Archive for January, 2011
Democracy Without Politicians or Elections (As We Currently Know Them)…
If this economic crisis has done anything, it has exposed our so called “democracy” as a fraud.
I believe the problem is simple: Politicians are no longer accountable after they win the election. Because if they were accountable then they wouldn’t be able to transfer the massive amounts of taxpayer wealth to the bankers. They wouldn’t be able to ignore the massive fraud in the mortgage “securitization” business.
They wouldn’t be able to change the FASB (accounting) rules so that bankrupt banks could hold their assets at pre-crash prices. And if the only thing citizens can do is riot in the streets and still be ignored by their governments, then it’s safe to say that while politicians hold office they are unaccountable.
In this video I present an alternative to our “democracy”: No elections. No politicians. Instead, it’s a political system where citizen completely control the legislative process without needing to be actively involved in crafting the legislation. In other words, they can continue living their lives, but they have absolute control over the laws in their country:
Prize-Winning Director Shoots New Film On iPhone
Photo: Park Chan-wook at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival
South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (known for award-winning movies such as Oldboy and Lady Vengeance) shoots his latest film on his Apple iPhone 4s. Could this be the beginning to a new shift in film? Or just a quick gimic supported by Apple? Via Reuters:
Prize-winning South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s latest film, “Night Fishing,” has created a buzz in his native country — it was filmed using 10 Apple iPhone 4s, three of which he himself controlled.
Park, who won the Cannes Grand Prix in 2004 for “Oldboy,” also directed the 30-minute tale about a fisherman and a female shaman with his brother, Chan-kyong, and said the circumstances of its shooting gave making the film an unusual flavour.
“Movies that I directed before were meticulously planned ahead and shot just as pictured. Compared to that, shooting this film felt free, and everyone had an…
This Just In: World Ending (Again) On May 21
I know you are waiting in anticipation for the end of times on December 21, 2012, but I have some bad news: according to several poorly designed websites, the Day of Judgment and the Rapture will begin on May 21, 2011.
Hopefully you can adapt your 2012 contingency plans to prepare for the arrival of Jesus this spring.
You can get your fill of this latest (and some would say greatest) hysterical prophecy here.
And as is always the case with your high-quality Doomsday prophecy sites, the website was optimized for Internet Explorer.
Seeing Other People’s Happy Lives On Facebook Makes Us Depressed
A new study suggests that viewing everyone else’s cheery updates and pictures on Facebook makes us feel even worse about our own crummy existences. Of course, online sharing often takes the form of a sort of competitive, veiled bragging, an effort to make it appear that we’re having fun and finding fulfillment. Slate explains:
“Misery Has More Company Than People Think,” a paper in the January issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, draws on a series of studies examining how college students evaluate moods, both their own and those of their peers. Led by Alex Jordan, who at the time was a Ph.D. student in Stanford’s psychology department, the researchers found that their subjects consistently underestimated how dejected others were–and likely wound up feeling more dejected as a result. Jordan got the idea for the inquiry after observing his friends’ reactions to Facebook: He noticed that they seemed to feel particularly…
Brain Scan Can Tell If A Smoker Will Quit
If your New Years resolution is to quit smoking every year, there may be scientific proof as to why you never seem to be able to follow through with it. Or you can keep telling yourself, “I’ll quit tomorrow.” The Vancouver Sun reports:
U.S. researchers have found a way to predict how successful a smoker will be at quitting by using an MRI scan to look for activity in a region of the brain associated with behaviour change.
The scans were performed on 28 heavy smokers who had joined an anti-smoking program, according to the study published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal Health Psychology.
Participants were asked to watch a series of commercials about quitting smoking while a magnetic resonance imaging machine scanned their brains for activity.
[Continues at The Vancouver Sun]
China To Create Mega-City With Population of 42 Million
China is planning to merge nine existing municipalities into what will be the world’s largest super-city, the Telegraph reports. Your move, America: it’s time to meld together Cleveland and Toledo into a shining beacon of freedom.
City planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge together the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta. The “Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One” scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.
The new mega-city will cover a large part of China’s manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.
Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together,…
Next Gen Biological Computers Use Gold And DNA
Gold, DNA, Future Tech. Let the apocalypse/conspiracy theories fly. io9 reports via a Nature Materials article:
Researchers have fabricated a lattice out of gold and virus fragments. It could make your computer much faster. And turn it into a biological machine.
Optical computing technology, a growing field in the tech sector, involves computers that send data using beams of light. In order to expand the capabilities of optical computing, engineers are required to find materials that manipulate light very precisely. Photonic crystals are one such helpful material. A photonic crystal can block very precise wavelengths of light, making it a great optical tool. But creating such a crystal is a challenge. Now scientists have tested a new method for making them, and they have done using the coolest materials possible: Gold and virus parts.
Tiny gold nanospheres and pieces of virus were hooked together using strands of DNA. The DNA pieces were created specifically for the…
How To Reverse Diabetes
Potentially massive news for those who suffer Type 2 diabetes — you may be able to reverse it, without the “help” of Big Pharma and their medications. Val Willingham reports for CNN:
When Jonathan Legg of Bethesda, Maryland, got a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes at 39, he was shocked. “I had always been pretty active,” said Legg. “But it was a big wake-up call, that what I was doing and my current weight were not OK.”
That was two years ago. Since that time, the Morgan Stanley executive decided to make some changes and reverse his diabetes. Although his doctor recommended he go on medication to control his illness, Legg took a different approach…
How Egypt Is Gypped By The West
Demonstrators on Army Truck in Tahrir Square, Cairo, 29 Jan. 2011 Photo: Ramy Raoof (CC)
This is an upstairs/downstairs story that takes us from the peak of a Western mountaintop for the wealthy to spreading mass despair in the valleys of the Third World poor.
It is about how the solutions for the world financial crisis that the CEOs and Big Pols are massaging in a posh conference center in snowy Davos, Switzerland have turned into a global economic catastrophe in the streets of Cairo, the current ground zero of a certain-to-spread wave of international unrest.
Yes, the tens of thousands in the streets demanding the ouster of the cruel Mubarak regime are there now pressing for their right to make a political choice but they are being driven by an economic disaster that has sent unemployment skyrocketing and food prices climbing.
People are out in the streets not just to meet but by…
Google Would Beat Bing On Jeopardy
In two weeks, IBM’s Watson computer will compete on Jeopardy against two of the show’s all-time human champions. But instead of wondering whether humanity emerge victorious against the rise of the machine, Stephen Wolfram is wondering which machine is better. The physicist behind the Wolfram Alpha “answer engine” just announced the results of his own experiment, which revealed that Google would beat Microsoft’s Bing search engine in any contest based on questions from Jeopardy!
“Wolfram took a sample of Jeopardy clues and fed them into search engines,” explains this technology blog. “When it came to the first page, Google got 69 percent correct, just beating Ask with 68 percent and Bing on 63 percent… To put that into context, the average human contestant gets 60 percent of answers correct, while champion Ken Jennings has a record of 79 percent.” Interestingly, Wikipedia came in last, scoring 23%, though they may have more to…
NY Times, Guardian Newspapers Analyze Their Coverage Of WikiLeaks
This past weekend saw some major introspection by the newspapers that led the mainstream media’s dissemination of the U.S. diplomatic cables provided by WikiLeaks. In the New York Times Magazine, Executive Editor Bill Keller led with a cover article detailing how little they liked or trusted Julian Assange — but worked with him anyway. Describing the visible change in Assange as his media stardom blossomed, Keller writes:
Assange was transformed by his outlaw celebrity. The derelict with the backpack and the sagging socks now wore his hair dyed and styled, and he favored fashionably skinny suits and ties. He became a kind of cult figure for the European young and leftish and was evidently a magnet for women. …I came to think of Julian Assange as a character from a Stieg Larsson thriller — a man who could figure either as hero or villain in one of the megaselling Swedish novels that…
Could A U.S. Government Crackdown Take America Off The Internet?
I’m sure this has been on the minds of many following the ongoing events in Egypt. An io9 article discusses the possibility:
With the threat of today’s protests looming in Egypt, on Thursday Egyptian authorities cut the nation off the internet. No online communication could pass in or out of the country. We investigated whether a similar lockdown could happen in America.
How the Egyptian government erased its citizens from the internet
No one is completely certain what happened to the Egyptian internet, but it appears that the shutdown started off early in the week with the country blocking Twitter and Facebook access for those within its borders. Then, shortly after Thursday midnight local time, the country simply disappeared from the internet. With a few exceptions like the stock exchange, Egyptian websites and services were unreachable; the network traffic over Egyptian borders dropped by an astonishing 90 percent. Cell phone networks were also down. Today…
Pot Catapult Seized At US-Mexico Border
Via Reuters:
In a brazen attempt reminiscent of a medieval siege, Mexican smugglers tried to use a hefty catapult to hurl drugs north over the U.S. Border, authorities said on Wednesday.
The Mexican military seized 45 pounds of marijuana, a sports utility vehicle and a metal-framed catapult just south of the Arizona border near the small town of Naco last Friday, following a tip-off from the U.S. Border Patrol.
Surveillance video taken by National Guard troops deployed to support the Border Patrol caught a group of men apparently attempting to pull down a metal beam and load or test the catapult, which was powered by powerful elastic and mounted on a trailer close to the metal border fence.
“It looks like a medieval catapult that was used back in the day,” Tucson sector Border Patrol spokesman David Jimarez told Reuters.
Planets Viewed From Earth As If They Were At The Moon’s Distance (Animation)
Great job by BradBlogSpeed.com. Have to say … I am afraid of Jupiter!:
Iraq Toys With Polygamy As Solution For War Widows
Roula Ayoubi reports for BBC News:
Years of conflict in Iraq have left the country with more than one million war widows and a shortage of young unmarried men — pressures that may be bringing about the return of polygamy. Iraqi woman and child Politicians have suggested financial incentives for men who marry widows
Hanan lost eight members of her family in the war, including her husband, and was left to bring up three children alone.
The experience has not broken her. She continues to work as a hairdresser in her noisy and lively home on Haifa Street in Baghdad. But she still needs a “man-shelter”, she says — and this is why she ended up married to a married man.
“When he proposed to me, he said he was divorced,” she says. “But after we got married, he got back together with his first wife, because he has children with her.”
He now stays…
Cliff Notes To The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report
Like most lengthy reports resulting from a governmental commission investigating a past mishap/misdeed, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report is full of obfuscation. Luckily one of the New York Times‘ better business reporters, Gretchen Morgensen, has created what she terms a “Cliff Notes” summary:
Truly startling revelations were few in the voluminous report, published last Thursday by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on the origins of the financial panic. This is hardly a shock, given the flood-the-zone coverage and analysis of the crisis since it erupted four years ago.
Yet the report still makes for compelling reading because so little has changed as a result of the debacle, in both banking and in its regulation. Providing chapter and verse, for example, on the bumbling and siloed management at the nation’s largest banks is enlightening, in that many of these institutions are even bigger than they were before. With too-big-to-fail institutions now larger…
Is The Internet Making Society Uncivil?
ABC News reports:
The next time you’re about to leave a snarky comment on someone’s blog or give up an hour to bid for things you don’t need on eBay, consider this: What you do and the self you create online could be forever changing the person you really are.
The Internet may connect us in unprecedented ways, and it may put more information at our fingertips than ever before. But just as it’s changing how the world works, one psychiatrist says it may be irreparably altering how our personalities develop.
Two-Headed Calf Born in Armenia (Video)
On January 25, at 10:00 a.m. a two-headed calf was born in Sotk village, Gegharkunik region of Armenia in the cowhouse of Hakob and Alina Avetyans. Hakob is an electrician and his spouse is a housewife. The couple has been living together for 25 years and has been engaged in livestock breeding for 20 years.
According to Avetyans, the cow gave birth to a calf with a difficulty. The calf is fed artificially 3 times a day. According to local veterinarians, if the calf lives three days, there will not be life threats. They stressed the animal has gender characteristics of both sexes.
