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.

black stone beach wallpaper, the spurious reporting on benghazi, cancer drug may help with neurodegenerative diseases

black stone beach wallpaper

 

The Truth About The Right’s Latest Benghazi Attacks. Is it not just Fox News, as one would expect, but ABC and CBS have joined in on echoing completely spurious versions of reality. CBS “reporter” Sharyl Attkisson has previously proven she is in the bag, pushing conservative talking points rather than the truth, and receiving a Conservative award for doing so.

Paris 1978. By Elliott Erwitt.

Brazil, 1961. by Erwitt. It was Erwitt’s habit to simply label his photos with the place and date.

Cops Beat Woman For Filming Another Beating. “You want to film something b**ch? Film this!” This despite the well known fact that police may be photographed or filmed while on duty. The city of Baltimore – and it’s tax payers are going to be paying out quite a bit of money for these bad apples.

 Milk, oil on canvas by Vassilis Avramidis. It looks like Thomas Hart Benton on LSD. Not a bad thing in this case.

Cancer drug prevents build-up of toxic brain protein

Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have used tiny doses of a leukemia drug to halt accumulation of toxic proteins linked to Parkinson’s disease in the brains of mice. This finding provides the basis to plan a clinical trial in humans to study the effects.

They say their study, published online May 10 in Human Molecular Genetics, offers a unique and exciting strategy to treat neurodegenerative diseases that feature abnormal buildup of proteins in Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), frontotemporal dementia, Huntington disease and Lewy body dementia, among others.

Nilotinib is normally used to treat chronic myelogenous leukemia. Though they found that in low doses it also clears the garbage proteins, preventing their accumulation in pathological inclusions called Lewy bodies  and also prevents amyloid secretion into the extracellular space between neurons. Thus those proteins do not form toxic clumps or plaques in the brain.

coral cherry blossoms wallpaper, austerity is worse than zombies, buffalo soldiers

coral cherry blossoms wallpaper

Myths are hard to kill. I don’t keep up with all the zombie news, but it is my understanding that a well placed shotgun blast to the head will kill a zombie. No such luck with the belief in austerity, which is pretty much the same as believing in warlocks and tooth fairies. This is yet another, well written and documented look at the failures of austerity, Why a Bad Idea Won Over the West

Unable to take constructive action toward any common end, the U.S. Congress has recently been reduced to playing an ongoing game of chicken with the American economy. The debt-ceiling debacle gave way to the “fiscal cliff,” which morphed into the across-the-board cuts in military and discretionary spending known as “sequestration.” Whatever happens next on the tax front, further cuts in spending seem likely. And so a modified form of the austerity that has characterized policymaking in Europe since 2010 is coming to the United States as well; the only questions are how big the hit will end up being and who will bear the brunt. What makes all this so absurd is that the European experience has shown yet again why joining the austerity club is exactly the wrong thing for a struggling economy to do.

The eurozone countries, the United Kingdom, and the Baltic states have volunteered as subjects in a grand experiment that aims to find out if it is possible for an economically stagnant country to cut its way to prosperity. Austerity — the deliberate deflation of domestic wages and prices through cuts to public spending — is designed to reduce a state’s debts and deficits, increase its economic competitiveness, and restore what is vaguely referred to as “business confidence.” The last point is key: advocates of austerity believe that slashing spending spurs private investment, since it signals that the government will neither be crowding out the market for investment with its own stimulus efforts nor be adding to its debt burden. Consumers and producers, the argument goes, will feel confident about the future and will spend more, allowing the economy to grow again.

In line with such thinking, and following the shock of the recent financial crisis, which caused public debt to balloon, much of Europe has been pursuing austerity consistently for the past four years. The results of the experiment are now in, and they are equally consistent: austerity doesn’t work.

Mr. Blyth is playing by the strict rules of golf, or what philosophers refer to as taking your opponents argument and the basis for that argument at face value. One assumes that said opponent is being both honest and genuine. There are people within the austerity club who probably believe what they say just as there are witches who believe they can whip up the perfect love potion. I know enough neuroscience, psychology and have enough real world experience to know that trying to convince a true believer in unjustified beliefs that they are wrong is a Sisyphean struggle. Though Mr. Blyth may not be aware of the lack of genuineness of U.S. conservatives. To paraphrase the gigolo senator from Arizona, John McCain, from 2000 to 2008 conservatives spent money like a “drunken sailor”. Now, having entered a recession in which conservative economic polices combined with a stunning lack of oversight of the financial industry, suddenly spending like said sailor ( sailors are generally nice people who have been dragged into this conversation via history, sorry about that) is something only the anti-Christ or Stalin or Hitler would do. On a historic scale this is the conservative clusterfu*k version of do as I say not as I do. One of the biggest reasons for this sudden change of their many faces, is that conservatives see the national debt as an opportunity to undo the safety net that started with The New Deal. That is why they did not care about spending and debt for eight years. They consider programs like Medicare and Social Security a form of political and cultural blaspheme. When the crony corporatists, that run America screw up, with an odd exception or two, the wealthy stay wealthy. Who pays for the recession – we have them regularly – the middle-class and working poor. The deal went like this. We have this meager safety net so that the powers that be can continue to screw up yet again, and again and again, but at least most Americans will have some kind of shelter, food and some medical care. According the dogma set forth in the holy book of conservatism this meager safety net makes everyone into a weak, morally lose, lazy moocher. By taking away the safety net they’re setting everyone free to let out their inner John Galt. Cheer-leading austerity is just a way for the conservatives and libertarians to literally let everyone know the real freedom of being old and poor, disabled and poor, and sick and poor. Anyone who thinks that sounds goofy is not reading enough conservative and libertarian articles and punditry. One of the neatest tricks ever pulled in politics is making millions of people believe that buying some candy with food stamps is the ruination of America, but turning the country into a wage slave plantation is pure patriotism.

This is just one example of how the game is rigged ( more at the link),

In 2006, hedge fund manager John Paulson realized millions of Americans had signed up for mortgages they couldn’t afford and would soon start defaulting on their payments, causing the housing bubble to burst. So he took out “insurance” on stocks made up of bundled-together mortgages, which had been sold to investors. Paulson even teamed up with Goldman Sachs to create new stocks — in which he helped select the mortgages, ensuring there’d be lots of faulty ones – and then took out “insurance” on them. This was like taking out insurance on someone else’s car, after arranging with the car manufacturer to put in faulty brakes. When the housing market collapsed, triggering the Wall Street meltdown, Paulson collected $3.7 billion, giving him the all-time record for profiting from the misery of others.

Two unidentified buffalo soldiers with musical instruments, ca. 1860-1880. Photographer unknown. Not all Buffalo Soldiers were musicians. They started out as  members of the U.S. 10th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army, formed on September 21, 1866 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Though the name spread to describe all of the black soldiers in the Army which eventually included the 9th Cavalry Regiment,10th Cavalry Regiment, 24th Infantry Regiment and the 25th Infantry Regiment.

Cops in pink flip flops tackle crime (Picture: Hampshire Constabulary).

Sgt Richard Holland and PCSO Rebecca Williams exposed their toes as they patrolled in Winchester, Hampshire – where critics said the footwear was ‘casual and impractical’.

The officers were showing support for the city’s Street Pastors, who give the flat footwear to drunk revellers struggling home in heels.

mustard field old oak wallpaper, how to profit from immigration reform, key of lifespan found in mouse brain

mustard field old oak wallpaper

 

I enjoyed The Social Network (with the acknowledged factual flaws) and I’ve watched interviews with Mark Zuckerberg. He seems like a nice enough person. At least he does not come across as arrogant and self-absorbed as the Winklevoss twins.  One way of saying that in terms of surface appearance, Mark is someone whose public persona is not as obnoxious as so many others we see on the news. Substance matters, at least it still does to some people. In that regard Zuckerberg has some issues, Mark Zuckerberg’s Self-Serving Immigration Crusade

Zuckerberg wrote that “in a knowledge economy, the most important resources are the talented people we educate and attract to our country.” To that end, FWD.us says on its website it aims to “establish a streamlined process for admitting future workers” and increase the number of H-1B visas that let companies hire high-skilled foreign workers to “continue to promote innovation and meet our workforce needs.”

The implicit argument behind FWD.us is that the U.S. doesn’t have enough high-skilled domestic workers to meet tech companies’ needs. This is a myth, and Zuckerberg and FWD.us are just the latest tech players to promote it. In fact there is no shortage of domestic IT workers, as shown in a new study from the Economic Policy Institute. While there is an unusually low unemployment rate among American tech workers (3%), they haven’t enjoyed the large salary increases that would signal a shortage. There is also little evidence that the foreign workers tech companies hire are any better than Americans. The real reason tech companies want to hire more high-skilled immigrants is that they can pay them less than Americans, since immigrants are in a more economically precarious position. More than 80 percent of workers hired under the H-1B program are paid less than their American counterparts, according to the EPI. This kind of outsourcing benefits tech companies while hurting domestic tech workers.

We might get the immigration reform that Zuckerberg wants. From what I have read so far, it is shaping up to be a fairly good, if imperfect bill. One that is especially humane in regards the kids of immigrants that are already here. It seems to be one of those bills that the malevolent minded, like Zuckerberg plan to exploit to their economic advantage. One assumes because having billions of dollars just doesn’t go as far as it used to.

There have been a few studies over the years warning about wonderful new findings in some basic research using mice. I’ve probably cited a few of those studies. Frequently studies using mice, say in which a new anti-cancer drug shows promise, frequently turns out to be a dead-end as far as human cancer cures. This is not always the fault of scientists per se. They publish their findings and by the time the evening news reports it, the report does not contain all the caveats the researchers stipulated in the original paper – usually something like more research and drug trials are needed to see if it works on humans. With that in mind, Age-defying: Master key of lifespan found in brain (in mice).

Tick tock, tick tock… A mechanism that controls ageing, counting down to inevitable death, has been identified in the hypothalamus?– a part of the brain that controls most of the basic functions of life.

By manipulating this mechanism, researchers have both shortened and lengthened the lifespan of mice. The discovery reveals several new drug targets that, if not quite an elixir of youth, may at least delay the onset of age-related disease.

I think the current world population is slightly below replacement levels – that is that more people die every year than are born. Though because world population is so massive – about 6.5 billion people, we’re likely to have between 8, maybe even 10 billion people before world population starts to decline. If the mouse findings do translate into prolonging life and mental alertness by 20%, are we ready for the repercussions of that.

 Vue de Paris prise de Montmartre, 1886 by Van Gogh.

smooth river stones wallpaper, green spaces good for health, watching the new day rise

smooth river stones wallpaper

Green spaces boosts wellbeing of urban dwellers

Parks, gardens and green space in urban areas can improve the wellbeing and quality of life of people living there, says a University of Exeter study.

Using data from 5,000 UK households over 17 years, researchers found that living in a greener area had a significant positive effect.

The findings could help to inform urban planners and have an impact on society at large, they said.

The study is published in the journal Psychological Science.

There are some encouraging trends in architecture, just judging from my visits to architectural news sites over the last couple years. One is incorporating green spaces into remodeled and new buildings. Sometimes meaning a roof-top garden, occasionally having green areas on every floor (part indoors/part outdoors  mini-parks on upper floors). Space is at a premium in cities so the growth of small street level parks is limited. While not directly a green space, many architects are getting away from the rectangular box. Incorporating curves - sometimes with jetting with balconies. They at least give the impression of being in a structure that is more organic, a more natural part of the environment. I like the nice clean lines of some minimalist rectangles, but we can have both.

watching the morning sun

A few quick links of note, How the “Koch Brothers Bill” will mean fewer happy sunrises

In February, 11 congressmen—10 Republicans and 1 Democrat—joined some two dozen [2] industry groups, including the Fertilizer Institute, the American Chemistry Council, and the International Institute of Ammonia Refrigeration, to back the General Duty Clarification Act [3]. The bill is designed to sap the Environmental Protection Agency of its powers to regulate safety and security at major chemical sites, as prescribed by the Clean Air Act.

“We call that the Koch brothers bill,” Greenpeace legislative director Rick Hind says

Just because the Koch brothers get a kick out of seeing towns blow-up and American workers getting sick, does not mean its true freedom, of the the new improved conservative libertarian variety.

Once in a while a squirrel finds a nut or a conservative stands for truly American values, Bill for compulsory science fiction in West Virginia schools

Republican state delegate Ray Canterbury says move would inspire pupils to use practical knowledge and imagination in the real world.

Lucky I wasn’t drinking milk when I read that or it would have been spraying out of my nose.

Some conspiracies are true or at least there is enough rational based evidence to warrant a deeper look, Filmmaker claims CIA kept innocent man jailed to cover up drug trafficking

golden forest wallpaper, banks are at it again, the difficult life of lucia joyce

golden forest wallpaper

Are the Banks Already Orchestrating Another Meltdown?

But Wall Street is making more investments, known as structured financial products, and escaping new financial regulations, such as the Dodd-Frank bill that did not change the structure of how loans are bundled — which, when done riskily, causes crisis.

Tad Phillips, a commercial real estate analyst at Moody’s rating agency, told the Times: “The players in the business are generally the same as they were before. … Because it’s the old players, they know how to push the boundaries.”

The Times reported that banks have issued $26 billion in new collateralized loan obligations, or loans pooled and given to poorly rated companies, in just 2013 alone — more than what they issued in all of 2007. The Times stated, “Demand for the loan pools has been so brisk that banks have been able to loosen underwriting standards on the underlying loans and bonds. This provoked the Federal Reserve to release guidance last month [5] warning that “prudent underwriting practices have deteriorated.”

The Times also reported that “57 percent of the outstanding money in commercial mortgage-backed securities” was in risky, interest-only loans before the crisis. It has now reached 34 percent — 11 percent more than two years ago.

The banks are doing what thy did before the meltdown of 2006-07. They take mortgage loans and place them in bundles. They then say those mortgages represent potential profits as the retail value of the property increases. Those bundles are now secures or just a few degrees removed from being  a bet at the horse track. All the way back in the early aughts these same people genuinely thought the value of real estate would never go down. Though they did hedge those bets by buying derivatives – a kind of insurance. If their bundled securities – home mortgages, credit car debt and even car loans – should go down in value the derivatives will pay off the loss. Derivatives, not necessarily a bad concept if done correctly, themselves became more important than ever in the economy. The housing market crashed. Those bundled securities – CDOs ( collateralized debt obligations) lost a lot of value – well into the trillions. The derivatives did not cover losses because the financial houses that sold them did not have enough capital in reserve to pay off such historic losses. So here we go again. And we will not see a bill passed to reign in this corrupt behavior because such regulations are anti-business, communistic and anti-American according to conservatives.

 Lucia Joyce, daughter of James and Nora Joyce. 1932, by Eugene Jolas. Lucia was born with an eye defect,  strabismus, which her mother had also. Not a horrible burden but it may have been one of the things that affected her behavior, making her seem quirky at times. Especially in hindsight as people pondered how she became so mentally unstable in her twenties that she was committed to a mental hospital. Whether she truly needed to be institutionalized at the time is debatable. The institutionalization itself probably did push her the rest of the way. More here, The difficulties of being James Joyce’s daughter.