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Maiello: Defeat the Press Ramona: Pointers on Bad Disaster Coverage Miami Fans Mistakenly Chant "Let's Go Eat" During Playoff Game |
Blowing |
Longtime councilman Bill John Baker unseated three-term incumbent Chad Smith and will be sworn in as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation on Aug. 14.
Was it the plethora of gunplay, admiration for a man who 'did it his way', the fantasy to live by your own rules and go down in a hail of bullets, or the feeling that Billy was his true Soulmate that attracted industry titan, union busting, government employee belittler, and GOP supporting corporate magnate William Koch to blow $2.6 million on a fading tintype of outlaw Billy the Kid? Oh, and the 'job creating' Bush tax cuts for millionaires helped Koch afford the high price to add the item to his private collection of knick-knacks.
The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion.
That's more than NASA's budget. ( $18.7 billion requested 2012) It's more than BP has paid so far for damage during the Gulf oil spill. It's what the G-8 has pledged to help foster new democracies in Egypt and Tunisia.
"When you consider the cost to deliver the fuel to some of the most isolated places in the world — escorting, command and control, medevac support — when you throw all that infrastructure in, we're talking over $20 billion," Steven Anderson tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Rachel Martin. Anderson is a retired brigadier general who served as Gen. David Patreaus' chief logistician in Iraq......
Perhaps GWB should have said in 2001: "We plan, before the end of the next decade, to spend more on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan than it cost to put a man on the moon, it is vital to our national interests, security and my re-election as War President to do so!" The Bush Base doesn't know what we spend each year on A/C in Iraq/Af as the news is not reported on Fox news, just 'liberal' NPR, which the GOP would like to throw in the trash bin.
I saw this at docudharma.com; apparently the Working Familes Party wrote the bill in 2009, and they've been trying to get it funded, and now have. This is a fantastic piece of news, and a model for how states can be innovative about energy efficiency and create jobs, given that the federal government is offering so little help.
"Lawmakers this afternoon passed historic on-bill financing legislation to dramatically expand the state’s new energy efficiency retrofitting program, Green Jobs/Green NY. The new law will finally enable moderate-income property owners to access safe loans for retrofits, and use energy savings to repay the loan via their utility bills.
On-bill financing will open the door for NYSERDA, the state’s energy authority, to raise an estimated $5 billion in private investment in the state’s energy economy. Utility bills’ low default rates and strong collections leverage provide unprecedented security for green capital investing in building retrofits.
Green Jobs/Green NY was passed into law in 2009 with the goal of creating 60,000 job years (14,250 full time jobs), substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and making one million homes and buildings more energy efficient – but it did not establish a financing mechanism to pay for the projects. On-bill financing will allow Green Jobs-Green NY to realize these goals." [snip]
"Dave Palmer, Executive Director of the Center for Working Families which designed both Green Jobs/Green NY and the on-bill financing program, said, “This is a simple and innovative solution to intertwined problems of climate change, joblessness and economic stagnation. It puts New York at the forefront of national efforts for a green economic recovery: We are the first state to implement on-bill financing on a statewide basis, and the first state to find the missing piece: ensuring that households can buy energy efficiency on the same safe terms as energy, and making deep, cost-saving energy upgrades widely available to working people. The Center for Working Families is proud to have led a bipartisan, multi-sector coalition of leaders and advocates to make Green Jobs/Green NY with on-bill financing a reality.”
(The link at the bottom of the LIP page buzzzes you to a piece about Lady Gaga's penis shoes...is pretty hilarious, but the photo doesn't show what the hell a penis shoe is.) ;o)
"Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser allegedly grabbed fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley around the neck in an argument in her chambers last week, according to at least three knowledgeable sources.
Details of the incident, investigated jointly by Wisconsin Public Radio and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, remain sketchy. The sources spoke on the condition that they not be named, citing a need to preserve professional relationships.
They say an argument that occurred before the court’s release of a decision upholding a bill to curtail the collective bargaining rights of public employees culminated in a physical altercation in the presence of other justices. Bradley purportedly asked Prosser to leave her office, whereupon Prosser grabbed Bradley by the neck with both hands."
Both declined to comment.
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Photo by: Pete Souza President Barack Obama |
Last night Obama headed to the Upper East Side to wine and dine Wall Street.
The DNC fundraiser at tony restaurant Daniel cost attendees $35,800 each, and a source told Ben White at Morning Money that the event netted $2.4 million.
So his calculations were that at least 67 financiers had come to the party.
"Wall Street may hate Washington but sources tell M.M. that last night's $35,800 per-head event... was a boffo success packed with hedge fund and private equity types."
They had 'young spinach' and some other funny things like 'hen of the woods' that sounds like the title of a children's book.
It makes me proud to be a New Yorker
I always liked this guy.
I hated Columbo though, he always was about to leave his interviews with villains and he would say:
ONE MORE THING!
Drove me nuts after the first three episodes. hahahah
But he portrayed so many more characters. What a great actor!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Falk
The House votes against endorsing US participation with NATO in Libya and then votes for continued authorization for the funding of that campaign.
U.S. commodity regulators are examining whether word of a decision to coordinate a release of global oil stockpiles was leaked ahead of Thursday's announcement by the International Energy Agency, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Officials with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as well as market participants have pointed to unusual trading in the oil-futures market before the IEA's announcement that it would release 60 million barrels of oil, the person said.
The CFTC is reviewing market data to find clues as to whether some traders may have received an early tip on the IEA's plan, the person said
The person familiar with the matter described the CFTC's actions as a preliminary step, adding that in these kinds of cases, the regulator will often try to work with foreign regulators to determine if suspicious trading patterns originated in other countries outside of the CFTC's jurisdiction.
The idea that we can draw endless supplies of clean energy from the wind and waves just doesn't add up
WITNESS a howling gale or an ocean storm, and it's hard to believe that humans could make a dent in the awesome natural forces that created them. Yet that is the provocative suggestion of one physicist who has done the sums.
He concludes that it is a mistake to assume that energy sources like wind and waves are truly renewable. Build enough wind farms to replace fossil fuels, he says, and we could seriously deplete the energy available in the atmosphere, with consequences as dire as severe climate change.
Axel Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, says that efforts to satisfy a large proportion of our energy needs from the wind and waves will sap a significant proportion of the usable energy available from the sun. In effect, he says, we will be depleting green energy sources. His logic rests on the laws of thermodynamics, which point inescapably to the fact that only a fraction of the solar energy reaching Earth can be exploited to generate energy we can use.
Kleidon's brief:
The chemical composition of the earths atmosphere far from equilibrium is unique in the solar system and has been attributed to the presence of widespread life. Here I show that this perspective can be quantified using non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Generating disequilibrium in a thermodynamic variable requires the extraction of power from another thermodynamic gradient, and the second law of thermodynamics imposes fundamental limits on how much power can be extracted. When applied to complex earth system processes, where several irreversible processes compete to deplete the same gradients, it is easily shown that the maximum thermodynamic efficiency is much less than the classic Carnot limit, so that the ability of the earth system to generate power and disequilibrium is limited. This approach is used to quantify how much free energy is generated by various earth system processes to generate chemical disequilibrium. It is shown that surface life generates orders of magnitude more chemical free energy than any abiotic surface process, therefore being the primary driving force for shaping the geochemical environment at the planetary scale. To apply this perspective to the possible future of the planet, we first note that the free energy consumption by human activity is a considerable term in the free energy budget of the planet, and that global changes are closely related to this consumption of free energy. Since human activity and demands for free energy is going to increase in the future, the central question is how human free energy demands can increase sustainably without negatively impacting the ability of the earth system to generate free energy. I illustrate the implications of this thermodynamic perspective by discussing the forms of renewable energy and planetary engineering that would enhance overall free energy generation and thereby "empower" the future of the planet.
Former Democratic President grasps the importance of getting aggressive on the jobs issue.
[Karl Rove sez:] President Barack Obama is likely to be defeated in 2012. The reason is that he faces four serious threats. The economy is very weak and unlikely to experience a robust recovery by Election Day. Key voter groups have soured on him. He's defending unpopular policies. And he's made bad strategic decisions.
Let's start with the economy. Unemployment is at 9.1%, with almost 14 million Americans out of work. Nearly half the jobless have been without work for more than six months. Mr. Obama promised much better, declaring that his February 2009 stimulus would cause unemployment to peak at 8% by the end of summer 2009 and drop to roughly 6.8% today.
Q: I heard about Twitpic commercializing user-uploaded photos and became curious. [...] Is there any service that isn't my own website that won't commercialize my photos?
You're correct about Twitpic commercializing user photos: the company recently announced that it was the "exclusive photo agency partner" of the World Entertainment News Network (WENN). This agreement allows WENN to sell images uploaded to Twitpic and to pursue copyright action against parties who try to use those images commercially without authorization.
Theoretically, this means that a photo that you upload to Twitpic of your cat wearing a Poptart box as a hat could be sold by WENN to the Nyan Cat Empire for marketing purposes without them asking for further authorization from you. In reality, the company is unlikely to be interested in photos taken by plebes by us—WENN wants paparazzi-type pictures of celebrities, not whatever you ate for lunch today.
Still, it's a good question, and increasing numbers of Internet users are becoming more conscious of the terms of service (TOS) on sites that they use regularly. So, I looked up the TOS for all seven of the image services that Twitter's native app recommends when you first begin using the app: Twitpic, yfrog, img.ly, Posterous, Mobypicture, Lockerz, and twitgoo. (Yes, Twitter has announced that it will begin using its own image service, but plenty of people are still using third-party services for a variety of reasons, and not just for Twitter.)
A sound of gulls, a sunlit port, human voices, barking dogs. In a city market, dogs are sitting, lying down, walking past. Dogs gather in the center of the screen. Night falls. A dog gives birth; she nurses her babies. A constable in sharp silhouette comes and looks on as, growling, she huddles over her young.
So begins Serge Avedikian’s fifteen-minute animated film Barking Island (originally Chienne d’histoire in French), which, in 2010, won the Palme d’Or as the best short film at Cannes. The images are paintings by Thomas Azuélos, made deep and weighty, contoured yet dissolving at the edges, almost palpable.
Once the music changes, the scene shifts to humans at a long table discussing how to eliminate the dogs. Newspapers announce that there are more than 60,000 dogs on the streets of Constantinople. The Turkish authorities appeal for an end to them. After exploring various options—gassing, incineration, turning corpses into meat for human consumption—offered by the Pasteur Institute in Paris and other European experts, the Turks decide to round the dogs up and abandon them on a deserted island in the Bosporus.
Don't laugh at her no matter how much it kills you, Mattie says. Uh-oh.
The Federal Reserve appears ready to ease off the stimulus pedal that is pumping life into the US economy at a key meeting that opens Tuesday, despite signs of slowing growth.
Most economists expect the Federal Open Market Committee will signal the Fed's $600 billion asset purchase program will end as scheduled by June 30.
And few expect the quantitative easing, dubbed QE2, will be followed by additional stimulus.
The aim of the FOMC program to buy Treasury bonds announced in November was to lower as much as possible medium- and long-term interest rates at a time when the Fed has run out of firepower.
The central bank slashed its key target to between zero and 0.25 percent two and a half years ago, helping to keep short-term rates low.
The Treasury bond purchases, or quantitative easing, dubbed QE2, are set to end on June 30.
[And the economy continues to roll even more swiftly backwards to the edge of a cliff]
Undercover Israeli intelligence officers appeared on national television Saturday to talk about assassinating Palestinians in a program broadcast on Israel's Channel 10.
""Beaton explained that he kept photos of his victims.
"This is a photo of a Palestinian young man called Basim Subeih who I killed. This is another young man. I shredded his body, and the photo shows the remnants of his body," he said.""
Because I am completely unfamiliar with the Ma'an News agency which reported this story I did a quick Google search for criticism of it being a biased or partisan agency which distorted its reporting. I found nothing incriminating but I include the wiki link here.
Some people who need medical care but can't afford it go to the emergency room. Others just hope they'll get better. James Richard Verone robbed a bank.
Earlier this month, Verone (pictured), a 59-year-old convenience store clerk, walked into a Gaston, N.C., bank and handed the cashier a note demanding $1 and medical attention. Then he waited calmly for police to show up.
He's now in jail and has an appointment with a doctor this week.
A federal judge ruled Monday that publishing an entire article without the rights holder’s authorization was a fair use of the work, in yet another blow to newspaper copyright troll Righthaven.
It’s not often that republishing an entire work without permission is deemed fair use. Fair use is an infringement defense when the defendant reproduced a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, commentary, teaching and research. The defense is analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
...
The judge also said he took into consideration that only five of the editorial’s paragraphs were “purely creative opinions” of the author.
“While the work does have some creative or editorial elements, these elements are not enough to consider the work a purely ‘creative work’ in the realm of fictional stories, song lyrics, or Barbie dolls,” he wrote. “Accordingly, the work is not within ‘the core of intended copyright protection.’”
Judge Pro, in his fair-use analysis, also found that the posting was for noncommercial purposes, and was part of an “online discussion.”
That said, Pro did not need to decide the fair-use question.
That’s because he also found that Righthaven did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, a hot-button topic in the Righthaven litigation.
Edd Vulliami: "War, as I came to report it, was something fought between people with causes, however crazy or honourable: like between the American and British occupiers of Iraq and the insurgents who opposed them. Then I stumbled across Mexico's drug war –..."
Commentary on this article and about the subject in general is at Chis Floyd's Empire Burlesque.
A banker was gunned down in Puerto Rico on Wednesday and at least one Puetro Rican news agency suspects that it might have had something to do with an audit he had recently launched.
The banker, 56-year old Maurice J. Spagnoletti, was Doral Financial corporation's executive vice president of Mortgage and Banking Operations. He had only been working at Doral for 6 moths when he was killed.
What happened is scary. Caribbean Business News says that he was driving a Lexus near the intersection of Muñoz Rivera Avenue and the Minillas Tunnel on the major highway in the capital of San Juan when gunmen, who had been trailing him, shot him three times.
“The shots were very well placed,” the police chief told Caribbean Business News.
So well placed that now detectives are investigating the crime. One angle is that the killing might have had something to do with recent layoffs. According to CBNews:
Use of guest workers in Palm Beach County draws fire
While Palm Beach County unemployment remains above 10 percent - higher for unskilled labor - country clubs and luxury resorts are importing foreign guest workers to fill hundreds of jobs that are listed as seasonal but last most of the year...
Schell says the provision that ties H-2B workers to one employer helps keep local "prevailing wages" down. "The employers use H-2B workers because it turns out cheaper for them," he says. "Those workers can't change jobs and look for better wages and better situations elsewhere."
By Nicholas Kulish, New York Times, May 22/23, 2013
BERLIN — Three of Europe’s most powerful countries — Britain, Germany and France — have thrown their weight behind a push for the European Union to designate the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, a move that could have far-reaching consequences for the group’s fund-raising activities on the Continent.
On Wednesday, Germany signaled an about-face in its policy toward the group, with a statement saying Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle supported listing “at least the military wing” of the organization as a terrorist group. The announcement came just a day after Britain’s Foreign Office said it would...
By Richard Luscombe in Miami, guardian.co.uk, 22 May 2013
An FBI agent shot dead a man believed to be a friend of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects Tamerlan and Djokhar Tsarnaev, during a "violent confrontation" in a Florida apartment early on Wednesday.
Sources said that Ibragim Todashev, 27, "flipped out" under questioning by the federal agent and two...
Woolwich killing: meat cleaver, knife and jihadist claims filmed on mobile
By Vikram Dodd, Shiv Malik & Ben Quinn, guardian.co.uk, May 22,2013
Dramatic footage emerges of suspect after British soldier is killed in suspected terror attack
• British soldier dead in suspected terror attack in London
• Knife attack near barracks 'an eye for an eye', says suspect
• Killing in street is 'absolutely sickening' says prime minister
Also @ The Guardian:...
By Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. If you are wondering how far PBS is willing to go to placate David Koch to keep their funding? It gives you a look into the special documentry "Citizen Koch" and its fall out. The program was never aired except at Sundance. David Koch resigned from WNET on May 16th.
