Archive for December, 2009
The ’00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade from Hell
Andy Serwer writes on TIME:
At exactly two minutes after midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, an alarm sounded at a nuclear power plant in Onagawa, Japan. Government officials and computer scientists around the globe held their breath. Was this the beginning of a massive Y2K computer meltdown? Actually, no. It was an isolated event, one of a handful of glitches to occur (including the failure of 500 slot machines at two racetracks in Delaware) as the sun rose on the new decade. The dreaded millennial meltdown never happened.
Instead, it was the American Dream that was about to dim. Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post–World War II era. We’re still weeks away from the end of ‘09, but it’s…
Danny Schechter Dissects Wall Street Fraud: ‘Plunder: The Crime of Our Time’
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it.”
– Political economist Frederic Bastiat, The Law (1850)
“I used to think of Wall Street as a financial center.
I now think of it as a crime scene.”
– Filmmaker Danny Schechter, Plunder (2009)
I am an old-fashioned “follow-the-money” journalist. As I’m writing this, most economists have learned to downplay fear and panic and up-play the “resilience” of the market. It’s a belief that all we need is confidence and then, all will be right with the world. Sadly, journalism has gone along with this charade by first denying the crisis and then avoiding investigating its architects and beneficiaries.
Three years ago, by choosing to be an “investigative” journalist, I made the film In Debt We Trust, with the idea in mind that I…
The Criminalization of Protest
From Reason.com:
Police and politicians ignore the First Amendment when we need it the most.
I’ve lived in the Washington, D.C., area for the better part of the last 10 years. So I’ve seen my share of demonstrations, although more often than not I just try to avoid the traffic nightmares they cause. Among the various classes of protests—pro-life, anti-war, environmental, and now tea parties—the most destructive are the anti-globalization marches. So when cops clashed with anti-globalization demonstrators at the Pittsburgh G-20 summit in September, it was easy to assume that most of the altercations represented justified police responses to overzealous protesters.
But a number of disturbing photographs, videos, and witness accounts told a different story. Along with similar evidence from other recent high-stakes political events, they reveal an increasing, disquieting willingness to smother even peaceful dissent.
On the Friday afternoon before the G-20 meeting kicked into high gear, a student at the University…
TSA Threatens Blogger Who Posted New Screening Directive
Kim Zetter writes on WIRED’s Threat Level:
Image: TSA Special Agent John Enright (left) speaks to Steven Frischling (right) after returning his laptop, outside of Frischling’s home in Niantic, Conn., on Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2009.
Two bloggers received home visits from Transportation Security Administration agents Tuesday after they published a new TSA directive that revises screening procedures and puts new restrictions on passengers in the wake of a recent bombing attempt by the so-called underwear bomber.
Special agents from the TSA’s Office of Inspection interrogated two U.S. bloggers, one of them an established travel columnist, and served them each with a civil subpoena demanding information on the anonymous source that provided the TSA document.
The document, which the two bloggers published within minutes of each other Dec. 27, was sent by TSA to airlines and airports around the world and described temporary new requirements for screening passengers through Dec. 30, including conducting “pat-downs” of…
Detroit Terror Attack: United States ‘Plans Retaliatory Attacks on Yemeni Soil’
From Telegraph:
Intelligence efforts are said to be focused on finding those involved in the plot to get Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the Northwest Airlines plane with explosives in his underwear.
Security officials are also likely to identify other “high value” al Qaeda targets who could be the target of strikes.
The suggestion comes as US President Barack Obama condemned the “systemic failures” that saw intelligence about a Nigerian trained in Yemen planning a bomb attack squandered with the potential cost of hundreds of lives.
Mr Obama called for “lessons to be learned” over the failures to link up intelligence. The terror suspect has told his interrogators that there are many more insurgents preparing to attack the West – diplomats have revealed that at least six British students have been arrested and deported from Yemen in the last year for allegedly trying to join radical Muslims.
America is now said to be focusing its…
Sharks, Zombies, Weird Clouds: The Most Popular Stories of 2009
From Wired:
This has been Wired Science’s most successful year, by far. We like to think this is the result of a combination of your excellent taste and our efforts to learn what you like to read.
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We have often joked that the perfect Wired Science story is about robot sharks with lasers in space. While we haven’t gotten a chance to write that one just yet, looking at this list of our most popular stories of the year, we’ve come pretty close. Golden-silk-spinning spiders, the mathematics of zombies and weird clouds were all among your favorites.
10. Mysterious, Glowing Clouds Appear Across America’s Night Skies
Speaking of weird clouds, number 10 on our 2009 hit list is the mysterious appearance of noctilucent clouds in the night skies over the United States and Europe. These night-shining clouds typically form closer to the poles, but more frequent sightings in lower latitudes could be the result…
Survivalism Lite: Rise Of The Preppers
They call themselves ‘preppers.’ They are regular people with homes and families. But like the survivalists that came before them, they’re preparing for the worst. Jessica Bennett reports for Newsweek:
Lisa Bedford is what you’d imagine of a stereotypical soccer mom. She drives a white Tahoe SUV. An American flag flies outside her suburban Phoenix home. She sells Pampered Chef kitchen tools and likes to bake. Bedford and her husband have two young children, four dogs, and go to church on Sunday.
But about a year ago, Bedford’s homemaking skills went into overdrive. She began stockpiling canned food, and converted a spare bedroom into a giant storage facility. The trunk of each of her family’s cars got its own 72-hour emergency kit—giant Tupperware containers full of iodine, beef jerky, emergency blankets, and even a blood-clotting agent designed for the battle-wounded…
Announcing the 2009 P.U.-Litzer Prizes
From Alternet:
The stinkiest examples of corporate media malfeasance, spin and just plain outrageousness.
For 17 years our colleagues Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon have worked with FAIR to present the P.U.-Litzers, a year-end review of some of the stinkiest examples of corporate media malfeasance, spin and just plain outrageousness.
Starting this year, FAIR has the somewhat dubious honor of reviewing the nominees and selecting the winners. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. So, without further ado, we present the 2009 P.U.-Litzers.
–The Remembering Reagan Award WINNER: Joe Klein, Time
Time columnist Joe Klein (12/3/09), not altogether impressed by Obama’s announcement of a troop escalation in Afghanistan, wrote that a president “must lead the charge–passionately and, yes, with a touch of anger.”
He described the better way to do this:
Ronald Reagan would have done it differently. He would have told a story. It might not have been a true story, but it would…
Brain Scans Show Distinctive Patterns in People With Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Via Science Daily:
Scrambled connections between the part of the brain that processes fear and emotion and other brain regions could be the hallmark of a common anxiety disorder, according to a new study from the Stanford University School of Medicine. The findings could help researchers identify biological differences between types of anxiety disorders as well as such disorders as depression.
The study, published Dec. 7 in the Archives of General Psychiatry, examined the brains of people with generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, a psychiatric condition in which patients spend their days in a haze of worry over everyday concerns. Researchers have known that the amygdala, a pair of almond-sized bundles of nerve fibers in the middle of the brain that help process emotion, memory and fear, are involved in anxiety disorders like GAD. But the Stanford study is the first to peer close enough to detect neural pathways going to and…
Tomb of Legendary General Cao Cao Unearthed in Central China
Posted on China View:
BEIJING — The tomb of Cao Cao, a renowned warlord and politician in the third century, was unearthed in Anyang City of central China’s Henan Province, archaeologists said Sunday.
Cao Cao (155–220 A.D.), who built the strongest and most prosperous state during the Three Kingdom period (208–280 A.D.), is remembered for his outstanding military and political talents. Cao Cao is also known for his poems that reflected his strong character. Some of the poems are included in China’s middle school textbooks.
Three ancient corpses, one man and two women, were found in the two-chamber tomb in Xigaoxue village of Anyang. The man was found to have died in his sixties, which coincides the age of Cao Cao when he died, Liu Qingzhu, director of the academic committee of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told a press conference in Beijing.
More than 250 articles, made of gold, silver, pottery and etc, were…
The Strange Case of Lee Harvey Oswald
From Nick P. at Black Sun Gazette:
Few events have captured the American imagination more than the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The American public and our greatest intellectuals have poured over the evidence over and over again. It nags at national consciousness like a wound that won’t heal because you keep picking at it.
The solution to the problem always lies on the tip of our collective tongue. Of course, a great deal of the evidence is locked up, hidden away in the vaults of the intelligence community. This article will not attempt to shed new light on the assassination.
Much of the information presented here is available elsewhere, and has been repeated ad nauseum. I wish to concentrate on the subject of the man Lee Harvey Oswald, a singularly fascinating figure in American history.
Rare New Year’s Eve ‘Blue Moon’ to Ring in 2010
From Yahoo News:
LOS ANGELES – Once in a blue moon there is one on New Year’s Eve. Revelers ringing in 2010 will be treated to a so-called blue moon. According to popular definition, a blue moon is the second full moon in a month. But don’t expect it to be blue — the name has nothing to do with the color of our closest celestial neighbor.
A full moon occurred on Dec. 2. It will appear again on Thursday in time for the New Year’s countdown.
“If you’re in Times Square, you’ll see the full moon right above you. It’s going to be that brilliant,” said Jack Horkheimer, director emeritus of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium and host of a weekly astronomy TV show.
The New Year’s Eve blue moon will be visible in the United States, Canada, Europe, South America and Africa. For partygoers in Australia and Asia, the full moon does not show up…
Space Probe Gets Halfway to Pluto in Record Time
From Wired:
The fastest man-made object ever built, the Pluto-bound New Horizons probe, is now closer to the former planet than Earth, just a little under four years after its launch.
It’s currently traveling at about 31,000 miles an hour and is located about 1.527 billion miles from Earth.
“Today, 29 Dec 2009, New Horizons crossed a milestone boundary– henceforth we’re now closer to Pluto than to Earth. Go New Horizons!” the mission’s controllers tweeted Tuesday.
The spacecraft will be the first to flyby Pluto, the planet or dwarf planet or plutoid, and on to the other objects lurking in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of the solar system.
While the craft is hibernating most of the time while it awaits its July 2015 rendezvous with Pluto, it was roused for a Jupiter flyby that yielded some gorgeously detailed images of that planet and its satellites.
Unlike an orbiter, much of the New Horizons action will come in an…
The 9 Strangest News Stories of 2009
From LiveScience.com:
Weirdness takes many forms, and 2009 had its share of weird events. Here’s a look back at the strangest news stories of the year drawn from the realms of pseudoscience, the paranormal, media hype, outright lies and the just plain strange.
9. Trailcam Transforms Hiker into Bigfoot
When some hunters set up a camera to record wildlife in the Minnesota woods, they accidentally photographed a hiker or hunter on a trail. A few local Bigfoot buffs concluded that the dark figure was probably Bigfoot, much to the embarrassment of other Bigfoot researchers who claimed it was just a guy in a dark outfit—unlike the famous 1967 image of Bigfoot, which couldn’t possibly be a guy in a dark outfit.
8. Turin Shroud Duplicated
A team of Italian scientists duplicated the Shroud of Turin, believed by some to be the burial cloth of Jesus. The test does not prove that the shroud was faked, merely…
China Jails Dissident Liu Xiaobo for 11 years
From Reuters:
China’s most prominent dissident, Liu Xiaobo, was jailed on Friday for 11 years for campaigning for political freedoms, with the stiff sentence on a subversion charge swiftly condemned by rights groups and Washington.
Liu, who turns 54 on Monday, helped organize the “Charter 08″ petition which called for sweeping political reforms, and before that was prominent in the 1989 pro-democracy protests centered on Tiananmen Square that were crushed by armed troops.
He stood quietly in a Beijing courtroom as a judge found him guilty of “inciting subversion of state power” for his role in the petition and for online essays critical of the ruling Communist Party, defense lawyer Shang Baojun said.
Liu was not allowed to respond in court to the sentence.
“Xiaobo and I were very calm when the verdict was read. We were mentally prepared for it that he would get a long sentence,” said Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, who was…
DEA Forced to Scrub Misleading Info on the American Medical Association’s Position on Marijuana
From Alternet:
Activists get the DEA to remove obsolete information from its website claiming that the American Medical Association (AMA) still opposes medical marijuana.
On November 10th, the AMA reversed its long-held position that marijuana has no acceptable medicinal value and adopted a new policy position favoring medical marijuana. The AMA called on the U.S. government to reconsider its current classification as a Schedule I substance. (The government categorizes drugs into “Schedules.” Four of the five actually regulate the use of substances, but Schedule I drugs—such as marijuana, heroin and LSD—are completely banned.)
However, a week after the announcement of this historic reversal, the DEA still hadn’t removed mention of the AMA’s old, anti-medical-marijuana position from its website.
So, the advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organization of cops, judges and prosecutors calling for the legalization and regulation of all drugs, created an action alert asking U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to order…
Scientists Discover a Controller of Brain Circuitry
Via Science Daily:
By combining a research technique that dates back 136 years with modern molecular genetics, a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist has been able to see how a mammal’s brain shrewdly revisits and reuses the same molecular cues to control the complex design of its circuits.
Details of the observation in lab mice, published Dec. 24 in Nature, reveal that semaphorin, a protein found in the developing nervous system that guides filament-like processes, called axons, from nerve cells to their appropriate targets during embryonic life, apparently assumes an entirely different role later on, once axons reach their targets. In postnatal development and adulthood, semaphorins appear to be regulating the creation of synapses — those connections that chemically link nerve cells.
“With this discovery we’re able to understand how semaphorins regulate the number of synapses and their distribution in the part of the brain involved in conscious thought,” says David Ginty, Ph.D., a professor…
More Herbicide Use Reported On Genetically Modified Crops
By Julie Masis for the Christian Science Monitor:
A report has found that farmers are using more herbicides on genetically engineered soybeans, corn, and cotton because of resistant weeds.
A report has found that farmers are using more herbicides on genetically engineered soybeans, corn, and cotton because of resistant weeds.
A report released by the Organic Center found that the amount of herbicides used on genetically engineered crops has increased in the past 10 years, not decreased as might be expected. Since many genetically engineered crops were modified so that farmers could spray Roundup, or Glyphosate, to kill the weeds in their fields but not the crops themselves, the expectation was that less herbicide would be required. But the new report found that this is not what happened.
The authors of the report, entitled “Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use,” used US Department of Agriculture data to look at America’s three largest…
FDA Continues World Colonization, Opens Another International Facility In Mexico
Mike Adams for Natural News:
In its supposed efforts to improve food safety, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced the opening of its third Latin American facility located in Mexico City. Since an increasing quantity of fruits, vegetables, and medical devices are being imported into the U.S. from Mexico, FDA officials believe setting up outposts there will improve the food safety process.
Throughout the past year, FDA has opened ten facilities around the globe. Because of numerous recent contamination outbreaks, regulators claim that establishing permanent international offices will improve their ability to operate effectively.
The agency plans to work collaboratively with international governments and food regulators to harmonize regulatory standards, establish new food safety guidelines, and improve product handling safety protocols.
U.S.-based staff is now working in FDA facilities in China, India, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and several European countries. Native regulatory agencies in these countries are still said to be…
