Archive for March, 2010
Religious Fanatics Threaten Atheist Philip Pullman With Death
Let’s hope the unhinged religious fanatics targeting Philip Pullman manage to propel him to even greater heights of fame and sales success. From the Times:
The novelist Philip Pullman has been threatened by religious zealots over his new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.
He has received scores of letters condemning him to “eternal hell” or “damnation by fire” and accusing him of blasphemy.
“Many refer to the title itself, for which there is clearly a passionate objection from some out there,” said Pullman.
Published next week, the book is written in the form of a gospel. It says that a man called Jesus lived 2,000 years ago but that Christ, as the son of God, was the invention of the disciple Paul.
“The letter writers essentially say that I am a wicked man, who deserves to be punished in hell,” said Pullman. “Luckily it’s not in their power to do anything…
Final Crazy Tea-Bagger Health Care Protests In Washington
Shortly before the passing of Congress’s health care reform bill, New Left Media did some final hilarious street interviews with tea baggers who had descended on Washington to protest. I’m curious to see what issue they turn their interest and astute political analysis towards next.
An Ominous Drilling Sign for the Truth
The year is 2010 and to anyone not in denial, the industrialized nations have entered the greatest calamity the world has ever known:
- Iceland is history.
- Greece’s economy, much like the ancient Parthenon, is in ruin.
- 46 states could face bankruptcy in the United States.
So then, why is President Obama going back on his word and drilling holes in the earth?
The Interior Department under Barack Obama offered for sale more acres of dry-land drilling on public lands than the Bush Administration had at the same point in 2008.
An economy in a state of rigor mortis doesn’t need oil to lubricate an engine that blew up on October 29, 2008, and our way of life won’t come back if the oil industry creates a handful of jobs or we reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Drill, Drill, Drill didn’t make environmental sense in 1973 or 2008
In 1973, America’s solution to the Arab oil embargo and long gas lines…
National Geographic Puts LSD Under The Microscope
That's enough acid to send an army insane!
(Via Sitting Now), National Geographic’s Explorer series examines the myths and effects of LSD:
LSD’s inventor Albert Hofmann called it “medicine for the soul.” The Beatles wrote songs about it. Secret military mind control experiments exploited its hallucinogenic powers.
Outlawed in 1966, LSD became a street drug and developed a reputation as the dangerous toy of the counterculture, capable of inspiring either moments of genius, or a descent into madness.
Now science is taking a fresh look at LSD, including the first human trials in over 35 years. Using enhanced brain imaging, non-hallucinogenic versions of the drug and information from an underground network of test subjects who suffer from an agonizing condition for which there is no cure, researchers are finding that this “trippy” drug could become the pharmaceutical of the future.
Can it enhance our brain power, expand our creativity and cure disease? To find out, Explorer puts LSD…
Health Reform 3.0: What’s in the Health Care Reform Bill’s Final Draft.
With all the celebrating and bellyaching I am hearing on the interwebs today, I figured it might be good to post a story about what was actually in the health care reform bill. This article was published three days ago, but as far as I can tell, the bill outlined in this article is what passed last night. Even with a big tax credit that would cover the premium, I’m not sure if I like the government telling me that I have to buy insurance. However, it would appear that this will help a lot of people who are less fortunate than myself. Is it worth the trade? Your comments are welcomed.
From Slate:
A friend of mine wrote the original script for a Hollywood movie I prefer not to name. The script was full of wonderful stuff, but the director gave it to another writer who crapped it up. So far, a familiar story. What happened next, though, was a little unusual. The director recognized the error of his ways—not completely enough to return to the original version, but enough to get my friend to put some of his wonderful stuff back in. The movie, although no masterpiece, ended up being a huge hit.
This is more or less the pattern health care reform has followed. The House passed a bill full of wonderful stuff, the Senate crapped it up (mainly by tossing out the public option), and now the House, with a strong assist from the Obama White House, has restored some of the House’s wonderful stuff (though not, alas, the public option, whose inclusion in this round would doom the bill—not necessarily in the Senate, ironically enough, but in the House, where the Democratic leadership is still short a half-dozen or so votes). What we’re left with falls short of what health care reform could have been—it’s no masterpiece—but it’s better than it almost was, and it lays a workable and long-overdue foundation for health policy in the United States that, I predict, will eventually win support even from the Republican Party. In spite of the dark threats we’ve been hearing. (Fred Barnes: “The Health Care Wars Are Only Beginning.” Booga-booga!) Assuming the damn thing passes.
Political Activists Call for Inquiry after Revelations about Undercover Police
From the Guardian:
Protest groups that were targeted by infiltrators plan legal action to obtain access to police files after disclosures by Officer A.
Political activists have reacted with anger to revelations in last week’s Observer that their organisations were infiltrated by an elite undercover unit of the Metropolitan police.
Members of one of the groups demanded a public inquiry after the Observer disclosed that a former member of Special Branch, known as Officer A, had infiltrated far-left organisations in the mid-1990s to gather intelligence about potentially violent demonstrators. He was regularly involved in brutal confrontations with uniformed police officers and activists from the extreme right. On numerous occasions he engaged in violent acts to maintain his cover.
Many activists suspected they were being infiltrated by the state at the time, but it is only now that their suspicions have been confirmed. One target of Officer A, a former student union leader who has…
New Senate Bill Reduces Penalties For Crack Cocaine
Photo: Oaktown Crack Comics (GNU)
With all the fuss over health care dominating media coverage of what’s going down in the United States Congress, I missed this story about a Senate bill that would reduce criminal penalties for crack possession. Curious timing actually – the endless recession is causing an upswing in hard drug use where I live and I assume elsewhere, but it’s a step in the right direction I think (you? let us know in the comments section). From Big Think::
The Senate just passed a bill drastically reducing the penalty for possessing crack cocaine. The bill would increase the amount of crack requiring a five-year mandatory minimum sentence from 5 grams to 28 grams. The bill was approved unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee and finally passed this week with a voice vote. According to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) it is the first time since 1970 that Congress has…
Space Colonies And Robots For Everyone
Josh Hall, the chief scientist at Nanorex (and a science author) predicts nanotech could grow “as rapidly as the Internet and cell phone use has over the past couple of decades.” And then he makes some remarkable predictions…
- Robots with human mental capabilities and virtually any physical capabilities…would rapidly become affordable for everyone.
- Nanofactories, powerful enough “to kick the entire physical economy over into a Moore’s Law-like growth mode, eradicating hunger and poverty in a decade or two.”
- Ocean and space colonization, since nanotech could provide “The modifications to the standard human body necessary to thrive in space.”
He concludes that all of these “require more scientific knowledge than we have now, but not more than the current rate of scientific progress human scientists are likely to produce in the next few decades,” predicting nanotech could grow “as rapidly as the Internet and cell phone use has over the past couple of decades.”…
9/11 Becomes A Children’s Picture Book
Did you know there’s children’s picture books about the holocaust, the Los Angeles riots, and the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center? (Plus one about a court jester in a cancer ward — with a foreward written by Maurice Sendak!)
This list of “The Most Depressing Children’s Picture Books Ever Written” even includes one that Jane Goodall wrote about a baby monkey whose parents are both killed by hunters!
When Twitter Can Make You A Jailbird
RICHARD LARDNER writes on the AP via Yahoo News
Maxi Sopo was having so much fun “living in paradise” in Mexico that he posted about it on Facebook so all his friends could follow his adventures. Others were watching, too: A federal prosecutor in Seattle, where Sopo was wanted on bank fraud charges.
Tracking Sopo through his public “friends” list, the prosecutor found his address and had Mexican authorities arrest him. Instead of sipping pina coladas, Sopo is awaiting extradition to the U.S.
Sopo learned the hard way: The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, too.
Law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, even going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that surfaced in a lawsuit.
The document shows that U.S. agents are logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with…
Mainstream Media Collectively Forgets Anniversary of the Start of the Iraq War
Glynnis MacNicol writes on Mediaite:
Things I have gleaned from my Twitter feed [on March 20th]: It is the second anniversary of the death of Arthur C. Clarke. Things that are noticeably absent: Any mention that today is the 7th anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq.
But let’s forget Twitter for a second — though it’s a great measure of where the hive mind is focused — and turn to some more “reliable” news sources. There’s not a single op-ed in the New York Times today to mark the anniversary, or pontificate on where it all went wrong (update: there is a photo slideshow from this weekend’s Magazine). Nor the Wall St. Journal to tell us what went right. Nothing in the Washington Post either. Nor the LA Times. I can’t even find a single link on Drudge. Perhaps even more shocking is that I can’t find anything on Andrew Sullivan.
It’s almost as though where the media is concerned the Iraq War didn’t happen.
Well, Robert Greenwald did not forget: Iraq: Thousands Dead, $747.3 Billion Spent And Not Any Safer
Researchers Turn Mosquitoes Into Flying Vaccinators
Thanks scientists for taking mosquitoes from an “annoying” level to now a plot line for a super-villain. Martin Enserink writes on ScienceNOW:
Here’s a study to file under “unworkable but very cool.” A group of Japanese researchers has developed a mosquito that spreads vaccine instead of disease. Even the researchers admit, however, that regulatory and ethical problems will prevent the critters from ever taking wing — at least for the delivery of human vaccines.
Scientists have dreamed up various ways to tinker with insects’ DNA to fight disease. One option is to create strains of mosquitoes that are resistant to infections with parasites or viruses, or that are unable to pass the pathogens on to humans. These would somehow have to replace the natural, disease-bearing mosquitoes, which is a tall order. Another strategy closer to becoming reality is to release transgenic mosquitoes that, when they mate with wild-type counterparts, don’t produce viable…
TV Presenter Gets Death Sentence for ‘Sorcery’
From CNN World:
Amnesty International is calling on Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah to stop the execution of a Lebanese man sentenced to death for “sorcery.”In a statement released Thursday, the international rights group condemned the verdict and demanded the immediate release of Ali Hussain Sibat, former host of a popular call-in show that aired on Sheherazade, a Beirut based satellite TV channel.
According to his lawyer, Sibat, who is 48 and has five children, would predict the future on his show and give out advice to his audience.
The attorney, May El Khansa, who is in Lebanon, tells CNN her client was arrested by Saudi Arabia’s religious police (known as the Mutawa’een) and charged with sorcery while visiting the country in May 2008. Sibat was in Saudi Arabia to perform the Islamic religious pilgrimage known as Umra.
[Read more at CNN World]
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
From Newsweek:
Six billion dollars later, the Afghan National Police can’t begin to do their jobs right—never mind relieve American forces.
Mohammad Moqim watches in despair as his men struggle with their AK-47 automatic rifles, doing their best to hit man-size targets 50 meters away. A few of the police trainees lying prone in the mud are decent shots, but the rest shoot clumsily, and fumble as they try to reload their weapons. The Afghan National Police (ANP) captain sighs as he dismisses one group of trainees and orders 25 more to take their places on the firing line. “We are still at zero,” says Captain Moqim, 35, an eight-year veteran of the force. “They don’t listen, are undisciplined, and will never be real policemen.”
Poor marksmanship is the least of it. Worse, crooked Afghan cops supply much of the ammunition used by the Taliban, according to Saleh Mohammed, an insurgent commander in…
Houston Bus Driver Runs Red Light Into Train, Asks Right Afterward: “Was That Light Green?”
KTRK-TV Houston reports that future Darwin Award nominee, bus driver Debra Harrison, not only ran a red light right into a train … but right afterward said to the bus passengers, “was that light green?”
Nineteen people were hurt, and Harrison has been involved in five accidents in the last three years according to KTRK-TV Houston. Below is the raw footage of the “accident” below from the AP:
Your Life Will Some Day End; ACTA Will Live On
From Ars Technica:
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) isn’t just another secret treaty—it’s a way of life. If ACTA passes in anything like its current form, it will create an entirely new international secretariat to administer and extend the agreement.
Knowledge Ecology International got its hands on more of the leaked ACTA text this week, including a chapter on “Institutional Arrangements” that has not leaked before. The chapter makes clear that ACTA will be far more than a standard trade agreement; it appears to be nothing less than an attempt to make a new international institution that will handle some of the duties of groups like the WTO and WIPO.
Why bother? Well, from the perspective of countries like the US, the existing institutions have problems. For one, they feature a huge number of nations, some of whom have blocked some of the anti-counterfeiting provisions desired by the US and others. Call this…
The Health Care Industry Apocalypse In ‘Repo Men’
Annalee Newitz reviews Repo Men on io9.com:
With health care a source of fierce debate in America, a movie like Repo Men was bound to be made. A bloody satire of the marriage between medicine and capitalism, it’s about repo men who collect on overdue artificial organs.
A cult musical about this same topic, called Repo! The Genetic Opera, came out last year, though Repo Men itself was based on a novel called The Repossession Mambo. The idea of scary semi-serial killers who kill to repossess mechanical organs seems to be in the air. Indeed, one of the best parts of Repo Men is the way it captures the sentiments of millions of people who feel dicked over by hospitals and medical insurance companies right now. But the movie’s strength is also its problem: Evil medical corporations are a pretty easy target, and Repo Men gives us a black-and-white view of a problem that is in reality all shades of gray.
The World’s Only Immortal Animal
Bryan Nelson of the Mother Nature Network writes via Yahoo Green:
The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish may be the only animal in the world to have truly discovered the fountain of youth.
Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scientists say the hydrozoan jellyfish is the only known animal that can repeatedly turn back the hands of time and revert to its polyp state (its first stage of life).
The key lies in a process called transdifferentiation, where one type of cell is transformed into another type of cell. Some animals can undergo limited transdifferentiation and regenerate organs, such as salamanders, which can regrow limbs. Turritopsi nutricula, on the other hand, can regenerate its entire body over and over again. Researchers are studying the jellyfish to discover how it is able…
How To Annoy Glenn Beck In Five Minutes Or Less
Glenn Beck at CPAC 2010. Photo: Gage Skidmore CC
Thank you Karl Frisch – who doesn’t want to annoy Glenn Beck without actually devoting too much time to doing so? He writes in Media Matters:
Want to annoy Fox News’ Glenn Beck in five minutes or less while simultaneously making sure your community gets its fair share of federal money? Fill out and return the 2010 U.S. Census questionnaire when it arrives in your mailbox.
Few other issues seem to whip media conservatives into a frenzy of misinformation and half-baked conspiracy theories like the decennial count of Americans.
You see, for the world of “conservative journalism,” the census is a manifestation of everything they fear. Put yourself in their shoes: Obama’s administration is hell-bent on imposing a socialist-fascist-communist-totalitarian-Marxist police state, and now he’s sending us all mail! Even worse, Obama’s thugs may show up at your door to get a more accurate count.
Why wait for the third installment of the…
