Archive for June, 2011
Jimmy Carter: End the Global War on Drugs
I doubt any other former (or current) president(s) will make this statement. Jimmy Carter writes in the New York Times:
In an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade. The commission includes the former presidents or prime ministers of five countries, a former secretary general of the United Nations, human rights leaders, and business and government leaders, including Richard Branson, George P. Shultz and Paul A. Volcker.
The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment…
Can A Man Still Fly? Happy Fourth of July (Video)
Superhero movies, should still be this good, for the world. And I am saying this against that craptastic Green Lantern movie produced. What the fuck happened … ?
FBI Gives Itself Power To Follow You, Go Through Your Trash, Test If You’re Lying and More
Illustration: RadioKirk (CC)
Very startling observations from Sam Biddle on Gizmodo:
The easiest way to change the rules that apply to you is to just rewrite them yourself. So the FBI’s done exactly that, the NYT reports, self-releasing a new edition of its rulebook. Let’s dig through some garbage, Fed bros!
The “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide” is the FBI’s big fat guide to investigative dos and don’ts. Formerly under the don’t category: administer lie detector tests, go through private residential garbage, and send out “surveillance squads” without any firm evidence that the person in question might possibly be a criminal. Not anymore! This is a new, chill, laid back FBI. Who needs evidence?
Now the Feds can do all of the above as an “assessment”—basically an entirely informal version of an official investigation, allowable without any proof that anyone’s up to anything illegal. So, if the FBI cares to, it can now “assess” you.…
Saudi Arabian Women Protest Driving Ban
Jason Burke writes in the Guardian:
At just after 10 o’clock on Friday morning Maha al-Qahtani swapped places with her husband, Mohammed, and took the wheel of the family car.
For the next 50 minutes, she drove through the Saudi capital, along the six-lane King Fahd Road, through Cairo Square, down the upmarket Olaya Street with its shopping malls, Starbucks, Apple store and boutiques.
“No one tried to stop us. No one even looked,” the 39-year-old civil servant said. “We drove past police cars but had no trouble.”
In fact, the biggest problem for Qahtani was her husband sitting next to her in the family Hummer. “He kept telling me to slow down or speed up. He was very fussy,” she said.
This is Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world that bans women from driving motor vehicles.
The NYC Fancy Rat Convention
June is a special time of year in New York, when the sun warms the city, and the rats come out of hiding and get whisked off to fashion shows in the finest of attire at the Fancy Rat Convention.
Only In America: Purchase A Giant Pepsi To Raise Money For Diabetes Research
The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation has confirmed that this is a real promotion occurring now at KFCs across the country. Gulp down a “mega jug” of Pepsi — that’s a half gallon containing 56 spoonfuls of sugar — and one whole dollar will go towards finding a cure for the terrible disease that the drink will give you. Via Grist:
I honestly didn’t believe this one was for real at first. No way even KFC, purveyors of a sandwich that uses fried meat as a delivery mechanism for fried meat, would seriously market a soda size called the “mega jug.” And even if they did, they’d never have the chutzpah to donate “mega jug” dollars to juvenile diabetes research.
Sadly, I had totally underestimated KFC’s capacity for irony. The mega jug is a half gallon of soda, and this is a real local promotion. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation defends it thus: “JDRF…
Researchers Extol The Medical Benefits Of Magic Mushrooms
Not only that, but the researchers at John Hopkins say they’ve found the perfect dosage. Sadly, this looks to be one of those cases in which society lags behind science. Via Yahoo News:
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have been studying the effects of psilocybin, a chemical found in psychedelic mushrooms. Now, they say, they’ve zeroed in on the perfect dosage level to produce transformative mystical and spiritual experiences that offer long-lasting life-changing benefits, while carrying little risk of negative reactions.
The breakthrough could speed the day when doctors use psilocybin–long viewed skeptically for its association with 1960s countercultural thrill-seekers–for a range of valuable clinical functions, like easing the anxiety of terminally ill patients, treating depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and helping smokers quit.
The Johns Hopkins study involved giving healthy volunteers varying doses of psilocybin in a controlled and supportive setting, over four separate sessions. Looking back more than…
Image Comics’ ‘The Big Lie’ Asks Some Big Questions
Brian Truitt writes in USA Today:
It has been nearly 10 years since 9/11, and the tragedy is still on the minds of many Americans. One of those, writer and artist Rick Veitch, is convinced we haven’t been told the complete truth about it.
The questions surrounding that fateful day power the themes and story of his new Image Comics series The Big Lie, which debuts Sept. 7 and reteams Veitch with fellow artist Gary Erskine.
Veitch structured the story similarly to the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “No Time Like the Past,” in which a man uses a time machine to try to “fix” three events: warning a Hiroshima policeman about the atomic bomb, assassinating Hitler before World War II and stopping the sinking of the Lusitania.
In The Big Lie, the heroine is a woman named Sandra, who lost her husband, Carl, during the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.…
No Such Agency (NSA) Teams With Providers To Monitor Your Email
Surely they were doing this anyway? Ellen Nakashima reports for the Washington Post:
The National Security Agency is working with Internet service providers to deploy a new generation of tools to scan e-mail and other digital traffic with the goal of thwarting cyberattacks against defense firms by foreign adversaries, senior defense and industry officials say.
The novel program, which began last month on a voluntary, trial basis, relies on sophisticated NSA data sets to identify malicious programs slipped into the vast stream of Internet data flowing to the nation’s largest defense firms. Such attacks, including one last month against Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin, are nearly constant as rival nations and terrorist groups seek access to U.S. military secrets.
“We hope the . . . cyber pilot can be the beginning of something bigger,” Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III said at a global security conference in Paris on Thursday. “It could serve as a model…
The Weather Underground and Ronald Stark
From Modern Mythology:
Named after that line from a Dylan tune, (”You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”) the Weather Underground were a “radical left” organization that seemed to use white guilt to crystallize the need for revolution. Not so much on the methodology, but culturally, the forces that created the WUO couldn’t have been far from our minds when dreaming up the fictional side to the Mother Hive Brain.
Here is a rather good documentary on the Weather Men which is available free online. Watch the whole documentary on YouTube, it’s also available on Netflix On-Demand.
Skilluminati Research has an excellent write up on a figure that had connection with this organization, using more methods sanctioned by the need to counter fascist order with blind chaos, Ronald Stark :
“He had a mission, he explained, to use LSD in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both…
Would You Eat a Sh*t Burger? It’s Made From You Know What (Video)
Via LiveLeak:
A Japanese scientist making artificial meat from human feces:
Why Are Democrats So Weak? Thoughts on the Weiner ‘Scandal’ (Video)
Rachel Maddow speaks with Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks who has plenty to say:
LulzSec ‘Takes Down’ CIA Website
Via BBC News:
The hacker group Lulz Security has claimed it has brought down the public-facing website of the US Central Intelligence Agency.
The alleged attack on CIA.gov occurred on the same day the group opened a telephone request line so its fans could suggest potential targets.
On its Twitter feed, the group wrote: “Tango down – cia.gov – for the lulz”.
The CIA website was inaccessible at times on Wednesday but appeared to be back up on Thursday.
It was unclear if the outage was due to the group’s efforts or to the large number of internet users trying to check the site.
The CIA would not confirm if it had been the victim of an attack. In a statement, a spokesperson told BBC News: “The CIA’s public web site experienced technical issues that caused it to respond slowly for a short time yesterday evening. Those issues are now resolved.”
Happy Bloomsday, America!
Hand drawing of Bloom by Joyce
June 16th is the annual celebration of Leopold Bloom’s doomed wanderings through Dublin in 1904, as chronicled in James Joyce’s classic novel “Ulysses”. And in the 21st century, reality finally catches up with and overtakes fiction.
In 1921 a U.S. court banned Ulysses on the grounds that some of its graphic depictions of nudity and sexuality constituted pornography under the Postal Code. And while that decision was reversed in 1933 by a judge who could only have failed today’s more rigorous selection processes for illiteracy and cretinism, the private sector came to the rescue of public morals when Apple banned an online illustrated version from its iStore last year.
However, that victory had an even shorter half-life. A couple months later, presumably realizing that it would lose it’s investment completely if it maintained the ban, and that nobody would likely access anything remotely smacking of literary merit anyway, Apple decided…
Two Men Run Wild In An Empty Terminal At Dallas Forth-Worth Airport
There has been a video floating around the internet of photographer Joe Ayala and friend Larry Chen stranded at Dallas Fort-Worth Airport after their connecting flight was canceled one night. When it appeared there was no one else in the terminal, the two decide to make the most of the situation and goof around in wheelchair races and enjoying themselves to some free beer. The incident was seen on security cameras, but no personnel seem to be in the terminal. Aviation security experts don’t believe it to be too much of a security risk because the men were ticketed passengers who had already been through TSA screenings, but not everyone agrees.
DFW airport board member Betty Culbreath says while it may have been a prank, it sent the wrong message. “It’s not funny. It’s not going to happen again as far as I’m concerned. It should not have happened because it gives the perception the airport is sitting out there unguarded and that’s why I was concerned, and am still concerned.”
How The Top 10 Military Contractors Lobby In Tandem
Irregular Times discovers the beautiful geometry of evil cronyism:
Tightly connected. Massively funded. Working for war. This is what the peace movements are up against. Together, the top ten federal contractors, all working for the military, received $138.4 Billion in taxpayer funds through federal contracts during fiscal year 2010. In the first three months of 2011 alone, these ten corporations paid for the services of no fewer than 109 different lobbying firms, deployed to Capitol Hill along with their own in-house corporate lobbyists. A line is drawn between any two military contractors if they both hired the services of at least one lobbying firm in common; the number indicates the number of lobbying firms hired in common:
What Do You Get If You Blend Metallica And Lou Reed?
Metallica & Lou Reed (from metallica.com)
You don’t need to guess the answer to this question – the Metallica guys and Lou are releasing an album of their collaboration. From the Metallica site:
A few months ago our own Kirk Hammett hinted at a new Metallica project that’s “not really 100 percent a Metallica record.” While Kirk may have jumped the gun a little (and has since been properly punished with a series of push-ups!), we are more than proud to announce that we have just completed recording a full length album that is a collaboration with none other than the legendary Lou Reed.
Ever since we had the pleasure of performing with Lou at the 25th Anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at Madison Square Garden in October of 2009, we have been kicking around the idea of making a record together. Some of you astute Bay Area residents may…
Spaghetti Monster Spotted In Nighttime Sky Over Argentina
Public opinion in Argentina is aflame over a spate of recent UFO sightings. This video caught footage of something resembling the flying spaghetti monster, the deity of the religious faith known as Pastafarianism. Is this what Harold Camping was predicting — the return of our savior to Earth?
Confessions Of A Nuclear Power Safety Expert
An expert on the safety of nuclear power plants comes to the conclusion that there is simply no such thing as an 100 percent safe nuclear reactor. Via Miller-McCune:
I soon came to the conclusion that neither international cooperation nor technological advancements would guarantee human societies to build and safely run nuclear reactors in all possible conditions on Earth (earthquakes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, wars, terrorism, climate change, tsunamis, pandemics, etc.). I am sadly reminded of this turning point in my life as I listen to the news about the earthquake, tsunami and extremely worrying nuclear crisis in Japan.
When Italy decided in the mid-’70s to add nuclear power to its power portfolio, young mechanical and nuclear engineer Cesare Silvi was among those attracted to the opportunities it presented. His work centered on nuclear safety issues — in particular, what might happen if something unexpected struck a power plant.
Corners he saw cut there…
