Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Virgin Galactic


Richard Branson has been a successful entrepreneur since he was a teenager. 

Richard Branson


He started with a record label, eventually built an airline called Virgin Atlantic, and now is the driving force behind Virgin Galactic, a company poised to give customers the chance to travel into space and return safely.


Spaceship Two with Mothership


Famed aeronautical innovator Burt Rutan is the man behind the technology that drives the Virgin Galactic vision.  The goal when Branson and Rutan began was to create a system for delivering a handful of people into suborbital space and bringing them back safely and relatively inexpensively.  It appears that Virgin Galactic is close to delivering on that promise.   They have built a spaceport in New Mexico and expect to begin commercial space travel in the next 24 months or so.

Here is a link to the Virgin Galactic website.. .http://www.virgingalactic.com/

Here is a video that tells the Virgin Galactic story...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRvC9bVMX2k


Monday, April 29, 2013

The Wild Trees


A few years ago, I read a book titled, The Wild TreesRichard Preston, the author, has a well-deserved reputation for engaging, well-researched writing on a range of important subjects. 

This book reports on the dedication of Steve Sillett and Marie Antoine,  whose forestry work at Humboldt State University in Northern California focuses on the giant trees in California and Oregon.  The trees we're taking about can be two thousand years old,   380 feet tall, and nearly 30 feet in diameter at ground level.  They are the tallest living things on Earth.




Only four percent of the once expansive forests of giant coastal trees remain.   These majestic trees are jewels that should be treated as such. Fortunately, most are now protected against exploitation.  They are far more valuable as trees than as so many board feet of lumber. 





Here is a link to the Save the Redwoods League, which has been working to protect these giant, wild trees for nearly a century... http://www.savetheredwoods.org/


Here is a link to a TED video presentation that features Richard Preston talking about The Wild Trees...   http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/richard_preston_on_the_giant_trees.html.


Sunday, April 28, 2013

Roundup - Most Popular Poison on Earth


You would think Roundup was some kind of party drink. The latest mass market TV commercial for it features a  yard warrior wielding a spray wand of this herbicide like a gunslinger shooting at  bad guys. Instead, the suburabn stud is shooting jets of Roundup poison at dandelions emerging from cracks in his driveway.

On March 30 & 31 of 2013, I wrote two blog entries about the absence of any songbirds in the community where we live just a few miles west of downtown Portland, Oregon.   I raised the issue of toxic herbicides and pesticides being used on lawns and gardens as a cause for the lack of any birds other than crows and blackbirds.

The article below comes from the Common Dreams website.  It provides some very unsettling perspective on the impact of using Roundup, the most widely used herbicide on Earth.  Yes, it kills weeds,  but it is also highly toxic to humans as well as birds and other animal life.  As I mentioned earlier, the TV commercials for Roundup feature a guy spraying this poison around his garden like it's water. 

Why aren't these poisons regulated?  In fact, there are laws that regulate the use, labeling, etc. of these very dangerous chemicals. The problem is the regulatory process has been captured by the chemical industry.  The government people in charge of protecting the public welfare are instead looking out for the interests of Monsanto and other chemical giants.  Thus, there is no effective regulation, and this deadly poison is hocked to the public like a softdrink.

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Study: Monsanto's Roundup Herbicide Linked to Cancer, Autism, Parkinson's

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, may be "the most biologically disruptive chemical in our environment," say authors

- Andrea Germanos, staff writer
 

The active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup herbicide may be "the most biologically disruptive chemical in our environment," being responsible for a litany of health disorders and diseases including Parkinson’s, cancer and autism, according to a new study.



 

  "Negative impact on the body" from glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup, "is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body," according to a new study. (Photo: astridmn/flickr)



It's "the most popular herbicide on the planet," widely used on crops like corn and soy genetically engineered to be "Roundup Ready," and sprayed on weeds in lawns across the US. But in the peer-reviewed study published last Thursday in the journal Entropy, authors Anthony Samsel, an independent scientist and consultant, and Stephanie Seneff, a senior research scientist at MIT, crush the industry's claims that the herbicide glyphosate is non-toxic and as safe as aspirin.
Looking at the impacts of glyphosate on gut bacteria, Samsel and Seneff found that the herbicide "enhances the damaging effects of other food borne chemical residues and environmental toxins," and is a “textbook example” of "the disruption of homeostasis by environmental toxins."
The researchers point to a potential long list of disorders that glyphosate, in combination with other environmental toxins, could contribute to, including inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, depression, ADHD, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, multiple sclerosis, cancer, cachexia, infertility, and developmental malformations.
The herbicide's "Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body," they write.
The authors conclude:
Given the known toxic effects of glyphosate reviewed here and the plausibility that they are negatively impacting health worldwide, it is imperative for more independent research to take place to validate the ideas presented here, and to take immediate action, if they are verified, to drastically curtail the use of glyphosate in agriculture. Glyphosate is likely to be pervasive in our food supply, and, contrary to being essentially nontoxic, it may in fact be the most biologically disruptive chemical in our environment.



The new findings may add further momentum to concerns from food safety and food sovereignty advocates who have challenged Monsanto's grip on corporate agriculture and its genetically engineered crops.

In a "March Against Monsanto" in cities in the US and beyond, activists plan to gather on May 25 to highlight environmental and health concerns from genetically engineered crops and call out the corporatism that allows "Organic and small farmers [to] suffer losses while Monsanto continues to forge its monopoly over the world’s food supply, including exclusive patenting rights over seeds and genetic makeup.



 

Friday, April 26, 2013

Tickling a Loris


The loris is a funny faced creature indigenous to India and Southeast Asia.  Apparently they like being tickled.   I'm posting this entry because it shows this creature to be intelligent and also endearing.  The best way to appreciate the loris is to leave it alone,  free in the forest where it belongs. Loris's are wild animals.  We should not be encouraging people to have them as pets. The best thing we can do for them is protect the forested lands they depend on for survival. 

I would love to tickle a loris, but I prefer they be left alone to live out their lives free of human interference.




Here is a link to a loris getting tickled...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ5ACLVjYwM&NR=1&feature=endscreen



Thursday, April 25, 2013

The George W. Bush Presidency


This week George W. Bush's Presidential Library opens on the campus of Southern Methodist University. Amazing when, despite claims to the contrary, you could probably fit all of the book's GWB has ever read on one small shelf. Vacuous and vain in equal parts, GWB was, as the late, great Anne Richards once said, 'Born with a silver spoon in his mouth'.  Being an intellectual lightweight is hardly the worst thing you can say about GWB.  He was largely a dupe, used by a cabal of morally bankrupt political hacks lead by Dick Cheney.  This group lied our nation into two terrible, deeply destructive wars that killed thousands of Americans and probably more than a million Iraqis.  Bush's unnecessary wars have cost the American treasury in excess of three trillion dollars. 

GWB should be under indictment for the crimes he and his cabal committed while holding the reins of government.

Today GWB is being commemorated at the opening of a presidential library that will be dedicated to rewriting the corruption and failure associated with his presidency.    His 'libary' will always have a dark and ugly cloud hanging over it. 

The following article appeared yesterday in the Washington Post.  It reflects the truth about GWB, in stark contrast to the venal tributes that will come as the doors of his 'library' open. 


 _____________________________



George W. Bush’s presidency, in 24 charts

 
 


Good news for George W. Bush! His approval rating is the highest it’s been in years, just as he’s set to open his presidential library at Southern Methodist University. Forty-seven percent of Americans approve of Bush, up from 33 percent when he left office as the economy cratered.

Bad news for George W. Bush! His newfound popularity comes, as my colleague Dan Balz notes, because of “the passage of time and Bush’s relative invisibility” rather than any re-evaluation of his record. Majorities still oppose his decision to invade Iraq and disapprove of his handling of the economy.

But in the interest of history, let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at Bush’s record, issue by issue, and, of course, in charts.


1. Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terrorism.

Iraq freedom

Might as well start with the big one. In 2003, before the invasion, Iraq was a brutal dictatorship suffering under a sanctions regime which, according to UNICEF, killed at least 500,000 children.

How does it look in 2013? Well, it’s a dictatorship again, at least according to Freedom House, a highly respected arbiter of regime type. Freedom House rates 2013 Iraq as “not free,” giving it scores of 6 (out of 7, with 7 being as unfree as is possible) on both political rights and civil liberties. By comparison, Russia also gets a 6 on political rights, and a 5 on civil liberties, and many critics believe that Putin is running a dictatorial regime at this point.

What explains this? I’ll leave it to Freedom House:
Iraq’s political rights rating declined from 5 to 6 due to the concentration of power by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and increasing pressure on the political opposition, as exemplified by the arrest and death sentence in absentia of Vice President Tariq al Hashimi, the country’s most senior Sunni Arab politician.
Maliki is obviously less brutal than Saddam Hussein, but still, that’s not exactly the ideal result. As for Afghanistan, it’s a similar story. Hamid Karzai is a step up from the Taliban but the country is still “not free,” according to Freedom House:


Afghanistan freedom


To be fair to Bush, though, at the end of his tenure the country had snuck into the “partly free” category according to Freedom House. It’s slid back under President Obama.

And what did it cost to get there? Well, a lot of money, for one thing. The Cost of War project puts the economic tally of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars at about $4 trillion – with a “t”. And if we don’t pay off the debt accumulated as a consequence of going to war, the interest alone could add over $7 trillion more to that by 2053:

Iraq cost

This isn’t all Bush, as Obama made the decision to continue the war in Afghanistan. But Bush set in motion policies that wound up costing about $4 trillion.

It’s also cost a lot of lives. The most accurate data we have are on U.S. military casualties: 6,648 service members have died in Iraq and Afghanistan to date, a large majority of the deaths occurring under Bush’s presidency. Civilian casualties are harder to count. The UN mission in Afghanistan estimates that 14,728 civilians died there between 2007 and 2012. That, of course, does not include casualties of the invasion and occupation between 2001 and 2006.

Iraq is even harder to track. Iraq Body Count, an NGO devoted to tallying deaths in that war, puts the number at between 112,114 and 122,644. The real number could be much higher. The World Health Organization published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine putting the death toll between 2003 and 2006 at 151,000. The medical journal Lancet published a study in 2006 estimating that around 655,000 had died. That survey in particular was very controversial, but regardless of whether upwards of 600,000, or “only” over 100,000, have died, the war has killed a whole lot of people.

And of course, this leaves out harder to quantify costs. The U.S. tortured people in the course of all three wars. We flew people to secret prisons and brutally interrogated them, including by using methods that most people would classify as torture. It’s hard to put a number on that, but it’s a real moral cost.

What about the wars’ benefits? Well, it’s hard to say, and harder to quantify. Did the war in Afghanistan reduce terrorist attacks on the United States and related targets? Terrorism as a phenomenon is so extraordinarily rare that it’s quite possible it didn’t, and that’s before taking into account potential recruitment effects due to the invasion, which could have made the overall effect positive.

This is a problem for counterterrorism policy more generally. Criminologists Cynthia Lum, Leslie Kennedy, and Alison Shirley did a critical review of the literature in 2008 and found no evidence that any widely used counterterrorism practice actually reduces the incidence of terrorist attacks. Twelve studies found that metal detectors and security screening worked, for instance, but another 13 found they were actually harmful to counterterrorism efforts. All 11 studies on military strikes either found no effect or that the strikes backfired. “Perhaps what is equally (if not more) interesting is what we didn’t find from our review,” they write. “Most interventions have never been evaluated, which speaks to the lack of an evidence base for counter-terrorism policy.”

That counts for Obama too, but it underscores a key problem with the war on terrorism, including as it was conducted by Bush: it never relied on evidence-based practices to address the problem at hand.
As for Iraq, it is, again, tough to draw conclusions. The country has liberalized considerably, to be sure, but all counterproliferation and counterterrorism benefits touted pre-invasion weren’t forthcoming. Indeed, according to Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, the war actually ended up increasing worldwide terrorism sevenfold, due to copycat attacks and recruitment effects.


2. The economy.

Overall, the economy under Bush (and Alan Greenspan, and Ben Bernanke) was pretty much all right. Unemployment was low, though not sub-4 percent, as it was under President Clinton:


Bush unemployment
And while growth was under the 4-5 percent rates it was averaging during the 1990s, it was hardly bad:


Bush rgdp


Median compensation (or, wages plus benefits) stagnated after growing under Clinton. The bottom three lines are all real average hourly compensation.

Epi compensation

Indeed, the Hamilton Project’s Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney find that median annual earnings for men actually fell under Bush, after rising under Clinton.
Inequality actually rose more slowly under Bush than it did under Clinton:

Bush inequality


Poverty increased, after having fallen under Clinton:

Bush poverty

Extreme poverty continued the upward trajectory it’s been on ever since welfare reform:



But then 2008 happened. While almost all of the Great Recession has taken place under Obama’s presidency, the groundwork was laid during George W. Bush’s, and the crisis started in his final year.
Take, for instance, housing prices. One root cause of the financial crisis was the continued overvaluation of housing stock in the United States. That really took off when Bush was in office, though it began under Clinton:

House prices bush

Interestingly, though, the share of the economy devoted to finance didn’t grow a lot while Bush was president. “Finance and insurance,” in particular, was only 8.2 percent of the economy when Bush took office, and never went above that. The main growth was under Clinton:

Bush finance

The most obvious case for Bush’s culpability in the crisis is negligence, that he — or his appointees — should have noticed the housing bubble forming, or the dangers of unregulated securities, and acted to stop them. But Bush was also an active deregulator, as his Securities and Exchange Commission exempted large investment banks from limits on their debt-to-equity ratios in 2004, following a lobbying push by, among others, future Bush Treasury Secretary and then Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson.

That led to a sharp increase in the debt-to-equity ratio, or the share of bank assets that are borrowed from somewhere. Many analysts believe high debt-to-equity ratios are the defining danger that caused the crisis, as it increased the damage that certain loans going bad could do to banks. Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, for example, argue that ratios more like 2 to 1 mean that events like those in 2008 would have just challenged banks rather than sinking them outright.


gao_dte


All the same, Bush’s initial response to the crisis was better than some imaginable alternatives, though one could find fault with his administration’s failure to bail out Lehman Brothers, which arguably precipitated the crisis outbreak. He worked with Nancy Pelosi to craft a fiscal stimulus package in early 2008, which some researchers concluded increased consumer spending by an average of 3.5 percent. And, of course, Bush and his Treasury secretary Hank Paulson devised the bank bailout package which Alan Blinder and many others credit with preventing an actual depression.
In any case, it’s left us with a lot of debt. Even if you don’t blame the crisis on Bush, at least half the debt is directly attributable to his policy choices. Racking up debt isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and some have even argued that surpluses can be economically dangerous, but for whatever it’s worth, Bush played a big role there:





It’s also worth noting that Bush was increasing the deficit at a time when the economy was expanding — which is exactly the opposite of what Keynesians believe makes sense, and which also made it more difficult for the country to respond to the recession.


3. Taxes

Another enduring legacy of the Bush administration is the creation of the current tax structure. With the exception of some minor changes for earners making above $400,000, or $200,000 if you include changes to some tax deductions, the tax code is roughly as it was after Bush’s second tax cut in 2003. That means a lot less revenue:


Bush revenue


Even at its highest point, revenue under Bush was a full percentage point of GDP below where it was in 2001. That means billions of dollars in annual lost revenue. If, in 2009, the government had taken in as much revenue as a percent of GDP as it had in 2001, it would have gotten about $600 billion more.

What about distribution? Well, let’s take a look at the Tax Policy Center’s distributive breakdown of Senate Republicans’ proposal late last year to extend the tax cuts, relative to letting them expire totally:

Bush tax distro


Millionaires would have gotten an 8.1 percent tax cut, while those making under $10,000 got an average tax cut of $4. Of course, everyone making under $200,000, and most making between $200,000 and $400,000, got this exact deal. The public perception is correct: the Bush tax cuts were heavily tilted to benefit wealthier taxpayers.


4. Health care

Under Bush, insurance premiums as paid both by workers and their employers roughly doubled, as you can see in this Kaiser Family Foundation chart:

kaiser_bush

And according to KFF, the percentage of firms offering health benefits fell from 68 percent to 59 percent during his tenure.

But Bush did inaugurate Medicare Part D, which has provided prescription drug coverage to 73 percent of Medicare recipients. As this Kaiser chart shows, the program came in way cheaper than expected:

medicared

Then again, that’s largely because prescription drug prices have fallen due to lackluster pharmaceutical innovation.


5. Education

Bush’s crowning accomplishment in this regard is No Child Left Behind, which established testing standards for all elementary and secondary schools for the first time ever. However, its implementation was been somewhat shaky, with many local districts recoiling against its mandates. One frequent cause of grievance is that, as this New America Foundation chart explains, the Bush administration repeatedly signed budgets that provided less than the authorized funding levels for NCLB:

Nclb funding

Whether or not that money would have actually helped student achievement is, of course, another question. So what happened to student achievement? On math, it rose.FFourth grade math scores, for example, rose for students of all races:

Bush math race

But for reading, the results were less impressive. Here’s fourth grade again, by race:

Bush reading race

Some progress, but not of the same scale you see with math.


6. Environment

The Bush administration was pretty hostile to most efforts to combat climate change, between withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol to needing to be sued for the EPA to do anything to combat it. As a consequence, greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise (update: before falling in 2008/2009, as Brad points out to me):

greenhousegas

As did the sea level:

Colorado sealevels

And U.S. temperatures:

noaa_temperatures

The overall trend is still troubling, and even if year-to-year temperatures didn’t rise, they’re still higher than they’ve ever been. It’s really really bad, you guys.


7. HIV/AIDS

Pepfar map
Map source: PEPFAR Worldwide Activities Map.

One bright spot on Bush’s record is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a program to fight HIV/AIDS in the developing world by, among other things, distributing anti-retroviral drugs, preventing transmission from mothers to children, and preventing initial infection through abstinence and condom programs. It worked. One study found that the program saved 1.2 million peoples’ lives, and reduced HIV-related mortality by about 10 percent. It directly supports 5.1 million peoples’ antiretroviral drug regimens.









 

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

The Swiss Put the Clamp on Corporate Fat Cats


In its most recent election, Switzerland became a beacon for corporate and economic enlightenment. By a 2 to 1 margin, Swiss voters approved a Constitutional amendment that  seriously erodes the trend toward more corporate power.    The amendment restricts bloated payouts for arriving and departing corporate executives.  It includes prison penalties for corporate leaders who fail to follow the new rules. It gives corporate shareholders the right to veto excessive executive compensation packages.

Just a few weeks before the vote, the Swiss firm Novartis awarded its outgoing chairman a $78 million payoff, even as the firm was eliminating jobs.  An outraged Swiss public responded by its resounding support for the Constitutional measure that bans such unwarranted compensation. 

This noble action by the Swiss people is a reflection of the kind of response sorely needed in our United States. In the US, the equivalent response would be to rally behind Move to Amend, the political action group whose sole focus is on passing a Constitutional amendment that would nullify money being treated as speech and would declare that corporations are not people. Eliminating these two morally bankrupt legal constructs would take us a long way down the road the Swiss have already traveled.

It says a lot about our news, controlled as it is by large corporations, that this major step taken by Swiss voters has gone almost unreported in the American media.

Here is a link to Move to Amend...https://movetoamend.org/



Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Earth Day



These cartoons showed up in an email I received today from the Population Media Center.  The message they deliver is pretty clear.  The Earth is the only home we have. We have to take better care of it.




ed1

ed2
ed3
ed4
ed5
ed6
ed7
ed8





 


Here is a link to the Population Media Center...  www.populationmedia.org
 
 
 
 
 

Monday, April 22, 2013

Eagle Cam


Washington, DC is not a place where you might expect to find nesting bald eagles,  but in fact a few miles from the White House a pair of the majestic birds has taken up residence in a tree on the campus of the metropolitan police academy.





The National Geographic Society maintains a live webcam that allows anyone on the net to tune in to the eagles nest.  In March 2013, two chicks were born.  The young birds have grown a lot since then. Pretty cool to watch the parents fly in with a fish from the nearby Anacostia River.





The link to the live eagle cam is  http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/eagle-cam-live/


Sunday, April 21, 2013

Hanging Out With Whale Sharks


About ten years ago,  my friend and sometimes film collaborator, Michael Tobias told a group of us at a party about his sublime experience swimming with whale sharks in Mexico's Sea of Cortez.  Michael's experience was part of Whale Shark Hunters of the Philippines,  a film he executive produced in 2001 for National Geographic about these marvelous creatures.




Whale sharks are kin to some of the most ferocious predators in the sea, but while great white sharks and their ilk can be extremely dangerous, whale sharks are the gentlest of creatures.   To be sure, they are giants. The largest can exceed forty feet in length and 50,000 pounds in weight. Thought to live up to 70 years, they are filter feeders, living off of plankton, and other small organisms, and can be found in all the world's tropical oceans.


 

 
 
I read a piece on the net today that reported on a whale shark tourist industry that has developed on Cebu in the Philippines.  It turns out that Michael Tobias's documentary, which was directed by filmmaker Erin Calmes,  was a catalyst that led to many nations declaring the whale shark a protected species.  Further, whale shark tourism is thriving now in the Sea of Cortez as well as in the Philippines.   Instead of hunting these gentile giants,  fisherman in Cebu are making money taking tourists to swim with them. 

I just told my wife, swimming with whale sharks is on my 'to do' list.

Here is a link to a wonderful video that features people swimming with giant whale sharks...http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_898895&feature=iv&src_vid=dUMUSFLyZpU&v=o6lpDsBYX6A

Here is a link to a group that is working to protect whale sharks...http://www.whalesharkfest.com/pdf/ecoocean-brochure.pdf



Saturday, April 20, 2013

Chasing Ice


James Balog is a climate warrior. A few years ago, the acclaimed environment photographer  launched the Extreme Ice Survey [EIS].  The mission of the EIS is to create a visual record of the human induced destruction of  the world's great ice fields. These glaciers are a critical source of fresh water during the dry season in many parts of our planet. What Balog's EIS documents is the extreme rapid melting and destruction of this seriously underappreciated resource.  The cause of this melting is well known. It is the massive human consumption of fossil hydrocarbon fuels like coal and oil.  The pollution from the burning of these fuels causes too much of the sun's radiant energy to be trapped in our atmosphere rather than reflected back into space. As a consequence of this greenhouse effect, atmospheric temperatures are elevated; sea levels rise,  storm systems become more extreme, and glaciers that have been in place for a thousand years  begin to melt away.  We humans are caught in a downward environmental spiral of our own making.  Too many of us remain in denial.

The primary focus of the EIS is to create a visual documentation of climate change's impact on glaciers.   James Balog and his team set up time lapse cameras to document the rapid changes taking place with glaciers in Iceland, Greenland, and Alaska. 

The first result of this multi-year effort is a remarkable, feature length documentary titled, Chasing Ice.    It's stunning imagery presents a clear and unambiguous picture of the frightening impact of climate change.





Here is a link to a video tease of James Balog's, Chasing Ice...http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eIZTMVNBjc4




Friday, April 19, 2013

Gus Harper at Work



What we have here is a melding of talents; a gifted fine art painter,  a very talented filmmaker, and a great musician/composer.  I found this gem on the Boing Boing blog this morning.  I like that site because of the eclectic and often interesting links it showcases. Thanks to Boing Boing's team for spreading the word  and bringing this work to my attention.



Gus Harper


In this video, it's such a pleasure to see the fruits of three exceptional artists come together. Light flows over a beautiful, emotionally engaging montage of the painter at work. 


Little Pomscape by Gus Harper


Gus Harper's art is presented gracefully, unobtrusively, by Isaac Rodriguez, a video artist in full control of his medium.  The original music, performed in pitch perfect fashion, is the work of English composer Dexter Britain  

Here is the link to Issac Rodriguez's wonderful video short about gifted fine art  painter, Gus Harper. http://vimeo.com/64367301




Thursday, April 18, 2013

Senate Sells Out to the NRA


Today, the United States Senate, or I should say the conservatives in the Senate toed the line for the  National Rifle Association [NRA] and voted down legislation that would be instituted universal background checks for people wanting to purchase guns in America.  The Republican party deserves the blame for this because there were enough votes to pass this bill, were it not for yet another GOP filibuster. The vote was 54-46; not enough to beat the much-abused filibuster rules in the Senate.

This effort to establish a universal background check system for gun purchases was favored by 90% of the voting public. Republican voters supported it. Even NRA members overwhelmingly supported it.

Sad to say, the background check legislation was supposedly the easiest of the mix of actions needed to quell gun violence in America.  The separate Senate efforts to limit gun cartridge magazine size, to restrict assault weapons, and to criminalize 'strawman' purchases of guns all were doomed right along with the background checks.

In the wake of the mass murder of children in Newton, Connecticut, how could the senate naysayers respond so despicably?  Very simply, it comes down to politics.  The conservatives who refused to support Senate action on gun safety are beholden to the NRA, which  ignored it's own membership and stood vehemently against any kind of restriction on guns  Let's call a spade a spade. The NRA is a lobbying organization.   It's gun owner members are being used to shield the NRA's real mission, which is to vigorously shill for gun and ammunition manufacturers.

The whole gun debate is a microcosm for the root cause of the sweeping dysfunction in our system of governance.  American is no longer a democracy. It is a plutocracy; it represents the rich and big corporations, not it's citizens.  Quite simply, he who has the money makes the rules in America.  This circumstance applies across the board. No matter the issue, corporations and wealthy individuals are are able to use their money and influence to manipulate public policy to get the result they want, no matter the public interest.

The conservative leaning U.S. Supreme Court has said that money is a form of free speech.  They also consider corporations as persons under the law. As long as these two morally bankrupt legal constructs stand,  democracy in America is a sham. 

The path to much needed gun safety legislation requires a congress that respects the will of  the people.  The same is true for climate change. Whatever the issue, the first step to meaningful action is to push back against the money and influence of the rich and powerful. Best way to do that is to enact a Constitutional amendment that says money is not speech and corporations are not people. Until we do that, nothing much good is going to get done by the people we elect to represent the public interest.

Anyone who wants to be a part of the solution on gun safety should take the time to visit the website for Move to Amend. Become part of the citizen action to take back our government by passing a Constitutional Amendment to end 'money as speech' and corporate personhood.

Here is a link to the Move to Amend website... https://movetoamend.org/



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Wednesday, April 17, 2013

IMAX Fighter Pilot


I just came across a video that originated a few years ago as an IMAX presentation in theaters.   It is focused on the famous Red Flag fighter aircraft exercises that take place over the Nevada desert near Nellis Air Force Base, which is located just outside Las Vegas.




I decided to build a blog entry around this video simply because it has some of the most exciting video footage I've ever seen of fighter jets in action. 

Here is a link to the IMAX Fighter Pilot Video... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V30f88a8OTA



Sunday, April 14, 2013

Victor Borge - Funniest Comedian I Ever Saw


The funniest person I ever saw was a comedian named Victor Borge.   He passed away in 2000 at the age of 81. He was performing in concert halls around the world right up to the point of his death.  His brand of humor was unique. Borge was a piano prodigy born in Denmark. His humor was an outgrowth of his classical music training. Borge was fun, and often silly in the very best way. I had the good fortune of seeing him in concert twice.


Victor Borge


Here is a link to a video clip of Victor Borge entertaining an audience....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtDX1Vl-Jxk

Another clip of Borge at his best.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ij-UNTNCFA