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Best of the Web: Jaw Dropping Propaganda: Healthy food obsession sparks rise in new eating disorder

Amelia Hill
Guardian.co.uk.
Sat, 22 Aug 2009 20:09 UTC
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© Red Pill Press
Eating disorder charities are reporting a rise in the number of people suffering from a serious psychological condition characterized by an obsession with healthy eating.

Comment: Obsession? Since when has making informed dietary choices and learning about how certain foods and food additives affect the human body become an obsession?

The condition, orthorexia nervosa, affects equal numbers of men and women, but sufferers tend to be aged over 30, middle-class and well-educated.

Comment: Well-educated, meaning the ability to read and discern between what is good for human consumption and what is pure poison? The ability to critically think and ask researched and informed questions about food quality, supplementation, production and distribution?

The condition was named by a Californian doctor, Steven Bratman, in 1997, and is described as a "fixation on righteous eating". Until a few years ago, there were so few sufferers that doctors usually included them under the catch-all label of "Ednos" - eating disorders not otherwise recognized. Now, experts say, orthorexics take up such a significant proportion of the Ednos group that they should be treated separately.
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Light Saber

Best of the Web: Word gets around: Twilight and the trick of the psychopaths

Maasanova
Under the Radar Media
Sat, 21 Feb 2009 09:52 UTC
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© Unknown"Denver reveals the Government"
Note: The following is largely extracted from two articles: Twilight of the Psychopaths, by Dr. Kevin Barrett and The Trick of the Psychopath's Trade by Silvia Cattori.

I make the effort to share this information because it gives me, at last, a plausible answer to a long-unanswered question: Why, no matter how much intelligent goodwill exists in the world, is there so much war, suffering and injustice? It doesn't seem to matter what creative plan, ideology, religion, or philosophy great minds come up with, nothing seems to improve our lot. Since the dawn of civilization, this pattern repeats itself over and over again. The answer is that civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been built on slavery and mass murder. Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, cheat, steal, torture, manipulate, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse, in order to establish their own sense of security through domination. The inventor of civilization - the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers - was almost certainly a genetic psychopath. Since that momentous discovery, psychopaths have enjoyed a significant advantage over non-psychopaths in the struggle for power in civilizational hierarchies - especially military hierarchies.
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Bell

Best of the Web: Global Warming, a Mass Mania

Walter Starck
Quadrant Online - Doomed Planet
Tue, 11 Aug 2009 04:06 UTC
Gore Warming
© Scott ThongThe Goracle
Throughout history episodic eruptions of mass manias have swept societies. These outbreaks embody the dissatisfactions, fears and hopes of their times while offering a shining path to a bright new future. They are characterised by a millenarian nature, wherein threat of punishment for past sins is accompanied by promise of salvation through a new faith.

The power of mass manias is reinforced by severe disapproval of any questioning of their certain truth. Any doubt is seen not just as error needing correction but as conscious deliberate evil deserving expulsion or extermination. With adherents permitted only to support the established dogma, these movements tend to gather followers rapidly. But they also soon become afflicted with a growing disconnect from reality which they can neither acknowledge nor adjust for.

As no believer dares express anything other than certainty, social manias tend to persist for some time after their disconnect with reality has become obvious to all. In the face of such recalcitrant reality, leaders are forced to become ever more extreme in their proclamations. This then often leads to a zenith of zealotry and disconnect just before increasingly obvious reality finally forces them to make some small admission of error. The spell is then broken and the faith collapses.
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Vader

Best of the Web: How the Secret Team transformed America into an Empire

Ed Encho
OpEd News
Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:30 UTC
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© UnknownEmpire State
This ongoing investigative series, the first four installments of which are posted here, brings to the forefront recent revelations on the expansion of the US government's surveillance apparatus and the stolen technology that makes it all possible. On the heels of NSA whistleblower Russell Tice's allegations of a government intelligence community that has crossed the line and trashed the constitution, Ed Encho covers a span of investigations throughout the years that reads like a Tom Clancy suspense thriller. Only it's real.
"Over the last two weeks I have encountered just such an apocalyptic situation, where I and the Department of Justice have been asked to be part of something that is fundamentally wrong." (Excerpt from Deputy Attorney General James Comey's draft letter of resignation to President Bush, dated March 16, 2004, which Comey did not in the end send.)

"Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull" (George Orwell: 1984)
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Smiley

Best of the Web: The Constitution Says Obama Can't Be President. And Neither Could Reagan

Chris Kelly
The Huffington Post
Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:28 UTC
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© mrssatan.blogspot.comObama's ofishill birth cert
Barack Obama's birthday is tomorrow (or is it?) and in the spirit of gift giving, I've got something for the 28% of Republicans who don't believe Obama was born in America: An invitation to common ground.

Here's the first place we can agree: It would be nice if the president would ask Hawaii to release his original, long form birth certificate.

There are all kinds of perfectly good moral, legal and political reasons why he shouldn't, but, frankly, I'm still tuckered out from all the perfectly good moral, legal and political reasons Hillary Clinton wouldn't release the Rose Law Firm billing records.

I'm not going through that hell again.
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Eye 2

Best of the Web: The First Psychopaths - er... Corporation

Angie Reidel
Think or Be Eaten Blog
Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:23 UTC
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Thousands of years ago people lived in close knit clans and the population of the world was only a tiny fraction of what it is now. People could go an entire life time without ever encountering a stranger. Unfortunately, sometimes strangers purposely encountered them.

One particular day at one particular village a very long time ago, such an encounter took place. It was just after dawn on a foggy morning that the village clan was going about its normal morning routine. Firewood was gathered, fires were lit, and food preparation was underway. Mothers breast fed their babies, children played and elders sat waiting to be fed.

The comforting sounds of fire crackling and children laughing were interrupted by the muffled rumbling of hoof beats and the sharp clatter of scraping metal coming from somewhere beyond the fog. The sounds grew louder and more distinct by the second, and so, sensing danger, the people of the clan quickly gathered together in the center of the camp.

Moments later, emerging from the haze came a terrifying vision:
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Meteor

Best of the Web: Stephen Hawking: Space debris represents biggest natural threat to humanity

Casey Kazan & Rebecca Sato
dailygalaxy.com
Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:13 UTC
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© Space Telescope Science InstituteSomething wicked this way comes
Stephen Hawking believes that one of the major factors in the possible scarcity of intelligent life in our galaxy is the high probability of an asteroid or comet colliding with inhabited planets. "We have observed," Hawking points out in Life in the Universe, "the collision of a comet, Schumacher-Levi, with Jupiter (below), which produced a series of enormous fireballs, plumes many thousands of kilometers high, hot "bubbles" of gas in the atmosphere, and large dark "scars" on the atmosphere which had lifetimes on the order of weeks."

It is thought the collision of a rather smaller body with the Earth, about 70 million years ago, was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. A few small early mammals survived, but anything as large as a human, would have almost certainly been wiped out.

Comment:


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Meteor

Best of the Web: Jupiter collision a warning call to Earth

Peter N. Spotts
The Christian Science Monitor
Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:01 UTC
Jupiter's scar
© NASA/Reuters
This detail image shows a large impact shown on the bottom left on Jupiter's south polar region captured on July 20, by NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii
The list of cosmic objects that could hit Earth is growing. Scientists study satellite 'tractors' and nuclear weapons as ways to divert asteroids headed our way.

When an object smacked into Jupiter over the weekend, giving astronomers their best cosmic-collision show since the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994, the giant gas ball of a planet took the poke like the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

For all its scientific interest, however, the collision also serves as a stark reminder that the solar system remains a shooting gallery - with Earth, as well as Jupiter, on the wrong side of the firing line.

The object's signature on Jupiter's cloud tops initially was discovered by Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley as he gathered digital images of the giant planet through his 14.5-inch telescope. After alerting other astronomers to what appeared to be a "scar" in the cloud tops similar to those generated by the pieces of Shoemaker-Levy 9, NASA scientists trained a 3-meter (9.8-foot) infrared telescope on the planet and got a good look at the scar.

Comment: The reader might also want to read Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls.

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Cult

Best of the Web: Sex and power inside "the C Street House"

Jeff Sharlet
Salon
Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:15 UTC
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© David Kaiser
Sanford, Ensign, and other regulars receive guidance from the invisible fundamentalist group known as the Family

I can't say I was impressed when I met Sen. John Ensign at the C Street House, the secretive religious enclave on Capitol Hill thrust into the news by its links to three political sex scandals, those of Gov. Mark Sanford; former Rep. Chip Pickering, R-Miss., who allegedly rendezvoused at the C Street House with his mistress, an executive in the industry for which he then became a lobbyist; and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev. Although Sanford declared today that his scandal will actually turn out to be good for the people of South Carolina because he's now more firmly in God's control, the once-favored GOP presidential prospect will finish out his term and fade away. And Ensign's residence at the C Street House during his own extramarital affair now threatens to end a career that he and other Republicans hoped would lead him to the White House.

When I met Ensign, he was just back from a run, sweaty and bouncing in place, boasting about the time he'd clocked and teasing a young woman from his office. She seemed annoyed that the senator wouldn't get himself into a shower and back on the job. When I wrote about Sen. Ensign in my book about the evangelical political organization that runs the C Street House, "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," I described him as a "conservative casino heir elected to the Senate from Nevada, a brightly tanned, hapless figure who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling-fortune name."
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Crusader

Flashback Best of the Web: Jesus plus nothing: Undercover among America's secret theocrats

Jeffrey Sharlet
Harper's Magazine
Sat, 01 Mar 2003 19:05 UTC
And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.

- Matthew 10:36
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© wrapped-in-the-flag.com
This is how they pray: a dozen clear-eyed, smooth-skinned "brothers" gathered together in a huddle, arms crossing arms over shoulders like the weave of a cable, leaning in on one another and swaying like the long grass up the hill from the house they share. The house is a handsome, gray, two-story colonial that smells of new carpet and Pine-Sol and aftershave; the men who live there call it Ivanwald. At the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac, quiet but for the buzz of lawn mowers and kids playing foxes-and-hounds in the park across the road, Ivanwald sits as one house among many, clustered together like mushrooms, all devoted, like these men, to the service of Jesus Christ. The men tend every tulip in the cul-de-sac, trim every magnolia, seal every driveway smooth and black as boot leather. And they pray, assembled at the dining table or on their lawn or in the hallway or in the bunk room or on the basketball court, each man's head bowed in humility and swollen with pride (secretly, he thinks) at being counted among such a fine corps for Christ, among men to whom he will open his heart and whom he will remember when he returns to the world not born-again but remade, no longer an individual but part of the Lord's revolution, his will transformed into a weapon for what the young men call "spiritual war."
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