Archive for June, 2011
Wikileaks’ Mastercard Parody
Wikileaks is suffering under a banking blockade. In response, they decided to help make Mastercard’s advertising more accurate:
Censorship, like everything else in the West, has been privatized.
For six months, five major US financial institutions, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union and the Bank of America have tried to economically strangle WikiLeaks as a result of political pressure from Washington. The attack has blocked over 90% of donations, costing some $15M in lost revenue. The attack is entirely outside of any due process or rule of law. In fact, in the only formal review to occur, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner found, on January 12, that there were no lawful grounds to add WikiLeaks to a financial blockade.
Military’s Best Secret Weapon: Dolphins
Assassinating enemy divers with CO2-filled syringes? Parachuting from the sky and blowing up enemy ships kamikaze-style? Acoustically detecting a 3-inch ball 200 meters away in complete darkness? All this and more as Skeptoid covers the James Bond’s of the sea, deployed first by the USSR and today by the Indian Navy and U.S. Navy Marine Mammal System:
Dolphins and sea lions have advantages that are hard for navies to ignore. They swim far faster than divers, and are much easier and cheaper to deploy than remote underwater vehicles. They can dive hundreds of meters and return, with no concern about decompression, quicker than a human diver could even get suited up. Dolphins’ underwater acuity is such that they can acoustically detect a 3-inch ball 200 meters away in complete darkness, and even discriminate between different kinds of metal. A dolphin’s brain is famously larger than a human’s, in part because so much of…
Make Video Games Cool Again: The Blue Skies Campaign
We want to COLLECT BANANAS FROM MAGIC CASTLES not shoot enemies in unrealistic and shoddy drive-bys! We want to fight WEIRD MONSTERS not drug-dealing criminals!
Sure, video games are art nowadays, but do they have to be depressing art? In light of the preponderance of dark, dull, grey-and-brown-hued titles such as the Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto series, the Blue Skies in Games Campaign is a call for a return to the days when the ascendant video games were happily surreal and bursting with technicolor. In addition to more detailed discussion, a quick-fix series of suggestions is offered:
DEVELOPERS: HOW YOU CAN HELP TODAY!
- Change everything that’s grey into blue.
- From now on, everyone wears red shoes.
- Make everything happen at midday or sunset.
- Replace gun textures with banana textures.
- Turn all cars into pink convertibles that wobble and only do 15mph.
- If you get 100 of anything, a little tune plays.
- Instead…
Woman Arrested For Spraying Police With Her Breast Milk
This has to be a first! Reuters has the story:
A lactating U.S. woman was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after she sprayed sheriff’s deputies with breast milk as they tried to remove her from a vehicle, police said on Monday.
Ohio-resident Stephanie Robinette, 30, was arrested and charged with domestic violence and assault linked to a domestic dispute, as well as resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, according to the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office.
It said Robinette’s husband told authorities the pair had been attending a wedding when his wife got drunk and started a dispute. He said that she hit him multiple times before locking herself in her car outside a banquet facility on Saturday.
Sheriff Walter L. Davis III said that when police approached the car to speak to her, she yelled profanities and refused to get out.
“When deputies attempted to remove Robinette from the vehicle she advised the deputies that she…
Free Speech Moment: Declare War on Christianity Not Drugs!
Site Note: From time to time, Disinfo.com does post an article for the sole purposes of the speaker intended on exercising their First Amendment rights. If you are curious about this new venture, contact us through the site with the subject line “free speech moment”, and of course, all comments are welcome.
HFS, Christians have denied and continue to deny non-Christians the right to pursue happiness. Christians oppress homosexuals and their right to marry and pursue happiness. Christians are attempting to thwart legal marijuana use. It’s time we deny them their rights for they have clearly shown they abuse those rights to oppress non-Christians.
If Germany can keep out Scientology then America should be able to boot out Christianity!
ISN, 666
Learn How to Build A UFO Anti-Gravity Electrogravitic Saucer
Via SaucerKOPilot.blogspot.com:
I have recently begun working on a project, “Feasibility Study — Evaluation of Existing & Emergent Candidate Technologies for Development of Personal Transportation Flying Craft With Zero Carbon Footprint in Operation”.
Have questions about UFO technology? Would you like answers backed by 6500+ pages of UFO blueprints verified functionally legitimate by the United States government?
Join Luke Fortune & the host of Universal Truth Evolution Jerry Avalos live at 12:30pm Pacific Standard Time, 6/30/11 where the facts and history about UFO technology will be revealed, and how YOU can be participate in the New Space Age.
Join us LIVE this Thursday, June 30th @ 12:30 PST at www.blogtalkradio.com/universaltruthevolution
Indian Parents Push For Surgical Procedure To Turn Children From Girls To Boys
Photo: Planemad (CC)
Oh the social questions this raises! How does this benefit/hurt the future generation? Should parents have the right to change a child’s sex? What psychological damage could occur? What if an adult learns that they had the procedure when they were young and want it reversed? The next twenty years may see a rise in the search for therapists. Hindustan Times reports:
Girls are being ‘converted’ into boys in Indore – by the hundreds every year – at ages where they cannot give their consent for this life-changing operation.
This shocking, unprecedented trend, catering to the fetish for a son, is unfolding at conservative Indore’s well-known clinics and hospitals on children who are 1-5 years old. The process being used to ‘produce’ a male child from a female is known as genitoplasty. Each surgery costs Rs 1.5 lakh.
Moreover, these children are pumped with hormonal treatment as part of the sex change…
Social Networking Surpasses Porn As Top Internet Activity
“My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don’t have time to look at adult sites.”
Reuters claims that social media has overtaken porn as the primary reason for having an internet connection. (My advice: If you want to make a fortune, figure out a good way of combining the two.)
Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, has analyzed information for over 10 million web users to conclude that one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.
He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.
“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased,” said Tancer, indicated that the…
Wikileaks: U.S. Forced Haiti To Nix Raising Its Minimum Wage To 62 Cents
Wikileaks unveils an incredibly infuriating revelation, via the Nation. To sum up: desperately poor Haiti planned to raise its minimum wage from 24 cents per hour to 62 cents, angering the contractors for U.S. corporations such as Levis and Hanes, who pay slave wages to Haitians who sew our clothes. The Obama administration intervened on behalf of those companies, and bullied the Haitian government into setting the mark at 32 cents.
To put things in perspective, upping the hourly wage to 62 cents would have cost Hanes an additional $1.6 million each year. Hanesbrands turned $211 million in profit last year and CEO Richard Noll personally was paid $10 million.
‘Super Sand’ Cleans Dirty Drinking Water
Sand has been used as a purifier for thousands of years. An innovative way of cleaning water, by adding graphite waste, provides a cost affective way to bring purified water to those who may not normally have access to a clean water source. Via Treehugger:
The solution is cheap since the sources of graphite could include the waste produced by graphite mining companies that still contains a significant amount of graphite. And the researchers believe that it is possible to modify the graphite oxide to pick out particular pollutants and therefore tailor the super sand to specific areas that might be having trouble with certain water-borne diseases or pollutants.
Woman Dies Of Heart Attack After Awakening At Own Funeral
When someone miraculously returns to life at their own funeral, but then dies of shock at what’s taking place, is it perhaps best to continue on with the service as if nothing happened? The Daily Mail reports:
A woman died from a heart attack caused by shock after waking up to discover she had been declared dead – and was being prepared for burial. As mourning relatives filed past her open coffin she suddenly woke up and started screaming as she realized where she was.
Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov, 49, of Kazan, Russia, had been wrongly declared deceased [the first time] by doctors. Her eyes fluttered and [she was] immediately rushed back to the hospital but she only lived for another 12 minutes in intensive care before she died again, this time for good.
Google Launches Latest Social Network: Google+
It seems when you get tired of one social networking site another appears. Google+ is the new answer for those of you who are tired of Facebook, or just enjoy creating new online profiles of yourself. Via Mashable:
Google has finally unveiled Google+, the company’s top secret social layer that turns all of the search engine into one giant social network.
Google+, which begins rolling out a very limited field test on Tuesday, is the culmination of a year-long project led by Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president of social. The project, which has been delayed several times, constitutes Google’s answer to Facebook.
The search giant’s new social project will be omnipresent on its products, thanks to a complete redesign of the navigation bar. The familiar gray strip at the top of every Google page will turn black, and come with several new options for accessing your Google+ profile, viewing notifications and instantly sharing…
Pope Sends His First Tweet Via iPad
Pope Benedict XVI has posted his first tweet! The pope has gone digital, announcing the launch of the new site www.news.va, so the world can keep up with what’s going on at the Vatican.
Timothy Leary: Back In The Mainstream
Leary recording 'Give Peace a Chance' with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Photo: Roy Kerwood (CC)
He may have turned on, tuned in and dropped out, losing his post as a Harvard professor and instead becoming an icon of ’60s counterculture, but Timothy Leary has finally (and posthumously) made it back into the mainstream. The New Yorker details the acquisition of his archives by the New York Public Library:
Sitting in a storage complex in Long Island City, waiting to be sorted and processed, are several hundred boxes that make up the complete archive of Dr. Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist turned fugitive drug propagandist. The material was recently acquired from Leary’s estate by the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library, whose collection includes Mesopotamian clay tablets from the third millennium B.C.; documents from America’s founding, including a handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson; letters and manuscripts…
Women Are Better At Everything
Really?!? Meredith Melnick explains for TIME:
Recently in the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch columnist David Weidner noted that women “do almost everything better” than men — from politics to corporate management to investing.
Weidner cites a new study by Barclays Wealth and Ledbury Research, which found that women were more likely than men to make money in the market, mostly because they didn’t take as many risks. And why are they risk-averse? Because they’re not as overconfident as men, the study found.
The study’s findings backed up those of previous research on the topic: in a 2001 study [PDF] of 35,000 American households with an account at a discount brokerage, financial scholars Brad Barber and Terrance Odean found that women’s risk-adjusted returns beat men’s by 1% annually. A 2005 study by Merrill Lynch found that 35% of women held an investment too long, compared with 47% of men. More recently, in 2009, a study by…
First Advertising Campaign Targeted At Monkeys
The advertising belief that sex sells may not just work on humans, but on monkeys too. That is what the first non-human aimed advertising campaign is basing its marketing strategy on. Via Wired:
A primatologist has created the first advertising campaign aimed at non-human primates and believes that it will be sex that sells.
Laurie Santos from Yale University’s Comparative Cognition Laboratory has teamed up with advertising agency Proton Studio to “determine where advertising has innate primate responses”.
Santos and team will create two foods specifically aimed at Capuchin monkeys — possibly two different colours of jelly. One will be featured on a billboard outside of the monkeys’ enclosure and the other will not. After a set period, the monkeys will be offered both foods. “If they tend toward one and not the other we’ll be witnessing preference shifting due to our advertising,” Keith Olwell of Proton told New Scientist.
[Continues at Wired]
…
The First Science Fiction Film
Dreamy and surreal, it lives up to its name:
A Trip to the Moon (French: Le Voyage dans la lune) is a 1902 French black-and-white silent science fiction film. The film was written and directed by Georges Méliès, assisted by his brother Gaston. It is based loosely on two popular novels of the time: From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne and The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells.
It is the first science fiction film and uses innovative animation and special effects, including the well-known image of the spaceship landing in the moon’s eye.
Glow-In-The-Dark Pork And More: China’s Nauseating Food Woes
Fake soy sauce flavored with hair salon clippings? Fake eggs implanted in fake eggshells? Amazingly, it gets worse in this Los Angeles Times piece on China’s fast-ballooning food safety issues. Never have I been so thankful for the FDA:
If anything, China’s food scandals are becoming increasingly frequent and bizarre.
In May, a Shanghai woman who had left uncooked pork on her kitchen table woke up in the middle of the night and noticed that the meat was emitting a blue light, like something out of a science fiction movie. Experts pointed to phosphorescent bacteria, blamed for another case of glow-in-the-dark pork last year.
Farmers in eastern Jiangsu province complained to state media last month that their watermelons had exploded “like landmines” after they mistakenly applied too much growth hormone in hopes of increasing their size.
“The profit margin is bigger than drug trafficking if you add the lean pork powder to the pig food,”…
Japanese Pop Star Outed As Computer-Generated Creation
Has CGI technology become super realistic? Or is it more that actual famous people now resemble virtual creations to the extent that the difference is hardly noticeable? Kotaku reveals:
AKB48 is Japan’s most popular female pop group. With give-or-take 48 members, its latest member is Aimi Eguchi, who has rocketed from obscurity to become the poster girl for a Japanese ice candy, Ice no Mi. Now revealed as a computer composite of other girls in the group, she appears 4 seconds in below.
