russia. It's changed, though. It's mutated. All the... ZAKARIA: Really? I mean you understand numbers and you understand these - the numbers of these Russian companies. You really think Putin is the richest man in the world? BROWDER: I really think that, and I'm not just saying that crazily. I mean... ZAKARIA: Get an estimate - estimate his net worth. BROWDER: Two hundred billion. ZAKARIA: Really? BROWDER: I believe that it's s ‘. After 14 years in power of Russia, and the amount of money that the country has made, and the amount of money that hasn't been spent on schools and roads and hospitals and so on, all that money is in property, bank - Swiss bank accounts, shares, hedge funds, managed for Putin and his cronies. ZAKARIA: And it would explain why he personally has so much power, right? It's not the power of the party or even the army you worry about, or the state? BROWDER: The power is very simple in Russia - whoever has the power to arrest people is the person in power. And so what Putin does is he has a bunch of guys around him who have the power to arrest people. And so it doesn't matter how rich you are, if you can be arrested, put in jail and have your money taken away, the guy who can do that to you is the most powerful person in Russia. ZAKARIA: The second half of your book is about this incredible campaign that you have - you have launched ever since the death of Sergei Magnitsky, your - the guy who was looking after your accounts and the legal issues surrounding them. How did you manage to get people in the United States, politicians in the United States attention, focused on this issue? BROWDER: Well, my attorney was Sergei Magnitsky. He was murdered for exposing government corruption, murdered in pretrial detention. And they covered up his murder. What they did to him was so evil and so heartbreaking and so well-documented, that when I went and told the story to members of Congress, it didn't matter whether you were the most conservative Republican or the most liberal Democrat, this is the one thing in Washington everybody could agree on, which was these people were bad. These guys killed Sergei Magnitsky, my lawyer, for money. They all got rich, they all got bank accounts and villas and cars. Why should we allow them to come to America, travel to America, keep their accounts here, spend that money? And everyone said, yes, that's easy. It doesn't cost anything to stop them from doing that. And so this started snowballing. And against the interests of the U.S. administration - the U.S. administration, at that time, wanted to play nice with Russia - we got the Magnitsky Law passed 92 to four in the Senate. It's the one thing that everyone in Washington could agree on. ZAKARIA: Oil prices are down 50 percent. The Russian economy is being sanctioned. Banks are in trouble. How does this - how does this play out for Putin? BROWDER: Well, there's the Zimbabwe-North Korea scenario, where he just runs Russia truly and absolutely into the ground and stays in power. And that could happen. There's also the Ukraine/Georgia/Kyrgyzstan scenario, where people - the Russian people - say this - why are we allowing this man to ruin everybody's life? He makes some decision, some small decision, it doesn't even have to be a big decision, which just sparks a million people on Red Square and they - and they get rid of him. Or it could even be that some members of the army and the police decide, palace coup, let's get rid of him. We don't know. But in the meantime, while he's still in power, he’s going to be running Russia into the ground and causing the West a lot of problems. ZAKARIA: Bill Browder, a pleasure to have you on. BROWDER: Thank you. http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2015/02/15/putins-net-worth-is-200-billion-says-russias-once-largest-foreigner-investor/?iid=ob_article_footer_expansion&iref=obnetwork

Zachary Quinto: Leonard Nimoy was like a father to me Leonard Nimoy helped his replacement as Spock deal with the pressure of stepping into an iconic role. But Quinto remembers how a professional relationship soon developed into a close friendship http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/03/zachary-quinto-leonard-nimoy-was-like-a-father-to-me

As noted previously, will be fascinating to see how the Israel elections play out in the shadow of Bibi's late shenanigans. Heartening to be reminded by the U.S. House's current contortions over DHS funding that rightwing bullying does not always necessarily carry the day.

That was Dutch humor. Sometimes hard to be sure, of course.

Found this in a post on LinkedIn by a Dutch person on her country's personality traits... No hugs please, I'm Dutch Let’s just get it out there; we Dutch don’t hug, we don’t give compliments and we are very bad tippers. Yes, that’s a generalisation and yes, I do know loads of Dutch people who give the most beautiful compliments, love hugging and provide a proper tip after good service. Generally though, we just don’t. Does that make us stingy, cold and reserved? Well, we prefer to think we are authentic! Being authentic The whole ‘being authentic’ thing is big for us. Coming from the time when we were a trading nation and contracts were sealed through a handshake and a verbal commitment, it means you are true to yourself and cut to the chase (we also value time and ”move” is simply quicker than ”would you mind terribly stepping aside please”). The problem is that, unlike us, other cultures may neither see nor describe our behaviour as ‘authentic’. They will use words like ‘rude’, ‘direct’, ‘confrontational’ or even ‘unfriendly’. And while all of this comes down to perception, in the end we Dutch probably need to understand that there are only 17 million of us and a couple billion non-Dutch out there. Our ‘authentic’ ways may not always go down as well as we’d hoped. Adapting to other, more context based, cultures may require quite a bit of effort though and I personally have to work really hard to be less, well let’s say ‘explicit’. Even after 12 years of international experience, half the time I still honestly don’t even realise I could potentially be perceived as overly direct or confrontational. It’s only by asking for regular feedback that I can continuously enhance my understanding of what works and what ‘crosses the line’. Authority issues On top of all of this, we don’t like authority and have a huge need for an egalitarian leader, company and society. “You are not the boss of me” is a phrase that could have originated in the Netherlands and one that we fiercely live by. Our favourite phrase, directly translated, is ‘act normal, that’s crazy enough’. In the Netherlands, trying to be special and standing out from the crowd is simply not done. We are all equal and want to be treated as such. It goes without saying that this causes issues when either Dutch go and work abroad or when foreigners come to our beautiful little country in a leadership position (except for the Danish and Swedish who have the same need for equality in leadership). We want the company hierarchy to be as flat as our country is. One of the leading Dutch newspapers, NRCQ, published an article (in Dutch) about the differences that I’m describing above. They wrote that when it comes to deciding, together with Sweden and Japan we go for the consensus model, trying to get everyone’s input, more than any other country in the world. Our royal family is one of the most prominent examples of our need for equality. You will see photos of them, dressed in orange t-shirts (along with the rest of the nation during a large event like the Olympics or a World Cup) jumping up and down and cheering on the athletes as much as any of us. In fact, at those moments more than at any other time, we feel they are ‘just like us’ and we love them for it. Just imagine Prince Charles doing something like that... Celebrate differences I live in Ireland and my entire team is Irish. To top it off, my line manager and the majority of my colleagues are in the US while my stakeholders are all over Europe. With more international experience also comes the willingness and, more importantly, the ability to adapt more. To think twice, to say things like “could you consider other options?” rather than “this just isn’t going to work” and I’ve even converted to hugging (I now just hug everyone which is potentially going slightly overboard ;-). At the same time, my plea to all other nationalities I work with, is to please be patient with me. To understand that my brain is hardwired to give direct feedback, to say it as I see it and to be to the point. Trust me; I’m just trying to be authentic ;-) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hugs-please-im-dutch-sacha-dekker ...Reminds also of McCullough's account in John Adams of how Adams, finally fed up with the French and Franklin equally, left Paris in exasperation and went to the Netherlands, where he found the hardheaded direct people much more in tune with his own Yankee sensibilities, and successfully negotiated substantial loans to help prosecute the Revolutionary war.

Too much human poo on Mount Everest says Nepal http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/03/too-much-human-poo-on-mount-everest-says-nepal

My nominee for the BoyToy barrister...

At a glance, this looks only slightly more likely to have its intended effect than Republican efforts to court the Hispanic vote.

Also in that article: On Sunday, Netanyahu called his trip to Washington “a fateful, even historic mission” that he is undertaking as “the emissary of all Israelis, even those who disagree with me, of the entire Jewish people.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) knocked Netanyahu for suggesting that he represents all Jewish people on the topic of Iran. “He doesn’t speak for me on this,” Feinstein said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I think it’s a rather arrogant statement. I think the Jewish community is like any other community. There are different points of view. I think that arrogance does not befit Israel, candidly.”