Some of the greatest Western films about America were made by Italians. Italian westerns made the career of Clint Eastwood when Hollywood regarded him as strictly a television guy. No surprise Italians have such affinity for the Old West, they have it in their own culture too.Butteri, Italian cowboys, for centuries have roamed the marshes of the Maremma, a coastal area that stretches across parts of the Tuscany and Lazio regions, herding “maremmana” cattle, a local breed famous for their large bellies and long, lyre-shaped horns.Maremmana are bordering on extinction but the Italian cowboys who herd them may already be there...
The downside to kooks diluting real conditions like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD) is that, over time, the public will regard the quackery as the real thing. PTSD has now gone from being a rare condition suffered by soldiers in battle to being a blanket diagnosis for anyone who feels traumatized by anything. Now, we are supposed to believe a person who hears about stories of people who suffer PTSD will somehow catch it. Mac McClelland, a civil rights 'reporter' obsessed with sexual violence, was working for Mother Jones when she accompanied a Haitian victim of sexual violence to a hospital and the woman saw her attackers and went into shock.
The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, which bans race and gender considerations for college admissions and government hiring and contracting, has been struck down by an appeals court, meaning merit continues to take a back seat to artificial equality.
Maybe fantasy baseball scouting will start to list eye color along with which side players bat from and how their home park is configured - lighter-colored eyes, it seems, don't absorb light the way darker eyes do, and in a precisely game like baseball where milliseconds matter, the impact can be substantial.The clarity of a player's vision, called visual acuity, is not the only important quality to track for baseball players. So is contrast sensitivity. Dr. Keith Smithson, the team optometrist for the Washington Wizards, Washington Nationals and D.C. United, measures this in order to interpret "a ball player's ability to pick out a white target, a baseball, against different backgrounds."
"San Francisco doesn't realize that social legislation is like garlic," writes Meghan Daum at the LA Times. "Used sparingly, it can provide a useful kick to a dish, but overused and it makes people run away every time you open your mouth."San Francisco lives for garlic on its fries so perhaps that explains its need to micro-manage every aspect of everyones' lives in the name of freedom and choice. They want to ban circumcision, they want to ban Happy Meals and now goldfish.
Twice as many people have recently died in Europe from eating organic food than died in the Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion and the nuclear power plant meltdown in Fukushima, Japan - combined. If this were Monsanto doing the killing, there would be Enron levels of Congressional hearings but instead it's organic food and, gosh, it just must be better because it's, you know, organic, so few people are stating the obvious.Namely that it's time to regulate that stuff.
John Lennon disagreed with Paul McCartney on more than Macca's post-Beatles career arc - not the outrageous success part, but the leftwing proselytizing.John Lennon's last personal assistant said as the musician aged, he got more conservative. No surprise there, most intellectuals do. In a new documentary,"Beatles Stories", Fred Seaman tells filmmaker Seth Swirsky Lennon wasn't the peace-loving militant fans thought he was and that he instead argued with former left-wing radicals and was embarrassed by his former stances.
Does a police officer really need a four-year degree? Or a plumber or a journalist or a musician? The 'college is a right' experiment in America is now two decades old and it has led to ballooning costs, a result of unlimited money being thrown at a finite number of colleges. Has it led to a better life?To be sure, college educated people have higher lifetime earnings, though no evidence shows it is a result of college - if a police officer retires after 25 years on the job, did the degree make them successful?
It's easy to hate the government. It's a faceless bureaucracy that can easily grind you down to nothing if you are on the wrong side of it. But there are higher orders of contempt reserved for the select few, even in government, and TSA is that.No one really believes TSA ia making anyone safer, since they can't profile the people most likely to be a threat and instead resort to making 95-year-old women remove their adult diapers because, you know, geriatric grandmothers in diapers bombed the twin towers 10 years ago.
Why do nations rise and fall? Historians and anthropologists can usually make an educated hypothesis but some instances are nothing more than guesses. Here are 10 that disappeared and maybe it was due to global warming or global cooling or famine or flood, but no one knows, including the Minoans, the Anasazi, the Indus, the Nabateans and six more.Top 10 Civilizations That Mysteriously Disappeared
