A Train Wreck Waiting to Happen :)

6 months ago, yours truly stated that Trump had a real shot at the GOP nomination. Needless to say, all parties listening to said bloviator responded with choice tidbits like, "You're crazy, Never happen, Dream on, Jeb's got it in the bag". Well, at this point in time, unless something truly extraordinary happens, The Donald looks like he's going to get it. As for Hillary, it looks like she'll be the candidate for the Dems but the notion of Hillary beating Trump big time, not so fast as seen by the juicy blurbs seen below. :)

One thing Clinton supporters remain in complete denial about (other than the fact most Americans who don’t identify as Democrats find her to be somewhere in between untrustworthy and criminal), is that a significant number of Sanders supporters will never vote for Hillary. Forget the fact that I know a few personally, I’ve noticed several interviews with voters who proclaim Sanders to be their first choice but Trump their second. Are they just saying this or do they mean it? I think a lot of them mean it.

It gets better ...

Trump’s political dominance is highly dependent on his idiosyncratic, audacious method of campaigning. He deals almost entirely in amusing, outrageous, below-the-belt personal attacks, and is skilled at turning public discussions away from the issues and toward personalities (He/she’s a “loser,” “phony,” “nervous,” “hypocrite,” “incompetent.”) If Trump does have to speak about the issues, he makes himself sound foolish, because he doesn’t know very much. Thus he requires the media not to ask him difficult questions, and depends on his opponents’ having personal weaknesses and scandals that he can merrily, mercilessly exploit.

This campaigning style makes Hillary Clinton Donald Trump’s dream opponent. She gives him an endless amount to work with. The emails, Benghazi, Whitewater, Iraq, the Lewinsky scandal, Chinagate, Travelgate, the missing law firm records, Jeffrey Epstein, Kissinger, Marc Rich, Haiti, Clinton Foundation tax errors, Clinton Foundation conflicts of interest, “We were broke when we left the White House,” Goldman Sachs… There is enough material in Hillary Clinton’s background for Donald Trump to run with six times over.

This has the makings of the WWE with Trump having a field day with Hillary. If a miracle happens and Sanders becomes the Dems' candidate, the campaign would become far more substantial as Trump respects Sanders as a smart politician with integrity, something not quite so true with Hillary.

Addendum: I agree with this take on The Donald and Hillary without question.

The Invasive

Tyrannosauroids—the group of carnivores including Tyrannosaurs rex—are some of the most familiar dinosaurs of all. A surge of recent discoveries has helped clarify some aspects of their evolution, but competing phylogenetic hypotheses raise questions about their relationships, biogeography, and fossil record quality. We present a new phylogenetic dataset, which merges published datasets and incorporates recently discovered taxa. We analyze it with parsimony and, for the first time for a tyrannosauroid dataset, Bayesian techniques. The parsimony and Bayesian results are highly congruent, and provide a framework for interpreting the biogeography and evolutionary history of tyrannosauroids. Our phylogenies illustrate that the body plan of the colossal species evolved piecemeal, imply no clear division between northern and southern species in western North America as had been argued, and suggest that T. rex may have been an Asian migrant to North America. Over-reliance on cranial shape characters may explain why published parsimony studies have diverged and filling three major gaps in the fossil record holds the most promise for future work.

In other words, T Rex was an invasive of the 3rd kind. :)

2nd Generation

It's just a matter of time.

The Art of Persuasion

Aeon is a gem. Articulate, insightful and wise, the site never disappoints in presenting essays that provoke profound thought regarding important issues like health, science and, in this case, the art of persuasion, Google style.

But what would happen if new sources of control began to emerge that had little or no competition? And what if new means of control were developed that were far more powerful – and far more invisible – than any that have existed in the past? And what if new types of control allowed a handful of people to exert enormous influence not just over the citizens of the US but over most of the people on Earth?

It might surprise you to hear this, but these things have already happened.

Google decides which web pages to include in search results, and how to rank them. How it does so is one of the best-kept secrets in the world, like the formula for Coca-Cola

To understand how the new forms of mind control work, we need to start by looking at the search engine – one in particular: the biggest and best of them all, namely Google. The Google search engine is so good and so popular that the company’s name is now a commonly used verb in languages around the world. To ‘Google’ something is to look it up on the Google search engine, and that, in fact, is how most computer users worldwide get most of their information about just about everything these days. They Google it. Google has become the main gateway to virtually all knowledge, mainly because the search engine is so good at giving us exactly the information we are looking for, almost instantly and almost always in the first position of the list it shows us after we launch our search – the list of ‘search results’.

That ordered list is so good, in fact, that about 50 per cent of our clicks go to the top two items, and more than 90 per cent of our clicks go to the 10 items listed on the first page of results; few people look at other results pages, even though they often number in the thousands, which means they probably contain lots of good information. Google decides which of the billions of web pages it is going to include in our search results, and it also decides how to rank them. How it decides these things is a deep, dark secret – one of the best-kept secrets in the world, like the formula for Coca-Cola.

It gets better.

... the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (or SEME, pronounced ‘seem’)

SEME’s near-invisibility is curious indeed. It means that when people – including you and me – are looking at biased search rankings, they look just fine. So if right now you Google ‘US presidential candidates’, the search results you see will probably look fairly random, even if they happen to favour one candidate. Even I have trouble detecting bias in search rankings that I know to be biased (because they were prepared by my staff). Yet our randomised, controlled experiments tell us over and over again that when higher-ranked items connect with web pages that favour one candidate, this has a dramatic impact on the opinions of undecided voters, in large part for the simple reason that people tend to click only on higher-ranked items. This is truly scary: like subliminal stimuli, SEME is a force you can’t see; but unlike subliminal stimuli, it has an enormous impact – like Casper the ghost pushing you down a flight of stairs.

Edward Bernays, "the father of public relations" and propaganda, would understand and appreciate the Google Effect to the max. 

Addendum: Read BRT's PR to see the originators of all things related to The Art of Persuasion.

Only the beginning

BRT discussed the Apple/FBI issue in depth in The Answer is No, a piece articulating, in part, how the FBI screwed the pooch in terms of changing passwords twice in disregarding Apple's advice in terms of working with the iPhone vis a vis iCloud, the service that can force the iPhone to dump its data if the password is NOT changed. With this in mind, Monday Note weighs in with a cautionary tale as to why a slippery slope looms if the FBI gets its way.

OK, Apple. You know the key that will get an iPhone (any iPhone, mark those words) to accept an iOS image. So, write a firmware update that bypasses the passcode lockout. We’ll bring the iPhone 5c to your offices so your own engineers can “update” the device. All we ask is that you give us a remote connection — while the device is still under your control — so we can keep guessing the passcode. It’s only four digits, 10,000 attempts, tops. [If you’re interested in the odds of crypto-guessing, see the addendum.]

On to the Principles Con.

Assuming Apple can trump (I had to do it) the security check, why would it refuse to cooperate? It’s for an indisputably good cause and it’s just for this one phone, you know?

The problem is one of consequences, of what comes next on this road paved with good intentions. If Apple gives in for just this one phone, there will be requests for more…and more. Of course, they’ll all be in the interest of solving the most abominable crimes, or for thwarting credible threats. How can anyone be against fighting terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles…?

Further down the road, other countries see that Apple has cried uncle and demand the same access. Will these foreign demands be as “enlightened” as those from our (not so) trusted US agencies?

Make no mistake, what we have here is, by any measure, a backdoor.

When taken in conjunction with what the NSA/CIA/FBI, and significant others, do in capturing ALL OF OUR DATA 24/7, one readily sees Apple's encrypted smartphone data to be the last bastion of privacy we have on planet earth. (Google's jumping in on this as well.) 

Extending this notion further regarding our civil rights, yours truly just saw Citizenfour, the engrossing documentary on Edwin Snowden, the NSA whistleblower. In it was the astounding revelation that not only can the NSA track and capture ALL digital & analog traffic in the US but that said data is immediately retrievable by simply accessing an e-mail address, a CC number or a person's telephone number due to the environment's unique ability to link all the skeins of content relating to the specific search item in question and packaging it in such a way that any intelligent person versed in information technology can easily understand. Even more disquieting, according to Snowden, is the use of predictive analytics to ascertain what the targeted party may do in any given situation, whether it's in the present day or in the future, thanks to the singular leveraging of metadata in ways only techs at the NSA can understand. 

In an April 5th, 1887 letter to Archbishop Mandell Creighton, Lord Acton coined words that were to be widely quoted – and too often forgotten when inconvenient [as always, edits and emphasis mine]:

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. […] still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.“

The only one missing :)

The only one missing ... is no longer missing. :)

Awesome!

A Quiescent Monster

In this sea of light resides a quiescent monster, a supermassive black hole equal to 21 billion suns.

The brightest orb in the center of this photograph captured by the Hubble Space Telescope is a galaxy some 300 million light-years away called NGC 4889.

At its core rests a supermassive black hole that is about 21 billion times the size of the sun, according to NASA and the European Space Agency.

Though you cannot see it in this image because black holes swallow light, NASA said it was one of the largest star devourers ever observed. It dwarfs the black hole that twists at the center of our Milky Way, which researchers estimate is only four million times the size of the sun. The monster once feasted upon many of its host galaxy’s stars, gas and dust, but is no longer active.

How long the SMBH remains quiet, no one knows.

Located about 300 million light-years away in the Coma Cluster, the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 4889, the brightest and largest galaxy in this image, is home to a record-breaking supermassive black hole. Twenty-one billion times the mass of the Sun, this black hole has an event horizon — the surface at which even light cannot escape its gravitational grasp — with a diameter of approximately 130 billion kilometres. This is about 15 times the diameter of Neptune’s orbit from the Sun. By comparison, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is believed to have a mass about four million times that of the Sun and an event horizon just one fifth the orbit of Mercury.

The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine. - J.B.S. Haldane

The Webb

Intricate, powerful and incredibly sophisticated, the James Webb Telescope will change how we view reality if it is properly deployed approximately 1.1 millions miles from earth given that this is, according to scientists, the most complex scientific endeavor ever attempted.

The pressure cooker is an apt metaphor for the whole project. Webb is the biggest, most complex, and most expensive science mission that NASA has ever attempted, and expectations among astronomers and the public are huge. Webb will have 100 times the sensitivity of the Hubble Space Telescope. It will be able to look into the universe’s infancy, when the very first galaxies were forming; study the birth of stars and their planetary systems; and analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets, perhaps even detecting signs of life. “If you put something this powerful into space, who knows what we can find? It’s going to be revolutionary because it’s so powerful,” says Matt Mountain, director of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C., and former JWST telescope scientist. 

The specs.

I "pray" this wonderful instrument works as intended as the impact it will have on man will be enormous.

All Writs Act

Here is a wonderful explanation of the All Writs Act, a 1789 statute used today to boost government surveillance into the stratosphere. In this vein, Arstechnica does a quick analysis on how Apple will defend their refusal to comply with the FBI regarding a forced creation of a backdoor to the iPhone.

Cook said Apple will fight the Riverside, California, magistrate judge's orders, calling it an "unprecedented use of the All Writs Act of 1789 to justify an expansion of its authority." Depending on where you line up in the cryptowars debate, Cook's characterization of the government's stance may or may not be true. But what is undeniable is that the act has certainly been used to expand the government's surveillance reach. Whether it ultimately will in the iPhone case is an open question likely to be resolved by the Supreme Court.

Watch the video. Interesting to say the least.

Substitutionary Atonement :)

Substitutionary Atonement equates to the word "assume" don't you think? :)

Creative Destruction

Terrific video showing the size range of black holes. Very cool, very informative. Enjoy. :)

The Answer is No

Tim Cook is absolutely right in resisting the FBI's insistence on a back door to the iPhone given the inherent potential abuses such a back door would have on the millions of customers who use iPhones for all things related to conducting business on planet earth. 

In the past, Apple has helped extract data from iPhones when issued with an appropriate warrant. Since iOS 8, however, full encryption has been enabled by default—a move that was seemingly introduced specifically to prevent such data-grabs by governments. "Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data," the company wrote on its website at the time. "So it's not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8."

Now, however, Judge Sheri Pym has ordered Apple to introduce a backdoor to help the FBI unlock the iPhone—and, unsurprisingly, Tim Cook is not best pleased.

Cook's message to "our customers" is impressive without question.

We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we believe their intentions are good. Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them. But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.

Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.

The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.

From the court order, we even know what kind of backdoor the US government wants:

Apple's reasonable technical assistance shall accomplish the following three important functions: (1) it will bypass or disable the auto-erase function whether or not it has been enabled; (2) it will enable the FBI to submit passcodes to the SUBJECT DEVICE for testing electronically via the physical device port, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or other protocol available on the SUBJECT and (3) it will ensure that when the FBI submits passcodes to the SUBJECT DEVICE, software running on the device will not purposefully introduce any additional delay between passcode attempts beyond what is incurred by Apple hardware.

The all inclusive nature of the order scares the crap out of yours truly as the number of new soft targets hackers will have access to boggles the imagination if Apple complies with the court. Lastly, when you consider how our right to privacy have been taken away from us by the Bush and Obama administrations via the ongoing 24/7 surveillance being done by the NSA/FBI/CIA/IRS and other significant parties, it's no wonder why Apple's going to fight this as Google should or any other vendor who has our data in hand 24/7.

We are at a crossroads where either we take back our country or sit back and let the powers at be run it into the ground for the sake of ever increasing profit and power no matter what the cost may be.

The choice is up to us.

Addendum: Click here to get MIT's take on why backdoors, in general, are a really bad idea.

Update on why giving the FBI a backdoor is a REALLY REALLY bad idea.

On Friday, we noted that one of the reasons that the FBI was unable to get access to the data on the remaining iPhone from Syed Farook was because after the shooting and after the phone was in the hands of the government, Farook's employer, the San Bernardino Health Department, initiated a password change on his iCloud account. That apparently messed stuff up, because without that, it would have been possible to force the phone to backup data to the associated iCloud account, where it would have been available to the FBI. But, after we published that article, a rather salient point came out: the Health Department only did this because the FBI asked it to do so. 

From a San Bernardino County Twitter account:
If you can't read that, it says: "The County was working cooperatively with the FBI when it reset the iCloud password at the FBI's request." 

In short: a big reason why the FBI can't get the info it wants is because of an action taken... by the FBI. 

Apple has also provided further information on this, showing how it was perfectly willing to cooperate in reasonable ways with the FBI -- but that it was the FBI that messed things up:

The Apple executive told reporters that the company’s engineers had first suggested to the government that it take the phone to the suspect’s apartment to connect it to the Wi-Fi there. But since reporters and members of the public had swarmed that crime scene shortly after the shootings occurred, it was likely that any Wi-Fi there had been disconnected. So Apple suggested the government take the phone to Farook’s former workplace and connect the phone to a Wi-Fi network there. 

The executive said that Apple walked the government through the entire process to accomplish this, but the government came back about two weeks later and told Apple that it hadn’t worked. 

Apple didn’t understand why it had not worked—until the company learned that sometime after the phone had been taken into the custody of law enforcement, someone had gone online and changed the Apple ID that the phone uses to conduct backups.

Any questions?

13.8

13.8 billion years, equivalent to the age of our part of the multiverse, is the estimated length of time 5D optical memory will last according to the University of Southampton.

Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.

The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C ) opening a new era of eternal data archiving. As a very stable and safe form of portable memory, the technology could be highly useful for organisations with big archives, such as national archives, museums and libraries, to preserve their information and records.

The technology was first experimentally demonstrated in 2013 when a 300 kb digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D.

Sounds like End Times from the scientific perspective. :)

How the tech works.

The self-assembled nanostructures change the way light travels through glass, modifying polarisation of light that can then be read by combination of optical microscope and a polariser, similar to that found in Polaroid sunglasses. 

Coined as the ‘Superman memory crystal’, as the glass memory has been compared to the “memory crystals” used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz. The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.

Major documents from human history such as Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Newton’s Opticks, Magna Carta and Kings James Bible, have been saved as digital copies that could survive the human race.

13.8 billion for the human race? A stretch beyond imagination without question.

The Law of Diminishing Returns

No, this is NOT about the Terminator but rather about Bill Joy's Why The Future Doesn't Need Us meeting the Law of Diminishing Returns whereby bots, tech and AI are not the saviors of the economy and the world but rather the terminators if the Arstechinca article rings true. 

There is no denying the impact of the information technology revolution on our economy. From the time that personal computers started infiltrating the workplace, there have been impressive gains in productivity. At the same time, there's been an uncoupling of the traditional link between productivity and employment; unlike in years past, the benefits have not been felt by many—or even most—in society. That was the central message from Moshe Vardi's talk.

A professor of computational engineering at Rice University, Vardi said that technology has been destroying jobs since the industrial revolution—one only needs to look at the role of horses in transportation as an example. But in the past, those jobs have been taken by machines designed to do a specific thing, like weaving cotton. Now, Vardi argued, we're facing the possibility of machines that may be better than humans at nearly everything.

Vardi raised the concerning possibility that an over-reliance on automation and AI could have the same effect on our economy as the Roman dependence on slaves. "Can our economic system deal with labor participation rates below 25 percent? Below 50 percent?" he asked. The solution in ancient Rome, he pointed out, was bread and circuses or life as a legionary.

What's interesting about this notion of tech not being the end all is the take The Economist has regarding the same subject with emphasis given to how The Law of Diminishing Returns applies.

IF THERE IS a technological revolution in progress, rich economies could be forgiven for wishing it would go away. Workers in America, Europe and Japan have been through a difficult few decades. In the 1970s the blistering growth after the second world war vanished in both Europe and America. In the early 1990s Japan joined the slump, entering a prolonged period of economic stagnation. Brief spells of faster growth in intervening years quickly petered out. The rich world is still trying to shake off the effects of the 2008 financial crisis. And now the digital economy, far from pushing up wages across the board in response to higher productivity, is keeping them flat for the mass of workers while extravagantly rewarding the most talented ones.

Between 1991 and 2012 the average annual increase in real wages in Britain was 1.5% and in America 1%, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a club of mostly rich countries. That was less than the rate of economic growth over the period and far less than in earlier decades. Other countries fared even worse. Real wage growth in Germany from 1992 to 2012 was just 0.6%; Italy and Japan saw hardly any increase at all. And, critically, those averages conceal plenty of variation. Real pay for most workers remained flat or even fell, whereas for the highest earners it soared.

Where this leads, no one knows as AI, combined with robotics and nanotech, as Joy and others have noted with great eloquence, are open ended creations, fraught with uncertainty in terms of how these technologies will interact with man, something sanguine researchers like Ray Kurzweil seem to not fully understand. As often stated in BRT, there's a cost to everything thanks to the two laws of thermodynamics,  irrefutable facts we ignore at our peril.

The Way of the Dodo?

From one of the guys who gave us the 2008 economic collapse, Larry Summers, comes his really excellent suggestion, eliminate Benjamins from the gene pool. After that, let's do away with cash altogether because cash is messy and, unfortunately, ANONYMOUS, a notion that should not continue if the central banks of the world have anything to say about it.

We also noted that according to a Bank of America analysis, the scrapping of the largest denominated European note "would be negative for the currency", to which we said that BofA is right, unless of course, in this global race to the bottom, first the SNB "scraps" the CHF1000 bill, and then the Federal Reserve follows suit and listens to Harvard "scholar" and former Standard Chartered CEO Peter Sands who just last week said the US should ban the $100 note as it would "deter tax evasion, financial crime, terrorism and corruption."

Well, not even 24 hours later, and another Harvard "scholar" and Fed chairman wannabe, Larry Summers, has just released an oped in the left-leaning Amazon Washington Post, titled "It’s time to kill the $100 bill" in which he makes it clear that the pursuit of paper money is only just starting. Not surprisingly, just like in Europe, the argument is that killing the Benjamins would somehow eradicate crime, saying that "a moratorium on printing new high denomination notes would make the world a better place."

Yes, for central bankers, as all this modest proposal will do is make it that much easier to unleash NIRP, because recall that of the $1.4 trillion in total U.S. currency in circulation, $1.1 trillion is in the form of $100 bills. Eliminate those, and suddenly there is nowhere to hide from those trillions in negative interest rate "yielding" bank deposits.

Gotta love the reasoning. Reminds one of the old saw, Just keep moving folks, nothing to see here, nothing whosoever. 

For something completely different :)

A magnificent jam on the Dire Straits classic Sultans of Swing.

Here's the original, which is even better! :)

Compare this to the vapid rock of today, no comparison, right?

Speaking the Truth

Yours truly is not in love with THE DONALD but at the same time, yours truly respects the guy, both as a media genius and, when not bloviating about The Wall or Citizens United or the birthplace of Obama, his take on Iraq,  the Middle East, "W's" Mission Accomplished Fiasco and the fact Bush lied about the weapons of mass destruction.

This reminds me of this.

And the beat goes on.

Triumph L'oeil

Talented artist Stephan Pabst does Triumph L'oeil to the max. :)

Infrared 3 Step

Had to do just one more. :)

Infrareds are inherently mysterious and aleatory, something yours truly find fascinating and addictive as processing this work is akin to developing them in a darkroom but using a computer to make it happen. Hope you like the work. Best, Robert E.

A Touch of Infrared

Had to do another on a bitterly cold & very windy February day. As stated in the video blurb, infrared is inherently mysterious as the range of color is drastically reduced to wavelengths almost too long for humans to see. With a fast camera, one can actually shoot hand held, thus attaining freedom from a tripod as long as the environment is as bright as this frigid but sunlit February day of 2016. Enjoy.

Infrared 4K

A test of the Sony A7S II in 4K/handheld, using a 24mm Nikkor lens and Hoya 52mm infrared filter. Stills and video without a tripod with little noise is something else altogether different. Enjoy.

Days of Future Past Rev II

The Gilbert & Bennett site is a ghost, formerly the largest wire mill in the world. Built in 1919, the facility became redundant after WW II. There is hope it can be transformed into something wonderful but the reality of that happening is difficult to conjecture at best. Architecturally, the factory was innovative, as one will see in this short clip. Enjoy.

LIGO Rules - Not bad for Article 1800 :)

LIGO did the deed. Gravational waves have been discovered, thus validating the last prediction of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity penned 100 years ago regarding the existence of Gravitons. The implications of this discovery are truly staggering as Gravitons, the no longer theoretical carriers of gravity, can now be integrated into a possible viable Theory Of Everything in ways not possible prior to the success of LIGOs persistent research into finding out that gravational waves do indeed exist and have so since the beginning of time.

This discovery comes at the culmination of decades of instrument research and development, through a world-wide effort of thousands of researchers, and made possible by dedicated support for LIGO from the National Science Foundation. It also proves a prediction made 100 years ago by Einstein that gravitational waves exist. More excitingly, it marks the beginning of a new era of gravitational wave astronomy – the possibilities for discovery are as rich and boundless as they have been with light-based astronomy.

How cool is that? :)

The mother of all mergers. :)

In 50 years...

The abyss beckons if man continues to plunder the planet in the pursuit of profit. Who says this, Forbes does, and with good reason.

Capitalism has generated massive wealth for some, but it’s devastated the planet and has failed to improve human well-being at scale.

• Species are going extinct at a rate 1,000 times faster than that of the natural rate over the previous 65 million years (see Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School).
• Since 2000, 6 million hectares of primary forest have been lost each year. That’s 14,826,322 acres, or just less than the entire state of West Virginia (see the 2010 assessment by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN).
• Even in the U.S., 15% of the population lives below the poverty line. For children under the age of 18, that number increases to 20% (see U.S. Census).
• The world’s population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050 (see United Nations’ projections)

It gets better.

Human activities are behind the extinction crisis. Commercial agriculture, timber extraction, and infrastructure development are causing habitat loss and our reliance on fossil fuels is a major contributor to climate change.

Public corporations are responding to consumer demand and pressure from Wall Street. Professors Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg published Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations last fall, arguing that businesses are locked in a cycle of exploiting the world’s resources in ever more creative ways.

“Our book shows how large corporations are able to continue engaging in increasingly environmentally exploitative behaviour by obscuring the link between endless economic growth and worsening environmental destruction,” they wrote.

But pushback is starting to happen not only in the corporate sector but also in the political and public as seen by the "wonderful" presidential campaign of 2016 whereby disgust with the status quo is shaking up the powers at be in ways not even imagined just 6 months ago thought the actions of Trump and Sanders. As for yours truly, it's gratifying Forbes is beginning to see the light. With luck, so will enough others to demand and effect real change before it's too late. 

Of empathy & love

Intelligence and empathy, traits once considered to be only human, is simply not true as researchers have seen these wonderful traits in elephants, cetacians, primates, dogs and birds like crows and parrots, sensitive creatures social to the max, attuned to each other to a degree never thought possible until now. In an extraordinary NY Times article by Charles Siebert titled What Does a Parrot Know About PTSD? we discover through his experience, that there is something truly special about parrots and their unique ability to connect with us at deep level. Note: It's just a partial list of life forms possessing intelligence to be sure.

Nearing Serenity Park’s exit, I decided to turn back and step inside Cashew’s quarters for a moment. I had only to nestle close to her perch and she immediately hopped on my back. Crisscrossing my shoulders as I had watched her do with Lilly Love, she stopped at one point for what I assumed would be the parrot equivalent of a kiss. Instead, she began to clean my teeth: her beak lightly tapping against my enamel, the faint vibrations strangely soothing. Immediately afterward, she took a brief nap in my shirt’s left breast pocket — it felt as if I’d grown another heart — then re-emerged and crawled to the top of my head. She strolled about there for a time before plucking out one of her own deep blue-green feathers and then descending to gently place it on my left shoulder. I have it still.

Read this piece in it's entirety, it may move you to tears. It did me, without question.

Kookie, a green eclectic.

Of moonlight & wonder

As my faithful readers know, yours truly loves full moons as the light luna reflects from the sun to earth is pretty special. When seen from space. as shown by this gem from the ISS, wonderment grows to astonishment as nature never disappoints. :)

Up to here ...

The Big Short, awesome both as book and flick, points out in spades that a revolution is nigh. With luck, it will be a peaceful one as people are up to here with the status quo where wall street, corrupt politicians and the military industrial complex rule while the middle class continues to get hosed in more ways than one can count. This populist revulsion of the status quo covers the entire political spectrum whether it be Tea Partiers railing about immigration or the relentless incursion of government in all aspects of our lives or the left taking about the obscenity of US healthcare and the education ripoff, topics bandied about by the totally unforeseen successful disruptors of politics Trump and Sanders.

Nearly a decade after plutocrats exploded the economy, we're just as unequal as ever — and people are fed up.

And it's about time.

Read the book and, in the movie, check out the gal at the black jack table telling, in a few sentences, why wall street makes Vegas look like a shrine because it least in Vegas, you're betting on something that's real. Priceless says it all. :)

A 1000 Ways to Die :)

The TV show, A 1000 Ways to Die, was a paean to the Darwin Awards whereby really stupid people offed themselves in ways truly staggering in stupidity but this post isn't about Darwin, unfortunately, :) but rather in the perception of how we die versis the stats compiled by the CDC and other such entities eminently qualified to talk about such things. 

Everyone dies of something, but after slogging through the daily news, you'd think most people die from terrorism, shark attacks and gas explosions. But are these tragedies — not to mention deaths from lightning strikes, plane crashes and tsunamis — actually top killers in the United States?

Not really.

Even combined, these incidents killed far fewer people than the most deadly illness — heart disease, which took the lives of more than 614,000 people in the United States in 2014, accounting for about 23 percent of all deaths in the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

To separate the deaths that make headlines from those that are far more common, Live Science investigated the odds of dying from various causes. We used the CDC's Wonder database for 2014 data and other sources, and found that you're more likely to die of Alzheimer's disease (about 29 deaths per 100,000 people in the U.S.) than you are from contact with a venomous snake or lizard (there were just five such deaths in 2014).

Check out the article, interesting without question says it all. :)

Had to put in the logo. Awesome without question. :)

With a clear eye ...

Ray McGovern is a treasure. A former CIA agent, devout Catholic and above all else, a really smart guy with integrity, looks at geopolitics from a sense of history and how that history, in conjunction with the inherent vagaries of reality, impacts the actions of the most powerful nations in the world.

If you know a little bit about Russian history, you’re aware that it’s a very sad history. It starts millennia behind other histories. People don’t know that the Slavic peoples who emerged from the area in and around Kiev and what is now Belorussia—they had no written language until the 9th century! A.D.!

Remarkable. Did they have an oral literature?

They had an oral literature. “Slovo o Polku Igoreve” [“The Song of Igor’s Campaign”] was one of their major epic poems. It rivals “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad.” It’s a really beautiful thing, except they had no way to set it down in writing. And so two Greek priests, Cyril and Methodius, go up in the 9th century, and they say, “These people are incredibly bright and prosperous. They’re prosperous—and this is kind of a mind leap for most people—because the Norse, from Norway and Sweden, traded with the East all the way to Istanbul by coming through the series of rivers of which the Dnieper [which flows through Russia and empties into the Black Sea] was one. A great deal of so-called civilization and some wealth had accrued there. So they go up there and they say, “Well, that sounds like kai. Let’s make that sound a kai (or “k”). That sounds like the Latin V. That one sounds like Hebrew. That one doesn’t sound like anything, so let’s manufacture a character for that.” And they put the [written] language together. This we call “Cyrillic,” of course.

Read the Salon post, you will learn a great deal on why so much has gone wrong with intel, the CIA and the erosion of our bill of rights. Addendum: click here to read more about McGovern's take on the CIA and the Deep State.

Ray McGovern