Archive for December, 2010
Who Else Will Congressman Peter King Investigate?
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
According to a recent New York Times article, Representative Peter King, incoming head of the House Homeland Security Committee, will open a Congressional inquiry into the “radicalization” of America’s Muslim community.
As Justin Elliott at Salon points out, King himself gave material support (fundraising), a crime that can land any American citizen in Gitmo, to the IRA back in the 80’s. In fact, he only broke ties with the organization back in 2005.
I wonder then, if part of King’s investigation will concern other prominent U.S. citizens who helped other Foreign Terrorist Organizations, such as those who worked on Operation Cyclone, the CIA operation which armed and trained the mujahideen (two splinter groups are currently designated FTO’s) during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, many members of which went on to join Al-Qaeda.
RIP Captain Beefheart
Rest in Peace: Captain Beefheart: Jan. 15, 1941–Dec. 17, 2010.
Cult musician and visual artist Don Van Vliet died Friday after years of suffering from multiple sclerosis.
Found on YouTube below is “Making Love to a Vampire with a Monkey on my Knee” by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band.
[Image: Captain Beefheart at Convocation Hall, Toronto, 1974. Photo by Jean-Luc via Wikimedia Commons]
For the Christmas Season, It Costs $82,000/Month To Light This House
Casey Chan writes on Gizmodo:
The Faucher Family in Delaware have built extravagant Christmas lights setups for 25 years now. How extravagant? They use 1,000,000 lights. So how much does it cost them to run the lights for a month? $82,320. Gulp.
HouseLogic estimated the total cost by using the average price per kWh in the Faucher Family’s region and assumed each of their 1,000,000 bulbs were the average 5 watt C7 bulb. They then figured the lights to run for 4 hours each night and 30 nights in total. The estimated cost came out to be $686/hour and $82,320 for those bright 30 nights. A lot of money to get in the Christmas spirit!
CIA Chief in Pakistan Pulled After Legal Action Reveals Covert Drone Attacks
Declan Walsh writes in the Guardian:
The CIA has pulled its station chief from Islamabad, one of America’s most important spy posts, after his cover was blown in a legal action brought by victims of US drone strikes in the tribal belt.
The officer, named in Pakistan as Jonathan Banks, left the country yesterday, after a tribesman publicly accused him of being responsible for the death of his brother and son in a CIA drone strike in December 2009. Karim Khan, a journalist from North Waziristan, called for Banks to be charged with murder and executed.
In a rare move, the CIA called Banks home yesterday, citing “security concerns” and saying he had received death threats, Washington officials told Associated Press. Khan’s lawyer said he was fleeing the possibility of prosecution.
“This is just diplomatic language they are using. Banks is a liability to the CIA because he’s likely to be called to court.…
Evolver the Podcast: Exploring Prehistoric Man and the Changing of the Times
Evolver the Podcast: Exploring Prehistoric Man and the Changing of the Times
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Hello everyone and welcome back to Evolver the Podcast. In this episode we have interviews with Graham Hancock, bestselling author of Fingerprints of the Gods, The Sign and the Seal, Supernatural, and most recently Entangled. After that we interview Robin Gunkel who is a regional coordinator for Evolver Baltimore. Then we have Erin Shaw from Evolver LA interviewing Daniel Pinchbeck, co-founder of Evolver, and bestselling author of Breaking Open The Head, 2012 the Return of Quetzalcoatl, and most recently Notes from the Edge Times.
Billy Corgan Talks Chemtrails (Video)
First Beck and now Billy. Maybe Rock isn’t dead after all.
The Year’s Best-Dressed Graphic Novel
Chapter 16 asked me to have a chat with Jim McCann and Janet Lee in order to get to the bottom of their new graphic novel Return of the Dapper Men. The book has been selling out following a wave of rave reviews and this wide-ranging chat included talk about the Big Bang, the nature of time, innocence, experience and the nature of the relationship between men and their machines:
Can you hear a buzzing sound? No, it’s not Rudolph’s nose on the fritz. This is a holiday surprise that finds two book creators with Nashville connections giving Santa a run for his sleigh with what looks to be one of the season’s hit holiday gifts.
Although their celebrated new book takes place in a fantastical world, Jim McCann and Janet Lee both trace their roots to Nashville. McCann, a native Nashvillian, moved to New York in 2004 to become a successful comic book…
Damanhur: My Sci-Fi Theophany Under the Mountain
Joseph Allen writes about his visit to Damanhur, a sizeable New Age commune nestled in the Italian Alps. The community is best known for the stunning Temples of Humankind. From Confessions of a CyberCasualty:
December, 2007. The distant Alps are covered in snow. Small flakes swirl in the wind, dancing around red clay statues of muscular giants and voluptuous goddesses, reminiscent of Egypt. Most prominent is the falcon-headed god, Horus, facing the Fire Altar where the looming statues converge.
I start to walk into the grove of the Earth Altar, but my guide Shama tells me I should go no further.
“It is dangerous for anyone who is not spiritually prepared,” she warns me. “Very dangerous.”
I would be willing to chance it, but I suppose rules are rules.
In the distance is Monti Pelati, the sacred mountain of the Damanhurians. It is said that more Synchronic Lines converge there than any place in the world. These lines are like the Earth’s…
Florida Truck Dealership Gives Out Free AK-47s With Vehicle Purchases
Ah, America, where machine guns are dispensed like party favors. Via Aol News:
A truck dealership in Florida is firing up sales with the promise of a rapid-fire machine gun.
Customers have been streaming into Nations Trucks in Sanford, near Orlando, purchasing two dozen vehicles since the sale campaign began on Veterans Day last week. Each new truck owner also walks out with a free AK-47. “We’ve tripled our business,” general sales manager Nick Ginetta told AOL News. “We knew it would be controversial, but it’s been a phenomenal response.”
An image of the semiautomatic rifle is taped to the showroom’s window to lure shoppers. Buyers receive a $400 voucher good for one Kalashnikov at Shoot Straight, a weapons dealer with several locations in the Sunshine State.
All prospective gun owners must meet state and federal gun-control laws, but Ginetta has still drawn fire from anti-gun activists and alarmed neighbors. “I’ve had calls from…
Astronomers Find First Evidence Of Other Universes
Amazing to think the universe has “cosmic bruises.” Via Technology Review’s Physics arXiv blog:
There’s something exciting afoot in the world of cosmology. Last month, Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford and Vahe Gurzadyan at Yerevan State University in Armenia announced that they had found patterns of concentric circles in the cosmic microwave background, the echo of the Big Bang.
This, they say, is exactly what you’d expect if the universe were eternally cyclical. By that, they mean that each cycle ends with a big bang that starts the next cycle. In this model, the universe is a kind of cosmic Russian Doll, with all previous universes contained within the current one.
That’s an extraordinary discovery: evidence of something that occurred before the (conventional) Big Bang.
Today, another group says they’ve found something else in the echo of the Big Bang. These guys start with a different model of the universe called eternal…
Newton’s Third Law – The Coming Collision
The Singularity by Ken Vallario.
“To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction: or the forces of two bodies on each other are always equal and are directed in opposite directions.”
In watching the coming collision collision between one individual and the world’s mightiest government, we are about to see if these forces are in fact equal, or if these laws will soon be broken.
The Good News
In the light of the latest Wikileaks events I have been thinking very deeply about citizen empowerment and how technology enabled a small group of people to threaten the legitimacy of the most powerful government the world has ever known. And surprisingly that same government has yet to find a legitimately effective response against this very big pie in their very large collective face.
As many of us have done, I have attempted to fill this void with my own speculations about the retaliatory…
Government Needs Warrant To Secretly Read Emails, Court Rules
I’m confused — you’re telling me that the Constitution doesn’t grant the government the right to peruse our emails as desired? Via Gizmodo:
The government must obtain a court warrant to require internet service providers to turn over stored e-mail to the authorities, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.
The decision by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was the first time an appellate court said Americans had that Fourth Amendment protection.
“The government may not compel a commercial ISP to turn over the contents of a subscriber’s e-mails without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause” (.pdf), the appeals court ruled. The decision—one stop short of the Supreme Court—covers Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.
Kevin Bankston, a privacy attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, applauded the decision.
“I expect e-mail providers across the country will comply with this,” he said in a telephone interview.
The legal brouhaha centered on Steven Warshak, founder of an…
Danny Schechter on The Secret Wall Street Bailout
The U.S. doled out $12.3 trillion dollars to finance bailouts, a figure far higher than what was previously stated. Danny Schechter writes in Al Jazeera:
Go, Wall Street, Go!
Never mind the rise in unemployment and foreclosures. Never mind the folks waiting to know if they will get the benefits they need before they are cut off. Never mind the growing gap between rich and poor, and the rapid spread of poverty. (Did you know that inequality in the US is at the highest level of any industrialised country?)
Does any of this matter?
The idea of equality as a social goal is apparently passé. Christmas has a special meaning on Wall Street: It’s bonus time.
Just five too big to fail bankster companies have stashed $90 billion for payouts to prized employees. They know that the beat on The Street is fading, so it seems to be take the money and run time. Incidentally, that…
Thomas Edison’s Concrete Houses
Thomas Edison had notoriously bad judgment about the viability of his many inventions. He once embarked on an expensive scheme to construct entire houses, including furniture, out of cast concrete. This via IEEE Global History Network:
Edison’s concrete housing effort began around 1908. Portland cement (which Edison did not invent) was coming into fashion as a construction material. Edison and his team worked on perfecting a formula for mixing concrete (a mixture of cement and filler materials such as sand or gravel) and building re-usable steel molds to cast the walls of houses. By 1910, he had cast two experimental buildings — a gardener’s cottage and a garage — at his New Jersey mansion Glenmont. He announced in the press that he did not intend to profit from the venture, but would instead give away the patented information to qualified builders.
The publicity generated by this announcement attracted the attention of philanthropist Henry Phipps…
Letters To Santa Have Taken A Sad Turn
Has the “modern family” structure put pressure on children to grow up too quick, or just be more considerate? Letters to Santa usually contain kids’ materialistic desires, but lately they’re more concerned with the happiness of their family and education of their siblings. Via NPR:
This year, postal workers opening and processing letters to Santa Claus have noticed a significant change in tone from years past.
“Normally the letters would be greedy-type things — big televisions, Xbox, Wiis, things of that nature,” Pete Fontana, the head elf in New York City’s main post office, tells NPR’s Robert Siegel. “This year, the letters are single moms, three kids, no winter coats, no shoes, blankets, can’t pay the bills, not enough food in the pantry. So the need has changed tremendously.”
Fontana, who has been working in U.S. Postal Service’s Operation Santa Claus program for 15 years, shares an example:
Dear Santa, my name is Chisertopher.…
The Red Cross Briefed the U.S. on India’s Use of Torture in Kashmir
The AFP reports, via CommonDreams:
The International Committee of the Red Cross provided US diplomats in 2005 with evidence of the systematic use of torture by Indian security forces in Kashmir, leaked US diplomatic cables revealed Friday.
In a confidential briefing, the ICRC told the diplomats of 177 visits it had made to detention centres in Indian Kashmir that revealed “stable trend lines” of prisoner abuses, according to the cables released by website WikiLeaks.
Techniques included electric shock treatment, sexual and water torture and nearly 300 cases of “roller” abuse in which a round metal object is placed on the thighs of a sitting detainee and then sat on by guards to crush the muscles.
The ICRC said it had been “forced to conclude that the (Indian government) condones torture,” the cables said.
Human rights groups have repeatedly accused India of abuses in Muslim-majority Indian Kashmir, where it has been fighting an armed separatist insurgency…
Congress Refuses an Article V Convention — Has Our Government Been Hijacked?
Signing of the Constitution. Painting by Howard Chandler Christy.
Article V is the only part of the US Constitution that tells how we can change the Constitution. The states, not Congress, propose amendments at an Article V Convention. An Article V Symposium was held at Cooley Law School on September 17, 2010 in Lansing, Michigan. Bill Walker, cofounder of Friends of the Article V Convention, shared how he filed two federal lawsuits stating that Congress was obligated to call an Article V Convention. The latter lawsuit (Walker v. the Members of Congress in 2004) was appealed to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court declared, as it had in three other separate decisions, that Congress must call for an Article V Convention. But Congress has simply refused in violation of the US Constitution.
To listen to Bill Walker’s speech and to the other scholars at the symposium, who all argue that we should want,…
Bill Hicks on Marketers: ‘Kill Yourself’ (Video)
Happy 49th birthday, Bill Hicks, wherever you are.
