Archive for September, 2011
Banned Books Week 2011
It’s Banned Books Week in America (Sept. 24-Oct. 1). Lest you think that America doesn’t ban books, the American Library Association has a long list of 11,000 challenged titles. At the head of the queue this year:
- And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
Reasons: homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and unsuited to age group - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
Reasons: offensive language, racism, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and violence - Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Reasons: insensitivity, offensive language, racism, and sexually explicit - Crank, by Ellen Hopkins
Reasons: drugs, offensive language, and sexually explicit - The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Reasons: sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and violence - Lush, by Natasha Friend
Reasons: drugs, offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group - What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
Reasons: sexism, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group - Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
Reasons: drugs, inaccurate, offensive language, political viewpoint, and religious viewpoint - Revolutionary…
Peaceful Protesters Penned And Maced
The Occupy Wall St. site has footage of the disturbing pattern of police abuse from the protests near New York City’s Wall Street and Union Square, including this example of police entrapping female protesters in net barriers and macing them:
Objects Confiscated From People Entering British Parliament
Drawn from a freedom of information request, a breakdown list from London’s Metropolitan Police of the 667 items which they confiscated at Parliament over the first half of 2011 that were classified as “other”. Why were there so many attempts at sneaking harmonicas, giant tennis balls, and shaving cream into the halls of power? I wish that some of these revolutionary plots had gotten further along before being squelched by the law enforcement apparatus. Posted on Reddit:
In Alabama Town, Offenders Must Choose Between Church And Jail
“It was agreed by all the [area] pastors that the crime problem [is due to] the erosion of family values and morals.” Crime problem solved. Via the Washington Post:
Jail or Jesus. These are the options that one Alabama town is giving its non-violent offenders.
The program is called Operation Restore Our Community, WKRG reports. Bay Minette citizens charged with a misdemeanor can choose spending a year’s worth of Sundays in a local church rather than paying a fine and sitting in the clink.
Town police chief Mike Rowland…told the Alabama Press-Register: “It was agreed by all the pastors that at the core of the crime problem was the erosion of family values and morals. We have children raising children and parents not instilling values in young people.”
The stark choice has civil libertarians asking whether the initiative could be seen as government-coerced religion, which is forbidden under American law. The American Civil Liberties…
CERN’s Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Speed Of Light
Scientists making discoveries that defy the laws of physics seems to be something of a theme this month. Now the eggheads at CERN say they’ve observed subatomic particles moving faster than the speed of light, which might theoretically allow us to travel back in time. Eryn Brown and Amina Khan report for the LA Times:
Albert Einstein had the idea. A century of observations have backed it up. It’s one of the cornerstones of physics: Nothing travels faster than the speed of light.
But now a team of experimental physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, says that one exotic particle possibly can.
The scientists reached their conclusion after sending streams of tiny, subatomic particles called neutrinos hurtling from an accelerator at CERN outside Geneva to a detector at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, about 450 miles away.
The neutrinos seemed to get there too soon — 60 nanoseconds…
Occupying Wall Street On A Saturday Afternoon
A Report from A Front That May Soon Be Shut Down
Before you read on, watch this: a video from the base camp of the #OccupyWall Street protest that is now in its seventh day. It’s called “No One Can Predict the Moment of Revolution.” (The video was produced by Martyna Starosta and her friend Iva)
These are the faces of a wannabe revolution, more than a protest but not yet quite a major movement. The spirit is infectious perhaps because of the sincerity of the participants and their obvious commitment to their ideals.
Occupy Wall Street is more than a protest; it is as much an exercise in building a leaderless, bottom-up resistance community with a more democratic approach to challenging the system where everyone is encouraged to have a say.
But saying that also leads to a conflict between my emotional identification with the kids that have rallied in this small park/public space on Liberty Street to exercise some liberty, with a despairing analysis that wishes this enterprise well but harbors deep doubts about its staying power and impact…
The High Price Of Cheap Food
Mark Bittman asks and answers the question “Is junk food really cheaper?” in the New York Times:
The “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli …” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.”
This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of…
Chimpanzees Are Spontaneously Generous After All
Via ScienceDaily:
Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have shown chimpanzees have a significant bias for prosocial behavior. This, the study authors report, is in contrast to previous studies that positioned chimpanzees as reluctant altruists and led to the widely held belief that human altruism evolved in the last six million years only after humans split from apes.The current study findings are available in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
According to Yerkes researchers Victoria Horner, PhD, Frans de Waal, PhD, and their colleagues, chimpanzees may not have shown prosocial behaviors in other studies because of design issues, such as the complexity of the apparatus used to deliver rewards and the distance between the animals.
“I have always been skeptical of the previous negative findings and their over-interpretation, says Dr. de Waal. “This study confirms the prosocial nature of chimpanzees with a different test, better adapted…
Money is Fiction!
Episode 423 of This American Life, The Invention of Money. Remember this next time a politician claims your country doesn’t “have enough money” to pay for something.
Senate Candidate Elizabeth Warren: ‘There Is Nobody in This Country Who Got Rich On His Own’
Irishman Dies Of Spontaneous Combustion (So Rules A Court of Law)
A most bizarre find from Annalee Newitz of io9.com:
A man in Galway, Ireland apparently died of spontaneous combustion last year in December. At least, according to a court ruling this week. Michael Faherty’s death had been a mystery because coroners and police couldn’t explain how the fire that killed him only seemed to have burned the man and his immediate surroundings.
Spontaneous combustion occurs when a person suddenly catches on fire without any external source of fire causing the blaze. There have been only a few hundred cases recorded throughout the world. The Irish Times reports: West Galway corner Dr Ciarán McLoughlin said he had never encountered such a case in the 25 years that he had been investigating deaths in the region …
The Architecture of Control
Architecture and design made specifically to control and easily subdue populations is nothing new; architects and urban planners have long recognised the inherent ability of design to affect mood, temperament, and even the physical and social properties of people. Prison design is one such exercise that directly engages the dialogue between space and social control. Via Web Urbanist :
Should architecture be used as a punishment in itself, made as harsh and cruel as possible in a bid to make inmates sorry for what they’ve done, or should it uplift and rehabilitate them, showing them that there’s more to the world than a life of crime?
While some architects boycott prison design altogether so as not to participate in what is often seen as a corrupt and immoral system, others produce (often controversial) designs that revolutionize prisoners’ relationships with their environment, each other and the world at large – for better or…
Reward: $1 Million For Rick Perry Sex Tape
Larry Flynt. Photo: Toglenn (CC)
Good old Larry Flynt is pulling one of his favorite stunts on Repuplican presidential candidate Rick Perry. What do you think, is there someone out there who’ll take the bait? From Reuters:
Pornographic magazine publisher Larry Flynt offered $1 million on Thursday to anyone with proof of “an illicit sexual liaison” involving leading Republican presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry.
The offer by the politically left-leaning Flynt targeting Perry was similar to past efforts by the Hustler magazine founder to embarrass public figures he dislikes.
Los Angeles-based Larry Flynt Productions, which publishes Hustler, said it bought full-page advertisements in the weekly editions of the U.S. satirical tabloid The Onion and the Austin Chronicle, a Texas alternative paper, seeking evidence of any Perry peccadilloes.
“I’ve been doing this for 35 years,” Flynt said in a telephone interview with Reuters. “We’ve found running these ads were very successful in finding sources…
God Helps Run The Economy?
Cathy Lynn Grossman reports in USA TODAY:
The way you see God tells a lot about how you see the U.S. economy, a new national survey finds. About one in five Americans combine a view of God as actively engaged in daily workings of the world with an economic conservative view that opposes government regulation and champions the free market as a matter of faith.
“They say the invisible hand of the free market is really God at work,” says sociologist Paul Froese, co-author of the Baylor Religion Survey, released today by Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
“They think the economy works because God wants it to work. It’s a new religious economic idealism,” with politicians “invoking God while chanting ‘less government,’” he says.
“When Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann say ‘God blesses us, God watches us, God helps us,’ religious conservatives get the shorthand. They see ‘government’ as a profane object — a…
Enter the FBI’s ‘Stingray’ Phone Tracker, Able to Locate Cell Phones Even When Not In Use
Jennifer Valentino-Devries reports in the Wall Street Journal:
For more than a year, federal authorities pursued a man they called simply “the Hacker.” Only after using a little known cellphone-tracking device — a stingray — were they able to zero in on a California home and make the arrest.
Stingrays are designed to locate a mobile phone even when it’s not being used to make a call. The Federal Bureau of Investigation considers the devices to be so critical that it has a policy of deleting the data gathered in their use, mainly to keep suspects in the dark about their capabilities, an FBI official told the Wall Street Journal in response to inquiries.
A stingray’s role in nabbing the alleged “Hacker” — Daniel David Rigmaiden — is shaping up as a possible test of the legal standards for using these devices in investigations. The FBI says it obtains appropriate court approval to use…
A Machine To Let You Taste Words
A nonsensical waste of time? Goofy conceptual art? Or a magical cross-sensory experiment? A device that converts any word that you type into a cocktail, via Morskoiboy:
My piece has buttons working as pumps and has pipes instead of wires. It also has a display like any other electronic panel board, but as opposed to using liquid crystals as in electronic displays, my machine’s display functions via multicoloured syrups. My machine converts words into cocktails. And, yes, it does work. Now I can literally taste the flavor of my words.
Pressing the buttons on the keyboard injects the corresponding ingredients into the display, which tints different segments of the display and thus produces letters. You can try to imagine that each letter can have a taste (L-Lime, A-Apple), a color (R-Red, G-Green), or a name (K-Kahlua, J-Jagermeister).
What Would Drug Legalization Look Like?
Suppose we decriminalized hard drugs — heroin, cocaine, and all the rest? The Indypendent ponders the scenario and how we could make it work:
For heroin, says Eric Sterling, the conundrum is how much use would spread if “the price goes down and the ease of acquisition goes up,” but if a legal scheme set the price too high or made the restrictions too inconvenient, users would go back to the illegal market.
He posits a system in which “addiction management” specialists would supply enough drugs to keep addicts from getting sick, but would not tolerate criminal behavior. Rehab and counseling would be available, and addicts might also be required to work or go to school.
Switzerland, which had close to the highest rate of heroin addiction in Europe in the mid-’90s — with an estimated 30,000 addicts out of about 7 million people — has had some success with heroin maintenance. In 1994,…
Product Placement Reaches New Heights
Wondering how out of control product placement in film has gotten? Check out this reel of highlights from The Marine, a crappy Twentieth Century Fox action flick from a couple years ago which apparently stars Miller Genuine Draft. It points to an emerging form of cinema — the low-quality, low-budget Hollywood movie that serves as an extended two-hour commercial.
Vast Majority Of Israelis Want To Recognize Palestinian State, Poll Reveals
Regarding the question of Palestinian statehood, Barack Obama nows hold a position far to the right of the Israeli populace. Raw Story writes:
Nearly 70 percent of Israelis surveyed recently said that Israel should accept a Palestinian state if the United Nations chooses to recognize it, according to a report in Thursday’s edition of The Jerusalem Post.
The poll results fly in the face of American conservatives and even President Barack Obama, who have taken the lead in discouraging the U.N. from voting on the matter, claiming that it could threaten Israel’s security.
The study was carried out by the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. A further 83 percent of Palestinians said that turning to the U.N. for statehood is the right thing to do.
The United States has vowed to veto any request for Palestinian statehood at the Security Council,…
