Netherlands Judge Backs Cannabis Cafe Ban For Foreign Tourists
Via BBC News:
A judge in the Netherlands has upheld a new law to ban foreign tourists from entering cannabis cafes.
While soft drugs are tolerated, there is growing concern at tourists visiting just for drugs, and foreign dealers selling illegally at home.
The ban is due to start in three southern provinces next month, and go nationwide by the end of the year.
A group of cafe owners argued at The Hague district court that the ban was discriminatory against foreigners. Under the new law, Dutch residents will still be allowed into the cafes, as long as they have valid identification, or possibly hold a new “weed pass”, which is also being debated. There are about 700 coffee shops, as they are called, in the Netherlands. The cultivation and sale of soft drugs through them is decriminalised, although not legal; police generally tolerate possession of up to five grams of cannabis.
LA to NY in 30 Minutes: 10,000 MPH Tunnel Train Used for Underground Bases?
Via the Intel Hub:
The Vary High Speed Transit System (VHST) was a Rand Corporation concept that was presented to the military industrial complex in the 1970′s.
The concept was way ahead of it’s time, exactly what the secret sinister government needed to connect their vast expansions of underground bases throughout the United States and in various regions worldwide.
This could offer an explanation for some of the recent strange sounds and booms across the country. The late (and presumably murdered) Phil Schneider spoke about what he called an Electro Magneto Leviton Train System that traveled at speeds in excess of Mach 2.
The VHST and its proposed routes, (vast advanced tunnel systems) at the time of it’s conception in the early 1970′s, fit and follow other underground base researchers findings as well as some of my own. An interesting aspect within the Rand Corp. document is the fact that the tunnels are way…
The TSA Precheck Program for the 1 Percent
Because rich people sure do hate being inconvenienced. Via the WSJ:
Hate the full-body scans, pat-downs and slow going at TSA airport security screening checkpoints? For $100, you can now bypass the hassle.
The Transportation Security Administration is rolling out expedited screening at big airports called “Precheck.” It has special lanes for background-checked travelers, who can keep their shoes, belt and jacket on, leave laptops and liquids in carry-on bags and walk through a metal detector rather than a full-body scan. The process, now at two airlines and nine airports, is much like how screenings worked before the Sept. 11 attacks.
To qualify, frequent fliers must meet undisclosed TSA criteria and get invited in by the airlines. There is also a backdoor in. Approved travelers who are in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s “Global Entry” program can transfer into Precheck using their Global Entry number.
Theme Park From Hell: Singapore’s Haw Par Villa
Singapore Paranormal Investigators has everything you need to know about the Haw Par Villa amusement park. Built in 1937, it is dotted with lush gardens and life-size depictions of scenes including the ten levels of hell described in ancient Chinese mythology, torture and dismemberment, humans with the heads of animals, and a women breastfeeding her father-in-law. It has been described as “if Heironymus Bosch built a putt-putt course”. Book your tickets and take your kids for a vacation that will change their lives.
Space Adventures Offers Moon Tourism At $150 Million Per Seat
What are you doing this summer? Via io9:
If you’ve got a lust for space travel, a desire to go where only a couple of dozen people have gone before, and $150 million to spare, Space Adventures needs you.
The space tourism company—it’s the one that organizes the ISS trips via the Russian Soyuz—has mapped a potential tour around the moon that could lift off within five years.
The company has already secured a nine-digit commitment from one customer for a potential lunar sightseeing tour. And the logistics are already in place as well: aboard a three-seat Russian Soyuz spacecraft (the third seat is for a Russian mission commander), the tourists would launch into orbit where they would rendezvous with a separately-launched unmanned rocket, which would jet them the rest of the way to the moon.
Round trip: eight or nine days.
Washable RFID Tags Help Catch Hotel Towel Thieves
Damn you, Big Travel! Discovery News reports:
Plush terrycloth bathrobes, 800-thread-count sheets and fluffy, freshly laundered towels can tempt even the most law-abiding hotel guest to take up a life of suitcase-stuffing crime.
Irresistible as they may be, petty theft of these luxurious (and free!) linens are gouging the hotel industry to the rude wake-up call of approximately $100 million a year.
Sticky-fingers everywhere, consider this a warning! Some hotels are reinforcing their defences against pilfering patrons like yourself and they’re using radio frequency identification (RFID) to catch you in the act.
Three hotels in Honolulu, Miami and New York City have begun using towels, sheets and bathrobes equipped with washable RFID tags to keep guests from snagging the coveted items. Just to keep you guessing, the hotels have chosen to remain anonymous.
Rent Your Own Country: Liechtenstein Available At $70,000 Per Night
At least when people say that our government is for sale, it’s meant metaphorically. Wired UK writes:
For a cool $70,000 a night (for a minimum of two nights), you can hire the tiny country of Liechtenstein, which measures around 61.7 square miles and has just 35,000 inhabitants. According to the profile on Airbnb, Liechtenstein can accommodate between 450 and 900 people, has 500+ bedrooms and 500+ bathrooms. The cancellation policy is classified as “Super Strict”.
[This] follows last year’s attempt by Snoop Dogg to rent Liechtenstein to shoot a music video. He was rebuffed because his management did not give enough prior warning.
Turkey’s Museum Of Hair
Oddity Central examines one of the planet’s most disturbing “museums,” The Hair Museum in Avanos, Turkey. Every inch of every surface is covered in human hair, culled from tens of thousands of women and tagged and labeled. Great fun for the whole family!
The Hair Museum of Avanos, in Cappadocia, is definitely a must-see if you’re into bizarre tourist spots.
Ever since 3000 BC, Avanos has been known for its high quality earthenware, made from the mineral-rich mud of the Red River, but in recent years, the town has mostly been mentioned in relation to a unique hair museum created by skilled Turkish potter Chez Galip. The unusual establishment, located under Galip’s pottery shop, is filled with hair samples from over 16,000 women. The walls, ceiling, and all other surfaces, except the floor, are covered with locks of hair from the different women who have visited this place, and pieces of paper with…
Thousands Of Tourists’ Photographs, Combined Into One
Framing sites of mass tourism in our viewfinders, we create photographic souvenirs that are integral to the touristic experience. These products, coined “photograph-trophies” by Susan Sontag, separate our leisurely pleasures from the real everyday experiences of work and life.
Artist Corinne Vionnet begins with the most recognizable of images and creates something unearthly and unsettling — from Flickr and personal blogs, she culls thousands of tourists’ snapshots of a well-known landmark (such as the Taj Majal, below) and overlaps them into single composite, revealing the collective “tourists’ gaze” produced by the absurd behavior of millions of people endlessly taking the same photograph over and over. Via My Modern Met:
Mark Frauenfelder: ‘Passport Ownership Prevents Diabetes’
Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing writes, “It’s conclusive: owning a passport will prevent you from becoming diabetic.”
Exposing Naked Scanners In The EU And Beyond – Again
Image from FlyWithDignity.org
One year on from the fast tracking of digital strip searches and the hysteria over the “pants incident” [1], the push for the use of naked scanners continues. Whilst naked scanners have not been front page news for some time, the issue, like many others the mainstream media choose to ignore, forges ahead unexposed.
The delayed EU Commission green paper
In June 2010, the European Commission finally published a green paper on the use of naked scanners at EU airports [2] — a paper that was originally promised back in 2008! The Commission’s green paper refers to naked scanners as “Security Scanners” in an attempt to play down the intrusive nature of the technology and highlight the supposed security benefits.
The Commission presents the all too common argument at the EU level — that it is inevitable that scanners will be introduced, so what we need is European Regulation to create…
Growing Your Own Security: Professor Breeding Bomb-Detecting Plants (Video)
Spencer Ackerman writes on WIRED’s Danger Room:
The next hydrangea you grow could literally save your life. With the help of the Department of Defense, a biologist at Colorado State University has taught plant proteins how to detect explosives. Never let it be said that horticulture can’t fight terrorism.
Picture this at an airport, perhaps in as soon as four years: A terrorist rolls through the sliding doors of a terminal with a bomb packed into his luggage (or his underwear). All of a sudden, the leafy, verdant gardenscape ringing the gates goes white as a sheet. That’s the proteins inside the plants telling authorities that they’ve picked up the chemical trace of the guy’s arsenal.
Garbage Hotel Opens In Madrid
Photo: TresSugar
Looking for a place to stay in Madrid? Make an ec0-friendly reservation at the Beach Garbage Hotel! The Leader Post reports:
A new hotel has opened in the heart of Madrid proudly declaring that it’s complete rubbish.
More of a wooden shack than a five-star establishment, the walls of the Beach Garbage Hotel are strewn with detritus dragged up by the tide, recovered from landfills or snapped up at flea markets.
Among the wall decorations: Plastic drums, wooden frames, musical instruments, striped socks, tyres, and children’s books.
In the five rooms there are street lights, wobbly sideboards, and torn Persian rugs, ready to welcome the lucky winners of a Facebook competition whose prize was a free stay.
Out front, there is a small patch of sand and palm trees.
[Continues at Leader Post]
Against Tourism: The Art Of Traveling
Dante’s Inferno provides us with what is perhaps the most apt picture of tourism to date. More specifically, it is in the first layer of Hell, Limbo, that Dante depicts the circumstances that contextualize tourism and the individual who undertakes it, i.e. the tourist.
Like the unbaptized and virtuous Pagans whose torture is the inability to imagine something greater than their rational minds can conceive, the tourist never ventures beyond the predetermined image of the places they visit. The tourist deals only in images, whether it is the image of the Grand Canyon that was promised to him by the travel agent, or the image he must make of it (by snapping a picture) in order for it to become real. The tourist cannot know the mystery or grandeur of the Grand Canyon as it stretches across the horizon, she can only seen it in comparison to the image she was promised.…
Exploring The Secrets Of Underground New York
All above-ground metropolises harbor shadow cities beneath. A New York Times reporter spent five days on a subterranean urban hiking expedition, spelunking through NYC’s labyrinthine sewer system. His colorful travel journal details encounters with wildlife and “mole people.” Here’s how to go on an invigorating adventure into the unknown, without leaving city limits:
Tuesday, 12:36 a.m.
Exterior Street, the BronxWe inspect our exit point — a manhole in the middle of the road. Will Hunt, a bespectacled 26-year-old who is writing a book about the underground (“The last frontier,” he says, “in an over-mapped, Google-Earthed world.”) will serve as our spotter. Will’s job is to watch for traffic: ascending from the hole, we do not wish to be hit by a car. We are to communicate by walkie-talkie. Will ties a long pink ribbon to the inside of the manhole cover. Dangling downward, this will be our signal we have reached the end.
1:20…
Damanhur: My Sci-Fi Theophany Under the Mountain
Joseph Allen writes about his visit to Damanhur, a sizeable New Age commune nestled in the Italian Alps. The community is best known for the stunning Temples of Humankind. From Confessions of a CyberCasualty:
December, 2007. The distant Alps are covered in snow. Small flakes swirl in the wind, dancing around red clay statues of muscular giants and voluptuous goddesses, reminiscent of Egypt. Most prominent is the falcon-headed god, Horus, facing the Fire Altar where the looming statues converge.
I start to walk into the grove of the Earth Altar, but my guide Shama tells me I should go no further.
“It is dangerous for anyone who is not spiritually prepared,” she warns me. “Very dangerous.”
I would be willing to chance it, but I suppose rules are rules.
In the distance is Monti Pelati, the sacred mountain of the Damanhurians. It is said that more Synchronic Lines converge there than any place in the world. These lines are like the Earth’s…
Amtrak To Allow Guns On Most Trains
Want to travel through the country with your firearms, but can’t get through airport security? No worries, take the train! Amtrak will soon allow passengers to transport their firearms, unloaded and stored away. The Sacramento Bee reports:
Reversing a near decadelong ban, Amtrak will allow passengers to bring guns on most trains starting next month, including several that stop in Sacramento.
The change, pushed by gun rights advocates and ordered by Congress, aligns Amtrak’s firearms policy with air travel rules that allow unloaded guns to be stored in locked baggage holds.
Federal Homeland Security officials on Monday said they are OK with guns being on trains as long as security protocols are enforced.
“It’s deemed safe and appropriate,” federal Transportation Security Administration spokesman Nico Melendez said. “If people follow the rules, it’s pretty simple.”
[Continues at The Sacramento Bee]
No Holiday At Chernobyl
A few years ago disinformation published an alternative travel book by Martin Cohen, No Holiday: 80 Places You Don’t Want To Visit. Somewhat tongue in cheek, Martin created a grueling world tour of political and cultural excursions to the likes of North Korea’s DMZ, Tora Bora in Afghanistan, and, first in line, radiation-blitzed Chernobyl in Russia.
It turns out that Martin was ahead of the curve; AFP reports that Chernobyl is now a top tourist destination! Only 79 more to go Martin…
CHERNOBYL, Ukraine — Yellow Geiger counter in hand, the guide announces that radiation levels are 35 times higher than normal. Welcome to Chernobyl, the site in 1986 of the worst nuclear disaster in history and now an attraction visited by thousands of tourists every year.
Nearly 25 years after a reactor at the Soviet-era plant exploded, the irradiated zone around Chernobyl is attracting curious visitors from around the world, from nuclear specialists to ordinary tourists, willing to pay 160 dollars (122 euros) a day to visit the zone…
My Black Eyed Apocalypse
The JoeBot writes on Confessions of a CyberCasualty:
Last year, I toured with the Black Eyed Peas on their Japan/Australia run. It was dubbed The E.N.D. — World Tour, which was appropriate. The production is a dazzling metaphor for the end of civilization.
As I get older, I frequently find myself forced to compromise my principles — whether ethical or aesthetic — for a higher standard of living. My job is to fly lights, sound, and video — not to judge the artists. My crew chief said this a dozen times. After all, I was paid well, enjoyed fine meals and plush hotel rooms, had fantastic adventures on the streets of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Melbourne, and Auckland, and I only had to wear a BEP t-shirt one time — when my laundry was dirty. Still, the damage is evident.
I began to absorb the insidious beats and lobotomizing lyrics through constant exposure. To make matters worse, I was born with a hyperactive cerebral sequencer that will sample and loop any catchy tune within a 100′ radius. You hear about nuclear lab technicians who glow green when the lights go out. Well, for months after I came home you could hear “Boom Boom Pow” playing from my head in a quiet room. Just another occupational hazard …
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 a bustling place, full of trains and welcoming visitors.
Unfortunately, you can only visit via a website created from the imagination…
