Hulleye Comes By!

Zbigniew Brzezinski on The Daily Show, speaks some very harsh truths. But as he so notes, there is salvation to be had if we can survive till next year.

“[President George W. Bush] has a vision which can be described with two other words: Manichaean paranoia … the notion that he is leading the forces of good against the empire of evil, that in that setting, the fact that we are morally superior justifies us committing immoral acts. And that is a very dangerous posture for the country that is the number one global power. … The fact is he squandered our credibility, our legitimacy, and even respect for our power.”

Speaking of Enron, I got an interesting forwarded email today which explains social economic values using cows rather well. I’ll just paste it below. Enron is explained perfectly.

SOCIALISM: You have 2 cows, and you give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISM : You have 2 cows. The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM : You have 2 cows. The State takes both and sells you some milk.

BUREAUCRATISM : You have 2 cows. The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away…

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.

SURREALISM : You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take
harmonica lessons AN AMERICAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.

ENRON VENTURE CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public buys your bull.

THE ANDERSEN MODEL: You have two cows. You shred them.

A FRENCH CORPORATION: You have two cows. You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create a clever cow cartoon image called ‘cowkimon’ and market it worldwide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are. You decide to have lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 2 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION: You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you. You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity, and arrest the reporter who reported the real situation.

A BRITISH CORPORATION: You have two cows. Both are mad.

IRAQI CORPORATION: Everyone thinks you have lots of cows. You tell them that you have none. No-one believes you, so they bomb the **** out of you and invade your country. You still have no cows, but at least now you are part of a Democracy….

AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. Business seems pretty good. You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

The reality is that after eighteen years and countless false promises, ExxonMobil has still not paid the billions of dollars in punitive damages that the courts have determined it owes the spill victims–this despite the fact that the company posted the most profitable year in 2006 of any corporation in history. In 1994, a federal court in Anchorage, Alaska, awarded $5 billion in punitive damages to fishermen, Native Alaskans, and other plaintiffs in a class action suit against the oil giant. But rather than accepting its obligations Exxon has been fighting the verdict, employing hundreds of lawyers, filing countless appeals and effectively buying science that supports its claims.

This has added injury to injury as more than 30,000 people whose lives and livelihood were disrupted by the spill have now been dragged through years of litigation. During this time, according to the advocacy group ExposeExxon whose excellent mailing prompted this column, 6,000 plaintiffs have died waiting for compensation.

Keep reading at The Nation.

By the way, I also finished reading “Confessions of an Enron Executive: A Whistleblowers Story“. A fascinating insight on how greedy corporations can really get and how the term business ethics is an oxymoron.

not sure how many of you caught this but the french govt. has recently decided to publish it’s entire archive of ufo sightings, news, video, imagery etc. online. this is just a link to their press release. better luck trying to get to the archive which is linked on that page. it’s VERY slow since the entire world is trying to download it at the same time.

Since the dawn of time, people have observed all kinds of phenomena in the skies—often with interest, sometimes with fear. Over the centuries, these phenomena have given rise to varied interpretations, usually based on belief in superior beings or divine powers.

In Greek mythology, for instance, natural phenomena like wind, storms and lightning were sent by the gods to show their approval or anger at the schemes and intrigues of mortals.

More recently, research and discoveries have helped further our understanding of our environment and demystify many of these phenomena. However, the advent of new technologies, exploration systems and spaceflight in the 20th century has led to renewed interest in the “unknown”.

In response, Geipan, the French UAP research and information group, investigates unidentified aerospace phenomena and makes its findings available to the public.

One of the most bizarre weather patterns in the solar system has been photographed at Saturn, where astronomers have spotted a huge, six-sided feature circling the north pole.

Rather than the normally sinuous cloud structures seen on all planets that have atmospheres, this thing is a hexagon.

The honeycomb feature has been seen before. NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged it more than two decades ago. Now, having spotted it with the Cassini spacecraft, scientists conclude it is a long-lasting oddity.

more at msnbc

Now scientists create a sheep that’s 15% human

Scientists have created the world’s first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.

Vigilante attack sheep guard British village

Leighterton is protected by 60-year-old retired farmworker Keith Clifford and his herd of “highly-trained” attack sheep.

9/11 remains possibly used on roads

Debris that may have contained bits of bone from victims of the World Trade Center attacks was used to fill potholes and pave city roads: and apparently there’s a landfill in Staten Island called Fresh Kills!

Fantastic voyage: From science fiction to reality
Succeeded for the first time in guiding, in vivo and via computer control, a microdevice inside an artery, at a speed of 10 centimetres a second

3pointD.com reports:

NASA, the U.S. space agency, is getting ready to launch its own exploration into virtual space. NASAs Learning Technologies arm has issued an intramural call for proposal ideas for the development of a massively multiplayer online game that is intended to be the front-end of a larger synthetic environment. The program is funded to the tune of $1 million a year for fiscal years 2007, 2008 and 2009.

For the first time, physicists have devised a way to make visible light travel in the opposite direction that it normally bends when passing from one material to another, like from air through water or glass. The phenomenon is known as negative refraction and could in principle be used to construct optical microscopes for imaging things as small as molecules, and even to create cloaking devices for rendering objects invisible.”

WTFCNN is one of my favourite new daily reads. it highlights cnn headlines and then you say out loud WTF!?!?!

edit: fixed the link and goes to correct website now.

Desktop Tower Defense.

Can’t stop playing it.

A French map shows that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to discover Australia in the early 1520s, almost 250 years before Captain Cook claimed them for Britain. “‘The Vallard cartographer has put these individual charts together like a jigsaw puzzle. Without clear compass markings its possible to join the southern chart in two different ways. My theory is it had been wrongly joined.’ Using a computer Trickett rotated the southern part of the Vallard map 90 degrees to produce a map which accurately depicts Australia’s east coast.

An anonymous author (they cannot legally reveal their identity) describes their National Security Letter gag order. Since the Patriot Act, the FBI has been sending out tens of thousands of these Letters, the recipients of which have no choice but to comply and keep absolutely quiet about it.

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand — a context that the FBI still won’t let me discuss publicly — I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power.

this time, the top 50 most important people on the web. they shape what we read, hear, write and talk about in our daily lives. it’s an interesting list with everyone from brin, page and schmidt to schneier, jobs, newmark, rosedale, scoble, cerf and many others.

St. Louis University researchers have concocted batteries fueled by almost any kind of sugar, from tree sap to flat soda, and that could be used to power everything from computers to cell phones. Their thinking: If sugar can jack up the human body, why not electronics?

Chinese people have customarily burned fake currency called Hell Money to honor (and equip) their ancestors in the afterlife.

Now, in keeping with modern times, they’re burning paper viagras!

Cemeteries in China are selling paper replicas of Viagra, which are to be burned for dead relatives so they can have sex in the afterlife, state media reported today.

According to the Nanjing Morning News, the paper Viagra is being snapped up by customers, along with images of condoms and heavily made-up bar girls, who are women employed by bars to act as companions to male customers and make them spend a lot of money.

so i’ve been on blogging hiatus. i’ve tried to keep up with most of the blogs i like and read but things have been keeping me busy lately. lots of stuff happened recently. woolmer’s dead. it’s warm today. pakistan and india didn’t make it to the super 8’s. britons are held captive in iran. and i won’t bother mentioning all the geek stuff i’ve been reading. anyway i’ll continue on as if nothing happened yet.

Looks like the DC gods chose today to rain upon the earth many interesting new developments about next year’s Batsie adventure The Dark Knight. First up, Maggie Gyllenhaal is in final talks to star opposite Christian Bale as Rachel Dawes. Katie Holmes, as you may grudgingly remember, played Rachel in 2005’s Batman Begins, but dropped out of the project earlier in the year. Joining them are Heath Ledger as the Joker, Morgan Freeman, Michael Cain, Gary Oldman and Aaran Eckhart.There’s also this little tidbit. According to a source initially reported by Aint It Cool News, Batman “changes his suit halfway through the film - and its a major plot point as to why and how this happens.” No details yet on the Joker’s get-up, but there’s certainly no way in hell we’re getting those infamous Bat-nipples again.

Warner Bros. Pictures is planning for a July 18, 2008 release for TDK. Director Christopher Nolan is set to begin filming either in late spring or early summer.

here’s a countdown of the top 20 coolest comic book weapons. who do you think they’ve missed?

5 - Wolverine’s claws – Wolverine and X-men

While we originally thought that these razor sharp Adamantium claws were added on to Wolvie during his Weapon X days, relatively recent comics have revealed that he always had claws, they just used to be made of bone. Whether made from bone or Adamantium (the hardest metal in the Marvel U, unbreakable and indestructable) these claws have most likely killed more people than the Black Plague, and don’t appear to be stopping anytime soon.

remember click the country and improve your geography game i linked to a while back. well this is a more fun game. this clock is scary as it counts down while you try and list the 192 UN member states. i only got 104 countries before the clock ran down. how many can you name?

Last week the Associated Press did an experiment: it had a blackout on all news about Paris Hilton, just to see if anyone cared.

Turns out, people noticed:

The reaction was to the idea of the ban, not the effects of it. There was some internal hand-wringing. Some felt we were tinkering dangerously with the news. Whom, they asked, would we ban next? Others loved the idea. “I vote we do the same for North Korea,” one AP writer said facetiously.

… an internal AP memo about the ban had found its way to the outside world. The New York Observer quoted it on Wednesday, and the Gawker.com gossip site linked to it. Howard Stern was heard mentioning the ban on his radio show, and calls came in from various news outlets asking us about it. On Editor and Publisher magazine’s Web site, a reader wrote: “This is INCREDIBLE, finally a news organization that can see through this evil woman.” And another: “You guys are my heroes!”

Ken Silverstein in Harper’s Magazine:

Other countries, as former senior CIA official Michael Scheuer reminded me, do not look at the world from the same point of view as the United States. “The first duty of any intelligence agency,” he said, “is to protect the national interest. Pakistan is not going to destroy the Taliban because at some point they would like to see the Taliban back in power. They cannot tolerate a pro-Indian, pro-American, pro-Russian, pro-Iranian government in Afghanistan. They already have an unstable Western border and have to worry about a country of one million Hindus that has nuclear bombs.”

That point was echoed by a second retired CIA official, who asked to remain anonymous. “The United States,” he told me, “has never recognized the essential security concerns of Pakistan, which are on its eastern border. India can be in Islamabad in three days. We tell them India would never do that, but they have fought three wars against India. Pakistan cannot be put in a position where it might have to fight a war on two fronts, from India and Afghanistan.”

Keep reading.

The Islamic republic of Pakistan has won the distinction of producing the Muslim world’s first 20-year-old malt whisky.

…

Under Pakistani law it cannot be drunk by 97 per cent of the country and it cannot be exported.

But the production of the rare whisky has coincided with an unprecedented debate in Pakistan about the prohibition on drinking alcohol. In 1977 the former prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, bowed to the demands of Islamic political parties and imposed an alcohol ban on Muslims.

Since then the brewery has officially been catering for the three per cent of Pakistan’s population that comprises of the non-Muslim communities of Christians, Hindus and those of Mr Bhandara’s Zoroastrian faith.

However, the ingenuity of thirsty Pakistanis means that rather a lot of the 660,000 gallons of beer that Murree produces every year and the 110,000 gallons of whisky that is stored in its cellars reaches a Muslim clientele.

“I think 99 per cent of my customers are Muslim,” said Mr Bhandara, who is an Oxford-educated MP.

The official punishment sanctioned by the Koran of 80 lashes with an oil-soaked whip has never been applied.

Mohsin Hamid’s second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been published and been reviewed by the Guardian.

The janissaries of the Ottoman empire were captured Christian boys trained to fight against their own people, which they did with singular ferocity. This interesting class of warrior is described during a business lunch to Changez, the young hero of Mohsin Hamid’s second novel, at a moment of crisis over his own identity. Born in Pakistan, educated at Princeton and currently the hottest new employee at a New York firm specialising in ruthless appraisals of ailing companies being targeted for takeover, Changez recognises himself in the description. “I was a modern-day janissary,” he observes, “a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine …”

The recognition completes a process of inward transformation that began when he realised he was half-gladdened by the World Trade Center attacks, and it now prompts him to sabotage his own high-flying career, to give up his pursuit of the beautiful, troubled Wasp princess Erica and go back to Lahore. There, bearded and generally reacculturated, he meets an American in a restaurant in the Old Anarkali district, and buttonholes him with his life story.

Urban, suburban, and even rural parents cite a number of everyday reasons why their children spend less time in nature than they themselves did, including disappearing access to natural areas, competition from television and computers, dangerous traffic, more homework, and other pressures. Most of all, parents cite fear of stranger-danger. Conditioned by round-the-clock news coverage, they believe in an epidemic of abductions by strangers, despite evidence that the number of child-snatchings (about a hundred a year) has remained roughly the same for two decades, and that the rates of violent crimes against young people have fallen to well below 1975 levels.

Yes, there are risks outside our homes. But there are also risks in raising children under virtual protective house arrest: threats to their independent judgment and value of place, to their ability to feel awe and wonder, to their sense of stewardship for the Earth—and, most immediately, threats to their psychological and physical health. The rapid increase in childhood obesity leads many health-care leaders to worry that the current generation of children may be the first since World War II to die at an earlier age than their parents. Getting kids outdoors more, riding bikes, running, swimming—and, especially, experiencing nature directly—could serve as an antidote to much of what ails the young.

Keep reading. 

Who says global warming isn’t around? This is the first winter that Tokyo has had in 131 years without a snowfall.

The Japanese capital has experienced its first winter without snow for 131 years, weather officials say.

The Japan Meteorological Agency said it had recorded no snow in central Tokyo between December and the end of February, the official winter months.

This the first time no snow has fallen in winter since records began in 1876, the agency said.