Thanks government regulators, corporate psuedoscience, and big business!

And don’t forget that includes all cordless phones, which are worse because the base stations are always on. And don’t forget to disable your wireless too when you’re not using it, as it is always on too.

I’m pissed. I’ve been using all this stuff for about 10 years, and according to this brain surgeon, my risk of brain cancer is now double what it would be otherwise. If I get brain cancer I’m going to sue the bastards until their products come with warning labels. Look for that in about ten years, when the first giant waves of brain cancer start rolling through the system.

Courtesy of Warren Ellis

Cracked.com’s round-up of the craziest scientific experiments of all time.

One limit of a sea creature’s top speed is how much pain is caused by rushing through the water at high velocity. Some of the limits of the dolphins’ tolerance are delved into in this article. It is said that near the surface, it hurts dolphins to swim any faster than 54 kph. Nothing is said of how fast a dolphin could swim if it was willing to ignore the pain for a bit, like say if it was in a hurry. And then the article throws in this exciting tidbit:

The theoretical top speed of dolphins and tuna is unknown, however, as the animals’ intrinsic power and maximum “tail beating rate” is unknown.

Either way, Iosilevskii says reports of dolphins overtaking speed boats are likely to be a result of the dolphins “cheating” by surfing the bow waves.

Hmm.

UPDATE: Pilot whales discovered to swim incredibly fast: “cheetahs of the deep.”

Now they tell us.

He told the BBC: “We know that plastics in the marine environment will accumulate and concentrate toxic chemicals from the surrounding seawater and you can get concentrations several thousand times greater than in the surrounding water on the surface of the plastic.

“Now there’s the potential for those chemicals to be released to those marine organisms if they then eat the plastic.”

And since the plastic is breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces, everything is eating it.

Whose responsibility is it? The science that created the technology of plastic? The chemical industry that squashed whistleblowers? Weak government regulators with a revolving door to industry? It’s a colossal failure, repeated in the nuclear industry, the GMO industry, and soon, the nanotech industry.

In today’s Sunday Brunch special, a scene with a clear moral -Watch giant robot fights from home even if you’ve got season tickets to the arena.

And it’s even got charged nanoparticles. Or something.

The black hole is like a boogeyman for scientists. Good eye-candy though.

They’re everywhere.

Here’s his legal defense fund website - we have written about this before. It’s probably nothing, since the theory we could all die from this thing is based on Big Bang assumptions which are probably faulty -

This fund has been established by Walter L. Wagner, a nuclear physicist, to initiate legal action to require that CERN and the Large Hadron Collider engage in a full safety analysis for all potential theoretical hazards inadequately addressed to-date.  Such hazards include theoretical miniature black holes, theoretical strangelets, deSitter Space transitions, etc. 

-all the same, what does it say about science that they are willing to fire this thing up anyway? The risk maybe miniscule but… has anybody checked the Precautionary Principle lately? Oh right, that’s not scientific. It’s scientific to ram technology down people’s throats. Fire it up!

What do you know? Supports the exploded planet hypothesis.

Scarface, Abbreviated

Pointless Profanity Part 1

One from the Vault : Mr. Nice

Pointless Profanity Part II

We’re not worthy: Richard Pryor

The Godfather: Carlin 

An early Gonzo Science prototype.

Gonzo Science remains a hotbed of Puppet Liberation sympathizers.

The eye-candy makes the song tolerable.

MKultra brand brainwashing leaves your brain feeling refreshed and compliant.

Giant sandcastles exploding in reverse? Hell yes.

Stan Cox over at Counterpunch offers this sobering tale of disaster foretold.

Furthermore, as I argued on the CounterPunch site in 2004, any agroterrorists who might want to see their mission accomplished in rural America need only sit back and watch. Agrocapitalism is already doing their work for them: poisoning water supplies, releasing antibiotic-resistant, highly pathogenic bacteria into streams and dust clouds, and contaminating our food supply.

Even bioterror alarmists admit that the increasing concentration of US agriculture, and its increasingly industrial infrastructure, are precisely what make it more vulnerable. The US Government’s General Accounting Office acknowledged in a 2005 report that

the highly concentrated breeding and rearing practices of our livestock industry make it a vulnerable target for terrorists because diseases could spread rapidly and be very difficult to contain. For example, between 80 and 90 percent of grain-fed beef cattle production is concentrated in less than 5 percent of the nation’s feedlots. Therefore, the deliberate introduction of a highly contagious animal disease in a single feedlot could have serious economic consequences.

The GAO didn’t go on to discuss the damage that can be done by such a highly concentrated farming system even if terrorists never cast their shadow onto the churned soil of the American Plains. And now the federal government plans to take a laboratory that harbors some of the planet’s most menacing animal and human germs and place it closer than ever to the cattle feedlots and slaughterhouses of Kansas or Texas, the hog-confinement facilities of North Carolina, or the vast poultry operations of the Deep South.

Robots can now not only play air hockey but in Japan they can watch the kids. Also, the military is using Nintendo Wiis and iPhones to control their robotic “assistants”.

GMOs 101. After watching the video, instead of killing yourself enjoy this radio interview with Percy Schmeiser, the Canadian farmer who wouldn’t roll over when his livelihood was contaminated by Monsanto.

That’s my favorite expression in science, and lucky me I see it all the time. Seems like if you believed everything is older than previously believed, you could be right enough of the time to make money.

Uncle Sam concedes that mercury causes autism.Send in the lawyers.

The anti-carjacking flamethrower courtesy of South Africa. I’d like to charbroil the narrator but it’s still neat looking.

Addendum: An anti-theft device which breaks your arms.

There’s a joke in there somewhere but in the meantime here’s the link.

Turns out the more haste used by the FDA in approving a new drug the more likely it is the drug will wind up harming the populace.Gosh, I wonder if similar correlations could be found in other industries.

Originally published in Zenith City Weekly, Duluth, by Jim Richardson and Allen Richardson

An Israeli cognitive psychologist named Benny Shanon got himself in the news recently for writing a controversial article in the philosophy journal Time and Mind, suggesting that Moses might have been tripping during the whole burning bush and 10 Commandments thing. Shanon argues that the Acacia tree, mentioned in the Bible, is a good source of the potent hallucinogen DMT, and was used in rituals at the time.

Intrigued, we turned to our trusted psychedelics expert and ethnobotantist, Dr. Dennis McKenna. Dennis McKenna is the surviving brother of the Terence and Dennis McKenna brother act, famed for co-authoring the book The Invisible Landscape. (Dennis may be also be remembered by some of you Duluthians for being the special guest speaker at the “Area 61” UFO Convention a couple years ago.) One thing we wanted to pick Dennis’ brain about was that Benny Shanon was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald about his Moses theory, but he used the word “narcotics” synonymously with “psychedelics.” This is a pet peeve of ours, since the government has consistently conflated hard and soft drugs in its decades-long War on Drugs, resulting in much confusion and injustice. So we asked Dennis if this indicated Shanon might not be a serious researcher, and what was his evaluation of Shanon’s theory.

Turns out Dennis knows the guy, knows all about it, and has been saying the same thing for years: “I know Benny Shanon personally, he’s a good scholar and the author of The Antipodes of the Mind, which is his book about ayahuasca. He should know better than to use the term ‘narcotic’ in reference to psychedelics, but I think he is deferring to mainstream no-nothingism. But his idea, or speculation, is right on. Many Acacia species are good sources of DMT; some of the Australian species are the most potent sources of DMT on the planet (up to 2% in some cases), but the African species are no slouches either when it comes to that. The trick is, what was the admixture plant? Because if the mixture was taken orally, you need a beta-carboline-containing plant, as a source of MAO inhibitors, in order to render it orally active. Fortunately, there’s already a good candidate: Peganum harmala, the Syrian rue …. It was already recognized as a sacred plant in the Middle East at the time of Moses, and some have speculated that it is one candidate for the legendary Soma; Peganum harmala is called “haoma” in Persian, and it probably was used, likely in combo with Acacia or some DMT-bearing plant. So, yeah, I think Benny is correct in his speculation (I’ve been making the same, in lectures and such, for years…). He will of course be denounced, but that’s about what you’d expect. The theocratic fascists don’t like it when you assert that their major prophets were just stoners! All the more reason to figure he’s probably right. BTW, the Acacias were also important to the Egyptians. They had a major jones on about it, probably because they also knew about its entheogenic qualities.”
           
The word “entheogenic” refers to that class of psychedelics which bring forth “god from within,” a specialty of DMT. So it does appear that Moses could have been tripping. As Shanon was quoted saying in the Sydney Morning Herald, “As far Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don’t believe, or a legend, which I don’t believe either…” The alternative is that Moses was tripping, which Shanon rightly characterizes as “very probable.”

Very probable… if Moses actually existed. There are a number of views on this, but suffice it to say that there is apparently no archeological evidence of the Exodus, and that Moses may very well have been a character cobbled together from various sources as the Bible developed during its long and complex history. There may in fact be a so-called “historical core” beneath centuries of calcified embellishments and transmission errors. Pioneering Biblical scholar Martin Noth believed Moses may have actually been “an obscure person from Moab” that an early Biblical editor decided to “(weave) separate themes and traditions around.” So if Moses existed, he may have been tripping, or he may have been an obscure person from Moab, subsequently elevated by an editor into a fantastic mythology.

A juicy piece of the Gov. Eliot Spitzer story. This is awesome. “Conspiracy” tag activated by phrase “dirty tricks operative.”

Several freakish examples of nature’s motherfucking majesty.

The DB Cooper hijacking, wherein mystery dude parachuted out of the back of the plane in a storm with $200,000, is back in the news. So, wait, does crime pay or not? Did crime used to pay and now does not? Hey FBI, I’m kidding. Seriously. Good luck.

Update: The original newscast with Walter Cronkite.