Archive for October, 2011
This #OccupyWallStreet Dog Hates Banksters!
You know your movement is rockin’ the interwebs when you have a Tumblr blog for animals supporting it.
See more conscientious animal objecters to the current state of capitalism at: Awwccupy Wall Street …
Making Everyday Objects Deadly: The Art of the Shiv
I’ve also heard them called shanks, the word itself, “shiv” or “shank,” intuitively sounds like their intended use, further relayed with these photos from this article by William Drenttel in Design Observer:
A shiv is a weapon crafted from the limited resources of a prisoner’s closed world. Crudely constructed from such things as spoons, shoelaces and upholstery tacks, shivs lie somewhere between the graceful and the grotesque. They’re primitive, too — like outsider art, but produced deep on the inside.
The individual parts that make up a shiv tend to be everyday objects, innocent things furtively reconstituted as lethal weapons. Each design choice is essential, but what’s particularly notable is that shivs, at their core, are not so much evocations of minimalism as they are symbols of survivalism. A shiv is all about masked utility: it’s an innocuous object with improbably toxic intent (whether used to attack others or to protect oneself…)
Christian Faith Requires Accepting Evolution
Jonathan Dudley writes on Huffington Post:
As someone raised evangelical, I realize anti-evolutionists believe they are defending the Christian tradition. But as a seminary graduate now training to be a medical scientist, I can say that, in reality, they’ve abandoned it.
In theory, if not always in practice, past Christian theologians valued science out of the belief that God created the world scientists study. Augustine castigated those who made the Bible teach bad science, John Calvin argued that Genesis reflects a commoner’s view of the physical world, and the Belgic confession likened scripture and nature to two books written by the same author.
These beliefs encouraged past Christians to accept the best science of their day, and these beliefs persisted even into the evangelical tradition. As Princeton Seminary’s Charles Hodge, widely considered the father of modern evangelical theology, put it in 1859: “Nature is as truly a revelation of God as the Bible;…
Project Ouroboros Planet
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How Occupy Wall Street Is Really Funded
Adrianne Jeffries writes in the New York Observer:
“George Soros money is behind this!” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners two weeks ago, feeding speculation that the “99 percent” agenda espoused by the Occupy Wall Street protesters has filthy-rich backers — a claim picked up by Reuters and heatedly debated in the media. Soros money? If only. Around the time Reuters was walking back its headline, “Who’s Behind the Wall Street Protests,” later revised to “Soros: Not a Funder,” protesters were voting on whether to spend $3,000 on brooms and trash cans to clean up the occupied plaza in order to avoid eviction by the city.
Back in July, when local activists hammered out the logistics of the Occupy Wall Street protest, they were planning for little more than an urban camping trip. Committees were established to handle security, medication and sanitation. Nourishment was a major concern. Fundraising was an afterthought.
Still, onlookers are…
Will Librarians Revolt Over Amazon’s Kindle Lending Program?
A California librarian is urging librarians to complain to Amazon over issues with privacy and advertising in Amazon’s new Kindle ebook lending program for libraries. “In our greedy attempt to get content into our users’ hands, we have failed to uphold the highest principle of our profession, which is intellectual freedom,” she argues in a 10-minute video. (Read the transcript here):
Kindle has allowed Amazon to harvest all of this borrowing data, so it’s an instant violation of all of our privacy policies … [I]f they’re using a Kindle, Amazon’s keeping friggin’ everything. And we haven’t told people that, and we need to tell people that.
She argues Amazon’s retention of your reading history may violate, for example, California’s Reader Privacy Act, and she also complains that the check-out and renewal process include unacceptable promotional content about Amazon’s for-sale ebooks. Though she owns a Kindle and loves ebooks, she’s urging librarians to speak…
Soy Protein Present in Egg Yolks and Chicken Tissues
Via Health Freedoms:
There is a growing market today of consumers trying to avoid soy in their diet. Many people have developed soy allergies, and a number of people are concerned about the plant estrogen properties of soy protein. Soy protein is linked to the rise in hypothyroidism, early puberty in young girls, and lower testosterone levels in men, among other problems. Much of this research is documented in Dr. Kaayla Daniel’s book The Whole Soy Story.
What most people do not realize, however, is that due to the predominance of soy in animal feeds, soy protein is probably present in your food even if it is not listed as an ingredient anywhere. Very little testing has been done to determine if the soy protein from the animal feed is passed into the end products we consume. Most laboratories do not even have tests available to test for this.
Professor M. Monica Giusti,…
Turn the Shame Around
From the Weekly Sift:
For the longest time I didn’t get Occupy Wall Street, but then Herman Cain helped me out: He said something so monumentally wrong that my reaction against it pointed me in the right direction.
Here’s Herman: Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! … It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they failed.
That’s when I got it. An unjust system’s first line of defense is shame. As long as we’re ashamed to admit that we’re victims, as long as we’re ashamed to identify with the other losers, we’re helpless.
It would be great to have a 10-point plan that solves everything. It would be great to have a party that endorses that plan and a get-out-the-vote movement to put that party into office. But none of that is…
Identifying Psychopathic Killers By Their Own Word Choices
Via ScienceDaily:
As words can be the soul’s window, scientists are learning to peer through it: Computerized text analysis shows that psychopathic killers make identifiable word choices — beyond conscious control — when talking about their crimes.This research could lead to new tools for diagnosis and treatment, and have implications law enforcement and social media.
The words of psychopathic murderers match their personalities, which reflect selfishness, detachment from their crimes and emotional flatness, says Jeff Hancock, Cornell professor of computing and information science, and colleagues at the University of British Columbia in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology.
Hancock and his colleagues analyzed stories told by 14 psychopathic male murderers held in Canadian prisons and compared them with 38 convicted murderers who were not diagnosed as psychopathic. Each subject was asked to describe his crime in detail. Their stories were taped, transcribed and subjected to computer analysis.
Psychopaths used more conjunctions like “because,” “since”…
Media Roots: Occupy Wall Street, Divide & Conquer, Medical Marijuana Crackdown
Via Media Roots:
Abby & Robbie Martin cover the Occupy Wall Street Movement: the divide and conquer tactics being used to discredit OWS, the different schools of thought and ideology within the movement and the original demands made by the U.S. Day of Rage; the Obama administration’s shocking crackdown on medical marijuana and new federal law banning medical marijuana card holders from owning firearms; Blackwater and the privatization of the armed forces: is the corporatization of the U.S. military preventing an anti-war rebellion similar to that seen in the ’60s?
Climate Skeptic Admits He Was Wrong
Muller demos a Van de Graaff generator.
You have to admire a scientist who stands up and admits he backed the wrong strain of dogma. The LA Times reports on Richard Muller’s change of heart:
Remember when scientists who had cast doubt on global temperature studies boldly embarked on an effort to “reconsider” the evidence?
They have. And they conclude that their doubt was misplaced.
UC Berkeley physicist Richard Muller and others were looking at the so-called urban heat island effect — the notion that because more urban temperature stations are included in global temperature data sets than are rural ones, the global average temperature was being skewed upward because these sites tend to retain more heat. Hence, global warming trends are exaggerated.
Using data from such urban heat islands as Tokyo, they hypothesized, could introduce “a severe warming bias in global averages using urban stations.”
In fact, the data trend was “opposite in sign to that…
General Motors’ Anti-Bicycling Advertising Campaign
The League of American Bicyclists highlights a fascinatingly awful, recent (now aborted) ad campaign from General Motors, commanding college students, “Reality sucks. Stop pedaling…start driving”. Yes — tune out the world, stop exercising, go into debt buying a $20,000 pickup truck:
If you are a student looking to add tens of thousands of dollars of long term debt, care little about the environment, and want pay through the nose for insurance, gas, and parking…GM has got a perfect deal for you. Bonus: it’ll make you fat and unhealthy! All you have to do is give up that dorky bicycle that’s easy to use, practically free, gets you some exercise and is actually fun to ride.
In case you were wondering, GM has a fine-sounding corporate responsibility statement: “As a responsible corporate citizen, General Motors is dedicated to protecting human health, natural resources and the global environment.”
President Obama: All U.S. Troops Out of Iraq by End of Year
Via MSNBC:
President Barack Obama announced on Friday that all U.S. troops will leave Iraq by the end of the year. The president made the announcement at a White House briefing following a private video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
“As promised the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, the war in Iraq will be over,” Obama said.
More than 4,400 American military members have been killed, and another 2,000 wounded since the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003.
The two countries have been negotiating over whether the United States would leave behind up to several thousand military trainers after year-end, or if all remaining troops would depart as planned by Dec. 31. The main sticking point has been legal immunity for any U.S. forces that remain.
In 1883, Did Earth Narrowly Miss Comet That Would Have Destroyed All Life?
“If they had collided with Earth we would have had 3275 Tunguska events in two days, probably an extinction event.”
The biggest event which never happened and no one knows about? Offering a novel reinterpretation of some forgotten historical data, several Mexican researchers say a billion-ton comet may have passed a few hundred miles from Earth in 1883. Via Technology Review:
On 12th and 13th August 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation. José Bonilla counted some 450 objects, each surrounded by a kind of mist, passing across the face of the Sun.
Bonilla published his account of this event in a French journal called L’Astronomie in 1886. Today, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and a couple of pals, think that Bonilla must have been seeing fragments of a comet that had recently broken up. This explains the…
Was The Iran Terror Plot A U.S. Fabrication?
Mere paranoia? Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, G6 of U.S. Army’s 94th Division, says last week’s alleged plot by Iran to conduct a bombing and assassination on U.S. soil may be a fabrication by the Obama administration, perhaps even to establish a cause for war:
Ron Paul on Occupy Wall Street (Video)
Hear his remarks on the Occupy Wall Street gatherings. Unfortunately, CNN didn’t find the time to allow him to give a closing statement. It’d be nice to watch Ron Paul debate Barack Obama:
