Archive for June, 2010
Stephen Colbert Ruins The US-UK Special Relationship
Stephen Colbert makes the English feel even worse about BP and “The Hand of Clod.” Genius stuff.
Douglas Coupland’s Generation X Clothing Line
Douglas Coupland has written dozens of books, but will probably always be best known for his classic novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. He’s come so far back into the mainstream now that he’s designed a clothing line for Roots, the Canadian company that designed those awful berets for the USA Winter Olympic team a few years back. They don’t have a site yet but this page has a promo video, and this is the press release:
TORONTO, June 14 – Clothing retailer Roots is launching a collaboration with prominent writer & visual artist Douglas Coupland on a limited-edition clothing and accessory collection debuting July 8th and available for sale in the United States at www.roots.com/douglascoupland.
The ROOTS X DOUGLAS COUPLAND collection includes apparel for women/men/children, accessories, leather goods, design items, furniture and art. This is the first time Douglas Coupland has designed fashion wearables. He is best known as the…
Why the Far Right Hates Soccer
I already love soccer, but the mere fact that the likes of Glenn Beck feel threatened by its mainstream popularity in the United States makes me want to love the beautiful game even more! Dave Zirin writes for The Nation/NPR:
Every World Cup, it arrives like clockwork. As sure as the ultimate soccer spectacle brings guaranteed adrenaline and agony to fans across the United States, it also drives the right-wing noise machine utterly insane.
“It doesn’t matter how you try to sell it to us,” yipped the Prom King of new right, Glenn Beck. “It doesn’t matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn’t matter how many bars open early, it doesn’t matter how many beer commercials they run, we don’t want the World Cup, we don’t like the World Cup, we don’t like soccer, we want nothing to do with it.”
Beck’s wingnut godfather, G. Gordon Liddy also said on his radio program,
‘Whatever…
President Makes Analogy, Right Wing Freaks Out
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
While the vitriol over the president’s analogy shouldn’t surprise anyone, it is troubling. The most hard core right wing conservatives, along with many people on the left, love to say that 9/11 “changed everything.” Though the increasingly polar opposite ends of the spectrum will disagree on what exactly changed, if the national conversation is to be so flippant about words, one could say both the right and left agree with each other on the matter.
The response to the tragedy of September 11th brought about sweeping legislation which forever altered our civil rights, the longest running military action in American history and the justification for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Subsequent to the attacks, we also created the Department of Homeland Security and adopted a new foreign policy (The Bush Doctrine).
Read the full post at Diatribe Media
Bilderberg 2010: Post-Meeting Summary
Map of countries by the number of politicians, which have attended one or more conferences organized by the Bilderberg Group.
Charlie Skelton wraps up his coverage for the Guardian:
Weary and bramble-scratched, elated by the press coverage, and sick of riot vans and lukewarm Spanish omelette baguettes, we return from Bilderberg 2010 with the following thoughts uppermost in our tired mind:
• ‘Global cooling’ is on the cards
Check out the agenda for Bilderberg 2010: “Financial reform, security, cyber technology, energy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, world food problem, global cooling, social networking, medical science, EU-US relations.” That list is a window into your future. Don’t think for one minute that it isn’t. And don’t ignore it, because it isn’t ignoring you.
I love how “social networking” must fry the Bilderbergian mind. On the one hand, as Zuckerberg of Facebook says, privacy is no longer a social norm so it’s okay to milk the networking sites for information, social…
James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ Censored Again — This Time By Apple
Definitely interesting, considering the publication history of this book (it was banned in the United States for over 10 years). Nick Spence writes on Macworld UK:
A comic book adaptation of James Joyce’s notoriously challenging epic Ulysses is now available on the App Store, but only after Apple demanded cuts.
Rob Berry and Josh Levitas launched the ambitious webcomic version of the classic novel, one of the most important works of Modernist literature, earlier this year under the title Ulysses Seen. The comic includes only cartoon nudity, which the pair had to remove before Apple would approve the app.
“Apple has strict guidelines and a rating system to prevent ‘adult content.’ Their highest mature content rating is 17+, which doesn’t seem to be a problem since no one reads Ulysses at sixteen anyway. But their guidelines also mean no nudity whatsoever. Which is something we never planned for,” Berry told Robot 6.
Joyce’s novel is pretty explicit…
Michael Shermer: The Pattern Behind Self-deception
In this TED Talk Michael Shermer says the human tendency to believe strange things — from alien abductions to dowsing rods — boils down to two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired survival skills. He explains what they are, and how they get us into trouble.
At Last: Installing Tourist/Native Walking Lanes In New York
On Fifth Avenue, not far from Disinformation’s offices, pranksters posed as Department of Transportation employees and reconfigured the sidewalks into “tourist” and “New Yorker” lanes and spent the day training pedestrians on how to use them. This is something for which city citizens have been clamoring for decades — I’m glad these rogue urban planners stepped in and made it happen.
U.S. Identifies $1 Trillion In Mineral Deposits In Afghanistan
The war in Afghanistan looks like it just got a lot bigger and longer. The New York Times reports:
The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.
Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the…
Turkish Inventor Claims World’s Most Advanced Electric Generator
Sterling D. Allan reports that a Turkish inventor, Attila Alperen, and his group who have been developing an overunity motor/generator technology for over a decade, are now saying they are ready to license the technology for production. Electric output ranges from several watts to megawatts, for Pure Energy Systems News:
Turkish inventor, Attila Alperen, Founder and Chairman of The Alperen Group of Companies, has announced that he is now ready to go to market with an ultra high efficient motor and generator technology his group has developed.
People in the free energy community would describe what he has as ‘overunity’, being attributed to harvesting inexhaustible energy freely from the environment, because it puts out more energy than what is required to run it…
Man Accused Of Incest Fathered Children With Two Daughters
From CNN:
Pinheiros, Brazil — Law enforcement agents in Brazil’s northeastern town of Pinheiros trekked and canoed for nearly two hours through rugged terrain to arrest a 54-year-old man accused of fathering eight children with his two eldest daughters, a top regional investigator said.
Pinheiros Regional Police Chief Laura Amelia Barbosa told CNN that Jose Agostinho Bispo Pereira — who was arrested Thursday after complaints that he sexually abused his 29-year-old daughter, whom he held captive — fathered yet another child with his eldest daughter.
“He fathered seven children with his 29-year-old daughter and one with his 31-year-old,” Barbosa said.
The seven children born from his 29-year-old daughter range in age from 2 months old to 12 years, she said.
“We just learned that he fathered a child with his 31-year-old daughter. … The 14-year-old is right here beside me,” Barbosa said in a phone interview with CNN.
“We also confirmed that two other of his children/grandchildren…
World’s Most Creative Online Video
From Techcrunch:
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, YouTube and HP have teamed up in search of the world’s most creative online video. In collaboration with Hewlett-Packard and Intel, Google’s YouTube set up a dedicated site section dubbed Play, in an effort to find and showcase the most exceptional talents working in the realm of online video.
Irish Minister’s Fluoride Hypocrisy: ‘Fluoridated Water Causes Cancer in Children!’ But You’re Going to Pay for it Anyway!
Neil Foster stirs up the fluoride-in-water health controversy, in Ireland’s Sovereign Independent:
In the video below, John Gormley, 3 years prior to becoming the [Irish] Minister of the Environment clearly stated on RTE’s ‘Primetime’ program that fluoridated water was dangerous for babies and indeed elaborated on this by informing the public, quite rightly, that it caused bone cancer in children. He now expects us to pay, through the use of water meters, for the very same fluoridated toxic water which he openly admits is detrimental to human health.
Despite the clear evidence that this is indeed the case and the statement by Gormley back in 2003 that there was no need for fluoride in the public water supply, it is still there…
What Happens When You Die? Evidence Suggests Time Simply Reboots
Robert Lanza, M.D., theorizes at Huffington Post:
What happens when we die? Do we rot into the ground, or do we go to heaven (or hell, if we’ve been bad)? Experiments suggest the answer is simpler than anyone thought. Without the glue of consciousness, time essentially reboots.
The mystery of life and death can’t be examined by visiting the Galapagos or looking through a microscope. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves. We wake and find ourselves in the present. There are stairs below us, which we seem to have climbed; there are stairs above us, which go upward into the unknown future. But the mind stands at the door by which we entered and gives us the memories by which we go about our day. Everything is ordered and predictable. We’re like cuckoo birds who appear through a door each morning. We fancy there’s a clockwork set in motion at…
A Case For The Anti-Christ
Now a lot of people like to talk about Christianity like they know what they’re talking about. I hear people talking about Jesus’s love for the world, who then apologize for the assholes who apparently “messed up” Jesus’ gospel and turned into something he never would have approved of. You hear it from soccer moms to gay priests, generally liberal, you yourself may have thought Jesus got a bad rap and try to justify all the war, crime and pestilence carried out in his name; that Jesus was basically a good guy. But I wonder, fictional character or real life man, what would Jesus think about the world he left behind 2000 years ago? Because his story has certainly left an impact on world society as a whole – that’s one thing we can all agree on. It’s almost baffling if you try to contemplate it all – of course…
Left And Right Agree: Buy Gold!
When the New York Times runs a front page story suggesting that now is the time to buy gold and they quote Peter Schiff saying that paper money may become useless, is it time to buy, or a classic signal that the hype exceeds reality? Personally I think buying land, livestock and seeds might be a better bet…
It is the resurgent passion of the doomsday crowd, a bet that everything will go wrong. No matter what has you worried, they say, the answer is gold.
Inflation, deflation, government borrowing or the plunging euro — you name it — the specter of these concerns has set off a dash to gold, driving the precious metal to new highs and illustrating how fears of economic turmoil have moved from the fringe to the mainstream.
And gold bugs, often dismissed as crackpots who hoard gold bars in the basement, are finally having their day.
“I just think…
FML On The Subway
Only in New York folks. From CNET:
NEW YORK: File this under “not particularly serious news, but hilarious.”
This week, an alteration in New York City transit signs to address forthcoming route changes have placed an unfortunate Internet acronym on a heavily trafficked subway station: Displays that list the color-coded subway services running at the 14th Street-6th Avenue underground station now display a bold “FML.”
Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA, may or may not have been aware that this is an acronym for “f*** my life,” a profane exclamation of disgruntlement that arose in Web forums, in text messages, and on a popular blog several years ago.
The MTA’s press office could not immediately be reached for comment.
Revisiting Orwell’s 1984
By Richard Mynick for the World Socialist Web Site:
Since first appearing in the popular lexicon, the term “Orwellian” has conjured up a vision of the prototypical “totalitarian state”: a one-party dictatorship that swarmed with secret police, spied on its own people, quashed dissent, made arbitrary arrests, tortured prisoners, waged perpetual war, rewrote history for mere expedience, impoverished its own working population, and rooted its political discourse in doublethink—a thought system defined as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
Many Americans would easily recognize this description of “Oceania,” the futuristic dystopia immortalized by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the most influential English-language novels of the mid-twentieth century.
Whether many Americans recognize that this description applies to their own society as well is another matter. But since the theft of the 2000 election—a period marked by such events as the 9/11 attacks, the…
Low-Lying Pacific Islands ‘Growing Not Sinking’
Nick Bryant writes for the BBC:
A new geological study has shown that many low-lying Pacific islands are growing, not sinking.
The islands of Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia are among those which have grown, because of coral debris and sediment.
The study, featured in the magazine the New Scientist, predicts that the islands will still be there in 100 years’ time.
However it is still unsure whether many of them will be inhabitable.
In recent times, the inhabitants of many low-lying Pacific islands have come to fear their homelands being wiped off the map because of rising sea levels.
But this study of 27 islands over the last 60 years suggests that most have remained stable, while some have actually grown.
Using historical photographs and satellite imaging, the geologists found that 80% of the islands had either remained the same or got larger – in some cases, dramatically so.
They say it is due…
