Archive for December, 2011
Drug Cartels Building High-Tech Tunnels Below U.S.-Mexico Border
Gives new meaning to “underground economy.” The Globe and Mail writes:
When architect Felipe de Jesus Corona built Mexico’s most powerful drug lord a 200-foot-long tunnel under the U.S.-Mexican border with a hydraulic lift entrance opened by a fake water tap, the kingpin was impressed. The architect “made me one [expletive] cool tunnel” Joaquin (Shorty) Guzman said, according to court testimony that helped sentence Mr. Corona to 18 years in prison in 2006.
Built below a pool table in his lawyer’s home, the tunnel was among the first of an increasingly sophisticated drug transport system used by Mr. Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel. U.S. customs agents seized more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine that had allegedly been smuggled along the underground route.
In the past five years, a crackdown on drug smugglers in Mexico and tighter U.S. border security above ground has led to a dramatic increase in the use, and the sophistication, of tunnels under…
A Glimpse Of The God Particle
A simulated event in the CMS detector, featuring the appearance of the Higgs boson. (CERN)
As an update to this post, physicists the world over are all ashiver at the prospect of the elusive Higgs boson particle being announced tomorrow. Via ExtremeTech:
Tomorrow, at 9am EST, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland are expected to announce, with fairly strong certainty, that they have observed the Higgs boson “God” particle at a mass-energy of 125 GeV.
For just over a week, rumors have been rife that observations with 2.5 to 3.5 sigma certainty (96% to 99.9%) have been made. For it to be declared an actual discovery, however, a sigma level of five has to be recorded. A score on the higher end of the range, towards 3.5, would definitely have particle physicists, engineers, scientists, and philosophers jumping around excitedly, though. Perhaps more importantly, LHC has two detectors at the…
Woman Arrested For Attempting Meth Lab Inside Wal-Mart
If Wal-Mart has supplanted plazas, main streets, and town squares as the communal gathering place in locales across the country, and meth culture has become the predominant culture in some areas, it stands to reason that a logical weekend activity would be cooking up some meth at Wal-Mart. KJRH in Oklahoma reports:
Tulsa Police say a woman tried to make a meth lab inside a south Tulsa Walmart.
According to police, Alisha Halfmoon, 45, began taking items used to make meth off of shelves at the Walmart located at 81st and Lewis in south Tulsa. She then began trying to make the drug while still inside the store.
When officers took the items outside the store, some spilled. One officer suffered a minor burn to his hand. No customers were injured.
Buy A House Atop A Cold War Missile Silo
Via Best Places To Live In NY, a home for sale for $1.76 million in the mountains of upstate New York offers the perfect retreat for the collapse of civilization:
It might be the closest you can come to having a secret lair. A home in the Adirondacks is for sale – that from the outside looks like a traditional mountain retreat. But underneath is a cold war-era missile silo that would make Dr. Evil drool.
Should Pepper Spray Be TIME’s Person of the Year?
Slade Sohmer asks at HyperVocal:
What started out as a joke has become an increasingly real proposition: Even though it’s not a “person,” we must now begin to debate whether Pepper Spray should grace TIME’s most discussed cover.
No person, place or thing has come to define the absurdity of 2011 more than the “food product, essentially,” this suddenly ubiquitous lachrymatory agent/chemical weapon.
Pepper spray, essentially, gave birth to the national media’s recognition of the Occupy Wall Street movement when NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna cowardly pepper-sprayed some unwitting young women. Without his depraved indifference to the freedom to assemble and the freedom of speech, the national media, and by extension the nation, might never have begun to discuss income inequality in earnest.
The pepper-spraying incidents then moved west: The notoriously corrupt Tulsa police department doused some eyes while evicting the Occupy protesters in that city, then Seattle police sprayed 84-year-old Dorli Rainey as she checked out…
WikiLeaks Releases Spyware Firm Videos That Show How to Hack Email, Skype, WiFi
Kim Zetter writes on WIRED’s Threat Level:
What better way to sell your wares than to produce a marketing video showing exactly how your product works? Even if that product is spyware, marketed to oppressive regimes.
WikiLeaks, as part of its Spy Files trove of documents, released on Thursday a series of videos from Gamma International, a UK-based firm that markets the Finfisher spyware.
The video shows how the company’s product can be used to sniff WiFi networks from a hotel lobby, hack computers and cell phones, or intercept Skype communications and siphon encryption passwords.
Shocking 9/11 Architecture
Gawker says what we’re all thinking (aside from the architects perhaps):
“AAAAAGH! YOU HAVE ERECTED A TERRIFYING MONUMENT TO THE NIGHTMARES OF 9/11!!!” was probably not the reaction that Seoul-based Yongsan Dream Hub corporation had in mind when they unveiled their plans today for an ambitious new construction project: Two high-rises connected by a “pixelated cloud” structure that, tragically, calls to mind the kinds of images you don’t really want to call to mind when looking at a new set of twin towers…
Via Gawker
Full story at Gawker.
Is Fire Protection a Right or a Privilege?
You might have heard about this Tennessee couple lost their home as firefighters watched. John McQuaid asks in Forbes:
As tax revenues have fallen over the past three years of recession, and austerity became the default policy of local governments, the public sector has been steadily hemorrhaging employees and cutting back on services. This is kind of a shadow recession, its effects lagging behind the first and putting a drag on the recovery. Most of us get by on a patchwork of public and private services, with overlapping responsibilities: the fire department (paid for with tax revenues, usually) will put out the fire, while most homeowners have insurance to pay for the damages. These days, both the public and private ends of this arrangement are fraying badly, and gaps are opening up. As the story notes, this is the second time firefighters in South Fulton have let a house burn because the owner…
TSA Recruiting ‘Junior Officers’ at Airports
Via InfoWars:
Remember when you were growing up and wanted to be a police officer, fire fighter or other public servant?
Now the TSA appears to be tapping children as future recruits for airport checkpoints, as evidenced by this novelty “Junior Officer” badge handed out at Austin Bergstrom International Airport. Not only are young, impressionable fliers indoctrinated by the unconstitutional checkpoints themselves, but now by a subtle driver to join the team someday when they can get the power to conduct their own pat-downs and body scans.
Giant Godzilla-Shaped Christmas Tree in Shopping Mall
John Farrier writes on Neatorama:
Allegedly, this is a picture of a Godzilla-shaped Christmas tree that appeared in the Aqua City Odaiba shopping mall.
Within minutes, it destroyed the mall.
So, in retrospect, it was a really bad idea …
A Vaccination Against Social Prejudice
Via ScienceDaily:
Evolutionary psychologists suspect that prejudice is rooted in survival: Our distant ancestors had to avoid outsiders who might have carried disease. Research still shows that when people feel vulnerable to illness, they exhibit more bias toward stigmatized groups. But a new study in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science suggests there might be a modern way to break that link.
“We thought if we could alleviate concerns about disease, we could also alleviate the prejudice that arises from them,” says Julie Y. Huang of the University of Toronto, about a study she conducted with Alexandra Sedlovskaya of Harvard University; Joshua M. Ackerman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Yale University’s John A. Bargh. The group found that the sense of security derived through measures such as vaccination and hand washing can reduce bias against “out” groups, from immigrants to the obese.
The researchers conducted three experiments.…
The LSD Portraits: Marc Franklin Spends 25 Years Photographing ‘Psychedelic Pioneers’
Remember the Reagan administration’s “This is your brain on drugs” ads? In response a photographer started a lifelong project of photographing all the living “psychedelic pioneers,” including Timothy Leary, Jerry Garcia, William S. Burroughs, and Ken Kesey.
“I thought, ‘You know, that’s such a load of horseshit … I’m going to dismantle that poisonous propaganda lie visually… I’m going to portray these people how they are.” He started with the man who invented LSD — Albert Hoffman — on its 50th anniversary in 1988, and at one point drove over 11,000 miles in just 7 weeks (including a 26-hour drive to drink beer with William S. Burroughs).
He’s interviewed by the former editor of High Frontiers magazine (”the official psychedelic magazine of the 1984 Summer Olympics.)”, and the article includes three of his best photos. (He’s exhibiting them this month in Los Angeles). But the strangest fact of all?
He started his career taking photographs…
Bull Moose or Bull Sh*t: Is Obama Changing His Stance Towards Wall Street?
Is Obama changing?
Many in the Occupy Wall Street Movement are patting their efforts on the back, and even claiming credit for what looks like a shift by President Obama towards a more engaged campaign discussing economic fairness.
The President’s speech in Kansas was modeled on remarks made by the Republican Bull Moose Teddy Roosevelt in 1910. There’s nothing like quoting a Republican for credible centrist positioning. (Note: he quotes TR, not FDR.)
Will he embrace GOP Pres Eisenhower’s warning about the Military Industrial Complex next?
Unlikely.
Richard Eskow was quick to salute the new Obama:
“Barack Obama channeled one of American history’s truly transformative figures by visiting the tiny Kansas town where Teddy Roosevelt gave his ‘New Nationalism’ speech over a century ago. It was refreshing to see the President invoke his predecessor, who was a powerful and fearless agent of change both inside and outside the White House.
“For the first time the President directly…
Extreme Futurist Festival 2011
Picture an event where the bridge between the counterculture and academia is finally crossed. From live tech demonstrations to futuristic presentations to provocative performance art to live music we will take you off the grid as we explore a new kaleidoscopic wonderland. If the original Burning Man was to meet the Singularity Summit, you would have Extreme Futurist Fest 2011.
The dance for the realization of the future begins in the corridors of art, literature, and culture. Only by connecting together the greatest visionary minds with the most innovative and rule-breaking forms of artistic expression and cultural mind-melding can we unlock the full potential of the Future and bring it into the Present. We offer you the bold new interdisciplinary movement of the 21st Century. A place where the right brain and left brain merge into a new “Undivided Mind”.
The future is all around us today. The explosion of the Internet…
BP Accuses Halliburton of Destroying Evidence in Gulf Oil Spill Case
Laurel Brubaker Calkins reports in the Washington Post:
BP Plc accused a unit of Halliburton Co. of intentionally destroying evidence that could be used to prove the oilfield services firm shares blame for the blowout that caused the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Halliburton Energy Services Inc. destroyed test results that showed samples of the cement used to seal London-based BP’s Macondo well, which exploded off the Louisiana coast last year, were unstable, BP said in a filing in federal court in New Orleans.
The oilfield services provider also suppressed computer models that might prove Halliburton was at fault “because it wanted to eliminate any risk that this evidence would be used against it at trial,” BP said in the filing. BP asked the court to find that Halliburton destroyed evidence on purpose and to compel the company to turn over for third-party examination the computer used for the modeling.
“Halliburton is reviewing…
This Is What “Indefinite Detention” Looks Like (Video)
The military detention provisions are written in impenetrable legal and military jargon and incorporated into an obscure section of the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012″.
The Lesbian Vampire Story That Inspired “Dracula”
In composing his novel Dracula, Bram Stoker drew heavily upon an earlier, more seedy story in which a young woman succumbs to the attractions of an undead countess. Victorian Gothic reviews J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla:
First published in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was destined to become the universally-acknowledged masterwork of vampire fiction, but it was not, by any means, the first of its kind. Stokers genius consisted not in having invented the modern vampire monster, but in the imaginative way he synthesized and expanded upon the ideas that prior authors had already been exploring.
One of these was J. Sheridan Le Fanu, whose 1872 tale Carmilla provided a template for many of Dracula’s best-remembered characters and motifs, including the occult doctor (Dr. Hesselius), and the lonely Gothic castle set in a barbarous region of Europe. Many of the proper names in Dracula, in fact, are direct allusions to Carmilla’s characters and settings: “Karnstein” became “Carfax,” “Reinfeldt” became “Renfield,” and so on. Le Fanu’s protagonist,…
