Archive for February, 2010
Cannabis Easier to Buy Than Pizza, Drug Expert Dr Alex Wodak Says
From News.com.au:
Cannabis is easier to buy than a pizza, says a drug expert, so why not legalise and tax it to benefit everyone? Dr Alex Wodak, the director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital, says cannabis will soon be Australia’s smoke of choice.
“In a few years time, we’ll have more Australians smoking cannabis than we have smoking tobacco and by default that market is largely taken over by criminals,” Dr Wodak said.
“Having a black market of that size is not good for anybody and inevitably big black markets can only survive if there’s significant police corruption.’
Dr Wodak delivered the keynote address at the Australian Drug Law and a Civil Society symposium at the Lismore campus of Southern Cross University today. He also heads the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation.
At the moment, we have no control over cannabis at all because the trade is run by…
The Digital Dictatorship
From WSJ:
It’s fashionable to hold up the Internet as the road to democracy and liberty in countries like Iran, but it can also be a very effective tool for quashing freedom. Evgeny Morozov on the myth of the techno-utopia.
A storm of protest hit Google last week over Buzz, its new social networking service, because of user concerns about the inadvertent exposure of their data. Internet users in Iran, however, were spared such trouble. It’s not because Google took extra care in protecting their identities—they didn’t—but because the Iranian authorities decided to ban Gmail, Google’s popular email service, and replace it with a national email system that would be run by the government.
Such paradoxes abound in the Islamic Republic’s complex relationship with the Internet. As the Iranian police were cracking down on anti-government protesters by posting their photos online and soliciting tips from the public about their identities, a technology company…
Remembering the “Prince of Gonzo Porn”
Porn star Jamie Gillis died of cancer today. But just two years ago, Susie Bright performed the definitive interview with “the first male superstar of porn.”
“Gillis graduated from Columbia University in 1970. An aspiring actor, he was working as a cabbie when he answered an ad in the Village Voice and – ka-boom! He found himself making porn loops…”
After “The Opening of Misty Beethoven,” he became the world’s most famous adult film star — and evventually, even Jamie’s dad was asking if Jamie could get him a date with porn stars…
NASA Shows First WISE Telescope Images
From CBC News:
NASA released the first pictures from the WISE infrared space telescope Wednesday, including a new view of our closest galactic neighbour.
The new images include a shot of the Andromeda galaxy and its smaller satellite galaxies, a glowing comet, a distant galaxy cluster, and cloud of dust and gas teeming with newly born stars.
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, launched in December, is on a mission to survey the entire sky in the infrared part of the light spectrum.
Since it began its scan of the heavens Jan. 14, it has sent more than 250,000 raw images back to Earth, and NASA has processed some of them for the public to see, assigning false colours to the different wavelengths of infrared light.
“These first images are proving the spacecraft’s secondary mission of helping to track asteroids, comets and other stellar objects will be just as critically important as its primary mission of…
Google Buzz Draws Class-Action Suit From Harvard Student
Ironically, this is a good time to mention that Disinformation has a new Buzz account. Here’s a link to our profile. From ABC News:
Love it or loathe it, Google Buzz has dominated tech headlines since its launch last week.
The latest product unveiled by the Mountain View tech giant, Google Buzz, is a social networking service that plugs right into a Gmail user’s e-mail account.
Like Facebook or Twitter, the new tool lets users post status updates, YouTube videos and photos, connecting users in an ongoing online conversation.
While some people have hailed Google Buzz as a potential “Facebook killer,” others have lambasted the service for publicizing users’ private information.
One law school student decided this week to take the Google Buzz backlash to a whole new level.
Arlington Student’s ‘GOD IS DEAD’ Shirt Won’t Make Debate Club Photo in Yearbook
Remember kids, you can’t wear anything to school that might be considered ‘offensive.’ We can’t have the counterculture getting to our nice Christian boys. We’ve got to keep them in line so they can move on into that service industry job we’ve designed for them.
From The News Tribune:
As debate club president and a top student, Arlington High School senior Justin Surber has studied the constitutional rights of free speech.
Surber, 18, recently took a stand that will keep him from appearing in his club’s yearbook photo.
Once a week, Surber wears a black T-shirt featuring the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s take on religion. In block letters, the shirt reads “GOD IS DEAD.”
Nobody has told him he can’t wear the shirt to school. He wears it to provoke debate, he says, and that’s why he wore the shirt the day the debate club photo was taken for the yearbook.
Now Surber believes his T-shirt…
Ron Paul Wins CPAC Presidential Straw Poll
From USA Today:
Talk about your political upsets.
Rep. Ron Paul, hero of a fervant band of libertarians, unexpectedly won the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference today, claiming 31% of the votes cast.
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who has carried the survey for the past three years, was second at 22%.
The straw poll is unscientific but is sometimes seen as a show of organizational strength among presidential hopefuls. However, Paul, who made a longshot bid for the Republican nomination in 2008, has given no indication he plans to run again.
“It is clear that Paul brought a lot of people” to CPAC, said Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio, who ran the straw poll.Fabrizio said 2,395 of a reported 10,000 attendees voted. It was the most votes in the history of CPAC — about 40% higher than last year, he said.
[Read more at USA Today]
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Master Shaman Jose Vargas’ Alien Encounters (Video)
Master Shaman Jose Vargas describes his telepathic communications with alien beings in another dimension where time moves more slowly, for Reality Sandwich:
Wesley Snipes, Joe Stack and the Growth of the Tax Resistance Movement
Federal tax authorities spend a lot of time trying to convince Americans like IRS attacker Joe Stack that paying taxes is part of one’s civic duty. But resistance – though not violence – is downright American, say tax protesters like Wesley Snipes. Patrick Johnson reports for the Christian Science Monitor:
Commenting on the suicide plane attack on an IRS office building in Austin, Texas, by tax resister Joe Stack, actor and tax protester Wesley Snipes shrugged his shoulders and said: “I think [tax revolt] was an issue even for the early colonists and the British, so what’s new?”
The Boston Tea Party. The Whiskey Rebellion. The Sagebrush Rebellion.
Since its very founding, the US has been awash in sometimes violent anti-tax movements, giving way to a strain, amid ever broader federal reach, of a particularly pervasive, and more individualistic, form of rebellion in the late 20th century: The tax-resistance, or tax-denial, phenomenon.
Mr. Stack, a software…
Anthrax Myth Persists Despite Evidence
The highly convenient way in which the U.S Government’s FBI has “closed the case” on the 2001 anthrax attacks will not wash with anyone who has read the excellent Dead Silence: Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail by Bob Coen and Eric Nadler. I’d be interested to hear what Messrs. Coen & Nadler make of the issue of whether or not the anthrax spores used in 2001 were weaponized, discussed here in USA Today:
Can science ever do away with bad ideas? Or do they just limp along forever?Consider the federal investigators who have “formally concluded” their investigation into the 2001 anthrax killings, pointing again to the late anthrax vaccine researcher Bruce Ivins as the case’s culprit.
Whatever history’s verdict on Ivins, one brouhaha at the center of the case has already outlived him — the story of “weaponized” anthrax.
“One of my biggest frustrations with this has been showing people the data, and it doesn’t matter,” says researcher Joseph Michael of Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M…
FBI Probes US School Webcam ‘Spy’ Case
An update to this story. From MSN:
The FBI is investigating a Pennsylvania school district officials accused of secretly activating webcams inside students’ homes, a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case told The Associated Press.
The FBI will explore whether Lower Merion School District officials broke any federal wiretap or computer-intrusion laws, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Days after a student filed a suit over the practice, Lower Merion officials acknowledged on Friday that they remotely activated webcams 42 times in the past 14 months, but only to find missing student laptops. They insist they never did so to spy on students, as the student’s family claimed in the federal lawsuit.
Families were not informed of the possibility the webcams might be activated in their homes without their permission in the paperwork students sign when they get the computers, district spokesman Doug Young said.
“It’s clear what was in…
1,000 Architects & Engineers Call for New 9/11 Investigation
From Yahoo News:
Richard Gage, AIA, architect and founder of the non-profit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Inc. (AE911Truth), will announce a decisive milestone today at a press conference in San Francisco, as more than 1,000 worldwide architects and engineers now support the call for a new investigation into the destruction of the and Building 7 at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
After careful examination of the official explanation, along with the forensic data omitted from official reports, these professionals have concluded that a new independent investigation into these mysterious collapses is needed.Mr. Gage will deliver the news around this major development, accompanied by signers of the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth petition. The press conference will be held concurrently in 38 cities in 6 countries.
These prominent architectural and engineering professionals will discuss the organization’s findings and concerns. A brief presentation of the explosive evidence they have…
Zimbabwe Displays ‘Ark of Covenant Replica’
From BBC News:
A wooden object claimed to be a replica of the Biblical Ark of the Covenant has gone on display at a Zimbabwe museum.
The “ngoma lungundu” belongs to the Lemba people – black Africans who claim Jewish ancestry.
They say the vessel was built almost 700 years ago from the remains of the original Ark, which the Bible says was used to store Moses’ 10 Commandments.
For decades the ancient vessel was thought to be lost, until it was found in a storeroom in Harare recently.
Tudor Parfitt, who rediscovered the artefact three years ago, told the BBC he believed it was the oldest wooden object ever found in sub-Saharan Africa.
“On each corner there is the remnants of a wooden ring, and obviously at one point, it was carried by inserting poles through these two rings on either side,” he said.
[Read more at BBC News]
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The Chemist’s War
From Slate:
The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.
It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.
Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins…
One of the Popes Wrote an Erotic Book
The following is the second chapter from my book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.
For more on me: go to The Memory Hole.
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Before he was Pope Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was a poet, scholar, diplomat, and rakehell. And an author. In fact, he wrote a bestseller. People in fifteenth-century Europe couldn’t get enough of his Latin novella Historia de duobus amantibus. An article in a scholarly publication on literature claims that Historia “was undoubtedly one of the most read stories of the whole Renaissance.” The Oxford edition gives a Cliff Notes version of the storyline: “The Goodli History tells of the illicit love of Euralius, a high official in the retinue of the [German] Emperor Sigismund, and Lucres, a married lady from Siena [Italy].”
It was probably written in 1444, but the earliest known printing is from Antwerp in 1488. By the turn of the century, 37 editions…
Beware the ‘Flying Toblerones’: Reports of Scottish UFOs Released
The BBC reports:
Reports of “flying Toblerones” and objects travelling at 1,100 mph across the Scottish sky have been released by the Ministry of Defence. The files detail how unidentified objects have been witnessed flying over a range of locations across Scotland.Among them were one from a senior air traffic controller at Prestwick Airport who reported seeing a fast-moving UFO on the airport radar.
While four fishermen spotted a flat, shiny object hovering off the coast. The Scottish accounts are among the thousands of reports made of close encounters with UFOs across the UK which have been released in a joint project between the MoD and the National Archives.
For five years the people both you and I represent have witnessed a phenomenon in the area that has been left unexplained The Prestwick airport incident in February 1999 led to an extensive investigation by RAF air defence staff who impounded radar tapes from a…
‘Family Guy’ Actress with Down Syndrome Tells Sarah Palin to Lighten Up
Following up on this this story, I am wondering what the disinfo.com audience thinks of this:
Italian TV Chef Recommends ‘Cat Stew’
John Hooper writes in the Guardian:
Among other things, Giuseppe “Beppe” Bigazzi is known for his prize-winning cookbook La cucina semplice dei sapori d’Italia (”The simple cuisine of the flavours of Italy”). But as of this week, the flavour with which the TV gastronome is likely to be most closely associated is that of stewed cat.
Bigazzi is familiar to millions of viewers of the publicly-owned RAI network as the white-haired co-presenter of a popular pre-lunchtime programme, La prova del cuoco (”The proof of the cook”). But today he was experiencing his first day without television commitments in 10 years after being axed for expressing his enthusiasm for the flesh of felines.
His remarks came after mentioning how, in the desperate conditions of post-war Italy, some people had taken to boiling stray mogs.
U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion
Via the Onion:
WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.
Calling it “basically no more than five rectangular strips of paper,” Fed chairman Ben Bernanke illustrates how much “$200″ is actually worth.
What began as a routine report before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday ended with Bernanke passionately disavowing the entire concept of currency, and negating in an instant the very foundation of the world’s largest economy.
“Though raising interest rates is unlikely at the moment, the Fed will of course act appropriately if we … if we …” said Bernanke, who then paused for a moment, looked down at his prepared statement, and shook his head in utter disbelief. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. None of this — this so-called ‘money’ — really matters…
