Well apparently to North Korea, Americans love going around killing women and children with swords, while smoking cigarettes and always smiling when doing it. While the smoking cigs and smiling part might be true, I think they have gone a little over board with the ruthless murdering. Either way its a point of view that most of the world probably has which I guess you can say we did it to ourselves. Go U.S.A.

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If this picture is a little small, click on it 3 times and it will magnify to the size of a VW bus. Just kidding, but it will be more readable.

What does this all mean for you? Your pretty much fucked unless you can pay large chunks at once. Good luck! Check out the rest of this article here, which includes a brief report on how and why credit card companies are aloud to do this.

If your somewhere in the middle on political views it’s nearly impossible to find an evening news anchor worth watching because they are all so far right or so far left.  Every night I go through the news shows, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, NBC’s Keith Olberman, Glenn Beck, Rachel Madow, Chris Wallace, Sean Hannity.  All express good points and seem right and it’s always fun to go through the channels and see how much they hate each other.  But with all the shit these guys talk on each other and their political views I always wondered why the hell they never square off.  Politicians debate each other, but it is a truly rare event to see news anchors at opposite ends of the liberal – conservative spectrum in the same room together.  I was originally writing this as a rally call to create scheduled television events where these guys square off, there could be fact checkers and point systems and at the end someone walks away the real champ.   So I flipped on the tube tonight and it turns out wishes do come true.  O’Reilly had Jon Stewart on his show.  The king of comedic liberal satire vs the conservative cornerstone of Fox News.   Take your pick, but I give it to Stewart, O’Reilly reaches too far into the conservative bag which makes his argument points a little far fetched against Stewart’s realist views.  Enjoy, its more entertaining than 2 drunk ballbags arguing politics at a party.

Part 1

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The world’s #1 search engine is vowing to take a stand against China.  The communist nation has censored results for the Chinese version of the search engine google.cn since it launched in 2006. The people of China only get search results the gov’t wants them to get.   Now viewing the censorship as a free speech and human rights issue Google is trying to find a way to work within the laws of China and make google.cn uncensored or possibly abandon operations in China if necessary.  To complicate things further, Google has accused the Chinese gov’t of a cyber attack, with a primary objective of gaining access to gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.  From the official Google Blog:

“First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.”

Internet freedom will continue to be a growing debate and with Google owning 67% of the search market in the U.S. they will continue to be influential.   Google’s actions with this issue will have a much bigger impact than simply what search results the people of China get to see.  Maybe a defiant Google will buck the trend of American companies bowing down to China just to get a piece of the 1.3 billion person market 253 million of which are internet users.  Probably not though.

Hilary Clinton’s speech themed around internet freedom on Jan 21st couldn’t of had better timing.  She said this “We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas”.  It’s nice to know our gov’t believes in the freedom of internet.  Doesn’t mean they won’t try to put all kinds of crazy restrictions around it though.

Although the term, WMD, has become a part of our daily lexicon, it remains very much an abstraction for most of us. When most people here the word “weapon of mass destruction” they just think of a nuclear bomb, which isn’t the case. The actual definition of a weapon of mass destruction is, a weapon that can kill large numbers of humans and/or cause great damage to man-made structures (e.g. buildings), natural structures (e.g. mountains), or the biosphere in general. Although the term, WMD, has become a part of our daily lexicon, it remains very much an abstraction for most of us. This series of images offers a retrospective look at some of these weapons. Most of my subjects are drawn from the Cold War period during which there was a very real threat to the survival of civilization itself. The last sixty years has seen a frenzied tango between strategy and technology that has left us with the chilling array of doomsday machines seen here.This series of images offers a retrospective look at some of these weapons.

“The Gadget” (Trinity Atomic Bomb) 1945

“Little Boy” (Hiroshima Atomic Bomb) 1945
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Im not really a huge anti government kind of guy, and I certainly am not standing on the corner in the cold with a sign trying to push opinions on anyone, but this video is really interesting. Start with a cage containing 5 monkeys…. this story illustrates how human society keeps doing the same things over and over again because – “that’s the way things have always been done around here”. Most people have no idea why they follow the path laid out before them, but instead of questioning why, they simply go along with everyone else.

Artwork and Music Produced by Peter Zaza

I usually don’t get involved with politics and the wars being fought around the world, but this speech by a war veteran, Mike Prysner, really caught my ear. I won’t attempt to add my two cents for or against the speech below, just listen for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy… The loss of Liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad…” – James Madison

I have never taken acid before, but I think I can imagine how intense it is on some kind of level. A part of me would like to see how it is for the laughs and cool imagery, but the other half knows I would go ape shit and probably jump out of a building, so I will not be trying acid any time soon. Before acid was introduced as a hallucinogen to get high, it was thought to be a key advantage in warfare. What looks like a soldier having a bit of fun above, was actually a series of controlled experiments that lasted for decades. We’re talking about mind control or the use of hallucinogenics such as LSD as weapons used in warfare. Said to have been pioneered by the Nazis; Britain, the United States and others soon followed suit with their own experiments on unwitting soldiers and civilians, the Vietcong and now terrorists…
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Planestupid.com recently came out with a new advertisement depicting the harmful chemicals European planes release into the atmosphere every flight. I applaud the production and the visualization, but it has an eerily similar feel to the World Wildlife spot we featured back in September, in other words we could do without the uncomfortable (intentional or not) allusions to 9/11. The point the company is trying to make is that on average every European flight produces about 400 kg of greenhouse gases for every passenger, which is equivalent to the weight of an adult polar bear. So they are trying to depict each flight releases like 80 polar bears worth of poisonous gas into the atmosphere. Well, whatever makes people aware of our usual environment crushing ways is cool with us, even if it’s a little extreme. On the other hand if your little brother was attacked and killed by polar bears during your trip to Antarctica last winter, you are going to give this video a standing ovation.