Archive for May, 2010
Virtual Reality Veteran FSK1138 Talks About His New Low-Tech Lifestyle
Via Technoccult:
You say now use the Internet for less than 3 hours a week and do not own a TV, phone, or stove. What brought you to the point that you decided you had to unplug like that?
I lived in Guyana for 4 years. You can have days when you have no power, and I survived. I feel that people think that the Internet will always be there. I feel it will not and the day is coming soon. I have seen the Internet change over the years – it has changed alot. The day is coming, I feel, that the can not remain a free utility.
Life really is not hard without technology if you learn to live without it. But if you’re addicted – what then?
When did you decide to cut back your use of technology?
When I realized it was taking up so much of my time – 2007…
Moonshine Is Back In A Big Way
Apparently not just because we’re in a never-ending crisis, either. Time reports on why Moonshine is the trendiest bottle on the shelf:
“They call it that old mountain dew, and thems that refuse it are few…” So goes the old song, and it gets truer every month. Yes, the distilled spirit known as moonshine, white lightning, white dog, or simply white whisky is the liquor of the moment, bringing together whiskey geeks, home distillers, and high-end mixologists, all of whom find in the formerly clandestine rotgut a new means of expression, both for their palates and their politics.
Why is moonshine making a comeback? For the same reason absinthe did a few years ago. Because it’s delicious. Because it’s illegal. And because it’s cool. Moonshine, both then and now, is whiskey as it comes out of the still: no oak barrels, no caramel color, no aging. It’s just straight liquor from fermented corn or…
Kevin Costner Has a Machine that Turns Oil Into Water (Video)
Is BP listening? Reports WGNO ABC26 News:
Kevin Costner is in town hoping star power and his oil spill clean-up machine will help in the gulf.
It promises to help clean up the oil spill. And it’s got some big backing. “Years before I got involved oil spills would come and, I would wonder why we couldn’t clean this up,” says Actor Kevin Costner. He’s invested in a company that invented a processing machine that turns oil into water. “It’s robust. Works at the speed that someone talked about, 200,000 gallons a minute. But it takes 99% of the oil.”
Using a small prototype of the machine, Costner demonstrated how it works for a group of stressed parish officials today. “We’ll take this any day over the black oil that’s covering south Plaquemines right now,” says Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser.
The larger centrifuge model can collect up to 3,000 gallons of oil a day and right now, 31 are available. The response: There are no better options. “I think it’s a no-brainer to try it,” says Jefferson Parish Councilman John Young. Nungesser says, “I think we need to put it to work.” And St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro says, “Let’s get this out there. See what it can do.”
U.S. Drug Czar Admits Drug War Has Failed
The unusual thing about this story is that it’s being carried by a news heavyweight, the Associated Press, and it covers a surprising amount of ground in covering the issues:
After 40 years, the United States’ war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.
Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn’t worked.
“In the grand scheme, it has not been successful,” Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. “Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified.”
This week President Obama promised to “reduce drug use and the great damage it causes” with a new national policy that he said treats drug use more as a public health issue and focuses on prevention and treatment.
Nevertheless, his administration has increased spending on interdiction and law enforcement to record levels…
Dio: The Last In Line
Nick Pell from Red Star Times:
While most people think that RJD came from the belfry of a castle in Anglia, his origins were far more mundane. He was born Ronald James Padavona in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a small mill / port city on the New Hampshire sea coast where I once lived. Soon after his family moved to the middle-of-nowhere in New York. It was here that he changed his name to “Dio” (after a mafia kingpin) and cut his teeth in the world of rock, playing on a series of obscure rockabilly singles.
I suspect that many will be surprised at the deep outpouring of grief surrounding the untimely passing of Ronnie James Dio. He is not the famous figure that Ozzy Osbourne is. However, Ronnie James Dio did something no other singer in metal or rock did quite as well as he did. Dio brought mythological significance and a…
Blobfish In Danger Of Extinction
Oh no! How was it possible to miss this news? Nature’s saddest-looking animal, the blobfish, is in danger of going extinct due to over-fishing. I would sacrifice a hundred rare white timberwolves to save a single blobfish. The Telegraph reported:
Scientists fear the blobfish, which can grow up to 12 inches, is in danger of being wiped out by over-fishing in its south eastern Australian habitat.
The fish, which lives at depths of up to 800m, is rarely seen by humans but it lives at the same depths as other ocean organisms, such as crabs and lobsters and other edible sea creatures.
As a result the fish, which is inedible, is being dragged up with other catches by trawler fishermen.
The Worst-Case Global Warming Scenario? Much Of Earth Uninhabitable In 100 Years
Blog Early Warning discusses a new study, from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, laying out the most severe of climate change possibilities. Using a figure called “wet bulb temperature,” it assigns 1 in 20 odds to a doomsday situation in which a combination of higher temperature and oppressive humidity could make the majority of Earth unfit for human life a century from now:
If you were outside for an extended period during the hottest days of the year, even in the shade with wet clothing, you would die.To give you a feeling for the likely uninhabitable regions…it includes most of the eastern US, much of inland Brazil and Latin America, tropical Africa, pretty much all of India, portions of northern China, and most of Australia.
Neil Gaiman: If You Read This Book The World Will End
Source: The Hypothetical Library. (C) 2010 Charles Orr
Such a cool idea: a graphic designer’s site with cover art for imaginary books. Neil Gaiman obviously likes it too as he’s submitted a title to designer Charles Orr, and this is the result:
Mr. Gaiman provided a very different kind of proposal. Here it is as I received it.
“The trouble with imagining a book I would never write is that when I think of it, I think ‘but I could WRITE that…’
So it would have to be a book of books I would never write. A book of ideas I would never have. A book of things I would never do in prose or in fiction. A book of things that should have remained unwritten, fragments and dreams and moments. Secrets too terrible to be learned. Things that would destroy me if I knew them, or hurt my friends. It would contain the secret…
Karl Rove Seizing Control Of GOP
Rolling Stone’s Tom Dickinson says Bush’s former strategist is secretly seizing control of the GOP – and amassing $135 million to destroy the Democrats. Let’s hope this legend’s comeback ends like most do: lots of hype and promises resulting in abject, humiliating failure:
One afternoon in late April, Karl Rove welcomed an elite group of conservative political operatives and moneymen into his home in Washington, D.C. Along with his protégé Ed Gillespie, who succeeded him as George W. Bush’s top political adviser, Rove had gathered together the heavyweights of the GOP’s fundraising network. In attendance were the political director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as well as the leaders of two new megadollar campaign groups loyal to Rove: American Crossroads and the American Action Network. Rove’s plan was straightforward: to seize control of the party from Michael Steele, whose leadership of the Republican National Committee was imploding in the wake…
Novice Level Monster on Fox News Fails to Defeat Atheist
Thanks to BoingBoing for uncovering this clip of a Fox News reporter fighting the culture war:
In this Fox News segment about the recent U.S. District Court decision banning the National Day of Prayer, Dan Barker (author of Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists) handily parries a Fox News announcer’s clumsy blows.
Finally A Plastic That We Can Feel Good About
If this becomes real, maybe we can stop feeling so guilty about all those plastic water bottles. That’s a big ‘if,’ though, so get off the bottle for now… Story from Popular Mechanics:
By year’s end, an Indiana company says it will be making plastic from algae, substituting up to half of the material normally derived from fossil fuels with biomass from the aquatic plants, and selling the product to manufacturers.
As the bioplastics industry surges, a search for alternative feedstocks led Cereplast CEO Frederic Scheer and his colleagues to algae, which he says is close enough to the starches the company already turns into plastics—like corn, wheat and tapioca—to go commercial after just 18 months of R&D. There’s just one hitch: getting enough of the green stuff to make it in quantity. Given a big enough source of algae, Scheer says, “we could have introduced this product probably last year.”
Algae has long…
Facebook CEO: ‘A Ruthless And Untrustworthy Sex Maniac’
Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: Raphaël Labbé (CC)
Aren’t there defamation laws that protect against this kind of depiction? I have no idea if Mark Zuckerberg is worthy of this movie’s claims, but do the producers really know either? From the Times:
Just as he hoped to clean up his image, Mark Zuckerberg, the inventor of Facebook, is to be portrayed in a Hollywood film as a ruthless and untrustworthy sex maniac.
The website and its 400m users have been beset in the past week by rows over changes to its privacy settings.
However, they have nothing on the invasion of privacy facing Zuckerberg in a £40m black comedy called The Social Network, adapted from The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing.
Six years ago Zuckerber created what was to become the internet phenomenon Facebook in a “tidal wave” of grief after being dumped by his girlfriend.
On Friday,…
Mark Of The Beast: Obama’s Latest Monsanto Pick, Elena Kagan
Photo: Doc Searls (CC)
Rady Ananda writes for Thepeoplesvoices.org:
First, we spit out our coffee over President Obama’s appointments of former Monsanto goon Michael Taylor as Food Safety [sic] Czar and ‘biotech governor of the year’ Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture. Then we choked on our grits when he made Monsanto lobbyist, Islam Siddiqui, the US Ag Trade Representative. Now, the real food movement has completely lost its appetite with Obama’s nomination of Monsanto defender, Elena Kagan, to the US Supreme Court.
In December 2009, in her capacity as Solicitor General, Kagan intervened in the first case on which SCOTUS will rule involving genetically modified crops, Monsanto v Geertson Seed. She defended Monsanto’s fight to contaminate the environment with its GM alfalfa, not the American people’s right to safe feed and a protected environment.
The lower court ruled that “contamination of organic and conventional alfalfa crops with the genetically engineered gene has occurred and defendants…
The Financial Crisis Is Back: Get Ready For Contagion
Watch for markets taking a dive tomorrow. Or for governments to heavily interfere to try to prevent plunging stock market indices. It ain’t going to be pretty. From the New York Times:
After a brief respite following the announcement last week of a nearly $1 trillion bailout plan for Europe, fear in the financial markets is building again, this time over worries that the Continent’s biggest banks face strains that will hobble European economies.
In a sign of the depth of the anxiety, the euro fell Friday to its lowest level since the depth of the financial crisis, as investors abandoned the currency as well as stocks in favor of gold and other assets seen as offering more safety. And in an interview published Saturday, the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, warned that Europe was facing “severe tensions” and that the markets were fragile.
Contagion, a loss of confidence that…
Gulf Spill May Far Exceed Official Estimates; 70,000 barrels a day?
Richard Harris writes for NPR:
The amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico may be at least 10 times the size of official estimates, according to an exclusive analysis conducted for NPR.
At NPR’s request, experts examined video that BP released Wednesday. Their findings suggest the BP spill is already far larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil.
BP has said repeatedly that there is no reliable way to measure the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by looking at the oil gushing out of the pipe. But scientists say there are actually many proven techniques for doing just that.
Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.
A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video…
The Virus
Tiny little robots of God adjusting life forms and controlling populations.
Take note on how you feel before and after a cold or flu are you the same you?
I think of the yearly cold and flu season as the viral update.
Many escape this natural cycle in life by getting inoculated.
Postponing death through education, in this case in the form of a weakened virus shot.
Thus bringing up the point of where do we draw the line at working with or against nature?
Viruses come in many forms including thoughts and ideas that are communicated to others.
One of the most well known of this type of virus is “Propaganda” this nasty little bugger
manipulates the masses in many ways, war, genocide, persecution,exploitation, enslavement,
and control of the general population. Fear is the basic fuel for this virus so by removing the fear you can starve the virus.
This can be done through education, by exposing the virus…
Space Nazis Launch Future Sneak Attack Against The World (Video)
And you thought the Nuremberg Trials would end this evil. The good folks at io9.com have been monitoring this Finnish production from the get-go, let us know what’d cha think:
The Black Fridays Meet Paratopia’s Jeremy Vaeni
The Black Fridays Episode 19 — Jeremy Vaeni
Website • iTunes • Direct Download • RSS
The Black Fridays welcome Jeremy Vaeni to the show! As the host of Culture of Contact and the Co-Host of Paratopia, Jeremy has been on the scene for quite a while, and we tap his knowledge-base of the esoteric for information on the state of ufology, the paranormal in general, his experiences and then he gets to turn the microphone on Stacy for an interesting conversation about religion.
We thank Jeremy for his time, and look forward to working with him again in the future! Enjoy…
Jeremy can be found at Paratopia!
Bayou Fisherman: Oil Execs “Should Be Treated Like Terrorists”
Photo: Jason Reed
Jon Bowermaster writes on TakePart:
BARATARIA, Louisiana— It is the perfect blue sky, humidity-free spring day in bayou country that makes you feel like everything should be all right in the world.
The intercoastal waterway leading to the Gulf of Mexico is calm, the canals that host fishing boats behind each neat suburban home reflect the midday sun, and a cool breeze washes away extraneous sounds and smells.
But despite the bucolic day, fisherman Mike Roberts is angry. “Osama bin Laden couldn’t have done a better job of destroying a part of the American economy. This oil spill? It’s like the ultimate act of terrorism. And these guys should be treated like terrorists.”
The guys he’s referring to: BP and Transocean executives, and the Mineral Management Service, the federal agency that was supposed to police the oil companies but appears to have been very cozy with the industry instead.
Read More: TakePart
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