Archive for February, 2009
Geronimo’s Kin Sue Skull and Bones Over Remains
HARTFORD, Conn. — Geronimo’s descendants have sued Skull and Bones — the secret society at Yale University linked to presidents and other powerful figures — claiming that its members stole the remains of the legendary Apache leader decades ago and have kept them ever since.
The federal lawsuit filed in Washington on Tuesday — the 100th anniversary of Geronimo’s death — also names the university and the federal government.
Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo said his family believes Skull and Bones members took some of the remains in 1918 from a burial plot in Fort Sill, Okla., to keep in its New Haven clubhouse, a crypt. The alleged graverobbing is a longstanding legend that gained some validity in recent years with the discovery of a letter from a club member that described the theft.
To Believe or Not to Believe … Is That the Question?
It’s really incredible to me how much our beliefs are shaped by the society in which we live.
Unfortunately,(more so than not)the societal constructs which frame our belief system can sometimes be to our detriment.
Noted French philosopher Emmanuel Descartes stated in one of his many treatises, “…I think, therefore I am”.
This notion from my perspective is the primary postulate lending credibility to the viability of consciousness/personality.
The question now is does consciousness create or follow form? (Which came first, the chicken or the egg?)
Society would have us believe that viability begins sometime between gestation and birth but I beg to differ.
To believe or not to believe…is that the question?
man_thinking_447_v4 To believe or not to believe…is that the question?
It’s really incredible to me how much our beliefs are shaped by the society in which we live. Unfortunately,(more so than not)the societal constructs which frame our belief system can sometimes be to our detriment. Noted French philosopher
Hunting the Wild Corprodemocan: When Goverment and Corporations Breed
Ronald Reagan chided “Big Gummint” as the problem, not the solution, but for the past several decades government and private enterprise have co-mingled DNA to form a completely different species…one that now rides wild over the nation.
Draft Stormy: Push to Make Porn Star a Senator No Stunt, Claims Supporters
CNN: Fans of porn star Stormy Daniels are drafting her to run for the U.S. Senate seat in Louisiana now held by Republican Sen. David Vitter. And it’s no racy gimmick, they say.
Vitter is famous — or infamous — for his link to the “D.C. Madam,” the woman who ran a prostitution ring. Elected to the Senate in 2004, he admitted to “a very serious sin in my past” in July 2007 after his phone number turned up in records of an escort service run by the late Deborah Jeane…
Spurned Co-Worker Puts Fake Ad on Craigslist Offering Sex from Victim
A Texas man could face harassment charges for impersonating a former co-worker by placing a Craigslist ad that said she would have sex with those who contacted her on Valentine’s Day.
Bummer: Touch and Go Records to Stop Releasing New Music, Shut Down Distribution
It’s a very, very sad day for indie rock. One of America’s foremost independent record labels, Touch and Go Records, has announced that they will no longer release new music.
They have also shuttered their distribution arm, which manufactured and brought to market releases for labels like Merge, Kill Rock Stars, Drag City, Suicide Squeeze, Flameshovel, Jade Tree, and Post Present Medium.
From Big Black and Shellac to Butthole Surfers and the Jesus Lizard, from Dirty Three and Pinback to Ted Leo and TV on the Radio, from Calexico to the Mekons to Slint, Touch and Go nurtured the careers of so many bands that served as backbones for indie rock. They even boasted a promising crop of new bands, with recent releases from Crystal Antlers, Mi Ami, All the Saints, and Sholi.
Understanding Our Current Socioeconomic Metamorphosis: A One-Two Combo with Juan Enriquez
Almost everyone that I have been interacting with over the last few months is now beginning to feel the impact of our current socioeconomic metamorphosis, even though most still do not seem to grasp the magnitude of the crisis.
Many believe that our corporate governments with the help of our banking institutions will be able to stabilize the markets and rejuvenate our economy by flooding the system with money. In essence, they are buying into the hype that propping up a failed system with a fiat currency will bring back the good old days of inequality, where the majority of the world lives in poverty while we drive our fancy cars, live in our over priced homes, take for granted the opportunities and freedoms we use to have, while we police the world and waste our precious and limited resources. That’s not going to happen, and the main reason for why…
Tom Hanks to Switch On Repaired Large Hadron Collider
The giant underground machine, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, suffered a catastrophic malfunction soon after being switched on amid a fanfare of publicity last September.
A faulty electrical connection led to a leak of super-cold helium causing damage estimated at £20 million to the device, operated by Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva.
As a result, 53 of the magnets used to accelerate subatomic particles around the machine’s 17-mile circular tunnel underneath the Franco-Swiss border have had to be brought to the surface for repair or cleaning.
Hanks was approached about the move while filming his latest film Angels and Demons in which he plays a Harvard University academic investigating a plot to annihilate the Vatican with 0.25 grams of antimatter stolen from Cern.
Steve Myers, Cern’s director of accelerators and technology, told Nature News that he gave the actor a tour of the laboratory on February 13 and asked him if…
Kidnapper Reads Bible to Victim for 3 Days
An Ohio man has been charged with kidnapping and assault after he held a homeless woman against her will and read the Bible to her for three days.
Reverse Darwin Action
Devolve Me allows you to upload a photo and see what the caveman version of yourself would’ve looked like. You can become a homo erectus (1.8 million years ago), australopitchecus afarensis (3.7 million years ago), or another stage of evolutionary development (there’s an adjustable de-evolving slide bar). Weirdly, your caveman version will probably look wiser than regular you.
Cessna Counters Unfair Hatred Of Private Jets
Private luxury jet maker Cessna is offended by all of the post-bailout controversy over CEOs still using their planes while gorging on taxpayer money.
So the company has unveiled a new ad campaign to counter all of the misinformation regarding what they call “business aircrafts.”
According to their press release (click the link), flying commercial makes you a coward unfit to run a company.
Ensuring that our nation’s CEOs are outfitted in personal jets so they can stay relaxed and in peak form is “exactly what is needed to work our way toward economic recovery.”
Facebook Yields to User Outrage: Reverts to Old TOS
Amid user revolt Facebook backed away from a newly implemented terms of service that many considered a privacy violation. Last night Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the company would reverted back to its previous version of its terms of service that “everybody can understand.”
Zuckerberg explained in a blog post: “Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”
Facebook had updated its terms of service earlier this month. The change went largely unnoticed until last weekend when bloggers caught wind of the change. The details of the terms of service change were highlighted in an extremely popular blog at the Consumerist Website where people felt Facebook’s new terms of service meant “anything you upload…
Facebook Yields to User Outrage: Reverts to Old TOS
Amid user revolt Facebook backed away from a newly implemented terms of service that many considered a privacy violation. Last night Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the company would reverted back to its previous version of its terms of service that “everybody can understand.”
Zuckerberg explained in a blog post: “Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”
Facebook had updated its terms of service earlier this month. The change went largely unnoticed until last weekend when bloggers caught wind of the change. The details of the terms of service change were highlighted in an extremely popular blog at the Consumerist Website where people felt Facebook’s new terms of service meant “anything you upload…
‘Drunk’ Japanese Finance Minister ‘Quits’ (i.e. Forced To Resign)
HIROKO TABUCHI, NY Times: The resignation of Japan’s finance minister, who faced criticism for his odd behavior at a news conference at a Group of 7 meeting in Rome over the weekend, poses fresh problems for the country’s leadership during a worsening recession.
The episode, which led the minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, to quit on Tuesday, was a major setback for Prime Minister Taro Aso, who has been in office since only September. He has already come under fire for his handling of the economy and for a series of embarrassing gaffes of his own.
A weekend poll by the NTV television network found Mr. Aso’s approval rating at about 10 percent, and figures this week showed that the Japanese economy was contracting at the fastest rate since 1974.
Erick Schonfeld: ‘Mining The Thought Stream’
Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch: What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter?
And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right nowabout any imaginable subject or event?
Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.
In fact, the crude beginnings of this “now” search engine already exists. It is called Twitter, and it is a big reason why new investors poured another $35 million into the two-year-old startup on Friday. Twitter is not the only company trying to solve this problem.
Facebook, FriendFeed, and even Google are trying to crack it, but Twitter has a decided advantage in that it is capturing the vast majority of the real-time thought…
Race For ‘God Particle’ Heats Up
Europe’s particle physics lab, Cern, is losing ground rapidly in the race to discover the elusive Higgs boson, or “God particle”, its US rival claims. The particle, whose existence has been predicted by theoreticians, would help to explain why matter has mass.
Finding the Higgs is a major goal of Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). But the US Fermilab says the odds of its Tevatron accelerator detecting the famed particle first are now 50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best.
Both machines hope to see evidence of the Higgs by colliding sub-atomic matter at very high speeds. If it exists, the Higgs should emerge from the debris.
What Cooked the World’s Economy? It Wasn’t Your Overdue Mortgage
Finally, some clarity on the nature of the scam that is going down. In short:
“What is going on now is a massive rip off, and if the banks, hedge funds and corporations involved, were prosecuted rather than bailed out, the government could gain around 30 trillion dollars.”
That’s right, 30 trillion dollars. 30 trillion dollars!
What Cooked the World’s Economy? It wasn’t your overdue mortgage.
Finally, some clarity on the nature of the scam that is going down.
In short; What is going on now is a massive rip off, and if the banks, hedge funds and corporations involved, were prosecuted by the government, rather than bailed out, the government could gain around 30 trillion dollars. Thats right, 30 trillion dollars.
