Archive for April, 2010
Whose Idea Was This? Testing Tasers On Meth-Head Sheep
You definitely can’t make this stuff up. Come on PETA, forget about the rich bitches in fur coats, get these sheep into rehab and away from the psycho scientists who dreamed up this “experiment,” reported at POPSCI:
Cocaine is a hell of a drug, but getting shocked with a Taser while riding high on methamphetamines probably beats any white-knuckled cocaine experience hands down. And that’s exactly what happened to some lucky sheep in a new study that tested the effects of Tasers on meth-addled targets, funded in part by Taser International.
There’s at least some scientific reasoning behind all the apparent madness. Growing abuse of methamphetamines has led to arrest-related deaths in situations where law enforcement officers used their Tasers on drug-intoxicated suspects. The latest study was designed to test whether electronic control devices (e.g. Tasers) can lead to dangerous cardiac responses in meth-intoxicated humans, with sheep standing in for people.
The less-lethal…
TNA Transportation Neutralization Authority: Mobile Body Scanners Hit The Streets!
We Are Change Atlanta hits the streets with their entry into the infowars.com Naked Body Scanner Contest! Please watch, rate, and share!
Be The Change! -NOW
How To Use Twitter To Predict The Future
Researchers Sitaram Asur and Bernardo A. Huberman from HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, have been using Twitter to predict the performance of Hollywood movies at the box office and believe that they can use social media to successfully predict far more:
… this method can be extended to a large panoply of topics, ranging from the future rating of products to agenda setting and election outcomes. At a deeper level, this work shows how social media expresses a collective wisdom which, when properly tapped, can yield an extremely powerful and accurate indicator of future outcomes.
You can download a PDF of their paper here. This is the abstract:
In recent years, social media has become ubiquitous and important for social networking and content sharing. And yet, the content that is generated from these websites remains largely untapped. In this paper, we demonstrate how social media content can be used to predict real-world…
The Real-Life Time Lords
Doctor Who: Ultimate Time Lord
All fans of British sci-fi series Doctor Who are familiar with Time Lords, but as happens so often, they are now making the jump from science fiction to science fact, as reported in New Scientist:
Time Lords walk among us. Two per cent of readers may be surprised to discover that they are members of an elite group with the power to perceive the geography of time.
Sci-fi fans – Anglophile ones, at least – know that the coolest aliens in the universe are Time Lords: time-travelling humanoids with the ability to understand and perceive events throughout time and space.
Now it seems that people with a newly described condition have a similar, albeit lesser ability: they experience time as a spatial construct.
Synaesthesia is the condition in which the senses are mixed, so that a sound or a number has a colour, for example. In one version, the sense of touch…
Russian Military is Full of Hot Air
via mailonline
They wouldn’t be much good in a dogfight. In fact, they wouldn’t be much good in a stiff breeze.
But despite their somewhat comical appearance, these inflatable warplanes and tanks serve a vital role in the Russian military.
Seen from even a short distance, they are indistinguishable from the real thing – meaning they can be effectively used to confuse and distract an enemy.
These inflatables are made by the Russian manufacturer Rusbal.
The company was approached by the Russian defence ministry to supply full-scale decoys to protect the true capabilities of their strategic installations from being seen by surveillance satellites.
Weighing around 220lb (100kg), the decoys can easily be transported and installed by small teams of soldiers in minutes.
They imitate the heat signature of combat units, fooling enemy infra-red detectors. And they even stay intact after suffering minor damage from bullets or explosions.
Demand from other nations has been so strong that Rusbal is now offering imitations of Western military equipment as well as Russian.
It is not the first time armies have used decoys to fool their enemies. Such tactics were used during the Cold War and extensively in the Second World War.
Professors Outsource Grading Of Papers To India
Outsourcing enters yet another realm of American life: college professors have begun using Virtual-TA, a service in which students’ essays are graded by workers in India. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:
Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., took over. The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task—and even, the company says, to do it better than TA’s can.
The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail.
Full story at the Chronicle of Higher Education
Pedobear Appears On The Pope’s Billboards
The Times of Malta reports that billboards advertising the Pope’s visit to the Mediterranean nation were defaced with “images of what looks like a panda. It is not clear why the ‘artist’ in question juxtaposed the bears with the Pope.” Can Pedobear be the Vatican’s new mascot?
Promoting Plunder
My efforts to promote my new film PLUNDER are underway with a little help from our Globalvision team and the good folks at Disinformation, who have managed to get it on iTunes and various cable TV VOD systems, as well as DVD. I was happy to see that the Wall Street Journal ran a shorter version of their story saying the film is “not just for Michael Moore fans” on their Deal Blog in the weekend edition of the newspaper. Here are some of the comments on the WSJ blog:
shaun wrote:
Why hasn’t anyone been successfully prosecuted for committing the crime Schechter speaks of? Because it’s too big. It’s too big of a problem for those culpable and those currently in charge (Wall Street and Washington) to deal with. Officials would much rather make the crisis a blip in our economic history, rather than a decade-defining moment (e.g. Depression of the 1930s)–this from Lawrence…
British Newspaper Played Key Role In Demise Of Copenhagen Climate Conference
Was this responsible behavior by the Guardian? Comments welcome below!
The Copenhagen conference was destroyed from the start by the leak of the “Danish draft” negotiating text to The Guardian, the Indian environment minister said this weekend in a warning that the breakdown of international trust would continue to undermine climate talks this year.
In an interview with The Guardian ahead of a new round of meetings, Jairam Ramesh shed new light on last December’s fraught summit and highlighted the continuing gulf between rich nations and the Basic block of emerging economies — Brazil, South Africa, India and China.
Dismissing Britain’s attempt to blame China for the disappointment of Copenhagen, the Indian minister said the outcome was determined by a failed “ambush”, targeted at the leaders of emerging economies, by the host nation Denmark. This attempted to switch a new negotiating text for the existing UN texts.
“The Danish draft was circulated at the beginning of…
From ‘Avatar’ To The Amazon: James Cameron To The Rescue
Alexei Barrionuevo writes for the New York Times:
VOLTA GRANDE DO XINGU, Brazil — They came from the far reaches of the Amazon, traveling in small boats and canoes for up to three days to discuss their fate. James Cameron, the Hollywood titan, stood before them with orange warrior streaks painted on his face, comparing the threats on their lands to a snake eating its prey.
“The snake kills by squeezing very slowly,” Mr. Cameron said to more than 70 indigenous people, some holding spears and bows and arrows, under a tree here along the Xingu River. “This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be,” he added.
As if to underscore the point, seconds later a poisonous green snake fell out of a tree, just feet from where Mr. Cameron’s wife sat on a log. Screams rang out. Villagers scattered.…
Did Corruption Bring The World Cup To Africa?
FIFA, the soccer world’s governing body, has been accused of various corrupt practices, as has its controversial president, Sepp Blatter, who engineered the selection of South Africa for the 2010 edition of the event, which takes place every four years, like the Olympics. Rumors of bribery amongst African nations swirled at the time of Blatter’s election as FIFA president. The upcoming disinformation® documentary World Cup Soccer in Africa: Who Really Wins? also questions FIFA’s motives and whether the event will really benefit Africa. Now William Watts asks some tough questions of FIFA, at Marketwatch:
It may carry a lower profile than the International Olympic Committee, another controversial, Swiss-based international sports body. And to many Americans, Fifa, which stands for Federation Internationale de Football Association, means nothing alongside the likes of the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball.
But the overseer of international soccer captained by Joseph “Sepp” Blatter has repeatedly shaken off allegations of corruption and regional in-fighting as well as a global recession to become arguably the most powerful sports organization on the planet.
It’s all down to the World Cup — the quadrennial extravaganza that crowns the world’s soccer champion and is rivaled only by the Olympics as the most watched sporting event around the globe.
Blatter last month was able to brag that Fifa’s annual 2009 revenues passed the $1 billion level for the first time in its history, leaving the organization with a $196 million surplus…
Google Unleashes Make-Your-Own Video Tool
Jason Kincaid reveals the details, at TechCrunch:
Remember Google’s Hell-froze-over, critically acclaimed Super Bowl ad Parisian Love? The one that managed to use a series of basic search queries to tell a touching love story? Now you’ve got a chance to tell a story of your own.
Some time in the last few days Google launched a new feature called the “Search Stories Video Creator“. And damn if it isn’t fun. The new feature prompts you to input up to seven search queries spread across Google’s search features (including Images, Maps, and standard web search), choose a song, and it generates a video in the same style as Google’s other Search Stories.
The whole process only takes a few minutes (the tool automatically uploads your video to YouTube when you’re ready). And while there are plenty of parodies already out there, we can expect a whole lot more of them to pop up in…
U.S. Loosens Rules On Experimenting With Psychedelics
For many years the United States government has classified more or less all psychoactive drugs, many of them plants sacred to indigenous peoples around the world, with so-called “hard” drugs, making it extremely difficult for researchers to study their mental health benefits. Graham Hancock has written on this topic extensively, including in his essay “The War on Consciousness” included in the disinformation® anthology You Are STILL Being Lied To, and that issue will be at the heart of his first novel, Entangled, which will be published in the fall. Now the New York Times is reporting that policy may be changing:
As a retired clinical psychologist, Clark Martin was well acquainted with traditional treatments for depression, but his own case seemed untreatable as he struggled through chemotherapy and other grueling regimens for kidney cancer. Counseling seemed futile to him. So did the antidepressant pills he tried.
Nothing had any lasting effect until, at the age of 65, he had his first psychedelic experience. He left his home in Vancouver, Wash., to take part in an experiment at Johns Hopkins medical school involving psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient found in certain mushrooms.
Scientists are taking a new look at hallucinogens, which became taboo among regulators after enthusiasts like Timothy Leary promoted them in the 1960s with the slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Now, using rigorous protocols and safeguards, scientists have won permission to study once again the drugs’ potential for treating mental problems and illuminating the nature of consciousness…
Declassified Cable Reveals Kissinger Blocked US Protest on Condor Assassinations
From TPR:
A controversy has simmered for some years over the role of the United States, and particularly of its then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in the actions surrounding Operation Condor. Condor was an assassination and torture plan implemented by a number of South American countries, braintrusted by Pinochet’s Chile.
A new FOIA release, courtesy of the National Security Archive, shows that only five days before former high-ranking Allende official, Orlando Letelier, and his U.S. assistant, Ronnie Moffit, were assassinated by Chile’s notorious DINA secret service in Washington, DC, a September 16, 1976 State Department cable from Henry Kissinger told his assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, Harry Shlaudeman, to cancel a formal demarche to the Uruguayan government, protesting the assassinations and other activities of Operation Condor. The cable was followed four days later by instructions from Shlaudeman to numerous South American U.S. embassies to forego any protests regarding Condor policy, offering…
Ron Paul Chastises at GOP Conference: Conservatives ‘Like the Empire’
From The Raw Story:
Texas Rep. Ron Paul proved once again Saturday that his politics continue to divide the Republican Party.He was met with both disapproval and applause during the Southern Republican Leadership Conference for describing conservatives as hypocritical when they call for a return to Constitutional values while supporting foreign wars.
The conservatives and the liberals, they both like to spend. Conservatives spend money on different things. They like embassies, and they like occupation. They like the empire. They like to be in 135 countries and 700 bases.
Don’t you think it’s rather conservative to say, ‘Oh it’s good to follow the Constitution. Oh, except for war. Let the President go to war anytime they want.’ We can do better with peace than with war.
Saturn’s Strange Hexagon Recreated in the Lab
From Science Now:
Saturn boasts one of the solar system’s most geometrical features: a giant hexagon encircling its north pole. Though not as famous as Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, Saturn’s Hexagon is equally mysterious. Now researchers have recreated this formation in the lab using little more than water and a spinning table—an important first step, experts say, in finally deciphering this cosmic mystery.
Saturn’s striped appearance comes from jet streams that fly east to west through its atmosphere at different latitudes. Most jets form circular bands, but the Voyager spacecraft snapped pictures of an enormous hexagonally shaped one (each side rivals Earth’s diameter) when it passed over the planet’s north pole in 1988. Stumped scientists first attributed the shape to a huge, stormlike vortex along one of the hexagon’s sides, which Voyager also spotted during its journey. Astronomers believed this gyre was altering the jet stream’s course, much in the same way…
NYC’s Own Superheroes
From the New York Post:
With great costumes comes great responsibility.
“Kick-Ass,” an action movie opening this week, spins a tale of average Joes becoming masked crime fighters, but New York has been home to real-life caped crusaders for years.
Gotham’s legion of real-life superheroes includes a leather-clad martial-arts expert who battles drug dealers, a masked religious hipster who feeds the homeless and an engaged pair of relationship counselors, Arjuna Ladino, 42, and Shanti Owen, 50, who don star-spangled spandex as the “Transformational Warriors” to spread the power of love.
“We are just people who really care and try to go out and make a difference,” says Chris Pollak, 25, whose alter ego, “Dark Guardian,” strikes fear in the hearts of drug peddlers in Washington Square Park. “The idea is to be this drastic example of making change in your community.”
The Staten Islander has been patrolling city streets for the last seven years, frequently…
Afghan Farmers Reap Cannabis Harvest Worth £61m
From the Independent:
Afghanistan, already the world’s top opium supplier, is now the world’s biggest producer of cannabis, according to United Nations drug experts.
There is large-scale cultivation of the drug in half of the country, resulting in 3,500 tons of hashish worth an estimated £61m annually, according to the first assessment of cannabis in Afghanistan by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. It warns that the threat from the drug needs to be dealt with to deny the Taliban the millions they make in protection taxes paid by farmers and drug smugglers.
The focus on opium has resulted in cannabis being overlooked, according to Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of UNODC. “A concentration of cultivation in the southern part of Afghanistan shows that the Taliban and those insurgents that control the southern parts of the country are not only funding themselves by trafficking opium but also by trafficking cannabis. It’s the same area.”
Richard Dawkins: I Will Arrest Pope Benedict XVI
From the Times Online:
Richard Dawkins, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.
Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.
The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.
The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases.
Benedict will be in Britain between…
