Archive for March, 2011
Ralph Nader Discusses How The Labor Movement May Start A Revolt
On the Middle East news network Al Jazeera, Ralph Nader suggests that President Obama is not supporting the labor movement and if such ‘games’ continue it may lead to a ‘popular revolt’ in the United States.
Pastor Helps Teens ‘Gain Purity’ Through Sexual Exploitation
Is this really helping them gain ‘purity’ or is it just an outlet for the pastor to act on his homosexual impulses without having regret? The thirty-one year old pastor admitted to engaging in sexual contact as a means of ‘praying’ for the teens. The Raw Story reports:
A former youth pastor arrested in Iowa on 60 counts of suspicion of sexual exploitation allegedly told teenage boys he was trying to help them gain “sexual purity in the eyes of God.”
Thirty-one-year-old Brent Girouex, a former youth pastor at Victory Fellowship Church in Council Bluffs, turned himself in to the police in February after four young men came forward with allegations against him, The Daily Nonpareil reported.
Girouex has been released on a $30,000 bond and is due back in court on April 21. If found guilty, he faces up to five years on each charge.
Court documents show Girouex told investigators he had sexual contact with a…
Joe Rogan On WTC 7 And The Military Industrial Complex
Joe Rogan takes on the Military Industrial Complex and questions World Trade Center Building 7′s Immaculate Collapse.
Thank you Joe Rogan! I hope you can convince many of the young warriors in MMA of the difference between Warriors and Soldiers. Soldiers do what they are told, Warriors make their own fate.
Transcendental Meditation Fashionable Again
David Lynch has been publicly evangelizing the benefits of Transcendental Meditation for many years, but he needed some A-list Hollywood amperage to land him on the front page of the current Sunday Styles section of the New York Times, where he is shown in a photo with Russell Brand. The accompanying story begins with an account of Brand’s colorful past before detailing his involvement with TM:
…It is jarring then, to say the least, to hear Mr. Brand, 35, speaking passionately and sincerely about the emotional solace he has found in Transcendental Meditation, or TM. Yet there he was in December, onstage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (as his new wife, the pop singer Katy Perry, waited backstage), describing how TM has helped him repair his psychic wounds.
“Transcendental Meditation has been incredibly valuable to me both in my recovery as a drug addict and in my personal life, my marriage, my professional life…
Man Receives Full Face Transplant
Illustration: Patrick J. Lynch (CC)
BBC reports:
A 25-year-old man horrifically injured by an accident involving an electric power line has received a full face transplant in the US.
It took a team of more than 30 doctors over 15 hours to give Dallas Wiens his new face.
Surgeons who carried out the operation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston have hailed it a success.
It follows nearly a year to the day after the world’s first full face transplant in Spain.
Mr Wiens, from Texas, was injured in November 2008 when his head touched a high voltage electrical wire. The burns erased all of his facial features.
The surgery has replaced the nose, lips, skin and muscles as well as the nerves that power them and provide sensation. But, unfortunately, the surgeons were unable to give him new eyes to restore his vision.
His surgeons said: “Dallas is doing great. He’s meeting all the milestones that he’s…
Is It Unethical To Kill Plants?
Our green, leafy friends lack faces and voices, but below the surface, they possess a surprising sensitivity and a desperate will to remain alive and unharmed. The New York Times questions the ethics of vegetarianism:
Surely, I’d thought, science can defend the obvious, that slaughterhouse carnage is wrong in a way that harvesting a field of lettuces or, say, mowing the lawn is not. But instead, it began to seem that formulating a truly rational rationale for not eating animals, at least while consuming all sorts of other organisms, was difficult, maybe even impossible.
The differences that do seem to matter are things like the fact that plants don’t have nerves or brains. They cannot, we therefore conclude, feel pain. In other words, the differences that matter are those that prove that plants do not suffer as we do. Here the lack of a face on plants becomes important, too, faces being requisite…
Radiation Dose Chart
Randall Munroe of the blog xkcd took the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake tragedy (with its resultant fears of nuclear contamination) as an opportunity to construct a chart putting into perspective the quantities of radiation received from various sources — allowing for comparisons between Fukushima, Chernobyl, living near a coal plant, taking a walk, getting an x-ray, flying on an airplane, and the largest and deadliest cases of exposure. Read and learn:
The ‘Nuclear Boy’ Viral Video Sensation From Japan
For those of you who haven’t already seen this video, currently making the rounds of weirdness aggregation sites everywhere, here’s the Japanese cartoon that explains the Fukushima nuclear reactor crisis to children. Apparently Kazuhiko Hachiya’s “Nuclear Boy” is actually playing on national TV in Japan.
FBI’s ‘Next Generation Intelligence’ Program Now Capturing Your Biometric Data
Several years ago I received a notice from the U.S. Government requiring me to report to an austere federal office building in downtown Manhattan for biometric data collection. I was almost disappointed when it turned out to be little more than enhanced facial photography and fingerprinting. That was then. The FBI has now launched it’s “Next Generation Intelligence” program and it is far more akin to what I had in mind: So-called multimodal biometrics (i.e., voice, iris, facial, etc.). There’s a wealth of information on the FBI’s site explaining their impressive but worrying capabilities, current and future; here’s a taste:
Driven by advances in technology, customer requirements, and growing demand for Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) services, the FBI has initiated the Next Generation Identification (NGI) program. This program will further advance the FBI’s biometric identification services, providing an incremental replacement of current IAFIS technical capabilities, while introducing new functionality. NGI…
Liberty Dollar ‘Architect’ Convicted Of Conspiracy Against United States
The Courier Press reports:
The former head of an Evansville-based company that tried to introduce a currency that competed with the U.S. dollar has been found guilty of federal charges in North Carolina.
Bernard von NotHaus, 67, was convicted Friday by a federal jury of making, possessing and selling his own coins, said Anne M. Tompkins, U.S. attorney for the Western District of North Carolina.
After an eight-day trial and less than two hours of deliberation, von NotHaus, the founder and “monetary architect” of a currency known as the Liberty Dollar, was found guilty of making coins resembling and similar to United States coins; of issuing, passing, selling and possessing Liberty Dollar coins; of issuing and passing Liberty Dollar coins intended for use as current money; and of conspiracy…
CNN Sending Eight Times More Staff To Prince William’s Wedding Than To Japan
Ah, cable news. 2011 has brought a wealth of incredible, transformative, and tragic events around the globe, but the mainstream media will have to hold off on covering that until after royal wedding season. The Atlantic Wire notes the figure, mentioned in passing in a Wall Street Journal story:
This crazy statistic comes from the Wall Street Journal’s Amy Chozick and Cecile Rohwedder, who discovered, as proof of the media madness that will be Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding, “CNN alone will have a team of roughly 400 reporters, cameramen and crew assigned to the wedding.” To compare: A group of just 50 CNN employees, one-eighth the size of the anticipated wedding fleet, are currently on the ground in Japan covering the aftermath of the earthquake and the continuing nuclear containment problem.
CNN isn’t the only network with such disproportionately big plans for the royal wedding. On the day of the earthquake, Technolayer…
U.S. Soldiers in Afghanistan Posed in ‘Trophy’ Photos With Murdered Civilians
Jon Boone writes in the Guardian:
The face of Jeremy Morlock, a young US soldier, grins at the camera, his hand holding up the head of the dead and bloodied youth he and his colleagues have just killed in an act military prosecutors say was premeditated murder.
Moments before the picture was taken in January last year, the unsuspecting victim had been waved over by a group of US soldiers who had driven to his village in Kandahar province in one of their armoured Stryker tanks.
According to testimony collected by Der Spiegel magazine the boy had, as a matter of routine, lifted up his shirt to reveal that he was not hiding a suicide bomb vest.
That was the moment Morlock, according to a pre-arranged plan, threw a grenade at the boy that exploded while other members of the rogue group who called themselves the “kill team” opened fire.
They would later tell military investigators that…
First Day of Libya Strikes Cost More Than $100 Million
Here we go again … Robert Greenwald points out the insane financial cost of yet another preemptive war (never mind the human cost), at his blog on the Rethink Afghanistan site:
President Obama’s decision to participate in the strikes in Libya has already cost U.S. taxpayers “well over $100 million,” according to the National Journal. The Journal also relayed that, “the initial stages of taking out Libya’s air defenses could ultimately cost…coalition forces between $400 million and $800 million.” The administration launched this new war (and yes, it is a war) with no official congressional authorization, little public debate and with a vague, possibly even non-existent, endgame in mind. It’s as if the lessons of the last decade are completely lost on policymakers in the United States.
Tomahawk Block IV cruise missile (Approximate cost: $756,000 in 2011 dollars).
Congress and the President should be ending the wars we were already in, not starting new…
Rare Photos From Eva Braun’s Private Collection
LIFE has a collection of recently released photos that belonged to Adolph Hitler’s longtime girlfriend Eva Braun, providing a window into the often strange and silly personal lives of some of history’s greatest villains. Most of the images depict the couple in leisure-time activities. However, my favorite is the below shot, taken in 1937, of the narcissistic and not-so-inviting interior decoration in the living room of their home in Berchtesgaden, Germany:
Genpatsu-Shinsai: The Language of Disaster That Stalked Japan
Interesting article from Leo Lewis in the Times from 2007, about how Japan nearly avoided a “nuclear power-quake disaster” back then. It always seems when these great disasters happen there was the one lone expert who no one took seriously. Leo Lewis writes”
Japan’s turbulent history of war and natural catastrophe has already given the world a terrifying vocabulary of death: tsunami, kamikaze, Hiroshima.
But the country now stands on the brink of unleashing its most chilling phrase yet: genpatsu-shinsai — the combination of an earthquake and nuclear meltdown capable of destroying millions of lives and bringing a nation to its knees.
The phrase, derived from the Japanese words for “nuclear power” and “quake disaster”, is the creation of Katsuhiko Ishibashi, Japan’s leading seismologist and one of the Government’s top advisers on nuclear-quake safety. He said that the world may never know how close it came to its first genpatsu-shinsai this week. Luck, as much an anything else, helped to avert it.
Kucinich Wants to Impeach Obama For Libyan Strike
John Bresnahan & Jonathan Allen write in the Politico:
A hard-core group of liberal House Democrats is questioning the constitutionality of U.S. missile strikes against Libya, with one lawmaker raising the prospect of impeachment during a Democratic Caucus conference call on Saturday.
Reps. Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), Donna Edwards (Md.), Mike Capuano (Mass.), Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), Maxine Waters (Calif.), Rob Andrews (N.J.), Sheila Jackson Lee (Texas), Barbara Lee (Calif.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.) “all strongly raised objections to the constitutionality of the president’s actions” during that call, said two Democratic lawmakers who took part.
Kucinich, who wanted to bring impeachment articles against both former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney over Iraq — only to be blocked by his own leadership — asked why the U.S. missile strikes aren’t impeachable offenses.
Kucinich also questioned why Democratic leaders didn’t object when President Barack Obama told them of his plan for American…
Japan Estimated To Take Five Years To Rebuild
Tokyo, Japan
The rebuilding of a city has a price and the World Banks has come up with an estimate. New Zealand Herald reports:
Japan may need five years to rebuild from the earthquake and tsunami that has caused up to US$235 billion ($320 billion) of damage, says the World Bank.
The March 11 disaster will likely shave up to 0.5 of a percentage point from the country’s economic growth this year, the bank said in a report. The impact will be concentrated in the first half of the year.
“Damage to housing and infrastructure has been unprecedented,” the World Bank said. “Growth should pick up, though, in subsequent quarters as reconstruction efforts, which could last five years, accelerate.”
The bank cited damage estimates between US$123 billion and US$235 billion, and cost to private insurers of between US$14 billion and US$33 billion. It said the government will spend US$12 billion on reconstruction in the current national budget…
iPhone App To ‘Cure’ Homosexuality
No longer want to be gay in the 21st century? There’s an app for that. While it’s hard to believe that anyone would buy this to be used seriously, it’s encouraging to see how many people were so quick to demand it’s removal. Over 90,000 people have already signed a petition against it. The Atlantic reports:
Gay rights activists are outaged — and rightfully so. More than 90,000 people have signed a petition hosted on Change.org demanding that Apple remove an application from the iTunes Store that promises to deliver “freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.”
Developed by Exodus International, an Orlando, Florida-based Christian organization, the application claims to be “a useful resource for men, women, parents, students, and ministry leaders.” But Truth Wins Out, a nonprofit organization that defends the LGBT community against anti-gay misinformation campaigns, finds the app offensive at best. “Exodus’ message is hateful and bigoted,” the petition…
2011 Bilderberg Group Meeting Set
Hotel de Bilderberg (2007), name-giving location of the first conference in 1954
Jim Tucker, veteran obsessive investigator of the Bilderberg Group, reports on the dates of their 2011 annual meeting at American Free Press:
The shadowy group known as Bilderberg will be gathering this year for its annual meeting at the resort city of St. Moritz, in southeastern Switzerland, June 9-12, but they will have a lot of company. St. Moritz is a short distance from Davos, the site of the regular high-priced meeting of thousands of bankers, political leaders and other notables called the World Economic Forum. But unlike at Davos, where the press is always welcome, Bilderberg still tries to maintain absolute secrecy.
Bilderberg has met in Switzerland four times over the years but never in the same city. Normally, when their sibling in crime, the Trilateral Commission (TC), meets in North America, Bilderberg does, too. This year, the TC will…
