Archive for January, 2010
Arianna Huffington: ‘Hope’ Has Been a Bust, It’s Time for Hope 2.0
Arianna Huffington writes on the Huffington Post:
On the eve of the first anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration, it’s become painfully obvious that elected officials are not going to save us. The 2008 election was all about “Hope.” But Hope is simply not cutting it.
What we need is Hope 2.0: the realization that our system is too broken to be fixed by politicians, however well intentioned — that change is going to have to come from outside Washington.
This realization is especially resonant as we celebrate Dr. King, whose life and work demonstrate the vital importance of social movements in bringing about change. Indeed, King showed that no real change can be accomplished without a movement demanding it.
As Frederick Douglass put it: “Power never concedes anything without a demand; it never has and it never will.”
Read More: Huffington Post
On Martin Luther King Day
From Nick P. at Black Sun Gazette:
It’s Martin Luther King Day again, and that means low low prices on used cars. This year, it also means the obligatory national pat on the back for “how far we’ve come” gets laid down extra hard.
I am speaking, of course, of the election of America’s first black President. Somehow when Martin Luther King marched on Selma and had a dream, I don’t think he was imagining a political landscape where the black Presidesnt doesn’t give a shit about poverty, bombs other brown people into dust, and generally acts as Ronald Reagan’s eighth term.
U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret ‘Jesus’ Bible Codes
JOSEPH RHEE, TAHMAN BRADLEY and BRIAN ROSS write on ABC News:
Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.
The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.
U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious “Crusade” in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.
One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of…
Television: Opiate Of The Masses
[A classic article by Wes Moore, originally published here at disinformation® on May, 5, 2001]
T.V.
It satellite links
Our United States of Unconsciousness
Apathetic therapeutic and extremely addictive
The methadone metronome pumping out
150 channels 24 hours a day
You can flip through all of them
And still there’s nothing worth watching.
~~ Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Television, Drug of a Nation
Momma’s gonna make all of your nightmares come true
Momma’s gonna put all of her fears into you
Momma’s gonna keep you right here under her wing
She won’t let you fly but she might let you sing
Momma’s gonna keep baby cozy and warm.
~~ Pink Floyd, Mother
The nearest analogy to the addictive power of television and the transformation of values that is wrought in the life of the heavy user is probably heroin.
~~ Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods
There’s a tumor in the TV mouth
Burn it out before it grows.
~~ Marilyn Manson, Little Horn
Aright junkies, I know you don’t like staring…
Twitter Joke Led to Arrest and Lifetime Airport Ban
Mark Hughes and Jason Walsh write in the Independent:
When heavy snowfall threatened to scupper Paul Chambers’s travel plans, he decided to vent his frustrations on Twitter by tapping out a comment to amuse his friends. “Robin Hood airport is closed,” he wrote. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”
Unfortunately for Mr Chambers, the police didn’t see the funny side. A week after posting the message on the social networking site, he was arrested under the Terrorism Act and questioned for almost seven hours by detectives who interpreted his post as a security threat. After he was released on bail, he was suspended from work pending an internal investigation, and has, he says, been banned from the Doncaster airport for life. “I would never have thought, in a thousand years, that any of this would have happened because of…
Today Is The Most Depressing Day Of The Year
According to the UK’s Daily Mail, you have a ready-made excuse if you were too depressed to show up for work today. In America of course, it’s Martin Luther King Day, so some people have the day off anyway (not at disinformation’s offices though…):
If you think life is a grind and you’d rather be doing anything other than going to work, you’re not alone.
Today is officially Blue Monday – the most miserable day of the year.
A combination of Arctic temperatures, Christmas debt and the next pay day feeling like it’s months away leaves many of us depressed and unable to face work.
And to make matters worse, you probably can’t afford to take time off sick thanks to the recession or because you’ve already had days off as a result of the snow.
The gloomy research was carried out by FirstCare, a company that helps firms tackle absenteeism.
Chief executive Aaron Ross said:…
More People Will Die in Haiti This Week Than Hiroshima
Bob Ellis writes on ABC’s Drum Unleashed:
Fewer deaths occurred in Hiroshima in August 1945 than in Port-au-Prince last week and more people will die there soon than in Rwanda in 1994. Yet the modern global world was unprepared for it, so busy were they with Terrorism, which has killed fewer people in the last thirty years than quarrelsome Americans with handguns in the last eight months.
When are we going to get the arithmetic right, and distinguish what threatens us mightily from what threatens us barely at all?
Cuba, a socialist state, is well-prepared for natural disaster and few die there in the hurricane season, and rebuilding happens quickly. The United States, a capitalist nation, was ill-prepared for Hurricane Katrina though experts had warned for years of broken dykes, inundation, chaos, disease and looting, and its response was an international joke.
China, a socialist state, handles earthquakes well. Australia, a social democratic state,…
Graham Hancock on Marijuana & Consciousness
Graham Hancock’s view on Marijuana and its effect on human consciousness. This echoes his essay The War on Consciousness included in the disinformation anthology You Are STILL Being Lied To. You can read that article here.
For Guard And Ex-Prisoners, A Guantanamo Bay Reunion
“You know here I was basically just putting innocent people in cages.”
The BBC has the story a bizarre reunion between a former Guantanamo Bay guard, Brandon Neely of Texas, and two of his former prisoners, Shafiq Rasul and Ruhal Ahmed of England, who were held there for two years.
Against all odds, Neely and Ahmed had become friends chatting through the bars Guantanamo, cracking jokes and discussing Eminem and Dr. Dre. Several years later:
“I was pretty new to Facebook and decided to type in their names to see if their profiles popped up and I came across Shafiq’s Facebook page,” says Mr Neely.
To Mr Neely’s astonishment he received a reply and the pair began an exchange of e-mails. BBC asked if both sides would be prepared to meet in person…
Glenn Beck On Conspiracy Theories, His Critics On The Right And Left, And How He Resembles Howard Beale Of ‘Network’
James Taranto, a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, writes a fawning profile of the increasingly loonie Glenn Beck. Does this mean that we can expect the Journal to become a semi-respectable print version of another of Rupert Murdoch’s “news” outlets, Fox News Channel (which of course is home to Mr. Beck’s TV show)?
Glenn Beck didn’t always believe in what he was doing. “When I was young, I used to hear people say, ‘He’s a golden boy. Look at that guy. Can you imagine what he’s going to be like when he grows up?’ Well, I unfortunately bought into that. And I hadn’t even found myself. Quite honestly, I was running from myself. But I knew how to work Top 40 radio.”
“Golden boy” was no exaggeration. “I was in Washington, D.C., on the morning show, by the time I was 18, programming a station by 19, No. 1 in the…
Google Lifts the Veil on Tiananmen Massacre Images in China as Censorship Row Continues
From Daily Mail:
Google has stopped censoring images of the Tiananmen Square massacre on its Chinese website.
Users on Google.cn’s image search can now see the iconic picture of Tank Man, among other images from the massacre in the Beijing square in 1989 – just as users on Google’s other country portals, such as Google.co.uk, can.
Students and intellectuals protested communist rule for seven weeks in the square in 1989 in the face of a brutal security crackdown. Roughly 100,000 people are believed to have taken part in the protests – with up to 3,000 of those killed during the demonstrations.
Tank Man: One of the most iconic images of the Tiananmen Square massacre, that of a man standing alone and defenceless in a face off against four tanks, now appears on Google.cn
Previously, the images search on Google’s China website did not show images from the massacre.
But Google has lifted the veil on the…
Proof Of Martians ‘To Come This Year’
From Paul Sutherland on Scientific American:
Final proof that Mars has bred life will be confirmed this year, leading NASA experts believe. The historic discovery will come not on Mars itself but from chunks of the red planet here on Earth.
David McKay, chief of astrobiology at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, says powerful new microscopes and other instruments will establish whether features in martian meteorites are alien fossils.
He says evidence for life in the space rocks could have been claimed by the UK if British scientists had used readily-available electron microscopes. Instead, images of colonies of martian bacteria were collected by American scientists.
The NASA team is already convinced that colonies of micro-organisms are visible inside three martian rocks that landed on Earth. If so, this would have profound implications for our understanding of life in the universe.
Two of the meteorites – ALH84001 and Yamato 593 – were found in the Antarctic…
Why It’s So Tricky for Atheists to Debate with Believers
From Alternet:
Debates over faith often leave non-believers holding the bag: look like a jerk or leave the debate unfinished and apparently concede defeat.
In conversations between atheists and believers, is there any way atheists can win?
I’ve been in a lot of discussions and debates with religious believers in the last few years, and I’m beginning to notice a pattern. Believers put atheists in no-win situations, so that no matter what atheists do, we’ll be seen as either acting like jerks or conceding defeat.
Like so many rhetorical gambits aimed at atheists, these “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” tactics aren’t really valid criticisms of atheism. They really only serve to deflect valid questions and criticisms about religion. But they come up often enough that I want to spend a little time pointing them out. I want to spell out the exact ways that these “no-win” situations are both unfair and…
World’s Smallest Robot Can Move Atoms!
Prof. Nadrian "Ned" C. Seeman
A New York professor just built the world’s smallest robot The nano-scopic device is just 150 x 50 x 8 nanometers in size – and over a million of them could fit inside a single red blood cell!
The tiny nanorobotic device has the ability to place specific atoms and molecules wherever scientists want them to. And it can even build nanoscale structures and machines – including a nano-sized walking biped!
Albert Einstein On Palestine And Zionism
By Edward Corrigan at OpEedNnews.com:
There is some controversy over Einstein’s political views, especially on the issue of Palestine and the creation of a A Jewish State. Many Zionists claim Einstein as one of their own. Einstein, however, was a pacifist, a universalist and abhorred nationalism.
The recently published book, Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East, by Fred Jerome, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009) has brought Einstein’s political views on the Middle East back into the spotlight.
The evidence of Einstein’s position on Palestine and Zionism is best seen in his own words and actions on the subject. For example, Einstein made a presentation to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, which was examining the Palestine issue in January 1946 and argued against the creation of a “Jewish State.”…
Our Solar System May Have Millions of ‘Twins’
Brian Handwerk writes in National Geographic News:
Of the billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, 15 percent may host “twins” of our solar system, a new study says. While that might not sound like much, the find suggests that several hundred million star systems look a lot like the one we call home, the study authors say.
The research is based on surveys of stars with gas giant planets — similar to Jupiter and Saturn — that orbit far from their stars.
As in our solar system, vast distances stretch between these stars and their gas giants. This creates ample room for rocky planets to thrive in the stars’ habitable zones, the regions where liquid water can exist.
And that boosts the likelihood that other Earths, and maybe even other forms of life, abound in the Milky Way.
Read More: National Geographic News
It’s Idiotic to Blame Anything Other Than Geology for the Haitian Earthquake
Christopher Hitchens writes on Slate:
On Nov. 1, 1755 — the feast of All Saint’s Day — a terrifying combination of earthquake and tsunami shattered the Portuguese capital city of Lisbon. Numerous major churches were destroyed and many devout worshippers along with them. This cataclysmic event was a spur to two great enterprises: the European Enlightenment and the development of seismology. Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were only some of those who reasoned that no thinkable deity could have desired or ordained the obliteration of Catholic Lisbon, while other thinkers — Immanuel Kant among them — began to inquire into the possible natural causes of such events.
Today, we can clearly identify the “fault” that runs under the Atlantic Ocean and still puts Portugal and other countries at risk, and it took only a few more generations before there was a workable theory of continental drift. We live on a cooling planet with a…
Gay Teen Worried He Might Be Christian
Via the Onion:
LOUISVILLE, KY—At first glance, high school senior Lucas Faber, 18, seems like any ordinary gay teen. He’s a member of his school’s swing choir, enjoys shopping at the mall, and has sex with other males his age. But lately, a growing worry has begun to plague this young gay man. A gnawing feeling that, deep down, he may be a fundamentalist, right-wing Christian.
“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” Faber admitted to reporters Monday. “It’s like I get these weird urges sometimes, and suddenly I’m tempted to go behind my friends’ backs and attend a megachurch service, or censor books in the school library in some way. Even just the thought of organizing a CD-burning turns me on.”
Added Faber, “I feel so confused.”
The openly gay teen, who came out to his parents at age 14 and has had a steady boyfriend for the past seven months, said he…
