Archive for August, 2010
America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution
This 12,000-word essay by Angelo Codevilla, “The Ruling Class–And the Perils of Revolution,” published in the conservative magazine American Spectator, has been so popular that Al Regnery is getting back into publishing to turn it into a full-length book (Regnery founded but no longer runs his eponymous and very successful right wing political imprint).
As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual…
Wisconsin’s Answer To The Obesity Crisis: The Krispy Kreme Cheeseburger
They’re trying to persuade us that it’s low-calorie and healthy … come on Wisconsin, this is going to send you straight to the morgue, especially if you add the optional chocolate-covered bacon!
Thinking About God Calms Believers, Stresses Atheists
What does thinking about God do to agnostics though? Report from Live Science:
Researchers have determined that thinking about God can help relieve anxiety associated with making mistakes. However, the finding only holds for people who believe in a God.
The researchers measured brain waves for a particular kind of distress response while participants made mistakes on a test.
Those who had been prepared with religious thoughts had a less prominent response to mistakes than those who hadn’t.
“Eighty-five percent of the world has some sort of religious beliefs,” says Michael Inzlicht, who cowrote the study with Alexa Tullett, both at the University of Toronto-Scarborough.
“I think it behooves us as psychologists to study why people have these beliefs; exploring what functions, if any, they may serve.”
With two experiments, the researchers showed that when people think about religion and God, their brains respond differently—in a way that lets them take setbacks in stride and react…
Terrorist Comic Book Character To Teach Children
Ali Imron
Will scaring children with colorful drawings teach them a lesson about terrorist recruits? From BBC news:
The only surviving perpetrator of Indonesia’s deadliest terrorist attack, Ali Imron, is an unlikely comic book subject.
But the story of his journey from young Muslim to convicted terrorist has been chronicled in a new comic book.
Some 10,000 copies of Ketika Nurani Bicara, or When the Conscience Speaks, will be circulated in schools and libraries from next month, in an attempt to warn the country’s youth of the dangers of Islamic extremism.
Ali Imron is currently serving a life sentence for his role in the bombing of the popular resort of Bali that killed 202 people, many of them foreign tourists.
He escaped the death sentence because he repeatedly expressed remorse, and co-operated with police.
“From the time I was instructed to bring the bomb… there was already doubt in my heart. Is this really jihad?” he said at…
Gulf States Order Blackberry Users To Cover Their Phones In A Tiny Burqa
Photo: Newsbiscuit
[disinformation ed's note: this is humor - not real news]
From Newsbiscuit:
New laws in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will require that every Blackberry user dress their phone a miniature burqa and face veil.
‘The Blackberry burqa means that people can still use their phones,’ said a Saudi government official, ‘but the tiny niqab that covers the screen will stop them from reading emails or accessing the Internet.’
The introduction of the burqa is intended to conceal the Blackberry from unwanted attention. With the veil in place only a tiny slit remains revealing just the time and date, thus preserving its modesty.
‘This is not about censorship or oppression,’ said UAE telecommunications regulator Mohammed al-Ghanem, ‘this is about preserving the essential purity of the Blackberry and protecting it from being corrupted.’
Some businessmen believe that making their phone wear a burqa can be very liberating. ‘It’s great,’ said one, ‘with the veil…
A Real Life Masonic Plot – Or A Bizarre Crime?
Thierry Tilly
This feature story in Vanity Fair is better than a Dan Brown book (OK, not so hard, but he does sell a lot of ‘em): it features the aristocratic de Védrines family who are persuaded they hold the key to great treasure and are targets of a Masonic plot, and so turn over their lives, fortune, and ancestral château to a shadowy “grand master.” Then came captivity and torture—and a bizarre escape!
Far, far down the High Street, long past where Oxford’s golden spires give way to neon strip malls, you come to a dense residential zone of tidy town houses, row upon row. In one of these, in a small room, a woman sits immobile in a chair.
She has been held prisoner in this room for days. Eight? Ten? Hard to keep track, when they won’t let you sleep. In shifts, day and night, her captors take turns berating her:
We…
Peggy Noonan: America Is at Risk of Boiling Over
Peggy Noonan with Ronald Reagan
Author and popular political pundit Noonan says out-of-touch leaders don’t see the need to cool things off in this op-ed for the Wall Street Journal:
It is, obviously, self-referential to quote yourself, but I do it to make a point. I wrote the following on New Year’s day, 1994. America 16 years ago was a relatively content nation, though full of political sparks: 10 months later the Republicans would take the House for the first time in 40 years. But beneath all the action was, I thought, a coming unease. Something inside was telling us we were living through “not the placid dawn of a peaceful age but the illusory calm before stern storms.”
The temperature in the world was very high. “At home certain trends—crime, cultural tension, some cultural Balkanization—will, we fear, continue; some will worsen. In my darker moments I have a bad hunch. The fraying…
A Duck’s Penis Length Depends on The Male Ducks Around Him
You are really screwed, Daffy. All that time you spent arguing with that rabbit … Susan Milius writes on Wired Science:
New measurements find that the maximum length of a duck’s penis depends on the company he keeps. And in this case, it’s his fellow males who make the difference.
A drake’s penis substantially wastes away at the end of one breeding season and then regrows as the next season begins. Among lesser scaup and ruddy ducks, the regrowth varies in length or timing depending on whether males have to compete with a bunch of other guys, said Patricia Brennan of Yale University.
Her new measurements offer the first evidence in vertebrates that social circumstances influence penis growth, she reported July 29 at the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society.
In many bird species, males don’t grow specialized organs to deliver sperm. Ducks typically do, their penises sometimes reaching considerable lengths (9.8 inches…
Cargo Cults And Ancient Astronauts
Giorgio A. Tsoukalos
[disinformation ed.'s note: The following is the foreword from the new book by Erich von Däniken, Twilight of the Gods: The Mayan Calendar and the Return of the Extraterrestrials, courtesy of New Page Books.]
What is a “cargo cult”? The term refers to the real-life ethnological phenomenon of what happens when a technologically primitive society comes in contact with a technologically more advanced society. On countless documented occasions, ethnologists have observed that if technologically advanced visitors live among technologically – not intellectually! – primitive cultures for short periods of time and then leave, soon thereafter, the visitors’ advanced nuts-and-bolts technologies causes the native population to view these rather ordinary humans as gods and begin to worship them. On many occasions during their stay, the visitors would interact with the native population, giving them goods and food – cargo! After the departure of these “gods,” the native culture surmised that they would return if they practiced intense…
Text Alert When Your Female Leaves Saudi Arabia
Just in case mahrams, or male guardians, in Saudi Arabia needed a shorter leash. If you’re a man in Saudi and are worried about your woman leaving the country, well, there’s an app for that. Aside from the cultural aspect of gender segregation, this seems like a waste of technology for “keeping tabs” on women. The Guardian reports:
Want to know whether your wife, sister or daughter has left the county? Well, in Saudi Arabia, there’s an app for that. Reportedly, male guardians or mahrams in Saudi Arabia are now receiving text message notifications when their female charges leave the country unaccompanied. “iMahram”, a friend of mine jokingly called it.
According to Wajeha al-Huwaider, a Saudi female activist, when she left the kingdom for a holiday with her family, her husband received a text message from the foreign ministry notifying him that she had departed.
“It is sad how Saudis use technology in a…
Where The High Paid Jobs Are In The United States
From The Atlantic:
Last week, I posted on a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report on the metro regions with the highest-paying jobs in nine major occupations. But this report only listed the top two regions in each category. So I decided to take a closer look at the underlying BLS data to compile a more comprehensive mapping of regional pay. With the help of my colleague, Charlotta Mellander, we looked at the pay levels for three types of jobs – high-skill, high-pay, creative class jobs; traditional, blue-collar, working class jobs; and lower-skill, lower-pay service jobs.
The first map (above) shows the distribution of pay levels across all U.S. metro regions. The highest-paying metro pays more than double the lowest-paying one ($66,780 vs. $30,670). In fact, there are roughly two dozen metros which have half the pay level of the highest-paying region. That highest-paying region is San Jose ($66,780), followed by nearby San Francisco…
$45 Garage Sale Find Was Worth $200 Million
A California man bought $200 million worth of rare Ansel Adams negatives for $45 at a yard sale — some of the 5,000 that were feared lost by Adams when his studio was destroyed by a fire in 1937. But are they real?
Adams’ grandson is now disputing their source, saying they aren’t marked with the numbers Adams used for cataloging, and that some of the labels contain suspicious misspellings. The Fresno painter who discovered the negatives insists he’d been rebuffed in attempts to have Adams’ grandson involved in the authenticating — and handwriting experts have verified that the handwriting on the labels does belong to Adams’ wife.
So while Adams’ grandson argues it’s “irresponsible to claim that they’re Ansel,” this could still end up being the most valuable garage sale find of all time!
Christopher Hitchens: On The Topic Of Cancer
Hitch describes his coming to terms with cancer, in Vanity Fair:
I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and summon the emergency services. They arrived with great dispatch and behaved with immense courtesy and professionalism. I had the time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and…
Insanely Interactive Trailer for ‘Scott Pilgrim vs. the World’ (Video)
Here’s a fairly insane marketing effort by Universal Pictures for their upcoming Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Created in a 8-bit video game style, this “I-trailer” has commentaries, videos, making of footage and other stuff that usually is included in the DVD extras or commentary. (Click the image below for the trailer.)
Perhaps interactive trailers will become as commonplace as 3D has become for big budget films … coming off the buzz this film had a Comic Con, they certainly have kicked it up a notch.
Feds Admit Storing Checkpoint Body Scan Images
TSA's X-ray backscatter scanning with "privacy filter"
Declan McCullagh reports on cnet News’ Privacy Inc:
For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they’re viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded.”
Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.
This follows an earlier disclosure (PDF) by the TSA that it requires all airport body scanners it purchases to be able to store and transmit images for “testing, training, and evaluation purposes.” The agency says, however, that those capabilities are not normally activated when the devices are installed at airports.
Body scanners penetrate…
Basil Marceaux: He Wants Everyone in Tennessee to Have a Gun, and He’ll Fine You For Not Having One
Stephen Colbert sums up the candicacy of Basil Marceaux much better than I ever could. Remember Tennessee voters, that state has an open primary system … so anyone can vote!
Read The Latest Attempt by the U.S. Congress to Bring Back the Draft
Read it for yourself on GovTrack. This is the fourth attempt for the Universal National Service Act introduced in July of this year by Congressman Charlie Rangel, who I agree with Danny Schechter has overstayed his welcome as a “servant” of the people in the U.S. Congress.
While I can understand Rangel’s point for introducing the bill, these type of political theatrics do little to address the underlying issues they attempt to.
Jul 15, 2010 — Introduced in House. This is the original text of the bill as it was written by its sponsor and submitted to the House for consideration. This is the latest version of the bill currently available on GovTrack.
HR 5741 IH
111th CONGRESS, 2d Session
To require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and…
Charlie Brooker on How To Report The News (Video)
The BBC show Newswipe, presented by Charlie Brooker, has created a brilliant step-by-step guide on how to report the news in the trite, empty manner necessary for television:
Corporations Are Placing Their Brands In Your Subconscious Mind
From Nielsen, the TV audience ratings company, an article on its blog by Dr. A.K. Pradeep, CEO of NeuroFocus, Inc. and author of the forthcoming book, The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind, which provides the knowledge and the tools necessary to help marketers understand how to appeal to the subconscious on a very practical level by covering the five major areas of neuromarketing practice: brand, products, packaging, in-store marketing, and advertising:
Each year a trillion dollars is spent on communicating to and persuading the human brain, yet few understand how the brain really works—what’s attractive to it, how it decides what it likes and doesn’t like, and how it chooses to buy or not buy the infinite variety of products and services presented to it every day. Neuromarketing research is revealing a myriad of fascinating insights that help improve the effectiveness of every aspect of clients’ brands, products, packaging, in-store marketing, advertising, and entertainment content…
