Archives for August 2012

In Memoriam Marvin Hamlisch (1944-2012): Below, his “Nobody Does it Better,” theme of the 1977 Bond film, “The Spy Who Loved Me” and among the best of the 20-odd Bond film themes. It was performed by Carly Simon: If we post-moderns all live our lives to a set of background theme songs, Mr. Hamlisch provided […]

The Baath government’s attack on East Aleppo, a rebel stronghold in the past couple of weeks, began Tuesday night, with an assault by advanced Russian-made tanks. It began with a drive to cut the district in two, and the heavy shelling is said to have left large numbers of rebel fighters dead. Some 20,000 residents […]

Michael Klare writes at Tomdispatch: The Hunger Wars in Our Future Heat, Drought, Rising Food Costs, and Global Unrest The Great Drought of 2012 has yet to come to an end, but we already know that its consequences will be severe. With more than one-half of America’s counties designated as drought disaster areas, the 2012 […]

NASA has released the first high-res picture of Mars received from Curiosity, showing Mount Sharp

1. If you regularly pose proudly in front of a swastika flag, you might be a Nazi loser. 2. If you refer to “non-whites” as the “dirt people,” you might be a Nazi loser. 3. If you are the lead singer in a bad racist punk band, you might be a Nazi loser. 4. If […]

Maeve McClenaghan writes at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism😐 Huawei is not yet a household name in the UK – for one thing, there is confusion over how to pronounce it – but the Chinese telecommunications giant is spreading its reach around the world. But accompanying its global expansion are worrying whispers of covert surveillance […]

In this video of the NASA control room during the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars, I don’t see only one race or gender. I see human beings of various shades and cultures and both sexes, collaborating in a project far beyond the atmosphere of our home planet. (3:13 in is the explosion of […]

We still have only rumors about Wade Michael Page, the gunman who walked into a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin near Milwaukee and opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon (weapons that should be illegal) on men women and children beginning to gather for a day of worship, singing and feasting. He killed 6 Americans […]

Updated Number of Murders, United States, 2010: 12,996 Number of Murders by Firearms, US, 2010: 8,775 Number of Murders, Britain, 2011*: 638 (Since Britain’s population is 1/5 that of US, this is equivalent to 3,095 US murders) Number of Murders by firearms, Britain, 2011*: 58 (equivalent to 290 US murders) Number of Murders by crossbow […]