Archive for April, 2009
End the University as We Know It
Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, rips graduate programs a new one and offers some suggestions for making universities more useful. But tenured professors aren’t going to like this.
‘Faith Fighter’ Game Unites Religions in Outrage
MediaWatch: Representatives of several major religions have called for a game by radical developers Molleindustria to be removed from the internet because it is “deeply provocative” and “disrespectful”.
[UPDATE: The game has been removed from the Molleindustria site in response to a statement from the OIC. But you can still play it here.]
Faith Fighter is a punch-up game for one or two players which involves bouts between Jesus, Mohammed, Ganesh, Buddha, Budai, and God Himself. According to its developers: “Faith Fighter is the ultimate fighting game for these dark times. Choose your belief and kick the shit out of your enemies. Give vent to your intolerance! Religious hate has never been so much fun.”
Douglas Miller, pastor of the Link Church in Birmingham: “This game is going out of its way to upset people and I think it should be taken off the internet. Playing violent video games will ultimately affect your behaviour and this game…
Hillary Clinton Compares Eugenicist Margaret Sanger to Thomas Jefferson
Infowars: At 4 minutes 25 seconds into this video, the Secretary of States compares the eugenics advocate and racist Margaret Sanger to Thomas Jefferson. In fact, she seems to think Jefferson was a lesser person than Sanger because he held slaves.
Are we to assume Hillary wants to kill Africans and African-Americans? In 1939, Clinton’s heroine said:
“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social service backgrounds and with engaging personalities … We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”
There is a straight line from Sanger and the eugenicists and the Nazis.
The Great Swine Flu ‘Debacle’ of 1976
Guess what folks, the government overreacted and actually ended up killing people with vaccinations…
Shari Roan, LA Times: Warren D. Ward, 48, was in high school when the swine flu threat of 1976 swept the U.S. The Whittier man remembers the episode vividly because a relative died in the 1918 flu pandemic, and the 1976 illness was feared to be a direct descendant of the deadly virus.
“The government wanted everyone to get vaccinated,” Ward said. “But the epidemic never really broke out. It was a threat that never materialized.”
What did materialize were cases of a rare side effect thought to be linked to the shot. The unexpected development cut short the vaccination effort — an unprecedented national campaign — after 10 weeks.
The episode triggered an enduring public backlash against flu vaccination, embarrassed the federal government and cost the director of the U.S. Center for Disease Control, now known as the Centers…
The First 100 Days: Obama’s Media Love-Fest
How the President Fared In the Press vs. Clinton and Bush
As he marks his 100th day in office, President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either
Bill Clinton or George Bush during their first months in the White House, according to a new study of press coverage.
Overall, roughly four out of ten stories, editorials and op ed columns about Obama have been clearly positive in tone, compared with 22% for Bush and 27% for Clinton in the same mix of seven national media outlets during the same first two months in office, according to a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The study found positive stories about Obama have outweighed negative by two-to-one (42% vs. 20%) while 38% of stories have been neutral or mixed.
When a broader universe of media—one that includes 49 outlets and reflects the more modern media culture of 2009,…
A Broad Look at Psychedelics
Manifesting the Mind is a broad look at psychedelics. Why are psychedelics so brutally suppressed in our culture? What exactly are some of the psychedelic plants and chemicals and how can they benefit us? With philosophy and insight from Dennis McKenna, Daniel Pinchbeck, Alex Grey, and many others, this film is not to be missed by anyone interested in psychedelics and shamanism.
Bolivia is to Lithium as Saudi Arabia is to Oil
Xeni Jardin, BoingBoing: Photographer/tumblogger Clayton Cubitt says, “Bolivia is the Saudi Arabia of lithium, the metal needed for the batteries that will power our electric car future. I saw this ITN report on News Hour the other night, and was stunned by the visuals and the story.”
Google To Remove ‘Inappropriate’ Books From Digital Library
Miracle Jones writes: “In an interview with Professor (and former Microsoft employee) James Grimmelmann at the New York Law School, who is both setting up an online clearinghouse to discuss the Google book settlement and drafting an amicus brief to inform the court about the antitrust factors surrounding “orphan books,” he revealed that Google will be able to moderate the content of its book scans in the same way that they moderate their YouTube videos, leaving out works that Google deems “inappropriate” from the 7 million library books it has scanned. The Fiction Circus has called for a two-year long rights auction that will ensure that these “inappropriate” titles do not get left behind in the digital era, and that other people who are willing to host and display these books will be able to do so.
There is only one week left for authors and publishers to “opt out” of…
Republican Senator Arlen Specter Switches Parties, Breakthrough to Filibuster-Proof Senate in Sight
Carolyn Lochhead, SFGate: Facing a conservative primary challenge, moderate Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania is switching to the Democratic Party.
If Al Franken wins the Minnesota seat, that gives Democrats a 60-vote filibuster-proof Senate majority and President Obama an LBJ-style shot at history.
Obama told Specter he was “thrilled” with the decision.
Specter was among the last of the vanishing moderate Northeastern Republicans. He was key to passing Obama’s $800 billion stimulus, one of three Republicans, with Maine’s two other Republican moderates, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, to provide the necessary votes for passage. Specter said that vote produced a “schism” in the party that created “irreconcilable differences” between him and the GOP.
Specter also irked Democrats this year by quashing the push by liberals for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it much easier for workers to join unions. But with Franken putting Democrats so tantalizingly close to a stunning…
Ron Paul On The Swine Flu Scare
Congressman Paul gives his perspective on the swine flu issue:
The Day After Military Planes Flew Too Low Over NYC
The verdict is out, and yesterday’s lower Manhattan flyover by the “Boening 747 sometimes known as Air Force One” and military jets was a bad idea. So bad that the White House Military Office’s director Luis Caldera apologized for the mission. It was so bad that the city official who knew about the event but didn’t tell the mayor was “reprimanded and a disciplinary letter has been placed in his file,” according to Newsday.
Newsday explains that many city employees actually knew about the photo opportunity, which was apparently intended to amass updated photographs of Air Force One near landmarks: “The New York Police Department knew. The 911 dispatchers knew. And Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s citywide event coordination and management director, Marc Mugnos, knew. In fact, the FAA and several other public agencies knew.” Mayor Bloomberg only found out through messages to his Blackberry and he was pissed:”I’m annoyed—furious is a better…
Builders Find Auschwitz Message
Builders working near the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp have found a message in a bottle written by prisoners, museum officials say.
The message, written in pencil and dated 9 September 1944, bears names, camp numbers and home towns of seven young inmates from Poland and France.
Telescope Snaps Photo Of Most Distant Object In The Universe
Astronomers tracking a mysterious blast of energy called a gamma ray burst said on Tuesday they had snapped a photograph of the most distant object in the universe — a smudge 13 billion light-years away.
Hawaii’s Gemini Observatory caught the image earlier this month after a satellite first detected the burst.
“Our infrared observations from Gemini immediately suggested that this was an unusually distant burst, these images were the smoking gun,” said Edo Berger of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Distortions in the light signature of the object show it is 13 billion years old — at the speed of light, 13 billion light-years away. A light-year is 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km).
This makes it easily the most distant object ever seen by humanity, Berger said.
Barack Obama’s Handshake of Death!
David Gardner, Daily Mail: A man who shook Barack Obama’s hand in Mexico died the next day from symptoms similar to those of swine flu. The White House insisted the President’s health was not in any danger, but he was said to be taking the threat of an epidemic ‘very seriously’.
The President’s health advisers were already concerned about his visit south of the border after learning the contagious virus first struck in Mexico City on April 13 — three days before Mr Obama flew in to meet government officials.
Their alarm grew after learning that Felipe Solis, director of the National Anthropology Museum, had died from pneumonia.
Swine Flu Vaccination Propaganda from 1976
From the voluminous shelves of the National Archives, some vintage Swine Flu PSAs from 1976. For those who don’t remember the great swine flu scare, here you go:
xkcd: Twitter Is Great for Watching Uninformed Panics Unfold Live
Try it yourself folks, on Twitter. Mass hysteria, right over your computer screen! (Disinfo is there.)
Glenn Beck’s Latest Conspiracy Theory: Barack Obama and the Swine Flu
On his radio show today, Glenn Beck launched his latest conspiracy theory that President Obama is making a big deal out of nothing when it comes to the swine flu. Beck claimed that Obama is using the swine flu to get Kathleen Sebelius confirmed as Sec. of Health and Human Services.
Here’s more on Beck’s take on swine flu from his TV show:
Can We Afford to Eat Ethically?
Organic food prices are daunting in a recession. But do we have to choose between our principles and our pocketbooks? I devised an experiment to find out. Siobhan Phillips writes on Salon.com:
Last month, a report from England found sales of some organic food had fallen up to 31 percent. Ethical food advocates have been worrying about a similar trend in this country since the recession began: Just as the need for better food choices became more widely accepted, our economy fell apart, and consumers who once considered free-range, $5-a-dozen eggs a necessity may start eyeing the caged-hens carton for half that price. A recent National Review column argued that organic food was, in fact, “an expensive luxury item, something bought by those who have the resources.”
I had wondered about the elitism of ethical eating ever since I started reading about the movement in books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Fast Food Nation and…
