There are more than 400 exorcists in Italy, recently recognized for their work by Pope Ratzi. It’s nice to know someone is worrying about demon affliction in the modern age. Sadly they are all in Italy, freeing demons in the rest of the world to run amok on the internets.
More than half of US adults are overweight ( Flegal et al. 1998 ), which makes food the most abused substance in our country. If it continues its rise, poor physical condition will supplant tobacco as the leading voluntary cause of death.
As an iPod user, the stories of iPod theft really upset me. It’s one of the most trafficked technology devices because it’s just so compact and useful…and because people who carry them use the white headphones, announcing to all around them that they carry one.
But this story is a happier story. A young man brought an iPod in to a store to purchase cables for it. The store manager recognized his own iPod, stolen from his car one week earlier, and kept the thief occupied until police arrived.
This [b]lovely story[/b] comes from India, where an internationally renowned photographer was threatened with a lawsuit by an American company.
Coca-Cola has threatened Sharad Haksar with legal action and demanded an unconditional apology for using a ubiquitous advertisement as a backdrop for a commentary on water shortages in several Indian communities with Coca-Cola bottling plants.
This is the same company whose CMO spoke at my MBA graduation about all the wonderful things it was doing for the third world…like using all their water.
I Tivo Law & Order and SVU. Having watched at least 70% of episodes from both series, I have come to notice a trend. Comments on everything from the health of food to the dangers of the internets are mentioned off-the-cuff or used as central plot concepts with irreverance for the truth.
While fishing, a character mentions the dangers of the mercury in the fish he’s catching. Another episode deals with the ease of obtaining your entire life story by ‘following the bread crumbs you leave on the Internet’ or emailing a worm that renders one’s computer completely vulnerable to eavesdropping. These factoids are often subtle and always unverified.
Taken together, these factoids verify existing suspicions in people’s minds. Coincidentally, these suspicions often support entrenched industry. In the two cases above, the farm-raised fish industry and organizations that capitalize on identity theft and virus protection like banks, credit card companies and software producers.
Case 1:
The question of the Ten Commandments in courthouses has finally been answered by the High Court. As expected, the justice system must operate within the bounds of the Constitution without any competing guidelines.
The ruling was delivered 5-4, however, which is only one vote away from condoning the use of the Ten Commandments before the Constitution in judicial decisions.
Justice Souter delivered this opinion on behalf of the majority:
“The touchstone for our analysis is the principle that the First Amendment mandates government neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion. … When the government acts with the ostensible and predominant purpose of advancing religion, it violates the central Establishment clause value of official religious neutrality.”
Case 2:
In a unanimous decision, the court sent the case of services/software used for copyright infringement back to the lower court, which had previously found in favor of the services.
Souter delivered this response:
“We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by the clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.”
It is now for the lower court to decide what constitutes ‘affirmative steps’.
It’s difficult to tell sometimes, best advice is to follow the money. If you can’t follow the money, follow the influence.
The White House changed a news conference time slot to accomodate prime time line-ups yesterday, mostly in favor of NBC.
This might seem a hasty, conspiracy-nutish conclusion were it not for Dubya’s closing utterance: “I don’t want to cut into some of these TV shows that are getting ready to air, for the sake of the economy.” Story.
I love this country: school shootings and terrorism have tweaked everyone past reason into perpetual fight-or-flight. So much is our fervor that a junior high school in New Mexico was locked down after receiving tips of a suspected weapon in the school. Upon closer inspection, the ‘weapon’ was identified as a giant burrito. Story.
“Bush nominated a man on record as having no respect for the United Nations, John Bolton, as UN ambassador. He put Alberto Gonzalez who suggested America did not have to follow the Geneva Conventions in charge of the Justice Department. There’s no getting around it…George W. Bush has HUGE balls.”
-Ed Helms, The Daily Show 20050316
$170 million in Federal monies are allocated in 2005 abstinence-only sex education programs. Abstinence is a respectable and safe choice, but it is not an approach to sex any more than sitting pool-side is an approach to swimming.
Exmaples of errors in such programs are:
- A 43-day old fetus is a thinking person
- HIV can be spread by sweat and tears [I love this one]
- Condoms fail to prevent the spread of HIV as often as 31% of the time in heterosexual intercourse
- 5 to 10% of women who have an abortion become sterile
These programs are doing an excellent job helping to make the last vestige of personal freedom (one’s own body) a mysterious and dangerous place.
Read the complete report.