2011

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(Image by Christian Fischer.)

The folks at 100 people.org explain how the billions of people on Earth are living right now by reducing world population to 100 and breaking it down into categories. I guess I’m most skeptical of just 1% of the population owning a computer and 82% being literate. The site’s numbers:

“50 would be female
50 would be male

20 would be children
There would be 80 adults,
14 of whom would be 65 and older

There would be:
61 Asians
12 Europeans
13 Africans
14 people from the Western Hemisphere

There would be:
31 Christians
21 Muslims
14 Hindus
6 Buddhists
12 people who practice other religions
16 people who would not be aligned with a religion

17 would speak a Chinese dialect
8 would speak Hindustani
8 would speak English
7 would speak Spanish
4 would speak Arabic
4 would speak Russian
52 would speak other languages

82 would be able to read and write; 18 would not

1 would have a college education
1 would own a computer

75 people would have some supply of food and a place to
shelter them from the wind and the rain, but 25 would not

1 would be dying of starvation
17 would be undernourished
15 would be overweight

83 would have access to safe drinking water
17 people would have no clean, safe water to drink”

Bryant wasn’t the only one who needed an explanation. (Thanks Reddit.)

In 2008, Alan Kay presents the original 1960s Dynabook prototype, which was made of carboard.

Computer tablets became a big deal in 2010, but they weren’t anything new to Alan Kay. From “Space Wars: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” Stewart Brand’s 1972 Rolling Stone article about the emerging computer culture:

“Alan is designing a hand-held stand-alone interactive-graphic computer (about the size, shape and diversity of a Whole Earth Catalog, electric) called ‘Dynabook.’ It’s mostly high-resolution display screen, with a keyboard on the lower third and various cassette- loading slots, optional hook-up plugs, etc. His colleague Bill English describes the fantasy. thus:

‘It stores a couple of million characters of text and does all the text handling for you – editing, viewing, scanning, things of that nature. It’ll have a graphics capability which’ll let you make sketches, make drawings. Alan wants to incorporate music in it so you can use it for composing. It has the Smalltalk language capability which lets people program their own things very easily. We want to interface them with a tinker-toy kind of thing. And of course it plays Spacewar.’

"If Xerox Corporation decides to go with the concept, the Dynabooks could be available in two or three years."

The drawing capability is a program that Kay designed called ‘Paintbrush.’ Working with a stylus on the display screen, you reach up and select a shape of brush, then move the brush over and pick up a shade of half-tone-screen you like, then paint with it. If you make a mistake, paint it out with ‘white.’ The screen simultaneously displays the image you’re working on and a one-third reduction of it, where the dot pattern becomes a shaded half-tone.

A Dynabook could link up with other Dynabooks, with library facilities, with the telephone, and it could go and hide where a child hides. Alan is determined to keep the cost below $500 so that school systems could provide Dynabooks free out of their textbook budgets. If Xerox Corporation decides to go with the concept, the Dynabooks could be available in two or three years, but that’s up to Product Development, not Alan or the Research Center. Peter Deutsch comments: ‘Processors and memories are getting smaller and cheaper. Five years ago the idea of the Dynabook would have been a absolutely ridiculous. Now it merely seems difficult….'”

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French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has his lecture interrupted by a member of the Situationist International, the Marxist political group with a flair for surreal spectacle. Great academic theater from roughly four decades ago. (Thanks to The Documentarian.)

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"The applicant's bald spot is not less than three inches in diameter."

 

  • Bald-Head Club of America: Organized in Falls Village, Connecticut, in 1912. One of the conditions mentioned in the application for membership is the statement printed therein that the applicant’s bald spot is not less than three inches in diameter, and a further purpose is to promote social and fraternal relations between bald heads and cultivate a sentiment of sympathy for men who have hair. Membership fee, $1.
  • Anti-Horse Thief Association: To ensure the safety of our people and the security of their property against loss by thieves, robbers, murderers, vagrants, tramps, incendiaries, and all violators of the law, and to secure for us and our families the enjoyment of life and the pursuit of happiness in the possession of our honest reward of labor with equal and just rights to all. Founded in 1854, membership 45,000.
  • Telephone Pioneers of America: The objects of this society are social. They are to bring together those who were associated with the early days of the telephone business and perpetuate those friendships made at that time.
  • The Anti-Saloon League of America: Organized at Washington D.C., December 18, 1895 and installed in all States and Territories, including the Hawaiian Islands and Alaska. The league throughout the nation employs about 1,000 persons, who give their entire time to the work of this institution, and it has about 175 offices from which were distributed during the year more than 2,000,000 book pages of anti-saloon literature per day.
  • American Society for Thrift: The society was founded to promote thrift by inquiry, discussion, and education. It accepts no fees or contributions; it sends out regularly literature on the subject of thrift. In brief, its function is to lead to an American thrift propaganda. It has interested the National Education Association in its work, and that body has appointed a thrift board which is canvassing a plan of introducing thrift teachings in the public schools of America.

•Taken from the 1916 World Almanac and Encyclopedia.

Made herself vomit bolts right before the show, but, yes, she looks fabulous.

Sign: "Woman Voter Monthly Magazine 5 cts."

I posted once about a woman who opposed women’s suffrage, but how were men who supported female voting treated? The above classic photo shows the NYC headquarters of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage in 1915. Just two years earlier, an article in the New York Times provided coverage of the organization’s ill-fated attempt to spread its message of equality to London. An excerpt:

“Riotous scenes attended the attempt of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage to hold a meeting in Hyde Park this afternoon. The police gave the League permission to use a truck as a platform, and the overturning of this truck by the crowd ended the proceedings.

Laurence Housman, 1915. (Image by Bain News Service.)

The meeting, as usually, started in an orderly manner, but when Laurence Housman, the poet and playwright, attempted to address an audience of some 10,000 he was greeted with hisses and catcalls, and his speech was interrupted by a fire of heated comments from his hearers. Other speakers had even less success, the interruptions taking the form of clods of earth and other missiles. One youth had an ingenious idea for annoying the speakers. By means of a piece of a mirror he reflected the sun’s rays upon their faces, causing such discomfiture that they were obliged to turn around and address another section of the crowd.

Later one speaker made an allusion to ‘ignorant hooligans.’ The crowd took this as a direct application to themselves. Angry cries were raised, and an ugly rush was made for the truck. The police made valiant efforts to keep back the excited crowd but were practically powerless. The speakers made hasty exits from the vehicle, but one of them had not left it when the truck was captured. He took a flying leap just in time, for a half second later the wagon was completely overturned after a desperate heave by the protesting audience.”

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"His wardrobe was picked from the racks of Versace, Gucci, and Dolce & Gabbana, and he spared no expense on himself." (Image by Rodrigues Pozzebom.)

Someday Teodoro Nguema Obiang is likely to become dictator of oil-rich Equitorial Guinea, but for now he makes do in a $30 million Malibu compound stocked with Playboy bunnies. Considered the heir to his father, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the nation’s current dictator who’s suffering from prostate cancer, Teodorin, as he is nicknamed, rules the sub-Saharan African nation’s media remotely, while spending lavishly and awaiting his iron throne. The opening of “Teodorin’s World,” Ken Silverstein’s fascinating article in the current Foreign Policy:

“The owner of the estate at 3620 Sweetwater Mesa Road, which sits high above Malibu, California, calls himself a prince, and he certainly lives like one. A long, tree-lined driveway runs from the estate’s main gate past a motor court with fountains and down to a 15,000-square-foot mansion with eight bathrooms and an equal number of fireplaces. The grounds overlook the Pacific Ocean, complete with swimming pool, tennis court, four-hole golf course, and Hollywood stars Mel Gibson, Britney Spears, and Kelsey Grammer for neighbors.

With his short, stocky build, slicked-back hair, and Coke-bottle glasses, the prince hardly presents an image of royal elegance. But his wardrobe was picked from the racks of Versace, Gucci, and Dolce & Gabbana, and he spared no expense on himself, from the $30 million in cash he paid for the estate to what Senate investigators later reported were vast sums for household furnishings: $59,850 for rugs, $58,000 for a home theater, even $1,734.17 for a pair of wine glasses. When he arrived back home — usually in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce or one of his other several dozen cars — his employees were instructed to stand in a receiving line to greet the prince. And then they lined up to do the same when he left.

The prince, though, was a phony, a descendant of rulers but not of royals. His full name is Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue — Teodorin to friends — and he is the son of the dictator of Equatorial Guinea, a country about the size of Maryland on the western coast of Africa. A postage stamp of a country with a population of a mere 650,000 souls, Equatorial Guinea would be of little international consequence if it didn’t have one thing: oil, and plenty of it. The country is sub-Saharan Africa’s third-largest producer of oil after Nigeria and Angola, pumping around 346,000 barrels per day, and is both a major supplier to and reliable supporter of the United States. Over the past 15 years, ExxonMobil, Hess Corp., and other American firms have collectively invested several billion dollars in Equatorial Guinea, which exports more of its crude to the U.S. market than any other country.” (Thanks Longform.)

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But real hummingbirds still taste way better. I kid.

"Don't overpay anymore for your sheitel."

SHEITELS human european wigs (NEW YORK)

Ladies,,,,Don’t overpay anymore for your sheitel,,, I did the same thing… Im posting everywhere to warn aginst doing so…I didn’t know the markups on the sheitels your buying are 6X and more, i guess they charge alot for advertising costs etc… I found someone that can get them very low priced,,, and I wanted to tell everyone .. What I did is I went on eBay and found them , and I bought one… and now I’m buying more… I love mine, its perfect, its been about 4 months and I am trying to tell everyone I know about how happy I am,. its the best one iver ever seen. it has the kosher certificate also… and what a low price I paid. around 800$ and its long too… once i bought one for 3500$  and it fell apart in 6 months. I couldn’t get a refund. This wig is so much better.

Check your watch, smiley. Time's growing short. (Image by Marcello Casal Jr.)

Marginal Revolution pointed me to a blog post on the Monkey Cage by Graeme Robertson that wonders why protests can usurp the grip of authoritarian regimes. I think the points here are good, but I wonder if it applies to North Korea, or if that nation is just too much of an outlier? An excerpt:

“The key to answer this question, I think, is to understand the basic nature of authoritarian rule. While the news media focus on ‘the dictator’, almost all authoritarian regimes are really coalitions involving a range of players with different resources, including incumbent politicians but also other elites like businessmen, bureaucrats, leaders of mass organizations like labor unions and political parties, and, of course, specialists in coercion like the military or the security forces. These elites are pivotal in deciding the fate of the regime and as long as they continue to ally themselves with the incumbent leadership, the regime is likely to remain stable. By contrast, when these elites split and some defect and decide to throw in their lot with the opposition, then the incumbents are in danger.

So where do protests come in? The problem is that in authoritarian regimes there are few sources of reliable information that can help these pivotal elites decide whom to back. Restrictions on media freedom and civil and political rights limit the amount and quality of information that is available on both the incumbents and the opposition. Moreover, the powerful incentives to pay lip service to incumbent rulers make it hard to know what to make of what information there is. Rumor and innuendo thus play a huge role in all authoritarian regimes.

In this context, protests are excellent opportunities for communication. Broadly, there are two types of messages being sent. The one that gets the most scholarly attention is at the level of protesters trying to convince other citizens that “people like them” hate the incumbents and are willing to act.”

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Some of Gilbert Gottfried’s finest work since he played Dr. Peabody in Problem Child 3: Junior in Love. (Thanks Reddit.)

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An original Blue Box at the Computer History Museum. Al Gilbertson invented the first such box, which gave callers the same control over the phone system as an operator. (Image by RaD man.)

Before the World Wide Web allowed most of the planet to be readily connected, people were already using whatever techological gadget they had at hand to try to reach out-of-the-way places and obscure information. Phone phreaks were pre-computer revolution hackers who figured out ways to place free phone calls and learn the finer points about the phone company’s computer system. For phreaks (including the pre-Apple Steves, Jobs and Wozniak), this hacking was a training ground for future endeavors in the computer industry.

The phone company was not amused, however, so these phreaks hid behind aliases like “Captain Crunch” and “Legion of Doom.” It was a subculture that few knew about until 1971, when Ron Rosenbaum’s Esquire article, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” profiled hacker Al Gilbertson. An excerpt:

“There is an underground telephone network in this country. Gilbertson discovered it the very day news of his activities hit the papers. That evening his phone began ringing. Phone phreaks from Seattle, from Florida, from New York, from San Jose, and from Los Angeles began calling him and telling him about the phone-phreak network. He’d get a call from a phone phreak who’d say nothing but, ‘Hang up and call this number.’

When he dialed the number he’d find himself tied into a conference of a dozen phone phreaks arranged through a quirky switching station in British Columbia. They identified themselves as phone phreaks, they demonstrated their homemade blue boxes which they called ‘M-F-ers’ (for ‘multi-frequency,’ among other things) for him, they talked shop about phone-phreak devices. They let him in on their secrets on the theory that if the phone company was after him he must be trustworthy. And, Gilbertson recalls, they stunned him with their technical sophistication.

I ask him how to get in touch with the phone-phreak network. He digs around through a file of old schematics and comes up with about a dozen numbers in three widely separated area codes.

‘Those are the centers,’ he tells me. Alongside some of the numbers he writes in first names or nicknames: names like Captain Crunch, Dr. No, Frank Carson (also a code word for a free call), Marty Freeman (code word for M-F device), Peter Perpendicular Pimple, Alefnull, and The Cheshire Cat. He makes checks alongside the names of those among these top twelve who are blind. There are five checks.

John T. Draper, the computer legend also known as "Captain Crunch." (Image by Aaron Getting.)

I ask him who this Captain Crunch person is.

‘Oh. The Captain. He’s probably the most legendary phone phreak. He calls himself Captain Crunch after the notorious Cap’n Crunch 2600 whistle.’ (Several years ago, Gilbertson explains, the makers of Cap’n Crunch breakfast cereal offered a toy-whistle prize in every box as a treat for the Cap’n Crunch set. Somehow a phone phreak discovered that the toy whistle just happened to produce a perfect 2600-cycle tone. When the man who calls himself Captain Crunch was transferred overseas to England with his Air Force unit, he would receive scores of calls from his friends and ‘mute’ them — make them free of charge to them — by blowing his Cap’n Crunch whistle into his end.)

‘Captain Crunch is one of the older phone phreaks,’ Gilbertson tells me. ‘He’s an engineer who once got in a little trouble for fooling around with the phone, but he can’t stop. Well, this guy drives across country in a Volkswagen van with an entire switchboard and a computerized super-sophisticated M-F-er in the back. He’ll pull up to a phone booth on a lonely highway somewhere, snake a cable out of his bus, hook it onto the phone and sit for hours, days sometimes, sending calls zipping back and forth across the country, all over the world….’

Back at my motel, I dialed the number he gave me for ‘Captain Crunch’ and asked for G—- T—–, his real name, or at least the name he uses when he’s not dashing into a phone booth beeping out M-F tones faster than a speeding bullet, and zipping phantomlike through the phone company’s long-distance lines.

When G—- T—– answered the phone and I told him I was preparing a story for Esquire about phone phreaks, he became very indignant.

‘I don’t do that. I don’t do that anymore at all. And if I do it, I do it for one reason and one reason only. I’m learning about a system. The phone company is a System. A computer is a System. Do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a System. Computers. Systems. That’s my bag. The phone company is nothing but a computer.'”

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Thanks for ruining the ceiling, jackass. (Image by Mathew Brady.)

I recently posted about Abraham Lincoln’s less-than-graceful youth, using examples from Carl Sandburg’s great biography, The Prairie Years. Here’s another brief tale of Lincoln’s boorish behavior from that tome:

“He put barefoot boys to wading in a mud puddle near the home trough, pulled them up one by one, carried them to the house upside down, and walked their muddy feet across the ceiling. The stepmother came in, laughed at their foot tracks, told Abe he ought to be spanked–and he cleaned the ceiling so that it looked new.”

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Created by farmer Wu Yulu.

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"It is alleged by his wife that he has given her but $7 in fifteen years for the needs of herself and her children." (Image by Maria Feodorovna.)

The July 19, 1896 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle tells the story of miserly Maurice Flynn, who probably could have been a better husband. An excerpt:

“The miser in Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet seems too miserly to be true, but he is outdone in real life. Newark has a worse than prototype in Maurice Flynn, a rich contractor. It is alleged by his wife that he has given her but $7 in fifteen years for the needs of herself and her children, that when she was ill form overwork and asked for help he told her that she was beggar enough and poor enough to be her own servant, that he made her cook for twenty men on a skimped allowance, that when she asked for more and better food he broke her breastbone with a blackjack, while at other times he tried to hold her on a hot stove and beat her with a poker to curb her strange desire for meals. So she asks for divorce, and as her statements are corroborated she is likely to get it.”

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During his suspension from boxing for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War, Muhammad Ali appeared on a 1968 episode of William F. Buckley’s Firing Line program to discuss a myriad of issues. In the same year, Pete Hamill wrote an article about Ali’s embattled status for Life. An excerpt:

“Even before he exhausted all legal means of defense on his conviction as a draft evader, his title and livelihood were taken away. And yet Ali does not seem bitter. ‘I’m happy,’ he had said on his way to the theater, ’cause I’m free. I’ve made the stand all black people will have to make sooner or later: whether or not they can stand up to the master.'”

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"He must be....of a hopeful or sanguine disposition."

Player, coach and writer Walter Camp describes the “Quarter-Back” position in his 1891 book, American Football:

“The quarter is, under the captain, the director of the game. With the exception of one or two uncommon and rare plays, there is not one of any kind, his side having the ball, in which it does not pass through his hands. The importance of his work it is therefore impossible to overrate. He must be, above all the qualifications of brains and agility usually attributed to that position, of a hopeful or sanguine disposition. He must have confidence in the centre himself, and, most of all, in the man to whom he passes the ball. He should always believe that the play will be a success. The coach can choose no more helpful course during the first few days, as far as the quarter is concerned, than that of persuading him repose confidence in his men. Many promising half-backs are ruined by the quarter. There is nothing that makes halves fumble so badly, get into such awkward positions, start so slowly, and withal play so halfheartedly, as the feeling that the quarter does not think much of them, does not trust them, or believe in their abilities. When he lacks confidence in his man, his passing is unsteady and erratic as well as slow.”

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"Interracial, milf, midgets (lol), bbc, bt, bc, dp, Latin, black, some Asian." (Image by mylerdude.)

50 Adult Dvds for trade for Ipod or any smartphone or electronics – $1 (Queens)

I have 50 adult dvds for trade for anyone with an ipod 4 or 3g or any smartphone, or any other electronics in excellent and operational condition cosmetics don’t really matter as long as it works good. The dvds are mixed but the average run time is 7 hours and consist of interracial, milf, midgets (lol), bbc, bt, bc, dp, Latin, black, some asian, and one dvd by 50 cents (the rapper) among many others. All the vids are worth well over $300 and you’ll have days, upon days of self satisfaction without having to see the same material again unless you like a scene.

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I think. (Thanks Reddit.)

Today T.G.I. Friday's is a ginormous chain and tourist trap. (Image by Americasroof.)

It may be difficult to believe considering the way T.G.I. Friday’s is viewed today, but the origin story of the first Friday’s restaurant in Manhattan on First Avenue and 63rd Street, which opened in 1965, is also the origin story of the singles bar in America. Founder Alan Stillman recalled his place in urban history for the New City Reader not long ago. An expanded version is now available at Edible Geography. An excerpt:

New City Reader: Explain how you went about recreating that cocktail party atmosphere in a public space.

Alan Stillman: All I really did was throw sawdust on the floor and hang up fake Tiffany lamps. I painted the building blue and I put the waiters in red and white striped soccer shirts. If you think that I knew what I was doing, you are dead wrong. I had no training in the restaurant business, or interior design, or architecture — I just have a feel for how to use all those things to create an experience.

I wanted T.G.I. Friday’s to feel like a neighbourhood, corner bar, where you could get a good hamburger, good french fries, and feel comfortable. At the time, it was a sophisticated hamburger and french fry place — apparently, I invented the idea of serving burgers on a toasted English muffin — but the principle involved was to make people feel that they were going to someone’s apartment for a cocktail party.

The food eventually played a larger role than I imagined it would, because a lot of the girls didn’t have enough money to stretch from one paycheque to the other, so I became the purveyor of free hamburgers at the end of the month.

I don’t think there was anything else like it at the time. Before T.G.I. Friday’s, four single twenty-five year-old girls were not going out on Friday nights, in public and with each other, to have a good time. They went to people’s apartments for cocktail parties or they might go to a real restaurant for a date or for somebody’s birthday, but they weren’t going out with each other to a bar for a casual dinner and drinks because there was no such place for them to go.

It took off extraordinarily quickly. In the first six to nine months, T.G.I. Friday’s got written up in Time, Newsweek, and the Saturday Evening Post. Then Maxwell’s Plum opened up across the street, which was another singles bar. It was really quite a phenomenon.

I believe that the first line in the history of bars, restaurants, and discos may have been at T.G.I. Friday’s. Inside of three months, we had to hire a doorman. One night I was tending bar, and he walked up to me and said, ‘Listen, there’s a dozen people standing outside, and we have no tables and no room at the bar. What do you want me to do?” And I said, “I tell you what. Why don’t you just tell them to wait, and when someone comes out, you’ll let them in.’ He said that he didn’t know whether they would wait or not, and I said I didn’t know what else to tell him, and so he went back.

Next thing you know, I came out from behind the bar to get something and I looked outside and there were forty people standing in line. The next week we ended up buying velvet ropes. There was nothing like that anywhere else. You would either have a reservation at a fancy restaurant or you would just go into a bar or diner — nobody would wait in line for food and drink.” (Thanks Long Form.)

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What would you tell a generation living 1,000 years from now about the life you’ve lived and the lessons you’ve learned? (Thanks Open Culture.)

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"The church is a hugely profitable global racket."

With the 1991 Time article, “The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power,” investigative reporter Richard Behar brought concerns about Scientology to the mainstream. The hard-hitting article’s opening:

“By all appearances, Noah Lottick of Kingston, Pa., had been a normal, happy 24-year-old who was looking for his place in the world. On the day last June when his parents drove to New York City to claim his body, they were nearly catatonic with grief. The young Russian-studies scholar had jumped from a 10th-floor window of the Milford Plaza Hotel and bounced off the hood of a stretch limousine. When the police arrived, his fingers were still clutching $171 in cash, virtually the only money he hadn’t yet turned over to the Church of Scientology, the self-help ‘philosophy’ group he had discovered just seven months earlier.

His death inspired his father Edward, a physician, to start his own investigation of the church. ‘We thought Scientology was something like Dale Carnegie,’ Lottick says. ‘I now believe it’s a school for psychopaths. Their so-called therapies are manipulations. They take the best and brightest people and destroy them.’ The Lotticks want to sue the church for contributing to their son’s death, but the prospect has them frightened. For nearly 40 years, the big business of Scientology has shielded itself exquisitely behind the First Amendment as well as a battery of high-priced criminal lawyers and shady private detectives.

The Church of Scientology, started by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard to ‘clear’ people of unhappiness, portrays itself as a religion. In reality the church is a hugely profitable global racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a Mafia-like manner.”

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Some Facebook, lots of porn.

In addition to slaughtering his own people, how is longtime nutbag Muammar el-Qaddafi spending his time during the Libyan revolution? An excerpt from an May 2010 Q&A in the German publication Spiegel provides a hint:

Spiegel: Where do you get your facts? Do you watch television? Do you read books?

Qaddafii: I get most of them from the Internet. I constantly sit at my computer. I read in Arabic, but now it is of course also possible to immediately get translations from English.”

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“In 20 years, this technology will be mainstream…absolutely,” says Hod Lipson, roboticist at Cornell University. (Thanks Endgadget.)

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