The standard-bearers of Anglo-American imperialism in the current epoch, President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron, met in London on May 25 to discuss the world's two ongoing wars of aggression, those in Afghanistan and Libya, both under the command of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization dominated by Washington and London.

As well as joining a barbecue for American and British troops in the prime minister's haunts, in the gardens of Number 10 Downing Street, the two potentates called for continuing to bomb Libya back to the Paleolithic Age.

Displaying what passes for sophisticated humor in the contemporary deadened age, Cameron told the press, "It was...probably the first time in history, as we stood behind that barbecue, that I can say a British prime minister has given an American president a bit of a grilling."

Correspondents chuckled as Libyan, Afghan and Pakistani civilians writhe in their death throes from the bombs and Hellfire missiles delivered by Cameron's and Obama's warplanes.

Dramatic footage filmed from a helicopter by Australia's Channel 7 shows a series of powerful waterspouts near the coastal suburb of Terrigal, on Australia's New South Wales coast. Several powerful columns of swirling air could be seen blasting along the water's surface near the coastline. Channel 7 claimed the spouts reached heights of up to 600 metres (nearly two thousand feet), but dissipated as they neared land. The natural wonders came as strong winds and heavy rain also lashed other parts of the state, causing flash flooding and traffic chaos in Sydney.

"Our music was far from political or antiwar...I never felt comfortable with political advocacy."
- John Phillips

"There were no political speeches or overt protest songs performed."
- John Phillips, discussing the Monterey Pop Festival, of which he was a key organizer

Thus far on this journey, we have seen how what are arguably the two most bloody and notorious mass murders in the history of the City of Angels - the Manson Family murders of the occupants of the home on Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, and the so-called Four-On-The-Floor bludgeoning murders of four Laurel Canyon drug dealers on Wonderland Avenue - were directly connected to the Laurel Canyon music scene.

But the city of Los Angeles can boast of one other particularly notorious murder, which stands to this day as both the most gruesome single-victim murder and the most famous unsolved murder in the city's history.

On January 15, 1947, the mutilated body of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short was found posed in a field. The ritualistically butchered body was nude, sliced cleanly in half, and completely drained of blood. Parts of the body had been removed, after which the corpse had been thoroughly sanitized. Bruising clearly indicated that the young girl had been savagely beaten. Forensic evidence suggested that she had been forced to eat feces during her tortuous ordeal. She was quickly dubbed the 'Black Dahlia,' and it is by that name that she is known and written about today.

An eminent Mexican geophysicist says that despite predictions of global warming based on computer models, the world may be on the verge of an eighty-year cold period similar to the "little ice age" experienced by Europe from 1300 to 1800 A.D..

Víctor Manuel Velasco, of the University of Mexico's Institute of Geophysics, says that recent winter conditions are similar to those of the "little ice age", and in particular the "Maunder Minimum," a period during which sunspot activity dropped significantly. He also notes that the Earth is in a similar position today in relation to the rest of the solar system, a fact which he regards as significant for climate.

"We are talking about the period between 1645 and 1715, which is known as the Maunder Minimum, a period in which the sunspots practically disappeared from the surface of the sun, and in which our planet occupied a position similar to which it has today, with respect to the center of gravity of our [solar] system." Velasco said in an interview published by the university.

The objectivism of the scientific method seems to have been hijacked by corporations who often pay for scientists to support their products, as well as politicians who move through the revolving door between the private and public sector. Even worse is that sometimes the consumer protection agencies themselves are complicit.

The trust placed by consumers in scientific studies and Federal oversight committees has been violated in service to profit so that products are allowed to enter the marketplace with reduced safety standards. The synthetic chemicals we encounter on a daily basis in our food, water, and environment are increasingly shown to be disastrous to our physical and mental well-being. Volumes can be written - indeed have been written - by experts in both mainstream and alternative medicine who have documented the sleight of hand used to hoodwink consumers and threaten our health. The categories below are worth deeper investigation as prime examples of what we might face as a species if this chemical bombardment continues.

Many Americans believe they understand the dangers of the Patriot Act, which Congress has vowed to extend 4 more years in a vote later this week. Trust me when I say, Americans are not nearly frightened enough.

Ever wonder why the facts about 9/11 never got exposed? Why Americans don't fathom the leadership fraud surrounding the War on Terror? Why Americans don't know the 9/11 investigation failed? Why the "Iraqi Peace Option" draws a blank? Somebody has known the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden--- or his grave--for the past 10 years. But nobody's talking.

In significant part, that's because of the Patriot Act--- a law that equates free speech with sedition. It's got a big agenda, with 7,000 pages of Machiavellian code designed to interrupt individual questioning of government policy. In this brave new world, free speech under the Bill of Rights effectively has been declared a threat to government controls for maintaining "stability". And the Patriot Act has become the premiere weapon to attack whistleblowers and dissidents who challenge the comfort of political leaders hiding inconvenient truths from the public. It's all the rage on Capitol Hill, as leaders strive to score TV ratings, while demagoguing their "outstanding leadership performance" on everything from national security to environmental policy.

Hi Dr. West,

I've been following the latest news. And I thought you could use a bit of moral support.

It probably sounds crazy for a certified welding inspector and ironworker to retire and pursue impact research full-time. Especially since I'm pretty much a nobody. But like many others, I'm looking to identify the planetary scarring and blast-affected materials of the impact storms of the Early Holocene. A little military training in battle damage assessment from aerial photography and a copy of Google Earth goes a long way here.

And being a nobody makes me especially sensitive to ad hominem attacks. I am prepared to debate the science I propose with the big kids. But as an autodidact, an outsider and a complete nobody, I have no defense if the attacks are personally about me, and not the science. So whenever I'm reading along and one side or another, in any given debate, sinks to ad hominem, I have a policy of looking past it at the science that's being ignored or smoke-screened. I tend to mentally disqualify any debater who sinks to such small-minded tactics, and ignore further comments from them in the future. And from what I see of it, the science of yours I see smoke-screened by all the ad hominem crap in the popular press lately is, nevertheless, as good as it gets.

Like you and the others of Firestone et al, what I've been able to find pretty much flies in the face of the kind of Uniformitarian/Gradualist assumptive reasoning that's been the foundation postulate of the Earth Sciences since Sir Charles Lyell published Principles of Geology back in 1830. And regarding the events of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, I'm ready to make the case that the foundation geologic principle in the Earth sciences, expressed in the slogan, "The present is the key to the past", is almost as naïve as flat-world theory.

Tell Congress to Kill COICA 2.0, the Internet Censorship Bill

UPDATE: Great news. We don't always see eye-to-eye with Google, but we're on the same team this time. Google CEO Eric Schmidt just came out swinging against PROTECT IP, saying, "I would be very, very careful if I were a government about arbitrarily [implementing] simple solutions to complex problems." And then he went even further. From the LA Times:

"If there is a law that requires DNSs, to do X and it's passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president of the United States and we disagree with it then we would still fight it," he said, according to the report. "If it's a request the answer is we wouldn't do it, if it's a discussion we wouldn't do it."

Big content is irate. The Motion Picture Association of America released a statement saying, "We've heard this 'but the law doesn't apply to me' argument before - but usually, it comes from content thieves, not a Fortune 500 company. Google should know better."

Sarkozy, Obama, and the other leaders at the G8 should be evaluating the policies that have brought them to the brink of financial ruin. Unfortunately, their attention will be elsewhere: on Internet regulation, for one thing.

President Obama will join other G8 leaders today at the posh, French seaside resort of Deauville. On the agenda: proposed global regulations for the Internet, post-tsunami Japan, and military escapades in North Africa. Bizarrely absent from the top priorities listed by hosting head of state Nicolas Sarkozy is the most urgent issue of all: the need to rein in massive government over-spending and debt.

One needn't travel to France to get a clear view of this problem. Here in the US, for example, federal revenues will top $2 trillion this year, but federal spending will approach double that amount. Such reckless spending has set the stage for a battle royal between Democrats and Republicans over raising the national-debt ceiling.

House Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio has correctly warned that increasing the debt ceiling without a firm commitment to slash spending would signal to investors that America still is not serious about kicking its spending addiction.

Of all the dangerous ideas that health officials could have embraced while trying to understand why we get fat, they would have been hard-pressed to find one ultimately more damaging than calories-in/calories-out. That it reinforces what appears to be so obvious - obesity as the penalty for gluttony and sloth - is what makes it so alluring. But it's misleading and misconceived on so many levels that it's hard to imagine how it survived unscathed and virtually unchallenged for the last fifty years.

It has done incalculable harm. Not only is this thinking at least partly responsible for the ever-growing numbers of obese and overweight in the world - while directing attention away from the real reasons we get fat - but it has served to reinforce the perception that those who are fat have no one to blame but themselves. That eating less invariably fails as a cure for obesity is rarely perceived as the single most important reason to make us question our assumptions, as Hilde Bruch suggested half a century ago. Rather, it is taken as still more evidence that the overweight and obese are incapable of following a diet and eating in moderation. And it puts the blame for their physical condition squarely on their behavior, which couldn't be further from the truth.

Gary Taubes from Why We Get Fat