Archive for December, 2010
Santa Flying High On Mushrooms
One of the highlights of Graham Hancock’s lecture in support of his new book Entangled is when he shows us how the mythological character that he refers to as “Father Christmas” (better known in the U.S. as Santa Claus) has much in common with Siberian Tungus shamans who fly high on fly agaric (amanita muscaria) mushrooms, eaten by reindeer whose urine is then drunk by the shamans — and whose urine is then drunk by villagers, passing through up to seven bladders before potency is lost. Gross, right? Yes, but effective!
disinformation reader Dainius sent along a link to a similar account, saying it’s “about how the meme of Santa Claus was born in the minds of tribal psychonauts, and shows the fascinating links between Christmas and shamanism,” by Mark Adams at the Aminam Recro blog:
These red and white mushrooms, Amanita muscaria, were found in an alpine forest around Creede, Colorado. A. muscaria was the “sacred…
Banks Accused of Illegally Breaking Into Homes
Man, can’t wait for WikiLeaks to release their (alleged) dirt on Bank of America. If that bank does what is reported below, who knows what else the Banksters of America have been involved with. Andrew Martin reports in the NY Times:
TRUCKEE, Calif. — When Mimi Ash arrived at her mountain chalet here for a weekend ski trip, she discovered that someone had broken into the home and changed the locks.
When she finally got into the house, it was empty. All of her possessions were gone: furniture, her son’s ski medals, winter clothes and family photos. Also missing was a wooden box, its top inscribed with the words “Together Forever,” that contained the ashes of her late husband, Robert.
The culprit, Ms. Ash soon learned, was not a burglar but her bank. According to a federal lawsuit filed in October by Ms. Ash, Bank of America had wrongfully foreclosed on her house…
Jesus of Nazareth Discusses His Failure
The following article “Jesus of Nazareth Discusses His Failure” is written by H. G. Wells, one of over 40 articles in the Disinformation anthology I edited, Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion.
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Russ Kick writes: H. G. Wells is best-remembered as a late-Victorian pioneer of science fiction, mainly due to his 1890s novels The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. He cranked out dozens of books in numerous genres of fiction and nonfiction, and 1945—the year before his death—saw the publication of his last two books to come out during his lifetime: The Happy Turning: A Dream of Life and Mind at the End of Its Tether.
The Happy Turning is a slim, strange work that gets even stranger as it continues. Wells sets it up by claiming that sometimes he dreams about taking his daily walk and coming across a pathway he’s never noticed in real life. Taking this turn (the “Happy Turning”) leads him to the utopian Dreamland (a/k/a the Beyond), where his body is perfectly fit, where society knows no war, poverty, or inequality, and where his “subliminal self” lets loose with a flood of “cryptic and oracular” symbols.
Wells then steps back in time to relate some dreams he had when he was young, including the one that “made me an atheist.” Having read about “a man being broken on the wheel over a slow fire,” the preteen Wells had a nightmare. “By a mental leap which cut out all intermediaries, the dream artist made it clear that if indeed there was an all powerful God, then it was he and he alone who stood there conducting this torture.” Upon awakening, he felt that he had two alternatives: go insane or stop believing in God. “God had gone out of my life. He was impossible.”
Catholic Church Says Virgin Mary Appears In Wisconsin
The Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help. Photo: Royalbroil (CC)
It must be silly season for religion — this story made the front page of the New York Times today:
CHAMPION, Wis. — In France, the shrine at Lourdes is surrounded by hundreds of hotels and has received as many as 45,000 pilgrims in a single day. Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Mexico, draws millions of fervent worshipers a year.
Now, a little chapel among the dairy farms here, called Our Lady of Good Help, has joined that august company in terms of religious status, if not global fame. This month, it became one of only about a dozen sites worldwide, and the first in the United States, where apparitions of the Virgin Mary have been officially validated by the Roman Catholic Church.
In 1859, the year after Mary is said to have appeared in Lourdes, a Belgian immigrant here named Adele Brise said…
On the Edge with Max Kaiser – Latest on Global Financial Crisis
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts and Max Keiser sum it up. I’m moving to Sweden. [Dr. Roberts is a former assistant secretary to the U.S. Treasury.]
WikiLeaks Release Details Indonesian Military Abuses
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Author: Addicted04 (CC)
The Age reports:
The United States fears that Indonesian government neglect, rampant corruption and human rights abuses are stoking unrest in its troubled province of West Papua.
Leaked embassy cables reveal that US diplomats privately blame Jakarta for instability and “chronic underdevelopment” in West Papua, where military commanders have been accused of drug smuggling and illegal logging rackets across the border with Papua New Guinea.
A September 2009 cable from the US embassy in Jakarta says “the region is politically marginalized and many Papuans harbor separatist aspirations”. An earlier cable, from October 2007, details claims by an Indonesian foreign affairs official about military influence in West Papua.
“The Indonesian official] claims that the Indonesian Military (TNI) has far more troops in Papua than it is willing to admit to, chiefly to protect and facilitate TNI’s interests in illegal logging operations,” says the cable, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available exclusively to The Age.”The…
Evil Santa’s Crimes Against Humanity
Science fiction writer Robert Anton Wilson once researched all of Santa’s “Crimes Against Humanity.”
Jolly Ol’ St. Nick is guilty of more than just paganism, perjury, and trying to steal Christmas from Christ. “Pope John XXIII threw the suspiciously merry old clown out of the Roman Catholic church back in the late 1960s,” and “The Jehovah’s Witnesses have always denounced Santa for his unsavory pagan past. (They also recognized Christmas trees as phallic symbols long before Freud.)”
Santa also has “a rather criminal family history all around,” since he’s a descendant of the primordial bear-god. And in some rustic parts of Europe “and probably in Kansas, Santa retains traces of his carnivorous past. Children are told that if they are good all year, Santa will reward them, but if they are bad, he will EAT THEM ALL UP.”
If You Thought Santa Was Judgmental … Meet Krampus! (Video)
Here’s a video of a “Krampus Parade” filmed in South Tyrol, an autonomous region in Italy right on the Austrian border … Enjoy!
Australian Man Installs Microchip In Hand, For Keyless Living
An Australian man finds that many of life’s daily hassles are reduced by installing a RFID chip in your right hand. Perhaps this is how the rest of us will be convinced to do it. The Sydney Morning Herald reports:
Fed up with carrying his keys around, Joe Wooller, 28, decided it was time for an implant. This year, the father of two from Perth had a microchip, which uses radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, implanted in his right hand.
His passive RFID chip does not require batteries, can last for many years and communicates with receivers attached to doors, for instance, via a magnetic field. “The goal was really just to get rid of keys and to try to minimize the amount of clutter one would have in their pockets,” he said.
Since the surgery in June, performed while he was still awake and posted on his website, Mr Wooller has endeavored to uncover…
Christmas Memories: Bing Crosby Smoked Pot
My favorite part of Christmas is that every time someone plays a Bing Crosby song, I’m thinking about how he used to smoke pot with Louis Armstrong — and that he loved smoking pot his whole life!
He even recommended it to his son as a less-harmful alternative to alcohol. And this song from The Road to Morocco could be seen as a secret testament to how much how loved the mellow, laid-back life:
Julian Assange Hijacks Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Man of the Year’ Speech (SNL Video)
TIME Magazine pretty much consigned itself to the dinosaur dustbin of old media when it chose Mark Zuckerberg over Julian Assange for its increasingly irrelevant “Man of the Year” award. Nonetheless, the ridiculous decision did make good fodder for Lorne Michaels’ effervescent team at Saturday Night Live:
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Nearly 1 in 4 Fail U.S. Army Entrance Exam
Not a good trend. We may end up with an “Army of One.” Reports the AP via Yahoo News:
Nearly one-fourth of the students who try to join the U.S. Army fail its entrance exam, painting a grim picture of an education system that produces graduates who can’t answer basic math, science and reading questions, according to a new study released Tuesday.
The report by The Education Trust bolsters a growing worry among military and education leaders that the pool of young people qualified for military service will grow too small.
“Too many of our high school students are not graduating ready to begin college or a career — and many are not eligible to serve in our armed forces,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the AP. “I am deeply troubled by the national security burden created by America’s underperforming education system.”
The effect of the low eligibility rate might not be noticeable…
New Species Of Human Discovered
Denisovan tooth. Photo: David Reich, et al./Nature
Unraveling ancient human DNA must be like crack for anthropologists — they just can’t stop! Joe Palca reports for NPR:
DNA taken from a pinkie bone at least 30,000 years old is hinting at the existence of a previously unknown population of ancient humans. It’s just the latest example of how modern genetic techniques are transforming the world of anthropology.
The pinkie bone in question was unearthed in 2008 from what’s called the Denisova Cave.
“The Denisova Cave is in southern Siberia in the Altai Mountains in central Asia,” says David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “This bone is the bone of a 6- to 7-year-old girl.”
Reich and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig were able to extract DNA from the pinkie bone and sequence all 3 billion letters of DNA that made up this girl’s genome. This is…
The Westboro Baptist Church’s Christmas Carol
An update of ‘Santa Claus Is Coming To Town’ titled ‘Santa Will Take You To Hell,’ this is sure to earn a place in the modern believer’s seasonal songbook. Actually, it’s nice to see a Christian group that acknowledges that Christmas is a pagan holiday.
UN Torture Office Probes Treatment of Bradley Manning
Al Jazeera reports:
The United Nations is looking into a complaint on behalf of a US soldier who is said to have been mistreated while held since May in US army custody pending trial.
Bradley Manning, an army private suspected of giving classified documents to WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website, is being held in solitary confinement at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, and faces a court martial sometime in 2011.
The office of Manfred Nowak, the UN special rapporteur on torture in Geneva, received a complaint from one of Manning’s supporters alleging conditions amount to torture. Visitors say he spends at least 23 hours a day alone in a cell.
The UN could ask the US to stop any violations it finds. However, the Pentagon has denied mistreating Manning.
A Marine Corps spokesman says the military is keeping Manning safe, secure and ready for trial.
Political prisoner?
Manning was charged in July with leaking classified material, including a video posted by WikiLeaks of…
North Korea ‘Ready For Sacred War’
Sibling refugees during the 1950-53 war, the last time North Korea shelled innocent civilians until last month's attack on a Southern Island. Photo: 1951, Major F.V. Spencer, UAF
Via The Korea Herald:
North Korea on Thursday reiterated its warning of nuclear warfare, with a top North Korean military leader saying that the North is ready to launch a “sacred war” against South Korea on the basis of its “nuclear deterrent.”
According to the North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Kim Young-chun, minister of the People’s Armed Forces, made the warning while reading a report during a ceremony in Pyongyang marking the 19th anniversary of leader Kim Jong-il gaining supreme commandership of the Korean People’s Army (KPA).
“The revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK (North Korea) are getting fully prepared to launch a sacred war of justice of Korean style based on the nuclear deterrent at any time necessary to cope with the enemies’ actions…
Iraqi Christians Cancel Christmas
Arts & Crafts on the Victory Base Complex, Iraq Photo: Staff Sgt. Joy Pariante
Christmas isn’t always accompanied with holiday cheer, sometimes it comes with death threats. MSNBC reports:
Iraqi Christians on Wednesday called off Christmas festivities across the country as al-Qaida insurgents threatened more attacks on a beleaguered community still terrified from a bloody siege at a Baghdad church two months earlier.
A council representing Christian denominations across Iraq advised its followers to cancel public Christmas celebrations out of concern over new terror attacks and as a show of mourning for the victims of the church siege and other violence.
Church officials in the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, the southern city of Basra and in the capital confirmed they will not put up Christmas decorations or hold evening Mass and have urged worshippers to refrain from decorating their homes.
Even an appearance by Santa Claus was called off.
“Nobody can ignore the threats…
