relax, it's covered by Obamacare

From: pinterest

“Jihad Ahmed Mujstafa Diyab is a Syrian man who has been a detainee at the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since 2002. In 2009, the Guantánamo Review Task Force ruled that he was not a threat to national security and could be released. Yet here we are five years later, and Diyab is still imprisoned at Guantánamo, having never been tried, or even accused of a crime, and with no idea when — or if — he’ll ever get out. Last year, to protest their continued confinement, he and many other detainees began a hunger strike.
     One reason many detainees abandoned their hunger strikes is because, twice a day, the government used what is called 'enteral feeding' to ensure that they were getting nutrients. A more common term is force-feeding. The ordeal begins with something called 'forced cell extraction,' which one of Diyab’s lawyers, Jon Eisenberg, described to me as 'a highly orchestrated procedure.
     'A five-man riot squad in complete armor pins the guy to the floor, shackles him, and carries him out,' Eisenberg says. Then the detainee is strapped into a restraint chair — which the prisoners have dubbed the 'torture chair.' One soldier holds the detainee’s head, while another feeds a tube into his nose and down to his stomach. It is very painful to endure. […]
     One of those who testified on Diyab’s behalf, Steven Miles, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, said it’s not even a close call. He was first horrified to discover that the government had been lubricating the tube with olive oil instead of a water-soluble lubricant. 'When you pass the tube, some of the lubricant can drop into the lungs,' he said. Olive oil in the lungs can cause an inflammatory reaction called lipoid pneumonia. (The government says it stopped using olive oil as a lubricant over the summer.)
     After listing a half-dozen other ways the government’s force-feeding violated medical protocols, he concluded: 'They turned it from a medical procedure to a penal strategy dressed up to look like a medical procedure. The procedures look nothing like medicine.'”
— Hullabaloo
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through the eyes of babes

Image Credits: Really Big Coloring Books, Inc.

“As a special thank-you for all the veterans who sacrificed so much for our country, they [Really Big Coloring Books] have re-issued their best-selling Ted Cruz coloring book alongside an 8-page coloring book 'short' that shows the makings of a true American hero - Ted Cruz, of course. […]
     Cruz is a hero for fighting against the evil hydra of Obamacare. Health insurance is the number one threat to citizens of America, alongside illegal immigration, high taxes, lawlessness and injustice.
     Of course, the story of Ted Cruz the superhero also ends in the White House in 2016. He hath slayethed the dreaded hydra.”
— Crooks and Liars
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“The Council for Biotechnology Information (CBI) has published a kids' book on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that purports to give kids 'a closer look at biotechnology. You will see that biotechnology is being used to figure out how to: 1) grow more food; 2) help the environment; and 3) grow more nutritious food that improves our health.'
     If that book doesn't appeal to you, you could try a nanotechnology coloring book made by a company that produces such things as 'colloidal silver nanoparticles' used in antibacterial products that find their way into the water supply and can be poisonous to the human system. It compares nanotechnologies like these silvers to ‘the smell of baking cookies.’ […]
     As [The Center for Media and Democracy] CMD's PRWatch has reported, industries and their front groups ‘target ... America's teachers and, ultimately, our children ... trying to justify everything from deforestation to extinction of species. ... Surreptitious public relations campaigns and deceptive advertising are battling today for the hearts and minds of our children.’
     John Borowski, an environmental science teacher, reported that teachers at the 2000 National Science Teachers Convention were ‘quickly filling their bags with curricula as corrosive as the pesticides that the Farm Bureau promotes.’
     Twelve years haven't changed the way spinmeisters operate. Corporate propaganda like this is distributed online, handed out at conferences and fairs where these corporations, agencies, and their front groups exhibit, as well as at teachers' conventions like Borowski describes.”
— Rebekah Wilce, sott.net
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From: US Holocaust Memorial Museum; europe-isreal.org

“One page of an antisemitic coloring book widely distributed to children with a portrait of a Jew drawn by the German caricaturist known as Fips. […]”
— PROPAGANDA, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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anthropocentric sovereignty

Photo: The Times

“[…] One might expect unexplained incidents in NATO airspace to concern the authorities, particularly given that since 1947 over 100,000 UFOs have been reported worldwide, many by militaries. However, neither the scien- tific community nor states have made serious efforts to identify them, the vast majority remaining completely uninvestigated. The science of UFOs is minuscule and deeply marginalized.
     Although many scientists think privately that UFOs deserve study, there are no opportunities or incentives to do it. With almost no meaningful variation, states—all 190+ of them—have been notably uninterested as well. A few have gone through the motions of studying individual cases, but with even fewer exceptions these inquiries have been neither objective nor systematic, and no state has actually looked for UFOs to discover larger patterns. For both science and the state, it seems, the UFO is not an 'object' at all, but a non-object, something not just unidentified but unseen and thus ignored.
     The authoritative disregard of UFOs goes further, however, to active denial of their object status. Ufology is decried as a pseudo-science that threatens the foundations of scientific authority, and the few scientists who have taken a public interest in UFOs have done so at considerable cost. For their part, states have actively dismissed ‘belief’ in UFOs as irrational (as in, ‘do you believe in UFOs?’), while maintaining considerable secrecy about their own reports.”
— Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, Political Theory (Volume 36, Number 4)
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“[...] the Chicken of Tomorrow”

First Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurant (Tampa FL, 1961) from: tampapix

“The [chicken] was rarely more than an incidental food in colonial America. On Winslow’s farm, wild bird remains excavated by archaeologists outnumber those of chickens three to one, and cattle, pig, sheep and goat bones dominate. Virginians, meanwhile, feasted on turkey, goose, pigeon, partridge and duck, along with venison, mutton, pork and beef, as well as shad, sturgeon and shellfish. […]
     For enslaved African Americans, this humble status proved a welcome boon. In 1692, after several individuals had bought their freedom with profits from animal sales, the Virginia General Assembly made it illegal for slaves to own horses, cattle and pigs. Masters often banned their human chattels from hunting, fishing or growing tobacco, and at Mount Vernon raising ducks and geese was an undertaking reserved solely for George Washington’s white staff. The chicken ‘is the only pleasure allowed to Negroes; they are not permitted to keep either ducks or geese or pigs’, one visitor there remarked.
     On the expanding farms of the colonial South, African Americans began to breed, sell, buy and eat fowl as they saw fit. Many first-generation slaves came from West Africa, where the birds were widely raised and often used in ritual sacrifice. Chicken fried in palm oil is still a favourite meal there.
     Owners granted slaves authority over chickens because the birds were of negligible economic importance and reduced plantation spending on feeding field hands. Just as European Jews gained expertise in moneylending, a profession disdained by Christians, poultry became an African-American speciality because whites preferred beef and pork.
     Planters often paid their slaves cash for fowl and eggs, giving black cooks an economic incentive to encourage their masters to eat more chicken. By the middle of the 19th century, fried chicken was a quintessentially Southern dish.”
— Andrew Lawler, aeon
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simple

From: Mr. 70s

“HuffPost Canada TV:
     So we’re landing something on a comet. How in the hell is that even possible?
 Dan Riskin [co-host of ‘Daily Planet’]:
     Simple. I don’t know what the big deal is. You launch a rocket on a trajectory that has it loop around Earth four times, then go around Mars, then go to sleep for two-and-a-half years, and then travel out further from Earth than any other solar-powered spacecraft has ever gone before, then have it wake itself up, and then have it chase down the comet -- which until now has just looked like a far-away space blob, but turns out it's like a giant spinning four-kilometre-long rubber duckie going 137,000 kph with gasses coming out of it.
     Then the spacecraft finds a safe orbit around the duck, takes photos of the surface so that the people back on Earth can choose a landing spot, and then from 22.5 km up, it throws a lander out, with no thrusters on it or anything that would control its descent. Simple. Then we all just watch it fall for seven hours until it lands. We don’t know if it’s landing in powder or on a sandy hill, or on sheer ice, but once it lands it'll screw itself into the ground and secure itself with harpoons. And then so long as it didn't accidentally fall on its side, it does some drilling/photographing/sampling and we get to see a side of the early solar system that we've never seen before. Ten years from launch to landing. So really it’s no big deal.”
— Chris Jancelewicz, Huffington Post
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artificial smartness

Sculpture by Anatoly Vyatkin, 2005 (from: BIT REBELS)

“A few months ago I made the trek to the sylvan campus of the IBM research labs in Yorktown Heights, New York, to catch an early glimpse of the fast-arriving, long-overdue future of artificial intelligence. This was the home of Watson, the electronic genius that conquered Jeopardy! in 2011. The original Watson is still here—it's about the size of a bedroom, with 10 upright, refrigerator-shaped machines forming the four walls. The tiny interior cavity gives technicians access to the jumble of wires and cables on the machines' backs. It is surprisingly warm inside, as if the cluster were alive.
     Today's Watson is very different. It no longer exists solely within a wall of cabinets but is spread across a cloud of open-standard servers that run several hundred 'instances' of the AI at once. […]
     Every intelligence has to be taught. A human brain, which is genetically primed to categorize things, still needs to see a dozen examples before it can distinguish between cats and dogs.
     That's even more true for artificial minds. Even the best-programmed computer has to play at least a thousand games of chess before it gets good. Part of the AI breakthrough lies in the incredible avalanche of collected data about our world, which provides the schooling that AIs need. Massive databases, self-tracking, web cookies, online footprints, terabytes of storage, decades of search results, Wikipedia, and the entire digital universe became the teachers making AI smart.”
— Kevin Kelly, Wired
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“Tesla CEO and famous technology innovator Elon Musk has repeatedly warned about AI threats. In June, he said on CNBC that he had invested in AI research because 'I like to just keep an eye on what's going on with artificial intelligence. I think there is a potential dangerous outcome there.'
     He went on to invoke The Terminator. In August, he tweeted that 'We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.' And at a recent MIT symposium, Musk dubbed AI an 'existential threat' to the human race and a 'demon' that foolish scientists and technologists are 'summoning.'
     Musk likened the idea of control over such a force to the delusions of 'guy[s] with a pentagram and holy water' who are sure they can control a supernatural force—until it devours them. As Musk himself suggests elsewhere in his remarks, the solution to the problem lies in sober and considered collaboration between scientists and policymakers.
     However, it is hard to see how talk of 'demons' advances this noble goal. In fact, it may actively hinder it.”
— Adam ELkus, Slate
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"Why don't you and I combine?" — Bob Marley

via: aeon

“Scientists hope to unlock the secrets of millions of marine microbes from waters as far apart as Sydney’s Botany Bay and the Amazon River in Brazil, with the help of an international team of volunteers sharing their spare computer capacity to create a research 'supercomputer.'
      The project, co-led by University of New South Wales’ (UNSW) Associate Professor Torsten Thomas, has the aim of making 20 quadrillion—or twenty thousand million million—comparisons of genes from a wide variety of tiny life-forms that are invisible to the naked eye.
     'Microorganisms rule the planet. Without bacteria and other microbes, life on Earth would very rapidly cease,' says Prof. Thomas, of the UNSW School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences and Center for Marine Bio-Innovation. 'But we know very little about them. Scientists have studied less than one percent of microbial diversity around the globe. Valuable discoveries await us if we can learn about the remaining 99 percent.' The Uncovering Genome Mysteries project is hosted on IBM’s World Community Grid. In the past decade more than 670,000 people have volunteered their spare computer capacity to the grid, creating a virtual supercomputer that carries out scientific research around the clock. 'Anyone with a computer, smartphone or tablet can join and help to give us the computational power to carry out our microbe research,' says Prof. Thomas, who heads the project with Dr. Wim Degrave of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil.
     With enough volunteers the project could be completed within months. By comparison, it would take 40,000 years for a single PC to make 20 quadrillion computations.'”
— Asian Scientist
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