Sierra, because that's where I am. And cynic, for the original meaning of the word, that "They are especially harsh critics of dogmatic thought, theories they consider useless, and metaphysical essences." Speaking truth to power; criticing authority; and tearing down silly conventions. Read the About page for more
Update: I’ve added a few links and visual evidence in support of the information herein
First what the “bad man” provision is, in the video below. And how Terra Nullius should be seriously bad news for Energy Transfer Partners and the government agencies involved …
… and especially for North Dakota law enforcement and all law enforcement agencies that have participated in the carnage and brutality of the past year.
And if you’re a North Dakota taxpayer, you could be on the hook for hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars because of the “Bad Man” provision. There’s been a lawsuit filed by the National Lawyers Guild in federal court (complaint here). For those in North Dakota that cheered on the brutality, and I know there were many, these are called ‘consequences’ for your actions
By the way, DAPL / Energy Transfer Partners, get ready for lawsuits
On to the second half of this post
According to my non-lawyer understanding, the 1868 Treaty abrogated the 1851 Treaty (which is illegal if you click the link below) by reducing the boundary from below the Heart River to Standing Rock’s current borders, which is where Terra Nulllius (legal defintion) should prevail, because the land was NEVER ceded legally to the US Gov
TERRA NULLIUS AND THE HISTORY OF BROKEN TREATIES AT STANDING ROCK
If treaties are the supreme law of the land, as the U.S. Constitution states, then how is it that treaties can be so easily broken by a government that claims to uphold a respect for the law? An even more unsettling question: how is it that the trail of broken treaties has been able to span generations under an outdated, imperial logic unknown to the majority of the U.S. citizens? The founding of the United States is predicated on this painful contradiction between principles of equality and rule of law on one side, and the colonial appropriation of land from native peoples who have inhabited them for millennia, on the other.
The current resistance against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) is inscribed in this contradiction, making evident the non-rule of law when it comes to appropriating native lands.
[…]
Lots of good info at the link below. Again, I’m not a lawyer, but I think they have a case using Terra Nullius
As I’m writing this Trump is leading on election night. I’ve wanted to write this for awhile, but I only have a short amount of time to put this together to really get into the weeds, but The Democratic candidate for president should be up by 20 points. The institutional Democrats decided that the weaker candidate would be their choice ‘come hell, or highwater’, well, that’s what they got.
They decided that cheating their way to a win in the primaries to promote the most neoliberal/neocon in US history was a winning formula to win the general.
They live in a bubble on the coasts, or the urban areas; go to their offices; drink their lattes; and act all smug and condescending; they make 6 figures and can’t figure out why the “common people” are voting for a wealthy narcissistic asshole like Trump. He is that, but people are worried about jobs and feeding their families; paying for healthcare; keeping a roof over their heads.
They’re angry and are reaching for someone who will fight for them.
Hillary Clinton represents NAFTA, CAFTA, and the TPP which they know will lead to the loss of their jobs.
They not only want a better life but to keep their heads above water.
They want someone who will upset the establishment’s apple cart, and if there’s no Democrat to do it, they’ll look to a Republican to do it
Sorry, but I have zero patience anymore for incompetent ivory tower establishmmentarian hubris; for people who went to the “best” colleges; for people who are well-schooled, but poorly educated in real-life; for people who check off all the right career boxes, but lack wisdom and judgment.
The term “best and brightest” has become an insult, not an accolade, thanks largely to Halberstam’s magnificent, scabrous epic about the policymaking blunders that swept the United States into Vietnam. This classic work is part of the Vietnam canon, but it is not really about Vietnam; it is very much a Washington book, focused on the surety of the hawks stateside rather than the misery and warfare in Indochina.
… from Greek hybris “wanton violence, insolence, outrage,” originally “presumption toward the gods
People who time, after time, after time, after time … have let us down. People whom we put into positions of political power who have failed spectacularly. People who would be described by the internet as Epic Failures.
Yet we’re continually told that they know better; that they’re The Best and Brightest.
Supposedly, these people, whether they self-label themselves as Republican or Democrat have completely floundered. The top five failures can blamed on both of the establishment approved political parties. 9-11 is totally on Bush and the Republicans. The financial collapse of 2008 was started in motion by Bill Clinton, but accelerated by George Bush. Hurricane Katrina is 100% Bush. And the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is all Obama. And Abu Ghraib wouldn’t have happened without warhawks like Hillary Clinton cheering it on.
People have died because of their hubris. And in our quadrennial political system we’re told we have to vote for this person, or we have to vote for that person because the person from that other political party will destroy your life and the lives and future of your family. But when push comes to shove, they keep voting against my, and your best interest. And they explain it away because they know better than those other people in that other artificial made up club.
Sure they agree to disagree on fringe issues, like gay marriage, and abortion, but really how many people are going to marry someone else of the same sex, or get an abortion?. I’m not diminishing either issue for those people involved, but for the vast, vast, vast majority of the population neither of these are going to come up in their actual lives. But how much time is spent on these issues on cable news, or talk radio, and debated in congress?
Think about how similar they are on other issues
The distraction is what they’ve learned from the Romans, i.e. panem et circenses
They have the same corporate owners. On a smaller scale, I’ve been to California state Democratic conventions, and if you’ve never been, one of the first things you’ll notice are the corporate sponsorship signs … everywhere.
I believe in the Democratic Party of Kennedy and FDR, but sadly that’s ancient history. I used to think of myself as JFK’s description of a liberal. But that definition of liberals, and Democrats seems to exist only in a few individuals anymore.
I’m done
I will not suffer fools gladly for people in charge. When those people have the ability and power to destroy people’s lives by war, and oversight failures through a combination of abject incompetence or through wanton political ambition.
To bring the incompetence theme to a personal level, I used to work for a Fortune 500 company and our office and plant was downsized because of shortsighted ambition for financial gain. It was a combination of our local managers, and corporate managers who made poor decisions, and also our largest client which happened to be Hewlett Packard.
Hewlett Packard at the time was run by someone you may have heard of, Carly Fiorina, who ran Hewlett Packard into the ground. Her decisions contributed to our company downsizing and in the process several hundred people lost their jobs along with many employees of our vendors.
Back to politics. Do I really need to do a list of the voter suppression, corporate kickbacks, charity fraud of one of the major party candidates? And the excuses of that person’s sycophants make me ill
I will not vote for the lesser of two evils anymore, because after George Bush and Dick Cheney you can’t scare me.
The Ancient Babylonians knew about a form of trigonometry more advanced than the modern-day version – about 1,000 years before its supposed invention by the Ancient Greeks, academics in Australia say.
The astonishing claim is based on a 3,700-year-old clay tablet inscribed with a table of numbers.
Known as Plimpton 322, it is already known to contain evidence that the Babylonians knew Pythagoras’ famous equation for right-angled triangles, long before the Greek philosopher gave his name to it.
In the mid-1990s, 1,000 truckloads of orange peels and orange pulp were purposefully unloaded onto a barren pasture in a Costa Rican national park. Today, that area is covered in lush, vine-laden forest.
A team led by Princeton University researchers surveyed the land 16 years after the orange peels were deposited. They found a 176 percent increase in aboveground biomass — or the wood in the trees — within the 3-hectare area (7 acres) studied. Their results are published in the journal Restoration Ecology.
Here’s another TED-Ed brain bender that can ruin your evening. I actually tried for a little while to solve the puzzle on my own, but I got bogged down and went for the answer. Yeah, there’s math involved, as well as logic, which is why I got bogged down.
New study shows that chimps’ ability to learn simple circular relationships is on a par with that of 4-year-old children
Chimpanzees of all ages and all sexes can learn the simple circular relationship between the three different hand signals used in the well-known game rock-paper-scissors. Even though it might take them longer, they are indeed able to learn the game as well as a young child. Jie Gao of Kyoto University in Japan and Peking University in China is lead author of a study in the journal Primates, which is the official journal of the Japan Monkey Centre, and is published by Springer. The research compares the ability of chimpanzees and children to learn the rock-paper-scissors game.
Here’s every total solar eclipse happening in your lifetime.
On Aug. 21, a total solar eclipse will be visible from the contiguous United States. It’ll be the first to traverse coast to coast in nearly a century. There will be 69 total solar eclipses visible from somewhere on the planet in the next 100 years, but only a few will be visible from North America. See how many total solar eclipses are left in your lifetime:
The brain continues to surprise us with its magnificent complexity. Groundbreaking research that combines neuroscience with math tells us that our brain creates neural structures with up to 11 dimensions when it processes information. By “dimensions,” they mean abstract mathematical spaces, not other physical realms. Still, the researchers “found a world that we had never imagined,” saidHenry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, which made the discovery.
Grasshopper mice (genus Onychomys), rodents known for their remarkably loud call, produce audible vocalizations in the same way that humans speak and wolves howl, according to new research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Grasshopper mice employ both a traditional whistle-like mechanism used by other mice and rats and a unique airflow-induced tissue vibration like that of humans.
Researchers from Northern Arizona University, Midwestern University at Glendale and Ritsumeikan University in Japan used heliox experiments, laryngeal and vocal tract morphological investigations and biomechanical modelling to investigate how grasshopper mice produce spectacular long-distance calls.
New information on how the timing of meals impacts weight gain or loss
[…]
A study by researchers from Loma Linda University School of Public Health and the Czech Republic has found that timing and frequency of meals play a role in predicting weight loss or gain.
Using information gleaned from more than 50,000 participants in the Adventist Health Study-2 (AHS-2), the researchers discovered four factors associated with a decrease in body mass index: eating only one or two meals per day; maintaining an overnight fast of up to 18 hours; eating breakfast instead of skipping it; and making breakfast or lunch the largest meal of the day. Making breakfast the largest meal yielded a more significant decrease in BMI than did lunch.
A vacuum is a space absolutely devoid of matter, at least according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. But if you talk to a physicist you may get a different answer. According to quantum physics, even vacuums are not completely empty. Constant fluctuations in energy can spontaneously create mass not just out of thin air, but out of absolutely nothing at all.
“It’s like a boiling sea of appearing and disappearing particle pairs,” said James Koga, a theoretical physicist from the National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology in Kyoto, Japan. The pairs, made up of one particle and one antiparticle, exist for only moments. Koga is investigating the subtle effects caused by these fluctuations.This peculiar nature of vacuum, sometimes referred to as “quantum vacuum,” is not just theoretical speculation. It has real, measurable effects on our physical reality. Although these effects are usually far too small to impact even the most sensitive instruments of today, scientists think the picture will change for the miniaturized technologies of tomorrow.”In the macroscopic world, we don’t care about these forces at all. You wouldn’t care about it when you are driving a car for instance. It’s totally negligible,” said Alejandro Manjavacas, a physicist specializing in photonics at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. “But in the context of nanotechnology or nanophotonics—at a super small scale, these effects will start playing a role.”
Diamonds are forever, unless you’re on Saturn or Jupiter. Loads of the super-hard precious stones may be floating among the gas giants’ fluid layers and melted into liquid further into their depths, say a pair of planetary scientists.
The research, being presented at the Division for Planetary Sciences conference this week [Oct, 2013] in Denver, sprang from very humble beginnings — soot in Saturn’s atmosphere, said Kevin Baines, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the work’s coauthors.
New studies of ancient concrete could teach us to do as the Romans did
July 3, 2017
Around A.D. 79, Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote in his Naturalis Historia that concrete structures in harbors, exposed to the constant assault of the saltwater waves, become “a single stone mass, impregnable to the waves and every day stronger.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. While modern marine concrete structures crumble within decades, 2,000-year-old Roman piers and breakwaters endure to this day, and are stronger now than when they were first constructed. University of Utah geologist Marie Jackson studies the minerals and microscale structures of Roman concrete as she would a volcanic rock. She and her colleagues have found that seawater filtering through the concrete leads to the growth of interlocking minerals that lend the concrete added cohesion. The results are published today in American Mineralogist.
Romans made concrete by mixing volcanic ash with lime and seawater to make a mortar, and then incorporating into that mortar chunks of volcanic rock, the “aggregate” in the concrete. The combination of ash, water, and quicklime produces what is called a pozzolanic reaction, named after the city of Pozzuoli in the Bay of Naples. The Romans may have gotten the idea for this mixture from naturally cemented volcanic ash deposits called tuff that are common in the area, as Pliny described.
From tywkiwdbi from a story in The Atlantic about anthropology professor, Bill Schindler
The skills prehistoric peoples depended on seem exotic to today’s college students, who Schindler says arrive on campus each year with less and less of the sort of practical experience that he emphasizes in his class. He tells of the time he asked some students to crack eggs and separate the yolks from the whites. He returned to the kitchen 10 minutes later to find that not a single egg had been cracked. “I asked them if the problem was that nobody had ever told them how to separate the yolk from the whites, and received blank stares in return,” he recalled. “After a minute of silence, one of them said, ‘I’ve never cracked an egg.’ I was floored—how do you even make it to 19 without cracking an egg?
Sierra, because that's where I am. And cynic, for the original meaning of the word, that "They are especially harsh critics of dogmatic thought, theories they consider useless, and metaphysical essences." Speaking truth to power; criticing authority; and tearing down silly conventions. Read the About page for more
Sierra, because that's where I am. And cynic, for the original meaning of the word, that "They are especially harsh critics of dogmatic thought, theories they consider useless, and metaphysical essences." Speaking truth to power; criticing authority; and tearing down silly conventions. Read the About page for more
Sierra, because that's where I am. And cynic, for the original meaning of the word, that "They are especially harsh critics of dogmatic thought, theories they consider useless, and metaphysical essences." Speaking truth to power; criticing authority; and tearing down silly conventions. Read the About page for more
Sierra, because that's where I am. And cynic, for the original meaning of the word, that "They are especially harsh critics of dogmatic thought, theories they consider useless, and metaphysical essences." Speaking truth to power; criticing authority; and tearing down silly conventions. Read the About page for more
Sierra, because that's where I am. And cynic, for the original meaning of the word, that "They are especially harsh critics of dogmatic thought, theories they consider useless, and metaphysical essences." Speaking truth to power; criticing authority; and tearing down silly conventions. Read the About page for more
Sierra, because that's where I am. And cynic, for the original meaning of the word, that "They are especially harsh critics of dogmatic thought, theories they consider useless, and metaphysical essences." Speaking truth to power; criticing authority; and tearing down silly conventions. Read the About page for more
Sierra, because that's where I am. And cynic, for the original meaning of the word, that "They are especially harsh critics of dogmatic thought, theories they consider useless, and metaphysical essences." Speaking truth to power; criticing authority; and tearing down silly conventions. Read the About page for more
Sierra, because that's where I am. And cynic, for the original meaning of the word, that "They are especially harsh critics of dogmatic thought, theories they consider useless, and metaphysical essences." Speaking truth to power; criticing authority; and tearing down silly conventions. Read the About page for more
Sierra, because that's where I am. And cynic, for the original meaning of the word, that "They are especially harsh critics of dogmatic thought, theories they consider useless, and metaphysical essences." Speaking truth to power; criticing authority; and tearing down silly conventions. Read the About page for more
Sierra, because that's where I am. And cynic, for the original meaning of the word, that "They are especially harsh critics of dogmatic thought, theories they consider useless, and metaphysical essences." Speaking truth to power; criticing authority; and tearing down silly conventions. Read the About page for more
Sierra, because that's where I am. And cynic, for the original meaning of the word, that "They are especially harsh critics of dogmatic thought, theories they consider useless, and metaphysical essences." Speaking truth to power; criticing authority; and tearing down silly conventions. Read the About page for more
Sierra, because that's where I am. And cynic, for the original meaning of the word, that "They are especially harsh critics of dogmatic thought, theories they consider useless, and metaphysical essences." Speaking truth to power; criticing authority; and tearing down silly conventions. Read the About page for more
Yet we’re continually told that they know better; that they’re The Best and Brightest.
sierracynic 