Archive for February, 2009
One in Four Liver Transplants Go to Heavy Drinkers in the UK
Sarah Knapton, Telegraph:
Transplants for people with alcohol-related liver damage rose by more than 60 percent in the last decade, while waiting lists for donors has lengthened. Dr Tony Calland, chairman of the British Medical Association’s ethics committee, says surgeons could refuse transplants to heavy drinkers unless they agree to curb their alcohol habit.
“Organs are precious resources and should be used where the clinical outcome, the patient’s health, justifies the use of something so scarce,” Dr Calland told the Observer. “You have to have to have a very definite evidence that the person is going to stop drinking.
“If someone won’t promise, you could refuse them the transplant on clinical rather than ethical grounds.” Official figures show that in the year to March 31 2008, a total of 151 liver transplants out of 623 in the UK went to people with alcohol-related liver disease.
Cases of cirrhosis of the liver have tripled over…
Saudi King Appoints First Woman to Council
CNN: Saudi King Abdullah has appointed a woman to the council of ministers for the first time as part of a Cabinet reshuffle, networks including Saudi state-run Channel One reported Saturday. King Abdullah announced a new supreme court chief, minister of health, justice minister and information minister as part of the reshuffling, according to Channel One.
King Abdullah appointed Noor Al-Fayez to the Saudi Council of Ministers. She will serve in a new position as deputy minister for women’s education. “I’m very proud to be nominated and selected for such a prestigious position,” Al-Faiz told CNN on Saturday. “I hope that other ladies, females, will follow in the future.”
“People are very excited about this,” said Khaled Al-Maeena, editor-in-chief of Arab News, an English-language daily newspaper in Saudi Arabia. “This sends a clear signal that the King means business. Instead of appointing some bureaucrat, he appointed a woman.”
…
G.W. Bush, Bad President, But Not The Worst According to Presidential Historians
Timed for Presidents Day 2009, C-SPAN today releases the results of its second Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership, in which a cross-section of 65 presidential historians ranked the 42 former occupants of the White House on ten attributes of leadership.
I’m interested to see what disinfo.com readers think not only of the bottom of the barrel here, but who historians are holding in high regard:
Online Thieves Scam State of Utah out of $2.5 Million
Joel Hruska, arstechnica: States have been slashing funding allocations and contemplating tax increases as a means of balancing their budgets, which makes a recent revelation concerning the state of Utah’s treasury all the more embarrassing.
According to investigators, state officials recently uncovered evidence that some $2.5 million had been transferred from the state’s coffers into various holding accounts. The scheme is thought to have originated in Africa, possibly in Nigeria, but is not the same sort of attack that’s typically referenced when a person or article refers to a “Nigerian scam.”
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the chain of events leading to the theft were set in motion when one of the would-be thieves (or an associate) acquired a vendor number for the University of Utah’s design and construction department. That information allowed the miscreants to forge documents, changing the bank account information for the account in question. Once the account…
‘Most of What We Eat Is Not Real Food’
SPIEGEL ONLINE: The “eat local” movement has become a force to be reckoned with in the United States in recent years, going from the fringes to the mainstream as more and more people become interested in eating better and minimizing their carbon footprint. The kind of locally grown, sustainable organic food that was once a California phenomenon can now be found at stores and farmers markets across the country.
One of the pioneers of that movement is chef Alice Waters, who transformed her state’s cooking in the 1970s into world-renowned “California cuisine” with her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. Inspired by her experiences in France, she promoted the use of produce from local farms that is in season and advocated planting vegetable gardens in schools.
More than 30 years later, Waters is promoting sustainable agriculture as tirelessly as ever. She is now vice president of the international Slow Food movement, which promotes regionally…
Where They Make a Desert…
A video of the Iraq invasion, of Roman and U.S. imperialism, and of eternal reasons, mythologies and justifications.
In the words of Philip K. Dick: “The Empire Never Ended…”
Man Goes to Jail for Whistling “The Adams Family” at his neighbours.
Some bizarrre ASBO new about a man who went down for whistling the popular thee tune at his neighbors.
Half The World Is Now Middle Class
The Economist: For the first time in history more than half the world is middle-class — thanks to rapid growth in emerging countries.
THE crowd surges back and forth, hands above heads, mobile-phone cameras snapping one of Brazil’s best-known samba bands. It could be almost anywhere in Latin America’s largest city on a Saturday night. But this is Paraisopolis, one of São Paulo’s notorious crime-infested favelas (slums). Casas Bahia, the country’s largest retailer, is celebrating the opening there of its first ever store in a favela. It is selling television sets and refrigerators in a place that, at first glance, has no running water or electricity.
Among the shacks, though, rise three-storey brick structures with satellite dishes on their tin roofs. In the new shop, Brazilians without bank accounts — plumbers, salesmen, maids — flock to buy on instalment credit. In a country with no credit histories, the system is cumbersome: the staff…
Words Give Brain Handle on Feelings
Reuters: Brain scientists are starting to understand something poets, songwriters and diarists have long known: putting feelings into words helps ease the mind.
“It is a pretty well-established finding that this occurs, but we don’t know why,” Matthew Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.
“When you put feelings into words, you are turning on the same regions in the brain that are involved in emotional self-control,” Lieberman said.
“It regulates distress,” said Lieberman, who studies the brain using technology known as functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI, which highlights brain regions as they become active.
Lieberman’s findings are based on studies in which healthy subjects lie in an MRI machine and view emotionally evocative pictures, such as scared or angry faces. Study participants touch a button corresponding to a word that expresses that emotion.
…
The Scientifically Engineered ‘Worst Song’ in the World
Craig Hlavaty: Crazy science, will you ever learn? Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. Sure, we could start transplanting monkey heads on humans, but you shouldn’t. The atom bomb sure as hell ended World War II, but it began an era of atomic fear and guilt. We ended up with all kinds of hassles, like communism and bad Schwarzenegger movies.
This brings us to the crack team of Dave Soldier and Komar & Melamid, who scientifically created the world’s worst song. It clocks in at over 20 minutes. The trio has a website where they asked visitors to list their most hated sounds, be they operatic hip-hop with cowboy lyrics, swelling harps or marching-band music from hell. They claim that “fewer than 200 individuals of the world’s total population will enjoy this,” but released it anyhow.
Pill to Erase Bad Memories: Ethical Furor Over Drugs ‘That Threaten Human Identity’
Daily Mail: A drug which appears to erase painful memories has been developed by scientists. The astonishing treatment could help sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder and those whose lives are plagued by hurtful recurrent memories.
But British experts said the breakthrough raises disturbing ethical questions about what makes us human. They also warned it could have damaging psychological consequences, preventing those who take it from learning from their mistakes.
Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey starred in Eternal Sunshine Of the Spotless Mind — which saw the couple use a technique to erase painful memories of each other.
Fireball Over Texas — It is Debris from the Crashed Satellites?
Discover News: News 8 out of Austin has video of the fireball! I can now state unequivocally that this is not the result of the satellite collision.
The meteor is moving far too quickly for that; satellite collision debris would fall at perhaps 10 km/sec max, while incoming meteoroids are moving at 11km/sec at a minimum, and this thing is screaming across the sky at several dozen km/sec (assuming it’s at a typical meteor height of 50 or more km). So I was probably right in the first place, and what we have here is almost certainly a single object, perhaps a meter or two across, and it came from deep space.
Beyond 93!
The Infinite and the Beyond — Podcast: Episode #002 — Beyond 93!
Website • iTunes • Direct Download • RSS
In this episode of The Infinite and the Beyond, we talk about seeking community as this seems to be a hot issues right now throughout the Pagan Podcasting community.
We meet a common friend of heavy metal album covers and anti-mason propagandists as we learn about Baphomet in the regular show segment A Corner in the Occult. The most well known image of Baphomet was drawn by 19th century French occultist and magickian Eliphas Levi for his text Transcendental Magic and it is an often misinterpreted image often misconstrued as being a depiction of Pan or the Christian Devil, but in truth the image, symbolism, origins, and history of Baphomet offers so much more to the aspiring student than one can ever realize.
We learn just what I mean when I refer to occultism and the occult as many individuals often misunderstand these terms and in their ignorance over look the greater complexities and contributions that occultism has done for human history and continued human development in this day and age.
And to close I offer some friendly discourse by elaborating on Thelema, its Laws, and how I personally apply them in my daily life as we go beyond 93; all this and more in this thrilling second episode!
To message the show please go here.
A New Explanation for the Way Humans Evolved from Apes
Annalee Newitz, io9.com: It’s Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday [Feb. 12th], and we still don’t know why humans and chimps share 99 percent of their DNA, yet are such different animals. A new study published advances a weird new theory.
A group of researchers at the University of Washington have discovered that there is one area where human and ape DNA mutated very rapidly during the time that they were diverging on the evolutionary tree. Both species’ genomes mutated a great deal in areas where there are a lot of repeat sequences of DNA. Humans, like most creatures, have areas of their genome where the same chunk of genetic code is repeated once or several times.
U.S. Army ‘Wants More Immigrants’
BBC News: The United States army is to accept immigrants with temporary US visas, for the first time since the Vietnam war, according to the New York Times.
Until now immigrants have had to have permanent residency — a “green card” — in order to qualify for the services.
But those with temporary visas will be offered accelerated citizenship if they enrol, the Times says.
The Pentagon hopes the scheme will cover shortages in areas like medical care and language interpretation.
Many temporary immigrants will have been granted visas on the basis of their education or skills, so the defence department expects the new recruits to be more qualified than applicants who are US citizens — and in particular to have languages useful in combat zones like Afghanistan and Iraq.
“The American army finds itself in a lot of different countries where cultural awareness is critical,” said Lt-Gen Benjamin C Freakley, the top recruitment officer for…
Obama’s ‘Spy-Proof’ Blackberry Can Be Breached, Says Famous Hacker
While U.S. President Barack Obama’s blackberry has been claimed to be a spy-proof device, the world’s most famous hacker Kevin Mitnick says that it can still be breached.
He said that Obama’s super-secure BlackBerry only makes cracking into it more challenging, but it can still be done. “It’s a long shot, but it’s possible. You’d probably need to be pretty sophisticated, but there’s people out there who are,” Fox News quoted Mitnick as saying.
Mitnick served nearly five years in prison after pleading guilty to charges of wire and computer fraud for hacking into computer systems at some of the country’s largest cell-phone and computer companies during the 1990s, and he presently heads Mitnick Security Consulting. “If I was the attacker, I would look to Obama’s close circle of friends, family and associates and try to compromise their machines at home. The objective would be to get Obama’s e-mail address on the…
A Torture Report Could Spell Big Trouble For Bush Lawyers
Michael Isikoff | NEWSWEEK: An internal Justice Department report on the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics is causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials. H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the department’s ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), confirmed last year he was investigating whether the legal advice in crucial interrogation memos “was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.”
According to two knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters, a draft of the report was submitted in the final weeks of the Bush administration. It sharply criticized the legal work of two former top officials—Jay Bybee and John Yoo—as well as that of Steven Bradbury, who was chief of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the time the report was submitted, the sources said. (Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury did not respond…
Black Hole Confirmed in Milky Way
Pallab Ghosh, BBC News:
There is a giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy, a 16-year study by German astronomers has confirmed.
They tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the centre of the Milky Way, using two telescopes in Chile.
The black hole, said to be 27,000 light years from Earth, is four million times bigger than the Sun, according to the paper in the Astrophysical Journal.
Black holes are objects whose gravity is so great that nothing — including light — can escape them.
According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit.
New Opening Title Sequence for ‘The Simpsons’
The Simpsons is finally going HD — and, in what some fans might consider an even bigger development, getting a new opening title sequence as well:
