Half the users just trying to escape boredom

The world’s most dangerous drug:

It’s perhaps the biggest threat to the nation’s mental wellbeing, yet it’s freely available on every street – for pennies.

The dealers claim it expands the mind and bolsters the intellect: users experience an initial rush of emotion (often euphoria or rage), followed by what they believe is a state of enhanced awareness. Tragically this “awareness” is a delusion. As they grow increasingly detached from reality, heavy users often exhibit impaired decision-making abilities, becoming paranoid, agitated and quick to anger. In extreme cases they’ve even been known to form mobs and attack people.

Technically it’s called “a newspaper”…

In its purest form, a newspaper consists of a collection of facts which, in controlled circumstances, can actively improve knowledge. Unfortunately, facts are expensive.

To save costs and drive up sales, unscrupulous dealers often “cut” the basic contents with cheaper material, such as wild opinion, bullshit, empty hysteria, reheated press releases, advertorial padding and photographs of Lady Gaga with her bum hanging out.

The hapless user has little or no concept of the toxicity of the end product: they digest the contents in good faith, only to pay the price later…

So you want to be a genius

What does all this research about your body adapting to circumstances tell us? You are what you do all day. What does all this research about brain plasticity and rewiring tell us? You are what you do all day.

You are what you do all day.
That probably scares the shit out of a lot of people.
And it should.

The church as an arbiter of ethical values?

With 3000 cases of abuse reported to them between 2000 and 2010, the Church’s doctrinal office elected to proceed with church trials for less than 10%.

Matt Taibbi rightfully rants, “…if someone molested my child and was allowed back in the priesthood, I’d be reaching for an axe.”

So this monster who was known to the highest authorities in the church to be a monster was allowed to die an active priest who was allowed to work with children for 24 years even after he was exposed, until the end of his life.

They’ll use any means necessary to keep their market share and if they have to lie and cheat and deflect and point fingers to keep the racket going, they’ll do it, just like any other sleazeball company.

But I think it’s time we started considering that what the church is is even worse than that. It’s possible we should start wondering if the church is also a criminal organization that in this country, anyway, should be broken up using RICO statutes.

Results of The Harris Poll of March 24

Republicans believe that President Obama:

• Is a socialist (67%)
• Wants to take away Americans’ right to own guns (61%)
• Is a Muslim (57%)
• Wants to turn over the USA to a one world government (51%); and
• Has done many things that are unconstitutional (55%).

Also large numbers of Republicans believe that President Obama:

• Resents America’s heritage (47%)
• Does what Wall Street and the bankers tell him (40%)
• Was not born in the United States, not eligible to be president (45%)
• Is the “domestic enemy Constitution speaks of (45%)
• Is a racist (42%)
• Will use economic collapse or terror to take dictatorial powers (41%)
• Is doing many of the things that Hitler did (38%).

Fully 24% of Republicans believe that “he may be the Anti-Christ” and 22% believe “he wants the terrorists to win.” Source: Harris Poll Interactive

Wingnuts ! What do we know, what will we do?

Take The Wingnut Quiz !

The author of Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America, John Avlon responds, “Wingnuts are hijacking our politics. This poll should wake-up all Americans about the costs of using fear and hate to pump up hyper-partisanship.

“Wingnuts always forget – patriotism is more important than partisanship.”

And what about organizing Wingnuts?
Secrets of the Tea Party: The Troubling History of Tea Party Leader Dick Armey

In the spring of 2009, groups calling themselves TEA, or Taxed Enough Already, were planning rallies to protest wasteful government spending. By the time Tax Day rolled around, over 300 protests were under way in all 50 states. More than 100,000 people took to the streets, gathered in parks and city centers with signs, slogans and costumes evoking America’s revolutionary past.

They marched on Washington, organized by the man behind the Tea Party. From the base of the Capitol, Dick Armey addressed the crowd with his wife Susan by his side. They were there together, he said, for the future of their grandchildren.

FreedomWorks chairman, former House Majority Leader and retired lobbyist extraordinaire.

Dick Armey is their de facto leader.

What they left out of health care

Yes, ladies and gentleman, gravity is a horrible natural force for our poor bodies to endure, so allow me to introduce what they’ve known for years at NASA. A few moments counteracting gravity using the Old Age Rejuvenator Centrifuge will reverse the action of gravity! Come one and all. Get that spry as a whirling bucket feeling. Be centrifused today!

We could all live in New Hampshire

The USA is about 300 million people living on 3,794,000 square mile. That’s a population density of approximately 79 Americans per square mile.

If the population density of the United States was equal to that of Brooklyn, the entire US population would fit into New Hampshire.

If we lived as tightly as Manila, Philippines, the entire USA would be just 52 by 52 miles.

Formal recognition will likely be contentious

Yes, it’s human activity. Stunning population growth, sprawling megacities and fossil fuels have changed the planet

Wired’s Brandon Keim: “From diverting a third of Earth’s available fresh water to planting and grazing two-fifths of its land surface, humankind has fiddled with the knobs of the Holocene, that 10,000-year period of climate stability that birthed civilization.”

We enter a new geologic time, an age of mankind’s making.

To be either a golfer or a Galahad

Here’s a short Sufi tale, a timely reminder on the treasure of marriage, no, on the honor of knowing each other:

A lover came to the dwelling of the Beloved and asked to be admitted. “Who is there?” the Beloved asked. “I am here,” the lover answered. The Beloved refused to admit the lover.

After wandering in grief and longing for years, the lover returned to the Beloved and begged to be admitted. “Who is there?” The lover responded, “You alone are there.”

The door opened.

O' beauty is a speedy thing

New research from Penn’s School of Medicine has opened up a clearer understanding of how the human eye communicates with the brain.

While earlier studies on vision have focused on what kind of information is sent from eye to brain, the Penn team instead wondered how fast and how much of that information is transmitted.

By studying an intact retina, the team found “spikes” of electrical impulses to the retina transmit data at 10 million bits per second—a speed that rivals computer connections of 10 to 100 million bits per second.

Residents do not prefer to be counted

Only 65 percent mailed back the 2000 census form. The remainder had to be collected in person at a cost of about $57 per household.

The 2020 Census may look in our records for some form of existing documentation such as databases and archives to count us.

Never to soften our slavish dependence

She wrote,

“Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind . . . and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to show . . . that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being.”

We're talking length here, not duration

This volcano, Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull eruption, is a fissure more than one-half mile in length. Will the crack lengthen? Will the fissure cause flooding by spreading under the ice? Iceland wants to know.

Yes, much ‘suspenseful concern‘ about fountains of lava near a field of glaciers.

As if infinity is not too far to go together

1816 — first flag of Canada.

Flying about 150 years before their Maple Leaf.

The infinity symbol over sky blue symbolizes the fusion of native and immigrant peoples toward a vigorous and cooperating new society that will exist forever.

Never strutting heraldry nor religion, Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, thought that using heraldry or religious symbols in public affairs is exhibitionist and arrogant.

Quickly grab the screen or any part of a website

oops
Update: Elegant wee product, full of bugs!

While writing posts, capturing a screen or a snippet of a website such as a logo is laborious, but screensnapr makes it easy.

And FTP upload is automated !

Meditators were found to have thicker cortex in the dorsal anterior cingulate and bilaterally in secondary somatosensory cortex.

Yes I think I can be pretty sure you read it here first.