~o ~o ~o SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG! o~ o~ o~ » Art

★✩★ Heroin Bag Stamp Art ★✩★ Junkie Branding

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:25:29 +0000

Video Burn by Ant Farm (1975) TV Cadillac Car Crash Destruction Performance Art

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 04:38:00 +0000

“Media Burn” by Ant Farm. Excerpt from Ant Farm’s classic video art piece examining and satirizing the media, particularly the impact of television. On July 4, 1975, what a TV newscaster described as a “media circus” assembles at San Francisco’s Cow Palace Stadium. A pyramid of television sets are stacked, dowsed with kerosene, and set ablaze. Then a modified 1959 Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz, piloted by two drivers who are guided only by a video monitor between their bucket seats, crashes through the pyramid destroying the TV sets

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieVwRqUxVI8

Excerpt from Ant Farm’s classic video art piece examining and satirizing the media, particularly the impact of television. On the Fourth of July, 1975, artist-president John F. Kennedy (Doug Hall) delivers a speech about the media: “Now I ask you, my fellow Americans: Haven’t you ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?” at San Francisco’s Cow Palace Stadium. You can watch the full video HERE.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U53-Sfnqwss

When I saw this I realized The Plasmatics borrowed heavily from the piece for their video for ‘The Damned’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuQLyDv7uO4

KOrNY 2012

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:59:00 +0000



✖ Amazing Chinese Thieves Using Chopsticks to pickpocket! (Videos): There are lots of thieves in China, and they are all very brave! In the following, we will have two videos to show you how those professional thieves using a pair of chopsticks to steal people’s mobile phone
✖ Note: Add “Judge’s Nameplate” to List of Things Not to Steal: For a reason or reasons unknown, but possibly explained by the lighter and what may or may not be a baggie of contraband on his lap, 21-year-old Steven Mulhall stole Judge Michael Orlando’s nameplate from the door of the judge’s courtroom in Broward County, Florida. At some point thereafter, Mulhall posed for this picture with his prize, and his girlfriend appears to have posted it on Facebook. (They are only the latest in a growing horde of people who don’t seem to understand that by posting things on the “Internet,” you make them “public,” thus creating potentially incriminating “evidence.”) A tipster told police about the photo and gave them Mulhall’s name and address.
✖ Local Dentist Allegedly Caught Doing Cocaine Before Treating Patients: Police arrested 52-year-old Dr. Anthony Monteleone on Wednesday in the back parking lot of his office. They say he was caught snorting lines of suspected cocaine and then going inside Katsur Dental and Orthodontics in Edgewood to treat his patients. Undercover agents grabbed Monteleone after they witnessed him using what appeared to be cocaine. “There was a police officer observing what appeared to be drug use,” Edgewood Police Chief Robert Payne said. “It was outside the car.” Chief Payne, who made the arrest, asked Dr. Monteleone if he had a problem. The doctor, according to the criminal complaint, admitted to using marijuana, Xanax and cocaine.
✖ A War In Outdoor Space: Banksy Versus Advertising: The art world’s most intriguingly anonymous character, Banksy, is known for appropriating all sorts of outdoor and arguably “public” spaces. Who else does that? The advertising industry of course. I think one has to agree with his sentiments, albeit with a wry smile given his own predilection for placing his art in places our eyeballs can’t avoid. Here’s his statement
✖ LSD Gets Another Look As Alcoholism Treatment: The Hopkins group that Johnson is part of has been investigating the use of psilocybin, the hallucinogen in “magic mushrooms,” for smoking cessation and to help terminal cancer patients cope with their illness. They’ve also taken a look at Salvinorin A, a hallucinogen in salvia, too. Why would hallucinogens be suited for these kinds of treatments? Johnson said people taking the drugs in the studies he’s helped with report that it is “one of the most meaningful experiences — or the most meaningful — in their life.” Some says the “trip” changes the direction of their lives and can trigger a redefinition of how they see themselves. That could be as profound as, “I’m now a nondrinker, or whatever the adciction may be,” he said.
✖ The Language of Persuasion – Government Or Regime?
✖ Bullshit – Police are warning that the smell of cannabis plants is carcinogenic: “Police are warning that when cannabis plants reach the final stages of maturity the odour they release has carcinogenic properties. “Officers who deal with the plants use ventilation masks and protective suits and people who have plants in their home, especially anyone with young children, may be exposing their family to a health risk.”
✖ From Road Salt to Pink Goo, What’s In the Food?: In the modern-day world in which we live you never really know to what extent the corrupt globalists will go to profiteer from adding deadly poisons, toxins, drugs, and chemicals to our food and water supply. Not only do we have to pay attention as consumers to fluoride levels in our drinking water, now we must watch for a whole slew of toxic and gruesome additives in the foods we eat.
✖ ‘Wheels’ Neil Hope Dies at 35 – ‘Degrassi’ Actor Whose Life Unraveled: Neil Hope grew up in the 1980s before an audience of millions as a star in a pair of gritty Canadian television dramas, “Degrassi Junior High” and its sequel, “Degrassi High.” The shows were cultural touchstones in Canada and cult favorites in the United States, where they anticipated teenage docudramas like MTV’s “Real World” and soaps like “Beverly Hills, 90210.”
✖ Honeybees May Have Personality: The researchers found that thrill-seeking is not limited to humans and other vertebrates. The brains of honeybees that were more likely than others to seek adventure exhibited distinct patterns of gene activity in molecular pathways known to be associated with thrill-seeking in humans. The findings present a new perspective on honeybee communities, which were thought to be highly regimented and comprised of a colony of interchangeable workers taking on a few specific roles to serve their queen. It now seems as though individual honeybees differ in their desire to perform particular tasks and these differences could be down to variability in bees’ personalities. This supports a 2011 study at Newcastle University that suggested that honeybees exhibit pessimism, suggesting that insects might have feelings.
✖ Josef Skvorecky on the Nazis’ Control-Freak Hatred of Jazz: Being a Nazi, this public servant obviously didn’t miss an opportunity to couch as many of these regulations as he could in racist or anti-Semitic terms. Such, after all, are the National Socialist equivalent of soothing conventional wisdom. But that’s just it: If you’re a Nazi, and you can pass something you don’t like off as a “Negroid excess,” or a manifestation of “Jewish Fremason-ry,” it helps you with the kind of Nazi cred you need insulate yourself from having to justify what’s wrong with the music as music. More than that, it helps you hide your fear of the deeper resonance the music has with people as people. In an interview given in Prague in 1968, relayed in Talkin’ Moscow Blues, Skvorecky noted that “jazz is, above all, a kind of fraternity.” That’s not an entirely obvious thought if you come from the same part of the world jazz itself does.
✖ Control AI before it controls us, expert says: Keeping the artificial intelligence genie trapped in the proverbial bottle could turn an apocalyptic threat into a powerful oracle that solves humanity’s problems, said Roman Yampolskiy, a computer scientist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. But successful containment requires careful planning so that a clever breed of artificial intelligence cannot simply threaten, bribe, seduce or hack its way to freedom. “It can discover new attack pathways, launch sophisticated social-engineering attacks and re-use existing hardware components in unforeseen ways,” Yampolskiy said. “Such software is not limited to infecting computers and networks — it can also attack human psyches, bribe, blackmail and brainwash those who come in contact with it.”
✖ TSA Threatens Mainstream Media Not To Cover Story: The TSA is clearly no fan of the 4th Amendment, nor of 5th Amendment due process rights, and now this blatant attempt to manipulate the free press with “strong caution” hits at Amendment the First. Why strong caution? Are there repercussions for journalists that fail to heed this “advice?” Because, you know, if I were a member of the free press and the federal government asked me to censor myself, I’d happily comply . . . . . . . . . riiight. I have news for the federal government: Americans will not take censorship in any form. We thought we made this clear when you tried to force SOPA on us.
✖ Making Facebook private won’t protect you: I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Setting your Facebook page to “friends only” and your Twitter feed to private is a good idea, especially if you’re hunting for a job or trying to get into the college of your choice. You want to be selective in the details you reveal about yourself and, quite frankly, what you post on a social network is none of their damned business. But it appears even that may not be enough to protect you any more. Bob Sullivan of MSNBC reports that some state agencies and colleges are forcing prospective employees and students to grant them full access to their social networks.
✖ Kony 2012 Hoax Exposed: Kony 2012 is but another piece of slick propaganda designed to tug on the heart strings – and the purse strings – of ignorant Americans who are clueless about the real reasons why the globalists are now moving into Africa in a big way. Invisible Children’s connections to USAID and thus the CIA should put the effort in context. Africa is one of several targets prized by the globalists as they move to grab vital natural resources, consolidate power and unleash their monetary enslavement and world totalitarian government end game around the globe.
✖ Legendary French artist Moebius, the man who made The Abyss, Alien, and Tron even weirder, is dead at 73: Today is an incredibly sad day for fans of comic books, concept art, and downright anything science fiction. Artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud, who provided some of the most stunning scifi and fantasy art ever to grace a page, has succumbed to illness at the age of 73. It’s pretty hard to overstate the hand Moebius had in some of science fiction’s most phantasmagoric cinema. You know his work even if you’ve never realized it. In addition to providing preliminary designs for such films as Alien, Tron, The Abyss, Masters of the Universe, The Fifth Element, and Willow (which were awesome albeit unused), the artist provided concept art for El Topo director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s never-realized Dune adaptation, which was to star Mick Jagger and boast a soundtrack by Pink Floyd.
✖ NSA whistle-blower: Obama “worse than Bush”: In the New Yorker article, Jane Mayer quotes you as saying, “I actually had hopes for Obama.” What’s your opinion on the Obama administration’s stated support for whistle-blowers and, more generally, his counterterrorism record? Worse than Bush. I have to say that. I actually voted for Obama. It’s all rhetoric for me now. As Americans we were hoodwinked. He’s expanding the secrecy regime far beyond what the Bush even intended, interestingly enough. I think Bush is probably like, “Whoa.”
✖ Bust Reveals Government Runs Hacking Groups: In October, Mother Jones revealed that the FBI is notorious for creating supposed terrorist groups from scratch and then framing patsies in order to claim the government is protecting the United States from terrorists and also breathe life into an otherwise moribund war on mostly nonexistent terrorism. Sabu’s role as an FBI provocateur working inside LulzSec reveals the government is attempting to do the same in order to push its so-called cybersecurity agenda. The establishment is eager to pass a raft of legislation to closely regulate the internet, strip the medium of its anonymity, and close it down as an activism and alternative media tool.
✖ 18.6 Million Empty Houses in America: That is what the census says. Andrew Leonard in Salon notes that it is a bit misleading, that “4.7 million are for “seasonal use” only, the Census tells us — unoccupied vacation homes, in other words. 4.1 million are for rent, 2.3 million are for sale, and the remaining 7.5 million “were vacant for a variety of other reasons.” The census also lists the total number of homeless in America as 759,101, so there are 24 empty houses for every homeless person in America. What a shocking misallocation of resources, materials and energy.
✖ 70 Percent of Ground Beef at Supermarkets Contains ‘Pink Slime’: Gerald Zirnstein grinds his own hamburger these days. Why? Because this former United States Department of Agriculture scientist and, now, whistleblower, knows that 70 percent of the ground beef we buy at the supermarket contains something he calls “pink slime.” “Pink slime” is beef trimmings. Once only used in dog food and cooking oil, the trimmings are now sprayed with ammonia so they are safe to eat and added to most ground beef as a cheaper filler. It was Zirnstein who, in an USDA memo, first coined the term “pink slime” and is now coming forward to say he won’t buy it. “It’s economic fraud,” he told ABC News. “It’s not fresh ground beef. … It’s a cheap substitute being added in.”
✖ $1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog — How Anyone Can Get Anything Past The Scanners: This video is here to demonstrate that the TSA’s insistence that the nude body scanner program is effective and necessary is nothing but a fraud, just like their claims that the program is safe (radiation what?) and non-invasive (nude pictures who?). The scanners are now effectively worthless, as anyone can beat them with virtually no effort. The TSA has been provided this video in advance of it being made public to give them an opportunity to turn off the scanners and revert to the metal detectors. I personally believe they now have no choice but to turn them off.
✖ Hooking Kids on Sex II [Video]: Planned Parenthood exposes children to sexual material in order to seed a generation of sex addicts, who will become future customers for the abortion giant. This report exposes Planned Parenthood’s sex-education programs, using images from Planned Parenthood’s own websites, social networks, and events.
✖ Not just for superheroes anymore! ‘Mantyhose,’ tights for men, grow in popularity: The secret’s out: Men are wearing tights. Pantyhose for men, or “mantyhose,” have been popular throughout Europe for years and now the trend – even outside the ballet barre – has crept stateside.
✖ Sodas Contain Animal Carcinogen, Study Finds: Today’s leading cola beverages contain high levels of a substance linked to cancer in animals, according to new research. An independent study commissioned by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) uncovered 4-methylimidazole, or 4-MI, in Coke, Diet Coke, Pepsi and Diet Pepsi at levels 4.8 times greater than those allowed in beverages in California. 4-MI is a byproduct of the reaction that produces the caramel coloring in brown sodas. The chemical has been found to be carcinogenic in animal studies. The state of California has banned 4-MI in any amount that could potentially lead to one cancer case in 100,000 people. However the levels found in these 4 leading Cola brands indicated a lifetime risk of 5 cancers out of 100,000, assuming that people drink one soft drink per day. That risk rises to 10 cancers out of 100,000 people who drink only soft drinks containing caramel coloring.
✖ CNN attempts to counter scandal over “Syria Danny” propaganda: Anderson Cooper attempted, and miserably failed, to mitigate the damage from the discovery that one of the poster boys for foreign intervention in Syria was manufacturing complete propaganda for Western consumption. The video below is the original video exposing “Danny” as a vicious propagandist actively working against the interests of the Syrian people. This is just more exploitation of the good intentions of people around the world for nefarious ends. These revelations further damage the credibility of the already highly untrustworthy Syrian rebels, much like the Libyan rebels delegitimized themselves. Stay weary of the effort to push us into military intervention in Syria and question all sources of information and the “statistics” we are fed by the Western establishment media. Keep in mind none of this is confirmed, the sources have a political interest in disseminating disinformation and so do those who report the claims made by so-called activists as gospel.
✖ Buy My Face – New advertising space: Two Cambridge graduates have thought of a clever way of making enough money to pay the debts they built up attending university. Facing a combined bill of £50,000 ($80,000), Ed Moyse and Ross Harper started a business called Buy My Face. The product: advertising space on their faces. The pair started by selling the space to family and friends for just £1-per-day, but the price is now up to £400-per-day.they even have a sponsor in Ernst & Young. They started the business last October and it appears to still be going strong.
✖ Ohio: Fracking waste tied to earthquakes: A dozen earthquakes in northeastern Ohio were almost certainly induced by injection of gas-drilling wastewater into the earth, Ohio oil and gas regulators said Friday as they announced a series of tough new regulations for drillers.
✖ HIV Rates in Black Urban Women 5 Times Higher Than Previously Thought: The HIV rate among black women living in some U.S. cities is the same rate as that of some African countries, according to a new multicenter study presented Thursday at the 19th Conference of Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. The jarring findings acknowledge that HIV is not an infection that has been eradicated, but one that has been somewhat forgotten, researchers said. The new data come from the ISIS study (The Women’s HIV Seroincidence Study), and reflect an analysis of at-risk women in six urban areas of the United States that have some of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS: Baltimore, Atlanta, Raleigh-Durham, N.C., Washington, D.C., Newark and New York City. “This disease is alive and well in this country,” said Dr. Carlos Del Rio, principal investigator for the Atlanta area of the study and professor of medicine and infectious disease at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. “But this epidemic is the face of the forgotten people.”
✖ Viagra in a Condom: A new condom that aims to enhance erections may also lift earnings and buyout prospects for unprofitable U.K. drugmaker Futura Medical Plc. Durex condoms made by partner Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc will contain a dose of Futura’s Zanifil gel inside the tip, boosting blood flow within the penis. The product results in firmer, larger and longer-lasting erections for men who may find wearing condoms challenging, according to Futura.
✖ Russian feminist punk group members facing seven years in jail: Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova are accused of hooliganism over the incident last month in which four members of the group cavorted and shouted a song protesting against the rule of Vladimir Putin in front of the iconostasis of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral. Mr Putin’s spokesman has described the performance as “disgusting” and said the prime minister and president-elect regarded it “negatively”. The two young women were arrested the night before Mr Putin won a third term in the Kremlin on Sunday, and have been remanded in custody until a trial next month. Pussy Riot formed in October last year and has focused on guerrilla activism against Putin, including an impromptu concert on Red Square. Its members use pseudonyms and wear brightly-coloured balaclavas and clothes for performances and interviews.
✖ Oxnard Middle School Teacher Pulled From Classroom Amid Rumors She’s Working As Hard Core Porn Actress: Rumors started among students, and then instructors, about the teacher’s alter persona before it came to the attention of Haydock Intermediate School officials. The district superintendent told KCAL9 that the videos do not involve any Oxnard school district students. According to a written notice sent to parents Tuesday, the school says the teacher does not face any criminal charges but has been placed on administrative leave: Oxnard Middle School Teacher Pulled From Classroom Amid Rumors Shes Working As Hard Core Porn Actress (credit: CBS) “It has been alleged that one of our teachers is depicted in at least one pornographic video and possibly others on the internet…These sites contain extremely graphic and inappropriate pornographic material.”The notice also warns parents to keep students away from social media sites, inappropriate outside networks and smartphones. The 30-year-old instructor’s identity has been withheld while the allegations are being investigated.
✖ Israel’s never-ending Holocaust: The issue that should have sparked panic in the survey is the total consensus among Israeli Jews – regardless of religious, ethnic or political differences – that the “guiding principle” for the country and for Judaism itself is “to remember the Holocaust.” Ninety-eight percent of the respondents consider it either fairly important or very important to remember the Holocaust, attributing to it even more weight than to living in Israel, the Sabbath, the Passover seder and the feeling of belonging to the Jewish people.
✖ Does listening to rock make you racist? Five minutes of Bruce Springsteen makes students favour white people over others: Students were told they were taking part in a study of how funds should be distributed in college – and offered a range of ethnic-based groups to share money between. After listening to Bruce Springsteen and the White Stripes, the students handed most of the money to white people. ‘Rock music is generally associated with white Americans, so we believe it cues white listeners to think about their positive association with their own in-group,’ said Heather LaMarre, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Minnesota. ‘That was enough for them to show more support for a student group representing mostly whites.’ After listening to Top 40 pop such as Gwen Stefani, Akon and Fergie, the students divided money more equally between white people, black people and latinos.
✖ Feeling racist? Blood pressure pill Propranolol may open hearts and minds: A commonly prescribed drug used to treat high blood pressure may have the unintended benefit of muting racist thoughts in those who take it. A new Oxford University research study found that Propranolol, which works to combat high blood pressure, anxiety, migraines, and a number of heart ailments, affects the same part of the central nervous system that regulates subconscious attitudes on race.
✖ Pat Robertson: Pot should be legal like alcohol: Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says marijuana should be legalized and treated like alcohol because the government’s war on drugs has failed. The outspoken evangelical Christian and host of “The 700 Club” on the Virginia Beach-based Christian Broadcasting Network he founded said the war on drugs is costing taxpayers billions of dollars. He said people should not be sent to prison for marijuana possession. The 81-year-old first became a self-proclaimed “hero of the hippie culture” in 2010 when he called for ending mandatory prison sentences for marijuana possession convictions.
✖ Cuban man ’24′ proud of his 4 extra fingers, toes: They call him “Twenty-Four.” Yoandri Hernandez Garrido’s nickname comes from the six perfectly formed fingers on each of his hands and the six impeccable toes on each foot. Hernandez is proud of his extra digits and calls them a blessing, saying they set him apart and enable him to make a living by scrambling up palm trees to cut coconuts and posing for photographs in this eastern Cuban city popular with tourists. One traveler paid $10 for a picture with him, Hernandez said, a bonanza in a country with an average salary of just $20 a month. “It’s thanks to my 24 digits that I’m able to make a living, because I have no fixed job,” Hernandez said.
✖ Celebrities with STDs – Famous People with STDs – STIs – VD: Famous Celebrities with Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) Welcome to the celebrities section of the STD Carrier Registry. Here you can browse our list of idolized (and not so idolized) people from Hollywood, professional sports, pornography, politics, literary writing, activism, and other notable segments of society. All celebs on the list correspond to detailed profiles containing pictures, some videos, and references to news reports.
✖ Uh-Oh: You Might Have an STD! The Whole World Might Know, Too: Love is supposed to be everlasting. Unfortunately for many, the only permanent thing to come out of a relationship is an incurable sexually transmitted disease. And that’s why Cyrus Sullivan, of Portland, Ore., claims that he runs STD Carriers Disease Control and Prevention Services, a website that lists claimed and confirmed carriers by their names, locations, descriptions, and sometimes their photos. The database is completely open to the public — you don’t have to login to browse the listings, and many of the recently added carriers’ pics are displayed prominently on the site’s front page. Users submit photos freely. There are about 1,500 listings.
✖ Condoms with QR code allow users to check-in on their smartphones when they ‘do it’: Watch out Facebook and Foursquare: there’s a new site that allows users to “check-in” when they are having, uh… protected sex! There’s a new batch of condoms with wrappers equipped with a QR code – a scannable barcode – giving users the ability to “check-in” when they use the contraceptive, according to Planned Parenthood. After scanning the QR code, users check in on wheredidyouwearit.com. The website displays an interactive map showing where users have checked in at. Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest (PPGNW) released 55,000 condoms to colleges and universities in Washington state in honor of National Condom Week, which was Feb. 14 to Feb. 21.
✖ Woodland Mall surveillance video shows December teen melee (video): It shows a couple of fights, one between two women just outside the mall that was broken up by a mall security guard and another inside the mall between what appears to be young males. In one scene, a man is knocked to the mall floor and appears unconscious. Other males can be seen running. After the incident, stores were briefly on lockdown and the video shows frightened shoppers trying to exit the mall. In December, police said they arrested three people in connection with the fights.
✖ Video: So Nasty: Police Arrest 19-Year-Old Caught On Camera Having Sex With His Neighbor / Boss’s Dogs!: Lafayette said she was inside her home taking a nap on Saturday when someone knocked on her door. When she stepped outside, several Newton County deputies were in her yard. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, don’t tell me that the dogs got out,’” she said. She was worried her dogs got out and attacked someone. “A deputy told me I didn’t do anything wrong, I was the victim. I said, ‘Victim!’ I’m thinking, ‘Wait a minute, did someone kill my dog?’ He said, ‘No the neighbor behind you, they saw the teenager having sex with your female dogs.’ I said, ‘Having sex with my female dogs?’ I think they must have got it wrong,” said Lafayette. Lafayette didn’t believe them until they showed her the video her neighbors recorded. “And it showed him on his knees inside the kennel with my dog. He was on his knees like he was a dog,” said Lafayette. Police arrested 19-year old Bernard Archer and charged him with two counts of bestiality
✖ US High School Teachers in Paedophile Ring Shared Student: Three male teachers at a US high school have been arrested and charged on suspicion of child seduction after admitted to passing around a 16-year-old student. Officials were called in after the male student revealed on 18 January the school band director, a swimming coach and a substitute Spanish teacher all engaged in physical relationships with him several times on school grounds. The boy, who cannot be name for legal reasons, claimed that many of the alleged acts, which range from touching and kissing to having sex in a car, took place on the grounds of North Putnam High School in Roachdale, central Indiana. According to Indiana state police, those arrested and charged were: substitute Spanish teacher Nicholas Vester, 24, who worked at the school for 12 weeks last autumn; band director Craig Rogers, 24, currently on paid leave; and volunteer swimming coach Brandon Largent, 20, a student at Ivy Tech community college.

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Phil Spector Biography

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 20:25:37 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6753E7D9328707AF

139 Gallons Of PCP

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:33:54 +0000



✸ Lab-grown meat is first step to artificial hamburger: Dutch scientists have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with the aim of producing the first lab-grown hamburger later this year. The aim of the research is to develop a more efficient way of producing meat than rearing animals. At a major science meeting in Canada, Prof Mark Post said synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60%. “We would gain a tremendous amount in terms of resources,” he said. Professor Post’s group at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has grown small pieces of muscle about 2cm long, 1cm wide and about a mm thick.
✸ Should police and coastguards use laser dazzlers?: Though they are purportedly less harmful than other non-lethal weapons, such as tasers and rubber bullets, the International Committee of the Red Cross is concerned that not enough has been done to lessen the risk of people suffering permanent blindness. Dazzlers are designed to warn people away by temporarily blinding them with pulses of green laser light. Unlike tasers or rubber bullets, there is no possibility that the lasers could kill a person, they just create a beam that is too intense to look at. Most models that have been built for military use are designed to work at distances of 300 to 500 metres during the day and a kilometre or so at night. This makes them attractive for long-range use at sea to stop vessels suspected of drug trafficking, for example. At 40 metres, however, the intense beam of a 200-milliwatt laser can permanently damage eyes. Despite this, they have seen regular use in Iraq since 2006.
✸ Cocaine fueled son —not his 75-year-old mom — racked up $120,000 in Port Authority unpaid tolls and fines: “I used to take her car to the city to buy drugs,” said a contrite Peter Davis, 52, who says he’s a recovering addict and lives with his mom in an Englewood, NJ, apartment. It’s actually Davis’ mother, Jean, 75, who is shamed on the Port Authority’s Web site as owing the most money of any scofflaw. But yesterday, Peter admitted to The Post that he’s the one who racked up the debt, by using her Ford Focus for years to blow through tolls on numerous trips to Manhattan to get high. “When you’re addicted like that you don’t think of he consequences. You have other things on your mind,” he said. Thanks to Peter’s many drug junkets, his mom is in the hole for $21,365 in unpaid tolls and has accrued $102,141 in fines — a sum that continues to grow.
✸ US military nurtures a new weapon – the Slimeball: The US Air Force has a history of imaginative weaponry proposals. Whitehurst says “many attempts have been made over the years to impede naval forces in a variety of manners, including floating smoke pots, entanglement devices, and even ‘floating purple mountains of shaving cream’ … but none ever made it into wide use.” More flashily, plans prepared long ago at the US Air Force’s Wright laboratory, in Dayton, Ohio, called for development of a potent chemical weapon. This is the so-called gay bomb that makes enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Wright laboratory was awarded the Ig Nobel peace prize, in 2007, for instigating that line of research.
✸ Scientists make DNA robot to kill cancer cells: Researchers at Harvard University said they have successfully made a DNA robot which acts almost as a postal worker and is capable of targeting particular cells such as cancerous cells and deliver them self-destruction order. The robots were designed in the shape of an open barrel made of two halves joined by a hinge. The two halves are held shut by special DNA latches that respond to particular targets by allowing the two halves to swing open and expose their payload. To produce the biologic robot, George M. Church, Shawn Douglas and their colleagues used a technique called ‘DNA origami’, in which long DNA chains are folded in a prescribed way. The programmable nanorobot also carries on its surface some peptide molecules called aptamers that can identify specific proteins on the outer layer of the targeted cells and bind to them, researchers wrote in the journal Science.
✸ Foreclosure abuse rampant across U.S., experts say: A report this week showing rampant foreclosure abuse in San Francisco reflects similar levels of lender fraud and faulty documentation across the United States, say experts and officials who have done studies in other parts of the country. The audit of almost 400 foreclosures in San Francisco found that 84 percent of them appeared to be illegal, according to the study released by the California city on Wednesday. “The audit in San Francisco is the most detailed and comprehensive that has been done – but it’s likely those numbers are comparable nationally,” Diane Thompson, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, told Reuters.
✸ Comedian David Cross claims he snorted cocaine near President Obama at White House event: ‘It was a tiny granule of coke that I put on my wrist and said, “Watch this. I need a witness.” And then I ducked under the table and did it,’ he said. Cook claimed he was about 65 feet from the president at the event when he snorted the drugs. ‘It wasn’t like I got high. The jolt was similar to licking an empty espresso cup. It wasn’t about that. It was just about being able to say that I did it, that I did cocaine in the same room as the president. I’m not proud of it, nor am I ashamed of it,’ he told Playboy.
✸ Production of Afghan heroin jumps by 61%: UN: The latest UN figures indicate that the output of heroin increased by 61 percent in Afghanistan last year despite the Western claims about their will to curb the production of drugs during the invasion of the war-battered country. Opium production by Afghan farmers rose between 2001 and 2011 from just 185 tons to a staggering 5,800 tons. Last year, levels increased by 61 percent, with more than 90 percent of heroin found on British streets being traced back to opiates cultivated in Afghanistan, according to UN figures. The UN figures make grim reading for those who backed the invasion of Afghanistan. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in 2001 that a significant reason for deployment of foreign forces to Afghanistan was to curtail a flourishing heroin trade.
✸ Radiation detected 400 miles off Japanese coast: Radioactive contamination from the Fukushima power plant disaster has been detected as far as almost 400 miles off Japan in the Pacific Ocean, with water showing readings of up to 1,000 times more than prior levels, scientists reported Tuesday.
✸ Three Frightening Teen Drug Trends: prescription drugs, teenagers, pharm parties, energy drinks, elementary schools, parents, huffing, Dust-Off
✸ A US government program secretly injected people with plutonium: In early 1945, Ebb Cade, a worker at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Facility, got into a car wreck. He survived, but was bed bound with a broken arm and a broken leg. When doctors interviewed him, they ascertained that the fifty-three-year-old African American man was otherwise perfectly healthy, eating well, drinking well, and had no history of serious illness. And so, having obtained a healthy subject, on April 10th his doctors secretly injected him with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium. Who exactly ordered the injection, and who exactly administered it, has never been determined, with the most likely candidates all contradicting each other.
✸ How credit ratings agencies rule the world: Britain’s credit rating took a knock this week, when Moody’s expressed a ‘negative outlook’ for the national economy. But who are the mysterious agencies who take it upon themselves to grade everything from countries to corporations – and how much power do they really wield?
✸ Drug Task Force Seizes $100M in PCP, Largest Ever: A man and woman were arrested in what authorities described as the biggest PCP bust in memory after 139 gallons of the drug – worth nearly $100 million on the street – was seized by an L.A. County narcotics task force. Long Beach Police Department is a part of L.A. IMPACT. Darryl Dwayne Burton, 55, and Lagina Bell Huckaby, 31, were arrested Wednesday at a UPS store in Culver City where they were allegedly trying to ship drugs, according to Lt. Scott Fairfield of the Los Angeles Intra-agency Metropolitan Police Apprehension Crime Task Force, or L.A. IMPACT. “It’s the largest PCP seizure I’ve ever heard of,” he said. Enough of the drug was seized to dose nearly 10 million people at cost of about $15 each, authorities said. About $389,000 in cash was seized as part of the investigation.
✸ Senators Ramp Up Fear Mongering To Try To Rush Through Cybersecurity Bill: “Think about how many people could die if a cyber terrorist attacked our air traffic control system and planes slammed into one another,” Rockefeller said. “Or if rail switching networks were hacked—causing trains carrying people—or hazardous materials—to derail and collide in the midst of some of our most populated urban areas, like Chicago, New York, San Francisco or Washington.” Yes, and think about how life would suck if someone hacked the road system in West Virginia and turned all roads into cabbage patches? I mean, if we’re talking about total hypotheticals with no actual likelihood of happening, that seems just as reasonable a scenario as Rockefeller’s. It’s pure, insane, unsupported hypothetical fear mongering.
✸ Millions of Pounds of Toxic Poison to Flood US Farmland: The EPA omitted critical information in its assessment, and current dioxin levels are a significant health risk. Dioxin levels will increase when Dow’s Agent Orange 2,4-D resistant crops are planted. The EPA’s lack of interest in dioxin DCDD is disgusting. Dioxin DCDD that contaminates 2,4-D herbicide is not tested, measured or monitored by the EPA, or even regulated. A Canadian research paper states that dioxin DCDD may have large public health implications due to its prevalence in our food and environment.
✸ SOPA replacement uses child porn as excuse to spy on 99.7 percent of Americans: The SOPA and PIPA bills that went down in flames earlier this year for their unbearable intrusiveness, used content piracy as an excuse to give the government powerful tools with which to censor Internet content. For 2012 the primary author of those bills has switched to a fallback tactic: using child porn as an excuse to create a vast surveillance network from which the government can demand data on every email sent, site visited or link clicked on by all but a fraction of one percent of the U.S. population. Internet anti-censorship advocates including Anonymous are calling for the ouster of Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, who is following his co-sponsorship of the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) with a bill critics call “Big Brother” disguised as an effort to curb child porn and sexual abuse.
✸ The Writing on the Wall [Video]: Al Jazeera interviews graffiti artists JR and RSH for this spot on graffiti as the world’s oldest form of social media.
✸ Talk about blue in the face! The extraordinary tale of the Blue Family in Appalacia: Isolated family in Kentucky started producing blue children in 1800s French orphan Martin Fugate married pale American Elizabeth Smith Had seven children, four were blue; they intermarried with local family Genetic mutation reduces individual’s ability to carry oxygen in blood Intermarriage led to ‘pure’ gene pool which often met ‘met-H’ gene
✸ Wednesday Weird Bible Verse – Judges 3:20-22 – blade, belly-fat and bowels: “Ehud then approached him…and said, “I have a message from God for you.” As the king rose from his seat, Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king’s belly. Even the handle sank in after the blade, and his bowels discharged. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it.” – Judges 3:20-22
✸ Whitney Houston and Alcohol’s Toll: Sawyer wanted to know what Houston was on. Everyone wanted to know what Houston was on, and news reports after her death took unconfirmed inventory of the pills in her hotel suite, wondering if they represented the extent of her indulgences. No. By many accounts, Houston also drank. More than a little. In fact one early, leading theory about the cause of her death, which won’t be known until toxicology tests are finished, was that a mix of prescription drugs and alcohol did her in. But while the drugs leapt immediately to the foreground, with questions raised about which doctors and pharmacies had provided them, the alcohol receded from focus, as it too often does. Wrongly, perilously, we tend not to attribute the same destructive powers to it that we do to powders, capsules and vials.
✸ The Inside Story on Climate Scientists Under Siege: It is almost possible to dismiss Michael Mann’s account of a vast conspiracy by the fossil fuel industry to harrass scientists and befuddle the public. His story of that campaign, and his own journey from naive computer geek to battle-hardened climate ninja, seems overwrought, maybe even paranoid. climate_desk_bugBut now comes the unauthorized release of documents showing how a libertarian thinktank, the Heartland Institute, which has in the past been supported by Exxon, spent millions on lavish conferences attacking scientists and concocting projects to counter science teaching for kindergarteners.
✸ AntiChrist -Obama head implant Just Like Old Egyptian Art Shows [Video]: Notice the Days of Egyptian Gods..The Alien in the back of the Head..Then look at the new scars of Obama and his alien in the back of his head..Hell is upon us..
✸ WTF, BROCCOLI?: LITTLE TERRIFYING ECSTATIC FACES, HIDING IN THE TEENY TINY BROCCOLI BITS.

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✰ Girl Removes Make-up after Two Years: For the last two years, the young girl never used make-up removers, so her mother, exasperated by Bae’s behaviour, contacted a TV station and told them Bae’s incredible story. During a variety show, dermatologists managed to convince Bae Dal-mi to finally remove the layers of make-up, and after a specialized check-up they found her skin was two times older than her actual age. All because of an obsession with beauty
✰ Electric Cigarette Explodes In US Man’s Mouth: A faulty battery caused an electronic cigarette to explode in a man’s mouth, taking out some of his front teeth, a chunk of his tongue and severely burning his face, fire officials said.
✰ Seattle woman sets underwear world record: The Guinness World record was 250. Janine Keblish topped that by two pairs of underwear. Why? Keblish wanted to bring attention to a cause she’s involved with, Days for Girls. A few years ago Keblish and Celeste Mergens discovered a shameful secret on a trip to an orphanage in Kenya – a total lack of feminine hygiene products for young women. “Millions of women all over the world go without, resulting in infection and exploitation and even girls being sold into slavery. They also miss three months of education each year, just for lack of hygiene,” says Mergens. “And you wonder, how could this be happening in this day and age? The truth is, it’s taboo to talk about.”
✰ India, Bihar: Poo Highway: The high incidence of open defecation in the Indian state of Bihar is not due to a lack awareness about toilets, according to this new Water for People video. In their view, it’s more of a supply chain, marketing problem. The toilets on offer are not particularly good.
✰ $23.60 – The Most Expensive Starbucks Drink Possible (in the World): It’s not every day that you receive a coupon for one of the priciest beverage chains in the world! Armed with my Starbucks Rewards card, I decided to take the opportunity to find out just how much money I could pour into a Trenta—Starbucks’ whopping 31 ounce cup! After about a half-hour with a laughing barista, we created the most expensive drink possible: one Java Chip Frappuccino in a Trenta cup, 16 shots of espresso, a shot of soy milk, caramel flavoring, banana puree, strawberry puree, vanilla beans, Matcha powder, protein powder, and a drizzle of caramel and mocha. Price: $23.60. The resulting beverage contains 1400mg of caffeine. According to Erowid, a widely respected drug catalog, a heavy caffeine dose is 400+mg. This drink has 3 times that. If I drank this all at once, it would put me in the hospital. Two of these would kill me.
✰ Top 10 Bizarre & Controversial Archeological Discoveries: Many strange archeological discoveries have been made in modern history. Hundreds of artifacts have been unearthed that have baffled scientists and challenged modern man’s view of history. Many of these objects have been labeled out of place artifacts or anachronisms. These archeological discoveries are always controversial and the scientific community is extremely selective in what they accept as fact. Every object on this list has been accused of being an elaborate hoax. In many cases, a conspiracy is the only explanation, without an extensive rewriting of the world’s history books. These artifacts tell a story of ancient civilizations, Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contracts, and mysterious technological advancements. Many of these archeological discoveries challenge the scientific theory of evolution, as well as many religious beliefs.
✰ Elderly junkies find ‘freedom’ at Dutch old-age home: In a tiny fourth-floor room overlooking The Hague’s city centre, a grey-haired man carefully plugged a small pipe with a ball of cocaine, lit up and drew a deep breath. “This is real freedom,” said 65-year-old William as a billow of white smoke poured from his nostrils and wafted through his apartment at Woodstock, the only Dutch home for elderly junkies and other addicts. The apartment block, flanked by a canal and a tram line, takes a unique approach to drug abuse by helping to keep ageing homeless people off the city’s streets and out of trouble with the law. “I like it here. Here there is no police watching you,” William told AFP as he rearranged the paraphernalia of his addiction on a small table: a pipe, a lighter, a mirror with traces of cocaine lines and an old credit card. “I can do what I want to do.”
✰ NH town to vote on whether to change name of pond at bishop’s urging: Voters in a small New Hampshire town will have the final say on whether to change the controversial name of a local pond. The small pond near the middle of Mont Vernon is known as Jew Pond. Town officials say it got its name back in the 1920s because the operators of a hotel that once stood next to it were Jewish. The name recently got the attention of New Hampshire Bishop Peter Libasci. He wrote a letter to the local newspaper saying the name conveyed contempt and urged townspeople to change it. Residents will decide in the March 13 election. Some residents told WMUR-TV that they don’t find the name offensive and that it’s part of the town’s history.
✰ Exposing the Severity of the Fukushima Disaster (Video): Fukushima has had 5 major meltdowns now, in a disaster that is making experts say that it is larger than Chernobyl. Aljazeera reported in September that the radiation emitted from Fukushima would rival or surpass Chernobyl in only the weeks following the disaster. According to Aljazeera: “Experts say that the total radiation leaked will eventually exceed the amounts released from the Chernobyl disaster that the Ukraine in April 1986. This amount would make Fukushima the worst nuclear disaster in history.” This news was from 2011, but the current news isn’t much better. After officials said they were going to perform a ‘cold shutdown’ to prevent any further issues, its now come out that the Fukushima reactor temperature now surpasses 752 degrees — whereas 100 degrees celsius was required for the cold shutdown. Tepco, the operators of the plant, say the thermometer is conveniently broken, but they have been known to conceal the truth from the public in the past.
✰ Indian Man Killed for Public Toilet Time: The fight occurred between residents of a tenement with shared facilities, a common situation in India’s densely populated financial matrix. The incident brings India’s sanitation problems and the lack of proper facilities sharply into focus. Simon Lingeree was killed last month when he got into a heated argument with Santosh Kargutkar while using a public toilet. The latter became highly impatient while waiting his turn. When Mr. Lingeree exited the toilet, he was physically assaulted. There were no weapons involved, just fists, but the young man was struck a fatal blow to the crotch. The killer quickly fled the scene and was later arrested.
✰ Marijuana Odor Overpowers Police Station: The strong odor of marijuana from the evidence room at a local police station in Florida seems to be a real problem for some whiny cops. “The biggest complaint is how strong the odor is,” said Atlantic Beach Police Commander Victor Gualillo, reports ActionNewsJax.com. All seized dope collected during busts is stored in a 200-square-foot evidence room at the station. “Anytime you store that much marijuana it’s rather pungent,” Commander Gualillo complained. But it seems you count on this bunch of overwrought weenies to dramatize the situation way beyond just the smell. They’re talking about “doing something” before “somebody gets hurt.” “I’m told there are serious health concerns,” claimed Atlantic Beach City Manager Jim Hanson about all the collected drugs in the evidence room. “There are other evidence technicians who have gotten sick,” Hanson claimed.
✰ Addict was smoking 15 joints a day: Adrian Watson, 41, was arrested by police after neighbours complained of a strong smell of gas coming from a house in Huddersfield Road, Elland. Bradford Crown Court heard how officers at first thought there may have been a leak, but after entering the property found 24 cannabis plants and growing equipment. They also found documents in the house with Watson’s name on and another address in Dewsbury Road, Elland, where they later found Watson as well as more cannabis. A total of 2.24kg of the drug was found, with a street value of around £19,000. Police experts believe there was enough cannabis to last up to 594 days, but Watson told police that his habit of 15 joints a day meant he would have got through the drug much quicker. He admitted producing cannabis for personal use.
✰ Dolphins Reported Talking Whale in Their Sleep: News has come from France that some captive-born dolphins there have been recorded “talking in their sleep” — and talking in Whale, no less, not Dolphinese. The scientists involved say this would be the first time that dolphins have been recorded mimicking sounds a significant period of time after hearing them. But there’s also the intriguing possibility that these sounds — virtually identical to sounds made by the humpback whale — may, if the dolphins are really asleep and not just resting, be direct expression of something the dolphins are dreaming.
✰ Youngsters get high on cobra venom: “The sale of drugs (like K-72 and K-76) which have cobra venom is increasing at rave parties and in discos. These drugs enhance sensation and boost energy so that revellers can dance for longer hours,” a senior officer of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) told IANS on condition of anonymity. “The sales increase a week before Valentine’s Day in Delhi and NCR (National Capital Region) and are consumed at hushed-up parties,” he added.
✰ Morgellons: Static Electricity or Moving Nano-Machines? You Decide: Contrary to what the CDC says, Morgellons is not a delusion. I have personally felt and seen my hair move by itself, I’ve had strange fibres come out of my skin, I constantly feel like there are bugs crawling over my body. I have witnessed many of my fresh organic vegetables, fruits and meat moving by itself, causing me to have to throw out the majority of the food I’ve bought. I have had to stop wearing a lot of my clothes because even those seem to be comprised of moving fibres. Some might say the fibres in the video below are moving because of static electricity, however I find that very hard to believe.
✰ Sick: Young, Undercover Cops Flirted With Students to Trick Them Into Selling Pot: Last year in three high schools in Florida, several undercover police officers posed as students. The undercover cops went to classes, became Facebook friends and flirted with the other students. One 18-year-old honor student named Justin fell in love with an attractive 25-year-old undercover cop after spending weeks sharing stories about their lives, texting and flirting with each other. One day she asked Justin if he smoked pot. Even though he didn’t smoke marijuana, the love-struck teen promised to help find some for her. Every couple of days she would text him asking if he had the marijuana. Finally, Justin was able to get it to her. She tried to give him $25 for the marijuana and he said he didn’t want the money — he got it for her as a present. A short while later, the police did a big sweep and arrest 31 students — including Justin. Almost all were charged with selling a small amount of marijuana to the undercover cops. Now Justin has a felony hanging over his head.
✰ The Disappearing Face of New York: ‘During the eight years it took James and Karla Murray to complete this project, one third of the stores they featured have closed’
✰ Congrats, US Government: You’re Scaring Web Businesses Into Moving Out Of The US: The federal government has been paying lip service to the idea that it wants to encourage new businesses and startups in the US. And this is truly important to the economy, as studies have shown that almost all of the net job growth in this country is coming from internet startups. Thankfully some politicians recognize this, but the federal government seems to be going in the other direction. With the JotForm situation unfolding, where the US government shut down an entire website with no notice or explanation, people are beginning to recognize that the US is not safe for internet startups.
✰ Facebook hacking student Glenn Mangham jailed: A software development student from York who hacked into Facebook has been jailed for eight months. Glenn Mangham, 26, had earlier admitted infiltrating the social networking website between April and May 2011. Mangham, of Cornlands Road, York, had shown search engine Yahoo how it could improve security and said he wanted to do the same for Facebook. Sentencing Mangham, Judge Alistair McCreath said his actions could have been “utterly disastrous” for Facebook. Alison Saunders, from the Crown Prosecution Service, described the case as “the most extensive and flagrant incidence of social media hacking to be brought before British courts”. Prosecutor Sandip Patel rejected Mangham’s claims, saying: “He acted with determination, undoubted ingenuity and it was sophisticated, it was calculating.” Facebook spent $200,000 (£126,400) dealing with Mangham’s crime, which triggered a “concerted, time-consuming and costly investigation” by the FBI and British law enforcement, Mr Patel said.
✰ A medical study of the Haitian zombie: We hear a lot about zombies these days – in films, in music and even in philosophy – but many are unaware that in 1997 The Lancet published a medical study of three genuine Haitian zombies. The cases studies were reported by British anthropologist Roland Littlewood and Haitian doctor Chavannes Douyon and concerned three individuals identified as zombies after they had apparently passed away. The Haitian explanation for how zombies are created involves the distinction between different elements of the human being – including the body, the gwobon anj (the animating principle) and the ti-bon anj, which represents something akin to agency, awareness, and memory.
✰ Musicians Wage War Against Robots: After the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, all bets were off for live musicians who played in movie theaters. Thanks to synchronized sound, the use of live musicians was unnecessary — and perhaps a larger sin, old-fashioned. In 1930 the American Federation of Musicians formed a new organization called the Music Defense League and launched a scathing ad campaign to fight the advance of this terrible menace known as recorded sound. The evil face of that campaign was the dastardly, maniacal robot. The Music Defense League spent over $500,000, running ads in newspapers throughout the United States and Canada. The ads pleaded with the public to demand humans play their music (be it in movie or stage theaters), rather than some cold, unseen machine.
✰ Italy confiscates $6 trillion in fake US bonds: Swiss authorities have confiscated $6 trillion in counterfeit U.S. bonds at the request of Italian prosecutors, authorities in Italy said Friday. Eight people were arrested in Italy and placed under investigation for fraud and other crimes. The bonds, carrying the false date of issue of 1934, had been transported in 2007 from Hong Kong to Zurich, where they were transferred to a Swiss trust, according to prosecutors in the southern Italian city of Potenza. Authorities said that U.S. officials had confirmed the bonds were counterfeit. Prosecutors said the fraud had not been completed, but it appeared that the suspects intended to try to sell the fake bonds to a developing nation, directly or through an intermediary bank.
✰ FBI Foils Own Terror Plot (Again): The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has once again proven that the only thing Americans need fear, is their own government, with the latest “terror attack” foiled being one entirely of their own design. USA Today reports that a suspect had been arrested by the FBI who was “en route to the U.S. Capitol allegedly to detonate a suicide bomb.” While initial reports portrayed the incident as a narrowly averted terrorist attack, CBS would report that a “high ranking source told CBS News the man was “never a real threat.”" The explosives the would-be bomber carried were provided to him by the FBI during what they described as a “lengthy and extensive operation.” The only contact the suspect had with “Al Qaeda” was with FBI officials posing as associates of the elusive, omnipresent, bearded terror conglomerate. The FBI, much like their MI5 counterparts in England, have a propensity for recruiting likely candidates from mosques they covertly run.
✰ Lawmakers riled by Google iPhone tracking: Three U.S. lawmakers urged the Federal Trade Commission to grill Google after it admitted secretly tracking millions of people’s iPhone and Mac Web browsing. Reps. Edward Markey, D-Mass., Joe Barton, R-Texas, and Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., said they want to know whether Google’s behavior “constitutes a violation” of a privacy settlement Google Inc. and the commission worked out last year. Google pledged at the time not to “misrepresent” its privacy practices to consumers. The fine for violating the agreement is $16,000 for every violation each day. Google and three other advertising companies used special computer code that tricks Apple Inc.’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor users’ Internet habits — even though Safari, the most-widely used smartphone Web browser, is designed to block such tracking by default.
✰ Virginia Poised To Enact ‘State-Sponsored Rape’ Law Forcing Women To Be Vaginally Probed Before Abortions: Simply put, it is difficult to distinguish a law requiring women to be vaginally penetrated by a long metal object from state-sponsored rape. Worse, discussions among lawmakers leave little doubt that its supporters understood just what they were trying to write into law — they just didn’t care. As an unnamed lawmaker told a fellow Virginia delegate, a woman already consented to being “vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant.”
✰ Big Greenwashing 101: John Muir must be rolling over in his grave. The organization he founded in 1892, the Sierra Club, America’s oldest and largest environmental group, have been in cahoots with the worst of the worst corporations in recent years. They’ve been paid tens of millions of dollars by the fossil fuel industry, tyrannical billionaire mayors and Wall Street in exchange for cleaning (and greening) up their public images. Not only have they acted as a green public relations firm for the bastions of wealth and power, but have also sold out frontline communities most impacted by extractive industry.
✰ Cellphone use linked to selfish behavior: Marketing professors Anastasiya Pocheptsova and Rosellina Ferraro, with graduate student, Ajay T. Abraham, conducted a series of experiments on test groups of cellphone users. The findings appear in their working paper, “The Effect of Mobile Phone Use on Prosocial Behavior.” Prosocial behavior, as defined in the study, is action intended to benefit another person or society as a whole. The researchers found that after a short period of cellphone use the subjects were less inclined to volunteer for a community service activity when asked, compared to the control-group counterparts. The cell phone users were also less persistent in solving word problems — even though they knew their answers would translate to a monetary donation to charity. The decreased focus on others held true even when participants were merely asked to draw a picture of their cellphones and think about how they used them.
✰ Poachers slaughter 200 elephants in Cameroon; ivory profits fueling regional conflicts: Poachers have slaughtered at least 200 elephants in the past five weeks in a patch of Africa where they are more dangerously endangered than anywhere else on Earth, wildlife activists said. The money made from selling elephant tusks is fueling misery throughout the continent, the International Fund for Animal Welfare warned. Many elephant calves orphaned by the recent killings have been spotted in Cameroon’s Bouba Ndjida National Park, and activists fear the animals may soon die of hunger and thirst. “Their deaths will only compound the impact of the poaching spree on the Cameroon’s threatened elephant populations,” the organization said Thursday in a statement. It is not known how many elephants remain in the West African nation. The latest figures from the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimated there were only 1,000 to 5,000 left in 2007.
✰ Let’s Kill the Internet and Start Over: The internet is broken – we need to start over … Last year, the level and ferocity of cyber-attacks on the internet reached such a horrendous level that some are now thinking the unthinkable: to let the internet wither on the vine and start up a new more robust one instead. On being asked if we should start again, many – maybe most – immediately argue that the internet is such an integral part of our social and economic fabric that even considering a change in its fundamental structure is inconceivable and rather frivolous. I was one of those. However, recently the evidence suggests that our efforts to secure the internet are becoming less and less effective, and so the idea of a radical alternative suddenly starts to look less laughable.
✰ Loop Geography as Defensive Tactic: The existence of these clusters is so little known that most people don’t realize when they’re nearing the epicenter of Fort Meade’s, even when the GPS on their car dashboard suddenly begins giving incorrect directions, trapping the driver in a series of U-turns, because the government is jamming all nearby signals. It’s an experiential trap street—an infinite loop—a deliberate cartographic error introduced into the mapping of the world so as to sow detour and digression. A kind of digital baffling, or recursive geography as state defensive tactic. I’m also curious when we might see this privatized and domesticated—gated communities, for instance, blocking the GPS navigation of their streets in the misguided belief that this will help protect them from future burglary, effectively delisting themselves from public cartographic records. Perhaps the future of neighborhood security lies in the privatized repurposing of advanced signal-jamming technology
✰ Pa. man’s Facebook ‘surfer’ page lured teens: A married father used phony Facebook profiles to pose as two different Florida surfers to solicit sexually graphic messages and photos from seven teenage girls in western Pennsylvania, and two of the girls eventually agreed to meet for sex with the surfers’ middle-aged “friend” — yet another fake persona he used, the state attorney general said Friday. William R. Ainsworth, 53, of Mars, was charged Thursday with 68 counts, including involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and multiple counts of charges that include attempted unlawful contact with a minor, possession of child pornography and criminal use of a computer.
✰ Mobile Apps Take Data Without Permission: The address book in smartphones — where some of the user’s most personal data is carried — is free for app developers to take at will, often without the phone owner’s knowledge. Companies that make many of the most popular smartphone apps for Apple and Android devices — Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram among them — routinely gather the information in personal address books on the phone and in some cases store it on their own computers. The practice came under scrutiny Wednesday by members of Congress who saw news reports that taking such data was an “industry best practice.” Apple, which approves all apps that appear in its iTunes store, addressed the controversy on Wednesday after lawmakers sent the company a letter asking how approved apps were allowed to take address book data without users’ permission. Apple’s published rules on apps expressly prohibit that practice.
✰ ‘Piggyback Bandit’ puzzles high school sports officials in Northwest: The stocky man showed up in a basketball uniform for a game at Century High School in North Dakota. Players and coaches assumed he was a fan who had come with another team, so nobody objected when he began to pitch in around the bench. “He helped lay out uniforms, got water. He even gave a couple of kids shoulder massages. Creepy stuff like that,” said Jim Haussler, activities director for the Bismarck Public School District. After the game was over, the man joined the winning team on the court and asked if he could get a piggyback ride. One bemused player gave it to him. “He makes himself appear as if he’s limited or handicapped. I think he plays an empathy card, so to speak,” Haussler said. “We didn’t realize what we were dealing with until several days later.”
✰ Paul McCartney says he’ll quit cannabis in Rolling Stone interview: Sir Paul has a self-confessed passion for marijuana. He has also been in trouble for drugs more times than bandmate John Lennon ever was, despite Lennon’s reputation as a heavy user. Sir Paul, 69, was introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan, who was stunned to learn he was a ‘pot virgin’ – in the mid-Sixties. After that came heroin, cocaine, LSD and a range of other psychedelics which inspired some of the Beatles’ best known songs. Sir Paul’s rap sheet for drugs is almost as long as his list of hits. He was arrested for cannabis possession in Sweden and at his Scottish farm in 1972.
✰ Calif. Woman Wins Suit Over Honda Hybrid’s Mileage Claim: It says that “a Los Angeles Superior Court commissioner has awarded Heather Peters $9,867.” As was discussed last month on All Things Considered, “Peters decided to opt out of a class-action settlement that would have given her as little as $100 and awarded the attorneys $8.5 million. The 46-year-old Los Angeles resident, who is also a lawyer, decided to even the playing field by filing her suit in a small claims court, which doesn’t allow the parties to retain lawyers.” Her case: Peters showed that ads had claimed her Honda Civic hybrid would get 50 miles per gallon. In court, as Eyder previously wrote, “she came armed with hundreds of pictures of her dashboard showing that she got at best 42 miles per gallon and after a software update that number dropped to fewer than 30 miles per gallon.”
✰ Man Killed in Dog Poop Dispute: A neighborly dispute over dog poop turned deadly in the Tacony section of Philadelphia. It happened just after 4 p.m. Tuesday on the 6500 block of Torresdale Avenue. Tyrirk Harris, 27, is accused of killing his 47-year-old neighbor Franklin Manuel Santana, according to Philadelphia Police. Cops say Santana walked a couple doors down Torresdale to confront Harris over his dogs. “A German Shepherd and a Chihuahua — these dogs were running free,” said Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small. “There were dog feces on several of the neighbor’s yards. That’s what led to this particular confrontation.” Police say Harris then pulled out a 9-mm handgun and shot his neighbor several times, striking Santana in his face and chest.
✰ Anonymous Hacked Documents Reveal Law Enforcement Spied on Occupy and Shared Information with Private Intelligence Company, STRATFOR: Computer hackers known as Anonymous leaked information obtained by hacking into private intelligence firm Stratfor’s computer network. The documents – what Anonymous is calling a teaser – suggest that from at least October to November 2011 Stratfor worked with Texas law enforcement to infiltrate the Occupy movement and spy on the Deep Green Resistance movement. The document contains emails in which Stratfor employees discuss Occupy Austin and Deep Green Resistance. Stratfor “Watch Officer” Marc Lanthemann writes about receiving information on Occupy Austin and DGR from a “Texas DPS agent.” The Texas Department of Public Safety is a statewide law enforcement agency that includes an Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division.
✰ Dawn of the Drones: The Realization of the Total Surveillance State: “To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is it’s justice; that is it’s morality.” – Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 19th century French philosopher
✰ David Choe Takes Barbara Walters To Paint Graffiti: David Choe has received a world wind of media attention after the story broke that he is holding $200 million worth of Facebook stock after painting their offices in 2005. Barbara Walters recently met up with Choe for an interview, and to hit the streets. Check out the hilarious video.
✰ 300k farmers hope for lawsuit against Monsanto: Not only were the smaller farms concerned over how the manufactured seeds had been carried by wind and creature alike onto their own plantations, but the biggest problem perhaps was that Monsanto was filing lawsuits themselves against farmers. Monsanto went after hundreds of farmers for infringing on their patented seed after audits revealed that their farms had contained their product — as a result of routine pollination by animals and acts of nature. Unable to afford a proper defense, competing small farms have been bought out by the company in droves. As a result, Monsanto saw their profits increase by the hundreds of millions over the last few years as a result. Between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto tackled 144 organic farms with lawsuits and investigated roughly 500 plantations annually during that span with a so-called “seed police.”
✰ Is Agriculture Sucking Fresh Water Dry?: The average American uses enough water each year to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and global agriculture consumes a whopping 92% of all fresh water used annually. Those are the conclusions of the most comprehensive analysis to date of global water use, which also finds that one-fifth of humankind’s water consumption flows across international borders as “virtual water”—the water needed to produce a commodity, such as meat or electronics, if the ultimate consumers were to make it themselves rather than outsource its growth or manufacture.
✰ Female Passengers Say They’re Targeted By TSA: When Ellen Terrell and her husband, Charlie, flew out of DFW Airport several months ago, Terrell says she was surprised by a question a female TSA agent asked her. “She says to me, ‘Do you play tennis?’ And I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘You just have such a cute figure.’” Terrell says she walked into the body scanner which creates an image that a TSA agent in another room reviews. Terrell says she tried to leave, but the female agent stopped her. “She says, ‘Wait, we didn’t get it,’” recalls Terrell, who claims the TSA agent sent her back a second time and even a third. But that wasn’t good enough. After the third time, Terrell says even the agent seemed frustrated with her co-workers in the other room. “She’s talking into her microphone and she says, ‘Guys, it is not blurry, I’m letting her go. Come on out.’” When TSA agents do a pat down on a traveler, only female agents are allowed to touch female passengers. But the TSA allows male agents to view the images of female passengers.
✰ CDC Warns Untreatable Gonorrhea is On the Way: Gonorrhea, one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the United States, is increasingly showing resistance to one of the last known effective antibiotic treatments, leading researchers from the Centers for Disease Control to “sound the alarm” about potentially untreatable forms of the disease. “During the past three years, the wily gonococcus has become less susceptible to our last line of antimicrobial defense, threatening our ability to cure gonorrhea,” Gail Bolan, director of the CDC’s sexually transmitted disease prevention program, wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine last week.
✰ Darpa’s Magic Plan: ‘Battlefield Illusions’ to Mess With Enemy Minds: Arthur C. Clarke once famously quipped that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So perhaps it was inevitable that the Pentagon’s extreme technology arm would eventually start acting like magicians — and try to create illusions on the front lines. In its new budget, unveiled on Monday, Darpa introduced a new $4 million investigation into technologies that will “manage the adversary’s sensory perception” in order to “confuse, delay, inhibit, or misdirect [his] actions.” Darpa calls the project “Battlefield Illusion.” Of course. “The current operational art of human-sensory battlefield deception is largely an ad-hoc practice,” the agency sighs as it lays out the project’s goals. But if researchers can better understand “how humans use their brains to process sensory inputs,” the military should be able to develop “auditory and visual” hallucinations that will “provide tactical advantage for our forces.”
✰ ‘Black’ hurricane names brewing swirl of dissent: Do devastating hurricanes need help from affirmative action? A member of Congress apparently thinks so, and is demanding the storms be given names that sound “black.” The congressional newspaper the Hill reported this week that Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, feels that the current names are too “lily white,” and is seeking to have better representation for names reflecting African-Americans and other ethnic groups. “All racial groups should be represented,” Lee said, according to the Hill. She hoped federal weather officials “would try to be inclusive of African-American names.” A sampling of popular names that could be used include Keisha, Jamal and Deshawn, according to the paper.

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Loveless

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 02:53:11 +0000



☛ Saudi Journalist, Hamza Kashgari Might Be First To Face Death Penalty For Controversial Tweet: A Saudi journalist, Hamza Kashgari might be the first person to face death penalty for remarks that he shared on Twitter which insulted The Holy Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him). It is believed that Kashgari tweeted his doubts about The Prophet (PBUH) on His birthday last week. Insulting the Prophet (PBUH) is considered blasphemy in Islam and is punishable by death under the strict laws of Saudi Arabia. Kashgari’s controversial tweet caused a huge uproar with more than 30,000 responses and a large number of death threats. More than 13,000 people joined a Facebook page called, ‘The Saudi People Demand The Execution of Hamza Kashgari.’
☛ In Washington, Fear the Silence, Not the Noise: Punish the Whistleblowers The Obama administration has already charged more people — six — under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information than all past presidencies combined. (Prior to Obama, there were only three such cases in American history.)
☛ Facebook “defriending” led to double murder: He said Billy Clay Payne, Jr. and Billie Jean Hayworth were killed last month after they deleted Jenelle Potter, the daughter of one of the suspects, from their “friends” list. Both were shot in the head and the man had his throat cut. The couple’s 8-month-old baby was in the mother’s arms, unharmed, when the bodies were found. Marvin Enoch “Buddy” Potter Jr., 60, and Jamie Lynn Curd, 38, were each charged on Wednesday in Mountain City in northeastern Tennessee with two counts of first-degree murder. The men were arrested on Tuesday. The case was not the first involving violence linked to Facebook. Last year in Iowa, a woman was arrested on accusations of setting fire to a friend’s garage after she was defriended on the social network site, local media reported.
☛ She Dialed 911. The Cop Who Came to Help Raped Her. – The Daily Beast: She now stood on a floor littered with broken glass and pointed to the brick. The cop she had summoned to protect her instead chose this moment to grab the back of her head by her hair and sodomize her. Then he raped her. Her revulsion in the aftermath was so visceral that she vomited as she ran outside. The cop’s partner had become concerned when he did not immediately see Cates and called for back-up. Other cops began arriving and saw a woman screaming incoherently about being raped. Cates appeared and grabbed her by the waist, spinning her around. Her swinging feet may or may not have struck the partner. She was handcuffed and taken in, told at the stationhouse that she was being charged with assaulting a police officer. She became more coherent but no less outraged and vocal as she continued cry out from a holding cell that she had been raped. She also continued to vomit. The other cops dismissed her as a liar.
☛ Why are so many Americans in prison?: The US has the highest prison population in the world – some of whom have been subjected to lengthy sentences for relatively minor crimes. And that population has surged over the past three decades. Although there has been a slight reduction in the past year, more than two million people are either incarcerated in prison or in jail awaiting trial. The US has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, with 743 people incarcerated for every 100,000 Americans. No other nation even comes close to these figures. One explanation for the boom in the prison population is the mandatory sentencing imposed for drug offences and the “tough on crime” attitude that has prevailed since the 1980s. But it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes US prison policy. Some prisoners are locked up for life – literally – and many receive harsh sentences for non-violent crime.
☛ What Happened to Whitney Houston?: Oprah: Did you think something was gonna happen in those drug-crazed, drug-filled days where you’re sitting for hours and days? Whitney: There were times when he (Bobby Brown) would smash things, break things in the home. Glass. We had a big, big giant portrait of me and him and my child. He cut my head off the picture. Stuff like that. And I thought, “This is really strange.” So I figured, cutting my head off a picture, that was a little much for me. That was one sign. And then there were other things like he started to paint in my bedroom eyes. Just eyes. Evil eyes that were looking at every point of the room. Oprah: He started to paint on the walls? Whitney: Yeah. The rugs. The walls. The closet doors. If I opened the door, there would be one picture. Then I’d close them and there would be another picture and eyes and faces. It was really strange. …
☛ Black Bloc: The Cancer in Occupy: The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. The Occupy encampments in various cities were shut down precisely because they were nonviolent. They were shut down because the state realized the potential of their broad appeal even to those within the systems of power. They were shut down because they articulated a truth about our economic and political system that cut across political and cultural lines. And they were shut down because they were places mothers and fathers with strollers felt safe.
☛ Sex Thief: Over 25 years and six dropped rape cases, Hy Doan has perfected the art of stealing sex.
☛ Secret documents lift lid on WWII mutiny by US troops in north Queensland: An Australian historian has uncovered hidden documents which reveal that African American troops used machine guns to attack their white officers in a siege on a US base in north Queensland in 1942. Information about the Townsville mutiny has never been released to the public. But the story began to come to light when James Cook University’s Ray Holyoak first began researching why US congressman Lyndon B Johnson visited Townsville for three days back in 1942. What he discovered was evidence detailing one of the biggest uprisings within the US military.
☛ World’s Pyramids Beaming Energy To Mysterious Space Cloud: Although NASA covered up the strange photon cloud that’s now enveloped the solar system, the word has leaked out from some scientists. And now, as the ominous cloud approaches it’s affecting the sun and planets in measurable ways. Amazingly, as the bizarre energy invades our space, some of the world’s most famous pyramids are generating intense energy. Several incredible incidents of visible power beams shooting skywards into space towards the region of the alien photonic cloud are well-documented. At the same time, people around the world began hearing and recording frightening sounds—noises that seem as if the Earth itself is moaning and wailing. All the phenomena—including measurements of the never-before-seen gigantic electrification of the turbulent sun—seem to be centered on the deadly photonic cloud that some have called a ‘potential Doomsday space event.’
☛ Secrets of NXIVM: In a Saratoga County townhouse complex, a man who wears a Jesus beard and seeks to patent his philosophies keeps a cluster of adoring women at his side. He has drawn more than 10,000 people to his mission of ethical living. But some disciples say he has delivered a much darker reality. Keith Raniere, a multilevel-marketing businessman turned self-improvement guru, has peddled himself as a spiritual being to followers, most of them women. A close-knit group of these women has tended to him, paid his bills and shuttled him around. Several have satisfied his sexual needs. And a few have left their families behind to wrap him in their affections. Claiming one of the world’s highest IQs and holding three degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Raniere has evolved over the past two decades
☛ El Diablo Restaurant – Volcano Grill on Lanzarote Island: What could be more natural than having a barbecue party on a volcano? Apart from the obvious health and safety hazards, that is. But such things are not a concern at the El Diablo restaurant, where chefs actually cook food over the heat produced by an active volcano. Located on a Spanish island called Lanzarote, northwest of Morocco, El Diablo is a unique restaurant where the chefs have access to a volcano of their own. Of course, it isn’t like a lava-spewing mountain, because if that were the case there would be no question of leisurely eating. No, this volcano is more like a hole in the ground, through which volcanic heat erupts from the deeps of the Earth.
☛ World’s Largest Breasts Save Drunk Driver’s Life: Sheyla Hershey, whose 38KKK breasts hold the Guinness world record for implants, crashed her Mustang while allegedly driving drunk to her Houston home on Super Bowl Sunday. She was not wearing a seatbelt, and claims those giant breasts saved her life.
☛ US marines pose with Nazi SS flag: THE US Marines are again in damage control over a photo of an Afghanistan sniper team posing with a Nazi SS flag. The unit is seen posing in front of a flag with a logo resembling that of the notorious Nazi SS – a special unit that murdered millions of Jews, gypsies and others. The Marine Corps said in a statement that using the symbol was not acceptable, but the marines in the photograph taken in September 2010 will not be disciplined because investigators determined it was a naive mistake.
☛ Who Is Paul McCartney?!: Damn, the youth are lost.
☛ Dad Shoots Daughter’s Laptop To Teach Her A Lesson: “A 15-year-old North Carolina girl posted a mouthful on her Facebook wall, not intending for her father to see it. Unfortunately for her, he did. His reaction? He’s created a YouTube video where he reads his daughter’s wall post and then, as a grand finale, puts a round of bullets through her laptop. According to the father, Tommy Jordan, he did not “hack” into his daughter’s computer. Although the daughter had used Facebook’s privacy settings to block family members from viewing her wall post, she failed to block the family pet from viewing it, who wasn’t tagged as a family member on her Facebook account. That’s right, the family dog has her own Facebook page and here’s how Tommy says it happened, “I logged in as the dog the next morning to comment on the photo. However, when I logged into the dog’s profile, my daughter had forgotten to add her to the “family” list…. so our family dog’s profile showed her post right there on the front page.”
☛ How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy: Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? A biologist’s science- fiction hunch is gaining credence and shaping the emerging science of mind- controlling parasites.
☛ Astronaut feels space’s toll on his body: NASA’s new priority is how to protect astronauts from going blind on the years-long trip to get wherever they are going. “I absolutely agree that this is our number one priority,” Barratt said. Why? Because when Barratt blasted off to the international space station, he needed eyeglasses for distance. When he returned to Earth, his distance vision was fine, but he needed reading glasses. That was more than two years ago. And he’s not getting better. “We really need to understand this. This is a critical point for understanding how humans adapt to spaceflight,” he said. In the past few years, about half of the astronauts aboard the international space station have developed an increasing pressure inside their heads, an intracranial pressure that reshapes their optic nerve, causing a significant shift in the eyesight of male astronauts. Doctors call it papilledema. Female space travelers have not been affected.
☛ Iran sent pink drone to Obama: After tough sanctions imposed by the United States and the West, Iran has given into the demands of President Obama, well some demands. Iran is returning the RQ-170 drone that was hacked back in December of last year. Their are some differences though: it’s pink, it’s about one eightieth the original size and being marketed as a toy in Iran.
☛ The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to Read: “Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan.” Davis goes on to explain that everything in the report is “open source” – i.e., unclassified – information. According to Davis, the classified report, which he legally submitted to Congress, is even more devastating. “If the public had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes,” Davis writes. “It would be illegal for me to discuss, use, or cite classified material in an open venue and thus I will not do so; I am no WikiLeaks guy Part II.”
☛ Rabbi Menachem Youlus Says He Lied About Saving Torahs: For years Rabbi Menachem Youlus, a self-described “Jewish Indiana Jones,” received plaudits from those captivated by his stories of traveling to Eastern Europe and beyond to search for historic Torahs that were lost or hidden during the Holocaust. But on Thursday, Rabbi Youlus stood inside the federal courthouse in Manhattan and confessed that he had made up those tales of daring. “Between 2004 and 2010, I falsely represented that I had personally obtained vintage Torah scrolls — in particular ways, in particular locations — in Europe and Israel,” he told Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court. “I know what I did was wrong, and I deeply regret my conduct.”
☛ Le Roy High School: Could chemical spill from 1970 train crash be cause of Tourette’s like outbreak?: As the Tourette’s-like illness continues to plague Le Roy school and baffle health experts, questions are now arising around the cleanup of a 40-year-old chemical spill that contaminated some of the local water supply. Around 30,000 gallons of trichloroethylene (TCE), an industrial solvent that’s hazardous in high doses and can affect the nervous system, were dumped into the ground during a train crash in 1970 on the outskirts of Le Roy. The EPA declared the area a Superfund site in 1999 after the TCE soaked into the ground and spread into a plume under part of Le Roy.
☛ Fukushima reactor may be overheating again: Temperature readings at one of the crippled Fukushima nuclear reactors have risen above Japan’s stringent new safety standard but there was no immediate danger, its operator said Sunday. Tokyo Electric Power said one of three thermometers on the number-two reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant indicated gradual heating this month and reached 82 degrees Celsius (179.6 degrees Fahrenheit) Sunday. The temperature was above the 80-degree safety standard newly employed by Japan’s nuclear safety authority, prompting the utility to publicise the reading and notify public agencies. But it remains below the 100 degree level that the government says is needed to maintain the safe state of “cold shutdown”.
☛ Drones over U.S. get OK by Congress: Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s … a drone, and it’s watching you. That’s what privacy advocates fear from a bill Congress passed this week to make it easier for the government to fly unmanned spy planes in U.S. airspace. The FAA Reauthorization Act, which President Obama is expected to sign, also orders the Federal Aviation Administration to develop regulations for the testing and licensing of commercial drones by 2015.
☛ Google will swap you a box of crisps for your web privacy: Google has revealed exactly how little cash it thinks a user who is willing to “sell” their data to the search giant is actually worth. The answer? $25 for one year of letting the Chocolate Factory happily slurp your data. And that figure isn’t even in the form of cold, hard cash. Nope. Amazon gift vouchers are on offer to those exposing their online selves to Google (2011 revenue: $38 billion).
☛ I’m addicted to eating plastic: Meet the teenage girl who snacks on water bottles, coat hangers and even TV remotes: She is seen crunching on a variety of items in a trailer for the show, from water bottles to CD cases. Listing some of the things she has eaten, Kailyn tells the camera: ‘I have eaten 12 remotes, over 5,000 beads, over 1,000 cocktail swords, 100 forks, about ten water bottles, two pacifiers, three CD cases, about 50 hangers, about 25 plastic lids on to-go cups…’
☛ Pa. Vending Machine Dispenses ‘Morning-After’ Pill: The machine has been in place for about two years, and its existence wasn’t widely known until recently. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is contacting state officials and the university to gather facts, agency spokeswoman Stephanie Yao said Tuesday. null AP This undated photo provided by Shippensburg… View Full Caption The FDA’s sudden interest took place amid a furor over religious rights and access to birth control. An official resigned from the nation’s largest breast cancer charity Tuesday over Planned Parenthood funding, and Republican presidential candidates attacked the Obama administration for a recent ruling requiring church-affiliated employers to provide birth control. Consumers have long been able to insert a few coins for the likes of aspirin, ibuprofen, antacids and other common over-the-counter remedies. But some experts see a worrisome trend in making drugs like Plan B, which is kept behind the pharmacy counter, available in a vending machine.
☛ Nicolas Cage: I’m Not a Vampire: Personally, I believe it’s him and that he is some sort of walking undead / vampire, et cetera, who quickens / reinvents himself once every 75 years or so. 150 years from now, he might be a politician, the leader of a cult, or a talk show host. My theory is that he allows himself to age to a certain point … then the actor “Nicolas Cage” will “die”… but in reality, the undead vampire “Nicolas Cage” will have rejuvenated himself and appeared in some other part of the world, young again, and ready to start all over. From time to time somebody might mention to him that he bears a slight resemblance to the young version [of] that dead American actor, whose name they can’t recall, but eventually, those occurrences will stop altogether.
☛ Chinese Father Forces 10-Year-Old Daughter to Eat Feces As Punishment: Several witnesses are interviewed. The woman in the red jacket says the father used a folded advertisement leaflet to pick up the excrement and that the father looked sophisticated and around 30 years old. The next woman wearing purple says the father first smeared the excrement on the daughter’s face and mouth. She walked over and tried to stop him but he wouldn’t listen. She saw the father try to stuff the feces into her firmly shut mouth. Another woman wearing dark gray says she asked him why he doesn’t eat the feces himself first. A young woman wearing black says the father repeatedly fished out excrement and tried to stuff them into the little girl’s mouth. Thanks Jasmine
☛ Terry Southern reports from the 1968 Democratic Convention — November 1968: Six p.m. Rendezvous of our hard-hitting little press team-Jean Jack Genet, Willy Bill Burroughs, and yours truly as anchor man, trying to lend a modicum of stability to the group. Also on hand, Esky editor young John Berendt-his job: straighten these weirdos, and K.F.S. (“Keep Flying Speed!”). We met in the queer little Downstairs Lounge, one of several bars in our hotel, the Chicago-Sheraton, and John Berendt was quick to charge us with our respective assignments: “You Jean Jack Genet, on the alert for all manner of criminality and perversion in high places! You, Big Bill Burroughs, let your keen and experienced eye discern any sign of sense derangement through the use of drugs by these delegates, the nominees, and officials of every station! Now then, you, T. Southern, on double alert for all manner of absurdity at this convention!”

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Fuck Yeah, Tony Alva!

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:10:06 +0000

Fuck Yeah, Tony Alva!

FBI vs ODB

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:58:40 +0000



✰ I Got Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s FBI File: Some gems include: “The WTC is heavily involved in the sale of drugs, illegal guns, weapons possession, murder, carjacking and other types of violent crime.” [p5] Connections to the murder of Robert “Pooh” Johnson and Jerome “Boo Boo” Estrella. [p6] Connection to murder of Ishamael “Hoody” Kourma. [p13] A shoot-out with the NYPD. [p15] Arrest for felony possession of body armour. [p16] Connections to the Bloods Gang. [p17] Found in possession of large bags full of paper currency. [p40] Details of his being robbed and shot while staying in the Kingston projects. [p45]
✰ Heroin in a burrito allegedly smuggled by L.A. County deputy into courthouse jail: In a sign of how serious officials consider the smuggling problem to be, the Sheriff’s Department recently recorded a former deputy, now in state prison, as he explained what led him to help inmates sneak in heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine. In the video, Peter Felix tearfully recounts from behind bars how his fall from grace started with taking a burrito to an inmate. The video is meant to serve as a cautionary tale for other deputies. In Marin’s case, prosecutors allege that at least two other unnamed individuals conspired with him. According to the indictment, one of those individuals contacted the other to discuss using a deputy to get narcotics into the Airport Courthouse jail. Several days later, the two met at a sheriff’s jailhouse. One instructed the other to get the drugs and stuff them into a “food item,” the indictment states.
✰ Man surrenders 94 hamsters to MSPCA: More than 90 hamsters were found in one man’s apartment, well-cared for and kept in aquariums, buckets and Tupperware containers. The Boehm Street man had 94 hamsters in total and decided on his own it was just too many. He went to the MSPCA’s Small Animal Shelter at Nevins Farm in Methuen last week to let officials there know he had a large number of hamsters he wanted to surrender. “The situation was not dire, so we asked him to wait a week so we could prepare for them,” said Mike Keiley, director at the Methuen shelter.
✰ Cocaine: The New Front Lines: Since 2000, cultivation of coca leaves—cocaine’s raw material—plunged 65% in Colombia, to 141,000 acres in 2010, according to United Nations figures. In the same period, cultivation surged more than 40% in Peru, to 151,000 acres, and more than doubled in Bolivia, to 77,000 acres. More important, Bolivia and Peru are now making street-ready cocaine, whereas they once mostly supplied raw ingredients for processing in Colombia. In 2010, Peru may have passed Colombia as the world’s biggest producer, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Between 2009 and 2010, Peru’s potential to produce cocaine grew 44%, to 325 metric tons. In 2010, Colombia’s potential production was 270 metric tons.
✰ Mother jailed for raping daughter in bizarre sex education lessons: A MOTHER of four who subjected her 11-year-old daughter to a “bizarre sex education” was jailed for four years yesterday. The 37-year-old Sunshine Coast mother used her mobile phone to create three films showing her raping her youngest child and exposed her to other sexual activity “in response to repeated questions”. Judge John Robertson said the mother, through her “selfish criminal conduct”, had deprived her daughter of the right to “a wholesome and loving relationship with her mother”. He said while sexual offences against children by their own mothers were “rare”, the community acting through the courts should denounce “this shocking conduct” with a significant punishment.
✰ Breast Augmentation with Saline breast implants: This 23 year old patient from Menifee, California (Riverside County) had always been self conscience about her left breast. It seemed as if she had an additional breast and nipple on that left side. She had been thinking about breast augmentation surgery for quite a while but wanted to find a board certified plastic surgeon who would also address her 3rd breast on the left side. This condition is known as a supernumerary breast tissue which are a common minor congenital malformation that consists of nipples and/or related tissue in addition to the 2 nipples normally appearing on the chest.
✰ Accessory breast tissue: A 27-year-old woman presented with a soft, non-tender lump in the right groin, with cyclical pain during menstruation. After surgical excision, histopathology revealed normal breast tissue. Accessory breasts occur in 0·4-6% of women along the milk line which runs from axilla to groin.
✰ 5 more dirty tricks: Social engineers’ latest pick-up lines: You may now be savvy enough to know that when a friend reaches out on Facebook and says they’ve been mugged in London and are in desperate need of cash, that it’s a scam. But social engineers, the criminals that pull off these kinds of ploys by trying to trick you, are one step ahead. Social engineering attacks are getting more specific, according to Chris Hadnagy author of Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking. “Targeted attacks are earning social engineers better results,” he said. What that means is they may need to do more work to find out personal information, and it may take longer, but the payoff is often larger. “Attacks now are not just a broad spam effort, sending out a million emails with an offer for Viagra,” said Hadnagy. “These are now individual attacks where they are going after people one by one.”
✰ Top 20 arguments having a dog causes families: A new study shows ‘man’s best friend’ can also be his worst enemy as it triggers up to three rows every single day. That’s the equivalent of 156 quarrels every year – or 1,997 over the average pooch’s life expectancy of 12.8 years. And the spats range from disagreeing about who should take the dog for a walk, feeding them too many treats and what to do with them when going away.
✰ Grisly find reveals Indonesia’s fixation with black magic: In all, the graves of 24 children had been exhumed on the same night in a co-ordinated action. Police have yet to make an arrest and the investigation continues, but few are in doubt about the motivation of the grave robbers. ”It was for black magic,” Sapari says. ”Maybe for immunity, or strength … or maybe to make yourself disappear.” Ki Kusumo, anointed by several magazines as Indonesia’s most popular paranormal, says: ”There are plenty of cases like this. It’s just that they don’t always make the media.” He says deceased virgin teenage girls are particularly sought after and ”families have to guard the tomb for 40 days” after burial. In Indramayu in West Java, he says he knows of babies born on an auspicious day in the Javanese calendar being kidnapped and beheaded. ”The heads are buried in the front of the person’s house. They believe, this way, they will become wealthy.”
✰ Not Just the Wendrows: Sex Abuse Cases Dismissed After Facilitated Communication: In the early 1990s, the Wheatons were part of a disturbing trend: families whose autistic children accused them of sexual abuse — allegations leveled through a technique called facilitated communication. The technique involves a trained person called a facilitator, who holds a disabled person’s arm while they type on a keyboard. But in case after case, charges against accused parents were dropped or dismissed and questions were raised about whether facilitators were, in fact, guiding their young clients to type the unthinkable accusations. The cases caught the attention of the American Psychological Association. In 1994, the association deemed the technique an “unproved communicative procedure with no scientifically demonstrated support for its efficacy,” a position it continues to stand behind today.
✰ Woman says her fake penis got her fired: IS THAT a Fruit-A-Freeze in your pocket – or are you just happy to see me? A northeastern Pennsylvania woman is suing a South Jersey-based maker of frozen treats and other snack foods, claiming that she was wrongfully fired because she wore a prosthetic penis to work. Pauline Davis, 45, wore the device to the J&J; Snack Foods plant in Moosic, Lackawanna County, while she contemplated a gender change, according to a federal civil-rights complaint filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Scranton. She confided in several co-workers about the device, and someone told management, according to the complaint. She subsequently was fired from her job as a packer/line inspector. Her termination, she claims, was discriminatory because a male co-worker who wore female clothing and prostheses and took hormone treatments was not fired nor disciplined.
✰ Girls Licking Doorknobs: It seems like Japan is in the news, more often than not, for bizarre activities. The latest that’s making waves on the internet is a Tumblr blog with pictures of girls licking doorknobs. The work belongs to illustrator Ryuko Azuma, who says the idea started as many good ones do – with a drunken tweet. Famous for his sexy, edgy drawings, one night he tweeted that a collection of photos of a girl licking a doorknob would be a big hit. Azuma says he wouldn’t have done anything about it if the tweet had gone unnoticed. But as luck would have it, it didn’t. A 21-year-old photographer, Ai Ehara, replied to the tweet and that was how the ‘Doorknob Girl’ was launched. Ehara herself posed as the first Doorknob Girl, but when the site went viral, they began to hire several other models for the job. According to Ehara the idea was ‘extraordinarily unusual’.
✰ Man’s marimba iPhone ring stops Mahler symphony dead: “The symphony ends incredibly quietly so there was literally no way that we could go on, Gilbert told NBC News. “So I stopped the music and I asked the general vicinity where the sound was coming from ‘please turn off your cellphone.’ And I had to ask several times…” In the ensuing pause, some in the audience reportedly called for blood, shouting: ”Kick him out!” and “$1,000 fine!” the witness recounted. Gilbert quietly employed shame until the offender — described as an elderly man by another blogger — confirmed that the phone was off. Before continuing with the concert, Gilbert apologized and explained that normally it’s best to ignore such disturbances, but he said this was “so egregious that I could not allow it.” This was the first time Gilbert has stopped the orchestra for a violation of the “cell-phones off” rule, a media contact at the symphony said, but at least the second time that it has happened in the symphony’s history.
✰ Shithouse Restaurant serves dinners in mini-toilets: Co-owner Feng Lu said: ‘We had the idea when we were discussing one of the worst restaurants we’d ever eaten in and one of us said it had been a real toilet. So we decided to see if we could make a restaurant that was just one big toilet.
✰ Deal reached in case of accused phony doctor offering breast exams: At the time of Winikoff’s arrest, the Broward Sheriff’s Office said he carried a little black bag to lend credibility to his claim of being a doctor. The first victim, 36 at the time, told detectives he started the exam by fondling her breasts, and she knew something was wrong when his hands wandered elsewhere.
✰ Swastika Earrings Reportedly No Longer For Sale At Brooklyn Jewelry Store: New York City Councilman Steve Levin, D-Brooklyn, visited Bejeweled in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on Wednesday and met with owner Young Sook Kim, who agreed to remove them from the shelves, the Daily News reports. A day earlier, politicians and advocates told FoxNews.com that the earrings were the latest example of anti-Semitism in New York and New Jersey. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer demanded that the store immediately stop selling them. “Let me be clear — a swastika is not a fashion statement,” Stringer said in a statement to FoxNews.com. “It is the most hateful symbol in our culture, and an insult to any civilized person.” But the store’s manager defended the $5.99 earrings, saying the swastika is a symbol of eternity in Tibetan Buddhism, not just a symbol popularized by Nazi Germany. “It’s not a Nazi symbol,” Kim told FoxNews.com on Wednesday. “I don’t know what’s the problem. My earrings are coming from India as a Buddhist symbol.”
✰ ‘Anti-semitic’ car bombs were motivated by insurance fraud NOT racial hatred, say police: When a number of cars were firebombed in a Jewish neighbourhood, with racist graffiti nearby, police assumed that they were dealing with a hate crime. Community leaders were so outraged by the apparent anti-semitism in Midwood, an area of Brooklyn, that they organised a march against hate attended by more than 100 residents. But now police say that the cars were in fact torched as part of an insurance scam, and the abhorrent graffiti – including swastikas scrawled in the street – was an attempt by the fraudsters to cover their tracks.
✰ In Which Eben Moglen Like, Legit Yells at Me for Having Facebook: That’s the consequence of social media structures which encourage people to share using centralized databases, and everything they share is held by someone who is no friend of theirs who also runs the servers and collects the logs which contain all the information about who accesses what, the consequences of which is that we are creating systems of comprehensive surveillance in which a billion people are involved and those people’s lives are being lived under a kind of scrutiny which no secret police service is the 20th century could ever have aspired to achieve. And all of that data is being collected and sold by people whose goal it is to make a profit selling the ability to control human beings by knowing more about themselves than they know. Okay? That’s true of all this information all the time everywhere. The thing you’re working on is simply one of 100,000 implications of that disaster.
✰ Salmon DNA used in data storage device: Salmon … they’re good to eat, provide a livelihood for fishermen, are an important part of their ecosystem, and now it seems that they can store data. More specifically, their DNA can. Scientists from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have created a “write-once-read-many-times” (WORM) memory device, that combines electrodes, silver nanoparticles, and salmon DNA. While the current device is simply a proof-of-concept model, the researchers have stated that DNA could turn out to be a less expensive alternative to traditional inorganic materials such as silicon. The device is made up of a thin film of salmon DNA that has been impregnated with silver atoms, then sandwiched between two electrodes. When UV light is shone onto the system, the atoms cluster together into nanoparticles.
✰ Questions, perception prompt burger chains to ditch product ‘Pink Slime’: McDonald’s and two other fast-food chains have stopped using an ammonia-treated burger ingredient that meat industry critics deride as “pink slime.” The product remains widely used as low-fat beef filling in burger meat, including in school meals. But some consumer advocates worry that attacks on the product by food activist Jamie Oliver and others will discourage food manufacturers from developing new methods of keeping deadly pathogens out of their products.
✰ Bacon linked to higher risk of pancreatic cancer, says report: Eating 50g of processed meat every day – the equivalent to one sausage or two rashers of bacon – increases the risk by 19%, compared to people who do not eat processed meat at all. For people consuming double this amount of processed meat (100g), the increased risk jumps to 38%, and is 57% for those eating 150g a day. But experts cautioned that the overall risk of pancreatic cancer was relatively low – in the UK, the lifetime risk of developing the disease is one in 77 for men and one in 79 for women.
✰ Iran Sentences Alleged Video Game Developer ‘Spy’ to Death [UPDATE]: “After (working for DARPA), I went to Kuma (Games Company),” Hekmati was quoted as saying as part of his December “confession” according to Iran’s Tehran Times. “This computer company was receiving money from the CIA to (produce) and design and distribute for free special movies and games with the aim of manipulating public opinion in the Middle East. The goal of the company in question was to convince the people of Iran and the people of the entire world that whatever the U.S. does in other countries is a good measure.”
✰ Who Is Flying Unmanned Aircraft in the U.S.?: “Drones give the government and other unmanned aircraft operators a powerful new surveillance tool to gather extensive and intrusive data on Americans’ movements and activities,” said EFF Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch. “As the government begins to make policy decisions about the use of these aircraft, the public needs to know more about how and why these drones are being used to surveil United States citizens.”
✰ IBM smashes Moore’s Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms: IBM announced Thursday that after five years of work, its researchers have been able to reduce from about one million to 12 the number of atoms required to create a bit of data. The breakthrough may someday allow data storage hardware manufacturers to produce products with capacities that are orders of magnitude greater than today’s hard disk and flash drives. “Looking at this conservatively … instead of 1TB on a device you’d have 100TB to 150TB. Instead of being able to store all your songs on a drive, you’d be able to have all your videos on the device,” said Andreas Heinrich, IBM Research Staff Member and lead investigator on this project.
✰ Man hides 38 caliber pistol up him Rectum in jail [Video]: A man wanted for murder in the Atlanta area was found with a gun in his jail cell, and lawmen believe he had that weapon hidden in his rectum when he was booked into jail. Michael Ward remains in the Onslow County jail after his arrest Monday morning. Deputies say the gun measures 10 inches, including a 4-1/2 inch barrel. Deputies say that Ward was searched and strip searched before he was placed into a holding cell. Jailers also made Ward perform what they call a “squat and cough” procedure.
✰ Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces [PDF]: Modern automobiles are pervasively computerized, and hence potentially vulnerable to attack. However, while previous research has shown that the internal networks within some modern cars are insecure, the associated threat model —requiring prior physical access—has justiﬁably been viewed as unrealistic. Thus, it remains an open question if automobiles can also be susceptible to remote compromise. Our work seeks to put this question to rest by systematically analyzing the external attack surface of a modern automobile. We discover that remote exploitation is feasible via a broad range of attack vectors (including mechanics tools, CD players, Bluetooth and cellular radio), and further, that wireless communications channels allow long distance vehicle control, location tracking, in-cabin audio exﬁltration and theft. Finally, we discuss the structural characteristics of the automotive ecosystem that give rise to such problems and highlight the practical challenges in mitigating them
✰ The hidden danger of touchscreens: Ergonomic risks are not new to computer users. Laptops and netbooks, whose sales now outnumber desktop computers by more than two to one, pose their own health-related problems. But the rise of the touchscreen means both new kinds of health hazards and more usage in risky scenarios.
✰ Halle Berry plays a white woman in Cloud Atlas: White actors “blacking up” for a role has become taboo, but Halle Berry is happy to do the opposite. The black American actress agreed to “white up” for her performance in a forthcoming adaptation of David Mitchell’s acclaimed novel Cloud Atlas.
✰ Milky Way Crammed With 100 Billion Alien Worlds?: Last year, using the exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope as a guide, astronomers took a statistical stab at estimating the number of exoplanets that exist in our galaxy. They came up with at least 50 billion alien worlds. Today, astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., and the PLANET (Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork) collaboration have taken their own stab at the “galactic exoplanetary estimate” and think there are at least 100 billion worlds knocking around the Milky Way. Why has the estimate doubled? The key difference here are the methods used to detect alien worlds orbiting distant stars.
✰ The New York Times public editor’s very public utterance: Thursday, Arthur Brisbane, the public editor of the New York Times, went to his readers with a question: “I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” Brisbane (who, as public editor, speaks only for himself, not the Times) referred to two recent stories: the claim that Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial reporting form when he left out key information, and Mitt Romney’s assertion that President Obama gives speeches “apologising” for America. Brisbane asked whether news reporters should have the freedom to investigate and respond to those comments. The reaction from readers was swift, voluminous, negative and incredulous. “Is this a joke? THIS IS YOUR JOB.” “If the purpose of the NYT is to be an inoffensive container for ad copy, then by all means continue to do nothing more than paraphrase those press releases.”
✰ Totally drug-resistant TB emerges in India: Physicians in India have identified a form of incurable tuberculosis there, raising further concerns over increasing drug resistance to the disease1. Although reports call this latest form a “new entity”, researchers suggest that it is instead another development in a long-standing problem. The discovery makes India the third country in which a completely drug-resistant form of the disease has emerged, following cases documented in Italy in 20072 and Iran in 20093. However, data on the disease, dubbed totally drug-resistant tuberculosis (TDR-TB), are sparse, and official accounts may not provide an adequate indication of its prevalence. Giovanni Migliori, director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases in Tradate, Italy, suggests that TDR-TB is a deadlier iteration of the highly resistant forms of TB that have been increasingly reported over the past decade. “Totally resistant TB is not new at all,” he says.
✰ Network [Video]: Information technology has become a ubiquitous presence. By visualizing the processes that underlie our interactions with this technology we can trace what happens to the information we feed into the network.
✰ Drake Confronts LA Face Tattoo Artist: My whole deal with people wanting completely outrageous and potentially life-ruining tattoos is this: I’ll ask them three times if they really think it’s a good idea, I tell them what the potential consequences of getting a tattoo on their face might be, and after that, the bad decision is on them. I believe that people get the tattoos that they deserve…I guess I feel bad that this dumbass got the name of the softest motherfucker in hip-hop tattooed on her forehead. But what makes that any less valid of a tattoo to her?… I lost a little sleep over it that first night, wondering if I wanted to be known as the asshole who tattooed “DRAKE” on some crackhead’s forehead.
✰ Sir Isaac Newton’s Occult Studies Online: it took me awhile to search online for Newton’s occult writings about the Philosopher’s Stone (the mythical element that would turn lead to gold and provide a means to immortality), the Tarot, astrology, alchemy, magic, and the end of the world. Newton also wrote of Atlantis in his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms. He concealed these works to avoid criticism. When he died, these papers were considered ‘unfit to publish.’ When they finally surfaced in 1936 after being kept for centuries in the Earl of Portsmouth’s attic, they were auctioned. One of the people who eagerly bought and read Newton’s secret writings was John Maynard Keynes – there’s some food for thought as the world’s economic crisis deepens. After reading them, Keynes reportedly said, “Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians.”
✰ Hitler reacts to SOPA. [Video]: “Don’t cry, Disney owns the right to that emotion.”
✰ Juicing medical marijuana the latest trend in amazing cures: The current methods of taking in medical marijuana include: Smoking, vaporizing, ingesting edibles, and reducing THC hemp into a vial of concentrated hemp oil. They all have healing qualities, but the concentrated hemp oil that Rick Simpson discovered seems to have been the most efficacious form of medical marijuana, at least up to now (http://www.naturalnews.com/027756_cancer_cure_Big_Pharma.html). Now it appears that Dr. William Courtney, MD, has discovered the best way to take in CBDs and other beneficial cannabinoids without the THC becoming psychoactive even though it’s still in the plant: Eating or juicing the whole raw marijuana plant. Dr. Courtney explains that heating marijuana destroys enzymes and excites the THC’s psychoactive effects. But if ingested raw the CBD takes over, and dramatic healing activity occurs without the high.
✰ Is the Head of One Tyrant Worth the Lives of Millions?: Is the head of one tyrant worth the lives of millions and the pain of billions? Sadly, throughout the most of history people have been convinced that this is a fair trade, and that the ends somehow justify the means. Unfortunately, the only ends in any war are violence, murder and a total decline in civilization. Maybe some oil companies get some contracts, some arms manufacturers get some sales and some governments pick up some land, but nothing is ever really accomplished in war. A war with Iran is no different, it will do nothing but bring more pain to the innocent people of this world and ensure that the United States will repeat the same fate suffered by the ancient Roman Empire.
✰ Rick Santorum’s End Times Theory About a Nuclear Iran: While talking about Iran—whose nuclear facilities the former Pennsylvania senator recently said he would bomb if they weren’t opened to international arms inspectors—Santorum noted that one of the regime’s enrichment facilities is located near the city of Qom, home to the Jamkaran mosque, which houses an ancient well considered sacred to some Shia Muslims. According to local belief, Santorum said, the Mahdi—”he’s the equivalent in some respects to a Jesus figure—was going to come back at the end of times and lead Shia Islam to the ruin of the world and peace and justice. That’s what their end of times scenario is.” He continued: Well he comes back at a time of great chaos. So there are many who speculate that there are folks over in Iran who wouldn’t mind creating a time of great chaos for religious reasons. And the fact they built this nuclear program in the city next to where this man is supposed to return leads one to the think that there may be more to it…
✰ Tweeting the word ‘drill’ could mean your Twitter account is read by government spies: Simply using a word or phrase from the DHS’s ‘watch’ list could mean that spies from the government read your posts, investigate your account, and attempt to identify you from it, acccording to an online privacy group. The words which attract attention range from ones seemingly related to diseases or bioweapons such as ‘human to animal’ and ‘outbreak’ to other, more obscure words such as ‘drill’ and ‘strain’. The DHS also watches for words such as ‘illegal immigrant’. The DHS outlined plans to scans blogs, Twitter and Facebook for words such as ‘illegal immigrant’, ‘outbreak’, ‘drill’, ‘strain’, ‘virus’, ‘recovery’, ‘deaths’, ‘collapse’, ‘human to animal’ and ‘trojan’, according to an ‘impact asssessment’ document filed by the agency. When its search tools net an account using the phrases, they record personal information.
✰ The New York Times misleading public on Iran: The claim that there is “a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran’s nuclear programme has a military objective” is misguided. As Washington Post’s Ombudsman Patrick Pexton noted on December 9: But the IAEA report does not say Iran has a bomb, nor does it say it is building one, only that its multiyear effort pursuing nuclear technology is sophisticated and broad enough that it could be consistent with building a bomb. Indeed, if you try now to find the offending paragraph on the New York Times website, you can’t. They took it down. But there is no note, like there is supposed to be, acknowledging that they changed the article, and that there was something wrong with it before. Sneaky, huh?
✰ World’s worst places: Top 10 places you do not want to visit in 2012: The places on this list are the bad places. Some have run out of hope. Others have fought war for so long it is the new normal. Most are exceptionally dangerous and heartbreaking. And while none of them are fighting for write-ups by travel bloggers or inspiring travel with the NetJet set, some of these locations may someday be on the travel map. After all, it was not long ago that current hot-spots like Cambodia and Croatia would have made such a list.
✰ ‘Doomsday Clock’ Ticks One Minute Toward Destruction: In a sign of pessimism about humanity’s future, scientists today set the hands of the infamous “Doomsday Clock” forward one minute from two years ago. “It is now five minutes to midnight,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) director Kennette Benedict announced today (Jan. 10) at a press conference in Washington, D.C. That represents a symbolic step closer to doomsday, a change from the clock’s previous mark of six minutes to midnight, set in January 2010. The clock is a symbol of the threat of humanity’s imminent destruction from nuclear or biological weapons, climate change and other human-caused disasters. In making their deliberations about how to update the clock’s time, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists focused on the current state of nuclear arsenals around the globe, disastrous events such as the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, and biosecurity issues such as the creation of an airborne H5N1 flu strain
✰ Mass Suicide Threats at Xbox 360 Plant: On Jan. 2, over 300 employees at a Foxconn plan in Wuhan, China threatened to throw themselves off a building in a mass suicide. Foxconn makes Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony products. These workers manufacture Xbox 360s. According to Chinese anti-government website China Jasmine Revolution (via Watch China Times), the workers were protesting denied compensation they were promised. On Jan. 2, the workers asked for a raise. Foxconn told them they could either keep their jobs with no pay increase or quit and get compensation. Most decided to quit with compensation. However, the agreement was supposedly terminated, and the workers never received their payments. Website Record China reported that the uproar the incident actually caused Xbox 360 production to be temporarily suspended. The mayor of Wuhan intervened to talk down the group down, and on Jan. 3 at 9pm, the group of 300 decided not to jump, ending what could have been a deadly game of chicken.
✰ My Guantánamo Nightmare: ON Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as “undeliverable,” and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost. Some American politicians say that people at Guantánamo are terrorists, but I have never been a terrorist. Had I been brought before a court when I was seized, my children’s lives would not have been torn apart, and my family would not have been thrown into poverty. It was only after the United States Supreme Court ordered the government to defend its actions before a federal judge that I was finally able to clear my name and be with them again.
✰ Warren Jeffs bans sex in his fundamentalist Mormon congregation until he gets out of prison (He’s serving a life sentence plus 20 years): Warren Jeffs, the convicted rapist leader of a fundamentalist Mormon cult, has banned sex until he gets out of prison. Jeffs is serving a life sentence plus 20 years in Texas after he was convicted of raping a 12 and a 15-year-old girl. He has already kicked one member who dared to sleep with his own wife after Jeffs declared that all marriages are void until he can return and ‘seal’ them. ‘He has predicted that the walls in the prison where he’s at will fall and crumble,’ Joni Holm, who has many relatives in the polygamous sect, told the Desert News. Thanks Jasmine.

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Poisoned Cat Meat

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:45:19 +0000

✦ China: Tycoon Long Linyuan Dies In Guangdong As Police Allege Poisoned Cat Meat Stew Responsible: Police investigating the sudden death of a billionaire fear he was killed when he ate the poisoned flesh of a cat. Tycoon Long Liyuan died in Guangdong province in China after having dinner with two business associates on December 23. The trio ate slow-boiled cat meat stew, a local delicacy. While all three men became sick, 49-year-old Mr Long died. Mr Long died after dining in the Quangdong province in China Officers initially detained the owner of the restaurant for allegedly serving unsanitary food, but the dead businessman’s family refused to believe it was food poisoning and pressed police to make further checks. Local official Huang Guang has now been arrested on suspicion of poisoning the dish with a toxic herb called Gelsemium elegans. Police say the pair had fallen out over money.
✦ Driver used skeleton as passenger in carpool lane: A man stopped for aggressive driving in a carpool lane last month had an unusual passenger: A seat-belted, plastic skeleton. A Washington State Patrol trooper had stopped the man on Interstate 5 at South 272nd Street near Dec. 20. The trooper had clocked the driver going 82 miles per hour and watched him make some dangerous lane changes. The driver, in a silver Mazda, had also been driving in the carpool lane. At first, the trooper thought he had a passenger. Then he realized it was a propped-up, plastic skeleton, draped in a white hoodie, with some kind of metal cookie tin between its thighs.
✦ Industry-Wide Use of Meat Glue Sticks Together Scraps of Meat To Sell You Prime Cuts: It creates a type of franken-meat in that it allows butchers to use the undetectable glue to piece together scraps of meat into a seamless full meat cut. England banned use of Thrombin coagulant last year. They found it mislead consumers to think they are getting a prime cut for their money, and also the original glue was made from cow and pig blood, something they didn’t think was wise in restaurant meats. When multiple pieces are globbed together, bacteria have a better chance of growth. “If there is a bacteria outbreak, it’s much harder to figure out the source when chunks of meat from multiple cows were combined,” said Keith Warriner who teaches food science at University of Guelph. The EU recently brought back the use of the new glue, Thrombian, or Transglutaminase, right along with Australia, Canada and the US. The FDA, of course, deems it GRAS (generally recognized as safe). The meat preparers in the video below need to wear masks when using it because, “It’s dangerous s—.”
✦ Israel vows to retaliate after credit cards are hacked: Israel has said it will respond to cyber-attacks in the same way it responds to violent “terrorist” acts after the credit card details of thousands of its citizens were published online. A hacker named OxOmar claiming to be Saudi said on Thursday he had leaked the private information. Credit card companies say at least 6,000 valid cards have been exposed. Reports say OxOmar may be a 19-year-old living in Mexico. Such cyber-attacks are “a breach of sovereignty comparable to a terrorist operation, and must be treated as such”, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon has said. “Israel has active capabilities for striking at those who are trying to harm it, and no agency or hacker will be immune from retaliatory action,” he added, without giving further details.
✦ Mainstream Media Lies: 23 Things That Are Not What They Seem To Be On Television: Most Americans believe the lie that the mainstream media is “fair and balanced” and is looking out for the interests of average Americans. Well, that simply is not true. Those in the mainstream media serve those that are providing them with paychecks. The reality is that just 6 gigantic corporations collectively own most of the major mainstream media outlets in this country. Reporters are simply not going to be allowed to report stories that are severely damaging to those corporations or to the owners of those corporations. In addition, reporters are simply not going to be allowed to report stories that are severely damaging to those that spend millions of dollars on advertising (such as pharmaceutical companies) on those mainstream media outlets. At this point, our “news” is absolutely packed with propaganda. Way too often, things are not what they seem to be on television. The mainstream media lies, lies and then lies some more.
✦ Child-on-child sex abuse poses complex challenges: Recent high-profile cases of child sex abuse have roused national revulsion against the adults who perpetrated them. Rarely mentioned is the sobering statistic that more than one-third of the sexual abuse of America’s children is committed by other minors. For many of the therapists and attorneys who deal with them, these juvenile offenders pose a profoundly complicated challenge for the child-protection and criminal justice systems. It’s a diverse group that defies stereotypes, encompassing a minority of youths who represent a threat of long-term danger to others and a majority who are responsive to treatment and unlikely to reoffend. “There’s a long continuum, from kids who will never do it again to a kid who probably will be an adult rapist/pedophile,” said Steve Bengis, executive director of the New England Adolescent Research Institute in Holyoke, Mass. “It’s not a ‘one size fits all’ yet we end out with public policy that’s geared toward the worst 5 percent.”
✦ What in the fuck has Obama done so far?
✦ 12 Worst Tattoos of 2011

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