Archive for October, 2011
A Capitalist Against Corporate Greed
Critics of the Occupy Wall Street movement often point to activists’ use of iPhones and laptops in their fight against corporate greed and control of America. As Natalie W of Capricious Yet Constant points out, we sometimes must use the tools of the system to dismantle it. We recognize the irony of biting the hand that feeds, but the lifestyle choices anyone makes do not diminish their involvement in the movement, or the movement itself:
I own an Apple iPhone.
I have a MacBook that I take everywhere with me.
I drink Starbucks when my body needs a caffeine fix.
I eat McDonald’s but prefer Corner Bakery when I’m hungry and away from home.
I smoke Camel cigarettes.
I am a proud member of Occupy Chicago. I am protesting in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and the 1000-plus occupied cities in the US for economic equality for all people, for an elimination of corporate influence over…
Microbes Found Preadapted for Life in Space
Via the Daily Galaxy (some have been unable to get this link, here is the cached version):
Microbes born on Earth are already pre-adapted for journeying through space, living in space, and not just surviving but flourishing in radioactive environments where they are continually exposed to radiation by ions similar to what might be encountered in a nebular cloud.
In 1958, physicists discovered clouds of bacteria, ranging from two million bacteria per cm3 and over 1 billion per quart, thriving in pools of radioactive waste directly exposed to ionizing radiation and radiation levels millions of times greater than could have ever before been experienced on this plane.
The world’s first artificial nuclear reactor was not even built until 1942. Prior to the 1945, poisonous pools of radioactive waste did not even exist on Earth. And yet, over a dozen different species of microbe have inherited the genes which enable them to survive conditions which…
Five Demands To Rein In Wall Street
If we want a country in which the most powerful financial institutions may longer hold our political process hostage, where do we start? Via Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi puts forth his list of five demands for anti-Wall Street protesters to push for:
1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called “Too Big to Fail” financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term “Systemically Dangerous Institutions” – are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled; a good start would be to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and mandate the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.
2. Pay for your own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on…
A Ron Paul Economy
What would a Ron Paul economy look like? Suzy Khimm connects the dots for the Washington Post:
Ever wonder what Ron Paul’s America would look like? Then read the budget outline that Paul released as part of his 2012 presidential bid. It promises to cut $1 trillion during his first year in office, balance the budget by 2015, withdraw us from all foreign wars and eliminate five Cabinet-level agencies in the process. Economists across the political spectrum say the impact of such drastic government spending cuts would be majorly disruptive and harmful to the economy in the short term.
“At the scale he’s talking about, it’s unlikely you could have an immediate reduction in government without hurtling the economy into recession,” says Kevin Hassett, economic policy director for the American Enterprise Institute and chief economic adviser to John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign. Hassett maintains that Paul’s plan for a limited government “would be really…
Woman Arrested For Closing Her Bank Account
Wonkette has a disturbing account of the NYPD’s alleged arrest of Citibank customers for attempting to close their bank accounts. A snippet:
“I heard that a few dozen people had decided to head over to the local Citibank branch to talk about their student debt and close their accounts. I thought one of my friends might be among them so I walked the few blocks to the bank.
As I arrived I saw Citi Bank security guards locking the doors to the bank. Contrary to the City Bank PR statement, the cops were not yet on the scene when Citi Bank officials chose to lock the doors to the branch–effectively kidnapping those inside.”
The 1979 Wall Street Occupation
The 1979 march on Wall Street offered a smaller, more whimsical glimpse of what would come 30 years later. It’s fitting as a premonitory event, especially if one believes that the economic crises of the 1970s were never truly solved, but merely lay dormant before returning with a vengeance in 2008:
This is a short clip from the film “Early Warnings” that details the sit-in that happened on Wall Street on the 50th Anniversary of the 1929 Stock Market Crash. The protesters were demanding an end to financial support for the nuclear industry and the action was part of the larger occupations at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant. The costumed figures on stilts are from the Bread and Puppet Theatre.
Occupy George: Fix Your Money
Occupy George is a (presumably illegal) attempt to convey the reality of wealth distribution in the United States to the public by adding pertinent information to paper currency and circulating it as needed. Now your money will have informational as well as purchase value. Download their templates or order the custom stamps, and you can begin minting your own Occupy George bills at home:
Money talks, but not loud enough for the 99%. By circulating dollar bills stamped with fact-based infographics, Occupy George informs the public of America’s daunting economic disparity one bill at a time.
The Robot Author Has Arrived
We can all agree that it’s O.K. for robots to take over unpleasant jobs — like cleaning up nuclear waste. But how could we have allowed them to commandeer one of the most gratifying occupations, that of author?
Via the New York Times, Pagan Kennedy looks into the phenomenon of android authors, and finds that their works are already being published and sold on Amazon:
One day, I stumbled across a book on Amazon called “Saltine Cracker.” It didn’t make sense: who would pay $54 for a book entirely about perforated crackers? The book was co-edited by someone called Lambert M. Surhone — a name that sounds like one of Kurt Vonnegut’s inventions. According to Amazon, Lambert M. Surhone has written or edited more than 100,000 titles, on every subject from beekeeping to the world’s largest cedar bucket. He was churning out books at a rate that was simply not possible for…
Who Lobbies In Washington?
OpenSecrets has a wealth of information concerning private lobbying of federal and state government in the United States. However, it may be best to begin by looking at where the lobbying money is coming from. The FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sector leads the field in terms of lobbying funds spent from 1998-2011. Also notable is how far down the list the Republican bogeyman of “Big Labor” is:
Sesame Street Letter X Hack Puts Porn On YouTube Page
So far as subversive pranks go, this one doesn’t seem especially anti-establishment. How about hacking some banks’ YouTube pages instead? CNN reports on the juvenile shocker:
Hackers appeared to have commandeered the YouTube page of the venerable “Sesame Street” children’s show Sunday, reprogramming the page with content brought to you by the letter “X.”
The show page was taken offline Sunday afternoon, and visitors were greeted with a message from the video website informing them it had been shut down “due to repeated or severe violations of our community guidelines.” Users who called up the account earlier had found explicit sex videos instead of Muppets …
Forgive the Debt of The 99 Percent?
“So my immodest proposal is simply this,” as posed by Alex Pareene on Salon.com:
Individuals and households in the bottom 99 percent who owe debt to any large financial institution that received federal government support during and after the 2008 crisis should see their debt forgiven. That would certainly stimulate the economy, as most people would suddenly find themselves with a great deal more money to spend on iPads (and food, and clothing, and housing, and healthcare). The debt can be forgiven by decree or if the government really wants to it can step in to pay it itself; I don’t much care either way. (Though it’d be nice to see it just wiped off the books, to enrage the banks.)
Let’s wipe the debt of the 99 percent off the books, tell the financial sector to eat it, and get on with our lives.
I’m by no means the first person to come…
Add Muslim College Students to the List The NYPD Has Spied On
Joe Coscarelli writes in New York Magazine’s Daily Intel:
The Associated Press’s series on NYPD spying continues today with the news that Muslim students at colleges in New York were investigated covertly by the secret NYPD and CIA program that also monitored community centers, government allies, and entire neighborhoods in the years after September 11. The new report places NYPD undercover officers at schools including Brooklyn College, Baruch, Hunter, City College, Queens College, La Guardia, and St. John’s, where they sought out student radicalization. But according to experts, their methods “may have broken a 19-year-old pact with the colleges and violated U.S. privacy laws, jeopardizing millions of dollars in federal research money and student aid.”
“The government, through the police department, is working privately to destroy the private lives of Muslim citizens,” said Moustafa Bayoumi, an English professor at Brooklyn College.
“We come to the room, we talk, we chill,” said one 20-year-old student of…
Mystery Behind Virgin Births Explained
Explaining a virgin birth by means of a serpent? God must have a sense of irony. Jennifer Viegas writes on Discovery News:
An eastern diamond rattlesnake recently gave successful birth five years after mating, according to a new paper that describes this longest known instance of sperm storage, outside of insects, in the animal kingdom.
The study, published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, also presents the first documented virgin birth by a copperhead snake. In this case, the female never mated, proving that snakes and certain other animals can either give true virgin — dadless — birth, or may store sperm for long periods.
Actual mate-less virgin birthing, known as parthenogenesis, “has now been observed to occur naturally within all lineages of jawed vertebrates, with the exception of mammals,” co-author Warren Booth told Discovery News. “We have recently seen genetic confirmation in species such as boa constrictors, rainbow boas, various…
Obama’s Crackdown on Medical Marijuana
Photo: O'Dea (CC)
Justin Elliott writes in Salon:
Back in July, I interviewed a drug policy expert about an apparent change in Justice Department policy that suggested a crackdown on medical marijuana — which is legal in many states but illegal under federal law — might be coming.
Now, with the announcement last week by California’s four U.S. attorneys that pot dispensaries will be targeted with harsh criminal sanctions, the shift feared by drug policy reform advocates appears to have come to pass. The rhetoric from candidate Barack Obama about not prioritizing medical marijuana cases now seems a distant memory.
To learn more about what’s happening in California, I spoke to Bob Egelko, a veteran reporter who covers courts for the San Francisco Chronicle and has been following the story.
Conservative Agent Provocateur Infiltrates Occupy Wall Street and Gets Pepper-Sprayed
Via The Week:
The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., was shut down Saturday after a crowd of protesters showed up to voice their opposition to U.S. drone strikes. The march was organized by an antiwar group called October 11, but was quickly joined by some members of the Occupy Wall Street offshoot Occupy D.C. Ten or so protesters tried to force their way past security and were pepper-sprayed in return. One was Patrick Howley, an editor at the conservative magazine The American Spectator, who shoved his way into the museum even after being pepper-sprayed. “As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause — a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine [it] in the pages of The American Spectator,” Howley says in his (since-modified) article. Did he step beyond the bounds of journalism?
DARPA Tech Invades iPhones Now with Siri
Tim Stevens on Endgadget said this was happening back in ‘09. For all those who rushed out to get the new iPhone, if you are using Siri, you are giving a hell lot of personal info to Apple:
Microsoft’s little Clippy, the uppity paperclip who just wanted to help, never got a lick of respect in the ten years he graced the Office suite.
He’s long-since gone, but his legacy lives on through a DARPA project called CALO: the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes. It’s intended for use to streamline tedious activities by military personnel, like scheduling meetings and prioritizing e-mails, but there are a few non-com spin-offs intended as well, like an iPhone app called Siri due to hit the App Store sometime this year. Siri will have more of a consumer angle, helping to find product reviews and make reservations, but we’re hoping a taste of its military upbringing shines through.
Women and Disbelief
A long-running critique of the New Atheist movement has been how strikingly male-dominated it is. Victoria Bekiempkis over at Bitch Magazine explores the intersection between feminism and atheism:
Women are God-fearing and don’t challenge institutions. Men, on the other hand, are skeptical and rational, and go out of their way to publicly call bullshit on faith and religion — which is why today’s well-known secular thinkers, especially in the ranks of the New Atheism movement, are all male.
These statements should sound ridiculous because, of course, they are. From Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American Atheists, whose 1963 Supreme Court lawsuit brought an end to prayer in public schools, to Sergeant Kathleen Johnson, who started an organization for atheists in the United States military, to Debbie Goddard, founder of African Americans for Humanism, countless women have worked as successful atheist activists. They’ve penned books, run organizations, and advocated on behalf of religiously…
99 or 53, We’re Still All The Same
Natalie W and Aaron Cynic write at Diatribe Media:
Ever since the Occupy Wall Street movement began, one of the ways members have told their stories is through simple photos of themselves holding writings of their life experiences and what makes them part of the “99 percent” of Americans who have been ignored, mistreated, and misrepresented by their government. Some of their heartbreaking stories include tales of vast amounts of medical debt due to unforeseen chronic illness and no insurance coverage, overwhelming college debt coupled with joblessness or no job prospects, and a shortage of work combined with short unemployment assistance, among many others. To read their stories, see We Are The 99 percent.
This week, founder of the right wing blog Red State, Erik Erickson began a Tumblr account dubbed the “53 percent.” The project attempts to be the conservative perception of Occupy Wall Street and solidarity occupations as a movement of whiners…
