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Archive | April 12, 2013

Police Kill Woman Fleeing Drug Warrants

By on April 12, 2013 in News 16

Emily_Josephine_KrumreiI feel safer now, don’t you?

Via Information Liberation:

A police officer in the suburban Dallas community of Richardson, Texas, shot and killed a woman with outstanding drug arrest warrants as she fled from an attempted traffic stop Monday morning. Emily Krumrei, 32, becomes the 9th person to die in US domestic drug law enforcement operations so far this year.

Emily Josephine Krumrei (Smith County SO)According to the Dallas Morning News, citing Richardson police spokesperson Sgt. Kevin Perlich, an officer “was attempting to get a violator to pull over in a parking lot” for reasons that are yet unclear, but Krumrei fled in her Lexus. Shortly thereafter, an officer in a squad car saw her and attempted to stop her, but she refused to pull over.

Krumrei turned onto the southbound frontage road to the North Central Expressway. There, Perlich said, “a third officer near the frontage road was working a traffic accident.

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Should the State Seize Your Firearms if You’re On Meds?

By on April 12, 2013 in News 35
Picture: RAMA (CC)

Picture: RAMA (CC)

The attorney for a New York State man claims his client’s firearms license was revoked after the state learned he was on an anti-anxiety medication. Is this a sign of future things to come? Should the state be able to seize your firearms if you’re on certain medications?

Via LiveScience:

An attorney for an upstate New York gun owner claims his client’s permit to own firearms was suspended by state police because he received a prescription for anti-anxiety medication.

“It’s disconcerting to know that if your doctor prescribes you a psychotropic medication … that results in the state police trolling to pick up this information, and if you do have a gun license, it will be revoked,” Jim Tresmond, attorney and gun-rights advocate, told Buffalo news station WKBW.com.

Keep reading.

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‘What a Conspiracy Theorist Believes’

By on April 12, 2013 in News 24

The-New-Yorker-Logo-1Another day, another smug, politically-motivated take on the beliefs of others. One man’s conspiracy is another’s truth.

Via New Yorker:

But, over all, the trends were clear. The more people believed in free-market ideology, the less they believed in climate science; the more they accepted science in general, the more they accepted the conclusions of climate science; and the more likely they were to be conspiracy theorists, the less likely they were to believe in climate science.

These results fit in with a longer literature on what has come to be known as “motivated reasoning.” Other things being equal, people tend to believe what they want to believe, and to disbelieve new information that might challenge them. The classic study for this came in the nineteen-sixties, shortly after the first Surgeon General’s report on smoking and lung cancer, which suggested that smoking appeared to cause lung cancer. A careful survey revealed that (surprise!) smokers were less persuaded than nonsmokers were.

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Vatican Department Shares Building With Italy’s Biggest Erotic Gay Sauna

By on April 12, 2013 in News 5

vatican gay sex club saunaCan the Catholic Church just no longer be bothered to make a token effort to hide the obvious? The Vatican’s department of missionary activities recently paid $35 million to house its officials within a building that also contains Europa Multiclub, an anonymous men’s hookup club that claims to be the “number-one gay sauna in Italy,” the BBC reports:

A historic palazzo in Rome that houses a key Vatican department is also the home of a well-known gay sauna. The Vatican paid 20m euros in 2008 for around 20 apartments in the building.

The proximity to Europa Multiclub, billed as Italy’s top gay sauna, has drawn comment due to the Vatican’s strict stance on gay partnerships. The facility boasts a Turkish bath, Finnish sauna, whirlpools and massages. Also on offer are “bear parties”.

The Vatican has declined to comment on the proximity of the sauna to the department headquarters.

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Convenient Insect Cuisine Coming to UK

By on April 12, 2013 in News 4

I’ve likened my gastronomic habits to that of a catfish: If I’m hungry, I’ll be happy to eat just about anything that floats by. I credit my lack of pickiness to growing up in a home where there weren’t a lot of home-cooked meals, so it was catch as catch can. (I also developed terrible eating habits, which I’m still addressing, but that’s a story for another time.) Anyway, I’d cheerfully eat an insect-based meal – especially if it’s nutritious and convenient. I can understand that others might be squeamish, tough.

Via Gothamist:

One British company has now presented their plan (in the video below) to get bugs into our bellies, noting insects are high in protein, and low in fat and cholesterol. But this isn’t just a personal thing—eating them would also be good for the planet, which is being damaged by digestive gas and feed production from the unsustainable herds of cattle that are at the center of the Western diet.

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Deir Yassin Massacre Remembered

By on April 12, 2013 in News 12
Picture: Palestine Solidarity Project (C)

Picture: Palestine Solidarity Project (C)

(Note from the editor: I regret that we weren’t able to run this on April 9 due to site upgrades, but it’s still an important story and worthy of your consideration.)

Tell me this doesn’t reek of abuse victims becoming perpetrators.  Raouf J. Halaby writes in Counterpunch:

Even though April 9, 1948, is a day of infamy for Palestinians, few commemorative ceremonies will be held.

Sixty-Five years ago today organized Jewish terrorist groups, including the Irgun and Stern gangs, attacked the Village of Deir Yassin, a village whose population numbered some 600 people; 112 women children and old men were brutally butchered in a massacre that has been likened to the Babi Yar Nazi massacre of Jews in Kiev, Ukraine. Add insult to injury, some of the survivors were stripped, loaded on flat truck beds, paraded in a demeaning triumphal drive through Jerusalem’s Jewish neighborhoods, driven out of town, and shot to death.

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How To Potty Train Your Child By Demonic Exorcism

By on April 12, 2013 in News 7

demonic exorcismCould parenting difficulties be attributable to Satanic possession of your children? Top anti-demon website DemonBuster reveals:

We received the following email about a woman learning DELIVERANCE, and practicing DELIVERANCE on her young child:

“Well my baby boy has been difficult to potty-train. I would sit him in the toilet for a long time and nothing would happen. So I got really mad, sat him in the potty and told him he had to “go”. The baby started screaming and I got the idea that it was a demon. So I commanded it to manifest and give me his name. The baby continued screaming and saying: “You can’t make me, you can’t make me”. I insisted in the demon telling me his name, so the Holy Spirit said: “That’s his name, “you can’t make me”. I commanded it out. The baby had deliverance and he has been potty-trained since.”

Praise the Lord!

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Iranian Government Scientist Claims To Have Invented Machine That Reveals The Future

By on April 12, 2013 in News 8

speculationsHow does it work? Algorithms, duh. Via the Telegraph:

Ali Razeghi, a Tehran scientist has registered “The Aryayek Time Traveling Machine” with the state-run Centre for Strategic Inventions. The device can predict the future in a print out after taking readings from the touch of a user, he told the Fars state newsagency.

Razaeghi, 27, said the device worked by a set of complex algorithms to “predict five to eight years of the future life of any individual, with 98 percent accuracy”. As the managing director of Iran’s Centre for Strategic Inventions, Razeghi is a serial inventor with 179 other inventions listed under his own name.

“My invention easily fits into the size of a personal computer case and can predict details of the next 5-8 years of the life of its users,” he said. “The reason that we are not launching our prototype at this stage is that the Chinese will steal the idea and produce it in millions overnight.”

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Americans and Their Conspiracy Theories

By on April 12, 2013 in News 33

Apollo 15 flag, rover, LM, IrwinAs you all know, we’re not scared of a conspiracy theory or two here at disinformation, but we’re also skeptical, wanting to hear multiple views. Not so Jeff Nesbit of US News:

There’s just no polite way to put it.

There are big, entire parts of American society that believe in things that just aren’t true – and a recent national survey by Public Policy Polling only confirms it.

Name your conspiracy theory, and some segment of America believes it, the PPP survey found. The handful of news reports and blog posts on the PPP poll last week focused on the usual political subjects that always seem to float through the Internet ether.

About a fifth of Republican voters believe President Barack Obama is the anti-christ, for instance. Three quarters of Democrats believe former President George W. Bush’s administration lied about weapons of mass destruction in the run up to the Iraq war, while three quarters of Republicans don’t.

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Robotic Bees to Pollinate Monsanto Crops

By on April 12, 2013 in News 11

Maybe.  Russ McSpadden writes at Earth First! Newswire:

Pollinators participate in the sexual-reproduction of plants. When you eat an almond, beet, watermelon or sip on coffee, you’re partaking of an ancient relationship between pollinators and flowers. But since the 1990s, worldwide bee health has been in decline and most evidence points to toxic pesticides created by Shell and Bayer and the loss of genetic biodiversity due to the proliferation of GMO monocrops created in laboratories by biotech companies like Monsanto.

But never worry, those real life pollinators—the birds and the bees, as they say—may soon be irrelevant to the food needs of civilization. Harvard roboticists are developing a solution to the crisis: swarms of tiny robot bees made of titanium and plastic that can pollinate those vast dystopian fields of GMO cash crops.

The Harvard Microrobotics Lab has been working on its Micro Air Vehicles Project since early 2009. Borrowing from the biomechanics and social organization of bees, the team of researchers is undergoing the creation of tiny winged robots to fly from flower to flower, immune to the toxins dripping from petals, to spread pollen.

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