Archive for May, 2010
How To Stop The Economic War Sweeping The World
We are all still stuck in the “big Muddy.” No, not the wars of old or even the oil disaster. The mud I am referring to is more like quicksand and it sucks anyone who wants to look at what happened in the financial crisis deeper and deeper into it.
Soon, you are buried in shifting sea of so-called “exotic financial instruments,” and tranches, derivatives, credit default swaps, naked short-selling, etc and so forth, ad fin item. It’s murkier in there than in the oil-infested waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Stop, my head hurts.
A far simpler explanation, pervasive fraud and financial crime, has been ignored by most of our economic geniuses. As I made my film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time offering a “crime narrative,” I ran up against the denial that greeted my 2006 film In Debt We Trust warning of a meltdown. Then I was called, a “doom and…
Can You Make Your Own Darth Vader Helmet? (Photos)
Vader Helmet by Plasticgod
Laura Sweet writes on if it’s hip, it’s here:
If you’ve never heard of The Vader Project, the idea began in 2005 and the first exhibit took place in 2007. Since then, it has continued annually. Each year, various artists are asked to customize a 1:1 scale authentic prop replica of the actual Darth Vader helmet featured in the STAR WARS films.
This summer, 2010, the following 100 talented artists are participating in the project: Josh Agle (Shag), Troy Alders, Kii Arens, Attaboy, Anthony Ausgang, Axis, Aye Jay, Gary Baseman, Andrew Bell, Tim Biskup, Mark Bodnar, BXH HIKARU, Andrew Brandou, Buff Monster, Mister Cartoon, Chino, Mr. Clement, Robbie Conal, CRASH, Steven Daily, Dalek, Dehara, DGPH, Cam de Leon, Devilrobots, Yoko d’Holbachie, Bob Dob, Tristan Eaton & Azk One — Thunderdog Studios, Marc Ecko, Eelus, Ron English, FERG, David Flores, Brian Flynn — Hybrid Design, Paul Frank, Gargamel, Huck Gee,…
Gulf Coast Oil Spill Nets $270 Million for Transocean
PressTV reports:
The firm that owns the leaking oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico has made a $270 million profit from insurance payouts, despite having caused a massive ecological disaster.
Transocean, the company contracted by BP to drill the well, brought the story to light in a conference call on Monday.
Transocean took out a $560 million insurance policy on its Deepwater Horizon rig, which was greater than the value of the rig itself.
The company has already received a cash payment of $481 million, with the rest due over the next few weeks.
The “accounting gain” arises because the compensation it will be receiving more than covers the $200 million that it has to pay to survivors and their families and for higher insurance costs.
Lamar McKay, the chairman of BP’s US arm, Steve Newman, Transocean’s chief executive, and managers of several other companies involved in the drilling are scheduled to testify in hearings in…
Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets (Video)
Armen Keteyian reports on the CBS Evening News:
At a warehouse in New Jersey, 6,000 used copy machines sit ready to be sold. CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian reports almost every one of them holds a secret.
Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive — like the one on your personal computer — storing an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine.
The Kids in the Hall Invents “Glenn Beck” Before Glenn Beck (Video)
An eerily (and awesomely) prescient sketch from The Kids in the Hall:
Rumble In The Jungle: Activists vs Palm Oil
Photo: Whitebox (CC)
Barry Estabrook for The Atlantic:
Wake up in the morning. Enjoy a warm, soapy shower. Eat a bowl of cereal, perhaps with soy milk. Dab on some lipstick …
Perform any of those mundane tasks and chances are you’ve done your bit to destroy a patch of rainforest somewhere in Indonesia where vast stands of virgin trees have been cut, bulldozed, and burned to clear land for palm oil plantations.
Once used primarily in cosmetics, palm oil, which is free of artery-clogging trans fats, has become the ingredient du jour in processed foods. In the United States, consumption of the stuff has tripled over the past five years. Growing oil palms is now the largest cause of deforestation in Indonesia, contributing to global warming and destroying crucial habitat for the country’s endangered orangutan population, which has fallen by half since the onset of the palm-oil boom.
Early this month, the San Francisco-based…
Criminal Investigation Of Top Wall Street Banks
Seems like Danny Schechter’s call for criminal prosecution of the bankers who ruined so many peoples’ lives with the needless financial crisis is finally getting through. Make sure your voice is heard and let your local politicians know that you want these banksters to do real jail time. Story from the Wall Street Journal:
Federal prosecutors, working with securities regulators, are conducting a preliminary criminal probe into whether several major Wall Street banks misled investors about their roles in mortgage-bond deals, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The banks under early-stage criminal scrutiny—J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG and UBS AG—have also received civil subpoenas from the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a sweeping investigation of banks’ selling and trading of mortgage-related deals, the person says. Under similar preliminary criminal scrutiny are Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, as previously reported by The Wall…
Food Allergies: All In The Mind?
Does anyone over the age of, say, 30 feel as though the amount of people claiming allergies to all kinds of foods has spread like wildfire, whereas when you were a kid hardly anyone had a food allergy? I thought that the proliferation had to be due to environmental changes, particularly various man-made toxins and pollution of our food, water and air, but according to this New York Times story, many of these people aren’t allergic at all:
Many who think they have food allergies actually do not.
A new report, commissioned by the federal government, finds the field is rife with poorly done studies, misdiagnoses and tests that can give misleading results.
The ubiquitous EpiPen, carried everywhere by those with food allergies. Photo: Sean WIlliam (CC)
While there is no doubt that people can be allergic to certain foods, with reproducible responses ranging from a rash to a severe life-threatening reaction, the true incidence…
Making The World Safe For Cancer
Alison Rose Levy, writing for Huffington Post:
When it comes to increasing cancer rates, we’ve done everything right. We couldn’t have done it better if we’d actually planned it.
That’s the takeaway from the President’s Cancer Panel. Legislatively mandated back in 1971, this prestigious panel just issued its 2009 report. Reading it is an eye-opening experience. I’ll synopsize the basic findings here (along with others from other sources) so that if other societies (or other planets) want to replicate our outstanding results in making the world safe for cancer, they can roll up their sleeves and do just what we’ve done:
• For 35 years, pour billions of dollars into vested institutions aiming to self-perpetuate via a perennial “war on cancer” featuring intense and costly treatments, which, according to a GAO report, failed to substantively increase actual survival rates once you factor in reductions in lung cancer deaths thanks to smoking cessation
• Run…
DNA ‘Spiderbot’ Is On The Prowl
Via AFP:
Scientists on Wednesday announced they had created a molecular robot made out of DNA that walks like a spider along a track made out of the chemical code for life.
The achievement, reported in the British journal Nature, is a further step in nanoscale experiments that, one day, may lead to robot armies to clean arteries and fix damaged tissues.
The robot is just four nanometres — four billionths of a metre — in diameter.
Milan Stojanovic of New York’s Columbia University, who led the venture, likens the nanobot to “a four-legged spider.”
The beast moves along a track comprising stitched-together strands of DNA that is essentially a pre-programmed course, in the same way that industrial robots move along an assembly line.
The track exploits one of the basic characteristics of DNA. A double-helix molecule, DNA comprises four chemicals which pair in rungs.
By “unzipping” the DNA, one is left with one side of the…
Can Massive Crowd-Sourcing Predict The Future?
The crowdsourcing process in eight steps. Image: Daren C. Brabham (CC)
Alex Lightman was the CTO for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Renewable Energy Organization. Now he compares the NASA Mission Control room to Caesars Palace Race and Sports Book, and asks whether we can harness the multi-billion dollar sports betting community to predict elections, markets, wars and weather?
A new company is trying to tap millions of users for a massive “crowd-sourced” prediction site inspired by both open source software and sports gambling. “If predictive entertainment ends up with the same ‘S-curve’ growth as the Internet itself, humanity could develop a sort of social superorganism superpower of precognition…” Using complexity to solve complexity, the site allows recorded, ranked predictions to be made millions of times an hour. “The open source model allows for parallel input of multiple approaches, agendas, knowledge banks, and priorities with far more flexibility and speed than traditionally closed…
Sign O’ The Times: Gold Is Now An ATM Choice
The price of gold has been setting new highs in recent days as pretty much every major currency around the world looks shaky. Gold dispensing ATMs may be a gimmick today, but one has to wonder if gold may not be making a comeback as the world’s favorite and most desired currency. Story via AFP/Yahoo News:
There’s no mistaking what’s in this vending machine. The well-heeled in the Gulf can now grab “gold to go” from a hotel lobby in the United Arab Emirates, when the need for a quick ingot strikes.
On Thursday, a day after its inauguration, the shiny machine attracted spectators of many different nationalities who gathered to watch whenever an enthusiast was struck with the urge to splurge on a bar of the precious metal.
Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace Hotel became the first place outside Germany to install “gold to go, the world’s first gold vending machine,” said a…
Utah Uses Eminent Domain to Seize Land of … Uncle Sam
Medical Marijuana isn’t the only issue which has states challenging federal power. ABC News reports:
Photo: Donar Reiskoffer (CC)
Utah is itching for a land fight. A battle with Washington over territorial rights and state sovereignty. It wants to spark a revolt in which Western states attempt to wrest control of federal lands within their borders.
The Beehive State might just get its way, too. In March, Gov. Gary Herbert (R) signed a controversial law authorizing the use of eminent domain to capture some of the millions of acres that the federal government owns here.
The law was tailor-made to provoke a lawsuit, possibly reaching the US Supreme Court, and to inspire other Western states to enact similar legislation.
While it’s unusual for eminent domain to involve the taking of federal lands, this law is a byproduct of many Utahns’ frustrations: The US government owns more than 60 percent of the state, thus dictating whether land…
Supermassive Black Hole Is Hurled Out Of Galaxy
A Hubble Space Telescope image of the galaxy studied by Marianne Heida. The white circle marks the centre of the galaxy and the red circle marks the position of the suspected offset black hole. Image: STScI / NASA
This is shock and awe. Report from BBC News:
A supermassive black hole may have been observed in the process of being hurled from its parent galaxy at high speed.
The finding comes from analysis of data collected by the US Chandra space X-ray observatory. However, there are alternative explanations for the observation.
The work, by an international team of astronomers, has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Normally, each galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its centre. Given that these objects can have masses equivalent to one billion Suns, it takes a special set of conditions to cause this to happen.
High-speed exit
The authors believe this could be the result of…
Blackwater’s Erik Prince Speaks
A leaked recording of secretive Blackwater founder Erik Prince giving a private talk reveals that if it’s up to him, the company’s role in 21st-century history is just beginning. Prince wants to have Blackwater (now Xe) mercenaries embedded in Islamic countries around the globe and leading the war on drugs. The Nation reports:
Despite Prince’s attempts to shield his speeches from public scrutiny, The Nation magazine has obtained an audio recording of a recent, private speech delivered by Prince to a friendly audience. The speech, which Prince attempted to keep from public consumption, provides a stunning glimpse into his views and future plans and reveals details of previously undisclosed activities of Blackwater.
In the speech, Prince proposed that the US government deploy armed private contractors to fight “terrorists” in Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia and Saudi Arabia, specifically to target Iranian influence. He expressed disdain for the Geneva Convention and described Blackwater’s secretive operations at…
Exhausted Noam Chomsky Just Going To Try And Enjoy The Day For Once
Photo: Stevertigo (CC)
From the Onion. Yeah, that Onion, so progressives please try to remember where you left your sense of humor:
LEXINGTON, MA — Describing himself as “terribly exhausted,” famed linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky said Monday that he was taking a break from combating the hegemony of the American imperialist machine to try and take it easy for once.
“I just want to lie in a hammock and have a nice relaxing morning,” said the outspoken anarcho-syndicalist academic, who first came to public attention with his breakthrough 1957 book Syntactic Structures. “The systems of control designed to manufacture consent among a largely ignorant public will still be there for me to worry about tomorrow. Today, I’m just going to kick back and enjoy some much-needed Noam Time.”
“No fighting against institutional racism, no exposing the legacies of colonialist ideologies still persistent today, no standing up to the widespread dissemination of misinformation and…
The Prince Of Pot Is Finally Going To Jail
Canadian cannabis advocate Marc Emery, profiled in the disinformation documentary Escape To Canada, has given up fighting against his extradition to the United States. Story from AFP:
Canada’s self-styled “Prince of Pot” rallied supporters on Monday before turning himself in to Canadian authorities to be extradited to the United States to face a five-year jail term.
Marc Emery, 52, is alleged by US prosecutors to have sold more than four million marijuana seeds through the mail via his website. About 75 percent of the seeds went to US customers.
His wife Jodie Emery told AFP her husband expected to be extradited within “days or a week” after exhausting all legal challenges and an appeal for clemency to Canada’s justice minister.
“It?s absolutely devastating to think that I might not see my husband for five years,” she said. “It?s a harsh reality.”
The couple are still holding out hope that Emery may be allowed to serve…
Citizens’ Arrest Of Karl Rove (Video)
Ya gotta love this! CODEPINK activists stage a citizens’ arrest of Karl Rove at his book signing in Sacramento, CA on May 10, 2010.
