Archive for November, 2009
Two Million Muslims Prepare To Stone Devil At Haj
From Reuters:
MUZDALIFA, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) – Some two million Muslims headed to Muzdalifa on Thursday after spending the day at the plain of Arafat to prepare to cast stones at the devil in the most dangerous part of the annual haj pilgrimage.
Bright weather greeted the pilgrims after heavy rain hit the nearby city of Jeddah, gateway to Mecca, on Wednesday. Some 77 people were killed, none of them pilgrims, most of whom were swept away by currents and drowned, state television said.
At Muzdalifa, the pilgrims will collect pebbles to throw at walls at the Jamarat Bridge on three occasions over the next three days in an act that symbolizes the rejection of the devil’s temptations.
The bridge has been the scene of a number of deadly stampedes — 362 people were crushed to death there in 2006 in the worst haj tragedy since 1990…
‘Matrix’ Bullet Time Scene Re-Created … in Legos
A great find from the Wrap:
From the famous green digital falling numbers to Keanu Reeves’ bending over backwards to dodge bullets, “Trinity Help” is a frame-accurate stop-frame animation of the famous bullet-dodge scene from 1999’s “The Matrix” — entirely in Lego.
If you’re wondering how they did it, check out the website. If you’re wondering WHY they did it, you’re on your own.
Also at the website, you can explore the behind-the-scenes machinations that went on during 440 hours of creating the Lego scene, and watch it side by side with the original scene from the movie.
Enjoy the video:
Presenting Alan Moore’s New ‘Zine – Dodgem Logic
Comic writer, Magician and all around ’swell bloke’ Alan Moore has launched his the website for his new underground magazine, Dodgem Logic.
Moore Writes, “Off in the unpacked suitcase of the night there’s Doppler sirens skittering like beads of panicked mercury through dark and distant plasterboarded streets, maybe a hammering an overdose a tower-block fire, electric curlew voices shrilling at the gloom pretending that there’s something to be done meanwhile somewhere a disembodied twelve-year old romantic courts that wafer-thin girl in his year by sending links to sites that specialise in anal object-rape as touching as a single rose ah bless, bless all the land-ice and the holiday chalets as they go slithering in a quaint avalanche down to the pirate-haunted seas bless all the City bonus-monkeys on their island fenced by gold barbed wire shrieking and wiping their distended purple baboon arses with your repossession notice bless every star-studded spearmint-breathing…
Catholic Churches Raise Funds To Battle Gay Marriage
A tip from Hamptons Dictionary author Miles Jaffe led us to this report in the National Catholic Reporter:
Gathering money from 50 U.S. dioceses, the Portland, Maine, diocese contributed more than $550,000 to the campaign to rejecte Maine’s law extending civil marriage to gay and lesbian couples, according to financial records filed with the state agency that tracks political contributions.
In the Nov. 3 referendum, Maine voters rejected 53 to 47 percent the same-sex marriage law.
Supporters and opponents of the law spent more than $7 million, according to the Portland Press Herald.
During the summer, Bishop Richard J. Malone of Portland sent an appeal to other Catholic bishops seeking contributions to defeat the law that the state legislature passed and the governor signed in May.
According to financial records filed with Maine’s campaign finance watchdog, the Portland diocese donated nearly $286,000 to Stand For Marriage Maine, which was seeking to repeal the same-sex law. Malone…
We Are Change Colorado at Al Gore Book Signing – Activist Rips Up Al’s Book in Front of His Face
Sourced from the New World Order Report:
Vietnamese Man Slept Beside Dead Wife For 5 Years
Mad news courtesy of Reuters:
HANOI (Reuters) – A Vietnamese man dug up his wife’s corpse and slept beside it for five years because he wanted to hug her in bed, an online newspaper reported on Thursday.
The 55-year-old man from a small town in the central province of Quang Nam opened up his wife’s grave in 2004, molded clay around the remains to give the figure of a woman, put clothes on her and then placed her in his bed, Vietnamnet.vn said.
The man, Le Van, told the website that after his wife died in 2003 he slept on top of her grave, but about 20 months later he worried about rain, wind and cold, so he decided to dig a tunnel into the grave “to sleep with her.”
His children found out, though, and prevented him from going to the grave. So one night in November 2004 he dug up his wife’s…
British Police Arrest People ‘Just For The DNA’
Strangely enough, this page is no longer on MSNBC. Here the cached version via Google, MSNBC via Reuters:
More than three-quarters of young black men are on system, watchdog says
Britain has built the world’s biggest DNA database without proper political debate and police routinely arrest people just to get their DNA profiles onto the system, the genetics watchdog said in a report on Tuesday.
The Human Genetics Commission, which advises the government on the social, legal and ethical aspects of genetics, called for a review of the database and said new laws must be passed to govern its use.
In a damning report, the commission said “function creep” had transformed the system from a DNA store for offenders into a database of suspects.
Was on MSNBC via Reuters, also on USA Today
WikiLeaks Releasing Over Half A Million Text Messages From 9/11
On WikiLeaks:
From 3 AM on Wednesday November 25, 2009, until 3 AM the following day (U.S. East Coast time), WikiLeaks is releasing over half a million U.S. national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.
The messages are being broadcast “live” to the global community — synchronized to the time of day they were sent. The first message is from 3 AM September 11, 2001, five hours before the first attack, and the last, 24 hours later.
Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center.
The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entrance into the historical record…
Courtroom First: Brain Scan Used in Murder Sentencing
Alexis Madrigal writes in Wired:
A defendant’s fMRI brain scan has been used in court for what is believed to be the first time.
Brain scan evidence that the defense claimed shows the defendant’s brain was psychopathic was allowed into the sentencing portion of a murder trial in Chicago, Science reported Monday. Brian Dugan, who had been convicted of the rape and murder of a 10-year-old, was sentenced to death, despite the fMRI scans.
“I don’t know of any other cases where fMRI was used in that context,” Stanford professor Hank Greely told Science.
While the possibility of using fMRI data in a variety of contexts, particularly lie detection, has bounced around the margins of the legal system for years, there are almost no documented cases of its actual use. In the 2005 case Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court allowed brain scans to be entered as evidence received at least one amicus brief based in part…
Why You Should Be Hot and Bothered About ‘Climate-Gate’
John Lott writes on Fox News:
A coordinated campaign to hide scientific information about climate change appears unprecedented. Could it wind up costing us trillions?
Science depends on good quality of data. It also relies on replication and sharing data. But the last couple of days have uncovered some shocking revelations. Computer hackers have obtained 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. These e-mails, which have now been confirmed as real, involved many researchers across the globe with ideologically similar advocates around the world. They were brazenly discussing the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global warming claims. The academics here also worked closely with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit, and Professor Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University, who has been an important scientist in the climate debate,…
Building Stonehenge: This Man Can Move Anything
Wally Wallington has demonstrated that he can lift a Stonehenge-sized pillar weighing 22,000 lbs and moved a barn over 300 ft. What makes this so special is that he does it using only himself, gravity, and his incredible ingenuity:
The Original Office, Revisited
Nick P. at Black Sun Gazette
I recently re-watched the show that started an international phenomenon. The original version of The Office has spawned many imitators, but never any that live up to the original. This is the fifth or sixth time that I’ve watched the series in its entirety. While upon first viewing the series can be seen as a brilliant piece of British comedy- and it is- it is only with this viewing that I realized what the show really is. The Office is an amazing dramatic piece that lays bare the crushing ennui that effects men and women in contemporary society.
Who’s Watching Glenn Beck?
Much like the Depression-era demagogue Father Charles Coughlin, the Fox News personality is promoting a mass movement. Should his bosses be pulling the plug? Tim Rutten asks this imponderable question in the Los Angeles Times:
For nearly a century, the Anti-Defamation League has stared unflinchingly into the dark corners of America’s social psyche — the places where combustible tendencies such as hatred and paranoia pool and, sometimes, burst into flame.
As a Jewish organization, the ADL’s first preoccupation naturally is anti-Semitism, but in the last few decades it has extended its scrutiny to the whole range of bigoted malevolence — white supremacy, the militia movement, neo-nativism and conspiratorial fantasies in all of their improbable permutations. These days, the organization’s research is characterized by the sense of proportion and sobriety that long experience brings.
That makes its recent report on the extremist groups and propagandists that have emerged since President Obama’s election — “Rage…
Majority Now Against War In Afghanistan
From Infowars, a majority of the U.S. population now seems the Afghan war as not worth fighting:
Support for the US mission in Afghanistan has slipped to a new low, with 44 percent of Americans now saying the war there has been worth the cost, according to a recently released poll.
The numbers come as Obama grapples with whether to send more US troops to Afghanistan to boost the fight against a growing Taliban-led insurgency, just a week after a stopover at a US military base in Alaska at the start of his Asia trip when he told US troops he will get “public support back home” for the mission.
CIA’s Lost Magic Manual Resurfaces
Via Wired:
At the height of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency paid $3,000 to renowned magician John Mulholland to write a manual on misdirection, concealment, and stagecraft. All known copies of the document — and a related paper, on conveying hidden signals — were believed to be destroyed in 1973. But recently, the manuals resurfaced, and have now been published as “The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.” Topics include working a clandestine partner, slipping a pill into the drink of the unsuspecting, and “surreptitious removal of objects by women.”
This wasn’t the first time a magician worked for a western government. Harry Houdini snooped on the German and the Russian militiaries for Scotland Yard. English illusionist Jasper Maskelyne is reported to created dummy submarines and fake tanks to distract Rommel’s army during World War II. Some reports even credit him with employing flashing lights to “hide” the Suez…
Kim Jong-il Bans World Cup Coverage – Unless North Korea Wins
From The Telegraph:
The Supreme Leader has ordered state-run television not to broadcast live games, and to only screen highlights of North Korea’s victories.
The ruling means that 99 per cent of the country’s 29 million population will not be able to find out who wins the competition unless the 350-1, outsiders win it.
Games between other nations will be banned from the airwaves, while any highlights of North Korea’s matches will be heavily edited to ensure that they look like the better team.
All advertising in the stadiums will also be blurred out – along with opposition fans, The Sun newspaper reported.
Mike Breen, author of highly-respected book Kim Jong-il: North Korea’s Dear Leader, said: “Like everything else there, the regime will have complete control over the World Cup.
[Read more at The Telegraph]
‘Counterinsurgency’ to Fight U.S. Crime? No, Thanks
From Wired:
After the sickening murder of a 9-year-old boy in Washington, our friend Spencer Ackerman made an impassioned plea: U.S. Central Command chief General David Petraeus for D.C. metro police chief. The idea of America’s leading counterinsurgent taking on one of its most crime-ridden towns definitely has a certain visceral appeal. But militarizing our approach to policing is an idea that could backfire in a hurry.
Spencer’s done an outstanding job of explaining counterinsurgency as a progressive military doctrine: The whole point is to not uphold the social status quo, it’s an attempt to get at the “root causes” of violence through political reform and public works. These days, that’s a job for both the armed forces and the police. “The ’soldiers aren’t cops’ argument isn’t going to fly here,” he wrote. After all, talented military officers are now telling their fellow soldiers to “view neighborhood security as if they were running…
Annals of Unsolved Crime: The Oswald Mystery
From The Huffington Post:
The endless tangle of questions about bullets, trajectories, wounds, time sequences and inconsistent testimony that has surrounded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and has obsessively fascinated, if not entirely blinded, two generations of self-styled assassination investigators, probably never will be satisfactorily resolved. Each new release of documents from the various bureaucracies involved in the nearly half century old investigation may only deepen the apparent contradictions.
Within this morass of facts. however, there is a central actor, Lee Harvey Oswald. His rifle, which fired the fatal bullet into the president, was found in the sniper’s nest at the Texas Book Depository. So was his palm print. He had also bought the ammunition. His cartridge cases were found near the body of a murdered policeman on the route of his flight.
In light of such evidence, the issue that ought to have concerned Americans was not Oswald’s…
Hitler’s Favorite Car Makes Comeback?
From Reuters:
A car expert says he has tracked down Hitler’s favorite Mercedes to a garage near the town that helped the Austrian-born Fuehrer become a German citizen.
Classic cars specialist Michael Froehlich said he found the bullet-proof touring car after charting its postwar travels from Austria to Las Vegas and back to Munich, where Hitler burst onto the political scene with a failed putsch in 1923.
“It was the best car in the world at the time. Better than the Bugatti, Bentley, Rolls Royce or whatever,” Froehlich told Reuters from his office in Duesseldorf. “It was his favorite car: the one he used most often, which he used for parades.”
After being commissioned by a Cypriot buyer to find the vehicle, Froehlich discovered it had been bought by a farmer near Braunschweig, where in 1932 local Nazi officials got Hitler a civil servant’s job so he could claim citizenship.
“I thought it was an…
