Summary of the Richard Sternberg saga
Posted by Lippard at 12/15/2005 03:45:00 PM 3 comments
Labels: Richard Sternberg affair
Posted by Lippard at 12/13/2005 06:22:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 12/13/2005 09:40:00 AM 1 comments
Indigo Children are the current generation being born today and most of those who are 8 years old or younger. They are different. They have very unique characteristics that set them apart from previous generations of children. The name itself indicates the Life Color they carry in their auras and is indicative of the Third Eye Chakra, which represents intuition and psychic ability. These are the children who are often rebellious to authority, nonconformist, extremely emotionally and sometimes physically sensitive or fragile, highly talented or academically gifted and often metaphysically gifted as well, usually intuitive, very often labeled ADD, either very empathic and compassionate OR very cold and callous, and are wise beyond their years. Does this sound like yourself or your child?Here's a story originally from the Orange County Register about some "indigo children." How hard would it be for an undisciplined, rebellious child to set up the "orange incident" to impress some gullible parents? (Thanks to several people on the SKEPTIC mailing list for the references.)
Posted by Lippard at 12/13/2005 07:40:00 AM 1 comments
Posted by Lippard at 12/12/2005 05:18:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 12/11/2005 08:26:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: botnets, InfraGard, security, technology
Posted by Lippard at 12/11/2005 03:28:00 PM 2 comments
Labels: history, Multics, security, technology
Posted by Lippard at 12/11/2005 01:08:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 12/10/2005 11:09:00 AM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 12/09/2005 04:38:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: economics, housing bubble
Domain Name: ENTIRELYPETS.COMIts website gives a mailing address in Norfolk, Nebraska that's a private mailbox service:
Administrative Contact:
EntirelyPets.com, EntirelyPets.com rm3xt7yr2ra@networksolutionsprivateregistration.com
ATTN: ENTIRELYPETS.COM
c/o Network Solutions
P.O. Box 447
Herndon, VA 20172-0447
570-708-8780
710 South 13th Street Suite 900I went into the site's online chat:
PMB# 384
Norfolk, NE 68701
Please wait for a site operator to respond.I looked up information on HealthyPets, Inc., and found that there is no Nebraska corporate registration for a company with that name, but there is one in California:
Chat Information
You are now chatting with 'Herman'
Herman: Welcome to EntirelyPets.com! How can I assist you?
Jim: Hello, Herman. I'm trying to find out if there is a legitimate corporation behind entirelypets.com before I do business with you.
Jim: How can I verify that?
Herman: That's an excellent question sir. We have been in business for over 6 years now. The name of our corporation is HealthyPets, Inc. We are certainly legitimate. If you would like to speak with one of our reps you can call us at 1-800-889-8967.
Jim: Is that a Nebraska corporation?
Herman: That is both a Nebraska and California Corporation. All of our shipments are made from CA, but our main branch is here in Nebraska.
Jim: OK, thank you very much!
HEALTHYPETS, INC.M. Ghumman turns out to be Mandeep Ghumman, DVM, and it turns out that HealthyPets, Inc. has a long history of registering domains in the names of other online pet stores and vets, and then losing them to those other pet stores and vets in WIPO arbitration hearings:
Number: C2133197 Date Filed: 2/5/1999 Status: active
Jurisdiction: California
Address
43450 MINTWOOD ST
FREMONT, CA 94538
Agent for Service of Process
M GHUMMAN
43450 MINTWOOD ST
FREMONT, CA 94538
Posted by Lippard at 12/07/2005 06:55:00 PM 2 comments
Posted by Lippard at 12/07/2005 04:20:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: science
Cops mistakenly break down the door of a sleeping man, late at night, as part of drug raid. Turns out, the man wasn't named in the warrant, and wasn't a suspect. The man, frightened for himself and his 18-month old daughter, fires at an intruder who jumps into his bedroom after the door's been kicked in. Turns out that the man, who is black, has killed the white son of the town's police chief. He's later convicted and sentenced to death by a white jury. The man has no criminal record, and police rather tellingly changed their story about drugs (rather, traces of drugs) in his possession at the time of the raid.According to Maye's attorney, though the jury was initially sympathetic, they turned against her because in her closing arguments she suggested that God might not give them mercy in heaven if they showed no mercy to Maye. They further thought that he should be convicted because his mother and grandmother spoiled him and he was disrespectful of his elders and authority figures.
Posted by Lippard at 12/07/2005 03:32:00 PM 4 comments
Labels: police abuse and corruption
Posted by Lippard at 12/07/2005 01:03:00 PM 1 comments
Labels: science
Depending on the type of work they do, computer software engineers in metro Phoenix earn an average $71,580 to $78,240, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the low end, that's 55 percent more than the median household income of $46,111 in Maricopa County.And those are mostly jobs that do not have summer vacations.
Posted by Lippard at 12/06/2005 08:28:00 PM 0 comments
Dembski has crossed over a line at this point, I think. I don't think it's any longer possible to maintain that he is merely an ideologue undergoing cognitive dissonance, or that he's just engaging in wishful thinking of the type we are all probably prone to when defending ideas we have a personal stake in. He is now simply lying outright, and he has to know that.
Posted by Lippard at 12/05/2005 02:57:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: Casey Luskin, creationism, Discovery Institute, intelligent design, religion
Posted by Lippard at 12/02/2005 05:39:00 PM 5 comments
Labels: Ben Stein, Goldwater Institute, politics
Posted by Lippard at 11/29/2005 09:26:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 11/26/2005 03:31:00 PM 3 comments
Labels: lottery winners and losers
Posted by Lippard at 11/26/2005 12:46:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 11/23/2005 03:17:00 PM 1 comments
Posted by Lippard at 11/23/2005 02:47:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 11/23/2005 02:27:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: arts
Posted by Lippard at 11/21/2005 10:23:00 AM 7 comments
Posted by Lippard at 11/21/2005 09:20:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: medicine
I think we've been dividing the world along the wrong axes. It's normal for us to dichotomize our interactions along simple, one-dimensional lines—liberal-conservative, men-women, atheist-theist—and while that is a useful way to categorize (as long as we don't get so committed to the extremes that we fail to recognize them as continua), I fear that we've neglected to notice one dimension that is extremely relevant to the current discourse.
... I need a label, so I'm going to call those people who consider material evidence paramount and regard the real world as a mostly sufficient container of phenomena that define our existence the Naturals. ...
What's the contra position? There are those who think inspiration and intuition and all the internal imagery of their minds define their external reality; that what they wish to be so will be so if only they can articulate it and select and distort evidence for the purposes of persuasion. ...
I'm going to call them Unnaturals, plainly enough.
More at the source. Needless to say, we're Naturals here...
Posted by Lippard at 11/20/2005 06:45:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 11/19/2005 07:00:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 11/19/2005 06:23:00 PM 6 comments
Labels: ACLU, Arizona, civil liberties, FCC, law, Multics, NSA, politics, privacy, security, technology, TSA incompetence, wiretapping
Posted by Lippard at 11/19/2005 01:07:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: science
Posted by Lippard at 11/18/2005 09:00:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: politics
In the sharpest White House attack yet on critics of the Iraq war, Vice President Dick Cheney said on Wednesday that accusations the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify the war were a "dishonest and reprehensible" political ploy.Yet it was Cheney who was rewriting his own 2001 history in 2004 (quoting here from an az.general newsgroup posting I made on June 24, 2004):
Cheney repeated Bush's charge that Democratic critics were rewriting history by questioning prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction even though many Senate Democrats voted in October 2002 to authorize the invasion.
"The president and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory, or their backbone -- but we're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," said Cheney, a principal architect of the war and a focus of Democratic allegations the administration misrepresented intelligence on Iraq's weapons program.
Cheney said the suggestion Bush or any member of the administration misled Americans before the war "is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city."
Here's another recent example of a lie from Dick Cheney (both are on video, and were shown on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" night before last)--this text is quoted from http://www.spinsanity.org/:On "Meet the Press" on November 14, 2003, Cheney stated that "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11." What else could he have meant when he claimed a "pretty well confirmed" Mohammed Atta link to Iraq?During the CNBC interview, Cheney also dissembled in the following exchange about Mohammed Atta, an Al Qaeda member who was allegedly involved in the September 11 attacks (a witness claimed that Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in the spring of 2001, a heavily disputed assertion that the FBI and CIA have questioned):So in December 2001 he said the Atta/Iraqi meeting in Prague was "pretty well confirmed," but in 2004 he says he never said that, and that "we have never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down."BORGER: Well, let's get to Mohamed Atta for a minute because you mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was, quote, "pretty well confirmed."But as a White House transcript demonstrates, Cheney said in a December 9, 2001 interview on "Meet the Press" that, "Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that's been *pretty well confirmed*, that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack." (our emphasis)
CHENEY: No, I never said that.
BORGER: OK.
CHENEY: I never said that.
BORGER: I think that is...
CHENEY: Absolutely not. What I said was the Czech intelligence service reported after 9/11 that Atta had been in Prague on April 9 of 2001, where he allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence official. We have never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down, we just don't know.
So he was lying in December 2001 when he said it was pretty well confirmed, and lying again in 2004 when he said he never said that it was pretty well confirmed.
BTW, up until very recently the Bush administration was denying the content of Seymour Hersh's story in the New Yorker which was the first report of Rumsfeld's memo approving these techniques. They were lying.In that USA Today story, the Bush administration response to Hersh's charges, now confirmed, was:
E.g., look at the quotes attributed to "The Pentagon" and Condoleezza Rice in this USA Today article from May 15:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-05-15-rumsfeld-abuse_x.htm
I think the most blatant evidence of dishonesty by the Bush administration is found by just comparing their own statements over time, and watching them contradict themselves.
The Pentagon said that story was "filled with error and anonymous conjecture" and called it "outlandish, conspiratorial." National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in a German television interview, said of The New Yorker report, "As far as we can tell, there's really nothing to the story."In the Washington Post, May 17, 2004:
CIA spokesman Bill Harlow called the Hersh story "fundamentally wrong" in its assertion that there was a "DOD/CIA program to abuse and humiliate Iraqi prisoners." Harlow added, "Despite what is alleged in the article, I am aware of no CIA official who would have or possibly could have confirmed the details of the New Yorker's inaccurate account."Compare what's in the news these days (Washington Post, November 1, 2005) about CIA prisons to what was said in May 2004:
On Friday, the Pentagon announced that the U.S. military will not use certain prisoner interrogation procedures in Iraq and Afghanistan, including sleep and sensory deprivation, as a result of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.Nor is it clear whether the ban applies to secret prisons in other countries...
...
It remains unclear whether the ban applies to accused Taliban and al Qaeda detainees held by the U.S. military in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Posted by Lippard at 11/17/2005 08:08:00 AM 0 comments
Posted by Einzige at 11/14/2005 09:15:00 PM 3 comments
Posted by Lippard at 11/13/2005 05:16:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: Arizona, civil liberties, crime, law, politics, prayer, security, technology
Posted by Lippard at 11/11/2005 09:24:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 11/11/2005 08:56:00 PM 1 comments
Labels: creationism, intelligent design
Today CNN quotes President Bush:
Bush has a terrible habit of going on the offensive even when he's in the wrong, as he is in this case. Here, he is conveniently forgetting that much of what his Administration presented as solid fact was already discredited prior to its presentation to the American public, but it was used anyway. He forgets that this wasn't a matter of objective intelligence assessments, but of reports that were assembled by a new special intelligence analysis unit set up for the White House by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith (#3 man in the Pentagon, who resigned on January 26, 2005), David Wurmser's Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which cherry-picked intelligence to find anything that suggested a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, while ignoring all evidence to the contrary, as documented in James Bamford's book, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies (2004, Doubleday)."While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began," the president said during a Veterans Day speech in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania.
"Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war," Bush said. "They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein."
Posted by Lippard at 11/11/2005 07:10:00 PM 1 comments
Labels: politics
Posted by Lippard at 11/11/2005 01:53:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: creationism, Dover trial, intelligent design
Posted by Lippard at 11/11/2005 12:30:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: copyright, security, technology
Posted by Lippard at 11/10/2005 10:01:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: copyright, law, security, technology
Posted by Lippard at 11/10/2005 09:02:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: history, NSA, security, technology, wiretapping
Posted by Lippard at 11/09/2005 05:20:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: creationism, Dover trial
I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because he might not be there.Nothing like argumentum ad baculum...
Posted by Lippard at 11/09/2005 05:00:00 PM 1 comments
Labels: creationism, Dover trial, intelligent design
Posted by Lippard at 11/07/2005 09:37:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 11/03/2005 09:26:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: botnets, security, technology
Posted by Lippard at 11/02/2005 08:08:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 11/02/2005 07:26:00 PM 3 comments
Labels: copyright, security, technology
In addition, after a careful review of the Discovery Institute’s submission, we find that the amicus brief is not only reliant upon several portions of Mr. Meyer’s attached expert report, but also improperly addresses Mr. Dembski’s assertions in detail, once again without affording Plaintiffs any opportunity to challenge such views by cross-examination. Accordingly, the “Brief of Amicus Curiae, the Discovery Institute” shall be stricken in its entirety.A fuller quote (as well as a Fuller quote) may be found at Stranger Fruit.
Posted by Lippard at 11/02/2005 08:56:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: Discovery Institute, Dover trial, intelligent design