Friday, October 03, 2014

You only go around once. Fashion is a great place to experiment with sex appeal.

The following designers (click here) are making waves not only for their collections but also for their level-headed approach to running a fashion label with real potential.

Yes Ladies, sex appeal. There actually is a real reason why Victoria's Secret does so well. Now, with a thriving economy it seems as though finding joy, happiness and fulfillment is returning to the American landscape.

Women don't just like to look pretty, they like to make a statement and distinguish themselves from each other. It is called personality. 
  1. COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — L Brands Inc., the owner of Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works, said profit in its latest quarter increased 10 percent on stronger sales. The Columbus, Ohio-based retailer earned$156.9 million, or 53 cents per share, in the three months through May 3.

There is no casual approach to Ebola. It is a very dangerous virus. Panic, though, is more dangerous.

Sometimes during the process of copying the RNA or DNA of the virus, small errors (substitutions in nucleotide base pairs) occur in the copy. These errors are replicated into subsequent copies. If the change isn't fatal to the virus and causes it to stop replicating, then the virus has resulted in a mutation. If that mutation results in a changed protein that enables the virus to survive, infect or replicate better the virus will become more infectious.

With all do respect, no one should be minimizing the danger of this virus to the public. People have a right to know the dangers that are ahead of them. I am confident the USA will bring this under control, but, a great effort has to be given to this. The Ebola virus is probably the most dangerous problem the world has right now. The danger is immediate. 

The longer a virus exists the more of an 'opportunity' it has to mutate.

October 4, 2014

The Ebola virus (click here) could become airborne if the epidemic is not brought under control quickly enough, the chief of the United Nations Ebola mission warned yesterday.

Anthony Banbury, the UN secretary-general's special representative, said aid workers were racing against time to bring the epidemic under control in case the virus mutated and became even harder to deal with.

"The longer it moves around in human hosts in the virulent melting pot that is West Africa, the more chances increase that it could mutate," he said. "It is a nightmare scenario [that it could become airborne], and unlikely, but it can't be ruled out."

He admitted that the international community had been "a bit late" to respond to the epidemic, but that it was "not too late". Banbury, who has worked with the UN since 1988, said that the epidemic was the worst disaster he had witnessed....

Koch a typical old world company where paying fines and civil suits is still their answer to exorbitant profits.

Nothing stops these companies. Fortunately, most are no longer disregarding laws, but, there is a profound reason Koch Industries in held tightly as a private enterprise able to break every law on the books while continuing to rack in profits. They care for no one besides their family laced company.

September 24, 2014
By Tim Dickinson

The enormity of the Koch (click here) fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they've cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today's GOP. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year's midterms. So far in this cycle, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate....

...Koch touts only one top-line financial figure: $115 billion in annual revenue, as estimated by Forbes. By that metric, it is larger than IBM, Honda or Hewlett-Packard and is America's second-largest private company after agribusiness colossus Cargill. The company's stock response to inquiries from reporters: "We are privately held and don't disclose this information."...


...Under the nearly five-decade reign of CEO Charles Koch, the company has paid out record civil and criminal environmental penalties. And in 1999, a jury handed down to Koch's pipeline company what was then the largest wrongful-death judgment of its type in U.S. history, resulting from the explosion of a defective pipeline that incinerated a pair of Texas teenagers....

...Koch's climate pollution, meanwhile, outpaces oil giants including Valero, Chevron and Shell. Across its businesses, Koch generates 24 million metric tons of greenhouse gases a year....

Koch Industries is directly involved in the Canadian Tar Sands. That is how bad Koch Industries is to the American landscape. They don't care what occurs or who is killed along the way, their wealth simply buys them out of any tight spot and this is the primary financiers of the Republican Party.

Now, you tell me, with a financial backer like Koch Industries will the Republicans actually demand them to clean up their act? No. When voting for a Republican anyone in the electorate are voting for villains and scoundrels that will poison their air and water and add to the velocity of the next tornado or hurricane. The Kochs are old money that keeps getting dustier and dirtier with every passing day.

Petroleum coke, a waste byproduct of refining oil sands oil, is piling up along the Detroit River.

May 17, 2013
By Ian Austen


...And no one knows (click here) quite what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it.
The company is controlled by Charles and David Koch, wealthy industrialists who back a number of conservative and libertarian causes including activist groups that challenge the science behind climate change. The company sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste, usually overseas, where it is burned as fuel.
The coke comes from a refinery alongside the river owned by Marathon Petroleum, which has been there since 1930. But it began refining exports from the Canadian oil sands — and producing the waste that is sold to Koch — only in November....

The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway have received more than it's fair share of pollution over the decades. That was decades. Pollution from these industries has been ended a long time ago, ie: The Love Canal (click here), but, not for David and Charles Koch. After the American people have spent billions on rehabilitating the Great Lakes, the Kochs completely disregard the will of the people and continue to dump their toxic soups.

Yes, the Love Canal. That is how long Koch Industries have exceeded the capacity to be controlled while other PUBLIC companies came into compliance. 

...Mr. Masse wants the International Joint Commission, the bilateral agency that governs the Great Lakes, to investigate the pile. Michigan’s state environmental regulatory agency has submitted a formal request to Detroit Bulk Storage, the company holding the material for Koch Carbon, to change its storage methods. Michigan politicians and environmental groups have also joined cause with Windsor residents. Paul Baltzer, a spokesman for Koch’s parent company, Koch Companies Public Sector, did not respond to questions about its storage or the ultimate destination of the petroleum coke....

With Koch backing Republicans and seeking to control the legislature at the federal level is there any doubt any and all environmental controls will be rolled back and even worse dissolved to allow Koch to continue it's draconian practices that literally kill people with the pollution they produce.

Voting for a Koch Republicans is like voting for your own death. This family is heinous and continues their practices long after they have been outlawed by any other business. They simply pay fine, the lawsuits and continue to break the law and destroy lives.

How did we get to the place where it was wrong to leave Iraq?

The USA had no control over corruption. Afghanistan has been corrupt since the beginning of the war there. This is ridiculous. The USA left Iraq on December 15, 2011. Today is October 2, 2014 and the Islamic State didn't manifest in Syria until about year ago according to most sources. The Syrian Civil War was bearly started when our troops left Iraq and the Iraqi military was considered stable AS IT WAS EVER GOING TO BE. 

October 2, 2014
By Jennifer Rubin
...We debated (click here) with al-Maliki even as we debated among ourselves, with time running out. The clock wound down in December, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter continued to argue our case, extending the deadline for the Iraqis to act, hoping that we might pull out a last-minute agreement and recognizing that once our forces left, it would be essentially impossible for them to turn around and return. To my frustration, the White House coordinated the negotiations but never really led them. Officials there seemed content to endorse an agreement if State and Defense could reach one, but without the President’s active advocacy, al-Maliki was allowed to slip away. The deal never materialized. To this day, I believe that a small U.S. troop presence in Iraq could have effectively advised the Iraqi military on how to deal with al-Qaeda’s resurgence and the sectarian violence that has engulfed the country....

The United States of America illegally invaded Iraq. The numbers of civilian deaths is enormous. Where does anyone get the idea the USA troops were welcome in Iraq? Oh, wait, I forgot, the USA can invade and occupy any dam country it wants to.
Panetta can go straight to hell. I am sure his GOSSIP war revelations will well for him.
Iraq is not stable and it will never be stable. Iraq wasn't stable when the USA was occupying the country. There were killings all the time in Iraq and it wasn't with USA or Iraqi troops, it was between each other. Forget it, there was no staying in Iraq and at the time we finally left, the American people were ready to carry out a civil war themselves for the cost of the two lousy wars. 
Panetta needs a job. I hear that McDonalds will provide at least part time jobs to nearly anyone.

The Super-panamex are too big. Their displacement is too wide.

The Panama Canal can't provide enough water to raise this ship higher so the width is narrower in deeper water. I think it is too tight a fit for these ships.

Lock dimensions of 427 m (1,401 ft) in length, 55 m (180 ft) in beam, and 18.3 m (60.0 ft) in depth. 


New Panamex 366 m (1,200 ft) in length, 49 m (161 ft) wide and 15.2 m (50 ft) draft (waterline).


You have got to be joking. There is a ten foot clearance in depth. Ain't no way. The weight capacity will displace more than 60 feet. The buoyancy isn't there. What the heck were they thinking? The water displacement in 60 feet of water simply isn't there. There is a limit, but, human arrogance never admits it.


The expansion of the Panama Canal cost something like $6 billion. These ships need a lot of water to turn around, too. They need to go down around South America for now or the southern tip of Africa. These canals aren't able to handle them. 

They are playing bumper cars in the Suez. It ain't going to work.

If there was more water under this ship it could rise and would not bring it's width to bear on the lock. But, the water displacement isn't enough to allow a higher buoyancy of the ship. Why do I have a feeling the Army Corp will chime in on this mess.

The cargo weight for those containers runs from 27.5 tons for the 20 footer and up to 26.48 ton for the 40 footer. That is about right when the trailer and truck are added to the over the road weight, it comes close the max of 80,000 (40 tons) for USA roads and bridges. That is a lot of displacement to ask 60 feet of water to handle.

No playing "Chicken" in the Suez Canal.