:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 11.22.2010 ::

:: This Day in Tech ::

Nov. 22, 1963: Zapruder Films JFK Assassination
Wired News

1963: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated as his motorcade passes through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. Texas Gov. John Connally, riding in the same car as Kennedy, is seriously wounded.

A spectator unwittingly films the assassination on his 8mm home-movie camera, contributing one of the 20th century’s earliest and most significant pieces of user-generated content. The funerary weekend that follows will be telecast by satellite worldwide in the first giant example of the “global village.”

The Warren Commission, set up by order of President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the assassination, concluded that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, firing from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Although the report was widely accepted at first, skepticism grew as more information concerning possible conspiracies leaked out.

Oswald denied having anything to do with the shooting at all, let alone being part of any conspiracy, but he was killed — and silenced — two days after the assassination while in the custody of Dallas police.

That, coupled with the FBI’s miserable handling of the initial investigation, did nothing to quell the suspicions of those who believed Kennedy’s assassination was the work of (pick one, or more than one): the CIA, Johnson, the mob, Fidel Castro, the anti-Castro Cubans, J. Edgar Hoover.

Whether the shooter was acting alone or as part of a bigger conspiracy may never be known. Most of the available evidence, such as the Warren Commission Report, is inconclusive.

But the other big assertion — that Oswald (or whoever the Book Depository gunman was) had help from shooters on the ground — has never been adequately supported by hard evidence, either.

The so-called “grassy knoll” theory maintains that one, or possibly two, gunmen shot from ground level in Dealey Plaza. A number of eyewitnesses claimed to have heard gunfire coming from the grassy knoll, but nobody actually saw a gunman, and no shells were ever recovered.

The Warren Report, basing its findings on the autopsy and forensics reports, concluded that two bullets struck Kennedy. They came from the same weapon, a bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano military rifle of Italian manufacture that was recovered at the Book Depository. Three shots were fired, all from above and behind the target. The first missed. The second, the so-called “magic bullet,” passed through Kennedy and tore into Gov. Connally, causing all his wounds. The third shot, the killing one, exploded into the right side of Kennedy’s head.

Conspiracy theorists point to the impossible trajectory of the magic bullet, and to the 26 seconds of silent film shot by Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder, which shows Kennedy’s head snapping backwards as the fatal third shot takes off the right side of his head, as evidence that shots came from more than one direction.

Forensics experts disagree, however, arguing that the described path of the second bullet, while improbable, was not impossible and that Kennedy’s head snap at the moment of impact suggests a reaction to the first bullet striking him and not the second. Forty-seven years on and we’re still not entirely sure what happened in Dallas that day.

The assassination changed the political landscape of the United States. The aftermath changed the media landscape of the world.

Read more here.

A L S O

Photo Gallery
Magic Bullet, Tragic Path — A Look at the JFK Assassination
Wired

Celebritology: DiCaprio to produce, star in JFK assassination movie
Washington Post

Young, old visit Dealey Plaza to mark anniversary of JFK assassination
JFK Interactive Timeline
Dallas Morning News

John F. Kennedy's Secret Service agents break their silence in book, documentary
Dallas Morning News

JFK's Assassination: 'Changing From Memory To History'
NPR (blog)

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:: Stewart Rally -- Why It Was Vastly Bigger Than The Beck Event ::

Huffington Post

If there's one thing that's certain about the Jon Stewart rally it's that the attendance has been grossly under-counted.

This is not just sour grapes or an effort to re-write history. All anyone has to do is to look at a map.

Let's start with the 1963 March on Washington, the most iconic public demonstration of modern times. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and the crowd extended along the Reflecting Pool and beyond. The usual estimate is that 200,000 to 300,000 people attended the King rally.

This summer Glenn Beck held his rally, also speaking from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. By one estimate 87,000 people attended the Beck rally, but photos plainly show that his supporters -- like King's-- largely filled the banks of the Reflecting Pool, meaning that his rally was of similar size.

The rally led by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert was plainly larger than the Beck event. Vastly larger.

A L S O

CBS News: estimated 215,000 attend Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

CBS News estimated 215,000 attended the rally organized by Comedy Central late night stars Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert last Saturday in Washington. The news organization based its estimate on a report from AirPhotosLive.com, which uses aerial pictures taken over the rally and which, the company says, has a margin of error of plus or minus 10 percent. During the rally, Stewart joked that there were 10 million Mall attendees.

CBS News had commissioned the same company to come up with a crowd estimate for Glenn Beck's August rally on the Mall and reported the company estimated that crowd at 87,000.

Here is the CBS News report.

Sanity, Iraq, and Jon Stewart's "View From Nowhere"
Huffington Post

For me -- and I think for a lot of people -- the moment that "sanity" left the building in American discourse came in late 2002 and early 2003, when it became clear that Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Paul Halfwits, and their minions were dead set on invading Iraq. This was a country that had nothing to do with supposed issue at hand --the 9/11 attacks or any ongoing terror threat from al-Qaeda -- and, weakened by years of sanctions, an allied no-fly zones, etc., posed no credible security threat to the United States. And so the idea of a U.S.-initiated war with Iraq struck me as so -- and I cannot think of a better word -- "insane" that for months I waited for the forces of reason, such as influential journalists, foreign policy experts, and rational members of Congress, to rise up and swat down such a bad and dangerous idea. In fact, it struck me, foolishly, at the time that an Iraq war debate -- such as it was in that winter of American-flag lapel pins -- would validate the very reason that I and so many others in my generation went into journalism in the late 1970s and the early 1980s -- in aftermath of Vietnam, civil rights but especially Watergate, when it was dogged reporting and the uncovering of facts that proved that an American government had gone way off that tracks. Surely that would happen again in 2002-03.

When that didn't happen -- and when so many of the nation's best-known journalists not only failed to expose the lies surrounding the invasion of Iraq but enabled them -- it radicalized me, and radicalized my ideas about journalists and our responsibilities in a free but fragile society.

Slide Show: Reader Photos from the Rally to Restore Sanity
The Nation

Stewart-Colbert Rally Mixes Fun With Sober Message
ABC News

A N D

The Sanity Song

posted by me

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:: Exorcist Shortage in Catholic Church ::


The Roman Catholic Church is looking for a few good men -- to battle Satan.

The church in the US has become so short of priests who know how to perform an exorcism that it began an emergency two-day meeting yesterday to teach clerics how to properly cast out demons.

A group of 56 bishops and 66 priests -- including an assistant to New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan -- have gathered in Baltimore for the Conference on the Liturgical and Pastoral Practice of Exorcism. The mystical meeting was focused on a lot more than just dodging green vomit and stopping heads from spinning.

"Learning the liturgical rite is not difficult," said Daniel Cardinal DiNardo, archbishop of Houston, who is attending the conference. "The problem is the discernment that the exorcist needs before he would ever attempt the rite."

The number of US clerics who know how to do an exorcism has dropped dramatically in recent years, ever since the holy procedure became a laughingstock thanks to Linda Blair's head-spinning performance as a possessed girl in the 1973 film "The Exorcist."

The situation has gotten so hellacious that only five or six priests are left in the country with the knowledge to properly carry out an exorcism, the Catholic News Service reported.

But with numerous Catholic immigrants coming to the United States from nations where exorcisms are taken seriously, the church's handful of exorcists are being overwhelmed.

Read more here.

posted by me

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:: Stewart, Colbert To Hold 10/30 Rallies ::

The Atlantic
By Marc Ambinder

It's "Fear!" v. "Simmer Down." Satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will hold competing and complimentary marches on Washington just days before the November elections, breaking the fourth wall and inserting themselves directly into the political debate in a way that might influence the November elections.

Appearing on each other's shows tonight, the two men portrayed the 10/30 marches as representing the true divide in American politics: Stewart's march is for people who want to "take it down a notch for America." Colbert's march is about "freaking out for fear," he said, because there are a lot of things to fear. Although Stewart's politics are left of center, his video montage of fear-mongers included Democrats who believe that President Bush was Hitler-esque and radical leftists who believe that 9/11 was an inside job.

Stewart and Colbert have disclaimed any interest in participating in politics. But the timing, and message, are undeniably political -- and not helpful to conservatives. Audiences for both shows tend to be younger and more liberal than the older, conservative independents who watch Fox News. The events were conceived as a response of sorts to Glenn Beck's recent "Restoring Honor" rally, which drew as much as 100,000 conservatives to the Washington mall on the anniversary of Marlin Luther King's historical speech. I'd imagine that these rallies will draw counter-rallies, and that smart conservative folks will try to incorporate them in a way that helps Republicans as well.

Depending on how the media covers the run-up to these rallies, Stewart and Colbert could generate interest and enthusiasm among the type of voters who have so far been turned off by the independent conservative resurgence.

Moments after the announcements, Comedy Central posted websites. Stewart's is rallytorestoresanity.com and Colbert's is keepfearalive.com.

Stewart's web site includes this essay:

"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

Who among us has not wanted to open their window and shout that at the top of their lungs?

Seriously, who?

Because we're looking for those people. We're looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn't be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it's appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles.

Are you one of those people? Excellent. Then we'd like you to join us in Washington, DC on October 30 -- a date of no significance whatsoever -- at the Daily Show's "Rally to Restore Sanity." Ours is a rally for the people who've been too busy to go to rallies, who actually have lives and families and jobs (or are looking for jobs) -- not so much the Silent Majority as the Busy Majority. If we had to sum up the political view of our participants in a single sentence... we couldn't. That's sort of the point.


Colbert, in his tongue-in-cheek-Fox News-y fear-mongering mode, describes his rally this way:

America, the Greatest Country God ever gave Man, was built on three bedrock principles: Freedom. Liberty. And Fear -- that someone might take our Freedom and Liberty. But now, there are dark, optimistic forces trying to take away our Fear -- forces with salt and pepper hair and way more Emmys than they need. They want to replace our Fear with reason. But never forget -- "Reason" is just one letter away from "Treason." Coincidence? Reasonable people would say it is, but America can't afford to take that chance.

A L S O

Distraction or Engagement? Researcher On What Viewers Learn from The Daily Show
Big Think

Why Jon Stewart Is a Huge Long Term Threat to Fox News
AlterNet

Fans lobby Stephen Colbert to host 'Restoring Truthiness' rally in DC to rival Glenn Beck's event
New York Daily News

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to Hold Rallies on Washington Mall Oct. 30
CBS News

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:: DOCUMERICA: The World Trade Center ::

Found on Flickr:

The U.S. National Archives presents historic images of the then-newly completed World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, from May 1973.

Wil Blanche’s DOCUMERICA assignment took him to New York City and Westchester County where he took pictures of landfills, water pollution and the rapidly changing Lower Manhattan skyline. Among his photographs are images of the newly completed Twin Towers of the World Trade Center – U.S. National Archives.

posted by me

:: 11:22:00 PM [+] ::
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:: Why 9/11 is no longer a day free of politics ::

Never Forget (To Vote for Me)
Slate.com

The liberal panic of the week, now that Saturday's Quran-burning ceremony has been canceled, is the mystery-cloaked rally that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are holding in Anchorage tomorrow evening. "Right Wing Leaders Plan To Use September 11th Anniversary To Make Money," writes Lee Fang at ThinkProgress. "Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck Exploit 9/11 for Profit" reads a headline at Firedoglake.

Instant outrage, just add water—although unlike every other news-cycle-burner of the year, there might be some actual outrage here. Between the Palin/Beck event in Alaska, the launch of a new war-on-terror documentary (America At Risk: The War With No Name) produced by Newt Gingrich in Washington, a rally against the Park51 Community Center in New York City, and the made-for-cable idiocy in Florida, there is something new about the way the 9/11 anniversary is being played in 2010.
Until this year, America basically operated under the impression that politics stopped on Sept. 11. In 2008, Barack Obama's campaign caught some flack for promoting a fundraiser with Warren Buffett that would have been held on the 9/11 anniversary; in public, both his campaign and McCain's campaign were pulling down TV ads. They spent the anniversary attending a solemn memorial at Ground Zero, and that was it.

Two years on, that just seems quaint. In New York, Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio (yes, him) has super-glued his campaign to the spat over the construction of a Muslim community center two blocks from Ground Zero. His commercial on the topic is as subtle as a bazooka, with imagery of the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center as the background for his plea that "New Yorkers have been through enough." He's not dropping it as the holiday approaches, and he is one of many politicians holding events and fundraisers tomorrow—as if Sept. 11, 2010, were just another Saturday. If there's been a backlash, no one's noticed it.

How did we get from 9/11 as sacred day-of-no-politics to this?

Read more here.

Slate's coverage of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

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:: May 5, 1945: Japanese Balloon Bomb Kills 6 in Oregon ::

By David Kravets
Wired

1945:: A Japanese balloon bomb kills six people in rural eastern Oregon. They are the only World War II U.S. combat casualties in the 48 states.

Months before an atomic bomb decimated Hiroshima, the United States and Japan were locked in the final stages of World War II. The United States had turned the tables and invaded Japan’s outlying islands three years after Japan’s invasion of the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor.

That probably seemed a world away to a Sunday school teacher, her minister husband and five 13- and 14-year-old students near Klamath Falls. Rev. Archie Mitchell was driving the group along a mountainous road on the way to a Saturday afternoon picnic, according to the Mail Tribune, a southern Oregon newspaper.

Teacher Elyse Mitchell, who was pregnant, became sick. Her husband pulled the sedan over. He began speaking to a construction crew about fishing conditions, and his wife and the students momentarily walked away.

They were about a hundred yards from the car when she shouted back: “Look what I found, dear,” the Mail Tribune reported.

One of the road-crew workers, Richard Barnhouse, said “There was a terrible explosion. Twigs flew through the air, pine needles began to fall, dead branches and dust, and dead logs went up.”

The minister and the road crew ran to the scene. Jay Gifford, Edward Engen, Sherman Shoemaker, Dick Patzke and their teacher were all dead, strewn around a one-foot hole. The teacher’s dress was ablaze. Dick Patzke’s sister Joan was severely injured and died minutes later, the Mail Tribune wrote.

The six were victims of Japan’s so-called Fu-Go or fire-balloon campaign. Carried aloft by 19,000 cubic feet of hydrogen and borne eastward by the jet stream, the balloons were designed to travel across the Pacific to North America, where they would drop incendiary devices or anti-personnel explosives.

Made of rubberized silk or paper, each balloon was about 33 feet in diameter. Barometer-operated valves released hydrogen if the balloon gained too much altitude or dropped sandbags if it flew too low.

In all, the Japanese released an estimated 9,000 fire balloons. At least 342 reached the United States. Some drifted as far as Nebraska. Some were shot down.

Read More here.

posted by me

:: 2:34:00 PM [+] ::
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:: Wired: This Day in Tech ::

April 13, 1953: CIA OKs MK-ULTRA Mind-Control Tests

1953: Central Intelligence Agency director Allen Dulles authorizes the MK-ULTRA project. The agency launches one of its most dubious covert programs ever, turning unsuspecting humans into guinea pigs for its research into mind-altering drugs.

More than a decade before psychologist Timothy Leary advocated the benefits of LSD and urged everyone to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” the CIA’s Technical Services Staff launched the highly classified project to study the mind-control effects of this and other psychedelic drugs, using unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as lab mice.

Dulles wanted to close the “brainwashing gap” that arose after the United States learned that American prisoners of war in Korea were subjected to mind-control techniques by their captors.

Loathe to be outdone by foreign enemies, the CIA sought, through its research, to devise a truth serum to enhance the interrogations of POWs and captured spies. The agency also wanted to develop techniques and drugs — such as “amnesia pills” — to create CIA superagents who would be immune to the mind-control efforts of adversaries.

MK-ULTRA even hoped to create a “Manchurian Candidate”, or programmable assassin, and devise a way to control the minds of pesky despots, like Fidel Castro — giving credence forevermore to claims by the tinfoil-hat contingent that the government is out to control our minds.

In addition to drugs, the program included more than a hundred sub-projects that involved radiological implants, hypnosis and subliminal persuasion, electroshock therapy and isolation techniques. (The MK in the project name referred to the Technical Services Division that oversaw the project, and ULTRA was a security classification applied to top-secret intelligence.)

More than 30 universities and institutions participated in CIA-funded research, though not all were aware the spy agency was their benefactor, because funding was sometimes laundered through shell organizations.

Under the guise of research, LSD, whose psychedelic properties were discovered by a Swiss chemist in 1943, was secretly administered to CIA employees, U.S. soldiers and psychiatric patients, as well as the general public.

One federal drug agent who worked as a “consultant” for the CIA for a project dubbed “Operation Midnight Climax” hired prostitutes to slip the drug to unsuspecting clients, then watched through two-way mirrors as the clients tripped out. He also reportedly slipped the drug to patrons at bars and restaurants.

The CIA ultimately concluded that the drug was too unpredictable for reliable research, but that was too late for Frank Olson.

Olson was a 43-year-old civilian germ-warfare researcher for the U.S. Army who was also a CIA employee and an unwitting recipient of CIA acid. During a 1953 meeting at a mountain retreat with MK-ULTRA head Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and other CIA employees, Olson and four other scientists drank a glass of Cointreau that had been secretly spiked with LSD.

They were told about the drug about 20 minutes after ingesting it. Olson apparently had a severe reaction and left the retreat in an agitated state and later threatened to resign.

The CIA claimed he suffered a sudden bout of extreme paranoia and depression and sent him to a psychiatrist in New York for consultation. He died in a “fall” from the 10th floor of his New York hotel room. A CIA employee who had accompanied him to New York reported that he awoke at 1:30 a.m. to see Olson hurl himself through the closed window.

Olson left a 38-year-old widow and three children under the age of 10. In the absence of other evidence, Olson’s family reluctantly accepted the CIA’s puzzling explanation that the scientist had been suddenly seized by a fatal depression.

When news of the CIA’s secret LSD program finally leaked out 20 years later, the family learned through a congressional inquiry that Olson had been slipped some of the hallucinogen days before his death. The CIA continued to insist that Olson had committed suicide, but at President Gerald Ford’s urging, the family was paid $750,000.

Read more here.

A L S O

From the Wasington Post archives:
Suicide Revealed:
CIA Infiltrated 17 Area Groups, Gave Out LSD
June 11, 1975, page 1

Vets Sue CIA Over Mind Control Tests
Wired

For two decades or more during the Cold War, the CIA and the military allegedly plied the unwitting with acid, weed, and dozens of psychoactive drugs, in a series of zany (and sometimes dangerous) mind-control experiments. Now, the Vietnam Veterans of America are suing the agency and the Pentagon for perceived abuses suffered under the so-called "MK-ULTRA" and other projects.

Six veterans are suffering from all kinds of ailments tied to this
"diabolical and secret testing program," according to a statement from the vets’ lawyers, passed on to SpyTalk’s Jeff Stein.

The experiments allegedly included "the use of troops to test nerve gas, psychochemicals, and thousands of other toxic chemical or biological substances, and … the insertion of septal implants in the brains of subjects in … mind control experiments that went awry, leaving many civilian and military subjects with permanent disabilities." Subjects were tested without their consent, the veterans say. And when the trials were over, the government failed to "provide health care or compensation."

In a book published last year, former military psychiatrist James Ketchum describes an Army project — separate from the CIA’s efforts — that took place at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. There, he saw test subjects "carry on conversations with various invisible people for as long as 2-3 days." Others "salute latrines" and attempt to "revive a gas mask" that they mistake for a woman.

The feds insist that MK-ULTRA ended, when it was exposed during
Congressional hearings. But interest in chemical mind-control lives along, in some corners of the military-intelligence community. In a 2003 memo, then-Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo suggesting interrogation drugs could be used if their effects were not permanent or profound. Since then, evidence has accumulated that some detainees may have been drugged. "It’s coming back," retired Colonel John Alexander told Sharon.

Read more here.

A N D

The Frank Olson Legacy Project

"My father, Frank Olson, died in November of 1953 under circumstances that remain both obscure and controversial nearly half a century later.

This Internet site is dedicated to exploring those circumstances and the political and ethical issues embedded in them - issues of paramount importance to the maintenance of an open democratic society.

The aim here will be to provide a laboratory for the conversion of the secretive, labyrinthine system that led to my father's death into the expanding, open network of the Web. I think of this site, therefore, as Frank Olson's window."

- Eric Olson

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:: 11:51:00 PM [+] ::
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:: Hands off the Internet ::

Washington Post
By Robert M. McDowell

A federal appeals court ruled this week that Congress never granted the Federal Communications Commission authority to impose "network management" regulations on Internet service providers and that the FCC's overly "expansive view" of its power did not merely strain the outer limits of its authority but "seeks to shatter them entirely." In real terms, this rebukes the commission for its effort to order high-speed Internet service providers such as Comcast to treat equally all traffic that flows through their pipelines.

Despite this defeat, the FCC might still try to regulate the Internet under century-old rules made for railroads and Ma Bell phone monopolies. This mistaken effort would hinder recent successes in deploying broadband throughout the country.

While the U.S. economy has shrunk substantially over the past two years, the Internet sector has flourished. Increasingly, our commerce and culture ride on the rails of high-speed, or "broadband," Internet access. But this success was not inevitable.

The Clinton administration set today's "hands-off" policy when the Internet was privatized in the mid-1990s.

Read More here.

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:: 1:28:00 PM [+] ::
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:: Obama: King's work is 'living history' ::

USA Today

President Obama sought to transmit Martin Luther King's message across generations today, speaking with a group of senior citizens and their grandchildren at the White House.

The older people discussed their own actions during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, including encounters with King himself, Obama said. It was a good way to remind the other guests that young people played a major role in "one of the great moments in United States history."

The younger people asked many question as they realized how King's work is "living history," Obama said after the meeting in the Roosevelt Room, just steps from the Oval Office itself.

The group also heard from author Taylor Branch, whose three-volume history of the King years is the standard work.

Obama made special note of two guests.

"Mr. Joseph Harvey is 105, and Ms. Mabel Harvey here is the spry young one at 102," Obama said. "And Ms. Harvey just now was whispering in my ear, as you guys were walking in, that this must be the Lord's doing, because we've come a mighty long way."

Read more here.

A L S O

Current events resonate during Martin Luther King Jr. Day events
Washington Post
By Ashley Halsey III and Hamil R. Harris

With Haiti in ruins and the needy closer to home bearing the brunt of a sour economy, the transformation of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday from a day of remembrance to one of action was evident across the Washington region and the nation Monday.

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.
Washington Post

A look at how the Washington area celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

What Would Martin Luther King Make of Twitter?
Huffington Post

posted by me

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