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Eric Spiegelman put together this amazing stream of 130 photos of Obama posing with dignitaries during this week’s U.N. meetings (long video after the jump). And Obama’s smile never changes. Of course you may suspect some Photoshopping, but Spiegelman defends himself by directing us to the State Department’s flickr site.
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New information from Norwegian police has made clear the real scale of a shooting at a youth gathering on Utoya Island in Norway: more than 80 dead and dozens wounded.
A gunman disguised as a police officer started shooting on Utoya Island just outside Oslo, where youth were attending a Labor Party conference. Many ran for their lives, some jumping into the water in an attempt to reach the mainland. Law enforcement officials say the consequences of the attack are catastrophic: at least 80 lives lost, and dozens more wounded. The police did not rule out that there might be more victims.
Locals who tried to rescue some of the injured claimed they saw dozens of bodies in the water.
Undetonated explosives were also found on the island, where some 700 teenagers had gathered for a political rally.
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“ASC [Altered States of Consciousness] are only possible because of a normal waking state of consciousness. I propose that it is the role which [endogenous tryptamines including DMT] play in our waking awareness which allows them to play a role in the ASC as well.” (“Endogenous hallucinogens as ligands of the trace amine receptors: A possible role in sensory perception,” J.V. Wallach, Medical Hypotheses 72 (2009) 91–94. doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2008.07.052. 94). In this case, if endogenous DMT is in part responsible for how we experience waking life (visually), it follows that altered and normal states of consciousness might not be so radically divergent as we might be led to believe. It also stands to reason that if conscious experience has no intrinsic meaning, altered states of consciousness are no more intrinsically meaningful than waking life.
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“Children need to encounter risks and overcome fears on the playground,” said Ellen Sandseter, a professor of psychology at Queen Maud University in Norway. “I think monkey bars and tall slides are great. As playgrounds become more and more boring, these are some of the few features that still can give children thrilling experiences with heights and high speed.”
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What Rick Ehlert did aboard a cruise ship in November was stupid, his attorney says.
Ehlert admits he got drunk aboard the MS Ryndam, broke into a control room and deployed the ship’s anchor early in the morning, Daniel L. Castillo said. “I guess he thought it was a big joke.”
Castillo added, “He’s got a lot of money. It was a silly thing to do. It’s silly. He’s not denying he did it.”
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Something happened to Dylan’s Google account, and it’s been disabled. He doesn’t know what happened to the account, and no one at Google with the power to help him is interested in acknowledging the problem or letting him back in to the cloud-based services where all of his correspondence and much of the digital trail from the last few years of his life is stored. Google doesn’t own Twitter, though (yet), and he has taken to Twitter to try to draw attention to his problem and urge anyone who will listen not to trust Google with their digital lives.
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Forget a five finger discount — a group of women caught on surveillance video robbing a Florida liquor store used their thighs to carry away the booze they lifted.
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A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio’s 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.
The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio’s vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush’s unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.
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To the madcap music of “Yakety Sax,” the video shows correction officers chasing a jumpsuit-clad inmate through Albany County jail corridors and stairways. The action is speeded up, lending the attempted escape the feel of a Keystone Kops comedy.
Sheriff’s officials were not amused.
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Scientists have created more than 150 human-animal hybrid embryos in British laboratories.
The hybrids have been produced secretively over the past three years by researchers looking into possible cures for a wide range of diseases.
The revelation comes just a day after a committee of scientists warned of a nightmare ‘Planet of the Apes’ scenario in which work on human-animal creations goes too far.
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Prior to this research, most scientists have believed that the sudden extinction of nearly half of all life forms on the planet was due solely to the emissions from volcanic eruptions that were occurring in what was to become the Atlantic Ocean. Ruhl et al contend that instead, what happened, was that the small amount of atmospheric heating that occurred due to the exhaust from the volcanoes, caused the oceans to warm as well, leading to the melting of ice crystals at the bottom of the sea that were holding on to methane created by the millions of years of decomposing sea life. When the ice crystals melted, methane was released, which in turn caused the planet to warm even more, which led to more methane release in a chain reaction, that Ruhl says, was the real reason for the mass extinction that led to the next phase in world history, the rise of dinosaurs.
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Ronald Tackman, a convicted New York robber and notorious prison-breaker famously told police he held up stores like Dunkin’ Donuts just blocks from home because he was “lazy,” The New York Post reported. But the Upper East Side stick-up artist was no slouch when it came to his elaborate escapes.
Tackman last gave law enforcement the slip in 2009, when he was transported to court from Riker’s Island wearing a three-piece suit but no metal bracelets. The uncuffed criminal strolled out after noticing the door to the 12th floor holding cell was open. He found his way to the lobby and was shown the door by an officer who mistook him for a lawyer, The Post notes.
Thanks Nico Dios -
Just how did the term “Duck and Cover” become universal shorthand for the paranoid excesses of the Cold War and for every geo-political panic attack since? How did the image of a pith-helmet-wearing cartoon turtle named Bert become as lasting a symbol of this dark era as the yellow and black fallout shelter signs that still adorn many buildings around the United States?
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Members of a tagging crew allegedly responsible for more than 1,600 pieces of graffiti vandalism were arrested Wednesday by authorities serving search warrants at houses in cities across southwest Los Angeles County.
Eight people, including one juvenile, were charged with causing more than $100,000 in vandalism to schools and Metro bus and rail systems, according to a report from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. All are alleged members of the ASC — Art Sex Crime — tagging crew.
Thanks Brendan Donnelly -
✦ Science and religion: God didn’t make man; man made gods
Scientists have so far identified about 20 hard-wired, evolved “adaptations” as the building blocks of religion. Like attachment, they are mechanisms that underlie human interactions: Brain-imaging studies at the National Institutes of Health showed that when test subjects were read statements about religion and asked to agree or disagree, the same brain networks that process human social behavior — our ability to negotiate relationships with others — were engaged.
Among the psychological adaptations related to religion are our need for reciprocity, our tendency to attribute unknown events to human agency, our capacity for romantic love, our fierce “out-group” hatreds and just as fierce loyalties to the in groups of kin and allies. Religion hijacks these traits. The rivalry between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, for example, or the doctrinal battles between Protestant and Catholic reflect our “groupish” tendencies.
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Police said they spotted Dunn and Jefferson sitting at the playground, the young children on the ground next to them. As officers approached them, police said they spotted an empty 40-ounce bottle of Steel Reserve beer on the ground beside the boy. They said a baby bottle next to the baby contained a dark liquid that smelled strongly of an alcohol beverage. Dunn was identified as the children’s mother.
Police said witnesses told them that Jefferson had handed the bottle of beer to the boy and ordered him to chug it. When he had finished it police said Jefferson called the boy an alcoholic.
Both children were taken to Bridgeport Hospital where police said both the boy and girl tested positive for alcohol and the 10-month-old also had cocaine in her system. While being examined, police said the 4-year-old told a social worker he likes, “Natural Ice beer, Budweiser beer, but didn’t like the taste of Dog-Bite beer.”
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Norway’s Ministry of Finance announced that the Norway Oil Fund divested from Africa-Israel Investments and Danya Cebus Ltd. on Monday.
The reason given is the companies’ construction in the West Bank.
The Norwegian Finance Ministry said, “The ethics council stresses that construction of settlements in the occupied territories violates the decision of the Geneva convention regarding defense of civilians during war time. Several decisions of the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice have reached the conclusion that construction of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories is prohibited.”
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What if you were chatting with someone on OKCupid and they’re all like “I love kids too!” and then they showed up on your first face-to-face date wearing one of these shirts? Would you smooch them anyway? I’d at least think about it… Hey, it’s hard out there for a single lady!
Thanks Carlen Altman. -
Civil libertarians are raising the alarm over the state’s plans to create a Big Brother database that could map drivers’ whereabouts with police cruiser-mounted scanners that capture thousands of license plates per hour — storing that information indefinitely where local cops, staties, feds and prosecutors could access it as they choose.
“What kind of a society are we creating here?” asked civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate, who along with the ACLU fears police abuse. “There comes a point where the surveillance is so pervasive and total that it’s a misnomer to call a society free any longer.”
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