Key Posts Category
10 hangover cures from famous writers
WHAT’s your favourite cure for a hangover?
Hunter S. Thompson recommended poppers and beer.
Kingsley Amis recommended the Polish Bison (Bovril beef paste and vodka) and/ or a cup of Grand Marnier at breakfast.
“When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is.”
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Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev fight the religious war with Islam (bigots seize the moment)
HBO’s Bill Maher discussed the matter with Brian Levin,Director of Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism:
At one point Levin calls out”Pamela Geller”.
Well, she and the likes of Steve Emerson and Glenn Beck have been pointing the finger at a Saudi Arabian student who was injured in the blast. Here’s Beck:
We at the Blaze know that this Saudi national is a bad, bad, bad man … This administration is playing an extraordinarily dangerous game. They have very little regard for what it takes to be a citizen. Before the sequester cuts happened, they opened the prison and let illegals out. Who does that? Remember also, the Saudi national that was — is about to get on a plane — involved in blowing the legs off of American citizens, being held in protective custody or being protected, at least, by our administration. He will be put in protective custody and the plans are to deport him.
All wrong.
On the very day of the bombing, the New York Post reported on a Saudi “suspect“. That was wrong.
Of course, the Saudi is likely to be Mulsim. So. Was this an example of Islamophobia? You should be free to criticise Islam without being labelled a bigot. But critics should be scrutinised. They too can be criticised.
The Saudi national is in a Boston hospital and “is not a suspect, nor is he a person of interest. He was an individual at the marathon, and therefore, like so many individuals, has been questioned,” said the DHS. His name is Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi. He’s an innocent. He’s a victim twice over.
But other were unsure. Steve Emerson wrote in WorldNetDaily
“I just learned from my own sources that he is now going to be deported on national security grounds next Tuesday, which is very unusual,” Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism told Sean Hannity of Fox News Wednesday night.
The Reuters news agency reported President Barack Obama met with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal on Wednesday, noting “the meeting was not on Obama’s public schedule.”
After that meeting was mentioned, Emerson told Hannity, “That’s very interesting because this is the way things are done with Saudi Arabia. You don’t arrest their citizens. You deport them, because they don’t want them to be embarrassed and that’s the way we appease them.”
Smell that? The implication seems clear: the Saudi is not innocent and Obama is helping him. But Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says it is not so. “I am unaware of anyone who is being deported for national security concerns at all related to Boston. I don’t know where that rumor came from,” Napolitano said.
The full story seems to be this:
Boston – The Department of Homeland Security tells CNN that there has been some confusion and misreporting regarding two different Saudi nationals.
There is one Saudi national who is in a Boston hospital, and has been questioned by the FBI because he was at the marathon during the terrorist attack.
He is not a suspect, nor is he a person of interest. He was an individual at the marathon, and therefore, like so many individuals, has been questioned.
There is a second Saudi national from the Boston area who is in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody for being in violation of his visa. This ICE custody has nothing to do with the Boston Marathon, officials from the Department of Homeland Security said.
Geller demandsthat “American People Must Demand the Full Story”.
Jim Hoft went on the Gateway Pundit site:
Tonight Steven Emerson told Sean Hannity that the non-suspect Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi is being deported back to the Saudi Kingdom.
Barack Obama met with the Saudi foreign minister today. It was not on public schedule.
UPDATE: Shoebat Foundation reported that ali Alharbi had links to several Al-Qaeda terrorists.
Sarah AB notes:
The Muslim community, and others, are right to express reasoned concerns about the way some critics of Islam express themselves without being tarred as intolerant and deceitful extremists, eager to clamp down on free speech, or as apologists for abuses carried out in the name of Islam.
So. Islam? Max Fisher writes about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s viewing habits:
One of the “favorite” videos lists “7 steps to a successful prayer.” Another denounces Sufism, a more mystical branch of Islam. Another, with the title “one of the signs of Allah,” shows a chameleon changing colors at will as a man sings Arabic prayers in the background.
Several of the videos under “Islam” are by a man named Abdülhamid Al Juhani, who is listed by a Salafist Web portal as a scholar. His videos include Arabic audio and Russian text and show photos of Grozny, the Chechen capital. Another video under the “Islam” heading shows young men carrying assault rifles through a forest as a narrator intones, “They demonize as terrorists anyone who supports Islam.”
Update: Mother Jones’s Adam Serwer also looks at the YouTube page. He says it includes “a video of Feiz Mohammad, a fundamentalist Australian Muslim preacher who rails against the evils of Harry Potter” as well as a video “dedicated to the prophecy of the Black Banners of Khurasan, which is embraced by Islamic extremists — particularly Al Qaeda.”
Bob McManus says the NYPD were right:
Just as it’s time for politicians — and especially the press — to stop chewing on Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s leg over the NYPD’s so-far-enormously-successful anti-terrorist surveillance programs.
Knock wood on the “successful” part, of course. If America has learned anything about terrorism since 9/11, it’s that the threat is incessant, though hugely unpredictable as to source, specific motivation and any given terrorist’s tool kit of choice. . . .
No doubt the dark fantasies that put the Boston bombers into motion will be teased out of their personal histories in the days and weeks to come. But there was enough on the record yesterday to discern radical Islamist motives in their plot.
That is, to ratify once again the wisdom of Ray Kelly and the NYPD in targeting Islamic extremism as a profound and continuing threat to New York and its citizens — all of its citizens, including thousands upon thousands of Muslims — and then acting accordingly.
Where was Kelly & Co. supposed to go to protect the city from Islamist terror — Lutheran quilting bees?
Roger L Simon wrote back to David Sirota, who hoped the bombers were white non-Muslims:
…what to do about Islam, an all-consuming ideology that seeks to engulf the world. The Sirotas of our culture want to downplay that but the reality remains.
Andrew Sullivan writes
That’s what I mean by a religious war. It’s war between the extremes of fundamentalist Islam and the free, secular West. That war can exist inside the mind of a single young fanatic who, merely with access to the web and guns and pressure cookers, can stop the world in its tracks. Or it can take the form of sectarian violence in Iraq.
My reader is correct that this is not reducible to Islam in all its breadth and complexity and history. But it cannot be understood at all without grasping the fundamentalist Jihadist mindset. The uncle of the two Jihadists could not be more emphatic that he as a Muslim feels utterly violated and offended by what these losers did. He says he feels ashamed. He is a Muslim as well. And he is an American through and through.
We have to make a simple distinction: between being a Muslim and being an apocalyptic self-proclaimed Jihadist. But the latter exist, are very real, and are inspired by a toxic distortion of Islam.
A reader writes:
Would you characterize Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and the militia movement they were associated with as being “at war” with the US? If anything, those men can be said to have been “at war” with EVERYONE, including the 19 children and hundreds of others that they murdered. These men and their ilk are murderers, not soldiers, and what they have done doesn’t deserve the dignity of cloaking it as some part of a larger ideological struggle. They killed because they could. Because they wanted to. And they are enemies of all humanity.
M. Zuhdi Jasser argues for more Muslim action:
Until most Muslims begin to harness our resources and our efforts to counter the ideology of Islamism and its attraction of vulnerable American Muslim youth and its pathway towards jihadization, we will continue to see youth ages 13 and up turn against us. The “morphine” of jihadism numbs their identity and drives them to destroy free societies. It infects them, dehumanizes their fellow Americans, and instructs them to commit acts of terrorism against their own — Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
As is often the case with Islamists, their radicalization is preceded by misogyny and a learned behavior that dehumanizes women and then all those who seek to be free. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was arrested in 2009 for assault and battery against his girlfriend.
The warning signs in these two youths were obvious. But as a society that refuses to engage Islamism, we ignored them at our own peril.
Howie Carr has the last word:
“I know you’re not supposed to paint with a broad brush, unless you’re a liberal, in which case you are not only permitted, but expected to make Adam Lanza the poster boy for 100 million law-abiding legal gun owners.”
Such are the facts.
Posted: 21st, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment (1)
What they all said about peaceful all American kids Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev
RIGHT up until the moment Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev allegedly planted bombs and blew up people watching the Boston Marathon they were just regular guys. Not for a moment should you think that the therapy industries and police agencies failed to notice two budding mass murderers passing through the system. Know that they were just a couple of lads:
The family was given permanent residence on March 2, 2007. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev became a US citizen in September 2012. There is no record of him ever having left the US. Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent six months outside the US in 2012.
Sky News: “Boston: Brothers Were ‘Regular American Kids'”
The Gobe – Zolan Kanno-Youngs talke of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev:
“Dzokhar was just a guy with full potential, and never showed any signs of doing this whatsoever. I think that if you ask anybody in Cambridge that truly knew him, and truly hung out with him, this you would know that this is probably the most shocking news we’ve heard in a while….
“He was one of the more peaceful religious people I know. He never brought up any sort of political views whatsoever. I’m still in shock. I honestly can’t accept it. But I’m gonna have to.”
Alina Tsarnaev talks to WBZ-Boston about her brothers:
“They were great people. I never would have expected it. They are smart – I don’t now what’s gotten into them.”
Maret Tsarnaeva, the brother’s aunt, talks to journalists in Toronto, Canada:
“Within the family, everything was perfect…
“What century are we living in? We need evidence. Otherwise you can go shoot anyone like a chicken on the street. Not for me. We need evidence.All these pictures are on the computer. I have to see them. You have to have a motive first. Something that would drive you through some actions. They cannot go crazy or mad or sick just for one day. As far as I know them they are fine.”
She says Tamerlan Tsarnaev is married and has a daughter.
“Tamerlan has his daughter, above the age of that little boy who died there. Why would he think that this daughter’s life is worth more than that little boy’s life that died there? I don’t trust the FBI. Show me evidence.”
Anzor Tsarnaev, the father of the suspects, tells the AP:
“My son is a true angel… We expected him to come on holidays here… They were set up, they were set up! I saw it on television; they killed my older son Tamerlan.”
“In my opinion, my children were set up by the secret services because they are practising Muslims.”
“I will never believe my boys could have done such a terrible thing,” he said in a telephone interview from Makhachkala, the capital of the Dagestan region. “I have no doubt they were set up.”
“My older son is killed and now they are after my little boy,” he said. “It is a provocation of the special services who went after them because my sons are Muslims and don’t have anyone in America to protect them.”
Tsarnaevs’ father has more:
Q: Did he want to be an American citizen?
A. He wanted to, of course. Why not?
Q. But it didn’t work out, right?
A. Because with his girlfriend, there was a scandal. He hit her lightly. He was locked up for half an hour. There was jealousy there. He paid $250, that was it, he went home. Because of that — in America you can’t touch a woman, they wouldn’t give him citizenship.
A. Because of that they didn’t give him citizenship?
Q. He had gone through the interview, that was it. But they said, he said, they will check the federal authorities, when they check me they will give it. He would have been granted it, he passed the interview. Now we have a new system where they check young people. Because he is a Muslim, I think, and a Chechen, too.
And this might be a classic:
Yes, he was in Makhachkala. Makhachkala, he was never out my sight. He used to sleep till lunchtime, then we visited relatives. We went to Chechnya to visit relatives. He only communicated with me and his cousins. There was nobody (else). People know. I would ask him, did you come here to sleep or what?
Ramzan Kadyrov, leader of Chechnya speaks on Instagram:
“Tragic events happened in Boston. As a result of a terrorist attack, people were killed. We already expressed our condolences to the residents of the city and to the people of America. Today, as the media report, a certain Tsarnaev was killed during a detention attempt. It would be logical if he was detained and an investigation was conducted, all the circumstances and degree of his guilt explained. Apparently, the special forces needed a result at any price to calm society. Any attempt to make a link between Chechnya and the Tsarnaevs, if they are guilty, is in vain. They grew up in the US, their views and beliefs were formed there. The roots of evil must be searched for in America. The whole world must battle with terrorism. We know this better than anyone. We wish recover to all the victims and share Americans’ feeling of sorrow.”
Robin Young, host of the public radio PRI show Here and Now, tweets:
“Remember Djohar well, beautiful boy in tux at prom party and elsewhere.”
They knew it!
Tamerlan Tsarnaev won the New England Golden Gloves amateur boxing competition in 2009. New York Daily News speaks to boxer Edwin Rodriguez:
“He was really weird and kind of downplaying [the workout] saying ‘Edwin is too light. He’s not going to be a good work for me, but I’m going to come down anyways… He was odd looking, dressed up with military boots, kind of a weird guy.
“We were just sparring so I wasn’t trying to knock him out. But I was trying to hurt him to the point he’d respect me because he thought I was too small so I didn’t really like that. He told that to my trainer. Like I said, he was kind of a cocky and arrogant type of character. He was a little odd and different.”
Ruslan Tsarni is the brothers’ uncle. Why would they have done it?
“We’re Muslims, we’re Chechens, we’re ethnic Chechens. Someone radicalised them, but it was not my brother, who just moved back to Russia. He spent his life bringing bread to their table, fixing cars. He didn’t have time or chance. He’s been working. What do I think was behind this? Being losers, not being able to settle themselves, and thereby hating everyone who did…
“It’s not a surprise about him [Tamerlan]. The younger one, that’s something else.”
Deana Beaulieu went to school with Dzhokhar. She told the AP, you have to be “careful with the quiet ones”.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev tweeted:
“I didn’t become a lifeguard to just chill and get paid, I do it for the people, saving lives brings me joy.”
On the day of the bombing, he tweetred:
“There are people that know the truth but stay silent & there are people that speak the truth but we don’t hear them ‘cus they’re the minority… Ain’t no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people,” and urged fellow users to re-tweet a photograph of a man bending over an injured woman.”
His last tweet was on Wednesday went:
“I’m a stress-free kind of guy.”
Russia Today talks to Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the brothers’ mother:
Such are the facts…
Posted: 19th, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comments (3)
In pictures: the 2013 Breaking News Photography Pulitzer Prize winners
THe 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography is won by Rodrigo Abd, Narciso Contreras, Khalil Hamra, Manu Brabo and Muhammed Muheisen, all of the Associated Press, for “their compelling coverage of the civil war in Syria”. Photojournalism does not get better than this:
13014382
Injured men are carried to a hospital during fierce fighting between Free Syrian Army fighters and government troops in Idlib, north Syria, Saturday, March 10, 2012. U.N. envoy Kofi Annan met with Syrian President Bashar Assad on Saturday in Damascus during a high-profile international mission to mediate an end to the country's yearlong conflict. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
Posted: 17th, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Photojournalism, Reviews | Comment
Boston Marathon bombs: praying for Jeff Bauman Junior
YOU can see the photos from the Boston bombings here. We saw the AP’s picture of one man’s injuries. Not every publication thought it too much. You can see our cropped version of the man as he’s helped by first repsonders and Carlos Arredono.
And now some good news. Well, better news. The man was rushed to the Boston Medical Center ER. His name is Jeff Bauman Junior. He’s lost both of his legs. His father, Jeff Bauman Senior, writes:
“Can everyone pray for my son Jeff Jr.? I just can’t explain what’s wrong with people today to do this to people. I’m really starting to lose faith in our country.”
He adds:
Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers, they did help greatly. Unfortunately my son was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had to have both lower limbs removed due to the extensive vascular and bone damage. I was with him last night and am heading back down to Boston – Boston Medical Center to be with him today. He went back into surgery last night at midnight for exploratory due to fluid in his abdomen. He came out at 2:30 and doctors informed us he was doing better. Thanks again to all you guys and girl
You can help Jeff here.
When people say they are praying for someone, it can sound glib. Tony Woodlief helps :
Sometimes I wake up in a hotel bed or my apartment and I forget where I am, what bed this is and what city this is. I shower and sometimes I shave and I mutter sentences that have no meaning because they are not in the right place. They are divorced from all place, these words like I don’t understand this and I can’t do this and Please help me. I mutter these sentences and I stop, the washrag over my face or the blade to my neck, and I wonder where the words came from, and who they are for, and why I am saying them, and if only God understands why we talk to ourselves in the bleary dark morning hours.
Only God understands if they are prayers or laments, and how words can be both, how every sentence spoken out of place is really just another way of saying: Where am I to go?
Heather MacDonald does not believe:
I take it that believers do not ascribe such inconsistent results to capriciousness on God’s part, but rather to their own limited capacities to understand God’s ways: “Thy Will be done.” But why continue directing any psychic energy to a being so lacking in sympathetic correspondence to human needs and values. It will not do to say: “God does respond to our prayers, but in ways that we cannot fathom.” Saving a child from cancer and letting a child die from cancer cannot both be a sympathetic response to prayer; if we had wanted a stricken child to die in order to secure an earlier entry to heaven, we would have said so. And if premature death from cancer is such a boon, why doesn’t a loving God provide it to one and all?It is humans who work with passion and commitment every day to try to save their fellows (and a range of other creatures) from suffering and sorrow. Emergency room medicine is constantly evolving to try to ensure that gun shot victims and people crushed by cars survive. Doctors and hospital staff work frantically throughout the night to try to revive a failing heart or a shattered brain. They do so out of love and compassion, while God, who could restart an exhausted heart in an instant, demurs. The only source of love on earth is human empathy. Transferring our own admirable traits onto a constructed deity just obscures the real human condition: we are all we have, but that is saying a lot.
If you can’t pray for Jeff Bauman, we can at least contemplate what it means to be him.
Posted: 17th, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comments (3)
The Boston Marathon Bombs were the work of Muslims, the Tea Party, whites, immigrants, Nazis, al-Qaeda, anarchists and the US Government
WHO set off the bombs at the Boston Marathon? Everyone who has an agenda knows:
CNN’s national security analyst Peter Bergen twice suggested that “right-wing extremists” could be behind Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings… Bergen was asked to explain if the bombing could have been an act of terror. Bergen answered in the affirmative, and proceeded to name possible suspects depending on the type of explosive used.
Setting off two bombs at the end of a public race could be an act of terror. Well, he’s the expert:
“I think the actual – the constituency inside the bomb will make a big difference about how we identify the person who did this,” he explained at the end of CNN’s 4 p.m. ET hour of live coverage. The perpetrators “could be a right-wing extremist group.”
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Bombs kill three and maim many more at Boston Marathon (photos)
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Posted: 15th, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Sports | Comments (2)
Justin Bieber was an Auschwitz doctor working on non-surgical mass sterilisation through sound
JUSTIN Bieber was once a Nazi SS wartime general, historians say. Experts who saw Bieber sign the visitor book at Anne Frank’s wartime home in Amsterdam – he wrote: “Truly inspiring to be ble to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she has belieber Would have beens” – believe the singer was once an SS stormtrooper named Helmet Wirth.
Wirth escaped to Paraguay. It is now believed his knowledge of genetics and suitcases full of baby skin and children’s organs enabled him to disguise himself as ‘Justin Bieber’.
“Wirth worked in the aural desensitisation zone at Auschwitz,” explains one historian. “His job was to test sounds to see if they could create non-surgical mass sterilisation. As former chairman of the anatomy department at the Reich University in Strassburgu, Wirth’s experiments on babies enabled him to rise to the upper echelons of the Third Reich.”
Wirth recorded his experiments. He would often sing whilst he worked. Anorak played some of Wirth’s tapes to a group of teenagers. Twelve year-old Jessica Hool from Basildon, was impressed:
“OMG! You can really hear it’s Bieber.”
Holly Jones, added:
“To think that thousands of murdered children were forced to listen to Justin Bieber before they were raped and murdered shows that the Nazis weren’t all bad. My nan had Procol Harem at her funeral. It’s just a matter of taste”
Bieber fan Milly Samson added on twitter: “Ho the fuck is Anne Frank? If that bitch takes my baby maker I’m gonna fuck her up. For shit!”
Posted: 15th, April 2013 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts | Comment (1)
Hillsborough: In 1981 Tottenham Hotspur not Liverpool fans were the white working-class scum in the cage
IN Liverpool, two memorials to the 96 football fans who died at Hillsborough have gone on display. It was On 15 April 1989 when it happened. Liverpool were playing Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-final. There was a crush of bodies in the Liverpool end. And it got worse. And worse. The fans had nowhere to go. The police would not open the gates to release the pressure. The fans begged them to. The police did nothing. To them, the unfolding human disaster was only about crown control.
As the bodies were being collected, the police, the State and the media colluded to blame the fans. They lied.
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Posted: 14th, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Sports | Comment (1)
The greatest most terrifying buried alive moments in film history
BEING buried alive is right up there in the list of things you fear most.
YOUTUBER jethack shows us the Mysterious Swaying Plant. He says it’s creepy. It is. But when I saw it I stated to think of The Vanishing, the Dutch film in which a man is buried alive. Jewthack walks off with his video to post on YouTube. He never digs beneath the wavering plant. And in a box beneath the soil a man with only a stem to breath through, screams…
Presenting the Best Buried Alive Scenes in Film.
The Vanishing
The Screaming Woman
The Candy Snatchers
Superman
Gunmen
Patrick Stewart played his drug lord role with relish, especially since it is such a change for him recently. From the press packet: With his role as the captain of the starship Enterprise, “I became everything synonymous with honor, intelligence, and rectitude,” he says. “Loomis is a delightful and refreshing alternative to that.” Indeed. In his very first appearance, we see him sitting at an open grave, where he calmly has his wife buried alive.
The Big Carnival
The Serpent and the Rainbow
Blood Simple
White Zombie
Tales of Terror
Kill Bill (Vol 2)
Casino
Creepshow
Premature Burial
Couple caught having sex on Street View (5 of the Best)
A COUPLE have been caught on Google Street View, doing the sex outdoors while the Google car drove by.
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Posted: 11th, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comments (2)
Margaret Thatcher and Hillsborough: Her Press Secretary Bernard Ingham’s letter to a ‘disgusted’ Liverpool fan
ANORAK has argued against a minute’s silence at football grounds for Margaret Thatcher. She was no football fan. Her time as Prime Minister coincided with English football’s slide into darkness. The nadir was the Millwall fans rioting at Luton Town. The horrors were at Bradford City (56 dead), Heysel (39) and Hillsborough. Of that last tragedy in which 96 Liverpool fans – adults and children – lost their lives at the FA Cup semi-final, voices poured misinformation into Thatcher’s ear. She was a willing audience to their lies – “One officer, born and bred in Liverpool, said that he was deeply ashamed to say that it was drunken Liverpool fans who had caused this disaster, just as they had caused the deaths at Heysel.”
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Margaret Thatcher: ‘Is Margaret Thatcher A Woman?’ asked the envious Polly Tonybee
IN May 1988, Polly Tonybee wrote about Margaret Thatcher in the Washington Monthly. The diatribe was entitled “Is Margaret Thatcher A Woman?”.
Yes, she was. And a mother. But Tonybee wants to present Thatcher as a man, her Spitting Image puppet made flesh.
True enough, Thatcher never gave another women a job at her Cabinet table. But, then, it was her simply being there, Britain’s first female Prime Minister, that makes her a symbol of female emancipation and power. Like her or loathe her, Margaret Thatcher believed she could be Prime Minister. And she made it happen.
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Posted: 9th, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Politicians | Comments (2)
Glasgow leads parties to ‘mark Thatcher’s death’
WORDS on Margaret Thatcher’s passing will run into the millions. But only STV has the apparent scoop that her son Mark Thatcher has also died.
In other news, over 300 people massed in Glasgow to celebrate the former Prime Minister’s death.
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Posted: 8th, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Politicians | Comments (20)
Can psychedelic psilocybin make magic mushrooms a cure for severe depression?
NEWS on Magic Mushrooms. Can they be used to cure depression? The key component is something called psilocybin. The theory is that it can stop patients dwelling on their perceived inadequacies. Psilocybin turns off the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex, an area that appears to control emotion. It is a psychedelic drug.
Says Professor David Nutt (more nominative determinism at work), neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London:
“People with depression have overactive default mode networks and so ruminate on themselves, on their inadequacies, on their badness, that they are worthless, that they have failed – to an extent that is sometimes delusional. Again psilo-cybin appears to block that activity and stops this obsessive rumination.”
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Posted: 8th, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comments (9)
When football kits clash changes are inevitable: a history of soccer disasters
FLASHBACK looks at football kit changes. When both teams are wearing the ame kit,
Are you Crystal Palace in disguise?
There’s only one conceivable reason why any of the 21,281 spectators at Selhurst Park are likely to remember Saturday’s match between Crystal Palace and Barnsley: both team played in Palace kits. The Eagles played in their usual red-and-blue and the Tykes donned Palace’s yellow away shirt. Whether they took advantage of the 30 percent reduction in the club shop is not known. In the event both teams played like Palace and failed to score.
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Posted: 7th, April 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, Sports | Comments (2)
How to say goodbye when you’re dying
RIP Robert Ebert. He knew the end was coming. The film critic wrote in September 2011:
I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.
How do you approach the end? Iain Banks, the writer, is unwell. He took to his blog:
I am officially Very Poorly.
After a couple of surgical procedures, I am gradually recovering from jaundice caused by a blocked bile duct, but that – it turns out – is the least of my problems.
I first thought something might be wrong when I developed a sore back in late January, but put this down to the fact I’d started writing at the beginning of the month and so was crouched over a keyboard all day. When it hadn’t gone away by mid-February, I went to my GP, who spotted that I had jaundice. Blood tests, an ultrasound scan and then a CT scan revealed the full extent of the grisly truth by the start of March.
I have cancer. It started in my gall bladder, has infected both lobes of my liver and probably also my pancreas and some lymph nodes, plus one tumour is massed around a group of major blood vessels in the same volume, effectively ruling out any chance of surgery to remove the tumours either in the short or long term.
The bottom line, now, I’m afraid, is that as a late stage gall bladder cancer patient, I’m expected to live for ‘several months’ and it’s extremely unlikely I’ll live beyond a year. So it looks like my latest novel, The Quarry, will be my last.
As a result, I’ve withdrawn from all planned public engagements and I’ve asked my partner Adele if she will do me the honour of becoming my widow (sorry – but we find ghoulish humour helps). By the time this goes out we’ll be married and on a short honeymoon. We intend to spend however much quality time I have left seeing friends and relations and visiting places that have meant a lot to us. Meanwhile my heroic publishers are doing all they can to bring the publication date of my new novel forward by as much as four months, to give me a better chance of being around when it hits the shelves.
There is a possibility that it might be worth undergoing a course of chemotherapy to extend the amount of time available. However that is still something we’re balancing the pros and cons of, and anyway it is out of the question until my jaundice has further and significantly, reduced.
Lastly, I’d like to add that from my GP onwards, the professionalism of the medics involved – and the speed with which the resources of the NHS in Scotland have been deployed – has been exemplary, and the standard of care deeply impressive. We’re all just sorry the outcome hasn’t been more cheerful.A website is being set up where friends, family and fans can leave messages for me and check on my progress. It should be up and running during this week and a link to it will be here on my official website as soon as it’s ready.
Iain Banks
– ENDS –
How do you face the end?
Posted: 5th, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment (1)
In epic photos: One World Trade Center rises from Ground Zero New York
NEW YORK City’s One World Trade Center is up. It occupies part of the Ground Zero site when the Twin Towers once stood. When completed, the tower will be the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere – 1776ft high. Visitors will be able to stand on the observation deck – floors 100 to 102 – and look out at the great city. After 11 years that wonderful view is back. We’ll never forget 9/11. But – you know what – up yours Al Qaeda. In your face. We win:
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1972: School’s out in London for Steve ‘Ginger’ Finch and the Schools’ Action Union strike
Photo: A boy is held around the neck by a helmetless policeman during scuffles outside County Hall, Lambeth, where schoolchildren were demonstrating in support of the demands put forward by the Schools Action Union, which had called a one day strike of London pupils. 17/05/1972.
ON the 4th May 1972 about 200 boys aged between 11 and 16, put down their pencils and rulers at Quinton Kynaston School in the Finchley Road near St John’s Wood in North London, in a protest over unpleasant school dinners, caning, and the conformity of school uniforms. They swarmed over the school wall and not knowing really what to do next, decided to all go home, writes Rob Baker.
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Posted: 3rd, April 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts | Comment
Manchester United’s ‘hurt’ Rio Ferdinand loses to Chelsea’s honest broker John Terry
MANCHESTER United’s Rio Ferdinand is a terrific player whose decision not to play for England was an elegant revenge for once being overlooked in favour of Chelsea’s John Terry. Ferdinand only got the call because the obnoxious Terry has retired from international football. Ferdinand could have used the moment of his selection to tell everyone at the FA what he thought of them in words of one syllable. But he chose not to rake over old ground and mention the row between his brother Anton Ferdinand and Terry. He just said he’d like to play for England, got picked, then explained that his treatment schedule wouldn’t allow him to play, before heading to Qatar for a spot of media work. Mindful of Ferdinand’s grace under fire, we wondered what it would be like when United played Chelsea in the FA Cup.
Terry never got on the pitch, acting as an unused substitute. The monocular Chelsea fans, predictably, jeered Ferdinand’s every touch. Just as they did when the teams’ last played at Stamford Bridge.
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Posted: 2nd, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Sports | Comments (2)
Mick and Mairead Philpott did kill his six children before they went dogging
MICK Philpott, 56, set a fire to his home at 8 Victory Road in Derby. The May 11 2012 fire killed six of his children. He is guilty of manslaughter. He never meant to kill. He meant to frame his former mistress, Lisa Willis. She lived with Philpott and Mairead Philpott, his wife, 32. He would sleep with the women on alternate nights.
Then in the February before the fire, Lisa left. Philpott wanted revenge.
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David Miliband used Paolo Di Canio and left Sunderland with the better man
PAOLO Di Canio has caused “outrage” at Sunderland. The Sun says “thousands of furious” Mackems are turning on the club. A Rob Johnson says he is “sickened and ashamed” that Di Canio is the club’s new manager. John Hall, a 92-year-old World War 2 veteran says he would “fight the fascists all over again”.
The Sun’s lead headline, “WAR VETS BOYCOTT ‘FASCIST’ DI CANIO”, is somewhat undone when Mr Hall’s quote is seen in full:
“I’m too old to go to matches but I’d pack it in if I was still going.”
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Posted: 2nd, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews, Sports | Comments (13)
The 19 greatest Christian gifts
YESTERDAY’S news of religious Easter eggs piqued our appetite for further Christian gifts with which to enhance our enjoyment of the holiday.
Here are just some of the myriad delights we discovered.
‘Inspired by scripture’
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Posted: 1st, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, The Consumer | Comment
The best April Fools jokes of 2013
THE best April Fools Day pranks of 2013:
* YOUTUBE deletes every video , leaving only the winners behind:
I encourage everybody to watch as many videos as possible before YouTube deletes everything tonight.” –Antoine Dodson
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Posted: 1st, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment (1)
The best of the Passing Show: Bolshevism, Ireland, Japanese empire and German hurt satirised
THE Passing Show was a British magazine published in the early 1920s. One section was particularly adventurous. Called Culled From The World’s Press, Culled From Sources, Through Foreign Spectacles, Through American Spectacles or Other People’s News, the feature was a look at news-based cartoons in other organs. A round-up of the satire and the funny was an exercise in editorialised news aggregation.
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Posted: 28th, March 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts | Comment
