Find the Others...'s topics - tribe.net

connect the dots with FtO...

2009-12-29T22:27:44Z

Mexico under siege amid war on drug cartels
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29404699/

Ending the "War on Drugs": The Fierce Urgency of...When?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norm-stamper/ending-the-war-on-drugs-t_b_170267.html

Struggling States Look to Unorthodox Taxes
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/us/01sin.html?_r=2&hp

posted in Find the Others... - 53 replies

guns don't kill people...yet.

2009-12-03T22:02:15Z

"...senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank."

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=ahD2WoDAL9h0

15 Signs American Society Is Coming Apart at the Seams:

"The economic elite have launched an attack on the U.S. public and society is unraveling at an increased rate. You may have missed it in the mainstream news media, but statistical societal indicators are reading red across the board. "

http://www.alternet.org/story/144109/15_signs_american_society_is_coming_apart_at_the_seams?page=entire

posted in Find the Others... - 6 replies

Sony subsidizing US military supercomputers

2009-12-02T21:40:58Z

"With respect to cell processors, a single 1U server configured with two 3.2GHz cell processors can cost up to $8K, while two Sony PS3s cost approximately $600."

http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/11/sony-still-subsidizing-us-supercomputer-efforts.ars

Sony sells the PlayStation 3 at a loss so that it can recoup the money on game sales, elements of the "value chain" like HD TVs, memory sticks, and so on. But the military isn't buying games or TVs—they're just taking their subsidy from Sony and running with it.

posted in Find the Others... - 2 replies

The Illusatrated Man

2009-11-20T20:36:16Z

atom, can you hook a brotha up?
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/11/the-illustrated-man-how-led-tattoos-could-change-the-face-of-humanity

posted in Find the Others... - 7 replies

stop making sense

2009-10-30T02:18:17Z

finally, the supercollider crowd is speaking my language:

I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, *might be so abhorrent to nature* that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?_r=1

“Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.”

posted in Find the Others... - 37 replies

amazons of the ukraine

2009-10-30T02:06:36Z

In the Ukraine, a country where females are victims of sexual trafficking and gender oppression, a new tribe of empowered women is emerging. Calling themselves the “Asgarda”, the women seek complete autonomy from men. Residing in the Carpathian Mountains, the tribe is comprised of 150 women of varying ages, primarily students, led by 30 year-old Katerina Tarnouska. Reviving the tribal traditions of the Scythian Amazons of ancient Greek mythology, the Asgarda train in martial arts, taught by former Soviet karate master, Volodymyr Stepanovytch, and learn life skills and sciences in order to become ideal women.

http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/2009/art/jenna-martin/asgarda/#http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/2009/art/jenna-martin/asgarda/

posted in Find the Others... - 21 replies

have you seen this man?

2009-10-18T01:23:50Z

http://www.disinfo.com/2009/10/ever-dream-this-man/

posted in Find the Others... - 12 replies

How come you and I see an objective reality?

2009-09-15T03:10:31Z

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/09/physicists-explain-why-we-observe-a-common-objective-reality.ars

It's simple really. Simple.

posted in Find the Others... - 0 replies

cost of admission

2009-09-07T20:57:01Z

Tom Petrie of BankofAmericaMerrillLynch says we are at Peak Oil right now:

http://www.inteldaily.com/news/154/ARTICLE/11706/2009-09-02.html

posted in Find the Others... - 4 replies

there is no thumb

2009-09-03T05:53:55Z

rogert ebert (yes, that roger ebert) gets physical:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/07/everymans_guide_to_quantum_the.html

and even references RAWilson...!

posted in Find the Others... - 2 replies

rushkoff on colbert

2009-09-03T05:48:28Z

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/238643/july-15-2009/douglas-rushkoff

posted in Find the Others... - 8 replies

Mexican Government Validates UFO's via Military

2009-06-24T01:25:12Z

this is definitely more definite than usual:
http://www.disinfo.com/content/story.php?title=Government-Admits-to-Aliens-Being-Real

NYT recently profiled a disclosure lobbyist in DC:
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/05/14/14greenwire-a-climate-solution-thats-out-of-this-world-19116.html

i took a raincheck on hope for the last election, maybe, just maybe, the right time to redeem it is drawing near...

posted in Find the Others... - 10 replies

buying a stairway to heaven

2009-06-03T03:14:16Z

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/05/the-rich-tapestry-of-contemporary-american-extremism/

posted in Find the Others... - 7 replies

This is what politics has come to...

2009-05-31T16:34:18Z

Eating baby seal hearts. In view of the public eye...
http://wonkette.com/408754/royal-canadian-governor-eats-heart-of-baby-seal

(be sure to read the first comment)

posted in Find the Others... - 7 replies

lost in space

2009-05-23T03:14:44Z

"There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going."

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/1302/lost_in_space.html

posted in Find the Others... - 3 replies

can't get enough of those scientist types...

2009-05-23T02:24:30Z

this article tickles me 8 ways to sunday.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25448647-30417,00.html

apparently an astrophysicist has detected an unusual organized light pulse from distant space. (that'd be the important part)

but i've always chuckled at the incredible short-sightedness of programs like SETI looking for radio waves, of all ridiculous things...assuming distant intelligent civilizations would a) develop the same exact (nearly obsolete already) technology we did, and b) bother to send us a signal with it, or c) maybe we'd accidentally catch a snippet of their otherworldly 'hogan's heroes' rerun or something...

however, Dr. Bhathal had the unusual common sense to search for light pulses, since they're actually a much more practical communication medium for vast distances in space, much to the chagrin of, and mockery from, the SETI fundraising committee...cheers!

the article goes on in great depth to explain how life is only likely to exist in "the goldilocks zone", which means planets most like ours is where all the effort goes, despite how amazingly few of them there are.... boo!

i was almost impressed there for a minute. you get about an inch reprieve from good old fashioned scientific arrogance, and then they dump a mile of it right back on ya...

*bonus weirdness*: someone named de Horta makes a Star Trek reference near the end of the article...oh hey, it made *me* laugh.

posted in Find the Others... - 9 replies

One nation, seven sins

2009-05-09T03:39:40Z

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/mar/26/one-nation-seven-sins/

By culling statistics from nationwide databanks of things like sexually transmitted disease infection rates (lust) or killings per capita (wrath), the researchers came up with a sin index.

posted in Find the Others... - 1 reply

awesome chinese industrial landscape animation...

2009-04-28T02:40:36Z

being played on giant flatscreens in pristine subways.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YLxF1q_UqQ&feature=player_embedded

posted in Find the Others... - 4 replies

when the dust finally settles...

2009-04-22T18:58:40Z

there's nano-thermite in it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_tf25lx_3o

A Danish laboratory reports that it has found evidence of the presence of the explosive thermite in dust recovered from the WTC. Researchers have long contended that the buildings appeared to implode, as if they had been destroyed by controlled demolitions. The discovery that thermite was definitely present during the disaster strongly suggests that the towers were prepared in advance for destruction. The specific substance found was a metastable intermolecular composite, or superthermite, containing nanoparticles.

It has not been shown that the temperatures of burning of jet fuel could have caused steel structure in the buildings to fail.

posted in Find the Others... - 14 replies

The Rich Who Don't Feel Rich...

2009-04-22T18:50:52Z

Now for your daily dose of crazy pills, I present The Rich Who Don't Feel Rich...
http://finance.yahoo.com/retirement/article/106934/Wealth-Less-Effect-Earning-Well-Feeling-Otherwise

Srsly? Only in America... We're a consumer economy, and worse, we're a consumer culture. You can live a very comfortable life on $100k a year, only in a culture this corrupt would we consider $250k not rich. If you make that much and blow through it and think you haven't made it, you're in severe need of seeing a kid in Africa starving to death in the street. Wealth is so much an illusion, any misstep in life and any of us could easily be starving in poverty and homeless. Anyone who makes enough to drive a car, have a roof over their head and eat three meals a day without worrying where tomorrows food and shelter is coming from should feel rich... but sadly, we don't, and people bitch that $250k isn't rich... ha!
Buy more stuff and go back to sleep!

posted in Find the Others... - 5 replies

captain obvious

2009-03-23T22:29:37Z

i don't know exactly why anyone who could remotely consider themselves a whistleblower *ever* gets into a small aircraft, but here's the 3rd dead one i can remember under a bush administration, and i don't even pay attention:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/20/man-who-set-up-alter.html

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/bush-insider-planned-tell-all/story.aspx?guid=%7B3386CE02-96CC-4933-874A-C96677A2F36E%7D&dist=msr_1

“Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened.”

posted in Find the Others... - 13 replies

strange shit about the moon

2009-03-05T03:20:56Z

http://freeduhm.com/strange-moon-facts-mystery-moon-growing/

and just the tip of the turdberg, IMO.

posted in Find the Others... - 2 replies

Bruce Sterling's state of the world 2009

2009-03-03T04:25:56Z

"I keep remembering the half-stunned, half-irritated looks on the
faces of those car execs when they were chided for flying their company
jets to Washington to beg. I felt sorrow for them. Truly. These
guys are the captains of American industry at the top of the food
chain. Of course they fly corporate jets. Corporate jets were
*invented* for guys like the board of General Motors. And now they're
getting skewered for that by a bunch of punk-ass Congressmen they can
usually buy and sell?

*That's* the issue at stake, a few jets? General Motors built the
aviation industry in World War II. General Motors aircraft pounded
Nazi Germany into a flaming ruin. Here they get this off-the-wall,
total-hokum act of peanut-gallery gotcha humiliation about the
corporate airplanes they've used for fifty years. That must have felt
surreal, even nauseating."

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/343/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page01.html

posted in Find the Others... - 9 replies

Is the web helping us evolve?

2009-02-26T17:16:25Z

Originally posted by Devastator Jr over in New Scientist tribe.

Is the Web helping us evolve?

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2008/12/23/david_brin_google/print.html
Is the Web helping us evolve?
The truth lies somewhere between "Google is making us stupid" and "the Internet will liberate humanity."
By David Brin

Dec. 23, 2008 |

Some of today's most vaunted tech philosophers are embroiled in a ferocious argument. On one side are those who think the Internet will liberate humanity, in a virtuous cycle of e-volving creativity that may culminate in new and higher forms of citizenship. Meanwhile, their diametrically gloomy critics see a kind of devolution taking hold, as millions are sucked into spirals of distraction, shallowness and homogeneity, gradually surrendering what little claim we had to the term "civilization."

Call it cyber-transcendentalists versus techno-grouches.

Both sides point to copious evidence, as Nicholas Carr recently did, in a cover story that ran in the Atlantic, titled, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" In making the pessimists' case, Carr offered up studies showing that the new generation of multitaskers aren't nearly as good at dividing their attention effectively as they think they are. According to Carr, focus, concentration and factual knowledge are much too beneficial to toss aside in an avid pursuit of omni-awareness.

A related and even more worrisome trend is the decline of rigorously vetted expert knowledge. You wouldn't expect this to be a problem in an era when humanity knows more -- and shares information more openly -- with every passing year, month and day. Wikipedia is a compendium vastly larger than all previous encyclopedias combined, drawing millions to contribute from their own areas of micro-expertise. But the very freedom that makes the Internet so attractive also undermines the influence of gatekeepers who used to sift and extol some things over others, helping people to pick gold from dross.

In the past, their lists and guides ranged from the "Seven Liberal Arts" of Martianus Capella to "The Great Books of the Western World," from Emily Post's "Etiquette" to the Boy Scout Manual, from compulsory curricula to expert scientific testimony. Together, this shared canon gave civilized people common reference points. Only now, anyone can post a list -- or a hundred -- on Facebook. Prioritization is personal, and facts are deemed a matter of opinion.

Carr and others worry how 6 billion ships will navigate when they can no longer even agree upon a north star.

Of course, an impulse toward nostalgia has been rife in every era. When have grandparents not proclaimed that people were better, and the grass much greener, back in their day? Even the grouches' ultimate dire consequence has remained the same: the end of the world. Jeremiahs of past eras envisioned it arriving as divine retribution for fallen grace, while today's predict a doom wrought by human hands -- propelled by intemperate, reckless or ill-disciplined minds. The difference, from a certain angle, is small.

Take the dour mutterings of another grumbler, Internet entrepreneur Mark Pesce, whose dark rumination at last year's Personal Democracy Forum anticipates a dismal near-future commonwealth. One wherein expertise is lost and democracy becomes a tyranny of lobotomized imitation and short-tempered reflex, as viral YouTube moments spread everywhere instantaneously, getting everybody laughing or nodding or seething to the same memes -- an extreme resonance of reciprocal mimicry or hyper-mimesis. And everybody hyper-empowered to react impulsively at almost the speed of thought.

"All of our mass social institutions, developed at the start of the liberal era, are backed up against the same buzz saw," Pesce said. "Politics, as the most encompassing of our mass institutions, now balances on a knife edge between a past which no longer works and a future of chaos."

From there, it seems only a small step is needed to incite the sort of riled-up rabble that used to burst forth in every small town; only, future flash mobs will encompass the globe. Pesce's scenario is starkly similar to dystopias that science fiction authors Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth portrayed, back in the 1950s, as in "The Marching Morons," or Ray Bradbury in "Fahrenheit 451," with civilization homogenizing into a bland paste of imitation and dullard sameness, punctuated by intervals of mass hysteria.

Indeed, it is this very sameness -- the "flat world" celebrated by pundit Thomas Friedman -- that could demolish global peace, rather than save it. Arguing that an insufficiency of variety will eliminate our ability to inventively solve problems, Pesce dramatically extrapolates: "Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a rapid descent into the Bellum omnia contra omnes, Thomas Hobbes' war of all against all ... Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyper-empowerment. After the arms race comes the war."

Wow. Isn't that cheery? Well, with Michael Crichton no longer around to propound that there "are things mankind was never meant to know," perhaps Carr and Pesce are auditioning to fill in, offering the next vivid anthem for a rising renunciation movement -- the nostalgic murmur that technology and "progress" may have already gone too far.

Responding to all of this -- on the Encyclopaedia Britannica Blog -- Clay Shirky, the technology forecaster and author of "Here Comes Everybody," presents an equally impressive array of evidence showing that the ability of individuals to autonomously scan, correlate and creatively utilize vast amounts of information is rising faster, almost daily. In the human experience, never before have so many been able to perceive, explore, compare, analyze and argue over evidence that questions rigid assumptions. How can this not lead to insights and exciting new breakthroughs at an accelerating pace?

Perhaps even fast enough to get us ahead of all our modern perplexities and problems.

Nor is this refrain new. From Jefferson and Franklin to Teilhard de Chardin and J.D. Bernal, the tech-happy zealots of progress have proclaimed a rebellious faith in human self-improvement via accumulating wisdom and ever-improving methodology.

Even some artists and writers began siding with the future, as when Bruno Bettelheim finally admitted that it was OK to read fairy tales, or when H.G. Wells stood up to Henry James over whether stories can involve social and scientific change. Confronting stodgy culture mavens, modernists and science fiction writers spurned the classical notion of "eternal verities" and the assumption that all generations will repeat the same stupidities, proclaiming instead that children can make new and different mistakes! Or even (sometimes) learn from the blunders of their parents.

Before the Internet was more than an experimental glimmer, Marshall McLuhan fizzed: "But all the conservatism in the world does not offer even token resistance to the ecological sweep of the new electric media."

This surge of tech-zealotry is taken further -- to a degree that seems almost fetishistic -- by fans of a looming "positive singularity," in which a humanity that is aided by loyal and super-smart artificial intelligence (AI) will soon transcend all known limitations, toppling all barriers before an unstoppable can-do spirit. All we need is to keep exponentiating knowledge and computing power at the rate we have, and soon those AI assistants will cure all ailments, deliver clean energy, and solve the riddle of our minds. Singulatarians such as Ray Kurzweil and John Smart foresee a rosy Aquarian age just ahead, one of accelerating openness and proliferating connectedness, unleashing human potential in something radiantly self-propelled and exponentially cornucopian.

Oy! Teilhard's bodhisattva has returned! And part of me wants to believe the transcendentalists, who think we'll all have godlike powers just in time to end poverty, save the planet, and give the baby boomers eternal life. Hal-AI-lujah!

But, alas, even the coiner of the term "technological singularity" -- author Vernor Vinge -- will tell you that it ain't necessarily so. If these wonders are going to come to pass, it won't happen in a way that's smooth, organic, automatic or pain-free. As Edward Tenner pointed out in "Why Things Bite Back," there are always surprising, unintended consequences. The ultimate, pragmatic purpose of free debate is to find most of these error modes before well-made plans go awry. A practical aim that is forgotten by those who worship self-expression entirely for its own sake.

Anyway, emergent properties help those who help themselves. Very few good things ever happened as gifts of circumstance, without iteration and hard work. Above all, we'll need to improve the tools of the Enlightenment, at an ever-increasing pace, so that Howard Rheingold's vaunted citizen-centered smart mobs really are more smart than mobs!

Too bad for us, then. Because, looking at today's lobotomizing social nets, avatar worlds and dismal "collaborationware," any rational oddsmaker would have to favor the grouches by a 10-point spread.

So, is the Google era empowering us to be better, smarter, more agile thinkers? Or devolving us into distracted, manic scatterbrains? Is technology-improved discourse going to turn us all into avid, participatory problem solvers? Or will the Web's centrifugal effects spin us all into little islands of shared conviction -- midget Nuremberg rallies -- where facts become irrelevant and any opinion can be a memic god?

Alas, both sides are right. And both are missing key points. If I must simplistically choose between Teilhardists and renunciators, my sentiments go with the optimists who helped bring us to this party we're all enjoying -- the worldwide culture and Internet that lets me share these thoughts with you and that empowers the grouches to be heard. Luddism has always been a lame and deep-down hypocritical option.

But no, this latest tiff seems to boil down to another of the infamously oversimplifying dichotomies that author Robert Wright dismantles in his important book, "Nonzero." No. 1 on our agenda of "ways I might grow up this year" ought to be giving up the foul habit of believing such tradeoffs. Like the hoary and obsolete "left-right political axis," or the either-or choice we are too frequently offered between safety and freedom.

But let's illustrate just how far off base both the mystics and the curmudgeons are, by offering a step-back perspective.

Only a generation ago, intellectuals wrung their hands over what then seemed inevitable: that the rapidly increasing pace of discovery and knowledge accumulation would force individuals to specialize more and more.

It may be hard to convey just how seriously this trend was taken 30 or so years ago. Sober academics foresaw an era when students might study half a lifetime, just to begin researching some subfield of a subfield, excruciatingly narrow and dauntingly deep, never knowing if they were duplicating work done by others, never cross-fertilizing or sharing with other domains. It reflected the one monotonic trend of the 20th century -- a professionalization of all things.

It's funny, though. You just don't hear much about fear of overspecialization anymore. Yet has the tsunami of new knowledge ceased? If anything, it has speeded up. Then why did that worry go away?

As it turned out, several counter-trends (some of them having nothing to do with the Internet) seem to have transformed the intellectual landscape. Today, most scientists seem far more eclectic, agile and cross-disciplinary than ever. They seek insights and collaboration far afield from their specialties. Institutions like the Sixth College at the University of California at San Diego deliberately blend the arts and sciences, belying C.P. Snow's "two cultures forever schism'd." Moreover, the spread of avocations and ancillary expertise suggests that the professionalization trend has finally met its match in a looming age of amateurs.)

If anything, our worry has mutated. Instead of fretting about specialists "knowing more and more about less and less," today's info glut has had an inverse effect -- to spread people's attention so widely that they -- in effect -- know just a little about a vast range of topics. No longer do our pessimists fear "narrow-mindedness" as much as "shallow-mindedness."

Indeed, doesn't Carr have a point, viewing today's blogosphere as superficial, facile and often frivolous? When pundit mistress Arianna Huffington crows about there being 50,000 new blogs established every day, calling them a "first draft of history," is that flattering to history?

Don't get me wrong -- I want to believe this story. My own metaphor compares today's frenzy of participatory self-expression to a body's immune system that might sniff out every dark abuse or crime or unexamined mistake. I still believe the age of amateurs has that potential. But, in darker moments, I wonder. If our bodies were this inefficient -- with such an astronomical ratio of silliness to quality -- we'd explode from all the excess white blood cells before ever benefiting from the few that usefully attack an error or disease.

Above all, can you name a problem that all this "discourse" has profoundly or permanently solved -- in a world where problems proliferate and accumulate at a record pace? No, let's make the challenge simpler: Can Shirky or Huffington point to even one stupidity that has been decisively disproved online? Ever?

Sure, there are good things. Professional journalism has added many innovative cadres and layers that show more agility and zest than the old newspapers and broadcasting networks, often aided or driven by a stratum of actinically focused semipro bloggers. I am well aware of -- and grateful to -- the many excellent political and historical fact-checking sites that debunk all kinds of mystical or paranoid nuttiness. But still, the nutty things never go away, do they? Debunking only serves to damp each fever down a little, for a while, but the infections remain. Every last one of them.

What the blogosphere and Facebook cosmos do best is to engender the raw material of productive discourse -- opinion. Massive, pyroclastic flows of opinion. (Including this one.) They can be creative and entrancing. But they are only one-half of a truly creative process.

Such processes that work -- markets, democracy, science -- foster not only the introduction of fresh variety and new things but also a winnowing of those that don't work. Commerce selects for better products and companies. In elections, the truth eventually (if tardily) expels bad leaders. Science corrects or abandons failed theories. It's messy and flawed, but we owe almost everything we have to the way these "accountability arenas" imitate the ultimate creative process, evolution, by not only engendering creativity but also culling unsuccessful mutations. To make room for more.

Today's Web and blogosphere have just one part of this two-stage rhythm. Sure, bullshit makes great fertilizer. But (mixing metaphors a bit) shouldn't there be ways to let pearls rise and noxious stuff go away, like phlogiston and Baal worship? Beyond imagination and creativity and opinion, we also need a dance of Shiva, destroying the insipid, vicious and untrue.

To the nostalgists, there is only one way of accomplishing this -- the 4,000-year-old prescription of hierarchy. But all those censors, priests and credentialed arbiters of taste had their chance, and all our instincts, as children of the Enlightenment, rebel against ever letting them get a grip on culture once again! Authoritarian gatekeepers would only wind up stifling what makes the Net special.

But there is another option. A market could replicate the creative (and creatively destructive) power of evolution in the realm of good and bad ideas, just as our older markets sift and cull myriad goods and services. That is, if the Web offered tools of critical appraisal and discourse. Tools up to the task.

Tentative efforts have been taken to provide this second half of the cycle, where amateur participants might manifest, en masse, the kind of selective judgment that elite gatekeepers and list makers used to provide. Wikipedia makes a real effort. A few debate and disputation sites have tried to foster formal set-tos between groups opposing each other over issues like gun control, experimenting with procedures that might turn debate from a shouting and preening match into a relentless and meticulous exploration of what's true and what's not. But these crude efforts have been given a just scintilla of the attention and investment that go to the fashionable, honey pot concepts: social networks and avatar spaces, "emotional" self-expression, photo/art/film sharing, and ever more ways to gush opinions.

Am I sounding like one of the curmudgeons? Look, I like all that stuff. Heck, I can self-express with the best of 'em. It's how I make my living! But all by itself, it is never, ever going to bring us to a singularity -- or even a culture of relatively effective problem solvers.

Note that my complaint isn't the same as Carr's about our fellow citizens becoming "nekulturny" and losing the ability to read (as in the Walter Tevis novel "Mockingbird.") Sure, I wish (for example) that some of the attention and money devoted to shallow movie sci-fi remakes would turn to the higher form of science fiction, with its nuanced Gedanken experiments about speculative change. But we're in no danger of losing the best mental skills and tools and memes of the past. It's a laughable fret.

What we need to remember is that there is nothing unique about today's quandary. Ever since the arrival of glass lenses and movable type, the amount that each person can see and know has multiplied, with new tools ranging from newspapers and lithographs to steamships and telegraphs, to radio and so on. And every time, conservative nostalgists claimed that normal people could not adapt, that such godlike powers should be reserved to an elite, or perhaps renounced.

Meanwhile, enthusiasts zealously greeted every memory and vision prosthetic -- from the printing press to lending libraries to television -- with hosannas, forecasting an apotheosis of reason and light. In 1894, philanthropist John Jacob Astor wrote a bestselling novel about the year 2001, a future transformed by science, technology, enterprise and human goodwill.

Of course, life can be ironic. Astor died with a famed flourish of noblesse oblige aboard the sinking Titanic -- the first of many garish calamities that began quenching this naive zeal for progress. For a while. And so it has gone, a bipolar see-saw between optimists and pessimists.

In reality, the vision and memory prosthetics brought on consequences that were always far more complicated than either set of idealists expected. Out of all this ruction, just one thing made it possible for us to advance, ensuring that the net effects would be positive. That one thing was the pragmatic mind set of the Enlightenment.

So let's conclude by returning to a core point of the cyber-grumblers. Yes, for sure, some millions, perhaps billions, will become couch or Net potatoes. Unimaginative, fad-following and imitative. But there is a simple answer.

So what? Those people will matter as little tomorrow as couch potatoes who stay glued to television matter today.

Meanwhile, however, a large minority -- the "creative minority" that Toynbee called essential for any civilization's success -- will continue to feel repelled by homogeneity and sameness. They'll seek out the unusual and surprising. Centrifugally driven by a need to be different, they'll nurture hobbies that turn into avocations that transform into niches of profound expertise.

Already we are in an era when no worthwhile skill is ever lost, if it can draw the eye of some small corps of amateurs. Today there are more expert flint-knappers than in the Paleolithic. More sword makers than during the Middle Ages. Vastly more surface area of hobbyist telescopes than instruments owned by all governments and universities, put together. Following the DIY banner of Make magazine, networks of neighbors have started setting up chemical sensors that will weave into hyper-environmental webs. Can you look at all this and see the same species of thoughtless, imitative monkeys that Mark Pesce does?

Well, we are varied. We contain multitudes. And that is the point! Those who relish images of either gloom or apotheosis forget how we got here, through a glorious, wonderful, messy mix of evolution and hard work and brilliance, standing on the shoulders of those who sweated earlier progress. Now we sprint toward success or collapse. If we fail, it will be because we just barely missed a once-in-a-species (perhaps even once-on-a-planet) chance to get it right.

I don't plan to let that happen. Do you?

No, what's needed is not the blithe enthusiasm preached by Ray Kurzweil and Clay Shirky. Nor Nicholas Carr's dyspeptic homesickness. What is called for is a clear-eyed, practical look at what's missing from today's Web. Tools that might help turn quasar levels of gushing opinion into something like discourse, so that several billion people can do more than just express a myriad of rumors and shallow impulses, but test, compare and actually reach some conclusions now and then.

But what matters even more is to step back from yet another tiresome dichotomy, between fizzy enthusiasm and testy nostalgia. Earlier phases of the great Enlightenment experiment managed to do this by taking a wider perspective. By taking nothing for granted.

If we prove incapable of doing this, then maybe those who worry about the latest generation's devolution are right after all.

-- By David Brin

posted in Find the Others... - 33 replies

Master the internets!

2009-02-26T05:12:26Z

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/074b646f2b/master-of-the-internet-from-scatmandeux

posted in Find the Others... - 1 reply

Singularity University

2009-02-11T20:05:22Z

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/02/BUQO15LUGH.DTL&type=tech

This sounds very interesting.

posted in Find the Others... - 2 replies

Scientists Not So Sure...

2009-02-01T10:21:22Z

from the people who brought you "junk DNA" and the 80% of your brain that's "unused"...

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,483477,00.html

OOPS.

"Three physicists have reexamined the math surrounding the creation of microscopic black holes in the Switzerland-based LHC, the world's largest particle collider, and determined that they won't simply evaporate in a millisecond as had previously been predicted."

okay, first of all, the only reason this comes out before they switched the damn thing on is because it's already malfunctioned, and currently under repair. how in the world this ridiculous crapshoot EVER got approved is beyond me...

posted in Find the Others... - 12 replies

Planet Harddrive

2009-01-24T05:32:01Z

"The Bay Area was rocked this morning by a fatal disk error reaching 6.5 on the Richter scale at 4:34 AM PST. Residents are advised to be prepared for post-crash data dumps."

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/planet-harddrive.html

posted in Find the Others... - 0 replies

hope floats

2009-01-23T20:30:09Z

Collective Consciousness & the Inauguration
Dean Radin reports a data spike from the Global Consciousness Project.

http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-is-plot-of-odds-against-chance-for.html

"...the coincidence in time between what was arguably the single most anticipated moment by hundreds of millions of viewers during the inauguration, and the spike in odds at the same time, is quite striking."

posted in Find the Others... - 1 reply

we need to get atom a govt commissioned art installation

2009-01-23T18:35:14Z

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/world/europe/15mosaic.html?_r=3

posted in Find the Others... - 2 replies

The Will to Disbelieve

2008-12-22T21:35:15Z

"There are two ways to respond to surprising outcomes of pilot tests. One way is to say, hmmm, that's curious, let's try it again. The other way is to say, that can't possibly be true because the universe doesn't allow for such things."

http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2008/12/will-to-disbelieve.html

posted in Find the Others... - 6 replies

the big bounce

2008-12-13T18:37:23Z

apparently, someone finally fired up a decent joint down in the lab...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026861.500-did-our-cosmos-exist-before-the-big-bang.html?page=1

"Most cosmologists believe that our universe emerged from a singularity during the Big Bang. But now physicists are exploring the possibility that our universe was created by the death of an earlier universe.

Martin Bojowald and Abhat Ashtekar began researching their theory of loop quantum cosmology (LQC), an approach to cosmology that combine’s Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics. They have modeled the birth of our universe, exploring the mathematics of universe as it contracts back toward its point of origin.

The researchers have found that when applying LQC, the universe does not revert back to a singularity as it contracts. Instead of seeing a big bang, the models indicate that the universe experienced a big bounce, with a predecessor universe contracting as it ended and then reemerging as our new, expanding universe. If the theory proves correct, it could mean that our universe does not have a finite beginning and end but is, instead, part of a chain of universes that expand and then contract to give way to a brand new universe."

***

no way, you mean it works in cycles like everything IN the universe...!?? who could possibly have imagined?

posted in Find the Others... - 0 replies

find the trapped others...

2008-11-24T17:55:26Z

"A man suffering from "locked in" syndrome, where a fully-conscious person is completely paralyzed except for some eyelid movements, is speaking again using a computer. Doctors report in Nature today that he's using a brain implant to control speech synthesizing software with his mind."

http://io9.com/5096448/paralyzed-man-speaks-again-using-brain-implant

WOW.

posted in Find the Others... - 1 reply

back to the same old future

2008-11-18T22:39:38Z

file under: "dude, where's my goddamn flying car?!?"

http://io9.com/5067829/can-futurism-escape-the-1990s

" A new transhumanist magazine, H+, has just hit the ether and is packed with stories about implantable information technology, longevity drugs, and the importance of preparing for a near future where humans take control of their own evolution. The cover is of a hot CGI babe sporting reprogrammable makeup and a lip stud that is also her PDA. Why does this future look almost exactly like the future that we were predicting back in 1992? Partly that's because the magazine was created by R.U. Sirius, writer and co-founder of 90s futurist mag Mondo 2000, whose 20-year-old ideas about a posthuman tomorrow still feel relevant. Is futurism stuck in the past?

A better question might be whether tomorrow has simply receded into the distance."

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/

posted in Find the Others... - 16 replies

Greedy Christians Worship Golden Calf

2008-11-11T00:14:19Z

Did you know that some Christian dingbat has dubbed today the “Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies?” Well here they are, at the Wall Street bull statue thing, praying to Jesus for money.

http://wonkette.com/403920/jesus-people-pray-that-false-idol-will-save-gods-economy

posted in Find the Others... - 26 replies

hope dies last

2008-11-05T03:23:30Z

RIP Studs Terkel 1912-2008

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96437774

http://www.avclub.com/content/node/24200

posted in Find the Others... - 3 replies

partrick farley still rocks my universe...

2008-11-04T21:08:21Z

http://www.dicebox.net/asides/dontlookback.htm

can someone please cut this guy a big fat production check?

http://pfarley.livejournal.com/

posted in Find the Others... - 0 replies

Men on a Mission

2008-11-04T18:50:11Z

and when i say everything's been done, i mean EVERYTHING...

http://www.thepinupblog.com/files/1650f71a48a3448f383ae4868aee830b-150.html

posted in Find the Others... - 0 replies

one way to find them:

2008-10-26T21:18:50Z

"The latest request from the Pentagon...looking for contractors to provide a "Multi-Robot Pursuit System" that will let packs of robots "search for and detect a non-cooperative human".

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2008/10/packs-of-robots-will-hunt-down.html

you have 30 seconds to comply. or just freak right out...

posted in Find the Others... - 1 reply

rushkoff invades boingboing

2008-10-22T15:37:34Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/25/my-boingboing-future.html

"Now that I've got a toe in the door at BoingBoing, I'm going to pitch them hard on a longer-term relationship. ... So, I want to create pieces that initiate the conversations and behaviors that engage people in these processes. Each one would be the beginning of a discussion, and part of an expanding wiki of resources, supporting material, and user-generated content."

now, if we could get some snappy icons going on in their forum, we could finally dispense with tribe altogether...!

posted in Find the Others... - 8 replies

projectionist

2008-08-22T22:38:26Z

http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?in_article_id=235424&in_page_id=2

posted in Find the Others... - 7 replies

Where ARE the others?

2008-06-09T13:09:21Z

I found a couple recently, or they found ME, really.... but then they ran away!
What's up with THAT?

posted in Find the Others... - 7 replies

apparently THEY have an ironic sense of humor

2008-06-08T03:34:49Z

http://findtheothers.tribe.net/photos/07e2bdc4-9f06-4f02-97d3-fe9a93eb5101

posted in Find the Others... - 2 replies

May God Bless Your Brand

2008-06-08T03:33:49Z

http://www.christvertising.com/
each and everyone one...

posted in Find the Others... - 3 replies

your nuts or your guns

2008-03-20T01:15:22Z

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080318/wl_sthasia_afp/healthindiapopulationfamilyplanningguns;_ylt=Ask80cj1b6XMbO_KVIauKq4Bxg8F

I can think of a few states here we should try this out in...

Texas anyone?

posted in Find the Others... - 3 replies

With Friends Like These

2008-03-15T02:47:03Z

y'all better stop trollin for jailbait on facebook and git somewhere else...

I'm all for virtual world expansion, but these guys just make it all so creepy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

Published on Thursday, January 17, 2008 by the Guardian/UK
With Friends Like These …

Facebook has 59 million users - and 2 million new ones join each week. But you won’t catch Tom Hodgkinson volunteering his personal information - not now that he knows the politics of the people behind the social networking site.

by Tom Hodgkinson

I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you”. But hang on. Why on God’s earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?

And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn’t it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval. (”I like Facebook,” said another friend. “I got a shag out of it.”) It also encourages a disturbing competitiveness around friendship: it seems that with friends today, quality counts for nothing and quantity is king. The more friends you have, the better you are. You are “popular”, in the sense much loved in American high schools. Witness the cover line on Dennis Publishing’s new Facebook magazine: “How To Double Your Friends List.”

It seems, though, that I am very much alone in my hostility. At the time of writing Facebook claims 59 million active users, including 7 million in the UK, Facebook’s third-biggest customer after the US and Canada. That’s 59 million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information and consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing about. Right now, 2 million new people join each week. At the present rate of growth, Facebook will have more than 200 million active users by this time next year. And I would predict that, if anything, its rate of growth will accelerate over the coming months. As its spokesman Chris Hughes says: “It’s embedded itself to an extent where it’s hard to get rid of.”

All of the above would have been enough to make me reject Facebook for ever. But there are more reasons to hate it. Many more.

Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don’t mind being bombarded by adverts for the world’s biggest brands. As with PayPal, national boundaries are a thing of the past.

Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third investor called Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners (more on him later). Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook when Harvard students Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz went to meet him in San Francisco in June 2004, soon after they had launched the site. Thiel now reportedly owns 7% of Facebook, which, at Facebook’s current valuation of $15bn, would be worth more than $1bn. There is much debate on who exactly were the original co-founders of Facebook, but whoever they were, Zuckerberg is the only one left on the board, although Hughes and Moskowitz still work for the company.

Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual banking system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for himself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets magazine recently called him “one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the country”. He has made money by betting on rising oil prices and by correctly predicting that the dollar would weaken. He and his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently been labelled “The PayPal Mafia” by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a $500,000 McLaren supercar. Thiel is also a chess master and intensely competitive. He has been known to sweep the chessmen off the table in a fury when losing. And he does not apologise for this hyper-competitveness, saying: “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”

But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the “multiculture” led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux (”Let there be light”). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls himself “way libertarian”.

TheVanguard is run by one Rod D Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom Thiel greatly admires. On the site, Thiel says: “Rod is one of our nation’s leading minds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public policy. He possesses a more complete understanding of America than most executives have of their own businesses.”

This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their vision for the world: “TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us.” Their aim is to promote policies that will “reshape America and the globe”. TheVanguard describes its politics as “Reaganite/Thatcherite”. The chairman’s message says: “Today we’ll teach MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and the leftwing media some lessons they never imagined.”

So, Thiel’s politics are not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I listened to a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes’ famous characterization of life as “nasty, brutish and short”, and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: “For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe.”

Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

Thiel’s philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behavior called mimetic desire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel’s virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. Girard is a regular at Thiel’s intellectual soirees. What you don’t hear about in Thiel’s philosophy, by the way, are old-fashioned real-world concepts such as art, beauty, love, pleasure and truth.

The internet is immensely appealing to neocons such as Thiel because it promises a certain sort of freedom in human relations and in business, freedom from pesky national laws, national boundaries and suchlike. The internet opens up a world of free trade and laissez-faire expansion. Thiel also seems to approve of offshore tax havens, and claims that 40% of the world’s wealth resides in places such as Vanuatu, the Cayman Islands, Monaco and Barbados. I think it’s fair to say that Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is against tax. He also likes the globalization of digital culture because it makes the banking overlords hard to attack: “You can’t have a workers’ revolution to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu,” he says.

If life in the past was nasty, brutish and short, then in the future Thiel wants to make it much longer, and to this end he has also invested in a firm that is exploring life-extension technologies. He has pledged £3.5m to a Cambridge-based gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey, who is searching for the key to immortality. Thiel is also on the board of advisers of something called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. From its fantastical website, the following: “The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies … heading in this direction … Artificial Intelligence … direct brain-computer interfaces … genetic engineering … different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence.”

So by his own admission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he also calls “nature”, and install a virtual world in its place, and it is in this context that we must view the rise of Facebook. Facebook is a deliberate experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright young thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out techno-utopian fantasies. Not someone I want to help get any richer.

The third board member of Facebook is Jim Breyer. He is a partner in the venture capital firm Accel Partners, who put $12.7m into Facebook in April 2005. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he is also a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Now these are the people who are really making things happen in America, because they invest in the new young talent, the Zuckerbergs and the like. Facebook’s most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock’s senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What’s In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA. After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which “identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions”.

The US defense department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier. “We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries,” defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003. “We need to make the leap into the information age, which is the critical foundation of our transformation efforts.” In-Q-Tel’s first chairman was Gilman Louie, who served on the board of the NVCA with Breyer. Another key figure in the In-Q-Tel team is Anita K Jones, former director of defence research and engineering for the US department of defence, and - with Breyer - board member of BBN Technologies. When she left the US department of defence, Senator Chuck Robb paid her the following tribute: “She brought the technology and operational military communities together to design detailed plans to sustain US dominance on the battlefield into the next century.”

Now even if you don’t buy the idea that Facebook is some kind of extension of the American imperialist program crossed with a massive information-gathering tool, there is no way of denying that as a business, it is pure mega-genius. Some net nerds have suggested that its $15bn valuation is excessive, but I would argue that if anything that is too modest. Its scale really is dizzying, and the potential for growth is virtually limitless. “We want everyone to be able to use Facebook,” says the impersonal voice of Big Brother on the website. I’ll bet they do. It is Facebook’s enormous potential that led Microsoft to buy 1.6% for $240m. A recent rumor says that Asian investor Lee Ka-Shing, said to be the ninth richest man in the world, has bought 0.4% of Facebook for $60m.

The creators of the site need do very little bar fiddle with the program. In the main, they simply sit back and watch as millions of Facebook addicts voluntarily upload their ID details, photographs and lists of their favorite consumer objects. Once in receipt of this vast database of human beings, Facebook then simply has to sell the information back to advertisers, or, as Zuckerberg puts it in a recent blog post, “to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web”. And indeed, this is precisely what’s happening. On November 6 last year, Facebook announced that 12 global brands had climbed on board. They included Coca-Cola, Blockbuster, Verizon, Sony Pictures and Condé Nast. All trained in marketing bullshit of the highest order, their representatives made excited comments along the following lines:

“With Facebook Ads, our brands can become a part of the way users communicate and interact on Facebook,” said Carol Kruse, vice president, global interactive marketing, the Coca-Cola Company.

“We view this as an innovative way to cultivate relationships with millions of Facebook users by enabling them to interact with Blockbuster in convenient, relevant and entertaining ways,” said Jim Keyes, Blockbuster chairman and CEO. “This is beyond creating advertising impressions. This is about Blockbuster participating in the community of the consumer so that, in return, consumers feel motivated to share the benefits of our brand with their friends.”

“Share” is Facebookspeak for “advertise”. Sign up to Facebook and you become a free walking, talking advert for Blockbuster or Coke, extolling the virtues of these brands to your friends. We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships.

Now, by comparision with Facebook, newspapers, for example, begin to look hopelessly outdated as a business model. A newspaper sells advertising space to businesses looking to sell stuff to their readers. But the system is far less sophisticated than Facebook for two reasons. One is that newspapers have to put up with the irksome expense of paying journalists to provide the content. Facebook gets its content for free. The other is that Facebook can target advertising with far greater precision than a newspaper. Admit on Facebook that your favorite film is This Is Spinal Tap, and when a Spinal Tap-esque movie comes out, you can be sure that they’ll be sending ads your way.

It’s true that Facebook recently got into hot water with its Beacon advertising program. Users were notified that one of their friends had made a purchase at certain online shops; 46,000 users felt that this level of advertising was intrusive, and signed a petition called “Facebook! Stop invading my privacy!” to say so. Zuckerberg apologized on his company blog. He has written that they have now changed the system from “opt-out” to “opt-in”. But I suspect that this little rebellion about being so ruthlessly commodified will soon be forgotten: after all, there was a national outcry by the civil liberties movement when the idea of a police force was mooted in the UK in the mid 19th century.

Futhermore, have you Facebook users ever actually read the privacy policy? It tells you that you don’t have much privacy. Facebook pretends to be about freedom, but isn’t it really more like an ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a population that will very soon exceed the UK’s? Thiel and the rest have created their own country, a country of consumers.

Now, you may, like Thiel and the other new masters of the cyberverse, find this social experiment tremendously exciting. Here at last is the Enlightenment state longed for since the Puritans of the 17th century sailed away to North America, a world where everyone is free to express themselves as they please, according to who is watching. National boundaries are a thing of the past and everyone cavorts together in freewheeling virtual space. Nature has been conquered through man’s boundless ingenuity. Yes, and you may decide to send genius investor Thiel all your money, and certainly you’ll be waiting impatiently for the public flotation of the unstoppable Facebook.

Or you might reflect that you don’t really want to be part of this heavily-funded program to create an arid global virtual republic, where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodities on sale to giant global brands. You may decide that you don’t want to be part of this takeover bid for the world.

For my own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as unplugged as possible, and spend the time I save by not going on Facebook doing something useful, such as reading books. Why would I want to waste my time on Facebook when I still haven’t read Keats’ Endymion? And when there are seeds to be sown in my own back yard? I don’t want to retreat from nature, I want to reconnect with it. Damn air-conditioning! And if I want to connect with the people around me, I will revert to an old piece of technology. It’s free, it’s easy and it delivers a uniquely individual experience in sharing information: it’s called talking.

Facebook’s privacy policy

Just for fun, try substituting the words ‘Big Brother’ whenever you read the word ‘Facebook’

1 We will advertise at you

“When you use Facebook, you may set up your personal profile, form relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form groups, set up events, add applications, and transmit information through various channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service and offer personalized features.”

2 You can’t delete anything

“When you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information.”

3 Anyone can glance at your intimate confessions

“… we cannot and do not guarantee that user content you post on the site will not be viewed by unauthorized persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of user content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other users have copied or stored your user content.”

4 Our marketing profile of you will be unbeatable

“Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg, photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience.”

5 Opting out doesn’t mean opting out

“Facebook reserves the right to send you notices about your account even if you opt out of all voluntary email notifications.”

6 The CIA may look at the stuff when they feel like it

“By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States … We may be required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. We do not reveal information until we have a good faith belief that an information request by law enforcement or private litigants meets applicable legal standards. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Facebook service or using the Facebook name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies.”

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday January 16 2008 The US intelligence community’s enthusiasm for hi-tech innovation after 9/11 and the creation of In-Q-Tel, its venture capital fund, in 1999 were anachronistically linked in the article above. Since 9/11 happened in 2001 it could not have led to the setting up of In-Q-Tel two years earlier.

posted in Find the Others... - 11 replies

I hope you guys don't mind

2008-03-05T01:24:43Z

Especially Atom, but I invited a couple of people to join. Arthur and I were talking about the harsh realities of alternative energies and Dimi's something of an expert on Corporate exploits.

posted in Find the Others... - 26 replies

better odds than Russian roulette at least...

2008-03-03T22:32:03Z

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/navy-hits-spy-satellite-with-missile/20080219173609990001

although they likely shot it down over a poor populated area where the inhabitants are less likely to complain or do anything about it if they're poisoned.

Navy Hits Spy Satellite With Missile
By ROBERT BURNS and LOLITA C. BALDOR,
AP
Posted: 2008-02-21 11:37:18
Filed Under: Science News
WASHINGTON (Feb. 21) -- Debris from an obliterated U.S. spy satellite is being tracked over the Pacific and Atlantic oceans but appears to be too small to cause damage on Earth, a senior military officer said Thursday, just hours after a Navy missile scored a direct hit on the failing spacecraft.

Military officials said Thursday that a missile fired from a Navy cruiser scored a direct hit on a failing U.S. spy satellite that was falling out of orbit. Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there was up to a 90 percent chance the missile destroyed the spacecraft's fuel tank which was filled with highly toxic hydrazine.
Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an expert on military space technologies, told a Pentagon news conference that officials have a "high degree of confidence" that the missile launched from a Navy cruiser Wednesday night hit exactly where intended.

It was an unprecedented mission for the Navy, so extraordinary that the final go-ahead to launch the missile Wednesday was reserved for Defense Secretary Robert Gates rather than a military commander.

Cartwright estimated there was an 80 percent to 90 percent chance that the missile struck the most important target on the satellite - its fuel tank, containing 1,000 pounds of hydrazine, which Pentagon officials say could have posed a health hazard to humans if it had landed in a populated area.

Cartwright showed a brief video of the SM-3 missile launching from the USS Lake Erie at 10:26 p.m. EST, northwest of Hawaii, and of the missile's small "kill vehicle" - a non-explosive device at the tip - maneuvering into the path of the satellite and colliding spectacularly.

posted in Find the Others... - 11 replies

synthetic DNA has arrived...

2008-01-28T23:31:53Z

http://www.sptimes.com/2008/01/25/Worldandnation/Scientists_boast_brea.shtml

posted in Find the Others... - 5 replies

the spice...

2007-12-23T19:33:58Z

Sri Lanka at the weekend revived an ancient ritual of offering the first cinnamon harvest to the gods, three years after a devastating tsunami wiped out centuries-old plantations here.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071223/wl_sthasia_afp/srilankaeconomytsunamicommodities
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071223/wl_nm/tsunami_cinnamon_dc

K. P. Mahinda, a 51-year-old farmer who lost all but two cinnamon trees to the tsunami in his modest plot, offered a sapling from his nursery.

Survivors of the tsunami are finding that contrary to their initial fears, the soil is richer and cinnamon is growing rapidly.

posted in Find the Others... - 0 replies

is the u.s. rapidly becoming third world for all but rich people?

2007-07-27T04:16:45Z

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/06/13/hospitaldeath.probe.ap/index.html

cnn would have me believe that yes, yes it is. this is the kind of shit that happens to people in mexico or india or africa and then people shake their heads and say, yeah, that's why i never travel to third world countries.

"• Authorities in California probing death of bleeding woman in emergency room
• 911 operators wouldn't call paramedics because she was already in hospital
• Police asked to help woman arrested her instead, relatives say
• Hospital's chief medical officer placed on ordered leave
Adjust font size:

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- A woman who lay bleeding on the emergency room floor of a troubled inner-city hospital died after 911 dispatchers refused to contact paramedics or an ambulance to take her to another facility, newly released tapes of the emergency calls reveal....Relatives said Rodriguez was bleeding from the mouth and writhing in pain for 45 minutes while she was at a hospital waiting area. Experts have said she could have survived had she been treated early enough."

posted in Find the Others... - 1 reply

Everytime a bell rings, an angel gets its wings... unless the bell is incredibly high pitched

2007-06-21T17:45:59Z

It's starting to look like HAARP may be the culprit in the Bee Colony Collapse crisis:

http://www.hyperstealth.com/haarp/index.htm

posted in Find the Others... - 5 replies

I was invited back here

2007-06-21T17:44:19Z

Are there any objections this time? Don't be shy, speak now or forever hold your peace, aye.

posted in Find the Others... - 27 replies

Will ratifying Kyoto harm the economy?

2007-06-13T21:49:19Z

a friend (whom i've invited to join us here - who BELONGS here) believes that ratifying and implementing kyoto will end the u.s. reign as premier superpower of the world - and that this is the reason why china and india won't join. if the premise is correct that kyoto will harm the economy by forcing industry to scale back, then it seems unlikely that the superpowers would agree to it, unless their idealism is stronger than their greed. yet corporations are going green...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/02/AR2007030202044.html

With the prospect that carbon emissions will soon bear a price -- and perhaps an escalating one -- the decision by the new owners of TXU to steer away from a focus on carbon-intensive coal-based power makes good business sense. In fact, leading-edge companies nationwide are factoring in carbon charges and thus higher prices for burning fossil fuels into their business planning models. This new approach has several important implications. By making companies pay for every increment of pollution, society puts an economic premium on vigorous environmental effort, and forces executives to make pollution control and management of natural resources a core part of their strategy.

Companies that fail to grasp this point put themselves at competitive risk.

================================================================
but perhaps kyoto doesn't go far enough to save us anyway?
http://www.earthfirstjournal.org/article.php?id=65

While the US multinational corporate public relations firms were busy duping the public into believing global warming was a myth, the UN’s own scientists were recommending a minimum 60 percent reduction in greenhouse gasses to prevent global environmental catastrophe. So our global saviors began with Rio Earth Summit in 1992 manifesting into the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. This empty agreement called for a measly 5.2 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from the 1990 level.

the world could EASILY force china and india to ratify and this is what the u.s./eu/etc should do, but is earth first right...that kyoto doesn't go far enough? i think earth first is right, which means maybe saul is right about the end of the world.

posted in Find the Others... - 39 replies

Bet you ATOM is surprised when he shows up here!

2007-06-13T21:48:02Z

for he's a jolly good fellow, for he's a jolly good fellow
for he's missing in action, we miss him we won't deny

report for duty, soldier!

posted in Find the Others... - 0 replies

Something happened today...

2007-06-13T21:35:59Z

...that kind of bothered me. I was at the local mall, and about to head down the escalator, and coming towards me, also about to go downstairs, were two Indians (not Native Americans, but Indians), a boy in his 20's and his father. Now, I ushered them to go on ahead, and the boy jumped right on, but his father refused and just flat out insisted that I go first. Which is okay, that's nice of him, but then I asked him how he's doing and he called me "sir". And I'm thinking, here's a man in his 50's - I should be calling him sir, not the other way around,not to mention that I could tell that it angered his son, and it made me realize two things...
1) Just how deeply conditioned the Indians had been, for generations, to uphold the sovereignty of the white man, and
2) Just how justifiably angry this generation is of that notion. Now, it's something I'd noticed before talking to Indians online - but not right up close and personal like this. My family were friends with a family of Indian-Americans, but they were both born and raised here. But here's this guy, ready and willing to bend over backwards for me... for absolutely no good reason.

posted in Find the Others... - 8 replies

Does the Loch Ness Monster Really Exist?

2007-06-02T12:11:20Z

Let's find out more!

http://catandgirl.com/and/lochnessmonster.mp3

maybe j3r3my and saul can sample this for future musical creations!

posted in Find the Others... - 4 replies

Secret IDF anthrax vaccine trial on soldiers to be investigated

2007-05-28T01:18:48Z

this is pretty scary big brother stuff:

Last update - 01:15 28/05/2007
Secret IDF anthrax vaccine trial on soldiers to be investigated
By Yuval Azulai, Haaretz Correspondent

The Israel Defense Forces will provide the ethics bureau of the Israeli Medical Association with all the details of secret experimental anthrax vaccine trials it carried out on over 800 soldiers since 1999.

A committee will be established to probe whether the trials adhered to World Medical Association ethical requirements relating to human clinical trials as set out in the Helsinki Declaration.

The IMA probe will comprise specialists in infectious diseases, and members of the Israeli delegation to the Helsinki committee which devised the international standards for clinical trials on humans. Chairman of the IMA Ethics Bureau, Professor Avinoam Reches, said on Sunday that the probe's findings will be made public.

The Israel Medical Corps requested that the IMA investigate the experiments after Channel 2 television's current affairs program, Uvda, revealed earlier this month that dozens of participants still suffered unexplained medical symptoms.

Following the expose, the Defense Ministry and former IDF chief medical officer issued statements saying the experiment had been carried out because Iraq was expected to use spores of the deadly anthrax bacteria to attack Israel.

Israel did not possess sufficient quantities of the vaccine to field such an attack, and was therefore compelled to produce the vaccine rather than importing it.

Years after the receiving the experimental Israeli vaccine, soldiers continued to suffer unexplained skin tumors, severe lung infections, serious migraine headaches, bronchitis and even epilepsy symptoms.

However, the IDF did not take responsibility for their ongoing treatment at civilian medical centers, and they were not allowed to discuss the experiment under any circumstances despite its likely connection to their continuing health problems.

One of the soldiers who took part in the experiment told Uvda "They said that one group would receive the American vaccine, and the other group would receive the experimental Israel vaccine."

"They specifically explained to us that the vaccine is not dangerous and that we were not being injected with the actual virus, not even the dead virus. Instead, they said they would inject us with the altered DNA of the virus. They said it was very advanced," added the soldier.

The Ethics Bureau investigation committee will hear testimonies from Israel Medical Corps staff responsible for carrying out the secret experiments, as well as from soldiers who received the vaccine.

Israeli non-profit group Physicians for Human Rights has requested the soldiers' testimonies as well, in order to pressure the authorities to create an independent probe commission into the medical practices of the IDF and Defense Ministry.

posted in Find the Others... - 0 replies

Mayan priests to purge Bush's evil after he leaves

2007-04-19T05:59:45Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/03/09/guatemala_mayan_prie.html

During President Bush's visit to Guatemala this week, he was escorted to Iximche, an ancient Kakchiquel Mayan holy site which is the center of continued ritual practice today. Mayan peasant activist Juan Tiney, who is the head of Guatemala's Coordinating Council of Indigenous People and Campesinos, says Mayan priests have decided they're going to have to purge the site of Bush's bad vibes:

"That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture."

posted in Find the Others... - 6 replies

Rush Spills The Beans

2007-03-26T02:08:01Z

From DivineCosmos.com

http://www.divinecosmos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=302&Itemid=70

*********************************************

"Every now and then there is a "glitch in the Matrix" - and someone in a position of influence lets the curtain drop, and reveals insider secrets.

Read the world-exclusive premiere of one of the most amazing examples of this, three years after it first happened… suggesting that the Powers That Be not only believe Mars was once inhabited, but think they are the descendants of this ancient race.

RUSH SPILLS THE BEANS… AND THE STORY IS IMMEDIATELY 'SANITIZED'

"Three years ago, one of our clients alerted us to a stunning Rush Limbaugh broadcast that aired on March 4, 2004. Had this been covered by the mainstream media and discussed with any seriousness, it could well have pierced the veil of UFO secrecy and led to some form of open disclosure.

We first found out about it on March 15th, and by that point, any transcript of the show had already been "sanitized" from the Internet. There were a few places left where you could read it, but only in the Google cache - and once those had cleared, it was gone for good. Three years later, the most detailed searches turn up absolutely no record of it ever having happened.

When we first heard this astonishing broadcast, and read the transcript, we were really in a bind as to whether we should disclose it or not. For whatever reason, we decided not to. Such has been the case with much of the material you are now reading in "The Revealing"."

*********************************************
I listened to this and it just weirds me out. It is a must-check-out!
http://www.divinecosmos.com/The_Gore_Report.mp3

Hoax or not-hoax? YOU be the one to decide. But please check it out if only for entertainment purposes.

You can also read the rants about it here:

http://godlikeproductions.com/bbs/message.php?page=1&showdate=3/12/07&messageid=357111&mpage=1

posted in Find the Others... - 6 replies

Hello, new to tribe

2007-03-25T16:30:50Z

I just wanted to introduce myself to everyone. Seems like an eclectic good hearted crowd with some insight in here. So, Hello! :o)

- sammy

posted in Find the Others... - 10 replies

finding just one other

2007-03-11T17:46:02Z

The comprehensive new study paints a sobering picture of an increasingly fragmented America, where intimate social ties -- once seen as an integral part of daily life and associated with a host of psychological and civic benefits -- are shrinking or nonexistent. In bad times, far more people appear to suffer alone.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/22/AR2006062201763_pf.html

posted in Find the Others... - 32 replies

Bio-artists bridge art-science divide

2007-03-11T17:44:47Z

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070303/ap_en_ot/bio_arts

Adam Zaretsky once spent 48 hours playing Engelbert Humperdincks's "Greatest Hits" to a dish of E.coli bacteria to determine whether vibrations or sounds influenced bacterial growth. Watching the bacteria's antibiotic production increase, Zaretsky decided that perhaps even cells were annoyed by constant subjection to "loud, really awful lounge music."

posted in Find the Others... - 5 replies

Solar Explosion Larger Than The Sun Itself

2007-01-29T18:03:47Z

This is rather...

...thought-provoking.

|| http://www.lmsal.com/solarsoft/latest_events_summary/gev_20070124_1341/gev_20070124_1341_laslm.html ||

...and everyone is going chicken-little on the godlikeproductions forum:

|| http://godlikeproductions.com/bbs/message.php?messageid=334581&mpage=1&showdate=1/24/07&forum=1 ||

Also, Princeton Egg Project going berserk:

|| http://godlikeproductions.com/bbs/message.php?messageid=334525&mpage=1&showdate=1/24/07&forum=1 ||

[note: be warned that the people on these boards are nowhere near as polite as the people on tribe.net, in case you decide to post!]

posted in Find the Others... - 9 replies

water on mars?

2007-01-29T17:15:46Z

they'll say anything these days...
;~)

http://video.msn.com/v/us/msnbc.htm?g=D91E0ABF-EA2B-467F-BF40-86FF8B781971&f=00&fg=copy

posted in Find the Others... - 32 replies

Passing Gas

2007-01-16T02:29:34Z

It's not just New York City. All I can think is WTF????

From the Godlike Productions BBS:

1. Half Moon Bay Gas Leak

http://godlikeproductions.com/bbs/message.php?messageid=327191&mpage=1&showdate=1/8/07&forum=1

2. AUSTIN TX Dozens of Birds Found Dead--it was blamed on a gas leak:

http://godlikeproductions.com/bbs/message.php?messageid=326903&mpage=1&showdate=1/8/07&forum=1

3. Gas Leak In London Subway

http://godlikeproductions.com/bbs/message.php?messageid=327074&mpage=1&showdate=1/8/07&forum=1

4. Fuel tankers reporting increased methane venting from sea beds:

http://godlikeproductions.com/bbs/message.php?messageid=327019&mpage=1&showdate=1/8/07&forum=1

5. Not to mention the token radiation leak; Radiation Leak at British Nuclear Plant:

http://godlikeproductions.com/bbs/message.php?messageid=327172&mpage=1&showdate=1/8/07&forum=1

Who knew that when humanity messed with Mother Nature, she would blithely fart at us?

Truth is gassier than fiction.

posted in Find the Others... - 1 reply

fear and loathing in the indigo spectrum

2006-12-30T01:04:20Z

Nikki Harwood believes her daughter is a super-evolved, psychic being with powers to heal the world. And she's not the only one.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,1837295,00.html

posted in Find the Others... - 19 replies

Jesus Camp

2006-11-04T02:08:07Z

Oh this makes me want to vomit...

http://www.jesuscampthemovie.com/

posted in Find the Others... - 18 replies

finding

2006-10-07T06:00:50Z

What's up, my name is Jamie. I'm fairly new to Tribe. I went to the disinfo thingie at the Omega institute in 2004, which how I knew to join this tribe. In the vein of finding the others: My boyfriend Geoff and I just moved to the SFBay area, anyone else near by?

Jamie

posted in Find the Others... - 2 replies

ACCEPTENCE ≠ ACQUIESENCE

2006-10-02T14:05:57Z

From Arthur magazine, Douglas Rushkoff's " ACCEPTENCE ≠ ACQUIESENCE "
http://people.tribe.net/devastatorjr/blog/147055b5-5829-4e3c-8110-068badd7b081

posted in Find the Others... - 3 replies

so fuck you, matthew alper

2006-08-30T17:45:21Z

Brain scan of nuns finds no single “god spot” in the brain.

http://www.umontreal.ca/medias/english/press_releases/2006-2007/20060829_brainscan.html

posted in Find the Others... - 0 replies

able to leap tall couches with a single bound....

2006-08-30T13:02:39Z

http://www.sptimes.com/2006/05/06/Tampabay/Scientology_nearly_re.shtml/

posted in Find the Others... - 3 replies

Flight 93 roundup

2006-08-30T05:07:55Z

However, the absence of any significant debris — including tailplane and wings — bewildered witnesses, relatives and, more importantly, some crash experts.

They found it hard to believe that an airliner up to 155ft long, with two engines each weighing more than six tons, could have penetrated the ground so completely as to utterly disappear. Had it, in reality, been blown to pieces in mid-air?

Certainly it is unclear how a single piece of fuselage the size of a dining room table could have been recovered from a marina in Indian Lake, a couple of miles away from the crash site — unless it fell from the sky during an aerial break-up.

But a bigger mystery is why the engines went missing.

Considering their weight, they should have plunged deep into the earth along with the rest of the airliner.

Yet they weren’t in the crater and only a one-ton segment of an engine was ever recovered, again more than a mile from the crash site. The FBI said, unconvincingly, that it had ‘bounced’ there.

The FBI also claimed metal fragments found up to eight miles away could have been carried there by the wind, even though the breeze was very light.

Witnesses said nothing was left at the crash site, yet the FBI belatedly claimed to have made two sensational discoveries — a red bandana and a passport allegedly belonging to the hijackers.

Very conveniently, these turned up as prosecution evidence earlier this year at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the socalled 20th hijacker and only terrorist to be convicted over the 9/11 atrocities.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=401315&in_page_id=1770

posted in Find the Others... - 2 replies

'Magic Mushroom' Drug Study Probes Science, Spirituality

2006-08-18T21:38:05Z

"What's more, most of the 36 adult participants -- none of whom had taken psilocybin before -- counted their experience while under the influence of the drug as "among the most meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their lives," Griffiths said. Most said they became better, kinder, happier people in the weeks after the psilocybin session -- a fact corroborated by family and friends."

http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=62879

Check out who funded the research:

"funded by the U.S. National Institute of Drug Abuse and the Council on Spiritual Practice"

posted in Find the Others... - 13 replies

LA Times says Reuters Lebanon photos were forged

2006-08-17T21:34:13Z

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-rutten12aug12,1,640725.column?coll=la-news-columns

apparently reuters admits the photos were forged and fired the photographer, but several photographers are saying this was not an isolated incident...
the writer links to reutersgate:
http://www.pajamasmedia.com/2006/08/reutersgate_butch_hajj_and_the.php

posted in Find the Others... - 0 replies

the earth is growing...

2006-08-12T15:32:55Z

http://www.continuitystudios.net/guestvid.html

I always wondered why dinosaurs got so huge, and on land even, it didn't seem very efficient, but if there was at one time a different gravitational pull, well then...

posted in Find the Others... - 3 replies

Fakes on a Plane

2006-08-09T16:26:01Z

9-11 Truth seekers don't need Stone to see their theories propounded in cinematic form. In the half-decade since 2001, as a loose congeries of varied political fringe groups and conspiracy hounds melded with a newly radicalized crop of Bush-burnt Americans to form a growing network of like-minded skeptics, the movement has fostered a robust filmmaking subculture of its own. Nearly 20 feature-length videos have been circulating through its ranks, first on DVD, more recently for free through video services like Google and YouTube.

http://villagevoice.com/film/0632,halter,74115,20.html

posted in Find the Others... - 0 replies

The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes

2006-07-30T15:33:36Z

Deepak Chopra and Grant Morrison have a verbal getdown with tights...

http://comix.tribe.net/thread/3096237d-13d3-4c5c-afd1-403a85ba6909

posted in Find the Others... - 0 replies

Are kidding me...this is news

2006-07-28T01:27:57Z

Show of hands...who didn't know this??

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060726/ap_on_en_mu/people_lance_bass

posted in Find the Others... - 8 replies

Seeds And Moss Are Creatures?

2006-07-13T18:17:37Z

I guess they must be more Others.

"Other creatures sent into space have been dogs, mice, cats, beetles, spiders, seeds, ants, fish, chimps, moss, newts, frogs, bacteria and chicken embryos."

http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=5407

posted in Find the Others... - 8 replies

(more) evidence of wtc demolition

2006-07-13T00:35:13Z

Scientific analysis on WTC steel debris undertaken by BYU Professor Steven Jones proves that the twin towers were demolished by means of incendiary devices and the release of the conclusive evidence is imminent.

"In this photo, for example, the column directly above the fireman's helmet shows that it was cut with thermite. There is a substantial amount of hardened molten iron which can be seen on both the inside and outside of the box column. This is precisely what one would expect to find on a column which had been cut with thermite,"

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2006/200606scientificanalysis.htm

posted in Find the Others... - 12 replies

911 question hits frontpage - in Norway

2006-07-12T20:27:44Z

Was September 11th an inside job?
From the July 1, 2006 Norwegian Le Monde Diplomatique

http://www.gnn.tv/B16458

http://www.911blogger.com/2006/07/le-monde-11-september-en-innsidejobb.html

http://www.lookingglassnews.org/viewstory.php?storyid=6608

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/7/5/152450/0414

posted in Find the Others... - 2 replies

crapping plastic

2006-07-12T19:56:02Z

instead of plastic crap...

http://www.livescience.com/technology/060307_styrofoam_cup.html

posted in Find the Others... - 21 replies

Kenny Boy got his

2006-07-12T17:39:04Z

http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/05/news/newsmakers/lay_death/index.htm?cnn=yes

Enron founder Ken Lay dies
64-year-old former energy executive was awaiting sentencing for fraud.
By Shaheen Pasha, CNNMoney.com staff writer
July 5 2006: 11:10 AM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Enron founder Kenneth Lay died early Wednesday in Aspen, Colo., a family spokeswoman said.

Lay, 64, was awaiting sentencing after being found guilty of conspiracy and fraud in the Enron trial in May.

In a statement, spokeswoman Kelly Kimberly said, "The Lays have a very large family with whom they need to communicate, and out of respect for the family we will release further details at a later time."

CNN affiliate KPRC in Houston said Lay was admitted to the Aspen Valley Hospital overnight with a massive coronary.

(Watch what penalties Lay would have faced -- 1:54)

On May 25, Lay was found guilty of 10 counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the collapse of Enron, the energy company he founded that eventually grew into the nation's seventh largest company before it imploded after an accounting scandal.

It was an astounding fall from grace for the Houston businessman who was once nicknamed "Kenny Boy" by President Bush. Lay had raised funds for Bush earlier in his political career.

In the Enron trial, Lay was accused of lying to investors and Wall Street about the health of Enron in late 2001 even as he enriched himself by selling millions of dollars in stock.

But Lay maintained his innocence to the end.

In a May 25 interview, Lay's lead attorney, Michael Ramsey, who was forced to take a backseat midway through the trial after he underwent vascular surgery, said that "Enron was his creation, he nursed it like a child, and the death of Enron was like the death of a child to him."

"He lost a fortune, his family lost a fortune, he can certainly feel the pain of the people that lost money in it, he will feel that till the day he dies," Ramsey said.

Lay was scheduled for sentencing on Oct. 23 along with Enron's former chief executive Jeffrey Skilling, who was found guilty of conspiracy, fraud, making false statements and insider trading.

Both men faced 25 to 40 years behind bars, legal experts said.

Presiding Judge Sim Lake originally scheduled sentencing for Sept. 11.

Enron filed for bankruptcy in December 2001 after investigators found it had used partnerships to conceal more than $1 billion in debt and inflate profits. Enron's downfall cost 4,000 employees their jobs and many of them their life savings, and led to billions of dollars of losses for investors.

The collapse was the first of the high-profile corporate scandals that later rocked WorldCom, Global Crossing, Adelphia and Tyco.

The wave of fraud led to the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation meant to tighten oversight of how American companies were audited.

Lay, the son of a baptist preacher in Missouri, worked his way up to become a corporate titan. He earned his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the University of Missouri and went on to earn a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Houston. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1968 to 1971, during which he received the Navy Commendation Medal and National Defense Service Medal.

He is survived by his wife Linda Phillips Lay, five children and twelve grandchildren.

-- CNNMoney.com's Grace Wong contributed to this story.

posted in Find the Others... - 8 replies

Impaired Reasoning

2006-07-11T15:40:35Z

michigan is a special place, a place where you can be tested for drugs for years (at your own expense) after getting caught driving drunk...so, upping the logic further:

http://www.reason.com/sullum/062806.shtml

As recently interpreted by the state Supreme Court, Michigan law prohibits marijuana smokers from driving long after the drug's psychoactive effects have disappeared. A dozen states have similar policies, and federal drug officials think all of them should, which would in effect revoke or periodically suspend the driver's licenses of more than 25 million Americans.

The four judges in the majority bent over backward to reach this bizarre conclusion. They cited several definitions of 'derivative' that could be read to include 11-carboxy-THC, most of which also would render ubiquitous chemicals such as carbon dioxide "controlled substances," meaning that no one would be allowed to drive...

posted in Find the Others... - 23 replies

here we go

2006-07-04T05:40:47Z

There are no cards or PIN numbers to remember. Just stick your finger in the scanner and be on your way.

http://www.sptimes.com/2006/06/20/Business/No_cash_No_card_Just_.shtml

"We're also going into places where people who don't have a banking relationship cash paychecks.''

posted in Find the Others... - 26 replies

time for a new home?

2006-07-04T05:12:50Z

Humans need to get out more, Stephen Hawking advises
SYLVIA HUI
Associated Press
Hong Kong — The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.

Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference.

“We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system,” added Dr. Hawking, who arrived in Hong Kong to a rock star's welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture planned for Wednesday were sold out.

He added that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

“It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,” Dr. Hawking said. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

The 64-year-old scientist — author of the global best seller A Brief History of Time — is wheelchair-bound and communicates with the help of a computer because he suffers from a neurological disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

Dr. Hawking said he's teaming up with his daughter to write a children's book about the universe, aimed at the same age group as the Harry Potter books.

“It is a story for children, which explains the wonders of the universe,” said his daughter, Lucy, a journalist and novelist. They didn't provide other details.

posted in Find the Others... - 8 replies

Space aliens or Slayer lyrics?

2006-07-04T04:48:30Z

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/06/02/red.rain/index.html

posted in Find the Others... - 6 replies

find your way back...

2006-07-04T04:46:48Z

or forward, depending...

The Aymara, an indigenous group in the Andes highlands, have a concept of time that's opposite our own spatial metaphor. A new study by cognitive scientists explains how the Aymara consider the past to be ahead and the future behind them. According to the study, this is the first documented culture that seems not to have mapped time with the properties of space "as if (the future) were in front of ego and the past in back."

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/soc/backsfuture06.asp

posted in Find the Others... - 1 reply

spying on los angeles...

2006-07-04T04:24:21Z

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drone aircraft, are about to be launched for the first time by the police in Los Angeles.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5051142.stm

bonus #1: we have to read about it on the bbc.

bonus #2: these planes bear a striking resemblance to the remote control planes that terrrorists could use at any second to spread anthrax.

posted in Find the Others... - 14 replies

black tinted town cars run on gas, not hydrogen...

2006-07-04T01:41:36Z

VENTURA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA, USA --

On May 16, a technician who was one of a team of garage experimenters investigating a hydrogen-on-demand technology was run off the road near a rural intersection and accosted by four white, middle-aged males in black suits, carrying Glocks and Mac tens. The assailants were driving a late model, black Lincoln Town Car.

"Using information which could only have been obtained by monitoring digital cell phones and e-mail, the assailants portrayed to the victim that they had total control over his personal life, and was told to remain silent and to not talk to government authorities." He was told that if he did not comply, a family member would be killed. The assailants produced extensive details about this target family member. The threat also included himself, his family and all associates if he did not stop work on the process immediately. The threats made actually applied broadly to anyone working on overunity.

http://pesn.com/2006/06/02/9500276_Water_fuel_experimenter_threatened/

posted in Find the Others... - 2 replies

The Journey to Wild Divine Biofeedback software

2006-06-15T13:51:00Z

I will need to buy this at some future date. It's expensive but oh well...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00099YLPM/ref=pe_8020_2193320_pe_hpc_wilddivine_1005_fl/102-0701529-7432159?%5Fencoding=UTF8&%3Bv=glance&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&n=3760901

scroll down to See preview of game...
It uses bio feedback so you control the game by learning to control your physical responses.
"Build stairways with your breath, meditate to open doors and juggle balls with your laughter."

How cool is that!!!

posted in Find the Others... - 17 replies

this might explain why it doesn't matter who owns our ports anymore..

2006-06-15T00:11:55Z

Quietly but systematically, the Bush Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S. along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Tex., to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minn.

Mexican trucks to bring containers with cheap Far East goods into the heart of the U.S., all without the involvement of any U.S. union workers on the docks or in the trucks.

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?print=yes&id=15497

http://sanfrancisco.tribe.net/listing/Bush-Administration-Quietly-Plans-NAFTA-Super-Highway/san-francisco-ca/e9f27665-a963-4498-8bd6-1e27f8366638

posted in Find the Others... - 2 replies

PNAC Ends With a Whimper ?

2006-06-14T18:47:31Z

Is the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which did so much to promote the invasion of Iraq and an Israel-centered"global war on terror," closing down?

In the absence of an official announcement and the failure since late last year of a live person to answer its telephone number, a Washington Post obituary would seem to be definitive.

http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=9132

posted in Find the Others... - 1 reply

Left Behind: Eternal Forces

2006-06-13T17:37:15Z

At first I thought it was a joke... then I thought really hard about fundamentalist xtians... then I laughed my ass off... now I am starting to get a little scared...

http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
http://www.leftbehindgames.com/pages/index.html

In defense of the absolute stupidity behind this game, I guess it would be pretty boring if you were one of the "saved" people, the game would end as soon as it began... I will wait though I think for the suicide bomber jihadist spinoff...

posted in Find the Others... - 14 replies

Forever Young

2006-06-11T16:16:28Z

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050411_aubrey_interview.html

okay here are some thoughts I was having:
1) this guy Aubrey De Grey is kind of an egoist nutball (god complex anyone?)
2) if we lived "forever" at what point do we begin to become other people, I mean after 30 years I remember less and less of my early childhood and i reckon memories of today would be nearly gone by the time I reached 3 centuries
3) what about the population problem we already have? and then the one that will occur after this?
4) I think access to the technology will be reserved for the rich and the elite and this will create a huge gulf between the haves and the have nots
5) society as we know it will be screwed (not always a bad thing) in so far as innovation will die in the arts and sciences. Einstein, altough brilliant, only got so far and we needed young minds to come along to think differently about his ideas and expand on those. I see innovation as slowing down greatly and I think this may be the biggest threat living forever may pose to society because this extends to prejudices and hatred and other ways of inflexible thinking, it's always the next generation which comes up with ideas like accepting homosexuality or racial differences and society needs the old generation to die off to make progress.

just some thoughts, I will have to think about this for a while yet, not that I believe we will actually solve this aging problem in my natural lifetime...

posted in Find the Others... - 29 replies

of course we're all gonna die..

2006-06-11T16:03:28Z

here's why:

http://www.crnc.org/index.php?content=beach

"Prior to your "Global Cooling Day" event, arm your College Republican chapter with solid talking points on the issue, and then kick-back and enjoy the sun. The facts are on your side."

posted in Find the Others... - 6 replies

Alex Jones Detained On Orders Of Bilderberg Group

2006-06-09T21:26:05Z

Officials knew everything about Alex, even the fact that George W. Bush had once had him arrested in 1998.

"I was screamed at, I was cussed at, I was interrogated," said Alex.

Jail threats were issued as officials seized and searched through Alex's equipment for 15 hours. He was told that if any trace of pornography was found on his three computers that he would be arrested.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2006/080606alexjones.htm

posted in Find the Others... - 5 replies

Duck eats alien???

2006-06-07T21:23:21Z

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060602/ap_on_fe_st/duck_x_ray

So please tell me why this duck wasn't sliced open as soon as it died?? Alien, I doubt it, but wouldn't you want to know what it was...

posted in Find the Others... - 15 replies

Too many funny stories this morning....

2006-06-06T13:42:24Z

Party in Hell on 06/06/06

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060604/ap_on_fe_st/party_in_hell

Lioness in zoo kills man who invoked God. This is AWESOME!!!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060605/od_nm/ukraine_lion_dc;_ylt=AkyubZilh_3V.bRcWvprmJouQE4F;_ylu=X3oDMTA3NW1oMDRpBHNlYwM3NTc-

posted in Find the Others... - 5 replies