Monday, December 19, 2011

Our Wacky World—12/22/2011

And now for something really awful—Billy Idol singing "White Christmas"

Yep, that hella sucked. On another holiday note, here's some skateboard hooligans trashing stores. It's a good thing they got it all on HD video. Hope their families can afford lawyers.


Now, with all the Xmas cheer out of the way, here's this week's quote from Michelle Bachmann:
If she were president and a U.S. drone crashed in Iran, as one did last week, Bachmann said she would "seek to obtain that drone." However, she would not provide further details because "it's not prudent to say as a president what I would do ahead of time."
Not that any voters would want to know what she would do as president. (CNN)

As you may have already heard, Christopher Hitchens is now burning in hell. A few people have had the temerity to call out some of his "mistakes"

I first became aware of who Hitchens was when he suddenly popped up as a supporter of the war against terror Islam. All of the lionizing of him has fallen flat for me since. People who knew him before then (Randi being a good example) no doubt have a different perspective. He was a great wit and writer but also a classic example of a flawed human being. I'm assuming that his drinking was the cause of his cancer. At the risk of beating this to death, here's Glenn Greenwald's longer essay about his Iraq war nonsense. I'm just a bit sus of Richard Dawkins, too. Maybe it was was his hysterical screeching about Stephen J. Gould. Well, actually it was that that soured me.

"A video camera recorded what happened next as DeAngelo Mitchell told his brother he couldn't afford another strike against him and that he needed his brother to eat the cocaine he had in his possession. Mitchell then appears to hand off the cocaine, which was stuffed in his buttocks, to his brother." [includes the video]
Mail Online

"Hair is an extension of the nervous system, it can be correctly seen as exteriorized nerves, a type of highly evolved ‘feelers’ or ‘antennae’ that transmit vast amounts of important information to the brain stem, the limbic system, and the neocortex."
Skeptic blog


"A New York woman claims her home got more than it agreed to when they brought an adopted toy poodle into their home that was demon possessed. Olga Horvat, a certified Lumia Science Color Therapist and writer of a book Paranormal Pooch writes that her pure-bred dog Princess brought with her a string of bad luck on her home and family.
✂. . .
...she is selling energy shield pendants for both animals and humans at $197 for the human and $189 for the pet. The Energy Shield is a device that will support and balance your body’s own magnetic field, while protecting you from the negative energy generated by many aspects of our environment,’ her website describes the small metal objects which resemble tiny water-tight canisters for holding addresses or other slips of paper – with the addition of ‘Energy Shield’ written around it. In addition her pendants, she says that dogs with pointy, opposed to floppy ears, she has learned, are more prone to demon infiltration, ‘because the spirit can get in there easier,’ she explained."
Skeptic blog


Well gang, what could possibly go wrong with THIS idea?
"The laser, resembling a rifle and known as an SMU 100, can dazzle and incapacitate targets up to 500m away with a wall of light up to three metres squared. It costs £25,000 and has an infrared scope to spot looters in poor visibility. Looking at the intense beam causes a short-lived effect similar to staring at the sun, forcing the target to turn away."
Telegraph

I'm sure this damn thing will be declared safe as the people who will be using it will be the ones interpreting the safety data. And then DHS will be giving them to every police dept. in America who will in turn use them to break up lawful protests and bust people with an ounce of pot.

I have lasers. A bunch of them. I even have a one Watt laser. It sets thing on fire. These things are not toys; I singed my fingers focusing the 1W! Here in the US lasers are a radiological hazard regulated by the FDA. It should get interesting when every "eye doctor" in the country comes out against this.

'Two former participants in the CIA’s Mars visitation program of the early 1980’s have confirmed that U.S. President Barack H. Obama was enrolled in their Mars training class in 1980 and was among the young Americans from the program who they later encountered on the Martian surface after reaching Mars via “jump room.”'
Exopolitics


The Alabama immigration law trainwreck continues:
'A young man interviewed by Human Rights Watch said he was stopped and detained by police for not having a driver's license and was told by an officer, "You have no rights." One permanent resident was told by a major store employee her prescription could not be refilled because she is not a citizen.'
CNN

"Thanks to a $374,000 taxpayer-funded grant, we now know that inhaling lemon and lavender scents doesn't do a lot for our ability to heal a wound. With $666,000 in federal research money, scientists examined whether distant prayer could heal AIDS. It could not. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine also helped pay scientists to study whether squirting brewed coffee into someone's intestines can help treat pancreatic cancer (a $406,000 grant) and whether massage makes people with advanced cancer feel better ($1.25 million). The coffee enemas did not help. The massage did."
Chicago Tribune

"Even though [sperm donor] Johnson has been helping lesbian couples become pregnant, one of his main gubernatorial platforms in 2010 was running against gay marriage."
The Sideshow

"For most of this week the air in Beijing has been rated as “very unhealthy” and “hazardous” by the US Embassy air monitor, reputed as the most reliable indicator of pollution in the city. On Sunday it posted a new record: “beyond index”, as it registered 522 micrograms of particulate pollutants per cubic meter of air." [includes pictures of what little you can see—and comments about how the pictures must be fake]
France 24