Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
Actually, we don’t know just how standard [Mitt Romney’s] behavior was — and won’t until we see his tax returns, which will probably never happen (there has to be something really explosive in there). In any case, however, the fact that we’ve had a Gordon Gekko economy for 30 years doesn’t make it OK.
Total wage stagnation for three decades. It’s awe-inspiring.
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The Atlantic magazine has a racket with the Google news team. The mag fills up its blogs with the most intelligence-insulting drivel it can push onto the web at network speed. And Google, taking some cash money bribe, immediately posts the material as “featured” material, guaranteeing views.
In this way we are given the short idiot ramble of one Nicola Twilley, someone who writes for the publication, featured in a magazine sponsored video musing that someday we might be able to end hunger by eating twigs. This as part of a special series called “The Future of X”.
No kidding.
“We Could Use Bacteria to Feed the Starving” read the title on Google. And it was reasonably interesting, as a teaser.
But when you went to it, this is what you got — some callow young girl without a science education or even much indication she really was interested in knowing anything about such, saying:
[We] could spray out bacteria in a dust … We could expand what we’re able to digest — maybe we’re inhaling bacteria that help us digest foods that are not currently digestible … Rather than growing more food to feed more people, maybe what we say is, ‘you know what? We can actually chew on a twig instead.
It’s the equivalent of spam blogging by and for The Atlantic.
If you search Twilley’s blog or her writings you will find nothing to show the vaguest interest in basic science. Which is what one needs a bit of to not come off as a smiling ninny going on about eating twigs.
This is what makes The Atlantic so mercilessly bad. Its editors defiantly and rather proudly publish the musings of the most senseless and therefore fit for the job on such subjects. As with its relentless pummeling of the Higgs Boson story.
This would not be so bad if it were just some run of the mill blog or delivered as some random nerd’s home video series on YouTube.
But no-o-o-o-o, that’s not the casel. The magazine, in conjunction with the giant of search, shoves this material daily onto the featured spaces of Google’s news tab. It is the worst kind of whoring for eyeballs. Indeed, if Google actually applied its own “guidelines for content developers” for not peddling SEO-tricked up trash to itself and The Atlantic, much of the latter’s blogs would be marginalized off the web.
As for a future of eating twigs after being seeded with unique microbial flora by city municipal services, one would no more spend time arguing down Twilley than one would have a dialogue with a can of paint.
Nicola Twilley, what made you think human beings are just like, uh, ruminants or termites? Not a trick question. Mother Nature took a long time to make them that way.
The “eat twigs” thing at the Atlantic.
A Google editors’ pick.
“Got paper?” asks Nicola Twilley.
If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while. — Tom Lehrer
More self-promotion at the Singularity School, Ray Kurzweil’s black hole for journalists who like stories about soon living forever, via PBS. Computers and advances in molecular genetics will soon cure all disease, fix up your decrepitude — just hang in there, like Ray — who — the segment at PBS shows, appears not to have slowed his aging, even though he does phosphatidylcholine for his membranes.
It takes one hundred fifty pills a day to defeat human entropy, according to Ray K., which — along with his phosphatidylcholine drip — is reminiscent of how double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling turned into a quack after going public with his Vitaimin C obsession. Treat the onrush of years aggressively or the sands of time will run out for you.
While Kurzweil lacks the same clout with stupid people enjoyed by Pauling and his Vitamin C stories years ago, one imagines the makers of phosphatidylcholine supplements are not displeased by his activities.
The approach of the Singularity can be visualized with this Ray chart.
Malaria, however, may just miss the boat. It stubbornly killed over 600,000 last year, still proving resistant to computer power combined with the miracle of molecular biology and nanobots.
Wait for the moment, if you can stand the rest, of Craig Venter giving it the brush.
Ray’s PBS performance, excerpted:
RAY KURZWEIL: The electronics will be so small, and we will put computerized devices that are the size of blood cells inside our body to keep us healthy. A new biological virus comes out, these little nanobots could download their software to combat that new pathogen.
PAUL SOLMAN: And so, immortality.
PAUL SOLMAN: Of course, as more time goes by, there will be more to remember. But Kurzweil says we will have augmented brains to retain more of it.
RAY KURZWEIL: Information defines your personality, your memories, your skills. And it really is information. And we ultimately will be able to capture that and actually recreate it. So then we will back ourselves up. People a hundred years from now will think it pretty amazing. People actually went through the day without backing up their mind file?
PAUL SOLMAN: His cholesterol, for example, has dropped from 280 to 100, thanks to a strict regimen of diet, exercise, statin drugs and nutritional supplements. He takes about 150 pills a day.
And then there are injections and I.V. drips for the more exotic substances.
RAY KURZWEIL: I will give you one example. In a baby, 90 percent of the cell membrane is made up of phosphatidylcholine. That substance is responsible for letting the nutrients in, letting toxins out, keeping the cell supple.
By the time you’re 90 years old, the level of phosphatidylcholine you have will be less than 10 percent of what you had as a child.
PAUL SOLMAN: So you’re getting shots of this?
RAY KURZWEIL: It’s an I.V ..,
More, from the Singularity School and the same reporter.
Thoon we will lith forether — here and here — from the archive.
When I was a young boy I saw a documentary about Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity School. “I am seven thousand three hundred and twenty two years old…”
Alert reader Steve alerts us to the best comic on science journalism and lotsa other things, ever, a new Brewster Rockit here.
Stories on the Bigg Moron in the Google news tab — 187,000 today, down from eleventy million last week. Ten thousand of these were published by The Atlantic because they are whores and bribe Google.
“In sum: I personally continue to have no idea what the Higgs boson is … ,” writes Robert Wright for that magazine, in one of many posts. Wright, who’s Twitter handle is RobertWrighter, his bio informs, could’ve won a Pulitzer Prize but didn’t.
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Occasionally I run across futurist pabulum claiming we’ll soon be manufacturing everything we need at home, all due to the revolution in 3D printing. Just think of all the people in China, and everywhere else, we’ll finally be able to put out of work for good!
Not in our lifetime.
However, today comes news of a “hacker” who has used his 3D printer to make a working key to Chubb handcuffs. And, because he is motivated by the pure milk of human kindness, he will upload the digital blueprint to his handcuff key to the Internet later in the week. (If you read it all the way through, the article seems to stupidly maintain you can make assault rifles this way, too, a meme ignited and chased around by the tech nerd fanzine crowd over a year ago.)
Forbes’ Andy Greenberg reports that the security consultant, who goes by the name “Ray,??? used a 3-D printer to cheaply produce plastic versions of the keys to high-security handcuffs manufactured by the English company Chubb and the German company Bonowi. Ray’s plastic keys easily sprung open both firms’ cuffs.
This is a serious problem for handcuff makers …
How would [anyone] get such access? Well, Ray has one answer: According to Greenberg, “he plans to upload the CAD files for the Chubb key to the 3D-printing Web platform Thingiverse after the annual lockpicking conference LockCon later this week.???
Ray says his goal is not to undermine police, but to make them aware of their handcuffs’ vulnerabilities.
Yes, soon 3D printers will be in every apartment and household.
“Finish” for 3D printers from 1200 to 2500 USD: “fair to poor.”
Now, for $11,000, you can have excellent. Or you can stick with dropping a grand and some for a trinket maker, like this. You’ll be making your own Cracker Jack prizes in no time at all.
Over a year ago DD blog briefly mentioned Harrison Harmonicas, a manufacturing startup in Rockford.
Many news outlets flipped over Harrison. Readers and tv news viewers were informed, was using revolutionary 3d manufacturing to make ridiculously priced $180 blues harmonicas.
How’d that work out?
The company went out of business a year after it opened.
From the Rockford, Illinois, newspaper:
ROCKFORD — The number of complaints filed with the Illinois attorney general’s office against the now-shuttered Harrison Harmonicas continues to grow, driven by unhappy customers who ordered the company’s Rockford-made harmonicas and never received them.
Harrison Harmonicas folded about three months ago and informed customers that it was “no longer able to continue as a company??? via email …
Brad Harrison, founder of Harrison Harmonicas, made a name for himself when he won the 2008 Stateline FastPitch Competition, a contest for local entrepreneurs organized by Rockford’s EIGERlab. He went on to win $40,000 at the Innovate Illinois entrepreneur competition.
Harrison gained international press for being the only U.S.-based harmonica manufacturer and for his B-Radical harmonica design.
Harrison Harmonicas worked out of a space at EIGERlab, 605 Fulton Ave., but Harrison moved back to Chicago and took the company with him in May.
EIGERlab officials haven’t heard from Harrison since then.
Now get to work making your artisan handcuff keys. Plus, nothing impresses the ladies so much as telling them you made your own plastic handcuff key with your 3D printer. You’ll need to comb the poon out of your hair, yes sir.
A website full of cheap plastic tinker toys, unsightly plastic sculpture and trivial plastic widgets made expensive by milchtoasts and their 3D printing presses. They stockpile plans for 279 worthless plastic knives!
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In the zeal for profit western companies still put customers at risk, often fatally.
The latest case involves pet poisonings traced back to China, caused by some as yet unidentified adulterant included in “jerky treats” for dogs. The company involved is Nestle Purina, which refuses to pull its product from the market because no test yet exists for whatever it is that is sickening and killing dogs.
Supply chain security has remained iffy and there is a proven record of unscrupulous businessmen who work hard to find adulterants which can be used to increase profit margin.
An FDA page on the matter indicates the contamination of “jerky treats” varies, perhaps waning when reports of animal deaths begin to pick up and the production of the material in question is withdrawn until the heat dies down.
In 2011, FDA saw an increase in the number of complaints it received of dog illnesses associated with consumption of chicken jerky products imported from China.
FDA previously issued a cautionary warning regarding chicken jerky products to consumers in September 2007 and a Preliminary Animal Health Notification in December of 2008. The number of complaints being received dropped off during the latter part of 2009 and most of 2010. However in 2011, FDA once again started seeing the number of complaints rise to the levels of concern that prompted release of our earlier warnings.
Since the issuance of the CVM Update on November 18, 2011, the agency has received numerous additional complaints regarding chicken jerky products.
Dog owners in eight states who believe contaminated chicken jerky treats from China sickened or killed their pets are banding together in a class-action lawsuit against Nestle Purina, the maker of two popular brands of the canine snacks, and several mega-stores that sell them.
They are suing just as Food and Drug Administration officials have refused to release results of inspections of Chinese plants that make the jerky treats blamed for at least 1,000 illnesses and deaths in U.S. pets.
In the past, manufacturers in China have been caught using melamine to extend pet foods and substituting a fake heparin for dialysis patients. The former killed pets nationwide, the latter — people.
In both cases American businessmen were also negligent.
Fine biochemicals like heparin cost money and who can argue
with the logic of increasing profits by sending the work to a slave labor country where it can be made in some kitchen not checked by any annoying regulatory agency?Not Baxter or Scientific Protein Laboratories, the two American companies entangled in the mass recall of the drug heparin. Tainted heparin from these firms, the purification of which was outsourced to China, has resulted in 19 deaths.
If you have the news on the scandal you can’t help but notice there is no sign of public remorse. No one from the involved American firms has anything human to say.
In a Chicago Tribune feature on Baxter International and the tainted heparin scandal, the newspaper reported the company leaping into action to root out the problem. It was a self-serving account.
And it was so egregious and intelligence-insulting, a good portion of it is worth republishing.
“Inside Baxter’s Deerfield headquarters, it was code red,” reported the Tribune. “Robert Parkinson, the company’s chief executive, began holding early morning meetings with a team of key leaders: people responsible for Baxter’s drug surveillance, drug quality, legal, manufacturing, research, and regulatory affairs.
“After the morning meetings, Parkinson made a point of popping in on his key executives. This kept him up to speed on developments and gave people a chance to share what they had learned.
“One surprise: Parkinson soon learned the FDA never had inspected the China manufacturing plant. Recalling the finding in a recent Tribune interview, Parkinson sought to minimize the oversight.
“It’s not unusual for us not to know that the FDA has not inspected a supplier to a supplier,” he said.
On the melamine contaminations.
Also — see here.
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From the wire, on one of the many gurus of the Culture of Lickspittle:
Stephen R. Covey, author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” as well as three other books that have all sold more than a million copies, has died. He was 79.
In a statement sent to employees of a Utah consulting firm Covey co-founded, his family said the writer and motivational speaker died at a hospital in Idaho Falls, Idaho, early Monday due to complications from a bicycle accident in April …
Covey was hospitalized after being knocked unconscious in the bicycle accident on a steep road in the foothills of Provo, Utah, about 45 miles south of Salt Lake City.
At the time, his publicist, Debra Lund, said doctors had not found any signs of long-term damage to his head.
Of minor interest to this blog because of his book’s alleged importance to the yearly thing called Keystone Boys State in Pennsy.
Keystone Boys State, one of the bane’s of DD’s existence long before he was DD, was originally dealt with here. (Click the link in graph before this one — ha-ha. Imagine how vexing it must be!)
In part, it reads:
Yes, one thinks learning to suck up, march in formation and follow pointless orders does teach something about life but one ought not to ask teenage kids to give up a week of summer to learn it. The current website seems to indicate Keystone Boys State is big with those junior ROTC operations which haven’t yet been run off public high school properties.
“The effort to get everyone involved at [KBS] manifests itself by having every ‘citizen’ elected, selected, assigned or appointed to leadership positions throughout the week. Each citizen also is provided with text materials based on organizational science and personal development exercises. Much of what we do is a spin-off of the Stephen Covey text, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective [People],” the boys camp proclaims.
“All citizens should become familiar with parliamentary procedures, ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’ and Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – NOW ! ! !”
“The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” wasn’t required reading when DD attended Keystone Boys State, probably because it hadn’t yet been written.
It is another in a long line of publications from the self-help industry, filled with the kinds of slogans and advice people used to following orders and doing pointless institutional or corporate busy work for work’s sake think will help them improve their attitude so they can earn a quick million dollars, get promoted and exit the logjam of daily life.
“[Endless work] may be necessitated by constantly raising your sights,” writes Barbara Ehrenreich in “Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America.” “If you are satisfied with your current condition, you need to ‘sharpen the saw,’ in self-help writer Stephen Covey’s words, and admit you could be doing better.”
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In the election of ’64, Lyndon Johnson considered Barry Goldwater an easy mark. Goldwater, a John Bircher, jabbered about nuclear war so much the Johnson campaign made a famous commercial, the Daisy ad, that helped destroy the man.
Goldwater appeared so extreme and virulently anti-Communist he conveyed the message he was ready to take down the entire world, to turn it into a cinder with America’s nuclear arsenal, to stop it.
The power to hit the nail on the head is now in President Obama’s corner. Mitt Romney has a frightening message, too, just like Barry Goldwater. He is ready to turn the rest of the country into an economic cinder, with the spoil reserved for the fittest at the very top. And the President is right to show the truth of it, having a potential “Daisy ad” in this:
The alert may notice the producer’s of the video have added varying digital reverberations to Romney’s “sing.” Some making it sound as if from a distant claustrophobic lo-fi radio broadcast, some from a dim tunnel, like an empty bomb-shelter. It’s an artful and devastating touch. My hat is off.
Showing Mitt Romney as he is can scare people. He is as inhuman to the daily experience as he appears to be. He’s a person who has created the image that if you took a phone call from him you’d get an invoice, as a file attachment from Bain, to the amount of $10,000 for 60 seconds of consult. The ad, without much effort, is loathsome.
And it’s not like it’s the first. Mitt Romney is a stationary target, one furnishing an always bigger and more inviting bull’s-eye. Outside his class Mitt Romney is appalling. But this commercial has the President’s image and voice in it up front, setting it apart from all the rest. He’s telling us, “Take a look at this guy, can you believe it?”
Mitt Romney is the symbol of the high-button asshole, the antithesis to whatever delusions anyone may cling to about the America dream. The more he appears on screen, the more people must turn away knowing the only reason he’s succeeded in life is because he’s had a mountain of cash to start and that he was in a place where “I like being able to fire people” (1 billion hits on Google) was the Golden Rule.
Mitt Romney is a gift to the art of lampoon.
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Richard Clarke is the top of the heap. Peter Bergen, now here, comes to mind. Here’s a school pimping its list of justifiably ignored academics. And this Google generated list holds the potential for hours of merriment.
Amusingly, here.
You can trust me because I am a terrorism expert, but not a celebrity. We know this because, most recently, it said so right here and here. And also.
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