Archive for January, 2011
“Invisible” Tanks Could Be On Battlefield Within Five Years
Perfect for fighting “invisible” wars. The Telegraph reports:
Armoured vehicles will use a new technology known as “e-camouflage” which deploys a form “electronic ink” to render a vehicle “invisible”.
Highly sophisticated electronic sensors attached to the tank’s hull will project images of the surrounding environment back onto the outside of the vehicle enabling it to merge into the landscape and evade attack.
The electronic camouflage will enable the vehicle to blend into the surrounding countryside in much the same way that a squid uses ink to help as a disguise.
Unlike conventional forms of camouflage, the images on the hull would change in concert with the changing environment always insuring that the vehicle remains disguised.
In Helmand, for example, all armoured vehicle have desert sand coloured camouflage, which is of little use in the “Green Zone”, an area of cultivation where crops are grown and the Taliban often hide.
Up until recently such concepts were thought to be…
Hu’s On First: It’s China-U.S. Summit Time
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Hu Jintao. Photo: www.kremlin.ru. (CC)
On the eve of the Chinese President’s visit to the United States, and the intense speculation about his intentions—and ours—I found myself a dark room at the Anthology Film Archive in New York’s East Village watching a spectacular documentary by Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang called Petition.
It’s about the tens of thousands of people with grievances who seek redress in China at offices ostensibly set up to resolve their problems.
The right to petition is guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution—yes China has a Constitution, but it is unevenly enforced like our own. Falun Gong first tried, but failed, to bring its human rights claims to a Petition office like the bureaucratic centers shown in the film as do a small army of individuals who every day, bravely—sometimes fanatically—insist it is their human right to be heard. (In Falun Gong’s case, they were outlawed and systematically repressed for more…
Against Tourism: The Art Of Traveling
Dante’s Inferno provides us with what is perhaps the most apt picture of tourism to date. More specifically, it is in the first layer of Hell, Limbo, that Dante depicts the circumstances that contextualize tourism and the individual who undertakes it, i.e. the tourist.
Like the unbaptized and virtuous Pagans whose torture is the inability to imagine something greater than their rational minds can conceive, the tourist never ventures beyond the predetermined image of the places they visit. The tourist deals only in images, whether it is the image of the Grand Canyon that was promised to him by the travel agent, or the image he must make of it (by snapping a picture) in order for it to become real. The tourist cannot know the mystery or grandeur of the Grand Canyon as it stretches across the horizon, she can only seen it in comparison to the image she was promised.…
34,000 Year-Old Bacteria Discovered Alive
Photo: Magnified microscopic view of large algae and prokayotes (Brian Schubert)
Can this ancient discovery help us understand future discoveries of bacteria on other planets? Via The Epoch Times:
Scientists have found prokaryotes believed to have been alive when trapped in salt crystals 34,000 years ago, according to a study published this month in The Geological Society of America’s open-access journal GSA Today.
“Microbes are known to exist in subsurface habitats, such as sub-seafloor sediments and continental and oceanic crust, to depths of up to 3 km,” the paper reads.
“Prokaryotes (single-celled organisms lacking a nucleus and other membrane-bound specialized structures) in these subsurface environments live in water within sediment pores and rock fractures.”
Organisms have also been found in glaciers up to 8 million years old, according to the paper.
[Continues at The Epoch Times]
Japan’s Abandoned Island Of Rabbits
At the far corners of the earth, mythical places spring into being. Formerly the base of the Imperial Japanese Army’s poison gas production facilities, Japan’s Okunoshima Island lay dormant for decades. Then something strange happened: it was overrun by hundreds and hundreds of rabbits. Japan Probe observes:
Many visitors to Okunoshima Island, located some three kilometers off the Hiroshima Prefectural city of Takehara, are bringing their cameras to take photographs of the rabbits, next year’s zodiac animal, for their New Year’s greeting cards and personal blog sites. Today, there are some 300 rabbits living on the island.
The small island of about four kilometers in circumference used to be a base for the Imperial Army’s lethal gas production between 1929 and 1945. It was once erased from the map of Japan for security reasons.
The poison gas produced at the site took the lives of many people in China and other battlefronts, and former facility…
Hinduism Was Founded By Saptarshis
The question of who founded Hinduism, the world’s third largest religion with 800 million followers, is one of the biggest mysteries of World History even today. When confronted with this question, answers range as follows:
“Relatively little is known about the origins of Hinduism, as it predates recorded history.”
“Hinduism – as I see it – is a coming together of various doctrines and philosophies. To find out the exact origins of Hinduism is a bit pointless I think. It is like asking – Where did the Ocean Originate”
“Hinduism, the world’s oldest religion, has no beginning–it precedes recorded history. It has no human founder. It is a mystical religion”
Here is the first ever look on the founders of Hinduism.
Just as there has been a huge amount of migration in the last four centuries from all over the world to United States and other North American provinces, there was a time thousands of…
“Baby Doc” Duvalier Questioned By Haiti’s Authorities
It didn’t take long after his arrival before “Baby Doc” Duvalier was questioned about his crimes. BBC News reports:
Former Haitian leader Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier has been questioned by judicial officials and was later led out of his hotel by police.
He was questioned over claims he stole from the country’s treasury. It is not clear whether he has been arrested.
Haiti’s chief prosecutor and a judge were seen arriving at his hotel in Port-au-Prince earlier on Tuesday.
Mr Duvalier, who ruled the country for 15 years before being ousted in 1986, made a surprise return to Haiti Sunday.
“He will be questioned and he will remain at the disposal of the judicial system,” a senior government official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters news agency earlier.
[Continues at BBC News]
Planned-opolis: Envisioning City Life In The Future
Forum for the Future is a United Kingdom-based think tank with funding from corporate giants such as PepsiCo and Vodafone. Prior to New Year’s, it unveiled a series of animated shorts depicting how life within megacities might look in the year 2040. Perhaps most interesting is the vision of a benignly-Orwellian “Planned-opolis” in which daily activity is carefully regulated:
Paul Haggis And The Scientology Tell-All Book
Paul Haggis. Photo: David Shankbone (CC)
It’s been tagged as “the Scientology expose we’ve been waiting for” (Gawker), but some serious questions have been raised about just how much Paul Haggis has cooperated with New Yorker staff writer and Looming Tower author Lawrence Wright’s new book, The Heretic of Hollywood: Paul Haggis vs.The Church of Scientology. The LA Times suggests it’s time for conspiracy theorists to ponder whether or not Haggis has been nobbled by the Scientology “Church”:
Paul Haggis has severed ties with the Church of Scientology. But maybe he’s not quite willing to tell all.
Last week, a number of reports said Haggis was collaborating on a Scientology-themed book with New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright, who was also writing an as-yet-unpublished magazine article on the subject. The book was to explore the director’s involvement with, and disassociation from, the Church of Scientology.
The next day, a representative for the filmmaker messaged to clarify that while…
Saudis Hold Conference On UFOs For World Leaders
Saudi Arabia is a very conservative nation, so if they feel the need to hold a conference about UFOs to discuss the effects on business, maybe they have something interesting to say… stay tuned! Michael E. Salla reports at Exo News:
A leading business forum discussing global competitiveness will in its annual conference host a panel discussing UFOs and extraterrestrial life. The Global Competitiveness Forum is hosted by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and discusses business trends and insights essential for future business investment and competitiveness. The panel is titled: “Contact: Learning from Outer Space”, and features famed astrophysicist Dr Michio Kaku and a leading Islamic scholar, together with prominent UFO experts Stanton Friedman and Nick Pope. The Global Competitiveness Forum is poised to introduce, perhaps for the first time, many world business leaders to key issues concerning UFOs and extraterrestrial life, and how these impact on economic competitiveness.
The Global Competitiveness Forum…
Swiss Banker Gives WikiLeaks Damning Data On Wealthy Tax Evaders
Another week, another round of WikiLeaks. Clearly there are no sacred cows and in fact it is the biggest targets who are going down fastest, from corrupt governments to cheating taxpayers. Playing the Bradley Manning role this time is ex-Bank Julius Baer executive Rudolf Elmer. AP/Yahoo News has the story:
A former Swiss banker on Monday supplied documents to WikiLeaks that he alleges detail attempts by wealthy business leaders and lawmakers to evade tax payments.
Rudolf Elmer, an ex-employee of Swiss-based Bank Julius Baer, said there were 2,000 account holders named in the documents, but refused to give details of the companies or individuals involved.
He has previously offered files to WikiLeaks on financial activities in the Cayman Islands and faces a court hearing in Zurich on Wednesday to answer charges of coercion and violating Switzerland’s strict banking secrecy laws.
“I do think as a banker I have the right to stand up if something…
Japanese Scientists Plan to Resurrect Mammoth Within Five Years
_-_Mauricio_Ant%C3%B3n.jpg "Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) - Mauricio Antón")
Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) – Mauricio Antón/PLoS (CC)
Are we one step closer to Jurassic Park? Perhaps wishful thinking on my part, but we’re making progress, as reported by the Daily Mail:
It died out around 8,000 years ago…but in just five years the woolly mammoth could soon be walking the Earth again.
Japanese scientists are behind an ambitious project to bring the long-extinct mammal back from the dead.
The revival requires a sample of intact DNA for cloning purposes and an elephant to act as surrogate mother, donating an egg and her womb.
Taking into account the 600 or so days needed for the pregnancy, the first baby mammoths of the modern age could be born in four to five years.
In recent years, scientists have used samples of hair frozen in the Siberian ice for thousands of years to piece together the mammoth’s genetic code. And DNA preserved in bone has been used to…
Still Think Financial Markets = Financial Investment?
For those STILL too gullible to believe that we will never recover until we stop the irresponsible hoarding and gambling behaviours of Wall Street through a property tax on large securities holdings, I present the following:
Our economy doesn’t need to print more money. The economy must have had about $1.5 TRILLION more money at the end of 2010 than it started with. What we need to do is make the banksters and uber-rich pay their fair share and stop glomming off old age pensioners.
Details available upon request. Or check it out for yourself here.
If you liked this, or better yet, if you hated this, check out my ‘Policy Directions‘ page at Dystopia Diaries.
The Paranoid Style In American Politics
From Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay in Harper’s:
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms–he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (”Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)
As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised,…
Study Finds Possible Link Between Genes and Friendship
Could your genes help decide the friends you choose? BBC News reports:
Researchers in the United States say they have uncovered tentative evidence of a genetic component to friendship.
Using data from two independent studies, they found carriers of one gene associated with alcoholism tended to stick together.
However, people with another gene linked with metabolism and openness, stayed apart.
Details are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers looked at six genetic markers in two long-running US studies, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the Framingham Heart Study, which contain both genetic data and information on friends.
[Continues at BBC News]
‘Concrete’ Dress Helps Purify The Air
Looking for that perfect dress that will turn heads? Well, this one is made with pollutant-absorbing concrete, so you can clean the air too! Discovery News reports:
A collaboration between London College of Fashion, University of Sheffield, and the University of Ulster, “Herself” is a prototypical dress sprayed with a concrete mixture that purportedly absorbs pollutants in nearby air. The details of the process remain a little hazy, although pollutant-absorbing concrete does actually exist — in fact the same Italian company that made this “transparent” cement (as some readers pointed out, this should have been concrete, which is actually the mixture of cement plus gravel and sand) has already built some air-friendly structures in Europe with it. Using sunlight as a catalyst, titanium dioxide on the surface of the material reacts with pollutants in the air, reportedly decreasing nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide in the surrounding area by up to 65 percent. I suspect…
Thermite Compound Found in World Trade Center Dust
An article published by The Open Chemical Physics Journal in 2009 details that a team of scientists lead by a Danish University of Copenhagen researcher have found traces of what appears to be unreacted and partially reacted super-thermite, or nano-thermite, in four different samples of the World Trade Center dust collected by eyewitnesses. The unique compound shows immense reactivity to heat and ejects the same iron-rich spheroids observed in the ignition of commercial thermite.
An English-subtitled Danish television interview with the lead researcher, Niels Harrit, who believes that the discovery of this thermite compound implies foul play, is shown below, followed by an abstract from the research paper.
Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier Returns To Haiti
Photo: Francios Duvalier and Jean-Claude Duvalier shortly before Francios' death and Jean-Claude's presidency
Shortly after Haitians remember the one year anniversary of the devastating earthquake, Haiti is struck with another surprise. The return of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who took over the country at the age of 19, continuing his father’s dictatorship of fear and torture. His arrival gave rise to mix emotions: some are questioning if his crimes will finally be tried, some remember the time of his dictatorship as the last time of stability in Haiti, some wonder if this will encourage exiled former President Jean-Bertrande Aristideto visit the country. One thing is for certain, he returned out of the concern of his homeland and it’s people. Can a man and his country put aside differences to help his people in a time of need? Forbes reports:
Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, a once feared and reviled dictator who was ousted in a popular…
Abu Dhabi Now Creating ‘Man-Made Rainstorms’ Regularly
Abu Dhabi now controls its weather with giant ionizers, the Telegraph reports:
A secret £7 million weather project in Abu Dhabi has resulted in dozens of man-made rainstorms, according to reports.
Scientists employed by Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the UAE and leader of Abu Dhabi, successfully created more than 50 rainstorms in the state’s Al Ain region last year, mostly in July and August when there is virtually no rain at all. It is believed to be the first time the system has produced rain from clear skies.
They have been using giant ionizers, shaped like giant lampshades, to generate fields of negatively charged particles, which create cloud formation.
In a company video, seen by The Sunday Times, Helmut Fluhrer, the founder of Metro Systems International, the Swiss company in charge of the project, said: “We are currently operating our innovative rainfall enhancement technology, Weathertec, in the region of Al Ain…
