Archive for January, 2010
Report: No sanctions for Lawyers who OK’d Torture
Is anyone surprised at this report? Is anyone not disgusted?
From Yahoo News:
Bush administration lawyers who drafted legal theories that led to waterboarding and other harsh treatment of terrorism suspects showed poor judgment but won’t face sanctions for professional misconduct, according to a published report.A forthcoming government ethics report initially concluded the two key authors of the so-called torture memos, Jay Bybee and John Yoo, who were officials in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration, had violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted the memos that allowed the use of harsh interrogation tactics.
But a senior Justice Department official, David Margolis, later softened the department’s finding to say the authors simply showed poor judgment, Newsweek reported.
[Read more at Yahoo News]
According to DNA, You’re Half-Human, Half-Virus
Frank Ryan writes in New Scientist:
When, in 2001, the human genome was sequenced for the first time, we were confronted by several surprises. One was the sheer lack of genes: where we had anticipated perhaps 100,000 there were actually as few as 20,000. A bigger surprise came from analysis of the genetic sequences, which revealed that these genes made up a mere 1.5 per cent of the genome.
This is dwarfed by DNA deriving from viruses, which amounts to roughly 9 per cent.On top of that, huge chunks of the genome are made up of mysterious virus-like entities called retrotransposons, pieces of selfish DNA that appear to serve no function other than to make copies of themselves. These account for no less than 34 per cent of our genome.
All in all, the virus-like components of the human genome amount to almost half of our DNA. This would once have been dismissed as mere “junk DNA”, but we now know that some of it plays a critical role in our biology. As to the origins and function of the rest, we simply do not know…
Meet the People of Vermont Who Want to Secede from the Union
Christopher Ketcham writes on Time.com:
The President on Wednesday may have reassured Americans that the state of the Union is “strong,” but, just the week before, a group of Vermont secessionists declared their intention to seek political power in a quest to get their state to quit the Union altogether.
On Jan. 15, in the state capital of Montpelier, nine candidates for statewide office gathered in a tiny room at the Capitol Plaza Hotel, to announce they wanted a divorce from the United States of America. “For the first time in over 150 years, secession and political independence from the U.S. will be front and center in a statewide New England political campaign,” said Thomas Naylor, 73, one of the leaders of the campaign.
A former Duke University economics professor, Naylor heads up the Second Vermont Republic, which he describes as “left-libertarian, anti-big government, anti-empire, antiwar, with small is beautiful as our guiding…
Illegal Warrantless Eavesdropping Still Unaddressed by Courts and Congress
David Kravets writes on Wired’s Threat Level:
Heads spun four years ago this weekend, when AT&T was accused of funneling every one of its customers’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency — without warrants. A Jan. 31, 2006, lawsuit alleged major violations of the Fourth Amendment right to be free from warrantless searches and seizures. Such a sweeping breach seemed far-fetched.
Yet months after the lawsuit was lodged, the Electronic Frontier Foundation produced internal AT&T documents allegedly outlining secret rooms in AT&T offices connected to the NSA, which was siphoning all internet traffic, from e-mails to Voice Over Internet Protocol phone conversations.
But four years and a mountain of court briefs and rulings later, the legal system has never addressed the merits of the allegations — and likely never will. Even Congress has weighed in and passed legislation to prevent the allegations from being heard.
Read More: Wired’s Threat Level
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How to Fall 35,000 Feet — And Survive
Dan Koeppel writes in Popular Mechanics:
You’re six miles up, alone and falling without a parachute. Though the odds are long, a small number of people have found themselves in similar situations — and lived to tell the tale.
6:59:00 AM, 35,000 Feet: You have a late night and an early flight. Not long after takeoff, you drift to sleep. Suddenly, you’re wide awake. There’s cold air rushing everywhere, and sound. Intense, horrible sound. Where am I?, you think. Where’s the plane?
You’re 6 miles up. You’re alone. You’re falling.
Things are bad. But now’s the time to focus on the good news. (Yes, it goes beyond surviving the destruction of your aircraft.) Although gravity is against you, another force is working in your favor: time. Believe it or not, you’re better off up here than if you’d slipped from the balcony of your high-rise hotel room after one too many drinks last night.
Or…
The Roman Army Knife Predates the Swiss Army One by 1,800 Years
Via the Daily Mail:
The world’s first Swiss Army knife’ has been revealed — made 1,800 years before its modern counterpart. An intricately designed Roman implement, which dates back to 200 AD, it is made from silver but has an iron blade. It features a spoon, fork as well as a retractable spike, spatula and small tooth-pick.
Experts believe the spike may have been used by the Romans to extract meat from snails. The Roman army pen knife It is thought the spatula would have offered a means of poking cooking sauce out of narrow-necked bottles.
The 3 in x 6 in (8 cm x 15 cm) knife was excavated from the Mediterranean area more than 20 years ago and was obtained by the museum in 1991. The unique item is among dozens of artefacts exhibited in a newly refurbished Greek and Roman antiquities gallery at the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge.
Read More: Daily…
NASA Worried About Solar Threat To Earth?
One of the alarmist predictions for 2012 concerns the supposed cyclical climax of solar flare activity (see the Larry Joseph section in the disinformation documentary 2012: Science or Superstition). Although NASA felt moved to create a web page to deny this kind of story around the release date of Roland Emmerich’s 2012 disaster movie, apparently they are hedging their bets. Chris Hastings and Jonathan Leake report on a new NASA probe that could help scientists predict chaos-causing solar storms, in the Times:
NASA is to embark on one of its most ambitious missions in an attempt to unlock the secrets of the sun.
Following its launch in nine days’ time, the US space agency’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) will spend five years in orbit trying to discover the causes of extreme solar activity, such as sun spots and solar winds and flares.
Scientists have long been aware that disturbances on the sun can trigger…
The Walmart of Weed
Matthai Kuruvila writing for the San Francisco Chronicle:
Call it the Walmart of weed.
In a 15,000-square-foot warehouse just down the road from the Oakland Airport, an entrepreneur is opening a one-stop shop for medicinal marijuana cultivation that’s believed to be the largest in the state.
Don’t know the first thing about growing pot? The folks at iGrow have a doctor on site to get you a cannabis card and sell you all the necessary equipment for indoor, hydroponic cultivation – from pumps, nutrients and tubing to lights and fans.
Don’t know how to set it up? For a fee, on-site technicians will show you how to build it in your home and even maintain it weekly.
“A lot of people don’t know much about growing pot,” said Dhar Mann, 25, the owner, who stood in front of an array of Ikea-like displays, showing different rooms of cannabis cultivation systems. “Since there are no full-service…
Coast to Coast’s Art Bell In Conversation With Michio Kaku
Art Bell was joined for the entire program by one of his favorite guests, theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku, for a discussion on a variety of science-related topics.
Kaku provided an update on the problem-plagued Large Hadron Collider (LHC), while quashing a theory that suggested the giant particle accelerator was being sabotaged from the future…
Bachmann Cancels Tea Party Appearance
From The Star Tribune:
Rep. Michele Bachmann has become the latest high-profile conservative to bag the rapidly unraveling Tea Party Convention in Nashville next week.
The Minnesota Republican, who has become something of a heroine of the Tea Party movement, decided Thursday morning that she is cancelling her appearance at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel next Friday, where she was scheduled to be a breakfast speaker.
Bachmann’s office cited the same concerns that other Tea Party activists have voiced about the first-of-its-kind national gathering: namely, the for-profit model of organizer Judson Phillips, a self-described “small town lawyer” with a history of financial problems.
Phillips has announced that the $549-a-head convention featuring Sarah Palin is sold out. But Tea Party critics and allies alike have been asking questions about what Phillips plans to do with the money. Concrete answers have been in short supply, and in the end it looked like too big a risk for…
Was the Moon Created by a Nuclear Explosion on Earth?
From the Daily Mail:
How the Moon was created and came to orbit the Earth has long puzzled scientists.
The most commonly held theory is that when the solar system was first formed, an object collided with Earth, knocking off a chunk of rock that fell into orbit around it.
But now two scientists have come up with a new explanation. They believe the Moon did not break away from the Earth because of an impact or an explosion in space, but because of a nuclear explosion on Earth itself.
Similarities: Lunar samples from moon landings have shown that the material of the moon is nearly identical to Earth’sTheir idea is based on the fission theory which was first outlined in the 19th century.
The fission theory suggested that the Earth and Moon were both created out of the same blob of spinning molten rock – with a part becoming separated which later became the…
The Weird World of Occult America — How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation
Alternet reviews Mitch Horowitz’s Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation:
If witch-burning Puritans are the original jocks of American history, then the mystics surrounding Johannes Kelpius are the first goths. While the rest of the British colonies were still dutifully worshipping their angry Christian god, Kelpius and his followers—who fled Austria to settle in Philadelphia during the late seventeenth-century—busied themselves with astrology, alchemy, Kabbalah, and other “dark arts” with tangled roots in the Italian Renaissance, the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, and various (often fabricated) antiquities. We meet Kelpius early in Mitch Horowitz’s Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, an uneven but always interesting account of 400 years of New World Strange. Among the several misconceptions Horowitz seeks to dispel, the most foundational is the idea that Colonial America provided shelter only for persecuted Christian sects. Almost from the beginning, North America was also home to a fair number of those who, like Kelpius, had more arcane spiritual interests.
Horowitz never claims that these beliefs were as formative an influence as Christianity in the making of America, but after finishing his book, one can’t help but wonder if maybe Ouija boards don’t belong next to King James in every motel room…
The Truth About Flight 253 Has Been Revealed
By Kurt Haskell on the Lori’s Liberal Realm blog:
The Sharp Dressed Man Who Assisted Mutallab Onto Flight 253 Was A U.S. Government Agent
Since our flight landed on Christmas Day, Lori and I have been doing everything in our power to uncover the truth about why we were almost blown up in the air over Detroit. The truth is now finally out after the publication of the following Detroit News article:
Let me quote from the article:
“Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, said Abdulmutallab’s visa wasn’t taken away because intelligence officials asked his agency not to deny a visa to the suspected terrorist over concerns that a denial would’ve foiled a larger investigation into al-Qaida threats against the United States.
“Revocation action would’ve disclosed what they were doing,” Kennedy said in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators…
EXHIBIT A: Denis Leary Vs. Bill Hicks
Andy Gately from Austin Underground submitted this lead to us:
“Did comedian Denis Leary steal fellow comic Bill Hicks’ stand-up act and persona? You be the judge. This is the definitive, side by side comparison of the two artists, with all the similar material in question:
EXHIBIT A: Leary Vs. Hicks is an experimental documentary about the potential for artistic theft in the world of stand-up comedy, and the allegation that performer Denis Leary lifted much of his persona and act from fellow comedian Hicks. Culled from hours of archive footage and presented here for the first time, the similarities in question are shown back-to-back, allowing viewers to decide for themselves. The film premiered at the Austin Underground Film Festival, in the town Bill Hicks called home.
Wolf Moon, Largest of 2010, Appears Tonight With Support By Mars
For those of you not in a part of the world too cold (or too far) to go outside and take a look, today brings a rare appearance of the year’s largest full moon, with a bonus appearance by planet Mars, just to the left of the moon. This report from National Geographic:
The biggest full moon of 2010 will rise in the east tonight, and it’ll appear with a bright sidekick: Mars will cozy up just to the left of the supersize moon.
January’s full moon is also called the wolf moon, according to Native American tradition associating this month’s full moon with wolves howling in the cold midwinter.
The 2010 wolf moon will appear 30 percent brighter and 14 percent larger than any other full moon this year, because our cosmic neighbor will actually be closer to Earth than usual.
The moon will be at its closest perigee—the nearest it gets to…
Professors Help U.S. Army With Social Media Networks Research
By Molly Johnson for Indiana Daily Student:
IU statistics professor Stanley Wasserman points at the map of the “Celebrity Twitter Ecosystem” from the New York Times that he has tacked to his bulletin board. “Networks are hot,” he says.
Social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, have pervaded almost every aspect of our society –they help us make friends, get jobs, and now, thanks to a new military effort, they could help us catch terrorists.
The project, sponsored by the U.S. Army, will urge researchers, including two professors at IU, to come up with new ways to analyze data surrounding networks. The project is designed to aid military operations, including anti-terrorism efforts, and to explain how knowledge is spread between peers in the modern military, according to the IU press release.
“They want to be able to understand networks better, all kinds of networks,” said Wasserman, one of the IU professors on the team. “To…
Under Obama in Afghanistan, US Conducts Night Raids, Runs Hidden Detention Centers
By Anand Gopal for Alternet:
Even if inherited from the Bush administration, the Afghan night raids, the accompanying killings are now after a year in office, Obama’s official policy.
One quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished. He had last been seen in the town’s bazaar with a group of friends. Family members scoured Khost’s dust-doused streets for days. Village elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who were wont to kidnap government workers, but they had never heard of the young man. Even the governor got involved, ordering his police to round up nettlesome criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young bazaar-goers for ransom.
But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and village elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a neat,…
Landlords Want Office-Crashing Meteorite
What would you do with a meteorite if it crashed into your office? Sell it? Make a dragon-slaying sword with a black blade? The doctors in the story resisted the temptation to do any of these things, and decided to donate their meteorite to the Smithsonian so everyone could see evidence of the strangest day at the office in American history. Just when you though this fortean tale had a happy ending, enter the evil landlord….
From UPI:
A meteorite that dropped into a Virginia doctors’ office is now at the center of an ownership battle between the doctors and their landlords.Dr. Marc Gallini and Dr. Frank Ciampi said they were in the process of donating the small meteorite that crashed into their Lorton office Jan. 18 to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History when their landlords, brothers Deniz and Erol Mutlu, claimed ownership of the rock, The Washington Post reported…
WikiLeaks Shuts Due to Lack of Funds, Hopes to be Back Soon
From Google News:
Whistleblower website WikiLeaks has temporarily shut down because of financial difficulties.WikiLeaks.org announced it was suspending operations in a message on its homepage that included an appeal to the public for donations.
“To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, but will be back soon,” it said.
WikiLeaks, which relies on public contributions for much of its funding, said it had raised “just over 130,000 dollars for this year but cannot meaningfully continue operations until costs are covered.”
It said its costs are 200,000 dollars a year and 600,000 dollars a year if staff are paid.
WikiLeaks, run by Sunshine Press, describes itself as a “non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public.”
[Read more at Google News]
