Access to the carpool lane while driving solo: $8. (…) The right to shoot an endangered black rhino: $250,000.
photo { JeongMee Yoon/NY Times }
Eating people is wrong. But why? People of different sorts, at different times, expressing their views in different idioms, have had different answers to that question. Right now, our culture isn’t obsessed with cannibalism, though we are still unwholesomely fascinated enough to buy books and go to movies about anthropophagy among the Uruguayan rugby team that ran out of food after their plane crashed in the Andes. (…)
Our modern idioms for disapproving of cannibalism are limited. There is a physical disgust at the very idea of eating human flesh, though it’s not clear that this is necessarily different from the revulsion felt by some people confronted with haggis, calf brains, monkfish liver, or sheep eyes, the rejection of which rarely requires, or receives, much of an explanation. It is widely thought that cannibalism is in itself a crime, but in most jurisdictions it isn’t. (It is criminal to abuse a corpse, so eating dead human flesh tends to be swept up under statutes mainly intended to prevent trading in human body parts or mutilating cadavers.)
artwork { Keith Haring }
Chances are pretty good you’ve recently seen the “Banksy on Advertising” quote that begins, “People are taking the piss out of you everyday.” The passage is from Banksy’s 2004 book Cut It Out, and it presents the idea that if advertisers are going to fill your world with ads, you have every right to “take, re-arrange and re-use” those images without permission. The quote has been posted widely on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, which is where I found it.
Here’s the interesting part:
Most of it is swiped directly from an essay I wrote in 1999.
Spontaneous Human Combustion occurs when a human body bursts into flame and is reduced to ashes without any apparent external source of ignition. Moreover, while the body is almost completely incinerated, which requires temperatures of about 3,000 degrees, the rest of the room, the furniture remain almost undamaged by the fire. SHC takes place in Charles Dickens’ novels but also in contemporary police investigations. A few months ago, the badly burned body of a pensioner was found in his living room in Galway, Ireland. Apart from his body, investigators could only find minor damage on the ceiling above him and the floor beneath him. “This fire was thoroughly investigated and I’m left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation,” said the coroner.
{ We Make Money Not Art | Continue reading | Thanks Rob }
photo { Mark Thiessen }
The world’s population is burning through the planet’s resources at such a reckless rate – about 28 per cent more last year - it will eventually cause environmental havoc, said the Worldwatch Institute, a US think-tank.
In its annual State of the World 2010 report, it warned any gains from government action on climate change could be wiped out by the cult of consumption and greed unless changes in our lifestyle were made.
Consumerism had become a “powerful driver” for increasing demand for resources and consequent production of waste, with governments, including the British, too readily wanting to promoted it as necessary for job creation and economic well-being.
More than £2.8 trillion of stimulus packages had been poured into economies to pull the world out of the global recession, it found, with only a small amount into green measures.
But the think tank warned that without a “wholesale transformation” of cultural patterns the world would not be able to “prevent the collapse of human civilisation”.
The think tank found that over the past decade consumption of goods and services had risen by 28 per cent — with the world digging up the equivalent of 112 Empire State Buildings of material every day.
The average American consumes more than his or her weight in products each day.
May 31, 1884: John Harvey Kellogg patents flaked cereal. (…) He was highly incensed by masturbation and campaigned zealously, if not rabidly, for its discontinuation. He warned that masturbation caused acne and recommended the “treatment” of carbolic acid on the clitoris in order to stop females from participating in the unsavory practice. Carbolic acid is very dangerous when applied to skin.
photo { Steven Meisel }
In 1986, Guantanamo became host to the first and only McDonald’s restaurant within Cuba.
A Subway sandwich shop was opened in November 2002. Other fast food outlets have followed. These fast food restaurants are on base, and not accessible to Cubans.
It has been reported that prisoners cooperating with interrogations have been rewarded with Happy Meals from the McDonald’s located on the mainside of the base.
In 2004, Guantanamo opened a combined KFC & A&W restaurant at the bowling alley and a Pizza Hut Express at the Windjammer Restaurant. There is also a Taco Bell, and the Triple C shop that sells Starbucks coffee and Breyers ice cream.
All the restaurants on the installation are franchises owned and operated by the Department of the Navy. All proceeds from these restaurants are used to support morale, welfare and recreation (MWR) activities for service personnel and their families.
A new study led by two Florida State University marketing professors finds that some frontline service employees who are rewarded for hikes in customer loyalty and satisfaction also may engage in “service sweethearting,” a clandestine practice that costs their employers billions of dollars annually in lost revenue.
The study, the first to examine the employee and customer sides of this activity, will appear in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Marketing, a publication of the American Marketing Association. It identifies traits that may predispose some employees toward service sweethearting and may aid employers in weeding them out of the candidate pool. The study also reveals that in cases of sweethearting, customer loyalty is tied to the rogue employee rather than the company, so that firing the employee actually hurts the firm’s ability to retain customers.
The term service sweethearting describes the behavior of employees who provide friends and acquaintances with food and beverages or other free services that never appear on the bill. Though the practice is most prevalent in the hospitality industry, the potential for such behavior exists in any industry in which employees interact with customers at the point of sale, according to the study. In a retail setting, for example, a cashier may slide a product around a bar-code scanner, giving the false impression that a friend is paying for the item.
How did we end up with a drinking age of 21 in the first place?
In short, we ended up with a national minimum age of 21 because of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984. This law basically told states that they had to enact a minimum drinking age of 21 or lose up to ten percent of their federal highway funding. Since that’s serious coin, the states jumped into line fairly quickly. Interestingly, this law doesn’t prohibit drinking per se; it merely cajoles states to outlaw purchase and public possession by people under 21. Exceptions include possession (and presumably drinking) for religious practices, while in the company of parents, spouses, or guardians who are over 21, medical uses, and during the course of legal employment.
photo { Miss Aniela }
How would things change if Google and Bing went down for 24 hours, and there wasn’t a way around the block?
If your first thought is to do your online searches through Yahoo!, you will run into another roadblock. Since 2010, Yahoo! searches are powered by Bing. Can you name any other search engine sites off the top of your head? (…)
Losing search sites is only the tip of the iceberg. Google and Bing also provide extensive services in other areas, one of the most obvious being email—Gmail alone has 350 million users. Blacking out Gmail would certainly affect all these people, but it would also affect everyone trying to reach them.
{ Naked Capitalism | Continue reading }
Last week, I got a notice from Twitter saying the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had subpoenaed my account activity for a three-month period between September and December of last year. On October 1, I was arrested along with 700 or so other people marching across the Brooklyn Bridge as part of an early Occupy Wall Street demonstration. (…)
Why was it Twitter who got subpoenaed even though they’re my words the DA wants to see?
The short answer is: they’re not my words. Not in the legal sense at least. Part of the Twitter user agreement is that the Tweets belong to the company, not to the user. As far as the law is concerned, my online self is an informational aspect of a legal entity named Twitter, not me. That means if someone wants to use my statements against me in court, it’s not me they have to call, it’s that little blue birdie. In this context the term “microblogging” gets some new meaning: Twitter’s users really are unpaid content producers for a giant microblog hosting site.
related { Will the Web Break? }
photo { Guy Bourdin }
Facebook’s inventory of data and its revenue from advertising are small potatoes compared to some others. Google took in more than 10 times as much, with an estimated $36.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2011, by analyzing what people sent over Gmail and what they searched on the Web, and then using that data to sell ads. Hundreds of other companies have also staked claims on people’s online data by depositing software called cookies or other tracking mechanisms on people’s computers and in their browsers. If you’ve mentioned anxiety in an e-mail, done a Google search for “stress” or started using an online medical diary that lets you monitor your mood, expect ads for medications and services to treat your anxiety.
Ads that pop up on your screen might seem useful, or at worst, a nuisance. But they are much more than that. The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.
Material mined online has been used against people battling for child custody or defending themselves in criminal cases. LexisNexis has a product called Accurint for Law Enforcement, which gives government agents information about what people do on social networks. The Internal Revenue Service searches Facebook and MySpace for evidence of tax evaders’ income and whereabouts, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has been known to scrutinize photos and posts to confirm family relationships or weed out sham marriages. Employers sometimes decide whether to hire people based on their online profiles, with one study indicating that 70 percent of recruiters and human resource professionals in the United States have rejected candidates based on data found online. A company called Spokeo gathers online data for employers, the public and anyone else who wants it. The company even posts ads urging “HR Recruiters — Click Here Now!” and asking women to submit their boyfriends’ e-mail addresses for an analysis of their online photos and activities to learn “Is He Cheating on You?”
Stereotyping is alive and well in data aggregation. Your application for credit could be declined not on the basis of your own finances or credit history, but on the basis of aggregate data — what other people whose likes and dislikes are similar to yours have done. If guitar players or divorcing couples are more likely to renege on their credit-card bills, then the fact that you’ve looked at guitar ads or sent an e-mail to a divorce lawyer might cause a data aggregator to classify you as less credit-worthy. When an Atlanta man returned from his honeymoon, he found that his credit limit had been lowered to $3,800 from $10,800. The switch was not based on anything he had done but on aggregate data. A letter from the company told him, “Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped have a poor repayment history with American Express.” (…)
In 2007 and 2008, the online advertising company NebuAd contracted with six Internet service providers to install hardware on their networks that monitored users’ Internet activities and transmitted that data to NebuAd’s servers for analysis and use in marketing. For an average of six months, NebuAd copied every e-mail, Web search or purchase that some 400,000 people sent over the Internet.
Deep down on the bottom of the Baltic Sea, Swedish treasure hunters think they have made the find of a lifetime. The problem is, they’re not exactly sure what it is they’ve uncovered. Out searching for shipwrecks at a secret location between Sweden and Finland, the deep-sea salvage company Ocean Explorer captured an incredible image more than 80 meters below the water’s surface.
“I have been doing this for nearly 20 years so I have a seen a few objects on the bottom, but nothing like this,” said Lindberg.
Using side-scan sonar, the team found a 60-meter diameter cylinder-shaped object, with a rigid tail 400 meters long. The imaging technique involves pulling a sonar “towfish” — that essentially looks sideways underwater - behind a boat, where it creates sound echoes to map the sea floor below. On another pass over the object, the sonar showed a second disc-like shape 200 meters away.
Lindberg’s team believe they are too big to have fallen off a ship or be part of a wreck. (…)
The reliability of one-side scan sonar images is one of his main concerns, making it difficult to determine if the object is a natural geological formation or something different altogether. (…)
Odyssey Marine Exploration — a company made up of researchers, scientists, technicians and archaeologists — have at least 6,300 shipwrecks in their database that they are looking to find. Mark Gordon, president of Odyssey, says at least 100 ships on their watch-list are known to have values in excess of $50 million dollars.
“When you think about the fact until the mid 20th century, the only way to transport wealth was on the oceans and a lot of ships were lost, it adds up to a formula where we have billions of dollars worth of interesting and valuable things on the sea floor,” he said.
The email might contain “privileged, confidential and/or proprietary information,” they are told. If it landed in their inbox by error, they are strictly prohibited from “any use, distribution, copying or disclosure to another person.” And in such case, “you should destroy this message and kindly notify the sender by reply email.” (…)
Email disclaimers, those wordy notices at the end of emails from lawyers, bankers, analysts, consultants, publicists, tax advisers and even government employees, have become ubiquitous—so much so that many recipients, and even senders, are questioning their purpose. (…)
Emails often now include automatic digital signatures with a sender’s contact information or witty sayings, pleas to save trees and not print them, fancy logos and apologies for grammatical errors spawned by using a touch screen. (…)
Some lawyers say the disclaimers have value, alerting someone who receives confidential, proprietary, or legally privileged information by accident that they don’t have permission to take advantage of it.
Others, including lawyers whose email messages are laden with them, say the disclaimers are for the most part unenforceable. They argue that they don’t create any kind of a contract between sender and recipient merely because they land in the recipient’s inbox.
It’s largely untested whether email disclaimers can hold up in court and at least one ruling on the matter was mixed.
Boilerplate language attached to every email dilutes the intention, some say. For instance, when every message from a sender’s account is tagged with “privileged and confidential,” it might make it difficult to convince a judge that any one email is more private than another.
Of the 110 sword swallowers queried, 46 responded and agreed to have their results reported. (…)
The most common medical complaint: a sore throat, or “sword throat” as it’s known in the business, which typically occurred while they were still learning, after frequent performances or from stunts involving multiple or odd-shaped swords. Some experienced lower chest pains, often lasting for days, which could be relieved by not swallowing any swords for a few days. Sixteen mentioned intestinal bleeding and one was told a sword had “brushed” his heart. (…)
The study also revealed how swallowers learned their craft. Often practicing daily for months or years, many desensitized their gag reflexes by gradually increasing the size of objects they shoved down their throats, beginning with their finger, then spoons, paint brushes and knitting needles before moving on to the commonly used bent wire coat hanger.
Performers must learn how to align a sword with their upper esophageal sphincter, a muscular ring at the upper end of the esophagus, and how to relax muscles in the pharynx and esophagus, which usually are not under voluntary control.
Tricks used to coax a blade down the throat varied: Many performers lubricated their swords first with saliva; one performer used butter and another had to retire because of a dry mouth condition. Some performed “the drop,” in which the sword falls abruptly down the throat; some invited audience members to move the sword.
Microwave Massacre is a 1983 dark comedy/horror film directed by Wayne Berwick. (…)
After coming home drunk one night and getting into an argument with his wife May, Donald loses his temper and bludgeons her to death with a large pepper grinder. He wakes up the next day with a bad hangover, no memory of the night before, and a growling stomach. He discovers May’s corpse in the microwave and after the initial wave of horror passes, he starts to take it in stride, telling his co-workers that he and May separated. After work, he cuts up May’s body and stores it in foil wrap in the fridge.
Looking for a midnight snack one night, Donald unintentionally takes a few bites of May’s hand, and after the initial wave of horror passes, he realizes it’s the best thing he’s ever eaten. He even brings some to work with him and shares it with Phillip and Roosevelt, who concur. He soon starts picking up hookers and using them for meat in his recipes. (…)
Donald’s lunches continue to be a hit with his friends, and he decides to cater an outing to a wrestling match with a new recipe he calls “Peking chick.” When Roosevelt and Phillip show up to pick up Donald, they discover him dead on the floor of a heart attack, and some body parts in the microwave. They leave in horror and disgust, realizing what Donald had been serving them.
photo { Glenn Glasser }
There is no consensus about the symptom criteria for psychopathy, and no psychiatric or psychological organization has sanctioned a diagnosis of psychopathy itself. (…)
The Hare Psychopathy Checklist is a standard ratings tool in forensic settings to label people as psychopaths.
A study by Hare and colleague suggested that one to two percent of the US population score high enough on a screening version of the scale to be considered potential psychopaths.
According to some, there is little evidence of a cure or effective treatment for psychopathy; no medications can instill empathy, and psychopaths who undergo traditional talk therapy might become more adept at manipulating others and more likely to commit crime. (…)
According to Hare, psychopathy stems from as yet unconfirmed genetic neurological predispositions and as yet unconfirmed social factors in upbringing. A review published in 2008 indicated multiple causes, and variation in causes between individuals.
Hare also notes that some psychopaths can blend in, undetected, in a variety of surroundings, including corporate environments He has described psychopaths as “intraspecies predators.” (…)
Psychopaths are rarely psychotic.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
Robert D. Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist, Revised (PCL-R) is the psycho-diagnostic tool most commonly used to assess psychopathy. (…)
▪ Glibness/superficial charm
▪ Grandiose sense of self-worth
▪ Pathological lying
▪ Cunning/manipulative
▪ Lack of remorse or guilt
▪ Shallow affect (genuine emotion is short-lived and egocentric)
▪ Callousness; lack of empathy
▪ Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
▪ Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
▪ Parasitic lifestyle
▪ Poor behavioral control
▪ Lack of realistic long-term goals
▪ Impulsivity
▪ Irresponsibility
▪ Juvenile delinquency
▪ Early behavior problems
▪ Revocation of conditional release
▪ Promiscuous sexual behavior
▪ Many short-term marital relationships
▪ Criminal versatility
▪ Acquired behavioural sociopathy/sociological conditioning (Item 21: a newly identified trait i.e. a person relying on sociological strategies and tricks to deceive)
