Archive for February, 2011
NYC’s Last Chinatown Arcade Shuts Its Doors
It’s a sad day for lovers of underworld history, as an important slice of gritty “old New York” just faded into dust: the last video arcade in Chinatown has closed its gates. The iconic and beloved Chinatown Fair arcade perfectly embodied the cool, seedy downtown culture of Taxi Driver/Warriors-era NYC, and offered a futuristic escape from reality for teenagers and misfits from all boroughs. The arcade was minorly famous for its “tick-tack-toe chicken” booth game, which allowed customers to play an electronic game of tick-tack-toe (sometimes losing) against a live chicken. NYC The Blog offers great photos and a farewell:
Rumors started flying around New York City blogs last week that Chinatown Fair, one of the last traditional arcades left in the city, was closing. Those rumors became reality yesterday when Chinatown Fair locked its doors for good at 8 Mott Street yesterday at 12:48 am. It was in business since at…
Last U.S. WWI Veteran Dies
Frank Buckles at age 16
Via BBC:
America’s last surviving veteran of World War I, Frank Buckles, has died aged 110.
Mr Buckles, who joined the US army in 1917, at the age of 16, lying about his age to get enlisted, died of natural causes at his home near Charles Town, West Virginia, on Sunday.
He was one of more than 4.7m Americans who signed up to fight in the Great War between 1917-18.
He served in England and France, as a driver and a warehouse clerk.
Mr Buckles was turned down by the marines and the navy for being too young to serve, but managed to convince an army recruiter he was 21.
“A knowledgeable old sergeant said if you want to get to France right away, go into the ambulance corps,” he said in a 2001 interview with the Library of Congress.
[Continues at BBC]
…
Alex Jones Defends Charlie Sheen on ‘The View’ (Video)
My freakin’ head just exploded: Alex Jones is sitting at a table with Barbara Walters. Here’s a clip below. Via TV Squad:
Alex Jones, the host of the radio show on which Charlie Sheen raged last week, vehemently defended the Two and Half Men star on The View arguing that Sheen is a recovering addict who’s being harassed and portrayed poorly by CBS, Chuck Lorre and the media.
“I just think that he’s somebody going through a hard time who got clean,” said Jones. “It’s wrong from them to be prodding him and demonizing him and trying to make him blow up. That’s actually what I believe’s going on here … Charlie’s tired of being held up like the devil.”
But, the discussion quickly goes off-topic as Jones relentlessly hypes his website and simultaneously rails against the TSA, financial institutions that are “bankrupting” the country and George W. Bush. Eventually, an exasperated Barbara Walters brings the segment to a close while Jones talks over her.
Are Paper And Cotton Bags Bigger Eco-Villains Than Plastic?
Has the disposable plastic bag been unfairly scapegoated? The Independent reports on a contrarian U.K. study which found that, with typical use, plastic grocery store bags actually have less of an environmental footprint than paper ones or cotton tote bags. The lesson: avoid needless consumption, and don’t imagine your screen-printed tote is saving the planet:
Hated by environmentalists and shunned by shoppers, the disposable plastic bag is piling up in a shame-filled corner of retail history. But a draft report by the Environment Agency has found that ordinary high density polythene (HDPE) bags used by shops are actually greener than supposedly low impact choices.
HDPE bags are, for each use, almost 200 times less damaging to the climate than cotton hold-alls favoured by environmentalists, and have less than one third of the Co2 emissions than paper bags which are given out by retailers such as Primark.
Most paper bags are used only once and one…
Oscar Winner Slams Wall Street In Acceptance Speech (Video)
Respect for Inside Job director Charles Ferguson for delaying the usual thanks to everyone he knows to say this:
“Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.”
‘If Hell Were Not Already Created, It Should Be Invented Just For You’
John Dominic Crossan. Photo: Donald Vish (CC)
That’s quite an endorsement! John Blake reports on the “blasphemous” John Dominic Crossan, for CNN:
One of his first fan letters came from someone who declared: “If Hell were not already created, it should be invented just for you.”
Other critics have called him “demonic,” “blasphemous” and a “schmuck.”
When John Dominic Crossan was a teenager in Ireland, he dreamed of becoming a missionary priest. But the message he’s spreading about Jesus today isn’t the kind that would endear him to many church leaders.
Crossan says Jesus was an exploited “peasant with an attitude” who didn’t perform many miracles, physically rise from the dead or die as punishment for humanity’s sins.
Jesus was extraordinary because of how he lived, not died, says Crossan, one of the world’s top scholars on the “historical Jesus,” a field in which academics use historical evidence to reconstruct Jesus in his first-century setting.
“I cannot imagine a…
Secret Society Connecting Through the Internet Feeds Eating Disorders
'Anorexia nervosa' by Dr Mohamed Osman, Physician & Artist
ScienceDaily reports:
University of Cincinnati communication researchers are reporting on a new type of social support group as social networks grow on the Web. This emerging Online Negative Enabling Support Group (ONESG) surrounding the pro-anorexia movement is reported in the current issue of the journal, New Media & Society.
Members of this society embrace anorexia as a choice rather than acknowledging it as an illness. The ONESG pro-anorexia movement reflects four themes and uses several communication strategies to encourage anorexics to embrace their harmful and dangerous impulses, writes lead author Stephen M. Haas, a UC associate professor of communication. The themes are:
- Staying “true” to the anorexia movement — Forums and blogs invite members to discuss eating, binging and exercising, an “online confessional” of sorts where members can confess their guilt if they feel they have eaten too much or have not exercised enough to stay inline…
‘You Have A Collect Call From Bernard Madoff’
New York Magazine’s Steve Fishman wrote to financial criminal Bernie Madoff hoping for an interview. He could hardly have known what a coup would result:
…one evening a few weeks ago, my home phone rang. “You have a collect call from Bernard Madoff, an inmate at a federal prison,” a recorded message announced. Out of nowhere, there was that accent, familiar to anyone who’s visited Queens. Madoff apologized for calling collect. “I don’t have that much money in my commissary account,” he told me, before starting on a remarkable conversation that would stretch to several hours in more than a dozen phone calls. This being Bernie Madoff, in dollar terms the greatest criminal in history, I didn’t know what to believe. But I listened…
For anyone interested in the psychology of the man made famous for his long-running Ponzi scheme, it’s a must read story.
How The Banksters Got Away With The Biggest Rip-Off Ever
Hats off to Matt Taibbi for staying on the Wall Street crime beat, asking in his most recent report in Rolling Stone: “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”
“Financial crooks,” he argues, “brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them.”
True enough, but that’s only part of the story. The Daily Kos called his investigation a “depressing read” perhaps because it suggests that the Obama Administration is not doing what it should to reign in financial crime. Many of the lawyers he calls on to act come from big corporate law firms and buy into their worldview.
Kos should be more depressed by the failure of the progressive community to focus on these issues, and not pressing the government to do the right thing.
There is much more to this story. It’s also more about institutions than individuals, more about a captured system…
Horrific Medical Experiments On Prisoners And Mental Patients In U.S.
Dr. Jonas Salk, who led one of the studies.
You really want to believe that America would be above this sort of thing, but I suppose for a nation that imported human vivisection experts from Nazi Germany after WW2, trying out dubious medical procedures on its own citizens should not be too much of a surprise. The broad scope of the experiments might be though: Mike Stobbe reports on a review by AP of over 40 medical “studies”:
Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.
Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in…
Sand Animation Depicts German Invasion of USSR (Video)
Kseniya Simonova gave this performance on Ukraine’s Got Talent:
Hydrofracking Is Poisoning U.S. Water Supply
Photo: David R. Tribble (CC)
When the mainstream media decries the practices of large energy companies, you know they must really be operating outside any possibility of acceptable behavior. Case in point: hydraulic fracturing for natural gas deposits. Ian Urbina reports for the New York Times:
The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new wells and drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century’s gold rush — for natural gas.
The gas has always been there, of course, trapped deep underground in countless tiny bubbles, like frozen spills of seltzer water between thin layers of shale rock. But drilling companies have only in recent years developed techniques to unlock the enormous reserves, thought to be enough to supply the country with gas for heating buildings, generating electricity and powering vehicles for up to a hundred years.
So energy companies are clamoring to drill. And they are getting rare…
The Political Power of Literature (Video)
Via Al Jazeera:
Riz Khan interviews writers Ahdaf Soueif of Egypt, Hisham Matar of Libya, and Ariel Dorfman of Chile about the roles of artists and intellectuals in revolutions.
Why Evan Emory Could Spend 20 Years In Jail For Edited ‘Prank’ YouTube Video
Unfortunately the original video is removed, however I cannot reasonably see how this man could face up to 20 years for a fake, edited skit. If anybody has the original, please share in comments. The Chicago Tribune reports:
The Muskegon County prosecutor who charged a 21-year-old West Michigan college student with manufacturing child abusive material says a recall effort targeting him likely is based on misinformation.
Tony Tague tells the Muskegon Chronicle he “will not be deterred in my efforts to protect the children of Muskegon County” after a Facebook group dedicated to his recall was set up.
Tague charged Evan Emory of Fruitport in connection with a sexually-themed YouTube video he [edited] that featured local first-grade students and vulgar lyrics.
Serbian Parents Claim Their 7-Year-Old Boy Is Magnetic (Video)
Benjamin Radford writes in Discovery News:
A 7-year-old Serbian boy named Bogdan is making international news for an apparently paranormal (though not terribly useful) ability.
According to several sources including MSNBC and The Daily Mail, Bogdan is magnetic. Household objects such as spoons, knives and forks cling to his skin with almost supernatural ease. The idea that a person could generate a strong magnetic field is bizarre, but what’s even stranger is that other things stick to him too, such as small plates, small flat glass objects and even a remote control.
Bogdan is only the latest in a long line of people who have claimed this ability. Yet there is no evidence that Bogdan, or anyone else, is “magnetic.”
President Obama Signs Extension of PATRIOT Act: The Same Act He Railed Against During His Campaign
Image Courtesy of TheDissenter.
“Lawmakers will soon start debating” … yeah right, it seems like the PATRIOT Act is a permanent reality. I’d like to know more about the scope of this “lone wolf” provision. Via the Washington Post:
President Barack Obama has signed a three-month extension of key surveillance provisions of the Patriot Act.
The law extends two areas of the 2001 act. One provision allows law enforcement officials to set roving wiretaps to monitor multiple communication devices. The other allows them to ask a special court for access to business and library records that could be relevant to a terrorist threat.
A third provision gives the FBI court-approved rights for surveillance of non-American “lone wolf” suspects — those not known to be tied to specific terrorist groups.
Obama signed the three-month extension of the provisions Friday. They were to expire Monday.
Lawmakers will soon start debating a multiple-year extension of the provisions, which have…
Two Planets Found Sharing One Orbit
It really is a strange universe out there. Marcus Chown writes in New Scientist:
Buried in the flood of data from the Kepler telescope is a planetary system unlike any seen before. Two of its apparent planets share the same orbit around their star. If the discovery is confirmed, it would bolster a theory that Earth once shared its orbit with a Mars-sized body that later crashed into it, resulting in the moon’s formation.
The two planets are part of a four-planet system dubbed KOI-730. They circle their sun-like parent star every 9.8 days at exactly the same orbital distance, one permanently about 60 degrees ahead of the other. In the night sky of one planet, the other world must appear as a constant, blazing light, never fading or brightening.
Gravitational “sweet spots” make this possible. When one body (such as a planet) orbits a much more massive body (a star), there are…
Geoengineering Set To Change Life On Earth
Oceanic phytoplankton bloom in the South Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Argentina.
Why is it that some of the best human minds are so focused on what they can achieve in the name of science that they seldom contemplate whether or not they are helping or hurting our ability to exist on planet Earth?
In a lengthy story for USA Today, Dan Vergano reveals the many and varied plans of scientists at the forefront of geoengineering plans for our fragile mother:
Scientists call it “geoengineering,” but in plain speak, it means things like this: blasting tons of sulfate particles into the sky to reflect sunlight away from Earth; filling the ocean with iron filings to grow plankton that will suck up carbon; even dimming sunlight with space shades.
Each brings its own set of risks, but in a world fretting about the consequences of global warming, are these ideas whose time has come?
With…
