Archive for March, 2011
Congressman Peter King Resurrects McCarthyism: This Time Around the “Communists” are Muslim
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
Peter King’s brand new version of the HUAC hearings and the glory days of the McCarthy era is set to begin Thursday, when King will hold hearings deciding whether or not American Muslims have been “radicalized.” King told CNN’s State of the Union “We’re talking about the affiliates of Al Qaeda who have been radicalizing, and there’s been self-radicalization going on within the Muslim community, within a very small minority, but it’s there. And that’s where the threat is coming from at this time.”
King justified his witch hunt, titled “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response” by citing three terrorist incidents in the U.S. instances involving Muslims – the tragic shooting at Fort Hood in 2009 and two bomb plots in New York. King said “People in this country are being self-radicalized, whether it’s Major Hasan or whether it’s Shahzad or…
America’s Secret Plan To Arm Libya’s Rebels
Robert Fisk writes in the Independent:
Desperate to avoid US military involvement in Libya in the event of a prolonged struggle between the Gaddafi regime and its opponents, the Americans have asked Saudi Arabia if it can supply weapons to the rebels in Benghazi. The Saudi Kingdom, already facing a “day of rage” from its 10 per cent Shia Muslim community on Friday, with a ban on all demonstrations, has so far failed to respond to Washington’s highly classified request, although King Abdullah personally loathes the Libyan leader, who tried to assassinate him just over a year ago.
Washington’s request is in line with other US military co-operation with the Saudis. The royal family in Jeddah, which was deeply involved in the Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, gave immediate support to American efforts to arm guerrillas fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan in 1980 and later – to America’s chagrin –…
Biologists Say Giant-Penised Frog is ‘Good for the Forest’
Peter Fimrite writes in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Sheepish scientists refer to it as a tail, but the appendage dragging behind the male frog recently discovered in Mendocino County is no tail.
The little amphibian, known as a coastal tailed frog, is unique among frog and toad species for its comparatively magnificent, let’s call it, copulatory organ.
The unusual species was found recently for the first time in the 23,780-acre Garcia River Forest, farther south than it has ever been known to exist. Biologists say the 1- to 2-inch-long amphibian has a lot going for it, most notably its genitalia, which can get up to a quarter of the length of its body.
But it is less about size than it is motion, as they say. This stream-loving critter apparently wags his tail with admirable dexterity.
Could Children And Chimps Really Do Modern Art?
Psychology Today discusses a smart-alecky study in which art-majors were shown unlabeled paintings — some by great abstract artists and some by toddlers, primates, and elephants — and asked to pick the superior pieces. The professional works were preferred about two-thirds of the time, suggesting that chimpanzee and infant painters can at least hold their own in the realm of world-class contemporary painting. To me, the lesson is not that modern art is worthless — just that artistic expression is both highly subjective and can be found everywhere.
Below: works by a 4-year-old and by abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann.
Video Of China’s ‘Two Suns’ Unexplained By Scientists
Photo:Yan Zhang (CC)
Two suns were seen setting in the China sky. Videos of the sight have baffled scientists after an earlier report was ridiculed warning of a nearby star explosion that would appear to be another sun. Could there really be another sun-like star or is it just an optical illusion? Via Mother Nature Network:
Weeks after a story shot across the Web claiming that the imminent explosion of a nearby star would result in the appearance of a second sun in the sky – a story that was later debunked – two suns were caught on camera yesterday in China. The suns – one fuzzy and orange, the other a crisp yellow orb – appeared side-by-side, one slightly higher than the other.
What’s going on? Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to Space.com, asked Jim Kaler, the University of Illinois astronomer who squelched the excitement over the aforementioned exploding Betelgeuse and who…
Obama Restarts Guantanamo Trials
The Washington Post reports:
President Barack Obama approved Monday the resumption of military trials for detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ending a two-year ban.
It was the latest acknowledgement that the detention facility Obama had vowed to shut down within a year of taking office will remain open for some time to come. But even while announcing a resumption of military commission trials, Obama reaffirmed his support for trying terror suspects in U.S. federal courts – something that’s met vehement resistance on Capitol Hill.
“I strongly believe that the American system of justice is a key part of our arsenal in the war against al-Qaida and its affiliates, and we will continue to draw on all aspects of our justice system – including Article III courts – to ensure that our security and our values are strengthened,” the president said in a statement.
Bioartificial Organs For Humans Now Being Grown In Labs
Miracle Grow: In the future people who need a body part may get their own back—regrown in the lab from their own cells. Josie Glausiusz reports for National Geographic:
More than 100,000 people are waiting for organ transplants in the U.S. alone; every day 18 of them die. Not only are healthy organs in short supply, but donor and patient also have to be closely matched, or the patient’s immune system may reject the transplant. A new kind of solution is incubating in medical labs: “bioartificial” organs grown from the patient’s own cells. Thirty people have received lab-grown bladders already, and other engineered organs are in the pipeline.
The bladder technique was developed by Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Researchers take healthy cells from a patient’s diseased bladder, cause them to multiply profusely in petri dishes, then apply them to a balloon-shaped scaffold made…
Decoding Washington, DC’s Mysterious Advertising
Photo: Mission Essential Personnel/WSJ
I recently visited Washington, DC, to meet up with Robert Bauval, co-author of the next book that disinformation will be publishing, The Master Game: Unmasking The Secret Rulers Of The World. We went on a mini-tour of the city with Robert interpreting the symbology of many famous structures such as the Washington Monument and the House of the Temple. (We’ll be releasing some video footage that we shot there soon.)
We noticed another set of mysterious signs around the city, far more modern, that require an insider’s knowledge to understand them, and as luck would have it, Thomas Catan reports on them now for the Wall Street Journal:
This city is different; you just have to look at the side of a bus to see that.
Every day in the nation’s capital, commuters and visitors stare at ads in subway cars, on buses or on mobile billboards, unable to figure out…
Squatters Take Over 45-Story ‘Tower of David’ in Venezuela
Could you ask for a more poetic sign of the times? Simon Romero and Maria Eugenia Diaz report from Caracas, Venezuela, for the New York Times:
Architects still call the 45-story skyscraper the Tower of David, after David Brillembourg, the brash financier who built it in the 1990s. The helicopter landing pad on its roof remains intact, a reminder of the airborne limousines that were once supposed to drop bankers off for work.
View of Caracas taken from Mount Avila by Gloria Rodríguez (CC)
The office tower, one of Latin America’s tallest skyscrapers, was meant to be an emblem of Venezuela’s entrepreneurial mettle. But that era is gone. Now, with more than 2,500 squatters making it their home, the building symbolizes something else entirely in this city’s center.
The squatters live in the uncompleted high-rise, which lacks several basic amenities like an elevator. The smell of untreated sewage permeates the corridors. Children scale unlit stairways…
Frozen Flamingos Fall From The Sky In Siberia
NPR provides more wildlife-plummeting-from-the-heavens oddness to cap off a packed season. Going back at least a hundred years, solitary flamingos occasionally fall from the sky in the brutal Siberian winter, thousands of miles from the birds’ habitat:
The two boys ran over, called their father, Vasily, who picked up the bird and took it home. It was still alive. “[This is the ] first time I see a bird like this,” he told a TV reporter.
They fed the flamingo fish and buckwheat saturated in water (not normally flamingo food) and pretty soon it was up, active and knocking around the Muravyev’s apartment. Here it is, head in a feeding bucket.
That should be the end of the story. Except that one year later, also in November and also in Siberia, it happened again. Another flamingo flew out of the sky, landed by another Siberian river, was also brought to the greenhouse, then sent…
‘Democracy’, ‘Extremism’, ‘Stability’: Decoding The Code Words In News Media
Terms such as “stability”, “democracy”, and “religious extremism” in political discourse are generally used in a way that is different or opposite to their generally understood meaning.
Metadeniz presents a quick, amusing, and insightful primer on what Noam Chomsky calls “words with a technical meaning.” Including:
Promoting Democracy verb installing a government friendly to our interests in another country.
Freedom Fighters noun a proxy terrorist army that we support
National Interest noun the interests of the ultra-rich, particularly those in the U.S.A.
Stability noun (used referring to other countries) subordination to US power interests -> Usually achieved through war against the population.
Example: “We should promote democracy by supporting the freedom fighters in Nicaragua because it is in America’s national interest to promote stability in Central America.”
Translation: “We should send weapons to a proxy terrorist army that murders civilians to overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicaragua, for the benefit of U.S investors and to intimidate other countries into doing what we say.”
Chinese Road Workers Stumble Across 700-Year-Old Mummy
At any given moment, who knows what might be buried right beneath our feet? Perhaps, there’s a still-fresh-faced 700-year-old woman waiting to be found below the pavement. Via the Daily Mail:
The corpse of the high-ranking woman believed to be from the Ming Dynasty – the ruling power in China between 1368 and 1644 – was stumbled across by a team who were looking to expand a street.
And the mummy, which was found in the city of Taizhou, in the Jiangsu Province, along with two other wooden tombs, offers a fascinating insight into life as it was back then.
Discovered two meters below the road surface, the woman’s features – from her head to her shoes – have retained their original condition, and have hardly deteriorated. It was as though she had only recently died.
Her body, which measures 1.5 meters high, was found at the construction site immersed in a brown liquid…
Why Bill O’Reilly Is Running Scared Of Alex Jones
Alex Jones’ colleague Paul Joseph Watson, editor of InfoWars, details the horror expressed by traditional media stalwarts like Bill O’Reilly at Jones’ sudden appearance in the mainstream:
It has become abundantly clear that the establishment is so petrified of the fact that Alex Jones is at the tip of the spear of a new media revolution that is sweeping away the old guard, that we have now reached the point where talking heads like Bill O’Reilly and indeed the Obama White House itself dare not even mention his name.
During a segment about “the dumbest things of the week,” Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly entertained his dwindling geriatric audience by poking fun at Alex Jones’ appearance on The View last week, chuckling and guffawing at the behavior of “some guy on the radio, we really don’t know who he is.”…
Clark: A Gonzomentary
In the spirit of mockumentaries like Spinal Tap, Hunter S Thompson’s Gonzo style, and the art world in general, Clark is an indie web series that has been ravaging the minds of viewers for months now. To make things more confusing, the actors are going on camera presenting their method as heavily based on occultism and gnosticism. It’s not clear where the line between fiction and reality is, but it seems a fun ride for the hale at heart.
Why Evangelical Christians Hate Jesus
The Four Evangelists, by Jakob Jordaens
Phil Zuckerman, Professor of Sociology at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA, reveals some wonderfully ironic facts about the loudest bible bashers, at Huffington Post:
The results from a recent poll published by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reveal what social scientists have known for a long time: White Evangelical Christians are the group least likely to support politicians or policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus.
It is perhaps one of the strangest, most dumb-founding ironies in contemporary American culture. Evangelical Christians, who most fiercely proclaim to have a personal relationship with Christ, who most confidently declare their belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, who go to church on a regular basis, pray daily, listen to Christian music, and place God and His Only Begotten Son at the center of their lives, are simultaneously the very people most likely to…
Defense Department Wants To Be A Better Storyteller
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
The folks at DARPA, the Defense Department Advanced Research Project, put a call out for those interested to attend a workshop held at the end of February to understand what role “theories of narrative play in security domains.”
In other words, the Pentagon wants to learn more about storytelling, because a better understanding of “the role stories play in a security context is a matter of great import and some urgency.” To summarize, the Stories, Neuroscience and Experimental Technologies (STORyNET) workshop was held on the 28th with three goals:
To survey narrative theories – understanding the nature of a story and what makes one up.
To better understand the role of narrative in security contexts – asking what role stories play in political radicalization and how they influence participants in politics.
To survey the state of the art in narrative analysis and decomposition tools – “How can we take stories and make them quantitatively…
March Madness And The Class War
The term class war has been extricated from the archives of another era, while divisions over the future of the economy have become a battleground in which the adversaries yell at each other, but rarely engage in any discourse with each other in a shared language.
The worse things get, the harder it is for people to agree on what to do.
This is a month known in the USA for the “March madness” college basketball finals, but the madness seems now to be oozing from sports arenas to political capitols.
In the Middle East, all the political turmoil will ultimately impact on a regional economy build on the flow and price of oil, contends author/historian Michael Klare:
“Whatever the outcome of the protests, uprisings, and rebellions now sweeping the Middle East, one thing is guaranteed: the world of oil will be permanently transformed. Consider everything that’s now happening as just the first tremor of an…
America’s Third War: ICE Agents Nab More Than 600 Alleged Gang Members In Raids On U.S. Cities
Photo: Tiasma31 (CC)
Fox News reports:
“Hands on the car!! Hands on the car!!” “Guys! Come to the railing!! Come to the railing!!”
The urgent commands were coming from heavily armed agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And the people quickly putting their hands up or onto the vehicle are not along the Mexican border, as one might expect with ICE, but in cities all over the country.
For the past two months, ICE, working with local law enforcement, nabbed hundreds of alleged gang members with transnational ties to major drug-smuggling cartels. Operation Southern Tempest had one goal: disrupt the dealing of cocaine, crack, meth and pot in American neighborhoods.
“These are not simply drug dealers,” ICE Director John Morton told Fox News. “We are talking about violent street gangs that are involved with everything from murder to theft to racketeering.”
Morton is announcing the results of his nationwide sweep through more than a hundred U.S.…
Interview with Brett Smith, Creator of 9/11 Movie ‘Hypothesis’
Brett Smith. Photo: Brett Smith
This is an exclusive Media Roots Radio interview with Utah based documentarian Brett Smith, conducted by Abby and Robbie Martin on February 23, 2011. In 2006, Brett’s love of films drew him into taking a film class where he was required to make a 15 minute short. That 15 minute short later turned into 40 minute documentary called Hypothesis.
Hypothesis is a documentary that follows physics professor Steven E. Jones during a pivotal time in his life. In 2005, Jones went public with a theory about 9/11 that was so controversial, it resulted in everything from hate mail, threats, and even bribery to try to end his research. Despite the outside pressures, Jones vowed to never give up on his pursuit of the truth.
Interview with Filmmaker Brett Smith, Creator of Hypothesis by Media Roots
The above timeline is interactive. Scroll through it to find out more about the show’s music…
