Michelangelo, guerilla anatomist:

It is reported that Michelangelo concealed an image of the brain in the first of these last 4 panels, namely, the Creation of Adam. Here we present evidence that he concealed another neuronanatomic structure in the final panel of this series, the Separation of Light From Darkness, specifically a ventral view of the brainstem.

via Atrios:

BP has told the Environmental Protection Agency that it cannot find a safe, effective and available dispersant to use instead of Corexit, and will continue to use that chemical application to help break up the growing spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Thousands of photos of students taken remotely … Classic!!

The assassins who killed Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh at a five-star Dubai hotel in January made one mistake: their work was too perfect. The hit team took elaborate steps to make the Hamas military commander’s cause of death appear natural. His body was found lying in bed unclothed, his pants folded neatly over a chair and a bottle of heart medicine on the nightstand beside him. There were no bruises on the corpse, and no sign of a struggle in the room. The door was even chain-locked from inside. But the scene was so immaculate that when Dubai police finally entered the room, after his wife complained she couldn’t reach him on his cell phone, “they were struck by how neat everything was,” in the words of a foreign law-enforcement official who is close to the investigation, and provided fresh details to NEWSWEEK on condition of anonymity. “It made them suspicious.”

You mean these kinds of black ops don’t just happen in the movies?

An exploration of the late Robert Anton Wilson’s work.

The flavor-

A Non Euclidean Rumination On Subliminal Rationalists and Recalling Robert Anton Wilson

“Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.”
-Robert Anton Wilson

“Positivists decline to acknowledge any a priori knowledge. They wish to reduce everything to sense perceptions. Generally they contradict themselves in that they deny introspection as experience. … They use too narrow a notion of experience and introduce an arbitrary bound on what experience is”
-Kurt Godel

Kudos to The Anomalist.

Abuse of the Journal/Peer Review system?? What??!?

Bayblab has more.
Good thing this is only confined to stem cell journals and not, say, cosmology or astronomy journals grumble grumble

The question is, since the system of doing science is broken, what are scientists going to do to fix it?

Whaler scum ram Sea Shepherd boat

Looks like they’re going to take a high-tech look at the handwritten notes of the Nixon meeting that spawned the 18-minute tape gap:

They will search for clues that incriminating pages are missing and try to reconstruct what Haldeman, a prolific note-taker on yellow legal pads, might have written on them.

Among the advanced tools for the task is electrostatic detection analysis. The technology is capable of detecting and highlighting indented images, such as those left on a sheet of paper when a pen has written on a sheet above it…. Techniques known as hyperspectral imaging and video spectral comparison also will be used to study the ink and look for hidden clues to missing material.

Don’t get me started about Nixon.

Effing religious whackjobs and their violent fantasies. They wouldn’t have stood for this crap for one second if the left had been publically trolling for Bush assassins back when there was an actual fascist in the White House. I agree with this dude in the Maddow interview - support Obama. He needs it, because the crazies want blood.

We saw all of these GMO-related articles today at the Organic Consumers Association in which:

-a scientist states his objections to GMOs. I guess this guy doesn’t know New Scientist magazine says it’s irrational to draw a distinction.

-the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility says the ruling on GM sugarbeets calls into question the approval of GM corn. Ya think?

-a scientist wrote a career-destroying paper critical of GMOs. Solution: publish no more critical papers, because anything other than boosterism is irrational

-a scientist says a corporation suppressed inconvenient data showing environmental harm from their GMO corn, and so it got approved for planting. Good thing New Scientist already knows it’s safe.

Large Hadron Collider infiltrated by Al-Qaeda guy - what, was he threatening to turn it on?

I love my new Senator Al Franken. Here he EVISCERATES a hapless shill for Halliburton-KBR, relating to the gang-rape/shipping container incident/s.

Below are the pro-gang-rape Senators who voted against Franken’s amendment to end the abuse of binding arbitration that let it all happen. All Republicans, no women:

Excellent excellent excellent documentary about a highly controversial project from my recent backyard.

H.A.A.R.P. is the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a project being funded by the USAF, US Navy, U of Alaska and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It is located in remote Alaska wilderness a few hundred miles Northeast of Valdez, AK in an area called Gakona. Most simply be labeled as an advanced Tesla technology.
The critics claim that underlying its stated goals lies the potential for advanced space warfare offense and defense capabilities, weather control, terrestrial geomagnetic control (earthquakes/eruptions), biophysical interference, and worst of all mind control through synched bioelectric frequencies.

The instated public relations tool and head of the project play stupid when it comes to accusations, respond in denial and ignorance, and claim that notions of these accusations are completely unfounded. No surprises there.

Critics range far and wide, and interviewed in this short 50 minute piece are the original head of the project, plasma physicists, biophysicists, electromagnetic specialists and Nick Begich, Jr. Brother of US Senator Mark Begich.

Watch and think and decide, but I for one have never wanted a tinfoil…no, make that iridium foil hat more in my life.

Andrew Vachss, the One-Man-War-on-Child-Exploitation, annotates the AP article about the arrest of religious whackjob sex predator Phillip Garrido.

The upshot? Our laws are not strong enough to stop menaces like Garrido. Paraphrasing Vachss, predators can not be rehabilitated because that means returning to a state that doesn’t exist. They are not crazy but evil since evil is behavior and behavior is volitional. GPS ankle bracelets that track every movement, like Garrido wore, will not stop them, especially since their wives are 100% complicit.

A link to Vachss’ essays and articles here.

No shortage of this commodity. Here’s page 1 of 620,000 of what Google can find on the matter.

At one point I bought a handful of books on the Chappaquiddick incident to see if I could find any hint of conspiracies to get him. But all I found was a very depressing story about a horrible accident.

The fact that Kennedy wandered away and didn’t call the authorities immediately is simply accounted for by his concussion and shock. It’s actually a fairly typical thing for accident victims to wander around and act crazy for a while. In point of fact, Kennedy could have used his medical diagnosis of concussion and shock to defend himself, but he never did, accepting full moral responsibility.

…This post seems to be bringing in a lot of new readers, so let me say welcome, and you may find all of our conspiracy-related posts (including this one) here. Thank you.

“Poisoned Profits” talk from Beyond Pesticides. Sorry if this video looks extra large - it plays fine though, although you may lose the edge of the screen… but in this case it’s the info in the audio that’s important, and not the fact that I’m too lazy to find a way to fix this. Sorry fans!

Interview with Richard Hoagland about the secret history of NASA. Hoagland is a controversial figure to put it mildly. To the skeptics he’s a nutbar. We enjoy evaluating wild claims.

Arrests made as part of clusterfuck arrest bonanza in New Jersey:

There’s a lot to dig into on this story about New Jersey mayors, lawmakers, and rabbis being charged in connection with a federal corruption and international money laundering probe.

But we’ve been focusing on one of the few New Yorkers: Issac Rosenbaum, a Brooklynite who works in real estate — and has been charged with trafficking in human kidneys. It’s not clear how or whether this case is tied to the public corruption probe. But with details like these, who cares, frankly…

While I generally loathe Chris Matthews, this bit about Obama’s birth certificate is a home run.

Even if any of the photos become accepted as proven fakes, that doesn’t mean the mission didn’t happen. All that would logically entail is that some of the photos were faked. That would itself entail a conspiracy, but obviously a much smaller one. Need good propaganda against the Reds from your Moon mission but the photos didn’t turn out? Fake ‘em. Years later, a sloppy documentary appears on Fox that debunks the photos, and extends those conclusions to the entire mission. I don’t want to take a side (re: the photos) with this post exactly, but I do want to make clear, as a point of order, that the photos are different than the entire mission.

The death of weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly openly reconsidered as a conspiracy of black market anthrax interests “suiciding” him. (This came as a surprise to me as I would have first guessed it was British Intelligence that did it. Not that British Intelligence and black market anthrax interests are necessarily mutually exclusive of course.) From the article:

“…David Kelly was of particular interest to us because he was a world expert on anthrax and he was involved in some degree with assisting the secret germ warfare programme in apartheid South Africa.”

…I am reminded by a diary on DailyKos that the ruling of Kelly’s death as a suicide was disputed in an open letter by three specialist medical professionals:

Dr Nicholas Hunt, the forensic pathologist at the Hutton inquiry, concluded that Dr Kelly bled to death from a self-inflicted wound to his left wrist. We view this as highly improbable.

The dispute over the nature of Kelly’s death is a great science vs. science story, suggesting the omnipresent question: if the scientists can’t agree, how can the layperson ever know? And the answer, we think, is to just go ahead and do the research yourself and evaluate competing explanations according to the criteria of adequacy. Sometimes the answer comes up conspiracy!

No one could have predicted this would get out of hand.

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.

They read Bill Clinton’s email!

Just so everyone’s aware that this hasn’t gone away, I’m going to keep you updated as the story of the “mystery barrels” unfolds.  This is the most comprehensive list of info on the subject I could find (courtesy of Nukewatch).  I’ve also included a pdf from the MN Dept. of Health which is chock full of tasty info including maps and pictures.  Hopefully they’re just full of zombies…

Missing vials of a potentially dangerous virus have prompted an Army investigation into the disappearance from a lab in Maryland.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Jim posting as Allen here. It’s Andrew Vachss day at Gonzo Science. Allen forwarded me a link to this Vachss video cache on youtube, and I have hoovered up the ones that interest me most. For those who don’t know, Vachss is the Batman of child advocacy, attorney by day, hard-boiled novelist by night, with the sole mission of combatting child abuse. He wears dark glasses throughout these videos instead of his traditional eyepatch; one of his eyes was severely damaged in a fight, as I understand the story (I guess he is actually more like Daredevil overall - not to minimize him by comparing him to superheroes; but more to understand him by identifying some of the complex of archetypes he expresses).

In this video, Vachss (pronounced Vax) discusses what is essentially his (VERY DISTURBING) origin story - that of being a federal STD investigator who, by accidentally discovering the rape of a baby, stumbles into the underground world of child rapists. (Trust me, skip this video if you are faint of heart.) He has been fighting them ever since, and as he says at one point in these excerpts, “We are surrounded.”

Here is his homepage, which we link to under “Politics”; we also have a link to his anti child abuse resource section in our sidebar. Andrew Vachss is the toughest, angriest man alive, a war machine against child abuse. Forward his links around, donate to his site, do whatever it takes to support him and his work. A real-life superhero in his own right.

Vachss on child protection court cases, which he explains have higher stakes than death penalty cases. He also debunks the “bad seed” myth of evil, arguing that if Ted Bundy had been raised by a not-abusive family, he would not have been a monster.

Vachss’ advice re: how to get started protecting children … for real.

Eat shit, torture fans. Your security state sucked.

I didn’t need the CIA to tell me this, but oddly I guess it helps.

If one were to ask if Wellstone was murdered by an apparatus of state, these are the guys who make viable candidates for whodunnit. Just sayin’.

UPDATE: …and here’s a viable candidate for how it could have been done.