He Scares Chuck Norris

Andrew Sharp on Jadeveon Clowney:

On the sixth day God created Clowney and on the seventh day everyone was dead.
And all I'm saying is, after rereading those numbers from Feldman on Wednesday and rewatching that Michigan clip 10 or 20 times in the past 24 hours, it's clear that Clowney should not be playing college football. Send him to the NBA for a year so he can break 50 backboards, shut down LeBron James, and end the year by shattering Blake Griffin's clavicle and getting banned from the league for life. There is no good reason the Sacramento Kings shouldn't draft Jadeveon Clowney in June.
Or he could mentor at-risk youth. And by "mentor" we mean stalk teenagers and stare them in the face as they consider breaking the law. Want to reduce crime and scare kids into staying in school? Pay Clowney to be a truancy officer. Or put him in the NHL, for the simple reason that the world needs a 6-foot-6 dreadlocked freak of nature roaming the ice. Or let him interrogate terror suspects. Or just broadcast a six-month version of the NFL combine where we watch him do incredible shit. I don't know.
Any of these alternatives would be safer.

While I found this pretty humorous, I do think it playing with that gnawing knowledge in the back of our heads that football is becoming more and more dangerous.  The future of the sport will be interesting.

Space Bras?

Wired:

Back in 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, they were wearing custom-made suits crafted by people who had previously earned their living making bras and girdles. These very important people who played such a significant role in one of the great moments in history will soon have their story told on a big screen near you.
According to Deadline, Warner Bros. has hired Richard Cordiner to pen an adaptation of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, Nicholas de Monchaux’s book about the Playtex design team behind the Apollo outerwear. The book, released in 2011, “tells the story of the 21-layer spacesuit in 21 chapters addressing 21 topics relevant to the suit, the body, and the technology of the 20th century.” It also somehow manages to weave in details about cyborgs, latex, John F. Kennedy’s image, and a little bit of Christian Dior.
Obviously there’s no word yet on when this film could hit theaters, but amid this year’s summer slate of future-dystopia space stories — Oblivion, After Earth — news of a (presumably) happier tale of space exploration would be a welcome respite, especially if it can deliver something for fashion geeks and NASA nerds.

That is a bit of history I didn't realize.

Wealth on a Plane

The Coffinmaker

The Coffinmaker from Dan McComb on Vimeo.


If you are looking for a wooden coffin and want to support a monastery, check out the Trappists in Iowa.

Still Alive

With work and planting, things have been a tad busy.  But we're on the downhill side, we've got 55 acres of beans left.

Catholic Schools Struggle

I found this little piece interesting:

Private education as we have known it is on its way out, at both the K-12 and postsecondary levels. At the very least, it's headed for dramatic shrinkage, save for a handful of places and circumstances, to be replaced by a very different set of institutional, governance, financing, and education-delivery mechanisms.
Consider today's realities. Private K-12 enrollments are shrinking -- by almost 13 percent from 2000 to 2010. Catholic schools are closing right and left. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia, for example, announced in January that 44 of its 156 elementary will cease operations next month. (A few later won reprieves.) In addition, many independent schools (day schools and especially boarding schools) are having trouble filling their seats -- at least, filling them with their customary clientele of tuition-paying American students. Traditional nonprofit private colleges are also challenged to fill their classroom seats and dorms, to which they're responding by heavily discounting their tuitions and fees for more and more students.
Meanwhile, charter school enrollments are booming across the land.

44 of 156 schools closing?  Ouch.  Our local school is making small steps toward growth, but the classes there aren't nearly as big as they were back in my day.  I think they average about 20 kids a class, while we were closer to 30.  Right now, it looks like our school may see an enrollment increase, but around the region, schools are closing or merging.  

There is a chapter in American Catholic by Charles R. Morris titled "God's Bricklayer", which discusses the growth of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia under Cardinal Daugherty.  He was instrumental in building parishes and schools throughout Philadelphia and the suburbs in the early 20th century.  It appears that some of those schools have run their course.

Life is Improv

Via the Dish, David Zahl remembers Stephen Colbert's 2011 commencement speech at Northwestern University:

After I graduated from here, I moved down to Chicago and did improv. Now there are very few rules about improvisation, but one of the things I was taught early on is that you are not the most important person in the scene. Everybody else is. And if they are the most important people in the scene, you will naturally pay attention to them and serve them. But the good news is you’re in the scene too. So hopefully to them you’re the most important person, and they will serve you. No one is leading, you’re all following the follower, serving the servant. You cannot win improv.
And life is an improvisation. You have no idea what’s going to happen next and you are mostly just making things up as you go along. And like improv, you cannot win your life. Even when it might look like you’re winning. I have my own show, which I love doing. Full of very talented people ready to serve me. And it’s great. But at my best, I am serving them just as hard, and together, we serve a common idea, in this case the character Stephen Colbert, who it’s clear, isn’t interested in serving anyone. And a sure sign that things are going well is when no one can really remember whose idea was whose, or who should get the credit for what jokes. (Though naturally I get credit for all of them.)
But if we should serve others, and together serve some common goal or idea — for any one of you, what is that idea? And who are those people?
In my experience, you will truly serve only what you love, because, as the prophet says, service is love made visible.  If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve money. And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself, and you will have only yourself.
So no more winning. Instead, try to love others and serve others, and hopefully find those who love and serve you in return.
In closing, I’d like to apologize for being predictable. The New York Times has analyzed the hundreds of commencement speeches given so far in 2011, and found that “love and “service” were two of the most used words. I can only hope that because of my speech today, the word “brothel” comes in a close third.

Well said.  I'd like to think this applies to how I live my life, but sometimes I wonder. 

NASA Photo of the Day

May 17:

 

The Waterfall and the World at Night
Image Credit & Copyright: Stéphane Vetter (Nuits sacrées) Explanation: Above this boreal landscape, the arc of the Milky Way and shimmering aurorae flow through the night. Like an echo, below them lies Iceland's spectacular Godafoss, the Waterfall of the Gods. Shining just below the Milky Way, bright Jupiter is included in the panoramic nightscape recorded on March 9. Faint and diffuse, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) appears immersed in the auroral glow. The digital stitch of four frames is a first place winner in the 2013 International Earth and Sky Photo Contest on Dark Skies Importance organized by The World at Night. An evocative record of the beauty of planet Earth's night sky, all the contest's winning entries are featured in this video.

Cooking Ourselves

A big pile of petroleum coke from a Detroit refinery handling Tar Sands "oil" gets peoples' attention:

Much of the new coking investment has gone into refineries in the Midwest to allow them to take advantage of the oil sands. BP, the British energy company, is building what it describes as the second-largest coke refinery in Whiting, Ind. When completed, the unit will be able to process about 102,000 barrels of bitumen or other heavy oils a day.

And what about the leftover coke? The Environmental Protection Agency will no longer allow any new licenses permitting the burning of petroleum coke in the United States. But D. Mark Routt, a staff energy consultant at KBC Advanced Technologies in Houston, said that overseas companies saw it as a cheap alternative to low-grade coal. In China, it is used to generate electricity, adding to that country’s air-quality problems. There is also strong demand from India and Latin America for American petroleum coke, where it mainly fuels cement-making kilns.

“I’m not making a value statement, but it comes down to emission controls,” Mr. Routt said. “Other people don’t seem to have a problem, which is why it is going to Mexico, which is why it is going to China.”

“One man’s junk is another man’s treasure,” he said. One of the world’s largest dealers of petroleum coke is the Oxbow Corporation, which sells about 11 million tons of fuel-grade coke a year. It is owned by William I. Koch, a brother of David and Charles.

Lorne Stockman, who recently published a study on petroleum coke for the environmental group Oil Change International, says, “It’s really the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth,” he said.

Working the Tar Sands is just unsustainable.  There may be a ton of petroleum there, but we're just killing ourselves for it.  It is pretty clear why the Koch brothers spend so much money trying to convince useful idiots that climate change isn't real.

Austerity Works

If the plan is to make a recession into a Depression:

The past is a foreign country we like to think wasn't as smart as our own.

But if reality television wasn't proof enough, the financial crisis should put the lie to this intellectual narcissism. While the U.S. has muddled through its Great Recession, the euro zone is still mired in its new Great Depression -- and this despite 80 years of hard-won knowledge that should have made such a slump a barbarous relic.

The latest GDP numbers for the euro zone were brutal as usual. The 17-nation economy contracted for the sixth consecutive quarter in the beginning of 2013 -- longer even than in 2008-09 -- as it fell 0.2 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012. The entire bloc is either in a long recession, a new recession, or almost so. Indeed, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy continued their neverending slumps; Cyprus, the Netherlands, Finland and France fell into new slumps (and Slovenia likely would have too if it had reported numbers); while Austria, Belgium, and Germany only just avoided new slumps by growing 0.1 percent in the first quarter. Add it all up, and euro zone GDP is still 3.4 percent below where it was in 2007 -- compared to U.S. GDP growing 3.2 percent over that period, as you can see below in the chart from the Wall Street Journal.

Guess what: More austerity and less monetary stimulus were pretty horrible ideas (emphasis mine).

No fucking shit!  Keynes figured this shit out almost 80 years ago.  But conservatives are so damn dumb that not only do they not understand the theories Keynes espoused, they think the theories are stupid.  We've got a real world case to study right now, and they still don't get it.  Now, one of the most prominent austerians is arguing that Keynes is wrong because he was gay.  God Bless America, conservatives are stupid assholes. In the end, their problem is that they are trying to make an economic moral argument, but Depressions are amoral.  They destroy the wealth of the rich while crushing the souls of the poor, and conservatives want to make sure that "bad" folks get what's coming to them.  Hey dumbasses, it doesn't do any good to punish everybody just to make sure a few folks get what's coming to them.  Just watch the Germans.  They want to make sure the folks in the south get punished, but really it is just destroying the savings of the Germans themselves.  All those German bank deposits were loaned out to the countries to the east and the south, so the austerity just ends up making sure the Germans have to bail themselves and everybody else out after the suffering goes on long enough to get the sadists in the conservative world off.  But conservatives here want to bring the show to the U.S.  Idiots.