mumble mumble

via pi4nobl4ck

Your $1,790 buys you a full face mask with hose and 1st stage underwater communication unit, a 40 meter (131 feet!) long cable with a waterproof connector, a waterproof interface box for your cell phone (NOT included, by the way) with integrated Bluetooth, and lastly an inflatable buoy with flags… so rescuers will know where to find your waterlogged carcass.

News:lite

PATTERNS in brain activity can be used to determine whether someone is looking at a surrealist landscape by Salvador Dali or the cubist lines of Pablo Picasso.

via azspot

In the cradle of civilization, young women have become terrified about having children.

This is the news I take with me into Thanksgiving and the season of gratitude and family togetherness: that doctors in Fallujah, the Iraqi city we devastated in two military assaults in 2004, have begun documenting a startling rise in birth defects — about 15 times the pre-invasion occurrence of early-life cancers and brain and nervous-system abnormalities, according to the U.K.’s Guardian.

A group of British and Iraqi doctors have petitioned the United Nations to investigate the situation, which is clearly related to the U.S. invasion and occupation. According to their letter: “In September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 newborn babies, 24 percent of whom were dead within the first seven days (and) a staggering 75 percent of the dead babies were classified as deformed.” In comparison, the letter said, in August 2002 — before the invasion — 530 babies were born; six of them died within the first week, with a single birth defect reported.

Young women in Fallujah, the doctors wrote, “are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs.”

What might be causing this nightmare? The most likely factors are chemical or radiation poisoning, according to the Nov. 14 Guardian article, which noted: “Abnormal clusters of infant tumors have also been repeatedly cited in Basra and Najaf — areas that have in the past also been intense battle zones where modern munitions have been heavily used.”

Finally, this is just another story about ecocide — the murder of a nation’s ecosystem, both intentionally and as a predictable consequence of military actions — which is the true name for war. When the New York Times and all other mainstream outlets see the need to write about the future ecocide ventures we are now preparing for, or the current ones we are always in the process of throttling down or up, I wish they’d stop using the romantic word “war.” The modern manifestation of this exercise in mutual and collective insanity is so toxic and destructive, its effects cannot simply be absorbed by the human race, the environment in which our lives are possible or even our DNA.

Continue reading at The Smirking Chimp

also see: What you didn’t know about the war

Ben Witherington via azspot

Now we have prominent Southern Baptist figures falling all over themselves to get their names attached to the signatory list of the ”Manhattan Declaration,” released this past Friday. The original list includes nearly everybody who is anybody on the Christian right, as well as people who ought to know better, such as Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action and the presidents of Gordon-Conwell and Asbury Theological Seminaries and Wheaton College.

Goodness knows how many more are among the 30,000 people who have signed it since then. As one reads through this seven-page, single-spaced smokescreen document (as I did), one finds out that the great social issues of the day are abortion, homosexual marriage and a truncated definition of religious liberty that allows the Christian Right to do whatever it wishes in the name of freedom.

Not mentioned in this ”call of Christian conscience” is anything about climate change and global warming; adequate health care for all Americans; just immigration policies; combating poverty and hunger here and abroad; equal rights for women and racial minorities; or the ongoing specter of war.

via azspot

via ar3

Julio Betancourt via azspot

Of 237 countries and territories in the world, the 4 largest newsgathering and distribution companies that supply the world with 90% of news do not cover 116 of them. 

These 116 countries or territories contain 4 billion people over half the world. 

63 of these media-ignored countries and territories are desperately poor.

via azspot

“Sarah Palin: Fooling None Of The People All Of The Time,” by Deepak Chopra (via ryking) (via thesmarttart)

Gun Owners of America is a lobby group dedicated to the proposition that the National Rifle Association is a bunch of accommodationist sissies. Since June it has been campaigning energetically against the health care reform bill (“TeddyCare”). What does health reform have to do with gun control? Absolutely nothing. But when you’re a wingnut and right-wing rage is in the air, the sidelines can seem awfully lonesome.

GOA’s primary animus appears to be against health reform’s “individual mandate” requiring people who lack health insurance to acquire some. This offends GOA for approximately the same libertarian reasons that gun control does. A June 16 alert to members went on at great length about the requirement that Americans “buy as much health insurance as the government demands.” You had to read halfway down to find the gun-control angle, which was laughably tenuous. Computerization of medical records, which is promoted in the bill, meant that the government would acquire all sorts of information relating to … gun ownership.

Huh?

“Remember,” asked GOA, “when your son was asked by his pediatrician about your gun collection?” Er, no. “That would be in the federal database.” It continued:

Remember when your wife told her gynecologist that she had regularly smoked marijuana ten years ago—thereby potentially barring both her and you from ever owning a gun again? That would be in the database.

Or if a military veteran complains to his psychiatrist that he’s had emotional stress since coming back to the States, that would be in the database.

Or remember when gramps was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, thereby making him a “mental defective” who would have to relinquish his life-long gun collection? That’s in there too.

Keeping guns out of the hands of Alzheimer’s patients and the mentally ill seems a pretty good idea to me, but as it happens, there is no national medical database, and the bill would not create one. Even if one existed, the Health and Human Services Department would not be allowed to share such information with law enforcement authorities without explicit permission from Congress. David Blumenthal, national coordinator for health information technology, told Southern California Public Radio: “We don’t want to do it, and it’s not authorized. We don’t just do things without the Congress permitting us to do them.”

Read more at Slate

via syntheticpubes

A small group of protesters gathered outside Bishop Thomas Tobin’s office in Providence two days after news broke that the bishop had asked Kennedy in 2007 not to take Holy Communion because he supports abortion rights.

“He claims that it’s important that we protect the unborn. But it’s equally as important to protect those who have been born and those young children who have been raped and sodomized by clerics and priests. But yet he seems to protect those clerics,” said Ruth Moore, of Hull, Mass.

From the AP via Crooks and Liars

RJ Matson via azspot

daggatt via azspot