Archive for July, 2011
Back to the Future: UK CCTV Debate Stuck in Time Loop
Imagine if you had a time machine and you could travel back to the UK in the 1990s. Back then there was a banking crisis [1], a Conservative government and CCTV cameras were being put up all over the UK. So what’s changed over the last 20 years?
With regards to political debate and public awareness of the issues surrounding surveillance cameras it seems very little. Come with us now on a journey of discovery as we leap backwards and forwards in time to present the Then and the Now of CCTV in the UK.
A Code of Practice for CCTV: NOW
One of the “new” ideas touted by the government in 2011 is a Code of Practice for surveillance cameras. On 27th June a Written Answer from the Home Office was published in response to a question about the government’s policy on CCTV [2]:
Julie Hilling: To ask the Secretary of State for…
Monkey Wedding Called Illegal By Indian Officials
Humanity, look out. There is no way by causing this action, it will turn out well for all of humanity. Via the Huffington Post:
In the small village of Talwas, Rajasthan, Raju, a well-known cigarette smoking monkey, and his bride Chinki were married, according to Stuff.
Raju had become a local celebrity after Ramesh Saini, a rickshaw driver, adopted him three years ago when he found the monkey unconscious.
He’s been a surrogate son to the childless Ramesh ever since.
“I want to enjoy the feelings of a son’s marriage through Raju’s wedding.” Ramesh told the publication. “We will welcome the bride in our house … after the wedding with all rituals.”
Senator Orrin Hatch To Poor: Do More For The Rich
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
According to Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the poor and middle class aren’t doing enough to share the economic burden in America. In a speech on the Senate floor, the 77 year old Republican, whose net worth is estimated from $2 to $5 million and takes in a $174,000 per year salary from the Senate, said that the poor “need to share some of the responsibility” of the deficit, and that he preferred the Republican approach of “shared prosperity.”
Hatch went on to say that “51 percent of wage earners, of all households, do not pay income taxes.” He attempted to clarify a few sentences later, saying that payroll taxes were the same thing as social security taxes.
Senator Hatch appears deeply out of touch with exactly what “poor” people endure and where most of the federal budget goes. The richest Americans Hatch felt the need to so quickly defend…
New Way To Fight Malaria: Take Pill That Kills Mosquitos After First Bite
Malaria is an infectious disease carried by mosquitoes. Many communities in Africa and Asia best treatment is in prevention, using insect repellents and nets to sleep in and. This inexpensive deworming pill kills the mosquito once it bites a human who has consumed the medicine, reducing the number of mosquitoes able to pass disease amongst inhabitants. Via The New York Times:
Scientists have proposed an intriguing new way to fight malaria: turning people into human time bombs for mosquitoes.
A cheap deworming pill used in Africa for 25 years against river blindness was recently shown to have a power that scientists had long suspected but never before demonstrated in the field: When mosquitoes bite people who have recently swallowed the drug — called ivermectin or Mectizan — they die.
Other scientists caution that while the mosquito-poisoning trick is pretty nifty, it is not very practical: For it to work effectively, nearly everyone in a…
Space-Time Cloak Possible, Could It Make Events Disappear Too?
Could an entire bank heist take place at an open bank with no one seeing it? The National Geographic reports:
It’s no illusion: Science has found a way to make not just objects but entire events disappear, experts say.
According to new research by British physicists, it’s theoretically possible to create a material that can hide an entire bank heist from human eyes and surveillance cameras.
“The concepts are basically quite simple,” said Paul Kinsler, a physicist at Imperial College London, who created the idea with colleagues Martin McCall and Alberto Favaro.
Unlike invisibility cloaks — some of which have been made to work at very small scales — the event cloak would do more than bend light around an object. Instead this cloak would use special materials filled with metallic arrays designed to adjust the speed of light passing through.
The Ultimate Harry Potter Fan Maze
Harry Potter mania in the UK is threatened only by the great phone hacking scandal. Check out the maze created by a farmer in the north of England, via the Yorkshire Post:
A Yorkshire farmer has created the world’s largest spot the difference competition as a tribute to Harry Potter.
Tom Pearcy has carefully cut out two portraits of the boy wizard in his crop of maize plants at his field near York. With some subtle differences between the two images it creates the world’s largest spot the difference competition. At over 50m in diameter each head is also believed to be the largest image of Daniel Radcliffe ever created.
The images have been painstakingly carved out of over one million living maize plants. The 10km of pathways form an intricate maze for visitors to explore. The York Maze is the largest maize maze in Europe and one of the largest in the…
The Pentagon’s LSD Bombs
I never knew there was such a thing as “psychedelic warfare”. From a vintage Popular Science article, via Parapolitical:
Secret U.S. tests show[ed] startling military uses for weird new chemical agents. The so-called “loony gas,” which we believed could incapacitate enemies without actually harming them, turned out to be LSD. Although we acknowledged that LSD could make people “daffy,” we also stated that these psycho-chemicals were more or less humane. That is, the military could saturate enemies with LSD and take over their towns, without destroying them, before the people recovered.
Metal Objects Stick To Brazil’s ‘Magnet Boy’
Miracle or hoax? An 11-year-old Brazilian boy’s boy attracts metal household objects, and there are reports of a similar child in Croatia. Perhaps most baffling is the comment from his doctor: “It is not completely out of the ordinary.”
Federal Government Rules Marijuana Has No Medical Purpose
Our government will continue to structure policy on the basis that marijuana is the same as heroin — because it’s science. Via the Los Angeles Times:
In a decision announced Friday the federal government ruled that [marijuana] has no accepted medical use and should remain classified as a dangerous drug like heroin.
The decision comes almost nine years after medical marijuana supporters asked the government to reclassify cannabis to take into account a growing body of worldwide research that shows its effectiveness in treating certain diseases, such as glaucoma and multiple sclerosis.
DEA Administrator Michele M. Leonhart sent a letter dated June 21 to the organizations that filed a petition for the change. Leonhart said she rejected the request because marijuana “has a high potential for abuse,” “has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States” and “lacks accepted safety for use under medical supervision.”
This is the third time that…
Frightening ‘Super Gonorrhea’ Strain Emerges
It has been found in Japan, the country from which new strains have typically originated in the past. (Due to their love hotels?) It could go global in a decade, writes Reuters:
Scientists have found a “superbug” strain of gonorrhea in that is resistant to all antibiotics and say it could transform a once easily treatable infection into a global public health threat.
The new strain of the sexually transmitted disease — called H041 — cannot be killed by any currently recommended treatments for gonorrhea, leaving doctors with no other option than to try medicines so far untested against the disease.
Magnus Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria, who discovered the strain with colleagues from Japan in samples from Kyoto, described it as both “alarming” and “predictable.”
In a telephone interview Unemo said the fact that the strain had been found first in Japan also followed an alarming pattern — “Japan…
Sacred Economics
This is the introduction to Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, by Charles Eisenstein, courtesy of Evolver Editions/North Atlantic Books and Reality Sandwich.
The purpose of this book is to make money and human economy as sacred as everything else in the universe.
Today we associate money with the profane, and for good reason. If anything is sacred in this world, it is surely not money. Money seems to be the enemy of our better instincts, as is clear every time the thought “I can’t afford to” blocks an impulse toward kindness or generosity. Money seems to be the enemy of beauty, as the disparaging term “a sellout” demonstrates. Money seems to be the enemy of every worthy social and political reform, as corporate power steers legislation toward the aggrandizement of its own profits. Money seems to be destroying the earth, as we pillage the oceans,…
What Walkable Los Angeles Would Look Like
Suppose Los Angeles were like Paris, New York, et cetera, with dense, narrow, two-lane streets rather than wide, barren five-lane ones? Artist David Yoon conducted a “fantasy urban makeover in photographs” to show exactly this. On Narrow Streets LA, click on (actual) shots of Japantown, Santa Monica, Downtown, Melrose Avenue (below, real on left and photoshopped on right), and tons of other locations to reveal the far more pleasing, charming, and inviting narrowed versions — a fantastical vision of the non-car-dominated Los Angeles that never was but could have been:
South Africa’s Cancer Of Corruption
DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA: Twenty one years after Nelson Mandela walked free, corruption has become the issue du jour in South Africa.
Even president Jacob Zuma who narrowly slithered out of a corruption trial before his election is blasting corruption in the ranks of the African National Congress which came to power as the morally superior alternative to an apartheid regime that shamelessly used the wealth it controlled to benefit Afrikaners and deprive the black majority of services.
“Let’s make a plan,” were the code words members of the all white National Party used to scheme ways of stealing state resources to benefit themselves, a cozy reality overshadowed by the vicious racial policies that outraged the world.
As the ANC prepared to win power democratically, there was concern among leaders that a deprived black majority might feel it was “their turn” and thus, their right to cash in on their political victory. Some of their…
Japanese Love Hotels
Via Trendland, photographer Misty Keasler examines the strangest places on Earth, Japan’s themed love rooms, which resemble everything from gigantic bird cages to outer space to subway cars. In the future, they are where all romantic activity will be conducted:
The Love Hotel is an intensely unique Japanese institution. The themed rooms [are] rented by the hour. There are an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 of them in the country and they are so prevalent that the Japanese take them for granted.
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The Final Nail In The Supply Side Coffin
Taxes are low and corporate profits are high, but nothing is trickling down to the American worker.
If politicians are going to continue kowtowing to every whim of the rich, can they at least think of a new excuse? Via Salon:
The theory of supply-side economics tells us that if you cut taxes on rich people and corporations, the moguls and businessmen will take their windfall and invest it, creating jobs and accelerating the rate of economic growth. The benefits of a light hand on the upper class, therefore, will “trickle down” to the working man and woman.
Ever since Ronald Reagan first attempted to make supply-side economics a reality and proceeded to inaugurate an era of persistent government deficits and growing income inequality, it has become harder and harder to make the trickle-down argument with a straight face. But we’ve never seen anything quite like the disaster that’s playing out right now.
The…
Grand Funk Railroad: The Sounds of Secret CIA Torture Prisons
I have on good authority that this song was played at something called the “Jihadi Bar,” a place where CIA interrogators working at a Black Site went to unwind. That and other secrets of undisclosed torture prisons are found within my interview with ex-interrogator Glenn Carle for Danger Room.
