Archive for May, 2011
Wikileaks Cables Show Race To Carve Up Arctic
BBC News reports:
Secret US embassy cables released by Wikileaks show nations are racing to “carve up” Arctic resources — oil, gas and even rubies — as the ice retreats.
They suggest that Arctic states, including the US and Russia, are all pushing to stake a claim.
The opportunity to exploit resources has come because of a dramatic fall in the amount of ice in the Arctic.
The US Geological Survey estimates oil reserves off Greenland are as big as those in the North Sea.
The cables were released by the Wikileaks whistleblower website as foreign ministers from the eight Arctic Council member states – Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Iceland – met in Nuuk, Greenland on Thursday to sign a treaty on international search-and-rescue in the Arctic and discuss the region’s future challenges.
The cables claim the Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller joked with the Americans saying “if you stay…
Is Your Religion Your Financial Destiny?
Jehovah's Witnesses. Photo: steelman (CC)
This is one of the most interesting studies on comparative religions that I have seen in a long time. Who’d be a Jehovah’s Witness, eh? David Leonhart reports for the New York Times:
The economic differences among the country’s various religions are strikingly large, much larger than the differences among states and even larger than those among racial groups.
The most affluent of the major religions — including secularism — is Reform Judaism. Sixty-seven percent of Reform Jewish households made more than $75,000 a year at the time the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life collected the data, compared with only 31 percent of the population as a whole. Hindus were second, at 65 percent, and Conservative Jews were third, at 57 percent.
On the other end are Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Baptists. In each case, 20 percent or fewer of followers made at least $75,000. Remarkably, the…
Pepsi Unveils Plastic Bottle Made Entirely From Plants
Pepsi is trumpeting its creation of a plastic bottle made entirely from plant matter. Great — now we’ll be filling our landfills with plastic forever, even after we run out of oil. Via Gizmodo:
Soda’s bad for you, but plastics—especially the petroleum-based PET plastics used widely for bottles—are bad for everyone. Thankfully, after millions of dollars and years of research, Pepsi thinks it’s cracked the code on a 100% plant-based PET bottle.
It looks…just like the old bottle. “It’s indistinguishable,” says Rocco Papalia, PepsiCo’s senior vice president of advanced research. But instead of drawing from our planet’s diminishing supply of petroleum, it’s made entirely from plant waste—currently switch grass, pine bark, corn husks and eventually incorporating orange peels, oat hulls, potato scraps and other materials leftover from its food business.
Pepsi’s going to test the bottle with a run of a few hundred thousand in 2012, and if all goes well they plan…
Planets Spinning In Reverse
Did you know that some planets spin backwards? A new study reveals the so called hot Jupiters, reported via Reuters:
Some planets are just flipping backward.
Of the more than 500 planets detected around stars besides our Sun, the vast majority appear to spin the same way the star does, scientists reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
But some of these extrasolar planets spin in the opposite direction of the stars they orbit, astronomers found. These strange, backward-spinning planets are usually gassy giants called hot Jupiters, not rocky orbs like Earth.
Besides their backwards twirling, which the astronomers call flipped orbits, these big planets huddle close to their stars, unlike Jupiter, which is about 483 million miles (778 million km) from the Sun, more than five times as distant from the Sun as Earth.
“That’s really weird, and it’s even weirder because the planet is so close to the star,” Frederic Rasio of Northwestern…
Lost At The Con
[disinfo ed.'s note: The following is an excerpt from Lost At The Con, new fiction from Big Shiny Robot's Bryan Young.]
A political writer for a second rate, online news magazine, Michael Cobb is assigned by his editor to cover a sci-fi and fantasy convention in a bid to humiliate him.
Since Cobb can’t afford to turn down the job, he heads to Georgia and dives head first into the world of Griffin*Con, renowned the world over as the Mardis Gras of geek conventions. In Atlanta he finds a place that takes geeky debauchery to new heights: science fiction and fantasy, cosplay, booze, sex, comic books, drugs, slash fiction, and more.
This scene takes place on Cobb’s first day at the con:
My heart sank, killing the warmth of the drugs. The urge for locomotion finally returned to my legs and I continued my sojourn to the elevator.
That feeling of flying high without a safety net returned as the elevator doors I’d finally reached opened with a sharp DING.
And there before me was a Darth Vader…
Bob Marley Died Dreaming of Babylon on Fire
Courtesy of Brandt Hardin
Fire up a spliff and bow to this man at RockStarMartyr.net:
Bob Marley shined a ray of hope upon the starved and battered denizens of the Third World with his soothing reggae rhythms. The singer rose up from the brutal Jamaican ghetto to emerge on the international music scene as a charismatic voice of conscience, holding up the bitter legacy of European colonialism to the shame of well-fed “baldheads.” He sang an apocalyptic song of freedom, tapping Rasta prophecies that promised the return of Africans to their homeland, “Zion,” and the total destruction of decadent Western society — Babylon. As the tumultuous 1970s drew to a close, Marley and his fellow Rastafari were certain the end was nigh.
Bob Marley’s world ended in a Miami hospital bed thirty years ago this week on May 11, 1981, while the First World’s marketing gurus captured and framed his image in ganja green, blood red, and merchandising…
Drugs Help ‘Reduce’ HIV Transmission
HIV-1 particles assembling at the surface of an infected macrophage.
BBC News reports:
An HIV-positive person who takes anti-retroviral drugs after diagnosis, rather than when their health declines, can cut the risk of spreading the virus to uninfected partners by 96%, according to a study.
The United States National Institutes of Health sampled 1,763 couples in which one partner was infected by HIV.
It was abandoned four years early as the trial was so successful. The World Health Organization said it was a “crucial development”.
The study began in 2005 at 13 sites across across Africa, Asia and the Americas.
HIV-positive patients were split into two groups. In one, individuals were immediately given a course of anti-retroviral drugs. The other group only received the treatment when their white blood cell count fell.
Both were given counselling on safe sex practices, free condoms and treatment for sexually transmitted infections. Among those immediately starting anti-retroviral therapy there was only one…
Political Game Playing Promotes Partisanship Through Polarization
Fox News studio. Photo: Inside Cable News (CC)
Grrrrrrrr.
You can almost hear the growling in the background as the masters of attack politics go into action, virtually every hour on the hour, on the Fox News Channel. The issues they focus on are carefully selected by top executives and then broken down into highly politicized message points.
Their dominant emotion is annoyance, as expressed in sarcasm and scowling. Contempt is the underlying attitude.
The other side is usually not just wrong but plain stupid, almost unbelievable in its soft-headed naivete and distance from reality
A “what do you expect” question invariably tops off the argument which always ends with the Fox host a winner and the Democrat or social critic a loser on every level.
Standing on a podium, driven by self-righteous certainty, the finger pointers view the people they talk about, and talk down to, as below the intelligence threshold of people even worth…
Space Adventures Offers Moon Tourism At $150 Million Per Seat
What are you doing this summer? Via io9:
If you’ve got a lust for space travel, a desire to go where only a couple of dozen people have gone before, and $150 million to spare, Space Adventures needs you.
The space tourism company—it’s the one that organizes the ISS trips via the Russian Soyuz—has mapped a potential tour around the moon that could lift off within five years.
The company has already secured a nine-digit commitment from one customer for a potential lunar sightseeing tour. And the logistics are already in place as well: aboard a three-seat Russian Soyuz spacecraft (the third seat is for a Russian mission commander), the tourists would launch into orbit where they would rendezvous with a separately-launched unmanned rocket, which would jet them the rest of the way to the moon.
Round trip: eight or nine days.
Do You Know What These Objects Are?
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is into historical inventions, including the revolutionary, strange, and ill-conceived — everything from primitive 45 rpm record players to radiation monitors. However, some items in their fascinating digital archives defy explanation — no one is sure where they came from or what their functions are (time travel dial? witch detector?). The government is asking for your help in identifying mystery machines:
Do you hold the key to solving some gadget mysteries from the last century of U.S. science and technology? Visitors to the site can view the items and offer clues about the history and origins of some of these important artifacts.
All-Female Cult Worships Vladimir Putin As Saint’s Reincarnation
Let’s face it — at one time or another, you’ve wondered if Putin was, in fact, something more than an ordinary mortal. The Telegraph reports:
Vladimir Putin has become the object of veneration for a bizarre Russian all-female sect whose followers believe that the prime minister is a reincarnation of the early Christian missionary Paul the Apostle.
“According to the Bible, Paul the Apostle was a military commander at first and an evil persecutor of Christians before he started spreading the Christian gospel,” the sect’s founder, who styles herself Mother Fotina, said.
As befits a sect that worships a man who has denounced the decadence of the oligarchs, the sect’s members are said to survive on a Spartan diet of turnips, carrots, peas and buckwheat.
Father Alexei, the priest in the local village church, has dismissed the sect. “Her so-called teachings are a nonsensical mixture of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, the occult, Buddhism and political information,” he…
Osama Had Gigantic Porn Stash In Compound
I’m slightly skeptical of this story — not because I can’t imagine Osama bin Laden having a propensity for porn, but because the military would be saying it regardless of whether or not it were true. The Los Angeles Times notes the breaking geopolitical news:
It appears Osama bin Laden may not have been totally disconnected electronically. Despite reports that he didn’t have Internet connection or mobile service, Pentagon officials say the Navy SEALs found pornography — and a lot of it — at Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consisting of “modern, electronically recorded video.”
No word on how it got there. But some analysts are speculating it may have been transferred by thumb-sized flash drives that he used to send emails while in hiding. Or it could’ve been through the satellite television that he used to watch Al Jazeera.
Taliban Terry Arrested In Ireland For Obama Death Threat
Is there a nuttier Irishman than Khalid Kelly, a/k/a Taliban Terry? He’s one of the main characters in Stephen Marshall’s acclaimed documentary Holy Wars (see trailer below), and is now vowing revenge for the killing of Osama bin Laden. Via AP:
Police arrested Ireland’s most notorious Muslim convert Thursday over his reported death threats against President Barack Obama.
Police said Khalid Kelly, a 44-year-old dubbed “Taliban Terry” by Dubliners, was arrested at his Dublin residence on suspicion of threatening to kill the U.S. leader. He could be held for up to three days before being charged or released.
The arrest came 10 days before Obama’s arrival in Ireland and four days after a British newspaper, the Sunday Mirror, printed an interview with Kelly. He is Ireland’s most outspoken supporter of al-Qaida and its slain founder, Osama bin Laden.
Kelly was quoted as telling the newspaper that he expected al-Qaida to kill Obama during his visit to Ireland…
Lord Vader Says: Obi-Wan Kenobi Is Dead
Den Dhur and Hallis Saper write on the Galatic Empire News:
CORUSCANT— Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mastermind of some of the most devastating attacks on the Galactic Empire and the most hunted man in the galaxy, was killed in a firefight with Imperial forces near Alderaan, Darth Vader announced on Sunday.
In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the Imperial Palace, Lord Vader declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that agents of the Imperial Army and stormtroopers of the 501st Legion had finally cornered Kenobi, one of the leaders of the Jedi rebellion, who had eluded the Empire for nearly two decades. Imperial officials said Kenobi resisted and was cut down by Lord Vader’s own lightsaber. He was later dumped out of an airlock.
The news touched off an extraordinary outpouring of emotion as crowds gathered in the Senate District and outside the Imperial Palace, waving imperial flags, cheering, shouting,…
Reform the PhD System or Close It Down
Mark Taylor writes:
The system of PhD education in the United States and many other countries is broken and unsustainable, and needs to be reconceived. In many fields, it creates only a cruel fantasy of future employment that promotes the self-interest of faculty members at the expense of students. The reality is that there are very few jobs for people who might have spent up to 12 years on their degrees.
Most doctoral-education programmes conform to a model defined in European universities during the Middle Ages, in which education is a process of cloning that trains students to do what their mentors do. The clones now vastly outnumber their mentors. The academic job market collapsed in the 1970s, yet universities have not adjusted their admissions policies, because they need graduate students to work in laboratories and as teaching assistants. But once those students finish their education, there are no academic jobs for…
Charles Koch Buys Right to Choose Economics Professors at Florida State University
This via the St. Petersburg Times:
A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University’s economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting “political economy and free enterprise.”
Traditionally, university donors have little official input into choosing the person who fills a chair they’ve funded. The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom.
Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control. The contract specifies that an advisory committee appointed by Koch decides which candidates should be considered. The foundation can also withdraw its funding if it’s not happy with the faculty’s choice or if the hires don’t meet “objectives” set by Koch during annual evaluations.
Immigrants For Sale
This powerful animated video exposes how our immigrant community is being sold to private prisons for obscene profits.
Top three facts to know about private prisons (via immigrantsforsale.org):
- The victims: Private prisons don’t care about who they lock up. At a rate of $200 per immigrant a night…
Who Is The Protect IP Act Really Protecting?
The Preventing Real Online Threats of Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act, or PROTECT IP Act, is supposedly targeted at so-called ”rogue websites” that trade in infringing goods. Abigail Phillips gives some much-needed context to the controversial legislation for the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Last year’s rogue website legislation is back on the table, with a new name: the “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011″—or (wink, wink) “PROTECT IP”. The draft language is available here.
The earlier bill, which failed to pass thanks largely to a hold on the legislation placed by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, would have given the government dramatic new copyright enforcement powers targeted at websites “dedicated to infringing activities,” even where those websites were not based in the United States. Despite some salient differences (described below) in the new version, we are no less dismayed by this most recent…
