Archive for December, 2011
Oilsands Imperil Western Canada
Mike De Souza reports for the Vancouver Sun/Postmedia News:
Contamination of a major western Canadian river basin from oilsands operations is a “high-profile concern” for downstream communities and wildlife, says a newly-released “secret” presentation prepared last spring by Environment Canada that highlighted numerous warnings about the industry’s growing footprint on land, air, water and the climate.
The warnings from the department contrast with recent claims made by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Environment Minister Peter Kent that the industry is being unfairly targeted by environmentalists who exaggerate its impacts on nature and people.
The presentation noted figures from the Canadian Energy Research Institute, a collaboration among industry, government and academics, that estimate the oilsands sector is responsible for more than 100,000 direct and indirect jobs in Canada, and will contribute more than $1.7 trillion to the country’s economy over the next 25 years.
But it warned that Alberta and other parts of Western Canada…
Why Smoking Synthetic Marijuana Is A (Very) Bad Idea
Six excellent reasons not to touch the synthetic stuff, from Adam Brown. Here’s Number 5, but it’s worth reading the rest at Cracked.com:
#5. Because It Absolutely Is Not “Like Weed”
The obscure chemical compound that blazed the path that leads to full-on adults like myself casually strolling into a beat-to-shit liquor store and saying, “I’ll have one Zombie Matter, please” all while keeping a straight face was developed by a Clemson University chemist named John Huffman. He was conducting research on cannabinoids for the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse. The compound he came up with was called JWH-018, because JWH are Huffman’s initials and he’s clearly an egotistical prick. You know what else he is? A buzzkill. Check out this quote:These compounds were not meant for human consumption. Their effects in humans have not been studied and they could very well have toxic effects. They absolutely should not be used as recreational…
Archaeologists Reveal Neanderthals to Have Been Even More Badass Than Previously Thought
It turns out they built ornate homes out of bone. This from Richard Gray of The Telegraph:
Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 44,000 year old Neanderthal building that was constructed using the bones from mammoths. The circular building, which was up to 26 feet across at its widest point, is believed to be earliest example of domestic dwelling built from bone. Neanderthals, which died out around 30,000 years ago, were initially thought to have been relatively primitive nomads that lived in natural caves for shelter.
The new findings, however, suggest these ancient human ancestors had settled in areas to the degree that they built structures where they lived for extended periods of time. Analysis by researchers from the Muséum National d’Histories Naturelle in Paris also found that many of the bones had been decorated with carvings and ochre pigments…
[Continues at The Telegraph]
Clean-Shaven, Severed Leg Washes Ashore In St. Petersburg, Florida
The beachfront find raises a host of questions. Why shave your leg if it’s going to be cut off? Or, why shave a severed leg if you’re going to toss it into the ocean? For what it’s worth, this area also saw multiple brutal attacks by people who believed themselves to be vampires in 2011. The Tampa Bay Times reports:
Police continued a search for clues Wednesday in a mystery that began Tuesday morning when Canadian tourists found a severed human leg behind a waterfront home. The leg washed ashore near the Bay Vista Recreation Center. Police believe it was in the water for a day or two. They believe it was a right leg that may have belonged to an overweight white female who was dismembered.
Two marine units on Wednesday searched waters from Tierra Verde to the Tropical Shores area, said St. Petersburg police spokesman Mike Puetz. Officers did not find any…
The Perils of Articles Like This One
Author: Christian R. Linder
Via ScienceDaily:
Short, fast, and frequent: Those 21st-century demands on publication have radically changed the news, politics, and culture — for the worse, many say. Now an article in January’s Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, aims a critique at a similar trend in psychological research. The authors, psychologists Marco Bertamini of the University of Liverpool and Marcus Munafò of the University of Bristol, call it “bite-size science” — papers based on one or a few studies and small samples.”We’re not against concision,” says Bertamini. “But there are real risks in this trend toward shorter papers. The main risk is the increased rates of false alarms that are likely to be associated with papers based on less data.”
The article dispatches several claimed advantages of shorter papers. Proponents say they’re easier to read. Perhaps, say the authors, but more articles mean more…
The Filthy Little Atheist … Founding Father
[Site editor's note: The following is an excerpt from the new Disinformation title 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know: Religion, authored by Daniele Bolelli.]
The story of his life is richer and weirder than any fiction. Among his close friends were visionary poets such as William Blake as well as political icons like Benjamin Franklin. Napoleon slept with his books by his pillow, and told him statues of gold should be erected to him in every city in the universe (but the admiration was not reciprocated). Thomas Edison believed him to be one of the most brilliant minds in human history. Some of his writings rank among the greatest bestsellers of the 18th century. He participated in the two revolutions (the American and the French) that changed the political face of the modern world.
During the American Revolution, George Washington used his writings to inspire his troops to remember what they were…
Marvel Comics Lawyers Argue That Mutants Are Not Human
Bullpen Bulletin! A “real world” conflict based on the bottom line has infringed on the civil liberties of our uncanny “fictional” heroes, who have lately made a ton of dough for their corporate creator. Grant Morrison has tread this ground in Animal Man to explore the dynamic between the creator and the creation, but sans the grand mega-corporate, economic drama. (Probably need to see Seaguy for that: I wonder if Mickey Eye is behind the actions of Marvel’s Law Defense Team!)
The folks at io9.com do a great job of explaining how the map is not the territory in this collision of “realities.” As Meredith Woerner explains (and check out the Radiolab Podcast):
Mark this up as one more blow to human-mutant equality. Marvel lawyers are putting up a fight to prove the mutants aren’t the same as humans after all. Unleash the Sentinels!
This strange piece of news comes via the Radiolab Podcast, which uncovered a weird saga of…
Walter Potter’s Taxidermy Wants to Swallow Your Soul
Walter Potter’s collection of anthropomorphic taxidermy included cigar-smoking squirrels, athletic toads, and a kittens’ tea party. Victorian Gothic writes:
While the preservation of hunting trophies may be the best-known use of the taxidermist’s art, fans of Walter Potter’s anthropomorphic tableaux can attest to the fact that it has its other, more silly uses. Potter (1835-1918) was a self-taught taxidermist who grew up in the rural community of Bramber, Sussex, at a time when stuffing dead animals was considered to be a suitable hobby for young boys. For technical assistance, he would have had any number of popular manuals at his disposal. For inspiration, he had his younger sister’s illustrated nursery rhyme books and the Great Exhibition of 1851, where anthropomorphic taxidermy was first displayed to the British public.
His first major contribution was an elaborate diorama depicting the death and burial of Cock Robin, which he began at age 19 and took seven years to…
Ocean Acidification Levels Reach Levels Predicted For 2100
Via ScienceDaily:
A group of 19 scientists from five research organizations have conducted the broadest field study of ocean acidification to date using sensors developed at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.The study was recently reported in the journal PLoS One. It is an important step toward understanding how specific ecosystems are responding to the change in seawater chemistry that is being caused as the oceans take up extra carbon dioxide produced by human greenhouse gas emissions, said its authors. “These data represent a critical step in understanding the consequences of ocean change: the linkage of present-day pH exposures to organismal tolerance and how this translates into ecological change in marine ecosystems,” the authors wrote.
“These pH time series create a compelling argument for the collection of more continuous data of this kind.” Ocean acidification research is a relatively new study topic as scientists have only appreciated the potential extent of…
It’s Time To Occupy A New Year
"Plunder" Filmmaker Danny Schechter
Out with the old. I would say good riddance to 2011 even as I fear 2012 may be worse, given the financial trends, social chaos and political idiocy that we confront every day.
Every time I think it can’t get worse, it does.
It seems so clear that the political system is moribund and paralyzed and the economic system may be in worse shape.
A tiny sliver of the 1% may be in charge although not in control. Their own short-term greed makes it unlikely that they can stabilize the system or do any longer term planning. Their Titanic has hit its iceberg. Some new technologies may be keeping it afloat for now but for how long?
We lurch from crisis to crisis in an atmosphere of deep denial.
Obama clearly has no new ideas and the Republican candidates for the most part don’t know what an idea is, as they pander…
Whitley Strieber Interviews Graham Hancock On Coast To Coast AM
An incredible holiday treat of an interview (starts at about 43 minutes in):
For those of you interested in the books they discuss in the interview, these are published by disinformation:
Was Cuban Mafia Boss Nixon’s Gay Lover?
Did Nixon make history as our second gay president (following Abraham Lincoln)? In other more minor news, he maybe was drunk during most of his presidency. Via the voice of authority on secret gay affairs, the Daily Mail:
Given everything that Richard Nixon has been accused of, it’s difficult to believe there could be any more skeletons left in his cupboard. Yet the most extraordinary claim is that the homophobic Nixon may have been gay himself.
A new biography by Don Fulsom, a veteran Washington reporter who covered the Nixon years, suggests the 37th president had a serious drinking problem, beat his wife and — by the time he was inaugurated in 1969 — had links going back two decades to the Mafia, including with New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello, then America’s most powerful mobster.
Fulsom argues that Nixon may have had an affair with his best friend and confidant, a Mafia‑connected Florida wheeler-dealer…
Grant Morrison’s Supergods
Longtime disinformation ally Roy Christopher reviews the first non-fiction book from Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human:
Grant Morrison describes his growing up through comics books as a Manichean affair: “It was an all-or-nothing choice between the A-Bomb and the Spaceship. I had already picked sides, but the Cold War tension between Apocalypse and Utopia was becoming almost unbearable” (p. xiv). Morrison’s first non-comic book, Supergods (Spiegel & Grau, 2011), is one-half personal statement, one-half art history. It’s an autobiography told through comic books and a history of superheroes disguised as a memoir. His early history of superhero comics is quite good, but it gets really, really good when Morrison enters the story full-bore — first as a struggling but successful freelancer and later as a chaos magician of the highest order, conjuring coincidence with superhero sigils.
As if to follow…
Occupy vs. Ron Paul
Via CNN:
Five members of the Occupy the Caucus movement in Des Moines Iowa were arrested this morning while blockading the entrance to Ron Paul’s campaign headquarters.Using their iconic mic-check speaking style, the protestors spoke out against Ron Paul’s campaign pledge to close the Environmental Protection Agency if elected.
Sitting arm in arm, the members of the Occupy movement chanted; “We are fighting for the future generations. In order to live we need clean air, clean water, and safe food. Don’t dismantle the EPA. We won’t allow this business to open before our demands are met.”
Police gave the protestors the opportunity to move from the private entrance to the public sidewalk twenty feet away. Some complied, but five refused to move and were arrested.
Many of the occupy demonstrators claimed sympathy, if not outright support for the ideology of Ron Paul, which made this protest especially uncomfortable for both the occupiers and the…
December 30, 2011 Will Not Exist (In Samoa)
After accepting bad advice nearly 120 years ago from an American trader, this South Pacific nation is taking a major step to improve its economy. (And in a nice slight of hand I wouldn’t mind experiencing, all Samoans who were supposed to get paid that day will still be paid for a day that didn’t exist …) Via Herald Sun:
On Thursday night, it will be December 29 when they go to bed and Saturday Dec 31 when they wake up — meaning they’ll skip Friday forever.
This neat bit of time travel is the result of a very contemporary concern: trade and economic relations with Pacific neighbors Australia and New Zealand, who are currently nearly a day ahead on the clock. Now, with the disappearance of Friday, Samoa will shift west of the international dateline and share the same date and time as its two key partners.
Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi…
Inside The Octopus Mind
Who can think? Who can feel? Via Orion, the revelation that octopi — boneless creatures with brains the size of a walnut — seem to have immense intelligence, feelings, and personalities is challenging our understanding of what consciousness means and where it comes from:
I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent.
Many times I have stood…
Bethlehem Battle: Clergymen Clash At Birthplace Of Jesus
For once the police are called to a Christmas brawl and none of my relatives are implicated. From Bernat Armangue at Huffington Post:
BETHLEHEM, West Bank — The annual cleaning of one of Christianity’s holiest churches deteriorated into a brawl between rival clergy Wednesday, as dozens of monks feuding over sacred space at the Church of the Nativity battled each other with brooms until police intervened.
The ancient church, built over the traditional site of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, is shared…
Chavez Suggests US May Have Caused Cancer In Political Enemies
Considering the many bizarre attempts to poison Fidel Castro, it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that the CIA would try to engender a terminal disease in Hugo Chavez and sympathizers. From Bloomberg News:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez hinted that the U.S. may be behind a “very strange” bout of cancer affecting several leaders aligned with him in South America.
Chavez, speaking a day after Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, said the Central Intelligence Agency was behind chemical experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s and that it’s possible that in years to come a plot will be uncovered that shows the U.S. spread cancer as a political weapon against its critics.
“It’s very difficult to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what has been happening to some of us in Latin America,” Chavez said in a nationally televised speech to the military. “Would it be…
