Archive for November, 2009
Alcohol “Protects Men’s Hearts”
From BBC News:
Drinking alcohol every day cuts the risk of heart disease in men by more than a third, a major study suggests.
The Spanish research involving more than 15,500 men and 26,000 women found large quantities of alcohol could be even more beneficial for men.
Female drinkers did not benefit to the same extent, the study in Heart found.
Experts are critical, warning heavy drinking can increase the risk of other diseases, with alcohol responsible for 1.8 million deaths globally per year.
The study was conducted in Spain, a country with relatively high rates of alcohol consumption and low rates of coronary heart disease.
The research involved men and women aged between 29 and 69, who were asked to document their lifetime drinking habits and followed for 10 years.
Crucially the research team claim to have eliminated the “sick abstainers” risk by differentiating between those who had never drunk and those whom ill-health had forced…
Obama’s Approval Rating Falls Below 50 Percent For First Time
AFP reports that Obama’s leadership no longer is favored by the majority of Americans:
President Barack Obama’s job approval rating has dipped below 50 percent nationally for the first time, as Americans worry about the war in Afghanistan, a new poll released Wednesday found.
The Quinnipiac University poll showed 48 percent of Americans approve of the way Obama is handling his job as president, compared to 42 percent who disapprove. The president also scored low marks from Americans on his handling of the situation in Afghanistan, with just 38 percent saying they approved of his approach.
How CGI Pioneers Were Banned for “Cheating”
A new interview with the director of the original TRON (and co-producer of the new TRON: Legacy) offers some fascinating perspective on the history of both cyberspace and cinema. “TRON was supposed to be our Mickey Mouse…It represented a new frontier a chance to get to this place… cyberspace, first…
“Some of the old-timers at Disney came up to me and said, ‘this is actually what it felt like in the old days, when Walt was around.’”
Ironically, the movie’s special effects weren’t nominated for an Academy award “because they said we cheated when we used computers.” But the film singlehandedly spawned the CGI business as well as the merging of movies and video games. (”I don’t even think there’s a line there, anymore…”)
Now 27 years later, the new TRON reflects more than a quarter century of change. “[I]t’s a little like cyberspace is the same, but it’s moved on from being…
The Montauk Project Resurfaces
Our friends at AboveTopSecret have brushed off one of our favorite mad conspiracy theories, the Montauk Project. When the Disinformation team was commissioned by Britain’s Channel 4 TV to create a pilot for the TV series that later became Disinfo Nation, we asked friend (and now Disinformation author) Alexandra Bruce to take us to the far end of New York’s Long Island to meet the wacky characters at the center of the reptilian conspiracy depicted in Peter Moon’s series of books. You can watch that original pilot on the DVD DisinfoTV on DVD. Here’s the ATS report:
The original “Subversive Element” and one of AboveTopSecret.com’s original founding members, “William One Sac,” who is now in the battle of his life with cancer, recounts his first-hand experiences as he explored, photographed, and learned about the mysteries, stories, and hidden features of Camp Hero in Montauk, NY.
Climate Change Causes Women To Become Prostitutes
Well here’s a novel theory about the dangers of climate change! As more and more counter-arguments are raised against the now-establishment wisdom that man-made global warming is prevalent, those banging the warning drums on climate change have reached so far into the barrel it boggles the mind to think what they’ll say next. From the Filipino news organization GMANews:
The effects of climate change have driven women in communities in coastal areas in poor countries like the Philippines into dangerous work, and sometimes even the flesh trade, a United Nations official said.
Suneeta Mukherjee, country representative of the United Nations Food Population Fund (UNFPA), said women in the Philippines are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the country.
“Climate change could reduce income from farming and fishing, possibly driving some women into sex work and thereby increase HIV infection,” Mukherjee said during the Wednesday launch of the UNFPA annual…
Mea Culpa: Fox News Keeps Making Conservative-Friendly Mistakes
From Daily Finance:
Every news organization makes mistakes. But when Fox News makes mistakes, they seem to tilt in a suspiciously consistent direction, favoring Republicans and conservatives over Democrats and liberals.
It happened again Wednesday, when host Gregg Jarrett, introducing a segment on Happening Now, described the “huge crowds” that were turning out to greet Sarah Palin on the promotional tour for her book, Going Rogue. “These are some of the pictures just coming into us,” Jarrett said as images of Palin surrounded by throngs of supporters flashed across the screen.
While Palin may indeed be drawing big crowds, it didn’t take long for liberal watchdog blogs like Think Progress and Media Matters to point out that the masses Jarrett touted on Happening Now had nothing to do with Palin’s book…
Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five
On the fascinating site Letters of Note:
In December of 1944, whilst behind enemy lines during the Rhineland Campaign, Private Kurt Vonnegut was captured by Wehrmacht troops and subsequently became a prisoner of war. A month later, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs reached a Dresden work camp where they were imprisoned in an underground slaughterhouse known by German soldiers as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five). The next month — February — the subterranean nature of the prison saved their lives during the highly controversial and devastating bombing of Dresden, the aftermath of which Vonnegut and the remaining survivors helped to clear up.
Vonnegut released the book Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969.
Below is a letter he wrote to his family that May from a repatriation camp, in which he informs them of his capture and survival:
Interest on U.S. Debt: $4.8 Trillion
Jeanne Sahadi writes on CNNMoney.com:
Here’s a new way to think about the U.S. government’s epic borrowing: More than half of the $9 trillion in debt that Uncle Sam is expected to build up over the next decade will be interest.
More than half. In fact, $4.8 trillion.
If that’s hard to grasp, here’s another way to look at why that’s a problem.
In 2015 alone, the estimated interest due — $533 billion — is equal to a third of the federal income taxes expected to be paid that year, said Charles Konigsberg, chief budget counsel of the Concord Coalition, a deficit watchdog group.
More on CNNMoney.com
To The White House and Beyond: Palin/Beck 2012!
Forget what the Mayans say, magnetic pole reversal, or solar flares for 2012. If these two horsemen of the Apocalypse join forces to take the White House in 2012, the end is near…
Chris Good writes on the Atlantic:
Don’t rule it out, because apparently Palin wouldn’t either in an interview with Newsmax:
Palin initially chuckled when Newsmax broached the idea. But then she had some serious words of praise for the popular Fox personality.
“I can envision a couple of different combinations, if ever I were to be in a position to really even seriously consider running for anything in the future, and I’m not there yet,” Palin tells Newsmax. “But Glenn Beck I have great respect for. He’s a hoot. He gets his message across in such a clever way. And he’s so bold — I have to respect that. He calls it like he sees it, and he’s very, very, very…
Government Watchdog Can’t Verify Stimulus Job Stats
EAMON JAVERS writes on the Politico:
The chief federal oversight official for the stimulus program said in a letter Wednesday that he can’t certify whether the number of jobs “created or saved” by stimulus funds is accurate.
Recovery Board Chairman Earl Devaney was responding to a request for information by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In a letter to Issa dated Nov. 17, Devaney wrote, “Your letter specifically asks if I am able to certify that the number of jobs reported as created/saved on Recovery.gov is accurate and auditable. No, I am not able to make this certification.”
The Obama administration claimed that it saved or created at least 1 million jobs this year. But errors in the stimulus job creation data have become a political hot potato, as the administration has been hit by news reports revealing that data it posted…
Minnesota Dad Spoke Only Klingon to Child for Three Years
Yes, Mr. Worf. That does sound bonkers. Hart Van Denburg writes in Minneapolis / St. Paul City Pages:
Is this taking the whole Star Trek thing a teensie weensie bit too far? d’Armond Speers spoke only Klingon to his child for the first three years of its life.
Klingon? Not Spanish, French, Mandarin? Not some gutteral genuflecting concoction from the deepest recesses of Borneo? Klingon? You heard it right. (And if you don’t know about the Klingon Empire, look it up.)
“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers told the Minnesota Daily. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”
And get this, Speers says he isn’t really a huge Star Trek fan.
H1N1 Is a Plot to Kill Baby Boomers, Argues Conspiracy Theorist
Nice find. Annalee Newitz writes on io9.com:
A new day, a new H1N1 conspiracy theory! But this one is special. Ken Welch says on his blog, before treating us to an extremely detailed analysis:
We’ve recently learned the secret behind the Swine Flu Vaccine that is being pushed so strongly on the public. While the vaccine may make you sick, its real purpose is to greatly increase the fast-kill mechanism of the pandemic still to come. Worse yet, the vaccine is being used to target specific groups of people who are simply not welcome in our brave new world.
In the USA these include Blacks, American Indians, and Baby Boomers.
Read the whole thing from Ken Welch.
Supercrocs Ate Dinosaurs, Ruled the Sahara
Sounds like a bad B-Movie (oh look it actually is a B-movie). Fun stuff. Christine Dell’Amore writes on National Geographic:
A “saber-toothed cat in armor” and a pancake-shaped predator are among the strange crocodile cousins whose bones have been found beneath the windswept dunes of the Sahara, archaeologists say.
The diverse menagerie of reptiles ruled Gondwana — a landmass that later broke up into the southern continents— about a hundred million years ago, during the Cretaceous period.
“There’s an entire croc world brewing in Africa that we really had only an inkling about before,” said Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and leader of a new study.
“We knew about SuperCroc, the titan of all crocs, but we didn’t have quite an idea of what existed in the shadows of the Cretaceous,” he said.
More on National Geographic
Evolution of the God Gene
Nicholas Wade reports in the New York Times:
In the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.
During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.
This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that…
Star Trek-like Phaser Developed
From the Telegraph:
However, anyone hoping that the machine will become a powerful new weapon could be disappointed, scientists have only proven the effect on worms.
A phaser traditionally emits a beam capable of stunning or killing an enemy.
Researchers have now found a way to paralyse tiny worms when they expose them to ultraviolet light.
Even when the ultraviolet light was turned off the animals stayed stunned.
However, if they were subsequently exposed to a different form of light they recovered again and were able to move.
[Read more at the Telegraph]
CIA Secret ‘Torture’ Prison Found at Fancy Horseback Riding Academy
Matthew Cole and Brian Ross break an exclusive story for ABC News:
The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.
Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time.
“The activities in that prison were illegal,” said human rights researcher John Sifton. “They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions.”
[go to ABC News for a video report]
US Army Corps Blamed for Katrina Floods
From BBC News:
A US judge has ruled that negligence by the US Army Corps of Engineers led to massive floods in parts of New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.
The court upheld complaints by six residents and a business against the Corps over its maintenance of a navigational channel.
They were awarded damages totalling $720,000 (£431,000), and the ruling could lead to thousands more claims.
About 80% of New Orleans was flooded by Hurricane Katrina.
More than 1,800 people died on the US Gulf coast in the devastating storms.
The Corps is responsible for maintaining a system of canals and earthworks that protect New Orleans from storm surges.
US district judge Stanwood Duval ruled “negligent failure” to maintain the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet – a shipping channel – had led to flooding in the city’s Lower 9th Ward and nearby St Bernard Parish.
[Read more at BBC News]
…
Audit The Fed Effort Wins Support From An Unusual Coalition
via HuffPo:
“An unusual coalition of progressive economists, labor leaders, and bloggers has decided to fight back against a congressional amendment that would allow the Federal Reserve to continue operating in secrecy.”
November 18, 2009
House Financial Services Committee
2129 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515Dear Chairman Frank, Ranking Member Bachus, and Members of the Committee,
During the past two years, the Federal Reserve dramatically changed its operating procedures. Instead of simply setting interest rates to influence macroeconomic conditions, it rapidly acquired a wide variety of private assets and extended massive secret bailouts to major financial institutions.
There are still many questions about the Fed’s behavior in these new activities, including potential cronyism and favoritism in its distribution of many trillions of dollars. As the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program recently wrote about their bailout of AIG, the Fed’s “strategy to pursue concessions from counterparties offered little opportunity for success, even in…
What Does Civil Disobedience Mean To You?
What does civil disobedience mean to you? That’s what the identity-shifting Yes Men want you to know. Then, they want you to take to the streets and protest bad companies and bad ideas. Here’s the thing – they want you to enjoy yourself while your raging against the machine! Check out the real men behind the Yes Men, as they reveal their true selves on Talk Stoop with Cat Greenleaf.
