ralph
Managing Editor, Disinformation
The New Disinfocast with Matt Staggs
iTunesThe Disinformation Company is excited to announce the return of the Disinformation Podcasts with The Disinfocast, hosted by Matt Staggs. Matt Staggs is a writer and longtime aficionado of the curious and bizarre. A career spent in journalism and psychology has led Matt to to the understanding that exploring why people believe the things they do is just as important as the things themselves. When he’s not reading, podcasting or writing, you can usually find Matt arguing over a table full of strange books and funny dice. Follow him on Twitter at @mattstaggs.
Matt’s first guest will surely be familiar to listeners of the Disinformation Podcasts over the years, it’s former host, now author of The Georgia Guidestones: America’s Most Mysterious Monument: Raymond Wiley!
Join Raymond and Matt as they discuss this great mystery: the Georgia Guidestones are at once a Rosetta Stone, an astronomical observatory, and a road map for…
The JFK Speech That Made Rick Santorum Want to “Throw Up” (Video)
I’m really wondering if the goal now of the Republican Party is to get Barack Obama re-elected. Scott Collins reports in the LA Times:
Rick Santorum has not been a frequent presence on the Sunday morning chat shows during his Republican presidential campaign. But when he shows up, he really makes an impression.
On Sunday, the former Pennsylvania senator told ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” that a 1960 speech by John F. Kennedy to Baptist ministers in Houston made him want to “throw up.” In the speech, Kennedy, then running for president, tried to reassure critics that, as a Catholic, he would not take orders from the pope and that he believed in “absolute” separation of church and state.
Journalism and The View From Nowhere
Interesting self-created Q&A found on Jay Rosen’s PressThink:
Q. You’ve been using this phrase, “the view from nowhere,” for a while—
A. Yeah, since 2003…
Q. So what do you mean by it?
A. Three things. In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.” Second, it’s a means of defense against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it’s an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance.
Q. Well, does it?
A. What authority there…
The Wow! Signal: SETI’s Most Tantalizing Recording
Good article about the mysterious Wow! signal from Ross Andersen in the Atlantic:
Late one night in the summer of 1977, a large radio telescope outside Delaware, Ohio intercepted a radio signal that seemed for a brief time like it might change the course of human history. The telescope was searching the sky on behalf of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the signal, though it lasted only seventy-two seconds, fit the profile of a message beamed from another world. Despite its potential import, several days went by before Jerry Ehman, a project scientist for SETI, noticed the data.
He was flipping through the computer printouts generated by the telescope when he noticed a string of letters within a long sequence of low numbers — ones, twos, threes and fours. The low numbers represent background noise, the low hum of an ordinary signal. As the telescope swept across the sky, it momentarily landed…
How PETA Can Be Extremely Stupid (Video)
Yes, I can agree (usually) what this org does, in principle … Via the Daily Show:
Apollo 17: “I Was Strolling on the Moon One Day”
IS this fake? Bring it on, you shit-for-brains moon landing idiots …
Mitt Romney Claims To Be “Severely Conservative”
It’s like watching a robot self-destruct … David Frum opines on CNN:
Mitt Romney ended a very bad week with a pretty good weekend.
Tuesday, Romney lost two caucuses and a nonbinding primary to Rick Santorum. Saturday, Romney won the also nonbinding Maine caucuses and the straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Four weeks from now, no one will remember the Maine caucuses. I’m guessing though that people will remember a phrase from Romney’s speech to CPAC on Friday, in which he described himself as a “severely conservative” governor of Massachusetts.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Video)
One day, on The History Channel as actual history? (This is my parallel-universe check for the day.)
Chinese ‘Twitter’ Claims North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un Assassinated
Reports Lucas Shaw via Reuters:
Did social media just prematurely kill off the leader of North Korea?
Rumors that Kim Jong-un, the country’s supreme leader, has been assassinated just months after he took power originated on Chinese microblogging service Weibo and have now spread all over Twitter.
Others are reporting that Jong-un, believed to be 28 years old, may be on the run rather than dead, but both reports claim that some kind of coup is taking place.
One person on Weibo wrote (loose translation): “north korea’s biggest leader kim jung un, this morning in beijing time 2:45 am, had his residence broken into and was assassinated by unidentified people, who were shot dead by his bodyguards in korea’s embassy in beijing, vehicles are rapidly increasing in number, and have surpassed 30 of them, this sort of battle formation hasn’t been seen in over two years. please verify this.”
Newt Gingrich Is Right About Having A Permanent Moon Base
Yes, “Gingrich” and “right” in the same sentence is very strange: Saturday Night Live managed to successfully mock this derided idea in a recent well received sketch (which I thought was reminiscent of that show’s style from the ’70s). Here is a differing perspective presented by Robert T. Gonzalez on io9.com:
Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has promised us a permanent Moon base by 2020. Many people have been calling Newt’s vow a publicity stunt, while others have chimed in by attacking the idea of a lunar base in and of itself, with assertions like “real scientists know [a Moon base] is fantasy.” We won’t speak to Newt’s political maneuverings, but we’re sure as hell not going to sit idly by while people bash the feasibility or scientific potential of a lunar settlement. In fact, we’ve got 185 reasons we should set a course straight away …
An Off-World Energy Source: We spoke to astrophysicist Michael…
Alan Moore Wants to Build a Statue of Harvey Pekar in Cleveland (Video)
Photo: Davidkphoto (CC)
Seems like a good cause to me. If you’d like watch the full two-and-a-half hour chat and/or read about the highlights, check out Bleeding Cool:
A few months back Joyce Brabner, the widow of comics legend Harvey Pekar, started a Kickstarter Campaign in the hopes of raising enough money to help fund a Harvey Pekar Library Statue in Cleveland.
Towards the latter half of the campaign it was made known that one of the incentives would be “A Cup of Tea and a Long Winter’s Chat With Comics Giant Alan Moore,” in which Moore would, for the first time, host a live video conference in which he would answer “impertinent questions” …
… Moore was the epitome of congeniality, proving himself gracious, rational and quite funny while speaking to all those present — even in the face of some potentially ire-raising issues (such as BEFORE WATCHMEN or the constant jabs made at him by…
California Court Rules Gay-Marriage Ban Unconstitutional
And now the Supremes will decide. Via Reuters:
The U.S. 9th Circuit of Appeals in San Francisco Tuesday upheld a lower court decision, which had declared unconstitutional California’s controversial Proposition 8 banning same sex marriage.
The matter is now expected to travel to the U.S. Supreme Court. The ruling, made by judges Stephen Reinhardt, Michael Daly Hawkins and Randy Smith — appointed by Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush respectively — ruled on both the constitutionality of Prop 8 and whether the judge who struck down Prop 8 should have recused because he is gay. They heard oral arguments on the constitutionality question more than a year ago, and the recusal matter in December.
California voters agreed to Prop 8 — also known as the California Marriage Protection Act — in November 2008 by a 52 to 47 percent margin (approximately 13 million voters took part). That vote inserted language in…
Do Not Mess With (Lego) Captain America (Video)
Man, what is the “real” (Captain) America like?
Life On Venus, So Claims Russian Scientist
Maybe Jack Nicholson was right after all. Via Yahoo News:
Leonid Ksanfomaliti, an astronomer based at the Space Research Institute of Russia’s Academy of Sciences, analyzed photographs taken by a Russian landing probe during a 1982 during a mission to explore the heavily acid-clouded planet.
Venus is roughly the same size as Earth, but it has a thick atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide. With an atmospheric pressure 92 times Earth’s, a waterless and volcano-riddled surface and a surface temperature of 894 degrees, the planet has never been considered a serious target of research into the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
But in his article, published in the magazine Solar System Research, Ksanfomaliti says the Russian photographs depict objects resembling a “disk,” a “black flap” and a “scorpion.”
“What if we forget about the current theories about the non-existence of life on Venus?” he wrote. “Let’s boldly suggest that the objects’ morphological features would allow us to…
‘Soul Train’ Moments: Young Al Sharpton (Video)
In the news because Soul Train creator Don Cornelius died today. This nineteen-year-old would run for president (see Al after Mr. James Brown, around the 2:30 mark into this clip):
America’s Ancient ‘Ten Commandments’ Rock: The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone
This is a strange bit of disputed archaeology. Check it out over the web and Wikipedia does have a good description:
The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone is a large boulder on the side of Hidden Mountain, near Los Lunas, New Mexico, about 35 miles south of Albuquerque, that bears a very regular inscription carved into a flat panel. The stone is also known as the Los Lunas Mystery Stone or Commandment Rock. The inscription is interpreted to be an abridged version of the Decalogue or Ten Commandments in a form of Paleo-Hebrew. A letter group resembling the tetragrammaton YHWH, or “Yahweh,” makes four appearances. The stone is controversial in that some claim the inscription is Pre-Columbian, and therefore proof of early Semitic contact with the Americas.
The first recorded mention of the stone is in 1933, when professor Frank Hibben, an archaeologist from the University of New Mexico, saw it. Hibben was…
How To Photograph an Atomic Bomb (Video)
Not a job I would take. But there must be worse jobs in the world. Ideas?
