Archive for February, 2010
How the U.S. Took on Dr. Strangelove and Tried to Make Americans Love the Bomb
From the Guardian:
Nuclear Armageddon has always had its funny side. But the US military wasn’t laughing in the early 1960s as Americans, freshly shaken by the Cuban missile crisis, lapped up Stanley Kubrick’s classic satire, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
The film – which portrays a psychotic air force general who sets in chain the nuclear obliteration of the Soviet Union – was one of a spate of popular novels and films about accidental atomic war which had the US air force worried that some viewers might believe it all possible.
So in an attempt to persuade Americans that there was no chance of some rogue general or crosswired computer unleashing an atomic war, Strategic Air Command (SAC) went into the film business itself.
The result, a 17-minute propaganda film called SAC Command Post, was never shown to the public and was all but forgotten until…
Americans Support Gays, Oppose Homosexuals In The Military
As the government weighs the repealing of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” wonder where the American public stands? Wonkette reports that the latest polls show that a majority of Americans support “gay men and lesbians” serving openly in the military, but less than half support “homosexuals” doing so. There you have it, a wise and decisive answer.
How Many More Are Innocent?
From Reason.com:
America’s 250th DNA exoneration raises questions about how often we send the wrong person to prison.
Freddie Peacock of Rochester, New York, was convicted of rape in 1976. Last week he became the 250th person to be exonerated by DNA testing since 1989. According to a new report by the Innocence Project, those 250 prisoners served 3,160 years between them; 17 spent time on death row. Remarkably, 67 percent of them were convicted after 2000—a decade after the onset of modern DNA testing. The glaring question here is, How many more are there?
Calculating the percentage of innocents now in prison is a tricky and controversial process. The numerator itself is difficult enough to figure out. The certainty of DNA testing means we can be positive the 250 cases listed in the Innocence Project report didn’t commit the crimes for which they were convicted, and that number also continues to rise. But…
Stephen Colbert: ‘Sarah Palin Is a F**cking Retard’
Chris Matthews described her as an “empty vessel”, and Stephen Colbert’s opinion is well, see you yourself. Alternet reports:
“Sarah Palin knows that it’s okay to call someone a retard if like Rush you clearly don’t mean it which is why we should all come to her defense and say: Sarah Palin is a fucking retard,” Colbert quipped.
Palin’s son, Trig, has Down Syndrome. She had criticized Obama chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel for telling liberal activists that a political strategy was “fucking retarded” during a private meeting in the White House. But when Rush Limbaugh used the same word, Palin declared that his usage was acceptable because it was satire.
Giant Monster Crab Found In England
The Daily Mail reports on something scary. This giant crab may kill us all:
With its enormous legs and lethal claws, this monster of the deep is already the biggest crab ever seen in Britain. But astonishingly, the arthropod — which measures a staggering 10ft from claw to claw — is still growing, and could live until it is 100.
Nicknamed ‘Crabzilla’ after the fictional giant monster, the Japanese Spider Crab has legs [that] can straddle a car. They will eventually measure a massive 15 ft. Crabzilla was caught by fishermen in the Pacific Ocean.
Out of the water, the crab looks limp and languid because it cannot support its heavy limbs.
But in its own habitat &mdash up to 2,500 ft down in the cold seas of the ocean — it is a lethal predator.However, it also has predators of its own — humans — as it is considered a delicacy in Japan.
Can Anyone Stop the Predatory Lenders?
From Mother Jones:
No one told Deanna Walters she was about to lose her home. Not when her mortgage servicing company foreclosed on it, nor when it landed on the county auction block and sold to the highest bidder. She realized what was happening only when a man taped a note to the front door of her well-kept house in a leafy corner of Stockton, California, last January. “My son went out and took it down,” recalls the 43-year-old single mother of two, “and that’s when he told me it was a ‘three-day or quit’ notice.”
Walters’ discovery that her home had been sold out from under her marked the low point of a four-year fiasco that began when Ocwen Loan Servicing became her mortgage servicer in late 2004. Through no fault of her own, Ocwen incorrectly processed or lost dozens of Walters’ payments and charged her more than $2,000 in late fees…
Feds Push for Tracking Cell Phones
From CNET News:
Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the “Scarecrow Bandits” that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves.
FBI agents obtained logs from mobile phone companies corresponding to what their cellular towers had recorded at the time of a dozen different bank robberies in the Dallas area. The voluminous records showed that two phones had made calls around the time of all 12 heists, and that those phones belonged to men named Tony Hewitt and Corey Duffey. A jury eventually convicted the duo of multiple bank robbery and weapons charges.
Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court…
The Coming Christianizing Of Public School Textbooks
The New York Times asks, “How Christian were the Founding Fathers?” The Texas State Board of Education will be rewriting the standards for public school textbooks, and there’s a good chance that the resulting books (used across the country) will teach that America is a “Christian nation”:
The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however, some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society.
As Cynthia Dunbar, a Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”
Captain America Attends a Tea Party, But He’s Not Welcome
Dave Gilson writes on Mother Jones:
President Obama may be secretly plotting to declare martial law, but the Tea Partiers now face a more immediate threat: Captain America. Conservative blogger Warner Todd Huston has checked out issue 602 of the long-running series and concludes that Marvel Comics is “making patriotic Americans into [its] newest super villains.”
The offending storyline finds Captain America and his African-American sidekick the Falcon in Idaho, where they encounter a Tea Party rally. They then scheme to infiltrate the antitax protesters as a way to get to their real target, a militia group known as the Watchdogs. The Falcon is skeptical: “I don’t exactly see a black man from Harlem fitting in with a bunch of angry white folks.” It’s not the first time the Star Spangled Avenger has revealed his secret identity as a big-government liberal. Back in the ’80s he battled Ronald Reagan when the Gipper turned…
Carly Fiorina’s Bizarre ‘Demon Sheep’ Campaign Ad
Widely considered to be one of the worst American CEOs of all time Carly Fiorina thinks it’s a good idea to bring that business acumen to the U.S. Senate for the good people of California. From CNBC:
A consummate self-promoter, Fiorina was busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered. She paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs. The merger Fiorina orchestrated with Compaq in 2002 was widely seen as a failure. She was ousted in 2005.
THE STAT: HP stock lost half its value during Fiorina’s tenure.
Check out this campaign ad about “FCINO: Fiscal Conservative In Name Only” — the weirdness begins at around two and a half minutes into the video:
Cyborg Anthropologist Amber Case Interviewed
Klint Finley interviews Amber Case on Technoccult:
What are some of your most interesting recent findings?
Some of my favorite things have been mistakes. For instance, when a middle aged woman thinks that she’s sending a private message to someone she’s been seeing, and in reality she posted on her wall for everyone to see.
Yahoo Answers are amazing. It’s where a lot of very young kids ask each other ridiculous questions — and young kids answer back.
Also, looking at people’s signatures. Not their handwritten ones, but their digital ones. How they compose sentences and where they use capitalization. How they respond to things, etc. It really tells a lot about who they are.
The other thing I like to discover is digital artifacts. There are some digital archeologists and historians who try to keep data alive and in circulation. When one considers it, and Stewart Brand has mentioned this quite a bit ……
Artificial Stem Cells? Researchers Transform A Skin Cell Into A Nerve Cell
Via h+ magazine:
Stanford researchers just changed a skin cell into a nerve cell. “Only stem cells have been known to do this… The direct conversion of one terminally differentiated cell to another changes the facts, and shakes our understanding – implying that, just maybe, under the right conditions, all cells are pluripotent: with the proper tools, all types of cells may form all types of cells…
“There is much to hope for as we discover this great leap sideways…”
The team bathed skin cells in “delivery viruses” containing proteins to trigger a neuron-specific DNA sequence, and discovered the skin cells changed completely — growing rounder, extending axon-like processes and even forming functional synapses…
This article suggests ultimately research in this field “could lead to revolutionary progress in the fight against Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and neurodegenerative disorders.”
Read More: h+ magazine
No Joke: South Carolina Now Requires ‘Subversives’ to Register
Yes, the South is as messed up as you though it was. This new law from the birthplace of secession is utterly ridiculous, and it will be used as an excuse to arrest and imprison activists of all stripes. Also, I want to drive over to Columbia and pay five dollars to have the South Carolina Republican Party registered.
From The Raw Story:
Five-dollar registration fee for persons planning to overthrow U.S. government.
Terrorists who want to overthrow the United States government must now register with South Carolina’s Secretary of State and declare their intentions — or face a $25,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison.
The state’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act,” passed last year and now officially on the books, states that “every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or…
Virginia Delegates Pass Bill That Bans Chip Implants as ‘Mark of the Beast’
Daniel Tencer reports in the always interesting RAW Story:
Concerns over privacy have aligned with apocalyptic Biblical prophecy in a proposed Virginia law that limits the use of microchip implants on humans because of a lawmaker’s concern that the chips will prove to be the Antichrist’s “mark of the beast.”
On Wednesday, Virginia’s House of Delegates passed a bill that forbids companies from forcing their employees to be implanted with tracking devices, a move likely to be applauded by civil libertarians. But Virginia state Delegate Mark Cole’s reasons for proposing the law have as much to do with the Book of Revelation as they do with concerns over privacy in the digital age.
Cole says he is concerned that the implants will turn out to be the “mark of the beast” worn by Satan’s minions. “My understanding — I’m not a theologian — but there’s a prophecy in the Bible that says you’ll have…
Holy Blood, Holy Grail! The Famed Henry Lincoln on Disinformation: The Podcast
Disinformation: The Podcast – The Rennes-le-Chateau Mystery with Henry Lincoln
iTunes • Direct Download • RSS
We are proud to bring you an interview with Henry Lincoln, author of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and subject of the disinformation® documentary Origins of the Da Vinci Code.
Henry’s work was the basis for Dan Brown’s famous novel, as well as numerous other works in the genre.
We discuss the mystery surrounding the town of Rennes-le-Chateau, and even talk about Henry’s early work, including writing the second series of Doctor Who!
Thanks for listening! Share your enjoyment with a brand, new Disinformation: The Podcast T-shirt available NOW via disinfo.com.
The Man Who Found the Holy Grail
From Fortean Times:
According to the New Catholic Dictionary the Holy Grail is “a legendary sacred vessel, identified with the chalice of the Eucharist or the dish of the Paschal Lamb, and the theme of a medieval cycle of romance”. It “is said to have been the dish… used by Joseph of Arimathea to gather the Precious Blood of Christ.” And, according to author, historian and folklorist Mark Oxbrow, the Grail has actually been found.
Of course, the Grail was once in the hands of Indiana Jones, but even he ultimately lost it; so what makes Oxbrow’s claims special? Why should we believe him when we already have several Grails, including the Nantios Cup, the “Holy Bloodline” of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln’s The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and the Stone Tablets of the Ark of the Covenant in Graham Hancock’s The Sign and The Seal? And the foregoing is a non-exclusive…
The New Jim Crow
From The Huffington Post:
It’s that time of year again, when we hear Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches in 10 second clips, the same clips that get recycled on an annual basis now — radical proclamations that have been reduced over the years to mere platitudes. His booming voice declares that he’s been to the mountaintop and has glimpsed the promised land. He has a dream, he says, and his voice soars.
During this year’s Black History Month, like last, we will be treated to celebrations of Obama’s presidency — the ultimate symbol, we are told, of America’s triumph over its ugly history of discrimination, exclusion, and racial caste. This is a time to rejoice, it is said, though we still have a long way to go.
That is the dominant racial narrative today among those who claim to care about racial justice: Look how far we have come, but yes we still…
What Would You See As You Plummet Into a Black Hole? (Video)
Hazel Muir writes on New Scientist:
A new interactive program reveals the spectacular light show you’d see if you dared to wander close to a black hole. It demonstrates how the extreme gravity of a black hole could appear to shred background constellations of stars, spinning them around as though in a giant black washing machine.
The program’s creators say it could be an excellent tool to familiarise people with the weird ways that black holes warp light. “It’s useful for people to play around with the parameters to study how, for instance, a black hole would distort the constellation Orion,” says Thomas Müller of the University of Stuttgart in Germany.
TSA Detains Student for Arabic Study Cards; Asked By Agent ‘Do You Know Who Did 9/11?’
RAW Story is reporting today the ACLU is filing a lawsuit on behalf of the student. Here’s the original report from Dave Davies in the Philadelphia Daily News:
EIGHT YEARS after 9/11, we’re used to changes in our routines. We show ID to get into office buildings, and take off our shoes at airports. But should a college student flying back to school be handcuffed and held for five hours because he has Arabic flash cards in his backpack?
That’s the way Nick George, a senior at Pomona College, in California, sees what happened to him at the Philadelphia airport two Saturdays ago. George, of Wyncote, Montgomery County, was about to catch a Southwest flight back to school when stereo speakers in his backpack caught the eye of screeners at the metal detector.
