The Northeast Passage Opens for Business
Iraq’s New Flashpoint
A Hotline for China and India
A New Housing Bubble?
The ‘Civilian Surge’ Fizzles
The Beijing-Brazil Naval Axis
Dead Man Gets Passport
Chechen Murders Go Global
America Joins Uganda’s Civil War
A ROTC for Spies
MonthDecember 2009
Thuggish petro-state Canada is at it again:
The Vancouver-based activist was en route to Portland to give a speech critical of the Games. By Renn’s own account, U.S. guards refused to let her cross the border. They cited her lack of employment. She finished school three months ago, and doesn’t have a job.
Renn claimed she was photographed, fingerprinted and searched. Guards went through her cell phone. She was grilled by Canadian and American officials about her anti-Olympics activism and contacts in the U.S. The interrogation lasted hours, Renn said.
Z Magazine: Olympics activist detained six hours at US border
This follows Amy Goodman being detained for 6 hours at the Canadian border and questioned about the Olympics.
Update: See also Naomi Wolf on border restrictions and fascist shifts.
It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that Ditko sees himself as a real-life “Howard Roark,” Rand’s fictional architect in The Fountainhead, a man who refuses to compromise his vision. Rand’s influence was even more obvious in his right wing vigilante character Mr A, who would throw someone off a building for disagreeing with him. His work became didactic, shrill, hectoring and far-right his influence waned. Mr. A was like Bill O’Reilly as a superhero. What teenager wants to be yelled at by a moralistic superhero? In the opinion of many, his work degenerated into fascistic rhetoric and lunacy from the late 60s onwards.
There have been almost no interviews, ever, with Steve Ditko. While really not a hermit or a recluse, he’s an intensely private person and refuses all interviews, although there are stories of him speaking to a fan ballsy enough to ring his doorbell, but always standing in the doorway, never inviting them in to his studio. In his recent BBC documentary In Search of Steve Ditko, otaku British talkshow host Jonathan Ross tracked Ditko down in New York City and called the artist on the telephone. Ditko politely refused his request for an on camera interview. But when Ross (and Neil Gaiman) showed up on his doorstep, he did in fact entertain them, although not on camera.
Dangerous Minds: Searching for Steve Ditko
See:
Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (Buy it on Amazon)
In search of Steve Ditko documentary on YouTube
I first heard about this documentary from Trevor a couple years ago, but I haven’t watched it yet.
Actor Sam Elliott has accused the Catholic Church of pressurising Hollywood producers to scrap a classic fantasy trilogy.
Studio bosses have shelved plans to film the final two instalments of His Dark Materials, despite the success of the first movie, The Golden Compass, two years ago. […]
Asked what happened to the series, Elliot said: “The Catholic Church happened to The Golden Compass, as far as I’m concerned. It did ‘incredible’ at the box office, taking $380million. Incredible. It took $85million in the States. […]
A spokesman for New Line Cinema declined to comment.
This London: Catholics ‘forced film chiefs to scrap Dark Materials trilogy’
(Thanks Cat Vincent)
Underwater footage reveals that the creatures scoop up halved coconut shells before scampering away with them so they can later use them as shelters.
Writing in the journal Current Biology, the team says it is the first example of tool use in octopuses.
One of the researchers, Dr Julian Finn from Australia’s Museum Victoria, told BBC News: “I almost drowned laughing when I saw this the first time.”
He added: “I could tell it was going to do something, but I didn’t expect this – I didn’t expect it would pick up the shell and run away with it.”
BBC: Octopus snatches coconut and runs
(Thanks Cat Vincent)
Today, Alex Feigel at the Soreq Nuclear Research Center, a government lab in Yavne Israel, suggests an entirely new way to modify the momentum of the quantum vacuum and how this can be exploited to generate propulsion.
Feigel’s approach combines two well-established ideas. The first is the Lorentz force experienced by a charged particle in electric and magnetic fields that are crossed. The second is the magnetoelectric effect–the phenomenon in which an external magnetic field induces a polarised internal electric field in certain materials and vice versa.
Technology Review: A Blueprint for a Quantum Propulsion Machine
(via HiggsBoson23)
*The messages, which span 13 years, show a few scientists in a bad light, being rude or dismissive. An investigation is underway, but there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.
*Some critics say the e-mails negate the conclusions of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the IPCC report relied on data from a large number of sources, of which CRU was only one.
*E-mails being cited as “smoking guns” have been misrepresented. For instance, one e-mail that refers to “hiding the decline” isn’t talking about a decline in actual temperatures as measured at weather stations. These have continued to rise, and 2009 may turn out to be the fifth warmest year ever recorded. The “decline” actually refers to a problem with recent data from tree rings.
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