born live love die

Jeez, buddy, let it go.

Order violation: 11:40 a.m., 100 block of 10th Ave. A Kirkland woman reported that her ex-husband had given their five-year-old son a dead turkey head. The woman said that the turkey head was intended for her and her boyfriend. The woman also reported that the husband had violated several restraining orders. Police attempted to contact the 46-year-old man and could not. The woman said that she is afraid for the safety of her son. The ex-husband was eventually contacted and arrested.

Afraid for the safety of her son?  Yeah, right.  A little truth would go a long way with these folks.

I shot this picture from my front door this Thanksgiving morning.

Full size after the break.

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I saw two crime related movies recently.  ”The Town” and “Gomorrah”.  The first movie is the second directorial effort from Ben Affleck.  He wrote and stars in the movie also.  I don’t know how much of the movie he actually directed, because many of the action scenes are quiet involved and speak either to a an encyclopedic memory of action films or an uncanny ability to get the right action at the right time.  The action scenes are quite good.  This movie is about a section of Boston that has raised up a lot of bank robbers.  Doug MacRay (Affleck) leads a robbery crew where his opposite is James Coughlin (Jeremy Renner).  They work for Fergie Colm (Pete Postelwaite).  The crew is pursued by FBI agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm).  Krista Coughlin (Blake Lively), James sister and Doug’s lover, vies with Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) for Doug’s affections.  How did he meet Claire?  By sticking up the bank at which she is the assistant manager.  James takes her hostage and Doug stalks her to make see if she knows anything.  It turns out she does, but it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

The story is as old as time, and parallels the story of Jonathan Wild, except that Fergie isn’t a Thief Taker.  There were very few beats to this story that I didn’t see coming.  There is an air of realism to it that has a cinematic quality, which means that it isn’t really realistic, it only appears so for the purposes of cinema.  There were times when the movie could have been speeded up with no real loss of story, and Affleck love of the two shot close up pulled me out of the movie and left me wondering about how else it could have been staged.

The story doesn’t lend itself to nuanced story telling.  This is a movie where the only color of character is in the primary range.  Bold is the starting point and over-the-top is about medium.  The women are the only characters who show any vulnerability.  Claire had fewer opportunites, but Blake Lively as Krista has more and delivers when she can.

Jeremy Renner got good reviews, but his is pretty much a one note character, and Renner plays it like it is a gong.  Some people like that sort of character in a movie.  There were a few changes I would have made to the story to provide it with a bit more moral grounding.  Doug has an existentialist journey, but that isn’t made clear.  Claire has a decision that will illuminate her sense of morality, but we don’t really see it.  Agent Frawley is not really explored to provide a clear moral picture of who he is and why he does what he does.  Many of these quibbles could have been covered easily, but the movie doesn’t do it.

It was an enjoyable action picture and speaks to Ben Affleck’s organizational skills.  Running a movie shoot requires a tremendous amount of attention to detail before one even tries to deliver on the art that one is attempting.  Affleck has that skill.

“Gommorah” is a movie based on the book of the same name by Roberto Saviano.  That book is about the crime families of Naples called the Cammora.  Saviano has had to leave Italy because of death threats on his life by members of the Cammora.

The movie uses interconnected stories and a large cast to tell several stories about the Cammora.  This movie has a more realistic feel than “The Town”.  It has a gritty look of deep focus and what we can see in the deep focus isn’t pretty.  Aging apartment buildings, abandoned buildings, rust everywhere.

The movie has no heroes.  But maybe that is the way things are for people engaged in criminal activity in Naples.  I have seen a viral video (available on Youtube) of a man being shot in Naples.  It is the surveillance footage from a corner shop.  The gunman nonchalantly walks up in back of the victim, shoots him in the head, and nonchalantly walks away.  Many people saw the killer’s face, but no one was willing to speak.

Italy has a plunging birth rate.  Society can become unstable with an aging population and an influx of immigrants who don’t speak the language and don’t know the customs.  The government is the problem in that government corruption hinders efforts to establish and enforce the rule of law.

The movie is interesting, if only for a voyeuristic view of rampant pathology.

As a control systems exercise, Research D’Andrea at ETH looks like a lot of fun.

and

There are a lot of links at the web site.

Dopamine receptor D4 is encoded by the DRD4 gene.  A new study linked variations in this gene to a variety of thrill seeking behaviors, including infidelity.

In a first-of-its-kind study, a team of investigators led by Justin Garcia, a SUNY Doctoral Diversity Fellow in the laboratory of evolutionary anthropology and health at Binghamton University, State University of New York, has taken a broad look at sexual behavior, matching choices with genes and has come up with a new theory on what makes humans ‘tick’ when it comes to sexual activity. The biggest culprit seems to be the dopamine receptor D4 polymorphism, or DRD4 gene. Already linked to sensation-seeking behavior such as alcohol use and gambling, DRD4 is known to influence the brain’s chemistry and subsequently, an individual’s behavior.

Other reports:

His team discovered that there is a variation in the thrill-seeking gene and those with much longer alleles are more prone to, well, getting prone. (An allele is part of the gene’s DNA sequence responsible for different traits such as eye color or curly hair.)   Those with at least one 7-repeat allele reported a higher rate of promiscuity — that is admitting to a “one-night stand.” The same group had a 50 percent increase in instances of sexual cheating. ”It turns out everyone has got the gene,” said Garcia, who is a doctoral fellow in the laboratory of evolutionary anthropology and health at SUNY Binghamton. “Just as height varies, the amount of information in the gene varies. In those who have more, their alleles are longer and they are more prone to thrill-seeking.”  ”It’s inheritable, too,” he said. “If your parents have it, you have it.”   When the brain is stimulated — drinking alcohol, jumping from planes, having sex — it releases dopamine, the pleasure response hormone.

But that is not all:

Upbringing, experience and culture may actually wield more influence than the risk-taking gene, according to Susan Quilliam, a noted British psychologist and author of the updated “Joy of Sex.” “We are learning more and more about genes implicated in behaviors,” she said. “Every time a genetic study comes out, responsible scientists also stress that we have choice — nature and nurture,” she said. “Not everyone with the gene is promiscuous and not everyone who is promiscuous will have that gene.”

And can’t risk-taking be a good thing? “Sometimes that overlaps with creativity, with entrepreneurship and wanting to push the boundaries,” she said. “In relationships that can be exciting and fulfilling and help the whole couple move into new areas.”

So should a woman have her boyfriend tested before accepting his marriage proposal? “By the time she meets him, unless he is very young, his track record will prove whether he has acted on his infidelity gene or not,” said Quilliam. “If he has been unfaithful in the past, he is likely to do it in the future.”

Why is it that it is assumed that men are the cheaters?  I have never cheated.  I can’t say that about the women I have known.

There is one thing that money can’t buy, and it isn’t love.  It is the ability to read other people’s emotions.

Upper-class people have more educational opportunities, greater financial security, and better job prospects than people from lower social classes, but that doesn’t mean they’re more skilled at everything. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds surprisingly, that lower-class people are better at reading the emotions of others.

There are probably a lot of stories for which this is the sub-text.  Rich man loses everything and must then actually work for a living.  He is successful only when he learns to read and respect the emotions of the people around him.

And I was thinking of an O.Henry story when I wrote that first line.  In the story, a man arranges for his child to meet the right person by paying for a series of happenstances which propel the two people together.  I can’t remember the story title.  But it is still probably true that you can’t buy love for yourself.

Recently revealed documents suggest that around 30% of the capital required to keep the Nazi regime afloat came from the people, principally Jews, that they killed.  Sometimes the Jews fought back.

On November 19, 1943, inmates staged an uprising against the Nazis and attempted a mass escape. A few succeeded in escaping, but most were recaptured and killed. The SS staff and their local auxiliaries murdered at least 6,000 Jews who had survived the uprising killings, as well as Jews in other forced labor camps in Galicia, at the time of the Janowska camp’s liquidation.

Sometimes aggression must be met with aggression.

Life has been found in the deepest part of the Earth’s crust that we have been able to explore.

IT’S crawling with life down there. A remote expedition to the deepest layer of the Earth’s oceanic crust has revealed a new ecosystem living over a kilometre beneath our feet. It is the first time that life has been found in the crust’s deepest layer, and an analysis of the new biosphere suggests life could exist lower still.

On a hypothetical journey to the centre of the Earth starting at the sea floor, you would travel through sediment, a layer of basalt, and then hit the gabbroic layer, which lies directly above the mantle. Drilling expeditions have reached this layer before, but as the basalt is difficult to pierce it happens rarely.

To facilitate the task, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme set its sights on the Atlantis Massif. Tectonic activity beneath this submerged mountain in the central Atlantic Ocean has pushed the gabbroic layer within 70 metres of the sea floor, making it easier to reach (see diagram). A team led by Stephen Giovannoni of Oregon State University in Corvallis drilled down to 1391 metres, where temperatures reach 102 °C.

There, they found communities of bacteria that were sparse but widespread. The type of bacteria they found came as a surprise to Giovannoni, who has previously found micro-organisms living in the basalt layer. “We expected to find similar organisms in the deeper layer,” he says. “But actually it was very different.”

The planet is alive in ways that we don’t understand.

I am a veteran.  I am more of a pacifist now than I was when I was younger.  My conflict is that I feel pride when I read things like this:

I was with Alpha Element, which was led by Staff Sergeant Homestead.  We were first on the boat and moved to the superstructure as Bravo Element, led by Staff Sergeant Hartrick, made their way aft and then below decks…

The details of what happened next are important as they highlight the individual actions of 24 highly trained shooters who were put in decision points of the highest moral magnitude: when to shoot, when not to shoot.  I can’t go into all those details at this time, but the long and short of it was: some of the enemy threw their hands up when rifles were put in their face, some ran and attempted to elude us in the superstructure but were run down and some hesitated but were taken down by less than lethal force, as the situation dictated.  The end result was 9 pirates captured in an opposed boarding and 11 crew members rescued.

I’ve never been more proud than I was watching the balance of violence of action and professional restraint that is the hallmark of a true professional warrior.

That is something that the idiots who populated the Bush White House will never understand.

I have a bunch of RSS feeds set up on my Google front page and one of the feeds is a “This Day in History”.  On September 10, there was a bit about the Lattimer Massacre.  I made a note of it but didn’t log something here about it.

The Lattimer massacre is the violent death of 19 unarmed striking immigrant anthracite coal miners at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 1897. The miners, mostly of Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German ethnicity, were shot and killed by a Luzerne County sheriff’s posse. Scores more workers were wounded.

When people talk about socialism and unions, they don’t remember what things were like for people who had no voice and no property.  People used to get shot down.  The shooters when they were tried, were acquitted.