World Affairs
How appalling. Read this NYT article to see the scare tactics Cheney is using: QUOTE Mr. Bush’ running mate, Vice President Dick Cheney, stepped up his criticism of Mr. Kerry’s leadership by telling a small audience in Des Moines that if voters choose Mr. Kerry as president, the nation would be vulnerable to another terrorist [...]
It is utterly incomprehensible how the U.S. Justice department can have a secret law that people are supposed to adhere to when they don’t know what it is, and that when challenged in court, that they would claim that the court case itself must also be kept secret, because knowledge of the case would inhibit [...]
Wired wrote this great article on the MoveOnPAC, which was started by two founders, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, only six years ago and which has become “one of the most revered activist groups in America, supporting Democratic political candidates with tens of millions of dollars in advertising, as well as countless hours of telephone [...]
Life imitates art. Art imitates life. “Godsend“, a movie opening August 17th, starring Robert de Niro as a doctor who clones children for parents who have lost a child due to early accidents or other loss, has a real-life equivalent. Or so says the man in question – Doctor Panos Zavos. Quoting from a news.scotsman.com [...]
This graphic clearly illustrates what was up until now a difficult to understand terror alert system. Thanks to bettybowers.com.
This article at Newsday.com talks about the release of the findings of a major study being presented at the Annual Meeting of the European Society of Cardiology. The research [...] followed 29,000 people in 52 countries. It took a decade and 262 scientists to complete the work, which, according to the editor of The Lancet [...]
Quoting from Mark Morford’s new rant on SF Gate: QUOTE So, let’s see: Bona-fide war hero turned incredibly articulate, educated, gifted Vietnam War protester and respected senator on one side, alcoholic AWOL failed-businessman born-again pampered daddy’s boy evangelical Christian on the other. Is this really the contest? Bush slugs gin and tonics like Evian while [...]
I don’t even have the energy to write much about this much-maligned system that was CAPPS and then CAPPS 2 and now SecureFlight. It is essentially a passenger screening system (like the flawed one I wrote about here and here) that has cost $100M to date and that is being relaunched with a new, friendly [...]
Bruce is one of my favourite security authors. He has a very macro view of the world and his reasoning on security issues is always well-thought out and pragmatic. He has written an article on CNET about how he sees the ongoing American dissolution into a police state that is happening right now. QUOTE We [...]
I am absolutely stunned by the simplicity and brilliance of this composite graph on Fred Wilson’s site that shows the last four years of opinion polls on George W. Bush. The most informative thing is the amount of trust and faith that has been repeatedly handed to him on 9/11 and then Iraq and then [...]
Dear American Friend: We’re sorry you’re down there. Feel free to come up and marry a Canadian anytime, we’d love to have you. You can no longer travel without papers in your own country (as designated by the secret laws that you are not allowed to read about.) The FBI are showing up on your [...]
Erroll Morris, the brains behind the much parodied, often copied “Switch” ads for Apple’s Macintosh computers, has found a new way to use his powerful interviewing technique. He contacted and interviewed 500 Republicans who have decided to vote for Kerry and had them tell why they were switching. Many of them are still Republican but [...]
If this is true, it’s hilarious and definitely a sign of the times. From the Times of India article: QUOTE Says a programmer on Slashdot.org who outsourced his job: “About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 out of the $67,000 I get. He’s happy [...]
Here are a couple of articles on the new report from the Inspector General of the EPA where he states that the White House directly changed the language in the press releases before they were releaased to the public around the time of 9/11. Now there is still a huge amount of pollution, possibly including [...]
Universities (in the U.S.) are now going to be offering courses in such exciting Homeland Security topics as: how to hunt witches, how to protect against witch spells, and ….oops, that was in the McCarthy era. The new courses include Homeland (In)Security and the State, Jihad and the End of the World, and Urban Security [...]
Everything old is new again. It’s all about timing. These are only two of a few choice phrases that may describe something that is afoot here in British Columbia. Some major global, national, and provincial forces are in play that are driving the development of a new (to us) association that may be created in [...]
Reuters is covering the story of how EPIC extracted through the Freedom of Information Act the fact that the Census Bureau pulled Arab-American data out and gave it to the Department of Homeland Paranoia. I’m not sure what pisses me off more – that the DHP requested this info, that the Census Bureau provided it [...]
I love Craig Venter for his long view, his burning curiousity, and his adventurous spirit. And probably because he pisses so many people off in the scientific community for being a dilletante. And yet, he has done more for the development of the various *omics (genomics, proteomics) than almost all others to date. This article [...]
Premier Gordon Campbell has publicly stated that he would like to see BC go from being 16th to 10th in terms of being a North American technology centre. That is so Canadian! We need to be more like Singapore (no, not by fining people for chewing gum, although that is seeming like not a bad [...]
I was laughing so hard, my stomach hurt and I was in tears. I highly recommend this movie being hosted at Atom Films. CNET has written an article on the fact that this film has now received 10.4 million unique visitors in July – more than three times the number that visited Kerry’s and Bush’s [...]
Mark Morford strikes again with his brilliant take on the circus show that is about to be played out in the U.S.: QUOTE There is a sense of lawlessness, of desperation, among the Republican party right now. It is no longer a question of simply which party will run the show or which platform will [...]
Those crazy Nigerians are really making the news today. In this BBC report, Nigerians are apparently scared to answer their mobile phones for fear of dying immediately. A half-formed thought about giving Star Trek Communicators to extremely superstitious people from another planet comes to mind. Can you say global culture clash?
Richard Smalley recently testified to the U.S. Senate on how how nanotechnologies and distributed power grids are the future of power.
I love this article on Bob Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace, who along with others is competing in the X Prize competition for $10 million to build a private space ship. The space station will cost approximately $200 MILLION when it’s completed, versus the current International Space Station which has cost $50 BILLION – 250x more. [...]
Like we need any more evidence that the U.S. has turned into a police state, along comes this article about an innocent Nepalese man who has been in solitary confinement for two years in BROOKLYN, with no trials, no charges, and who has been kept in a 6×9′ cell with the lights on 24 hours [...]
I can’t remember the numbers but there are some rules of thumb that state that if a movie goes from PG-13 to R, it cuts its potential revenues to 20% or 30% of what it could be, because R rated movies often do not draw enough people and so they get limited distribution. This is [...]
Sex drives all new technologies: Super-8 films, Videos, DVDs, the web. Well, now it’s time for orgasm-inducing porn on your…phone. According to this article, Europeans are building, building, building (pant) towards a climactic $1.5B worth of soft and hard-core porn purchases over their phones. A few lessons come to mind: • Selling sex is almost [...]
This is a wonderful article from the SF Gate website about a man named Dick Grace. From football captain to Marine Captain, to VP of Smith Barney Investments, and now a reformed alcoholic and Buddhist who owns a niche Cabernet Sauvignon winery and spends his time, money, and effort raising money for kids around the [...]
For anybody interested in stories of interesting people, behavioural structures, anti-capitalist brain-washing, or even those who think that they work a lot, I suggest reading this very cool article on Silicon Valley News about Min Zhu, the Webex founder.
Anybody with any interest in robotics, robo-ethics, brain augmentation, or why Sony’s great little bipedal doll is sitting in vast warehouses rather than selling like hotcakes should read this article about the Robo-Ethics Symposium being held in San Remo on the Italian Riviera. And I also had no idea that Alfred Nobel, father of the [...]
