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Showing posts from May 13, 2012

Donna is dead

  “At first, God gave the judgement of death upon man, when he should transgresse, absolutely, Morte morieris , Thou shalt surely dye: The woman in her Dialogue with the Serpent, she mollifies it, Ne fortè moriamur , perchance, if we eate, we may die; and then the Devill is as peremptory on the other side, Nequaquam moriemini , do what you will, surely you shall not die; And now God in this Text comes to his reply, Quis est homo , shall they not die? Give me but one instance, but one exception to this rule, What man is hee that liveth, and shall not see death? Let no man, no woman, no devill offer a Ne fortè , (perchance we may dye) much lesse a Nequaquam , (surely we shall not dye) except he be provided of an answer to this question, except he can give an instance against this generall, except he can produce that mans name, and history, that hath lived, and shall not see death. Wee are all conceived in close Prison; in our Mothers wombes, we are close Prisoners all; when we a

reputation poker: Dimon the mad banker of Wall Street

GHARIB: As you know, there is a lot of anxiety out there that the financial crisis is not over, that there is another shoe to drop. What is the next big thing you are worried about in terms of credit quality? DIMON : We go through this every five or six years and you can just go back in history. They are always a little bit different. But there are a lot of commonalities: Fear, specter of recession, credit assets, re-price, spreads re-price, etcetera. You`ve seen sub-prime, SIV, CDOs, CLOs (ph) and now it is monolines, municipals, wraps. But at the end of the day, those things will resolve and our system has resolved a lot of them. A lot has been de-leveraged. A lot has been paid off. A lot of problems have popped up are now gone. It`s not over yet, but you know, I would be surprised if the financial part of this isn`t over by the end of the year. - February 14, 2008 In Matthew Josephson’s amusing history, The Robber Barons, there is a nice story about the young J.P. Morgan.

Erecting a monument to tasering in Seattle

Ah, the blood pressure read of the day is the article about the pregnant women tasered for refusing to sign her traffic ticket. A beautiful story of moral idiocy, state power overreach, and what happens when you fill the courts with idiot j udges. Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/us/police-taser-use-on-pregnant-woman-goes-before-supreme-court.html?hp This article is a regular mine for the satirist who lives away from the home of the free. There's the idea that tasering is a “a useful pain technique,” rather than a useless one - both of which are beloved by our boys in blue! There's the quote from the 10th district judgem Alex Kozinski, a real prize from the Reagan era, who said, of the three cops who tasered a pregant woman for not signing her traffic ticket for going 12 miles above the speed limit in a school zone: “They deserve our praise, not the opprobrium of being declared constitutional violators. The City of Seattle should award th

Back to zero

Back to the zero The golden age of psychometrics extended from the first measurements of current in the nerves, effected by Helmholtz, and the first attempt to measure the time of sensation, which was performed by Helmholtz’s student, Sigmund Exner, up to the Pavlovian era of the conditioned reflex in the 20s. It was a mad scramble of different instruments all employed to make psychology a science of the smallest interval – the measure of the thought, the nerve impulse, the present of seeing, hearing, and touching. He who says science says measurement – such was the law and the prophets in the 19 th century – and under this law, psychology seemed, by its very object, to be excluded – since psychological states seem preeminently qualitative. But instrument by instrument (the myrograph! the Weber compass! The kymograph!), a physiological route to psychological states was carved out. If the object of psychology was not the qualitative state, but the quantitative reflex arc, t