Archive for February, 2009
Fine for Constitution
A business owner is being threneted by florida to remove his art work from his business, instead of removing it he put a banner of hanging a poster of the constitution amendment 1 facing a 500$ a day fine.
Applying the Three Stages of Truth to the 2012 Prophecies: Stage 1 — Ridicule with Dr. Neil deGrasse
It has been said that truth passes through three stages: ridicule, violent opposition, and acceptance. This credit has been given to German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”…
A few days ago I came across a video regarding a 2012 prophecy that was a perfect example of the first stage of truth. This video is of Neil deGrasse Tyson, an American astrophysicist, answering a question regarding Planet X and/or Nibiru, I’m not sure which since the original question is not included in the video.
It appears that since we all appreciate good humor and need a little more laughter in our lives this video has gone viral online. But let’s go beyond the humor and analyze some of the critical points Mr. Tyson tries to make.
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Dream On: Why Dreams Mean Less Than We Think
John Cloud, TIME:
Most people dream enthusiastically at night, their dreams seemingly occupying hours, even though most last only a few minutes. Most people also read great meaning into their nocturnal visions. In fact, according to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the vast majority of people in three very different countries — India, South Korea, and the United States — believe that their dreams reveal meaningful, hidden truths.
According to the study, 74% of Indians, 65% of South Koreans, and 56% of Americans hold an old-fashioned Freudian view of dreams: that they are portals into the unconscious.
But after so many years of brain research showing that most of our everyday cognitions result from a complex but observable interaction of proteins and neurons and other mostly uncontrolled cellular activity, how can so many otherwise rational people think dreams should be taken seriously? After all, brain activity isn’t…
Norway Education Minister: There’s No Future in Fighting P2P
Jacqui Cheng, arstechnica:
Noncommercial file sharing should be legal in Norway, according to the Norwegian Minister of Education. Bård Vegar Solhjell wrote in a blog post last week that file sharing is not only a great way to discover new music, but that “there is no future in fighting” against file sharing services.
“All previous technology advances have led to fears that the older format to die. But TV did not kill radio, the Web did not kill the book, and the download is not going to kill music,” wrote Solhjell. He goes on to note that artists should still get paid for their work, and discusses the ad-supported revenue model for streaming music that has worked for radio for so long.
When it comes to illegal downloads, however, Solhjell says that those fighting it will only waste their resources. “This means that less resources is used for printing, transport and music shops.…
A Russian Eco-Cult Community in California
Boingboing guestblogger Paul Spinrad:
If you’re looking for a way to get back to the land and enjoy an integrated life while society collapses, The Shambhala-Shasta Anastasia Eco-Settlement Project has 466 acres of land and is looking for settlers. It sounds nice!
I’ve long fantasized about this kind of thing. Maybe now’s the time. The “Anastasia” in their name refers to the heroine of the “Ringing Cedars” series of books by Vladimir Megre, which came out in Russia during the mid-1990’s and started being translated into English beginning in 2004.
If numerous websites are to be believed, the series has a large following not just in Russia, but around the world. “Ringing Cedars” refers to the books’ claim that when a Siberian Pine tree (sometimes translated as “Cedar”) reaches 500 years of age, it becomes a sort of cosmic energy-channeling antenna.
And so also rings the New Age BS detector, but please stay with me…
Sean Penn Speech Censored In Asia
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Gay Asians voiced indignation Wednesday after television broadcasts of the Academy Awards in their region censored the words “gay” and “lesbian” in speeches that called for equal rights for homosexuals.
The Ghosts Finally Get Ms. Pac-Man
Most likely everyone is happy to see Circuit City and (soon) Blockbuster go, but there is one sad case of household-name corporate bankruptcy to come from this economic crisis; Midway Games, maker of classic arcade titles such as Tron, Rampage, and, most importantly, Pac-Man and Mortal Kombat, has filed for Chapter 11.
Despite making games which were broadly influential pop culture beacons of the ’80s and ’90s, the company has been losing money since 2000, including $150 million last year alone. In November, media mogul Sumner Redstone sold his majority stake.
Regardless on what happens, Midway’s spirit will live on in soda-soaked arcade consoles around the world.
Bill Mandates Wi-Fi User Logs For Police
Congressional Republicans have called for an ambitious new federal law forcing all internet providers and operators of Wi-Fi access points to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations. Hotels, coffee shops, and libraries would store data on all users, which could then be accessed by law enforcement if needed.
Two bills have already been introduced in the House under the title “Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act,” or “Internet Safety Act” for short. Senate Republican John Cornyn of Texas explained that “[The internet's] limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children.”
Bush’s attorney general Alberto Gonzales had called for a similar measure, but the idea has bipartisan support; new attorney general Eric Holder has voiced his approval of such a law.
Twitter First To Publish Dramatic Crash Pictures (First Video Too)
The social networking site Twitter again stole a march on traditional media when it was the first outlet to publish dramatic pictures of the Turkish Airlines crash.
Moments after the plane crashed at Amsterdam’s Schipol airport on Wednesday morning the news was appearing on Twitter, CNN’s Errol Barnett said.
“This is a story that broke on Twitter first and continued to unfold from there. Eyewitnesses were posting comments about the shock of seeing the plane ‘dive’ and amazement of passengers walking out of the wreckage,” Barnett said.
“It was a dramatic image of a fractured plane posted on Twitter.com that was the first worldwide view of the Turkish Airlines crash. It was snapped by an eyewitness driving on the nearby A-9 highway, just north of the crash site.”
Jesus The Corporate Shill
Jesus is back and the greedy folks of Corporate America have got their mits on him … and he’s selling you everything from Chewing Tobacco to shares in Lockheed Martin.
Holy Crap!!! The Lost Issue of ‘Doom Patrol’!!!
Brendan McCrathy, one of the creators of Reboot, on the discovery of a Doom Patrol script by Grant Morrison!
Brendan McCrathy writes:
I found this DOOM PATROL script the other day that I had doodled all over, from Grant Morrison … It was an episode that Grant wrote for me to draw back in 1991/92 or thereabouts: I asked for an old style DC ‘imaginary story’ with Danny The Street as the central character.
But by the time the script turned up, I had to do a film so I couldn’t draw it and I think eventually, we all sorta forgot about it … It would be fun to draw it up after all these years and release it as a VERTIGO ANOMALY one shot.
Even the very idea of a lost issue of Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol, especially one drawn by Brendan McCarthy, has already caused drastic and irreversible changes to my central…
Obama: Regime Rotation
The arrival of the Obama administration will not fundamentally alter the course of military expansion accelerated during the Bush era. The origins of these policies do not lie uniquely in neoconservative ideology. While the election of President Obama may offer new opportunities for progressive forces to delimit the damage, their space for movement will ultimately be constrained by deep-seated structural pressures that will attempt to exploit Obama to rehabilitate American imperial hegemony, rather than transform it.
Indeed, the radicalization of Anglo-American political ideology represented by the rise of neoconservative principles and the militarization processes of the ‘War on Terror’, constituted a strategic response to global systemic crises supported by the American business classes. The same classes, recognizing the extent to which the Bush era has discredited this response, have rallied around Obama. Therefore, as global crises intensify, this militarization response is likely to undergo further radicalization, rather than a meaningful change…
EU-Ukraine-Russian Gas Crisis in Retrospective: It’s Just the Beginning
Last month, a price dispute between Russia and Ukraine triggered the shutting of the transit route through which Europe receives about a fifth of all its natural gas. The gas crisis was largely interpreted as resulting from a breakdown in negotiations between Russia and Ukraine over how much the latter would pay for its own gas supplies, as well as questions about who would provide the technical gas to operate Ukraininian compressor stations.
Yet under the surface of the unprecedented dispute is a looming energy crisis. Russia produces about 22 percent of world gas supply, and is believed to hold 30 percent of the world’s remaining gas reserves. In a prescient analysis in late 2008, Dr. Pierre Noel, Acting Director of the Electricity Policy Forum at the University of Cambridge, warned that: “Over the next 15-20 years, Gazprom faces serious supply challenges, and the international gas market is likely to experience…
Torture, Rendition, Terror & Oil: A Primer on “Deep Politics”
Why is the Obama administration hell-bent on continuing rendition, and covering-up torture? Why are Western states complicit in these illegal activities? How can the systematic perpetuation of such criminal practices under the rubric of the ‘War on Terror’ be conducted by the very states who claim to be the guardians of ‘international law’ and ‘human rights’?
The practice of rendition, linked inextricably to the facilitation of torture, is an integral part of the conduct of the western ‘War on Terror’, initiated after 9/11. It therefore needs to be understood in the context of western geopolitical, strategic and economic strategies, and their connection to national security policies. Only by grasping this wider context can rendition be understood in terms of its relationship to the logic of current western strategies, which are themselves rooted in longstanding social, political, ideological and economic processes tied to the protection of powerful vested interests. The movement against…
Ammiano Introduces California Bill to Decriminalize, Tax, Regulate Marijuana
California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) today introduced a bill to decriminalize, tax and regulate marijuana. Not medical marijuana — all marijuana.
Third-Hand Smoke and ChemTrails: Invisible Toxin Fears
Third-hand smoke has been touted lately by the media as yet another invisible toxin we must be diligent in avoiding, and yet another reason why smokers ought to be (and should be) discriminated against everywhere they’d like to go.
This critical examination of the dangers (or not) of third-hand smoke allays any fears that smokers could possibly be harming other people just by bringing into a room the smell of cigarette smoke.
The Messiah-in-Chief and the War of Error
Last week, the Messiah-in-Chief began crawling out from under his clean up job on the mound of domestic debacles left in the WH inbox. He’s turning his attention back to the Wars of Error and so far, that attention is thin as Gitmo Gruel.
Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street
Felix Salmon, Wired: A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists — even Wall Street quants — have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li’s work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all.
Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut — determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related — and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.
In the mid-’80s, Wall Street turned to the quants — brainy financial engineers…
Health Care Costs to Top $8,000 Per Person
Sinking economy making reform much harder, new report shows
AP (WASHINGTON): A new government report on medical costs paints a stark picture for President Barack Obama, who is expected to call for a health care overhaul in a speech Tuesday night to a joint session of Congress.
Even before lawmakers start debating how care is delivered to the American people, the report shows the economy is making the job of reform harder. Health care costs will top $8,000 per person this year, consuming an ever-bigger slice of a shrinking economic pie, says the report by the Department of Health and Human Services, due out Tuesday.
As the recession cuts into tax receipts, Medicare’s giant hospital trust fund is running out of cash more rapidly, and could become insolvent as early as 2016, the report said. That’s three years sooner than previously forecast.
At the same time, the government’s already large share of the nation’s…
