purplegem

Survival Flick "The Grey" Is a Tear-Jerker. wired.com.

"Adventure-thriller "The Grey" reveals its gutsy story like a clockwork onion. A propulsive tale of plane-crash survivors fighting for their lives in the Alaskan wilds, the movie strips its characters of their bravado and exposes their souls layer by layer, one brush with death or honest moment of brotherhood at a time.

And ultimately, tears might flow.

The movie stars Liam Neeson in a gripping performance as a man called Ottway, a hired killer of wolves at an Alaskan oil outpost. Desperately missing his wife, he works with a rifle and a sense of grim determination, plugging the wild canines to keep his roughneck colleagues safe.

When a plane shuttling workers back from a remote site encounters turbulence, the tough guys on board joke at first. Then things get harrowing fast as the movie plunges its characters into a Call of the Wild-style survival adventure riddled with bracing blasts of raw emotion. Just like the pack of wolves that menaces them, the men settle into a loose hierarchy, with Ottwayâ€s alpha status being questioned as he attempts to lead the group to safety.

Itâ€s a man-versus-nature tale of what happens when technology fails us completely and weâ€re left with nothing but our wits, and our comrades, to survive. And itâ€s enough to make some reviewers cry â€" in a good way."

"The Tank Man of Tienanmen Square. Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston in victory. The portrait of the Afghan Girl on the cover of National Geographic. Many of us can automatically recall these photos in our heads, but far fewer can name the photographers who took them. Even fewer know what those photographers look like.

Tim Mantoani hopes to change that by taking portraits of famous photographers holding their most iconic or favorite photos in his new book Behind Photographs: Archiving Photographic Legends. Mantoani has shot over 150 of these portraits in the last five years, most of which are contained in the book.

"I felt like there was kind of this void," says Mantoani. "There were all these anonymous photographers out there who have not been given enough credit."

At a time when everyone has a camera in their pocket and millions, if not billions of photos are flying around the internet each day, Mantoani wants to help people understand that iconic photos don't just happen. They are the product of people who devote their entire lives to photography. Giving these people a face, he says, helps do that.

"It was important to step back and understand that cameras didn't make these photos, photographers made these photos," he says. "Without these people and their understanding of photography, these moments would not be there for us to understand and appreciate over the course of time." [Via Jayme Art.]

Iconic photos are thus a combination of the photographer's creativity, years of work, and raw talent.

Monsanto and GMO manipulation with viruses and bacteria.

GMOs are made by manipulation of extremely deadly viruses & bacteria (such as E. coli) that have been engineered to be IMMUNE TO ANTIBIOTICS (Pause video at 8:08). Monsanto spends millions of dollars each year in order to "sugar" coat the facts of what GMOs actually are and more importantly, how they are made.

This video straight-forwardly explains the scientific facts on how Monsanto manufactures their GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) by simply removing all the corporate propaganda, the "smoke & mirrors" if you will.

Monsanto's greed, combined with their quest to monopolize all aspects of food & seed on the planet, has knowingly allowed the proverbial Reaper free upon the world. [Via Jayme Art.]

The SEC Mulls An Investigation Calls Grow For John Boehner To Resign. politicususa.

From the page: "The complaint specifically highlights that TransCanada asserts that the pipeline will create American jobs "at a rate that is 67 times higher than job creation totals given by the company to Canadian officials for the Canadian portion of the pipeline." The inflated job creation numbers were designed to pressure President Obama to issue an approval permit to build the pipeline and without its construction, TransCanada's future earnings and share prices will be significantly impacted. Speaker Boehner owns shares in seven different Canadian tar sand companies and it is highly likely that he knows the job numbers are inflated as an investor and stands to profit if the pipeline is built. Boehner went so far as threatening to tie 160 million working Americans' payroll tax cut extension to approval of the pipeline. Boehner's extortion threats were the last straw, and inspired a national petition to force him to resign or face expulsion from Congress for ethics violations. However, ethics violations are the least of Boehner's problems once the SEC finishes their investigation which they confirmed is actively under consideration.

To be fair to TransCanada, they accurately provided Canadian regulators with realistic job numbers as well as the potential for environmental disaster which is, by the way, a near certainty according to TransCanada. Tar sands crude extraction is responsible for elevated cancer rates and involves razing ancient boreal forests, and there are 82% greater GHG emissions as compared to average crude refined in the United States. TransCanada also predicted that one of their existing pipelines would produce one spill every seven years, but it has produced 12 spills in less than one year. Even with one spill, over 1,000 rivers will be adversely impacted as well as the Ogallala Aquifer that supplies drinking water to 2 million Americans and is the primary source of groundwater for 20% of America's agriculture production. John Boehner never cites those issues and neither did Mitch Daniels (R), Indiana governor, who stated categorically in the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address that the Keystone XL project was "a perfectly safe pipeline that would employ tens of thousands." Mr. Daniels' financial disclosure form is under investigation to determine how much stock he owns in Canadian tar sand companies or TransCanada and if he owns shares in any of the companies, he will face a national petition drive to force him from politics forever.

As an investor, Speaker Boehner was privy to the authentic job creation numbers TransCanada reported to investors and Canadian regulators. It is despicable that Boehner deliberately lies to the American people for personal financial gain, but it is illegal to lie to influence investors and potential investors to drive up share price. Boehner, the American Petroleum Institute, and many Republicans in Congress have launched an aggressive set of attacks on the President to force him into granting a Presidential Permit, and the overriding point is that like TransCanada, they are using false job creation claims to exert pressure and convince Americans that the Keystone XL pipeline will be a boon to the economy, unemployed construction workers, and create lower gas prices, all of which are lies and they know they it.

It would be unethical for any person to use fallacious numbers for personal financial gain, but it is beyond the pale that the Speaker of the House knowingly lies to the American people and the media to boost Canadian tar sand companies' profits and TransCanada's balance sheets and share price. Boehner's almost daily Keystone XL propaganda is not only unfair to President Obama and the American people, it misleads potential and current investors. Manipulating share prices is a violation of SEC regulations and if their investigation finds Boehner and other GOP shareholders deliberately inflated job numbers, a House Ethics panel will be the least of Boehner's problems.

Speaker of the House John Boehner has some options. He can address the American people and admit that he deliberately lied for personal financial gain and to enrich the oil industry that stands to gain selling Canadian oil to Europe if the Keystone XL pipeline is built, or he can save his family the embarrassment and resign immediately. Mr. Boehner can rest assured of two things; if he does not admit to lying and resign immediately, the petition calling for his expulsion or resignation remains active, and this column will be unrelenting in demanding that, for once in his career, he serves all the American people and vanishes from politics as if he never existed. Now that the Securities and Exchange Commission is alerted to TransCanada and Boehner's lying, it would be incumbent on him to make the right decision before they make it for him."

[Thank you, saboma.]

Neil Gaiman talks to the Open Rights Group about how the internet affects the books and publishing industry.
Gaiman on Copyright Piracy and the Web.

Gaiman: SOPS and PIPA are on the wrong side of history. Gigaom.

From the page: "Gaiman said the Internet represents a fundamental change that is altering the competitive landscape for virtually every business whose product can be digitized and uploaded, and they need to adapt or perish. "Gutenberg put an awful lot of scribes out of work too," the author said. "They had debates back then that seem nonsensical now, like the debate about the evils of printing bibles that anyone could read, rather than having them interpreted for them by monks and priests."

That disruption isn't good or bad, Gaiman said, "it just is. It's a fact of life now." And while legislators will no doubt continue to push forward with laws like SOPA and PIPA, he said, they won't be able to turn back the clock to a time before the Internet was invented. In a video interview he recorded last year for the Open Rights Group, which is embedded below, Gaiman talked about how he was initially incensed about people pirating his work, but eventually came to the realization that they were actually promoting his work, and he was selling more in countries where his books were pirated."
[Thank you, Serinadruid.]

Doctor Who Sound Fix..Tardis take-off.
[Thank you, earlwayne.]

Disappearing Tardis!
[Thank you, earlwayne.]