Archive for November, 2010
Bill Maher On The Dangers Of The Rally To Restore Sanity
“If you’re going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you might as well go ahead and make it about something.”
Bill Maher lambasts the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert “Rally to Restore Sanity” as misguided in its call for “moderation” at a time when clear-headed people should be standing up firmly for what’s right. Right on, I say.
George W. Bush’s Interview With Matt Lauer (Video)
It’s no secret that Mr. Bush’s book is out today, nor that he chose NBC’s Matt Lauer as his first television interviewer since his term as president of the United States came to a close. Here are some previews from the interview, covering the invasion of Iraq, Katrina, and of course Kanye West:
For the full set of clips from the interview go to the Today Show site. Lauer and Bush will talk live on the Today Show on Wednesday, November 10th.
Could ‘Decision Points’ Rewrite History?
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern published a brilliant and damning piece regarding former President Bush’s upcoming memoir, Decision Points. In his essay, McGovern points out W’s little talked about “damn right” remarks he made when authorizing the waterboarding of terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Not only did W sign off on the form torture as an acceptable practice, but added “damn right” and asserted that the torture saved lives.
McGovern not only points out the glaring falsehood in that assertion, but shows exactly how the torture of prisoners became a recruiting tool for insurgents in Iraq. In addition, he rightly states that the under-reporting of the torture issue in the media, coupled with plenty of support (or shoulder shrugging) of the American public at large implicates us all. The essay comes on the heels of Bush’s related comments regarding the “lowest point” in his presidency, when Kanye West…
Community Action Stops Westboro Baptist Protest
Whatever a person may feel about the politics surrounding the multiple issues involved, lessons can be taken from the small community that found a way to beat Fred Phelps at his own game, legally and morally, with non-violent techniques. Via UPI.
WESTON, Mo., Nov. 7 — A small Missouri town turned out to keep Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church from protesting a soldier’s funeral.
The funeral of Sgt. First Class C.J. Sadell, who died Oct. 24 from wounds in Afghanistan, was held Saturday in Weston, Mo.
“I’d say probably half the people in Weston are here,” Marine veteran Eric Moser told WDAF-TV, Kansas City, Mo.
Sadell was in the Arif Kala region of Afghanistan when his unit was ambushed Oct. 5. He was 34 and leaves a wife and two sons.
“We got everybody here early so we could take up all the parking spots,” said Rebecca Rooney, who organized the supporters. “We did that…
I Want Everything You’re Doing To Fail
The people at Brave New Films are having some good ole fashioned fun ‘n games with Bill, Rush, Glenn and Sarah, playing a special kind of Pacman.
Are you ready to take on the Right Wing? Get started at Brave New Pacman!
To share the game go here.
More about Brave New Films at BraveNewFilms.org.
Large Hadron Collider Creates Mini ‘Big Bangs’
Our universe was created after the occurrence of the Big Bang. Humans have successfully reenacted mini Big Bangs. Does this mean we could create mini universes? From The Telegraph:
The reaction created temperatures a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun, which have not been reached since the first billionths of a second following the Big Bang.
The heavyweight particle collisions follow seven months of earlier experiments crashing protons – which are 200 times lighter than lead ions – at near-light speeds.
The collisions were produced by firing lead ions – atoms with their electrons removed – at incredible speeds in opposite directions around the LHC’s underground tunnel at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva.
This was expected to cause atomic particles such as protons and neutrons to melt, producing a “soup” of matter in a state previously unseen on Earth.
Scientists, including British particle physicists, will now study the…
Gay “Kiss-In” Protest Greets Pope In Spain
Welcome Pope Benedict XVI! From The New York Daily News:
A crowd of about 200 gay men and women in Barcelona staged a massive make-out session in front of the Pope Sunday as he was driven through town in the bullet-proof Popemobile on his way to celebrate mass at one of the city’s basilicas.
The monster spit-swap was organized by a Facebook group called Queer Kissing Flashmob, which sought to protest Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Spain and the Catholic church’s policies about homosexuals.
“We are here for a peaceful protest,” Eduardo Prado, one of the men who participated in the so-called kiss-in, told The Irish Times. “The church oppresses us and doesn’t respect us…We can’t tolerate this sort of Pope in the 21st century.”
The kissing protesters were a small segment of the estimated 250,000 Spaniards who lined the streets along Benedict’s motorcade route, but they were joined by others who were unhappy with the 83-year-old…
The Tunnel People Beneath Las Vegas
The Daily Mail claims that 1,000 people live underground in the flood tunnels beneath the city of Las Vegas. While tourists and the rich flock to palace-like casinos, the tunnel people live below in darkness, amongst poisonous spiders and individuals with names like The Troll.
Deep beneath Vegas’s glittering lights lies a sinister labyrinth inhabited by poisonous spiders and a man nicknamed The Troll who wields an iron bar.
But astonishingly, the 200 miles of flood tunnels are also home to 1,000 people who eke out a living in the strip’s dark underbelly.
Some, like Steven and his girlfriend Kathryn, have furnished their home with considerable care – their 400sq ft “bungalow” boasts a double bed, a wardrobe and even a bookshelf. They have been there for five years, fashioning a shower out of a water cooler, hanging paintings on the walls and collating a library from abandoned books. Steven was forced into the…
Doctors Linking Gulf Coast Illnesses to BP Oil Spill
A C-130 Hercules drops an oil-dispersing chemical into the Gulf of Mexico
From Al Jazeera:
“The dispersants used in BP’s draconian experiment contain solvents such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol,” Dr. Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor, said. “People are being made sick in the Gulf because of the unprecedented release of oil and toxic chemicals from this past summer in response to BP’s disaster.”
Ott is frank in her assessment of the ongoing health crisis residents are facing in the Gulf.
“It’s clear to me there are four to five million people, from Terrebonne Parish in Louisiana, through the big bend of Florida, who are being exposed to dangerous levels of dangerous chemicals,” she said.
“Oil and dispersants are in the air and water, that are at levels that exceeded the acute or intermediate threshold that federal agencies have declared to be safe. Just speaking of air exposure, and there are…
The Market as God
The Worship of Mammon by Evelyn De Morgan
Harvey Cox, a professor of divinity at Harvard, writing in the March 1999 issue of the Atlantic:
At the apex of any theological system, of course, is its doctrine of God. In the new theology this celestial pinnacle is occupied by The Market, which I capitalize to signify both the mystery that enshrouds it and the reverence it inspires in business folk. Different faiths have, of course, different views of the divine attributes. In Christianity, God has sometimes been defined as omnipotent (possessing all power), omniscient (having all knowledge), and omnipresent (existing everywhere). Most Christian theologies, it is true, hedge a bit. They teach that these qualities of the divinity are indeed there, but are hidden from human eyes both by human sin and by the transcendence of the divine itself. In “light inaccessible” they are, as the old hymn puts it, “hid from…
Gruesome Murder Pamphlets From Pre-Civil War America
People had a thirst for blood-drenched, depraved news long before there was a New York Post or British Mirror or Sun to provide it each morning. The National Library of Medicine has published online a collection of murder pamphlets from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. The brochures were sold on street corners and detailed the latest gristly crimes. Today they shed a light on villains from the dark underbelly U.S. history, such as Lucretia Cannon, circa 1841:
Cannon’s first name was Patty, but the press nicknamed her Lucretia after the Renaissance aristocrat who murdered her victims with poison. At 16, “Lucretia” married Alonzo Cannon, who died suspiciously of “failing health.” Widowed, she set up a tavern in Maryland, and headed up a gang which captured free blacks and fugitive slaves and sold them into slavery. She was alleged to have beaten a crying infant and then burned it alive; murdered tavern patrons for their money (one…
The Death of Privacy with Steve Rambam – Right Where you are Sitting Now
Right Where You are Sitting Now – Episode 40 – The Death of Privacy with Steve Rambam
iTunes • Direct Download • RSS
This week we talk to private investigator, and head of Pallorium Inc, Steve Rambam. Steve is famous in the hacker community for his enlightening lectures on the death of privacy.
In this weeks episode we discuss: The death of privacy, smartphones: The little snitch in your pocket, The cavalier use of your data, how to (or not) avoid detection in the age of the Internet, why Foursquare is a really bad idea (see, we told you) and much more.
Steve’s fantastic talk, ‘Privacy is Dead – Get Over It’, is available over at Google Videos – Part 1, Part 2.
Steve Rambam Bio:
Steven Rambam is a private investigator operating out of New York and Texas. He has conducted several thousand missing-person searches over almost three decades. Steven is well known in the hacker community…
Scientists Vow To Fight Back Against Climate Skeptics
Neela Banerjee of the Tribune Washington Bureau reports that The American Geophysical Union plans to announce that 700 researchers have agreed to speak out on the issue. Other scientists plan a pushback against congressional conservatives who have vowed to kill regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. Via the Los Angeles Times:
Faced with rising political attacks, hundreds of climate scientists are joining a broad campaign to push back against congressional conservatives who have threatened prominent researchers with investigations and vowed to kill regulations to rein in man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
The still-evolving efforts reveal a shift among climate scientists, many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media. Many now say they are willing to go toe-to-toe with their critics, some of whom gained new power after the Republicans won control of the House in Tuesday’s election.
On Monday, the American Geophysical Union, the country’s largest association of climate…
Quantum Physics and Life After Death
Some food for thought on the after-life courtesy of Robert Lanza, MD, author of Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, at Huffington Post:
When I was young, I stayed at my neighbor’s house. They had a grandfather clock. Between the tick and the tock of the pendulum, I lay awake thinking about the perverse nature of time. Mr. O’Donnell is gone now. His wife Barbara, now in her nineties, greets me with her cane when I go back to visit.
We watch our loved ones age and die, and we assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime. But experiments increasingly cast doubt on the existence of time as we know it. In fact, the reality of time has long been questioned by philosophers and physicists. When we speak of time, we’re usually referring to change. But change isn’t the same thing as time.
To measure anything’s position precisely is to “lock in” on one static frame of its motion, as in a film. Conversely, as soon as you observe movement, you can’t isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. Consider a film of a flying arrow that stops on a single frame. The pause enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy: it’s 20 feet above the grandstand. But you’ve lost all information about its momentum. It’s going nowhere; its path is uncertain.
Numerous experiments confirm that such uncertainty is built into the fabric of reality. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a fundamental concept of quantum physics. However, it only makes sense from a biocentric perspective…
Scientists Find Damage to Coral — Essential to Marine Life — Near BP’s Oil-Spill Well
The Associated Press reports via CommonDreams:
For the first time, federal scientists have found damage to deep sea coral and other marine life on the ocean floor several miles from the blown-out BP well — a strong indication that damage from the spill could be significantly greater than officials had previously acknowledged.
Tests are needed to verify that the coral died from oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, but the chief scientist who led the government-funded expedition said Friday he was convinced it was related.
“What we have at this point is the smoking gun,” said Charles Fisher, a biologist with Penn State University who led the expedition aboard the Ronald Brown, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel. “There is an abundance of circumstantial data that suggests that what happened is related to the recent oil spill,” Fisher said.
For the government, the findings…
United States Is Officially A Banana Republic
In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof reels off some key statistics in confirming what most Americans have suspected for years —the United States has now become the largest banana republic of it’s kind, with the largest slice of income going to the smallest group of oligarchs.
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976.
As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
Not really breaking news, but he includes several helpful links to recent studies demonstrating the emotional toll of striving to achieve the hyper-riches of the Bushes next door, through higher divorce rates and forced moves to hunt down the more lucrative positions.
Smart People Sleep Late
Interesting article from Robert Alison in the Winnipeg Free Press earlier in the year:
Sleep is a fundamental component of animal biology. New evidence confirms that, in humans, its timing reflects intelligence. People with higher IQ’s (intelligence quotients) tend to be more active nocturnally, going to bed later, whereas those with lower IQ’s usually retire to bed sooner after nightfall.
The precise function of sleep is arguable. But, accumulating evidence shows that lack of sleep in humans and animals can result in obesity, high blood pressure and reduced life spans. Drowsiness impairs mental performance. For instance, 37 per cent of all motor vehicle accidents are caused by drowsy motorists, according to a University of Pennsylvania study. Even minor sleep deficiencies impact on body chemistry.
According to Juliette Faraco of Stanford University, sleep loss generates a proportionate need for “sleep rebound”. One of the most controversial and significant recent findings is the correlation in humans…
The Return of Doctor Weird and the “Laugher Curve”
Laffer Curve drawn by Vanessaezekowitz (CC).
With millionaire dilettante Ron Johnson confirmed as Wisconsin’s senator elect to the government his own Tea Party professes to disdain, it’s a sure bet we’re gonna be bombarded with a lot of blather about how tax cuts for corporations and the uber-rich are supposed to magically improve employment and erase deficits. Which is utter batshit lunacy. But don’t take my word for it — run the numbers yourself. All within the linked workbook “Laffer Curve Analysis v1″.
Midterms are over; here begineth the real shitstorm: the struggle against Right Wing corporatists and faux populists trying to complete their destruction of the United States.
No, that’s not just the Wild Turkey talking. Haven’t touched the stuff for the better part of a week now. And though the night terror visions of President Palin’s Interior Secretary Don Blankenship leasing the floor of the House to BP for fracking natural gas and Treasury Secretary Richard…
