I thought for a moment this might be an amazingly sharp photo of the surface of Jupiter or Saturn or one of their moons, but, no, that couldn’t possibly be right. It had to be some sort of art.
I tracked it down and found it was an image created by Markus Mrugalla, an artist, photographer, and graphic designer, born in Poland in 1985, who currently lives in Germany.
A reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System devised by METEO-France’s Michel Leroy. The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends. The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward.
Watching the Olympic Games this time around, the wife and I puzzled as usual as to why team games in general, footling games like table tennis, and certain activities amounting more to entertainment than displays of athletic prowess (synchronized diving, for example) are considered worthy of the Olympics while some events included in the past were eliminated from the Games.
DayRiffer lists a number of events that were purged from the Olympic schedule.
Ancient Olympic competitions tested not only athletic skills but creative, intellectual, and rhetorical powers, as well. Poetry, music, and eloquence were just three of the “events†contested at the ancient Games.
The modern-day Games are supposedly devoted to testing athletic prowess exclusively, though many surprising events have found their way onto the Olympic docket, primarily in the earliest Games – in Athens in 1896, Paris in 1900, St. Louis in 1904, and Athens again, site of the Interim Olympic Games in 1906. The following events have since been removed from the Olympic program, often after one appearance and usually with good reason.
• Live pigeon shooting (1900). This is the only event in Olympic history in which animals were killed intentionally. Leon de Lunden of Belgium won the gold medal, with 21 birds killed, one more than Frenchman Maurice Faure bagged.
• A 100m freestyle swim that was open only to members of the Greek navy (1896).
• Tug-of-war (1900-20). In 1908, after a humiliating first-round loss to the British, the Americans protested that the British had used illegal spiked boots. When the protest was disallowed, the Americans withdrew.
• Croquet (1900).
• Dueling pistols (1906).
• Plunge for distance (1904).
• Underwater swimming (1900).
• The standing broad jump (1900-12).
• The standing long jump (1900-12).
• The standing triple jump (1900 and 1904).
• Motor boating (1908).
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National Geographic has a slideshow which adds a couple more.
So, why is ping pong an Olympic sport and not Croquet? Jeu de palme certainly looks more worthy of representation than table tennis.
The elimination of live Pigeon Shooting after 1900 was, of course, a terrible surrender to the bleeding hearts and reformers. Clearly this was the point when Western Civilization began going to hell in a handcart. Pigeon Shooting is a very challenging sport, which in the old days attracted the participation of many of the most renowned target shooters and game shots, European royalty, and all sorts of illustrious sportsmen, including Ernest Hemingway. Pigeon Shooting significantly excelled skeet and trap in difficulty, and provoked the creation by the high-end gun makers of a special, well-balanced but relatively heavy, long-barreled, and tightly-choked form of shotgun which many regarded as the supreme expression of the gun maker’s art. The loss of Live Pigeon Shooting is a serious loss to the shooting sports.
You mustn’t live shoot “rats with wings,” but it’s perfectly fine to watch the Olympic Games and then go dine on chicken or steak. The problem with Live Pigeon Shooting is the usual urban difficulty with actually seeing one’s dinner’s demise, not a genuine commitment to Ahimsa.
The Weekly Standard reports that American athletes winning medals at the London Olympics will owe the US Government money.
Americans who win bronze will pay a $2 tax on the medal itself. But the bronze comes with a modest prize—$10,000 as an honorarium for devoting your entire life to being the third best athlete on the planet in your chosen discipline. And the IRS will take $3,500 of that, thank you very much.
There are also prizes that accompany each medal: $25,000 for gold, $15,000 for silver, and $10,000 for bronze.
Silver medalists will owe $5,385. You win a gold? Timothy Geithner will be standing there with his hand out for $8,986. …
[M]ost other Olympians won’t pay any taxes on their medals because America is one of only a handful of countries which taxes “worldwide” prize income earned overseas.
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The Politico reports that at least on Republican wants to give American athletes a break.
[Senator Marco] Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced [on Wednesday] The Olympic Tax Elimination Act, which would exempt U.S. Olympic medal winners from paying taxes on their medals. Olympians receive honorariums in the form of cash payments of $25,000 for gold, $15,000 for silver and $10,000 for bronze, which the IRS currently taxes.
“Our tax code is a complicated and burdensome mess that too often punishes success, and the tax imposed on Olympic medal winners is a classic example of this madness,†Rubio said in a statement. “Athletes representing our nation overseas in the Olympics shouldn’t have to worry about an extra tax bill waiting for them back home.â€
The New York Times’ idea of a conservative, Harvard-man Ross Douthat warmly defends the practice of the establishment community of fashion elite “using every means at its disposal short of banning speech outright” to coercively change American culture and the private views and opinions of Americans generally in directions it deems more enlightened.
Douthat is nowhere nearly as offended as such liberals as Kevin Drum, Andrew Sullivan, and Glenn Greenwald by quasi-legal harassment of heretics by politicians on the fashionable side.
As always, the solution to noxious ideas like the ones from this chicken CEO are to rebut them, not use state power to suppress them. The virtue of gay equality has become increasingly recognized in the U.S. because people have been persuaded of its merits, not because state officials, acting like Inquisitors, forced people to accept it by punishing them for their refusal.
Greenwald and I have been over this ground a bit before, so I’ll say again what I said then: This is an idealized view of how cultures change, and it doesn’t acknowledge the link between law and culture, and the crucial role that [emphasis added -jdz] stigma, harassment and legal sanctions can play in changing attitudes and behavior. The cause of gay marriage has indeed advanced because many millions of people have been persuaded of its merits: No cause could move so swiftly from the margins to the mainstream if it didn’t have appealing arguments supporting it and powerful winds at its back. But it has also advanced, and will probably continue to advance, through social pressure, ideological enforcement, and legal restriction. Indeed, the very language of the movement is explicitly designed to exert this kind of pressure: By redefining yesterday’s consensus view of marriage as “bigotry,†and expanding the term “homophobia†to cover support for that older consensus as well as personal discomfort with/animus toward gays, the gay marriage movement isn’t just arguing with its opponents; it’s pathologizing them, raising the personal and professional costs of being associated with traditional views on marriage, and creating the space for exactly the kind of legal sanctions that figures like Thomas Menino and Rahm Emanuel spent last week flirting with.
This reality is not a judgment on the cause of gay marriage itself. Many admirable causes, including the cause of civil rights for African-Americans, have advanced through a similar legal and social redefinition of what constitutes acceptable opinion, and obviously gay people have historically been the victims, rather than the victimizers, where the human tendency to use law and custom to pathologize difference and marginalize dissent from respectable opinion is concerned. But it’s naive to think that gay marriage is only winning because of the power of sweet reason, and that the climate created by the bluster of figures like Menino and Emanuel isn’t a big part of the story as well. When David Blankenhorn, heretofore one of the leading critics of same-sex marriage, wrote last month that he was “bending the knee†on the issue, it was an explicit nod to this reality: Causes advance by persuading people to change their minds, but they win their final, sweeping victories by inducing people who haven’t really changed their mind to simply give up the fight. And there’s no surer way to gain that kind of victory than by adding legal hassles — or even just the threat of legal hassles — to the list of reasons why the fight isn’t worth having anymore.
The Jesuits used to say: if the ends are lawful, so are the means lawful. Obviously many prominent representatives of our elite establishment agree, and consider themselves empowered on the basis of their own allegedly superior moral insight to forcibly cram any change in morals, culture, faith, or opinion that they believe to be desirable right down the throats of their less powerful and influential fellow citizens, because they can and because it makes them feel so righteous and so powerful.
