I'm betting there's no tanning salons on those planets.
How many stars does it take to "raise" a planet? In our own solar system, it took only one -- our sun. However, new research from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows that planets might be forming in systems with as many as four stars.
This artist's concept illustrates one such quadruple-star system, called HD 98800. The system is still relatively young, at 10 million years old. One of its two pairs of stars is known to be circled by a dusty disk, which contains materials that are thought to clump together to form planets. When Spitzer set its infrared gaze on the disk, it detected gaps. How did the gaps get there? One possible answer is that planets are growing in size and carving out lanes in the dust.
Finally someone else is pointing out the gall & irony of that stupid Binsack radio show, which I pointed out a year ago.
As I always say, even the appearance of impropriety can damn you. And perhaps rightly so in many cases. If you don't want to be accused of promoting a criminal, don't promote a criminal, and then hide behind "well he paid us" when someone has the audacity to point out that you promoted a criminal.
If someone paid me to say something stupid on this blog, and I published it, even if I was paid, and openly stated I was paid, it doesn't mean I'm not responsible for my own actions & what I say. Binsack didn't hold the radio station hostage with a gun and force them to take his money, for pete's sake.
John Burkavage, vice president of station owner Entercom Pocono Northeast, doesn't see it that way. Mr. Binsack didn't have a show, he said. It was an ad. He compared it to a television infomercial. The station can't critically evaluate all its advertisers, he said.
I think radio stations should critically evaluate their sponsors!
It would be different if Binsack had no past. Then it would be pretty much an Ooops. But he had a criminal past in the same line of work of his radio show!
First off, their on-air disclaimer, I believe, did not say "this is a paid advertisement" and "the views expressed do not..." I listened once, after the first Scranton Times article, and heard the disclaimer, and it was more like "this is a paid programme", and that's it, nothing else. Nothing about the views expressed, and the word "advertisement" wasn't even used, just "paid". And "paid" can mean a lot of things depending on who's interpreting it.
Until days after his arrest last week, he was featured on the radio station's "on-air staff" Web page, just like WILK's own on-air personalities such as Steve Corbett and Kevin Lynn.
Well, perhaps this speaks more to the lack of professional wit of the web producer working for WILK. I must say that as a long-time graphic designer, both personally & professionally , I don't consider the WILK site to be a quality web site by any stretch of the imagination. I would not claim to be a real cutting edge whiz with web site programming, but certainly better could be done. It's clumsy at best, not organized nor tidy.
That said, someone in charge of content ought to have been able to look at the web site and say, "Hey, this is misleading, don't organize these paid advertisers in with the staff."
Indeed, if I were Steve Corbett, someone with a journalism background, I would've complained about having a paid advertiser listed alongside of actual radio hosts.
I never heard the radio show last year when I posted about it a year ago, so all I had to go by was their web site, which had no disclaimer, and no way to discern any difference between Binsack or Corbett or whoever else.
I took this screen shot today:
Why that page is still up, I don't know. All I had to do was click on the link from my post from last year.
But nowhere on that page does it say "paid advertisement" or have any type of disclaimer.
"Mr. Burkavage said he would review the practice."
Ya THINK so?
"He had a story, and you really want to believe the guy," Mr. Burkavage said.
...
He said WILK has "a few" unpaid invoices for Mansions & Estates, which established a record of unpaid bills with many vendors.
So Burkavage is claiming WILK to be a victim too?
This is most funny to me because this morning Kevin Lynn pretty much said anyone who fell for Binsack must've been foolish and stupid.
So Kevin Lynn will defend his radio station's support of Binsack, but he feels free to insult his boss, by pretty much saying he must've been a fool to have fallen for this character?
What a convoluted paradox.
I think the WILK radio station is just trying to hold its world together with the cheeks of its ass.
I believe they're scrambling there at WILK because they know they screwed up.
They'd get a lot more respect if they just admitted the judgement and decisions were inappropriate regarding their confusing promotion of Scott Binsack.
But no, Kevin Lynn was on the radio talking as if "criminal" was stamped next to Binsack's name on WILK material, and kind of insinuating that the radio station openly announced his criminal past, and even seemed to hint that they told people not to trust this guy.
They did no such thing. And it's terribly disingenuous of Kevin Lynn to innuendo that they had.
Some of Mr. Binsack's clippings were even fraudulent. A fawning advertorial that ran in The Times-Tribune's classified section was pasted under the Business page masthead to pass it off to customers as a conventional news story.
That's certainly sinister. I wonder where this was and how they found out about it.
Hardly the Scranton Times' fault, of course.
But it sounds like Binsack would use anyone & anything in whatever way he chose, no matter how dishonest. And anyone willing to go along with him, whether by default, because of not knowing anything, or because of greed, was at risk.
As is demonstrated by the other related articles in the Scranton Times this morning.
About five months ago, Mansions & Estates clients Jerome and Jean Sebastianelli, of Moosic Lakes, became investors. Mr. Sebastianelli became Mansions & Estates' secretary/treasurer, according to company memos.
Soon, Mr. Sebastianelli found himself in a struggle with Mr. Binsack over reviewing the books, Mr. Stever recalled.
"Like many people, including me, he believed in Scott," Mr. Stever said.
And a woman who through absolutely no fault of her own, was used most cruelly:
About a year after losing her husband to a fatal car crash and selling her house to help pay the bills, Robin Pellegrino thought her life had finally turned around on Christmas Eve.
Scott Binsack, of Mansions & Estates International LLC, told the widowed mother on his live radio program that he was going to build a house for her and her infant daughter, Gianna.
But the "Keys to Your Castle" contest, she said, turned out to be another false promise from the controversial homebuilder.
After months of excuses and delays, there was no house. Not even land on which to build it.
Instead, the Dickson City woman feels as though Mr. Binsack used her name and personal tragedy to burnish his image.
I think I feel the most compassion for this Robin Pellegrino out of all of the tragic characters in this wretched real-life soap opera.
and he's still blaming everyone & everything but himself, and probably still bragging at the same time no doubt...
Mr. Binsack, 37, previously convicted of bad checks and fraud in New York state and in Monroe County, was charged Wednesday with two counts of bad checks, signaling what may be the end of the controversial, high-profile building company.
...
Arguing for $20,000 bail before Judge Gibbons, Assistant District Attorney Maryann Grippo explained how Mansions & Estates structured its business on bad checks.
...
To the end, Mr. Binsack made excuses to the court.
He blamed the checks on "internal company problems," yet boasted that his business has several hundred-thousand dollars in multiple accounts.
But sometimes Mr. Binsack contradicted himself.
...
In the 1990s, Mr. Binsack was doing business in Sullivan County, N.Y., under the name East Coast Building and Development, until bad checks caught up with him in 1998. He was convicted of grand larceny for paying for legal services and building supplies with bad checks and was sentenced to one to three years in state prison.
Just across the border in Monroe County, he was later accused of taking money from several customers and not completing their homes. In 2001 he pleaded guilty in Monroe County Court to fraud, served time in state prison and was ordered to pay $100,000 restitution to his victims.
Upon his release, he founded Mansions & Estates International LLC in Clarks Summit, complete with a lush marketing plan that featured an image of a castle on hill. On parole until January 2008, he has fought the Monroe County Court's order that he pay restitution even as he boasted of his success in Lackawanna County.
I'm glad David Falcheck of the Scranton Times pointed out the contradictions and the gall of this man, making excuses, while bragging.
I saw this coming almost a year ago, of course. And I'm sure there's people in Monroe County & New York that are thinking we in Lackawanna County must not be too swift on the uptake to fall for a repeat con.
So the question remains now... What county will he be allowed to set up business in next after this stint in jail? Will we be revisiting this in another 5 years? Perhaps in another state? Maybe just the Back Mountain area will do.
I recall some saying about leopards not changing their spots, after all.
Or will he actually be held for more than awhile this time?
Obviously all he'd have to do is find an area, like Lackawanna County, that's got a few people who don't know how to do an internet search.
Because that's all it would've took for history not to repeat itself in Lackawanna County. There are people in Lackawanna County who had Google'd his name a year ago, and decided not to do business with him after seeing the stories in the Pocono Record.
For goodness sake, if you have friends & family who aren't on the internet, advise them to have someone else do internet searches for them when they're contemplating hiring someone for big money. Spread the word. Maybe we can prevent at least a little of this in the future.
On the other hand, I suppose there may have been those people who willingly did business with Scott Binsack, knowing his past.
I scoff at any list of "wonders" that included a statue created less than 100 years ago, with no mystery attached to it, but failed to include the statues of Easter Island.
"All of these wonders obviously deserve a place on the list, but what disturbs us is that the list is limited to just seven," he said, pointing out that "seven were adequate in antiquity because the antique world was much smaller than today", only comprising the area surrounding the Mediterranean.
I scoff at any list of "wonders" that included a statue created less than 100 years ago, with no mystery attached to it, but failed to include the statues of Easter Island, which are one of the greatest mysteries of histories the world has ever known.
But the problem was clear in that the choices given to people included choices that defied the term "wonder".
And sadly, I think many of the voters probably chose a statue created less than 100 years ago, with no wondering necessary, simply because they're Christians and felt they should vote for it for no other reason than that the statue depicts Jesus.
Not that it's not a nice statue & all, and not that it doesn't deserve attention & admiration...
But how can you even compare a statue erected in 1913 to the hundreds of moai monoliths on Rapa Nui, that are such wonders, that even top scholars & archaelogists are unable to narrow down their construction dates to a particular century.
I certainly saw this coming, and I don't know much about building at all. Just seems like common sense. Though I have heard that only 7% of the population has that.
It was almost a year ago I first heard of Scott Binsack.
Watermelon Punch, the Blog - Side-Blog - 26 Aug 2006 | in the same line of work
Are there not some kind of rules or laws to prevent someone from continuing in the same line of work for which they were convicted of swindling? "I want to pay the restitution, but the judge by law has no authority to order me to pay a higher amount per month if I can prove I don't have the income to do so," Scott Binsack, 37, said Wednesday night after President Judge Ronald Vican issued the decision.
And it reminded me of this story:
Watermelon Punch, the Blog - 18 May 2004 | The nerve of some gamblers! A New Jersey man pled guilty to concocting a bogus investment scheme and faces up to 20 years in prison. But instead of showing up for sentencing, Brian Strahl faxed the judge a letter saying he was playing in the world series of poker in Las Vegas -- an effort, he claimed, to win funds to pay back victims. The judge rescheduled the sentencing and denounced Strahl as a "degenerate gambler."
My concerns from last year certainly seem to have been founded. (Surprise, surprise.)
The Times-Tribune - Detractors, growing debt dog local builder For those aware of Mr. Binsack's past as a home builder in Monroe County, the recent issues come as no surprise.
In 1999 he was accused of taking money from several customers and not completing their homes.
... A near-fatal motorcycle crash prevented him from building the homes, he said.
... After a few years, however, many vendors and subcontractors refuse to do business with him or say Mansions & Estates owes them money. This year, some of those deals gone wrong have found their way to Lackawanna County Court.
... Mansions & Estates was in default to the tune of $13,026 for a commercial loan and had overdue balances on two commercial credit cards, according to court documents.
... Mr. Binsack said all businesses his size get sued.
"We are a $25 million business," he declared. "Anyone our size will have lawsuits, and I'm not going to pay for unjustifiable charges. Everyone who deserves to get paid will be paid."
The picture painted after all is one of narcissism, a person who plays fast & loose with reality, at the expense of people around him.
The over-the-top advertising alone perplexed me, as did the fact he got his own radio show of some type.
But what really makes me wonder is this... Is it really that 93% of the population sorely lacks common sense?
Or is there some other phenomenon that would explain why vendors, subcontractors, home buyers, and a bank would step willingly into his fold?
Or should we all just believe that all home builders get convicted of swindling and fail to pay vendors, that all businesses 'that size' get sued, default on commercial loans, and fail to pay for office furniture?
Are all the wronged supposed to just shut up and turn on the radio to listen to him hold court & regale his audience with fanciful tales of importance and persecution...
what's bothered me for years about the whole Big Bang thing is this...
Details of what the universe was like before the big bang may be forever lost to us, according to a new analysis. Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity, describes the evolution of the cosmos but breaks down at the moment of the big bang, preventing researchers from understanding its origins. To glimpse behind the veil, a researcher has applied a speculative theory that treats the universe as pixilated into tiny atom-like units of space and time. His findings suggest that experiments would never be sensitive enough to fully reconstruct the state of the universe before the bang.
I will state I'm by no means a physicist nor a mathemetician of any kind. So maybe there's something I just don't understand that can't be explained to me without me spending a whole lot of time on the mathematics... that I don't want to spend...
But what's bothered me for years about the whole Big Bang thing is this...
If everything in the universe is expanding, including you know, the usuals... matter, energy, --- and Time... TIME! hullo?? TIME?? ...
Then maybe using a word like "before" in relation to this Big Bang is kind of a conundrum misnomer of some sort.
I just wonder if maybe this obsession with origin and what was before, and where things came from (notice tense)... I just wonder if that's all a side-effect of being stuck in a some kind of proverbial Flatland of sorts.
For more than a decade, researchers have asserted that women speak much more than men do, with one neuropsychiatrist reporting in a book ("The Female Brain") that women use 20,000 words per day compared to only 7,000 for men.
The author of the book, Louann Brizendine of the University of California, San Francisco, said she later found out those numbers were based on an “unreliable” study.
...
Mehl noted that there are "very large individual differences around this mean," or average. For instance, one of the most talkative males spewed out 47,000 words a day (nearly 1 per second) compared with just more than 500 daily words for the least talkative male.
In fact, the three chat-chart toppers were men.
Someone called the 'Corbett' show and asked Steve Corbett to name one person who died as a result of inadequate health insurance... I know at least one name -- Deamonte Driver.
Ever since WILK AM took over 103.1 FM, I sometimes listen to it during my commute in the evening, when Corbett is on. I'm not a big talk radio fan, by any stretch of the imagination, but very few stations come in consistently on my car radio on my commute route. 103.1FM happens to be one that does come in fairly well most of the way.
Today Corbett was discussing health care in the U.S., in regards to the new movie Sicko that's coming out. And a guy really did call and claim nobody had ever died from inadequate insurance, and challenged Corbett to name one person. It's surprising this guy who called in would be so ignorant as to think nobody in this country had ever died because of lack of health insurance. And Corbett was armed with a load of statistics of just how much more likely it is for someone to die without insurance. It's chilling.
I called in the Corbett show and told the guy answering the phone about the story of this poor child, Deamonte Driver, but as my phone was running out of power, and my other phone was completely out of power, I just quickly related the information.
And I can only imagine they were probably flooded with calls from people who knew someone personally who died as a result of lack of health insurance.
I can't imagine why I didn't blog this story before, because it was so personally horrifying to me.
Deamonte Driver?
The poor kid couldn't get the tooth out by a dentist, because his mother worked and so didn't qualify for free dental, and even after he got public dental, there wasn't a dentist available in their area would take that. So it spread to his brain, and then he needed brain surgery.
It could've cost the tax payers under $100 for him to have had that tooth out. But instead, the taxpayers wound up paying about $250,000.00 for his brain surgeries. And he still died.
Deamonte Driver's life could have been spared if his infected tooth was simply removed -- a procedure costing just $80.
However, the Driver family faced obstacles with Medicaid, poverty, and access to resources, resulting in an easily preventable health problem turning deadly.
In the end, Driver endured two surgeries and weeks of hospital care totaling about $250,000 in medical bills. Sadly, it was too late to save the boy, and he passed away on Feb. 25.
Just over a year ago I had an infection in a tooth that had a root canal many years ago. The tooth broke underneath the gum, and became infected. So much so that my face swelled out and I experienced intense pain, fever, ear ache, sore throat, and sinus problems. The infection got all through. I had to pay almost $200 out of pocket with dental insurance (only paying for about half of the total costs, which were up around $300), to have the tooth and the infection removed. There would've been nothing medical doctors or the ER of a hospital could've done to me to keep that infection from spreading and going deeper. I had to see an oral surgeon to have it removed. And no oral surgeon will perform procedures without getting paid on the spot. (Which is probably the basic reason that boy never had the procedure when it would've been $80.) In fact, the oral surgeon I went to, the people in the office couldn't get immediate verification from my dental insurance whether or not it covered a certain procedure related to removing the infection, so I had to pay an extra $75 on the spot, which was eventually returned to me a month later. But had I not had that extra $75, I couldn't have gotten the procedure at all.
And as it happens, many people do not get dental insurance with their jobs. It's not a requirement for employers to provide it to full time employees. Frankly, I think infection removal should be covered under medical insurance, considering it's a medical problem that can lead to even more serious, even life threatening, medical problems.
Not only that, but it seems rather ridiculous that in a society where missing teeth is such a taboo, that dental care wouldn't be considered a basic need.
That's probably part of the reason people on public programmes stay there, as do their children.
How many positions would an employer deem it okay to fill with someone with blackened rotten & missing teeth? How many employers wouldn't even consider hiring someone with missing teeth for any position? I bet a lot wouldn't.
scientists learn that identifying, listening to, and talking about one's feelings is actually healthy, beneficial, and natural, confirming what many have already known
superficiality >>If the facade is what's important to you, all you wind up with is an illusion. Disillusionment is the gift of substance.
-- Chloe<<
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