Panhandle Slim… Art for Folk…
Sensitive New Age guy
The making of Sgt. Pepper
Ancient hair
See, I just love this stuff:
Her coiffure queries began, she says, when she was killing time in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore back in 2001. A bust of the Roman empress Julia Domna caught her eye. “I thought, holy cow, that is so cool,” she says, referring to the empress’s braided bun, chiseled in stone. She wondered how it had been built. “It was amazing, like a loaf of bread sitting on her head,” says Ms. Stephens.
A hairstylist by day, Janet Stephens has become a “hair archaeologist” studying the intricacies of ancient Greek and Roman hairstyles. As WSJ’s Abby Pesta reports, she’s been published in the academic community on her research, which she says proves the intricate hairstyles were not wigs.
She tried to re-create the ‘do on a mannequin. “I couldn’t get it to hold together,” she says. Turning to the history books for clues, she learned that scholars widely believed the elaborately teased, towering and braided styles of the day were wigs.
She didn’t buy that. Through trial and error she found that she could achieve the hairstyle by sewing the braids and bits together, using a needle. She dug deeper into art and fashion history books, looking for references to stitching.
In 2005, she had a breakthrough. Studying translations of Roman literature, Ms. Stephens says, she realized the Latin term “acus” was probably being misunderstood in the context of hairdressing. Acus has several meanings including a “single-prong hairpin” or “needle and thread,” she says. Translators generally went with “hairpin.”
The single-prong pins couldn’t have held the intricate styles in place. But a needle and thread could. It backed up her hair hypothesis.
In 2007, she sent her findings to the Journal of Roman Archaeology. “It’s amazing how much chutzpah you have when you have no idea what you’re doing,” she says. “I don’t write scholarly material. I’m a hairdresser.”
John Humphrey, the journal’s editor, was intrigued. “I could tell even from the first version that it was a very serious piece of experimental archaeology which no scholar who was not a hairdresser—in other words, no scholar—would have been able to write,” he says.
He showed it to an expert, who found the needle-and-thread theory “entirely original,” says Mr. Humphrey, whose own scholarly work has examined arenas for Roman chariot racing.
Ms. Stephens’ article was edited and published in 2008, under the headline “Ancient Roman Hairdressing: On (Hair)Pins and Needles.” The only other article by a nonarchaeologist that Mr. Humphrey can recall publishing in the journal’s 25-year history was written by a soldier who had discovered an unknown Roman fort in Iraq.
Big oopsie on Lyme disease
Wow. There was yet another major assault on Lyme victims by the medical establishment about six months ago, insisting none of this was true. Why, you would almost think patients could be trusted to tell the truth!
Bad news first? Mistakes were made counting Lyme disease cases. Big mistakes. According to the CDC, its previously reported numbers were short by a factor of 10. The more accurate total is 300,000 new cases of Lyme disease per year.
More bad news? In multiple studies, antibiotics typically used to treat Lyme disease have been proven to not eradicate all of the Lyme bacteria in animals. More recently, these same antibiotics, doxycycline and amoxicillin, were also proven to be unable to kill all of the Lyme bacteria in the lab.
In other words, people treated for Lyme disease based on the Infectious Diseases Society of America treatment guidelines may continue to suffer from symptoms caused by an active infection.
It is reported drugs with the highest activity against Lyme persisters do not work against the actively growing spirochetes that cause Lyme disease, according to Lucy Barnes, director of Lyme Disease Education and Support Groups of Maryland. This means to kill all of the Lyme bacteria in its various stages a combination of drugs would be necessary for an undetermined length of time.
The good news? A follow up study published by Johns Hopkins confirmed eradication of the Lyme bacteria in the lab was achieved using a combination of three drugs — daptomycin, cefoperazone and doxycycline.
People with Lyme disease who experience symptoms after standard treatment now have a legitimate reason for their complaints, an ongoing infection.
Many patients treated by the IDSA’s insurance friendly protocols were mistakenly told they were cured and were denied further treatment even when suffering from continuing, relapsing or worsening symptoms. Many were reported to be malingerers, or were inappropriately referred for mental health counseling, or were prescribed anti-inflammatory medications and told to begin an exercise program, or worse yet, were prescribed steroids to mask their symptoms, rather than receiving appropriate antimicrobial treatment for a chronic, disabling and sometimes life-threatening infectious disease, Barnes said.
With Lyme tests still missing 75 percent of those who are infected, many of these people have since been misdiagnosed with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, MS, Parkinson’s, ALS, anxiety, heart conditions, depression, ADD, autism, cancer, arthritis and a host of other conditions with no known cause and no known cure. Chances are good that a new combination of FDA approved drugs already on the market may help those with chronic Lyme and other maladies that mimic the later, more expensive and extensive, disabling stages of Lyme disease, Barnes said.
I couldn’t even get treated the first time when, despite having all the classic symptoms (including the bite ring), the highly inaccurate blood tests kept coming back negative. God only knows what the little bastards have done to me after all these years.
The NYT deigns to mention dark money behind Walker
Soon, Mr. Walker began talking with Mr. Grebe and other advisers about the White House. As he started making visits over the winter to national conservative conferences, as well as early nominating states like Iowa and New Hampshire, he made Act 10 a centerpiece of his stump speech.
David Koch offered an opinion at a recent private gathering that Mr. Walker was the favorite for the Republican nomination. And Mr. Walker’s old allies are hungry once more for a leader who will go to extremes, this time as president.
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Boycott Live Nation
We’ve already seen when happens when a stage is poorly built – people die. And naturally, Live Nation is pulling this shit in the areas where extreme weather is more likely to hit. Greed is our national epidemic:
Brian Hill is a 28-year-old stagehand from Atlanta who’s been planning to address Wednesday’s annual shareholders meeting of the giant Beverly Hills-based concert promotion firm Live Nation Entertainment.
Hill has been hoping to explain that Live Nation condemns stagehands in his home region to poverty-level wages while depriving them health and retirement benefits. Conditions in many venues are dangerous and unhealthy — sometimes the workers aren’t even given water to drink. Safety training is all but nonexistent.
The Crew One stagehands are not subject to the contracts Live Nation has signed with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, or IATSE, for shows in which Live Nation is the direct employer. Union scale for stagehands in Atlanta runs from $18 to $26 an hour; employers also are required to contribute to IATSE’s retirement and health insurance funds. (In Los Angeles, union rates are higher: At Staples Center, for instance, staffers earn a minimum of about $32 an hour.)
When Live Nation works through Crew One, however, the technical workers are paid as little as $9 an hour — a hair above Georgia’s minimum wage of $7.25 — according to testimony delivered by Crew One General Manager Jeff Jackson at a National Labor Relations Board hearing in April 2014. It pays no health or retirement benefits. Crew One’s “independent contractors” have to provide their own hard hats, rigging ropes and steel-toed work boots, which are required on the job. Crew One provides no safety training, Jackson acknowledged, though the firm’s website declares, “We make safety a top priority.”
Sure they do! Uh huh.
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What makes a woman?
TISA is even worse than TPP
David Dayen on the Wikileaks release of TISA (Trade In Services Agreement) documents, and yes, it’s really, really bad:
The deal would liberalize global trade of services, an expansive definition that encompasses air and maritime transport, package delivery, e-commerce, telecommunications, accountancy, engineering, consulting, health care, private education, financial services and more, covering close to 80 percent of the U.S. economy. Though member parties insist that the agreement would simply stop discrimination against foreign service providers, the text shows that TiSA would restrict how governments can manage their public laws through an effective regulatory cap. It could also dismantle and privatize state-owned enterprises, and turn those services over to the private sector. You begin to sound like the guy hanging out in front of the local food co-op passing around leaflets about One World Government when you talk about TiSA, but it really would clear the way for further corporate domination over sovereign countries and their citizens.
Reading the texts (here’s an example, the annex on air transport services) makes you realize the challenge for members of Congress or interested parties to comprehend a trade agreement while in negotiation. The “bracketed” text includes each country’s offer, merged into one document, with notations on whether the country proposed, is considering, or opposes each specific provision. You need to either be a trade lawyer or a very alert reader to know what’s going on. But between the text and a series of analyses released by WikiLeaks, you get a sense for what the countries negotiating TiSA want.
First, they want to limit regulation on service sectors, whether at the national, provincial or local level. The agreement has “standstill” clauses to freeze regulations in place and prevent future rulemaking for professional licensing and qualifications or technical standards. And a companion “ratchet” clause would make any broken trade barrier irreversible.
It may make sense to some to open service sectors up to competition. But under the agreement, governments may not be able to regulate staff to patient ratios in hospitals, or ban fracking, or tighten safety controls on airlines, or refuse accreditation to schools and universities. Foreign corporations must receive the same “national treatment” as domestic ones, and could argue that such regulations violate their ability to provide the service. Allowable regulations could not be “more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service,” according to TiSA’s domestic regulation annex. No restrictions could be placed on foreign investment—corporations could control entire sectors.
This would force open dozens of services, including ones where state-owned enterprises, like the national telephone company in Uruguay or the national postal service of Italy, now operate. Previously, public services would be either broken up or forced into competition with foreign service providers. While the United States and European Union assured in a joint statement that such privatization need not be permanent, they also “noted the important complementary role of the private sector in these areas” to “improve the availability and diversity of services,” which doesn’t exactly connote a hands-off policy on the public commons.
Corporations would get to comment on any new regulatory attempts, and enforce this regulatory straitjacket through a dispute mechanism similar to the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process in other trade agreements, where they could win money equal to “expected future profits” lost through violations of the regulatory cap.
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