JacobSloan
First Commercially Available Jetpacks For Sale For $86,000
It’s time to live the dream: jetpacks from Martin Jetpacks are now on sale. If you’re able to plunk down $86,000, one could be yours in twelve months. The Martin Jetpack gives you 30 minutes of flight time, tops out at 60 miles per hour, and has mechanisms designed to correct for operator flight error, supposedly reducing the chance of fatal mistakes in the air. No license is needed to fly this in the United States, as of now.
Is It Time To Stockpile “Survival Seeds”?
Are seeds the new gold? Advertisements for “survival seeds” are being run during Glenn Beck’s prime time show on Fox News, advising viewers to stockpile nonhybrid seeds rather than gold or silver. When the “politicians and bankers bring the whole thing crashing down,” you’ll be able to grow your own “crisis garden” with nutrient-rich foods to sustain your family…scary times.
Homegrown Right-Wing-Extremist Terrorism: A Recent History
The Southern Poverty Law Center compiled a jaw-dropping overview of about seventy terrorist attempts on American soil by right-wing extremists over the past fifteen years; a lot happened between Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing and the recent plane attack on an IRS building in Austin. Take the 1999 attack by Buford Furrow, for example:
Buford Furrow, a former member of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations who has been living with the widow of slain terrorist leader Bob Mathews, strides into a Jewish community center near Los Angeles and fires more than 70 bullets, wounding three boys, a teenage girl and a woman. He then drives into the San Fernando Valley and murders Filipino-American mailman Joseph Ileto. The next day, Furrow turns himself in, saying he intended to send “a wake-up call to America to kill Jews.”
Ten Years From Now: The CD Revival
Pitchfork’s Tom Ewing writes a convincing imagining of a future in which the compact disc makes a comeback as a music format. Much as is happening with tape cassette culture right now…
Back in London, wiping strawberry jam from a CD, Reece Maclay agrees. “All the music I’ve ever known I got free, and I didn’t know what owning or paying for music was all about– not that most CD labels charge anything but voluntary fees anyway. But all this isn’t just about trying to turn the clock back ’cause we liked mix CDs when we were kids. CDs started to die when people stopped wanting to pay for a product, and then social media and music streams came along and let people stop paying for it all legally, and the product vanished.…
You Decide. Could Hitler Ever Serve in the United States Senate?
Here’s what Hitler would look like minus his mustache and with a flag lapel pin added: basically, ready to sit in Congress next to Orrin Hatch.
City Of Topeka Renamed ‘Google, Kansas’ For March
Lame joke? Apt metaphor? Sign of the apocalypse? Future trend? In an effort to gain Google’s favor in the hopes of winning a high-speed internet sweepstakes, Kansas’s capital city has temporarily renamed itself after the company. CNN reports:
In a formal proclamation Monday, Bunten announced his city will be known as “Google” — Google, Kansas.
The unusual move comes as several U.S. cities elbow for a spot in Google’s new “Fiber for Communities” program. The Web giant is going to install new Internet connections in unannounced locations, giving those communities Internet speeds 100 times faster than those elsewhere, with data transfer rates faster than 1 gigabit per second.
Yes Men Dupe Utah With Call For Gay “Final Solution”
Pranksters the Yes Men held a bogus press conference in Salt Lake City, posing as an organization called “Patriots for a Moral Utah,” and called for a “Final Solution” of the forced removal of gays and lesbians of Utah. Amazingly, the event seemed believable enough for local reporters…Utah’s ABC 4 reports:
The so-called press conference was held at the Utah State Capitol at 1:00 p.m. Monday.
The woman claimed that…Utahns should get behind the initiative that would force homosexuals to relocate to New York City, Portland or San Francisco. According to the woman, who claimed to be Nora Young, homosexuals who chose not to relocate who be forced to undergo therapy that would “rehabilitate” them from homosexuality.
Republicans’ Internal Documents Call For Strategy Of “Fear”
The politics of fear, laid out in PowerPoint. From Politico:
The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on “fear” of President Barack Obama and a promise to “save the country from trending toward socialism.”
The strategy was detailed in a confidential party fundraising presentation, obtained by POLITICO, which also outlines how “ego-driven” wealthy donors can be tapped with offers of access and “tchochkes.”
The presentation was delivered by RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart to top donors and fundraisers at a party retreat in Boca Grande, Florida on February 18, a source at the gathering said.
Jesus Hates Klingons
The video you’ve been waiting for, if what you’ve been waiting for is a low-budget version of Star Trek in which the Enterprise crew are Evangelicals. From Everything Is Terrible:
What Happened To The Employees Of Collapsed Wall Street Companies?
Remember the epic collapses of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns? What do you suppose happened to employees at those doomed institutions?
Turns out they’re not on the breadlines or working in industries other than finance; examining data from LinkedIn shows that the brains at the failed Wall Street companies were quickly scooped up by the biggest existing competitors. Here’s where they went:
ShadyURL.com: Make Your URLs More Menacing
I think this site is a stroke of brilliance. ShadyURL.com offers a URL shortener along the lines of TinyURL.com or Bit.ly. However, in addition to shortening URLs, it makes them more menacing. So when you want to send your friends a link to a recipe or New York Times article but the URL is to long, now you can instead send http://5z8.info/open.exe_b1p3e_freeanimalporn.com-start-download.
American Family Association Calls For Stoning Of Whale
It sounds like a joke, yet isn’t; leading fundamentalist Christian organization American Family Association is calling for the stoning of a whale that killed a trainer at Orlando’s SeaWorld two weeks ago. From Huffington Post:
The American Family Association, a religious right group, is urging that Tillikum (Tilly), the killer whale that killed a trainer at SeaWorld Orlando, be put down, preferably by stoning. Citing Tilly’s history of violent altercations, the group is slamming SeaWorld for not listening to Scripture in how to deal with the animal.
However, the group is going further and laying the blame for the trainer’s death directly at the feet of Chuck Thompson, the curator in charge of animal behavior. According to Scripture, if one of your animals kills a second time because you didn’t kill it…
The Math Behind Geometric Hallucinations
An interesting article from Plus Magazine on the mathematics of geometric hallucinations (think swirling patterns) and what it says about the brain:
Think drug-induced hallucinations, and the whirly, spirally, tunnel-vision-like patterns of psychedelic imagery immediately spring to mind. But it’s not just hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, cannabis or mescaline that conjure up these geometric structures. People have reported seeing them in near-death experiences, as a result of disorders like epilepsy and schizophrenia, following sensory deprivation, or even just after applying pressure to the eyeballs. So common are these geometric hallucinations, that in the last century scientists began asking themselves if they couldn’t tell us something fundamental about how our brains are wired up.
The Surprising Woman Credited With Starting The Tea Party Movement
The New York Times reports on the “first tea-bagger,” who is younger and (slightly) cooler than one might expect:
SEATTLE — Keli Carender has a pierced nose, performs improv on weekends and lives here in a neighborhood with more Mexican grocers than coffeehouses. You probably would not think of her as a Tea Party type.
But leaders of the Tea Party movement credit her with being the first.
Ms. Carender’s first rally drew only 120 people. A week later, she had 300, and six weeks later, 1,200 people gathered for a Tax Day Tea Party. Last month, she was among about 60 Tea Party leaders flown to Washington to be trained in election activism by FreedomWorks, the conservative advocacy organization led by Dick Armey, the former House Republican leader.
Internet Overtakes Print In News Consumption
“The Internet” is finally beating “newspapers” as a primary source for news among Americans. If you think this means that the way people learn about the world is drastically changing, think again — among primary news sources, television is still King. From Ars Technica:
The Internet has surpassed newspapers as a primary way for Americans to get news, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
National and local TV stations still dominate the news cycle for most Americans, but the Internet now stands third in the list, ahead of national and local newspapers.
Additionally, the majority of news consumers say they use two to five websites per day to get their fix—a number we think sounds about right—but a surprisingly high number (21 percent) rely on that one favorite site to…
Britain Uses Classical Music For Social Control
Authorities across Britain are introducing classical music in public places — not for citizens’ enjoyment, but as a social control device. The concept harkens back to scenes in A Clockwork Orange. From Reason:
In recent years Britain has become the Willy Wonka of social control, churning out increasingly creepy, bizarre, and fantastic methods for policing the populace.
Across the UK, local councils and other public institutions now play recorded classical music through speakers at bus-stops, in parking lots, outside department stores, and elsewhere…as a deterrent against bad behavior.
Tyne and Wear in the north of England was one of the first parts of the UK to weaponize classical music. In the early 2000s, the local railway company decided to do something about the “problem” of “youths hanging around” its train stations.
Bush’s CIA Torture Psychologists Sought To Use ‘Mock Burials’
Documents reveal that burying detainees alive was sought as an interrogation method by the Bush’s torture psychologists, but rejected by the Department of Justice “in the rush to approve waterboarding”:
CIA’s torturers asked DOJ to let them use mock burials. But DOJ said no.
PDF page 42 of the OPR Report (searchable copy here) includes a list of the torture techniques that Mitchell and Jessen recommended be used with Abu Zubaydah. Whereas the Bybee Two Techniques memo approves ten techniques, Mitchell and Jessen recommended twelve. In other words, Mitchell and Jessen asked for two techniques to be approved that did not get specific approval.
The twelfth technique–which Mitchell and Jessen wanted approved but which Yoo excluded because of the rush to approve waterboarding–is mock burial.
There must have been significant discussion about the decision to…
Researchers Uncover 30,000-Year-Old Written Language
The Globe and Mail reports on the discovery of what might be the earliest written language, comprised of lines and geometric shapes:
A graphic code uncovered by researchers at the University of Victoria suggests that written communication may have started 30,000 years ago.
Compiling the cave signs of nearly 150 sites across Ice Age France, researchers found striking similarities that suggest human beings may have used a graphic language made up of simple lines and geometric shapes to communicate shortly after the first African civilizations arrived in Europe…suggesting that the “creative explosion” occurred tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
26 signs illustrated in a consistent style were found across the sites using images from a digital archive. While the illustrations may be rudimentary – composed of circles, straight lines and triangles…
A Third Of Texans Say Dinosaurs And Humans Coexisted
Does a third of the population believe that “The Flinstones was a documentary”? In a poll, one out of three Texans say that humans and dinosaurs lived together at one point. Oh, and, the majority say that humanity did not develop from an earlier species. The Texas Tribune reports:
Nearly a third of Texans believe humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, and more than half disagree with the theory that humans developed from earlier species of animals, according to the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.
[Professor David] Prindle recall[s] a line from comedian Lewis Black. “He did a routine a few years back in which he said that a significant proportion of the American people think that the ‘The Flintstones’ is a documentary,” Prindle says. “Turns out he was right.”
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