Hans Howe

“…The terrible truth is that Israel was infected from the moment of its birth with the European evils whose virulent, 20th-century apotheoses necessitated, in the minds of so many, the creation of Israel in the first place, and we Jews, through Israel, have become a sick reflection of our own historic persecutors. I am not even speaking of the still unique evil of Nazism, although in the more extreme eructations of Israeli hard-liners, you do hear the debased language of racial purity and superiority. I am thinking of the old, durable, seemingly ineradicable traditions of pogrom, persecution, expropriation, and colonization. The Israelis possess the imperial arsenal of a modern Western nation-state, which camouflages the essentially primitive, pre-modern nature of their policy toward the Palestinians. The state of Israel is behaving like a village mob. Palestinian tunnels are the poisoned well. The Israelis are killing and lighting fires. We will drive them out! Where will they go? How will they escape? They will have to figure it out, the devils! But you forced them into the ghetto in the first place. Yes, and they should be happy for what they have! The US stands by like a distant monarch, its silence and occasional provision of more kindling a kind of majestic assent.

“It would be comforting to say simply: I wash my hands of all of you. But we have accepted a state made of our religion, and that state is behaving abominably, unforgivably. It is a shame that we will not erase in a hundred years.

http://jacobbacharach.com/2014/07/30/a-prophet-of-hashem-whose-name-was-oded/

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How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb?

Such number as may be deemed to perform the stated task in a timely and efficient manner within the strictures of the following agreement:

Whereas the party of the first part, also known as Lawyer, and the party of the second part, also known as Light Bulb, do hereby and forthwith agree to a transaction wherein the party of the second part (Light Bulb) shall be removed from the current position as a result of failure to perform previously agreed-upon duties, i.e., the illumination of the area ranging from the front (north) door, through the entryway, terminating at an area just inside the primary living area, demarcated by the beginning of the carpet, any spillover illumination being at the option of the party of the second part (Light Bulb) and not required by the aforementioned agreement between the parties.

The aforementioned removal transaction shall include, but not be limited to, the following steps:

1.) The party of the first part (Lawyer) shall, with or without elevation, at his option, by means of a chair, stepstool, ladder, or any other means of elevation, grasp the party of the second part (Light Bulb) and rotate the party of the second part (Light Bulb) in a counterclockwise direction, said direction being non- negotiable. Said grasping and rotation of the party of the second part (Light Bulb) shall be undertaken by the party of the first part (Lawyer) with every reasonable caution by the party of the first part (Lawyer) to maintain the structural integrity of the party of the second part (Light Bulb), notwithstanding the aforementioned failure of the party of the second part (Light Bulb) to perform the aforementioned customary and agreed-upon duties. The foregoing notwithstanding, however, both parties stipulate that structural failure of the party of the second part (Light Bulb) may be incidental to the aforementioned failure to perform, and in such case the party of the first part (Lawyer) shall be held blameless for such structural failure insofar as this agreement is concerned so long as the non-negotiable directional codicil (counterclockwise) is observed by the party of the first part (Lawyer) throughout.

2.) Upon reaching a point where the party of the second part (Light Bulb) becomes separated from the party of the third part (Receptacle), the party of the first part (Lawyer) shall have the option of disposing of the party of the second part (Light Bulb) in a manner consistent with all applicable state, local, and federal statutes.

3.) Once separation and disposal have been achieved, the party of the first part (Lawyer) shall have the option of beginning installation of the party of the fourth part (New Light Bulb). This installation shall occur in a manner consistent with the reverse of the procedures described in Step 1 of this document, being careful to note that the rotation should occur in a clockwise direction, said direction also being non-negotiable.

NOTE: The above-described steps may be performed, at the option of the party of the first part (Lawyer), by said party of the first part (Lawyer), by his heirs and assigns, or by any and all persons authorized by him to do so, the objective being to produce a level of illumination in the immediate vicinity of the aforementioned front (north) door consistent with maximization of commerce and revenue for the party of the fifth part, also known as The Firm.

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New browser extension warns you when articles are paid for by advertisers
<<http://www.pcworld.com/article/2597421/new-browser-extension-warns-you-when-articles-are-paid-for-by-advertisers.html>>
NOTE: The article has at its conclusion a linkie to a video. Here you go:
<<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc>>
Now the article:
“New browser extension warns you when articles are paid for by advertisers

Ian Paul @ianpaul Aug 21, 2014 9:15 AMe-mailprint
You can get browser extensions to stop advertisers from tracking you, but until now there hasn’t been one that can prevent you from getting suckered by hucksters on news sites.

Thanks to the Internet, journalism’s core funding models of subscriptions and advertising are not what they used to be. Trying to find new ways to make money, publications–including PCWorld and its sister sites–are trying out other sources of revenue such as sponsored posts, also known as “native advertising.”

These are articles written and published along with regular news articles, but are either written by or for an advertiser. Sponsored posts are only a few years old and publications are still grappling with how to mark what is sponsored content and what is not.

To help online news junkies see the difference between sponsored posts and regular articles, Google Product Engineer Ian Webster created a sponsored post-sniffing browser extension in his spare time.

The result is AdDetector, a simple extension available in the Chrome Web Store or Mozilla’s add-ons gallery for Firefox. Once it’s installed, AdDetector scans web pages you visit to ferret out ads. When it does find a sponsored article, the extensions displays a large red banner at the top of the page. If the extension can determine the sponsor’s name it will display that, too.

Webster recently told The Wall Street Journal that comedian John Oliver helped inspire the extension. The British satirist recently took native advertising to task during one of his epic rants on the HBO show Last Week Tonight.

addetectorbuzzfeed
An article sponsored by Cheerios on BuzzFeed.

Webster’s aim isn’t necessarily to keep you away from that fun BuzzFeed article about 14 modern keepsakes to give to your future children. Instead, he’s trying to inject more transparency about which articles are sponsored and which are not.

AdDetector’s red banner can be very useful since some websites try to play down an article’s sponsorship by putting a notice off to the side of main copy, blending the sponsorship notice with the general design of article, or marking it as sponsored at a relatively small font size. That may hide sponsorship notices from human eyes, but not a computer program scanning for hints of native ads.

Well, most of the time.

Venturing out onto the web with AdDetector installed, the extension easily identified sponsored content from BuzzFeed, The Washington Post, and others. Interestingly, however, it failed to alert me when I visited a sponsored post here on PCWorld as well as a video on The Atlantic’s site.

Although AdDetector does have to run on most pages you visit to do its job, Webster says your browsing data is never used, stored, or transmitted. The code for the extension is also up on GitHub for anyone that wants to take a look.

Speaking of having a look, here’s the scathing John Oliver rant that spurred the creation of AdDetector.””<<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc>>

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The utter collapse of all health care in west Africa means the horrors of Ebola are only the beginning….

“But Ebola is a warning sign of a much bigger crisis: the fragility of African health and sanitation systems after many years of poverty, illiteracy, neglect and, in some countries, catastrophic civil war. Even in countries that have recently seen impressive economic growth and foreign investment, the money is failing to reach the hospitals and health-care workers who can prevent disease outbreaks.

“Government authority has been almost non-existent in many West African regions, including, crucially, the border crossings in the Ebola hot zone where a million people live. Hospitals and clinics, meanwhile, are severely under-staffed, suffer from shortages of equipment (even such basics as disposable rubber gloves) and medicine, and often lack even electricity and running water.

“Everywhere the signs of state collapse have been exposed. Bodies of Ebola victims, often lie uncollected in homes and streets for days at a time. Some hospitals have been completely abandoned after staff and patients fled. Quarantine efforts sometimes fail because people simply walk around the checkpoints.

“The spread of Ebola out from the villages of southern Guinea, the source of the current outbreak, was fueled by a similar state failure. Guineas first cases were confirmed in March, and by April the virus was taking hold. But the health system was so inadequate, and ignorance so widespread, that many people with the Ebola virus decided to cross over the poorly controlled border to Sierra Leone, where they sought treatment from a herbalist who claimed to have the power to cure Ebola.

“Instead of curing others, she soon became infected with the Ebola virus and died. Mourners at her funeral then spread the disease across the region, according to published reports. The herbalists death led to hundreds of new cases of the disease in Sierra Leone.”

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Never ever ship ANYTHING UPS – they’re rip-offs… They want $14 UPS Ground to send a 1# book from Red Wing to Quincy, MA vs $3.17 via U.S. Post Office… mofos

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Researchers have for the first time extensively mapped Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets with the help of the ESA satellite CryoSat-2 and have thus been able to prove that the ice crusts of both regions momentarily decline at an unprecedented rate. In total the ice sheets are losing around 500 cubic kilometers of ice per year.

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“Via Laila’s Blog, a collection of Graphic Photos: Liberian Soldiers Open Fire on Residents of Ebola Slum. Many are by John Moore, who has become the major photographic chronicler of the outbreak.
While a couple of photos shows the blood of a kid who ran afoul of some barbed wire, the most disturbing aspect of the images is the sheer squalor on which Ebola has imposed itself.

“If they tell me anything, it’s that we in the rich countries can no longer afford poverty anywhere in the world. It’s not just the tough luck of the poor; it’s a clear and present danger to everyone.” crof at h5n1

http://www.lailasblog.com/2014/08/graphic-photos-liberian-soldiers-open.html#more

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Date: August 19, 2014 Source: American Society of Anesthesiologists
Summary:
People taking prescription opioids to treat moderate to severe pain may be able to breathe a little easier, literally. A study has found that a new therapeutic drug, GAL-021, may reverse or prevent respiratory depression, or inadequate breathing, in patients taking opioid medication without compromising pain relief or increasing sedation.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140819112958.htm

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