Archive for September, 2010
Here’s A Christian Pastor Planning to Burn A Koran This Saturday on 9/11 (Video)
His right to do so is protected by the First Amendment. While the president hasn’t questioned the “wisdom” of doing so, the military has, namely General Petraeus. Interview from Hardball with Chris Matthews:
How Rupert Murdoch’s Sleazy Journalists Hacked British Royals’ Mobile Phones
The New York Times declares open season on a favorite liberal media pastime: bashing Rupert Murdoch and his “news” empire with this lengthy Magazine article on how the News of the World, an unabashedly lowbrow UK tabloid, hacked the mobile phones of Princes William and Harry and many other celebrities, possibly with some covert assistance from the police:
In November 2005, three senior aides to Britain’s royal family noticed odd things happening on their mobile phones. Messages they had never listened to were somehow appearing in their mailboxes as if heard and saved. Equally peculiar were stories that began appearing about Prince William in one of the country’s biggest tabloids, News of the World.
The stories were banal enough (Prince William pulled a tendon in his knee, one revealed). But the royal aides were puzzled as to how News of the World had gotten the information, which was known among only a small, discreet…
Glenn Beck & Sarah Palin’s 9/11 Event
I fear the worst. The Week speculates on what they may be planning:
Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are appearing together at the Dena’ina Center in Anchorage on Sept. 11, and nobody’s sure why. Beck, on his radio show, confirmed the event but would say only, “I’m gonna give a speech up there, and Sarah’s gonna give a speech, too, but that’s it.” Beck’s coyness, along with Palin’s silence and the provocative date, have only amped up the speculation about this “mysterious” event. (Watch a Russia Today discussion about the pair of leaders.) Here’s five theories on what Palin and Beck are up to on 9/11:
1. This is the launch of Palin-Beck 2012
“The symbolic date of 9/11 invests this event with the inescapable possibility that he and Palin plan to announce their Presidential candidacy for 2012,” says Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. Such a ticket is “not exactly unexpected,” but launching it…
The Ideological Animal
Jay Dixit in Psychology Today, from 2007:
By 2004, as the presidential election drew near, researchers saw a chance to study the Jost results against the backdrop of unfolding events. Psychologists Mark Landau of the University of Arizona and Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore sought to explain how President Bush’s approval rating went from around 51 percent before 9/11 to 90 percent immediately afterward. In one study, they exposed some participants to the letters WTC or the numbers 9/11 in an image flashed too quickly to register at the conscious level. They exposed other participants to familiar but random combinations of letters and numbers, such as area codes. Then they gave them words like coff__, sk_ll, and gr_ve, and asked them to fill in the blanks. People who’d seen random combinations were more likely to fill in coffee, skill, and grove. But people exposed to subliminal terrorism primes more often filled in…
The Atomic Cake Controversy of 1946: A “Mission Accomplished” Photo-Op From Yesteryear
President George W. Bush and many of his top administration officials were often accused of hubris in their eight-year run, but I have to say this incident from 1946 really tops the literal cake. It has the haughtiness of President Bush’s 2003 “Mission Accomplished” photo-op aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, combined with an element as you see below, I can best describe as … callous. From CONELRAD Adjacent:
The celebratory event took place on Tuesday evening, November 5, 1946 at the Officers’ Club of the Army War College in Washington, D.C. The occasion was to mark the disbanding of Joint Army-Navy Task Force Number One, the body that organized and oversaw the first post-war atomic tests in the Pacific. These highly publicized detonations on Bikini Atoll are remembered today, if at all, for displacing an entire indigenous population of islanders, for inspiring a revealing line of swimwear for women and for…
A Response to Kevin Barrett’s 9/11 Truth News Attacks
A blog post by Cosmos at 911 Truth News:
When we launched 9/11 Truth News, we knew we would be attacked.
And no one on the team was surprised when the first attacks came from people claiming to be on the side of 9/11 truth.
On Monday August 30, 2010, it came to my attention that I was the target of three hit pieces that had been published in rapid succession. The most prominent of these attacks came from Kevin Barrett, a self-declared 9/11 truth leader with a long history of actions and statements considered by many to be extremely discrediting to the 9/11 truth movement. Under an ugly, libelous headline on his “Truth Jihad” blog, Barrett issued a venomous litany of bizarre accusations against me: I’m probably an agent of the state, perhaps stalking his family, I’m a “wrecker” getting him kicked off conference lineups and – to top it off –…
Michelle Obama Program Blames Sony PlayStation For Making America’s Children Fat
A great post from disinformation friend and neighbor Nicholas Deleon, over at Crunchgear:
Consuming more calories than you use makes you fat. That’s a fact, Jack. Figuring out where these calories come from, OK, that’s a noble endeavor, but let’s not pretend there’s anything secret going on here. Like, you see this graphic here? It’s the winner of some Michelle Obama-headed design contest to help folks figure out how to best fight childhood obesity. And you’ll see the PlayStation completely demonized, as if Sony itself is somehow responsible for little kids packing on the pounds.
The chart, part of the Let’s Move program (and you’ll want to see the full-res version), highlights a few bad guys, including the use of high fructose corn syrup in soda, the launch of Super Size-sized foods at McDonalds, the increase in screen-watching hours, and, yes, the launch of the Sony PlayStation.
Surely Nintendo and Microsoft are thrilled with the award-winning…
Bed Bug Blaster: Get Them Before They Get You
Call it the Summer of Bed Bugs in New York City: seems like they have been popping up everywhere around here from Victoria’s Secret to the AMC movie theater in Times Square.
If you’ve or your loved ones have been a victim of our new Bed Bug Overlords, get some virtual payback with this Bed Bug Blaster game:
Don’t become a bed bug late-night snack! If they can infect GE executives are any of us safe?
Craigslist Removes Adult Services Ads
Founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark
I wonder how much the traffic will decrease on Craigslist now that there is no adult service choice. From The Washington Post:
One of the world’s biggest providers of Internet classified advertising abruptly shut down the “adult services” section of its U.S. Web sites this weekend, apparently in response to criticism from prosecutors that it had become a tool for prostitution.
But it was unclear whether Craigslist – an icon of the new media transformation of American society – had closed the site to placate those critics, or to hit back at them, casting itself as the victim of censorship. On its famously bare-bones Web sites, the blue-lettered link for adult services was gone. It had been replaced with a black box, containing one word: “censored.”
Craigslist’s usually outspoken leaders gave no explanation for their move and no signal as to whether it would be permanent. Last year, the…
Cockroaches Contain Antibiotics To Treat MRSA & E-coli
New York City may be the breeding ground for the next antibiotic for superbugs. It’s good to see there may be a use for cockroaches besides creating an image of “dank and dingy hotels.” Daily Mail reports:
Cockroaches are usually seen as a health hazard, to be found in dank and dingy hotels.
But scientists believe that they could hold the secret to treating the most resilient of superbugs.
Tests have found tissue from the brains and nervous systems of the insects can kill off more than 90 per cent of MRSA and E-coli infections without harming human cells.
Simon Lee, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Nottingham, says they hold powerful antibiotic properties after discovering nine different molecules in their tissues which are toxic to bacteria.
He said: ‘We hope that these molecules could eventually be developed into treatments for E-coli and MRSA infections that are increasingly resistant to current drugs.
Continues at Daily Mail …
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The World Cup Of Robot Soccer
In addition to the World Cup, this summer featured RoboCup — an international tournament in which teams of soccer-playing robots square off. The level of play is low, and the game is often unsettling to watch, as when a fallen robot player struggles fruitlessly to right itself, limbs flailing. The hope, however, is that by 2050, a robot team skilled enough to compete against humans will be developed.
Did The CIA Test LSD On An Entire French Town?
For a short, nightmarish period in August 1951, dozens of residents of Pont-Saint-Espirit suffered from extreme hallucinations, leading to five deaths. A newly-unearthed memo hints that it was a CIA experiment, the BBC reports:
On August 26, 1951, postman Leon Armunier was doing his rounds in Pont-Saint-Esprit when he was suddenly overwhelmed by nausea and wild hallucinations.
“It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms,” he remembers.
Leon, now 87, fell off his bike and was taken to the hospital in Avignon. He was put in a straitjacket but he shared a room with three teenagers who had been chained to their beds to keep them under control.
Over the coming days, dozens of other people in the town fell prey to similar symptoms. Doctors at the time concluded that bread at one of the town’s bakeries had become contaminated by ergot,…
TeaPartyTracker.org – A Watched Pot Never Boils
Thanks to good ole Fox News for alerting us to this valuable new service:
A new website sponsored by the NAACP and left-leaning media operations is seeking videographers and bloggers who will search out “racism” and “extremism” among Tea Partiers.
Teapartytracker.org will feature tweets, interviews with people at rallies, blog entries and a picture of a t-shirt they say someone spotted at a rally that reads “Blacks own slaves in Mauitania, Sudan, Niger & Haiti.”
The site, sponsored by the NAACP, Think Progress, New Left Media and Media Matters for America, will monitor “racism and other forms of extremism within the Tea Party movement. We call on the Tea Party to repudiate extremists among their ranks and join in civil dialogue with all Americans.”
The NAACP and other groups have accused the Tea Party of several instances of racism, including spitting on a black congressman, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., on Capitol Hill as he went to…
See No Evil: New Films, Crisis Inquiry Avoid Fraud While Banksters Cheer When Charges Are Dropped
Ben Affleck’s next movie, The Town, is set in Charlestown, Mass, known for the battle of Bunker Hill and dubbed in the past by tabloid TV as “hell’s half acre” for all the crimes that take place there. The film, a cops and robbers tale, focuses on a gang that robs banks with extreme violence. Its ads refer to Charlestown as national capitol of bank robberies.
Actually the take by the gangsters there doesn’t come close to the amount of money stolen by “Banksters” and banks on Wall Street.
Movies like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2 delve into its well-mined culture of greed, with the director, perhaps chastened by the criticisms of his recent political travelogue in South America, assuring the New York Times it’s not a “Michael Moore movie” whatever that means. Presumably it’s not explicitly political. (The Wall Street Journal called my film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time “the Anti-Wall Street Film That’s Not Just for Michael Moore fans.”)
A new studio backed documentary by Charles Ferguson about the financial crisis is titled Inside Jobs. It’s more about the business collapse than the crimes that caused it…
Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig Live Happily Ever After in New Zine
The good people at Microcosm Publishing have sent me a few interesting packages lately and I’ve been sifting through the goodies picking out a few shiny treasures to share with you Disinfonauts.
The crown jewel is an almost-too-good-to-be-true comic/zine starring buff icons Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig – as gay lovers.
When we first saw this book among Microcosm’s up-coming releases, we anticipated a kind of tongue-in-cheek fan-fiction romance in which the macho-rockers put their tongues in one another’s cheeks – oral or otherwise.
While Henry and Glenn’ wasn’t what we’d expected, we’ve fallen in love with this warm wonder of sweet insanity.
Henry and Glenn’ consists of a number of barely connected cartoons, comic strips and journal entries created by the Igloo Tornado art collective. Rollins is clearly “The Man” in their relationship and some of the book’s best bits find Danzig decked out in various accoutrements, inquiring whether a given get-up makes “my butt look fat?”.
While the…
Magic Mushrooms Confirmed As Cancer Drug
Psilocybe mexicana. Photo: Cactu (CC)
The shamanic use of sacred plants has long demonstrated some amazing mental health benefits. Now a new study reports that magic mushrooms, a/k/a psilocybin, are beneficial for terminal cancer patients. Anne Harding reports for Health.com/CNN:
Terminally ill cancer patients struggling with anxiety may get some relief from a guided “trip” on the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin, a new study suggests.
The study included 12 patients who took a small dose of psilocybin — the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms” — while under the supervision of trained therapists. In a separate session, the participants took a placebo pill, which had little effect on their symptoms.
By contrast, one to three months after taking psilocybin the patients reported feeling less anxious and their overall mood had improved. By the six-month mark, the group’s average score on a common scale used to measure depression had declined by 30 percent, according to the study,…
Drug Policy Should Be Based On Science, Not Ideology: The Vienna Declaration
The Vienna Declaration is a statement seeking to improve community health and safety by calling for the incorporation of scientific evidence into illicit drug policies. We are inviting scientists, health practitioners and the public to endorse this document in order to bring these issues to the attention of governments and international agencies, and to illustrate that drug policy reform is a matter of urgent international significance. We also welcome organizational endorsements.
The declaration process was launched as the the official declaration of the XVIII International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2010) held in Vienna, Austria from July 18th to 23rd. The declaration was drafted by a team of international experts and initiated by several of the world’s leading HIV and drug policy scientific bodies: the International AIDS Society, the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy (ICSDP), and the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.
Read the Vienna Declaration in full here.
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Democrats and Republicans Are Both Addicted to Lying
This won’t be news to some, but the details are telling. Back in 2006 LiveScience reported:
Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.
And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that’s contrary to their point of view.
Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects’ brains were monitored while they pondered.
The results were announced today.
“We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.”
Bias on both sides
The test subjects on both sides of…
Another Ex-Scientologist Publishes Damning Tell-All
From the Village Voice:
Adding to Scientology’s woes, some of the people who have been making defections in recent years are turning around and writing damning tell-alls.
Regular publishers won’t touch these books — even though some of them are actually very well written — so the authors have had to go the self-published route.
Last year’s killer I-escaped-from-Scientology narrative was put out by Marc Headley. His Blown for Good made for a gripping read, about a low-level grunt who spent years at Scientology’s secret HQ in the California desert until he finally made a mad dash for freedom.
This year, we can report that Headley’s book has been equaled. In Counterfeit Dreams: One Man’s Journey Into and Out of the World of Scientology, ex-Scientologist Jefferson Hawkins not only provides his own dramatic tale of getting sucked into and ultimately escaping from Scientology, but Hawkins was no low-level scrub.
He, maybe more than any other single person, may be the reason Scientology ever became as popular as it did…
