April 2015 archive

The Clothes You Wear

Most everyone wants to look fashionable or at least well dressed and everyone loves a bargain. But after you watch this segment on the fashion industry, you just might want to rethink your buying habits when it comes to clothing, or perhaps, just go naked.

John Oliver obliterates fashion industry: Your skinny jeans are made by child laborers!

By Colin Gorenstein, Salon

Cheap chic CEOs are making millions while children in overseas sweatshops are being subjected to horrid conditions

The average American buys 64 items of clothing per year. That’s fantastic news for CEOs of fast fashion retailers (the chairman of H&M is the 28th richest person in the world; the co-founder of Zara is the 4th richest person of the world) and ghastly news for the thousands of children working in overseas sweatshops – often under incredibly dangerous working conditions – to produce the high volume of clothing necessary. [..]

To give these incredibly rich fashion CEOs a taste of their own medicine, Oliver decided to deliver some suspiciously cheap lunches from unknown origins to each of them – and asked them to “f**king eating it.”

“If you are thinking ‘I can’t do that, I don’t know where that came from – what if someone rubbed their balls on it?’ then I don’t know what to tell you other than ‘now do you understand the importance of supply chain management?'”

Cartnoon

On This Day In History April 28

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

April 28 is the 118th day of the year (119th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 247 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day, two events occurred involving the South Pacific. Separated by 158 years, one was a mutiny, the other a grand adventure.

Apr 28, 1789: Mutiny on the HMS Bounty Mutiny on the Bounty: The mutiny  was led by Fletcher Christian against the commanding officer, William Bligh. The sailors were attracted to the idyllic life on the Pacific island, and repelled by the alleged cruelty of their captain. Captain Bligh and 18 sailors were set a drift in the South Pacific, near the island of Tonga. Christian along with some of the mutineers and native Tahitians eventually settled on Pitcairn Island an uninhabited volcanic island about 1000 miles south of Tahiti. The mutineers who remained behind on Tahiti were eventually arrested and returned to England where three were hanged. The British never found Christian and the others. Captain Bligh and the 18 others eventually arrived in Timor.

Years later on 1808. am American whaling vessel discovered the colony of women and children led by the sole surviving mutineer, John Adams. The Bounty had been stripped and burned. Christian and the other 8 mutineers were dead. Adams was eventually granted amnesty and remained the patriarch of Pitcairn Island until his death in 1829.

1947 Thor Heyerdahl and five crew mates set out from Peru on the Kon-Tiki to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia. His crew of six fellow Norwegians set sail from Peru on a raft constructed from balsa logs and other materials that were indigenous to the region at the time of the Spanish Conquistadors. After 101 days crossing over 400 miles they crashed into a reef at Raroia  in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947. Heyerdahl’s book, “The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas”, became a best seller, the documentary won an Academy Award in 1951. The original raft is on display in the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo. Heyerdahl died April 18, 2002 in Italy.

Because I’m a liar. A Liar! A LIAR!!

President Obama Demands Critics Tell Him What’s Wrong With TPP; Of Course We Can’t Do That Because He Won’t Show Us The Agreement

by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt

Mon, Apr 27th 2015 7:59am

President Obama is apparently quite annoyed by the fact that his own party is basically pushing against his “big trade deals” (that are not really about trade). Senator Elizabeth Warren has been pretty aggressive in trashing the TPP agreement, highlighting the fact that the agreement is still secret (other than the bits leaked by Wikileaks). In response, President Obama came out swinging against the critics of TPP arguing that “they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

He insists that it’s unfair to compare TPP to NAFTA because they’re different deals.



Well, Mr. President, I would love to do that, but I can’t because you and your USTR haven’t released the damn text. It takes an insane lack of self-awareness for the guy who once declared his administration “the most transparent in history” to demand people tell him what’s wrong with his trade agreement, when that agreement is kept entirely secret.

Furthermore, multiple experts concerning things like the corporate sovereignty ISDS provisions and the intellectual property chapters have gone into great detail as to why the leaked versions have problems. They’re not complaining about NAFTA. They’re actually complaining about the latest drafts — but the USTR won’t acknowledge them because they’re talking about leaked versions.

In fact, the only real complaints I’ve seen relating to NAFTA concern the fact that the government says one thing about these big agreements, but the reality is something different.



Obviously, President Obama is only talking about elected members of Congress. But that’s not what they’re complaining about. They’re complaining about the fact that the American public cannot see the text of the document or discuss the specifics of what’s in there. And that’s absolutely true.

And even the fact that members of Congress can actually see the document is tremendously misleading. Yes, members of Congress are allowed to walk over to the USTR and see a copy of the latest text. But they’re not allowed to take any notes, make any copies or bring any of their staff members. In other words, they can only read the document and keep what they remember in their heads. And they can’t have their staff members — the folks who often really understand the details — there to explain what’s really going on.

And it all comes back to the point that Senator Warren has been making for a long time: that former USTR Ron Kirk has admitted that a big reason why they keep the document secret is that when they tried being more transparent in the past, the agreement failed. As Warren says, if being transparent with the American public means the agreement will fail, then the problem is with the agreement, not the public.



Here’s a little test: can we see the current TPP documents today? No? Then it’s secret. Claiming otherwise is what’s dishonest.

ek- tell me what you really think.

Lyrics below.

The Worst Doctor in Scrubs

Once a well respected and brilliant cardiac surgeon with a worldwide reputation, Dr. Mehmet Oz has taken quite a fall since a study in  British Medical Journal that less than 50% of his television advice could be backed by actual science and his appearance before a Senate subcommittee on consumer protection where he caught a harsh scolding about his diet product ads.

Last June, John Oliver, host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” took on Dr. Oz in an epic segment that outlined what was problematic with him and the nutrition supplement industry. Then this month a group of ten prominent physicians sent a letter to Dr. Lee Goldman, Columbia’s Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and Medicine calling for Dr. Oz’s ouster from the hospital’s faculty, citing, among other reasons, his “egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”

The good doctor has been doing damage control with interviews in TIME magazine, televised news media and on his show.

Once again, at the beginning of his show, John Oliver blasted him, calling him “the worst person in scrubs who has ever been on television” and included an amusing reference to actress Katherine Heigl who played a doctor on ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.”

“No. You are scientifically wrong about that as you are about so many things. Let’s be clear: The First Amendment protects Americans against government censorship, and that’s it. It does not guarantee you to simultaneously hold a faculty position at a prestigious private university and make misleading claims on a TV show. It absolutely protects you to say whatever you like on it, just as it protects my right to say what I think about you on mine, which is this: You are the worst person in scrubs who has ever been on television-and I’m including Katherine Heigl in that. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to be worse than Katherine Heigl? You are also the admittedly handsome ringmaster of a middling mid-afternoon snake-oil dispensary and it says something that even when you do a show with seven fake models of human feces, the biggest piece of shit on the stage has his name in the title.”

(h/t The Daily Beast)

Cartnoon

Dazzle

At first glance, dazzle seems an unlikely form of camouflage, drawing attention to the ship rather than hiding it, but this technique was developed after Allied navies were unable to develop effective means to hide ships in all weather conditions.

The British zoologist John Graham Kerr, who first applied dazzle camouflage to British warships in WWI, outlined the principle in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1914 explaining that disruptive camouflage sought to confuse, not to conceal, “It is essential to break up the regularity of outline and this can be easily effected by strongly contrasting shades … a giraffe or zebra or jaguar looks extraordinarily conspicuous in a museum but in nature, especially when moving, is wonderfully difficult to pick up.”

The anti-surveillance state: Clothes and gadgets block face recognition technology and make you digitally invisible

Janet Burns, AlterNet

26 Apr 2015 at 18:52 ET

CV Dazzle designs for hair and makeup obscure the eyes, bridge of the nose and shape of the head, as well as creating skin tone contrasts and asymmetries. Facial-recognition algorithms function by identifying the layout of facial features and supplying missing info based on assumed facial symmetry. The project demonstrates that a styled “anti-face” can both conceal a person’s identity from facial recognition software (be it the FBI’s or Facebook’s) and cause the software to doubt the presence of a human face, period.

Harvey’s work is focused on accessibility in addition to privacy. “Most of the projects I’ve worked on are analog solutions to digital challenges,” he said. His hair and makeup style tips – a veritable how-to guide for how to create “privacy reclaiming” looks at home – are “deliberately low-cost.” His current project – software to “automatically generate camouflage…that can be applied to faces” – will allow a user to “create [their] own look and guide the design towards [their] personal style preferences.”

Other low-tech protections against widespread surveillance have been gaining ground, too. Though initially designed as a tongue-in-cheek solution to prying eyes and cameras, Becky Stern’s Laptop Compubody Sock offers a portable, peek-free zone to laptop users, while the CHBL Jammer Coat and sold-out Phonekerchief use metal-infused fabrics to make personal gadgets unreachable, blocking texts, calls and radio waves. For people willing to sport a bit more hardware in the name of privacy, the Sentient City Survival Kit offers underwear that notifies wearers about real-life phishing and tracking attempts, and its LED umbrella lets users “flirt with object tracking algorithms used in advanced surveillance systems” and even “train these systems to recognize nonhuman shapes.”



Earlier this year, antivirus software leaders AVG revealed a pair of invisibility glasses developed by its Innovation Labs division. The casual looking specs use embedded infrared lights “to create noise around the nose and eyes” and retro-reflective frame coating to interfere with camera flashes, “allowing [the wearer] to avoid facial recognition.” In early 2013, Japan’s National Institute of Informatics revealed a bulky pair of goggles it had developed for the same purpose.

A spokesperson for Innovation Labs claims its glasses represent “an important step in the prevention against mass surveillance…whether through the cell phone camera of a passerby, a CCTV camera in a bar, or a drone flying over your head in the street.” Innovation Labs says that, with a person’s picture, facial recognition software “coupled with data from social networking sites can provide instant access to the private information of complete strangers. This can pose a serious threat to our privacy.” Though AVG’s glasses are not scheduled for commercial release, Innovation Labs said that individuals can take a number of steps to prevent their images from being “harvested”:

“First and foremost, make sure you’re not allowing private corporations to create biometrics profiles about you. When using social networks like Facebook, be aware that they are using facial recognition to give you tag suggestions. Facebook’s DeepFace was already tested and trained on the largest facial dataset to-date (an identity labeled dataset of more than 4 million facial images belonging to thousands of identities).”

Dazzle

At first glance, dazzle seems an unlikely form of camouflage, drawing attention to the ship rather than hiding it, but this technique was developed after Allied navies were unable to develop effective means to hide ships in all weather conditions.

The British zoologist John Graham Kerr, who first applied dazzle camouflage to British warships in WWI, outlined the principle in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1914 explaining that disruptive camouflage sought to confuse, not to conceal, “It is essential to break up the regularity of outline and this can be easily effected by strongly contrasting shades … a giraffe or zebra or jaguar looks extraordinarily conspicuous in a museum but in nature, especially when moving, is wonderfully difficult to pick up.”

The anti-surveillance state: Clothes and gadgets block face recognition technology and make you digitally invisible

Janet Burns, AlterNet

26 Apr 2015 at 18:52 ET

CV Dazzle designs for hair and makeup obscure the eyes, bridge of the nose and shape of the head, as well as creating skin tone contrasts and asymmetries. Facial-recognition algorithms function by identifying the layout of facial features and supplying missing info based on assumed facial symmetry. The project demonstrates that a styled “anti-face” can both conceal a person’s identity from facial recognition software (be it the FBI’s or Facebook’s) and cause the software to doubt the presence of a human face, period.

Harvey’s work is focused on accessibility in addition to privacy. “Most of the projects I’ve worked on are analog solutions to digital challenges,” he said. His hair and makeup style tips – a veritable how-to guide for how to create “privacy reclaiming” looks at home – are “deliberately low-cost.” His current project – software to “automatically generate camouflage…that can be applied to faces” – will allow a user to “create [their] own look and guide the design towards [their] personal style preferences.”

Other low-tech protections against widespread surveillance have been gaining ground, too. Though initially designed as a tongue-in-cheek solution to prying eyes and cameras, Becky Stern’s Laptop Compubody Sock offers a portable, peek-free zone to laptop users, while the CHBL Jammer Coat and sold-out Phonekerchief use metal-infused fabrics to make personal gadgets unreachable, blocking texts, calls and radio waves. For people willing to sport a bit more hardware in the name of privacy, the Sentient City Survival Kit offers underwear that notifies wearers about real-life phishing and tracking attempts, and its LED umbrella lets users “flirt with object tracking algorithms used in advanced surveillance systems” and even “train these systems to recognize nonhuman shapes.”



Earlier this year, antivirus software leaders AVG revealed a pair of invisibility glasses developed by its Innovation Labs division. The casual looking specs use embedded infrared lights “to create noise around the nose and eyes” and retro-reflective frame coating to interfere with camera flashes, “allowing [the wearer] to avoid facial recognition.” In early 2013, Japan’s National Institute of Informatics revealed a bulky pair of goggles it had developed for the same purpose.

A spokesperson for Innovation Labs claims its glasses represent “an important step in the prevention against mass surveillance…whether through the cell phone camera of a passerby, a CCTV camera in a bar, or a drone flying over your head in the street.” Innovation Labs says that, with a person’s picture, facial recognition software “coupled with data from social networking sites can provide instant access to the private information of complete strangers. This can pose a serious threat to our privacy.” Though AVG’s glasses are not scheduled for commercial release, Innovation Labs said that individuals can take a number of steps to prevent their images from being “harvested”:

“First and foremost, make sure you’re not allowing private corporations to create biometrics profiles about you. When using social networks like Facebook, be aware that they are using facial recognition to give you tag suggestions. Facebook’s DeepFace was already tested and trained on the largest facial dataset to-date (an identity labeled dataset of more than 4 million facial images belonging to thousands of identities).”

TBC: Morning Musing 4.27.15

I have 3 articles for you this morning!

First up, this needs to happen:

The Sun Must Go Down on the Patriot Act

Predictably, the Patriot Act has been at the root of many of the most serious abuses of government spying powers. It was the Patriot Act the FBI relied on to vastly expand its use of “national security letters,” which the FBI now issues thousands of times every year to obtain information about innocent Americans who have no connection to terrorism. It was the Patriot Act the government relied on to conduct clandestine searches in investigations having nothing to do with terrorism. It was the Patriot Act the government invoked to permit the FBI to disregard the Fourth Amendment’s usual requirements – criminal probable cause, a particularized warrant – in ordinary law enforcement investigations. And it’s the Patriot Act the government is now using to justify the NSA’s call-records program.

Jump!

On This Day In History April 27

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

April 27 is the 117th day of the year (118th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 248 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1805, Naval Agent to the Barbary States, William Eaton, the former consul to Tunis, led an small expeditionary force of Marines, commanded by First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, and Berber mercenaries from Alexandria, across 500 miles to the port of Derna in Tripoli. Supported by US Naval gunfire, the port was captured by the end of the day, overthrowing Yusuf Karamanli, the ruling pasha of Tripoli, who had seized power from his brother, Hamet Karamanli, a pasha who was sympathetic to the United States.

Lt. O’Bannon raised the US flag over the port, the first time the US flag had flown over a foreign battlefield. He had performed so valiantly that newly restored Pasha Hamet Karamanli presented him with an elaborately designed sword that now serves as the pattern for the swords carried by Marine officers. The words “To the shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Corps official song commemorate the battle.

Sources:

Wikipedia

About.com

 

The Jon Stewart Mysteries Presents: The Case of the Iranian Agent!

Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette

The Jon Stewart Mysteries Presents: The Case of the Iranian Agent!

Six In The Morning

On Sunday

Nepal earthquake: Rescue effort intensifies

   

BBC

Rescue efforts in Nepal are intensifying after nearly 2,000 people were killed on Saturday in the worst earthquake there in more than 80 years.

Many countries and charities have offered aid to deal with the disaster.

Seventeen people have been killed on Mount Everest by avalanches – the mountain’s worst-ever disaster.

Meanwhile a powerful aftershock was felt on Sunday in Nepal, India and Bangladesh, and more avalanches were reported near Everest.

The 6.7 magnitude tremor sent people running for open ground in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu.




Sunday’s Headlines:

Migrant boat crisis: the story of the Greek hero on the beach

Syria conflict: The illicit art trade that is a major source of income for today’s terror groups is nothing new

US filmmakers unveil FBI tactics to snare Muslims

A Third-Grade Rap Portraitist’s First Visit to New York, for His Tribeca Film Festival Debut

Russian ‘Night Wolves’ bikers banned from Germany

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