Archive for October, 2010
‘Star Wars’ As A Silent Film
I know scenes have been floating around on the internet, but in my opinion the climax from Empire is the best use of this treatment:
The War Addicts: The Pentagon and Military Would Do Almost Anything to Continue A Never-Ending War
Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch via Alternet:
Sometimes it’s the little things in the big stories that catch your eye. On Monday, the Washington Post ran the first of three pieces adapted from Bob Woodward’s new book Obama’s Wars, a vivid account of the way the U.S. high command boxed the Commander-in-Chief into the smallest of Afghan corners.
As an illustration, the Post included a graphic the military offered President Obama at a key November 2009 meeting to review war policy. It caught in a nutshell the favored “solution” to the Afghan War of those in charge of fighting it — Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Petraeus, then-Centcom commander, General Stanley McChrystal, then-Afghan War commander, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others.
Labeled “Alternative Mission in Afghanistan,” it’s a classic of visual wish fulfillment. Atop it is a soaring green line that represents the growing strength of…
John Lennon Would Be 70…
Enjoy.
Never gets old for me: John, George, Paul, Ringo. Great job.
‘Charlie the Smoking Chimp’ Dies from Old Age, At 52
Via Reuters:
JOHANNESBURG — A chimpanzee once hooked on smoking by visitors offering it cigarettes has died at a South African zoo at the relatively advanced age of 52, officials said on Wednesday.
“He appears to have died of old age,” said municipal spokesman Qondile Khedama. An autopsy will be conducted to determine the exact cause of death.“Charlie the smoking chimp” used to put two fingers to his mouth to mimic smoking and reach out with his other hand to bum cigarette butts from visitors at Bloemfontein Zoo. But when videos of him puffing away circulated globally a few years ago, zoo officials moved to cut off the supply of smokes.
The nickname stuck even though the cigarette habit faded.
The life expectancy for chimps in the wild is about 15 years and only 7 percent of wild chimps live past 40, a Harvard University report published in 2007 said.
FBI Wants Its GPS Back After Device Is Found By Student
Afterwards, agents told him not to worry … because he’s “boring”… but apparently he was just interesting enough to merit between 3 to 6 months of observation … and a GPS tracker under his car. From Kim Zetter at Wired. Enjoy the article … and consider its ramifications.
A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online. The post prompted wide speculation about whether the device was real, whether the young Arab-American was being targeted in a terrorism investigation and what the authorities would do.
It took just 48 hours to find out: The device was real, the student was being secretly tracked and the FBI wanted their expensive device back, the student told Wired.com in an interview Wednesday.
The answer came when half-a-dozen FBI agents and police officers appeared at Yasir Afifi’s apartment complex in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday demanding he return the device.
GM Crops Are Less Profitable Than Normal Crops
From the Independent:
Previous studies into the economics of growing GM crops have concentrated on the farmers who have taken up the technology, but the latest research looked at a wider area, including non-GM fields that may have benefited from being near fields planted with GM varieties.GM maize, which is called corn in the US, has a bacterial gene called “Bt” added to it so that the plant excretes a protein which has a toxic effect on the European corn borer, a serious insect pest introduced accidentally into America in 1917.
Nearly two-thirds of the US corn belt is now cultivated with Bt maize, and it has had a dramatic impact on the decline of the corn borer moth, which cannot distinguish between the GM and conventional varieties. When female moths lay their eggs on Bt corn, the larvae die within two days of hatching.
Paul Mitchell, an agricultural economist at the University…
Thousands Of Stimulus Checks Went To The Deceased And Incarcerated
Someone didn’t check their list twice to see who was naughty or dead. From The Washington Post.:
The federal government last year sent about 89,000 checks of $250 each to dead or incarcerated people through the Obama administration’s economic stimulus program, according to a watchdog report.
The Social Security Administration distributed about $13 billion to 52 million eligible beneficiaries in the form of $250 checks as part of the economic recovery program. The program cost $814 billion. Most of the payments were issued properly, but SSA failed to check all available payment records or was unaware that beneficiaries had died, according to a report by the Social Security Office of Inspector General.
Although SSA lacks the authority to recoup most of the money, the report estimates that slightly more than half of the payments have been returned.
Continues at The Washington Post …
The Bolivian President’s Infamous Knee Strike Video
Just in case anyone missed it (I know, you’re not all soccer fans), President Evo Morales of Bolivia caused a stir last weekend when he kneed a player on an opposing soccer team in the groin and had the misfortune of having his dirty deed caught on video tape:
Here’s what Morales had to say for himself:
“The player who kicked me started to insult me and offend me and I very much regret my reaction. I ask forgiveness to the sportsmen, to the players, to the player. But after kicking me, it was another insult, a reaction. Again, I ask for forgiveness. Sport is integration, but later I realized it was a trap.”
Why Do People Confess To Crimes They Didn’t Commit?
We know that eyewitness testimony can frequently be flawed, but what about confessions? False confessions of crimes are far more common than one might think, and there are an assortment of reasons why people admit to crimes they didn’t commit — what takes place in those police interrogation rooms is often very strange. New York Magazine investigates:
In the criminal-justice system, nothing is more powerful than a confession. Decades of research on jury verdicts has demonstrated that no other form of evidence—not eyewitnesses, not a video record of the crime, not even DNA—is as convincing to a jury as a defendant who says “I did it.” The police, of course, understand the power of confessions and rely on interrogation techniques to produce them quickly so they can clear their cases.
In recent years, the use of DNA evidence has allowed experts to identify false confessions in unprecedented and disturbing numbers. In the past…
Government Seizes Newborn Baby Over Political Beliefs Of Parents
Paul Joseph Watson for PrisonPlanet:
A newborn baby was ripped from its mother’s arms by officials from the New Hampshire Division of Family Child Services accompanied by police after authorities cited the parents’ association with the Oath Keepers organization as one of the primary reasons for the snatch, heralding a shocking new level of persecution where Americans’ political beliefs are now being used by the state to kidnap children.
Lawyer Jailed For Not Reciting Pledge Of Allegiance
Danny Lampley is an attorney in Mississippi. After he stood silently while the Pledge of Allegiance was being recited in court, the judge held him in contempt and had him jailed. That’s just how free societies work.
How To Replace Styrofoam With Mushrooms
Anyone who buys goods online can identify with this post from Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch:
Lately at my house we’ve been getting a lot of packages. And with packages, comes styrofoam. My three-year-old loves styrofoam. Me, not so much. He breaks it up and it makes a huge mess. The little bits get everywhere and they are impossible to clean up. I can only imagine that multiplied by 100 million homes in the U.S. alone.
Styrofoam is everywhere, but nobody really thinks about it. It is a $20 billion dollar business in the U.S. and occupies an estimated 25% of the country’s landfill by volume. But Eben Bayer is thinking about it…
Collective Intelligence: Number of Women in Groups Linked to Effectiveness in Solving Difficult Problems
I must admit, I considered facetiously titling this “Women Are Collectivists, and Collectivism Works.” From ScienceDaily:
Many social scientists have long contended that the ability of individuals to fare well on diverse cognitive tasks demonstrates the existence of a measurable level of intelligence in each person. In a study published Sept. 30, in the advance online issue of the journal Science, the researchers applied a similar principle to small teams of people. They discovered that groups featuring the right kind of internal dynamics perform well on a wide range of assignments, a finding with potential applications for businesses and other organizations.
“We set out to test the hypothesis that groups, like individuals, have a consistent ability to perform across different kinds of tasks,” says Anita Williams Woolley, the paper’s lead author and an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. “Our hypothesis was confirmed,” continues Thomas W. Malone, a co-author…
Loon Running for Office in Oregon
You just have to watch this thing to believe it:
That’s Republican candidate for Congress in Oregon’s 4th District, Art Robinson, who believes that:
- We should restart above-ground nuclear testing because “a little radiation is a good thing for the human body.”
- He wants to “dissolve radioactive waste in water”, and “sprinkle radiation over our oceans and over America”.
- AIDS is fake, and just a collection of other diseases given the term “AIDS”, and that “AIDS may be little more than a general classification of deaths resulting from exposure to homosexual behavior.”
- Global warming is fake and claims that the number of scientists who agree with him outnumber the amount of scientists who disagree with him (a notion so easily disproven it’s not even worth bothering to shoot down).
Note if you will that he characterizes Ms. Maddow as “incapable of understanding his scientific theories,” thereby…
No Pay, No Spray: Firefighters Let Tennessee Home Burn Because Homeowner ‘Forgot’ to Pay $75 Fee
Photo courtesy of punkpatriot on Etsy
I saw the man in question, Gene Cranick, interviewed on Countdown with Keith Olbermann earlier in the week. Seems a bit insane to not just collect the fee (plus some penalty) after putting out the fire. Via MSNBC:
Firefighters in rural Tennessee let a home burn to the ground last week because the homeowner hadn’t paid a $75 fee. Gene Cranick of Obion County and his family lost all of their possessions in the Sept. 29 fire, along with three dogs and a cat.
“They could have been saved if they had put water on it, but they didn’t do it,” Cranick told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. The fire started when the Cranicks’ grandson was burning trash near the family home. As it grew out of control, the Cranicks called 911, but the fire department from the nearby city of South Fulton would not respond.
“We wasn’t on their list,” he…
Chinese Call Nobel Prize Award To Dissident ‘Blasphemy’
Hold on, communists claiming blasphemy? Don’t you have to be religious for that? The Nobel committee must really have the Chinese government steaming to use that term! From RFI:
The Chinese government says the Norwegian Nobel committee has violated the Nobel Peace Prize by awarding it to dissident Liu Xiabao, and warns that ties between the two countries could suffer. But many governments and NGOs around the world have welcomed the award.
China dubbed the award “blasphemy” and has blocked reporting of the news on its territory.
Liu was jailed for 11 years in December 2009 after cowriting Charter 08, a petition which called for political reform in China. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday…
[continues at RFI]
20 Percent of UK Kids Believe Buzz Lightyear Was First to Walk on Moon
OK, so maybe in the UK Neil Armstrong isn’t quite the folk hero he is in the United States, but still! From the Daily Mail:
One in five British children thinks Buzz Lightyear from the Toy Story films was the first person to walk on the moon, researchers found.
And although twice as many knew it was actually a man called Armstrong, they thought he was called Lance – the seven-time Tour de France winner – rather than Neil.
The figures emerged in a study of 2,000 children aged six to 12 which revealed that while many know all about celebrities, there are worrying gaps in their knowledge of key events in history.
[continues in the Daily Mail]
An Alien’s View of Our Solar System (Video)
With the recent discovery of an Earth-like exoplanet, this video from the perspective of alien planet hunter looking at our Solar System is intriguing. Nancy Atkinson writes on Universe Today:
We have just begun to try and image distant solar systems around other stars, and hopefully our techniques and technology will improve in the near future so that we can one day find — and take pictures of — planets as small as Earth.
But what if another civilization from a distant star was looking at us? What would they see? A new supercomputer simulation tracking the interactions of thousands of dust grains show what our solar system might look like to alien astronomers searching for planets. It also provides a look back to how our planetary system may have changed and matured over time.
Obama’s Burden
With the midterm election less than a month away and the economic crisis unabated, the Obama Administration may be at a crossroads.
The President’s own advisor, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker says the financial system is “broken.” High unemployment is not dropping and home foreclosures are up. The Obamacrats are being blamed for the economic downturn and the economy has become ‘the issue’ of the November midterm elections.
The signs of an economic recovery are hard to see, and tensions with China, a leading trade partner, may be on the cusp of a trade war. Add to this the trillions poured into two wars we are not winning, and you have the elements of a perfect storm that some fear could lead to a depression or even a systemic collapse.
With the President’s popularity slipping and his opposition surging, (at least in the media if not in the streets) the Democrats are…
