Friday, June 6, 2008

Chattanooga

Barbara Schwartz describes her submarine village where she supposedly lived until the age of four when she was, according to her, kidnapped by the German secret service. It's a village which is supposed to exists under the Great Salt Lake in Utah, where people don't age and produce their own purified air and water. The funny thing is that she sincerely believes such a village exists and longs to return to it.

Freedomofmind

freedomofmind Yahoo discussion group. This site was developed in cooperation with Steve Hassan. This fact alone gives the color of the group, which is most probably of the anti-cult flavor. Indeed, it says that much in its description: "Learn and discuss the tactics used by destructive groups or individuals". Although it is open to all, it also is moderated, and "the moderator reserves the right to unsubscribe anyone who ... becomes disruptive". Given the fact that to "become disruptive" is used to weed out dissenters from moderated anti-Scientology groups such as OCMB, Enturbulation.org and the anti-Scientology IRC channel, one has to wonder whether the moderation in this yahoo group is anywhere better.

YouTomb

YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation. YouTomb is currently monitoring 232,383 videos, and has identified 5,218 videos taken down for alleged copyright violation and 17,160 videos taken down for other reasons. This may seem like many but Viacom, the owner of Paramount Comedy and Nickelodeon TV channels, claims that more than 150,000 copyright clips on Youtube had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. Viacom is threatening Google with a one billion dollar lawsuit.