Klown Show Redux

Paddy Chayefsky would have a field day with these klowns running for president. Uninformed, crass and above all else, obsequent to Israel and devoted to war mongering, it truly is a sad moment in US politics to have to listen to these buffoons bloviate about everything save that Rand Paul actually makes sense vis a vis foreign policy.

The mainstream media is complicit in the circusization of the Republican debates.

When voters decide they will no longer be mistreated and summon candidates to their own citizen-powered debates, the dynamics behind the campaigns will shift toward the citizenry.

The mass media, with usual exceptions, have allowed themselves to be pulled down to the level of the political circus. If the Republican Party’s early primary campaigns for the presidential nomination had an elephant and a clown car, Ringling Brothers would be in trouble. It is hard for the Republican presidential candidates to resist temptation, defined by hyping an entertainment circus led by the chief circus barker—Donald Trump of gambling casino fame.

Sixteen candidates, after inexplicably excluding Mark Everson, the former IRS commissioner under George W. Bush and the first to announce, are hurling epithets, war-mongering bravados, and assorted boasts against one another. After their so-called debates, the media emphasize the insults of Trump and others against one-another. Reading the coverage and watching the TV clips, once comes away with the impression that snarls, quips, ripostes, and gaffes, now pass for news.

The operative term for news in this country is Nooze with a CAPITAL N for added emphasis to make sure us rubes are getting a "fair & balanced" view of what is actually going on in this country while we get plied with drugs, beer, cars and never ending financial advice on how to live life large in the good ole USA. :)

Super Moon/Lunar Eclipse :)

Had to do my bit regarding the Super Moon Lunar Eclipse. :)

Under the cover of Darkness

Check out some insane footage from the ME20F-SH 30K Canon camera that handles ISO up to 4.560.000, a level permitting near total darkness video in full color. Unreal says it all.

The Military Welfare State

For a long time, yours truly has considered the military to be America's largest welfare state, a notion supported by an excellent article in Aeon titled Welfare's Last Stand. 

Over the past four decades in the United States, as the country has slashed its welfare state and employers gutted traditional job benefits, growing numbers of people, especially from the working class, grasped for a new safety net – the military. Everyone recognises that the US armed forces have become a global colossus. But few know that, along with bases and bombs, the US military constructed its own massive welfare state. In the waning decades of the 20th century, with US prosperity in decline, more than 10 million active‑duty personnel and their tens of millions of family members turned to the military for economic and social security.

The military welfare state is hidden in plain sight, its welfare function camouflaged by its war-making auspices. Only the richest Americans could hope to access a more systematic welfare network. Military social welfare features a web of near-universal coverage for soldiers and their families – housing, healthcare, childcare, family counselling, legal assistance, education benefits, and more. The programmes constitute a multi-billion-dollar-per-year safety net, at times accounting for nearly 50 per cent of the Department of Defense budget (DoD). Their real costs spread over several divisions of the defence budget creating a system so vast that the DoD acknowledged it could not accurately reckon its total expense.

Read the history behind the military welfare state,  you won't be disappointed.

Competency+

The competency of NASA never ceases to amaze, particularly regarding New Horizons
and it's rendezvous with Pluto. Astounding to say the least.

The newest high-resolution images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons are both dazzling and mystifying, revealing a multitude of previously unseen topographic and compositional details.

One image, showing an area on Pluto’s best-mapped hemisphere near the line that separates day from night, captures a vast rippling landscape of strange, aligned linear ridges that has astonished New Horizons team members.

“It’s a unique and perplexing landscape stretching over hundreds of miles,” says William McKinnon, a New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team deputy lead from Washington University in St. Louis. “It looks more like tree bark or dragon scales than geology. This’ll really take time to figure out; maybe it’s some combination of internal tectonic forces and ice sublimation driven by Pluto’s faint sunlight.”

The “snakeskin” image of Pluto’s surface is just one tantalizing piece of data New Horizons sent back in recent days. The spacecraft also captured the highest-resolution color view yet of Pluto – along with detailed spectral maps and other high-resolution images.

The new “extended color” view of Pluto – taken by New Horizons’ wide-angle Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) on July 14 and downlinked to Earth on Sept. 19 – shows the extraordinarily rich color palette of Pluto.

Seen below is the snakeskin image of Planet Pluto. :)

In 1952 ...

Santa Monica Hospital rates - 1952

Charles Hugh Smith's take on economics, as stated before in BRT, is thoughtful, practical and wise, characteristics readily on display when discussing the fubar of healthcare and why it has to become either single payer or competitively transparent with emphasis on cash and carry, notions anathema to the powers at be who foisted this horrible system upon the US beginning around 1965.

For starters ...

1. License all M.D.'s nationally so they don't need to go through the absurd waste of time and money being licensed in multiple states.

2. Make all information on clinics, hospitals, surgeries, etc. public on the Web. Those doctors willing to take on the very ill will have more patients die than those who avoid the risky cases; it will be up to consumers to sort out the track record of the people who they choose to hire to attend to their health. (include patient outcomes & true costs of procedures and hospital per day costs) ed.

Pay cash, take charge of your health and question the validity of insurance and government entitlements are Smith's start points for changing the HC system for the better.

With no insurance or government program to bill vast sums, then every clinic, doctor and hospital in the U.S. would instantly go broke. Someone would pick up the pieces for $1 or whatever the auction price happened to be and start charging people $50 for a visit to the doctor--not a "co-pay" which was accompanied by a bill for $500 or $1,500 or $15,000 to an insurance company or the government, but $50 cash--that would be the total cost. People might decide they did not need to see the doctor every time they got the sniffles. They might ask the doctor if an MRI was really going to help diagnose their problem or if it was gilding the lily.

Last but not least.

Everybody's got an excuse in our current system, and perhaps that's why it is morally and financially bankrupt. The U.S. (and certainly not Santa Monica) was not a Third World nation in 1952; people did not feel their healthcare was deficient or poor. There was simply no money to pursue marginal returns except perhaps for a few millionaires seeking exotic treatments. Fine, it's their money; most died right along with the rest of us and at about the same lifespan.

As for "overall health" of the populace: what with the "diabesity" epidemic out of control due entirely to lifestyle changes, it's hard to say we've gotten 50 times healthier as a result of our healthcare costs rising 50-fold.

When it comes right down to it, the current system is based on this premise: the average American is too dumb to figure out healthcare for themselves and so we need a gigantic structure of "experts" to figure out what should be done and what it should cost. It's not even really "insurance" because everyone gets old, ill and then dies.

HC will change as the current system, like that of enormous college tuition costs and continued expansion of the incredibly wasteful military/industrial/congressional complex, cannot be sustained as the US cannot afford these and other outrageous expenses (Homeland Security anyone?) that are bankrupting the nation as we speak. People are starting to ask why we have such a crappy system and why it costs so much. In time, people will stop asking and demand change and now. The question to ask is, when will it happen. For yours truly, it can't happen soon enough.

The Military Industrial Complex

Great speech by a president slowly becoming recognized as one of the greats. The only thing Ike missed on his commentary was adding the word Congressional into the mix when describing the engine of never ending war, a warning the Republicans, like Carly Fiorina, just don't seem to understand in any way shape or fashion.

In trying to sound like she actually knows something about national security policy there was not a single neocon shibboleth that she didn’t name check, nor any possibility for bolstering Washington’s military might she failed to mention:

Having met Vladimir Putin, I wouldn’t talk to him at all. We’ve talked way too much to him…….What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states. I’d probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin would get the message…..We could also, to Senator Rubio’s point, give the Egyptians what they’ve asked for……..We could give the Jordanians what they’ve asked for…bombs and materiel. We have not supplied it…We could arm the Kurds.

Read David Stockman's piece, interesting to say the least in terms of facts not mattering one bit when one panders to one's base with the vim and vigor of a Carly.

Yogi

What a sad day, Yogi Berra died today. What a bummer. Amazing catcher, even more, a kind and amazing man who stayed true to his roots. Yours truly will miss him and his zen comments that always had a bit of the Bronx in them as per this classic.

When you come to a fork in the road, TAKE IT!

Yogi Berra, one of baseball’s greatest catchers and characters, who as a player was a mainstay of 10 Yankee championship teams and as a manager led both the Yankees and Mets to the World Series — but who may be more widely known as an ungainly but lovable cultural figure, inspiring a cartoon character and issuing a seemingly limitless supply of unwittingly witty epigrams known as Yogi-isms — died on Tuesday. He was 90.

In 1949, early in Berra’s Yankee career, his manager assessed him this way in an interview in The Sporting News: “Mr. Berra,” Casey Stengel said, “is a very strange fellow of very remarkable abilities.”

It ain't over until it's over. :)

Open Tree of Life

Words cannot describe this site. Go to it to learn about life on planet earth. Stunning.

For the love of $

Outside of the amazing tech that has changed medical for the better, as seen by this awesome image of Homer, along with good docs and hc practitioners doing the right thing for their patients, the HC environment in the US is predicated on $, something egregiously exemplified by a rather large price increase of a drug called Daraprim.

 The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“What is it that they are doing differently that has led to this dramatic increase?” said Dr. Judith Aberg, the chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She said the price increase could force hospitals to use “alternative therapies that may not have the same efficacy.”

It gets better.

Turing’s price increase is not an isolated example. While most of the attention on pharmaceutical prices has been on new drugs for diseases like cancer, hepatitis C and high cholesterol, there is also growing concern about huge price increases on older drugs, some of them generic, that have long been mainstays of treatment.

Although some price increases have been caused by shortages, others have resulted from a business strategy of buying old neglected drugs and turning them into high-priced “specialty drugs.”

Single payer anyone?

From Vietnam to China/timelapse style

Timelapse to the max. Worth seeing without question.

Genius is ...

Richard Feynman was a very cool guy. Musician, painter, Nobel Laureate and teacher, he was genius incarnate, NOT in IQ (125) but in being able to make connections, something yours truly has talked about for years. This connectedness & vision, along with the ability to see deep relationships among differing aspects of reality, permeate the work of all true creatives, whether they be farmers, architects, physicists or artists (etc., etc) as the discipline in question shapes the kind of output produced. As stated before in BRT, intelligence, is a prerequisite of vision, vision is not a prerequisite of intelligence as vision is an extremely rare commodity, something Feynman had in great abundance. :)

In 1959, Feynman's  stunning Plenty of Room  at the Bottom lecture described the potential of miniaturization and nanotech 20+ years before the notion, let alone the possibility of nanotech, was even envisioned until writers such as K. Eric Drexler came along to explain how this tech could work, something that is finally happening today thanks, in large part, to the personal computer revolution that began back in the early 80's.

Whales win!

Whales win regarding Navy sonar. Stellar without question. Let's hope this applies to the Arctic as well.

Melon headed whales like these on the west side of Hawai'i island will now be protected from dangerous mid-frequency sonar training and testing.

The blue whale is one of the largest animals ever known to have lived on Earth, but despite its heft, this magnificently oversized marine mammal can’t withstand the biological blows caused by Navy sonar training and testing.

Today, the blue whale got a break from these harmful sounds. For the first time ever, the U.S. Navy has agreed to put vast swaths of important habitat for numerous marine mammals off limits to dangerous mid-frequency sonar training and testing and the use of powerful explosives.

The significance of this victory cannot be overstated. Ocean noise is one of the biggest threats to the health and well-being of marine mammals, which rely on sound to “see” their world. For years, scientists have documented that high-intensity, mid-frequency sounds wreak havoc on the aquatic environment, causing serious impacts to marine mammals, such as strandings, habitat avoidance and abandonment, and even death.

Without question, this is a step in the right direction regarding the world's oceans. 

Mirroring the human eye

Mirroring the human eye regarding light levels and contrast has been the holy grail of camera tech for years. Seems MIT has come up with a viable solution dealing with this issue. Interesting to say the least. 

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging is a method that allows both very bright and very dim light sources to be pictured in a single image with no loss in quality. HDR cameras have been created before, but conventional HDR cameras use multiple normal images to create one final HDR image. This means that if the camera is shaking, or if the image is of a moving target, the HDR technique does not work. However, the modulo camera, created in a collaboration between the Media Lab's Camera Culture group, MIT Lincoln Lab, and Singapore University of Technology and Design, only requires one shot to create an HDR image. This not only allows HDR photos to be taken free of blur, but also allows for the possibility of HDR video.

Unbounded, as per MIT, says it all. :)

Click here to get the tech paper on this remarkable work.

Can you keep a secret?

On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez struck Prince William Sound's Bligh Reef at 12:04 a.m.[1] local time and spilled 11 to 38 million US gallons (260,000 to 900,000 bbl; 42,000 to 144,000 m3) of crude oil[2][3] over the next few days. It is considered to be one of the most devastating human-caused environmental disasters.[4] The Valdez spill was the largest in US waters until the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in terms of volume released.[5] However, Prince William Sound's remote location, accessible only by helicopter, plane, or boat, made government and industry response efforts difficult and severely taxed existing plans for response. The region is a habitat for salmon, sea otters, seals and seabirds. The oil, originally extracted at the Prudhoe Bay oil field, eventually covered 1,300 miles (2,100 km) of coastline,[6] and 11,000 square miles (28,000 km2) of ocean.[7]

It gets better.

At a meeting in Exxon Corporation's headquarters, a senior company scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen. Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered a sobering message: carbon dioxide from the world's use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.

It was July 1977 when Exxon's leaders received this blunt assessment, well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.

A year later, Black, a top technical expert in Exxon's Research & Engineering division, took an updated version of his presentation to a broader audience. He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent researchers estimated a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles.  Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.

End result.

Exxon responded swiftly. Within months the company launched its own extraordinary research into carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and its impact on the earth. Exxon's ambitious program included both empirical CO2 sampling and rigorous climate modeling. It assembled a brain trust that would spend more than a decade deepening the company's understanding of an environmental problem that posed an existential threat to the oil business.

Then, toward the end of the 1980s, Exxon curtailed its carbon dioxide research. In the decades that followed, Exxon worked instead at the forefront of climate denial. It put its muscle behind efforts to manufacture doubt about the reality of global warming its own scientists had once confirmed. It lobbied to block federal and international action to control greenhouse gas emissions. It helped to erect a vast edifice of misinformation that stands to this day.

As often stated in BRT, it's all about the money so the question to ask again is .... Barak, why did you let Shell go up to the Arctic to drill for oil?

Just the beginning - Rev 2

The influx of refugees, as stated before in BRT, is just starting to ramp up, with dire implications for the cultural and economic future of Europe. This crisis, along with others like environmental degradation, resource depletion and continued fossil fuel use, in concert with never ending war, are prime drivers to a possible dark age as we move further into the 21st century. From this purview, one has to ask if other civilizations living on rocky planets, go through the same process and .... do they survive in using tech and political enlightenment to move to a sustainable way of conducting business on their planets before it's too late. One never knows but to yours truly, the success rate for us is razor thin given just how fractured a state mankind is at this point in time.

Europe Refugee Crisis: Croatia's President Calls For Further EU Help As Tensions With Neighbors Worsen

Croatia’s President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic called for more help from the European Union in dealing with a massive influx of refugees Saturday. In an interview with the Associated Press, she said that the country of 4.2 million could only do so much to assist the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing violence and chaos in the Middle East and Africa.

Thousands of them streamed into Croatia Thursday after they were forcibly pushed back from Hungary’s borders, and the country shut its borders after over 20,000 entered this week, saying it could not handle more.

"We need to stop the flow, we need to get reassurances from European Union what happens to these people who are already in Croatia, and those who still want to transit through Croatia further," she said, according to the Associated Press.

The migrants are trying to transit through nations like Croatia in the hopes of reaching the Schengen Zone, from where they can go to wealthy west European nations like Germany.

Manufactured crisis, courtesy US foreign policy and resource depletion in the desert nations of North Africa, are the two reasons why Europe is in the cross hairs of something never thought possible prior to 2001.

49% & Counting

WWF’s Living Blue Planet Report tracks 5,829 populations of 1,234 mammal, bird, reptile and fish species through a marine living planet index. The evidence, analyzed by researchers at the Zoological Society of London, paints a troubling picture. In addition to the plummeting number of marine vertebrate species, populations of locally and commercially fished fish species have fallen by half, with some of the most important species experiencing even greater declines.

Time is running out as the world warms and as we continue to pollute and plunder the planet no matter the cost. Seen below is Eco Watch's chart showing the precipitous decline of all vertebrate species in the world's oceans.

Time to WTFU before it's game over, don't you think?

The Clown Show - Round 2

The Repugs debate is on CNN, Wednesday, September 16 @ 8:00 pm. Question to ask is ...

Will it be as stupid as the clown show seen above? Only the gods know for sure. :)

Meltdown

BRT has talked copiously about global warming for years with connects to James Hansen's work and to numerous NOAA and NASA articles citing specific facts as to why burning fossil fuels is detrimental to one's health, including the planet's. On the heels of of all this verbiage comes a blurb from the NY Times reinforcing James Hansen's emphatic wakeup call to the Shells of the world to leave it in the ground before it's to late.

Burning all the world’s deposits of coal, oil and natural gas would raise the temperature enough to melt the entire ice sheet covering Antarctica, driving the level of the sea up by more than 160 feet, scientists reported Friday.

In a major surprise to the scientists, they found that half the melting could occur in as little as a thousand years, causing the ocean to rise by something on the order of a foot per decade, roughly 10 times the rate at which it is rising now. Such a pace would almost certainly throw human society into chaos, forcing a rapid retreat from the world’s coastal cities.

The rest of the earth’s land ice would melt along with Antarctica, and warming ocean waters would expand, so that the total rise of the sea would likely exceed 200 feet, the scientists said.

Click here to get the consise article detailing the "doomsday" scenario from Science Advances.

Well Barack, why in hell did you give Shell the permit to drill in the Arctic?

Last but not least, the NY Times piece also factored in Greenland, along with significant other ice environs as the Arctic, as per the Antarctic, is doing the same meltdown dance as we speak.

360 & then some

VR & flicks, the merge is now real as seen by Dirrogate, a sign of things to come. 

I'm Sorry ...

I am far more liberal than Michael Ramirez but every once in awhile, a true gem is created by this really talented cartoonist and this is one of them. Pulling teeth out of a chicken or sucking a very sour lemon comes to mind in watching Hillary say she's sorry in acknowledging that her grievously self inflicted wound vis a vis an easily avoidable email fubar required at least some expression of remorse, even if forced or faked, if she wants to become president of the United States of America. :)

Complexity +

Pluto's complexity shows, in spades, why assumptions can be dangerous to the max as researchers never imagined just how amazing Pluto truly is.

This synthetic perspective view of Pluto, based on the latest high-resolution images to be downlinked from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, shows what you would see if you were approximately 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) above Pluto’s equatorial area, looking northeast over the dark, cratered, informally named Cthulhu Regio toward the bright, smooth, expanse of icy plains informally called Sputnik Planum. The entire expanse of terrain seen in this image is 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) across. The images were taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers). 

It gets better.

New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity.

“Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.”

Who would have "thunk" it. :) Seen below is Pluto's system courtesy New Horizons.

Collaboration 2 Step

The Best coverage worldwide, complete with evocative graphics, touts AT&T's end to end connectivity to us 24/7 but lost in the shadows, the tagline inadvertently points to something all together different, AT&T's deep connect to it's erstwhile partner, the NSA, a fact not known to the public at large, until now.

THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY’S ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.

While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed NSA documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”

AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013. AT&T has given the NSA access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T.

The NSA’s top-secret budget in 2013 for the AT&T partnership was more than twice that of the next-largest such program, according to the documents. The company installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its similarly sized competitor, Verizon. And its engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency.

It gets better.

The documents also show that another program, code-named Stormbrew, has included Verizon and the former MCI, which Verizon purchased in 2006. One describes a Stormbrew cable landing that is identifiable as one that Verizon operates. Another names a contact person whose LinkedIn profile says he is a longtime Verizon employee with a top-secret clearance.

Seen below is a diagram showing a small part of just how sophisticated the network data flow from AT&T to the NSA truly was, something not denied by either party thanks to the accuracy of the data collected when Edwin Snowden blew the whistle on these guys.

The question to ask now is, is the connect still on? Only FISA knows, for sure.

Seen below is the art used to support the Best tagline. If nothing else, it's creative as hell.

It's God's Way

Speaking of god, let's talk about Kim Davis and her refusal to grant marriage licenses to Gays, something that has, thank god, become legal, which means Kim, by law, has to do the drill. Because she's devout, she will not do said drill so, she was jailed for not following the letter of the law. A few days later, she was released and ...

CNN correspondent Martin Savidge, who was at the jail, explained following the order that her attorney, Harry Mihet, said that the judge had ordered the release because her office had satisfied the court by issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples while she was behind bars.

“The problem here is that the attorney says she has not changed her mind, that Kim Davis is adamant that as long as her name appears on those marriage licenses, she objects and she will attempt to stop those licenses from being distributed," Savidge reported. “Which means if she goes back on the job as is expected, she will bring the process to a halt. That’s what her attorneys believe."

So ... lets think about this. Imagine what it would be like if the Kim Davis' of the world had their way, courtesy the SC's rulings on Greece NY and Hobby Lobby, whereby the "freedom" of religion scenario would permit all kinds of prejudices to issue forth from elimination of gay marriage to the striking down of women's rights and god knows what else, with enforcement being provided for by administering biblical punishments like stoning or crucifixion in order to not infringe upon one's religious beliefs like those of the Kim Davis' of the world. Sounds like ISIS anyone?

Without question, the Founding Fathers, as imperfect as they were, would have reacted with supreme distaste as they knew, as products of the Age of Reason, that separation of church and state was essential to preclude the kinds of excesses religion dominated governances tend to generate as seen by Europe, beginning with Ferland & Isabella using the Jesuits and the Inquisition to keep their subjects in line while Columbus made his way to the Americas with and end result of 250,000+ indians enslaved or killed using god (and mammon) as the path to their "enlightenment" in order to enrich the coffers of Spain.

Think about it, kind of scary isn't it?

Addendum: Without question, this tweet refutes the logic space of the Kim Davis' of the world.

In Transit

A short clip showing the transition from woodland to farm with some extras thrown in for added spice. :)

Lethal Injection of the good kind

This short clip shows how pattern recognition software, combined with an undersea robot equipped with a lethal injection system, works in eradicating the Crown of Thorns starfish, a giant plaque victimizing the Great Barrier Reef 24/7.

Meet the COTSbot.

It may not be as adorable as other patrolling robots we’ve seen recently, but when the COTSbot is sent on a patrol it means business.

Operating so close to the sea floor — one of the most difficult environments for autonomous robots to navigate — the COTSbot is equipped with some serious tech. With stereoscopic cameras for depth perception, five thrusters to maintain stability in all weather conditions, GPS and pitch-and-roll sensors and a pneumatic injection arm to deliver the fatal shot that previously divers would administer by hand — the COTSbot is one lean, mean starfish-killing machine.

Pretty cool tech without question.

Seen below is nature's way of dealing with the problem with a Giant Triton doing a number on the COT in real time. Pretty awesome without question.

MENA

MENA, aka Middle East/North Africa, the tinderbox beginning to explode, is heading for Europe with skirmishes as prologue as people try to escape an untenable situation no matter what the cost may be.

The desperate wish in what is loosely called the West to at least appear morally correct is unfortunately over-matched by the desperation of people fleeing unstable, overpopulated places outside the West, and it is a fiasco beyond even the events of the moment.

The refugee / immigrant crisis around the Mediterranean is a preview of a horror show to which there is no end in sight, and is certain to escalate. So anyone who indulges in fantasies about organizing an orderly, rational distribution of displaced persons for the current wave, is badly missing the point. Wave beyond wave awaits after the this one. And then what will the well-intentioned sentimentalists say? We wanted to do the right thing… we meant well… we cried when we saw the little boy dead on the beach….

Yes, the tragic intrusions of the US military in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and elsewhere have been reckless and stupid. But that is not the whole story. The desert nations of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have populations abnormally swollen by a century of oil-and-gas-based agriculture, really by the benefits of Modernity in general. Now that the oil age is chugging to an unruly crack-up, and Modernity with it, and the earth’s climate is doing wonky things, and the rich nations to the north have faked their finances to the point of bankruptcy, well, circumstances have changed.

When factoring in the issues of climate change, environmental degradation and resource depletion, aka Overshoot, the real possibility of an Elysium looms unless the world does a total reboot before it's too late.

The absurdity of NO

Brian McFadden's spot on regarding the sorry state of the nation thanks, in large part, to the supremes and their rulings against the Founding Fathers' insistence on the separation of church and state via the 1st Amendment, thanks to Hobby Lobby & Greece NY .

Free at last

Robert Parry is one of the few reporters who get it. Do due diligence to get the facts regarding any given story before publishing it, something the NY Times has forgotten at times since Punch Sulzberger left the scene as scion of America's most important newspaper. To that end, Deflategate dominated the football scene to such an extent that even BRT posted blurbs about it, citing Robert Parry's excellent take on why the case was shaky at best when the story broke 7 months ago. As stated in BRT, it matters not what team or quarterback was "possibly" aware about the "possible crime" of people deflating footballs, what matters is the validity of the case, something completely annihilated by science (the ideal gas law) and a judge who gets it when Judge Richard Berman set Brady free from a NFL kangaroo number the NY Times accepted as gospel prior to the ruling and facts of the case given out on Thursday.

It’s been my experience from nearly four decades in Washington journalism that it’s increasingly rare when a powerful institution protects an individual from unfair and abusive treatment by another powerful institution. The U.S. District Court decision throwing out the National Football League’s kangaroo case against New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was one of those exceptions.

I realize that some readers feel that I should not have “wasted” time examining the scientifically flimsy case known as Deflategate or observing how the NFL’s supposedly “independent” investigation slanted what little evidence it had to support the league’s initial rush to judgment and harsh punishment of Brady. One reader joked it was just a case about men and their balls.

And I initially had no intention of writing about this topic. But I noted a disturbing haste in the conclusions about Brady’s guilt and I then read the Wells report last spring out of curiosity. What I found in it was what I had seen in so many other bogus investigations that start with a conclusion and make the “facts” fit.

My annoyance also didn’t stop with the NFL. It extended to the news media, where – from The New York Times to ESPN – the NFL’s case was accepted as unassailable and Brady was casually denounced as a cheater and a perjurer. Considering how much ink and time were devoted to this overblown Deflategate “scandal,” there was almost no serious examination of the actual evidence.

The question to ask here is, would the Pentagon Papers be published today by the NY Times? Somehow, I rather doubt it.

Click here to read the ruling, courtesy the NY Times. :)

The Deep State

Seen above is an excellent chart from oftwominds.com, detailing the power elite who runs America aka The Deep State, a term originating from Turkey describing a government within a government linking private to public with its sole aim to remain in power... forever. To whit:

Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude. - Mike Lofgren

In essence, this is very old news as this kind of thing has been going on since the beginning of time where those in power will do everything in their power to remain in power .... forever.

Origins:

The Deep State arose in World War II, as the mechanisms of electoral governance had failed to prepare the nation for global war. The goal of winning the war relegated the conventional electoral government to rubber-stamping Deep State decisions and policies.

After the war, the need to stabilize (if not "win") the Cold War actually extended the Deep State. Now, the global war on terror (GWOT) is the justification.

One way to understand the Deep State is to trace the vectors of dependency. The Deep State needs the nation to survive, but the nation does not need the Deep State to survive (despite the groupthink within the Deep State that "we are the only thing keeping this thing together.")

The nation would survive without the Federal Reserve, but the Federal Reserve would not survive without the Deep State. The Fed is not the Deep State; it is merely a tool of the Deep State.

This brings us to the U.S. dollar and the Deep State. The Deep State doesn't really care about the signal noise of the economy--mortgage rates, minimum wages, unemployment, etc., any more that it cares about the political circus ("step right up to the Clinton sideshow, folks") or the bickering over regulations by various camps.

What the Deep State cares about are the U.S. dollar, water, energy, minerals and access to those commodities (alliances, sea lanes, etc.). As I have mentioned before, consider the trade enabled by the reserve currency (the dollar): we print/create money out of thin air and exchange this for oil, commodities, electronics, etc.

Any questions?

Summer 2015 - Of Land & Sea

The Summer of 2015, weatherwise, has been stellar for the Northeast though drought is becoming severe thanks to the strong El Nino happening out west. Enjoy as we move toward fall, the season of harvest & the turning of leaves from green to all shades connected to yellows and reds. :)