From futurist Stephan A. Schwartz - Trends That Will Affect Your Future …

[giovonni]

regarding the most recent Charleston, W. Virginia water source pollution scare ...


West Virginia’s Message to the Nation

Here is a very important essay about the lessons to be learned from the West Virginia spill, a story that has gotten remarkably little in-depth coverage by the corporate media. I read today that the supposedly safe water trucks that have been bringing water to the people in fact having been filling from the same river downstream from where the leak occurred.

by ALAN FARAGO

"The vaunted capacity of enlightened corporations to do better than government to protect the public interest in clean, safe water just cracked a big leak in West Virginia.

Here is the most curious omission in media coverage of the West Virginia pollution disaster: how politics in West Virginia harbors antipathy to the very environmental regulations that ought to protect the state’s drinking water.

It is also an outstanding example how politics have consequences like those depriving 300,000 people in Charleston of safe drinking water. It is almost as though the media — that knows no boundaries when it comes to matching mayhem to eyeballs — has discovered in the underbrush of West Virginia politics a tragedy that is too horrible: the indelicate matter of voters supporting choices that undermine their own existence.

Curious, too, the media has no difficulty macerating an event in New Jersey that is similarly totemic: traffic flow on the George Washington Bridge traffic constipated by political ambition. Arguably the Elk River in West Virginia represents the same theme of politics making mince-meat of citizen safety with a significantly more dire outcome. Yet the media holds its nose.

Although both US Senators from West Virginia are Democrats, they are a leaden part of the Democratic majority in the Senate that exposes the American public to the worst of right-wing extremism against environmental regulation.

West Virginia is a poor state. Poverty indexes put the state near the very bottom. So when a story like the Elk River, that bears an eery familiarity to the burning rivers of the industrial midwest that spurred in the 1970′s the first federal environmental laws, emerges: one struggles for interpretation more clear than a poor state subject to most unfortunate, unavoidable calamity. That is exactly what is playing out on nightly network news.

Not a word either from Fox News how environmental rules might have reached to protect Charleston’s drinking water from the owners of the coal-industry company. The Politburo in the Soviet Union had the Soviet era organ called Pravda to selectively inform Russians. That pretty much defines Fox News, when it comes to the environment and the importance of regulations. Where is the indignation? Where is the outcry? Where is the investigation of the evisceration of the EPA’s enforcement authority?

Although the federal EPA — the bogeyman of the right-wing — is not implicated in the Elk River disaster, the shadow cast over a city incapable of delivering clean water to citizens invites full disclosure.

According to news reports, even though the tanks were decades beyond their useful life, the catastrophic pollution event awaits dilution and time. Thus it is with pollution in the United States.

The name of the company responsible for the catastrophe in West Virginia: Freedom Industries."

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[giovonni]

Green Fade-Out: Europe to Ditch Climate Protection Goals

If you have any questions about which are the real power centers in our world this story should disabuse you of illusions. The Virtual Corporate States that are the actual power centers in the 21st century do not like regulations in general and climate change regulations in particular. And so, once again, the profit for the few trumps the well-being of the many, indeed, the planet.

These are such sad stories. A child can look at the data and see where this is headed.

GREGOR PETER SCHMITZ - Der Spiegel (Germany)
BRUSSELS -- The EU's reputation as a model of environmental responsibility may soon be history. The European Commission wants to forgo ambitious climate protection goals and pave the way for fracking -- jeopardizing Germany's touted energy revolution in the process.

The climate between Brussels and Berlin is polluted, something European Commission officials attribute, among other things, to the "reckless" way German Chancellor Angela Merkel blocked stricter exhaust emissions during her re-election campaign to placate domestic automotive manufacturers like Daimler and BMW. This kind of blatant self-interest, officials complained at the time, is poisoning the climate.

But now it seems that the climate is no longer of much importance to the European Commission, the EU's executive branch, either. Commission sources have long been hinting that the body intends to move away from ambitious climate protection goals. On Tuesday, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported as much...

Read more

[giovonni]

Big Banks Launder Hundreds of Billions of Illegal Drug Cartel Money …
But Refuse to Provide Services for Legal Marijuana

You have probably noticed in stories about Colorado that the newly legal Marijuana business is run on a cash only basis because banks will not provide banking services. And you may remember the piece I ran the other day about how the government secretly was in league with one of the major Mexican drug cartels. That led me to wonder whether the banks also had a secret deal. And, once again, a little digging turned up evidence that this was the case.

This makes the hypocrisy of the entire War on Drugs even more blatant and its inherent racism even more evident. Nothing about the War on Drugs is what it appears, except the destruction of hundreds of thousands of families and the endless incarceration of Black and Brown kids.

WashingtonBlog

The big banks have laundered hundreds of billions of dollars for drug cartels. See this, this, this, this, this and this (indeed, drug dealers kept the banking system afloat during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis).

The HSBC employee who blew the whistle on the banks’ money laundering for terrorists and drug cartels says said: 'America is losing the drug war because our banks are [still] financing the cartels', and 'Banks financing drug cartels … affects every single American'.

And yet the banks refuse to provide banking services for LEGAL marijuana in states like Colorado which have blessed the sale of pot... Read more

[giovonni]

More Than Half of All Members of Congress Are Millionaires



The point this study makes is largely ignored by the media but, in my view, is very important. A millionaire just by the nature of their financial security simply cannot understand the world of someone who lives pay check to pay check, with no assurance the next paycheck will be there. You have to live that life to know it. I think this explains a great deal about why the Congress acts as it does.

JIM HIGHTOWER - AlterNet (U.S.)
The rich truly are different from you and me -- they tend to hold seats in Congress.

Our nation purports to be a representative democracy, yet you don't find many plumbers, mineworkers, dirt farmers, Wal-Mart associates, roofers, beauty parlor operators, taxi drivers, or other "get-the-job-done" Americans among the 535 members of the U.S. House and Senate.

What you do find is an over-supply of lawmakers drawn from a very thin strata of America's population: Millionaires. In fact, the Center for Responsive Politics reports that last year -- for the first time in history -- more than half of our senators and House members are in the Millionaires Club. Indeed, the average net worth (the value of what they own minus what they owe) for all lawmakers now totals more than $7 million... Read more

[giovonni]

Shades of Shawshank: Guards, Staff Committed Half of all Prison sex Assaults

The American gulag by its nature is corrupting. The warehousing of great numbers of human beings is both extraordinarily costly, and inevitably corrupting because just like slavery the power relationship is so distorted it is dysfunctional.

KELLY RIDDELL - The Washington Times
A decade after President George W. Bush signed into law the Prison Rape Elimination Act, sexual abuse is still rampant in America’s corrections facilities, with a growing number of accusations lodged against the very officers charged with protecting their inmates.

Nearly half of all sexual assault accusations reported in U.S. correctional facilities in 2011 were aimed at prison guards or staff, according to a report released Thursday by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. That was up 18 percent since 2006.

But the challenge for officials is sorting through cases in which evidence indicates the commission of a crime and those in which prisoners may have been motivated solely by a desire to harm guards they don’t like - a concern corrections unions have raised for years. The report found that only about 10 percent of reported sexual assaults in prison could be substantiated... Read more

[giovonni]

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Jan. 24, 2014

British Museum: Prototype for Noah's Ark was round


Here is an intriguing new archaeological discovery.


JILL LAWLESS - The Associated Press

"LONDON -- It was a vast boat that saved two of each animal and a handful of humans from a catastrophic flood.

But forget all those images of a long vessel with a pointy bow - the original Noah's Ark, new research suggests, was round.

A recently deciphered 4,000-year-old clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia - modern-day Iraq - reveals striking new details about the roots of the Old Testament tale of Noah. It tells a similar story, complete with detailed instructions for building a giant round vessel known as a coracle - as well as the key instruction that animals should enter "two by two."

The tablet went on display at the British Museum on Friday, and soon engineers will follow the ancient instructions to see whether the vessel could actually have sailed.

It's also the subject of a new book, "The Ark Before Noah," by Irving Finkel, the museum's assistant keeper of the Middle East and the man who translated the tablet.

Finkel got hold of it a few years ago, when a man brought in a damaged tablet his father had acquired in the Middle East after World War II. It was light brown, about the size of a mobile phone and covered in the jagged cuneiform script of the ancient Mesopotamians.

It turned out, Finkel said Friday, to be "one of the most important human documents ever discovered."

"It was really a heart-stopping moment - the discovery that the boat was to be a round boat," said Finkel, who sports a long gray beard, a ponytail and boundless enthusiasm for his subject. "That was a real surprise."

And yet, Finkel said, a round boat makes sense. Coracles were widely used as river taxis in ancient Iraq and are perfectly designed to bob along on raging floodwaters.

"It's a perfect thing," Finkel said. "It never sinks, it's light to carry."

Other experts said Finkel wasn't simply indulging in book-promotion hype. David Owen, professor of ancient Near Eastern studies at Cornell University, said the British Museum curator had made "an extraordinary discovery."

Elizabeth Stone, an expert on the antiquities of ancient Mesopotamia at New York's Stony Brook University, said it made sense that ancient Mesopotamians would depict their mythological ark as round.

"People are going to envision the boat however people envision boats where they are," she said. "Coracles are not unusual things to have had in Mesopotamia."

The tablet records a Mesopotamian god's instructions for building a giant vessel - two-thirds the size of a soccer field in area - made of rope, reinforced with wooden ribs and coated in bitumen.

Finkel said that on paper (or stone) the boat-building orders appear sound, but he doesn't yet know whether it would have floated. A television documentary due to be broadcast later this year will follow attempts to build the ark according to the ancient manual.

The flood story recurs in later Mesopotamian writings including the "Epic of Gilgamesh." These versions lack the technical instructions - cut out, Finkel believes, because they got in the way of the storytelling.

"It would be like a Bond movie where instead of having this great sexy red car that comes on, somebody starts to tell you about how many horsepower it's got and the pressure of the tires and the capacity of the boot (trunk)," he said. "No one cares about that. They want the car chase."

Finkel is aware his discovery may cause consternation among believers in the Biblical story. When 19th-century British Museum scholars first learned from cuneiform tablets that the Babylonians had a flood myth, they were disturbed by its striking similarities to the story of Noah.

"Already in 1872 people were writing about it in a worried way - What does it mean that Holy Writ appears on this piece of Weetabix?" he joked, referring to a cereal similar in shape to the tablet.

Finkel has no doubts.

"I'm sure the story of the flood and a boat to rescue life is a Babylonian invention," he said.

He believes the tale was likely passed on to the Jews during their exile in Babylon in the 6th century B.C. And he doesn't think the tablet provides evidence the ark described in the Bible existed. He said it's more likely that a devastating real flood made its way into folk memory, and has remained there ever since.

"I don't think the ark existed - but a lot of people do," he said. "It doesn't really matter. The Biblical version is a thing of itself and it has a vitality forever.

"The idea that floods are caused by sin is happily still alive among us," he added, pointing out a local councilor in England who made headlines recently for saying Britain's recent storms were caused by the legalization of gay marriage.

"Had I known it, it would have gone in the preface of the book," Finkel said."

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[giovonni]

DEA Leader Fumes About White House Playing Softball With Marijuana Legalizers

Here we see the pro-prohibition forces beginning to raise their heads to block the gathering trend against prohibition. There is nothing surprising about this. The ricebowl of the pro-prohibitionists depends on this insane war against American society. If the DEA had nothing to be concerned about but Heroin and Meth they could be reduced to a quarter of the size they presently are. That's why the Sheriffs who heard this speech reacted as they did. Their ricebowls are also at risk.

Michele Leonhart says she has spent 33 years working for Americans. I would say she has spent 33 years destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of American families using a policy that has no scientific basis whatever.

STEVEN NELSON, Reporter - US News & World Report

The Drug Enforcement Administration's leader reportedly contradicted President Barack Obama's views on marijuana during a "closed-door" speech Wednesday and denounced White House staff for playing softball against a team of marijuana activists.

DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart's candor about her boss and his staff didn't stay quiet for long.

Key details about Leonhart's speech at the closed-to-the-press annual winter meeting of the Major County Sheriffs' Association in Washington, D.C., were reported Saturday by the Boston Herald.

"She was particularly frustrated with the fact that, according to her, the White House participated in a softball game with a pro-legalization group," Bristol County, Mass., Sheriff Thomas Hodgson told the Herald.

Leonhart spoke to the sheriffs less than a week after The New Yorker published an exclusive interview with Obama, in which he said marijuana is less harmful than alcohol and that "it's important for [legalization] to go forward" in ...
Read more

[giovonni]

The Great Lakes Go Dry: How One-Fifth Of The World’s Fresh Water Is Dwindling Away

Water is destiny, either too much, or too little...
Here is an aspect of climate change few outside of the area seem to know about.



JOANNA M. FOSTER - Climate Progress

The frozen opalescent lake and thin, gray sky fade together into white light where the horizon should be. Tall, skeletal grasses shiver on the beach in a wind that makes any sliver of exposed skin burn. The Arni J. Richter, an icebreaking ferry, is about to pull away from Northport Pier for its second and final trip of the day to Washington Island. It’s loaded with food and fuel for the more than 700 hardy residents who call the remote island, just north of Door County peninsula in Wisconsin, home.

People have lived on Washington Island for over 160 years. They’re proud of their tight-knit community and their Icelandic heritage. But life on the island is threatened. For the past 15 years, islanders have watched Lake Michigan slowly disappear. Last January, the lake hit a record low, 29 inches below the long-term average as measured since 1918... Read more

[giovonni]

West Virginia Water Contains Formaldehyde, Official Says




This story is so sad and demoralizing. The truth is West Virginia is essentially a carbon energy plantation not a state. And West Virginians, rather than develop alternative employment opportunities, have been brainwashed into feeling a kind of fierce pride in their subjugation.

KILEY KROH - Climate Progress

"A West Virginia state official told a legislative panel on Wednesday that he “can guarantee” residents are breathing in formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, nearly three weeks after a massive chemical spill contaminated the water supply for more than 300,000 residents.

Scott Simonton, a Marshall University environmental scientist and member of the state Environmental Quality Board, told the panel that he had found formaldehyde in local water samples and was alarmed by the lack of information regarding the lingering impacts of the spill on public health, the Charleston Gazette reported.

“It’s frightening, it really is frightening,” Simonton said. “What we know scares us, and we know there’s a lot more we don’t know.”

On January 9, Freedom Industries reported a leak of crude MCHM, a mixture of chemicals used in the coal production process, from its storage facility on the Elk River and into the water supply for 16 percent of the state’s population. Simonton said the crude MCHM can be broken down into formaldehyde, which causes cancer, and inhaled while people are showering.

Very little is known about crude MCHM and just how toxic it may be to humans. Initially, state authorities maintained that levels of the chemicals below 1 part per million were considered safe for people, based on consultations with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The CDC’s recommendation, however, was derived from a study conducted by Eastman Chemical company, which only tested the mixture’s main ingredient and contained no human toxicity data.

Two days after the state began lifting the ‘do not use’ water ban, the CDC issued guidance advising pregnant women not to drink the water until there were no detectable levels of crude MCHM.

Simonton also expressed concern about the 1 ppm threshold and the studies used to derive it, telling the panel that “in one study it couldn’t even be determined what the cause of death was for the rats because there were so many different things happening to them.”

Shortly after admitting another largely unknown chemical, PPH, had also spilled into the water, Freedom Industries said on Monday that 10,000 gallons of chemicals had spilled, the second time the estimate has been increased."

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[giovonni]

Fracking Is Using up Billions of Gallons of Water in the Places That Need it Most




Once again, as has been true of so many other situations, we see in this report the profit for the few trumping the wellbeing of the many. It is literally killing American society, destroying the middle class, and corrupting our democracy. What continues to amaze me is how loyal Red state voters are to those who are degrading their lives.

LINDSAY ABRAMS, Assistant Editor - Salon

The tremendous drought that’s currently affecting California has the state anticipating the need to conserve its remaining water - Gov. Jerry Brown has urged residents to cut their usage by 20 percent, and some are beginning to argue that it’s time to make restrictions mandatary. As climate change worsens, we can expect dry periods like this - not just in California, but across wide swaths of the country - to get worse, the demand for water more pressing. And the 97 billion gallons of water needed to frack our oil and gas wells isn’t helping matters.

Of the 4,000 oil and gas wells drilled in the U.S. since 2011, a new report from Ceres found, a full three-quarters owere located in areas of water scarcity. More than half - 55 percent - were in areas experiencing drought... Read more

[giovonni]

Obesity in the United States – Dysbiosis From Exposure to Low-dose Antibiotics ?

Here for the first time we see a possible explanation for the explosion of Obesity, and the connection between the rampant overuse of antibiotics and our deeply sick industrial agriculture system. Once again it demonstrates the profit of the few over the wellness of the many. Our society is dying because we either cannot or will not commit to social policies that prioritize national wellness.

Lee W. Riley, Eva Raphael, and Eduardo Faerstein, Division of Infectious Disease and Vaccinology, School of Public Health, University of California - Frontiers in Public Health

The rapid increase in obesity prevalence in the United States in the last 20 years is unprecedented and not well explained. Here, we explore a hypothesis that the obesity epidemic may be driven by population-wide chronic exposures to low-residue antibiotics that have increasingly entered the American food chain over the same time period.. Read more

[giovonni]

From California to the Middle East, Water Shortages Pose Threat of Terror and war



I have been saying to you for over a decade that water is destiny. Now some others are coming to recognize this. I am afraid it is probably too late to deal with this in an optimal way, but the longer we let it go undealt with the less optimal the solution.

SUZANNE GOLDENBERG - The Raw Story

Huge areas of the world are drying up and a billion people have no access to safe drinking water. US intelligence is warning of the dangers of shrinking resources and experts say the world is ‘standing on a precipice’

On 17 January, scientists downloaded fresh data from a pair of Nasa satellites and distributed the findings among the small group of researchers who track the world’s water reserves. At the University of California, Irvine, hydrologist James Famiglietti looked over the data from the gravity-sensing Grace satellites with a rising sense of dread.

The data, released last week, showed California on the verge of an epic drought, with its backup systems of groundwater reserves so run down that the losses could be picked up by satellites orbiting 400km above the Earth’s surface... Read more

[giovonni]

Industrial Heat Has Acquired Andrea Rossi's E-Cat Technology

Here is some more good news. This is the latest on Low Energy Nuclear Reaction technology (LENR) which, I continue to believe, is going to be a game changer. Industrial Heat LLC, mentioned in this report, is backed by Cherokee Investment Partners, the vehicle of investor and CEO Thomas Darden, who is interested in deploying the cold fusion tech commercially in both China and the US. In the next five years I think this is going to become a big deal.

PR Newswire

RESEARCH TRIANGLE, N.C. -- Industrial Heat, LLC announced today that it has acquired the rights to Andrea Rossi's Italian low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) technology, the Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat). A primary goal of the company is to make the technology widely available, because of its potential impact on air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels and biomass.

"The world needs a new, clean and efficient energy source. Such a technology would raise the standard of living in developing countries and reduce the environmental impact of producing energy," said JT Vaughn speaking on behalf of Industrial Heat (IH).

Mr. Vaughn confirmed IH acquired the intellectual property and licensing rights to Rossi's LENR device after an independent committee of European scientists conducted two multi-day tests at Rossi's facilities in Italy... More here

[giovonni]

One American City Enjoys a Hyperfast Internet --
Any Surprise Corporations Don't Control It ?

Here is some good news. In the U.S., where the internet was created, by the standards of the developed world we have mediocre internet speeds. If you live in Singapore, or South Korea, or Japan for instance and you come to the U.S. the poor internet speeds available are a constant irritant. Because we have been brainwashed to believe we have the biggest and best of everything, most Americans have no idea how second rate our electronic infrastructure actually is.

But it does not have to be that way, as this report spells out.

The Thom Hartmann Show - AlterNet (U.S.)

It’s time for high-speed internet access for all !

This morning, President Obama spoke to a crowd at a middle school in Adelphi, Maryland about the importance of high-speed internet access for America’s students.

But while high-speed internet access may still seem out-of-reach for many Americans, down in Chattanooga, Tennessee it’s been a reality for a long time.

That’s because Chattanooga is home to 'The Gig,” a taxpayer-owned, high-speed fiber-optic network... Read more

[giovonni]

Mammograms Do Not Reduce Breast Cancer Deaths, Study Finds




Here is some important health information that I suggest women readers discuss with their physicians.

BAHAR GHOLIPOU, Staff Writer - Live Science

Yearly mammograms in middle-age women do not reduce breast cancer deaths - these tests are essentially as good as physical examination alone, according to a new 25-year study from Canada.

The study, which included nearly 90,000 women ages 40 to 59, is the latest to question the value of routine mammography. The researchers found the same number of women died of breast cancer over 25 years, regardless of whether they underwent yearly mammograms or not... Read more

[giovonni]

Could This Baker Solve the Gluten Mystery ?



Where I live about half the women I know live on Gluten-free diets. Here is the back story. It is another tale of corners cut in the name of increased profit and decreased national wellness. Happily the story not only explains something, it provides a solution.

TOM PHILPOTT - Mother Jones

Washington State University's agriculture research and extension facility in Mount Vernon, about an hour due north along the Puget Sound from Seattle, looks at first glance like any recently built academic edifice: that is to say, boring and austere. On the outside, it's surrounded by test plots of wheat and other grains, as well as greenhouses, shrouded in the Pacific Northwest's classic gray skies and mist. Inside, professors and grad students shuffle through the long halls, passing quiet offices and labs.

Yet one of those labs is not like the others-or any other that I know of, for that matter. When you look down the length of the room from the back wall, you see two distinct chambers, separated by long, adjoining tables: gleaming chunks of impressive-looking machinery to the left; flour sacks, mixing bowls, a large, multileveled oven to the right. And in place of the vaguely chemical ... Read more

[giovonni]

Phantom Melodies Yield Real Clues to Brain’s Workings



There is so much we still don't understand about how our brains work.


CARL ZIMMER - The New York Times

In 2011, a 66-year-old retired math teacher walked into a London neurological clinic hoping to get some answers. A few years earlier, she explained to the doctors, she had heard someone playing a piano outside her house. But then she realized there was no piano.

The phantom piano played longer and longer melodies, like passages from Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto number 2 in C minor, her doctors recount in a recent study in the journal Cortex. By the time the woman - to whom the doctors refer only by her first name, Sylvia - came to the clinic, the music had become her nearly constant companion. Sylvia hoped the doctors could explain to her what was going on... Read more

[giovonni]

Who Needs Sunlight? In Arizona, Solar Power Never Sleeps




More fascinating news about solar and the transition out of the carbon era. Personally I would rather see a decentralized system, but it will surely be a mix, and this offers power even at night.

KATE SHAW YOSHIDA - arstechnica

GILA BEND, ARIZONA-Every afternoon during the summer, millions of people across the American Southwest come home from work and switch on their air conditioners, straining the power grid in states like Arizona. Traditional solar power-although perfectly suited to the sunny climes of this region-can’t meet this demand since the surge in use peaks just as the day’s sun is disappearing.

That’s why most power suppliers diversify, using electricity from different sources to meet local needs. Solar power is abundant in the middle of sunny, clear days, but energy from other sources-coal, nuclear, or hydroelectric power for example-is necessary at night or when the weather is bad.

But increasingly efficient technology is allowing solar plants to contribute for a longer period of time each day and produce energy even in cloudy conditions. The key is a design that allows them to store the sun’s energy to be used later ... Read more

[giovonni]

15 Reasons Why Your Food Prices Are About To Start Soaring

I think this is a pretty good assessment concerning what is coming in food prices.

MICHAEL SNYDER - ZeroHedge

Did you know that the U.S. state that produces the most vegetables is going through the worst drought it has ever experienced and that the size of the total U.S. cattle herd is now the smallest that it has been since 1951? Just the other day, a CBS News article boldly declared that "food prices soar as incomes stand still", but the truth is that this is only just the beginning. If the drought that has been devastating farmers and ranchers out west continues, we are going to see prices for meat, fruits and vegetables soar into the stratosphere. Already, the federal government has declared portions of 11 states to be "disaster areas", and California farmers are going to leave half a million acres sitting idle this year because of the extremely dry conditions ... Read more

[Roisin]

Wow, I didn't think things were that bad but good article and will start stocking up on various food items, flour, sugar, tea, corn meal, herbs, coffee, pasta, dried beans, canned vegs. fish and meat, dry milk, cheese etc.... before the prices go up more. I live next to a Save-A-Lot and the current prices there are still pretty low.

Will circulate this article to family and friends. Thanks for posting it!