Archive for June, 2009
Review: Italian and Norwegian Liber AL vel Legis
John L. Crow: This book shall be translated into all tongues: but always with the original in the writing of the Beast; for in the chance shape of the letters and their position to one another: in these are mysteries that no Beast shall divine.
Liber AL vel Legis, Chapter III, verse 47.
Review: Italian & Norwegian Liber AL vel Legis
By John L. Crow:
This book shall be translated into all tongues: but always with the original in the writing of the Beast; for in the chance shape of the letters and their position to one another: in these are mysteries that no Beast shall divine.
Liber AL vel Legis, Chapter III, verse 47.
The Great Designer Baby Controversy of 2009
A fertility service in L.A. and New York lets couples pick the sex of their baby. (3,800 so far!) and screens embryos for breast cancer, cystic fibrosis, and 70 other diseases. But the scientist who founded it faced controversy when their pre-implantation diagnostic services began including the baby’s eye and hair color. Even the Pope objected — and the Great Designer Baby Controversy began… Is this “ridiculous and irresponsible” — or is “some demand still demand?”
“[W]e cannot escape the fact that science is moving forward,” the fertility service explained — before capitulating to pressure to eliminate the eye and hair color screenings.
The World Transhumanist Association is highlighting this story in the summer issue of their magazine, h+
Japanese Pair Arrested in Italy with U.S. Bonds Worth $134 Billion
Richard Owen, The Times: Italian prosecutors were trying to establish yesterday whether US bonds with a face value of $134 billion seized from two alleged smugglers were real or counterfeit.
The bonds were found when the two men — said to be Japanese but as yet not identified — were arrested while attempting to cross into Switzerland from Italy by train at the frontier town of Chiasso this month. Prosecutors in Como said that the two men had hidden the bonds in the false bottom of a suitcase.
Police said that Chiasso was a notorious crossing point for currency and bond smugglers but the sums involved this time were “colossal”. The amount of $134 billion would place the two travellers as the fourth most important investors in US debt, well ahead of Britain ($128.2 billion) and just behind Russia ($138.4 billion).
The bonds were described as being 249 US Federal Reserve bonds each…
Cooking in a Coffee Pot
I write this for the millions who, like myself, are holed up in basements, garages, empty houses, fields, culverts and what have you. Guilty of being Americans and homeless, trying to make it through just one more day in the land of Fuck You and the home of the slave. I am at the top of the homeless pyramid; I still have internet access and a toilet.
The one thing to remember about the homeless is that they never have a day off. They are homeless every day; it’s easy to forget and difficult to understand, but the homeless face the world without a buttress. They are toe-to-toe with the heat and the humidity, the rain, the mud, and the bugs.
Cooking in a Coffee Pot
I write this for the millions who, like myself, are holed up in basements, garages, empty houses, fields, culverts and what have you. Guilty of being Americans and homeless, trying to make it through just one more day in the land of Fuck You and the home of the slave. I am at the top of the homeless pyramid; I still have internet access and a toilet.
The one thing to remember about the homeless is that they never have a day off. They are homeless every day; it’s easy to forget and difficult to understand, but the homeless face the world without a buttress. They are toe-to-toe with the heat and the humidity, the rain, the mud, and the bugs.
10th Anniversary of Napster This Month
DrewWilson, ZeroPaid:
Some may not know it, but June is an interesting month for file-sharer’s. This year, June marks a major milestone for file-sharers. It was June, 1999 when Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker released the first version of Napster — an application that has since changed the face of entertainment, the internet and copyright to name a few.
What would it mean if files couldn’t be freely distributed online? For one, the whole idea of sharing viral video’s on a site like YouTube would be completely gone. You couldn’t listen to music via the internet, so naturally, music sites couldn’t exist and, arguably, there wouldn’t be much evidence to suggest that taking your music to the internet and selling them would be viable. Of course, pictures ranging from personal scrapbooks all the way to the often silly lolcats couldn’t happen. Then there’s the web itself since they are little more than…
The Capitalist Manifesto: Greed Is Good (To A Point)
Fareed Zakaria, NEWSWEEK: A specter is haunting the world—the return of capitalism. Over the past six months, politicians, businessmen and pundits have been convinced that we are in the midst of a crisis of capitalism that will require a massive transformation and years of pain to fix. Nothing will ever be the same again. “Another ideological god has failed,” the dean of financial commentators, Martin Wolf, wrote in the Financial Times. Companies will “fundamentally reset” the way they work, said the CEO of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt. “Capitalism will be different,” said Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
No economic system ever remains unchanged, of course, and certainly not after a deep financial collapse and a broad global recession. But over the past few months, even though we’ve had an imperfect stimulus package, nationalized no banks and undergone no grand reinvention of capitalism, the sense of panic seems to be easing. Perhaps this…
Bill Maher on Obama’s Use of Television: ‘You’re the President, Not a Rerun of Law & Order’
From Real Time With Bill Maher, his “New Rules” for June 12, 2009:
“You don’t have to be on television every minute of every day. You’re the president, not a rerun of Law & Order … The other day, I caught myself saying to a friend, ‘Don’t tell me if he’s fixed the economy yet. I’m TiVo-ing it.’”
Newsweek Editor Evan Thomas: Obama Is ‘Sort Of God’
Can’t make this stuff up folks. Newsweek editor Evan Thomas said President Obama is “sort of God” in a way that’s “standing above the country.” Transcript below:
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Evan Thomas is editor at large for Newsweek magazine. Evan, you remember 1984. It wasn’t 100 years ago. Reagan and World War II and the sense of us as the good guys in the world, how are we doing?
EVAN THOMAS: Well, we were the good guys in 1984, it felt that way. It hasn’t felt that way in recent years. So Obama’s had, really, a different task We’re seen too often as the bad guys. And he, he has a very different job from … Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is — we are above that now. We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial. We stand for something, I mean in a way Obama’s standing…
Sacred Plants Of The Ancient Maya
Some of the Central American rainforest’s hidden treasures are being revealed by the Maya, more than a millennium after their passing.
A study of the giant trees and beautiful flowers depicted in Maya art has identified which they held sacred.
Created during the Maya Classic Period, the depictions are so accurate they could help researchers spot plants with hitherto unknown medicinal uses.
The research is published in the journal Economic Botany.
Plants played a significant role in the ecology, culture and rituals of the Maya people, whose artwork reflected the rich diversity of plant life around them.
But while numerous examples of such artwork exist, few have been studied to see exactly which plants they depict.
All Violent Video Games To Be Banned In Germany
German ministers have today agreed to ban the production and distribution of all violent video games, with the law only having to go through parliament in the next few weeks.
The country has been infamously hard on violent video games before now, but an outright ban would result in a huge loss for the video games industry in one of its most successful European countries.
The law would result in no Call of Duty, no God of War, no Crysis, no World of Warcraft, no BioShock, no Uncharted and no Grand Theft Auto.
U.S. Military: Heavily Armed And Medicated
In deploying an all-volunteer army to fight two ongoing wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has increasingly relied on prescription drugs to keep its warriors on the front lines. In recent years, the number of military prescriptions for antidepressants, sleeping pills, and painkillers has risen as soldiers come home with battered bodies and troubled minds. And many of those service members are then sent back to war theaters in distant lands with bottles of medication to fortify them.
According to data from a U. S. Army mental-health survey released last year, about 12 percent of soldiers in Iraq and 15 percent of those in Afghanistan reported taking antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, or sleeping pills. Prescriptions for painkillers have also skyrocketed. Data from the Department of Defense last fall showed that as of September 2007, prescriptions for narcotics for active-duty troops had risen to almost 50,000 a month, compared with about 33,000…
FBI Seeks to Target Lone Extremists
The recent killings of a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum guard and a Kansas abortion doctor came a few months after the Federal Bureau of Investigation stepped up efforts to pre-empt violence committed by just such political extremists working alone.
“Lone-wolf offenders continue to be of great concern to law enforcement,” the agency said in a February memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The FBI is “trying to identify a potential lone wolf before he or she would act out violently,” Michael Ward, the bureau’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, said in an interview earlier this year.
The lone-wolf initiative is one element of a broader strategy to fight domestic terrorism, dubbed “Operation Vigilant Eagle,” launched late last year in response to what the memo identified as “an increase in recruitment, threatening communications, and weapons procurement by white supremacy extremist and militia/sovereign citizen extremist groups.”
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How Troubled Is Your Bank?
Wondering how sound your bank is these days? It’s helpful to take a look at the site Banktracker, which has the financial details on American banks and credit unions available in a database. You can browse by state, or search for your bank by name. I checked out mine, Citibank. As of March, Citibank had $2 billion in delinquent loans on the books, and a $16 billion total troubled assets. Also interesting to know is that Citibank is headquartered in Las Vegas, not New York as commonly believed (a perfect metaphor?).
What’s the overall picture like? “As of March 31, 238 banks had more troubled assets on their books than they had in capital and loan loss reserves.” Uh oh.
Old-Fashioned Medical Advertising: Cocaine, Alcohol, Heroin, Amphetamines
The Pill Talk pharmacology blog takes a look at choice vintage medical advertisements for cures that seem questionable in hindsight. Included are old magazine and newspaper ads for cocaine drops (an instant cure for toothaches), cocaethylene (a “pleasant tonic and invigorator” made by combining cocaine and wine), heroin (”the sedative for coughs”), cigarettes (a cure for asthma and bad breath), injectable opium, Quaaludes, and various tonics, “nerve soothers,” barbiturates, and pep pills. Perhaps the most surprising thing is how relatively recent a few of these appear to be.
Panetta Wonders If Cheney Wants Al Qaeda To Attack US To Prove Point
CIA Director Leon Panetta’s remarks on former Vice President Dick Cheney made in a nearly 7,600-word interview with The New Yorker generated some media attention last night and this morning. Calling them “tough words,” ABC World News reported briefly that Panetta said of Cheney, who “has repeatedly, of course, criticized the Obama Administration’s approach to terrorism,” that “it’s almost as if he is wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point.’”
Panetta, the New Yorker reports, was responding to a speech the former vice president made at the American Enterprise Institute, where he accused the Administration of making “the American people less safe” by banning brutal CIA interrogations of terrorism suspects that had been sanctioned by the Bush Administration.
With “surprising candor,” the magazine reports Panetta said, “I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue. It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When…
North Korea Warns Of Nuclear War
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – North Korea’s communist regime has warned of a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula while vowing to step up its atomic bomb-making program in defiance of new U.N. sanctions.
The North’s defiance presents a growing diplomatic headache for President Barack Obama as he prepares for talks Tuesday with his South Korean counterpart on the North’s missile and nuclear programs.
A Teenager Faces Charges in a Gruesome String of Cat Mutilations and Killings
A teenager faces charges in a gruesome string of cat mutilations and killings that have horrified his neighbors and shaken animal lovers in two South Florida communities.
Tyler Hayes Weinman, 18, was charged Sunday with 19 counts each of animal cruelty and improperly disposing of an animal body and four counts of burglary related to the deaths.
In the past month, residents in the Palmetto Bay and Cutler Bay neighborhoods have reported finding the bodies of more than two dozen cats. Police said some were likely killed by dogs. Some were missing fur — neighbors said some had been skinned — and appeared to have been cut with a sharp, straight instrument, police said.
