In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law (1). It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President’s ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C.331 -335) has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C.1385), helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions.

The answers are sometimes already nearby…

The dye in your blue jeans could soon be used to kill cancer cells, say scientists.

UK researchers are employing tiny gold “nanoparticles”, 1/5000th the thickness of a human hair, to deliver the chemical compound directly into cancer cells, tearing them apart instantly.

read the whole story…

A couple of days ago, I posted a couple of videos detailing the latest (and potentially greatest) abomination foisted upon the american people by its government. Under the snappy title ‘will it be alright?’ I stated that there is still hope; I’d like to back that statement up.

Found this over at Jamoker’s site. Excellent stuff…

It’s 7:30 p.m. in Soho, that magic hour when the scent of first-course dishes wafts heavenward from the tables at Savoy, the anxiety of last-minute meal planners courses through the aisles of Dean & DeLuca, and a grown man’s fancy turns to thoughts of food. My own thoughts, at the moment, are of practically nothing else. Half-sprinting through the Prince Street crowds, I am late for a dinner party I’ve been planning for weeks, and I’m starving.

I’ve been starving for the past two months, actually, and that’s precisely what the party is about: My dinner guests—five successful urban professionals who for years have subsisted on a caloric intake the average sub-Saharan African would find austere—have been at it much, much longer, and I’ve invited them here to show me how it’s done. They are master practitioners of Calorie Restriction, a diet whose central, radical premise is that the less you eat, the longer you’ll live. Having taken this diet for a nine-week test drive, I’m hoping now for an up-close glimpse of what it means to go all the way. I want to find out what it looks, feels, and tastes like to commit to the ultimate in dietary trade-offs: a lifetime lived as close to the brink of starvation as your body can stand, in exchange for the promise of a life span longer than any human has ever known.

Well, before we get into the nitty-gritty, before we confront some ugly facts, let me just say that I still have faith.

I still have hope, perhaps foolish, that we can once again craft a government that serves its people rather than terrorizes them.

But that hope is a hard topic to write about, because it is a flimsy thing, and has been much assaulted these past years, that hope is slipping away.

We The Creators of this site, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish Fantasy Congress for the United States of America.

In this game, we give you the power to draft and manage a team of members from the U.S. Congress. Enjoy our gift to you, o great nation: the power to play politics!™

Well, after reading the Jester’s post (see below) I think I need to order this book…

Title: Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America (Process Self-reliance Series)
Author: Mark Ehrman
LC Rating:

Whether you find the government oppressive, the economy on a devastating course, or if you simply want adventure, you’re not alone. Over 300,000 Americans emigrate each year.

I hate to blatantly steal that from the good doctor, but I can’t think of another phrase that captures the essence of the thing properly.

Here’s the scene: Good friend’s birthday, so the band takes a short practice prior to heading for the bar. The difficulty arises in the fact that, not having a television, I had utterly forgotten about this whole ‘World Series’ thing. Now, I’m not necessarily opposed to sports, but given the opportunity, I will make certain I do not find myself in a confined space with the sort of people who scream at steroid-laden millionaires on television as they chase little balls around the big screens.

I hate commercials. But these are ok…

Previous commercial here (the bouncing balls)

Autism is currently estimated to affect approximately one in every 166 children, yet the cause or causes of the condition are not well understood. One of the current theories concerning the condition is that among a set of children vulnerable to developing the condition because of their underlying genetics, the condition manifests itself when such a child is exposed to a (currently unknown) environmental trigger. In this paper we empirically investigate the hypothesis that early childhood television viewing serves as such a trigger.

read the whole story… (application/pdf Object)

Title: Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism
Author: Daniel Pinchbeck
LC Rating:

This is for the cognoscenti;
the discerning eye.

big shout to talking plant
for bringing this tome to my attention

This is not ground to be entered lightly.

Did you know that the US dropped three hydrogen bombs on spain in the sixties?

The discovery of radioactive snails at a site in southeastern Spain where three U.S. hydrogen bombs fell by accident 40 years ago may trigger a new joint U.S.-Spanish clean-up operation, officials said on Wednesday.

The hydrogen bombs fell near the fishing village of Palomares in 1966 after a mid-air collision between a bomber and a refuelling craft, in which seven of 11 crewmen died.

Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever known. In just a few thousand years we have swallowed up more than a third of the planet’s land for our cities, farmland and pastures. By some estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And we’re leaving quite a mess behind: ploughed-up prairies, razed forests, drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change. If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet.
“15,589 Number of species threatened with extinction”

Now just suppose they got their wish. Imagine that all the people on Earth - all 6.5 billion of us and counting - could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let’s not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses). Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust.

Express your opinion, get arrested. Nice. Real nice. Course you can shoot someone in the face and not even have charges pressed, but that’s beside the point.

Steve Howards says he used to fantasize about what he’d say to President Bush or Vice President Cheney if he ever got the chance.

That opportunity arrived on June 16, the same day he says he read about U.S. fatalities in Iraq reaching 2,500.

ok, i really don’t mean to keep posting this terribly depressing stuff, but . . .

a friend hipped me to this technology a while ago, and then just last night, talking plant sent me a link to a longer video of the same stuff, and while watching it i had this vision . . . i think it was the overly happy voice-over and the up-beat music behind it, but i saw this briefing room, with the powers that be (in terms of the american military) gathered around a conference table, watching this very presentation on a big screen . . .

Please oh please oh please can I make it to this one?

Peering outward from behind a mottled screen of vines and leaves, the Green Man does not speak or sleep; he waits. His meaning and his origins are largely lost to time — the Green Man wasn’t named till 1939. We know, however, that this type of enigmatic figure was the work of artists, anonymous craftsman whose unsigned work adorns the crevices and walls of medieval cathedrals. This year we will appropriate the Green Man and the primeval spell he casts on our imaginations for a modern purpose. Our theme concerns humanity’s relationship to nature. Do we, as conscious beings, exist outside of nature’s sway, or does its force impel us and inform the central root of who and what we are?

Have you heard about peak oil yet?

Although the debate is growing around the point in time when global oil production starts to decline permanently, for countries or regions where oil production is null or very low, the amount of oil available for trade in the market is a much more relevant issue. Such is the case of the European Union; with oil consumption topping 14.5 Mb/d, only two of its member states figure in the exporting countries list, and both with marginal numbers. More than worrying with a Peak Oil date, importing countries should worry on the future availability of tradable oil.

And that isn’t the type of drugs that you might want in there by the way…

How An Aging Population And Our Growing Addiction To Pharmaceuticals May Be Poisoning Our Rivers

But what of those poor lowly viruses. Who will speak for them?

Giving your digital camera a virus may not sound very smart, but a memory chip that incorporates millions of viruses may just be the fastest thing around.

By coating 30-nanometre-long chunks of tobacco mosaic virus with platinum nanoparticles, it’s possible to create a transistor with very fast switching speed. Millions of these transistors could eventually be used in a memory chip to replace flash memory in mp3 players and digital cameras, for example.