Snow doesn't impede freedom if you know how to play

Colts - Bills game, December 10, 2017:

Isaac Asimov on an education revolution

This Bill Moyers interview happened in 1988, before Time Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.


Isaac Asimov on an education revolution

How to really sell a used car

According to Bill Myers this commercial was created by just "one guy with a phone mounted on a 3 axis gimbal and a drone."

Used Car Commercial // 1996 Honda Accord

Yet, on the YouTube site it says this:

Written and Directed by Max Lanman 

Cinematography by Christopher Ripley 

Produced by Max Lanman & Christopher Ripley 

Starring Anne Marie Avey 

Voiceover by Matt Pratt 

Featuring Papa Puff Pants 

Additional Stunt Driving by Carrie 

Original Score by Andrew Johnson 

Sound Designed and Mixed by Colin Heath 

Drone Piloting, Foley Recording, Editing, and Motion Graphics by Max Lanman 

Color by Christopher Ripley 

I'd like to send a special thanks to Burg for helping me record additional foley, Kelly and Chris for all the time you babysat and re-parked Greenie when we were out of town, Canon for helping out on the principal shoot day, and Brian for lending your handwriting to this. 

Finally, a huge thanks to Carrie for letting me do this, even though it took me a lot longer than I had planned. 

Thanks for watching!
- Max 

P.S. Read the fine print!

Whatever the above means, it suggests it was not a one-man show.  

Below is a picture of the principal creator of the commercial, Max Lanman, and his fiancé, Carrie Hollenbeck.  (source)

Although Carrie owned the 149,095-mile Accord, Anne Marie Avey drove the car in the commercial, for the most part.  (below)

If Ann Marie is not a professional actress she could be.

Finally, here is what CNBC said about the commercial:

"The idea came to me when I was driving the very stretch of highway that you see in the commercial," Lanman, the writer and director behind the project, tells CNBC Make It. He's the founder of a creativity agency based out of Los Angeles, Calif., called, LEÃO, which makes ads, virtual reality and branded content for companies like Microsoft and Häagen-Dazs. 

"It just dawned on me that making a high-end car commercial for a really crappy car might be funny, and Carrie fortunately had just the car for the job." 

Carrie Hollenbeck, now Lanman's fiancée, is not the actress in the video. That's their friend, Anne Marie Avey. "Carrie's a little bit camera shy so she didn't want to be the main character," says Lanman. But she was the stunt driver for the aerial shots that Lanman took with his drone, a DJI Phantom 3 Professional. 

He also used his own SONY A7S2 camera. In fact, except for a pickup truck he rented out to shoot some of the footage, Lanman says he did the entire project with his own equipment and with his own friends. The other cameraman is his buddy Christopher Ripley. The video's narrator with the born-for-radio voice is his neighbor, Matt Pratt. And the cat, Papa Puff Pants, belongs to Avey. 

The commercial hardly cost them a thing. 

Lanman acknowledges that they put in 200-some hours over the course of a year. And 200 hours might seem like a lot of effort to sell a car with a Kelly Blue Book value of $1,500. 

Still, he says, "the experience of doing it was just a blast. That was our M.O. from the beginning. If we have fun making this, then it will be worth it."

The Sony a7S II Lanman used is a full-frame E-mount camera that shoots 4K video.  From what I've seen a high-end smartphone could do a comparable job for shooting a commercial like this.  

Bill Myers mentioned a 3-axis gimbal.  Gimbals come in many prices, but here's one that's inexpensive:  The Zhiyun Smooth-Q 3 Axis Handheld Gimbal for Smartphones Up to 6".  $139 Prime at Amazon.

What is a gimbal?  Here's the Wikipedia answer:

Handheld 3-axis gimbals are used in stabilization systems designed to give the camera operator the independence of handheld shooting without camera vibration or shake. Powered by three brushless motors, the gimbals have the ability to keep the camera level on all axes as the camera operator moves the camera. An inertial measurement unit (IMU) responds to movement and utilizes its three separate motors to stabilize the camera. 

With the guidance of algorithms, the stabilizer is able to notice the difference between deliberate movement such as pans and tracking shots from unwanted shake. This allows the camera to seem as if it is floating through the air, an effect achieved by a Steadicam in the past. Not limited to handheld shooting, gimbals can be mounted to cars and other vehicles such as drones, where vibrations or other unexpected movements would make tripods or other camera mounts unacceptable.

The DJI Phantom 3 Professional Quadcopter 4K UHD Video Camera Drone Lanman used gets high marks from customers for its quality, but absolutely devastating comments regarding the company's customer service.  

Flatearther plans to launch

This caught my attention. I liked Astronaut Farmer and thought this might be something similar in real life.

"Self-taught rocket scientist plans to launch over ghost town"

The launch is scheduled for this Saturday.

"This will actually be the second time ['Mad' Mike Hughes has] constructed and launched a rocket. He jumped on a private property in Winkelman, Arizona, on Jan. 30, 2014 , and traveled 1,374 feet. He collapsed after that landing — the G-forces taking a toll — and needed three days to recover.

"That distance, though, would've been enough to clear the Snake River Canyon, which is a jump daredevil Evel Knievel made famous when he failed to clear it during his attempt in 1974."

So far, so good.

"Here's the thing: Hughes doesn't make all that much money — $15 per hour as a limo driver, plus tips. That's why he's scrounged for parts, finding the aluminum for his rocket in metal shops and constructing the rocket nozzle out of an aircraft air filter. He gave it a good varnish of cheap paint, and his launch pad is attached to a motor home he bought for $1,500."

"The location of the jump will be Amboy , a ghost town in the Mojave Desert and along historic Route 66. The fictional town of Radiator Springs in the Disney movie Cars was loosely based on Amboy."

"On the morning of the launch, Hughes will heat about 70 gallons of water in a stainless steel tank and then blast off between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. He plans to go about a mile — reaching an altitude of about 1,800 feet — before pulling two parachutes. They're discouraging fans — safety issues — but it will be televised on his YouTube channel . He said he's been in contact with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Bureau of Land Management.

"Following his jump, he said he's going to announce his plans to leap into the race for governor of California.

"No joke."

If Mad Mike succeeds he might make a decent governor. He knows how to stretch a dollar, he's got guts, and he "believes what he believes," meaning, I suppose, he's an independent thinker, including the view that the earth is really flat. That last part is disconcerting but could he be any worse than the current governor?

Fantastic illusionist

Peace! Peace! Anybody want peace?

Soldiers on both sides were ordered to end the Christmas Truce of 1914 by officers far from the front lines.  During that brief period of unauthorized peace the soldiers had put down their rifles and traded

chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home, these sons and fathers far away from families of their own,  

Oh, soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more;
with sad farewells, we each began to settle back to war,
but the question haunted every heart that lived that wondrous night
“Whose family have I fixed within my sights?” 

-- John McCutcheon, "Christmas in the Trenches" 

We no longer ask that question, since to answer it would be a threat to "national security."  All we do is glorify and express thanks to the troops for the killing service they're doing "over there, somewhere."

Changing the “War No More” Sentiment of Armistice Day to the War-Glorifying Propaganda of Veterans Day by Gary G. Kohls, MD

Ray Kurzweil at the CFR

Inventor, futurist, and author Ray Kurzweil talks about the future of AI and its impact on society.

Hysteria over global cooling

What's Up With That?, which claims to be the most viewed site on global warming and climate change, has sitting in its archives a "compilation of news articles on the global cooling scare of the 1970’s" reproduced from PopTech.  It's a very long list.

Here's what PopTech shows for the post of February 28, 2013:

"The scientists and computers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were confidently predicting that the frigid weather would continue. The chilling pronouncement of NOAA's senior climatologist: 'The forecast is for no change.' "

The Coming Ice Age was blamed on pollution from heavy industry.  "Environmental extremists called for everything from outlawing the internal combustion engine to communist style population controls."

Has a familiar ring to it, doesn't it?

Check out the list.  The experts warned us.

The CIA's JFK Assassination Records

Circumstantial Evidence in the JFK Assassination

by Jacob G. Hornberger

October 24, 2017 

Having recently discovered this Thursday’s legal deadline for the National Archives’s mandated release of JFK assassination records that the CIA, FBI, and other agencies have succeeded in keeping secret for more than 50 years, the mainstream media is repeatedly emphasizing that the records will contain no “smoking guns.” 

Well, duh! As I stated in my article yesterday, “I Predict Trump Will Continue the CIA’s JFK Assassination Cover-Up,” ever since the CIA began specializing in assassinations, one of its principal rules has been never to put any reference to a covert state-sponsored assassination into writing. Given such, it’s no big revelation that the records that are set to be released — assuming that President Trump doesn’t grant the CIA’s request to keep them secret — will not contain a videotaped confession, a memorandum detailing how the assassination was to be carried out and covered up, or any other such “smoking gun” type of evidence. 

However, it is a virtual certainty that the tens of thousands of records will contain bits of circumstantial evidence that further fill in the mosaic that the assassination of President Kennedy was one of the CIA’s regime-change operations, no different in principle from those carried out in the 1950s-1970s in such countries as Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Cuba, and Chile. 

The problem is that mainstream reporters and commentators, generally speaking, have no understanding of or appreciation for the importance and relevance of circumstantial evidence. To them, all that matters is direct evidence, such as a videotaped confession or a signed memorandum showing how the assassination was carried out. 

What is circumstantial evidence? The definition provided by Wikipedia is as good as any other: 

Circumstantial evidence is evidence that relies on an inference to connect it to a conclusion of fact — like a fingerprint at the scene of a crime. By contrast, direct evidence supports the truth of an assertion directly — i.e., without need for any additional evidence or inference. 

It is worth noting that courts consider circumstantial evidence to be of equal value to direct evidence. 

When the mainstream media refers to the term of Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s, they always repeat the same mantra — that the ARRB found no “smoking guns.” They are, again, referring to direct evidence and not circumstantial evidence. 

An example of circumstantial evidence was the testimony of Saundra Spencer, who was the petty officer in charge of the White House Laboratory at the Naval Photographic Center in Washington, D.C. As such, she worked closely with the Kennedy White House, including on highly classified matters. 

It would be virtually impossible to find a more credible witness than Saundra Spencer. I think that everyone, including the Pentagon and the CIA, would attest to her integrity and veracity. 

Spencer gave sworn testimony before the ARRB. The mainstream media has never devoted any attention to her testimony. Why? Because her testimony did not constitute direct evidence. That is, since she didn’t testify that she saw who shot the president or some other type of direct “smoking gun” testimony, the mainstream media has ignored what she told the ARRB. 

Spencer testified under oath that on the weekend of the assassination, she was asked to develop JFK autopsy photographs, on a highly classified basis. 

The ARRB asked Spencer to identify the official autopsy photographs in the record. She examined the photographs and told the ARRB, in direct and unequivocal terms, that those were not the autopsy photographs she developed. The ones she developed showed a big exit-sized hole in the back of the president’s head. The official autopsy photographs in the record show the back of JFK’s head to be intact. 

Spencer’s sworn testimony before the ARRB leads to but one conclusion: The official autopsy photographs in the JFK assassination are fakes.

Read the rest of the article

Jesse and Ron Pound Warhawks

AlphaGo Zero

J. Q. Adams on foreign policy

On July 4, 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams delivered an historic address on U.S. foreign policy. After reading the full text of the Declaration of Independence, he continued (a portion of his talk follows):

In the progress of 40 years since the acknowledgment of our independence, we have gone through many modifications of internal government, and through all the vicissitudes of peace and war, with other mighty nations. But never, never for a moment have the great principles, consecrated by the Declaration of this day, been renounced or abandoned.

And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the older world, the first observers of mutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to inquire, what has America done for the benefit of mankind?

Let our answer be this–America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, equal justice, and equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama, the European World, will be contests between inveterate power, and emerging right.

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

-- ‘She Goes Not Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy’, The American Conservative

War

Nutritional Ketosis and Cancer

[This article is based on Dr. Joseph Mercola's piece "Promoting Advances in Managing Cancer as a Metabolic Disease Need Your Support," August 02, 2017]

In 2012 Dr. Thomas Seyfried wrote "Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management and Treatment of Cancer." In the book's preface he writes:

Several major findings planted the seed for this treatise: 

First, it became clear to me that the therapeutic action of some anticancer drugs operated largely through reduced caloric intake. 

Second, the reduced caloric intake could target the majority of cancer hallmarks. 

Third, that ketone bodies can serve as an alternate fuel to glucose in most cells with normal respiratory function. 

Fourth, that metastatic cancer arises from cells along macrophage lineage. 

Fifth, that all cancer cells regardless of tissue origin express a general defect in mitochondrial energy metabolism. 

Finally, that cancer can be effectively managed and prevented once it becomes recognized as a metabolic disease.

Seyfried has a distinguished background. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the department of neurology at the Yale University School of Medicine and then served on the faculty as an assistant professor in neurology. Throughout his long career, he's received many awards and honors from organizations such as the American Oil Chemists Society, the National Institutes of Health, the American Society for Neurochemistry and the Ketogenic Diet Special Interest Group of the American Epilepsy Society.

He recently received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of New England, and a lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Comprehensive Integrative Medicine.

He presently serves on several editorial boards, including those for Nutrition and Metabolism, Neurochemical Research, the Journal of Lipid Research and ASN Neuro, where he is a senior editor. In total, Seyfried also has over 170 peer-reviewed publications in the scientific literature.

He and others have been able to advance the theory that cancer is primarily the result of defective energy metabolism in, and damage to, the cells' mitochondria.

Simply put, genetic mutations are not the primary cause of cancer but are, rather, a downstream effect of the defective energy metabolism. 

Seyfried is one of the pioneers in the application of nutritional ketosis for cancer, a therapy that stems from the work of Dr. Otto Heinrich Warburg, one of the most brilliant biochemists of the 20th century. Warburg, a personal friend of Albert Einstein, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1931 for how cells obtain energy from respiration. He was even nominated for two additional Nobel's.

According to Warburg,

Cancer, above all other diseases, has countless secondary causes. But, even for cancer, there is only one prime cause. Summarized in a few words, the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by a fermentation of sugar.

Primarily a researcher and professor, Seyfried doesn't personally see patients. Instead, he collaborates with clinicians who base their treatment protocols on metabolic therapy and nutritional ketosis protocols he developed. Yet, Seyfried receives progress reports from doctors and patients alike.  Mercola cites several encouraging reports.  Here is one:

Bomar Herrin

Dr. Bomar Herrin, 58, was the envy of many men his age. Working out regularly, he was averaging 16 pullups, punching the speed bag and doing a grueling P90X exercise program. But something unexpected occurred during his weightlifting routine in July 2009. Herrin, an emergency medicine physician for 30 years, felt a snap near his right shoulder.

Initially he was diagnosed with a pathological fracture. A biopsy revealed it was caused by a plasmacytoma, or a cluster of cancerous plasma cells. Plasma cells are a type of white blood cell, and when they become abnormal they are called myeloma. Myeloma cells in several parts of the body are called multiple myeloma. While Herrin had radiation to treat the plasmacytoma in his arm, a PET scan revealed lesions on his spine, sacrum and ribs, which indicated that his cancer might have spread.

Strongly motivated to find a way to halt the progression of his disease, he embarked on a different path: metabolic therapy. That was eight years ago. For eight years, Herrin has been following a ketogenic diet and fasting regularly. He recently reported to Seyfried that his cancer load and inflammation markers are down.

In March 2017, his kappa/lambda ratio was normal for the first time — a measure of multiple myeloma activity. His eating plan has also helped him reduce and stabilize his weight at 173 pounds, down from 225. And he reports: "At the Mayo Clinic, I am now being asked to describe just what I am doing!"

Conclusion

As Mercola states, metabolic therapy isn't a magic wand. It won't — and doesn't — save everyone's life. Typically, a majority of the clinics following this alternative protocol see patients at the end of their journey, typically when traditional treatments have failed. Unfortunately, a certain percentage of patients aren't going to survive, no matter what.

But if patients can get through this metabolic protocol, the median survival can increase 400 percent and their quality of life can be drastically improved.

A friend's health philosophy and diet

. . . in his own script, as of 2007.  He does not use computers and probably never will.  Overall, I think his diet and health philosophy has much to recommend it.  In my long life I've met no one who takes diet and exercise more seriously than he does.

More information:

Smart Crow

Here's a crow not hampered by the dumbing down of public education.

Sheer entertainment: 'Nique - Jordan

Dominique Wilkins was nicknamed the Human Highlight Film for good reason.  Michael Jordan needs no introduction.  Both were fierce competitors, especially when they played against each other.

Dominique Wilkins VS Michael Jordan | 'Nique 57 Points, MJ 41 | 12.10.86

Being Creative with Craigslist Ads

Callers have gotten into the spirit of the ad.  The first lady who called said she had a "galactic" interest in the items. 

My PhD son-in-law devised the ad after the two of us hauled it from upstairs down to our garage.  My original intention was to put it in the basement then call 1-800-GOTJUNK later when we had other stuff to get rid of.  He suggested Craigslist.  Giving it away would guarantee it would get a new home fast, and he had fun composing the ad.

The ad went up around 11:30 a.m. on a Saturday.  By 1:30 the desk was loaded into an F150 and on its way to its new home 20 miles away.

Climate Change Sanity

Some sober thoughts on this political thing called climate change:

Random Thoughts on Climate Change by Steve Saville 

A pat on his orange head by Eric Peters  

Pigs at the Trough by Bionic Mosquito

Even if humans are bringing about their own demise with uncontrolled pollution, getting governments involved will make it worse.  

The answer is the restoration and enforcement of property rights. 

Final Four? No, Final Two

My grandson and his new dog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZB1EN2BTwk&feature=youtu.be