global village people

From: EdinPhoto

“The world's wealthiest people aren't known for travelling by bus, but if they fancied a change of scene then the richest 85 people on the globe – who between them control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population put together – could squeeze onto a single double-decker.
     The extent to which so much global wealth has become corralled by a virtual handful of the so-called 'global elite' is exposed in a new report from Oxfam on Monday. It warned that those richest 85 people across the globe share a combined wealth of £1tn [$1.57 trillion],  as much as the poorest 3.5 billion of the world's population.”
— Graeme Wearden, The Guardian
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“Our image of the very very rich — MacMansions, only scaled up; nice cars, only pricier; like us, but with more toys — is very very wrong. ... They never ride first class because they never fly commercial ... they own airplanes. They don't own homes, they own estates — so many of them in fact that not one is 'home' in the normal sense. Now extend that — for most of these people, not one country is home either. ... Real Money lives in the world, everywhere, all of it. And most are loyal to none of it. […]
     [Yet they] control most aspects of public life. Whether you live poorly or well, you work so they can be richer. You're fired when they want you fired. You're killed — in their wars; by their poisons; by their unaffordable health care system; by your poverty; by their police — when they want you to die.
     Like fish in water, you live with their greed every day. You watch their propaganda (we call it 'entertainment'). You vote for their candidates. Their touch and reach is everywhere, yet they're invisible to us. The key to their destruction is to expose their lives to view.
     In a demonstrable way, life on this planet is under the control of fewer than 200,000 people (Eskow) — at the top, a lot fewer than that — all part of a connected self-recognizing tribe whose culture is pathological (Sachs). The truth could not be more blunt or more plain. It's why we're careening off so many cliffs.”
— RJ Eskow and Jeffrey Sachs, via Crooks and Liars
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“They are the elite of the elite: Although they account for far less than 1 percent of lawyers who filed appeals to the Supreme Court [of the USA], these attorneys were involved in 43 percent of the cases the high court chose to decide from 2004 through 2012.
     The Reuters examination of the Supreme Court’s docket, the most comprehensive ever, suggests that the justices essentially have added a new criterion to whether the court takes an appeal – one that goes beyond the merits of a case and extends to the merits of the lawyer who is bringing it.
     The results: a decided advantage for corporate America, and a growing insularity at the court. Some legal experts contend that the reliance on a small cluster of specialists, most working on behalf of businesses, has turned the Supreme Court into an echo chamber – a place where an elite group of jurists embraces an elite group of lawyers who reinforce narrow views of how the law should be construed.”
— Joan Biskupic, Janet Roberts and John Shiffman, Reuters
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it's a crime

From: policeguide

“The crime legislation of the 1990′s didn’t just put more cops on the streets and build more prisons, it also made sure those cops were armed to the teeth. Throughout the 90′s, there was an expansion of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) and Byrne grants, which financed local police departments to wage a heavy-handed drug war (both programs increased under President Obama).
      This past June, progressive House Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) introduced an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that would block the 'transfer' of 'aircraft (including unmanned aerial vehicles), armored vehicles, grenade launchers, silencers, toxicological agents, launch vehicles, guided missiles, ballistic missiles' from the Department of Defense to state and local police forces. The amendment received the support of only 62 Members, and those voting against it included Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO), who represents Ferguson, and every senior member of Democratic Party leadership including Reps. Nancy Pelosi (CA), Steny Hoyer (MD), and James Clyburn (SC).
     These Democrats (and Republicans, most of whom joined them) were courted by police unions such as the National Fraternal Order of Police and by weapons manufacturers who develop the Pentagon armaments that are now finding their way to the police."
— Zaid Jilani, Salon Read more…

"Slave Patrol" (from: LewRockwell) — see a slave patrol in action here...

“Whether or not crime was on the rise [in ninetieth century America], after the introduction of modern policing the number of arrests increased. The majority of these were for misdemeanors, and most related to victimless crimes, or crimes against the public order. They did not generally involve violence or the loss of property, but instead were related to public drunkenness, vagrancy, loitering, disorderly conduct, or being a 'suspicious person.' In other words, the greatest portion of the actual business of law enforcement did not concern the protection of life and property, but the controlling of poor people, their habits and their manners. Sidney Harring wryly notes: 'The criminologist's definition of "public order crimes" comes perilously close to the historian's description of 'working-class leisure-time activity.' […]
     The aims and means of social control always approximately reflect the anxieties of elites. In times of crisis or pronounced social change, as the concerns of elites shift, the mechanisms of social control are adapted accordingly. So, in the South, following real or rumored slave revolts, the institution of the slave patrol emerged. White men were required to take shifts riding between plantations, apprehending runaways and breaking up slave gatherings.
     Later, complex factors conspired to produce the modern police force. Industrialization changed the system of social stratification and added a new set of threats, subsumed under the title of the 'dangerous classes.' Moreover, while serious crime was on the decline, the demand for order was on the rise owing to the needs of the new economic regime and the ideology that supported it.”
— Kristian Williams, HISTORY IS A WEAPON
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divide

Source image: CHRISTINA HH

“[...] When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before. […]
     So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years.
     If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, ‘Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.’ It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t.
     The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.”
— Chris Rock in conversation with Frank Rich, via Upworthy
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“Figure-Ground: The characteristically unequal emphasis in human visual perception on a figure, which stands out against an undifferentiated background, which merely contributes to that perception. This unequal emphasis is found in the distinction between a word and its context between an organism and its environment or between pattern and chance. There are many visual examples of figure and ground reversals which are the equivalents of paradoxes. cybernetics has synthesised the paradoxes arising out of this alternating emphasis by the construction of systems of interacting subsystems in which each is simultaneously a figure in its own right and part of the background for the other subsystems. (Krippendorff)”
— Principia Cybernetica Web
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"My dream is that one day you'll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof [with colloidal quantum dots].” —Illam Kramer

Solar Car Shade (from: Gizmag)

“Pretty soon, powering your tablet could be as simple as wrapping it in cling wrap. Scientists have just invented a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces using miniscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) -- a major step toward making spray-on solar cells easy and cheap to manufacture.
     [Illan Kramer] calls his system sprayLD, a play on the manufacturing process called ALD, short for atomic layer deposition, in which materials are laid down on a surface one atom-thickness at a time.
     Until now, it was only possible to incorporate light-sensitive CQDs onto surfaces through batch processing -- an inefficient, slow and expensive assembly-line approach to chemical coating. SprayLD blasts a liquid containing CQDs directly onto flexible surfaces, such as film or plastic, like printing a newspaper by applying ink onto a roll of paper. This roll-to-roll coating method makes incorporating solar cells into existing manufacturing processes much simpler. In two recent papers in the journals Advanced Materials and Applied Physics Letters, Kramer showed that the sprayLD method can be used on flexible materials without any major loss in solar-cell efficiency.
     Kramer built his sprayLD device using parts that are readily available and rather affordable -- he sourced a spray nozzle used in steel mills to cool steel with a fine mist of water, and a few regular air brushes from an art store.
     ‘This is something you can build in a Junkyard Wars fashion, which is basically how we did it,’ said Kramer. ‘We think of this as a no-compromise solution for shifting from batch processing to roll-to-roll.’”
— Science Daily
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“Solar power is often associated with solar cells on your roof, but here are many ways in which to exploit that never-ending energy of our little star. Artificial leaves have quite a lengthy history, here described with platinum catalysts, as used in labs in Colorado and California.
     The leaf has been more admired recently than ever before, by the chemists struggling to use sunlight energy to prepare hydrogen, oxygen or even electricity. The catalytic equivalent of chlorophyll, which promotes the conversions first of water into oxygen and then hydrogen into carbohydrate, is slowly being worked out. The photocatalyst is pasted onto a transparent indium tin oxide electrode to produce a semiconductor. […]
     The gases hydrogen and oxygen are given off. An artificial leaf is now being prepared to provide the much-vaunted hydrogen fuel that we have been going on about in the latest cars. […]
     The lower cost of their leaf means it can be converted into a full production module very soon, utilising solution synthesis and vacuum filtration. It is also free standing and needs no wiring up or external devices to increase costs. The attraction is the diversion of hydrogen production from the natural gas industry to an almost carbon –free production, using only solar energy.”
— Dave Armstrong, Earth Times
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yellow face

From: Josef Albers's "Interraction of Color" (differing backgrounds make the Xs look different)

“[…] they could talk forever about colors and never disagree. Yet inside their heads, it could all be very different.”
— Nell Greenfieldboyce, npr
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“The question I have been considering since this debate is whether 'authenticity' of theatre casting actually risks narrowing opportunities for minority group actors and restricts their opportunities to play a cross-section of roles?
     For example, if we were to take demands for authenticity at an entirely literal level are we then saying: that a Jew must always play Shylock, a Russian in a Chekhov play, and an American in a Mamet play?
     To this end, could some of the same actors in the audience for this debate from all ethnicities and vocally advocating authenticity of casting even be ones to then object if imported actors of authentic origin were to undertake such specific roles, denying them work and even prevent them from displaying their own talent performing in a diverse variety of parts?”
— Richard Jordan, The Stage
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“We do not in any way blame or begrudge the actors currently cast for their involvement [ in musical  ‘The Nightingale,’ based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale and set in China] — this is not about them. We simply find it baffling and frustrating that unlike ‘The Lion King’ or ‘Bombay Dreams,’ musicals where the majorities of their multicultural casts have been comprised primarily of African and Indian American actors, respectively, the creative team would not consider it an artistic or social priority to find and cast Asian Americans in the majority of roles for a story set in Asia.
     That Moises Kaufman was a part of this decision — an artist who has long been concerned with giving voice to an oppressed minority and speaking their truth — is even more disappointing … Was there a perception on the part of the creative team that the Asian American talent pool was inadequate? Was it based on fear that there wasn’t enough of a box-office draw with an all-Asian cast? Was there not even that much thought given to telling the story with an Asian American cast in the first place? […]”
— The Asian American Performers Action Coalition, via The Rafu Shimpo
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Take a colour vision test here…

diseases old and new: Affluenza, Influenza… Melanin

Editorial Cartoon: by Matt Davies in Newsday

“The cellphone video of the last moments of Eric Garner’s life was watched millions of times on the Internet, clearly showing a white police officer holding the unarmed black man in a chokehold, even as he repeatedly gasped, 'I can’t breathe.'
     But despite that visual evidence, and a medical examiner’s ruling that the chokehold contributed to the death, a Staten Island grand jury decided Wednesday not to bring any charges against the officer involved, prompting protests across the country and sending thousands onto New York’s streets, where they marched, chanted and blocked traffic into the next morning.
     While legal experts note it’s impossible to know how the grand jurors reached their conclusion, they say the Garner case, like Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, once again raised concerns about the influence local prosecutors have over the process of charging the police officers they work with on a daily basis.”
— Tom Hays And Colleen Long, Associated Press via metro news
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“Authorities said the teen and friends were seen on surveillance video stealing two cases of beer from a store. He had seven passengers in his Ford F-350, was speeding and had a blood-alcohol level three times the legal limit, according to testimony during the trial. His pickup truck slammed into the four pedestrians, killing Brian Jennings, a 43-year-old Burleson youth minister; Breanna Mitchell of Lillian, 24; Shelby Boyles, 21; and her 52-year-old mother, Hollie Boyles. […]
     ‘Money always seems to keep you out of trouble,’ [Eric] Boyles said. ‘Ultimately today, I felt that money did prevail. If you had been any other youth, I feel like the circumstances would have been different.’ […]
     A psychologist called as an expert defense witness said the boy suffered from ‘affluenza […].”
— Huffington Post
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“Sadly, many dark spot correctors still use ingredients proven dangerous. Using a product with these ingredients can have worse effects than simply not seeing results. These can cause serious damage to your health:

Foxincitin-vitriol: this carcinogenic chemical is actually banned in most countries- except the US! Why? Besides increasing skin sensitivity, it has been linked to tumor growth! This is not something you want to be rubbing into your skin.

Redstate-dumbassbullshit: Believe it or not, [it’s] still used in some skin products. The reason - it's cheap. Be very careful of this as it is one of the most harmful things you can put near your body. [It] can destroy your kidneys and nervous system. [It’s] used more often the you think, so always, ALWAYS read the label before buying!.”
— Karen Weathers, Consumer’s Guides [bolderized by Michael Hale]
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hunger games

“World's most expensive hot dog: $2,300.00" — Daily Mail

“[…] we dive out of need, in the light of day, and we are not alone. Since even seasoned scrappers and dumpster divers are often reluctant to pick up food, I never thought I would see the day when there was great competition for discarded food in the United States, but that is exactly what we have observed.
     Last year we joked about eating out of dumpsters and about how much we hate it when people actually put garbage into a dumpster. We asked ourselves why we had waited so long. This year, it is no longer a joke. Our competition is varied, clean and extremely thorough. We have directly observed people picking up food in the middle of the day, and we have varied our routine and reduced our food choices accordingly.”
— Crane-Station,  firedoglake
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“A flight on Jet Edge International costs $67,000 on average, and the company also charges a $2,000 refundable pet deposit in case of accidents on board. The average net worth of the company’s customers is $1 billion, according to Chief Executive Officer Bill Papariella.
     Letting animals tag along is ‘one of the main reasons why people will fly private,’ Papariella said in an interview. ‘They don’t want to go to Aspen or their holiday or to their second home without their pets being on board.’
     For those with means, a charter flight or a jet with fractional ownership is an attractive alternative to airlines’ limits on carry-on kennels or the risks of sending a crated pet in the hold. It’s a niche market that can include handmade dog snacks — a $1,000 Kobe beef snack or rice pilaf with salmon — special attendants and even solo flights without an animal’s owner.”
— Joanna Rothkopf, Salon
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“Facing what it described as a severe cash shortfall, the United Nations food aid organization said Monday that it had been forced to suspend a voucher program that was helping to feed 1.7 million Syrian refugees in neighboring countries.
     The suspension by the organization, the World Food Program, was one of the most drastic cutbacks ever by an emergency relief provider in the nearly 4-year-old Syrian crisis, raising the prospect of widespread hunger at the onset of winter.”
— Nick Cumming-Bruce and Rick Gadstone, The Globe and Mail
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