Kelly McNulty Valenzuela

pole slothing

“I was going through old family photos with my best friend when I came across this gem. Looks like the shirt should say ‘sweatshirt,’ but the way he’s positioned it looks like it says ‘Eat…'”

(submitted by Amanda)

The post Lost In Translation appeared first on AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com.

“This is a photo of my mother Bonnie in Vegas last year for my cousin’s 21st birthday. It looks like my mom is the one who got the presents.”

(submitted by Jamie)

How I feel whenever someone tries to show me that Miley Cyrus performance from the VMAs.

"What do you think of this peacock spider mating display? I’m going for seductive, yet elegant.”

"Nailed it."

She just wanted to get a basetan.

(submitted by Darsa)

This is a grammar comic about the proper usage of who versus whom.

View

“My dad is the baby in this photo. Apparently there was some confusion back then about what exactly feeds a baby.”

(submitted by Heather)

The post Tune In Tokyo appeared first on AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com.

by Jason Stotts

I am very pleased and excited to announce that tomorrow The Erosophia Podcast will be interviewing Dr. Darrel Ray on sex and religion!  Last year Dr. Ray released the very good book Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality, which I recommend for anyone who wants to understand the true, and terrible, effects that religion has on sexuality.

Book description:

Why are all the major religions consumed with sex? What makes sex so important, whether Buddhism or Islam, Christianity or Mormonism? What is the impact of religion on human sexuality? This book explores this and more. It ventures into territory that has never been examined. You will be surprised at how much religion has influenced your sexuality, who you marry, the pleasure you get or don’t get from sex, and what you can do about it.

If you have any questions for Dr. Ray, please email them to me at Jason(at)JasonStotts.com

Dr. Ray also heads the very useful and much need organization Recovering from Religion, where they help people to re-establish their lives away from religion and to find meaning in the real world.

I’m very excited about this interview and I hope that you will enjoy it as much when it’s released!

by Jane Nelsen, co-author of Positive Discipline for Teenagers.

I just received an interesting question from a journalist wondering if parents could be both a friend and a disciplinarian. Following is my answer:

I'm not sure what you mean by disciplinarian and what you mean by friend. When people say, “You should be a parent, not a friend to your children,” I always wonder what kind of friend they are talking about. The implication is that friends are wishy washy. I don't have any wishy washy friends. My friends treat me with respect, are honest, hold me accountable, tell me what I need to hear in very loving ways, and don't put up with disrespect. And they love me and encourage me through all my ups and downs. Sounds like good parenting to me.

Regarding the disciplinarian part of the question, in all of the Positive Discipline books, we do not advocate punishment of any kind--which is what most people mean by disciplinarian. We believe in respectfully involving kids in focusing on solutions that are respectful to everyone.

How many friends would we have if we used the disciplinarian methods used by many parents?

1) Lecture
2) Nag
3) Try to control through punishments and withdrawal of privileges
4) Tell us what to do, when to do it, and how to do it
5) Withdraw love or show strong disappointment when expectations aren’t met

A theme I share with parents and teachers is "connection before correction." In other words, you have to have a good relationship before you can teach children anything--and then correction still means solving problems together respectfully. Parents would have much greater influence if they were good friends to their children by:

1) Encouraging (unconditional love)
2) Friendly discussions
3) Brainstorming for solutions
4) Scheduling special time for fun
5) Regular family meetings that involve all of the above
6) Making sure kids know you are on their side

One father shared that he was in the middle of an argument with his teenaged son when he stopped and said, “Son, do you know I’m on your side?” His son got tears in his eyes and said, “How would I know that?” Friends usually know we are on their side. Do our children?

Create a connection (closeness and trust), and then use respectful methods for correction. In other words, be a good friend to your child.

the holy booger

[video]

Here’s the Facebook page for Landfill Harmonic and here’s the website for the upcoming documentary movie (January 2014) about the Landfill Harmonic Orchestra (“The world sends up garbage. We send back music”).

1. “Why I Changed My Mind on Weed” — CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta says we have been “terribly and systematically misled for 70 years” about marijuana, he “apologizes for his role in that,” and for being “too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis.”

2. Uruguay’s president wants to make a “contribution to humanity” by legalizing weed to sap the devastating cartel violence. For example, Drug War-related casualties in Mexico alone are estimated to be between 60,000 and 100,000.

3. Drug War Fact: More people were arrested in the US for drug crimes in 2011 than any other class of crimes.

Summary: By legalizing weeds, a) we’ll improve the lives of thousands of sick people, b) save the lives of thousands of Drug War victims, and c) stop arresting and prosecuting innocent people for a victimless crime. Sure seems like win-win-win to me.

4. Question: Given the Obama administration’s commitment to double US exports in five years, why are they delaying dozens of applications to export our abundance of natural gas?

5. Meanwhile, in a move that many would accurately describe as excessively dangerous social engineering, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is imposing a new rule that would allow the federal government to track racial diversity in America’s neighborhoods and then push housing policies to change those it deems discriminatory. The “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” requires HUD to gather data on segregation and discrimination in every single US neighborhood and try to remedy it.

6. A nation of $100,000 per year firefighters: Across Canada, cities and towns are getting hosed by the skyrocketing salaries of firefighters.

7. NBER study: Higher female absenteeism induced by the 28-day menstrual cycle explains almost 12% of the gender wage gap.

8. Last year, GM was losing almost $50,000 on each Chevy Volt. Driven by trendy environmentalism, GM will cut its price by $5,000 and lose even more money.

"Hey, evolution, what are you working on?"

"Nothing."

"Come on, show me."

"I don’t want to."

"Aw, why not?"

"Because you’re going to think it looks stupid."

"What? No I’m not."

"Yes you are. You always do."

"Don’t be ridiculous. Aren’t we friends?"

"Fine. Here. It’s called a crested guineafowl."

"Oh my god, what happened to its head? It looks like you transplanted it from a smaller, uglier animal."

"I hate you."

just fabulous!1!

Milton Friedman was born on this day, July 31, in 1912, and he would have been 101 years old today. Unfortunately, Milton died on November 16, 2006 when he was 94 years old. In an editorial in the Wall Street Journal following Friedman’s death, they reported his loss with the same tribute Milton used when Ronald Reagan died, saying “few people in human history have contributed more to the achievement of human freedom.” In honor of his legacy and birthday, here are some of my favorite Milton Friedman quotes:

1. There is nothing as permanent as a temporary government program.

2. Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

3. Inflation is caused by too much money chasing after too few goods.

4. Sloppy writing reflects sloppy thinking.

5. All learning is ultimately self-learning.

6. I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.

7. Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.

8. The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

9. The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

10. The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books.

11. Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, all of the great wonders of the modern era have meant relatively little to the wealthy. The rich in Ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing: running servants replaced running water. Television and radio? The patricians of Rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leading actors as domestic retainers. Ready-to-wear clothing, supermarkets — all these and many other modern developments would have added little to their life. The great achievements of Western capitalism have redounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.

12. President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”… Neither half of that statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. “What your country can do for you” implies that the government is the patron, the citizen the ward. “What you can do for your country” assumes that the government is the master, the citizen the servant.

13. On the difference between public vs. private education: “Try talking French with someone who studied it in public school. Then with a Berlitz graduate.”

Russia in 15 seconds

Best comment: “Im glad they filmed this during the summer, in the winter it gets depressing sometimes.”

360 degrees of fail

fuck it, its friday!

More than any single person, Texas oil man and petrochemical engineer George P. Mitchell gets credit for developing the drilling technology known as hydraulic fracturing that created a shale oil and gas revolution in the US, and which has dramatically transformed the global energy landscape in America’s favor. The significance of the shale energy boom that has resulted from Mitchell’s revolutionary drilling technologies is illustrated in the chart above that shows the annual US production of crude oil and natural gas (data here, production for 2013 is estimated). As advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling starting unlocking oceans of shale gas and oil in America in about 2006, the domestic production of oil and gas surged by more than 30% between 2005 and 2012 and completely reversed a three-decade decline in US oil and gas output. More oil and gas was produced in the US last year (41,600,000 billion BTUs) than in any year since 1974, 38 years ago. Further production gains this year will likely bring domestic production of US gas and oil close to the record highs set back in the early 1970s.

Various news agencies are reporting today that oil man, fracking pioneer, and “super-petropreneur” George Mitchell has died at age 94.

From Bloomberg:

George P. Mitchell, the Texas billionaire who pioneered shale-drilling techniques that triggered a renaissance in North American oil and natural gas production, has died. He was 94. Mitchell’s innovative use of horizontal wells and hydraulic fracturing in the 1990s to release gas from a previously-impermeable rock formation near Fort Worth, Texas, earned him the nickname the “father of the Barnett Shale.” Those drilling breakthroughs revolutionized oil and gas exploration from Pennsylvania to Poland and the Yukon Territory to Argentina.

“My engineers kept telling me, ‘You are wasting your money, Mitchell.’ And I said, Well damn it, let’s figure this thing out, because there is no question there is a tremendous source bed that’s about 250 feet thick.”

As other companies adopted Mitchell’s techniques, U.S. gas production rose 25% in the past decade, pushing prices to a 10-year low in April 2012. The nation now has an estimated 890 trillion cubic feet equivalent of recoverable natural gas, enough fuel for almost 40 years at current consumption rates. As the same methods were applied to oil fields, crude production has more than quadrupled in places such as the Bakken formation in North Dakota and Montana in the past three years.

Mitchell had the “guts” to do certain things that other people would be too scared to do, said Michael Richmond, who worked for Mitchell for 25 years, eventually retiring as chief executive officer of the real-estate company that developed The Woodlands.

“George didn’t like to hear the answer, ‘No,’” Richmond said. “He always wanted to hear the answer, ‘How.’ You had to figure out solutions to any issue that was on the table.”

From Reuters:

George P. Mitchell leveraged a penchant for hard work, an appetite for risk and dogged persistence in the face of futility into a technological breakthrough that reshaped the global energy industry and made the wildcat oilman a billionaire. Mitchell, the developer and philanthropist who also is considered the father of fracking, doggedly pursued natural gas he and others knew were trapped in wide, thin layers of rock deep underground. Fracking brought an entirely new — and enormous — trove of oil and gas within reach.

For the entire oil and gas age, drillers had searched for hydrocarbons that had seeped out of layers of sedimentary rock over millions of years and collected into large pools. Once found, they were easy to produce. Engineers merely had to drill into the pools and the natural pressure of the earth would send huge volumes of oil and gas up to the surface. These pools are exceedingly rare, though, and they were quickly being tapped out as the world’s consumption grew, raising fears that the end of the oil and gas age would soon be at hand and raising prices to alarming levels.

Mitchell’s idea: Go directly to the sedimentary rock holding the oil and gas, essentially speeding up geological processes by thousands of millennia. He figured out how to drill into and then along layers of gas-laden rock, then force a slurry of water, sand and chemicals under high pressure into the rock to crack it open and release the hydrocarbons. This process, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, is the now-common industry practice known generally as fracking.

Engineers after Mitchell learned to adapt the process to oil-bearing rock. The U.S. is now the world’s largest producer of natural gas and is on track to overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest oil producer by the end of the decade.

MP: ‘Super-petropreneur’ George Mitchell’s life and legacy demonstrates how one person with vision, guts, Yankee ingenuity, determination, entrepreneurship, and hard work can change an industry and change the world. R.I.P. George Mitchell, a true American hero.

“In the 20th Century, babies were kept in cages outside windows, so they could get sunlight and air to get Vitamin D for good health. Originating in America, it was also said that these too provided more room for families who had little space in their city homes & somewhere for the child to play with toys.”

(via heil,schatzen)

1. Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man’s well-being is not their goal.

~Ayn Rand, writing in the book “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.”

2. If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as “social gains”; if businessmen
struggle for higher profits, this is damned as “selfish greed.” If the workers’ standard of living is low, liberals blame it on the businessman; but if the businessmen attempt to improve their economic efficacy, to expand their markets, and to enlarge the financial returns of their enterprises, thus making higher wages and lower prices possible, the same liberals denounce it as “commercialism.”

Ayn Rand, writing in the book “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.”

HT: Dennis Gartman in today’s The Gartman Letter

Looks like Reggie is super excited that football season is almost here.