or so this I received about 75 days ago would have us believe:
Man, those Occupy Wall Street people just keep getting bad news.
October 21, 2011: The really real end of the world
October 20th, 2011
Chavez doesn’t have cancer; he got a liposuction. EDIT: NEW DETAILS.
July 31st, 2011My father told me that he believes the whole Hugo Chavez “cancer” thing is actually false and meant to bring him support for the upcoming elections. (Chavez is polling at about 50%, the opposition seems united and willing to present a single candidate, Chavez is currently ruling mostly by decree, and he recently said he doesn’t have a single cancerous cell in his body, among other things.). Fidel Castro is “the ultimate mastermind” capable of fomenting this plan to save the billions Cuba gets from Venezuela in subsidies, cheap oil, direct “loans,” etc. The only reason Chavez has lost weight is because of a liposuction.
When I asked my dad about the comments Chavez gave that he will probably begin to lose his hair as a result of the chemotherapy, my dad replied, “He’ll just shave it off.”
I am putting this out there so it will be time stamped. If this is ever proven true, I am expecting my dad to get a column in the New York Times adjacent to Paul Krugman’s musings.
——-
UPDATE:
Thanksgiving Dinner conversation:
Me: ”So, do you still think Chavez’s cancer is fake?”
Him: …
Me: …
Him: No.
Case closed.
Some M&A action going on about
November 9th, 2010“AOL taps BofA to explore Yahoo deal: sources” [Reuters]
They say “the Yahoo deal is compelling for AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong, who believes he can do a better job running a combined company.”
O rly? Because it just happened to strike me that three out of eight words on the headline refer to big, obsolete corporate clunkers, each one amounting to less than the sum of its parts. Throwing more random shit together will work this time.
Time to start posting some new shit
November 8th, 2010…We’ve been having way too much fun graduating, moving across the country, etc. So here’s a YouTube video, of Bieber eating a twiglet, on a talk show eating a twiglet:
When you don’t know how to handle money
March 21st, 2010…it doesn’t matter how much you have.
Case in point: Almost 80% of NFL players near bankruptcy two years after they retire.
Laws_of_Armed_Conflict.PPT
February 25th, 2010The pair of war crime prosecutors who indicted Charles Taylor back in 2003 have created a new firm, CW Group, that offered legal services to Guinea’s military regime. They made a 14-slide PowerPoint presentation, apparently aimed at educating the military’s officers and soldiers about the laws governing warfare (and maybe even get them to not violate them so egregiously?) [FP]
I guess if you’re going to have a military, you should teach your soldiers about the rules of war, somehow… But PowerPoint? Really?
One imagines that in the original .ppt version, these bullet points (pun intended?) “Civilians!” “Medical personnel!” and “Prisoners!” would fly in from the right side of the slide, with that car-zooming-and-screeching-to-halt sound effect.
Perhaps the excessive use of PowerPoint is the real war crime here…
Is Andrew Breitbart coming to take us down?
February 23rd, 2010Breitbart, editor for the Drudge Report and a media figure in his own right, confronted Max Blumenthal at CPAC over Blumenthal’s article on James O’Keefe (summary: the dude who spied on ACORN maybe is somewhat of a white nationalist).
Breitbart’s not done yet. He is having so much fun he now wants to take down the “institutional left,” and he believes this will happen “within the next three weeks”:
He might be referring to his appearance on former Congressman (and radio personality!) Ernest Istook’s Harvard Institute of Politics study group, “Propaganda in American Politics.” Breitbart is scheduled to be a guest speaker next week, which falls within the deadline he gave on a Fox News show that attracts more viewers at 3AM than CNN at 8PM.
This is a must-not-miss event. What better way to take down the institutional left than to corrupt influence the minds of young Harvard intellectuals who will lead the institutions? It worked for Peggy Noonan.
(EDIT: Didn’t happen. Some anti-global warming guy came instead. The institutional left survives.)
[Media Matters via Gawker]
Wyclef Jean: Harvard Foundation Artist of the Year
February 19th, 2010The announcement comes on the heels of the Harvard for Haiti Benefit Concert, which raised over $37,000 for earthquake relief efforts. All the money from the concert will go to Partners in Health.
The Harvard Foundation and the Office for the Arts at Harvard are different entities, but wouldn’t it make sense — given that the OAH and concert organizers are using the arts to promote aid for Haiti — to donate at least part of the concert proceeds to Jean’s Yele Haiti organization?
The money will go to Partners most likely because its co-founder is Harvard professor Paul Farmer, a graduate from the med school. Or perhaps it’s due to the increasing amount of negative information coming out about Jean’s foundation.
Give Jean the voice, not the money?
Hopefully the Harvard Foundation will not have to regret its choice.
The 2010 speakers
February 18th, 2010Commencement: Former Justice David Souter.
Class Day: CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. (General feeling in our circles: “Several seniors expressed ambivalence about the choice—a sentiment that may stem from a lack of recognition of Amanpour’s name among some individuals.” Let’s hope her speech is a good one.)
Amy Bishop, the UAH Faculty Senate, and Campus Residency
February 16th, 2010A memorial page has been set up for the UAH victims [Legacy].
Amy Bishop, who had problems with “noise and kids” when she lived in MA, recently opposed a policy that would require all freshmen and sophomores to live on campus. She spoke against it during one of UAH’s Faculty Senate meetings late last year [al.com].
Most of the UAH Faculty Senate website is currently inaccessible, but Google again does its job [Minutes] [Senate Journal][Resolutions Passed] [Executive Committee Reports] [Upcoming Meetings] [Bills Pending]
Bishop’s Faculty Senate involvement, bills proposed, and other things we found after the jump:
Bishop had other problems in Mass.
February 15th, 2010NBC Channel 7 in Boston has the scoop on Bishop’s time living in Ipswich, MA [7NEWS].
She often called the police to complain about “noise and kids in the neighborhood.” Bishop had been outspoken at the November 12 faculty senate meeting against a new university policy that would have required all freshmen and sophomores to live on campus [al.com]. And what does the faculty senate do? [UAH Faculty Senate]
(Here are details on some of the specific things that ticked Bishop off and what she and her husband tried to do about them [Boston Globe]. The general perception is that they ostracized themselves from the local community).
The Mercedes Paz in the Channel 7 report is likely the M.A. Paz who in the early 1990′s authored papers with Amy Bishop and Paul Gallop, Bishop’s dissertation advisor [UAH] [ProQuest snapshot].
The reporter interviews a woman named Sylvia Fluckiger, who is listed as a former colleague of Bishop’s. There is a person named R. Fluckiger on some of the Bishop-Gallop papers. Perhaps she used a different name back then or the author was her husband/relative? She mentions in the video that Jim Anderson, Bishop’s husband, was a “tinkerer” who could have made the pipe bombs mailed to murder Professor Paul Rosenberg. According to the Boston Globe’s story yesterday, “Anderson was questioned about whether he had purchased any of the components used to make the bombs” [Boston Globe]. In that story Fluckiger made the connection more overt, saying that “we knew she had a beef with Paul Rosenberg. And we really thought it was a really unbelievable coincidence that he would get those bombs.”
More Amy Bishop and Jim Anderson, Part Deux
February 14th, 2010In December 1993 someone tried to kill Harvard professor Paul Rosenberg with two mailed pipe bombs. The incident as reported by the college newspaper back then [The Crimson]
Now we find that Bishop was allegedly a suspect in the attempted bombing [Boston Globe]:
Bishop surfaced as a suspect because she was allegedly concerned that she was going to receive a negative evaluation from Rosenberg on her doctorate work, the official said.
Result: no charges. Anderson says that they were not suspects and the police “questioned everybody that ever knew this guy” [NY Times].
And meanwhile she wanted to write a novel about a scientist who kills her brother. Sound familiar?
EDIT: Bishop’s dissertation was also published in December 1993. For anyone who is interested and has access to ProQuest, it is called The Role of Methoxatin (PQQ) in the Respiratory Burst of Phagocytes. You can search for it and buy a copy [ProQuest]
The only listed advisor in the full ProQuest summary (only available to subscribers, snapshot here) is the late Harvard professor Paul Gallop, not Paul Rosenberg. Both professors worked at Children’s Hospital Boston and co-authored papers from time to time [NCBI] [Harvard Catalyst]. Bishop and Gallop also shared some publications in the early 1990s [UAH].