Why-the-world-stays-screwed-up edition.
- Isolation and hallucinations: Why the mental health of astronauts is one of the biggest hurdles when it comes to successful space missions.
- The US is holding on to nuclear weapons to defend the Earth against rogue asteroids.
- Huge feature on the Moon may be an enormous volcanic vent system.
- Exploring the monstrous creatures at the edges of the dark matter map: What if the most popular hypothesis is wrong? Plenty of fringier theories exist.
- Green snot is taking over the world’s rivers.
- How we really feel about drugs.
- Healing trip: How psychedelic drugs could help treat depression.
- Memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s reversed using systems approach.
- What will it take for computers to be conscious?
- Late addition: The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever: A quixotic historian tries to hold oil and gas companies responsible for Louisiana’s disappearing coast.
- Managing a Nightmare: How the CIA watched over the destruction of Gary Webb.
- Kill the Messenger: Since the Contra-crack-cocaine scandal surfaced in 1985, major U.S. news outlets have disparaged it, most notably when the big newspapers destroyed journalist Gary Webb for reviving it in 1996. But a NYTimes review of a movie about Webb finally admits the reality.
- Monsanto spends millions to fight GMO labeling efforts in a few US states.
- Inside the Koch brothers’ toxic empire.
- iPhone? It’s a spyphone: Apple devices can record your every movement.
- Leaked documents reveal chemical industry arm-twisting in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal, which is poised to derail European regulations on chemicals, endocrine disrupters and GMOs.
- A confidential report and a fired bank examiner’s hidden recorder penetrate the cloistered world of the Fed — and its history of deference to banks.
- New Intel Doc: Do not be ‘led astray’ by ‘commonly understood definitions’.
- For the first time, filmmakers in the forests of Borneo’s Mount Kinabalu have documented the so-repulsive-it’s-captivating behavior of a large, red, worm-guzzling predator, which remains unclassified by science.
- Fairies and Elves – a history (sort of). Leave your wings at the door.
Thanks to Kapryan.
Quote of the Day:
NSA plays a lot of word games.
The DIA document shows that for the NSA, ‘collection’ of your e-mails doesn’t mean what you think it means. It means something totally different. They want to be able to say they’re not ‘collecting’ your data, so they claim that even though they copied all your e-mails, put them in a server for five years, and searched them at will, that’s not ‘collection’ because your e-mail didn’t go into a report.
The NSA plays the same games with all of the words they use — they say you are not a ‘target,’ even though they collect, store and search all your data. They say your data is collected only ‘incidentally,’ even though the NSA intentionally designs its programs to collect everything you do online. They say your data is not collected ‘under this program,’ which almost certainly means it is collected under some other program. The NSA says things, using some very tortured and legalistic definitions, which are technically true but designed to mislead Americans about how it collects and uses our data. The NSA’s collection and use of Americans’ data would never stand up to any kind of public scrutiny or judicial review. The only way these programs survive is because they are shielded from review and oversight and challenge in the courts.
John Tye, a former State Department official, in ‘New documents show how Reagan-era executive order unbounded NSA’.
