RFID Privacy Charade

Feds Leapfrog RFID Privacy Study

By Ryan Singel| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Oct, 30, 2006

The story seems simple enough. An outside privacy and security advisory committee to the Department of Homeland Security penned a tough report concluding the government should not use chips that can be read remotely in identification documents. But the report remains stuck in draft mode, even as new identification cards with the chips are being announced.

Jim Harper, a Cato Institute fellow who serves on the committee and who recently published a book on identification called Identity Crisis, thinks he knows why the Department of Homeland Security Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee report on the use of Radio Frequency Identification devices for human identification (.pdf) never made it out of the draft stage.

"The powers that be took a good run at deep-sixing this report," Harper said. "There's such a strongly held consensus among industry and DHS that RFID is the way to go that getting people off of that and getting them to examine the technology is very hard to do."

RFID chips, which either have a battery or use the radio waves from a reader to send information, are widely used in tracking inventory or for highway toll payment systems.

But critics argue that hackers can skim information off the chips and that the chips can be used to track individuals. Hackers have also been able to clone some chips, such as those used for payment cards and building security, as well as passports.

The draft report concludes that "RFID appears to offer little benefit when compared to the consequences it brings for privacy and data integrity" -- a finding that was widely criticized by RFID industry officials when the committee met in June.

Fear and Smear

FEAR AND SMEAR IN BUSH'S AMERICA AS REELING REPUBLICANS RUN SCARED

By Bill Gallagher

DETROIT -- They kill, torture, lie and steal. For six years, they have largely escaped accountability for their crimes. Now they find themselves in the last throes of unchallenged power and the Busheviks are acting in pure desperation.

Losing just one house of Congress --with Democrats then possessing broad subpoena authority -- will expose even more of the dirty deeds of this, the most pervasively corrupt, dishonest and incompetent presidency in our history.

What we know already is frightening. What we will learn will be worse. The task of even evaluating the extent of the damage is daunting. Beginning to deal with the mess President George W. Bush has wrought will be difficult and, in some cases, may be well beyond repair. Iraq, global warming and the nation's fiscal health come quickly to mind.

-more

Why and How--War

Why and How
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld
started the U.S.—Iraq War

This article was written from notes taken from more than 50 books.
The author loves the United States. He is not associated
with any political party or any agency of any government.

2006-10-31, 11:30. See the revision history. Web address:
http://futurepower.org/why_and_how_the_war.html

Sections:
Why? The Bush administration got what it wanted.
How? The Bush administration found support through manipulation.
Quick tips that help eliminate confusion
Remarkable occurrences involving the Bush family
"The two faces of Donald Rumsfeld"
The Comedy of George W. Bush...
... and Tragedy
Arab complaints are justified. (Violence is never justified.)
The U.S. government has invaded 24 countries since the Second World War.
Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government
The behavior of Bush and Cheney is consistent with the behavior of alcoholics.

Cognitive Elite

Elephants Join Cognitive Elite

New experiments have revealed that elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror, an important indicator of self-recognition that places them in an elite group that includes humans, dolphins and great apes. Mirror self-recognition is thought to relate to empathetic tendencies and the ability to distinguish oneself from others, a characteristic that evolved independently in several branches of animals.

In the study, researchers from Emory University and the Wildlife Conservation Society exposed three female elephants housed at the Bronx Zoo, New York to a, er, jumbo-sized mirror measuring eight feet square inside the elephants' enclosure. The elephants quickly began testing their mirrored images by making repetitive body movements and using the mirror to inspect themselves, such as the insides of their mouths, a part of the body they usually can't see. Tellingly, the animals did not react socially to their images, as many other animals do, and did not seem to mistake their reflection for that of another elephant.

Mirror self-recognition has long been suspected in elephants because of the creature's well-known social complexity but past experiments were inconclusive. "Elephants have been tested in front of mirrors before, but previous studies used relatively small mirrors kept out of the elephants' reach," said researcher Joshua Plotnik. "This study is the first to test the animals in front of a huge mirror they could touch, rub against and try to look behind."

"We see highly complex behaviors such as self awareness and self-other distinction in intelligent animals with well established social systems," continued Plotnik. "The social complexity of the elephant, its well-known altruistic behavior and, of course, its huge brain, made the elephant a logical candidate species for testing in front of a mirror."

Peace, Love & Understanding

Stun Gun Kills

Police Stun Gun Kills Teen With Bible

AP- A teenager carrying a Bible and shouting "I want Jesus" was shot twice with a police stun gun and later died at a St. Louis hospital, authorities said.

In a statement obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, police in Jerseyville, about 40 miles north of St. Louis, said 17-year-old Roger Holyfield would not acknowledge officers who approached him and he continued yelling, "I want Jesus."

Police tried to calm the teen, but Holyfield became combative, according to the statement. Officers fired the stun gun at him after he ignored their warnings, then fired again when he continued struggling, police said.

Holyfield was flown to St. Louis' Cardinal Glennon Hospital after the confrontation Saturday; he died there Sunday, police said.

An autopsy was planned for Tuesday.

The statement expressed sympathy to Holyfield's family but said city and police officials would not discuss the matter further.

Calls Tuesday to Jerseyville Police Chief Brad Blackorby were not immediately returned. The department has been using stun guns for about five months, according to the statement.

In a report released in March, international human rights group Amnesty International said it had logged at least 156 deaths across the country in the previous five years related to police stun guns.

Quantum Mystery

A Quantum Mystery

In the submicroscopic world, things behave in strange ways. The laws of quantum mechanics are different from the Newtonian laws that govern the macro world—for instance, one quantum physicist has discovered that he can lower the temperature of an object or cause it to move just by watching it.

According to physicist Keith Schwab, the problem comes in finding the dividing line between the two worlds—the micro and the macro—even in establishing that such a line exists. He has created a tiny device—a tiny (8.7 microns, or millionths of a meter, long; 200 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, wide) sliver of aluminum on silicon nitride, which is pinned down at both ends and allowed to vibrate in the middle. He and his team observed this tiny object and measured its vibrations. Schwab says his team discovered that "by looking at it we can make it move." They were able to cool it down the same way. He says, "…if we were to keep going on with this work, we would be able to cool this thing very cold. Much colder than we could if we just had this big refrigerator." Next, he wants to test another principle of quantum mechanic--the superposition principle--which holds that a particle can simultaneously be in two places. Schwab says, "We're trying to make a mechanical device be in two places at one time. What's really neat is it looks like we should be able to do it."

Quantum physicist Dean Radin, who was a recent Dreamland guest, doesn’t think the micro world acts so differently from the macro, but says the problem is that we don't fully understand how the larger world really works. He writes: "One of the most surprising discoveries of modern physics is that objects aren't as separate as they may seem. When you drill down into the core of even the most solid-looking material, separateness dissolves. All that remains…are relationships extending curiously throughout space and time…Scientists are now finding that there are ways in which the effects of microscopic entanglements 'scale up' into our macroscopic world. Entangled connections between carefully prepared atomic-sized objects can persist over many miles…What if these speculations are correct? What would human experience be like in such an interconnected universe? Would we occasionally have numinous feelings of connectedness with loved ones at a distance? Would such experiences evoke a feeling of awe that there's more to reality than common sense implies? Could ‘entangled minds’ result in the experience of your hearing the telephone ring and somehow knowing-- instantly--who's calling? If we did have such experiences, could they be due to real information that somehow bypassed the usual sensory channels, or are such reports mere delusions? Can psychic or 'psi' experiences be studied by science, or are they beyond the reach of rational understanding?"

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via: unknown country

Life Extension

One for the Ages: A Prescription That May Extend Life

Jeff Miller/University of Wisconsin-Madison

Canto, left, a rhesus monkey, is aging fairly well at 25 on a calorie restriction diet. Owen, though only a year older than Canto, is frail and moves slowly. He eats a normal diet.

Splitting Water

Brand new substance created from water

• 13:27 27 October 2006
• NewScientist.com news service
• Rob Edwards

If you think we know all there is to know about water, think again. Scientists claim they have created a totally new alloy of hydrogen and oxygen molecules by splitting water.

It takes high-energy X-rays and an extremely high pressure, but the end result is a solid mixture of H₂ and 0₂ that has never been identified before, they say. The discovery could change our understanding of the complex chemistry of water.

The new alloy is "a highly energetic material", says Wendy Mao at Los Alamos National Laboratory, US, who led the research. "It may help us find a way of storing energy."

Mao’s team subjected water to a pressure 170,000 times greater than atmospheric pressure at sea level. Then they bombarded it with X-rays, causing the water molecules to split and reform into a previously unknown crystalline solid made of H₂ molecules and 0₂ molecules.

Just right...

Bosch Foresaw Globalisation

Bosch Foresaw Globalisation

By John Berger
The Guardian - South Africa News

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Bosch Foresaw Globalisation

The Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg)
November 26, 1999
By John Berger

Johannesburg - In the history of painting one can sometimes find strange prophecies: prophecies that were not intended as such by the painter. It is almost as if the visible by itself can have its own nightmares. For example, in Breughel's Triumph of Death, painted in the 1560s and now in the Prado museum, there is already a terrible prophecy of the Nazi extermination camps.


Most specific prophecies are bound to be bad, for, throughout history, there are always new terrors. Even if some of the terrors disappear, there are no new happinesses - happiness is always the old one. It is the modes of struggle for this happiness that change. Half a century before Breughel, Hieronymus Bosch painted his Millennium Triptych. The left-hand panel shows Adam and Eve in Paradise, the large central panel describes the Garden of Earthly Delights, and the right-hand panel depicts hell. And this hell has become a strange prophecy of the mental climate imposed on the world, at the end of our century, by globalisation and the new economic order.


Let me try to explain how. It has little to do with the symbolism employed in the painting. Bosch's symbols probably came from the secret, proverbial, heretical language of certain 15th-century millennial sects, who believed that, if evil could be overcome, it was possible to build heaven on earth. Many essays have been written about the allegories to be found in his work. Yet if Bosch's vision of hell is prophetic, the prophecy is not so much in the details - haunting and grotesque as they are - as in the whole. Or, to put it another way, in what constitutes the space of hell.


There is no horizon there. There is no continuity between actions, there are no pauses, no paths, no pattern, no past and no future. There is only the clamour of the disparate, fragmentary present. Everywhere there are surprises and sensations, yet nowhere is there any outcome. Nothing flows through: everything interrupts. There is a kind of spatial delirium.


Compare this space to what one sees in the average publicity slot, or in a typical CNN news bulletin, or any mass- media commentary. There is a comparable incoherence, a comparable wilderness of separate excitements, a similar frenzy.

more

Shreddin' With Dick

HuffPo:

From wonkette.com

Document Shredding Truck Spotted On The Way To Cheney's House...

Many Final Farewells

A Most Violent Month, and Many Final Farewells

Burials at Arlington National Cemetery took on a grim regularity in October, when at least 103 American troops were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, the toll had reached 99 by Saturday, making October the deadliest month since January 2005.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Sidney Dyer with her mother, Jodi, at Mr. Dyer’s burial. Mr. Dyer, 38, of Cocoa Beach, Fla., was killed in Afghanistan.

A Mournful Month

Military officials attributed the high number of deaths to a spike in violence during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began in late September and ended last week. They also pointed to a three-month campaign to win control of Baghdad from death squads that led to increased attacks on American troops.

But such explanations were little comfort to a 6-year-old girl weeping at the grave of her father, a mother clutching the flag from her son’s coffin, or a widow walking slowly through the rain behind her husband’s honor guard.

THOMAS J. LUECK

(more photos)

Kill the Messenger

►View Trailer: Windows Media
►View Trailer: QuickTime

International TV Coverage

• French TV: Canal +

• Belgium TV: BeTV

►PEN America Center Press Release

►Sibel Edmonds Acceptance Speech

►Sibel Edmonds Informal Talk at Award Breakfast (audio)

A Timeline of Secrecy

By ACLU

01/26/05 "ACLU" -- -- After her termination, many of Edmonds' allegations were confirmed by the FBI in unclassified briefings to Congress. More than two years later, in May 2004, the Justice Department retroactively classified Edmonds' briefings, as well as the FBI briefings, and forced Members of Congress who had the information posted on their Web sites to remove the documents. ►click to continue

An Inconvenient Patriot
By David Rose

08/15/05 "Vanity Fair" - September 2005 Issue -- -- Love of country led Sibel Edmonds to become a translator for the F.B.I. following 9/11. But everything changed when she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving Turkish nationals. Fired after sounding the alarm, she’s now fighting for the ideals that made her an American, and threatening some very powerful people. ►click to continue

Deep Background

By Philip Giraldi

04/24/06 "The American Conservative" -- -- Sibel Edmonds, the Turkish FBI translator turned whistleblower who has been subjected to a gag order could provide a major insight into how neoconservatives distort US foreign policy and enrich themselves at the same time. On one level, her story appears straightforward: several Turkish lobbying groups allegedly bribed congressmen to support policies favourable to Ankara. But beyond that ►click to continue

Material Given to Congress is Now Classified

By Eric Lichtblau

05/24/04"New York Times"-- --''What the F.B.I. is up to here is ludicrous,'' Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said in an interview. ''To classify something that's already been out in the public domain, what do you accomplish? It does harm to transparency in government, and it looks like an attempt to cover up the F.B.I.'s problems in translating intelligence.'' ►click to continue

Hell Awaits, America:

("Dante and Virgil in Hell" was painted by Adolphe-William Bouguereau)

Mass Manipulation, Blissful Psychosis, and 7 Easy Ways to Achieve
Damnation

By Jason Miller

10/28/06

“'But I don’t want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

'Oh, you can’t help that,' said the Cat. 'We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.'

'How do you know I’m mad?' said Alice.

'You must be,” said the Cat. 'or you wouldn’t have come here.'”

---Lewis Carroll


Awakening to a masochistic impulse last Sunday, I opened the Op-Ed section of my local paper, The Kansas City Star. Throwing caution to the wind, I plunged headlong into the mind-engulfing thicket of sophistry. Running for my intellectual life, I felt the collective breath of the ravening wolves thirsting to rip the jugular vein coursing with the life-blood of my capacity for independent thought. Driven by an insatiable hunger to devour the cognitions of those who strayed from the herd, the voracious pack pursued me with a vengeance. Yet today I was moving with the agility of Brer Rabbit navigating the Briar Patch. Powered by critical thinking and a fierce determination to maintain my noetic integrity, I evaded the ferocious canines’ furious bid to sink their razor-like fangs into the succulent gray matter they craved. Emerging from the tortuous copse, my psyche was bloodied but intact. And more importantly, it remained free.

Consider that The Kansas City Star, a paper that “serves” a metropolitan population of 1.9 million, is but one of 29 publications owned by The McClatchy Company, a corporate entity that raked in a net of $160.5 million in 2005(1). With McClatchy backing them and a daily subscription of 270,000 people, the Star can afford to publish the scribblings of the best propagandists money can buy. And they desperately need them.

Burdened with a task as daunting as the Twelve Labors of Heracles, the mainstream media strive with a fury to satisfy their demanding corporate paymasters. Yet unlike Heracles, they can’t luxuriate in the knowledge that quiescence awaits. For theirs is a Sisyphean challenge. Truth, the eternal and immutable one, anxiously anticipates the moment his would-be assassins crest the summit where he is poised to hurl them violently back to the base of the hill. Powerless to prevent their relentless prevarication, Old Man Verity delights at the opportunity to condemn them to perpetual toil.

Ostensibly fragmented and autonomous, the MSM duplicitously peddle their perversions of reality in a seemingly cacophonous din of independent truth-seekers. Yet how could such an incestuously entangled group of entities owned by a handful of leviathan corporations possibly adhere to a spirit of integrity? Acting in unison to protect the interests of opulent shareholders and maleficent politicians, print, radio, and television media embody the Ministry of Truth Orwell envisioned.

Thomas Carlyle once commented:

“Burke said that there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate, more important far than they all.”

Wallowing in a fetid sewer of avarice, speciousness, sensationalism, and pornography, Carlyle’s Reporters’ Gallery has all but abandoned its crucial role. The Fourth Estate has evolved from a fierce watchdog of the public interest into a massive swarm of winged vectors infecting the body politic with the parasitic disease of fascism...

Lewis Black on God

- Gay Banditos -

Forgetful Virus

Forgetful? Virus may be eating your brain

Reuters

Tuesday, 24 October 2006

Viruses may be able to cross into the brain, causing steady damage over the years

Forget where you left your glasses? Did those keys go missing again? A virus may be to blame.


Viruses that cause a range of ills from the common cold to polio may be able to infect the brain and cause steady damage, a team at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota reports.


"Our study suggests that virus-induced memory loss could accumulate over the lifetime of an individual and eventually lead to clinical cognitive memory deficits," says Dr Charles Howe, who reports the findings in the latest issue of the journal Neurobiology of Disease.

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Answers

Spiritual Orgasm

The Quest for Spiritual Orgasm

By abstaining from intercourse, the spirit has no opportunity for expansiveness, yin and yang are blocked and cut off from one another.

Sexual love can be one of the most powerful human experiences. Over the past two thousand years, certain Daoist and Tantric cultures sought to tap the power of sexuality to cultivate elevated spiritual states of awareness and achieve immortality. These practices appear to have originated in China and India and later spread to Tibet and elsewhere in Asia. Daoism and Tantrism are both experiential approaches to life, and share similar microcosmic-macrocosmic theories of the human body as an inner mirror of outer Nature. The body-centered cosmology of each has led to a spectrum of sexual practices that range from ritualized physical sexual intercourse to celibacy accompanied by conscious subtle-body love making. (Bokemkamp, 1997, 43; Wile 1992, 25, White, 2000, 15).

Both posit a multi-dimensional universe governed by divine, all pervading polar energies identified in Tantra as Shakti-Shiva deities or in Daoism as the yin-yang forces of Heaven and Earth. These polar forces arise from a mysterious non-dual unity, whose dance within the physical plane follows a five-fold pattern of harmony governed by five families of deities or five phase principles. Both offer alchemical maps, often hidden within mandalas interiorized within the body - yantras in Tantra and I Ching (Yijing) patterns in Daoism - that can be fully understood only by the initiated adept. These subtle body maps allow the adept to navigate the apparent chaos of conflicting physical and sexual desires to find the way to the true self at the still center of the drama of creation. Despite these underlying similarities in their cosmology, the Tantric and Daoist methods of sexual cultivation, both physical and subtle body, are radically different.

Far Gone Books

Graham Hancock Dreamland

Graham Hancock has been on one of the great journeys of all time and has discovered the most important moment in history: the moment when the human mind began. The human body and brain were exactly as they are now as long as 130,000 years ago. For most of that time, nothing happened. Then, about 30,000 years ago, there was an explosion of cave art of unforgettable mastery. Then Linda Howe interviews the scientist who has been researching some VERY strange signals from the center of the galaxy!

In a journey that took him from the depths of the Amazon to the depths of his own mind, Graham actually re-created the conditions that inspired that great art--the first real record of human thought in action.

Listen to his astonishing, inspiring and courageous story on this week's Dreamland.

An Elephant Crackup?

By CHARLES SIEBERT
Published: October 8, 2006

All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a whole new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem. In the Indian state Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001; 265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their revenge. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks.

Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a less anthropocentric term — of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990’s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in “a number of reserves” in the region. In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants who were responsible for the killings of 63 rhinos, as well as attacks on people in safari vehicles. In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate of 6 percent in more stable elephant communities.

In a coming book on this phenomenon, Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist at the environmental-sciences program at Oregon State University, notes that in India, where the elephant has long been regarded as a deity, a recent headline in a leading newspaper warned, “To Avoid Confrontation, Don’t Worship Elephants.” “Everybody pretty much agrees that the relationship between elephants and people has dramatically changed,” Bradshaw told me recently. “What we are seeing today is extraordinary. Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relative peaceful coexistence, there is now hostility and violence. Now, I use the term ‘violence’ because of the intentionality associated with it, both in the aggression of humans and, at times, the recently observed behavior of elephants.”

For a number of biologists and ethologists who have spent their careers studying elephant behavior, the attacks have become so abnormal in both number and kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the customary factors. Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. But in “Elephant Breakdown,” a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

First Molecular Movie

Light Moving Through Condensed Matter: the First Molecular Movie

Contact: Lynn Yarris, lcyarris@lbl.gov

While it won't compete at the box office with Titanic, a movie made by an international collaboration of scientists working at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS) stands alone for originality: it's the first ever based on recorded observations of light moving through matter at the molecular level. Unlike a box office blockbuster, this movie carries ramifications well beyond summer entertainment, as it illuminates a possibility for using light to alter material properties. A computer graphic movie shows a wave of terahertz radiation propagating through a crystal of lithium tantalate, against an x ray diffraction pattern of the material. (Go here for the mpg movie file.) "If you want to understand the propagation of light through condensed matter at a microscopic level, especially in some of the complex materials that are of interest for modern optoelectronic applications, you need to make a molecular movie of how the atoms and electrons wiggle in the light field," says Andrea Cavalleri, a physicist now at Oxford University who was a member of Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division at the time of the experiments. "We were able to do this by combining ultrafast pulses of laser light with the electron beam at the ALS to create a camera with an extremely quick shutter speed."

Chris Whitley -Automatic

Automatic

Pants on Fire

Pants on Fire

Running money can be a pain in the ass. Sure, the money is great but sometimes you wonder if its worth the sacrifices.

Its not just the boring conferences where some loud jerk sitting behind you drowns out the presentation as he yaps on his cellphone. Or punching up endless charts as you try to find the ideal setup. Perhaps the ultimate downer is a perfect summer days when the tape is frozen in time and the beach seems to mock you in your Aeron chair.

How about crushing your benchmark but getting screwed while the new hire down the hall snags a fat signing bonus and drains the compensation pool dry? Becoming the most jaded, cynical guy on your block is the only thing you are guaranteed when you work on the street.

Still, money never sleeps. And while its great to be on the right side of a steep stock ramp or a spectacular blowup, piecing together a mosaic that gives you an edge can take months of hard work. Part of this process includes endless meetings with sell-side analysts and company management teams who, for lack of a better word, lie.

They lie through their teeth.

Limbaugh's Just Faking

Everyone knows Rush Limbaugh's just faking

LINWOOD BARCLAY

Now, I know this may offend those who suffer from this particular condition, and these individuals might not like it much when I suggest that a certain person with this diagnosis is exaggerating his symptoms, but I have to say, I think Rush Limbaugh is just pretending to be a dick.While the right-wing radio host does exhibit most, if not all, of the common characteristics of this behaviour, it's so rare for all of them to coalesce at a single moment that one can only conclude Limbaugh's most recent performances are nothing short of fraudulent.

While the right-wing radio host does exhibit most, if not all, of the common characteristics of this behaviour, it's so rare for all of them to coalesce at a single moment that one can only conclude Limbaugh's most recent performances are nothing short of fraudulent.I'm no expert diagnostician, but nobody could be this big a one. Limbaugh must be acting.

read the rest...

Father of Modern Ethnobotany

RICHARD EVANS SCHULTES: FATHER OF MODERN ETHNOBOTANY

from The Daily Telegraph of the United Kingdom

Richard Schultes was the father of modern ethnobotany, the study of the use of plants by native cultures such as the Amazonian Indians, among whom he lived in the 1940s.

He was also the leading authority on peyote, ayahuasca and other hallucinogenic plants, and his research came to influence William Burroughs, Aldous Huxley and the drug culture of the 1960s.



Schultes was regarded as the last of the great plant explorers in the tradition of William Dampier and Alexander von Humboldt. Clad in a pith helmet, for much of the 1940s and 1950s he navigated the tributaries of the Amazon in a portable aluminum canoe, relying on the hospitality of local Indians.

He documented the use by them of more then 2,000 medicinal plants, and gathered some 24,000 specimens. He also gave his name to 120 species, as well as to 2.2 million acres of rain forest protected by the Colombian government. Schultes was among the first to chart the growing threat to the eco-culture of the Amazon.

The hallmark of his work was his sympathy and sensitivity to the ways of life he encountered. He happily chewed coca powder with tribesmen, and treated the often fearsome-looking people he met with disarming courtesy. He never carried a firearm, “I do not believe in hostile Indians,” he said. “All that is required to bring out their gentlemanliness is reciprocal gentlemanliness.”

His research into plants that produce hallucinogens brought his scientific works an underground following in the 1960s, and he met both Burroughs and Timothy Leary. He afforded neither much respect. Schultes chided the latter for misspelling the Latin names of plants, and when Burroughs describes a psychedelic trip as an earth-shattering experience, his response was: “that’s funny, Bill, all I saw were colors.”

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Schultes maintained that contrary to popular conception, the Indians were eager to share their medical secrets. But, he warned in 1994: "The Indian people and their knowledge are disappearing even faster than the plants themselves."

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Peace Train

Welcome to The Peace Train

Welcome to The Peace Train. We want to be a resource for people involved in (and wanting to be involved in) the Peace Movement. Peace is a broad topic that includes many things such as: social justice, war issues, personal growth, poverty, human needs- the list is long. Please be sure to visit the Forums! We want to know what you are thinking! We are in the process of adding FAQs at the bottom, tips on how to use the site. Want to submit an article to consideration? Paste your text into the "Submissions" link on the bottom left of this page. Visit the NEW PEACE ART GALLERY!! Just click on the red "Make Art, Not War" link on the bottom left of this page.

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via: mariamariacuchita

Touching Muscles

Man banned from touching muscles

A man has been ordered by a judge not to feel people's muscles or ask them to do exercises in public.

Akinwale Arobieke, 45, from Liverpool, was also banned from measuring the size of muscles, under the order requested by Merseyside Police.

Arobieke, who is known in the area as Purple Aki, is out of jail on licence after a sentence imposed in 2003 for 15 counts of harassment.

He pursued young people with requests such as asking to feel their muscles.

Deputy District Judge Aled Jones granted the order to coincide with Arobieke's release on Thursday.

Town ban

Merseyside Police applied to Liverpool Magistrates' Court for a Sexual Offences Prevention Order against Arobieke - despite the fact he has not been convicted of a sex crime.

A spokeswoman for Merseyside Police confirmed an interim order had been granted until 23 November.

Under the terms of the order Arobieke cannot touch, feel or measure muscles or ask people to do squat exercises in public.

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via: blog of funk

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Let this be a lesson to Congressmen, everywhere.

Paglia Slices and Dices

exerpted from:

Salon Interview: Camille Paglia

Our fave pop intellectual weighs in on the Dems' gift to Ann Coulter (Foley), why Condi's success matters to feminsts, and Bob Woodward (yawn)

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It seems like religion has never been a bigger issue in American politics, recognized on both sides of the aisle as something that needs to be addressed. Have the Democrats changed the longtime Republican characterization of them as godless?

Well, as long as the Democrats are perceived as the anti-religion party, we're going to lose the culture wars. That's why Hillary has made such a show of churchgoing and wearing crucifixes -- even while there seems to be little connection between her Christian ideals and her backstage activities as a politician and money raiser. But religion is absolutely central to this country in ways that Europe's secularized intellectuals fail to understand. I'm speaking here as an atheist who studies religion and respects it enormously. In the history of mankind, the benefits that religion has brought to society in shaping behavior and moral choice are overwhelming in comparison to the negatives, which anyone can list -- like religious wars and bigotry. Without religion, we'd have anarchy.

Religion is also a metaphysical system that honors the largeness of the universe. It's that sense of largeness, which my generation used to call cosmic consciousness, that is missing in the cynical ideologies promoted by the elite universities -- like post-structuralism, which is obsessed with politics and language and has a depressingly debased view of human experience. Post-structuralism doesn't see the stars or the enormity of nature, which for religious people symbolizes God's power. So I think that the constant sniping at religion coming from liberal Democrats is really a dead end.

But there's reason for alarm at the right-wing intertwining of religion and politics, where the Bible is seen as the prophetic master plan of the universe and where Israel as the Holy Land must be protected at all costs from Muslim infiltration -- duplicating the agenda of the medieval crusades. But to claim, as Democrats often do, that there has always been a separation of church and state in America is misleading: The U.S. simply has no official state religion. The formative influence in our intellectual heritage came from Puritan dissidents in New England. Major universities like Harvard and Yale were founded on religious principles.

The more liberal parents are, the less contact their children have with religious ideas. That will surely disable our future American leaders from being able to understand the religious commitment of Islamic fundamentalists. Liberal journalists often seem incredulous about how anyone would seek death for religious principles. But that was the entire history of early Christianity, when the saints willingly sought martyrdom. We're heading into that world again.

What do contemporary intellectuals have to offer anyhow? What passionate engagement do they have to appeal to young people? Liberal secularism has become bourgeois and materialistic. It's snide, elitist, and politically marginalized. The chattering class clearly has no effect whatever on decision-making in Washington. Conservative radio hosts have been claiming that liberal criticism of Bush's decisiveness in invading Iraq mirrors the shilly-shallying of 1930s intellectuals during Hitler's rise. The intellectuals, with their cultivated internationalism, always counsel procrastination and leave it to the men of action to deal forcefully with fascist regimes.

The Jackal's Feast

Blood And Gravy II:
The Jackal's Feast Goes On
By Chris Floyd
10-26-6

The picture below (from the New York Times) speaks most eloquently on the essence of the Bush Regime's brutal, grubby Babylonian Conquest: fat mercenaries guarding the construction of yet another prison.

The picture comes from a story on the "overhead costs" of reconstruction projects, based on a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, who found astonishing amounts of waste and cost overruns by the crony contractors who came to feast on the carcass that Bush killed for them. Two main points emerge from the report.

First, that the IG's catalogue of gouging, feather-bedding and other profitable forms of war-profiteering is by no means complete, because "the United States has not properly tracked how much such expenses have taken from the $18.4 billion of taxpayer-financed reconstruction approved by Congress two years ago." In fact, the IG's office was only able to examine $1.3 billion of the contracts.

In other words, as oft reported here (and here and here), much of that money has simply disappeared -- into corporate coffers, into copious baksheesh for the Bush-backed Iraqi government, into kickbacks for Congressional vultures, and doubtless into slush funds both for covert ops (including perhaps the Bushists' deliberate fomenting of terrorism and arming of militias) and domestic politics. We are most likely seeing the fruits of some of this blood money wash up on American screens at this very moment, as the GOP's last-ditch "Smear and Fear" campaign goes into hyperdrive.

The second salient point is the fact that most of this "overhead" is not going toward security costs. Apologists for the Dear Leader's war crime have been quick to answer any criticism of the woeful dearth of "reconstruction" -- and the fact that the Iraqi people now have lower levels of electricity, fuel, health care, sanitation, etc. than before the invasion -- by blaming the colossal waste and fraud on the insurgents. But the Inspector General -- appointed by the Bush Administration itself -- tells us that the war-crime apologists are dead wrong:

Rape Photos Released

Judge Orders Release of Abu Ghraib Child Rape Photos

Submitted by davidswanson on Mon, 2006-10-23 20:54. Evidence

By Greg Mitchell, http://www.editorandpublisher.com

NEW YORK A federal judge ruled today that graphic pictures of detainee abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison must be released over government claims that they could damage America's image. Last year a Republican senator conceded that they contained scenes of "rape and murder" and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said they included acts that were "blatantly sadistic."

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ordered the release of certain pictures in a 50-page decision that said terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven they "do not need pretexts for their barbarism."

The ACLU has sought the release of 87 photographs and four videotapes taken at the prison as part of an October 2003 lawsuit demanding information on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody and the transfer of prisoners to countries known to use torture.

Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, said Thursday that releasing the photos would hinder his work against terrorism. "When we continue to pick at the wound and show the pictures over and over again it just creates the image--a false image--like this is the sort of stuff that is happening anew, and it's not," Abizaid said.

The judge said, however, that "the freedoms that we champion are as important to our success in Iraq and Afghanistan as the guns and missiles with which our troops are armed."

The Black House

The Black House

On
Pennsylvania Avenue

By Mary Sparrowdancer
Copyright © 2006 Mary Sparrowdancer
All Rights Reserved
10-25-6

It appears that hell has finally frozen over. The extent of the US government's illegal conduct--its lying, scheming, cheating, torture, murder, sexual escapades, and covering up of criminal activities--is finally surfacing and it is breaking through the once calm, sleepy, uninformed U.S. like the tip of an iceberg from hell. Americans all over the country are now wondering when and how the government of the United States became the very thing that the Founding Fathers loathed and despised: a malignant government that is brutal, feared, drunk with power, secretive, completely unaccountable, negligent and dishonest to the hilt.

We have been heading in this direction since 1913, but under the leadership of the current decider and his family and co-conspirators, we, the Citizens of the United States now find ourselves plunged into a draconian form of government reminiscent of the Dark Ages.

Had we not been lulled asleep, lied to, misinformed and uninformed by the news media for so long, we might have been able to fix things with less drastic measures than are now called for. At this time, however, we find ourselves facing a government made up of individuals involved in so many criminal acts and scandals, our situation is unprecedented in the history of the United States. A massive overhaul is in order. It is time to return to our roots and reestablish the great Republic this nation was founded as and meant to be.

No longer able to hide behind their historically owned media propaganda machines because the internet has rendered canned, fake and non-news worthless, those occupying important government seats of trust now stand starkly before us as never before in a horrifying line-up of suspects wanted for every type of crime known. Their offenses and crimes are all impeachable, running the full gamut as described in the Constitution: "treason, bribery, high crimes and misdemeanors."

more

Funniest Film of the Year

Laughter by the cartload as Borat and his babes ride in

Last updated at 17:59pm on 26th October 2006

Reader comments (49)

Borat arrives for the UK premiere of his controversial film

There were peasants, prostitutes, several barrels of fermented horse urine and possibly the most politically-incorrect speech Britain has ever heard.

Borat, Kazakhstan's famous TV reporter, was in town.

Gallery
The stars come out for the Borat premiere

Also...
• American cinemas close doors on new Borat movie
• REVIEW: 'Borat the movie will offend everyone'

He arrived on a wooden cart drawn by a mule, surrounded by a gaggle of cheap-looking Kazakh ladies of the night.

And he brought laughter - although much more bafflement - to London's Leicester Square.

Unsuspecting office workers paused on their way home last night to watch as Borat attended the premier of his film, Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

A Negligent Press

Covering Iraq: Hear from reporters from the Washington Post, CNN, the BBC, and more. Oct. 25. Tuesday, Oct 24 Robert Kennedy Jr.: 'We Have A Negligent Press In This Country' Robert Kennedy Jr. blasted everyone from polluters to politicians to the press today during a speech today at the American Magazine Conference in Phoenix that was, by his own admission, a long, rambling, passionate digression. "We have a negligent press in this country," Kennedy Jr. said, one that has "let the American people down" by not covering what he called the "worst environmental White House we've ever had in history, bar none." Kennedy Jr. spoke without notes and, it seemed, without taking a breath — his voice often cracking during a spirituality-tinged monologue you might hear on a subway platform waiting for the F train. Kennedy Jr. said that media consolidation that began in the Reagan administration has devolved to a state where news divisions are "corporate profit centers." And he blamed the press for not getting the story of corrupt polluters out there, instead pandering to the "reptillian part of our brains." "We know more about Tom and Katie than we do about global warming," Kennedy Jr. said. "We're the most entertained, least informed people in the world."

Breaking Up

Austrian man separates from wife and ring finger

VIENNA (Reuters) - A Viennese man cut off his ring finger and presented the digit, still holding his wedding band, to his ex-wife after an acrimonious divorce, Austrian news agency APA reported Tuesday.

Charged with dangerous harassment and assault for the act, he told a preliminary hearing he did not regret having cut off the finger and had chosen deliberately not to reattach it.

"It was an act of breaking free," the man was quoted as saying. He did not miss his finger, could work well without it and did not plan on getting married again anyway, he said.

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via: the rings around uranus

Mysterious Galactic Signals

One, Maybe Two, More Mysterious Radio Bursts from Galactic Center

© 2006 by Linda Moulton Howe

Radio image of the central region of our Milky Way Galaxy.
The white arrow points at the SNR 359.1-00.5 region where intense radio bursts
repeated five times spaced 77 minutes apart on the night of September 30, 2002,
to October 1, 2002. Image courtesy Northwestern University.

Date: Night of September 30 to October 1, 2002.
Radio Wave Size: About 1 meter in wavelength.
Number of Bursts: Five bursts over 7-hour period.
Name Assigned 5 Radio Bursts: "GCRT J1745-3009"
Length of Each Burst: 10 minutes duration and each radio burst
separated by about 77 minutes of silence. Rise time in intensity was
about 8 minutes, slower than decay time which was about two minutes.
Estimated Location: As far as 24,000 light-years, or as close as 300 light-years,
toward center of Milky Way galaxy and region of red supernova
remnant known as "SNR 359.1-00.5."

October 23, 2006 Sweet Briar, Virginia - A year and a half ago in early March 2005, I reported at Earthfiles about a physicist’s report in Nature concerning a powerful and repeating burst of radio waves toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy in a region known as SNR 359.1-00.5. The galactic center is 26,000 light-years from Earth and is full of stars. There were five radio bursts in 1-meter-long radio wavelengths of 330 MegaHertz detected over a 7 hour period on the night of September 30 to October 1, 2002. The five radio bursts were equally spaced apart by 77 minutes and there were no detectable x-ray emissions. No one studying our galaxy has ever seen any radio bursts like that before. The source is a complete mystery.

The SNR 359.1-00.5 region is enlarged on the left and the yellow spot
indicates the location of the 5 strong, repeating radio bursts in the 1-meter-long
wavelength recorded on September 30 to October 1, 2002. Name given
to unknown source: "GCRT J1745-3009." Graphic overlay
courtesy Sweet Briar College Physics Department.

Another Radio Burst September 28, 2003

Now, this year on March 1, 2006, the same science team published in The Astrophysical Journal new data about another similar radio burst detected on September 28, 2003. That was a single burst luckily caught in a short 10-minute observation. No one knows if there were other bursts before and after the one detected from Earth. The 2003 single radio burst was approximately three times weaker than the five radio bursts in 2002. Still, no one knows what the source of such similar radio bursts toward the center of our galaxy could be, while a possible third radio burst is being analyzed from 2004 data.

The lead scientist monitoring the Milky Way Galaxy center is Scott Hyman, Ph.D., Professor of Physics in the Dept. of Physics and Engineering at Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Virginia. He began his research a few years ago at the request of a colleague at the Naval Research Laboratory. Why the Navy would want to investigate radio signals in the galactic core is not known. But the strong, repeating radio bursts on regular intervals without x- ray emissions (X-rays are found in some natural cosmic emitters) provokes at least a question: could the source be another cosmic civilization? I recently talked with Prof. Hyman about that question and what more he has learned about the powerful, repeating long wave radio bursts.

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Interview:

Scott Hyman, Ph.D., Prof. of Physics, Dept. of Physics and Engineering, Sweet Briar College, Sweet Briar, Virginia: "It’s still an enigma...

The Jackies

Best Magazine Cover

'New Yorker' Wins Best Magazine Cover of the Year

September Issue Pictured Oval Office Under Water

By Nat Ives

Published: October 24, 2006

PHOENIX (AdAge.com) -- The best magazine cover of the last year arrived on the front of The New Yorker's Sept. 19, 2005, issue, on which cartoonist Barry Blitt pictured the Bush Administration,

The New Yorker's Sept. 19, 2005, cover depicting the Oval office innundated by Katrina-like flood waters was named Magazine Cover of the Year by the American Society of Magazine Editors.

MEANWHILE: The Media Guy Picks Just a Few of the Worst Magazine Covers From 'Rosie's 'Staph is no laugh!' to 'Talk's Squatting Heather Graham. Send him your nominees at sdumenco@crain.com

from the president to Condoleezza Rice to Dick Cheney to Karl Rove, flooded to the shoulders with water and trouble after the government outraged millions with an awful response to Hurricane Katrina.

That assessment is according to the American Society of Magazine Editors, which wrapped up the American Magazine Conference today with its first picks for a to-be-annual magazine cover competition.

Top prize
The New Yorker won the top prize over two other nominees, Wenner Media's 1,000th issue of Rolling Stone, an elaborate 3-D affair, and The Economist's July issue picturing North Korea's Kim Jong-il riding a rocket plume skyward. That cover, however, did win for best cover line, "Rocket Man."

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Star, Nov. 29, 2004
"260 lb Kirstie: TOO FAT FOR SEX!"
A deranged Kirstie Alley flips the paparazzi a double birdie. But wait, there's more! Kirstie's flanked by a "DUMPED!" Lindsay Lohan, Star "BRIDEZILLA!" Jones, and eight-weeks-preggers Britney. You know, on second thought, maybe this belongs on the best-ever list. I'm petitioning ASME for a recount.
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For Simon Dumenco's nominees for the worst covers of the year, see this week's The Media Guy in MediaWorks.