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POPSWhy an Alan Watt group might be a *bad* idea After one commenter suggested we start an Alan Watt discussion group, another wrote in to plead that we don't. After visiting Above Top Secret I am not sure about the idea, either. There is something degrading that often happens in those discussions. The author of this post (excerpt and link below) says the Allies are responsible for the Holocaust. And he says first-hand reports from former prisoners of the Nazis are as reliable as alien abductees and Bigfoot spotters.
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POPS2012: NASA sees start of "new solar cycle" NASA today published a forecast for a "big and intense" new solar cycle in 2011 or 2012, which its suggests will wreak havoc on satellite GPS and telecommunications, power grids and air traffic. NASA says the next solar cycle, Solar Cycle 24, "could make itself felt as never before."
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POPSGoogle's Street Views now test Bostonians' privacy Google today added Boston to its growing list of U.S. cities featuring on-the-ground, street level views of people and places. Bostonians will note that Boston's roughest neighborhoods, in Mattapan and Dorchester, are not included in Street Views. Those are the areas in which most of the city's homocides took place in 2007. -- Mark Baard http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/Third_Party_Photo/2007/12/11/1197374304_1928.jpg
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POPSIntel will make net video "addictive" There's that word again. An Intel marketing exec. today tells the Times the company's latest chip, Penryn, will make videos on sights like YouTube "addictive." The chip is half the size of its predecessor, and "switches more quickly, requires less switching power and leaks less current than that previous transistor," the Times says. Technology companies, particularly online gaming producers, have been using the same addiction model advertisers have been using for decades. By improving the quality of net videos to match that of high definition television, Intel is promising Google and Microsoft their content will be impossible to resist.
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POPSAT&T's "cloak-and-dagger" room AT&T is going out of its way to comply with requests for data that have not even been made. In AT&T's secret room in San Francisco, NSA spooks can check-up on U.S. citizens. Now, the company, is trying to avoid responsibility for helping the U.S. government violate its citizens' constitutional rights. As with water-boarding, and despite what the mainstream media would have you believe, there is no gray area here.
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POPSSavvy? A born sucker? Your genes decide This finding mirrors the results of animal (primate) studies about fairness. Reminds me of Alan Watt's depictions of an inbred, psychopathic, power-elite. I wonder whether rest of us shlubs are having our "fairness" genes exploited or overridden through behavior modification techniques...
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POPSHempfest '07 Boston: Leaders say smoke, kids get busted The Boston Herald today reports that the geezers at the head of Boston's "pot parade" incited kids to get blazed on Boston Common. Some of my Emmanuel College journalism students said they planned to attend. (Lousy, wet weather gave way to sunshine later in the day. I hope my students made it, and took pictures.)
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POPSCITO: The globalist homeland security agency U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards is proposing a global security agency to track terrorists. He's calling it CITO, the Counterterrorism and Intelligence Treaty Organization. The emerging global government already has a CITO
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POPSMuni Wi-Fi sinking under mishandling and corruption As city officials from places such as San Francisco and Philadelphia head to the consultancy they'd hired with taxpayer dollars, Earthlink is pulling-out of its end of the deals, saying the cities are asking too much. This article does an excellent job describing the cities' poor planning. It does not, however, mention the company that may be responsible for much of this mess: Civitium. Civitium is the consultancy that now employs tsome of the city officials that hired the firm in the first place, including San Francisco's former deputy CIO Denise Brady, and Philadelphia's former CIO Dianah Neff.
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POPSResearcher induces out-of-body experiences A Swedish neuroscientist today announced that he has reproduced the out-of-body experience often reported by stroke victims, epileptics, drug users and those who have been through near death experiences. H. Henrik Ehrsson's experiment sheds light on how people are able to experience phantom pains in missing limbs, for example. Link to latest story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6960612.stm The consequences of that disembodiment would be catastrophic. "If the distinction fails, the animal might try to feed on itself and will not be able to plan actions that involve both body parts and external objects," Ehrsson told the BBC several years ago (link here is to that story). Using a virtual reality headset and camera, Ehrsson in his most recent experiment, published by the journal Science, today, caused 12 test subjects to view their own bodies as someone else's.
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POPSTimes rehashes sim story The Times reported this story several years ago, but the topic (with the emergence of Second Life and Ray Kurzweil's predictions for the Singularity), seems even more relevant today. Perhaps the only question is whether we are already in the Matrix, or are destined for it.
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POPSWhat's wrong with this quote? So let me get this straight... "American officers receive 16 hours of training...because U.S. officials want to be less intrusive." No chance that insufficiently trained TSA worker might terrorize air travelers?
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POPSThe New York Times' terror freak-out http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/if-you-were-a-terrorist-how-would-you-attack/ But while the critics say Levitt is shaking things up at the Grey Lady, it looks more like he is fitting in perfectly. After all, it was NYT fear mongering over Iraqi nukes and other weapons that helped get us into the war (recall Judith Miller's abominable "reporting")... The Times is again using fear to sell papers and, perhaps, someone else's agenda, as it has for years.
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POPSSigns of resistance to muni Wi-Fi San Franciscans, Earthlink and other parties are balking at SF mayor Gavin Newsom's and Google's scheme to provide free wireless internet services to the city. Privacy (given Google's coziness with the CIA, for example) is among the concerns cited by civil libertarians. Earthlink is just wondering how it will make money on the deal.
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POPSYour toxic home office http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2007/aug/figures/nl_printers.jpg Your laser printer could be making you gag, according to a new study. Queensland University of Technology (Australia) researchers found that laser printers spew as many particulates into the air as cigarette smokers. I am wondering if inkjet printers may cause similar problems... After testing more than 50 printers throughout the building, they found that particle emissions varied depending on the type and age of the printer. In one case, standing near a working printer was much like standing next to a cigarette smoker.
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POPSSuck-ups: Civvies use cop stickers to doge tix "Members of law enforcement, their families and the general public are displaying (thin blue line stickers) on their vehicles," the AP reports. You never now, it might work. I've always suspected that PBA supporters in my town might experience a quicker response time in an emergency--it's one reason I've even kicked in $20 bucks on occasion. It's a bit like those phony "support our troops" magnets and stickers that everyone still seems to have on their cars, to demonstrate their nationalism.
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POPSHomeland Security alert: test called "glitch" Homeland Security last week issued four "presidential" alerts from its National Emergency Action Network, panicking early morning TV viewers who saw an unspecified threat warning scroll across their screens
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POPScrackdown on cameras in new york Virtually unenforceable, bans on video- and filmmakers do have a chilling effect. But the message this year is, "don't come to new york on 9/11/07." Some now are counting on tens of thousands to protest with their ubiquitous mobile phone cameras and camcorders.
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POPSBiofuels are bad for you Farmers are being threatened by the rush to grow feedstock for biofuels processing, the Beeb reports today. With giant agribusinesses planting hundreds of millions of acres of inedible crops, food prices, too, will jump in the poorest countries.
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POPSClassic: poll names cheesiest marketing terms Blooks are "an exciting new stage in the life-cycle of content," according to a company that makes 'em. A poll finds that web users consider the term "blooks" obnoxious, however. Blooks can also be as lame as the blogs they come from. My personal least-favorite term from this list, however, is "folksonomy."
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POPSNew end date for Planet Earth: 2060 Isaac Newton is 1704 used "the Bible's Book of Daniel to calculate the date for the Apocalypse," according to this Daily Mail article. But when the author of this article writes, "Luckily for modern scientists in awe of his achievements, Newton based this figure on religion rather than reasoning." A lot of terrible things have happened, after all, based upon religious prophecy.
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POPSTruly the end of retirement When cultures beileved to treasure their elders start putting pensioners to work, that can't be good news. Japan's population, as many in the West, is growing older, and its pensioners threaten to bankrupt their economies. But what of the elders who are to frail to make money? Euthanasia? Soylent green?
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POPSSolved: Illegal immigration Immigration costs the United States tens of billions annually. And since more than a third of Mexicans want to be Americans, this author (provocatively enough) suggests annexing the narco-state of Mexico. Check out my website: www.parallelnormal.com
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POPSNew book: All of us "Left Below" in education School sucks even more when you're paying for it. From the book's description at Cato.org: "Washington can now tell public schools whether their teachers are qualified, their reading instruction acceptable, and what they must do when their students do not achieve on par with federal demands. At the outset of his presidential administration."
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POPSWhat happens when nanomaterials will get under our skin? The U.S. federal government will spend $12 million to study how nanomaterials will get under our skin. The EPA this week announced it will help fund research into the "extent nanomaterials bioaccumulate, whether they pose unique risks to human health and the environment through biomagnification along the food chain, and what exposures might occur."
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POPSHas the Stasi ever left us? German police are collected scent samples from potential "troublemakers" ahead of next month's G8 summit. Police dogs can then pounce on certain protesters before they make a move, presumably,
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POPSRemote health monitoring works Telemedicine helped patients with "access issues related to geography, lack of resources or infirmity” lower their risk of dying from heart failure by 20 percent, said Dr. Finlay McAlister, University of Alberta researcher.
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