Best of the Web:


Alarm Clock

Best of the Web: I, Psychopath


I, Psychopath - Synopsis
Thu, 25 Mar 2010 09:42 UTC
Image
Despite the best advice of the world's top experts, Australian documentary-maker Ian Walker was naive to think he could study a psychopath in the wild and not get hurt.

"I didn't really understand how manipulative a psychopath can be," the director of I, Psychopath now admits. "I thought it would be a fair fight. After all, the filmmaker has the power, really. The power of the camera and the edit."

But, as it turns out, Walker chose his subject well. 47 year-old Israeli-born Sam Vaknin is a former corporate criminal and a self-proclaimed master of manipulation and reinvention. Walker first interviewed him several years ago as the author of the book Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited.

Walker was intrigued by a throwaway line where Vaknin professed he thought himself a "corporate psychopath". Afterwards, the film-maker spent several years researching the subject, but always wanted to make a film which might show psychopathic behaviour in action. Because of his narcissism, Vaknin was almost certain to say "Yes".

So, in February 2008, joined by Vaknin's long-suffering but ever-loyal wife Lidija, the threesome embarked on a diagnostic road trip to the world's top experts in psychopathy. Via a battery of psychological testing and brain scanning experiments, Vaknin becomes the world's first civilian to willingly seek a diagnosis for psychopathy.

Comment: Watch or download the I, Psychopath documentary online here.

Read More...
Bad Guys

Best of the Web: Synagogue Bomb Suspects: The Feds Put Us Up to It!

Jonathan Dienst and Hasani Gittens
Associated Press
Fri, 19 Mar 2010 09:57 UTC
Associated press NY arrest
© Associated PressOnta Williams also known as Hamza is led by police officers from a federal building in New York, after being arrested by the FBI on charges related to a plot to bomb targets in the Bronx.

Defense attorneys say an alleged plot to bomb New York synagogues was hatched and directed by a federal informant.

Lawyers for four men from Newburgh have filed a motion to dismiss the terror indictment against them.

They said the informant badgered the defendants until they got involved in the plot.

They said the informant chose the targets, supplied fake bombs for the synagogues and a fake missile to shoot down planes. The motion said he also offered to pay the defendants, who attorneys alleged weren't inclined toward any crime until the informant began recruiting them.

The government well knew that their case had been a government-inspired creation from day one and that the defendants had not been independently seeking weapons or targets," the motion said.

Comment: Read also this excellent analysis on US Homegrown Terrorists.

Read More...
Health

Best of the Web: Opening Pandora's Bread Box: The Critical Role of Wheat Lectin in Human Disease

Sayer Ji
GreenMedInfo.com
Sun, 21 Mar 2010 02:39 UTC

Comment: This is a follow up to The Dark Side of Wheat - New Perspectives on Celiac Disease and Wheat Intolerance


Just say no to gluten
© cafepress.com
Now that celiac disease has been allowed official entry into the pantheon of established medical conditions, and gluten intolerance is no longer entirely a fringe medical concept, the time has come to draw attention to the powerful little chemical in wheat known as 'wheat germ agglutinin' (WGA) which is largely responsible for many of wheat's pervasive, and difficult to diagnose, ill effects. Not only does WGA throw a monkey wrench into our assumptions about the primary causes of wheat intolerance, but due to the fact that WGA is found in highest concentrations in "whole wheat," including its supposedly superior sprouted form, it also pulls the rug out from under one of the health food industry's favorite poster children.

Below the radar of conventional serological testing for antibodies against the various gluten proteins and genetic testing for disease susceptibility, the WGA "lectin problem" remains almost entirely obscured. Lectins, though found in all grains, seeds, legumes, dairy and our beloved nightshades: the tomato and potato, are rarely discussed in connection with health or illness, even when their presence in our diet may greatly reduce both the quality and length of our lives.

Although significant progress has been made in exposing the dark side of wheat over the past decade, gluten receives a disproportionate share of the attention. Given that modern bread wheat (Triticum Aestivum) is a hexaploid species containing three distinct sets of chromosomes capable of producing well over 23,000 unique proteins, it is not surprising that we are only now beginning to unravel the complexities of this plant's many secrets.1 What is unique about the WGA glycoprotein is that it can do direct damage to the majority of tissues in the human body without requiring a specific set of genetic susceptibilities and/or immune-mediated articulations. This may explain why chronic inflammatory and degenerative conditions are endemic to wheat-consuming populations even when overt allergies or intolerances to wheat gluten appear exceedingly rare. The future fate of wheat consumption, and by implication our health, may depend largely on whether or not the toxic qualities of WGA come to light in the general population.
Read More...
Igloo

Flashback Best of the Web: Sign of Cosmic Climate Change: New Island Forms in South Pacific


Hoax-slayer.com
Wed, 09 Aug 2006 15:32 UTC
Image
© Fredrik FranssonFredrik Fransson and crew witnessed this volcano rear its head above the water's surface to form a new island in the Pacific in 2006. Increasing underwater vulcanism causes more water to evaporate from the Oceans.
This email forward arrives with a series of photographs that depict a yacht's encounter with a large area of floating volcanic stones and the apparent birth of a new volcanic island in the South Pacific Ocean. Although the images are certainly unusual, they are genuine. Both the phenomena of the floating stones and the newly formed volcanic island have now been well documented by a variety of reliable sources including NASA.

The images in the email were taken from a post on the blog operated by Fredrik Fransson and the crew of the yacht 'Maiken'. In August 2006, the Maiken was sailing in the South Pacific near Tonga when it came across a large area of floating volcanic stones (pumice). When lava with a high gas and water content erupts from a volcano and then cools it can produce pumice, a very light rock material filled with gas bubbles. Pumice is the only kind of rock that can float on water. A large mass of pumice floating on the ocean surface is known as a "pumice raft".

Comment: We covered this story in 2006 and are reposting it now along with these eyewitness photographs. As we outlined in our recent installment of Connecting the Dots, this undersea activity, including the birth of a whole new island, does not bode well for our planet because increased undersea volcanism means that the ocean water is being heated. This heating of the water can lead to increased evaporation and heat pockets of the lower atmosphere. At the same time, the upper atmosphere is cooling due to increased comet dust (or other cosmic dust entering the solar system from who knows where?) - the evidence for which is the increasing number of fireball sightings being reported over the past dozen years or so, not to mention reports of colourful snow and high-altitude noctilucent clouds. The cosmic dust is electrically charged and tends to create drag on the Earth's rotation, slowing it down marginally. This affects the magnetic field which then increases earthquakes and volcanism, and a feedback loop gets going.

When the increased moisture in the lower atmosphere hits the cooling upper atmosphere, the result is torrential rains and/or increased snowfall depending on location and season of the location. It can also produce odd effects like falling chunks of ice, extraordinary hail storms in the middle of summer, and so on. There have been many reports of these phenomena over the past dozen years or so.

In short, we are witnessing the process of the initiation of an ice age and while the drama reported in the above story is entertaining, it is also a grim reminder of what is really going on in our solar system.

Read More...
Meteor

Best of the Web: Cosmic Climate Change: Yellow snow falls in Russia's far east, again


RIA Novosti
Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:49 UTC
Image
Valeriy Melnikov
The Amur region in Russia's Far East was hit by yellow snow, Elena Pechkina, a regional meteorologist, told RIA Novosti on Friday.

High winds in Mongolia mixed the clouds from a front with dust and sand, crossed northern China, and then dumped the unique-colored snow in Russia.

"This type of precipitation is not harmful to the residents of the area and no additional analyses will be done," Pechkina said.

She said this type of snow was not rare, however usually falls in the region at the end of March or early April.

Comment: Four years ago Sott.net published this: Comet dust build-up? South Korea gets rare yellow snowfall

Two years ago we noticed this: Yellow snowfall over western Siberia

Just last week we reported an incident of purple snowfall, again in Russia.

Of course, they'll say it was the "high winds from Mongolia" that produced this effect, and that explanation will suffice for most. Some however, have looked closer...
From 25 July to 23 September, 2001, in Kerala, India, red rain sporadically fell, staining clothes with an appearance similar to that of blood. Yellow, green, and black rain was also reported. The rains were the result of the atmospheric disintegration of a comet, according to a study conducted at the School of Pure and Applied Physics of the MG University by Dr Godfrey Louis and his student Santosh Kumar. The red rain cells were devoid of DNA which suggests their extra-terrestrial origin. The findings published in the international journal Astrophysics and Space Science state that the cometary fragment contained a dense collection of red cells.


Read More...
Question

Best of the Web: Case of the US Garage Door Gremlins: San Antonio, Texas balky door openers tied to NSA

Scott Stroud
My San Antonio
Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:18 UTC
Image
© NSA
If the first complaints to City Councilman Ray Lopez's office had come anywhere close to the truth, they probably wouldn't have gotten much attention.

I mean, "My garage door opener's not working and I think the government's involved"? That's tinfoil hat territory.

But the calls kept coming, and soon Lopez and his District 6 staff confronted a mystery that led them to the doorstep of the National Security Agency, the nation's code-maker and code-breaker, which is putting a data center into the old Sony microchip plant near Loop 410 and Military Drive.

Call it the Case of the Garage Door Gremlins.

It started in January with a trickle of calls and e-mails, but the complaints were oddly similar. West Side residents around Loop 410 and Military Drive were having problems with their garage door openers. Some had talked to one another and suspected a widespread problem.

Comment: For several years now, SOTT has been collecting 'garage jamming' stories from all over US and even Canada:

Virginia, US: Marine Base radio signal knocks out garage door openers
Airwave glitch hits Colorado Springs, US area: Garage-door openers jammed, hundreds say
Florida, US: Air Force radios jamming garage-door openers in Panhandle
Ottawa, Canada: Garage doors work after mystery signal vanishes
San Antonio, Texas, US has a reccuring mysterious garage door dilemma

Land Mobile Radio system - United States Department of Defense's new state-of-the-art communication system is being blamed in all of them. They even issued an uncooperative news release, urging unlucky owners of baby monitors, cordless telephones, computers, garage door opener remote controls, wireless mouses, etc. to purchase a retrofit for their remote control system to allow operation on a frequency that is not used by the LMR system.

Although the explanation of Land Mobile Radio system being responsible for garage doors' jamming sounds plausible and fits military's 'we don't care' mentality, it still doesn't explain what exactly they are doing and why. Care to speculate?

Read More...
Bizarro Earth

Best of the Web: Chile: 2nd Aftershock Earthquake Magnitude 6.9 - Within Minutes of Magnitude 7.2


US Geological Survey
Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:39 UTC
Image
© USGS
Date-Time:
Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 14:55:30 UTC

Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 11:55:30 AM at epicenter

Location:
34.287°S, 71.657°W

Depth:
44.4 km (27.6 miles)

Distances:
85 km (55 miles) W of Rancagua, Chile

125 km (80 miles) N of Talca, Chile

130 km (80 miles) SW of SANTIAGO, Chile

140 km (85 miles) S of Valparaiso, Chile
Read More...
Snowman

Best of the Web: Southern Russia overwhelmed with purple snow


RT
Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:43 UTC


The very morning following the widely celebrated Woman's Day - people in Southern Russia could not believe their eyes when they found purple snow piled on city streets.

Scientists confirmed a multi-coloured snowfall - ranging from light purple to brown - had landed in Russia's Stavropol Region.

Having analysed the samples, climatologists ruled that the snow is perfectly safe. However, eating purple snow is still not recommended as scientists say it is full of dust from Africa.

Comment: Very interesting. According to the media, we are living in a fairy tale, with purple snow and rosy future. While, in fact, the reality is quite different, and far grimmer (no pun intended).

It is not the first time that we hear about the cases of colorful precipitation. Take this and this articles for example. And we are wondering, what's going on?

In one of the previous Connecting the Dots articles, we pondered on a similar topic:
"That reminds us of another interesting event that happened in Siberia at the beginning of 2007.

There is nothing unusual about snow in the towns and endless forests of Siberia. But when locals in the small village of Pudinskoye woke up on Wednesday they immediately noticed something rather strange: the snow falling from the sky was orange...

Russia's environmental watchdog said the snow contained four times higher than normal quantities of iron as well as acids and nitrates.

Curiously enough, there was a sighting of a volleyball size meteorite in a neighboring region two week prior to the orange snow event. And if the meteorite exploded high up in the atmosphere, its very fine particles could easily float around for a couple of weeks or longer. On the other hand, thanks to Victor Clube's work we now know that meteorites are often accompanied by the phenomenon of dust suspended in the atmosphere, so it didn't have to be just an overhead explosion to cause such peculiar precipitation. "
Also, consider the following from Laura Knight Jadczyk's article Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls:
"2001 - 25 July to 23 Sept. - Kerala, India - red rain sporadically fell; staining clothes with an appearance similar to that of blood. Yellow, green, and black rain was also reported. The rains were the result of the atmospheric disintegration of a comet, according to a study conducted at the School of Pure and Applied Physics of the MG University by Dr Godfrey Louis and his student Santosh Kumar. The red rain cells were devoid of DNA which suggests their extra-terrestrial origin. The findings published in the international journal Astrophysics and Space Science state that the cometary fragment contained dense collection of red cells."


Read More...
Better Earth

Best of the Web: In Denial: The Meltdown of the Climate Campaign

Steven F. Hayward
The Weekly Standard
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:23 UTC
Image
© The Weekly StandardExposed! The global warming campaign enters its emperor's-new-clothes phase
It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago - changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign's fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media - even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC - are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying "It is too so!" In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.
Read More...
Light Saber

Best of the Web: ABC News Vs. Loose Change

gigjunkie99
YouTube
Sat, 06 Mar 2010 13:45 UTC
At the Treason in America Conference on 3/6/2010, ABC News' Chris Wallace decided to drop by and attempt to entrap Dylan Avery and Corey Rowe, but the creators of the Loose Change documentaries were ready for them...

Read More...