spring tree leaves wallpaper, the conservative triangle of propaganda

spring tree leaves wallpaper

 

Does anyone have the impression that the IRS singled out or “targeted” conservative groups seeking special tax status (501(c)4. If so, how did you get that impression. Did you read the New York Times or the Washington Post, watch ABC or the other networks. If you read this The Latest Lie: IRS Targeted Conservatives - it may change your mind. That article does have links to primary sources, including the report from the IG that everyone is using as absolute proof conservatives groups were targeted or denied the status they were seeking unfairly. Not one, not even one tea party group was denied the (501(c)4 status that deserved to have it. In fact some of the groups granted (501(c)4 status should have been denied because they were funneling more than 51% of their donations directly to advertising that advocated the election of certain candidates or the disposition of certain clearly partisan legislation. Why do we find ourselves in this bubble of misinformation. These major media outlets do not seem to have a liberal bias, according the well-known myth. On the contrary. The IG’s report (pdf), which many people have not bothered to read, trusting that the media would not get such a big story wrong. In the report it says that “For the 296 total political campaign intervention applications TIGTA reviewed as of
December 17, 2012, 108 had been approved, Final Report issued on May 14, 2013 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 were open from 206 to calendar days (some for more than to the Internal Revenue Service Acting three years and crossing two election cycles).” I’m not claiming the IRS is completely innocent ( the time delays seem unfair). Only that conservative groups were not signaled out. That perhaps some of the groups that gave up seeking 501 were conservative, but that is not that same as targeting. Some of them were liberal groups. Why are we not hearing from the media about liberal groups being subjected to the same basic litmus tests as conservative groups. Why are we not hearing that more liberal groups were denied 501 status than tea stain groups. This tsunami wave of sound bites has happened before. It is not a coincidence and no tin foil is required, it is not an especially secret conspiracy. Like the IG report on the IRS. People could read that. It does take some reading comprehension and analysis skills, but nothing a high school grad couldn’t handle. Yet we’re not reading the report, we’re hearing or participating in the echo of the media’s interpretation of the report,  Background: Democrats & The Netroots

The Triangle

Looking at the political landscape, one proposition seems unambiguous: blog power on both the right and left is a function of the relationship of the netroots to the media and the political establishment. Forming a triangle of blogs, media, and the political establishment is an essential step in creating the kind of sea change we’ve seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

[  ]…With a well-developed echo chamber and superior top-down discipline, the right has a much easier time forming the triangle. Fox News, talk radio, Drudge, a well-trained and highly visible punditocracy, and a lily-livered press corps takes care of the media side of the triangle. Iron-clad party loyalty – with rare exceptions – and a willingness of Republican officials to jump on the Limbaugh-Hannity bandwagon du jour takes care of the party establishment side of the triangle. The rightwing netroots, therefore, is already working within the triangle on most issues. Their primary strategic aim is to prevent the left from forming its own triangle, as occurred with Katrina. It’s a defensive posture, with the goal being the preservation of the status quo. Which explains why the right is profoundly hostile to dissent and why the pretense to libertarianism is common: “independent thinkers” don’t like to be seen as defending the powers that be.

The triangle construct also explains rightwing bloggers’ relentless attacks on the “MSM” and on anyone who contends that the media is conservative. In a nation dominated by shrill rightwing voices, with all branches of government in the hands of Republicans, and an ineffectual press corps, the “liberal media” myth is so absurd that it requires no rebuttal. But the right desperately needs to keep the media from doing what they did in the aftermath of Katrina: tell the unvarnished truth. They need to block the left from building the kind of triangle that Katrina generated, where outspoken left-leaning bloggers are joined by leading Democrats and reporters who have no choice but to describe the catastrophic results of Bush’s dismal leadership. The result in Katrina’s case is a major political crisis and a dramatic shift in public perceptions, a body blow to the long-standing conventional wisdom of Bush as a “resolute leader” and a protector.

Whereas rightwing bloggers can rely on their leadership and the rightwing noise machine to build the triangle, left-leaning bloggers face the challenge of a mass media consumed by the shop-worn narrative of Bush the popular, plain-spoken leader, and a Democratic Party incapacitated (for the most part) by the focus-grouped fear of turning off “swing voters” by attacking Bush. For the progressive netroots, the past half-decade has been a Sisyphean loop of scandal after scandal melting away as the media and party establishment remain disengaged.

Some people will dismiss conservative bloggers because of how unhinged they sound. Not just on any particular day or topic, but everyday they post. With Drudge at the top of that pyramid. At the level of Drudge and the next level down, his echo, new realities are created. So it goes with the IRS controversy, where tea stain group were not targeted and were not asked questions anymore silly than they asked liberal groups. Besides the conservative love of victim-hood this controversy serves their agenda. They get to funnel more money from more anonymous donors to groups getting special tax treatment, and in return they get more control over elections.

china rivers sunset wallpaper, depression linked to out of sync biological clock

china rivers sunset wallpaper. China’s river system, at least those that have not dried up or been drained are a nightmare. Up towards their mountain origins things are not as bad.

 

Depressed people’s body clocks ‘out of sync’

Every cell in our bodies runs on a 24-hour clock, tuned to the night-day, light-dark cycles that have ruled us since the dawn of humanity. The brain acts as timekeeper, keeping the cellular clock in sync with the outside world so that it can govern our appetites, sleep, moods, and much more.

But new research shows that the clock may be broken in the brains of people with depression—even at the level of the gene activity inside their brain cells.

This discovery may mean there are distinct biomarkers for chronic depression. That knowledge may lead to better medications and the ability to fine tune them for the individual. While most people probably already realize this, depression and mood disorders are not a sign of personal failing. These findings are another proof that most depression, is the result of biological processes. That is not to say that therapy does not help. Therapy is a way to sort emotions. Emotions have biological consequences in a kind of feedback loop. That is why the combination of psychological therapy and medication has been the most effective treatment.

What is the difference between conservatives in America and the Taliban in Afghanistan? As far as I know conservatives have not started cutting off hands for stealing a loaf of bread. I’m still figuring out the others, Virginia GOP Nominee For Attorney General Would Force Women To Report Their Miscarriages To Police.

If a woman in Virginia has a miscarriage without a doctor present, they must report it within 24 hours to the police or risk going to jail for a full year. At least, that’s what would have happened if a bill introduced by Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) had become law.

And yet, the Virginia Republican Party wants to make Obenshain into the state’s top prosecutor. This weekend, Virginia Republicans selected Obenshain as their nominee to replace tea party stalwart Ken Cuccinelli (R) as the state’s attorney general.

This obsessive need to control others bodies, humiliate people during a tragedy and get government deeply involved into one’s personal life is some kind of value. A value out of a dystopian hallucination.

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.

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.