Inventor S. S. Adams liked to test his sneezing powder on rooms full of executives.
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Body Language Reveals How We Really Feel
To figure out how someone is really feeling, don't just read their lips,
watch their body language. In a recent study, researchers from
Princeton University asked participants to determine from photographs if
people were experiencing feelings such as loss, victory, or pain from
facial expressions or body language alone, or from both.
In four separate experiments, participants more accurately guessed the pictured emotion based on body language - alone or combined with facial expressions - than on facial context alone.
In four separate experiments, participants more accurately guessed the pictured emotion based on body language - alone or combined with facial expressions - than on facial context alone.
In Cancer Quackery News
Stanislaw Burzynski threatens one of his own patients over website
That site, burzynskiscam.com, is still up, despite the nastygram threatening "to file a legal lawsuit" for its purportedly "defamatory" contents.
Threatening bloggers is nothing new for Burzynski, but threatening cancer patients is, as far as I can tell.
Blaskiewicz adds,
The Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients is looking to put an actual dent into Burzynski's wallet while shaming him publicly for what he's done by raising money for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. We're trying to raise $30,000, the cost of starting his bogus trials according to a patient who was dead just days after starting his treatment. We're donating all of it in his name on his birthday, Jan 23rd. That same day, we're issuing a challenge to the Clinic to MATCH THE TOTAL that skeptics raise. That's the big thing. Regardless of whether or not he participates (and I suspect that it's hard to shame the shameless), we plan to say that it's probably the greatest contribution to cancer research ever made in his name. :) The fundraiser is here. For bloggers who want to help drive his google search results into the toilet (by putting reliable info in its place), a guide can be found at thehoustoncancerquack.com. Feel free to use the birthday ducky graphic I have there. :)Below, two excerpts from the nastygrams sent by Burzynski's rep to Wayne Merritt’s wife. They're pretty wacky. And it takes a special kind of asshole to bully a cancer patient and his wife in this manner.
I'll paste it here, below:
Stanislaw Burzynski is a doctor who has lured patients to his Houston clinic with two promises: to try to cure their incurable cancers with his antineoplaston treatments, and to enroll them in a clinical trial. Patients in clinical trials are usually reimbursed for all expenses and paid for participating. Instead, Burzynski makes them pay for everything, typically $30,000. And, he is only claiming to do clinical trials because the FDA has investigated him and has prohibited him from treating patients outside of trials. So he pretends to be doing clinical trials, but he never publishes any results. Instead of a research protocol with IRB oversight and informed consent, he offers "individualized" experimental treatments to patients without any randomization or controls. He produces his own drugs and charges more than they would cost elsewhere. He claims to have many miraculous successes, but a website is accumulating the case histories of his far more numerous failures. Read some of the stories here and weep. Just one example: He told a patient his cancer had shrunk by 84% on the latest MRI, so the patient assumed he was improving and wrote a check for another course of treatment. Then the neurosurgeon who had originally operated on him got a hold of the MRI and saw that the tumor was actually unchanged; the Burzynski Clinic had misinterpreted the healing of the hole where part of the tumor had been removed. Over a hundred of these cases have been collected and are gradually going up on the website to counter the testimonials on the misleading Burzynski Patient Group website. [The most recent entry demonstrates that threats have been issued against cancer patients.]
A website entitled "The Houston Cancer Quack" has been established to carry out a fund raising drive. The plan is to raise $30,000, the typical cost of treatment for a Burzynski patient, and to notify Burzynski on his birthday as a sort of birthday present. The money will go to support legitimate cancer research at the St. Jude Children's Hospital, and Burzynski will be challenged to match the donation. He can afford it. He lives in a $6 million, 14,495 square foot mansion.
He continues to offer unethical treatments to these desperate patients, who are being financially ruined in the pursuit of false hope and have been robbed of the opportunity for conventional palliative care and precious time with their families.
For more information see the article Dr. Gorski wrote on the "Science-Based Medicine" website today.
Also see the numerous articles he has written on the Respectful Insolence website.
What Burzynski is doing is evil. The FDA tried to stop him and failed. The Texas Medical Board tried to stop him, but lost on a technicality. We are hoping this fund raising drive will bring his misdeeds to the attention of the public. We hope the media will pick it up and spread the word to a wide audience.
This is a win/win proposition: You can support cancer research for children and simultaneously embarrass a doctor who is getting rich preying on vulnerable cancer patients. I can't think of a worthier cause. Please, PLEASE go to this webpage.
Click on the donate button. It's secure and simple to make a donation with your credit card online.
Skeptics, Unite! Here's a chance for skeptics to really make a difference.
Bolshoi Ballet director attacked with acid
Half-naked man ran after train for 7 kilometers in in sub-zero temperatures
A 42-year-old Russian man literally ran for his life for seven kilometers in the freezing cold after he accidentally fell off a train
in the country’s Far East, wearing only a T-shirt, sweatpants and
slippers.
The man said that he had gone to the train’s vestibule for a smoke.
As he was coming back to his carriage, he missed his door and opened another one to a non-functioning vestibule. He stepped into the dark and then found himself in taiga forest, on the railroad, all alone. The passenger ran after the train for seven kilometers, but couldn’t catch up with it. At the next station the man was given help.
“The 42-year-old man survived by sheer luck,” the Interior Ministry’s local transport department reported on Friday. An investigation into the matter has been launched, and police are trying to ascertain whether what happened was an accident, or whether a train attendant forgot to close the door out of neglect.
The man turned out to be a driver working under a rotation system. “He is feeling fine, has already started working, and has suffered no bodily harm. Certainly, he had been very scared, but got over the shock,” the man’s employer said. The train was traveling from Moscow to Nerungri. The average winter temperatures in the area measure around -30°C.
As he was coming back to his carriage, he missed his door and opened another one to a non-functioning vestibule. He stepped into the dark and then found himself in taiga forest, on the railroad, all alone. The passenger ran after the train for seven kilometers, but couldn’t catch up with it. At the next station the man was given help.
“The 42-year-old man survived by sheer luck,” the Interior Ministry’s local transport department reported on Friday. An investigation into the matter has been launched, and police are trying to ascertain whether what happened was an accident, or whether a train attendant forgot to close the door out of neglect.
The man turned out to be a driver working under a rotation system. “He is feeling fine, has already started working, and has suffered no bodily harm. Certainly, he had been very scared, but got over the shock,” the man’s employer said. The train was traveling from Moscow to Nerungri. The average winter temperatures in the area measure around -30°C.
William Cody
William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody
A portrait of William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody
who was born in Iowa but grew up in Leavenworth, Kansas. During the
Civil War, William served in the 7th Kansas Cavalry Regiment. Later, he
was chief of scouts for the Third Cavalry during the Indian Wars. He
claimed to have worked many jobs, but he became world famous for his
Wild West show. He got his nickname for supplying Kansas Pacific
Railroad workers with bison meat.
Magnificent Ceilings From Around The World
40 in fact
Stairways That Lead Nowhere
22 of them in Fact
They get your mind going, spurring you to imagine secret places and invisible doors. Try climbing the next one you encounter. Or just imagine climbing these.
The Mick Jagger Flower
Affectionately known as Hot lips, Psychotria elata with it’s colorful red flowers attracts many pollinators including butterflies and hummingbirds. One of the host plants for the golden silkmoth (Xlophanes adalia). Also known in some circles as Mick Jagger’s lips. Native to Tropical America, this specimen was found at the Butterfly Gardens in Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica.
What REAL Snowflakes in Nature Look Like
Researchers at the University of Utah utilized high speed cameras to shoot 3D images of snowflakes as they float to the ground. The camera, dubbed the Multi Angle Snowflake Camera, can take exposures as quick as 1/25,000th of a second. They discovered that most snowflakes in nature are complex clumps of many smaller flakes that stuck to each other.
The findings could be useful, too:
The images could be used to better understand snowfall and create a more accurate model of winter storms. One of the things weather simulations are not currently good at is predicting snowfall accurately. "The reason they do so badly is because they don't represent snowflakes very well, because they are based on measurements of snowflakes that were done, painstakingly, by hand in the 1970s,” Garrett explained. “They were able to collect maybe a few thousand snowflakes. I knew the guy who did it and he felt he needed to get glasses because of this project."Read more about it over at Tech News Daily.
Incredible Frozen Waterfalls Around The World
The Evolutionary Biology Of Star Trek
Did all those human groups meet at some point? Did they interbreed or kill each other? Is it even appropriate to call them all human, or were some human and some animals?
Star Trek has the answers to these questions. And they are just as tangled and frustrating in science fiction as they are in real evolutionary science.
Beaming Mona Lisa to the Moon
NASA scientists digitized the famous painting and sent it almost 240,000 miles away to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter using laser pulses from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland:
For last March's Mona Lisa maneuver, researchers encoded a black-and-white version of Leonardo da Vinci's enigmatic masterpiece as a series of values in a 152-by-200-pixel grid. Each value represented a shade of black to gray to white, ranging from zero to 4,095. The signal for each pixel was then piggybacked on the ranging station's laser-tracking pulses: Each pulse was fired during one of 4,096 super-short designated time slots, at a rate of about 300 bits per second.300 bits per second? That's a 300 baud modem! Definitely not broadband.
As the pulses were received in lunar orbit, LOLA's software used the precise timing of each pulse to figure out the grayscale value for a given pixel — and reassembled the black-and-white image. The process wasn't perfect: Atmospheric turbulence introduced laser transmission errors, even when the sky was clear. To accommodate the 15 percent error rate, the researchers used Reed-Solomon data coding, which is the same method used to smooth out the bumps in the playback of CDs and DVDs.
Alan Boyle of NBC's Cosmic Log blog explains: Here. | SPACE.com has the video clip explaining how they did it: Here.
Manatee Nebula
Sea Cow in Space!
When scientists took a new image of the W50 nebula in the constellation Aquila, a remnant of a supernova 10,000 years ago, someone at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory remarked that it looks like a manatee floating on its back.
The name stuck, and the W50 nebula is being renamed during a ceremony today at the Florida Manatee Festival in Crystal River, Fla.: More
Animals Caught Doping Show No Remorse
All levels of the animal kingdom from flies to top predators
indulge in drugs and alcohol. Sometimes humans even push intoxicants on
the creatures.
Hundreds Of Sheep Branded With Smiley Face
Pranksters are being blamed for the bizarre branding - but some internet users are convinced aliens are responsible. Farmers, meanwhile, are scratching their heads - wondering why their flocks have been targeted.
Young red deer finds new home among flock of sheep
A young red deer has joined a flock
of sheep on the Suffolk coast and seems to have been adopted. The deer appears to have lost his herd and joined 100 sheep which graze on
National Trust land at Dunwich Heath and Orford Ness in Suffolk.
Andrew Capell, the flock's shepherd, said: "I've been involved with sheep all my life but I've never seen deer interact with them. They seem to have accepted him as one of their own."
The buck joined the sheep after the flock was moved from the Orford Ness National Nature Reserve in early December. "He seems to be happy living with the sheep and has made a few friends, but he comes and goes and hops over the fence to visit them when he likes," said Mr Capell.
"He's found some animals which are his own size and there is a bit of a pecking order within the flock and he'll be bottom rung at the moment." The National Trust said it hoped the deer would re-join its herd if it roamed past the flock of sheep.
Andrew Capell, the flock's shepherd, said: "I've been involved with sheep all my life but I've never seen deer interact with them. They seem to have accepted him as one of their own."
The buck joined the sheep after the flock was moved from the Orford Ness National Nature Reserve in early December. "He seems to be happy living with the sheep and has made a few friends, but he comes and goes and hops over the fence to visit them when he likes," said Mr Capell.
"He's found some animals which are his own size and there is a bit of a pecking order within the flock and he'll be bottom rung at the moment." The National Trust said it hoped the deer would re-join its herd if it roamed past the flock of sheep.
Friday, January 18, 2013
The Daily Drift
Yeah, we're like that ...
Some of our reader today have been in:
Taytay, Philippines
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Baghdad, Iraq
Seremban, Malaysia
Banjul, Gambia
Cape Town, South Africa
Kampala, Uganda
Hanoi, Vietnam
Karachi, Pakistan
Petalina Jaya, Malaysia
Naples, Italy
Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia
Tiraspol, Modolva
Slough, England
Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
Amman, Jordan
Rivonia, South Africa
Warsaw, Poland
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Riyadh, Saudi Abraia
Yerevan, Armenia
Johannesburg, South Africa
Pekanbaru, Indonesia
Kampot, Cambodia
San Pedro, Philippines
Aberdeen, Scotland
Novi Sad, Serbia
Jakarta, Indonesia
Manila, Philippines
Belgrade, Serbia
Sialkot, Pakistan
Edinburgh, Scotland
Kuwait, Kuwait
Ankara, Turkey
Algiers, Algeria
Kiev, Ukraine
Sofia, Bulgaria
Minsk, Belarus
Tirana, Albania
Maharagama, Sri Lanka
Slavutich, Ukraine
Izmir, Turkey
Jawa, Indonesia
Niagara Falls, Canada
Katowice, Poland
Makati, Philippines
Port-Of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
Lahore, Pakistan
Beirut, Lebanon
Chrzanow, Poland
Islamabad, Pakistan
Burnaby, Canada
Asaba, Nigeria
Today is Pooh (Winnie, The) Day
Don't forget to visit our sister blog!
Today in History
| 1486 | Henry VII marries Elizabeth of York. | |
| 1701 | Frederick III, the elector of Brandenburg, becomes king of Prussia. | |
| 1778 | Captain James Cook discovers the Hawaiian Islands, naming them the 'Sandwich Islands' after the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich. | |
| 1836 | Jim Bowie arrives at the Alamo to assist its Texas defenders. | |
| 1862 | John Tyler, former president of the U.S., is buried at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond. | |
| 1902 | The Isthmus Canal Commission in Washington shifts its support from Nicaragua to Panama as a favored canal site. | |
| 1910 | Aviator Eugene Ely performs his first successful take off and landing from a ship in San Francisco. | |
| 1916 | The Russians force the Turkish 3rd Army back to Erzurum. | |
| 1942 | General MacArthur repels the Japanese in Bataan. The United States took the lead in the Far East war criminal trials. | |
| 1945 | The German Army launches its second attempt to relieve the besieged city of Budapest from the advancing Red Army. | |
| 1948 | Ghandi breaks a 121-hour fast after halting Muslem-Hindu riots. | |
| 1962 | The United States begins spraying foliage with herbicides in South Vietnam, in order to reveal the whereabouts of Vietcong guerrillas. | |
| 1964 | Plans are disclosed for the World Trade Center in New York. | |
| 1978 | The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) isolate the cause of Legionnaire's disease. | |
| 1991 | Iraq starts firing Scud missiles at Israeli cities. |
The repugicans Call Him a Dictator, But Obama Has Issued Fewest Executive Orders in 100 Years
Republicans immediately and predictably went off the rails as soon as the president mentioned executive action and guns. Rep. Paul Broun said, “There is a tremendous potential for a horrendous public backlash against the president if he continues the policies that he has been doing of trying to go around Congress, create law and be a dictator like he’s been doing.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (r-FL) accused the president of abusing his power, “Making matters worse is that President Obama is again abusing his power by imposing his policies via executive fiat instead of allowing them to be debated in Congress. President Obama’s frustration with our republic and the way it works doesn’t give him license to ignore the Constitution.”
Rep. Darrell Issa said, “The president’s imperial behavior and his abuse of power didn’t begin with the Second Amendment. He did it with immigration. He’s certainly done it with the Obamacare. So, once again, it’s a president exceeding his intended authority.”
A funny thing happened on the way to Obama is dictator who is taking away all of guns Republican Memeville. New York Magazine crunched the numbers of presidential executive orders and concluded that this president has issued the fewest executive orders of any president over the last 100 years. Every Republican president signed more executive orders than Barack Obama has. On an order per day basis, Obama has issued fewer EOs than every single repugican president over the past century.
This fact will not stop repugicans from claiming that President Obama is stealing their rights, but it does demonstrate how far apart perception and reality are for the right. With their comments today, repugicans demonstrated that they are more interested in name calling and scoring political points with their base than seriously discussing the root causes of gun violence.
The right is still feeding their myth of the imaginary imperial dictator Obama, and everything this president does will be viewed through their collective Obama delusion.
The tea party’s Intolerable Acts Are a Parting Shot from George III
The tea party’s Inspiration: King George III.
The repugicans are wedded to their theories of government (aka
liberal) tyranny but all the evidence, and I do mean the entirety of the
available evidence, demonstrates that tyranny is imposed not by the
political left but by the political right.We have actual and ongoing examples in both Wisconsin and Michigan of what repugican governance looks like, and it’s not pretty. It is the suppression of the will of the people, in complete violation of everything the United States stands for: that political power derives from the will of the people.
According to tea party political philosophy, political power derives from corporations, plutocrats, and religious fanatics. These oligarchs have a message for you: “Fuck you.” And ironically, given Tea Party pretensions, that is precisely the attitude of King George III in 1774.
In fact, despite all the talk about Obama acting like George III, it is the tea party that has embraced the imperial British heritage. The Colonists in the days, weeks, and months leading up to the Revolution were literally up in arms over the Massachusetts Government Act of May 20, 1774.
Kevin Philips in his 1775: A Good Year for Revolution (2012) describes the effect of this measure:
The Massachusetts Charter of 1691 was eviscerated. Key provisions of the new statute all but eliminated town meetings, ended locally chosen juries, gave the governor sole power to appoint and remove judges, and transferred the selection of the Governor’s Council, the upper legislative house, from elected representatives to Crown appointees.Is the first thing that comes to your mind the tea party rape of Michigan democracy? PoliticusUSA has extensively covered the imposition of tea party tyranny in Michigan, which just as did the Massachusetts Government Act, ignore the will of the people.
Even when the outrageous use of “emergency managers,” analogous to the Crown’s appointment of judges and legislators, were overwhelmingly revoked by the people, the governor ignored the vote – simply pretended it hadn’t happened. Governor Rick Snyder and the tea party have no more interest in what the people want than did George III and his ministers.
The colonists, for reasons you can readily understand, called this act and others like it the Intolerable Acts. And they were intolerable. The suspension of local democracy is a serious matter because Democracy is not imposed from the top down but created from the bottom up. The repugicans know this, which is why they are so intent on destroying it at the local level through imposition of the very [heavy-handed] government they claim to hate.
These acts are just as intolerable today. And they are no more an expression of the popular will in 2012 than they were in 1774, but rather the act of a tyrannical and authoritarian mindset intent on imposing the will of a powerful minority on the majority.
For the British, the Intolerable Acts were the Coercive Acts, a no more inspiring if somewhat more precise name for the legislation. The Coercive Acts (the others were the Quartering Act, the Boston Port Bill, the Administration of Justice Act, and the Quebec Act) were meant to do just that: coerce the colonists into obedience.
The tea party laws in Wisconsin and Michigan (and elsewhere; these two states are merely the most complete examples) trace their lineage directly back to the Prime Minister, Lord North, who said that the Massachusetts Government Act was intended “to take the executive power from the hands of the democratic part of government.” In other words, as Black Liberal Boomer put it, “Strangle Blue States [or colonies] in the Crib.”
As a result, the Tea Party adoption of patriot flags and garb is not only hypocritical; it is nothing short of obscene. Christopher Gladsen could never have imagined his “Don’t Tread on Me” flag would be used not as an expression of liberty, but of tyranny.
Yet again and again repugicans like Rand Paul, insist that it is the Democrats who are behaving in a tyrannical fashion. It does not matter that most of what they say is composed of lies, often old lies that have been retold countless times and proven false on each and every occasion. And they have proven that, if thwarted, there is no limit to what they will stoop to in revenge.
World Net Daily is, no surprise, a hotbed of such stupidity. But they are hardly alone. Faux News reaches a far wider market and is only a little less absurdist in its claims, and there is also Breitbart.com and The Blaze, Drudge Report, and others. All of them would have you believe that conservatives champion liberty while liberals want to impose tyranny.
The fact is that conservatism is not about liberty, but about maintenance of the status quo, which is often diametrically opposed to the concept of liberty (the continuation of slavery and the disenfranchisement of women being two notable examples). Liberalism, on the other hand, is about liberty, about the granting, not the suppression of rights. Liberty demands that people of all ethnic and religious backgrounds and economic statuses have the same rights, which is, after all, what the Constitution grants them.
Every law restricting this right to equality comes from the repugican cabal, whether it is limiting your right to employment, equal pay, free exercise of speech or religion, or even voting.
That is when the repugicans have charge of any government local, state, or Federal. Where they lack complete authority, as in the President and Senate, they foment rebellion, and quite openly. Just as the colonies were in revolt well before the Declaration of Independence in 1776 (as King George III recognized in October, 1774 when he forbade the export of war supplies to the Colonies), the repugican cabal is already in revolt against the parts of the Federal government it does not control. The current scramble to obtain firearms can be likened to the colonist’s mad scramble to obtain both firearms and powder in 1774 and 1775. Americans waiting for the ball to drop do not realize that it has already fallen.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine in The American Crisis during the winter of 1776. If the American Revolution, as opposed to the American War for Independence has never ended, as some have argued, those words are doubly applicable today, as we face the long-awaiting counter-revolution of conservatism.
Michelle Bachmann stiffs her campaign staff, they retaliate by ratting to the feds
[Peter Waldron, a widely known evangelist enlisted by the Bachmann campaign for outreach to Christian conservatives], formerly Bachmann's national field coordinator, is accusing the campaign of improperly dipping into money from MichelePAC to pay longtime fundraising consultant Guy Short for presidential campaign work he performed in the critical final weeks ahead of Iowa's caucuses last year.
Waldron also alleges that the campaign concealed payments to Iowa state campaign chairman Kent Sorenson, a state senator who abruptly left the Bachmann camp to join then-U.S. Rep. Ron Paul's insurgent campaign. Under Iowa Senate rules, Waldron maintains, Sorenson could not perform paid work for a presidential campaign.
...One of those involved in the payment dispute is Barbara Heki, who sued the campaign last year over the use of a database listing the names and e-mail addresses of thousands of Christian home-school families. Although the campaign eventually agreed to pay $2,000 for the list, the lawsuit continues, as does a separate criminal investigation.
CEOs insist Americans need to work until 70
Nothing says “shared sacrifice” quite like a rich guy telling everyone else they need to work longer.We already know that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson have spent a lifetime living off of government money, yet now want to cut that money for everyone else.
We have also heard Wall Street leaders promote cuts to the social system, while ignoring their own multi-billion dollar handouts. And the $182 billion handout queen from AIG, from the comfort of his Mediterranean villa, let everyone know that maybe Americans needed to work until they were 70 or 80.
Now we have more pampered American CEOs daring to step forward and insist on other Americans working harder and longer. How thoughtful of them.
One of those CEO’s is AT&T’s Randall Stephenson. He also thinks that Americans need to work until they are 70 years old. Stephenson received a $2.08 million pay cut – that’s right, a cut – last year for a failed deal on his watch. Most Americans won’t make $2.08 million in their lifetime, let along have their pay cut by that much.
Stephenson still made out okay though, coming in at $22 million for the year. He’s probably going to retire with the usual benefits that are denied regular workers, but yes, he thinks you need to work longer. Over the last five years, Stephenson has made $81.29 million, according to Forbes.
What the pampered 1% somehow misses is that corporate profits are roaring to record levels. Yes, under the far left-wing, Hugo Chavez-loving, rebirth of Stalin and Hitler administration of Barack Obama, corporate profits have out performed the Reagan years. Yes, a Marxist like Obama out performed Saint Reagan!
But no, this isn’t enough for the likes of Stephenson, Blankfein,
Bowles and Simpson, who see the need for the middle class to get their
act together and work harder. It’s a bit like the old joke from the days
of the Soviet Union, when Moscow would wire countries like Vietnam or
Cuba and say it was time they had to tighten their belts. The response
would be: “send belts.”
If only today’s corporate executives were trying to be funny. Sadly, they’re quite serious, which only proves how out of touch they truly are.
Unemployment rates for older workers currently remain lower than for younger workers, but when an older worker loses a job, finding a new job can take almost a year. This is a real problem. As more Millenials (a very large group) come into the work force, they are also likely to put pressure on the system, and older workers may be forced out to make room. We just don’t know.
In addition, we have seen exploding healthcare costs and stagnating earnings for most people, other than the pampered 1% executives and elite government workers (like Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson) who are set with health insurance and other retirement benefits that are far beyond what most workers see today. When is the last time you met someone who went into a new job that actually had a good retirement program (or any at all), besides a Wall Street giveaway 401K?
How legitimate is it to accept the word of some of the most privileged that have everything to gain financially by squeezing the middle class? When is enough enough for them, and for us?
All of us are equal, but some of us are more equal than others.
CNBC:
We have also heard Wall Street leaders promote cuts to the social system, while ignoring their own multi-billion dollar handouts. And the $182 billion handout queen from AIG, from the comfort of his Mediterranean villa, let everyone know that maybe Americans needed to work until they were 70 or 80.
One of those CEO’s is AT&T’s Randall Stephenson. He also thinks that Americans need to work until they are 70 years old. Stephenson received a $2.08 million pay cut – that’s right, a cut – last year for a failed deal on his watch. Most Americans won’t make $2.08 million in their lifetime, let along have their pay cut by that much.
Stephenson still made out okay though, coming in at $22 million for the year. He’s probably going to retire with the usual benefits that are denied regular workers, but yes, he thinks you need to work longer. Over the last five years, Stephenson has made $81.29 million, according to Forbes.
What the pampered 1% somehow misses is that corporate profits are roaring to record levels. Yes, under the far left-wing, Hugo Chavez-loving, rebirth of Stalin and Hitler administration of Barack Obama, corporate profits have out performed the Reagan years. Yes, a Marxist like Obama out performed Saint Reagan!
U.S. corporations’ after-tax profits have grown by 171 percent under Obama, more than under any president since World War II, and are now at their highest level relative to the size of the economy since the government began keeping records in 1947, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Profits are more than twice as high as their peak during President Ronald Reagan’s administration and more than 50 percent greater than during the late-1990s Internet boom, measured by the size of the economy.
If only today’s corporate executives were trying to be funny. Sadly, they’re quite serious, which only proves how out of touch they truly are.
Unemployment rates for older workers currently remain lower than for younger workers, but when an older worker loses a job, finding a new job can take almost a year. This is a real problem. As more Millenials (a very large group) come into the work force, they are also likely to put pressure on the system, and older workers may be forced out to make room. We just don’t know.
In addition, we have seen exploding healthcare costs and stagnating earnings for most people, other than the pampered 1% executives and elite government workers (like Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson) who are set with health insurance and other retirement benefits that are far beyond what most workers see today. When is the last time you met someone who went into a new job that actually had a good retirement program (or any at all), besides a Wall Street giveaway 401K?
How legitimate is it to accept the word of some of the most privileged that have everything to gain financially by squeezing the middle class? When is enough enough for them, and for us?
All of us are equal, but some of us are more equal than others.
CNBC:
Executives of the Business Roundtable are urging Congress to raise the Social Security and Medicare age eligibility to 70, from the current 67 [sic], and to adopt means testing for wealthier retirees, in order to keep the entitlement programs solvent longer-term.Let them eat cake, Mr. Stephenson?
“When you look long-term at the U.S. fiscal health, you have to look at these questions,” said Business Roundtable President John Engler during meeting with reporters in Washington Tuesday.
“It’s the power of compound savings here,” said Randall Stephenson, chairman and CEO of AT&T, and vice chair of the group’s health and retirement committee. “If you start to save now, it really adds up.”
Did you know ...
That Joe Biden has become the most influential vice president in history
That Obama created a new national park
That conspiracy theorists (read: lunatic fruitcakes) who believe that the Sandy Hook victims were actors hired by the government
That Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o does not have a dead girlfriend
That christian fundamentalists (read: lunatic fruitcakes) freak out over yoga in the military
A Minnesota union leader says tax the rich and raise welfare grants
That the NRA had a less-than-1% rate of return for investors in the last election
We all know that comment trolls suck, but now there's scientific proof!
That Obama created a new national park
That conspiracy theorists (read: lunatic fruitcakes) who believe that the Sandy Hook victims were actors hired by the government
That Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o does not have a dead girlfriend
That christian fundamentalists (read: lunatic fruitcakes) freak out over yoga in the military
A Minnesota union leader says tax the rich and raise welfare grants
That the NRA had a less-than-1% rate of return for investors in the last election
We all know that comment trolls suck, but now there's scientific proof!
US commandos boost numbers to train Mexican forces
Such assistance could help newly elected Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto
establish a military force to focus on drug criminal networks that have
terrorized Mexico's northern states and threatened the U.S. Southwest
border. Mexican officials say warring drug gangs have killed at least 70,000 people between 2006 and 2012.
Based at the U.S. Northern
Command in Colorado, Special Operations Command-North will build on a
commando program that has brought Mexican military,
intelligence and law enforcement officials to study U.S.
counterterrorist operations, to show them how special operations troops
built an interagency network to target al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin
Laden and his followers.
The special operations team within Northcom will be turned into a new headquarters,
led by a general instead of a colonel. It was established in a Dec. 31
memo signed by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. That move gives the group
more autonomy and the number of people could eventually quintuple from
30 to 150, meaning the headquarters could expand its training missions
with the Mexicans, even though no new money is being assigned to the
mission.
The special operations program has already helped Mexican officials
set up their own intelligence center in Mexico City to target criminal
networks, patterned after similar centers in war zones built to target
al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Iraq, two current U.S. officials said.Mexican and U.S. military officials played down the change, and it's unclear whether the Mexican government will agree to boost its training.
"We are merely placing a component commander in charge of things we are already doing," said Northcom spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis in a written statement.
Mexico's Foreign Affairs Department emailed a statement saying it had been briefed on the changes and had no further comment
The creation of the new command
marks another expansion of Adm. Bill McRaven's special operations
empire, as he seeks to migrate special operators from their decade of
service in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan to new missions, even as
the rest of the military fights postwar contraction and
multibillion-dollar budget cuts.
The new headquarters will also
coordinate special operations troops when needed for domestic roles like
rescuing survivors after a natural disaster, or helping the U.S. Coast
Guard strike ships carrying suspect cargo just outside U.S. territorial
waters, according to multiple current and former U.S. officials briefed
on the mission. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the
Pentagon has not formally announced the new headquarters.
The initial document petitioning
Panetta for the command stresses the command's role in
military-to-military cooperation with Mexico. The document was signed in
September 2012 by McRaven and Northcom commander Gen. Charles Jacoby.
Northcom's current special
operations training missions are an outgrowth of the Merida Initiative
that was formalized in 2008, to provide extensive military assistance to
Mexico. The extra special-operations staff, including both troops and
civilians, will help coordinate more missions as Mexico requests them,
current and former officials said.
Pena Nieto is likely to welcome
the continued training to help him build and coordinate the forces he
needs to reduce drug violence, according to Rand Corp.'s Dr. Agnes
Gereben Schaefer.
"He has talked about setting up a
paramilitary force...made up of former military and police forces,
which he has described as more surgical," than the current campaign by
Mexican army and police, Schaefer said. He would dispatch the force into
towns that have been overrun by drug violence, where police don't have
the numbers to fight it, she said.
Mexican military, intelligence
and law enforcement chiefs have already toured the Joint Special
Operations Command headquarters at Fort Bragg in North Carolina to see
how U.S. officers coordinate efforts by special operations aircraft,
naval vessels and air- and sea-based raiders, according to one current
military official.
A small group of top Mexican
military and intelligence officials also visited the command's targeting
center at the Balad air base in Iraq before the U.S. troop withdrawal
in 2011, a former U.S. official said.
U.S. officials stress that
sharing this expertise does not mean U.S. special operations teams will
be conducting raids against targets in Mexico, nor will they be entering
the country with their own weapons. Mexico forbids U.S. military or law
enforcement officers from carrying guns inside their borders, with few
exceptions, though American commandos have conducted training missions
in the past, two current and one former U.S. military official said.
They were speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not
authorized to discuss the sensitive missions.
Man murders mom in sacrifice for health of Hugo Chavez
Shipment of 18 human heads intercepted at airport
"Because the shipment's paperwork was not in order, agents confiscated the heads and sent them to the Cook County Medical Examiner for safekeeping." The protective power of antioxidants might be vastly oversold
Scientists are beginning to question the idea that free-radicals cause aging
and, with that, the entire basis of the antioxidant industrial complex.
Maybe, now, everything can stop tasting of acai berries.
This Family Lives on an Ice-Locked Boat in the Arctic.
On Purpose!
They had already spent five years on a boat in the Svalbard Islands north of Norway. That wasn't quite extreme enough for the Brossier family. For two years, they've lived on their 15-meter boat Vagabond in Grise Fiord in northern Canada. At the moment, the boat is ice-locked. But they can handle it:
This is the second year the family has spent in Grise Fiord, but Brossier and his family are no strangers to living on a boat in the Arctic. They also spent five years on a boat near Spitsbergen, which is an island near Norway. Brossier’s eldest daughter was only 12 days old when her parents first brought her on board.“Our neighbours were really the polar bears. I think we saw 800 polar bears in five years so it was not many people,” he said. [...]
“We live here without any agenda and without any tight schedule. When you start something you have time to finish it,” he said. “Of course there are some things we cannot do. We miss mainly our families but we are already with our own little family… and it’s easier nowadays to keep in touch with Skype and the internet.”
De-frosting a building-sized refrigerator
But first, the new owners had to defrost it.
The Fulton Market Cold Storage building has ice-covered walls for the same reason a freezer can get covered in hard, packed ice. When you put something into a freezer — say, a giant slab of beef fresh from a slaughterhouse — that thing contains moisture. There's liquid trapped inside it. Over time, especially if it's not sealed very well, that moisture will turn into water vapor in the air. When temperature changes cause that vapor to condense back into liquid, it instantly freezes — turning to ice anywhere it touches.
In your fridge at home, that's just an annoyance. At the Fulton Market Cold Storage building, it was epic.
Besides the video linked above, you should really check out the amazing photos taken for the ice, pre-melt, by photographer Gary Jensen.
Warp Speed
What Hyperspace Would Really Look Like
Where Did the Phrase 'Caught Red Handed' Come From?
Given how it was used in the earliest references, the phrase 'red hand'
or 'redhand' probably referred to people caught with blood on their
hands from murder or poaching. The first documented mention of 'red hand' is in the Scottish Acts of Parliament of James I, written in 1432.
Useful words with no English equivalent
Surprisingly, they're not all long, Germanic compound words (generally a font of useful no-equivalent words):
8. Tartle (Scots)Tartle is something I often experience, because I'm really, embarrassingly terrible with names.
The nearly onomatopoeic word for that panicky hesitation just before you have to introduce someone whose name you can't quite remember.
9. Koi No Yokan (Japanese)
The sense upon first meeting a person that the two of you are going to fall in love.
10. Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego)
This word captures that special look shared between two people, when both are wishing that the other would do something that they both want, but neither want to do.
Utensils probably gave us all overbites
According to a new book, the human overbite developed at different
times, in different places — and was always coincident with the
widespread use of eating utensils. In Europe, for instance, evidence suggests that humans have only had an overbite for about 250 years. —
Seven Out of Ten Most Air-Polluted Cities Are in China
The air-quality monitoring device atop the United States
Embassy in Beijing had recorded the highest pollution levels yet.
Deforestation Robs Amazon Soil of Life
It's not just the animals in the forest that are robbed of
their home due to deforestation, microbial diversity is lost as well.
Global Warming Brings Earlier Spring Flowers
The warmest springs on record have caused flowers in two historic sites to bloom at their earliest dates in decades.
Ten Spectacular Volcanic Plugs and Natural Monoliths
Look at this huge limestone pillar -and there's a little church on top! The only way to get there is by ladder. It's in the village of Katskhi in western Georgia (the European one). There are many monoliths like this around the world, and for some reason, people always want to build something on top. See ten such sites at The World Geography.
Ancient 'Killer Walrus' Not So Deadly After All
An artist's rendition of the extinct walrus, Pelagiarctos thomasi
A new analysis of fossil evidence of the prehistoric beast shows it was more of a fish-eater than an apex predator with a bone-crushing bite.
Traces of the middle Miocene walrus, named Pelagiarctos thomasi, were first found in the 1980s in the Sharktooth Hill bone bed of California. A chunk of a robust jawbone and sharp pointed teeth, which resembled those of the bone-cracking hyena, led researchers to believe the walrus ripped apart birds and other marine mammals in addition to the fish that modern walruses eat today.
But a more complete lower jaw and teeth from the long-gone species were recently discovered in the Topanga Canyon Formation near Los Angeles. Researchers say the shape of the teeth from this new specimen suggest the walrus was unlikely adapted to regularly feed on large prey. Instead, they think it was a generalist predator, feasting on fish, invertebrates and the occasional warm-blooded snack.
"When we examined the new specimen and the original fossils, we found that the teeth really weren't that sharp at all — in fact, the teeth looked like scaled-up versions of the teeth of a much smaller sea lion," researcher Robert Boessenecker, a geology doctoral student at the University of Otago in New Zealand, told the PLOS ONE Community Blog.
Using a model to estimate body size based on the size of the jaw, Boessenecker and Morgan Churchill of the University of Wyoming found that Pelagiarctos was quite large — about 770 pounds (350 kilograms), or similar in size to some modern male sea lions. But they noted that a big body alone likely wouldn't indicate that the species was a dominant predator. That's because both large and small modern species in the pinniped family — which includes seals, sea lions and walruses — are dietary generalists that tend to eat mostly fish.
Boessenecker added that the new findings give a clearer picture of the modern walrus' evolutionary past.
"Right now, there is only one modern walrus species but back then, walruses were a very diverse group," the researcher told the PLOS blog. "Many of these other extinct walruses had strange adaptations — such as the development of upper and lower tusks, gigantic body size, ultradense bones, unusually short forelimbs, and even the loss of all teeth aside from tusks. The myriad types of extinct walruses — Pelagiarctos included — beautifully demonstrate the often convoluted path that evolution can take."
Chimps Have a Sense of Fairness
Chimps and humans have a similar sense of fairness, a new study shows.
The findings, published today (Jan. 14) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that humans and chimpanzees may share an evolved sense of fairness common to many cooperative species, said lead study author Darby Proctor, a primatologist at Emory University.
"If you're involved in some cooperative act you need to be sure you're engaging in something that's beneficial to you," Proctor told LiveScience. "Comparing your rewards with others' seems like it would be really, really important."
Fair and square
In a classic economic trial called the ultimatum game, people are given $100 and can give some fraction of it to an anonymous partner they'll never see again. The recipients can reject the offer if they don't like it, in which case both people get nothing.
Rationally, the "smart" response would be to take any offer, no matter how low, but participants routinely reject offers lower than $10 or $20, said Manfred Milinski, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany, who was not involved in the study. Most people offer around $40 to their partners and in some countries, people offer more than half of the money to partners, Milinski told LiveScience.
Selfish apes
But past studies of the ultimatum game in chimpanzees (with raisins) had suggested our closest living relatives were "rational maximizers" who would accept even the stingiest offering without getting ruffled. They even accepted zero-raisin offers without even a squawk. That suggested their main goal — getting more tasty raisins — overrode any meager sense of fairness they may have had.
Those studies, however, instantly started a new round of the game if the apes accepted, but made them wait a full minute after rejecting the offer, raising the possibility that the apes realized it was more fruitful to accept quickly to get more raisins, rather than rejecting low-ball offers.
Chimps and children
In the new study, the team trained the primates to dole out tokens that stood for bananas, with one token symbolizing an equal split, while the other was an unfair deal that benefitted the first chimp. (See a Video of Chimps' Ultimatum Game)
No chimp recipients rejected unfair offers, but they did occasionally hiss, spit or shout at unequal distributions. One recipient even spit a mouthful of water at its partner, Proctor said.
At first the chimps were stingy, but very quickly, they switched to offering equitable splits in the ultimatum game.
To test the method, the researchers had 3- to 5-year-old children participate in a similar experiment using stickers instead of bananas. The little ones started out greedy but quickly offered the tokens for fairer distributions of stickers. And those who got a raw deal complained.
"Their reactions struck me as very similar to the chimps," Proctor said. "They would say things like 'You got more stickers than me,' or 'I want more stickers.'"
The findings suggest chimp and human sense of fairness aren't so different, Milinski said.
"I am not surprised we are so similar to chimps. We are not unique," Milinski told LiveScience.
Fisherman caught giant goldfish in lake
A giant goldfish was caught in Lake St. Clair, between the Province of Ontario and the State of Michigan, last Friday. Mike Martin loves to fish. He has been fishing for 20 years. "First one I've ever caught and I fish it religiously," said Martin.
"We see them all the time but, to actually catch them is rare," he said. "Everybody wants to just dump them off their seawall and let them be free and this is what they turn into."
The fish was over 3 pounds and nearly 15 inches long. Martin caught it while ice fishing for perch. He says he thought it was just a big perch on the line before he saw what it really was. "Definitely not a perch," he said.
YouTube link.
Martin says he called his father after the catch "I didn't know what to do with it, what do you do with a goldfish?" His father told him to put it in a bucket and take it home. "This will probably be the only one I ever catch so he's going to go on the wall," said Martin.
"We see them all the time but, to actually catch them is rare," he said. "Everybody wants to just dump them off their seawall and let them be free and this is what they turn into."
The fish was over 3 pounds and nearly 15 inches long. Martin caught it while ice fishing for perch. He says he thought it was just a big perch on the line before he saw what it really was. "Definitely not a perch," he said.
Martin says he called his father after the catch "I didn't know what to do with it, what do you do with a goldfish?" His father told him to put it in a bucket and take it home. "This will probably be the only one I ever catch so he's going to go on the wall," said Martin.
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