Archive for January, 2010
Dear Apple: We Wanted This, Not An Expensive and Bulky iPhone
Submitted by mondomaniatrics via reddit:
67-Year-Old Grandpa Holds Off Three Marijuana Robbers
Thanks to disinfo.com reader Steve Elliott for the news tip! Steve Elliott writes on Toke of the Town:
If you plan on stealing James Tillman’s marijuana, you’re going to need more than three guys. They’re not going to get James Tillman’s weed.
Tillman, 67, on Sunday shot and wounded one of three burglars who broke into his Sacramento, California home to steal his medical marijuana, reports Elyce Kirchner of CBS13.com:
The other two fled and haven’t been seen since. Mr. Tillman was definitely having none of their nonsense. After all, his grandkids were at home.
UFOs and The Philosopher – The Black Fridays
The Black Fridays – Episode 7: Steve Cowan
Website • iTunes • Direct Download • RSS
The Black Fridays welcomes Dr. Steve Cowan to talk about UFO’s and other Esoterica from a Philosophers viewpoint. We had a great time talking to Dr. Cowan and look forward to talking with him in the future!
Photos of Famous Literary Drunks & Addicts
Mark Frauenfelder on BoingBoing recommends taking a look at Life magazine’s great photo gallery of famous literary drunks and addicts; it’s pretty cool. One of my favorites:
Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005): Everything
“I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs, or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”
Florida Residents Near Super Bowl Stadium Told to Watch Out for The Who’s Pete Townshend
Jose Lambiet writes in the Palm Beach Post:
The homes and schools close to Dolphins Stadium are receiving “sex offender advisory” postcards this week warning residents to watch out for The Who’s Pete Townshend, who’ll be performing at halftime of Super Bowl XLIV.
By next week, 1,500 homes will have received the postcard, sent by the Brevard County-based Protect Our Children. The non-profit acts as a community watchdog when it comes to sex offenders and sends similar cards to Melbourne residents where known pedophiles live.
Townshend, 63, was arrested in England in a 2003 roundup of alleged pedophiles accused of cruising online sites for photos of child sex. Townshend said he was just doing research for a book at the time. He wasn’t convicted of anything but was placed on that country’s list of sexual offenders for five years.
Lies, Damned Lies, and State of the Union Addresses
Nick P. at Black Sun Gazette:
While the capitalist media is treating Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address as some kind of “political pivot,” I didn’t hear much of the unexpected.
There was the usual economic nationalism, call for tax breaks for people who already have money, and stoking the flames of war while telling damned lies.
Little Girl Who Had Eight Limbs and Was Worshiped As a Deity, Starts School
Via the Daily Mail:
She was born with a unique body — eight limbs and two torsos fused at the hips. Now Lakshmi Tatma, the Indian toddler whose plight touched the world, has grown up and started school.
Two years after a ground-breaking operation to separate her from a parasitic twin, Lakshmi is a lively and bubbly four-year-old.
She loves playing cricket with her older brother, has a tendency to boss around her newfound friends and remains firmly a daddy’s girl.
‘When I think of the way she was, never in a million years would Lakshmi have been able to go to school or have the life she does today,’ said her mother Poonam, 26. ‘All the things she’s capable of now were impossible two years ago.
Scientists Plan Man-Made Earthquakes To Combat Global Warming
The Telegraph reports on a geoengineering project by climate change scientists to block the sun by simulating volcanic eruptions:
A global plan to put man-made particles into the atmosphere to deflect the Sun’s heat would rapidly lower global temperatures until cuts in carbon dioxide emissions took effect, they argued.
They acknowledged concerns about geoengineering but said multi-national experiments should begin soon before it is too late to reverse climate change or in case a rogue state carried out separate measures.
The environmental scientists, David Keith of the University of Calgary in Canada, Edward Parson of the University of Michigan and Granger Morgan of Carnegie Mellon University, were writing an editorial in the journal, Nature.
They called for governments to establish a multimillion-pound fund for research into the simulated volcanoes and other solar-radiation management techniques for shielding the Earth against sunlight.
“The idea of deliberately manipulating Earth’s energy balance to offset human-driven climate change strikes many as…
Danny Schechter: Bungled Aid Hurts More Than It Helps
“Knock, knock journalists? Many of you have done a great and compassionate job of documenting this tragedy and showing the pain of the victims. Now let’s investigate how and why this relief operation imploded and became worse than Katrina. Who is responsible and who should be held accountable? Why can?t we have more international cooperation of the kind the Cubans are asking for? Why is the focus on military security–is France right that the US is acting like an occupying power? If the Haitian government isn’t working, why not allow Aristide to come back and re-energize it? It is sickening to watch all this pain compounded by incompetence. The relief operation needs relief and it needs”–Danny Schechter, director of Plunder: The Crime of our Time.
‘Catcher in the Rye’ Author J.D. Salinger Dies at 91
“People always think something’s all true.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 2
Hillel Italie writes on the AP Via Yahoo News:
J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose The Catcher in the Rye shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91.
Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author’s son said in a statement from Salinger’s literary representative. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.
The Catcher in the Rye, with its immortal teenage protagonist, the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which made Catcher a featured selection, advised that for “anyone who has ever brought up a son” the novel will be “a source of wonder and delight — and concern.”
Enraged…
Welcome to the Weirdest New Internet Pastime: Chat Roulette
Fast Company’s Cliff Kuang reports:
Welcome to Chat Roulette. It’s simple: The site pairs you with a random videochat partner. You can click “next” any time, or stay with your current pairing.
Then things start tripping into psychedelic performance-art territory. As a friend says, “It’s the Internet. UNFILTERED.” The big lure is basically seeing something strange–or doing something so strange that you blow your partner’s mind.
You might see people in horrifying masks dancing around. Chinese users seem to love virtual high fives. One person’s shtick is a puppet who makes like a caring psychotherapist and will sit with you for hours. A friend reports a man holding up a sign that said, “Assroll?”–and promptly rolling over backwards, naked. (Nudity is hard to avoid.)
Also, challenges are big–successively crazier things. You might start by eating a page of your favorite book. You might end by calling your mother and screaming that you’re being murdered. Think of YouTube, with even more exhibitionism because everything is live and nothing is being recorded.
This appears to be the place where all the freaks trawling 4chan–a bulletin board better known for inventing LOL Cats and Rick Rolling–have migrated their insanity. And it’s insanely addictive–basically like a slot machine where instead of cherries, you’re hoping for the strangest that humanity has to offer…
Supreme Court Justice Alito Mouths ‘Not True’ To President Obama
This political media are all over this story. Here’s the Huffington Post’s take on it:
With the Supreme Court Justices sitting right in front of him, President Barack Obama unloaded in his State of the Union address on this past week’s ruling qualifying corporations as having the rights of citizens and opening the “floodgates” to their political donations.
“Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections,” Obama said. “Well I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that’s why I’m urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong.”
There was some strong applause from members of Congress — with both sides of the chamber rising to their feet with applause. The Justices — all there except Scalia and Thomas — sat in silence (as is their custom), but at the beginning of the exchange, Justice Alito [on the far left] can be seen shaking his head and mouthing words that seem to resemble “not true.”
Revealed: See Who Was Paid Off In The AIG Bailout
Ryan Grim and Shahien Nasiripour write on the Huffington Post:
A key question at the heart of the controversial bailout of AIG is just how much money the government lost. The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department have worked to keep that number secret and to conceal who was on the winning end.
An unredacted document obtained by the Huffington Post list the damage in detail. Goldman Sachs alone, for instance, got $14 billion in government money for assets worth $6 billion at the time — a de facto $8 billion subsidy, courtesy of taxpayers.
The list was produced as part of a congressional investigation led by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee into the federal bailout of AIG…
The War on Drugs: What a Joke!
From American Drug War’s YouTube, a collection of clips about prescription pharmaceuticals, marijuana, and the hypocrisy of the War on Drugs:
Wal-Mart Uses Fake Community Group to Manufacture Support
From the Chicagoist:
The controversy over Wal-Mart’s attempts to break into the Chicago retail market has flared up again recently. Opponents argue that Wal-Mart drives down wages, destroys local businesses and leads to no net increase in jobs or tax revenue for the city.
Wal-Mart and its allies contend that neighborhood residents deserve to have a say in what happens in their neighborhood, and people that don’t live there should stay out of the matter. The lack of good options available to people that live on the South and West sides of Chicago has been well-documented, and it’s very plausible that there is a substantial and passionate movement in those neighborhoods to bring Wal-Mart to their communities as a solution. Wal-Mart would have us believe that such a sentiment exists, but it turns out that support for their expansion into the city is being manufactured by the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, a local public…
Why ‘Avatar’ is Actually the 26th Biggest Movie of All Time
I’m not saying it’s rank won’t increase, but here’s an interesting point from The Live Feed:
Boxoffice is arguably more straightforward to report than TV ratings. You have this weekly Top 10 list of returns, you compare each movie to the other movies. TV ratings are a murky swamp where one network’s hit is another network’s flop and context is not just a factor, but often the entire story.
Han fucking soloYet one respect in which boxoffice reporting is pretty odd — emphasizing ticket grosses yet rarely mentioning ticket sales. That would be like always reporting how many ad dollars sold off Lost and not mentioning the number of viewers that actually watched the show. With everybody reporting how Avatar is The Biggest Movie of All Time based on grosses ($1.859 billion and counting), it’s important to remember how rising ticket prices skew the returns.
Here’s the Top 10 movies of all time … by number of tickets sold:
1. “Gone With the Wind” (1939) 202,044,600
2. “Star Wars” (1977) 178,119,600
3. “The Sound of Music” (1965) 142,415,400
4. “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” (1982) 141,854,300
5. “The Ten Commandments” (1956) 131,000,000
6. “Titanic” (1997) 128,345,900
7. “Jaws” (1975) 128,078,800
8. “Doctor Zhivago” (1965) 124,135,500
9. “The Exorcist” (1973) 110,568,700
10. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937) 109,000,000
U.S. Military Prepares for Cyber War
Surfdaddy Orca writes in h+ magazine:
Ever wonder how exactly the U.S. military would fight a cyber war? In August 2009, the U.S. Air Force activated its new cyberspace combat unit, the 24th Air Force, to “provide combat-ready forces trained and equipped to conduct sustained cyber operations.”
It’s commanded by former Minuteman missile and satellite-jamming specialist Major General Richard Webber. (And under his command are two wings, the 688th Information Operations Wing and the 67th Network Warfare Wing, plus a combat communications units.)
Meanwhile, to counter the threat of cyber warfare, DARPA is still deploying the National Cyber Range, a test bed of networked computers to test countermeasures against “cyberwar”. (According to one report, it provides “a virtual network world . to be populated by mirror computers and inhabited by myriad software sim-people ‘replicants,’ and used as a firing range in which to develop the art of cyber warfare.”)
And the Obama administration has even added a military cybersecurity coordinator to the National Security team.
Radiohead Raises More Than $500,000 for Haiti
I’ve noticed that Radiohead always ends up in the news for what I like to call “non-Metallica-like” reasons. They have a great relationship with their fans, and a terrible one with the record industry. If those aren’t enough reasons to like Radiohead, here’s one more:
From MSNBC:
Attendees bid online for tickets to show, some paying as much as $4,000.
Radiohead raised more than $500,000 for Haiti earthquake relief at a special weekend concert that attracted celebrities and die-hard fans.The band performed for more than two hours Sunday at the Henry Fonda Theatre. The star-studded crowd included Justin Timberlake, Jessica Biel, Charlize Theron, Anna Paquin and Daniel Craig.
Attendees bid online for tickets, with proceeds going to Oxfam International, a group that works with developing countries. Prices went as high as $4,000 for a pair of tickets. The closing minimum bid was $475.
[Read more at MSNBC]
Howard Zinn: Historian, Activist, Author, Teacher, Dies at 87
What an incredible lifetime of work. Reports the AP via the NY Times:
Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose book A People’s History of the United States became a million-selling leftist alternative to mainstream texts, died Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 87 and lived in Auburndale, Mass. The cause was a heart attack, his daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn said.
Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, A People’s History was, fittingly, a people’s best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although Professor Zinn was writing for a general readership, his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country, and numerous companion editions were published, including Voices of a People’s History, a volume for young people and a graphic novel.
A People’s History told an openly left-wing story. Professor Zinn accused Christopher Columbus and other explorers of committing genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters.
