Archive for February, 2010
Goldman Sachs CEO’s Giant, Nuclear-Powered Testicles
As described by the inimitable Matt Taibbi, for Rolling Stone:
On January 21st, Lloyd Blankfein left a peculiar voicemail message on the work phones of his employees at Goldman Sachs. Fast becoming America’s pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman’s role in precipitating the global financial crisis.
The bank had already set aside a tidy $16.2 billion for salaries and bonuses — meaning that Goldman employees were each set to take home an average of $498,246, a number roughly commensurate with what they received during the bubble years. Still, the troops were worried: There were rumors that Dr. Ballsachs, bowing to political pressure, might be forced to scale the number back. After all, the country was broke, 14.8 million Americans were…
Stock Market Slows as Tiger Woods Apologizes
So for thirteen minutes on Friday, the world’s biggest casino came to a crawl while Tiger Woods made his “apology” speech. (One can argue that the apology was more for Nike’s benefit than his wife’s.) As financial blog Zerohedge puts it:
When Tiger’s speech causes a more dramatic volume impact than the FOMC you know this market is all sorts of perfectly efficient. Bloomberg’s chart of the day below shows the total NYSE volume change in-between when Tiger started his convoluted and meandering mea culpa, and when he ended.
FOMC stands for Federal Open Market Committee, a.k.a. “The Fed” that many disinfo.com visitors have plenty to say about. So Tiger had more impact than a Fed Discount Rate hike announcement that day, good to know for the next time I talk to some finance guy who cold calls me about getting into the market…
Seems like just more proof that, as the Onion recently put it (brilliantly), money is a “symbolic, mutually shared illusion.”
Raymond Wiley on The Black Fridays
The Black Fridays – Episode 8: Raymond Wiley
Website • iTunes • Direct Download • RSS
Raymond Wiley received his undergraduate degree in history from the University of Georgia in 2008. From 2005 to 2008, he worked at WUOG 90.5 FM, the university’s 26,000 watt FM radio station, gaining experience first as a talk show host, producer, and DJ. Later he had the honor of serving as the station’s public affairs director and finally as its general manager. When he’s not producing the Disinformation Podcasts or appearing as a guest on other shows to talk about occult and conspiracy related topics, he serves as promotions director for the Disinformation Company. His interest in the occult, religion, hidden history, and conspiracy goes back more than two decades.We had a great time talking with Ray about his work at the Disinformation Company and about both his favorite issues and what he won’t talk about.
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The Truth About Mossad
The recent, outlandish assassination in Dubai may prove the most damaging yet in the Mossad’s history of high-profile, bungled operations. Ian Black asks how it squandered its reputation for ruthless brilliance, for the Guardian:
Last November, a sharp-eyed Israeli woman named Niva Ben-Harush was alarmed to notice a young man attaching something that looked suspiciously like a bomb to the underside of a car in a quiet street near Tel Aviv port. When police arrested him, he claimed to be an agent of the Mossad secret service taking part in a training exercise: his story turned out to be true – though the bomb was a fake. No comment was forthcoming from the Israeli prime minister’s office, which formally speaks for – but invariably says nothing about – the country’s world-famous espionage organisation. The bungling bomber was just a brief item on that evening’s local TV news.
There was, however, a far bigger…
Freemasons Keen to Open Office in EU Capital
This makes me wonder how much influence the masons still have in the Good ol’ U.S. of A.
via euobserver.com
A French freemason has said that part of the movement is keen to open a bureau in Brussels to lobby against the rising influence of religious organisations in the EU institutions.
“The masonic orders should practice politics in the positive sense of the term: So that despite their own partisan divisions, they speak out on the side of secularism and voice their disagreement with this or that governmental or European decision,” Jean-Michel Quillardet, the former Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France, told Belgian daily Le Soir in an interview out on Wednesday (17 February).
“It is necessary to impose the universal idea of the Enlightenment, which consists of the notion that people are citizens and European citizens before being Jewish, black, Maghreb, homosexual, heterosexual.”
Mr Quillardet explained that the Grand Orient de France has already created a cell which attempts to bring together all the lodges in Europe.
“We told him that apart from its Christian roots, Europe owed much to Greek and Roman philosophy, Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment. We obtained representation for masonic orders and for groups which defend secularism in Bepa,” he said, in reference to the Bureau of European Policy Advisers, a high-level policy analysis unit in the EU commission.
Is The Bloom Box The Holy Grail Of Electricity? (Video)
Large corporations have been testing a new device that can generate power on the spot, without being connected to the electric grid. Will we have one in every home someday? Lesley Stahl reports.
Life Magazine’s Maps Of A Nazi Invasion Of America
The blog Ptak Science Books has an interesting slice of history: an extensive series of maps originally published in Life Magazine in 1942, detailing a number of ways in which the Axis powers could have successfully invaded the United States and taken over the country.
The companion article was titled “Now the U.S. Must Fight for Its Life” and intended to make readers consider the possibility of the United States losing World War II and falling under Nazi control. Thankfully, these are maps of a history that never occurred.
Oath Keepers and the Age of Treason
Glenn Beck loves them. Tea Partiers court them. Congressmen listen to them. Meet the fast-growing “patriot” group that’s recruiting soldiers to resist the Obama administration. By Justine Sharrock for Mother Jones:
The .50 caliber Bushmaster bolt action rifle is a serious weapon. The model that Pvt. 1st Class Lee Pray is saving up for has a 2,500-yard range and comes with a Mark IV scope and an easy-load magazine. When the 25-year-old drove me to a mall in Watertown, New York, near the Fort Drum Army base, he brought me to see it in its glass case—he visits it periodically, like a kid coveting something at the toy store. It’ll take plenty of military paychecks to cover the $5,600 price tag, but he considers the Bushmaster essential in his preparations to take on the US government when it declares martial law.
His belief that that day is imminent has led Pray to a group called Oath Keepers, one of the fastest-growing “patriot” organizations on the right…
California City To Charge Residents $300 Per 911 Call
Calling 9-1-1 is no longer a right, it’s a privilege for those with the means to afford it. The city of Tracy, California will begin charging people $300 when they call 9-1-1 to report a medical emergency. On the bright side, there is a yearly flat rate option. A CBS affiliate reports:
Tracy residents will now have to pay every time they call 9-1-1 for a medical emergency.
But there are a couple of options. Residents can pay a $48 voluntary fee for the year which allows them to call 9-1-1 as many times as necessary.
Residents will soon receive the form in the mail where they’ll be able to make their selection. No date has been set for when the charges will go into effect.
Atomic Bomb Book Author Admits He Was Duped
You have to feel sorry for the author I guess, but shouldn’t his publisher have checked the facts? From the New York Times:
A new book about the atomic destruction of Hiroshima has won critical acclaim with its heartbreaking portrayals of the bomb’s survivors and is set to be made into a movie by James Cameron.
“The Last Train from Hiroshima,” published in January by Henry Holt, also claims to reveal a secret accident with the atom bomb that killed one American and irradiated others and greatly reduced the weapon’s destructive power.
There is just one problem. That section of the book and other technical details of the mission are based on the recollections of Joseph Fuoco, who is described as a last-minute substitute on one of the two observation planes that escorted the Enola Gay.
But Mr. Fuoco, who died in 2008 at age 84 and lived in Westbury, N.Y., never flew on the bombing run, and he never substituted for James R. Corliss, the plane’s regular flight engineer, Mr. Corliss’s family says. They, along with angry ranks of scientists, historians and veterans, are denouncing the book and calling Mr. Fuoco an impostor…
Doug Rushkoff on the Book Business (Video)
A glimpse of what Douglas Rushkoff had to say about the future of publishing at Mediabistro’s eBook Summit.
Fnord: Conspiracy Is Job One
The ever reliable David Pescovitz brings you this tidbit for fans missing RAW, at BoingBoing of course:
Fans of Robert Anton Wilson, the Principia Discordia, and the Church of the Subgenius will appreciate this delightful logo. To understand (or rather experience the illusion that you understand) the meaning of “fnord,” I direct you first to the references I listed above, the contents of which are inextricably linked to the original bOING bOING print ‘zine, and also the Fnord wikipedia page, where I found the image above.
Real-Time Movie-Quality CGI for Games?
Evan Newton writes on h+ magazine:
There aren’t very many games today that, graphically, give one goose bumps. While movies like James Cameron’s Avatar or Peter Jackson‘s Lord of the Rings have graphical effects that appear absolutely real, many wonder if games will ever achieve that level of detail.
Now get ready for Project Offset. This little-known development team, owned by Intel, is building a game engine that may make you believe that the richness of reality in the virtual world is not so far away.
Videos posted on their website show a variety of graphics engine experiments. You will find video footage that ranges from the detailed facial expressions of an ogre to a meteor shower blasting through ancient stone pillars.
10 Families Who Killed Together
From the interesting folks at WeirdWorm:
The family that plays together stays together so what does that say about those folks who get a little rough? The mothers who arm their offspring, the brothers who take out their elders or those large extended families who make the neighbors very nervous are not the Norman Rockwell type, but they are in a weird way far more interesting.
1. The Harpe Family: No Angels Here
The new world held out hope to the cousins Micah and Wiley Harper, but only because the fledging country didn’t know them. After migrating with their families from Scotland as children the pair changed their names to John and William. Because of their constant habit of remaining together the pair was given the witty nicknames of Big Harpe (William) and Little Harpe (John).
The Harpes not exactly men given to more empathic endeavors left home just out of their teens to become slavers or overseers in Virginia. The American Revolution presented them with better opportunities as Troy outlaws where they learned such useful skills as pillaging livestock, burning crops and raping young farm girls.
There was a downside to their new lifestyle namely a country side from North Carolina to Kentucky, who knew them and wanted to see them both dangle at the end of twin ropes. The men took up with at least three women and produce many children who traveled with them.
Joe Stack Plane Crash: Why Did He Hate the IRS Enough to Kill?
We certainly received, and continue to receive, a range of opinion on the final act of Andrew Joseph Stack III. Since that day, many news outlets have attributed a 1986 tax law change as the source of his anger expressed in the Stack “manifesto” many of you have been commenting on.
As it currently stands, 1 person was killed and 12 injured by his actions in Austin that day.
Carlin DeGuerin Miller writes on CBS News:
Joseph Andrew Stack’s seething hatred for the IRS appeared to have roots at least two decades long, judging from the web post he left behind before crashing his plane into in an Austin, Texas office building Thursday where some 200 employees of the tax agency worked.
The anti “tax man” fuse may have been lit in Stack in 1986, when the software engineer confronted a change in tax law, that required companies using high-tech contractors to withhold part of their salaries for…
Justice for Sale: What Can ‘The People’ Bid to Have Democracy in America?
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship writes on Huffington Post:
That famous definition of a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything — and the value of nothing — has come to define this present moment of American politics.
No wonder people have lost faith in politicians, parties and in our leadership. The power of money drives cynicism deep into the heart of every level of government. Everything, and everyone, comes with a price tag attached: from a seat at the table in the White House to a seat in Congress, to the fate of health care reform, our environment, and efforts to restrain Wall Street’s greed and prevent another financial catastrophe.
Our government is not broken; it’s been bought out from under us, and on the right and the left and smack across the vast middle, more and more Americans doubt representative democracy can survive the corruption of money.
Last month, the…
Tom Brokaw Explains Canada To Americans
From a pre-recorded short film, narrated by Tom Brokaw, that aired on NBC prior to the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver:
Man Appears Free of HIV After Stem Cell Transplant
Jacquelyne Froeber writes on CNN:
A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“The patient is fine,” said Dr. Gero Hutter of Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin in Germany. “Today, two years after his transplantation, he is still without any signs of HIV disease and without antiretroviral medication.”
The case was first reported in November, and the new report is the first official publication of the case in a medical journal. Hutter and a team of medical professionals performed the stem cell transplant on the patient, an American living in Germany, to treat the man’s leukemia, not the HIV itself.
However, the team deliberately chose a compatible donor who has a naturally…
Kidnapping and Trading in Iraqi Children
Layla Anwar writes on uruknet.info:
While quite a bit of a fuss was raised regarding the kidnapping, smuggling and trafficking in Haitian children and rightly so, the same can’t be said about the fate of Iraqi children.
I have already written several posts about this new lucrative business in Iraq, that of the kidnapping, trafficking and trading of children, and I am always aghast to see that no media or organization for the protection of children, like the famous UNICEF or Save the Child or OXFAM or anyone else, has given enough attention and dedicated effort to denounce and stop this tragedy…
Of course, before our “liberation” such criminality involving the selling, buying, trading, kidnapping, killing of children was unheard of…am I to deduce that Freedom and Democracy are baby killers? Am afraid so.
Hussein Anwar kindly forwarded this article a couple of months ago and I have been so busy with other things and…
