Spitting Image

Fun...Filters

2X

"crunchy clusters"

'The Worst of the Worst"

In 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld famously referred to Guantanamo prisoners as "the worst of the worst."

...there are the British men who were detained for nearly three years and who have sued the US government, alleging torture and other human-rights violations. In a 115-page dossier, the men allege that they were beaten, stripped, shackled and deprived of sleep during their detention. They charge that guards threw prisoners' Korans into toilets and attempted to force them to give up their religious faith. There say detainees were forcibly injected with unidentified drugs and intimidated with military dogs. And they claim they were subjected to abuse and beatings during their detention.
Each said they eventually gave false confessions that they appeared in a video with al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta, one of the September 11 hijackers, despite the fact that they could prove they were in Britain when the video was made.
After they were freed last March, the men were questioned by British police but quickly released without charge.

[Then there are at least three children, ages 13 to 15.]

article by William Fisher | TruthOut

[Guanatanamo detainee]

~There are no recent photos of detainees in the new Guantanamo prison.

Bush Defies Hundreds of Laws

WASHINGTON -- President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

story | Boston Globe via TruthOut

~I'm stuck on the idea that giving himself "the power to set aside any statute" is not illegal in itself, let alone that no one in Congress (the Courts?) has yet held the President accountable for any of the laws he has so far chosen to ignore. (I'm a silly man.)

Update from Opus Dei Awareness Network

Opus Dei in the Spotlight
Due to the upcoming release of the 'Da Vinci Code' film in May, Opus Dei has been featured in all areas of the media - television, radio and newsprint. The movie, based on the novel by Dan Brown, includes Opus Dei characters. As a result, ODAN (Opus Dei Awareness Network) has supplied information to many media outlets recently.

more news: http://www.odan.org/

Opus Dei Affiliated Foundations

Discipline: a cord-like whip which resembles macrame, used on the buttocks or back once a week. Opus Dei members must ask permission to use it more often, which many do. The story is often told in Opus Dei that the Founder was so zealous in using the discipline, he splattered the bathroom walls with streaks of blood.

[photo: http://www.odan.org/corporal_mortification.htm]

~The Cardinal of Chicago, the largest Archdiocese in the United States is a member of Opus Dei.
ODAN reminds me that today in America one can't understand political power unless one understands the power of cults.

Photo Caption Non Sequitur

"What a blessing it is to fall down and to get up again."

("What a pleasure it is to knock people down and see them get up again for more.")

Quotation from Ayn Rand

"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." (appendix to 'Atlas Shrugged') @

[photo not with above]

Update: Operation Iraqi Freedom

Thousands of Iraqis Displaced

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Sectarian violence has forced about 100,000 families across Iraq to flee their homes, a top Iraqi official said...

Earlier this week, U.S. spokesman Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch told reporters that U.S. forces had found no "widespread movement" of Shiites and Sunnis away from religiously mixed areas, despite reports to the contrary by Iraqi officials.

An Iraqi girl stands in front of her family's tent at a refugee camp Saturday April 29, 2006 in Diwaniyah, 130 kilometers (80 miles) south of Baghdad, Iraq...

story | AP Yahoo

Plastic (PTFE) Piercings

Jessica Russell of Lewiston, who has 66 body piercings - 31 of them on her back - was competing in the most unusual category at the tattoo show in Bangor (ME). The piercings on her back are not metal, but are made of flexible plastic. BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTO BY LINDA COAN O'KRESIK

"Once I put that in, I decided I didn't want metal anymore," said Russell, who has a total of 66 piercings, 31 of which are done with PTFE hollow tubing. One well-known brand of PTFE is Teflon.

The corset was created by double rows of five piercings on her lower back that are tied together with the red ribbon. A huge black-widow-spider tattoo, with PTFE (polytetrafluorethylene) piercings at each knuckle of its eight legs, sits on the top of Russell's back and is connected to the corset by a silver chain and black suede cord. Each end of the PTFE plastic tubing is secured by a small silver ball.

PTFE is extremely flexible," J.B. (James Bernard, owner of Mystical Emporium in Auburn, who did all of Russell's piercings) said... while bending a piece of PTFE that is pierced though his sternum. "It's used in angioplasty and other surgeries. It basically eliminates rejection problems."

In addition to nonstick cooking pans, PTFE is used in medical applications because human bodies rarely reject it...

"It will take up to a year" for a PTFE piercing to heal...

story

~With flexible light-weight hollow tubes replacing metal, piercings can extend greater distances around one's body as well as into space. Allowing for miniature structures, architecture?
People can now have a miniature PTFE Statue of Liberty, Sears Tower, Seattle Space-Needle, Cathedral of Notre Dame, etc. attached to their skull or extending from any part of their body that can be pierced?

RSF Says Chinese Security Goons Kidnapped a Blogger

(Reporters Without Borders)

http://www.politechbot.com/2006/04/28/rsf-says-chinese/

[photo not from politech]

~It can't happen here.

~I thought I'ld never get the chance to post this photo of nude (naturist?) shoppers.

The Homo Risk Audit Project

"The Risk Audit Project measures the extent to which public school districts are collaborating with homosexual activists by determining, among other things, whether schools have adopted pro-homosexual policies or curricula, and whether the school district is sponsoring pro-homosexual clubs, events, or activities..."

blog entry w/ links | Pandragon

~How gay is your kids' school, your church, your place of work?

>From Unknown News: "Mission America...have a serious following in the crazed faux Christian community. This bonkers homosexual "audit" program got serious coverage in all the right-wing faux Christian media, Agape Press and Christian News Wire. The National Association of Evangelicals, a group that claims to represent "millions of evangelical Christians in the United States," circulates material from Mission America. They're for real, they're mainstream evangelical faux Christians, and their hate material can't be casually discounted...

I just have to wonder aloud what I've wondered inside for so long: For Christ's sake, where are the real Christians? Why are they allowing these hatemongers to take Christ's name in vain, so loud?"

~On a scale of one-to-ten, with one being absolute aesexuality and ten being flaming, how gay is this photo?

[photo not from above/ caption stubbornson]

Naturist Cartoons- Loxie & Zoot!

more cartoons: http://loxieandzoot.comicgenesis.com/archive.html

~For me to practice nudism, for free at home, I would first need to pull the shades on the windows in any of the rooms I might use, blocking the natural light or else plant trees and bushes (at considerable expense) that would block the view. The realization that nudism requires walls (or membership in "colonies" or resorts) seems antithetical to the experience of freedom nudism promises.

Why We Think Nature Is Beautiful

Henry James once wrote:

Mr. (Winslow) Homer . . . cares not a jot for such fantastic hairsplitting as the distinction between beauty and ugliness. . . .to see, and to reproduce what he sees, is his only care. . . . He not only has no imagination, but he contrives to elevate this rather blighting negative into a blooming and honorable postive. He is almost barbarously simple, and to our eye, he is horribly ugly. . . . He has chosen the least pictorial features of the least pictorial range of scenery and civilization; he has resolutely treated them as if they were pictorial, as if they were every inch as good as Capri or Tangiers; and to reward his audacity, he has incontestably succeeded.

A Lecture by Gene Hargrove

~I've found that the awareness I'll never be able to enjoy, except at great cost, the spectacular locales the people on tv and in the movies so effortlessly visit has contributed to my affection for places I don't have to go in debt to see. That and a growing misanthropy has changed my ideas about what makes nature beautiful.

Polyester Fabric Neutralizes Stun Gun Jolt

An Arizona company told the technology website CNet.com in
April that it has created a polyester fabric that neutralizes shots
from a Taser gun, basically forming an electric loop on the cloth
and sending the charge back into the gun. G2 Consulting
Company's Thor Shield is now marketed only to law enforcement
and military agencies, for their own personnel to wear.*

press release \ ThorShield

*item via News of the Weird

~Once China starts producing knock-offs of this fabric for criminals and demonstrators to buy will police be forced to aim their tasers at suspects' heads? (Would a tasered eyeball explode?)

News of the Weird

* China's Xinhua news agency reported in March that the police
department in Nanjing has gone beyond fingerprints and now has a
data bank of smells taken from criminals and crime scenes to aid
police dogs in investigations. Officials say that storing the scents
at minus-18 degrees (C) retards degradation for at least three years,
and already, they say, the bank of 500 odors has led to the
identification of 23 suspects. [BBC News, 3-16-06]

>related? on Spitting Image New Detectors Sniff Terrorists Scents

LifeStyles

Debbie Doyle, 11, of Florham Park wears the
riot control gear that her father, Morris
County Park Police Sgt. David Doyle, might
wear at the annual Police Expo at Rock-
away Townsquare mall...

[photo from this story at Unknown News)]

~Q: There's something about a kid in a uniform that makes me...

A. Anxious.
B. Optimistic about America's future.
C. Wish I had invested in phamaceutical stocks years ago.
D. Sad for the world

Quiet Time: Creatures

Here is the friend that must always argue.

Whatever I say, he must contradict, refine, dissect and doubt.

He takes a great pleasure in owning a few fine things and in being ascetic

(but in his eyes there is a hunger

for something else, an opulence of the soul.)

I am not it, although I stand before him, solid, dependable.

I have no shine, no flecks of gold, no real

pride in my accomplishments, no wit, no grace or height.

I have nothing beautiful to show him, nothing to envy. No great truth to tell him.

He wants only one friend, I am only a subject awaiting a trial.

Although I will miss his passion, I cannot not argue.

He knows what he wants. I am only curious as to my successor,

what test I am continuously failing.

more creatures

http://www.quiet-time.com/newsite/sitemap.html

Photos of the Day: American Border Patrol

large (url)

Group of people walking along fence just west of Naco, Sonora, Mexico. American Border Patrol sent live images of group and other activity, including the apprehension of 8 illegal aliens out over the Internet...

http://www.americanpatrol.com/ABP/PHOTO-OF-THE-DAY/Menu-Photos.html

via Aberrant News

~My work is too dull to provide 'photos-of-the-day' but there are many occupations like the American Border Patrol where this makes perfect sense. In America there are tens of thousands of police and Homeland Security forces as well as fire and emergency departments that routinely video their interactions with the property they protect, or with us, the public they serve. To see what they see day-in and day-out can be instructive.

Sex in a Spray...

"PT-141, a nasal spray that is perhaps the world’s first legitimate aphrodisiac, may hit the market in under three years.

...a dose of PT-141 results, in most cases, in a stirring in the loins in as little as 15 minutes. Women, according to one set of results, feel ‘genital warmth, tingling and throbbing’, not to mention ‘a strong desire to have sex’.
Among men who have been tested with the drug more extensively, the data set is richer...

story | TruthDig

from Aberrant News

~So how soon until stories about people tricked into thinking they've purchased aphrodisiac nasal-prays become common place?
Will hospital emergency rooms start reporting more poisonings? When will the first person be killed by a fake nasal-spray aphrodisiac?
Will street-drug entrepreneurs develop new combinations of old drugs to cash in the inevitable nasal-spray popularity if and when PT-141 becomes available?

Overheard at Starbucks

"All would be great, all would be heavenly, if the damned would only stay damned."

We Can All Agree on This, Right?

"...expand the ability of victims of domestic violence (and other gender-related human rights abuses like trafficking, sexual slavery and honor killing) to seek asylum in the United States."

article by William Fisher | TruthOut

~Under the guidelines outlined here for individuals escaping violence, doesn't it follow that American military detainees in Iraq, Guantanamo and secret CIA prisons throughout the world could also appeal to the INS for asylum?

Femicide?

[Salon Abu Ghraib photo not with above]

Three Graces

(illus info. wiki Primaver)

Wiki's article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charites

~The only figures from Greek mythology that are part of my personal pantheon. I owe these women so much.

Encyclo-Paideia

A Working Index of Male Initiation Rituals

"This open project aims to list so-addressed male initiation rites or
rites de passage worldwide. The columns feature, from left to right, the indigenous name, the ethnogeographic site, some features, and
references/outlinks..."

http://www.boyhoodstudies.com/encyclopaideia.htm

by way of Growing up Sexually (Topica)

[photo not from above]

Video Magazine: Radical Software

The historic video magazine Radical Software was started by Beryl Korot, Phyllis Gershuny, and Ira Schneider and first appeared in Spring of 1970, soon after low-cost portable video equipment became available...

Vol.2 #6

all the issues: http://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/index.html

~For anthropologists only?

Researchers Aim to Detect Dirty Bombs

~Nodes

A radiation sensor inside a cell phone was used with a network of tiny computers spread out around Vanderbilt Stadium... to detect a fake radioactive "dirty bomb."

...they set their equipment up in the stadium press box and watched as a red dot moved across their computer screens.
The dot represented the real-time movements of researcher Janos Sallai as he walked up and down the stadium seats and around the playing field while watching the radiation sensor inside his cell phone.

Tiny radio-transmitting computers spaced around an area, like Vanderbilt Stadium, can be used to help security workers find potential threats, such as the fake radioactive bomb...
The computers, called nodes, are square white boxes with a short antenna protruding from the top. The current device is no bigger than a coffee cup, but future versions may be the size of buttons on an overcoat.
"It will be miniaturized as the technology matures," Ledeczi said.
The nodes feed information from sensors like the one in the researcher's cell phone back to computers being monitored by the researchers. In a real-world application, the information would be sent to computers used by security personnel.
The nodes can also be used to instantly train security cameras with almost pinpoint accuracy to the site of trouble, Ledeczi said. That ability has already drawn the interest of the Pentagon for its ability to detect snipers.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientist Frank DeNap said the technology the team is developing will be versatile enough to detect more than just radioactive threats.
"It will work with any type of sensor," he said. "If the threat is chemical, you can use a chemical sensor. Or, if you think the threat is explosives, you can use an explosives sensor."
Ledeczi said practical use of such a threat detection system could be about a year away.

press release | Houston Chronicle

~One day they'll be able to put tiny sensors on people before they enter a targeted/suspect area without the people knowing. (Not eco-tourism...terror-tourism.) Also sensors on animals: birds, mice, dogs, cats, polar bears, whales?

Anything that uses a cell phone is accessable anywhere in the world? They're hoping to use satellites to track sensored-up (sic) animals and cooperative or even unsuspecting individuals and the radiation, explosives, poisons and diseases they might encounter on their travels.

How far along are bio-sensors for specific airborne diseases? Science fiction?

(I wonder if corporations are developing contingency plans? When pollution sensors are cheap enough for every town to purchase, polluting businesses will be facing a shit-storm of new VERY LOCAL environmental regulations. Towns and neighborhoods won't need to wait for their state or federal environmental experts to tell them how much they're water, air or soil might be poisoned.)

Overheard at Starbucks

"Some people watch soap-operas, have their stories. I don't need the daily dramas but when occasionally stressed I've found BBC- mysteries work like a valium."

---"Romania, Bulgaria, any of the Balkan countries."

News: Watching America

Discover What the World Thinks About U.S.

http://watchingamerica.com/index.shtml

~Aren't these headlines strange, disconcerting, crazy? Who knew they talk about us like this? Who do they think they are? Who are they anyway?

[photo not from above]

Lifestyles: World Bank Data & Statistics

Country Groups By Region By Income

~China, Brazil, Iraq, Romania? Nicaragua?

>Coincidentally from BBC/TruthOut:

World Bank Falsifies Malaria Data

The World Bank has been accused of publishing false accounts and wasting money on ineffective medicines in its malaria treatment programme.
A Lancet paper claims the bank faked figures, boosting the success of its malaria projects, and reneged on a pledge to invest $300-500m in Africa.
It also claims the bank funded obsolete treatments - against expert advice.

~After more than four years of the Bush Administration I had forgotten that this method of (NOT) taking care of business hadn't been invented by the neo-cons. (Perhaps perfected by them...as a way of running a country?)

[illus from Malaria On The Rise, Children Most Vulnerable | The World Bank]

Lifestyles: Most Expensive Zip Codes 2006

http://www.forbes.com/2006/04/17/06zip_most-expensive-zip-codes_land.html

| Forbes

~East and West Coast house-prices dominate this list. The Midwest first appears ranked 88. I wonder if zip codes of least expensive real estate are more evenly distributed throughout America? Maine, West Virginia, South Dakota? In locales farthest from the coasts? The mountains?

"Don't Thread On Me Either"

(large/url) | Nmazca.com

RFID Popularity Contest

Even if everything in a gallery is there to be looked at, some projects tend to gather more eyes. A new project, called 'Attention Please!' is the vehicle for artist Sara Smith's research into how audiences engage with works of art, and how technology might shift these personal practices. Together with tech partner Kisky Netmedia, Smith has established an 'attention seeking video installation,' in which gallery-goers can swipe an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) card to express interest in a video. When one video becomes most popular, the others exhibit jealous behavior, in hopes of stealing attention from their co-competitors. The project is funded by Liverpool's FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), who has a special initiative to support the development of exhibition technologies. 'Attention Please!' will be on view there, on May 3rd and 4th, but in the mean time the group is putting out a call for active participants. If you're in the area, you too! can swipe in support of your attention span, putting your consumption on display. - Marisa Olson | Rhizome

http://www.attentionplease.co.uk

~Forget about RFID swiping in museums over art... (aren't RFID 'business cards' already indispensable at trade shows?)...I'ld like to see something like this applied to the indoor and outdoor environments architects, urban and recreational planners and their public and corporate sponsors have designed for us to use.
There are places in cities as well as near wilderness that deserve a nod, an acknowledgement. There are street corners, paths, highway- ramps, overlooks, picnic areas, fishing holes, bridges, gardens, bus stops, camping areas, stairways, individual trees, viaducts, store fronts, public squares, water fountains, beer gardens, embankments, lawns, elevators, parking lots, food courts, roof-tops, etc. etc. worthy of special mention, a shared appreciation.
There are also many many areas designed and executed for us, or our automobiles, by people who've profited, (who continue to profit) and who should know better, totally devoid of any aesthetic, of any joy to look at.

(Instead of RFID "rate your environment" cards and the necessary readers salted everywhere maybe it would be simpler through text messaging to register GPS coordinates into local Scenic/Anti-scenic Databases.
When you find one of these places you type in the direction you're looking, whether it's scenic or antiscenic and you press a button that sends your 'vote'.
A web site keeps a running tally...with photographers' volunteer attempts at documentation, comments from the public, etc...and every year or so journalists or other local experts report on the Best and Worst places to see?)

~Most of these photos by way of a google image search: spring dance.

WalMart Evolves Into Big Political Issue

There is no candidate. There are no ballots. There won't be an Election Day. And yet it may be the hottest, highest-stakes political contest in America today.
It's the campaign against Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart's main opponents are the Service Employees International Union, which started Wal-Mart Watch, and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which funds a separate campaign called WakeUpWalMart.com
After failing to organize employees of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. with traditional tactics, the unions decided to use modern campaign and communications methods to drag the company into the public square and try to shame them into change.
Both groups have hammered the world's largest retailer about its wages, health insurance, treatment of workers and proclivity for buying non-U.S. goods. Wal-Mart has responded with counterattacks and a multimillion-dollar public campaign to polish its image.
On both sides are some of the best political strategists money can buy.

story

~Elections? We don need no stinkin' elections.

That this is being worked through political consultants and not politicians is bizarre isn't it? If the consultants can create a big enough buzz maybe a politician or two will get interested in these issues that affect the employees of America's largest private employer?

Don't forget to vote.

[photo from google]

NY Times Gets Young Officers to Criticize Rummy

Criticism of Rumsfeld Widens to Young Officers

"This is about the moral bankruptcy of general officers* who lived through the Vietnam era yet refused to advise our civilian leadership properly," said one Army major in the Special Forces who has served two combat tours. "I can only hope that my generation does better someday."

story By Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt The New York Times via TruthOut

*~I will proudly obey the President's orders to the very last drop of your blood.

[photo DefenseLink\ not NYTimes]

~No questions here?

Bush Brandishes Jail Time at Critics

Over the past five-plus years, the American people have gotten a taste of what a triumphant George W. Bush is like, as he basked in high approval ratings and asserted virtually unlimited powers as Commander in Chief. Now, the question is: How will Bush and his inner circle behave when cornered?

article by Robert Parry | Consortium News via TruthOut

~Sedition!

[illus. not with above]

Spring Dance 2005

Teatro Alto Spring Dance 2005 (100 photos)

Spring Cinema

Isn't Spring the most cinematic season? There's something new happening everyday, (albeit in slow-motion).
Fall with it's colors is more painterly. Summer is for snapshots,...kodachrome...slides. Winter is sculpture.

The Hook-Up: AvaFlirting

"...an avatar-based "hooking up" social networking game for America's mobile phones."

press release | Guardian Games Blog

~Copy with your camera-phone add the appropriate acronym and send!

Tab A Slot B

How to Blog: blog entry

~It's funny because it's true.

Fun...

2X

tab A slot B

Mail Art: Business Reply Mail

Why would they send them to us if they didn't want them back?

>for example:

main gallery (1437 files)

"Sending mail back to companies with something besides the intended consumer information is nothing new folks. ..

Our goal is to have fun with writing, quotes, collage, paint, photography, "found art" (trash art), random conversations, and bizarre things we think people somewhere may get a kick out of...

Dont send:
Anything with sharp edges or moving parts
Food or objects that decompose (or are already decomposing),
Anything that could be construed as dangerous or a health hazard

http://replymail.fnordinc.com/

thanks Conscientious

~Random acts of communication. Similar to what I'm doing here.

Army Suicides Hit Highest Level Since '93

"We have increased the number of combat stress teams, increased suicide prevention and training, and we are working very aggressively to change the culture so that soldiers feel comfortable coming forward with their personal problems in a culture where historically admitting mental health issues was frowned upon," (Army spokesman Col. Joseph) Curtin said.

According to the Army, there are more than 230 mental health practitioners working in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared with "about a handful" when the war began, Curtin said. story | AP via TruthOut

[photo not with above]

Waiting for the Savior to Come

http://www.aliciaross.com/03.htm

rhetoric

I assume we are talking about saving a few young men from suicide. I have in mind those who commit suicide out of disgust, because they find that others own too large a share of them. To them one should say: at least let the minority within you have the right to speak. Be poets. They will answer: but it is especially there, it is always there that i feel others within me; when i try to express myself, i am unable to do so. Words are readymade and express themselves: they do not express me. Once again i find myself suffocating. At that moment, teaching the art of resisting words becomes useful, the art of saying only what one wants to say, the art of doing them violence, of forcing them to submit. In short... Found a rhetoric, or rather, to teach everyone the art of founding his own rhetoric. This saves those few, those rare individuals who must be saved: those who are aware, and who are troubled and disgusted by the others within them.those individuals who make the mind progress, and who are, strictly speaking, capable of changing the reality of things. ---Francis Ponge

http://www.kalin.lm.com/ponge.html

[illus. stubbornson\ not from above]

Overheard at Starbucks

"You're saying the party-girls are protected by fascists?"

"It's a automaton world after all."

Google Image Search: organ donor

*

more organ+donor search+images

>related:
How do they decide when you're dead enough to be an organ donor? | The Straight Dope (1987)

~Check out Ricky's ...who really should know better...inspirational yet misinformed response following Cecil's explanation.
Anyway, I wonder what's changed since 1987?

*If involved in a automobile accident would an organ donor vanity license plate inspire the rescue workers to rush me to the hospital a little bit quicker? (Of course but once there...??)

American Patriot

>About Iran:

"We civilians may say there’s not enough troops. We don’t count. The military believes they can do this mission, and they are planning to do this mission because they have received the political guidance from their commander-in-chief to accomplish this mission. That’s the only reality that counts. None of the pundits that appear on TV, none of the ill-informed people writing op-eds have a vote in this matter. The only votes that count are those who have the authority to order military action and implement those orders, and that’s the president, his inner circle and the military, and they are preparing for war with Iran as we speak.

>About 'citizenship':

It would be nice to trust [elected officials], but, you know, representative democracy isn’t a one-phase process, where you vote, and then—boom—somebody gets elected and now that’s it, you back off. There’s a thing called accountability. They’re still accountable to you, and you have to hold them accountable for what they do in your name. It’s a constant process. We have to supervise, because, remember, they work for us."

http://www.sdcitybeat.com/article.php?id=4281

thanks Conscientious

~Do you see the contradiction in these two (non sequential) paragraphs? Is Mr. Ritter naive?
American consumers may be ignorant, but if their ignorance keeps them, if not their more athletic children, out of the Pentagon's sites, they ain't stupid.

[photo not from above]

Boobdha

lg (url)

http://www.jazlink.com/jazlbums/Boobdha/

20,000 On Death Row World-Wide

In its annual survey on the death penalty, Amnesty International said 94% of the 2005 executions took place in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the US.
The numbers are down from 2004 thanks to a "global tide" against the death penalty, the group said.

At least 1,770 executions took place last year in China, where a person could be sentenced and executed for non-violent crimes including tax fraud, embezzlement and drug offences, the UK-based group said.
It was a worry that that high profits behind the country's organ transplants from executed prisoners may act as an incentive to maintain the death penalty, the group added.

press release | BBC via TruthOut

[illus. from google image search\ not Amnesty or the BBC]

Super Bowl Used to Test Sensor Network

Members of the Michigan National Guard’s 51st Civil Support Team were testing an innovative sensor technology for use, in this case, in a security setting at a public event attended by 65,000 people.

Equipped with paperback-size Sony Vaio U50s—handheld computers running Microsoft Windows XP Pro with sensing devices connected to a wireless network—soldiers posted at entry tents and scattered around the venue checked for the presence of hazardous materials...

[photo with press release]

If chemical or radiation levels had gone up as an individual walked through the entry tent, or if soldiers sweeping another area picked up some other chemical presence, that data could be sent back to the operations center wirelessly in real time for analysis and potential action.
The technology, called sensor data fusion, is the creation of Distributed Instruments LLC of Sterling Heights, Mich. Jeffrey Ricker, the company’s chief executive officer, described sensor fusion as a way to create a single picture from multiple sensors.

"This technology reduces the number of communications our teams have to make and allows me to keep track of real-time data instead of relying on my soldiers to report back on radio. The teams can remain situationally aware without having to look too much at their equipment.”

press release | GCN

~Soldiers on the ground and emergency personnel at the scene can be the eyes, ears and noses of their command centers with technology like this.

Diagnostic Doll

Diagnostic doll, China, (19th c.) Chinese tradition forbade women from undergoing a physical examination or mentioning parts of her body to a male physician. Women from wealthy families used carved ivory dolls such as this to indicate where their symptoms were.
[ photo: @ | Digital Clendening\ caption @ | Heart Views Vol.5 #1]

College Bars Students from Posing for Playboy

Baylor, known for its conservative outlook, did not allow dancing on campus until 10 years ago. story

3 Signs That Your Superpower Is Becoming a Cheap Rip-Off of the Soviet Union

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2006/04/three-signs-that-your-superpower-is.html

~Wake-up and smell the bor-sht, Homelanders.

thanks Conscientious

[photo not from above]

Cartoon: Enemy from Within?

@ | Military.com

First Face Transplant for China

The patient was identified as Li Guoxing, 30, a hunter from the Lisu ethnic minority in the south-western province of Yunnan, who was attacked by a bear two years ago. item | BBC

New Detectors Sniff Terrorists' Scents

The Pentagon...wants to keep track of potential enemies-of-the-state in every way imaginable: not just by sight, or by sound, or by their e-mail; but by their smell, as well.
Darpa's "Unique Signature Detection Project (formerly known as the Odortype Detection program)" aims to sniff out genetic markers in "human emanations (urine, sweat, etc.)" that "can be used to identify and distinguish specific high-level-of-interest individuals within groups of enemy troops."

Darpa's smell detector is part of a larger, $15 million-per-year effort to develop "novel sensors" for U.S. troop operating in "urban settings." The goal of the Urban Vision program is "to enable the warfighter to 'see' movers within a building using a variety of fused multi-spectral techniques." The "Enemy Dismount Intrusion Detection program," on the other hand, "will develop a chemical sensor that is capable of providing an advanced warning of the presence of enemy troops or combatants by detecting the chemical emissions... that are common to all humans."

press release

~Every year or so since 9/11, DARPA reprints a version of this story. I don't have a clue if they're any closer to making it happen. If they're compiling an Odortype Database of bad guys, for example. But wouldn't they WANT to keep Odortype Detection, as well as other 'novel sensors' a secret?

>somewhat related:

China's Xinhua news agency reported in March that the police department in Nanjing has gone beyond fingerprints and now has a data bank of smells taken from criminals and crime scenes to aid police dogs in investigations. Officials say that storing the scents
at minus-18 degrees (C) retards degradation for at least three years,
and already, they say, the bank of 500 odors has led to the
identification of 23 suspects. [BBC News, 3-16-06] by way of News of the Weird (April 30)

[illus google\ not DefenseTech]

Bio-War Test in Iowa?

blog entry | Xymphora

~Mumps.

Dumb Suicide Bombers

blog entry | Xymphora

Buried Truths

Debunking the nuclear "bunker buster."

According to Defense Department estimates, there are perhaps 10,000 underground military installations in the world. Most, no doubt, are crude ammo dumps, but some are literally subterranean fortresses...

Since the Cold War, the U.S defense community has become obsessed with the problem of bunkers and how to destroy them. The solution put forward has, of course, been expensive new weaponry. Soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration made a push for new nuclear programs, the most conspicuous of which was the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), designed to destroy deeply buried bunkers.

Were the effectiveness of bunker busters to be demonstrated, the weapons might conceivably be worth the risk and expense. But in fact, even a cursory consideration of the science shows that bunker-busting nuclear weapons are a wasteful and dangerous delusion.

Deterrence remains the government's public justification for building more nuclear weapons, but the term has undergone semantic drift. What today is passed off as deterrence by proponents of low-yield bunker busters and the RNEP is not, as it once was, the demonstrable ability of nuclear weapons to prevent nuclear war but the unproven power of unworkable weapons to bully other countries into abjuring any action at all deemed offensive by the United States.
Even supporters of the new projects concede that nuclear weapons don't seem to work as well in the new deterrence as they did in the old. "Sometimes they just don't deter, do they?" Joseph Howard, a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos and an early and influential voice in favor of low-yield nuclear weapons, told me recently..

article By Benjamin Phelan | Harper's Magazine via TruthOut

A weapons engineer at Sandia National Laboratories prepares a scaled-down model of a B61-11 for aerodynamic testing in a wind tunnel.

[photo/caption/more info. The Birth of a Nuclear Bomb: B61-11]

Army Turns Its Back on Torture Whistleblower

As an Army interrogator at Abu Ghraib in 2004, Torin Nelson helped investigators document instances of prisoner abuse and torture by his colleagues. Now a contract employee, he's being blacklisted from working in the military...

story

~A few bad apples.

2 Dems Ask Bush About Military Operations in Iran

"...on the heels of a growing number of news reports that American forces may have already begun military operations in Iran.."

story

~The world waits for The President's response...

>Meanwhile: As Rhetoric Builds, Democrats in Congress Lie Low on Iran

~'Rhetoric' is now a euphemism for 'military operations'? Make a note of it.

Vatican Backs Moscow Mayor's Ban of Gay Parade

Unholy row develops as activists claim diplomatic interference

~Note the 'activists' objection to the Vatican's support of the Mayor's proposed ban:

“[Archbishop] Mennini expresses in Russia the views of The Vatican as a state and not of a Catholic Church,” organisers say. “Therefore, the views of Mr. Mennini concerning the support for the ban on Moscow pride is nothing less than interference in the affairs of sovereign state – and instigation to breach the laws.”

The first gay parade march is scheduled to take place in Moscow on Saturday May 27, the day of 13th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Russia.

story | UK Gay News

>related http://www.gayrussia.ru/en/

~Moscow has millions of residents and is (still) the capital of Russia?
What capital city anywhere in the world doesn't have a sizable gay population?

Looks like the Mayor, the Archbishop, the Mullahs and the Rabbis are all spitting in the wind doesn't it?

FBI Seeks Access to Jack Anderson Files

The Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to review the files of the late muckraking journalist Jack Anderson and confiscate any documents it believes are classified before they are opened to the public.

http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2006/04/fbi_seeks_access_to_jack_ander_1.html

~If Jack Anderson were still alive would the FBI be so bold?
(When reporters die, the Bushies are making sure their work dies with them.)

>also Did FBI Trick Anderson's Widow?

~On tv last night Anderson's biographer Mark Feldstein suggested that a FBI agent convinced the widow they both came from the same part of West Virginia and were 'cousins'.

Art: CreativeChick

Cosmic Pod 11-P. Bidol-Padva

more photos of fiber art: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiberart/

the artist's blog: http://creativechick.blog-city.com/

~Scroll down on the left for links to more fiber artists.
I look at the photos of these works and might think, "well that's a nice effect". I've no understanding of the materials, the craft or the hours of work that goes into making them.
I've been fooling around with photoshop a little too much.

Video: Imagine This

"Imagine This is an audio mash up of GW Bush singing the John Lennon classic "imagine", it has been a worldwide hit and has made it into (John Peel's) BBC Radio 1 Music Festive 50 on UK Radio 1.

The audio was produced by Waxaudio, I [John Callaghan] created a video for it by tracking down over 40 separate video clips from George Bush speeches, I lip synched these clips to the audio and interspersed them with footage from the original imagine Video, along with some Iraq war footage and some other bits and pieces..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7meAXUguTQo&search=bush%20lennon%20beatles%20audiovisual%20mashup%20caltv

thanks Joerg

FEAR Conference

This conference seeks to explore and engage in issues surrounding fear both as a subject matter and a tactic in popular culture and its varying discourses. The delegates' papers explore issues regarding the moral, social, political and psychological significance of fear, dealing with a diverse range of subjects, including some of the following:

- the fear of the other, class, race and gender issues
- propaganda and the use of fear as a weapon of war
- medical and technological developments and the fear of progress
- the significance of fear in the representation of religious, moral and artistic narratives
- the aesthetic pleasures of fear from the Romantic sublime to the slasher film
- the role of fear in childhood and childhood memories

FEAR - A ONE-DAY INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE, 19th MAY 2006. TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN.

http://fear-conference-2006.blogspot.com/

Overheard at Starbucks

"While in the dentist chair last week, mouth open, listening to the lite-rock musak being piped in, it came to me: these songs are my poetry, my Goethe, Shakespeare, Proust; my and millions of others' literature!"

---"Oh the 'Great Books'. ...Yes."

Intelligent Transportation Systems in Europe and Japan

>from the Summary of Findings and Recommendations:

Driver

Two major recommendations emanate from the driver-related findings of this scan:

1. Identify stakeholders and interest groups and promote their collaborative efforts to raise the awareness of the driver's needs.
2. Advance the use of technology, driver education, insurance incentives, and other means to promote greater speed compliance and management.

Vehicle

The vehicle has been the focus of many safety improvements over the years, including seatbelts and airbags. These passive systems have netted substantial benefits to the public and have clearly resulted in reduced injuries and fatalities. The team believes that the safety benefits of these passive systems likely are nearing a maximum, and that in the future more emphasis should be placed on active systems that will further reduce the adverse effects of crashes on the Nation's highways. Active systems, such as electronic stability-control systems found on many of today's cars, should be complemented with such technologies as adaptive cruise control, assisted braking, lane keeping, and others to achieve even greater safety improvements.
The team has two broad recommendations on the vehicle component:

3. Promote the aggressive implementation of low-cost, onboard processing devices in U.S. automobiles that will communicate with infrastructure features and receive information from other sources.
4. Promote and collaborate in the development of technology focused on driver assistance (e.g., adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, assisted braking, etc.).

>with chapters on Image Processing to Assist the Driver; Video Detection for Traffic Management; Automated Enforcement Signs; Dynamic Speed Limits; Evaluating Advanced Video Detection And Incident Analysis Technology; etc. (3,357KBs worth)

http://international.fhwa.dot.gov/ipsafety/index.htm#execfindings
| US Dept. of Transportation FHWA

[photo not from above]

Fun...Filters

2x

nothing is revealed

Book Crunchy-Cons:

How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party)...

"In Crunchy cons (Rod) Dreher reports on the amazing depth and scope of this phenomenon, which is redefining the taxonomy of America’s political and cultural landscape. At a time when the Republican party, and the conservative movement in general, is bitterly divided over what it means to be a conservative, Dreher introduces us to people who are pioneering a way back to the future by reclaiming what’s best in conservatism..."

Crunchy Cons disapprove of abortion rights, same-sex marriage, illegal immigrants, public schools, secular liberals and mothers who work outside the home. But they don't like Wal-Mart, McMansions, suburbs, pollution, agribusiness or processed foods, either.

complete Crunchy-Confusion or, Meet the New Guys
blog entry | Low Culture

Keyword: Shattering Glass

Related Keywords

Acting Musician Actor Playing Multiple Roles Alcohol Alternative Reality Ambulance Ambush Armored Car Arrest Arson Assassination Attempt Automobile Automobile Salesman Axe Bar Bar Brawl Bar Fight Bar Keeper Beer Drinking Billiards Blind Body Bag Bouncer Brain Scan Brawl Bullet Time Bulletproof Vest Bully Burning Building Business Tycoon Car Car Crash Car Dealer Car Dealership CGI Cigarette Smoking Class Differences Concert Construction Site Convertible Convicted Felon Cop Cop Killing Country Music Dance Dark Past Deputy Diner Scene Doctor Dodging Bullets Dog Drifter Drug Dealing Dual Role Embezzlement Embezzler Employment Dismissal Escape Evil Twin Exploding Building Exploding Car Fall From Height Fat Man Female Doctor Female Nudity Fighting Fire Truck Firefighter Fish Out Of Water Fistfight Flashlight Flat Tire Fugitive G String Gas Station Gay Slur General Store Guitarist Gun Gunfight Handcuffs Harassment Head Butt Helmet Henchman Horse Intimidation Jeep Jukebox Kicked In The Head Knife Knife Attack Knife In Shoe Knife Wound Lake Life Sentence Loading Dock Machismo Male Nudity Marriage Mass Murderer Maximum Security Prison Megalomania Mentor Monster Truck Motorcycle Motorcycle Cop Mouse Mullet Haircut Neck Breaking Scene Neon Signs Nightclub Nudity Old Friend Organized Crime Parallel Universe Parallel Worlds Parking Garage Passionate Kiss Pick Up Polar Bear Police Police Officer Policeman Pool Cue Pool Hall Prison Prison Break Prison Cell Prison Planet Prostitute Protection Money Protection Racket Redneck Rivalry Rock Music Scar Self Defense Severe Tire Damage Sex Sex On First Date Sex Standing Up Shotgun Showdown Skinny Dipping Small Business Small Town Spear Stage Strip Joint Stripper Stuffed Animal Sunglasses Super Speed Super Strength Superhuman Strength Suture SWAT Team Swimming Pool Table Dance Tai Chi Teleportation Throat Ripping Thrown Through Window Thug Title Spoken By Character Trophy Animal Tunnel Tycoon Uncle Niece Relationship Underwear Vandalism Veterinarian Violence Violent Waitress Wheelchair Wormhole

@ IMDB

~I heard that in movies made during the 1980's there was an correlation between scenes of shattering glass and the amount of cocaine on the set and/or used to bankroll the films.

Like shoot-outs and explosions, shattering glass is part of the magic of modern cinema.

Movie-Montage.com

You've seen them, but have you ever really thought about them?

We're talking about movie montages, that music video in the movie that not only entertains but actually conveys important narrative that would take far too long to convey normally.

There are several categories of montages, and as our crack team of life-less movie watchers discovers them, we'll add them to the site....

http://www.movie-montage.com/montages.php

~No videos, no mp3s, some stills, little discussion.
However a useful reminder of the visual forms (as codified as any waltz or square dance?) and god-awful music movie producers push onto expectant consumers crowded together in darkened rooms.

["Building Montage" still not from above]

Lyric: I Pity the Poor Immigrant

I pity the poor immigrant
Who wishes he would've stayed home,
Who uses all his power to do evil
But in the end is always left so alone.
That man whom with his fingers cheats
And who lies with ev'ry breath,
Who passionately hates his life
And likewise, fears his death.

I pity the poor immigrant
Whose strength is spent in vain,
Whose heaven is like Ironsides,
Whose tears are like rain,
Who eats but is not satisfied,
Who hears but does not see,
Who falls in love with wealth itself
And turns his back on me.

I pity the poor immigrant
Who tramples through the mud,
Who fills his mouth with laughing
And who builds his town with blood,
Whose visions in the final end
Must shatter like the glass.
I pity the poor immigrant
When his gladness comes to pass.

@ by Bob Dylan

Can Fetuses Feel Pain?

http://www.docuticker.com/2006/04/can-fetuses-feel-pain.html (link to 138KB PDF)

[photo by Bora Baysal\ not with above]

~My first thought was 'it depends on how far along the fetus has developed'. Then after reading the excerpt I started to wonder if the word fetus still refers to the full nine months of gestation; thinking there's now more precise terms to describe for example when a fetus becomes viable outside the womb, or when it feels pain.

I looked fetus up in the dictionary: "specif: a developing human from usu. three months after conception to birth".
For some reason I had it in my head (for a long time!) that a developing human from conception to three months was a fetus, while a developing human from three months to birth was...well, a developing human.
What odd ideas I fabricate in trying [not?] to understand things over which I have no control.
By the way my ignorance about what constitutes a fetus nonwithstanding, 'it depends' is probably right on the money.

(Do the people who insist that women contemplating abortions learn about the fetus' pain care a fig about male circumcision?)

Overcoming Barriers to Mobility: The Role of Place in the United States and UK

In late 2004 and the first half of 2005, the US media elite caught the mobility bug. Within weeks of one another, three newspapers of national record—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times—each independently published a series of articles describing, by various measures, whether and how Americans are 'getting ahead' today. Collectively, the articles offered a re-examination of a powerful narrative in the United States: that of a classless society, with boundless opportunity awaiting those who choose to seize it.

Why these newspapers all chose to examine the issue at the same time is anyone's guess. But one might wonder why the media elite did not place social mobility on the public radar in the run-up to November 2004, when the nation was embroiled in yet another narrowly contested presidential election...

For frustrated US researchers, then, it is quite gratifying —and envy inducing—to see the issue of social mobility assume a central place in the public debate across the Atlantic. In the UK, the discussion is empirically grounded, its implications are acknowledged across the political spectrum, and policymakers connect the issue to a series of domains, including education, health, safety, and employment. Americans who foolishly argue that the UK is not really a 'foreign' country need look no further.

One important strand of the UK mobility discussion has focused on the role of 'place'. The central questions here seem to be (a) 'Does where you live affect your chances in life?' and (b) 'If so, how much?.' The answers could inform a range of policies regarding housing, schools, regeneration, and welfare — and could help policymakers assess the relative importance of reforms in these areas to broader efforts aimed at enhancing social mobility

by Alan Berube

http://www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/20060410_ukmobility.htm (link to pdf report 90KB)

[photo/caption stubbornson\ not above]

~I believe there can be a world of difference between being mobile and social mobility.

Nike Pushes Soccer Videos to U.S. Fans

JogaTV will deliver soccer footage and related content to people who install a downloadable application. Features include... TV spots from Nike, a rap video featuring U.S. soccer player Clint Dempsey, viral videos featuring Brazilian stars Ronaldinho and Ronaldo, a weekly blog, and a countdown to the U.S. team's first game in Germany at the start of the World Cup tourney.
JogaTV will automatically download new content each week, notifying end users when it's available.

Nike is promoting the channel through outreach to blogs and discussion forums, as well as via its NikeSoccer.com and Joga.com properties.

press release

~Junk mail delivered to your door/ junk video delivered to your pc.
By the way today "blog outreach" occurs in 55 stories gathered by Google News Search.

Uncle Sam Blogs You

~Blog outreach...

After administratively punishing some soldiers for their blogging, and informally citing others for operational security violations, the Army finally developed a policy governing what soldiers can and cannot do on their blogs in March 2005.
Now, the Reserve is embracing military bloggers as a conduit for news designed to persuade soldiers to lengthen their tours of duty. In January, a handful of military bloggers received variations of an e-mail from Charlie Kondek of Haas MS&L, a Detroit public relations firm. The service hired the company to "test a new outlet for public information," Kondek wrote in his e-mail. "The Army believes that military blogs are a valuable medium for reaching out to soldiers," Kondek added. "The Army plans to offer you and selected bloggers exclusive editorial content on a few issues you're likely to be interested in."

What this "exclusive editorial content" might be wasn't specified..

Spc. Jason Christopher Hartley, a 14-year veteran of the Army National Guard, is amused that the Army's first foray into the blog world would be via a public relations agency, especially for purposes of retention and recruitment. Hartley started his Web log, justanothersoldier.com, after deploying to Iraq in 2003.
Almost immediately, his commanding officer ordered him to take it down. Hartley complied, and instead mass e-mailed his observations and musings to readers. But in the waning days of his tour, he put his blog back up, and in no time was pulled out of combat and sent back to Fort Drum, N.Y., to face a disciplinary hearing on more than a dozen blog-related charges, including disobeying a direct order, violating operational security and conduct unbecoming a noncommissioned officer.

Hartley's observations were sometimes darkly comic in content and sarcastic in tone. What's so ironic about the new Haas MS&L effort, he says, is that he regularly gets e-mails from young people telling him that justanothersoldier.com has inspired them to join the Army, or asking him for advice about enlisting - which he almost always recommends.
"You don't need to make it all nice - you can give kids the straight poop and say, 'Look, I don't like hurting people but I like combat; I want to be a good person but I like shooting stuff;' and they can process those statements of duality pretty well," he says.

...the Army isn't just doing blog outreach in the name of recruiting and retention. In a February speech, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld revealed that a special public affairs unit at U.S. Central Command has been active in blog outreach as well.
The three-man unit - whose motto is "Engage" - offers materials written by the military to bloggers and encourages them to link to CENTCOM's Web site. The unit also writes to bloggers to correct or take issue with information it considers incomplete or inaccurate. According to critics such as Christopher Simpson, an intelligence and propaganda scholar at American University, some of CENTCOM's efforts merit further scrutiny and discussion, especially since the bulk of its interaction is with bloggers the command considers favorable. "There is a variety of things the military can promote, but they can't promote partisan politics, particularly on the taxpayers' dime,"

story

Internet devices threaten NSA's ability to gather intelligence legally

http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=33816&printerfriendlyVers=1

by Shane Harris

The NYPD can take photos of you -- but you can't turn your lens on them

http://www.politechbot.com/2006/04/15/the-nypd-can/

Video Sensor Network

Wireless video networks – the kind of technology useful in disaster scene analysis, homeland security and search and rescue operations – may soon be in development at the University of California, Riverside thanks to a $250,500 award from the National Science Foundation.

There is no technology available to detect and recognize people, vehicles or objects that could pose problems in an environment of large distributed wireless network of video sensors,” (Electrical Engineering Professor Bir) Bhanu said. “Or to control and manage animals in wilderness parks or large farms using not only the non-imaging sensors but also the network of videos. This requires continuous data collection and analysis, which is what we propose to do.”
The technologies needed require the expertise of faculty from many areas of engineering, such as computer vision, machine learning, image processing, pattern recognition and data mining, communication and control, network security, database and artificial intelligence. The goal is to develop integrated techniques that can work in a distributed environment and account for dynamic tradeoffs between processing and communication.
The laboratory will consist of 80 pan-tilt zoom video cameras that can be accessed over a network using IP addresses. Each camera would be connected to a computational unit that takes care of processing at the camera site. It will compress and transmit the data and identify the activities/objects. The whole system will be triggered by acoustic, seismic and vibration sensors. Fixed sensors are powered conventionally, while mobile ones will be powered by solar energy.

press release | UCR News

~Video-sensor networks will make gated-communities more secure.

US Building Massive Embassy in Baghdad

The fortress-like compound rising beside the Tigris River here will be the largest of its kind in the world, the size of Vatican City, with the population of a small town, its own defense force, self-contained power and water...

"It's somewhat self-evident that there's going to be a fairly sizable commitment to Iraq by the U.S. government in all forms for several years," (State Department spokesman Justin Higgins) said in Washington.

"Embassy Baghdad" will dwarf new U.S. embassies elsewhere, projects that typically cover 10 acres...

Original cost estimates ranged over $1 billion, but Congress appropriated only $592 million in the emergency Iraq budget adopted last year. Most has gone to a Kuwait builder, First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, with the rest awarded to six contractors working on the project's "classified" portion - the actual embassy offices.
Higgins declined to identify those builders, citing security reasons, but said five were American companies.

story

~This construction should convince the Iraqi people Americans are serious about bringing democracy to their war-torn country.

[photo google image: "iraq democracy"\ not AP]

True Crime: Second Hospital Worker Arrested on Sex Charge

Male nurse accused of molesting patient at San Diego children’s hospital

SAN DIEGO - Police have charged a 32-year-old male nurse with molesting a patient of a children’s hospital, the second time this year an employee at the facility has been arrested on sex abuse allegations, officials said Saturday.
Christopher Alan Irvin of San Diego was arrested Friday on two counts of lewd acts on a child and child pornography charges, authorities said.
Irvin had worked since October 2004 at the intensive care unit of the Children’s Hospital and Health Center San Diego.

Assistant Police Chief Cheryl Meyers said the investigation continues and she could not rule out the possibility of additional victims.
Hundreds of child porn images were found on Irvin’s personal computer following an April 12 search of his home, Meyers said. No images of patients had been found in the files at this point, she added.

A respiratory therapist at the hospital charged with molesting brain-damaged patients was taken into custody in March and pleaded not guilty.

story | MSNBC

~Note it's not until the second paragraph that we learn the male nurse is accused of molesting a child-patient. And while the Assistant Police Chief "could not rule out the possibility of additional victims" there's no suggestion anyone's looking for additional perpetrators. Nor are we told if this nurse and the respiratory therapist "charged with molesting brain-damaged patients" (also children?) knew each other, that they shared anything in common. One can only guess how this arrest came about.

The parents of former patients are panicking. Their lawyers are massing outside the hospital's walls...

Is this something that happens in hospitals more often than anyone in the health-care industry cares to admit?
I'm guessing the hospital installed hidden cameras in these rooms, on their lawyers' advice, soon after the first arrest.

The social responsibility of the health-care industry is much greater than law enforcement or business.

Update: June 14

Nurse Admits Molesting Comatose Child, Court Papers Say

Christopher Alan Irvin, 32 ...remained in custody in lieu of $2 million bond. He is charged with two counts of lewd acts on a child under 14 and multiple counts of distributing child pornography.
If convicted of all counts, he could face a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.
Investigators said in court hearings Monday that the case has expanded to include planned interviews with six children at an acute-care facility in Tallahassee, Fla., where Irvin worked as a registered nurse before moving to California. Files and documents seized at Irvin's home include the names of the children, investigators said.
Irvin worked in the intensive care unit at Children's Hospital from October 2004 until his arrest in April.
Another caregiver there, respiratory therapist Wayne Albert Bleyle, 54, was arrested in March. He has pleaded not guilty to charges that he molested five young patients, all of whom were unable to communicate because of brain damage or other severe conditions. He remained in custody in lieu of $5 million bond.
Raylene Filley, a senior managing director of Children's Hospital legal staff, said that the hospital has hired extra staff to guarantee that two adults are present whenever patients are treated behind a curtain. The hospital has ordered curtains with mesh windows to maintain visibility for passersby.
"Everyone's on a heightened state of alert," Filley said Tuesday.

story | AP/The Denver Channel

True Crime: Man Planned to Eat Slain Girl

Man held in 10-year-old’s death allegedly fantasized about cannibalism

The family of Jamie Rose Bolin was in shock...

(Purcell (OK) police Chief David) Tompkins and McClain County District Attorney Tim Kuykendall released the gruesome details about the final moments of Jamie’s life and what they alleged were Underwood’s plans for her body...

["...this appears to have been part of a plan to kidnap a person, rape them, torture them, kill them, cut off their head, drain the body of blood, rape the corpse, eat the corpse, then dispose of the organs and bones,” the police chief said."]

...but they would not say whether Underwood had confessed to the slaying.

Jamie was in the apartment below us the whole time,” said Rose Fox, Jamie’s grandmother. “The only reason that he couldn’t move the body and hide it was because somebody was out there the whole time, either on the balcony smoking or standing in front of the apartment.

Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agents seized a decorative dagger, a hack saw, duct tape, meat tenderizer, barbecue skewers, a duffel bag, the cutting board, a computer, and a videotape about a serial killer...

story | MSNBC

~OK the sicko's guilty as sin but if these alleged fantasies of cannibalism are necessary to get a murder conviction, to keep him from killing again, shouldn't the authorities have waited until the trial, or the sentencing?

Who gains, who is best served, from making this girl's recent death more horrendous then it is? Her parents; his neighbors? The little girl's classmates and friends?
WTF?

Is the DA trying to get the killer to confess himself into a death penalty, to spare McClain county the cost of an expensive trial?

The additional trauma to the children and parents of Purcell, Oklahoma...priceless?

The one and only social responsibility of law enforcement is to arrest criminals and deliver the swiftest maximum penalty?

> HH at Unknown News writes:

"The murder of a 10-year-old girl is a tragedy to her family, and newsworthy to her community, but when such sick and twisted
details are reported world-wide on Associated Press, this kid's murder has become entertainment.

The police chief told reporters: "Regarding a potential motive, this appears to have been part of a plan to kidnap a person, rape them, torture them, kill them, cut off their head, drain the body of blood, rape the corpse, eat the corpse, then dispose of the organs and bones."

What does that information add, really, for readers in Rhode Island and viewers in Vermont and listeners in Los Angeles? It has no effect on my life -- I don't know the killer, the community, or the kid, so
for me, like for most folks outside Oklahoma, this news has no news value beyond its lurid appeal. It's just entertainment, no different to most Americans than the latest 'Friday the 13th' horror movie. And
that's why we don't ordinarily spotlight such news."

Mainstream reporters and editors, of course, love this stuff for the "train wreck" effect. Most readers enjoy the mild titillation of sex-crime reports, so it sells papers and keeps viewers transfixed through the commercials.

And police love this kind of reporting, too. That's why they feed it, why the Police Chief made sure his sound byte was as sickening as he could make it. He hypes the gruesomeness to hype his own work as society's supposed defense against such crimes.

Of course, in cases like this one (where the alleged perp had no criminal record) there really is no defense against such crimes. But that's not something the Chief will mention.

Instead, he wants to make sure everyone in the county knows every gruesome detail, to keep the locals afraid, and build the "support your local police" mindset. And without doubt the publicity will result in a fat increase in the local police budget next year. The Chief said what he said because, the more horrendous and gruesome the reports, the bigger and longer those desired budgetary and public-relations effects will last.

The Police Chief isn't anywhere near as sickening as the killer, of course. But they're in the same business, and so's the reporter. They're in the business of fear."

HH

[photo Dallas News]

A google image search today for jamie rose bolin shows four photos of Jamie and five photos of her alleged killer.

Rumsfeld "Personally Involved" in Sexual Degradation of Detainee

Editor's Comment: The revelations regarding the sexual degradation of one detainee, Mohammad al-Qahtani, at the Guantanamo Bay prison in late 2002 and early 2003 do not stand alone. These are the practices that became the subject of the scandalous photographs that emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison facility a year later. This was the point at which sexual degradation became - at the direction of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Geoffrey Miller - a practice for US military interrogators

The report contradicts Rumsfeld's earlier statements.

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/04/14/new-report-rumsfeld/

by way of TruthOut

thanks Conscientious

[Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld 'serves it up hot and steaming'.
Defense Link photo\ not with above]

Fun in the Great Outdoors

2X

ta-dah

The Social Responsibility of Business

... in a free society... "there is one and only one social responsibility of business - to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud."

article by Milton Friedman

~I'm confused. If business doesn't stay "within the rules of the game", doesn't or no longer needs to engage in open and free competition, does that change "the one and only social responsibility of business"?

[illus. not with article]

Psychological Tests/ Videos

http://www.healthyplace.com/site/tests/psychological.asp

HealthyPlace videos

~Now that you've found a name for it, what's next?
("I know you are, but what am I?")

[photo\caption NOT from HealthlyPlace]

News of the Weird

Shania Twain Is Nothing But Trouble

(1) Matt Brownlee, 33, with a long record as a drunk driver, was
acquitted of criminal DUI charges in Ottawa, Ontario, after
psychiatrists concluded that his latest accident was the result of a
sincere belief that singer Shania Twain was helping him drive the
car. (A 1996 brain injury might have given him a disorder in
which he believes that celebrities communicate with him
telepathically.) (2) Following a hung jury in England's Winchester
Crown Court in April, Linda West faces retrial in the 2005 death of
her husband, which she said was accidental, in that her gun slipped
while she was energetically performing a Shania Twain number
("Man! I Feel Like a Woman") in what she described as the
couple's sex game. [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 3-28-06]
[Daily Telegraph (London), 3-30-06]

Worst Lawyers' Strategies

* Madison County, Ill., lawyer Gary Peel, 62, who was battling an
ex-wife over alimony, filed for bankruptcy to reduce her chances of
getting anything, and then when she challenged his filing, he
allegedly tried to blackmail her into silence. According to federal
charges against him in March, he told his ex-wife that, unless she
relented, he would shock her elderly parents by giving them
decades-old nude photos of him with the ex-wife's younger sister.
However, Peel perhaps forgot that the sister was allegedly only 16
when the photos were taken, and he has been charged with
possessing child pornography. [Belleville News-Democrat, 3-24-06]

Recurring Themes

News of the Weird has several times visited the issue of people
(mostly men) who are dissatisfied with their bodies because of the
imagined unsightliness of their limbs or their genitals and who
seek voluntary amputation ("body integrity identity disorder"). In
March, three men were arrested in rural North Carolina and
charged with castrating several such needy men who had read
about the unlicensed "surgeons" on the Internet and traveled from
other states (and one foreign country) to get relief. (Under North
Carolina law, the specific crime is "castration without malice.")
[Asheville Citizen-Times, 3-31-06]

others news items: http://newsoftheweird.blogspot.com/

Nukes in the News: Blowing Smoke

~A special report on DU at Los Alamos labs (LANL) with hair depilitating info and stats for everyone:

Depleted uranium has contaminated the Earth and global atmosphere,” said Leuren Moret, a whistle-blower formerly of Laurence Livermore National Laboratory. She added up 340 tons of DU exploded in the first Gulf War; an undisclosed amount reducing targets in Bosnia and Kosovo to radioactive rubble; 1,000 tons bestowed upon Afghanistan; and as of 2004, before U.S. bombing intensified and vastly ballooned the total, well over 2,000 tons decimating Iraq.

Discounted Casualties, a book by Japanese journalist Akira Tashiro, listed 26 American states housing DU firing ranges, DU weapon factories and/or DU storage facilities.

DU is an extremely effective weapon. Each tank round is 10 pounds of solid uranium-238 contaminated with plutonium, neptunium, americium . . . generating intense heat on impact. When uranium munitions hit, it’s like a firestorm inside any vehicle or structure, and so we saw tremendous burns, tremendous injuries. It was devastating.”

DU consists entirely of uranium, chiefly the isotope U-238. It is “depleted” during a process called “enrichment,” which extracts traces of the more fissile isotope U-235 to make nuclear fuel rods and, originally, A-bombs. The DU remainder is 99.8 percent U-238. Natural uranium is 99.3 percent, half of a percent difference. The United States stores a million unquiet tons of DU “waste,” gives it away free to U.S. munitions makers, and peddles it around the world.

The orchestrated campaign to downplay depleted uranium comes with shifting themes: don’t mention depleted uranium; don’t acknowledge using depleted uranium; acknowledge using it only to penetrate the armor of tanks and bunkers; assert that the dust from exploded uranium falls down and goes nowhere; imply that the “depletion” of uranium renders it harmless; never mention that not all uranium munitions are depleted; stress that depleted uranium, no big deal, is the least radioactive of all radioactive elements; argue that since alpha radiation from DU can’t penetrate the skin, it can’t harm the body; claim that any radioactive particles that do enter the body will be swiftly expelled; never admit to any connection between exposure to DU and illness, birth defects, death or Gulf War Syndrome, the infamous malady afflicting veterans of Gulf War I.

>Much more http://www.sunmonthly.com/HOFF%20%20.htm

for Sun Monthly by Marilyn Gayle Hoff

>related from Aug 1999: DoD Launches Depleted Uranium Training

An ammunition specialist examines a 105mm armor- piercing round to be used in an M-1 Abrams main battle tank during Operation Desert Shield in 1991. The object on the nose of the round is a sabot, a cover that protects and stabilizes the round's needle-like depleted uranium penetrator, then falls away as the projectile leaves the gun barrel.DoD Photo

...the vast majority of Gulf War DU exposure cases didn't occur in combat, but were people who toured the battlefields and climbed in and on vehicles struck by DU munitions.

"So the big message in the video is: Leave things alone. If you
don't need to touch something, don't," she (Dee Dodson Morris, a retired Army chemical corps colonel and the Lessons Learned Implementation director in the Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses) said.

press release | American Forces Press Service

The Body's Internet

Most of the body's cells have internal communication systems which
employ, among other things, a network of microtubules along which
chemical messages are carried by motor proteins. (SF#140)

Cells, however, need to also communicate with other cells within an
organism. Some fluid chemical signals can find their ways through
the spaces between cells via diffusion, but there are other ingenious
and rather sophisticated modes of intercell signaling.

"*Hard-wired connections.*" In experiments with bacteria, it has been noticed that chemical signals were not passed cell-to-cell by diffusion but rather through a pipeline of sorts.

High-resolution differential interference contrast microscopy
revealed intercellular tubular structures up to 100 microns
in length and 20 to 200 microns in diameter. When cells were
labeled with a calcium-sensitive dye, an increase in the
concentration of the intercellular calcium caused by
mechanical stimulation of one cell could be seen to pass
via the nanotubes.

(Anonymous; "Nanotubular Communication," *Science*, 310:21, 2005)

*Bacterial speech bubbles*. Some bacteria send long-distance chemical signals to other members of their species in bubble-like "vesicles." Said vesicles are in essence membrane-protected enveloped discharged into intercellular fluids. The contained messages are poorly soluble in water and could otherwise be lost or degraded if not encased.

(Winans, Stephen C.; "Bacterial Speech Bubbles," *Nature*, 437:330, 2005.)

*Versatile vesicles*. In addition to carrying chemical messages, vesicles transport cargo, such as proteins, to specified addresses. These membranous UPS "boxes" are fashioned by cells in various sizes and shapes to fit the intended cargoes. Often, they are cage-like structures synthesized to order by the sender cells.

(Smith, Corinne; "Two Geometric Solutions to a Transporting Problem,"*Science*, 311:182, 2005.)

Comments. Unexplored above are electrical signaling and communication biophotons.

from SCIENCE FRONTIERS, No. 164, Mar-Apr 2006, p. 2

http://www.science-frontiers.com/ [no direct link]

~My toes are always talking to my nose.

The Army Slays Its Own

"...the netherworld of Fort Sill's Physical Training and Rehabilitation Program, or PTRP."

story | TBR News

~If you must enlist (facing a jail term, bankruptcy, a shotgun wedding) never volunteer for anything and try not to get injured during Basic Training.

Serialized Citizenships:

Periodicals, Books, and American Boys, 1840-1911

In the last few decades, scholars have turned their attention to constructions of masculinity and its influence on expressions of nationality and citizenship. Serialized Citizenships participates in and critiques these ongoing conversations about boyhood by examining works produced between 1840 and the first decade of the twentieth century. American boyhood has often been narrowly defined by nineteenth- and twentieth- century canonical texts, such as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which represent boyhood as a time of rebellion against society. This book suggests that significant representations of American boyhood can be found elsewhere: in serialized texts published in middle-class magazines such as Youth's Companion and Our Young Folks, and also in less familiar children's periodicals, including Young American's Magazine of Self-Improvement and Boys of New York.

Author Lorinda Cohoon argues that through their regular publication, these forms of productions construct citizenships that are then adapted by readers from a wide variety of backgrounds—not just by the white middle-class boy readers for whom many of the serialized representations of boyhood were originally published. Cohoon analyzes serializations of Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, along with serializations published by Jacob Abbott, William Taylor Adams, Louisa May Alcott, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Challenging the seemingly omnipresent "bad boyhood" that is still used to characterize American masculinity, this text examines cultural and textual evidence that reveals many other versions of boyhood citizenships that have been marginalized and sometimes ignored. The serializations and the surrounding periodical material also provide insights into texts that intervene in the construction of regional and national boyhood citizenships throughout the nineteenth century and continue to shape the ways citizenship is negotiated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through this investigation of boyhood in children's magazines and children's books, Serialized Citizenships contributes to children's literature scholarship, studies of childhood, and explorations of constructions of masculinity.

http://www.scarecrowpress.com/Catalog/SingleBook.shtml?command=Search&db=%5EDB/CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0810854252

About The Author
Lorinda B. Cohoon is an assistant professor of English at The University of Memphis.

from: (GUS) http://lists.topica.com/lists/growingupsexually/prefs/info.html(Topica e-mail)