Archive for March, 2009
Cop Rear-Ends Car While Checking BlackBerry
A Washington police chief has issued a public apology for hitting another car while he was checking his BlackBerry.
American Drivers Fight Back Against Surveillance Cameras
The village of Schaumburg, Ill., installed a camera at Woodfield Mall last November to film cars that were running red lights, then used the footage to issue citations. Results were astonishing. The town issued $1 million in fines in just three months.
But drivers caught by the unforgiving enforcement — which mainly snared those who didn’t come to a full stop before turning right on red — exploded in anger. Many vowed to stop shopping at the mall unless the camera was turned off. The village stopped monitoring right turns at the intersection in January.
Once a rarity, traffic cameras are filming away across the country. And they’re not just focusing their sights on red-light runners. The latest technology includes cameras that keep tabs on highways to catch speeders in the act and infrared license-plate readers that nab ticket and tax scofflaws.
Drivers — many accusing law enforcement of using spy tactics to…
Naomi Wolf: Do the Secret Bush Memos Amount to Treason?
In early March, more shocking details emerged about George W. Bush legal counsel John Yoo’s memos outlining the destruction of the republic.
The memos lay the legal groundwork for the president to send the military to wage war against U.S. citizens; take them from their homes to Navy brigs without trial and keep them forever; close down the First Amendment; and invade whatever country he chooses without regard to any treaty or objection by Congress.
It was as if Milton’s Satan had a law degree and was establishing within the borders of the United States the architecture of hell.
I thought this was — and is — certainly one of the biggest stories of our lifetime, making the petty burglary of Watergate — which scandalized the nation — seem like playground antics. It is newsworthy too with the groundswell of support for prosecutions of Bush/Cheney crimes and recent actions such as Canadian attorneys…
UN Globalists Strengthen Call For One World Currency
UNITED NATIONS (AFP) – A UN panel of expert economists pressed Thursday for a new global currency reserve scheme to replace the volatile, dollar-based system and for coordinated steps by rich countries to stimulate their economies.
“A new Global Reserve System — what may be viewed as a greatly expanded SDR (Special Drawing Rights), with regular or cyclically adjusted emissions calibrated to the size of reserve accumulations, could contribute to global stability, economic strength and global equity,” the panel said.
As part of several recommendations to tackle the global financial crisis, the panel also noted recovery would require all developed countries, in the short term, to take “strong, coordinated and effective actions to stimulate their economies.”
Pot Saved My Life, Mr. President
Jim Gilliam, HuffPo: Today, in the historic first online town hall, President Obama fielded questions from nearly a hundred thousand people online. One of the most popular questions, and indeed, one of the most popular questions in any forum that lets people vote on what matters to them, was about whether legalizing marijuana would help improve the economy and job creation.
Chuckling, the President said: “I don’t know what this says about the online audience, but [laughing] this was a fairly popular question, we want to make sure it was answered. The answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy.”
I’ve never smoked pot in my life, indeed I’ve never smoked anything at all. Despite that, a couple years ago, I needed a double lung transplant. My lungs were scarred beyond repair due to side effects from radiation treatments I’d had nearly a decade earlier…
The 12 Bankers Responsible For The Financial Crisis
Rolling Stone: Meet the bankers and brokers responsible for the financial crisis — and the officials who let them get away with it
The Enabler: ALAN GREENSPAN
WAS Chairman of the Federal Reserve (1987–2006)
WHAT HE DID Pushed for sweeping power to regulate Wall Street — and then failed to use it. Fueled “irrational” bubble with low interest rates.
WORST MOVE Called derivatives like CDOs “extraordinarily useful”; regulating them would be a “mistake.”
The Bagman: ROBERT RUBIN
WAS Treasury secretary (1995–1999)
WHAT HE DID Opposed regulation of credit swaps; fought to overturn Glass-Steagall Act, leading to creation of Citigroup, where he later made $115 million.
WORST MOVE Asked Treasury to pressure ratings agencies to delay downgrading Enron, a Citigroup debtor.
NOW Still on Citi’s board; mentor of Treasury Secretary Geithner.
NOW ADMITS He was “partially” wrong to not impose tougher oversight.
Hemp Is Not Pot: It’s the Economic Stimulus and Green Jobs Solution We Need
Dara Colwell, AlterNet: While Uncle Sam’s scramble for new revenue sources has recently kicked up the marijuana debate — to legalize and tax, or not? — hemp’s feasibility as a stimulus plan has received less airtime.
But with a North American market that exceeds $300 million in annual retail sales and continued rising demand, industrial hemp could generate thousands of sustainable new jobs, helping America to get back on track.
“We’re in the midst of a dark economic transition, but I believe hemp is an important facet and has tremendous economic potential,” says Patrick Goggin, a board member on the California Council for Vote Hemp, the nation’s leading industrial hemp-farming advocacy group. “Economically and environmentally, industrial hemp is an important part of the sustainability pie.”
With 25,000 known applications from paper, clothing and food products — which, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal this January, is the fastest growing new food…
Rahm Emanuel’s Stint at Freddie Mac Made Him $320,000
Bob Secter and Andrew Zajac | Chicago Tribune:
Before its portfolio of bad loans helped trigger the current housing crisis, mortgage giant Freddie Mac was the focus of a major accounting scandal that led to a management shake-up, huge fines and scalding condemnation of passive directors by a top federal regulator.
One of those allegedly asleep-at-the-switch board members was Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel — now chief of staff to President Barack Obama — who made at least $320,000 for a 14-month stint at Freddie Mac that required little effort.
As gatekeeper to Obama, Emanuel now plays a critical role in addressing the nation’s mortgage woes and fulfilling the administration’s pledge to impose responsibility on the financial world.
Emanuel’s Freddie Mac involvement has been a prominent point on his political résumé, and his healthy payday from the firm has been no secret either. What is less known, however, is how little he apparently did for his…
Science Learns. Does God?
Discover’s Bad Astronomy: If you ask where the Big Bang came from, why can’t you ask the same thing of God?
When a person like this is asked who or what created God, the standard answer is that God always existed. But why can’t we say the same about the Universe itself? It’s entirely possible the Universe is a part of a larger structure, a metaverse, if you will, that always existed and always will. Our understanding of the nature of time is still incomplete, so something like this is not out of the question.
But the details of this aren’t terribly important; the key thing here is the pot calling the kettle black. This so-called flaw in the Big Bang theory, if it is a flaw, is also a flaw in the supposition that God always existed as well. As such, it’s a terrible argument for the existence of God.
My favorite…
Police Raid Wikileaks Domain Owner Over ‘Censorship Lists’
Chloe Lake, NEWS.com.au: POLICE have raided a Wikileaks associate’s homes in Dresden and Jena after the website published a list of banned websites.
Theodor Reppe owns the German domain registration for “wikileaks.de”, one of the many URLs used by the whistleblowing website. Wikileaks published a Twitter update:
“Police raid home of Wikileaks.de domain owner over censorship lists – stay tuned.”
Wikileaks, which offers an anonymous service, has previously published alleged web censorship lists from Thailand, Denmark, and Australia. A statement on Wikileaks’s website claims police were investigating the “distribution of pornographic material” and “discovery of evidence”.
Wikileaks claims Mr Reppe is not involved in the website other than “sponsoring the German domain name and mirroring a collection of Wikileaks US Congressional Research Service reports”. Mr Reppe also reportedly maintains one of the most popular anonymous proxy servers in Germany.
Wikileaks told news.com.au it’s not clear whether the raid was initiated after complaints from Australia. “The…
Google Street View Forced to Remove Images of Naked Children
Jane Merrick, Indepedent: Google was forced to remove photographs of naked children from its Street View service last night as a row over internet privacy escalated into one about public safety.
The Independent on Sunday alerted the internet search giant after finding images of the toddlers, playing at a family summer picnic in a garden square in north London, captured permanently on the revolutionary mapping system. Britain’s privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, is considering an investigation into Google if more images of naked children are found to have been picked up by its cameras and made available to internet users.
Google has had hundreds of requests for images to be removed since it launched Street View on Thursday [in the UK], including pictures of members of the public leaving sex shops or vomiting in the street. But the pictures of young children suggest the service could be exploited for more sinister…
Classic Gags Discovered in Ancient Roman Joke Book
Alison Flood, Guardian: We may admire the satires of Horace and Lucilius, but the ancient Romans haven’t hitherto been thought of as masters of the one-liner. This could be about to change, however, after the discovery of a classical joke book.
Celebrated classics professor Mary Beard has brought to light a volume more than 1,600 years old, which she says shows the Romans not to be the “pompous, bridge-building toga wearers” they’re often seen as, but rather a race ready to laugh at themselves.
Written in Greek, Philogelos, or The Laughter Lover, dates to the third or fourth century AD, and contains some 260 jokes which Beard said are “very similar” to the jokes we have today, although peopled with different stereotypes — the “egghead”, or absent-minded professor, is a particular figure of fun, along with the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath.
“They’re also poking fun at certain types of…
Despite Obama’s Vow, Combat Brigades Will Stay in Iraq
Democracy Now!: Nearly four weeks ago President Obama declared that U.S. combat operations would end in Iraq by August 2010.
Under President Obama’s plan, all combat troops will be pulled from Iraq but a transition force of up to 50,000 will remain after August 2010.
Despite Obama’s pledge, new evidence has emerged that the U.S. plans to keep combat brigades in Iraq but they will operate under a different name.
Investigative reporter Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service has revealed some of the Brigade Combat Teams currently in Iraq will stay beyond August 2010 and will be renamed so-called “advisory and assistance brigades.”
Bobcat Attacks Two Men in a Bar
An angry bobcat attacked three people in a central Arizona community yesterday, including two men sitting inside a bar.
In Troubled Times, Vasectomies Snip and Prosper
Dr. J. Stephen Jones had seven vasectomies to perform in a day.
The schedule for Jones, a Cleveland, Ohio, urologist, has become more crowded during a recent boom in vasectomies.
“My staff came to me and said, what’s happening?” said Jones, the chairman of the Department of Regional Urology of Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. “Why are we suddenly having an explosion in guys asking for vasectomies?”
They looked at their statistics and realized the uptick started around November as the economic crisis deepened. October went down in the history books as one of Wall Street’s worst months.
Since then, the Cleveland Clinic has seen a 50 percent increase in vasectomies, an outpatient surgery that is the cheapest form of permanent birth control. Vasectomies are less invasive and cheaper than tubal ligation, which involves blocking, tieing or cutting a woman’s fallopian tubes to prevent pregnancy.
“It’s unlikely that some guy read…
How Close is the United States of America to Becoming a Failed State?
Economies around the world are unraveling, and governments are failing.
Since 2005 the United States think-tank, the Fund for Peace and the magazine Foreign Policy, have been publishing an annual index called the Failed States Index.
“The index’s ranks are based on twelve indicators of state vulnerability — four social, two economic and six political. The indicators are not designed to forecast when states may experience violence or collapse. Instead, they are meant to measure a state’s vulnerability to collapse or conflict. All countries in the red, orange, or yellow categories display some features that make parts of their societies and institutions vulnerable to failure. Some in the yellow zone may be failing at a faster rate than those in the more dangerous orange or red zones, and therefore could experience violence sooner. Conversely, some in the red zone, though critical, may exhibit some positive signs of recovery or be deteriorating slowly,…
Doctor Finishes Brain Surgery While Having Heart Attack
An Italian doctor is being called a hero after he refused to abandon brain surgery on a patient despite suffering from a heart attack during the operation
Major Studio H.P. Lovecraft Movie Coming Soon
Universal and Imagine Entertainment are gearing up for “The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft.”
The studio has bought the film rights to Image Comics’ graphic novel, with the project a potential directing vehicle for Ron Howard. The book bows April 8.
U sparked to “Lovecraft” because its take on classic horror fits in well with the studio’s library of monster fare featuring Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy and the Wolf Man, the last of which is being brought back to the bigscreen later this year.
Created by Mac Carter and Jeff Blitz, book borrows elements from Lovecraft’s life, such as his family’s struggle with mental illness and his own bouts with writer’s block, and transforms the young writer’s darkest nightmares into reality when he comes across a book that puts a curse on him and lets the evils he conjures up loose on the world.
Lovecraft, who died in 1937, is considered one of the…
Army of Robots! DoD Bidding ‘Multi-Robot Pursuit Systems’
The Defense Department is bidding a “Multi-Robot Pursuit System” — and two companies have already created new military robots.
One robot from Boston Dynamics carries a 340-pound load (and can roll across rubble). And Massachusetts-based iRobot has actually mounted stun weapons on its robots.
The Defense Department’s Request for Proposals now specifies that it now wants to “enable teams of robots to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject.”
