Nothingman's Blog About Nothing
If I Hate You More Than Myself We’ve Got A Problem
I like to think I’m an acquired taste, like old whiskey or arsenic in your tea
So this is usually the part where pretension comes out in full and beautiful force but this is going to be the first time in a long time I'm going to be honest. My name is Clarence (Hello), born in 1988, i got my undergrad degree in Sociology (with a concentration in Women's Studies) and I'm utterly terrified. I'm scared of everything, people, my own feelings and sometimes even being but really there's nothing much to be done about that despite what I say. And I will say a lot about how my life has no meaning and i want to die (which is the majority of the time) but sometimes it seems like life is worth living for and everything in it is a spectacular explosion of awe inspiring wonder (which is usually a three week span some time in March). If it seems odd to read think what it might be like living it. So to get off the topic of terror I prefer stories. I like to read them, I love to live in them and there is nothing better to me than a story so I guess this blog is a story mostly about me. Don't bother trying to find themes, connection or messages in what I post cause there really aren't any (unless they are completely accidental).
This blog is a story about what I find, what I feel and what I think so to that end I collect things to post or reblog. Its not meant to be anything truly meaningful or interconnected, just fun (mostly fun for me if you don't like it you can fuck right off) This is collection of all the the weird and interesting links from around the net that I find, comics, technology, comedy, current events, sociology, general geek/nerd interest, a little pornography and more weird stuff (seriously its become about 65% clusterfuck of the strange stuff which is also why I don't feel bad about continuing to name it Strange World). I think it makes for the closest representation to who I am that I've ever done and it just keeps growing bigger which is most of the fun. And don't be disturbed if i in several post warn about my soon to happen suicide (I have yet to actually do it so we're all probably safe for a few more years). Please feel free to talk to me and don't mind the depressive tone i will probably be using. I like to think I'm somewhat fun if also a complete idiot.
Please feel free to talk to me by letter in my ask or by following me on other social networks but please just throw me a message about who you are so I accept the request I have no patients for spamming (send me an ask here if you want to be a friend on Steam.
By the By it goes without saying you should make sure children don't read most of this (I like swearing and naked women of all shapes, colors and sizes).
You can Check me on Good Reads to Find out what I'm reading or send me Recommends
You can Also check me on Steam, I game a LOT (But its mostly solo RPGs)
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westeros’s celebs read mean tweets (ps: all tweets are real)
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lord
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This is the only reasonable solution to...
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now,
ahead of schedule by five years. also, FYI, Tesla
develops and builds electric cars.
Three Radical New Brain-Mapping Tools Obama’s Plan Could Deliver
The Obama administration wants to make a huge investment in mapping the human brain, according to The New York Times. How can they get the most bang for their buck? We have details on three future technologies that are being eyed by the scientists behind the bold proposal.
The U.S. already has one big brain-mapping effort under way, the Human Connectome Project, which aims to map the connections between regions of the human brain. The new project would go beyond this static depiction and map the activity of individual neurons in real time.
“All the really interesting features of the brain — language, perception, cognition, the mind — emerge from collections of neurons interacting with each other in ways we don’t understand,” said neuroscientist John Donoghue of Brown University, one of the architects of the proposed project. It’s those interactions, the electrochemical blips coursing through networks of interconnected neurons, that the new Brain Activity Map project aims to capture.
The Connectome project focuses mostly on static images of the brain. Although it does include some measures of brain activity, the fMRI scans it will use provide a view that’s something like that of a city seen from an airplane window. What the scientists behind the proposed Brain Activity Map want instead are detailed street maps with real-time traffic info. Ideally, they want to record every blip of every neuron in a network of thousands, or even millions.
The scientists hope they’ll get as much as $3 billion over the next decade to build a new set of dream tools for studying how the human brain works when it’s healthy and what goes wrong in disorders like epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease. Here are three ideas they’ve discussed, all in various stages of development.
“Sure, they sound far-fetched,” Donoghue said. “But we’re on the cusp of being able to do them.”
President Obama approves plans to build a natural gas pipeline through an environmentally sensitive National Park in coastal Brooklyn. To be clear, there are millions of miles of gas lines in the U.S. So, a new line normally doesn’t make news. However, this pipeline is special. It will slice through a piece of a National Park called the Gateway National Park. Only the president has the authority to change what happens in our National Parks.
Thus, he signed a bill called the New York City Natural Gas Supply Enhancement Act. The bill was sponsored by a Republican congressman back in February. It would have died if it weren’t for Hurricane Sandy, which provides Obama with, in my opinion, enough cover to fend off environmentalists and lawsuits. After all, it helps provide much needed “clean energy” for New York City according to NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the bill’s sponsors.
The New York City Natural Gas Supply Enhancement Act authorizes Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to issue permits to build and maintain the pipeline, which is aimed at boosting access to natural gas in the region.
The three-mile pipeline would run from the Atlantic Ocean beneath Jacob Riis Park in the Rockaways and under Jamaica Bay to Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field.
Some area residents and environmental activists have voiced safety and planning concerns about the project.
Republican Rep. Michael Grimm, who represents Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, applauded the approval of the measure.
Grimm said the pipeline could bring as much as $265 million in revenue and create about 300 construction jobs.
In a statement, Grimm called the project an important economic boost to the region in the aftermath of superstorm Sandy.
The current pipeline system serving Brooklyn and Queens was built 40 to 60 years ago and can no longer meet current demand, Grimm said.
The new measure will allow for a new pipeline to be built off the existing Williams pipeline that currently brings natural gas from New Jersey to Long Island.
According to Grimm, the planned route will avoid residential, commercial and environmentally sensitive areas.
The measure was sponsored by Grimm and introduced with Reps. Gregory Meeks (D-Queens) and Robert Turner (R-Brooklyn/Queens).
…the president’s second term may provide another chance for him to push his vision for high-speed passenger rail, which was stalled by Congress’ refusal to keep paying for it.
more.
….The Bush administration’s contempt for what it dismissed as the “reality-based community” was vindicated when it successfully ginned up a war by convincing Americans that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis and that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Our susceptibility to elaborate, beautifully wrought myths remains intact—whether we’re being spun by politicians, captains of finance pumping up a bubble, or sports heroes like Lance Armstrong and Joe Paterno. The news business, which we once counted on to vet hoaxes and fictions, is now so insecure about its existential future that it was cowed to some extent…ignoring the statistical data…and instead predicting a long, nail-biting Election Night. (In reality, the election was called for Obama at 11:12 p.m. EST on NBC, just twelve minutes after it had been in 2008.) Our remaining journalistic institutions have even outsourced what used to be the very core of their craft, fact-checking, to surrogates relegated to gimmicky sidebars (awarding Pinocchios and “pants on fire”). The fact-checkers have predictably become partisan targets, only further destabilizing the whole notion of what is meant by “news.”
more.
OHHHHH SNAP! Watch “The Young Turks” tonight at 7E/4P for more of President Obama’s “Atlas Shrugged” book report and other blunt talk from a new “Rolling Stone” article.
(via 40h4error)
Margaret Kimberley, Freedom Rider: Malala the Worthy Victim via Black Agenda Report
She is not the only victim of violence and terror in Pakistan, but she has become the latest of the worthy victims that we hear so much about. The propaganda created by our corporate media tells us that some victims of tragedy are worthy of our consideration and concern, while others are not. The worthy victim is a person who advances the interests of the powerful or the elites. The unworthy victim makes unwanted demands on the powerful and is crushed, or brings to light things which those at the top want to keep hidden, or is just a member of a group that is out of favor.
[…]
Malala is the worthy victim du jour among a sea of unworthy victims created by our government. According to a recent study American drones have killed between 2,562 and 3,325 people in Pakistan. Between 474 and 881 of those killed were civilians, and 176 were children. These numbers are estimates because the drone program is shrouded in official secrecy. But it is clear that our government is responsible for bringing terror to a civilian population, a war crime by any definition.
The corporate media that have given Malala Yousufzai so much attention give none to the nameless victims of American terror. These drone attack victims in Pakistan have been deemed unworthy with no right to be mentioned or spoken of for the simple reason that our government killed them.
[..]
If Americans and others in the West want to be outraged about official violence used against teens, they should be outraged about the death of an American teenager in Yemen. In October 2011, sixteen year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed by a drone in Yemen, just days after his father Anwar al-Awlaki was dispatched in the same manner. Both father and son were American citizens and neither was ever charged with a crime, but both are dead because the president ordered them killed and neither media pundits nor celebrities bemoan that fact. They are deemed unworthy of sympathy or attention because they were on the “Kill List” which the White House bragged about putting into place.
Must read.
(via jayaprada)(via jayaprada)
- ROMNEY: It took the President 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.
- OBAMA: Get the transcript.
- CROWLEY (to Romney): He did in fact, sir.
- OBAMA: Can you say that a little louder, Candy?
- (Crowd applauds.)
Hamid, a student in his mid-20s who works in a computer shop near Tehran
Average Iranians Struggling To Make Ends Meet Amid Currency Crisis
About a year ago, the price of $1 was around 10,000 rials. This week, when the rial hit a record low, $1 traded for 36,000 rials. The collapse of the rial is blamed on the government’s mismanagement of the economy and on economic sanctions imposed on Iran over its sensitive nuclear work.
Murtaza Hussain explains the affects on Iranians by imposing Western sanctions
Today as the United States continues to intensify its international economic sanctions programme against Iran, it is worth revisiting the catastrophic harm which a previous sanctions campaign against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had upon that country. While the sanctions failed to remove Saddam from power and by many accounts helped him solidify his grip on the country by keeping the overwhelming majority of the population focused purely on subsistence, they took a calculatedly devastating toll on Iraqi civilians.
Between 1989 and 1996 per capita income in the country dropped from $3,510 to below $450, a drop caused primarily by the rapid currency depreciation of the Iraq dinar due to financial sanctions against the country’s central bank. Prices of basic commodities soared, with staples such as wheat, sugar and rice increasing several hundred-fold in a matter of months. From having a relatively modern economy fuelled primarily by oil income, by the year 2000 over 60 per cent of Iraqis were reliant on food rations for their daily sustenance. [x]
Sanctions are dehumanizing Iranians and it is war upon them
In all of the massive commentary in establishment foreign policy circles that has come out on the Iran issue as of late, however, very little focuses on the immense human costs a war on Iran would entail. According to a new report that tries to estimate this, the number of immediate casualties that would result from bombing Iran’s top four enrichment sites would be would be about 5,000 people. “If the bombing would include more than those four sites,” says the study from the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics, ”then the immediate casualty would be up to 10,000 people.”
[..]
What about casualties that are not immediate? Even if a US or Israeli strike only targeted Iran’s nuclear sites and it didn’t result in larger land war (unlikely), the toxic plumes released as a result of the strikes could kill or injure up to 70,000 civilians in nearby cities and towns. ”People’s skin could be burnt, they could become blind, their lungs could be destroyed, their kidneys could be damaged, and in the future they could face other health problems such as skin cancer and [other forms] of cancer,” according to the author of the report. [x]
See more:
Study: Thousands Would Die in an Attack on Iran’s Nuclear Sites | Golnaz Esfandiari
The currency war on Iran | Peter Beaumont
(via jayaprada)(via jayaprada)
Stop for a moment and read this headline on Fox News’ website.
What is the first thing that comes to mind?
Being a journalism major I can tell you that this headline was written extremely well. The phrasing is impeccably planned and deliberate in its purpose to deliver both a factually accurate message, along with a not-so-subtle false one.
You see, Obama did in fact make a phone call to thank the Libyan president following the attacks and deaths at the U.S. Embassy. The gratitude delivered to him was that resulting from President Mohamed Yusuf al-Magariaf reaching out and giving his condolences, his remorse and disdain for a few extremists that reside within his nation, and his full support in investigating this tragedy.
But Fox News knows that the majority of its viewer and readership won’t read past the headline. In fact, journalists know that a well-written headline should convey the core topic of the article, to catch attention and immediately make a statement without the reader having to read any of the actual article. What Fox News has done with this headline is purposefully sway readers into beleiving that our United States President made a phone call to THANK the Libyan president for the attacks and deaths of our fellow Americans. Crazy right?
Not. The scary part is that most people who see this headline are going to think just that. Regardless of the facts. Regardless of what should be common sense in that our own President would NEVER thank anyone for damage and death caused to his citizens.
This is irresponsible journalism, just one example of thousands of poor decisions that Fox “News” makes on a daily basis to feed its own fire and to steer its ignorant and ill-informed followers in whichever direction they see fit. But why not just call it what it really is?
Legal brainwashing and defamatory propaganda, not unlike that of Nazi Germany (Godwin’s Law or not) or Middle Eastern terrorist groups.
American terrorism, right here, right now.
^Perfectly explained.
(via recreationalsociologist)
