Archive for February, 2009
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 that 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. That’s right, 30 trillion dollars, and quite a few Wall streeters in the pokey.
Toymaker Wants Bernie Madoff Doll to Crack You Up
Like many other toys at the 2009 Toy Fair, the Bernie Madoff doll offers something extra.
And just like swindler Madoff, it’s gonna cost you.
The $99, red-suited, pitchfork-wielding figure comes with a golden hammer.
You see, you’re not just buying Bernie, but also the fun of smashing him to smithereens.
The maker hopes its “Smash-Me Bernie” doll — available online at minimemodelworks.com — could become a “Tickle Me Elmo” for grownups who haven’t lost all their money in a Ponzi scheme.
The World’s Longest Ear Hair
Officially recognised by Guinness in 2003 as having the longest ear hair in the world, Radhakant has carefully coifed his ear-folicles from 13.2cm to their current ear-itching length.
Considered by Radhakant, 58, to be symbol of luck and prosperity, his incredible ear-hair has been growing since he was 18 and more importantly has never been cut.
He added: “Before people would tease me, not maliciously, but still would ask me why my I never cut my ear hair.
“Now I tell people with pride about the good fortune that my hair has brought me.
“I am sure that no one in the world has ear-hair longer than mine and my hair is almost double the length of the first record I set in 2003.
“We are currently waiting for confirmation from Guinness that my ear hair, which stands at 25cm is now the new standard for men with extreme ear-hair.”
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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 and stated a little more aggressively than the author does;
What is going on now is a massive rip off and that if the banks, hedge funds and corporations involved, were prosecuted by the government, rather than being bailed out, the government could gain around 30 trillion dollars. That aught to cover building some nice new luxury prisons to put the guilty portion of wall street up for a while.
Obama Scores Big with $800 Billion for High Speed Rail
Buried in the $800 Billion stimulus package is $8 Billion for high speed rail in the United States. It’s the most serious investment in commuter rail service in the nations history.
Additionally President Obama intends to ask for a further $1 Billion a year for high speed rail in his budget request to congress, starting with the 2010 budget.
High speed rail was one of Obama’s campaign pledges, speaking in Indiana during the campaign he said:
“The time is right now for us to start thinking about high-speed rail as an alternative to air transportation connecting all these cities. And think about what a great project that would be in terms of rebuilding America.”
The Fantasy Life and Lonely Death of the SAS Veteran Who Never Was
He professed to have been a member of Britain’s secretive and elite Special Air Service, writing an account of his time in the Hindu Kush and other places in Afghanistan, training the mujahideen to fight the Soviets during the invasion in the late 1970s. But after selling 50,000 copies of his book Jihad!, Tom Carew was exposed as a fantasist fixated with the SAS whose real name was Philip Sessarego.
This week, the tale of the man whose Walter Mitty-style fictions caused him to be despised by real members of the SAS — who rarely speak of their time in “the Regiment” — took a strange, and final, twist when it emerged that a decomposed body discovered in a rented garage in Antwerp is believed to have been his.
Crazy Indian Snake Charmers Protest Wildlife Laws
Indian snake charmers denounced wildlife protection laws in Calcutta yesterday to protest a ban they claim is killing their profession.
Joe Bageant: Skinny Dipping in Reality
“There’s nothing better that 250 mics of good acid to kick start the cosmic coonhunt for Enlightenment. It takes juice. After all sonny boy, you don’t knock down stars with a bee bee gun.”
—Mad Dog Howard, Hippie Doper/Philosopher
First LSD trip, 1965: Tumbling, tumbling, tumbling inward with eyes closed, I could hear the spider plant hanging in the basket overhead singing in its green subatomic plant language, a hymn to the sunlight charging my bedroom atmosphere. On the back of my eyelids spun a great wheel of existence, turning both ways simultaneously generating an unearthly mournful chant that seemed to be composed of every human voice on earth. It rose in some unknown universal tongue singing, “Wheel of life, wheel of death, Bangladesh, Bangladesh. Wheel of life, wheel of death, Bangaladesh, Bangaladesh.” Millions of starving faces, young men, girls, old men, babies, crones, materialized in uncountable swarms, each face transfigured by…
U.S. Muslim TV Boss Arrested For Beheading Wife
The founder of an American Muslim television channel, launched to counter the negative stereotypes of Muslims after 9/11, was arrested in New York late Thursday for beheading his estranged wife.
Muzzammil Hassan, 44, was charged with second-degree murder hours after he went to the police and told them his wife’s dead body was at the Bridges TV office in Buffalo, New York, local papers reported.
Former MI5 Chief: UK Government Exploits Terror Fears To Restrict Civil Liberties
The former head of MI5 has accused ministers of exploiting fears over terrorism to restrict civil liberties, adding to mounting criticism of the government’s record on human rights.
In an interview with a Spanish newspaper, Stella Rimington said state interference in people’s privacy played into the hands of terrorists.
“It would be better that the government recognised that there are risks rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, [which is] precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state,” she told La Vanguardia.
Rimington, who stood down as the British security service’s director general in 1996, also accused the US of torture.
“The US has gone too far with Guantánamo and the tortures. MI5 does not do that,” she said.
Her comments came as a court heard that MI5 lawyers were involved in devising a policy governing the…
Supreme Court Case With The Feel Of A Best Seller
BECKLEY, W.Va. — In a small town, a local resident claims wrongdoing by a big corporation and wins a multimillion-dollar award after a jury trial. The corporation’s CEO then pumps enough campaign money into a judicial election to get a new judge on the state supreme court. During an appeal, that judge casts a critical vote siding with the corporation — and reversing the resident’s victory.
Sound like the plot of a John Grisham novel?
It is — his 2008 best seller, The Appeal. But it also resembles a real dispute between West Virginia coal mining rivals that now is before the U.S. Supreme Court. The decade-long dispute, a reflection of the growing questions surrounding judicial elections, tests whether an elected judge’s refusal to take himself off a case involving a chief financial backer is unconstitutional.
Doomsday Seed Vault’s Stores Are Growing
The stores of seeds in a “doomsday” vault in the Norwegian Arctic are growing as researchers rush to preserve 100,000 crop varieties from potential extinction.
The imperiled seeds are going to be critical for protecting the global food supply against devastating crop losses as a result of climate change, said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
“These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation,” Fowler said. “You can’t imagine a solution to climate change without crop diversity.”
That’s because the crops currently being used by farmers will not be able to evolve quickly enough on their own to adjust to predicted drought, rising temperatures and new pests and diseases, he said.
The Texas Fireball Video
Was it just a meteor? Space junk re-entering our atmosphere? Something else?
U.S. and UK Anti-Terror Tactics ‘Actively Undermined’ International Law
Anti-terror measures worldwide have seriously undermined international human rights law, a report by legal experts says. After a three-year global study, the International Commission of Jurists said many states used the public’s fear of terrorism to introduce measures.
These included detention without trial, illegal disappearance and torture. It also said that the UK and the US have “actively undermined” international law by their actions.
It concluded that many measures introduced to fight terrorism were illegal and counter-productive. It called for justice systems to be strengthened and warned that temporary measures should not become permanent.
The Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) is a non-governmental organisation which promotes the observance of the rule of law and the legal protection of human rights. The panel of eminent lawyers and judges concluded that the framework of international law that existed before the 9/11 attacks on the US was robust and effective.
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The Super-est Supermen of Pre-Golden Age Science Fiction
Joshua Glenn, io9.com: Long before Alan Moore asked “Who will watch the Watchmen?” science fiction writers of the Pre-Golden Age (1904–33) worried whether supermen would rescue us ordinary mortals — or try to dominate us.
Dreamed up by American and European SF writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — at a time when Lamarckian-Bergsonian evolutionary philosophy, which posits a tendency for organisms to become more perfect as they evolve, remained popular — many of the first fictional supermen were portrayed by their creators as examples of a more perfect species towards which humankind has supposedly long aimed. Pre-Golden-Age superman was, that is to say, homo superior, an evolved human whose superiority was mental, physical, or both.
The influence of Pre-Golden Age supermen remains a powerful one. Consider Adrian Veidt, in the forthcoming Watchmen movie adaptation. He’s an Übermensch — a self-overcoming individual, that is to say, who has not only mastered…
Stephen Colbert Tackles the Shepard Fairey Obama Poster Controversy
Two legal experts, David Ross and Ed Colbert (Stephen’s brother), debate the copyright issues surrounding Shepard Fairey’s famous Obama poster:
Scandal-Ridden Blackwater Changes Name to Xe
ABC News: The scandal-ridden security firm Blackwater USA is officially changing its name effective immediately as the company moves to rebrand itself after being fired last month by the State Department from its job protecting diplomats in Iraq.
The company will now be known as Xe and hopes to be a “one-stop shopping source for world class services in the fields of security, stability, aviation, training and logistics”, according to a memo sent by company president Gary Jackson to employees today.
The division that handles the diplomatic protection services will now be known as U.S. Training Center, Inc., but now its primary focus will be operating training facilities, including the flagship campus in North Carolina, according to Jackson. It was that very division that handled Blackwater’s overseas operations, which also faced the most criticism.
“Blackwater’s latest attempt at re-branding itself would be hilarious if the company’s record wasn’t so deadly,” said Jeremy Scahill,…
Executive Compensation Demystified
NPR Weekend Edition: Here’s a fact we learned this week: Nearly 700 Merrill Lynch employees earned more than a million dollars last year, even though the company lost $27 billion and was forced to be sold to Bank of America.
It’s the kind of news that raises the hackles of Rakesh Khurana, who teaches at Harvard Business School. He tells host Scott Simon that the highest paid person isn’t always the best.
Monkeys Have a Sense of Morality
Jonathan Leake, Times:
MONKEYS and apes have a sense of morality and the rudimentary ability to tell right from wrong, according to new research.
In a series of studies scientists have found that monkeys and apes can make judgments about fairness, offer altruistic help and empathise when a fellow animal is ill or in difficulties. They even appear to have consciences and the ability to remember obligations.
The research implies that morality is not a uniquely human quality and suggests it arose through evolution. That could mean the strength of our consciences is partly determined by our genes.
Such findings are likely to antagonise fundamentalist religious groups. Some believe the ability to form moral judgments is a God-given quality that sets humans apart.
The scientists say, however, that the evidence is clear. “I am not arguing that non-human primates are moral beings but there is enough evidence for the following of social rules to agree…
