The recent legislative session was one of the worst for small business in the history of the state. “Businesses are going to react to the environment that government creates,” Smith says. And they’re going to look for a way to succeed, even if that means cutting jobs or switching to automation, he says.
Our Democratic-controlled has just been doing an incredible job over the past year in achieving their apparent goal of reducing opportunities for employment. Small businesses form the backbone of the state economy, and Portland Democratics have worked hard to undermine them. Their work, however, is far from complete; they still need to pass a statewide minimum wage of at least $13.50 so that even more people can be pushed out of the job market and onto food stamps.
And their union friends are counting on hire business taxes as well, although it's interesting to see that in general, UFCW workers take home less money in their paychecks than [AACK! PFFFTH!] Walmart employees here.
KALISPELL – An elderly woman who authorities said was feeding bears at her home west of Kalispell was attacked by one inside her residence Sunday.
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks investigator Brian Sommers termed the attack by a black bear “severe” and said the woman, whose age was not provided, suffered serious injuries and remains hospitalized at Kalispell Regional Medical Center.
FWP officials said bears had been “extensively” fed with bird seed and other food at the residence.
It's unfortunate that she was severely injured, and it's also unfortunate that the bear will be tracked and killed because it's now habituated and therefore a menace. Fed = dead. Some people just can't seem to get that through their heads.
And black bears are just about everywhere, it seems. This time of year, they're trying to pack on all the pounds they can - a guy down the hill from us spotted one in his apple tree a week or so ago; a bit more unnerving than spotting, say, a partridge in the pear tree.
Yes, well, about that; it's another example of so-called "settled science", and we've been warned since the 1960s that we'd soon run out of oil. Back in the mid-1970s, newspapers warned that by 2015 the wells would run dry, yet somehow we keep finding more of the stuff. Of course, back in the 1960s and early 1970s we were also warned of global famine, thanks to Paul Ehrlich and his "Population Bomb", and we were also warned of an impending global ice age.
Yet "Peak Oil" continues to bubble to the surface from time to time; as some doomsayers to this day love to point out, sooner or later we're going to run out of dead dinosaurs. This despite the fact that oil and natural gas are not derived from dead dinosaurs, nor from dead anything - they're abiotically produced, so referring to them as "fossil fuels" is ignorant; the only fossil fuels on the planet are compressed plant matter: coal and peat.
That's not to say we wouldn't be better off by encouraging the development of more effective emission-control systems, as any time we burn stuff to produce energy, there will be emissions. But the idea that we will at any time in the foreseeable future be able to rely solely upon wind and solar as energy sources is pure mythology - and touting them as "clean" or "sustainable" is idiocy; calling upon us to believe that there are no environmental costs associated with the production and installation of such systems when in fact there are considerable costs involved.
Moreover, neither of them can provide necessary baseload energy, so until and unless the greenies can get behind next-generation nuke plants, we're going to be burning stuff for years to come. And all the propaganda they can generate isn't going to change that.
As a lot of people discovered over the weekend, their smartphones may be great for snapping photos of that family trip to the beach, but they really suck when it comes to shooting astronomical events. That's because the small sensor and lenses packed into the tiny wonders just don't have what it takes to capture the events, so - assuming they got anything at all - the results were, shall we say, less than stellar.
Even the latest and greatest iPhones aren't up to the job.
Perky Katie Couric was among the less-than-enthused photographers, but hey, she tried. For some reason, people nonetheless felt compelled to share their photos on Twitter:
These horrible super moon iPhone photos may be the only thing worse than those horrible fireworks iPhone photos.
Those who thought ahead and paired their phones to spotting scopes and telescopes fared considerably better.
NASA has announced that there is, in fact, flowing water on Mars. And there's incontrovertible proof that, much as we're doing here, human activities killed the planet:
PeTA plans to launch protesters in the coming weeks.
Nobody from the FTC walked up to the bigwigs at tiny Bellingham-based Haggen's, put a gun to their heads, and ordered them to buy 150 Albertson's and Safeway stores. The FTC did order the latter two to sell off a bunch of stores if they wanted to merge.
But Haggen's stepped up and spent millions to buy the places, millions more on new signage, and millions more in litigation. Anybody with a butt for an eye knew this was a bad move that would not end well. And so now, bleeding cash from all arteries, they're trying desperately to stay afloat by shutting down almost every grocery they own - throwing thousands of people out of work in the process.
These idiots, who for years have been peddling junk at incredibly high prices (try $3.75 for a can of soup that you can buy for $1 and change at Freddy's), decided that they could buy up all of those stores and expand from around nine stores in the Pacific Northwest to include California and the Southwest. Unsurprisingly, the bodies are stacking up as they now try to unload. What a bunch of dorks.
Daniel turned up saying that he was half blind. Although he had healthy eyes, a brain operation to cure headaches seemed to have destroyed a region that was crucial for vision. The result was that almost everything to the left of his nose was invisible to him. It was as if he were looking out of a window, with the curtains drawn across half of his world.
But as an ophthalmologist ran tests with him, he noticed that Daniel could reach out and grab the physician's hand, even though the hand was clearly located in Daniel's "blind" area. Somehow, without being consciously aware of the location of the hand, he was able to determine its location and grab it.
Further tests administered by a pair of psychologists confirmed that Daniel was able to locate objects within his "blind" field with surprising accuracy, despite his adamant contention that he could not see.
Clearly, despite his blindness, Daniel’s healthy eyes were still watching the world and passing the information to his unconscious, which was guiding his behavior.
“These cases open a window into parts of the brain that are normally not visible,” says Marco Tamietto, who is based at Tilburg University. “They offer a view to functions that are difficult to observe – that are normally silent.”
It seems that the patients are still perceiving, but are not aware of that perception. In one experiment, a man who was totally blind and used a cane to navigate was set up: the shrinks loaded a hallway with objects that he'd be almost certain to stumble into - if he was in fact well and truly blind. The result was rather astounding:
Importantly, the participant claimed that not only was he not aware of having seen anything; he was not even aware of having moved out of the way of the objects. He insisted he had just walked straight down the hallway. According to Beatrice de Gelder, who led the work, he was “at a loss to explain or even describe his actions”.
Of interest is that all blindsight subjects have suffered damage to a neural region at the back of the head, referred to as V1. It appears that this region of the brain processes the visual data-stream and pushes the results into our conscious level of awareness.
It further appears that a sub-processing system located in the center of the brain, known as the lateral geniculate nucleus, can bypass the V1 area to process data in subconscious areas normally devoted to orientation, motion, and emotion.
If the V1 area is essential to the projection of visual data into our consciousness, yet we can function remarkably well without it, what does this say about "free will"?
“It shows that awareness isn’t the whole story,” says Tamietto. “Very often we believe we have decided something, but our brain has made the decision for us before that – in many ways, and in many contexts.”
Juha Silvanto at the University of Westminster agrees: “Consciousness is just a summary of all the information coming in, but the fact the subconscious can guide behaviour suggests that elaborate processing is going on without us being aware of it.”
What, then, is the purpose of consciousness - and attention in general? Most likely, it boils down to one thing: more efficient coding in more or less real-time, which affords faster and more coordinated responses to events that may impact you.
Pope Francis said on Monday government officials have a "human right" to refuse to discharge a duty, such as issuing marriage licenses to homosexuals, if they feel it violates their conscience.
On the flight back to Rome, he was asked if he supported individuals, including government officials, who refuse to abide by some laws, such as issuing marriage licenses to gays.
"Conscientious objection must enter into every juridical structure because it is a right," Francis said.
Moreover, he continued - stating that if someone does not allow others to be a conscientious objector, he denies a right. Golly, I hope his Popefulness didn't offend anybody in the "Pride" crowd. At least he didn't advocate throwing homosexuals off tall buildings, as is fashionable in some parts of the Middle East.
Someone using Twitter under Granny's name - we all know that she doesn't understand any of this digital stuff - called Chinese president Xi Jinping "shameless" for hosting a summit meeting on women's rights at the U.N.; greatly ticking off the Chinese, as the term is considered an especially egregious insult in Chinese culture, where honor is supposedly very important.
To Granny, women's rights is a critically important component of her campaign; she's all about women's rights. Just ask Jennifer Flowers or Monica!
