Archive for September, 2011
Obama Readies Jobs Plan While The Right Plans To Scuttle It In A Country Facing Economic Apocalypse
New York, Labor Day Weekend 2011: The magic wand is being readied in the White House as the President and his minions finally unwrap the mother of all jobs plans that will be revealed to the rest of us in a speech next Thursday before the cameras and Congress with the gravitas-packed aura of a State of the Union Address.
Attention, collapsing Economy: you finally have the big man’s attention. Nearly 70 organizations are pressing the President to take strong action.
Please give him a break. He’s been busy tending Empire business — waging GWOT warfare on IraqAfghanistanLibyaYemenPakistanSomalia et al …
Call it the greatest “long war” in American history: an unending and unbelievably expensive intervention justified as necessary to keep us safe.
We can assume that contingency plans for new wars with Syria, Iran and the Republic of Wikileaks are being drafted as we speak.
The challenge this week is to bring together all…
African American Unemployment At 27 Year High
Annalyn Censky reports on this depressing statistic for CNN Money:
The August jobs report was dismal for plenty of reasons, but perhaps most striking was the picture it painted of racial inequality in the job market.
Black unemployment surged to 16.7% in August, its highest level since 1984, while the unemployment rate for whites fell slightly to 8%, the Labor Department reported.
“This month’s numbers continue to bear out that longstanding pattern that minorities have a much more challenging time getting jobs,” said Bill Rodgers, chief economist with the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
Black unemployment has been roughly double that of whites since the government started tracking the figures in 1972.
Economists blame a variety of factors. The black workforce is younger than the white workforce, lower numbers of blacks get a college degree and many live in areas of the country that were harder hit by the recession — all…
We Have to Clean Up Outer Space Now in Order to Safely Launch New Spacecraft
Via the BBC:
Scientists in the US have warned NASA that the amount of so-called space junk orbiting Earth is at tipping point. A report by the National Research Council says the debris could cause fatal leaks in spaceships or destroy valuable satellites.
It calls for international regulations to limit the junk and more research into the possible use of launching large magnetic nets or giant umbrellas. The debris includes clouds of minuscule fragments, old boosters and satellites.
Some computer models show the amount of orbital rubbish “has reached a tipping point, with enough currently in orbit to continually collide and create even more debris, raising the risk of spacecraft failures,” the research council said in a statement on Thursday.
Spiritualism was the Psychedelic Movement of the 1870s
…complete with altered states, free love, and millenarian ideals. In this piece, Victorian Gothic discusses “The Lighter Side of Victorian Spiritualism”:
“One important and often overlooked aspect of Victorian mediumship is that it could be enormous fun,” says Alex Owen in The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. This is the picture that emerges when one looks particularly at the “star mediums” of the 1870′s, who were known for performing theatrical, full-body materializations for eager audiences.
In a dim seance room, the medium would enter a closed cabinet wherein she would tap the mysterious psychical forces that would allow her to manifest one of her spirit familiars. This familiar would then emerge to from behind the curtain to entertain the assembled sitters. Each medium had her own repertoire of otherworldly entitles at her command, each with his or her own distinct personality, speech patterns, favored tricks and antics. They could be…
WikiLeaks Reveals Iraqi Children Were Executed in U.S Raid on Ishaqi
U.S. officials had originally claimed that “nothing inappropriate” had occurred during a controversial incident in 2006 in the town of Ishaqi, Iraq. A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks, however, tells a different story. In this version of events, according to an autopsy of the bodies in Tikrit (along with several witness reports which were vigorously denied by U.S. officials) four women and five children (all of which were five years old or younger) were handcuffed and then shot in the head, after which an air-strike was called in to destroy the home in which the massacre had transpired. Not surprisingly, the Pentagon has thus far declined to comment. I hope you all will join me in pinching the bridge of our noses and muttering “Sweet fucking Christ”. (More on McClatchy)
Dolphin Whisperer Could Help Us Speak To E.T.
Photo: Auntie Rain (CC)
Could talking to animals guide us to talking to extraterrestrials? Discovery News reports:
For 27 years, marine biologist Denise Herzing and colleagues have been regular visitors in the Atlantic Ocean home of a 200-member pod of spotted dolphins living north of the Bahama Islands.
Understanding the relationships between the members of the pod is key to unraveling what their dozens of whistles, clicks and other signals mean.
“The large goal of this project is to tell the story of what it’s like to be a dolphin,” Herzing, a researcher with Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and the founder and head of the Wild Dolphin Project, told Discovery News.
[Continues at Discovery News]
The Apollo 18 Moon Conspiracy
It’s probably just hype around the release of the “documentary” Apollo 18 that just opened in theaters across America, but Space.com is reporting on a purported conspiracy about the astronauts finding signs of alien life and that being the reason we never again sent humans to the moon:
Apologies to anyone whose bubble will burst, but “Apollo 18,” the film opening Friday (Sept. 2), is fictional.
The film, purporting to be produced from footage kept secret by NASA and leaked to the media, chronicles a NASA mission to the moon that went awry when astronauts encountered signs of alien life there.
Whether because the studio actually believes anyone will be fooled or simply because it makes for a fun marketing angle, the Weinstein Co., which produced the picture, is calling it a “documentary.”
“Decades-old found footage from NASA’s abandoned Apollo 18 mission, where two American astronauts were sent on a secret expedition, reveals the reason the…
Joel’s Army and Omnicide in the Name of God
If you’ve never heard of omnicide this article on Daily Kos from a few years back is helpful:
Yesterday, we revealed that John Hagee’s church is confirmedly within the “Joel’s Army” movement — a group of the “most extreme of the extreme” of neopentecostal dominionists, who believe they are part of a “third pentecost” designed to raise a group of divine ubermenschen to “name and claim” the world for their theology.
One of the parts of their theology that is very rarely discussed — save by a few of us researchers — is that they are one of the very few groups on the planet to literally have a theological mandate for not only genocide but near omnicide — both pre- and post-Tribulation. Combined with the known use of coercive tactics and the decidedly unique interpretations of Biblical verses that claim they’re part of an end-time army of “God Warriors “… it’s not exaggeration to state this…
Stop Atos From Censoring the Web!
Call for solidarity from the UK! Poverty pimps and well known corporate slime Atos Origin have taken their harassment of disabled people one step further by using flaky legal threats to censor and close down websites in the UK which have been critical of them. At least three websites have now been hit by legal threats attempting to censor online criticism of the company.
The Carer Watch forum, which is an online meeting place for hundreds of disabled people and carers has been taken offline by the hosting company after legal threats made by Atos Origin regarding unspecified comments made on the forum. Atos Origin’s involvement in the condemn Government’s notorious health and disability testing has made them a target of fury amongst many disabled people, which has led to a fierce campaigning against them both on and offline. Atos are fighting back with the CarerWatch forum being only the latest website hit…
Need A New Liver? Get One Printed
Scientists at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University are creating headway in being able to grow human organs in laboratories. If you need a new liver or finger, it may soon be as easy as pressing print. Via Reuters:
Niger Delta Villagers Vs. Oil Giant Shell’s Destruction of Their Land
Once again, unregulated Big Business makes everything better. John Vidal writes in the Guardian:
Goi is now a dead village. The two fish ponds, bakery and chicken farm that used to be the pride and joy of its chief deacon, Barrisa Tete Dooh, lie abandoned, covered in a thick black layer. The village’s fishing creek is contaminated; the school has been looted; the mangrove forests are coated in bitumen and everyone has left, refugees from a place blighted by the exploitation of the region’s most valuable asset: crude oil.
A long-awaited and comprehensive UN study exposed the full horror of the pollution that the production of oil has brought to Ogoniland over the last 50 years.
The UN report showed that oil companies and the Nigerian government had not just failed to meet their own standards, but that the process of investigation, reporting and clean-up was deeply flawed in favour of the firms…
Will Bookstores Boycott Amazon-Published Books?
Amazon has begun signing their own authors and then publishing the books themselves, leaving booksellers “wary” as Amazon “tries to have it all,” according to a Boston newspaper. The co-owner of an independent bookstore near Cambridge considered boycotting Amazon’s new line of books, complaining “They are a huge competitor, and they don’t collect sales tax, giving them an unfair advantage.”
A children’s bookstore noted that “the pie is getting cut into fewer pieces. I’d be nervous if I were an adult book publisher.” Borders bookstore has already declared bankruptcy, leaving The Daily Show to joke that bookstores should simply become “digital downloading” stations — or a “living history” museum where future generations can learn what “a magazine rack” was.”
Parasite Tricks Male Rats Into Becoming Cat Food
Via ScienceDaily:
When a male rat senses the presence of a fetching female rat, a certain region of his brain lights up with neural activity, in anticipation of romance. Now Stanford University researchers have discovered that in male rats infected with the parasite Toxoplasma, the same region responds just as strongly to the odor of cat urine. Is it time to dim the lights and cue the Rachmaninoff for some cross-species canoodling?
“Well, we see activity in the pathway that normally controls how male rats respond to female rats, so it’s possible the behavior we are seeing in response to cat urine is sexual attraction behavior, but we don’t know that,” said Patrick House, a PhD candidate in neuroscience in the School of Medicine. “I would not say that they are definitively attracted, but they are certainly less afraid. Regardless, seeing activity in the attraction pathway is bizarre.”
For a rat, fear of…
Study Of Coral May Lead To Sunburn Pill
Photo: Richard Ling (CC)
What happened to remembering to apply sunscreen? The Bangkok Post reports:
The research team hope within the next two years to test a compound based on one which shields coral against harmful ultraviolet rays.
“We already knew that coral and some algae can protect themselves from the harsh UV rays in tropical climates by producing their own sunscreens but, until now, we didn?t know how,” said Dr Paul Long, head of the team.
“What we have found is that the algae living within the coral makes a compound that we think is transported to the coral, which then modifies it into a sunscreen for the benefit of both the coral and the algae.
“Not only does this protect them both from UV damage, but we have seen that fish that feed on the coral also benefit from this sunscreen protection, so it is clearly passed up the food chain,” the King’s team leader…
WikiHouse: Design And Print Out A Home
WikiHouse is an open source construction set from London architectural firm 00:/. Design a home, “print it out” with a CNC cutter, and assemble, without needing any training or power tools, even. TreeHugger explains:
Four years ago, I wrote:
Imagine ordering a custom house, connecting lightweight, manageable pieces without a crane, living in a house where the framing is furniture quality and you don’t even want to cover it with drywall. This is truly the future.
That future gets closer every day, and the future will be open sourced with WikiHouse.
You download the plans and cut them out on a CNC router, then bolt them together into a frame, which are set at 2 feet on centre. when you bolt on the exterior panels you have a rigid structure.
Anyone will be able to simply go into Google Sketchup, combine and adapt components, then hit “Make this house” and send instructions to the CNC router.
Four years…
Advertising And Our World
Advertising has became our dominant creative industry – what Stuart Ewen calls ‘the prevailing vernacular of public address’. It sucks up our talent for art, design, creativity and storytelling.
Via Our Kingdom, a look at the cumulative effects of advertising on our society and why it must be controlled:
Advertising is everywhere. Media that were once largely commercial free – from movies to the internet – now come replete with commercial messages. Not so long ago, most musicians were reluctant to see their work used to endorse shampoo or sneakers. Today, the music and advertising industries are locked in a lucrative embrace.
We now have commercials in our schools and on our clothes. They clog up – with increasing speed – nearly every form of communication we devise. Our dominant TV genre – in terms of sheer volume – is not comedy, drama or sport, but advertising. The average British viewer is now…
Ugandan Police Use Pink Goo To Stifle Opposition
Reuters has a gallery of images from the scene of anti-government unrest in Uganda, where things have turned surreal with authorities using an unknown pink substance as their choice method of repression. Brutality made beautiful, as whole streets, buildings, and crowds are made magenta:
Ugandan police dispersed opposition who had gathered in a Kampala suburb on Wednesday to mourn people killed during demonstrations earlier this year. Keen to attract foreign investors to turn the country into a major oil producer, Uganda was rocked by widespread anti-government protests in April and May [when] at least nine people were killed in the government’s clampdown.
The Future Of Capitalism
Noreena Hertz’s ideas for the future of capitalism set off against British conservative journalist Danny Finkelstein:
Media Fail: Is Anonymous Helping Time Warner’s Bottom Line?
Photo: Vincent Diamante (CC)
Way more positive social action than feeding their machine, but an interesting shot at activism from Nick Bilton in the NY Times:
Anonymous, the hacker group, has jostled with the Iranian government and the Church of Scientology and has briefly shut down the Web sites of Visa, MasterCard and other global corporations.
When members appear in public to protest censorship and what they view as corruption, they don a plastic mask of Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century Englishman who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
Stark white, with blushed pink cheeks, a wide grin and a thin black mustache and goatee, the mask resonates with the hackers because it was worn by a rogue anarchist challenging an authoritarian government in “V for Vendetta,” the movie produced in 2006 by Warner Brothers.
What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the…
