Joined on Oct 29, 2006 Dysviz I like them

incredible view on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Jul 4, 8:08am  photography, flickr, mountains, scenics, canadian-rockies  http://www.flickr.com/photos/vizpix/3683...

Delete this site from your blog? or Delete review only

Amnesty: Israel Used Children as Human Shields in Gaza | World | AlterNet...

Jul 3, 12:29pm    (3 reviews)  politics, israel, gaza  http://www.alternet.org/world/141078

israel used children as human shields during gaza attacks

Delete this site from your blog? or Delete review only

sacha cohen from barat now courts more outrage · Jun 29, 1:43pm

With the guilelessly stupid comic characters Ali G and Borat this sensitive, private Jewish boy from north London has conned the great, the good and the ordinary in the UK and America, first on TV and now on film, into revealing the worst about themselves.
He places himself in the most visible, embarrassing and often dangerous situations but utterly shuns the limelight himself.
Now, the third of Baron Cohen's unholy trinity of alter-egos has been fully revealed at last night's London premiere.
In Brüno, Baron Cohen plays a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion hack.
Like Borat and Ali, Brüno is absurd, but inhabited with such perfectionist conviction by his creator that many are taken in, revealing the fatuous side of fashion -- and a homophobia as corrosive as the anti-Semitism that Borat exposed.
In advance of the film's general release next month, on the same day in the UK and US, gay rights groups and commentators in America have been quick to prejudge and are divided on the $20 million movie, unsure whether Brüno is a harmful caricature or a helpful tool against prejudice.
The film's producer, Universal, meanwhile, is simply hoping it will show a similar return to Borat, which cost $18 million and earned more than $260 million.
Baron Cohen himself, typically, is not saying anything.
But his co-writer and producer Dan Mazer, whom he met at school aged 11, is hoping Brüno will be even bigger than Borat.
Even if this renders the character, like his predecessors, redundant as an agent for covert comedy.
"After Borat the challenge was to make something more extreme, more outrageous, and hopefully a better movie," says Mazer.
"On Borat we were learning on the job. This time we have had a sharper idea, creatively and editorially, of what we were doing. And hopefully -- if it goes well, and his recognition factor reaches saturation -- Brüno will become defunct."
For all their apparently improvised quality, both Borat and Brüno were tightly scripted.
"We prepare comprehensively and copiously for everything, writing pages of jokes for each scenario," says Mazer.
"If Borat addresses a feminist as my little chicken' you can generally predict what the reaction will be.
Where Sacha is so brilliant is in reacting to the unexpected."
As they did in the Ali G days, Baron Cohen and Mazer created several fake companies to give Brüno a plausible background.
Those featured in the film are asked to sign waivers which are vaguely worded, or read as if badly translated.
Baron Cohen says he has been sued by "about 3,000 people" after Borat: a lawyer is therefore always on hand to advise on the legality of the day's planned antics.
Director Larry Charles amassed several hundred hours of footage in 100 days of shooting on Brüno, before whittling it down into a two-hour movie.
Baron Cohen remains in character during filming, in script conferences, promotional interviews and even in his regular tussles with the police.
While making Borat, he refused to wear deodorant or have the Kazakh character's suit cleaned.
"What he does is the ultimate in method acting, in a way. And since Sacha is the only fake part of the equation, it makes sense for him to stay out of the limelight.
Plus, he has no interest in celebrity or fame in any case," says Mazer.
Certainly, Baron Cohen seems to have an ambivalent relationship with the business of showing off.

Delete this blog entry?

Dazed Digital | Vivienne Westwood meets James Lovelock on Video

Jun 27, 10:59am    (1 review)  environment, climate-change, apocalypse  http://www.dazeddigital.com/ArtsAndCultu...

james lovelock interviewed by vivienne westwood:
James Lovelock, speaking to Vivienne Westwood for Dazed & Confused: "One of the most harmful analogies that has been around recently is the 'tipping point'. Because it seems to imply that if only we pull back at this point then all will be well. It won't. It's already changed and it is changing. You see, in the last few years, ice that is in the north polar regions... it's all going and the whole lot will be gone in between five and twenty years. When it dies, the amount of extra heat absorbed from the sun during the Arctic summer will be equivalent to all of the heat from all of the CO2 we've added to the atmosphere. So, suddenly the heating doubles and that's something we can't stop at all. We can't do a thing about it... and that's only one of many what we call `positive feedbacks' in the system where the earth is moving rapidly to its hot state. We're not going to stop it. So, what we should be thinking about is not trying to stop it, but preparing for the new world that is to come. It's not a bad world but it's not fit for seven billion people. There'll be lots of places, not only on this island but all of the Arctic places - places like Canada, Siberia and so on - and we've got to make wherever we are a civilized and a fit place. It's an enormous challenge and I hope that we'll succeed. History tells us we might, you see, humans have been on the earth for a million years now and there have been seven events like the one about to happen during that time... the last one happened only 14,000 years ago. And when they happen, there are massive deaths... that's were the legends of the floods come from, because the sea-level rose 120 metres at the last one - that's huge amount. It flooded an area equal to the size of Africa as a continent. So, there were massive deaths during that occasion and on one of those - geneticists tell us - only 2,000 people survived. We've all come from that 2,000. It's amazing, really."

Delete this site from your blog? or Delete review only

Froomkin on US media debacle, Gelb study · Jun 27, 8:36am

blog.niemanwatchdog.org [blog.niemanwatchdog.org]

Delete this blog entry?

american media failed to be objective in war coverage · Jun 27, 8:34am

Leslie H. Gelb, writing in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, concludes that American's finest journalists failed to even minimally evaluate administration claims. "For the most part, the elite print press conveyed Administration pronouncements and rationale without much critical commentary," he writes.

Gelb and assistant Jeanne-Paloma Zelmati focused specifically on the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek. They coded 576 news and opinion articles from three key moments in 2002 and 2003, using the following scale:

0: A story is entirely slanted, suppresses skepticism, and is completely supportive of the Administration line
1: A story is somewhat slanted to the Administration's side, with skeptical and questioning sentences over-weighted by supportive ones
2: A story dutifully reports both sides by balancing experts or political leaders
3: A story raises questions about official statements and events and generally projects skepticism
4: A story casts fundamental doubt on Administration explanations, policies, and claims
5: A story casts fundamental doubt and then reports the Administration's reaction to such doubt

Gelb writes he would have been satisfied with a solid three. But he ended up giving the elite press scores in the high ones and low twos. Some of the examples he cites, from the likes of Karen DeYoung, David Sanger, Richard Cohen, Jim Hoagland, Michael Gordon, Richard Wolffe and Daniel Klaidman, Bill Keller and Vernon Loeb are enough to make you weep.

(For comparison purposes, an online survey of Nieman fellows last year gave the American press overall an abysmal grade of D for its coverage of the run-up to the war.)

A former New York Times editor, senior government official and president of the Council on Foreign relations -- and an avowed big supporter of the war in the early days -- Gelb never satisfactorily explains why the press was so trusting. He doesn't even raise the factor mentioned most often in a Nieman Foundation panel discussion last October: The abiding fear, especially among senior editors, of appearing out of step with the country.

But he does make some important observations nonetheless. In the run-up to war, for instance, he writes: "The elite media's posture of neutrality amounted to little more than deference to the Administration's position." Another big problem was that "most stories emphasized politics over policy." As Gelb explains:

fixating on politics is worrisome. It sometimes suggests that the writer doesn't know much about policy or the genuine ideological positions of policymakers. It's also evidence that the writer has not mastered the substance of their subject. I have found over the years that if people don't know substance, they talk pure politics. Everyone is a political expert; it is the great leveler

Gelb's suggestions for averting another such journalistic disaster include these two excellent ones:

First, to do its job right, the elite press has to adopt an aggressive but fair attitude to all stories about war and peace. Editors have to stress this, so reporters won't fear they'll get punished for being too critical. And to help them be aggressive in an informed manner, editors should encourage them to read history and keep up with other stories and op-eds. Reporters have to know enough to ask intelligent follow-up questions.

Second, do more and better news analysis pieces. Over the last decade or so, these critically important articles have slipped into a pattern of he says/she says, not much superior to cable news. They should be about what we know and don't know, and they should point out how difficult it is to establish key facts in certain situations. These pieces need to explore policy ideas in depth.

Echoing a call that veteran editor Gilbert Cranberg made on this Web site in 2007, Gelb expresses a hope that his appraisal will spur further probes of what went wrong. He writes:

The stakes could not be higher: Our public deba

Delete this blog entry?

Raw Story & Healthcare industry spending $1.4 million - a day - on lobbyists...

Jun 26, 11:42pm    (1 review)  politics  http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/06/26/h...

The healthcare industry is spending upwards of $1.4 million each day on average to lobby members of Congress on health care legislation, a report issued by Common Cause this week reveals.

Industry spending has nearly doubled since 2000. Healthcare interests contributed $94 million to Congress members during the 2008 election cycle alone -- up from $40 million in 2000.

Common Cause's report has received almost no treatment in the press -- with a single article in Bloomberg News and one in the National Journal.

The industry is attempting to alter the course of Democrats' plans to provide universal health coverage for most Americans.

"The top recipients of health industry campaign contributions from 2000 to 2008 are new Democrat Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) and Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AK) at $7.3 million and $6.3 million respectively," National Journal reports. "All of the campaign finance data used in the report came from the Center for Responsive Politics.

Delete this site from your blog? or Delete review only

Why a Mac is really the only option. Can your PC do this? - The Next Web...

Jun 26, 11:40am    (5 reviews)  animation, technology, futures, video, funny  http://thenextweb.com/2009/06/25/mac-opt...

give it 30 seconds and it becomes really funny and very well done!

Delete this site from your blog? or Delete review only

The curious story about a cancer cured that Cramer manipulated · Jun 24, 2:09pm

deepcapture.com/preview-of-a-coming-attraction-michael-milken-60000-deaths-... [deepcapture.com/preview-of-a-coming-attraction-michael-milken-60000-deaths-...]

Delete this blog entry?

Naked short selling of a cancer cure-; attempted take-over?? · Jun 24, 2:08pm

Then, on April 28, at 10:01 am central time -- just hours before Dendreon's triumph in Chicago - an anonymous message board author on Yahoo! Finance posted this message: "HIGH PROBABILITY OF MASSIVE BEAR RAID...DNDN [Dendreon] could easily drop 50% on a massive bear raid...its coming today@12:30 pm central."

Just minutes before 12:30 pm central, Dendreon's stock price began to fall. It didn't just fall-it nosedived from $24 to under $8 ... in 75 seconds. That's correct, during a period of 75 seconds, more than 4,000 trades were placed, totaling 3 million shares, or about 50% of Dendreon's (spectacularly high) average daily volume. Given that the message board poster knew what was coming more than two hours beforehand, and predicted the timing almost precisely, it is a safe bet that this was a coordinated, illegal naked short selling attack. And just in case you still didn't get this - it caused Dendreon's share price to lose more than 65% of its value - in just 75 seconds flat.

"My desk was floored," one trader wrote on a message board. "We all just stood up swearing, headsets and other assorted desk items being thrown at monitors...I haven't heard that much swearing in years..."

It was, say others, one of the strangest occurrences in Wall Street history.
* * * * * * * *

In fact Dendreon had witnessed even stranger occurrences - brutal naked short selling attacks occurring simultaneously with antics that simply have no precedence in the world of medicine. As will be described presently, these strange occurrences very nearly destroyed Dendreon in 2007. These strange occurrences have also prevented patients from having access to Dendreon's treatment - a treatment that, as will become clear, should have reached the market some time ago.

And from the day of that first strange occurrence in September 2005, when Cramer predicted that Dendreon would become a "battleground" stock, to the latest strange occurrence in April 2009, when Dendreon's stock nosedived by 65% in 75 seconds, more than 60,000 men in the United States died of prostate cancer.

So we must ask: Who did this? Who stood to profit from Dendreon's demise? Were the extremely odd delays in getting Provenge to market purely accidental? Or, were the remarkable trading patterns and volatility accompanying those delays in fact an expression of stock manipulation, and if so, who were the manipulators? Since we know that Dendreon experienced naked short selling, and naked short selling is a crime, who are the criminals? And when much of the medical community rallied around Provenge last month, which manipulators crashed the stock to single digits - possibly to make the company ripe for a hostile takeover by the very people who once sought to destroy it?

Delete this blog entry?