Weekend Digest: The Anger In Iowa Edition

TV PREVIEW CONG. FRENCH HILL
On this week’s TV edition of Talk Business & Politics:

Cong. French Hill is out on recess and he’s in studio. His take on Iran, the IRS, highways, and presidential politics. Hill goes one-on-one with TB&P host Roby Brock.

Our political roundtable focuses on the resignations of Arkansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Jim Hannah and U.S. Attorney Conner Eldridge. What happens next for both of these positions?

KATV’s Janelle Lilley, Michael Tilley with The City Wire, and author/politico Bill “Scoop” Lancaster join the roundtable for a conversation. Plus a look at the top business and political stories of the week.

Tune in to Talk Business & Politics on KATV Ch. 7 Sunday at 9 a.m.

A DOTCOM FLAMEOUT FINDS SUCCESS
His name is Todd Krizelman, and Forbes reports he “was one of the youngest Internet sensations of the first dot com boom.”

As a 20-year-old student at Cornell, in 1995 he cofounded a New York City-based social media company called TheGlobe.com, which allowed users to post their own web pages, chat and play games with one another. TheGlobe went public in November 1998 and on its first day of trading, shot from $9 to $97 a share. But less than two years later, the stock had plummeted to $2 and in 2000, Krizelman and partner Stephan Paternot resigned.

Now at 41, Krizelman owns a company with 400 employees and has projected $20 million in revenue for this year. What happened in-between? Go to this link for Krizelman’s flameout-to-success story.

CREATIVE EMOTIONS
What are the emotions that make us more creative?

Artists and scientists throughout history have remarked on the bliss that accompanies a sudden creative insight. Einstein described his realization of the general theory of relativity as the happiest moment of his life. More poetically, Virginia Woolf once observed, “Odd how the creative power brings the whole universe at once to order.”

But what about before such moments of creative insight? What emotions actually fuel creativity?

Logic points to positive emotions as the ticket for creativity, but Harvard Business Review says “emerging research suggests that the positive vs. negative emotions distinction may not be the most important contrast for understanding attentional focus.”

So what emotions are the real conduit for creativity? Find out at this link.

GOOGLE AND THE ALPHABET
It’s called Alphabet and Fast Company reports, “Alphabet, Google’s new parent company, just gave a better idea of what its next moonshot project might be.”

The Information reported Wednesday that Google exec Linus Upson was interested in genetically engineering mosquitos to fight disease. According to Re/code, Upson and Larry Page, now Alphabet’s chief executive, have spoken to George Church, a prominent geneticist and Harvard professor, about his work with gene editing.

Church said that Upson and Page were most interested in the use of genetically modified mosquitos to fight ailments like dengue fever and malaria.

Could this be a commercial success or do they have some other goal in mind? For details on this fantastic and futuristic endeavor, click here.

VERIZON WANTS TO MAKE THE INTERNET 1,000 TIMES FASTER
CNN Money reports, “Verizon is working on new broadband technology that is capable of delivering some of the fastest Internet speeds ever recorded.”

The new service would provide customers download speeds of 10 gigabits per second. That would be 10 times faster than Google Fiber and 1,000 times faster than the average U.S. home Internet.

How fast is that exactly? A two-hour high definition movie would take eight seconds to download, 100 students could download a textbook in two seconds simultaneously, and uploading 1,000 photos would take about two seconds as well, Verizon says.

How would it work and when could we see it? Follow this link for the full story.

ANGER IN IOWA
POLITICO reports, “Hawkeye State Republicans are fed up with Washington and ho-hum presidential candidates. Enter Donald Trump.”

Iowans are mad as hell and they know who to turn to — Donald Trump.

Outsider candidates have a history of gaining traction among Hawkeye State GOP caucus-goers fed up with Washington and establishment candidates more broadly. The Iowa agitation was loud and clear in the CNN/ORC poll released on Wednesday showing Donald Trump soaring with voters, despite a slew of highly controversial remarks made in the past few weeks, with retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, another political outsider, coming in second.

Whether they are momentarily voicing their frustrations through nontraditional candidates or will ultimately caucus for them are two very different things, and the answer to that will come down the road.

For many conservatives in Iowa and elsewhere, there’s the sense that even after electing a Republican Senate last cycle, giving the GOP control of both chambers of Congress, little has changed — and some are venting by aligning with Trump, who has no compunctions about railing against Washington and the political establishment, and to a lesser extent with Carson, who has never worked in politics.

POLITICO has full details and analysis here.

ARE WE HEADED FOR A FOUR-PARTY MOMENT?
In an editorial, The Washington Post says, “If anything’s constant in American political life, it’s the stable two-party system, jostled occasionally by third-party presidential challengers such as Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996 or Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.”

Yet, more rarely, at times of extreme political flux, this society has broken up into four parties.

Might we be headed toward another four-party moment? There are two reasons to say “yes.” Learn what they are by connecting to this link.

THE IRAN DEAL
By mid-September, Congress will vote on a yes-or-no resolution that would give the nuclear deal President Obama negotiated with Iran a green light, “or halt it at least temporarily,” reports The Washington Post.

Obama has vowed to veto any “no” vote or effort to dilute a deal that he says will keep Iran from building a bomb. But because an agreement was reached just before the August recess, opponents of the agreement have two months to rally support for their side and try to gather the two-thirds majorities required to overcome that veto.

So what is the latest whip count in the Senate? Click here for the tally.

WHAT COUNTRY OTHER THAN MEXICO SENDS THE MOST IMMIGRANTS TO EACH U.S. STATE?
Interesting question posed by Business Insider.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch recently circulated a “Transforming World Atlas” that investigates some of the big demographic and economic trends that define the world.

One of the many charts and maps in the note was a map, based on data from the Department of Homeland Security, showing the country, other than Mexico, that is the most common country of origin for immigrants living in each state.

You might be surprised to learn what country has Arkansas’ second highest immigrant count. Answers at this link.

THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON LIKE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN
Or have you ever seen a full shot of the dark side of the moon? We can guarantee you’ve not seen it like this.

It’s a regular celestial event witnessed from an entirely different perspective, and it sure is mesmerizing.

Last month, the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) captured a series of test photos with its Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera. From its lofty perch 1 million miles from Earth, EPIC looked on as the moon transited our planet:

Take a breathtaking look here from Huffington Post Science.

I’LL HAVE ANOTHER, MR. ROBOT
Don’t kid yourself. It’s coming and this is what will happen. You go to your favorite watering hole, and instead of Jackie your usual bartender serving up your scotch and soda, it will be…a robot.

A team from MIT has been working on having robots function in situations that are not isolated from the human factor (just like it would happen in a bar full of people). They managed to team up with a couple of cocktail-making robots with other two smaller units that work as waiters.

Just think. Bartender and waiter robots. And if you want to take a look at robot bartending school, click on this link from AOL.

WHO THE HECK WAS ‘JESSIE’S GIRL’?
You know as in “Jessie’s Girl” from the smash hit by Rick Springfield. The song still gets play today.

When the first chord of the iconic love song “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield is played, fans immediately get excited and ready to jam – a feeling that Springfield only dreamed about until his smash hit was performed live. The question on all of our minds is “Who is Jessie’s Girl?” Springfield shared the unrequited love story that inspired the song that the whole world has fallen in love with.

So who is she? Fox News has the scoop at this link.