Archive for May, 2011
The Taliban Joins Twitter
Military maneuvering in the 21st century means the Pentagon and Islamicist rebels responding to one another’s tweets, apparently. If this is a hoax, it has fooled the Guardian, among others:
When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, they eschewed most modern technology, including television and music players. But in the latest sign of the hardline movement’s rapprochement with at least some areas of the modern world, the Taliban have embraced microblogging.
Their Twitter feed, @alemarahweb, pumps out several messages a day, keeping 993 followers up to date with often highly exaggerated reports of strikes against the “infidel forces” and the “Karzai puppet regime”. Most messages are in Pashtu, with links to news stories on the elaborate and multilingual website of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban’s shadow government likes to style itself.
Today, the feed broke into English for the first time, with a tweet about an attack on police in Farah province:…
New York Man Spends Life Savings Ahead of May 21 Doomsday
[disinfo ed.'s note: just as a reminder, the world may end on Saturday. Have a great week!]
A video report from CNN, and below a write up from Fox News:
A New York man spent his entire $140,000 life savings advertising his prediction that the world will end May 21, the New York Post reported Friday.
Robert Fitzpatrick, a 60-year-old Staten Island resident, said he spent at least that sum on 1,000 subway-car placards and ads on bus kiosks and subway cars…
Florida Senate Accidentally Outlaws Sex?
Weird move, Florida. Via Southern Fried Science:
Question: If your elected officials fail basic taxonomy, promote anti-science curriculum, and consistently attempt to undermine the fundamental underpinning of all biology, what happens when they start trying to legislate from this flawed view of reality?
The answer is this poorly-worded miasma of a law recently passed in Florida, which presumably was designed to prevent bestiality and promote animal welfare, but which has actually made it illegal, effective October 1, 2011, for anyone to have sex in Florida:
An act relating to sexual activities involving animals; creating s. 828.126, F.S.; providing definitions; prohibiting knowing sexual conduct or sexual contact with an animal; prohibiting specified related activities; providing penalties; providing that the act does not apply to certain husbandry, conformation judging, and veterinary practices; providing an effective date.
Christopher Hitchens Vs. Noam Chomsky on Osama Bin Laden
Hitchens Photo: Trockennasenaffe (CC) / Chomsky Photo: Duncan Rawlinson (CC)
Christopher Hitchens takes issue with Noam Chomsky’s recent Guernica article in Slate:
Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism.
This cognitive dissonance — to give it a polite designation — does not always take that precise form. Sometimes the same person who hails the bravery of al-Qaida’s martyrs also believes that the Jews planned the “operation.” As far as I know, only leading British “Truther” David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the…
Salvador Dalí Made a Cartoon with Walt Disney (Video)
This is an unexpected find, and a good one from Cyriaque Lamar on io9.com:
In 1946, Salvador Dalí collaborated with Walt Disney animators on Destino, a surrealist animation that was storyboarded but scrapped due to budgetary concerns. Destino wouldn’t be finished until 2003, when Roy Disney resurrected the project. Melting clocks à la Disney!
The Battle Over FBI’s Warrantless GPS Tracking
Kim Zetter writes on WIRED’s Threat Level:
Kathy Thomas knew she was under surveillance. The animal rights and environmental activist had been trailed daily by cops over several months, and had even been stopped on occasion by police and FBI agents.
But when the surveillance seemed to halt suddenly in mid-2005 after she confronted one of the agents, she thought it was all over. Months went by without a peep from the FBI surveillance teams that had been tracking her in undercover vehicles and helicopters. That’s when it occurred to her to check her car.
Rumors had been swirling among activists that the FBI might be using GPS to track them — two activists in Colorado discovered mysterious devices attached to their car bumpers in 2003 — so Thomas (a pseudonym) went out to the vehicle in a frenzy and ran her hands beneath the rear bumper. She was only half-surprised to find…
Google Lobbies Nevada to Allow Self-Driving Cars
John Markoff writes in the NY Times:
Google, a pioneer of self-driving cars, is quietly lobbying for legislation that would make Nevada the first state where they could be legally operated on public roads.
The cars, hybrids, have a laser range finder on the roof, as well as radar and camera sensors and more equipment in the trunk.
And yes, the proposed legislation would include an exemption from the ban on distracted driving to allow occupants to send text messages while sitting behind the wheel.
The two bills, which have received little attention outside Nevada’s Capitol, are being introduced less than a year after the giant search engine company acknowledged that it was developing cars that could be safely driven without human intervention.
Disney Trademarks ‘Seal Team 6′
Alex Weprin writes on FishBowlNY:
In a perfect example of a big media company looking to capitalize on current events, The Walt Disney Company has trademarked “Seal Team 6,” which also happens to be the name of the elite special forces team that killed Osama Bin Laden.
The trademark applications came on May 3rd, two days after the operation that killed Bin Laden… and two days after “Seal Team 6″ was included in thousands of news articles and TV programs focusing on the operation.
Disney’s trademark applications for “Seal Team 6″ cover clothing, footwear, headwear, toys, games and “entertainment and education services,” among other things.
See a Plane Get Struck by Lightning (Video)
Natalie Wolchover writes on Life’s Little Mysteries via MSNBC:
When an Airbus 380 from Dubai came in for landing at Heathrow Airport on a recent stormy night in London, it was struck by a giant bolt of lightning. The event was caught on camera, giving the world a rare glimpse of what’s actually a common occurrence.
“In the video, this is without a doubt a triggered flash,” Mazur told Life’s Little Mysteries. “You can see it’s a dark sky, so you have rain and other evidence of a recent thunderstorm. Natural lightning had most likely ended already, but in decaying storms you have a very high electric field. It’s enough to support the development of lightning, but there is no natural mechanism for initiating lightning discharge. When an airplane comes in, it acts as an artificial trigger.”
Blackwater’s Secret Middle East Army Exposed
The New York Times exposes Erik Prince’s latest meddling in the Middle East:
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Late one night last November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept military complex in the desert sand.
The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary army being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the oil-soaked sheikdom.
Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American…
Why Do Gadget Makers Wield A ‘Kill Switch’?
Photo: Stahlkocher (CC)
Mark Milian writes on CNN:
When you buy a video game from Best Buy, you don’t give the retailer the right to barge into your house whenever it wants. So why do we give that permission to software companies?
Most popular smartphone operating systems and other electronic gadgets include what security researchers refer to as a kill switch.
This capability enables the company that makes the operating software to send a command over the Web or wireless networks that alters or removes certain applications from devices.
Apple, Google and Microsoft include this function in their platforms, along with a few lines in their usage agreements describing the policy. Google and Apple executives say this feature is important in order to protect against malicious software.
“Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs told The Wall…
Brazilian Woman Wins The Right To Watch Porn & Masturbate At Work
Dodai Stewart writes on Jezebel:
How do you relieve stress and anxiety when you’re on the job? Do some online window shopping? Hit up the vending machine for some chocolate? Take a smoke break? One Brazilian woman masturbates. Eighteen times a day.
Ana Catarina Bezerra, a 36-year-old accountant, has a chemical imbalance. She suffers from severe anxiety and hypersexuality. She finds that masturbating helps… for a little while. According to Guanabee, Bezerra explains: “I got so bad I would to masturbate up to forty seven-times a day. That’s when I asked for help, I knew it wasn’t normal.”
Now Bezerra has seen a doctor, and she’s medicated, so she doesn’t need to jill off as often. But she still needs to. And she had to take her employer to court in order to be allowed to masturbate during the workday. A few weeks ago she won her case, which means she can reach orgasm…
Asthma Rate Rising Sharply in U.S.
Peak flow meters used to measure expiration speed.
Roni Caryn Rabin writes in the New York Times:
Americans are suffering from asthma in record numbers, according to a study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly one in 10 children and almost one in 12 Americans of all ages now has asthma, government researchers said.
According to the report, from 2001 to 2009 the prevalence of asthma increased among all demographic groups studied, including men, women, whites, blacks and Hispanics. Black children are most acutely affected: the study found that 17 percent of black children — nearly one in five — had a diagnosis of asthma in 2009, up from 11.4 percent, or about one in nine, in 2001.
While officials at the Centers for Disease Control emphasized that asthma could be controlled if managed effectively, they were at a loss to explain why it had become more widespread even as…
IMF Director Arrested After Alleged Sex Attack on NY Hotel Maid
Via MSNBC:
NEW YORK— The leader of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was arrested on Saturday, minutes before he was to fly to Paris from John F. Kennedy International Airport, The New York Times reported.
Strauss-Kahn, a candidate for president of France, was taken off an Air France flight by officers from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and turned over to Manhattan detectives, a Port Authority spokesman told the Times.
He was accused of a sodomizing a maid at a Times Square hotel earlier in the day, the authorities said. He has not been charged but was being questioned, police said.
Strauss-Kahn, 62, allegedly crept up behind a maid after she entered his room and forced her to perform oral sex on him, sources told the New York Daily News. The New York Post said he was naked and had emerged from the bathroom.
Stephen Colbert: I Don’t Want To Be The ‘Chump’ Without Unlimited Corporate Cash (Video)
This is brilliant. Looking forward to seeing how far Colbert can go with this. Ryan J. Reilly writes on Talking Points Memo:
Stephen Colbert doesn’t “want to be the one chump” without any unlimited corporate money going to his political action committee. That’s why he showed up the the Federal Election Commission building in D.C. to formally request an advisory opinion on behalf of “Colbert Super PAC,” a proposed independent expenditure only committee able to accept unlimited corporate, individual, political committee and labor contributions.
Accepting unlimited funding is “a right as described by the Citizens United case,” Colbert said in response to a question from Politico’s Ken Vogel. “I believe the Citizens United decision was the right one, there should be unlimited corporate money, and I want some of it. I don’t want to be the one chump who doesn’t have any.”
Colbert said he expected the FEC to take his request seriously.
Osama Bin Wankin’
Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post once again demonstrates that his tabloid “newspapers” (he owns The Sun in the UK among others) are in a class of their own when it comes to cover headlines.
In addition to this classy example, the Post suggests that some of the titles in Osama’s porn collection include:
- Talibuns
- Oral Qaeda
- 1,000 Arabians In One Night
- Debbie Does Abbotabad
… and the list goes on. Makes you wonder what’s in Rupert’s own collection…
It’s Official: Ron Paul Is Running For President (Again)
Too old? Nah. Ron Paul may not have much chance of winning, but he’ll likely force the other presidential candidates to face up to some of the tough issues America needs to deal with. Paul Steinhauser reports for CNN:
Saying “the time is right” because more people agree with his positions, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas on Friday announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.
The long-time lawmaker, who was first elected to the House of Representatives 35 years ago, says he’s optimistic…
California Man Tasered to Death After Running Stop Sign
Police issue X26 TASER. Photo: Junglecat (CC)
Phil Willon writes in the LA Times:
A 43-year-old man died after San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies used a Taser gun to subdue him after a traffic stop, authorities said Wednesday.
A deputy attempted to stop Allen Kephart, a disc jockey and teacher’s assistant from Crest Park, after he allegedly ran a stop sign about 3:15 p.m. Tuesday on California 189 in Blue Jay, said Cindy Bachman, a Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman.
Kephart pulled into a Valero gas station parking lot about a quarter of a mile away, got out of the car and “became combative and uncooperative” with the deputy, Bachman said. Additional deputies arrived to assist, she said.
“The deputy attempted to place him under arrest, at which time he was Tased,” Bachman said. “He became unconscious, and medical aid was immediately provided, CPR.” Kephart was taken to a local hospital, where he was declared dead.
Kephart’s father,…
