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Dare I say it?
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Day: February 19, 2014
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Someone needs to buy me this t-shirt
Seriously.
Seriously
SI swimsuit models vie with Swiss scenery
The scenery couldn’t be better: the medieval chateau of Chillon, the waters of Lake Geneva and, lolling on a rock in the foreground, bikini-clad model Kate Bock. Bock and another skimpily attired model posed for photos in and around the lake for American magazine Sports Illustrated’s 50th anniversary swimsuit issue.
The annual issue, described by Vanity Fair as a cash register in the shape of a girl, went on sale on Tuesday, annoying feminists but pleasing others, including the canton of Vaud’s tourist office. The office and Switzerland Tourism rolled out the red carpet for the magazine when it sent its photography team and cast of bikinied models to Switzerland for six days last August for on-location shooting.
“This project is a unique opportunity to present at a large-scale international level some of our major sites, such as the chateau of Chillon and Lavaux (the Unesco-designated vineyard area overlooking Lake Geneva),” Andreas Banholzer, director of the Vaud tourist office said in a news release issued on Tuesday.
An estimated 70 million readers of the swimsuit issue, published between the American football and baseball seasons, will see glimpses of Lake Geneva scenery — behind the bathing belles at the centre of attention.
Bock, from Canada, and Genevieve Morton, a model from South Africa, posed in the town of Vevey, in the vineyards of Lavaux and on the shores of the lake and in boats on the water. Morton even provocatively posed topless, with one arm strategically placed to avoid revealing too much, on a sailboat in the middle of the lake with the Vaud Alps in the background.
Meanwhile, near Zermatt, American Emily DiDenato modeled a two-piece swimsuit in front of Switzerland’s iconic Matterhorn. The issue features the likes of Kate Upton, Tyra Banks and Christie Brinkley who posed for shots elsewhere, in such places as the Cook Islands.
Keeping the sheeple stupid and afraid
One week ago, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden was interviewed on the German television network ARD. What many Americans may be unaware of is that the Edward Snowden interview was intentionally blocked from the US public with none of the major new outlets covering the interview or its contents. YouTube has even taken steps to remove the post as soon as it is reposted.
The video got a wide viewing in Europe and it is not only an important interview when it comes to the vast surveillance state that is currently constructed, but is also still future. Snowden explained to German television (oh the irony here is rich) how tyrannical surveillance programs erode human rights and individual liberty and freedom.
According to Snowden, his “breaking point” was “seeing Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress” with his denial of the existence of a domestic spying programs in March 2013. Snowden continued, “The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public.”
One has to wonder about the complicity of the media in blacking out vital information that exposes the criminal activity of the federal government. While many debate whether or not Edward Snowden is a hero or a traitor, Snowden decided to answer for himself.
“If I am traitor, who did I betray?” he asked. “I gave all my information to the American public, to American journalists who are reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason, I think people really need to consider who they think they’re working for. The public is supposed to be their boss, not their enemy. Beyond that as far as my personal safety, I’ll never be fully safe until these systems have changed.”
Not only has the media been in bed with the Obama administration to attempt to paint Snowden in a bad light, while virtually ignoring the criminal law breaking of the federal government, specifically the Fourth Amendment, but apparently many in government has said they would be more than willing to assassinate Snowden, which is something he feared.
Benny Johnson reported:
“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share this sentiment.”
“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single-handedly the greatest traitor in American history.”
“His name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas intelligence collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”
One Army intelligence officer even offered BuzzFeed a chillingly detailed fantasy: “I think if we had the chance, we would end it very quickly,” he said. “Just casually walking on the streets of Moscow, coming back from buying his groceries. Going back to his flat and he is casually poked by a passerby. He thinks nothing of it at the time starts to feel a little woozy and thinks it’s a parasite from the local water. He goes home very innocently and next thing you know he dies in the shower.”
I’d say we have a lot more to fear from a tyrannical federal government than Edward Snowden. It’s an amazing thing when traitors occupy positions of power, while those that simply expose their criminal conduct are said to be guilty of the same.
More fallout from that stupid, xenophobic vote.
In a tit-for-tat retaliation, the European Union has frozen research grants for Swiss universities worth hundreds of millions of euros and suspended the involvement of Switzerland in the Erasmus student exchange programme. A spokesman for the EU announced the freeze on Sunday, a day after after Bern announced it had refused to sign a deal opening labour market access to Croatia, the ATS news agency reported.
The Swiss government said it was unable to ink the deal because of the February 9th referendum decision to scrap the freedom of movement of labour agreement with the EU and impose immigration quotas.
But Brussels considers that Horizon 2020, an 80-billion euro research and innovation programme spread over seven years (2014-2020), and Erasmus, are tied to the free movement of people accord, ATS said.
The freezing of research and educational programme funding was earlier feared by Swiss universities and student groups both in Switzerland in the EU. Lausanne’s Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) said it faces losing 80 to 100 million francs a year in research grants. ETH, the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, faces a similar cut in funding.
When Horizon 2020 was launched in January, the Swiss government said it expected to create 8,000 jobs from the programme.
Last Thursday, the national union of students in Switzerland (VSS) and the European Students Union sounded a warning about the potential impact of the Swiss immigration vote on the Erasmus programme. The European Union approved a 14.7-billion euro budget for the Erasmus programme from 2014-2020, including exchanges for education, training, youth and sport.
One in four Americans ‘don’t know the Earth orbits the Sun’ and only half believe in evolution
With the possible exception of ‘is the Earth flat?’ it is (according to Discover magazine at least) the most basic question in science: ‘does the Earth orbit the sun?’ The good news is that 74 per cent of Americans know the answer. The very bad news is that means 26 per cent really don’t.
These results, which appear in the National Science Foundation (NSF) survey of 2,200 Americans, will form part of a report set to be presented to Barack Obama and lawmakers in congress, and are likely to once again raise the issue of educational standards in the United States.
Other startling results from the survey included that only 39 per cent of Americans believe “the universe began with a huge explosion”. And fewer than half of the people surveyed (48 per cent) agreed that “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals”.
Meanwhile, 51 per cent of Americans knew that antibiotics don’t kill viruses. The study also demonstrated that a total of 42 per cent of Americans thought astrology was either “very scientific” or “sort of scientific”.
The tao of Henri
Don’t know why I like this, but I do.
