July 13, 2013

Malala Yousafzai's full speech before the UN. (Wow,just wow,wow)

She puts us to shame!

July 12, 2013

This Dawg really, really wants a kitteh!

Ha!

July 12, 2013

The sportswriter who made Twitter cry - Do you have a picture of the best moment of your life?

Richard Deitsch was perusing Twitter when one photo made him stop. At first glance it's unremarkable, not much different from any other victory photo. It's a bit grainy and shows three young men smiling and hugging.
One of the men had just won an NCAA hockey championship at Yale.

This pic of brothers Greg Day, from left, Anthony Day and Steven Bennett inspired Richard Deitsch to ask Twitter users for their best photo moments.

Deitsch said he was struck by something more than just the photo. He knew the man who posted it, Steven Bennett, host of a Buffalo-based sports podcast. Bennett is in the picture celebrating his younger brother's victory, despite having just spent more than six weeks in the hospital.

"You gotta come now," Bennett remembers his younger brother, Anthony Day, telling him over the phone. Bennett made it for the semifinal, which his brother's team won in overtime. For the final game, Bennett was joined by 23 family members, one of whom snapped the photo of all three brothers embracing.

"I thought to myself how remarkable it was to have an image of what was clearly one of the best moments of Steven's life," Deitsch said. "I wondered: How many others have a similar image? So I took to Twitter and asked," he said. He credited @Sports_Casters, one of Bennett's accounts, for the idea in his tweet.

And just like that, the heart of the Internet broke wide open.
<snip>
Some photos he received:

A little girl sees her brother for the first time.


First day my daughters went to school together.


Returning home from a 6 month deployment to see my wife, and meet my 2-week-old son for first time.


my mother, baking cookies with my son. She passed away 3 years later.


More:http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/11/tech/storify-best-moments

Do you have a picture of the best moment of your life?

After spending time on the interwebs, the vile nature of some people is disheartening to say the least.
This was like a burst of sunshiine that obscured all of that.

Dietsch is one of my favorite people in general much less sportswriter. He always has links to intersting an diverse sites.

July 12, 2013

The LandFillharmonc Orchestra:

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=UJrSUHK9Luw

It does not matter what your instrument is made of.
It matters that you play.

Remarkable and beautiful

July 11, 2013

Bravo! See "Night Watch" by Rembrandt come alive in a mall in the Netherlands:

(From email)

Bravo!

July 11, 2013

Bloomberg Businessweek cover really smacks hedge funds & those who manage them:

RT @ReformedBroker: Ohmygod this @BW cover...

Ha!

July 11, 2013

Leland Mitchell has passed. Do you know who he is? You should.

In 1963, Leland Mitchell and his Mississippi State teammates had to sneak out of their state to compete in the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament. Gov. Ross Barnett and other hard-core segregationists were worried that their all-white team might compete against blacks, a step the governor said he feared “might lead to integration across the land.”

In a tense if peculiar moment in the civil rights movement, a state court had enjoined Mississippi State University from going to Michigan to play Loyola University of Chicago in the Midwest Regional of the prestigious tournament. Mississippi State had won the right to advance to national play by winning the championship of the Southeastern Conference. It was the fourth time in five years that the university earned a berth but seemingly would again be unable to play.

But the team did play. The game between Mississippi State and Loyola on March 15, 1963 — contested at the height of the civil rights struggle — is widely seen as the beginning of the end of segregation in college sports. In explaining his opposition to integrated sports in 1960, Governor Barnett had said: “If there were a half-dozen Negroes on the team, where are they going to eat? Are they going to want to go to the dance later and want to dance with our girls?”

But by the spring of 1963, pride in Mississippi State’s superb basketball team was challenging old racial attitudes, which were already starting to soften. Reacting to pressure from students and the public, the university president and the board governing state universities agreed to let the team compete. The governor and a handful of state legislators fumed but realized that they had no legal power to stop the team.

Then a chancery court judge stepped in and issued an injunction to keep the university from violating “the public policies of the state of Mississippi.”

Mitchell, a star player and team leader who died at age 72 on Saturday at his home in Starkville, Miss., had an immediate and sharp reaction.

“We need to head out tonight,” he said. “Who all else has a car?”

The actual escape was more complicated. The university president decided the officials named in the injunction should get out of town. He left for a speaking engagement in Atlanta. The coach, Babe McCarthy, along with the athletic director and his assistant, drove on back roads to Memphis and flew to Nashville. The next morning, the team’s second-stringers were sent to the local airport in Starkville.
<snip>
Much more on their escape and what happened:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/11/sports/ncaabasketball/leland-mitchell-defied-racism-on-the-basketball-court-dies-at-72.html?hpw&_r=0

RIP Leland Mitchell.
Every step helped.

July 11, 2013

Five unforgettable charts from "The War on Marijuana in Black and White:

Thanks to the citizens of Colorado and Washington, the tide is turning in the War on Pot. But the true toll of marijuana prohibition has been little studied – and poorly understood. A blockbuster report from the ACLU lays out the scope, the costs and the targets of this war in stunning detail. Here are five unforgettable charts from "The War on Marijuana in Black and White":

1) Over the last two decades, marijuana possession arrests have soared by 193 percent to 784,021 in 2010. They now account for nearly half of all drug arrests in the country.


2) New York and Texas top the nation in making marijuana arrests – 97 percent of which are for simple possession.


3) The United States wasted a collective $3.6 billion on marijuana possession enforcement in 2010, led by the nation's capital, where the per-capita cost of pot prohibition is greater than $40 a year.


4) Marijuana consumption has remained stable in the last decade, and there is no meaningful disparity in the rates that black and white Americans smoke pot.


5) The racial disparity in arrest rates for marijuana possession, however, ought to shock the conscience of every American.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/five-mind-blowing-charts-on-the-war-on-pot-20130710

Stop.This.Now!
The fact that alcohol is legal highlights the hypocrisy of this policy. You want a substance that can cause violence and bad behavior? Alcohol makes marijuana look staid.
I never wanted to hit anybody unless they took my munchies. Even then it was too much effort.

There are so many other problems that need this kind of attention.
Go chase child molesters and other violent offenders.
Do something that has a real and positive impact on society. This ain't it.

July 11, 2013

Harper Lee pwned a Virginia school board that banned To Kill A Mockingbird:

The problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism

Early-1966, believing its contents to be "immoral," the Hanover County School Board in Virginia decided to remove all copies of Harper Lee's classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, from the county's school libraries. As soon as she was alerted, Lee responded perfectly by way of the following letter, written to, and later published in, The Richmond News Leader.

Also sent, as mentioned in the letter, was a contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund — a project set up by the newspaper in 1959 to highlight/compensate for "official stupidities," and which subsequently gave away copies of the banned book to all children who asked.

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/problem-is-one-of-illiteracy-not.html

Ha!
Rebel with a clue.

July 11, 2013

A huge waterspout formed near Tampa:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/video-captures-waterspout-forming-tampa-bay-141311354.html

Beautiful and scary....