I haven't written for a while, so I figured I should do summa that. Also, I found a bunch of really cool articles and so rather than trying to force coherence on to some of my typical rambling blather, I'm going to talk about those. All of these are real articles, though I can't vouch for the sources because that would require research, and that doesn't seem like a thing that I'd do.
The components of DNA have now been confirmed to exist in extraterrestrial meteorites, researchers announced.
This is the type of statement I love, because it gives me the chance to tell how people think. See the logical among you have read that and thought it was pretty awesome, but ultimately want to know a bunch more because it's not a complete statement. Those of you who are less logical are thinking, "HOMG thurrz aliuns!!" Also I take it back about what the logical people are thinking; they're probably reading the rest of the article.
See, if I wrote an article with the headline, "Elements for carbon-based life found on Mars", two things would be true: I would be misleading, and I would be 100% correct. See, Mars has carbon. Life on Earth is carbon-based. Therefore, "[Some] elements for carbon-based life [are] found on Mars". But the article is pretty cool.
Amino acids were found in meteorites. While amino acids are the building blocks of DNA, they are not DNA. They are not life. But the idea is cool. As a matter of fact panspermia, votest as "Funniest-Named Theory Ever" by a panel consisting of me, has been around as a theory for a long time. The theory basically says that life exists all throughout the universe, dispersed by things like meteors. The proper name for that being specific to Earth is exogenisis, which means "outside origin". There are types of bacteria that can handle being frozen, dried, and irradiated, all of which are things that would happen to something unshielded in outer space. They're called extremophiles, and they even thrive on the type of toxic compounds we see in near-Earth objects like Venus or Titan.
I don't really have a personal view on this article, I just think it's incredibly cool. There's a huge difference between convergent (two species, evolving separately, will evolve toward a similar form because it is the "most desirable" form--like how people picture aliens as having two arms, two legs, a torso, a head, two eyes, etc.) and divergent (two species, starting from a shared "root" form but evolving separately, will evolve in to separate species that still look sort of similar) evolution theories, but this doesn't contradict either since it's just about the basic building blocks.
While no one is massively arguing against this yet, I'll just add that arguing that this is impossible is like saying that because I made a scale model of a moose out of Legos at my house, someone else can't have a laptop at theirs because they can't both contain plastic. Complex molecules are complex but if you swirl enough stuff together, eventually some of it combines. There are only so many ways it can do that that are stable.
I apologize about the "universe doesn't think we're special" thing. You are all, of course, beautiful and unique snowflakes.
"In our view, the U.S. sovereign credit rating constrains the long-term rating on these U.S. insurers because their businesses and assets are highly concentrated in the U.S. and they have significant holdings in U.S. Treasury and agency securities"
It's not. But it's politically manipulable. There's actually some really weird stuff that can influence the markets, including the day of the week, the sun and the moon, and a particular culture's level of belief in hell. Company projections can have an influence, but not nearly as much as investor panic, as was shown when Apple's stock dropped 10% ($4.8 BILLION dollars) on the (false) news that Steve Jobs died of a massive heart attack in October 2008. Did Apple investors think that Steve Jobs & His Magical Turtleneck designed and built every product they've ever made? Does this mean that when Warren Buffett dies, the entire world economy is going to go under?
Standard & Poor's, for those of you don't know, are a financial services company that is one of 3 major credit-rating companies. They are the ones who downgraded the United States of Goddamned 'Merica's credit status from AAA to AA+. That's like if lenders went from fellating you with everything they had, to using slightly less enthusiasm. On a national scale, it's a big smack in the face, because, well...'MERICA. But they did what they had to do, as far as they considered was necessary.
Warren Buffett, who's known as an investment genius, came out the day after on the side of the US of f'n'A, saying that he still trusted US Treasury Bonds explicitly, and that he kept all his money in them when it wasn't out using its superpowers to make him more money. Fair enough. That's his thing. He trusts it, and he's really good with money. Way better at it than I am. So I sort of believe he's right. But this isn't about me.
Today, Standard & Poor's gave several companies a "negative" outlook, downgraded from "neutral". One of them was Warren Buffett's. So you can look at this in a couple ways: Either Standard & Poor's was retaliating for him disagreeing, or they were applying a consistent policy in line with their previous statements.
See, Warren Buffett's company, and the others that were downgraded, are all heavily invested in US Treasury Bonds and US stocks. So Standard & Poor's applied their new view of US stuff and it changedtheir prognosis for some companies. And yet people are crying foul about conspiracies and politics.
I don't know enough about economics to have a valid opinion. But the reasoning here seems solid to me. "We think X is worth less now [notice the space...]. Y is heavily invested in X. Therefore Y is worth less now." But there's another interesting thing about Warren Buffett. "In June 2006, he announced a plan to give away his fortune to charity, with 83% of it going to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation" (yeah, it's a lift from his Wikipedia page). That's a transparently operated foundation dedicated to enhancing healthcare and eradicating extreme poverty. He is against dynastic wealth, calling the born-rich, "winners of the lucky-sperm club". He's a notable billionaire who wasn't against killing the estate tax in the US.
Y'know, whether he's a winner or a loser in this debate, I'd kind of like to side with the guy who thinks like that. Do well while you're around. Provide. Improve. Then be gone. Seems like a natural order to me.
Thing 3: Tea Party Is Influential, Broke
In 2008, he [her husband] filed for bankruptcy, with tax debts alone of more than $680,000.
I don't want to say that the Tea Party are a bunch of lunatic right-wingers, because to be fair, that's not how it started. For the most part, at the beginning, they were a bunch of people who were sick of government spending a ridiculous amount of money on little return. The USA has lower income taxes than any other G20 nation, and yet they complain they pay too much. I think it's got more to do with a feeling of a lack of individual control than it does a hatred of taxes. After all, if you're getting for what you're giving, it's not so bad, right? But when your federal government has an "Office for the Negotiation of the Federal Status of Micronesia", it's hard to take any of its other expenses seriously. That office has existed for 20 years. If it's not negotiated by now, as Dave Barry said, screw Micronesia. Canada isn't any better. At one point, we had a department dedicated to the life-numbing task of determining what constituted a "wild" salmon. So here's where I agree with Tea Partiers: If it's raised in captivity, it's not "wild". Therefore, your people should be shot and your department should be razed to the ground. The Earth upon which it stood should be salted so that nothing stupider may grow. Basically if it can be solved by common sense, don't throw money at it.
Mostly what I'm just saying is that Jenny Beth Martin makes $72,000 a year as a spokesperson for a political group that doesn't believe government should cost so much. That's funny to me. People describe US politics as "agitated" and "passionate" and "partisan". Know what I think would calm them down? Rational application of common sense. A decent sense of perspective. An explanation of what "tax" is, and means, and how it benefits them. Maybe try to remove a meth lab or two from the southern ones, and teach those poor dears something instead of just writing them off as educationally useless but politically active. Why are people who are consistently rated as the stupidest allowed to have the same vote as everyone else?
I mean...I don't really have an opinion. How could I? I'm jus' sayin'...
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