Archive for October, 2010
Panopticon Podcast Episode 13 – The Manson Family Mythos with Adam Gorightly
Panopticon — Podcast Episode 13 — The Manson Family Mythos with Adam Gorightly
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On this episode, we speak with author, podcaster, and musician Adam Gorightly about his book The Shadow Over Santa Susana: Black Magic, Mind Control, and the Manson Family Mythos, one of my favorites. We talk about many different facets of that fascinating American cultural phenomenon, the Manson Family, and its possible connection to intelligence agencies, various other cults, and American culture at large. It was a ton of fun to speak with Adam, and we really thank him for taking the time to come on the show with us. Enjoy!
92 Percent of American Babies Are Online With A Social Networking Presence
This just doesn’t seem right. The article gives stats for 10 Western countries, and no surprise that the U.S is #1 in parents putting their babies online. (I don’t expect there are many mutant super-genius babies creating their own profiles, but I haven’t been in the loop on what DARPA is up to these days…) Via CNN:
Children can’t change their DNA, and now it seems they’re inheriting another permanent feature from their families — an online presence.
Thanks to the ubiquity of photo-sharing websites like Facebook, 82 percent of children in 10 Western countries have a digital footprint before the age of 2, according to a study by internet security firm AVG.
The U.S. led, with 92 percent of American children under 2 appearing in online pictures, the report said.
New Zealand was a close second with 91 percent, followed by Canada and Australia with 84 percent. The study also covered the UK,…
Most U.S. Stock Trades Are Made by Computers, Not People: Is “High Frequency Trading” Manipulating the Stock Market?
I came across this topic while working on the Disinformation-published The Crime Of Our Time, written by Plunder filmmaker Danny Schechter. To me, this is one of those topics, the media should be more concerned about, (60 Minutes did report on this last night), but I wonder if the fear of massive manipulation destroying confidence in the entire system is causing many to look the other way. 60 Minutes reports:
It may surprise you to learn that most of the stock trades in the U.S. are no longer being made by human beings, but by robot computers capable of buying and selling thousands of different securities in the time it takes you to blink an eye. These supercomputers — which actually decide which stocks to buy and sell — are operating on highly secret instructions programmed into them by math wizards who may or may not know anything about the value of the companies that are being traded.
It’s known as “high frequency trading,” a phenomenon that’s swept over much of Wall Street in the past few years and played a supporting role in the mini market crash last spring that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunge 600 points in 15 minutes. Most people outside of the industry know very little, if anything, about it. But the Securities and Exchange Commission and members of Congress have begun asking some tough questions about its usefulness, potential dangers, and suspicions that some people may be using computers to manipulate the market.
You Might Be Racist and Not Even Know It
From ScienceDaily:
A new study from the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis looks at how much African Americans and whites favor or prefer their own racial group over the other, how much they identify with their own racial group, and how positively they feel about themselves.
The work, by Leslie Ashburn-Nardo, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology in the School of Science at IUPUI, looked at both consciously controllable sentiments and gut feelings about social stigma and found a significant difference in both groups between what people say they feel and their less controllable “gut feelings.”
“The Importance of Implicit and Explicit Measures for Understanding Social Stigma” appears in the current (September 2010) issue of the Journal of Social Issues.
Many studies of stigma have been conducted since the end of World War II but until recently they have looked primarily at explicit (recently learned) attitudes and did not include implicit measures…
UK Schools Doing UFO Crash Drills
Lounge Daddy writes on Dateline Zero:
There seems to be a growing trend among schools to stage a UFO crash, and then teach students how to react, as well as to “properly” investigate and report on the incident.
It sounds like a lot of fun, and a great way to fire up a student’s imagination as well as writing skills. Hell, I wish we would have done a staged UFO crash at my school.
The latest “UFO drill” took place Wed, Sept 29, at Sandford Primary School in the UK. The kids were treated to a full UFO crash scenario that included wreckage, police tape, and real police officers. (Perhaps it was only lacking men from the government telling the children not to talk about what was seen.)
What’s interesting is that “police were on hand to show the children how to properly investigate the UFO crash site.” Um, were any of the officers…
Does The Sun Revolve Around The Earth? Presenting The Inaugural Geocentrism Conference
I was confident that this had to be satire, yet somehow, it’s real: one month from now will herald Galileo Was Wrong: The First Annual Catholic Conference on Geocentrism. A panel of Christian “experts” will be convening in South Bend, Indiana to discuss and promote Geocentrism — the theory that Earth, not the sun, is the center of our solar system (and the entire universe to boot).
Get ready to hop on the Geocentrism bandwagon. Conference admission is $50, including complementary lunch.
Geocentrism [is] the academic belief that the Earth is immobile in the center of the universe…garnering scientific information from physics, astrophysics, astronomy and other sciences. Scientific evidence available to us within the last 100 years that was not available during Galileo’s confrontation shows that the Church’s position on the immobility of the Earth is not only scientifically supportable, but it is the most stable model of the universe and the one which…
The Real Willy Wonka: Three-Course Meal in a Single Stick of Chewing Gum
By Niall Firth for the Daily Mail:
It didn’t work out that well for poor Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka’s factory.
But now researchers say they may have cracked the secret behind creating a sweet that replicates three meals in a single stick of chewing gum.
Scientists at the Institute of Food Research (IFR) say the latest technology could be used to turn Willy Wonka’s eccentric invention into reality – but without the unpleasant side effects.
Food scientist Dave Hart believes that recent advances in nanotechnology, which deals with structures just millionths of a millimetre in size, could capture and release flavours in a precisely controlled way…
[continues in the Daily Mail]
Why is This Republican Candidate for Congress Dressed as a Nazi?
Rich Iott, second from right, in a Nazi SS Waffen uniform.
First saw this on Bill Maher’s show over the weekend, he was discussing this story from Joshua Green on the Atlantic:
An election year already notable for its menagerie of extreme and unusual candidates can add another one: Rich Iott, the Republican nominee for Congress from Ohio’s 9th District, and a Tea Party favorite, who for years donned a German Waffen SS uniform and participated in Nazi re-enactments.
Iott, whose district lies in Northwest Ohio, was involved with a group that calls itself Wiking, whose members are devoted to re-enacting the exploits of an actual Nazi division, the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking, which fought mainly on the Eastern Front during World War II. Iott’s participation in the Wiking group is not mentioned on his campaign’s website, and his name and photographs were removed from the Wiking website.
When contacted by The Atlantic,…
Flirting in the 21st Century, Brett Favre Style
Brett Favre in 2006.
Via the First Church of Mutterhals:
Everyone knows I’m not exactly keen on manners. But in some ways I am downright old fashioned. For instance, if a man I was vaguely acquainted with took a liking to me and decided the best way to win my favor would be to forward a hastily snapped pic of his, oh, how should I put this, his wang; well let’s just say there is a very short list of people who could get away with such a thing without my taking out a restraining order.
You know where I’m going with this. Proving once and for all that he is a congenital retard, Brett Favre did the above to a comely female member of the sporting press, thusly taking a bad idea and making it monumentally worse. I know, I know, allegedly. Brett Favre allegedly stuck his cell phone down his shorts…
Foreclose This: There’s More Than Robo Signatures To Blame For The Ongoing Foreclosure Scandal
The other day, during an interview on Al Jazeera, I was asked if I was frustrated because my warnings and worries about the financial meltdown and foreclosure crisis, first aired in 2006, have been ignored so long.
Duh!
The excruciating lesson I learned is that it takes time for a problem to turn into an issue and, then, an issue to get attention, to move from the business section to the news section, from the back of the paper to page one. It is always hard to predict which story will grab the attention of a news media that has not paid sufficient attention to these issues for years. What connect for editors are usually a small matter and a symbolic one, a story that’s not just new but dripping with the appearance of injustice or hypocrisy?
Once some truth slips through the cracks, a flood threatens like the toxic sludge undoing parts…
2010 Ig Nobel Prizes: Whale Snot, Socks Over Shoes, And Scientists’ Beards
The 2010 Ig Nobel Prize winners (like the Nobels but better) have been announced in various categories of science. These amazing discoveries are the reason we are living in the most exciting of times. ABC News reports the results:
ENGINEERING: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, Agnes Rocha-Gosselin and Diane Gendron for developing a method to collect whale snot using a remote control helicopter.
TRANSPORTATION PLANNING: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi, Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.
PHYSICS: Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams and Patricia Priest for demonstrating that wearing socks on the outside of your shoes helps prevent slipping on ice.
PEACE: Richard Stephens, John Atkins and Andrew Kingston for confirming that swearing helps relieve pain.
PUBLIC HEALTH: Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews and Larry Taylor for determining that microbes cling to bearded scientists.
MANAGEMENT: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda and Cesare Garofalo for…
Scientists Report An Array Of Obesity Genes
Well maybe obesity is genetic, after all, per this report from U.S. News & World Report:
Scientists have found genes that appear to play a role in the propensity for obesity.
The findings are reported in two new studies published in the Oct. 10 online edition of Nature Genetics.
In one report, researchers say they have identified 18 gene variants linked to obesity and confirmed the involvement of 14 others. In a second report, the same group of researchers say they have identified 13 gene variants that appear to direct fat to the belly or thighs.
“We have made a big leap forward in identifying new gene variations that contribute to the susceptibility to obesity and susceptibility to store fat more on your hips or more on your waist,” said researcher Ruth Loos, a group leader in the Genetic Aetiology of Obesity Program in the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the Institute of Metabolic Science, in…
“I Was a Soldier”: Psychiatric Patient’s Letter to Jesus
This shattering note, in which a mental patient alludes to herself as being confined in a Nazi concentration camp, was recovered from the estate of a doctor who practiced at Willard Psychiatric Hospital, in Willard, NY. In its half-coherent, broken language, it poignantly expresses the crushing, all-pervasive hopelessness and regret of a mental health inmate confronting her mortality:
“Dear Jesus,I am sorry I cannot help you. I tried to spread my grace because of the Britian Prophescy and the German Prophescy Due to cutterage of the Head, Heart, stomach and Reproductive Organs. I am no longer going to be living. I tried as a prophet and person. I don’t even want to be an animal. For what a person does to an animal. I wish to stay in my grave. And not rise again from the Grave.
I have seen too much to life. Now I am blind and deaf. And have lost my feeling too.
I am not Jewish but was put in a Nazi Concentration Camp. And haven’t been released. And I have sinned too. But the Master-Mind won’t let me forget it.
And I have losted my Christianity because of herorhim. – Master Mind…
Meet Pamela Geller, New York’s Number 1 Islamophobe
Pamela Geller with former IDF chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon. Photo: P. Geller (CC)
Quite why the New York Times thinks it should give hate merchant Pamela Geller such a high profile, massive write up is mystifying … unless the Times itself is conforming to an unfortunate stereotype:
Pamela Geller’s apartment, in the fashion of the blogosphere, doubles as her office. It is a modern full-floor unit in a high-rise on the East Side of Manhattan that could belong to a socialite or the editor of a lifestyle magazine. There is ample light and a tasteful lack of clutter. The kitchen appliances are made of brushed steel; the countertops are slate. In the earth-toned living room hangs a painting, in vibrant colors, of a woman in a swimsuit.
It is in this genteel setting that Ms. Geller, 52 and a single mother of four, wakes each morning shortly after 7, switches on her laptop…
Google’s Self-Driving Cars Are On California Roads (Now!)
While it’s entirely possible that Google’s AI cars are actually better driven than many of the human-controlled vehicles they are sharing the roads with, I’m kind of glad I’m not in California! John Markoff reports on the latest scariness from Google for the New York Times:
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving.
The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver…
Meet the Tea Party’s Corporate Puppet Masters
Profiled by Jane Mayer in the August 30 New Yorker, brothers Charles and David Koch are two libertarian billionaires who have been quietly funding the Tea Party and other anti-Obama campaigns:
“The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch—who, years ago, bought out two other brothers—among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
“The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In…
Barack Obama is Not a Liberal and Sarah Palin is Not a Conservative
Scott Horton interviews Roger D. Hodge regarding his book The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism for Harper’s:
1. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs recently derided liberal critics of the Obama Administration as the “professional left.” Was he talking about you? What do you make of this line of attack?
I’m not sure Gibbs has a coherent idea of what he means by the “left,” but if opposition to permanent war, extrajudicial assassination of American citizens, boundless state secrecy, and unlimited corporate bailouts constitutes “leftism,” then so be it. True to their Clintonian principles, President Obama and his advisors have spurned the Democratic Party’s liberal base and have sought to govern by appropriating the policies of the Republican right. Just as Bill Clinton enacted NAFTA and destroyed welfare, Barack Obama has pushed through a health-care program that was inspired by the Heritage Foundation and largely written by the…
Bill Hicks: Censored!
In October of 1993, Bill Hicks made his last appearance on Late Night with David Letterman…sort of. In October of 2010, Hicks is funnier than ever.
Hicks was a favorite comedian on Letterman’s old Late Night show and the television venue was Hicks’ most consistent national audience. After a routine taping, Hicks left New York expecting to see himself on television that night. He didn’t. Letterman decided to censor Hicks, pulling the performance. The decision was made all the more tragic by Hicks’ untimely death in February, 1994.
In 2009, Letterman showed a lot of class by inviting Hicks’ mother to his new show, taking responsibility for the censorship and apologizing to her and his audience for his decision. He then aired Hicks’ censored performance for the first time.
Hicks has said that the performance had been pulled because he made fun of Pro-Life groups who supported the show. Letterman doesn’t get specific,…
The Short-Lived Glory Days of Nude Psychotherapy
Another great find from Cyriaque Lamar over at io9.com. How times have changed:
In 1967, psychologist Paul Bindrim introduced the world to the salubrious properties of naked psychotherapy. Despite the treatment’s somewhat lurid connotations and relative obscurity nowadays, nude psychotherapy did garner its share of press attention, professional consideration, and happy, naked adherents.
Bindrim’s theories were inspired by the famed psychologist Abraham Maslow (you know, the fellow with the hierarchy of needs) and focused on the acceptance of the naked body as a whole. This message wasn’t particularly unorthodox even if his methodology was. Historian Ian Nicholson describes Bindrim’s birthday suit treatments in his eminently readable paper “Baring the soul: Paul Bindrim, Abraham Maslow and ‘Nude psychotherapy”
