HOWTO ask good skeptical questions - Boing Boing

In this Richard Dawkins Foundation video, Skeptic Magazine’s Michael Shermer explains the ten criteria we can use when confronted with claims about how the world works that serve as a “baloney detection kit.”

Source: Boing Boing

 

The House of Death: An Interview with DEA Whistleblower Sandy Gonzalez

Radley Balko, senior editor of Reason magazine, says: “Federal agents looked the other way while one of their drug informants [Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, also known as “Lalo”] participated in a series of gruesome murders. They knew about the murders, but refused to call off the drug investigation. When an outraged DEA agent [Sandy Gonzalez] blew the whistle, the DEA, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and DOJ forced him into early retirement. The government is now trying to deport the informant they’ve paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to over the years. They want to send him to Mexico, where he’ll almost certainly be killed.”

Reason: The DEA administrator at the time, Karen Tandy, has admitted in court testimony that she gave you the only poor performance review of your career because of your letter calling for an investigation into the murders. That led to your retirement. Have any of the ICE officers who handled the Lalo case been held accountable –criminally, professionally, or otherwise?

Gonzalez: Not to my knowledge. I doubt it. I would have heard about it.

Reason: Have you had any indication that Congress might step in? Have you talked to anyone on Capitol Hill?

Gonzalez: Back in 2005 I went and briefed the senior staff of two senators.

Reason: Which ones?

Gonzalez: [Iowa Sen. Charles] Grassley and [Vermont Sen. Patrick] Leahy. I think what happened is one of the members of Leahy’s staff was a Justice Department officer who was on loan on a detail to the senator’s staff. I think she knew [U.S. Attorney] Johnny Sutton. She worked out of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys. She knew Sutton personally and throughout the whole interview she was antagonistic. My guess is that she railroaded the whole thing.

An Interview with DEA Whistleblower Sandy Gonzalez

Source: Boing Boing

 

Sight restored in less than a month using stem cell contact lenses

The humble contact lens has long been used to improve people’s vision, but now researchers have restored sight in patients suffering corneal damage using a technique where contact lenses are cultured with stem cells. Fast, cheap and non-invasive, the groundbreaking technique even has the potential for regrowing skin and other organs…

Source: Gizmo Emerging Technology Magazine

 

YouTube - Former Interrogator Rebukes Cheney for Torture Speech

 

Obamabot to be installed at Disney World, will robotically cover up torture, suspend habeas corpus

An incredibly lifelike advanced Obamabot is ready to be installed in the Walt Disney World Hall of Presidents. It’s traditional for the current president’s robot to give a little speech at the end of the show. Presumably, Obamabot will explain how the reasonable middle-ground demands suspending habeas corpus, covering up war crimes, and blocking the prosecution of participants in illegal wiretapping programs.

The Obama figure is the result of attention to minute details by Disney sculptors, animators, engineers and even anatomists who pored over presidential photographs and video of him and then drew on the latest advances in robotic technology.

Thus the audio-animatronic Obama purses its lips to pronounce its b’s and p’s in a way frighteningly evocative of the real one, and raises its hands, open-palmed, while shrugging its shoulders, in a way that can only be described as Obamaesque. Even the president’s wedding ring, with its braided design, has been recreated.

Animatronic Obama Going to Disney World With High-Tech Style

(Thanks, Eloisa!)

Source: Boing Boing

 

Mobile News Network

Wis. nurse called out of surgery and laid off

Published: Yesterday

MADISON, Wis. (AP) - A nurse was called out of surgery so a manager could tell her she was being laid off. Dean Health said the surgery was minor and the patient wasn’t affected, but the manager who summoned the nurse from surgery violated medical protocol. Dean Health spokesman Paul Pitas said the incident happened at Dean’s West Clinic in Madison on Wednesday or Thursday.

Read the rest here.

Source: apnews.com

 

Jared Diamond lecture on the evolution of religion

Here’s a fantastic lecture by Jared “Guns, Germs and Steel” Diamond at the USC College Center for Religion and Civic Culture on the “evolution of religion” — the evolutionary forces that shape religions and cause some to prevail and others to wane.

Source: Boing Boing

 

British cops identify 200 schoolchildren as potential terrorists

200 children in the UK, some as young as 13, have had files opened on them by the British anti-terror cops as potential terrorists — even though they have committed no crimes. The children were reported to the anti-terror squad by their teachers on the basis of school work, journals and conversations that, in the teachers’ view, indicated that the children were susceptible to extremist beliefs. The programme is only 18 months old and has already identified 200 children who should be treated as terrorism suspects. At this rate, every child in Britain should be on the watch list by, what, 2018?

The police say it’s all right, though, so that’s OK.

A Home Office spokesman said: “We are committed to stopping people becoming or supporting terrorists or violent extremists. The aim of the Channel project is to directly support vulnerable people by providing supportive interventions when families, communities and networks raise concerns about their behaviour.”

Police identify 200 children as potential terrorists

Source: Boing Boing

 

Obama Continues Bush-Era Extremism on Liberties, Secrecy

Dan Gillmor is a BoingBoing guest-blogger.

The Obama administration has undone a few of the Bush administration’s worst policies, true. Yet when it comes to Obama’s increasingly clear disdain for some core civil liberties and his administration’s penchant for secrecy despite cheerful rhetoric to the contrary, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald arrives at a dismal — but sadly, logical — conclusion:   

After many years of anger and complaint and outrage directed at the Bush administration for its civil liberties assaults and executive power abuses, the last thing most people want to do is conclude that the Obama administration is continuing the core of that extremism. That was why the flurry of executive orders in the first week produced such praise: those who are devoted to civil liberties were, from the start, eager to believe that things would be different, and most want to do everything but conclude that the only improvements that will be made by Obama will be cosmetic ones.

But it’s becoming increasingly difficult for honest commentators to do anything else but conclude that. After all, these are the exact policies which, when embraced by Bush, produced such intense protest over the last eight years.  Nobody is complaining because the Obama administration is acting too slowly in renouncing these policies. The opposite is true:   they are rushing to actively embrace them.  And while there are still opportunities to meaningfully depart from the extremism of the last eight years, the evidence appears more and more compelling that, at least in these areas, there is little or no real intent on the part of the Obama administration to do so.

Democrats in Congress and much of the political left have been silent or nearly so despite the evidence. You expect cowardice from Congress, which spent the Bush presidency in a perpetual bent-over posture. The Netroots folks who did so much to elect Obama should be screaming bloody murder by now. Too few are even slightly audible. A shame.

Maybe the Republicans will re-discover civil liberties at some point. Nah.

(photo via Flickr by 

Source: Boing Boing

 

CIA Busted by Google Earth

Google Earth reveals secret history of US base in Pakistan: When the CIA gets busted by Google Earth, you know it’s a whole, new world.

The US was secretly flying unmanned drones from the Shamsi airbase in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Baluchistan as early as 2006, according to an image of the base from Google Earth.

[…] the Pakistani Government said in 2006 that the Americans had left and both sides have since denied repeatedly that Washington was using Pakistani bases. Pakistan has also demanded that the US cease drone attacks on its tribal area, which have increased over the last year, allegedly killing several “high-value” targets as well as many civilians.

Source: Gadgetopia

 

370H-SSV-0773H

Osama Bin Laden decided to send George Bush a letter in his
own handwriting to let him know he was still in the game. Bush opened the
letter and it contained a single line of coded message:

370H-SSV-0773H

Bush was baffled, so he e-mailed it to Condoleezza Rice. Condi and her aides
hadn’t a clue either, so they sent it to the FBI.

No one could solve it at the FBI so it went to the CIA, then to MI6 and Mossad.

Eventually they asked Australian Intelligence (ASIO) for help. Within a
minute, ASIO emailed the White House with this reply:

‘Tell the President he’s holding the message upside down.’

 

What if Alfred E. Newman from Mad Magazine and Jimmy Carter had a child?

What if Alfred E. Newman from Mad Magazine and Jimmy Carter had a child?

 

Sony’s Profits Down 95%

Sony just reported that through the fourth quarter of 2008, their profits plummeted a staggering 95%, losing $1.67 billion. The reported down profits were taken from last year’s Christmas season, usually the time of the year that all companies including Sony sell the most products. This is the first loss that Sony has reported since 1995 when they produced several box-office flops. In lieu of the situation, Sony is reportedly cutting 8,000 jobs and going to shut down five or six of the 57 worldwide factories. Will the headless chicken that is the economy ever recover?

Source: OSNews

 

Dems start ad campaign

The ads will be sent widely to the press later this morning by the coalition funding them, which includes Americans United for Change, MoveOn.org Political Action, AFSCME and SEIU. 

The spot shows some arresting images of the recession — chained up factories, empty warehouses — and features Obama talking about our dire economic times and his economic package, an effort to harness Obama’s popularity to push the plan at a time when Republicans are training their fire on House Dems, rather than the White House.

Along with the ads, Democrats will run campaigns in their districts an official tells Politico. The White House plans to release state-by-state job figures so we can put a number on what folks voted for an against, an administration aide added. It’s clear the Republicans who voted against the stimulus represent constituents who will be stunned to learn their member of Congress voted against [saving or] creating 4 million jobs.

 

Study Finds High-Fructose Corn Syrup Contains Mercury

MONDAY, Jan. 26 (HealthDay News) — Almost half of tested samples of commercial high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contained mercury, which was also found in nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient, according to two new U.S. studies.

HFCS has replaced sugar as the sweetener in many beverages and foods such as breads, cereals, breakfast bars, lunch meats, yogurts, soups and condiments. On average, Americans consume about 12 teaspoons per day of HFCS, but teens and other high consumers can take in 80 percent more HFCS than average.

“Mercury is toxic in all its forms. Given how much high-fructose corn syrup is consumed by children, it could be a significant additional source of mercury never before considered. We are calling for immediate changes by industry and the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] to help stop this avoidable mercury contamination of the food supply,” the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy’s Dr. David Wallinga, a co-author of both studies, said in a prepared statement.
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Source: Washington Post

 

‘Like Going From an Xbox to an Atari’

Obama administration officials meet the existing White House tech infrastructure:

The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found
computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft
software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the
West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on
online videos.

Senior advisers chafed at the new arrangements, which severely limit
mobility — partly by tradition but also for security reasons and to
ensure that all official work is preserved under the Presidential
Records Act.

Source: Daring Fireball

 

‘A Return to These Truths’

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.

– President Barack Obama

Source: Yahoo

 

Harper’s Index - The Bush years in numbers

Total amount the Bush campaign paid Enron and Halliburton for use of corporate jets during the 2000 recount: $15,400

Minimum number of Bush appointees who have regulated industries they used to represent as lobbyists: 98

Number of Chevron oil tankers named after Condoleezza Rice, at the time she became foreign policy adviser: 1

Months before September 11, 2001, that Cheney’s Energy Task Force investigated Iraq’s oil resources: 6

Minimum number of calls the FBI received in fall 2001 from Utah residents claiming to have seen Osama bin Laden: 20

Percentage of the amendments in the Bill of Rights that are violated by the USA PATRIOT Act, according to the ACLU: 50

Minimum number of laws that Bush signing statements have exempted his administration from following: 1,069

And this list goes on…

Source: Harper’s

 

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) on Vimeo

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

My friend Amanda had never seen a whole Star Wars film. When I asked her if she wanted to watch the original trilogy she said that she would, but that she already knew what happens. So I took out my voice recorder and asked her to start from the top.

I then created some very basic animation in Final Cut to go along with her narration.

Source: Vimo

 

The bill for the Bush administration

President Bush inherited a peaceful, prosperous America. As he exits, Salon consults experts in seven fields to try to assess the devastation.

How much poorer are we going to get before we start getting richer again? Here are some (scary, morbid, gruesome) clues.

Expected shortfall of gross domestic product below normal growth path in 2009: $900 billion

Decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average from its decade high to its value at the close of business, Jan. 7, 2009: 5,394.83, or 38.1 percent

Number of manufacturing jobs lost since 2000: 3.78 million

Increase in number of unemployed workers from 2001 to 2008: 4 million, a jump of 2.7 percent in the unemployment rate

Real median household income according to the 2000 census, adjusted for inflation: $51,804

Real median household income as of August 2007: $50,233

Of course, the government didn’t sit idly by while our financial future was disappearing down the drain. Instead, the feds have pumped in hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, hoping to juice lending and public spending.

Cost of finance industry bailout: $350 billion, with another $350 pending congressional approval

Cost of auto industry bailout: $17.4 billion, so far

And even though there’s widespread agreement among economists that the government needs to be spending a large sum of money on an economic stimulus package, it still won’t look pretty on the public balance sheet.

National debt: $10.6 trillion

Amount of that debt owned by China: At least $800 billion

Source: salon.com