~o ~o ~o SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG! o~ o~ o~ » Wild

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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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The Wild Beasts (1984) PCP Gets Into The Water At The Zoo ‘N The Dusted Animals Go Wild

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 01:08:04 +0000

When PCP gets into the water supply of a large zoo in Frankfurt, Germany, it soon becomes blood and gore galore as the zoo animals go crazy, break out of their cages, and go on a homicidal, nigh time rampage through the city killing any person they see starting with sewer rats killing a number of strangers, then tigers, cheetahs, lions and even elephants join in the killing spree. Zoo veterinarian Rupert Berner, his scientist girlfriend Laura, along with a local police officer, Inspector Braun, try to find a way to control the murderous animals and stop them before they decimate the entire city in this “nature strikes back” horror film.

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

Groupies (1970) Rock ‘n Roll Sluts Documentary

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 06:53:13 +0000

A Wild Experience, An Eye-And-Ear Blowing Trip Into Weirdsville USA

This documentary on rock ‘n’ roll groupies, including the infamous Plaster Casters, features performances (musical) by such bands as Ten Years After, Terry Reid, Spooky Tooth, and Cat Mother.

Sorry, part 4 is missin’ from YouTube.

200 Million + People Using Illicit Drugs Worldwide

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:50:49 +0000

✖ 200 Million People Use Illicit Drugs, Study Finds: Roughly 200 million people worldwide use illicit drugs such as marijuana, amphetamines, cocaine and opioids each year, according to a new study. The figure represents about one in 20 people between the ages of 15 and 64. Using a review of published studies, Australian researchers estimated that as many as 203 million people use marijuana, 56 million people use amphetamines including meth, 21 million people use cocaine and 21 million people use opioids like heroin. The use of all four drug classes was highest in developed countries. …The 200 million number does not include people who use ecstasy, hallucinogenic drugs, inhalants, benzodiazepines or anabolic steroids — just one reason it’s likely a vast underestimate of illicit drug use, according to lead author Louisa Degenhardt of the Sydney-based National Drug and Alcohol Research Center.
✖ Vancouver running out of free crackpipes: He said PHS, which runs InSite, has distributed monthly highs of 20,000 pipes through its own needle and pipe distribution program. The 3,000 pipes PHS received from VCH in December were exhausted in three days. “At the beginning of the study, we expressed our concerns that (the pipe supply) is a tiny number … but we were told the number’s staying the same,” Townsend said. “To meet the demand we would need around 1,000 per day.”
✖ Newt Gingrich To New Hampshire: Jefferson, Washington Would Have Cracked Down On Pot: During a town hall-style appearance in Concord, the former House Speaker said he had no interest in exploring drug decriminalization, arguing that such efforts haven’t worked in Europe. Contra Gingrich, however, Portugal has had some success with decriminalization initiatives. Pushed a bit later on the incarceration rate related to petty drug crimes, Gingrich responded, “I think the best thing is to get young people not to do drugs and then you won’t be dealing with criminals that you just described.” A third resident of the “live free or die” state argued that the founding fathers had been far more lenient about marijuana than the current political class. “I think Jefferson or George Washington would have rather strongly discouraged you from growing marijuana and their techniques with dealing with it would have been rather more violent than our current government,” Gingrich replied.
✖ Chivas Scotch Heroin Bottles Bust At Newark Airport: We hope he drank the scotch before adding the H! On New Year’s Eve customs officials stopped Miami man Wilfer Bohorquez Rojo, 53, as he allegedly tried to smuggle 25 pounds of heroin from Medillin, Colombia, to Newark Airport. At first authorities just thought he had smuggled the drugs in “packages of plastic flags and between glued photographs” but further inspection found he’d filled four Chivas Royal Salute scotch bottles with “packages of a substance that also tested positive for heroin, according to the agency.” After the discovery of the drugs—estimated by authorities to be worth at least $700,000—Rojo was turned over to authorities and now faces federal narcotics smuggling charges.
✖ Purdue: Block Disclosure Of OxyContin Documents: A long-simmering court battle over a trove of OxyContin documents has finally won the attention of Purdue Pharma. The drugmaker is belatedly seeking to intervene in a 2008 lawsuit in a Massachusetts state court, where an attempt is being made to force the state attorney general to release documents that were used to prosecute Purdue and three current and former execs several years ago. At issue are countless documents that were compiled by the US Department of Justice, which charged Purdue and the execs with misbranding – they facilitated improper use of the drug and misled patients, regulators and doctors about addictive risks. All totaled, $634 million in fines were paid, and the execs were barred from doing business with federal healthcare programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid
✖ Ron Paul: Drug War Could Be Bigger Failure Than Prohibition (VIDEO): “This war on drugs has been a detriment to personal liberty and it’s been a real abuse of liberty,” Paul said. “Our prisons are full with people who have used drugs who should be treated as patients — and they’re non-violent. Someday we’re gonna awake and find out that the prohibition we are following right now with drugs is no more successful, maybe a lot less successful, than the prohibition of alcohol was in the ’20s.”
✖ Man wants rehab over Diet Cola 42 litres a week addiction: Darren Jones wants to check himself into rehab – to cure a bizarre addiction to Diet Cola. Darren, 38, knocks back 42 litres of the drink every week. Now the 35 stone father of two is vowing to get treatment for his £100 a week habit to get fit again and save his relationship with 33-year old mother of two Paula Mullen. Darren, of Stockport, Greater Manchester, said: “I believe what I have is an actual addiction and I start to worry if I’m getting near the end of the bottle. “If I can’t get in touch with Paula to get me some more I start to panic – it’s like a drug or alcohol addiction. “I called up Diet Coke to ask them if it’s addictive and what I should do and she recommended putting water in it to dilute it, but it would taste horrid and I don’t think it would help. “We joke that I should get one of those hats with bottles either side of my head and straws straight into my mouth so I can drink it all the time. It’s like gold, it’s my fuel.”
✖ Why Ron Paul Is Right And Barack Obama Is Wrong About Iran: Obama also argues that he opposes Iran’s nukes because of proliferation in the region. At which point one must loudly cough “Ahem.” Only one country in the region has illegally, in defiance of internatinal law and the NPT and US policy, has nuclear weapons and it’s Israel, not any Arab state. More absurdly, the US government has a formal policy of never acknowledging this fact. At one point in the not-so-distant past, the US government was committed to the view that Iraq had nukes but Israel didn’t. When will the US evolve a sane policy in the Middle East? One that advances our interests, avoids a catastrophic global religious war, and bases it judgment on history and statecraft rather than religion and a US-Israel alliance that, since the end of the Cold War, has become increasingly unhealthy to both parties? Less Kennedy, more Eisenhower, please.
✖ Judge: Black church rightful owner of KKK store: After a lengthy legal battle between a black South Carolina church and members of the Ku Klux Klan, a judge has ruled that the church owns a building where KKK robes and T-shirts are sold. A circuit judge ruled last month that New Beginnings Baptist Church is the rightful owner of the building that houses the Redneck Shop, which operates a so-called Klan museum and sells Klan robes and T-shirts emblazoned with racial slurs. The judge ordered the shop’s proprietor to pay the church’s legal bills of more than $3,300.
✖ No easy way to dissolve mouse in Mountain Dew: A man in the U.S. is suing Pepsi Co. over a mouse allegedly found in a can of Mountain Dew, a claim the company rejects by saying the acid in the beverage would disintegrate the animal’s body. However, that reasoning doesn’t hold water with Canadian food experts. “There would not be enough acid in the matrix of the can to actually start causing those physical changes to the mouse,” says Massimo Marcone, an associate professor of food science at the University of Guelph. “The mouse would start to spoil; there would not be enough acid to preserve the mouse. It would start to smell bad. But to say that the mouse would actually dissolve in about 300 millilitres of soft drink, it’s pretty hard.”
✖ Free Philip K. Dick: Download 11 Great Science Fiction Stories: Although he died when he was only 53 years old, Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982) published 44 novels and 121 short stories during his lifetime and solidified his position as arguably the most literary of science fiction writers. His novel Ubik appears on TIME magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels, and Dick is the only science fiction writer to get honored in the prestigious Library of America series, a kind of pantheon of American literature. If you’re not intimately familiar with his novels, then you assuredly know major films based on Dick’s work – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report. Today, we bring you another way to get acquainted with his writing. We’re presenting a selection of Dick’s stories available for free on the web. Below we have culled together 11 short stories from our collection of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.
✖ Time Cheers the Drone War: The new issue of Time magazine promises on its cover “Essential Info for the Year Ahead.” One apparently essential report: U.S. drones are awesome. The report–written by Mark Thompson, available to subscribers only explains that a “hot military trend” this way: Today’s generals and admirals want weapons that are smaller, remote-controlled and bristling with intelligence. In short, more drones that can tightly target terrorists, deliver larger payloads and are some of the best spies the U.S. has ever produced, even if they occasionally get captured in Iran or crash on landing at secret bases. And also, you know, kill innocent civilians.
✖ Alejandro Jodorowsky Needs Your Support To Create The Autobiographical DANZA DE LA REALIDAD: Alejandro Jodorowsky – the legendary cult filmmaker behind Santa Sangre, El Topo and The Holy Mountain – needs your help. After years trying to raise funding for big new projects King Shot and Son Of El Topo, Jodorowsky is moving on to something more personal: Danza De La Realidad, an autobiographical picture based on his own childhood and teenaged years. Having had no luck with conventional film financing methods in recent years, Jodorowsky is taking this one to the streets and trying the crowd funding method. Put a hundred dollars into the film and you’ll receive a special cut of the finished movie on DVD.
✖ YOUR KID’S ON DRUGS [Video]
✖ Sea Shepherd Intercepts the Japanese Whaling Fleet with Drones: The Sea Shepherd crew has intercepted the Japanese whaling fleet on Christmas Day, a thousand miles north of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. The Sea Shepherd ship, Steve Irwin, deployed a drone to successfully locate and photograph the Japanese factory ship Nisshin Maru on December 24th. Once the pursuit began, three Japanese harpoon/security ships moved in on the Steve Irwin to shield the Nisshin Maru to allow it to escape. This time however the Japanese tactic of tailing the Steve Irwin and the Bob Barker will not work because the drones, one on the Steve Irwin and the other on the Bob Barker, can track and follow the Nisshin Maru and can relay the positions back to the Sea Shepherd ships. “We can cover hundreds of miles with these drones and they have proven to be valuable assets for this campaign,” said Captain Paul Watson on board the Steve Irwin.
✖ ‘Supersoldier’ ants with gigantic jaws: Nightmarish ‘supersoldier’ ants with huge heads and jaws have been created by activating ancient genes. Scientists believe the monster ants may be a genetic throwback to an ancestor that lived millions of years ago. Scientists say they can create the supersoldiers at will by dabbing normal ant larvae with a special hormone – the larvae then develop into supersoldiers rather than normal soldier or worker ants.
✖ ACLU sues library for blocking Wiccan websites: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Eastern Missouri sued a local public library on Tuesday for allegedly blocking websites related to Wicca, a modern pagan religion. Anaka Hunter of Salem, Mo., said she tried to access websites about Wicca, Native American religions and astrology for her own research, but the library’s filtering software blocked the sites. According to the ACLU, the software labeled the sites as “occult” and “criminal.”
✖ Psychedelic Heroin: Grey Lodge Archives: I recently tracked down the pdf’s for nearly all of the issues of the now-deceased counterculture online zine Grey Lodge Occult Review. The site was taken down due to “legal threats and religious hackers”. To see the table of contents for the issues visit the Wayback Machine here. Along with the rabbit hole that is Deoxy, this was one of my formative sanctuaries for all things mindfuckery.
✖ Forget Stocks Or Bonds, Invest In A Lobbyist: In a recent study, researchers Raquel Alexander and Susan Scholz calculated the total amount the corporations saved from the lower tax rate. They compared the taxes saved to the amount the firms spent lobbying for the law. Their research showed the return on lobbying for those multinational corporations was 22,000 percent. That means for every dollar spent on lobbying, the companies got $220 in tax benefits.
✖ Excavator on Rooftop of 12-Story Building in Taiyuan: Shanxi province Taiyuan city Wanbailin district Yingze West Street, an excavator operates on the rooftop of the Shanxi Science and Technology Hotel, causing surrounding city residents both surprise and concern.
✖ US ‘space warplane’ may be spying on Chinese spacelab: The US Air Force’s second mysterious mini-space shuttle, the X-37B, could be spying on China’s space laboratory and the first piece of its space station, Tiangong-1. Amateur space trackers told the British Interplanetary Society publication Spaceflight that the black-funded spaceplane seemed to be orbiting the Earth in tandem with Tiangong_1, or the Heavenly Palace, leading the magazine to speculate that its unknown mission is to spy on it. “Space-to-space surveillance is a whole new ball game made possible by a finessed group of sensors and sensor suites, which we think the X-37B may be using to maintain a close watch on China’s nascent space station,” Spaceflight editor Dr David Baker told the BBC.
✖ NOT SATIRE: L.A. Tells Arrested OWS Protesters They Can Pay for “Free Speech” Classes to Avoid Court: Incredibly, the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office is offering Occupy L.A. protesters arrested in recent weeks the opportunity to pay $355 for private free speech classes to avoid their court dates. As reported in the Los Angeles Times: Los Angeles Chief Deputy City Atty. William Carter said the city won’t press charges against protesters who complete the educational program offered by American Justice Associates. … Carter said the free-speech class will save the city money and teach protesters the nuances of the law. “The 1st Amendment is not absolute,” he said, noting that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled government can regulate when, where and how free speech can be exercised. As a civil rights attorney working with some of the approximately 350 protesters who have been arrested in recent weeks noted, the offer is nothing short of “patronizing.”
✖ Toddlers and Tiaras mothers DOPING their daughters with drinks spiked with ‘pageant crack’?: No brand names are mentioned on the show, but many have speculated that the drink is Mountain Dew, a caffeinated soft drink. Others believe it even contains alcohol. Mrs Holler is filmed instructing Alana to take ‘two big gulps’ from an unlabelled drinks bottle. Within seconds the change is apparent. ‘A lot of pageant moms and people know what the special juice is – everybody has their different concoctions. Special juice is to help energise her’ The young pageant contestant starts rapidly swinging her arms over her head and spinning around on the floor, exclaiming: ‘My go-go juice is kicking in right now!’ After her drink fix, Alana takes to the stage in a plaid shirt displaying inches of stomach to perform a routine, inspired by sex symbol Daisy Duke. Describing how the drink makes her feel, she says smiling: ‘Go-go juice makes me laughy, and play-ey, and makes me feel like I want to pull my mommy’s hair.’
✖ Polar challenge: How do you cycle to the South Pole?: Blue Peter presenter Helen Skelton is hoping to become the first person to use a bike to reach the South Pole. She is attempting to travel 500 miles (805km) across Antarctica and will cycle for large parts of it, as well as snowkiting and walking. She hopes to complete the trek for Sport Relief in 20 days. At this time of year, the average temperature in Antarctica is -25C, but can drop to -50C. Severe coastal winds come from cold air flowing down off the interior ice sheet. Wind speeds can reach up to 125mph (201km/h) and average about 80mph. In addition, she will be dragging 12.9st (82kg) of equipment and supplies behind her on a sledge. It’s no average ride and she is not using your average bike. The specially-built Hanebrink “ice bike” took designers in Los Angeles three months to finish. Dan Hanebrink and Kane Fortune have been building all-terrain hybrid bikes that can be used in all environments for many years.
✖ Rick Santorum is coming for your birth control: Here is an actual Rick Santorum quote: “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.” And also, “Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
✖ With all eyes on their ears, lobe stretchers snip: Some plastic surgeons are reporting an increase in younger clients, specifically those who are ready to undo a generational fashion statement that has left a lot of self-conscious people with a lot of sagging earlobe. Dr. David Kahn, who performed Tidwell’s surgery, was blunt in his assessment of his client’s condition. “It was unsightly, a distortion that needed to be overcome.”
✖ Miracle ‘chimeric’ monkeys made from cells of six animals spark protests: They may look like any other baby monkeys, but these two are scientific breakthroughs. Roku and Hex are the world’s first chimeric monkeys – created with genetic material from six ‘parents’. But their birth has caused an ethical storm, with critics accusing scientists of disregarding the welfare of the animals.
✖ SOPA-Supporting News Outlets Aren’t Covering SOPA [STUDY]: MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS and NBC have dedicated no time to covering the Stop Online Piracy Act in their evening newscasts since Oct. 1, according to a report by Ben Dimiero of Media Matters For America. CNN, meanwhile, has dedicated a single evening news segment to the issue. All of the companies covered in the report have either publicly supported SOPA or have parent companies that have done so. Dimiero based his report on Lexis-Nexis searches which includes transcripts of nighttime newscasts. Comcast/NBCUniversal (which owns MSNBC and NBC News), Viacom (CBS), News Corporation (Fox News), Time Warner (CNN) and Disney (ABC) are all listed as supporters of the bill. ABC and CBS are also listed as separate supporters of the bill.
✖ Japan plans futuristic farm with robot workers in disaster zone: Japan is planning a futuristic farm where robots do the lifting in an experimental project on land swamped by the March tsunami. Under an agriculture ministry plan, unmanned tractors will work fields where pesticides will have been replaced by LEDs keeping rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit and vegetables safe until robots can put them in boxes. Carbon dioxide produced by machinery working on the up to 250-hectare site will be channeled back to crops to boost their growth and reduce reliance on chemical fertilizers, the Nikkei newspaper said this week. The agricultural ministry will begin on-site research later this year with a plan to spend around 4 billion yen over the next six years, a ministry official said. Land in Miyagi Prefecture, some 300 kilometers north of Tokyo, which was flooded by seawater on March 11, has been earmarked for the so-called “Dream Project.”
✖ Newt Gingrich: ‘African-American Community Should Demand Paychecks And Not Be Satisfied With Food Stamps’: Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said Thursday he is willing to go before the NAACP and urge blacks to demand paychecks, not food stamps. Gingrich told a town hall meeting at a senior center in Plymouth, N.H., that if the NAACP invites him to its annual convention this year, he’d go there and talk about “why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” He also said he’d pitch a new Social Security program aimed at helping young people, particularly African-American males, who he said get the smallest return on Social Security.
✖ Pentagon-backed ‘time cloak’ stops the clock: The researchers created what they call a time lens, which can manipulate and focus signals in time, analogous to the way a glass lens focuses light in space. They use a technique called four-wave mixing, in which two beams of light, a “signal” and a “pump,” are sent together through an optical fiber. The two beams interact and change the wavelength of the signal. To begin creating a time gap, the researchers first bump the wavelength of the signal up, then by flipping the wavelength of the pump beam, bump it down.
✖ Pro skater with a love of God and psychedelic drugs goes on rampage inside Midtown hotel: A pro skateboarder with a passion for God and psychedelic drugs was arrested Thursday after he went on a drug-fueled rampage inside a Midtown hotel wearing only his birthday suit, cops said. Jereme Rogers, 26, was high on angel dust when he ran naked out of his room at the Afinia Shelburne hotel and started tearing down framed pictures lining an 11th floor hallway, sources said. “It was a rampage,” said a witness who declined to give her name. “He was screaming. We didn’t even know what he was doing. He was incoherent and belligerent.” Rogers, a heavily-tattooed Californian who has appeared in several X Games and says his skills come from God, was taken to Bellevue Hospital. He was charged with criminal mischief and unlawful possession of marijuana, cops said.
✖ DHS Training excercise startles locals: With their blue and white SUVs circled around the Main Street office, at least one official was posted on the door with a semiautomatic rifle, randomly checking identifications. And other officers, some with K-9s, sifted through the building. “I thought someone was upset about not getting there check,” said Laura Kelly, who took a friend to the office on Tuesday. According to one Homeland official in the Washington, D.C. office, Operation Shield. is an effort that uses routine, unannounced visits by FPS inspectors to test the effectiveness of contract guards, or protective security officers — “detecting the presence of unauthorized persons and potentially disruptive or dangerous activities.”
✖ Panda caught eating meat on camera [Video]: A wild panda is caught on surveillance camera eating a dead gnu in south-west China. An analyst says the bamboo-loving animals were predators millions of years ago. Although classified as carnivores, giant pandas mainly live on bamboo, but eat other foods including honey, eggs, fish, oranges and bananas when they are available

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Sabotage

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:22:57 +0000

☛ Emo Style Makeover Game: Stupendous beauty game in which you’ll be able to put makeup on a normal, common girl with the latest emo style cosmetics. You’ll be able to combine them with the most daring hairstyles and with the most stylish accessories, such as earrings, piercings, etc.
☛ Steve Jobs Action Figure: Apple Threatens Chinese Toy Maker With Lawsuit: Apple has allegedly threatened to sue Chinese company In Icons over its eerily realistic 12-inch action figure of Steve Jobs, the company’s late founder. The 1:6 scale model, which was said to be distributed by DiD Corp. in late February, comes with the clothes and accessories popularized by Jobs, such as the black faux turtleneck, blue jeans and sneakers. The figurine, which is packaged in a box that looks like Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” biography cover, also comes with a chair, a “One More Thing…” backdrop, as well as two red apples, including one with a bite in it. To make it extra creepy, the doll’s realistic head sculpt features Jobs’ famous unblinking stare.
☛ 34 Shocking Facts About U.S. Debt That Should Set America On Fire With Anger: We have all been lied to. For decades, the leaders of both major political parties have promised us that they can fix our current system and that they can get our national debt under control. As the 2012 election approaches, they are making all kinds of wild promises once again. Well you know what? It is all a giant sham. The United States has gotten into so much debt that there will be no coming back from this. The current system is irretrievably broken. 30 years ago the U.S. debt was a horrific crisis that was completely and totally out of control. If we would have dealt with it back then maybe we could have done something about it. But now it is 15 times larger, and we are adding more than a trillion dollars to the debt every single year.
☛ Vertu making ‘year of the dragon’ Signature phone…Only $20,733!
☛ Paul Supporter Likely Violated Military Conduct Code: Following a third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, Ron Paul held a boisterous rally, featuring a speech from Army Corporal Jesse Thorsen. Thorsen, who was in uniform, voiced impassioned support for Paul’s non-interventionist views. “We don’t need to be picking fights overseas,” he said, and pledged to help “make sure this man is the next president of the United States.” It was an understandable sentiment from a soldier who said he had served in the military for 10 years, which included tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the appearance likely violated the protocols for service members included in Defense Department Directive 1344.10, which states explicitly that they are not to participate in political rallies as anything more than spectators. And if they do attend a political function, they’re not supposed to do so in uniform.
☛ Arthur Lee Thompson steals police vehicle while high on crack [Video]
☛ Islam Critical Black Metal music nominated for Norwegian Grammy: Metal band Taake is nominated for the Norwegian Grammys in the category for best metal album for the album “Norway’s weapons,” which came out this fall. Besides the line of text devoted to “Moslems”, include “those who burn our flag,” called the swine in the song “Hurricane.” The text also says that hard to be against hard: “Now wake up soon Norway.”
☛ Swank sushi: Tuna fetches record $736K: A bluefin tuna caught off northeastern Japan fetched a record $736,000, Thursday in the first auction of the year at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market. The price translates to $1,238 per pound — also a record, said Yutaka Hasegawa, a Tsukiji market official. Though the fish is undoubtedly high quality, the price has more to do with the celebratory atmosphere that surrounds the first auction of the year.
☛ How fracking might have led to an Ohio earthquake: The link between “fracking”-related activities and earthquakes was thrown into stark relief over the weekend when a magnitude 4.0 quake struck Youngstown, Ohio – typically not a hot bed of noticeable seismic activity. The quake triggered shaking reportedly felt as as far away as Buffalo, N.Y., and Toronto. The temblor struck Dec. 31 and was the latest and strongest of 11 minor-to-light quakes that have hit the region since March. The epicenters are clustered around a wastewater injection well for a hydraulic fracturing operation.
☛ Denver woman accused of attacking $30 million painting: A 36-year-old Denver woman, apparently drunk, leaned against an iconic Clyfford Still painting worth more than $30 million last week, punched it, slid down it and urinated on herself, according to a criminal case filed against Carmen Lucette Tisch. “It doesn’t appear she urinated on the painting or that the urine damaged it, so she’s not being charged with that,” Lynn Kimbrough, a spokeswoman for the Denver district attorney’s office, said Wednesday. “You have to wonder where her friends were.” Tisch is being charged with criminal mischief in the incident that happened at the Clyf ford Still Museum at 3:30 p.m. on Dec. 29. Damage to the painting — “1957-J-No. 2.” — is estimated at $10,000. The painting, which is nearly 9 1/2 feet tall and 13 feet wide, is estimated to be worth between $30 million and $40 million by the museum. Tisch allegedly committed the offense with her pants pulled down, according to the police report, and struck the painting repeatedly with her fist.
☛ STEVE ESPO POWERS: ESPO is legit.

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Everyday Skank

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:38:36 +0000

▲ Ferret Legging – A Truly Unusual Sport: Also known as ferret-down-trousers and put ‘em down, the rules of the sport are pretty tight. Competitors have two ferrets placed inside their trousers, which are tied firmly at the ankles and belted up at the waist, thereby eliminating any point of escape for the furry creatures. The competitor then stands before judges, enduring the misery of the razor-sharp claws and teeth of the ferrets. Other rules state that competitors cannot be drunk and the ferrets must not be sedated. Also, the ferrets must have a full set of teeth that have not been blunted or filed. The man who stands the longest, wins. Sounds gruesome, doesn’t it? Well, get this – they aren’t even allowed to put on underwear, so as to allow free access to the ferrets from one leg to the other.
▲ Shoplifting Around the World [Infographic]
▲ Mountain Dew Will Dissolve Rats On Contact: According to McGill, if a mouse is submerged in Mountain Dew between four and seven days, the rodent “will have no calcium in its bones and bony structures.” During those days of soft drink immersion, “the mouse’s abdominal structure will rupture.” Additionally, “its cranial cavity (head) is also likely to rupture within that time period,” McGill noted. After 30 days exposure to Mountain Dew, “all of the mouse’s structures” would have disintegrated to the point that it would not be recognizable. In fact, “the mouse will have been transformed into a ‘jelly-like’ substance.” The only part of the rodent that could possibly survive, added McGill, was “a portion of the tail.”
▲ Lab-grown glands, eyes and brain parts: Growing a complete, functioning brain is unfeasible, but there is real potential in growing functional neural tissue containing specific types of cells, for transplantation into the human brain. This is one avenue of research that the team are investigating. Last year, they showed that ES cells can be coaxed to differentiate into functional cerebellar Purkinje cells, which integrate themselves into the brain when transplanted into mouse foetuses. “We are now attempting to generate Purkinje cells from human ES and induced pluripotent stem cells,” says Sasai. This would be useful in establishing animal models for the spino-cerebellar ataxias, to investigate their pathogenesis and to explore the possibility of gene therapy for these diseases.” The 3D culture technique could also be used to grow midbrain tissue containing neurons that synthesize the neurotransmitter dopamine, which could eventually prove to be very useful in the development of therapies for Parkinson’s Disease.
▲ No Fear: Memory Adjustment Pills Get Pentagon Push: The Pentagon hasn’t come close to solving the PTSD crisis plaguing the current generation of troops. But a cutting-edge realm of treatment might change that — by wiping away the fear that military personnel associate with traumatic memories. The Pentagon this week announced an $11 million grant for three research institutions, all of them long-time hubs for the military’s ongoing PTSD investigations. Experts at Emory University, the University of Southern California and New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center will study the effectiveness of D-Cycloserine (DCS). DCS is a pharmaceutical thought to help extinguish fearful memories. It’s usually taken right before exposure therapy, a process that involves recalling traumatic experiences in an effort to nullify the menacing associations that accompany them.
▲ Saudi son sale: $20 million price tag for a child: A failed Saudi businessman has put up his own son up for sale on Facebook. He claims that with all doors closed to him, he couldn’t see any other way to provide for his wife and daughter. Saud bin Nasser Al Shahry wants more than 73 million UAE Dirhams for the boy, a sum equivalent to almost $20 million, reports Qatar’s Al Sharq newspaper. A deal on the boy would offer “a decent life to his mother and sister rather than living in poverty.” The resourceful businessman said his debt-collecting firm had been ruled illegal by a local court and had to be shut down. When Al Shahry approached the Labor Office for financial assistance, the authorities allegedly refused him aid as the ministry does not provide help to individuals over 35 years old.
▲ 7 year old Poppy Burge gets liposuction voucher from ‘Human Barbie’ mum Sarah for Christmas: A seven-year-old who received a voucher for a boob job on her last birthday has received yet another inappropriate gift from her surgery-obsessed mother: A £7,000 voucher for liposuction. Little Poppy Burge received the gift in her Christmas stocking after her mother, a 51-year-old plastic surgery addict known as The Human Barbie, decided it would ‘come in handy’. ‘I put the voucher in her stocking – there’s nothing wrong with that,’ she said. ‘She asks for surgery all the time. She wants to look good and lipo is one of those procedures that will always come in handy.
▲ Police Shoot and Kill Armed 8th Grader in Texas: Police shot and killed an eighth grader brandishing a handgun in a Texas middle school hallway Wednesday. Police received a call around 8 a.m. saying there was someone with a weapon at Cummings High School in Brownsville, Texas, the Associated Press reported. Officers found the student with a handgun in a hallway and shot him after he “engaged” police, a district spokeswoman said in a statement. He was taken to a nearby medical center where he later died, the Brownsville Herald reported. His name has not been released. Local ABC affiliate KXXV-TV reported that police told the student to put his weapon down and fired three times after he refused to comply.
▲ Stephen Hawking admits he finds women ‘a complete mystery’: His career has shed light on the secrets of the universe, from the nature of space-time to the workings of black holes, but there is one conundrum that still baffles the world’s most famous scientist. In an interview to mark his 70th birthday this weekend, Stephen Hawking, the former Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, admitted he spent most of the day thinking about women. “They are,” he said “a complete mystery.”
▲ Avoiding Facial Recognition of the Future: The main focus of the camouflage is to use makeup and hair to create a look that is a mix between organic and machine. This makes it very hard to program software that can detect facial features if the traditional lines of a person’s visage are broken up in non-organic fashion. For those wanting to take a stab at protecting their identity, there are a few basic tips offered: 1. Avoid enhancers: They amplify key facial features. 2. Partially obscure the nose-bridge: The region where the nose, eyes, and forehead intersect is a key facial feature. 3. Partially obscure the ocular region: The position and darkness of eyes is a key facial feature. 4. Remain inconspicuous: For camouflage to function, it must not be perceived as a mask or disguise.
▲ PayPal Tells Buyer To Destroy Purchased Violin Instead Of Return For Refund: a seller claims that she’s out $2,500 and an antique violin after the company told the buyer to destroy the instrument. According to the seller, who shared her tale with the aforementioned Regretsy, she had sold the old violin to a buyer in Canada, who subsequently disputed the instrument’s bona fides. It is certainly not uncommon for people in the antique musical instrument field to argue over whether or not a particular item is the real deal, and it makes sense to notify PayPal that you are disputing the purchase. But the decision as to whether or not the violin is the real deal or an impersonator is not usually left up to the company that promises the payment. Alas, someone at PayPal apparently is an expert in old violins, because the company determined the instrument was “counterfeit” and told the buyer he needed to destroy it in order to get his refund. The buyer not only smashed the violin to bits; he also snapped some pics that he sent to the seller.
▲ La Redoute Naked Man Kids PHOTO: Stylist UK reports that the image has stirred up its fair share of controversy in France — and with good reason. The photo, found on La Redoute’s e-commerce site, features four annoyingly happy looking children frolicking on the beach wearing fun (if grammatically incorrect) T-shirts. But way off in the distance behind them is a man wearing absolutely nothing. This is creepy on a number of levels — in the photo, this naked man’s presence invalidates all that childlike joy the children are experiencing. But then you have to step back a level. How did this man get here in the first place? Did La Redoute really do a children’s photoshooot on a beach where people are allowed to roam around naked? Odds are, if there was one naked guy on that beach, there were probably more.
▲ Chinese Girls Before and After Makeup: Before and after makeup comparisons, even more shocking than plastic surgery
▲ Deadly parasite turns Bay Area honeybees into zombie slaves: Infected bees go mad, abandoning their hive in a suicidal rush toward bright lights, according to a new study by San Francisco State researchers. “It’s the flight of the living dead,” said lead investigator and biology professor John Hafernik, also president of the California Academy of Sciences. The parasite, a tiny fly, has been found in bees from three-quarters of the 31 surveyed hives in the Bay Area — essentially, everywhere except Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. In a plotline similar to a George Romero horror film, the fly deposits its eggs into the bee’s abdomen, then takes over. The hapless bees walk around in circles, with no apparent sense of direction. Some are unable to even stand on their legs. “They kept stretching them out and then falling over,” Hafernik said. “It really painted a picture of something like a zombie.”
▲ India girl killed in ritual sacrifice to ensure better harvest: Police arrested two men, both poor farmers, last week and they told police they killed the girl to appease their gods and get a better harvest, Das said. Tati was walking home after watching television at a neighbor’s house when she was kidnapped, Das said. The two men confessed to cutting her open and removing her liver as an offering. Das said the police had gathered enough evidence, apart from the confessions, to charge the two with murder. They would face life in prison or even the death sentence if convicted. The men were described as “tribals,” a term referring to the region’s indigenous people, most of whom remain mired in poverty and illiteracy.
▲ ‘Lost World’ Of Sea Creatures Discovered Near Antarctica: A “lost world” of sea creatures was discovered near Antarctica, British scientists announced Wednesday. Scientists doing their first exploring of deep-sea vents in the Antarctic said it was unlike anything found around other hydrothermal vents — a world populated by new species of anemones, predatory sea stars, and piles of hairy-chested yeti crabs. It was “almost like a sight from another planet,” said expedition leader Alex Rogers, a professor of zoology at Oxford University. Even in the eye-popping world of deep-sea vents, the Antarctic discoveries stand out, with the unfamiliar species of crabs found crowded in piles around the warm waters emanating from the seafloor. Many of the animals found at the vents have never been found at hydrothermal vents in other oceans, Rogers said. “To see these animals in such huge densities was just amazing,” Rogers told LiveScience.
▲ Naked man interrupts ‘Chipmunks’ at North Riverside Mall theater: Kids and parents who paid admission to see a movie about three shipwrecked chipmunks on Dec. 29 at the North Riverside Park Mall’s Classic Cinemas theater, 7501 Cermak Rd., got a bonus show that afternoon – one that landed a 34-year-old Chicago man in Cook County Jail. About a half hour into the 4 p.m. showing of the kiddie feature Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, police say an entirely naked Edward L. Brown stood up from his seat in the front row, faced the crowd of 86 theater-goers, stretched out his hands and displayed his genitalia for all to see before sitting back down to enjoy the movie. …According to the police report, Brown told officers that he had been let inside the movie theater for free by an unknown female who allegedly told him to have a seat in the front row of the theater, take off his clothes and wait for her, so they could have sex, smoke crack and do heroin.
▲ Charlton Library Sends Police To Collect Overdue Books From 5-Year-Old: A Charlton mom says her local library crossed the line when they sent police to collect her daughter’s overdue library books. Her mom says the 5-year-old girl was so afraid that she burst into tears. Charlton Police Sergeant Dan Dowd stopped by the home of Shannon Benoit to let her know that her daughter had two books several months overdue which needed to be returned or paid for.
▲ Bonobo ape lights campfire, cooks hamburgers: Kanzi, a 31-year-old Bonobos, also known as the pygmy chimpanzee, reportedly became obsessed with the film “Quest for Fire” at an early age. “Kanzi makes fire because he wants to,” Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, his main handler at the Great Ape Trust, told the Telegraph. “The movie was released about a year after Kanzi was born and was about early man struggling to control fire. Kanzi watched this spellbound over and over hundreds of times.”
▲ Children becoming ‘addicted’ to computers: Children’s access to smartphones and computers should be limited to stop them becoming “addicted” to electronic gadgets, according to a schools’ leader.
▲ Password case reframes Fifth Amendment rights in context of digital world: Beyond the log-in screen of Ramona Fricosu’s laptop computer lies what federal prosecutors say could be the key evidence in the bank-fraud case against her. There’s only one problem: Prosecutors don’t know her password. Thus, in an extraordinarily rare move, prosecutors in Denver are seeking a court order forcing Fricosu to unlock the computer so that they can obtain files they would use to try to convict her and her ex-husband. Civil-liberties groups nationwide have taken notice, saying the case tests the strength of rights against self-incrimination in a digital world. Prosecutors, meanwhile, say that allowing criminal defendants to beat search warrants simply by encrypting their computers would make it impossible to obtain evidence in an age when clues are more likely held within a hard drive than a file cabinet.
▲ White powder sent to Fla. gov’t office sickens 4: According to the Palm Beach Post, initial testing of the white powder was “inconclusive.” WPEC mentioned that there can be psychological and physical effects or psychosomatic symptoms even if the substance is not hazardous due to the panic caused by the situation, but Emergency Manager for the City of West Palm Beach Allan Ortman told the Palm Beach Post that when tested the powder didn’t change colors, which is raising some concern. The powder has been sent to a FBI lab for further testing, and results are expected within 24 hours.
▲ Police State 2012: No Need to Wait, It’s Already Here: One of the greatest problems in talking about the police state is that all such discussion of the subject is hampered by the lack of a clear-cut definition. Given the public’s own ignorance of the true nature and function of a police state, story after story after story of intolerable levels of official oppression, secret illegal surveillance, and increasingly sophisticated technology for tracking, apprehending, incapacitating and even killing dissenters can be dismissed because these stories are reported one at a time, in a contextless and therefore meaningless way that invites the interpretation that these stories are only warnings of what is to come instead of sign posts of a reality that is already here.
▲ John Lydon’s top of the pops roots Reggae picks: Don Letts: The Rastas loved John! To them he was “THE punk rock Don from London” they were aware of all the trouble he had stirred up in London, and yeah, they were into what he stood for and his stance, and they dug it… We smoked a chalice together with U Roy for breakfast, and then went out to one of his dances, miles out in the countryside, quite a long journey by car. I remember the dreads stringing up this sound, and kicking off with some earthquake dubs. Now let me tell you this sound system was LOUD, and me and John both of us, literally passed out! I remember hours later some dreads shaking us awake, it was like, “Wake up man, dance done, dance finish now man!” Yeah, it was pretty wild for me and John out in Jamaica. We loved it. John just had a vibe you know, people were drawn to him. It was the same in London; it was the same in Kingston. John is Irish, and there is a definite affinity between Jamaicans and Irish!
▲ Pot Culture: White Punks on Dope: In fact, despite protestations to the contrary, the punks always smoked pot when no one was looking. In John Lydon’s autobiography, Don Letts explains how he became DJ at the seminal punk hang out, The Roxy: “I took the job at first for the money. I thought the punks were just a bunch of crazy white people. I didn’t really tune into it. When I became the deejay and started meeting them, I picked up on what they were doing. I got the job first, and then got all my black mates to work there. Everybody who worked there, besides Andy (Czezowski), was black. We used to make joints before we went to work to sell to the punks over the counter. The people would come up and say, ‘Give me two beers and a spliff. No, make that two spliffs and a beer.’ They couldn’t roll Jamaican cones.”

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i58008 618

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 17:39:24 +0000

✖ ‘Absolutely no progress being made’ at Fukushima nuke plant, undercover reporter says: Conditions at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant are far worse than its operator or the government has admitted, according to freelance journalist Tomohiko Suzuki, who spent more than a month working undercover at the power station. “Absolutely no progress is being made” towards the final resolution of the crisis, Suzuki told reporters at a Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan news conference on Dec. 15. Suzuki, 55, worked for a Toshiba Corp. subsidiary as a general laborer there from July 13 to Aug. 22, documenting sloppy repair work, companies including plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) playing fast and loose with their workers’ radiation doses, and a marked concern for appearances over the safety of employees or the public.
✖ 9 Underground Economies – And Greece: The fortunes of the world’s legitimate economies may rise and fall, but the global black market is currently booming. From Somalia’s “pirate stock exchange” to the flourishing illegal organ trade in Egypt, there are some making money hand-over-fist, under the table. We took a look at nine “alternative economies” — and Greece — to find out how people make do on the margins.
✖ TEPCO says it ‘no longer owns’ Fukushima fallout: TEPCO’s lawyers used the arcane legal principle of res nullius to argue the emissions that escaped after the tsunami and earthquake triggered a meltdown were no longer its responsibility. “Radioactive materials (such as cesium) that scattered and fell from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant belong to individual landowners, not TEPCO,” the utility told Tokyo District Court. The chief operating officer of the prestigious golf course, Tsutomo Yamane, told The Australian that he and his staff were stunned: “I couldn’t believe my ears. I told my employees, ‘TEPCO is saying the radiation doesn’t belong to them’, and they said ‘I beg your pardon’.”
✖ The Leading Cause of Breast Cancer?: Profiteers in the medical CT scan business took a big hit last week from a major new government report on the causes of breast cancer. Published by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, the exhaustive analysis found that medical radiation, particularly the large radiation dose delivered by CT scans, is the foremost identifiable cause of breast cancer
✖ Street Cams Can Now Tag, Track and Follow Individuals (video): The dystopian nightmare described in George Orwell’s novel 1984 took place in London, UK. This very city is today one of the most heavily monitored places in the world, using a record number of cameras and the most advanced surveillance technology to keep track of its citizens. Reuters now reports that the CCTV system of London has now the ability to tag specific people, track them across the entire system and even run a “search” on them for previous footage. The report basically praises the software and quickly dismisses the privacy concerns it raises, stating that most citizens approve of being monitored (I’d like to see a scientific survey proving this). Of course, this summer’s London Riots were mentioned as an excuse to implement this technology, as anticipated in my article entitled The London Riots and How They Will be Used to the Elite’s Advantage.
✖ Man Jailed In Near-Shooting Over Facebook: A North Strabane Township man has been jailed on attempted homicide and other charges after police said he tried to shoot his wife because he believes she spends too much time on Facebook.
✖ The Pentagon and its Sock Puppets: The inspector general’s investigation grappled with the question of whether the outreach constituted an earnest effort to inform the public or an improper campaign of news media manipulation. The inquiry confirmed that Mr. Rumsfeld’s staff frequently provided military analysts with talking points before their network appearances. In some cases, the report said, military analysts “requested talking points on specific topics or issues.” One military analyst described the talking points as “bullet points given for a political purpose.” Another military analyst, the report said, told investigators that the outreach program’s intent “was to move everyone’s mouth on TV as a sock puppet.”
✖ Child sex: Woman arrested on sex charges involving 7-year-old girl: A woman who told deputies she had sex with a 7-year-old girl to prove her love for her married boyfriend is in the Orange County Jail, where she is being held on sexual-battery and other charges. Margaret Ann O’Neill, 26, of Kissimmee, admitted to sheriff’s investigators that she had sex with the child three times last year at a home in west Orange County, they said. O’Neill, known as Meg, told detectives that her lover, Christopher P. Smith, 32, manipulated her to perform the acts. He promised to leave his wife for her and said “she was led to believe that by giving herself to Smith’s sexual appetites proves her love for him,” a sheriff’s report states. Smith was arrested Dec. 5 and is being held without bail at the same jail. Another woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair turned him in Dec. 4 after he asked her to have sex with the child, now, 8, according to the report.
✖ Rock Hill woman struck in head with bowling ball: Deputies were called Sunday to Strikers Family Sports Center, 124 N. Anderson Road, Rock Hill, and found a 28-year-old woman on the floor next to the snack bar, bleeding from the forehead, according to a York County Sheriff’s Office report. Deputies could see her skull through the cut, and EMS treated her before taking her to Piedmont Medical Center. The woman told police she and a man had been arguing because she wouldn’t let him buy her drinks, the report states. When it was his turn to bowl, the man picked up a 12-pound ball and flung it at her head while she was sitting down. Witnesses told deputies they saw Stevenson pick up the ball and throw it at the woman before he left the bowling alley.
✖ Venezuela’s Chavez: Did U.S. give Latin American leaders cancer?: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez speculated on Wednesday that the United States might have developed a way to give Latin American leaders cancer, after Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez joined the list of presidents diagnosed with the disease. It was a typically controversial statement by Venezuela’s socialist leader, who underwent surgery in June to remove a tumor from his pelvis. But he stressed that he was not making any accusations, just thinking aloud. “It would not be strange if they had developed the technology to induce cancer and nobody knew about it until now … I don’t know. I’m just reflecting,” he said in a televised speech to troops at a military base. “But this is very, very, very strange … it’s a bit difficult to explain this, to reason it, including using the law of probabilities.”
✖ Tessa Gay, 35, ‘had sex with her daughter’s underage friends on dozens of occasions’: A mother is facing up to 80 years in jail after being accused of having sex with two of her daughter’s male teenage friends. Tessa Gay, 35, is also alleged to have played sexually charged game of ping pong with another teen where the winner allowed to intimately touch the loser. Gray, a mother of one, is said to have admitted to the underage sex charges when interviewed by police.
✖ Ohio dad charged with drugging kids: An Ohio father has been charged with giving his children a potentially addictive pain medicine so he could submit their urine for his drug tests. Police said Lawrence E. Kirk Jr., 30, Conneaut, Ohio, had to submit to a urine test before his prescription for Oxycodone could be renewed in order to assure he was not using illegal drugs. They said he diluted the Oxycodone in water and then had his 6, 7, 9 and 10 year old children drink the solution. He would then collect their urine and present it to a doctor as his own.
✖ Police Search For “Backpage Killer” After Four Women Found Dead: Police have found the dead bodies of four women this month, and police say three of them had advertised escort services on Backpage.com, a Craigslist-type site that includes ads for escort, massage and stripper services. On December 19, the bodies of 23-year-old Renisha Landers (pictured), and her cousin, 24-year-old Demesha Hunt, were found in the trunk of Lander’s new Chrysler 300 parked in the driveway of a vacant home. Their bodies showed no outward sings of trauma and investigators are awaiting autopsy results to determine the cause of death. Then, on Christmas Day, two black females between the ages of 28 and 29 were found in the trunk of a car that had been set on fire. They were both burned beyond recognition. Police would later identify them and reveal both had advertised escort services on Backpage.com, as did either Landers or Hunt.
✖ Photographer arrested after falling asleep in Mcdonalds with child porn on laptop screen: According to a probable-cause affidavit, Harrison County Police Department Officer Nicholas Smith was walking through a McDonald’s restaurant Nov. 14 in Corydon when he observed Brockman asleep in an upright position behind a table. There was a laptop computer in front of him. When the officer walked behind Brockman, he observed multiple pictures of nude children who appeared to be between the ages of 5 and 10 on the computer screen. Brockman consented to a warantless search of his computer, which was taken into evidence. An investigation by the Indiana State Police revealed “hundreds of images of child erotica,” according to court records. There was at least one image that depicted sexual conduct by a child.
✖ Caught In Act, TSA Bomb Screener Declares Child Porn “Not Right In A Legal And Moral Sense”: After waiving his Miranda rights, Wilson–who has been suspended by the TSA–told investigators that he used his laptop to download illicit images of children, and that he “sometimes masturbates to the images of child pornography.” Wilson added that he “usually deletes the child pornography” after viewing movies and images “because he knows that it is not right in a legal and moral sense. Wilson stated that he knows that he has a problem.” A “forensic preview” of Wilson’s two computers (as well as various storage devices found in a locked safe) revealed a variety of videos and photos “depicting prepubescent females engaged in sexually explicit conduct with adults.
✖ Man Who Sexually Assaulted Teen Allegedly Posed As Police Officer: A Brooklyn neighborhood remains on edge as police continue their search for a man who allegedly pretended to be a police officer and sexually assaulted a teenage boy he met in a subway station last week. Investigators say the man, seen above in a police sketch, approached a 15-year-old boy at the 53rd Street and Fourth Avenue station in Sunset Park around 9:30 a.m. Friday, after the teen threw an empty bag of potato chips on the ground.
✖ Richard Prince Lawsuit Focuses on Limits of Appropriation: One recent afternoon in the offices of the Midtown law firm run by David Boies and his powerful litigation partners, a large black clamshell box sat on a conference table. Inside were raucous, sometimes wildly funny collages of photographs and magazine pages handmade by the artist Richard Prince, works of art that have become the ur-texts of one of the most closely watched copyright cases ever to rattle the world of fine art. In March a federal district court judge in Manhattan ruled that Mr. Prince — whose career was built on appropriating imagery created by others — broke the law by taking photographs from a book about Rastafarians and using them without permission to create the collages and a series of paintings based on them, which quickly sold for serious money even by today’s gilded art-world standards: almost $2.5 million for one of the works. (“Wow — yeah,” Mr. Prince said when a lawyer asked him under oath in the district court case if that figure was correct.)
✖ Embolism After Long Flight Killed Rapper Heavy D: A pulmonary embolism brought on by a long flight killed rapper Heavy D, according to a report from the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office released Tuesday. Heavy D (real name: Dwight Arrington Myers) collapsed and died suddenly outside his Beverly Hills home on Nov. 8 at age 44. His cause of death was a blood clot in his lung, but he also suffered from deep vein thrombosis and heart disease. Craig Harvey, chief of the L.A. County Coroner’s Office, said the blood clot was “most likely formed during an extended airplane ride,” according to the L.A. Times. The rapper had recently returned to L.A. from a trip to London. Risk factors for deep vein thrombosis, or DVT, include long distance travel with little mobility, obesity, and immobility from an acute illness or surgery.

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Venom’s 1985 Christmas Interview!

Billoney — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:20:00 +0000

Hack Yer DNA

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

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

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One in a Million

o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 02:57:14 +0000

➪ The Most Bizarre Use for Michael Jackson’s Old Hair Ever: Today the gambling website OnlineGamblingPal.com dropped $10,871 for a sample of entombed pop star Michael Jackson’s old hair. Why so much? Because that’s the going market rate for the amount of Michael Jackson hair you see in the photo. Also, they saw the hairball’s potential—as a roulette ball.
➪ Hey Kids! See the 10 Most Tasteless X-Rated Christmas Ornaments! (NSFW): Christmas season is a time of warmth and love, especially if it concerns two leathermen engaging in sweaty doggie-style buttsex. At least that’s the thinking among people who enjoy X-rated Christmas-tree ornaments, and we can only assume those people don’t have a lot of little nephews and nieces over for egg nog. Here are ten of the more, ummm, striking ornament possibilities out there. The first one is safe for work; after that you’re on your own.
➪ Google+ rolling out facial recognition feature: Google is rolling out a feature that lets members of its online social network automatically find themselves in photos posted by friends. The “Find My Face” feature being added to Google+ over the next several days is opt-in only, meaning people have to make a point to turn it on. By leaving it to Google+ members to activate the feature, the Internet giant was sidestepping privacy concerns raised when social networking rival Facebook added facial recognition in an opt-out style this year.
➪ Learning high-performance tasks with no conscious effort may soon be possible (w/ video): In the future, a person may be able to watch a computer screen and have his or her brain patterns modified to improve physical or mental performance. Researchers say an innovative learning method that uses decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging could modify brain activities to help people recuperate from an accident or disease, learn a new language or even fly a plane.
➪ Bedbugs Get Away with Incest: As if bedbugs weren’t gross enough already, entomologists have now found that they get ahead by mating with their own mothers, brothers, sisters and fathers. By inbreeding, a single pregnant female can start the infestation of an entire building on her own. Parent-sibling matings and sibling-sibling matings are rare in the animal kingdom. So this study reveals an exception to the anti-inbreeding rule. But I’m drawn to the report for a pettier reason. As far as I’m concerned, DNA evidence has trumped the words of my landlord and a New York City housing inspector.
➪ Obama GAVE Iran the Drone!: The immediate and obvious questions were these: 1) Why didn’t we try to recover the drone? 2) In lieu of a rescue effort why didn’t we bomb it into oblivion? Apparently there was third option and Onama struk that down also. THE ANSWERS WILL SHOCK YOU – or maybe not. Fox News National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin reported that apparently the Pentagon pleaded with Barrack Hussein Obama to give the order to do just that. The Pentagon initially wanted to send a special forces team to recover the drone. Obama shot down that suggestion. Then the Pentagon offered up plan B , blow it to kingdom come. Obama refused that too and now Iran and China have a brand spanking new fully functional top secret US RQ 170 Sentinel Drone. The Drone was not recovered or destroyed specifically per Obama’s orders
➪ World Domination From Denver Airport?: Almost no one likes being in airports these days, but some people believe that one airport in particular — the Denver International Airport — is not only a hassle but also tied to conspiracies about the collapse of Western civilization. Some say there’s a top-secret underground bunker for the world’s elite to survive a nuclear war (or the impending Mayan 2012 apocalypse). Others say the airport must have a connection to Nazis since the runways form a perfect swastika (actually they don’t). Even ex-Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura got into the act, interviewing a man claiming that massive tunnels under the airport were built not for luggage handling or mass transit (that’s what they want you to think!), but instead for much more sinister purposes.
➪ 7 Creepiest Abandoned Zoos on Earth: The wind swings the old cage door open as if to free a reluctant occupant. But there’s nothing there… Or are those paw prints in the sand? Besides, isn’t that the stale breath of some meat-eating beast hanging in the air? And what’s that rustling sound in the bushes? As we explore the following places, you’ll see that abandoned zoos can be more than a little creepy.
➪ Lightning Sprites, Elves Caught on Camera: Flying above the U.S. Midwest, scientists using high-speed video cameras have caught the first 3-D images of sprites, elves, blue jets, and crawlers—in the form of lightning, that is. First seen by scientists in 1989, sprites and their menagerie of exotically named kin are bursts of electrical energy that form about 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth, sometimes leaping all the way from the tops of thunderheads to outer space.
➪ Students ordered to school on a Saturday as Russia resorts to ‘devious tricks’ to limit numbers at anti-Putin rally: Russian authorities today resorted to ‘devious tricks’ to limit the numbers attending an anti-Vladimir Putin rally which is expected to be the largest ever against the prime minister. Pupils between 14 and 17 have been ordered to attend school tomorrow for hastily arranged tests during the hours of the protest. They were warned they risk flunking their courses if they fail to sit at their desks for unprecedented Saturday exams.
➪ This 28-Year-Old’s Startup Is Moving $350 Million And Wants To Completely Kill Credit Cards: There’s a tiny 12-person startup churning out of Des Moines, Iowa. Dwolla was founded by 28-year-old Ben Milne; it’s an innovative online payment system that sidesteps credit cards completely. Milne has no finance background, yet his little operation is moving between $30 and $50 million per month; it’s on track to move more than $350 million in the next year. Unlike PayPal, Dwolla doesn’t take a percentage of the transaction. It only asks for $0.25 whether it’s moving $1 or $1,000.
➪ Hundreds of NASA’s moon rocks reported missing: The space agency has lost or misplaced more than 500 pieces of the lunar rocks and other space samples, NASA’s inspector general reported Thursday, making the case for better inventory controls. Astronauts on the Apollo moon landings from 1969 to 1972 returned 842 pounds of lunar rock and soil to Earth. The space agency now loans samples, along with meteorite and comet dust, to about 377 researchers worldwide. The space agency now lists 517 moon rock samples as missing or stolen. However, the inspector general audit suggests much more is missing, based on inquiries to a sample of 59 scholars loaned moon rocks, comet dust or meteorites. The audit found 19% could not locate all of their samples.
➪ Smuggler tried to hide $140,000 drug stash in nacho cheese: Customs and Border officials nabbed a 21-year-old Mexican citizen this week on suspicion of smuggling $140,000 worth of methamphetamine in these three cans of liquid nacho cheese and jalapenos, the LA Times reports. Incredibly, this is not the first time nacho cheese has been used as a smuggling tool. In October, a customs officials found 7 pounds of meth hidden in nacho cheese cans, NPR reports.
➪ White House–Laughingly–Declines to Comment on Senate Vote to Repeal Military’s Ban on Sodomy and Bestiality: At the White House press briefing on Monday, reporter Lester Kinsolving of WorldnetDaily noted the 93 to 7 Senate vote for a defense authorization bill that repeals the military’s ban on sodomy and bestiality and asked White House Press Secretary Jay Carney whether President Obama, as commander-in-chief, approves or disapproves of bestiality in the armed forces. Carney declined to comment.
➪ Rats Feel Each Other’s Pain: Empathy lets us feel another person’s pain and drives us to help ease it. But is empathy a uniquely human trait? For decades researchers have debated whether nonhuman animals possess this attribute. Now a new study shows that rats will free a trapped cagemate in distress. The results mean that these rodents can be used to help determine the genetic and physiological underpinnings of empathy in people.
➪ Make no bones about it, this is Britain’s scariest cave! Photographer captures eerie skull in rock face of remote diving spot: Only the bravest would tackle a cave whose icy waters have already claimed the lives of several divers. But if there was any doubt about the peril that awaits at Hodge Close Quarry, one need only look at this picture The lake at the abandoned slate quarry is an eerie enough site – but as this image shows if you turn your head you are greeted with the terrifying sight of a giant skull.
➪ SWAT Raids, Stun Guns, And Pepper Spray: Why The Government Is Ramping Up The Use Of Force: But America’s police departments have been moving toward more aggressive, force-first, militaristic tactics and their accompanying mindset for 30 years. It’s just that, with the exception of protests at the occasional free trade or World Bank summit, the tactics haven’t generally been used on mostly white, mostly college-educated kids armed with cellphone cameras and a media platform. Police militarization is now an ingrained part of American culture. SWAT teams are featured in countless cop reality shows, and wrong-door raids are the subject of “The Simpsons” bits and search engine commercials. Tough-on-crime sheriffs now sport tanks and hardware more equipped for battle in a war zone than policing city streets. Seemingly benign agencies such as state alcohol control boards and the federal Department of Education can now enforce laws and regulations not with fines and clipboards, but with volatile raids by paramilitary police teams.
➪ Suit filed after NM teen cuffed for burp in class: A 13-year-old was handcuffed and hauled off to a juvenile detention for burping in class, according to a lawsuit filed against an Albuquerque school principal, a teacher and school police officer. The boy was transported without his parents being notified in May after he “burped audibly” in PE class and his teacher called a school resource officer to complain he was disrupting her class. The lawsuit also details a separate Nov. 8 incident when the same student was forced to strip down to his underwear while five adults watched as he was accused of selling pot to another student; the boy was never charged.
➪ Dead scuba diver had been missing 26 years: It had been 26 years since anyone last laid eyes on well-known wheelchair scuba diver Peter Devoe, who failed to resurface after a 1985 family dive at Cates Park in North Vancouver. Devoe, who was 29 when he disappeared, was finally recovered in the Burrard Inlet by a pair of commercial fishers in October. Coroners said Wednesday they identified his remains by the jewelry he wore and telltale marks on his bones from a car accident. His body was surprisingly well-preserved within his full-body scuba suit, despite floating in the inlet for almost three decades. His remains were found just west of where he vanished during a dive with his brother on March 13, 1985. His body never floated out of the bay, and was anchored down in the calm waters by his weighty equipment, Coroner Stephen Fonseca said.
➪ Supercharged mobility scooter seized by Doncaster council: A supercharged mobility scooter has been seized by Doncaster council officers after being driven at speeds of up to 60mph, scaring wild deer and annoying residents in the area. Converted to be driven by a supercharged 140cc petrol engine, the mobility scooter was described as a ‘feat of engineering’ by Cynthia Ransome, Doncaster council’s communities officer. As well as the engine, it had been ‘pimped’ with go-kart wheels and a large exhaust.
➪ The Worst Sounds In The World: 15. Death by electrocution, government sanctioned or otherwise. 14. Human or animal run over, hit, or maimed by a car. 13. Civil War surgeon amputating limbs. 12. Guillotine in use; subsequent lopping and dropping. 11. Monkey having its skull bashed open, brains eaten in the name of impotence-curing cuisine. 10. Cannibal chewing on his own penis. 9. Involuntary dual nipple piercing via meat hooks. 8. Bones breaking and/or cracking. 7. Disembowelment (not even Mel Gibson, Freedom!). 6. Human body ejected through the windshield of an automobile. 5. Drawing and quartering. 4. Reanimated corpse biting into your (or a loved one’s or a stranger’s) neck muscles, jugular vein or assorted sinewy tissues. 3. Hair torn from a scalp, human or otherwise. 2. Frenzied knife-stabbing-a-sandbag sound most often heard in cinematic prison shank scenes, except here. 1. Curb stomp.
➪ Pro Grade (3D Printer-Made?) ATM Skimmer: In July 2011, a customer at a Chase Bank branch in West Hills, Calif. noticed something odd about the ATM he was using and reported it to police. Authorities who responded to the incident discovered a sophisticated, professional-grade ATM skimmer that they believe was made with the help of a 3D printer. Below is a front view image of the device. It is an all-in-one skimmer designed to fit over the card acceptance slot and to record the data from the magnetic stripe of any card dipped into the reader. The fraud device is shown sideways in this picture; attached to an actual ATM, it would appear rotated 90 degrees to the right, so that the word “CHASE” is pointing down.
➪ Anti-graffiti campaign under way in Brooklyn: An anti-graffiti campaign is under way in Brooklyn to help business owners keep their buildings clean and keep customers spending money. Some consider the colorful spray-paint graffiti to be street art, but in the bustling business district of Bay Ridge along 3rd, 4th and 5th avenues, it is frowned upon. Dennis Monier has owned Tops Restaurant Supply for 43 years, and he also lives in Bay Ridge, so his neighborhood pride runs deep. He was dismayed on Sunday morning to see graffiti on his building. “It’s not good for the neighborhood, because it makes the neighborhood look dirty,” he said. “We’re trying to keep the neighborhood clean, the sidewalks, the walls, everything. And to have a graffiti-ed neighborhood, people won’t shop here. So you do want this removed.”
➪ Why Is Pesticide Used As An Ingredient In Infant Formula?: Why is cupric sulfate — a known herbicide, fungicide and pesticide — being used in infant formula? And why is it displayed proudly on product labels as a presumably nutritious ingredient? Used to kill fungus, aquatic plants and roots of plants, parasitic infections in aquarium fish and snails, as well as algae and bacteria such as Escherichia coli, cupric sulfate hardly sounds fit for human consumption, much less for infants.
➪ Prescription drug addiction skyrocketed 430% over past decade; Drug rehab for painkiller abuse soars: Federal statistics released Thursday revealed that treatment for prescription painkiller abuse has skyrocketed 430% over the last decade. The increase is even more pronounced given that over the same time period the overall rate of substance-abuse-related admissions to rehab facilities has flatlined, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration. The rise occurred in every region of the country, but was highest in Maine, Vermont, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Arkansas, Rhode Island, and West Virginia. Tylenol with codeine, Darvocet, Vicodin and Percocet ranked high on the SAMHSA’s list of most-abused prescription meds. Thanks King Solomon
➪ Man jailed for blasting co-worker’s rectum with air compressor: A CARPENTER’S assistant blasted pressurised air up his friend’s rectum, rupturing his large intestine, because he was seeking a pleasant change that would break the monotony of hard work, a Nicosia court has said. The foreign EU national who is a father of two, was jailed for 45 days last week after admitting that in October last year he had seriously injured his friend who required surgery and a lengthy stay in hospital to recover. “The defendant’s idea to administer pressurised air into his friend’s anus is indeed original and in reality the thought of it provokes laughter; but putting the idea into practice ended up in tragedy for the victim and the perpetrator,” the court said.
➪ Will the Kinect 2 read your lips? Open the pod bay door, HAL: The next generation of the Kinect (bundled with future Xbox consoles) may be “so accurate it can lip read,” the Technology Review Hello World headline breathlessly reads — evoking HAL 9000 in 2001. What’s more, says Eurogamer, citing a nameless source, “Kinect 2 will be so powerful it will enable games to detect when players are angry, and determine in which direction they are facing, and track the pitch and volume of player voices and facial characteristics to measure different emotional states.” Thanks Ava
➪ Anna Nicole Smith: Never-seen-before photoshoot… months before her death: Before her tragic passing in 2007, Anna Nicole Smith was well known her outrageous behaviour. But in a bizarre never-seen-before photo shoot, it appears that she took things to a whole other level. New snaps show the late actress and model completely naked and painted in gold. Taken while she was pregnant with her now five-year-old daughter Danielynn, Smith’s modesty is merely covered by her arm and a thick veil of the metallic paint.
➪ Facebook, Google, And YouTube In 1997 Format: Three important contemporary web sites, recreated with technology and spirit of late 1997, according to our memories. Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.03 and a screen resolution of 1024×768 pixels, running under Windows 95. We recommend using a Virtual Machine or appropriate hardware, connected to a CRT monitor. If such an environment unachievable, it should be possible to experience the piece with any browser that still supports HTML Frames. The transfer speed of our server is limited to 8 kB/s («dial-up» speed).

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