Archive for June, 2010
NARCAP’s Project Sphere: A Paratopia/Black Fridays Cross-Over
The Black Fridays Episode 23 — Ted Roe and Dr. Richard Haines from NARCAP
Website • iTunes • Direct Download 
• RSS
In a first for our show, we simulcast with Paratopia! A warm welcome goes out to all you Paratopians out there, and we want to say a special “Thanks!” to Jeremy Vaeni for being our special Co-Host on this show. Ted Roe, and Dr. Richard Haines join us in an exclusive discussion on NARCAP’s “Project Sphere” and much, much more. It was a pleasure talking with these gentleman, and we look forward to carrying on the conversation in the future!
NARCAP’s Website can be found here
BP And Transparency
As oil continues to pour from the sea floor off the coast of the Southern United States from the BP/Deepwater Horizon fiasco on April 20th, the public has become more outraged with BP, accusing the company of covering up the amount of petroleum, restricting access to footage of the spill for many weeks, and not taking all possible steps to mitigate the flow of the oil from the hole itself or its spread into the sensitive marshes of Louisiana.
By e-mail, the 501(c)(4) Moveon.org issued a call for members to protest yesterday at the BP Amoco Government Affairs office, listed by WhitePages.com as 1776 I St. NW in Washington. Just as BP cannot stop the oil from bleeding from the Earth and decimating entire populations of organisms very probably as yet unknown, they have not proven unable to conduct a “top kill” on the flow of blood from the hearts of their…
Noam Chomsky, Libertarians, Intentional Communities, and the Venus Project
In searching for YouTube videos of Noam Chomsky debating libertarians such as Ron Paul or Austrian economists such as Murray Rothbard, I found this:
Chomsky argues in this video that “if you go back to the Constitutional debates, they are all very clear: Madison, the framer of the Constitution, makes clear that the prime responsibility of government is to protect the minority, the opulent, against the majority.”
“Madison warned of what he called ‘the danger of the leveling spirit among the growing number of people who labor under all the hardships of life and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings’.” Chomsky thus argued that the primary principle of our Constitution was that “democracy is unacceptable.”…
Vatican Official Tied To BP, Goldman Sachs And Media Censorship In The Oil Fiasco…
[disinformation ed's note: we're not sure whether to consider this so crazy that you can't make it up, or that actually you can - what do you think?] By Sherri Kane and Leonard G. Horowitz for rense.com:
News unfolding from the oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico has linked media censorship to investment bankers at Goldman Sachs (GS) stewarding the Vatican’s wealth, and increasing evidence that the explosion was intended.
A near total news blackout from independent sources, and arrests of anyone caught photographing and filming the devastation, show the Halliburton-British Petroleum (BP) oil crisis is being criminally controlled, implicating some of Wall Street’s heaviest hitters.
According to a report issued by frightened, yet faithful, documentary filmmaker, James Fox, interviewed from the Gulf’s Grand Isles by Mel Fabregas on the Internet’s Veritas Radio Show, “There is a complete media blackout” on news coverage broadcast from the region.
“They are arresting people with cameras…
A Crass Footnote Re: The Supposed Anti-Depleted Uranium Conspiracy
Well, it’s been roughly half a month since Aaron Dames posted a link to the reductionist new Conspiracy Theories page over at America.gov. Within about a week, astute reader 5by5 would comment that the State Department is now deliberately downplaying the effects of depleted uranium, or at least equating its effects with those of tungsten. Of course, the healthy distrust so imbues Disinformation’s readership that 5by5’s comment became quite popular.
As posted at The Buffalo Beast, a new article about how the State Department’s newest claims stand up against medical experts, the EPA, and those working closest with victims of heavy-metal poisoning:
Late this May, America.gov sought to clear the air on a wide variety of topics: aliens, anti-Semitism, Islam, fake moon landing stories, various 9/11 theories, government synthesized AIDS and more. The page is produced by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs and, as expected, they endorse none of…
The History Of Race In America, As Seen Through The Census
In an interesting journey through U.S. history, the site Racebox.org shows the changing ways in which the United States Census form has addressed the question of race/ethnicity, from 1790 up to today. Below is a box from the 1850 Census, to be filled in by slave owners:
Buzz Aldrin’s Answer To The Louisiana Oil Spill
Howard Bloom, one of the stars of the Disinformation TV Series, sent us this press release:
Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, has proposed an answer to the Louisiana oil spill. It’s solar energy harvested in space, known in the space community as Space Solar Power.
“The timing of the oil catastrophe,” says Aldrin, “is a great opportunity for re-evaluating solar energy from space.”
We’ve been harvesting solar power in space and sending it to Earth since 1962, when the first commercial satellite, Telstar, was launched and began transmitting energy harvested by the solar panels studded all over its beach-ball-like surface. Today, the space solar power harvesting business is a quarter of a trillion dollar industry. We call it “the commercial satellite industry.” That industry uses space solar power transmitted to earth for everything from satellite radio and television to direction finding via GPS.
The Japanese space agency, JAXA,…
Japan Launches Spacecraft Powered By Solar Sail
Is the future of space travel in solar-powered kite crafts? Japan just launched one, and it looks amazing, at least. MSNBC’s Cosmic Log reports:
Ikaros was launched on May 20 atop an H-2A rocket from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center, along with a Venus orbiter known as Akatsuki. The solar-sail spacecraft’s name pays tribute to Icarus, the young man from Greek myth who flew too close to the sun on wings of wax, but it’s also an acronym standing for “Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun.”
The craft is designed to be pushed by the pressure of the sun’s photons on the thin panels, which are covered with photoelectric cells to generate electricity. If the experiment works, future solar sails might be equipped with electric-powered ion engines as a second propulsion method.
So far, solar sails have provided propulsion only in science-fiction tales. In the “Star Wars” saga, for example, Count Dooku uses…
Is There A Tiny Art Museum on the Moon?
A Lunar Warhol? Far out. Walt Becher writes on Tampa Bay Online:
When author and art curator Jade Dellinger looks up at a full moon, he thinks it’s amazing that there might be a tiny “Moon Museum” there containing the works of six world famous artists, including Andy Warhol.
Dellinger, a Tampa-based art and pop culture expert, has a rare duplicate of a tiny ceramic chip containing the six drawings that could have been smuggled aboard the Apollo 12 moon mission in 1969.
The chip, which may be attached to a lunar module left behind, contains the whimsical and symbolic work of radical ’60s artists Warhol, Claes Oldenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain and Forrest “Frosty” Myers, who was the mastermind behind the project.
“It’s fantastic to think that these artists managed to get something that represents our culture on the moon,” said Dellinger whose curiosity about this 40-year-old mystery lead to an…
ESC Chicago Keynote Makes Case For Time Travel
Karen Field reports that theoretical physicist Ronald Mallett is on a lifelong mission to build a time machine. His theory of a time machine, based on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, involves creating a circulating beam of light and exploiting the energy to produce a gravitational field, at RF Designline:
Ronald Mallett, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Connecticut, gave a mind-bending keynote speech on the physics of time travel to an enthralled audience at the Embedded Systems Conference here Tuesday morning, describing how black holes, blue giant stars, and worm holes (tunnels that connect the mouths of black holes)—some of the strangest things in the Universe—illustrate (at least in theory) the potential for time travel some day.
And that day, Mallett claimed, is not so far in the future as one might think.
“Time travel one of mankind’s oldest fantasies. But is it really possible? All of us have wondered…
Heaven’s Gate Hearts Disinformation?
I honestly don’t know what to make of this. Disinfo collaborator and Office-mate Tim Pugh pointed out to me the other day that Disinformation is listed as an interesting link on the Heaven’s Gate website.
Really surprised to see the site still up, I didn’t realize the group was still in “existence” after the March 1997 mass suicide.
In case you haven’t gotten your dose of massive creepiness today, here’s an initiation tape from Heaven’s Gate’s Marshall Applewhite. Still creepy after all these years. Thanks to Tim Pugh for creeping me out even more…
The Coming Working Class Revolt
From Nick Pell at Red Star Times
.
Hard to believe, but it’s been a year since the Obama Administration forced General Motors into bankruptcy. This has resulted in a curious phenomenon: the first generation of auto assembly workers in almost a hundred years who cannot afford to buy the cars they manufacture.
Given the context both nationally (the Massey mine collapse and the uncontrolled hemorrhaging that resulted from the BP / Deepwater Horizon disaster) and internationally (Greece seems always on the verge of explosion and the Chinese working class are waking from their 20-year post-Tienanmen slumber) the situation at GM points towards a very exciting and potentially explosive phenomenon.
Dubious Climate Change Science
Here’s a pretty good summary of the current state of affairs in the increasingly acrimonious debate about global warming, or the lack thereof, by Ed Hiserodt in New American:
Last December, as even every cloistered monk and Third World inhabitant probably knows, there was an International Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen, attended by government functionaries from around the world. The pampered delegates, who evidently weren’t worried about their own carbon footprints, caused a Scandinavia-wide shortage of black stretch limousines.
The conference actually had very little to do with climate change, ignoring almost out-of-hand the prominent news at the time: the Climategate scandal — the release of the e-mails indicating top global-warming scientists were skewing temperature data and engaged in a smear campaign against climate-change skeptics. But the conference had much to do with money. So-called Third World countries demanded reparations for damage done to their satrapies by CO2 emissions from industrial…
South African Team May Use “Muti” Magic To Win World Cup
The South African national soccer team’s nickname “Bafana Bafana” is sometimes pejoratively renamed “Banana Banana” in SA, due to their underwhelming performances, so if they can use some good old black magic to assist them in the World Cup, it will be much needed! Report by Nicolas Brulliard for the Wall Street Journal:
JOHANNESBURG—As the second-lowest ranked team in the World Cup competition, South Africa is expected to lose its opening match Friday against Mexico. But to ensure victory, Michael Mvakali recommends a simple fix: a concoction of plants and animal limbs.
“You use the horse’s foot and the ostrich leg, you mix it with some herbs and you put it on the players, on their knees and their legs, and when they kick, even the goalkeeper can’t get hold of that ball…
Thom Yorke Says Music Industry ‘On Verge Of Collapse’
The only surprise, really, is that it took this long, but of course only certain parts of the music biz are really collapsing. Right? Report via Chron.com/World Entertainment News:
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke is warning the music industry is on the brink of collapse, insisting young musicians should resist signing record deals because the major labels will “completely fold” within months.
The British rockers broke away from their longtime label, EMI, in 2007 and went on to embrace the new digital era with the release their seventh album, In Rainbows, which they offered up over the internet and allowed fans to choose the price.
Yorke has now issued a warning to upcoming artists, urging them not to sign traditional record deals because they would be tying themselves to “the sinking ship.”
In an interview for a new high school textbook called The Rax Active Citizen Toolkit, which aims to inspire youngsters to become more politically literate,…
U.S., Mexico Swap Accusations Over Border Shooting
From CBS World News:
A U.S. Border Patrol agent fatally shot a 15-year-old Mexican boy after a group trying to illegally enter Texas threw rocks at officers near downtown El Paso, U.S. authorities said Tuesday.
The shooting, which happened Monday evening beneath a railroad bridge linking the two nations, drew sharp criticism from Mexico, where the government said Tuesday that “the use of firearms to repel attacks with stones represents disproportionate use of force, particularly coming from authorities who have received specialized training.”
It was the second death of a Mexican at the hands of Border Patrol officers in less than two weeks, and the case threatened to swell into a full-blown international incident when U.S. and Mexican officials traded suggestions of misconduct.
Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the Chihuahua Attorney General’s office, said a spent 40-mm shell was found near the body – raising the question of whether the fatal shot was fired…
My Post-Apocalyptic Resume
Stacie Adams writes at Diatribe Media:
Years of horror movies and video games have prepared me for just about every tragedy you could imagine, affording me a post-apocalyptic skill set that would make George Romero envious. Therefore I have more job prospects for the impending apocalypse than I have now, despite society’s dire need to for an anti-bullshit artist. Here is just a bit of what I plan to do on the day after:
Rogue Doctor – This one is for any nuclear holocaust or natural disaster that will render the earth’s landscape a barren wasteland. I will patrol the terrain in my makeshift auto tending to the septic wounds of all the post apocalyptic freaks. For payment I will take first born children and other chattel. A girl’s gotta eat, after all.
Executioner – When our fascist overlords finally implement the New World Order I will make one king hell executioner, culling unruly prisoners with…
BP Buys Search Term “Oil Spill” from Google
Reports Reuters:
BP Plc has bought terms such as “oil spill” from search engine providers including Google Inc to help direct Internet users to its website as it attempts to control the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
A spokesman said BP would pay fees so its own website would rank higher or even top in the list of advertisements that appear alongside search results when Internet users search on terms such as “oil spill,” “volunteer” and “claims.”
BP did not say how much it was paying for the service but U.S. President Barack Obama has criticised the company for spending $50 million on TV advertising to bolster its image during the crisis.
BP said it wanted to help people who were trying to access information on the BP website to find it more readily, rather than intending to draw away hits from other sites.
“We know people are looking for those terms on our…
Adderall Receives Honorary Degree From Harvard
The above headline is from the good folks at The Onion, please read their story here. What is alarming is, if you watch this recent report from 60 Minutes, this really isn’t a joke.
I have to imagine the chemically induced behavior (i.e. “productivity”) makes it way into the workforce, what does this say about the state of America, is this is commonplace among the so-called best and brightest?
