It’s all well and good to joke about signs of the end times now and again, but seriously.  When 5,000 birds drop out of the sky New Years Night, and then elsewhere in the state 100,000 fish roll over and beach themselves, it’s time to start looking at man-made causes.

The alternatives are just too creepy.  From Mediaite:

An AP interview with an expert affiliated with the state’s Livestock and Poultry Commission suggested that the birds may have died as a result of “lightning or high-altitude hail.” Another possibility for the bird die-off? New Year’s Eve fireworks may have startled the birds so severely, that they died from stress.

But neither of these reasons would account for the massive fish die-off.

>>> Read the rest at Mediaite.

Past projects by anarchic Internet collective Anonymous like punking Scientology or flooding YouTube with porn pale in comparison to their recent attempts to disrupt the established entities who they deem to have aligned with the wrong side of justice over the WikiLeaks story. Now, in eerie and awesome fashion, a new video has been posted that describes Anon’s agenda in the most historic terms.

>>See the video at Mediaite.

Last night, Arianna Huffington appeared on The Daily Show and made a rather dramatic offer right off the bat, pledge to provide bus service to anyone interested in attending Jon Stewart’s Rally To Restore Sanity from the Soho offices of Huffington Post.

HuffPost:

Stewart has described the event as “Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement.” As of Tuesday, a Facebook page dedicated to the rally shows that over 170,000 people have committed to attend.

Details of the HuffPost Sanity Bus are still in the works, but you can sign up [at HuffPost] to participate. As soon as we know more, we’ll alert you via email.

>>>Check out the video of the announcement at Mediaite.

In case you missed it: Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert (host of The Colbert Report) testified this morning before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law.

The appearance almost didn’t happen—at least, it wouldn’t have if Colbert had followed the direction of Rep. John Conyers, (D-MI), chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Conyers asked that Colbert leave so that the Committe could “get to the bottom” of the issue.

Mediaite has videos of Colbert’s testimony, including the now-immortal “cornpacker” line, and further coverage.

(Mediaite)

All through last night, the media section of TeaParty.org, an official Tea Party website, was bombarded with new users who filled the photo section with shocking and offensive pictures. The pictures were so shocking that the site almost began to look like the outlaw imageboard 4chan. Who could have done it? Hmmm …

>>>Full story at Mediaite.

Early this summer, prolific writer and provocateur Christopher Hitchens revealed that he has terminal esophageal cancer. Since then, he’s been remarkably open about his condition — he even sat down with Anderson Cooper to discuss the disease in August. During that interview, the atheistic Hitchens also gave his opinion about the numerous people who have said that they would pray for him. As Frances Martel wrote at Mediaite:

On the topic of prayer, Hitchens noted that the prayers about his cancer—both the people praying for his health and those who have “lavish websites… praying for me to suffer and die”—are meaningless to him, even “Everyone Pray for Hitchens Day,” which he says has been designated to be the 20th of September. “I don’t think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation– or anything else, by the way.”

One month later, the God is Not Great author hasn’t changed his tune: ”I shall not be participating” in “Pray for Hitchens Day,” he told the Associated Press.

>>>More at Mediaite.

A Norwegian radio journalist quit her job on the air this past weekend because she said “nothing important [had] happened” that day, and refused to read the news.

While live on air, the journalist claimed that her demanding producers were disabling her from being able to “eat properly” and “breathe.” The allegedly breathless reporter then announced that she was “quitting and walking away” from her 18-month-old job, for which she covered Oslo and the Ahershus region.

This apparently surprised her boss.

(from Mediaite)

When a segment on the TV show features Fallon, as Neil Young, singing a song using the lyrics from the Double Rainbow Guy, the real success won’t come on TV, but online.

Fallon has played Neil Young a couple other times (more background from the Late Night blog) but this was the first song that was generated by a purely internet creation. Either way, Fallon is amassing quite a few musical hits through Late Night sketches.

It’s one thing to hear the Double Rainbow guy ask “what does it mean?” and say “It’s starting to look like a triple rainbow,” but it’s entirely different to hear Neil Young sing it.

>>>Check out the video at Mediaite.

USA Today is reportingthat Cold War era paranoia is alive and well in today’s society (albeit modified to accommodate the more ambiguous range of threats we face today) in the form of a booming underground bunker industry. But these aren’t your average hole-in-the-desert bunkers, mind you. These are bona fide luxury comfort subterranean shelters. No joke!

Meet the Vivos network, “a nationwide group of 20 fortified, underground shelters” that you can buy into for the small price of $50,000 per person ($25,000 for each of the kids). According to USA Today, the network offers “partial ownership similar to a timeshare” in luxury styled underground bunkers (artistic rendering above). Amenities include a hospital, dental clinic, move theater, and (judging from schematics available on their website) a bank of desktop computers. Great, I’m glad to know I can check Facebook while I’m waiting out the apocalypse.

>>>Check out the TV report on this thing that actually exists at Mediaite.

In what’s being called “one of the biggest leaks in US military history,” whistleblower site WikiLeaks today posted tens of thousands of classified “military field reports” about the Afghan war. According to the New York Times, the Times, the Guardian, and the German newspaper Der Spiegel were “given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday.”

Based on that access and reporting, which WikiLeaks was not involved in, the New York Times has published a series of articles today which are too lengthy to go through here in detail but, broadly speaking, conclude that the Afghan war is not going as well as official reports might lead the public to believe. And the White House isn’t happy:

>>>Get the full scoop at Mediaite.