Archive for August, 2010
MEDIA FAIL: C-SPAN Tries And Fails To Cover Up The Facts Of 9/11
You gotta love seeing CIA Disinfo Agents Squirm.
Record High: 1 in 8 Americans Are Receiving Food Stamps
Examples of traditional "food stamps" that today are distributed on debit cards.
The Boston Globe via Bloomberg News reports:
The number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a record 40.8 million in May as the jobless rate hovered near a 27-year high, the government reported yesterday.
Recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 19 percent from a year earlier and increased 0.9 percent from April, the US Department of Agriculture said in a statement on its website.
Participation has set records for 18 straight months.
Unemployment in July may have reached 9.6 percent, according to a Bloomberg News survey of analysts in advance of the Aug. 6 release of last month’s rate. Unemployment was 9.5 percent in June, near levels last seen in 1983.
An average of 40.5 million people, more than an eighth of the population, will get food stamps each month in the year that began Oct. 1, according…
Hong Kong Filmmakers Shoot “First” 3D Porn Film
Reports the AFP via Google News:
A group of Hong Kong filmmakers have started shooting what they claim will be the world’s first 3D pornographic film. The 3.2 million-US-dollar 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy, set for release in May, has already generated interest in a host of Asian film markets, as well as Europe and the US, the Sunday Morning Post reported.
Loosely based on a piece of classical Chinese erotic literature, The Carnal Prayer Mat, the movie will star Japanese adult actresses Yukiko Suo and Saori Hara, the Post said.
The film chronicles the story of a young man who, after being introduced to the erotic world of a duke, realises his ex-wife is the love of his life and features “orgies, swinging and some very graphic sex scenes”, the paper said.
Producer Stephen Shiu acknowledged that censors would likely block the movie’s screening in mainland China, a key market for Hong Kong…
Digg Responds to Claims of Massive Conservative ‘Censorship’
Josh Halliday writes on the Guardian:
The popular link-sharing website Digg is investigating claims that a group of the site’s “influential conservative” members are systematically downgrading thousands of stories deemed to be “liberal”.
Online magazine AlterNet claimed to have uncovered a group of Digg members — dubbed “Digg Patriots” — who have “censored hundreds of users, dozens of websites, and thousands of stories” from the site. Alternet alleged that the Digg Patriots, thought to number nearly 100 members, are “able to bury over 90% of articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3 hours”.
Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, said via Twitter: “We’re looking into this.”
The six-year-old social bookmarking website ranks submitted web content by the number of times they are ranked up or down. Popular items, those receiving the most “Diggs” and least attempts to “Bury”, are voted onto the Digg homepage, and can generate significant amounts of traffic for external websites.…
Bailed-Out Firms Using Bail-Out Funds to Lobby for More Government (i.e. Taxpayer) Money
The NY Times was reporting on this over a year ago and now we have a recent report from Fox News. As much I believe in “freedom of speech” the Supreme Court has already made it much easier for corporations to influence our government, and I definitely am NOT willing to pick up the tab for it … Stephen Clark of report from Fox News writes:
Several companies that escaped financial failure two years ago through massive taxpayer-funded bailouts are spending millions of dollars to make donations to political causes and even some candidates’ campaigns.
General Motors, Chrysler and Citigroup are just three of the biggest bailout recipients who have continued to remain politically active, through their political action committees, federal lobbying or direct donations to the pet projects of lawmakers.
The potential public relations disaster for firms spending big dollars on political causes and federal lobbying after being extended a taxpayer lifeline has led some,…
Ergo, the Ego
The Infinite and the Beyond — Podcast: Episode #015 — Ergo, the Ego
Website • iTunes • Direct Download • RSS
In the latest episode we discuss the Ego, ergo the name of this episode, and we explore some of the issues surrounding it with prominent occult author and musician Lon Milo DuQuette as well as talk about his new book titled Low Magick: It’s All In Your Head … You Just Have No Idea How Big Your Head Is.
Not only is Lon Milo DuQuette the author of over a dozen books on western esotericisim, but he is also the United States Deputy Grand Master of the O:.T:.O:., an expert on the life of and work of Aleister Crowley, and a Brother Freemason as well. In my interview with Lon he shares some his personal insights and tales in regards to the ego and we even address the role that the ego plays in groups and fraternal…
Plant Enzyme To Power Exhaust-Powered Cars
From Discovery News:
An enzyme found in the roots of soybeans could be the key to cars that run on air.
Vanadium nitrogenase, an enzyme that normally produces ammonia from nitrogen gas, can also convert carbon monoxide (CO), a common industrial byproduct, into propane, the blue-flamed gas found on stoves across America.
While scientists caution the research is still at an early stage, they say that this study could eventually lead to new, environmentally friendly ways to produce fuel — and eventually gasoline — from thin air.
“This organism is a very common soil bacteria that is very well understood and has been studied for a long time,” said Markus Ribbe, a scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and a co-author of the new paper that appears in the journal Science.
“But while we were studying it, we realized that the enzyme has some unusual behavior,” he added.
The organism that the researchers studied was…
Genetically Modified Canola ‘Escapes’ Farm Fields
Photo: Heather LeMoine/North Dakota Tourism
Geoffrey Brumfiel reports for NPR:
Genetically modified crops are commonplace in fields across the United States, but a new study suggests that some plants have spread into the wild. A survey of North Dakota has turned up hundreds of genetically modified canola plants growing along roads across the state.
The results, presented Friday at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Pittsburgh, show that the vast majority of feral canola plants in the state contain artificial genes that make them resistant to herbicides. Researchers also found two plants that contained traits from multiple genetically modified varieties, suggesting that genetically modified plants are breeding in the wild.
“What we’ve demonstrated in this study is a large-scale escape of a genetically modified crop in the United States,” says Cindy Sagers, an ecologist at the University of Arkansas, who led the study.
Canola plants are used in cooking oil and…
There Was No Big Bang at the Start of the Universe
Alasdair Wilkins writes on io9.com:
A new theory explains the accelerating universe without invoking mysterious, unseen dark energy to account for the expansion. But it also gets rid of singularities, an unchanging speed of light … and the most famous astrophysical phenomenon of all, the Big Bang.
The observation of certain supernovas in the late 1990s led astronomers to the very unexpected discovery that the universe is expanding, and that the expansion is speeding up. There was nothing in the existing laws of physics to account for this, and so the only solution was dark energy — a mysterious force so named because we’ve never detected it, and yet it has to make up 75% of all the energy and mass in the universe for it to account for this cosmic acceleration. Also, the existence of dark energy weakens the supposedly inviolate law of conservation of energy, if not negates it completely.…
65 Years Ago, The U.S. Dropped a Bomb on Hundreds of Thousands of People
Alex Pasternack writes on Motherboard:
In the early morning hours of July 16, 1945, some of the greatest scientific minds of a generation gathered in the New Mexican desert to watch the results of their unprecedented, world-changing experiment: to build the most powerful weapon in the world. But when they pressed the button on their bomb, nicknamed “Gadget,” they weren’t quite sure what would happen.
The general consensus was that the bomb would yield energy equivalent to 5,000 tons of TNT (the actual result as it was finally calculated was 21,000 tons). Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project, had bet ten dollars against scientist George Kistiakowsky’s wager, with his entire month’s pay, that the bomb would not work at all. Enrico Fermi offered a wager on “whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world.”
9/11 Truth Billboard in San Luis Obispo California
San Luis Obispo, August 6, 2010:
In what may be the first of it’s kind in the nation, a group of 9/11 Truth activists organized, designed and paid for a commercial billboard in which 1,200 Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth invite the public to “Examine the Evidence.”…
What To Do At Your First Sex Orgy
Advice from Daniel O’Brien at Cracked.com:
When people aren’t busy assuring me that they’re not interested in my thoughts on orgies, they are just bombarding me with question after question about orgies. “Orgy this,” they say. And so on. In an effort to cut back on the amount of time I have to spend actually talking to people face-to-face, I’ve decided to compile all of my orgy knowledge in a handy little guide, which I’ve included almost immediately after this sentence.
Here it is!What Food to Bring
If you’re anything like me, your first question upon finding an unsigned orgy invitation taped to the windshield of your car is “Are there gonna be Cheez-Its at this thing, or what?” It’s an important question. With all of the sweating and various other fluid expulsions, you lose a lot of important liquids over the course of an orgy, and Cheez-Its are high in very necessary…
Coca-Cola: “No Consumer Could Reasonably Be Misled into Thinking Vitaminwater Was a Healthy Beverage”
Photo: Lpinaye (CC)
Courtroom insanity when a company that makes a product can say in its defense that why would a consumer consider it to be safe … John Robbins writes on the Huffington Post:
Now here’s something you wouldn’t expect. Coca-Cola is being sued by a non-profit public interest group, on the grounds that the company’s vitaminwater products make unwarranted health claims. No surprise there. But how do you think the company is defending itself?
In a staggering feat of twisted logic, lawyers for Coca-Cola are defending the lawsuit by asserting that “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitaminwater was a healthy beverage.”
Does this mean that you’d have to be an unreasonable person to think that a product named “vitaminwater,” a product that has been heavily and aggressively marketed as a healthy beverage, actually had health benefits?
Or does it mean that it’s okay for a corporation to lie about its…
Winston Churchill Ordered Cover-Up of World War 2 UFO Incident to Prevent Public Hysteria
Well, of course he did. Good ol’ Winston was well aware of The Doctor, and even tried to use Daleks to defeat those Nazi bastards during WW2. Andrew Hough and Peter Hutchison write in the Guardian:
Winston Churchill was accused of ordering a cover-up of a Second World War encounter between a UFO and a RAF bomber because he feared public “panic” and loss of faith in religion, newly released secret files disclose.
The former Prime Minister allegedly banned reporting of the “bizarre” incident, off the east coast of England, for half a century amid fears disclosures about unidentified flying objects would create public hysteria.
He is said to have made the orders during a secret war meeting with US General Dwight Eisenhower, the then commander of the Allied Forces, at an undisclosed location in America during the latter part of the conflict.
The claims are contained in thousands of pages of declassified files on…
BP May Drill In Same Undersea Oil Pocket Again
Really?! What about learning from our mistakes? What about waiting to see if the plug actually holds? How about cleaning up the mess before making a new one? RawStory reports:
BP PLC said Friday it might someday drill again into the same lucrative undersea pocket of oil that spilled millions of gallons of crude, wrecked livelihoods and fouled beaches along the Gulf of Mexico.
“There’s lots of oil and gas here,” Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said at a news briefing. “We’re going to have to think about what to do with that at some point.”
The vast oil reservoir beneath the blown well is still believed to hold nearly $4 billion worth of crude. With the company and its partners facing tens of billions of dollars in liabilities, the incentive to exploit the wells and the reservoir could grow.
Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s point man on the spill, said he…
Al-Qaeda’s New Leader
AP is reporting that Al-Qaeda has a new leader, per the FBI:
A suspected al-Qaida operative who lived for more than 15 years in the U.S. has become chief of the terror network’s global operations, the FBI says, marking the first time a leader so intimately familiar with American society has been placed in charge of planning attacks.
Adnan Shukrijumah, 35, has taken over a position once held by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was captured in 2003, Miami-based FBI counterterrorism agent Brian LeBlanc told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview. That puts him in regular contact with al-Qaida’s senior leadership, including Osama bin Laden, LeBlanc said.
Shukrijumah (SHOOK’-ree joohm-HAH’) and two other leaders were part of an “external operations council” that designed and approved terrorism plots and recruits, but his two counterparts were killed in U.S. drone attacks, leaving Shukrijumah as the de facto chief and successor to Mohammed – his…
The Harm Caused By Charity (Video)
A short animated film of a talk by philosopher/theorist Slavoj Zizek, who is always eager to push people’s buttons. Zizek examines the ethics and effects of charitable giving, and concludes that charity has a dark side, in that it helps preserve the status quo:
Chic Neo-Nazis In Mongolia
The Guardian reports on the emergence of a neo-Nazi movement in Mongolia. The groups hate the Chinese and post disturbing videos on YouTube of women having their heads shaved against their will. The Nazi identification is surprising, to put it lightly, considering Mongolia’s own history, but the followers have definitely taken fascist fashion to a new level:
A new strain of Nazism has found an unlikely home: Mongolia.
Once again, ultra-nationalists have emerged from an impoverished economy and turned upon outsiders. This time the main targets come from China, the rising power to the south.
Groups such as Tsagaan Khass, or White Swastika, portray themselves as patriots standing up for ordinary citizens in the face of foreign crime, rampant inequality, political indifference and corruption.
Dayar Mongol threatened to shave the heads of women who sleep with Chinese men. Three years ago, the leader of Blue Mongol was convicted of murdering his daughter’s boyfriend, reportedly because…
Superman (Comic) Saves Family Home From Foreclosure
Damn, why can’t I find one of these laying around? Ray Sanchez reports on ABC News:
A struggling family facing foreclosure has stumbled upon what is considered to be the Holy Grail of comic books in their basement — a fortuitous find that could fetch upwards of a quarter million dollars at auction.
A copy of Action Comics No. 1, the first in which Superman ever appeared, was discovered as they went about the painful task of packing up a home that had been in the family since at least the 1950s. The couple, who live in the South with their children, asked to remain anonymous.
“The bank was about ready to foreclose,” said Vincent Zurzolo, co-owner of ComicConnect.com and Metropolis Comics and Collectibles in New York. “Literally, this family was in tears. The family home was going to be lost and they’re devastated. They can’t figure out a way out of this. They…
