Hi, Artemis/Orion!

You'll never guess what happened!!

PS- Amy isn't kidding about the links... I get away with two in that first comment because I *didn't* put anything in the URL field when writing it, as I did in this comment.

Priorities.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/whos-perks-bureaucrats-at-the-cash-strapped-world-health-organization-who-fly-business-class-an/

Whassup, Doc?

Favorite passage:

To some hospitals and their business, I’m not a Surgeon. I’m just an employee.

Maybe the penis hoax wasn't all that beautiful.

Got food poisoning plus some horrible back pain from falling asleep on my bathroom floor. Recovering. Will post new stuff on Monday.

@Amy - wishing you a Refuah Shleimah

Feel better Amy!

Get better and don't forget to have Gregg rub some Tiger Balm on your back.

Get better and don't forget to have Gre

Never mind

When is a promise not a promise?

According to their attorney, it's when the DNC promises donors that the candidate selection process will be fair and unbiased.

Cue the lawyers.

From The Atlantic: "When Your Child is a Psychopath."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/when-your-child-is-a-psychopath/524502/

It's long, so I haven't read it all yet.

Excerpt:

...researchers stress that a callous child—even one who was born that way—is not automatically destined for psychopathy. By some estimates, four out of five children with these traits do not grow up to be psychopaths. The mystery—the one everyone is trying to solve—is why some of these children develop into normal adults while others end up on death row.

A trained eye can spot a callous and unemotional child by age 3 or 4. Whereas normally developing children at that age grow agitated when they see other children cry—and either try to comfort them or bolt the scene—these kids show a chilly detachment. In fact, psychologists may even be able to trace these traits back to infancy. Researchers at King’s College London tested more than 200 five-week-old babies, tracking whether they preferred looking at a person’s face or at a red ball. Those who favored the ball displayed more callous traits two and a half years later.

As a child gets older, more-obvious warning signs appear. Kent Kiehl, a psychologist at the University of New Mexico and the author of The Psychopath Whisperer, says that one scary harbinger occurs when a kid who is 8, 9, or 10 years old commits a transgression or a crime while alone, without the pressure of peers. This reflects an interior impulse toward harm. Criminal versatility—committing different types of crimes in different settings—can also hint at future psychopathy.

But the biggest red flag is early violence...

(snip)

Obviously, many cold-blooded future criminals don't make their traits as obvious as the children in the report, even as teens; they're not always born that way, and even some future killers are not necessarily psychopaths, technically speaking. It's worth remembering, though, that just as parents have every moral obligation not to keep looking the other way when something is OBVIOUSLY wrong, so too parents have the moral obligation to make sure their "good" kids are not leading secret amoral lives, whether it's a straight-A girl who is also a vicious class bully (as in Judy Blume's novel "Blubber") or someone who cannot comprehend qualities like humility or empathy any more than a language that's never been taught at length, as in (maybe) the 1924 murder case of Leopold and Loeb. Practice is everything; you are what you do. (Which is why Miss Manners has no patience for those parents who argue that children who don't really mean words like "please" "thank you" and "I'm sorry" shouldn't be ordered to say them.) No one ever said that keeping a close eye on kids is easy, but it's still the parents' job not to raise a future felon, psychopath or not.

Btw, the same issue has an incredible cover story concerning modern slavery in the U.S. and one man's story about growing up with his parents and their Filipino slave. Plus a story about white supremacist Richard Spencer, told by his former high school classmate.

> It's long, so I haven't
> read it all yet.

Same with your comment, though I'll finish it on a plane tomorrow.

Meanwhile Prager once said: A person who tortures animals will eventually torture a human being. (I've yet to find an exception.)

He immediately presented the parallel truth, in punishing irony, that a person who loves and respects animals in all contexts might still be a violent, conniving murderer of his fellow man.

I'm pretty sure about 88% of his audience missed that second part, because people are dim.

And they're AGGRESSIVELY simple-minded. When truths aren't symmetrical and easy-to-remember, people think they shouldn't be on the test.

Oh, they are. They SO are. Asymmetrical truths are SO on the test.

I doubt most adults really have that much trouble with the basic idea of asymmetrical truths. While it may NOT be true that "Hitler loved his dogs" -

http://trinities.org/blog/why-we-should-doubt-the-hitler-as-dog-lover-traditions/

- it's not as though he didn't like them enough to have more than one in his lifetime. So there's one well-known example of a monster who wasn't completely predictable. (As most people here would know, he was also a vegetarian, teetotaler, and lover of classical music. Including works by "subhuman" Russian composers such as Peter Tchaikovsky, Alexander Borodin and Sergei Rachmaninoff.)