Cardon Webb makes the world a little more beautiful, at the same time rendering quiet service to people in need of publicity. He finds ads stapled to phone poles or other similar places, takes them home, and replaces them with eye-catching new versions. Visit his project at Cardon Copy.
Original ad on location
Closeup
Finished Product
Replaced!
I love guerilla art.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
For four years before the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake, I-15 was torn up and widened from Riverton to the north end of Salt Lake. It was sheer misery, although I have to say the final result was very nice. In 2009, it was Utah County’s turn, as the CORE project widened the freeway from American Fork to Payson.
This is a little tribute to our suffering, with music provided by Salzburger Echo, who wrote the I-15 Polka in honor of the previous project.
Charles Addams – shown in The New Yorker in 1959
Behind your Google Search
I was led to this site via a post at Glaserei, Frankfurter Zeitung’s intriguing blog about cats, the universe and everything.
Much like the old game of “telephone,” played with Bing translator (which isn’t as good as Google Translate, for what it’s worth) – but the results can be amusing.
If you need something translated, hire a professional instead of your brother-in-law. Otherwise your next ad might say that your new camera exposes itself automatically.
Frog Applause here.
Translation party here
The Old Wolf has spoken.
So says Newark mayor Cory Booker.
Well, I agree. Our nation was built on equal opportunity (at least on paper), and that means equal responsibility. There’s a lot being tossed around these days about “forced redistribution of wealth,” and that’s an idea I can’t get behind. At the same time, I can’t deal with the concept of poor folk shouldering the lion’s share of our nation’s tax burden while massive corporations and the super-rich use tax shelters and loopholes to avoid paying effective tax rates at parity with the poor and (suffering!) middle-class.
Even a 3% gap in tax burden is unacceptable, given the top-heavy nature of the wealth pyramid. I suspect that the graph only depicts the tip of the iceberg as well, and doesn’t address corporations at all.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints instituted the Law of Tithing in 1838 by revelation. However, even as late as 17 May 1899, members of that faith were observing the commandment sporadically or partially, and the Church was deeply in debt after resolving its difficulties with the government. On the latter date, President Lorenzo Snow announced to the Church at a conference in St. George, “The word of the Lord is: The time has now come for every Latter-day Saint … to do the will of the Lord and to pay his tithing in full. That is the word of the Lord to you, and it will be the word of the Lord to every settlement throughout the land of Zion”. From that day to this, worthy Mormons pay 10% of their increase to support the work of the Church. What their “increase” is (gross income, net income, 100 eggs, whatever) is left up to the conscience of the individual member, but the point is: If you make a dollar, you pay 10¢. If you make seven jillionteen dollars, you divide that by ten, and that’s your tithing. There are no deductions, no loopholes, nothing. Ten percent.
We need a similar system when it comes to income taxes. There are many who will claim that a flat tax is regressive and unduly burdens those of lesser means, but I don’t buy it. Each of us has the obligation to pay our fair share, and a flat tax system with equal sharing of the burden would result in far less resentment than a system where the poor are squeezed for every last dime and those who can afford high-priced lawyers, corporations included, pay little, or in some cases nothing.
‘
Compiled by CTJ (Citizens for Tax Justice); found here.
This level of disparity is mind-boggling, and even moreso that it continues to be permitted. Demanding that corporations and the wealthy pay a fair share of taxes is not “forced redistribution” of wealth – it’s just plain old human decency and common sense.
As I’ve said elsewhere, “trickle down” economics is insulting even at the semantic level. If our nation is going to regain any sense of the greatness it once had, and the equality of opportunity implied in “lifting a lamp beside the golden door,” the trickle must of necessity become a torrent.
Sadly, the situation is not new – as the early 20th-century cartoon above shows, the wealthy have in effect been raping the vast majority of our population for centuries, and we deserve better.
Forced redistribution of wealth basically means, ‘I don’t have to do anything, I don’t have to be anything, I’m a human being. Now gimme half of what you’ve got.” That’s socialism at its worst, and it’s not what I’m advocating in the slightest. People prosper for all sorts of reasons. Some were born into wealth, others started businesses on a shoestring and built empires. But it’s important to remember that even the CEO’s who built their businesses didn’t do it alone: US Humorist Don Marquis (Archy and Mehitabel) once said,”When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: ‘Whose?'”
Not all of us are cut out to build global business networks worth billions. Those who do, by dint of honest work and business savvy, should be entitled to enjoy the fruits of their labors. But the person who makes money honestly and holds on to it by dint of legal jiggery-pokery is no better than the thief who dips into the till – he or she is ripping off the entire nation, and it’s just plain not right.
I’m not an economist, but it would seem to me that a flat tax, with deductions for interest paid on a primary residence and charitable contributions, would be the fairest way to go. If you make a little, you pay a little. If you make a lot, you pay a lot. Eliminating all the loopholes and special circumstances would go a long way to establishing tax equity in our nation, and might just even be part of a solution for returning to the concept of a balanced budget, which at the moment looks as substantial as an opium dream. Such a plan might put a bunch of lawyers out of work, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Light shined into dark corners will make the cockroaches scurry for cover. Today we’re talking about Ketonic Labs Green Coffee Bean extract.
Executive Summary: This product is a fraud, this product is a scam, and this product is snake oil.
Here’s the spam email I got this morning:
The spam issue
In the first place, I shouldn’t be getting this junk because I’ve never done business with Ketonic Labs, Micronet Tech or Performemmbers.net. That’s the beauty of the toothless CAN-SPAM act passed by our amazing congressmen, it means that anyone “can spam” you by simply offering an unsubscribe link: thank you very little, you gutless cabrones. Comcast does a pretty good job keeping most spam out of my inbox, but image-based ads like this continue to slip through their filters.
The scam issue
Supplements are almost totally unregulated. You can claim that a product will give you wings and allow you to mate with sphinges (that’s plural for sphinx), as long as you tack on this little disclaimer: “These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.” The FDA will, in general, only come after companies whose ad copy actually does claim such things, despite the disclaimer, and they’ll only take the time to prosecute the biggest players because their resources are limited. But from where I sit, the email itself violates all the rules, and the web page is even worse.
Notice the almost-invisble “ADVERTORIAL” at the top of the page. I hate that word, for what it’s worth.
In short, these people, like hundreds of thousands of others, are dazzling you with weasel words and pseudo-scientific horsehockey, and it’s almost a guarantee that enough people in our country will believe it that they can recoup their costs and walk away with a tidy profit before moving on to another fraud. Make no mistake – they know they are shoveling out the barn- just have a look at this great disclaimer at the bottom of the page:
DISCLAIMER
*THIS PAGE RECEIVES COMPENSATION FOR CLICKS ON OR PURCHASE OF PRODUCTS FEATURED ON THIS SITE.
*The story depicted on this site and the person depicted in the story are not real. rather this story is based on the results that some people who have used these products have achieved. The results portrayed in the story and in the comments are illustrative and may not be the results that you achieve with these products. The depictions on this page are fictitious and indicitive [sic] of potential results. Actual results may vary.
Of course, none of this is new. People have been hawking snake oil since the earliest days:
The less educated a population, the more likely you are to be able to sell them anything. You’d think as the availability of information increases, people would become more enlightened, but the general trend in my own experience is downward; mass media caters to the lowest common denominator and good information on the internet is covered with a layer of bovine ejecta worthy of the Augean stables. The older I get, the more cynical I become about sales and marketing in general, and that’s a problem because I have products of my own to sell, and it’s a constant battle to figure out how to carve out market sector without being a douchebag.
With thanks to B. Kliban
Here’s the product label:
So what is Ketonic selling you for $50.00 a bottle? Caffeine, which has long been combined in numerous diet pills and combined with other quack ingredients including PPA, ginseng, green tea extract and countless others. Double-blind, placebo-based trials, however, seem to indicate that caffeine is not effective as a weight-loss aid. But please, don’t confuse us with the facts – where there’s money to be made, the marketers will sell you all they can.
Conclusion
There are some solid principles for losing weight, but as I have said elsewhere, there is no magic bullet. Do yourself a favor and stay away from the snake oil.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Update: It appears that I have found the solution to the problem below. It’s more detailed than I thought, but fairly simple.
The problem is not Bing itself, but a piece of camel ejecta called “conduit.”
Going to about:config and typing in “conduit” turned up a veritable plethora of infected entries (here I have already cleared the first three).
Right-clicking on each entry allows you to select a pick called “reset.” Once I had done this, and closed out Firefox, my URL bar search remained pointed to Google. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the problem doesn’t return. For what it’s worth, it appears that the culprit that brought it along was uTorrent.
*yarg*
I’ve been over this before. On May 3rd of this year, I posted the following over at my Livejournal:
I have been told that it’s not becoming of a Christian soul to consign others to Hell, even in jest, regardless of the magnitude of their transgressions. Ultimate judgment does not rest in our hands, and in the end, we all fall short.
Heck, however, ruled over by Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light, is another matter.
©1989 United Features Syndicate
Every now and then, some piece of hqiz software that I install brings an unpleasant and unexpected “bonus” along with it: the infestation of my browsers with “Bing.”
My home page gets changed, my search engines get shuffled, my URL search bar default is hijacked, and I’m gifted with an unasked-for toolbar.
And mind you, I’m very careful when installing things to uncheck all the little extras that many packages hope you’ll opt-in for.
Surely people who write such installation packages deserve to spend Eternity in Heck.
If you’re a Firefox user and this has happened to you, here’s how to exorcise the demons.
1) Close Firefox, and via Control Panel, navigate to “Uninstall or Change a Program”. I’m using Win7 Professional, but all recent Windows operating systems have some variation of this. Look for and nuke anything that says “Bing” in it. This should get rid of the Bing toolbar.
2) Open Firefox, go to Tools/Add-ons. Look at both “Extensions” and “Plug-ins” and clobber anything that says “Bing” in it.
3) Next to your URL bar you’ll see something that looks like this:
By clicking on the little triangle, you’ll get a drop-down menu. Choose the option that says “Manage Search Engines.”
If Bing is there, make another option your default search engine, move it to the top, and delete Bing. Delete it hard, and sing “My Way” while you do it.
4) This is the tricky one, because it’s buried deep. If you type key words in your URL bar, you’ll be redirected to some Bing search helper.
This will return the default URL search results to Google. If you want another search engine here, you’ll have to hunt around for the appropriate string – Google is all I ever use.
That should do it. If you execrate Bing as much as I do, perhaps you will find this useful if you have ever been “Bung.”
You’re welcome.
But you know what’s driving me nuts? I have followed my own advice, and what I find is that replacing Keyword:URL only works for the current session. As soon as I close and re-open Firefox (currently v. 15.0), the value pops back to “http://search.conduit.com/ResultsExt.aspx?ctid=CT3072253&SearchSource=2&q=”
Now I really want to slap someone. That’s just downright dirty. I’ve searched my registry (Win7 Pro, 64-bit) and “search.conduit.com” doesn’t exist anywhere as a key. I’m totally at a loss to what to do next.
At least I was, until I finally found what I desperately hope to be the proper solution.
I’ve long had in my library a September 1958 National Geographic entitled “You and the Obedient Atom.” It’s an intriguing look at the scientific applications of nuclear radiation, and one of these has always intrigued me.
Ektachromes by Gervase A. Arndt ©1958 N.G.S.
“Bombarded Foods Stay Germ-free as Others Rot
Using gamma rays to destroy micro-organisms that cause decay, the Army Quartermaster Corps preserves foods for weeks and months at room temperatures. When exposures are light, changes in taste are scarcely noticeable; gamma radiation does not linger.
Foods irradiated in Argonne’s pool (illustration not shown – Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago) and elsewhere were first fed to rats, without harmful effect. Later, military volunteers tried samples. Congressmen have eaten entire gamma-sterilized dinners.
Both samples of frankfurters were kept three months in air¬tight plastic wrappers. Irradiated meat on right looks as fresh as ever. A potato sprouts six months after harvesting; in its opposite, sprouting is delayed. Treated oranges stay fresh and juicy. Moldy bread contrasts with a two-month-old treated loaf. The Food and Drug Administration has not yet certified gamma-treated foods for the market.”
National Geographic, September, 1958
Wow. What a way to reduce spoilage. Yet despite the massive consumer push-back against GMO’s or “frankenfoods,” we hear almost nothing about irradiation today. Doing a bit of research, I came across
Apparently foods treated by radiation will display the “radura”
And yet despite the initial approval by the FDA of irradiated foods for certain applications and continuing research showing its safety, I have never once in my life seen the radura on any food label, anywhere.
“Irradiation has not been widely adopted due to an asserted negative public perception, the concerns expressed by some consumer groups and the reluctance of many food producers.[47]
Consumer organizations, environmentalist groups, and opponents to food irradiation refer to some studies suggesting that a large part of the public questions the safety of irradiated foods, and will not buy foods that have been irradiated.[48]
On the other hand, other studies indicate the number of consumers concerned about the safety of irradiated food has decreased in the last 10 years and continues to be less than the number of those concerned about pesticide residues, microbiological contamination, and other food related concerns. Such numbers are comparable to those of people with no concern about food additives and preservatives. Consumers, given a choice and access to irradiated products, appear ready to buy it in considerably large numbers”
Wikipedia, Food Irradiation
Irradiation works by destroying DNA, preventing microorganisms from reproducing or creating toxic byproducts. Obviously people are going to have concerns about consuming modified (destroyed) DNA in the same way as they will about consuming transgenic foods, but that doesn’t mean the issues are the same. Still, given what we know about how prions work and the devastating effects of BSE, people are right to be concerned enough to do their homework.
Given the relative paucity of irradiated foods on the market, it’s probably safe to say you are not likely to encounter any, but I’m going to do a bit more digging. If it is safe, it could go a long way to reducing food waste, which at this point reaches a level of about 40% of all consumables in the US alone.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Playing in the World Game 