Featured adoptable pet(s) of the day

These two adorable senior Labs need to go home together. They love one another so much! Wilma (chocolate lab) and Betty (black lab) were found together, dumped on the street. They are 10+ years old and would love a comfy home to live their last few years in. They are your typical labs, so even at 10+ they still have energy and tons of heart. They love snacks and know the sit command. They would do best without small kids bugging them. Please open up your heart and home to these two old girls. Please contact Islip Animal Shelter if interested.

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Address: 210 South Denver Avenue, Bay Shore, NY 11706

Phone:(631) 224-5660

The 10 Coolest Subway Stations in the World

By: Gianni Jaccoma

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Credit: Flickr/Jamie Moore

New Yorkers spend most of their time on the subway either stressing over train delays or wondering why the dude manspreading next to them is wearing a velour jumpsuit and eating a full plate of spaghetti. Straphangers abroad have similar woes, but with an added bonus: many of their subway stations are actually nice to look at!

And to prove just how good other subway riders have it — at least in terms of aesthetics — we scoured the world’s metro tunnels to find the 10 coolest subway stops on Earth.

SPOILER ALERT: Times Square – 42nd Street didn’t make the cut.

More: 14 Airport Hacks to Make Your Next Flight Better

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Credit: on-a Architecture Lab

Drassanes Station

Barcelona, Spain
It might look like a set from Tron or Star Wars, but that wasn’t always the case. Drassanes station’s proximity to the Port of Barcelona resulted in some pretty serious flooding problems a while back, and as a result, the station was remodeled in 2007. Architectural firm ON-A led the charge and wanted the space to emulate the look and feel of a train car, with glass-reinforced concrete panels and zig-zagging overhead lights.

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Credit: Flickr/Achim Lammerts

Candidplatz

Munich, Germany
This stop on the Munich U-Bahn was named after a 16th-century Flemish painter and, as such, has an artsy feel; the walls, ceilings, and pillars are all bathed in the colors of the visible light spectrum. It’s a captivating sight to behold, unless you’re colorblind.

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Credit: Wikimedia Commons user Yulu

Jiantan Station

Taipei, Taiwan
Arguably the most striking Metro station in Taipei, Jiantan received almost instant recognition for its distinctive design, a blend of modern minimalism and traditional Chinese dragon-boat styling. Jiantan is often packed with evening travelers thanks to the nearby Shilin Night Market — one of the busiest in the city.

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Credit: Shutterstock

Burj Khalifa/Dubai Mall Station

Dubai, UAE
One of the Dubai metro’s busiest stations, it opened to the public on the same day as the nearby Burj Khalifa, and is a prime example of the uniform design implemented throughout the metro system. It also features a climate-controlled, 2,690ft footbridge that allows people to visit the Dubai Mall without having to take a bus. How walking the equivalent of nearly 10 football fields is any better than taking a bus, though, is anyone’s guess. Even if it does have A/C.

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Credit: Flickr/Milton Correa

T-Centralen

Stockholm, Sweden
Sitting, as the name would suggest, at the center of Stockholm’s metro system, T-Centralen serves as the crossroads for all three of the city’s subway lines. Like several other stops on the Blue Line, T-Centralen is noteworthy for its painted bedrock ceilings and walls that make you feel like you’re in an actual cave — albeit a well-lit, and intricately painted one.

Head to Thrillist.com for 5 more of the coolest subway stops on earth!

More from Thrillist:

The Coolest Hotel in Every State (and DC!)

The 10 Most Photographed Places on Earth

Follow Thrillist on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Thrillist

Bill Belichick Denies Deflating Footballs

In a brief statement Thursday morning, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick denied knowing anything about deflated footballs that the Patriots allegedly used during their AFC championship game with the Indianapolis Colts on Sunday.

Belichick, who did not take questions, said he was “shocked” to learn of the “deflate-gate” controversy on Monday morning, maintaining that he did not know how the balls may have been altered. “In my entire coaching career, I have never talked to any player or staff member about football air pressure,” he continued.

The NFL found that 11 of the 12 footballs used during Sunday’s game were deflated two pounds per inch below the required level. The league is investigating the matter. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is expected to address the media at 4pm on Thursday.

As Obama and Modi Meet, 4 Opportunities for US-India Action on Clean Energy and Climate

This blog post was co-authored by David Waskow, director of the World Resources Institute’s International Climate Initiative.

All eyes are on India this week, as President Obama is set to make an unprecedented second trip to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. While the leaders’ discussions will address several issues, including nuclear energy and trade, climate and clean energy will be a central part of the agenda. So it’s a tremendous opportunity for the two countries to make substantive progress on shifting to low-carbon, climate-resilient pathways.

To put the countries’ relationship in context, however, it’s important to first understand the dimensions of India’s energy and climate situation.

India’s Unique Climate and Energy Situation

India is the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases (behind the United States and China), and it’s expected to increase its use of coal to meet its energy needs. But India is quite different from the United States or China.

India’s current total emissions are one-fourth of China’s, and its per capita emissions — about 2 tons of greenhouse gases — are well below the world’s average and significantly less than those in China (8 tons per person) or the United States (20 tons per person). In addition, India’s cumulative emissions since 1990 are only 4 percent of the world total, far below China’s 14 percent and the United States’ 16 percent.

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That isn’t to say that India shouldn’t play an important role in overcoming the global climate change challenge. Indeed, India presents some of the greatest opportunities to shift to low-carbon pathways in order to achieve economic benefits.

India’s Shift to a Low-Carbon Economy

Although India is an emerging economy, 300 million of its people still lack access to electricity. That’s roughly 25 percent of the population and nearly equivalent to the population of the United States. For many more Indians, energy supply remains infrequent and unreliable. India’s urbanization – with its cities’ population expected to rise from around 380 million to almost 600 million by 2030 — is also changing the social landscape and creating opportunities for new approaches to growth. Taking bold action to address electricity access and urbanization challenges can play a key role in advancing India’s economy and standard of living.

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Prime Minister Modi’s new government appears to recognize these opportunities. The Indian government committed to provide 24-hour electricity to all Indians by 2019, with renewable energy providing some of the share. Last month, the government announced an exceptionally bold goal to increase solar power to 100 gigawatts (GW) by 2022–30 times the current level and five times above the previous renewable energy target.

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Estimates from KPMG and others show that solar energy in India may soon be as cheap as conventional energy sources, enabling a major expansion of reliable electricity. The government also announced that it intends to create new policy programs to enhance wind energy and deal with the health impacts of climate change.

With a commitment to create “100 smart cities” in India, Modi has also initiated a major new effort to improve urban growth and development across existing and new cities. Well-designed cities provide significant benefits that go beyond cleaner air and water. Research shows that if the world’s largest and fastest-growing cities adopted compact and connected rather than sprawled designs, they could save more than $3 trillion in the next 15 years.

Building the U.S.-India Relationship on Climate and Energy

India and the United States are already working together through programs such as the Partnership to Advance Clean Energy (PACE), and Obama and Modi announced additional collaboration during their meeting in Washington this past September. But they can go even further to secure economic growth and climate action. The two leaders can take four steps to build on existing cooperation:

First, the governments should work together to ensure that investment can flow to meet India’s ambitious renewable energy targets. A mutually beneficial approach would be to develop a long-term commercial strategy for resolving thorny issues such as requirements for domestically made solar panels and access for U.S.-made panels, in conjunction with a substantial increase in U.S. investment to help India reach its solar production goal. This kind of agreement would build on recent moves by the private sector, such as SunEdison’s investment in a $4 billion solar manufacturing plant in India. Financial assistance from U.S. agencies like the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, Export-Import Bank, U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Energy could pave the way for such collaboration, which should extend to all renewable energy systems (not only solar) being embraced by the Modi government.

Second, going beyond bilateral efforts, the United States and India could agree to lead development of a global clean energy collaborative, a proposal first made by Modi during the recent G20 meeting. This collaborative could help build bridges among research institutes, mobilize new initiatives and resources, and foster greater access to clean energy technologies. For example, while many renewable energy technologies are already relatively well developed, others, such as battery storage for the energy produced by solar and wind sources, are ripe for research and development. The leaders could bring this collaborative to the G20 in November and make it a key component of the new international climate agreement to be concluded this December in Paris.

Third, the two countries could expand on their September commitment to create a partnership to build resilience to climate change. The Modi government has already taken a first step in creating an adaptation fund (albeit small) to enable states and institutions to develop practical ways of implementing adaptation programs. An important step would be to launch a major initiative on ensuring universal access to data and information on the impacts of a warmer world. This information should be easily usable by citizens, such as bringing important technology like weather and water gauges to India’s rural communities. The initiative could take advantage of both countries’ exceptional information technology capacity and build on work the United States is already doing with Google to make climate information more accessible, benefiting not only both countries, but also providing a global public good.

Finally, to help spur success in negotiating a new international climate agreement in Paris in December 2015, the two leaders should create an open, direct line of communication between the countries’ highest levels of government. This could be particularly important during the final stages of the Paris meeting, when key decisions about country actions and the overall agreement will be made.

Advancing cleaner, low-carbon and climate-resilient pathways can create more vibrant economies in both India and the United States. The moment to do it together is in front of them.

50 Amazing, Adorable Cats, Dogs, Birds, And Bunnies — Even A Pig! — Looking For Homes

This little teddy bear of a dog had a loving home for the first 9 years of his life, but Chewy’s situation changed and his family could no longer keep him.

His impossibly cute photo was posted on Facebook in hopes of finding a new home.

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Greta Engle saw the plea and offered to foster Chewy in her home outside Baltimore, where she lives with two sons, two cats and a little Frenchie pup. So just around the holidays, Chewy was dropped off by his bereft former owner, along with “two beds, a bag of toys, a case of clothes and lots of goodbye kisses,” says Engle. “However things came to a head, we were just really glad to help because it’s sad for everyone.”

Chewy has fit right in, snuggling and napping with his human brothers and begging for morsels of food in charming ways that make it hard to keep him at a healthy weight.

“We love him so much already,” says Engle, but she can’t keep Chewy forever. Her home is very full already, and this situation was temporary from the start.

So like all of the amazing, deserving cats, dogs, bunnies, and one very handsome pig in this slideshow of adoptable pets, what our pal Chewy really needs now is his very own home.

“I wish more people would treat pets like members of their family, and committed to that furry buddy for their lifetime. Boy that would be a wonderful miracle,” says Engle. “Fortunately there are a lot of great people who really care.”

We’d take them all these critters ourselves, it goes without saying. But we don’t want to deny you the pleasure of bringing home Wilbur the friendly bunny, or tiny Chewy himself. There’s also sweet Margo the cat and Natalie the pig, who will grow very big — and, well, take a look for yourself at these 50 wonderful pets of all shapes and sizes who’d love nothing more than to help warm up your winter:

The pets in this slideshow come from shelters and rescue groups across the country — which provided the information and photos in the adoption listings — including: Best Friends Animal Society, Animal Allies, Barkie’s Legacy, the Washington Animal Rescue League, the Animal Welfare League of Arlington, the Humane Society of Calvert County, PAWS Chicago, Animal Care & Control of NYC, the Humane Society of Utah, the Washington Humane Society, the Kauai Humane Society, the Humane Society Silicon Valley, the Austin Animal Center, the Kansas City Pet Project, SPCA of Southwest Michigan, All Species Kinship, the Providence Animal Rescue League and P.A.W.S. of Dearborn County Humane Center.

Know a rescue doing great work? Have another animal story to share? Get in touch at arin.greenwood@huffingtonpost.com!

More and War: The Tao of Washington

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

When it comes to the national security state, our capital has become a thought-free zone. The airlessness of the place, the unwillingness of leading players in the corridors of power to explore new ways of approaching crucial problems is right there in plain sight, yet remarkably unnoticed.  Consider this the Tao of Washington.

Last week, based on a heavily redacted 231-page document released by the government in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Charlie Savage, a superb reporter for the New York Times, revealed that the FBI has become a “significant player” in the world of warrantless surveillance, previously the bailiwick of the National Security Agency.  The headline on his piece was: “FBI is broadening surveillance role, report shows.”

Here’s my question: In the last 13 years, can you remember a single headline related to the national security state that went “FBI [or fill in your agency of choice] is narrowing surveillance role [or fill in your role of choice], report shows”?  Of course not, because when any crisis, problem, snafu or set of uncomfortable feelings, fears, or acts arises, including those by tiny groups of disturbed people or what are now called “lone wolf” terrorists, there is only one imaginable response: more money, more infrastructure, more private contractors, more surveillance, more weaponry, and more war.  On a range of subjects, our post-9/11 experience should have taught us that this — whatever it is we’re doing — is no solution to anything, but no such luck.

More tax dollars consumed, more intrusions in our lives, the further militarization of the country, the dispatching of some part of the U.S. military to yet another country, the enshrining of war or war-like actions as the option of choice — this, by now, is a way of life. These days, the only headlines out of Washington that should surprise us would have “narrowing” or “less,” not “broadening” or “more,” in them.

Thinking outside the box may seldom have been a prominent characteristic of Washington, but when it comes to innovative responses to problems, our political system seems particularly airless right now.  Isn’t it strange, for instance, that being secretary of state these days means piling up bragging rights to mileage by constantly, frenetically circumnavigating the globe?  The State Department website now boasts that John Kerry has traveled 682,000 miles during his time in office, just as it once boasted of Hillary Clinton’s record-breaking 956,733 miles, and yet, like the secretary of defense or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs or the CIA director or the national security advisor or the president himself, when it comes to rethinking failing policies, none of them ever seem to venture into unknown territory or entertain thoughts that might lead in unsettling directions.  No piling up of the mileage there.

In a sense, there are only two operative words in twenty-first-century Washington: more and war.  In this context, there really is just one well-policed party of thought in town.  It matters not a whit that, under the ministrations of that “party,” the Pentagon and the rest of the national security state have grown to monstrous proportions, even though American war and security policies don’t have a significant success to their name.

Four Words That Rule Washington (and Two Words That Don’t)

Here then are four key words — security, safety, intelligence, and war — essential to present-day Washington.  Add in two others, peace and bases, that for very different reasons are missing in action.  Now, put together both the chatter and the silences around those six words and you can begin to grasp why our nation’s capital is such a dead zone in terms of new ideas or ways of acting in our world.

Let’s start with two words so commonplace that no serious player would bother to question them: security (as in “national”) and safety (as in “American”).  On those two words alone, the new Washington has been funded and expanded endlessly in the post-9/11 era.  They are the soil in which has grown just about every action that put the state intrusively in our lives, sidelined the citizenry, and emboldened a spirit of impunity in the national security bureaucracy, a sense that no one will ever be held accountable for any action, including kidnapping, torture, murder, the destruction of evidence, assassination, and perjury.  Both words have an implied “from” after them, as in “from terrorism.”

And yet it has been estimated that an American’s annual fatality risk from terrorism is only one in 3.5 million.  When it comes to your security and safety, in other words, don’t focus on local lone wolf jihadists; just put your car in the garage and leave it there.  After all, your odds on losing your life in a traffic accident in any year are about one in 8,000.

Put another way, Americans have learned how to live with, on average, approximately 38,000 traffic deaths a year in the post-9/11 era without blinking, without investing trillions of dollars in a network of agencies to protect them from vehicles, without recruiting hundreds of thousands of private contractors to help make them safe and secure from cars, trucks, and buses.  And yet when it comes to the deaths of tiny numbers of Americans, nothing is too much for our safety and security.  More astonishing yet, almost all of this investment has visibly led not to the diminution of terrorism, but to its growth, to ever more terrorists and terror organizations and ever greater insecurity.  This, in turn, has spurred the growth of the national security state yet more, even though it has shown little evidence of offering us significant protection.

Imagine that the government suddenly decided to build high-tech shark fences off every American beach to protect bathers from another kind of headline-inducing predator which strikes even more rarely than terrorists.  Imagine as well that an enormous bureaucracy was created to construct and oversee the maintenance of those fences and the launching of armed patrols to take out the global shark population.  And imagine as well that the result was a rise in the threat of shark attacks off those coasts, as well as endless claims from the officials in that bureaucracy that they were doing a completely bang-up job.  Wouldn’t their word be doubted?  Wouldn’t the whole program be reconsidered?  Wouldn’t there be a debate in this country about what it means to be safe and secure, and about where our tax dollars were going?

Life itself is a danger zone.  It’s not possible to live in total safety and security.  So any system that aims to offer that, even for one phenomenon, and then feeds off the very opposite, should be open to question.  Certainly, sacrificing things that have long been considered important to American life for protection from the rare and random chance that you might be injured or die is a decision that should be rethought from time to time.  In this case, however, it seems that we can no longer imagine what life without a looming national security state might be like.

Now, here’s another word closely associated with the last two: intelligence.  Consider it sacrosanct, representing as it does the religion of the national security state.  There is only one rule when it comes to intelligence: you can’t have too much of it.  Hence, our 17 ever-expanding, intertwined “intelligence” agencies, a vast, still proliferating apparatus for conducting covert ops and gathering information on everyone from presidents and chancellors to peasants in the rural backlands of the planet in every form in which anyone could possibly communicate or simply express themselves or even engage in public play.

This vast world of information overload has, in turn, been plunged into a world of secrecy in which, if it weren’t for leakers and whistleblowers, we would never have any intelligence that they didn’t want us to have.  Over these last years, this system has proven intrusive in ways that even the totalitarian states of the previous century couldn’t have imagined, as well as abusive in ways degrading almost beyond imagination.  It has also collected more information about all of us than can even be grasped; and yet, as far as we can tell, it has also been eternally a step behind in delivering actionable information to the government on just about any subject you want to mention.

However, whether what it does works or not, is legal or not, is useful or not, doesn’t matter in Washington.  There, the American intelligence community is unassailable.  It emerges from every imbroglio, including the recent one over torture, stronger, not weaker.  Its leadership, having made howling mistakes from 9/11 on, is never held accountable for any of them and is always promoted and honored.  Oversight of what it does is on the wane.  The visibly Orwellian nature of American intelligence is now widely accepted, at least in Washington, as a necessity of our age, of our need for… you guessed it… safety and security.

As a result, its bureaucratic expansion, secret wars, global kill lists, and other activities are largely beyond challenge.  In response, for instance, to the disaster of 9/11, a new post, the director of national intelligence, was created to better coordinate the “U.S. intelligence community.”  The director’s “office,” which started with a staff of 11, now has an estimated 1,750 employees, the sort of growth that can be seen just about everywhere in the intelligence world.

We no longer have the slightest idea what life might be like if, instead of 17 significant intelligence outfits, we had just two of them, or even one.  Or whether an intelligence agency operating purely on open-source information might not offer a more useful view of how our world works to American leaders than the vast, secretive, privatized crew of the present moment.  We have no idea what our world would be like if the president no longer had his private army, the CIA (not to mention his second private army, the Joint Special Operations Command).  None of this could possibly be brought up in the halls of power in Washington.

And here’s another word that’s had its way in the capital in these years: war (and related terms like intervention, counterinsurgency, surge, and raid).  It has become the option of choice in situation after situation, while the Pentagon has reached monumental proportions and its elite operatives have become a massive secret military within the military.  In any crisis, even essentially civilian ones such as the Ebola outbreak in Western Africa, that military is invariably called upon to ride to the rescue.

You could, in fact, think of these last 13 years in Washington as a sweeping, all-encompassing experiment in modern warfare.  The denizens of that city now live in an eternal “wartime,” while from Pakistan to Libya across the Greater Middle East and now much of Africa, U.S. military personnel are eternally engaged in a range of wars, war-like activities, and preparations for future conflicts, while the skies are filled with U.S. planes and drones.  At a moment when war seems to be the only go-to option (other than sanctions) in the U.S. foreign policy tool box and a high official can even talk about declaring war on scattered deranged individuals, the results of this military-first global strategy should be considered definitively in.  Since 9/11, it has led to a series of well-publicized failures of the first order without a single genuine success, not one instance where anything like a goal Washington set was actually met.  Yet a military-first policy remains the unquestioned, unchallenged option of choice and the military budget is largely sacrosanct even for a budget-cutting Congress.

Here, on the other hand, is a word you won’t see in Washington: peace.  Once, it was part of the American political lexicon; now, it’s essentially been banished. You’d have to be a wuss to use it. 

And here’s another word that’s essentially forbidden: bases.  Since World War II, the U.S. has garrisoned the planet in a way achieved by no other imperial power.  In the twenty-first century, when even the largest powers have only a few or no military bases outside their national territories, the U.S. still has hundreds scattered around the world.  Included in the tally should be the 11 floating towns, loaded with air power — we call them aircraft carriers — that regularly cruise the high seas.

The Greater Middle East is packed to the seams with U.S. military bases and drone bases have been spreading rapidly as well.  This is a living reality in much of the world.  In the U.S., it goes essentially unnoticed and almost completely unmentioned.  It’s so fundamental to Washington’s military-first policies that, while taken for granted, it is beyond discussion or even public acknowledgement.  The very idea of beginning to dismantle this empire of bases, which would automatically change Washington’s military stance in relation to the rest of the planet, is similarly beyond consideration, discussion, or thought.

Who knows what it would mean to abolish the CIA, slash the defense budget, scale down American intelligence, dismantle that empire of bases, or return peace to its first-option status?  We know nothing about this because we haven’t seen any of it tried, or even seriously discussed, in twenty-first-century Washington.

Decades of the Living Dead

In the title of his prophetic pre-9/11 book Blowback, Chalmers Johnson brought that term of CIA tradecraft out of the closet.  He focused on the way covert Agency operations in distant lands carried the seeds of future retaliation on this country.  Because those operations were so secret, though, ordinary Americans were incapable of making the connection between what we did and what hit us.  Today, in a world filled with blowback, the connections between Washington’s acts and what follows are no longer in the shadows but regularly in plain sight.  Yet they are seldom acknowledged, particularly by policymakers in Washington.

In the wake of the 2014 midterm elections, the capital is said to be a big government town being taken over by smaller government types — not, however, if you’re talking about the national security state. With the rarest of exceptions, the “small government” folks, aka Republicans, have never seen an oppressive state power they wouldn’t bow down before and champion.  Hence, whatever the situation at hand — Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Ukraine, surveillance — Republican war hawks, now in control of Congress, will invariably demand more.  

Nor should you imagine, as the 2016 campaign revs up, that any of this is likely to change in the years to come.  If we end up with the much-ballyhooed dynastic contest between Hillary and Jeb (or, if you prefer, Hillary and that eternal presidential wannabe Mitt), here’s what you should already know: whichever candidate steps into the Oval Office in January 2017 will bring along a whole host of suitably retread personalities toting a jostling crowd of retread ideas.

Some of the people the new president will nominate for office or appoint as advisors will be familiar faces, since that’s the way of the world in Washington.  Naturally, they will carry with them the most familiar of Washington mindsets.  Just recall January 2009, when the hope candidate entered the White House bringing with him those economic retreads from the reign of the man from Hope, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin; in foreign and war policy, there was the ur-Clintonista Hillary, Bush military appointee General David Petraeus, and the director of the CIA under George H.W. Bush and secretary of defense under his son, the former cold warrior Robert Gates.  Others who weren’t household names or faces from previous administrations might as well have been.  In foreign, war, and economic policy, it was a cast of characters eminently suitable for (as I wrote at the time) a political zombie movie.

Similarly, none of the retreads Hillary, Jeb, or Mitt would bring with them will have a new idea or entertain a thought that wanders off the Washington reservation.  And that essentially guarantees one thing: Republican or Democrat, it’ll be dead air to 2020 — and if either a Bush or a Clinton is then reelected, until 2025, by which time the U.S. would have been led by those two families for 28 of the last 36 years.  Washington is, in this sense, the land of the walking policy dead and war, safety, security, and intelligence (that is, failure and disaster) are ours to the horizon.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His new book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (Haymarket Books).

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Julianne Moore's Secret For Flawless Skin Is Surprisingly Simple

There’s so much we covet about Julianne Moore — that fiery red hair, her killer red carpet style and, of course, her career, but there’s nothing we would like more than to age just like her. At 54, the actress is a spokeswoman for beauty giant L’Oreal. Considering her lovely, alabaster skin, she’s the perfect choice.

Moore’s skin is always radiant and glowing, and she spilled the secret to that flawless complexion to Bravo’s Andy Cohen. The answer? Sunscreen. “Honestly, that’s really it,” Moore said, adding that she also uses a face oil as part of her regimen before applying sun protection and avoiding the sun.

But you won’t find her slathering on pricey products. Moore says drugstore brands are her preference.

The star has eschewed many Hollywood beauty fads, making her even more delightfully down-to-earth. She’s said she hasn’t had any plastic surgery and believes in aging without it. She’s even slammed the juice-cleanse fad, saying after trying it once, “the only weight I lost was in my brain.”

Now excuse us while we go dig out our SPF.

Here's The World's Largest Animated GIF, Captured From Outer Space

If you know the name INSA, you’re likely familiar with the street artist’s signature technique known as Gifiti — yes, the glorious combination of animated GIFs and street art graffiti. It’s a beautiful thing.

The British artist is known for his moving murals, outdoor artworks that transform into digital shorts, thus erasing the space between your neighborhood and your computer screen. He creates his masterpieces by documenting the process of the graffiti painting itself, then working the footage into a looping animated clip. “Mixing retro internet technology and labor intensive painting, INSA creates slices of infinite un-reality,” the artist states on his blog, “cutting edge art for the tumblr generation.”

In case there was any doubt that INSA was not the reigning king of Gifiti, this about settles it. He recently created the largest animated painting in existence, a four-frame animation that was painted on such a huge scale it was photographed by satellite. The painting required 576 man hours and measured in at 57,515 square meters. As you may have guessed, it makes one beautiful work of Gifiti.

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Activity Tracking Dress Watch does more than tell the time

activity-tracking-dress-watchMost of the time, we would see watches as devices that have only one function – to tell the time. Sure, some of them do come with built-in alarm and all that, but it is still primed to let you know what time of the day it is. While some other watches have started to offer more than just that, those of you who would like to keep track of how much movement you make each day without having to wear a fitness band of sorts, can rely on the $99.95 Activity Tracking Dress Watch.

This will be different from majority of the pedometer watches out there which do not betray their added functionality, that is, they resemble sports watches. This Activity Tracking Dress Watch will be different – it is meant to be worn with business attire, while it goes about its task in a discreet manner, jotting down information such as the number of steps taken, distance, time spent walking, and calories burned. All of those will remain hidden – at least until you press a button, and it will make an appearance digitally, in order to preserve the watch’s formal appearance. Capable of recording up to a week’s worth of activity, the advanced accelerometer can tell the difference between actual steps taken and movements such as waving your hand or standing up, resulting in accurate step counts.
[ Activity Tracking Dress Watch does more than tell the time copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

James Patterson Offers $294,038 Self Destructing Book

I like to read and while I certainly like sci-fi books as much as the next geek, I really like action novels like the Mitch Rapp series. If you like to read James Patterson, the author’s latest book called Private Vegas is available with a couple strange twists.

patterson-620zoom in

The first thousand folks to buy the normal hardback also get a digital version of the book that self-destructs in 24 hours after you start reading. That digital book has a countdown timer at the top and apparently, you can steal time from other readers if you want.

The coolest versions is a physical copy that self destructs in 24 hours and apparently bursts into flames. That book costs the strangely precise amount of $294,038(USD). The purchase also gets you a private trip – I’d wager to Vegas – and a fancy meal with James Patterson when you can talk about the burns you got reading his latest book.

[via TheNextWeb]