Bootleg

Butt Of Course

Is Wheat Addictive?
Within the Primal/paleo community and elsewhere, it’s often stated offhandedly that wheat is addictive. And absolutely, wheat for many people feels like something they could never give up. I hear it all the time: “I couldn’t live without bread.” “What would I do without cereal, dinner rolls, toast, {insert your favorite grain-based food item here}.” And wheat is often the main culprit in the sugar/insulin rollercoaster that drives sugar-burners’ need to eat (more wheat) every few waking hours. But is wheat addictive in a different sense – as an opiate like heroin and other drugs? Today I take a look at the research and attempt to separate fact from fiction. What do we really know about wheat as an opiate?
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Cops Paint Over Inwood Mural That Depicts NYPD as ‘Murderers’
A pair of plainclothes officers arrived at New Edition Cleaners at 4929 Broadway at 11 a.m. Tuesday, armed with buckets of black paint, rollerbrushes and drop cloths, and began painting over local graffiti artist Alan Ket’s five-day-old mural titled “Murderers.” The two identified themselves as police to a reporter. The mural, which included the word “murderers” painted above several tombstones and coffins with epitaph names that included the NYPD, the Environmental Protection Agency and global corporations including Halliburton and Monsanto, was painted on the wall of the business with the permission of its owners. Officers visited the store on Monday, telling owners that the painting needed to come down and calling the message a “bad idea.” “I can’t confront them, because I don’t want problems,” New Edition Cleaners owner Marina Curet, who has owned the business for five years, said in Spanish. “There is no freedom of expression.
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The truth about sports drinks
These links between sports medicine journals and the sports drinks industry may help to explain a characteristic of the sports drinks literature that is familiar to those who have analysed drug trials over the past 30 years—the relative (or almost complete) absence of negative studies.
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Dead East River ‘monster’ confounds New Yorkers, animal experts
What the hell IS that thing? A bloated, pig-like carcass spotted beneath the Brooklyn Bridge over the weekend has spooked New Yorkers buzzing about mutant river “monsters.” Photographer Denise Ginley shot pics of the rotting, sand-covered corpse on Sunday. “My boyfriend and I were walking along the East River on our way to a farmer’s market when we spotted it among some driftwood on a small stretch of sand below the Brooklyn Bridge that you can barely call a beach,” she emailed the Daily News.
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Memphis Man Was Paid Three Slices For Serving As Lookout In Robbery Of Domino’s Deliveryman
Domino’s worker Jose Reyes told police that he was delivering a pizza around 9 PM when he was approached by two men, one of whom threatened to shoot Reyes if he did not “give him the money and pizza.” Reyes said he handed over $20, his HTC cell phone, and the pizza. Hamer, seen in the adjacent mug shot, told investigators that he “participated as a look out and provided protection for the other male during the robbery.” Cops noted, “Hamer received three slices of Pizza for his participation in this robbery.”
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4 NYC Beachgoers Stuck by Needles in Sand
Four people walking or playing on New York City beaches have suffered puncture wounds from needles in the sand in the last three weeks, park officials said. In the most recent incident, a lifeguard on duty at Rockaway Beach stepped on a needle at Beach 139th Street Tuesday afternoon, officials said. The other three people were wounded over the last three weeks on Staten Island. On July 16, a 63-year-old woman stepped on a hypodermic needle on Cedar Grove Beach, cutting her foot. On July 14, a 37-year-old man was stuck in the hand by a needle while he was on the sand at South Beach, near Father Capodanno Boulevard and Sand Lane. And on July 4, a 40-year-old man was stuck by a needle at South Beach. All three beachgoers were taken to Staten Island University Hospital North. “You don’t know where these needles come from,” said Crystal Matis of Elm Park, who was at the beach Wednesday with her young daughter. “It’s very scary.”
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248 human fetuses found in Russian forest
Villagers in Russia’s south Urals region have stumbled upon a gruesome discovery — four barrels left in a forest containing 248 human fetuses, prompting an official probe, officials said Tuesday. Police in the Sverdlovsk region said the fetuses, preserved in formaldehyde, were kept in barrels with tags marked with surnames and numbers.
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Police: Nude Teen, Apparently On LSD, Attacks Car
A 17-year-old boy was arrested after police found him lying completely naked in the middle of a street while apparently high on LSD. Police said the boy also jumped on the hood of their patrol car and broke out the windshield with his fists.
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Teacher with “food fetish” asks student to put a pie down his pants
A former teacher with an apparent “food fetish” is accused of asking a female student to put a pie down his pants, BBC News reported. The man is also accused of having inappropriate video-chats with his students, in which he asked them to smear themselves in ketchup and eggs and to pour sour milk into their underwear.
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The Jeffersons Star Sherman Hemsley Had An LSD Lab In His Basement
Yes, George Jefferson was a head. He wasn’t just a fan of prog music – he actually cut an album with YES founder Jon Anderson. Called Festival of Dreams, it has never been released. Hemsley was pretty evangelical about his prog obsessions. Besides dancing on Dinah! (if someone has that video, please share!), he wore a shirt for the band Nektar while doing press. And he pulled every string he could to hang out with Daevid Allen of the band Gong. Allen later gave an interview to Magnet Magazine where he talked about the bizarre experience of visiting the short TV star and discovering the guy had an acid lab in his basement (which means if you were taking acid in LA in the 70s it may well have been coming from George Jefferson himself)
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How to Make a Syringe in Prison
Addicts in prison go to extreme lengths to get their fix. But scoring the drugs isn’t the only obstacle they face—how to shoot them up? With no works available, a heroin user in jail needs a little ingenuity. The result of this ingenuity is a “binky.” But even though these can be manufactured, not every user has his own—shakedowns and a lack of materials make them scarce. Prisoners try not to share, but when it comes right down to it, they’re likely to overcome their reservations. “I usually don’t share needles,” says one prisoner. “But if there’s only one binky, and my homeboy got the chiva, you know I’m taking a hit. Why wouldn’t I? This is prison, fool, and I’m trying to get blasted. I’ll deal with all the rest later.” The “rest” includes widespread HIV and Hep. C. But here’s how you make a binky:
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Personalized Cremation Urn – Comes out a Head
An Arlington Vermont company called Cremation Solutions is creating custom made cremation urns in the shape of your loved ones head. Thats right, with just one or two pictures of the persons face, and by using state of the art 3D imaging techniques, the company will make a polymer compound likeness of your loved one’s head and mount it on a marble base. Excellent. I know you’re probably wondering, so yes, the heads will have hair, for folks that had very closely cropped hair, it can simply be digitally added to the head, or the company will gladly add a wig, per your specifications. Ashes are loaded from the bottom and a beautiful brass nameplate is affixed to the heads luxurious black marble base.
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Solar flare: The sun touches our psyche
Solar Effects From 1948 to 1997, the Institute of North Industrial Ecology Problems in Russia found that geomagnetic activity showed three seasonal peaks each of those years (March to May, in July, and in October). Every peak matched an increased incidence of anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and suicide in the city Kirovsk. One explanation for the correlation is that solar storms desynchronize our circadian rhythm (biological clock). The pineal gland in our brain is affected by the electromagnetic activity. This causes the gland to produce excess melatonin, and melatonin is the brain’s built in “downer” that helps us sleep. “The circadian regulatory system depends on repeated environmental cues to [synchronize] internal clocks,” says psychiatrist Kelly Posner, Columbia University. “Magnetic fields may be one of these environmental cues.”
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Man has penis stolen by masked intruders after alleged affairs
A MAN is recovering in hospital after four men broke into his flat and cut off his penis. Police are hunting the masked intruders, who are thought to have acted over accusations that their victim was engaged in affairs with local women. The 41-year-old told cops he had been asleep when the men burst into his bedroom around 4am. “They put something over my head and pulled down my trousers and then they ran off. I was so shocked I didn’t feel a thing – then I saw I was bleeding and my penis was gone,” he said. Although emergency workers searched for the severed organ, they failed to locate it and believe it was taken away by the attackers.
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Chik-Fil-A Called Out For Pathetic Attempt At Damage Control
Uh oh, Chik-Fil-A: Looks like your half-assed attempt to cover up the fact that the Muppets recently ended a partnership with you over your anti-gay views just hit a little roadblock called “anyone with a computer.” How does it feel to be outed? Sorry no one bought your airtight “kids are trying to finger their kids’ meal toys” defense (seen below), or your sassy new fictional tween spokeswoman. Maybe you should stick to what you’re best at: putting pickles on chicken sandwiches and alienating customers with your creepy religious views.
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Tijuana Bibles From Wesley Morse, Creator Of Bazooka Joe (NSFW)
Bazooka Joe has endured for almost 60 years now, but few know the name of the man who created him (and his original gang; Bazooka Joe’s gang has been revamped a couple of times). That man is Wesley Morse, and he was a pornographic cartoonist. Morse is one of the only known artists of the famous Tijuana Bibles. These 8 page porno comic strips were wildly popular in the 30s and 40s; some were dirty jokes illustrated, some were porn parodies of famous stars or cartoons and some were wholly original tales. The vast majority of Tijuana Bible creators were anonymous but Morse, who also did pin-up art, was a known figure in the field. His most famous Bibles were tied in to the New York World’s Fair of 1939; legend has it that Morse sold his books at the Fair itself (a risky proposition in those more strict days). It was his Tijuana Bible work that actually got Morse the Bazooka Joe job.
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Ecstasy Drug Harms Memory, Study Reveals
Recreational use of the club drug Ecstasy could cause memory problems, new research finds. The research is the first study of Ecstasy users before they begin to use the drug regularly, which helps rule out alternative causes for the memory loss, said study leader Daniel Wagner, a psychologist at the University of Cologne in Germany. “By measuring the cognitive function of people with no history of Ecstasy use and, one year later, identifying those who had used Ecstasy at least 10 times and remeasuring their performance, we have been able to start isolating the precise cognitive effects of this drug,” Wagner told LiveScience.
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A Working Assault Rifle Made With a 3-D Printer
While there are still some details to sort out, it’s pretty clear that making weapons at home using 3-D printers from commonly available materials is going to become much more commonplace in the near future. In fact, as 3-D printing technology matures, materials feedstock improves, and designs for weapons proliferate, we might soon see the day when nearly everyone will be able to print the weapons of their choice in the numbers they desire, all within the privacy of their own homes.
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The $40 Million Counterfeit Coupon Caper
Talk about extreme couponing! Three women in Arizona were arrested recently for selling counterfeit coupons—a lot of counterfeit coupons. After an eight-week undercover investigation, police raided three homes in the Phoenix area, seized $40 million worth of bogus coupons, and arrested the women, who were enjoying a life of “opulence and the money was the equivalent of drug cartel-type of stuff,” according to the police.
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Just A Dick Away
Walmart’s Bad Kerning
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Honey, I’m Working Late, and Other Stories
The human voice is the most natural and the most nuanced form of communication. Introduce new technology like email, instant messaging and the telephone and people start behaving differently. They tell an astonishing number of lies per day… or per conversation. Here’s how it differs depending on what sort of media you are using. And there’s also some advice on what you can do ti keep it real!
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Lucky Restaurant in a Indian Cemetary
The owner Krsihan Kutti Nair who built the restaurant that’s spread out over a centuries old Muslim cemetery, doesn’t know who the patrons in the basement floor are, but claims their presence has been great for business. And he’s right. Business is brisk at the bustling restaurant where the graves are scattered erratically. The plan wasn’t to begin a restaurant right in the middle of a cemetery. In India, however, where death and life mix as smoothly as tandoori chicken and rum, and reincarnation theories are a permanent fixture of folklore and Bollywood movies, people aren’t as spooked by graveyards as Westerners are. Plus, in a country of a billion with space at a premium, graveyards are often used for commercial and even residential purposes. The constant flow of relatives, who visit graveyards to visit their dead kin, has meant that these macabre locations are actually great from a business point of view.
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Bath Salts May Be as Addictive as Cocaine
Recreational drugs called bath salts, which have gained popularity recently and have been in the news for their bizarre effects on users, have the potential for abuse and addiction, similar to that of cocaine. Bath salts, which, despite their name, have no use in the tub, are different variations of the compound called cathinone, an alkaloid that comes from the khat plant. Currently, 42 U.S. states have laws banning many substituted cathinones. Mephedrone is one of the most common derivatives of cathinone and was listed federally in October 2011 on Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act for one year, pending further study. Then on July 9, 2012, President Barack Obama signed a law placing bath salts containing mephedrone or the stimulant MDPV onto the controlled substances list. The drugs can cause a laundry list of body and mind changes, including dizziness, delusions, paranoia, suicidal thoughts, seizures, nausea, vomiting and even death.
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Nationwide raids on synthetic drug labs lead to 90 arrests, seizure of $36 million
In the first-ever nationwide crackdown on the synthetic drug industry, law enforcement officers arrested more than 90 people, seized $36 million in cash and more than 4.8 million packets of synthetic cannabinoids Wednesday, authorities said. Agents also confiscated material to make 13.6 million more packets and 167,000 packets of synthetic hallucinogens, more commonly known as bath salts. In addition, materials to make 392,000 more packets of bath salts were seized. Operation Log Jam, a joint effort between the Drug Enforcement Administration and federal and local agencies, was conducted in more than 90 cities spanning 30 states, DEA Administrator Michele M. Leonhart said at a news conference Thursday. She said the raids included 29 manufacturing facilities at every level of the industry, from small-scale operations to large warehouses.
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I fell for cocaine honeytrap, claims British physicist in Argentine jail
Paul Frampton, 68, said he thought that he was to meet Denise Milani, a Czech-born glamour model and former Miss Bikini World in a hotel, and was asked by a man in the lobby to look after a suitcase that he was told belonged to her. The suitcase contained 2kg of cocaine hidden in its lining. Dr Frampton now believes that a fraudster was posing as 32-year-old Miss Milani in an online chat room. The physicist, who has a double first from Brasenose College, Oxford, and has collaborated with winners of the Nobel Prize, was stopped from boarding a flight from Buenos Aires to Peru in January after customs officials found the cocaine. Since then he has been on remand in Argentina’s Villa Devoto jail and faces a 16-year sentence if convicted.
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Former DARE officer gets 3 years for sexual exploitation of a child
Mangino pleaded guilty to sexually exploiting a 15-year-old girl who was in his custody in March 2011. He was child while still an Aurora Police officer for having sexually explicit pictures of the girl on his cell phone. Chief Deputy District Attorney J.P. Moore said during Thursday’s sentencing the March 2011 crime was not an isolated incident but rather a pattern of conduct. “Mangino took advantage of his position as a police officer…the violation of trust was beyond the victim, the violation also extended to the Aurora Police Department and the community,” he said. Aurora Police Chief Daniel J. Oates says, “Mr. Mangino, by his perverse and sexually deviant actions, did great harm to the image of the Aurora Police Department. He insulted and offended all the wonderful men and women of this agency.”
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Law enforcement likes getting really high off drug busts
Cops calculate the “street value.” It’s a branch of mathematics in which economies of scale meet public relations. By envisioning thousands of transactions that will never occur — and sometimes padding the numbers on top of that — law-enforcement agencies can wind up doubling, tripling, quadrupling, quintupling, sextupling or even septupling what the confiscated drugs are worth to the bulk-level dealers who got popped. In the hands of a narcotics cop with a calculator, $2 million of heroin can become $9 million, $500,000 worth of meth can become $2.5 million, coke worth less than $1 million can become several million.
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Cannabinoids, like those found in marijuana, occur naturally in human breast milk
Woven into the fabric of the human body is an intricate system of proteins known as cannabinoid receptors that are specifically designed to process cannabinoids such as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), one of the primary active components of marijuana. And it turns out, based on the findings of several major scientific studies, that human breast milk naturally contains many of the same cannabinoids found in marijuana, which are actually extremely vital for proper human development. Cell membranes in the body are naturally equipped with these cannabinoid receptors which, when activated by cannabinoids and various other nutritive substances, protect cells against viruses, harmful bacteria, cancer, and other malignancies. And human breast milk is an abundant source of endocannabinoids, a specific type of neuromodulatory lipid that basically teaches a newborn child how to eat by stimulating the suckling process.
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Uroko Onoja death: Husband ‘raped to death’ by 5 wives, because he was paying too much attention to the sixth
A wealthy businessman – and husband of six – has died after allegedly being forced into a marathon sex session with his ‘jealous’ wives. Nigerian Uroko Onoja was having sex with the youngest of his spouses when the remaining five are reported to have set upon him with knives and sticks – and demanded that he have sex with each of them too. Mr Onoja went on to have intercourse with four of his wives in succession, but ‘stopped breathing’ as the fifth was making her way to the bed in Ogbadibo, according to Nigeria’s Daily Post. Two women have been arrested following the incident in the state of Benue last week, said the report, which used the term ‘raped to death’ to describe the businessman’s fate.
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Medical News: DMAA Found Not ‘Natural,’ Not Geranium
A substance marketed as a natural stimulant in nutrition and sports supplements has proven to be entirely synthetic, investigators reported. Chemical analysis of 1,3-dimethylamylamine (DMAA) from supplements found it indistinguishable from two known synthetic versions of the compound. Purportedly derived from geranium plants, DMAA did not show up in analyses of extracts from eight different types of geranium.
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21 Burned in Hot Coal Walk Hosted by Motivational Speaker
Fire officials said 21 people at an event hosted by motivational speaker Tony Robbins suffered burns while walking across hot coals and three of the injured were treated at hospitals. The injuries took place during the first day Thursday of a four-day event at the San Jose Convention Center hosted by Robbins called “Unleash the Power Within.” Most of those hurt had second and third degree burns, said San Jose Fire Department Capt. Reggie Williams. Walking across hot coals on lanes measuring 10 feet long and heated to between 1,200 to 2,000 degrees provides attendees an opportunity to “understand that there is absolutely nothing you can’t overcome,” according to the motivational speaker’s website.
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The ‘chemputer’ that could print out any drug
At the same time, one branch of that thinking has itself evolved into a new project: the notion of creating downloadable chemistry, with the ultimate aim of allowing people to “print” their own pharmaceuticals at home. Cronin’s latest TED talk asked the question: “Could we make a really cool universal chemistry set? Can we ‘app’ chemistry?” “Basically,” he tells me, in his office at the university, with half a grin, “what Apple did for music, I’d like to do for the discovery and distribution of prescription drugs.”
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Serial infector: Arrest made in hepatitis C outbreak (scary stuff)
Kacavas said Kwiatkowski engaged in “diversion,” an act in which a person injects a drug with a syringe and leaves behind another syringe filled with a substance such as saline. By doing a switch, rather than just taking the syringe, it becomes more difficult to detect drugs that have gone missing.
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Dance music has gone mainstream, but it doesn’t have to sell out
The draw to see any DJ live usually stems from an affinity for their original productions, so their skills in the studio should be able to make up for the fact that they are going to just “hit play.” These guys get more music submissions than anyone on the planet; is it really that hard to find new material to play out? They spend countless hours on planes with their laptops and production tools at the ready; is it really that hard to put together a new mashup or bootleg before a set? I miss the days where I would say “Whoa, what is this?!” instead of “Ugh, this bootleg again?” As much as it sucks when Shazam can’t ID a track, it sucks even more when you know every single song being played. If the current trajectory of DJ sets continues, it won’t be long before everyone catches on to what’s really going on here. In the same way that mainstream radio stations have killed songs by playing them far too often, DJs are quickly doing the same.
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united we fail, we all hit play.
I think given about 1 hour of instruction, anyone with minimal knowledge of ableton and music tech in general could DO what im doing at a deadmau5 concert. Just like i think ANY DJ in the WORLD who can match a beat can do what “ANYONE else” (not going to mention any names) is doing on their EDM stages too.
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A-Trak: Don’t Push My Buttons
Traditionally, a DJ spun vinyl records on turntables and would change his set every night. So what about guys who play on laptops? Those who spend more time raising their hands than mixing? Or those whose presence is lost behind intricate light shows? Esteemed electronic producer deadmau5, who recently graced the cover of rock bible Rolling Stone wearing his namesake, robo-rodent mask, decided to blow the whistle himself with a refreshingly frank tumblr post entitled “We All Hit Play.” Explaining how his pre-planned stage show works, he admits that the term “live” is an overstatement. But his tone is strangely defensive and he unjustly lumps DJs into the argument, reducing their craft to mindless beat-matching: “I had that skill down when I was 3.”
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Pornography in Public Causes Some to Gasp, Others to Shrug
The library has been stung by complaints about the content, including explicit pornography, that some people watch in front of others. To address the issue, the library over the last six weeks has installed 18 computer monitors with plastic hoods so that only the person using the computer can see what is on the screen. “It’s for their privacy, and for ours,” said Michelle Jeffers, the library spokeswoman. The library will also soon post warnings on the screens of all its 240 computers to remind people to be sensitive to other patrons — a solution it prefers to filtering or censoring images. It is an issue playing out not just at libraries, but in cafes and gyms, on airplanes, trains and highways, and just about any other place where the explosion of computers, tablets and smartphones has given rise to a growing source of dispute: public displays of mature content.
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Are Authorities Closing In On the Online Drug Market Silk Road?
Just over a year ago, we broke the story of Silk Road, the underground online market that’s like an eBay for illegal drugs. It’s been thriving ever since. But as the summer drags on, Silk Road users are becoming increasingly paranoid over a series of unexplained disappearances. And the Drug Enforcement Agency has now revealed it’s investigating the site. Is Silk Road really as invincible as it seems? In early July, the DEA told the Austin TV news station KXAN that it was investigating Silk Road, where users openly buy and sell drugs, from heroin to ecstacy and pot. New York Senator Chuck Schumer had asked the DEA to look into the site after we first wrote about it about a year ago, but this is the first public acknowledgement that the DEA has heeded his call.
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Urine, feces found in courthouse coffee machine
The best part of waking up? Not exactly. County employees in Anaconda got an unexpected morning jolt last month after someone left urine and feces in their coffee pot at the courthouse. Police Chief Tim Barkell said the prank could land felony assault charges against the culprit, who both urinated into the can of coffee grounds and four days later smeared feces directly in the machine. Two county employees are being tested for hepatitis A after they unknowingly drank the coffee tainted with urine. Nobody else drank the coffee. Thanks Jasmine
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Termites explode to defend their colonies
A species of termite found in the rainforests of French Guiana takes altruism seriously: aged workers grow sacks of toxic blue liquid that they explode onto their enemies in an act of suicidal self-sacrifice to help their colonies (see video). The “explosive backpacks” of Neocapritermes taracua, described in Science today1, grow throughout the lifetimes of the worker termites, filling with blue crystals secreted by a pair of glands on the insects’ abdomens. Older workers carry the largest and most toxic backpacks. Those individuals also, not coincidentally, are the least able to forage and tend for the colony: their mandibles become dull and worn as the termites age, because they cannot be sharpened by moulting.
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N.J. Terrorist Hideout Actually NYPD Operation
On June 2, 2009, an apartment superintendent in New Brunswick, N.J., stumbled upon what he thought was a terrorist hideout and called 911. It was really an NYPD operation to conduct surveillance well outside its jurisdiction
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Giving the green finger: Gardener who carved bush into rude gesture ordered to remove it
A gardener who carved a giant bush into a hand displaying a rude gesture has been ordered to remove it after being accused of committing a public order offence. Richard Jackson has displayed the offending topiary, which shows the middle-finger sign, in his garden for the last eight years. The 53-year-old has now been told by the council to alter it after a neighbour complained, but he has refused to comply.
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Kissing device lets you smooch remotely [Video]
Thanks Nico
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Holding onto a Who ticket? You can finally cash in 33 years later
The Who announced on Wednesday that they’re playing at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center on Feb. 26 as part of their 2012-2013 North American tour. It’s their first Providence show since 1975; a scheduled 1979 show was canceled due to security concerns by then-Mayor Vincent A. Cianci in the wake of a fatal crowd stampede at a Who concert in Cincinnati. If you were headed for that cancelled show, you may finally make it. Dunk general manager Larry Lepore said on Thursday that anyone who still has a ticket for the 1979 Who Providence concert can trade it in for a free ticket to February’s show. The vintage ticket will be donated to charity, Lepore says: “It’s got to be worth something.”
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FBI Wants a Database of Your Tattoos
The FBI is consulting local police and vendors about technology currently in use that can spot crooks and terrorists by interpreting the symbolism of their tattoos, according to government documents. The inquiry follows work already underway at the bureau and Homeland Security Department to add iris and facial recognition services to their respective fingerprint databases. The FBI on Friday issued a request for information on existing databases “containing tattoo/symbol images, their possible meanings, gang affiliations, terrorist groups or other criminal organizations.” The mass collection of multiple biometric markers, potentially including vocal tracks and handwriting samples, has upset immigrant communities who say the FBI and DHS are misusing the technology to deport innocent people.
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Deadly count: US averages 20 mass shootings every year
All of the US has turned to Aurora, Colorado after a Friday morning shooting left more than a dozen movie-goers dead. But while the latest massacre has scarred millions of Americans, it’s also just another item added to a list of gruesome sprees. According to an ongoing tally kept by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the United States is experiencing an average of around 20 mass shootings each year. While Friday morning’s incident inside of a Aurora movie theater has perhaps the unfortunate distinction of being the most violent in recent memory — taking no fewer than 12 lives and injuring around 50 more — it is only yet only one example out of many that has marred society this year. The Aurora massacre is believed to be one of the worst incident on American soil since a rampage at Virginia Tech in 2007 left 32 people dead. The Fort Hood, Texas massacre two years later also ended with massive bloodshed, as well, with 13 people losing their lives in that event.
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Judge: Man who stripped nude at airport not guilty
An Oregon man who stripped nude at Portland’s airport security to protest what he saw as invasive measures was found not guilty of indecent exposure. Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge David Rees ruled Wednesday that John Brennan’s act was one of protest and therefore, protected speech. Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney Joel Petersen argued that Brennan’s strip-down was an act of indecent exposure. “I was aware of the irony of removing my clothes to protect my privacy,” Brennan said from the witness stand on Wednesday.
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Adult theater where Fred Willard arrested is frequent LAPD target
The manager of the adult theater in Hollywood where actor-comedian Fred Willard was arrested said Los Angeles police have conducted checks there dozens of times since late 2011. Tiki Theater manager Kazi Jafor said that since November 2011, officers have been to the theater 40 times and made 23 arrests. Jafor said the theater displays in writing rules against lewd conduct. “If we see anybody in this activity, we try to stop them,” he said. He said three adult movies were showing on a continuous loop, including the “Client List” parody and “Follow Me 2.” Several people were in the theater when two uniformed vice officers conducted a spot check Wednesday night around 7:45 p.m. Jafor said he saw the officers talking to the 72-year-old actor before they placed him in handcuffs. “The police officers were telling him he did something wrong, he denied it,” Jafor said. According to the LAPD, Willard “engaged in a lewd act,” but police did not elaborate.
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9-year-old boy with massive tumor, living in one of Mexico’s most dangerous cities, is brought to U.S. for treatment
A 9-year-old boy with a massive tumor was whisked from a dangerous neighborhood in Mexico in an armored vehicle by U.S. agents and taken across the border for treatment in New Mexico, his family said. The boy and his parents were snatched Thursday from the gang-infested neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez — one of the deadliest cities in the world — after members of a New Mexico Baptist church saw him near an orphanage and sought help. The parents of the child, identified by officials only as Jose to protect his family, said the tumor on his shoulder and neck has grown so large that it affects his eyesight and could move into his heart.
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Woman: Geek Squad employee copied, kept racy phone photos
Ellison says after learning she had not backed up her data on her home computer, the employee offered to buy the iPhone with a cracked screen she was replacing. She says he paid her $60 out of his own wallet, and promised to wipe clean her older iPhone after transferring the data to her new iPhone 4s. A day later, she realized her new iPhone 4s didn’t have any of her 900 photos, including suggestive personal photos and a video taken by her young children of themselves, joking after getting out of the shower. “I felt sick. I felt violated. I felt so embarrassed,” Ellison tells WTOP. Ellison called the Best Buy to complain, and asked a manager to call her. Instead, the Geek Squad employee called her, promising to retrieve her photos. “A few days later, he called back to tell me he’d made a CD at his house with all my photos, and when can I come get them. I could pick them up at his house,” Ellison said. Ellison hung up the phone.
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Compact Fluorescent Bulbs Could Cause Ultraviolet Damage to Skin
We know CFL bulbs are world-changingly efficient, producing the same level of light as their incandescent parents while using a quarter of the energy. But they’re still a relatively new device, and few long-term studies have been carried out on them. One of the most recent, a new report from a team at Stony Brook, suggests CFLs might cause damage to skin by releasing UV rays.
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YouTube Launches Face Blurring Tool to Keep Protesters Anonymous
A “blur all faces” option in YouTube’s video enhancement tool lets a user edit their video, creating a new copy with obscured faces. After that, you can preview what the video will look like, then delete the blurless original. (There’s still some bugs to be worked out in facial recognition, but the feature goes live today.)
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Video Game addiction underscored as teen dies after 40-hour marathon
The 18-year ran a 40-hour marathon session with the game in Taiwan before then he was reported to have booked a room at his local Internet café before plunging into Diablo III and foe the entire 40-hours he neither slept or stopped or had anything to eat. He was checked on by an employee of the cafe and was found lifeless on a table Sunday but he immediately woke up as he notched but after moving a few steps he collapsed and was immediately rushed to the hospital and he was later pronounced dead at the hospital. Hospital authorities suspected that he probably suffered blood clots due the long period of sitting.
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The deadly rise of ‘hippy crack’: For celebrities, it’s the party drug du jour. Now inhaling laughing gas – is spreading to middle-class living rooms
Cheap, seemingly harmless and guaranteeing a night of raucous laughter, so-called ‘hippy crack’ is increasingly popular with celebrities and their well-heeled young fans alike. Even Prince Harry was seen indulging two years ago. There is just one problem: nitrous oxide is no more legal than it is innocuous. Despite being touted openly at music festivals and in bars and nightclubs across the country, sale of the gas for recreational use is very much against the law. As for being innocuous, that is only true if one ignores the alarming side-effects it can cause: strokes, hallucinations, seizures, blackouts, incontinence, stress on the heart, chronic depression and even — in cases of prolonged use — depleted bone marrow. Few would tack the word ‘harmless’ on to such a list.
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Vt. gov. to sign emergency rule banning bath salts
Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin is going to be joined by Barre Mayor Thomas Lauzon and police officials when he signs an emergency rule banning 83 new dangerous drugs commonly known as “bath salts.”
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Bolivia Becomes Better Cocaine Producer, US Says
The U.S. government confirmed that Bolivia has fewer coca plantations but it is producing more cocaine because drug traffickers are using a more “efficient” process known as the “Colombian method,” according to an interview published Sunday in the daily Pagina Siete.
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This much I know: Marilyn Manson
My body is a place where drugs and alcohol have made germs afraid to live. I have no health problems to speak of, touch wood.
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10 pounds of meth found hidden in a baby crib
“The narcotics and a shotgun were found hidden in a baby crib inside the residence,” Ruiz said in a statement. “Investigators believe the suspect in the case is involved with the distribution of narcotics to other drug dealers in the city of Burbank.”
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Oregon kills medical marijuana deduction for food stamp applicants
Oregon and two other states will no longer allow certain food stamp applicants to deduct medical marijuana expenses from their incomes after federal officials threatened the states with penalties. The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a nationwide memo to regional directors of the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, after The Oregonian contacted the agency about the practice last week. The newspaper surveyed 17 states that permit marijuana for medicinal use and found three – Oregon, New Mexico and Maine – allowed certain applicants to deduct the cost of the drug from their income when applying for the benefit.
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Police bust $3M drug ring allegedly led by 17-year-old Mason High School student
For about a year, the Warren County Drug Task Force had been investigating the trafficking of high-grade marijuana being sold to students at Mason and King Mills high schools, which they say they traced to the 17-year-old. When officials searched the boy’s house, they found more than $6,000 in cash in his bedroom at his parents’ house. As part of the investigation, task force members searched locations in Blue Ash, Norwood and Hamilton where they seized more than 600 hydroponic high grade marijuana plants . Officials with the Warren County Drug Task Force say the street value from the pot was $5,000 a pound. They seized thousands of dollars in grow equipment as well. Authorities valued the drug operation at more than $3 million and say they believe the 17-year-old was grossing more than $20,000 a month.
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3 Accounting Tricks the Obama Administration Uses to Hide the Cost of the Drug War
“Since day one, President Obama has led the way in reforming our Nation’s drug policies by, among other things, addressing drug use and its consequences as a public health problem,” reads a statement posted on We the People, the petition site started by the, er, Obama administration. If you’ve been the victim of a federal raid—one in which, say, your two-year-old was yanked out if his crib—or worked at one of the 500 California medical pot dispensaries the DEA and the IRS have shut down in the last year, you’re probably rolling your eyes right now.
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Marketing the Munchies
That kind of winking and nudging is typical in the emergent genre of ads aimed at stoners, a once taboo marketing approach recently embraced most blatantly by the fast food industry. Just look at the actor in the next burger commercial you see. Odds are he’ll be a glassy-eyed Spicoli, dropping coded reefer references (see Jack in the Box’s favorite mumbling pothead). Companies as big as Taco Bell and General Mills have gotten in on the act and they’re reaping the rewards. Taco Bell, with its Doritos-taco hybrid and “late night munchies” tagline saw a six percent sales increase in the first quarter of 2012. General Mills, which revived Cheech and Chong for a Fiber One web campaign, deemed the ad so successful it plans to do more just like it. Then there’s Sonic and its hallucinating twenty-something dreaming of man-sized cheesy tots. Carl’s Jr. is touting its “wake and bake” habit. Denny’s is promoting a reggae-loving unicorn.
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Pot-smoking moms tired of being judged by wine drinkers
The drug helps her keep focus on the giant statue of popsicle sticks she’s building with her kids and relaxes her so she can get through the rest of the night without stressing. “It can make folding a pile of laundry fun,” says Margaret, 45, who asked that we not use her last name for fear of getting in trouble with the law. “If I didn’t smoke, that’d be three piles later in the week.” Still, she doesn’t flaunt her marijuana use. Her sons aren’t allowed to go into the room where she keeps the drugs locked up, and she hides it from other moms who would keep their kids away if they knew she smoked pot. “Being judged for doing something nontoxic and totally organic, enjoying a god-given plant, by moms who suck back two bottles of Chardonnay like sports drinks feels like s—,” complains Margaret. “Any hypocrisy is hard to swallow. A drunk mother is pathetic and I often leave parties when I experience other mothers tying one on.”
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Deodorant sniffing outbreak ‘incredibly serious’
Australia’s peak drugs body says it is concerned by reports young Aboriginal people in central Australia are stealing deodorant from supermarkets to get high. An Alice Springs youth organisation says there is a deodorant sniffing outbreak in the town involving children as young as seven. The Alcohol and other Drugs Council of Australia’s David Templeman says it is a dangerous situation. “In some cases, it can include hallucinations and drowsiness and coma and that can then sometimes lead to death,” he said.
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Man allegedly DWI on a Wal-Mart scooter
Houma police say a 24-year-old man is accused of driving a shopping scooter while drunk. Police say Thomas J. Phillip’s breath tested at more than double the amount considered legal proof of intoxication under Louisiana law when he was pulled over Sunday. Police say they got a call about a motorized scooter pulling a wheelchair, and found Phillip on the scooter and a friend of his in the wheelchair. They say Phillip was arrested after allegedly telling police he’d been at a Wal-Mart store and decided to take the scooter for a joyride.
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New Jersey Medical Marijuana: Legal for Some, Pot Crops Up in N.J.
In a sign that the Garden State’s budding medical marijuana program is finally moving forward, the first crop has been growing hydroponically for about a month in a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in an undisclosed location, officials said. The first plants are about a foot high, said Joseph Stevens, president of the Greenleaf Compassion Center, the first licensed provider of medical pot. By mid-September, the center’s Montclair dispensary should be open and accepting patients to buy marijuana, he said.
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New Welfare Restrictions Target Booze, Tattoos
New York lawmakers have proposed barring spending on alcohol, strip clubs, cruise ships and psychics. “It’s a slap in the face to people who are on public assistance and are trying to get off, when others abuse the system,” said state Sen. Thomas Libous, a Republican. Ann Valdez of Brooklyn’s Coney Island section said it’s “crazy” for the government to be dictating where people spend their assistance instead of creating living-wage jobs. She said she struggles just to cover toiletries, clothing and other expenses for herself and her 13-year-old son on the $120 she receives every two weeks. “I don’t know one person who uses their EBT money to buy liquor or anything like that,” Valdez said. Washington state lawmakers have prohibited purchases of tattoos, body piercings, alcohol and tobacco. Bars, bail bond agencies, gambling establishments and strip clubs are also now required to deactivate the ability of their ATMs to accept benefit cards.
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File under Culture, Fetish, Graffiti, Music, SeMeN SPeRmS Links 'o Death, Sex

Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on July 28, 2012

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Burn, Baby, Burn

  • A four-time Texas lottery winner’s timing is priceless.Joan Ginther, 63, has been dubbed “the luckiest woman on earth,” having scratched her way to four jackpots worth a total of $20.4 million.

    Ginther, a reclusive, Stanford-educated math genius, has had winning tickets in 1993, 2006, 2008 and 2010. Now, Harper’s magazine theorizes that the Lone Star legend skillfully charted when and where winning tickets might show up.

  • MOX fuel that was believed to have been kept cool at the bottom of one of the reactors at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant after its core melted is believed to have breached the vessel after melting again, a study said Monday.The study by Fumiya Tanabe, an expert in nuclear safety, said most of reactor 3′s mixed uranium-plutonium oxide fuel may have dribbled into the containment vessel underneath, and if so, the current method being used to cool the reactor will have to be rethought. This could force Tokyo Electric Power Co. to revise its schedule for containing the five-month-old disaster.

  • Fuel inside one of the reactors at the crippled nuclear complex in Fukushima Prefecture, which was believed to have been kept cool at the bottom of the pressure vessel after its core suffered a meltdown, has possibly breached the vessel after melting again at the bottom of the vessel, an expert’s study showed Monday.
  • In the past decade, America’s pharmaceutical industry has knowingly marketed dozens of dangerous drugs to millions of children, a group that executives apparently view as a lucrative, untapped market for their products. Most kids have no one to look out for their interests except anxious parents who put their trust in doctors. As it turns out, that trust is often misplaced. Big Pharma spends massive amounts to entertain physicians, send them on luxury vacations and ply them with an endless supply of free products. As a result, hundreds of thousands of American kids—some as young as three years old—have become dependent on amphetamines like Adderall and a pharmacopeia of other drugs that allegedly treat depression, insomnia, aggression and other mental health disorders.
  • On his Twitter feed Monday, the Oscar-winning film director also blamed the 2008 economic collapse on Standard & Poor’s — apparently because it and other credit-ratings agencies did not downgrade mortgage-based bonds, which encouraged the housing bubble and let it spread throughout the economy.“Pres Obama, show some guts & arrest the CEO of Standard & Poors. These criminals brought down the economy in 2008& now they will do it again,” Mr. Moore wrote.

    Standard & Poor’s, one of three key debt agencies, stripped the U.S. federal government of its AAA status Friday night and reduced it to AA+ for the first time in the nation’s history.

    Mr. Moore went on to note that the “owners of S&P are old Bush family friends,” continuing a theme he has developed through several films about capitalism as essentially a crony system for the rich and Wall Street, especially the Bush family.

  • The hypocrisy of police trying to stop citizens from videotaping their public actions should be obvious in this, the Patriot Act Age. From warrantless wiretapping to data mining to the proliferation of red-light cameras, the Surveillance State is clearly on the march. And yet, when citizens occasionally exercise their constitutional rights and turn the camera on the Surveillance State itself, they increasingly face the threat of police retribution.
  • Well, this could pretty much rule out a marketing campaign touting BlackBerry as the smartphone of choice for rioters. Which is too bad, because Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) could use a new demographic stronghold to reverse its dwindling market share.Media reports since the weekend’s rioting in sections of London following the shooting death of a local man by police have focused on the roles Twitter and BlackBerry’s IM service played in stoking the mayhem.

    Now RIM has officially responded. BlackBerry UK, the “official UK Twitter account” for Canada-based RIM, early Monday tweeted:

    We feel for those impacted by the riots in London. We have engaged with the authorities to assist in any way we can.

    So how can RIM help the police identify riot and looting participants? According to The Register, “RIM can pass over decrypted versions of BBM chatter.”

  • The 34-year-old rapper known for his outbursts was the headline act at the Big Chill music festival Saturday night, where he ranted in the middle of his set about being misunderstood and underappreciated. “I walk through the hotel and I walk down the street, and people look at me like I’m (expletive) insane, like I’m Hitler,” he said. “One day the light will shine through and one day people will understand everything I ever did.”West received light boos from the crowd as a result.

  • Cyber attacks designed to knock Web sites off line happen every day, yet shopping for a virtual hit man to launch one of these assaults has traditionally been a dicey affair. That’s starting to change: Hackers are openly competing to offer services that can take out a rival online business or to settle a score.An ad for a DDoS attack service.

    There are dozens of underground forums where members advertise their ability to execute debilitating “distributed denial-of-service” or DDoS attacks for a price. DDoS attack services tend to charge the same prices, and the average rate for taking a Web site offline is surprisingly affordable: about $5 to $10 per hour; $40 to $50 per day; $350-$400 a week; and upwards of $1,200 per month.

  • Charges against a California mother have been upgraded from manslaughter to second-degree murder this week after evidence at preliminary hearings suggested that she knowingly endangered her infant’s life by breast-feeding while using methamphetamine.Six-week-old Anthony Acosta III died last year after an allegedly lethal amount of the drug was passed to him when his mother, Maggie Jean Wortman, 26, continued to breast-feed despite her meth habit.

  • Battling an addiction to bath salts, Kish took his mother and two others hostage in his mother’s Chestnuthill Township house Thursday afternoon. After he wounded a state trooper with birdshot and set fire to the house, police said, he ran outside with a gun and refused to put it down.
  • In the early days of Michael Moorcock’s 50-plus-years career, when he was living paycheck-to-paycheck, he wrote a whole slew of action-adventure sword-and-sorcery novels very, very quickly, including his most famous books about the tortured anti-hero Elric. In 1992, he published a collection of interviews conducted by Colin Greenland called Michael Moorcock: Death is No Obstacle, in which he discusses his writing method. In the first chapter, “Six Days to Save the World”, he says those early novels were written in about “three to ten days” each, and outlines exactly how one accomplishes such fast writing.
  • From subs to nuts, in wigs, sculpture, fruit and “wearable heroin,” drug smugglers are finding more creative ways to conceal their bootlegged goods.
  • Aquarium staff have managed to wean a chocoholic giant fish onto a healthier diet after inheriting the gourami, raised entirely on Kit Kats by its owners.
  • The prosecutor said police seized $3 million worth of cocaine, $900,000 in cash, steroids, money counters and other paraphernalia from several locations. Also seized were eight vehicles, including a Mercedes-Benz and two Cadillac SUVs.Besides the secret compartments, the ring took extra precautions by placing the vehicles on car carriers ordinarily used by legitimate auto dealers. The car carrier companies weren’t aware that drugs were being shipped inside the vehicles, authorities said.

  • Caleb admitted: “We would wake up at 3pm, soundcheck, have dinner and drink two bottles of wine. We would drink another before we went on stage, take a bunch of pills, drink another bottle on stage followed by a bowl of cocaine.”
  • This is the most arcane of uprisings and the most modern. Its participants, marshalled by Twitter, are protagonists in a sinister flipside to the Arab Spring. The Tottenham summer, featuring children as young as seven, is an assault not on a regime of tyranny but on the established order of a benign democracy. One question now hangs over London’s battle-torn high streets. How could this ever happen?
  • A mystery investor or hedge fund reportedly made a bet of almost $1billion at odds of 10/1 last month that the U.S. would lose its AAA credit rating.Now questions are being asked of whether the trader had inside information before placing the $850million bet in the futures market.

    There were mounting rumours that investor George Soros, 80, famously known as ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’, could be involved.

  • Twitter users in the United Kingdom who posted inflammatory messages encouraging others to engage in violence could be arrested, according to Scotland Yard Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Kavanagh.Kavanagh told The Telegraph that officers were investigating messages posted on Twitter and would “absolutely” consider arresting users who helped incite some of the worst rioting in the British capital in years.

  • Using a hidden video camera, a Texas man filmed four naked, honey-drenched teenage girls while they showered at a church where he worked as a youth pastor.But since the statute of limitations has already expired, prosecutors today were forced to dismiss felony charges lodged against Thomas Fortenberry, who allegedly did the surreptitious filming in November 2007 at the Greater Harvest Community Church in Pasadena.

  • Chinese hospitals and abortion clinics that are connected to the business immediately notify pharmaceutical companies when a baby dies, mostly because of a still birth or an abortion.The companies purchase the baby corpses and store them in some family’s refrigerator to avoid suspicion. The next step in this highly secretive process is putting the corpses in a medical drying microwave and grinding them into pills. The ground baby powder is then put in a capsule, ready to be sold as a stamina enhancer, according to the SBS team.

  • Scientist Mohamed Babu from Mysore, India captured beautiful photos of these translucent ants eating a specially colored liquid sugar. Some of the ants would even move between the food resulting in new color combinations in their stomachs.
  • History always repeats itself, said Hegel. But he forgot to add, commented Karl Marx, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. What Marx meant in his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is that history does not repeat itself at all. It only appears to, because human imaginations cannot keep up with the speed of change, so they dress it in costumes borrowed from the past. It is not the 2011 rioters who are dressing in history’s robes – they appear to have modelled themselves more on recent zombie movies – but commentators, who are reaching for analogies of 1980s socialists to attribute these troubles to familiar causes.It is worth looking at images of London’s violent weekend and asking how they make you feel. Far from fitting into any historical model, they seem to me to come from an imagined London, a horror scenario of the city as a blazing wilderness. Sci-fi nightmares of urban catastrophe resonate with these pictures because this is a city made strange.

  • The drought in Texas has gotten so severe municipal water managers have turned to a once untenable idea: recycling sewage water.”When you talk about toilet-to-(water) tank it makes a lot of people nervous and grossed out,” says Terri Telchik, who works in the city manager’s office in Big Spring, Texas.

    Water for the town’s 27,000 residents comes through the Colorado River Municipal Water District, which has broken ground on a plant to capture treated wastewater for recycling.

    “We’re taking treated effluent (wastewater), normally discharged into a creek, and blending it with (traditionally supplied potable) water,” district manager John Grant told Discovery News.

  • Watch The Throne will be released first on iTunes before the Best Buy chain’s exclusive deal to sell the album nearly two weeks ahead of other music retailers.The letter says the deal will do “great damage” to more than 1,700 record stores and calls for equal access.

    Jay-Z’s spokesman had no comment.

    Posted by the organisers of Record Store Day, the letter has been signed by shops across the US and calls the release plan a “short-sighted strategy”.

  • Three Mexican nationals attempted to illegally land their boat on California’s Huntington Beach Sunday — about a mile away from where crowds were forming to watch a professional surfing contest.Lifeguards spotted the small fishing boat at around 8:30 a.m., but when the men realized they had been spotted, they turned back to sea and were seen throwing a package overboard, The Orange County Register reported.

  • Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific Airways is launching an investigation into pictures that appear to show a pilot receiving oral sex from a flight attendant while in a commercial airplane cockpit.Low quality photos of the act, featuring a woman in a red outfit not unlike those of Cathay Pacific’s flight attendants and a pilot, have circulated through Chinese media. According to some reports, the two are a couple.

  • A witness on the scene during the Rawesome Foods raid has publicly stated that an agent of the Specialized Surveillance & Enforcement Bureau of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health stole $9,000 in cash from James Stewart after placing him in handcuffs. The $9,000 in cash was about to be used to acquire food products (honey, watermelons, eggs and others) that are offered to club members of Rawesome Foods.During the raid on Rawesome Foods, $4,500 in cash was taken from the store and $9,000 confiscated from James Stewart, but only the $4,500 in cash was noted on the warrant. California law requires that all items seized at the raid are noted on the warrant, but the LA County Department of Public Health failed to note the $9,000, meaning there is no longer any paper trail for this cash that was taken from James.

  • A short doc about a kinetic sculpture that took four years to build. We had the honor of spending three days in Chris Burden’s studio filming this sculpture before it was moved to the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art (LACMA) where it is being reinstalled.
    The installation opens fall 2011.
  • “To ban kebabs in Cittadella is like forbidding pizza in Paris or New York,” said Abdallah Khezraji, a member of the Consulta Regionale Immigrazione for Italy’s Veneto region.On Friday, the town council of Cittadella passed a law stopping to stop the issue of licenses to vendors wishing to sell kebabs in the medieval walled city in Veneto.

    ‘Protecting tradition’

    “This food is certainly not part of our tradition and of our identity,” said Mayor Massimo Bitonci of the anti-immigration Northern League party, which shares power in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling coalition.

    Bitonci said kebabs were “not suited to our historic center [because of] the way in which the foods are eaten, the smell they give off.”

    He also justified the ban on health grounds, saying the ordinance targeted “dishes cooked and then left in the open for a long time.”

  • What I am about to describe in this article are not “predictions” of any kind. Rather, they are forecasts based on available data and common sense projections of where the Global Power Elite are trying to take the world, why they are doing so, and what they hope to achieve. The more they keep the general public in the dark, the higher their chances of success.Doing this kind of forecast is rather like understanding the weather. If on a hot summer day you look out your window and see dark clouds and lightning on the horizon, and suddenly a strong, damp ozone-filled gust blows your way, it’s basic common sense to say that you shouldn’t be forecasting “sunny and calm today,” but rather “drenching rain, thunder, lightning and hail.”

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File under Horror, Music, SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG, SeMeN SPeRmS Links 'o Death, Sex

Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on August 9, 2011

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Puppets ‘n Dummies


  • A gang of hackers known as SwagSec announced at the tail end of last week that they had hacked into Lady Gaga’s UK website and made off with a database of names and email addresses of fans. To prove their point, they published the stolen data online.
  • Ventriloquism creeps me out as it is, but these vaudeville era portraits of ventriloquists with their creepy dummies are, well, creepy. This first one is quite possibly the most unsettling thing I have ever seen. Enjoy the rest, including the random police booking photo of “The Great Lester”.
  • For decades, farmers had it relatively easy when it came to weeds infesting their soil: apply herbicides, wait for the weeds to die and grow more crops. Those salad days, alas, are coming to an end.

    A new series of studies released by Weed Science this month finds at least 21 weed species have become resistant to the popular herbicide glyphosate (sold as Monsanto’s Roundup), and a growing number survive multiple herbicides, so-called “super-weeds.” The same selection pressure creating bacteria resistant to multiple antibiotics is leading to the rapid evolution of plants that survive modern herbicides. If the trend continues, yields could drop and food costs climb as weeds grow more difficult to uproot.

  • NAMING your new bundle of joy Lucifer has been effectively banned by New Zealand’s names registrar after three parents had the odd request knocked back.

    The country’s Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages has been cracking down on mothers and fathers getting too creative with their children’s names, ruling out punctuation marks such as . (Full Stop), * (Asterisk) and / (presumably ”Slash”).

    The list of 102 names rejected in the past two years includes Baron, Bishop, Duke, General, Judge, Justice, King, Knight and Mr, all deemed too similar to titles.
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    Messiah was also turned down, as was 89, and the single letters, C, D, I and T, although Q and J were accepted after being queried.

  • RAGING pop star Roger Daltrey claims PM David Cameron does not have “the balls” to tackle mass immigration.

    The Who’s working class hero Roger Daltrey sparked a storm a fortnight ago when he blasted Labour for “screwing” Brits by opening the floodgates to foreigners.

    Yesterday he turned on the Tories, saying Mr Cameron and his team lacked the guts to deal with the issue.

    He also took a pop at leftie rocker Bono for claiming he is a socialist while dodging taxes in his homeland.

  • After getting a pie in the face, Rupert Murdoch inadvertently gets a pair of devil horns.
  • After “Dare to Dream” was put up on YouTube one of its early listeners was Jimmy Iovine, founder of Interscope records. Recognizing quality, Iovine had plans in his mind for Skepta’s track so, with help from parent company Universal, they had YouTube remove the song on copyright grounds.

    Armed with cash Interscope approached Boy Better Known, a group and record label founded in 2005 by Skepta and the team behind Dare to Dream.

    “Being in an industry where money talks, everybody involved in the ‘Dare To Dream’ project came to a conclusion to sign it to Interscope,” says Skepta.

    So who is the lucky recipient of the track? None other than Interscope giant Eminem.

  • For years, it has been a poorly-kept secret that some of the world’s largest wireless providers rely on caller ID information to verify that a call to check voicemail is made from the account holder’s mobile phone. Unfortunately, this means that if you haven’t set up your voicemail account to require a PIN for access, your messages may be vulnerable to snooping by anyone who has access to caller ID “spoofing” technology. Several companies offer caller ID spoofing services, and the tools needed to start your own spoofing operation are freely available online.
  • Last month, however, John Brennan, the White House’s top counterterrorism advisor broke this silence, telling reporters that “in the last year ‘there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.’”

    Zero civilian casualties — during a period when there were more than 100 CIA drone strikes — sounded almost too good to be true. As it turns out, it was. According to a new report from the UK’s award-winning Bureau of Investigative Journalism, released last night, at least 45 civilians were killed in 10 strikes since August 2010. Among these, the Bureau reports that it has identified, by name, six children killed in drone strikes. More civilians are likely to have been killed in an additional 15 strikes for which precise information is not available.

  • The FBI has released its files on two famously controversial publishers, Paladin Press and Loompanics Unlimited, following a FOIA request filed by Government Attic. The files suggest that the booksellers’ huge libraries of books on drugs, guns and other ultra-libertarian issues only rarely drew the FBI’s attention.
  • A series of adverts for a range of women’s hygiene products by Summer’s Eve have sparked a massive backlash from viewers.

    The use of ‘talking’ hands of black, white and Latina women to represent female genitalia was always meant to be provocative, but have been branded racist by some.

    Hundreds of negative comments have been posted online, with some arguing that the distinctive voice-overs adhere to racial stereotypes.

    The commercials were made with the intention of promoting cleanliness, but for many women it’s the image of Summer’s Eve that needs a good scrub.

  • Seventeen people were indicted on Wednesday on charges of running a high-end prostitution ring that catered to Wall Street clients who often spent more than $10,000 in a night, authorities said.

    The ring pulled in more than $7 million over three years, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said at a news conference.

    “The business of high-end prostitution is enormously profitable,” Hynes said.

    The prostitution service, named High Class NY, was run 24 hours a day out of an office in Brooklyn and charged from $400 to $3,600 an hour for its services, according to the 144-count indictment. It also provided customers with cocaine and other narcotics, the indictment said.

    Hynes said clients often spent in excess of $10,000 in a single night.

    They were “all high-end customers coming from the financial markets. People with nothing but money,” he said.

  • Backers of Israel worried that a diminished Rupert Murdoch presence may mute the strongly pro-Israel voice of many of the publications he owns.
  • A bottled liter of water with a few teaspoons of bleach is proving to be a successful recipe for dwellers in the light-deprived slums of the Philippines. The simple technology is spreading sunlight in places where it has never been, and saving residents money at the same time.
  • Police in Nigeria are holding a goat on suspicion of attempted armed robbery.

    Vigilantes seized the black and white goat, saying it was an armed robber who had used black magic to transform himself into an animal to escape after trying to steal a Mazda 323.

    ‘The group of vigilante men came to report that while they were on patrol they saw some hoodlums attempting to rob a car. They pursued them.

  • The store owner quickly begins placing money in a robber’s backpack. As he does, his Chihuahua erupts into ferocious barking at the two men, who beat a hasty retreat, running out of the store with the backpack but taking less money than they could’ve gotten.

    At one point, one of the robbers even points his rifle at the diminutive but undaunted pooch, who chases the pair out of the store and down the street.

  • Pro-abortion activists from Holland who took a seaborne clinic to staunchly Catholic Poland have been forced to pull out after a fortnight of furious protests and official pressure.

    Women on Waves, a group of radical campaigners seeking to spread their doctrine of “free abortions” throughout Europe, had hoped to bypass Poland’s tough anti-abortion laws by ferrying women to international waters aboard a converted tug, the Langenort, to undergo abortions.

    Last week, however, they abandoned their efforts and left Polish waters after providing “counselling” to only 20 women. Rebecca Gomperts, a former Greenpeace activist who heads Women on Waves, refused to say whether they had performed any abortions.

    The arrival of the Langenort in the northern Polish port of Wladyslawowo provoked outrage from the Roman Catholic Church, and the vessel was met by furious demonstrators when it docked.

  • Japan’s science ministry says air above the ground about 150 kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is as radioactive as areas 50 kilometers from the source of radioactivity.

    The ministry on Wednesday released a map showing radiation levels at locations one meter above the ground in Miyagi Prefecture, north of Fukushima, based on the results of an aerial survey from June 22nd through 30th.

  • They looked like Apple products. It looked like an Apple store. It had the classic Apple store winding staircase and weird upstairs sitting area. The employees were even wearing those blue t-shirts with the chunky Apple name tags around their necks.
  • It might be among the hardest materials known, but place a diamond in a patch of sunlight and it will start to lose atoms, say a team of physicists in Australia. The rate of loss won’t significantly trouble tiara wearers or damage diamond rings, but the discovery could prove a boon for researchers working to tap diamond’s exceptional optical and electronic properties.
  • Certain species of Timema stick insects were known to reproduce asexually, with females producing young in “virgin births” without the need for egg fertilisation by males.

    The insects instead produce genetic clones of themselves.

  • A new doll, called the “Breast Milk Baby,” is slated to make a debut sometime this year in US toy stores. A sensation in Europe, the doll has already polarized many groups at odds over issues like breastfeeding in public and those who feel young girls are already growing up too fast.

    The doll comes with a halter which is worn by a young girl as she holds the baby up to a pair of rose petal “nipples” on the front. When the doll is placed near the petals, it begins to make suckling sounds.

    Naturally, when asked what they thought about a breast milk baby doll, some shoppers in NYC were astounded, even offended. But the company who makes it remains philosophical.

    “I think that it’s totally bizarre to teach a prepubescent child how to breastfeed,” said one Manhattanite woman. “Quite strange.”

  • With increasing frequency it seems agencies of the government are looking to tap into the public consciousness to gather information on everything from how you surf the Web to how they can use information generated by you to predict the future. It’s all a little creepy, really. Here we take a look at seven programs announced this year that in some cases really want to crawl into your brain to see what’s happening in the world.
  • New Yorkers have witnessed an urban solar phenomenon, with the Sun setting in alignment with the city’s skyscrapers and giving an effect fans say is reminiscent of Wiltshire’s Stonehenge. Welcome to Manhattanhenge.
  • A good journalist brings that depth of commitment to a story, along with the appropriate contextual information, public memory, and reportorial skill. When a reporter from the German magazine Der Spiegel told me in 2003 that Fox News reporters in Baghdad had borrowed sandbags from American soldiers and piled them on the roof of their hotel to stage an on-camera impression that they were reporting from a battle elsewhere, I was reminded that Murdoch’s News Corporation isn’t so interested in serious journalism.

    No large news organization in the world, in fact—at least none that’s as large as or larger than those influenced by Vladimir Putin in Russia or Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or the Communist Party in China—tries as brazenly as Murdoch’s globe-straddling News Corporation to generate and even fabricate news or to subvert good reporting of news so cynically and powerfully—and hurtfully, to both its subjects and its audiences.

  • Walter Bagdasarian was found guilty two years ago of making threats against a major presidential candidate in comments he posted on a Yahoo.com financial website after 1 a.m. on Oct. 22, 2008, as Obama’s impending victory in the race for the White House was becoming apparent. Bagdasarian told investigators he was drunk at the time.

    A divided panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that conviction Tuesday, saying Bagdasarian’s comments were “particularly repugnant” because they endorsed violence but that a reasonable person wouldn’t have taken them as a genuine threat.

    The observation that Obama “will have a 50 cal in the head soon” and a call to “shoot the [racist slur]” weren’t violations of the law under which Bagdasarian was convicted because the statute doesn’t criminalize “predictions or exhortations to others to injure or kill the president,” said the majority opinion written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt.

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Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on July 21, 2011

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Open Wide

  • The lobster with which a woman was masturbating defecates into her vagina, implanting brine shrimp eggs which later hatch inside her.
  • Already Passed by Congress On October 5, 1982, Dr. Brain T. Clifford of the Pentagon announced at a press conference (“The Star”, New York, Oct. 5, 1982) that contact between U.S. citizens and extra-terrestrials or their vehicles is strictly illegal. According to a law already on the books (Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations, adopted on July 16, 1969, before the Apollo moon shots), anyone guilty of such contact automatically becomes a wanted criminal to be jailed for one year and fined $5,000.
  • Gundersen Postulates Unit 3 Explosion May Have Been Prompt Criticality in Fuel Pool
  • The question raises a fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds? Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to quartz oscillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality. The rapid eye movements in the mirror, known as saccades, aren’t the only things that get edited out. The jittery camera shake of everyday vision is similarly smoothed over, and our memories are often radically revised. What else are we missing? When Eagleman was a boy, his favorite joke had a turtle walking into a sheriff’s office. “I’ve just been attacked by three snails!” he shouts. “Tell me what happened,” the sheriff replies. The turtle shakes his head: “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”
  • Fukushima, or rather the almost 200 tons of fuel present in the four reactors and the 2800 tons of old reactor cores in big 40 ft deep swimming pools that stand over the reactors, represent a lethal and potentially apocalyptic contaminant for the internal poisoning of the whole human race. Taken together, the active reactors and old cores are equivalent to 2000 atomic bombs of 500 kilotons each. Fukushima is then, capable of dispersing in the biosphere, five times the long lived breathable radioactive poisons, cesium 137, Strontium 90, plutonium 239, etc., than all the combined nuclear detonations to date. It is as if Fukushima were equal to a 1000 megaton Atomic Bombs; or expressed another way, 2,000 individual 500 kiloton Atomic Bombs.
  • One argument he consistently makes is that while tech enthusiasts regularly highlight the benefits of new Internet innovations for activists, rarely do they consider the other side of the equation: how technology can also aid enemies of democracy and free expression. He suggests that dictators are not nearly so afraid of the Internet as we might imagine, and that in many cases they have effectively co-opted bloggers and mined social networks to promote their repressive ends. “States used to torture to get this kind of information,” he says. “Now all they have to do is go onto Facebook.”
  • A Connecticut mother who says she wanted to give her son a better education will be arraigned on Wednesday on charges for enrolling the 6-year-old in another town, sparking outrage and support from people nationwide.

    Tanya McDowell, a 33-year-old homeless woman whose last known address was in Bridgeport, Conn, is scheduled to be arraigned on charges of larceny and conspiracy to commit larceny for allegedly stealing $15,686 from Norwalk schools. Prosecutors allege that figure is the value of her son’s education at Norwalk’s Brookside Elementary School between the time he was illegally enrolled in January and McDowell’s arrest on April 14. If convicted, she faces up to 20 years in prison.

  • Shopping for fake Louis Vuittons or Chanel bags on Canal street in Chinatown has become a requisite tourist activity. Only now you could go to jail for it.

    City councilwoman Margaret Chin, who represents the Chinatown district, is introducing a bill this Thursday that proposes harsh punishment for shoppers caught purchasing counterfeits, the New York Post is reporting. Under Chin’s bill, that fake LV could cost you $1,000 in fines (still not quite the cost of some of the real deals) or up to a year in prison.

    Sound harsh? That’s the point.

  • The startling claim went without controversy until today, when Good Magazine pointed out that Trump’s “plan” to seize $1.5 trillion from Iraq’s oil profits to “reemburse ourselves” for the invasion and subsequent occupation would actually be an explicit violation of international law — a violation considered to be a war crime.

    “According to the 1907 Hague Convention, ‘pillaging,’ the stealing of valuable goods from a locality, especially during combat, is a war crime, regardless of what you feel you deserve,” noted Cord Jefferson, Good’s senior editor. “In the Hague’s exact words: ‘The pillage of a town or place, even when taken by assault, is prohibited.’”

  • ‘He probably looked like somebody who probably had some beef,’ he said. But Mr Muhammad added that he wasn’t surprised by the attack.

    ‘I’ve seen just about everything that could happen in this community. I renamed this avenue here body-a-week avenue,’ he said.

    ‘I’ve been here since 1989. I think I’ve seen at least 15 murders on this block in that period of time. It’s a dangerous block.’

  • Lesson of the day… when a police officer asks you a simple question, DO NOT LIE! A simple yes from this guy would have saved him a lot of bruises from the Las Vegas police dept. My view on this: cops dodge bullets every day and deal with all kinds of liars… for the cops safety, Mr – I KNOW MY RIGHTS should be treated no differently than a street thug once he lies to an officer.
  • # Third plateau: At 7.5 to 15.0 mg/kg, effects include flanging of visual effects, difficulty recognizing people or objects, chaotic blindness, dreamlike vision, inability to comprehend language, abstract hallucinations, delayed reaction time, decision making impairment, feelings of peace and quiet, near complete loss of motor coordination, short-term memory impairment, and/or feelings of rebirth.
    # Fourth plateau: At 15.0 mg/kg or more, an individual may experience a perceived loss of contact and control with their own body, changes in visual perception, out-of-body experiences, perceptions of contact with “superior” beings, other miscellaneous delusions, lack of movement or desire to move, rapid heart rate, complete blindness, increased hearing, and intensification of third plateau effects.

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