Archive for October, 2009
Twitter and a Newspaper Untie a Gag Order
Noam Cohen reports for the New York Times:
Twitter has been credited with helping to organize political protests and shine a light on abuses around the world. At the same time, the ubiquitous service has been criticized for disrespecting the sanctity of once-private halls of deliberation — whether a criminal jury’s chambers or an N.B.A. locker room.
In the rarest of cases, apparently, Twitter can do both. That is the view of the editor of The Guardian in London, Alan Rusbridger, who, after prevailing in a legal fight over the publication of secret documents, wrote that “the Twittersphere blew away conventional efforts to buy silence,” as a headline on his column put it.
Last month, a British judge ruled that material obtained by Guardian journalists about a multinational corporation had to be kept secret. Unlike other such injunctions, however, the “gag order” applied to the existence of the injunction itself. That is, The…
Poll: 75% Of Finns Don’t Want The Swine Flu Vaccine
sikainfluenssa.biz writes
In Finland at least three somewhat big media outlets, Ilta-Sanomat, MTV3 and Helsingin Sanomat, have held polls asking the Finnish people if they are going to take the swine flu vaccine. The results are as follows.
The first online poll was held by MTV3. It’s unclear how many people took part in it, but 61% said they do not want the swine flu vaccine.
Nearly 12,000 people answered the Helsingin Sanomat gallup, and the overwhelming majority, 75%, answered “No”.
Then a third poll at the end of September held by Ilta-Sanomat rendered the exact same percentage as the Helsingin Sanomat gallup, 75% will not be taking the vaccine. Over 16,000 people took part in the Ilta-Sanomat poll.
Churches Denounce African Children as “witches”
From NYT:
EKET, Nigeria (AP) — The nine-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall.
His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him — Mount Zion Lighthouse.
A month later, he died.
Nwanaokwo Edet was one of an increasing number of children in Africa accused of witchcraft by pastors and then tortured or killed, often by family members. Pastors were involved in half of 200 cases of ”witch children” reviewed by the AP, and 13 churches were named in the case files.
Some of the churches involved are renegade local branches of international franchises. Their parishioners take literally the Biblical exhortation, ”Thou…
Aliens Regret Policy of Only Abducting Lone Weirdos
From NewsBiscuit:
Extra-terrestrials have today conceded that a decades-long programme of abduction to gather detailed knowledge of human society and biology might have produced better results had they looked beyond suggestible loners with a history of mental health problems.‘In hindsight, I suppose there was always going to be a limit to the intelligence we could get from a depressed farmer drink-driving his tractor at 2am,’ said an alien spokesbeing today. ‘We were disappointed to find that the majority of these people from isolated rural communities were not as well-connected to the planet’s major political powers as we’d hoped, and in truth they only confused our understanding of the human race. For a time we weren’t sure the species had a definitive stance on incest, or indeed what the correct number of fingers and toes was for a human. Perhaps we should have made better use of Wikipedia.’
Alien leaders have taken the…
Rush Limbaugh: The Race Card, Football and Me
Rush Limbaugh has penned an op-ed in his own defense:
David Checketts, an investor and owner of sports teams, approached me in late May about investing in the St. Louis Rams football franchise. As a football fan, I was intrigued. I invited him to my home where we discussed it further. Even after informing him that some people might try to make an issue of my participation, Mr. Checketts said he didn’t much care. I accepted his offer.
It didn’t take long before my name was selectively leaked to the media as part of the Checketts investment group. Shortly thereafter, the media elicited comments from the likes of Al Sharpton. In 1998 Mr. Sharpton was found guilty of defamation and ordered to pay $65,000 for falsely accusing a New York prosecutor of rape in the 1987 Tawana Brawley case. He also played a leading role in the 1991 Crown Heights riot (he called…
James Arthur Ray’s Sweat Lodge Death Count Rises
I posted a story earlier this week about new age guru James Arthur Ray’s culpability in the Arizona sweat lodge deaths. Now a third victim has died, as reported by the BBC:
A woman taken to hospital with multiple organ failure after attending a spiritual retreat in Arizona has died.
Forty-nine-year-old Liz Neuman was one of 21 people taken to hospital after the sauna-like experience on 9 October.
It brings the total number of deaths from the event, run by self-help expert James Ray, to three.
The deaths at the Angel Valley Retreat Center, 115 miles north of Phoenix, are being treated as homicides, but no charges have been laid.Emergency services were called to the sweat lodge after some of the 50 people at the event reported they were having difficulty breathing.
Those taken to hospital were said to have illnesses ranging from dehydration to kidney failure.
Swine Flu Vaccine Mandate for NY Health Care Workers Halted by Judge’s Restraining Order
Mike Adams writes on Natural News:
Amid growing discontent among New York health care workers who are being forced to receive swine flu vaccine injections, the Public Employees Federation sued in state court to halt the mandate. Friday, a state Supreme Court judge issued a restraining order granting a temporary halt to the mandate until a subsequent hearing can be completed.
The lawsuit was brought by the Public Employees Federation, New York State United Teachers and four Albany nurses. Until today, these workers were required to be vaccinated by November 30th or many were told they would be fired from their jobs. Others were told pay increases would be suspended. Across the board, there was a campaign of intimidation against NY health care workers to force them into receiving the swine flu vaccine injections.
With this court order, mandatory vaccines are temporarily suspended pending a follow-up court hearing on October 30.
Shepard Fairey Responds To The AP: Yes, I Lied. But It Was Still Fair Use.
Jason Kincaid writes on TechCrunch:
We reached out to Shepard Fairey about the AP’s release this evening claiming that he had admitted lying about which image he used as the source image for his iconic Hope poster. He sent us a response (reproduced below), which effectively confirms what the AP says.
Tonight’s admission focuses on the photo that Fairey originally claimed to use during his creation of the ‘Hope’ poster — he claimed to use an image other than the one the AP claims to own, and then lied and deleted evidence when he realized he was wrong. Both were taken at the same press event. The one Fairey originally said he used showed Obama next to George Clooney, the one he really used was a close-up. The AP has succeeded in character assassination (perhaps rightfully so given Fairey’s actions), but Fairey may still have a case arguing that his image is protected…
CIA Fights To Keeps Its JFK Assassination Files Secret
Scott Shane writes in the New York Times:
Is the Central Intelligence Agency covering up some dark secret about the assassination of John F. Kennedy?
Probably not. But you would not know it from the C.I.A.’s behavior.
For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundreds of documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance.
The files in question, some released under direction of the court and hundreds more that are still secret, involve the curious career of George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans in 1963. In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations —…
How Fox News Outsmarted the White House
John Batchelor commentary in the Daily Beast:
The White House’s war on Fox shows its ignorance of the network’s true purpose: show business. And Team Obama is giving Murdoch just what he wants.
After David Axelrod sneaked into Roger Ailes’ office in New York to powwow on Sept. 30, the White House brain trust of David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel decided that it is shrewd and useful to attack Fox News as a Republican tool—or as White House Communications Director Anita Dunn remarked, as “a wing of the Republican Party.” It is a guess that the president is not annoyed by this tactic. It is a better guess that the White House has not had a chance, in its custard pie-throwing glee, to pause and consider why this is a stupid idea—not only unfair to all other networks that will become suspect, but also guaranteed to give comedy skits about Fox an…
U.S. Map Of Banned Books
There are hundreds of challenges to books in schools and libraries in the United States every year. According to the American Library Association (ALA), there were at least 513 in 2008. But the total is far larger. 70 to 80 percent are never reported.
This map is drawn from cases documented by ALA and the Kids’ Right to Read Project, a collaboration of the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. Note that the cases mapped are only from the past three years (2007-2009).
Universe Will End Sooner Than Expected
There’s some bad news: apparently the entire universe will cease to exist far sooner than previously thought, ending in a horrible state known as “heat death.” Science News writes:
For all its tumult — erupting stars, colliding galaxies, collapsing black holes — the cosmos is a surprisingly orderly place. Theoretical calculations have long shown that the entropy of the universe — a measure of its disorder — is but a tiny fraction of the maximum allowable amount.
A new calculation of entropy…suggests that the universe is messier than scientists had thought — and slightly further along on its gradual journey to death….The collective entropy of all the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is about 100 times higher than previously calculated.
In the case of the universe, Egan says, “we’d like to know [when and] if the entropy will eventually reach a maximum value, marking the end of all dissipative processes, including…
Adventures with Mazatec Mint: Exploring the Mind-Bending World of Salvia Divinorum
David Jay Brown writes in Reality Sandwich:
Within around thirty seconds of smoking the dark herbal extract the effects rapidly began, and I felt my entire sense of identity suddenly shift. I was instantly transformed from a human being into a tiny disembodied speck of consciousness — completely bewildered as to what I was and amnesic of my former identity. I was suspended in a hyperspatial dimension, a crystalline network of pulsing energies, that was filled with countless other miniature beings like me. I found myself inside of a kind of space within space, that appeared to transcend the whole three-dimensional universe. Suddenly, my identity shifted again, as a portion of the space and beings around me folded and twisted into me, becoming a part of me. More and more layers of the space around me continued folding in and becoming a part of my expanding sense of identity — until,…
Chomsky Book Banned at U.S. Prison Camp
Carol Rosenberg reports in the Miami Herald:
Professor Noam Chomsky may be among America’s most enduring anti-war activists. But the leftist intellectual’s anthology of post 9/11 commentary is taboo at Guantánamo’s prison camp library, which offers books and videos on Harry Potter, World Cup soccer and Islam.
U.S. military censors recently rejected a Pentagon lawyer’s donation of an Arabic-language copy of the political activist and linguistic professor’s 2007 anthology Interventions for the library, which has more than 16,000 items.
Chomsky, 80, who has been voicing disgust with U.S. foreign policy since the Vietnam War, reacted with irritation and derision. “This happens sometimes in totalitarian regimes,” he told The Miami Herald by e-mail after learning of the decision.
“Of some incidental interest, perhaps, is the nature of the book they banned. It consists of op-eds written for The New York Times syndicate and distributed by them. The subversive rot must run very deep.”
Scientists Create ‘Sexual Tsunami’
Chris Irvine writes in the Telegraph:
Scientists at the University of Toronto found that by genetically tweaking fruit flies so they failed to produce a particular type of pheromone or odour, it turned them irresistible to their species.
Professor Joel Levine, who led the study, removed the cuticular hydrocarbon pheromone, used by the flies to communicate.
They discovered that when the pheromone was removed, it created a “sexual tsunami” where the bugs proved attractive to one another, regardless of sex. The research found that male fruit flies with no history of homosexuality attempted to mate with their pheromone-free males, according to the research published in journal Nature.
Even flies of a different species were interested, according to the research team.
“Lacking these chemical signals eliminated barriers to mating,” Prof Levine said.
He conceded however that although pheromones play a key part in the human mating game, ours is far more complex than that of fruit flies.…
Swine Flu Shots Revive a Debate About Vaccines
Well it may be a little late to the party, but the Gray Lady is finally acknowledging that there are many, many Americans who don’t trust their government’s massive propaganda campaign to promote swine flu (H1N1) vaccine as being “safe.” 
Needless to say, of course, the anti-vaccine crowd are portrayed as madcap conspiracy theorists, but nonetheless it’s significant that the debate has reached the front page of the New York Times:
People who do not believe in vaccinating children have never had much sway over Leslie Wygant Arndt. She has studied the vaccine debate, she said, and came out in favor of having her 10-month-old daughter inoculated against childhood diseases. But there is something different about the vaccine for the H1N1 flu, she said.
“I have looked at the people who are against it, and I find myself taking their side,” said Ms. Wygant Arndt, who lives in Portland, Ore. “But then…
Hemp researcher believes it makes you live longer!
A Saskatchewan hemp farmer believes hemp plants have rare properties that can dramatically increase the lifespan of humans! “It’s one of the superfoods supplying a cornucopia of oils, proteins, fiber and phytonutrients,” says Morris Johnson, chief technical officer of Canada’s Lifespan Pharma.
He plans to work with the University of Saskatchewan’s “Research Group on Aging” to design a study, and he’ll also fund product-specific trials for hemp in the U.S. — but now he’s struggling against the stigma around hemp research. (To get high on hemp, you’d have to smoke a joint the size of a telephone pole…) “In a moment of sheer frustration, I created a logo with a hemp leaf and a red circle with a stroke through it…with the words, ‘I can’t believe it’s not marijuana.’”
Currently he’s resorted to testing hemp on high-performance horses, whose owners “have a history of looking for and applying new ways to keep their…
Vandalizing Darwin: the Kirk Cameron, Ray Comfort campaign
Douglas Mesner of the Boston Underground Examiner adds his own acerbic commentary regarding Kirk Cameron’s latest anti-evolution campaign:
A new piece of Creationist drivel asks some inane questions meant to be provocative to the flummoxed “Darwinian fundamentalist”:
“Can you explain which came first—the blood or the heart—and why? Did the heart in all these different species of fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals evolve before there were blood vessels throughout their bodies? When did the blood evolve? Was it before the vessels evolved or after they evolved?”
If asked in honest curiosity by a middle school child before entering her first formal biology lessons, the questions might merit praise, and the child might be assumed to genuinely value the answers. Alas, in the case quoted above, the questions are meant rhetorically, believed to have no plausible answer, and posed by an incurious – if outspoken – evangelical propagandist named Ray Comfort.
With these questions and more, Comfort,…
Indian Origins of Christianity
Excerpts from “19000 Years of World History: The Story of Religion” by Prithviraj R – a reconstruction of 19,000 year world history, based on the historical content of the scriptures and theologies of ancient religions. The book, for the first time, explains the precise way in which the major religions of the world were born, in a new framework of human history.
Christian theology keeps tying up scholars in knots. There are a lot unexplained elements in it, which almost look mysterious.
What does the phrase “Son of Man” mean? We can understand what “Son of God” means, but what does “Son of Man” mean? Why are the two phrases “Son of Man” and “Son of God” used interchangeably in the scriptures? The explanation generally given is that Jesus wanted to show himself as both human and divine, so both these phrases were used by him. However, the term “Son of Man”…
