Andrew Breitbart, well-known author, pundit, and political activist, passed away shortly after midnightin Los Angeles. He was 43.
His website, Big Journalism, which first reported the news, says Breitbart died of natural causes.
“We have lost a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a dear friend, a patriot and a happy warrior,” says the site in a statement. “Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love.”
Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin confirmed the news, calling Breitbart’s death a “devastating loss.”
He is survived by his wife Susannah, and his four children.
###
Medicare Hospital Compare Quality of Care “Compare hospitals quality of care survey ratings from patients with certain medical conditions or surgical procedures and find them by location, address, mapping, directions and contact information. A U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services website.”
Ambergris (whale vomit) has been added to cigarettes for flavor. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
###
Yellowstone National Park Established (This Day in 1872)
Before Ferdinand Hayden’s extensive geological exploration of the Yellowstone area in 1871, many doubted the stories of prior European explorers describing a remarkable landscape dotted with geysers and boiling springs. Paintings and photographs from Hayden’s expedition helped convince Congress to make Yellowstone the US’s first national park, and it now draws millions of visitors each year. Why do park officials refrain from extinguishing wildfires that pose no immediate threat to human life? More…
###
Manao tupapau -The Spirit of the Dead Keep Watch by Gaugin (1892)
Paul Gaugin – Part 3 (Conclusion)
Today I am concluding my look at the life of Paul Gaugin. My earlier blogs on February 23rd and February 25th looked at the early and middle part of Gaugin’s life and should probably be read before you begin today’s offering.
We had reached 1887 and left Gaugin desperately wanting to leave France and head for Panama where he believed he would be able to lead a worry-free lifestyle. He and his artist friend Charles Laval set sail in April of that year and before reaching Colon in Panama the ship weighed anchor off the island of Martinique. They eventually arrived at Colon and Gaugin was disappointed not only with the area but also that his plea to his brother-in-law for financial assistance was turned down. Gaugin and Laval now had insufficient money to return to their newly chosen destination, Martinique. It was then imperative that they found the funds from another source to pay for their proposed sea passage and so they worked on the construction of the Panama Canal. The French had made the first attempt to construct a sea-level canal in 1880 under the leadership of Ferdinand de Lesseps who had been involved in the construction of the Suez Canal some twenty five years earlier. Gaugin and Laval finally accrued enough money for their trip to Martinique in June. The Gods however didn’t look favourably on the two intrepid artists for whilst on the island of Martinique both Gaugin and Laval were extremely ill suffering from bouts of malaria and dysentery. The pair returned to Paris in November 1887. Despite his illness during his sojourn on Martinique, Gaugin believed his short time on the island was a defining moment in his life. He wrote enthusiastically about it in a letter to his wife, Mette, in February 1888:
MORE.
###
Yoga and Sex Scandals
The wholesome image of yoga took a hit in the past few weeks as a rising star of the discipline came tumbling back to earth. After accusations of sexual impropriety with female students, John Friend, the founder of Anusara, one of the world’s fastest-growing styles, told followers that he was stepping down for an indefinite period of “self-reflection, therapy and personal retreat.”
Mr. Friend preached a gospel of gentle poses mixed with openness aimed at fostering love and happiness. But Elena Brower, a former confidante, has said that insiders knew of his “penchant for women” and his love of “partying and fun.”
Few had any idea about his sexual indiscretions, she added. The apparent hypocrisy has upset many followers.
“Those folks are devastated,” Ms. Brower wrote in The Huffington Post. “They’re understandably disappointed to hear that he cheated on his girlfriends repeatedly” and “lied to so many.”
But this is hardly the first time that yoga’s enlightened facade has been cracked by sexual scandal. Why does yoga produce so many philanderers? And why do the resulting uproars leave so many people shocked and distraught?
One factor is ignorance. Yoga teachers and how-to books seldom mention that the discipline began as a sex cult — an omission that leaves many practitioners open to libidinal surprise.
Hatha yoga — the parent of the styles now practiced around the globe — began as a branch of Tantra. In medieval India, Tantra devotees sought to fuse the male and female aspects of the cosmos into a blissful state of consciousness.
READ MORE.
###
Hey, a true blue Wal Mart shopper:
###
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. — Secel Montgomery Sr. stabbed a woman in the stomach, chest and throat so fiercely that he lost count of the wounds he inflicted. In the nearly 25 years he has been serving a life sentence, he has gotten into fights, threatened a prison official and been caught with marijuana.
Despite that, he has recently been entrusted with an extraordinary responsibility. He and other convicted killers at the California Men’s Colony help care for prisoners with Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia, assisting ailing inmates with the most intimate tasks: showering, shaving, applying deodorant, even changing adult diapers.
Their growing roster of patients includes Joaquin Cruz, a convicted killer who is now so addled that he thinks he sees his brother in the water of a toilet, and Walter Gregory, whose short-term memory is ebbing even as he vividly recalls his crime: stabbing and mutilating his girlfriend with a switchblade.
“I cut her eyes out, too,” Mr. Gregory declared recently.
Dementia in prison is an underreported but fast-growing phenomenon, one that many prisons are desperately unprepared to handle.
MORE.
###
From the author: My name’s David, and I’m a marijuana addict. I started smoking when I was thirteen, and by the time I got to college, I realized marijuana had become the most important thing in my life.
Having spent the last five years surrounded by weed, I had adopted the mindset that it was impossible to get addicted to.
As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t even a drug. My problems with marijuana began when I decided it was time to stop. That’s when I realized… I couldn’t.
###
Sprinkles, an Beverly-Hills-based bakery, is giving the people what they want: The world’s first 24-hour cupcake ATM.
This automatic cupcake machine dispenses freshly baked cupcakes, cupcake mixes, apparel and even cupcakes for Fido! In the heart of Beverly Hills nestled between Sprinkles Cupcakes and the brand new Sprinkles Ice Cream, 24 Hour Sprinkles will be continuously restocked day and night with a variety of freshly baked cupcake flavors.
Sweet.
###
Tyrannosaurus rex had the most powerful bite of any creature that has ever walked the Earth, say scientists.
Previous estimates of the prehistoric predator’s bite suggested it was much more modest – comparable to modern predators such as alligators.
This measurement, based on a laser scan of a T. rex skull, showed that its bite was equivalent to three tonnes – about the weight of an elephant.
The findings are published in the journal Biology Letters.
MORE.
###
Twenty years after Ceausescu’s execution his secret service is still active. For the first time, Romanian-German writer Herta Müller describes her ongoing experience of Securitate terror.
Update October, 8th: Romanian-born German novelist Herta Müller wins the Nobel Prize for Literature 2009! Here you can read an excerpt from her latest novel “Everything I Own I Carry With Me” (“Atemschaukel”).
For me each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my life were coincidence and which were staged. This is why I have, in each and every public statement I have made, demanded access to the secret files kept on me which, under various pretexts, has invariably been denied me. Instead, each time there was signs that I was once again, that is to say, still under observation.
In spring earlier this year I visited Bucharest, on the invitation of the NEC (New European College). On the first day I was sitting in the hotel lobby with a journalist and a photographer when a muscular security guard inquired about a permit and tried to tear the camera from the photographer’s hands. “No photos allowed on the premises, nor of any people on the premises,” he bellowed. On the evening of the second day I had arranged to have dinner with a friend who, as we had agreed on the phone, came to pick me up from the hotel at six o’clock. As he turned into the street in which the hotel was situated, he noticed a man following him. When he asked to call me at the reception, the receptionist said he would have to fill in a visitor’s form first. This frightened him because such a thing was unheard of, even under Ceausescu.
My friend and I walked to the restaurant. Again and again he suggested that we cross to the other side of the street. I thought nothing of it. Not until the following day did he tell Andrei Plesu, the Director of the NEC, about the visitor’s form and that a man had followed him on his way to the hotel, and later the two of us to the restaurant. Andrei Plesu was infuriated and sent his secretary to cancel all bookings at the hotel. The hotel manager lied that it was the receptionist’s first day at work and that she had made a mistake. But the secretary knew the lady, she had worked in the reception for years and years. The manager replied that the “patron”, the owner of the hotel, was a former Securitate man who, unfortunately, would not change his ways. Then he smiled and said that by all means the NEC could cancel its bookings with him, but that it would be the same in other hotels of the same standard. The only difference being that you wouldn’t know.
I checked out. After that I didn’t notice anyone else following me. Either the secret service had backed off, or they worked professionally, i.e. unnoticed.
MORE .
###
Jennifer Lopez packs a punch as she shows off her toned figure in new risque boxing-themed shoot
###
Landlord-musician. I’m a hyphenated guy. Depends what kind of cocktail party I’m at, whether I say “landlord” or “musician” first (I play clarinet in a klezmer band), but I don’t try to hide the landlord part. I should: everybody hates landlords. Nobody paid rent as a child, so people think they should live free as adults, too. The walls, heat, and water—that should be free, like the wind, rain, and baby food.
I used to feel guilty about charging rent. I hadn’t done anything to deserve it, other than maintaining a building—a building I hadn’t even built. Now that I’m middle-aged, though, I feel fine collecting rent. Somebody has to keep these old buildings from falling down.
Landlord-musician. I know one more in Cleveland. He’s a tough guy who wears a toupee, plays accordion and trumpet, and tells dirty jokes. He’s got a strip center on the West Side of Cleveland. “Strip center”—strange term. It’s short for “shopping strip center.”
I don’t have any strip centers. I do have about 25 storefronts: Main Street–style buildings in Lakewood, Ohio, an inner-ring suburb of Cleveland. On the street level are stores. (I’ve rented to art galleries; they all go under. Things that don’t go under: beauty parlors, tanning salons, yoga studios, and bars.) Above the stores are apartments, about 160 suites in total. Like Disneyland’s Main Street, but with real mice.
###
How the world fell in love with quick-fix weight loss
First published online by Amanda Mitchison.
Ginevra Tamberi, a 21-year-old film studies student from Rome, has very tall, very skinny parents. Her brother can eat 4,000 calories a day and remains one of nature’s giraffes. But Ginevra is not so lucky. She eats one slice of bread and it goes down her throat and directly on to her bum.
Ginevra tried everything: the Aktins diet, the Dukan diet, the Scarsdale diet, the Zone diet, the cabbage diet, the onion diet. She saw a private nutritionist and a personal trainer. All to no avail.
In desperation she visited the plastic surgeon Marco Gasparotti. Ginevra says, “Everybody in Rome knows Gasparotti.” And everybody does, too: you cannot throw a brick in Italy and not hit Dr Gasparotti demonstrating his innovative techniques on some TV chat show. For Gasparotti is no slouch; he has a liposuction cannula to his name and has patented an elastocompressive cellulite-busting girdle called the Lipo Contour Elite Capri. He has also garnered countless international awards, and is at the very forefront of innovative ways of redraping skin and sucking out and resculpting fat that cannot be described to readers looking at this magazine over breakfast.
MORE .
###
The Baylor Bears are dominating in football and men and women’s basketball. The price of instant greatness? Just $60 million a year.
Baylor University, long the runt of the Big 12 college sports division, is in the midst of an athletic renaissance. In 2011, the face of its success was Heisman trophy-winning quarterback Robert Griffin III, who led the Bears to a top 25 finish and a thrilling win in the Alamo Bowl. But as The New York Times writes today, the NFL-bound star is just one piece of the mounting evidence that Baylor has, to the shock of many, transformed itself into one of the country’s elite college athletics programs. At least ten of its teams were nationally ranked between November and mid-January. Its women’s basketball team is tops in the country, and its men’s squad is a respectable number nine.
Winning hasn’t come cheap, though. The Times notes that in the dog-house days of 1995, the school’s entire athletic budget was a paltry $7.5 million, or roughly $11.1 million in current dollars. Today, that would hardly cover its coaching salaries. The school spends roughly $60 million on athletics, as illustrated in the chart below from the U.S. Department of Education, which tracks spending at university athletic programs. Its football team alone costs more than $14 million to operate.
MORE.
###
Osama bin Laden hid terror codes in two copies of the Bible
###
The “rarest insect in the world” also happens to be freaking enormousIn 1918, a battered British supply ship was forced to run aground off the coast of Lord Howe Island, a volcanic remnant located hundreds of miles off Australia’s eastern seaboard. There, the ship’s crew was received by the island’s famous Dryococelus australis, a positively massive, hand-sized species of stick insect known to Europeans as “tree lobsters.” But these impressive bugs were not long for this world.
In the nine days it took the ship’s crew members to repair their damaged vessel, a pack of stowaway rats had managed to jump ship and invade the island. A scourge had been unleashed upon the D. australis population. By 1920, the island had been overrun by rats, and the insects had vanished. The tree lobsters of Lord Howe — long believed to be endemic to the island — were presumed extinct.
READ.
###
Oldest Fossilized Forest: Entire Fossil Forest Dating Back 385 Million Years Unearthed
Identifying some of the key themes of contemporary political debate is easy enough. A glance at the media reveals that those who pass for our leaders are largely anti-democratic, elitist and have little compunction about intruding into our private lives. Working out how they reach the conclusions they do, understanding the internal logic or their approach, is more difficult.
In many ways, economics is the discipline best suited to the technocratic mindset. This has nothing to do with its traditional subject matter. It is not about debating how to produce goods and services or how to distribute them. Instead, it relates to how economics has emerged as an approach that distances itself from democratic politics and provides little room for human agency.
Anyone who has done a high-school course in economics is likely to have learned the basics of its technocratic approach from the start. Students have long been taught that economics is a ‘positive science’ – one based on facts rather than values. Politicians are entitled to their preferences, so the argument went, but economists are supposed to give them impartial advice based on an objective examination of the facts.
More recently this approach has been taken even further. The supposedly objective role of the technocrat-economist has become supreme, while the role of politics has been sidelined.
MORE.
###
Julie Sedivy is the lead author of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You And What This Says About You. She contributes regularly to Psychology Today and Language Log. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary, and can be found at juliesedivy.com and on Twitter/soldonlanguage.
Keith Chen, an economist from Yale, makes a startling claim in an unpublished working paper: people’s fiscal responsibility and healthy lifestyle choices depend in part on the grammar of their language.
Here’s the idea: Languages differ in the devices they offer to speakers who want to talk about the future. For some, like Spanish and Greek, you have to tack on a verb ending that explicitly marks future time—so, in Spanish, you would say escribo for the present tense (I write or I’m writing) and escribiré for the future tense (I will write). But other languages like Mandarin don’t require their verbs to be escorted by grammatical markers that convey future time—time is usually obvious from something else in the context. In Mandarin, you would say the equivalent of I write tomorrow, using the same verb form for both present and future.
Chen’s finding is that if you divide up a large number of the world’s languages into those that require a grammatical marker for future time and those that don’t, you see an interesting correlation: speakers of languages that force grammatical marking of the future have amassed a smaller retirement nest egg, smoke more, exercise less, and are more likely to be obese. Why would this be? The claim is that a sharp grammatical division between the present and future encourages people to conceive of the future as somehow dramatically different from the present, making it easier to put off behaviors that benefit your future self rather than your present self.
MORE.
Originally posted 2012-03-01 11:45:40. Republished by Blog Post Promoter