Nature, in the end, rules

 Alistair Chapman is an extraordinary cinematographer. His latest will blow you away. 

Nature, in the end - rules.

An Interesting "How To".

Click here to learn more about the offshore way to protect your stash while leaving
others to pick up the tab of supporting our country. Sounds ethical to me, right?

The Canary in the Coal Mine

Honey bees are a favorite of mine. Videotaping these industrial wonders doing their thing in flowers of all types never ceases to amaze but less of them come around doing what they do best because of what we are doing to their world.

We know what is killing the bees. Worldwide Bee Colony Collapse is not as big a mystery as the chemical companies claim. The systemic nature of the problem makes it complex, but not impenetrable. Scientists know that bees are dying from a variety of factors - pesticides, drought, habitat destruction, nutrition deficit, air pollution, global warming and so forth. The causes of collapse merge and synergize, but we know that humanity is the perpetrator, and that the two most prominent causes appear to be pesticides and habitat loss.

Biologists have found over 150 different chemical residues in bee pollen, a deadly "pesticide cocktail" according to University of California apiculturist Eric Mussen. The chemical companies Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, Dow, DuPont and Monsanto shrug their shoulders at the systemic complexity, as if the mystery were too complicated. They advocate no change in pesticide policy. After all, selling poisons to the world’s farmers is profitable.

Furthermore, wild bee habitat shrinks every year as industrial agribusiness converts grasslands and forest into monoculture farms, which are then contaminated with pesticides. To reverse the world bees decline, we need to fix our dysfunctional and destructive agricultural system.

In almost every way, if one looks at how we produce food and generate energy at industrial levels, the processes are inherently destructive as seen by the following:

1. 90% of the fish stocks in the ocean are being harvested at a rate too fast for the sea to replenish.
2. People and animals in PA are getting sick because of the environmental impact of fracking on their environment.
3. The Alberta Tar Sands project is the largest land operation in the world. It could grow to the size of New York before all the Bitumen is extracted from the earth. 
4. The tar sands di bit is the dirtiest fuel on earth.
5. GMO corn is now banned in eight nations including Hungary, France and Mexico, but not in the US, due to the negetive impact it has had on the environment.
6. Beef and chicken are unofficially considered frankenfoods thanks to the extensive use of steroids, antibiotics and genetic manipulation to produce livestock able to grow bigger and faster in time frames not possible to achieve without the use of these methodologies. See Food Inc as reference.

Any questions?

Man Bites Dog :)

The Tech Journal just posted this amazing article bout trollthensa.com. To whit...

The minds behind the operation have designed a stock message describing a mundane day and draconian boss, only with trigger words of nefarious activities. The words, if read by a computer system without context, can indicate suspicious activities.

Here’s a snippet:

Hey! How’s it going? I’m all right.

My job is so shitty I wish could overthrow my boss. It’s like this oppressive regimewhere only true believers in his management techniques will stay around. I workmarathon-length hours and he’s made all these changes that have made it the worst architecture firm to work at in Manhattan. Like he moved the office to the Financial District and fired my assistant...

This will be the ultimate test of how well the government spends our money.

Either Or but Not Together :)

 PHD Comics does it again in terms of explaining a fundamental property of reality through the seemingly magical lenas of Quantum Mechanics.

Prism

 Had to put this in about Prism from the Washington Post. Pretty informative to say the least.

Seen below is a graphic showing a "how To" for techs who use this most powerful and intrusive technology to spy on us rubes. 

Big Data - With a Twist

In reality, Big Brother, formerly know as the Total Information Awareness program, has morped into prism, a bigger and better way to spy on us using ever faster tech imbued with AI and ultra fast connects to the web, allowing said environment (NSA) to spy on anyone using digital systems (smartphones, tablets, laptops etc., etc.) linked to the internet. A this point in time, Prism is Big Brother edition 2013 but we already knew that, right? To this end, BRT has posted numerous blurbs about this disquieting development for quite some time as seen in a post titled Face Off & Then Some discussing face recognition and the NSA's now completed project of building the most powerful surveillance environment known to man (Bluffdale, UT).  

It gets creepier. With predicative analytics an essential part of big data, the notion of having a digital facsimile of the pre-cogs of Minority Report is not far off, something the NSA, among significant others, is avidly developing as this tech, supposedly, would not have the foibles of humanity as seen in Agatha, the most powerful of the three Pre-Cogs used by Pre-Crime, the special police force of the future circa 2054.

The reality of things

From 24/7 surveillance, courtesy of Prism, to the empty promise of energy independence from our beloved president, the incessant drumbeat of platitudes of newspeak issue forth from the corporate controlled press mimicing Minitrue, the political organ of Ingsoc, the party of Big Brother.

The Insoc logo (i.e. English Socialism) seen above, inadvertently shows how Democrats and Republicans go hand in hand when it comes to the really important things in life, i.e.1. Get elected  2. Stay in power by getting reelected and 3. Server the powers at be who enable the pols to stay in power by funneling money to their never ending campaigns for the sole purpose of getting reelected. With this in mind, some really smart wag stated, with true insight, that America is now a combination of 1984 and Brave New World with newspeak spouted by our politicians to explain away Iraq, Afghanistan, due process and energy independence while big media and the process food giants ply us with football, Cheese Doodles and machismo in the quise of huge trucks, beer and never ending patriotism.

Seen above is the stratification of society in 1984. Looks familiar doesn't it, especially when one substitutes the entities depicted with ones we are familiar with. i.e. The president, Congress/power elite, government workers and us rubes. Makes one think doesn't it?

Two More Reasons...

Two more reasons why pot should be legal  :)

METHODOLOGY: Researchers at the University of Nebraska, the Harvard School of Public Health, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center analyzed data from a nationally representative sample of over 4,600 adults. About 12 percent of the participants self-identified as current marijuana users, and another 42 percent reported having used the drug in the past. The participants were tested for various measures of blood sugar control: their fasting insulin and glucose levels; insulin resistance; cholesterol levels; and waist circumference.

RESULTS: Current marijuana users had significantly smaller waist circumference than participants who had never used marijuana, even after adjusting for factors like age, sex, tobacco and alcohol use, and physical activity levels. They also had higher levels of HDL ("good cholesterol"). The most significant differences between those who smoked marijuana and those who never or no longer did was that current smokers' insulin levels were reduced by 16 percent and their insulin resistance (a condition in which the body has trouble absorbing glucose from the bloodstream) was reduced by 17 percent.

Any questions? How about it Eric, do something useful for a change and legalize pot, now.

Buy Local - It's the Right Thing to do. :)

This was a fun project done gratis for a local Redding, CT store doing the right thing by offering top products locally grown, something whose time has come. Enjoy.

400

Crossing the Rubicon pales in comparison to reaching the threshold of 400 parts per million of CO2, the greenhouse gas that will change a benign earth into something altogether different thanks to the continued and unfettered use of fossil fuels all over the world.

The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.

Indirect measurements suggest that the last time the carbon dioxide level was this high was at least three million years ago, during an epoch called the Pliocene. Geological research shows that the climate then was far warmer than today, the world’s ice caps were smaller, and the sea level might have been as much as 60 or 80 feet higher.

With "luck", combined with continued use of fossil fuels, we might reach the Eocene era, a hot house scenario that could end man's existence on planet earth.

The Eocene Epoch contained a wide variety of different climate conditions that includes the warmest climate in the Cenozoic Era and ends in an icehouse climate. The evolution of the Eocene climate began with warming after the end of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) at 56 million years ago to a maximum during the Eocene Optimum at around 49 million years ago. During this period of time, little to no ice was present on Earth with a smaller difference in temperature from the equator to the poles. Following the maximum, was a descent into an icehouse climate from the Eocene Optimum to the Eocene-Oligocene transition at 34 million years ago. During this decrease ice began to reappear at the poles, and the Eocene-Oligocene transition is the period of time where the Antarctic ice sheet began to rapidly expand.

With no ice, sea level rise will be nearly 300 feet and...

Using isotope proxies to determine ocean temperatures indicate sea surface temperatures in the tropics as high as 35 °C (95 °F) and bottom water temperatures that are 10 °C (18 °F) higher than present day values.[15] With these bottom water temperatures, temperatures in areas where deep-water forms near the poles are unable to be much cooler than the bottom water temperatures.

What makes matters worse is man's ever expanding population and pollution footprint as the Eocene, even though extremely hot, was pristine and teemed with life because we were not there, littering the planet with innumerable pollutants while plundering the place with unbridled greed and ferocity.

Continue the status quo is no longer viable. To continue to burn fossil fuels at the expense of developing alternative ways of generating energy is suicide but we already know about this as the President contemplates approving Keystone, the truly modern way to bring forth a new Eocene within our lifetimes instead of having to wait for it to happen within a few centuries.

May 25th, March against Monsanto

May 25th, March against Monsanto, sounds good to me. 

Latch

Everyone HATES security, at least yours truly does. Has anyone ever forgotten a password? Don't ask but... two young guys have come up with something pretty cool. They built an app that eliminates this PITA in a heart beat. Enter Latch, the Swiss Army Knife able to save passwords. Today, it does Wordpress and iPhone, soon, it will do Android.

Way to go guys. :)

High Diving Giraffes

Exquisite animation with wit and style by French director Nicolas Deveaux is a ten. :)  Enjoy