Halbstark – The story of the first rocker Switzerland, who staid in the fifties Years as a derogatory yobs were called.
Switzerland 2004, directed by Adrian Winkler, Editor: Oliver Wüst
Duration: 40 min

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL97D7B6C8565EE988

Halbstarke (“beatnik”, literally “half-strongs”) is a German term describing a postwar-period subculture of adolescents – mostly male and of working class parents – that appeared in public in an aggressive and provocative way during the 1950s in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Later, the term sometimes described youths in general. While in German, it is still in use today for young, aggressive, mostly male adolescents, it has mostly fallen out of active usage in English.

Literal meaning

The word itself literally means “the half-strong”. Its origins can be traced back to a manufacturing technology named Walken (= to tumble/ mill/ full), via the word’s synonym Halbgewalkte– “half tumbleds”.  Seen that way, the word is a defamation, because it can be associated with “unformed” and “premature” (in German, there also are a few other slight verbal slanders containing “halb”: e.g. Halbschlaue (literally: half-smart) and halbe Portion (literally: half dish / half portion, used for children or adolescents that appear weak). But it is likely that the defamation wasn’t as defamatory to the subculture itself, because its members began calling themselves “Halbstarke”, too. In German, both terms also have an adjective-form (halbstark / halbgewalkt).

“Halbstarke“ during the 50s

These Halbstarken had found prototypes for their fashion and style in American movies, e.g. James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (German title: …denn sie wissen nicht, was sie tun) and Marlon Brando, as well as the stars of rock ‘n’ roll, that was gaining popularity then. In 1956 Karin Baal and Horst Buchholz became idols thanks to the movie Die Halbstarken. That same year Bill Hayley & His Comets’ song Rock Around The Clock reached #1 in the German Pop charts. Often, the Halbstarken wore a quiff, jeans, checked shirts and leather jackets. Their look separated them from the other, more widespread, German youth culture. Mopeds and motorbikes were very popular and used for riding in ‘gangs’ (as seen in American movies). Because there weren’t a lot of alternatives, the Halbstarken often spent their leisure time outdoors. Their cliques met at corners of the road, in parks or at other public places. This behaviour wasn’t appreciated by elder citizens and so they described it as “bumming around” (gammeln). Rock ‘n’ roll offered tunes and rhythms that were revolutionary and a catalyzer for the youths’ emotions and fears, unlike the then-popular but shallow genre Schlager. The effect of this was probably maximized by the new music being rejected by wide parts of the population. During the 1950s, more or less 5% of youth could be referred to as Halbstarke.

Riots by the Halbstarken

The first Halbstarken riots happened after concerts or cinema screenings, which usually were preceded later uprisings as well. On December 30, 1956 about 4000 juveniles walked through Dortmund’s city, affronting passers-by, rampaging and having battles with the police, after a cinema show of Außer Rand und Band (Rock Around the Clock with Bill Haley) Big riots occurred especially from 1956 to 1958. Often, the furniture of cinemas and concert halls was totally destroyed. These riots started severe discussions in media and politics. The seeming sense- and directionlessness of the riots wasn’t comprehensible. Often, the American popular culture was considered guilty. Nowadays, the riots and all of the Halbstarken-phenomenon is seen as a protest against society and its authorities which seemed draconic and bleak. But the protest was neither organized nor politically motivated.

- Wikipedia

Photos of the Halbstarke culture by Karlheinz Weinberger

☛✸Electrik Slide Show✸☚

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQlsfsypBi8

Plastic Bertrand – Ca Plane Pour Moi (1978)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32SkxLCZz_o

Captain Sensible and The Softies (1978)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDmzIO0Jsfk

King - Jet Boy Jet Girl [Feat. Captain Sensible] (1978)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5bk-4Y8gxE

Chron Gen – Jet Boy Jet Girl (1978)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfKRI3TqfwY

✪ Ron Jeremy exclusive: Will the condom law be a wrap for porn industry in L.A.?

An HIV-positive adult film actor is hailing the Los Angeles City Council’s final approval of a city law requiring condoms on porn sets – but veteran star Ron Jeremy thinks its dirty politics. Jeremy, originally from New York, told the Daily News he believes this week’s vote is part of a larger effort to stamp out porn production in the industry’s sunny San Fernando Valley home. “Performers don’t mind wearing rubbers, but viewers don’t want to see it. It ruins the fantasy,” Jeremy said Wednesday. “This will force production to leave Los Angeles, and that’s really what the supporters want,” he claimed. The legendary lothario said local porn purveyors are already feeling the squeeze from a flood of overseas imports and low-budget, amateur productions – and new condom requirements will make competitive success even harder. He said mandatory, monthly STD testing – now the industry standard – is more than adequate to keep performers safe.

✪ Feds Say 7 Behind Celeb-endorsed Megaupload.com Ran Massive, Worldwide Piracy Ring

Federal prosecutors have shut down one of the world’s largest file-sharing sites, Megaupload.com, on charges of violating piracy laws — a day after a 24-hour blackout of popular websites such as Wikipedia drew national attention to the issue. “This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States,” the Justice department said in a statement about the indictment. The indictment accuses seven individuals and two corporations — Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited — of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content. It was unsealed on Thursday, and claims that at one point Megaupload was the 13th most popular website in the world.

✪ Google Is Already Using SOPA-Like Censorship

However, Google’s main issue with SOPA is seemingly not related to their concerns about Chinese-style web censorship becoming commonplace, but rather which entity gets to wield those powers – large transnational corporations or governments. While Google criticizes SOPA publicly, it is already privately using SOPA-like powers to unfairly marginalize legitimate web content. Google News is a content aggregator that allows users to search thousands of news sources for relevant stories. Although the aggregator includes a plethora of obscure, occasionally offensive, and barely-read websites, in November 2010 Google took the decision to de-list PrisonPlanet.com and Infowars.com from its indexed news sources. Infowars.com alone is an internationally recognized news website that gets more traffic than MSNBC.com and innumerable other big mainstream news websites.

✪ Protest against discrimination of Ethiopian Jews

Thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets of Jerusalem, in protest against what they say is discrimination against Jews of Ethiopian origin. The protest came after a recent report in the Israeli media that landlords in southern Israel had agreed not to rent or sell their real estate to Jews of Ethiopian origin.

✪ Goodbye, Fish: Rising CO2 Direct Threat to Sea Life “Driving Fish Crazy”

New research shows the disastrous consequences the world’s rising carbon dioxide levels are having on ocean life. Photo courtesy of Dr Simon Foale, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies A team of researchers from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University published their findings in the journal Nature Climate Change. They document how elevated CO2 is “driving fish crazy.”

✪ WiFi signal with racist, anti-Semitic slur in Teaneck, NJ sparks police probe; signal came from rec center router

A bigot named their WiFi signal “F— All Jews and N—-” — and now cops are investigating. The hateful signal I.D. popped up on the iPhone of a 28-year-old mom inside a Teaneck, N.J. recreation center, where her 3-year-old daughter was attending dance class. The offending signal was coming from a router connected in the Richard Rodda Community Center in the the township, located 10 miles outside New York City. “When I first saw it, I said, ‘Did that say what I thought it said?,” said the woman, who asked that her name not be used. “I was shocked, hurt. I felt harassed.” The signal showed on her phone as it searched for an Internet connection in the center Tuesday. “I felt like I’m bringing my daughter to this place, and it should be a safe place,” she said.

✪ Scientists Create World’s Tiniest Ear

Have you ever wondered what a virus sounds like? Or what noise a bacterium makes when it moves between hosts? If the answer is yes, you may soon get your chance to find out, thanks to the development of the world’s tiniest ear. The “nano-ear,” a microscopic particle of gold trapped by a laser beam, can detect sound a million times fainter than the threshold for human hearing. Researchers suggest the work could open up a whole new field of “acoustic microscopy,” in which organisms are studied using the sound they emit.

✪ The Rise of the New Groupthink

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

✪ NYPD developing portable body scanner for detecting concealed weapons

You have to feel sorry for the police officers who are required to frisk people for guns or knives – after all, if someone who doesn’t want to be arrested is carrying a lethal weapon, the last thing that most of us would want to do is get close enough to that person to touch them. That’s why the New York Police Department teamed up with the United States Department of Defense three years ago, and began developing a portable scanner that can remotely detect the presence of a gun on a person’s body. The NYPD announced the project yesterday.

✪ Scientists Uncover The Mathematics Of Serial Killers

Andrei Chikatilo, “The Butcher of Rostov,” was one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history. Between 1978 and 1990 in the Ukraine, he committed at least 52 murders before he was caught, tried and executed. The pattern of his murders, though, was irregular. There were long periods of no activity, interrupted by several murders within a short period of time. Hoping to gain insight into serial killings to prevent similar murders, his pattern of behavior was examined by Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury at UCLA. They’ve published a paper on ArXiv with their preliminary results.

✪ Fake iPad 2s made of clay sold at Canadian stores

As many as 10 fake iPad 2s, all made of slabs of modeling clay, were recently sold at electronic stores in Vancouver, British Columbia. Best Buy and Future Shop have launched investigations into how the scam was pulled off. The tablet computers, like most Apple products, are known for their sleek and simple designs. But there’s no mistaking the iPad for one of the world’s oldest “tablet devices.” Still, most electronic products cannot be returned to stores. For the the stores and customers to be fooled by the clay replacements, the thieves must have successfully weighed out the clay portions and resealed the original Apple packaging.

✪ For rent: Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair

Anybody willing to pay the asking rent of £90,000 a year can take over the 13-hectare site in a secluded forest in eastern Poland, which during the war lay in German East Prussia. From 1941 to the end of 1944 the Wolf’s Lair was the nerve centre of the Nazi war machine owing to its proximity to the Eastern Front. The Polish Forestry Service, the owners of the camp, started looking for a tenant after the old 20-year lease expired. Hitler and his henchman built huge bombproof bunkers at the site that also housed 2,000 staff and security personnel. Although retreating German forces dynamited most of the bunkers in November 1944, their shattered shells remain a prime tourist attraction with some 180,000 visitors a year.

✪ The Great Martin Luther King Copyright Conundrum

Believe it or not, to legally watch that famous Martin Luther King “I Have a Dream” speech — arguably one of the most hallowed moments in American history — costs $10 thanks to the twisted state of United States copyright law.

✪ World’s Largest Garment Made From Golden Spider Silk Goes on Display

Before anyone asks, no, it’s not bulletproof. But that doesn’t mean that the glistening yellow cape—the world’s largest garment made entirely from spider silk—isn’t a massive feat of engineering to marvel at (hint: it is and you should). Now on public display for the first time at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the textile gets its unearthly gleam from the undyed filaments of the golden orb spider, a species of arachnid commonly found in Madagascar. Girl power can be taken literally in this instance: Only the females produce the coveted silk.

✪ NSFW: An Alabama Fan Teabagged A Passed-Out LSU Fan At The Bourbon Street Krystal

Those of us un/fortunate enough to have visited the Krystal restaurant at the mouth of Bourbon Street in New Orleans know it’s a place where the occasionally odd, bizarre, or criminal events take place. We don’t know which of these this incident is, if not all three. That’s especially given that some people are claiming the victim in this is now dead, making the “This guy’s life is over” line uttered in the video creepy.

✪ Funk Legend Jimmy Castor Dead At 64

Funk/disco great Jimmy “The Everything Man” Castor passed away on Monday from unknown causes in Las Vegas, according to reports. Castor, a respected saxophonist, was the leader of the seminal funk/disco band the Jimmy Castor Bunch. The group was behind funk classics like the 1972 smash, “Troglodyte (Cave Man).” Though the group’s popularity faded at the end of the disco era, Castor’s music lived on through hip hop as his song “It’s Just Begun” became a staple break of the ’70s and ’80s b-boy break dancing scene. The song served as the back up music for the iconic b-boy collective the Rock Steady Crew in the 1983 film Flashdance. Eric B. and Rakim, the Ultramagnetic MCs, N.W.A., and Kanye West were among the hip hop names to sample Castor’s tunes over the years.

✪ Radioactive tissue holders found at Bed, Bath & Beyond reveal hypocrisy of failed national security

The Dual Ridge Metal Boutique tissue boxes sold at Bed, Bath & Beyond stores have been discovered to be radioactive. Made with the extremely dangerous material used to blast cancer tumors with radiation — cobalt-60 — they emit gamma rays that are known to cause both cancer and infertility. They were manufactured in India, shipped on a commercial container to New Jersey, and then distributed to Bed, Bath & Beyond stores in 20 states. How much radiation do these tissue holders emit, exactly? Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman David McIntyre said, on the record, that standing near one of these tissue holders for 30 minutes a day would expose you to the equivalent of “a couple of chest X-Rays” each year. The Illinois Emergency Management Agency went even further, issuing a release stating that every 10 hours spent near the product would expose you to the equivalent of one chest X-Ray

✪ Big Brother Brazil: Daniel Echaniz ‘raped Monique Amin on live TV’ after alcohol-fueled party

A housemate on Brazil’s version of Big Brother has been raped live on TV, it has been alleged. Police today confirmed they had begun an investigation and carried out a search of the studios in Rio de Janeiro, where the popular reality show is being filmed. Viewers were shocked in the early hours of Sunday to watch contestant Daniel Echaniz 31, apparently force himself on 23-year-old student Monique Amin, who had passed out drunk after a boozy party.

✪ Exchange students report shocking placements

I’ve seen many things I don’t like, including students that had been sexually abused, photographed, and forced to drink alcohol, says Danielle Grijalva, She is the head of CSFES, an organization that helps exchange students who run into problems abroad. Only this past year, 10-12 Norwegian exchange students abroad contacted her for help.

✪ EPIC Request Reveals DHS Monitoring Social Media

A Freedom of Information Act has revealed the Department of Homeland Security awarded a contract in 2010 to General Dynamics’ Advanced Information Systems in order to provide constant surveillance of social media, according to The Washington Post. The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed the request, and according to a training manual that was among the documents they received, DHS engaged in monitoring comments on Facebook, Twitter and blogs to obtain public sentiment on a proposed transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees to a town in Michigan. The $11 million contract awarded to General Dynamics is expected to produce “reports on DHS, Components, and other Federal Agencies: positive and negative reports on FEMA, CIA, CBP, ICE, etc. as well as organizations outside the DHS,”

✪ MLK strip club flyer: Graphic designer under fire for ‘I Have a Dream Bash’

When Martin Luther King Jr. said he had a dream, this likely wasn’t what he meant. A flyer promoting a Miami strip club’s “I Have a Dream Bash” featuring MLK holding wads of cash next to scantily-clad women has its creator taking plenty of flack. Miami Beach graphic designer Jeffrey Darnell Paul says he didn’t realize the flyer, made for The Office strip club at 250 Northeast 183rd Street, would generate the controversy it has. “I wasn’t trying to disrespect anybody… it wasn’t on my mind that it would escalate to something like this,” Paul told NBC Miami Monday. “It was just supposed to be a promotional thing, it wasn’t about disgracing Martin Luther King, it wasn’t about that.”

✪ Mom forces son to wear ‘I sell drugs’ sign

An Indiana mother forced her son to wear a sign around his neck listing his law-breaking behavior and stand on a Ft. Wayne street corner for two hours earlier this week. The sign read: “I lie, I steal, I sell drugs, I don’t follow the law.” CBS New York reports that Dynesha Lax thought the punishment police had given her son when he broke the law recently wasn’t strong enough to get him to stop his behavior, so she took matters into her own hands.

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✖ 200 Million People Use Illicit Drugs, Study Finds

Roughly 200 million people worldwide use illicit drugs such as marijuana, amphetamines, cocaine and opioids each year, according to a new study. The figure represents about one in 20 people between the ages of 15 and 64. Using a review of published studies, Australian researchers estimated that as many as 203 million people use marijuana, 56 million people use amphetamines including meth, 21 million people use cocaine and 21 million people use opioids like heroin. The use of all four drug classes was highest in developed countries. …The 200 million number does not include people who use ecstasy, hallucinogenic drugs, inhalants, benzodiazepines or anabolic steroids — just one reason it’s likely a vast underestimate of illicit drug use, according to lead author Louisa Degenhardt of the Sydney-based National Drug and Alcohol Research Center.

✖ Vancouver running out of free crackpipes

He said PHS, which runs InSite, has distributed monthly highs of 20,000 pipes through its own needle and pipe distribution program. The 3,000 pipes PHS received from VCH in December were exhausted in three days. “At the beginning of the study, we expressed our concerns that (the pipe supply) is a tiny number … but we were told the number’s staying the same,” Townsend said. “To meet the demand we would need around 1,000 per day.”

✖ Newt Gingrich To New Hampshire: Jefferson, Washington Would Have Cracked Down On Pot

During a town hall-style appearance in Concord, the former House Speaker said he had no interest in exploring drug decriminalization, arguing that such efforts haven’t worked in Europe. Contra Gingrich, however, Portugal has had some success with decriminalization initiatives. Pushed a bit later on the incarceration rate related to petty drug crimes, Gingrich responded, “I think the best thing is to get young people not to do drugs and then you won’t be dealing with criminals that you just described.” A third resident of the “live free or die” state argued that the founding fathers had been far more lenient about marijuana than the current political class. “I think Jefferson or George Washington would have rather strongly discouraged you from growing marijuana and their techniques with dealing with it would have been rather more violent than our current government,” Gingrich replied.

✖ Chivas Scotch Heroin Bottles Bust At Newark Airport

We hope he drank the scotch before adding the H! On New Year’s Eve customs officials stopped Miami man Wilfer Bohorquez Rojo, 53, as he allegedly tried to smuggle 25 pounds of heroin from Medillin, Colombia, to Newark Airport. At first authorities just thought he had smuggled the drugs in “packages of plastic flags and between glued photographs” but further inspection found he’d filled four Chivas Royal Salute scotch bottles with “packages of a substance that also tested positive for heroin, according to the agency.” After the discovery of the drugs—estimated by authorities to be worth at least $700,000—Rojo was turned over to authorities and now faces federal narcotics smuggling charges.

✖ Purdue: Block Disclosure Of OxyContin Documents

A long-simmering court battle over a trove of OxyContin documents has finally won the attention of Purdue Pharma. The drugmaker is belatedly seeking to intervene in a 2008 lawsuit in a Massachusetts state court, where an attempt is being made to force the state attorney general to release documents that were used to prosecute Purdue and three current and former execs several years ago. At issue are countless documents that were compiled by the US Department of Justice, which charged Purdue and the execs with misbranding – they facilitated improper use of the drug and misled patients, regulators and doctors about addictive risks. All totaled, $634 million in fines were paid, and the execs were barred from doing business with federal healthcare programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid

✖ Ron Paul: Drug War Could Be Bigger Failure Than Prohibition (VIDEO)

“This war on drugs has been a detriment to personal liberty and it’s been a real abuse of liberty,” Paul said. “Our prisons are full with people who have used drugs who should be treated as patients — and they’re non-violent. Someday we’re gonna awake and find out that the prohibition we are following right now with drugs is no more successful, maybe a lot less successful, than the prohibition of alcohol was in the ’20s.”

✖ Man wants rehab over Diet Cola 42 litres a week addiction

Darren Jones wants to check himself into rehab – to cure a bizarre addiction to Diet Cola. Darren, 38, knocks back 42 litres of the drink every week. Now the 35 stone father of two is vowing to get treatment for his £100 a week habit to get fit again and save his relationship with 33-year old mother of two Paula Mullen. Darren, of Stockport, Greater Manchester, said: “I believe what I have is an actual addiction and I start to worry if I’m getting near the end of the bottle. “If I can’t get in touch with Paula to get me some more I start to panic – it’s like a drug or alcohol addiction. “I called up Diet Coke to ask them if it’s addictive and what I should do and she recommended putting water in it to dilute it, but it would taste horrid and I don’t think it would help. “We joke that I should get one of those hats with bottles either side of my head and straws straight into my mouth so I can drink it all the time. It’s like gold, it’s my fuel.”

✖ Why Ron Paul Is Right And Barack Obama Is Wrong About Iran

Obama also argues that he opposes Iran’s nukes because of proliferation in the region. At which point one must loudly cough “Ahem.” Only one country in the region has illegally, in defiance of internatinal law and the NPT and US policy, has nuclear weapons and it’s Israel, not any Arab state. More absurdly, the US government has a formal policy of never acknowledging this fact. At one point in the not-so-distant past, the US government was committed to the view that Iraq had nukes but Israel didn’t. When will the US evolve a sane policy in the Middle East? One that advances our interests, avoids a catastrophic global religious war, and bases it judgment on history and statecraft rather than religion and a US-Israel alliance that, since the end of the Cold War, has become increasingly unhealthy to both parties? Less Kennedy, more Eisenhower, please.

✖ Judge: Black church rightful owner of KKK store

After a lengthy legal battle between a black South Carolina church and members of the Ku Klux Klan, a judge has ruled that the church owns a building where KKK robes and T-shirts are sold. A circuit judge ruled last month that New Beginnings Baptist Church is the rightful owner of the building that houses the Redneck Shop, which operates a so-called Klan museum and sells Klan robes and T-shirts emblazoned with racial slurs. The judge ordered the shop’s proprietor to pay the church’s legal bills of more than $3,300.

✖ No easy way to dissolve mouse in Mountain Dew

A man in the U.S. is suing Pepsi Co. over a mouse allegedly found in a can of Mountain Dew, a claim the company rejects by saying the acid in the beverage would disintegrate the animal’s body. However, that reasoning doesn’t hold water with Canadian food experts. “There would not be enough acid in the matrix of the can to actually start causing those physical changes to the mouse,” says Massimo Marcone, an associate professor of food science at the University of Guelph. “The mouse would start to spoil; there would not be enough acid to preserve the mouse. It would start to smell bad. But to say that the mouse would actually dissolve in about 300 millilitres of soft drink, it’s pretty hard.”

✖ Free Philip K. Dick: Download 11 Great Science Fiction Stories

Although he died when he was only 53 years old, Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982) published 44 novels and 121 short stories during his lifetime and solidified his position as arguably the most literary of science fiction writers. His novel Ubik appears on TIME magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels, and Dick is the only science fiction writer to get honored in the prestigious Library of America series, a kind of pantheon of American literature. If you’re not intimately familiar with his novels, then you assuredly know major films based on Dick’s work – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report. Today, we bring you another way to get acquainted with his writing. We’re presenting a selection of Dick’s stories available for free on the web. Below we have culled together 11 short stories from our collection of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.

✖ Time Cheers the Drone War

The new issue of  Time magazine promises on its cover “Essential Info for the Year Ahead.” One apparently essential report: U.S. drones are awesome. The report–written by Mark Thompson, available to subscribers only explains that a “hot military trend” this way: Today’s generals and admirals want weapons that are smaller, remote-controlled and bristling with intelligence. In short, more drones that can tightly target terrorists, deliver larger payloads and are some of the best spies the U.S. has ever produced, even if they occasionally get captured in Iran or crash on landing at secret bases. And also, you know, kill innocent civilians.

✖ Alejandro Jodorowsky Needs Your Support To Create The Autobiographical DANZA DE LA REALIDAD

Alejandro Jodorowsky – the legendary cult filmmaker behind Santa Sangre, El Topo and The Holy Mountain – needs your help. After years trying to raise funding for big new projects King Shot and Son Of El Topo, Jodorowsky is moving on to something more personal: Danza De La Realidad, an autobiographical picture based on his own childhood and teenaged years. Having had no luck with conventional film financing methods in recent years, Jodorowsky is taking this one to the streets and trying the crowd funding method. Put a hundred dollars into the film and you’ll receive a special cut of the finished movie on DVD.

✖ YOUR KID’S ON DRUGS [Video]

✖ Sea Shepherd Intercepts the Japanese Whaling Fleet with Drones

The Sea Shepherd crew has intercepted the Japanese whaling fleet on Christmas Day, a thousand miles north of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. The Sea Shepherd ship, Steve Irwin, deployed a drone to successfully locate and photograph the Japanese factory ship Nisshin Maru on December 24th. Once the pursuit began, three Japanese harpoon/security ships moved in on the Steve Irwin to shield the Nisshin Maru to allow it to escape. This time however the Japanese tactic of tailing the Steve Irwin and the Bob Barker will not work because the drones, one on the Steve Irwin and the other on the Bob Barker, can track and follow the Nisshin Maru and can relay the positions back to the Sea Shepherd ships. “We can cover hundreds of miles with these drones and they have proven to be valuable assets for this campaign,” said Captain Paul Watson on board the Steve Irwin.

✖ ‘Supersoldier’ ants with gigantic jaws

Nightmarish ‘supersoldier’ ants with huge heads and jaws have been created by activating ancient genes. Scientists believe the monster ants may be a genetic throwback to an ancestor that lived millions of years ago. Scientists say they can create the supersoldiers at will by dabbing normal ant larvae with a special hormone – the larvae then develop into supersoldiers rather than normal soldier or worker ants.

✖ ACLU sues library for blocking Wiccan websites

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Eastern Missouri sued a local public library on Tuesday for allegedly blocking websites related to Wicca, a modern pagan religion. Anaka Hunter of Salem, Mo., said she tried to access websites about Wicca, Native American religions and astrology for her own research, but the library’s filtering software blocked the sites.  According to the ACLU, the software labeled the sites as “occult” and “criminal.”

✖ Psychedelic Heroin: Grey Lodge Archives

I recently tracked down the pdf’s for nearly all of the issues of the now-deceased counterculture online zine Grey Lodge Occult Review. The site was taken down due to “legal threats and religious hackers”. To see the table of contents for the issues visit the Wayback Machine here. Along with the rabbit hole that is Deoxy, this was one of my formative sanctuaries for all things mindfuckery.

✖ Forget Stocks Or Bonds, Invest In A Lobbyist

In a recent study, researchers Raquel Alexander and Susan Scholz calculated the total amount the corporations saved from the lower tax rate. They compared the taxes saved to the amount the firms spent lobbying for the law. Their research showed the return on lobbying for those multinational corporations was 22,000 percent. That means for every dollar spent on lobbying, the companies got $220 in tax benefits.

✖ Excavator on Rooftop of 12-Story Building in Taiyuan

Shanxi province Taiyuan city Wanbailin district Yingze West Street, an excavator operates on the rooftop of the Shanxi Science and Technology Hotel, causing surrounding city residents both surprise and concern.

✖ US ‘space warplane’ may be spying on Chinese spacelab

The US Air Force’s second mysterious mini-space shuttle, the X-37B, could be spying on China’s space laboratory and the first piece of its space station, Tiangong-1. Amateur space trackers told the British Interplanetary Society publication Spaceflight that the black-funded spaceplane seemed to be orbiting the Earth in tandem with Tiangong_1, or the Heavenly Palace, leading the magazine to speculate that its unknown mission is to spy on it. “Space-to-space surveillance is a whole new ball game made possible by a finessed group of sensors and sensor suites, which we think the X-37B may be using to maintain a close watch on China’s nascent space station,” Spaceflight editor Dr David Baker told the BBC.

✖ NOT SATIRE: L.A. Tells Arrested OWS Protesters They Can Pay for “Free Speech” Classes to Avoid Court

Incredibly, the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office is offering Occupy L.A. protesters arrested in recent weeks the opportunity to pay $355 for private free speech classes to avoid their court dates. As reported in the Los Angeles Times: Los Angeles Chief Deputy City Atty. William Carter said the city won’t press charges against protesters who complete the educational program offered by American Justice Associates. … Carter said the free-speech class will save the city money and teach protesters the nuances of the law. “The 1st Amendment is not absolute,” he said, noting that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled government can regulate when, where and how free speech can be exercised. As a civil rights attorney working with some of the approximately 350 protesters who have been arrested in recent weeks noted, the offer is nothing short of “patronizing.”

✖ Toddlers and Tiaras mothers DOPING their daughters with drinks spiked with ‘pageant crack’?

No brand names are mentioned on the show, but many have speculated that the drink is Mountain Dew, a caffeinated soft drink. Others believe it even contains alcohol. Mrs Holler is filmed instructing Alana to take ‘two big gulps’ from an unlabelled drinks bottle. Within seconds the change is apparent. ‘A lot of pageant moms and people know what the special juice is – everybody has their different concoctions. Special juice is to help energise her’ The young pageant contestant starts rapidly swinging her arms over her head and spinning around on the floor, exclaiming: ‘My go-go juice is kicking in right now!’ After her drink fix, Alana takes to the stage in a plaid shirt displaying inches of stomach to perform a routine, inspired by sex symbol Daisy Duke. Describing how the drink makes her feel, she says smiling: ‘Go-go juice makes me laughy, and play-ey, and makes me feel like I want to pull my mommy’s hair.’

✖ Polar challenge: How do you cycle to the South Pole?

Blue Peter presenter Helen Skelton is hoping to become the first person to use a bike to reach the South Pole. She is attempting to travel 500 miles (805km) across Antarctica and will cycle for large parts of it, as well as snowkiting and walking. She hopes to complete the trek for Sport Relief in 20 days. At this time of year, the average temperature in Antarctica is -25C, but can drop to -50C. Severe coastal winds come from cold air flowing down off the interior ice sheet. Wind speeds can reach up to 125mph (201km/h) and average about 80mph. In addition, she will be dragging 12.9st (82kg) of equipment and supplies behind her on a sledge. It’s no average ride and she is not using your average bike. The specially-built Hanebrink “ice bike” took designers in Los Angeles three months to finish. Dan Hanebrink and Kane Fortune have been building all-terrain hybrid bikes that can be used in all environments for many years.

✖ Rick Santorum is coming for your birth control

Here is an actual Rick Santorum quote: “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.” And also, “Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

✖ With all eyes on their ears, lobe stretchers snip

Some plastic surgeons are reporting an increase in younger clients, specifically those who are ready to undo a generational fashion statement that has left a lot of self-conscious people with a lot of sagging earlobe. Dr. David Kahn, who performed Tidwell’s surgery, was blunt in his assessment of his client’s condition. “It was unsightly, a distortion that needed to be overcome.”

✖ Miracle ‘chimeric’ monkeys made from cells of six animals spark protests

They may look like any other baby monkeys, but these two are scientific breakthroughs.   Roku and Hex are the world’s first chimeric monkeys – created with genetic material from six ‘parents’. But their birth has caused an ethical storm, with critics accusing scientists of disregarding the welfare of the animals.

✖ SOPA-Supporting News Outlets Aren’t Covering SOPA [STUDY]

MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS and NBC have dedicated no time to covering the Stop Online Piracy Act in their evening newscasts since Oct. 1, according to a report by Ben Dimiero of Media Matters For America. CNN, meanwhile, has dedicated a single evening news segment to the issue. All of the companies covered in the report have either publicly supported SOPA or have parent companies that have done so. Dimiero based his report on Lexis-Nexis searches which includes transcripts of nighttime newscasts. Comcast/NBCUniversal (which owns MSNBC and NBC News), Viacom (CBS), News Corporation (Fox News), Time Warner (CNN) and Disney (ABC) are all listed as supporters of the bill. ABC and CBS are also listed as separate supporters of the bill.

✖ Japan plans futuristic farm with robot workers in disaster zone

Japan is planning a futuristic farm where robots do the lifting in an experimental project on land swamped by the March tsunami. Under an agriculture ministry plan, unmanned tractors will work fields where pesticides will have been replaced by LEDs keeping rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit and vegetables safe until robots can put them in boxes. Carbon dioxide produced by machinery working on the up to 250-hectare site will be channeled back to crops to boost their growth and reduce reliance on chemical fertilizers, the Nikkei newspaper said this week. The agricultural ministry will begin on-site research later this year with a plan to spend around 4 billion yen over the next six years, a ministry official said. Land in Miyagi Prefecture, some 300 kilometers north of Tokyo, which was flooded by seawater on March 11, has been earmarked for the so-called “Dream Project.”

✖ Newt Gingrich: ‘African-American Community Should Demand Paychecks And Not Be Satisfied With Food Stamps’

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said Thursday he is willing to go before the NAACP and urge blacks to demand paychecks, not food stamps. Gingrich told a town hall meeting at a senior center in Plymouth, N.H., that if the NAACP invites him to its annual convention this year, he’d go there and talk about “why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” He also said he’d pitch a new Social Security program aimed at helping young people, particularly African-American males, who he said get the smallest return on Social Security.

✖ Pentagon-backed ‘time cloak’ stops the clock

The researchers created what they call a time lens, which can manipulate and focus signals in time, analogous to the way a glass lens focuses light in space. They use a technique called four-wave mixing, in which two beams of light, a “signal” and a “pump,” are sent together through an optical fiber. The two beams interact and change the wavelength of the signal. To begin creating a time gap, the researchers first bump the wavelength of the signal up, then by flipping the wavelength of the pump beam, bump it down.

✖ Pro skater with a love of God and psychedelic drugs goes on rampage inside Midtown hotel

A pro skateboarder with a passion for God and psychedelic drugs was arrested Thursday after he went on a drug-fueled rampage inside a Midtown hotel wearing only his birthday suit, cops said. Jereme Rogers, 26, was high on angel dust when he ran naked out of his room at the Afinia Shelburne hotel and started tearing down framed pictures lining an 11th floor hallway, sources said. “It was a rampage,” said a witness who declined to give her name. “He was screaming. We didn’t even know what he was doing. He was incoherent and belligerent.” Rogers, a heavily-tattooed Californian who has appeared in several X Games and says his skills come from God, was taken to Bellevue Hospital. He was charged with criminal mischief and unlawful possession of marijuana, cops said.

✖ DHS Training excercise startles locals

With their blue and white SUVs circled around the Main Street office, at least one official was posted on the door with a semiautomatic rifle, randomly checking identifications. And other officers, some with K-9s, sifted through the building. “I thought someone was upset about not getting there check,” said Laura Kelly, who took a friend to the office on Tuesday. According to one Homeland official in the Washington, D.C. office, Operation Shield. is an effort that uses routine, unannounced visits by FPS inspectors to test the effectiveness of contract guards, or protective security officers — “detecting the presence of unauthorized persons and potentially disruptive or dangerous activities.”

✖ Panda caught eating meat on camera [Video]

A wild panda is caught on surveillance camera eating a dead gnu in south-west China. An analyst says the bamboo-loving animals were predators millions of years ago. Although classified as carnivores, giant pandas mainly live on bamboo, but eat other foods including honey, eggs, fish, oranges and bananas when they are available

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Motorcycle mechanic C.C. Ryder (Joe Namath) joins “The Heads,” an outlaw biker gang. Fellow gang members menace fashion journalist Ann (Ann-Margret ) when her limo breaks down in the desert, but C.C. comes to her rescue. The bikers disrupt a motorcross event tied in with a fashion shoot, but C.C. enters the competition under Ann’s admiring eye. His win puts him at odds with Moon, leader of “The Heads.” When C.C. leaves with his cut of the purse, the bikers kidnap Ann, and C.C. races Moon to win her freedom.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW3uuQJIq0w

✰ Acoustic Levitation Of Stones

Tibetan Monks levitate stones by using an acoustic levitation technique with the aid of drams in this 1939 sketch by Swedish aircraft designer Henry Kjellson. A New Zealand scientist recently gave me an intriguing extract from an article published in a German magazine, relating to a demonstration of levitation in Tibet. After obtaining a translation by a German journalist, in English, I was amazed at the information contained in the story, and was surprised that the article had slipped through the suppression net which tends to keep such knowledge from leaking out to the public.

✰ Mysterious ‘Space Ball’ Crashes in Namibia

Ludik also described the object as being made of a “metal alloy known to man,” weighing in at six kilograms (13 pounds). “It is not an explosive device, but rather hollow, but we had to investigate all this first,” he added. Baffled, the Namibian police have appealed to NASA and the European Space Agency for an explanation. So what could it be? Assuming it does originate from space, is it a component from a top secret space weapon? Space hopper? Or could the explanation be a little more… alien? Sadly, we won’t be seeing the Men In Black flying to Windhoek any time soon. This hollow sphere will immediately strike a chord with any space expert. Exhibit A looks like a dusty “Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessel” (or COPV for short) and although it did drop from orbit, it’s simply an exotic-looking chunk of space junk.

✰ Baby foreskins could cut animal testing

A research organization is growing human skin in the hope of using it to trial cosmetics and medicines, reducing the need for animal testing. The synthetic skin is made using cells from infant foreskins.

✰ Is This Humble Plant Capable of Alleviating Most Human Suffering?

One of the novel findings that emerged in the author’s comprehensive review of turmeric is that it expresses over 150 distinct beneficial actions, describable in terms of traditional pharmacological pathways, e.g. interleukin-6 down-regulator, apoptotic, cyclooxygenase inhibitor, etc. During the indexing process the image emerged of a many-armed Goddess, due to how diverse, intelligent and simultaneous are this spice’s healing gifts. In fact, from the perspective of monochemical-oriented pharmacology, a drug with more than 10 simultaneously therapeutic actions, and without the vast array of adverse, unintended side effects commonly associated with novel, patentable chemicals, turmeric would represent an impossible, miraculous entity, which if patentable, would generate more revenue than all the blockbuster drugs on the market put together.

✰ Facebook Photos Lead Police To Suspects In Burglary

Police say they stole thousands of dollars in cash and goods, and then posed with their loot and posted the photos to a popular social media site. Police say the three suspects, along with another teen, posted the photos on Facebook about an hour after they burglarized Elliott’s Town Market on Chartiers Avenue in the West End. “We received information the day after the burglary that these pictures were posted on Facebook, and if you look at the pictures, you can see that the individuals are holding a large amount of cash,” Sgt. Kevin Gasiorowski, of the Pittsburgh Police, said.

✰ All the Companies Supporting SOPA, the Awful Internet Censorship Law and How to Contact Them

Who’s officially on the record backing what could be the worst thing to ever happen to the internet? All of these companies listed below. Don’t take our word for itě°˝€”this list comes straight from Congress. Just FYI. If you want to get in touch, we’ve provided a contact list below. Maybe you want to let them know how you feel about SOPA.

✰ Congressman apologizes for criticizing Michelle Obama’s ‘large posterior’

According to Fishbowl DC, which first reported the lawmaker’s remarks, Sensenbrenner was recounting a recent conversation he’d had at church event in Wisconsin. Obama, Sensenbrenner said loudly, “lectures us on eating right while she has a large posterior herself.” According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Daniel Bice, Sensenbrenner made a similar remark at the Wisconsin church he was referencing in his phone call, telling attendees there that Obama has a “big butt.” The Wisconsin lawmaker, who, it must noted, is a bit rotund–sent a personal note to Obama apologizing for his remarks, his spokeswoman Amanda Infield tells Yahoo News. She declined to go into detail about what the note said. In a statement to reporters, the lawmaker reiterated his apology. “I regret my inappropriate comment, and I have sent a personal note to the First Lady apologizing,” he said. A spokesman for Obama did not respond to a request for comment.

✰ D’oh! Stunned couple unearth 800-year-old stone head in their garden… and it looks like HOMER SIMPSON

Whoever carved the statue would not have had TV’s favourite cartoon anti-hero in mind – but there is no doubting the resemblance of this stone head to Homer Simpson It was found by Rosalind and Donald McIntyre when they were clearing the bottom of their garden at their home in Fife, Scotland, earlier this year. The couple were working in their garden when Mrs McIntyre picked up the head. She took it to St Andrews Museum, and the discovery has been referred to the National Committee for Carved Stones of Scotland.

✰ Boehner’s office cuts off C-SPAN cameras as GOP takes verbal beating

A strange thing happened Wednesday morning on Capitol Hill. As Rep. Stenny Hoyer (D-MD) attempted to call for a vote to extend a payroll tax cut to middle class and working Americans, his Republican colleagues adjourned the House and walked out of the chamber. And if that weren’t odd enough, it got even stranger: As Hoyer railed against them for failing to help working Americans, footage from C-SPAN went silent, then cut away. Moments later, C-SPAN took to the Internet to explain that it wasn’t their doing, but someone working for House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). The incident occurred mere moments after the House went into session. Hoyer made a motion for a vote on the Senate’s payroll tax cut extension, which would extend the lower rates for another two months, but the Republican presiding over the House did not acknowledge the motion. He instead adjourned the House, then got up and walked out.

✰ The Citigroup Plutonomy Memos: Two bombshell documents that Citigroup’s lawyers try to suppress, describing in detail the rule of the first 1%

So what are we talking about? In 2005 and 2006, several analysts at Citigroup took a very, very close look at the economic inequalities within the USA and other countries and wrote two memos which were addressed to their very wealthy customers. If there is one group of people who need to know the truth about what is really going on within the society and the economy, minus the propaganda, then it’s businesspeople who have a lot of money to invest, and who want to invest wisely. So Citigroup did their duty and published two explosive memos, which should have become mainstream news, but eventually did not. The first memo is dated October 16, 2005 (35 pages) and is titled: “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances.”

✰ FBI Says Activists Who Investigate Factory Farms Can Be Prosecuted as Terrorists

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force has kept files on activists who expose animal welfare abuses on factory farms and recommended prosecuting them as terrorists, according to a new document uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act. This new information comes as the Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a lawsuit challenging the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) as unconstitutional because its vague wording has had a chilling effect on political activism. This document adds to the evidence demonstrating that the AETA goes far beyond property destruction, as its supporters claim.

✰ It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s a UFO?

Sitting inside Lindly’s Appliance Store, Kammi Root is used to seeing large machinery towed down US 77. But what she saw Monday afternoon is something she won’t soon forget. “There was this funny sphere that went through on this big trailer and my first thought was, ‘That looks like a UFO,’” said Root.

✰ Bankers Join Billionaires to Debunk ‘Imbecile’ Attack on Top 1%

Jamie Dimon, the highest-paid chief executive officer among the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks, turned a question at an investors’ conference in New York this month into an occasion to defend wealth. “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” the JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) CEO told an audience member who asked about hostility toward bankers. “Sometimes there’s a bad apple, yet we denigrate the whole.”

✰ Rihanna barfs, yawns on stage during European concerts

It’s been a rough week for Rihanna. She became the target of racist vitriol not once but twice. First when a hotel guest in Portugal allegedly went on a racist tirade that prompted the pop singer to go on her own rant on Twitter in response. Then, a Dutch magazine printed a fashion feature that referred to her as a “n***abitch” (the editor later resigned over the story). Now, “The Sun” reports that the singer is being criticized for apparently yawning as she held the mic up for a crowd sing-a-long during a performance at London’s O2 arena on Wednesday night — mere days after she apparently vomited off-stage in Portugal while singing “What’s My Name.”

✰ Mystery buyer acquires vatican.xxx web address

The Vatican said on Wednesday an unknown buyer had snapped up the internet address vatican.xxx, a domain combining its name with an extension reserved for pornographic content. “This domain is not available because it has been acquired by someone else, but not the Vatican,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said on Vatican radio. It was not clear from his statement if the Vatican had tried to acquire the domain in order to prevent future misuse and had been beaten to the punch by the unknown buyer.

✰ For Christmas, Your Government Will Explain Why It’s Legal to Kill You

Summary: The government dropped a bomb on a U.S. citizen, who, though a total dick and probably a criminal, may have been engaged only in propaganda, which, though despicable, is generally protected by the First Amendment; it did so without a trial or even an indictment (that we know of), based at least in part on evidence it says it has but won’t show anyone, and on a legal argument it has apparently made but won’t show anyone, and the very existence of which it will not confirm or deny; although don’t worry, because the C.I.A. would never kill an American without having somebody do a memo first; and this is the “most transparent administration ever”; currently run by a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

✰ Frito-Lay sued for labeling its GMO-filled snacks as ‘All Natural’?

Less than a year after Frito-Lay announced plans to make half their products without “any artificial or synthetic ingredients,” the $13 billion company was sued last week in federal court for fraudulently marketing the snacks that contain genetically modified ingredients. Somehow, “artificial” and “synthetic” doesn’t include “genetically modified” in Frito’s mind.

✰ Local police stockpile high-tech, combat-ready gear

Fargo, like thousands of other communities in every state, has been on a gear-buying spree with the aid of more than $34 billion in federal government grants since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The federal grant spending, awarded with little oversight from Washington, has fueled a rapid, broad transformation of police operations in Fargo and in departments across the country. More than ever before, police rely on quasi-military tactics and equipment, the Center for Investigative Reporting has found. No one can say exactly what has been purchased in total across the country or how it’s being used, because the federal government doesn’t keep close track. State and local governments don’t maintain uniform records.

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✪ Mississippi mayor’s gay sex shop purchase billed to city

Receipts show Southaven Mayor Greg Davis, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2008 on a family-values platform, charged the city $67 for a purchase at a gay sex shop in Canada.

✪ Mysterious “white web” found growing on nuclear waste

This is as fascinating as it is unsettling. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site — a nuclear reservation in South Carolina — have identified a strange, cob-web like “growth” (their word, not ours) on the racks of the facility’s spent nuclear fuel assemblies. According to a report filed by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, “the growth, which resembles a spider web, has yet to be characterized, but may be biological in nature.” The Augusta Chronicle reported today that the “white, string-like” material was discovered amidst thousands of the spent fuel assemblies, which are submerged in deep nuclear storage pools within SRS’s L Area Complex.

✪ Poor-quality pot keeps grower out of prison

Despite being caught with enough home-grown cannabis to warrant a prison sentence, a man in western Sweden escaped with probation and a 500 kronor ($75) fine because the drugs were of such poor quality.

✪ Sniffer dogs get it wrong four out of five times

A RECORD 80 per cent of sniffer dog searches for drugs resulted in ”false positives” this year, figures show. The figures obtained from the state government in response to parliamentary questions on notice show 14,102 searches were conducted after a dog sat next to a person, indicating they might be carrying drugs. But, in 11,248 cases, no drugs were found. Only 2854 searches – 20 per cent – in the first nine months of this year, resulted in drugs being found, the figures show. Advertisement: Story continues below Last year, of the 15,779 searches conducted after police-dog identification, no drugs were found in 11,694 cases. Drugs were found in 4085 cases, resulting in a ”false positive” rate of 74 per cent, said the Greens MP David Shoebridge, who obtained the figures.

✪ Heroin found in UK National Archives file

A sealed package containing heroin was found in an 80-year-old Foreign Office file at the National Archives, its managers have said. The Class A drug was filed with a document from the British Consulate in Cairo about a 1928 court case. The off-white powder, discovered by a member of the public who asked to see the file, was sent for analysis. And having been confirmed as heroin, the substance was handed over to the Metropolitan Police. The pouch – which contained less than a gram of heroin in 19 sachets – has been replaced with a photo and the file is now back on public display.

✪ Tons Of Punk Videos Were Yanked Off YouTube: Here’s What Happened

On Wednesday morning, several punk bands awoke to find their videos had been removed from YouTube. They were understandably irritated; that’s almost worse than running out of beer. In their places were notes that they’d been yanked due to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints lodged by SST Records — the legendary label founded by Black Flag’s Greg Ginn, formerly based in Los Angeles but now in Austin. The allegation? That these videos were using unauthorized SST music. But that was not so. In fact, in the case of bands like L.A.’s The Adolescents and Austin’s The Lower Class Brats — two groups whose videos were pulled — their music has nothing to do with SST at all. They’ve never been on the label, and they certainly weren’t pilfering the imprint’s music. Immediately, then, animosity raged against Ginn. Various Internet forums teemed with allegations that he was on some sort of rampage, or had sold out and wasn’t punk.

✪ New strain of lab mice mimics human alcohol consumption patterns

A line of laboratory mice developed by a researcher from the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) drinks more alcohol than other animal models and consumes it in a fashion similar to humans: choosing alcohol over other options and binge drinking. Animal models previously available to alcohol abuse and alcoholism researchers do not get as drunk as the new strain, unless alcohol is the only choice of fluids, or alcohol is administered by the experimenter. When given the option, previously bred mouse lines continue to drink water even when they can select alcohol.

✪ Marijuana For Sale, With Free Samples

On Saturday, Dec. 17 at 11 a.m. a Humboldt County Sheriff’s Deputy on patrol in the Fernbridge area saw a vehicle parked near the Renner Gas Station with signs posted on it advertising “Marijuana for sale, with free samples.” The deputy drove up in his patrol car and asked the female associated with the vehicle, identified as Tami Lorraine Madison, 40 years from Butte, Montana if this was true. She told the deputy it was a joke. The deputy looked in her vehicle and saw dried marijuana bud in plain sight on the vehicles front passenger seat.

✪ Cocaine is losing its dubious status as drug of choice

Once the glitterati’s drug of choice, cocaine appears to have become a has-been drug, forcing drug cartels enriched from trafficking the white powder to find new markets and diversify their illicit products. Between 2006 and 2010, domestic cocaine use declined 37 percent, according to the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health. That’s no blip on the screen.

✪ World’s Douchiest DJs: The Top Five

Finding a douchey DJ is about as easy as finding an Ed Hardy t-shirt in Vegas on a Saturday night. Still, we strive for accuracy at LA Weekly, and we’ve gone through the list of top global spinners with a fine-tooth comb to bring you this revelatory Top 5 of supremely douchey spinners.

✪ Anti-fascists brick up Neo-Nazi politician’s front door

The front door was neatly walled in overnight, and sealed with a poster reading, “House arrest for Nazis.” An antifascist spokeswoman said the action was a symbolic attempt to stop him leaving the house.

✪ Hip-Hop Record Cover Tributes

✪ Drone-Ethics Briefing: What a Leading Robot Expert Told the CIA

Robots are replacing humans on the battlefield–but could they also be used to interrogate and torture suspects? This would avoid a serious ethical conflict between physicians’ duty to do no harm, or nonmaleficence, and their questionable role in monitoring vital signs and health of the interrogated. A robot, on the other hand, wouldn’t be bound by the Hippocratic oath, though its very existence creates new dilemmas of its own.

✪ Social Media Reduce Allure of High School Reunions

“Social networking has robbed us of our nostalgia,” said Michael Fox, who attended his 20-year high school reunion in November at a bar in Larchmont, N.Y. Mr. Fox, a New Rochelle High School graduate who lives in Midtown, said he attended his reunion to see the adult version of his classmates. But he was disappointed to find there was little he didn’t already know because of Facebook. “Even as a borderline user of social networking, I have a pretty good grasp of where people are, what they do, their family life, etc.,” he said. “So a lot of the mystery of the traditional reunion was missing.” Add high school reunions to the list of cultural familiarities forever altered by our hyperconnected lifestyle. Like camping out for concert tickets and plots that hinge on missed phone calls, the classic notion of the reunion, solidified by movies like “Peggy Sue Got Married” and “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” is becoming as old-fashioned as oversize Benetton sweaters.

✪ Could Domestic Surveillance Drones Spur Tougher Privacy Laws?

Have you ever been spied on by a surveillance drone? No? Are you sure? Maybe it looked like a hummingbird. Or an insect. Or maybe it was just really high up. Maybe there’s one looking in your window right now, and if so, there’s no law that says it shouldn’t. In a recent article in the Stanford Law Review, Ryan Calo discusses how domestic surveillance drones would fit into the current legal definitions of privacy (and violations thereof), and how these issues could inform the future of privacy policy. The nutshell? Surveillance robots have the potential to fundamentally degrade privacy to such an extent that they could serve as a catalyst for reform.

✪ Facebook is suing Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook is suing Mark Zuckerberg. No, I’m not talking about Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I’m talking about Rotem Guez, an Israeli entrepreneur who reportedly changed his name to Mark Zuckerberg after Facebook hit him with a lawsuit. “If you want to sue me, you’re going to have to sue Mark Zuckerberg,” Guez reportedly told Facebook. Talk about a publicity stunt.

✪ Russia Ramps Up New ‘Satan’ Nuke After U.S. Talks Breakdown

This new intercontinental ballistic missile, nicknamed “Satan” by Western analysts, will sport a 100-ton warhead and replace the Voevoda-class missile in the Russian nuclear arsenal, according to recent news reports. This massive ICBM will take its place alongside the Yars, Topol-M and Bulava-class ballistic missiles sometime in 2015, according to Sergei Karakaev, head of Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces. Development of the new ICBM will coincide with plans to revamp the country’s missile silo complexes over the next decade, Karakaev told Russian media. Moscow’s decision to accelerate work on the new “Satan”-class ICBM was directly tied to recently failed missile defense negotiations between Russia and the United States.

✪ 14,000 U.S. Deaths Tied to Fukushima Reactor Disaster Fallout

Impact Seen As Roughly Comparable to Radiation-Related Deaths After Chernobyl; Infants Are Hardest Hit, With Continuing Research Showing Even Higher Possible Death Count. An estimated 14,000 excess deaths in the United States are linked to the radioactive fallout from the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan, according to a major new article in the December 2011 edition of the International Journal of Health Services. This is the first peer-reviewed study published in a medical journal documenting the health hazards of Fukushima.Authors Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman note that their estimate of 14,000 excess U.S. deaths in the 14 weeks after the Fukushima meltdowns is comparable to the 16,500 excess deaths in the 17 weeks after the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986.

✪ Future Riot Shields Will Suffocate Protestors with Low Frequency Speakers

It’s not the first crowd control tool to use sound waves, but Raytheon’s patent for a new type of riot shield that produces low frequency sound waves to disrupt the respiratory tract and hinder breathing, sounds a little scary. Crowd control tools like the LRAD Sound Cannon emit bursts of loud and annoying sounds that can induce headaches and nausea. But Raytheon’s non-lethal pressure shield creates a pulsed pressure wave that resonates the upper respiratory tract of a human, hindering breathing and eventually incapacitating the target. The patent points out that the sound waves being generated are actually not that powerful, so while protestors might collapse from a lack of oxygen reaching their brains, their eardrums won’t be damaged in the process. Phew!

✪ TSA screenings aren’t just for airports anymore

Roving security teams increasingly visit train stations, subways and other mass transit sites to deter terrorism. Critics say it’s largely political theater.

✪ ‘Mind Control’ Possible in 5 Years: IBM

As part of IBM’s “5 in 5″ forecasts of predictions, the company says that “minding reading” (more like mind control) will no longer be a science fiction dream and that within five years, we’ll all be controlling our computers and smartphones by just wiggling our brains. While Apple focuses on speech technology with Siri, IBM believes the next revolution will involve our brains. To tackle and make mind control a reality, we’d all need to wear something like Emotiv’s EPOC neuroheadset that’s equipped with sensors that read electrical brain signals. According to IBM Research News “the idea is to use these electrical synapses to also do everyday activities such as placing a phone call, turning on the lights or even in the healthcare space for rehabilitation.”

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▲ Drake Fan Tattoo

▲ Pagan Partners – USA dating for pagans.

As one of the leading pagan dating services, this site is aimed at helping all people of a pagan faith to find a partner. We aim to make this the largest dating site of pagans on the net. So join us and together start on a path to finding love, friendship and happiness. Already, in our lists of members in the US we have people from all walks of life and of many Pagan faiths. So Wiccan, Druid, Shaman, come friends all. Step forward and become one with the Pagan partners community. Your Pagan Partner is waiting for you inside!

▲ Is Newt Gingrich’s EMP Doomsday a Reality?

Citing the specter that has been hanging over us since the Cold War, he believes the U.S. is vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse — or EMP for short. A nuclear weapon could be detonated above North America, reasons Gingrich, and the resulting electronic interference would render the nation’s power grid, satellites, computers etc., useless. Death and mayhem would ensue. It would be a bit like “Mad Max,” but with less ’70′s hairdos. “Without adequate preparation, we would basically lose our civilization in a matter of seconds,” he said during a 2009 conference. The situation is apparently so dire that Gingrich co-wrote a doomsday book on the topic, called “One Second After.” Although game developers take the effect of EMP damage for granted, what are the realities of a space-based nuclear detonation?

▲ Man gets 6 years in bondage sex, burned body case

Mark Andrew Rice pleaded guilty to arson and desecrating a corpse and was sentenced Monday to six years in prison for burning the truck and the body of Natasha Carpenter. Two years of the sentence were suspended for time served. Rice, 49, was a long-haul truck driver when he met Carpenter at a truck stop in Texas. He fell in love after several encounters along his rout and bought her an engagement ring, popping the question Sept. 15, 2009. As part of their celebration in Barstow, Calif., Carpenter agreed to let him bind her arms and legs and put a gag in her mouth as he acted out a fantasy, Rice told police. When he found her dead, Rice panicked and bought “all the meth his dealer had” and drove to Kiln, Miss., the body in the truck’s cab under a tarp, he told police.

▲ Hackers (According to Stock Photo Sites)

▲ How Homeland Security Helped Jamaica Massacre 73 Civilians

the disastrous raid to arrest Jamaican druglord Christopher “Dudus” Coke. At the DEA’s insistence, Jamaican authorities reluctantly raided Tivoli Gardens, the West Kingston slum Coke ran as a de facto governor, two years ago. Coke didn’t turn up, but Jamaican police officers killed 73 civilians, many of them allegedly in cold blood. A Department of Homeland Security surveillance plane was overhead the whole time. Coverage at the time portrayed the raid as a military-style showdown between Coke’s heavily fortified forces and Jamaican shock troops. But Schwartz, who spent three months in and around Tivoli Gardens reconstructing the battle, reports that Coke’s forces actually faded away shortly after the conflict began. Jamaican security forces claimed that many of the civilian casualties—among them a 25-year-old American citizen—were Coke’s gunmen. But they only recovered six guns. Only one police officer was killed.

▲ Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works

We get it. You think you can be cute and old-fashioned by openly admitting that you don’t know what a DNS server is. You relish the opportunity to put on a half-cocked smile and ask to skip over the techno-jargon, conveniently masking your ignorance by making yourselves seem better aligned with the average American joe or jane — the “non-nerds” among us. But to anyone of moderate intelligence that tuned in to yesterday’s Congressional mark-up of SOPA, the legislation that seeks to fundamentally change how the internet works, you kind of just looked like a bunch of jack-asses.

▲ Hidden Industry Dupes Social Media Users

A trawl of Chinese crowdsourcing websites—where people can earn a few pennies for small jobs such as labeling images—has uncovered a multimillion-dollar industry that pays hundreds of thousands of people to distort interactions in social networks and to post spam. The report’s authors, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also found evidence that crowdsourcing sites in the U.S. are similarly dominated by ethically questionable jobs. They conclude that the rapid growth of this way of making money will make paid shills a serious security problem for websites and those who use them around the world.

▲ Iran hijacked US drone, says Iranian engineer (Video)

In an exclusive interview, an engineer working to unlock the secrets of the captured RQ-170 Sentinel says they exploited a known vulnerability and tricked the US drone into landing in Iran. Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off communications links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who works for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently trying to unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could not be named for his safety.

▲ Coming soon: Ubiquitous surveillance from Big Brother’s wayback machine

As the price of digital storage drops and the technology to tap electronic communication improves, authoritarian governments will soon be able to perform retroactive surveillance on anyone within their borders, according to a Brookings Institute report. These regimes will store every phone call, instant message, email, social media interaction, text message, movements of people and vehicles and public surveillance video and mine it at their leisure, according to “Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Government,” written by John Villaseno, a senior fellow at Brookings and a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA. That will enable shadowing people’s movements and communications that took place before the individuals became suspects, he says.

▲ Controversial Air Force casket photo prompts investigation

The Air Force has launched an investigation into a controversial photo that shows several non-commissioned officers posing with an open casket, in which a fellow airman poses with a noose around his neck and chains over his body. The Air Force Times received a copy of the photo over email, which includes the caption, “Da Dumpt, Da Dumpt …. Sucks 2 Be U.” The casket is similar to those used to transport deceased U.S. soldiers home from the battlefield.

▲ Wisconsin Man Convicted For “Planking” Spree

When confronted by cops, Hart (pictured in the above mug shot) said that the images were done “to get laughs.” He then went on to claim that a specific image had been “Photo Shopped,” according to a City of Manitowoc Police report. Judge Steven Olson fined Hart $303 for his “planking” escapades, which were photographed by his brother Ryan, who himself faces a disorderly conduct trial next week. Ryan Hart apparently upset cops by lying across a police memorial monument in front of the county jail. An officer compared the act to going to a cemetery and “planking” atop a gravestone.

▲ Iraq war ends with a $4 trillion IOU

The nine-year-old Iraq war came to an official end on Thursday, but paying for it will continue for decades until U.S. taxpayers have shelled out an estimated $4 trillion.

▲ Scientists develop software that can map dreams

A team of Japanese scientists have created a device that enables the processing and imaging of thoughts and dreams as experienced in the brain to appear on a computer screen. While researchers have so far only created technology that can reproduce simple images from the brain, the discovery paves the way for the ability to unlock people’s dreams and other brain processes. A spokesman at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories said: “It was the first time in the world that it was possible to visualise what people see directly from the brain activity. “By applying this technology, it may become possible to record and replay subjective images that people perceive like dreams.” The scientists, lead by chief researcher Yukiyaso Kamitani, focused on the image recognition procedures in the retina of the human eye.

▲ Alien Cheerleaders: Seven of 16 convicted in cheerleader smuggling case

On Sept. 30, the group of 16 aliens traveled from Cali, Colombia to Miami International Airport pretending to be a cheerleading team attending a competition in South Florida. The group also used fraudulent documents to illegally enter the country, Yglesias said. “They basically came in and they lied [posing] as cheerleaders,” he said. “They abscond, they become visa overstays and they never leave the country.” The investigation into the possibility of human smuggling was initiated in Bogota, Colombia by the U.S. Homeland Security Investigations division in Miami. They learned of an organization involved in the smuggling of Colombian nationals into the U.S. through various methods and locations, agents said.

▲ Extraterrestrials: Elenin Cube reveals Dimensional Gateway to Hell that Humanity must avoid

Pagan Gnostics describe the archons as “mind parasites”. Archons get into the human mind, then project “simulated reality” as projections from the human mind. It is therefore possible, based upon Pagan Gnostic insights that the archons have exploited the imaginary construction of a Borg ship, and projected that into the image of a Borg-like ship. What may appear to us more and more like a Borg ship may be something entirely different. If we further seek to appreciate Pagan Gnostic insights, it is plausible that Borg-like Cube is actually and literally a dimensional doorway to Hell. We see this warning in pre-translated forms of the Bible which contained Pagan Gnostic warnings.

▲ Tiny Biocomputers Move Closer to Reality

Several research groups have recently reported progress in this field. A team at the California Institute of Technology, writing in the journal Science, made use of DNA nanostructures called seesaw gates to construct logic circuits analogous to those used in microprocessors. Just as silicon-based components use electric current to represent 1’s and 0’s, bio-based circuits use concentrations of DNA molecules in a test tube. When new DNA strands are added to the test tube as “input,” the solution undergoes a cascade of chemical interactions to release different DNA strands as “output.” In theory, the input could be a molecular indicator of a disease, and the output could be an appropriate therapeutic molecule. A common problem in constructing a computer in a test tube is that it is hard to control which interactions among molecules occur. The brilliance of the seesaw gate is that a particular gate responds only to particular input DNA strands.

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✰ London Dungeon skeleton found to be real

London Dungeon operations manager Catherine Pritchard said: “We have no idea where they originally came from, but suspected they might date back to… when bodies were regularly smuggled in from the Far East for dissection.” Both skeletons were due to move to the Dungeon’s annual “Satan’s Grotto” feature in mid-December, but will now have to be replaced by other props. Dungeon bosses now have to decide whether to pay more than £2,000 a year for a licence from by the Tissues Authority to keep the skeletons on display or have them removed altogether.

✰ Weather Control as a Cold War Weapon

In August of 1953 the United States formed the President’s Advisory Committee on Weather Control. Its stated purpose was to determine the effectiveness of weather modification procedures and the extent to which the government should engage in such activities. Methods that were envisioned by both American and Soviet scientists—and openly discussed in the media during the mid-1950s— included using colored pigments on the polar ice caps to melt them and unleash devastating floods, releasing large quantities of dust into the stratosphere creating precipitation on demand, and even building a dam fitted with thousands of nuclear powered pumps across the Bering Straits. This dam, envisioned by a Russian engineer named Arkady Borisovich Markin would redirect the waters of the Pacific Ocean, which would theoretically raise temperatures in cities like New York and London.

✰ Why the ‘Native’ Fashion Trend Is Pissing Off Real Native Americans

But many Native Americans are less than thrilled that this so-called “native look” is trendy right now. The company that’s stirred up the most controversy so far is Urban Outfitters, which offered a “Navajo” line this fall (items included the “Navajo Hipster Panty” and “Navajo Print Fabric Wrapped Flask”) before the Navajo Nation sent the company a cease and desist order that forced it to rename its products. Forever 21 and designer Isabel Marant also missed the memo that the tribe has a trademark on its name; thanks to the Federal Indian Arts and Crafts act of 1990, it’s illegal to claim a product is made by a Native American when it is not.

✰ How to kill political robocalls

Are you ticked off by automated phone calls from political candidates? Now you can do something about it. Visit Reverse Robocall, and for less than the cost of a latte you can make your own automated calls to politicians about things that really bug you (like robocalls). It’s pretty simple. Choose the issue, party, political entity, or representative you want to call. Plug your phone number into the site. Reverse Robocall will call your phone and let you record a message. Hang up and pay online to have that message sent and get an email report on whether the calls were answered. Better yet, you can post recordings of those calls online, if you choose, so others can listen in and rate your call (witty, angry, dull, etc).

✰ It’s official: French docs reveal ‘normal’ penis size

The Paris-based National Academy of Surgery (l’Academie nationale de chirurgie) was created in 1731 by Louis XV. Its headquarters are in the appropriately-named rue de l’Ecole de Medecine and it has more than 500 members specializing in different branches of surgery. In its latest declaration, the academy has published the average measurements of a man’s tackle in an effort to discourage men from going through potentially dangerous penis enlargement procedures. A “normal” penis should be between 9 and 9.5 centimetres (3.5 to 3.7 inches) when flaccid and between 12.8 and 14.5 centimetres (5 to 5.7 inches) when erect. When it comes to girth, the average circumference is between 8.5 and 9 centimetres (3.3 to 3.5 inches) “at rest” and between 10 and 10.5 centimetres (3.9 to 4.1 inches) when “standing to attention.”

✰ ‘Drop a bomb and wipe them out’: NYPD officers call West Indian Day parade goers ‘savages’ and ‘animals’ in racially-charged Facebook rants

The worst examples ‘I say have the parade one more year, and when they all gather drop a bomb and wipe them all out.’ ‘Why is everyone calling this a parade? It’s a scheduled riot.’ ‘Welcome to the Liberal NYC Gale, where if the cops sneeze too loud they get investigated for excessive force but the “civilians” can run around like savages and there are no repercussions.’ ‘They can keep the forced overtime…’ the safety of police officers should come ‘before the animals.’

✰ Recent Charges Of Sexual Abuse Of Children In Hollywood Just Tip Of Iceberg, Experts Say

“This has been going on for a very long time,” concurs former “Little House on the Prairie” star Alison Arngrim. “It was the gossip back in the ‘80s. People said, ‘Oh yeah, the Coreys, everyone’s had them.’ People talked about it like it was not a big deal.” Arngrim, 49, was referring to Feldman and his co-star in “The Lost Boys,” Corey Haim, who died in March 2010 after years of drug abuse. “I literally heard that they were ‘passed around,’” Arngrim said. “The word was that they were given drugs and being used for sex. It was awful – these were kids, they weren’t 18 yet. There were all sorts of stories about everyone from their, quote, ‘set guardians’ on down that these two had been sexually abused and were totally being corrupted in every possible way.”

✰ My Three-Month Facebook Dialogue With A Scammer From Malaysia Pretending To Be A Beautiful Woman

During Hurricane Irene weekend, while holed up in a friend’s apartment and looking for some stimulation, I got friend-requested and emailed by an obvious scammer on Facebook. The con artist, under the name “Claire Anrie,” used a few professional photos of an attractive young woman (whom I later reverse-image-searched and discovered was a personal trainer in New York) and a typo- and contradiction-filled profile. “Claire” quickly asked me to send her money by Western Union so she could come back to the U.S. and be with me, her “husband.” Over the next three months, I kept up an ongoing dialogue via Facebook messages and chat in which I continually found ways to irk her by screwing up the Western Union payment, demanding she send me more photos and de-friend the other men on Facebook she’d added in hopes of scamming them, claiming I’d lost all my money during Irene, and repeatedly confiding in her that I had chronic diarrhea and hoped she would still love me.

✰ Study: Vaccines & Hand-Washing Can Reduce Prejudice Against Immigrants, the Obese & Crack Addicts

The war between people and disease-causing pathogens is old as humanity itself. This has helped shaped our so-called behavioral immunity, which can lead us, for example, to automatically avoid people who are visibly sick. But it can also misfire; previous studies have shown that people with compromised immune systems (due to a recent illness), and even people who describe themselves as afraid of germs or susceptible to disease, are more likely to avoid and feel prejudiced toward otherwise healthy people who merely look different than them, like foreigners or immigrants.

✰ Chasing the Dragon in Jail

Being locked up is an inconvenience when you and your mates crave heroin. One London prisoner and ex-user recalls that getting the drugs is the easy part.

✰ 6 Terrifying Things Nobody Tells You About Donating Sperm

To a young guy with not much money, sperm donation seems too good to be true. It pays well (as we’ve pointed out before) and requires you to do nothing more than what you’d be doing anyway. And if you happen to help a childless couple along the way, that’s just icing on the cake. Having actually been a sperm donor, I can say that you had better be prepared for a long haul. There are a lot of (horrifying) hoops to jump through, and then sperm banks expect you to masturbate like … well, like it’s your job.

✰ Domino’s Pizza Dough Bong

On the job training at Domino’s is serious business.

✰ Congress temporarily thwarted in its effort to launch biological drug war

Remember Mark Souder? Well, back in 2006, he and Senator Hatch and Senator Biden were desperately trying to introduce some major biological warfare into the drug war – namely, the use of mycoherbicides for drug crop eradication. At that time, we were able to stop them from implementing active field studies of mycoherbicides in Colombia and Afghanistan. But they still managed to push a pro-mycoherbicide provision… into the ONDCP reauthorization.

✰ D’oh! Homer Simpson Decorated Pot Seized from Cartel

Some packages depicted a dog, another a smiley face. One even had a scornful looking Homer Simpson with the inscription “Voy de mojarra y que wey!” which roughly translates as “I’m going to get high, dude!”

✰ Former Narcotics Detective Admits Drug Planting Common

Stephen Anderson, a former New York Police Department (NYPD) narcotics detective, recently testified that he regularly saw police plant drugs on innocent people as a way for officers to meet arrest quotas. While the news may shock many civilians, the custom is so well known among officers that it has a name: “flaking.”

✰ Boy, 13, arrested for selling meth in Lincoln

A 13-year-old boy, not even 5 feet tall and less than 100 pounds, was arrested Wednesday night for selling methamphetamine. Lincoln police say the boy is the youngest person to sell meth they can remember. The Lincoln/Lancaster Narcotics Task Force began investigating the case after multiple sources reported the boy was selling, said Lincoln Police Officer Katie Flood. According to court records, the boy sold two grams of meth to an undercover officer for $200 in a parking lot near First Street and Cornhusker Highway about 7 p.m. Wednesday. Minutes later, an SUV pulled up and the boy allegedly bought more meth from 19-year-old Tasha Ryan, a transient who, police say, had 3.3 grams of meth and 12 grams of marijuana with her.

✰ 11 Year Old Boy photos parents’ pot stash; cops pounce

An 11-year-old Minnesota boy who says he was fed up with his mom and stepfather filling their home with marijuana smoke took photos of the drugs, which were then sent to police. Drug agents served a search warrant on their home in Ravenna Township near Hastings last month and arrested Heidi Siebenaler, a Dakota County probation supervisor, and her husband, Mark Siebenaler. Both face charges in the case after eight pounds of marijuana were found in two Wal-Mart shopping bags in the master bedroom, according to KMSP-TV.

✰ High IQ linked to drug use

The “Just Say No” generation was often told by parents and teachers that intelligent people didn’t use drugs. Turns out, the adults may have been wrong. A new British study finds children with high IQs are more likely to use drugs as adults than people who score low on IQ tests as children. The data come from the 1970 British Cohort Study, which has been following thousands of people over decades. The kids’ IQs were tested at the ages of 5, 10 and 16. The study also asked about drug use and looked at education and other socioeconomic factors. Then when participants turned 30, they were asked whether they had used drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and heroin in the past year.

✰ Cop Says Marijuana Legalization Could Cause Window Washers to Fall From Large Buildings and Land on People

Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department’s Robert McMahon is charged with enforcing the law on marijuana use. But he is very concerned about the many hidden ramifications of decriminalizing cannabis, making it legal for anyone to grow and smoke hemp. He’s afraid of what the second largest city and most populous state in the country would look like in 20 years if weed is made legal. “I think that anytime that an intoxicant is made legal there are social costs associated with it. And I point directly to cigarettes and alcohol as examples,” he says. “We’re talking about loss of work and collisions, work-related industrial injuries. Somebody comes to work stoned, and they are working some heavy equipment or up on a high-rise — a window washer that’s stoned — not only could he [or she] injure himself, but some of his or her negligence could cause someone else to be injured.”

✰ San Francisco drug lab technician indicted on federal charges she skimmed cocaine from lab

A former technician at the San Francisco Police Department’s crime lab has been charged in federal court with skimming cocaine from the lab, an allegation that forced its closure and the dismissal of hundreds of drug cases. A federal grand jury indicted 61-year-old Deborah Madden Thursday on a felony count of acquiring a controlled substance by subterfuge. Authorities say Madden took cocaine evidence from the lab while working there in late 2009.

✰ Bronx drug mill on residential street shut down, $400,000 of “Blackberry” heroin off the streets

Two NYPD “Operation Clean Halls” signs are posted in the lobby of a well-kept Cruger Ave. building where an apartment was used to package “Blackberry” heroin in glassine envelopes stamped with a likeness of the popular smartphone . Nearly $400,000 worth of heroin was seized and six pushers arrested this week after a two-month investigation brought down two drug mills in the tree-lined Pelham Parkway section, leaving residents shocked and scared.

✰ Smoking can make your nipples fall off

The nicotine in cigarettes and the carbon monoxide contained in cigarette smoke can diminish blood flow to various parts of the body. These toxins act as a virtual tourniquet. If the blood flow to a particular body part becomes greatly reduced or halted, that body part dies. In my memoir “In Stitches,” I told the story of a smoker whose nipples turned purple while undergoing a breast lift surgery. Purple is the precursor to black. Black is the precursor to falling off. To save the patient—and her nipples – we turned to the only treatment available. We went medieval. We used leeches.

✰ College Math Professor, 74, Accused Of Running Meth Lab

A 74-year-old math professor at two Boston universities is facing charges that she ran a methamphetamine lab with her son out of their home. Irina Kristy, 74, teaches math at Boston University and Suffolk University, the Boston Globe reported Sunday. Suffolk University placed her on administrative leave last week after learning of the charges against her.

✰ Third Grade Teacher Put Students In Lingerie

An Oklahoma teacher was arrested after concerned parents tipped off law enforcement that the woman made their children pose in Christmas lingerie during a pizza and Christmas tree decorating party at her house. That tip led police to discover child porn on her phone. Kimberly Crain, 47, hosted the gathering on Nov. 11 at her Shawnee, Okla., home for a handful of her students from McLoud Elementary School. When one third grader’s parents asked her how the party was, she told them “they dressed up in bras and panties and decorated the tree and ate pizza,” according to the police report. Thanks Jasmine.

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