Mexico and Argentina moving to decriminalize …

Washington did not protest against the announcement, which was kept deliberately low key. “They made no fanfare so as not to arouse the ire of the US,” said Walter McKay, of the Mexico City-based Institute for Security and Democracy. “I predict that when the US sees its nightmare has not come true and that there is no narco-tourist boom it will come under more pressure to legalise or decriminalise.”

Walter McKay, you can sit next to me.

“The Cartoonist and the Kid” Cartoon Art Show, featuring father-daughter cartoonists Jim Richardson and Violet Richardson

The show collects a father’s cartoons about his young child (ages 2-5), and displays her own eventual solo work, now at age 11 and consumed primarily with the dynamics of talking cats.

Friday, September 4th, 5-8 pm

Bohemia Arts, 22 N. 1st Ave. W., Duluth

Musical guests Total Freedom Rock will play a set at 6:30 pm

Refreshments will be served.

The event is free.

This report, sent to government leaders and media today, details eleven design flaws of the 13-country, Telecom-funded Interphone study. The Interphone study, begun in 1999, was intended to determine the risks of brain tumors, but its full publication has been held up for years. Components of this study published to date reveal what the authors call a ’systemic-skew’, greatly underestimating brain tumor risk.

The design flaws include categorizing subjects who used portable phones (which emit the same microwave radiation as cellphones,) as ‘unexposed’; exclusion of many types of brain tumors; exclusion of people who had died, or were too ill to be interviewed, as a consequence of their brain tumor; and exclusion of children and young adults, who are more vulnerable.

Lloyd Morgan, lead author and member of the Bioelectromagnetics Society says, “Exposure to cellphone radiation is the largest human health experiment ever undertaken, without informed consent, and has some 4 billion participants enrolled. Science has shown increased risk of brain tumors from use of cellphones, as well as increased risk of eye cancer, salivary gland tumors, testicular cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and leukemia. The public must be informed.”

Classic Gonzo Science story. I like the term ’systemic-skew’. Looks like we’re skewed again.

Strategies being plotted:

The ultimate aim of the project is to develop sound scientific sampling of marine debris, to assess prototype technologies for removing the waste and to gain insight into how future clean-up programmes might work.

Good luck all.

Wrist-mounted flamethrower for all your crime-fighting needs.

Oops, wait, no it’s not. Did some checking and turns out there’s something in there about promoting the general welfare.

I didn’t see anything about holding American citizens in indefinite detention though.

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.

…some years after being introduced into the environment and your body. Anybody see the problem here?

My prediction: a link will be found!

“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!

So says the Cancer Prevention Coalition - oh, and all reasonable people:

In 2005, based on highly sensitive and life-long feeding tests in groups of about 200 rats and at doses less than usual human dietary levels, the prestigious Italian Ramazzini Foundation confirmed that aspartame is unequivocally carcinogenic. A high incidence of cancers was induced in multiple organs of the lab rats fed the sweetener, including lymph glands, brain and kidney.

For the first time, a building block of proteins — and hence of life as we know it — has been found in a comet.

That adds to the prevailing notion that many of the ingredients for the origin of life showered down on the early Earth when asteroids (interplanetary rocks orbiting the inner solar system) and comets (dirty ice balls that generally congregate in the outer solar system beyond Neptune) made impact with the planet.

Some paradigms shift gradually, others catastrophically. Anyhoo, here’s the link.

Recently, there have been renewed efforts to pressure organic agriculture to abandon one of its foundational principles and accept genetically modified crops. While there may be nothing inherently wrong with contemplating a theoretical overlap between biotech crop genetics and organic farming systems, there’s not a compelling set of reasons to do so, either.

Alleging the principled barrier between the two is merely a quirky philosophical sticking point of “hard core resistance” within the organic community diverts attention from real questions as to the net value of this pairing.

Timothy LaSalle of The Rodale Institute puts it all in perspective.

Not much of it, but holy cow.

Auras anyone?

…adding also, as per Jeremy Narby, DNA emits laser light.

Rumors and reports of mermaid sightings off Israeli seashore.

Story here. One of the most influential inventors of all time. Oh yeah he was some sort of musician too.

Canine expert/professor emeritus: dogs can learn 165 words,

…have a basic understanding of arithmetic, and they can count to four or five.

….He found the top dogs, in order of their doggy IQ are:

1. Border collies
2. Poodles
3. German shepherds
4. Golden retrievers
5. Dobermans
6. Shetland sheepdogs
7. Labrador retrievers

[originally published in the Zenith City Weekly]

The scientific method includes the principle that expert testimony outweighs non-expert testimony. This ideal is rigorously adhered to until the testimony of the expert deviates from the scientific orthodoxy. In that case the expert becomes a heretic and is shut out of the entire enterprise. The following examples are intriguing case studies of experts who were cut loose for the crime of scientific apostasy. The scientific establishment thus protects itself, and the public, from experts gone wild.

Halton Arp

Halton Arp, a Ph.D., worked his way to the top of his field, was repeatedly recognized as a senior scientist, and awarded distinguished prizes. For a while he was president of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific - a company man. Most importantly he authored the renowned astronomers’ tome, the , later publishing a sequel covering the southern hemisphere. It is through these works that Arp became the expert on “peculiar” or unusual galaxies of any sort, and he consequently became an important voice on the subject of galaxy formation, which is a critical issue for understanding the Big Bang. Essentially no one had achieved his knowledge of galactic morphology and hence their origins. These topics are central to answering the questions surrounding the origin of the universe.

If you had something you had to know about the evolution of galaxies, you would have been smart to ask Arp, but he would have told you that his findings uncomfortably contradicted the status quo. Arp was lauded until he began publically recanting the Big Bang theory. Based on his literally encyclopedic observations of anomalous galaxies - he wrote the book! - Arp dared assert that the theorists had it all wrong. From the facts he could deduce about galaxies and their life cycles, based on his award-studded lifetime of professional training and expertise, Arp simply could not make his data conform to the needs of the Big Bang theory.

Arp was in an ideal position to see that theories of galactic formation had gone drastically wrong. The scientific method (as codified in the “criteria of adequacy”) demands that we give Arp’s testimony a lot of weight, as opposed to those who do not know as intimately what they are talking about, which is . But instead of remaining an experienced, trusted expert in his field, Arp’s telescope time was cancelled by a committee and he was cut loose as a pariah. His work remains the antidote to all the “dark matter” and “dark energy” bullshit one hears so much about.

Tom Van Flandern

The late Tom Van Flandern’s expertise was in the physics of the solar system, namely the intricate orbital dynamics of the sun, planets, moons, asteroids, and comets. Van Flandern knew as much as anyone on earth about the operation of the workings of the solar system. His scientific credentials were as big as a house; a mathematician who got his Ph.D. from Yale in Celestial Mechanics (the mathematical certainties of the solar system as expressed through the physics of orbiting bodies). With this skill set he worked for 23 years with the U.S. Naval Observatory, predicting eclipses and other celestial events with pinpoint accuracy. At a certain juncture, after it became obvious to him that asteroids commonly had orbiting moons of their own, he realized that the history of the solar system was different than the canonical establishment version. With a Ph.D. in Celestial Mechanics from Yale he bloody well knew the physics involved, and one thing he knew for sure was that asteroids will almost never just “capture” a moon. The only plausible origin of asteroidal moons is if a larger body explodes, then the pieces will orbit each other. Van Flandern was essentially resurrecting the exploded planet theory of the origin of the asteroids, long idle in the dustbin of history in the absence of confirming evidence. Now he had the evidence in the form of the asteroidal moons. After all those years of working within the establishment, Van Flandern went public with his heresy. His expertise had led him to rewrite the history of the solar system, and like Arp he was promptly shut out of the journals and conferences, a scientific death sentence.

Supplemental video for our “Astronomical Heresies” talk tonight at the Duluth Art Institute. In this video, Neal Adams explains some evidence for Planetary Expansion Tectonics, i.e. planets growing as if from the inside.

Evidence for Planetary Expansion Tectonics explained

Video explaining Tom Van Flandern’s reconstruction of the history of Mars, as per his Exploded Planet Hypothesis.

Posted as supplementary material to our “Astronomical Heresies” talk at the Duluth Art Institute tonight

At the show “Beyond: Visions of Planetary Landscapes”, composed of photographs from throughout the solar system. The Art Institute invited us to take part, and we will be giving a 45 minute presentation tonight, August 4th, at 5:30pm. The title of our talk is “Astronomical Heresies: A Survey of Weird and Fantastic Ideas About the Solar System.” Only stay away if you are allergic to astonishment.

UPDATE: It was fun!

This cheeky video is making the rounds on the intertubes.

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.