Archive for June, 2009
Jeremy Scahill: Over One Million Iraqis Deaths Due to U.S. Invasion
I can accept that the other people on the panel don’t know what Scahill is talking about (especially the Page Six dolt) but surprised Bill Maher has never heard it before:
NukeHampton
Wanna live in the fabulous Hamptons on the site of a former nuclear missile base? That is what advisors are hoping will lure people to this 96-acre parcel in the scrub pines of Westhampton adjacent to Gabreski Airport, just in back of Old Country Road.
The advisors are folks hired by Suffolk County, which now owns this site. They are coming up with ways for the County to sell off a few things it owns to, ahem, raise a little money in these hard times. The missile base is one of them.
The advisors say the property would fetch somewhere between $23 and $47 million. Figure it out. With two acre zoning, you could build a subdivision for 45 homes on the property. Figure you could get $2 million for each two-acre lot with all this history, deduct the cost of permits, roads and drainage and you could still walk away with…
Oliver Stone To Tackle ‘Wall Street’ Again
The Gothamist: We guess the Madoff movie has some competition! Oliver Stone is set to direct the sequel to his 1987 film, Wall Street. According to Variety, Shia LaBeouf “is negotiating to join Michael Douglas, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Gordon Gekko in the original pic. The sequel will once again involve a young Wall Street trader, and the recent economic meltdown spurred by rampant greed and corruption will fit prominently into the plot.”
Allen Loeb is writing the script, but Newsweek spoke to the original film’s screenwriter Stanley Wieser, who gave his two cents about the sequel — “I know it’s back with Gecko coming out of jail. But he wouldn’t be allowed to trade and I know that he would basically have to work using others. It’s in a shark’s blood to keep moving” — and believes, “If Gecko was around right now, he would find a…
io9.com: Science Fiction Books That Launched Their Own Genres
Charlie Jane Anders, io9.com: Science fiction is all about discovery and invention, but only a few books have actually created whole new genres. Here are 10 books that pioneered a new type of science-fictional story. Do you have what it takes to join them?
The genre: First contact with an alien race
The book: Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. This was a tough one — even if you only define “first contact” as being a scenario where human society, as a whole, comes into contact with an alien species (and not just one solitary human explorer) you still have tons of early stories about aliens showing up. Some would say the earliest notable “first contact” novel is H.G. Wells’ The War Of The Worlds.
But let’s say that a crucial component of the “first contact” story is that the aliens are friendly — or at least reasonably well-intentioned. Otherwise, you just have an invasion or…
The Looney Awards: Bachmann Time Travels to 1942
Some would say awarding a Looney Award to Michele Bachmann is like kicking a quadriplegic whilst they’re down. I suppose there’s some truth to that, but she always makes it so damned easy. This time she links the 2010 census to Japanese internment camps.
Cracked.com: The 7 Most Bizarrely Unlucky People Who Ever Lived
Alex Cipriano, Tim Parent: We’re not saying these are the unluckiest people in history; we realize the world is full of starving children and cancer victims. But sometimes you see people who have weird, one-in-a-million instances of bad luck, often over and over again, and you can’t help but wonder if they didn’t piss off a Gypsy at some point.
We’re talking about people like…
Roy Sullivan: He was struck by lightning. Seven times.
Statistically, getting hit by lightning is a three-thousand to one chance. Therefore getting hit seven times is about twenty-two septillion to one. That’s 22,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. To 1.
Still not long enough odds for Roy Sullivan, who was a U.S. park ranger in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. He was, in fact, hit by lightning seven different freaking times.
Some “scientists” theorize that Sullivan’s occupation as a park ranger in an area prone to thunderstorms might have something to do with his problem. We prefer…
The Lyme Disease Conspiracy
Frank DiGiacomo: There are moments when Under Our Skin felt to me like an episode of The X Files. I knew Lyme disease was controversial, but I was completely unaware of the politics surrounding the definition and treatment of the disease.
Andy Abrahams Wilson: Well, I was a big fan of The X Files, so I take that as a compliment. As a matter of fact, one reason that I was initially attracted to this issue is a conspiracy theory that the bug that causes Lyme disease was actually engineered as a biological warfare agent. There’s a whole book dedicated to this theory.
It’s called Lab 257 [Subtitle: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory, by Michael C. Carroll]. Lab 257 was, or is, an animal research laboratory off the coast of Long Island. There was even a Nazi doctor who was hired to run the lab after World War…
2012 Interview With Shaman Alberto Villoldo
A debate is raging over whether Dec. 21, 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar, heralds a doomsday of apocalyptic proportions — or the dawning of a golden age in consciousness. In the new documentary 2012: Science or Superstition, featured this month by SpiritualCinemaCircle, scientists and experts present both the science behind the Mayan calendar as well as a positive message that we will be ushered into a new age of elevated consciousness and increased awareness.
One of the experts featured in the film is Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D., a medical anthropologist who has researched the healing traditions of the Andes and the Amazon for over 20 years. Founder of The Four Winds Society and author of more than 10 books including Courageous Dreaming, The Four Insights and Shaman Healer Sage, Dr. Villoldo is dedicated to bridging ancient wisdom with modern medicine and psychology. He recently shared with us his perspective on 2012.
Michael Jackson’s Chimp Bubbles Tried to Commit Suicide in 2003!
From the Times of India, 23 Dec 2003:
The year seems to be ending on a bad note for some of the male pop-stars on the international scene. Several of them are battling law-suits or the ire of fans. Heading the list is Michael Jackson, who was formally charged with child-molestation last week.
The singer has always been under a cloud of suspicion, following a similar court case some years ago but that time an out of court settlement was reached. This time round, the charges are believed to involve a 14-year old boy who has spent night at his famous ranch named Neverland … To show their support to his cause, friends and relative descended on his ranch.
The singer is expected to travel to Britain soon to fulfil unspecified contractual obligations and also to promote his latest CD, Number Ones, which has opened to dismal sales. But the Moonwalker should not…
The Web Collapses Under The Weight Of Michael Jackson’s Death
MG Siegler, TechCrunch: In terms of well-known celebrities, few are bigger than Michael Jackson. Love him or hate him, pretty much everyone on the planet knows him. And that caused big problems for a lot of huge websites today with the news of his passing.
It was probably to be expected that Twitter would struggle as reportedly hundreds of thousands of tweets came in about Jackson in a very short amount of time. While I only got a couple actual Fail Whales, the site was really sucking wind for much of the hour that people were trying to get information about him. But Twitter was hardly the only site that was struggling.
Various reports had the AOL-owned TMZ, which broke the story, being down at multiple points throughout the ordeal. As a result, Perez Hilton’s hugely popular blog may have failed as people rushed there to try and confirm the news. Then…
The Michael Jackson Death Profiteering Has Begun…
Ebay auctions for RIP Michael Jackson t-shirts are flooding the market after news of the pop star’s death.
John Lennon’s Pact With Satan
The Beatles’ success and influence were immeasurable, extending beyond music to culture and society as a whole. How did they do it: talent? Luck? Nope, a deal with Lucifer.
A new book called The Lennon Prophecy unveils the sinister secret of the Beatles’ success: a pact which John Lennon made with the devil, which granted him exactly twenty years of unimaginable fame, fortune, and power, followed by his untimely death.
The book begins with a well-known remark Lennon made to his friend Tony Sheridan in the mid-1960s: “I’ve sold my soul to the Devil.”
Author Joseph Niezgoda then pinpoints December 27, 1960, a night on which the Beatles played at the Town Hall Ball Room in Litherland, England, as the eve on which twenty-year-old John Lennon, desperate to be “more famous than Elvis,” sold his soul to Satan … obviously, the Beatles’ music, lyrics, and album art are laden with “clues.”
Gay Teen Exorcism Video
From Hartford, Connecticut comes a video of a local church performing an exorcism, but not a regular one; rather, it’s specifically a gay exorcism. The video, which the Manifested Glory church posted to YouTube, has garnered some controversy on the local news; it shows adults pushing and pulling on the body of a teen boy as he writhes on the ground, with a man screaming for the “homosexual demon” to leave the youth’s body. The process goes on for more than twenty minutes, with the boy vomiting and seemingly in a state of near-seizure. Nice to see the role organized religion is playing in kid’s lives.
And Nothing of Value was Lost…
Any American that’s been alive for the 50 years has been privy to the prolonged mental break down that was Michael Jackson’s life. His story should serve as a warning to parents wishing to initiate their children into the world of celebrity.
Apocalypse Not: Behind the Swine Flu Hysteria
At the height of the swine flu pandemic this spring, when the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was recommending that schools with cases of H1N1 be closed for 14 days and Mexico was still on lockdown, the epidemiology community already suspected the world wasn’t ending. Why? The numbers came in: case fatality rate (how many infected people are dying) and replication rate (how many others an infected person will transmit the illness to — “R-zero,” in disease-speak). H1N1 had an RØ of about 1.3, high enough to spread the virus but low enough that a strong isolation program could break its back. Its case fatality rate was a wussy 1.9 percent in Mexico and 0.1 percent worldwide…
Australian Crop Circle Mystery Solved: Stoned Wallabies!
SYDNEY (Reuters) – The mystery of crop circles in poppy fields in Australia’s southern island state of Tasmania has been solved — stoned wallabies are eating the poppy heads and hopping around in circles.
“We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,” the state’s top lawmaker Lara Giddings told local media on Thursday.
“Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high,” she said.
Many people believe crop circles that mysteriously appear in fields around the world are created by aliens.
The CIA and the Iranian Experiment
voltairenet.org: The news of alleged election fraud has spread through Tehran like wildfire, pitching ayatollah Rafsanjani’s supporters against ayatollah Khamenei’s in street confrontations. This chaotic situation is secretly stirred by the CIA which has been spreading confusion by flooding Iranians with contradicting SMS messages. Thierry Meyssan recounts this psychological warfare experiment.
Was Michael Jackson A Radical Biotech Self-Engineer?
“For me, Michael Jackson represents a sort of pioneer of self-transformation…” argues Christopher Dewdney, culture theorist and author of Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era. “The freedom to choose all your ‘inherited’ features, both familial and racial, will probably become an intrinsic part of the transhuman era.”
But he worries that given the power to choose, people will simply mimic mainstream celebrities, citing Botox as “a dreadful symptom of a new, radical mundanity enabled by biotechnology.” His original vision — that explorers would “morph ourselves into elongated, blue-skinned, orange-haired, sixteen-fingered geniuses or perhaps flying ribbons of sensual bliss that performed acrobatic choreographies above the sunset” — turned out to be very unpopular.
And unlike Michael Jackson’s flirtations with cosmetic surgery, “Individuality or creative improvisation is the last thing most people want.”
In 1994 There Was ‘Something Called the Internet’
Paul Kedrosky: I’m a sucker for this sort of stuff: It’s Tom Brokaw talking to Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt in 1994 about “something called the Internet”. Dating myself, this was filmed at Comdex in Las Vegas in 1994, and I was there.
