America the challenged · Tuesday May 8, 2007 by colin newell
WASHINGTON An odd-looking Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind the U.S. Defense Department’s false espionage warning earlier this year, The Associated Press has learned.
The odd-looking but harmless poppy coin was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as “anomalous” and “filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology,” according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.
The silver-colored 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy, Canada’s flower of remembrance – inlaid over a maple leaf. The unorthodox quarter is identical to the coins pictured and described as suspicious in the contractors’ accounts.
The supposed nano-technology actually was a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy’s red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada’s 117,000 war dead.
It did not appear to be electronic or analog in nature or have a power source,” wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. “Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire like mesh suspended on top.”
The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defense Security Service, an agency of the Defense Department, that mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.
One contractor believed someone had placed two of the quarters in an outer coat pocket after the contractor had emptied the pocket hours earlier. Coat pockets were empty that morning and I was keeping all of my coins in a plastic bag in my inner coat pocket, the contractor wrote.
This proves my theory that the average U.S. government employee has the equivalent intelligence of a randomly selected 6 year old Canadian kindergarden drop-out.
The nutting of America · Sunday May 6, 2007 by colin newell
According to a University of Minnesota study, Americans distrust Atheists more than Muslims.
Really?
Let’s dig into the article shall we.
Penny Edgell, associate professor of Sociology writes:
From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in sharing their vision of American society. Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.
Edgell also argues that today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past—they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society.
Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.
Rampant materialism huh?
Last time I checked, every small American town had a Walmart, a Target Store and a CostCo…
and its aisles sure as hell weren’t full of Atheists on Sunday.
Anyway – it’s a scary and funny read.
The moral majority is neither · Saturday May 5, 2007 by colin newell
I close out most days listening to KGO 810 khz on the AM radio dial. I often have 2 choices of who I am going to get to listen to at this late hour; Bernie Ward or Dr. Bill Wattenburg.
I like Bernie. He is an apologist left-leaning, terrorist loving Liberal just like me… obviously hates freedom and everything that stands for it.
Dr. Bill Wattenburg is the other side of the coin. He swaddles himself in the American flag, supports the troops and those that support the troops and thinks Nuclear power is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Afterall, Dr. Bill Wattenburg invented Nuclear power, the transistor, electricity, the i-Pod and the internet. You name it.
Anyway – it is a good night when Bernie is on.
When he is not pontificating on the never-ending attack on freedom in America he is hitting the proverbial nail on the head on just about everything else clear-thinking Americans (and us Canadians to the North… we are all, afterall, linked at the border…) should concern themselves with.
And I might not be the most gifted listener around, but when Bernie brings something up, I tend to remember it, follow-up on it and dig a little deeper.
One of the things that scares Bernie more than anything else is the incursion into all levels of government by the nut-job religious right.
The federal government. Local governments. State governments. Municipal governments. No governmental agencies has been spared this frightening new cancer.
Enter freelance writer and author Michelle Goldberg.
After a year of traveling and reporting in India and East Asia, Michelle Goldberg moved to New York City and took a job as a news and politics reporter with Salon.com. There she covered all aspects of the ascendant political right, from the neocons to the theocrats. She was one of the first to expose how a tiny far-right Catholic sect convinced President Bush to cut off support for the United Nations Population Fund, which promotes reproductive health care and safe childbirth in the third world. She wrote about faith-based abstinence-only education and crisis pregnancy centers and about the right-wing attempts to take over the federal judiciary.
Scary stuff. Well she wrote a great book called Kingdom Coming
“In Kingdom Coming, Goldberg demonstrates how an increasingly bellicose fundamentalism is gaining traction throughout our national life, taking us on a tour of the parallel right-wing evangelical culture that is buoyed by Republican political patronage. Deep within the red zones of a divided America, we meet military veterans pledging to seize the nation in Christ’s name, perfidious congressmen courting the confidence of neo-confederates and proponents of theocracy, and leaders of federally funded programs offering Jesus as the solution to the country’s social problems.”
“With her trenchant interviews and the telling testimonies of the people behind this movement, Goldberg gains access into the hearts and minds of citizens who are striving to remake the secular Republic bequeathed by our founders into a Christian nation run according to their interpretation of scripture. In her examination of the ever-widening divide between believers and nonbelievers, Goldberg illustrates the subversive effect of this conservative stranglehold nationwide. In an age when faith rather than reason is heralded and the values of the Enlightenment are threatened by a mystical nationalism claiming divine sanction, Kingdom Coming brings us face to face with the irrational forces that are remaking much of America.”
We are living in truly dangerous times when bible thumpers have stolen the key to the White-house.
Read it and weep.
Comment [2]
The wonderful world of online... · Thursday March 22, 2007 by colin newell
Is there anyone out there that buys their beans exclusively online? I am curious.
Photo-left – There is no such company as funkie-coffee. I whipped this up with Photoshop
And I am not looking for names of online vendors – just information on consumer practices.
I hit someones nerve a couple of days ago when I did some research on people who spam or seed guestbooks and forums, promoting one online vendor or another…
What I found surprised and amused me.
Now I know some of you think I get a little obsessed by spammers and forum taggers (and I do…) but you have to remember: Time taken to clean defacements off this forum take time away from me responding to e-mail and writing articles. It is that simple.
Anyhow – what I did find was (after search Google with a couple of keywords based on the spam I was encountering) was that there were over 3000 websites marked with this perculiar spam — promoting one particular online coffee vendor.
In addition, the english or writing style of all the form entries was the same – the writer was obviously not from North America, English was not their first language AND they learned how to write English from a textbook over 75 years old!
Examples: Vendor-X is a fantastic coffee with magical smooth taste. You don’t need sugar or milk to enjoy it. And it is really madly popular now
Vendor-X is for special occasions too. When I make it my family has festive mood. Have you tried it? And I never use milk. ——- has too pure taste to be spoiled by milk or sugar. My husband likes to add it, me – never. I think that “elite” coffee doesn’t need it.
Vendor-X went down a bomb at the party we had last week. I can’t forget this godlike taste.
Vendor-X, zested with a peculiar bouquet, is really can be compared with nectar
I vote for Vendor-X. So rich taste… Amazing. I agree that Starbucks is bitter and it is the grave disadvantage. Vendor-X is smooth. You feel only taste of coffee.
Magical smooth taste? godlike taste? So rich taste?
Peculiar bouquet? Madly popular!
Other references go on to tell how Vendor-X coffee calms stirred nerves… or is a wild and healthful drink.
This is ad copy right out of the 40’s!
When I approached the vendor about this, I was threatened with legal action — so I removed the references to the company. Fair enough. For all I know, the spammer is working for a competing company to discredit this company. For all I know, their coffee is truely wonderful, a godlike drink, that calms flustered coffee nerves.
I do not know. What do you think?
Comment [2]
Anna Nicole Smith dead at 39 · Thursday February 8, 2007 by colin newell
Reality TV star and former model Anna Nicole Smith was pronounced dead Thursday after being taken to a Florida hospital, a law enforcement source told CNN.
Smith, 39, collapsed at a south Florida hotel, according to news reports.
Love or hate celebrities, I cannot help but feel the loss of an interesting human being.
Anna Nicole had become a fixture on Entertainment Tonight, the prime-time gossip vid that has crept into our lives. Everybody shared the loss of her son and her never-ending battle with depression and grief.
And although she was a product of another World, totally foreign to my own, her raw and genuine humanity did show through the glamour and glitz.
So today I offer a toast to Anna Nicole.
You gave us something that the likes of Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson could never give us; a window in the painful reality that is the life of the celebrity.
You were real. And now you’re gone.
Happy journey Anna Nicole Smith!
Bonus: Bob Harris’s take on Anna Nicole in the news
