Archive for March, 2009
Colbert Wins NASA’s Node 3 Naming Contest
Comedy Central: When the aliens come to Earth, they’re going to get a taste of hardcore patriotism on their way in. “Colbert” was the top vote-getter in NASA’s contest to name the new Node 3 space-module.
NASA’s online contest to name a new room at the international space station went awry. Stephen Colbert won. The name “Colbert” beat out NASA’s four suggested options in the space agency’s effort to have the public help name the addition. The new room will be launched later this year.
NASA’s mistake was allowing write-ins. Colbert urged viewers of his Comedy Central show, “The Colbert Report” to write in his name. And they complied, with 230,539 votes. That clobbered Serenity, one of the NASA choices, by more than 40,000 votes. Nearly 1.2 million votes were cast by the time the contest ended Friday.
NASA reserves the right to choose an appropriate name. Agency spokesman John Yembrick said NASA…
Rethinking Afghanistan in Real Time
BRIAN STELTER, NY Times: The activist filmmaker Robert Greenwald has tried for years to speed up the production process for his documentaries. Now, he says, he is creating one he can release almost immediately, in stages.
Mr. Greenwald is showing “Rethink Afghanistan,” a skeptical view of America’s war strategies, in five parts on the Internet, with the implied hope that it will contribute to the foreign policy debate.
Mr. Greenwald is well known in some progressive circles for his films about war profiteers, Wal-Mart’s corporate practices, and the Fox News Channel. His company, Brave New Films, uses documentary expertise to mount political campaigns, including a YouTube series last year about John McCain.
“Rethink Afghanistan” is being shaped both as a film and a campaign at the same time. Mr. Greenwald is already posting installments on the film’s Web site, RethinkAfghanistan.com, and also on YouTube. It will eventually be stitched together into a full-length…
A Quiet Revolution Grows in the Muslim World
Robin Wright, TIME: Three decades after Iran’s upheaval established Islamic clerical rule for the first time in 14 centuries, a quieter and more profound revolution is transforming the Muslim world. Dalia Ziada is a part of it.
When Ziada was 8, her mother told her to don a white party dress for a surprise celebration. It turned out to be a painful circumcision. But Ziada decided to fight back. The young Egyptian spent years arguing with her father and uncles against the genital mutilation of her sister and cousins, a campaign she eventually developed into a wider movement. She now champions everything from freedom of speech to women’s rights and political prisoners. To promote civil disobedience, Ziada last year translated into Arabic a comic-book history about Martin Luther King Jr. and distributed 2,000 copies from Morocco to Yemen.
Now 26, Ziada organized Cairo’s first human-rights film festival in November. The censorship board…
GPS Built-In to Monkeys
Two European researchers spent 217 days following around a tribe of 15 chimpanzees — and they proved the monkeys were doing something strange: travelling in perfectly straight lines “using a mental map built around geometric coordinates.”
In effect, monkeys have a built-in mental GPS, keeping “a geometric mental map of their home range, moving from point to point in nearly straight lines.”
They’re not just identifying landmarks in their surroundings, and even when swinging through trees, the chimpanzees planned their route out several trees in advance!
Michelle Obama Creates an Organic Garden at the White House
Megan Mulligan, Guardian: Just beyond the new swings the Obamas have installed for Sasha and Malia in the grounds of the White House, the first lady last Friday and 26 Washington schoolchildren began digging a 1,100-square-foot organic kitchen garden on the South Lawn.
Nearly everyone who has called 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue home has added personal touches to America’s most famous backyard. Bill Clinton laid a running track, Jimmy Carter’s daughter Amy got a tree house, and Dwight Eisenhower put in a putting green to hone his golf game.
But Obama’s seemingly simple move is seen by many as a political statement akin to Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1943 victory garden. Food activists, led by the California chef and Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters, have been lobbying for an organic White House garden since 1993. Now they are celebrating what they call a new “victory” garden. It sent out a message, Waters said, “that everyone…
Would-Be Soldiers Too Fat to Serve
[Disinformation Note: For more implications of America's obesity epidemic, check out the documentary KILLER AT LARGE]
Military Has Had to Turn Away 48,000 Overweight Recruits Since 2005
JOHN HENDREN, ABC News: Amanda Turcotte wants to be all that she can be, but she’s 25 pounds over the Army’s weight limit.
Her recruiter is sweating her down to regulation size with a grueling daily exercise regimen. “If you need to puke there’s a garbage can right there,” Army recruiter Sgt. Jessica La Pointe told Turcotte during a recent workout at an Annapolis high school. “That’s fine. You can come back and finish up.”
With fast-food diets and couch potato lifestyles expanding the waistlines of the nation’s youth, the former professional kickboxer says she must become personal trainer to many recruits just to get them to boot camp. “We do get people who come in the office that are overweight by Army standards,” La Pointe told ABC…
Venus Clouds ‘Might Harbour Life’
Martin Redfern, BBC News:
There could be life on the planet Venus, US scientists have concluded in a report in the journal Astrobiology.
The existence of life on the planet’s oven-hot surface is unimaginable.
But microbes could survive and reproduce, experts say, floating in the
thick, cloudy atmosphere, protected by a sunscreen of sulphur compounds. Scientists have even submitted a proposal for a Nasa space mission to sample the clouds and attempt to return any presumed Venusians to Earth.
“If you could get through the sulphuric acid clouds down to the surface of Venus you’d find it was hotter than an oven. You could melt lead at the surface of Venus and there’d be no water.”
But it was not always like that. Earth and Venus are in many ways sister planets. “Current theories suggest that Venus and the Earth may have started out alike. There might have been a lot of water on Venus and…
They’ve Seen the Future and Dislike the Present
ALAN FEUER, NY Times: Two hours into Z-Day, the educational forum associated with the online movie “Zeitgeist,” Peter Joseph, the film’s director and the evening’s M.C., stepped out from behind his lectern and walked forward earnestly on the stage.
In his goatee and mustache and tieless in a brown suit, Mr. Joseph had been lecturing for nearly 90 minutes on the unsustainable nature of the money-based economy — on cyclical consumption, planned obsolescence, corporate malfeasance and piles of poisonous waste. “It’s time that we wake up,” he intoned, speaking solemnly through a wireless clip-on mike. “The doomsday scenario, the big contraction, might be happening right now. The system of monetary exchange is — in the face of advancing technology — completely obsolete.”
This drew wild applause from the sold-out crowd, a patchwork of perhaps 900 people who paid $10 a head on Sunday night to sit in a packed auditorium at the…
They’ve Seen the Future and Dislike the Present
ALAN FEUER, NY Times: Two hours into Z-Day, the educational forum associated with the online movie “Zeitgeist,” Peter Joseph, the film’s director and the evening’s M.C., stepped out from behind his lectern and walked forward earnestly on the stage.
In his goatee and mustache and tieless in a brown suit, Mr. Joseph had been lecturing for nearly 90 minutes on the unsustainable nature of the money-based economy — on cyclical consumption, planned obsolescence, corporate malfeasance and piles of poisonous waste. “It’s time that we wake up,” he intoned, speaking solemnly through a wireless clip-on mike. “The doomsday scenario, the big contraction, might be happening right now. The system of monetary exchange is — in the face of advancing technology — completely obsolete.”
This drew wild applause from the sold-out crowd, a patchwork of perhaps 900 people who paid $10 a head on Sunday night to sit in a packed auditorium at the…
Breaking Apple’s Grip on the iPhone
Apple Inc. faces a growing threat to its iPhone business, as renegade stores spring up online to sell unauthorized software for the device.
The developer behind some popular iPhone software on Friday plans to open a service called Cydia Store that could potentially sell hundreds of iPhone applications that are not available through Apple’s official store. Users must download special software that alters their iPhones before they can run these programs.
Another small company plans a store called Rock Your Phone for iPhone users who have not yet modified their devices to make it easier to download and buy unauthorized applications. A third start-up is building an online store that specializes in selling adult games for the iPhone.
Man Steals Vodka; Tells Cashier to Call Police
A Florida man walked into a liquor store and told staffers to call police because he was about to steal a bottle of vodka.
Obama/Geithner Plan: Private Profit, Socialized Debt
Paul Krugman, NYT: The Geithner plan has now been leaked in detail. It’s exactly the plan that was widely analyzed — and found wanting — a couple of weeks ago.
The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank.
For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem.
This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn’t actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it…
Canada Becomes the First and Only Country in the World to Ban British MP George Galloway
George Galloway, a British Member of Parliament, author, and talk show host, has been banned from entering Canada after the Jewish Defence League of Canada wrote “an open letter to the country’s government urging it to do ‘everything possible to keep this hater away’.”…
The Jewish Defence League (JDL) is the same organization that the FBI in its Terrorism 2000/2001 report referred to as a “‘violent extremist Jewish organization’ and stated that the FBI was responsible for thwarting at least one of its terrorist acts.”
Dead Mouse Found in Half-Eaten Salami
A Romanian man eating a salami sausage was shocked to find a dead mouse inside.
AIG Hates, Fears the Rest of the Population
This leaked internal corporate memo from AIG advises employees on how to avoid being beaten to death by angry mobs in the streets. Among other things, AIG t-shirts, bags, and umbrellas are to be destroyed, and workers are instructed to always “walk in pairs,” utilizing the buddy system practiced on elementary school field trips.
How Science Fiction Found Jesus
Science-fiction has always ostensibly been about other worlds; ones far in the future, in alternate universes, in deep space. However, these fantastical locales always bear similarities to our own, and thus for decades, sci-fi books, television, film, and comics have make subtle or not-so-subtle political and social statements about the real-life world we live in.
Until recently, that is. Benjamin Plotinsky traces mainstream sci-fi’s movement over the last few decades away from political themes (such as Cold War paranoia) towards an obsession with Christian ones; from The Matrix to Star Wars to Superman and Terminator, Christian allegories have come to dominate the world of mainstream science-fiction. Why did this happen and what does it mean? With the economy collapsing and the War on Terror dragging on, will sci-fi writers step up to the plate and replace the bible-rehashing with something more profound?
An ‘Age of Commodified Intelligence’
Today’s idea: We are in an “age of commodified intelligence” — a time not of great enlightenment but of mere intellectual acquisition and credential-building lacking in deep understanding.
Culture | The magazine Intelligent Life recently put forth the contrarian notion that we are in age not of dumbing down but of smartening up — an “age of mass intelligence” characterized by rises in attendance at museums, literary festivals, operas and so forth.
But now comes a reader’s contrarian argument to that contrarian argument: We are actually only in an “age of commodified intelligence” — a “time of conspicuously consumed high culture in which intellectual life is meticulously measured and branded” but generally without true appreciation, writes George Balgobin.
“Facebook is devoted to cataloguing this cultural rebirth,” he adds. “Here people curate their personas and project them at the world.” Yes, the lights are on, but is anybody home? [More Intelligent Life]
South Africa Bars Dalai Lama From Peace Conference
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — South Africa barred the Dalai Lama from a peace conference in Johannesburg this week, saying Monday it did not want to endanger the government’s relationship with China. The move prompted sharp criticism from the Nobel Committee, among others.
Thabo Masebe, spokesman for President Kgalema Motlanthe, said now was not the time for such a high-profile visit from the Tibetan spiritual leader and added that South Africa hoped to avoid being “the source of negative publicity about China.”
Instead the barring — technically a refusal to issue an official invitation — generated negative comments toward South Africa. Retired Cape Town Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who is, like the Dalai Lama, a Nobel peace laureate, and members of the Nobel Committee canceled plans to participate in Friday’s conference because the Dalai Lama was not allowed to attend.
“It is disappointing that South Africa, which has received so much solidarity from the world, doesn’t…
Rockefeller: Internet is “Number One National Hazard”
According to the great-grandson John D. Rockefeller, nephew of banker David Rockefeller, and former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller the internet represents a serious threat to national security. Rockefeller is not alone in this assessment. His belief that the internet is the “number one national hazard” to national security is shared by the former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and Obama’s current director Admiral Dennis C. Blair.
“It really almost makes you ask the question would it have been better if we had never invented the internet,” Rockefeller mused during the confirmation hearing of Gary Locke (see video), Obama’s choice for Commerce Secretary. He then cites a dubious figure of three million cyber “attacks” launched against the Department of Defense every day. “Everybody is attacked, anybody can do it. People say, well it’s China and Russia, but there could be some kid in Latvia doing the same thing.”
