The origin of life and the future of computers

By John Hewitt on January 15, 2013 at 7:30 am         http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143901-the-origin-of-life-and-the-future-of-computers/3The evolution of computers, and the evolution of life, share the common constraint that in going forward beyond a certain level of complexity, advantage goes to that which can build on what is already in hand rather than redesigning from scratch. Life’s crowning achievement, the human brain, seeks to mold for itself the power and directness of the computing machine, while endowing the machine with its own economy of thought and movement. To predict the form their inevitable convergence eventually might take, we can look back now with greater understanding to the early drivers which shaped life, and reinvigorate these ideas to guide our construction.

Life is, in effect, a side reaction of an energy-harnessing reaction. It requires vast amounts of energy to go on.

Nick Lane, author of a new paper in the journal Cell, was speaking here about critical processes in the origin of life, though his words would also be an apt description of computing in general. His paper, basically, puts forth bold, new ideas for how proto-life forms originated in deep-sea hydrothermal vents by harnessing energy gradients. The strategies employed by life offer some insights into how we might build the ultimate processor of the future.
Many of us have read claims regarding the information storage capacity and processing rate of the human brain, and have wondered — how do they measure that? Well the fact is, they don’t. With our limited understanding of how living systems like the brain work, it is folly at this point to attempt any direct comparison with the operation of computing machines. Empirical guesswork is often attempted, but in the end it is little more than handwaving.

Powering the Cell: Mitochondria http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RrS2uROUjK4

Google, while clearly not a brain of any kind, certainly processes a lot of information. We might ask, how well does it actually perform? It is easy enough to verify that a typical search query [1] takes less than 0.2 seconds. Each server that touches the operation, spends perhaps a few thousandths of a second on it. Google’s engineers have estimated the total work involved with indexing and retrieval amounts to about 0.0003 kWh of energy per search. They did not indicate how they estimated this number, but if we think about it, it is a fascinating result, despite their unfortunate prefixing of the units. Suppose we take the liberty of defining this quantity, the energy per search, as a googlewatt. Such a measure would be a convenient way to characterize a computing ecosystem in much the same way that the Reynolds number [2] qualitatively characterizes flow conditions across aerodynamic systems.
One might then ask, if the size of a completely indexed web crawl is constantly expanding while the energy per elementary search operation contracts with improvements in processor efficiency, how might the googlewatt scale as the ecosystem continues to evolve? In other words, can we hope to continue to query a rapidly diverging database at 0.3Wh per search, or in dollar terms — at $0.0003 per search?
For sake of putting energy-per-search on more familiar terms, Google notes that the average adult requires 8000 kilojoules (kJ) a day from food. It then concludes that a search is equivalent to the energy a person would burn in 10 seconds. No doubt brains perform search much differently from Google, but efforts to explore energy use by brains have proved to be confounding. PET scanning [3], for example, is not a very reliable tool for localizing function to specific parts of the brain. Furthermore, its temporal resolution is pitiful. It is, however, not too bad at measuring global glucose utilization, from which energy use can be inferred. Subjects having their brains imaged by PET scanner while performing a memory retrieval task frequently appear to utilize less energy than when resting. So if we accept the bigger picture in some of these studies, we often see the counterintuitive result that the googlewatt for a brain, at least transiently and locally, can sometimes take on a negative value. This is not totally unexpected since inhibition of neuron activity balances excitability at nearly every turn. The situation is may be likened to that of a teacher silencing the background din of an unruly class and demanding attention at the start of class.
[4]To try to find a more relevant comparison to biological wetware, let’s take a quick look at IBM’s Watson [5], the supercomputer of Jeopardy! fame. When operating at 80 teraflops, it is processing some 500GB — the equivalent of a million books — per second. To achieve this kind of throughput, Watson replicates the 4TB of data in its filesystem across 16TB of RAM. While no longer the state-of-the-art, Watson is certainly no slouch.
Each of Watson’s 90 Power 750 server nodes [6] has four processor chips, making for a total of 32 cores per node. Each 567mm chip, fabricated with a 45nm process has 1.2 billion transistors. The Power 750 server was based on the earlier 575 server but was designed to be more energy efficient and run without the need for water cooling. As it is air-cooled, the 750 can not consume more than 1600W of power and is therefore limited to 3.3GHz. The 575 could handle 5400W and be run a bit higher at 4.7GHz. Just in case you might be wondering where these processor speeds come from in the first place, it may be comforting to know that they are probably not just pulled out of a hat. They appear to be part of a sequence known as the E6 preferred number series [7], which IBM must have a special fondness for, and which is of course, eminently practical.
Next page: Why Watson’s specs matter… [8]
The point of these details is that to marginally outperform a human at a memory game, Watson churns out 60 MFLOPs/watt while consuming a whopping 140 kilowatts. The human may be running a 50W system with only about 10 or so watts being used by the brain. So if life is a side effect of energy-harnessing reactions, computing in silicon looks more like a side effect of an energy-dissipating system!
In fact, the cooling system for IBM’s new 3-petaflop supercomputer, SuperMUC [9], uses waste heat from the machine to warm the Leibniz Center where it is housed. It seems our brains still have a few tricks to teach their silicon brethren. How then might we apply some of these tricks to computing?
Phillip Ball published articles last month in Nature and Scientific American where he suggests that future supercomputers might not be powered by electrical currents borne along metal wires, but instead driven electrochemically by ions in the coolant flow. The idea of supplying power along with the coolant is not entirely new — jet fuel has long been used to cool aircraft electronics. The problem with wires or circuit board traces is that routing dedicated power and ground traces to each transistor is, beyond a certain scale, a poor use of volume. Designers mitigate these problems in multi-layer boards by employing entire planes for ground, and for any of several supply voltages that might be needed. In large computers, 2D boards are stacked along with their cooling apparatus into 3D forms, but critically, the opportunity for efficient and local 3D interconnectivity is sacrificed.
If power was accessible anywhere in the volume, the efficient form of a 2D folded surface within a 3D volume might more readily be brought to bear. Elements in frequent communication but widely separated on a 2D surface can be closely opposed when folded. One may argue that high speed optical interconnects in computers reduce transmission delays and obviate the need for a more complex geometry. Typically however, the system of interconnects and opto-electronic hardware required to make them work takes up an exorbitant volume.
Life takes on a unique geometry at all scales according to need. Single-celled algae, for example, and the mitochondria that power cells, optimally pack catalytic surface into their volumes using convoluted folds that continually evolve and intercalate [10] according to need. Mitochondria divide when demand for their products increases, and they undergo fusion to perform error correction when their DNA is mutated by toxic oxygen metabolites. The cerebral cortex also uses an extensively folded and connected surface, as do the dynamic synaptic sculptures within it. Folding and re-folding might even be said to be one of the central preoccupations of life. This holds true whether one is referring to proteins, membranes, or organs. The ability of membranes in particular, to enclose and isolate equipotential volumes for use as local power sources or sinks as demand arises is life’s calling card.
It appears that life takes origin not by chance but in the most predictable, inevitable, and simple way possible. Life needs an energy gradient to drive things, but a gradient not so great that any nascent structure is destroyed before it might be stabilized. While lightning, volcanism, and even cosmic ray bombardment might forge molecular precursors to life, deep sea hydrothermal vents have emerged as the prebiotic mill through which life consistently percolates. The major ions which were segregated by primordial membranes appear to have been H+ and Na+, both logical choices in an ocean environment.
Next page: What computers can learn from organisms… [11]
Their early selection accounts for the present ubiquity of these ions as the currency for cellular charge. Iron-sulfide reactions of the type that led to early forms of metabolism still occur in the thermal vents today. Vast mineral deposits are also found near these vents, in particular rich “ manganese nodules.” (Incidentally, these minerals provided a convenient alibi for the CIA’s dramatic efforts to recover the Soviet K-129 submarine with the Howard Hughes Glomar Explorer [12] in the early 1970’s — but that is a story for another time.)

Inside a cell         http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwnw4vg9I5Q&feature=player_embedded

Nick Lane’s origin of life paper is notable for the primacy that it puts upon membrane bioenergetics as the base upon which life coalesced. The primitive membrane forms were initially devoid of the protein machinery [13] found in modern organisms. One such protein is a rotary engine known as an ATPase. Modern ATPase’s are clusters of up to 300 protein elements printed with a 5A (Angstrom) process, self-assembled, and typically run at around 9000 RPM. Initially leaky and randomly structured, early membranes harnessed energy gradients with marginal efficiency.
[14]Over time those that persisted grew increasingly more complex by incorporating these nanomachines, culminating in the exquisitely malleable geometry of the brain. Similarly our first computers made for a dreadful waste of energy. Over time their efficiency has dramatically improved and the number of atoms per transistor [15] has shrunk to near the limits where the current silicon technology can be reliably supported. New technologies incorporating circuits just a few atoms wide [16] promise dramatic miniaturization of our current state of the art.
Increasingly, heat looms as the single greatest obstacle to processor speed limits. As we have seen in the example of the Power 575, speed and investment in cooling go hand-in-hand. Years ago, the maximum rate of information processing in a given volume was derived under the assumption that irreversible computation would be limited only by the rate at which heat can be removed from that volume. Indeed our understanding of any such limits evolves with our grasp of natural phenomena. The maximum amount of information that might be stored within a spherical volume is known as the Bekenstein Bound [17]. This is a more esoteric quantity, but for those so inclined to investigate these kinds of measures, it is defined as the entropy of a black hole with an event horizon of a corresponding surface area.
In 2000, Seth Lloyd, one of the pioneers of quantum computing, envisioned the ultimate laptop [18] as a 1-kilogram mass occupying a 1-liter volume and calculated that its maximum speed would be 10^50 operations per second. Needless to say, any such device would quickly be consumed in a ball of plasma. Cells and their lipid membranes which sustain life only within a few degrees of 98.6, won’t stand a chance against whatever technology might approach the ultimate laptop — but for now at least, they still reign supreme.
Is it even possible to measure how good life is at what it does? One thing that makes life the envy of all things hardware is the ability to replicate itself. Imagine the power of a supercomputer that could replicate processors in-situ as demand arises, and then could absorb them just as fast (or faster) when they began to accumulate errors or became superfluous. Along these lines, a recent theoretical paper [19] seeks to define how efficiently an E. coli bacterium can produce a copy of itself.
The astounding result is that the excess heat generated by real bacteria is only about three times that which is optimally possible. It is difficult to imagine what an optimal assembly of a bacterium from its constituent atoms might look like as there are no doubt many near-optimal ways to go about it.
If we are to conclude anything at this point, it might be that any machine that could duplicate one of its processors using roughly the same amount of energy in the same amount of time that the processor itself uses during normal operation, would be something of unimaginable power. In the same breath, any computer which has the ability to direct its own assembly would potentially be ominous, perhaps — some might say — a bit too much like us.
Research papers: – “The Origin of Membrane Bioenergetics” [20] and  “Engineers Hunt for Ways to Cool Computing” [21]

Endnotes

1. typical search query: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-search.html
2. Reynolds number: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_number
3. PET scanning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission_tomography
4. : http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/IBMWatson-Post1.jpg
5. IBM’s Watson: http://www.extremetech.com/tag/watson
6. Power 750 server nodes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER7
7. E6 preferred number series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_number
8. Why Watson’s specs matter…: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143901-the-origin-of-life-and-the-future-of-computers/2
9. SuperMUC: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/131259-ibm-deploys-hot-water-cooled-supercomputer
10. intercalate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercalation_%28chemistry%29
11. What computers can learn from organisms…: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143901-the-origin-of-life-and-the-future-of-computers/3
12. Glomar Explorer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
13. protein machinery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y1dO4nNaKY
14. : http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/51ATPase.jpg
15. atoms per transistor: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/119025-extreme-nanotechnology-creating-a-transistor-with-a-single-atom
16. circuits just a few atoms wide: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/136614-researchers-create-single-atom-silicon-based-quantum-computer
17. Bekenstein Bound: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound
18. envisioned the ultimate laptop: http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9908043
19. recent theoretical paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.1179v1.pdf
20. “The Origin of Membrane Bioenergetics”: http://www.cell.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867412014389#MainText
21. “Engineers Hunt for Ways to Cool Computing”: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=engineers-hunt-for-ways-to-cool-computing

---

Printed from http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143901-the-origin-of-life-and-the-future-of-computers. Copyright ©2013 ExtremeTech unless otherwise noted.

Rise of the cyborgs

By John Hewitt on January 14, 2013 at 7:31 am          http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/144579-rise-of-the-cyborgs/3?printOf all the powers that we have imagined for the cyborg, which do we most covet? Their ability to see and sense detail in the environment? The ability manipulate things with the dexterity and power of a machine? Or perhaps it would be to command vast amounts of information which can be processed at tremendous speed?
If you chose none of those, you chose as any cyborg likely would have. The cyborg’s greatest power, that from which it derives the most satisfaction (to use that term loosely), must be the ability to see itself. As humans, we are a mystery unto ourselves. If we were suddenly presented with one of our own organs from beneath our skin, before the panic set in, we would be taken by the awe and mystery that a mother must feel after the delivery of her child. To know the mass inside our skull will be to know ourselves — and to control what we might become.
How are we to do this when the little that we really know of the brain today has come only after its peril? Without sufficient foresight and precaution we probably won’t. If care is taken to preserve existing structure and function while mapping and expanding the brain according to the principles which construct it, the addition of machine components which might interact at the level of the perceived mind, may give us the power we have imagined for the cyborg. The best hope we have of maintaining the integrity of our existing neural structure in the face of the onslaught of new computing machinery, is to bridge the two with additional, nonessential wetware which we can afford to radically and perhaps reversibly, modify.
How much extra room might we have in our heads for any of this? On average we have around 1700ml of available space in our skull. 1400ml of that is the brain itself, 150ml is for the blood, and 150ml for the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in which the brain floats. An additional 30ml of CSF circulates inside a network of chambers in the center of the brain known as the ventricular system. It is here that perhaps the best site for the first extensive cyborg mods exists.
[1]The ventricles are lined with a particular kind of cell that is very similar to the stem cells that generate new neurons. New cells generated here (and in parts of the olfactory system) generally migrate to predetermined locations, but artificial conduits for these newly generated neurons might direct them into close association with new hardware. [2] While there are many ways that these new neurons might communicate with hardware, those that afford for them the use of their existing transmitter systems [3] would be the least demanding.
The ventricular system is a perfect location to add recording and stimulation electrodes or optodes (the optical equivalent of electrodes.) Many areas of brain central to memory formation and retrieval, but often compromised in disease border the ventricles. To therapeutically pace or stimulate the fornix [4], the major output of memory systems within the hippocampus, from within the adjacent lateral ventricle makes a lot more sense than destructively plunging right through intact tissue. Small devices can be introduced fairly non-invasively through a natural opening called the median aperture at the base of the 4th ventricle underneath the cerebellum. There is so much anatomical variation among different people that surgeons today would scarcely consider trying to find these tiny openings, but as robot control and in-surgery imaging are increasingly brought to bear, the least invasive methods will be preferred.
CSF communication channels are fragile sites and frequently become blocked when things change in the brain, causing it to swell dangerously. Devising smart valves and pumps to protect and control these channels may be a wise preventive measure for any would-be cyborg. Machines navigating throughout this metabolite-rich CSF might run on glucose [5] or other energy resources available to the brain such as lactic acid. Once these ports are controlled, the magic of modern MRI technology can be brought to bear to manipulate ventricular devices with the powerful magnetic fields of an MRI machine. Other RF techniques using low frequency induction that penetrates the body well [6], and can be efficiently transacted with just a small antenna at sufficient energy levels, can also be used for this kind of communication and control.
[7]Right down the center of the brain there is a deep fissure that separates the cerebral hemispheres down to level of the corpus callosum, the thick band fibers that connects them. Placing record and stim hardware along the length of the callosum from above, and along the underside from within the intraventricular location, would permit direct access to these 300 million communicating fibers which are central to integrating the higher functions of the brain.
For the slightly more daring, reversibly inactivating these fibers would be possible using peltzier junctions or their equivalent to temporarily cool them below the threshold at which they can support transmission. This would enable a safe-mode boot of one of the most radical and informative brain surgeries known — the split-brain procedure. When this procedure is performed to alleviate intractable epilepsy, the full independence of the bi-lobed brain is witnessed, usually to startling effect. When the split-brain condition occurs naturally at birth, the greater independence of the hemispheres often affords unique abilities, a case in point being Kim Peek, aka the Rain Man, who unfortunately passed three years ago.
[8]After the ventricles have been supplied with hardware, the next likely step would be to get up nice and close to individual neurons through the brain’s backdoor — its vasculature. Provided your hardware is comparable to the scale and constitution of your 7-micron diameter red blood cells, it should have no trouble navigating to any location desired. No neuron is found more than a few hundred microns from a capillary, and the circulatory system could likely absorb the addition of many such machines.
When you upgrade the engine in your car to a much more powerful one, in addition to using more gas, you also may need to get a stronger axle, a bigger battery to start it, and a bigger carb or fuel injector system to supply oxygenated fuel. You soon come to the realization that everything is not going to fit under the old hood. The same situation will apply to the modding the brain. When surgeons open the skull for brain surgery, they apply their dremel wheel or trephine just over the area they need to access, wherever that may lie. If you have a choice though, and would prefer instead a more global and subtle procedure to create some extra real estate, it may be wise to try and take advantage of the natural suture lines in the scalp. These sutures are like tectonic plates — their border zones don’t represent sites of active volcanism, but instead locations where bone growth and absorption most actively occurs.
Now that you have made some basic ground-floor provisions, where do you begin hot-rodding your brain? Well, that probably depends on what it is you want to accomplish. Let’s just take one example: Suppose you have grown tired of having to actually say “call Alice” every time you want to call your spouse. How then, would you prefer to have it done? To be sure, you wouldn’t want her to be dialed when you didn’t really intend for it. For that matter, how many address books do you want to put in your head and in what form do you want them? Would you want to see them in your minds eye, speed scroll through them with an imagined finger? Hear it requested of you in an unsolicited voice in the manner of those who skirt the edge of sanity, or have the notion idealized first by you in your own inner voice, or your spouse’s voice, or maybe even God’s voice for those so inclined.
[9]Maybe you would find it convenient to have the voice emanate from preferentially organized virtual locations in space? Or you could feel it like a braille code, on your back, tongue, index finger, or virtual appendage. Maybe, you just want to simply “know it.” When you finally have the call cued up, how do you want to output it? It would be nice to be able to go directly from your inner voice or visual image to a radio out and be done with it. I would argue that while it may eventually be possible to do this, we may not want that level of integration. Our natural thought structure and memory is too valuable to us. Most output tasks would perhaps be best relegated to co-opted peripheral nerves. The delicate signals of the main processor in a computer, for example, are not brought out to the external world unbuffered. Even with inexpensive and pokey microcontrollers the task is usually relegated to other circuitry.
The sensory nerves enervating each rib are not really all that critical to us. For that matter, neither are the motor nerves that feed the intercostal muscles between them. Which one might you want to use as a dedicated signal channel? The motor nerves are already ideally suited for output commands. The simplest method might, for example, be to just have the command linked to a particular kind of exhalation since that is what the nerve already participates in. Before we jump into speculation about how mods might actually interact at the level of perception, there was an interesting video recently released that illustrates just how easily it is to completely deform something as seemingly rock solid as perceiving a face [10] by stimulating in the right place.
To complete our vision for a cyborg availing itself of enough personal data to serve as their brain’s administrator rather than just its sideshow, perhaps we can suggest a few ways its own activity might be harnessed. For those millions of fibers in the corpus callosum alone for example, it might be reasonable to assume initially only a fraction of them will be reliably recorded from and also targeted for stimulation. Suffice it to say that for those fibers, there are many ways, even using present-day techniques, that we can determine which side of the brain they originate from and therefore roughly where they project to. In fact actively tracing fiber projections in the brains of research animals is done routinely using a technique called antidromic stimulation.
It would be convenient for the cyborg to be able to visualize the activity of these fibers in their mind’s eye from an imagined central point in the brain. Perhaps this vantage point would be somewhere within the ventricles themselves just below the fibers so that flashes corresponding to their spikes can be seen to be directly superimposed upon them in the simulated view.
There may also be better ways to review activity trends and organize stimulation protocols over longer periods of time. The cyborg might intuit the vast amounts of spike data it generates as spread in a near-infinite regress of 3D tabbed browser windows, played one per side upon the visual cortices. They would contain the real time trans-callosal data from the respective hemispheres and eventually also incorporate data from the fornix and other tracts in the brain. These windows might be floated to the periphery of the simulated view, made minuscule and transparent, or brought front and center according to whim.
The elephant looming the corridors of the mind is that while the brain can sense in immediate detail the slightest departure from status quo in each of its millions of sensory nerve endings in the body — from the brush of a feather to a pinprick of a needle — it has not been given opportunity to learn to feel directly the activity within itself or even mild assaults to it. Recent experimental work that builds upon simple but ingenious treatments to cure phantom limb pain [11], indicates that the brain can quickly adapt to directly experience, for example, simulated pinpricks to an inanimate object, or real pinpricks to its own hand but felt to originate from a remote location in space.
With arrangements made in this fashion, it takes only a small leap to realize that the brain will quickly learn to feel its own activity, just as a baby so effortlessly learns to feel its body. In the same stroke, it will gain the ability to control what it feels. If one is to argue that consciousness is in some sense the brain feeling its own activity, then what the cyborg will come to possess will be something much greater than consciousness. We have at present no real evidence that the mapping of a neural state to a conscious state is, in the language of the mathematician, isomorphic or one-to-one — but the cyborg no doubt will.
The highest power a human might claim is not the ability to feel, but to be able to set the priority of, painful interrupts asserted by the body. This ability was not sought and has often cursed the individual, yet it was formative on the larger scale and delivered society to where we are today. Indeed our greatest heroes could set these priorities the lowest. In freeing itself from the demands levied by this power the cyborg generates completely a new master — to be compatible with society, and accordingly within its new and more expansive self, this master must be responsibility.
Clearly we have entered the realm of speculation some time ago, but there is an important practical footnote to this kind of hypothesizing. Unless we would prefer some company to guess the most appropriate way to design our neural mods and create for us the ones they would be inclined to build, we might want to start thinking about what we want such mods to do — and then start informing those views, and expressing them with real neuroanatomy and neurophysiology.

Endnotes

1. : http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ventricles.jpg
2. direct them into close association with new hardware.: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/135207-harvard-creates-cyborg-flesh-thats-half-man-half-machine
3. use of their existing transmitter systems: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/130111-supercharging-the-nervous-system-with-biological-ion-transistor-computer-chips
4. therapeutically pace or stimulate the fornix: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/142797-brain-pacemaker-helps-treat-alzheimers-disease
5. glucose: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/130923-mit-creates-glucose-fuel-cell-to-power-implanted-brain-computer-interfaces
6. low frequency induction that penetrates the body well: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/119477-stanford-creates-wireless-implantable-innerspace-medical-device
7. : http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/coronal2.jpg
8. : http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/veins.jpg
9. : http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/cranio.jpg
10. perceiving a face: http://healthland.time.com/2012/10/24/changing-faces-stimulating-the-brain-morphs-peoples-faces-before-patients-eyes
11. treatments to cure phantom limb pain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc3CmS8_vUI

---

Printed from http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/144579-rise-of-the-cyborgs. Copyright ©2013 ExtremeTech unless otherwise noted.

THE OBAMA COLT

Posted by George Freund on January 22, 2013

http://www.conspiracy-cafe.com/apps/blog/entries/show/22758574-the-obama-colt
Not to be outdone by rhetoric of the day, the German government has followed in the tradition of giving the President of the United States his own commemorative pistol. Of course this will not be on the evening news. Neither will be the reason for the auspicious change in policy among the modern liberal left states. It appears the Federal Reserve will not honor the request of the Germans to repatriate their gold held in New York. They may release it in portions over the next few years. That was the old Knights Templar trick. You give me your gold. I give you a piece of paper. When you come back for the metal, it's gone. Having learned their lesson in two previous world wars the Germans have devised the above pistol. Trusting that President Obama knows little to nothing about firearms other than they are a great marketing tool to destroy the United States and its pesky Constitution, he will solve the problem for them.
-
-
Meanwhile back in the fantasy world of corporate TV, CNN aired a live shooter drill from St. Rosa pre-school in Newtown on that infamous December 14th day. Like the gold it was all smoke and mirrors to make you believe something that isn't. You could call that psychological warfare. Since the administration of Obama I (first) has waged psychological warfare on the American people with the aid of corporate disinformation networks, we wonder how long it will be before real time warfare begins. We humbly recommend joining your local 2nd Amendment march Feb. 8th. If you don't, begging and grovelling lessons will be available at the steps of the 2nd Lincoln Memorial devoted to Obama I.
-

-
Police storm St. Rosa? WTF?
-

Video footage within the original LIVE broadcast which aired the morning of December 14, 2012 on CNN, reveals at least 7 police officers storming the entrance of what appears to be Sandy Hook Elementary School. The video gives the viewer a birds-eye-view filmed from a news helicopter.
-
The caption on the LIVE CNN broadcast with Anderson Cooper’s logo to the left on the ticker bar read that morning, “BREAKING NEWS… Source: Mother of Suspected Gunman Also Killed”. However, after closer analysis this is not footage of the Sandy Hook School grounds or shooting, but rather a different location entirely, signifying an advanced government sponsored false flag operation was possibly being conducted that morning in and around Sandy Hook.
-




-
St. Rose Pre School in Sandy Hook, CT

-
It is unconfirmed at this time if the footage is from a previously filmed drill or an actual realtime drill that was taking place simultaneously with the reported shooting. Notice the emergency cones “orange cones” in place signifying typical drill protocol (in the above picture).
-


-
Sandy Hook School Can you trust CNN to tell you the difference?
-
At this point it would be better for the Republic that the Sandy Hook shooting was real. It would mean well intentioned authorities are doing the wrong thing for the right reason. Since the reverse appears to be true, it means they are disarming the American public for a greater pogrom. All though history it has been this way. Don't fear. Take heart. They can be stopped in their tracks by becoming informed of the methods of subversion employed by despots and standing firm to the flag of the republic and the truths held so dear. Fear not because the Lord is with the brave and determined. We ask for victory in his name. We demand justice for the treason they have committed against WE THE PEOPLE. That day will come.

Is The “Self-Promotion-And-Envy Spiral” Taking Down Facebook?

Tuesday, January 22, 2013 at 4:59PM

Facebook isn’t over the hill, exactly. Last October, it announced that 1 billion people used it every month, in a world of 7 billion people. Leaping from one milestone to the next. But in its key markets, such as the US, where it derives most of its revenues, user rates have been plateauing, and a shudder-inducing D-word has snuck into polite conversation: declining.
Last month, according to social-media monitoring startup Socialbakers, there were 167.4 million active users in the US, down 2.4 million from prior month, and down 123,000 from three months earlier. Over the last six months, growth was a hefty 11.9 million. Other major markets saw similar scenarios, such as Indonesia, the UK, Canada, France, and Germany.
Maybe a seasonal dip. Or an indication that FB users in certain markets are backing off. All sorts of reasons have been bandied about: FB fatigue; too busy for a time suck; leeriness of FB’s no-privacy policy; fear of the treacherous reefs of FB-induced jealousy.... Now we were handed another one. Envy.
More precisely, “Envy on Facebook: A Hidden Threat to Users’ Life Satisfaction?“ The study by two German universities is based on responses from about 600 FB users, mostly German students, who were contacted via university email lists and bribed into participating with a raffle of Amazon.de gift cards.
The study cites research that acknowledges that “passive following”—keeping up with the minutiae of other people’s lives—allowed users to experience positive emotions and “positive cognitive effects” as it reduced uncertainty, “thereby providing a basis for social trust, civic engagement and political participation.” And so “users broaden their horizons and build a sense of connectedness.”
Alas, “a growing body of research warns against this one-sided positive view,” the study exhorts us and adds a laundry list of research on the many drawbacks. But the study focused on envy—”an unalienable part of social interaction” at work or wherever “inter-personal interactions take place.” Envy can lead to positive outcomes, such as “learning, motivation, better performance, and achievement,” but on the other end of the spectrum, it “breeds hostility.” Over the longer term, it can “damage one’s sense of self-worth, result in group dissatisfaction and withdrawal, lead to depressive tendencies, reduce perceptions of well-being, and poor mental health.” In short, envy is not good. Turns out, FB triggers it massively.
Survey respondents blamed 21.3% of all their recent envy feelings on FB. An outsized ratio, given how little time they spent on FB (half of them, 5-30 minutes daily). A mere 7.2% experienced envy elsewhere online. And 71.5% experienced it offline, proof that people still have a life.
In broader terms, 43.8% of the respondents reported at least one positive emotion after the last time they used FB, while 36.9% reported at least one negative emotion. When asked about FB-triggered frustrations, 29.6% of the respondents cited envy, followed distantly by “lack of comments, likes, feedback” (19.5%), “time loss” (13.7%), “social isolation” (10.4%), and “having missed something/not being invited” (5.5%). “Jealousy of one’s (ex-) partner, friend” was, despite overwhelming anecdotal evidence and countless urban legends to the contrary, at the bottom with 2%.
The triggers for envy on FB? “Travel and leisure!” Yes, 56.3% griped about those aggravating pics of Maya ruins in the lush jungle of Guatemala, or similar. In second place, but far behind on the envy-trigger list, was “social interaction” (14.1%), “appearance” (7.1%), etc. Fading out at the bottom were, for example, “success in general” (5.6%), “success in job” (2.8%), and “money” (1.4%).
The researchers determined that the “intensity of passive following,” because it triggers envy, “is likely to reduce users’ life satisfaction in the long-run.” Hence, people try to minimize or avoid envy by using a variety of strategies. None of them good for FB’s top or bottom line.
- Avoid friending, or even unfriend, people one is envious about. Unpopular because it “contradicts social norms” and might lead to tensions.
- Hide content from people one is envious about.
- Engage in “even greater self-promotion and impression management”—exaggeration of accomplishments being a common reaction to envy. But it can trigger a “self-promotion-and-envy spiral,” where users combat the self-promotional content of others with ever more self-promotion of their own. A vicious cycle that would lead the “envy-ridden character” of FB deeper into the thicket.
- Reduce, or refrain from, passive following. Users would miss out on information or events and thus see less value in FB. And FB would see less participation in an essential user activity.
A heads-up for FB. “Our findings signal that users frequently perceive Facebook as a stressful environment, which may, in the long-run, endanger platform sustainability,” the researchers concluded. And they warned that “addressing this threat should be seen as priority.”
While welfare programs were playing a prominent role in our boisterous Fiscal Cliff theatrics, Congress quietly and behind the scenes enriched corporate welfare programs—in this case, Medicare. Bitter irony: it happened as Congress was considering tightening the belts of people who’d paid into the system throughout their working years. Prime beneficiary: Big Pharma. One company, actually. Read.... Exhibit A: Enriching the Corporate Welfare Program.            

Envy on Facebook: A Hidden Threat to Users’ Life Satisfaction?

Envy on Facebook: A Hidden Threat to Users’ Life Satisfaction?                                         http://warhol.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/~hkrasnova/Ongoing_Research_files/WI%202013%20Final%20Submission%20Krasnova.pdf

CNN Caught Red Handed: CNN video of police charge at Sandy Hook is not Sandy Hook

truther January 22, 2013        http://www.pakalertpress.com/2013/01/22/cnn-caught-red-handed-cnn-video-of-police-charge-at-sandy-hook-is-not-sandy-hook/

Ralph Lopez

At the words “they arrived to carnage,” the CNN Anderson Cooper report cuts to helicopter footage of seven police officers charging across a parking lot and toward a school. It is breaking news coverage of the Sandy Hook shooting just hours earlier.

The three-minute report posted on the day of the shootings at the official CNN website is entitled “Tragedy Strikes at Elementary School.” But the school is almost certainly not Sandy Hook.

It is St. Rose of Lima School, a private school a few miles away, also in Newtown. Sandy Hook Elementary School is the site where 20 school children were killed on December 14, 2012, and 6 adults. Two adults were wounded, Natalie Hammond and another whom police have not named.
CNN: “Tragedy Strikes at Elementary School,” at official CNN Youtube channel
Posted at CNN website. MPEG4 file at Dropbox
The helicopter footage is broadcast at 8 seconds into the CNN report, and again at time stamp 1:02. A close examination of the landscaping, parking lot markings, and the distinct curvature of the sidewalk reveals that no such terrain exists at Sandy Hook Elementary School. However, a Google Earth satellite photo shows the true location almost beyond a reasonable doubt. After circulating across the Internet for a time, photographic evidence seems to bear out that doubts were founded.
It is not known whether the rush to the building of the seven officers seen in the clip is a drill. Also unknown is when it took place.
The GPS coordinates of the area of the St. Rose of Lima School in question are: latitude 41.415154, longitude -73.297764. The street address which can be entered into the Google Earth search box to find the location is 40 Church Hill Rd, Newtown, CT. Google Earth is an Internet tool which allows Internet users to view satellite photos of any place on the planet in minute detail. Users can instantaneously zoom in on details as small as cars or streetlights.
In the disputed CNN footage, at time stamp :08 seconds, police can be seen running around a curved landscape feature from which diagonal lines radiate on the parking lot asphalt. At 1:02 (one minute and 2 seconds) the same clip is played again, more extensively. Officers run onto a long, curving white sidewalk next to a building. A utility room of some sort can be seen on the roof, near a metallic, grill-like device, perhaps a solar collector.
An examination of a satellite photo of Sandy Hook shows no such grouping of features. An examination of the satellite photo of St. Rose of Lima School, however, shows the exact features in detail. It is nearly indisputable that the the site where the officers are shown running is St. Rose of Lima School, not Sandy Hook.
In the CNN report, the second appearance of the footage takes place in the context of a cut to Lt. Paul Vance of the Connecticut State Police at a press conference on that day. The script runs as follows:
Vance (at press conference): “Off-duty troopers responded to the school, and with Newtown police immediately upon arrival, entered the school and began a complete active shooter search of the building.”
As the report cuts to the charging officers, the CNN voice-over says:
“They arrived to carnage.”
The clip was run on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.” The theme of Cooper’s 360 program is “Keeping them honest.”
CNN report, “Tragedy Strikes at Elementary School,” screen shot at 8 seconds, police storming building

CNN

CNN report, “Tragedy Strikes at Elementary School,” screen shot at 1 minute, 1 second

CNN

CNN report, “Tragedy Strikes at Elementary School,” screen shot at 1 minute, 2 seconds

CNN

Sandy Hook Elementary School, satellite photo

NASA

St. Rose of Lima School, Newtown, CT, with area of detail (Google Earth)

NASA

St. Rose of Lima School, Newtown, CT, with detail (Google Earth)

NASA

This excellent story from Digital Journal

37 Statistics Which Show How Four Years Of Obama Have Wrecked The U.S. Economy

By Michael, on January 21st, 2013

 

The mainstream media covered the inauguration of Barack Obama with breathless anticipation on Monday, but should we really be celebrating another four years of Obama?  The truth is that the first four years of Obama were an absolute train wreck for the U.S. economy.  Over the past four years, the percentage of working age Americans with a job has fallen, median household income has declined by more than $4000, poverty in the U.S. has absolutely exploded and our national debt has ballooned to ridiculous proportions.  Of course all of the blame for the nightmarish performance of the economy should not go to Obama alone.  Certainly much of what we are experiencing today is the direct result of decades of very foolish decisions by Congress and previous presidential administrations.  And of course the Federal Reserve has more influence over the economy than anyone else does.  But Barack Obama steadfastly refuses to criticize anything that the Federal Reserve has done and he even nominated Ben Bernanke for another term as Fed Chairman despite his horrific track record of failure, so at a minimum Barack Obama must be considered to be complicit in the Fed's very foolish policies.  Despite what the Obama administration tells us, the U.S. economy has been in decline for a very long time, and that decline has accelerated in many ways over the past four years.  Just consider the statistics that I have compiled below.  The following are 37 statistics which show how four years of Obama have wrecked the U.S. economy...
1. During Obama's first term, the number of Americans on food stamps increased by an average of about 11,000 per day.
2. At the beginning of the Obama era, 32 million Americans were on food stamps.  Today, more than 47 million Americans are on food stamps.
3. According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of "Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming."
4. The number of Americans receiving money directly from the federal government each month has grown from 94 million in the year 2000 to more than 128 million today.
5. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either "poor" or "low income" at this point.
6. The unemployment rate in the United States is exactly where it was (7.8 percent) when Barack Obama first entered the White House in January 2009.
7. When Barack Obama first entered the White House, 60.6 percent of all working age Americans had a job.  Today, only 58.6 percent of all working age Americans have a job.
8. During the first four years of Obama, the number of Americans "not in the labor force" soared by an astounding 8,332,000.  That far exceeds any previous four year total.
9. During Obama's first term, the number of Americans collecting federal disability insurance rose by more than 18 percent.
10. The Obama years have been absolutely devastating for small businesses in America.  According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the number of startup jobs per 1000 Americans breaks down by presidential administration...
Bush Sr.: 11.3
Clinton: 11.2
Bush Jr.: 10.8
Obama: 7.8
11. Median household income in America has fallen for four consecutive years.  Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.
12. The economy is not producing nearly enough jobs for the hordes of young people now entering the workforce.  Approximately 53 percent of all U.S. college graduates under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed in 2011.
13. According to a report from the National Employment Law Project, 58 percent of the jobs that have been created since the end of the recession have been low paying jobs.
14. Back in 2007, about 28 percent of all working families were considered to be among "the working poor".  Today, that number is up to 32 percent even though our politicians tell us that the economy is supposedly recovering.
15. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, only 24.6 percent of all of the jobs in the United States are "good jobs" at this point.
16. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before.
17. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the United States is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
18. The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.
19. According to the World Bank, U.S. GDP accounted for 31.8 percent of all global economic activity in 2001.  That number declined steadily over the course of the next decade and was only at 21.6 percent in 2011.
20. The United States actually has plenty of oil and we should not have to import oil from the Middle East.  We need to drill for more oil, but Obama has been very hesitant to do that.  Under Bill Clinton, the number of drilling permits approved rose by 58 percent.  Under George W. Bush, the number of drilling permits approved rose by 116 percent.  Under Barack Obama, the number of drilling permits approved actually decreased by 36 percent.
21. When Barack Obama took office, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $1.84.  Today, the average price of a gallon of gasoline is $3.26.
22. Under Barack Obama, the United States has lost more than 300,000 education jobs.
23. For the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless.  That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.
24. Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 now have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
25. More than three times as many new homes were sold in the United States in 2005 as were sold in 2012.
26. Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.
27. Health insurance costs have risen by 29 percent since Barack Obama became president.
28. Today, 77 percent of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time.
29. It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.
30. The total amount of money that the federal government gives directly to the American people has grown by 32 percent since Barack Obama became president.
31. The Obama administration has been spending money on some of the most insane things imaginable.  For example, in 2011 the Obama administration spent $592,527 on a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.
32. U.S. taxpayers spend more than 20 times as much on the Obamas as British taxpayers spend on the royal family.
33. The U.S. government has run a budget deficit of well over a trillion dollars every single year under Barack Obama.
34. When Barack Obama was first elected, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio was under 70 percent.  Today, it is up to 103 percent.
35. During Obama's first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.
36. As I wrote about yesterday, when you break it down the amount of new debt accumulated by the U.S. government during Obama's first term comes to approximately $50,521 for every single household in the United States.  Are you ready to contribute your share?
37. If you started paying off just the new debt that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years to pay it off.
But despite all of these numbers, the mainstream media and the left just continue to shower Barack Obama with worship and praise.  Newsweek recently heralded Obama's second term as "The Second Coming", and at Obama's pre-inauguration church service Reverand Ronald Braxton openly compared Obama to Moses...

At Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, Braxton reportedly crafted his speech around Obama’s personal political slogan: “Forward!”
Obama, said Braxton, was just like Moses facing the Red Sea: “forward is the only option … The people couldn’t turn around. The only thing that they could do was to go forward.” Obama, said Braxton, would have to overcome all obstacles – like opposition from Republicans, presumably, or the bounds of the Constitution. Braxton continued, “Mr. President, stand on the rock,” citing to Moses standing on Mount Horeb as his people camped outside the land of Israel.
But it wasn’t enough to compare Obama with the founder of Judaism and the prophet of the Bible. Braxton added that Obama’s opponents were like the Biblical enemies of Moses, and that Obama would have to enter the battle because “sometimes enemies insist on doing it the hard way.”

So what do you think the next four years of Obama will bring?
Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below...

Be Sociable, Share!

Interview 584 – James Corbett on Dangerous Conversation

22
Jan
2013

Interview 584 – James Corbett on Dangerous Conversation

Posted by Corbett

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

James Corbett of the Corbett Report joins Scotty Ledger on his program, Dangerous Conversationa. Issues discussed include James’ influences and background, alternative media and tactics for disseminating information, Fukushima, and the possibility of an EMP false flag.

Pirate Bay Documentary First Ever to Premiere Online and at a Major Festival

• Ernesto
• January 22, 2013

TPB-AFK, the upcoming documentary about The Pirate Bay and its founders, has a release date. The film is premiering with a prominent spot at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival on February 8. At the same time TPB-AFK will also be released for free on the Internet., making it the first film ever to premiere both online and at an A-list festival.
Hollywood often hears that they force people into pirating films by failing to make their content widely available.
It often takes months before a blockbuster movie appears online after it premieres in theaters, while the public demands instant access.
So, when a documentary is made about the founders of The Pirate Bay, things have to be done differently. And this is exactly what’s going to happen with the upcoming release of TPB-AFK.
Today it was officially announced that the documentary will premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) on February 8th. This offline premiere coincides with the free online release, making it the first ever to have such a double release.
“I’m so thrilled to open the ‘Panorama Dokumente’ section of the Berlinale with the first film ever to be released for free online from an A-festival,” TPB-AFK director Simon Klose tells TorrentFreak in a comment.
“The Pirate Bay changed the film industry from the outside, I’m trying to change it from within,” he adds, hinting that it might be wise for others to follow this trend.
After seeing the TPB-AFK trailer many users and followers of the notorious BitTorrent site are excited to see the documentary. However, the film doesn’t have the classic Hollywood ending most are used to.
TorrentFreak talked to several people who’ve seen a private screener and the overall impression we got is that it’s not the most uplifting story. That doesn’t come as a surprise of course, as most of the material covers how the three founders fought their legal battles in Sweden, and lost.
Peter Sunde, one of the three founders followed in the documentary, has mixed feelings about the end result.
“It tells an important story,” Sunde tells TorrentFreak.
“I don’t want to tell too much about it because people should see it and make up their own minds. After seeing the full movie for the first time I was thinking about it for about two weeks without having an opinion or words to describe it.”
TPB-AFK highlights a lot of the negative events the three founders went through, ending with the final guilty verdict early last year. Needless to say these events had quite an impact on their lives.
“It’s still a fucked up story and the film makes me think about the past years of my life quite a lot,” Sunde says.
The Pirate Bay founder adds that he might have chosen other material to include and that many of the good parts are left out.
“It’s Simon’s decision what to include and it’s his view of our story. I like that he’s independent from us and that he’s promised to release lots of extra material for some of the things that I might have wanted to have included,” Sunde says.
Sunde concludes, however, that the director did a great job and that TPB-AFK is a must watch.

TPB-AFK coming soon.

Churchill's Heirs Seek To Lose The Future By Charging Biographer To Quote His Words

from the who-owns-your-words dept

"If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future." — Winston Churchill We've talked in the past about how the heirs of Martin Luther King Jr. and James Joyce have a long and unfortunate history of being ridiculous about letting anyone quote their dead ancestors. Both families have abused copyright law to demand excessive payments, even for researchers and memorials and the like. Now we can add the heirs of Winston Churchill to the bunch. The Freakonomics podcast recently explored this issue with a biographer of Winston Churchill, Barry Singer.

Singer is somewhat obsessed with Churchill, running an entire bookstore devoted to Churchill. As such, he actually says he's had a very good relationship with Churchill's heirs for years. But when he finally sought to write a book on Churchill himself, the family went the usual route and claimed no quotations unless you pay. The approximate rate: 50 cents per word. Quoting other Churchill relatives also costs money and the rates may differ. As Singer explains, he basically had to significantly cut back on what he quoted, and completely excise some Churchill family members from the book. But he did have to pay for the 3,872 words he used that included direct quotations from Churchill -- though the family gave him a slight discount, such that he had to pay £950 -- which works out to about 40 cents per word.

Singer admits that, while some lawyers told him he could fight this, he gave in to keep up his strong relationship with the family. Of course, that only brings to mind Churchill's quote:

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile--hoping it will eat him last.

Also:

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

It's too bad Singer chose not to stand up more.

To be honest, the podcast is a little weak in that it doesn't go too deep into the legal issues here and how they can impact history, culture and research. Furthermore, it does little to explore the actual law and how far the Churchill estate is overreaching. Oddly, it seems to suggest that this is just "the way" that the UK's copyright laws work (not quite true) and then does a little section on the attempts by the UK government to reform the laws -- even though the UK government decided to reject the idea of including a US-style fair use exception.

Stephen Dubner then talks to Steve Levitt about copyright in general, and claims that his take is "un-economic" because he doesn't seem to care much for stringent enforcement of copyright, and would prefer to share his own works more widely. I don't see how that's un-economic at all. In fact, as Levitt notes, his own status goes up as the work is more widely shared, increasing all sorts of opportunities elsewhere. I actually found this part of the discussion kind of disappointing, as there were a bunch of interesting nuanced directions in which it could have gone, including a much deeper analysis of the economics of copying, but instead, they went with the standard line from people who are just exploring this topic for the first time, which I'll paraphrase as: "well of course copyright is important, and we don't want anyone copying our book, but perhaps it goes too far in some cases."

The parts on Churchill are interesting, and hopefully Dubner (and Levitt?) will follow up in more detail down the road. For example, it would be great for them to bring on Chris Sprigman and Kal Raustiala, who they've had guest-post for them in the past, considering they've written an entire book on these kinds of things. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130118/16193821734/churchills-heirs-seek-to-lose-future-charging-biographer-to-quote-his-words.shtml

helmets  &  mittens  !!! what a fucking world we live IN ......&  YES    we ALL  say  shit  we shouldn't/   regret   .....ALWAYS    putting  your   finger up  &  C   ..Oops  offended    somebody .. OH  that's  not  what i meant ,blah ,blah,blah ,blah  boo hoo ,boo hoo .............what  do u fucking care ..your wearing a HELMET !!!                          

Wes Welker’s wife complains about Ray Lewis on Facebook, then apologizes

By Jay Busbee

This was Wes and Anna Welker after the 2012 Super Bowl, but chances are their mood's the same today. (Getty Im …

We understand being upset when your team loses. Everybody is. And we understand taking to Facebook to vent your frustration. Plenty of people do that, and get plenty of "Like"s for doing so. But when your favorite team happens to feature your husband as a prominent member, and when you attack the opposition in no uncertain terms, well ... it tends to make news.
In the hours after the Patriots lost the AFC championship, Wes Welker's wife, Anna, had the following to say on Facebook: "Proud of my husband and the Pats. By the way, if anyone is bored, please go to Ray Lewis' Wikipedia page. 6 kids 4 wives. Acquitted for murder. Paid a family off. Yay. What a hall of fame player! A true role model!"
You can understand why Mrs. Welker would be so frustrated; she's not the only one conflicted about the praise being lavished on the controversial (and, over her husband's team, victorious) Ray Lewis. Alas, there will be much more to deal with before the game is over.
[Related: Bill Belichick stiffs CBS interviewer, draws Shannon Sharpe's ire]
Later, Anna Welker apologized, saying in a statement, "I’m deeply sorry for my recent post on Facebook. I let the competitiveness of the game and the comments people were making about a team I dearly love get the best of me. My actions were emotional and irrational and I sincerely apologize to Ray Lewis and anyone affected by my comment after yesterday’s game.
“It is such an accomplishment for any team to make it to the NFL playoffs, and the momentary frustration I felt should not overshadow the accomplishments of both of these amazing teams.”
[Related: Joe Flacco backs up elite talk]
Well, that sounds a little lawyer-processed, but so be it. This, of course, is reminiscent of last year's incident involving Tom Brady's wife Gisele Bundchen. After Brady's Patriots lost to the New York Giants, hecklers taunted Bundchen, who responded with, "My husband cannot [expletive] throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time."
Hey, at least Anna Welker went after the other team. Small victories.

some more   ..that's  ..that's  ..that's   NOT  what I  , I ,I   meant ;0 ...   DOE'S    anybody have any  BALLS    left  anymore ?     or  an opinion   anymore ?   ...  we  all   wear Helmets  ...   so Y  ..r     we  ???   hint ,hint ?  what's  the  difference   NAZI   Germ ???    &  U.S.    today .....shshshsssssssssshhhhhh    watch what u say :o                  

Phil Mickelson regrets airing opinion on taxes

By DOUG FERGUSON (AP Golf Writer) | The Associated Press

• View PhotoPhil Mickelson hits from a fairway on the fifth hole during the first round of the Humana Challenge golf tournament at the La Quinta Country Club in La …

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- Phil Mickelson is talking more about how much he pays in taxes than how many fairways he hits off the tee.

Mickelson, regarded as the ''People's Choice'' for his connection with fans, put his popularity on the line with polarizing comments about how much he has to pay in state and federal taxes. The four-time major champion said it might lead to ''drastic changes,'' such as moving from his native California, and that it already caused him to pull out of the San Diego Padres' new ownership group.
His only regret was not keeping his opinion to himself.
''Finances and taxes are a personal matter, and I should not have made my opinions on them public,'' Mickelson said in a statement released Monday night. ''I apologize to those I have upset or insulted, and assure you I intend not to let it happen again.''
Mickelson first made a cryptic reference to ''what's gone on the last few months politically'' during a conference call two weeks ago for the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, where he won last year for his 40th career PGA Tour title. After his final round Sunday at the Humana Challenge, he was asked what he meant.
''There are going to be some drastic changes for me because I happen to be in that zone that has been targeted both federally and by the state, and it doesn't work for me right now,'' he said. ''So I'm going to have to make some changes.''
Mickelson said the new federal tax rate, and California voting for Proposition 30 to increase taxes on the earnings over $250,000, contributed to total taxes that tap into more than 60 percent of his income.
Golf Digest magazine, in its annual survey of top earners in the sports, said Mickelson made just over $45 million last year on and off the golf course.
The response to Mickelson's opinions on taxes ranged from mocking a guy who has become a multimillionaire by playing golf to support for having such a high tax rate and not being afraid to speak his mind.
A majority of PGA Tour players live in Florida and others in Texas, two states that have no state income tax. Tiger Woods grew up in Southern California and played two years at Stanford. He was a California kid when he won an unprecedented three straight U.S. Amateur titles, but when he made his professional debut in Milwaukee a week later, he was listed as being from Orlando, Fla.
''I moved out of here back in '96 for that reason,'' Woods said Tuesday.
''I enjoy Florida, but also I understand what he was - I think - trying to say,'' Woods said of the Mickelson comments. ''I think he'll probably explain it better and in a little more detail.''
Mickelson deflected questions at the Humana Challenge by saying he would prefer to elaborate at his news conference at Torrey Pines.
That couldn't wait.
''I know I have my usual pre-tournament press conference scheduled this week but I felt I needed to address the comments I made following the Humana Challenge now,'' Mickelson said in his statement. ''I absolutely love what I do. I love and appreciate the game of golf and the people who surround it. I'm as motivated as I've ever been to work on my game, to compete and to win championships.
''Right now, I'm like many Americans who are trying to understand the new tax laws. I've been learning a lot over the last few months and talking with people who are trying to help me make intelligent and informed decisions. I certainly don't have a definitive plan at this time, but like everyone else I want to make decisions that are best for my future and my family.''
Mickelson's news conference Wednesday will come after his pro-am round in the Farmers Insurance Open, a tournament he first won 20 years ago.
''He definitely showed a lack of sympathy for the plight of a lot of people, unemployed and all that sort of stuff,'' Geoff Ogilvy said. ''But everything is relative. He's verbalized when he's thinking, and you shouldn't get in trouble for verbalizing what you're thinking. I assume it's less of a personal thing and more of a political-type statement, maybe? ... He probably shouldn't have said it the way he said it.''
Texas Gov. Rick Perry even weighed in with this tweet: ''Hey Phil....Texas is home to liberty and low taxes...we would love to have you as well!!''
Mickelson is among the most famous athletes to come out of San Diego. He went to school at Arizona State and lived in Scottsdale, Ariz., for the first decade of his career until moving back home to Rancho Santa Fe.
He was part of the group that bought the San Diego Padres, saying that it would be a ''significant investment'' for him but that he saw it as a great opportunity to get involved in his hometown. Asked if the tax changes were why he withdrew, Mickelson said, ''Absolutely.''
Mickelson has earned just under $70 million in PGA Tour earnings for his career, which doesn't include corporate endorsements (Callaway, Barclays, Rolex) or his golf course design company, which is thriving in China.
In November, California voters approved Proposition 30, the first statewide tax increase since 2004. It raises the rate on earnings over $250,000 for seven years.
''If you add up all the federal and you look at the disability and the unemployment and the Social Security and the state, my tax rate is 62, 63 percent,'' Mickelson had said. ''So I've got to make some decisions on what I'm going to do.''
This is not the first time Mickelson's opinions have brought him attention. Ten years ago, he came to Torrey Pines and apologized for Woods for saying in magazine article that the world's No. 1 player was using inferior equipment.
These comments on paying taxes were sure to resonate with far more people.
Ogilvy recently moved from San Diego County to Scottsdale, though his reason was more about golf than taxes. He bought a home in Del Mar and lived with his wife and three kids for about four years, knowing there were other states he could live with lower tax rates.
''It's a little bit of one negative to a lot of positives,'' Ogilvy said. ''If the tax rate in California was the same as it was in Texas, half the tour would live here. The lifestyle is impressive. The climate is impressive. But even the ones who grow up here move away.''