The Strange Story Of Nazi Jazz
Jazz aficionados may think they know cool jazz, bebop, hard bop, and every other style, but what about Nazi bop? Though they had already passed laws criminalizing “Jewishly gloomy lyrics”, drum and horn solos, “Negroid excesses in tempo”, and plucked bass lines, the party realized that dance music was needed to reach the masses. Via Smithsonian Magazine:
Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels’ strangest effort was the creation of that oxymoron in four-bar form: a Nazi-approved, state-sponsored hot jazz band known as Charlie and His Orchestra [headed by] Karl “Charlie” Schwedler, an employee of the German Foreign Ministry, who discovered he had a talent for crooning.
As “Charlie,” Schwedler—who at least posed as a convinced Nazi—penned lyrics that generally followed a fixed pattern. The first verse of each song would remain untouched, perhaps in the hope of luring in listeners. But the remainder of the lyrics would veer wildly into Nazi propaganda and boasts…
Mysterious Flaming Rocks Spontaneously Ignite, Severely Burning Woman
The flaming rocks. Photo: Orange County Health Care Agency
California beachcombers may need to be more careful about picking up cool looking rocks to take home, although no one can explain how these combustible rocks arrived. Rick Rojas reports for the LA Times:
What could possibly cause rocks picked up at a popular state beach to ignite in the pocket of a woman’s cargo shorts?
To scientists, the answer is — well, there is no clear answer.
The case of an Orange County woman severely burned after rocks collected last weekend from San Onofre State Beach ignited in her pocket has puzzled scientists, who say they’ve never seen anything like it and aren’t quite sure how it happened.
“It’s pretty implausible,” said Larry Overman, a professor of chemistry at UC Irvine.
The 43-year-old San Clemente woman, who remained hospitalized Thursday with second- and third-degree burns, visited the northern San Diego County beach last Saturday with her…
Notorious Haunted Los Angeles Hospital To Be Turned Into Senior Homes
The Los Angeles Times reports on a recipe for trouble, with ambitious developers packing the elderly into one of Los Angeles’ most haunted grounds:
Historic — and some say haunted — Linda Vista Community Hospital that has been closed for two decades is set to be converted into apartments for low-income seniors in a $40-million makeover. The original hospital opened in 1905. It was razed and rebuilt on the same site in the mid-1920s.
Visitors come across stray medical equipment such as dusty baby incubators and gleaming stainless steel autopsy tables. A corner of the basement holds what appears to be a cluster of jail cells. “People tell me it’s the most haunted place in L.A.,” said Maurice Ramirez, executive vice president of Amcal.
Caretaker Francis Kortekaas acknowledged a couple of incidents he can’t explain. In the dimly lighted underground level housing the operating rooms, Kortekaas said he once saw the water turn on…
60,000 Ultra-Orthodox Jews Protest the Evils of the Internet
The sub-headline is priceless, “15,000 Hasidic women watched speeches at six sites thanks to live-streaming on the Internet.” Via the New York Daily News:
A mass rally for men only drew more than 40,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews to Citi Field Sunday to denounce the Internet and its pervasive impact on family life.
An overflow crowd of another 20,000 bearded men sporting long black coats and big black hats filled nearby Arthur Ashe Stadium for the unprecedented attack on modern technology.
Unable to enter the Queens stadiums because of the strict separation of the sexes enforced by the organizers, more than 15,000 Hasidic women watched the speeches at six sites across the tristate area — thanks to live-streaming on the Internet.
The rally was organized by a little-known rabbinical group called Ichud Hakehillos L’tohar Hamachane — the Union of Communities for the Purity of the Camp — to spread the word that online activities can lead…
What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Deep-Drilling an Italian Supervolcano
Photo: Donar Reiskoffer (CC)
Edwin Cartlidge writes on Science:
A project to drill deep into the heart of a “supervolcano” in southern Italy has finally received the green light, despite claims that the drilling would put the population of Naples at risk of small earthquakes or an explosion. Italian news agency ANSA quoted project coordinator Giuseppe De Natale of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology as saying that the office of Naples mayor Luigi de Magistris has approved the drilling of a pilot hole 500 meters deep.
The Campi Flegrei Deep Drilling Project was set up by an international collaboration of scientists to assess the risks posed by the Campi Flegrei caldera, a geological formation just a few kilometers to the west of Naples that formed over thousands of years following the collapse of several volcanoes. Researchers believe that if it erupted, Campi Flegrei could have global repercussions, potentially killing millions of…
Quebec: The Empire Strikes Back
Zig Zag writes on the Vancouver Media Co-Op:
Provincial and city governments in Quebec are resorting to repressive new laws in an effort to defeat the student mobilization, which has rocked that province for the past three months. Faced with strong and militant resistance by thousands in the streets, on May 18 Montreal passed a by-law banning the wearing of masks during protests. If convicted, people could be fined $3,000. This comes as the federal government prepares to amend the Criminal Code making it an offense to wear a mask during a riot or unlawful assembly (Bill C-306), with a maximum 10 year prison sentence if convicted.
On the same day as Montreal passed its anti-masking by-law, the Quebec government passed emergency legislation aimed directly at the student mobilization but affecting civil rights in general, “Bill 78: A Law Allowing Students to Receive the Education Provided by the School Which They Attend.” It contains 36 articles,…
Supreme Court Lets Stand Student’s $675,000 Penalty For Downloading 30 Songs
Photo: Joel Tenenbaum (CC)
That’s a penalty of $22,500 per song. Reports Mark Memmott on NPR:
… the Supreme Court this morning let stand a $675,000 jury verdict against a 25-year-old Boston University student who downloaded 30 songs nearly a decade ago and then shared them with others on a peer-to-peer network.
The court denied Joel Tenenbaum’s “write of certiorari,” which means his appeal of a lower court’s ruling and the judgment were turned down.
Bloomberg News reminds us that: “The Recording Industry Association of America, acting on behalf of major record labels, sued more than 12,000 people and sent notices to thousands of others it claimed were illegally sharing music … Tenenbaum and a woman from Minnesota took their cases to trial, and both lost.”
Tenenbaum tells his side of the story at his Joel Fights Back website. He says he’s part of an effort to defend “the average Davids against the corporate Goliath.”
Wired says, “the significance…
We Need A Media War On All Fronts
When do you feel like you are over the hill?
When you get letters like this one from Jose Hevia after writing an op-ed featuring an essay from your recent book Blogothon, recounting your experiences as a network TV insider turned independent media outsider. The essay offered a case study of how the nominally non-commercial network, PBS, turned its back on a human rights TV series I co-produced. It is about the challenges progressives face in offering a counter-narrative to parochial mainstream thinking.
My critical correspondent wondered what I was whining about:
Complaining that the old media is getting more and more monopolized is … Who cares about old media? … Nobody is my inner circle under 30 watches old media any more.
Bye.
Take that, old man. Ha, ha, ha.
I am not sure his view is totally true, what with Comedy Central, movie channels galore and unlimited sports coverage. The New York Times reports “Television is…
Soldiers Who Desecrate the Dead See Themselves as Hunters
Via ScienceDaily:
Modern day soldiers who mutilate enemy corpses or take body-parts as trophies are usually thought to be suffering from the extreme stresses of battle. But, research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) shows that this sort of misconduct has most often been carried out by fighters who viewed the enemy as racially different from themselves and used images of the hunt to describe their actions.
“The roots of this behaviour lie not in individual psychological disorders,” says Professor Simon Harrison who carried out the study, “but in a social history of racism and in military traditions that use hunting metaphors for war. Although this misconduct is very rare, it has persisted in predictable patterns since the European Enlightenment. This was the period when the first ideologies of race began to appear, classifying some human populations as closer to animals than others.”
European and North American soldiers who have…
Authorities Define “Violence” As Any Restriction Of Capital Flows
Critical Legal Thinking on the German government response to Occupy Frankfurt — peaceful protest is now defined as “violent” if the target is financial institutions:
As debate spilled over into a shouting match in the Hessian State Parliament concerning the effective ban of Blockupy protests this 16-19 May in Frankfurt am Main, the administrative decision that effected this ban has come to light. The key finding being that:
The blockade action cannot be assessed as peaceful. To make blockades and hinder traffic with the goal of closing down the entire financial district...has to be defined as violence. The European Central Bank ‘must be functional, especially in times of financial crisis around the clock’. This includes things like ‘the operation of large-value payment system TARGET2′.
So in effect, a civil disobedience directed against the Eurozone’s financial authorities cannot take place because the obligation of the Frankfurt government to support the operation of the Euro-system overrides…
Possible New Evidence That Earth Is A Giant Living Organism
If planet Earth, on a macro level, really is a being called Gaia that is functionally alive, then I hope I’m not standing on an uncomfortable spot. Via Junk Science:
Is Earth really a sort of giant living organism as the Gaia hypothesis predicts? A new discovery may provide a key to answering this question. This key of sulfur could allow scientists to unlock heretofore hidden interactions between ocean organisms, atmosphere, and land — interactions that might provide evidence supporting this famous theory.
The Gaia hypothesis — first articulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1970s — holds that Earth’s physical and biological processes are inextricably connected to form a self-regulating, essentially sentient, system.
Newly published work done at the University of Maryland provides a tool for tracing and measuring the movement of sulfur through ocean organisms, the atmosphere and the land in ways that may help prove or disprove the…
Guns Drawn On Occupy Journalists, Car Raided in Chicago (Video)
Via We Are Change:
Luke Rudkowksi (@Lukewearechange), Tim Pool (@Timcast), Jeoff Shively (@Jiraffa), Dustin & Jess were driving home after covering a NATO protest in Chicago only to have their car raided by police.
Study: People See Sexualized Images Of Women As Objects, Not People
Critiques of popular media as “objectifying” women are dead on — both males and females have been found to subconsciously process sexy women as being inanimate objects, yet recognize sexy men as human beings. Via Psychological Science:
Perfume ads, beer billboards, movie posters: everywhere you look, women’s sexualized bodies are on display. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that both men and women see images of sexy women’s bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people.
Psychological research has worked out that our brains see people and objects in different ways. For example, while we’re good at recognizing a whole face, just part of a face is a bit baffling. On the other hand, recognizing part of a chair is just as easy as recognizing a whole chair. One way that psychologists have found to test whether something is seen…
A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now?
Photo: O'Dea (CC)
There will be someone new to take Harold Camping’s place, these end-timers never seem to go away. Writes Tom Bartlett on Religion Dispatches:
For a while, their message was everywhere. They paid for billboards, took out full-page ads in newspapers, distributed thousands of tracts. They drove across the county in RVs emblazoned with verses from the books of Revelation and Daniel. They marched around Manhattan holding signs. They broadcasted day and night on their network of radio stations. They warned the world.
That warning turned out to be a false alarm. No giant earthquake rippled across the surface of the earth, nor were any believers caught up in the clouds. Harold Camping, the octogenarian whose nightly Bible call-in show fomented doomsday mania, suffered a stroke soon afterward and mostly disappeared from sight. The press coverage, which had been intense in the weeks leading up to May 21, 2011, dwindled to…
Neil Gaiman’s Inspiring Commencement Address (Video)
For any creative person who needs some motivation, whether a college graduate or not, Gaiman’s 2012 commencement address to Philadelphia’s University of the Arts is well worth viewing. It comes down to this: Make. Good. Art.”
The Marco Rubio Bilderberg Conspiracy
Marco Rubio. Photo: Gage Skidmore (CC)
The power elite has chosen the Republican Vice Presidential candidate. According to the Infowars crowd anyway. Kenneth Vogel stirs things up at Politico:
Mitt Romney isn’t very far into the vice presidential selection process. But according to a dedicated band of conspiracy theorists, the pick is all but a lock: Sen. Marco Rubio.
That’s the current thinking among a worldwide collection of activists who are obsessed with the secretive Bilderberg Group, an alternating roster of global power players who loom as large — if not larger — in the online fever swamps of the fringe as the Trilateral Commission or the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Bilderberg Group, which takes its name from the Dutch hotel where it first gathered in 1954, exists solely to bring together between 100 and 150 titans of politics, finance, military, industry, academia and media mostly from North America and Western Europe once a year…
What’s Really Happening In Chicago?
Illustration: FFox
Are any disinfonauts on the ground in Chicago at the NATO protests? This report from CNN suggests that Black Bloc members are “domestic terrorists”:
Two more suspects have been charged in connection with an alleged terror plot in Chicago during the NATO summit, bringing the total to five, prosecutors said Sunday.
Authorities previously charged three men, saying they planned to target President Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters, the home of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and several other law enforcement and financial sites.
Sebastian Senakiewicz, 24, of Chicago, is charged with falsely making a terrorist threat, the Illinois state’s attorney’s office said in a statement Sunday. Mark Neiweem, 28, also believed to be from Chicago, is charged with attempted possession of explosives or incendiary devices.
It was not immediately known whether the two have an attorney. They were scheduled to appear in court Sunday.
A lawyer representing the other three men charged in the alleged plot has…
Ron Paul Going Full Force to Republican National Convention (Video)
Via RT:
Ron Paul is the candidate that continues to be ignored by the mainstream media, but he is still in the game. The Texas congressman and his supporters continue to push towards the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, but many doubt Paul’s delegate strategy will give him the GOP nod. So what can we expect from Paul at the RNC? Brian Doherty, senior editor at Reason.com, joins us with more on Paul’s new strategy heading to the RNC.
Legal Highs Making The Drug War Obsolete
Via Mind Hacks:
If you want any evidence that drugs have won the drug war, you just need to read the scientific studies on legal highs.
If you’re not keeping track of the ‘legal high’ scene it’s important to remember that the first examples, synthetic cannabinoids sold as ‘Spice’ and ‘K2′ incense, were only detected in 2009.
Shortly after amphetamine-a-like stimulant drugs, largely based on variations on pipradrol and the cathinones appeared, and now ketamine-like drugs such as methoxetamine have become widespread.
Since 1997, 150 new psychoactive substances were reported. Almost a third of those appeared in 2010.
Last year, the US government banned several of these drugs although the effect has been minimal as the legal high laboratories have over-run the trenches of the drug warriors…
Waiting For Armageddon (Video)
Americas 50-million strong Evangelical community is convinced that the worlds future is foretold in biblical prophecy — from the Rapture to the Battle of Armageddon. This astonishing documentary explores their world — in their homes, at conferences, and on a wide-ranging tour of Israel. By interweaving Christian, Zionist, Jewish and critical perspectives along with telling archival materials, the filmmakers probe the politically powerful — and potentially explosive — alliance between Evangelical Christians and Israeli alliance that may set the stage for what one prominent Evangelical leader calls World War III.
