IMF Chief Wants Global Currency
Those on the lookout for signs of a one world government/new world order will be all over this, as reported by ABC News/AP:
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, suggested Friday the organization might one day be called on to provide countries with a global reserve currency that would serve as an alternative to the U.S. dollar.
“That day has not yet come, but I think it is intellectually healthy to explore these kinds of ideas now,” he said in a speech on the future mandate of the 186-nation Washington-based lending organization.
Strauss-Kahn said such an asset could be similar to but distinctly different from the IMF’s special drawing rights, or SDRs, the accounting unit that countries use to hold funds within the IMF. It is based on a basket…
The Virginia Colonists at Jamestown Practiced Cannibalism
Here is another chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, inspired by historian Howard Zinn, who passed away earlier this year.
For more on Russ Kick check out his website, The Memory Hole.
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During the harsh winter of 1609–1610, British subjects in the famous colony of Jamestown, Virginia, ate their dead and their shit. This fact doesn’t make it into very many U.S. history textbooks, and the state’s official website apparently forgot to mention it in their history section.
When you think about it rationally, this fact should be a part of mainstream history. After all, it demonstrates the strong will to survive among the colonists. It shows the mind-boggling hardships they endured and overcame. Yet the taboo against eating these two items is so overpowering that this episode can’t be mentioned in conventional history.
Luckily, an unconventional historian, Howard Zinn, revealed this fact in his classic, A People’s History of the United States. Food was so nonexistent during that winter, only 60 out of 500 colonists survived. A government document from that time gives the gruesome details:
Debt Dynamite Dominoes: The Coming Financial Catastrophe
By Andrew Gavin Marshall for the Centre for Research on Globalization:
Understanding the Nature of the Global Economic Crisis
The people have been lulled into a false sense of safety under the ruse of a perceived “economic recovery.” Unfortunately, what the majority of people think does not make it so, especially when the people making the key decisions think and act to the contrary. The sovereign debt crises that have been unfolding in the past couple years and more recently in Greece, are canaries in the coal mine for the rest of Western “civilization.” The crisis threatens to spread to Spain, Portugal and Ireland; like dominoes, one country after another will collapse into a debt and currency crisis, all the way to America.
In October 2008, the mainstream media and politicians of the…
Try to Find New Island on a Map: You Can’t, Even Though People Have Lived There for 43,500 Years…
Sounds to me like where Lost takes place. Fascinating story from Annalee Newitz on io9.com:
You can’t find New Island on most maps of the Indian Ocean because its location was a secret for most of the twentieth century. But now one man has chronicled the long, strange history of its ancient inhabitants.
The ruins you see here come from a group known locally as the “Old People,” who probably started living on the island 43,500 years ago. In the modern age, the island was discovered in the late eighteenth century by two convict ships that crashed there on the way to Australia. One of those ships was filled with hundreds of female convicts, who eventually founded their own civilization on the island, based on sexual equality and paganism. Today the island is…
Amazing Rice Field Art In Japan
This story from Hemmy.net is one of the first sites I found taking about this. Since then, the Guardian reported on it. Via Hemmy.net:
Every year, farmers in the rural town Inakadate, Japan create rice field art by using red rice in with their regular rice in special patterns. A few others fields in rural Japan also followed the trend of this beautiful rice field art.
You Are Still Being Lied To: Howard Zinn’s “Columbus and Western Civilization”
The following is an excerpt of “Columbus and Western Civilization” written by Howard Zinn that appears in the Disinformation anthology You Are Still Being Lied To edited by Russ Kick.
Author’s Note: In the year 1992, the celebration of Columbus Day was different from previous ones in two ways. First, this was the quincentennial, 500 years after Columbus’ landing in this hemisphere. Second, it was a celebration challenged all over the country by people—many of them native Americans but also others—who had “discovered” a Columbus not worth celebrating, and who were rethinking the traditional glorification of “Western civilization.” I gave this talk at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in October 1991. It was published the following year by the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series with the title “Christopher Columbus & the Myth of Human Progress.”
George Orwell, who was a very wise man, wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future. And who controls the present controls the past.” In other words, those who dominate our society are in a position to write our histories. And if they can do that, they can decide our futures. That is why the telling of the Columbus story is important.
Let me make a confession. I knew very little about Columbus until about twelve years ago, when I began writing my book A People’s History of the United States. I had a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University—that is, I had the proper training of a historian, and what I knew about Columbus was pretty much what I had learned in elementary school.
90 Percent Of Languages Will Be Extinct Next Century
Alasdair Wilkins writes on io9.com:
Linguist and conservative commentator John McWhorter estimates the 6,000 languages spoken today will dwindle to only 600 next century. He argues that this is part of a process that will confer economic and health benefits to the affected speakers.
His main point is that the vast, vast majority of threatened languages are those spoken by isolated indigenous groups, and that these languages are, in fact, a driving force of their isolation. The language barrier prevents the absorption of such groups into the larger society, and this often leaves those affected in significantly worse economic conditions than their neighbors that speak the majority language.
McWhorter outlines how the pursuit of a better life can often mean leaving one’s ancestral language behind:
As people speaking indigenous languages migrate to cities, inevitably they…
The World’s Tallest Building: A Symbol of Global Excess in Dubai
Juan Cole writes on Informed Comment:
The world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifah or Khalifah Tower, was unveiled in Dubai on Monday:
Dubai is a finance hub, the bubble of which has burst, so the building’s opening now seems a critique of past excesses more than the triumph originally dreamed of. Now that Dubai is having to be bailed out by its oil-rich sister emirate, Abu Dhabi, the tower had to be named for its ruler Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, rather than retaining its original name, Burj Dubai. Many critics have seen it as a monument to hubris likely to remain mostly empty, as the 21st century Tower of Babel.
As you can see, Dubai nevertheless went all out to celebrate the opening.
The Burj Khalifah is a symbol of everything wrong with our present moment. Rooted in a finance and real estate bubble, planned as big for the sake of bigness, opulent, now saved from disaster by Abu Dhabi’s unsustainable oil revenues, it casts its shadow on a nation of guest workers, many impoverished and exploited. If global warming proceeds at the pace some climate scientists fear, and the seas rise substantially, it may, ironically enough, be all that is visible of the low-lying United Arab Emirates a century from now.
FDA Continues World Colonization, Opens Another International Facility In Mexico
Mike Adams for Natural News:
In its supposed efforts to improve food safety, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced the opening of its third Latin American facility located in Mexico City. Since an increasing quantity of fruits, vegetables, and medical devices are being imported into the U.S. from Mexico, FDA officials believe setting up outposts there will improve the food safety process.
Throughout the past year, FDA has opened ten facilities around the globe. Because of numerous recent contamination outbreaks, regulators claim that establishing permanent international offices will improve their ability to operate effectively.
The agency plans to work collaboratively with international governments and food regulators to harmonize regulatory standards, establish new food safety guidelines, and improve product handling safety protocols.
U.S.-based staff is now working in FDA facilities in China,…
Finally A Truly “World” Wide Web: Non-Latin Web Addresses Debut in 2010
Tom Simonite writes in New Scientist:
Imagine what browsing the web would be like if you had to type out addresses in characters you don’t recognise, from a language you don’t speak. It’s a nightmare that will end for hundreds of millions of people in 2010, when the first web addresses written entirely in non-Latin characters come online.
Net regulator ICANN — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — conceded in October that more than half of the 1.6 billion people online use languages with scripts not fully compatible with the Latin alphabet. It is now accepting applications for the first non-Latin top level domains (TLDs) – the part of an address after the final “dot”. The first national domains, counterparts of .uk or .au, should go live in early…
Alcoholic Monkeys Stealing Booze from Tourists
Get your hands off my drink, you damn dirty ape! Michael Graham Richard writes on Treehunger:
Where Can I Get a Drink Here? Okay, this one is a bit on the light side, but I found it quite interesting as an illustration of the unintended consequences (sometimes really unintended) of introducing non-native species in foreign ecosystems. The video below shows alcoholic monkeys on the island of St. Kitts in the Caribbean. They were brought there from West Africa 300 years ago by slave traders back when the island was a rum-producing colony, and apparently they developed a taste for alcohol from eating fermented sugarcane left in the fields. Nowadays, they satisfy their liquor habit by stealing drinks from tourists:
Secretive Copenhagen Treaty Creates Larcenous Global Government Tax
Paul Joseph Watson for PrisonPlanet.com:
Lord Christopher Monckton warns that the secretive draft version of the Copenhagen climate change treaty represents a global government power grab on an “unimaginable scale,” and mandates the creation of 700 new bureaucracies as well as a colossal raft of new taxes including 2 percent levies on both GDP and every international financial transaction.
Speaking with The Alex Jones Show, Monckton, who is in Copenhagen attending the UN climate summit, said that when he attempted to obtain a copy of the current draft of the negotiating text agreement, he was initially rebuffed before he threatened an international diplomatic incident unless the document was forthcoming.
“I insisted and it took about 10 minutes and they consulted each other with three or four of them arguing over it – none…
Blood Gold at Wal-Mart; Five Million Dead in the Congo
One of the most interesting things I found out about in this 60 Minutes story is that Wal-Mart is the largest gold retailer in the United States. Here at Disinfo, we distributed Robert Greenwald’s Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, and here’s another troubling consequence to add to this idea, that low price doesn’t come without costs that you, the consumer, may not be aware of. Costs that can make you think twice about exactly what you are buying.
Scott Pelley reports on 60 Minutes:
Debt Crisis in Dubai: The Party’s Over
LANDON THOMAS Jr. writes in the New York Times:
Of the many economies that gorged on debt in the boom years, Dubai stood out. In the space of a few years the emirate’s investment arm, Dubai World, racked up $59 billion in debt, borrowing to build lavish developments like a giant island shaped like a palm tree to entice celebrities like Brad Pitt, and to invest in glittery properties like the MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas.
Now that the boom has gone bust, both in Dubai and in the United States, Dubai is stuck with a glut of real estate that no one wants to buy or rent. Creditors and markets had always assumed that when push came to shove, its oil-rich neighbor Abu Dhabi would bail out Dubai. But that assumption was called into question this week, and the resulting fear that Dubai might not be able to pay its bills sent a wave of uncertainty rippling through markets just as investors thought the worst of the global financial instability was over.
The anxiety reached Wall Street on Friday, sending the Dow Jones industrial average down more than 150 points, as investors worried about hidden debt bombs in other countries and institutions — heavily indebted nations like Greece and even Britain, high-flying emerging markets and even European and American banks that had lent Dubai money…
Behold: The World’s 10 Fattest Countries
Laurie Cunningham writes on GlobalPost:
If you tend to pack on a few pounds over the holidays, blame it on globalization. As the world has grown smaller, we’ve all grown larger — alarmingly so. In countries around the world, waistlines are expanding so rapidly that health experts recently coined a term for the epidemic: globesity.
The common fat-o-meter among nations is body mass index (BMI), a calculation based on a person’s height and weight. The World Health Organization defines “overweight” as an individual with a BMI of 25 or more and “obese” as someone with a BMI of 30 or higher. (To see how you weigh in, use this calculator by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute.)
Today, one in three of the world’s adults is overweight and one in 10 is…
How Osama Bin Laden May Have Been Inspired by Isaac Asimov
Giles Foden writes in the Guardian:
In October last year, an item appeared on an authoritative Russian studies website that soon had the science-fiction community buzzing with speculative excitement. It asserted that Isaac Asimov’s 1951 classic Foundation was translated into Arabic under the title “al-Qaida”. And it seemed to have the evidence to back up its claims.
“This peculiar coincidence would be of little interest if not for abundant parallels between the plot of Asimov’s book and the events unfolding now,” wrote Dmitri Gusev, the scientist who posted the article. He was referring to apparent similarities between the plot of Foundation and the pursuit of the organisation we have come to know, perhaps erroneously, as al-Qaida.
The Arabic word qaida — ordinarily meaning “base” or “foundation” — is also used for “groundwork” and “basis”. It is…
Is Every Woman in Africa an Octomom?
Women in Niger produce an average of 7.19 children each. And interestingly, India accounts for 21% of all children born.
A fascinating article on world demographic trends notes that Afghanistan has the third-highest population growth in the world. (”Bloody, poor, sick nations often reproduce the faster,” notes Hank Hyena, adding “Poverty + War + Disease = Booming Population.”) Partly because of this trend, the only populations assured of expansion in 2050 are Africa, the Middle East … and the United States.
More on h+ magazine
Ukraine Closes All Schools and Cinemas over Swine Flu
Anya Tsukanova reports via AFP:
KIEV — Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko on Friday ordered a three-week closure of Ukraine’s schools and cinemas in the toughest measures adopted yet to combat the swine flu virus in Europe.
“From today, all the school establishments in Ukraine — be they private or public — will be put on three weeks of holiday,” she told her cabinet in comments carried on Ukrainian television.
Tymoshenko said the government would also be banning “all public gatherings, every concert and every cinema showing for three weeks.” The government will also introduce “special regimes” to limit the movement of Ukraine’s citizens from one region to another for non-urgent purposes, she said. Ukraine has borders with four EU countries.
The prime minister’s tough actions came as Ukraine confirmed its first deaths from the…
Machines Designed to Change Humans
I remember how my mom used to yell at my dad because he was always trying to explain how we’re being farmed.
The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab creates insight into how computing products — from websites to mobile phone software — can be designed to change what people believe and what they do.
Yes, this can be a scary topic: machines designed to influence human beliefs and behaviors. But there’s good news. We believe that much like human persuaders, persuasive technologies can bring about positive changes in many domains, including health, business, safety, and education. We also believe that new advances in technology can help promote world peace in 30 years. With such positive ends in mind, we are creating a body of expertise in the design, theory, and analysis of persuasive technologies,…
