~o ~o ~o SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG! o~ o~ o~ » Street

Chinese Child Cannibals

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Wed, 09 May 2012 19:01:14 +0000

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✖ South Korea Targets Smuggled Capsules of Human Flesh: South Korea is saying this morning that its customs officials are stepping up their inspections targeting smuggled capsules that contain the powdered flesh of dead human babies. How’s that for something to wash down with your third cup of coffee this morning? The capsules originate in northeastern China, probably in Jilin province, which shares a border with North Korea. Since August, South Korean authorities have thwarted 35 smuggling attempts accounting for 17,450 capsules containing the powdered flesh of human babies whose bodies were “chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder,” the Associated Press reports.
✖ FBI: We need wiretap-ready Web sites – now: CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.
✖ DNA-Destroying Chip Being Embedded Into Mobile Phones: The excited press painted grand pictures of such technology being used by consumers to see through walls and objects, while health professionals like physcians might incorporate the technology to seek out small tumors inside patients without the need for invasive surgery. THz radiation unzips the DNA molecule In a breakthrough study conducted by Dr. Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a team of physicists, they discovered terrifying evidence that exposure to THz radiation builds cumulatively and affects human and animal tissue DNA. In essence, it tends to unzip the DNA molecule. The Los Alamos scientists paper, DNA Breathing Dynamics in the Presence of a Terahertz Field reveals very disturbing—even shocking—evidence that THz radiation significantly damages the DNA of the people being directed through airport scanners and all TSA workers in close proximity to the machines.
✖ Nanocomposite Cavity Filler Reverses Decay, Killing Bacteria and Regenerating Tooth Structure: Dentists may soon be getting a potent new weapons with which to wage the global fight against cavities. The University of Maryland has developed a novel new nanocomposite material that can be used not only as filling for cavities, but that will also kill any remaining bacteria in the tooth and regenerate the actual structure lost to decay. The nanocomposite is made up of silver nanoparticles and calcium phosphate nanoparticles, both of which are piped into the tooth as filler for a cavity. The silver nanoparticles along with a few other ingredients in the material kill off whatever bacteria is still lingering inside the tooth, paving the way for the calcium phosphate to regenerate tooth minerals. Over time, the tooth strengthens again.
✖ Woman, 22, given two life sentences for allowing professor to have sex with her five-month-old daughter: Kyle was sentenced to 37-and-a-half years in prison in March after pleading guilty of abusing the infant during several occasions in 2009, according to St Louis Today. Along with hundreds of child porn images on Kyle’s computers, investigators found information that led them to the St Louis area, where Kyle had visited Vanvlerah four times in five months since meeting online. During those visits, prosecutors say the pair had sex with the girl and each other at various hotels. Dr Kraushaar also told the court that the 22-year-old was so afraid of being rejected by others that she also allowed Kyle to choke, burn and urinate on her. ‘She is no longer Tessa’s plaything and she is no longer Tessa’s child’ Adoptive mother of victim, now three But prosecutors said Vanvlerah exercised free will when she started communicating online with Kyle and sharing child pornography. She also carved his name into her arm at his request but refused when he suggested bestiality.
✖ Identity Preserving Balaclava (all the warmth with none of the anonymity!): It’s pretty easy to wear warm clothes on just about every part of your body except for your face. As far as I can tell, the main reason that cold-weather facial attire is somewhat socially taboo is because it generally obscures the identity of the person wearing it. Despite all of the progress our society has made towards accepting and treating all people fairly, we are still yet to escape the notion that a person in a balaclava (or ski mask) is generally up to no good. The “Identity Preserving Balaclava” is my solution to the social stigma associated with the identity concealing effect of the average balaclava. Here is the method and pattern that I used to make my own “Identity Preserving Balaclava.” Hopefully other people will be able to use this to liberate their cold faces from social repression!
✖ Feds Seized Hip-Hop Site for a Year, Waiting for Proof of Infringement That Never Came: Federal authorities who seized a popular hip-hop music site based on assertions from the Recording Industry Association of America that it was linking to four “pre-release” music tracks gave it back more than a year later without filing civil or criminal charges because of apparent recording industry delays in confirming infringement, according to court records obtained by Wired. The Los Angeles federal court records, which were unsealed Wednesday at the joint request of Wired, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the First Amendment Coalition, highlight a secret government process in which a judge granted the government repeated time extensions to build a civil or criminal case against Dajaz1.com, one of about 750 domains the government has seized in the last two years in a program known as Operation in Our Sites. Apparently, however, the RIAA and music labels’ evidence against Dajaz1, a music blog, never came.
✖ Extraterrestrial find: Arizona grad student discovers strange-looking lava coils on Mars: A researcher has spotted lava flows shaped like coils of rope near the equator of Mars, the first time such geologic features have been discovered outside of Earth. These twisty volcanic patterns can be found on Hawaii’s Big Island and in the Pacific seafloor on our planet. While evidence for lava flows is present in many places on Mars, none are shaped like this latest find. “I was quite surprised and puzzled when I first saw the coils,” Andrew Ryan, a graduate student at Arizona State University, said in an email. He reported the discovery in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
✖ Mice That Eat Yogurt Have Larger Testicles: Then the researchers spotted something particular about the males: they projected their testes outward, which endowed them with a certain “mouse swagger,” Erdman says. On measuring the males, they found that the testicles of the yogurt consumers were about 5 percent heavier than those of mice fed typical diets alone and around 15 percent heavier than those of junk-eating males.
✖ Sauropod farts warmed the planet: Need to heat your planet? Install some dinosaurs. The biggest plant-eating dinosaurs pumped out huge amounts of greenhouse gas, helping to keep Earth toasty warm, according to new calculations. For much of the Mesozoic, the dinosaur era, the long-necked sauropods were one of the dominant groups. Like all herbivores, sauropods probably had gut bacteria to help them digest their food. “They were just containers for a lot of microbes,” says David Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK. The bacteria in the foreguts of herbivores like cows produce methane, which the animals belch out, contributing to climate change. Sauropods probably kept bacteria in their hindguts, and released methane in their farts.
✖ ‘Ransomware’ Malware Demands Payment for Alleged Copyright Infringement: A new wave of malware freezes a computer and demands payment to unlock it, this time falsely alleging victims have infringed copyright. The campaign, spotted by Roman Hussy, who authors the abuse.ch blog, targets users in the U.K., Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France and the Netherlands. Hussy posted a screenshot of the warning that users in the U.K. would see. It bears the logos of the Performing Right Society (PRS), a royalties collection organization, and the Metropolitan Police. It falsely alleges that material protected by copyright has been found on the computer and subsequently has been moved to an encrypted folder “to prevent further damage.” “To unlock your computer and to avoid other legal consequences, you are obligated to pay a release fee of £50 (US$80),” it reads.
✖ How to Muddy Your Tracks on the Internet: “Companies like Google are creating these enormous databases using your personal information,” said Paul Hill, senior consultant with SystemExperts, a network security company in Sudbury, Mass. “They may have the best of intentions now, but who knows what they will look like 20 years from now, and by then it will be too late to take it all back.”
✖ Student Claims He Drank Own Urine After Being Forgotten In Holding Cell For 5 Days: The Drug Enforcement Administration issued an apology Wednesday to a California student who was picked up during a drug raid and left in a holding cell for several days without food, water or access to a toilet. DEA San Diego Acting Special Agent-In-Charge William R. Sherman said in a statement that he was troubled by the treatment of Daniel Chong and extended his “deepest apologies” to him. The agency is investigating how its agents forgot about Chong. Chong, 23, was never arrested, was not going to be charged with a crime and should have been released, said a law enforcement official who was briefed on the DEA case and spoke on the condition of anonymity. Chong told U-T San Diego that he drank his own urine to survive and that he bit into his glasses to break them and tried to use a shard to scratch “Sorry Mom” into his arm.
✖ Boy, 11, urinates on $36K worth of Apple MacBooks: He had the means and the opportunity, but we may never know the motive of an 11-year-old student who urinated on a couple dozen laptops left unattended at Upper Allen Township Elementary in Pennsylvania. In a report now bemusing Mac fan forums across the Internet, the Upper Allen Township Police Department states that “the cart and computers were damaged beyond repair, resulting in the loss of over $36,000.” The cart in question contained approximately 30 school-owned MacBooks, according to a police department spokesperson I spoke to, who couldn’t tell me why the kid did it — let alone how. Because, c’mon — 30 MacBooks, even stacked, make for a formidable amount of square footage to cover, especially for a kid.
✖ Zoo Caretaker Licks Monkey’s Butt To Help It Defecate: Yesterday, Wuhan Zoo Monkey caretaker Zhang Bangsheng unbelievably used his tongue to lick a small monkey’s butt! 50-year-old Zhang Bangsheng used warm water to clean a small Francois’ Leaf Monkey’s buttocks, then began using his mouth to lick it, not stopping for over an hour, until the little monkey defecated a single peanut. Only after the peanut was defecated did Zhang Bangsheng laugh with satisfaction.
✖ Man arrested with 4 kids strapped to car hood: Police in north-east Indiana say a man who drove three blocks with four children strapped to the hood of his car has been arrested on a drunken driving charge. Fort Wayne police spokesman John Chambers says a witness called police Monday evening after seeing a man and woman strap the kids to the car in a liquor store parking lot, then drive away.
✖ Mother Mistie Atkinson ‘made sex tape with her son, 16, and sent him naked photos of herself’: A mother has been charged with incest after she was found in hotel room with her teenage son along with videos of them having sex. Police said the 16-year-old had videos on his cell phone that showed his mother Mistie Atkinson performing oral sex on him. They also recovered nude photographs the 32-year-old had sent her son as she began the illicit relationship earlier this year. Thanks Jasmine
✖ New Police Strategy in New York – Sexual Assault Against Peaceful Protesters: “Oh, this?” she held it up. “I was in Liberty Park on the 17th [the Six Month Anniversary of the Occupation]. When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast.” “Again?” someone said. We had all been hearing stories like this. In fact, there had been continual reports of police officers groping women during the nightly evictions from Union Square itself over the previous two weeks. “Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, ‘you grabbed my boob! what are you, some kind of fucking pervert?’ So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.”
✖ OWS protester who dumped buckets full of urine and feces mentally unfit: officials: Cops said they caught the distinctively thin and afro-wearing Amos on surveillance video dumping what was believed to be the accumulated waste of protesters down an outdoor staircase outside JP Morgan Chase at Nassau and Cedar Streets. Further biological warfare was committed inside a Chase ATM vestibule on Water Street.
✖ Free pot? Federal program ships marijuana to four: Uncle Sam a drug pusher? It’s true. For the past three decades, a handful of Americans have been getting regular deliveries of high-grade marijuana, courtesy of the federal government. It’s all part of the Compassionate Investigational New Drug program, a little-known initiative that grew out of a 1976 court decision that created the nation’s first legal pot smokers. Of the 14 people who were in the program initially, four are still alive.
✖ Non-penetrative sex: Non-penetrative sex or outercourse (which includes frottage, heavy petting and mutual masturbation) is sexual activity without vaginal, anal, or oral penetration, as opposed to the penetrative aspects of those activities. Non-penetrative sex is often considered a form of safer sex and birth control, as it is less likely that bodily fluids are exchanged.
✖ Pope calls in Opus Dei troubleshooter to uncover source of Vatican leaks: Vatican staffers who have been leaking embarrassing letters about corruption and nepotism inside the tiny city state are to be hunted down by a crack squad of cardinals led by a senior member of the religious group Opus Dei. Irritated by the anonymous release of documents to the press this year, Pope Benedict has named Cardinal Julian Herranz, 82, to lead a three-man team which will haul in staffers for questioning and rifle through files until they catch the perpetrators of what has been dubbed “Vatileaks”. A short statement printed on Thursday on the front page of the Vatican’s daily newspaper warned the team had a full “pontifical mandate” to “shed complete light” on the whistle blowers, who have lifted the lid on alleged theft and false accounting.
✖ Andrew Barnes awakening the sexual energy channels with Uma: This video shows Andrew Barnes opening a woman’s sexual energy channels. This type of energy work enables women and men to connect to their bodies sexual energetic system and to let go of resistance to experience more bliss in their life. If we know sexuality as an intuitive meditation, it transforms into a gateway, opening to a deeper level of energetic experience, and an expansion of consciousness. With this, a knowing of deep love for self and others that transcends personal relations returns, becoming a reunion back to the ultimate source of creation, and a realisation that we are one. The time for planetary consciousness is now”
✖ ‘Unusual event’ declared at Salem 1 nuclear reactor after plant automatically shuts down: LOWER ALLOWAYS CREEK TWP. — An “unusual event” was declared at the Salem 1 nuclear reactor here this morning after the plant shut down and fire alarms sounded, a spokesman for the plant’s operator said. An unusual event is the least serious of four emergency classifications at a nuclear power plant. Salem 1 automatically shut down at 10:15 a.m., according to Joe Delmar, spokesman for the reactor’s operator, PSEG Nuclear. According to Delmar what caused the reactor to trip remains under investigation, but testing was occurring on the reactor’s emergency cooling system at the time.
✖ The Top Five Special Interest Groups Lobbying To Keep Marijuana Illegal: Last year, over 850,000 people in America were arrested for marijuana-related crimes. Despite public opinion, the medical community, and human rights experts all moving in favor of relaxing marijuana prohibition laws, little has changed in terms of policy. There have been many great books and articles detailing the history of the drug war. Part of America’s fixation with keeping the leafy green plant illegal is rooted in cultural and political clashes from the past. However, we at Republic Report think it’s worth showing that there are entrenched interest groups that are spending large sums of money to keep our broken drug laws on the books:
✖ Psychologists Demonstrate Implanting Non-Believed false Memories in Troubling Study: A recent study has found that people can have memories of events that never occurred implanted in a laboratory setting, even when they know that it never actually happened. Combining these findings with the reality of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) hallucination-inducing technology and you have the potential for both the reliability of our memory and perception to be manipulated and thus become completely unreliable.
✖ Devil’s Work: The Fascinating History of America’s War on Masturbation and Porn: Comstock’s ideas did not come out of the clear blue sky. The fear of pornography was closely related to the ongoing mania against masturbation. Comstock himself had masturbated so furiously in his youth that he believed he might be driven to suicide. His own experiences seem to have strongly influenced his later work. In his book Frauds Exposed, he wrote that obscenity is like a cancer: It “fastens itself upon the imagination . . .defiling the mind, corrupting the thoughts, leading to secret practices of most foul and revolting character, until the victim tires of life and existence is scarcely endurable.” He warned: “Every new generation of youth is sent into the world as sheep in the midst of wolves. Traps are laid for them in every direction . . . [O]nce in the trap, the victim will love it and press greedily forward.” Few at the time disagreed that masturbation caused insanity, sickness, and death. Well-meaning parents everywhere were warned to look for signs of self-pollution
✖ How to hide from face-detection technology: If you take Adam Harvey’s advice, here’s what you might wanna wear to a party this weekend: A funny hat, asymmetrical glasses, a tuft of hair that dangles off your nose bridge and, most likely, a black-and-white triangle taped to your cheekbone. Optional: Cubic makeup patterns all around your eyes.
✖ How Creativity Connects with Immorality: In a recent paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers at Harvard and Duke Universities demonstrate that creativity can lead people to behave unethically. In five studies, the authors show that creative individuals are more likely to be dishonest, and that individuals induced to think creatively were more likely to be dishonest. Importantly, they showed that this effect is not explained by any tendency for creative people to be more intelligent, but rather that creativity leads people to more easily come up with justifications for their unscrupulous actions.
✖ London sperm bank under investigation after couple has baby from different race: The largest sperm bank in Britain is under investigation from health officials over claims they used sperm from the wrong donor after a gay couple had two children from different racial backgrounds. The alleged mix-up at the IVF clinic only emerged after the birth of the couple’s second child, who is of different race to the rest of the family. The parents are said to be “devastated” at the alleged mistake as they had wanted their children to be genetically related by using the same sperm donor, The (London) Sunday Times reported.
✖ Adult film producer convicted in obscenity trial: Jurors also were asked to decide whether the videos, some of which depicted fetishes involving feces, violated standards of what is acceptable to the community at large. In all three trials, jurors had to watch a series of explicit videos in entirety. Isaacs has maintained his work is an extreme but constitutionally protected form of art, but he hasn’t been supported by others in the porn industry.
✖ KFC ordered to pay $8.3 million to Australian girl: Fast food giant Kentucky Fried Chicken has been ordered to pay Aus$8 million (US$8.3 million) to an Australian girl who suffered severe brain damage and was paralysed after eating a Twister wrap. Monika Samaan was seven when she suffered salmonella encephalopathy — a brain injury linked to food poisoning that also left her with a blood infection and septic shock — in October 2005. Several other family members also fell ill and they claimed Samaan’s injuries, which include severe cognitive, motor and speech impairment and spastic quadriplegia, were caused by a chicken Twister wrap from a Sydney KFC outlet.
✖ U.S. drones killed 2,800 civilians in Pakistan in 7 years: A Pakistani human rights lawyer says over 2,800 of the 3,000 people killed over the past seven years in non-UN-sanctioned U.S. assassination drone strikes in Pakistan were civilians. Shahzad Akbar, the director of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, told Press TV on Saturday that only 170 of the people killed in the aerial attacks on the northwestern tribal belt of Pakistan have been identified as militants.
✖ Swiss woman starves to death on daylight diet: A SWISS woman starved to death after believing she could survive on light alone. Sign up for your free 2 month trial The woman embarked on the diet after watching the controversial 2010 documentary film “In the beginning there was light,” newspaper Tages Anzeiger said today. The movie centres on Swiss chemistry doctor Michael Werner, 62, and 83-year-old Indian yogi Prahlad Jani, who both claim to derive sustenance from spiritual means rather than the intake of food – a concept also known as breatharianism.
✖ College Dropout turns Maths Genius after street attack: after his brain was damaged in a brutal attack by muggers. Jason Padgett, 41, was left concussed after he was ambushed outside a karaoke club and repeatedly kicked in the head. Now, wherever he looks, he sees mathematical formulas and turns them into stunning, intricate diagrams he can draw by hand. He is the only person in the world known to have the skill and experts say it was caused by his head injury. They believe the damage to Mr Padgett’s brain has left him with a ‘remarkable gift’ for figures, much like the brilliant mathematician John Nash.
✖ Memphis Inmate Uploads Footage On Facebook Bragging About Smoking Weed In Prison: “The inmate is locked up on a six-year sentence for a violation of probation on aggravated burglary and theft convictions. Judging from his Facebook page, he’s doing anything but hard time behind bars. Sneaking in a cell phone inside a penal facility like the Shelby County Corrections Center is a big deal, but what else he has his hands on is almost unbelievable. In one of the video clips the inmate says, “I’m going to give ya’ll an episode, a preview of all this scrumptious items that we got that we eat on a daily basis.”" – News Channel 3
✖ Private Prison Corporations Are Modern Day Slave Traders: The Corrections Corporation of America’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission read very much like the documents of a slave-trader. Investors are warned that profits would go down if the demand for prisoners declines. That is, if the world’s largest police state shrinks, so does the corporate bottom line. Dangers to profitability include “relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws.” The corporation spells it out: “any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.” At the Corrections Corporation of America, human freedom is a dirty word.
✖ In Italy, Fake Euros That Even the Authorities Admire: Italy appears to have a particular artisanal flair for the printing arts, even though the authorities have also found illicit euro operations in France, Spain, Eastern Europe and South America. Its most accomplished practitioners can be found in and around Giugliano, where concrete-block apartments abut orchards and car dealerships, and young African prostitutes stand amid the rushes on unkempt roads. “In Italy, there’s a great, ancient and august tradition: Here, they make fake money, done well,” said Col. Alessandro Gentili, the head of the Italian Carabinieri’s Currency Anti-Counterfeiting Unit in Rome. “Giugliano is still the capital. It has the best professionals.” Quite a number of them, as it turns out. When the police rolled up some of the counterfeiting operations around Giugliano as well as in the Calabria region farther south in January 2009, they raided 162 locations and arrested 109 people, seizing a mountain of illicit materials.

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New Studies Say Drugs, Porn…Anything Pleasurable – Hurts Your Brain

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 17:05:44 +0000



✪ World’s oldest marijuana stash totally busted: Nearly two pounds of still-green plant material found in a 2,700-year-old grave in the Gobi Desert has just been identified as the world’s oldest marijuana stash, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany. A barrage of tests proves the marijuana possessed potent psychoactive properties and casts doubt on the theory that the ancients only grew the plant for hemp in order to make clothing, rope and other objects. They apparently were getting high too.
✪ A history of subversive remix video before YouTube: Thirty political video mashups made between World War II and 2005: Filmmakers, fans, activists, artists, and media makers have been reediting television, movies, and news media for critical and political purposes since almost the very beginning of moving pictures. Over the past century, this subversive form of populist remixing has been called many things, including appropriation art, détournement, media jamming, found footage, avant-garde film, television hacking, telejusting, political remix, scratch video, vidding, outsider art, antiart, and even cultural terrorism. The politically oriented mashup video subgenre has its roots in the rich and diverse history of left-leaning, often deeply antiauthoritarian, creative traditions. These transformative works, by their very nature, are suspicious of and challenge political, corporate, media, and social power structures. They focus on a wide array of issues, including race, gender, sexuality, and economics, in addition to more overtly political topics of government, public policy, and warfare.
✪ Ecstasy And Speed Associated With Depression In Teens: A study of nearly 4,000 teenagers published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, shows that secondary school children who take methamphetamine (speed) and MDMA (ecstasy) appear to be prone to depression later on. The study results proved to be independent of previous bouts of depressive symptoms or other drug use. Speed and ecstasy first gained popularity amongst clubbers and people in the rave scene. However, both drugs have also become increasingly popular in the general population, such as secondary school children, who, according to the researchers, often take both drugs at the same time.
✪ Cocaine Eats Up Brain Twice as Fast as Normal Aging: Cocaine may speed up the aging of the brain, according to new research that finds that people who are addicted to the drug lose twice the brain volume each year as non-drug users. As the brain ages, it inevitably loses gray matter, the part of brain tissue made up of neuron cell bodies. Loss of gray matter is linked with many of the signs of old age, including memory problems and other declining cognitive abilities, said study researcher Karen Ersche, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. Middle-age cocaine-dependent people show many of the signs of aging, including cognitive decline, Ersche told LiveScience. To look at the underlying cause, she and her colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure gray matter volume in 60 adults with cocaine dependence and 60 adults without substance-use troubles who were similar to the cocaine-abusing volunteers in age, gender and verbal IQ.
✪ Powerful, Dangerous Drug May Be Linked To Murder Case: A friend of a man accused of stabbing his mother to death reports the alleged stabber, may have been on a hallucinogenic, called, ‘Psychedelic DMT’. Twenty-two year-old William Walsh remains in jail, charged with stabbing his mother to death at their home over the weekend. DMT is a very expensive illegal drug, hard to find on the streets. “You shouldnt take anything you wont be able to control,” said Brian Chambers with the Memphis Division of the US Drug Enforcement Agency. According to Chambers, Psychedelic DMT is such a powerful drug, it drives people under the influence to do things they wouldn’t normally do. “They start hearing things, they get paranoid, they start seeing things that aren’t there.” expressed Chambers. Powerful, vivid hallucinations aren’t the only side effects. The crystal that’s crushed and then, snorted, smoked or shot up, can cause users to become short of breath, pass out, even die.
✪ Death blamed on excessive Coca-cola drinking: A 30-year-old woman who died suddenly in 2010 drank too much Coca-Cola says her partner. Natasha Marie Harris, a mother of eight, died in February 2010 from a cardiac arrest, and her partner Christopher Hodgkinson told an inquest into her death yesterday that she drank at least 10 litres a day, the Otago Daily Times reports. When he found out in 2011 Coke could be the cause, he was irate and made threats to Coca-Cola. Medical records said Ms Harris died of a cardiac arrhythmia, which a doctor in court yesterday said could have been caused by excessive consumption of a sugary drink. Dr Dan Mornin said the consumption can cause severe hypokalemia, a lack of potassium in the blood which could lead to cardiac arrythmias. But Mr Hodgkinson said he had no idea a soft drink like Coca-Cola could kill her at the time. He said she drank it first and last thing each day and throughout the day, and vomited regularly.
✪ Japanese island man lives as naked hermit: Dangerous currents swirl around Sotobanari island, which has not a drop of natural water, and local fishermen rarely land there. But 76-year-old Masafumi Nagasaki has made this kidney-shaped island in Japan’s tropical Okinawa prefecture his retirement home, with an unusual dress code: nothing at all. Naked, he braves lashing typhoons and biting insects as a hermit in the buff. “I don’t do what society tells me, but I do follow the rules of the natural world. You can’t beat nature so you just have to obey it completely,” he said. “That’s what I learned when I came here, and that’s probably why I get by so well.” The wiry Nagasaki, his skin leathered by the sun of two decades on the island, worked briefly as a photographer before spending years on the murkier side of the entertainment industry. When retirement came, he wanted to get far away from it all. He chose Sotobanari, which is roughly a 1,000 meters across and means “Outer Distant island” in the local dialect.
✪ From kettles to courtrooms: The police crackdown on protest: The past few months have seen dozens of students and other protesters charged with major offences – particularly ‘violent disorder’, which carries with it a maximum five-year sentence. Many people, often in their teens and early twenties, have faced crown court trials and been sent to jail for the flimsiest of reasons – throwing a lightweight placard stick, for example – and their lives have been seriously compromised by the stress and humiliation of a trial (many of which take place over a year after the protest) and the shock of prison. At the same time, policing at protests has been heavy-handed, including the use of kettling, horse charges and batons, and police are pushing for ever more resources (water cannon, rubber bullets) to ‘control’ protesters.
✪ Why soldiers take photos – Afghanistan – War Porn: The real grotesqueness isn’t in infantry soldiers taking a few war trophies. No, it’s the idea that’s been sold to the American public that war can be sterile. It’s the idea that 18-year-olds who have been ordered to kill people will never play with the body parts afterward. In this sterile world of war – one undoubtedly sold to the American public to ease their comfort with its perpetual existence – missiles are so precise they can avoid collateral damage, drones can narrow in on specific terrorist targets from the sky, and wars need to be neither bought nor paid for. Or something like that. The unfortunate reality is that war is messy. Missiles hit the wrong targets all the time. Drones accidentally kill women and children. And when 18-year-old infantry soldiers get their first confirmed kill, they high-five, cheer and take a photo.
✪ Jynxies Natural Habitat – dope bags, drug branding, brooklyn: This blog is by no means an advocate for the sale or purchase of illegal drugs. It is meant solely to provide a brief archive of a complex market and product that can often be dangerous. We believe strongly in the philosophy of HARM REDUCTION among recreational drug users and addicts alike. Information and education saves lives. Please be careful, everyone!
✪ If You Have a Smart Phone, Anyone Can Now Track Your Every Move: Location services company Navizon has a new system, called Navizon I.T.S., that could allow tracking of visitors in malls, museums, offices, factories, secured areas and just about any other indoor space. It could be used to examine patterns of foot traffic in retail spaces, assure that a museum is empty of visitors at closing time, or even to pinpoint the location of any individual registered with the system. But let’s set all that aside for a minute while we freak out about the privacy implications. Most of us leave Wi-Fi on by default, in part because our phones chastise us when we don’t. (Triangulation by Wi-Fi hotspots is important for making location services more accurate.) But you probably didn’t realize that, using proprietary new “nodes” from Navizon, any device with an active Wi-Fi radio can be seen by a system like Navizon’s.
✪ Olive Garden accidentally serves rum to 10-year-old boy: A family outing to an Olive Garden in Indianapolis turned into a brief horror show this week after the restaurant accidentally served their 10-year-old son an alcoholic drink. The boy was taken to the hospital on Thursday. The child–who has not been indenified– had ordered a non-alcoholic Frullato Smoothie, but the waitress mistakenly brought him a 4-ounce cocktail, WISH-TV reported. After realizing the error, the waitress told the restaurant’s management, which informed the boy’s parents. The parents took their son to a local hospital, where tests revealed alcohol in his system. A police officer at the hospital described the boy as “alert” but “shaken up,” according to the local television station.
✪ President Obama Is (Literally) On Drugs: President Barack Obama is the drug brand of choice for many dealers. Since his election in 2008, the Commander-in-Chief’s name and face has been slapped on a wide variety of contraband products including ecstasy pills, LSD tabs, heroin baggies and a popular strain of medical marijuana.
✪ Celebrities and LSD; Jack Nicholson, John Lennon, Steve Jobs: Sure, it’s not that shocking that a few of these famous writers and actors dropped acid back in the day. But we were surprised to find out how some athletes, scientists and groundbreaking innovators used LSD and how profoundly it affected them personally and professionally. Watch the video about to learn about how some of our most culturally prolific leaders and artists used the psychedelic drug.
✪ No Forensic Background? No Problem: This is how I — a journalism graduate student with no background in forensics — became certified as a “Forensic Consultant” by one of the field’s largest professional groups. One afternoon early last year, I punched in my credit card information, paid $495 to the American College of Forensic Examiners International Inc. and registered for an online course. After about 90 minutes of video instruction, I took an exam on the institute’s web site, answering 100multiple choice questions, aided by several ACFEI study packets. As soon as I finished the test, a screen popped up saying that I had passed, earning me an impressive-sounding credential that could help establish my qualifications to be an expert witness in criminal and civil trials. For another $50, ACFEI mailed me a white lab coat after sending my certificate.
✪ A troubling trend in teens drinking hand sanitizer: The liquid hand sanitizer is 62% ethyl alcohol and makes a 120-proof liquid. A few drinks can cause a person’s speech to slur and stomach to burn, and make people so drunk that they have to be monitored in the emergency room. Doctors said this is the latest over-the-counter product that teenagers have adapted for a quick high. Teenagers have done the same with mouthwash, cough syrup and even vanilla extract. “Over the years, they have ingested all sorts of things,” said Helen Arbogast, injury prevention coordinator in the trauma program at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “Cough syrup had reached a very sexy point where young people were using it…. We want to be sure this doesn’t take on the same trend.”
✪ They’re drinking what?: The best way to drink hand sanitizer is straight, like whisky, and down it “like a shot,” explains Tyler, a Grade 10 student who lives in Toronto. Undiluted, the alcohol-based liquid tastes a little like “vodka and bug spray,” he adds.
✪ Sometimes, When “All the Facts are In,” It’s Worse: The UC-Davis Pepper-Spray Report: Chancellor Katehi, on her part, “thought she made it clear” that when police ordered the students to leave, they were (a) not to wear riot gear into the camp, (b) not to carry weapons of any kind into the camp, (c) were not to use force of any kind against the students, and (d) were not to make any arrests. But all that anybody else on that conference call heard her say out loud was “I don’t want another situation like they just had at Berkeley,” and Chief Spicuzza interpreted that as “no swinging of clubs.” Chief Spicuzza “thought she made it clear” more than once that no riot gear was to be worn and no clubs or pepper sprayers were to be carried. What Lieutenant Pike said back to her, each time, was, “Well, I hear you say that you don’t want us to, but we’re going to.” And they did, including that now-infamous Mk-9 military-grade riot-control pepper sprayer that he used. Oh, funny thing about that particular model of pepper-sprayer? It’s illegal for California cops to possess or use.
✪ Guantanamo Watchers Say Obama Gets Away With Legal Moves Bush Wouldn’t: “This is the only court in the United States where you can plead guilty and still be given the death penalty, and it’s just another sign that the system is not set up to give anyone a trial it’s set up to give someone what appears to be a fair trial with a predetermined result,” Broyles said.* “It’s pretty clear to me that the public has lost interest in these issues,” Richard Kammen, a death penalty expert representing accused USS Cole attack plotter Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, told TPM. “There’s certainly a lot more interest in Trayvon Martin, for example, than there is in any of the military commissions, with the exception being the arraignment for the 9/11 people. But the day-to-day stuff, which is really quite important, has drifted off peoples’ consciences.” Kammen called the reforms instituted by the Obama administration in 2009 “quite superficial” and said there are “huge, huge problems” in the military commissions system.
✪ Porn May ‘Shut Down’ Part of Your Brain: Watching pornography would seem to be a vision-intensive task. But new research finds that looking at erotic movies can actually quiet the part of the brain that processes visual stimuli. Most of the time, watching movies or conducting any other visual task sends extra blood flow to this brain region. Not so when the movies are explicit, the researchers found. Instead, the brain seems to shunt blood — and therefore energy — elsewhere, perhaps to regions of the brain responsible for sexual arousal. Turns out, the brain may not need to take in all the visual details of a sex scene, said study researcher Gert Holstege, a uroneurologist at the University of Groningen Medical Center in the Netherlands.
✪ The Strangest School In The World?: From the archives of British Pathé, a look at Burgess Hill, a one-of-a-kind British boarding school in which nothing was forbidden and students were “allowed to find out for themselves whether conventions are good or bad.” In other words, plenty of cigarette smoking, mod styles, R&B; dancing, abstract painting, and motorbike races. Based on the revolutionary idea that kids should be happy: Burgess Hill was a progressive boarding school in Hertfordshire, England in the 1960s. Run by a Cambridge graduate, it allowed the kids to do what ever they liked! We can’t quite work out whether this is the best or worst school in the world. Would actually be interesting to know what became of these kids.
✪ Jamie is 13 and hasn’t even kissed a girl. But he’s now on the Sex Offender Register after online porn warped his mind…: And it was only when the police came knocking one morning that Jamie’s secret life was exposed. After identifying that someone in the house was accessing child porn, they took Jamie’s laptop away for examination. Jamie is only 13 — and he still hasn’t even kissed a girl, let alone had sex. Though he is only a child himself, the result is that he has been put on the Sex Offender Register, blighting his life for the foreseeable future. Even with intensive therapy, Jamie still suffers from deep shame — ‘as if it is written across my forehead’ — which has led him to fear he will never be able to form a healthy relationship with a woman.
✪ Israel’s top general says Iran unlikely to make bomb: Israel’s military chief said he does not believe Iran will decide to build an atomic bomb and called its leaders “very rational” – comments that clashed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assessment. Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz’s remarks, in an interview published on Wednesday in the left-wing Haaretz newspaper, drew little attention in Israel on its annual remembrance day for fallen soldiers, when political discourse is suspended. But they will add fuel to an internal debate on the prospects of Iran weaponizing its uranium enrichment program and the wisdom and risks of any Israeli military strike to try to prevent Tehran from becoming a nuclear power.
✪ US military fights negative perception of “pain ray”: In order to gain stronger public perception of new crowd control technology, the US miltary has been showcasing a new weapon dubbed the “pain ray”. The system cost more than $120m developing the technology and was deployed in Afghanistan two years ago
✪ Man Arrested In Attack Over Fried Chicken: A Bloomington man was attacked and knocked to the ground by a man who wanted to steal his bucket of fried chicken, police said. A 22-year-old man was walking home in the 500 block of South Park Ridge Road just before 1 a.m. Wednesday when he was confronted, police said. Sean M. Nelson, 24, demanded the man give him his bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and began slapping and punching him when he refused, police said. The victim suffered a chipped tooth, red marks on his neck and a torn shirt, police said.
✪ Father jailed over bathroom hidden camera: A father has been jailed for setting up a hidden camera in the bathroom where his daughters showered. The Adelaide District Court heard the 50-year-old man had developed an obsession with child pornography which he kept hidden from his family. Police raided his Adelaide home last June and seized more than 2,000 pornographic files from his computer. They also found edited movies of naked teenage girls which had been filmed by a small camera on a storage shelf in the family bathroom. The court heard the youngest daughter could be identified clothed in one of the videos but the naked girls could not be identified. Judge Geoffrey Muecke said the man denied those filmed were his daughters, but said they were of two of his daughter’s friends, aged 14 and 15.
✪ Saudi 4-yr-old kills father who ‘refused to buy PlayStation’: A four-year-old Saudi boy shot his father in the head while playing with his gun at their house, reportedly after his parent refused to buy him a PlayStation video game console. After the boy and his father returned home from the shop, the man, in his forties, put down his pistol while taking off his shirt. He did not notice that his son had grabbed his gun and was playing with it before putting his little finger on the trigger. The father died instantly. Some media reports however suggest the death was an accident, although Arabic media has already labeled the boy the youngest killer in Saudi Arabia.
✪ Outrage as Egypt plans ‘farewell intercourse law’ so husbands can have sex with dead wives up to six hours AFTER their death: Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives – for up to six hours after their death. The controversial new law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament. It will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women’s rights of getting education and employment. Thanks Adam Tetzloff
✪ Marine Booted for Facebook Obama Criticism: Sergeant Gary Stein will be kicked out of the Marines for Facebook comments he made criticizing President Obama on a page used by Marine meteorologists. He’ll get an other-than-honorable discharge and lose most of his benefits, three months before his contract would have been completed. “I’m having a hard time seeing how 15 words on Facebook could have ruined my nine-year career,” he said. Stein posted, “Screw Obama and I will not follow all orders from him.” Service members are allowed to criticize political candidates, but not as representatives of the Armed Forces.
✪ TSA screeners allegedly let drug-filled luggage through LAX for cash: Four current and former Transportation Security Administration screeners have been arrested and face charges of taking bribes and looking the other way while suitcases filled with cocaine, methamphetamine or marijuana passed through X-ray machines at Los Angeles International Airport, federal authorities announced Wednesday. The TSA screeners, who were arrested Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, allegedly received up to $2,400 in cash bribes in exchange for allowing large drug shipments to pass through checkpoints in what the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles called a “significant breakdown” of security.
✪ The Next US President Will Be….: President George Bush, President Barack Obama, and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney all work for the exact same handful of corporate-financier interests. While they vary in how they dress up their methods of carrying out what is essentially a singular agenda, there is glaring continuity from one administration to the next in a process analogous to a corporate spokesman presenting the agenda of the board of directors. Changing spokesmen doesn’t change the agenda of the board of directors. While the corporate media focuses on non-issues, and political pundits accentuate petty political rivalries between the “left” and the “right,” a look deeper into presidential cabinets and the authors of domestic and foreign policy reveals just how accurate this analogy is and who sits on the “board of directors.”
✪ Beelzebub’s Daughter: Even by the standards of New Agey, cult-friendly LA, Zeena Schreck had a bizarre and abusive upbringing at the hands of parents who made the devil more famous than he’s ever been. Zeena is the daughter of Church of Satan (CoS) founders Anton LaVey and Diane Hegarty, as well as the recipient of its first baptism. By 13, she had been completely indoctrinated by the CoS, received death threats regularly, and was pregnant. She went on to be ordained the CoS’s high priestess and spokesperson just as Reagan-era yuppies began to completely freak over tales of children being sacrificed in the woods by her congregation. Against all odds, Zeena managed to rebel against the self-absorbed zealots who raised her and left the church in 1990 with her husband, Nikolas Schreck. In 2002, the couple founded the Sethian Liberation Movement, a religious body that allows people to learn and practice magic without answering to an oppressive sect and helps free ex-cult members from their troubled pasts.
✪ Melting Glaciers Liberate Ancient Microbes: Locked in frozen vaults on Antarctica and Greenland, a lost world of ancient creatures awaits another chance at life. Like a time-capsule from the distant past, the polar ice sheets offer a glimpse of tiny organisms that may have been trapped there longer than modern humans have walked the planet, biding their time until conditions change and set them free again. With that ice melting at an alarming rate, those conditions could soon be at hand. Masses of bacteria and other microbes – some of which the world hasn’t seen since the Middle Pleistocene, a previous period of major climate change about 750,000 years ago – will make their way back into the environment. Once thought to be too harsh and inhospitable to support any living thing, the ice sheets are now known to be a gigantic reservoir of microbial life. Altogether, the biomass of microbial cells in and beneath the ice sheet may amount to more than 1,000 times that of all the humans on Earth.
✪ Four Things Grosser Than Pink Slime: But I’m wondering if focusing on the ew-gross aspects of “lean, finely textured beef” (as the industry calls it) doesn’t miss the bigger picture, which is that the meat industry’s very business model is deeply gross. Even if pink slime is purged from the face of the earth, the system that produces our meat and related products (eggs, milk) won’t be fundamentally changed. A while back, I identified something about meat production that’s “even grosser than pink slime”—proposed new rules that would privatize inspection at poultry slaughterhouses while dramatically speeding up kill lines. Here are four more.
✪ The ‘Icarus’ spacecraft: Mystery as Nasa sun-watching satellite captures ‘UFO’ surfing the hellish surface of the sun: ‘The unidentified flying object, which bears no resemblance to anything ever spotted near the Sun, somehow manages to withstand the blazing heat thrown off by solar flare activity and the incredibly high temperatures emanating from nuclear fusion generated on the surface of the star. What is it?’ asked the site. UFO fans on YouTube have been highly enthusiastic about the object, with many claiming it as a definite ‘spot’. SOHO, the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory, is a satellite built to study the Sun from its deep core to the outer corona and the solar wind.
✪ Solar and heliospheric image visualization tool: UFO Near The Sun
✪ Senate-Passed Bill Would Mandate Black Boxes in Cars, Plus More: The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that would make it mandatory for all new cars in the United States to include black box data recorders from the year 2015, and would (among many other provisions) permit the IRS to confiscate one’s passport on the suspicion of owing taxes. SB 1813, called the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP 21), passed in the Senate quite easily after heavy promotion from Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif., left). The bill is scheduled for a vote in the House, where Republicans are hoping to add a Keystone XL Pipeline provision before passage.
✪ ‘Dinosaur eggs’ discovered in Chechnya: The discovery of what Chechen scientists believe to be dinosaur eggs is causing a ruckus among paleontologists. The sphere-like fossils were found on a construction site and the area has become a magnet for locals eager to look at the ‘dinos’. Workmen building a new road were blacking through a hillside near the Chechen border with Georgia when they came across what geologists described as a clutch of 60 million year old “eggs”.
✪ Why Are We Drugging Our Soldiers?: But there is another factor that might be playing a role in the increasing rates of the disorder, one that has escaped attention: the military’s use of stimulant medications, like Ritalin and Adderall, in our troops. There has been a significant increase in the use of stimulant medication. Documents that I obtained in late 2010 through the Freedom of Information Act, and have recently analyzed, show that annual spending on stimulants jumped to $39 million in 2010 from $7.5 million in 2001 — more than a fivefold increase. Additional data provided by Tricare Management Activity, the arm of the Department of Defense that manages health care services for the military, reveals that the number of Ritalin and Adderall prescriptions written for active-duty service members increased by nearly 1,000 percent in five years, to 32,000 from 3,000.
✪ A Small Town Wants to Change Fucking Name: Shakespeare said, “a rose by another other name would smell as sweet.” The residents in a small village in Austria with the unfortunate name of Fucking think a place that’s called any other other name would get less offensive treatment. Moves are now afoot to change the village name to something less distinctive. “The only problem is that we need all of the Fucking residents to agree to the name change,” Mayor Franz Meindl said –speaking literally, you can assume, and not colloquially, in a recent TV interview. “Everyone needs to agree for it to happen.”
✪ Penis removal not needed for man to become woman: Ontario tribunal: Under current law, even if a man transitioning to a woman had undergone hormone therapy, grown a pair of breasts and developed a higher-pitched voice, they are barred from changing their sex without written proof of a vagina. “Even though you could be presenting as a female full-time, you couldn’t get your birth certificate changed to show you as female unless you had the male bits lopped off,” said Kay Lockhart, a woman-in-transition based in Ottawa.
✪ Hubby watches online porn for first time; finds movie starring his wife: “I found 11 films showing my wife in indecent scenes with her lover….it was the first time I watched a porno film and I did this just out of curiosity,” Ramadan told Egyptian newspapers at his house in the northeastern province of Dakhalia. “She first denied it and accused me of being insane before I faced her with the films…she then confessed to be still in love with her boyfriend, saying he is as young as her and that I am an old man.” Ramadan said he had been happy during his marriage life until he logged on to that website. Newspapers did not say whether he decided to divorce her.
✪ New Jersey Officer: May Be Fired For Stopping Beatdown: Plenty of cop “beat downs” can be found online, but how often does the officer who stops others from handing out the beating get fired for it? That’s exactly what’s happening to Officer Regina Tasca in the Bogota Police Department. Tasca’s dashboard camera captured her as she attempted to stop two officers from beating an emotionally disturbed young man. Just days after the incident, she was told she was being suspended with pay. A year later, her trial is about to begin as the Bogota PD seeks to fire her.
✪ ‘I Had An Abortion’ T-Shirts Fuel Controversy: Here’s a simple math equation: T-shirts + abortion = controversy. Tensions ran high on Monday, after T-shirts reading “I had an abortion” were sold on the University of North Carolina Wilmington campus, WECT reports . The shirts were on sale as part of a book signing and discussion lead by abortion rights advocate, Jennifer Baumgardner. The shirts are meant to help destigmatize abortion and help people talk about their experience, according to WWAY. A few students protested the shirts by wearing some of their own that said, “I haven’t killed a baby.”
✪ Florida charter junior high school wants to test all students for drugs: Students as young as 11 years old would be tested for use of marijuana, pills, cocaine and heroin under a proposal by a North Port charter school that wants to institute the region’s most aggressive student testing program.
✪ Tattoos, Piercings Tied to Heavier Drinking in French Study: “A host of previous studies have routinely shown that individuals with body piercings or tattoos are more likely to engage in risky behavior than non-pierced or non-tattooed people,” corresponding author Nicolas Gueguen, a professor of social behavior at the University of Southern Brittany, said in a journal news release. These risky behaviors include unprotected sex, fighting, theft and drinking. Educators, parents and doctors should consider tattoos and piercings as potential signs of drinking and use them to begin a conversation about alcohol use and other risky behaviors, Gueguen suggested.
✪ Drinking Alcohol at Work Okay at Some Companies: Though a variety of companies today serve alcohol to employees, it’s still ad agencies who hold highest the gin-soaked torch. The ranks of liquor-serving firms have recently included J. Walter Thompson, BBDO, TBWA/Chiat/Day, Grey, and Mindshare. In New York, J. Walter Thompson has in its offices a 50-foot-long bar with pedestal stools that would put many a commercial bar to shame. “Yes, we have a bar,” says a spokesperson, “and it is frequently accessed. We think it incentivizes and enthuses employees. It’s generally used for off-hours consumption, but that’s not to say there isn’t on-hours consumption as well.”
✪ Going Green – Legaling Marijuana Is The Best Thing For America: Infographic
✪ Working Women’s Fantasies: In the realm of private fantasy, the allure of sexual submission, even in its extremes, is remarkably widespread. An analysis of 20 studies published in Psychology Today estimates that between 31 percent and 57 percent of women entertain fantasies where they are forced to have sex. “Rape fantasies are a place where politics and Eros meet, uneasily,” says Daniel Bergner, who is working on a book on female desire to be published next year. “It is where what we say and what is stand next to each other, mismatched.” The researchers and psychologists he talked to for his 2009 New York Times article, “What Do Women Want?” often seemed reluctant to use the phrase “rape fantasy,” and in scholarly pieces, the idea makes even the chroniclers of these fantasies extremely nervous and apologetic. Even though fantasies are something that, by definition, one can’t control, they seem to be saying something about modern women that nearly everyone wishes wasn’t said.
✪ Mike Tyson’s ‘lowest point’ was drunkenly beating up 7 hookers while high on cocaine: The former heavyweight champion said that back in 2009 he was in a hotel room with seven prostitutes, a morphine drip in his arm, a pile of cocaine and a bottle of cognac when he began to feel paranoid. Convinced the women were trying to steal from him he started beating them up and threw them out – to stop them from ‘taking his soul’. Tyson said: ‘That’s when I realised it wasn’t just demons – it was the devil himself. ‘It was the lowest point of a very low life, but it was my own knockout punch to clean up life, get whole, get well – and I haven’t done anything in three years now.
✪ Canadian Man Caught For 120 Kilos Of DMT: The agencies launched an investigation earlier this month when a shipment from Brazil was intercepted at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. The packages, which police report were destined for Richardson’s apartment in Picton, contained drugs known as dimethyltryptamine, a hallucinogen more commonly referred to as DMT, which is a natural compound found in many plants and shrubs. Prince Edward OPP officers assisted with a search warrant at Richardson’s apartment and seized an additional 40 kilograms of the drug. Combined with the packages seized at the airport, police confiscated a total of 120 kgs. Of the illegal drug. This translates to an estimated street value of $68,750 and equals approximately 13,750 hits of the drug, police report.
✪ Tazered man high on LSD dies in police custody, family seeks answers: However, his friend Amanda Nazarao said she and Salgado were on LSD when police responded to a West Miami neighborhood, early Friday morning. Salgado was reportedly naked and behaving in a strange manner. When police arrived at the scene, they Tasered the 21-year-old and restrained him. “They had no reason to beat him, they had no reason to Taser him. He was naked, he had no weapon on him, he wasn’t a threat to them,” Nazarao said. Miami-Dade Police released the following statement: “Upon the officers’ arrival, the male who was later identified as George Salgado became aggressive and violent towards the officers and they utilized their electronic control device.” The 21-year-old was transported to Larkin Hospital, where he later died. Nazarao said, “He looked over. He was like, ‘I just want to tell you guys that I love you all,’ and that’s the last thing he said.”
✪ Blue Jays eject fan dressed as marijuana leaf: On a night the team curtailed beer sales in the upper deck, the Blue Jays also ejected a spectator dressed as a marijuana leaf.
✪ Feelings of immaturity accompany alcohol misuse into adulthood; discovery could improve treatments: When more than 400 25-years-old adults were interviewed, some showed signs of alcohol use problems, but their problems didn’t correlate to self-reported feelings of immaturity. When surveyed again four years later at age 29 and then again at age 35, subjects expressed different sentiments: individuals who showed signs of alcohol abuse or dependence also self-reported feeling immature for their age. “We interpreted our findings to suggest that, at 25, drinking is more culturally acceptable,” Winograd said. “Young adults are out at the bars with their friends and drinking is a bonding experience. They also view blacking out, vomiting and drunk driving as more acceptable because peers are behaving similarly. “But by 29, when many of their peers have settled down, individuals who still drink heavily may start to view themselves as ‘Peter Pans’ of partying, who never fully matured,” Winograd said.
✪ Feds shutter online narcotics store that used TOR to hide its tracks: Federal authorities have arrested eight men accused of distributing more than $1 million worth of LSD, ecstasy, and other narcotics with an online storefront that used the TOR anonymity service to mask their Internet addresses. “The Farmer’s Market,” as the online store was called, was like an Amazon for consumers of controlled substances, according to a 66-page indictment unsealed on Monday. It offered online forums, Web-based order forms, customer service, and at least four methods of payment, including PayPal and Western Union. From January 2007 to October 2009, it processed some 5,256 orders valued at $1.04 million. The site catered to about 3,000 customers in 35 countries, including the United States.
✪ The Dead Kennedys’ Sober Drummer: D.H. Peligro may hail from the wrong side of the segregated St. Louis tracks but after becoming the drummer of the Dead Kennedys and making his way into the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he has seen much of the world—including the dark side of addiction. Two years after a nasty relapse, Peligro is back with a new band (catch them at the Viper Room this Sunday night). He’s also now ready to tell the world what it’s like to be punk, black, and trying to hide a drug habit from Anthony Kiedis.
✪ Born to Win (1971) – Full Movie: A smart-mouthed junkie/loser known as J.J. (George Segal) spends his days looking for just “one more fix”.
✪ Former sheriff’s deputy’s wife testifies: Husband tried to force me to castrate lover: The woman was married to defendant Robert McClain, a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, at the time of the vicious attack, and pretended to castrate her 23-year-old boyfriend as the husband watched, prosecutors previously said. Through tears, the woman told jurors that she pleaded with her jealous husband to stop his violent two-hour rampage in September 2008 for the sake of his career and their children, the Orange County Register reported. McClain didn’t listen, she reportedly testified, and instead beat her boyfriend to the point of brain damage and slashed his body with a knife. The unidentified woman said her enraged hubby tried to have sex with her, ordered her to have sex with the badly injured boyfriend and demanded the castration as a sick form of retribution.
✪ Bill Stickers is innocent: In the UK in the 1960s an attempt was made to reduce fly posting (the illegal pasting up of posters). Warning notices were put up with the legend ‘Bill Stickers Will Be Prosecuted’. Waggish fly posters responded with ‘Bill Stickers is Innocent’ notices. The joke wasn’t new in the 1960s though. In a New York newspaper The Olean Herald, 1884, there’s a piece reprinted from the London Graphic: “A countryman named William Stickers, flying to London to escape from rural justice, was appalled at reading on a wall: ‘Bill Stickers Beware!’ He went a little further, but reading again, ‘Bill Stickers will be punished with the utmost rigour of the law,’ gave himself up for lost and surrendered.”
✪ Great Boston Molasses Flood: A five-story-tall cylindrical metal tank, 90 feet in diamater had burst. A two-story-tall wave containing 2.3 million gallons of molasses issued forth, traveling out in all directions like a shock-wave. The molasses spread across the city at an estimated 35 miles per hour. And it wasn’t just the sugary tidal wave that was so deadly; the tank ripped into sharp projectiles, and shot metal bolts from its sides like bullets. As the wave and debris crashed down Commercial Street, buildings were smashed to bits. Some were picked up by their foundations and floated away in the tide of molasses. Electrical poles keeled over, exposing live wires. A steel elevated train support beam was torn to smithereens. Molasses covered everything. According to a Boston Post article, “Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly paper.” It wasn’t just horses. The great Boston molasses flood killed 21 people.
✪ 10-year-old girl gives birth to baby daughter in Colombia: A 10-year-old girl from Colombia gave birth to a baby girl via cesarean section, Univision’s Primer Impacto, reported. The girl hails from an indigenous tribe in the town of Manaure, a town in the Colombian Department of La Guajira.
✪ Fake doctor Reginald Gill told women they had cancer which could be cured by perverted “treatments” – Mirror Online: Reginald Gill, 77, conned women into believing they had cancer and told one victim she could be cured if a man sucked her breasts. Thanks Jasmine
✪ Brazil ‘cannibals turned women into pastries’: The trio allegedly forged a sect called Cartel who wanted to purify the world and reduce the population according to police spokesman Democrito Honorato, from the Brazilian town of Guaranhuns. They were identified as Jorge Beltrao Negromonte and Elizabeth Pires da Silveira, both 51, and Bruna da Silva. Police allege they intended to kill three women per year. Once at their home, it is thought that the women were killed and their “meat” was cooked and used as the filling in a pastry dish known as empanada, which was then sold to unwitting neighbours.
✪ How Rape Axe Works: The Rape-aXe system consists of a latex sheath, which contains razor-sharp barbs. The device is worn in her vagina like a tampon. When the attacker attempts vaginal penetration the barbs attach themselves to the penis, causing great discomfort. The device must be surgically removed, which will result in the positive identification of the attacker and subsequent arrest
✪ IMDb: Worst IMDB Profile Photos
✪ Timeline of Early Psychedelia: A Recording Chronology Of The Early Days Of Psychedelic Culture This is an attempt to chronicle all relevant recording events during the early years in which psychedelic culture and pop/rock culture coalesced. The timeline does not deal with events outside rock music, and contains no entries related to jazz, avantgarde, exotica, etc. It is subjective to a certain degree, and some borderline entries that are not necessarily “psychedelic” have been included just the same. The dates have been verified against quality sources as far as possible. Prior to the 1965-66 era, a selection of important items have been included.
✪ Paul McCarthy – Sauce (1974): NSFW Ketchup performance art
✪ Slayer Reign in Blood Red Cabernet Sauvignon Vintage: 2010: As much as you love your Hell Awaits and Reign In Blood, you have now found a wine to match the music. Slayer one of the hardest thrash metal bands ever and pioneers in their genre, have chosen Sweden as the launch market for their first beverage, Slayer Reign in Blood Red! The wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon from California, is as uncomprimising and tough as the band. After a couple of Seasons in the Abyss, the wine has an undisputed attitude and a soft nose of dark berry fruits with oak and spicy nuances. Good mouth feel with hints of fresh fruit and juicy, smooth tannins. Well structured and rounded with subtle notes of oak, showing true Divine Intervention. Best company for the wine comes as no surprise, enjoy it while headbanging, riffing or with food, friends and great music. Reign in Wine!
✪ Light That Ass On Fire!: Need one of those wands.

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



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

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Boycott The Corporate Shill Lorax

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:18:30 +0000



★ Nightly porno TV shows for inmates prompt action by county leaders: The corrections officer said he was afraid that Liberty County Jail managers were failing to respond quickly enough to the nightly pornography shows and he was afraid it could lead to added violence between inmates. “That’s got to be in their mind. They’re watching this constantly and you have no way of releasing your frustrations,” said the jailer. “They can take full advantage of anybody.” Liberty County Sheriff’s Office Captain Rex Evans said the inmates were able to “somehow manipulate the system and were actually watching, at their own leisure, pornographic material.” One recent inmate told Local 2 Investigates there would be “a lot of fights” because of the nightly porn viewing. He said some guards didn’t care and allowed it to be watched. Another recent inmate, who also said he viewed the pornographic movies behind bars, said inmates would gather around and watch it for hours each night. He said it “made the showers hell” as inmates would act out from viewing the porn
★ Meth Addict Accidentally Burns Down World’s Fifth-Oldest Tree: Because Florida is running out of unique ways to embarrass itself, a 26-year old meth enthusiast set fire to and destroyed the world’s fifth oldest tree last month. While she was in it. Smoking meth. Sarah Barnes had climbed the tree to smoke, because where better to get high than in the branches of a 118-foot, 3,500 year old cypress ? The fire in question came when she wanted to get a better view of her surroundings, and presumably also her drugs. “The Senator,” as the tree was known, was burned to the ground. The good news is that Barnes seemed sufficiently chastened by the whole thing, reportedly telling friends that “I can’t believe I burned down a tree older than Jesus.” Neither can he, Sarah. Neither can he. So what have we learned? First of all, please be careful with lighters. In the wrong hands, they can be deceptively destructive little gadgets. And then yes, right, meth. Don’t do that.
★ Man shows up for job interview naked, high on meth: A man showed up for a job interview near Sacramento naked and high on methamphetamine, and now cellphone footage of his fight with police has gone viral. Jose Ayala didn’t make the best first impression at a Del Paso Heights-area welding shop when he showed up last week frazzled and unclothed, says shop owner Chris Johnson, who added he won’t soon forget the job applicant.
★ Airline steward, his swinger wife and her lover ‘used Craigslist to find a dog for sex’: A husband, his wife and her lover have been charged with conspiracy to commit bestiality after using Craigslist to find a dog for the wife to have sex with. Shane Walker and his wife Sarah Dae, who describe themselves as swingers in an open marriage, were arrested after an undercover sting operation. The couple, and her lover Robert Aucker, were held after they drove out to a pre-arranged location to engage in the unnatural sex. The two men were to watch while Sarah Dae had sex with the dog. The trio had been hoping to meet the owner of a Golden Shepherd having spent three weeks corresponding with her over the use of the dog. But when they arrived at the location in Phoenix, Arizona,they were arrested by detectives. The owner of the dog had tipped off police about the trio’s plans and an undercover officer took her place during the meeting. Before their arrest the three offered the ‘dog owner’ the opportunity to take part.
★ Former College Student Sues School Because Her Roommate Was Having Too Much Sex: Lindsay Blankmeyer is seeking up to $150,000 in damages and fees claiming that Stonehill College in Massachusetts did not assist her in dealing with her overly sexual roommate, The AP reports. Blankmeyer, who according to the criminal complaint suffers from depression and attention deficit disorder, first approached Stonehill officials with a complaint about her roommate, Laura, violating the school’s rules by having sex with her boyfriend without her permission. The actual intercourse and cyber sex had by Laura in Blankmeyer’s presence exacerbated her depression to the point of her becoming suicidal, alleges the complaint. Thanks Jasmine
★ NASA loses laptop with command code for ISS: Four dozen high-tech computing devices disappeared from the offices of NASA over a two-year span, including one laptop that contained the code needed to command the International Space Station. No big deal, guys!
★ Incompetent People Too Ignorant to Know It: A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it. Similarly, unfunny people don’t have a good enough sense of humor to tell. This disconnect may be responsible for many of society’s problems. With more than a decade’s worth of research, David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, has demonstrated that humans find it “intrinsically difficult to get a sense of what we don’t know.” Whether an individual lacks competence in logical reasoning, emotional intelligence, humor or even chess abilities, the person still tends to rate his or her skills in that area as being above average.
★ Indiana House Approves Bill That Allows Homeowners To Kill Police Officers: Republicans in Indiana are taking self-defense too far. In a move supported by the National Rifle Association, the Indiana House passed Senate Bill 1, which allows homeowners to shoot and kill police officers they believe are unlawfully on their property or in their homes. The bill could also extend to federal law enforcement officials.
★ People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say: The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies. The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.
★ ACTA in UK: 10 years in jail for ‘illegal downloads’: UK web surfers have caught a grim glimpse of the future with Internet users being threatened with 10 years in jail for “illegal downloading” after a prominent music file-sharing site was shut down shortly after Britain signed the notorious ACTA bill. It is the first time such a move has been made against Internet users in the UK. The British government introduced regulations in 2009 enabling Internet providers to track users who downloaded illegal content from the web and disable their connection if warning letters had no effect. But signing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has brought the conflict to a whole new level. In Europe, people are taking to the streets in protest at the contradictory Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, with some countries refusing to sign it.
★ The Simpsons Porn Videos: NSFW – Thanks Billy
★ Dominique Tarlé – Recording Exile: Dominique Tarlé is an acclaimed French photographer best known for his association with The Rolling Stones. The Stones escaped the UK’s punitive tax regime in 1971 and decamped to the South of France at Villa Nellcôte, where Keith had set up house with Anita Pallenberg and their son Marlon. It became the location where Exile On Main Street was recorded, with the help of a mobile recording truck connected to a basement studio. Tarle recounted to the New York Times that, “A carnival of characters paraded through: Terry Southern, Gram Parsons, John Lennon, even a tribal band from Bengal… dope dealers from Marseille; petty thieves, who stole most of the drugs and half the furniture; and hangers-on, all of them there to witness what was happening.”
★ Infant’s death at Maimonides Hospital linked to circumcision: The unidentified infant died Sept. 28, 2011, at Maimonides Hospital, according to a spokeswoman for the city Medical Examiner, who confirmed the death after a News inquiry. The cause of death was listed as “disseminated herpes simplex virus Type 1, complicating ritual circumcision with oral suction.” City officials declined to comment Friday. It’s unclear who performed the circumcision. In 2004, city health officials revealed that a baby boy died after a circumcision carried out by a Rockland County rabbi who specializes in the centuries-old, ultra-Orthodox ritual known as metzizah b’ peh. Under the practice, the rabbi or mohel removes blood from the wound with his mouth — a practice city health officials have criticized, saying it carried “inherent risks” for babies.
★ The Lorax helps market Mazda SUVs to elementary school children nationwide: The Lorax — that squat orange creature Dr. Seuss created to speak for the trees — is now hawking SUVs at elementary schools across the land. The sales pitch is part of the National Education Association’s “Read Across America tour — Driven by Mazda,” which arrived at Alexandria’s James K. Polk Elementary School on Tuesday. It was a hybrid event: a celebration of reading, a fundraiser for public-school libraries, and an opportunity to market Mazdas to the pint-size set. While they don’t buy many cars themselves, they have direct access to parents who do. “I track school advertising for a living,” said Josh Golin, associate director of the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. “This is among the most outrageous examples of any school advertisement program I’ve ever heard of.”
★ Zimbabwe: HIV-positive maid laces child’s porridge with menstrual blood: A 17-year-maid from Zimbabwe was caught lacing the porridge of her employers’ four-year-old child with her own menstrual blood. According to NewsDay, Pelagia Mureya, who is HIV-positive, “carried out the disgusting act several times until luck ran out.” The ruse was discovered when her employer “noticed a drop of blood when her child was eating porridge, and investigated.”
★ Government Increasingly Eyeing Dissent on Social Media: A subpoena by the New York City District Attorney’s office to Twitter should raise alarm bells for anyone who uses social media during demonstrations. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the DA subpoenaed the social media site for “any and all user information, including email address, as well as any and all tweets posted for the period of 9/15/2011-12/31/2011” from user Malcolm Harris (h/t Common Dreams). Harris (@destructuremal), managing editor for the New Inquiry online magazine, was arrested with 700 other demonstrators on the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2011. The arrested were charged with disorderly conduct, which carries a punishment of a $250 fine or up to 15 days in jail.
★ New speech-jamming gun hints at dystopian Big Brother future: Japanese researchers have created a hand-held gun (pictured above) that can jam the words of speakers who are more than 30 meters (100ft) away. The gun has two purposes, according to the researchers: At its most basic, this gun could be used in libraries and other quiet spaces to stop people from speaking — but its second application is a lot more chilling. The researchers were looking for a way to stop “louder, stronger” voices from saying more than their fair share in conversation. The paper reads: “We have to establish and obey rules for proper turn-taking when speaking. However, some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately interrupt other people when it is their turn in order to establish their presence rather than achieve more fruitful discussions. Furthermore, some people tend to jeer at speakers to invalidate their speech.” In other words, this speech-jamming gun was built to enforce “proper” conversations.
★ Seattle Cop Caught On Tape Telling Man He Will Be Framed For Robbery: Seattle’s KOMO 4 News reports on their city’s police department’s issue with tens of thousands of cop car dashcam videos “vanishing”. In the latest incident for which cruiser footage of critical moments was mysteriously lost, two innocent young men (both African American) were beaten and arrested at gunpoint for no legitimate reason. After they are taken to jail, an officer tells one that he will “make stuff up” and send them to prison for robbery. But no worries, the police department investigated itself and found no wrongdoing by officers. A department spokesman comments that concerned citizens have to “trust the system, trust the process”.
★ What about that pesky “natural” on food labels?: FoodNavigator.com has issued a collection of its recent articles on “natural” and processing. At issue is the meaning of “natural,” which many people perceive as equivalent to organic or healthy. As I’ve said before, it isn’t. Natural has no regulatory meaning. The FDA merely says (note obfuscating double negatives): From a food science perspective, it is difficult to define a food product that is ‘natural’ because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth. That said, FDA has not developed a definition for use of the term natural or its derivatives. However, the agency has not objected to the use of the term if the food does not contain added color, artificial flavors, or synthetic substances.
★ Ayahuasca: What Jennifer Aniston May Not Know About the ‘Spirit Vine’: Cut to February 2012, and the mega-celebrity, Jennifer Aniston, best known for playing perky girl-next-door Rachel in “Friends,” is tipping a bowl of ayahuasca to her lips in Universal’s newest romantic comedy “Wanderlust.” In just a few years, the once secret “shamans brew” of the Amazon has snaked its way into the popular consciousness, including the entertainment industry with cameos in the TV shows “Weeds” and “Nip/Tuck” and now the movie “Wanderlust.” But the question remains: Can Hollywood portray this ancient medicinal, psychonautic elixir with the maturity and complexity necessary to address its multifaceted experiences?
★ Enochs High teacher resigns after leaving wife, kids for student, 18: A 41-year-old Enochs High School teacher in Modesto has resigned and moved in with an 18-year-old student. The reaction has been largely shock, disapproval and betrayal. The teen’s mother has waged a very public campaign on Facebook since last week, when her daughter moved out of the family’s home and into a Modesto apartment with the man. He has left his wife and children, one of whom is a junior at Enochs. Modesto police are investigating whether there was inappropriate contact before the girl turned 18 in the fall. And school district and teachers union officials worry that an ethical and moral line has been crossed, even if the student is legally an adult.
★ The Mammoth Eye Of Mars: Everyone has heard of Percival Lowell’s theories of Martian canals, but have you heard the theory of Mars’ vast thinking vegetable and its mammoth eye? The above is an artist’s rendition of the eye of Mars. It’s not a metaphorical depiction. What you see is exactly what the theory claimed: (from the caption) “A vast eye, upon a tenuous, flexible, transparent neck raises itself high above the surface of Mars and can watch the growth of its vegetable body upon any part of the surface.” Its “vegetable body” is a Mars-hugging super-organism of intelligent vegetable life that creeps along the cracks left in the drying Martian surface (Lowell’s erstwhile “canals”).
★ Ex-Senators Say Saudi Arabia May Be Linked to 9/11: According to Sen. Graham, open questions include possible financial support of al Qaeda by Saudi charities, and the role of a Saudi resident of California who was in contact with both the hijackers and Saudi officials. “There was a direct line,” wrote Graham, “between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the September 11th attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia, and [a] Saudi government agent living in the United States, Omar al Bayoumi, provided direct assistance to September 11th hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar.” “Finally someone who knows some of the truth about 9/11 is standing up and saying ‘wait a minute, we didn’t give those guys the all clear’ as Saudi Arabia has been saying for several years,” said Sharon Premoli of Vermont, who was in the World Trade Center when it was struck. “Exonerated, I don’t think so!”
★ Lessons from Fukushima: It has been almost 12 months since the Fukushima nuclear disaster began. Although the Great East Japan earthquake and the following tsunami triggered it, the key causes of the nuclear accident lie in the institutional failures of political influence and industry-led regulation. It was a failure of human institutions to acknowledge real reactor risks, a failure to establish and enforce appropriate nuclear safety standards and a failure to ultimately protect the public and the environment.
★ Child Advocates Slam Greenwashing of Seuss’ Beloved ‘Lorax’: Generations of children have been moved by its powerful tale of how rampant greed and consumerism destroyed the forest of Truffula Trees and the Brown Bar-ba-loots, Swomee-Swans, and Humming-Fish that depended on them. But now, according to the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), the book’s powerful message is in danger of being crushed by a real-life landslide of corporate greed after Dr. Seuss Enterprises, Random House, and Universal Pictures produced the film and sold licenses for the various product agreements. In a statement accouncing their new campaign to ‘Save the Lorax!’ the CCFC writes: For more than forty years, Dr. Seuss’s classic book, The Lorax, has been a clarion call for reducing consumption and promoting conservation. But this Friday, Universal Pictures’ The Lorax arrives in theaters with dozens of corporate partners promoting everything from SUVs to Pottery Barn to Pancakes.

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Nuclear Powered Lies

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 15:25:27 +0000



✖ The myth of the eight-hour sleep: In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. His book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern – in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria. A woman tending to her husband in the middle of the night by Jan Saenredam, 1595 Roger Ekirch says this 1595 engraving by Jan Saenredam is evidence of activity at night Much like the experience of Wehr’s subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.
✖ The Internet Blames Obama for the Death of Andrew Breitbart: Before 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, The New York Times’ assistant managing editor, Jim Roberts, tweeted what was perhaps the first accusation that hinted at Barack Obama’s involvement. “Only a few weeks ago, #Breitbart spoke to CPAC, claiming to have videos of Obama from ‘college days,’” wrote Roberts. Sure enough, only weeks earlier Breibart, never one to hold back against the president, told an audience at the Washington, DC Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that he was close to leaking videos that would end the political career of the commander-in-chief. “I have videos, this election we’re going to vet him,” Breitbart told an audience of attendees last month. “We are going to vet him from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008.”
✖ Your brain on ‘shrooms: fMRI elucidates neural correlates of psilocybin psychedelic state: Psychedelic substances have long been used for healing, ceremonial, or mind-altering subjective experiences due to compounds that, when ingested or inhaled, generate hallucinations, perceptual distortions, or altered states of awareness. Of these, the psychedelic substance psilocybin, the prodrug (a precursor of a drug that must in vivo chemical conversion by metabolic processes before becoming an active pharmacological agent) of psilocin (4-hydroxy-dimethyltryptamine) and the key hallucinogen found in so-called magic mushrooms, is widely used not only in healing ceremonies, but, more recently, in psychotherapy as well – but little has been known about its specific activity in the brain.
✖ Wyoming House advances doomsday bill: State representatives on Friday advanced legislation to launch a study into what Wyoming should do in the event of a complete economic or political collapse in the United States. House Bill 85 passed on first reading by a voice vote. It would create a state-run government continuity task force, which would study and prepare Wyoming for potential catastrophes, from disruptions in food and energy supplies to a complete meltdown of the federal government. The task force would look at the feasibility of Wyoming issuing its own alternative currency, if needed. And House members approved an amendment Friday by state Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, to have the task force also examine conditions under which Wyoming would need to implement its own military draft, raise a standing army, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier.
✖ ‘Plume-Gate’ Shocker: Media Silence Raises Troubling Questions: The executive branch and multiple federal agencies, agencies tasked with keeping the American public safe, did their best to hide and to cover-up information about a deadly radioactive plume and ensuing fallout that was headed for the West Coast of the United States from Japan. The fact it was real and did arrive is proven by samplings from milk, vegetables and rainwater. Even though EPA testing methodology and actual capability were questioned, independent sources verified the fallout. To those who say radiation does not travel in a plume or that fallout is a local phenomenon, there is an excellent distillation of the book ‘Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment’ at GlobalResearch.ca that proves otherwise. The evidence obtained in the FOIA request indicates that right from the start, the NRC had a clear idea of the significance of the disaster that was unfolding, but concealed the truth from the American public.
✖ Underground ghost station explorers spook the security services: Last month TfL applied to issue anti-social behaviour orders which would not only stop them undertaking further expeditions and blogging about urban exploration but also prohibit them from carrying equipment that could be used for exploring after dark. Extraordinarily, it also stipulates they should not be allowed to speak to each other for the duration of the order – 10 years. “To me, telling people they can’t associate with their closest friends is an incredible invasion of human rights,” says Garrett. “It’s a complete overreaction and an amazing tack to take after the group already agreed to a caution.” He thinks TfL’s legal action is fuelled by a wider misunderstanding of what urban exploration is about. “What we do is very benign,” he says. “The motivation for it comes from a love for the city – we want to interact with its hidden histories and forgotten stories and places.”
✖ Giant fleas plagued feathered dinosaurs: At 20.6 millimetres long, the 165-million-year old fossils dwarf the largest living flea – a 12 mm species which plagues the mountain beaver of North America. The fossil beasts are so large they may have lived on feathered dinosaurs rather than the small mammals that scuttled across the Mesozoic landscape, according to André Nel at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, a member of the team that made the find
✖ Medical Journal: Legalize ‘After-Birth Abortions’, ‘Infants Are Not People’ :: Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.
✖ Cops nab Philly woman who gave illegal butt injections: A Philadelphia woman was arrested Wednesday at a so-called “pumping party,” where police say she was planning to administer buttock-enhancing injections. Police say they received a tip that Padge Windslowe, also known as “Black Madam,” would be performing the procedure at a Germantown home. This wasn’t the first time the “Black Madam” was connected to illegal buttock enhancements. Windslowe is under investigation for a botched butt-enhancement procedure on 20-year-old British student Claudia Aderotimi at the Hampton Inn near Philadelphia International Airport in February 2011, according to police. Aderotimi died after the procedure was performed.
✖ Inflation Is A Tax And The Federal Reserve Is Taxing The Living Daylights Out Of Us: Ronald Reagan once famously declared that inflation is a tax, but sadly most Americans did not really grasp what he was talking about. If the American people truly understood what inflation was doing to them, they would be screaming bloody murder about monetary policy. Inflation is an especially insidious tax because it is not just a tax on your income for one year. It is a continual tax on every single dollar that you own. As your money sits in the bank, it is constantly losing value. Over time, the effects of inflation can be absolutely devastating. For example, if you put 100 dollars in the bank in 1970, those same dollars today would only have about 17 percent of the purchasing power that they did back then. In essence, you were hit by an 83 percent “inflation tax” and all you did was leave your money in the bank. So who is responsible for this? Well, the Federal Reserve controls monetary policy in the United States…
✖ Chinese Drones Will Use Genetic Algorithms to Learn to Hunt For Submarines: China usually holds its military hand very close to the vest–that, or things “mysteriously” leak that it doesn’t (does) want the world to know about–so we’re left to wonder why the People’s Republic has decided to publish this in the journal Advanced Materials Research. Nonetheless, it’s pretty interesting. Chinese navy researchers have plans for a new submarine hunting scheme that uses ship-launched UAVs running genetic algorithms. Genetic algorithms narrow down a range of possibilities to an optimal solution much the way evolution does (at least in a simplified sense)–by weeding out the weaker offspring and mating the best with the best to create stronger candidates. These algorithms would take into account things like fuel economy, potential air and sea threats, and oceanographic geography to zero in on the most likely places for submarines to be moving at a given time.
✖ Wanna File a Police Complaint (Arrested for Trying) [Video]: Either intimidated into leaving or arrested… Either way he couldn’t File a Police Complaint
✖ DHS tracked Occupy Wall Street to ‘control protesters’: In addition to monitoring Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Meetup and Occupy live video feeds, the feds also relied on the left-leaning activist website Daily Kos for tracking protest locations. “The growing support for the OWS movement has expanded the protests’ impact and increased the potential for violence,” the report notes in its final paragraph. “While the peaceful nature of the protests has served so far to mitigate their impact, larger numbers and support from groups such as Anonymous substantially increase the risk for potential incidents and enhance the potential security risk to critical infrastructure (CI). The continued expansion of these protests also places an increasingly heavy burden on law enforcement and movement organizers to control protesters.” Hastings warned that there were “ominous” implications to this kind of information gathering.
✖ Anatomy of the Great Adderall Drought: The results of the shortage or lack of insurance coverage for generic Adderall XR forced many people to seek out name-brand Adderall XR, which, in turn, ran out. Then people, desperate for any ADHD medication, sought out the generic instant release amphetamine salts (formally Adderall). The increased demand on instant release dried up the supplies pretty quickly, and soon ADHD sufferers everywhere were unable to find any form of their medication. Luckily, Shire had magically possessed enough amphetamines from their DEA quota to produce plenty of their new ADHD medication, Vyvanse. In fact, Shire doubled its third quarter profits from 2010 to 2011, with most of that increase resulting from Vyvanse sales. During this time, coinciding nicely with the Adderall shortage, Shire hiked the price of Vyvanse.
✖ Stratfor Is a Joke and So Is Wikileaks for Taking It Seriously: The group’s reputation among foreign policy writers, analysts, and practitioners is poor; they are considered a punchline more often than a source of valuable information or insight. As a former recipient of their “INTEL REPORTS” (I assume someone at Stratfor signed me up for a trial subscription, which appeared in my inbox unsolicited), what I found was typically some combination of publicly available information and bland “analysis” that had already appeared in the previous day’s New York Times. A friend who works in intelligence once joked that Stratfor is just The Economist a week later and several hundred times more expensive. As of 2001, a Stratfor subscription could cost up to $40,000 per year.
✖ 9/11 Terrorist Featured in Ad on Facebook: As Facebook gets ready to go public, the eyes of the world will become even more focused on the Menlo Park-based social network. That’s just partly why Friday’s report of an insurance advertisement on Facebook featuring the face of 9/11 terrorist Mohamed Atta is not the type of publicity the site wants ahead of its initial public offering.
✖ Pantokrator, the Heavy Metal Church of Bogota: They meet every Saturday night on the second floor of a house, above a paint store. The services are a mix of traditional mass and metal that has biblical themes. The rosaries are made from chains and the bibles lined with denim. As the music reaches a crescendo, praises of the Lord are sung. Cristian asserts, “If Jesus were alive today, he would be neither a guerilla nor a metalhead. He would accept everyone without distinction and without reproach to anyone.” Can’t really argue with that!
✖ Man stricken eating ‘Triple Bypass’ burger: Laughing tourists were either cynical or confused about whether a man was really suffering a medical episode amid the “doctor,” “nurses” and health warnings at the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, a restaurant owner said Wednesday. “It was no joke,” said Jon Basso, who promotes himself “Doctor Jon,” his scantily-clad waitresses as nurses and customers as patients. Basso said he could tell right away the man in his 40s eating a Triple Bypass burger was having trouble. He was sweating, shaking and could barely talk.
✖ Deepest terrestrial animal found in Krubera-Voronja cave: Scientists have discovered four new species of primitive eyeless insects, one of which they described as the deepest land animal ever found. These animals are springtails (Arthropoda, Insecta, Collembola), a minute primitive wingless insect with six-legs and without eyes that commonly live in total darkness in caves, where they feed on fungi and decomposing organic matter. Described by Rafael Jordana and Enrique Baquero from University of Navarra (Spain), they are known for science as: Anurida stereoodorata, Deuteraphorura kruberaensis, Schaefferia profundissima and Plutomurus ortobalaganensis. The last one is the deepest arthropod ever found, at the remarkable depth of 1.980 meters (2,165 yards) below ground surface. The insects were collected during the Ibero-Russian CaveX team expedition to the world’s deepest known cave during the summer of 2010.
✖ Low-wage Facebook contractor leaks secret censorship list: Namely, female nipples or even the impressions of nipples under clothing are unacceptable to Facebook censors, whereas male nipples are fine. Images of breast feeding, too, are forbidden if they show an exposed nipple. “Crushed heads” and mutilated limbs are also fine, so long as the person posting such images does not express delight and no internal organs are visible. The list specifically says that on this point, no exceptions would be made for news media. Also verboten: images of bodily fluids, including ear wax and pus; dead animals; advocacy of violence; advocacy of eating disorders; racial jokes where “the humor is not evident”; and “any photoshopped images of people, whether negative, positive or neutral”; “pixelated or black-barred content showing nudity or sexual activity”; “digital/cartoon nudity”; and images of drunk or sleeping people with “things drawn on their faces.”
✖ Goodbye, First Amendment: ‘Trespass Bill’ will make protest illegal: In the text of the act, the law is allowed to be used against anyone who knowingly enters or remains in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so, but those grounds are considered any area where someone — rather it’s President Obama, Senator Santorum or Governor Romney — will be temporarily visiting, whether or not the public is even made aware. Entering such a facility is thus outlawed, as is disrupting the orderly conduct of “official functions,” engaging in disorderly conduct “within such proximity to” the event or acting violent to anyone, anywhere near the premises. Under that verbiage, that means a peaceful protest outside a candidate’s concession speech would be a federal offense, but those occurrences covered as special event of national significance don’t just stop there, either. And neither does the list of covered persons that receive protection.
✖ Cyberattack Could Be Directed at Facebook, Hijacking HAARP: But the line between mockery and hysteria may prove very thin, indeed, with one report at Consternation Security positing that, in the wake events such as the Iranian army overriding and capturing an RQ-170 drone, Anonymous might be able to hijack the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP. It is with HAARP, Consternation claims to report seriously under a shimmering photo of an aurora, that hackers could, after inciting bouts of “headaches, dizziness, confusion, and even insanity,” “quite literally cook the President while he sleeps.”
✖ Caught in the crossfire: Should musicians boycott Israel?: Last summer, punk rock icon Jello Biafra and his band decided to cancel a show they had planned on playing at the Barby Club in Tel Aviv. At the time, Biafra wrote that ‘the toll and stress on the band members and myself has been huge, both logistically and as a matter of conscience’. In August, Biafra decided to travel to Israel and Palestine himself to explore his thoughts on the cultural boycott of Israel.
✖ Starting March 1st, A Red License Plate in Nevada Means the Driver is a Robot!: An extended campaign in Nevada by Google has led to a new host of provisions which will allow automated cars to legally drive in the state. Starting March 1st, 2012 innovators like Google can officially apply for a new kind of robot driver’s license that will give them permission to openly test their cars on the road. Automated vehicles will be able to travel the same streets and highways as human drivers, with only a red license plate marking them as robots. Once research on those automated cars is complete (which may take years), the Nevada Department of Motorized Vehicles will issue them a neon green license plate – an indication that the robot drivers are good to go.
✖ Shocking photos of teacher accused in California molestation horror surface: Shocking photos of accused pedophile Mark Berndt offer a glimpse into his disturbing behavior at scandal-rocked Miramonte Elementary School in South Los Angeles. In the newly-surfaced pictures, the 61-year-old is seen wearing a bizarre costume clearly geared to the Disney set. He sports Mickey Mouse ears, a form-fitting black shirt and tiny baby-blue satin running shorts over black tights, with an arm draped around a little girl dressed as a fairytale princess. Berndt completes his over-the-top child-like appearance with a half-eaten cupcake in his hand and green frosting smeared on his mustache. The 61-year-old teacher faces multiple life sentences. He currently has been charged with 23 counts of lewd acts on children. Police say Berndt blindfolded students, taped their mouths and photographed them with a cockroach crawling on their faces. He is also accused of conducting “tasting games” in which he fed students semen from a spoon and cookies laced with the same bodily fluid.
✖ U.S. Tells South America to Shut Up About Legalizing Drugs: Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has a message for everyone who thinks the drug war is bad: you’re wrong, it’s awesome. (Reuters) – Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano defended Washington’s drug war strategy on Monday despite calls by some Latin American leaders to consider decriminalizing narcotics. … “I would not agree with the premise that the drug war is a failure,” Napolitano said. “It is a continuing effort to keep our peoples from becoming addicted to dangerous drugs.”
✖ China’s State Police Seize iPhone Branded Gas Stoves with Apple Logo: Now here’s something you don’t often hear about. Two warehouses containing iPhone branded gas stoves got seized by the state police at Wuhan, after discovering they are not real Apple products
✖ Shrines safeguarded from Pussy Riot: Russian Cossacks are to stand guard over Moscow’s Orthodox churches after a feminist punk band broke into a Cathedral and sang blasphemous songs at the altar. Earlier this month, four members of the all-girl band Pussy Riot rushed the church dressed in mini-dresses and wearing masks. Without losing time, they sang a song entitled Holy S**t before being escorted out by security. The girls are notorious for their publicity stunts. They’ve performed a song on Red Square addressed to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Now the Cossack say, “Let’s protect the holy shrines!”, promising to create vigilante groups to protect a number of churches in the Russian capital.
✖ Pussy Riot Band Members In Russian Orthodox Church (Punk Invasion) [Video]
✖ Report: Gov’t “collapsed” during Japan nuke crisis: “As we listened to our top nuclear experts, we politicians had no idea what they were talking about. Was anyone going to suffer radiation contamination? Would this be another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island? No one could give us a straight answer,” Fukuyama recalled in the report. After 300 interviews with officials and nuclear experts, the report said government was partially at fault for not having an emergency plan if a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck the country. However, investigators concluded the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric, was to blame for the majority of the problems. “They were astonishingly unprepared for this nuclear accident,” lead investigator Youichi Funabash told CBS News. It seems that Tokyo Electric was unprepared for a power failure. Without electricity, the cores of the reactor couldn’t stay cool, and it triggered explosions and meltdowns.
✖ Homeland Security Dept. Pays General Dynamics to Scour Internet for Criticism of its Policies: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been paying a defense contractor $11.4 million to monitor social media websites and other Internet communications to find criticisms of the department’s policies and actions. A government watchdog organization, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), obtained hundreds of documents from DHS through the Freedom of Information Act and found details of the arrangement with General Dynamics. The company was contracted to monitor the Web for “reports that reflect adversely on DHS,” including sub-agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
✖ Illegal Everything [Video]: This Stossel special will blow your mind! The government, especially the EPA is out of control as well as local prosecutors trying to make a name for themselves.
✖ Interpol arrests 25 suspected members of ‘Anonymous’ hackers group: “This operation shows that crime in the virtual world does have real consequences for those involved, and that the Internet cannot be seen as a safe haven for criminal activity,” said Interpol’s acting director of police services. However, it was not clear what evidence there was to prove those arrested were part of Anonymous, an extremely loose-knit international movement of online activists, or “hacktivists.” Spanish police said earlier they had arrested four suspected hackers accused of sabotaging websites and publishing confidential data on the Internet. They were accused of hacking political parties’ and companies’ websites and adding fangs to the faces of leaders in photographs online, and publishing data identifying top officials’ security guards, Spanish police said.
✖ Big Food Must Go: Why We Need to Radically Change the Way We Eat: It is time — now, not next year — to de-occupy Walmart. And Archer Daniels Midland. And Tyson Foods. And Monsanto. And Cargill. And Kraft Foods. And the other large corporations that decide what ends up on our plates. Take all our money out, public and personal, from our shopping dollars to school district lunch contracts to the corporate subsidies that uphold these firms’ grip on our food supply, and invest it in a new system that’s economically diverse and ecologically sustainable. These corporations’ stranglehold over food has wreaked havoc on the environment, our health, farmers, workers, and our very future. It is time for an end to Big Food, and a societal shift to something radically different. We all deserve a future where what we eat feeds community and land, instead of eroding soils, polluting water and air, and tossing away small farmers and immigrant workers as if they were balance sheet losers.
✖ A Bicycle That Plays Records: While we’ve seen plenty of crazy boombox bikes in our day, this bicycle by Dutch designers Merel Sloother, Liat Azulay and Pieter Frank de Jong, takes that idea one step further into the past. A prototype of their Feats per Minute project, this retro-inspired ride allows riders to play records as they travel throughout the city. We’re assuming that pedaling faster will speed up the music — which could prove problematic unless you’re going for a leisurely ride or enjoy listening to chipmunks squeak — but we’re in love the concept, as long as no one comes riding down our street too early on the weekend.
✖ YouTube Identifies Bird Song as Copyrighted Music: Is this a freak occurrence? NO! It is a very common occurrence. It is a well-known error. One person has had to file over 100 disputes for mistaken bird sounds. For some reason Google is reluctant to fix this so companies like rumblefish take advantage of it to gain fraudulent income (google makes something also).

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139 Gallons Of PCP

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:33:54 +0000



✸ Lab-grown meat is first step to artificial hamburger: Dutch scientists have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with the aim of producing the first lab-grown hamburger later this year. The aim of the research is to develop a more efficient way of producing meat than rearing animals. At a major science meeting in Canada, Prof Mark Post said synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60%. “We would gain a tremendous amount in terms of resources,” he said. Professor Post’s group at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has grown small pieces of muscle about 2cm long, 1cm wide and about a mm thick.
✸ Should police and coastguards use laser dazzlers?: Though they are purportedly less harmful than other non-lethal weapons, such as tasers and rubber bullets, the International Committee of the Red Cross is concerned that not enough has been done to lessen the risk of people suffering permanent blindness. Dazzlers are designed to warn people away by temporarily blinding them with pulses of green laser light. Unlike tasers or rubber bullets, there is no possibility that the lasers could kill a person, they just create a beam that is too intense to look at. Most models that have been built for military use are designed to work at distances of 300 to 500 metres during the day and a kilometre or so at night. This makes them attractive for long-range use at sea to stop vessels suspected of drug trafficking, for example. At 40 metres, however, the intense beam of a 200-milliwatt laser can permanently damage eyes. Despite this, they have seen regular use in Iraq since 2006.
✸ Cocaine fueled son —not his 75-year-old mom — racked up $120,000 in Port Authority unpaid tolls and fines: “I used to take her car to the city to buy drugs,” said a contrite Peter Davis, 52, who says he’s a recovering addict and lives with his mom in an Englewood, NJ, apartment. It’s actually Davis’ mother, Jean, 75, who is shamed on the Port Authority’s Web site as owing the most money of any scofflaw. But yesterday, Peter admitted to The Post that he’s the one who racked up the debt, by using her Ford Focus for years to blow through tolls on numerous trips to Manhattan to get high. “When you’re addicted like that you don’t think of he consequences. You have other things on your mind,” he said. Thanks to Peter’s many drug junkets, his mom is in the hole for $21,365 in unpaid tolls and has accrued $102,141 in fines — a sum that continues to grow.
✸ US military nurtures a new weapon – the Slimeball: The US Air Force has a history of imaginative weaponry proposals. Whitehurst says “many attempts have been made over the years to impede naval forces in a variety of manners, including floating smoke pots, entanglement devices, and even ‘floating purple mountains of shaving cream’ … but none ever made it into wide use.” More flashily, plans prepared long ago at the US Air Force’s Wright laboratory, in Dayton, Ohio, called for development of a potent chemical weapon. This is the so-called gay bomb that makes enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Wright laboratory was awarded the Ig Nobel peace prize, in 2007, for instigating that line of research.
✸ Scientists make DNA robot to kill cancer cells: Researchers at Harvard University said they have successfully made a DNA robot which acts almost as a postal worker and is capable of targeting particular cells such as cancerous cells and deliver them self-destruction order. The robots were designed in the shape of an open barrel made of two halves joined by a hinge. The two halves are held shut by special DNA latches that respond to particular targets by allowing the two halves to swing open and expose their payload. To produce the biologic robot, George M. Church, Shawn Douglas and their colleagues used a technique called ‘DNA origami’, in which long DNA chains are folded in a prescribed way. The programmable nanorobot also carries on its surface some peptide molecules called aptamers that can identify specific proteins on the outer layer of the targeted cells and bind to them, researchers wrote in the journal Science.
✸ Foreclosure abuse rampant across U.S., experts say: A report this week showing rampant foreclosure abuse in San Francisco reflects similar levels of lender fraud and faulty documentation across the United States, say experts and officials who have done studies in other parts of the country. The audit of almost 400 foreclosures in San Francisco found that 84 percent of them appeared to be illegal, according to the study released by the California city on Wednesday. “The audit in San Francisco is the most detailed and comprehensive that has been done – but it’s likely those numbers are comparable nationally,” Diane Thompson, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, told Reuters.
✸ Comedian David Cross claims he snorted cocaine near President Obama at White House event: ‘It was a tiny granule of coke that I put on my wrist and said, “Watch this. I need a witness.” And then I ducked under the table and did it,’ he said. Cook claimed he was about 65 feet from the president at the event when he snorted the drugs. ‘It wasn’t like I got high. The jolt was similar to licking an empty espresso cup. It wasn’t about that. It was just about being able to say that I did it, that I did cocaine in the same room as the president. I’m not proud of it, nor am I ashamed of it,’ he told Playboy.
✸ Production of Afghan heroin jumps by 61%: UN: The latest UN figures indicate that the output of heroin increased by 61 percent in Afghanistan last year despite the Western claims about their will to curb the production of drugs during the invasion of the war-battered country. Opium production by Afghan farmers rose between 2001 and 2011 from just 185 tons to a staggering 5,800 tons. Last year, levels increased by 61 percent, with more than 90 percent of heroin found on British streets being traced back to opiates cultivated in Afghanistan, according to UN figures. The UN figures make grim reading for those who backed the invasion of Afghanistan. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in 2001 that a significant reason for deployment of foreign forces to Afghanistan was to curtail a flourishing heroin trade.
✸ Radiation detected 400 miles off Japanese coast: Radioactive contamination from the Fukushima power plant disaster has been detected as far as almost 400 miles off Japan in the Pacific Ocean, with water showing readings of up to 1,000 times more than prior levels, scientists reported Tuesday.
✸ Three Frightening Teen Drug Trends: prescription drugs, teenagers, pharm parties, energy drinks, elementary schools, parents, huffing, Dust-Off
✸ A US government program secretly injected people with plutonium: In early 1945, Ebb Cade, a worker at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Facility, got into a car wreck. He survived, but was bed bound with a broken arm and a broken leg. When doctors interviewed him, they ascertained that the fifty-three-year-old African American man was otherwise perfectly healthy, eating well, drinking well, and had no history of serious illness. And so, having obtained a healthy subject, on April 10th his doctors secretly injected him with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium. Who exactly ordered the injection, and who exactly administered it, has never been determined, with the most likely candidates all contradicting each other.
✸ How credit ratings agencies rule the world: Britain’s credit rating took a knock this week, when Moody’s expressed a ‘negative outlook’ for the national economy. But who are the mysterious agencies who take it upon themselves to grade everything from countries to corporations – and how much power do they really wield?
✸ Drug Task Force Seizes $100M in PCP, Largest Ever: A man and woman were arrested in what authorities described as the biggest PCP bust in memory after 139 gallons of the drug – worth nearly $100 million on the street – was seized by an L.A. County narcotics task force. Long Beach Police Department is a part of L.A. IMPACT. Darryl Dwayne Burton, 55, and Lagina Bell Huckaby, 31, were arrested Wednesday at a UPS store in Culver City where they were allegedly trying to ship drugs, according to Lt. Scott Fairfield of the Los Angeles Intra-agency Metropolitan Police Apprehension Crime Task Force, or L.A. IMPACT. “It’s the largest PCP seizure I’ve ever heard of,” he said. Enough of the drug was seized to dose nearly 10 million people at cost of about $15 each, authorities said. About $389,000 in cash was seized as part of the investigation.
✸ Senators Ramp Up Fear Mongering To Try To Rush Through Cybersecurity Bill: “Think about how many people could die if a cyber terrorist attacked our air traffic control system and planes slammed into one another,” Rockefeller said. “Or if rail switching networks were hacked—causing trains carrying people—or hazardous materials—to derail and collide in the midst of some of our most populated urban areas, like Chicago, New York, San Francisco or Washington.” Yes, and think about how life would suck if someone hacked the road system in West Virginia and turned all roads into cabbage patches? I mean, if we’re talking about total hypotheticals with no actual likelihood of happening, that seems just as reasonable a scenario as Rockefeller’s. It’s pure, insane, unsupported hypothetical fear mongering.
✸ Millions of Pounds of Toxic Poison to Flood US Farmland: The EPA omitted critical information in its assessment, and current dioxin levels are a significant health risk. Dioxin levels will increase when Dow’s Agent Orange 2,4-D resistant crops are planted. The EPA’s lack of interest in dioxin DCDD is disgusting. Dioxin DCDD that contaminates 2,4-D herbicide is not tested, measured or monitored by the EPA, or even regulated. A Canadian research paper states that dioxin DCDD may have large public health implications due to its prevalence in our food and environment.
✸ SOPA replacement uses child porn as excuse to spy on 99.7 percent of Americans: The SOPA and PIPA bills that went down in flames earlier this year for their unbearable intrusiveness, used content piracy as an excuse to give the government powerful tools with which to censor Internet content. For 2012 the primary author of those bills has switched to a fallback tactic: using child porn as an excuse to create a vast surveillance network from which the government can demand data on every email sent, site visited or link clicked on by all but a fraction of one percent of the U.S. population. Internet anti-censorship advocates including Anonymous are calling for the ouster of Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, who is following his co-sponsorship of the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) with a bill critics call “Big Brother” disguised as an effort to curb child porn and sexual abuse.
✸ The Writing on the Wall [Video]: Al Jazeera interviews graffiti artists JR and RSH for this spot on graffiti as the world’s oldest form of social media.
✸ Talk about blue in the face! The extraordinary tale of the Blue Family in Appalacia: Isolated family in Kentucky started producing blue children in 1800s French orphan Martin Fugate married pale American Elizabeth Smith Had seven children, four were blue; they intermarried with local family Genetic mutation reduces individual’s ability to carry oxygen in blood Intermarriage led to ‘pure’ gene pool which often met ‘met-H’ gene
✸ Wednesday Weird Bible Verse – Judges 3:20-22 – blade, belly-fat and bowels: “Ehud then approached him…and said, “I have a message from God for you.” As the king rose from his seat, Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king’s belly. Even the handle sank in after the blade, and his bowels discharged. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it.” – Judges 3:20-22
✸ Whitney Houston and Alcohol’s Toll: Sawyer wanted to know what Houston was on. Everyone wanted to know what Houston was on, and news reports after her death took unconfirmed inventory of the pills in her hotel suite, wondering if they represented the extent of her indulgences. No. By many accounts, Houston also drank. More than a little. In fact one early, leading theory about the cause of her death, which won’t be known until toxicology tests are finished, was that a mix of prescription drugs and alcohol did her in. But while the drugs leapt immediately to the foreground, with questions raised about which doctors and pharmacies had provided them, the alcohol receded from focus, as it too often does. Wrongly, perilously, we tend not to attribute the same destructive powers to it that we do to powders, capsules and vials.
✸ The Inside Story on Climate Scientists Under Siege: It is almost possible to dismiss Michael Mann’s account of a vast conspiracy by the fossil fuel industry to harrass scientists and befuddle the public. His story of that campaign, and his own journey from naive computer geek to battle-hardened climate ninja, seems overwrought, maybe even paranoid. climate_desk_bugBut now comes the unauthorized release of documents showing how a libertarian thinktank, the Heartland Institute, which has in the past been supported by Exxon, spent millions on lavish conferences attacking scientists and concocting projects to counter science teaching for kindergarteners.
✸ AntiChrist -Obama head implant Just Like Old Egyptian Art Shows [Video]: Notice the Days of Egyptian Gods..The Alien in the back of the Head..Then look at the new scars of Obama and his alien in the back of his head..Hell is upon us..
✸ WTF, BROCCOLI?: LITTLE TERRIFYING ECSTATIC FACES, HIDING IN THE TEENY TINY BROCCOLI BITS.

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‘Love?! That’s soft stuff!’

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 07:04:48 +0000





✰ Girl Removes Make-up after Two Years: For the last two years, the young girl never used make-up removers, so her mother, exasperated by Bae’s behaviour, contacted a TV station and told them Bae’s incredible story. During a variety show, dermatologists managed to convince Bae Dal-mi to finally remove the layers of make-up, and after a specialized check-up they found her skin was two times older than her actual age. All because of an obsession with beauty
✰ Electric Cigarette Explodes In US Man’s Mouth: A faulty battery caused an electronic cigarette to explode in a man’s mouth, taking out some of his front teeth, a chunk of his tongue and severely burning his face, fire officials said.
✰ Seattle woman sets underwear world record: The Guinness World record was 250. Janine Keblish topped that by two pairs of underwear. Why? Keblish wanted to bring attention to a cause she’s involved with, Days for Girls. A few years ago Keblish and Celeste Mergens discovered a shameful secret on a trip to an orphanage in Kenya – a total lack of feminine hygiene products for young women. “Millions of women all over the world go without, resulting in infection and exploitation and even girls being sold into slavery. They also miss three months of education each year, just for lack of hygiene,” says Mergens. “And you wonder, how could this be happening in this day and age? The truth is, it’s taboo to talk about.”
✰ India, Bihar: Poo Highway: The high incidence of open defecation in the Indian state of Bihar is not due to a lack awareness about toilets, according to this new Water for People video. In their view, it’s more of a supply chain, marketing problem. The toilets on offer are not particularly good.
✰ $23.60 – The Most Expensive Starbucks Drink Possible (in the World): It’s not every day that you receive a coupon for one of the priciest beverage chains in the world! Armed with my Starbucks Rewards card, I decided to take the opportunity to find out just how much money I could pour into a Trenta—Starbucks’ whopping 31 ounce cup! After about a half-hour with a laughing barista, we created the most expensive drink possible: one Java Chip Frappuccino in a Trenta cup, 16 shots of espresso, a shot of soy milk, caramel flavoring, banana puree, strawberry puree, vanilla beans, Matcha powder, protein powder, and a drizzle of caramel and mocha. Price: $23.60. The resulting beverage contains 1400mg of caffeine. According to Erowid, a widely respected drug catalog, a heavy caffeine dose is 400+mg. This drink has 3 times that. If I drank this all at once, it would put me in the hospital. Two of these would kill me.
✰ Top 10 Bizarre & Controversial Archeological Discoveries: Many strange archeological discoveries have been made in modern history. Hundreds of artifacts have been unearthed that have baffled scientists and challenged modern man’s view of history. Many of these objects have been labeled out of place artifacts or anachronisms. These archeological discoveries are always controversial and the scientific community is extremely selective in what they accept as fact. Every object on this list has been accused of being an elaborate hoax. In many cases, a conspiracy is the only explanation, without an extensive rewriting of the world’s history books. These artifacts tell a story of ancient civilizations, Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contracts, and mysterious technological advancements. Many of these archeological discoveries challenge the scientific theory of evolution, as well as many religious beliefs.
✰ Elderly junkies find ‘freedom’ at Dutch old-age home: In a tiny fourth-floor room overlooking The Hague’s city centre, a grey-haired man carefully plugged a small pipe with a ball of cocaine, lit up and drew a deep breath. “This is real freedom,” said 65-year-old William as a billow of white smoke poured from his nostrils and wafted through his apartment at Woodstock, the only Dutch home for elderly junkies and other addicts. The apartment block, flanked by a canal and a tram line, takes a unique approach to drug abuse by helping to keep ageing homeless people off the city’s streets and out of trouble with the law. “I like it here. Here there is no police watching you,” William told AFP as he rearranged the paraphernalia of his addiction on a small table: a pipe, a lighter, a mirror with traces of cocaine lines and an old credit card. “I can do what I want to do.”
✰ NH town to vote on whether to change name of pond at bishop’s urging: Voters in a small New Hampshire town will have the final say on whether to change the controversial name of a local pond. The small pond near the middle of Mont Vernon is known as Jew Pond. Town officials say it got its name back in the 1920s because the operators of a hotel that once stood next to it were Jewish. The name recently got the attention of New Hampshire Bishop Peter Libasci. He wrote a letter to the local newspaper saying the name conveyed contempt and urged townspeople to change it. Residents will decide in the March 13 election. Some residents told WMUR-TV that they don’t find the name offensive and that it’s part of the town’s history.
✰ Exposing the Severity of the Fukushima Disaster (Video): Fukushima has had 5 major meltdowns now, in a disaster that is making experts say that it is larger than Chernobyl. Aljazeera reported in September that the radiation emitted from Fukushima would rival or surpass Chernobyl in only the weeks following the disaster. According to Aljazeera: “Experts say that the total radiation leaked will eventually exceed the amounts released from the Chernobyl disaster that the Ukraine in April 1986. This amount would make Fukushima the worst nuclear disaster in history.” This news was from 2011, but the current news isn’t much better. After officials said they were going to perform a ‘cold shutdown’ to prevent any further issues, its now come out that the Fukushima reactor temperature now surpasses 752 degrees — whereas 100 degrees celsius was required for the cold shutdown. Tepco, the operators of the plant, say the thermometer is conveniently broken, but they have been known to conceal the truth from the public in the past.
✰ Indian Man Killed for Public Toilet Time: The fight occurred between residents of a tenement with shared facilities, a common situation in India’s densely populated financial matrix. The incident brings India’s sanitation problems and the lack of proper facilities sharply into focus. Simon Lingeree was killed last month when he got into a heated argument with Santosh Kargutkar while using a public toilet. The latter became highly impatient while waiting his turn. When Mr. Lingeree exited the toilet, he was physically assaulted. There were no weapons involved, just fists, but the young man was struck a fatal blow to the crotch. The killer quickly fled the scene and was later arrested.
✰ Marijuana Odor Overpowers Police Station: The strong odor of marijuana from the evidence room at a local police station in Florida seems to be a real problem for some whiny cops. “The biggest complaint is how strong the odor is,” said Atlantic Beach Police Commander Victor Gualillo, reports ActionNewsJax.com. All seized dope collected during busts is stored in a 200-square-foot evidence room at the station. “Anytime you store that much marijuana it’s rather pungent,” Commander Gualillo complained. But it seems you count on this bunch of overwrought weenies to dramatize the situation way beyond just the smell. They’re talking about “doing something” before “somebody gets hurt.” “I’m told there are serious health concerns,” claimed Atlantic Beach City Manager Jim Hanson about all the collected drugs in the evidence room. “There are other evidence technicians who have gotten sick,” Hanson claimed.
✰ Addict was smoking 15 joints a day: Adrian Watson, 41, was arrested by police after neighbours complained of a strong smell of gas coming from a house in Huddersfield Road, Elland. Bradford Crown Court heard how officers at first thought there may have been a leak, but after entering the property found 24 cannabis plants and growing equipment. They also found documents in the house with Watson’s name on and another address in Dewsbury Road, Elland, where they later found Watson as well as more cannabis. A total of 2.24kg of the drug was found, with a street value of around £19,000. Police experts believe there was enough cannabis to last up to 594 days, but Watson told police that his habit of 15 joints a day meant he would have got through the drug much quicker. He admitted producing cannabis for personal use.
✰ Dolphins Reported Talking Whale in Their Sleep: News has come from France that some captive-born dolphins there have been recorded “talking in their sleep” — and talking in Whale, no less, not Dolphinese. The scientists involved say this would be the first time that dolphins have been recorded mimicking sounds a significant period of time after hearing them. But there’s also the intriguing possibility that these sounds — virtually identical to sounds made by the humpback whale — may, if the dolphins are really asleep and not just resting, be direct expression of something the dolphins are dreaming.
✰ Youngsters get high on cobra venom: “The sale of drugs (like K-72 and K-76) which have cobra venom is increasing at rave parties and in discos. These drugs enhance sensation and boost energy so that revellers can dance for longer hours,” a senior officer of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) told IANS on condition of anonymity. “The sales increase a week before Valentine’s Day in Delhi and NCR (National Capital Region) and are consumed at hushed-up parties,” he added.
✰ Morgellons: Static Electricity or Moving Nano-Machines? You Decide: Contrary to what the CDC says, Morgellons is not a delusion. I have personally felt and seen my hair move by itself, I’ve had strange fibres come out of my skin, I constantly feel like there are bugs crawling over my body. I have witnessed many of my fresh organic vegetables, fruits and meat moving by itself, causing me to have to throw out the majority of the food I’ve bought. I have had to stop wearing a lot of my clothes because even those seem to be comprised of moving fibres. Some might say the fibres in the video below are moving because of static electricity, however I find that very hard to believe.
✰ Sick: Young, Undercover Cops Flirted With Students to Trick Them Into Selling Pot: Last year in three high schools in Florida, several undercover police officers posed as students. The undercover cops went to classes, became Facebook friends and flirted with the other students. One 18-year-old honor student named Justin fell in love with an attractive 25-year-old undercover cop after spending weeks sharing stories about their lives, texting and flirting with each other. One day she asked Justin if he smoked pot. Even though he didn’t smoke marijuana, the love-struck teen promised to help find some for her. Every couple of days she would text him asking if he had the marijuana. Finally, Justin was able to get it to her. She tried to give him $25 for the marijuana and he said he didn’t want the money — he got it for her as a present. A short while later, the police did a big sweep and arrest 31 students — including Justin. Almost all were charged with selling a small amount of marijuana to the undercover cops. Now Justin has a felony hanging over his head.
✰ The Disappearing Face of New York: ‘During the eight years it took James and Karla Murray to complete this project, one third of the stores they featured have closed’
✰ Congrats, US Government: You’re Scaring Web Businesses Into Moving Out Of The US: The federal government has been paying lip service to the idea that it wants to encourage new businesses and startups in the US. And this is truly important to the economy, as studies have shown that almost all of the net job growth in this country is coming from internet startups. Thankfully some politicians recognize this, but the federal government seems to be going in the other direction. With the JotForm situation unfolding, where the US government shut down an entire website with no notice or explanation, people are beginning to recognize that the US is not safe for internet startups.
✰ Facebook hacking student Glenn Mangham jailed: A software development student from York who hacked into Facebook has been jailed for eight months. Glenn Mangham, 26, had earlier admitted infiltrating the social networking website between April and May 2011. Mangham, of Cornlands Road, York, had shown search engine Yahoo how it could improve security and said he wanted to do the same for Facebook. Sentencing Mangham, Judge Alistair McCreath said his actions could have been “utterly disastrous” for Facebook. Alison Saunders, from the Crown Prosecution Service, described the case as “the most extensive and flagrant incidence of social media hacking to be brought before British courts”. Prosecutor Sandip Patel rejected Mangham’s claims, saying: “He acted with determination, undoubted ingenuity and it was sophisticated, it was calculating.” Facebook spent $200,000 (£126,400) dealing with Mangham’s crime, which triggered a “concerted, time-consuming and costly investigation” by the FBI and British law enforcement, Mr Patel said.
✰ A medical study of the Haitian zombie: We hear a lot about zombies these days – in films, in music and even in philosophy – but many are unaware that in 1997 The Lancet published a medical study of three genuine Haitian zombies. The cases studies were reported by British anthropologist Roland Littlewood and Haitian doctor Chavannes Douyon and concerned three individuals identified as zombies after they had apparently passed away. The Haitian explanation for how zombies are created involves the distinction between different elements of the human being – including the body, the gwobon anj (the animating principle) and the ti-bon anj, which represents something akin to agency, awareness, and memory.
✰ Musicians Wage War Against Robots: After the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, all bets were off for live musicians who played in movie theaters. Thanks to synchronized sound, the use of live musicians was unnecessary — and perhaps a larger sin, old-fashioned. In 1930 the American Federation of Musicians formed a new organization called the Music Defense League and launched a scathing ad campaign to fight the advance of this terrible menace known as recorded sound. The evil face of that campaign was the dastardly, maniacal robot. The Music Defense League spent over $500,000, running ads in newspapers throughout the United States and Canada. The ads pleaded with the public to demand humans play their music (be it in movie or stage theaters), rather than some cold, unseen machine.
✰ Italy confiscates $6 trillion in fake US bonds: Swiss authorities have confiscated $6 trillion in counterfeit U.S. bonds at the request of Italian prosecutors, authorities in Italy said Friday. Eight people were arrested in Italy and placed under investigation for fraud and other crimes. The bonds, carrying the false date of issue of 1934, had been transported in 2007 from Hong Kong to Zurich, where they were transferred to a Swiss trust, according to prosecutors in the southern Italian city of Potenza. Authorities said that U.S. officials had confirmed the bonds were counterfeit. Prosecutors said the fraud had not been completed, but it appeared that the suspects intended to try to sell the fake bonds to a developing nation, directly or through an intermediary bank.
✰ FBI Foils Own Terror Plot (Again): The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has once again proven that the only thing Americans need fear, is their own government, with the latest “terror attack” foiled being one entirely of their own design. USA Today reports that a suspect had been arrested by the FBI who was “en route to the U.S. Capitol allegedly to detonate a suicide bomb.” While initial reports portrayed the incident as a narrowly averted terrorist attack, CBS would report that a “high ranking source told CBS News the man was “never a real threat.”" The explosives the would-be bomber carried were provided to him by the FBI during what they described as a “lengthy and extensive operation.” The only contact the suspect had with “Al Qaeda” was with FBI officials posing as associates of the elusive, omnipresent, bearded terror conglomerate. The FBI, much like their MI5 counterparts in England, have a propensity for recruiting likely candidates from mosques they covertly run.
✰ Lawmakers riled by Google iPhone tracking: Three U.S. lawmakers urged the Federal Trade Commission to grill Google after it admitted secretly tracking millions of people’s iPhone and Mac Web browsing. Reps. Edward Markey, D-Mass., Joe Barton, R-Texas, and Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., said they want to know whether Google’s behavior “constitutes a violation” of a privacy settlement Google Inc. and the commission worked out last year. Google pledged at the time not to “misrepresent” its privacy practices to consumers. The fine for violating the agreement is $16,000 for every violation each day. Google and three other advertising companies used special computer code that tricks Apple Inc.’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor users’ Internet habits — even though Safari, the most-widely used smartphone Web browser, is designed to block such tracking by default.
✰ Virginia Poised To Enact ‘State-Sponsored Rape’ Law Forcing Women To Be Vaginally Probed Before Abortions: Simply put, it is difficult to distinguish a law requiring women to be vaginally penetrated by a long metal object from state-sponsored rape. Worse, discussions among lawmakers leave little doubt that its supporters understood just what they were trying to write into law — they just didn’t care. As an unnamed lawmaker told a fellow Virginia delegate, a woman already consented to being “vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant.”
✰ Big Greenwashing 101: John Muir must be rolling over in his grave. The organization he founded in 1892, the Sierra Club, America’s oldest and largest environmental group, have been in cahoots with the worst of the worst corporations in recent years. They’ve been paid tens of millions of dollars by the fossil fuel industry, tyrannical billionaire mayors and Wall Street in exchange for cleaning (and greening) up their public images. Not only have they acted as a green public relations firm for the bastions of wealth and power, but have also sold out frontline communities most impacted by extractive industry.
✰ Cellphone use linked to selfish behavior: Marketing professors Anastasiya Pocheptsova and Rosellina Ferraro, with graduate student, Ajay T. Abraham, conducted a series of experiments on test groups of cellphone users. The findings appear in their working paper, “The Effect of Mobile Phone Use on Prosocial Behavior.” Prosocial behavior, as defined in the study, is action intended to benefit another person or society as a whole. The researchers found that after a short period of cellphone use the subjects were less inclined to volunteer for a community service activity when asked, compared to the control-group counterparts. The cell phone users were also less persistent in solving word problems — even though they knew their answers would translate to a monetary donation to charity. The decreased focus on others held true even when participants were merely asked to draw a picture of their cellphones and think about how they used them.
✰ Poachers slaughter 200 elephants in Cameroon; ivory profits fueling regional conflicts: Poachers have slaughtered at least 200 elephants in the past five weeks in a patch of Africa where they are more dangerously endangered than anywhere else on Earth, wildlife activists said. The money made from selling elephant tusks is fueling misery throughout the continent, the International Fund for Animal Welfare warned. Many elephant calves orphaned by the recent killings have been spotted in Cameroon’s Bouba Ndjida National Park, and activists fear the animals may soon die of hunger and thirst. “Their deaths will only compound the impact of the poaching spree on the Cameroon’s threatened elephant populations,” the organization said Thursday in a statement. It is not known how many elephants remain in the West African nation. The latest figures from the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimated there were only 1,000 to 5,000 left in 2007.
✰ Let’s Kill the Internet and Start Over: The internet is broken – we need to start over … Last year, the level and ferocity of cyber-attacks on the internet reached such a horrendous level that some are now thinking the unthinkable: to let the internet wither on the vine and start up a new more robust one instead. On being asked if we should start again, many – maybe most – immediately argue that the internet is such an integral part of our social and economic fabric that even considering a change in its fundamental structure is inconceivable and rather frivolous. I was one of those. However, recently the evidence suggests that our efforts to secure the internet are becoming less and less effective, and so the idea of a radical alternative suddenly starts to look less laughable.
✰ Loop Geography as Defensive Tactic: The existence of these clusters is so little known that most people don’t realize when they’re nearing the epicenter of Fort Meade’s, even when the GPS on their car dashboard suddenly begins giving incorrect directions, trapping the driver in a series of U-turns, because the government is jamming all nearby signals. It’s an experiential trap street—an infinite loop—a deliberate cartographic error introduced into the mapping of the world so as to sow detour and digression. A kind of digital baffling, or recursive geography as state defensive tactic. I’m also curious when we might see this privatized and domesticated—gated communities, for instance, blocking the GPS navigation of their streets in the misguided belief that this will help protect them from future burglary, effectively delisting themselves from public cartographic records. Perhaps the future of neighborhood security lies in the privatized repurposing of advanced signal-jamming technology
✰ Pa. man’s Facebook ‘surfer’ page lured teens: A married father used phony Facebook profiles to pose as two different Florida surfers to solicit sexually graphic messages and photos from seven teenage girls in western Pennsylvania, and two of the girls eventually agreed to meet for sex with the surfers’ middle-aged “friend” — yet another fake persona he used, the state attorney general said Friday. William R. Ainsworth, 53, of Mars, was charged Thursday with 68 counts, including involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and multiple counts of charges that include attempted unlawful contact with a minor, possession of child pornography and criminal use of a computer.
✰ Mobile Apps Take Data Without Permission: The address book in smartphones — where some of the user’s most personal data is carried — is free for app developers to take at will, often without the phone owner’s knowledge. Companies that make many of the most popular smartphone apps for Apple and Android devices — Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram among them — routinely gather the information in personal address books on the phone and in some cases store it on their own computers. The practice came under scrutiny Wednesday by members of Congress who saw news reports that taking such data was an “industry best practice.” Apple, which approves all apps that appear in its iTunes store, addressed the controversy on Wednesday after lawmakers sent the company a letter asking how approved apps were allowed to take address book data without users’ permission. Apple’s published rules on apps expressly prohibit that practice.
✰ ‘Piggyback Bandit’ puzzles high school sports officials in Northwest: The stocky man showed up in a basketball uniform for a game at Century High School in North Dakota. Players and coaches assumed he was a fan who had come with another team, so nobody objected when he began to pitch in around the bench. “He helped lay out uniforms, got water. He even gave a couple of kids shoulder massages. Creepy stuff like that,” said Jim Haussler, activities director for the Bismarck Public School District. After the game was over, the man joined the winning team on the court and asked if he could get a piggyback ride. One bemused player gave it to him. “He makes himself appear as if he’s limited or handicapped. I think he plays an empathy card, so to speak,” Haussler said. “We didn’t realize what we were dealing with until several days later.”
✰ Paul McCartney says he’ll quit cannabis in Rolling Stone interview: Sir Paul has a self-confessed passion for marijuana. He has also been in trouble for drugs more times than bandmate John Lennon ever was, despite Lennon’s reputation as a heavy user. Sir Paul, 69, was introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan, who was stunned to learn he was a ‘pot virgin’ – in the mid-Sixties. After that came heroin, cocaine, LSD and a range of other psychedelics which inspired some of the Beatles’ best known songs. Sir Paul’s rap sheet for drugs is almost as long as his list of hits. He was arrested for cannabis possession in Sweden and at his Scottish farm in 1972.
✰ Calif. Woman Wins Suit Over Honda Hybrid’s Mileage Claim: It says that “a Los Angeles Superior Court commissioner has awarded Heather Peters $9,867.” As was discussed last month on All Things Considered, “Peters decided to opt out of a class-action settlement that would have given her as little as $100 and awarded the attorneys $8.5 million. The 46-year-old Los Angeles resident, who is also a lawyer, decided to even the playing field by filing her suit in a small claims court, which doesn’t allow the parties to retain lawyers.” Her case: Peters showed that ads had claimed her Honda Civic hybrid would get 50 miles per gallon. In court, as Eyder previously wrote, “she came armed with hundreds of pictures of her dashboard showing that she got at best 42 miles per gallon and after a software update that number dropped to fewer than 30 miles per gallon.”
✰ Man Killed in Dog Poop Dispute: A neighborly dispute over dog poop turned deadly in the Tacony section of Philadelphia. It happened just after 4 p.m. Tuesday on the 6500 block of Torresdale Avenue. Tyrirk Harris, 27, is accused of killing his 47-year-old neighbor Franklin Manuel Santana, according to Philadelphia Police. Cops say Santana walked a couple doors down Torresdale to confront Harris over his dogs. “A German Shepherd and a Chihuahua — these dogs were running free,” said Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small. “There were dog feces on several of the neighbor’s yards. That’s what led to this particular confrontation.” Police say Harris then pulled out a 9-mm handgun and shot his neighbor several times, striking Santana in his face and chest.
✰ Anonymous Hacked Documents Reveal Law Enforcement Spied on Occupy and Shared Information with Private Intelligence Company, STRATFOR: Computer hackers known as Anonymous leaked information obtained by hacking into private intelligence firm Stratfor’s computer network. The documents – what Anonymous is calling a teaser – suggest that from at least October to November 2011 Stratfor worked with Texas law enforcement to infiltrate the Occupy movement and spy on the Deep Green Resistance movement. The document contains emails in which Stratfor employees discuss Occupy Austin and Deep Green Resistance. Stratfor “Watch Officer” Marc Lanthemann writes about receiving information on Occupy Austin and DGR from a “Texas DPS agent.” The Texas Department of Public Safety is a statewide law enforcement agency that includes an Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division.
✰ Dawn of the Drones: The Realization of the Total Surveillance State: “To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is it’s justice; that is it’s morality.” – Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 19th century French philosopher
✰ David Choe Takes Barbara Walters To Paint Graffiti: David Choe has received a world wind of media attention after the story broke that he is holding $200 million worth of Facebook stock after painting their offices in 2005. Barbara Walters recently met up with Choe for an interview, and to hit the streets. Check out the hilarious video.
✰ 300k farmers hope for lawsuit against Monsanto: Not only were the smaller farms concerned over how the manufactured seeds had been carried by wind and creature alike onto their own plantations, but the biggest problem perhaps was that Monsanto was filing lawsuits themselves against farmers. Monsanto went after hundreds of farmers for infringing on their patented seed after audits revealed that their farms had contained their product — as a result of routine pollination by animals and acts of nature. Unable to afford a proper defense, competing small farms have been bought out by the company in droves. As a result, Monsanto saw their profits increase by the hundreds of millions over the last few years as a result. Between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto tackled 144 organic farms with lawsuits and investigated roughly 500 plantations annually during that span with a so-called “seed police.”
✰ Is Agriculture Sucking Fresh Water Dry?: The average American uses enough water each year to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and global agriculture consumes a whopping 92% of all fresh water used annually. Those are the conclusions of the most comprehensive analysis to date of global water use, which also finds that one-fifth of humankind’s water consumption flows across international borders as “virtual water”—the water needed to produce a commodity, such as meat or electronics, if the ultimate consumers were to make it themselves rather than outsource its growth or manufacture.
✰ Female Passengers Say They’re Targeted By TSA: When Ellen Terrell and her husband, Charlie, flew out of DFW Airport several months ago, Terrell says she was surprised by a question a female TSA agent asked her. “She says to me, ‘Do you play tennis?’ And I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘You just have such a cute figure.’” Terrell says she walked into the body scanner which creates an image that a TSA agent in another room reviews. Terrell says she tried to leave, but the female agent stopped her. “She says, ‘Wait, we didn’t get it,’” recalls Terrell, who claims the TSA agent sent her back a second time and even a third. But that wasn’t good enough. After the third time, Terrell says even the agent seemed frustrated with her co-workers in the other room. “She’s talking into her microphone and she says, ‘Guys, it is not blurry, I’m letting her go. Come on out.’” When TSA agents do a pat down on a traveler, only female agents are allowed to touch female passengers. But the TSA allows male agents to view the images of female passengers.
✰ CDC Warns Untreatable Gonorrhea is On the Way: Gonorrhea, one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the United States, is increasingly showing resistance to one of the last known effective antibiotic treatments, leading researchers from the Centers for Disease Control to “sound the alarm” about potentially untreatable forms of the disease. “During the past three years, the wily gonococcus has become less susceptible to our last line of antimicrobial defense, threatening our ability to cure gonorrhea,” Gail Bolan, director of the CDC’s sexually transmitted disease prevention program, wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine last week.
✰ Darpa’s Magic Plan: ‘Battlefield Illusions’ to Mess With Enemy Minds: Arthur C. Clarke once famously quipped that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So perhaps it was inevitable that the Pentagon’s extreme technology arm would eventually start acting like magicians — and try to create illusions on the front lines. In its new budget, unveiled on Monday, Darpa introduced a new $4 million investigation into technologies that will “manage the adversary’s sensory perception” in order to “confuse, delay, inhibit, or misdirect [his] actions.” Darpa calls the project “Battlefield Illusion.” Of course. “The current operational art of human-sensory battlefield deception is largely an ad-hoc practice,” the agency sighs as it lays out the project’s goals. But if researchers can better understand “how humans use their brains to process sensory inputs,” the military should be able to develop “auditory and visual” hallucinations that will “provide tactical advantage for our forces.”
✰ ‘Black’ hurricane names brewing swirl of dissent: Do devastating hurricanes need help from affirmative action? A member of Congress apparently thinks so, and is demanding the storms be given names that sound “black.” The congressional newspaper the Hill reported this week that Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, feels that the current names are too “lily white,” and is seeking to have better representation for names reflecting African-Americans and other ethnic groups. “All racial groups should be represented,” Lee said, according to the Hill. She hoped federal weather officials “would try to be inclusive of African-American names.” A sampling of popular names that could be used include Keisha, Jamal and Deshawn, according to the paper.

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o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:24:00 +0000

✦ Teen who butchered 9-year-old neighbor wrote that killing was amazing, enjoyable in her journal before she went to church: “I just f—— killed someone. I strangled them and slit their throat and stabbed them now they’re dead. I don’t know how to feel atm. It was ahmazing. As soon as you get over the “ohmygawd I can’t do this” feeling, it’s pretty enjoyable. I’m kinda nervous and shaky though right now. Kay, I gotta go to church now…lol.” Thanks Jasmine
✦ GREAT (?) MOMENTS IN COMICS HISTORY: “MAD’S PUNK ROCK GROUP OF THE YEAR” (1978): But when it had one of its surges of brilliance, MAD was indeed a force to be reckoned with and if you were of the right age at the right time it was both eye opening and fucking hilarious, a good case in point being the hit-or-miss observations and social commentary found in the long-running “(FILL IN THE BLANK) OF THE YEAR” series. Two of those stand out in my memory as being absolutely vital in the forging of my sense of humor were “Mad’s Karate Movie Producer of the Year” (MAD #167, June 1974), a piss-your-pants moment of brilliance illustrated by Jack Davis during the height of the 1970′s martial arts movie boom, and issue #199′s (June 1978) poke at the British punk rock movement when it reared its Mohawked head over here in the States.
✦ Know your Rights!- right!?: Recently as I was doing some research I came across a designers site that had a rug for sale that had the exact style of my friend Keen One, I thought to myself how unlikely that he would do such a commercial project so I passed the link for confirmation. As it turned out it wasn’t an agreed upon collaboration but an artistic infringement by the designer. Since the work was painted on a wall in public they must have assumed the artist had no rights to said work since it may or may not have been legal and decided to use for their own commercial and financial gain.
✦ Play the Rings of a Tree Trunk Like a Record: What would the trunk of a tree sound like if a cross section of it were played like an LP? With his creation Years, Bartholomäus Traubeck attempts to answer that question by using a turntable, PlayStation Eye Camera, a stepper motor to control the arm, and computer running Ableton Live. As you’ll hear in the video above, the rings of the tree trunk, as interpreted by this piece, create an eerie and ominous piano track that sounds like it was taken from psychological horror film. Who knew trees were so emo?
✦ THE FAB 5 FREDDY DEBATE CONTINUES: Revok recently pulled Fab 5 Freddy’s card calling him a biter and a fraud (check Revok’s blog post HERE). This accusation has drew a line in the sand with people opposing and supporting Fred’s work. Today I received this harshly retarded email from Holland’s Shoe aka Niels Shoe Meulman…
✦ Fungi Discovered In The Amazon Will Eat Your Plastic: The Amazon is home to more species than almost anywhere else on earth. One of them, carried home recently by a group from Yale University, appears to be quite happy eating plastic in airless landfills. The group of students, part of Yale’s annual Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory with molecular biochemistry professor Scott Strobel, ventured to the jungles of Ecuador. The mission was to allow “students to experience the scientific inquiry process in a comprehensive and creative way.” The group searched for plants, and then cultured the microorganisms within the plant tissue. As it turns out, they brought back a fungus new to science with a voracious appetite for a global waste problem: polyurethane.
✦ Stealing in virtual world is theft in real life, top Dutch court rules: The amulet and mask were a 13-year-old boy’s virtual possessions in an online fantasy game. In the real world, he was beaten and threaten with a knife to give them up. The Dutch Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the theft conviction of a youth who stole another boy’s possessions in the popular online fantasy game RuneScape. Judges ordered the offender to perform 144 hours of community service. Only a handful of such cases have been heard in the world, and they have reached varying conclusions about the legal status of “virtual goods” — and whether stealing them is real-world theft. The suspect’s lawyer had argued the amulet and mask “were neither tangible nor material and, unlike for example electricity, had no economic value.”
✦ New Theory of Life Claims to Unite Fields of Science: The Earth is alive, asserts a new scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that purportedly inanimate, non-living objects — for example, planets, water, proteins, and DNA — are animate, that is, alive.
✦ First ‘Heartless’ Man: You Don’t Really Need A Heart, Or A Pulse: Two doctors Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier from the Texas Heart Institute successfully replaced a dying man’s heart with a device—proving that it is possible for your body to be kept alive without a heart, or a pulse.
✦ Twitter news: US bars friends over Twitter joke: TWO pals were barred from entering the US after innocent tweets joking about “destroying America” were picked up by the country’s anti-terror cops. US special agents monitoring Twitter spotted Leigh Van Bryan’s messages weeks before he left for a holiday in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting. Leigh, who also quipped about “digging up Marilyn Monroe” on Twitter, said they were treated like terrorists on arrival at a Los Angeles International Airport. The pair were held by armed guards and quizzed for five hours before being handcuffed, put in a van with illegal immigrants and locked up overnight.
✦ Key Internet operator VeriSign hit by hackers: VeriSign Inc, the company in charge of delivering people safely to more than half the world’s websites, has been hacked repeatedly by outsiders who stole undisclosed information from the leading Internet infrastructure company. The previously unreported breaches occurred in 2010 at the Reston, Virginia-based company, which is ultimately responsible for the integrity of Web addresses ending in .com, .net and .gov.
✦ A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors [Video]: Experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. Vehicles developed by KMel Robotics. Special thanks to Professor Daniel Lee for his support.
✦ 2,100 pounds of marijuana seized from fake AT&T; work truck: Two men are behind bars after authorities found more than a ton of marijuana inside a fake AT&T; work truck. It all happened off FM 490 just west of the Hidalgo County community of McCook. A Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) state trooper pulled over what appeared to be an AT&T; truck over for speeding 72 mph in a 60 mph zone. Driver Aaron Arrellano-Salgado fled on foot but was caught. Authorities found 189 bundles with 2,168 pounds of marijuana inside the cloned work truck. State troopers pulled over a second car driven by Wilfredo Garza-Salgado for running a stop sign nearby.
✦ Oriental riff: The Oriental riff, also known as the Asian riff or the Chinese riff, is a musical riff or phrase that has often been used as a trope or stereotype of orientalism in Western culture to represent the idea of the Orient, China, Japan or a generic East Asian theme by Western culture. The riff is sometimes accompanied by the sound of a gong.
✦ Police Raid 5-Story Bronx Marijuana Farm, 593 Plants Seized: Police raided a five-story Bronx building that they believe was being used as a marijuana farm with hundreds of plants in an elaborate growing system. A search warrant was executed at about 1 p.m. Tuesday at 610 Morris Park Ave., according to police. Investigators seized 593 plants, some as tall as seven feet, as well as 75 pounds of marijuana that had been cut, dried and packaged in plastic. Sources told NBC New York that each floor of the building was used for a different stage of growth for the plants. It had been outfitted with an intricate ventilation and hydration system. The seized plants and packages totaled about 1,550 pounds, police said. Investigators said about 50 to 60 pounds of marijuana were being produced each month for a value of about $250,000.
✦ Joan Rivers, 78, gets stoned in a carpark and is unable to drive home… and its all filmed for her reality show: Joan Rivers is not known as a shrinking violet. But the 78-year-old has taken things a step further by smoking a marijuana pipe in a carpark with her friend – and had it all filmed for her reality show. The comedian, known for her red carpet interviews at award shows, became so stoned, she was unable to drive home and later ended up fully clothed in a hot tub and drinking the water out of her shoe.
✦ Your cell phone is a government issued tracking device: Mobile phones have become a major part of our modern civilization. These hand-held computers have reached a level of sophistication that allows us to instantly communicate through text, voice and video. This same technology is also being used to amass a situational awareness and sensory system that will track you and the world around you. You and your cell phone are nodes in a grid of sensors that paints a virtual picture of the world.
✦ US ‘no-fly’ list of suspected terrorists doubles in 12 months: The size of the US government’s secret list of suspected terrorists who are banned from flying to or within the country has more than doubled in the past year. The no-fly list jumped from about 10,000 known or suspected terrorists one year ago to about 21,000, according to government figures. About 500 are US nationals. The flood of new names began after the failed Christmas 2009 bombing of a Detroit-bound jetliner when the US government lowered the standard for putting people on the list and scoured its files for anyone who qualified. “We learned a lot about the watchlisting process and made strong improvements, which continue to this day,” said Timothy Healy, director of the Terrorist Screening Centre, which produces the no-fly list.
✦Stacey Irvine, 17, collapses after eating only McDonald’s chicken nuggets since age 2: Ever since she was a toddler, Stacey Irvine has eaten little else but chicken nuggets and the occasional portion of chips. Now, at the age of 17, she has been warned by doctors to change her appalling diet or die. The factory worker – who says she has never tasted fresh fruit or vegetables – had to be taken to hospital earlier this week when she collapsed after struggling to breathe.
✦ Addicts’ cravings have different roots in men and women: When it comes to addiction, sex matters. A new brain imaging study by Yale School of Medicine researchers suggests stress robustly activates areas of the brain associated with craving in cocaine-dependent women, while drug cues activate similar brain regions in cocaine-dependent men. The study, expected to be published online Jan. 31 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, suggests men and women with cocaine dependence might benefit more from different treatment options.
✦ Missing Iraq $100 Million: Pentagon Unable to Account for Missing Iraqi Millions: The Pentagon doesn’t know what happened to more than $100 million in cash held at Saddam Hussein’s palace in Baghdad during the Iraq war, according to a new report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. What’s more, the Pentagon can’t find documents to explain what it spent as much as $1.7 billion on from funds held on behalf of the Iraqi government by the New York Federal Reserve, the report says. The missing records raise new questions about how the US government handled billions of dollars in Iraqi funds during the war. The new report, the latest in a multi-year investigation by the inspector general into missing money in Iraq, paints a picture of Pentagon officials digging through boxes of hard copy records looking for missing paper copies of Excel spreadsheets, monthly reports and other paper documents that should have been kept detailing what the money was spent on and why those expenditures were necessary. Apparently, there are no electronic records
✦ Cocaine accidentally sent to UN headquarters: Bags containing 16 kilogram of cocaine that Mexican drug traffickers recently lost has turned up in an unlikely place – the United Nations in New York. Two fake UN bags containing the drugs – which experts said had a street value of about $US2 million ($1.9 million) – set off a security alert when they were delivered, apparently by accident, to the global body’s headquarters. The bags, which had the UN symbol printed on them, were shipped from Mexico through the DHL delivery company’s centre in Cincinnati, Ohio, deputy commissioner Paul Browne of the New York Police Department said. But the bags had no address on them, nor any return to sender details. “It is my understanding that because there was no addressee, the DHL just thought, well, that’s the UN symbol so we should ship it on to UN headquarters and let them figure out who it was supposed to go to,” deputy commissioner Browne said.
✦ The Mercenary Techie Who Troubleshoots for Drug Dealers and Jealous Lovers: With Martin’s system, each crewmember gets a cell phone that operates using a prepaid SIM card; they also get a two-week plastic pill organizer filled with 14 SIM cards where the pills should be. Each SIM card, loaded with $50 worth of airtime, is attached to a different phone number and stores all contacts, text messages and call histories associated with that number, like a removable hard drive. This makes a new SIM card effectively a new phone. Every morning, each crewmember swaps out his phone’s card for the card in next day’s compartment in the pill organizers. After all 14 cards are used, they start over at the first one.
✦ Student receives free cocaine with Amazon textbook order: A US university student discovered a package of cocaine in a pre-owned textbook she bought from online retailer Amazon.com. Sophia Stockton, a junior at Mid-America Nazarene University in Olathe, Kansas, ordered a textbook called Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives and Issues through Amazon.com for a spring course on terrorism. After flipping through the pages of the just received textbook a bag of ‘white powder’ fell to the ground. Stockton initially thought that it was Anthrax and took the book and bag to the Gardner police station after classes and was surprised she had been shipped $400 worth of cocaine. She told WPTV: I told them white powder was in my terrorism textbook and so I put it on the table and they’re like, ‘oh, okay,’ And so he went back and tested it, He comes back and says, ‘you didn’t happen to order some cocaine with your textbook, did you?’ And I was like, no!
✦ New designer drug ‘Roflcoptr’ hits UK dance floors: The new ‘rave drug’ is called Roflcoptr, which is a street-speak acronym for “Roll On the Floor Laughing Crapping Our Pants Totally Ruined”. An alternative name is “mket” (which is a truncation of the full chemical name, as described below). Like other drugs linked to electronica and other forms of club / dance music, the physiological affect is to produce a state of euphoria and sometimes have hallucinogenic properties. The basis of the new substance is the chemical methoxetamine (and which has a very long chemical name: 2-(3-methoxyphenyl)-2-(ethylamino)cyclohexanone). The chemical takes the form of a white powder. The user snorts the powder.
✦ Drug war hypocrisy: drug trafficking’s big money benefits Big Brother and corrupt banksters: The hypocrisy of the war on drugs is outrageous when compared to the amount of drug trafficking that benefits the CIA and international banking system. The son of a convicted notorious mobster, John Gotti Jr, when asked in court if the family still dealt drugs cracked, “No, we can’t compete with the government.” Today in Afghanistan, American troops have been seen guarding poppy fields used to make heroin. Those fields were all but wiped out by 2001 when the Taliban destroyed them and forbade that agricultural pursuit. Now they’re flourishing again after the American occupation. This doesn’t make sense despite all the mainstream reports that American troops are protecting the poppy farmers from the bad guys. Internet sites such as Prison Planet, Info Wars, The Political Coffeehouse and others report otherwise. They connect the CIA and US military to restarting the poppy fields in Afghanistan in 2002, increasing poppy growth by over 650 percent. Who’s telling it like it is?
✦ Discipline recommended in Air Force whistle-blower case: The U.S. Office of Special Counsel said Tuesday it has recommended disciplinary action against three Air Force officials after concluding they retaliated against four civilian mortuary workers at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for disclosing that remains of fallen troops had been mishandled.
✦ Peacemaker: Lauderdale police put trouble spots under surveillance with Big Brother truck: Tania Ouaknine is convinced the police are watching her. She’s not paranoid — it says as much on the red sign painted along the side on the hulking armored truck that’s been parked in front of her eight-room Parisian Motel for several days. “Warning: You are under video surveillance,” reads the bold message on the side of the truck. From the front bumper of the menacing vehicle, another sign taunts: “Whatcha gonna do when we come for you?” The truck is a new weapon for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department in the fight against drugs and neighborhood nuisances, and it looks like a Winnebago on steroids. They call it “The Peacemaker,” and it may be a first in South Florida.
✦ Facebook IPO: What happens if Mark Zuckerberg were to die?: “In the event that Mr. Zuckerberg controls our company at the time of his death, control may be transferred to a person or entity that he designates as his successor. As a board member and officer, Mr. Zuckerberg owes a fiduciary duty to our stockholders and must act in good faith in a manner he reasonably believes to be in the best interests of our stockholders.”
✦ Teacher abused students during class, detective says: Investigators recovered photos from the film processing store and Mark Berndt’s home that allegedly showed the students bound and blindfolded and some with large Madagascar cockroaches crawling on them inside the school setting, Scott said. Scott said girls were allegedly photographed with a blue spoon holding a white substance near their mouths. Investigators said they believe that substance was Berndt’s semen and that he had the girls consume it. Thanks Jasmine
✦ 9-Eyes: Collection of strange Google Street View screenshots
✦ Early 70′s LA Gang Graffiti: Howard Gribble: When these photographs of Chicano “placas” (wall writing) were made in the early 1970s gangs and their graffiti were a mysterious presence that few understood — if they were aware of them at all. In the thirty plus years since the popular media and entertainment industry have repeatedly spotlighted the subject to the point that the gangsta culture has become a pervasive part of our society. The original gangster graffiti of this period was of a purer form than that seen today, with much emphasis on artistic flourishes. These pieces could last for years in the days before municipilaties instituted aggresive graffiti removal programs that quickly remove them from view — often overnight. This is, of course, still vandalism but from an earlier and more innocent time.
✦ ALIEN or HUMAN born with PIGS BODY….you decide. [Video]

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Painkillers ‘n Coffee Enemas

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:32:17 +0000

❑ 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,”
❑ Federal funding went to coffee enema study: A decade ago, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine helped fund a study with the National Cancer Institute of an arduous regimen for pancreatic cancer that is best known for frequent “detoxifying” coffee enemas. The research design pitted standard chemotherapy against a regimen developed by Nicholas Gonzalez, a New York City physician. In the study, volunteers on the Gonzalez protocol got coffee enemas twice a day. They also took dozens of supplements each day, including 69 to 81 capsules of pancreatic enzymes; maintained a strict diet; and engage in other “detoxifying” activities, such as “skin brushing.”
❑ Still more evidence that Morgellons disease is most likely delusional parasitosis, 2012 edition: Imagine having the feeling that tiny bugs are crawling on your body, that you have oozing sores and mysterious fibers sprouting from your skin. Sound like a horror movie? Well, at one point several years ago, government doctors were getting up to 20 calls a day from people saying they had such symptoms. Many of these people were in California and one of that state’s U.S. senators, Dianne Feinstein, asked for a scientific study. In 2008, federal health officials began to study people saying they were affected by this freakish condition called Morgellons. The study cost nearly $600,000. Its long-awaited results, released Wednesday, conclude that Morgellons exists only in the patients’ minds. “We found no infectious cause,” said Mark Eberhard, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who was part of the 15-member study team.
❑ Bonnie and Clyde guns bring $210,000 in Missouri auction: Two guns believed seized from gangsters Bonnie and Clyde in 1933 after a deadly Missouri shootout with police sold for a combined $210,000 at an auction on Saturday in Kansas City to an unnamed online bidder. The bidder paid $130,000 for a .45-caliber Thompson submachine gun, known as a “Tommy gun” in gangster slang. The same bidder paid $80,000 for an 1897 12-gauge Winchester shotgun.
❑ 5 Creepy Forms of Mind Control You’re Exposed to Daily: One of our favorite subjects is the way marketers can use psychology to manipulate you into doing what they want (we don’t think “brainwashing” is too strong a word). We know what you’re thinking: You’re far too cynical to fall for the ads you fast forward through on your DVR or the little tricks employed by marketers and politicians to push your subconscious buttons. But are you sure? Because science has found …
❑ Man gets 40 years for killing mom over Avril Lavigne concert tickets: Prosecutors say he got into an argument with his mother after she refused to call a friend to obtain skybox tickets for him to an upcoming Avril Lavigne concert. Lyons then hit Bolek with a cognac bottle, stabbed her repeatedly and poured chemicals like Tile-X, Drain-O and Rapid insecticide over her body. He was found several hours later at a Hooters restaurant.
❑ Calif. man arrested after driving SUV into subway tunnel: Police arrested the driver of an SUV after he headed straight down a tunnel into the San Francisco subway system, causing massive delays during Thursday morning’s commute. Muni Metro spokesman Paul Rose told NBCBayArea. com in San Francisco the vehicle drove into a tunnel on Church Street shortly before 6 a.m. Thursday and headed east toward the Van Ness Station. The SUV stopped when it got stuck on the tracks, police said. Police say 40-year-old Scott Mitchell of Sebastopol, Calif., was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence, failure to obey a stop sign and driving on train tracks.
❑ Scotland is the fake cocaine capital of the world: The reason why is obvious: a 25kg plastic drum of benzocaine wholesales at £2750 from specialist suppliers, but one kilo of high purity cocaine powder – say 89% pure cocaine hydrochloride just off the boat from Colombia – sells at £50,000 in Scotland. So anyone cutting 1kg of coke worth £50,000 with 1kg of benzocaine worth £200 would get 2kg of half-strength product that gives a profit of about 60% on a single cut. Detective Sergeant Michael Miller, a drugs expert at Strathclyde Police, reckons cocaine is cut up to 15 times with benzocaine before it is finally sold in small plastic bags in pubs and clubs as £40 per gramme. Miller and colleagues at the Scottish Crime & Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA) reckon the average purity of Scottish street level cocaine is now only 5%.
❑ 10 abandoned places: No-man’s-land: Man-made environmental catastrophes come in varying degrees of tragic, but none is as awful as when human action renders once-pristine land uninhabitable. It’s important to remember that while clean air, water and soil seemingly come for free, those resources require stewardship. Keeping that principle in mind, here’s our list of 10 places that have had to be abandoned because of environmental neglect.
❑ “Huffing” Isn’t Just Kid’s Stuff: More Adults Are Now Abusing Inhalants: Illicit drugs offer a high to adults and youth that comes with a dangerous price. Drugs like marijuana and cocaine cost people physically, mentally, and monetarily. When teens can’t monetarily afford drugs to give them a high, or are worried about using illicit drugs, sometimes they turn to getting their high from inhalants. These kids found that sniffing chemicals that are found in common products like household cleaners was an easy way to get their high. But one new study shows that it’s no longer just kids who are getting their high by “huffing.” A study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) revealed that more than half of the people who were admitted for treatment of inhalant abuse were 18 years and older. In the past year, 1.1 million adults used inhalants. In SAMHSA’s study, 52 percent of those admitted for inhalant abuse was aged 18 to 29, 32 percent were aged 30 to 44, and 16 percent were 45 and older.
❑ Man ate cat, used tail as necklace: A transient was arrested after police said he skinned and ate a cat while camping inside a Phoenix warehouse and music venue. Authorities say the building’s owners reported a burglary after they opened the warehouse Wednesday and heard blaring music. Police found 24-year-old Russell Christopher Hofstad inside with his face painted and the cat’s tail and intestines around his neck. Hunger claimed Hofstad told police he killed the cat because he was hungry. He also said he was going to use its skeleton as party decorations.
❑ Man sentenced for injecting 3-year-old girl with heroin: Authorities said Jeffrey P. LeBlanc, 31, of 18 Treadwell Drive, Spencer, told them he injected the child with the drug while babysitting for her on the afternoon of Oct. 21, 2010, because she had been ill the night before and he wanted to help her “feel better and relax.” He reportedly said he shot himself up with heroin first, then gave the girl a small amount of the drug.
❑ Chololi – The Nose Hair Notification Service: Have you been dying to tell someone that their nose hairs gross you out? Do you find yourself facing them every day, unable to voice out your disgust? If your answer to these two questions is “yes” , Chololi is just the service for you. It allows anyone to email people anonymously, telling them that their pesky nostril hairs need to be trimmed soon. Originally launched in Japanese, the web service is now available for the English-speaking as well. To use it, all you need to do is go to their website and fill out a form. Provide the person’s name, e-mail address, the nostril through which the hair is visible, the number of hairs and you’re done! The message will be conveyed in secrecy. Just for kicks, you can even choose the tone with which the message is delivered. There’s mild, strong, commanding, and the nastiest of them all, scornful.
❑ Ohio wrestler gets 32 years in HIV assault case: A former professional wrestler was sentenced Monday to 32 years in prison for having sex with women without telling them he had tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS. Andre Davis, 29, was sentenced in a Hamilton County court on 14 counts of felonious assault. Davis, who wrestled using stage names including Gangsta of Love and Sweet Sexy Sensation, was convicted in November. Prosecutors had said Davis violated state law by not telling a dozen sex partners about his HIV status or lying to them. Davis told the judge Monday that he was a “sex addict’’ and that his addiction grew worse when he lost his dream of becoming a professional wrestler after getting the HIV test results. He said sex addiction is probably the worst addiction anyone could have. “Drugs and alcohol are terrible, but sex is something everybody wants,’’ he said.
❑ N.Y. man arrested after passing heroin at Dulles Airport: U.S. Custom and Border Protection agents say Michael Babatune Ayodele, 19, from Queens, N.Y. passed 55 thumb-sized pellets while being questioned during a secondary inspection. Ayodele arrived Jan. 16 aboard a flight from Nigeria via Kenya and Zurich, Switzerland. Customs officers detected inconsistencies with Ayodele’s story about allegedly visiting family in Nigeria. While being questioned, Ayodele asked to use the bathroom, which is where he passed the heroin-filled pellets. Officers took Ayodele to a local hospital where he passed an additional 31 pellets, also filled with heroin. The 86 pellets had a combined weight of 1,089 grams, or more than 2 pounds, 6 ounces, and an approximate street value of about $78,000.
❑ Fleshlipad Holder Concept (Fleshlight iPad Holder and App): This conceptual design titled the FleshliPad Holder, melds the Fleshlight device to a rubber housing for the Apple iPad (or alternative tablet) allowing the cumsumer to interactively reach self-gratification with various pre-recorded multimedia (photograph, video or animation) designed specifically for the tablet-penis interface. Thanks Baller
❑ Adam Blumenkranz Arrested For Smoking Weed On A JetBlue Flight: This man brings a whole new meaning to the mile “high” club. Adam Blumenkranz, a 42-year-old LA man, was arrested Monday for allegedly smoking pot mid-flight in a JetBlue airplane bathroom, KTLA reports. Flight attendants became suspicious when Blumenkranz dropped a clear plastic bag in the cabin, reports the Associated Press. When he emerged from the lavatory, a “strong smell of marijuana” emerged with him. The plane was flying from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. to Newark, N.J. Police met Blumenkranz at the terminal gate in New Jersey and took him into custody, under charges of possession of a controlled dangerous substance and drug paraphernalia. According to KTLA, Blumenkranz told police he believed he had done nothing illegal because he has a medical marijuana card.
❑ Lana Del Rey, an Artificial Creation?: In a very short period of time, an enigmatic singer named Lana Del Rey went from complete anonymity to the front page of magazines, not to mention intense internet buzz and an SNL appearance. But along with this (almost literal) overnight success came revelations regarding the rising star: She is a total creation of her record company – Interscope, the same as Lady Gaga. When her previous artist persona named Lizzie Grant became a monumental flop, she underwent intense retooling including: A new name (which was assigned to her by her label), plastic surgery, a new musical style, a new image and a new marketing strategy. The same way Stefani Germanotta was “revamped” to become Lady Gaga – a fake persona that fits the requirements of today’s music industry – Lizzie Grant was revamped as Lana Del Rey. Will this alter-persona be used to push the Illuminati agenda in the future?
❑ Boy With Cat-Like Eyes Discovered in China [Video]
Marine to serve no time in Iraqi killings case: A Marine sergeant who led a squad that killed 24 unarmed Iraqis avoided serving any time Tuesday for his role in one of the darkest chapters of the Iraq war, winning leniency through a plea deal that carried no real punishment beyond a reduction in rank. Military judge Lt. Col. David Jones said he did not realize until after he recommended that Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich serve three months in the brig that his hands were tied by a deal that prevented any jail time.
❑ Picture of Cancerous Deer or Warts? – Shocking!: This picture was shared on Facebook through some of my friends. I am not going to go on and on about this topic. The picture is worth 1,000,000 words. Originally thought to have been shot in a fracking area, of PA, but the story has changed and other sources posted. ***EDIT: Now the story has gotten interesting, and has been changed and sources questioned. I removed the persons name and posted original sources. Apparently the deer was shot in Tenn too, now. This source seem much more credible and has a quote from the hunter.
❑ Caynton Caves: Black magic rituals force closure of mysterious site after owners lose patience with trespassing cult: A labyrinth of mysterious caves has been closed down after its owners finally got sick of them being invaded by a satanic cult. The Caynton Caves, hidden in dense woodland near Wolverhampton, have a rich history stemming back to the 17th century when they were apparently carved out of sandstone by followers of the Knights Templar. In the past, the landowners have tried to be accommodating when sects, good or evil, have asked permission to use the site.
❑ Suspect killed, ate homeless man: A man who allegedly killed and ate a homeless person traveled to Lynn Haven where he was arrested, Lynn Haven police said Wednesday. Tyree Smith, 34, of Bridgeport, Conn., told a family member that he killed the victim with a hatchet, police wrote in a news release. Smith, who was covered in blood at the time, added that “after he bludgeoned the victim he took pieces of brain matter and his eye, which he consumed,” police said.
❑ Millions were in germ war tests: The Ministry of Defence turned large parts of the country into a giant laboratory to conduct a series of secret germ warfare tests on the public. A government report just released provides for the first time a comprehensive official history of Britain’s biological weapons trials between 1940 and 1979. Many of these tests involved releasing potentially dangerous chemicals and micro-organisms over vast swaths of the population without the public being told. While details of some secret trials have emerged in recent years, the 60-page report reveals new information about more than 100 covert experiments. The report reveals that military personnel were briefed to tell any ‘inquisitive inquirer’ the trials were part of research projects into weather and air pollution.
❑ Red Spotlights to Mark ‘Precrime’ Suspects on Streets of New Jersey: In a glowing review of the rising prevalence of high-tech big brother surveillance gadgets in police force use, the Associated Press reports that East Orange, New Jersey plans to cut crime by highlighting suspects with a red-beamed spotlight– before any crime is committed– a “pre-crime” deterrent to be mounted on nearby street lights or other fixtures.
❑ Radioactive material stolen in Egypt: The theft this week of radioactive material from a nuclear power plant under construction in Egypt has highlighted once again the dangers of nuclear looting in countries undergoing social upheaval. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has confirmed that the material was taken from a laboratory at the El Dabaa nuclear power plant on the country’s Mediterranean coast. “According to the information we have, the items that have gone missing are low-level radioactive sources,” says an IAEA spokesperson.
❑ Is The NYPD Experimenting With Drones Over The City? Evidence Points To Yes: They’re used in war zones for surveillance and military strikes. But are there plans to deploy drones in the Big Apple to keep an eye on New Yorkers? More and more people believe it’s inevitable, reports CBS 2’s Don Dahler. Drones are unmanned aircraft that can fly at low altitudes and shoot live video — or shoot live missiles. Surveillance cameras already dot the city’s streets, but is the NYPD exploring the use of even more eyes in the skies, in the form of drones? Some evidence points to yes. A website named Gay City News posted an e-mail it says it acquired through the Freedom of Information Act. It’s purportedly from a detective in the NYPD counterterrorism division, asking the Federal Aviation Administration about the use of unmanned aerial vehicles as a law enforcement tool.
❑ This is a wireless router for your brain, and it shoots lasers: Optogenetics is a method of using light to control cells in the brain. It can be used to alter behavior, model diseases, and maybe even one day, deliver drugs right where you need them. And now, it’s wireless! With lasers! With genetic engineering, we can design cells that respond to light (from lasers or LEDs) by activating or deactivating themselves or otherwise changing their functionality. The appeal of using light to alter cells is that we can turn light on and off at the speed of, you know, light, which allows us to keep up with the speeds at which things happen inside our cells. For example, neurons in the brain send signals to other neurons using electric spikes that occur in just a few milliseconds, but with lasers, it’s possible to very precisely control (or disrupt) these messages, and this is what optogenetics is all about.
❑ A new federal report found 20 percent of Americans had mental illness: One in five Americans experienced some sort of mental illness in 2010, according to a new report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. About 5 percent of Americans have suffered from such severe mental illness that it interfered with day-to-day school, work or family. Women were more likely to be diagnosed with mental illness than men (23 percent of women versus 16.9 percent of men), and the rate of mental illness was more than twice as likely in young adults (18 to 25) than people older than 50. About 11.4 million adult Americans suffered from severe mental illness in the past year and 8.7 million adults contemplated serious thoughts of suicide. Among them, more than 2 million made suicide plans and about 1 million attempted suicide.
❑ Insight: Top Justice officials connected to mortgage banks: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who’s Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters inquiry shows. The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington’s biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and other federal ethics experts said that federal conflict of interest rules required Holder and Breuer to recuse themselves from any Justice Department decisions relating to law firm clients they personally had done work for.

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Have You Ever Wondered What A Virus Sounds Like?

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:38:42 +0000

✪ Ron Jeremy exclusive: Will the condom law be a wrap for porn industry in L.A.?: An HIV-positive adult film actor is hailing the Los Angeles City Council’s final approval of a city law requiring condoms on porn sets – but veteran star Ron Jeremy thinks its dirty politics. Jeremy, originally from New York, told the Daily News he believes this week’s vote is part of a larger effort to stamp out porn production in the industry’s sunny San Fernando Valley home. “Performers don’t mind wearing rubbers, but viewers don’t want to see it. It ruins the fantasy,” Jeremy said Wednesday. “This will force production to leave Los Angeles, and that’s really what the supporters want,” he claimed. The legendary lothario said local porn purveyors are already feeling the squeeze from a flood of overseas imports and low-budget, amateur productions – and new condom requirements will make competitive success even harder. He said mandatory, monthly STD testing – now the industry standard – is more than adequate to keep performers safe.
✪ Feds Say 7 Behind Celeb-endorsed Megaupload.com Ran Massive, Worldwide Piracy Ring: Federal prosecutors have shut down one of the world’s largest file-sharing sites, Megaupload.com, on charges of violating piracy laws — a day after a 24-hour blackout of popular websites such as Wikipedia drew national attention to the issue. “This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States,” the Justice department said in a statement about the indictment. The indictment accuses seven individuals and two corporations — Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited — of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content. It was unsealed on Thursday, and claims that at one point Megaupload was the 13th most popular website in the world.
✪ Google Is Already Using SOPA-Like Censorship: However, Google’s main issue with SOPA is seemingly not related to their concerns about Chinese-style web censorship becoming commonplace, but rather which entity gets to wield those powers – large transnational corporations or governments. While Google criticizes SOPA publicly, it is already privately using SOPA-like powers to unfairly marginalize legitimate web content. Google News is a content aggregator that allows users to search thousands of news sources for relevant stories. Although the aggregator includes a plethora of obscure, occasionally offensive, and barely-read websites, in November 2010 Google took the decision to de-list PrisonPlanet.com and Infowars.com from its indexed news sources. Infowars.com alone is an internationally recognized news website that gets more traffic than MSNBC.com and innumerable other big mainstream news websites.
✪ Protest against discrimination of Ethiopian Jews: Thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets of Jerusalem, in protest against what they say is discrimination against Jews of Ethiopian origin. The protest came after a recent report in the Israeli media that landlords in southern Israel had agreed not to rent or sell their real estate to Jews of Ethiopian origin.
✪ Goodbye, Fish: Rising CO2 Direct Threat to Sea Life “Driving Fish Crazy”: New research shows the disastrous consequences the world’s rising carbon dioxide levels are having on ocean life. Photo courtesy of Dr Simon Foale, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies A team of researchers from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University published their findings in the journal Nature Climate Change. They document how elevated CO2 is “driving fish crazy.”
✪ WiFi signal with racist, anti-Semitic slur in Teaneck, NJ sparks police probe; signal came from rec center router: A bigot named their WiFi signal “F— All Jews and N—-” — and now cops are investigating. The hateful signal I.D. popped up on the iPhone of a 28-year-old mom inside a Teaneck, N.J. recreation center, where her 3-year-old daughter was attending dance class. The offending signal was coming from a router connected in the Richard Rodda Community Center in the the township, located 10 miles outside New York City. “When I first saw it, I said, ‘Did that say what I thought it said?,” said the woman, who asked that her name not be used. “I was shocked, hurt. I felt harassed.” The signal showed on her phone as it searched for an Internet connection in the center Tuesday. “I felt like I’m bringing my daughter to this place, and it should be a safe place,” she said.
✪ Scientists Create World’s Tiniest Ear: Have you ever wondered what a virus sounds like? Or what noise a bacterium makes when it moves between hosts? If the answer is yes, you may soon get your chance to find out, thanks to the development of the world’s tiniest ear. The “nano-ear,” a microscopic particle of gold trapped by a laser beam, can detect sound a million times fainter than the threshold for human hearing. Researchers suggest the work could open up a whole new field of “acoustic microscopy,” in which organisms are studied using the sound they emit.
✪ The Rise of the New Groupthink: SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.
✪ NYPD developing portable body scanner for detecting concealed weapons: You have to feel sorry for the police officers who are required to frisk people for guns or knives – after all, if someone who doesn’t want to be arrested is carrying a lethal weapon, the last thing that most of us would want to do is get close enough to that person to touch them. That’s why the New York Police Department teamed up with the United States Department of Defense three years ago, and began developing a portable scanner that can remotely detect the presence of a gun on a person’s body. The NYPD announced the project yesterday.
✪ Scientists Uncover The Mathematics Of Serial Killers: Andrei Chikatilo, “The Butcher of Rostov,” was one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history. Between 1978 and 1990 in the Ukraine, he committed at least 52 murders before he was caught, tried and executed. The pattern of his murders, though, was irregular. There were long periods of no activity, interrupted by several murders within a short period of time. Hoping to gain insight into serial killings to prevent similar murders, his pattern of behavior was examined by Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury at UCLA. They’ve published a paper on ArXiv with their preliminary results.
✪ Fake iPad 2s made of clay sold at Canadian stores: As many as 10 fake iPad 2s, all made of slabs of modeling clay, were recently sold at electronic stores in Vancouver, British Columbia. Best Buy and Future Shop have launched investigations into how the scam was pulled off. The tablet computers, like most Apple products, are known for their sleek and simple designs. But there’s no mistaking the iPad for one of the world’s oldest “tablet devices.” Still, most electronic products cannot be returned to stores. For the the stores and customers to be fooled by the clay replacements, the thieves must have successfully weighed out the clay portions and resealed the original Apple packaging.
✪ For rent: Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair: Anybody willing to pay the asking rent of £90,000 a year can take over the 13-hectare site in a secluded forest in eastern Poland, which during the war lay in German East Prussia. From 1941 to the end of 1944 the Wolf’s Lair was the nerve centre of the Nazi war machine owing to its proximity to the Eastern Front. The Polish Forestry Service, the owners of the camp, started looking for a tenant after the old 20-year lease expired. Hitler and his henchman built huge bombproof bunkers at the site that also housed 2,000 staff and security personnel. Although retreating German forces dynamited most of the bunkers in November 1944, their shattered shells remain a prime tourist attraction with some 180,000 visitors a year.
✪ The Great Martin Luther King Copyright Conundrum: Believe it or not, to legally watch that famous Martin Luther King “I Have a Dream” speech — arguably one of the most hallowed moments in American history — costs $10 thanks to the twisted state of United States copyright law.
✪ World’s Largest Garment Made From Golden Spider Silk Goes on Display: Before anyone asks, no, it’s not bulletproof. But that doesn’t mean that the glistening yellow cape—the world’s largest garment made entirely from spider silk—isn’t a massive feat of engineering to marvel at (hint: it is and you should). Now on public display for the first time at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the textile gets its unearthly gleam from the undyed filaments of the golden orb spider, a species of arachnid commonly found in Madagascar. Girl power can be taken literally in this instance: Only the females produce the coveted silk.
✪ NSFW: An Alabama Fan Teabagged A Passed-Out LSU Fan At The Bourbon Street Krystal: Those of us un/fortunate enough to have visited the Krystal restaurant at the mouth of Bourbon Street in New Orleans know it’s a place where the occasionally odd, bizarre, or criminal events take place. We don’t know which of these this incident is, if not all three. That’s especially given that some people are claiming the victim in this is now dead, making the “This guy’s life is over” line uttered in the video creepy.
✪ Funk Legend Jimmy Castor Dead At 64: Funk/disco great Jimmy “The Everything Man” Castor passed away on Monday from unknown causes in Las Vegas, according to reports. Castor, a respected saxophonist, was the leader of the seminal funk/disco band the Jimmy Castor Bunch. The group was behind funk classics like the 1972 smash, “Troglodyte (Cave Man).” Though the group’s popularity faded at the end of the disco era, Castor’s music lived on through hip hop as his song “It’s Just Begun” became a staple break of the ’70s and ’80s b-boy break dancing scene. The song served as the back up music for the iconic b-boy collective the Rock Steady Crew in the 1983 film Flashdance. Eric B. and Rakim, the Ultramagnetic MCs, N.W.A., and Kanye West were among the hip hop names to sample Castor’s tunes over the years.
✪ Radioactive tissue holders found at Bed, Bath & Beyond reveal hypocrisy of failed national security: The Dual Ridge Metal Boutique tissue boxes sold at Bed, Bath & Beyond stores have been discovered to be radioactive. Made with the extremely dangerous material used to blast cancer tumors with radiation — cobalt-60 — they emit gamma rays that are known to cause both cancer and infertility. They were manufactured in India, shipped on a commercial container to New Jersey, and then distributed to Bed, Bath & Beyond stores in 20 states. How much radiation do these tissue holders emit, exactly? Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman David McIntyre said, on the record, that standing near one of these tissue holders for 30 minutes a day would expose you to the equivalent of “a couple of chest X-Rays” each year. The Illinois Emergency Management Agency went even further, issuing a release stating that every 10 hours spent near the product would expose you to the equivalent of one chest X-Ray
✪ Big Brother Brazil: Daniel Echaniz ‘raped Monique Amin on live TV’ after alcohol-fueled party: A housemate on Brazil’s version of Big Brother has been raped live on TV, it has been alleged. Police today confirmed they had begun an investigation and carried out a search of the studios in Rio de Janeiro, where the popular reality show is being filmed. Viewers were shocked in the early hours of Sunday to watch contestant Daniel Echaniz 31, apparently force himself on 23-year-old student Monique Amin, who had passed out drunk after a boozy party.
✪ Exchange students report shocking placements: I’ve seen many things I don’t like, including students that had been sexually abused, photographed, and forced to drink alcohol, says Danielle Grijalva, She is the head of CSFES, an organization that helps exchange students who run into problems abroad. Only this past year, 10-12 Norwegian exchange students abroad contacted her for help.
✪ EPIC Request Reveals DHS Monitoring Social Media: A Freedom of Information Act has revealed the Department of Homeland Security awarded a contract in 2010 to General Dynamics’ Advanced Information Systems in order to provide constant surveillance of social media, according to The Washington Post. The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed the request, and according to a training manual that was among the documents they received, DHS engaged in monitoring comments on Facebook, Twitter and blogs to obtain public sentiment on a proposed transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees to a town in Michigan. The $11 million contract awarded to General Dynamics is expected to produce “reports on DHS, Components, and other Federal Agencies: positive and negative reports on FEMA, CIA, CBP, ICE, etc. as well as organizations outside the DHS,”
✪ MLK strip club flyer: Graphic designer under fire for ‘I Have a Dream Bash’: When Martin Luther King Jr. said he had a dream, this likely wasn’t what he meant. A flyer promoting a Miami strip club’s “I Have a Dream Bash” featuring MLK holding wads of cash next to scantily-clad women has its creator taking plenty of flack. Miami Beach graphic designer Jeffrey Darnell Paul says he didn’t realize the flyer, made for The Office strip club at 250 Northeast 183rd Street, would generate the controversy it has. “I wasn’t trying to disrespect anybody… it wasn’t on my mind that it would escalate to something like this,” Paul told NBC Miami Monday. “It was just supposed to be a promotional thing, it wasn’t about disgracing Martin Luther King, it wasn’t about that.”
✪ Mom forces son to wear ‘I sell drugs’ sign: An Indiana mother forced her son to wear a sign around his neck listing his law-breaking behavior and stand on a Ft. Wayne street corner for two hours earlier this week. The sign read: “I lie, I steal, I sell drugs, I don’t follow the law.” CBS New York reports that Dynesha Lax thought the punishment police had given her son when he broke the law recently wasn’t strong enough to get him to stop his behavior, so she took matters into her own hands.

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