Until recently, the earliest-known use of the word "cocktail" in print that referenced drink was from 1806 in an upstate New York newspaper. Then, in 2005, it was discovered in a Vermont newspaper from 1803. In 2010 we found the word used in the March 20, 1798, edition of The Morning Post and Gazetteer, a long-defunct London newspaper. The paper had reported on March 16 that the landlord of the Axe & Gate tavern at the corner of Downing and Whitehall, on winning a share of a lottery, returned to his establishment and erased his regulars’ tabs with a mop “in a transport of joy”. Four days later the paper ran a satirical article listing who owed for what drinks in the heart of British politics. A certain Mr Rose (while writing letters upon the reform of public offices) owed for “gin and bitters”. Another owed for 35 nips of “glue”, “commonly called Burton ale, to make the members of the neutrality stick together”.
Toward the bottom, William Pitt the younger owed for “L’huile de Venus”, “perfait [sic] amour”, and a less French drink: "'cock-tail' (vulgarly called ginger)."
Exactly what this implied is open to conjecture. The most common use of the term “cocktail” at the time was in reference to a horse with its tail cut short to indicate it was of mixed breed. One colic remedy found in veterinary manuals from the period blended water, oats, gin and ginger.
Gingering was a technique employed by horse traders to fetch higher prices for their cocktails. A horse with a spring in its step, wide-open eyes and, most importantly, tail held high would sell for more. A well-placed thumb of peeled ginger produced the desired effect, at least until the horse was sold. Considering Pitt had recently doubled the price of the paper with a tax (the masthead read "price 3d, taxed by Mr. Pitt 3d, total 6d.") the newspaper’s editor could have been suggesting either one.
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In 1869, the first British book containing cocktail recipes was published: William Terrington's Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks. Reaching back to that first use of the word cocktail, his first recipe was for a Gin Cocktail made with brandy or gin, ginger syrup, aromatic bitters, and a splash of water.
Critics argue that the Electoral College is inherently undemocratic and gives swing states disproportionate influence in electing the President and Vice President. The Electoral College gives a numeric advantage in the election of the president to the smaller states, as the minimum number of electors for the small states is three compared to one for the election of representatives. On the other hand, the winner-take-all method of voting favors the larger states. A number of constitutional amendments have been proposed seeking to alter the Electoral College or replace it with a direct popular vote.
Already, two states -- Maine and Nebraska -- award an electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district. The candidate who wins the most votes statewide takes the final two at-large electoral votes. Only once, when President Obama won a congressional district based in Omaha in 2008, has either of those states actually split their vote.
But if more reliably blue states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were to award their electoral votes proportionally, Republicans would be able to eat into what has become a deep Democratic advantage.
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Obama won all three states in 2008, handing him 46 electoral votes because of the winner-take-all system. Had electoral votes been awarded by district, Republican nominee Mitt Romney would have cut into that lead. Final election results show that Romney won nine of Michigan's 14 districts, five of eight in Wisconsin, and at least 12 of 18 in Pennsylvania. Allocate the two statewide votes in each state to Obama and that means Romney would have emerged from those three Democratic states with 26 electoral votes, compared with just 19 for Obama (and one district where votes are still being counted).
Republicans are able to contemplate such a bold plan because of their electoral success in 2010, when the party won control of state legislative chambers and the governorships in all three states, giving them total control over the levers of state government.
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Tweaks of electoral-vote rules are hardly unprecedented, according to Michael McDonald, a political scientist at George Mason University. State legislatures routinely changed Electoral College allocation rules in the early years of the Republic; the political fallout then can inform present-day lawmakers considering the changes.
"State legislative elections became tantamount to the presidential election in a state. Local issues were put aside for presidential politics," McDonald said. "These states legislators thus risk the nationalization of their state politics, to the detriment of their personal careers. State legislators learned that once they fixed the Electoral College rules, national politics no longer dominated state elections."
Nguyen Chi Thien, who has died aged 73, spent nearly 30 years in prisons and “re-education” camps in Vietnam because he had the temerity to insist on historical truth and to write poems which attacked communist repression.
Thien first ran foul of the North Vietnamese authorities in 1958 when he asked permission to start a literary magazine. The police searched his home and found some romantic poems that, they claimed, were anti-communist. He was sentenced to two years’ hard labour.
While working as an assistant teacher, in 1960 he was imprisoned again after telling Vietnamese school pupils that the end of the Second World War in the East had not come about because of the heroism of Soviet forces in Manchuria, as claimed in their textbooks, but because of American nuclear attacks on Japan. In 1966 he was arrested again and imprisoned until 1977 because of poems he wrote that decried communist oppression. He used his time in jail, much of it spent in solitary confinement, to compose poetry and commit it to memory by reciting it to himself.
After being released in 1977, Thien lived with a friend and wrote down almost 400 poems from memory. He chose Bastille Day 1979 to smuggle his work to the French Embassy in Hanoi, but was deterred by Vietnamese security guards outside. Two days later, pursued by another security detail, he plunged into the British Embassy, shouting in English: “I am not a madman, I am a poet and I have something important to give to you.” As three British diplomats managed to hold back the guards, he handed over a manuscript with a covering letter which read: “Most of [the poems] were written during my years of detention. I think it is incumbent upon us, the victims, more so than upon anyone else, to show to the world the incredible suffering of our mercilessly oppressed and tortured people. Of my broken life there remains but one dream, that is to see the greatest possible number of people realise that communism is a great calamity for mankind.”
On leaving the embassy Thien was re-arrested. Detained under a law which enabled the authorities to hold “obstinate counter-revolutionary elements who have committed acts detrimental to general security” without trial, he spent a further 12 years in prison and composed a second collection of poems.
The smuggled-out verses mocked Karl Marx and Ho Chi Minh and were consciously intended to expose the rottenness at the heart of communism. In translation one poem reads: “I kept silent when I was tortured by my enemy:/With iron and with steel, soul faint in agony/— The heroic stories are for children to believe./I kept silent because I kept telling myself:/Has anyone, who has entered the jungle and who was run over by the wild beast/Been stupid enough to open his mouth and ask for mercy?”
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His plight prompted increasingly vociferous demands for his release from organisations like Amnesty and Pen (the international writers’ group) and from a few political leaders, including Britain’s Prime Minister John Major. In 1991 he was released from prison, but kept under house arrest until 1995 when, weak in body (he had developed tuberculosis in prison), but indomitable in spirit, he was allowed to emigrate to the United States.
“Poetry was what kept me alive and thinking. It kept me sane,” Thien explained. “What also kept me going was that I believed that right would always win out in the end in a fight against evil.”
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After moving to America, Thien continued to campaign for the thousands of political dissidents still languishing in Vietnam’s jails and was scathing of those who sought to build economic links with Vietnam. “If politicians in the Free World think that they can de-link business and human rights,” he said in 1996, “they deserve, and can expect the contempt that people living under a totalitarian regime will reserve for them.”
Mya was admitted to a hospital near the family’s home in Hutchinson, Kansas. Doctors thought she had a staph infection of her lymph nodes. But when they tried to drain the bump, nothing came out. Hours later, Aaron Whittington and his wife Emma noticed what appeared to be a “half-inch string” protruding from Mya’s face.
“[The pediatrician] threw on gloves and she pulled out a 2-inch feather and she’s like, ‘It’s a feather.’ And we’re like, ‘What do you mean it’s a feather?’ And she showed us,” Whittington said, still in disbelief.
“As far as how the feather got into the side of the neck, our doctor says we’ll probably never really know,” he said. “But her best guess is that she either inhaled it or tried swallowing it and it got lodged in the throat somewhere, and the body, just being crazy, just started to reject it and force it out the side of her neck.”
... reasoning by analogy from a US government trust fund stuffed full of US corporate bonds to a US government trust fund stuffed full of US government bonds is really popular. But if these two cases are actually parallel in the way that is implied, then a third case would also be parallel: a US corporate pension fund stuffed full of the bonds of that corporation ...
Such a pension fund would, of course, be illegal. And for good reason: we recognize that it is not, in fact, a pension fund. It’s a promise by the corporation to pay its workers at some later date, not a funded pension plan. The company can call this anything they want—trust fund, pension plan, Ponzi scheme—but whatever we call it, we’d recognize it for what it is: a meaningless accounting fiction that does not in anyway enhance the security of worker retirements. And if, say, Verizon tried to fund its pension plan this way, liberals would hit the roof. Because we recognize that a pension fund full of third-party securities is not, in fact, very much like a pension fund full of securities issued by the same entity—corporate or government—that owes you the pension.
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All of which is to say that this “trust fund” doesn’t bring anything to the party; if the company can pay, they will, and if they can’t, the workers get bupkis. Which is why the government has very sensibly forbidden companies from funding their pension plans this way. Funding corporate pensions with company bonds leaves retirees with nothing but a claim on the future sales of that corporation, which is to say, exactly what they had before you implemented the “trust fund”. And funding social security with special, non-tradeable US bonds leaves beneficiaries with no more than the claim they already had on future tax revenues.
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If the SSA stops writing checks, it will be because the US government is out of money. And if that happens, good luck waving those bonds in the air.
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... the Supreme Court ruled in Flemming v. Nestor that the government can take away your benefits any time it wants to. You have no legal rights to your Social Security benefits; you enjoy them at the pleasure of the US Congress.
The special-purpose bonds in the Social Security “trust fund” do not change this fundamental reality. Those bonds are owed to the Social Security Administration, not to individual beneficiaries, and you are not a shareholder of the Social Security administration. Since Flemming v. Nestor, you’re not even a creditor of the Social Security Administration. You’re just someone that they may or may not write a check to occasionally, as directed by Congress. Unlike a private company, Congress can decide at any time to cut benefits, and a judge will simply sigh and suggest you start hunting for sales on Fancy Feast.
Three English ships set out to find the Northeast passage to China in 1553; two disappeared, and one ended up in the White Sea, eventually coming across Arkhangelsk. Ivan the Terrible found out about this, and brokered a trade agreement with the ship's captain Richard Chancellor. It led to the establishment of the first diplomatic relations between Russia and England. Trade privileges were officially granted to English merchants in 1555, leading to the founding of the "Company of Merchant Adventurers", which began sending ships annually into the estuary of the Northern Dvina. Dutch merchants also started bringing their ships into the White Sea from the 1560s. Scottish and English merchants also traded in the 16th century; however, by the 17th century it was mainly the Dutch that sailed to the White Sea area. In 1584, Ivan the Terrible ordered to found town of New Kholmogory (on August 1, 1613 it was officially renamed into Arkhangelsk after the nearby Archangel Michael Monastery). At the time access to the Baltic Sea was still mostly controlled by Sweden, so while Arkhangelsk was icebound in winter, it remained Moscow's almost sole link to the sea-trade. Since late-1580s, Arkhangelsk become centre of Russian foreign trade, which brought 60% of profit into state treasury. Local inhabitants, called Pomors, were the first to explore trade routes to Northern Siberia as far as the trans-Urals city of Mangazeya and beyond.
The most important part of the college bubble story—the one we will soon be hearing much more about—concerns the impending financial collapse of numerous private colleges and universities and the likely shrinkage of many public ones. And when that bubble bursts, it will end a system of higher education that, for all of its history, has been steeped in a culture of exclusivity. Then we’ll see the birth of something entirely new as we accept one central and unavoidable fact: The college classroom is about to go virtual.
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The live lecture will be replaced by streaming video. The administration of exams and exchange of coursework over the internet will become the norm. The push and pull of academic exchange will take place mainly in interactive online spaces, occupied by a new generation of tablet-toting, hyper-connected youth who already spend much of their lives online. Universities will extend their reach to students around the world, unbounded by geography or even by time zones. All of this will be on offer, too, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional college education.
How do I know this will happen? Because recent history shows us that the internet is a great destroyer of any traditional business that relies on the sale of information.
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We may lose the gothic arches, the bespectacled lecturers, dusty books lining the walls of labyrinthine libraries—wonderful images from higher education’s past. But nostalgia won’t stop the unsentimental beast of progress from wreaking havoc on old ways of doing things. If a faster, cheaper way of sharing information emerges, history shows us that it will quickly supplant what came before. People will not continue to pay tens of thousands of dollars for what technology allows them to get for free.
The Moody Bluegrass project is a group of Nashville artists who have recorded an album of 12 Moody Blues songs in the Bluegrass style, under the title Moody Bluegrass – A Nashville Tribute to the Moody Blues. Those involved include Alison Krauss, Harley Allen, Tim O'Brien, John Cowan, Larry Cordle, Jan Harvey, Emma Harvey, Sam Bush and John Randall.
A second Moody Bluegrass album entitled Two...Much Love with a further 16 Moody Blues songs includes guest performances from Hayward, Lodge and Edge, (each of whom is credited as the lead vocalist on one song) plus Thomas and Pinder, making this the first time since 1978 that these five musicians all appeared on one newly-recorded album.
One recent example: the Honda Fit She’s [sic]. How do we know this car is for women? Well, there’s a heart instead of an apostrophe in "She's".
It’s available in pink or "eyeliner brown". And it comes with a PlasmaCluster A/C system "that pumps out specially treated air that improves your skin".
Whatever the stories the kids want to hear about, I do stress one thing. That you don't have to be a rocket scientist or an heiress to pursue your dreams. It simply takes a lot of sweat and determination. I'm heartened by examples of hard work and sacrifice. One of my friends is a teacher, and has had a few shining examples of students this last year, on their way to college on scholarships they earned through study and hard work. I see though, with many of these kids I talk to, that too many of the next generation have this sense of entitlement that previous generations never had. Entitlement is a dry rot in the very fabric of our lives now. I don't blame the kids, I blame those that set the example, and too often that's society in general, coming from the highest level.
I am a libertarian, which means fiscally conservative and socially permissive. Liberty means that people get to do things that you don't approve of, no matter how much you believe that it is "degrading to the culture" or "weakening our society."
If our society is so fragile that it is threatened by two men kissing in public, then how can we call ourselves any better than the Wahaabists? You know what changed me from a "Conservative" with "Conservative Christian Values"? Seeing what a theocracy really looks like with my own eyes. And it does not look like Liberty. It does not look like freedom. It looked like petty and cruel men gathering power for themselves and forcing their own version of morality on people who did not want or desire to be ruled.
California is about to further bankrupt itself in a vain attempt to halt man made global warming. I say vain attempt, because what California does will have no affect on global warming no matter whether the Believers or the Deniers are right. California just doesn’t produce enough CO2 to have that much effect. If you want to stop CO2, use the Strategic Air Force to bomb China and India into the Stone Age. Be careful to use neutron weapons detonated at optimum burst height. If you’re a real earth saver fanatic, save some of the weapons to use on the United States. Short of returning to the Stone Age (Bronze won’t do, still too much mining and burning of trees), we will need wealth and lots of it to deal with global warming; bankrupting industrial economies is not likely to help.
THE NUMBERS GAME
9.7 billion gallons of gasoline consumed, 1942-1945.
107.8 million hours flown, 1943-1945.
459.7 billion rounds of aircraft ammo fired overseas, 1942-1945.
7.9 million bombs dropped overseas, 1943-1945.
2.3 million combat sorties, 1941-1945 (one sortie = one takeoff).
299,230 aircraft accepted, 1940-1945.
808,471 aircraft engines accepted, 1940-1945.
799,972 propellers accepted, 1940-1945.
