Mountain Flower Goat Dairy is a sustainable agricultural project in downtown Boulder, Colorado. We are a demonstration and working goat dairy that brings goats to people and people to goats. In addition to producing goat milk, our goal is to get a lot of work done while offering young people and adults the opportunity to learn the skills that it takes to run an urban farm business. We seek to reconnect people with the source of whole foods, thereby providing them with the tools to improve health and wellness; while simultaneously demonstrating that urban agriculture is an effective land use tool for protecting critical urban open spaces.
Through Mountain Flower’s current experiential education programs, students learn to see themselves not only as consumers, but as important land stewards who are essential to ecological and animal health and wellness. Each student engages in the basics of goat care – feeding alfalfa and grain, providing clean water, cleaning pens and composting waste. We also teach necessary skills for clean food production and each student gets an opportunity to taste fresh milk or try some farmstead cheese. …
THIS DAY IN HISTORY: OCTOBER 17TH- MAURICE PAPON AND A MASSACRE
This Day In History: October 17, 1961
In the late evening hours of October 17, 1961, 30,000 Algerians were demonstrating throughout the city of Paris to protest a curfew imposed upon them earlier in the month by the city’s police chief. Before the night was over, at least 200 Algerians died at the hands of the Paris police.
Violent exchanges had become common between the Parisian contingent of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) movement, whose mission was to free Algeria from colonial rule, and the French police. Over a period of three months, 20 police officers had been killed.
This did not sit well with Maurice Papon, Chief of Police of Paris, whose other claim to fame was his past as a Nazi collaborator, among other atrocities. He was determined to find the FLN members responsible, and to crush their organization for good. …
John Oliver Exposes Wacky Third-Party Candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein
The ‘Last Week Tonight’ host went H.A.M. on American voters’ two main alternatives to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
THANKS to HBO and Last Week Tonight for making this program available on YouTube.
Let’s dispel with this fiction that Gary Johnson and Jill Stein know what they’re doing. They have no idea what they’re doing.
The “main story” of Sunday’s Last Week Tonight concerned the aforementioned third-party candidates who, national TV gaffes aside, are commanding a sizable amount of the vote in the upcoming U.S. election—thanks to the terribly low likability ratings of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump—even though they haven’t been properly vetted.
So, host John Oliver did just that.
“Americans are so disillusioned by the major party candidates it seems many would prefer to vote for Kevin Kline’s character from the movie Dave or the ghost of Martin Luther King, Jr.—assuming he only said the three quotes that white people like,” joked Oliver. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: “If you’re in a KFC/Taco Bell and you see a bunch of pigeons eating something in the parking lot, you might well think, ‘Hang on, what have they got over there?’”
It’s time to tell the truth: Donald Trump isn’t running a presidential campaign, he’s leading a cult
What kind of parent would allow that monster put his mouth on their child?
One of the biggest myths of the 2016 election has been that Donald Trump wants to be president – he doesn’t. While it’s true he wants to become president, that’s entirely different from actually doing the job. To Trump, being president is just another material possession or challenge to feed his own ego. He wants to become president so he can say to himself, “I’m the most powerful person in the world.”
He is the textbook definition of a narcissistic megalomaniac who truly believes that he can live by a different set of rules and is superior to others.
The truth is, his campaign has never been about anything more than Donald Trump’s own arrogance. …
10 Ways Ancient China And Rome Interacted Long Before Marco Polo
While Europe battled and traded, China appeared to be a civilization that had grown completely independently of the West. However, the truth is that China has been in contact with the West since the Roman Empire. As far back as the time of Julius Caesar, the empires of China and Rome influenced each other in more ways than you’d expect.
10. A Roman Legion Fought In China
In 53 BC, Marcus Crassus led a Roman army against the Parthian Empire in modern Iran. He had intended to spread the Roman Empire to the east, but the Parthians proved stronger than he imagined. The Romans were defeated, Crassus was beheaded, and his soldiers were executed.
One legion, though, may have escaped alive—by running east instead of west. According to one theory, a Roman legion may have joined the Hun army as mercenaries and gone to war against the Chinese. Chinese writing describes foreign mercenaries using a “fish-scale formation” that perfectly fits the description of the Roman tortoise formation. …
Trump’s Rigged Game
Two ways the candidate charges this election is “rigged” are absurd. The third is absurdly dangerous.
What does Donald Trump mean when he charges that the election is “rigged”?
There are at least three ways that Trump has applied the label. The first two are flatly absurd. But the third contains just enough truth to raise the specter of unrest, violence, and a destabilized democracy.
This usage—rigged—may stem from thimblerig, a swindler’s game played with three thimbles and a pea, like three-card monte. The sharp puts a pea beneath a thimble, and shuffles them around. His mark points to the thimble containing the pea, but when it’s lifted, there’s no pea to be found.
From there, it seems to have jumped to the stock market, to describe brokers manipulating stocks in an illegal manner. By the early 20th century, it was being applied to sports games or elections. In every case, though, it describes a con—where participants think it’s a game of chance or skill, but the outcome is actually being manipulated in an underhanded way. …
Oliver nails Trump’s scandal deluge: ‘He’s one Teen People interview away from being on a sex registry’
THANKS to HBO and Last Week Tonight for making this program available on YouTube.
As has been his custom since returning from hiatus, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver tackled his favorite subject: the collapsing campaign of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
The HBO host pointed out that Trump news has swallowed up all the media attention — some of which might have been devoted to the Wikileaks releases — as damning revelations about abusive encounters with women have become a daily occurrence for the embattled nominee.
“It is hard to focus on any of that when the man who could be our next president is now one unearthed 90’s era Teen People interview away from being on a sex offender registry,” he quipped.
Oliver took particular delight that Trump now claims that the “shackles are off” since he feels the GOP is no longer behind him. …
10 Scary Facts About The Justinian Plague
There have been numerous plagues throughout human history that managed to kill an innumerable amount of people within a short span of time. The Justinian Plague was one of the deadliest plagues in known history, with millions of fatalities. It was right up there with The Black Death, an infamous plague that killed off half the population in Europe in the mid-1300s.
10. First Major Plague In Recorded History
The Justinian Plague, which began in AD 541, is considered the first pandemic in recorded history because it swept across three continents. The plague may have started in Egypt and was carried to other continents by merchant ships infested with disease-carrying rodents. When the plague reached Constantinople, it killed roughly 300,000 people there in the first year.
The plague got its name from the Byzantine emperor Justinian, who reigned from AD 527 to 565. Just as Emperor Justinian was trying to rebuild his empire to the glory of ancient Rome, the plague struck and left it devastated. The plague destroyed his military and his economy. Emperor Justinian was also infected with the plague but pulled through, unlike many others. …
How a Hillary Clinton Presidency Would Affect the Supreme Court
Conservatives would suffer losses, but the notion that she would permanently vanquish originalism doesn’t withstand scrutiny.
Should the fate of the Supreme Court cause conservatives to support Donald Trump? That’s the message touted by a number of commentators on the right, who insist that judicial appointments are the stakes that matter most in the 2016 election.
To evaluate that position, I’ve scrutinized the arguments of its most formidable proponent, law professor Hugh Hewitt, who has made his case in columns and on talk radio, where he has fleshed out his argument in debates with #NeverTrump conservatives. (On October 8, Hewitt called on Trump to step down from the ticket, declaring that he cannot win, but he hasn’t repudiated his arguments about the court.)
One of those debates was particularly clarifying for anyone trying to understand the logic that separates conservatives on opposite sides of the Trump question. Tom Nichols teaches national-security affairs at the Naval War College. He has voted for every Republican presidential candidate going back to Ronald Reagan. He is voting for Hillary Clinton because he believes that Trump is “a fundamentally unstable person,” and that it would be dangerous to make him commander in chief. “I cannot entrust the Oval Office to somebody that I think has some serious emotional problems,” he told Hewitt, “and who does not take the time to learn. He is not just untutored in important affairs of state, but is willfully ignorant.” …
“What’s Aleppo?” Breaking down the times Gary Johnson didn’t know what he was talking about
The Libertarian presidential candidate has had a gaffe-filled campaign — so many gaffes it is hard to count
Gary Johnson’s entrance into the national spotlight hasn’t been the most graceful. The former Republican governor of New Mexico, who began his campaign in January, landed on the top of the ticket for the Libertarian Party alongside his perhaps better known running mate William Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts. Together, the two form the first ticket of any political party to feature two governors since 1948.
The Libertarian Party bills itself as a kind of “something for everyone” type of platform; Johnson wants to legalize pot and lower taxes, but he doesn’t care about global warming because the sun will one day encompass the Earth. See? A party for the people.
Why then, is the Libertarian Party having such a difficult time garnering support? With a populace this dissatisfied with their options, it’s surprising the third-party darlings have yet to break the 10-percent mark (Johnson’s poll numbers have been steadily decreasing in recent weeks, down to 6.6 percent from a high of 9 percent).
If you ask the candidate, the issue is name recognition. But while Johnson — who quit smoking pot in April so he could run on “all cylinders” during the election — definitely increased his name recognition in recent months, it also became clear that Johnson has no idea what he’s talking about.
We compiled the following gaffe-track of Johnson’s five most incredible blunders. …
HOW THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT CAME ABOUT
The Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1966—and it was the very first law in American history that gave regular citizens the legal footing to compel the government to release internal documents. Before that—not for you! Getting it passed was a long, tough battle. (And it’s still going on.) Here’s the whole story.
MR. MOSS GOES TO WASHINGTON
In 1952 a 37-year-old businessman named John E. Moss was elected to a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing California’s 3rd congressional district, which included his home city, Sacramento. Moss had lived a tough life: His mother died when he was twelve, and his father, an alcoholic and an unemployed coal miner, left shortly thereafter; Moss and his brother, both still young teens, were left to fend for themselves.
Then the Great Depression came.
Somehow, Moss not only survived those difficult years, but by 1938, through his hard work, he was the owner of a successful Sacramento appliance store. In 1948, after a stint in the Navy during World War II, he was elected to the California state assembly. …
I Just Want Nate Silver to Tell Me It’s All Going to Be Fine
Evan has a habit. He’s not ashamed of it, but he doesn’t want to reveal too much about himself, lest his colleagues learn how he’s spending so much of his time. Like so many others, the middle-age software developer can’t look away from the presidential election. But his fixation takes a particular form: with every browser refresh, he hopes math will reveal the future.
Evan is a poll obsessive, FiveThirtyEight strain—a subspecies I recognize because I’m one of them, too. When he wakes up in the morning, he doesn’t shower or eat breakfast before checking the Nate Silver-founded site’s presidential election forecast (sounds about right). He keeps a tab open to FiveThirtyEight’s latest poll list; a new poll means new odds in the forecast (yup). He get push alerts on his phone when the forecast changes (check). He follows the 538 Forecast Bot, a Twitter account that tweets every time the forecast changes (same). In all, Evan says he checks in hourly, at least while he’s awake (I plead the Fifth).
Evan’s been obsessed with elections since elementary school. He remembers coloring in electoral map states with markers when George Bush beat Michael Dukakis for the presidency. But tracking the FiveThirtyEight forecast isn’t just about politics, really; it’s about feelings. …
The drug industry’s answer to opioid addiction: More pills
UNNATURAL CAUSES: SICK AND DYING IN SMALL-TOWN AMERICA | Since the turn of this century, death rates have risen for whites in midlife, particularly women. In this series, The Washington Post is exploring this trend and the forces driving it.
Jonathan Moss, a physician and professor at the University of Chicago, helped develop what might be the next billion-dollar drug, designed to treat an uncomfortable side effect of high-dose opiate prescriptions — constipation.
Cancer patients taking high doses of opioid painkillers are often afflicted by a new discomfort: constipation. Researcher Jonathan Moss thought he could help, but no drug company was interested in his ideas for relieving suffering among the dying.
So Moss and his colleagues pieced together small grants and, in 1997, received permission to test their treatment. But not on cancer patients. Federal regulators urged them to use a less frail — and by then, rapidly expanding — group: addicts caught in the throes of a nationwide opioid epidemic.
Suddenly, Moss said, investors were knocking at his door.
“As clinicians, we wanted to help palliative patients,” said Moss, a professor and physician at University of Chicago Medicine. “The company that bought our work saw a broader market.” …
What Running An Escape Room Taught Me About People
Escape rooms are all the rage these days. They are live-action games in which you’re locked in a room and have to find your way out by either solving a series of elaborate puzzles or getting into shouting matches with your friends until you run out of time, depending on how good you all are at cooperating. It’s like living out a Saw movie, only you don’t have to mutilate yourself (probably).
We talked to Nate Martin, the co-founder of Puzzle Break, and Cody Civiero, Operations Manager for SmartyPantz, to learn about what it’s like to trap people for fun.
#4. You Have To Design Clever Puzzles (Which Frustrated Customers Will Smash To Pieces)
Escape room puzzles tend to employ the same logic as old video games — that is, you need to have the exact same mental illness as the developer to fully understand their reasoning. “In Morning Never Comes,” Cody said, “the players are trying to solve the mystery of Vivian Blackwood, a librarian rumored to have been murdered by her husband.”
Possibly due to her horrible taste in interior design.
“Players have to pay special attention to the books, newspaper articles, photos, and paintings in the room. Maybe one article clipping will point them to a particular book on the shelf, or maybe the first letters of the titles on one shelf will spell out the location of the next clue. Perhaps the person in the painting over the mantle is holding something you’ve seen in the room? You never know. Eventually, the players will find a decorative box with some ashes, a dog’s collar, and another key. What do they do with those? You have to come visit us to find out!”
The puzzles are about as straightforward as a wad of knotted Christmas lights, and while some people find it fun and rewarding to untangle the reasoning, other people get frustrated. And when humans get frustrated, they revert to a much simpler, Hulkier approach to problem solving. …
Was Venus the first habitable planet in our solar system?
Often referred to as Earth’s evil twin, Venus is the solar system’s hottest planet. But research suggests that Venus may have had vast oceans and a balmy climate
Its surface is hot enough to melt lead and its skies are darkened by toxic clouds of sulphuric acid. Venus is often referred to as Earth’s evil twin, but conditions on the planet were not always so hellish, according to research that suggests it may have been the first place in the solar system to have become habitable.
The study, due to be presented this week at the at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Pasadena, concludes that at a time when primitive bacteria were emerging on Earth, Venus may have had a balmy climate and vast oceans up to 2,000 metres (6,562 feet) deep.
Michael Way, who led the work at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, said: “If you lived three billion years ago at a low latitude and low elevation the surface temperatures would not have been that different from that of a place in the tropics on Earth,” he said. …
Euro ‘house of cards’ to collapse, warns ECB prophet
Otmar Issing was a towering figure at the euro’s inception
The European Central Bank is becoming dangerously over-extended and the whole euro project is unworkable in its current form, the founding architect of the monetary union has warned.
“One day, the house of cards will collapse,” said Professor Otmar Issing, the ECB’s first chief economist and a towering figure in the construction of the single currency.
Prof Issing said the euro has been betrayed by politics, lamenting that the experiment went wrong from the beginning and has since degenerated into a fiscal free-for-all that once again masks the festering pathologies.
“Realistically, it will be a case of muddling through, struggling from one crisis to the next. It is difficult to forecast how long this will continue for, but it cannot go on endlessly,” he told the journal Central Banking in a remarkable deconstruction of the project. …
10 Extinct Animals With Surprising Attributes
It’s not easy studying animals when they’re long dead. Nevertheless, paleontologists have managed to deduce quite a bit over the years. Then new research challenges established thought or uncovers species so weird that scientists don’t know what to make of them.
10. Homo Erectus May Have Built Boats
When you think of man’s ancestor Homo erectus, you probably aren’t imagining seafaring cavemen. Yes, they migrated out of Africa, into Asia, and all the way to Flores, but they did so on foot, right?
In 1998, researchers dated stone tools found on Flores to 800,000 years ago, implying that they were made by H. erectus. The ancient hominids would have had to cross deep, turbulent waters to reach the island, a task for which they would have needed some type of primitive boats or rafts. H. erectus generally isn’t thought to have possessed the mental capabilities needed for building and using boats. …
‘Scared straight’ programs divide parents as kids see gruesome results of violence
A hospital executive in Brooklyn hopes showing kids cadavers and violent videos will help keep them away from guns: ‘I just want to give them a choice’
In the basement of a hospital in East Brooklyn, 16 middle school students dressed in navy blazers and striped ties stare through a pane of glass at a cadaver wrapped in a white sheet.
“What we’re trying to show you is: this is the end,” says Khari Edwards, an executive at Brookdale University hospital and medical center. “We want you to never have to come down here.”
Edwards says he’s seen too many kids wheeled into the emergency room with gunshot wounds. His controversial new program, It Starts Here, brings students to his hospital in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, one of the most dangerous in the city.
Edwards aims to jolt kids “desensitized to violence” with a graphic 90-minute seminar that culminates in a visit to the morgue. He hopes that by being exposed to the reality of death, young people will make choices that keep them away from guns. But some parents and researchers consider it a counterproductive scare tactic. …
Galileo Fought Dirty With His Fellow Scientists
The Italian astronomer had critics inside and outside the Church.
In 1614, when the telescope was new technology, a young man in Germany published a book filled with illustrations of the exciting new things being discovered telescopically: moons circling Jupiter, moon-like phases of Venus, spots on the Sun, the rough and cratered lunar surface. The young man was Johann Georg Locher, and his book was Mathematical Disquisitions Concerning Astronomical Controversies and Novelties. And while Locher heaped praise upon Galileo, he challenged ideas that Galileo championed—on scientific grounds.
You see, Locher was an anti-Copernican, a fan of the ancient astronomer Ptolemy, and a student within the Establishment (his mentor was Christoph Scheiner, a prominent Jesuit astronomer). Locher argued that Copernicus was wrong about Earth circling the Sun, and that Earth was fixed in place, at the center of the Universe, like Ptolemy said. But Locher was making no religious argument. Yes, he said, a moving Earth messes with certain Biblical passages, like Joshua telling the Sun to stand still. But it also messes with certain astronomical terms, such as sunrise and sunset. Copernicans had workarounds for all that, Locher said, even though they might be convoluted. What Copernicans could not work around, though, were the scientific arguments against their theory. Indeed, Locher even proposed a mechanism to explain how Earth could orbit the Sun (a sort of perpetual falling—this decades before Isaac Newton would explain orbits by means of perpetual falling), but he said it would not help the Copernicans, on account of the other problems with their theory. …
PROTIP: It is now a federal crime to bring a Galaxy Note 7 onto an airplane
Offenders are subject to civil penalties of up to $179,933 for each violation
The Federal Aviation Administration officially banned Galaxy Note 7s from being brought onto airplanes earlier this week, and under a new Emergency Restriction / Prohibition Order, it’s now a federal crime to fly with the device.
The FAA issued Emergency Restriction/Prohibition Order No. FAA-2016- 9288 on Friday, which states that as of noon on October 15th, fliers are prohibited from bringing the device onto an aircraft. The order restricts passengers from carrying the phone “on their person, in carry-on baggage, in checked baggage, or as cargo,” and says that anyone who inadvertently brings one on a plane must power it down immediately. Carriers are also required to “deny boarding to a passenger in possession” of the phone. …
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE LEGEND OF PELORUS JACK
Cook Strait, located between the north and south islands of New Zealand, is within the zone of the Roaring Forties which consists of strong winds that sweep across the southern hemisphere from the west. The winds themselves are funneled through a gap in the two islands. On top of this, cool currents from Canterbury travel north up the coast of the South Island while the warmer D’Urville current travels south to meet it, contributing to the occasionally turbulent waters. (You can see an example of this here and here.) In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this stretch of water wreaked havoc for many ships, including resulting in the two worst sea catastrophes of New Zealand’s history: the 1909 demise of the SS Penguin and the sinking of the Wahine ferry in 1968.
However, in 1888, a Risso’s dolphin that later became known as Pelorus Jack came on the scene. It has since been widely reported that for the next two to three decades, Jack safely guided countless ships through a narrow and particularly dangerous region of the strait between D’Urville Island and the South Island. So did this actually happen? …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
THANKS to CNN and US Political News for making this interview available on YouTube.
BILL MAHER FULL EXPLOSIVE INTERVIEW WITH FAREED ZAKARIA – CNN (10/16/2016)
FINALLY . . .
Netflix and ill: is the golden age of TV coming to an end?
It may finally be time to pay the piper for Netflix and for traditional cable – but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as your favorite shows could get shorter and cheaper
There has never been a better time to be a couch potato: an endless stream of shows, old and new, delivered online without pricey cable or satellite packages. Critics have called it TV’s golden age, but some analysts say “peak television” is coming to an end.
Money is the root of TV’s problems. In the US, where the TV economy is headquartered, TV and internet access costs two to three times what it does in the UK, and networks are in a tug-of-war with Americans, who are increasingly shredding steep cable bills in favor of Netflix and streaming services. This summer, many networks became locked in all-out legal battles with cash-strapped cable companies, with multibillion-dollar distribution deals at stake to fund those networks’ huge programming budgets.
Executives are planning for a less luxurious future, in which TV shows may be briefer, lower-budget and filled with the kind of product-placement ads that audiences hate and advertisers pay for. Worse still, the company that started much of the trouble may soon confront flaws in its own business model. …