Archive for January, 2010
Taiwan TV Makes CGI Recreation of Conan O’Brien-Jay Leno Struggle (Video)
From the same folks who brought you the Tiger Woods reenactments, I bring you the future of news (I love the part where Jay and Conan turn into superheroes):
Naked Republican Wins Kennedy’s Senate Seat; Democrats Lose ‘Filibuster-Proof’ Senate Supermajority
Heidi Przybyla and John McCormick write on Bloomberg:
Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat of the late Democrat Edward Kennedy, a political upset that imperils health-care legislation in Congress and sends a warning shot to Democrats ahead of November’s elections.
Brown was leading Democratic state Attorney General Martha Coakley 52-47 percent with 92 percent of the state’s precincts reporting, according to the Associated Press, which projected Brown as the winner. Independent candidate Joseph Kennedy, no relation to the late senator, had about 1 percent of the vote.
Brown, 50, a previously little-known state senator, cast himself as an independent voice who would help thwart President Barack Obama’s health-care plan and keep a check on Democrats in Congress, particularly on tax-increase proposals.
Brown’s victory increases his party’s Senate numbers to 41, which would give Republicans enough members in the 100-person Senate to block votes on an overhaul of the U.S. health-care system, Obama’s top…
Egypt Announces Find of Ancient Cat Goddess Temple
HAMZA HENDAWI writes in the AP via Yahoo News:
CAIRO — Archaeologists have unearthed a 2,000-year-old temple that may have been dedicated to the ancient Egyptian cat goddess, Bastet, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said Tuesday. The ruins of the Ptolemaic-era temple were discovered by Egyptian archaeologists in the heart of the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great in the 4th century B.C.
The city was the seat of the Greek-speaking Ptolemaic Dynasty, which ruled over Egypt for 300 years until the suicide of Queen Cleopatra. The statement said the temple was thought to belong to Queen Berenice, wife of King Ptolemy III who ruled Egypt in the 3rd century B.C.
Mohammed Abdel-Maqsood, the Egyptian archaeologist who led the excavation team, said the discovery may be the first trace of the long-sought location of Alexandria’s royal quarter. The large number of statues depicting Bastet found in the ruins, he said,…
Anderson Cooper in the Midst of Looting Chaos in Haiti
Via AC360:
We were covering another story when we heard shots being fired. We ran toward the sound and found a store being looted. Two Haitian police officers were occasionally firing into the air to try to keep order, but that only worked for a few moments, then the looting would begin again.
They were stealing boxes of candles. An American businessman named Tony who owns two stores nearby barricaded one street to keep looters away. He had armed the two Haitian police with automatic weapons, and they were assisting him, but they were not able to control anything beyond their barricade.
It quickly became a free-for-all. Young men began fighting one another for the stolen items. A number of young men had knives, and planks of wood, screwdrivers and rocks. They were using their improvised weapons to threaten and injure others who had stolen items from the store. The robbers were now…
In The RAW: Necessary Heresies
[A vintage 1990s-era disinformation® essay-interview with Robert Anton Wilson by our former site editor, Alex Burns]
Author’s note: This interview was originally published in REVelation magazine (#13, Autumn, 1995): 36-40. The many lists of occult and New Age philosophers betrays its authors’ self-conscious youth: beginners often first learn discourse by referencing. I subsequently joined the Temple of Set in June 1996 after further correspondence with Dr. Michael A. Aquino and other Setians. This was also Robert Anton Wilson’s first interview by email. At least, I think it was RAW who replied, but I’m still not sure . . .
The paleolithism of the future (which for us, as mutants, already exists) will be achieved on a grand scale only through a massive technology of the Imagination, and a scientific paradigm which reaches beyond Quantum Mechanics into the realm of Chaos Theory & the hallucinations of Speculative Fiction.
~~ Hakim Bey, Temporary Autonomous Zones.
Some may get through the…
U.S. Waves White Flag in Disastrous ‘War on Drugs’
Hugh O’Shaughnessy writes in the Independent:
After 40 years of defeat and failure, America’s “war on drugs” is being buried in the same fashion as it was born — amid bloodshed, confusion, corruption and scandal. US agents are being pulled from South America; Washington is putting its narcotics policy under review, and a newly confident region is no longer prepared to swallow its fatal Prohibition error. Indeed, after the expenditure of billions of dollars and the violent deaths of tens of thousands of people, a suitable epitaph for America’s longest “war” may well be the plan, in Bolivia, for every family to be given the right to grow coca in its own backyard.
The “war”, declared unilaterally throughout the world by Richard Nixon in 1969, is expiring as its strategists start discarding plans that have proved futile over four decades: they are preparing to withdraw their agents from narcotics battlefields from Colombia…
Jihad for Jesus: More Evidence The Pentagon Is Fighting A Religious Crusade
From MOX News:
FBI Broke Law for Years in Phone Record Searches
John Solomon and Carrie Johnson write in the Washington Post:
The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.
E-mails obtained by the Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analysis unit with work that ultimately was not connected to imminent threats.
A Justice Department inspector general’s report due out this month is expected to conclude that the FBI frequently violated the law with its emergency requests, bureau officials confirmed.
The records seen by the Post do not reveal the identities of the people whose phone…
How Marijuana Affects The Brain
A really good graphic from the Wall Street Journal of all places!
John Travolta Will Assist Haitians By Airlifting In Scientology Ministers
In the too good to be true department, brought to you by Gawker:
Scientologists have mobilized to seize on the promotional and recruitment opportunities presented by the horror going on in Haiti, and John Travolta has personally arranged to fly “volunteer ministers” to Haiti to inflict his junk science on victims there.
Anywhere people are suffering, Scientology’s yellow-shirted “volunteer ministers” can be found lurking near news cameras and claiming to help people with their bullshit technology. They performed “purification rundowns” on recovery workers sifting through the ruins of the World Trade Center after 9/11, administered “touch assists” to victims of the tsunami, distributed literature after the Virginia Tech shooting, and are on the ground in Haiti right now warning the starving, dehydrated populace about the dangers of psychiatry.
John Travolta is using his air miles to help the Haiti relief effort by planning a mercy mission to the earthquake ravaged nation.
The movie star and celebrity…
‘Freefall’ Excerpt: Too Late To Fix The Biggest Banking Blunder In History?
Rogue economist Joseph Stiglitz has a new book out, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, excerpted here by the Huffington Post:
The entire series of efforts to rescue the banking system were so flawed, partly because those who were somewhat responsible for the mess–as advocates of deregulation, as failed regulators, or as investment bankers–were put in charge of the repair. Perhaps not surprisingly, they all employed the same logic that had gotten the financial sector into trouble to get it out of it. The financial sector had engaged in highly leveraged, non-transparent transactions, many off balance sheet; it had believed that one could create value by moving assets around and repackaging them. The approach to getting the country out of the mess was based on the same “principles.” Toxic assets were shifted from banks to the government–but that didn’t make them any less toxic. Off-balance sheet and non-transparent guarantees became a regular feature of the Treasury, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Federal Reserve. High leverage (open and hidden) became a feature of public institutions as well as private.
Worse still were the implications for governance. The Constitution gives Congress the power to control spending. But the Federal Reserve was undertaking actions knowing full well that if the collateral that it was taking on proved bad, the taxpayer would bail it out. Whether the actions were legal or not is not the issue: they were a deliberate attempt to circumvent…
Hugo Chavez Says Playstation Is “Poison”
And who would argue with him? As reported by Yahoo News/AFP:
CARACAS (AFP) – Sony’s PlayStation video game console is “poison” and leads children down the capitalist “road to hell,” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said.
Chavez, in his weekly radio-TV show “Alo Presidente,” called on Venezuelan manufacturers to make “educational” toys and dolls with indigenous peoples’ features to replace capitalistic counterparts like the Barbie doll that “have nothing to do with our culture.”
In expanding on his dislike of western toys and games — he already slammed Nintendo for promoting “selfishness, individualism and violence,” Chavez Sunday took on the world’s top selling game console, Sony’s PlayStation.
“Those games they call ‘PlayStation’ are poison. Some games teach you to kill. They once put my face on a game, ‘you’ve got to find Chavez to kill him.’”
The firebrand leftist president said any game that “bomb cities or just throw bombs,” are sold by capitalist countries to…
Why Biologists Should Run From Their Labs Directly to the Movie Theaters, Put On 3-D Glasses and Watch “Avatar”
Biologist Carol Kaesuk Yoon has written one of the best essays I’ve come across regarding James Cameron’s masterpiece (yes, I really think so), Avatar, for the New York Times:
When watching a Hollywood movie that has robed itself in the themes and paraphernalia of science, a scientist expects to feel anything from annoyance to infuriation at facts misconstrued or processes misrepresented. What a scientist does not expect is to enter into a state of ecstatic wonderment, to have the urge to leap up and shout: “Yes! That’s exactly what it’s like!”
So it is time for all the biologists who have not yet done so to shut their laptops and run from their laboratories directly to the movie theaters, put on 3-D glasses and watch the film “Avatar.” In fact, anyone who loves a biologist or may want to be one, or better yet, anyone who hates a biologist — and certainly…
U.S. Supreme Court Rules Against Mumia Abu-Jamal
Breaking news from Reuters:
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday granted an appeal by prosecutors and set aside a ruling that invalidated the death sentence of black political activist Mumia Abu-Jamal for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer.
His case has become a prominent cause for many death penalty opponents.
In a brief order, the Supreme Court sent the case back to a U.S. appeals court based in Philadelphia for further consideration in view of the high court’s recent decision in an Ohio case that had raised similar issues.
The Supreme Court in the Ohio case unanimously reinstated the death sentence of a neo-Nazi convicted of murdering three men. The court’s action, which was not a ruling on the merits of the case, could lead to Abu-Jamal’s death sentence being reinstated, too.
The appeals court had ruled that Abu-Jamal, 55, deserved a new sentencing hearing because of flawed jury instructions…
[more at Reuters]
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Why America And China Will Clash
Gideon Rachman explains in the Financial Times:
Google’s clash with China is about much more than the fate of a single, powerful firm. The company’s decision to pull out of China, unless the government there changes its policies on censorship, is a harbinger of increasingly stormy relations between the US and China.
The reason that the Google case is so significant is because it suggests that the assumptions on which US policy to China have been based since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 could be plain wrong. The US has accepted – even welcomed – China’s emergence as a giant economic power because American policymakers convinced themselves that economic opening would lead to political liberalisation in China.
If that assumption changes, American policy towards China could change with it. Welcoming the rise of a giant Asian economy that is also turning into a liberal democracy is one thing. Sponsoring the rise of a…
Russia Bans U.S. Poultry Over Chlorine
By Dan Flynn for FoodSafetyNews.com:
With as much as 30,000 tons of American poultry in the pipeline to Russia, the government in Moscow imposed a ban on future U.S. poultry imports on New Year’s Day.
Russia joins the European Union in prohibiting the use of chlorine as an anti-microbial treatment in poultry production, which is commonly used in the United States.
As for birds in the pipeline, USA Poultry and Egg Export Council President Jim Summers said he thinks based on earlier assurances from the Russian Veterinary Service that poultry in transit will be allowed to enter.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture defended the use of chlorine by the American poultry industry.
“Since chlorine has been used as an anti-microbial treatment for more than 25 years, this resolution effectively blocks U.S. exports of poultry to Russia, has a devastating impact on the U.S. poultry industry and trade, and raised the costs of poultry products for…
Why Do We Fear The Headless Dog Robot?
Whether it’s the BigDog military quadruped robot or an anthropomorphic robot with the ability to sweat, “All of them are disturbing to watch,” and this article documents what Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori calls “the uncanny valley,” or why near-lifelike creatures can seem real but unhealthy and even genetically unfit.
“The Uncanny Valley effect is most often evoked by the face, which is why it may not be a good idea for sex dolls to look too lifelike, and why people look scary after too much plastic surgery….”
But interestingly enough, the BigDog robot doesn’t have a face! In this case its the legs which are so realistic, they create the impression that the robot is alive. But whether it’s the robot that climbs vertical walls or the locomotion robot shaped like a giant black cockroach, it’s the “Uncanny Valley” which explains why people see a robot and say:
“I swear I’m gonna have nightmares…
A Sonic Blaster So Loud, It Could Be Deadly
David Hambling writes for Wired:
All kinds of of devices have been dubbed “sonic blasters” — from the Long Range Acoustic Device super loudhailer to the piercing Banshee to the Inferno (”most unbearable, gut-wrenching noise I’ve ever heard in my life” according to Danger Room’s own Sharon Weinberger). But a new device, developed in Israel, merits the “sonic blaster” label more than most: the Thunder Generator really is a blaster, producing a series of ear-splitting explosions. Some are so loud, they could be deadly.
Israeli firm PDT Agro developed the Thunder Generator, based on a gadget to scare away birds. The design is very simple: gas from a cylinder of domestic liquid petroleum (LPG) is mixed with air and then detonated, producing a series of high-intensity blasts. Patented “pulse detonation” technology ensures high-decibel blasts. According to Defense News, the Israeli Ministry of Defense has now licensed a firm called ArmyTec to market the Thunder Generator for military…
Yellowstone Hit By Swarm Of Earthquakes
By Howard Pankratz for the Denver Post:
Yellowstone National Park has been rattled by more than 250 earthquakes in the past two days following a period of 11 months of quiet seismic activity in the park.
The quakes have been gaining strength, with a 3.1 tremor recorded at 11:03 a.m. today. A 2.9 quake was recorded at 12:38 p.m.
Prof. Robert B. Smith, a geophysicist at the University of Utah and one of the leading experts on earthquake and volcanic activity at Yellowstone, said that the activity is a “notable swarm.”
“The swarm is located about 10 miles northwest of Old Faithful, Wyo., and nine miles southeast of West Yellowstone, Montana,” said Smith.
Jamie Farrell, a doctoral student in geophysics who works with Smith at the University of Utah, said that as of 3 p.m. today, 270 quakes have been recorded in the past two days.
Farrell said the quakes are occurring in an area about…
