Particle accelerator in Anchorage home; Global warming may spark ice age; Spoon bending for Israel & Palestine; How much coca in ya Coca-Cola?

Dick Van Patten eats dog food. Japanese Monkeys have accents. With a start like that, the basis for today's goodies must be fark.

Magic touch, bent spoons help on Israeli-Palestinian deal
GENEVA (AFP) - Entertainer and psychic Uri Geller played an unusual role in breaking the ice during talks on a historic deal between the Palestinian Red Crescent and its Israeli counterpart by bending spoons.

The Good Stuff: High Times has a feature story on coca growers in Peru, which seems to indicate that Coca-Cola purchases about 200 tons of coca leaf from Peru and Bolivia annually. So yes, the major American brand is still using the flavorings of nose candy to hook millions -- including myself. Congratulations. Apparently this was originally picked up by the excellent Narco News Bulletin.

Good Stuff Pt. II: Hack a Coke Machine (also Google hacking - damn!). You can change around many Coke machine settings. There was a fark story but its link seems broken. b3ta.com presents the Phallic Logo Awards.

We'll always have the burned out ruins of Paris: Commentary on how maybe this marks the death of the welfare state, etc. A little apocalyptic in tone.

Phasers on Stun: The Air Force has developed a hand-held laser weapon, according to Jane's Defense Weekly.

While only in prototype form and years away from fielding, the weapon, known as the Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response (PHaSR) system, holds great promise, they said.

Although maybe it only blinds people. But now their thirst for Power has only been increased!

The Travolta Complex: The Scientologists built this weird thing in the New Mexico desert full of Hubbard's teachings, engraved in metal. It is depressing that millions of years after the apocalypse, aliens will find this shit and make fun of humanity for the Xenu story.

But the deep desert glyphs may not only be geographical markers: "Former Scientologists familiar with Hubbard's teachings on reincarnation say the symbol marks a 'return point' so loyal staff members know where they can find the founder's works when they travel here in the future from other places in the universe. 'As a lifetime staff member, you sign a billion-year contract. It's not just symbolic,' said Bruce Hines of Denver, who spent 30 years in Scientology but is now critical of it... 'The fact that they would etch this into the desert to be seen from space, it fits into the whole ideology.'"

Henry Earl still a hero for freedom: The Dude has gotten 43 44 offenses so far this year. He is currently in jail. Average jail duration: 3.85 days. Average not-jail duration: 1.6 days. Total offenses: 933. Now that's a rap sheet. Burglar stuck in a window. Hockey player tries to kill his agent.

Open Pandora's Box: The Music Genome Project is sweet. Basically you type in who you like, and the system will start playing similar music. So cool. Seems to work well.

Ancient Pyramid found in Bosnian hill. Body of Missing Mobster Turns Up in NJ car trunk. How original. Genovese crime family, involved control of the waterfront.

Winter health tips: drink water, don't smoke, reduce alcohol, stay clean, wash your hands a lot, get a flu shot, do some detox, get your vitamins. Smart. I would add that smoking cigarettes is especially bad in winter because you basically put all the germs on your hands into your mouth.

Atheists lead the way: Atheist Agenda, a group at U Texas-San Antonio, staged a Porno for Bibles (or Smut for Smut) event. Religious dogma could be traded for exploitative images devoid of theological frameworks. Nice. (As always I am still a militant atheist and approve wholeheartedly) Here's their site.

This project was partly to have fun on campus before finals, but also proclaim that we find religious text to be smut. To set pornography and religious texts as equal forms of smut.

This included the Qur'an and Torah. Equal opportunity smuttery. They provide a link to Church of Virus which sounds weirdly interesting.

Because you only live once: Grandma hits the three-story beer bong.

The first video game was on an oscilloscope: This is really pretty cool. Back in the late 1950s, a researcher at Brookhaven designed a tennis game that could be played on an oscilloscope, making it much older than PONG. That's freakin' awesome.

HDTV is making celebrities freak out, because they look Too Sharp, and this may require new makeup techniques, surgery and the rest. Seeing as how I never watch HDTV, I have no idea. I hope the extra pixels make Hollywood implode in an orgy of vanity and botox. of course this guy did Best and Worst on HDTV. (more - blech - via TVpredictions.com)

OnStar 'help' leads to drunk driving ticket: Some guys that were wasted in their Escalade pressed the OnStar button but refused to talk to the person on the other end, so the OnStar AllSeeingEye Illuminati Panopticon Service dispatched the police to their GPS-transmitted coordinates. Horrible.

Meanwhile "FDA approves injecting ID chips in patients", Satan Lobby Approves. (and you can get somewhat oddball researcher Michel Chossudovsky's book on the War on Terror for a mere $14 for Christmas from the Centre for Research on Globalization.

The Japanese and their android chicks: Well this one was not a big surprise. But it's spooky. The site, Akihabaranews.com, has a lot more sweet robots. All right. Harper's reports on a talking doll marketed for the lonely Japanese elderly.

Grateful Dead recording fight: Archive.org has tons of free Grateful Dead concerts from decades past (1965-1995!), and apparently the drummers demanded that a lot of this material be pulled. However there was a quick boycott and the decision was mostly reversed, although high-quality direct soundboard recordings will not be available. An Internet forum goer said it "sucked royally."

A city bus in Richmond VA collided with the State Capitol, bounced across the street and blasted a hole in the Department of Transportation.

The crack researchers at FoxNews tell us that "Sexy Attire Works Against Businesswomen."

Oh by the way some mild bird flu was found in California.

Russian Squirrel Mafia: Something strange about Koko the Gorilla's "nipple fetish." A pack of Russian squirrels killed a dog; also Komosmolskaya Pravda notes that in the fall chipmunks terrorized cats nearby. A lack of pinecones has been blamed for the situation.

Cold Particles: A guy in Anchorage wants to install a particle accelerator at his house/business. He built his first cyclotron when he was 17.

Nelson Mandela was granted permission to wander around a British town with sheep and a sword.

Woodward's a DB: John Belushi's sister is pissed off with Bob Woodward because he wrote a hack book in 1985 about his death. So she is getting even by writing a nasty bio of Woodward. John Landis and Al Franken agree. Franken:

"I went over to [Woodward] and said, 'Well, you know, the only time I ever saw John snorting coke was with [Woodward's colleague] Carl Bernstein.' And that was the last I ever heard from him." (Franken assures us that he was just kidding.)

Kick some ass at the toll booth: What happens when people are really stupid? I am sad because the site I was just looking at, TollRoadsNews.com, got disabled, probably because this good story about two cars stuck in a toll booth was too popular.

Mentos Kaboom: Kind of like the old baking soda volcano.

Snow Crash: A while ago I saw a show on PBS about how global warming might cause a circulating pattern of water in the Atlantic Ocean to suddenly halt -- so that more heat would stay in the tropics, and the north would get colder. It is thought that the mini-ice age in Europe a few centuries ago may have been caused by this phenomenon.

Now researchers find that the current has dropped about 30% in intensity. So we're on our way to total destabilization.

Failing ocean current raises fears of mini ice age
The ocean current that gives western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age.

The dramatic finding comes from a study of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which found a 30% reduction in the warm currents that carry water north from the Gulf Stream. The slow-down, which has long been predicted as a possible consequence of global warming, will give renewed urgency to intergovernmental talks in Montreal, Canada, this week on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
.....
After warming Europe, this flow comes to a halt in the waters off Greenland, sinks to the ocean floor and returns south. The water arriving from the south is already more saline and so more dense than Arctic seas, and is made more so as ice forms.

But Bryden’s study has revealed that while one area of sinking water, on the Canadian side of Greenland, still seems to be functioning as normal, a second area on the European side has partially shut down and is sending only half as much deep water south as before. The two southward flows can be distinguished because they travel at different depths.
....
The last shutdown, which prompted a temperature drop of 5°C to 10°C in western Europe, was probably at the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago. There may also have been a slowing of Atlantic circulation during the Little Ice Age, which lasted sporadically from 1300 to about 1850 and created temperatures low enough to freeze the River Thames in London.

Thanks, Bumiller: "I am here to tell you [Bush] reads the newspapers"

MediaMatters redesigned their excellent website and now it's still excellent. If 'the good guys' are ever going to get a grip on the spin cycle, sites that apply Fair Use to capture and reapply video clips are crucial.

In this case, they caught NY Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller informing Chris Matthews that she was 'here' to let him know that Bush actually skims newspapers. In any other country the host might scoff about that.

We have a lot of catching up to do before the Kool Kids get it. WaPo's Dana Milbank spoke in Minnesota the other day, and it was rebroadcast on MPR today. The audience questioned Milbank about how long she thought it would take before people fully understood how this war started. Milbank responded that she still hadn't seen anything that indicated they had manipulated intelligence -- most of The Mistake was already clearly understood. Besides, she said, this Office of Special Plans thing was sooo small, how could it have manipulated the Big American Government (and the infallible Dinner Party Junta that runs the country)?

She claimed that the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate to Congress proved it was mainly the Agency's fault for hyping the intel (which they only hyped because they low-balled Iraq's WMD in the 1990s).

Again, whenever these establishment types refer to the Silberman Report or the Senate Intel Committee Report, they are making a basic 'appeal to authority' argument that absolves everyone in the Bush Administration from how they systematically, mendaciously exaggerated the Saddam Threat. Likewise, the NIE sort of pins the blame on the CIA, but in reality the NIE was but one slice of the broad War Selling effort.

So there are two main, competing narratives: the "war intel was spoofed mainly by Iraqi exiles and neo-cons" narrative that I've tried to illustrate on this site, and DC's shiny answer, "the CIA was a little bit stoned, and then we invaded. Oops," narrative.

The problem is that over the past couple months, the whole 'innocent mistake' narrative has been dissolving, and the 'war intel was spoofed' narrative is now much stronger. Scooter Libby's indictment was fallout from the 'dirty fight' that the neo-cons and the war's partisans fought in 2002 and 2003, the somewhat esoteric 'information war' that Rove, Cheney, Libby, the 'White House Iraq Group,' Woolsey, Perle, Feith & the Office of Special Plans, and media pawns like Robert Novak fought to defend the old "Saddam == Al Qaeda == Teh Satan!! OMG!!" narrative.

More later...

Minutemen Nazis for Congress: What could go wrong with white nationalist border militia?

There is a lot of weird shit on the Internet, and the last few days' dark December surfing have brought me to some mean and lowly places.

I have not said much about the Minutemen militia / vigilante groups that have spontaneously mobilized on the southern border. Healthy democracies don't usually have strange mobs milling around their border deserts, acting out militant nationalist fantasies of control. No, not healthy at all.

While I sensed an violent undercurrent right away, I underestimated the direct white supremacist organizational ties to Minutemen. It seems that neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups are deeply tied in with the Minutemen, seeing them as an instrument to attempt to mainstream their unpopular views.

One of the Minutemen leaders, Jim Gilchrist, is running for Congress in California's 48th CD, where he will probably split the hard-right vote as the grassroots goes xenophobic, possibly allowing a Democrat to squeak into victory. Small plus, but if this one-issue movement expands further it could herald a New Intolerance.

In times that feel this right-wing, it seems unlikely for mainstream politicians to veer fully into racist politics, but I worry that it could mushroom easily.

These groups are using the Internet to chat and organize, of course. The average armchair militant racist, who formerly had to find physical groups, now finds virtual community among the 'white' genome purists. But this allows we who fear them to peer in and see what they are really thinking, and publicize it.

In particular, the Internet exchanges around a set of Minutemen and "SOS" (Save Our State) protest rallies in California — where a Nazi flag was suddenly unveiled — show that the display of the swastika is a debated but widely accepted move among the hardcore racists and border vigilantes. (the photos came from an Indymedia post)

The (liberal) blogger David Neiwart at Orcinus, who has written a book about right-wing extremists, offered a fine summary and links to a neo-Nazi white supremacist forum called Stormfront and its discussion of the Minutemen rallies and the Nazi flag. Some argued that it would turn whites off of the message, but there seemed to be no real sense of shock that such a symbol was an element of their movement. As Neiwart explained,

The Stormfront forum is especially enlightening, since it is a specifically neo-Nazi chatroom. Especially noteworthy were the many posts questioning the use of the Nazi symbology at the rally, since it would "turn off" many whites. It's worth remembering that most dedicated racists take care not to let it show publicly -- unlike these fellows. But the whole thread makes clear to what extent these extremists now move among allegedly "mainstream" right-wing operations and not infiltrate them, but fully hijack them.

(Neiwart's work called "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An Exegesis" (PDF) is a classic at explaining where a latent fascist movement or proto-ideology could lie in America today)

The idea that such openly racist stuff is going straight into the mainstream right via sites like RedState.org ought to be considered as well.

George Wallace and David Duke left their mark on the American political landscape (Duke is still involved with Stormfront) by scapegoating the Other, as so many experienced politicians did before them. American political discourse these days is in a twitchy state of paranoia, and the Borders remain a favorite topic for cable news anchors like Lou Dobbs to bitch about, to burnish their tough-nationalist credentials.

Most of what I found today pointed out that Republicans are reluctant to criticize these groups, and instead co-opt them. Their outward agenda is just a thin facade for traditional xenophobic white supremacism. Their members know it. Why doesn't the media?

National Socialists of some sort also have a TV show on MTN - Minneapolis public access TV. I support the marketplace of ideas, and I think that we can disprove racist genetic dogma quite easily nowadays, so it's not surprising that they have coded their virtual-KKK politics into the matter of immigration. I think that they have the right to organize for peaceful politics on the Internet, and if that lets the concerned Real World peer in and get an idea of their basic idiocy, then perhaps the consequences will be positive.

But this Nazi-Minutemen thing is spooky. It ought to be talked about.