File under Culture, Music, SeMeN SPeRmS Approved, SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG, SeMeN SPeRmS ViDeO CLuB
Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on February 23, 2012
The Unholy Three
- ☹ Shroud of Turin: Redux
- The bottom line on the Shroud remains the same: the Shroud continues to fail several key practical tests, as discussed by skeptical investigator Joe Nickell in his classic work on the subject, Looking for a Miracle:2 Provenance: there is no sign that this object existed before the 14th century; Art history: the Shroud fits into art history as part of a genre of artistic depictions and recreations of burial cloths of Christ; Style: the image upon the shroud looks like a manufactured illustration consistent with 14th century religious iconography, not like a real human being; Circumstance: a 14th century Catholic bishop determined that the Shroud was a “cunningly painted” fraud—and discovered the artist who confessed to creating it; Chemistry: the Shroud contains red ochre and other paint pigments; Radiometric dating: carbon-14 dating tests showed in 1988 that the Shroud was likely created between 1260 and 1390 CE.
- ☹ New powerful painkiller has abuse experts worried
- Drug companies are working to develop a pure, more powerful version of the nation’s second most-abused medicine, which has addiction experts worried that it could spur a new wave of abuse. The new pills contain the highly addictive painkiller hydrocodone, packing up to 10 times the amount of the drug as existing medications such as Vicodin. Four companies have begun patient testing, and one of them — Zogenix of San Diego — plans to apply early next year to begin marketing its product, Zohydro. If approved, it would mark the first time patients could legally buy pure hydrocodone. Existing products combine the drug with nonaddictive painkillers such as acetaminophen. Critics say they are especially worried about Zohydro, a timed-release drug meant for managing moderate to severe pain, because abusers could crush it to release an intense, immediate high. “I have a big concern that this could be the next OxyContin,”
- ☹ The NDAA Repeals More Rights
- Little by little, in the name of fighting terrorism, our Bill of Rights is being repealed. The 4th amendment has been rendered toothless by the PATRIOT Act. No more can we truly feel secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects when now there is an exception that fits nearly any excuse for our government to search and seize our property. Of course, the vast majority of Americans may say “I’m not a terrorist, so I have no reason to worry.” However, innocent people are wrongly accused all the time. The Bill of Rights is there precisely because the founders wanted to set a very high bar for the government to overcome in order to deprive an individual of life or liberty. To lower that bar is to endanger everyone. When the bar is low enough to include political enemies, our descent into totalitarianism is virtually assured.
- ☹ Porn Condoms Initiative Approved by L.A. City Clerk Even as City Attorney Wants to Keep it From Voters
- The war over condoms in porn continues this week as the AIDS Healthcare Foundation announced Tuesday that the L.A. City Clerk has “officially certified” the signatures it submitted in order to get a mandatory condom measure before you, the voter, next year. The announcement comes in the wake of a strange, L.A. City Attorney’s lawsuit to keep the condom measure off the ballot — and a challenge by an L.A. city councilman to that challenge. Yeah, seems like everybody wants in on this porn thing (or maybe they don’t want to deal with, er, head-on): The AHF has been battling for a few years now to get condoms mandated at California porn sets. As part of its drive it collected 70,901 voter signatures in support of putting the idea before city voters. AHF’s initiative would ask the city to require condom use as a part of obtaining film permits.
- ☹ US Senators: Give Residence Visas to Foreigners Who Buy Homes
- Two United States Senators have a new idea that would solve two problems at once: give visas to foreigners who make a significant investment in residential real estate in the United States. The move would help the poor housing market recover while at the same time tackling much-needed immigration reform. This is just one idea put forth by New York Democrat Charles Schumer and Utah Republican Mike Lee in a proposed package of immigration reforms. According to their plan, immigrants who spend more than $500,000 on a residential property in the United States would be granted residency. Much like the EB-5 investment visa, this new visa would welcome those from overseas who wish to help the U.S. economy while starting a new life on American soil.
- ☹ Fukushima: TEPCO uses Organized Crime forced labour
- People who fall into debt to loan sharks are often forced by the Yakuza to work in nuclear power plants, said a Japanese journalist who has written a book on his experience working at the Fukushima 1 nuclear plant this summer. About ten percent of workers at the damaged Fukushima 1 plant were brought in by the Japanese mafia, said Tomohiko Suzuki. Though the Yakuza is deeply involved in the nuclear power industry, its members themselves don’t work at the plants, added Suzuki. Instead they have an established practice of sending debtors there as a way to pay off their debts to loan sharks.
- ☹ Mythbusters Banned From Talking About RFID By Visa and Mastercard TPTB [Video]
- ☹ President Obama Eats Traditional Christmas Baby
- President Obama took part this weekend in one of the most ancient and eagerly-anticipated presidential traditions: the annual Christmas Baby Eating, a ritual that goes back to well before recorded history.
- ☹ What every state needs to do: Montanans launch recalls of Senators who voted for NDAA
- In response to the traitorous actions of 86 senators who voted to pass the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, commonly referred to as the NDAA, Montanans have announced a recall campaign against Senators Max Baucus and Jonathan Tester. As I have previously outlined, the fact that the NDAA allows for the indefinite detention without charge or trial of American citizens is simply irrefutable. Therefore, every single one of our so-called representatives who voted for this atrocious legislation is in direct violation of their oath to uphold the Constitution and thus are actively working against us – the American people. Thankfully, some people are already taking action, as we see in the cases of the Montana recall effort and Representative Jeff Landry who introduced an amendment (after voting for the NDAA with detention provisions intact) which would protect Americans’ right to due process.
- ☹ Mary Lisee Allegedly Called 9-1-1 to Report That She Ate Too Much
- Again, the cops asked why she called. Police say she responded by saying she “ate too much.” Cops asked her to repeat why she called — yep, she ate too much. Police asked her if it was a medical emergency — she said it wasn’t — and they reminded her that 9-1-1 is for emergencies. For good measure, police asked her again why she called 9-1-1. “Because I ate too much food,” she said, according to the cops. Police say she then “began repeatedly yelling that she had not consumed cocaine in over a year.” The cops asked her if she wanted to make a written statement about why she called 9-1-1, and she started writing what police describe as a “mostly illegible statement.” At that point, the deputies asked her to read it to them, and she read, “My name is Mary Ellen Lisee. I have beaten, I believe in God, and He forgives me. I may joke, but I do not do crack. I will not for as long as I live.”
- ☹ Could Mars and Moon Harbor Alien Artifacts? Leading Astrophysicists Says “Yes”
- The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has a low probability of success, but it would have a high impact if successful. Physicists Paul Davies and Robert Wagner of Arizona State University argue that it makes sense to widen the search to scour the Moon for possible alien artifacts. Meanwhile at Penn State, researchers propose the same search for Mars. To date, SETI has been dominated by the paradigm of seeking deliberately beamed radio messages. The ASU team argues that Alien civilizations may have sent probes to our region of the galaxy, and that any mission to the solar system would probably have occurred a very long time ago. The lunar environment could preserve artifacts for millions of years due to the absence of erosion and plate tectonics.
- ☹ In Japan, Radiation Fears Reshape Lives
- But while the horror has receded, for many of us, particularly women with families, things will never be the same. There’s no getting past the fact that the nuclear accident dumped radioactive particles into the atmosphere, soil and sea. While Fukushima Prefecture in the northeast was hardest hit, radiation “hot spots” keep turning up in neighborhoods far from the accident. The latest was at a school, minutes from where I live in Tokyo. What’s more, figuring out what’s “safe” to consume has become all but impossible. At my local supermarket, the familiar ritual of shopping has changed drastically. Instead of just tapping fruit or checking for spots, now I scrutinize the place of origin. “Made in Japan” used to be the gold standard. But now domestic foods are suspect, as is anything on sale. I obsessively search for produce grown as far from Fukushima as possible.
- ☹ Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker’s 1903 lulz
- LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution’s celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK. Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of “diddling the public”. Their demonstration had been hacked
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Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on December 28, 2011
Orangutan Grabbin’ On Those Thangs
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The GOP senator claims illegal immigrants may have started Arizona’s massive blaze, but his lack of evidence is drawing howls of protest and mockeryAs the Wallow wildfire charbroils more than 500,000 acres of Arizona, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is blaming illegal immigrants. “There is substantial evidence that some of these fires have been caused by people who have crossed our border illegally,” McCain said Saturday, while declining to offer any such evidence.
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Like other parts of the body, brain cells begin to eat themselves as a last-ditch source of energy to ward off starvation, a study found.The body responds by producing fatty acids, which turn up the hunger signal in the brain and increase our impulse to eat.
Researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York said the findings could lead to new scientifically proven weight loss treatments.
Tests on mice found that stopping the brain cells from eating themselves – a process known as autophagy – prevented levels of hunger from rising in response to starvation.
The chemical change in their brains caused the mice to become lighter and slimmer after a period of fasting, the researchers reported in the journal Cell Metabolism.
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Ken Wieczerza usually loves a slice of leftover pizza from the refrigerator.But when he bit into this particular piece of cold Pizza Hut pie, he recoiled when his teeth encountered an unexpected ingredient: a blue bandage with what appeared to be remnants of dried blood.
“It felt kind of like biting into a folded-up piece of plastic,” he recalled. “I can’t think of anything more disgusting than chewing on a bandage, other than a body part. Fortunately, I didn’t swallow it.”
The bandage was baked into the bottom crust with a slight indentation, he said. The approximately 1-by-3-inch adhesive strip in a bright blue hue was dotted with what looked like blood droplets.
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Letters written by Helen Keller. Forty-thousand photographic negatives of John F. Kennedy taken by the president’s personal cameraman. Sculptures by Alexander Calder and Auguste Rodin. The 1921 agreement that created the agency that built the World Trade Center.Besides ending nearly 3,000 lives, destroying planes and reducing buildings to tons of rubble and ash, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks destroyed tens of thousands of records, irreplaceable historical documents and art.
In some cases, the inventories were destroyed along with the records. And the loss of human life at the time overshadowed the search for lost paper. A decade later, dozens of agencies and archivists say they’re still not completely sure what they lost or found, leaving them without much of a guide to piece together missing history.
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No matter how rich, famous, and powerful you become, it simply won’t happen, for one simple reason: they’re all fictional, dreamed up by author Bret Easton Ellis.But American Psycho, set in the soulless, superficial, status-seeking world of 1980′s New York finance, name-drops dozens of restaurants and clubs that actually did exist during that era, the elite NYC hot spots where you and I would have absolutely no shot of ever getting in (admit it!).
What still remains from the world of American Psycho? Are Patrick Bateman’s old haunts still around, turning away all but those graced with a much sought after reservation? Or have the Dorsia’s of the world been replaced by Shake Shacks and Duane Reades?
Let’s have a look! The locations below are presented in the order they appear in the film. If you ever dined/partied at any, please leave your memories in the comments!
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The deadly secret of a rat that kills lions and jackals has at last been revealed. Unlike some mammals that produce their own toxins, the African crested rat is the first known to protect itself by daubing its fur with poisons from plants. The same lethal toxins are used by African tribal hunters to coat their arrow-tips.
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An undercover operation was developed wth the assistance of Officer Robert Koehler and Officer Scott Haigh acting as the undercover “John.”"He went in plain clothes through the drive-thru window,” Schwarzmann said. “He spoke to her and she said if he wanted a good time to call her and she gave him her phone number.”
Haigh parked in the parking lot and Redmond allegedly came out, approached him and gave him a specifc price list for her services.
Haigh returned on another occasion and inquired about her services, was offered a new, and lower, price so he said he needed to go to a bank machine but would return with the money.
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More than $210,000 intended for poor people but instead used to furnish a City of Detroit office paid for numerous leather chairs, a $3,000 mahogany-finish conference table and at least three stainless steel trash cans with motion sensor lids and a price tag of $315 each, records show.A 56-page receipt, obtained by the Free Press under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act, lists dozens of high-end items destined last year for the Human Services Department’s east-side building, including more than $30,000 spent to furnish the office and conference room of the director.
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Australia’s government has launched a court action against former Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks in a bid to seize profits from his autobiography.The case is being brought under a law banning profits from crime.
Hicks’s legal team says the law does not apply because his conviction by a US military commission at Guantanamo Bay was invalid.
Hicks spent five years at the facility before pleading guilty to providing material support for terrorism.
His book Guantanamo, My Journey, tells the story of his incarceration at the controversial detention centre in Cuba. It has sold about 30,000 copies.
The Australian government wants to retrieve any profits that Hicks has made from the book, claiming he has benefited financially from a crime.
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man has been detained by the Secret Service after jumping a fence at the White House Tuesday.James Dirk Crudup, 41, scaled the fence on the north side of the White House between 7:30 and 8 p.m.
Crudup was quickly taken into custody after scaling the fence. A backpack Crudup was carrying was confiscated by Secret Service.
The contents of the backpack were investigated by Secret Service and D.C. Fire & EMS. Nothing hazardous was found.
According to the Secret Service, Crudup is homeless.
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Taxpayer watchdogs say the Secret Service should do everything it can to protect Mr. Biden, but they wonder whether he should be collecting rent from the agency while it’s doing its job.“He should be afforded every single protection available to him and his family, as should every vice president and president,” said Leslie Paige, spokeswoman for the Washington-based Citizens Against Government Waste.
“But this arrangement seems bizarre to me,” she added. “You’d think the vice president, who shepherded the deficit committee, would think twice about charging the Secret Service rent. Why would he need the money? I don’t get it.”
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Vilnius Mayor A.Zuokas Fights Illegally Parked Cars with Tank
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Two police officers went to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Peterborough Street June 19 and ordered two cups of coffee from Hildreth, according to authorities. They said Hildreth took two coffee cups and then went to the back room to make the coffee.According to the affidavit, the officers found his behavior odd because they had ordered coffee from Hildreth before and never saw him go out back to make coffee.
And what the officers saw Hildreth do next will disturb you.
Watching from a store-front video monitor which shows a view of the back room, police say they saw Hildreth put nasal mucus into the cups.
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A leaked contract between BP and the Iraqi government has revealed the extent to which the company has gained control over Iraq’s oil. The 20-year contract for the Rumaila field near Basra published today by oil industry watchdog PLATFORM, commits future Iraqi governments to paying BP whether or not it extracts oil, irrespective of OPEC quotas and of the state of Iraqi pipeline and export infrastructure.BP was awarded the deal at an auction in June 2009, but suspicions were raised when the company did not sign the contract until four months later. The Iraqi government said nothing had changed in the interim, only “clarifications” – claims that the leaked contract show not to be true.
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The account’s creators befriended at least 32 people, almost all of them children.Several have since unfriended the fake Facebook profile but exchanges visible on the wall show some believed it was the teacher and innocently added the frauds as a friend.
The fake account uses his name as well as the name of the school where he teaches in Sydney’s west.
It features a profile picture of two naked men blowing kisses at the camera.
In the information section it states: “I’m a teacher at (name deleted) school and I adore my students. Especially the boy’s (sic) I could eat them up with a spoon.”
Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar.
End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar.
It features inappropriate pictures with captions such as “This is me being a gay god”.
The profile lists his favourite pop stars as Michael Jackson, Elton John, the Pet Shop Boys and Lady Gaga.
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Martial is coming to America and Canada in slow motion. The train left the station a long time ago. And the cunning conductors are not going to lose their nerve as their train of evil approaches the final destination: mass detention of activists, violent government crackdowns on protests, and slavery for the people.Corporate fascism, government oppression and private banking tyranny didn’t suddenly creep up on America and other Western countries. The crisis of freedom in America and Western civilization was foreseen years ago both by people within government (John F. Kennedy) and by people outside of government.
What blind and arrogant people don’t want to admit is that “conspiracy theorists” like Alex Jones, Ron Paul, Jesse Ventura and countless other truth-tellers are the Paul Reveres of this generation.
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News accounts in the 1920s called the Dark Corner “a little Chicago” because of federal agents’ raids on stills, killings, and gun and knife fights that broke out after church, he said.Illegal moonshine is still being made there, Campbell said. In June, sheriff’s deputies busted a still in Landrum, South Carolina, and confiscated 2,000 gallons of illegal white liquor along with $150,000 in cash.
State lawmakers in 2009 altered existing liquor laws in a way that lessened the financial burden on small distilleries, paving the way for the Dark Corner Distillery to set up shop.
Despite the drink’s reputation, legal moonshine makers also have popped up in other states, including Oregon, Wisconsin, Montana, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, New York and North Carolina.
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Missouri Senate Bill 54 is deigned to prevent children and adults from having sexual relationships. It will no doubt drive an even firmer wedge than already exists in the U.S. between children and their tutors, preventing other socially healthy and perfectly natural affectionate bonds between them, which can be crucial to a child’s development. It’s also likely to discourage American educators, increasing their stress and anxiety by treating them as potential predators. —ARK
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Swedish police have detained a 31-year-old man in Ängelholm in western Sweden who was discovered after he sought advice from authorities on the legality of building a nuclear reactor in a domestic kitchen.
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rep.licants.org is a web service allowing users to install an artificial intelligence (bot) on their Facebook and/or Twitter account. From keywords, content analysis and activity analysis, the bot attempts to simulate the activity of the user, to improve it by feeding his account and to create new contacts with other users.The bot does not born with a fictitious identity, but will be added to the real identity of the user to modify it at his convenience. Thus, this bot can be seen as a virtual prothesis added to an user’s account. With the aim to help him to forge a digital identity of what he would really like to be and by trying to build a greater social reputation for the user. Moreover, this bot can be perceived as a threat by defrauding even more the reality of who is really who on social networks and by showing the poverty of our social interactions on these so-called social networks.
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Several groups – two of them led by highly trained computer scientists from MIT and Northeastern University – formed gambling companies and began pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into Cash WinFall, a phenomenon lottery officials first noticed in 2005.The top five groups and individuals playing Cash WinFall collectively win back the cost of their tickets plus $1 million to $6 million in profits each year during rolldowns, without ever winning the jackpot, according to Mohan Srivastava, a Canadian statistician who found a flaw in a Canadian instant game that allowed him to detect winning tickets without scratching them.
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If you’re in a position to be tased, you’ve typically got one (not very impressive) advantage: the police officer or rent-a-cop trying to send 20,000 volts through your body has to be pretty close to you. But your advantage is about to disappear in a hail of electric shock cartridges.Taser International is teaming up with crazy-ass Australian electric gun company Metal Storm to produce a bowel-liquifying stun shotgun called — seriously — MAUL. Picture, if you will, a 12-gauge shotgun that stacks stun cartridges on top of one another and uses electricity to fire them out, railgun-style. Five of Taser’s XREP cartridges come flying at you from 30 yards away — “semi-automatic fire as fast as the operator can squeeze the trigger,” the company boasted on Thursday.
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The controversy was triggered when METI’s Agency for Natural Resources and Energy earlier this month opened a call for bids for its so-called Nuclear Power Safety Regulation Publicity Project.The bid said the agency needed a contractor “to monitor blogs on nuclear power and radiation issues as well as Twitter accounts around the clock”.
The contractor would be asked to “conduct research and analysis on incorrect and inappropriate information that would lead to false rumours and to report such Internet accounts to the agency”, it said.
The contractor would then “publish correct information in question-and-answer format on the agency’s website and Twitter account, after consulting with experts and engineers if necessary”, said the call for tenders.
Asatsu DK, a major Japanese advertising company, won the contract for 70 million yen ($897,000) which expires at the end of March 2012.
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Radiation can damage human cells and DNA, with prolonged exposure causing leukemia and other forms of cancer, according to the World Nuclear Association. Children are more susceptible as their cells grow at a faster rate.“It’s all invisible. The trees are still trees, people are shopping, the birds are singing and dogs are walking in the street,” said Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster’s school of biomedical sciences, who visited Fukushima prefecture last week to provide information on health risks. “When you bring out the (Geiger) machines, you can see everything is sparkling and everyone is being bitten by invisible snakes that will eventually kill them.”
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The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant said Monday that it measured the highest radiation levels within the plant since it was crippled by a devastating earthquake. However, it said the discovery would not slow continuing efforts to bring the plant’s damaged reactors under control.The operator, Tokyo Electric Power, said that workers on Monday afternoon had found an area near Reactors No. 1 and 2, where radiation levels exceeded their measuring device’s maximum reading of 10 sieverts per hour — a fatal dose for humans.
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“The levels reported of 10 sieverts per hour are very high levels and it’s going to be very difficult to manage workers going into those areas and doing operations,” he said.”To put the 10 sieverts into context, that 10 sieverts is actually a lethal dose of radiation. So you can’t afford to be exposed for more than a few minutes at those levels.
“It means you’re directly exposed to fuel rods in the reactors or the spent fuel ponds very closely and while it’s possible to get to those levels it means there is very little shielding going on there.”
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Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning polling organization out of North Carolina that likes to make news with flashy headlines, released the results of a survey today that included a question not too often asked by pollsters: “If God exists, do you approve or disapprove of its performance?” Fifty-two percent of the 928 respondents approve of the job the Almighty’s done while 9 percent disapprove.So about half the public isn’t too thrilled with the way God is handling, well, everything. These people realize that, if God exists, He knows how they answered, right? Looks like we’ve got a new flood to get ready for.
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Swedish sea treasure hunters have found something extraordinary: A 60-foot disc sunk in the bottom of the ocean, with what appears to be 985-foot-long impact tracks leading to it. The team leader never found anything like it:You see a lot of weird stuff in this job but during my 18 years as a professional I have never seen anything like this. The shape is completely round… a circle.
Those are the words of Peter Lindberg, commander of the Ocean Explorer. He and his team found the strange disc on June 19 2011, at 285 feet below the surface of the Botnia Gulf, which is located somewhere between Finland and Sweden in the Baltic.
The Ocean Explorer is not a team of crazy UFO hunters, but a company that finds sunken ships and retrieve their contents for profit. In 1997 they found the ship Jönköping, which was loaded by 2.500 bottles of an amazing champagne: Heidsieck&Co Monopole 1907 “Gout Americain” dedicated to the Russian Imperial Fleet. They sold those bottles for $13,000 a pop.
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Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on August 3, 2011
