Category: interesting

Create a stampede to your next product launch with cattle car advertising!

This press release from Europe’s RyanAir is your first warning that eye-level billboards are on the way to your favorite airline too. via ironic sans

“We are delighted to be the first Brand to market with this new advertising medium… The Aeropanel® offers a unique and exciting advertising format in an uncluttered, relaxed and comfortable environment.”

Still horrified, always supportive of victims around the world, I am deeply saddened by the humiliation priests and pedophiles have delivered to all adults.

Newsweek shows us a new coloring book published by the Roman Catholic Church:

“If a child and an adult happen to be alone, someone should know where they are, and the door should be open or have a big window in it.”

The Daily Coyote will keep you posted as Charlie grows up.

“Charlie is a wild-born coyote who was unexpectedly delivered to my doorstep this past April after both his parents were shot for killing sheep.

“Whatever reservations I had about raising a wild animal simply didn’t matter – couldn’t matter – when I realized his survival, at least in the short term, depended on me.”

There are short clips of Charlie, including sharing dinner with Eli, his tomcat buddy, and affectionately kissing young calves.

“I have no expectations regarding how long he will be with me.

“It totally depends on Charlie, and what his needs and desires prove to be.

‘I’ve been telling myself since day one that it is unlikely he will stay with me – if it is best for him to be wild and free, I would never ‘keep him for myself,’ and there are places where I could safely set him loose.”

Before Shreve Stockton plucked Charlie from danger, before she moved to a one-room Wyoming cabin 60 miles from a grocery store, she bought a Vespa and drove it from San Francisco to New York. Vespa Vagabond follows her solo adventure from August 1st to October 1st 2005, as she says, “fully immersed in the thrill, the ecstasy, the unknown.” Shreve is a sensitive photographer, IMHO, editing with scissor’s willingness to crop her photographs.

Shreve’s pics bring us warmly close to Charlie. Consider supporting her efforts with paypal. She’s created a neat gift idea: Charlie’s 2008 calender, the only calendar commemorating a 10 day old baby coyote.

via Dooce
via Janet Lee Johnson

Where does our money go?

After more than two hundred years dedicated to growth, hard work and prosperity, why are we sinking, carrying the shame of millions in poverty, worried for our children, afraid of next month, and listening to silly oligarchs tell us to polish, well, to accept their limitless credit cards?

Launching our trillion dollar death machine might be, might be, keeping us alive, and may require $3,000 toilet seats. Who really knows? But building an American plutonomy where we fail to be rational about managing huge and concentrated government budgets is slowly maiming us.

A trillion here and there
We’re spending, we’re overspending, and we do not know where our money goes. Each one of a trillion dollars that fails its purpose is reducing us, and in too many cases may shorten our lives too.

We’re overspending not because we support the poor, the ill, the old, young children, or immigrants; not because our water is clean, our environment is green, our roads are smooth, our schools and buildings are strong or our neighborhoods are safe. We need these services for a livable nation.

We overspend because our money is not under our control.

Choose any day. In any thousand public and corporate offices we are being pilfered – money siphoned away because of poor performance, lax control, trickery and outright fraud.

There are few audits, less evaluation, and piddling efforts to keep us informed. Not one local, state or federal representative is on the evening news each day to tell us about the success of a spending program or that we’ve achieved new benchmarks in sensibility. Count ’em. Send me their names. Instead we learn we’re buying FEMA trailers at the price of McMansions.

A cost overrun needs only the time it takes to get a piece of the funding. We provide windfall riches to hustlers of every type at all levels, from toilets seats to treatment plants to water systems that span across our continent. We’re flooded in worry and increased burden because our vaults are leaking.

Homeland Infrastructure
It’s recently fashionable to build a costly local army in every village; to hastily post boot-camp recruits in every factory, tank farm and under every bridge. But this is not the first time we’ve spent large. We took a ride erecting America’s infrastructure. We worried about the mayor’s cousin painting the town’s offices once a year. We established a generation of procedures to prevent three tons of cement sold as thirty. But we don’t use these rules today, or if we do, we don’t know why they’re ineffective.

The mid- to late 20th Century seems quaint compared to today. We didn’t have teams of highly paid, astutely trained and institutionalized hustlers with a cellphone and a plane ticket on every nearby golf course while they subserviently steer every deal into the pockets of controlling shareholders.

Today we might be bilking ourselves as we purchase an a la carte menu of sweat-proof shoulder badges, shopping mall munition sniffers, nursery school taser training, street corner frown and twitch behavior specialists, and rebuilding convention resorts to bomb-proof the meeting rooms for our security planners.

Future spending might bring us the least while we build an invasive security fiefdom where white pick-up trucks roam to detect outgassing from our front porches. Any mosquito you see tomorrow might be the latest spy robot from a platinum funded research program that cost us billions, and consumed a million of our kids on our credit-card’s tuition for science training. But these mosquito keep us alive, maybe.

The Effective Dollar
What truly might cost more than any item in the budgets of this country is that we don’t get what we pay for.

Not bridges. Not schools. Not insurance. Not even peaches or cookies. Certainly not school lunches. And this may be why there’s more rich each year while we’re going broke. We’re being hustled. We are supplying more yachts, sandbar Dubai plantations, caviar pedicure and gems on underwear to such a huge layer of new wealth it’s time to see if the mayor is not only contracting his relatives but if he’s also selling himself the paint at profiteering prices.

Enough from me.
The NYTimes hires better writers and a few journalists too.

They also say it’s our simple civilian programs that bankrupt us.

The story at the NYTimes tells us we can go to a pharmacy with $3,500 for an oxygen breathing apparatus, as one example, including a 3 year supply of oxygen in little green canisters. But Medicare will pay $8,280. “Medicare spends billions of dollars each year on products and services that are available at far lower prices from retail pharmacies and online stores.”

For erectile dysfunction, (this post is suddenly spam), a retail penile pump is just over $100, but Medicare spends $450. Now that’s enlargement!

Under the weight of a crustacean
The story tries to explain why Medicare is being hustled.

The paper tells us even minor changes in the rules are “confronted by obstacles” from phone and letter rallies and face-offs with corporations.

But as government works in real life, our leaders and officials are merely confronted with conversation, at dinner perhaps – clobbered by a lobster with enough butter to loosen a billion or more of our tax dollars.

I don’t want one more official telling us they’re being confronted with “political and logistical obstacles” whether arms dealers or physician groups, medical device manufacturers, insurance companies and other businesses. These so-called obstacles are not weapons, just talk, merely compromise and agreement, often over dinner. We’re not invited.

The paper tells us “dozens of industries have tried to harness the political might … for corporate goals.” Harness political might? What is political might except what a politician does and what he doesn’t say?

The purpose of our vote
It’s politicians that encumber our politicians, not rallies or lobbyists.

I don’t want to hear one more politician campaign on morality or religious belief. If their campaign stumps about abortion, it’s clear to me who must be aborted, even if it’s late in their term. We don’t need a politician to harness our morality any more than we should provide a harness to lift that huge lobster on their plate. It’s time they spoke only for all of us and for making better use of our money.

The Penny Party
We need an assembly of voters with nothing to argue about at their convention except why we are losing the prosperity th
at generations died to give us. We need new political goals, keeping our focus only on value and results – and theft, and guile. All our confrontation are belong us.

The fashion of politicians speaking for God has cost us too much.

When the rich steal from the rich, it’s Good Business.
When the rich steal from the rich for the poor, it’s Noblesse Oblige.
When the middle steal from the middle, it’s Corruption.
When the rich and the middle steal from the poor, it’s Fiscal Responsibility.
When the poor steal from the rich and the middle, it’s Crime.
When the poor steal from the poor, it’s Tough Luck.
BH

From the mid- to late 80s, I helped set up biodiesel distribution systems in northern California.

From Procter & Gamble, which was pooling its oilseed farmers across the grain belt, we had millions of gallons ready to ship via cross country rail to tank farms throughout the region.

We went everywhere. Our first fleet targets were to convert the various bus systems of the San Francisco Bay Area to soybean diesel. AC Transit of the East Bay and the Golden Gate bus system of Marin/Sonoma were the most willing. Several federal grants and other incentives were arranged to offset the cost per gallon against high volume commodity diesel fuel.

After many attempts though, after many presentations, reports and meetings, there really was insufficient interest and never a vigorous commitment to adopt new and unfamiliar supplies. Even if managers would leap to the vanguard of ‘green’, ordinary diesel was cheap, and easier. Several administrators chose a few ‘showcase’ projects, but it seemed to me these so-called trials were merely self-satisfying politics; conversations for insider cocktail parties, or new items on a resume.

Many are now realizing that fuel from food crops may not be best in the long term, perhaps neither clean nor sustainable, yet finally San Francisco is trumpeting its new ‘green’.

But they’re actually 20 years late!! Now you know, as it’s said, the rest of the story!

I got a kick out of the shrewd ‘power words’ sprinkled throughout, as if written by savvy politicians and not merely simple reporting at the NYTimes – words such as ‘green fleet’, ‘virgin soy’, ‘friendly fuel’, and these zingers too: ‘toxic diesel’ ‘risk of asthma’, ‘premature death’ !!

ScienceDaily posts a new map of the Internet generated by new algorithms from computer scientists at UC San Diego.

NetworkWeaving looks at the social graph of the Internet.

Restrained by guilt, afraid of malware, nervous about lawsuits, confused in a labyrinth of point and counterpoint about DRM or P2P, what we know about bandwidth is seldom stated this way:

Are those who use less than 1% of the real capacity pirates or are those holding more than 99% of the capacity aside the real pirates?

Who are the heroes and who are the pirates?

These are the days for wondering about religion, politics and war.

“The rise of the West had much less to do with democracy than with the rise of secularism. The West’s advance was chiefly related to the decline in the influence of religion that sought the truth by “looking in” to see what God had to say, and its replacement by looking out, deriving authority from observation, experimentation and exploration.

…
“The inconvenient truth is that the West should be exporting secularism around the world before it exports democracy.

…
“Prosperity comes from secularism, and where you have prosperity you have political and social stability.”

Peter Watson, author of A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind

panty Gattling
panty Gattling

rapid fire panties
panties fired from a machine gun

panties over the rainbow

crotch power

tons of panties per hour

I miss you Marvin.
You are too not spoken.

You cared if I was livin’.
You cared I might be dead.

Even fathers do that.

For fun, we can always ask,
“Is a bell necessary on a bicycle?”

Marvin A. Holt passed away 11/07 at age 94.

Survived by his wife of 57 years, Isabel Holt (a skater with Shipstad and Johnson Ice Follies); sons, Bradley Holt & Reed Holt; 5 grandchildren.

Marvin was a graduate of Gustavus Adolphus and William Mitchell College of Law. He crossed the English Channel as Captain for the 1944 Normandy Invasion and then served in the Judge Advocate Office in Naples, Italy, until September 1945.

In 1951 the army ordered him to report for duty for the Korean War. His wife joined him while he was on duty in Japan. In 1952 he returned to his private law practice. He also, with his wife, were members of the U.S.A. Power Squadron. [obit link]

Booze we own.
Breath is ours.

Drunk isn’t.

Be certain.

Soil is rising.
Dirt is near top of the list of how we’ll reduce the effects of global warming.

Browning the Earth
From an earlier post, ‘Earth without dirt‘, it’s undeniable we will not green the earth until we fix brown.

It’s an exciting time to be a soil scientist because we might manage carbon when we learn dirt.

In the industrial north, conventional farms lose soil about 90 times faster than new soil is produced – 24 billion tons of soil blows or washes away each year. The costs and impacts are enormous.

Across the rest of the world, soil exploitation is the primary contributing factor to desertification.

What’s soil exploitation?

Harvesting crop residues for use as [biofuel in cars], fodder for livestock, fuel for cooking and heating, construction material, and other competing uses is a reality in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, China, and other developing countries.

Therefore, it is not surprising that these are also the regions that have been plagued with severe problems of soil degradation.

After a time, soils do not respond, even to fertilizers.

With demand greater than supply, the first problem of all our problems, Philip Small warns, “The temptation is to mine the soil of its vitality…. “

NYT reports: “In a withering evaluation of the World Bank’s record on African agriculture, the bank’s own internal watchdog concluded in October not only that the removal of subsidies had led to exorbitant fertilizer prices in African countries, but that the bank itself had often failed to recognize that improving Africa’s declining soil quality was essential to lifting food production.”

Yo!
Mekes me a shirt.

BTW, not a bad reminder to fix the Republican Party policy too.

Incisive summary of Facebook:

“It spends my social capital inefficiently, making me look like a doofus. Moreover, it uses up my social capital in ways that don’t benefit me. How long will it take members to figure out that Beacon is a Freudian revelation of a system designed to feed, vampire-like, on your social energy while minimizing the creative latitude you have to grow, add value and collaborate with your peeps?”

Somewhat summarizes, ey?

“In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the question of how people know you,” he says. “When you look at Facebook, you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are.” – Michael Wesch in the NYTimes, via Susan Mernit

William Blake, a pioneer of persons, was born 250 years ago. A commemoration at The Guardian says Blake was ‘poet, prophet and public activist‘.

“Politics today is largely a question of management and administration. Blake, by contrast, viewed the political as inseparable from art, ethics, sexuality and the imagination. It was about the emancipation of desire, not its manipulation.

“Desire for him was an infinite delight, and his whole project was to rescue it from the repressive regime of priests and kings. His sense of how sexuality can turn pathological through repression is strikingly close to Freud’s. To see the body as it really is, free from illusion and ideology, is to see that its roots run down to eternity.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

“Political states keep power by convincing us of our limitations.

“They do so, too, by persuading us to be “moderate”; Blake, however, was not enamored of the third way.

“He sees that Jesus’ ethics are extravagant, hostile to the calculative spirit of the utilitarians. If they ask for your coat, give them your cloak; if they ask you to walk one mile, walk two.

“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, and those who restrain their desires do so because their desires are feeble enough to be restrained.”

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake

Science Daily tells us we may soon lose more than one-quarter of our birds.

I suppose we’ve used the habitat.

This post is cruel. To birds. To us. The raw helplessness of losing wildlife starkly rises against the realization we carpet the earth in our styled civilization. Neither birds nor we could explain what we’ve done or why.

But let’s face it. Humans have abraded the so-called natural earth, and its air. There will be additional incursion too. Scientific American reports a study of increased population showing we’ll jump from today’s 6.5 billion to 10 billion before rates of growth might stabilize.

The most valuable behavior for us is to face reality.

Our curiosity can join our relentless ambition as we create new options.

The world we are coming to has changed. Much damage cannot be reversed, but many of our impacts can be adjusted.

We must enjoy our new challenges. The years ahead are the first of an era. We will learn to live sustainably.

Other than merely you and me, naturally, what kills us?

Over 50 years, there are many causes, more threats, but few studies.

Because there are too few studies, take this analysis with a grain of too few studies, but would you believe violence in our media is #2?

Maybe smoking, but not pollution, not guns.

Media is killing us.

“Exposure to violent electronic media has a larger effect than all but one other well known threat to public health. The only effect slightly larger than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking on lung cancer.”

Go.
Leave.
Find out for yourself.

The egg
The egg at McDonalds

sodium acid pyrophosphate
citric acid
monosodium phosphate
nisin
soybean oil
water
partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil
hydrogenated cottonseed oil
salt
soy lecithin
mono- and diglycerides
sodium benzoate
potassium sorbate
artificial flavor
citric acid
vitamin A palmitate
and beta carotene

Cream
Cream at McDonalds

sodium phosphate
sodium polyphosphate
Di-Acetyl Tartrate Ester of Monoglyceride
sodium stearoyl lactylate
tetra sodium pyrophosphate
sodium hexametaphosphate
sodium citrate
and carrageenan

Chicken
Chicken at BurgerKing

Chicken Breast with Rib Meat, Water, Seasoning (Maltodextrin, Salt, Sugar, Autolyzed Yeast Extract, Garlic Powder, Spices, Natural Flavors, Onion Powder, Modified Corn Starch, Chicken Fat, Chicken Powder, Chicken Broth, Disodium Guanylate and Disodium Inosinate, Citric Acid, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Dehydrated Garlic, and Artificial Flavors.), Modified Corn Starch, Soybean Oil, Salt, Sodium Phosphates. Glazed with: Water, Seasoning [Maltodextrin, Salt, Sugar, Methylcellulose, Autolyzed Yeast Extract, Partially Hydrogenated Sunflower Oil, Modified Potato Starch, Fructose, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Garlic Powder, Onion Powder, Dehydrated Garlic, Spices, Modified Corn Starch, Xanthan Gum, Natural Flavors, Disodium Guanylate and Disodium Inosinate, Chicken Fat, Carmel Color, Grill Flavor (from Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and Cottonseed Oil), Chicken Powder, Chicken Broth, Turmeric, Smoke Flavor, Annatto Extract, and Artificial Flavors], Soybean Oil.

Rice
Rice at Taco Bell

dimethylpolysiloxane
note: optically clear; used in silicone caulk, adhesives, and as an anti-foaming agent.

Article at NewsTarget, with citations.

TruthNews reports the suicide rate of our heros: – 17 per day.

Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50.

From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces.

What they discovered is that in 2005 alone — and remember, this is just in 45 states — there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.

The war death rate from violence in Iraq is 25 per week.

There has been a monthly average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theater of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2,112 deaths. [source]

With no criticism intended, our dilemma is crippled when the solution is enabled.

Here’s an example of a layman question followed by an answer.

Q: I am familiar with WiFi, but am curious regarding how Cellular network operate.

A: The answer you seek would fill volumes. Fundamentally, GSM and CDMA employ different ways of reserving frequencies for users on the network, but both specifications do reserve spectrum. There is no intentional contention, in which manner GSM and CDMA (and their third-generation flavors HSPA and EVDO) are akin to WiMax, which uses OFDMA to reserve data slots (either by time or frequency). GSM uses time division multiple access (TDMA) or multiplexing to reserve periods of time for each receiver; CDMA’s very definition is code division multiple access, which assigns unique codes which allow multiple transmissions over the same frequency at the same time.

Armin Falk, an economist, says, “The fact that we are social beings is a well-known fact.” But we’re happier when others get less and we feel more successful when others fail.

Time.com reports that there’s “a mountain of survey data collected by modern economists and psychologists that suggests people care very much about keeping up with the Joneses.

Many scholars believe that social comparison helps to explain why, even as much of the world gets ever richer, people today don’t report being happier than people did 50 years ago.

It turns out the negative response to earning less is usually stronger than the positive response to earning more….”

“The splurge is over, folks. As the days of easy money come to an end, what will America look like? Maybe we’ll see a recession in the short term, but more importantly over the long term: the American middle class will have a truer understanding of what it can and cannot afford; a truer sense of what’s really happened to its paychecks; and a more realistic view of where and to whom the economic gains of the last dozen years have actually gone.”

Robert Reich has a blog. Reich was Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. He’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations.

Tip:
As the dollar falls, the expert looks to export from the USA. Search for USA product.

Robert A. Levy:

Significantly, the 2nd Amendment refers explicitly to “the right of the people,” not the rights of states or the militia. And the Bill of Rights is the section of our Constitution that deals exclusively with individual liberties.

The three letters in the FCC contain three words: compromise, failure, betrayal. But another most important word must be added: easy.

Here’s a brilliant example of Washington Spin.

F.C.C. Chief Forced to Scale Back Cable Plan

“In the face of a lobbying blitzkrieg from cable television executives and their lobbyists, the head of the Federal Communications Commission said this evening that he had struck a compromise to salvage…”

Stop!

There’s a population of millions being hustled by cable, a pipe that ingeniously drains cash from our homes, but the Washington media finds a way to induce our sympathy because a tiny crew with offices on one D.C. street has stumped a coward on his way to lunch? This might be the blitzkrieg Hitler overlooked.

How to speak easy:
The ‘power words’ [wiki] compacted by this brilliant NYTimes powdered wig would sink attendance at a Hudson Valley poetry reading, but for poor Americans these words are merely funding the palm at a piety reading in Washington.

Thomas Jefferson recommended that the capital of the United States must be relocated to a new location with a new staff each generation in order to prevent the lifting of a more dangerous elite than Europe had ever dreamed.

sobering statistic:

There has been a monthly average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theatre of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2,112 deaths. That gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000 soldiers.

The firearm death rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000 persons for the same period.

That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in the U.S. Capital than you are in Iraq .

Think for yourself. You are not a copy.

Funny how humans are. There are too many ways we reinforce one part of us by strengthening another.

For example, exercising to increase happiness. That’s not a route to dopamine any junkie will believe. More common and perhaps more complex is when we believe something because we think it might increase our status. For example, Ronald Reagan said:

“I have always believed that this anointed land was set apart in an uncommon way, that a divine plan placed this great continent here between the oceans to be found by people from every corner of the Earth who had a special love of faith and freedom. Our pioneers asked that He would work His will in our daily lives so America would be a land of morality, fairness, and freedom.”

Will these words help us feel special? Is our nation elevated if we choose to believe these words? Do you feel a mere smidge or an entire allotment of status? Nazis did.

In the iron march that drew millions to serve Hitler, “Gott mitt uns” is a phrase at the foundation [wiki]. Germany was an ‘anointed land‘. Uncommonly, Germany was set apart. Nazi Germany indeed was a land of morality. Nazi pioneers enlisted with a special love for Germany’s divine plan. “Let’s work so hard and fight so fiercely that God cannot refuse to hand the victory palm to Germany.” God was with them. He would work His will. These beliefs thundered into the daily lives of people in every corner of the Earth.

Do these words now revolt us?

Does belief both love and kill? Bob Dylan sang,

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.

There’s much to think about.

Does the world respect what Ronald Reagan said is our “special love of faith and freedom”? What are Europeans saying about America’s love affair with itself?

One says, “I’m seriously afraid that the “Gott mitt uns” idea seems to have caught on in the USA.”

Another says, “We DON’T hate the US, or it’s people, but some of us find the ‘fundagelicals’ only fractionally less scary than the Muslim loonies.”

What happens in America is very much at the heart of God’s purpose for humanity. “A myth.”, says the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams [wiki], “America is no ‘chosen nation’.”

For further reading, piercing insights from PsyBlog.
Why We do Dumb or Irrational Things: 10 Brilliant Social Psychology Studies