If there’s something out there to bet on, people will. That seems to be the principle behind the latest round of bets being taken at gambling site, “BetUS.com”:http://www.betus.com/. It seems that online gamblers have taken to betting on what the effects of global warming will be. The consensus: Manhattan will be underwater by 2012. Other interesting stats to note: BetUS gives the odds of Capes Henry and Hatteras being part of the ocean floor by 2015 at 200- and 300-to-1 respectively.
Go on and place a bet, global warming might just be good for someone yet. Thanks to “Yahoo! News”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070413/ap_on_fe_st/odds_global_warming_bets for the lead on the story. The picture is from “The Day After Tomorrow”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319262/.
Tag Archives: us culture
Zero Tolerance = No Fun
If you’re in the mood to get really angry or even to poke fun at the tough stance schools are taking nowadays, check out these “examples”:http://zerointelligence.net of zero tolerance gone wrong. Check out “this story”:http://zerointelligence.net/archives/000category/world-japan/ where a Japanese student was given a box cutter and a paper so he could write an apology letter in blood for falling asleep class. Don’t worry though, the teacher was only suspended for few days and you can bet that kid never slept in class ever again. Yikes!
Roomba TV
Roomba, autonomous vacuum cleaner and primary reason to hate everything about American society. These little suckers are just plain odd, and so is this. An overenthusiastic Roomba owner has attached a spy cam to the front of his which can be found streaming live vacuum-packed action “here”:http://www.vacuumcleanerlive.com/. Obviously most of the time the stream shows nothing but wall as the Roomba recharges, so he has also put up these “older videos”:http://www.vacuumcleanerlive.com/video.htm/. Thank God for the free market.
Josh Wolf released, along with his footage
After being incarcerated awaiting charges for 226 days, Josh Wolf has been released. Wolf refused to hand over his raw footage (a journalistic right) of an anti-G8 protest in San Francisco after law enforcement agencies subpoenaed it. His justification was that there was nothing of consequence on the tape, which after having seen it myself, I would have to agree with. As part of Wolf’s release terms, he agreed to publish the footage online which can be found through his website “here”:http://www.joshwolf.net/blog/?p=324 or by clicking the picture below.
http://blip.tv/file/get/Fappy-JoshWolfVideo772.mov
The video in question shows what you would expect a video of an anti-G8 protest to look like. A very small amount of educated but frustrated American youths in facemasks and hoodies march through the streets shouting things like "Whose streets? Our streets" and "fuck the police state." After awhile, the mob mentality takes over and the protesters start throwing paint balloons at local shop windows, dragging metal newspaper stands into the street, and tagging passing buses. Police enter the scene and the whole thing is actually unremarkable. Still, it was good to see that Wolf had been right in his assertion that his footage showed nothing too important and it is even better to know that he is finally out of jail.
See my previous post about Wolf winning a Journalist of the Year award "here":http://duenos.net/article/89/josh-wolf-wins-journalist-of-the-year
A "BBC article":http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6524359.stm about Wolf's release
Go South Young Man
Global warming isn’t happening quite fast enough for sun-seeking Americans who have been moving to sunny Southern California and Florida at such rates that the property prices haven’t had time to catch up. “Business Week”:http://businessweek.com recently put out a special report about the 274 most appreciative zip codes in America. Quite why they’re appreciative is unclear, and there’s certainly no real understanding as to why they chose 274, but in an equally random number choice, here are the top 11 and here is a “link to the report.”:http://www.businessweek.com/investing/special_reports/20070302luxuryreal.htm Absolutely brilliant and heartbreaking, those are the words that come to mind looking through Chris Jordan’s “web-preview”:http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set.php?arch_id=6 of his book, _In Katrina’s Wake._ The Northern California Chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists have awarded “Josh Wolf”:http://www.joshwolf.net/ their highest honor, the SPC Monroe Award. For those of you who don’t know, Josh is a blogger/independent journalist who has been in jail awaiting charge since August 1st, 2006 when he refused to release video tape footage he’d taken at a demonstration in July, 2005. He is being held unconstitutionally on trumped up charges of civil contempt and on February 6th of this year he became longest-jailed journalist in US history for refusing to comply with a federal subpoena. I am a big supporter of Josh’s and he more than any other person has convinced me that this country needs more independent journalists keeping us up-to-date on what is happening in this world. In one of the more blatant acts of selfishness I have heard of, a group of American families hurt by the USS Cole-incident, is suing the government of Sudan for $100 million. Some facts for you: The bombing of the USS Cole killed 17 sailors in October of 2000. Since 2003, the genocide in Sudan has taken the lives of probably 400,000 people and displaced a further 2.5 million. If this law suit goes through and the Sudanese do pay, I think we all know where it’s going to come from. It’s one thing to file ridiculous law suits within the US where we’re all relatively well-off, but this is unconscionable.
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In Katrina's Wake
The Hurricane Katrina is one of those important events that gets completely ignored by the generation that lived through it only to be memorialised by their less-guilty-feeling children. The reason for the guilt? While we continue to consume at an almost inhuman pace, fight wars all over the world, and thumb our noses at global warming, proof that not all is right sits there in the heart of the United States where the Mississippi meets the Gulf and we’re almost straining ourselves to not look at it.
Josh Wolf wins Journalist of the Year
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An excerpt from his acceptance speech, which he had to deliver from prison:
_The face of the media is changing. This we know for sure. But what remains to be seen is the role professional journalists take in developing this new landscape. Will the battle lines be drawn with two classes of warring voices or will we work together in solidarity to develop a massive chorus as diverse and eclectic as our society itself? As journalists is our commitment to an economic system or is it to the pursuit of the free flow of information? The power is in your hands. Choose wisely._
Selfish thinking taken to a new level
A “BBC article”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6444449.stm on the subject.
A very well-referenced “Wikipedia page”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict on the Darfur tragedy.
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