Tag Archives: offbeat

Spy Kids: The NSA Is Looking for the Next Generation of Sneaky Geeks

by Billy Jobs Posted on June 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Although the National Security Agency is incredibly secretive and could probably care less what you think, it does have an interest in helping our kids become great mathematicians. The NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians in the country, so, the agency explains, it is “critically dependent on the continuing development of first-class American mathematicians.”

Enter the CryptoKids, the NSA’s band of codemaking and codebreaking cartoon characters. There’s Cyndi, one half of the CyberTwins, a cat with braces, two-tone hair, and what may be Google Glass. Her advice for online-savvy kids: “Mom says that once something is out on the Internet, it will be there forever, and ‘might come back to haunt us one day.'” Her brother Cy, a malware victim, also values his digital privacy and security: “The stuff on my computer is really important to me, and I don’t want anyone getting in and messing it up again!”

The CryptoKids. NSA

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Spy Kids: The NSA Is Looking for the Next Generation of Sneaky Geeks

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A Graduation Day Speech for the Class of 1966

by Felixct7yh Posted on June 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Here may be the most commonplace sentence anyone could write about graduation day in any year: when I think back to my own graduation in 1966, an eon, a lifetime, a world ago, I have no memory of who addressed us. None. I have a little packet of photos of the event: shots of my parents and me, my grandmother and me, my aunt and me, my former roommates and me, my friends and me. You can even see the chairs for the ceremony. But not the speaker. And yet it’s odds on that he—and in 1966, it was surely a “he”—made some effort to usher me into the American world, offering me, as a member of a new generation, words of wisdom and some advice. You know, the usual thing that no one pays much attention to or ever remembers.

Here, on the other hand, is my most vivid memory of that day. I reserved a room at a local motel for my parents the night before the graduation ceremony. As it happened, I had reserved the same room the previous night for my girlfriend and me (and conveniently not paid for it). When, on the morning of graduation, I picked my parents up and my father went to pay, the hotel clerk charged him for both nights, winked, and said something suggestive.

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A Graduation Day Speech for the Class of 1966

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The 6 Weirdest Things Found in the EPA Warehouse

by gorso6 Posted on June 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Environmental Protection Agency’s Inspector General released a report on Monday on the agency’s Landover, Maryland warehouse. The 70,000-square-foot facility is used to store inventory from the EPA’s Washington headquarters, but what the inspectors found basically sounds like a cross between a frat house and your grandma’s attic.

Here are the six weirdest things discovered in the warehouse:

multiple “unauthorized personal spaces” that were “arranged so that they were out of sight of security cameras” and included televisions, refrigerators, radios, microwaves, couches, pin ups, clothing, books, magazines and videos
two pianos
new appliances received in 2007 still in the original packaging
dirt, dust and vermin feces were “pervasive,” and several items were described as “rotting and potentially hazardous”
an exercise space that included weights, machines, and other exercise equipment that, unlike most of the rest of the warehouse, “appeared to be well maintained”; the report also noted that “agency steno pads were used for recording workouts”
a big box of old passports

(h/t National Journal)

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The 6 Weirdest Things Found in the EPA Warehouse

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In the Era of Climate Change, Poets Can’t Write About the "Eternal Sea"

by Ivan Nutter Posted on June 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In heavy fog on the night of October 7, 1936, the SS Ohioan ran aground three miles south and west of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, and by noon on October 8th, I was among a crowd of spectators come to pay its respects to the no small terror of the sea. I was two years old, hoisted on the shoulders of my father, for whom the view to windward was neither openly nor latently sublime. The stranded vessel, an 8,046-ton freighter laden with a cargo valued at $450,000, was owned by the family steamship company of which my father one day was to become the president, and he would have been counting costs instead of looking to the consolations of philosophy. No lives had been lost—Coast Guard boats had rescued the captain and the crew—but the first assessments of the damaged hull pegged the hopes of salvage in the vicinity of few and none.

Happily aloft in the vicinity of my father’s hat, and the weather having cleared since the Ohioan missed its compass heading, I was free to form my earliest impression of the sea at a safe and sunny distance, lulled by the sound of waves breaking on the beach, delighting in the drift of gulls in a bright blue sky.

The injured ship never regained consciousness. All attempts at righting it were to no avail, and in the summer of 1937, the removable planking and machinery having been sold for scrap, the Ohioan was declared a total loss, the hull abandoned to the drumming of the surf and the shifting of the sand. The prolonged and unhappy ending of the story my father regarded as a useful lesson, and over the course of the next three years as I was moving up in age from two to five, he often walked me by the hand along the cliff above the wreck to behold the work of its destruction.

To foster my acquaintance with the family’s history and changing fortunes, he spoke of distant ancestors sailing from the port of Boston and the Gulf of Maine in the early-nineteenth-century China trade, of my great-grandfather’s organizing the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company in 1899 not because of the money in the business but because of the romance. My father’s turn of mind was literary, and he was fond of strengthening his narratives with lengthy quotations from William Shakespeare’s plays and extensive recitations from Joseph Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

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In the Era of Climate Change, Poets Can’t Write About the "Eternal Sea"

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Liberace’s Best TV Moments

by NatishaFe Posted on May 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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The King of Bling before it was a thing Alan Light/Flickr

When I met Liberace in 1986, I tried to eat his diamond rings. He was making an appearance at Caldors in Riverside, Connecticut, promoting a coffee table book of photos of one of his fantastic homes. My mom tells me he held me in his famously bejeweled hands and we exchanged grins. I was two.

“He was an absolute sweetheart,” Mom recalled the other day. “Beautiful in his ermine sweater. Big dimples, big diamonds.”

I don’t remember the encounter, but as an “older millennial” I have an awareness of who Liberace was: a flamboyant pianist with a taste for furs and jewels who was the butt of many a terrible late-show joke. Wladziu (Lee) Liberace was a child prodigy born of humble Midwestern roots who gained fame by combining exceptional musical talent with personal charm and a flair for showmanship.

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Liberace’s Best TV Moments

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Anna Jarvis, the Radical Behind Mother’s Day

by Ludie69E Posted on May 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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This cartoon was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

More from Steve Brodner on his website and Facebook page.

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Anna Jarvis, the Radical Behind Mother’s Day

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Why Darrell Issa Should Hold Hearings on Space Aliens

by Hadwin Partize Posted on May 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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Roscoe Bartlett is pissed.

“It’s outrageous!” thunders the recently retired 10-term Republican congressman from Maryland. “It’s outrageous!”

The source of his ire is a stack of newspaper clippings about 20 feet away from where he’s standing in the wood-paneled ballroom of National Press Club in downtown DC. For the last three days, Bartlett and five other retired members of Congress have been holding hearings on the “truth embargo”—that is, the government’s decades-long silence on unidentified flying objects. Next to the empty bottle of Honest Tea orange–mango Honest Ade, which he has been drinking out of a wine glass, Bartlett has a pile of stories from mainstream news sources that have dismissed the privately organized hearings. On top is a New York Daily News story featuring a photo of a woman with a headband featuring a “third eye” that, she maintains, allows her to contact beings in other dimensions. (It includes this caption: “Ex-Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (center) and ex-Sen. Mike Gravel (right) listen to testimony without cracking a smile.”)

The hearings are being sponsored by the Paradigm Research Group, the nation’s only organization dedicated to lobbying Washington on UFO disclosure. Its president, Stephen Bassett, is a full-time lobbyist on this front.

(MoJo readers might remember Bassett for his theory that alien technology recovered at Roswell holds the secret to stopping climate change, and for his endorsement of the Exopolitics Institute, which contends that the Iraq War was a ruse to recover an ancient inter-stellar portal that had been buried in Mesopotamia.)

In addition to Bartlett, Bassett recruited former Reps. Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-Mich.), Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), Darlene Hooley (D-Ore.), Merrill Cook (R-Utah), and ex-Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) to come to DC to hear testimony about aliens.

Bassett doesn’t have much influence in Congress, but his organization apparently does have some money. The former members will receive $20,000 apiece for five days work.

“It helped,” Woolsey says, of the honorarium. “It was nice, and I think…let’s put it that way.” As she puts maintains, it’s standard operating procedure for retired politicians to make money on the speaking circuit; learning about UFOs is kind of like getting paid to speak to a trade association. Cook says the money was a big part of Bassett’s pitch, but it’s not why he’s here. “Even though the fee was offered up first thing, that still didn’t convince me,” the barrel-chested former talk radio host says. “It really didn’t.” Kilpatrick called the honorarium “miniscule,” adding, “And I’m appalled that someone would even raise that.” Bartlett is likewise appalled that anyone would associate his participation in the hearings with the appearance fee. “It’s an insult to infer that that’s why I’m here.” Hooley insists she’s actually losing money by taking a week off from her consulting firm.

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Why Darrell Issa Should Hold Hearings on Space Aliens

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8 Things You Won’t See at the George W. Bush Presidential Library

by 2KeaheySchoeffler461 Posted on April 25, 2013

Mother Jones

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“Eight years was awesome and I was famous and I was powerful.”—Former President George W. Bush, July 2012

On Thursday, the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum will be officially dedicated at Southern Methodist University, a school attended by the likes of former first lady Laura Bush, actor Powers Boothe, and Kourtney Kardashian. The invitation-only event will be attended by President Obama, before he visits a memorial at Baylor University for victims of the West, Texas, plant explosion. A spokesperson says attendance at the library dedication is expected to be in the thousands.

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8 Things You Won’t See at the George W. Bush Presidential Library

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Is a Game of Thrones Winter Coming?

by gjrrkjujp Posted on April 5, 2013

Mother Jones

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George R.R. Martin’s wildly popular Game of Thrones saga—whose third season just launched on HBO—is, on the broadest level, a story driven by climatic change. “Winter is coming,” warn the ill-fated Starks, a family of northern nobles who help guard the realm from the frozen beyond. In Martin’s world, winters and summers vary in length and can for last years or even a generation—and as the books advance, a devastating winter begins to descend, forcing southward migrations and an intense test of mettle to see who can literally stand against the cold.

Back on Planet Earth, our own weather has felt distinctly Game of Thrones-like lately—depending heavily, of course, upon where you live. But if you’re in the northeastern U.S., 2012 felt like a long summer, with scarce any winter at all—whereas early 2013 featured a snowy winter that has felt like it won’t end (though it finally does now seem to be letting up). See here for a graphic of March temperature anomalies in 2012 and 2013, courtesy of Climate Central, proving this perception isn’t merely subjective:

The UK—a kind of homeland for Game of Thrones, in that the books are inspired by England’s historic “Wars of the Roses,” and the gigantic ice wall in the north of the fictional Westeros is modeled on Hadrian’s Wall, built by the Roman emperor to protect against tribes of Britons—is also undergoing a staggering winter this year. A recent Daily Mail report features disturbing pictures and video of sheep frozen to death in giant snow drifts, noting that the current freeze is threatening to persist throughout April.

So what’s going on here? Could climate change actually give us a Game of Thrones world with longer, or at least more variable, winters and summers? On an admittedly much more modest scale—we’re working with mere physics here, not a recurring meteorological conflagration between good (heat) and evil (cold)–the answer may be yes.

One key factor behind the UK’s and East Coast’s supercharged winter of 2013 is the odd behavior of the jet stream, the high level river of air that meanders from west to east in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere. Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at Rutgers University, explains that climate change is weakening the jet stream through an unexpected mechanism—the dramatic melting of ice in the Arctic. And this, in turn, is leading to more fixed weather patterns—whether hot or, alternatively, intensely cold—across the globe.

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Is a Game of Thrones Winter Coming?

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Pope Francis Vs. Black Francis

by greenenergy4 Posted on March 14, 2013

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Yesterday’s selection of Pope Francis got me wondering: How does the new Holy Father compare against indie rock godfather and former Pixies frontman Black Francis?

Pope Francis
Black Francis

Namesake
St. Francis of Assisi
Name his dad wanted to give his next son

Means of elevation to current status
College of cardinals
College radio

Mass attendance
Excellent
Dropped out of UMass

Animal lover cred
Named after patron saint of animals

Named Doolittle after man who talked to animals

Spanish skills
Fluent
Amusing

Controversy involving B/breeders
Says only straight people should be able to get married or adopt kids
More critical acclaim for Kim Deal’s post-Pixies work

Believes God is number…
One
Seven

Followers
1.2 billion Catholics
Backing band called The Catholics

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Pope Francis Vs. Black Francis

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