What’s Next For Occupy?
Erik Eckholm ponders the future of the Occupy movement, writing at the New York Times:
The ragtag Occupy Wall Street encampments that sprang up in scores of cities last fall, thrusting “We are the 99 percent” into the vernacular, have largely been dismantled, with a new wave of crackdowns and evictions in the past week. Since the violent clashes last month in Oakland, Calif., headlines about Occupy have dwindled, too.
Far from dissipating, groups around the country say they are preparing for a new phase of larger marches and strikes this spring that they hope will rebuild momentum and cast an even brighter glare on inequality and corporate greed. But this transition is filled with potential pitfalls and uncertainties: without the visible camps or clear goals, can Occupy become a lasting force for change? Will disruptive protests do more to galvanize or alienate the public?
Though still loosely organized, the movement is putting…
Andrew Breitbart Tells Occupy Protesters to Behave and Stop Raping People
If Breitbart ever has a meltdown, how will anybody know?
Kids Show Cultural Gender Bias
Via ScienceDaily:
Talk about gender confusion! A recent study by University of Alberta researchers Elena Nicoladis and Cassandra Foursha-Stevenson in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology into whether speaking French influenced how children assigned gender to objects yielded some interesting observations. Nicoladis and Foursha-Stevenson found some differences between the unilingual English children and the bilingual French-English children they surveyed. Some of the more startling results from the Anglo crowd? Cows are boys. Cats and stars are girls.
Le culture or la culture: our bias
The researchers showed objects or images to the children participating in the study and asked them whether the objects seemed to be masculine or feminine in nature. While the unilingual children seemed to identify most objects as masculine, many younger bilingual children were willing to consider that, globally speaking, some objects could be feminine in nature even though, Nicoladis says, “their categorizations didn’t correspond very well to whether the objects were…
Judge Napolitano Grills Donald Rumsfeld On WMD, Torture & More
Proof that Rummy is lying his ass off again. Here as well he attempts to revise history.
Keep in mind that “Freedom Watch,” Judge Napolitano’s TV show, is now cancelled (though there is a massive influx for support calling for its reinstatement — click here to add your voice).
Tennesseans Evolved Thumbs After All
Courtesy of Brandt Hardin
People think Tennesseans are remarkably stupid. Like the late Bill Hicks, who continually mocked my state during his comedy routines. “In many parts of our troubled world, people are yelling ‘Revolution!’” he ranted. “In Tennessee they’re yelling ‘Evolution! We want our thumbs!!‘” Whenever Tool or A Perfect Circle would come to town, singer Maynard Keenan always asked Tennessee audiences to put their thumbs in the air. As we held our opposable digits over our heads, Keenan came with the punch line: “Just making sure you have them.” What can I say? Stereotypes are hilarious.
So it is without resentment that this Tennessean wishes Charles Darwin a happy 203rd birthday today. I would love to celebrate with a heapin’ helpin’ of chilled monkey brains, but ’round these parts that would require cannibalizing the locals.
Despite the creationists’ best efforts, Darwin’s theory of natural selection reigns as the unifying concept in…
Rick Santorum Declares War On Heavy Metal
Keith Spillett’s satirical article on Santorum at The Tyranny of Tradition blog is the funniest political story I’ve read this week. Or this year.
Rick Santorum has been on the offensive lately, but his target has not been Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney or even President Barack Obama. For the past week, Santorum has been using his campaign to take aim at an issue he feels to be the single most dangerous force in America today: Satanism in heavy metal. “If you listen to the radio today, many of these brand new, so-called heavy metal music bands like Black Sabbath, Venom, The WASP and Iron Maiden use satanic imagery to corrupt the minds of young people,” announced Santorum at a 10,000 dollar a plate sock-hop in Valdosta, Georgia on Thursday.
Santorum’s popularity in the polls has grown substantially since he began speaking out against metal and its assault on traditional values. He has spent much of the past week in the Midwest encouraging young people to stay away from metal artists and listen to performers like Michael W. Smith and Pat Boone. In a recent Gallup Poll, 87 percent of Republican voters think that the biggest problem in America today is “the demented bloodlust of teenagers caused entirely by heavy metal music.”
In the past, Santorum has accused heavy metal of being the cause of some of the worst crimes in American history…
Are The World’s Pyramids Beaming Energy To Mysterious Space Cloud?
Photo: Stephen Witherden (CC)
Terrence Aym submitted this story to BeforeItsNews.com [disinfo ed.'s note: we do not endorse this story, but it has received a lot of attention so we decided to link to it here]:
Although NASA covered up the strange photon cloud that’s now enveloped the solar system, the word has leaked out from some scientists.
And now, as the ominous cloud approaches it’s affecting the sun and planets in measurable ways.
Amazingly, as the bizarre energy invades our space, some of the world’s most famous pyramids are generating intense energy.
Several incredible incidents of visible power beams shooting skywards into space towards the region of the alien photonic cloud are well-documented.
At the same time, people around the world began hearing and recording frightening sounds—noises that seem as if the Earth itself is moaning and wailing.
All the phenomena—including measurements of the never-before-seen gigantic electrification of the turbulent sun—seem to be centered on the deadly…
The Violence Of God
Julie Shoshana Pfau, a graduate student in religion at Emory University, and David R. Blumenthal, who teaches and writes on constructive Jewish theology, medieval Judaism, Jewish mysticism, and holocaust studies, discuss “How can you relate to an abusive God in a positive way?” at CrossCurrents:
Introduction
In 1993, I published my post-shoah theology entitled Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (Westminster John Knox). The book did not have the impact on Jewish and Christian theologians, on psychotherapists, or on holocaust survivors that it should have had. The reasons for this are complicated and I have tried to explain them elsewhere. However, the book has been read very steadily by survivors of child abuse and occasional doctoral students from whom I receive a steady stream of letters. The exchange below is a very good example and I am grateful to Julie Pfau for her willingness to publish these letters, as well as for her…
Is North Korea Addicted To Meth?
Could between a quarter and half of the North Korean population be meth users? SINO-NK reports:
Though the North Korean government would never admit to outsiders that there is a drug problem in the country, the Daily NK has filed many reports over the past several years suggesting that “bingdu” (meth) is available practically at epidemic levels inside the DPRK. Articles claim, among other things, that commodity prices rise and fall depending on the harshness of ongoing crackdowns on bingdu; that middle schoolers in Hamhung, South Hamgyong Province, were caught producing bingdu; that teenagers give it as a birthday gift to peers; and, most recently, that Kim Jong-Un had ordered a crackdown on bingdu producers, sellers, and users.
Quotes from defectors and sources who spoke to the Daily NK report that anywhere from ¼ to ½ of the population in North Korea are using the drug. And as reported by Isaac Stone Fish…
Anonymous Takes Down CIA Website
Via AFP via Google News:
The website of the Central Intelligence Agency was inaccessible on Friday after the hacker group Anonymous claimed to have knocked it offline.
“CIA Tango down,” a member of Anonymous said on @YourAnonNews, a Twitter feed used by the group. “Tango down” is an expression used by the US Special Forces when they have eliminated an enemy. Attempts to access the CIA website at cia.gov were unsuccessful.
More than two hours after the initial attack on the site attempts by AFP to reach cia.gov were met with a message saying the Web page was not available. Members of Anonymous also claimed Friday to have hacked the website of Camimex, the Mexican chamber of mines, and posted emails taken from the site online …
Icelanders Avoid Inbreeding Through Online Incest Database
So says Samantha Grossman in TIME:
Nowadays, some light Internet stalking is as common a pre-date ritual as showering or putting on a clean shirt. But for Icelanders, that online screening process can include running a date’s name through an incest database.
Sound ridiculous? Consider this: when you live in an isolated nation with a population roughly the size of Pittsburgh, accidentally lusting after a cousin is an all-too-real possibility. But a search engine called Íslendingabók (the Book of Icelanders) allows users to plug in their own name alongside that of a prospective mate, determining any familial overlap. The site claims to track 1,200 years of genealogical information about the island’s inhabitants. Anyone with an Icelandic ID number — that is, citizens and legal residents — is accounted for, the New York Daily News reports.
Not only can the site rule out courtships that might be a bit too close for comfort, but also it…
British Woman Predicts The Future Via Throwing Asparagus
South West England’s This Is Somerset profiles a local celebrity who hurls pieces of asparagus and gleans the future by interpreting how they land. Think of it as a terrible alternative to reading tea leaves:
A fortune teller who predicts the future using ASPARAGUS unveiled her top tips for 2012 – including two Royal pregnancies, the collapse of the Euro, and British glory at the Olympics. Mystic Jemima Packington, 56, claims to be the world’s only Asparamancer. She has made dozens of accurate predictions in recent years, including the demise of Gordon Brown, the credit crunch, and Oscar glory for British film The King’s Speech.
Chinese ‘Twitter’ Claims North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un Assassinated
Reports Lucas Shaw via Reuters:
Did social media just prematurely kill off the leader of North Korea?
Rumors that Kim Jong-un, the country’s supreme leader, has been assassinated just months after he took power originated on Chinese microblogging service Weibo and have now spread all over Twitter.
Others are reporting that Jong-un, believed to be 28 years old, may be on the run rather than dead, but both reports claim that some kind of coup is taking place.
One person on Weibo wrote (loose translation): “north korea’s biggest leader kim jung un, this morning in beijing time 2:45 am, had his residence broken into and was assassinated by unidentified people, who were shot dead by his bodyguards in korea’s embassy in beijing, vehicles are rapidly increasing in number, and have surpassed 30 of them, this sort of battle formation hasn’t been seen in over two years. please verify this.”
Alan Moore On V for Vendetta And The Rise Of Anonymous
Ahead of the ACTA protests this weekend, BBC News asked V for Vendetta’s writer, Alan Moore, for his thoughts on how his creation had become an inspiration and identity to Anonymous:
PREOCCUPATIONS
Without wishing to overstate my case, everything in the observable universe definitely has its origins in Northamptonshire, and the adoption of the V for Vendetta mask as a multipurpose icon by the emerging global protest movements is no exception.Back at the crack of the 17th century, Rushton Triangular Lodge was a strange architectural folly constructed to represent the Holy Trinity by an increasingly eccentric Sir Thomas Tresham while he endured decades of house-arrest for his outspoken Catholicism.
It was also one of the two locations, both owned by Tresham and both in Northamptonshire, at which the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was formulated by a group of dissident Catholics that included Tresham’s son Francis.
It would seem likely that the treatment afforded to the…
How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
Is a microscopic, mind-altering parasite spread by cats responsible for car accidents, hoarding behaviors, and schizophrenia? Respected scientists are now saying that “crazy cat lady” disease is real and millions of people are infected. Shocker via the Atlantic:
Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia?
The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in…
Dynasphere, Forgotten Vehicle Of The Future
Could the Dynasphere have replaced the car? Probably not, but it’s still fun to dream of an alternate world in which it did. Via the Museum of RetroTechnology:
The Dynasphere was invented Dr. J. H. Purves. In the picture below, the son of the inventor is at the controls, and apparently having some difficulties in steering; leaning this monowheel to one side is clearly not going to be easy. The Dynosphere was reported to have reached 30 mph on this run…[and] was said to have weighed 1000 pounds. One eye-witness states: “As a lad one day in the 1930s I went to the beach and saw a man trying to drive a huge wheel across the sands. It wasn’t very successful and wobbled about… I have always wondered what it was or whether I imagined it.”
Don’t Go Into Diabetic Shock Around The Police
Abby Zimet for Common Dreams:
The city council of Henderson, Nev. has approved a settlement of $158,500 after police brutally beat a man in diabetic shock after they stopped him for what they thought was drunken driving. Video shows five officers screaming at, pulling guns on and subduing Adam Greene as a sixth kicks him hard enough to break several ribs. Then they figured out he was ill. Who is it these guys work for again?
Smoking Marijuana Nearly Doubles Risk Of Driving Accidents
While it might seem obvious, researchers Mark Asbridge, Jill A. Hayden and Jennifer L. Cartwright took the trouble to scientifically conclude that “acute cannabis consumption is associated with an increased risk of a motor vehicle crash, especially for fatal collisions.” They report their findings in the British Medical Journal – here’s the abstract:
Objective To determine whether the acute consumption of cannabis (cannabinoids) by drivers increases the risk of a motor vehicle collision.
Design Systematic review of observational studies, with meta-analysis.
Data sources We did electronic searches in 19 databases, unrestricted by year or language of publication. We also did manual searches of reference lists, conducted a search for unpublished studies, and reviewed the personal libraries of the research team.
Review methods We included observational epidemiology studies of motor vehicle collisions with an appropriate control group, and selected studies that measured recent cannabis use in drivers by toxicological analysis of whole blood or self report. We excluded experimental or…
