Author Archive | majestic

Koch Brothers Set To Buy Major Newspapers

By majestic on April 21, 2013 in News 0

Charles and David Koch, the billionaires who own companies like Georgia Pacific and bring you products like Brawny paper towels, are notorious for their singularly harsh vision for a more conservative America, with the Tea Party movement their most visible political mouthpiece. Both they and the Tea Party movement have been largely pigeon-holed as extreme and outside the mainstream by the media (Fox News excepted, of course), so now they are looking to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun.

In case you’ve forgotten just how mean the Kochs’ vision for America is for the average American, check out the powerful documentary Koch Brothers Exposed. The New York Times has the story on the planned newspaper acquisitions:

Three years ago, Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists and supporters of libertarian causes, held a seminar of like-minded, wealthy political donors at the St.

… Read the rest

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Deepak Chopra’s Reply to Chris Anderson, TED and the TED Community: ‘We’re Halfway There, But…’

By majestic on April 20, 2013 in News 0

Chris Anderson. Photo: Pierre Omidyar (CC)

At this point, you just know that Chris Anderson and the gang at TED wish that they’d never messed with Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock. Following his earlier diatribe against TED for censorship of Messrs. Hancock and Sheldrake, Deepak Chopra assembles a cast of scientists to hammer away again at the TED establishment, at Huffington Post:

Dear Chris,

Thank you for clearing up some issues, particularly the confusion surrounding TEDx’s decision to take down or shift the talks by Sheldrake and Hancock. Actions speak louder than words, and the talks were removed from the website, followed by your letter warning TEDx organizers essentially not to repeat the same mistake again by inviting similar talks. To underline the point, TEDx withdrew its brand name from a West Hollywood event that was by no means filled with “goofballs” or “questionable” figures.

TED has invited religious leaders to speak, but that’s not at issue.

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The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution

By majestic on April 20, 2013 in News 0

Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, fresh from a visit to North Korea in January, on why the Internet is far from an unalloyed good to the citizens of dictatorships around the world, in the Wall Street Journal:

How do you explain to people that they are a YouTube sensation, when they have never heard of YouTube or the Internet? That’s a question we faced during our January visit to North Korea, when we attempted to engage with the Pyongyang traffic police. You may have seen videos on the Web of the capital city’s “traffic cops,” whose ballerina-like street rituals, featured in government propaganda videos, have made them famous online. The men and women themselves, however—like most North Koreans—have never seen a Web page, used a desktop computer, or held a tablet or smartphone. They have never even heard of Google (or Bing, for that matter).

Even the idea of the Internet has not yet permeated the public’s consciousness in North Korea.

… Read the rest

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Are Alex Jones’ Conspiracy Theories Beyond the Pale?

By majestic on April 19, 2013 in News 0

The Los Angeles Times is running a poll of its online readers and the scary thing is that only 60% of them are voting “yes” (so far – you can vote too!)

David Horsey writes the accompanying article explaining why the number should be closer to 100%:

Usually, it would be best to ignore conspiracy-mongers such as Alex Jones and not reward him and his angry gaggle of paranoiac followers with any sort of attention. But, in a week when thoughts of the dead and maimed victims of the Boston Marathon bombings weigh heavy on the hearts and minds of most Americans, it is worth pointing out what a worthless waste of skin and bones Jones and his minions happen to be.

Nearly as soon as I heard about the bombings on Monday, I was certain that somewhere in the nutty right-wing blogosphere someone was already concocting a storyline that would blame the crime on President Obama and the federal government.

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Artists Who Drink Crazy Amounts of Coffee (Balzac Was a 50-Cup-a-Day Man)

By majestic on April 19, 2013 in News 0

Recently we heard about the woman who poisoned herself with fluoride by drinking 100 cups of tea a day. Now we learn that Balzac drank 50 cups of coffee a day. Can anyone up that? Mason Currey writes for Slate:

Coffee! It is the great uniting force of my Daily Rituals book. It’s what brings together Beethoven and Proust, Glenn Gould and Francis Bacon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Gustav Mahler. This should hardly be surprising. Caffeine is the rare drug that has a powerful salutary effect—it aids focus and attention, wards off sleepiness, and speeds the refresh rate on new ideas—with only minimal drawbacks. And the ritual of preparing coffee serves for many as a gateway to the creative mood. Balzac wrote:

“Coffee glides into one’s stomach and sets all of one’s mental processes in motion. One’s ideas advance in column of route like battalions of the Grande Armée. Memories come up at the double, bearing the standards which will lead the troops into battle.

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“It is Indisputable that the United States Engaged in the Practice of Torture”

By majestic on April 19, 2013 in News 0

Still from “Doctors of the Dark Side”

For those who have any doubt that the United States government has sanctioned the use of torture in recent years, Ritika Singh, a research assistant at the Brookings Institution, reports for Lawfare that,

The Constitution Project has released the results of its Task Force on Detainee Treatment in the form of this 577-page report—which concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that “the nation’s highest officials bear some responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of torture.”

The people who create and run the torture programs are oftentimes doctors, as depicted in the new documentary Doctors of the Dark Side.

Lawfare provides the Statement of the Task Force:

This report of The Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment is the result of almost two years of intensive study, investigation and deliberation.

The project was undertaken with the belief that it was important to provide an accurate and authoritative account of how the United States treated people its forces held in custody as the nation mobilized to deal with a global terrorist threat.

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Dear TED, Is It ‘Bad Science’ or a ‘Game of Thrones’?

By majestic on April 18, 2013 in News 0

The botched handling of the TEDx Whitechapel talks by Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock continues to cause waves, now via an open letter to TED by Deepak Chopra, MD. FACP, Stuart Hameroff, MD, Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., and Neil Theise, MD, published at Huffington Post:

One of modern science’s great strengths is that any questionable finding dies a quick death if it’s invalid. The safeguards are mainly two: Your new finding must be repeatable when other researchers run the same experiments, and peer review by qualified scientists subjects every new finding to microscopic scrutiny. So it surprised the millions of admirers of TED, whose conferences attract wide attention to new, cutting-edge ideas, when that organization decided to practice semi-censorship.

The flap is over two videos of TEDx talks delivered in the UK in January that were summarily removed from TEDx’s YouTube channel (TEDx is the brand name for conferences outside the main TED events that are allowed to use the TED trademark, such as TEDxBoston or TEDxBaghdad — so far, about 5,000 such events have used the name).

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The Price of Fame? An Early Death

By majestic on April 18, 2013 in News 0

So is it better to die old in obscurity or young in the limelight? From Reuters:

The price of fame can be high with an international study on Thursday finding that people who enjoy successful entertainment or sporting careers tend to die younger.

Researchers Richard Epstein and Catherine Epstein said the study, based on analysing 1,000 New York Times obituaries from 2009-2011, found film, music, stage performers and sports people died at an average age of 77.2 years.

This compared to an average lifespan of 78.5 years for creative workers, 81.7 for professionals and academics, and 83 years for people in business, military and political careers.

The Australian-based researchers said these earlier deaths could indicate that performers and sports stars took more risks in life, either to reach their goals or due to their success…

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Western Style Diet Leads To Early Death

By majestic on April 16, 2013 in News 0

No doubt the headline will cause some septuagenarians who eat nothing but processed meat and fried food to claim the “Western style diet” never hurt them, but a new study shows that for most people eating this stuff is likely to shorten your life. From Alpha Galileo Foundation:

Data from a new study of British adults suggest that adherence to a “Western-style” diet (fried and sweet food, processed and red meat, refined grains, and high-fat dairy products) reduces a person’s likelihood of achieving older ages in good health and with higher functionality. Study results appear in the May issue of The American Journal of Medicine.

“The impact of diet on specific age-related diseases has been studied extensively, but few investigations have adopted a more holistic approach to determine the association of diet with overall health at older ages,” says lead investigator Tasnime Akbaraly, PhD, Inserm, Montpellier, France. “We examined whether diet, assessed in midlife, using dietary patterns and adherence to the Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI), is associated with aging phenotypes, identified after a mean 16-year follow-up.”

The AHEI is a validated index of diet quality, originally designed to provide dietary guidelines with the specific intention to combat major chronic conditions such as cardiovascular diseases and diabetes.

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Guantanamo Hunger Striker Tells His Story

By majestic on April 15, 2013 in News 0

This may be the most important report out of Gitmo ever. If it doesn’t cause Americans to seriously question the indefinite detention of prisoners without trial, what will? (Not to mention the brutal “medical” treatment at the hands of American doctors.) Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, told this story to his lawyers at the legal charity Reprieve in an unclassified telephone call (in Arabic, translated to English):

One man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.

I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

I could have been home years ago — no one seriously thinks I am a threat — but still I am here.

… Read the rest

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