~o ~o ~o SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG! o~ o~ o~ » Downtown

Hi-Yah!

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 20:42:11 +0000



☆ Meth Lab Found In Boaz Walmart Restroom: Of all the things a Walmart janitor comes across, meth labs are probably low on the list. Boaz Police say a maintenance worker cleaning the women’s restroom found pseudoephedrine pills and a plastic water bottle with residue in the bottom. Managers contacted police, who recovered what Chief Terry Davis called a one-pot ‘shake and bake’ type lab. “That kind of blew my mind when I read the report,” Davis said. “We’ve found a lot of shake and bake meth labs in different places but never inside a business.” Police said it takes about 15 to 30 minutes to cook low-quality methamphetamine using this method, and they do not know if the culprit finished the product.
☆ Why Wall Street loves the War on Drugs: The raid on Oaksterdam has just about everyone in local politics engaging in a little head-scratching: What possible reason would the Obama administration have to crack down on medical marijuana in an election year? How does it help the president, who will be facing an unsettled and angry electorate in a still-tough economy, to alienate the pot smoking liberals of the world, who were at one point among his most loyal constituents? What a fucking idiot.
☆ Facebook can cause addiction for poorly educated: According to researchers from the University of Gothenburg, many people log on as soon as they turn on their computers and its turning into a full blown addiction. They also discovered that people in low income groups and the poorly educated are at a greater risk. Of the ~800 million Facebook users, 85% of them log on daily, and at least half of them open Facebook before anything else when getting on the internet. So why does Facebook make people less happy with their lives? It would seem that many people fear that they are not ‘on top of things’ if they do not regularly check the site, and 25% say they fill ‘ill at ease’ if they can’t log in regularly. Users with low income and low education use Facebook more than other groups. Within these groups, users who spend more time on Facebook also report feeling less happy and less content with their lives. This relationship is also present for women, but not for men.
☆ Edwardsville police officer accused of taking secret photos at tanning salon: An Edwardsville police officer was charged on Monday for surreptitiously taking pictures of three women at a Glen Carbon tanning salon. Michael R. Collins was charged with three felony counts of unauthorized video recording. A female customer accused Collins, who was in the next room, of taking pictures with his cellphone over the wall while she prepared to tan, according to the Madison County state’s attorney. The incident happened on Tuesday at Image Sun Tanning Center in the 6600 block of Edwardsville Crossing Drive.
☆ Ex-Santa Fe cop accused of graphic sex talk in squad car: He was supposed to be supervising other cops in the field, but one Santa Fe Police Department sergeant was caught on his own dash cam video having a graphic sexual conversation with himself. 4 On Your Side spent over a month requesting and reviewing dash cam videos taken from former Sgt. Mike Eiskant’s patrol car. One video shows Eiskant’s vehicle pointed toward Cerillos Road in the middle of the day. Audio from the recording depicts moans, then the unmistakable sound of a zipper. Eiskant is alone in his squad car, and it sounds like he may be masturbating while looking at a picture of a naked woman on his cell phone and texting. At one point in the video he says, “Oh show me those big beautiful breasts baby.” The sex talk, recorded in broad daylight goes on for nearly ten more minutes.
☆ Kickbacks and Other Abuses “Rampant” in Drug Testing Industry: A multimillion dollar settlement paid by a Massachusetts drug test laboratory for an illegal kickback scheme is the latest chapter in an industry bedeviled by criminal investigations, lawsuits, finger pointing and ruthless competition. Calloway Laboratories agreed last week to pay $20 million to settle state charges that it defrauded Medicaid with a kickback scheme that included sham companies, fake doctor signatures, and excessive urine tests for drug addicts.
☆ More than 3,500 NY sex offenders have online video-gaming accounts yanked: Under the “operation game over” initiative, manufacturers who operate online video-gaming networks, like the one for “Call of Duty,” have agreed to cross check their customer accounts with the New York state sex offender registry to remove predators trolling game sites. The companies participating include Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Warner Brothers, Disney, Blizzard Entertainment and Electronic Arts. “We must ensure online video game systems do not become a digital playground for predators,” Schneiderman said.
☆ 5-year-old brings heroin for ‘show and tell’: According to Bryant, the boy, a kindergarten student at Barnum School, had come to school carrying Roman’s jacket. When it came time to make his presentation in class, Bryant said the boy opened the jacket and showed off to his classmates 10 small plastic bags, each containing five folds of heroin. He said the teacher quickly grabbed the bags away from the student and notified the principal, who then called police.
☆ Woman sees image of Jesus on the back of a stingray: It’s not as famous as Grilled Cheesus or the Nun Bun, but the image a James Island woman found Friday on the back of a dead cownose ray may be one day. “I just kind of thought it looked like a bearded homeless man,” said Erica Scheldt, 24. “But when I posted pictures on Instagram, one of my friends was like, ‘That’s Jesus.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God! You’re right!’ ”
☆ The Earth is full: The reason is we have now reached a moment where four words — the earth is full — will define our times. This is not a philosophical statement; this is just science based in physics, chemistry and biology. There are many science-based analyses of this, but they all draw the same conclusion — that we’re living beyond our means. The eminent scientists of the Global Footprint Network, for example, calculate that we need about 1.5 Earths to sustain this economy. In other words, to keep operating at our current level, we need 50% more Earth than we’ve got.
☆ California teen dumps teacher accused of sexually abusing another student: A Northern California teen who made national news when she and her high school teacher moved in together says she has broken off the relationship following allegations that he sexually abused another student. Jordan Powers, 18, told ABC News that when her now former boyfriend, Christopher Hooker, called her from jail she told him, “We’re done.” Hooker, 41, was arrested Friday on suspicion of sexually abusing a different student more than a decade ago. After being booked on one count of oral copulation with a minor, he made a brief court appearance during which a judge entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.
☆ Fdr’s Deadly Secret: FDR and Cocaine: The use of cocaine by FDR for “sinus treatments” is not surprising. We know, from readily available information that from mid-1939, FDR saw McIntire on a daily basis for “sinus treatments”. I believe the only incorrect assumption is that cocaine was being used to treat FDR for chronic sinusitis. Cocaine is a powerful anesthetic and vasoconstrictor and was being used to combat the pain brought on by the constant irritation from therapy. With the goal of affecting a slow cosmetic removal of the cancerous lesion, FDR had innumerable painful procedures over his left eye and in his sinuses, performed by McIntire Between early 1940 and late 1941. Daily use of cocaine obviously leads to addiction, ceasing use, brings about a”rebound” phenomenon, a nasal swelling and intense congestion begging for more cocaine. Mcintire had no problem obtaining cocaine for medical use.
☆ Mexican town celebrates Easter with ‘burning of the Jews’: A newspaper in Mexico is detailing Sunday’s “burning of the Jews,” an annual tradition in Coita, a small town in the state of Chiapas. As part of the custom, locals spend the middle of their Holy Week making Jewish effigies — a reference to Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus before his crucifixion. The fake Jews are then displayed for three days in different parts of the town, serving as an example of poor conduct. They’re ultimately paraded through the streets on Easter Sunday, with local children assigned to stand in front of them and collect money for flammable materials.
☆ Ex-New York woman charged with faking cancer for wedding: Authorities say a former New York woman pretended to have terminal cancer so she could have lavish wedding reception and honeymoon. The Times Herald-Record reports an Orange County Grand jury has indicted 25-year-old Jessica Vega, a former Montgomery resident, with grand larceny and scheme to defraud. According to the indictment, Vega accepted thousands of dollars in donated services and goods after claiming in 2010 that she was dying of leukemia. The newspaper ran a story on Vega’s wedding wish. She married Michael O’Connell in May 2010 and the couple spent their honeymoon in Aruba. Four months later, O’Connell told the newspaper that Vega was faking the illness.
☆ Age 25 – Entire Cycle | Beautiful Cervix Project: This 25 year old woman has never given birth and has no history of STIs. Each photo was taken at approximately 10:00 pm every day starting the first day of her menstrual cycle. For the duration of this project, she used condoms as her birth control method so as not to introduce semenal fluid into the photoshoot. She did not use tampons or mooncups during her menstruation either. This cycle is of normal/average length for her, about 33 days. Her cycle’s follicular phase (variable number of days preovulation) lasts until about day 20 or 21. Her fertile phase lasts from days 13 to 21 with ovulation on day 20. Her luteal (postovulation) phase is 13 days long (12-16 days is the norm and is not variable in a normal cycle).
☆ Free Speech/Protesting Is Now A Felony Punishable By Jail: The Declaration of Independence recognizes all three freedoms as stemming from our humanity. So, what happens if you can speak freely, but the government officials at whom your speech is aimed refuse to hear you? And what happens if your right to associate and to petition the government is confined to areas where those of like mind and the government are not present? This is coming to a street corner near you.
☆ 19 Things That The Talking Heads On Television Are Being Strangely Silent About: Unfortunately, most Americans seem perfectly content with the “infotainment” that they are getting from the major news networks, so major changes to the mainstream media are not likely to happen any time soon. For those wanting something different, you will have to seek out alternative sources of news (such as this website) that are willing to discuss the truly earth shattering events that are continually taking place all over the globe. So what are some of the things that the mainstream media has been ignoring? The following are 19 things that the talking heads on television have been strangely silent about….
☆ British man allegedly fathered up to 600 children through sperm bank donations: New DNA tests suggest the owner of a British fertility clinic may have fathered as many as 600 children, while keeping his donations a secret. And in an even stranger twist, one of his newly discovered offspring says the man’s belief in eugenics may have been behind the decision.
☆ Standing near women now a sex crime in DC: Just look at those perverts, engaging in the age old pervy tradition of rubbing stomachs on boobs and getting off in public with hot elbow-to-elbow action. Or, you know, look at those two guys just trying to get to school, or get home from work, and who are probably as upset about the train being crowded as you are. Yes, groping people on the train is bad, criminal even. But you know what else is bad? Portraying men as sexual predators simply because they boarded a crowded train and someone near them is a woman.
☆ 30-year-old Alleged Child Porn Producer Replaces Bin Laden On FBI’s ‘Most Wanted’ List: A 30-year-old former school teacher who allegedly produced child pornography has replaced former Al Qaeda chief Usama bin Laden on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list.
☆ SATANISM IN HOLLYWOOD | KENNETH ANGER’S GOLDEN AGE OF OCCULT 1969: There is something largely missing from popular cinema and music these days, and that’s Satan. I might be sounding old-fashioned – but Satanism had some style. While 1969 turned many things bad – Hells Angels, heroin, peyote, Charles Manson, Dick Van Dyke – Kenneth Anger’s pact with the devil was reaping psychedelic fruit. Anger was a powerful force. His grasp of the symbolic – reckoned with the Satanic creed of ‘Do What Thou Wilt’ – alchemised into works such as Scorpio Rising and Invocation of My Demon Brother, and dealt the decade a final score. And along the way he also scared some people. In fact, his “awesomely evil 11-minute masterpiece” Invocation – starring himself, Anton LaVey (the High Priest of the Church of Satan), Charles Manson sidekick Bobby Beausoleil (later to serve life imprisonment with Manson for first degree murder), and featuring documentary footage from a satanic cat funeral, a ceremonial skull smoking session, a mummified psychic and a synthesized Moog soundtrack
☆ Drug death at Blaine party draws 10 years: Showing no emotion, LaMere, 22, spoke briefly about how he ordered the substance online but didn’t know it was illegal. Handing out what turned out to be the drug 2C-E at the party, he saw Trevor Robinson, 19, snort it and “start to have a bad experience.” Sometime later, LaMere said, “I was in an ambulance, and Trevor ended up dying.” Ten others who took the drug became ill and were hospitalized. LaMere was charged with felony third-degree murder last March. The high-profile case prompted heightened awareness about the dangers of synthetic drugs, which are easily bought off the Internet with buyers never knowing exactly what they’re getting. It also provoked a highly unusual letter from the top levels of federal prosecution that put pressure on local prosecutors to seek a tough sentence.
☆ Cannabis Vending Machine: Vending machines normally cure the munchies with shelves laden with chips and chocolates, but one being trialled in West Auckland may well cause them. New Zealand’s first cannabis club, the Daktory, has been using the machine – which sells one gram bags of cannabis for $20 – at it’s New Lynn headquarters to avoid any of their members being charged with dealing the Class C drug. The hired vending machine is a standard dispenser but has been filled with cannabis rather than confectionery or toys.
☆ Man growing marijuana turns himself in ‘to do the right thing’: A Treasure Coast man walked into the Port St. Lucie Police Department on Monday carrying marijuana plants and seeds, saying “he wanted to turn himself in to do the right thing,” according to an arrest report. Port St. Lucie police said Michael Cabral entered the station carrying 12 marijuana plants, seeds and drug paraphernalia.
☆ Painkiller Opana, new scourge of rural America: Prescription drug abuse is the new scourge of rural America. It now leads to more deaths in the United States than heroin and cocaine combined, and rural residents are nearly twice as likely to overdose on pills than people in big cities, according to the Centers for Disease Control. While methamphetamine addiction has long been associated with small towns, prescription painkillers have overtaken meth as the most abused drugs in places such as southern Indiana, according to local authorities. Opana is the hot new prescription drug of abuse, sometimes with tragic consequences.
☆ Chinese Farmers Become Gigolos To Pay for Online Gaming Addiction: Motivated by a desire to make easy money, many of these SGF head into the city, but because they are uneducated, they turn to a life of prostitution. While prostitution has bought considerable income to some, sometimes they might even make 3000 RMB ($476 US) a month, the frequency of “pick-ups” and an addiction to online games, has made this occupation taxing upon the body.
☆ World’s largest Christian TV channel ‘funds owners’ exorbitant lifestyle’: It also describes the purchase of “multiple motor vehicles, including a $100,000 motor home purchased by Trinity Broadcasting as a mobile residence for director Janice Crouch’s dogs”. Directors of the network are also accused of misusing funds to cover up sex scandals, including the alleged “cover-up and destruction of evidence concerning a bloody sexual assault involving Trinity Broadcasting and affiliated Holy Land Experience employees; the cover-up of director Janice Crouch’s affair with a staff member at the Holy Land Experience; the cover-up of director Paul Crouch’s use of Trinity Broadcasting funds to pay for a legal settlement with Enoch Lonnie Ford (a former TBN employee who said he had a homosexual affair with [founder] Paul Crouch)”.
☆ Parents in shock as priest displays gay porn images: A PRIEST has denied knowing how gay porn images appeared on a screen during a presentation he was giving to parents of children preparing for First Communion. Fr Martin McVeigh was setting up the PowerPoint display when the explicit sex scenes flashed up on the screen. He was about to give a talk to the parents of First Communicants but abandoned the presentation after the pornographic images appeared. One of those present said the pictures appeared on the screen after the priest put a USB memory stick into the computer at St Mary’s School in Pomeroy, Co Tyrone. “There were plenty of shocked faces. There’s a lot of parents very angry about it.”
☆ The Results From Our Nationwide Cell Phone Tracking Records Requests: Given the intimate nature of location information, the government should have to obtain a warrant based upon probable cause to track cell phones. That is what is necessary to protect Americans’ privacy, and it is also what is required under the constitution. But is that what the police do? The answer is it depends. Law enforcement agencies’ tracking policies are in a state of chaos, with different towns following different rules — or in some cases, having no rules at all.
☆ Sperm-hunting women prowl Zimbabwe highways: Susan Dhliwayo was stunned when she pulled her car over recently to pick up a group of male hitchhikers and they refused to get in. The reason? They feared being raped. Sensational reports of gangs of beautiful women picking up male travellers to have sex and harvest their sperm in condoms have gripped Zimbabwe in a dizzying mix of taboos, rituals and the downright bizarre. “Now, men fear women. They said: ‘we can’t go with you because we don’t trust you’,” 19-year-old Dhliwayo recounted. Local media have reported victims of the highway prowlers being drugged, subdued at gun or knife point — even with a live snake in one case — given a sexual stimulant and forced into repeated sex before being dumped on the roadside. The sperm hunters first surfaced in the local press in 2009 but police have only arrested three women, found with a plastic bag of 31 used condoms in October. The attacks have continued since they were nabbed for allegedly violating 17 men.
☆ US government: We hear there’s child porn on those Megaupload servers, judge!: Megaupload wants the servers back to help with its defense, but with most of its assets seized by the federal government, it can’t pay for them. Carpathia would normally wipe the servers and lease them to new clients, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation is demanding that legitimate users of the site be allowed to retrieve their personal data first. The Motion Picture Association of America doesn’t want this to happen without assurances that its copyrighted content won’t be retrieved and distributed again; besides, it might want the servers for a future lawsuit of its own. And the federal government yesterday announced that the servers “may contain child pornography,” which would render them “contraband” and limit Carpathia’s options for dealing with them.
☆ Is sugar toxic?: The chances are good that sugar is a bigger part of your daily diet than you may realize which is why our story tonight is so important. New research coming out of some of America’s most respected institutions is starting to find that sugar, the way many people are eating it today, is a toxin and could be a driving force behind some of this country’s leading killers, including heart disease. As a result of these findings, an anti-sugar campaign has sprung up, led by Dr. Robert Lustig, a California endocrinologist, who believes the consumption of added sugars has plunged America into a public health crisis.
☆ Explosive Billy Corgan Interview: The Awakening Has Begun: Infowars.com and Prisonplanet.tv proudly presents Alex Jones’ sit down interview with Billy Corgan, founder of the rock band, “The Smashing Pumpkins”. During this incredible conversation, Alex and Billy discuss the impact social media has on the music business, the role of the musician in society, the ever evolving left-right paradigm, the occupy wall street movement, and the noticeable spiritual awakening that threatens the very core of the globalist agenda.
☆ Ugly New Reputation-Smearing Tactic: Going After A Toddler’s Internet Footprint: Crystal Cox, a Montana woman who calls herself an “investigative journalist” was slapped with a $2.5-million judgment last year for defaming an investment firm and one of its lead partners. Cox had taken control of the Google footprint of Obsidian Finance and its principal Kevin Padrick by writing hundreds of posts about them on dozens of websites she owned, inter-linking them in ways that made them rise up in Google search results; it ruined Obsidian’s business due to prospective clients being put off by the firm’s seemingly terrible online reputation. After Obsidian sued Cox, she contacted them offering her “reputation services;” for $2,500 a month, she could “fix” the firm’s reputation and help promote its business. (In some circles, we call that ”extortion.”)
☆ ‘Annoying, Offending’ Language Online Would Be Crime Under Arizona Bill: Distasteful comments and online insults are a mainstay of many social networks and online comment boards, but a new bill passed in Arizona could send people who “annoy or offend” to jail for up to six months.
☆ ‘Stalker’ app pulled after ‘tool for rapists’ outcry: An iPhone app that in effect allowed users to stalk women nearby using location-based social networking service Foursquare has been pulled from the iTunes app store by its developer after an outcry. The “Girls Around Me” app used publicly available data from the check-in service Foursquare to show where women had checked in nearby. Foursquare then yanked the Girls Around Me app’s access to its data. This, in turn, led to the app’s developer removing it from iTunes as it did not work properly.
☆ Student’s Science Project Shuts Down Dallas Airport: The device was discovered by authorities near the cockpit of Southwest Airlines Flight 157 after arriving from Kansas City shortly before 4PM on Sunday. The device looked like a cell phone attached to a remote control car with some exposed wires protruding. The TSA evacuated gates 3 through 15 as a precautionary measurement against the “deadly” science project. In all, 11 people were detained in connection with the device. The incident caused ongoing flight delays at the Dallas airport, including three that had to be diverted.
☆ Worse than SOPA: CISPA cybersecurity bill will censor the Internet: H.R. 3523, a piece of legislation dubbed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (or CISPA for short), has been created under the guise of being a necessary implement in America’s war against cyberattacks. But the vague verbiage contained within the pages of the paper could allow Congress to circumvent existing exemptions to online privacy laws and essentially monitor, censor and stop any online communication that it considers disruptive to the government or private parties. Critics have already come after CISPA for the capabilities that it will give to seemingly any federal entity that claims it is threatened by online interactions, but unlike the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Acts that were discarded on the Capitol Building floor after incredibly successful online campaigns to crush them, widespread recognition of what the latest would-be law will do has yet to surface to the same degree.
☆ NBC News regrets editing of Trayvon shooting call: The “Today” show’s segment ran as: “Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.” The full conversation ran as: “Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about. Dispatcher: OK, and this guy – is he black, white or Hispanic? Zimmerman: He looks black.” NBC News is owned by NBC Universal, a unit of Comcast Corp.
☆ Israel at forefront of testing medical marijuana: Israel’s health ministry says the country now has the world’s highest per capita rate of medical marijuana use. Around 9,000 Israelis with serious injuries or illness have access to prescription cannabis and doctors there are learning more about the benefits of the plant, that go beyond pain relief.
☆ Live Go-Go In The 80′s/90′s: Earlier this week, I came across some amazing live go-go videos from the late 80′s and early 90′s on YouTube. Growing up near D.C. (I lived an hour away), I can remember as a kid on one particular occasion seeing a flurry of kids in go-go bands playing on every corner, homemade junk percussion in tow and some insanely intense, rich grooves. It’s the sub-genre’s distinctive rhythms that drive the music into something focused almost purely on the percussive interplay and call-and-response participation; describing the sound is difficult to put into words, but once you hear it, you know what go-go is.
☆ Crazy Dyed Cats (I Smell Photoshop): Restyling of the cat. Coloring or dying costs $15,000 and must be repeated every 3 months. Therefore, $60,000 a year.
☆ Gang tattooed barcodes onto women forced to be prostitutes: Spanish police: Spanish police arrested 22 suspected pimps who allegedly used violence to force women into prostitution and tattooed them with bar codes as a sign of ownership, officials said Saturday. Police are calling the gang the “bar code pimps.” Officers freed one 19-year-old woman who had been beaten, held against her will and tattooed with a bar code and an amount of money — €2,000 (about $2,650) — which investigators believe was the debt the gang wished to extort before releasing her. The woman had also been whipped, chained to a radiator and had her hair and eyebrows shaved off, according to an Interior Ministry statement. Thanks Jasmine
☆ Homosexual necrophiliac serial killer helps blind children: Homosexual serial killer Dennis Nilsen, who sexually abused his dead victims’ corpses has proved he can be a productive member of society by helping blind children learn science. Nilsen murdered at least 15 men and boys between 1978 and 1983 by strangling or drowning them before storing their bodies for sexual purposes and possibly eating parts of them. The corpses were eventually dismembered, fed to wild animals, burned on bonfires or flushed down the toilet. Nilsen has been in prison for almost 30 years serving eight life sentences, his minimum tariff of 25 years was overruled by the Home Secretary and Nilsen has been told he will never be eligible for parole. But this week it has come to light that the nefarious murderer, who was nicknamed the ‘Kindly Killer’ has been helping blind children to read for years.
☆ New surveillance camera can search 36 million faces for matches in one second: A new surveillance camera by Hitachi Kokusai Electric can look at footage that contains an image of someone, either still or video, and then search other video or still images on file for other instances of that same face. In so doing, it can search, process and display up to thirty six million faces in just one second. Each hit is displayed immediately in its native format, i.e. still or video, in thumbnail form, which its makers say, allows the camera to display the actions of a person prior to, or even after, being seen by the surveillance camera. All they need do is click on the thumbnail to watch the video play.
☆ Teacher’s aide fired for refusing to hand over Facebook password: You can add this one to the short but growing list of employers demanding access to Facebook accounts. After refusing to give her Facebook password to her supervisors, Kimberly Hester was fired by Lewis Cass Intermediate School District from her job as an aide to Frank Squires Elementary in Cassopolis, Michigan. She is now fighting a legal battle with the school district. This all started in April 2011, when Hester was using Facebook on her own time (when she wasn’t working at the school). She jokingly posted a picture of a co-worker’s pants around her ankles and a pair of shoes, with the caption “Thinking of you.” A parent and Facebook friend of Hester’s saw the photo and complained to the school. A few days later, Lewis Cass ISD superintendent Robert Colby asked her three times for access to her Facebook account. Hester refused each of the district superintendent’s requests.
☆ TacoCopter – Tacos Delivered Straight to Your Home With GPS Guided Quadcopters: TacoCopter is an idea whose time has come. Quadcopters plus tacos plus a delivery service equals a college student’s dream, and with it, rampant speculation across the web. Around since last July, the TacoCopter website suddenly grabbed the web’s attention days ago with its claim that they will take your order via a smartphone and deliver tacos straight to your location with GPS-guided, unmanned quadcopters.
☆ The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say): Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program
☆ NBC: Skittles Now ‘A Symbol of Racial Injustice’: Filling in for Matt Lauer on Friday’s NBC Today, co-host Hoda Kotb made a bizarre proclamation about race relations in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting: “Skittles obviously has become really kind of a symbol in the whole Trayvon Martin case. A symbol of racial injustice. You see people holding up the bags of Skittles in their hands and it clearly means something.”
☆ Rammellzee on the Making of “Beat Bop” (previously unpublished interview, 1999).: Given its participants, “Beat Bop” is a recording with mystique virtually encoded in its DNA. Highly collectable in its elusive original Tartown Records’ incarnation thanks to Basquiat’s unmistakable work on its picture sleeve, the 10-minute masterpiece’s trippy, reverb-bathed post-punk funk – unforgettably punctuated by Rammel’s mutant nasal rhyme forays (or “gangster duck” style) – epitomized the experimental ethos of early ’80s downtown New York. A time when hip-hop’s dissemination from the Bronx across neighborhoods, train lines, boroughs and well beyond put the world on notice: shit was about to change in irrefutable ways.
☆ False memories generated in lab mice: In the 1940s, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield found his patients would recall seemingly random information – the smell of cookies for instance – when he stimulated different brain areas with electric shocks. Two studies have now found evidence to support the memory storage theory that Penfield stumbled across. The research, in mice, even demonstrates that it is possible to manipulate brain cells to create false memories. Mark Mayford of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, and colleagues genetically engineered mice so that neurons that fired would fire again when the brain was injected with a drug.
☆ Man Charged In Best Buy Porn Case: “It was extremely, extremely pornographic image,” customer Gloria Berg says. “I think even the word ‘pornographic’ doesn’t cover it. I have never watched pornography, so I don’t know what else you can see there, but to me, I really felt extremely violated.” Berg was inside the store with her son and his children. She says they were looking at the store’s display of 55-inch screen smart televisions when a pornographic photo of a man and woman suddenly popped up. She says the image stayed up for several minutes before the manager came over and took it down, and by then, several horrified families had seen it. She says the manager told her someone had used the store’s WI-FI to upload the image to the TV’s.
☆ Solar storm dumps gigawatts into Earth’s upper atmosphere: A recent flurry of eruptions on the sun did more than spark pretty auroras around the poles. NASA-funded researchers say the solar storms of March 8th through 10th dumped enough energy in Earth’s upper atmosphere to power every residence in New York City for two years.
☆ A CLOCKWORK ORANGE in-depth analysis: “THE POWER DRUG” An in-depth analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
☆ Alex in the Chelsea Drug Store: How much Stanley Kubrick trivia can you stand? One of the delights of DVD over VHS tape is the ability to step frame by perfect frame through any given film sequence without the picture being disturbed by noise. This reveals a lot more detail should you wish to scrutinise a favourite scene like the single dolly shot in A Clockwork Orange where Malcolm McDowell makes a circuit of the “disc-bootick” before chatting up a couple of devotchkas.
☆ The Kubrick Site: The Hechinger Debacle: A Clockwork Orange has attracted more than its share of controversy, both as book and later as movie. Little wonder then that, when the film was attacked in the New York Times op-ed pages as an example of what the author, Fred Hechinger, called ‘the voice of fascism’, no less an exigiter of the film than Stanley Kubrick himself joined in the debate. Usually reticent regarding his personal interpretations, Kubrick, in this instance, reveals himself to be a passionate exponent of specific thematic ideas, and the way in which film can be used to exposit them. It all began with a relatively harmless promotional piece; from the January 4, 1972 issue of The New York Times
☆ Qing Dynasty Official’s Tomb Robbed, Body Well-Preserved: March 17th, Fujian province Ningde city, local residents while hiking discovered an ancient body wearing dynastic clothing embroidered with what appears to be dragons and called the police. Investigations revealed that it was related to the grave robbing of a government official who had served the Qing Emperor Guangxu (1882 AD) in his 8th year, and the body had been casually cast aside by the grave robber. According to reports, this is the highest ranking and most well preserved mummified body of a Qing era government official discovered locally. [Above] March 19th, Fujiang Ningde Xiapu county, the little pavilion of the old tomb that was robbed. This 1882-built construct is one of 4 “Phoenix” tomb rooms, which presently have all been robbed. 130 years ago, tombs were divided into 4 rooms, a household tomb, where two couples were interred.
☆ FBI Linked to Yet Another Domestic Terrorism Plot: Over the course of a year, 29-year-old Amine El Khalifi, who was clearly mentally ill and often high on cocaine and other drugs, was persuaded by an FBI informant to agree to attack the U.S. Capitol. Because El Khalifi didn’t have a gun, a bomb or a car, the FBI informant graciously offered to provide him all three – and thus El Khalifi was driven to the U.S. Capitol building by the FBI, handed a gun and a bomb, and then arrested as an “al Qaeda operative.” Khalifi was best known for his years of selling drugs and strutting through D.C. nightclubs in designer suits, living a playboy lifestyle. But two years ago, while dating a Muslim woman of Bulgarian and Turkish descent, El Khalifi embraced Islam and became religious, friends said. After the relationship ended, the girlfriend, obviously disgruntled, contacted the FBI and suggested her ex-boyfriend might be a good target for a frame-up.
☆ How Long Until Obama Bans Troops From Wearing This Awesome “Pork-Eating Crusader” Gear?: The patch includes an image of a knight in a Crusade’s tunic, eating what appears to be a large ham hock, and lest there be any confusion — a translation in Arabic. They haven’t gone unnoticed. The website Muslim Awakening, posts a picture of what appears to be a German soldier with the patch adhered to his combat uniform.
☆ ALERT ! Mexico 7.9M earthquake PRE-PLANNED = verified simulation for march 20, 2012: This is profound and disturbing. There was a “drill” planned for March 20, 2012 in Mexico for a 7.9M earthquake “simulation”…. also on a separate note.. Barack Obamas daughter was at the epicenter on spring break: WTH is going on?!
☆ Teen’s Porn Star Date To Prom Scuttled By District Officials: A Minnesota high school student who lined up a porn actress to be his senior prom date will not be allowed to take the adult star to the dance, FoxNews.com has learned. Mike Stone, 18, of Oakdale, Minn., sent hundreds of tweets this week to adult film stars asking them to accompany him to the May 12 dance at Tartan High School. Two actresses, Emy Reyes and Megan Piper, soon responded, with Reyes saying, “I would love tooo” [sic] and Piper agreeing to attend if Stone covered her travel costs from Los Angeles. But Stone’s dream date won’t happen, according to school district officials.

Submit Links:
SeMeNSPeRmS@SeMeNSPeRmS.com

DJ SeMeN SPeRmS This Saturday At Westway Something Smells Fishy

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 03:19:45 +0000

Arron Bondaroff Presents
“Something Smells Fishy”
Pisces Festival Part 2
Saturday March 17 @ Westway

Music Malady By
Cold Ones
Virgins
Normally Important
Jailbait
Crazy Band

DJs
SeMeN SPeRmS
Physical Therapy
Nate Lowman
8 Yr Old Kid Sensation DJ Arson
Plain Pat

Birthday Celebration For
Gordon Stevenson
Aaron Bondaroff
Weirdo Dave
Fat Bill Strobeck
Shelly Zander
Keir Kramlich
Miss Info

Notable Pisces

Chris & Cory Kennedy , ALex Olson, lesely Arfin,ethan swan , lissy trullie, vanna youngstien, nartasha nunez, pam love , malcom ford
nick ackerman, chrissie miller, greg krelenstein, ,alden nusser , susan miller, rob lowe, joe mamma, nat king cole, pete doherty casey anthony, charles barkley , justin bieber, spike lee, johnny cash, kurt cobain, cindy crawford, Dr J , lou reed , albert einstien ,

Touched

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:27:30 +0000

★ Americans Shoplifted $1.8 Billion Worth of Stuff This Christmas: Hope you have a Merry Christmas, America, because you’ve been extremely naughty at the mall this year. After surveying retailers in the U.S., the Global Retail Theft Barometer says that shoppers pinched $1.8 billion worth of merchandise during the four weeks leading up to Christmas, reports the AP. $1.8 billion! For context, $1.8 billion is a 6 percent increase from 2010 — a total of approximately 62 million Tickle Me Elmos at retail. And this is a year when there aren’t even any good toys to buy. When stores are offering big markdowns because people aren’t spending as much. But that’s exactly the point: while there will always be some built-in kleptomania to society, the sour economy drives some people to buy less and steal more. Or at least gives them a good excuse for doing so.
★ Cardinal Faces Pushback For Comparing Gay Rights Movement To The KKK: Change.org has released a petition calling for the resignation of Catholic Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, following comments the Cardinal made to FOX Chicago Sunday comparing the gay rights movement to the Klu Klux Klan’s anti-Catholicism. Equally Blessed, an umbrella group of pro-LGBT rights Catholic organizations, has reinforced the pushback by releasing a statement declaring in part that George, “has demeaned and demonized LGBT people in a manner unworthy of his office. In suggesting that the Catholic hierarchy has reason to fear LGBT people in the same way that blacks, Jews, Catholics and other minorities had reason to fear the murderous nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan, he has insulted the memory of the victims of the Klan’s violence and brutality.” The petition has already garnered well over half the 2,500 signatures the organization was aiming for.
★ Aquaponics: Baltimore city, suburban residents try hand at fish farming: The aquarium in the living room of Meir and Leah Lazar’s Baltimore County home isn’t just for decoration. The tilapia and bluegills packed into the 50-gallon glass tank are waiting their turn to wind up on dinner plates. Out back, Meir Lazar is putting the finishing touches on a bigger new home for the fish inside a plastic-covered greenhouse. There, he hopes, the waste from the fish he’s tending will help him raise enough lettuce, tomatoes and other produce to feed his family of five year-round. Sustainability is more than a buzzword for Meir Lazar, 32, a computer systems administrator and teacher who’s pursuing aquaponics in his small suburban backyard off Greenspring Avenue. He said he’s inspired at least in part by news reports about food tainted by pesticides, bacteria and even radiation from the Japanese nuclear reactor meltdown earlier this year.
★ Man Dressed as Santa Believed to Shoot Six: Police were looking for a motive in a shooting in which they believe a man dressed as Santa Claus killed six family members in a Fort Worth, Texas, suburb on Christmas day before shooting himself. No one survived the carnage in the living room of a two-story apartment in Grapevine, Texas. Police said it was the single largest mass-shooting death in the city’s history and among the worst in Texas in recent years.
★ Unrelenting Global Economic Crisis: A Doomsday View of 2012: The economic, political and social outlook for 2012 is profoundly negative. The almost universal consensus, even among mainstream orthodox economists is pessimistic regarding the world economy. Although, even here, their predictions understate the scope and depth of the crises, there are powerful reasons to believe that beginning in 2012, we are heading toward a steeper decline than what was experienced during the Great Recession of 2008 – 2009. With fewer resources, greater debt and increasing popular resistance to shouldering the burden of saving the capitalist system, the governments cannot bail out the system. Many of the major institutions and economic relations which were cause and consequence of world and regional capitalist expansion over the past three decades are in the process of disintegration and disarray. The previous economic engines of global expansion, the US and the European Union, have exhausted their potentialities and are in open decline.
★ 8-Bit Yulelog
★ Mexico’s cartels build own national radio system: The alert goes out from a taxi driver or a street vendor, equipped with a high-end handheld radio and paid to work as a lookout known as a “halcon,” or hawk. The radio signal travels deep into the arid countryside, hours by foot from the nearest road. There, the 8-foot-tall (2-meter-tall) dark-green branches of the rockrose bush conceal a radio tower painted to match. A cable buried in the dirt draws power from a solar panel. A signal-boosting repeater relays the message along a network of powerful antennas and other repeaters that stretch hundreds of miles (kilometers) across Mexico, a shadow communications system allowing the cartel to coordinate drug deliveries, kidnapping, extortion and other crimes with the immediacy and precision of a modern military or law-enforcement agency.
★ Killin’ for Candy and Concords: The Price of Black Life: In recent news, an up and coming rapper was killed in a crowded Atlanta mall. According to authorities, Joe Blackmon, aka “Killa Black,” was standing in line for a pair of Air Jordan Concords when he, accidentally, knocked a Jolly Rancher out of the hand of the man in front of him. The man, described only as “an African American in a black hoodie with saggin’ pants” pumped five rounds in him before fleeing the scene. Witnesses say that the crowd just stepped over the dying Blackmon like nothing happened ,some even refusing to let paramedics through for fear of losing their places in line… Recently, people were shocked that Brick Squad affiliate, Slim Dunkin, was murdered in an Atlanta studio, allegedly, stemming from a fight over a piece of candy. This tragic event was coupled by media images of mobs of people beating each other senseless over the new Air Jordan XI Concords
★ Touched: The Jerry Sandusky Story: Submitter: Hello, I’m a librarian in [NY] and a huge college football fan. Shortly after the sex abuse scandal at Penn State I decided to look on amazon and in our library catalog to see if we had anything by or about Jerry Sandusky. There are 14 copies of his unfortunately titled autobiography, Touched, floating about according to WorldCat
★ Israel Spyware Sold To Iran: The clandestine arrangement worked smoothly for years. The Israeli company shipped its Internet- monitoring equipment to a distributor in Denmark. Once there, workers stripped away the packaging and removed the labels. Then they sent it to a man named “Hossein” in Iran, an amiable technology distributor known to them only by his first name and impeccable English, say his partners in Israel and Denmark. Israeli trade, customs and defense officials say their departments didn’t know that the systems for peering into Internet traffic, sold under the brand name NetEnforcer, had gone to a country whose leaders have called for the destruction of the Jewish state. Israel’s ban on trade with its enemy failed, even though a paper trail on the deals was available in Denmark.
★ Report Assails Japan Response to Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident: From inspectors’ abandoning of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as it succumbed to disaster to a delay in disclosing radiation leaks, Japan’s response to the nuclear accident caused by the March tsunami fell tragically short, a government-appointed investigative panel said on Monday. The failures, which the panel said worsened the extent of the disaster, were outlined in a 500-page interim report detailing Japan’s response to the calamitous events that unfolded at the Fukushima plant after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out all of the site’s power. Three of the plant’s six reactors overheated and their fuel melted down, and hydrogen explosions blew the tops off three reactor buildings, leading to a major leak of radiation at levels not seen since Chernobyl in 1986.
★ An Independent America: Voters leaving Republican, Democratic parties in droves: A recent analysis conducted by USA Today showed that American voters are fed up with both mainstream political parties and are leaving them in droves. The newspaper claims that “More than 2.5 million voters have left the Democratic and Republican parties since the 2008 elections.” Over the last decade this trend has only seemed to accelerate says USA Today. While many people feel there is little difference in the parties, their options remain slim. Yet, voters switching to Independent have climbed dramatically. According to the statistics gathered from eight swing states, “Democrats’ registration is down by 800,000 and Republicans’ by 350,000. Independents have gained 325,000.”
★ ATF and D.C. Police Impersonate Rap Label; Arrest 70 in Year Long Guns and Drug Sting: Over $7.2 million in drugs and 161 weapons were confiscated after a year long investigation by the Washington D.C. Police and the Bureau the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which operated as fictional rap label. According to Washington D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier, D.C. police and ATF agents acted as undercover officers and “music industry insiders” during the year-long sting. The police created the “Manic Enterprisess” studio in Northeast Washington, for fictional rap artist Richie Valdez in November of 2010. Agents then told the underground world and black market that they were seeking to purchase weapons and drugs. Over the course of the year, agents confiscated 161 firearms (including a rocket launcher), 29 assault weapons, 80 pounds of methamphetamine, 21 pounds of cocaine, 1.25 gallons of PCP, 24 pounds of marijuana, heroin and Ecstasy. “If these drugs and guns had made it to our streets, the impact would have been devastating to community,”
★ LAPD botched use of downtown crime cameras: Most of the surveillance cameras installed in downtown Los Angeles as part of an effort to help police crack down on crime have not been working for two years, according to interviews and records reviewed by The Times. The cameras were installed over the last few years in a highly publicized partnership between local business groups, which purchased them, and the Los Angeles Police Department, which was to monitor and maintain them. But officials said the majority of the cameras don’t work. Some broke down and were never fixed. In the case of six cameras purchased to watch over Little Tokyo, LAPD officials admit that they were never plugged in to the police station’s monitoring bank.

Submit Links:
SeMeNSPeRmS@SeMeNSPeRmS.com

Hack Yer DNA

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:31:45 +0000

✧ 1972 Kenner Toy Comic Book Catalog: 1972 Kenner Toy Comic Book Catalog (Newspaper Insert)
✧ THE COOLEST TOYS EVER: The barely legal pleasure palace: If there’s one thing that kids have in common, it’s a love of toys. Whether your parents got you ever latest new flashy thing, or you just found an armless GI JOE to pass the time with, toys have played an important role in all of our lives. Here’s a loving look at the coolest toys of all time, resulting from an intensive 8 year multi-million dollar study performed by our website.
✧ Sandusky’s Lawyer: If You Believe Witness, “I Suggest You Dial 1-800-REALITY.” That’s A Gay Phone Sex Line.: Joe Amendola, the attorney for Jerry Sandusky who thus far has been lawyerin’ like a man who got his J.D. from the bottom of a cereal box, did some more lawyerin’ in front of the cameras this morning. The choicest moment: At one point, Amendola discussed the possibility that Mike McQueary witnessed a rape, told Joe Paterno and two university administrators, and no one did anything except tell Sandusky to stay out of the locker room with kids. To anyone who believes that version of events, Amendola said, “I suggest you dial 1-800-REALITY.” We did. Here’s what we got: Hey guys, welcome to the hottest place for triple-X action. Get ready for bulging, bursting pleasure with horny gay, bi, and bi-curious studs. Just 99 cents per minute.
✧ “Mad Honey” Sex Is A Bad Idea: “Mad honey” is honey made by bees from the nectar of toxic Rhododendron flowers. In places where wild Rhododendrons grow, including Turkey, it’s a health hazard. The dangers of mad honey were known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and it’s reported that leaving tainted honeycombs in the path of invading armies was a popular military tactic. 2000 years later, some people still haven’t quite got the message. According to a case report from cardiologists Yarlioglues et al, a married couple deliberately ate some mad honey “for reasons of sexual performance”.
✧ The Internet Blacklist vs. The Constitution: Last week, two leading Constitutional scholars offered detailed analyses of the Internet blacklist bills now pending in Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect-IP, or PIPA. Both scholars concluded that the proposed law could not pass muster under the U.S. Constitution. So you’d think that the new version of SOPA circulated this week would have resolved those concerns. You’d think wrong. While the revised SOPA briefly mentions the First Amendment, the substantive text makes clear that’s just lip service. Here’s a selection of fundamental flaws that remain in both SOPA and PIPA:
✧ Rosemount High parent-on-student kissing prank has principal apologizing: A prank on some blindfolded Rosemount High School athletes — they were unknowingly and at times amorously kissed by their parents during a recent pep fest — is collecting YouTube views by the tens of thousands and has the principal apologizing for what happened… …The captains of the school’s winter sports teams — boys and girls — were lined up and blindfolded. They were told they would be kissed and then asked to guess who was on the other side of their lips. Some of the parents during the 59-second YouTube video are seen holding the kisses for several seconds, cupping their child’s faces or embracing and swaying. One mother moved her son’s hand down to her behind during the encounter. Another mom has her son down on the gym floor to the delight of two male students nearby. The hoots, screams and laughter rolled on as the students pulled off their blindfolds to realize it was Mom or Dad they were smooching.
✧ Brain scans should not be used in court… for now: Should an offender’s sentence be decided on the basis of a brain scan? A group of neuroscientists have put together a report for the Royal Society to assess this issue and other ways that progress in brain science might impact the law. Neuroscience is already making waves in court: an Italian woman convicted of murder recently had her sentence reduced on the grounds that her behaviour could be explained by abnormalities in her brain and genes. The authors on the Royal Society panel, led by Nicholas Mackintosh of the University of Cambridge, also flag up research that suggests the brains of psychopaths are fundamentally different. This raises the question: should individuals with the brain anatomy of a psychopath have their sentence reduced on the ground of diminished responsibility, or should brain scan evidence be used to keep dangerous individuals locked away?
✧ Gingrich ‘proposed the death penalty for marijuana’: Over the weekend, struggling Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson reminded MSNBC viewers that GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich had once to called to punish some drug offenders with death. “Newt Gingrich, in 1997, proposed the death penalty for marijuana — for possession of marijuana above a certain quantity of marijuana,” Johnson explained. “And yet, he is among 100 million Americans who’ve smoked marijuana.”
✧ Machine reads your age, gives sample: Big Brother isn’t just watching, he’s also about to size you up via a new product sampling machine that can determine whether you’re the right age — or even the right sex — to receive a sample. Kraft’s new sampling machine, developed by Intel, scans your face and can detect it you’re an adult or a child and blocks dispensing if you are a child. Today, Kraft Foods, the nation’s biggest foodmaker, will roll out in Chicago a device that dispenses its mousse-like Temptations dessert by Jell-O, but only to the product’s target market: grown-ups. The machine, developed by Intel, can detect facial age with a special camera that scans your face and determines if you’re an adult or a kid. If the machine detects a child, it shuts down and asks the child to step away. If it detects an adult — bingo — the sample can be dispensed.
✧ China Keeps Slapping America In The Face And America Just Keeps Taking It: Today, China is absolutely crushing the United States on the global economic stage, but they are hardly playing fair. They shower their own firms with huge government subsidies, they brazenly steal technology, they publicly violate intellectual property rights, they manipulate currency rates so that foreign firms cannot compete with Chinese prices and they slap ridiculously high tariffs on many classes of foreign goods. In short, they basically do everything that they can get away with to give themselves a trade advantage. This predatory behavior has caused an enormous transfer of wealth from the United States to China. It isn’t as if it is just some sort of an “accident” that we now owe China about a trillion dollars. The truth is that China just keeps slapping America in the face and America just keeps taking it. We are like an abused spouse that just keeps coming back for more. It is disgraceful and it needs to stop.
✧ As Facebook Aims at Millions of Users, Some Are Content to Sit Out: As Facebook prepares for a much-anticipated public offering, the company is eager to show off its momentum by building on its huge membership: more than 800 million active users around the world, Facebook says, and roughly 200 million in the United States, or two-thirds of the population. But the company is running into a roadblock in this country. Some people, even on the younger end of the age spectrum, just refuse to participate, including people who have given it a try. One of Facebook’s main selling points is that it builds closer ties among friends and colleagues. But some who steer clear of the site say it can have the opposite effect of making them feel more, not less, alienated. “I wasn’t calling my friends anymore,” said Ashleigh Elser, 24, who is in graduate school in Charlottesville, Va. “I was just seeing their pictures and updates and felt like that was really connecting to them.”
✧ 10 Ridiculous Things That Make You a Terror Suspect: You thought you weren’t doing anything wrong, so why should you care about who they call a terrorist? Well, you may not believe it, but you’re likely a terror suspect in America’s new paradigm of the Land of the Fear. The government is casting a wide net over its citizens in its search for potential threats. Now, you don’t need to actually commit a crime to be hauled away to a detention center and held without charges while you are tortured; you just need to appear suspicious by sympathizing with anti-government views to be labeled a domestic terrorist.
✧ DNA: The next big hacking frontier: Imagine computer-designed viruses that cure disease, new bacteria capable of synthesizing an unlimited fuel supply, new organisms that wipe out entire populations and bio-toxins that target world leaders. They sound like devices restricted to feature-film script writers, but it is possible to create all of these today, using the latest advances in synthetic biology. Just as the personal computer revolution brought information technology from corporate data centers to the masses, the biology revolution is personalizing science.
✧ DNA Hackers: Synthetic biology weaponized virus, zero-day exploit to infect your brain?: From the let’s get futuristically freaky department, future hacking crimes could take a decidedly sinister twist; not hacking to breach systems but brains, bodies and behaviors. This DNA hacking goes way beyond potentially using police bees to bust biohackers, or even storing unhackable data in box of bio-encrypted bacteria. It’s not science fiction to hack insulin pumps or to use jamming signals to stop hackers from lethal pacemaker attacks, but now bioengineers and security futurists are warning that the day is coming when criminals and bioterrorists hunt for vulnerabilities that will give a new meaning to zero-day exploits. In the future, a weaponized virus will aim to infect you, your brain and body biology, and not just your computer or mobile device.
✧ Woman sues sex toy company after injuring herself using vibrator: A California woman claims a little foreplay nearly put her six feet under. April Bonjour says her pleasure turned quickly to pain while using a “vibrator/dildo” with her boyfriend last November when the sex toy caused a sharp vaginal pain and massive bleeding. “I started to get faint from the loss of blood,” she wrote in a personal injury complaint filed Aug. 30 in California Superior Court. “My boyfriend called 911. By the time they got there, I was in and out of consciousness.” Bonjour, in her suit against Pipedream Products Inc., said both she and her son “thought I was dying … Once we got to the hospital, I had lost so much blood I was given several pints.” Thanks Jasmine
✧ Mother tasered and buried alive in cardboard box by ‘bored’ lover, court told: “Terrified” Michelina Lewandowska, 27, was bound by her hands and feet and left to die in a shallow grave, Leeds Crown Court was told. In a bid to stop her getting free Marcin Kasprzak, her partner and father of their two-year-old son, had a friend help him bury her in a box less than 2ft high and then covered it in soil and leaves and then put a large branch over the top, a jury heard. But she eventually managed to free herself and raise the alarm. A jury was told how Kasprzak, 25, had decided that he no longer wanted to live with his partner and wanted his mother to bring up their young son. In a bid to get her out of the way he used a 300,000 volt electric stun gun on her at their home in Waterloo, Huddersfield, West Yorks, before using parcel tape to gag her and tie her hands and feet.
✧ Woman caught smuggling 1.5kg of cocaine in her dreadlocks on flight to Bangkok: A woman was caught trying to smuggle 1.5 kilograms of cocaine in her dreadlocks on a flight to Bangkok, it was reported today. South African Nobanda Nolubabalo, 23, was arrested and held in Thailand’s capital yesterday after customs officers allegedly noticed a suspicious white substance in her hair. Officials later carried out a search and discovered she had allegedly matted the Class A drug into her dreadlocks before boarding a flight from Brazil.
✧ Man dressed as Santa drugs teen at Berlin Christmas market, 9th victim in a week: A man dressed as Santa drugged a 15-year-old girl at a Berlin Christmas market over the weekend — the latest such attack that has seen holiday revelers left either sickened or unconscious, police said Monday. At about 10 p.m. Saturday the suspect approached the girl and her friend at Berlin’s downtown Alexanderplatz Christmas market, offering both of them what he said was a shot of alcohol in a paper cup, police said. One girl refused, but the other girl drank both of the shots. She soon started vomiting and had to be taken to the hospital, where she underwent a blood test, before being released. Police said it appeared she had been slipped some type of a date rape drug, but released no further details, citing the ongoing investigation.
✧ Man dressed as Santa drugs teen at Berlin Christmas market, 9th victim in a week: A man dressed as Santa drugged a 15-year-old girl at a Berlin Christmas market over the weekend — the latest such attack that has seen holiday revelers left either sickened or unconscious, police said Monday. At about 10 p.m. Saturday the suspect approached the girl and her friend at Berlin’s downtown Alexanderplatz Christmas market, offering both of them what he said was a shot of alcohol in a paper cup, police said. One girl refused, but the other girl drank both of the shots. She soon started vomiting and had to be taken to the hospital, where she underwent a blood test, before being released. Police said it appeared she had been slipped some type of a date rape drug, but released no further details, citing the ongoing investigation.
✧ Indonesia: Punkers’ Mohawks Shaved, Piercings Stripped By Hard-Line Police: Police in Indonesia’s most conservative province raided a punk-rock concert and detained 65 fans, buzzing off their spiky mohawks and stripping away body piercings because of the perceived threat to Islamic values. Dog-collar necklaces and chains also were taken from the youths before they were thrown in pools of water for “spiritual” cleansing, local police chief Iskandar Hasan said Wednesday. After replacing their “disgusting” clothes, he handed each a toothbrush and barked “use it.”
✧ If you want to drink less, then turn down the music: Alcohol tastes sweeter as noise impairs judgement of intake: Alcohol tastes sweeter when loud music is playing and the noise could make it difficult for drinkers to judge how much they are consuming, new research has claimed. Dr Lorenzo Stafford, a psychologist from the University of Portsmouth, conducted the first experimental study to find out how music can alter the taste of alcohol. Dr Stafford said: ‘Since humans have an innate preference for sweetness, these findings offer a plausible explanation as to why people consume more alcohol in noisy environments.’
✧ Man grows new fingertip on stomach: Doctors in China saved a man’s partially-severed finger – by attaching it to his stomach. Furniture worker Wang Yongjun, 20, cut off the end of his middle finger with an electric saw in an accident at work. Wang, of Liaoyang, Liaoning Province, was rushed to hospital where doctors had to think fast. Dr Huang Xuesong said the muscle and skin had been cut away from the end of his finger leaving only the bone showing. “We had to make a quick decision or he could have lost his finger. We decided to cultivate a new fingertip on his stomach,” he said. Doctors operated and attached Wang’s finger to his stomach in the hope that new skin and muscle would grow around it.
✧ Baby, baby, baby, no: Pay up or be forced to listen to Justin Bieber: For someone who isn’t a fan of teen idol Justin Bieber, being forced to listen to one of his songs over and over again could be considered cruel and unusual punishment. At Evanston Township High School this week, they called it a fund-raiser. To motivate their fellow students to donate money for a struggling cafe/arts center popular with ETHS kids, seniors Charlotte Runzel and Jesse Chatz persuaded administrators to let them blast Bieber’s hit “Baby” over the school’s loudspeaker system at the end of each class period — and not stop playing the song until Runzel and Chatz had met their goal.
✧ Bye Bye Booie! California’s smoking chimpanzee who learned sign language dies at 44: A chimpanzee that kicked a smoking habit and used sign language to beg for candy has died at a California animal refuge. Martine Colette, founder of the Wildlife WayStation, said Booie was being treated for a heart condition when he died on Saturday, at the age of 44. The chimp had been living at the animal sanctuary near Los Angeles since 1995, after he retired from a research lab. Ms Colette said she successfully turned Booie away from his smoking habit but could not make a dent in his love of sweets. She said he would use his signing skills to panhandle for candy by signing: ‘Booie see sweet in pocket.’
✧ Girl, 13, brought booze-laced milk to school: A Glen Ellyn junior high student brought chocolate milk mixed with Bailey’s Irish Cream to school as a “joke,” Glen Ellyn police said. Glen Ellyn Deputy Police Chief Bill Holmer said this week the 13-year-old girl allegedly brought the liquor mixed with chocolate milk to Hadley Junior High School on Dec. 9. Holmer said it’s unclear if any students actually drank the concoction, but it was “given to some other students who claimed to not know what they were given.” The “kid brought this stuff to school claiming it was meant to be a joke,” Holmer said. A student at the school informed staff about the drink, who interviewed other students about the incident then called police, Holmer said. Police worked with the juvenile and her parents “regarding enforcement action,” according to a police report.
✧ Pig Born Without Back Legs: A Balancing Act Like No Other: Wang taught her to walk on her front hooves and she learned in just a few days. After about a month, she began walking on her own, balancing her weight on her front legs as she moves about. Today, despite a body weight of 50 kg (110 pounds), the piglet walks upside down quite effortlessly.
✧ 14 bomb-sniffing dogs on way to Afghanistan died in truck: The death of 14 bomb-sniffing dogs allegedly housed in an unventilated sealed truck while awaiting air shipment from Houston to military forces in Afghanistan has spawned a lawsuit in which requested damages may top $1 million… In an unsuccessful bid to settle the matter without going to court, a Houston lawyer for the Florida company asked the defendants to pay $1.3 million in damages and $30,000 in legal fees. According to the lawsuit, the animals — Tiny, Rex, Rocky, Crock, Dork, Harrie, Stress, Sigo, Rex, Jaco, Kimbo, Kilo, Albert and Bak — were taken the Houston shipping facility on Dec. 20.
✧ Giant Smiley Feel-o-Meter Reflects the Mood of the City: Fuehlometer (Feel-o-meter) by Richard Wilhelmer, Julius von Bismarck, and Benjamin Maus is a light installation consisting of a giant smiley face that reflects the average mood of the people living in the city. An earlier version of this work originally used a more standard light screen installation instead of kinetically moving the different parts of the smiley face. The average emotional value is calculated through the computational analysis of the faces of people passing a camera located in a specific part of the city,
✧ The teenage politics of the British Churches are summed up by their pathetic Christmas poster: The Baby Jesus will not be visited by Three Wise Men bearing gifts of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh this Christmas. Three different sorts of guys will turn up at the manger, bringing the young Son of God a Fabergé egg, a Swarovski crystal perfume bottle and a Damien Hirst skull. All this is on the seasonal advertising poster issued by the British Churches. There are no shepherds either. These are replaced by a cycle courier and a plasterer. As King Herod himself might have said: “Gee, it’s so relevant and accessible it fair sets your teeth on edge.” Jesus famously commanded us: “Take no thought for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment? Why take ye thought for raiment?”
✧ As Banks Start Nosing Around Facebook and Twitter, the Wrong Friends Might Just Sink Your Credit: A new wave of startups is working on algorithms gathering data for banks from the web of associations on the internet known as “the social graph,” in which people are “nodes” connected to each other by “edges.” Banks are already using social media to befriend their customers, and increasingly, their customers’ friends. The specifics are still shaking out, but the gist is that eventually, social media will account for at least the tippy-top of the mountain of data banks keep on their customers. “There is this concept of ‘birds of a feather flock together,’” said Ken Lin, CEO of the San Francisco-based credit scoring startup Credit Karma. “If you are a profitable customer for a bank, it suggests that a lot of your friends are going to be the same credit profile. So they’ll look through the social network and see if they can identify your friends online and then maybe they send more marketing to them. That definitely exists today.”
✧ How common is Nazi fancy dress?: It is really very easy to avoid a controversial costume, but that does not seem to stop some people. And one of the most offensive outfits is a Nazi uniform, as Conservative MP Aidan Burley has discovered. The MP for Cannock Chase in Staffordshire has been pictured in a national newspaper sitting next to another man dressed as an SS guard. Burley, who was on a stag do in a French ski resort at the time, has apologised for the “clearly inappropriate behaviour” of some of his friends. In some countries, wearing a swastika armband in public would be illegal But he is not the first person, and will surely not be the last, to hit the headlines over a Nazi costume. Prince Harry is perhaps the most famous Nazi fancy dress costume-wearer in the world. In 2005, he was pictured wearing a German desert uniform and a swastika armband at a friend’s birthday party. The fancy dress theme was “colonial and native”.
✧ The school of Jay-Z studies: Judging by the amount of fuss he caused, one would think Georgetown University Professor Michael Eric Dyson had floated the idea of abolishing child labor laws. In reality, all he had done was announce that this semester he would be teaching a course entitled “Sociology of Hip-Hop – Urban Theodicy of Jay-Z.” And it was Glastonbury all over again. The outrage flew from all directions. A SPIN headline referred to “Georgetown’s Semi-Ridiculous Jay-Z Class”, while the main article nonchalantly mentions that tuition at the university is $40,920, attaching the price to a particularly inarticulate quote from a college sophomore. Gawker was still more ruthless in its takedown, declaring: “One notable thing about Michael Eric Dyson is that although he is very good at being an academic celebrity, he doesn’t know shit about hip-hop.”
✧ Census data: Half of U.S. poor or low income: Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income. The latest census data depict a middle class that’s shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government’s safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.
✧ China’s deserted fake Disneyland: Situated on an area of around 100 acres, and 45 minutes drive from the center of Beijing, are the ruins of ‘Wonderland’. Construction stopped more than a decade ago, with developers promoting it as ‘the largest amusement park in Asia’. Funds were withdrawn due to disagreements over property prices with the local government and farmers. So what is left are the skeletal remains of a palace, a castle, and the steel beams of what could have been an indoor playground in the middle of a corn field.
✧ Memphis Cop Sexts & Rapes 14 Year Old Relative: A Memphis police officer is behind bars after investigators say he sent a 14-year-old girl nude pictures and had a sexual relationship with the teen. Officer Ericck Cain, 25, has been charged with aggravated statutory rape and exploitation of a minor by electronic means. Investigators say Cain emailed a naked picture of himself to a 14-year-old relative in January. About six months later, police say, the two had sex in a house in the 5600 block of Cottonwood. “He gave us a statement of admission,” said Dave Martello, of the Memphis Police Department. Police say the initial report was made at the Mt. Moriah precinct. One of the teenager’s friends came went to the station Monday night and told police everything she knew about the relationship. Police say they do not suspect there are any other alleged victims, but that one is enough. “It’s such a disappointment,” said Martello.”This person is a criminal just like the people that we deal with on the streets every day.”
✧ Somalia’s Rebels Embrace Twitter: Think of it as the Battle of the Tweets. Somalia’s powerful Islamist insurgents, the Shabab, best known for chopping off hands and starving their own people, just opened a Twitter account, and in the past week they have been writing up a storm, bragging about recent attacks and taunting their enemies. “Your inexperienced boys flee from confrontation & flinch in the face of death,” the Shabab wrote in a post to the Kenyan Army. It is an odd, almost downright hypocritical move from brutal militants in one of world’s most broken-down countries, where millions of people do not have enough food to eat, let alone a laptop. The Shabab have vehemently rejected Western practices – banning Western music, movies, haircuts and bras, and even blocking Western aid for famine victims, all in the name of their brand of puritanical Islam – only to embrace Twitter, one of the icons of a modern, networked society.
✧ ‘White Only’ Pool Sign Owner Explains: A female landlord, Jamie Hein, had a sign that read, “Public Swimming Pool, White Only” hanging on a gate at her house and her private pool. (Photo credit: Ohio Civil Rights Commission) An Ohio landlord accused of discriminating against an African-American girl with a “white only” sign at her swimming pool told ABCNews.com that the sign was an antique and a decoration. “I’m not a bad person,” said Jamie Hein of Cincinnati. “I don’t have any problem with race at all. It’s a historical sign.” The sign in question reads, “Public Swimming Pool, White Only.” It is dated 1931 and from Alabama. Hein, 31, was unapologetic about the racist origins of the sign that she displayed at the entrance to her pool. She said she collects antiques and was given the sign as a gift. She also said that even though the sign seems to indicate that the pool is public, the pool is on her private property and “everybody has to ask before getting in my pool.”

Submit Links:
SeMeNSPeRmS@SeMeNSPeRmS.com

There’s No Place To Hide When The Dead Are Alive

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 13:01:29 +0000

✭ Internet archivist seeks 1 of every book written

Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an Internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word.Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.

“There is always going to be a role for books,” said Kahle as he perched on the edge of a shipping container soon to be tricked out as a climate-controlled storage unit. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. “We want to see books live forever.”
✭ America’s city of broken dreams: 50 jobless and destitute people set up forest community on New York’s doorstep

In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression these are the ramshackle homes of the desperate and destitute U.S. families who have set up their own ‘Tent City’ only an hour from Manhattan.More than 50 homeless people have joined the community within New Jersey’s forests as the economic crisis has wrecked their American dream.

And as politicians in Washington trade blows over their country’s £8.8 trillion debt, the prospect of more souls joining this rag tag group grows by the day.

Building their own tarpaulin tents, Native American teepees and makeshift balsa wood homes, every one of the Tent City residents has lost their job.
✭ Who’s Grabbing Africa’s Land? U.S. Speculators, Including Universities

China and Arab countries have generally been scrutinized in the media for their land deals, but much of the cash flow comes through U.S. and European investors, according to Oakland Institute—through established pension funds, agribusiness behemoths and even educational institutions.
✭ Facebook – the destruction of the innocence of computing

Facebook is a living computer nightmare. Just as viruses took the advantages of sharing information on floppies and modems and revealed a devastating undercarriage to the whole process, making every computer transaction suspect… and just as spyware/malware took advantage of beautiful advances in computer strength and horsepower to turn your beloved machine of expression into a gatling gun of misery and assholery… Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship. While I can’t really imply that it was going to be any other way, I can not sit by and act like this whole turn of events hasn’t resulted in an epidemic of ruin that will have consequences far-reaching from anything related to archiving.
✭ Burning Man Sells Out – limits tickets, increasing scalpers

And now it has come to this: For the first time ever, Burning Man has literally sold out.Organizers were forced to cap the number of attendees to the weeklong event, an art-focused, community-centric festival that starts Aug. 29. The event sold out last week, giving rise to a profitable black market that some past Burning Man participants say goes against the festival’s principles.

The cap on ticket sales was necessary to limit attendance as required by the permit issued by the federal Bureau of Land Management. That permit allows for 50,000 people at any one time, organizers said, and more than 51,500 tickets were sold last year.
✭ Cremated Ashes Packed into Ammunition

If you’d like to go out with a bang, Holy Smoke LLC offers to pack your cremated ashes (or those of your loved ones) into ammunition cartridges. You tell them the caliber or gauge, ship the remains to them, and they’ll load the cartridges:Once the caliber, gauge and other ammunition parameters have been selected, we will ask you (by way of your funeral service provider) to send approximately one pound of the decedant’s ash to us. Upon receiving the ashes our professional and reverant staff will place a measured portion of ash into each shotshell or cartridge.[...]
✭ Amy Winehouse planned to adopt little girl

Amy Winehouse was in the process of secretly adopting an adorable Caribbean child — hoping to save her from her impoverished life — just before the tragic singer died, the little girl’s family said.Bright-eyed Dannika Augustine, 10, of St. Lucia, had caught the eye of the 27-year-old “Rehab” crooner during one of the singer’s many jaunts to the island and was going to be formally adopted by Winehouse before the troubled star died in her London pad on July 23, London’s Mirror newspaper reported yesterday.
✭ Do trees communicate?

Graduate student Kevin Beiler has uncovered the extent and architecture of this network through the use of new molecular tools that can distinguish the DNA of one fungal individual from another, or of one tree’s roots from another. He has found that all trees in dry interior Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca) forests are interconnected, with the largest, oldest trees serving as hubs, much like the hub of a spoked wheel, where younger trees establish within the mycorrhizal network of the old trees. Through careful experimentation, recent graduate Francois Teste determined that survival of these establishing trees was greatly enhanced when they were linked into the network of the old trees.Through the use of stable isotope tracers, he and Amanda Schoonmaker, a recent undergraduate student in Forestry, found that increased survival was associated with belowground transfer of carbon, nitrogen and water from the old trees.
✭ Ghostface Killah Sued By ‘Iron Man’ Composer for Copyright Infringement

On his second album, “Supreme Clientele,” Killah allegedly “copied verbatim” the Urbont-written “Iron Man Theme” on two tracks.The album was released back in 2000 (way before the recent Jon Favreau-directed movies) and it’s unclear why it took Urbont so long to sue. But he may have grown tired of seeing Killah’s name attached to his music on the Internet.

Much of the case is a typical copyright infringement claim, but Urbont throws in an unusual unfair competition allegation that caught our attention.

According to the complaint: “Defendant Ghostface is also known for the nickname, ‘Tony Starks,’ which is a take-off of the name ‘Tony Stark,’ Iron Man’s real name and true identity. In this way, Defendants’ use of Urbont’s ‘Iron Man Theme’ gives them a substantial commercial advantage by linking Ghostface to Iron Man without paying for it.”
✭ Joe Biden likens tea partiers to terrorists

Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit, according to several sources in the room.
✭ Nikon’s Racist Camera

Did someone blink?
✭ How Facial Recognition Technology Can Be Used To Get Your Social Security Number

Those freaked out by facial recognition technology have fresh fodder: a study from Carnegie Mellon University in which researchers were able to predict people’s social security numbers after taking a photo of them with a cheap webcam.At the head of the research team was Alessandro Acquisti, a CMU professor who pointed out in 2009 that the social security number system has a huge security flaw — social security numbers are predictable if you know a person’s hometown and date of birth. This study essentially adds a facial recognition component to that study. Acquisti, Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman ran three experiments. In the first, they data mined Facebook for photos of people with searchable profiles. They then used that database of faces and identities when applying off-the-shelf facial recognition technology (PittPatt) to “anonymous” singles on a popular dating site. Acquisti told me in an interview last month that they were able to reidentify 15% of the digital Cupids.
✭ Twitter admits editing offensive Trending Topics, plans more

Today Twitter’s CEO said they may in the future “edit out any…clearly offensive [trending topics].” He also said “we edit out any [trending topics] with obscenities.”
✭ Stasi Chic: Exhibition Unmasks the Art of the East German Spy Disguise

At first glance the photos look staged. They show stocky men stiffly clad in various outfits that include fur hats and thick coats with upturned collars — and, most importantly, sunglasses. But these photos aren’t stage props from a silly low-budget spy film, they are images snapped by members of the feared East German secret state police, or Stasi, for an internal course called the “art of disguising.”Berlin-based artist Simon Menner unearthed the images while sifting through the Stasi archives, which were opened to the public after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was allowed to reproduce the photos and they are now on display in an exhibition entitled: “Pictures from the Secret Stasi Archives.”

Morgen Contemporary, the Berlin gallery hosting the exhibition, says in its description of the collection that “many of the snapshots seem absurd and they may even be amusing. And yet we ought not lose sight of the intention that led the Stasi agents to take them.”
✭ Mind Control: Car’s Brakes, Bicycle Gears Worked by Brain Signals

It’s the future. You’re racing down the highway when, all of a sudden, the driver ahead of you slows down. You know you need to hit the brakes to avoid an accident, but your foot can’t move as fast as your brain. You’re about to rear-end the guy, except. …… except that your car has read your mind. It picks up your brain waves and automatically slows down. Accident averted.
✭ Twitter Avatar Portraits
✭ Hideouts or Sacred Spaces? Experts Baffled by Mysterious Underground Chambers

At least 700 of these chambers have been found in Bavaria alone, along with about 500 in Austria. In the local vernacular, they have fanciful names such as “Schrazelloch” (“goblin hole”) or “Alraunenhöhle” (“mandrake cave”). They were supposedly built by elves, and legend has it that gnomes lived inside. According to some sagas, they were parts of long escape tunnels from castles.
✭ Quadriplegic man dies in Mont. skydiving accident

A quadriplegic man with five years of skydiving experience died in a weekend skydiving accident in northwestern Montana, Flathead County officials said Monday.Sheriff Chuck Curry said Zack Fogle, 27, of Kingston, Wash., died Saturday afternoon when his parachute did not open during a jump at the 44th annual Lost Prairie Boogie, a 10-day skydiving event near Marion that typically draws hundreds of participants.
✭ Republican Congressman Refers To President Obama As A ‘Tar Baby’

Congressman Doug Lamborn (R-CO) has equated negotiating with President Obama to ‘touching a tar baby’.
✭ Downtown L.A.: A nightmare on Every Street

“Look, Daddy, that man’s going to the bathroom!”No, not the words any daddy wants to hear from his 10-year-old daughter, especially during a stroll through their brand-new neighborhood.
‪✭ Pig Race Mosque [Video]

Upset neighbor races his pigs during prayer in protest of new mosque
✭ U.S. Now an Electronic Concentration Camp

We’re under constant scrutiny—our movements monitored by cameras, tracked by satellites and catalogued by a host of increasingly attentive government agencies. No longer does the idea of an omnipresent government seem all that farfetched. As technology becomes ever more sophisticated, the idea of a total surveillance society moves further from the realm of George Orwell’s science fiction fantasy into an accepted way of life.In fact, surveillance has become a huge moneymaking industry in itself, with many sectors having sprung up devoted to developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep targeted individuals under surveillance, with or without their cooperation. The science behind this technology is particularly brilliant.
✭ Soaring demand spotlights secret NY gold hoard

If there’s one place a James Bond villain — or even some actual governments — would love raiding today, it’s the basement of a somber building in lower Manhattan: the world’s biggest gold vault.Gold prices hit a record $1,632.8 an ounce Friday, reflecting a nervous rush by private and national investors from stocks, dollars and euros to the safe-haven commodity.

And the biggest single pile of the stuff on the planet lies deep beneath the New York branch of the US Federal Reserve Bank, a stone’s throw from the Stock Exchange.

On a visit, a guide from the bank revealed the 7,000-ton hoard gleaming softly in a vault carved from Manhattan’s bed rock, five stories under the Big Apple’s teeming streets.

Cast in bricks, stacked ceiling-high in blue-painted, caged boxes, the heap is worth a staggering $350 billion.
✭ Computer To Wed Couple In Texas

You could call it “My Big Fat Computer Geek Wedding.”After a Houston couple couldn’t get a friend to serve as the minister at their wedding, they decided to create their own.

When Miguel Hanson and his fiancee, Diana Wesley, get married on Saturday, a computer will conduct the ceremony. Well, technically, a computer program Hanson wrote will serve as the minister.

During the wedding, to be held in the Houston home of Hanson’s parents, the couple will stand before a 30-inch monitor in the backyard. In a robotic voice, the computer will greet the guests, say how the couple met and go through the ceremony.
✭ Obama Says Becoming A Dictator Is Very Tempting As La Raza Crowd Cheers [Video]

Submit Links:
SeMeNSPeRmS@SeMeNSPeRmS.com

Fight Or Fuck

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:01:11 +0000

◆ TSA readying new behavior detection plan for airport checkpoints

The federal government is planning to introduce new behavior detection techniques at airport checkpoints as soon as next month, Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole said Thursday.

TSA already has “behavior detection officers” at 161 airports nationwide looking for travelers exhibiting physiological or psychological signs that a traveler might be a terrorist. However, Pistole said TSA is preparing to move to an approach that employs more conversation with travelers—a method that has been employed with great success in Israel.
◆ Existence: Am I a hologram?

TAKE a look around you. The walls, the chair you’re sitting in, your own body – they all seem real and solid. Yet there is a possibility that everything we see in the universe – including you and me – may be nothing more than a hologram.

It sounds preposterous, yet there is already some evidence that it may be true, and we could know for sure within a couple of years. If it does turn out to be the case, it would turn our common-sense conception of reality inside out.

The idea has a long history, stemming from an apparent paradox posed by Stephen Hawking’s work in the 1970s. He discovered that black holes slowly radiate their mass away. This Hawking radiation appears to carry no information, however, raising the question of what happens to the information that described the original star once the black hole evaporates. It is a cornerstone of physics that information cannot be destroyed.
◆ Are cancers newly evolved species?

A molecular biologists has long believed that cancer results from chromosome disruption rather than a handful of gene mutations, which is the dominant theory today. That idea has led him to propose that cancers have actually evolved new chromosomal karyotypes that qualify them as autonomous species, akin to parasites and much different from their human hosts.

“Cancer is comparable to a bacterial level of complexity, but still autonomous, that is, it doesn’t depend on other cells for survival; it doesn’t follow orders like other cells in the body, and it can grow where, when and how it likes,” said Duesberg. “That’s what species are all about.”
◆ Photo Tampering throughout History

Though photo manipulation has become more common in the age of digital cameras and image editing software, it actually dates back almost as far as the invention of photography. Gathered below is an overview of some of the more notable instances of photo manipulation in history. For recent years, an exhaustive inventory of every photo manipulation would be nearly impossible, so we focus here on the instances that have been most controversial or notorious, or ones that raise the most interesting ethical questions.
◆ Why Your Dad’s 30-Year-Old Stereo System Sounds Better than Your new One

If you fashion yourself as an audiophile and just threw down a decent wad of cash on a new A/V receiver, you probably won’t like hearing that the receivers of yesteryear produce comparable sound. Why is that? Technological advancement, ironically.

Cnet’s Steve Guttenberg sheds light on this interesting development that over the years, actual sound quality became a secondary selling point since most people started buying their equipment either online or from big box retailers. People started caring more about the number of connections and wireless interfaces and wattage of systems. As a result, there was less money in R&D budgets to spend on advancements in sound.
◆ You Can’t Keep Your Secrets From Twitter

When you tweet–even if you tweet under a pseudonym–how much do you reveal about yourself? More than you realize, argues a new paper from researchers at the Mitre Corporation. The paper, “Discriminating Gender on Twitter,” which is being presented this week at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Scotland, demonstrates that machines can often figure out a person’s gender on Twitter just by reading their tweets. And such knowledge is power: the findings could be useful to advertisers and others.
◆ New Twitter Algorithm Could Out Dudes Pretending to Be Lesbians

Anonymous tweeters may have just become a little less anonymous. Researchers have put together an algorithm that can predict the gender of a tweeter based solely on the 140 characters they choose to tweet. Of course, determining the gender of an Internet personality has its monetary benefits for Twitter. “Marketing is one of the major motivators here, adding that he had heard talk that Twitter was internally working on similar demographically identifying algorithms internally,” linguist Delip Rao told Fast Company’s David Zax. But it could also help identify phonies misrepresenting themselves. Like, say, older men pretending to be lesbian bloggers. Remember when the Gay Girl in Damascus revealed himself as a middle-aged man from Georgia?
◆ Belsen Was A Gas parka by Australian label Evil Twin causes furore

An Australian designer has been forced to apologise for referencing the Holocaust in the name of one of its garments.

The “Belsen Was a Gas” military parka designed by Australian label Evil Twin, caused a furore among shoppers on the online retail website Buy Definition this week.

Shoppers condemned the label for “committing the sin of such hateful, shallow and selfish callousness”.
◆ Atheist group sues over cross at Sept. 11 museum

The installation of a cross-shaped steel beam at the Sept. 11 memorial at ground zero is unconstitutional, a national atheist group argued in a lawsuit filed Wednesday, asking a judge to order it removed or request that other religions and nonreligious views be equally represented at the site.
◆ Woman allegedly pulls baby from stroller, slams him against truck – says she wants to eat baby’s arm

A 36-year-old woman allegedly snatched an infant from his stroller and slammed him into the metal railing of a truck as his mother and aunt tried to fight her off, police said Wednesday.

The woman, Natasha Hubbard, later told police she wanted to eat the baby’s arm. The baby suffered only minor injuries.
◆ Thief dresses like armored truck guard — and walks out of Queens check-cashing spot with $15K

A clever crook, dressed as an armored truck guard, waltzed out of a Queens check-cashing joint last week with almost $15,000 in cash, cops said.

After stepping into Lorenzo’s Enterprises on 31st St. in Astoria about 10:15 a.m. Friday, the disguised bandit said he was there for a pickup and was given the load of cash, police said.

The employees never suspected the man, who was clad in a GARDA Armored Courier uniform, was a thief.

It wasn’t until a few hours later, when an actual guard from the same armored truck company arrived for the cash, that the workers realized they had been had, cops said.
◆ Homeless man killed in Fullerton police brawl; witnesses sought

Responding to reports of someone breaking into cars, officers had confronted Thomas, a transient well-known to merchants and officers in downtown Fullerton.

The Orange County Register reported that Thomas, who suffered from schizophrenia, began to struggle as officers tried to search him and that Thomas sustained head and neck injuries.
Thomas’ father, a retired Orange County sheriff’s deputy, has asserted that officers used excessive force to subdue his son, who was unarmed, slight and of medium height.

After seeing his son’s injuries and talking with witnesses, Thomas told the Register his son “was brutally beaten to death.”

“When I first walked into the hospital, I looked at what his mother described as my son … I didn’t recognize him,” Thomas said. “This is cold-blooded, aggravated murder.”
◆ Paul Krassner: My Lesson in Mindfulness

A dozen police cars had been set on fire, which in turn set off their alarms, underscoring the angry shouts from a mob of five thousand understandably outraged gays. The police were running amuck in an orgy of indiscriminate sadism, swinging their clubs wildly and screaming profanity-laden homophobic epithets.I was struck with a nightstick on the outside of my right knee and I fell to the ground. Another cop came charging at me and made a threatening gesture with his billy club. When I tried to protect my head, he jabbed me viciously on the exposed right side of my chest. Oh, God, the pain! It felt like an electric cattle prod was stuck between my ribs.
◆ Know Your Rights!

Your computer, your phone, and your other digital devices hold vast amounts of personal information about you and your family. This is sensitive data that’s worth protecting from prying eyes – including those of the government.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects you from unreasonable government searches and seizures, and this protection extends to your computer and portable devices. But how does this work in the real world? What should you do if the police or other law enforcement officers show up at your door and want to search your computer?

EFF has designed this guide to help you understand your rights if officers try to search the data stored on your computer or portable electronic device, or seize it for further examination somewhere else.

Because anything you say can be used against you in a criminal or civil case, before speaking to any law enforcement official, you should consult with an attorney.
◆ T-Shirts to Offend Lesbians

The rabidly politicized, mad-as-hell, accept-us-or-die quotient of gay Americans—at last count, somewhere between 97 to 99 percent of them—seem determined to prove that they can get just as offended as your average hillbilly breeder mountaineer, if not more so.

It’s as if they’re taking it to the streets, up into the hills, and down into the hollers to spread a simple message—“You think you can get offended, you stupid, hateful, one-toothed, inbred, Christ-worshiping rednecks? You ain’t seen an uptight bunch of whiny wah-wah emotionally retarded walking fetuses until you’ve tangled with us!”
◆ Scientists clone beagle that glows fluorescent green

Scientists in South Korea have used a cloning technique to created a “glowing” dog, which they hope to use to investigate certain human diseases. The “glowing” effect in the two year old beagle named Tegon can be turned on and off with a doxycycline antibiotic.
◆ WANTED IN GREENPOINT: “Hipstras”

Fuck MTV
◆ Apple Now Has More Cash Than The U.S. Government

According to the latest daily statement from the U.S. Treasury, the government had an operating cash balance of $73.8 billion at the end of the day yesterday.

Apple’s last earnings report (PDF here) showed that the company had $76.2 billion in cash and marketable securities at the end of June.

In other words, the world’s largest tech company has more cash than the world’s largest sovereign government.
◆ Damaged Nuclear Fuel Rod Stuck At Japanese Plant for 17 Years

A damaged nuclear fuel rod was stuck inside a reactor at Japan’s ageing Hamaoka nuclear plant after an accident 17 years ago and is still there, the plant’s operator said Thursday.

The operator, Chubu Electric Power Co., said experts were unable to remove the spent fuel rod from the plant, located 125 miles (200 kilometers) southwest of Tokyo, Kyodo News reported.

The rod was stored inside a special container in the spent fuel pool of a decommissioned reactor. The company sought help from domestic and foreign experts on how to safely extract it, but no solution was found so far.
◆ War Texting : Hackers Unlock Car Doors Via SMS

Don Bailey and Mathew Solnik, Two hackers have found a way to unlock cars that use remote control and telemetry systems like BMW Assist, GM OnStar, Ford Sync, and Hyundai Blue Link. These systems communicate with the automaker’s remote servers via standard standard mobile networks like GSM and CDMA — and with a clever bit of reverse engineering, the hackers were able to pose as these servers and communicate directly with a car’s on-board computer via “war texting” — a riff on “war driving,” the act of finding open wireless networks.

Submit Links:
SeMeNSPeRmS@SeMeNSPeRmS.com

PHEW..!

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:01:45 +0000

✖ Busted by Facebook: Some on probation learn the hard way that online posts can backfire

If you don’t want to do the time, stay offline. Or at the very least, don’t “friend” your probation officer.

Convicted of possessing methamphetamine and Ecstasy, Scott W. Roby learned that the hard way. The Louisville man had his probation revoked this month — and was sentenced to two years in prison — in part for violating conditions that required him to stay alcohol-free and out of bars and liquor stores.

Roby had invited his probation officer to be his friend on Facebook, then Roby posted pictures of himself drinking — including one in which he was holding a beer while posed next to “Buddy Bat,” the mascot for the Louisville Bats, said prosecutor Dinah Koehler.

In another Facebook post, according to court records, Roby asked: “Anyone wanna go get smashed tonight one last time before the end of the Earth?”
✖ Heroin in the Heartland | An Epidemic of Addiction

The change in Oxycontin formulation had a second, deadlier effect. Oxycodone is a lipid (fat)-soluble molecule, so the drug crosses nasal membranes quickly—almost as quickly as when the drug is injected. Most users of oxycodone were content to snort the drug, as the benefit of injecting was not worth dissolving the crushed tablets and using needles. But heroin burns when it is ‘insufflated’ or snorted, and the molecule crossed lipid membranes more slowly— providing reasons to inject the drug. Many patients tell me that they never considered using needles when Oxycontin was around, but that the only way to get similar effects from heroin was by injecting the drug. In other words, the change in formulation of Oxycontin resulted in an increase in intravenous drug abuse.
✖ Dad Busted for Injecting Heroin Into Nine-Year-Old Son’s Neck

According to New Mexico state police, the mother of Velasquez’s nine-year-old son noticed unusual track marks on the boy’s neck and took him to the hospital. There, the youngster told investigators about how his dad would inject him with heroin sometimes. The police then arrested Velasquez, who’s now facing charges of child abuse and contributing to a delinquency of a minor.
✖ Ecuador suspends liquor sales after homemade booze kills 21

The Ecuadorian government imposed a 72-hour nationwide ban on sales and consumption of alcohol after 21 people died from drinking homemade aguardiente made with methanol.

The announcement was made Sunday during a press conference at which a number officials took part including Health Minister David Chiriboga and Security Minister Homero Arellano, and at which a national health emergency was declared.

A source at Arellano’s office told Efe that the ban on booze is in force for all types of liquors, but only homemade alcohol will be subject to summary confiscation.

Authorities had already declared the health emergency and alcohol ban in Los Rios province, where the deaths took place and where some 9,000 liters (2,400 gallons) of homemade liquor were seized.
✖ A History of Government Management of UFO Perceptions through Film and Television

UFOs and aliens beings have often been portrayed in mass media, whether it be movies or television shows. Most of these appearances were however heavily edited and calculated by the American government in order to communicate a specific attitude towards this mysterious phenomenon. What is the purpose of these efforts? This article looks at the fascinating history of government involvement in UFO-related movies and television shows.
✖ State Rep. Hurley admits carving initials into House floor desk

Yes, she carved her initials in her desk on the floor of the state House, state Rep. Julia Hurley, R-Lenoir City, confirmed today.

“It was like 1 in the morning on the last day of the session,” Hurley said of that late-night session in May. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

Hurley was responding to a recent report on a Nashville television station about the incident. The station reported several other desks also have marks on them, ranging from initials to a dollar sign.
✖ Britain ‘four meals away from anarchy’

MODERN civilisation may not be quite as safe as we thought. Britain’s security services have been privately warning their staff that western societies are just 48 hours from anarchy.

MI5’s maxim is that society is “four meals away from anarchy”. In other words, the security agency believes that Britain could be quickly reduced to large-scale disorder, including looting and rioting in the event of a catastrophe that stops the supply of food.
✖ Nonbelievers

Never Forget 9/11
Religion was the cause.
✖ Going viral with doggie doo

Pollution in the Puget Sound is such a problem that a group trying to protect the ecosystem spent $27,000 in state money to make a catchy video, complete with dance steps, telling people how they can do something about it.

Pick up dog poop.
✖ Polk sheriff won’t cover inmate undies

He changed the menu at Polk County’s jail, directing cooks to dish up less-expensive food. He banned basketball, ordering inmates to uproot the jail’s hoops. And he changed the jail’s TV options to favor educational viewing rather than sports and violent programming.

Now Polk Sheriff Grady Judd is taking on skivvies. His latest cost-saving measure: stop providing free underwear to male inmates.

“There’s no state law; there’s no federal law that says we have to provide underwear in the county jail,” Judd said.

The jail will sell white boxers for $4.48 a pair and white briefs for $2.54 a pair — to inmates who choose to wear underwear.

Judd presented the idea to county commissioners Thursday, saying the plan would save $45,000 a year.

“Why shouldn’t they pay like the rest of us pay?” the sheriff said. “We pay to maintain the county jail; to keep them there. Certainly they can pay their way as much as they can afford.”

“This is the county jail; it’s not a welfare program,” he said.
‪✖ Colonizing Space – ’70s Style!‬‏

A NASA video from a time of great optimism about space exploration. The Apollo missions were completed and the Space Shuttle program was underway. How soon before cheap and frequent flights to space would allow the construction of O’Neal colonies and mining camps on the Moon? This visionary approach calls for tiered greenhouses in space and unlimited solar power beamed back to Earth… all before the year 2000!
✖ Murdoch news sites defaced, brought down by hackers

LulzSec, the group of hackers that said three weeks ago it was disbanding, claimed credit Monday for defacing Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper website, while an allied group, Anonymous, claimed credit for a denial-of-service attack that brought down the website of The Times, another Murdoch paper. The Sunday Times and News International sites also appeared to be down Monday.

“Tango down,” Anonymous said on its Twitter page about The Times. Meanwhile, late Monday, those who went to the Sun’s website were redirected to a website that looked like The Sun with a fake story that said Murdoch’s body had been found in his garden. Then they were taken to LulzSec’s Twitter page, where the group proclaimed:

“TheSun.co.uk now redirects to our twitter feed. Hello, everyone that wanted to visit The Sun!,” then followed with this: “”We have joy, we have fun, we have messed up Murdoch’s Sun.”
✖ Cities Report Surge in Graffiti

And Los Angeles does not appear to be alone in grappling with a recent upsurge in graffiti, which is turning up in some unlikely places. A bumper crop of scrawls is blossoming in many modest-size communities across the country — in places like Florence, Ala.; Bernalillo County, N.M.; Taylors, S.C.; and in larger cities like Nashville and Portland, Ore. — even as major cities like Chicago, Denver, New York and Seattle say vigilant antigraffiti campaigns have spared them thus far.

“It’s popped up all of a sudden in the last six months,” said Tim Sandrell, the owner of Safari Adventures in Hair in Florence. “I’ve been downtown for 10 years, and I’m really disappointed that we are seeing this kind of activity. We have a beautiful city and an historic city, and it’s really upsetting to me seeing this going on.”
✖ Pseudomamma on the foot: An unusual presentation of supernumerary breast tissue

On physical examination, the breasts were symmetrical having no nodes or retractions. In the plantar region of the patient’s left foot, there was a well-formed nipple was surrounded by areola and hair on the surface, measuring 4.0 cm in diameter, with no palpable nodes (Figs. 1 and 2). The remaining physical examination was normal, including the mammary line. Results of the following laboratory tests were normal: complete blood count, fasting serum glucose level, urine exam, electrolytes, serum urea and creatinine. No alterations were found during ultrasound of the lesion and urinary tract.
✖ Your Brain on Androids

Ever get the heebie-jeebies at a wax museum? Feel uneasy with an anthropomorphic robot? What about playing a video game or watching an animated movie, where the human characters are pretty realistic but just not quite right and maybe a bit creepy? If yes, then you’ve probably been a visitor to what’s called the “uncanny valley.”

The phenomenon has been described anecdotally for years, but how and why this happens is still a subject of debate in robotics, computer graphics and neuroscience. Now an international team of researchers, led by Ayse Pinar Saygin of the University of California, San Diego, has taken a peek inside the brains of people viewing videos of an uncanny android (compared to videos of a human and a robot-looking robot).
✖ Salt or cocaine, a fix is a basic instinct

PRIMORDIAL instincts that drive animals to seek out salt may be governed by the same mechanism that drives drug addicts to hunt down their fix.

Researchers deprived mice and rats of salt, then offered them salty water to drink. After killing the animals they examined gene activity in the hypothalamus, the brain’s “reward” centre. They found that gratification genes had been activated – the same genes that are active in cocaine and heroin addicts when their craving has been satisfied.
✖ An Alarming New Stimulant, Sold Legally in Many States

The cases are jarring and similar to those involving PCP in the 1970s. Some of the recent incidents include a man in Indiana who climbed a roadside flagpole and jumped into traffic, a man in Pennsylvania who broke into a monastery and stabbed a priest, and a woman in West Virginia who scratched herself “to pieces” over several days because she thought there was something under her skin.
✖ How the drugs of the 60s changed art

In the ’60s, a lot of people were experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs including marijuana, LSD and everything in between. You had acid rock posters in San Francisco associated with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and groups like that.

But my theory is that there were probably a lot of artists that didn’t necessarily want to do psychedelic-style art that were still influenced by the experience and created works that don’t necessarily look psychedelic in the stereotypical way, but may be conceptually psychedelic or have a kind of philosophical way of looking at the world.
story.serra.maze.gi.jpg

If you look at a lot of different styles in art of the past 50 years, you can see the influence of psychedelics, ranging from sculpture that looks very minimal like Richard Serra’s giant, spiral, mazelike structures, to something like Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” there’s an interest in having art be experiential…
✖ Brothers grim: Jake or Dinos Chapman – in pictures

Jake and Dinos Chapman’s new two-part show at London’s White Cube galleries are presided over by a troupe of ghoulish Nazis with smiley-face armbands and a horde of schoolgirls with animal faces. Just two distinctive touches in an exhibition that makes a virtue of bad taste

Warning: contains images that some people may find offensive
✖ Colo. Woman Accused Of Groping TSA Agent In Ariz.

Authorities say a Colorado woman who allegedly groped a female Transportation Security Administration agent at Phoenix’s international airport is facing a felony count of sexual abuse.

Phoenix police say 61-year-old Yukari Mihamae is accused of grabbing the left breast of the unidentified TSA agent Thursday afternoon at an airport checkpoint.

TSA staff say Mihamae refused to be go through passenger screening and became argumentative before she squeezed and twisted the agent’s breast with both hands.
✖ How to Damage Your Laptop in the Quickest Possible Time

Your laptop, with all its sensitive data and/or ill-gotten gains, is about to be confiscated by the authorities, who are banging on the door. There’s no time to reformat it—you’ve got to destroy it, fast.

This sticker will help you do just that, provided you’ve a drill by your side. (And which self-respecting cyber criminal wouldn’t?)

Meant to be placed directly above your laptop’s hard disk, the sticker sports a crosshair with which you can accurately destroy any digital evidence the cops are after.

Randy Sarafan, who created the stickers, advises to “research the build of your laptop and locate the position of your hard drive”.
✖ Austerity For Everyone, Except The Department Of Defense

While Congress and the President fight it out over the debt ceiling and all of America quietly shudders over whether our economy will completely default on itself, at least one industry still hums along without a care in the world. Amidst a fiscal crisis of apparently apocalyptic proportions, where the GOP demands dollar for dollar spending cuts from the budget in order to raise our debt limit, the Pentagon asked Congress for $264 million to cover part of a $771 million overrun on the F-35 program. The Hill reports Republican Senator John McCain let the news slip via Twitter, saying “Congress notified that first F-35 jets have cost overruns of $771M. Outrageous! Pentagon asking for $264M down payment now. Disgraceful.”
✖ Pentagon Wants a Social Media Propaganda Machine

On Thursday, Defense Department extreme technology arm Darpa unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself.

This is more than just checking the trending topics on Twitter. The Defense Department wants to deeply grok social media dynamics. So SMISC algorithms will be aimed at discovering and tracking the “formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes)” on social media, according to Darpa’s announcement.
✖ Photo Gallery: South African Prison Tattoos

Cut into the flesh with nails and makeshift blades, rubbed into the wounds with a mixture of melted black rubber seals, ground red brick, trash bins, batteries, and saliva — these tattoos are forbidden in the South African prison system. Despite the severe penalties and permanent stigma, tattooing persists. For her photo study Life After, Cape Town photographer Araminta de Clermont sought out former inmates of “Numbers” prison gangs who were struggling for acceptance and survival since being released after years, sometimes decades of incarceration and shot their portraits in their current environment. Faces. Signs. A sailor’s grave. A note to a deceased mother, inked across the forehead. These full body and facial tattoos serve as narratives of crime history and life struggle. See the compelling images in our gallery.
✖ Online child porn bill raises privacy fears

A bill that seeks to clamp down on online child pornography is raising some alarms in the tech and privacy communities because of a provision that would require Internet service providers to store users’ IP addresses for 18 months.

The legislation, spearheaded by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), would require Internet providers and possibly other entities to retain that information to aid law enforcement investigations of child exploitation.

The bill already has some notable support, namely from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

However, it also faces tough criticism from tech companies and public interest groups, which believe the section on data retention is too broad, threatens Web users’ privacy and may not accomplish its stated goal of cracking down on child pornography.
✖ MK ULTRA AND MIND CONTROL IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Timothy McVeigh? The V-Tech Shooter? The Columbine Killers? John Hinkley Junior? Mark David Chapman? Sirhan Sirhan? Harvey Lee Oswald? These people have significantly impacted our lives, all MK Ultra victims.
✖ Nobel Prize Winning Economist Paul Krugman: “So When Officials Tell You that We Must Rush to Settle with the Banks for the Sake of the Economy, Don’t Believe Them. We Should Do This Right, And Hold Bankers Accountable for Their Actions”

Officials are pushing for a settlement with mortgage companies that, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, “would broadly absolve the firms of wrongdoing in exchange for penalties reaching $30 billion and assurances that the firms will adhere to better practices.”

Why the rush to settle? As far as I can tell, there are two principal arguments being made for letting the banks off easy. The first is the claim that resolving the mortgage mess quickly is the key to getting the housing market back on its feet. The second, less explicitly stated, is the claim that getting tough with the banks would undermine broader prospects for recovery.

Neither of these arguments makes much sense.
✖ News of the World phone-hacking whistleblower found dead

Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbiz reporter who was the first named journalist to allege Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead, the Guardian has learned.

Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems, is said to have been found dead at his Watford home.

Hertfordshire police would not confirm his identity, but the force said in a statement: “At 10.40am today [Monday 18 July] police were called to Langley Road, Watford, following the concerns for the welfare of a man who lives at an address on the street. Upon police and ambulance arrival at a property, the body of a man was found. The man was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after.

“The death is currently being treated as unexplained, but not thought to be suspicious. Police investigations into this incident are ongoing.”
✖ 2 Arrested After Goats, Guinea Pigs, Ducks Found In Car of Bang Bus Stars

Two men face animal cruelty charges after a call reporting crying coming from a car led officers to discover several animals inside.

Miami police said officers were dispatched to Northwest 37th Avenue and Northwest Seventh Street on Monday after receiving a report that someone had heard what they thought was a baby crying in a car parked there.

The officers found no child in the car, but they did find several animals, including goats, roosters, pigeons, guinea pigs and ducks.

Police said one of the goats died later that day, but they did not elaborate on the animal’s cause of death.
✖ Tepco Works to Cover Fukushima as Storm Nears

Tokyo Electric Power Co. is rushing to install a cover over a building at its crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant to shield it from wind and rain as Typhoon Ma-on approaches Japan’s coast from the south.
✖ BP pipeline leaks oily mixture onto Alaskan tundra

BP reported yet another pipeline leak at its Alaskan oilfields, frustrating the oil giant’s attempts to rebuild its reputation after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

BP said on Monday that a pipeline at its 30,000 barrel per day Lisburne field, which is currently closed for maintenance, ruptured during testing and spilled a mixture of methanol and oily water onto the tundra.

The London-based company has a long history of oil spills at its Alaskan pipelines – accidents which have hurt its public image in the U.S., where around 40 percent of its assets are based.
✖ 64 missile warheads stolen from train

AUTHORITIES are investigating the theft of 64 missile warheads from a train transporting military equipment to Bulgaria.

Interior ministry spokesman Marius Militaru said Sunday the components are not dangerous on their own – only when integrated into missile systems. Prosecutors said on nday they are investigating the theft.

Officials did not respond to inquiries regarding if the warheads contained explosives.

Railway workers on Saturday noticed the seals on a carriage door were broken, and it was not properly closed when the train reached Giurgiu, a Danube port that borders Bulgaria.
✖ Cheap Trick Stage Collapse VIDEO: Catastrophic Crash At Ottawa Bluesfest

The main stage at the Ottawa Bluefest came crashing down Sunday right in the middle of a Cheap Trick set, injuring 4 people including one in serious condition.

Winds apparently picked up around 8 p.m. EDT, causing the stage to seemingly fold in on itself and sending the band members quickly off their feet. All members of the band reportedly emerged unharmed.
✖ Police: Foreclosed Home Set Fire; Man Shot

a Broward Sheriff’s Office deputy went to a townhouse at 738 SW 107th Ave. to serve an eviction notice about 11 a.m.

The real estate agent for the property confirmed the man inside the home was Allen Gauntlett, 52, who had lost the home to foreclosure after owing $10,000 in homeowners’ dues and fees.

Police officers said Gauntlett would not come out of the home, and the deputy called for backup.

“As we were sending a unit to that location, the BSO deputy then called again and said that the subject was setting the house on fire,” said Sgt. John Gazzano, of the Pembroke Pines Police Department.

“They said he put gasoline in his whole house and set it on fire, and the windows are all burned out, and the door has burnout around it,” said neighbor Kara Burbano.

Police said Gauntlett walked out of the burning house and got into a fight with officers, so the officers shot him.
✖ Police say city men kidnapped teen and glued his lips shut

Holding the butcher knife, Bangs allegedly ordered the teen to take off his clothes and lie down. Bangs allegedly burned a rubber glove over the teen, letting it drip onto him and burning his abdomen, according to police.

Bangs accused the teen of being “a snitch,” according to the police report.

After dripping the burning rubber on the teen, Ismael then allegedly held a lighter close to the teen’s lips and told him not to blow it out or he would cut him. He also stuck paper up the teen’s nostrils and lit it, again telling him not to blow it out. The teen suffered burns on his lips, according to the report.

Ismael then allegedly applied a large amount of glue to the teen’s lips, gluing them together. He also used a lighter to heat up the blade of a knife and applied it to the victim’s shoulder “numerous times,” causing several burn injuries.

Submit Links:
SeMeNSPeRmS@SeMeNSPeRmS.com

The Grand Wizard Of Links

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 13:11:08 +0000

✪ Yearbook recalled over child porn photo

Hundreds of Big Bear High School yearbooks have been recalled because of a picture showing a 17-year-old boy with his hand up his date’s dress, officials said Thursday.

The photo may involve sexual penetration and constitutes child pornography, said Cindy Bachman, spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.
✪ Woman says she’s too ‘educated’ to be kicked off New York train

A woman traveling on New York’s Metro North train line was recorded by a fellow passenger telling train employees that she is too “well-educated” to be told to quiet down and not use profanity in her cell-phone conversation.

“Do you know what schools I’ve been to? How well-educated I am?” she asks the train employee, who is seen explaining to another employee that she asked the passenger to stop using the “F-bomb.”

“I’m sorry do you think I’m a little hoodlum?” she asks, then demands her money back and dares the conductor to stop the train.
✪ Anti Nowhere League – So What
✪ Black hole fires beam of energy at Earth while swallowing star

Black hole fires beams at Earth while destroying star: a massive black hole has been discovered devouring a star, causing the star to shoot beams of energy at Earth. The event is thought to occur only once every 100 million years.
✪ Rising water, falling journalism | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Virtually every article about the flooding mentions that the Fort Calhoun plant was shut down on April 9. On May 27, the Omaha World-Herald reported, “The Omaha Public Power District said its nuclear plant at Fort Calhoun, which is shut down for maintenance, is safe from flooding.” The implication is that being shut down makes a plant safe. But as the ongoing crisis in Fukushima demonstrates, nuclear fuel remains hot long after a reactor is shut down. When Fort Calhoun is shut down for maintenance and refueling, only one-third of the fuel in the reactor core is removed. Besides the hot fuel remaining in the core, there is even more fuel stored in the spent-fuel pool, which is not shut down. According to a May 2011 report by Robert Alvarez at the Institute for Policy Studies, there are an estimated 1,054 assemblies of spent fuel, weighing 379 tons, at Fort Calhoun.
✪ In Japan, Another Nuclear Reactor Tests Nation’s Will

Three hundred miles southwest of Fukushima, at a nuclear reactor perched on the slopes of this rustic peninsula, engineers are engaged in another precarious struggle.
The Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor — a long-troubled national project — has been in a precarious state of shutdown since a 3.3-ton device crashed into the reactor’s inner vessel, cutting off access to the plutonium and uranium fuel rods at its core. Engineers have tried repeatedly since the accident last August to recover the device, which appears to have gotten stuck. They will make another attempt as early as next week.
✪ New plant disease linked to GM crops and pesticides

US scientists claim to have discovered a dangerous new plant disease linked to genetically modified crops and the pesticides used on them.

The research, which is yet to be completed, suggests the pathogen could be the cause of recent widespread crop failure and miscarriages in livestock.

Emeritus Professor Don Huber from Perdue University says his research shows that animals fed on GM corn or soybeans may suffer serious health problems due to the pathogen.

“They’re finding anywhere from 20 per cent to as much as 55 per cent of those [animals] will miscarriage or spontaneously abort,” he said.
✪ Formative Experiences with Nude Imagery

I’m 35. I come from an era in which pre-teens had to go on cultural-archeological digs not just for porn, but also for punk music, so-called art house movies, strange literature, and underground comics. We shoplifted, sent away for zines and catalogs, and traded with each other to get our hands on contraband materials. But something we probably have in common with the youth of today, and all kids ever, is that when we were even younger, images seem to have sought us out—not the other way around. That brings me, finally, to the subject of this post, which is a few of the images that, at some point early in my life, lodged themselves into the nascent “this is what turns you on” portion of my brain. These things are running around in there even now, perhaps a little more spectral with each year, but working their influence nonetheless.
✪ Officials explain Bananas Foster fire at Palm Harbor restaurant

The fire spread quickly. Flaming rum splashed across plates and onto skin, igniting Katie Hudgins’ dress, sending horrified shrieks through the dining room of Ozona Blue restaurant.

The table of five had just minutes earlier ordered dessert: two helpings of Bananas Foster, a sweet, spectacular flambe dish sauteed in butter and ignited with rum.

But as server Ian Monsalvo poured the 151-proof liquor into the pan, a sudden burst of flames erupted. Caught in the blaze was Hudgins, 25, an elementary school teacher, whose fiance’s parents had invited her to dinner.

Nick Salzer, 20, an Ozona Blue chef and aspiring firefighter, raced from the kitchen, tore off Hudgins’ burning dress and stomped out the flames. With others, he guided Hudgins to a couch in the lobby and covered her with a blanket as an unidentified woman frantically called 911.
✪ San Francisco Is a City of Sluts, Study Finds

General sluttiness is surely among the attributes preening liberals refer to when they bray about “San Francisco Values.” From the Mission to the Marina, from the “soiled doves” who ruled the Barbary Coast to the present-day skank chain-smoking in front of Vertigo, we are a city of the lecherous, the depraved, and the polyamorous.

This open secret is confirmed in a new study commissioned by condom-maker Trojan, which found that among residents of the major U.S. cities surveyed, San Franciscans reported having had sex with the greatest number of people. We clocked in at an average of 30 partners. (Not all at once, mind you — even San Franciscans face certain physical limitations.) At the bottom of the list were Chicagoans, who reported, on average, having had 11 partners.
✪ Prison escapee knocks on wrong door

An escaped convict was caught following a day on the loose after he knocked on the door of a cabin in the woods – only to find out the man renting the lodge was an off-duty guard at the prison he just fled.
✪ Herschel Telescope Spots a Star Spewing Powerful Water Jets into Interstellar Space

Researchers looking for signs of life elsewhere in the universe often start by looking for one key ingredient necessary to complex life as we know it: water. And just 750 light-years away, they’ve found quite a bit of it spewing from the poles of a young, sunlike star that is blasting jets of H2O into interstellar space at 124,000 miles per hour.
✪ High Wired: Does Addictive Internet Use Restructure the Brain?

Whereas descriptions of online addiction are controversial at best among researchers, a new study cuts through much of the debate and hints that excessive time online can physically rewire a brain.

The work, published June 3 in PLoS ONE, suggests self-assessed Internet addiction, primarily through online multiplayer games, rewires structures deep in the brain. What’s more, surface-level brain matter appears to shrink in step with the duration of online addiction.

“I’d be surprised if playing online games for 10 to 12 hours a day didn’t change the brain,” says neuroscientist Nora Volkow of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who wasn’t involved in the study. “The reason why Internet addiction isn’t a widely recognized disorder is a lack of scientific evidence. Studies like this are exactly what is needed to recognize and settle on its diagnostic criteria,” she says.
✪ Student faces extradition to US over TV website

A British student is facing extradition to the United States and up to five years in jail for running a website that offered links to pirated films and television shows.
✪ UFO over Mexico City

A research team from Open Minds captured photos of a strange, seemingly biologic UFO in the sky above Mexico City. For more details, you can read the full story in the August/September 2010 issue of Open Minds magazine.
✪ ‘Deer With Wings’ Causes Montana Power Outage

A Montana resident says an energy company has identified the cause of a brief power outage as “deer with wings.” Lee Bridges says she was outside with her dogs around the time the power went out when a NorthWestern Energy truck pulled up, giving her a chance to ask the driver what caused the problem.

She says he pointed up and said, “Apparently, we’ve got deer with wings.”
✪ Media ignores public outrage while protesters camp out in NYC

“Once you go outside the hoard and you start covering that unions and workers are fighting against cut-backs from a powerful mayor and they want Wall Street to pay higher taxes, well, those are likely your sponsors if you are a big commercial news operation,” explained journalism Professor Jeff Cohen.

As the media treads carefully around the issues, the people’s anger is growing – so how many will be camping out here before the media is shaken out of its self-imposed oblivion to report what matters?
✪ TSA “Security Exercise” Covers 3 States, 5000 Miles

The TSA, in alliance with a whole host of federal, state, local agencies as well as military personnel, is currently conducting a massive “security exercise” throughout Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia.

“The participating teams are composed of a variety of TSA assets including federal air marshals, canine teams, inspectors and bomb appraisal officers. They will be joined by state and local law enforcement officials to supplement existing resources, provide detection and response capabilities. The exercise will utilize multiple airborne assets, including Blackhawk helicopters and fixed wing aircraft as well as waterborne and surface teams,” reports the Marietta Times.

Although the exercise is couched in serious rhetoric about preparedness, it relates to “no specific threat” and the details are nebulous to say the least and seems to revolve around little else than testing out high-tech surveillance equipment and reminding Americans who their bosses are.
✪ US Orders News Blackout Over Crippled Nebraska Nuclear Plant

Located about 20 minutes outside downtown Omaha, the largest city in Nebraska, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant is owned by Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) who on their website denies their plant is at a “Level 4” emergency by stating: “This terminology is not accurate, and is not how emergencies at nuclear power plants are classified.”

Russian atomic scientists in this FAAE report, however, say that this OPPD statement is an “outright falsehood” as all nuclear plants in the world operate under the guidelines of the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) which clearly states the “events” occurring at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant do, indeed, put it in the “Level 4” emergency category of an “accident with local consequences” thus making this one of the worst nuclear accidents in US history.

Submit Links:
SeMeNSPeRmS@SeMeNSPeRmS.com

Riot On!

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 13:03:51 +0000

✦ Video of mad Canada riots: Vancouver fans run amok, set cars on fire

Angry, drunken revellers ran wild on Wednesday night after the Vancouver Canucks’ 4-0 loss to Boston in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals, setting cars and garbage cans ablaze, smashing windows, showering giant TV screens with beer bottles and dancing atop overturned vehicles. Later, looters smashed windows and ran inside department stores. There were no immediate indications of injuries, although images were shown on television of at least one woman mopping blood from her forehead. Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson praised the police and firefighters and asked people to stay away from the central downtown area. Tear gas mingled with the stench of acrid smoke and stale beer as riot police, truncheons drawn, moved in to quell the violence, pushing crowds away from the burning cars. Later, police cars also were set on fire.
✦ Photos of Vancouver rioting
✦ Arizona Police Officer Execute Man For Telling Them They Needed A Warrant

Arizona Police Officer Execute Man For Telling Them They Needed A Warrant

cop cops execute execution arizona “arizona police” “cop kills unarmed man” “cop kills man in home” “no warrant” “cop executes man” nwo 666 “nwo thugs”
✦ Too Much TV Could Shorten Your Lifespan

Harvard researchers reviewed eight studies and found that for each two hours of TV watching a day, the risk of Type 2 diabetes goes up by 20 percent, the risk of heart disease goes up by 15 percent and the risk of premature death goes up by 13 percent.

That means for every two hours of TV watched a day among 100,000 people per year, 176 people will develop Type 2 diabetes, 38 people will develop heart disease and 104 people will die prematurely, according to the study, which was published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
✦ Magic mushroom’s positive effects lasting over a year, say researchers

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine claim to have determined the proper dose levels needed to create positive changes in attitudes, mood, life satisfaction, and behavior that persist for more than a year with the psychoactive substance in so-called “magic mushrooms.”

The findings are the latest in a series of experiments done at Johns Hopkins to investigate psilocybin, a psychedelic substance contained in certain mushrooms. The findings were published online this week in the peer-reviewed journal Psychopharmacology.
✦ CNN Reports Ron Paul At 0% While CNN Online Poll Shows Him At 75%

While the online poll conducted by CNN shows Ron Paul as the clear winner with 75% of the votes, CNN reporters pull a fast one by citing a lesser known poll hosted at National Journal claiming Ron Paul came in at 0%.

CNN discards their own poll in favor of another poll that shows results more to their liking.

This is overt propaganda.
✦ Mississippi flooding could mean largest Gulf dead zone ever

Scientists predict this year’s “dead zone” of low-oxygen water in the northern Gulf of Mexico will be the largest in history — about the size of Lake Erie — because of more runoff from the flooded Mississippi River valley.
✦ RT crew caught in Athens tear gas chaos, slammed by Greek rioters

RT film crew in Athens got caught in the middle of violent street protests. The cameraman has been slammed by a group of protesters, while correspondent Sarah Firth required medical assistance due to tear gas exposure.

Submit Links:
SeMeNSPeRmS@SeMeNSPeRmS.com

Jesus Jeans

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 13:02:42 +0000

✪ In jail: Zimbabwe police sergeant who dared to use Robert Mugabe’s loo

When the call of nature comes, it cannot always be denied. Few have answered it in such an unfortunate fashion as Alois Mabhunu.

While on duty at a trade fair, the Zimbabwean police sergeant could not hold on and allegedly dashed to the nearest toilet – disastrously, it transpired, as it was reserved for President Robert Mugabe.

He was arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of invading the presidential privy.
✪ Cops Discover Vinnie Vincent’s Dead Dog Collection

Former Kiss guitarist Vinnie Vincent was arrested in his current home of Tennessee Saturday on assault charges after his wife Diane reported to police an incident wherein the Lick It Up shredder hit her, threw her to the ground, and dragged her through broken glass. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Rutherford County officers dispatched to Vincent’s home immediately thereafter found “four sealed containers containing deceased dogs” that had apparently been killed by one of Vinnie’s other more “aggressive” dogs. We think we speak for the entire global heavy metal community when we ask what in the name of Paul Fucking Stanley is going on in Vinnie Vincent’s life in 2011?
✪ Matthew Perry to take break to focus on sobriety

Perry made two trips to rehab for addiction to alcohol and prescription painkillers during the 10-year run of “Friends” , on which he played wise-cracking Chandler Bing.
✪ Gruesome film banned from the UK

The sequel to ‘The Human Centipede’ has been refused a UK cinema release.

The imaginatively titled ‘The Human Centipede II’ was rejected by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) on the basis that it is “sexually violent and potentially obscene”.
✪ How Pure Is X?

From 1993 to 2008, the Drugs Information Monitoring System (DIMS) in The Netherlands gathered and analyzed tablets of purported MDMA sold on the street as Ecstasy. In a research report published in Addiction, Neeltje Vogels and others at the Netherlands Institute for Mental Health and Addiction in Utrecht found that between 70 to 90 % of the samples submitted as MDMA were pure. The most common non-MDMA adulterant was found to be caffeine.

The Dutch study obtained samples for testing from capsules seized by club owners and given to the police, who then passed them on to DIMS for analysis. This system helped eliminate the possible bias effect of voluntary submissions. In the mid to late 1990s, researchers saw an increase in samples contaminated with ephedra and methamphetamine, and sample purity hit an all-time low of 60% in 1997. The years from 2000 to 2004 were the golden era, so to speak, for MDMA purity.
✪ The things red-light and toll scofflaws will do to get out of a ticket

Florida Department of Transportation cameras capture people using various methods to avoid paying tolls and fines.
✪ One in four US hackers ‘is an FBI informer’

The underground world of computer hackers has been so thoroughly infiltrated in the US by the FBI and secret service that it is now riddled with paranoia and mistrust, with an estimated one in four hackers secretly informing on their peers, a Guardian investigation has established.
✪ Artists and Assistants: The Art Assembly Line

It’s a phenomenon that’s rarely discussed in the art world: The new work on a gallery wall wasn’t necessarily painted by the artist who signed it. Some well-known artists, such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, openly employ small armies of assistants to do their paintings and sculptures. Others hire help more quietly.

Art-market insiders say soaring prices and demand for contemporary art is spurring the use of apprentices by more artists. The art world is divided on the practice: While some collectors and dealers put a premium on paintings and sculptures executed by an artist’s own hand, others say that assistants are a necessity in the contemporary market.
✪ Fake Prada bags: Why counterfeits help high-end designers sell more of the real thing

When most people think about the effect of counterfeits on legitimate brands—and when brands themselves litigate against counterfeiters—they focus on the “business stealing” effect: Every fake Prada handbag represents a lost sale for Prada. But a dirty little secret is that Prada rip-offs can also function as free advertising for real Prada handbags—partly by signaling the brand’s popularity, but, less obviously, by creating what MIT marketing professor Renee Richardson Gosline has described as a “gateway” product. For her doctoral thesis, Gosline immersed herself in the counterfeit “purse parties” of upper-middle-class moms. She found that her subjects formed attachments to their phony Vuittons and came to crave the real thing when, inevitably, they found the stitches falling apart on their cheap knockoffs. Within a couple of years, more than half of the women—many of whom had never fancied themselves consumers of $1,300 purses—abandoned their counterfeits for authentic items.
✪ MI6 attacks al-Qaeda in ‘Operation Cupcake’

British intelligence has hacked into an al-Qaeda online magazine and replaced bomb-making instructions with a recipe for cupcakes.
✪ What makes an image memorable?

Next time you go on vacation, you may want to think twice before shooting hundreds of photos of that scenic mountain or lake.

A new study from MIT neuroscientists shows that the most memorable photos are those that contain people, followed by static indoor scenes and human-scale objects. Landscapes? They may be beautiful, but they are, in most cases, utterly forgettable.
✪ Asia’s Drug Zone Gets Up to Speed

A modern epidemic now threatens Phiyer and no amount of ancient voodoo will protect it. The village lies in the mountainous Sing district, which shares its northern border — and the mighty Mekong River — with Burma. There, in semiautonomous fiefdoms ruled by heavily armed militias, secret factories spew out hundreds of millions of tablets of methamphetamine, a highly addictive drug better known there by its Thai name yaba (crazy medicine). From Burma, the drug is spirited across the ill-policed Mekong into Laos and its four other neighbors — China, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia — and onward to other parts of Asia and as far afield as New Zealand. Sleepy Phiyer sits on one of Asia’s — and the world’s — busiest drug-trafficking routes.
✪ Melted Fuel at Fukushima May Have Leaked Through

The melted fuel at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power station may have leaked through the pressure vessels of the Nos. 1 to 3 reactors, the Yomiuri newspaper reported.

The Japanese government will submit a report to the International Atomic Energy Agency that raises the possibility the fuel dropped through the bottom of the pressure vessels, a situation described as a “melt through” and considered more serious than a “meltdown,” according to the report, which cited the document.
✪ Bitcoin: With Enemies Like Schumer, Who Needs Friends?

This time, his primary vendetta is against the online black market site Silk Road — but he has plenty of ire to spare for the encrypted e-currency Bitcoin as well, for facilitating such anonymous transactions. Silk Road — whose URL (http://ianxz6zefk72ulzz.onion/index.php) is accessible only through the Tor anonymizer — became a center of media attention after a story at Gawker.com on June 1 revealed that the anonymous marketplace hosts such goods for sale as hashish, weed, ecstasy, heroin and LSD.

Silk Road is a classic example of the kinds of rating and reputational mechanisms that emerge in a free market, absent the regulatory state. Although sellers’ real identities are unknown, their history of quality and reliability is tracked on the same user feedback model as Amazon and Ebay.
✪ Eating dirt can be good for the belly, researchers find

Most of us never considered eating the mud pies we made as kids, but for many people all over the world, dining on dirt is nothing out of the ordinary. Now an extensive meta-analysis forthcoming in the June issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology helps explain why. According to the research, the most probable explanation for human geophagy—the eating of earth—is that it protects the stomach against toxins, parasites, and pathogens.
✪ Are the feds torturing the Patriot Act for location data?

It’s hard to imagine a Senator making a blunter statement than Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) made in the heat of the Patriot Act reauthorization fight last month: “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act,” he said, “they will be stunned and they will be angry.” Wyden is in a position to know. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he receives classified briefings from the executive branch. And in recent years, three other current and former members of the Senate—Mark Udall (D-CO), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Russ Feingold (D-WI)—have made similar comments.
✪ Who Owns the TV Networks?

The warning of Theodore Roosevelt has much timeliness today, for the real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over City, State, and nation. It seizes in its long and powerful tentacles our executive officers, our legislative bodies, our schools, our courts, our newspapers, and every agency created for the public protection. To depart from mere generalisations, let me say that at the head of this octopus are….a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as the international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes.
✪ Forensic evidence emerges that European e.coli superbug was bioengineered to produce human fatalities

Even as the veggie blame game is now under way across the EU, where a super resistant strain of e.coli is sickening patients and filling hospitals in Germany, virtually no one is talking about how e.coli could have magically become resistant to eight different classes of antibiotic drugs and then suddenly appeared in the food supply.

This particular e.coli variation is a member of the O104 strain, and O104 strains are almost never (normally) resistant to antibiotics. In order for them to acquire this resistance, they must be repeatedly exposed to antibiotics in order to provide the “mutation pressure” that nudges them toward complete drug immunity.
✪ Mysterious ‘structure’ discovered on Mars

David Martines was scanning Google Mars when he discovered the long white edifice and has even listed the coordinates (49’19.73″N 29 33’06.53″W) so others can see it for themselves.

Mr Martines posted a video of the ‘station’ on YouTube which has been viewed more than 200,000 times.

On the video, he talks through the discovery he has named “Bio-Station Alpha”. “It’s very unusual in that it’s quite large, it’s over 700 feet (210m) long and 150 feet (45m) wide. It looks like it’s a cylinder or made up of cylinders,” he says.

“It could be a power station or it could be a biological containment or it could be a glorified garage — hope it’s not a weapon.
✪ Volunteers to take ecstasy pills live on Channel 4

Drugs Live, a four-part science series, will look at the effect of illegal drugs and alcohol on the body.

Announcing a raft of new programmes, Jay Hunt, Channel 4′s chief creative officer, said the future for the broadcaster lay in taking ”real risks”.

She said: ”When you look across the broadcast landscape, when other broadcasters are more conservative, it’s never been more important for Channel 4 to stimulate debate, to challenge the status quo, and above all to be brave.”

Introducing the Drugs Live project, she said: ”The Government’s drugs tsar Professor (David) Nutt was sacked for claiming that LSD and ecstasy were less harmful than alcohol.

”In an incredibly bold experiment we are going to be putting that to the test live, looking at the impact all of those substances have on the human body in a clinical environment.”
✪ Drug scanner checks Aberdeen pub-goers’ hands

Insp Moray Watt said: “Police officers, working closely with door staff at the premises, will select people for checking as a condition of entry.

“Those who test positive will be refused entry by door staff and potentially searched by police officers for any drugs they have on their person.”

He commended the owners of the pubs taking part in the operation for “taking such a responsible and realistic approach that acknowledges the possibility that controlled drugs may enter their premises”.
✪ ‘Magic penis’ killing set for trial date

A trial date is expected to be set on Thursday for 12 people arrested in connection with setting a pastor alight after accusing him of using a magic penis to sleep with women.
✪ 3 nuclear reactors melted down after quake, Japan confirms

Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant experienced full meltdowns at three reactors in the wake of an earthquake and tsunami in March, the country’s Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters said Monday.

The nuclear group’s new evaluation, released Monday, goes further than previous statements in describing the extent of the damage caused by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

The announcement will not change plans for how to stabilize the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the agency said.

Reactors 1, 2 and 3 experienced a full meltdown, it said.
✪ Did a pork-coated bullet kill Bin Laden? Yes, says firm who claim its pig fat gun oil is bought by U.S. military personnel

The makers of Silver Bullet Gun Oil claim it contains 13 per cent USDA liquefied pig fat thus making the product ‘a highly effective counter-Islamic terrorist force multiplier.’

The apparent owner of the gun oil site, who goes by the name ‘The Midnight Rider,’ explains how the pig fat will transfer onto anything the bullet strikes.

This ‘effectively denies entry to Allah’s paradise to an Islamo-fascist terrorist,’ Rider adds.
✪ Man In A Shopping Mall Takes A Shit In A Planter [Video]
✪ True Crime Archive: St. Louis Murderer Dipped Fried Chicken in Victim’s Blood, Ate It

On September 24, the four, along with Elroy’s girlfriend Sherry Brown, began a night of drinking. At some point, Willie and Betty bought fried chicken with Elroy’s money, who later became upset when Willie decided to eat the remaining chicken.

At 3 a.m. Elroy woke his sleeping brother and informed him that he was going to kill him, Willie and Betty. Forcing all three to sit on the couch, Elroy grabbed a hunting knife and stabbed Betty, severing her spinal cord. He then stabbed Willie nine times. Meanwhile, Sherry (Elroy’s girlfriend) cowered in a corner and Ervin (Elroy’s brother) begged Elroy not to kill him. After Willie died, Elroy dipped some of the chicken in his blood and ate it.
✪ KING RAT | Shock photo of giant rodent blamed for child attacks

THIS shocking photo is said to show a giant rat of the type being blamed for a series of attacks on children.

The monster rodents as big as cats are believed to have killed two babies in South Africa’s squalid townships.

The giant rats grow up to three-foot including their tails – and have front teeth over an INCH long.

Three-year-old Lunathi Dwadwa was killed as she slept in her parent’s shack in a slum outside Cape Town this week.

Another baby girl died in a similar rat attack, on the same day, but this time in the Soweto township near Johannesburg.
✪ German Apple store site defaced with Windows logo

A group calling itself the .Wav Collective, after a Windows audio file format, has posted a video showing a pair of street artists disguised as workmen cordoning off a section of the Jungfernstieg in downtown Hamburg Friday morning, hoisting a ladder against the construction barricade at the site of Apple’s (AAPL) newest retail in the city, and calmly affixing an oversize (and slightly jumbled) Windows logo.
Thanks Naw
✪ Rib Fest At Rochester NY beach turns rowdy as Black Youths go on Rampage

Police arrested more than a dozen people after fights involving about 50 youths broke out around 7 o’clock Monday night at Ontario Beach Park. Police had to clear the area, sending people home.
✪ Class Action Filed Over Texas Newborns Blood Taken For Database [Video]

Submit Links:
SeMeNSPeRmS@SeMeNSPeRmS.com