As Sarah Palin and others complain about $4-a-gallon gasoline, we can't help but wonder what the fuss is all about. Pound for pound, people pay far more than $4-a-gallon for lots of their favorite things all the time. Chill, baby, chill.
This article in the Huffington Post about how Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is pushing the state attorneys general to quickly as possible “bring to bed” their investigations of the wide-scale systematic violations of law by the nation’s largest financial institutions is a great reminder that, in America, there is a very important theft-to-punishment inflection point for the super rich and powerful. As demonstrated in this graph:
When you steal things of minor value, the value of what you stole is correlated with the level of punishment you receive. Shoplifting a candy bar is going to result in less punishment than stealing a car.
At some point, you steal enough to basically reach the punishment limit, which is the flat part in the graph. You will likely get the same amount of jail time if you steal $3 million or $6 million.
Eventually, though, if you systematically break the law to steal such an absurdly large amount of money for a long enough time that you become so politically powerful and integral to the entire economy, you hit the magical theft inflection point. It is the amount at which you become too big to jail and, as you can see from the graph, accountability just drops off a cliff.
My quilts are influenced by pop-art painters such as Mark Ryden and artists who have referenced a comic-strip drawing style such as Margaret Killgallen, in that I appreciate bold and graphic takes on images that are inspired by urban life. Though it is textile art rather than drawing or painting, my work is most comparable to that of pop, lowbrow and graffiti artists. My quilts are modern art pieces that happen to be rendered in fabric. I take quilts out of a rural context and bring them into present-day urban environments. My ReMix series of quilts are thematically and visually dense, full of sampled layers of meaning. They reflect the experience of city life, as seen through the graffiti, signs, and buildings present in every city. They serve as an anthropological record of an urban neighborhood, in that the images that I capture are constantly in a state of flux.Amy Ahlstrom: Urban Quilter (Thanks, Sarah Milstein!)
According to new research, oral sex causes more oral cancer than cigarettes in the U.S. $#*%! And we thought sex was supposed to be good for you…
Apparently, oral cancer has become rampant, particularly among white men, with cases increasing 225% between 1974 and 2007 (According to the Oral Cancer Foundation, diagnoses are up to 37,000 people per year). Maura Gillison, an Ohio State University researcher, blames the human papilloma virus (HPV), which she says accounts for as much as 64% of throat cancer cases and beating out tobacco use as the leading cause of oral and throat cancers. She also notes that the more oral sex partners someone has, the greater his cancer risk.
There are over 100 strains of HPV, about 40 of which can be sexually transmitted; while many assume that oral sex is safe, it easily transmits HPV and other STDs.
In more uplifting news: Women’s Health says that semen can make your teeth healthy. That’s worth something, right?
via CNN
Post from: BlissTree
Oral Sex Causes More Oral Cancer Than Cigarettes
The blog-o-sphere is abuzz with praise for Vivian Maier’s mid-century photographs of public New York and Chicago life. The photos were taken by a live-in nanny working for wealthy families in Chicago’s north shore. Her photos, over 100,000 of them, were discovered after her death two years ago. To my untrained eye, they are gorgeous, interesting, and well-composed. A fascinating look at another time. More sociologically, they gracefully depict differences in socioeconomic class. I wonder if Maier, working-class herself, had a special sensitivity to these divides. In any case, I appreciate the texture that the photographs add to an understanding of how people of different classes lived.
Three examples and 14 more after the jump:
More:
A self-portrait:
Visit the website devoted to Maier here. Photos borrowed from there and Chicago Magazine. Via Crooked Timber.
(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)
