LET'S ALL ENJOY OUR PAGAN AND CANDY FILLED HOLIDAY! I am pretty agnostic on Halloween overall but I do love the roots of the holiday. It all started with the Celts 2,000 years ago. Check this out:
This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth.
Cool, huh? Read the rest here.
IT'S A LIVING: WHERE DOES IT GO WHEN YOU FLUSH EDITION! We have a guy who worked in wastewater for a long, long time and he's on at 1!
WE KNOW WHO THE WHISTLEBLOWER IS And apparently so did everyone in DC, including all the major news media outlets. Read this whole thing and you will understand immediately why Democrats are so desperate to keep this guy's name and political leanings out of the press.
BEST AND WORST HALLOWEEN CANDY IS ON DECK TODAY Because duh, we all have to scope out what the candy tax is before the kids go out.
SPEAKING OF THE WORST HALLOWEEN CANDY Black licorice can be dangerous- as well as disgusting- if you eat too much.
LOOK, COMMUNES ARE BACK! At least that's what this article about Kingston, New York indicates to me. It's an article about how a whole town came together to create a barter system to get it's close knit community of artist medical care on a barter basis with local doctors. This article will be the WORST thing to EVER happen to Kingston, New York because they will inevitably be flooded with enough slacker types who don't want to do the work but want the benefits, which is the SAME reason communes failed in the late 60's and 70's. I'm talking about this today!
CATHERINE HERRIDGE IS LEAVING FOX NEWS And though the reports say this is unrelated to Shepherd Smith leaving it is a pretty high profile departure. Catherine is one of my favorites. She's headed to CBS News now.
AND NOW, JASON MOMOA AS ELVIS and this one is just for me.
WHY YOUR NEMESIS LIVES IN YOUR HEAD RENT FREE This is a fascinating look into why our own performance suffers when we perceive a competitor to have "momentum". I feel like this happened last night in Game 7 of the World Series. From the article in The Atlantic:
For a recent paper, researchers from Duke University, London Business School, and NYU conducted six studies across a variety of sports and other domains. In one study, the authors found that chess players had a lower chance of winning if their opponents had recently moved up in ranks. The more momentum an opponent had, the less likely a player was to win. In another study, the researchers analyzed nearly 60,000 professional tennis matches. They found that as an opponent gains momentum, a player’s chances of winning drop from 52 percent to 38 percent.
The likely reason this happens, the researchers determined, is not simply that opponents gaining momentum are always rapidly getting better at winning. Instead, the researchers found that players tended to expect opponents with momentum to keep rising. The players, in other words, seemed to be anticipating their own failure. In a parallel scenario involving two competing watch brands, study participants expected a middling brand moving up in a fictitious ranking to eventually overshadow a luxury watch brand that was ranked higher and showed no sign of movement. It was almost as though mediocre things are given a boost if they’ve recently gone from “bad” to “just fine.”
sSo how do you avoid giving up when the momentum is not yours? It's actually really simple. Read it here.
NO, NO ONE PAID A 91% TAX RATE IN THE 1950s And this video explains it better than I ever could. If you support Bernie's ridiculous tax plan you're in for a sad eye opening experience on this one.
IT MUST BE EXHAUSTING TO HAVE ZERO SENSE OF HUMOR and the media who wasted time yesterday "fact-checking" an obviously joking photo of President Trump giving the Medal of Honor to the adorable pup who assisted in hunting down a criminal mastermind should be wiped out today. There was a fever of righteous indignation that flowed through the Twitter feeds of humorless news organizations and very serious journalists. Good grief.
WHO IS FUNDING THE PROP CC CAMPAIGNS? Both for and against, there is money there. I had to dig for a good bit to try and find out who the Strategic Victory Fund is (they are for Prop CC) and could only find that it's Director is a long time progressive Democrat operative from Virginia. Here's the short explanation: Big Government Dems are for it, Small Government types are against it. You're welcome.
THIS IS AN AMAZING AND TOTALLY UNSURPRISING STORY FROM 9NEWS As two reporters decided to see whether driving or mass transit was faster on a snowy day.
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE??? Someone stole a one ton rock from a National Park in Arizona. Seriously.
OUR FIRST CLASS OF COMMON CORE GRADUATES IS THE LEAST PREPARED FOR COLLEGE IN A GENERATION And we need to move QUICKLY to kill this horrible, awful, no good curriculum before it damages another generation of kids. Read the sad state of affairs here.
LET'S TALK ABOUT WHAT A PALESTINIAN STATE MIGHT REALLY LOOK LIKE Please share this with your friends who believe that the Palestinian people are simply oppressed victims who want to live a peaceful and bucolic existence if only those horrible Israelis would just leave them alone.
CINDERBLOCK IS HAVING NO PART OF HIS NEW WEIGHT LOSS PLAN Cinderblock is a fat cat. Not in the rhetorical flourish way, he's a fat kitty. Some vets are trying to help him lose weight by using a treadmill in water. He wasn't buying it.