Archive for August, 2009
Researchers build a better monkey – but are humans next?
So Japanese scientists have created “transgenic” primates — inserting a jellyfish fluorescence gene into 80 monkey embryos, producing a new line of research animals with skin that glows green under ultraviolet light!
And the same technique could produce monkeys with Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and other diseases, helping scientists research treatments on animals nearly identical to humans.
But this also highlights the controversial possibility of inserting genes into humans. “The debate over this issue during the 21st Century is likely to be as large — or larger — than Roe v. Wade is today.”
Can Obama Be Deprogrammed? The President is a Prisoner of the Cult of Neoliberalism
Michael Lind, Salon.com: In my first foray into political life in the 1970s, I worked during college on the staff of a liberal Democrat in the Texas state Senate.
Only a few years earlier, Patty Hearst had been kidnapped and brainwashed by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and a moral panic about cults seducing college kids was sweeping the nation.
One result was the rise of a new, thankfully ephemeral profession: “deprogrammers” who for pay would kidnap a young person from a cult and break the spell, by means of isolation, interrogation and maybe reruns of “The Waltons.”
A reactionary Republican state senator from the Houston area, who was heartily despised by my senator, introduced a bill granting parents the right to hire deprogrammers to kidnap adult children who belonged to what the parents regarded as cults and then confine them in motels for several weeks, subject to psychological coercion, without notifying the authorities.
Needless…
Peekaru, The Snuggie That Makes Baby And Me Look Like ‘Aliens’
Ben Popken, The Consumerist: The Peekaru is a Snuggie-like fleece ensemble for mommies and daddies to carry their babies in. One version is sleeveless and covers the baby entirely, with just its face sticking out of a portal. Now, the question is, does the Peekaru make wearers look more like: a) Krang b) Quato c) Master Blaster or d) Kane? Photos so you can make an informed judgement here.
Sci-Fi Mahbharata Prepares To Blow Your Mind
Graeme McMillan, io9.com: The first trailer for 18 Days, Grant Morrison’s much-discussed CGI retelling of The Mahbharata, is online. And after watching it, we can’t wait for next spring to see the finished version of the We3/Invisibles writer’s psychedelic excursion.
In addition to the trailer, the project’s website also includes notes from Morrison about how he approached the project, which he likened to “a psychedelic The Lord of the Rings with Star Wars technology”:
“As I see it, the whole of the Mahabharata, and indeed the whole of Hindu thought and ultimately of all contemplative thought, expands outwards like the Big Bang from one timeless Singularity – the moment when Krishna stops time to deliver the terrible wisdom of the Gita and reveal to Arjuna his – and our own – place in the cosmos. Here is the ‘crack’ in time, the crack between Ages and the crack in every human heart through which the light…
U.S. ‘Video Terrorist’ Found Guilty
BBC News: A US court has found a man guilty of aiding terrorist groups by video-taping Washington landmarks and sending the tapes abroad.
Prosecutors said Ehsanul Islam Sadequee went to Bangladesh to meet terrorist cells and tried to help a Pakistani group linked to terror attacks.
At his trial in Atlanta, the 23-year-old denied any involvement in terrorist activity.
Sadequee, who was born and raised in the US, faces up to 60 years in jail.
At the trial — at which Sadequee represented himself — he acknowledged that he had spent time discussing jihad in online forums, but said it was empty talk.
“We were immature young guys who had imaginations running wild,” he told jurors, the AP news agency reported. “But I was not then, and am not now, a terrorist.”
The First Official Photo From James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’
Peter Sciretta, SlashFilm: I woke up this morning to find an an email from an anonymous source, with an attachment. A photo from the most anticipated movie of the next year (at least among film geeks). That’s right, the first real photo from James Cameron’s Avatar. I freaked out because I receive cool stuff all the time, which unfortunately the law prevents me from posting. And if I was the one to leak a photo like this, it would surely start a shit storm.
But I wanted to be sure, so I contacted Fox directly to ask permission to post what I had received. It was one of those moves to just make sure, a last resort. I didn’t really expect them to be like “yeah, that’s fine…” but, well, that’s almost exactly what they said. Apparently the photo was sent out to a couple magazines this week, so Fox is…
Black Book Omega Released by Original Falcon!
For the first time in over five years, your humble narrator here at the Black Sun Gazette is being featured in print. Black Book Omega: Cirque Apoklypsis from Original Falcon. In the book you can read original, never before released material by Dr. Christopher S. Hyatt, Joe Matheny, Wes Unruh, Antero Alli, and Calvin Iwema. Anyone interested in the life and work of Christopher Hyatt, and the Hyatt Method should pick this up. I promise to autograph any copy stuck in front of me. I’ve read the rest of the material in there and it’s totally explosive shit that you can’t live without. Go buy a copy now!
‘Obamacare’: What Does the Constitution Have To Say?
Chelsea Schilling, WorldNetDaily: Is a federal government takeover of the health care system constitutional?
Some argue that under the Constitution, Congress is not authorized to regulate or subsidize health care.
Michael Boldin, founder of The Tenth Amendment Center, told WND that if citizens want to understand whether health care is constitutional, they must first understand the function of the Constitution.
“The best way to look at it is that it doesn’t apply to you,” he said. “It doesn’t apply to me. It doesn’t apply to any person at all. It applies to the government, and it sets the boundaries of what government is supposed to do.”
Enumerated powers: In debating whether health care is constitutional, Boldin said citizens must look to the founding document to 1) determine whether the power is specifically listed there, or 2) if there isn’t a specific power listed, look to the “Necessary and Proper Clause,” or Article I, Section 8,…
Obama protestor carries an AR-15 rifle!?
About a dozen people carrying guns, including one with a military-style rifle, milled among protesters outside the convention centre where President Barack Obama was giving a speech Monday – the latest incident in which protesters have openly displayed firearms near the president…
Phoenix police said the gun-toters at Monday’s event, including the man carrying an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle… [committed][n]o crimes… and no one was arrested.”
Yeah, I get it.. the 2nd ammendment.
Is it going to get to the point that we have groups of Americans firing their assault rifles into the sky while burning stuffed President dolls in the streets? When did Phoenix become the Gaza Strip?
Be a big kid and use your words.
Anti-Gay Attacks On Rise In Iraq
Gay Iraqi men are being murdered in what appears to be a co-ordinated campaign involving militia forces, the group Human Rights Watch says. It says hundreds of gay men have been targeted and killed in Iraq since 2004.
The report says members of the Mehdi Army militia group are spearheading the campaign, but police are also accused – even though homosexuality is legal.
Interplanetary Internet Gets Permanent Home in Space
Rachel Courtland. New Scientist: The interplanetary internet now has its first permanent node in space, aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
The new software will make sending data from space less like using the telephone, and more like using the web. In the modern era of the web and information on demand, teams still have to schedule times to send and receive data from space missions.
But the newly installed system aboard the ISS could one day allow data to flow between Earth, spacecraft, and astronauts automatically, creating what is being dubbed the “interplanetary internet”.
A box boasting a computer and modules for science experiments owned by non-profit BioServe Space Technologies on the ISS was loaded with the necessary software for its new role in late May.
The payload recently sent down its first science data – images of crystals formed by metal salts in free-fall – using the new programming. Its new capability…
The Huffington Post is Crazy About Your Health
Why bogus treatments and crackpot medical theories dominate “The Internet Newspaper”
Rahul K. Parikh, M.D., Salon.com: This spring, during the swine flu outbreak, I was searching the Web for news when a blog post on the Huffington Post caught my eye. Titled “Swine Flu: Protect Yourself and Your Loved Ones,” its author, Kim Evans, offered a unique prescription for swine flu, one she believed could “save your life”: deep-cleansing enemas.
“Most estimates are that the average person has ten or more pounds of stored waste just in their colon,” Evans wrote. “In any case, many people have found that disease disappears when this waste is gone, and that when the body is clean it’s much more difficult for new problems, like viruses, to take hold in the first place. And it’s my understanding that many people who took regular enemas instead of vaccines during the 1918 pandemic made it out on the…
The Media Bundle Is Dead, Long Live The News Aggregators
Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch: Here we go again. The newspaper industry is blaming online news aggregators for its dwindling profits and inability to adapt to a world of links and truly-free flowing information. (They like it when information flows freely into their pages, but not so much when it flows out).
On Thursday, paidContent ran an essay by media consultant Arnon Mishkin called “The Fallacy Of The Link Economy” which was misguided on so many levels. Mishkin’s main argument is that:
The vast majority of the value gets captured by aggregators linking and scraping rather than by the news organizations that get linked and scraped.
It is not really clear whom he is calling an aggregator—actual news aggregators like Yahoo News, Google News, Digg, Techmeme and the Huffington Post, or anyone who links to a news story. After all, he equates the entire web to the blogosphere, which says more about his parochial industry view…
90 Percent of U.S. Bills Carry Traces of Cocaine
In the course of its average 20 months in circulation, U.S. currency gets whisked into ATMs, clutched, touched and traded perhaps thousands of times at coffee shops, convenience stores and newsstands. And every touch to every bill brings specks of dirt, food, germs or even drug residue.
Research presented this weekend reinforced previous findings that 90 percent of paper money circulating in U.S. cities contains traces of cocaine.
“When I was a young kid, my mom told me the dirtiest thing in the world is money,” said the researcher, Yuegang Zuo, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “Mom is always right.”
Scientists say the amount of cocaine found on bills is not enough to cause health risks. Money can be contaminated with cocaine during drug deals or if a user snorts with a bill. But not all bills are involved in drug use; they can get contaminated inside…
UK Government Releases More UFO Files
The deputy commander of a U.S. Air Force base in England was baffled by what he’d seen: bright, pulsing lights in the night sky.
Britain’s defense ministry couldn’t explain it either, but concluded that the unidentified flying object posed no threat.
The National Archives on Monday released the government’s complete file on the “Rendlesham Forest Incident” of December 1980, one of Britain’s most famous UFO sightings.
It was among more than 4,000 pages posted online Monday documenting 800 alleged encounters during the 1980s and 1990s. Over the past three years the Ministry of Defense has been gradually releasing previously secret UFO papers after facing Freedom of Information demands.
Brain-Jacking Fungus Turns Living Victims Into ‘Zombies’
Scientists say they have discovered a horrific flesh-eating fungus which is able to infect living creatures and turn them into “zombies”.
The hapless victims are then compelled to shamble away to a location where their immobilised bodies — as they are gradually consumed from within, acting as food supply and nest to the ghastly fungal offspring — can spray out more spores to seize control of more hosts.
…luckily, it focuses on carpenter ants.
Penn & Teller vs. The TSA
They’d been touring since the mid-1970s, but after the events of September 11, 2001, the experience lost, well, some of its magic.
“We were both getting older, I wanted to have kids, and that was certainly part of it. But we also just seemed to be getting our hearts broken every time we went through airport security. We’re often recognized and we are always treated very well by the TSA employees, but it bothered us to see other people getting hassled and it made being on the road much less fun.”
The average TSA worker is a glorified burger-flipper. Give them something to think about…
Tom Delay Joins Dancing With The Stars
Disinfo fave Tom Delay will be returning to the national spotlight in the fall when he will do some waltzing on Dancing With the Stars. The Republican southern heartthrob served as House Majority Leader from 2003 to 2005, when he resigned in the wake of legal problems.
On ABC this fall, Delay will pair with a professional ballroom dancer and attempt to out-dance Donny Osmond and Kelly Osborne. The other contestants should be careful not to leave their wallets lying around the set.
Fox News Viewership Strongest Ever
More Americans than ever before are turning to Fox News as their source of information and opinion; over the past year, the channel’s viewership has jumped up by 11 percent, according to Nielsen Media Research. In contrast, CNN and MSNBC are down.
Fox was riding high during the Bush years, and many thought that the return of a Democratic government to Washington would signal the end of channel’s dominance in the field of cable news. However the reverse has proved to be true, with Fox’s coverage of the Obama era taking its success to new heights. The network ratings lead is helmed by its big three of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glen Beck. Discussing rival news outlets, O’Reilly explains, “Our ratings are already soaring…They’re dying. We’re on fire.”
