Archive for February, 2011
Bipolar Christianity: How Torturing ‘Sinful’ Children Produced Holy Wars
Lloyd deMause
From Chapter 9 of Lloyd deMause’s The Origins of War in Child Abuse:
After half a century of primary source research into the history of childrearing, I and over a hundred other childhood historians have been unable to find a single mother who did not badly beat and torture their children prior to modern times. I have long offered a prize to anyone who could find actual evidence of just one mother prior to the 18th century who would not today be thrown into jail for badly abusing their children.
The occasional reformers, like Saint Anselm, who sometimes questioned whether whipping children “day and night” was wise, did not raise any children themselves because they were ascetic. Despite the fact that Jesus nowhere says children should be beaten, Christians taught that He wanted them to beat the sins out of them continuously, from birth. Actually, the main reference Jesus makes to children…
Proof That The United States Is Behind The Fall Of Mubarak
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Barack Obama, Sept. 2010.
Elad Pressman, editor of a major Israeli political website, was my guest on my radio show and did he have news! The Daily Telegraph had dug into WikiLeaks documents and pieced together a report that convincingly proves the United States was behind the violent Egyptian protests:
The American Embassy in Cairo helped a young dissident attend a US-sponsored summit for activists in New York, while working to keep his identity secret from Egyptian state police.
On his return to Cairo in December 2008, the activist told US diplomats that an alliance of opposition groups had drawn up a plan to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak and install a democratic government in 2011. He has already been arrested by Egyptian security in connection with the demonstrations and his identity is being protected by The Daily Telegraph. The disclosures, contained in…
How To Make Text Messages Self-Destruct
Lauren A.E. Schuker reports for the Wall Street Journal on a new text messaging service that claims to keep your secrets safe:
TigerText Inc., which can send texts that vanish from both the sender and receiver’s phone after a select period of time so they can’t be copied or forwarded, has developed a niche following among celebrities trying to keep their lives private. About half a million people have downloaded the service, which was started in February 2010 by four Los Angeles businessmen.
February 4: The Death Day Of Karen Carpenter
Joseph Allen writes about Karen’s hunger for affection at RockStarMartyr.net:
From Todd Haynes' "Superstar" (1987)
I’ve been listening to The Carpenters for three days straight. Does that make me a pansy? Of course not. These are sentimental love songs from a woman to a man—well, from Karen to me—and that’s miles from the pink-zone. Karen’s motherly voice pours suburban melancholy into my open wounds. I dare any road-hardened man to sit by himself—with a fifth of whiskey and a loaded gun—and listen to “Solitaire” as many times as I have. You’ll never make it out alive.
Karen Carpenter’s biography is as heart-wrenching as her wistful tenor. Her musical virtuosity was matched only by her willingness to be a victim to her controlling family, her conniving husband, and ultimately, to her own maniacal vanity, for which she starved herself to death. Randy Schmidt’s new book, Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter, weaves first-hand accounts…
Atheist Students Group Offers Porn For Bibles
Via WOAI San Antonio:
SAN ANTONIO — An atheist student group at UTSA is again offering to trade porn for bibles.
Atheist Agenda set up a booth on the UTSA campus on the Northwest Side and asked students to bring in their bibles in exchange for pornographic magazines. The event is called “Smut for Smut” and, obviously, brings with it some big controversy.
“It is to send a message that the stuff in the bible, and the Quran, and the Torah, and all that sort of thing is, in our case worse, in our opinion worse, than pornography,” explained UTSA student Kyle Bush.
“I can see that God can definitely use this for a greater purpose,” UTSA student Alex Liu
said. “And I see a lot of Christian organizations coming together, you know, to be brothers and sisters standing up for their faith.”
Georgia Guidestones Featured on The History Channel
Disinformation’s Raymond Wiley, co-author of the upcoming The Georgia Guidestones: Alternatives to Armageddon, is featured on this week’s episode of “Brad Meltzer’s Decoded” on The History Channel. This episode, the season finale, will begin airing on February 3rd at 10 p.m. EST. Please check your local listings for more details:
Episode 10 — Apocalypse in Georgia:
Best-selling author Brad Meltzer and the team search for the true meaning of the mysterious Georgia Guidestones. Often called America’s Stonehenge, this granite monument is located on a remote hilltop outside Atlanta. Brad and the team examine the multilingual messages carved into the stones for any clues to the monument’s anonymous creator, who’s known only by the pseudonym — R.C. Christian. The Decoded team checks out rumors that the Guidestones are really the work of a secretive religious sect called the Rosicrucians, who’ve been accused of practicing alchemy and mind control.
Astronomers Discover 6 Planets Orbiting The Same Star
eScience News reports:
A NASA team including three University of Florida astronomers has found six new planets in a distant solar system that in some ways resembles our own. The NASA team, including UF associate professor Eric Ford, postdoctoral associate Althea Moorhead and graduate student Robert Morehead, will announce its findings in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.
“This is the new prototype for a system of rocky planets beyond our own,” Ford said. “It changes our understanding of the frequency of solar systems like our own in deep space.”
The planets orbit Kepler-11, a sun-like star about 2,000 light years away. With temperatures hotter than Venus – likely more than 400 to 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit – the planets range in size from twice to 4½ times Earth’s diameter. The five confirmed planets are larger in mass but less dense than Earth, and closely packed, taking from 10 to 47 days to orbit the…
Hidden Messages Woven Into Birds’ Nests
Just more evidence that non-human animal species have deeper intelligence than we give them credit for, and communicate in ways to which we are oblivious. Wired Science discusses a secret form of bird-language, which we should probably learn if we hope to foil the coming avian takeover:
The discovery of messages in raptors’ nests has raised the possibility that many bird species encode signals into these structures, with seemingly decorative flourishes actually full of meaning.
Among black kites, scraps of white plastic are used to signal territorial dominance. To other kites, the scraps are a warning sign. To humans, they hint at an unappreciated world of animal communication.
“It’s probably very common that other bird species decorate their nests in ways compatible with what we found,” said Fabrizio Sergio, a biologist at the Doñana Biological Station in Spain. “And not only birds, but fish and mammals.”
A few species, such black wheateaters and bowerbirds, are…
McCain Calls Democracy In Middle East A “Virus”
“This virus is spreading throughout the Middle East. This is probably the most dangerous period of history…in the Middle East.” Speaking to FOX News, John McCain echoes the current sentiments of many politicians and pundits distressed by recent events in Egypt and Tunisia. Because the rules are, democracy only belongs in the countries where we choose to impose it. Via Think Progress:
2010 Financial and Commodity Markets and Productivity: WTF?
I could go on and on about the way speculative finance is utterly divorced from the real economy, sapping 80 cents out of the economy for each dollar it touches*, etc., etc.. But why bother when the following chart says it all? Compiled from the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics release.
![Financial and Commodity Markets in 2010 - WTF[1]](http://disinfo.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Financial-and-Commodity-Markets-in-2010-WTF1-300x200.jpg)
See underlying analysis, along with links to original source data, within this workbook.
P.S. I would like to offer a ’special’ TBA prize to the first Dystopia Diaries reader who detects the even more disturbing trend vis-a-vis crude oil prices and CPU within the workook data. Hint: Can you say “Peak Oil?”
Footnote
*Yeah, it’s true. By giving yet another extraordinary tax cut to the finance-addled trust fund brats, Obama and the Republican’ts are throwing away 80% of those dollars’ productivity. See the analytical graph and supporting details here.
Contributed from Dystopia Diaries
Mona Lisa Is Painting Of Da Vinci’s Gay Lover, Italian Researcher Claims
Is the most beautiful and iconic woman in the history of art actually a man? When one compares the Mona Lisa to other works in question (see right), the facial similarities are striking. The Washington Post reports on the controversial theory:
A male apprentice, longtime companion and possible lover of Leonardo da Vinci was the main influence and a model for the “Mona Lisa” painting, an Italian researcher said.
But the researcher, Silvano Vinceti, said Wednesday the portrait also represents a synthesis of Leonardo’s scientific, artistic and philosophical beliefs. Because the artist worked on it at various intervals for many years, he was subjected to different influences and sources of inspiration, and the canvas is full of hidden symbolic meanings. “The ‘Mona Lisa’ must be read at various levels, not just as a portrait,” Vinceti said.
The apprentice Gian Giacomo Caprotti, known as Salai, worked with Leonardo for more than two decades starting in…
Rachel Maddow Breaks Down Mubarak’s Disinformation Campaign
Some of the best reporting I’ve heard from Rachel Maddow. Could Mubarak’s tactics work in the U.S.?
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
The Ronald Reagan Cake: A Strange Concoction
The Washington Post’s Kelly DiNardo analyzes the 400 lb Ronald Reagan 100th birthday cake to be unveiled this weekend. To me it rather symbolizes the man himself: all American hero on the outside, but inside a strange man made up of conflicting components that are hard to reconcile:
Ronald Reagan’s sweet tooth is well documented; the 40th president even has a portrait made out of his favorite candy – Jelly Belly jelly beans – hanging in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library. So the six-foot-by-six-foot birthday cake that will be unveiled at the library on Sunday for the centennial of his birth is not just celebratory but also a monument to, well, chocolate.
Admittedly, not all of the five-layer concoction is cake. The first layer, fondant-covered Styrofoam, serves as a base for a layer of fondant-covered Rice Krispies treats, which supports a massive chocolate cake. A second fondant-covered Styrofoam layer buttresses another, smaller…
Oysters ‘Functionally Extinct’ Worldwide
Yet another sign that we’re entering end-times territory as oysters are declared “functionally extinct.” From AFP via Yahoo News:
A survey of oyster habitats around the world has found that the succulent mollusks are disappearing fast and 85 percent of their reefs have been lost due to disease and over-harvesting.
Most of the remaining wild oysters in the world, or about 75 percent, can be found in five locations in North America, said the study published in BioScience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.
An international team of researchers led by Michael Beck of the Nature Conservancy and the University of California, Santa Cruz, examined the condition of native oyster reefs in 40 ecoregions, including 144 bays.
“Oyster reefs are at less than 10 percent of their prior abundance in most bays (70 percent) and ecoregions (63 percent),” said the study.
“They are functionally extinct — in that they lack any significant…
February 3: The Death Day Of Buddy Holly
Joseph Allen writes about “the Buddy Holly Curse” on RockStarMartyr.net:
Anything cool you ever did, Buddy Holly did first. Those trend-lemming black specs? Buddy wore those when glasses were for nerds. Your hip, four-piece rock band? Buddy set that standard, son. Radical race-mixing? Buddy played with black musicians and married a Latina before such associations yielded multiculti cred—back when it got you bludgeoned by mongrels. Those teenage girls shaking hips by the jukebox? Buddy got the first slice of Miss American Pie, and by all accounts, she was home-grown cherry. And your tragic demise in the passenger seat of a hexed death-machine? Buddy beat you to it, dude. He’ll be worshipped forever, and you’ll be another statistic.
Like a sacrificial life-force, rock n’ roll was in Buddy Holly’s blood. His voice won over crowds from kindergarten on. As a teen in 1955, Buddy marveled at Elvis’ rockabilly performances, eventually opening for the King later…
Supercontinents of Planet Earth: 650 Million Years in Under 2 Minutes (Video)
Alasdair Wilkins on io9.com has a great post about the past and future of our planet’s continents. Definitely worth a read:
Earth’s continents are constantly changing, moving and rearranging themselves over millions of years — affecting Earth’s climate and biology. Every few hundred million years, the continents combine to create massive, world-spanning supercontinents.
Here’s the past and future of Earth’s supercontinets.
President Obama, Say The ‘D-Word’
Photo: Muhammad Ghafari. Giza, Egypt (CC)
Mark LeVine writes on Al Jazeera:
It’s incredible, really. The president of the United States can’t bring himself to talk about democracy in the Middle East. He can dance around it, use euphemisms, throw out words like “freedom” and “tolerance” and “non-violent” and especially “reform,” but he can’t say the one word that really matters: democracy.
How did this happen? After all, in his famous 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world, Obama spoke the word loudly and clearly — at least once.
“The fourth issue that I will address is democracy,” he declared, before explaining that while the United States won’t impose its own system, it was committed to governments that “reflect the will of the people… I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the…
Japanese Dog Sniffs Out Early Bowel Cancer
Labrador retrievers are known to be trained for many things. They can work as seeing-eye dogs, therapy dogs, sniff for drugs, sniff for bombs, and now, sniff bowel cancer? BBC News reports:
A Labrador retriever has sniffed out bowel cancer in breath and stool samples during a study in Japan.
The research, in the journal Gut, showed the dog was able to identify early stages of the disease.
It has already been suggested that dogs can use their noses to detect skin, bladder, lung, ovarian and breast cancers.
Cancer Research UK said it would be extremely difficult to use dogs for routine cancer testing.
The biology of a tumour is thought to include a distinct smell and a series of studies have used dogs to try to detect it.
[Continues at BBC News]
