Benjamins

Benjamins rule politics, but we already knew that, a sad reality egregiously amplified thanks to Citizens United, the supreme's ruling codifying the fact America's now an oligarchy with bought and paid for politicians whose mendacity knows no end. 

One of the most embarrassing aspects of U.S. politics is politicians who deny that money has any impact on what they do. For instance, Tom Corbett, Pennsylvania’s notoriously fracking-friendly former governor, got $1.7 million from oil and gas companies but assured voters that “The contributions don’t affect my decisions.” If you’re trying to get people to vote for you, you can’t tell them that what they want doesn’t matter.

This pose is also popular with a certain prominent breed of pundits, who love to tell us “Don’t Follow the Money” (New York Times columnist David Brooks), or “Money does not buy elections” (Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner on public radio’s Marketplace), or “Money won’t buy you votes” (Yale Law School professor Peter H. Schuck in the Los Angeles Times).

Meanwhile, 85 percent of Americans say we need to either “completely rebuild” or make “fundamental changes” to the campaign finance system. Just 13 percent think “only minor changes are necessary,” less than the 18 percent of Americans who believe they’ve been in the presence of a ghost.

Addendum:

• “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.” — Mark Hanna, William McKinley’s 1896 presidential campaign manager and later senator from Ohio, in 1895.

Any questions?

Remembering Cecil in a good way

Yours truly won't talk about the wanton killing of Cecil the Lion by a unconscious moron but rather about how his kind, and other endangered species, can be saved if we change how we do business on planet earth. To that end, this Saturday, August 1st, a powerful wake up call telling us to do just that will take place via the Empire State building where ... 

The callous murder of Zimbabwe’s beloved Cecil, the lion, has cast the plight of endangered species across the internet.

But this Saturday night, that plight will be cast offline in a new way as well, as digital projection mapper Travis Threlkel and filmmaker/photographer Louie Psihoyos collaborate to project massive images of the world’s most majestic endangered animals onto the face of New York City’s Empire State Building.

“We’re going to try to create something beautiful, not bum people out,” says Threlkel, adding that “hopefully, this is one big domino. If we can tip it, it would be great.”

To yours truly, the Snow Leopard is one prime reason why biodiversity must be maintained, not only for preserving animals as magnificent as these big cats are but also for our survival as everything's connected and we are, as my wife is won't to say, only as strong as our weakest link.

Acceleration 2 Step

The title & subtitle plus blurb says it all regarding GW.

The Wettest Rainforest in the United States Has Gone Up in Flames

When fire can eat a rainforest in a relatively cool climate, you know the Earth is beginning to burn.

The wettest rainforest in the continental United States had gone up in flames and the smoke was so thick, so blanketing, that you could see it miles away. Deep in Washington’s Olympic National Park, the aptly named Paradise Fire, undaunted by the dampness of it all, was eating the forest alive and destroying an ecological Eden. In this season of drought across the West, there have been far bigger blazes but none quite so symbolic or offering quite such grim news. It isn’t the size of the fire (though it is the largest in the park’s history), nor its intensity. It’s something else entirely -- the fact that it shouldn’t have been burning at all. When fire can eat a rainforest in a relatively cool climate, you know the Earth is beginning to burn.

Read the piece in its entirety. Disquieting to say the least.

Eye Candy/NASA style :)

4K video rocks, here's some eye candy courtesy NASA. :)

Here's another. 

Time waster to the max if you ask me. :)

Risk Assessment

BRT talks copiously about the inevitable costs in doing anything as the 1st law of thermodynamics rules no matter what endeavor man or nature undertakes. With this in mind, the Global Challenges Foundation takes the cost variable and applies it with skill to the 12 risks threatening society as we move further into the 21st century. To whit:

The idea that we face a number of global risks threatening the very basis of our civilisation at the beginning of the 21st century is well accepted in the scientific community, and is studied at a number of leading universities. But there is still no coordinated approach to address this group of risks and turn them into opportunities.

The 12 global risks that threaten human civilisation are:

Current risks

1. Extreme Climate Change
2. Nuclear War
3. Ecological Catastrophe
4. Global Pandemic
5. Global System Collapse

Exogenic risks

1. Major Asteroid Impact
2. Supervolcano (Yellowstone)

Emerging risks

1. Synthetic Biology
2. Nanotechnology
3. Artificial Intelligence
4. Uncertain Risks
5. Global policy risk
6. Future Bad Global Governance

Click here to download the PDF to learn why addressing these issue now is paramount to our survival.

Queen Anne's Lace

Queen Anne's Lace is a treasure. Coming to bloom in early summer, the action doesn't start until its fragrance becomes just right to attract wasps, bumble bees, honey bees and green flies, not to mention ants of all varieties and butterflies of many persuasions.

Factoid: Early Europeans cultivated Queen Anne’s lace, and the Romans ate it as a vegetable. American colonists boiled the taproots, sometimes in wine as a treat. Interestingly, Queen Anne’s lace is high in sugar (second only to the beet among root vegetables) and sometimes it was used among the Irish, Hindus and Jews to sweeten puddings and other foods.

Not bad for a wild carrot that plays well with tomatoes and lettuce and provides a banquet for insects both small and large as seen by an alpha wasp helping itself to a midday snack of nectar. :) Enjoy.

Queen Anne’s lace earned its common name from a legend that tells of Queen Anne of England (1665-1714) pricking her finger and a drop of blood landed on white lace she was sewing. 

360 & Then Some

Insane says it all. Not a plug but Immersive's pretty stellar tech without question.

Here's yet another.

Mother Nature's Way :)

Yours truly is a natural path. No prescription drugs, a relatively decent diet, (not perfect by any stretch of the imagination) and true distaste for the dysfunctional healthcare system in America where symptoms are treated and not the cause, are prime drivers in my dealing with health issues that, to date, thank god, are pretty damn minor in the grand scheme of things. In support of my "wonderful" approach to health, here is a treasure trove of useful info regarding the natural way to deal with day to day maladies courtesy Pioneer Settler, a terrific site filled with common sense advice on preventative health practices that work without issue. 

Read the article. You will NOT be disappointed. :)

Flyover & Than Some - Pluto Style :)

NASA's New Horizons rules. :)

Pluto's hazy skies, courtesy NW's nightside shot of our 9th planet. :)

Beyond Control

BRT has talked about secrecy and control and its connect to tech quite often as the subject matter is fascinating, something akin to a moth attracted to a flame, dangerous yet not if one keeps proper distance from the source of the attraction. To that end, 9/11 has given rise to an America we don't know, a Hidden world, growing beyond control.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

• Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
• An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
• In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.
• Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

"No one knows, do one?" - Fats Waller

Frontline - Top Secret America

Guns, lots and lots of Guns ...

"Guns, lots and lots of guns." - Neo/The Matrix sums up the military might of the established US vs China, the new kid on the block. Without question, Visual Capitalist's graphic depicts the strengths of the two in exquisite detail and precision, two qualities techs like yours truly admires to the max.

Divvying it up

Yours truly loves maps, especially if they illustrate data in ways not seen before, at least by this individual. To that end, How Much does the deed in spades in showing how the world's economy is divided by area. Awesome kind of says it all. With this in mind. Zero Hedge's take on the ponzi scheme writ large by the banks vis a vis the creation of unsustainable debt laid on entities like Greece means pucker up time is fast approaching if their analysis rings true. From this perspective, it looks pretty sound to me. To whit:

If itsy bitsy pie slice – Greece (.33%) – can create this much worldwide economic havoc because of their unpayble level of debt, imagine what will happen when the truth is revealed about France (3.81%), Italy (2.88%), and Spain (1.88%). China’s (13.9%) entire economic model has been built upon debt and the world consuming their output.

The world has run out of money to consume their shit. Japan (6.18%) is in the midst of a demographic and debt death spiral. The U.S. (23.32%) is living on borrowed time and the continued dominance of the USD. How long will it last? We are inhabiting in a world stacked with TNT run by monkeys with matches.

The map explained.

Today’s data visualization is the most simple breakdown of the world economy that we’ve seen. Not only is it split to show the GDP of dozens of countries in relation to one another based on size, but it also subtly divides each economy into its main sectors: agriculture, services, and industry. The lightest shade in each country corresponds to the most primitive economic activity, which is agriculture. The medium shade is industry, and the darkest shade corresponds to services, which tends to make up a large portion of GDP of developed economies in the world economy.

To take it one step further, the visualization also shades the countries by continental geography, to easily see the relative economic contributions of North America, Europe, South America, Asia, Oceania, and Africa.

Any questions?

When you think about it ...

Feedback Loops

Visualization of Antarctic temperature change

Feedback loops, as per a microphone getting too close to a speaker resulting in a piercing loud howl, are powerful entities whereby outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of a chain of cause-and-effect that forms a circuit or loop.[2] The system can then be said to feed back into itself. The notion of cause-and-effect has to be handled carefully when applied to feedback systems:

Feedback loop

"Simple causal reasoning about a feedback system is difficult because the first system influences the second and second system influences the first, leading to a circular argument. This makes reasoning based upon cause and effect tricky, and it is necessary to analyze the system as a whole." [3] , something that's happening to earth regarding the melting of ice caused by increased CO2 levels trapping in more heat, which, in turn, reduces the all important albedo which, in terms of the feedback loop effect, accelerates the process of turning the arctic and antarctic from a reflective surface to a heat sink, thus accelerating climate change at a rate unforeseen by climatologists, until now.

The study—written by James Hansen, NASA’s former lead climate scientist, and 16 co-authors, many of whom are considered among the top in their fields—concludes that glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica will melt 10 times faster than previous consensus estimates, resulting in sea level rise of at least 10 feet in as little as 50 years. The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, brings new importance to a feedback loop in the ocean near Antarctica that results in cooler freshwater from melting glaciers forcing warmer, saltier water underneath the ice sheets, speeding up the melting rate. Hansen, who is known for being alarmist and also right, acknowledges that his study implies change far beyond previous consensus estimates. In a conference call with reporters, he said he hoped the new findings would be “substantially more persuasive than anything previously published.” I certainly find them to be.

To come to their findings, the authors used a mixture of paleoclimate records, computer models, and observations of current rates of sea level rise, but “the real world is moving somewhat faster than the model,” Hansen says.

It gets better.

If you truly understand global warming, then you know it's all about the ice. That's what matters. Planet Earth has not always had great ice sheets at the poles, of the sort that currently exist atop Greenland and Antarctica. In other periods, much of that water has instead been in liquid form, in the oceans—and the oceans have been much higher.

How much? According to the National Academy of Sciences, the globe's great ice sheets contain enough frozen water to raise sea levels worldwide by more than 60 meters. That's about 200 feet. And it makes all the sea level rise that we've seen so far due to global warming appear piddly and insignificant.

That's why scientists have long feared a day like this would come. Two new scientific papers, in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters, report that major glaciers that are part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appear to have become irrevocably destabilized. The whole process may still play out on the scale of centuries, but due to the particular dynamics of this ice sheet, the collapse of these major glaciers now "appears unstoppable," according to NASA (whose researchers are behind one of the two studies).

BRT has talked about the 900 lb GW gorilla in numerous articles including the one titled Albedo , a blurb describing just how powerful a cooling agent ice truly is, something earth is losing 24/7 as we move further into the 21st century.

Short Takes

Quick glimpses into the world of flora & fauna in summertime CT. Enjoy

One must know one's limits

BRT did a post back in 2014 titled The 1st Law, depicting, IMHO, the most important law in science (The 1st law of Thermodynamics - conservation of energy) stating that energy can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed, a law that supports a new study regarding the limits of earth's resources and what it means to man's survival as we move further into the 21st century. 

Chemical energy is stored in plants, or biomass, which is used for food and fuel, but which is also destroyed to make room for agriculture and expanding cities.

Scientists estimate that the Earth contained approximately 1,000 billion tons of carbon in living biomass 2,000 years ago. Since that time, humans have reduced that amount by almost half. It is estimated that just over 10 percent of that biomass was destroyed in just the last century.

"If we don't reverse this trend, we'll eventually reach a point where the biomass battery discharges to a level at which Earth can no longer sustain us," Schramski said.

Working with James H. Brown from the University of New Mexico, Schramski and UGA's David Gattie, an associate professor in the College of Engineering, show that the vast majority of losses come from deforestation, hastened by the advent of large-scale mechanized farming and the need to feed a rapidly growing population. As more biomass is destroyed, the planet has less stored energy, which it needs to maintain Earth's complex food webs and biogeochemical balances.

"As the planet becomes less hospitable and more people depend on fewer available energy options, their standard of living and very survival will become increasingly vulnerable to fluctuations, such as droughts, disease epidemics and social unrest," Schramski said.

If human beings do not go extinct, and biomass drops below sustainable thresholds, the population will decline drastically, and people will be forced to return to life as hunter-gatherers or simple horticulturalists, according to the paper.

"I'm not an ardent environmentalist; my training and my scientific work are rooted in thermodynamics," Schramski said. "These laws are absolute and incontrovertible; we have a limited amount of biomass energy available on the planet, and once it's exhausted, there is absolutely nothing to replace it."

Overshoot awaits, if we let it.

Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year.

Moderate UN scenarios suggest that if current population and consumption trends continue, by the 2030s, we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us. And of course, we only have one.

"One must know one's limits" - Dirty Harry

A simple matter of perspective

In Transit :)

New Horizons is in transit. Awesome!

The image seen below shows just how small Pluto & Charon are compared to Earth.

(Pluto should still be reinstated as our 9th planet given how complex Pluto's system is. ) :)

Greece on Ebay

Zero Hedge nails it in terms of what will happen to Greece courtesy the Eurozone and the troika that runs all things related to the Euro.

With the provocative and dramatic Greek "time out" language pulled from the final finmin and summit draft language, the two most humiliating aspects of the latest extend and pretend "deal" for the Greek people will be the return of the Troika's (surely we can call it the Troika again as part of the Greek capitulation) IMF mission to Athens, and the escrowing of some €50 billion in  Greek assets in a liquidation fund.

Granted said fund will not be domiciled in Luxembourg as was originally envisioned, but Europe will still have control and first refusal rights over what are technically Greek properties, in the process Athens handing over about 25% of Greek GDP (and sovereignty) over the Brussels.

What are these assets? For the answer we go to the horse's mouth, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who laid out the holdings of the proposed Greek privatization that would be sold off as follows: "it still is going to be an independent fund, valued at €50 billion which can be airplanes, airports, infrastructure and most certainly banks.”

Bloomberg quotes the Eurogroup finmin president:

They will be brought in with the target to privatize those in the coming years, but we will take our time for that.

We then hope for proceeds of EU50 billion, but that will be clear later.

The banks first have to be refinanced from this aid program, but after that I take it that they’re worth money and then we can sell them.

The proceedings are aimed at lowering Greece’s national debt.

In other words, Greece will be liquidated piecemeal to repay creditors. In even other words, the proceeds from the Third Greek Bailout will not only not reach the Greek people, but Greece will have to sell itself in pieces to top off the creditors' funding needs.

One readily senses the reaction from the Greek people will not be pleasant by any stretch of the imagination. 

Wrong Number

I can honestly say I am not addicted to my smartphone. Addicted to tech and blogging maybe, but not to the phone, thank god but to many other poor souls, this is simply not the case.

Given how quickly cellphones have taken over our lives, it’s easy to forget that they are still a relatively new technology. The first iPhone came out eight years ago, and today a little more than half the American population has a smartphone, according to eMarketer.

Yet already people spend close to three hours a day looking at a mobile screen — and that excludes the time they spend actually talking on the phones.

In a recent survey of smartphone use by Bank of America, about a third of respondents said they were “constantly” checking their smartphones, and a little more than two-thirds said that they went to bed with a smartphone by their side. Those habits have prompted enough soul searching that a slew of new companies see a business opportunity in helping people cut back.

“Technology has evolved so quickly that we have spiraled out of control and nobody has stopped to think about how this is going to impact our lives,” said Kate Unsworth, the founder of a British company, Kovert, that also makes high-tech jewelry to filter out everything but the most urgent stuff.

It gets better, especially when somebody does something about it, especially when cluelessness is part of the equation.

A scene from "Shows for Days" with, from left, Dale Soules, Patti LuPone and Michael Urie

At Wednesday’s matinee of the Douglas Carter Beane comedy “Shows for Days,” in which Ms. LuPone plays a small-town theater diva, four cellphones went off, twice from the same phone. It created, as Ms. LuPone put it, “a cacophony of noise.”

So Ms. LuPone was on edge by the evening performance at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. And when the woman seated at the end of the second row texted — and texted and texted — during the show, Ms. LuPone took action. Without breaking character, Ms. LuPone walked into the audience and took the woman’s phone. “She didn't know what was going on,” Ms. LuPone said in a phone interview on Thursday. “I should be a sleight of hand artist.” (The phone was returned after the show.)

Awesome!

Mixed metaphor

Inside an artificial brain from Johan Nordberg on Vimeo.

BRT did a post titled There must be a Pony in there somewhere, a blurb about Google's Neural Net, the startpoint for true AI. Here's the video a good friend of mine turned me onto. Awesome and ... somewhat disquieting to say the least. Thanks Chuck for turning me onto this gem. :)

It's not what it seems :)

When looking at this shot, yours truly thinks of serendipity and how creatives take advantage of mistakes, accidents and, as seen by Alexander Fleming, the ability to "see" and not judge when looking at a particular, in this case, experiment that, on the surface, seemed to go awry.

"When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionise all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer," Fleming would later say, "But I suppose that was exactly what I did."[9]

By 1927, Fleming had been investigating the properties of staphylococci. He was already well-known from his earlier work, and had developed a reputation as a brilliant researcher, but his laboratory was often untidy. On 3 September 1928, Fleming returned to his laboratory having spent August on holiday with his family. Before leaving, he had stacked all his cultures of staphylococci on a bench in a corner of his laboratory. On returning, Fleming noticed that one culture was contaminated with a fungus, and that the colonies of staphylococci immediately surrounding the fungus had been destroyed, whereas other staphylococci colonies farther away were normal, famously remarking "That's funny".[10] 

Or this... 

On a winter day 50 years ago, Edward Lorenz, SM ‘43, ScD ‘48, a mild-mannered meteorology professor at MIT, entered some numbers into a computer program simulating weather patterns and then left his office to get a cup of coffee while the machine ran. When he returned, he noticed a result that would change the course of science.

The computer model was based on 12 variables, representing things like temperature and wind speed, whose values could be depicted on graphs as lines rising and falling over time. On this day, Lorenz was repeating a simulation he’d run earlier—but he had rounded off one variable from .506127 to .506. To his surprise, that tiny alteration drastically transformed the whole pattern his program produced, over two months of simulated weather.

The unexpected result led Lorenz to a powerful insight about the way nature works: small changes can have large consequences. The idea came to be known as the “butterfly effect” after Lorenz suggested that the flap of a butterfly’s wings might ultimately cause a tornado. And the butterfly effect, also known as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” has a profound corollary: forecasting the future can be nearly impossible.

When reading about Fleming, one gets encouraged to play and see beyond because, after all, play and perception are the prime drivers of creativity, without question. :)

Ominous Beauty

BRT posted a blurb titled Albedo, showing the enormous difference of ice vs water in terms of the fraction of solar energy (shortwave radiation) reflected from the Earth back into space. It is a measure of the reflectivity of the earth's surface. Ice, especially with snow on top of it, has a high albedo: most sunlight hitting the surface bounces back towards space. something hauntingly depicted in NASA's nighttime shot of noctilucent clouds surrounding the North Pole on June 10, 2015.

Noctilucent clouds were first described in the mid-19th century after the eruption of the Krakatau volcano. Volcanic ash spread through the atmosphere, making for vivid sunsets around the world and provoking the first known observations of NLCs. At first people thought they were a side-effect of the volcano, but long after Krakatau’s ash settled, the wispy, glowing clouds remained.

In the past decade, AIM has been observing and measuring these seasonal, high-altitude cloud formations. Researchers have found that they are appearing earlier and stretching to lower latitudes with greater frequency. There is some evidence that this is a result of increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Though they were not thick enough to appear in AIM imagery, some noctilucent clouds were visible to ground-based observers in the continental United States on June 9 and 10.

Here's what they look like from the ground.

Interesting, don't you think?

The Domino Theory

Charles Smith is a gem. Long term, analytic and correct, he explains economics in a precise and commonsense way as seen by his nation cycle chart seen at the top of this post. When his thought process is applied to the situation in Europe, one gets an alarmingly clear picture of just how dire the situation truly is.

Now an inescapable double-bind has emerged for Germany: If Germany lets its weaker neighbors default on their debts, the euro will be harmed, and German exports within Europe will slide. But if Germany becomes the "lender of last resort," then its taxpayers end up footing the bill.

If public and private debt in the troubled nations keeps rising at current rates, it's possible that even mighty Germany may be unable (or unwilling) to fund an essentially endless bailout. That would create pressure within both Germany and the debtor nations to jettison the single currency as a good idea in theory, but ultimately unworkable in a 16-nation bloc as diverse as the eurozone.

Despite endless assurances that the Greek debt crisis is contained, the reality is that the ragin' contagion of debt crises will spread not just to other deeply indebted nations but to the mercantilist economies that depend on selling goods to borrowers. Strip out the borrowing, and you strip out most of the customers for German, Dutch and Chinese goods.

Pucker up, the ride has just begun.

Your moment has come

Standing before the European Parliament yesterday, it took Nigel Farage just four minutes to completely destroy every argument supporting the Eurozone.

A few years back when he spoke at one of our Sovereign Man events in Santiago, he anticipated everything that we’re seeing right now.

Today it’s not nearly as controversial to say that the Eurozone experiment has failed. Anyone aware of what’s happening in Greece should say the same. But very few people really understand why.

As Nigel explains in the video below, right from the start, the system was never intended to help the Greek people.

Greece entering the euro was great for Goldman Sachs. But terrible for Greeks. It chained the country to a system in which it didn’t belong.

And what about all the bailout money that’s been thrown at Greece in the time since?

None of it actually went to the Greek people. It went to bail out the French, German, and Italian banks who own Greek debt.

Matt Taibbi nailed this bad boy a couple of years ago when describing Goldman as the Vampire Squid and how it drives high finance to make as much money as possible, no matter the cost.

LSD without the need for LSD

Of color and geometry, the extraordinary work of young photographer Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji  vis a vis the mosques of Iran will blow you away. Amazing without question. 

When one thinks of the home of psychedelic architecture, Iran probably isn’t the first place that springs to mind. But here it is. It’s undeniable. Northern Iranian student Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji has recently documented the existence of these intricate structures in Iran with gorgeous HDR photographs, so incredible that the Western mind can barely grasp them.

Go to Domiri's site. His work is astounding.

Cyberwar - In Real Time

Cyberwar in real time courtesy, Norse , shows where attacks come from and where they go, in real time. Intense without issue, something Zero Hedge talked about regarding the NYSE shutdown. The Norse map seen above shows St. Louis as a target from the Far East or Wargames - 21st century style.

What clearly stands out is that for some reason Chinese DDOS attacks/hackers seem to be focusing on St. Louis this morning.

Question, what's in St Louis to make it a biggie in this version of cyberwar circa 7/8/2015?

Franklin's Tower

On July 5, 2015, my home town had an outrageous July 4th blowout, complete with a bodacious cover of the Grateful Dead's classic, Franklin's Tower. Check it out. Worthwhile for sure. :)

In another time's forgotten space
your eyes looked through your mother's face
Wildflower seed on the sand and stone
may the four winds blow you safely home

Roll away, the dew
Roll away, the dew
Roll away, the dew
Roll away, the dew

I'll tell you where the four winds dwell
In Franklin's tower there hangs a bell
It can ring, turn night to day
It can ring like fire when you lose your way

Roll away, the dew,
Roll away, the dew
Roll away, the dew
Roll away, the dew

God help the child who rings that bell
It may have one good ring left, you can't tell
One watch by night, one watch by day
If you get confused just listen to the music play

Roll away, the dew,
Roll away, the dew
Roll away, the dew
Roll away, the dew

Some come to laugh their past away
Some come to make it just one more day
Whichever way your pleasure tends
if you plant ice you're gonna harvest wind

Roll away, the dew,
Roll away, the dew
Roll away, the dew
Roll away, the dew

In Franklin's Tower the four winds sleep
Like four lean hounds the lighthouse keep
Wildflower seed in the sand and wind
May the four winds blow you home again

Roll away, the dew
Roll away, the dew
Roll away, the dew
Roll away, the dew
You better roll away the dew

Songwriters: GARCIA, JEROME J. / KREUTZMANN, WILLIAM / HUNTER, ROBERT C.

Estimated Prophet :)

Yours truly has seen a lot of concerts, particularly from the early 60's to early 70's. One group I only saw once were the Dead, one of the truly great bands of all time, who did the ultimate mashup of blues, Django, bluegrass, reggae, jazz and rock in a style both generous and pure CA to the max. To make amends for only catching them once, here's a connect to arguably one of the best concerts they did way back in 1977, the same year Steely Dan did the deed with their masterpiece AJA.

Check out Estimated Prophet where Garcia does wa wa to the max with a touch of reggae thrown in for good measure. Without question, rock, back in the day, was truly unconscious, in a very good way. :)

Had to put in Blues for Allah, another gem from the Dead circa 1975.

Last but not least, here's a stellar 1972 concert stream.

The 1% "Solution"

Many people don't think twice about the chemicals they put on their bodies, perhaps thinking that the government regulates the personal care products that flood the marketplace. In reality, the government plays a very small role, in part because it doesn't have the legal mandate to protect the public from harmful substances that chemical companies and manufacturers sell in their products. Federal rules designed to ensure product safety haven’t been updated in more than 75 years. New untested chemicals appear on store shelves all the time.

"Under federal law, cosmetics companies don't have to disclose chemicals or gain approval for the 2,000 products that go on the market every year," notes environment writer Jane Kay in Scientific American. "And removing a cosmetic from sale takes a battle in federal court."

It's high time these rules are revisited. Not only have thousands of new chemicals entered the market in the past several decades, there is overwhelming evidence that the public is unnecessarily exposed to health hazards from consumer products. In 2013, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued a report that found "robust" evidence linking "toxic environmental agents" — which includes consumer products — to "adverse reproductive and developmental health outcomes."

Formaldehyde is a good example. It is a known carcinogen used as a preservative to kill or inhibit the growth of microorganisms in a wide range of personal care products, from cosmetics, soaps, shampoos and lotions to deodorants, nail polishes and hair gels. It is also used in pressed-wood products, permanent-press fabrics, paper product coatings and insulation, and as a fungicide, germicide, disinfectant and preservative. The general public is also exposed to formaldehyde through automobile tailpipe emissions. Formaldehyde has been linked to spontaneous abortion and low birth weight.

Something to think about, don't you think?