Capturing the Moment

Reality can never be scripted. Fleeting moments when one wishes they had the means to record something magical almost never happens but.... this time I did.

The Little Tiny Ones

Springtime, particularly after a harsh winter, beckons one to view the reawakening of nature.with a sense of wonderment and gratitude  To this end, here is a short clip from yours truly showing the often overlooked wonder of tiny flowers coming into bloom circa 2011. Enjoy

The Ownership Equation

Click on the image to see who actually owns the Fed. As stated before in BRT, the non-profit located in Delaware names no owners, and for good reason.

Addendum: This document dates back to 1976, which, in a way, validates ownership even more as digital manipulation of same was not even dreamed of way back when. This page also shows the source of the information in question so accuracy of this content can be ascertained without too much of a problem.

Addendum II: No doubt some of the players listed here are different due to the passage of time but the fact of our financial system being a private enterprise run for bankers by bankers has not changed.

Seek & Ye Shall Find. :)

The Gift that Keeps on Giving

The profit motive in healthcare keeps on giving...

"The nation’s major health insurers are barreling into a third year of record profits, enriched in recent months by a lingering recessionary mind-set among Americans who are postponing or forgoing medical care.


Yet the companies continue to press for higher premiums, even though their reserve coffers are flush with profits and shareholders have been rewarded with new dividends. Many defend proposed double-digit increases in the rates they charge, citing a need for protection against any sudden uptick in demand once people have more money to spend on their health, as well as the rising price of care."

But it's never enough, right?

"Because they say they expect costs to rebound, insurers have not been shy about asking for higher rates. In Oregon, for example, Regence BlueCross BlueShield, a nonprofit insurer that is the state’s largest, is asking for a 22 percent increase for policies sold to individuals. In California, regulators have been resisting requests from insurers to raise rates by double digits."

Sound like Wall Street to me.

We won't talk about big pharma and how the Bush Administration set precedence in not allowing the government to procure drugs on behalf of Americans, something the Canadian government routinely does, thus cutting the price in half of what we pay for drugs in this country. 



Bud Fox: How much is enough? 
Gordon Gekko: It's not a question of enough, pal. It's a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another. 

Another Keeper

Mashups are tres cool. Sepiatown connects gmaps locales to historical pix us rubes upload to give context to places we have visited. History lesson writ large I must say. :)

Thwarted Dreams :)

Risky Roads et al

I just discovered a great website to find out where risky roads reside. Living in CT, the condition and danger of probably the worst roads in the country, are well known but having RiskyRoads.org in tow is a good resource to have in hand.

Speaking about roads brings up the obvious fact the US addiction to the car reigns supreme, where bicycles are viewed a nuisance for people "on the move" using SUVs and other brobdingian vehicles to covey themselves to wherever, a situation needing to be changed as we move further into the era of past peak oil and contracted economies. When looking at the desperate moves to sustain the unsustainable via fracking, coal burning, deep water drilling and nuclear, one comes away with the fact, solar's (wind, wave & fuel cell as adjuncts) the only viable way to go, combined with a move toward intelligent mass transit, localized food production, broadband communications, fabbing and artificial photosynthesis, to enable transitioning to a life style able to be maintained by realistic means as we move toward the future. (Military misadventures, financial corruption, governmental malfeasance/incompetence and healthcare, among named disruptive forces, will be part of a longer article titled What If - Days of Future Past, a questimate on the near future that may or may not happen if change is not made to alter the disastrous course we find ourselves in.)

Under the fuel through artificial photosynthesis scenario, nanotubes embedded within a membrane would act like green leaves, using incident solar radiation (H³) to split water molecules (H2O), freeing up electrons and oxygen (O2) that then react with carbon dioxide (CO2) to produce a fuel, shown here as methanol (CH3OH). The result is a renewable green energy source that also helps scrub the atmosphere of excessive carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. (Credit: Illustration by Flavio Robles, Berkeley Lab Public Affairs)

As precursor, here's the Moody Blues classic, Days of Future Passed, an overblown but interesting sonic exploration using cutting age tech of the late 60's along with accompaniment provided by the London Festival Orchestra.

A Very Big Deal

This Rube Goldberg like diagram depicts a system able to change how man generates electricity while producing potable water at a cost thought to be impossible to achieve until now.

"Researchers have developed an aluminum alloy that could be used in a new type of mobile technology to convert non-potable water into drinking water while also extracting hydrogen to generate electricity.

Such a technology might be used to provide power and drinking water to villages and also for military operations, said Jerry Woodall, a Purdue University distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering.

The alloy contains aluminum, gallium, indium and tin. Immersing the alloy in freshwater or saltwater causes a spontaneous reaction, splitting the water into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The hydrogen could then be fed to a fuel cell to generate electricity, producing water in the form of steam as a byproduct, he said.

"The steam would kill any bacteria contained in the water, and then it would condense to purified water," Woodall said. "So, you are converting undrinkable water to drinking water."

Because the technology works with saltwater, it might have marine applications, such as powering boats and robotic underwater vehicles. The technology also might be used to desalinate water, said Woodall, who is working with doctoral student Go Choi.

A patent on the design is pending."

Needless to say, if this tech works in the real world, the first viable step to achieving affordable sustainability may be here at last.

Seen below is just one of Rube's "fabulous inventions". :)

Dear Diary

Dear Diary, this is but another piece in BRT that, hopefully, will live on long after I'm gone with the intent of "educating" people on the vagaries of tech, reality and the human condition. ;)

In actuality, this little passage is true as, we, as a species, are generating digital diaries at exponential rates, a  fact really well explained in a series of insightful articles from New Scientist titled Forever online: Your Digital Legacy.


"Today, historians have to piece together the details of their subjects' lives from tiny scraps of evidence. Their successors are more likely to be overwhelmed: the problem will be making sense of our vast digital legacies. What techniques will they use to make sense of this deluge?


Many of us now generate more data than we can manage – think of all those holiday pictures you'll never get round to organising into an album. The contents of our hard drives are jumbled messes; the web's lack of structure, coupled with anonymity and the use of aliases, will make the online world an equally formidable challenge for future historians."

Other questions NS posits includes this really important one.

"How much does it cost to keep a nation's heritage online? "The price of a cup of Starbucks coffee," claimed the civic-minded hacker who in January copied and archived 172 websites that the BBC had earmarked for deletion.


People like this anonymous hacker argue that we're not doing enough to preserve such digital records. These "preservationists" argue that even redundant or outdated websites have historical value – and that it's not very expensive to preserve them for posterity.


The BBC, which is funded by the British public, attracted opprobrium for its decision. Those who had donated personal stories and images to sites like The People's War felt betrayed. Surely a titan like the BBC could have afforded the cup-of-coffee cost of keeping the sites online?


Perhaps, but a cheap afterlife is a precarious one. Jason Scott, who in 2009 led an effort to rescue Geocities after Yahoo shuttered it, struggled to muster the bandwidth needed to publish the archive. And Geocities was tiny compared to today's vast social sites, which are spending not-so-small fortunes keeping their server farms running as efficiently as possible."

We live in strange times.

Addendum: Deathwatch is the connect to seeing what sites are going down. No doubt, much of the content contained within should not be lost.

To Be or Not to Be, That is the Question

Ah, it seems BRT is ahead of the NYTimes on this story as well but this time, it's not about mortgages but rather the Fed, the cartel protected by government. 

"Let us interject that in any monetary system, some authority must fix either the price of money or the supply. McDonald’s can either set the price of a hamburger and let the market consume the quantity it will — or, it can insist on selling a specified quantity, in which case consumer demand will determine the price.

The Fed has a similar choice with money. The Bernanke Fed, which is trying to stimulate the economy, regulates the price of money — the interest rate — presently 0.0 percent. Paul Volcker, who assumed command of the Fed in 1979, when inflation was rampant, chose the opposite tactic. Mr. Volcker provided a specific (and, dare I say, miserly) quantity of liquidity, letting interest rates go where the market directed — ultimately 20 percent. There is an element of arbitrary choice either way."

What's not stated in the article is the fact the Fed's a non-profit private entity located in Delaware with parties unnamed who run the institution using the IRS to collect interest on the (our) money the Fed borrows in order to buy US Treasuries. Fed Q&A When viewed in this light, one can easily see the corruption issuing forth, the most egregious of which is the BRT Let Them Eat Cake piece quoting Matt Tiabbi on who, in part, got bailouts courtesy of us middle class types.

To get more information about an organization run by banks for banks, type in The Fed in Search and stand back, the content presented will be most entertaining to say the least.

"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes her laws."

Mayer Amschel Rothschild