an obsession with color, banks still stealing homes

Notes on painting from Oscar Bluemner’s Theory Diary, 1920 Jan. 12. Bluemner’s notes in German regarding color theory, supplemented with watercolor samples. Oscar Bluemner papers, Archives of American Art.

 Bluemner’s notes in German regarding color theory, supplemented with watercolor samples. These papers are interesting in the context of obsessions. We’re told not to have them. The daily news is filled with the tragic results of unhealthy obsessions. Which may leave the impressions that there are no healthy ones. Bluemner’s obsession was not being the Proust of color. Nothing wrong with that. Though since I wasn’t there it wouldn’t surprise me if he drove his friends crazy on occasion.

 Turns out much-hyped settlement still allows banks to steal homes

The absolute least Americans can hope for from a major government settlement with a large industry over well-documented crimes is that the industry wouldn’t, after signing the settlement, just continue to commit the same crimes day after day. After all, following the tobacco industry settlement, cigarette makers did manage to stop advertising to teenagers that their product had no medical side effects.

But new evidence reveals the nation’s largest banks have apparently continued to fabricate documents, rip off customers and illegally kick people out of their homes, even after inking a series of settlements over the same abuses. And the worst part of it all is that the main settlement over foreclosure fraud was so weakly written that it actually allows such criminal conduct to occur, at least up to a certain threshold. Potentially hundreds of thousands of homes could be effectively stolen by the big banks without any sanctions.

One of the things state and federal officials agreed to was an error level below five percent. And they would not go storming in for another round of legal sanctions, with more fines. Now, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight officials and public interest groups who are keeping an eye on the banks have noted that even under five percent that could add up, and probably is, to hundreds of thousands of people being forced out of their homes with fraudulent paperwork. Homeowners themselves could sue, but despite all we hear about how easy it is to sue someone, it can take years and a lot of expense before a homeowners gets a settlement.

deck chairs rain wallpaper, benghazi and orwell

deck chairs rain wallpaper

This is your conservative media at work,  ABC, The Weekly Standard, The Daily Mail Townhall, The American Thinker, Hot Air, and Breitbart  All Misrepresented White House Benghazi Email. This is yet another inconvenient truth in the bag of conservative myths about Benghazi, Ambassador Stevens twice said no to military offers of more security, U.S. officials say. So some conservative operative doctors an e-mail and that  “news” report is echoed far and wide. Just an odd coincidence this are the same people that helped lie over 4,000 Americans to their death in Iraq. Than tried to blame their bungling of the economy on Barny Frank and liberals. People that have trouble finding anything resembling a moral conscience most days, that have a well documented track record of strangling the truth and leaving it for dead in an alley. These are the people America is supposed to go to for the truth. Note much has changed, it just seems we’re have a peak in the news cycle where conservatives are especially hell bent on honking their horn as they drive around drunk in the clown car. Give a conservative a clown car, a full bottle and apparently a dictionary, and you have a recipe for comedy gold, Benghazi Was Neither a Terrorist Attack Nor an Act of Terror

I am hereby declaring 99 Pinocchios on Barack Obama, all the people who work for him, everyone in the Republican party, and most everyone in the press who has reported on Benghazi.

This is about what has to be one of the most inane disagreements in the history of American politics, the argument about whether Obama called the Benghazi attack an “act of terror” or a “terrorist attack.” Incredibly, people are still bickering over this. The other day Darrell Issa expressed his outrage that Obama had, in his diabolical attempt to cover up the incident, used the phrase “act of terror,” which, let’s be honest, is almost like saying, “Way to go, al Qaeda!”, instead of using the far, far, far more condemnatory phrase “terrorist attack.” It’s like the difference between saying “steaming pile of bullshit” when you ought to say “steaming bullshit pile”—anyone who can’t tell the difference between the two obviously can’t be trusted to run the country. Then the ordinarily reasonable Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post’s fact-checker, sternly judged Obama to be guilty of a Four Pinnochio whopper, because at his last press conference he said, “The day after it happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism,” when in fact he didn’t say “act of terrorism but just “act of terror.” Facts? Checked.

But here’s what nobody seems to get: Benghazi was not a terrorist act. Or an act of terror. Or an act of terrorism.

Before my Republican friends start getting red in the face, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t awful. Many awful things are not terrorism. Pearl Harbor wasn’t terrorism. Jeffrey Dahmer’s murders weren’t terrorism. Adam Sandler’s Jack and Jill wasn’t terrorism. Terrorism is something quite specific: the intentional killing of civilians in order to achieve a political end.

Before anyone tries to describe something, define something and consult your watch about the time that you described or defined anything call The Conservative Orwellian Office of Language Framing. make sure your nouns follow your verbs or vice versa, because otherwise you might say something like blue sky instead of the sky is blue. Paul goes on to recite the law defining terrorism, U.S. law, section 2656f(d) of Title 22 of the United States Code, which reads, “the term ‘terrorism’ means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.” Of the personnel in that Benghazi compound seven worked for the State Department, and probably all of the remaining 23 worked for the CIA. That does not mean, as Paul also states that Benghazi was not a terrible tragedy, only that conservatives have taken the framing of what constitutes terrorism, with Democrats in tow, to ridiculous extremes. Conservatives seem to want to have it both ways. Whether you say act of terror or terrorist act is supposedly as different as night and day, yet every violent act is terrorism. If you don’t say terrorism at one AM and wait until after sunrise, the space-time continuum is also warped, so make sure you say what you’re supposed to say on time after you check in with Pravda or the conservative word slayers.

retro muted colors wallpaper, drone perverts, the real irs scandal that conservatives will get away with

retro muted colors wallpaper

 

So This Is How It Begins: Guy Refuses to Stop Drone-Spying on Seattle Woman Is this legal?

Well, here’s where the rubber meets the road for this abstract line of questioning. The Capitol Hill Seattle Blog is reporting a complaint it received from a resident in the Miller Park neighborhood. She writes:

This afternoon, a stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my house near Miller Playfield. I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day. After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away. My husband went to talk to the man on the sidewalk outside our home who was operating the drone with a remote control, to ask him to not fly his drone near our home. The man insisted that it is legal for him to fly an aerial drone over our yard and adjacent to our windows. He noted that the drone has a camera, which transmits images he viewed through a set of glasses. He purported to be doing “research”. We are extremely concerned, as he could very easily be a criminal who plans to break into our house or a peeping-tom.

The site adds, “The woman tells us she called police but they decided not to show up when the man left.”

She basically asks and answers her own question. There is a generally recognized right of the public to information. They can stand on a public sidewalk or road and take pictures of your house. They cannot violate your privacy by standing on your property to take photos or recordings, nor can they take pictures of you through a window with or without a drone. If the police would have pursued this, the perpetrator could have been prosecuted. Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I tend to think a couple well publicized prosecutions will stop this from being a growing phenomenon.

3D art, a combination of sculpted books and painting by French Canadian artist Guy Laramée. I hope he is not using any good books for this.

Did anyone watch Veep this past Sunday. The episode where there is an official lie and a foreign official gropes he Veep. Selina, for various reasons, one being we live in a ‘Dick” World, decides that she cannot say anything. That incident will fade quietly into history. The lie about the spy, knowing politics, will also likely fade after some hearings and plenty of faux outrage. This too will fade, except for some conservatives, most of whom have a martyr complex anyway, The Real I.R.S. Scandal

So the scandal—the real scandal—is that 501(c)(4) groups have been engaged in political activity in such a sustained and open way. As Fred Wertheimer, the President of Democracy 21, a government-ethics watchdog group, put it, “it is clear that a number of groups have improperly claimed tax-exempt status as section 501(c)(4) ‘social welfare’ organizations in order to hide the donors who financed their campaign activities in the 2010 and 2012 federal elections.”

A 501(c)(4) group is supposed to behave more or less like a charity. They cannot, by law, engage in openly political advocacy. They can and have pushed that by say, running an ad that says contraceptive use causes mental health problems ( it doesn’t). In this case a lot of tea stain affiliated groups have been using their charity status to avoid taxes and do blatant political advocacy. That real part of the scandal will wilt under the shrill cries of injustice endured by the deeply oppressed conservative movement. Billionaires like the Kochs, Sheldon Adelson, the Coors family and the Waltons (Wal-Mart) will dry their crocodile tears with French designer hankies. There will be hearings, apologies, the attempt to use the ‘scandal’ as a reason for impeachment. In a few months it will be something conservative have clipped and pressed into in their memory books. To look over with a Grinch-like smile while telling themselves yet another sob sorry about how tough they have it.

escaping corporate social media, chinese observatory 1874

Social Networking for a Better World

The rise of corporate-owned social media raises many flags about our online security and the future of the digital commons. The solution, says theorist Michael Albert, is a different kind of network altogether.

[  ]…Which, when you think about it, is probably the exact opposite of what the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world thought social media would do. So much of what sites like Twitter or Facebook are designed for, how they’re organized and governed, and how they make money, could not be further from ideals like social justice or goals like ending student debt. Many sites, like Facebook, even have a history of giving private data over to government agencies in the U.S. and abroad.

But here’s the good news. It doesn’t have to be like this. There’s no law of nature that social media need to be run by giant corporations or that users need to put up with government spying and manipulative advertising. So, what’s the alternative?

Michael Albert, social theorist and co-editor of Z Magazine, has come up with one solution—and it’s worth taking a close look at. It’s called FaceLeft, and it embodies the very best of social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, but emphatically without the spying, concision, and commercialization users have long put up with. Ad-free, substantive, and as open or private as users want to make it, FaceLeft is the first social network designed by and for activists—or anyone who feels uncomfortable with corporate-owned social media.

One, it is difficult to get people to get up and move in cyperspace. FaceBook has over a billion users. Activists have a tendency to want to get things rolling as quickly as possible. The situation – say some police brutality running rampant, a state legislature passing some crazy bill in the middle of the night…may demand urgent attention. So FaceLeft needs to get a massive influx of users. You could use FaceBook to announce your FaceLeft page. Two, is the privacy issue. FaceLeft can do some things that will easily surpass other social media sites, but ultimately, if you’re in the U.S. and the FBI shows up with a warrant, unless you’re ready to go to jail, you’ll be handing over whatever they want. Though with MySpace, FaceBook and Google+ some people had to be the pioneers. The negatives acknowledged it would be great if FaceBook lost a lot or, wishful thinking, most of their users. Every user is just a product to be marketed – to be a guinea pig for information, dots on spread sheets of big data to be harvested. From 2012, FaceBook: $5.32 in average revenue per user in 2012 , $1.58 billion in revenue for the last quarter. Zuckerberg has not proven to be as bright at social issues and social responsibility as he is at programming. Considering the good he could accomplish, that is a  tragedy.

A photograph of a Chinese Observatory with an armillary sphere, an azimuth theodolite and other astronomical Instruments taken by Adolf Erazmovich Boiarskii in 1874. Boiarskii was the official photographer on a Russian research and trading mission to China.

Three-Wheeled Wooden Vehicle with Chinese Dragon Artillery (Longshen Pao). Lanzhou, Gansu Province, China, 1875. Also taken by Adolf Erazmovich Boiarskii.

View south from Manzanar to Alabama Hills, Manzanar Japanese Relocation Center. 1943. By the great Ansel Adams. This was not a great print. Though considering that it was free and no royalties have to be paid, it is a great example of his work.

tiny dancers, protein makes hearts young again, travel by millay

Tiny dancers 1919

Stem Cell Institute find protein that reverses some effects of heart aging in mice

Two Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers — a stem cell biologist and a practicing cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital — have identified a protein in the blood of mice and humans that may prove to be the first effective treatment for the form of age-related heart failure that affects millions of Americans.

When the protein, called GDF-11, was injected into old mice, which develop thickened heart walls in a manner similar to aging humans, the hearts were reduced in size and thickness, resembling the healthy hearts of younger mice.

Even more important than the implications for the treatment of diastolic heart failure, the finding by Richard T. Lee, a Harvard Medical School professor at the hospital, and Amy Wagers, a professor in Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, ultimately may rewrite our understanding of aging.

It seems like I remember reading last year that men and women had reached parity in average life expectancy in the U.S. of 75 years. That is an average, one of the fastest growing age cohorts in the U.S. is people over 75. We have a lot of people die young for various reasons – bad health choices in general, poor eating habits, smoking and high levels of alcohol consumption. What would you do with your newly invigorated heart, should this research make its way to human treatment. If the average moved up to say 125, how would you live your life differently, how would you plan for your future with another fifty years.

George Sterling, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Bliss Carman. 1914.

The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.

All night there isn’t a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.

My heart is warm with friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing;
Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,
No matter where it’s going.

Travel by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Corporate Cowards Divert Shareholder Funds into “Dark Money”

If corporations are people, as the Supreme Court pretends, they certainly are loudmouths, constantly telling us how great they are and spreading their names everywhere.

Amazingly, though, these corporate creatures have suddenly turned demure, insisting that they don’t want to draw any attention to themselves. That’s because, in this case, corporations are not selling, they’re buying — specifically, trying to buy public office for their pet political candidates by funneling millions of corporate dollars through such front groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In turn, the fronts use the money to air nasty attack ads that smear the opponents of the pro-corporate candidates.

Why do corporations need a middleman? Because the ads are so partisan and vicious that they would appall and anger millions of customers, employees and shareholders of the corporation. So, rather than besmirch their own names, the corporate powers have meekly retreated behind the skirt of Republican political outfits like the Chamber.

But don’t front groups have to report (at least to election authorities) who’s really behind their ads, so voters can make informed decisions? No. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizen United edict in 2010, such groups can now pour unlimited sums of corporate cash into elections without ever disclosing the names of their funders. This “dark money” channel has essentially established secret political campaigning in America.

Conservatives and libertarians – good shepherds of the Constitution, so they keep yelling, have no problem with the concept of money equaling free speech. Use most of your money to survive, to take care of the kids and nothing left over to buy some speech, to make your voice heard over the shrill noise of the conservative-libertarian media. Tough luck.

picasso’s dance of the veils, aimless cruelty is not the road to justice, twiggy

Dance of the Veils by Pablo Picasso. 1907. Oil on canvas. A profound way of saying I can see who you are as much as I cannot see.

Who Would Kill a Monk Seal?

But the seals’ appearance has not been universally appreciated. The animals have been met by many islanders with a convoluted mix of resentment and spite. This fury has led to what the government is calling a string of “suspicious deaths.” But spend a little time in Hawaii, and you come to recognize these deaths for what they are — something loaded and forbidding. A word that came to my mind was “assassination.”

The most recent wave of Hawaiian-monk-seal murders began on the island of Molokai in November 2011. An 8-year-old male seal was found slain on a secluded beach. A month later, the body of a female, not yet 2 years old, turned up in the same area. Then, in early January, a third victim was found on Kauai. The government tries to keep the details of such killings secret, though it is known that some monk seals have been beaten to death and some have been shot. (In 2009, on Kauai, a man was charged with shooting a female seal twice with a .22; one round lodged in the fetus she was carrying.) In the incident on Kauai last January, the killer was said to have left a “suspicious object” lodged in the animal’s head.

Killing an endangered species in Hawaii is both a state and federal offense.

There is a long read with a lot of back story. One element is the resentment of some locals against protected species and public land like the marine sanctuary, combined with some native resentment against the history of white or mainland interference into native life and tradition. I can sympathize with some of that, but I cannot see how killing such beautiful innocent creatures solves their problems or garners public sympathy for their political complaints.

The British actress and model Twiggy, models a shirt dress amidst posters of her previous work, 1967. This picture combines two of my favorite aspects to modern era photography , say from the 1920s to the present. It looks retro and very modern at the same time. And Twiggy, or Lesley Lawson is also wonderful. She still acts, models, write books and is generally her own thriving business concern.

grey sea cliffs, a democracy cannot survive with a powerless working class

Grey sea cliffs

“It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.”
John Steinbeck, Cannery Row.

Conservatives Are Out To Shaft Women With Working Families Flexibility Act

But it’s not too hard to see how pernicious this legislation truly is. “Flexibility” is a word that should make hourly workers check for their wallets—employers hold most of the power in the relationship with hourly workers, which is all the more true if they are not unionized. So “flexibility” to decide if you want to get paid for overtime work, instead of getting fewer hours later on, can quickly become a way for employers to withhold payment for overtime work while also cutting your hours down the road.

Over 160 labor unions and women’s groups sent a letter to members of Congress on Monday, protesting that the Working Families Flexibility Act is “a smoke-and-mirrors bill that offers a pay cut for workers without any guaranteed flexibility or time off to care for their families or themselves.”

A popular meme with Glenn beck and radical Right web sites is always accuse Obama and Democrats of working straight out of the Saul Alinsky handbook. Conservatives on the other hand seem to be working straight out of the Giovanni Gentile. Workers must not have any power according to conservatism. They work constantly to give the elite more power and workers less. That formula makes for a culture in which democratic republicanism cannot survive.