RIP

RIP Reg Presley of The Troggs

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Caffeine Jitters

According to a report released last month by the U.S. Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration, the annual number of emergency room visits associated with energy drinks increased to 20,000 in 2011, a 36% boost from the previous year. Late last year, the New York Times reported that the U.S. Food & Drug Administration is investigating reports of five deaths linked to Monster Energy drinks and 13 deaths linked to 5-Hour Energy shots.
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“A Paranoid’s Guide to Bugging” Ramparts (1968)
Back before everyone had a bug on ‘em (Cellphone)
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KMPH Exclusive Interview w/ Kai, the Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker [Video]

Here is Jessob Reisbeck’s (KMPH News) exclusive raw interview w/ Kai, a hitchhiker who used his hatchet to stop a man that thought he was Jesus from killing people in Fresno, CA. Antoine Dodson, eat your heart out!
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Female Prison Guard Charged For Having Sex With Cop Killer Inmate

Nancy Gonzalez, a corrections officer at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, was arrested this morning at her home in Huntington, N.Y., on charges that she allegedly carried on a sexual relationship with a man convicted of killing two NYPD detectives. She is charged with engaging in sexual relations with an inmate and she is scheduled to be arraigned later this afternoon in Brooklyn federal court, according to court papers. Gonzalez, 29, is accused of having what is described as inappropriate relationship sex with Ronell Wilson, who was convicted of the 2003 capital murder of two undercover NYPD detectives in a point-blank execution in Staten Island. Gonzalez is now eight months pregnant with a baby, possibly from the relationship with Wilson, according to officials.
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How to kill Drones

The US Air Force team, dubbed the Space Aggressor Squadron, was set up to look for weak spots in satellite communications and navigation systems by playing the part of a potential enemy. “We ran a search on the Net and found there’s quite a lot of information out there on how to build and operate satellites but also, unfortunately, on how to jam them,” says Tim Marceau, head of the squadron. “Just type in ‘satellite communications jamming’ and you’ll be surprised how many hits you get.” Two rookie engineers from the US Air Force Research Laboratory were ordered to build a jamming system using only a Net connection and whatever they could buy for cash. For $7500, the engineers lashed together a mobile ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) high-power noise source that they could use to jam satellite antennas or military UHF receivers. “It’s just like turning your radio up louder than someone else’s,” Marceau says.
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A Drug Recall That Should Frighten Us All About The FDA

The FDA announced last week that the 300mg generic version of Wellbutrin XL manufactured by Impax Laboratories and marketed by Teva Pharmaceuticals was being recalled because it did not work. And this wasn’t just a problem with one batch – this is a problem that has been going on with this particular drug for four or five years, and the FDA did everything it could to ignore it. The FDA apparently approved this drug – and others like it – without testing it. The FDA just assumed if one dosage strength the drug companies submitted for approval works, then the other higher dosages work fine also. With this generic, American consumers became the FDA’s guinea pigs to see if the FDA’s assumption was right. It wasn’t.
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Food Cravings – The Truth Behind The “Mystery”

The fact of the matter is that food cravings are very important biochemical indicators that inform us when our body actually needs a particular nutrient. The thing is, most people (including ourselves) struggle to identify the true implication of the craving(s). Most of us live in the reality that “pre-packaged foods” are now considered an important part of a balanced diet; we also believe that they offer the same nutrient content as a food substance that has not been adulterated or reconstituted. By existing in this reality, we set ourselves up for failure. The truth is, there is hope! We just have to harness our energies by discerning the body’s cries for “real food”. In order to simplify your life a bit, we have found a table outlining the most common “food cravings”, the missing nutrients associated with those cravings, and which foods you can ingest to take corrective action in fulfilling your body’s need to function.
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Is sign at decaying Packard Plant a chilling reference to Nazi death camp?

Big letters have been placed on the overpass at the Packard Automotive Plant in Detroit that read in German “Work will make you Free,” concerning some metro Detroiters, given the resemblance to an infamous sign at the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz. It’s unclear who put up the letters. In capital red letters on a white background, the new sign at the decaying site on Detroit’s east side reads: “Arbeit Macht Frei,” the exact same words at the entrance to the concentration camps in Poland where Jews were forced to work and were murdered. The sign, which was used at other Nazi camps, became well known as an international symbol of cruelty.
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Anonymous posts personal data of 4,000 bankers online

Anonymous claims it filched the list from computers belonging to the Federal Reserve. Just as the Super Bowl was ending, Anonymous declared on Twitter, “Now we have your attention America: Anonymous’s Superbowl Commercial 4k banker dox via the FED.”
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U.K. spy agencies plan to install Web snooping ‘black boxes’

The U.K.’s intelligence agencies are planning to install ‘black box’-style surveillance devices in the country’s telecommunications infrastructure to monitor the U.K.’s online activity. According to lawmakers in the country’s capital [PDF], these devices will rely on deep packet inspection—a technique that has been criticized repeatedly by online activists and citizens alike—as part of the government’s efforts to increasingly monitor British Web. Such techniques will allow U.K. law enforcement agencies to log the details of almost everything that citizens’ visit and access online, including Web site domain names and even details of Skype calls.
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“Wild Thing” singer Reg Presley dies in UK

Reg Presley, the lead singer of 1960s British rock band The Troggs, who scored a hit with the love anthem “Wild Thing,” was reported to have died at his home in England on Monday after a battle with cancer. He was 71.
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China one-child policy enforcer runs over baby

A Chinese official demanding a couple pay a fine for violating the country’s one-child policy crushed their 13-month-old boy to death with a car, a local spokesman said Tuesday. Under China’s population controls, instituted more than 30 years ago, couples who have more than one child must pay a “social upbringing” fine, while in some cases mothers have been forced to undergo abortions. Authorities in the eastern city of Wenzhou are investigating how the infant ended up beneath the vehicle, a Mayu county official surnamed Zhou told AFP. “The family was agitated,” he said, “After starting the car to bring the family to the office to discuss the matter, the official discovered the child had been crushed underneath the car.”
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‘Racism’ of early colour photography explored in art exhibition

Broomberg and Chanarin say their work, on show at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery, examines “the radical notion that prejudice might be inherent in the medium of photography itself”. They argue that early colour film was predicated on white skin: in 1977, when Jean-Luc Godard was invited on an assignment to Mozambique, he refused to use Kodak film on the grounds that the stock was inherently “racist”. The light range was so narrow, Broomberg said, that “if you exposed film for a white kid, the black kid sitting next to him would be rendered invisible except for the whites of his eyes and teeth”. It was only when Kodak’s two biggest clients – the confectionary and furniture industries – complained that dark chocolate and dark furniture were losing out that it came up with a solution.
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Baby perfume? The idea stinks

Where will the objectification and commercialisation of children end? High heels for babies? Nope, that’s already been done. Heelarious provide cowboy boots for tots, as well as bright pink “teethers” shaped like credit cards, allowing baby to play at getting into debt. Ditto iPads for infants – last week, it was announced that the InnoTab 2, an £84.99 “chewable” tablet computer, would be launched in time for Christmas.
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What Are Perfect Teeth?

As Japan Today put it, yaeba means “‘multilayered’ or ‘double’ tooth, and describes the fanged look achieved when molars crowd the canines and push them forward.” They report it as a uniquely feminine trend: “Japanese women of all ages [are] flocking to dental clinics to have temporary or permanent artificial canines … glued to their teeth.” It’s been gaining in popularity over the past few years.
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Unbelievably Racist Vintage Valentine’s Day Cards, circa 1900 to 1930

They capture in a material object the racial discourse occurring at the moment…You can really get a sense of how common and everyday and widely accepted these cards were. It gestures to this past moment when racism was more apparent in society.
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Flash Mob Mayhem: Violent Groups Of Teens Leave Neighborhoods Worried

In New York and across the country, the mobs of kids – 20, 30, 40 or more — appear out of nowhere and suddenly charge a newsstand or convenience store. They ransack, steal and wreak havoc with no consideration for customers, such as Bennett, who get in their way. “They assemble, they do whatever it is that they’re going to do, and then they disassemble in a matter of minutes,” said Jon Shane, assistant professor of criminal justice at John Jay College. “By the time somebody recognizes what is happening or is injured, if the police are able to respond, it’s slow.”
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Justice Department memo reveals legal case for drone strikes on Americans

A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be “senior operational leaders” of al-Qaida or “an associated force” — even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.
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Facebook party wreckers threatened teenage host at knifepoint

“It took three days to clean up the house, and we had to face excrement that was put on the floor of the toilet, and mud all through the house,” he added. “The lad had no control of events when they got out of hand. He was hoodwinked into having a party, but when it went on Facebook the whole world got to know about it. “If he knew 10 people there, that would be the height of it; the rest were strangers just out to destroy the place,” he said. The boy’s aunt described the people who trashed the house as “scumbags”. “What sort of people can do a thing like this?” she asked. “Somebody set up a Facebook page in the lad’s name afterwards, making it look like he was the one posting the messages, but it’s not him.” “And then people were making all sorts of things up about what happened. There was no goldfish boiled, there was no hamster taped to the ceiling, the front door was not ripped off the hinges,” she explained.
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Stranger gave me SUV: stabbing accused

An offer of a free SUV from an affectionate stranger at 5 a.m. was too good to pass up, a man on trial for attacking an Ottawa couple in their home with a pair of knives testified Monday. Little did Richard Blake know the vehicle he had just been handed had just been stolen in a home invasion on Rideout Crescent where homeowners François Renaud and Amalle Thomas had been held captive for hours. Renaud was stabbed 20 times; Thomas had her throat slashed. Both survived. Blake explained that he was thirsty for milk after a sleepless night and was on his way to the corner store when he had a chance encounter with the stranger, who gave him a big chest-to-chest hug on a narrow pathway. The man promised him there was nothing wrong with the SUV, said Blake. A “naive” Blake said he was skeptical at first, but soon convinced himself it was a good idea. “I was pretty excited about it,” said Blake. “Free car, you know. Never had one before.”
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John Kerry to write ‘JK’ after all of his State Dept. tweets

Newly-installed Secretary of State John Kerry will begin tweeting soon from the Department of State’s official Twitter account. All tweets that come directly from Kerry will have his initials, “JK,” included at the end of the messages. But in the world of Social Media, “JK” is widely understood to mean “just kidding.”
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Effort building to change US pot laws

An effort is building in Congress to change U.S. marijuana laws, including moves to legalize the industrial production of hemp and establish a hefty federal pot tax. While passage this year could be a longshot, lawmakers from both parties have been quietly working on several bills, the first of which Democratic Reps. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon and Jared Polis of Colorado plan to introduce Tuesday, Blumenauer told The Associated Press. Polis’ measure would regulate marijuana the way the federal government handles alcohol: In states that legalize pot, growers would have to obtain a federal permit. Oversight of marijuana would be removed from the Drug Enforcement Administration and given to the newly renamed Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Marijuana and Firearms, and it would remain illegal to bring marijuana from a state where it’s legal to one where it isn’t.
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The power of TV: watching 20 hours a week halves sperm count, according to new study

The study, published by the British Journal of Sports Medicine, looked at the lifestyles of 189 healthy men between the ages of 18 and 22, over a three-month period, to establish a link between environmental factors and semen quality. It found an increasingly idle lifestyle might be a contributing factor to declining sperm levels. Other factors assessed included medical or reproductive health problems, diet, stress levels and smoking. Men who watched more than 20 hours of television a week had a sperm count 44 per cent lower than those who watched the least, it found.
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File under Photography, SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG, SeMeN SPeRmS Links 'o Death, Sex

Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on February 6, 2013

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Super Zeros

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1970s NY Graffiti Artists Still Have Urge to Tag
Witten and a generation of urban latchkey kids who spray-painted their initials all over Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s and landed in the city’s street art scene are coming of age — middle age, that is.
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1% Rappers
#20 Rick Ross – Net Worth $25 Million #19 Tie between T-Pain and T.I – Net Worth $30 Million #18 Nelly – Net Worth $55 Million #17 Busta Rhymes – Net Worth $60 Million #16 Ludacris – Net Worth $65 Million #15 Beastie Boys – Net Worth $75 Million Each #14 Timbaland – Net Worth $75 Million #13 Pharrell Williams – Net Worth $77.5 Million #12 Tie between LL Cool J and Akon – Net Worth $80 Million #11 Kanye West – Net Worth $90 Million #10 Lil Wayne – Net Worth $95 Million #9 Ice Cube – Net Worth $100 Million #8 Snoop Dogg – Net Worth $110 Million #7 Birdman – Net Worth $115 Million #6 Eminem – Net Worth $120 Million #5 50 Cent – Net Worth $250 Million #4 Dr. Dre – Net Worth $260 Million #3 Master P – Net Worth $350 Million #2 Jay-Z – Net Worth $475 Million #1 Diddy – Net Worth $500 Million
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It’s raining heroin on Indo-Pak border
On an average, more than a kilogram of heroin was seized every day on the Indo-Pak border adjoining Punjab for the first six months of this year. Records with the Border Security Force (BSF) show that in the first half of 2012, the force has seized a record 197 kilograms of heroin worth nearly Rs 1,000 crore. This is nearly three times more than 68 kgs seized last year. It is also the highest amount of the drug seized in the past five years.
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The Shining finally gets a second movie
Warner Bros have confirmed that they are working on a prequel to the Jack Nicholson thriller – which contained the famous line, “Heeere’s Johnny.”
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Heroin drug targets middle school students
Cheese is the slang name for a mixture of black tar heroin and Tylenol PM. The substances are combined and come out looking much like parmesan cheese. The resulting product is sold for as little as $2 per hit. Kids in the Dallas-area are buying “cheese” with their lunch money, according to media reports. They’re snorting the stuff up their noses – often at school – and dying in alarming numbers, according to the Dallas County medical office. A recent study by the Dallas Independent School district determined that more than 5,000 kids have tried cheese. More than two dozen have died of overdoses. Most, like Mariela, first take the drug in middle school. That’s shocking. Middle school students are being targeted by drug dealers and turned into heroin addicts before they reach high school.
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TSA Checkpoints Exposed: Journalist Tracked, Targeted and Harassed for Filming
Luke Rudkowski of WeAreChange breaks down WRC Correspondent Julio Rausseo’s experience at the Chicago Union Station, 1 week after releasing a video exposing TSA checkpoints being setup there.
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The Aleppo Codex Mystery
One day this spring, on the condition that I not reveal any details of its location nor the stringent security measures in place to protect its contents, I entered a hidden vault at the Israel Museum and gazed upon the Aleppo Codex — the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible. The story of how it arrived here, in Jerusalem, is a tale of ancient fears and modern prejudices, one that touches on one of the rawest nerves in Israeli society: the clash of cultures between Jews from Arab countries and the European Jews, or Ashkenazim, who controlled the country during its formative years. And the story of how some 200 pages of the codex went missing — and to this day remain the object of searches carried out around the globe by biblical scholars, private investigators, shadowy businessmen and the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency — is one of the great mysteries in Jewish history.
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Just a face in a crowd? Scans pick up ID, personal data
As you scan the face on that giant billboard, it may just be scanning your face right back. Increasingly sophisticated digital facial-recognition technology is opening new possibilities in business, marketing, advertising and law enforcement while exacerbating fears about the loss of privacy and the violation of civil liberties. Businesses foresee a day when signs and billboards with face-recognition technology can instantly scan your face and track what other ads you’ve seen recently, adjust their message to your tastes and buying history and even track your birthday or recent home purchase. The FBI and other U.S. law enforcement agencies already are exploring facial-recognition tools to track suspects, quickly single out dangerous people in a crowd or match a grainy security-camera image against a vast database to look for matches.
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Palestinians Rip Romney’s ‘Racist’ Praise for Israel – Candidate again steps in it, says Israel has better ‘culture’ for business
Mitt Romney offended Palestinians again today, saying that Israel was more prosperous than Palestine because of its superior culture and the will of God. “You notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality” between Israel and Palestine, Romney said at a fundraiser in Jerusalem today, citing each nation’s per-capita GDP, the AP reports. He went on to say that in considering Israel’s accomplishments “I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things” including the “hand of providence.”
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30 Global News Events The Batman Massacre Allows The American Media To Ignore
The essence of the infor­ma­tion war is the timely inter­jec­tion, dis­tor­tion or omis­sion of news events. Reports can min­i­mize, omit or basi­cally bury key news sto­ries that require analy­sis while mag­ni­fy­ing oth­ers which are of lesser impor­tance to the keen, ana­lyt­i­cal mind. While the Bat­man mas­sacre is tragic, the buzz in the so called alter­na­tive media cir­cle is cen­tered around the litany of ongo­ing sto­ries that will be sti­fled in the week to come by the main­stream media’s focus on the Aurora, CO shoot­ing. Beyond that, the analy­sis you read here is not all pre­sented as 100% fact, some con­clu­sions are pre­sented in light of other evi­dence, and where noted, some are spec­u­la­tive based on edu­cated the­ory. In this era of total media bom­bard­ment, to the point of over­load, some events have to be con­sid­ered beyond just what is con­firmed in print or on video and must be eval­u­ated in the full con­text of pos­si­ble human behav­ior.
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Feds Sue Telecom for Fighting Warrantless Search
The Justice Department is suing a telecommunications company for challenging a request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation for customer information — despite the fact that the law authorizing the request explicitly permits such challenges. According to documents provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is representing the telecom, the company (whose name is one of the many redacted details in the documents) received a national security letter (NSL) in 2011. An NSL is essentially a self-issued search warrant whereby the FBI bypasses the Fourth Amendment and demands information about an individual without bothering to obtain a judge’s consent — and forces the recipient of the letter to keep mum about it because disclosure would allegedly harm national security. NSLs were employed somewhat sparingly prior to 2001 but became widely used — and abused, as the Justice Department’s inspector general reported in 2007 — after the misnamed Patriot Act loosened the require
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Feeling bad about your life? Well, at least you’re not this guy!
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American fast food diet unleashes disease epidemic sweeping across Asia
Though increasingly looked down upon here in the U.S. as a sign of slothfulness and low socioeconomic status, routine fast food consumption in some parts of the world is actually considered to be culturally desirable. But as foreigners progressively adopt the American fast-food lifestyle in place of their own native foods, rates of chronic disease are skyrocketing, including in East and Southeast Asia where diabetes and heart disease rates are off the charts. According to a recent study published in the journal Circulation, globalization continues to usher U.S.-style fast food into East Asian countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Cambodia, where natives, especially those from the younger generations, are quickly adopting things like hamburgers and fries in place of their traditional fare. And based on the data, this Western fast food craze is responsible for a significant uptick in cases of diabetes and heart disease.
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Scientists Read Monkeys’ Minds, See What They’re Planning to Do Before They Do it
Neurologists working with monkeys at Washington University in St. Louis to decode brain activity have stumbled upon a rather surprising result. While working to demonstrate that multiple parameters can be seen in the firing rate of a single neuron (and that certain parameters are embedded in neurons only if they are needed to solve the immediate task), they also found that they could read their monkeys’ minds. This isn’t exactly ESP, but it is really interesting. The researchers came to find out that by analyzing the activity of large populations of neurons, they could discover what actions the monkeys were planning before they made a single motor movement. By monitoring neural activity, the researchers could essentially see what the monkey was thinking about doing next.
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CIA “Manages” Drug Trade, Mexican Official Says
In a recent interview, Chihuahua state spokesman Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva told Al Jazeera that the CIA and other international “security” outfits “don’t fight drug traffickers.” Instead, Villanueva argued, they try to control and manage the illegal drug market for their own benefit. “It’s like pest control companies, they only control,” Villanueva told the Qatar-based media outlet last month at his office in Juarez. “If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job. If they finish the drug business, they finish their jobs.” Another Mexican official, apparently a mid-level officer with Mexico’s equivalent of the U.S. Department of “Homeland Security,” echoed those remarks, saying he knew that the allegations against the CIA were correct based on talks with American agents in Mexico. “It’s true, they want to control it,” the official told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.
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Is There Too Much Pressure to Engage in Crazy, Kinky Sex?
What those trying to aggressively market an ever more “exotic sex life” fail to realize is that sexual preferences aren’t shaped by artifice. Buying a leather slapper won’t suddenly give you a penchant for spanking—and let’s face it, if you were really into the idea in the first place, you probably would have gone DIY and just picked up a hairbrush long before now. Making people feel shitty about their vanilla-ness is mainly a capitalist calculation. As any marketing exec knows, the moment people become satisfied is the moment they stop buying stuff.
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Black Hat presentation shows iris-scanning breach
A research team from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and West Virginia University have troubling findings for those who think iris scanning is one of the safest methods of biometric security. Their reverse-engineered, “replicated eye” image was able to bypass iris scanning, fooled into thinking the synthetic image was real and correct. Javier Galbally and his team printed out synthetic images of irises taken from codes of real irises stored in security databases to test iris-scanning vulnerabilities. An iris code is the data stored by recognition systems when they scan a person’s eye. This is information that the researchers could replicate in their synthetic images. A commercial iris system only looks for the iris code and not an actual eye, Galbally noted. He and his team tested their fake irises against a leading commercial-recognition system. In 80 percent of attempts, the scanner believed that the attempt was a real eye.
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Was the “Batman Shooting” a Ritualistic Murder Carried Out by Mind Controlled Patsy?
Shooter James Holmes even went as far as to take Vicodin, a drug found in Heath Ledger at the time of his death. Vicodin is a powerful pain-killer with morphine-like effects that is used in mind control to “dull out” victims. Is there some kind of ritualistic connection between The Dark Knight, the sacrificial death of Heath Ledger and this new installment of a Batman movie that was “launched” with a mass murder? Is there a reason why this mass-murder, which occurred during the midnight screening of a movie called Dark Knight RISING took place in a city called Aurora, the name Roman goddess of dawn (dawn being the time where the sun begins to rise)? Another interesting fact: Aurora is considered to be the mother of the morning star, also know as the Light Bringer, or Lucifer.
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Social Scientists Might Gain Access to Facebook’s Data on User Behavior
Social scientists hungry for Facebook’s data may be about to get a taste of it. Nature has learned that the social-networking website is considering giving researchers limited access to the petabytes of data that it has amassed on the preferences and behaviour of its almost one billion users. Outsiders will not get a free run of the data, but the move could quell criticism from social scientists who have complained that the company’s own research on its users cannot be verified. Facebook’s in-house scientists have been involved in publishing more than 30 papers since 2009, covering topics from what drives the spread of information and ideas to the relationship between social-networking activity and loneliness. However, because the company fears breaching its users’ privacy, it does not release the underlying raw data.
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With A Chemical Injection, Blind Mice Can See
Two of the most common causes of blindness are retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease, and macular degeneration, an age-related disorder. Both are characterized by damage to the rod and cone cells in the retina, which robs the eye of its photoreceptors. Treatments for these forms of blindness focuses on restoring the retina’s abilities, and we’ve seen a few examples — stem cell injections, implantations of light-sensitive compounds using viruses, and a whole host of electronic devices and artificial retinas. A chemical called AAQ can also make these damaged cells sensitive to light again, and it wouldn’t require any foreign substances or stem cells.
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How Much Is Your Gmail Account Worth?
The cloud backup guys over at Backupify put together a calculator to help folks estimate the value of their cloud-based Google Gmail web mail accounts. So what’s the average account’s worth? $3,588.85, Backupify’s Jay Garmon writes in a blog post. That’s the value of the time invested in the average Gmail account, given how many emails the average Gmail user has written (5,768), how long it takes to write the average email (one minute, 43 seconds), and the most recent U.S. Depart of Labor statistics on average annual salary ($45,230). In other words, if the average Gmail user were paid to recreate all the Gmail messages he or she’s ever written, it would cost $3,588.85.
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Honey buns sweeten life for Florida prisoners
They are a lowly, sturdy food designed for desperate cravings and vending machine convenience. They can endure weeks of neglect and even a mild mashing in a coat pocket or backpack. They are, it should come as no surprise, especially beloved by a similarly hardy but disrespected population: Florida’s prison inmates. Inmates in the Florida prison system buy 270,000 honey buns a month. Across the state, they sell more than tobacco, envelopes and cans of Coke. And they’re just as popular among Tampa Bay’s county jails. In Pasco’s Land O’Lakes Detention Center, they’re outsold only by freeze-dried coffee and ramen noodles. Not only that, these honey buns — so puffy! — have taken on lives of their own among the criminal class: as currency for trades, as bribes for favors, as relievers for stress and substitutes for addiction. They’ve become birthday cakes, hooch wines, last meals — even ingredients in a massive tax fraud. Thanks Jasmine
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Texas woman jailed for stabbing husband: Was it Facebook or PCP use?
Rhonda Roshell Washington, 33, told police her husband was high on PCP when they got into an argument about his drug use at their home in Bryan early Thursday, the Bryan-College Station paper reports. The fight turned physical, she said, and she jabbed him in the hand with her keys. Her husband, however, claimed she became upset about something on his Facebook page and chased him with a knife, stabbing him in the hand.
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UK’s largest skateboard unveiled ahead of Olympics
This isn’t a story about a skateboarding giant, the UK’s largest skateboard has been created to mark the fact two thirds of children think the Olympics will only be worth watching when more extreme sports like skateboarding are included, obviously. Measuring a staggering seven metres in length, two and half metres in width and at a metre high, the oversized board weighs as much as a baby African elephant – so any ‘ollies’ or ‘kick flips’ are probably out of the question.
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The Joke’s on You
Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.
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Google: we failed to delete all Streetview data
Despite repeated assurances in public and to the Information Commissioner, Google has admitted that it did not in fact delete all the data, which could include passwords and emails, collected over open WiFi networks by its Streetview mapping cars in 2010 in a number of countries around the world. The news means that Britain’s recently reopened investigation into the so-called WiFi snooping could be bolstered by an opportunity to re-examine evidence that the ICO had asked to be destroyed. The ICO has demanded to examine the data “immediately” to look for evidence that it is in fact more extensive than Google had originally claimed, as authorities in America had discovered for data collected there.
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Tim Geithner Admits Banks Bailed Out With Rigged Libor, Costing Taxpayers Huge Amount
But he also said that, months later, when it came time to set bailout terms for the Too Big To Fail Set, the government just had no other choice but to use Libor. Sure, that’s one way to look at it. Another, less charitable way to look at it is that the Fed was fully aware that Libor was being manipulated lower, and was fine charging an artificially low rate to lend money to banks and to AIG, in what amounted to yet another kind of bailout. Why make life harder for them, right? They had enough problems dealing with the crisis they had created. Raising red flags about Libor might have only made the crisis worse, making it harder for banks to borrow money. But in the process, the government left untold mountains of cash on the table for U.S. taxpayers. Even if Libor was only manipulated a tiny bit lower, these small breaks add up.
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Woman Claims Watching 3D Film Made Her Pregnant
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What Terrorizes Americans Most: Guns or Sexual Freedom?
America treats sex, not violence, as the biggest threat to families and the nation, starting with Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ratings bestowing action flicks that brutalize half-naked nymphets a PG-13, but anything suggesting female pleasure the deathly NC-17, as happened with the marital cunnilingus scene between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine. A common argument against gay marriage or condom commercials is, “What would I say to my kids,” as if sex talk destroys childhood innocence.
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19 Examples Of How Control Freaks Are Killing America With Their Completely Ridiculous Regulations
The control freaks are winning, and they are absolutely killing America. Our founding fathers intended to establish a nation where Americans would be free to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in an environment where freedom was maximized and government interference was minimized. Unfortunately, our nation has turned away from those principles and is now running 180 degrees in the other direction. For some reason, our political system tends to attract psychotic control freaks that want to micromanage our lives and make most of our decisions for us. These control freaks are actually convinced that freedom and liberty are “dangerous” and that there should be a rule or a regulation for just about everything. This is not just happening on the federal level either. The truth is that the control freaks are often the worst on the local level. When you add up the red tape on all levels of government, we literally have millions of laws, rules and regulations in America
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Iran nuclear energy facility hit with malware that plays AC/DC at full volume
An email to F-Secure — allegedly sent from an AEOI scientist — detailed the attack, noting that the malware has shut down some of the facility’s automated processes. The rather vague wording of the email leaves a few unanswered questions as to just what parts of the AEOI are in danger, but one piece of information was very clear: The insidious software prompted several of the group’s computers to begin playing the song “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC in the middle of the night, and at full volume.
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600-year-old linen bras found in Austrian castle
A revolutionary discovery is rewriting the history of underwear: Some 600 years ago, women wore bras. The University of Innsbruck said Wednesday that archeologists found four linen bras dating from the Middle Ages in an Austrian castle. Fashion experts describe the find as surprising because the bra had commonly been thought to be only little more than 100 years old as women abandoned the tight corset.
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Skydiver Fearless Felix jumps from 18 miles up
On Wednesday, Baumgartner took another stratospheric leap, this time from an altitude of more than 18 miles — an estimated 96,640 feet, nearly three times higher than cruising jetliners. He landed safely near Roswell, N.M. His top speed was an estimated 536 mph, said Brian Utley, an official observer on site. It’s the second test jump for Baumgartner from such extreme heights and a personal best. He’s aiming for a record-breaking jump from 125,000 feet, or 23 miles, in another month. He hopes to go supersonic then, breaking the speed of sound with just his body.
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62,000 pennies used to pay off mortgage
What started out as a joke 35 years ago ended with a Massachusetts man paying off his mortgage using 62,000 pennies. “I’ve never saved anything other than pennies. And it started out as a whim. You know, a penny for the mortgage,” Thomas Daigle told NBC affiliate WHDH-TV of Boston. Daigle, from Milford, Mass., recalled how, after signing the mortgage papers 35 years ago, he found a penny on the ground. He and his wife then joked about collecting pennies to pay off the loan — and the rest is history. Over the next 35 years, Daigle would roll pennies, 50 cents at a time. His bank found out the hard way just how much work that was — it reportedly took tellers two days to unroll the penny cases.
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More odd-colored lobsters turning up in the catch – but why?
Reports of odd-colored lobsters used to be rare in the lobster fishing grounds of New England and Atlantic Canada. Normal lobsters are a mottled greenish-brown. But in recent years, accounts of bright blue, orange, yellow, calico, white and even split lobsters – one color on one side, another on the other – have jumped. It’s now common to hear several stories a month of a lobsterman bringing one of the quirky crustaceans to shore.
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Did the NYPD Break International Law in Suppressing Protest?
A report by a group of civil and human rights attorneys released Wednesday morning paints the clearest picture yet of the New York City police department’s aggressive tactics and over-policing, all of which resulted in the systemic suppression of the basic rights of Occupy protesters. The report, which chronicles events from late September 2011 up to July of 2012, extensively documents numerous ways in which the NYPD acted with excessive force, attempted to intimidate and harass members of the press, expelled activists from public space due to the content of their speech, and ultimately concludes that authorities broke international law in their handling of Occupy Wall Street.
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Mayor Bloomberg Says Cops Should Go On Strike Until Americans Give Up Their Guns
In 2008, ten times more civilians regular people were killed by cops than cops were killed by perps. In 2011, 72 cops were shot and killed in the entire U.S.; in L.A. County alone, cops shot and killed 54 suspects the same year–22 percent of those people were unarmed. As Scott Reeder reported at Reason this morning, “Farmers, ranchers, commercial fishermen, loggers, garbage collectors, truck drivers, construction workers, pilots, steel workers, roofers, and others are far more likely to face death on the jobs than police or firefighters, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.” And as Choire Sicha wrote earlier this year, “2008 was the ten-year low for police officers being killed, and 2012 is, so far, year-to-date, down 49% from last year.”
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Batman Shooter James Holmes on Hardcore Pharmaceutical Drugs
Like virtually all massacre shooters before him, the notorious Batman shooter James Holmes is now reported to have been taking hardcore pharmaceutical drugs. In Holmes’ case, they happen to be the very same drugs that ultimately led to the early death of actor Heath Ledger. With a fix for ‘altering his state of mind’, the ‘Batman shooter’ was heavily hooked on the prescription painkiller Vicodin. Holmes even reportedly dosed up on a pharmaceutical cocktail just before the shooting. Side effects of Vicodin use, even at ‘recommended’ levels which Holmes likely far exceeded, include ‘altered mental states’ and ‘unusual thoughts or behavior’.
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The New Domain Awareness System Will Be Used To Track Potential Criminals And Terrorists
The New York Police Department will soon launch an all-seeing “Domain Awareness System” that combines several streams of information to track both criminals and potential terrorists. New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly says the city developed the software with Microsoft. Kelly says the program combines city-wide video surveillance with law enforcement databases. He says it will be officially unveiled by New York’s mayor as soon as next week.
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Two Texas Pre-Teens Create a Fake Facebook Account, Texas Cops Charge Them With Felonies and Lock Them Up
According to the Student Press Law Center, which investigated the girls’ arrest, officials in Hood County, Texas, are refusing to say whether the girls (who were arrested July 16) are still being detained. The center’s reporting suggests that the girls have been behind bars for more than a week for the crime of pranking a fellow student on Facebook
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File under Comedy, Culture, Fashion, Graffiti, SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG, Sex, Skateboarding

Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on July 30, 2012

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Marinated Morsels

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✖ Beauty writer Cat Marnell leaves xoJane.com to write book, smoke angel dust
Cat Marnell, the drug-addicted beauty columnist for Jane Pratt’s Web site xoJane.com, has parted ways from the site after refusing to get clean. Marnell chronicled her drug use on xoJane.com, and was profiled by New York magazine in April, the day before she entered rehab, as ordered by xoJane.com publisher Say Media. But sources say Marnell never stayed clean, with one suspecting she even worked high. “I’m always on drugs,” she wrote to us in an unapologetic e-mail. “Look, I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book, which is what I’m doing next.” Marnell, formerly a beauty editor at Lucky, admitted she’s not fit for the 9-to-5. “Drug addicts undeniably bring editorial black magic to the table like nobody else, but obviously we make the worst staffers,” she wrote us.
✖ Singer R. Kelly ‘owes $4.8m in back taxes to U.S. government’
R. Kelly reportedly owes $4.8 million in back taxes after ‘not paying anything’ on his superstar earnings for almost seven years. The ‘I Believe I Can Fly’ singer stopped paying taxes in 2005, according to documents filed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Despite the huge bill, the twice Grammy nominated singer is ‘confident’ the matter can be resolved.
✖ Operation: Entrapment – Cleveland bomb “plot” masterminded by FBI agents
Taking a closer look at the federal complaint against the five men reveals that although the suspects are believed to have expressed anti-government sentiments and disdain for major financial corporations, the impetus in the would-be bombing was the urging of undercover agents that had infiltrated a group of friends and encouraged them to consider acts of terrorism. Although the incident is still developing, federal authorities have submitted statements and recordings stemming from conversations their contacts had with the alleged terrorists, and unsurprisingly the mainstream media is largely ignoring one key problem with the federal probe: the FBI provoked members of an Occupy Wall Street off-shoot to embrace terrorist-like crimes despite voicing from the start that they were opposed to such.
✖ Miami Face-Chewing Victim: victim in the Miami “zombie” attack may have been shot by police
All that “zombie” watercooler talk may have subsided, but doctors working with the Miami face-chewing victim revealed another bizarre twist in the case Tuesday: The man, now awake and alert, may have been shot twice by the police during the attack.
✖ White House softball team smoked by pot lobby’s bats
Anyone notice a cloud hanging over the Mall last week? That might have been the White House softball team getting absolutely smoked by the team fielded by the marijuana lobby. The One Hitters, the team of pro-pot activists, beat STOTUS (the Softball Team of the U.S.) 25-3. Marijuana doesn’t seem to dampen athletic prowess (which we already knew — hello, Michael Phelps!). Still, the victors were gracious about the rout. “The One Hitters enjoyed slugging it out with the White House,” said Aaron Houston, executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, the group that sponsors the team. “Hopefully we can play them again when they aren’t totally absorbed in work.”
✖ 9-year-old girl stuck with bloody syringe buried in hotel bed
A 9-year-old girl faces months of tests to determine if she contracted any disease from a blood-caked syringe that pricked her heel inside a Washington hotel room. The dirty needle was left beneath the mattress cover of her bunk bed at the Guest House Inn and Suites in Aberdeen, where the girl and her family were attending a softball tournament, authorities said. Angie Smith, the mother of shortstop Emily, said the family was appalled to find the paraphernalia. “There were syringes, plastic bags, bloody bandages all underneath the mattress cover,” Smith told KOMO-TV. “We were really shocked and freaking out. It scare us to death.”
✖ Mom, Daughter Arrested After Girl Fight In Antelope Park
“She brought her daughter fully in Vaseline up on her face and arms,” Julian said, “to get her and to beat her and to rip her clothes off, which she did. She managed to tear the shirt to where my daughter’s breast came out during the fight at the park.”
✖ Vanity Wonder ‘Shot Girls’: Mother-of-two, who spent $15k on butt injections, writes book
She admits that her own first experience with butt shots could have been just as dangerous, as she had no idea what she was injected with – and still doubts the answer she was given. ‘The first two times, I was injected by a lady… when we finally asked her [what we were being injected with], she said soybean oil. So my first two times I had no idea what I was being injected with. ‘All the rest were done by [a different] lady, and it was medical grade silicone.’ She says the difference in the two substances was huge. The silicone, she says, is ‘a lot more moveable and jello-like. The ‘soybean oil’ made the treated areas ‘stiff and hard’. Describing her butt now, Vanity said: ‘Because that original work has been covered so many times, it’s all jiggly and very moveable. A lot of people are amazed.’
✖ Are Corporations and Big Banks Making a Windfall From Food Stamps?
How much more food stamp money is Walmart getting across the country? We don’t know, because USDA and state agencies refuse to release this information. We also have no clue how much money the likes of Coca-Cola, Kraft, and General Mills make from SNAP. The feds don’t even bother to collect that data, despite a national epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases fueled in part by your tax dollars. Then add healthcare on top of that. But one area of profit from food stamps is quite transparent: food corporations and industry groups have been lobbying intensely to make sure that junk food such as candy and soda can be purchased using SNAP. As New York City and nine states have pushed for health-based reforms to limit such purchases, these industry lobbies have pushed back hard to protect their pot of gold. Powerful food industry lobbying groups such as the American Beverage Association and the Snack Food Association teamed up to oppose health-oriented improvements to SNAP
✖ Computer files link TV dirty tricks to favourite for Mexico presidency
Mexico’s biggest television network sold prominent politicians favourable coverage in its flagship news and entertainment shows and used the same programmes to smear a popular leftwing leader, documents seen by the Guardian appear to show. The documents – which consist of dozens of computer files – emerge just weeks ahead of presidential elections on 1 July, and coincide with the appearance of an energetic protest movement accusing the Televisa network of manipulating its coverage to favour the leading candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto.
✖ 24 year old gets three life sentences for witnessing a drug deal
It’s been nearly 20 years since Clarence Aaron was put in jail for conspiring to distribute crack cocaine, and unless President Obama steps in, the 19-year veteran of the American prison system is expected to stay there for a while. A long while. Aaron wasn’t buying, selling or even touching coke when cops busted the then 23-year-old college student in 1993. Instead Aaron was simply a witness of a plotted crack transaction and associate of the buyer and seller, who, unlike him, pled guilty and gave law enforcement their full cooperation. But despite lacking any criminal record at all, however, Aaron was sentenced to serve three life sentences behind bars for his role in a would-be drug deal. Neither President Clinton nor George W. Bush offered a commutation to kill the lengthy sentence during their combined 16 years in office, and new evidence reveals that there may have been a reason for that.
✖ Israel rounds up African migrants for deportation
Israel said on Monday it had started rounding up African migrants in the first stage of a controversial “emergency plan” to intern and deport thousands deemed a threat to the Jewish character of the state. Israel Radio reported that dozens of Africans, mainly from South Sudan, had already been detained in the Red Sea resort of Eilat, including mothers and children. “This is only a small group of the infiltrators,” Interior Minister Eli Yishai said. “I’m not acting out of hatred of strangers but love of my people and to rescue the homeland.”
✖ Federal agents ‘have sex at Cirque Du Soleil’
A California performance of Cirque Du Soleil turned into “Sex Du Soleil” recently when two U.S. border agents allegedly had sex in front of other audience members before attacking them. Broadcast reports indicate Kallie Helwig was performing oral sex on Gerald Torello Jr. in plain view of others including children during the May 27 event at the Del Mar Fairgrounds near San Diego. “She had her head in his lap. It looked like her head and her hand were moving up and down and it looked like she was giving him oral sex in public,” an unidentified female witness told KFMB-TV. The witness also claims Torello, the male agent, gave a 5-year-old boy a high-five during the incident, and there were other children present at the time.
✖ Teens ‘huffing’ Freon from air conditioning units, experts say
Morris took that to mean someone tapped into the air conditioning units to steal the Freon, which can be inhaled, or “huffed,” to get high. Inhaling Freon produces a high that is similar to what is felt from drinking alcohol, and doing so can freeze the lungs or cause brain damage. It can also prove fatal, Morris warned, citing several recent examples, including a teenager in Oklahoma who died in November. “He was still in the yard next to the unit,” Morris said of that death. “So it is a one-time thing. You do it and it could kill you.” Californian Jacob Henry, 18, died in September after huffing Freon. “Huffing is a game of Russian roulette,” his mother Gail told Los Angeles’ KABC last fall. “Don’t ever consider doing it because that five seconds of high that you get when you do it, it isn’t worth dying over.”
✖ Ex-cop found guilty of rape; he blamed Zoloft for his actions
It found the defendant, Anthony Nicholas Orban, a Marine veteran of the Iraq War, guilty of two counts of rape, two counts of forced oral copulation, two of sexual penetration with a foreign object, one count of making a criminal threat, and a sentence enhancement of using a firearm in commission of a kidnapping. Orban faces a sanity hearing before sentencing. Defense attorney James Blatt had argued that Orban was rendered “unconscious” by use of the antidepressant, and therefore was not responsible for his actions in the brutal 2010 attack in Fontana. A defense psychiatrist testified that Orban had stopped taking the prescribed antidepressant, then resumed it at full dose, provoking a psychotic break during which he was not fully aware of his actions. But prosecutors said such a defense was “baloney” that ran counter to medical consensus on the drug’s effects. Orban had been out drinking and seeking sexual encounters before he kidnapped the victim at gunpoint and made her drive to
✖ Elevator Child Rapist Sought! Little Girl Beats His Ass [Video]
✖ TSA Sexually Assaults My Mother [Video]
5-28-11 at Sky Harbor International in Phoenix, AZ my mother was sexually assaulted which brought her to tears. Multiple TSA agents claimed to know my whole family (WELCOME TO 1984) TSA then threatened to steal my luggage because I left it unattended… rather because I was 10 feet from it. I was then threatened to have my ability to fly revoked by Southwest Airlines, NOT TSA. Southwest Airlines then threatened to have me arrested for filming the event, even though TSA, Southwest, and Phoenix Police couldn’t provide me with the statute or law that claims I cannot film in a public area. Here is that event. Police- Protecting and Serving??? Why is TSA asking for my father’s phone number and address at the end of this ordeal, to add us to a no-fly list or spy on us?
✖ Eating farts could reduce blood pressure: Chinese study
The hydrogen sulfide contained in flatus has the ability to help reduce blood pressure, according to a recent medical study, yet researchers at Zhongda Hospital at Southeast University in Nanjing are still unsure of the amount needed to be beneficial and whether patients are willing to accept “eating farts” as a form of treatment, reports our Chinese-language sister newspaper Want Daily. The smell of flatus comes from hydrogen sulfide, a substance that has been proven effective in controlling blood pressure in mice in an experiment at John Hopkins University. The study has been published in the journal Science. Thanks Jasmine
✖ Town Considers Fines for Cursing
“The cursing has gotten very, very bad. I find it appalling and I won’t tolerate it,” said Ms. Duphily, a civic leader in the otherwise quiet New England community, which calls itself the Cranberry Capital of the World. “No person should be allowed to talk in that manner.” Soon, Middleborough residents who do could risk a $20 fine. Ms. Duphily, 63 years old, tried scolding the cursers—whom she describes as young people shouting the “F word” back and forth—with a stern, “Hey kids, that’s enough!” Then she conferred with the Beautification and Activities Group, which informed the Middleborough Business Coalition, which then called a summit with Middleborough Police Chief Bruce Gates, who now, in his sworn role, is trying to stomp out swears.
✖ Woman Posed As Boy, Tricked Girl Into Sex
A 24-year-old Massachusetts woman who allegedly masqueraded as a teenage boy is facing federal charges for engaging in illicit sexual conduct with a 15-year-old girl who was unaware that the boyfriend she met online was actually a female
✖ Israel’s Richest Rabbis Make Hollywood Stars Look Poor
Many of these rabbis have their wealth in nonprofit organizations. But each has absolute control over their nonprofits and each uses them for any purpose they choose, often as their personal checkbooks. For example, Pinto allegedly buys custom made suits for his teenage son and high end collectible watches by the fistful using money donated to help the poor. Many of these rabbis have extensive private real estate holdings and business investments, as well and some have paid millions of dollars in settlements to Israel’s Tax Authority, its version of the IRS, to settle tax fraud charges. But the Israeli government is reluctant to press criminal charges against most of these rabbis because they control large voting blocs and, in the case of the Gerrer Rebbe, control a political party that has often had the ability to make or break government coalitions.
✖ Surveillance Video: Woman Set On Fire (WARNING: Very Disturbing)
Surveillance video from a Boynton Beach 7-Eleven store shows an attack during which a woman was set on fire Monday morning.
✖ Ultra Violet SUPERPOWER (!) after Cataract Surgery with Crystalens – color glow
I’ve been very happy so far with the Crystals implant for Cataract Surgery – after a lifetime of glasses, it’s life-changing to be able see good! I expected some color shifts since my natural cloudy/yellow lens was replaced and it’s wonderful seeing a “brighter more vivid” world. But one unexpected/interesting aspect is I see a violet glow that others do not – perhaps I’m more sensitive to the low end of the visible light spectrum. While I don’t have a “Sixth Sense” that allows me to say “I see dead people” (!), I suspect I’m actually seeing Ultraviolet light! ;-)
✖ How Urban Outfitters Peddles Ironic Conservatism, Hipster Racism and Other Terrible Values
Anti-Semitic apparel: The Anti-Defamation League once went after Urban Outfitters for selling shirts with the slogan “Everyone Loves a Jewish Girl” and pictures of dollar bills and shopping bags. The company also once sold yellow shirts with a Star of David on the pocket, which of course has horrible connotations. “Pro-ana” apparel: Who in their right mind would sell a shirt to young women with the slogan “Eat Less?” Urban Outfitters, that’s who. “Ghettopoly”: It’s like Monopoly, but shockingly racist! The game, which drew the ire of the NAACP among other groups, featured liquor stores, “Ghetto Stash” cards, and crack, basketball and pimp playing pieces. “You got yo whole neighborhood addicted to crack. Collect $50 from each playa,” read one space on the game board. The color “Obama black”: A few years ago, Urban Outfitters put a henley T-shirt in its online shop that came in the colors “White/Charcoal” and “Obama/Black.” Nothing to add.
✖ Billboard Swing – Created by Didier Faustino
Didier Fiuza Faustino created this awesome billboard swing for an installation entitled Double Happiness. This “urban reanimation device” was created for the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennial of Urbanism and Architecture in 2009. “Double Happiness responds to the society of materialism where individual desires seem to be prevailing over all. This nomad piece of urban furniture allows the reactivation of different public spaces and enables inhabitants to reappropriate fragments of their city. They will both escape and dominate public space through a game of equilibrium and desequilibrium. By playing this “risky” game, and testing their own limits, two persons can experience together a new perception of space and recover an awareness of the physical world.”
✖ George Zimmerman old phone: Orlando man with Zimmerman’s old phone number slammed by threatening calls
At age 49, Junior Alexander Guy got his first cell phone last month. The calls started immediately. Strangers called at all hours. Some were insulting. Others angry. Sometimes, they threatened him. “You murderer!” “You deserve to die!” By Day 2 he figured out what was going on: T-Mobile had given him the phone number formerly used by George Zimmerman, the Neighborhood Watch volunteer who fatally shot Trayvon Martin in February. The number —407-435-2400 — was the one Zimmerman spelled out to a police dispatcher in a recorded call the night of the shooting that has since been widely circulated by news organizations and is available on the Internet. Guy, who works at an Orlando wastewater plant, said his phone rang around the clock. “At 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock in the morning I kept getting these,” he said. He estimates he received 70 threatening calls. He has moved out of his home and relocated his mother, who had lived with him, to a different location, he said.
✖ Sales of sex accessories and kinky rope skyrockets among NYC women who read “Fifty Shades of Grey”
Nathaniel Garber Schoen, co-owner of Garber Hardware in the West Village, says customers eager to get tied up rather than secure lumber have a telltale sign: They request softer nylon material. In which case Schoen recommends the 12-gauge, non-braided nylon — “Anything skinnier is too small. You might hurt yourself,” he says of the rope, $18 for a 50-foot spool. “For those purposes, 12-gauge is a reasonable choice and the most popular.”
✖ The Real Reason Apple Can’t Make Your iPhone in America
China competes with us as a country. But our businesses see themselves as GLOBALIZED, not as part of a country. So since we – at least our businesses – no longer see themselves as part of a country we are not responding to this competition. We are not mobilizing to fight back. In fact, China has essentially recruited our own business leaders to fight against our own government. Look at the effects on our country since we entered into this deal with China. They are luring our businesses to move our jobs, factories, industries and technologies there for the private gain of a few, at the expense of us as a country, and we let that happen. The trade imbalance is bankrupting us as a country. It has already drained trillions from our economy, weakening us and strengthening them. They are smart, they do this as a NATIONAL strategy, as a country competing with us as a country, and the result is that in a competition between countries we may have already lost.
✖ Wayne Roberts, ‘Stay High 149’ in Graffiti Circles, Is Dead at 61
Wayne Roberts was a pioneering 1970s graffiti writer known as “Stay High 149” who borrowed the haloed stick figure from the title sequence of the 1960s television series “The Saint,” put a joint in its mouth and turned it around. His “Smoker” tag, or signature, turned the heads of legions of imitators and admirers, including the anonymous teenagers who slipped into train yards at night to paint whole cars, as well as Norman Mailer, who featured him in his book “The Faith of Graffiti.” Mr. Roberts, who disappeared from the scene for some 25 years until he was rediscovered by a new generation of fans and artists in 2000, died on Monday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 61.
✖ Does biker machismo fall under 1st Amendment freedoms?
The biker bar claims in the lawsuit that burnouts are among several activities patrons participate in while “expressing their manliness and macho, as all males are prone and inclined to do to a greater or lesser degree.” The bar says a burnout is an expressive motorcycle act that is protected by the First Amendment.

 

 

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File under Animation, Graffiti, Massive Consumption of Drugs, SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG, SeMeN SPeRmS Links 'o Death, Sex

Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on June 14, 2012

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