Where few dared to be rich

There is no regular system of taxation, but when the Emperor or the Bashaw want money, they levy on some rich man, and he has to furnish the cash or go to prison.

3 Religious Liberty Actions by the Trump Administration

Senators Daines, Lankford, Blunt and other Senators introduced a Religious Freedom Day resolution in the Senate, S.Con.Res. 34.

President Trump made remarks from the Oval Office. The White House issued a proclamation and fact sheet, and announced three actions it is taking to better protect organizations and people of faith:

Sunday Talk Recap: Senate Court of Impeachment

Preview: Lawmakers gear up for Senate impeachment trial

Recap: All eyes on Senate impeachment trial

Clips on Twitter

Congress Updates

GovTop Report

• Weekly Digest of the Congressional Record

Pray for Congress

• Congress Last Week
• Congressional Outlook
• Senate Floor Schedule
• Senate Committee Schedule

Turning AI's opaqueness transparent

IBM experimented with adding Urban Dictionary data to its artificial intelligence system Watson, only to scrub it all out again when the computer started swearing at them.

Source: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

I find this quote to be far more interesting than what McCulloch intended. Artificial intelligence is frequently portrayed as a “black box” into which humans have no way to directly peer. That is, computers have exceeded human at least in terms of being able to handle the data it used to come to its conclusions. Apparently there's more to the story.

Unexpected sources of life satisfaction

The young have so much more to look forward to than the elderly, yet ratings of life satisfaction actually rise slightly with age, up to age sixty-five, and, in some studies, well beyond.

People are often surprised to hear that the old are happier than the young because the old have so many more health problems, yet people adapt to most chronic health problems…

The last medieval monarchy

All good Americans wish to fight the representatives they have chosen.

All good Englishmen wish to forget the representatives they have chosen.

This difference, deep and perhaps ineradicable in the temperaments of the two peoples, explains a thousand things in their literature and their laws.

Who am I, and what am I to be?

They to whom a boy comes asking, Who am I, and what am I to be? have need of ever so much care. Each word in answer may prove to the after-life what each finger-touch of the artist is to the clay he is modelling.

Source: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace

Thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign

Tangier is the spot we have been longing for all the time.

Elsewhere we have found foreign-looking things and foreign-looking people, but always with things and people intermixed that we were familiar with before, and so the novelty of the situation lost a deal of its force.

Sunday Recap: Iran, Impeachment, China

Preview: Lawmakers mull Trump's war power, next steps with Iran

Recap: Administration officials grilled on Trump's Iran claims

Clips on Twitter

Congress Updates

GovTop Report

• Weekly Digest of the Congressional Record

Pray for Congress

• House denies protection for unborn children from drinking water contaminants
• Congress Last Week
• Congressional Outlook
• Senate Floor Schedule
• Senate Committee Schedule
• House Floor Schedule
• House Committee Schedule

A linguistic trust fall

Irony is a linguistic trust fall. When I write or speak with a double meaning, I fall backwards, hoping that you’ll be there to catch me.

The risks are high: misaimed irony can gravely injure the conversation.

But the rewards are high, too: the sublime joy of feeling purely understood, the comfort of knowing someone’s on your side.

No wonder people through the ages kept trying so hard to write it.

Source: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

Marriage and happiness

A good marriage is one of the life-factors most strongly and consistently associated with happiness.

Part of this apparent benefit comes from “reverse correlation”: Happiness causes marriage.

The romance of business

Americans are very unpunctual.

That is the last thing that a critic expects who comes to condemn them for hustling and haggling and vulgar ambition. But it is almost the first fact that strikes the spectator on the spot.

The chief difference between the humdrum English business man and the hustling American business man is that the hustling American business man is always late. Of course there is a great deal of difference between coming late and coming too late.

But I noticed the fashion first in connection with my own lectures; touching which I could heartily recommend the habit of coming too late. I could easily understand a crowd of commercial Americans not coming to my lectures at all; but there was something odd about their coming in a crowd, and the crowd being expected to turn up some time after the appointed hour.

Youth, the painted shell

Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.

Source: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace