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Los Angeles On High Alert As LAPD Back On Regular Duty | The Onion
Rays of Gold by Joe Lowery
(via Joe Lowery Scenics)
Stone Canyon by Jack Dykinga
Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness / AZ. Petrified sand dunes border “pot hole” pool with sun- bleached root in foreground.
(via Dykinga Photography)
The Shooter | Center for Investigative Reporting -
The Shooter is the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden. He left a few years before his retirement benefits would’ve kicked in because he was done. He doesn’t even want to work in security as a civilian because he doesn’t want to carry a gun. Now he has to pay for his own health insurance and physical therapy. Plus he has a family to support.
Center for Investigative Reporting:
But the Shooter will discover soon enough that when he leaves after sixteen years in the Navy, his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation:
Nothing. No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family.
And:
“I left SEALs on Friday,” he said the next time I saw him. It was a little more than thirty-six months before the official retirement requirement of twenty years of service. “My health care for me and my family stopped at midnight Friday night. I asked if there was some transition from my Tricare to Blue Cross Blue Shield. They said no. You’re out of the service, your coverage is over. Thanks for your sixteen years. Go f**k yourself.”
The government does provide 180 days of transitional health-care benefits, but the Shooter is eligible only if he agrees to remain on active duty “in a support role,” or become a reservist. Either way, his life would not be his own. Instead, he’ll buy private insurance for $486 a month, but some treatments that relieve his wartime pains, like $120 for weekly chiropractic care, are out-of-pocket. Like many vets, he will have to wait at least eight months to have his disability claims adjudicated. Or even longer. The average wait time nationally is more than nine months, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Anyone who leaves early also gets no pension, so he is without income. Even if he had stayed in for the full twenty, his pension would have been half his base pay: $2,197 a month. The same as a member of the Navy choir.
There’s an Indiegogo campaign to raise one year’s salary for him.
(via Center for Investigative Reporting)
“Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.” —
Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning
(via The Atlantic)
“In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it, they must not do too much of it, and they must have a sense of success in it.” — John Ruskin
That’s from a series called Darkened Skies by Thierry Cohen; he photographed various cities (NYC, Paris, Tokyo, SF) and matched them up with starry skies from more remote places like Montana, Nevada, and the Sahara. New Yorkers can see Cohen’s work at the Danziger Gallery starting March 28.
(via kottke)
Lego Macintosh, built by Chris McVeigh.
Rumor has it he will be offering the plans for this one as well as a limited number of kits. Prints of the photo are available now.
(via kottke)
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield tweets photos of Earth while he’s out in orbit aboard ISS.
(via Quipsologies)
Klaffi shelves - featuring individually folding shelves. Designed by Finnish architect/designer Eeva Lithovius.
(via Core77)
LL Ori and the Orion Nebula
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team
APOD:
This esthetic close-up of cosmic clouds and stellar winds features LL Orionis, interacting with the Orion Nebula flow. Adrift in Orion’s stellar nursery and still in its formative years, variable star LL Orionis produces a wind more energetic than the wind from our own middle-aged Sun. As the fast stellar wind runs into slow moving gas a shock front is formed, analogous to the bow wave of a boat moving through water or a plane traveling at supersonic speed.
(via APOD)
Autumn leaves at the top of the weir by Steve-h
Autumn leaves at the top of my favourite weir on the River Dodder in suburban Dublin. See where this picture was taken.
Travel Spending: 6 Myths That Cost You Money | TIME.com -
Apparently,
Click through to read more.