Author Archive | JacobSloan

One Quarter Of Britons Say They Are Curious To Try Cannibalism

try cannibalism

A taboo urge lying just below the surface of society, waiting to bubble up? Tabloid the Daily Star reports:

Millions of Brits want to eat human flesh like movie cannibal Hannibal Lecter, a shock report revealed yesterday. Almost a quarter of us reckon we are “curious” to taste human meat – while 14% want a piece of ourselves fried to learn what our own body tastes like.

Even more of those questioned confessed they would be happy to tuck into their own body if a doctor safely took a sample from them.

The findings of the cannibalism poll for telly channel Eden come just days after 40-year-old Brit Geoffrey Portway admitted a US plot to kill and eat a child. He faces up to 27 years in an American jail after law enforcement agents found his home in Massachusetts was equipped with a steel cage and a child-sized homemade coffin.

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Robert Moss On How To Use Active Dreaming

active dreamingLife feeling a bit grey? Sounds True talks to shamanic dream explorer Robert Moss, pioneer of “active dreaming,” who explains the power of dreaming techniques to help yourself and others:

When people think about dreams in our society at all and try to talk about them, they typically talk as if dreaming is a passive activity. You go to sleep and you have a dream or maybe a dream has you.

But we can be active dreamers in a couple of very interesting and important senses. We can learn to be active about entering the dream state—this approach goes beyond the more familiar version of lucid dreaming by teaching us how we can start out conscious or lucid and enter the dream state from that conscious level and stay conscious through the whole experience.

You learn to reenter that dream consciously, go back and find the dream, talk to a character, resolve a problem, go beyond a terror—learn how to use your personal dreams as portals to places of healing and imagination and doorways into the multidimensional universe.

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Did The Internet Destroy The Middle Class?

destroy the middle classVia Salon, virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier puts forth his argument that it is so:

The photography company Kodak employed more than 14,000 people. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. The number of people who are contributing to the system to make it viable is probably the same. Instagram wouldn’t work if there weren’t many millions of people using it.

So there’s still a lot of human effort, but the difference is that whereas before when people made contributions to the system that they used, they received formal benefits, which means not only salary but pensions and certain kinds of social safety nets. Now, instead, they receive benefits on an informal basis. And what an informal economy is like is the economy in a developing country slum. It’s reputation, it’s barter, it’s that kind of stuff.

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Dairy Associations Lobby The FDA To Alter The Definition Of “Milk” To Include Aspartame

definition of "milk"It’s not quite as bad as some have reported – cancer-causing artificial sweetening additives such as as aspartame likely would still need to be listed in tiny letters as ingredients. But the milk could otherwise be packaged, marketed, and sold as just “milk.” The stated goal is to reverse the trend of lagging dairy consumption by children, particularly in school. From the U.S. government’s Federal Register:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is announcing that the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) have filed a petition requesting that the Agency amend the standard of identity for milk and 17 other dairy products to provide for the use of any safe and suitable sweetener as an optional ingredient.

IDFA and NMPF request their proposed amendments to the milk standard of identity to allow optional characterizing flavoring ingredients used in milk to be sweetened with any safe and suitable sweetener—including non-nutritive sweeteners such as aspartame.

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2,300-Year-Old Mayan Pyramid In Belize Bulldozed For Roadway Project

mayan pyramidThe Sydney Morning Herald reports that a private company has demolished key Mayan ruins in order to use the debris to fill potholes:

A construction company has essentially destroyed one of Belize’s largest Mayan pyramids with backhoes and bulldozers to extract crushed rock for a road-building project. Nohmul sat in the middle of a privately owned sugar cane field.

The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, Jaime Awe, said the destruction at the Nohmul complex was detected late last week. The ceremonial center dates back at least 2300 years and is the most important site in northern Belize, near the border with Mexico.

“It’s a feeling of incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity…they were using this for road fill,” Mr Awe said. “It’s just so horrendous…To think that today you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but that this company would completely disregard that and completely destroy it.”

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875,000 People Are On America’s Terrorist Suspect List

terrorist suspect list

They’re all around us — the number of people being tracked as suspected terrorists will soon cross the one million mark, Reuters reports:

The number of names on a highly classified U.S. central database used to track suspected terrorists has jumped to 875,000 from 540,000 only five years ago, a U.S. official said. Among those was Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose name was added in 2011.

Maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center, the highly classified database is not a “watchlist,” but a repository of information on people whom U.S. authorities see as known, suspected or potential terrorists from around the world.

The “Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment” is a master database which agencies use to build other catalogs of possible terrorists, like the “no-fly” list which prevents people on it from boarding airplanes.

Karen Greenberg, an expert in counter-terrorism policy at Fordham University, questioned whether the growth in the database’s size made it easier for officials to spot threats before they materialize.

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What If European History Was Told Like Native American History?

european historyAn Indigenous History of North America inverts the norm by imagining a U.S. school textbook devoted to the intricacies of indigenous societies in the Americas, with a few paragraphs covering the history of Europe:

The first immigrants to Europe arrived thousands of years ago from central Asia. Most pre-contact Europeans lived together in small villages. Because the continent was very crowded, their lives were ruled by strict hierarchies within the family and outside it to control resources. Europe was highly multi-ethnic, and most tribes were ruled by hereditary leaders who commanded the majority “commoners.” These groups were engaged in near constant warfare.

Religion infused every part of Europeans’ lives. Europeans believed in one supreme deity, a father figure, who they believed was made of three parts, and they particularly worshiped the deity’s son. They claimed that their god had given humans domination over the earth. They built elaborate temples to him and performed ceremonies in which they ate crackers and drank wine and believed it was the body and blood of their god, who would provide them with entrance into a wondrous afterlife called heaven when they died.

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Blueprint For 3D-Printable Gun Downloaded 100,000 Times In A Few Days

3d-printable gunFiles for a printable gun which is immune to metal detectors were downloaded briskly for two days, before the gun’s inventors and Kim Dotcom’s Mega site removed them at the government’s behest. A few days ago Forbes reported:

[100,000] is the number of downloads of the 3D-printable CAD files for the so-called “Liberator” gun that the high-tech gunsmithing group Defense Distributed has seen in just the last two days.

The State Department has now demanded Defense Distributed take down its printable gun files due to possible export control violations.

The controversial gun-printing group [was] hosting those files on Kim Dotcom’s Mega storage site. It’s also been uploaded to the filesharing site the Pirate Bay, where it’s quickly become one of the most popular files in the site’s 3D-printing category.

It’s worth noting that only a fraction of those who download the printable gun file will ever try to actually create one.

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Guantanamo-Style Force Feeding Occurs In U.S. Prisons Every Day

force feedingVia Common Dreams, Ann Neumann on barbaric force feeding occurring onshore and offshore against prisoners who see hunger striking as their last available method of protest:

I know a hunger-striking prisoner who hasn’t eaten solid food in more than five years. He is being force-fed by the medical staff where he’s incarcerated. Starving himself, he told me last year, is the only way he has to exercise his first amendment rights and to protest his conviction.

The fact that force feedings are being discussed in the context of Guantánamo obscures the routine use of feeding tubes in American prisons. Other recent feeding tube cases have taken place in Washington state, Utah, Illinois and Wisconsin. No sweeping study of force-feeding has been done, so statistics on usage don’t exist. Only three states have laws against force-feeding prisoners: Florida, Georgia and California, where a hunger strike in 2011 at a facility in Pelican Bay effectively caused a court examination of prison conditions.

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The Mazzeri Dream Hunters Of Corsica

mazzeriOn the French isle of Corsica, the chilling prehistoric occult practice of dream hunting, performed by psychically-gifted individuals called mazzeri, is still done by a small number today. Drawing from descriptions by anthropologist Dorothy Carrington, TerraCorsa reveals:

The activities of the mazzeri stem from the Corsican hunting and foodgathering peoples of the pre-Neolithic times (before about 6000 B.C.)

The mazzeri are dream-hunters, who go out at night to kill an animal. They recognize in the face of the animal someone known to him, nearly always an inhabitant of his village. The next day he will tell what he has seen and the person mentioned will die in the space of time running from three days to a year, and always within an uneven number of days. If an animal is only wounded by the mazzere, then the person it represents will meet an accident or illness, but not death.

To be a mazzere it is necessary to have a psychic gift that opens the door to the parallel world.

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