Be Ware!!!

The 43-year-old woman’s children collected the rocks Saturday at a San Clemente beach, and she tucked them into the pocket of her shorts …

While the woman was standing in her kitchen Saturday about an hour after returning from the beach, the rocks appeared to spontaneously ignite, burning the woman’s right thigh and knee…

The rocks are small, smooth, and orange and green in color. …”The rocks were still smoking when firefighters took them to the hospital,”

Solution? Rock Bucket.

Elaine Bouschard and her grandson, Taylor Callaway, say it was a miracle when they saw this tiny dog fall from the sky.

…”I looked up and the hawk was just flying right here, circling around …”

…Bouschard’s still trying to figure out why the hawk decided to release the puppy from it’s clutches.

“He is so wiggly and his nose, he’s a bulldozer, I could see him wiggling right out of the talons of it,” she said.

…“How cool is this? Okay, again, pennies from heaven, puppies from heaven,”…

Given all the noise about Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, is this indicative of anything?

When Ryan Young, a butcher at the Del Rey Oaks Safeway, stopped a customer from hitting his pregnant girlfriend in the store last month, he won praise from the police department.

But Safeway slapped Young with a suspension — without pay — while the company investigates the altercation.

Safeway spokeswoman Wendy Gutshall said in a statement. “We have store security video of the incident and have been engaged in a careful and thoughtful forensic review of what transpired. …There are two sides to every story, and we would ask that judgment be reserved,… We will be relying on the video and other relevant evidence as well as statements of eyewitnesses and other information to make a final decision.”"

…”Now it’s been almost a month,” [Del Rey Oaks Police Chief Ron] Langford said. “We conducted an investigation, we filed the case with the district attorney’s office. What are they investigating?”

In a clinical trial that could lead to treatments that prevent Alzheimer’s disease, people with a genetic predisposition for the disease, but who do not yet have symptoms, will be given a drug intended to stop them from developing it, federal officials announced Tuesday.

…The $100 million study will run for five years, but results on sophisticated tests may indicate in as little as two years whether the drug is helping to delay memory decline or brain changes…

Federal money. Not the worst use for it — but I gotta ask, could this be done more economically by the private sector? Lotta money might be made there…

Here’s the odd bit:

Most of the study’s participants [300 family members] will be drawn from an extended family of 5,000 people who live in Medellin, Colombia, and remote mountain villages outside that city.

The family is believed to have more members who suffer from Alzheimer’s than any other in the world.

How did they find these people? Why all the focus on people “with gene mutations guaranteed to cause early-onset Alzheimer’s” and not on the “conventional Alzheimer’s”? I guess it’s a place to start…

$50 million from the current year’s NIH budget to pay for research including the Colombia trial.

An additional budget increase of $100 million is proposed for 2013 for research, education, caregiver support and data collection.

The Colombia drug trial will be financed with $16 million from the National Institutes of Health, about $15 million from private donors through the Banner Institute and $65 million from Genentech, the drug’s U.S. manufacturer.

Oh… it does include private money…

[Dr. Eric Reiman, executive director of the Banner Alzheimer's Institute in Phoenix, a lead researcher] said his team worked to persuade pharmaceutical companies to invest in the unusual, and sensitive, research. “We would have to be like Mark Twain,” he said, “getting the companies to pay to whitewash the fence and give us access to their most promising treatments.”

Researchers, U.S. officials and drug companies were especially sensitive to the fact that the study would be conducted on people in a developing country, many of whom have little education, paltry incomes and a history of superstitions about the disease they call “la bobera” — the foolishness.

The risks, he said, were balanced by the fact that if nothing is done, “they’re going to get this terrible, terrible disease for sure.”

Well, their means are beyond my ability to influence: I hope they come up with some useful information to fight this disease.

In the past two years, the number of people in the U.S. who are older than 16 (and not in the military or prison) has grown by 5.4 million. The number of people working or looking for work hasn’t grown at all.

…Figuring out how many of those now on the job-market sidelines are likely to come back onto the field matters to gauging the current state of the economy, to fashioning the right remedy for the sluggish recovery and to evaluating prospects for economic growth, which hinge, in part, on an expanding labor force.

OR, you could quit messing about with the system, get out of the way and allow it to find its own healthy solutions…

naaaaaaah. Silly idea.

…the official unemployment rate may be giving a misleadingly rosy reading of the job market. (It counts only those who say they are looking for work.) The U.S. may be even further from full employment than the 8.1% jobless rate suggests, and thus the economy might benefit from more fiscal or monetary adrenaline.

Wait… Is this a justification for more stimulus?!?

More jobless and disheartened workers turning to disability benefits or reluctant retirement, or otherwise leaving the workforce for good.

Not only is this a waste of human potential, but it diminishes the rate at which the U.S. economy can safely grow. It also creates a growing cadre of Americans who will need the support of the working population and makes the government budget deficit worse because there will be fewer workers to pay taxes. There’s no precise way to measure the size of this contingent. Official estimates of “discouraged workers” understate the problem; they count only those who say they want to work and have looked for a job in the past 12 months.

The longer people remain out of work, the more risk they will fall out of the workforce altogether. Getting them back to work—or keeping them tied to the job market through training or volunteering or collecting unemployment compensation—would have long-lasting benefits.

hm… You mean this?

The U6 unemployment rate counts not only people without work seeking full-time employment (the more familiar U-3 rate [the one reported on the nooz]), but also counts “marginally attached workers and those working part-time for economic reasons.” Note that some of these part-time workers counted as employed by U-3 could be working as little as an hour a week. And the “marginally attached workers” include those who have gotten discouraged and stopped looking, but still want to work. The age considered for this calculation is 16 years and over.

[14.5 -- April 2012]

U1 : Percentage of labor force unemployed 15 weeks or longer.
U2 : Percentage of labor force who lost jobs or completed temporary work.
U3 : Official unemployment rate per ILO definition.
U4 : U3 + “discouraged workers”, or those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no work is available for them.
U5 : U4 + other “marginally attached workers”, or “loosely attached workers”, or those who “would like” and are able to work, but have not looked for work recently.
U6 : U5 + Part time workers who want to work full time, but cannot due to economic reasons.

The U6 does not count people that have said “fuhgeddaboudit — where’s my gov’t check?!?”

As of January 2012, the most recent month available, there are 46.5 million Americans in the [SNAP program, which is technically a joint Federal/State effort].

That equates to 22.2 million households. To put these numbers in perspective, that is 20% of all households in the country. If the “Food Stamp Nation” were it state, it would be the largest one in the Union.

If the adults enrolled in the SNAP program (about half the total) all voted for one Presidential candidate in the Fall, they would represent over 2x the margin of victory in the last election.

And why wouldn’t they?

Yet More: Whole article is worth a read

President Obama’s budget suffered a second embarrassing defeat Wednesday, when senators voted 99-0 to reject it. Coupled with the House’s rejection in March, 414-0, that means Mr. Obama’s budget has failed to win a single vote in support this year. [more]

* Wedgie

Never let a a crisis go to waste, especially a made-up one. [/sarc]

This is a gift-from-God reality show treatment if there ever was one…

John Waters could have been starring in one of his own films today when he was picked up hitchhiking in Ohio by members of an indie rock band.

The band Here We Go Magic was motoring in a van through eastern Ohio, close to the Pennsylvania border, when they passed a man on the side of the road holding up a sign. They picked up the man, who turned out to be Baltimore’s own quirky filmmaker.

To repay the band’s generosity, Waters reportedly bought them all lunch.

Meanwhile, I’m now hearing that a Sun editor spotted Waters hitchhiking — with the same Route 70 sign — very early Monday morning near Guilford, off of St. Paul. He had no luggage, just grocery bags and the sign…. The plot thickens…

OPEN THREAD

Wow! Hawt Investment Opportunity!!! Jump in!!

Facebook Inc increased the size of its initial public offering by almost 25 percent, and could raise as much as $16 billion as strong investor demand for a share of the No.1 social network trumps debate about its long-term potential to make money.

…its IPO, floating about 421 million shares in an offering expected to be priced on Thursday.

…the third-largest initial share sale in U.S. history after Visa Inc and General Motors.

Facebook raised the target price range to $34-$38 per share in response to strong demand, from $28-$35, …value the company at $93-$104 billion…

With some 900 million users, it had $1 billion in net income on revenue of $3.7 billion in 2011…

Wow! That’s Great! Make $$$$$$$$$$ — Overnight!!!!!! We’re Saaaaaaaaved!!!!!!!

The revised budget plan unveiled by Brown on Monday projected $283 million in Facebook IPO-related revenue for California’s current fiscal year and $1.2 billion in the next fiscal year.

Happy Daze Are Here Again!!!!! Spend SPEND SPEND!!!!!! We’re gonna be rolling in dough!!!! Handing it out on street corners. Every Californian can be on a pay-off “Commission” or “Board”!!!!! WeeWeeWeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!

General Motors Co. plans to stop advertising with Facebook Inc. after deciding that paid ads on the site have little impact on consumers’ car purchases…

wait…. Gov’t Motors?

GM will continue to promote its products on Facebook, but without paying the social-media company…

What could possibly go worng?

Turkey’s Chief of General Staff Necdet Özel met with U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta for one hour in his office on May 10 … [where] he reiterated Turkey’s demands for the unmanned aerial vehicles, Reaper and Predator…

“demands”?

…in late December… along a narrow mountain ridge, a caravan of 38 men and mules paused on the Turkish-Iraqi border. Then they heard the propellers overhead. Minutes later, Turkish military aircraft dropped bombs that killed all but four of the men.

…It was a U.S. Predator drone that spotted the men and pack animals, officials said, and American officers alerted Turkey.

The U.S. drone flew away after reporting the caravan’s movements, leaving the Turkish military to decide whether to attack, according to an internal assessment by the U.S. Defense Department…

The strike … was meant to knock out Kurdish separatist fighters. Instead it killed civilians smuggling gasoline …ignit[ing] protests across the country and prompt[ing] wide-ranging official inquiries.

…The U.S. role, which hasn’t previously been reported, revealed the risks in a new strategy for extending American influence around the globe.

…After a decade of troop-intensive land wars, the Obama administration is promoting advanced drones, elite special forces and intelligence resources as a more nimble, and less expensive, source of military power. The strategy relies heavily on close cooperation with regional allies, in part to reduce the need for American troops on the ground.

Well, Turkey — right? Maybe Yemen… Somalia…. aQ — right?

…There is a statement on the FAA website that said that they are streamlining the process for public agencies to fly unmanned aerial surveillance planes, drones, inside the U.S.

…it’s been used once already. There’s already a case, a North Dakota man apparently testing the legality of drones in the domestic law enforcement cases…

KRAUTHAMMER: …I don’t want regulations, I don’t want restrictions — I want a ban on this. Drones are instruments of war. The founders had a great aversion to any instruments of war, the use of the military inside of the United States. They didn’t like standing armies, it has all kinds of statutes against using the Army in the country. A drone is a high-tech version of an old army and a musket. It ought to be used in Somalia to hunt bad guys, but not in America. I don’t want to see it hovering over anybody’s home.

Yes you can say we have satellites, we’ve got Google Street. And London has a camera on every street corner. But that is not an excuse to cave in on everything else and accept a society where you are always under — being watched by the government. This is not what we want. I would say you ban it under all circumstances. And I would predict, I’m not encouraging, but I predict the first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that’s been hovering over his house is going to be a folk hero in this country.

CARLSON: …here is what we know about drones. They’re cheap, they’re very cheap, they’re much cheaper than a police helicopter, multiples cheaper. … And there are a lot of them for sale as we are withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq. This is the perfect storm. We are going to see these around the country and they will be used for uses not yet considered and the result will be to lessen our privacy from what it is now.

Drones? For police enforcement? What’ll they think of next?!?

As we first reported last year, high tech street lights with “homeland security applications” are now being installed in major U.S. cities.

The street lights also have loudspeakers that can give audible warnings to individuals, mimicking the talking surveillance cameras in the UK that shout out orders through microphones telling people to pick up litter or leave the area.

…manufacturer Illuminating Concepts announcing the progress of its ‘Intellistreets’ system.

…A recent press release put out by Amerlux announces the company’s partnership with Illuminating Concepts to further advance the rollout of ‘Intellistreets’. The announcement confirms that the street lights will have a number of “homeland security features” including a loudspeaker system that will be used to “engage captive audiences”.

“Engage Captive Audiences”

“Controls, Monitors, & Maintains The Sensory World”

…SmartSite is a 24/7 area-wide system that offers architectural luminaire styles, a robust platform, digital wireless solutions, Wi-Fi capabilities, and a myriad of homeland security features.

…to provide information, advertising, security and entertainment for public spaces …can be equipped with a variety of cameras and sensors to ensure real-time 24/7-security coverage. The sensors detect a variety of threats that enable rapid response from emergency personnel or help prevent crime and gain control of the streets. …backed by a centralized remote control of lighting, signage and audio messaging that allow pedestrians to be ushered quickly and safely to the nearest route during storm warnings, events or emergencies… Using both video and audio advertising messages, businesses can promote brands… will provide a seamless audience experience as well as generate a measurable revenue stream.

Nice …”art work” on those poles.

Vid here.

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