The Church of Sarah Palin: A bunch of Pentecostals going batshit-crazy in the name of Jesus.

The guy with the microphone looks like the nutjob in the movie version of “Contact” who (spolier) blows up the first machine. Scary…

Priceless. By way of Kos.

From Tom Van Flandern’s press release about the cosmology conference “Crisis in Cosmology 2,” it sounds like the Hadron Collider is the astronomy equivalent to the Wall Street bailout:

Physicist John Hartnett from the University of Western Australia said “It’s amusing that our conference occurred just as they fire up the Hadron Collider in Europe. Most of our presenters showed the deep problems with the Big Bang while a 40 billion dollar project starts up to trying to find an elusive particle to keep the Big Bang story from collapsing.”

Highlights from an open letter to the scientific community published in New Scientist in 2004:

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed– inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.

….What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory’s supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.

Prominent among the 500 or so signers of this scientific declaration of independence:

Halton Arp, the Galileo of our time whose work is accepted by all anti-Big Bangers (see link to his homepage in our top links)

Hermann Bondi and Tommy Gold, two of the three founders of the Big Bang’s greatest all-time competitor, the Steady State theory, and Jayant Narlikar, another prominent Steady Stater

Eric Lerner and Anthony Peratt, two of the central figures in Plasma Cosmology, another heavyweight contender theory

Tom Van Flandern, whose deductive Meta Theory must be reckoned with by all parties (Van Flandern’s Meta Research in our top links)

A veritable who’s who of scientific Big Bang dissent.

Pretty illuminating.

May be found here.

Farm Worker Helping To Protect Traditional Chile Crop. Taos News, Click on Valle Vista.

Local Man Can’t Fucking Believe He’s Hanging Out With Percy Schmeiser

Thousands of home gardens across Great Britain have failed this year because the straw, manure, or compost the gardeners used contained herbicide residue.  The poison in question is aminopyralid, sold by Dow Agroscience under the names Milestone and Forefront, and was aggressively marketed to horse and cattle owners as an herbicide for pastureland.  When the pasture grass was cut for straw, chemical residue remained on the straw, which is, while unfortunate, not too out of the realm of believability.  What is, however, approaching the outside of that realm is the fact that when the horses and cattle grazed on the herbicide-treated grass, the chemical passed through their gut, came out the other end, the manure was rotted for a year, and there was still enough herbicide residue in the composted manure to kill sensitive crops like lettuce and tomatoes and cause mutations in other crops.

Dow’s own research shows that aminopyralid was persistent in the environment for up to 533 days, and other chemicals in the same class have been found to stick around all the way to the compost stage (in 2001 there was a similar hullabaloo about clopyralid, which is still sold under the name Confront).  Despite this, Forefront and Milestone were approved for use and declared “safe for humans and the environment” by the EPA thanks to the Reduced Risk Pesticide Initiative, which requires less scientific testing and research so long as the new chemicals are demonstrably less toxic than the chemicals that came before.  Hmm, an herbicide so powerful that they can pass through the digestive system of a cow, rot in a field for a year, and still manage to kill tomato plants?  Yes, that sounds safe to me.

Googling “aminopyralid” turns up lots of rightfully incensed British gardeners.  They thought they were doing the good and all-natural thing by mulching with straw and fertilizing with compost and manure, but instead they were unwittingly spreading posions in their garden that will contiue to kill and mutate garden crops for at least the next year or two.  Dow is claiming that the chemical poses “no threat to human health” but the Royal Horticultural Society is advising British gardeners not to eat any produce grown with the contaminated manure.

And there’s no reason why something similar couldn’t happen on this side of the pond: thousands of acres of North American pastureland have also been treated with aminopyralid.  And unlike in the UK, the chemical is still being sold, without any federal regulations.

On McCain not looking at Obama in Debate #1.

Via TPM, “a researcher on social cognition and behavior in primates” says McCain’s refusal to look at Obama during the debates means McCain is the low-ranking monkey:

McCain was afraid of Obama. It was really clear–look at how much McCain blinked in the first half hour. I study monkey behavior–low ranking monkeys don’t look at high ranking monkeys. In a physical, instinctive sense, Obama owned McCain tonight and I think the instant polling reflects that.

TPM’s reporting has been awesome. Here’s “The Dog Ate My Debate.”

As per this article:

The diet of prehistoric Neanderthals living in caves on the Rock of Gibraltar included seals and dolphins, showing once again that the hominids had skills rivaling those modern humans living then, according to a new study.

…. “Deep down there is this idea that modern humans are cognitively superior and therefore able to outcompete Neanderthals,” said researcher Clive Finlayson, director of the Heritage Division at the Gibraltar Museum. “I suppose we’ve thrown a bit of a spanner in the works by showing that Neanderthals were doing exactly the same thing.”

…The marine mammal discovery suggests that Neanderthals and modern humans were a lot more alike than once thought.

 From this article, this guy is making a lot of sense:

Some researchers dispute the idea that modern humans had any kind of innate advantage.

Trinkaus says he has not seen evidence of any kind of difference, either biological or social, between humans and Neanderthals.

“When we look at the archaeology, there’s essentially no difference in their implied social sophistication,” he said. “They use the same kinds of tools, they’re all burying their dead, they’re all using body decorations of some form or another. They were equally effective at hunting animals. In anything that we can measure, there’s very little difference between Neanderthal and modern humans 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.”

Trinkaus said the reason modern humans flourished and Neanderthals didn’t may have just been luck.

“Somebody once compared it to a football game,” he said. “They just happened to win this week. Why, in more recent time periods, do you have some groups of humans with certain cultural advances who displace others? It’s happened many times. There’s nothing biologically superior about one group versus the other.”

A similar analysis may be brought to the animal cognition debate, i.e. answering the loaded question “What separates humans from the animals?” Answer: not so much.

Urban agriculture, via Kos.

Research out of Sweden:

It sprung from a further analysis of data from one of the biggest studies carried out into the risk that the radiation causes cancer, headed by Professor Lennart Hardell of the University Hospital in Orebro, Sweden. Professor Hardell told the conference – held at the Royal Society by the Radiation Research Trust – that “people who started mobile phone use before the age of 20″ had more than five-fold increase in glioma”, a cancer of the glial cells that support the central nervous system. The extra risk to young people of contracting the disease from using the cordless phone found in many homes was almost as great, at more than four times higher.

Those who started using mobiles young, he added, were also five times more likely to get acoustic neuromas, benign but often disabling tumours of the auditory nerve, which usually cause deafness.

By contrast, people who were in their twenties before using handsets were only 50 per cent more likely to contract gliomas and just twice as likely to get acoustic neuromas.

Professor Hardell told the IoS: “This is a warning sign. It is very worrying. We should be taking precautions.” He believes that children under 12 should not use mobiles except in emergencies and that teenagers should use hands-free devices or headsets and concentrate on texting. At 20 the danger diminishes because then the brain is fully developed. Indeed, he admits, the hazard to children and teenagers may be greater even than his results suggest, because the results of his study do not show the effects of their using the phones for many years. Most cancers take decades to develop, longer than mobile phones have been on the market.

Unbelievable McCain Meltdown Featuring Letterman and Olbermann, courtesy of Dkos.

As if opening the wound and pouring in some salt wasn’t enough, living the “American dream” now includes swallowing whatever tripe they manage to throw together at the last minute.  Oh yeah, how many hurricanes blew through the gulf BEFORE 2004 without affecting gas prices?  How can the price of oil dip below 90 dollars a barrel and yet, miraculously, the price of a gallon of gas stay the same?  Why did no one think twice about the painfully obvious name of their SUB PRIME LOAN or ADJUSTABLE RATE MORTGAGE?  They handed it to us and we gobbled it right up.  Now they want to give their buddies another 3/4th of a TRILLION dollars?

Simply ridiculous.

California courts have held that … parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children,” Justice H. Walter Croskey said.

Parents’ reasons for homeschooling their children range from religious beliefs to dissatisfaction with the education received at public or private schools. But according to the court, all California children between the ages of 6 and 18 must attend either a full-time public or private school or (*) be taught by a tutor credentialed for their specific grade level.

“A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation,” Croskey wrote.

That last part just about says it all. The American education system isn’t about education at all, it is about indoctrination. All hail our new Orwellian NWO oppressionism.

Affects male fertility. According to

Ashok Agarwal, PhD, head of the andrology laboratory and the director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine at the Glickman Urologoical and Kidney Institute at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

But what do I know.

From Dkos

News From Taos County. Click On Valle Vista.

We’re doomed.

Awesome.

Scientists at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) have studied the effects of a drug that reduces the progression of a disease similar to multiple sclerosis in animals. This discovery represents another step in the standing fight against the disease.

It is known that the disease is produced by an autoimmune response where the defense-cells in the organism attack and destroy the nerve cells of the organism generating symptoms such as stiffness, twitching, progressive paralysis, etc.

The researchers managed by Professor Ismael Galve from the UCM, founded their conclusions on the role of the cannabinoids receptors in Experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, a disease that reproduces some of the proceses and symptoms of multiple sclerosis. In the study it has been tested that administering a drug that activates receptor CB2 (but not CB1, responsible for the psychoactive effects), the symptoms of the disease lessen and a reduction of 50% in nerve cell loss was perceived.

Therefore the role of the CB2 receptor in the regulation and neuro-immune response supports the research currently being carried out on the possible use of cannabinoid drugs in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.

I was having trouble inserting links the other night when I posted this rebuttal to some television commercial adds by the Corn Refiners Association. I went back and linked/sourced my claims.

I like the design of this study:

Some people report seeing a tunnel or bright light, others recall looking down from the ceiling at medical staff.

… To test this, the researchers have set up special shelving in resuscitation areas. The shelves hold pictures - but they’re visible only from the ceiling.

How about signs visible only from the ceiling that say, “Quit dying and get back in your body where you belong.”

Record-breaking acceleration of a fungal spore launch.

Galactic simulation.

Daily Kos diarist has the story.

Authentic Journalist Eartha Melzer

Well, lo’ and behold: Eartha Jane Melzer, 2004 graduate of the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism, is the reporter that broke the biggest voter-caging plot story of 2008 so far, a story of how a Michigan Republican party leader and his cronies planned to suppress the vote.

Melzer’s September 10 story, “Lose Your House, Lose Your Vote,” in the Michigan Messenger led to a furious uproar, demands from a caught-red-handed GOP official for its retraction, the newspaper standing by her story, and, today, to a federal lawsuit by three Michiganders, the Obama campaign and the Democratic state and national party, against those who would seek to “challenge” the votes of tens of thousands of Michigan voters who received home foreclosure notices.

Ms. Melzer was a college classmate of mine. Eartha, go on with your bad self.

The scoop.

High Fructose Corn Syrup is the same are regular sugar!? I saw it on TV, it must be true!

I profoundly disagree.

HFCS travels straight to your liver where it is processed into fat. (Wiki)
The advent of HFCS is the 1980’s has been strongly correlated with the rise in obesity on the U.S.

Soft drinks with HFCS have been found to contain 10x the carbonyl compounds than regular soft drinks. Carbonyl compounds have been blamed for diabetic complications, and eye and nerve damage. (Referencedi n Wiki also).
HFCS has been found to decrease absorption of iron, magnesium, calcium, and zinc.

Too much fructose can inhibit copper metabolism. Here too. Copper deficiency has been linked to an increased susceptability to ingested fluoride.

Leptin is a protein hormone which plays a key role in regulating appetite. Since fructose doesn’t stimulate glucose and insulin release, key chemicals for regulating you Leptin levels, it can leave you feeling ripe with hunger, when you really shouldn’t be.

High fructose corn syrup most certainly comes from GMO corn.

The enzymes used to process corn starch into HFCS are also GMO’s. Alpha-amylase (Syngenta), Glucoamylase (Novozymes), Glucose-isomerase (Sweetzyme).
So, all in all, HFCS does have the same caloric value as other sugars, but it is definitely NOT the same thing.

New Scientist:

…This research will help inform the policy of the US Food and Drug Administration, which held a public hearing into the chemical on 16 September, at which the paper was presented. Last month, the FDA issued a draft report saying current exposures of the chemical posed no danger.

Just a few weeks later, however, the National Toxicology Program, a government-funded body charged with providing unbiased, scientifically sound evaluations of available evidence, issued its final report on the chemical. This concluded that current human exposure levels were cause for concern.

…Anila Jacob, at the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit organisation based in Washington, DC, says the discrepancy between the two bodies is due to how they chose to weigh the evidence.

The FDA, she says, relied entirely on three industry-funded studies, because they followed certain procedural rules. “The FDA discounted scores of independent studies by academic labs,” she says. The NTP included these if they had merit.

This is getting pretty old, FDA.