XIAM007 - Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Tuesday, 12 July 2011

Fan Who Caught Jeter's 3,000th Hit May Owe IRS Thousands -

The tax man may be on the hunt for the super fan who caught Derek Jeter's 3,000th hit.

Christian Lopez, 23, recovered the prized ball his father fumbled after The Captain hammered it into their section of the stands in the third inning of the Yankees' win over Tampa Bay on Saturday.

The Verizon salesman from Highland Mills, N.Y., gave the ball back to Jeter, whom he called an "icon," and the Yankees lavished a slew of prizes, including luxury box seats for every remaining home game this season and post-season and some signed memorabilia, upon him.

Now the IRS wants a piece. The prizes Lopez received are estimated to be worth more than $32,000 -- and, like game show contestants, Lopez may have to pay taxes on the gifts and prizes because the IRS considers them income.

Some estimate the IRS will put Lopez on the hook for anywhere between $5,000 and $13,000, reports the Daily News.

If it comes down to that, Lopez says he'll pay the tax man because he's not about to relinquish his seats. The young government major says his family and friends will help him out.

"The IRS has a job to do, so I'm not going to hold it against them, but it would be cool if they helped me out a little on this," Lopez told the News.

Read more - http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Fan-Who-Caught-Jeters-3000th-Hit-May-Owe-IRS-Thousands-125406723.html

An Addition to the List of Tax Loopholes - Day traders and speculators who buy and sell futures contracts -

As the White House and Congress wrangle over raising the debt ceiling and reducing the federal deficit, tax loopholes would seem to be an easy target for compromise.

President Obama has talked about eliminating breaks for partners at hedge funds and private equity firms — along with corporate jet owners, oil companies and others taking advantage of quirks in the tax codes.

Here’s another little-known group of tax code beneficiaries that he might want to add to the list: day traders and speculators who buy and sell futures contracts.

For years, futures contracts, which are essentially bets on the price of commodities, stock indexes and the like, have received a more favorable tax treatment than stocks. A trader who buys and sells an oil contract in less than a year — even in a matter of minutes — pays no more than a 23 percent tax on the profits.

Compare that with the bill for flipping shares of Google, General Electric or even a diversified mutual fund in the same time period. Those short-term investment gains are treated like ordinary income, meaning the rate can run as high as 35 percent.

“There are so many ways to attack the logic of it,” Warren E. Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, said in an interview on Monday about of the futures tax break. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Read more - http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/07/11/an-addition-to-the-list-of-tax-loopholes/?emc=eta1

Salt: How Bad Is It, Really? -

Much like cell phones and eggs, salt is one of those things that studies say is bad for you one day, but O.K. the next.
Just last year, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated (using previous studies' numbers) that the U.S. could prevent 44,000 deaths annually if Americans reduced their salt intake by 3 grams per day.
Then, early this month, a review of seven real-life interventions to reduce salt consumption found nothing of the sort. The review, from the Cochrane Collaboration, found only ambiguity, with no evidence to suggest that salt reduction did the trial participants any good or any harm.
"It's Time to End the War on Salt," a headline in Scientific American proclaimed last week. "For every study that suggests that salt is unhealthy, another does not," the article said. As if to prove that point, a new paper this week in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine now argues, again, that too much salt is bad.
The latest study used national U.S. survey data linked to mortality files to show that the more salt people ate, the higher their death rates from all causes combined. The study looked further at salt intake in relation to potassium intake, and found that the lower people's potassium and the higher their sodium, the more likely they were to develop heart disease or die of a heart-related cause.
So just how bad is salt for us exactly — and why is there so much disagreement on the issue?

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/07/12/salt-how-bad-is-it-really/

Area 51 as seen from the air, circa 1964. This rare photograph has never been published before." -

"Yucca Flat, which spans several areas at the Nevada Test Site, is one of the most bombed-out places on Earth," writes Jacobsen. "In this photo taken during the winter months from a helicopter above Area 10, the Sedan Crater can be seen in the forefront. A 104-kiloton bomb was buried at a depth of 635 feet, and its detonation produced a crater 1,280 feet wide and a 320 feet deep, moving 12 million tons of radioactive dirt in an instant and creating a hole that can be seen from space."
Inside

Monday, 11 July 2011

Cyclist riding to work collides with nearly 300-pound bear, smacked him off bike and fled into some nearby woods -

Cyclist riding to work collides with nearly 300-pound bear, smacked him off bike and fled into some nearby woods -

A Panama City man is recovering after colliding with a black bear while riding his bike to work.

John Hearn said he saw something out of the corner of his eye early Thursday morning. The nearly 300-pound bear smacked him off his bicycle and then fled into some nearby woods. Passing motorists stopped to help Hearn, who sustained minor injuries. The back tire of his bike was also ripped off.

Read more - http://www.wtsp.com/news/florida/article/200596/19/Black-bear-Florida-bicyclist-collide

Pharmacist sentenced to LIFE for shooting robber -

A pharmacist has been sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in the shooting death of a teenager who tried to rob the south Oklahoma City store where he worked.

Jerome Ersland had no reaction and said nothing as Oklahoma County District Judge Ray Elliott handed down the sentence Monday.

As the 59-year-old Ersland left the courtroom he told a reporter the sentence is "an injustice of a monumental proportion."

In May, a jury convicted Ersland of first-degree murder in the May 2009 shooting of 16-year-old Antwun Parker.

Defense attorney Irven Box said the conviction and sentence will be appealed.

Survey Shows Men Need to Cuddle, Women Value Sex -

That old chestnut about women always wanting to cuddle? Myth, according to a Kinsey Institute study, which finds that kissing and hugging were more important to the happiness of men than of women.

The study involved 1,009 heterosexual middle-aged and older couples in long-term (average 25 years) committed relationships in five countries. Researchers asked participants to fill out questionnaires about their satisfaction with their relationships and sex lives, revealing some surprising truths: for instance, men who reported frequent kissing or cuddling with their partners were on average three times as happy with their relationships as men who reported limited snuggling. For women, such shows of tenderness didn't have much impact on relationship satisfaction.

How Seawater Can Power the World -

DEBATE about America’s energy supply is heating up: gas prices are rising, ethanol is under attack and nuclear power continues to struggle in the shadow of the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

But an abundant, safe and clean energy source once thought to be the stuff of science fiction is closer than many realize: nuclear fusion. Making it a reality, however, will take significant investment from the government at a time when spending on scientific research is under threat.

Harnessing nuclear fusion, the energy that powers the sun and the stars, has been a goal of physicists worldwide since the 1950s. It is essentially inexhaustible and it can be created using hydrogen isotopes — chemical cousins of hydrogen, like deuterium — that can readily be extracted from seawater.

Fusion energy is created by fusing two atomic nuclei, in the process converting mass to energy, which appears as heat. The heat, as in conventional nuclear fission reactors, turns water into steam, which drives turbines to generate electricity, or is used to produce fuels for transportation or other uses.

Fusion energy generates zero greenhouse gases. It offers no chance of a catastrophic accident. It can be available to all nations, relying only on the Earth’s oceans. When commercialized, it will transform the world’s energy supply.

There’s a catch. The development of fusion energy is one of the most difficult science and engineering challenges ever undertaken. Among other challenges, it requires production and confinement of a hot gas — a plasma — with a temperature around 100 million degrees Celsius.

But potential solutions to these daunting technical challenges are emerging. In one approach, known as magnetic fusion, hot plasma is confined by powerful magnets. A second approach uses large, intense lasers to bombard a frozen pellet of fusion fuel (deuterium and tritium nuclei) to heat the pellet and cause fusion to occur in a billionth of a second. Whereas magnetic fusion holds a hot plasma indefinitely, like a sun, the second approach resembles an internal combustion engine, with multiple mini-explosions (about five per second).

Saturday, 9 July 2011

North Carolina uses more antibiotics for livestock than the entire United States uses for humans -

The deaths of 31 people in Europe from a little-known strain of E. coli have raised alarms worldwide, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Our food often betrays us.
Just a few days ago, a 2-year-old girl in Dryden, Va., died in a hospital after suffering bloody diarrhea linked to another strain of E. coli. Her brother was also hospitalized but survived.

Every year in the United States, 325,000 people are hospitalized because of food-borne illnesses and 5,000 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s right: food kills one person every two hours.

Yet while the terrorist attacks of 2001 led us to transform the way we approach national security, the deaths of almost twice as many people annually have still not generated basic food-safety initiatives. We have an industrial farming system that is a marvel for producing cheap food, but its lobbyists block initiatives to make food safer.

Perhaps the most disgraceful aspect of our agricultural system — I say this as an Oregon farmboy who once raised sheep, cattle and hogs — is the way antibiotics are recklessly stuffed into healthy animals to make them grow faster.

The Food and Drug Administration reported recently that 80 percent of antibiotics in the United States go to livestock, not humans. And 90 percent of the livestock antibiotics are administered in their food or water, typically to healthy animals to keep them from getting sick when they are confined in squalid and crowded conditions.

The single state of North Carolina uses more antibiotics for livestock than the entire United States uses for humans.

This cavalier use of low-level antibiotics creates a perfect breeding ground for antibiotic-resistant pathogens. The upshot is that ailments can become pretty much untreatable.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America, a professional organization of doctors, cites the case of Josh Nahum, a 27-year-old skydiving instructor in Colorado. He developed a fever from bacteria that would not respond to medication. The infection spread and caused tremendous pressure in his skull.

Read more - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/opinion/12kristof.html

The “War On Drugs” Is A $2.5 Trillion Racket: How Big Banks, Private Military Companies And The Prison Industry Cash In -

Anyone who researches the “War on Drugs” already knows that it has been a very costly disaster. As the Global Commission on Drug Policy recently reported:

“The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world….
Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply or consumption….
Government expenditures on futile supply reduction strategies and incarceration displace more cost-effective and evidence-based investments in demand and harm reduction.”

The War on Drugs has cost US taxpayers over $2.5 trillion dollars. From 1998 – 2008, a UN study estimates that the use of opiates has increased 35 percent and cocaine use has increased 27 percent. Due to nonviolent drug offenses, the US prison population has increased “more thantwelvefold since 1980.”
The War on Drugs has also fueled organized crime and drug related violence has dramatically increased over the past few years. Due to drug war violence, since December of 2006, a stunning45,000 people have been killed in Mexico alone.
Despite numerous reports and a mountain of evidence proving the utter failure of the War on Drugs, the Obama Administration has defended the effort and escalated the war. What many reports criticizing the War on Drugs fail to discuss is how successful the war has been at enriching the global financial elite. The War on Drugs, just like the War on Terror, is another criminal racket set up to benefit profiteering banks, military companies and the prison industrial complex at our tragic expense.
Here’s a concise summation of how the global bankers cash in:

How Drug Profits Saved Capitalism
“Drug profits, in the most basic sense, are secured through the ability of the cartels to launder and transfer billions of dollars through the US banking system. The scale and scope of the US banking-drug cartel alliance surpasses any other economic activity of the US private banking system. According to US Justice Department records, one bank alone laundered $378.3 billion dollars between May 1, 2004 and May 31, 2007. Every major bank in the US has served as an active financial partner of the murderous drug cartels….
If the major US banks are the financial engines which allow the billion dollar drug empires to operate, the White House, the US Congress and the law enforcement agencies are the basic protectors of these banks…. Laundering drug money is one of the most lucrative sources of profit for Wall Street; the banks charge hefty commissions on the transfer of drug profits, which they then lend to borrowing institutions at interest rates far above what – if any – they pay to drug trafficker depositors. Awash in sanitized drug profits, these US titans of the finance world can easily buy their own elected officials to perpetuate the system.”

Here’s an example of how private military companies are profiteering:

Private Contractors Making a Killing off the Drug War
“As tens of thousands of corpses continue to pile up as a result of the US-led ‘War on Drugs’ in Latin America, private contractors are benefiting from lucrative federal counternarcotics contracts amounting to billions of dollars, without worry of oversight or accountability.
U.S. contractors in Latin America are paid by the Defense and State Departments to supply countries with services that include intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, training, and equipment.
‘It’s becoming increasingly clear that our efforts to rein in the narcotics trade in Latin America, especially as it relates to the government’s use of contractors, have largely failed,’ said U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill, chair of the Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight which released a report on counternarcotics contracts in Latin America this month. ‘Without adequate oversight and management we are wasting tax dollars and throwing money at a problem without even knowing what we’re getting in return.’”

For a further understanding of how the War on Drugs is deeply intertwined with the War on Terror, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has led to an explosive increase in drug trade profits:

Afghanistan as a Drug War
“From a modest 185 tons at the start of American intervention in 2001, Afghanistan now produced 8,200 tons of opium, a remarkable 53 percent of the country’s GDP and 93 percent of global heroin supply.
In this way, Afghanistan became the world’s first true ‘narco-state.’ If a cocaine traffic that provided just 3 percent of Colombia’s GDP could bring in its wake endless violence and powerful cartels capable of corrupting that country’s government, then we can only imagine the consequences of Afghanistan’s dependence on opium for more than 50 percent of its entire economy.
At a drug conference in Kabul this month, the head of Russia’s Federal Narcotics Service estimated the value of Afghanistan’s current opium crop at $65 billion. Only $500 million of that vast sum goes to Afghanistan’s farmers, $300 million to the Taliban guerrillas, and the $64 billion balance ‘to the drug mafia,’ leaving ample funds to corrupt the Karzai government in a nation whose total GDP is only $10 billion.”

Another major beneficiary of the drug war racket is the booming US private prison industry. With a stunning 2.3 million citizens imprisoned, the US incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. Most of these people are in jail as a result of draconian drug laws. Even former President Jimmy Carter recently spoke out against the mass incarceration resulting from the War on Drugs:

Call Off the Global Drug War
“Drug policies here are more punitive and counterproductive than in other democracies, and have brought about an explosion in prison populations. At the end of 1980, just before I left office, 500,000 people were incarcerated in America; at the end of 2009 the number was nearly 2.3 million. There are 743 people in prison for every 100,000 Americans, a higher portion than in any other country and seven times as great as in Europe. Some 7.2 million people are either in prison or on probation or parole — more than 3 percent of all American adults!
Some of this increase has been caused by mandatory minimum sentencing and “three strikes you’re out” laws. But about three-quarters of new admissions to state prisons are for nonviolent crimes. And the single greatest cause of prison population growth has been the war on drugs, with the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses increasing more than twelvefold since 1980.
Not only has this excessive punishment destroyed the lives of millions of young people and their families (disproportionately minorities), but it is wreaking havoc on state and local budgets.”

To capture the absurdity that is the War on Drugs, here’s the Daily Show’s coverage of the ATF’s deliberate arming of Mexican drug cartels:

“The ATF plan to prevent American guns from being used in Mexican gun violence is to provide Mexican gangs with American guns.”