This weekend, the blogoverse has been all abuzz about Jim Carrey’s new Web site. Speakeasy was a bit suspicious, given how the site’s launch was timed to coincide with the opening of the actor’s tepidly-reviewed “A Christmas Carol.” So we checked out the site with a little bit of cynicism. We were pleasantly surprised.

The Flash-heavy site, created by 65 Media, the Web designers behind the landing pages for Hollywood movies like “Ratatouille” and “Land of the Lost,” is a bizarre, mind-bendy experience into the world of Jim Carrey. When you click on any of the  site’s tabs — broken into News, Biography, Filmography and Origins — the screen launches visitors on an in-your-face, Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole journey, zooming and twisting through various landscapes until you arrive at your final destination. Along the way, you are also treated to views of Carrey’s eyeball, a giant squid, and the actor posed as Adam from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.

The site is also filled with Easter Eggs — if you click on a fleeting photographer that surfaces on-screen from time to time, a polaroid will pop up featuring candid snapshots of Carrey and his friends. The Canadian actor also gives shout-outs to his mother country and his daughter’s band’s MySpace page…

Federal authorities can resume combing through the notebooks, memory cards and computers of a twittering anarchist being investigated for violating an anti-rioting law, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled Monday.

U.S. district court judge Dora L. Irizzary found no reason to throw out the government’s search of the home of a 41-year old social worker who used the micro-publishing service Twitter to help anti-globalization protestors at the recent G-20 convention, clearing the way for the feds to look through the evidence they collected. Madison and his attorney sought to have his possessions returned unexamined, on the grounds the search violated his constitutional rights to free speech.

The Joint Terrorism Task Force raided Elliott Madison’s house in a dawn raid on October 1, seizing myriad computers, unpublished manuscripts, phones and books from the social worker, his urban planner wife and his housemates. The materials were seized as evidence in a federal grand jury investigation of whether Madison violated a rarely-used federal statute that makes it a crime to help rioters.

Madison, an anarchist and prolific writer, seems to have drawn the attention of New York’s U.S. Attorney’s office after he was arrested in a Pittsburgh motel room on September 24 for legally listening to a police scanner and then tweeting the information. During the G-20 summit, heavily armed police officers reacted to the anti-globalization protesters with tear gas, sonic weapons, rubber bullets and mass arrests. Madison was in jail during the height of the confrontation, charged with criminal use of a communication facility.

More on WIRED’s Threat Level

Lately I have been using the phrase “Corporate Communism” on my television show. I think it is an especially fitting term when discussing the current landscape in both our banking and health care systems.

As Americans, I believe we reject communism because it historically has allowed a tiny group of people to consolidate complete control over national resources (including people), in the process stifling competition, freedom and choice. It leaves its citizens stagnating under the perpetual broken systems with no natural motivation to innovate, improve services or reduce costs.

Lack of choice, lazy, unresponsive customer service, a culture of exploitation and a small powerbase formed by cronyism and nepotism are the hallmarks of a communist system that steals from its citizenry and a major reason why America spent half a century fighting a Cold War with the U.S.S.R.

And yet today we find ourselves as a country in two distinctly different categories: those who are forced to compete tooth and nail each day to provide value to society in return for income for ourselves and our families and those who would instead use our lawmaking apparatus to help themselves to our tax money and/or to protect themselves from true competition.

Read more of Dylan Ratigan’s article in the Huffington Post, and here’s a clip from his MSNBC program below:

A 22-year veteran kindergarten teacher in the Texas Bible Belt could lose her job for refusing, on religious grounds, to give fingerprints under a state law requiring them.The evangelical Christian, Pam McLaurin, is fighting a looming suspension, claiming that fingerprinting amounts to the “Mark of the Beast,” and hence is a violation of her First Amendment right to practice her religion. Her case is similar to a lawsuit by a group of Michigan farmers, some of them Amish, challenging rules requiring the tagging of livestock with RFID chips, saying the devices are also the devil’s mark.

The latest case is the first in which a teacher is refusing fingerprinting on religious grounds, the woman’s lawyer said. The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to decide whether the First Amendment is implicated in fingerprinting, especially at a time when states, local governments and civic organizations are increasingly making them mandatory for anyone wanting to drive a car or coach a youth basketball team.

[Read more at Wired]

The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA’s kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.

The criminal conviction of 22 CIA agents (and 2 Italian intelligence officers) by an Italian court yesterday — for the 2003 kidnapping of an Islamic cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, off the street in Italy and his “rendition” to Egypt to be tortured — highlights several vital points:

First, illustrating how these matters are typically distorted by the U.S. establishment media, note that CNN — in the very first paragraph of its story — claims that the CIA agents were convicted “for their role in the seizing of a suspected terrorist in Italy in 2003.”  What did Nasr allegedly do that warrants that “terrorist” label?  Did he participate in the 9/11 attacks, or plan attacks on “the American homeland” or U.S. civilians?  No.  According to CNN, this is what makes him a “suspected terrorist”:

He was suspected of recruiting men to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Read more at Salon]

BOBBY KENNEDY’S affair with the screen idol Marilyn Monroe has been documented, but a secret FBI file suggests the late US attorney-general was aware of – and perhaps even a participant in – a plan “to induce” her suicide.

The detailed three-page report implicates the Hollywood actor Peter Lawford, Monroe’s psychiatrist, staff and her publicist in the plot.

The allegations suggest the 36-year-old actress, who had a history of staging attention-seeking suicide attempts, was deliberately given the means to fake another suicide on August 4, 1962. But this time, it is suggested, she was allowed to die as she sought help.

The document, hidden among thousands of pages released under freedom-of-information laws last October, was received by the FBI on October 19, 1964 – two years after her death – and titled simply “ROBERT F KENNEDY”.

[Read more at The Sydney Morning Herald]

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan | U.S. military officials sent a medical team to a remote outpost in southern Afghanistan this week to take blood samples from members of an Army unit after a soldier in the unit died from an Ebola-like virus.

Dr. Jim Radike, an expert in internal medicine and infectious diseases at the Role 3 Trauma Hospital at Kandahar Air Field, told The Washington Times that Sgt. Robert David Gordon, 22, from River Falls, Ala., died Sept. 16 from what turned out to be Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever after he was bitten by a tick. The virus is transmitted by infected blood and can be carried by ticks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Dr. Radike, who is with the Navy, said the medical team “will be taking blood samples and the results may take several weeks to get back.” He called it “a precautionary measure.”

Dr. Radike did not say how many individuals would be tested or why the military had waited until now to act. The unit involved is the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry division, A-Company 2-1 Infantry.

The news comes as the Pentagon disclosed that it has sent 150,000 doses of vaccine for the H1N1 swine flu virus to Qatar for distribution to U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan – half of what U.S. Central Command has requested. More than a half dozen Afghans have died of the disease, which apparently was transmitted to the country by foreigners…

The hopes and prospects for peace aren’t well aligned — not even close. The task is to bring them nearer. Presumably that was the intent of the Nobel Peace Prize committee in choosing President Barack Obama.

The prize “seemed a kind of prayer and encouragement by the Nobel committee for future endeavor and more consensual American leadership,” Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in The New York Times.

The nature of the Bush-Obama transition bears directly on the likelihood that the prayers and encouragement might lead to progress.

The Nobel committee’s concerns were valid. They singled out Obama’s rhetoric on reducing nuclear weapons.

Right now Iran’s nuclear ambitions dominate the headlines. The warnings are that Iran may be concealing something from the International Atomic Energy Agency and violating U.N. Security Council Resolution 1887, passed last month and hailed as a victory for Obama’s efforts to contain Iran.

Meanwhile, a debate continues on whether Obama’s recent decision to reconfigure missile-defense systems in Europe is a capitulation to the Russians or a pragmatic step to defend the West from Iranian nuclear attack.

Silence is often more eloquent than loud clamor, so let us attend to what is unspoken.

Amid the furor over Iranian duplicity, the IAEA passed a resolution calling on Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and open its nuclear facilities to inspection.

The United States and Europe tried to block the IAEA resolution, but it passed anyway. The media virtually ignored the event.

More on In These Times

Vint Cerf, Google’s internet evangelist, has unveiled a new protocol intended to power an interplanetary internet.

The Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol emerged from work first started in 1998 in partnership with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The initial goal was to modify the ubiquitous Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to facilitate robust communications between celestial bodies and satellites. [...]

The core issue is that TCP assumes a continuous (and fairly reliable) connection. DTN makes no such assumptions, requiring each node to buffer all of its packets until a stable connection can be established. Whereas TCP will repeatedly attempt to send packets until they are successfully acknowledged, DTN will automatically find a destination node with a reliable connection, and then send its payload just once. Given the latency of space communications and the minimal power restrictions placed upon satellites, DTNs approach seems prudent.

However most people don’t have a need for regular satellite communication (well, our columnist Warren Ellis has that death ray of his), but Cerf sees his robust protocol having more down-to-Earth applications. Mobile networks, for example, must regularly cope with long periods of delay or loss – a train tunnel rudely interrupting a YouTube stream, for example. Perhaps looking to gain an edge on its competitors, Google has already integrated DTN into Android’s networking stack.

(via Wade)

I didn’t believe this story was true at first — thought it had to be a spoof. But it turns out to be true. The great banks of the world have gone on a p.r. counteroffensive in Europe, and are sending spokescrooks in shiny suits into churches to persuade the masses that Christ would have approved of the latest round of obscene bonuses.

Goldman Sachs international adviser Brian Griffiths explains it this way: that Christ’s famous injunction to love others as one would love oneself actually means that one should love oneself as one would love oneself. This seemingly baffling outburst by a Goldman executive in what appears to have been a prepared speech — someone actually wrote this, and thought about it, before saying it out loud — gets even weirder when one tries to figure out what could possibly have motivated this person, and by extension his employer Goldman Sachs, to make such statements in such a place as St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Disinfo’s Joe points out at Mutate that the Griffiths has a connection to the political cult The Family:

This shouldn’t be surprising for anyone who has read Jeff Sharlet’s book _The Family_. This rhetoric is straight out of their play book. This guy is likely a member (he *spoke at* the funeral of Wallace Haines, The Family’s ‘man in Europe’, in 2007). http://www.wallacehaines.com/inmemoryof.htm

By Allie Pruitt at Weekly World News

NEW YORK, NY – A paparazzo dropped dead after taking a photo of Lady Gaga!

Lady Gaga is a pop star who has become as famous for her outfits as she has her music. She wears a new and often bizarre outfit for every single event she attends, making her a prime target for celebrity photographers.

On Monday night, Lady Gaga attended the ACE Awards in New York City. Photographer A.J. Solkaner immediately took a photo of the singer, her face obscured in a spooky black veil.

[continues at Weekly World News]

Thanks to Raymond and Joe for putting up with two rather lengthy segments on a subject
that is as vast as the Planet itself. The Hollow Earth has long been a favorite
crypto-myth-consmology-theory of mine. Enjoy surfing these links as much as
I’ve enjoyed burrowing into this strangeness and sharing my notes.

The

Inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy…A little-noticed provision in the health care overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.

The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments — which substitute for or supplement medical treatments — on the same footing as clinical medicine.

Phil Davis, a senior Christian Science Church official, said prayer treatment was an effective alternative to conventional health care. But critics say the measure could have a broader effect, conferring new status and medical legitimacy on practices that lie outside the realm of science.

The spiritual healing provision was introduced in the House by Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), whose district includes a Christian Science school, Principia College.

Breckenridge made pot legal, Denver rejected a get-tough proposal on unlicensed drivers, and tax hikes were turned back around the state Tuesday in municipal elections that appeared to show a public in an anti-government mood.

In Breckenridge, 72 percent of voters in early returns voted to make up to 1 ounce of marijuana legal for adults over 21. The measure is largely symbolic — pot possession is still against state law — but supporters said they wanted to send a message to local law enforcement to stop busting small-time pot smokers.

[Read more at CBS]

From a slew of new brainwave toys and bionic monkeys to advanced brain scans and wireless neuro-implants that will soon enable paralyzed people to remotely operate computers with their minds, the gap in the human-machine interface is closing. But while mind-reading gets all the glory, other researchers are developing new amazing non-drug methods to control the brain as well. We’ve posted many times about zapping regions of the brain with magnetic pulses, called transcranial magnetic stimulation, to treat depression, boost creativity, or even improve reaction time. And brain “pacemakers” are increasingly common treatments for epilepsy, Parkinson’s, and even depression. What’s next? Mind control through sound and light.

[Read the full story at BoingBoing]

Today (Nov. 6) through Sunday (Nov. 8), UFO researcher Ryan Wood will gather with peers in Las Vegas for the 7th Annual UFO Crash Retrieval Conference.

The event showcases hard evidence of UFO crashes on Earth, from newspaper clippings and eyewitness reports to actual pieces of flying saucer wreckage.

Wood estimates there have been more than 300 UFO crashes on Earth over the years. He’s personally aware of about 100 of them.

He says the lesser-known incidents — like a mysterious crash in Mexico that the CIA covered up by killing witnesses and hiding evidence — are usually the most credible.

However, he can also see why aliens would gravitate to the highly-publicized site in Roswell, New Mexico. Since New Mexico is where the atomic bomb and other scientific devices originated, Wood believes advanced E.T. civilizations would find the state rather appealing.

A million thank yous to the reader who mailed me the Dianetics & Scientology Holiday catalog! With so much crazytown inside, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

While Scientology has been going through tough times lately — a French court convicted the church of fraud and Oscar-winning filmmaker Paul Haggis resigned publicly — spokesperson Tommy Davis says the church is flourishing: assets and property holdings have doubled over the past five years. Is some of that cash from the catalog sales? Maybe!

Chomsky says U.S. leaders would have had to be certifiably insane in order to commit 911 as an inside job…

Its solution? “Posthuman Nuclear Doomsday Maneuvers” – using the internet to instantly refabricate any targetted cities over the internet in the ultimate decentralization.

“This is city as signal, nukes as noise.”

Picking up where my last article left off, I’m going to gloat. The hardcore bands I listened to in high school are way better than the hardcore bands you listened to in high school. These are the bands of my youth, more or less. The bands I spent my entire paycheck on. The bands I would ride the T up to Boston to see. The bands whose patches I spent hours meticulously sewing patches onto my flight jacket and jeans. These are the bands I lived and died by. A big thank you to all of them for saving me from a life a misery.

Full Article at Black Sun Gazette

When Jim Channon authored the First Earth Battalion manual, he was hoping to bring warfare into a more humane, modern age. In a new series of columns, he talks about the film and why harnessing the paranormal is so important.

Jon Ronson, who wrote the book The Men Who Stare at Goats, has taken over the Guardian’s film section this week, and asked former Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon, one of the inspirations behind The Men Who Stare at Goats, write a few columns about the film and his ideas. Channon authored the First Earth Battalion manual, which proposed that the US Army modernize warfare by looking toward the human potential movement. Channon suggested engaging the enemy with positive vibrations and offerings of peace, but also suggested that soldiers unlock their potential by practicing meditation and yoga, and that work to develop superhuman abilities such as perceiving auras, teleportation, psychokinesis, and precognition. Ronson discusses Channon’s parapsychology in his book, and many of Channon’s ideas found their way into the film.

In his columns, Channon says that he doesn’t mind that his ideas are being presented as comedy (he calls it “the ultimate roast”), and is just happy that they’ve enjoyed such a long shelf life. After all, he still believes that the ideas he lays out in the First Earth Battalion are still important in the modern age. Modern warfare, he notes, is still extremely violent and psychologically scarring. He believes that, by opening up their perceptions, soldiers can avoid situations where they might be in physical danger or risk killing another human being.

More on io9.com and here’s the trailer for the film: