All major companies stop advertising on al Jazeera America; U-verse drops channel

 

Posted on August 21, 2013 by creeping

Except Vonage – if they can be considered major anything. Details below. via FFA.

 

 

 

 

CurrentTV officially became Al Jazeera America and started airing Al Jazeera content on August 20, 2013.

Al Jazeera America made their start with no major companies advertising on the network thanks to the support of thousands of Florida Family Association supporters.

Florida Family Association’s:

• Weekly contact with top officials at the companies that advertised on Al Jazeera America influenced 105 companies to stop advertising.
• Supporters who sent emails to companies that advertised on Al Jazeera America influenced 13 companies to stop advertising.
• Overall efforts influenced 118 companies to stop advertising.  See list posted below.

Florida Family Association tapes ten hours of programing on Al Jazeera America (formerly CurrentTV) every day.  The Florida Family Association office communicates with each advertiser no less than once per week.  This monitoring effort and contact with companies influenced 105 companies to stop advertising on Al Jazeera America.

 

Companies that continue to advertise after receiving emails from the Florida Family Association office are categorized as a major corporation, smaller company or non-profit organization (free) and rated from most frequent to least frequent.  Florida Family Association features the top advertisers in email campaigns and web articles.  Major companies were targeted one at a time because there were so few of them.  Some smaller companies, even with frequent ads, may never be targeted with a campaign because of their inferior reputation.

 

Florida Family Association launched thirteen email campaigns that were all successful in influencing the thirteen companies to stop advertising on Al Jazeera America thanks to thousands emails sent by FFA supporters.  All of the following companies, targeted in an email campaign, stopped advertising:  ADT, Allstate, Chrysler Group (Dodge Dart, Fiat) E-Trade, Foster Grant, Hershey, KIA, Nestle (Gerber Life Insur.), Pfizer, P&G (Gillette), Reckitt Benckiser plc, Red Lobster and Reputation.com. 

 

Additionally, many companies, more than for any other issue, contacted the Florida Family Association office to communicate their decision not to advertise again.  The companies that contacted Florida Family Association to communicate their intentions to pull off of Al Jazeera America include:  Approved Colleges, Binder & Binder, Craftmatic, Denny’s, DeVry University, Disaronno, Dream Brands, FabriClear, Harvest Direct, Heineken, iCan, Laser Spine Institute, Life Alert, National Collector’s Mint, Plymouth Direct, PODS, TD Ameritrade and The Tax Resolvers.

 

The use of advertising time by Al Jazeera America has been measured as follows: 18% for promotion of the channel and/or cable company, 7% for promotion of five non-profit organizations and 75% for advertising of sixteen small companies.  The breakdown for the channel’s advertising time is posted in the second table below.

 

IT IS IMPORTANT to encourage Corporate America NOT to advertise on Al Jazeera America because:

• American consumer dollars used to pay for goods and services provided by Corporate America should not go to support Al Jazeera.
• Corporate America brands appearing on the channel give implied approval to Al Jazeera.
• The policies of Corporate America may eventually be challenged to conform to the standards of Al Jazeera in order to reach the growing Muslim population in the United States.

REGARDLESS OF HOW MUCH OIL MONEY Al Jazeera spends to keep their American channel alive Corporate America must be vigorously challenged not to support the channel for the above reasons.

…

Florida Family Association deeply appreciates the support of CreepingSharia and BareNakedIslam.com for posting Floridafamily.org reports regarding these web campaigns that influenced some many companies to stop advertising on Al Jazeera America.

Al Jazeera is a news company that is owned by a non-democratic, monarch styled emirate who does not afford citizens freedom of the press, espouses Islamic Sharia law, backs the leader of Hamas and supports the Muslim Brotherhood.  Al Jazeera, headquartered in the Middle East (Doha, Qatar), purchased the CurrentTV channel in December 2012.  The CurrentTV name was changed to Al Jazeera America on August 20, 2013.

 

Support the Florida Family Association and their tremendous effort to keep al Jazeera’s anti-American propaganda out of the U.S. and subscribe to their mailing list to participate in their easy to use email campaigns that have immediate impact.

 

More via Breitbart.com: Al Jazeera America Dumped By 5 Million Customer Cable Provider

The Wrap reports that a mere hour before Al Jazeera America launched Tuesday, cable provider AT&T U-Verse dropped the Qatar-financed cable news channel over a “contract dispute.” This is a loss of five million potential households.

As of July 2013, U-Verse boasted over 5 million TV customers, though not all of them are subscribers to the package that contains Al Jazeera America. AT&T would not specify how many are subscribers to that package.

Thus far, after only a few hours on the air,  AJA’s launch is receiving widespread criticism. After boasting that AJA would deliver “fact-based, unbiased and in-depth news,” the network’s first guest was Stephen Walt, who is infamous for what the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg describes as “Jew baiting.”

AJA’s very first lead story Tuesday, was a sympathetic look at “anti-American terrorists detained on the battlefield for actions taken by U.S. medical personnel”.

Update: Vonage was the first and only new major corporation that advertised during the starting days of Al Jazeera America.

L.A., conservationists reach agreement to repair Mono Lake damage

By Louis Sahagun

August 23, 2013, 9:49 p.m.

Settlement over alkaline Mono Lake calls for water flows that are intended to restore the ecosystem harmed by stream diversion.

Mono Lake in December 2011. The settlement will not recreate historic flows, “but it will restore fisheries and riparian habitat that existed before the aqueduct was extended into Mono Basin in 1941,” said Geoffrey McQuilkin, executive director of the nonprofit Mono Lake Committee. (Brian van der Brug, Los Angeles Times)

Ending decades of bitter disputes over fragile Mono Lake, Los Angeles and conservationists on Friday announced an agreement to heal the environmental damage caused by diverting the lake's eastern Sierra tributary streams into the city's World War II-era aqueduct.

The controversy over alkaline Mono Lake, which is famous for its bizarre, craggy tufa formations and breeding grounds for sea gulls and migratory birds, is one of California's longest-running environmental disputes.

The settlement resolves all of the issues among weary combatants, including the city of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, California Trout and the Mono Lake Committee.

It calls for construction of a $15-million adjustable gate in Grant Dam, an earthen structure 87 feet high and 700 feet long designed to impound tributary water. The goal is to release pulses of water along a seven-mile stretch of Rush Creek to mimic annual flood cycles, distributing willow seeds and promoting healthy trout populations. The settlement will not affect water levels at Mono Lake.
Roughly 12,000 acre-feet of water will be exported to Los Angeles, which will allow DWP ratepayers to make up half the cost of the improvements at Grant Dam.

The DWP Board of Commissioners on Tuesday is scheduled to vote on the settlement, which will improve the utility's image as it prepares to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the aqueduct that helped transform the city into a metropolis of nearly 4 million people and turned portions of the Owens Valley and Mono Basin into arid wastelands.

DWP general manager Ron Nichols said the agreement "accommodates the concerns of Mono Lake stakeholders in a manner that is respectful of the concerns of LADWP's water customers for reliable and affordable water while providing certainty for all parties in the future."

The settlement will not recreate historic flows, "but it will restore fisheries and riparian habitat that existed before the aqueduct was extended into Mono Basin in 1941," said Geoffrey McQuilkin, executive director of the Mono Lake Committee, a nonprofit group organized to save and protect the bowl-shaped ecosystem roughly half the size of Rhode Island. "Now, the aqueduct can operate as required to protect the ecosystem here even as it delivers water to the city."

The settlement comes about two decades after the city was ordered to reduce the amount of water it had been diverting from Rush, Lee Vining, Parker and Walker creeks.

"This is a big deal," said Mark Drew, eastern Sierra regional manager of Cal Trout. "It was incredibly arduous to reach this agreement, which speaks to the commitment of the parties involved."
The environmental damage in the region just east of Yosemite National Park and about 350 miles north of Los Angeles was apparent by the 1970s. Tributary streams dried up. The lake level had dropped more than 40 vertical feet and the water had doubled in salinity, leaving behind smelly salt flats. The increasingly salty water threatened to kill brine shrimp, a favorite food of the estimated 50,000 California gulls that breed there each year.

The sex life of gulls became a hot topic when a declining water level revealed a land bridge connecting an island rookery to the shore, allowing coyotes to pad across and feast on the birds and their nests.

Formal protests began with a lawsuit filed in Mono County Superior Court in 1979 against the DWP by residents and environmental groups led by the Mono Lake Committee. The lawsuit alleged violations of public trust and creation of a public and private nuisance by the exposing of 14,700 acres of former lake bed.

In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a California Supreme Court ruling that environmentalists have the right to challenge the amount of water that Los Angeles imports from tributaries of Mono Lake. A decade later, the California State Water Resources Control Board ordered minimum flows restored for the diverted streams and set a minimum water level for Mono Lake while still allowing the utility to divert some water for consumption in Los Angeles.

The city's other major source of water in the region — the Owens River and a battalion of wells pumping aquifers beneath the Owens Valley — is unaffected by the Mono Lake agreement.
New stream-flow regimens are already underway, and structural modifications at Grant Dam could be completed within four years.

"We're expecting a huge leap forward in the recovery of an estimated 19 miles of stream corridors affected by this agreement," McQuilkin said. "We expect to see stream-side forests, more insects, birds and animals — and more and bigger fish."

louis.sahagun@latimes.com

Copyright © 2013, Los Angeles Times

Mysterious ‘horned’ sea monster washes ashore in Spain

The Big Blue An Outdoor // Nature Blog

 

Remains of odd, unidentified creature stretches 13 feet, leaves officials baffled; Loch Ness, water dinosaur, sea dragon are among absurd guesses

August 21, 2013 by David Strege

 

A mysterious sea creature featuring what appear to be horns on its head was discovered in the advanced stages of decomposition along the shoreline of Luis Siret Beach in Villaricos, Spain, on Thursday.
A woman first discovered the head and then found the body farther down the beach, according to ThinkSpain.com. The entire carcass with the head stretched 13 feet.
“A lady found one part and we helped her retrieve the rest,” said Maria Sanches of Civil Protection in Cuevas. “We have no idea what it was. It really stank.”

The find caused widespread speculation as to what it could be, some humorously suggesting it was a link to the Loch Ness Monster or was some sort of sea dragon or water dinosaur. Others surmised it was a mutant fish or some sort of shark species. The best guess here is an oarfish.
“It’s hard to know what we’re dealing with,” A PROMAR (Programa en Defensa de la Fauna Marina-Sea Life Defense Program) spokesman Paco Toledano told Ideal.es Ameria, according to Inexplicata. “It’s very decomposed and we cannot identify what it is.
“Perhaps we could learn something more from the bones, but to be precise, it would be necessary to perform a genetic analysis, which is very expensive and who would pay for it?
“Anyway, we have submitted the information to colleagues with more experience and knowledge to see if they can tell us something more specific.”
Toledano did shed some light on the horns of the sea creature, however. He said they are actually bones that have fallen out of place.
“It’s not a longhorn cowfish, that’s for sure,” he joked.
Photos from Ideal.es Ameria Facebook page. 

Microsoft Calls Foul After Google Yanks YouTube Access In New Windows Phone App

inShare19

Alex Wilhelm

posted 3 hours ago

79 Comments

This morning Google admitted that it had yanked access to YouTube from Microsoft’s brand-new Windows Phone application. This came fewer than 50 hours after the launch of the application. Windows Phone users were predictably disappointed.
What happened? In the intervening hours I’ve learned enough to piece together the situation. Let’s go.
When Microsoft released a new YouTube application for Windows Phone in May, Google was not pleased. The application didn’t properly carry Google advertisements, allowed for video downloads, and wasn’t branded to Google’s liking. Microsoft took the app down, and the two vowed to work together to get something done.
Why, then, did the new application have its YouTube access cut off? In short because of a spat over building the application using native code, or HTML5. Google wanted Microsoft to build the application using HTML5, which Microsoft said that it cannot do because of technical limitations of its current Windows Phone platform.
So Microsoft rebuilt its application — again, in native code — to meet Google’s three initial demands. The company also told Google that it was willing to move to HTML5 in the future, when Windows Phone could manage it. (Spoiler: Microsoft is working on a new version of Windows Phone.)
It appears that the two sides couldn’t sort this out, so Microsoft launched its application anyways. Google obviously was not entertained and axed its YouTube access. It was also not pleased that Microsoft had built its own system to interface with Google’s ads so that they could be delivered to the application. It might break, and so forth.
Microsoft wanted access to the advertising APIs that Google itself uses, but was rebuffed.
Google said in a statement that it wants everyone in its developer community to follow the “same guidelines.” That sounds reasonable: everyone builds YouTube apps with HTML5. Except Google. Google’s two mobile apps, for iOS and Android, are built with native code. Precisely what Microsoft wanted to do.
This didn’t sway Google, who wants the darn thing coded in HTML5. So, Microsoft was stuck: It needs to provide a solid YouTube experience for its users, but Google won’t let it do so sans using HTML5, which it can’t until Windows Phone itself is improved. So, a jam. In a bit of a cheeky move, the company released its own app, almost daring Google to cut off YouTube. Which it did.
Technology: Stranger than fiction.
The real crux of this is that millions of Windows Phone users can’t YouTube on the go via an app. Of course, they can watch YouTube on Internet Explorer on their Windows Phone handsets. Whatever the case, Google and Microsoft continue to slap each other. This isn’t over.
Update: Microsoft has written its own blog post that addresses the HTML5 spat in detail.

Oldest North American Rock Art May Be 14,800 Years Old Nevada petroglyphs could date back to the first peopling of the Americas.

Oldest North American Rock Art May Be 14,800 Years Old

Nevada petroglyphs could date back to the first peopling of the Americas.

Petroglyph-inscribed rocks.

Photograph courtesy Larry Benson, University of Colorado

Ker Than 

for National Geographic

Published August 15, 2013

Ancient symbols etched onto the sides of boulders lying along the western edge of a desiccated lake in Nevada are the oldest confirmed rock carvings in North America—possibly dating back to the first peopling of the New World, scientists say.

The so-called petroglyphs, carved in soft limestone millennia ago, range from simple lines, pits, and swirls to more complex and ambiguous shapes that resemble diamonds, trees, flowers, and veins in a leaf. They range from about 8 inches (20 centimeters) up to about 3 feet (1 meter) in width.

In a new study, published in this month's issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, geochemist Larry Benson and his team concluded that the petroglyphs, located about 35 miles (56 kilometers) northeast of Reno at Winnemucca Lake, are at least 10,500 years old, and perhaps as much as 14,800 years old.

"Whether they turn out to be as old as 14,800 years ago or as recent as 10,500 years ago, they are still the oldest petroglyphs that have been dated in North America," Benson, who is at the University of Colorado Natural History Museum in Boulder, said in a statement. (See video of rock art in Arizona.)

Clues in Carbonate

To date the petroglyphs, Benson and his colleagues began by figuring out just when they could have been made.

Though Winnemucca Lake is dried up now, it was once so full of water that the boulders upon which the petroglyphs are etched were submerged.

As the water levels slowly dropped, crusts of a mineral called carbonate formed on the boulders. Radiocarbon testing of these carbonate layers revealed them to range in age from about 14,800 to 10,300 years old.

The carbonate ages, combined with an analysis of sediment cores taken from neighboring Pyramid Lake, suggest that the boulders were exposed to air—and thus accessible for carving by humans—between about 14,800 to 13,100 years ago, and again from about 11,300 to 10,500 years ago. In between the two time periods, the boulders were submerged, the scientists say.

It's unknown what method was used to create the petroglyphs, but one possibility is the artists used hard volcanic rock to chip away at the carbonate, which is porous and relatively soft, said Benson, who conducted the dating research while with the U.S. Geological Survey.

As a result, the rock art would not have taken very long to carve, but "whether all of them were done within a short period of time or over a span of hundreds of years, I don't know," Benson said in an interview on Wednesday.

Rocks with petroglyphs of trees and diamonds.

Photograph courtesy Larry Benson, University of Colorado

Non-invasive Examination

Benson said it might be possible to better pinpoint the age of the petroglyphs, but it would require sampling carbonate from inside the etchings themselves—something that he has agreed not to do.

Benson obtained permission to non-invasively examine the carvings from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, which owns the land.

"One of the deals I made was that I would only work to the side of the glyphs, and not touch any of the glyphs themselves," Benson said.

Mystery Artists

Prior to the new dating of the Lake Winnemucca petroglyphs, the oldest rock art in North America was thought to be carvings found at Long Lake in Oregon that date to roughly 7,300 years ago.

Benson says he doesn't know what the symbols at Lake Winnemucca mean, or who might have made them, but he notes that their ages roughly match those of several pieces of fossilized human feces, or coprolites, that were discovered in Paisley Cave in Oregon and dated to around 14,400 to 13,000 years ago.

This date is close to when scientists think humans first began settling the Americas. In a new study published in this week's issue of the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists say they have found genetic evidence that a first wave of migrants crossed into the Americas from Asia about 15,000 to 18,000 years ago by slowly creeping down the continent's coasts.

A few thousand years later, according to the study, a second wave of humans entered North America, this time by slipping across the Bering Strait into Alaska and then crossing through an ice-free corridor into Canada.

Benson speculated that members of the first wave of settlers might have been responsible for the Lake Winnemucca rock art.

"It's possible that those people did occupy areas farther south, like the Lake Winnemucca area ... [but] it is also possible that paleoindians occupying the Winnemucca Lake basin between 11,300 and 10,500 years ago carved the petroglyphs," he said.

"At the moment we have no way to decide between the two possibilities."

Follow Ker Than on Twitter.

The Inventor Of The Rotary Engine Was A Nazi Nutjob

The guy who invented the rotary engine was a Jew-hating militaristic Nazi who was so ardently fascist he got thrown out of his own party, twice. Yes, Felix Wankel was a Nazi nutjob.

Felix Wankel was a great inventor, having invented the rotary engine with no university diploma on his resume, just experience from working in a book shop. In the 1960s, it seemed like the Wankel engine was going to be then next great innovation in car design. Even GM bought into the hype.

The engine ended up being too thirsty for the fuel-crisis '70s, and by the end of the decade only one carmaker stuck around with the rotary: Mazda. After earlier dreams of a full-rotary lineup, Mazda kept the engine going in its fantastic RX-line of sports cars, which ended up being the final cars to use rotaries.

It's because of this orphan status, and because of the legacy of cars like the double-rotor 1990s RX-7, the triple-rotor Cosmo, and the wailing, Le Mans-winning, quad-rotor 787b that the Wankel engine, and its creator have a quasi-cult following. Some call them rotards.

You could call Felix Wankel a bit cult-ish, too, but he was more interested in militarizing the Aryan race than restoring sports cars. Born in 1902 in the Baden state of Germany, Felix Wankel was an early supporter and member of the Nazi Party. He saw his first Nazi rally on a trip to Bavaria with his widowed mother in 1920, writes Marcus Popplow in Felix Wankel: more than an inventor's life. You can read much of the book right here on Google Books, if you speak German. A comprehensive summary of his Nazi career starts on page 36.

He was hardly 19 years old when he joined the 'German People's Protection and Defiance Federation' in 1922, the most active anti-Semitic group in Germany at the time, which is probably saying something. Only a year later he was a member of the official Nazi party, the NSDAP.

Throughout the 1920s, Wankel regularly traveled in public wearing a swastika, and when he posed for pictures, it was often with one on, writes Popplow.

Popplow also notes that Wankel often wrote anti-Semitic passages in his diary, though during interviews in the 1980s Wankel stated that these entries, along with anti-Semitic leaflets he distributed were only youthful mistakes.

In 1926, Wankel met with his regional leader of the Nazis, Robert Wagner and was appointed to run Baden's Hitler Youth. Wankel, however, fell out with Wagner, as Wankel wanted the Nazi party to be more militaristic. Wankel was so displeased with Wagner's more political aspirations that he publicly accused Wagner of corruption in 1931.

Wagner stripped Wankel of his title and then kicked him out of the Nazi Party. The Badische city archive gives a quote from Wagner, describing how much he hated Wankel.

Wankel is a man of entirely one-sided intelligence, which produces only in the negative ... , thereby poisonous ... acts.

Wankel didn't stop his accusations, and Wagner had him arrested in '33. Of course, this didn't stop Wankel, a charismatic speaker (as noted by the local Badische newspaper) with good connections thanks to his technical presentations to top-ranking Nazis. Hitler's economic adviser got Wankel out of jail and Wankel formed his own splinter Nazi party in Baden.

Wankel got himself a federally-appointed factory in Lindau in 1937, and though he was initially denied re-entry into the Nazi Party, Hitler's economic adviser intervened once more to make him an officer in the SS in 1940. In 1942, Wankel was kicked out by the Nazis once more, for unknown reasons. After the war, the French imprisoned him for his Nazi ties.

It's difficult to disassociate the man's Nazi side from his inventions, because his Nazi bent was particularly turned towards technology. Wankel even met with Himmler (you can see a photo of this meeting right here) and also Hitler to discuss the importance of technology and technical education. Wankel's best connection to the Nazi party came from Hitler's aforementioned economic adviser and industrialist Willhem Kepler. His first car, and his first rotary engines were built in the 1920s and 1930s.

Some argue that Wankel may be a brutally misunderstood character — that his Nazi ties were only to support his technical career, that he was making a deal with the devil, so to speak.

It does not appear that there is evidence to support this theory. I think you can gather that Wankel wasn't a casual member of the Nazi party. He was booted out once (if not twice) for being too radical. The guy was a Nazi.

Happy birthday, Herr Wankel.

---

Photo Credits: Getty Images/Mazda, Der-Wankelmotor.de

Sources

Popplow, Marcus. Felix Wankel: Mehr als ein Erfinderleben. Erfurt; Sutton Verlag, 2011.

"Erfinder und politisch wankelmütig," Badische Zeitung, August 13, 2011. This article can be found right here.

Hagedorn, Jutta. "Technisches Genie mit Schattenseiten," Badisches Stadtarchiv, August 10, 2002. This article can be found right here.

Donna Demok's PriZm Pictures on the Go

 

MEMPHIS TN (IFS) -- PriZm Pictures launches this season with Reno, Nevada's citizen, known as Mr. Motown, RG Ingersoll.

Russell George Ingersoll from Detroit. Michigan.

Known for his great recording mixes, PriZm captured an earlier mix-down session of "Thousand Shadows" for RG's All Nite Funk Band.