2011 April

Open Wide

  • The lobster with which a woman was masturbating defecates into her vagina, implanting brine shrimp eggs which later hatch inside her.
  • Already Passed by Congress On October 5, 1982, Dr. Brain T. Clifford of the Pentagon announced at a press conference (“The Star”, New York, Oct. 5, 1982) that contact between U.S. citizens and extra-terrestrials or their vehicles is strictly illegal. According to a law already on the books (Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations, adopted on July 16, 1969, before the Apollo moon shots), anyone guilty of such contact automatically becomes a wanted criminal to be jailed for one year and fined $5,000.
  • Gundersen Postulates Unit 3 Explosion May Have Been Prompt Criticality in Fuel Pool
  • The question raises a fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds? Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to quartz oscillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality. The rapid eye movements in the mirror, known as saccades, aren’t the only things that get edited out. The jittery camera shake of everyday vision is similarly smoothed over, and our memories are often radically revised. What else are we missing? When Eagleman was a boy, his favorite joke had a turtle walking into a sheriff’s office. “I’ve just been attacked by three snails!” he shouts. “Tell me what happened,” the sheriff replies. The turtle shakes his head: “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”
  • Fukushima, or rather the almost 200 tons of fuel present in the four reactors and the 2800 tons of old reactor cores in big 40 ft deep swimming pools that stand over the reactors, represent a lethal and potentially apocalyptic contaminant for the internal poisoning of the whole human race. Taken together, the active reactors and old cores are equivalent to 2000 atomic bombs of 500 kilotons each. Fukushima is then, capable of dispersing in the biosphere, five times the long lived breathable radioactive poisons, cesium 137, Strontium 90, plutonium 239, etc., than all the combined nuclear detonations to date. It is as if Fukushima were equal to a 1000 megaton Atomic Bombs; or expressed another way, 2,000 individual 500 kiloton Atomic Bombs.
  • One argument he consistently makes is that while tech enthusiasts regularly highlight the benefits of new Internet innovations for activists, rarely do they consider the other side of the equation: how technology can also aid enemies of democracy and free expression. He suggests that dictators are not nearly so afraid of the Internet as we might imagine, and that in many cases they have effectively co-opted bloggers and mined social networks to promote their repressive ends. “States used to torture to get this kind of information,” he says. “Now all they have to do is go onto Facebook.”
  • A Connecticut mother who says she wanted to give her son a better education will be arraigned on Wednesday on charges for enrolling the 6-year-old in another town, sparking outrage and support from people nationwide.

    Tanya McDowell, a 33-year-old homeless woman whose last known address was in Bridgeport, Conn, is scheduled to be arraigned on charges of larceny and conspiracy to commit larceny for allegedly stealing $15,686 from Norwalk schools. Prosecutors allege that figure is the value of her son’s education at Norwalk’s Brookside Elementary School between the time he was illegally enrolled in January and McDowell’s arrest on April 14. If convicted, she faces up to 20 years in prison.

  • Shopping for fake Louis Vuittons or Chanel bags on Canal street in Chinatown has become a requisite tourist activity. Only now you could go to jail for it.

    City councilwoman Margaret Chin, who represents the Chinatown district, is introducing a bill this Thursday that proposes harsh punishment for shoppers caught purchasing counterfeits, the New York Post is reporting. Under Chin’s bill, that fake LV could cost you $1,000 in fines (still not quite the cost of some of the real deals) or up to a year in prison.

    Sound harsh? That’s the point.

  • The startling claim went without controversy until today, when Good Magazine pointed out that Trump’s “plan” to seize $1.5 trillion from Iraq’s oil profits to “reemburse ourselves” for the invasion and subsequent occupation would actually be an explicit violation of international law — a violation considered to be a war crime.

    “According to the 1907 Hague Convention, ‘pillaging,’ the stealing of valuable goods from a locality, especially during combat, is a war crime, regardless of what you feel you deserve,” noted Cord Jefferson, Good’s senior editor. “In the Hague’s exact words: ‘The pillage of a town or place, even when taken by assault, is prohibited.’”

  • ‘He probably looked like somebody who probably had some beef,’ he said. But Mr Muhammad added that he wasn’t surprised by the attack.

    ‘I’ve seen just about everything that could happen in this community. I renamed this avenue here body-a-week avenue,’ he said.

    ‘I’ve been here since 1989. I think I’ve seen at least 15 murders on this block in that period of time. It’s a dangerous block.’

  • Lesson of the day… when a police officer asks you a simple question, DO NOT LIE! A simple yes from this guy would have saved him a lot of bruises from the Las Vegas police dept. My view on this: cops dodge bullets every day and deal with all kinds of liars… for the cops safety, Mr – I KNOW MY RIGHTS should be treated no differently than a street thug once he lies to an officer.
  • # Third plateau: At 7.5 to 15.0 mg/kg, effects include flanging of visual effects, difficulty recognizing people or objects, chaotic blindness, dreamlike vision, inability to comprehend language, abstract hallucinations, delayed reaction time, decision making impairment, feelings of peace and quiet, near complete loss of motor coordination, short-term memory impairment, and/or feelings of rebirth.
    # Fourth plateau: At 15.0 mg/kg or more, an individual may experience a perceived loss of contact and control with their own body, changes in visual perception, out-of-body experiences, perceptions of contact with “superior” beings, other miscellaneous delusions, lack of movement or desire to move, rapid heart rate, complete blindness, increased hearing, and intensification of third plateau effects.

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I Can’t Gitmo Satisfaction

  • Atomic Test Archive
  • Nasa says super solar storm coming in 2012. It could knock out all electricity on the planet!
  • Terry Holdbrooks is a former guard at the Guantanamo Bay detention camps. He was stationed at GTMO in 2003 and 2004. During his time there, he converted to Islam. He is now a vocal critic of the camp.
  • Alan Wolfson creates handmade miniature sculptures of urban environments. Complete with complex interior views and lighting effects, a major work can take several months to complete.

    The pieces are usually not exact representations of existing locations, but rather a combination of details from many different locations along with much of the detail from the artist’s imagination.

    There is a narrative element to the work. Scenarios are played out through the use of inanimate objects in the scene. There are never people present, only things they have left behind; garbage, graffiti, or a tip on a diner table, all give the work a sense of motion and a storyline.

  • Gen Antoshkin said he thought the Japanese were simply unable to cope on their own. “It is clear that they do not have enough strength or means. They need to ask the international community for help,” he said. “I think the Japanese catastrophe is already more serious than Chernobyl. The main thing is that they do not allow it to become three, four or five times more serious.”

    Gen Antoshkin, 68, was in charge of Soviet pilots who flew over Chernobyl’s stricken fourth reactor, dropping lead, sand and clay from the air to try to contain radiation. In the ten days after the accident on 26 April 1986, his pilots flew 4,000 such flights, exposing themselves to huge radiation doses.

  • Even to a layperson, it is obvious that this means that the huge hydrogen explosion at unit 3 must have occurred in the reactor itself, and that the entire top of the reactor containment vessel was obliterated, ejecting the contents of the core – as well as the spent fuel pool- into the atmosphere.
    This means, obviously, that significant quantities of plutonium were released, and that the release of radiation from unit 3 alone must be many times higher than has been admitted for the entire
    complex – Chernobyl pales in comparison.
  • The debate about coffee’s merits has raged ever since. Is it a pernicious brew that causes impotence, arterio-sclerosis, heart failure, indigestion, insomnia, premature old age, pancreatic cancer, birth defects and bad breath, as well as poverty among the farmers who grow it? Or is it an inky nectar that helps prevent Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, liver cancer, gallstones, type 2 diabetes and colon cancer, improves motor skills and reaction times, promotes fair trade to the impoverished south and stimulates both intellectual acuity and social interaction?
  • This really puts the whole DIY-maker-homebrew thing in perspective: Libya’s rebels aren’t just working with a hijacked cell phone network, but hobbling together their own weapons out of discarded military stockpiles. As this Al Jazeera report shows, they’re welding their own rocket launch platforms, affixing helicopter guns to pick-up trucks, and builidng missile firing controls out of light switches.
  • 5. Congress hasn’t changed a single law on oil and gas drilling in the past year. A year later, the liability cap for companies that cause a major spill is still just $75 million, companies with dismal safety records can still obtain new leases, and they can still avoid compensating families when workers die on rigs. In January, the National Oil Spill Commission released 300 pages of findings and recommendations that Congress has largely ignored.
  • As world marks the Chernobyl anniversary, many say that the world has failed to learn the lessons on nuclear safety that the tragedy provided. RT talks to Professor Christopher Busby, Scientific secretary of the European Committee on radiation risks, for a little more insight on 21st century’s most serious nuclear crisis at Fukushima.
  • Al-Qaeda plotted to blow you up, using your Sega. Detainee Abu Faraj al-Libi’s leaked records show that he was slotted to fill Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s leadership role after alleged 9/11 mastermind Mohammed was imprisoned, Wired reports. “Detainee headed an operation to build remote detonators and conceal them in children’s video game cartridges,” his file reads, and more than 20 ‘radio-type detonating devices,” designed to be triggered with cell phones, were found in a raid of a safe-house al-Libi ran, the detonators built into the back of Sega Genesis game cartridges.
  • A trove of more than 700 classified military documents provides new and detailed accounts of the men who have done time at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, and offers new insight into the evidence against the 172 men still locked up there.
  • Highbrow animated GIFs? You know, the visual medium best known for doing stuff like this? Apparently so. That, anyway, is the mission of a New York-based photographer named Jamie Beck. Beck calls her creations “cinemagraphs” — “more than a photo, but not quite a video” — and has posted a series featuring supermodel Coco Rocha to her Tumblr.
  • There is a saying that when one lives on the mountain, one lives off the mountain. If you live next to a mountain of garbage, then what do you live off of? Several tens of farmers in Nanjing have for many years gathered near the Shuige Garbage Landfill, and collected garbage from the landfill to feed their pigs, every year sending over ten thousand adult pigs to the slaughterhouse; At the same time, next to the Jiaoze Garbage Landfill, there is also someone who is “living off the mountain when one lives on the mountain”.
  • Uesugi also notes that at TEPCO press conferences, which are now being held at company headquarters, foreign correspondents and Japanese freelancers regularly ask probing questions while mainstream journalists simply record and report company statements reiterating that the situation is basically under control and there is nothing to worry about. One reason for this, Uesugi suggests, is that TEPCO, a giant media sponsor, has an annual 20 billion yen advertising budget. “The media keeps defending the information from TEPCO!” “The Japanese media today is no different from the wartime propaganda media that kept repeating to the very end that ‘Japan is winning the war against America,’” Uesugi exclaimed.
  • Scotch tape lets you see through frosted glass
  • A holy war erupted yesterday at a Sikh temple in Queens — where worshippers wielding swords and cricket bats interrupted a prayer session to attack their rivals in a vicious power struggle, police and witnesses said.

    Rival factions at the Baba Makhan Shah Lobana Sikh Center in South Richmond Hill have been bickering for months over control, authorities and members said.

    The dispute reached a bloody climax yesterday when the infighting turned violent, accompanied by screams, taunts and death threats.

    The alleged attackers — armed with at least one sword about 40 inches long, and another sword, according to a witness — were part of the old guard that had been recently voted out of power but refused to accept the decision, even going to court to challenge the election.
    Thanks Smart Crew

  • Files released by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks have revealed that the US believed many of those held at Guantanamo Bay were innocent or only low-level operatives.
  • I’m delighted to cross-post below an interview with Khaled Ben Mustapha, one of seven French citizens held at Guantánamo, who was released in March 2005, and who recently spoke to Arnaud Mafille, an intern for Cageprisoners. This is a fascinating interview for a number of reasons; primarily, because of Ben Mustapha’s reflections on his time in Afghanistan, on how he and others were sold to US forces, and on Guantánamo as part of a war on Islam, and also for his explanations of how he and the other French ex-prisoners have been treated in France.
  • A massive leak of more than 700 military documents, attributed to infamous transparency group WikiLeaks, was released Sunday night. Much of the new information deals with detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, records that begin immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks and range to 2009, including documents relating to 172 prisoners still held at the controversial detention facility.

    Here are seven shocking revelations about Guantanamo Bay and the practices there.

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The Bloodiest Oil

  • …Or is it mold?!
  • On April 19, Democracy Now ran a brief clip in which British author Muttitt called to mind Blair’s assurances to a TV audience on Feb. 6, 2003, six weeks before the war: “The idea that we’re interested in Iraq’s oil is absurd, it’s one of the most absurd conspiracy theories you can imagine.”

    Muttitt pointed out that, as Blair was saying this, a secret (until now) Foreign Office document setting out British strategy toward Iraqi oil asserted, “Britain has an absolutely vital interest in Iraq’s oil.”

    The London Mail Online summed up the contradictions on April 20 with classic English understatement. It noted that the flurry of meetings between oil executives and the Labour government in late 2002 “appear to be at odds with their insistence Iraq’s vast oil reserves were not a consideration ahead of the March 2003 invasion.”

  • Washington Post reporters obtained exclusive government documents and traveled to the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay to provide an unprecedented look at a base and prison complex that served as a central component in the Bush administration’s war on terror. It remains a key repository of detainees picked up in anti-terrorist operations. Founded in 1903, Guantanamo Bay is the oldest American military installation overseas, traditionally serving as a refueling port and a base of operations for drug interdiction and refugee missions. It covers 45 square miles of land and water along the southeastern tip of Cuba.
  • In Hong Kong, because of the space, apartments are small and expensive. Gary Chang, an architect, decided to design a 344 sq. ft. apartment to be able to change into 24 different designs, all by just sliding panels and walls. He calls this the “Domestic Transformer.”
  • Is that a chick?
  • Revok, one of Los Angeles’ best known graffiti writers, was arrested as he prepared to board a plane to Ireland at Los Angeles International Airport, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reported.

    Jason Williams, a.k.a. Revok, was taken into custody Thursday for an outstanding arrest warrant for failing to pay restitution, according to sheriff’s Capt. Mike Parker.

    Authorities claim Revok is a member of the graffiti crew Mad Society Kings, or MSK. Officials from the sheriff’s department were notified that there was an outstanding warrant against Revok for failure to repay victims of previous vandalism incidents.

    That led to his arrest, officials said.

    Revok is being held in the Los Angeles County Jail in lieu of $320,000 bail.

  • Thanks Baller
  • “So what will the Second Coming look like?” Amanpour wondered.

    “Well, the bible says that every eye is going to see it. And, you know, I thought how is that going to happen? There’s so many phones today. And just look at what’s happening in Libya or Egypt and everybody has got their phone up, and everybody is taking recordings and posting it on YouTube and whatever and sending it to you or — and they get shown around the world. I don’t know but he said they’ll be coming on the clouds and the world is going to moan. They’re going to groan,” Graham explained.

    “I don’t mean to be disrespectful but could there be a second coming by social media? Is that what you mean?” the ABC host asked.

  • A former Longmont-area firefighter has pleaded guilty to forcing his 11-year-old stepdaughter to watch him urinate in an adult diaper before changing him. His stepdaughter was also allegedly forced to wear an adult diaper as punishment on two occasions.

    Thanks Ramon.

  • Eco-Activist Killed, Composted His Girlfriend
  • Researchers at the University of Technology Sydney have created a new material that is lighter, less dense, harder, and stronger than steel. But this material isn’t one of those breakthroughs that only sounds good on paper. It is paper, and it could be a game-changer for materials science if it can live up to researchers’ hopes.

    This graphene paper is constructed of graphite reformed by chemical processes into monolayer hexagonal carbon lattices stacked as thin as a sheet of paper, and it is remarkably strong.

  • The brainchild of a now defunct government research organization, the apple-cheeked animated Little Mr. Pluto debuted in the mid-1990s wearing a green helmet with a pair of antennae and the chemical symbol for plutonium, Pu. Promising to “never be scary or dangerous,” Little Pluto extolled the benefits of plutonium, which Japanese nuclear authorities have viewed as a fuel of the future for fast breeder reactor technology.
  • A refreshingly simple new idea has emerged in the complicated world of high energy physics. It proposes that the early universe was a one-dimensional line. Not an exploding sphere, not a chaotic ball of fire. Just a simple line of pure energy.

    Over time, as that line grew, it crisscrossed and intersected itself more and more, gradually forming a tightly interwoven fabric, which, at large distances, appeared as a 2-D plane. More time passed and the 2-D universe expanded and twisted about, eventually creating a web — the 3-D universe we see today.

    This concept, called “vanishing dimensions” to describe what happens the farther one looks back in time, has been gaining traction within the high energy physics community in recent months.

  • Don’t forget about ‘The Lone Gunmen’ pilot episode… aired MARCH 2001
  • One of the Depression’s highest-grossing films was an outrageous fabrication, a scandalous and suggestive gorilla epic that set box office records across the country.
  • Source: US National Archives, Archive Research Catalog

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