Archive for November, 2011
Alberto Villoldo On Ayahuasca
Alberto Villoldo
Disinformation’s sister video label True Mind has just released a documentary film featuring Alberto Villoldo, Amazonia: Healing With Sacred Plants. Dr. Alberto Villoldo writes for True Mind about his film:
I started out in the brain laboratory at San Francisco State University – literally surrounded by hundreds of formaldehyde preserved brains. We were studying how we develop psychosomatic disease, and how we could create psychosomatic health.
One day I realized that I had been looking out of the wrong end of the microscope, becoming caught in the minutiae of neurons and brain chemistry, and missing the larger picture of the mind. I decided to leave my lab and travelled to the Amazon, to work and study with medicine men who had no MRI’s and brain scans, only the power of the mind and local herbs to heal their patients.
For twenty-five years, I apprenticed with extraordinary shamans and healers, and learned the use…
President Obama Has Raised More Money From Wall Street Than Any Politician in American History
This opinion piece from Joe Scarborough in the Politico is worth a read:
One of the most famous scenes in movie history comes from “Casablanca,” when a corrupt official shuts down Humphrey Bogart’s cafe. Bogart asks the French captain — who also happens to be a gambling aficionado — why he’s closing the joint down. His response is a classic.
“I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here.”
Political commentators have referred to Capt. Renault’s uproarious line for years when calling out hypocritical politicians. But few political narratives ever fit that scene as tightly as President Barack Obama’s bipolar approach to Wall Street. To fully understand the extent of Obama’s double-speak, it helps to let the “Casablanca” scene play out a bit, because after the corrupt captain makes his self-righteous declaration, a croupier hands him cash and says, “Your winnings, sir.”
Capt. Renault quietly thanks the croupier and then quickly returns…
Stereotypes Help Create False Memories
Illustration: J.J. (CC)
Via ScienceDaily:
A new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, published online October 26 addresses the influence of age-related stereotypes on memory performance and memory errors in older adults.
Ayanna Thomas, assistant professor of psychology and director of the Cognitive Aging and Memory Lab at Tufts University, and co-author Stacey J. Dubois, a former graduate student at Tufts, set out to investigate how implicitly held negative stereotypes about aging could influence memory performance in older adults.
Thomas and Dubois presented a group of older and younger adults with a list of semantically related words. A sample list participants would be presented with would be words associated with “sleep,” such as “bed,” “rest,” “awake,” “tired” and “night.” Though the word “sleep” itself was not actually presented, both the older and younger adults falsely indicated that they thought it had been included in the list, older adults…
Penis Cancer Linked To Sex With Animals
Photo: Waugsberg (CC)
A warning for zoophiles from MSNBC:
For many people, bestiality is a bad joke, but for some it could be a matter of life or death, according to a new study finding that men who had sex with animals in their lifetimes were twice as likely to develop cancer of the penis as others.
The study of 492 men from rural Brazil found that 35 percent of study participants, who ranged from 18 to 80 years old and included both penile cancer patients and healthy men, reported having sex with animals (SWA) in their lifetimes. A team of urologists from centers around Brazil co-authored the paper, which looked at risk factors for penile cancer in men who had visited 16 urology and oncology centers in 12 Brazilian cities. In addition to SWA, three other risk factors for penile cancer were found: smoking, the presence of premalignant lesions on the penis and…
Holograms You Can Manipulate With Your Hands
The future will involving interacting with objects that aren’t actually there. The 2050 World Series will be played with a holographic non-real “ball” and your grandchildren’s toys will be mere fragments of light. Via PhysOrg:
A research project at Microsoft Research Cambridge has brought forth a prototype called Holodesk, which lets you manipulate virtual objects with your hand.
How The Top 1% Are Reshaping America
Completed a few weeks before the Occupy Wall Street protests began, the latest episode of Al Jazeera’s fantastic Fault Lines program takes a hard look at the wealthiest 1% in the United States, including talking to those in the 1% about what their wealth means:
Traffic Fumes Linked To Brain Damage, Autism
Not that this should be any great surprise, but maybe now that scientists are able to measure the adverse effects of combustion-engine vehicle pollution, legislators will take action. One can dream, anyway. From the Wall Street Journal:
Congested cities are fast becoming test tubes for scientists studying the impact of traffic fumes on the brain.
As roadways choke on traffic, researchers suspect that the tailpipe exhaust from cars and trucks—especially tiny carbon particles already implicated in heart disease, cancer and respiratory ailments—may also injure brain cells and synapses key to learning and memory.
New public-health studies and laboratory experiments suggest that, at every stage of life, traffic fumes exact a measurable toll on mental capacity, intelligence and emotional stability…
Cave Art More Realist Than Abstract
Image of a horse from the Lascaux caves.
If you thought that those ancient cave paintings at Lascaux and elsewhere were pretty abstract, think again. AP via Fox News reports that DNA studies suggest the cave painters were actually painting what they saw:
Cave painters during the Ice Age were more like da Vinci than Dali, sketching realistic depictions of horses they saw rather than dreaming them up, a study of ancient DNA finds.
It’s not just a matter of aesthetics: Paintings based on real life can give first-hand glimpses into the environment of tens of thousands of years ago. But scientists have wondered how much imagination went into animal drawings etched in caves around Europe.
The latest analysis published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences focused on horses since they appeared most frequently on rock walls. The famed Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne region of southwest France and the…
British Man Kills Wife For Breaking His Star Wars Toys
I usually tune people out when they complain about how the population is becoming infantilized. However, case in point — a 30-year-old British man murdered his wife after finding she had smashed his Darth Vader action figures and then “ran sobbing to his mother who lived nearby,” reports the Mirror:
A Star Wars fan was yesterday jailed for life after murdering his wife in an alleged revenge attack for smashing up his cherished toy collection.
Rickie La-Touche, 30, told a court that his Thai wife Pornpilai Srisroy, 28, had damaged his precious Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker memorabilia. He later suffocated her during a row and then ran sobbing to his mother who lived nearby.
La-Touche later told police his wife had smashed up his Star Wars collection as part of a campaign to “make his life hell”. He also claimed he “flipped” when she threatened to leave him to go back to…
Large Asteroid 2005 YU55 to Pass Earth — Closer Than Moon
Edward Lovett and Ned Potter Report on ABC News:
We have a visitor — a large asteroid called 2005 YU55 that is expected to come within approximately 201,700 miles of Earth on Tuesday, according to NASA. That’s slightly less than the distance from Earth to the moon.
Asteroids often pass this close, but most are tiny. Countless thousands of pieces come plunging into the atmosphere, but they burn up without doing any harm. If they’re as large as grains of sand, we may, if we’re lucky, see them in the night sky as shooting stars.
But 2005 YU55 is at least 1,300 feet wide — larger than an aircraft carrier, according to radar measurements. The last time an asteroid this big passed by was in 1976, and the next one scientists know of won’t be until 2028, NASA says. (There have been some rude surprises in between, but not involving anything remotely as…
DARPA Waxes Poetic at Cyber Colloquium
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
The Defense Department plans to ratchet up cyber security over the next five years, say chatter from a conference its research arm, DARPA, held on Monday. DARPA is seeking $208 million in funding to “prepare for hostile cyber acts that threaten our military capabilities,” an increase in $83 million reports Information Week. At the “cyber colloquium” in Virginia on Monday, talking heads for the DoD waxed poetic about the issues the Pentagon faces with cyber security.
“It is the makings of novels and poetry from Dickens to Gibran that the best and the worst occupy the same time, that wisdom and foolishness appear in the same age, light and darkness in the same season,” said DARPA’s director Regina Dugan, Wired reports. Former White House Security chief Richard Clarke was more blunt, saying current networks are as “porous as a colande.” Meanwhile, Wired reports DARPA also tacitly reached out…
Chris Hedges’ Speech in Front of Goldman Sachs Leads to Arrest
Photo Courtesy of Chris Hedges
Via Nation of Change:
Chris Hedges made this statement in New York City’s Zuccotti Park on Thursday morning during the People’s Hearing on Goldman Sachs, which he chaired with Dr. Cornel West. The activist and Truthdig columnist then joined a march of several hundred protesters to the nearby corporate headquarters of Goldman Sachs, where he was arrested with 16 others.
Goldman Sachs, which received more subsidies and bailout-related funds than any other investment bank because the Federal Reserve permitted it to become a bank holding company under its “emergency situation,” has used billions in taxpayer money to enrich itself and reward its top executives. It handed its senior employees a staggering $18 billion in 2009, $16 billion in 2010 and $10 billion in 2011 in mega-bonuses. This massive transfer of wealth upwards by the Bush and Obama administrations, now estimated at $13 trillion to $14 trillion, went into…
WikiLeaks: the Novel?
Author Thomas S. Roche has written a new zombie novel which incorporates WikiLeaks, conspiracy forums, and viral YouTube videos, studying the new wasteland where military violence intersects corporate disinformation.
“I think WikiLeaks represents a very important impulse and the start of a strong movement toward anti-corporate sentiment and the demand for government transparency,” he explains in this new interview, “As ineffectual as that movement may end up being – because it started so late in the process of corporate control being consolidated…”
He moves from discussing fictional zombie-fighting to the brutal real-world military violence in neo-colonial nations around the world. And he ultimately wonders if our wireless technology-enhanced future will also include the potential for massive global disinformation.
Is Your Carrier Storing Information On Your Phone Usage?
Curious how long your cell phone company holds onto to data regarding what you’ve been doing with your phone? AT&T/Cingular will preserve your text and call detail records for 5-7 years. The ACLU uncovered the below document, created by the Department of Justice for use by law enforcement:
What Will Happen To OccupyWallStreet If It Loses Its Park?
Zuccotti Park. Photo: David Shankbone (CC)
The tarps are flapping and the tents are not bringing much warmth.
The harsh winds of winter are lashing the encampment at Zuccotti Park, or as many would prefer. “Liberty Plaza,” the symbol of a wannabe revolution against the status quote and powercrats of the American oligarchy.
The hard real-world contradictions of urban life have bumped up against the idyllic hopes of the occupiers as all the urban crises that our society has ignored and neglected surface in that half acre of hope.
There are man/woman handlers and gladhanders, doers and dopers, ragers and even rapists and so many poor with no where else to go. There are cops on the outside (and many on the inside) who plan for and hope for the worse.
This fight is not just the 99% against the 1% because, truth be told, this movement has so far only motivated a minority of…
When Pollution Grows Terrible, The Elite Breathe Purified Air
It has recently been noted that in the Chinese capital of Beijing, the air quality has grown so bad as to be off the charts of measurability. But the New York Times reports that the elite breathe special air thanks to purification systems — is this the global future, in which a breath of fresh air is a luxury item?
Ordinary Beijingers could take some comfort in the knowledge that the soupy air they breathe on especially polluted days also finds its way into the lungs of the privileged and pampered. Such assumptions, it seems, are not entirely accurate.
As it turns out, the homes and offices of many top leaders are filtered by high-end devices, at least according to a Chinese company, the Broad Group, which has been promoting its air-purifying machines in advertisements that highlight their ubiquity in places where many officials work and live.
The company’s vice president, Zhang Zhong, said…
1970s NASA Space Colony Art
This could be your neighborhood. Via the Public Domain Review, think tank concepts for possible off-Earth colonies — a glorious glimpse at what could have been in an alternate reality:
In the 1970s the Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, with the help of NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University, held a series of space colony summer studies which explored the possibilities of humans living in giant orbiting spaceships. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed and a number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made.
Greece’s Choice, And Ours: Rule By Democracy or Finance?
A number of nations, including Greece and the United States, are in the process of deciding between being governed by democracy or by finance, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor Robert Reich writes:
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou decided in favor of democracy yesterday when he announced a national referendum on the draconian budget cuts Europe and the IMF are demanding from Greece in return for bailing it out.
(Or, more accurately, the cuts Europe and the IMF are demanding for bailing out big European banks that have lent Greece lots of money and stand to lose big if Greece defaults on those loans—not to mention Wall Street banks that will also suffer because of their intertwined financial connections with European banks.)
If Greek voters accept the bailout terms, unemployment will rise even further in Greece, public services will be cut more than they have already, the Greek economy will contract, and the standard of…
Obama’s Reefer Madness
International Drug Policy Reform Conference, Nov. 2-11
Ethan Nadelman, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, suggests that President Obama needs to take charge of the medical marijuana legislative chaos around the United States, in the New York Times:
Marijuana is now legal under state law for medical purposes in 16 states and the District of Columbia, encompassing nearly one-third of the American population. More than 1,000 dispensaries provide medical marijuana; many are well regulated by state and local law and pay substantial taxes. But though more than 70 percent of Americans support legalizing medical marijuana, any use of marijuana remains illegal under federal law.
When he ran for president, Barack Obama defended the medical use of marijuana and said that he would not use Justice Department resources to override state laws on the issue. He appeared to make good on this commitment in October 2009, when the Justice Department directed federal prosecutors…
