GoodShit

Street art, Paris

In some ways, taxidermy can be viewed as a precursor to photography — a static, visual representation of life. And while the process itself is fascinating as a morbid half-resurrection, a bridge between the living and the dead, it’s the necromancers themselves who are the subject of photographer Mike McGregor’s series Preserve.

“There is a intimate relationship between taxidermists and their mounts that I wanted to express,” says McGregor, who made the portraits at businesses in the Northeastern states close to his home.

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Homeless

note: distinguish between checking on all incoming and outgoing stuff to leave or come into the country and domestic sphying, checking on stuff within the nation. note too that NSA did not officially open for business till 1950, under Truman, though there was anb army outfit doing what is now seemingly being done

By Joe Kloc on June 17, 2013

Whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelation early this month that U.S. intelligence agencies have been gathering user data directly from nine of the largest Internet companies in the U.S.—including Google and Facebook—shocked many Americans.

But, considering the history of the NSA, maybe it shouldn’t have. Decades before the agency was collecting massive amounts of phone and Internet records, it was collecting telegraph records in an operation that raises similar legal issues and worries about lack of oversight.

In August of 1945, U.S. Army representatives met in secret with the country’s three major telegraph companies, ITT World International, RCA Global and Western Union. They explained that the Army Signal Security Agency wanted copies of all telegrams sent to and from the United States. World War II was coming to a close and the top secret, multinational Manhattan project had proven the power of foreign intelligence. Executives from the three companies agreed to comply, provided they were assured by then-Attorney General Tom Clark that it was not illegal for them to do so. There is no record any such assurance was officially given, but the operation went ahead anyway.

via The history of NSA spying, from telegrams to email — www.dailydot.com — Readability.

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Babies born in areas with high airborne levels of mercury, diesel exhaust, lead, manganese, nickel and methylene chloride were more likely to have autism than those in areas with lower pollution

By Brian Bienkowski and Environmental Health News

Women who live in areas with polluted air are up to twice as likely to have an autistic child than those living in communities with cleaner air, according to a new study published today.

Building on two smaller, regional studies, the Harvard University research is the first to link air pollution nationwide with autism. It also is the first to suggest that baby boys may be more at risk for autism disorders when their mothers breathe polluted air during pregnancy.

Babies born in areas of the United States with high airborne levels of mercury, diesel exhaust, lead, manganese, nickel and methylene chloride were more likely to have autism than those in areas with lower pollution. The strongest links were for diesel exhaust and mercury.

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Although high school debate is often considered the thinking person’s—the nerd’s—alternative to sports, my memories of it are primarily somatic: the starched collar of the dress shirt against my recently shaved neck, small cuts and razor bumps deepening the sensation; the constant gentle pressure of the tie; how my gait and posture adjusted under the direction of the suit; the way the slacks always felt high and tight because I normally let my baggy jeans sag to whatever level we white midwestern adolescents had tacitly established as our norm. The constriction in my shoulders would be extreme—less accumulated stress than a kind of constant flexing, an indication of battle-readiness. My hair would be drawn into a ponytail (though the sides of my head were shaved, a disastrous tonsorial compromise between skinhead and hippie that can perhaps stand for the irresolvable tension between the household of my lefty, loving, Jewish psychologist parents and the very red state in which they’d raised me), which heightened the already considerable tension in my temples. I recall a continual low-level nausea, anxiety about the next round mixing with the McDonald’s breakfast we would have stopped for on the road; I recall prodigious perspiration independent of temperature, periodic involuntary erection or the fear of it. Understand, I was not the only one who found “competitive speech” so physically trying. I can conjure—cannot not conjure—the image of two young women in nearly matching charcoal pantsuits hyperventilating into paper bags at Washburn Rural High School. I can still see a sophomore vomiting into his file folders soon after learning he’d be facing the defending state champions in a semifinal round.

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Patterns of subtle sounds and pauses may reveal a skeleton of grammar in toddler-speak.
CREDIT: ewcastle University

The little sounds and puffs of air that toddlers often inject into their baby babble may actually be subtle stand-ins for grammatical words, new research suggests.

For their study, Cristina Dye, a Newcastle University researcher in child language development, made recordings of tens of thousands of utterances of French-speaking children between 23 months and 37 months old.

Dye and her colleagues analyzed each sound the kids made and the context in which it was produced. The team said they documented a pattern of sounds and puffs of air that seemed to replace grammatical words in many cases. Their findings suggest that toddlers may properly use little words (as, a, an, can, is) sooner than thought. [That's Incredible! 9 Brainy Baby Abilities ]

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ah, give it a try here.

Left: A bomb blast killed dozens of people at a hotel in Islamabad, Sept 20, 2008. Center: A Palestinian teenager with an explosive vest at an Israeli checkpoint, March 24, 2004. Right: A market after a bomb blast during a religious procession, Karachi, Pakistan, Dec. 28, 2009.

A decade ago, suicide bombings were still rare events. The political scientist Robert Pape counted a global total of 315 attacks from 1980, when they were first established as a modern terrorist method, through 2003. In the following two years, that number doubled. Today, the total is more than two thousand, and each day seems to bring news of more. Yet the tactic has not lost its power to shock and horrify. There has been a steady proliferation of efforts to make sense of it, not just among academics and policy wonks, but by novelists, filmmakers and artists the world over. John Updike (whose penultimate novel was “Terrorist”) and John le Carré may be better known in the West, but there are dozens of others who have tried to dramatize the world of violent jihad, including the Algerian novelist Yasmina Khadra and the Moroccan writer Mohammed Achaari.

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People go to Las Vegas for all sorts of reasons, but everyone wants to see the beloved and world-famous Fountains of Bellagio, the most popular free attraction on the Vegas Strip. There’s a reason that crowds are dazzled by watching the water dance. Bellagio’s iconic fountains are an engineering marvel, 8 acres of water, nearly 5,000 lights, and a fog system to help set the mood, as 1,200 water-shooting nozzles create a magnificent ballet of dancing fountains choreographed to music. Whether it is your first visit or your thousandth time to watch the show, there’s something magical about the Fountains of Bellagio.

[35 Photos, 9 Videos]

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When Hurricane Sandy tore through New York City last year, some of the most stirring photos — aside from those chronicling the storm’s devastation — were of city residents helping one another keep their smartphones charged up and powered on. Daisychained powerstrips were a common sight throughout the five boroughs, and lines stretched out the door at locations where charge was available. That illustrated one glaring problem in a city where public Wi-Fi is available on just about any block (and even underground): There’s no convenient solution for charging our devices on the go.

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Imagine this. Jay, an eight-year-old autistic boy, whose behavior has always been agitated and uncooperative, is smiling and splashing in the pool. A pair of bottlenose dolphins float next to him, supporting him in the water. Jay’s parents stand poolside as a staff member in the water engages him in visual games with colourful shapes. She asks him some questions, and Jay, captivated by his surroundings, begins to respond. He names the shapes, correctly, speaking his first words in months. With all this attention Jay is in high spirits; he appears more aware and alert than ever before. A quick, non-invasive EEG scan of his brain activity shows that it is indeed different from before the session.

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Turns out that driver’s license photos are useful for more than acute embarrassment. States, realizing they have a de-facto visual database of most of their residents, are increasingly plugging those photos into facial-recognition software and Facebook to solve crimes — and worrying privacy advocates in the process.

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Lauren Young

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Erdogan vows to expand police powers as authorities target protesters in Istanbul and Ankara suspected of violence

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Jared Cohen foresees a time when states will have two foreign and domestic policies: one for the physical world and one for cyberspace

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Cameron Todd Willingham in his cell on death row, in 1994. He insisted upon his innocence in the deaths of his children and refused an offer to plead guilty in return for a life sentence. Photograph by Ken Light.

Cameron Todd Willingham in his cell on death row, in 1994. He insisted upon his innocence in the deaths of his children and refused an offer to plead guilty in return for a life sentence. Photograph by Ken Light.

The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky.

Buffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled the smoke. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and they hurried up the street; that’s when they saw the smoldering house and Cameron Todd Willingham standing on the front porch, wearing only a pair of jeans, his chest blackened with soot, his hair and eyelids singed. He was screaming, “My babies are burning up!” His children—Karmon and Kameron, who were one-year-old twin girls, and two-year-old Amber—were trapped inside.

Willingham told the Barbees to call the Fire Department, and while Diane raced down the street to get help he found a stick and broke the children’s bedroom window. Fire lashed through the hole. He broke another window; flames burst through it, too, and he retreated into the yard, kneeling in front of the house. A neighbor later told police that Willingham intermittently cried, “My babies!” then fell silent, as if he had “blocked the fire out of his mind.”

Diane Barbee, returning to the scene, could feel intense heat radiating off the house. Moments later, the five windows of the children’s room exploded and flames “blew out,” as Barbee put it. Within minutes, the first firemen had arrived, and Willingham approached them, shouting that his children were in their bedroom, where the flames were thickest. A fireman sent word over his radio for rescue teams to “step on it.”

More men showed up, uncoiling hoses and aiming water at the blaze. One fireman, who had an air tank strapped to his back and a mask covering his face, slipped through a window but was hit by water from a hose and had to retreat. He then charged through the front door, into a swirl of smoke and fire. Heading down the main corridor, he reached the kitchen, where he saw a refrigerator blocking the back door.

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An Inside Look At The CIA’s Venture-Capital Arm In-Q-Tel.

GCHQ: Fake Internet Cafes.

The Great American Dragnet: Over 200 Million People Are in the Facial Recognition Database .

Hundreds of Classified Leaks Under Review by IC Inspector General .

The Security-Industrial Complex .

Gulf Source Says Saudi Supplying Missiles to Syria Rebels.

How the CIA Grows Tech .

First European & NATO heavy arms for Syrian rebels. Russian reprisal expected.

[my view: there might be a difference that can be made between cyber spying upon things considered military and those considered business and science. But for those who felt we did not cyber spy and the Chinese did, time to wake up to reality of the world we live in]

The Edward Snowden affair has done many things. One of the most signal is its complete destruction of the US government/national security megaplex’s campaign of cyberwar hype, disinformation and outright lying.

In the weeks preceeding the emergence of Edward Snowden’s information on cyber-spying the US government had been conducting a carefully staged p.r. operation to paint China as the primary sinner in cyberspace. China was a country that was not playing fair, one targeting our networks and “intellectual property” in the cyber equivalent of a clandestine war.

This was said, most notoriously by National Security Agency director Keith Alexander, to constitute “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.” The economic future of the United States was imperiled by Chinese espionage.

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Constitution Hall, Washington, D.C.
Monday, January 16 2006

…The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of according a level of protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue.

Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on “large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States.” The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program “without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection.”

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place.

But surprisingly, the President’s soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA’s domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution – our system of checks and balances – was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.”

An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution – an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”…

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The Promise and Threat of Ethiopia’s Dam on the Nile: 21st century Water Conflicts – Significant Figures by Peter Gleick.

Diet High in Red Meat Linked to Higher Diabetes Risk .

Chemical in antibacterial soap fed to nursing rats harms offspring, study finds.

New language discovery reveals linguistic insights | .

Blocking overactive receptor in Alzheimer’s recovers memory loss and more .

Printing artificial bone .

Mice in a ‘big brother’ setup develop social structures | .

Artificial sweetener a potential treatment for Parkinson’s disease .

Today on New Scientist -.

Will new tectonic fault system kill the Atlantic? .

New material enables 1,000-meter super-skyscrapers .

UPDATE 1-Saudi Arabia says MERS coronavirus kills four more.

Blood tests could detect sexually-transmitted oral cancers .

Observation of Prostate Cancer Safe, Saves $$$.

theirs

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New York City is doing some serious work on the Second Avenue Subway, the first new line built under the city since 1932. The $4.5 billion project aims to decrease commuter congestion for east Manhattan. Check out these pictures. They are incredible

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Horrific abuse. Rampant contamination. And the crime is…exposing it?

Illustration by Tim O’Brien

Shawn Lyons was dead to rights—and he knew it. More than a month had passed since People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had released a video of savage mistreatment at the MowMar Farms hog confinement facility where he worked as an entry-level herdsman in the breeding room. The three enormous sow barns in rural Greene County, Iowa, were less than five years old and, until recently, had raised few concerns. They seemed well ventilated and well supplied with water from giant holding tanks. Their tightly tacked steel siding always gleamed white in the sun. But the PETA hidden-camera footage shot by two undercover activists over a period of months in the summer of 2008, following up on a tip from a former employee, showed a harsh reality concealed inside.

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The trailer for Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” is out and it features a track from Kanye’s new album.

via HERE.

n the course of exploring the properties of a strange subatomic particle, physicists may have stumbled upon something even stranger: a mysterious and exotic new form of matter.

The intriguing discovery was made more or less simultaneously by two collaborations: the Belle experiment at the Japanese High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) and BESIII experiment run by the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in China.

Both teams were looking at a particle called Y(4260) that had been discovered in 2005 but whose nature has mystified researchers since. By smashing together electrons and their antiparticle, positrons, the experiments produced large numbers of Y(4260), which lives for only 10-23 seconds before falling apart into other particles. The teams noticed that their data had a peculiar bump around 3.9 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), an energy corresponding to roughly four times the weight of a proton.

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NSA has massive database of Americans’ phone calls

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In the mid-nineteenth century, work began on a crucial section of the railway line connecting Boston to the Hudson River. The addition would run from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Troy, New York, and it required tunnelling through Hoosac Mountain, a massive impediment, nearly five miles thick, that blocked passage between the Deerfield Valley and a tributary of the Hudson.

James Hayward, one of New England’s leading railroad engineers, estimated that penetrating the Hoosac would cost, at most, a very manageable two million dollars. The president of Amherst College, an accomplished geologist, said that the mountain was composed of soft rock and that tunnelling would be fairly easy once the engineers had breached the surface. “The Hoosac . . . is believed to be the only barrier between Boston and the Pacific,” the project’s promoter, Alvah Crocker, declared.

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The blue bandana that exonerated Michael Morton of the 1986 murder of his wife Christine. It was found to contain traces of blood and the DNA of Mark Norwood.

Photograph by Adam Voorhes

Michael Morton approached the witness box. It was a bright, clear morning in March, and a few dozen family members, journalists, and curious onlookers had gathered at the Tom Green County courthouse, in San Angelo, a grand, columned monument to justice built in 1928 at the height of an oil boom. Sunlight spilled into the courtroom, which had been meticulously restored to its original splendor, complete with a decorative relief on the ceiling of an enormous sunflower. Michael took his seat, his posture ramrod-straight. He glanced at the jurors on his left, then stared ahead, the crisp white collar of his dress shirt offsetting the rising color in his face.

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I watched online as a college classmate went from disgrace to redemption in months. That’s when I found myself deep in the world of black-ops reputation management.

by Graeme Wood…(Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine; Patrick McMullan (Upham))

On November 29, 2010, federal agents in San Francisco arrested a 33-year-old New Yorker named Samuel Phineas Upham, setting in motion the chain of news reports that are responsible for Google’s auto­completing his name in the following ways:

PHINEAS UPHAM TAX

PHINEAS UPHAM ARREST

PHINEAS UPHAM INDICTMENT

The case against Upham, who goes by “Phin,” was laid out by Preet Bharara, the financial-crime-fighting U.S. Attorney. The indictment alleged that Phin tried to cheat the IRS by conspiring to hide over $11 ­million in Zurich at the Swiss bank UBS, and helped his mother, Sybil Nancy Upham, sneak the money into the United States. It said Nancy Upham, with the aid of UBS advisers, started a sham Liechtenstein nonprofit, the Rivaro Foundation, in 1993, then a sham Hong Kong corporation, Grand Partner International Limited, and, when UBS began cooperating with the IRS, moved the accounts to a bank in Liechtenstein without a U.S. branch. In 2005, Nancy directed Phin to go to Zurich to secretly retrieve some of the money in cash. He went, in 2005 and 2007, bringing back amounts as large as $300,000.

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HERE.

June 1962:

Lion tamer Pablo Noel at Hamburg Circus

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Don’t try this at home kids. Seriously.

Taxidermy.

Taxidermy needn’t be taxing – cutting up birds.

“I don’t want to cause a weird fight or anything,” I said, “But someone’s shoved a frozen pizza on top of my rook. Obviously I can’t bring this up without alerting the house to the presence of dead rook in the freezer.”

“Sweetums. Treacle,” came the reply. “You cannot put a dead rook in the freezer and then not tell people it’s there.”

Prior to this conversation, I had rearranged the frozen pizzas, the ancient half-price steaks and the ice cubes with the breadcrumb dusting, and I had placed in the freezer the following items: two pigeons and one rook (dead). They nestled there wrapped in foil and orange Sainsbury’s bags next to the peas, and would stay there until the day when I would have time to stuff them with woodwool and cotton balls and replace their dead eyes with beads, because shitty amateur taxidermists like me do not actually purchase proper glass eyes. We cut corners. We get tired and rush the bit at the end. We make tiny monsters that we keep in our bedrooms that ensure we will never get laid again.

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The Fisht Olympic Stadium and other Olympic venues under construction for the 2014 Winter Olympic games in Sochi on March 7, 2013. (Reuters)

Boris Nemtsov has occupied many roles in post-Soviet Russia, both in government and in the parallel polis that is oppositional politics. He was first elected governor of Nizhny Novgorod, whose successful economic reforms in that region carved a political pathway that would ultimately take him into the deputy premiership under the Yeltsin government. Nemtsov has also been a dogged opponent of Vladimir Putin for the better part of a decade, warning as early as 2004 of a creeping dictatorship. He’s perhaps best recognized by the series of reports or white papers that he has co-authored on the state of Russia’s economy, the corruption at the heart of Gazprom, and Putin’s rumored multi-billion dollar personal fortune, a subject of endless fascination for journalists. Most recently, Nemtsov and Leonid Martynyuk produced a large study of waste and graft that has become the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. My colleague Olga Khvostunova and I had a chance to interview Nemtsov about his report, ” Winter Olympics in the Sub-Tropics: Corruption and Abuse in Sochi .” (An English-language version of the report was put out last week by The Interpreter, an online translation journal I edit under the auspices of the Institute of Modern Russia. Both the report and

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