26 Dezember 2012

Soviet space-program Christmas cards

Soviet space-program Christmas cards

http://craphound.com/images/a2006_005.jpg



"Soviet Christmas card" sounds like a mere kitschy improbability, but what if I told you that they were space-race-themed Soviet Christmas cards? It's a Christmas miracle, dude.


Old Soviet Christmas card collection (via Richard Kadrey )








via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2012/12/25/soviet-space-program-christmas.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

18 Dezember 2012

Video Tour of the International Space Station

Video Tour of the International Space Station

http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png

SternisheFan writes with an excerpt from Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, writing at Slate: "Before she came back to Earth in a ball of fire surrounding her Russian re-entry capsule, astronaut Sunita Williams took time out of her packing for the trip home to give a nickel tour of the International Space Station. ... I know the video's long, but if you have the time I do suggest watching the whole thing. I have very mixed feelings about the space station; it cost a lot of money, and in my opinion it hasn't lived up to the scientific potential NASA promised when it was being designed. But watching this video reminded me of the good that's come out of it: There is science being done there; we're learning how to design and build hardware for long-term space travel; we're learning just how to live in space (and NASA just announced it will be sending humans into space for an entire year, an unprecedented experiment); and we're finding new ways for nations and individuals to cooperate in space."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.










via Slashdot http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/12/15/2258243/video-tour-of-the-international-space-station?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

If you're suspected of drug involvement, America takes your house; HSBC admits to laundering cartel billions, loses five weeks' income and execs have to partially defer bonuses

If you're suspected of drug involvement, America takes your house; HSBC admits to laundering cartel billions, loses five weeks' income and execs have to partially defer bonuses

http://craphound.com/images/2956514714_77bc7002c6_b.jpg



Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi is brilliantly incandescent in his column about the HSBC drug-money-laundering settlement with the US government. HSBC was an active, knowing participant in laundering billions in drug money, and was fined a small percentage of its net worth (five weeks' income). Meanwhile, private individuals who are suspected of being incidentally involved in the drug trade routinely have all of their property confiscated, down to their houses and cars, under America's insane forfeiture laws. Then they often go to jail.



It doesn't take a genius to see that the reasoning here is beyond flawed. When you decide not to prosecute bankers for billion-dollar crimes connected to drug-dealing and terrorism (some of HSBC's Saudi and Bangladeshi clients had terrorist ties, according to a Senate investigation), it doesn't protect the banking system, it does exactly the opposite. It terrifies investors and depositors everywhere, leaving them with the clear impression that even the most "reputable" banks may in fact be captured institutions whose senior executives are in the employ of (this can't be repeated often enough) murderers and terrorists. Even more shocking, the Justice Department's response to learning about all of this was to do exactly the same thing that the HSBC executives did in the first place to get themselves in trouble – they took money to look the other way...


... So the executives who spent a decade laundering billions of dollars will have to partially defer their bonuses during the five-year deferred prosecution agreement? Are you fucking kidding me? That's the punishment? The government's negotiators couldn't hold firm on forcing HSBC officials to completely wait to receive their ill-gotten bonuses? They had to settle on making them "partially" wait? Every honest prosecutor in America has to be puking his guts out at such bargaining tactics. What was the Justice Department's opening offer – asking executives to restrict their Caribbean vacation time to nine weeks a year?


...How about all of it? How about every last dollar the bank has made since it started its illegal activity? How about you dive into every bank account of every single executive involved in this mess and take every last bonus dollar they've ever earned? Then take their houses, their cars, the paintings they bought at Sotheby's auctions, the clothes in their closets, the loose change in the jars on their kitchen counters, every last freaking thing. Take it all and don't think twice. And then throw them in jail.



Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke (via Dan Hon )


(Image: [HSBC], a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from willsurvive's photostream)








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15 Dezember 2012

CIA 'tortured, sodomized' terror suspect, European human rights court rules

CIA 'tortured, sodomized' terror suspect, European human rights court rules

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/01/09kidnap.xlarge1.jpg

09kidnap.xlarge1.jpg In a landmark ruling for human rights in the war on terror, the European court of human rights this week found that CIA agents tortured German citizen, Khaled el-Masri. The agents sodomized, shackled, and beat him, as Macedonian state police observed.

In a unanimous ruling, it also found Macedonia guilty of torturing, abusing, and secretly imprisoning Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese origin allegedly linked to terrorist organisations.


Masri was seized in Macedonia in December 2003 and handed over to a CIA "rendition team" at Skopje airport and secretly flown to Afghanistan. It is the first time the court has described CIA treatment meted out to terror suspects as torture.



More at The Guardian, and the ACLU website.


We've covered el-Masri's case before here on Boing Boing, including the inclusion of documents related to his case in Wikileaks cable dumps. Also, a documentary from Witness.org details his story, and the damage to his body and mental health.












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13 Dezember 2012

More Than Human: Tim Flach’s Striking Portraits of Animals

More Than Human: Tim Flach’s Striking Portraits of Animals

http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/timflach_morethanhuman.jpg

Sentient beings like you’ve never seen them before.


“Erasing the awe-inspiring variety of sentient life impoverishes all our lives,” historian Joanna Bourke wrote in her poignant meditation on what it means to be human. And yet our relationship with animals and our understanding of their inner lives remains inadequate at best.


In 2010, photographer Tim Flach gave us his extraordinary dog portraits. This year, he’s back with More Than Human (UK ; public library ) — a collection of striking, expressive portraits of our non-human fellow beings, captured with equal parts tenderness and aesthetic elegance.

















Despite the sciency sterility of his words, perhaps Darwin was ultimately right in a broader philosophical sense when he reflected in The Descent of Man :



The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.



See more of Flach’s breathtaking work on his site and treat yourself to the full glory of More Than Human , for the screen hardly does it justice.



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Einkommensverteilung: Deutschlands Mittelschicht schrumpft dramatisch

Einkommensverteilung: Deutschlands Mittelschicht schrumpft dramatisch

http://www.spiegel.de/images/image-437448-thumbsmall-onmb.jpg

Die Mittelschicht in der Bundesrepublik ist in den vergangenen Jahren um mehr als fünf Millionen Menschen kleiner geworden. Laut einer DIW-Studie profitiert nur noch eine kleine Elite vom wachsenden Wohlstand. Die Forscher warnen vor einer sozialen Spaltung des Landes.



via SPIEGEL ONLINE - Schlagzeilen http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/diw-studie-mittelschicht-schrumpft-ungleichheit-nimmt-zu-a-872641.html

O, tennenbohm

O, tennenbohm

http://craphound.com/images/1AG1b.jpg



Cubicle Christmas

by jingle_balls123

Artist's statement: This wasn't really a tree... I just twisted the wires and moves around the components to make it look like a tree. The parts are just LEDs, resistors (i used 100 ohms) and a 9v battery. Wire structures are just the leads from the LEDs and resistors.


This is how I decorated my cubicle (imgur.com) (via Neatorama )








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