ACTA IS DEAD (ish) (for now)

MEPs vote down ACTA: "HELLO DEMOCRACY, GOODBYE ACTA"

Here's an image that is destined to be truly iconic: Members of the European Parliament vote down ACTA in dramatic fashion, hefting signs that read HELLO DEMOCRACY, GOODBYE ACTA.

Michael Geist writes,

On October 23, 2007, the U.S., E.U., Canada, and a handful of other countries announced plans to the negotiate the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The behind-the-scenes discussions had apparently been ongoing for several years, leading some countries to believe that a full agreement could be concluded within a year to coincide with the end of the Bush administration. Few paid much attention as the agreement itself was shrouded in secrecy. ACTA details slowly began to emerge, however, including revelations that lobby groups had been granted preferential access, the location of various meetings, and troubling details about the agreement itself.
This morning, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly against the agreement, effectively killing ACTA within the EU. The vote was 478 against, 39 in favour, with 165 abstentions This is a remarkable development that was virtually unthinkable even a year ago. Much credit goes to the thousands of Europeans who spoke out against ACTA and to the Members of the European Parliament who withstood enormous political pressure to vote against the deal.
The European developments have had a ripple effect, with the recent Australian parliamentary committee recommendation to delay ACTA ratification and the mounting opposition around the world. ACTA is not yet dead - it may still eke out the necessary six ratifications in a year or two for it to take effect - but it is badly damaged and will seemingly never achieve the goals of its supporters as a model for other countries to adopt and to emerge as a new global standard for IP enforcement. That said, ACTA supporters will not take today's decision as the final verdict. In the coming weeks and months, we can expect new efforts to revive the agreement within Europe and to find alternative means to implement its provisions. That suggests the fight will continue, but for today, it is worth celebrating how the seemingly impossible - stopping a one-sided, secretly negotiated global IP agreement - became possible.

The European Parliament Rejects ACTA: The Impossible Becomes Possible

Where Anonymous actions come from

Quinn Norton reports in depth on Wired with a careful, important account of where Anonymous's actions come from -- how coordinated activity (political, lulzy, legal and illegal) can emerge from noise, randomness, bombast and joking. This is the best description of how decision-making works in decentralized movements, and has important implications for the future of activism, governance, politics, crime and security:

But it’s a mistake to identify Anonymous entirely with these arrestees, some of whom were blackhats and others who were guilty of just using the LOIC. The hacks draw their power from the support of the wider collective, not the other way around. The majority of Anonymous operations are conceived and planned in a chaotic and open fashion. At any given time, a few thousand people are congregating on the Anonymous IRC channels, figuring out for themselves what it means to be an anon. And together they embody whatever Anonymous is going to be that day.
Most of the time, in most of the channels, there’s little more than conversation; sometimes a whole channel will consist of lurkers, with no one contributing a thing. But when some offense to the net is detected, anons will converge on one or more of these “chans,” with hundreds or thousands arriving within hours—many of them new to Anonymous and yet all primed and eager to respond. What looks in one moment like a sad, empty chat room can quickly become the staging ground for a major multipronged assault.
Consider OpBART, which flared up in August 2011 and dealt with an unlikely issue for Anonymous: the messy offline world of race relations and police violence. Ever since 2009, when a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man named Oscar Grant, protests against abuse of authority by transit police had grown. On August 11, anti-BART activists were planning a rally at several of San Francisco’s underground transit stops to protest another shooting by a BART officer, this one of a homeless man named Charles Hill. It was an unremarkable story by the standards of the national media, but the response from BART to the planned protest did catch the interest of the local press: To thwart protesters from coordinating via mobile devices, BART cut cell service at its downtown stations.

How Anonymous Picks Targets, Launches Attacks, and Takes Powerful Organizations Down

Cisco locks customers out of their own routers, only lets them back in if they agree to being spied upon and monetized

 

Owners of Cisco/Linksys home routers got a nasty shock this week, when their devices automatically downloaded a new operating system, which locked out device owners. After the update, the only way to reconfigure your router was to create an account on Cisco's "cloud" service, signing up to a service agreement that gives Cisco the right to spy on your Internet use and sell its findings, and also gives them the right to disconnect you (and lock you out of your router) whenever they feel like it.
They say that "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product." But increasingly, even if you do pay for the product, you're still the product, and you aren't allowed to own anything. Ownership is a right reserved to synthetic corporate persons, and off-limits to us poor meat-humans.

Joel Hruska from ExtremeTech reports:

This is nothing but a shameless attempt to cash in on the popularity of cloud computing, and it comes at a price. The Terms and Conditions of using the Cisco Connect Cloud state that Cisco may unilaterally shut down your account if finds that you have used the service for “obscene, pornographic, or offensive purposes, to infringe another’s rights, including but not limited to any intellectual property rights, or… to violate, or encourage any conduct that would violate any applicable law or regulation or give rise to civil or criminal liability.”
It then continues “we reserve the right to take such action as we (i) deem necessary or (ii) are otherwise required to take by a third party or court of competent jurisdiction, in each case in relation to your access or use or misuse of such content or data. Such action may include, without limitation, discontinuing your use of the Service immediately without prior notice to you, and without refund or compensation to you.”
Since the Service is the only way to access your router, killing one would effectively kill the other.

Oh, and Cisco reserves the right to continue to update your router, even if you set it not to allow automatic updates.
Cisco’s cloud vision: Mandatory, monetized, and killed at their discretion

Why Microsoft Fell Behind: Bureaucracy

Long before Apple got its mojo back, the king of the technology hill was Microsoft.
Microsoft simply dominated the PC industry, but it has recently fallen back. It (almost) missed the Internet Revolution, had a tablet that could've pre-empted the iPad and other innovative products that withered in the R&D vine.
What happened? Vanity Fair editor Kurt Eichenwald interviewed dozens of Microsofties and delved into troves of corporate emails to discover the culprit of the malaise that has plagued the tech giant for years: bureaucracy.

Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
When Eichenwald asks Brian Cody, a former Microsoft engineer, whether a review of him was ever based on the quality of his work, Cody says, “It was always much less about how I could become a better engineer and much more about my need to improve my visibility among other managers.” Ed McCahill, who worked at Microsoft as a marketing manager for 16 years, says, “You look at the Windows Phone and you can’t help but wonder, How did Microsoft squander the lead they had with the Windows CE devices? They had a great lead, they were years ahead. And they completely blew it. And they completely blew it because of the bureaucracy.”

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Why Porn and Journalism Have the Same Big Problem

The smut business just isn't what it used to be.

The early days of the Internet were a bonanza for major pornography studios, as the web transformed adult entertainment into an instant, unlimited, and completely private experience -- always just a credit card charge and a cable modem away.

But what the Internet giveth, the internet taketh away. As the most recent Bloomberg Businssweek recounts in its feature on the rise of the new and controversial .XXX domain, the big production companies have seen their profits shrink by as much as half since 2007, as audiences have fled to aggregators such as XTube and YouPorn that offer up a never-ending stream of free naked bodies.

Stuart Lawley, the entreprenuer behind .XXX, has a plan to try and reclaim some of that lost revenue -- micropayments. Per Businessweek:

Next year, ICM plans to introduce a proprietary micropayment system. This service, Lawley promises, will help blue-chip pornographers fight back against the proliferation of free and pirated smut online. "We're going to do for adult what Apple (AAPL) did for the music business with the iTunes store," he predicts.

Consumers who have become conditioned to grainy, poorly shot giveaways, Lawley says, will get reacclimated to paying for higher-quality hard core. Price, quantity, and specificity are key. Rather than the traditional model--$24.99 upfront for all-access monthly memberships--porn consumers will shell out 99¢ apiece for short clips of niche material (akin to buying a favorite song, not the whole album). Perhaps more compelling, people seeking porn on their mobile devices will have a convenient way to purchase a quickie on the run.

Yikes. Comparing your business plan to Apple is pretty standard corporate trope these days, but in the case of porn, the iTunes analogy is hopelessly inapt. Here's the problem: Pornography is mostly a commodity product. Music is not. People have favorite bands and expect a certain level of production value in their music.

Bruce Springsteen devotees aren't just as happy listening to Bob Seger or an a cappella rendition of "Born In the USA." It's at least a little rarer to have favorite porn stars. And the audiences aren't demonstrably sensitive to production values. Worse yet, the tools for do-it-yourself filming are improving every time Apple upgrades the iPhone's video camera.

In other words, convincing people to pay for to watch sex is a much taller task these days than getting them to pay for a song.

In fact, it's a bit like getting them to pay for a newspaper. Like the porn studios, big media companies have seen their own profits plummet in the face of free aggregators, amateur bloggers, and the nearly limitless competition supplied by the web.

Unsurprisingly, micropayments have been a hot topic in the news industry over the past few years. But so far, they haven't really taken off. Here's how Clay Shirky explained the fatal flaw with the idea back in 2009:

The fantasy that small payments will save publishers as they move online is really a fantasy that monopoly pricing power can be re-established over we users. Invoking the magic word "micropayments" is thus grabbing the wrong end of the stick; if online publishers had that kind of pricing power, micropayments wouldn't be necessary. And since they don't have that pricing power, micropayments won't provide it.

What holds for journalism in this case holds for sex. In both cases, the competition is so broad that customers are likely to go elsewhere rather than pay. There are, obviously, exceptions in the case of newspapers -- the Wall Street Journal has a profitable paywall, and the New York Times appears to be having some early success with its own. But that might be cold comfort for the adult entertainment world.

That is, if you assume people still have slightly higher standards for their news than for their porn.

Fretting about Facebook, 17th century style

Economist technology editor Tom Standage, author of the 1998 classic The Victorian Internet (a history of the telegraph), gives us a glimpse of his upcoming book Cicero’s Web (due in 2013), which explores the social media revolution created by the coffee houses of the 17th century. As Standage points out, all the hand-wringing over time-wasting and intellectual decay attended by Facebook and its like are nothing new:

Enthusiasm for coffeehouses was not universal, however, and some observers regarded them as a worrying development. They grumbled that Christians had taken to a Muslim drink instead of traditional English beer, and fretted that the livelihoods of tavern-keepers might be threatened. But most of all they lamented that coffeehouses were distracting people who ought to be doing useful work, rather than networking and sharing trivia with their acquaintances.
When coffee became popular in Oxford and the coffeehouses selling it began to multiply, the university authorities objected, fearing that coffeehouses were promoting idleness and diverting students from their studies. Anthony Wood, an Oxford antiquarian, was among those who denounced the enthusiasm for the new drink. “Why doth solid and serious learning decline, and few or none follow it now in the university?” he asked. “Answer: Because of coffee-houses, where they spend all their time.” Similar concerns were voiced in Cambridge, where one observer noted that
it is become a custom after chapel to repair to one or other of the coffee houses (for there are divers), where hours are spent in talking, and less profitable reading of newspapers, of which swarms are continually supplied from London. And the scholars are so greedy after news (which is none of their business) that they neglect all for it, and it is become very rare for any of them to go directly to his chamber after prayers without first doing his suit at the coffee-house, which is a vast loss of time grown out of a pure novelty. For who can apply close to a subject with his head full of the din of a coffee-house?

The distractions of social media, 1673 style

Random Celbrity Photo

Brigitte Bardot 1952

Odds and Ends

Woman Slammed With $1.3 Million Electric Bill

Kristin Harriger lives on a budget, typically setting aside about $100 for her monthly electric bill.

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Inmates to test new locks at jail

Jailers in Atlanta have a challenge for inmates: Get past the new locks being tested on cell doors and win free food.

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Florida man rescues his 1,000th animal

On a recent June day, Jeff Bennett flew his four-seat plane from the mangrove-dotted Florida Keys, past some angry thunder clouds to the fertile hills of Greenville, Ala.

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Chinese-built ghost town in Angola

The first of many to come?

 

The BBC's Louise Redvers reports on the ghost town of Kilamba, Angola, a horrendously expensive high-rise enclave built by Chinese companies on a line of credit secured with Angolan oil, which has only seen 220 apartments out of 2800 sold. Kilamba is the most ambitious of several new towns being built outside of existing Angoloan cities by Chinese firms.
It's like a bizarro-world version of the Keynsian idea of getting the economy going by paying one group of laborers to dig holes and another to fill them in. But in this case, one group of workers are paid to pump oil, which is offshored to China. In exchange, a group of Chinese workers is paid to build a gate-guarded enclave for a non-existent pool of mega-rich locals that no one can afford to live in, and which gradually turns into a massive liability. Profit!

The place is eerily quiet, voices bouncing off all the fresh concrete and wide-open tarred roads.
There are hardly any cars and even fewer people, just dozens of repetitive rows of multi-coloured apartment buildings, their shutters sealed and their balconies empty.
Only a handful of the commercial units are occupied, mostly by utility companies, but there are no actual shops on site, and so - with the exception of a new hypermarket located at one entrance - there is nowhere to buy food.
After driving around for nearly 15 minutes and seeing no-one apart from Chinese labourers, many of whom appear to live in containers next to the site, I came across a tiny pocket of life at a school.
It opened six months ago, bussing in its pupils in from outlying areas because there are no children living on site to attend.

Angola's Chinese-built ghost town

Fifty-one-pound tumor removed from woman

By Jonathan Allen

New Jersey surgeons removed a rapidly growing, 51-pound (23-kg) cancerous tumor from a woman who had delayed treatment for more than a month until she became eligible for health insurance, her doctor said on Tuesday.
"She was a skinny lady with a huge belly. I mean it looked like she was literally pregnant with triplets," said Dr. David Dupree, who led the surgery on the 65-year-old woman, at Riverview Medical Center in Red Bank, New Jersey.
"She was just all belly," he said in describing his first meeting with the patient, a homemaker from nearby Union Beach, New Jersey, who asked to be identified only as Evelyn, her first name.
About six to eight weeks before she showed up at the hospital, Evelyn noticed discomfort in her abdomen and that her normally 120-pound frame was rapidly ballooning. Dupree said she sought medical help on June 4, just days after her 65th birthday, when she would qualify for Medicare, the U.S. healthcare program for seniors.
"The reason she didn't go earlier was because she had no insurance," he said.
By now, she weighed more than 170 pounds, her legs were swollen with trapped blood, she was badly dehydrated, and, scans showed, the tumor - a malignant sarcoma - was crushing her inferior vena cava, one of the main veins returning blood to the heart, and putting her life in danger.
With her body too weakened to be operated on immediately, Dupree scheduled surgery for the following Monday, allowing time for her to become rehydrated and for her blood pressure to be brought under control.
But after she became short of breath on Sunday evening, Dupree brought the surgery forward.
"I knew that she wasn't going to make it through the night," he said.
"Either she goes now or she dies tonight," he recalled thinking.
Opening her up, Dupree and his team found the tumor, which appeared to have originated out of the fatty tissue around her large intestine, had engulfed many of her internal organs, and had to be sliced away "millimeter by millimeter" over the course of the five-hour surgery.
Evelyn was still recovering from the operation in a rehabilitation center on Tuesday, Dupree said. She declined to be interviewed.
Although the immediate threat to her life has passed, she must still see an oncologist about treatment for her cancer, which may not have been completely eradicated by the surgery, and may require chemotherapy or radiation therapy.
Dupree said he would advise uninsured patients to see a doctor immediately if they knew they were unwell no matter how near their 65th birthday might be. He said the hospital would have operated on Evelyn regardless of her insurance status, but added he did not know whether doing so would have cost her more money.

Pharma company studying Oxycontin's effect on children

The maker of the prescription painkiller OxyContin confirms that a clinical trial is currently under way to measure the opioid's effects on children.

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Random Photo

Solar Flare Ionizes European Skies

Obviously frustrated by the headline-grabbing news of a quasi-potential Higgs boson discovery, the sun exploded with a headline-grabber of its own this morning.  
Read more

Awesome Pictures

Five Curiously Strange and Weirdly Awesome Trees

From providing dragon blood sap to the stuffing in lifejackets, the properties of these weird and wonderful trees will make you think you've stepped into a Dr. Seuss book More

Carnivorous Plant That Eats Worms Underground

You’d never know by looking at their gorgeous flowers, but a rare planet species called Philcoxia in Brazil are quite deadly … to underground worms:

Botanists have found three plants, all relatives of the popular
snapdragon garden flowers, that have an unusual network of sticky leaves
underground.
These leaves allow the plants to trap and digest worms, and possibly
other creatures, that stray onto their sticky surfaces in the soil.
While there are many species of carnivorous plants that use insects,
frogs and even small mammals to supplement the nutrients they need to
grow, none have ever been found to trap their prey beneath the ground.
Botanists now believe there could be many other plants that use
this previously unrecognised method of killing and consuming animals.

Richard Gray of The Telegraph has the story: here

Wildlife Overpasses

Unusual Bridges For Animals 

Wildlife overpasses, green bridges, and ecoducts all refer to structures that have been built over roads to allow wildlife to cross safely to the other side of the road. The bridges are for the animals; the animals walk over the road, and the vehicles go through the structure.

Most of the structures typically have soil, litter, and vegetation on top to provide suitable habitat for a range of different species and species groups. The larger structures are intended for large mammals ranging from ungulates to large carnivores. Here are pictures of some of the most beautiful and interesting wildlife overpasses in the world.

Ladybug Mimic Spider

Take a closer look at this cute ladybug and you'd be surprised to find that it's actually a spider. Meet the Ladybird Mimic Spider (Ladybug Mimic Spider for us Yanks), as wonderfully snapped by Singaporean photographer Nicky Bay: More

Do you really know what’s lurking in the depths?

Meet Peter’s elephantnose fish

It has been my intention to write a post telling you all about my new pets – I have recently ...

Continue Reading

Animal Pictures

The Daily Drift

Admit it you rather see this than anything else we could put here.

Some of our readers today have been in:

Amman, Jordan

Charleron, Belgium

Petaling jaya, Malaysia

Zagreb, Croatia

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Klang, Malaysia

Johannesburg, South Africa

Perai, Malaysia

Denpasar, Indonesia

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Shah Alam, Malaysia

Manila, Philippines

Cape Town, South Africa

Sampaloc, Philippines

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Cebu City, Philippines

Warsaw, Poland

Moscow, Russia

Kuantan, Malaysia

Gdansk, Poland

Klang, Malaysia

Port-Of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago

Poznan, Poland

Panama City, Panama

 Don't forget to visit our sister blog!

Today in History

1712		12 slaves are executed for starting a uprising in New York that killed nine whites.
1776		The amended Declaration of Independence, prepared by Thomas Jefferson, is approved and signed by John Hancock–President of the Continental Congress–and Charles Thomson, Congress secretary. The state of New York abstains from signing.
1817		Construction begins on the Erie Canal, to connect Lake Erie and the Hudson River.
1826		Two of America's founding fathers–Thomas Jefferson and John Adams–die.
1831		The fifth president of the United States, James Monroe, dies at the age of 73.
1845		Henry David Thoreau begins his 26-month stay at Walden Pond.
1855		Walt Whitman publishes the first edition of Leaves of Grass at his own expense.
1861		Union and Confederate forces skirmish at Harpers Ferry.
1862		Charles Dodgson first tells the story of Alice's adventures down the rabbit hole during a picnic along the Thames.
1863		The Confederate town of Vicksburg, Mississippi, surrenders to General Ulysses S. Grant.
1881		Billy the Kid is shot dead in New Mexico.
1894		After seizing power, Judge Stanford B. Dole declares Hawaii a republic.
1895		The poem America the Beautiful is first published.
1901		William H. Taft becomes the American governor of the Philippines.
1910		Race riots break out all over the United States after African American Jack Johnson knocks out Jim Jeffries in a heavyweight boxing match.
1931		Novelist James Joyce and Nora Barnacle are married in London after being together for 26 years.
1934		Boxer Joe Louis wins his first professional fight.
1946		The United States grants the Philippine Islands their independence.
1960		The 50-star flag makes its debut in Philadelphia.
1976		An Israeli raid at Entebbe airport in Uganda rescues 105 hostages.

Happy Birthday USA

Wingnut Wunderkind is now a Liberal

Did you ever say something at 13 that you regretted later in life? At least you had the presence of mind not to get that captured on camera or social media for posterity, right?
What? It's on Facebook?! Well, at least you didn't get it on YouTube, right? What?
Well, at least you're not this guy:

Like so many teenagers, Jonathan Krohn says he cringes when he thinks of some of the deeply uncool things he said when he was 13. Unlike most teenagers, Krohn said those things on camera in a speech at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference, making him a YouTube sensation. Now? Krohn tells Politico's Patrick Gavin he's not a conservative anymore. He likes gay marriage and Obamacare. He's going to New York University in the fall. He name drops German philosophers. But his old fans can't accept that he's changed. "Come on, I was thirteen," he told Politico. "I was thirteen."

From Elspeth Reeve of The Atlantic Wire: More | The interview at Politico

At least he grew up - unlike those who still spout the nonsense he used to spout.

Florida's repugican governor to refuse Healthcare Reform

There's the old obstructionist repugicanism that we all know by now. There's a big conflict of interest at play here since he made his money in the highly lucrative healthcare industry. Is Rick Scott blocking Healthcare Reform because it's bad for the people of Florida or because his healthcare business will make less profit?

Scott said the state will not expand the Medicaid program in order to lower the number of uninsured residents, nor will Florida set up a state-run health exchange, a marketplace where people who need insurance policies could shop for them.

"We care about having a health care safety net for the vulnerable Floridians, but this is an expansion that just doesn't make any sense,'' he told Faux host Greta Van Susteren.

Scott has gone back and forth on the issue after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Congress cannot withhold federal Medicaid funding from states that opt out of a requirement in the overhaul to expand coverage to those just above the poverty line.

Thankfully the decision is not completely his to make so part of the battle will be fought in the Florida legislature.

The Ugliest Four-Letter Word In The English Language

The ugliest four-letter word in the English language: taxes.

Romney involved in business that disposed of aborted fetuses

So between blatant lying and investing in a medical waste business that disposed of aborted fetuses, which one do you think the radical right will find more offensive? At least Mitt has been consistent in that he has never been able to stay consistent with his stories. Anything that he said yesterday has no relevance to what he's going to say or do today.

More from Mother Jones on the Bain Capital and Mitt Romney lies.

Earlier this year, Mitt Romney nearly landed in a politically perilous controversy when the Huffington Post reported that in 1999 the repugican presidential candidate had been part of an investment group that invested $75 million in Stericycle, a medical-waste disposal firm that has been attacked by anti-abortion groups for disposing aborted fetuses collected from family planning clinics. Coming during the heat of the repugican primaries, as Romney tried to sell South Carolina repugicans on his pro-life bona fides, the revelation had the potential to damage the candidate's reputation among values voters already suspicious of his shifting position on abortion.

But Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney founded, tamped down the controversy. The company said Romney left the firm in February 1999 to run the troubled 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and likely had nothing to with the deal. The matter never became a campaign issue. But documents filed by Bain and Stericycle with the Securities and Exchange Commission—and obtained by Mother Jones—list Romney as an active participant in the investment. And this deal helped Stericycle, a company with a poor safety record, grow, while yielding tens of millions of dollars in profits for Romney and his partners. The documents—one of which was signed by Romney—also contradict the official account of Romney's exit from Bain.

The mysterious millions of Mittens

Is it "blood money?"

You don't think he would handle American lives the same way...squeezing the maximum life out of the 99%?

....the Romneys were reported to have invested at least $1 million in Elliott associates, l.p., a hedge fund specializing in “distressed assets.” Elliott buys up cheap debt, often at cents on the dollar, from lenders to deeply troubled nations such as Congo-Brazzaville, then attacks the debtor states with lawsuits to squeeze maximum repayment. Elliott is run by the secretive hedge-fund billionaire and g.o.p. super-donor paul singer, whom fortune recently dubbed mitt Romney’s “hedge fund kingmaker.” (singer has given $1 million to Romney’s super-pac restore our future.) - More

Is this the really the type of president we want? The president our country can afford? -NO!

Romney to hold fundraiser with Barclays bankers in London

A trip to the Wild West of the banking industry for Romney. While shamed former CEO Bob Diamond has backed out, many more from the same side of Barclays will be present with open checkbooks for Romney.
Why is Romney showing such disregard for violations of the law by accepting Barclays money? It's as if he doesn't care how dirty the money is or how much the people paying have been involved in cheating people around the world.

Mr. Diamond had been one of 18 co-hosts for a dinner in London later this month in which guests are being asked to pay between $25,000- $75,000 to raise money for Mr. Romney, who will be in town for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

Mr. Diamond is one of several top executives at Barclays who have thrown their weight behind Mr. Romney to help defeat President Barack Obama. He also hosted similar events in support of John McCain during the 2008 presidential campaign.

At least 15 of Barclays Capital’s most senior bankers based in the US have donated $2,500 to the Romney campaign, the maximum allowable individual donation per election, Federal Election Committee filings show.

Barclays CEO Diamond resigns under pressure

Following the resignation of the Barclays Chairman, CEO Bob Diamond had suggested a hard fight to remain on the job. This morning Diamond resigned though the details of his exit compensation remain uncertain. As Joe Stiglitz has pointed out in his interview with The Independent, Diamond has spoken often about future bonuses being curtailed though nothing about the years of bonus money made based on phony business. Diamond, of course, has a lot of company in that department.
The Guardian is also reporting this morning that Barclays COO Jerry del Missier will also be resigning soon. Adding to the drama of the situation is Diamond's scheduled meeting with British MP's tomorrow. Diamond has allegedly told others that he would open up the scandal and detail how much previous (Labour) governments knew about the ongoing Libor scandal. Others have responded that unlike Capital Hill battles, the system in the UK is different and reacts quickly and harshly to such attacks.

Who will step in next to be Chief Gambler in Charge for Barclays? Anyone from his side of the banking world will be severely tainted. Not that being tainted has been an obstruction to power in the banking world.

The man who set up Barclays Capital and was responsible for much of Barclays’ increased profits stepped down as chief executive on Tuesday after calls for his resignation from politicians and shareholders.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne welcomed his resignation. "I think it's the right decision for Barclays, I think it's the right decision for the country because we need Barclays bank focused on lending to our economy and not distracted by this argument about who should be in charge," Osborne told the BBC. "I hope it's a first step to a new culture of responsibility in British banking."

He led a storm of political criticism of Barclays in the wake of the London inter-bank offered rate (Libor) manipulation scandal.

Did you know ...

... how the big banks are screwing us with overdraft fees.

Job insecurity in America

A terrified nation of disposable workers 

Alternet's new series on "job insecurity" opens with a frightening and infuriating piece from Lynn Parramore, who paints a picture of a nation where the new normal is to be marginally employed, in terror of a coming layoff, haunted by unshakable student debt, and in a continuous, panicked search for work, all at once:

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Our capitalist endeavor was supposed to make us safe from the vagaries of weather conditions and arbitrary events that harassed our ancestors. But somehow we’ve ended up more worried than ever.
Anxiety disorders now plague 18 percent of the U.S. adult population –- a whopping 40 million people. Only half that number are affected by mood disorders. The drug alprazolam — familiar by its brand name, Xanax — was prescribed 46.3 million times in 2010, making it that year’s bestselling psychiatric drug. Prozac, the happiness-and-optimism pill, has been pushed aside by a medication meant to just help you get through the day without collapsing in a puddle of anxiety.
It’s easy to see the appeal of popping a Xanax. A recent survey by the American Psychological Association paints a picture of workers on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
* Sixty-two percent say work has a significant impact on their stress levels.
* Almost 50 percent indicate their stress levels have increased between 2007 and 2008.
* Forty-five percent of workers say job insecurity has a significant impact on stress levels.
...When we fear the hatchet will fall, when the future is a fog, when we’re paralyzed by powerlessness, we start to flip out. We pile on more work than we can handle. We don’t take sick days when we need them. We start fueling up on coffee and cigarettes, and dropping the things that are good for us, like leisure activities and trips to the gym. Under chronic stress, our immune systems start to buckle from “overresponsivity.”

Job Insecurity: It’s the Disease of the 21st Century -- And It’s Killing Us

Cops in USA to drive around in pornoscannerwagons, covertly irradiating people and looking through their cars and clothes

American cops are set to join the US military in deploying American Science & Engineering's Z Backscatter Vans, or mobile backscatter radiation x-rays. These are what TSA officials call "the amazing radioactive genital viewer," now seen in airports around America, ionizing the private parts of children, the elderly, and you (yes you).
These pornoscannerwagons will look like regular anonymous vans, and will cruise America's streets, indiscriminately peering through the cars (and clothes) of anyone in range of its mighty isotope-cannon. But don't worry, it's not a violation of privacy. As AS&E's vice president of marketing Joe Reiss sez, "From a privacy standpoint, I’m hard-pressed to see what the concern or objection could be."
You know, I never looked at that way. I guess that's why I'm not the VP of marketing and he's getting the big bucks.

It would also seem to make the vans mobile versions of the same scanning technique that’s riled privacy advocates as it’s been deployed in airports around the country. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is currently suing the DHS to stop airport deployments of the backscatter scanners, which can reveal detailed images of human bodies. (Just how much detail became clear last May, when TSA employee Rolando Negrin was charged with assaulting a coworker who made jokes about the size of Negrin’s genitalia after Negrin received a full-body scan.)
“It’s no surprise that governments and vendors are very enthusiastic about [the vans],” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC. “But from a privacy perspective, it’s one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.”

Also: "the vans do have the capability of storing images."

Full-Body Scan Technology Deployed In Street-Roving Vans

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Brigitte Bardot

Kitty litter increases risk of suicide?

A small subset of suicide attempts may be linked to an infection that starts in the litter box.
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Honest Names For Snack Foods

Before Marketing complained, the R&D people at your favorite snack companies came up with these honest snack food names: More

Busy, Inc.: Is being busy a lifestyle choice?

Women never retire.

That was my holiday epiphany last Christmas, or Thanksgiving, when I noticed that all the men in the house were watching TV, playing Xbox, or napping, while the women were busy cleaning house and making dinner for a gazillion relatives.

Even mom, at the ripe age of 81 (or 82?) doesn't get a respite.  It seems no one told her at age 65 that she could stop doing all that "woman's work" around the house at about the same time dad stopped being an auto executive.

The retirement gap between men and women is likely easing somewhat in "modern" families where men take on more of the traditionally feminine roles of "keeping house."  But still, it's an obvious, and probably overlooked, observation (by men at least) that women don't ever get to "stop" like we do (again, in traditional homes).

Which leads to articles in the NYT and Slate about "busy" people.  Hanna Rosin sums up the NYT piece in Slate:

The “Busy Trap,” after all, is written by a man and one who does not mention having children. And in his view a 23-year-old single man has a daily reality not all that different than a 40-year-old mother of three. “Almost everyone I know is busy,” writes Tim Kreider, “They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications.”

But after that brief moment of revenge/relief I began to feel pretty uneasy, because what good does it do me that men live this way too? So many lines in that story made me cringe in self recognition: “Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half hour with classes and extracurricular activities.” And then this part, which really hit home: “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life can not possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy.” My one quibble with Kreider is his insistence that this kind of busyness is a form of bragging, a one-upsmanship over who worked more hours, familiar from how my investment-banker friends from the '90s used to act.

I've always been annoyed by "busy people."  I've never been one.  Perhaps it's my inherent laziness, or my inner Greek, but I've never understood people who "don't have time."  Putting parenthood aside (and even with parenthood, moms still seem to get the shaft), the busy people began about the time of college, which for me was the early 1980s, and it moved into full swing in law school.

The busy people were your friends and fellow students who always spent far more time than you did studying.  The thing is, it's not like they necessarily got better grades (though some did).  Which begs the question of whether busy-ness, in school at least, is a sign of the over-achiever or the UNDER-achiever (i.e., does the student study more because he's a geek, or because he needs to study more to keep up with the rest of us?)

There was certainly a "cult of study" when I was in law school.  People were insane.  They formed elite study groups at the beginning of the year, because "that's what law students do."  And they studied every night for a gazillion hours and never had time to do anything social because, you know, law school is just insanely hard.  I never understood that.

(It used to drive me nuts when people would find out I was in law school, and then wax about how "hard" it must be.  It was hard, like any good education at any good school.  But it simply wasn't nearly as bad as people made it out to be - which has always made me suspect that med school is its own busy-trap.)

Law school was certainly harder than undergrad (and harder than grad school, for me at least).  And undergrad was harder than high school.  But law school wasn't such a quantum leap harder than undergrad that everyone needed to suddenly stop having a life outside of school.  Yet many law students did.  And they were proud of their lifelessness.  For many, being busy was a form of bragging.  But that doesn't necessarily mean that they made themselves busy so that they could brag.  The bragging could have been an afterthought to the busy-ness - making ego lemonade out of busy lemons, as it were.

While my lack of busy-ness - I'm the last person who would say no to an invite to do something because "I have something else scheduled" (and I'm also the last person to schedule any weekend plans in advance) - is I suspect due in part to my own laziness, I sometimes suspect that the busy-ness of certain friends comes not from any desire to brag, but perhaps from the opposite of my lazy-ness.  While I like to turn my brain, and body, off after a long day of work, they like to turn it on.  Thus the endless tennis lessons, polo lessons, book clubs, etc.

And to some degree I'm jealous of my busy friends. There's a certain way of life in Paris, and I suspect NYC, where people tend to take advantage ("profiter", as we say in French) more of their surroundings.  In Paris, my friends are always going out to the latest show, exhibit, or just for dinner, or a nighttime picnic, with friends.  My New York friends are similar.

But, recently a New York friend complained that, yes, people are always out and about it NYC, but the problem is they're ALWAYS out and about, making it impossible to organize anything with her friends.  In Paris in August, the traditional vacation time, a friend posts a single message on Facebook that they're having a "pique-nique" at 7pm next to the Seine, and the next day somewhere between 7 and 20 friends will eventually show up, no further organizing necessary.  In NYC, she said, you'd have to organize the picnic a good month in advance, or no one would show (same in DC, I fear).  "Can you imagine just posting on Facebook that you're throwing a picnic, and then just expect people to show?" she asked me.

So I'm torn on the whole "busy" thing.  There is a part of me that feels like maybe I'm not "living" enough.  But there's also a part that feels far too many of my friends are living a bit too much, and thus not living much at all.  They've lost any sense of the impromptu, of caprice, in their lives.

I'm reminded of the T.S. Eliot passage:

We do not wish anything to happen.
Seven years we have lived quietly,
Succeeded in avoiding notice,
Living and partly living.
There have been oppression and luxury,
There have been poverty and licence,
There has been minor injustice.
Yet we have gone on living,
Living and partly living.

So is "busy" a prerequisite to living? Or an impediment?

Sonic Booms Shatter Supreme Court Windows

The Praça dos Três Poderes (Three Powers Plaza) in Brasilia, Brazil, is that nation’s governmental seat, and the home of the world’s largest continuously-flown national flag. The flag is replaced every month with ceremony. On Sunday, that ceremony included a flyover by two Mirage 2000 fighter jets. Rarely do supersonic planes fly low enough to be seen for a display like this. What could possibly go wrong?

Although nobody was injured the fighter flew so low and fast that the shock wave they generated broke almost all the windows of Supreme Court glass facade.
In a statement, Brig Ar Kanitz Marcelo Damasceno, chief of the Center for Social Communication of the Força Aérea Brasileira (FAB), said that the Brazilian Air Force Command has initiated the investigation of the incident and will compensate the damage caused.

See a video of the flyover at The Aviationist.

For all the country fans out there

 

Faith Hill

Ten Ways To Keep Your Car Clean Even If You're Lazy

You may think of your car as a means to get from point A to point B. But it's more. It's a little bit like your house with everything in it. Kids, dogs and cats, food etc. And no matter what you do, your car always ends up a mess.

Here are ten simple ways to keep your car from becoming a rolling trashbag.

Five New Uses For Eggshells

Though there's lots to love about an egg, it turns out the shells are actually the incredible part. They can be used for a variety of different garden uses, among other purposes. Here are some new uses for eggshells.

Seven Communities Who Salvage Trash to Survive in the World's Dumpsites

These garbage dumps and landfills in the less developed world are not only a place for unwanted trash; they also provide a place to live and work for thousands of people.

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Satanists claim theft of poster is hate crime

A couple who claim to be Satanists believe they’re a victim of a hate crime and were targeted because of their religious beliefs. Someone cut down a political poster stating, “VOTE SATAN” from their front porch where they live in Mountain View, a suburb of Denver. “We are Satanists… Satanists,” said Luigi Bellaviste.
Luigi and Angie Bellaviste belong to the Church of Satan. They even have a Satanic Bible in their home. The couple is upset because a poster they had hanging from their front porch was recently cut down. It wasn’t very popular with some neighbours. “Everybody that sees that sign says, ‘What is going on with those people?,’” said neighbour Mary Morasco.

The couple’s home and yard are decorated with items like a Christmas tree that has been painted black, skulls and the number 666. They believe the cutting down of the poster was an attack on their religious beliefs. “I feel like we’re being treated unfairly because it’s not a so-called mainstream religion,” said Luigi. “I know of many people who have the Virgin Mary and tons of Jesus memorabilia ‘I Love Jesus’ and what is the difference?” said Angie.

The couple wants the police to consider the incident a hate crime because their religion is protected by the U.S. Constitution. “Had that been the Star of David or a verse from the Koran,” said Luigi, “or something like that got damaged by somebody against those beliefs that would certainly be considered a hate crime.” An officer with the Mountain View Police Department said the report will likely be filed as theft because there was no obvious attack on the couple’s church or religious beliefs.

Man held at gunpoint and stabbed for not being a barber

A man had a gun pulled on him and was stabbed in front of his 6-year-old son in Southwest Philadelphia’s Elmwood section on Saturday morning, apparently for not being a barber, according to police.
Cops said the 29-year-old victim was inside his house on 64th Street near Chelwynde Avenue giving his 6-year-old son a haircut shortly after 7:30 a.m. Saturday when a stranger came in through his front door and asked if he was a barber. The man replied that he was not and the other man left the house without incident before returning about five minutes later and asking for a haircut, police said.

When the victim told the man he wasn’t a barber and asked him to leave, police said, the man pulled a black semiautomatic handgun from his pocket. The victim grabbed the man and struggled with him, at which point the man pulled out a small knife and stabbed him six times in the arms and chest, police said.

The victim was able to force the man outside, and police said the attacker dropped his gun at that point, then picked it up and fled westbound on Chelwynde Avenue in a dark grey SUV. The man stabbed was taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and listed in stable condition. The attacker is described as a tall black man in his mid 20s with a light complexion who wore a black long-sleeve shirt and black track pants.

Man used sword and peanut butter sandwich in attack on three women

Polk County deputies jailed a Winter Haven man on felony charges of battery and aggravated assault on Friday. The tools of the alleged attack: a 4-foot sword and peanut butter sandwich.
Mark Christopher Miller, 50, used the sword to threaten two women, one of them pregnant, and then smeared another with the sandwich before the deputies hauled him away, according to his arrest report. As the deputies drove him to jail, Miller tore a piece of padding from the inside of the patrol car with his teeth.

The fracas began when Miller heard a disturbance outside his mobile home at 2500 U.S. 92 W. No. 18A. He exited sword in hand and “poked” it at the 6-month pregnant woman’s stomach. She managed to grab the blade and stop him from stabbing her. Another woman stepped in to protect her and Miller threatened to kill her.

When a third woman intervened, Miller smeared her chest with a peanut butter sandwich he apparently carried. When deputies arrived at Polk County Jail, they found the 4-inch chunk of padding bitten from a divider in the vehicle lying next to Miller’s feet. Miller told the deputies he indeed carried a sword during the incident, but never left the doorway of his mobile home.

Don’t Bother with Positive Thinking, Do Positive Actions Instead!

Want to be happy? Don't try to think yourself happy, just smile instead (regardless of how you feel). Want to boost your will power? Tense up.
Countless self-help books advocate that you think yourself rich/thin/happy, but that won't work according to author Richard Wiseman. Instead of positive thinking, he said in his new book Rip It Up, the best thing is to do positive action, as he explained in this article in The Guardian:

HAPPINESS: Smile
This is the granddaddy of them all. As Laird's study demonstrated, smile and you will feel happier. To get the most out of this exercise, make the smile as wide as possible, extend your eyebrow muscles slightly upward, and hold the resulting expression for about 20 seconds.
WILLPOWER: Tense up
As Hung's experiments show, tensing your muscles boosts your willpower. Next time you feel the need to avoid that cigarette or cream cake, make a fist, contract your biceps, press your thumb and first finger together, or grip a pen in your hand.
DIETING: Use your non-dominant hand
When you eat with your non-dominant hand you are acting as if you are carrying out an unusual behaviour. Because of that you place more attention on your action, do not simply consume food without thinking about it, and so eat less.
PROCRASTINATION: Make a start
To overcome procrastination, act as if you are interested in what it is that you have to do. Spend just a few minutes carrying out the first part of whatever it is you are avoiding, and suddenly you will feel a strong need to complete the task.

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Man uncovers mysterious old woman walking in his garden using night vision camera

A wildlife lover was shocked when a video camera he set up to film animals at night took ghost-like images of an elderly woman. Dick Williams was ‘gobsmacked’ when he saw the film of a female in slippers and a dressing gown on a path in his back garden.

Photo from SWNS.

Mr Williams, 88, and police officers have so far failed to identify the woman, who was in the garden at about 10pm. ‘We spoke to the police and they took a photo round to local nursing homes, but we haven’t heard anything back yet,’ he said.

‘We wondered whether it was someone sleepwalking or someone living at the local residential home. I don’t think it’s a ghost. I don’t believe in them. Of course, people can make up their own minds.’ He added: ‘Nobody has come forward to say that they might know who it is.

YouTube link.

‘Because of the angle the camera was at we could only see her legs up to her lower back. She was heading towards the shed when she disappeared out of view and at no point did she come back into shot.' Mr Williams, who lives with his wife in Churchstoke, Powys, had put out the camera to film local wildlife.

A Line Millions of People Long

Photo via Steve McCurry's Simple Act of Waiting

Think that you're queueing in the longest supermarket checkout line ever? Well, at least you're not in this line of millions of people waiting to bathe in the Ganges river, as photographed by Steve McCurry. What an amazing sight!
Alice Yoo of My Modern Met wrote:

The Kumbh Mela is a mass Hindu pilgrimage that's been called the world’s largest act of faith, the greatest show on earth and the largest gathering on the planet. In 2001 it was held in Allahabad, India where the India government estimates that about 70 million people came to bathe in the holy river Ganges where it meets with the also holy Yamuna river. Bathing in the holy waters at this particular time is said to wash away your karmic debt or cleanse you from your sins. It's literally a shortcut to spiritual liberation.
In this particular photo, it shows people traversing temporary pontoon bridges built along the Ganges River to facilitate movement. Fascinating.

The Underwater Sculptures Of Jason DeCaires Taylor

Jason DeCaires Taylor is an eco-sculptor, an artist who has found a way to make his sculptures meld seamlessly with the natural world.
His works become one with nature and even support life, as demonstrated by the ring of sculptures shown above which now serve as habitats for coral and aquatic critters who fancy a human of their very own to call home.

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Awesome Pictures

Mass extinctions reset the long-term pace of evolution

A new study indicates that mass extinctions affect the pace of evolution, not just in the immediate aftermath of catastrophe ...

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UN Warns of Impending Environmental Disasters

Every generation has environmental problems to tackle, but we can face them without always worrying about the end of the world ... More

One hundred years of earthquakes

This map of all the world's recorded earthquakes between 1898 and 2003 is stunning. As you might expect, it also creates a brilliant outline of the plates of the Earth's crust—especially the infamous "Ring of Fire" around the Pacific Plate.
But the real story—which Smithsonian points out and which was also the first thing I noticed—lies elsewhere. To put it colloquially: Holy shit, you guys, look at all those intraplate earthquakes!
Plate tectonics explains a lot of things, but it doesn't totally explain why earthquakes (and, in rare cases, extremely large earthquakes) happen in places far from the meeting point of two pieces of crust. There are a few possible explanations out there. We just don't know yet which one is correct.
One of the theories explaining intraplate earthquakes is based off the fact that the tectonic plates we know today have not been constant throughout Earth's history. Some of the places that are now "intraplate" were once right along fault lines. Others are at spots where continents began—and then failed—to split apart. All these things might leave behind spots of "weak" rock that's more prone to upheaval than the strong, intraplate rock around it. Studies in the 1990s found that 49% of all intraplate earthquakes happen near places like this. Of course, that leaves 51% of the shaking still unexplained.
Read more about this and other theories for why intraplate earthquakes happen.
Check out Smithsonian's write up, which includes a nice comparison between this image and a cartoon map showing the tectonic plates.
View the image, created by data visualizer John Nelson, on Flickr

The World's Most Amazing Waterfalls

The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Feel the power of the planet's mightiest and most beautiful waterfalls.

In the picturesque mountains

Kirgizia has many wonderful places and landscapes. Here we are going to show you some. More

Woman trying to kill bedbugs burns down apartment block making 30 people homeless

Authorities say a Kentucky woman trying to kill bedbugs accidentally started a fire that destroyed several apartments in downtown Carlisle in Nicholas County. It took firefighters from several counties to put it out. Not only had to battle the flames, but the extreme heat as well. You could see the flames shooting out from the apartment's roof from several blocks away. "I was scared to death for my husband because he was in the apartment," says Vicky Bussell, who lived there.
Firefighters disappeared into the smoke as they climbed the ladder to make sure everyone was out the building. It took hours to get a handle on the out of control fire. "I've never really seen anything like this before," says Brianna Ross. About 30 people lost their homes. Six families in the apartment building where the fire started, and ten families next door. "It damages you. It's hard when you lose everything," Bussell says.

The Carlisle Fire Chief says a woman doused her couch in alcohol to try to get rid of bed bugs, and when she dropped her cigarette, the fire started. "They're just belongings, you can replace them anytime. Main thing is, nobody got hurt," says Randal Lutes, who lost everything. While everyone did make it out, four people were taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation. Jackie Bond's mother was one of them:

"My mom's bed ridden. I take care of her everyday. I don't know where I'm going to take her, I don't know what to do." Red Cross will be helping some of these people with a place to stay Friday night, but after that, many of these fire victims say they don't know where they'll go. "I guess i just work until we build everything back up," Bond says. "Everybody's alive. As long as everybody's alive, I'll find a way. I'll have to."

Fifty-three arrested in Sri Lanka in anti-mosquito searches

Police arrested 53 people for failing to eliminate stagnant water and other mosquito breeding grounds as Sri Lanka tries to prevent dengue fever, which has infected thousands already this year.
Police, army and health officers searched 11,500 houses in the capital Colombo over seven hours on Sunday, police spokesman Ajith Rohana said. Those arrested for not cleaning up their surrounding environment face fines and up to six months in jail. He said this is the first time police made such a large number of arrests from Colombo for failing to clean mosquito breeding places.

Dengue fever has killed 74 people this year and infected 15,000. Health officials say it has increased because residents have become more careless about cleaning their properties and eliminating mosquito breeding grounds. The flu-like illness is spread by the Aedes mosquito and spikes during the annual monsoons, when the rains leave puddles of stagnant water where the insects breed. In Sri Lanka, the southwest monsoon that usually begins in May lasts until September.

Dengue starts suddenly with a high fever, rash, severe headache and pain behind the eyes and in the muscles and joints. The severity of the joint pain has given dengue the name ``breakbone fever.'' Nausea, vomiting and loss of appetite also are common. The government said last week 10,000 security forces had been deployed to help dengue eradication efforts this month. They help to search houses and buildings to detect breeding places and join other public workers to clean public buildings and places.

Ten Bizarre Looking Bats

Cute, ugly or both? Bats may be Fledermaus in German but they're much more than just flying mice... and much less cute as well. These 10 bizarre bats take ugliness to the next level, in fact, and we're talkin' cracked mirror, turn-to-stone ugly.

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