Archive for August, 2009
Leonard Nimoy Wants You To Do Drugs And Have Orgies
Charlie Jane Anders, io9.com: If the new movie of Brave New World ever gets off the ground, it probably won’t feature Leonard Nimoy in a yellow frock, as the benign leader of the drugs-sex-and-conditioning fake utopia. Too bad.
The 1998 TV movie version of BNW is surprisingly great, with about as much crazy sex as television will allow. And I really like the conditioning sequences and all the debates over how much freedom to allow the “savage” visiting this allegedly perfect society, all of which feels pretty close to the book, based on my decade-old memories of it.
The Great Marijuana Book Bomb of 2009
Joel Warner, Westword: Mason Tvert, executive director of SAFER (Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation), which ran a successful 2005 campaign to legalize possession of up to one ounce of marijuana in Denver, has long been the merry prankster of Colorado weed activists — a prankster who knows how to have serious impact. When photos surfaced of Governor Bill Ritter’s son hitting the booze at a governor’s mansion party, Tvert and his posse threw a media-grabbing kegger on the mansion lawn to prove the point that the encouragement of alcohol but not pot was a total party foul.
He was also responsible for arguably the most successful billboard that never actually existed: In 2005, as part of the Denver pot legalization campaign, SAFER proposed a billboard celebrating Miami Dolphins running back Ricky Williams, who’d been suspended for marijuana use. The billboard attracted national attention — even though Tvert never actually put it…
Comet Swarm Delivered Earth’s Oceans?
Ker Than, National Geographic News: A barrage of comets may have delivered Earth’s oceans around 3.85 billion years ago, a new study suggests.
Scientists have long suspected that Earth and its near neighbors were walloped by tens of thousands of impactors during an ancient event known as the Late Heavy Bombardment.
This pummeling disfigured the moon, leaving behind massive craters that are still visible, preserved for millennia in the moon’s airless environment. But it’s been unclear whether the impactors were icy comets or rocky asteroids.
Now, based on levels of a certain metal in ancient Earth rocks, a team led by Uffe Jorgensen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark says comets were the culprits.
Whether Earth had oceans before any comets arrived has been intensely debated, Jorgensen noted.
Some experts say enough water could have existed from the moment Earth formed, while others argue that the young planet’s heat would have vaporized any liquids.
“It’s…
Flickr v. Free Speech. Where Is Their Courage?
Michael Arrington, TechCrunch: One thing I’ve learned over the years is this — screwing over your users while yelling “the lawyers made me do it!” rarely ends well. Particularly when the lawyers are just being lazy, and free speech rights are at stake.
Flickr really stepped in it this time. And they’ve sparked a free speech and copyright fascism debate that is unlikely to cool down any time soon.
Sometime last week they took down a photoshopped image of President Obama that makes him look like the Heath Ledger (Joker) character from The Dark Knight. The image was created and uploaded to Flickr by 20 year old college student Firas Alkhateeb while “bored over winter school break.” It was also later altered yet again by someone else and used to create anti-Obama posters that went up in Los Angeles.
Thomas Hawk has a good overview of some of the other details, but the…
Teen Becomes First Jailed in UK for Cyberbullying
Chris Matyszczyk, Technically Incorrect: In a week in which Google was ordered to reveal the identity of the “Skanks in NYC” blogger who may have defamed model Liskula Cohen, a landmark judgment was also reportedly reached in the United Kingdom.
In Worcester Magistrates Court of England, an 18-year-old woman was allegedly sent to three months in a young-offenders institute after being found guilty of posting death threats on Facebook, according to the Daily Mail. It’s thought to be the country’s first jail sentence for cyberbullying.
The young defendant allegedly wrote on her Facebook page that she would kill another young woman, the Daily Mail said. The two had been at school together, where the defendant’s bullying of the victim allegedly began.
The defendant already had two previous convictions stemming from her bullying of the victim, one for assault and one for criminal damage.
According to the Mail’s report, the defendant originally claimed the Facebook threat…
How Many Minutes to Earn the Price of a Big Mac?
Economist.com: The size of your pay packet may be important, but so is its purchasing power. Helpfully, a UBS report published this week offers a handy guide to how long it takes a worker on the average net wage to earn the price of a Big Mac in 73 cities. Fast-food junkies are best off in Chicago, Toronto and Tokyo, where it takes a mere 12 minutes at work to afford a Big Mac. By contrast, employees must toil for over two hours to earn enough for a burger fix in Mexico City, Jakarta and Nairobi.
Ridge’s ‘Revelations’ on U.S. Terror Alerts
U.S. Homeland Security Department director Tom Ridge was pressured by the Bush administration to raise the “terrorism threat level” on the eve of the 2004 presidential elections, Ridge claims in a new book due out in September.
In his book, Ridge self-servingly states that he opposed the move, making clear that he considered it to be at least partially politically motivated — i.e., to benefit the reelection campaign of then-President George W. Bush.
America’s Death Squads Inc.
The US Central Intelligence Agency contracted the now notorious private security firm Blackwater for a secret program of “targeted killings” against alleged Al Qaeda operatives, according to media reports Thursday.
The agency essentially was attempting to subcontract state assassinations to a private company employing mercenaries
Baghdad bombings cast doubt on US troop withdrawals
Wednesday’s bombings against key government buildings in the centre of Baghdad have dealt a significant blow to the claims of both the Obama administration and the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that the country has been pacified and secured by the US military “surge” in 2007 and 2008.
Mass abstention and vote rigging in Afghanistan election
Yesterday’s presidential election in Afghanistan featured massive abstention and blatant ballot rigging, underscoring the corrupt character of the entire exercise. Conducted under the guns of 100,000 foreign troops, the vote had nothing to do with democracy and was instead designed to provide a veneer of legitimacy for the US-led NATO forces’ increasingly bloody counter-insurgency campaign against those resisting the occupation.
The World’s First Cocaine Bar
“Tonight we have two types of cocaine; normal for 100 Bolivianos a gram, and strong cocaine for 150 [Bolivianos] a gram.” The waiter has just finished taking our drink order of two rum-and-Cokes here in La Paz, Bolivia, and as everybody in this bar knows, he is now offering the main course. The bottled water is on the house.
Birthers and the Democratization of Media
In the 90s, the advent of the Internet age, many people, including myself, thought the Internet’s democratization of media would be vehicle for social progress. R. U. Sirius was correct that “consensus reality” would be demolished. But instead of a new enlightenment, we have a new dark age in which disinformation flows at will and even educated people can’t be bothered to check Snopes before hitting forward on the latest right wing chain e-mail.
New Fletcher Hanks Collection: ‘You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!’
A new collection of the haunting, nightmare inducing work of Fletcher Hanks (the artist R. Crumb calls “one twisted dude”) is now available.
“You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! is the companion to the Eisner Award winning, I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets!. Together the two books comprise The Complete Works of Fletcher Hanks, the Super Wizard of the Inkwell who worked for three years in the earliest days of the comic book industry, created 51 stories and then disappeared.
“Volume I includes a 15 page comics story by Paul Karasik explaining Hanks’ haunted past.
“Volume II includes a prose introduction putting the work in historical context.”
The Fifty Top U.S. War Criminals Who Need To Be Prosecuted
The names, probable whereabouts, and crimes of 50 war criminals from the United States.
Underground Dinosaur Burrows Discovered
From National Geographic:
The recent discovery of the oldest known dinosaur burrow reveals one way polar dinosaurs adapted to extreme conditions—by going underground.
“That’s one of the fascinating aspects of polar dinosaurs, we have to put them in settings where there might be snow, ice, and darkness for long periods of the year,” said Emory University paleontologist Anthony Martin. Martin discovered the 100-million-year-old burrow on Australia’s southeastern coast.
The new den discovery suggests that similar dinosaur species on opposite ends of the Earth dug burrows for millions of years.
‘The Venture Bros.’ Season 4 Preview Trailer
Lauren Davis, io9.com: The first trailer for season four of The Venture Bros. promises that the new season will be every bit as full of trippy as we could hope, with plenty of spoilers to leave you asking, “What did I just watch?”
When last we left The Venture Bros., Hank and Dean’s clones had been sacrificed during an all-out assault on the Venture compound, Brock had quit his job as the Ventures’ bodyguard, and Henchman 21 was holding the decapitated head of his bosom buddy, Henchman 24.
The creators have promised that now that their clones have been destroyed, Hank and Dean will actually age past their perpetual sixteen years, physically if not mentally. Dean may be harboring sympathetic feelings for fascist dictators, but at least now Hank has better hair.
Now that Brock has quit the bodyguarding business, it looks like Rusty will be employing a new bodyguard (Brock will reappear, but…
Bush Sought To Raise Terror Alert Before ‘04 Election
CNN reports: Former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge says he successfully countered an effort by senior Bush administration officials to raise the nation’s terror alert level in the days before the 2004 presidential vote.
“An election-eve drama was being played out at the highest levels of our government” after Osama bin Laden released a pre-election message critical of President George W. Bush, writes Ridge in his new book, The Test of Our Times.
Attorney General John Ashcroft and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld strongly advocated raising the security threat level to “orange” — even though Ridge believed a threatening message “should not be the sole reason to elevate the threat level.”
“We certainly didn’t believe the tape alone warranted action, and we weren’t seeing any additional intelligence that justified it. In fact, we were incredulous,” Ridge said of the push. “… I wondered, ‘Is this about security or politics?’”
…
7 Completely Unrealistic Movie Plots (That Came True)
Danny Harkins, Cracked.com: Sci-fi visionaries like Jules Verne and Gene Roddenberry get all sorts of credit for predicting the future via fiction. But you know who doesn’t get credit? Weekend at Bernie’s. As it turns out, lots of movies turn out to be prophetic, seeing even the most ridiculous plot points turn into real headlines months or years later.
#7. Office Space: While Idiocracy is often cited as the under-appreciated Mike Judge film that is most likely to come true, Office Space already has. After performing poorly at the box office, Office Space became a massive hit on DVD, inspiring many a wage-slave to rip their apron off and tell their boss to kindly go fuck himself.
The films protagonist, played by Ron Livingstone, takes office rebellion a little further than that and decides to rip off the company he works for. His scam involves stealing fractions of pennies from financial transactions that would usually automatically…
