8
Jun
2011
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may i throw up now!!?? please.

took scenic route (right thing to do); shorten trip by 50 miles, lengthened time by 1 hour. knew this going into it but always choose scenic over hwy. but the one hour (or felt like) of switch backs and hairpins ranging from 15 to 30 mph….well may i throw up now!! the curves were perfectly banked. some engineers and road gurus perfectly designed this road dropping out of the smokies. it was like skiing down a black (slightly large exaggeration). in spite of the perfect banking that pulled one straight through each curve (wait bad verbage…how can one go straight through a curve…ponder); one guy this morning didn’t make it and flipped and smacked into an embankment. not a good sign when the cops have traffic stopped and are measuring, csi-like, skid marks and various other relevant data.

i’ve now settled in for deep thinking or assume it will be since i’ve arrived at a thinktank. really what is a think tank? a weapon of brain destruction or clear like container to pin in the thinkers? perhaps a little of both? hope there are not to many innocent bystanders harmed in the thinking.

wiki says, “A think tank (also called a policy institute) is an organization or individual that conducts research and engages in advocacy in areas such as social policy, political strategy, economy, science or technology issues, industrial or business policies, or military advice. …

…While the term “think tank” originated in the 1950s, organizations date to the 19th century. The Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) was founded in 1831 in London. The Fabian Society in Britain dates from 1884. The Brookings Institution began in Washington in 1916, After 1945, the number of think tanks grew, as many smaller new think tanks were formed to express various issue and policy agendas. Until the 1940s, most think tanks were known only by the name of the institution. During the Second World War, think tanks were referred to as “brain boxes” after the slang term for the skull. The phrase “think tank” in wartime American slang referred to rooms in which strategists discussed war planning. The term think tank itself, however, was originally used in reference to organizations that offered military advice, most notably the RAND Corporation, founded originally in 1946 as an offshoot of Douglas Aircraft and which became an independent corporation in 1948…

…The first American think tank was the Brookings Institution, founded in 1916 as the Institute for Government Research (IGR), with the mission of becoming “the first private organization devoted to analyzing public policy issues at the national level.”[16] The Air force set up the RAND Corporation in 1946 to think about air power.

In 1971 Lewis F. Powell Jr. urged conservatives to retake command of public discourse by “financing think tanks, reshaping mass media and seeking influence in universities and the judiciary.”[17] In the following decades conservative policies once considered outside the liberal mainstream–such as abolishing welfare, privatizing Social Security, deregulating banking, embracing preemptive war—were taken seriously and sometimes passed into law thanks to the work of the Hoover Institution, Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and smaller tanks.[18][19]

Think tanks help shape both foreign and domestic policy. They receive funding from private donors, and members of private organizations. Think tanks may feel more free to propose and debate controversial ideas than people within government. The liberal media watchgroup Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has identified the top 25 think tanks by media citations, noting that from 2006 to 2007 the number of citations declined 17%.[20] The FAIR report reveals the ideological breakdown of the citations: 37% conservative, 47% centrist, and 16% liberal. Their data show that the most-cited think tank was the Brookings Institution, followed by the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies….”

hmmm. ok. we’ll see. but really has me pondering is weird parallels with my bro…
my bro’s place in Oak ridge, TN

my place within a five days, not in oak ridge.

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