Catholic Churches Raise Funds To Battle Gay Marriage
A tip from Hamptons Dictionary author Miles Jaffe led us to this report in the National Catholic Reporter:
Gathering money from 50 U.S. dioceses, the Portland, Maine, diocese contributed more than $550,000 to the campaign to rejecte Maine’s law extending civil marriage to gay and lesbian couples, according to financial records filed with the state agency that tracks political contributions.
In the Nov. 3 referendum, Maine voters rejected 53 to 47 percent the same-sex marriage law.
Supporters and opponents of the law spent more than $7 million, according to the Portland Press Herald.
During the summer, Bishop Richard J. Malone of Portland sent an appeal to other Catholic bishops seeking contributions to defeat the law that the state legislature passed and the governor signed in May.
According to financial records filed with Maine’s campaign finance watchdog,…
We Are Change Colorado at Al Gore Book Signing – Activist Rips Up Al’s Book in Front of His Face
Sourced from the New World Order Report:
Vietnamese Man Slept Beside Dead Wife For 5 Years
Mad news courtesy of Reuters:
HANOI (Reuters) – A Vietnamese man dug up his wife’s corpse and slept beside it for five years because he wanted to hug her in bed, an online newspaper reported on Thursday.
The 55-year-old man from a small town in the central province of Quang Nam opened up his wife’s grave in 2004, molded clay around the remains to give the figure of a woman, put clothes on her and then placed her in his bed, Vietnamnet.vn said.
The man, Le Van, told the website that after his wife died in 2003 he slept on top of her grave, but about 20 months later he worried about rain, wind and cold, so he decided to dig a tunnel into the grave “to sleep with her.”
His children found out,…
British Police Arrest People ‘Just For The DNA’
Strangely enough, this page is no longer on MSNBC. Here the cached version via Google, MSNBC via Reuters:
More than three-quarters of young black men are on system, watchdog says
Britain has built the world’s biggest DNA database without proper political debate and police routinely arrest people just to get their DNA profiles onto the system, the genetics watchdog said in a report on Tuesday.
The Human Genetics Commission, which advises the government on the social, legal and ethical aspects of genetics, called for a review of the database and said new laws must be passed to govern its use.
In a damning report, the commission said “function creep” had transformed the system from a DNA store for offenders into a database of suspects.
Was on MSNBC via Reuters, also on USA Today
WikiLeaks Releasing Over Half A Million Text Messages From 9/11
On WikiLeaks:
From 3 AM on Wednesday November 25, 2009, until 3 AM the following day (U.S. East Coast time), WikiLeaks is releasing over half a million U.S. national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.
The messages are being broadcast “live” to the global community — synchronized to the time of day they were sent. The first message is from 3 AM September 11, 2001, five hours before the first attack, and the last, 24 hours later.
Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center.
The archive is…
Courtroom First: Brain Scan Used in Murder Sentencing
Alexis Madrigal writes in Wired:
A defendant’s fMRI brain scan has been used in court for what is believed to be the first time.
Brain scan evidence that the defense claimed shows the defendant’s brain was psychopathic was allowed into the sentencing portion of a murder trial in Chicago, Science reported Monday. Brian Dugan, who had been convicted of the rape and murder of a 10-year-old, was sentenced to death, despite the fMRI scans.
“I don’t know of any other cases where fMRI was used in that context,” Stanford professor Hank Greely told Science.
While the possibility of using fMRI data in a variety of contexts, particularly lie detection, has bounced around the margins of the legal system for years, there are almost no documented cases of its actual use. In the 2005 case Roper v.…
Why You Should Be Hot and Bothered About ‘Climate-Gate’
John Lott writes on Fox News:
A coordinated campaign to hide scientific information about climate change appears unprecedented. Could it wind up costing us trillions?
Science depends on good quality of data. It also relies on replication and sharing data. But the last couple of days have uncovered some shocking revelations. Computer hackers have obtained 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. These e-mails, which have now been confirmed as real, involved many researchers across the globe with ideologically similar advocates around the world. They were brazenly discussing the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global warming claims. The academics here also worked closely with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climate…
Building Stonehenge: This Man Can Move Anything
Wally Wallington has demonstrated that he can lift a Stonehenge-sized pillar weighing 22,000 lbs and moved a barn over 300 ft. What makes this so special is that he does it using only himself, gravity, and his incredible ingenuity:
The Original Office, Revisited
Nick P. at Black Sun Gazette
I recently re-watched the show that started an international phenomenon. The original version of The Office has spawned many imitators, but never any that live up to the original. This is the fifth or sixth time that I’ve watched the series in its entirety. While upon first viewing the series can be seen as a brilliant piece of British comedy- and it is- it is only with this viewing that I realized what the show really is. The Office is an amazing dramatic piece that lays bare the crushing ennui that effects men and women in contemporary society.
Who’s Watching Glenn Beck?
Much like the Depression-era demagogue Father Charles Coughlin, the Fox News personality is promoting a mass movement. Should his bosses be pulling the plug? Tim Rutten asks this imponderable question in the Los Angeles Times:
For nearly a century, the Anti-Defamation League has stared unflinchingly into the dark corners of America’s social psyche — the places where combustible tendencies such as hatred and paranoia pool and, sometimes, burst into flame.
As a Jewish organization, the ADL’s first preoccupation naturally is anti-Semitism, but in the last few decades it has extended its scrutiny to the whole range of bigoted malevolence — white supremacy, the militia movement, neo-nativism and conspiratorial fantasies in all of their improbable permutations. These days, the organization’s research is characterized by the sense of proportion and sobriety that long experience…
Majority Now Against War In Afghanistan
From Infowars, a majority of the U.S. population now seems the Afghan war as not worth fighting:
Support for the US mission in Afghanistan has slipped to a new low, with 44 percent of Americans now saying the war there has been worth the cost, according to a recently released poll.
The numbers come as Obama grapples with whether to send more US troops to Afghanistan to boost the fight against a growing Taliban-led insurgency, just a week after a stopover at a US military base in Alaska at the start of his Asia trip when he told US troops he will get “public support back home” for the mission.
CIA’s Lost Magic Manual Resurfaces
Via Wired:
At the height of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency paid $3,000 to renowned magician John Mulholland to write a manual on misdirection, concealment, and stagecraft. All known copies of the document — and a related paper, on conveying hidden signals — were believed to be destroyed in 1973. But recently, the manuals resurfaced, and have now been published as “The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.” Topics include working a clandestine partner, slipping a pill into the drink of the unsuspecting, and “surreptitious removal of objects by women.”
This wasn’t the first time a magician worked for a western government. Harry Houdini snooped on the German and the Russian militiaries for Scotland Yard. English illusionist Jasper Maskelyne is reported to created dummy submarines and fake tanks to…
PETA’s Banned Thanksgiving Day Commercial
PETA purchased ad spot airtime on NBC during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, however the network rejected PETA’s ad because the “commercial does not meet NBC Universal standards.”
