Archive for November, 2010
Simpsons: Fox News ‘Not Racist, But #1 With Racists’
The boundary-pushing Simpsons team risk the wrath of Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp minions by bashing Fox News Channel (remember that the Fox network carries The Simpsons). As well as having a dig at FNC, the gang also suggest there’s a mainstream media conspiracy to create one crisis or another to take our minds off what’s “really” happening (as if!, right?). Check it out:
Wikileaks Set to Release Over Two and a Half Million More Iraq War Logs
From the Daily Mail:
Wikileaks has announced it is to release a second batch of Iraq war logs which will be seven times bigger than the first.
In a defiant posting on its official Twitter account, the website’s founders said it was ‘under intense pressure’ over the disclosure but vowed to press ahead anyway.
‘The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined. Keep us strong,’ they added.
Such a vast information dump would create another firestorm in Britain and the U.S. where generals are still furious over the first set of 400,000 classified documents, the biggest military leak of all time.
Read more here.
Engineer Invents Underwear To Protect Privacy At Airport
Rocky Flats Gear/AP
If it’s easy enough for an engineer to manufacture underwear to maintain some privacy when going through the body scanners, how long before people wear entire outfits like this rendering the scans useless. The New York Daily News reports:
While holiday travelers may not get through this week without a Transportation Security Administration agent touching their junk, a man in Colorado has a new invention he says will prevent anyone from looking at it.
Jeff Buske has created a special kind of underwear with strategically placed fig-leaf designs he says will shield TSA scanners from viewing fliers’ private parts and keep travelers safe from radiation emitted from the notorious “backscatter” x-ray machines.
Buske, an engineer, said his briefs, bras and inserts, which he’s marketing under the name Rocky Top Gear, use a special metal that protects people’s privacy when undergoing medical or security screenings.
No Holiday at Fort Benning, Home of the School For Terror
This past weekend saw the annual protest at Fort Benning, Georgia, home to the notorious School of the Americas, a/k/a the School for Terror (famous alumnae include Manuel Noriega). According to the New York Times, the number of protesters this year was far lower than a few years ago when Martin Cohen included Fort Benning in his disinformation book, No Holiday: 80 Places You Don’t Want To Visit. To help try to boost interest in the effort to end the School of the Americas, now renamed as the “Department of Defense Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” (Blackwater and other criminal corporations aren’t the only ones who play that game), disinformation is pleased to bring you Martin’s advice on attending next November’s protest:
#28 No Holiday: Fort Benning, Georgia
Join the annual protest at the notorious School for Terror
How to get there:
Fly or take the train to Atlanta, Georgia, and rent a car and drive to Fort Benning, about 85 miles (137 kilometers) southwest. The Commandant’s door is always open to visitors:
We invite you come to our campus, meet our students and faculty, and see our programs in action. Our motto is “Libertad, Paz y Fraternidad,” which means Freedom, Peace, and Brotherhood. Together we will make a difference in the region and the world.
The crazy paving entrance and the pink stucco mansion of the main block look more appropriate to a college summer camp than the school for assassins and torture techniques that it really is.
What to see
Not that you can see that from outside. But at least every November at Fort Benning there is a protest outside one of the gates, attended in past years by over 10,000 people, some of them bearing crosses with names of civilian victims of Fort Benning’s graduates carefully inscribed on them…
Gore: ‘First-Generation Ethanol Was A Mistake’
It’s not often that politicians apologize for their actions without having to, but Al Gore voiced his regrets at a green energy business conference in Greece. From The Washington Post:
Former vice president Al Gore said Monday that he regrets supporting first-generation corn-based ethanol subsidies while he was in office.
Reuters reports that Gore said his support for corn-based ethanol subsidies was rooted more in his desire to cultivate farm votes for his presidential run in 2000 than in doing what was right for the environment:
“It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol,” said Gore, speaking at a green energy business conference in Athens, Greece. First-generation ethanol refers to the most basic, but also most energy intensive, process of converting corn to ethanol for use in vehicle engines.
Gore went on to say that “first-generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at…
Rupert Murdoch To Launch iPad-Only Newspaper
From Los Angeles Times:
Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corp., is hoping to lure the next generation of newspaper readers with the launch early next year of the Daily, an iPad-centric newspaper currently in development at News Corp.’s Manhattan offices, according to the New York Times.
Murdoch is sinking about $30 million into this venture, which will have a staff of about 100. It’s the first “newspaper” designed exclusively for tablet computers and is expected to include integrated media and photography constructed especially for the iPad, the New York Times said.
The Daily will incorporate some content from the rest of Murdoch’s media empire (Fox Sports will provide some video), but the majority of the Daily’s content is expected to be original, according to the report.
[Continues at LA Times]
Hillary Clinton Announces She Has No Intention Of Running For Elective Office Ever Again
Those of you who are awaiting a presidential ballot with Hillary Clinton as the first woman to run in the US can stop holding your breath. The Raw Story reports:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared Sunday that she has no intention of running for public office ever again.
The 63-year-old former senator from New York made the comments in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” Video of her remarks follows below.
“I am very happy doing what I’m doing and I am not in any way interested in or pursuing anything in elective office,” the onetime first lady said.
“I love what I’m doing. I can’t tell you what it’s like, Chris, to everyday get to represent the United States,” she said. “That’s why I feel so strongly about every issue, from START to Afghanistan.” (START is a nuclear arms treaty that is facing an uphill battle in the Senate, where she previously served…
Chalmers Johnson, R.I.P.
Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic, and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic passed away Saturday. Steve Clemons writes at the Washington Note:
Next week, Foreign Policy magazine and its editor-in-chief Susan Glasser will be releasing its 2nd annual roster of the world’s greatest thinkers and doers in foreign policy. I have seen the list — and it’s impressively creative and eclectic.
There is one name that is not on the FP100 who should be — and that is Chalmers Johnson, who from my perspective rivals Henry Kissinger as the most significant intellectual force who has shaped and defined the fundamental boundaries and goal posts of US foreign policy in the modern era.
Johnson, who passed away Saturday afternoon at 79 years, invented and was the acknowledged godfather of the conceptualization of the “developmental state“. For the uninitiated,…
Secret Service Agents Spill Details Of JFK Assassination
Interesting new details on one of America’s defining moments, from CNN:
After mostly avoiding the spotlight for decades, many of the former U.S. Secret Service agents who were assigned to protect President John F. Kennedy are now offering their accounts of the day he was assassinated, 47 years ago Monday.
After the first shot hit the president, former agent Clint Hill says, “I saw him grab at his throat and lean to his left. So I jumped and ran.”…
Jay-Z and Cornel West, Live at the New York Public Library (Video)
Controversial but super cool Princeton professor Cornel West recently spent over an hour in conversation with Shawn Carter a/k/a Jay-Z (no introduction required) at the prestigious New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, moderated by Paul Holdengräber, the NYPL Director of Public Programs. Their dialogue was inspired by the contents of Jay’s new book Decoded and covered everything from NWA, Michael Jackson and Thom Yorke to greed, race, politics and social activism.
Robert Trivers Discusses Deception With Noam Chomsky
Some may find Chomsky talking about deception a tad ironic (see this post), but Trivers’s ideas about the evolution of self-deception are particularly interesting.
Should Republicans Consider Hedging Their Bets On Paul ‘Speedy’ Ryan?
Rep. Paul Ryan
disinformation’s readers come through yet again. Responses to my last blogpost were extremely varied and thought provoking, with some well-reasoned and others less so. The persistence of themes played out in some of the latter so impressed me that it well pleases me to once again examine the big ol’ “Fail” written all over Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) endorsement of the Laffer Curve, especially its implications for ‘The Velocity of Money’.
Remember ‘The Velocity of Money’? That’s the basic economic concept introduced in our post about the hypothetical castration of Goldman Sachs. It’s a thumbnail measure of how efficiently an economy employs its capital—the more often a single dollar is spent during a given year, the higher the rate of employment. Any number of other theoretical implications can be drawn from that; the higher the rate of employment, the greater economic, social and political equality, the higher the rate of technological innovation, etc., etc.
Entangled with Graham Hancock – Disinformation: The Podcast
Disinformation: The Podcast: Episode 15 — Entangled with Graham Hancock
iTunes • Direct Download • RSS
This episode features an interview with Graham Hancock, author of Fingerprints of the Gods, Supernatural, The Sign and the Seal, and the recently released Entangled. We discuss Graham’s influential work in the field of alternative history, 2012, his recent shift from non-fiction to fiction, and his views on the “War on Consciousness.”
Disinformation: The Podcast is a monthly series featuring interviews with authors, artists and filmmakers about topics related to politics, the occult, conspiracy, magick, hidden history, spirituality, fringe science, and much more. Past interviews include Jim Marrs, Douglas Rushkoff, and the legendary Alan Moore.
New Clues In Race To Decode CIA ‘Kryptos’
Source: New York Times. Click Image To Review Clues.
Jim Sanborn, the artist who created the famous Kryptos sculpture for the CIA, is fed up with people trying — and failing — to decode its encrypted messages. He decided to speed up the process by giving the New York Times some of the answers:
It is perhaps one of the C.I.A.’s most mischievous secrets.
“Kryptos,” the sculpture nestled in a courtyard of the agency’s Virginia headquarters since 1990, is a work of art with a secret code embedded in the letters that are punched into its four panels of curving copper.
“Our work is about discovery — discovering secrets,” said Toni Hiley, director of the C.I.A. Museum. “And this sculpture is full of them, and it still hasn’t given up the last of its secrets.”
Not for lack of trying. For many thousands of would-be code crackers worldwide, “Kryptos” has become an object of obsession. Dan Brown…
Wi-Fi Makes Trees Sick
A weeping willow. Photo: Jdforrester (CC)
René Schoemaker reports on PC World:
Radiation from Wi-Fi networks is harmful to trees, causing significant variations in growth, as well as bleeding and fissures in the bark, according to a recent study in the Netherlands.
All deciduous trees in the Western world are affected, according to the study by Wageningen University. The city of Alphen aan den Rijn ordered the study five years ago after officials found unexplained abnormalities on trees that couldn’t be ascribed to a virus or bacterial infection.
Additional testing found the disease to occur throughout the Western world. In the Netherlands, about 70 percent of all trees in urban areas show the same symptoms, compared with only 10 percent five years ago. Trees in densely forested areas are hardly affected.
Besides the electromagnetic fields created by mobile-phone networks and wireless LANs, ultrafine particles emitted by cars and trucks may also be to blame. These…
Why The Bible is Repulsive (Video)
Via God Is Imaginary:
By watching this short video, you will be able to prove to yourself that the Bible is repulsive. The Bible is so repulsive that it has no place in a modern, civilized society.
Early Warning System For Asteroid Attack
One of the more credible of the various 2012 “end is nigh” scares is the prospect of a massive “Near Earth Object” (NEO), most likely a meteor or asteroid, smashing through the Earth’s atmosphere, causing damage locally on impact and potentially causing such great meteorological disruption that our way of life is changed forever, possibly to an extinction level. Frighteningly there is usually hardly any warning that they are coming. MIT’s Technology Review reports on an astronomer’s plans for a network of telescopes that could give up to three weeks’ warning of a city-destroying impact, on its Physics arXiv Blog:
At about 3am on 8 October last year, an asteroid the size of a small house smashed into the Earth’s atmosphere over an isolated part of Indonesia. The asteroid disintegrated in the atmosphere causing a 50 kiloton explosion, about four times the size of the atomic bomb used to destroy Hiroshima. The…
The 5 Most Profitable Drugs Do Not Cure You
The Village Voice has an interesting cover story about ibogaine which prompted Jason Parham to observe on the Village Voice blog site:
“Pharmaceutical companies don’t like cures. Really, they don’t — that’s the sad thing. They like treatment. Something for cholesterol or high blood pressure that you take for years and years, every day. That’s where the profit is.”
When we read that, a light went on. The worst thing for a drug company is a pill you take that completely cures you of your ailment with one dose, right? Where’s the money in that?
So, with that in mind, we thought we’d test Kuehne’s theory, and look at the five most profitable drugs in the United States.
Guess what they all have one in common? They never cure you…
Florida Airport Opting Out: Rejecting the TSA in Favor of A Private Company
Ken Tyndall reports on WDBO Local News:
The backlash continues over those new TSA screening measures, and now one Central Florida airport has decided to go with a private security screening firm. Orlando Sanford International Airport has decided to opt out from TSA screening.
“All of our due diligence shows it’s the way to go,” said Larry Dale, the director of the Sanford Airport Authority. “You’re going to get better service at a better price and more accountability and better customer service.”
Dale says he will be sending a letter requesting to opt out from TSA screening, and instead the airport will choose one of the five approved private screening companies to take over.
Congressman John Mica, who’s expected to lead the powerful Transportation Committee next year, says the TSA is crying out for reform. “I think TSA is overstepping its bounds,” said Mica.
Dale says, if all goes as planned, the private security firm…
