Michael Bates: January 2014 Archives
Cherokee Phoenix: Camp Gruber forced 2nd removal for Cherokees
"As war broke out in 1939 in Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for military preparedness, requiring the government to condemn land for military camps, including Camp Gruber in Muskogee County. That camp forced out more than 70 Cherokee families living on 50 square miles of restricted and allotment lands. ...
"Harold [Summerlin] was 12, the oldest of six children, when the government took 32,000 acres for Camp Gruber. He said his parents got a notice that they had 45 days to vacate.
"'The best I remember they offered us $1,200 for the farm. I think it was 160 acres, two houses, two ponds, one barn, a chicken house and an orchard. My dad hired a lawyer and got $400 more, but the lawyer got half of that,' Harold said. 'We moved out around early July of 1942. We moved a couple of miles across the Cherokee County line into Sequoyah County.'"
TSA Agent Confession - POLITICO Magazine
"We knew the full-body scanners didn't work before they were even installed. Not long after the Underwear Bomber incident, all TSA officers at O'Hare were informed that training for the Rapiscan Systems full-body scanners would soon begin. The machines cost about $150,000 a pop.
"Our instructor was a balding middle-aged man who shrugged his shoulders after everything he said, as though in apology. At the conclusion of our crash course, one of the officers in our class asked him to tell us, off the record, what he really thought about the machines.
"'They're s[***],' he said, shrugging. He said we wouldn't be able to distinguish plastic explosives from body fat and that guns were practically invisible if they were turned sideways in a pocket."
Tom Coburn Leaves a Lonely Place Lonelier - Margaret Carlson - Bloomberg
"In the Senate, Coburn pushed the sharpened-pencil auditors at the General Accounting Office to find duplication, fraud, waste and abuse in government. This quest wasn't merely a rhetorical weapon; he acted because no one else was really digging and because both sides were on the take. Critics scoffed at the small-bore savings, which seemed to overlook the goodies enjoyed by such Republican allies as investment bankers and oil companies. Still, just because you can't get at everything doesn't mean you don't get at something. You have to start somewhere....
"Reporters don't get to choose the senators they cover, but you can choose who you ask over to dinner. He was the most ego-free, funny and sensible person you could meet -- and not just by the low standards of the current Congress. It helped that he was a country doctor from Muskogee (4,000 babies delivered) and that he preferred to be called Dr. Coburn. He admitted that his mother-in-law, Mamie, liked my political positions better than he did and he asked me to write her a note. When a new senator, Democrat or Republican, arrived in town, Coburn always stopped by for a visit because, he said, Washington is such "a lonely place." Come the end of the month, it will be even more so.
7 Reasons the TSA Sucks (A Security Expert's Perspective) | Cracked.com
"The TSA couldn't protect you from a 6-year-old with a water balloon. What are my qualifications for saying that? My name is Rafi Sela, and I was the head of security for the world's safest airport. Here's what your country does wrong."
honest toddler: Food Review: Rice Cakes
"Rice cakes get negative 800 points for taste. The flavor of rice cakes is that of stagnant air. It reminds me of when I take a deep breath in a closet. I felt like I was eating someone else's sigh.
"I would like to propose some alternate names for this product: Starvation Disks. Sadness Patties. Hatred Circles.
"Rice Cakes need butter but they don't deserve it."
Pies and Puggles: Staunton, Virginia: An Epic Love Letter
A tribute to a historic town at the gateway to the Shenandoah Valley. One excellent local site not mentioned: The Frontier Culture Museum, which has a special emphasis on the Ulster Scots (Scotch-Irish) who settled the American frontier and lent their fighting spirit to our nation's struggle for independence.
Pies and Puggles: Staunton, Virginia: An Epic Love Letter
A tribute to a historic town at the gateway to the Shenandoah Valley. One excellent local site not mentioned: The Frontier Culture Museum, which has a special emphasis on the Ulster Scots (Scotch-Irish) who settled the American frontier and lent their fighting spirit to our nation's struggle for independence.
27 Things You Need To Know About Tulsa Before You Move There - Movoto
Mostly good stuff: Places to play like Tulsa's zoo and parks, places to eat like Brookside and the Blue Dome district, places to relax with friends like Coffee House on Cherry Street and Hodges' Bend.
Intellectual Discipleship? Faithful Thinking for Faithful Living - AlbertMohler.com
"A God-centered worldview brings every issue, question, and cultural concern into submission to all that the Bible reveals, and it frames all understanding within the ultimate purpose of bringing greater glory to God. This task of bringing every thought captive to Christ requires more than episodic Christian thinking and is to be understood as the task of the church, and not merely the concern of individual believers. The recovery of the Christian mind and the development of a comprehensive Christian worldview will require the deepest theological reflection, the most consecrated application of scholarship, the most sensitive commitment to compassion, and the courage to face all questions without fear."
Watchdog: Abortion fees hidden in Obamacare premiums
"Insurance companies working under the Obamacare umbrella have secretly added a surcharge to cover the cost of abortions, an apparent violation of federal law that forbids the practice, congressional leaders charge.
"Consumers signing up for insurance in an Obamacare exchange won't find a single sentence telling them that they will pay at least $1 a month to fund abortions.
"'The president promised when the health care bill passed that it would not cover abortion. We knew that was an empty promise as the bill stipulated a $1 a month surcharge for plans that covered abortions,' said Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., who chairs the House's Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Health. 'On top of that ... it's near impossible to decipher which plans include abortion and at what cost!'"
On masculinity and the War on Poverty | WashingtonExaminer.com
"That there are dramatically fewer men willing and able to safeguard family prosperity is perhaps America's greatest -- and most unrecognized -- problem.
"Consider Sunday's 'Shattering the Glass Ceiling' discussion on ABC's 'This Week.' Lamenting unrealized opportunities and unsolved problems when 'women aren't fully utilized,' businesswoman Carly Fiorina and co-panelists were oblivious about two key facts.
"First, two times more men than women aged 25-34 languish in their parents' basement far below the glass ceiling, according to U.S. Census data. Second, women now outperform men in nearly every measure of social, academic and vocational well-being."
http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2014/01/27/conservatives-must-break-the-establishments-rules-n1784170/page/full">Conservatives Must Break the Establishment's Rules - Kurt Schlichter
"Have you noticed how the Establishment invents a lot of special rules that only seem to apply to conservatives? Have you noticed how these rules always involve preventing conservatives from winning? And have you noticed how these rules never, ever seem to apply to our enemies?...
"There's another rule we didn't hear about until Chris Christie stopped haranguing conservatives long enough to explain why his administration thought it was cool to abuse the public for its own personal amusement. Apparently, we're supposed to offer our credibility in support of Christie in his time of need. He's a Republican you know, and the rules say that when a Republican moderate needs conservatives, we conservatives are duty bound to come running....
"The Establishment's rules also require that we stop demanding that Republicans who claim to be conservative act like conservatives, support conservatism and, you know, be conservative. The rules are there because this short-sighted insistence by conservatives on conservatism is somehow certain to prevent the success of conservatism. We conservatives are just too unsophisticated to understand that true conservatism will only be achieved by a strategy of surrender, compromise and acquiescence to expanded government power."
The Surprising Satisfactions of a Home Funeral | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian
Two deaths within a month, the author's father and father-in-law, and two very different ways of dealing with the remains: "In life both men had been devout Catholics, but one was a politically conservative advertising man, the other a left-wing journalist; you'll have to trust me that they liked each other. One was buried, one was cremated. One was embalmed, one wasn't. One had a typical American funeral-home cotillion; one was laid out at home in a homemade coffin. I could tell you that sorting out the details of these two dead fathers taught me a lot about life, which is true. But what I really want to share is that dead bodies are perfectly OK to be around, for a while."
Those Who Know | This Land Press
A fascinating profile of Mike Samara, owner of the Celebrity Club Restaurant at 31st and Yale in Tulsa, and you can learn about "liquor-by-the-wink" -- the hoops you had to jump through to get an adult beverage with your meal before the liquor laws were changed in 1984. Particularly interesting to know that several well-known Oklahoma families of have roots in the same southern Lebanon village, and to read about all the restaurants and businesses that the Samaras have been involved in over the years.
'Helpless and Hopeless Creatures' : The Other McCain
"My point is that social conservatism is more intellectually respectable than most people imagine, but for 20 years, those who are serious about fighting the Culture War have been shunted aside and told to be quiet, lest they cause Republicans to lose elections.
"Oddly, however, the GOP's active suppression of social conservatism has not translated to Republican electoral dominance. The nomination of John McCain -- whose profound contempt for social conservatives is no secret -- did not produce a GOP triumph, nor was the Massachusetts moderate Mitt Romney able to dodge the remarkably counterfactual Democrat propaganda that painted him as an extremist Trojan Horse, an agent of the Republican Taliban.
"The fundamental problem here is probably too large to be reduced to a blog post, and I'm not in a mood to tackle the whole problem today, but let's say this: Systemic incentives encourage conservative writers to devote themselves to the day-to-day political headlines, and to identify as 'important' only those issues which directly and immediately affect the Republican Party.
"Meanwhile, liberals -- who comprise 80%-90% of journalists and academics -- are writing about Everything Else, including sexuality, marriage and parenthood. So it is that, outside of whatever issues bear directly on the daily R-vs.-D political battle, nearly everything you read is written by liberals."
NFIB: 8 Surefire Ways to Demotivate Your Employees
Most of these apply to parenting, too: "Public criticism, failing to provide praise, not following up, give unachievable goals or deadlines, not explaining your actions or sharing company data, implied threats, not honoring creative thinking and problem solving, micromanagement."
MORE: ragan.com: Top 10 ways to ensure your best people will quit. Some overlap with the NFIB story, but emphasizes the importance of an employee retention strategy, with periodic retention interviews with key employees. Don't do this: "Wait until a great employee is walking out the door instead and conduct an exit interview to see what you could have done differently so they would not have gone out looking for another job."
NOTE: I've never worked for a company that does these things.
She couldn't speak, so she prayed by writing a string of indecipherable letters on index cards. Posting the cards on the internet, the pattern was quickly identified -- the first letter of each word. Some are obvious (the Lord's Prayer), some are still in the process of being deciphered on this Metafilter thread.
6 Simple Rituals To Reach Your Potential Every Day | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
1. Drink a glass of water when you wake up.
2. Define your top 3.
3. The 50/10 Rule.
4. Move and sweat daily.
5. Express gratitude.
6. Reflect daily.
Ace of Spades HQ: What I Learned on Wikipedia Today
Swaddle, wrestle, batter, patter, dazzle, bobble, flutter, glimmer, waddle, puddle, and jostle are all examples of verb formation by adding a "frequentive" ending, usually -le or -er, with consonant shifts and duplication for euphony.
Freedom in the 50 States 2013 | Oklahoma Overall Freedom | Mercatus Center
Oklahoma ranks 5th overall, improving from 31st place in 2001.
Lower East Side Aerial View Flashback | LESNYC
"The landscape of the Lower East Side has drastically changed through out the years. Take a look at these remarkable photos of yesterday's LES taken by Fairchild Aerial Surveys along with a visual diagram showing the development in the neighborhood over the last 80 years. The photos capture the Lower East Side shortly before the NYC Housing Authority and Robert Moses demolished hundreds of old tenement buildings to make way for future housing projects, displacing thousands of residents in the process."
The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence - Adam Grant - The Atlantic
"Emotional intelligence is important, but the unbridled enthusiasm has obscured a dark side. New evidence shows that when people hone their emotional skills, they become better at manipulating others. When you're good at controlling your own emotions, you can disguise your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can tug at their heartstrings and motivate them to act against their own best interests...
"The authors call this the awestruck effect, but it might just as easily be described as the dumbstruck effect....
"Leaders who master emotions can rob us of our capacities to reason. If their values are out of step with our own, the results can be devastating. New evidence suggests that when people have self-serving motives, emotional intelligence becomes a weapon for manipulating others....
"There was no relationship whatsoever between emotional intelligence and helping: Helping is driven by our motivations and values, not by our abilities to understand and manage emotions. However, emotional intelligence was consequential when examining a different behavior: challenging the status quo by speaking up with ideas and suggestions for improvement.
"Emotionally intelligent employees spoke up more often and more effectively. When colleagues were treated unjustly, they felt the righteous indignation to speak up, but were able to keep their anger in check and reason with their colleagues...."
Paws, Pee and Mice: Cats among Medieval Manuscripts | medievalfragments
"Hic non defectus est, sed cattus minxit desuper nocte quadam. Confundatur pessimus cattus qui minxit super librum istum in nocte Daventrie, et consimiliter omnes alii propter illum. Et cavendum valde ne permittantur libri aperti per noctem ubi cattie venire possunt."
Why I used to like Garrison Keillor. | Captain Digital
"Keillor was - and is - at his best when he pokes gentle fun at the day-to-day lives of people, hypocrisy, and human nature. As he became more political, his comments became more mean-spirited and less funny."
My comment:
I started listening about the same time [mid '80s] and listened religiously until he said farewell in 1987. I loved the gentle, affectionate satire of Keillor's Wobegon monologues, as well as the music (Butch Thomson Trio), spoof ads (Bertha's Kitty Boutique, in the Dales), and skits (Buster the Show Dog). He had some great guests, too, like fiddler Johnny Gimble, Michael Doucette, and Doc Watson. He introduced Bob and Ray to a new generation of radio fans.
Things were different after his comeback, and his pronouncements became increasingly divisive and bitter, perhaps reflecting the bitterness of his personal circumstances. I stopped listening.
A couple of years ago, I was given a pair of tickets to his appearance at Oral Roberts University. It was a birthday gift from a relative who remembered that I had been a big fan of his. To my pleasant surprise, he told Lake Wobegon stories and stayed entirely away from politics. Maybe he's relearning how not to poke his paying customers in the eye.
MORE: Spy magazine's prank on Keillor (in the early '90s, if I recall correctly) revealed a different side of the author.
Voter fraud: We've got proof it's easy « Watchdog.org
"New York City's watchdog Department of Investigations has just provided the latest evidence of how easy it is to commit voter fraud that is almost undetectable.
"DOI undercover agents showed up at 63 polling places last fall and pretended to be voters who should have been turned away by election officials; the agents assumed the names of individuals who had died or moved out of town, or who were sitting in jail. In 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, the testers were allowed to vote. Those who did vote cast only a write-in vote for a 'John Test' so as to not affect the outcome of any contest. DOI published its findings two weeks ago in a searing 70-page report accusing the city's Board of Elections of incompetence, waste, nepotism, and lax procedures.
[Here is a direct link to the New York City Department of Investigations report on the city's election bureau (72 pages, PDF).]
"The Board of Elections, which has a $750 million annual budget and a workforce of 350 people, reacted in classic bureaucratic fashion, which prompted one city paper to deride it as 'a 21st-century survivor of Boss Tweed-style politics.' The Board approved a resolution referring the DOI's investigators for prosecution. It also asked the state's attorney general to determine whether DOI had violated the civil rights of voters who had moved or are felons, and it sent a letter of complaint to Mayor Bill de Blasio."
MORE: WNYC's news story on the report.
MORE: A list of recent voter fraud stories, collected by the Republican National Lawyers Association.
Movable Type downloads archive
Free, open-source versions of MT4 and MT5 are here.
CLASSIC: Fundamentally Transforming America
Script by Lee Cary. Photoshop illustration by Biff Spackle. Via ClashDaily.
"1. Lower the number of employed along with the intensity of their employment with more part-time work.
"2. Increase dependency on government to support the unemployed, and tip the balance past 50-50.
"3. Stretch the ability of the productive to support the unproductive.
"4. Stress the system until the dense urban centers explode with civil unrest driven by social media.
"5. Use curfews and martial law to quell the unrest, leading to strict regimentation of the civilian populace -- until the system is on the cusp of a catastrophic collapse.
"6. The central government steps in to save the day, and brings order with boots on necks, and statists of both parties agree: It must be done."
MORE:
American Thinker: Cloward-Piven government
Doug Ross @ Journal: Cloward-Piven Democrats finally succeed
Historical Metropolitan Populations of the United States - Peakbagger.com
A chart showing the top 20 metro areas in population from the first census in 1790 to the most recent census in 2010. The lines show the path of each city. You can watch the rise (1820-1860) and fall (1960-1990) of the industrial Midwest, and the ascent of the Sun Belt, starting in the 1940s. Salem, Mass., was #5 in 1790, and remained in the top 10 until dropping off the chart in 1830.
"By 1930 Washington, DC was ranked #17, down from #5 in 1820. But the expansion of the federal government during the New Deal era and World War II propelled it up to #8 by 1970. It is the only metro area with a U-shaped curve, with a steady decline in rank followed by a steady rise."
9 Quirky Habits Spirit Filled Christians Should Break | Spirit Filled Christian Living
"I have heard people tell people to 'repeat after me' when praying for them to receive their prayer language. It used to be a running joke in some circles that a person 'learned' how to speak at tongues at ORU because they would always start off with the word 'shondala'."
YouGov poll: Bill Gates is the most admired person in the world
Rush Limbaugh beat Hillary Clinton in the US poll. Biggest surprise: The most admired British politician in Britain is Nigel Farage, head of the UK Independence Party. Retired Labourite Tony Benn and Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson are the only other pols to make the top 30; Prime Minister David Cameron is nowhere to be seen.
Conservative insurgents strike blow against GOP Establishment | WashingtonExaminer.com
Tim Carney explains the mechanisms (campaign cash and jobs) by which the Republican Establishment wields power and influence over congressional staffers, and how conservative insurgents and are defeating these mechanisms with alternative ways to access contributions and career opportunities.
New Scandal, Same Old Christie | National Review Online
Andrew McCarthy gives another reason not to trust Chris Christie. It's pretty clear Chris Christie is all about promoting Chris Christie.
Oklahoma Precincts and Districts, 2012 at GeoCommons
Layered over Bing maps, see where precinct, state house and senate district, and congressional district boundaries lie. Different boundary sets can be toggled off and on.
IWDRM: George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove
One of the funniest animated GIFs I've ever seen. In the war room, in front of the big board, his mouth (chewing gum) and his left eyebrow are the only things that move.
Harvard Law Review Forum: Limits on the Treaty Power
Can the President and the Senate override the Constitution by approving a treaty? U. S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) presents a scholarly essay on constitutional provisions and Supreme Court decisions regarding limits on the power of the president to make treaties and the power of Congress to implement the terms of a treaty. Medellin v. Texas (which Cruz argued as the state's Solicitor General), Missouri v. Holland, and an important pending case, Bond v. U. S. are discussed in depth, along with many other Court decisions.
"As Thomas Jefferson explained, the treaty power 'must have meant to except . . . the rights reserved to the states; for surely the President and Senate cannot do by treaty what the whole government is interdicted from doing in any way.'"
"Congress cannot, by legislation, enlarge the federal jurisdiction, nor can it be enlarged under the treaty-making power." -- Mayor of New Orleans v. United States, 35 U.S. (10 Pet.) 662, 736 (1836).
The Open-Office Trap : The New Yorker
"The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve. In June, 1997, a large oil and gas company in western Canada asked a group of psychologists at the University of Calgary to monitor workers as they transitioned from a traditional office arrangement to an open one. The psychologists assessed the employees' satisfaction with their surroundings, as well as their stress level, job performance, and interpersonal relationships before the transition, four weeks after the transition, and, finally, six months afterward. The employees suffered according to every measure: the new space was disruptive, stressful, and cumbersome, and, instead of feeling closer, coworkers felt distant, dissatisfied, and resentful. Productivity fell."
