Tom Faranda's Folly

My brother Phil gets quoted (again) in the media

Winter didn't freeze out region's homebuyers

For the second consecutive month there has been a decline in sales of existing homes nationally. The drop was 6 percent in December, and more of the same is expected for January and February when those numbers are announced, said the National Association of Realtors.

******

Not so for markets in Westchester.

There has been good business in this post holiday and pre-spring period, said J. Philip Faranda, broker/owner of Philip Real Estate LLC, and president of Hudson Gateway MLS.

"I can understand how the national numbers would be dragged down a bit by the very extreme weather we see in other regions of the country. Overall, I expect the market to catch up as people dig out in the snow belt," he added.

Olympic ice dance champs do their Indian folk dance

Charlie Davis and Meryl White. I didn't pay much attention to the Winter Games, but my friend and business associate Judy insisted I watch some of the Davis and White youtube video posted performances. This is from 2010.

there's something wrong with anyone who isn't impressed with this.

 

Nice story: Mom gives birth at 68th and 3rd.

And then help from Good Samaritans.

 

Good news - cold weather is killing off stinkbugs!

Although we've had a few around our house.

Up to 95% mortality according to this National Geographic posting.

Be glad you’re not an Asian stinkbug, which are dying off in large numbers due to the cold, a new experiment shows. The invasive insect, commonly called the brown marmorated stinkbug, has been plaguing homes and devouring agricultural crops in 38 states.

 

Thomas Kuhar, a professor of entomology at Virginia Tech, and his team have been gathering stinkbugs for the past three years near his campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, to use in lab experiments. The bugs spend the winter outside in insulated buckets that mimic the walls, shingles, and attics that they inhabit when the temperature drops.

 

That normally works out quite well for the bugs—but this year stinkbugs have been, well, dropping like flies.

 

“In the previous two years, natural mortality averaged about 20-25 percent,” he wrote in an email. In January 2014, however, Kuhar’s team discovered that the subfreezing temperatures had killed off 95 percent of the population.

 

Normally the bugs have a twofold strategy for dealing with cold weather: first holing up in those walls or attics, and then activating cryoprotectants in their body that act like antifreeze, explained Kuhar. (See video: “How Arctic Frogs Survive Being Frozen Alive.”)

 

But Kuhar’s recent observations suggest that in weather this extreme, the stinkbug’s natural defense mechanisms may not be enough—even though they’re generally better adapted to colder climates.

Rugby: Good game - Scotland vs. Italy, Six Nations

Played in Rome.

 

Kimmel: (funny) Liam Nessen threatens audience member!!

Already 200,000 views on youtube. A set-up of course.

 

The strange deaths of two former Navy SEALS

Very strange. Neither had a history of drug use.

The larger mystery was how two men in their 40s who had endured the grueling work of Navy SEALs — one of them surviving multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan — ended up dying together in the cramped quarters of the Maersk Alabama, a ship made famous by a 2009 pirate hijacking that was portrayed in the Oscar-nominated movie “Captain Phillips.”

While veterans, especially those returning from war zones, have shown a high prevalence of substance abuse and other risky behaviors, friends, family and acquaintances of the two men said they seemed to have adjusted well to civilian life after years in the military. They were known as much for their zest for life as their hulking physiques.

Still, long days at sea guarding against piracy — a threat that has receded significantly in recent years — were a stark contrast to their past lives in an elite military unit. Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Kennedy worked for a private security company, Trident Group, protecting the Maersk Alabama’s crew and cargo from attacks. Boredom, both men had told friends, was the real enemy on the open sea.

People who knew the men expressed shock that either would have used heroin, and former crew members on the Maersk said drug use was prohibited. When Jeremy White, a former Navy reservist and workout partner of Mr. Kennedy — so clean cut and chiseled that he was nicknamed Captain America — was asked about possible drug use by his friend, he said, “There’s no way you can do their job and that.”

Gold find! What can happen when you walk your dog. ...

The full story below the video. This is from the Telegraph (UK).

 

Published on Feb 26, 2014

A California couple out walking their dog on their property stumbled across a modern-day bonanza: $10 million (£5.9m) in rare, mint-condition gold coins buried in the shadow of an old tree.

Nearly all of the 1,427 coins, dating from 1847 to 1894, are in uncirculated, mint condition, said David Hall, co-founder of Professional Coin Grading Service of Santa Ana, which recently authenticated them.

Although the face value of the gold pieces only adds up to about $27,000 (£16,100), some of them are so rare that coin experts say they could fetch nearly $1 million a piece.

The pair are choosing to remain anonymous, in part to avoid a renewed gold rush to their property by modern-day prospectors armed with metal detectors.

They plan to put most of the coins up for sale through Amazon while holding onto a few keepsakes.

Before they sell them, they are loaning some to the American Numismatic Association for its National Money Show, which opens on Thursday in Atlanta.

What makes their find particularly valuable, is that almost all of the coins are in near-perfect condition.

That means that whoever put them into the ground likely hid them away as soon as they were put into circulation.

Because paper money was illegal in California until the 1870s, Mr Hall added, it's extremely rare to find any coins from before that of such high quality.

The coins, in $5, $10 and $20 denominations, were stored more or less in chronological order, McCarthy said, with the 1840s and 1850s pieces going into one canister until it was filled, then new coins going into the next one and the next one after that.

The dates and the method indicated that whoever put them there was using the ground as their personal bank and that they weren't swooped up all at once in a robbery.

Although most of the coins were minted in San Francisco, one $5 gold piece came from as far away as Georgia.

The coins were found along a path the couple had walked for years.

On the day they found them last spring, the woman had bent over to examine an old rusty can that erosion had caused to pop slightly out of the ground.

 

A quick, fun science quiz

Sent to me by my friend Ellen.

I got one wrong out of 13 - I'd be embarrassed to 'fess up as to which one ...

 

Science and Technology Knowledge Quiz

 

http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/science-knowledge/

 

 

Great! Gov. Jindal (LA) vs. Gov. Malloy (CT)

Easy to tell the Democrat from the Republican! This followed a meeting of a number of governors with the President.

 

Discussion: the disease that killed Harold Ramis

Lots of publicity the last couple of days about autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, which I'd never heard of, because of the death of actor and scriptwriter ("Ghostbusters) Harold Ramis.

Here is a somewhat detailed discussion of the diesease.

Piers Morgan co-workers happy he was fired by CNN

He was/is a pompous, condescending prig.

“He was always such an a------ to people working for him,” one insider says of the bombastic Brit. Morgan’s last show is likely to be this week, but no specific date has been set. We hear it was low ratings and a bad attitude that killed it, and the decision was made by network boss Jeff Zucker. “The makeup girls suffered the worst — he was rude and belligerent,” says our source. “The general feeling is Morgan didn’t show any respect to anyone working under him — the people who were trying to make him look good.”

Last Thursday, “Piers Morgan” was seen by just 364,000 total viewers, according to Nielsen. That was easily beaten by Fox News’ “The Kelly File” (1.9 million) and MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show” (925,000). Morgan was questioned in November in London by cops investigating phone hacking, but a CNN spokeswoman said that interview was not a factor in his show being canned.

Krauthammer: "The Myth of Settled Science" re: climate change

Great column (Krauthammer is a scientist; graduate of Harvard Medical School), dead on in his evaluation and explanation of how science works.  Hit the link for the whole column.

I repeat: I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier. I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I also believe that those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30 or 50 years are white-coated propagandists.

“The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist in chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.” Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge. Take a non-climate example. It was long assumed that mammograms help reduce breast cancer deaths. This fact was so settled that Obamacare requires every insurance plan to offer mammograms (for free, no less) or be subject to termination.

Now we learn from a massive randomized study — 90,000 women followed for 25 years — that mammograms may have no effect on breast cancer deaths. Indeed, one out of five of those diagnosed by mammogram receives unnecessary radiation, chemo or surgery.

So much for settledness. And climate is less well understood than breast cancer. If climate science is settled, why do its predictions keep changing? And how is it that the great physicist Freeman Dyson, who did some climate research in the late 1970s, thinks today’s climate-change Cassandras are hopelessly mistaken?

They deal with the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans, argues Dyson, ignoring the effect of biology, i.e., vegetation and topsoil. Further, their predictions rest on models they fall in love with: “You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as being real.” Not surprisingly, these models have been “consistently and spectacularly wrong” in their predictions, write atmospheric scientists Richard McNider and John Christy — and always, amazingly, in the same direction.

******

Climate-change proponents have made their cause a matter of fealty and faith. For folks who pretend to be brave carriers of the scientific ethic, there’s more than a tinge of religion in their jeremiads. If you whore after other gods, the Bible tells us, “the Lord’s wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit” (Deuteronomy 11).

Sounds like California. Except that today there’s a new god, the Earth Mother. And a new set of sins — burning coal and driving a fully equipped F-150.

But whoring is whoring, and the gods must be appeased. So if California burns, you send your high priest (in carbon -belching Air Force One, but never mind) to the bone-dry land to offer up, on behalf of the repentant congregation, a $1 billion burnt offering called a “climate resilience fund.”

Ah, settled science in action.

Obamacare example: woman loses her cancer med

Same story. Prior affordable coverage that provides a life-saving medication is cancelled and the woman - who knows the health insurance ropes - she runs a medical practice - is toast. The author is a college president.

"If you like your coverage you can keep your coverage."

Stephen Blackwood: ObamaCare and My Mother's Cancer Medicine. The news was dumbfounding. She used to have a policy that covered the drug that kept her alive. Now she's on her own.

Carcinoid, a form of neuroendocrine cancer, is a terminal disease but generally responds well to treatment by Sandostatin, a drug that slows tumor growth and reduces (but does not eliminate) the symptoms of fatigue, nausea and gastrointestinal dysfunction. My mother received a painful shot twice a month and often couldn't sit comfortably for days afterward.

******

And then in November, along with millions of other Americans, she lost her health insurance. She'd had a Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan for nearly 20 years. It was expensive, but given that it covered her very expensive treatment, it was a terrific plan. It gave her access to any specialist or surgeon, and to the Sandostatin and other medications that were keeping her alive.

******

The news was dumbfounding. This is a woman who had an affordable health plan that covered her condition. Our lawmakers weren't happy with that because . . . they wanted plans that were affordable and covered her condition. So they gave her a new one. It doesn't cover her condition and it's completely unaffordable.

Though I'm no expert on ObamaCare (at 10,000 pages, who could be?), I understand that the intention—or at least the rhetorical justification—of this legislation was to provide coverage for those who didn't have it. But there is something deeply and incontestably perverse about a law that so distorts and undermines the free activity of individuals that they can no longer buy and sell the goods and services that keep them alive. ObamaCare made my mother's old plan illegal, and it forced her to buy a new plan that would accelerate her disease and death. She awaits an appeal with her insurer.

Will this injustice be remedied, for her and for millions of others? Or is my mother to die because she can no longer afford the treatment that keeps her alive?

******

The "Affordable" Care Act is a brutal, Procrustean disaster. In principle, it violates the irreducible particularity of human life, and in practice it will cause many individuals to suffer and die. We can do better, and we must.

 

Jane Fonda - PO'd about being 76

Long article in the Mail online (UK). Not sure why I'm posting this. ... Yawn.

'I have so little time left!' Jane Fonda, 76, reveals she can't stop crying as she comes to terms with her own mortality

 

Rugby: Ireland vs. England, Six Nations Tournament

Played at Twickenham.

 

A tough winter; but here's Russian winter

Forwarded from my friend Ellen.

And

Senator McCain laughs @ Susan Rice explanation

Remember - Benghazi murders caused by a video. "... It's a little embarrassing"? No, a patent disgrace.

WSJ Op ed "I'm Black, Don't Abort Me"

An effort by an African-American writer to call out other African-American "intellectuals" and "journalists" (I'm using the terms very loosely!).

"I'm Black, Don't Shoot Me," is the website headline of a column in Friday's Washington Post by Eugene Robinson.

The column is a response to last week's verdict in the Michael Dunn trial. Jordan Davis, a black 17-year-old, was shot dead in his car by Dunn during a dispute over loud music. Dunn was found guilty on three counts of attempted second-degree murder—three other teenagers were in the car with Davis and survived—and could spend the rest of his life in prison. But the fact that the jury hung on the first-degree murder charge stemming from Davis's death has some black liberals in high dudgeon.

******

According to the latest Justice Department figures, blacks make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but represent 50 percent of homicide victims. Moreover, black offenders kill 90 percent of black murder victims. And in the vast majority of interracial crimes, the victim is white and the perpetrator is black. In 2008 there were about 520,000 interracial violent crimes reported, and 82.5 percent were black-on-white, while just 17.5 percent were white-on-black. Messrs. Robinson and Coates would have us believe that black people in America should be more fearful of the Michael Dunns and George Zimmermans than of fellow blacks. Which is preposterous.

What these crimes statistics don't show is how early the black-on-black violence begins. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has just released a report showing that more black babies in the city are aborted than born. In 2012, there were 6,570 more abortions than live births of black children. ... Blacks are 25 percent of New York's population, but the black babies aborted were more than 42% of all abortions.

Perhaps that might interest black liberals who want to downplay black-on-black violence and lecture us about the value that whites place on black lives.

Yanks pumped about new pitcher Tanaka

The guy from Japan, being paid $225 million.

Yankees in awe of Masahiro Tanaka’s split-fingered fastball

Austin Romine watched the pitch leave Masahiro Tanaka’s glove, then heard it hit Brian McCann’s glove behind him. He just had no idea what he had just seen.

“I had to turn around and ask what the pitch was,” said Romine, who was taking live batting practice against the Yankees’ new star pitcher. “I’ve never seen a ball move like that before. It’s special.”

 

Pope + Pope Emeritus @ Cardinal Ceremony

Ukrainian medic's "last" tweet (luckily not)

Shot in the neck, she thought she was dying.

 

Facebook $16 bil. purchase of WhatsApp explained in 90 seconds

On the Telegraph (UK) website. WhatsApp is very popular in other countries, not so much (yet) in the USA.

Worth $16 billion? That's hotly debated. And I have no real clue about it. 

 

How the digital age and social media are changing wife/hubby communications

From my friend Linda - pretty good -

 

We had a power outage at my place this morning and my PC, laptop, TV, DVD, iPad and my new surround-sound music system were all shut down.  Then, I discovered that my iPhone battery was flat and to top it off, it was snowing outside so I couldn’t play golf.  I went into the kitchen to make coffee and then I remembered that this also needs power, so I talked with my wife for a few hours.

 

She seems like a nice person.

Farmer's Almanac vs. Gov't. Climate Scientists: Almanac wins

Really good article.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center (CPC) predicted temperatures would be “above normal from November through January across much of the lower 48 states.”

“Not one of our better forecasts,” Mike Halpert, the Climate Prediction Center’s acting director, told Bloomberg Businessweek.

******

Who could have predicted such a harsh winter? The Farmers Almanac did, according to a CBS News report from August 2013. The nearly 200-year old publication hit newsstands last summer and predicted that “a winter storm will hit the Northeast around the time the Super Bowl is played at MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands in New Jersey,” and also predicted “a colder-than-normal winter for two-thirds of the country and heavy snowfall in the Midwest, Great Lakes and New England.”

“We’re using a very strong four-letter word to describe this winter, which is C-O-L-D. It’s going to be very cold,” Sandi Duncan, the almanac’s managing editor, told CBS News in August.

 

Neat! "Beauty of Mathematics"

I don't usually go for these slightly syrupy pictures/videos but I thought this was pretty cool. As is often the case, on youtube comments you'll find some pretty nasty ones. you wonder what people are afraid of.

 

Krauthammer on FCC "study"

He's right of course.

 

WSJ op ed on the FCC and the first amendment

This op ed was in the Journal on February 10th, and is suddenly drawing some attention. Drudge linked to it yesterday.

Pretty outrageous. And the author, who I'd never heard of, is himself an FCC Commissioner. This certainly won't help his career.

The FCC Wades Into the Newsroom Why is the agency studying 'perceived station bias' and asking about coverage choices?

... everyone should agree on this: The government has no place pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories.

Unfortunately, the Federal Communications Commission, where I am a commissioner, does not agree. Last May the FCC proposed an initiative to thrust the federal government into newsrooms across the country. With its "Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs," or CIN, the agency plans to send researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run. A field test in Columbia, S.C., is scheduled to begin this spring.

The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about "the process by which stories are selected" and how often stations cover "critical information needs," along with "perceived station bias" and "perceived responsiveness to underserved populations."

******

The FCC says the study is merely an objective fact-finding mission. The results will inform a report that the FCC must submit to Congress every three years on eliminating barriers to entry for entrepreneurs and small businesses in the communications industry.

This claim is peculiar. How can the news judgments made by editors and station managers impede small businesses from entering the broadcast industry? And why does the CIN study include newspapers when the FCC has no authority to regulate print media?

Kimmel: "Obamacare-care" - very funny

UPDATE: Here's an interesting short commentary on why nobody raised their hands. Perhaps the producers asked them not to, as part of the joke? or - my thought - perhaps people too embarassed to admit to it?

Yup.

WSJ on the CBO saying raising the minimum wage costs 500,000 jobs.

Their (the Congressional Budget Office) estimate. Could be one million jobs. On other hand, incomes of about 16 million people could rise (becausei f the minimum wage rises, so do the wages of many others).

Hurting the 0.3% CBO. says a $10.10 minimum wage could cost 500,000 jobs.

CBO estimated that President Obama's latest proposal—$10.10 by 2016 from $7.25 today—could cost half a million Americans their jobs as "some jobs for low-wage workers would probably be eliminated, the income of most workers who became jobless would fall substantially, and the share of low-wage workers who were employed would probably fall slightly."

A wage of $0 an hour doesn't sound good, especially for the poor. But the White House rolled out chief economist Jason Furman to point out that the report overall was good news. "CBO's central estimate" is that the $10.10 minimum would "lead to a 0.3% decrease in employment," said Mr. Furman, who deserves a raise for having to make these arguments. "And CBO acknowledges that the employment impact could be essentially zero." Yes, but CBO also says that it could be as high as one million; the 500,000 figure splits the difference.

 

Cute picture: Save that elephant!

Great, crazy picture - "What do I do next?"

The Telegraph (UK) had this in their daily email yesterday.

Caption: A young elephant had to to be rescued after falling into a hole next to a railway embankment in north-east India.

Got to love Krauthammer's explanation of who thinks Climate Change is important

Too true!

 

Kimmel: President's Day man on street interviews

And these people vote.FDR best known for the Louisiana Purchase and his twitter feed.

 

Krauthammer, five years since the stimulus

Totally right.

 

Research on jokes: "Who tells the best jokes? Neurotic, aggressive jerks"

From the NY Post -

Along the way, comedy researchers have stumbled upon surprising truths. For instance, lawyer jokes were almost nonexistent in the 1950s, whereas today more than 3,000 websites are dedicated to attorney mockery. Jokes about cleanliness (“Why do Italian men wear mustaches? To look like their mothers.”) don’t work in Europe, where nobody thinks it’s odd if you don’t shower very often.

Example of incongruity humor: Woman walks into a bar with a duck on a leash. Bartender says, “Where’d you find the pig?” Woman says, “This isn’t a pig, you idiot, it’s a duck.” Bartender says, “I was talking to the duck.”

Hit the link for more; for instance research that religious men aren't good joke tellers ...

A look at George Soros investing position

He's increased his puts (makes $$ when stocks go down) on the S & P (possibly just increasing his hedging of overall postion) and bought calls (Makes $$ when underlying position goes up) on gold mining stocks.

Note also that while this is the latest data on his holdings, it is based on holding 45 days ago.

... the "Soros put", a legacy hedge position that the 83-year old has been rolling over every quarter since 2010, just rose to a record $1.3 billion or the notional equivalent of some 7.09 million SPY-equivalent shares. Since this was an increase of 154% Q/Q this has some people concerned that the author of 'reflexivity' and the founder of "open societies" may be anticipating some major market downside.

,,, while the SPY puts are most likely simply a hedge to his overall bullish exposure, perhaps more notable was the $25 million call position that Soros put on the gold miners ETF which has been beaten into oblivion over the past year, in the fourth quarter. Does Soros think that it is finally the miners' turn to shine?

Moral of the story: Doing an evening hike? Bring a flashlight.

College students in California, from China.

After the sun went down, they realized they were too far up the canyon to return to their cars before nightfall and had only the light from their cellphones to guide them down a slope 100 feet above a pool, the sheriff’s account said. They called 911 shortly before 7 p.m..

As the volunteer rescue team responded, a separate group of hikers coming down the canyon heard calls for help, officials said. Equipped with headlamps, the hikers led the students down the trail, where they met up with search and rescue personnel. All returned to their cars safely.

 

Good investment article on not letting ideology kill your investment returns

As in, don't let liberal-conservative-right wing-left wing-democrat-republican mess with investment management reality. Off the Bloomberg website by a financial manager I hadn't heard of before.

“It’s going to blow up the deficit, won’t create any jobs and will cause all sorts of other problems.”

A hedge-fund manager was lecturing me about the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003, better known as the Bush tax cuts. I had been suggesting that this fund close its short positions on technology stocks, and move to a more constructive equity posture. I was getting nowhere.

The fund manager, active in New York Democratic politics, couldn't see past the policy issues involved. As long as George W. Bush was the U.S. president, this manager’s bias was against long positions. But as an astute market observer noted at the time, “Give me a trillion dollars, and I'll throw you one hell of a party."

How did missing that party work out for him? From the pre-Iraq war lows, U.S. markets rallied 96 percent during the next four years. Chalk up another bad investment decision to political bias, emotional involvement and lack of objectivity.

Before Republicans chuckle too hard, the exact same conversations played out six years later. In March 2009, I kept hearing how the newly elected, Kenyan-born, Marxist President Barack Obama was going to be bad for investors. Some 10,000 Dow points ago -- literally, the very day of the lows -- Michael Boskin, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President George H. W. Bush, penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled, "Obama’s Radicalism Is Killing the Dow."

That was 160 percent ago.

More good stuff if you hit the link. And I suppose I ahve to plead womewhat guilty to being an "inflationista" (see the article).

 

NYT columnist on parenting: "Parental Pity Party"

Ross Douthat has a Sunday column in today's NY Times - he's kind of their token politically conservative, practicing Catholic. His columns aren't always interesting, but this one hits the spot and is also amusing. 

WHEN I became a father, I expected to change in all the predictable ways — to become more responsible and more exhausted, to lose contact with friends and lean more heavily on relatives, to grow steadily balder of head and softer of belly. What I didn’t expect is that parenthood would make me such a whiner.

Fortunately, Jennifer Senior’s new book, “All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood,” is an excellent primer on possible explanations for the great parental pity party. It ranges across the problems with family policy in the United States (basically, we don’t have one), the changing role of children (who went, she notes, “from being our employees to our bosses”), the unsettling of gender roles, the “having it all” stresses inherent in the maternal quest for work-life balance, and the way economic uncertainty and technological change make it hard for parents to figure out what kind of world they’re supposed to be preparing their children for.

But Senior’s most insightful emphasis, I think, is on the gap that’s opened — thanks to our society’s extraordinary wealth and libertarian social ethic — between the lifestyles and choices available to nonparents and the irreducible burdens still involved in raising children.

HIt the link - it's a good, short column.

Girl whose parachute failed tells her story

Love her answer whether she'd skydive again.

 

Joe Girardi comments on Derek Jeter's retirement announcement

Confused - but successful - woman seeking to take retiring Congressman Henry Waxman's seat

"The congressional election in California’s 33rd District, a coastal tract encompassing some of the wealthiest, most liberal quarters of Los Angeles County​—​Bel Air, Santa Monica, and Beverly Hills, to name a few​—​just got a little weird."

Amusing article about a self-help celebrity woman who probably fits the bill of being the currently popular "spiritual but not religious" type. It takes about ten minutes to read.

"God Help Us. Marianne Williamson’s campaign to save America’s soul, starting with California’s 33rd Congressional District"

New Age spiritual teacher, guru to movie stars, friend of Oprah​—​she is both self-actualized and self-made. Born to a Jewish family in Houston in 1952, by the late 1970s, Williamson confesses, “I was a total mess.” After bouncing “from relationship to relationship, job to job, city to city, looking for some sense of identity or purpose,” she found herself living in New York, “seeking relief in food, drugs, people, or whatever else I could find to distract myself.”

She wallowed in this depression until stumbling across a book that she credits with transforming her life. That book was A Course in Miracles, a 1,300-page spiritual manual (complete with student workbooks and instructions on how to teach it) written by New York psychologists Helen Shucman and William Thetford and published by the Foundation for ParaSensory Investigation (now the Foundation for Inner Peace). Williamson heeded the book’s call to become a “miracle-worker.” In 1983, now living in Los Angeles, she began lecturing on The Course (as she calls it) at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz. She developed a large following, particularly among Los Angeles’s gay community, which was then being ravaged by the initial outbreak of AIDS. By the end of the ’80s, she had helped to found the Los Angeles Center for Living and Project Angel Food, both nonprofits providing assistance to people suffering from HIV, AIDS, and other life-threatening illnesses. ... In response to numerous media reports of her explosive temper and overbearing management style, Williamson, ever ready to embrace her own weaknesses, nicknamed herself “The Bitch for God.”

In 1992, she wrote a self-help manual, A Return to Love, expounding on excerpts from The Course. A Return to Love’s overall spiritual lesson is that we as human beings are in fact all one being, not under but with God, that all of our minds are actually one mind, and that we have tricked ourselves into thinking we are separate from one another, thus creating fear, which dominates us and throws us into collision with everyone else, who, we need to remember, are really also us. According to Williamson, there is only one way out of this destructive cycle, and that is (spoiler alert) a return to love.

Lots more fun if you have the time and hit the link above.

Always fun watching MSNBC - all-Christie-all-the-time

When in the gym in the evening, I channel surf the three cable news networks. CNN and FOX cover the news of the day, while MSNBC obsesses over the NJ Governor, as they try incessantly to nail him.

I didn't see this particular bit, but it is typical. Christie = Capone.

 

Kimmel: Unveiling of the 50th annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover

I guess this is legit!...

 

An interview with Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley

A man I admire, a true Franciscan. The interview starts a little alowly, but then gets much more interesting.

 

As in every other area of life, women are better than men at economic forecasting

Here's a good - and interesting example.

 

Another study: Even if you only start exercising later in life, exercising and "aging well" are related,

A good article from the NY Times -

being physically active during adulthood is particularly important. In one large-scale study published last fall that looked at more than 12,000 Australian men aged between 65 and 83, those who engaged in about 30 minutes of exercise five or so times per week were much healthier and less likely to be dead 11 years after the start of the study than those who were sedentary, even when the researchers adjusted for smoking habits, education, body mass index and other variables.

But here's the question -

Whether exercise habits need to have been established and maintained throughout adulthood, however, in order to affect aging has been less clear. If someone has slacked off on his or her exercise resolutions during young adulthood and early middle-age, in other words, is it too late to start exercising and still have a meaningful impact on health and longevity in later life?

And the studies say, better to start exercising late then never -

In the eight years between the study’s start and end, the data showed, those respondents who had been and remained physically active aged most successfully, with the lowest incidence of major chronic diseases, memory loss and physical disability. But those people who became active in middle-age after having been sedentary in prior years, about 9 percent of the total, aged almost as successfully. These late-in-life exercisers had about a seven-fold reduction in their risk of becoming ill or infirm after eight years compared with those who became or remained sedentary, even when the researchers took into account smoking, wealth and other factors.

Those results reaffirm both other science and common sense. A noteworthy 2009 study of more than 2,000 middle-aged men, for instance, found that those who started to exercise after the age of 50 were far less likely to die during the next 35 years than those who were and remained sedentary. “The reduction in mortality associated with increased physical activity was similar to that associated with smoking cessation,” the researchers concluded.

 

 

Kimmel: Outsourcing Olympic jokes to an Indian Call Center

Very funny.

Latest on HUD's attack on Westchester, and my town being on the "exclusionary" list.

Thanks to my friend Maria sending this around.

Mamaroneck off the list, other towns, including Croton and Ossining still on it.

In a report last year, the federal court monitor overseeing the settlement listed seven communities as having so few opportunities to build affordable housing that their zoning codes were legally exclusionary. The report was an attempt to break a deadlock between the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the county over a zoning analysis required by the settlement. The county has repeatedly asserted that there is no exclusionary zoning in Westchester and HUD has rejected its analyses as inadequate.

Sid Caesar

An original.

 

And here's some doubletalk, with Imogene Coco And Carl Reiner