Archive for May, 2009
Melting Ice Could Cause Gravity Shift
Steve Connor, The Independent: The melting of one of the world’s largest ice sheets would alter the Earth’s field of gravity and even its rotation in space so much that it would cause sea levels along some coasts to rise faster than the global average, scientists said yesterday.
The rise in sea levels would be highest on the west and east coasts of North America where increases of 25 per cent more than the global average would cause catastrophic flooding in cities such as New York, Washington DC and San Francisco.
A study into how the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could respond to global warming has found its disintegration would change the focus of the planet’s gravitational field, so sea levels would rise disproportionately more around North America than in other parts of the world. If the ice sheet covering West Antarctica disappears, the loss of so much mass from the southern…
Lost In Space
What really happened to Russia’s missing cosmonauts? An incredible tale of space hacking, espionage and death in the lonely reaches of space.
There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going.
‘Lost World’ of Dinosaurs Survived Mass Extinction?
Brian Handwerk, National Geographic: An isolated group of dinosaurs somehow survived the catastrophic event that wiped out most of their kind some 65.5 million years ago, a new study suggests.
Dinosaurs of this “lost world,” in a remote region of the U.S. West, may have outlived their doomed relatives by as much as half a million years, according to James Fassett, an emeritus scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Fassett, who has argued for years that some dinosaurs survived the mass extinction, based his latest work on fossils from the San Juan Basin in what is now Colorado and New Mexico.
There, the bones of hadrosaurs, tyrannosaurs, anklyosaurs, and several other species were found together in a sandstone formation that dates to the Paleocene epoch—the time period after the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction event, which is thought to have killed off the dinosaurs.
As with his past research, Fassett’s…
The Case of the Missing H-Bomb: The Pentagon Has Lost the Mother of All Weapons
Things go missing. It’s to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon’s inspector general reported that the military’s accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL.
Those anomalies are bad enough. But what’s truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it.
How Propaganda Works
Diatribe Media: In the 1920s, a woman smoking in public was taboo. The American Tobacco Company recognized that such a taboo cuts into a massive amount of profit, so they (along with Edward Bernays, father of propaganda) sent a group of women into a New York City parade. On cue, those women lit up “torches of freedom.” The New York Times picked up on the idea, running the headline “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of ‘Freedom’” and smoking and women’s liberation became linked.
The Nature of Nature
The Infinite and the Beyond — Podcast: Episode #005 — The Nature of Nature
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In the latest episode of The Infinite and the Beyond, we have a talk about the nature of magick. What does it take to do magick? What is magick primarily about? How does it relate to our view of existence and how does our perception of existence affect our ability to perform magick? Found out!
We listen to the song "Fade" from the album Normalize by the NYC area band The Evolutionaries. We reflect on the Eliphas Levi segment from Episode #003 – The Secrets of My Success. Was Levi possibly set up by someone? I share a personal tale of Will and relearn an old lesson about heeding one’s inner voice.
The first show contest is opened for entries. Upon moving in with my girlfriend I came across some resin wall pentacles that I made several years ago and offer one of them as a prize to a lucky listener! Go here to enter the contest, good luck!
We learn about Samuel Liddell Macgregor Mathers in A Corner in Occult. A major figure in 19th century occultism and magick who was not only the translator of many important magickal texts and documents, he was also an author and one of the founders of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Mathers was also a boxer, enjoyed studying the art of war, and was an early mentor of the famous occultist and magickian Aleister Crowley.
We continue with our journey through The Kybalion as we discuss the Principle of Mentalism. In it we discuss the ideas of thought, manifestation, the world around us, and all that which we create in life. All is mental and we learn about the nature of the universe in this second installment of The Kybalion.
Inspired by a discussion from school and the Keep America Beautiful Commercial from1970 we close this episode with a looking into the nature of nature. What does it mean to live in harmony with nature? What does it mean to honor nature? Are we doing this already or do we need to change our lives to fulfill this aspiration in our paths as pagans?
To message the show please go here.
Homeland Security Trains Scouts To Fight Terrorism
The Department of Homeland Security is training teenage scouts how to conduct armed raids on terrorists and drug dealers.
In a program which officials have described as “about being a true-blooded American”, boys and girls as young as fourteen are being put through their paces by DHS Border Patrol agents.
Vatican Reveals Letter That Split England From Roman Church
ELISABETTA POVOLEDO, NY Times: The Vatican has opened its Secret Archives, the repository of centuries worth of documents pertaining to the Holy See, to let the world get a closer look at a document presaging England’s split from the Church of Rome.
Dated July 13, 1530 and addressed to Pope Clement VII, the letter asks for the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon and includes the seals of dozens of peers of England who concurred with the request.
A facsimile of the document will go on sale next month for about $68,000 from Venice-based publisher Scrinium, which plans a limited run of 199 copies. A second, more damaged, copy of the document is in England’s National Archives in Kew.
The facsimile and accompanying scholarly texts will allow for closer perusal of “the cause of Henry VIII,” Monsignor Sergio Pagano, the archive’s Prefect, told journalists on Tuesday. It will be officially presented in…
Out of Work? Pfizer Wants to Keep You Hooked: Free Viagra, Lipitor
TRENTON, N.J. — Pfizer Inc. is unveiling a new program Thursday that will let people who have lost their jobs and health insurance keep taking some widely prescribed Pfizer medications — including Lipitor and Viagra — for free for up to a year.
The world’s biggest drugmaker will provide more than 70 of its prescription drugs at no cost to unemployed, uninsured Americans, regardless of their prior income, who lost jobs since Jan. 1 and have been on the Pfizer drug for three months or more.
The announcement comes amid massive job losses caused by the recession and a campaign in Washington to rein in health care costs and extend coverage. The move could earn Pfizer some goodwill in that debate after long being a target of critics of drug industry prices and sales practices.
The program also likely will help keep those patients loyal to Pfizer brands. “Everybody knows now a neighbor, a…
Tamiflu Scientist Says Swine Flu May Be Human Error
The World Health Organization is investigating a claim by an Australian researcher that the swine flu virus circling the globe may have been created as a result of human error.
Adrian Gibbs, 75, who collaborated on research that led to the development of Roche Holding AG’s Tamiflu drug, said in an interview that he intends to publish a report suggesting the new strain may have accidentally evolved in eggs scientists use to grow viruses and drugmakers use to make vaccines. Gibbs said he came to his conclusion as part of an effort to trace the virus’s origins by analyzing its genetic blueprint.
“One of the simplest explanations is that it’s a laboratory escape,” Gibbs said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today. “But there are lots of others.”
Camouflage Deceptions Of WWII
The blog Strange Harvest has a collection of images from the book ‘Masquerade, The Amazing Camouflage Deceptions of World War II’ by Seymour Reit.
During the effort against the Nazis, the Allies’ arsenal included not only conventional weapons, but also dummies, decoys, and camouflage to confuse and intimidate the enemy. This series of images has fascinating ones: a U.S. army headquarters disguised as a pile of rubbish, blowup tanks and tree trunks, et cetera. The book explains that all of this happened on a large scale; “whole towns disguised, canals made invisible, phantom armies, trick train tracks and so on. As though the landscape itself turns into a shifting hallucination.”
America’s Most Common Torture: Solitary Confinement
Wired reports: The expanding torture scandal has left the American public horror-struck at how casually the Bush administration and its employees countenanced torture techniques like sleep deprivation, waterboarding and stress positions. However, another form of torture was not just used on detainees, but is being used on at least 25,000 Americans right now.
That’s the number of people currently held in long-term solitary confinement in the United States, living for years in 80-square-foot concrete cubes lit by round-the-clock fluorescent light, with little or no human contact. The U.S. is alone among developed countries in using long-term solitary confinement on a regular basis.
Scientific analysis of solitary confinement is still in its early stages, but the results are obvious…Solitary confinement drives us mad.
Jim Tucker Reports From (Outside) Bilderberg 2009
Bilderberg luminaries all appeared grim-faced as they stepped from their limos on to the grounds of the Nafsika Astir Palace Hotel in Vouliagmeni, Greece. They arrived from the airport in nearby Athens, escorted by police with sirens blaring. The world economy is at the top of the Bilderberg agenda. Bilderberg will debate how to exploit the global recession and fabrications about “swine flu” to advance its world government goals. Bilderberg’s agenda has expanded, even as public awareness has grown.
Sources within Bilderberg said President Obama will be instructed to make another effort to get the United States to sign on to the International Criminal Court. The ICC treaty, if ratified by the Senate, would be superior to the Constitution, able to overrule Congress and the Supreme Court and impose “world law” on America.
Bilderberg leaders said they understood the effort would have to be handled with “subtle delicacy” because of the Senate’s…
Governments Get Ready To Mandate Vaccinations Against Swine Flu
GlaxoSmithKline, the UK’s largest pharmaceutical company, has received an order for 60m swine flu vaccines from the UK Government. The company, which already manufactures one of the key anti-viral treatments for the virus, Relenza, has also received millions of orders from other European governments including France.
GSK, led by chief executive Andrew Witty, said it expects to manufacture a vaccine for the H1N1 strain as soon as a virus seed is made available by the World Health Organisation (WHO). The first doses are expected to be available four to six months later, subject to regulatory approval.
Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama
As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: “blows to [the] testicles;” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;” being “inoculated … through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts;’” the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred “under the authority of American military personnel” and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.
More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.
The force is…
Malcolm Gladwell: Why David Beats Goliath
…David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time….
Bassnectar, Kush Arora, Two Fingers & Great Scott: Music + Interviews
This week on solipsistic NATION our guests are Bassnectar, Kush Arora, Doubleclick of Two Fingers and Great Scott.
This show came together in an unexpected way. Originally I was just pulling together songs that I liked that I thought would work together nicely in a mix. But as I started gathering the songs I started noting all sorts of connections. For example, Nibu has MC’d on tracks for both Great Scott and Bassnectar. Also, this month Bassnectar and Kush Arora did a show together in Portland. After some consideration I decided to focus on these artist and ignore the rest of the tracks I had gathered for the mix and as I interviewed them even more connections became apparent. Funny how these things work out.
A few notes. If you like Bassnectar’s music (and really, how can you not?) then you’ll enjoy his appearances on the The Newest In New! and Koyaanisqatsi editions of solipsistic NATION. Kush…
Freaks Survive Because They Are Strange
LiveScience: If a blue jay sees a normal-looking salamander, it will eat it. But if the same bird sees a freak, it may let it go. University of Tennessee researcher Benjamin Fitzpatrick says this discovery, which his team reports in the open access journal BMC Ecology, suggests why rare traits persist in a population.
Predators detect common forms of prey more easily, the scientists figure. The majority that share a common look are always on the dinner menu, while oddballs are left to reproduce.
Here’s to the strange ones!
“Maintenance of variation is a classic paradox in evolution because both selection and drift tend to remove variation from populations,” Fitzpatrick explained today. “If one form has an advantage, such as being harder to spot, it should replace all others. Likewise, random drift [genetic change that occurs by chance] alone will eventually result in loss of all but one form when there are no…
Ron Paul Interviewed by Rachel Maddow
Ron Paul accesses the state of the GOP and his own third-party movement on The Rachel Maddow Show. For more on Ron Paul, check out the Campaign For Liberty.
