SAN FRANCISCO — When the mayor of Richmond, Calif., and a gaggle of activists and homeowners showed up at the Wells Fargo Bank headquarters in downtown San Francisco this month, they were on a mission to speak with the bank's chief executive.
They wanted the bank to drop a lawsuit aimed at stopping Richmond's first-in-the-nation plan to use the government's constitutional power of eminent domain to "seize" hundreds of mortgages from Wells Fargo and other financial institutions.
Russian Sledgesattn overbey: you're going to know more about salinger's views on vedanta than you ever wanted to
Russian Sledges#mwip
by Eyder Peralta
A firefighter uses a hose to douse the flames of the Rim Fire on Saturday near Groveland, California.
The massive wildfire that's burning on the northwest edge of Yosemite National Park is spreading, threatening to destroy thousands of rural homes and also posing a threat to beloved ancient sequoias.
"The towering trees, which grow only on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada and are among the largest and oldest living things on earth, can resist fire. However, dry conditions and heavy brush are forcing park officials to take extra precautions in the Tuolumne and Merced groves. About three dozen of the trees are affected.
"'All of the plants and trees in Yosemite are important, but the giant sequoias are incredibly important both for what they are and as symbols of the National Park System,' park spokesman Scott Gediman said Saturday."
The Los Angeles Times reports the so-called Rim fire has grown into one the largest in recent California history.
According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection the fire was only 7 percent contained, last night and had burned through 129,620 acres.
The Times adds:
"Aside from the hot, dry weather and the rugged and hard-to-reach terrain, another difficulty was the blaze's tendency to burn the tops of trees, creating a 'crown fire' with long, intense flames that skip across forested land faster than a wildfire that creeps along near the ground.
"The blaze continued to threaten small communities throughout the area, some of which had been abandoned by residents, tourists and business owners who fled after looking skyward and seeing gray plumes of smoke or columns of flame rising from nearby mountain ranges. Tuolumne City and Ponderosa Hills, home to about 2,000 people, were under voluntary evacuation orders. Parts of Groveland were evacuated Friday.
CBS News reports the fire is so intense it is creating its own weather pattern and "forecasts for high wind gusts today could make it even less predictable."
As the San Francisco Chronicle reports, the fire is also still threatening public utilities for the city of San Francisco. Power lines that feed the city run through that area and the city also gets its water from nearby underground pipes.
We'll leave you with a report from CNN, which has some amazing images of the fire:
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Russian SledgesGIVE HIM TO ME
This picture might look photoshopped, but Patrick is 100% real. The 27 year-old wombat weighs 66 pounds and lives in the Ballarat Wildlife Park in Australia. While the adorable little man is already 12 years older than most wombats, he probably won't pass on his genes because he has never mated with a female, so don't hold out your hopes for a Patrick 2.0 to show up in another 27 years.
Russian SledgesState Education Department officials had told Trump to change the name of his enterprise years ago, saying it lacked a license and didn’t meet the legal definitions of a university. In 2011 it was renamed the Trump Entrepreneur Institute, but it has been dogged since by complaints from consumers and a few isolated civil lawsuits claiming it didn’t fulfill its advertised claims.
    
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A visit to Tokyo’s first co-sleeping cafe, where one can pay a set fee to sleep next to a woman in 20 minute increments, though spooning, being patted on the head, and a change of pajamas are extra.
Russian Sledgesattn overbey
[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
#1: Tartine Bakery
#2: Josey Baker Bread
#3: Della Fattoria
The history of sourdough bread in San Francisco goes way back to the time of the gold rush, when Basque migrants started baking bread in the area using the natural yeasts and bacteria present in the air for fermentation. San Francisco is widely regarded as the mecca of sour-style bread, though that reputation really has more to do with the culture of bread baking, the high concentration of great bakers, and the stiff competition than any sort of magical bread-baking climate (despite occasional claims to the contrary).
The baking scene in San Francisco these days is better than it's ever been, with the 1980s-era stalwarts of the artisan bread movement—Acme, Semifreddi, and the like—still going strong, and the newer bakers—Tartine, Josey Baker Bread, and Firebrand, to name a few—bringing on some serious competition and challenging the status quo of what San Francisco bread is supposed to taste like.
What's the state of the scene today? We tasted a dozen different loaves available in San Francisco to get a lay of the land.
What gives San Francisco sourdough its particularly sour flavor? Some argue that it's the makeup of the wild yeast strains native to the area, but if that were the case, you wouldn't be able to make sour breads in other localities without introducing some of that extra-sour San Francisco yeast first. This is clearly not the case, and indeed, once the particular strain of lactobacillus bacteria responsible for San Francisco bread's sour flavor was identified, it's been discovered all over the world. L. sanfranciscensis is what French and Italian country-style loaves owe their sourness to, it turns out.
In reality, good sour flavor really comes down to technique. All starter-based breads—those are breads in which the leavening comes from a batch of yeast and microbe-infested dough, rather than from dried or blocked commercial yeast—are made by combining a proportion of starter dough with fresh dough. That starter is packed with little buggers.
According to this great Discover Magazine article, a single teaspoon of active starter contains as many as 50 million yeasts and 5 billion lactobacilli bacteria. There are more bugs in a half cup of starter than there are humans who have ever existed in the universe. Think about that next time you bite into a loaf!
When these organisms are mixed with fresh flour, they start eating, producing alcohol, carbon dioxide, and other by-products in the process. It's the carbon dioxide that cause bubbles to form in the dough, giving it a light and airy structure, and the by-products that provide sourdough bread with its unique flavor. San Francisco bread is made with a particularly high ratio of starter to fresh dough—sometimes over 50%.
We wanted to do a side-by-side tasting, so in the interests of sparing our stomachs and minimizing palate fatigue, we decided to narrow down our selection to 12 loaves of bread. Eight are baked in San Francisco itself, and four are baked in the surrounding areas (Oakland and Sonoma), but readily delivered in the city.
When possible, all breads were purchased directly from the bakery. A few loaves had to be purchased from a retailer (we shopped at Bi-Rite, Whole Foods, and Urban Bread), but all breads were baked the day they were tasted, served after cooling to room temperature and resting at that temperature for at least two hours, in order to negate any effects that absolute fresh-out-of-the-oven crispness might have on the results.
The breads were served sliced and placed on plates marked only by number. Tasters were asked to comment on:
As some panelists pointed out, some of the bread was sliced thicker than others, due to the difficulty of slicing a very soft loaf into thin, even slices, which may have slightly affected the assessment of the internal crumb structure. Still, I'm confident that the results we achieved are fair and unbiased.
Post-tasting refreshments were also served.
Note to self: when you ask 22 people to bring "something that goes well with bread," you will receive more cheese than you can possibly consume in a lifetime.*
*We had reports that the cheesemonger at Bi-Rite figured out that all of these folks coming in saying "I want some cheese that will go well with a bread taste test" were going to the same party, which was great for us—over 15 different cheeses and not a single repeat!
"OMG, my favorite" and "DAMN, that's good bread" pretty much sum up the sentiment here. The San Francisco favorite baked on Guerrero, in the Mission, is known for its long lines (you can order the bread in advance, but it's also available through the regular bakery line after around 4:30 p.m.), but in our estimation, the hassle is well worth it. This is some of the best bread we've had anywhere.
Its crumb is described as "very moist and stretchy," with a "yeasty and complex" aroma. Like a few of the more recent bakeries, their flavor profile tends toward a "pleasant char mixed with sourness." This was one of the darkest-baked loaves we tried.
Another winner with a strong, deeply charred flavor and moist, stretchy crumb."Beautifully moist and easy to chew," and "absolutely delicious" were used to describe its crumb and aroma. Some folks even went as far as to describe its character as coffee-like.
The young, tattooed, internet-savvy New Englander-turned-San Franciscan Josey Baker (that's his real name) has only been making bread since 2010, but his loaves already have a well-deserved reputation as some of the city's best.
Plenty of whole grain and oat-y flavor in this loaf, the third in a row which came with a dark, dark char and a deep, fire-kissed flavor. Some folks found its crumb to be slightly too soft and would have preferred more resistance or larger bubbles, but its moist, wheat-y flavor was enough to push it into third place.
An upstart from Oakland, Firebrand's bread was a crowd-splitter. Some folks appreciated its deeply toasted flavor, while other described it as burnt. In particular, the bottom of this loaf was significantly darker than the rest. One comment summed up our feelings: "This is surprising and interesting, but I'm not sure that I'd want to eat too much."
Since its inception in 1999, this local French bakery has grown dramatically into a mini-chain of several locations, serving over 6,000 guests a day. Their loaves are not as overtly sour as some of the others, and their crust isn't quite as crisp or bubbly as some of our winners, but it's a respectable loaf nonetheless. Tasters were split on the multigrain seeds in its interior.
One of the smallest loaves of the bunch, Noe Valley's loaf has an extremely crunchy crust, reminiscent of a baguette in terms of its crispness and thinness. Its crumb has a classic clean, sour flavor without the overt wheatiness of some of the whole wheat doughs. Think of it as an improved and updated version of the classic white sour loaf from Boudin.
PANoRAMA caters mostly to restaurants, but you can get fresh loaves from Urban Bread. Their dark, dense loaf has a faintly malty aroma and very small bubbles. It bordered on dryness with a slightly leathery crust. This loaf is a good candidate for slicing and toasting.
A community-oriented young bakery, Sour Flour has some strong devotees in the Bay Area, and indeed among our tasters. "Interesting aroma with mild but complex flavor" and a "great airy-but-still-moist crumb" were some of its high marks. Others were not so impressed, describing its crumb as "dry" or "gritty and sandy."
An older bakery baking up classic pale sourdough loaves, we enjoyed their clean, soft, and moist crumb along with their very mildly sour aroma, but found that they needed a bit more salt to draw out flavors, and that the crust was slightly too pale and not crisp enough to push it into the higher ranks.
Surprisingly low marks for one of San Francisco's most famous and respected bakeries! We were sure Acme would fare among the top, but compared to other loaves tasters found Acme's bread to be distinctly lacking in salt, with a "very bland" aroma. One even went so far as to call it "almost tasteless."
As sourness goes, its flavor was very faint, but some people appreciated the fact that its wheatier "cereal" flavors easily came to the forefront without the sourness to keep it in check. As far as looks go, this one is picture perfect from the outside.
A very disappointing loaf from from one of Sonoma's celebrated bakeries. It was strange to look at from the start with an irregular rolled shape and a very pale crumb. To some tasters is looked more "like white bread" with a fluffy, soft crumb and very few large bubbles or stretchiness. It wasn't bad bread—we'd happily make a sandwich out of it—but it didn't embody the real nature of sourdough. One taster said it's like "really good Wonder bread," if that helps clarify.
Holding the record as San Francisco's oldest continuously running company, Boudin bakery started as a tiny family-run affair in 1849 and has since expanded into a full-blown tourist attraction on Fisherman's Wharf, with museums, tours, and several locations around the city. Unfortunately, their bread fell firmly to the bottom of our taste test with a "dry," "dense," and "uniform" crumb structure, a "strangely shiny" crumb (perhaps from an overenthusiastic steam-injector in the oven), and a "one-note" vinegary sourness that lacked the more complex wheatiness of our winning brands.
Our Tasting Methodology: All taste tests are conducted completely blind and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample 1 first, while taster B will taste sample 6 first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets ranking the samples for various criteria that vary from sample to sample. All data is tabulated and results are calculated with no editorial input in order to give us the most impartial representation of actual results possible.
About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.
San Francisco is on alert as blaze threatens power and water supply
A huge wildfire raging on the western boundary of Yosemite National Park was gaining strength on Saturday and led California's governor, Jerry Brown, to declare a state of emergency 150 miles away in San Francisco. Officials fear the blaze could threaten the city's water and power supply.
The week-long fire on the slopes of the western Sierra Nevada mountains is burning across nearly 200 sq miles, threatens 5,500 homes and could push deeper into Yosemite – one of the country's most treasured national parks as well as one of California's most popular tourist destinations.
Sprinklers were set up to protect two groves of giant sequoias, the park's symbol and among the largest and oldest living on earth. The so-called Rim fire is the fourth-largest in the US and one of 50 big blazes currently affecting the western states. But the speed at which it has grown – tripling in size over the past 24 hours – and the terrain over which it is travelling has made it hard to tackle, officials say. The fire has destroyed four homes and 12 outbuildings and was only 2% contained as of Friday. "It's just too doggone dangerous," said Lee Bentley of the forest service. "We could continue to see this fire burn very rapidly."
With more than 2,600 firefighters struggling to contain the blaze, Brown said the fire had caused damage to electrical infrastructure serving San Francisco's 2.6 million residents. The city receives 85% of its water from the Yosemite area. The blaze is less than four miles from the main reservoir, and two of the three hydroelectric power stations in the vicinity have been forced to shut down. The city has so far been able to buy power, but further disruptions or damage could have an effect, city officials said.
The fire has grown so large and is burning dry timber and brush with such ferocity that it has created its own weather pattern, making it difficult to predict in which direction it will move. Across the western states, the unusually early and intense fire season has prompted fire and land management agencies to open talks with Pentagon commanders and Canadian officials about bringing in reinforcements.
The US forest service reports that more than 31,900 fires have hit 3 million acres this year. While falling far short of records set in 2012 and 2006, when more than 9 million acres were burned in a year, climate change is being blamed for long stretches of drought and elevated temperatures. Last week, the service said it had spent nearly $1bn (£640m) on firefighting this year with only $50m remaining to control at least 40 fires burning in Idaho, Oregon, California, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana and other states.
In June, 19 members of a firefighting crew known as the Granite Mountain Hotshots died near Flagstaff, Arizona, after being forced into emergency shelters when winds shifted, cutting off their escape route.
Some experts say a decade-long drought in the western states, along with increased human settlement and activity in fire-prone regions, is behind the increasing severity and frequency of wildfires during the summer season.
Almost 87% of the western US is in a drought. Across the region, officials are taking extraordinary measures: Nevada is removing wild horses and stocks of cattle from federal lands; Wyoming is seeding clouds as part of a long-term "weather modification programme". Officials in Colorado say the state's south-eastern plains are experiencing dust-bowl conditions. All of New Mexico is officially in a drought, with ecologists warning of a permanent shift toward a desert ecology. The once-mighty Rio Grande is so dry it is being referred to as the "Rio Sand".
But with wildfires affecting major cities, California officials are calling for a new approach of controlled burns and mechanical clearing of brush – the so-called mosaic model – creating a patchwork of vegetation of different ages and densities that, if ignited, would burn less intensely. But fire managers say the mosaic model fails in the areas of dry, exposed chaparral and scrubland pervasive in southern California. Fires in those areas, they argue, burn hotter and more intensely than forest fires.
On Saturday evening, officials said they hoped a surge of tropical moisture would drench the region and ease conditions. But officials warned the rains may not reach the heart of the Rim fire. It continues to grow in several directions, said Daniel Berlant, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection: "Most of the fire activity is pushing to the east right into Yosemite."
Authorities in Kyrgyzstan have shut down a secret pipeline used to smuggle thousands of liters of alcohol into the country from Kazakhstan. The 8-inch wide tube was discovered during what's described as a "routine" patrol by Kyrgyz border guards, according to the AKIpress news agency. Running over a third of a mile in length, the pipeline was situated along the bottom of the Chu river.
Vodka was the primary alcohol tunneled in from Kazakhstan, and authorities believe the operation may have been running uninhibited for months prior to the shocking find. With the underground booze tunnel now out of order, they've shifted their focus to finding those responsible. No arrests have been made in the case yet, however. A similar plot was...
Russian Sledgesl'anamour
After an NSA spokesperson admitted a handful of "willful violations of NSA's authorities" over the past ten years, The Wall Street Journal reports a simple but worrying reason for some breaches: the officers were spying on an object of affection. Previously, two officials told Bloomberg that a few violations involved love interests, but another attributed the willful overreaches to overzealous analysts looking to prevent a terrorist attack. Now, sources tell the Journal that "LOVEINT" violations — a play on labels like SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) — make up most of the misconduct cases, with agents spying on someone like a spouse or partner.
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has said that most improper surveillance doesn't involve...
Russian Sledges'I mentioned this to some librarians at the American Library Association conference in Chicago this spring and they all said, effectively: "Welcome to the club. This is what we have to put up with all the time."'
In my latest Guardian column, I talk about the digital versions of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, the two most important lexicographic references to the English language. As a writer, my print copies of the OED and HTOED are to me what an anvil is to a blacksmith; but I was disturbed to learn that the digital editions of these books are only available as monthly rentals, services that come with expansive data-collecting policies and which cannot be owned. It's especially ironic that these books are published by Oxford University, home of the Bodleian, a deposit archive and library founded in the 14th century, a symbol of the importance of enduring ownership of books.
My discussions with OUP's execs convinced me that this wasn't the result of venality or greed, but rather the unfortunate consequence of a bunch of individually reasonable decisions that added up to something rather worrying. I hope that OUP and Oxford will continue to evolve its products in a way that honours the centuries-old traditions that Oxford embodies.
Oxford English Dictionary – the futureOUP – which has been selling dictionaries and thesauri since the 19th century – will not sell you a digital OED or HTOED. Not for any price.
Instead, these books are rented by the month, accessed via the internet by logged-in users. If you stop paying, your access to these books is terminated.
I mentioned this to some librarians at the American Library Association conference in Chicago this spring and they all said, effectively: "Welcome to the club. This is what we have to put up with all the time."
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Russian Sledges#livefree
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It's starting to feel like a rite of passage that every time there's a major inroad made to reform the controversial stop-and-frisk police policy, anonymous cops will go to the NY Post to complain about it. As Battlestar Galactica put it: "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." But today's bitchfest is particularly alarmist: "Crime is about to skyrocket. We are going to show up and take reports. This was the safest city in the country...Now most crimes will go unsolved." [ more › ]
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Russian Sledges#strongfemalecharacters
Elizabeth L. Silver advocates the death of the ingénue in fiction:
I recently went to hear Isabel Allende speak about her latest novel, Maya’s Notebook. At the Q&A, a young aspiring female writer rose to ask a question that surprised a majority of the audience. “You write a lot of strong women in your books,” she said, before asking, “Has there been anyone who has influenced you?” Allende either didn’t understand the question or wanted to emphasize the lunacy of it, and after three attempts replied: “Do you know any weak women?” Needless to say, a resounding uproar of applause emerged from the previously unobtrusive audience. This is not a topic that is far from the consciousness of the literary establishment, nor is it one that should be. It is so prevalent on people minds and hearts precisely because of its relevance. Readers don’t want to see any more ingénues or stock characters. They want to see the people that they know, the strong women who populate their lives, because, as Isabel Allende so bluntly and perfectly stated, there really aren’t weak women.
I’m not naively suggesting that contemporary fiction has conclusively banished the ingénue from its pages; nor am I claiming that the character is close to her coffin in certain genres, but I am suggesting that that she should be. Fiction, as any vital art form, serves a purpose to reflect society in its emotional, environmental, and political nuances. It informs us, teaches us, reflects humanity in its reverie. If the ingénue, which may be dying in literary fiction, begins to fade in all genres of contemporary literature, if we accept the evolution of the young female protagonist in literature, we may stop expecting women off the page to play that stock role, as well. By exiling the word to the trash bin or perhaps feeling a little bit guilty whenever used, we might continue to represent women as they are – likeable or not. Powerful characters who sometimes want love, sometimes want power, ache with ambition and passion, refuse to be called ingénues, or any other pile of stock stereotypes. They are merely women who need no other label.
I’m working on a brochure for a social program that helps at-risk children of all ages.
Client: Attached are a few photos for the brochure. We’d like to reflect diversity in age, race, and gender as much as possible, so I’ve sent you more photos than you need, so you can choose accordingly. It would be great for each row of pictures to have a mix of ages/races to whatever degree possible.
Attached to the email are eight images. Every picture is of the same African-American 18-year old boy in a graduation cap and gown.
Russian Sledgesvia firehose
Frederick Douglass. But if I had been alive back then it would, unfortunately, have been racially illegal. Screw that.
Russian Sledgesvia multitask suicide
Katie J.M. Baker, "Ladies, What's Up With the 'I Feel Like' Verbal Tic?", Jezebel 8/23/2013
When I search my Gmail inbox for the phrase "I feel like," infinity results come up. "I feel like this particular story's very up your alley," a professional acquaintance wrote. "I feel like this might be the transitional stage to Federici's utopia," a woman in my book group joked. "I feel like I look too meek in my new profile pic," I worried to a friend. "I feel like I've done nothing of worth lately," another friend confided in me. "I feel like I'm being unhelpful." "I feel like it was important." "I feel like I have to reconcile my expectations."
We are feeling so many feelings, and we are very aware that we are feeling these feelings. But most young women I know are self-conscious about how often they qualify their emotions with "I feel like." If it's how we feel, do we need to drop an "I feel like" as a prelude to our feelings?
Here's what I don't like about "I feel like," a phrase I use constantly:
* It sounds a little indulgent, verging on narcissistic; when I say "I feel like" I feel like (ha) a touchy-feely liberal girl who learned to talk about her feelings in school.
* It evokes Carrie Bradshaw's pseudo-pensive "I couldn't help but wonder…"
* "I feel like" seems sheepish. I don't want to apologize for my feelings!
Ms. Baker wrote to me, and I did a few minutes of research to convince myself of two things: The idiom " I feel like" is indeed increasing in frequency, and its use is indeed gendered.
A common explanation for more frequent use by female speakers would be that they want to "soften" their assertions more than male speakers do; but an alternative explanation would be that female speakers are just in the lead of this linguistic change, as they often are. I told Baker that I favor the second explanation, as she reported in her post.
This morning, I did a few more minutes of research, which further supports the "females leading language change" hypothesis over "females not confident of their opinions" hypothesis.
One piece of evidence that "I feel like" is getting commoner comes from the Google Books ngram viewer:
Another piece of evidence comes from the LDC's collection of transcribed telephone conversations, which contains 26,151,602 words in 14,137 two-person conversations — 28,274 conversational sides — mostly collected around 2003. In that collection, the use of "I feel like" is age-graded. Here are the average frequencies per 10-minute conversational side (about 900 words on average):
| Age ≤ 30 | Age 30-49 | Age ≥ 50 |
| 0.126 | 0.067 | 0.037 |
The rate of 0.126 per conversation translates to a rate of about 140 per million words, comparable in frequency to words like include, happened, culture, or miles. Presumably, a more recent sample focused on younger people would show continued growth in usage frequency.
The same collection provides evidence that use of "I feel like" is gendered — again the average frequency per conversational side (all ages):
| Female | Male |
| 0.094 | 0.051 |
This morning, I thought I'd take a look at a longer list of words and constructions that can be used to hedge statements, by identifying them as personal opinions or otherwise softening them. Again, these are the average frequencies per conversational side:
| Female | Male | |
| I feel like | 0.094 | 0.051 |
| seems | 0.318 | 0.389 |
| I guess | 1.46 | 1.78 |
| I believe | 0.100 | 0.131 |
| sort of | 0.415 | 0.605 |
| kind of | 1.74 | 1.85 |
| somewhat | 0.028 | 0.043 |
| a little bit | 0.330 | 0.367 |
| I think | 3.85 | 3.66 |
| probably | 0.989 | 1.06 |
| maybe | 0.883 | 0.902 |
If we add these all up, we come up with 10.85 per conversational side for male speakers, vs. 10.20 per conversational side for female speaker, a different of about 6.3% in favor of the men. But as I noted a few years ago, the guys also produce a slightly larger number of words per conversation: about 6.4% more.
So summing it up, there's no evidence in these counts for any overall difference in "hedging" between men and women.
This supports my hypothesis that women use "I feel like" more than men simply because that phrase has been increasing sharply in frequency over the past few decades, and women are leading that trend, as they often do.
I should note that I'm not talking about "I feel like dancing" or "I feel like an idiot", bur rather about a usage that's mostly a somewhat more involved way to say "I think that" or "it seems to me". A few random examples from the LDC conversational corpus:
uh i am a parent and i have three teenagers and um i'm not very involved in the school system insofar as i don't go to uh parent teacher meetings um i do check regularly that my kids have done their homework but i- in general and this is um something i've thought a lot about lately i feel like um americans don't understand what a bargain they're getting in in public education
um i personally feel really uncomfortable with the idea of bombing the country um because we disagree with the leader um i feel like it's the job that the u.n. should handle as opposed to the united states and i feel like the u.n. has done an adequate jobs of an adequate job of arms inspections in the past and we should just turn it over to them
i was involved in a a relationship off and on for about ten years and uh uh initially it was very good but it would have been clear to even the most casual observer after awhile but it was just not going to work and was not going to be productive for me but um i stayed in it probably for another five or six years after that and um you know an off and on kind of thing but i feel like i probably wasted a lot of time in that you know i should have learned the lesson from the relationship taken that forward and gotten on with things but instead i hung on to it for for a really long time and i i think i lost some very valuable years of my life
This is by far the commonest sense of "I feel like" in that dataset, and from the examples that Katie Baker gives, I feel like it's the usage she was talking about as well.
Russian Sledgesvia multitask suicide
… that Grigory Rasputin predicted the world would end. This has not gotten much coverage in the U.S., despite links to zombies, marijuana legalization and solar flares.
I've discovered a remarkable connection to linguistic theory, but have decided not to reveal it so as avoid unnecessary panic during our remaining hours.
Russian Sledges#popebeat
In a moving, personal essay, Joseph Bottum, the conservative Catholic and former editor of First Things, comes out in favor of same-sex marriage – only five years after declaring its proponents were attacking “biblical ethics.” Part of his argument? Its the wrong battle at the wrong time:
[T]here are much better ways than opposing same-sex marriage for teaching the essential God-hauntedness, the enchantment, of the world—including massive investments in charity, the further evangelizing of Asia, a willingness to face martyrdom by preaching in countries where Christians are killed simply because they are Christians, and a church-wide effort to reinvigorate the beauty and the solemnity of the liturgy. Some Catholic intellectual figures will continue to explore the deep political-theory meanings manifest in the old forms of Christendom, and more power to them, but the rest of us should turn instead to more effective witness in the culture as it actually exists.
How he connects same-sex marriage to his own conservative instincts:
[S]ame-sex marriage might prove a small advance in chastity in a culture that has lost much sense of chastity. Same-sex marriage might prove a small advance in love in a civilization that no longer seems to know what love is for. Same-sex marriage might prove a small advance in the coherence of family life in a society in which the family is dissolving.
I don’t know that it will, of course, and some of the most persuasive statements of conservatism insist that we should not undertake projects the consequences of which we cannot foresee. But same-sex marriage is already here; it’s not as though we can halt it. And other profound statements of conservatism remind us that we must take people as we find them—must instruct the nation where the nation is.
Mark Oppenheimer, interviewing Bottum, unpacks (NYT) the theological assumptions behind his change of heart:
Natural law, Mr. Bottum writes, depends for its force on a sense of the mystery of creation, the enchantment of everyday objects, the sacredness of sex. In the West, that climate of belief has been upended: by science, modernism, a Protestant turn away from mysticism, and, most recently, the sexual revolution. The strictures of natural law were meant to structure an enchanted world — but if the enchantment is gone, the law becomes a pointless artifact of a defunct Christian culture.
“And if,” Mr. Bottum writes, “heterosexual monogamy so lacks the old, enchanted metaphysical foundation that it can end in quick and painless divorce, then what principle allows a refusal of marriage to gays on the grounds of a metaphysical notion like the difference between men and women?”
Traditional-marriage activists would counter that we can at least begin a Christian renaissance by upholding marriage’s last connections to its Christian past. But Mr. Bottum says that’s the wrong starting point.
BINGHAMTON, N.Y. (AP) — President Barack Obama says law schools in the U.S. should cut down to two years instead of three to cut costs for students.
Obama says students do most of their classroom learning in the first two years of law school. He says the third year would be better spent clerking for a judge or working in a law firm.
The president says the question is whether schools could keep good professors and sustain themselves without that third year. But he says they could if they were creative.
Obama is answering questions at a town hall in New York. It's part of a two-day bus tour to highlight Obama's proposals for lowering the cost of higher education.
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