And Whether Pigs Have Wings

"The time has come,' the Walrus said, 

"To talk of many things: 

Of shoes -- and ships -- and sealing-wax -- 

Of cabbages -- and kings -- 

And why the sea is boiling hot -- 

And whether pigs have wings.' 

Through the Looking Glass has been a long time favorite of yours truly for years. From Butterflies to the Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll's book is a treasure trove of the nonsensical and wise, concepts most dear to this writer's heart but, as usual, this piece is not about Through the Looking Glass per se but rather about the collusion of government with Wall Street banks and big corporations in creating a nation state that is beginning to resemble  the Fascist model as seen in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany.

Note: This is but a tiny sampling of the move toward Fascism where inequality rules. 

• For starters, Citizen's United, the notion corporations are, in effect, people and as such, have the right to fund political campaigns without limitation.
• The Monsanto Rider. Thanks to Obama signing the budget bill, Monsanto, and significant others are, in effect, immune from government prosecution if any of it's GMO products prove harmful to people or the environment. The question to ask here is, why is there no option to take a rider off of a bill such as this one as riders ... are usually created as a tactic to pass a controversial provision that would not pass as its own bill. 

• Patenting genes - to date, more then 40,000 + genes have been patented, something BRT talked about in Reducto ad Absurdum, a piece asking if any company has the right to patent DNA, the double helix construct found in every living thing on planet earth.
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• The XL Pipeline - the dirtiest fuel on earth, will make it way to Texas for export in order to prop up oil prices because big oil holds our nation hostage while countries like Germany move toward solar and renewables at warp speed (50%) while the US lags behind at less then 2%. 
• 6 companies control 90% of news in America. Question, do you think extremely well paid "reporters" working for the big 6 are going to rock the boat and tell the truth about what's going on in America?
• Stupidity - Stupid and unaware people (37% & counting) are letting this slow descent into fascism happen by being functionally and intellectually illiterate  If one does not know what's going on, the ability of government to deceive one becomes eminently doable.
• Surveillance 24/7 - From the NSA to the FBI, we are being watched without our permission.
• Global corporate control of finance is Network writ large,  a world controlled by the banks and the corporations who serve them 24/7. 

• Wealth Inequality - The top 10% own 84+% of the countriey's wealth.

Any Questions?

Early Spring

Early Spring, the harbinger of things to come, is the time the earth wakes up, ready to put forth new life into the world. Recycling to the max, it's a good time to be alive. Enjoy.

Irreplaceability

PHD Comics rocks as seen by the terrific graphic seen above as this is what yours truly is going through regarding a provisional patent I wrote, (which passed muster) because once some fool knows the drill, then the irreplaceability equation no longer equates.

"The graveyards are full of indispensable men." - Charles deGaule

Projecting Mapping to the Max

Projection mapping live performance art - The Alchemy of Light by a dandypunk

from a dandypunk on Vimeo.

Have to put this up. Outrageous video using computers, lasers and light. Outrageous to the max.

The Art of Invention :)

Yours Truly is back from building databases and solving the world's problems, this time with a riff on Rube Goldberg and why Rube's unique approach to design applies to government in ways that can't be made up. For starters, the F 35, the multi trillion dollar fubar unable to fly through clouds. 

In January, the Lockheed Martin production facility in Fort Worth, Texas, reported it was well along "in the final phase of building the wings" of the 100th F-35 constructed by the Bethesda, Maryland, company. Of the first 99 F-35s, none are yet operational.

The F-35 isn't even close to fully operational - it can fly only on sunny days. It can't fly at night. And it can't fly in clouds or near lightning. We know this because the Pentagon tells us so, in a report written for the Secretary of Defense by the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, J. Michael Gilmore, dated February 15, 2013.

He who makes the rules

Barack Obama’s biggest second-term challenge isn’t guns or immigration. It’s saving his biggest first-term achievements, like the Dodd-Frank law, from being dismembered by lobbyists and conservative jurists in the shadowy, Byzantine “rule-making” process.

None of it made a difference. In September 2012, the U.S. Court for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned the CFTC’s rule. In the decision, the court wrote that the commission lacked a “clear and unambiguous mandate” to set position limits without first demonstrating that they were necessary and appropriate. And with that, more than two years after the passage of Dodd-Frank, there were still no federally administered position limits for any commodities except grain, and the CFTC was back to square one. The muckety-mucks at the exchanges rejoiced, as appropriate.

And we haven't even discussed healthcare, the siloed, proprietary and closed system operating totally outside of the net, complexified beyond belief, a system that will never, ever work as intended as long as the environment remains as uncompetitive and closed as it truly is.

Taxes, 20,000 pages and counting, the most complex document on earth, keeps metastasizing every month, only accessible to the upper 1/10th of 1% and big corporations able to grease the system by paying top dollar to minions to enable the GEs of the world to pay no taxes. 

And the beat goes on. :)

Life, Anyone?

It seems life may be more plentiful then previously thought as researchers are expanding the Goldilocks zone for planets, to whit...

The number of potentially habitable planets is greater than previously thought, according to a new analysis by a Penn State researcher, and some of those planets are likely lurking around nearby stars.

"We now estimate that if we were to look at 10 of the nearest small stars we would find about four potentially habitable planets, give or take," said Ravi Kopparapu, a post-doctoral researcher in geosciences. "That is a conservative estimate," he added. "There could be more."

As for Mars, it looks like it could have supported life without question. 

In the Sheepbed image on the right, these very fine-grained sediments represent the record of an ancient habitable environment. The Sheepbed sediments were likely deposited under water. Scientists think the water cemented the sediments, and also formed the concretions. The rock was then fractured and filled with sulfate minerals when water flowed through subsurface fracture networks (white lines running through rock). Data from several instruments on Curiosity -- the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer, the Chemistry and Camera instrument, the Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument, the Mars Hand Lens Imager, the Mast Camera, and the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument -- all support these interpretations. They indicate a habitable environment characterized by neutral pH, chemical gradients that would have created energy for microbes, and a distinctly low salinity, which would have helped metabolism if microorganisms had ever been present. 

It gets better.

Scientists were surprised to find a mixture of oxidized, less-oxidized, and even non-oxidized chemicals, providing an energy gradient of the sort many microbes on Earth exploit to live. This partial oxidation was first hinted at when the drill cuttings were revealed to be gray rather than red.

Me thinks, "Something's afoot" - Sherlock Holmes

Gradients

In every case, nature abhors gradients as she is wont to make connections to everything as seamless as possible and late winter storms proves this in indirect fashion as snow softens the contours of everything it touches, something readily seen in this short clip of the same name. Enjoy.

The Nutritious Value of Food

As a follow up to the wonderful animation What It... , the hilarious piece depicting the impact of fast food on African wildlife, comes the news NuVal is generating in evaluating the nutritious value of food, something the process food giants are apoplectic about and for good reason.

I couldn't believe my eyes.

I was in a Minneapolis branch of Byerly's, an upscale grocery chain in Minnesota. Scanning the aisles for a small extravagance for my dinner hosts, I noticed that the shelf labels included not just the price-per-unit, which I'm used to, but little blue and white linked hexagons marked on a scale of 1 to 100 -- a "NuVal" score.

NuVal [3] scores don't tip you off to a bargain. They tell you how good or bad a food is for your health.

Yeah, right. The idea that a food store would admit -- would explicitly declare, on the spot, as your hand is reaching for it -- that a product it's selling is nutritionally crappy: that violates every principle of Marketing 101, not to mention Ayn Rand 101.

This is different from the labels that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has required since 1990. Those are well-intentioned marvels of confusion, containing so much information (are you getting your minimum daily requirement of magnesium?), so much disinformation (calculating calories per serving, when a serving is half the amount a runway waif would eat), so much incomprehensible information (I forget -- is tripotassium phosphate good or bad for you?) that you can get an anxiety attack trying to figure out which granola will nourish you and which will kill you.

But NuVal scores make that simple, and sometimes shocking.

Cocoa Puffs, for example, gets a NuVal score of 26, but so does Life ("you don't have to be a grown-up to benefit from the whole grain inside"), and Kashi Strawberry Fields Cereal ("plenty of whole grain goodness") gets a 10, same as Cap'n Crunch.

An apple gets a 96, which you might expect. But unsweetened applesauce gets a 29, apple juice gets a 15 and Mott's Original Applesauce ("a great tasting snack that's actually good for you") gets a 4.

Nabisco Nilla Wafers ("simple goodness") get a 6, and Keebler Townhouse Bistro Multi-Grain Crackers (multi-grain! surely good for you, no?) get a 3 (no).

You'd expect fresh broccoli to get 100, as does Birds Eye Cooked Winter Squash. Grapefruits are 99, and sweet potatoes are 96. But Vlasic Old Fashioned Sauerkraut gets a 4.

Skim milk comes in at 91, 1 percent milk at 91 and 2 percent at 55. Capri Sun gets a 1. So does Odwalla Pomegranate Limeade with 20 percent juice. Who would buy products like these if they actually knew what poison -- I mean, um, empty calories -- they amount to, and if they had manifestly better alternatives an arm's reach away?

Pushback from the public regarding corporate control over our lives in terms of the harm it has caused, particularly regarding processed food and the deleterious impact it has had on our health, is finally starting to happen and it's about time. 

What if...:)

Had to put this in. Any questions? :)

By Moonlight

Moonlight, the myth of madness and werewolves also presents some pretty interesting images as shadows issue forth with astounding clarity and the look is something different thanks to the inherent coolness of the light source itself. Enjoy.

A Need to Know

A definite need to know from a company knowing why there is a need to know. :)