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Murphy is alive and well. The power supply blew in the middle of a push to get a design out the door. Fortunately we found a cheap replacement at my electronics store of choice, NewEgg.com. Athena Power AP-P4ATX35 350W Power Supply

You don’t make sense « Life-changing things that don’t matter Came across this while researching PlumpyNut. The United States are inhabited by about 300 million people with an unemployment rate of about 5 percent. If you’re interested in the rest of the world, look up Kwashiorkor. According to Medline , Kwashiorkor is a form of malnutrition characterized by thinning hair, edema, and of course weight loss. You’ve seen the photos of emaciated babies with swollen bellies – that’s Kwashiokor. The swollen belly can be due to edema, but it often is a sign of an overtaxed liver. Death is generally from liver failure. According to the World Health Organization , the cause of Kwashiorkor is not fully understood . However, one of the main factors is a high carbohydrate, low protein diet. Carbs are cheaper than proteins, so poor people around the world are at risk for kwashiorkor. The World Health Organziation points to a diet of corn or maize as a contributing factor. Co...

This rather chilling video demonstrates through video clips and interviews that children’s programming can have a profound effect on them, from predisposing them to subliminal messages to changing their entire worldview. The depth of dark manipulation by Disney is a definite must-see for parents and professionals alike.

I think we should bring back the codpiece. Tiberon Film festival picture: Codpieces in the Stanley Kubric film A Clockwork Orange . Presidential Piece:

If you haven’t read Kay Redfield Jamison’s “ Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament ” run out and get a copy. She is a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins and is bipolar herself. “I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less intense emotions can never do. I believe, in short, that we are equally beholden to heart and mind, and that those who have particularly passionate temperaments and questioning minds leave the world a different place for their having been there. It is important to value intellect and discipline, of course, but it is also important to recognize the power of irrationality, enthusiasm and vast energy. Intensity has its costs, of course — in pain, in hastily and poorly reckoned plans, in impetuousness — but it has it...

Amazon.com: Victorinox-Swisschamp XAVT “BIG DADDY” Knife: Sports & Outdoors Hey, Girl Scout friends! Now THIS is a knife. Get one of these bad boys and you can throw away your tool chest, cutlery, fishing tackle box, and corkscrew. Oh, and fire your auto mechanic. It’s all there. I can’t help it, I love to window shop at amazon.com. I have NO idea what I was looking for when I found this. I was thinking about getting one for hubby for Christmas as a joke. What’s really strange is that as I was typing this in, hubby came in with the Hammacher catalog. They’re selling one that has every tool Victrinox ever made. It’s about 5 times the width of this (and 5 times the price) and is simply bristling with screwdrivers for hardware that most people will never even see, much less need to tighten.

Letter to a good Christian woman: I think we can all agree that consistantly objectifying women is not just wrong, it is dysfunctional. By “objectifying” I mean that the viewer isn’t concerned with the woman’s needs and desires but only with his own. This lack of empathy, when taken to extremes , is the hallmark of a sociopath or a narcissistic personality . In Muslim cultures this objectification is so ubiquitous that the women must wear burqas to protect themselves from being attacked. Displaying the female form, the clerics claim, incites sexual excitement in men and invites rape . We heard this same argument when miniskirts were popular in the US. The United States actually has a great deal more censorship than most European countries. It started with the Comstock Laws , laws that were intended to oppress women by denying them healthcare information. In Europe, casual nudity is unremarkable and nobody is inappropriately aroused by it, while in the U.S. a...

Just in case anyone is still complaining that Islamists are violent, here’s something from the KJV bible. It’s pretty clear what a good Christian is supposed to do to non-Christians. Deuteronomy 13 6 If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; 7 Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth; 8 Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: 9 But thou shalt surely kill him ; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. 10 And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to th...

This refers to a previous bailout, not to the latest ripoff. H. R. 1424: Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 Here is the full text, and I suggest that everybody read this bill. It was pushed through with only a couple of days debate by lawyers who have little understanding of the workings of Wall Street or The Fed, and who have huge financial interest in the institutions that will benefit from it. To add insult to injury, they tacked a lot of pork barrel spending onto it to BRIBE Congress to agree to it. http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/financialsvcs_dem/essabill.pdf Some comments: “To amend section 712 of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, section 2705 of the Public Health Service Act, section 9812 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to require equity in the provision of mental health and substance-related disorder benefits under group health plans, to prohibit discrimination on the basis of genetic information with respect to health insurance an...

David Brooks: The Class War Before Palin Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts. I think both parties have completely lost their way. Republicans used to be fiscally conservative. They were for small government. They tended to be socially conservative but they also stayed out of people’s lives. What the hell happened? Twenty years post-Reagan, laissez-faire economics and dozens of Party-financed Think Tanks later they’ve lied their way into the heads of the citizens who are the most damaged by trickle-down economics, mostly by appealing to Christian moral issues that the average politician completely ignores in his own personal life. The NeoCons – “Teddy Roosevelt Republicans” – even lie to themselves. ...

Positive deception is when you change the parameters so that you don’t have to lie. Throwing the ball easy to a little kid so that he succeeds and develops a good attitude toward the game. Giving every kid a trophy so they don’t get discouraged. Putting everyone in the school on the Honor Roll so that they all feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, this instills the kids with total lack of concern for quality.

Rex 84 – From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Exercises similar to Rex 84 happen regularly.[5] Plans for roundups of large numbers of persons in the United States in times of crisis are constructed during periods of increased political repression such as the Palmer Raids and the McCarthy Era. CIVIL SECURITY PLANNING Since WWII, the U.S. government has had contingency plans in preparation for a large scale disaster or attack. However, during the last twenty-five years–beginning with civil unrest at the height of the Vietnam War–the government’s plans have increasingly on focused ways of controlling political dissent. US FEMA Camps The United States Federal Emergency Management Agency has numerous detainment camps throughout the United States. Some camps have been recently constructed and / or renovated and are fully staffed. The existence of the camps coupled with Presidential Executive Orders giving the President and Department of Homeland Security (of which FEM...

I’m sorry, but I had an existential crisis last night and in a fit of Kafka -esque boredom I morphed into a centipede and ate my computer.

Thinking Machine 4 : Play the game. Chess visualization I don’t have the patience for chess unless mentally enhanced by certain herbs. Until my local health food store starts selling it, I’m not going to be playing chess. Nonetheless, I found this site interesting. The picture above visualizes a computer opponent’s “thought” process as it examines series of moves and responses.

PubMed: [The origin of informed consent] . Interesting article about the history of “informed consent.” It hardly makes sense to let your doctor do things to you without a complete explanation. Therefore, invested with this authority which derived from his professional role and from his very work, he felt it his duty to guide the patient, deciding and for him. The patient is an ignorant person who does not have the knowledge, the intellectual capacity or moral authority to oppose or disagree with the wishes and decisions of the physician who, instead, on account of his doctrine, knows exactly what is good for him.

A few weeks ago there was a vehicle in front of me at the coffeeshop window with a phone number and link to The Evolutionary Brain . I called the number and got the guy in the truck, we waved at each other, and he gave me a DVD of the above video, Dr. Robert Scaer on Brain State Technologies and Trauma . I had a theory about this 18 years ago when I worked for an EEG company and was getting into brainwave synchronization. Doesn’t it seem obvious that if you can “read” brainwaves, then you can also write them? It would be tricky. We’re not looking for ECT, which is more like an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that wipes the whole thing clean. We just want to defrag the mind. The main site for the technology, Brain State Technologies™ Brain State Conditioning™ . Imnsho, information like this is an absolute necessity if you don’t want to drown in your own drool. YMMV, of course.