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[jimbenton]

Zimbabwe's dictator Robert Mugabe unleashed a storm of brutal, genocidal violence after losing the 2008 elections -- and now we know that it was funded by western hedge-funds and banks, led by Och-Ziff Capital Management, the largest publicly traded fund, with assistance from Blackrock, GLG Partners, and Credit Suisse, who raised $100M for Mugabe's weapons and torture-chambers in exchange for a sweetheart deal on the country's platinum mines. Read the rest

The Wild Wasteland perk lets you see some bonkers stuff in Fallout, but it never quite matches the absurdity of this New Vegas "easter egg."

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[video]

Clay Shirky has some some truths: "Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide 'Click to buy' is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad. After all, anything could happen with print. Hard to tell, really." Read the rest

gpoy

foodiebooty:

Bacon and Fried Egg Sandwich

with recipe (link)

Ben Swift put a couple of amusing new art prints up for sale today. “Weird x Five”  and “F-Bomb” are both 12″ x 18″ screenprints, have editions of 15 (Weird) and 50 (F-Bomb), and cost only $20 each. Visit BenSwift.com.

Hedy Epstein is a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor, as well as a Palestinian rights activist, and she was arrested on Monday while participating in a protest relating to the murder of Michael Brown:

Epstein, who aided Allied forces in the Nuremberg trials, was placed under arrest in downtown St. Louis, Missouri, “for failing to disperse” during a protest of Gov. Jay Nixon’s decision to call the National Guard into Ferguson. Eight others were also arrested.

“I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager. I didn’t think I would have to do it when I was 90,” Epstein told The Nation during her arrest. “We need to stand up today so that people won’t have to do this when they’re 90.”

Hedy is no stranger when it comes to activism and fighting for social justice:

In 2001 she founded the St. Louis chapter of the Women in Black anti-war group that originated in Israel, and has actively advocated for Palestinian rights since visiting the West Bank in 2003. As the last decade came to a close, Epstein continued her advocacy by traveling with the women’s peace advocacy group CodePink to the Gaza Freedom March.

In 2010, she was interviewed by The LA Times and discussed how she became a supporter of Palestinian rights:

How did you get interested in the Israel/Palestine issue?

I was born in Germany, I’m Jewish — after Hitler came to power, my parents realized very quickly that Germany was not a good place to raise a family. They were willing to go anywhere in the world, but one place they were not willing to go to was Palestine — they were anti-Zionists. As a child I didn’t quite understand this, but if my parents were anti-Zionist, I was anti-Zionist. I came to the U.S. in 1948, around the same time Israel became a state, about which I had mixed feelings. On the one hand it was a place for Holocaust survivors to go to, those who could not or did not want to return to their homes, but on the other, I considered my parents’ ardent anti-Zionism. While I was new in the U.S., Israel and Palestine remained on the back burner of my interests. In 1982, I heard about the massacres in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon — I wanted to know who was responsible for this, what had happened between 1948 and 1982. As I learned more, I became increasingly disturbed by the policies of Israel and its military. Fast forward to 2003 — I was in the West Bank for the first time, and have been there five times since then.

How have people reacted to your decision to be an advocate for Palestinians?

It depends whom you’re talking to or whom you’re talking about. The mainstream, organized Jewish community, both locally and in other places, have called me anti-Semitic, a self-hating Jew. I’m not anti-Israel, but you’re not allowed to criticize Israel or else you’re anti-Semitic, and if you’re Jewish you’re a self-hating Jew. I don’t hate myself. You’re allowed to criticize every other country, including the U.S., but not Israel, why is that?

How do you think Israel will respond to nonviolence/direct action?

I don’t know. I hope they will be nonviolent. When I was in the West Bank, before I went, I was told that the Palestinians are going to hurt me, they are going to do awful things to me. But they were the ones that protected me. In one demonstration, in 2006, near Ramallah, I lost some of my hearing because an Israeli sound bomb went off very close to me. The Palestinians near me were very concerned. I was strip-searched, internally searched at Israel’s David Ben Gurion airport, I was told that “I was a terrorist, I’m a security risk.” An 80-year-old woman is a terrorist? What, do I have a bomb in my vagina?

Do you think there can be peace in Israel in the near future?

In the near future, no. I’m an inveterate optimist, so someday there will be peace, but a lot of things have to change before that happens. If the occupation were to stop overnight, it would make all the difference in the world. Israel is the fourth-largest military entity in the world. They have the newest equipment, and it’s used on the Palestinians. Also, if the U.S. stopped funding Israel, that would be another way of bringing about peace. We have humongous problems in this country, people are unemployed, losing their homes, we could use that money instead of overseas in a destructive way. Let’s use it constructively. I think we should let the people decide what they want instead of telling them what they should do.

If one were to look up the word “integrity” in the dictionary, there ought to be a picture of Hedy right there next to it!

HEDY FOR PRESIDENT OF EVERYTHING 2014

The post 90-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor/Palestinian Rights Activist Arrested During Michael Brown Protest appeared first on disinformation.

lupoleo:

jeanpolfus:

The view from the tree-house at my parents house in northern Wisconsin. One fall I slept out here from October through mid-December. It is a wonderful feeling to fall asleep with a view out over the lake listening to the loons call.

🔝🌲🐾

The Portuguese man-of-war, also known as the weirdest looking creature with the coolest name, was captured in an up close video that shows how stunning this colorful alien-looking, not jellyfish, blown-up balloon can be. I can't believe these things live on the same planet that we do.

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Só porque o Vida de Suporte desafiou a galera do Café com HQ.

 

O post Mentirinhas #688 apareceu primeiro em Mentirinhas.

'Back to the Future' Makeup Aging vs. Reality [tiwuno]

Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes In South Carolina a 16-year old boy, Alex Stone, was arrested and charged with creating a disturbance at his school, as well as suspended, for choosing to write: "I killed my neighbor's pet dinosaur. I bought the gun to take care of the business," in response to a class writing assignment. The story has attracted international attention.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last day to submit for BAHFest, geeks!

Siurrealistinis, Gediminas Pranckevicius

theodd1sout:

I’ll be sleeping for most of eternity.

mucholderthen:

Our Favorite Orbits Are Getting Crowded With Space Junk
And scientists aren’t sure what to do about it
The Atlantic  ||  Josh Kramer

YouTuber waterskizone has a pet macaw named Vito that loves to fly. But where another parrot might be perfectly content to stretch its wings circling above a field, Vito, it seems, has a distinct preference for the open road – especially when his owner comes along for the ride.

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John Carmack, arguably best known as the co-creator of Doom, has a nine-year-old son named Ryan. This week, Ryan released his first video game - a variation of Pong that substitutes the simple graphics of white bars and a square with ovals and a...

The Chemin de fer de Petite Ceinture (French for “little belt railway”) was a 32 km railway that encirled Paris, connecting all the major railway stations within fortified walls during the Industrial Revolution. In service from 1852 to 1934, the line has now been completely abandoned for 80 years.

Several developers and local officials have recently set their sights on the vast swath of unused land, tunnels, and stations as an opportunity for new development. However, some railway enthusiasts and related organizations want the tracks and stations to be preserved indefinitely as part of the cities’ heritage. Others want to turn areas of de Petite Ceinture into parkways similar to the nearby Promenade plantée, a 4.7 km park built on an elevated train track in 1988 that later inspired New York’s famous High Line.

As part of his project “By the Silent Line,” photographer Pierre Folk has been working since 2011 to photograph the 160-year-old railway’s last remnants before any final decisions are made. He stalks the tracks at all times of the year, often returning to the same locations to document nature’s slow reclamation as rusted tracks and crumbling tunnels are swallowed by trees, vines, and grass. This is just a small selection of Folk’s work, you can see many more photos right here.

Hey! It’s kinda, sorta the one year anniversary for The Old Reader. I know, some of you have been using The Old Reader since 2012. But the current team took over just a year ago. And now we’re going to celebrate, have some cake, and reminisce.

When we first got involved, there was a lot of mystery about who we were. This blog initially only said that a “a new corporate entity in the United States” was going to take over and improve the service.

We didn’t mean to be so mysterious. We were a new company ourselves. Levee Labs is our web application company. It’s the kind of work we’ve been doing since the late 90’s before starting our own shop a few years ago.

Like most people who used TOR, we were sad when we heard that the founders, Elena and Dmitry, planned to shut it down because the volume of users was overwhelming. However, they were willing to sell the application as long as the new owners had the same values and attitudes along with the technical ability to improve the application’s availability. I like to think we’ve delivered on both.

Our first priority was to handle traffic spikes better. We’ve been building high volume, highly scalable web apps for a long time, so we knew a lot about that particular problem. In the first few months, a lot of what we did was backend stuff to improve the architecture and performance.

Thanks to all of you who hung with us while we moved all of the data 5,000 miles to our new infrastructure.

Next came the new features. We’ve added a number of new social sharing features as well as usability features. Social sharing features like Starred items and Send To allow you you to highlight and share posts from The Old Reader for friends or social media. We also added the bookmarklet feature to send a copy of any web page to your TOR account.

A lot of these are features you’ve all been asking for, while other are just things we think are cool. More recently, we added Spritz to help you read faster. And of course, we have grown the list of apps to make your Old Reader feed available everywhere, as with the most recent, Reeder for iOS and Mac.

Of course, the biggest change was in February when we rolled out Premium accounts for The Old Reader. This was the biggest risk of all, but I am happy to say it has worked out. TOR now has well over a half million users and thousands of Premium users.

Premium isn’t just way to make sure the service is viable for the foreseeable future. It’s what lets us keep the service available without resorting to the ads, feed manipulation, data mining, sponsored content, and all of the crap that pollutes social media and other online services. We’ll also keep rolling out new Premium features to make the service even more valuable. 

Reading this, I am immensely proud of what we’ve accomplished. But know that we’re not even close to done. We’ve got a lot of stuff in the works, big and small. It should be a fun year. 

Now, back to cake.

If you’re wondering by the way, I don’t really believe in the introvert/extrovert thing. Its just labels and as soon as you label yourself, you limit yourself :)

Just accept that we’re all complicated little snowflakes who have lots of little preferences when it comes to everything and have a good day, hooray!!