Archive for September, 2011
Supercomputer Predicts Revolution
OK, so it predicted Egypt and Libya – how about the United States? From BBC News:
Feeding a supercomputer with news stories could help predict major world events, according to US research.
A study, based on millions of articles, charted deteriorating national sentiment ahead of the recent revolutions in Libya and Egypt.
While the analysis was carried out retrospectively, scientists say the same processes could be used to anticipate upcoming conflict.
The system also picked up early clues about Osama Bin Laden’s location.
Kalev Leetaru, from the University of Illinois’ Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science, presented his findings in the journal First Monday.
[continues at BBC News]
It Takes 110 Chemicals To Grow A Tomato In Florida
There is so much wrong with Florida tomatoes it’s hard to believe that anyone will touch them. One farmer tells author Barry Estabrook “I get paid per pound. I don’t get paid a cent for taste.” He also says the farm workers are slaves: “Slavery is what is happening. There is no way to gloss it. You can’t say ’slavery-like.’ You can’t say ‘near-slavery.’ ‘Human trafficking’ doesn’t even do it credit.”
He’s interviewed by CNN’s Eatocracy blog:
Eatocracy: How did you become invested in telling the story of the modern day tomato?…
U.S. Federal Court: ‘1984 May Have Come A Bit Later Than Predicted, But It’s Here At Last’
What are the chances that the U.S. Supreme Court will restrict the use of GPS tracking devices in police surveillance? We’ll find out soon, reports Adam Liptak in the New York Times:
In a series of rulings on the use of satellites and cellphones to track criminal suspects, judges around the country have been citing George Orwell’s “1984” to sound an alarm. They say the Fourth Amendment’s promise of protection from government invasion of privacy is in danger of being replaced by the futuristic surveillance state Orwell described.
In April, Judge Diane P. Wood of the federal appeals court in Chicago wrote that surveillance using global positioning system devices would “make the system that George Orwell depicted in his famous novel, ‘1984,’ seem clumsy.” In a similar case last year, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the federal appeals court in San Francisco wrote that “1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but…
So Who Really Runs The World? A Network Analysis Reveals ‘Super Entity’ of Global Corporate Control …
An outline of the adversary emerges from Michael Ricciardi on PlanetSave:
In the first such analysis ever conducted, Swiss economic researchers have conducted a global network analysis of the most powerful transnational corporations (TNCs). Their results have revealed a core of 787 firms with control of 80% of this network, and a “super entity” comprised of 147 corporations that have a controlling interest in 40% of the network’s TNCs.
When we hear conspiracy theorist talk about this or that powerful group (or alliance of said groups) “pulling strings” behind the scenes, we tend to dismiss or minimize such claims, even though, deep down, we may suspect that there’s some degree of truth to it, however distorted by the theorists’ slightly paranoid perception of the world. But perhaps our tendency to dismiss such claims as exaggerations (at best) comes from our inability to get even a slight grip on the complexity of global…
Why Losers Stay in Wars and the Stock Market
This explains a lot. Via ScienceDaily:
Within hours this summer, 30 American troops died in a strike in Afghanistan and millions of American investors watched the Dow Jones Average shed an astonishing 634 points in one day. While it might be difficult to find similarities in the two events, social psychologists can detect a common theme: In each case, investments (money and human lives) were made, and those resources were painfully lost.
The ’sunk-cost’ effect: Untold Americans experienced what is called the “sunk-cost” effect: Less a cognitive thought than an emotional one, this effect is the feeling that they are being wasteful if they terminate a prior commitment. Thus, they pondered: Stay the course and “waste not, want not”; or “cut and run.”
Such a piercing event as suffering the greatest loss of American troops in the nearly 10-year-old war might seem to serve as a catalyst for people to denounce the war…
State-Sponsored Counter-Terror Tactics?
As we count down to the impending “credible terror threat” it is important to take a real look at the nature of many of the planned terror attacks in the USA. Gordon Corera takes an eye opening look at an interesting source of terror in the homeland for the BBC:
In May 2009 David Williams was keeping watch at the corner of 246th Street and Independence Avenue in the Bronx, New York — the look out for a terror group aiming to blow up a building nearby. The target was the Riverdale Jewish Center where the terror cell’s leader, James Cromitie, was planting what he believed to be two devices containing C-4 plastic explosive.
Having completed their task, the four man team planned to then head back to their hometown of Newburgh, a run-down town 60 miles (97km) north of New York City, where they intended to use a surface-to-air missile to…
A New Perspective On Transmedia
There’s a lot of talk about transmedia lately. Haven’t heard it? Well, there has been. Trust us. And heaven knows there are a lot of transmedia evangelists out there. So I just want to talk over some of the possibilities presented by transmedia storytelling as a concept, without pretending that this is the final word on anything.
Most of us (er, them) are motivated by deep excitement. And of course, many corporations are also excited by it as a new way of perceiving the “life cycle of their brands,” and “customer engagement,” and other terms that sound really creepy in the “bad touch” kind of way. But we see all of the possibilities for new ways of engaging with content. Some of us see exciting creative possibilities and some see dollar signs. (I prefer to see both, when possible.)
Engagement. Right there, some people get lost. ”You mean there is more than one way to engage with…
Architects & Engineers: Solving the Mystery of WTC 7
This video narrated by actor Ed Asner features AE911Truth experts including structural engineers, chemical engineers, physicists and others:
Plus-Sized Model Calls BS On American Apparel: Creates Portfolio To Mock Them
Photo courtesy of American Apparel
It’s taken over twenty years, but American Apparel has finally finally begun offering clothes in size XL. Up until just recently, anything over a “Large” was just plain “not our demographic,” according to American Apparel reps. It may seem strange that the popular clothing outlet has never provided anything over a size 11, but who here is truly surprised to hear that Don “I’m A Sleazeball And I’m Okay With That” Charney’s company caters exclusively to slender women?
New sizes apparently mean new models to display them, so American Apparel has started a plus-sized model search/contest looking for “booty-ful” women to fill out the new XLs. Women submit photos to American Apparel’s website, where they are then numerically ranked by readers based on their perceived attractiveness.
Anyone who has ever been to a model search can tell you that, despite the abundance of beautiful people, it’s a horribly…
Moon to Have No-Fly Zones
R. Prasad writes in the Hindu:
No-fly zones will come into effect on the moon for the very first time by the end of this month! Why, even buffer zones that spacecraft may have to avoid will come into existence. The reason: avoiding any spraying of rocket exhaust or dust onto certain historical sites and artifacts on the moon.
The historical sites are of course the Apollo landing sites and artifacts present on the moon. And the “recommendations” are for preserving and protecting these historical sites. There are currently more than three dozen historical sites that preserve the more than four-decade-old remains.
“Apollo 11 and 17 sites [will] remain off-limits, with ground-travel buffers of 75 meters and 225 meters from each respective lunar lander,” states the July 20 guidelines of NASA. Science journal had obtained the guidelines.
According to Science, by the end of this month NASA is expected to come up with a…
Maybe We’re All Conspiracy Theorists
Michael Shermer. Photo: David Patton (CC)
Matt Ridley for the Wall Street Journal:
Michael Shermer, the founder and editor of Skeptic magazine, has never received so many angry letters as when he wrote a column for Scientific American debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories. Mr. Shermer found himself vilified, often in CAPITAL LETTERS, as a patsy of the sinister Zionist cabal that deliberately destroyed the twin towers and blew a hole in the Pentagon while secretly killing off the passengers of the flights that disappeared, just to make the thing look more plausible.
He tells this story in his fascinating new book, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. In Mr. Shermer’s view, the brain is a belief engine, predisposed to see patterns where none exist and to attribute them to knowing agents rather than to chance — the better to make sense of the world.…
The One Big Reason You Should Not Celebrate 9/11
Are you the kind of sick pervert that celebrates the murder of 3,000 civilians? More than likely the answer is “yes”.
“Hold on a minute, A-h*le,” you may counter. “It’s not a ‘celebration’. It’s a ‘commemoration’. It’s one of the few things that can bring divided America together as a nation. Mourning a shared tragedy, a loss of innocence. Expressing gratitude for the selfless courage of the first responders. Building community.”
Ah, not so much. In reality, it is a masterful manipulation of the complementary moral and intellectual weaknesses of the both extreme wings of the American body politic, a satanic appeal to our vanity and invitation to the destruction of our democratic institutions. Stupid right wingers love the 9/11 narrative because it’s a simple authoritarian parable providing clearly delineated foreign villains and glorifying nativist military authorities. Spineless left wingers love it because they get to light all their coolest scented candles around…
Republican Presidential Race Picking Up Speed
Recently the Republican Party had a presidential candidate debate with Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. Surprisingly, considering how hard the mainstream news has worked to ignore him, Ron Paul was also present.
There’s a lot not to like about these goons and right now I’m still taking it all in, but what sticks in my memory is Rick “I Don’t Have A Prayer” Santorum attacking Ron Paul in the previous debate for underestimating the “threat” from Iran. Personally, I think that might be the only thing Ron Paul has gotten right, and seeing this one bit of sanity being attacked should worry us all.
In the aftermath of the debates, the question is: Who came out on top? This article offers some insight, but what does the Disinfo community think? Who’s in the lead, who will we see fall first, who will make the…
Toronto Hearings on the Events of 9/11 (Video)
This is the official broadcast site of the international hearings on the events of September 11, 2001, at Ryerson University from Sept. 8 to 11, 2011. The official website of the Hearings is torontohearings.org:
War with the Grey-Draco Reptilian ETs is Won!
Good news! Via the Examiner:
In an exclusive ExopoliticsTV interview by Alfred Lambremont Webre with a human representative-contactee of the extraterrestrial governance council known as the Andromeda Council it has been revealed that the war of liberation against a 4th dimensional Orion grey and Draco reptilian alliance has been won by the forces of the Andromeda Council as of the 3rd quarter of 2011. The attempted the occupation of Earth, our moon and Mars by this grey-Reptilian alliance is over. The defeated grey-reptilian forces have been sent via stargate into the far reaches of our universe.
The Andromeda Council representative states in his ExopoliticsTV interview that the forces of the 4th dimensional Orion grey and Draco reptilian forces that remain on Earth consist of small pockets of isolated forces around such as Washington, DC.
We can all cast in our $.02 on this one. I’ll stick to what I already cast into the pot a little while…
Selling Wikipedia Pages As Kindle eBooks
This article identifies a supposed ebook “author” whose 887 different ebooks were all apparently cut-and-pasted directly from Wikipedia entries!
The “WikiFocus” series targets obscure niches with few competing ebooks, like Hello Kitty, Aquaman, or the comic strip Archie.
“Of the 887 ebooks, all but 10 earned terrible reviews, averaging one star or less,” this article notes, “or received no reviews at all.”
A typical review? “This ‘book’ is just a word for word copy of the Wikipedia page.”
(And a least one other “author” has attempt the same trick, trying to pass off a Wikipedia page about Charlie Sheen as an $18.95 biography!)
The Strange Case of Benazir Bhutto’s Claims and Osama bin Laden’s Death
Jennifer Briney wrote back in 2008 on Little Country Lost:
In a November 2, 2007 interview, less than two months before she would be assassinated, Benazir Bhutto was asked by reporter David Frost of Al-Jazeera English about a letter that she had sent to Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf. The letter outlined who she believed should be investigated in the event of her assassination. While giving her answer, she listed as one of the suspects a “key figure in security … a former military officer in Pakistan” who had dealings with, among others, “Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Osama bin-Laden.”
If that name, Omar Shieikh, sounds familiar it’s because he was a key figure in some huge stories between 1999 and 2002. His full name is Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, and multiple variations of those names are used to describe him including Omar Sheikh and Saeed Sheikh. Here’s how you may have…
Fossils Reveal A New Ancestor On The Family Tree
Photo: University of Witwatersrand
We may have some relatives we didn’t know about. Jeffrey Kluger writes onTIME:
One August day in 2008, a pair of nine-year-old boys crossed paths at a cave in South Africa. The boys didn’t play, didn’t speak, didn’t even smile at each other. One of them was Matthew Berger, the young son of paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, accompanying his dad into the field for an expedition. The other boy was known only as Australopithecus sediba, a pre-human child who died 1.977 million years ago, leaving only his fossilized bones behind.
The site, 30 miles northwest of Johannesburg, had been visited before and other bones had been found, but the remains Matthew stumbled across, along with those of an adult female, are the subject of no fewer than five papers in this week’s issue of the journal Science — and with good reason.
The skeletons are both in remarkably good…
