Useful

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When constabulary duty’s to be done in Long Beach, California, police officers have a lot on their plates: arresting robbers and cut-throats, ticketing speeders…and being art critics.

That’s right: according to the Long Beach Post, the city’s police chief has “confirmed that detaining photographers for taking pictures ‘with no apparent esthetic value’ is within Long Beach Police Department  policy.”

The issue arose after a Long Beach police officer detained Sander Roscoe Wolff, a Long Beach resident, artist and regular contributor to Long Beach Post, for taking pictures of a local oil refinery. Wolff was released after the officer ran a check on his driver’s license.

The Long Beach Post reported the incident on June 30, shortly after it happened. In a follow-up story that appeared today, the paper quoted the police chief explaining that when “an officer sees someone taking pictures of something like a refinery, it is incumbent upon the officer to make contact with the individual.”

The protocol arises from the Los Angeles Police Department’s “Special Order No. 11″ from 2008, which spells out a policy for gathering information about activities–including non-criminal ones–that “could indicate activity or intentions related to either foreign or domestic terrorism.”

Police are instructed under the policy to write up “suspicious activity reports” for a variety of activities, including taking pictures or video footage “with no apparent aesthetic value,” and taking notes.

The police chief told the Post that police judge aesthetic value of photographers’ subjects “based on their overall training and experience.” The police chief also said that officers will generally approach photographers not engaging in “regular tourist behavior.”

So if you’re committing art photography in Long Beach, you might try licking an ice cream cone while you’re at it.

Get those evil street photographers, or else the terrorists win.

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or his project “Day Into Night”, photographer Stephen Wilkes set up a 4×5 camera with a 39-megapixel digital back 40-50 feet off the ground in a cherry picker, and photographed the scene throughout the course of one day. Keeping a constant aperture, he adjusted his shutter speed to compensate for the position of the sun. Afterward, the hundreds of images captured were edited to roughly 30-50 photos, and then seamlessly Photoshopped together to show a gradual transition from day to night.

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Discharges from pharmaceutical factories contaminate rivers on three continents.

Consumers who flush unwanted contraceptives down the drain have long been blamed for giving fish more than their fair share of sex organs. Drugs excreted by patients can also taint rivers, even after passing through wastewater-processing facilities.

But evidence is accumulating that the effluent coming from pharmaceutical factories could also be carrying drugs into rivers. Many ecotoxicologists had assumed that water-quality standards, along with companies’ desire to avoid wasting valuable pharmaceuticals, would minimize the extent of bioactive compounds released by factories into wastewater, and ultimately into rivers.

A string of studies suggest otherwise. In 2009, for example, researchers^1,2 reported very high levels of pharmaceutical ingredients in treated effluent coming from a plant that processes wastewater from factories near Hyderabad, India. The following year, a similar discovery was made at two wastewater-treatment plants in New York, both of which received discharges from drug-production plants³.

Now, researchers have provided the first evidence of similar problems in Europe⁴, and have linked it to sex disruption in wild fish populations found in the Dore River in France. “People thought this could not happen in a country that has high environmental standards and good manufacturing practices,” says Patrick Phillips, head of the National Water-Quality Assessment Program at the US Geological Survey in Troy, New York, and lead author of the US study. “The evidence from the United States and now from France shows that this is not the case.”

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Experts from the University of Queensland, Australia, write: “TV viewing time may have adverse health consequences that rival those of lack of physical activity, obesity and smoking; every single hour of TV viewed may shorten life by as much as 22 minutes.”

And that’s just the commercials!

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“Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and their former editor Andy Coulson all face embarrassing new allegations of dishonesty and cover-up after the publication of an explosive letter written by the News of the World’s disgraced royal correspondent, Clive Goodman.
In the letter, which was written four years ago but published only on Tuesday, Goodman claims that phone hacking was “widely discussed” at editorial meetings at the paper until Coulson himself banned further references to it; that Coulson offered to let him keep his job if he agreed not to implicate the paper in hacking when he came to court; and that his own hacking was carried out with “the full knowledge and support” of other senior journalists, whom he named.”

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Perry has received a total of $37 million over the last decade from just 150 individuals and couples, who are likely to form the backbone of his new effort to win the Republican presidential nomination. The tally represented more than a third of the $102 million he had raised as governor through December, according to data compiled by the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice.

Nearly half of those mega-donors received hefty business contracts, tax breaks or appointments under Perry, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis.

The rest of you can go pray for rain.

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WSJ: So you painted a bleak picture of sub-par economic growth going forward, with an increased risk of another recession in the near future. That sounds awful. What can government and what can businesses do to get the economy going again or is it just sit and wait and gut it out?

Roubini: Businesses are not doing anything. They’re not actually helping. All this risk made them more nervous. There’s a value in waiting. They claim they’re doing cutbacks because there’s excess capacity and not adding workers because there’s not enough final demand, but there’s a paradox, a Catch-22. If you’re not hiring workers, there’s not enough labor income, enough consumer confidence, enough consumption, not enough final demand. In the last two or three years, we’ve actually had a worsening because we’ve had a massive redistribution of income from labor to capital, from wages to profits, and the inequality of income has increased and the marginal propensity to spend of a household is greater than the marginal propensity of a firm because they have a greater propensity to save, that is firms compared to households. So the redistribution of income and wealth makes the problem of inadequate aggregate demand even worse.

Karl Marx had it right. At some point, Capitalism can destroy itself. You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to Capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That’s what has happened. We thought that markets worked. They’re not working. The individual can be rational. The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else’s income and consumption. That’s why it’s a self-destructive process.