Weirdly Beautiful

That is weirdly beautiful. Why would anyone want to go south and miss a sight like this? 

St Joseph Lighthouse, Lake Michigan 1/2014 after storm 

This is the St. Joseph Lighthouse on Lake Michigan. Today, it is encased in ice

as the Midwest was hit with wind chills that reached -50 degrees.

 

 

 

 What it normally looks like

Great Caesar’s Ghost

On the nauseating spectacle that is the State of the Union address

The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.

It’s the most nauseating display in American public life — and I write that as someone who has just returned from a pornographers’ convention.

It’s worse than the Oscars.

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Pool Hall Expert: How To Get Hustled

Many of the world's top pool sharks will be "smashing the rack" this weekend at one of America's premiere billiard tournaments: the Derby City Classic.

Held at Horseshoe Southern Indiana casino — not far from the site of Louisville's Kentucky Derby — the event promises thousands of dollars in prizes to masters of games such as bank pool, one-pocket and nine ball.

"Watching serious pool players compete for high stakes is something to behold," says R.A. "Jake" Dyer, billiard aficionado and author of "The Hustler & The Champ." "It's quite entertaining and just as exciting as any sport."
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State Commissioner: EPA Regulations Could Threaten ND Power Grid

Oil train derailments and a Canadian pipeline explosion that left North Dakota's Red River Valley without power in the midst of subzero temperatures has energy infrastructure in the headlines. But one state official says the Environmental Protection Agency is "threatening" North Dakota's power system with new emission regulations, which, he says, are impossible to comply with.

"This is not an attempt to close down power plants," EPA Region 8 administrator Shaun McGrath said during the event, according to the Bismarck Tribune. "Coal needs to be part of our energy future." But Public Service Commissioner Randy Christmann says proposed emissions regulations for new power plants tell a different story, one that could mean a bottleneck for power in a growing state.

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Sniffer and Tinni, The Story of Friendship Between A Fox and A Dog

It may sound like a fairy tale, but Sniffer the red fox and Tinni the dog are the best of friends despite the overwhelming odds of becoming enemies due to what they are. Both animals live on the same property as photographer Torgeir Berge, who quickly noticed that foxes and dogs are more alike than not. This realization caused Torgeir to openly oppose and speak out against the Norwegian fox fur trade. 

This video shows a dog and a wild fox who has been best friends for a long time and are enjoying what nature has to offer. Both are in need of freedom and joy. Foxes are, like other animals, dependent on the freedom to explore, live and play over large areas. Instead , they are born into a meaningless life in a cramped wire cages, with no opportunity to live a natural life. What excuse do we have for causing such great suffering of approximately one million animals each year, only for an unnecessary and pretentious product?

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To see more photos click HERE

SnakeBite Causes $89,000 Hospital Bill For North Carolina Couple

The couple visited the emergency room in August to receive treatment. The sticker shock comes as Americans continue to battle high health care costs following the introduction of the American Care Act

A couple in North Carolina is speaking out against hospital pricing after receiving a bill for an 18-hour emergency-room stay which they say cost them a whopping $89,000. The Charlotte Observer reports that Eric Ferguson visited a hospital near his home in Mooresville, N.C. over the summer after being bitten by a snake.

The four vials of anti-venom medication Ferguson received reportedly cost about $20,000 each. Ferguson and his wife Laura researched the price of the medicine and found its retail price was between $750 and $12,000 per vial. Medicare, they reportedly found, would have paid about $9,460 for the total treatment

Though their Blue Cross Blue Shield Insurance reduced the bill to a little over $20,000, according to the Charlotte Observer, and they only ended up paying about $5,400 to cover their deductible and co-pay, the couple said they were shocked by the price of treatment.

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Yahoo Email Account Passwords Stolen

NEW YORK (AP) -- Usernames and passwords of some of Yahoo's email customers have been stolen and used to gather personal information about people those Yahoo mail users have recently corresponded with, the company said Thursday.

Yahoo didn't say how many accounts have been affected. Yahoo is the second-largest email service worldwide, after Google's Gmail, according to the research firm comScore. There are 273 million Yahoo mail accounts worldwide, including 81 million in the U.S.

It's the latest in a string of security breaches that have allowed hackers to nab personal information using software that analysts say is ever more sophisticated. Up to 70 million customers of Target stores had their personal information and credit and debit card numbers compromised late last year, and Neiman Marcus was the victim of a similar breach in December.
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Forget Metadata … The NSA Is Spying On EVERYTHING

The NSA’s spying on everyone’s metadata can tell them just about everything about us … and it violates our Constitutional right to freedom of association.

But people are getting distracted from the big picture by focusing on metadata.

As security expert Bruce Schneier wrote yesterday:

What frustrates me about all of this — [the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board] report, the president’s speech, and so many other things — is that they focus on the bulk collection of cell phone call records. There’s so much more bulk collection going on —phone calls, e-mails, address books, buddy lists, text messages, cell phone location data,financial documents, calendars, [smartphone apps] etc. — and we really need legislation and court opinions on it all. But because cell phone call records were the first disclosure, they’re what gets the attention.

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District Apologizes After Taking Student Lunches

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Erica Lukes and other Utah parents were outraged when their children had their deep dish pizzas and other food taken and thrown away at their elementary school after a cashier said they owed money on their lunch accounts.

Lukes said taking the $2 meals from about 30 students was "humiliating and demoralizing."

"People are upset, obviously, by the way this has been handled because it's really needless and quite mean," she said. "Regardless if it's $2, $5, you don't go about rectifying a situation with a balance by having a child go through that."

The Salt Lake City School District apologized on Thursday and said it was investigating what happened at Uintah (Yoo-IN-tah) Elementary and working to make sure it doesn't happen again.
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Want To See Hillary In White House For 8 Years?

GOP positioned to advance Obama 'fast track' trade scheme

WASHINGTON – A nationwide, bipartisan survey released Wednesday measuring voters’ attitudes about the “fast-`track” authority the Obama administration is seeking to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement through Congress indicates Republican lawmakers who vote for the measure are risking their careers and could help put Hillary Clinton in the White House.

The survey results are especially bad news for House Speaker John Boehner and leading Republican House members such as Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan. Republican voters in general and conservatives in particular have concluded the GOP House leaders are capitulating to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the big business interests attempting to rush the bill though Congress.

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Possibly The Best Soldier-Dog Reunion Video Ever

Should California’s Crowded Prisons Look To San Francisco’s Shrinking Jails?

In the 1980s, San Francisco faced a court order similar to the one the state is facing now to reduce overcrowding. Rather than simply throwing the book at people, the city now often treats jail as a last resort and focuses on reintegrating ex-offenders back into society.

When Paul Henderson graduated from law school, he says, “Nobody clapped.” That’s because his family was wary of his goal of becoming a prosecutor. Henderson grew up in the San Francisco housing projects, where law enforcement was often seen as an adversary, and his career decision didn’t sit well with his mother, a public defender, or his grandmother, a community activist. But Henderson rejected the notion that as a black man from a poor neighborhood, he was destined to represent criminal defendants. In the world where he was raised, racial minorities were disproportionately charged with crime—but also disproportionately victims of it. He chose a career in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office because he wanted victims and witnesses to be able to speak with someone who shared their background. But he also believed he could change the criminal justice system from within.

Henderson, who is 46, spent nearly 20 years as a prosecutor. Now he is deputy chief of staff and public safety director for San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee. But he remains an activist on criminal justice reform. And he is well versed in the challenges facing a state whose tough-on-crime approach hasn’t done much to improve public safety, best illustrated by the much-criticized “three strikes” laws. “People do bad things, and they absolutely should be arrested, and there absolutely should be justice,” says Henderson. “But what that justice can look like has to be a broader discussion than ‘more jail—end of discussion.’”

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The "One Ring" Scam Could Prove Costly If It Finds Its Way To Your Phone

Your cell phone rings. But just once.

Then you see a missed call from an area code you don't recognize, like 268, that turns out to be from the Caribbean.

So you're curious and you decide to call it back.

That call back can prove costly.

It's being called the "One Ring" scam and it's shown up on phones of Marylanders and folks across the U.S.
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Runaway Bay Apartments

Obamacare's Unpopularity Rises Among Uninsured

As the deadline for 2014 enrollment nears, Obamacare is increasingly growing unpopular, especially among the uninsured. A new Kaiser Family Foundation survey finds that about twice as many uninsured people have an unfavorable view of the health-care law than have a favorable one.

Among the uninsured, 47 percent view Obamacare in a negative light versus the 24 percent who view it favorably. That’s a change from 43 percent who viewed it unfavorably last month, and 36 percent who viewed it favorably. Overall, half of Americans view Obamacare unfavorably, while just over one-third have a positive take on the law. ​

More of the uninsured also said Obamacare made them worse off (39 percent) than improved their situation (26 percent), according to the poll.

Source

SFD Calls For Service 1-30-14

• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 23:50:03Nature: Sick SubjectCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 19:13:17Nature: Automatic AlarmAddress: 101 Long Ave Salisbury, MD 21801
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 16:45:36Nature: Medical AssistAddress: 30451 Zion Rd Salisbury, MD 21801
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 15:31:30Nature: Difficulty BreathingCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 14:02:06Nature: Chest PainCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 13:17:42Nature: Pi AccidentCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 13:10:45Nature: Pi AccidentAddress: 812 Boundary St Salisbury, MD 21801
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 13:10:39Nature: Pi AccidentCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 12:53:22Nature: Pi AccidentCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 12:44:42Nature: Pi AccidentCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 11:59:00Nature: SeizureCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 11:20:17Nature: Subject FallenCity: Parsonsburg
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 10:25:32Nature: Difficulty BreathingCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 09:56:57Nature: Pi AccidentCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 08:16:26Nature: Difficulty BreathingCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 08:06:47Nature: Subject FallenCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 08:06:20Nature: Sick SubjectCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 08:01:27Nature: Sick SubjectCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 07:36:26Nature: Pi AccidentCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 07:35:02Nature: Subject FallenCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 05:58:13Nature: Smoke / Co DetectorAddress: 1002 Limestone Ct Salisbury, MD 21801
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 02:04:14Nature: InjuryCity: Salisbury
• Thursday January, 30 2014 @ 00:21:45Nature: ChokingCity: Salisbury

BREAKING NEWS: Keystone Pipeline Clears Key Hurdle

State Department review raises no major environmental objections to Keystone XL project, in a major boost for supporters of the Canada-to-Texas pipeline.

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Bankruptcy In The USSA: Detroit Bondholders About To Be GM'ed In Favor Of Pensioners

First, the Obama administration showed during the course of the GM and Chrysler bankruptcy proceedings, that when it comes to Most Preferred Voter classes, some unsecured creditors - namely labor unions, and the millions of votes they bring - are more equal than other unsecured creditors - namely bondholders, and the zero votes they bring. Five years later we are about to get a stark reminder that under the superpriority rule of a community organizer for whom "fairness" trumps contract law any day, it is now Detroit's turn to make a mockery of the recovery waterfall. As it turns out, bankrupt Detroit is proposing to favor pension funds at roughly double the rate of bondholders to resolve an estimated $18 billion in long-term obligations, according to a draft of a debt-cutting plan reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The breakdown to unsecured stakeholders would be as follows: 40% recovery for pension funds, 20% for unsecured bondholders - all this to the same pari class of unsecured creditors. Because just like in Europe when cashing out on CDS in insolvent nations is prohibited as it would suggest that the entire Eurozone experiment is one epic farce, regardless of how much "political capital" Goldman Sachs has invested in it, so in the US municipal creditors are realizing that in the worst case scenario, they will be layered first and foremost by all those whose votes are critical in keeping this crony administration in power.

According to the WSJ  the plan calls for recovery to be divided among the unsecureds amounting to $4.2 billion, more than the originally planned $2 billion to settle claims which included about $11 billion in unsecured debt, including $6 billion in health and other benefits for retirees; $3.5 billion for retiree pensions; and about $530 million in general-obligation bonds.

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Bad Accident Just Happened Moments Ago On Bypass

There's been a bad accident on the Bypass past the Mall heading towards Fruitland, (so to speak). A vehicle has overturned and they are down to one lane. 

Smaller Wind Turbine Collecting Data In Berlin In Advance Of Larger One

BERLIN — Town residents may have been surprised to see a much smaller than expected wind turbine turning silently in Berlin this week, but the sight is temporary, as it’s only being used to collect wind data and will be replaced this summer by a much larger construct.

Installed last week, the current, 7kw turbine sits on the former Rayne’s Sand and Gravel property on Old Ocean City Boulevard. The machine is collecting data on wind speed and direction that will be taken into account when the larger, 50kw turbine is installed. The smaller, 21-foot tall device with four-foot blades is also serving as a test run in construction for its 65-foot tall, 19-foot bladed big brother.

“The 7KW wind turbine is collecting data regarding wind direction and speed to be used to build a 50kW gearless wind turbine,” said Laura Allen, town administrator for Berlin. “Once that process is complete in the next three to four months, the smaller wind turbine will be removed and replaced by the 50kw wind turbine.”
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