Archive for July, 2009
Meet The Bagelheads
BIZARRE (Text: Maki / Photos: John Stone):
Picture the scene: five people, each with hideously distorted heads, tubes sticking into their faces.
Reminiscent of a medical experiment gone hideously wrong, you’d be forgiven for thinking they had a gross infection or disease. They look like alien abductees, fresh from invasive research by their interplanetary masters. But these are Japanese club kids, otherwise known as bagelheads, deliberately disfiguring themselves by experimenting with saline inflations.
Hitler Finds Out Michael Jackson Has Died…
Hitler is pretty pissed off to hear that Michael Jackson has died and won’t be able to perform at his birthday party. Created by stubod2001 on YouTube:
India’s First Porn Star is Dead?
Jason Overdorf, GlobalPost: Thanks to an anonymous group of computer geeks, India’s first international internet porn star is fast becoming this conservative country’s answer to Wonder Woman — and Monica Lewinsky.
But here’s the trick: The steamy web seductress is a cartoon.
Turning the tables on Bollywood’s demure heroines — who’ve only recently started agreeing to lip-to-lip kisses on screen — “Savita Bhabhi” (or sister-in-law Savita) is a buxom, recently married housewife who knows what she wants and how to get it.
Bored with her workaholic husband, she seduces door-to-door salesmen, neighborhood cricket players, even a not-so-subtle stand-in for the gray-bearded Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan — a move that earned her some flak from Indian entertainment channels.
Though pornography is illegal in India, Savita Bhabhi’s sexual misadventures, published on savitabhabhi.com with scripts based on fantasies submitted by fans, have attracted a huge following, according to one of the strip’s anonymous creators, who goes by…
Comedian/Stoner Rob Pue explains why pot should stay illegal
“Legalization of Marijuana means taxation and… I’m pretty comfortable with the price I pay for illegal weed right now. I don’t want the government putting some sales tax on my dime bag says ‘too much marijuana inhilation will cause playstation thumb.’”
As always, comedian Rob Pue finds the path less traveled and drives a semi-truck of honest logic down the middle of a split issue.
Living Without Money
I Know It Is Possible To Live With Zero Money, Abundantly
How? Because it’s happening to me, just as it’s happening to ants and deer and slugs and sparrows and bacteria and atoms and galaxies. Because it’s happening to the whole, infinite universe outside our teeny tiny itty bitty Babylon we call civilization (which we think is the whole universe).
I’ve been living without a cent to my name since the autumn of 2000 (with a month’s exception during my first year). I don’t use or accept money or conscious barter, and I don’t take food stamps or other government dole.
(And, after 8 years, to my joy, I’ve learned there are other people in the world doing the same.)
Why? I simply got tired of acknowledging as real this most common world-wide belief called money! I simply got tired of being unreal. Money is one of those intriguing things that becomes real because…
How the Food Industry Has Made Bacon a Weapon of Mass Destruction
The confluence of factory farming, the boom in fast food and manipulation of consumer taste created processed foods that can hook us like drugs.
Among my fondest childhood memories is savoring a strip of perfectly cooked bacon that had just been dragged through a puddle of maple syrup. It was an illicit pleasure; varnishing the fatty, salty, smoky bacon with sweet arboreal sap felt taboo. How could such simple ingredients produce such riotous flavors?
That was then. Today, you don’t need to tax yourself applying syrup to bacon — McDonald’s does it for you with the McGriddle. It conveniently takes an egg, American cheese and pork and nestles it between pancakelike biscuits suffused with genuine fake-maple-syrup flavor.
The McGriddle is just one moment in an era of extreme food combinations — a moment in which bacon plays a starring role, from high cuisine to low.
There is: bacon ice cream; bacon-infused vodka; deep-fried bacon;…
Twelve Percent Of People Have Tried To Buy Stuff From Spam
Ever wonder who would actually respond to unsolicited emails advertising miracle weight loss, cheap Viagra, or princely Nigerian sums? Apparently, a lot of people would.
A study conducted by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group found that 52 percent of email users say that they have clicked on a spam email before, and that a full 12 percent say that they have attempted to purchase something that was being advertised.
Serbia’s Worst War Criminal Spent Decade Posing As New-Age Guru
How did a Serbian war criminal hide from the world as a bioenergy-channeling, alternative-medicine-peddling, bearded and, well, nutty guru?
From 1995 until his arrest last year, Radovan Karadzic was the most hunted war criminal on the planet. As president of the Republika Srpska during the early 1990s, Karadzic led, with the aid of Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, a brutal war of “ethnic cleansing” against Bosnia’s Muslims.
However, after the International Criminal Tribunal indicted him for genocide, Karadzic disappeared, going underground and posing as a tofu-eating new-age therapist named Dragan Dabic, who was especially interested in treating “strong-blooded women who cannot live without sex.” Amazingly, the disguise worked so well that Dabic became a minor celebrity in Belgrade, with a national magazine column and a key position at a Connecticut-based vitamin company. Could your dietitian/yoga instructor/therapist be a mass murderer in disguise?
Douglas Rushkoff — The ESPN Porn Scam
On the Internet, there’s no currency more readily accepted—and exploitable—than a few pixels of porn. This week’s leak of a video, apparently taped illegally, of ESPN star Erin Andrews changing in her hotel room has kept her fans busy downloading torrents, and the gossip sites busy generating chatter and speculation.
But the Andrews video has also fueled the spread of highly toxic computer viruses, and quite probably financial thievery and terrorism, by hackers who know the real law of the Internet: The closer an Internet user is to a set of videotaped breasts, the more likely he (and 99% of those who fall into this trap are male) will be to click on whatever he’s told to.
Douglas Rushkoff – The ESPN Porn Scam
Emails
|
Single Page
|
text
-
+
|
|
Digg
|
Enter your email address:
Enter the recipients’ email addresses, separated by commas:
Message:
Your email has been sent.
Thanks for recommending The Daily Beast!
X Close
Erin Andrews Al Messerschmidt / Getty Images The scandal surrounding the illegal nude video of ESPN star Erin Andrews has reached your computer. Douglas Rushkoff on how an army of hackers is using porn to break into your bank account.
On the Internet, there’s no currency more readily accepted—and exploitable—than a few pixels of porn. This week’s leak of a video, apparently taped illegally, of ESPN star Erin Andrews changing in her hotel room has kept her fans busy downloading torrents, and the gossip sites busy generating chatter and speculation.
But the Andrews video has also fueled the spread of highly toxic computer viruses, and quite probably financial thievery and terrorism, by hackers who know the real law of the Internet: The closer an Internet user is to a set…
Post-Post Race
Racism is a complex problem between numerous factions and can only be addressed by rational, intelligent people who genuinely want to mend fences. It can’t be wrapped up before a commercial break and any true dissection of the problem will no doubt rile many racists of various backgrounds.
New York Times Amps Up Swine Flu Hysteria
This photo appears on the front page of today’s New York Times (A1). To what extent should we hold the media complicit in engendering fears of a flu virus to prepare Americans for vaccination, possibly mandatory? Those are questions the mainstream media doesn’t seem to want to ask itself, let alone answer….
With ‘Med Pot’ Raids Halted, Selling Grass Grows Greener
LAKE FOREST, Calif. — Sellers of marijuana as a medicine here don’t fret about raids any more. They’ve stopped stressing over where to hide their stash or how to move it unseen.
Now their concerns involve the state Board of Equalization, which collects sales tax and requires a retailer ID number. Or city planning offices, which insist that staircases comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act. Then there is marketing strategy, which can mean paying to be a “featured dispensary” on a Web site for pot smokers.
After years in the shadows, medical marijuana in California is aspiring to crack the commercial mainstream.
Could New Technologies Read Brain Waves?
Researchers are now building a device that can analyze neuron activity to measure the effectiveness of attention-deficit therapies. (”Many children are getting Ritalin without any objective diagnosis… And many adults don’t get Ritalin, even though they might be helped by it.”) But DARPA is taking it one step further, funding a $4 million project to map the brain’s electrical activity to specific words, hoping to make it possible to communicate by thought!
Has Science Proven That All Artists Are Crazy?
Ewen Callaway, New Scientist: We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the tortured artist. Salvador Dali’s various disorders and Sylvia Plath’s depression spring to mind. Now new research seems to show why: a genetic mutation linked to psychosis and schizophrenia also influences creativity.
The finding could help to explain why mutations that increase a person’s risk of developing mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar syndrome have been preserved, even preferred, during human evolution, says Szabolcs Kéri, a researcher at Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary, who carried out the study.to psychosis and schizophrenia also influences creativity.
Kéri examined a gene involved in brain development called neuregulin 1, which previous studies have linked to a slightly increased risk of schizophrenia. Moreover, a single DNA letter mutation that affects how much of the neuregulin 1 protein is made in the brain has been linked to psychosis, poor memory and sensitivity to criticism.to psychosis and…
Harvard Professor Arrested in Own Home (For Being Black…)
NY Times: Henry Louis Gates Jr., a prominent Harvard scholar of African-American history, was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Mass., last week by an officer investigating a report of a robbery in progress. Although charges for disorderly conduct were dropped, the incident has caused a stir over the issue of racial profiling.
We asked some experts (see below), if this is an example of racial profiling, how far have we progressed in reducing that problem (through federal monitoring of law enforcement agencies and the like), and what more might be done?
– Ralph Richard Banks, Stanford Law School
– Paul Butler, George Washington Law School
– Lorie A. Fridell, criminology professor, University of South Florida
– Samuel R. Sommers, psychologist, Tufts University
– Peter Moskos, author of “Cop in the Hood”
– Frank Askin, Rutgers Law School-Newark
Global Warming Brings Mysterious Glowing Night Clouds
Wired Science reports:
Mysterious, glowing clouds previously seen almost exclusively in Earth’s polar regions have appeared in the skies over the United States and Europe over the past several days.
Photographers and other sky watchers in Omaha, Paris, Seattle, and other locations have run outside to capture images of what scientists call noctilucent (”night shining”) clouds. Formed by ice literally at the boundary where the earth’s atmosphere meets space 50 miles up, they shine because they are so high that they remain lit by the sun even after our star is below the horizon.
The clouds might be beautiful, but they could portend global changes caused by global warming. Noctilucent clouds are a fundamentally new phenomenon in the temperate mid-latitude sky, and it’s not clear why they’ve migrated down from the poles. Or why, over the last 25 years, more of them are appearing in the polar regions, too, and shining more brightly.
The Christian Right Embraces Harry Potter
For years, Harry Potter, in book, film, and all other forms, has elicited reactions ranging from suspicion to panic from the Christian establishment. Pope Benedict XVI warned in 2003 that Harry Potter books “are subtle seductions, which…deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow,” and in 2007 James Dobson tied the series in with a “trend toward witchcraft and New Age ideology in the larger culture” and worried about “the effects such stories might have on young, impressionable minds.”
But, as ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ arrives in theaters, the tide at last seems to be turning, with Christian interests eager to co-opt Harry to promote their own message to kids. Christianity Today writes that Harry Potter’s “characteristics make him something of a Christ figure.” Even Focus on the Family now gives a positive spin: “Harry, whatever his faults, embraces such unglamorous words as ‘duty,’ ‘responsibility’ and ’sacrifice.’” Will…
