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The 6 Most Ridiculous Things Ever Taxed
You can tell a lot about a civilization by the taxes it collects. Throughout history, governments have used high taxes to try to discourage certain behaviors (like smoking) and cash in on others. So it's very telling and/or frightening that at various times governments have taxed ...
#6. Urine
Over a million people lived in ancient Rome, and one of the big problems was what to do with all those bodily fluids that leaked out of the citizens in an era when advanced plumbing wasn't really a thing. We're talking about an amount of urine that could quickly turn their city into Venice.
Ew. No. Just ... ew.
The Romans liked keeping their city neat and therefore had lots of public toilets scattered throughout the city. They also famously had a sewage system, but not surprisingly, not every toilet was connected to it. Not by a long shot. All those public toilets just had large containers under them, which if left alone would eventually fill up. But luckily, ancient Romans were like the MacGyver's of piss.
Emperor Vespasian was the first one to realize he was quite literally sitting on a liquid gold mine. He started sending people out to collect urine, which he got for free, and then sold it to a huge variety of workmen in the city. These workmen paid a tax for the use of the urine, which was easier than going out and rounding it all up themselves.
Obviously. Wait, what?
So just what did they do with it? Let's just say everyone in Rome must have been walking around smelling like a latrine: Tanners used it to soften leather, and it was especially practical in the laundry, where it was used to get togas that famous bright white. So the city stayed clean, everyone had nice clothes and the government took in lots of tax revenue. Everyone wins.
Finally, drunken urination pays off.
When Vespasian's son pointed out (and rightly so) that this whole thing was utterly disgusting, the emperor supposedly held up a gold coin and said, "It doesn't stink," meaning that money is money no matter where it comes from. Although if it had been in your toga too long it probably would have had a faint smell of piss.
Don't mock, yours is covered in ball sweat.
For being such an awesome guy, Vespasian was rewarded by having his name applied to toilets all over Europe. No, seriously, the word for public toilets is "vespasiennes" in French, "vespasiene" in Romanian and "vespasiani" in Italian. So while Mel Brooks lied to us when he said toilets were named after Prince John, that same scenario really did happen in Italy.
#5. The Anti-Cleanliness Tax
We think of people from the past as pretty lax when it comes to personal hygiene, and compared with today's "Oh-my-God-it's-a-germ-kill-it!" culture, that's probably a fair assessment. However, this wasn't necessarily through lack of knowledge about the benefits of being clean or the lack of desire. No, part of the reason people in England and France were so dirty for so long was the fact that buying soap was discouraged with heavy taxes, because the government decided bathing was the devil's pastime.
Mostly because it is.
Bathing regularly is something that has gone in and out of fashion over the past 2,000 years. While some queens happily boasted that they had bathed only twice in their lives, other people, like the ancient Britons and the odd "eccentric" aristocrat, thought that bathing at least once a week was good for you. The popularity of more regular baths was on the up again in England when King Charles I pissed off Parliament and got his head chopped off. His replacement was the ultrareligious, royalty and Christmas-hating, no-fun Puritan Oliver Cromwell, and it is thanks to him that the English went back to being filthy.
The God-fearing Puritans thought being too clean was ungodly. All that smelling good and being naked and wet -- nothing good would come of it. So to discourage it, they slapped on a huge soap tax, like the massive taxes on cigarettes now. Although Cromwell initiated the tax, when the royal family was restored under Charles II, the king never bothered to change the law. After all, if people were willing to pay to be clean, the king might as well make some money off it.
Via Wikimedia Commons
Capes don't buy themselves.
The tax was in place for 200 years and was taken so seriously that soap makers actually had representatives of the king watch them make all of their soap to ensure that none of it was being made in secret and sold on the black market. When this tax was finally repealed in England in the 1800s, the chancellor supposedly said, "A clean nation is a happy nation," and clothes that you could wash regularly became all the rage. Of course, from that moment on, Britain became the nonstop hedonistic fuck orgy it is today.
#4. Beards
Russia pretty much sucked in 1697. Peter the Great, new to the throne and having that awesome name to live up to, had grand plans to modernize the country to catch up to the rest of the world. This led to some great things, such as the construction of St. Petersburg from the ground up. But he thought there was one major thing holding Russia back:
No one in Europe wore beards anymore. Russians, in their long facial hair, looked as ridiculous as someone walking around in 6-inch platform heels with goldfish swimming inside would look today. In an effort to modernize Russia and make it more European than Eastern, Peter the Great made men cut off their beards. And when we say he "made" them, we're talking a man who was known to attack bearded men in the street and forcefully shave them.
But being a slightly reasonable giant psychopath, he also offered them the option of paying a ridiculously heavy tax to keep their long beards. That way, if they had to embarrass the motherland with their fashion faux pas, at least the czar made money off it (the fact that Peter himself couldn't grow a beard probably had nothing to do with his decision).
Via Wikimedia Commons
Honestly, if you let that guy beat you up, you kind of deserved it.
This yearly tax was especially controversial because Russian Orthodoxy said that men needed to wear beards down to their chests. It wasn't just a suggestion, either. Ivan the Terrible once stated that "to shave the beard is a sin the blood of all martyrs cannot cleanse," which to be fair is probably a little extreme on the pro-beard side.
Via Wikimedia Commons
But he could actually kick your ass, so there was that.
Most men found that their love of money and fear of Peter outweighed their religious leanings and shaved. Those who had their beards chopped off saved them and were buried with them to prove (presumably to God) that they had wanted to do the right thing but couldn't (because really, who has that many kopecks to spend on divine facial hair?).


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Center as a Whole
The University of Louisville Alcohol Research Center (ULARC) has been established to:
- facilitate interdisciplinary approaches to the investigation of nutrient/gene interactions in specific organ/systemic sequelae of chronic alcohol consumption
- investigate the role of inflammation in these effects
- focus the talents of both experienced senior researchers and outstanding junior investigators and the necessary institutional resources, in a fertile multidisciplinary environment, on these problems
- provide training opportunities in alcohol research for graduate and postgraduate students, and develop formal training and curricula to train clinical/translational alcohol researchers
- develop potential therapeutic interventions for alcohol induced organ
injury, such as alcoholic liver disease (ALD), based on the research of
these investigators.
Toward these ends, we have brought together basic scientists and clinicians from several disciplines who share a research interest in the organ/system consequences of alcohol consumption. The ULARC is a formalized arrangement among investigators who have already been collaborating for a number of years. This center is designed to help these investigators in their research by:
- providing a pilot project mechanism to allow junior investigators to develop hypotheses for further NIH applications, and to allow more senior investigators to take their research in new and innovative directions
- providing support for several existing resources at U of L specifically for the use of these researchers
- develop new training/education opportunities for clinical and translational alcohol research.
To assist in the research, there are two cores: administrative, and support core. The Administrative Core develops educational/curriculum opportunities, facilitates interactions among investigators, coordinates teaching and provides both scientific and financial oversight. The Support Core provides support for the ULARC researchers to facilitate their research.
Organized thus, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

subset: commoncrawl


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After the incident which caused Leonard's condition in Memento, he cannot remember anything more than a few minutes old, other than the events before that incident. Yet, he remembers his condition?
Leonard can not remember about his condition anytime. Even sometimes he forgets what he is doing right now. Remember the scenes when he is running because he is being chased or when he drinks the spitted beer. He just suddenly looses any clue why is he doing something in a time. After the accident, he said he can not store recent memories. But he can remember everything before the accident. But he has to be reminded of the incident (He does it by viewing his tattoos, notebook etc). In his tattoos he reminds himself everything. About the condition he reminds himself. Look carefully:
He remembered about Sammy Jenkins that who had a special condition.
He remembers about the accidents.
By remembering Sammy Jenkins, he remembers he has the similar condition.
He is now confirm about his weakness.
He reminds himself how he can try to remember things.
This is the way he reminds himself about his condition and the other facts he is looking for. Sam Jenkins is a fictional character through which he remembers he has the condition. Sammy is a character from Leonards memory where memory of Leonard and really Sammy has mixed.
All the tattoos listed by Mistu4u help Leonard in guiding himself to cope with his conditions.
However even in this condition he never forgets daily chores like driving, eating, shaving etc. He is also able to use English language comfortably. Through his subconscious he knows about his condition too.
he doesn't remember his condition but every time that he forgets things and he feels like he has just woken up, he first looks around (so he sees his left hand at the very first moment) and the tatoo


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Lexington police say a 19-year-old man is facing charges stemming from a shooting involving a toddler and another young child.
The Lexington Herald-Leader reports that a 2-year-old boy was accidentally shot in the arm by his male 4-year-old cousin.
Lexington police say Lavonne Myron Smith tried to hide the gun used in the shooting from officers after they arrived on the scene.
Smith is charged with carrying a concealed deadly weapon and tampering with evidence.
The toddler, who has not been identified, was shot Saturday evening in an apartment where adults were present.
The child's injuries are not considered life threatening, but he was taken to University of Kentucky Hospital. Social services workers were called to assist with the children.


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He Is Who Is
Being, Consciousness, Bliss
David Bentley Hart
Yale University Press, $25, 376 pp.
Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge asks, "Is it possible that there are people who say 'God' and think it is something they have in common?" This would have made an apt epigraph to David Bentley Hart's brilliant, frustrating new book, which he says he wrote from the conviction that
while there has been a great deal of public debate about belief in God in recent years…the concept of God around which the arguments have run their seemingly interminable courses has remained strangely obscure the whole time. The more scrutiny one accords these debates, moreover, the more evident it becomes that often the contending parties are not even talking about the same thing; and I would go so far as to say that on most occasions none of them is talking about God in any coherent sense at all.
The "public debates" Hart has in mind were the subject of his 2009 work, Atheist Delusions, an unanswerable and frequently hilarious demolition of the shoddy thinking and historical illiteracy of the so-called New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris). As Hart and several other critics—including Mark Johnston, Marilynne Robinson, Charles Taylor, and Terry Eagleton—have demonstrated, whatever the New Atheists don't believe in, it's not God, at least not God as conceived by a single one of the major theistic traditions on the planet.
Instead, the New Atheists ingeniously deny the existence of a bearded fellow with superpowers who lives in the sky and finds people's keys for them. Daniel Dennett wants to know "if God created and designed all these wonderful things, who created God? Supergod? And who created Supergod? Superdupergod?"—thereby revealing his lack of acquaintance not only with Augustine and Thomas but with Aristotle.
It was Aristotle who wrote that "one and the same is the knowledge of contraries." Denys Turner, in his recent Thomas Aquinas (which makes a fine companion piece to The Experience of God), puts the matter like this: "Unless…what believers and atheists respectively affirm and deny is the same for both, they cannot be said genuinely to disagree."
There are, then, a great many people who say "God" and mistakenly believe that they have the notion, at least, in common. Hart is interested in clarifying the notion, and one of his deeper points is that the major theistic religions do indeed have something in common when they say "God." In a churlish review for Harper's, Jane Smiley writes that Hart "is robustly convinced that there is only one definition of God, and that is his own." She then quotes Hart's "own" definition: "one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things."
As Hart makes plain, however, and as anyone even slightly familiar with the history of metaphysics is aware, that definition is not Hart's, but one shared by most major religious and philosophical traditions. It is as much Aristotle's definition as it is Moses Maimonides's and Thomas Aquinas's and Mulla Sadra's and, indeed, Spinoza's. It describes equally Brahman and Yahweh. Nor is Hart here proposing a dilution of the real differences among religions, à la Huston Smith; he is interested in what the theistic traditions disclose, a common conception of the ultimate transcendental ground of being. For Bahá'ís as for Sikhs, God is not one being among others, not even an especially powerful and wise being (this, Hart points out, is what differentiates God from gods). As Aquinas puts it, God is ipsum esse subsistens. In fact, Aquinas's definition of God at the outset of the Summa, which uncannily anticipates Hart's, has made more than a few Christian theologians uneasy precisely because it is a philosophical definition that could apply just as easily to Allah or Yahweh as to the Trinity.
Hart is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, but The Experience of God is, as the above suggests, wonderfully ecumenical: he draws with ease on the Upanishads, Sufi poetry, Islamic philosophy, and the Church Fathers to support his thesis that "naturalism—the doctrine that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and certainly nothing supernatural—is an incorrigibly incoherent concept, and one that is ultimately indistinguishable from pure magical thinking." He grounds his argument in three chapters: one on being ("Why is there something rather than nothing" is not a question about what processes within nature—quantum fluctuation, say—gave rise to the universe, but about being as such, a question for religion and ontology rather than for a materialist cosmology); one on consciousness (despite the cocksure proclamations of certain pop neuroscience writers, we still have no idea how the activity of eighty-some billion neurons gives rise to the qualia of subjective experience; mind is obviously related to brain, but there is simply no credible rationale for ruling out the mental as a formally distinct reality); and one on bliss (a rather muddled discussion of epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics).
These sections compose "meditations on the meaning of the word 'God,'" but I do wish they bore less of a resemblance to repetitive chanting. For Hart, often a subtle and eloquent writer, has come down with Harold Bloom Syndrome, whose sufferers reiterate perfectly good themes until they lose their rhetorical force. He tells us, for instance, that God "is not a 'being'…not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all." And that "God…is beyond all mere finite beings." And that "God is not a being…but is absolute Being as such." And "God's being [is] different from the being of a finite thing." And "God is to be understood as the unconditioned source of all things, rather than merely some very powerful but still ontologically dependent being." We must not be deluded that "God is just another being among beings." For the God of the theistic faiths is not "any kind of object at all, but is himself the light of being." Also, God is not "a finite entity who can be classed alongside or over against the finite entities that belong to nature."
Now, this is a vital point, and it is precisely where most atheists go wrong. (After I published an article on the subject, someone wrote to protest that the laws of physics suffice to disprove the existence of God. This really is the philosophically illiterate level at which these "debates" take place.) But the above is a mere sampling of the morass of repetition into which Hart repeatedly falls back. At crucial junctures, he will restate some thesis, disclaim the desire to prove anything, and self-consciously gesture toward his bibliography.
These faults, however, do not sink The Experience of God. Hart is a phenomenally gifted thinker who recalls believers of all faiths to the best of their traditions, challenges unbelievers to examine their own metaphysical presuppositions, and does these with tremendous gusto. He has written a necessary book in a bad time. In this country, for instance, the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich continues unabated while the CIA assassinates Pakistani grandmothers tending their gardens. Yet a great many American Christians are content to ignore their own Scripture's not exactly subtle precepts regarding economic justice and state murder, preferring to fret about the age of the earth and the calamitous threats posed by same-sex marriage. And non-Christians are likely to believe all sorts of dumb things about a religion unbelievers used to actually study for its sociocultural relevance.
Hart, on the other hand, will suffer no fools of any creed. He notes that biblical literalism—a very recent phenomenon, as he points out—requires one to believe "that Adam could have hidden from [God] behind a tree," while Origen, in the third century, thought it was self-evident "that these are figural tales, communicating spiritual mysteries, and certainly not historical records." And Hart is right to hold "young earth creationists…who believe that there really was a Noah who built a giant ark to rescue a compendious menagerie from a universal deluge" partly responsible for the proliferation of lazy atheist manifestoes.
Of course, showing up American fundamentalism is about as hard as shooting the deck of an aircraft carrier when you're standing on it, and it is the absurdities of popular scientism that Hart was put on this earth to expose. Here he is on Dawkins's vacuous concept of the "meme":
Genetic materials are propagated by physical transactions because they themselves are physical realities; at their level, no conscious acts need be present. Whatever else "memes" might be, however, if such things really did exist, they would most definitely be composed of intentional content and would exist only as objects of mental representation. They would not therefore be metaphorically "selected" by nature, in the way the units of biological evolution are said to be, but would literally be chosen (even if often a little passively) by a conscious mind.
What's astonishing isn't that Dawkins can't see that the meme is merely a metaphor, but that he doesn't realize it's a metaphor that presumes intelligent design. (Hart dismisses the Intelligent Design movement, though more kindly than it deserves.)
Hart is at his impish best when prompting us, with understandable exasperation, to remember that the natural sciences study nature—which is to say, what exists within spacetime. There is no doubt that they are very good at this: I'm typing these words on a new MacBook Pro, and antibodies are developing in my body in response to a flu vaccine, and I can hear an airplane in the skies above Chicago. Thomas Aquinas was in no more doubt of science's validity within its sphere than is Dawkins. But "within its sphere" is easily misread in the dim light naturalism casts upon metaphysical questions today, when science is said to explain Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and R. Kelly's "Ignition (Remix)" and why I love both so much. (You won't be surprised to learn it has something to do with natural selection.)
The central folly of scientism is the assumption that "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is a question for science—whose proper field is, after all, "something"—or, even more perniciously, that it isn't a question worth bothering about, isn't really a question at all. Hart borrows a delightful illustration of the problem:
How is it that any reality so obviously fortuitous—so lacking in any mark of inherent necessity or explanatory self-sufficiency—can exist at all? The American philosopher Richard Taylor once illustrated this mystery…with the image of a man out for a stroll in the forest unaccountably coming upon a very large translucent sphere. Naturally, he would immediately be taken aback by the sheer strangeness of the thing, and would wonder how it should happen to be there. More to the point, he would certainly never be able to believe that it just happened to be there without any cause, or without any possibility of further explanation; the very idea would be absurd. But, adds Taylor, what that man has not noticed is that he might ask the same question equally well about any other thing in the woods too, a rock or a tree no less than this outlandish sphere, and fails to do so only because it rarely occurs to us to interrogate the ontological pedigrees of the things to which we are accustomed.
This is certainly the dark wood in which we seem to find ourselves. But while I agree with Hart that naturalism appears incoherent—its incoherence is the external warrant for my belief in God—I think he is too hasty to dismiss the possibility that our bafflement before ontological mystery is the result of our being the particular kind of limited animals we are. A badger cannot understand differential equations, but that tells us something about badgers, not equations. I'm not sure I share Hart's confidence in human "reason's power to illuminate reality." My own beliefs notwithstanding, there might be some natural but unfamiliar perspective from which the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" simply dissolves—as from our perspective differential equations pose no insurmountable obstacle to understanding.
Still, the badger doesn't know there is a problem to be faced in the first place. And the giant translucent spheres that surround us everywhere we turn are astonishing indeed.
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Wondeful stuff! Thank you. Just now ordered "Atheist Delusions". Hopefully it will, like several of Hitchen's writings, allow me to dream of possessing such a remarkable ability to ponder, to understand and to write. As for my understanding of this post, other than for the sheer joy of learning, I have yet to understand what seems to be an expectation that belief and fact can become one if we just try a little harder.
Aquinas's definition "uncannily anticipates Hart's?"
May I respectfully suggest that any professional theologian worth his has read the Summa Theologiae at some point in his life, and so has Hart?
I have read the book twice, and my estimation is even higher. Hart is not merely an eloquent and subtle writer, but one of the best prose writers out there today. In this book, he is remarkably restrained by his standards (though in the last chapter his prose begins to flow more fully). The book is not vainly repetitious at all. Every time he repeats a formula, he does it as the conclusion reached from yet another angle, and the reiteration becomes more and more powerful as he progresses. Sure, for someone already in command of the metaphysical themes it will seem needless. But Hart is out to drive the point home, in a constantly shifting variety of ways, for those who do not yet fully understand. Comparing a writer as gifted to Hart to Harold Bloom, who has never managed a single good sentence, is silly.
Incidentally, I don't think there is any uncanny anticipation of Hart in Aquinas. Rather there is an elegant use of Aquinas in Hart.
And did you have to mention that dumb review by the boring Jane Smiley? You spoiled my evening.
Oh, and doesn't Hart clearly acknowledge we might be badgers after all? He says materialism could indeed be true, because then our feeble reason would be useless anyway. He merely complains that the naturalists don't realize that, if indeed they are right, they themselves are badgers too and so have no warrant for believing they are right.
Scientists are generally illiterate in philospophy: ex. funny debates with plenty even mistakes in textboks (I can show you in any univiersity library) on relativity and QM ("twin paradox", "Schrodinger cat"). They do not think; they perform monkey-mechanical operations. How many is able to prove: 1+1=2 or (1 or 11)?
I think Thomas Aquinas' idea of "ipsum esse" is just a copy of Avicenna ( a Muslim). An old staff.
For your entertainment: I've just "mocked" R.Dawkins on his blog by posing simple questions: 'Do you see light", Does (this) light exist?" I was kicked out immediately. I complained and was promised to recheck it (my complain) and no answer at all! I keep record of it. Sure, thank this present MinEducations for the illiteracy of society.
I wonder if that was my point? I.e. I was being ironic, in response to Smiley's inability to see that Hart is drawing on Thomas? Sheesh.
*that comment was in reply to Bella & Carlo. OF COURSE Hart has read Thomas, in other words. Smiley should have seen that his definition draws from deep tradition.
Having read a piece in an earlier Commonweal about the Hart book and having admired his earlier Beauty of the Infinite, I bought this book as quickly as I could. I confess that I am only about a third of the way into it.
That being the case, I want to offer my immediate reaction. As a priest in a small suburban parish I often hear people questioning whether there is a God and if so how does God act in daily life. So many of these folks believe, whether they're actually aware of it, that science - the human ability to think - can identify and solve every human need. We just don't need God anymore.
Hart's book, in just a few pages, has given me a wealth of ideas about how I can reach these folks in a way that both challenges and invites them to reconsider the reality of God. For me it's relevant and accessible; I can't wait to finish it.
Smiley's people are few and far apart. Pun is intended, as witless as it may read.
Sorry, Michael, but you out-subtled yourself.
I am not sure why you called the Bliss section muddled, incidentally. I thought it was the most straightforward: the structure of rational conscioucness is irreducibly ecstatic and transcendental, and we see this as applied to thinking (truth), willing (goodness), and desiring (beauty). I found the argument crystal clear and very cleverly composed.
See my reply below. Sorry I missed the point.


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Space is limited. Please call 415-355-2838 or register online here for reservations, starting six days before the program. The fun continues with playtime immediately after Baby Rhyme Time.
Rollicking rhymes, songs, and books for infants to 15 months and their caregivers.
Upcoming Events
- Baby Rhyme Time
- Saturday, July 23, 2016, 11:00 amPark, Park Meeting Room
- Baby Rhyme Time
- Monday, July 25, 2016, 11:00 amVisitacion Valley, Visitacion Valley Meeting Room
- Baby Rhyme Time
- Tuesday, July 26, 2016, 11:00 amMarina, Marina Childrens' Area


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The following news release is from the Kansas Division of Emergency Management.
Even as snowstorms start to leave Kansas, wind chill factors will approach dangerous levels during the evening hours, dipping below zero in some areas. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment encourages Kansans to be safe and exercise caution during and after the storms.
"Serious health problems can result from prolonged exposure to the cold," said Robert Moser, MD., KDHE Secretary and State Health Officer. "Most common cold weather-related problems are frostbite and hypothermia. If you experience symptoms of hypothermia or frostbite you need to seek medical care."
To prevent harm in extremely cold temperatures, take the time to prepare before you head outdoors, even for short periods of time. It's important during these winter storms to dress properly and to carry with you the right gear and equipment when leaving home.
Frostbite causes a loss of feeling and color in affected areas. It most often affects the nose, ears, cheeks, chin, fingers, or toes. Frostbite can permanently damage the body, and severe cases can lead to amputation. The risk of frostbite is increased in people with reduced blood circulation and among people who are not dressed properly for extremely cold temperatures.
At the first signs of redness or pain in any skin area, get out of the cold or protect any exposed skin - frostbite may be beginning.
"A victim is often unaware of frostbite until someone else points it out because the frozen tissues are numb," explained Moser.
If there is frostbite, but no sign of hypothermia and immediate medical care is not available, proceed as follows:
· Get into a warm room as soon as possible.
· Unless absolutely necessary, do not walk on frostbitten feet or toes; this increases the damage.
· Immerse the affected area in warm--not hot—water. The temperature should be comfortable to the touch for unaffected parts of the body.
· Or, warm the affected area using body heat. For example, the heat of an armpit can be used to warm frostbitten fingers.
· Do not rub the frostbitten area with snow or massage it at all. This can cause more damage.
· Don't use a heating pad, heat lamp, or the heat of a stove, fireplace, or radiator for warming. Affected areas are numb and can be easily burned.
Moser also noted that refreezing will occur as temperatures drop again, increasing the risk of falls on ice and packed snow; injuries have been reported across the state resulting from people slipping on ice.


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Who is the last person regarded as a true prophet in Judaism? What was his time frame?
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The Tosefta (Sotah 13:4) writes:
Additionally, the Talmud (Bava Batra 14b) writes:
These three prophets were all active at the beginning of the Second Temple period which is around 500 BCE or 350 BCE depending on how you deal with the Missing Years.
The Ibn Ezra (in his introduction to Malachi) writes that Malachi was the last prophet. The Rambam (Maimonides) in Melachim 11:1 implies that the Mashiach (messiah) will be a prophet (since he refers to the "other prophets"). (I think both of them agree, actually, just that Malachi was the last prophet until Mashiach.)


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1940 Chevrolet Master Deluxe Sedan - Street Rod Makeover, Part OneWritten by on January 14, 2003 Launching a '90s-Built Street Rod Into the 21st Century
Nothing gets dated-looking faster than a street rod. Either built to current vogue or slammed together on a budget, it's pretty easy to look at an average rod and name the date-of-build within a year or two. The good news is that these somewhat passe cars are the cheapest to buy, and the better news is that they're pretty easy to update to current trends. And so begins our two-part series on how easy it is to transform practically any hot rod with a few well-chosen tweaks.
Are we slaves to fashion? Yes and no. Remember, a big part of why many people build street rods is to get attention. But when the look grows stale and bystanders stop drooling, it's time to shuffle the deck. Of course, it also runs deeper than that. Many owners view their cars as paintings that are never finished. From adding a few fresh brush strokes once in a while to completely stripping to bare canvas and starting over, the passage of time (and the availability of newer parts and technologies) is as good a reason as any to make some adjustments in the name of progress.
So we present HRM Associate Publisher Ed Zinke's '40 Chevy Master Deluxe sedan. Ed has owned the car for the better part of 15 years and was the one who saved it from a rusty death as a Midwest chicken coop. Between 1990 and 1993 he and his son Jaeson transformed the hulk into a very respectable street rod, doing most of the work in the family's three-car garage. Ed: "It was pure low-buck. I didn't always know what I was doing, but at least I got it done." It has a '69 Camaro front subframe, a lowered stance thanks to cut coils, 15-inch rolling stock, shaved chrome, and a decent home-sprayed radiant white finish. The drivetrain starts with a B&M-blown 355 and a B&M-fortified TH350, and ends with a 3.31:1-geared Camaro 10-bolt rear axle. Neat but hardly awe-inspiring, this Chevy suffers from a case of the blahs. It needs a makeover.
The prime offenders were the wheels and the monochrome treatment that, so popular in the '80s, really takes some character away from the car. To get a new vision on the car, Ed contracted renowned designer Thom Taylor to sketch a vision of what the '40 was to become with just a wheel/tire swap, some body tricks, and some graphics. We'll show you that next month, but for now, watch as we lose the tiny brakes, dated rollers, and crunchy suspension bits.
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Before updating, the front suspension consisted of '69 Camaro 11-inch disc brakes connected to the chassis via shortened (by 1-5/8 inches) upper and lower control arms that reduce front track for extra tire-to-fender clearance. The setup suffered from flawed geometry thanks to the two coils hacked from the stock Camaro springs, allowing the suspension to bottom out when stressed. Yes, those are coil wedges (arrow).Fatman Fabrications now offers complete front suspension clips for '67-'69 Camaros and '68-'74 Novas, but we opted to retain the Camaro clip and update it with Fatman's tubular Camaro A-arms. Also available for '58-'64 Impalas and '64-'72 Chevelles, the arms are available in stock widths or 1-1/2 inches shorter than stock to help accommodate extra rubber in F-car applications. Under Ed Zinke's '40, they do the same thing though they increase front track by 1/8 inch per side versus the one-off cut A-arms. Despite this, there's still plenty of room for tire sidewall clearance in the bulbous front fenders. Fatman offers A-arms that accept stock-type coil springs or coilover conversions.QA1 offers Pro Coil kits that replace the springs and shocks with coilover setups for applications such as Chevelles, Tri-Five Chevys, and Camaros. Of course, the Camaro/Nova setup will also fit clipped street rods, so we used PN GMP14. Rated at 350 lb/in, the coils give the nose of the car an aggressive lowered stance without bottoming out on hard dips and bumps. The billet aluminum shocks feature 12-way adjustability to fine-tune damping for just about any driving condition. We set them at the number five position (one click left of center) for a smooth ride.Reinforcing the in-the-weeds stance are Superior 2-inch drop spindles from Fatman (PN RAH1215001). The Baer Racing Track & Touring Plus front disc brake kit (PN 1301019) requires minor spindle machining to accept the caliper adapters. Baer highly recommends that customers ship their spindles so the work is done right. After machining, Baer technicians assemble the brakes to the spindles and ship them back to you. They even pack the wheel bearings with grease.The 12-inch-diameter rotors and massive four-piston calipers give the '40 a modern look with performance to match. For added pizzazz, Ed ordered the optional zinc-washed, cross-drilled, and slotted rotor treatment as well as powdercoated calipers. The hubs are drilled for both GM (5-on-4-3/4) and Ford/Mopar (5-on-4-1/2) bolt patterns. Naturally, this Chevy uses the GM pattern.Compared to the original modified Camaro setup, the modernized front suspension is a vast improvement, shaving nearly 20 pounds of sprung and unsprung weight per side.At the rear axle, the stock 91/2x2-inch Camaro drum brakes are embarrassingly small in today's world, especially with 17-inch rims. They've got to go. The swap to Baer's Track & Touring Plus rear disc kit (PN 1262055) starts with the removal of the differential inspection cover, axle C-clips, and axleshafts.The Baer rear disc brake kit features big 13.25-inch rotors, four-piston calipers, and all of the required mounting hardware. Like the front brake kit, the rear brakes feature optional cross-drilling, slotting, zinc-washing, and powdercoating treatments.
The stock steel brake lines that once fed the drum brake wheel cylinders were reused with the discs after their ends were bent 90 degrees using a tubing bender to avoid kinks.The Baer kit includes hoses that merge with the reworked stock tubing and are safely strapped to the axletubes using the supplied clamps and tabs.Big brakes are mandatory equipment with modern large-diameter rims. More than simple status symbols, they add significantly to vehicle safety and performance by resisting fade and through their ability to generate far more clamping force than the stock binders.Replacing the previous 15x6 (front) and 15x8 (rear) American Racing Model 250 wheels and Falken radials are 17x7 (PN 77278) and 17x8 (PN 78278) Weld Racing/Cragar Rod 50s and P215/45ZR17 (front) and P275/50ZR17 (rear) Nitto 450 Extreme tires. The Big-O tire shop in Norco, California, handled the mounting and balancing.A tasty mix of modern billet aluminum dazzle and traditional textures and shapes, the 17-inch Weld Racing/Cragar Rod 50s and Nitto tires met Ed's desire to give the appearance of bigger wheels without actually increasing overall height or width of the tires.A Baer adjustable proportioning valve (PN ZOZZ17701) regulates brake pressure delivery. Ed set it to provide slightly more pressure to the rear calipers and says the car stops best this way. Here a tubing-cutter is used to prepare existing brake hard line for merger with proportioning valve.One thing that has bothered Ed since the car first went together in 1993 is how the rear shocks are mounted. Here we see how the lower bushings are forced into submission (and early failure) by misaligned mounting studs.QA1 Street Star 12-way adjustable shocks (PN STS1574P) replace the original Monroe-Matic gas shocks at the rear of the Chevy. Ed finds they give the most comfortable ride for rear seat passengers when set at the number three position.


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BEECH BOTTOM - The Business Development Corp. of the Northern Panhandle has emerged as the new owner of the 600-plus acre Wheeling Corrugating property in Beech Bottom, a complicated transaction that has been weeks in development.
The deal, which closed Wednesday in New York City, gives the BDC control of the massive property, which includes 150 acres of prime flatlands fronting the Ohio River as well as some 480,000 square feet of fully infrastructured warehouse space already under roof.
State Route 2 LLC, a subsidiary of Los Angeles-based Hackman Capital, owns the rights to the equipment that's on the property.
Article Photos
NEW OWNER — The Business Development Corp. of the Northern Panhandle is the new owner of the former Wheeling Corrugating property in Beech Bottom. -- Warren Scott
They'll work together to market it.
"Obviously, it's adjacent to the Ohio River, which is rare," said Susan Skros, vice president of marketing and investor relations for Hackman. "That's why we were drawn to the opportunity - the energy boom in this area of the country, the magnitude of the site and our desire to collaborate with the BDC. We want to redevelop the site for better economic use. This is the perfect opportunity to bring more jobs to the area, a chance to take advantage of the energy boom in the area."
State Route 2 LLC purchased the property out of bankruptcy from the now-defunct RG Steel, and immediately signed over the land - and with it, responsibility for legacy issues there - to the BDC.
Pat Ford, executive director of the BDC, described it as "a gem" of a property, a rare development opportunity in the heavily industrialized Northern Panhandle. As a non-profit, the BDC has access to state and federal funds to remediate contaminants on the site, money Hackman couldn't leverage on its own.
"This isn't scary," Ford said. "Scary is when your future lies in someone else's hands and you have no say, no control, no influence. Here, the people who will have a say in this site are the businesses and residents of Brooke and Hancock counties, of the Northern Panhandle."
Papers on file with U.S. Bankruptcy Court show State Route 2 LLC had initially offered $2.1 million, minus any back taxes, for the equipment as well as land. Under bankruptcy court rules, others interested in the property had 14 days to submit higher or better offers for the property, and several potential buyers availed themselves of that opportunity to submit counter bids, pushing the final sale price up.
While Skros declined to say what the actual buy price was, Ford did say the BDC paid $200,000 to buy the land rights from State Route 2 LLC, which has an option to harvest all of the equipment.
"The chain of title for liability goes from RG directly to the BDC, so we're on the hook for any liability," Ford said. "But we're doing it with our eyes wide open. We've already illustrated our capacity to handle environmental liabilities to to the community of Chester, to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. We've illustrated our capacity to manage environmental cleanup, and we've also illustrated our capacity to successfully seek out and obtain funding to assist with cleanup. We'll apply the same model to the Wheeling Corrugating site. It might look like a steal on paper, but if you're in this business you understand the liability we've assumed (in the Beech Bottom deal)."
In Chester, the BDC acquired the old Taylor, Smith & Taylor pottery property in 2011 for $125,000, then secured more than $1 million from local, state and federal sources for its cleanup. The BDC involved community residents throughout the planning process, and Ford said they'll be following that same blueprint now in Beech Bottom. He said the goal there, as in Chester, is to ensure it brings big gains in terms of jobs and revenue.
"I think it's going to be an asset to the village and to the county," Beech Bottom Mayor George Lewis, describing the deal as "the most positive thing that's happened to Beech Bottom in the last 30 years."
Lewis said growth potential at the corrugating property "will help breathe life back into Beech Bottom," and said the deal serves to "highlight the strength of the partnership" between the BDC, the Brooke and Hancock county commissions and the village.
"We just have to wait and see" what happens, he said. "Hopefully, it will be huge, not only for Beech Bottom but also for Brooke County. With the way the economy is, we can't predict what will happen but we've all got high hopes."
Ford pointed out the BDC board saw the Taylor, Smith & Taylor project "as a catalyst to economic development," and said they're looking for the same kind of spark in Brooke County. But he also pointed out site acquisition is just the first step. To turn the property into a job and revenue creator, he said they'll once again need the involvement of the state of West Virginia, WVDEP and U.S. EPA.
"We're happy about the acquisition," he said, "but there's still a ways to go before residents will see material changes."
Skros, meanwhile, characterized the partnership as a financial collaboration: The BDC owns the land, "but we'll work with them" to bring new business and industry to the property. She pointed out Hackman Capital, established in 1986 by Columbus native Michel Hackman, has done $1 billion worth of real estate transactions in its history.
"When you see an opportunity like this, you jump on it," she said.
(Harris can be contacted at email@example.com)


text: Okay guys, ever since I uploaded those two lessons on the Homestuck characters, I have been getting requests for me to make more. So here is "how to draw Aradia Megido", step by step. This figure from the we comic series is a troll. She is dark in color but has a very vibrant shade if that makes any sense. She is thirteen years old in Earth years, but on her own planet she is six. Her personality is described as being very vocal as well as very gifted. She has the ability to hear the dead talk and she has been doing so since she was very young. Aradia wears an all-black ensemble with the Aries zodiac symbol on the front of her shirt. She also has horns that curl and are orange in color. Her bad posture makes her even more mysterious, but even so, you will never get to know the true self of this Homestuck star. I will be back in a bit, for now have fun drawing Aradia. Adios people and enjoy.


text:
If I go to http://facebook.com, I am not redirected to https://www.facebook.com. If it doesn't have https in the URL, can the login be secure? Usually I am redirected to an https page on other sites? How is Facebook managing its login?
migrated from crypto.stackexchange.com Oct 8 '11 at 17:38
This question came from our site for software developers, mathematicians and others interested in cryptography.
No, it is not secure to enter your username and password on http://facebook.com.
The target of the login-form points to an https URL, so a passive attacker cannot read your password:
But an attacker, who can modify the data stream, can manipulate html code which contains the login form. He can modify the target url or add some javascript code that sends a copy of the username and password to his own server.
Furthermore after logging in, Facebook sends the session cookie over an http connection. This allows even an passive attacker to act in your name. This is not a theoretical attack, there is a tool called Firesheep that is extremly easy to use.
To prevent the first risk, always use https://facebook.com to login. There is a browser extension called https everywhere which does this for you and even stays at https which prevent the Firesheep style attacks, too.
Only log-in via https:// facebook.com is secure - and NOT http:// facebook.com which at this time does not auto-redirect to the secure site.
Because the target of the log-in form is an https URL, as given by the source code, the form data could not be read via passive attack, and in that sense is safe. But an active attack via data stream modification - which could enable a hacker's injection of malicious code to steal the username and password entered - could be easily done.
Subsequent data in the session cookie is additionally sent through an http connection, which enables passive attackers to act in one's name even without having stolen the log-in data from the form on the front page. The proof-of-concept extension Firesheep, written by developer Eric Butler for Firefox, demonstrates how this is possible. Lifehacker has written more about the need for SSL encryption in this regard.
To deter such attacks, in Facebook, one may simply edit one's account settings, select Account Security, and tick the checkbox to enable HTTPS, under the Secure Browsing header. With this option, certain pages - notably, some Facebook applications that have not yet been HTTPS-enabled - may not function properly; however, the sacrifice of that lost functionality could be made for the sake of account security.
Additionally, there are web browser extensions available to automatically enable HTTPS encryption, whenever possible - not only for Facebook, but for all web sites. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Tor Project have made an extension called HTTPS Everywhere which is available for Firefox and Google Chrome. Other similar extensions may be available for your browser of choice.
If you go to https://facebook.com you will log in using SSL. Yes it would be good if facebook would redirect, but they don't yet.
You can do it yourself by going directly to the https version of the page, or use HTTPSEverywhere which will help by pushing you to the https page for many common sites, including facebook.
protected by Jeff Ferland♦ Nov 2 '12 at 21:07
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text:
It is usual in algebraic geometry to represent morphisms by vertical arrows pointing downwards, like that :
$$\begin{matrix} X \\\\ \downarrow \\\\ S \end{matrix}$$
I suppose this stemmed from Grothendieck's amazingly original idea that a morphism of schemes should always be considered as some sort of fibre bundle, even in cases apparently very distant from the bundles considered in topology.
Many geometers have since adopted these vertical arrows, which they find suggestive and psychologically helpful.
My question is simply whether anybody had drawn maps vertically before Grothendieck a) in topology b) in algebraic geometry.
While on the subject I can't resist telling an anecdote I heard, according to which in some seminar led by Grothendieck, a joker ( Serre?) always drew the vertical morphism above on the blackboard just before Grothendieck arrived. So an auxiliary question might be: c) is this true?


text:
School Bus Strike Ends
After More Than Four Weeks, Drivers, Matrons Set to Return to Job Wednesday
New York City school bus union leaders voted Friday to end a nearly monthlong strike, sending more than 8,000 drivers, matrons and mechanics back to work apparently without achieving their goals.
The decision meant that the full fleet of buses should begin picking up children again Wednesday, the first day back following a school vacation.
Union leaders said they were willing to call off the strike because of a pledge of support from five Democratic mayoral hopefuls. The best way forward, they said, would be to try to work with a new mayor in 2014.
"Because of this strike, we have gained the support of many political allies in the city, in the state," Michael Cordiello, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181, said on a conference call to members. He said the strike was successful in raising awareness of their cause.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg also declared victory.
"For decades, the monopolistic bus contract process benefited the bus companies and unions at the expense of the city's taxpayers and students—but no longer," he said.
The vote capped a week of developments in the strike, which began Jan. 16 as a way to try to force the Bloomberg administration to keep job protections in contracts. Currently, bus companies are required to fill open jobs based on a citywide seniority list. The city said a 2011 court decision made the protections illegal, but the bus workers' union said the ruling didn't apply to the routes under dispute.
The first competitive bidding process in 33 years drew interest from scores of companies. On Tuesday, the city opened 67 bid packages for five-year contracts on about 1,100 routes.
The mayor said Thursday during his state of the city speech that he expected the city would save hundreds of millions of dollars on the new contracts and called the strike a "lost cause."
Most of the 1.1 million children who attend city public schools walk or take public transportation. The strike affected about 150,000 students who travel by bus to public, private and parochial schools, both in the city and in the surrounding suburbs.
As the strike dragged on, life slowly returned to a routine for most students. Attendance in general-education classes returned to normal—at 90% on Thursday—and special-education attendance was close to normal at 78%.
Larry Hanley, international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, said he had been in talks with Democratic mayoral candidates to figure out a "creative way" to end the strike.
The five candidates—City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, former Comptroller Bill Thompson, Comptroller John Liu and former City Councilman Sal Albanese—signed a letter asking them to return to work.
"It's irrelevant as to how this letter came to be," Mr. Liu said. He declined to provide details on who organized it or how he came to sign it. "It's quite possible that Bloomberg will get his way, but the issue is not going away." Several Democratic candidates praised the returning workers for making a decision they said was in the best interest of students.
Republican mayoral candidate Joseph Lhota said he was glad the strike was over but criticized his Democratic opponents. "I find it appalling and disrespectful that five Democrat candidates for mayor would pledge to put the desires of a union ahead of the needs of all New Yorkers," he said. "This is simply further proof that these candidates are beholden to union interests."
Drivers said they were eager to go back. They had been living on reduced pay without health benefits.
Michele Ferrara, 60 years old, of Staten Island, said morale on the picket lines is high some days, and low others.
"As time goes by it gets very depressing that we're still out of work," she said. "It's my first time on strike, and anybody on strike can tell you it's a rollercoaster. You hope and you pray that you have your job."
Bus companies say they have hired a few hundred replacement drivers, and some of the least experienced strikers wouldn't have jobs to return to.
One company official said the union members hurt their negotiating position in current contract talks. "They played their ace and lost the hand," the official said. "The threat of a strike is no longer a possibility. You went out on strike? What did it accomplish?"
Parents said they were eager to be relieved of the burden of bringing students to school. Some parents said they had been taking time off from work to make the extra commute, paying money out of pocket for cabs before receiving reimbursement from the city, or simply staying home with their children.
Margaret DePaula, 67, a substitute special-education teacher, said she drove her two grandsons home from their school in Bayside, Queens. She was still wary that the strike would have a tidy resolution.
"Truthfully, I don't trust the mayor," she said. "I'm not going to be relieved if these people are going to lose their jobs."
—Rachel Cromidas, Danny Gold and Alison Fox contributed to this report.
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