It's totally bogus that Halloween is about giving corn syrup wrapped in plastic. Meh. Home cookin' is always better.

By the way--
Who Spoiled Halloween?

In the 1960s and 1970s, the tradition of Halloween trick-or-treating came under attack. Rumors circulated about Halloween sadists who put razor blades in apples and booby-trapped pieces of candy. The rumors affected the Halloween tradition nationwide. Parents carefully examined their children's candy bags. Schools opened their doors at night so that kids could trick-or-treat in a safe environment. Hospitals volunteered to X-ray candy bags.

In 1985, an ABC News poll showed that 60 percent of parents worried that their children might be victimized. To this day, many parents warn their children not to eat any snacks that aren't prepackaged. This is a sad story: a family holiday sullied by bad people who, inexplicably, wish to harm children. But in 1985 the story took a strange twist. Researchers discovered something shocking about the candy-tampering epidemic: It was a myth.

The researchers, sociologists Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi, studied every reported Halloween incident since 1958. They found no instances where strangers caused children life-threatening harm on Halloween by tampering with their candy.

Two children did die on Halloween, but their deaths weren't caused by strangers. A five-year-old boy found his uncle's heroin stash and overdosed. His relatives initially tried to cover their tracks by sprinkling heroin on his candy. In another case, a father, hoping to collect on an insurance settlement, caused the death of his own son by contaminating his candy with cyanide.

In other words, the best social science evidence reveals that taking candy from strangers is perfectly okay. It's your family you should worry about.

The candy-tampering story has changed the behavior of millions of parents over the past thirty years. Sadly, it has made neighbors suspicious of neighbors. It has even changed the laws of this country: Both California and New Jersey passed laws that carry special penalties for candy-tamperers. Why was this idea so successful?

http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/

>> ^nibiyabi:
None of them were buried for "three days"? I stopped the video the first time this claim was made, and arrived at Mithra. Here is a source stating that Mithra was raised after 3 days: http://freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Jesus_and_Mithra


There's no actual evidence for that claim, though. You'll notice that the site you link to doesn't provide a source.

That's because there isn't one. Most of the stuff that's claimed about Mithraism is pure speculation. We have literally no idea what the doctrines of Mithraism really were. It was a mystery cult, and those initiated were forbidden from revealing the doctrines to the public. The doctrines were never written down, as far as we know. All we have to go on are a few scattered claims and rumors in extant texts, and the symbols inside the Mithraea where Mithras was worshiped--symbols that could mean practically anything.

>> ^thehelix:
http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/index.html
There are plenty of sources cited there in the interactive transcript. Check them out if you think this is all lies. He also has an extensive Q&A section that responds to a lot of the criticism.
People who have a knee-jerk "lies!" response without any open minded thought are far less credible in my mind. Agree or disagree, at least have a productive discussion before dismissing anything.


The fact is that Zeitgeist's assertions regarding religion stand or fall with the legitimacy of his main source Gerald Massey, a 19th century poet and self-taught Egyptologist. His work has not stood the test of time, and his theories are not at all accepted among professional Egyptologists today.

Other sources cited on that list as authoritative purveyors of fact include James Frazer's Golden Bough and Manly P. Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages. James Frazer used a flawed research methodology and came to conclusions that have since been abandoned by succeeding anthropologists and mythographers. Manly P. Hall was an early 20th century esotericist, occultist, and freemason. His writings are works of speculation more than history.

Yep, if Gerald Ford hadn't put an end to people disliking each other once and for all, things could have been really polarized by now!

If a therapist tells a client to kill themselves, and the client does so, that person didn't need to live. So in that case, I'd thank the therapist for ridding the earth of a weak person who took the advice of anybody in authority because they were too weak to make their own informed decisions. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

If a leader orates beautifully about killing millions of Jews, but he is speaking to an empty room because everyone is at home enjoying time with their families and neighbors, where does his message go? Do six million people end up in gas chambers? It's the people who propel the leader, not his message. That is why I absolve the leader of much of the blame, but condemn the followers. If the German people hadn't been so easily manipulated by a flatulent meth addict because they were reeling from a devastating loss in World War I, Hitler would have been reduced to nothing.

Some people would argue that Hitler was just as much to blame as his followers, but he was just a man with ideas. He couldn't have sent ten million people to their deaths by himself. And Charles Manson couldn't have massacred seven people on his own, either.

You think if he'd said to bake them brownies, instead of murder them, those people would still be alive?

That depends on how well the Manson Family could bake.

Squeaky Fromme tried to assassinate Gerald Ford, if you recall. I don't think Manson told her to do that. Some people are just crazy on their own. Maybe the murders would have still occurred, but maybe not. *shrugs*

>> ^Crosswords:
I'm very glad you have high moral standards and a strong will, not everyone does. In fact some people are pretty easily influenced by authority or their peers. And while this doesn't belay that these people are responsible for their actions it also doesn't exonerate those who push them into said actions. If somebody worships the ground I walk on, and I turn around and tell them to go kill some people, am I not responsible for how I used my influence over them? Isn't my influence and direction over them the catalyst? Again unless the influenced was coerced under extreme duress, they still retain responsibility for their action, but person who told them to is also responsible, it was their actions, their misuse of their power that caused the other person.
If a therapist tells a client, "wow you really don't have anything to live for, you should kill yourself", and the client does, is the therapist not responsible? Didn't they, in a position of authority, give the emotionally vulnerable client instructions to do something that would cause irreparable harm?
I would also like to add people can go to prison for conspiracy to commit murder. If somebody told you to kill someone, and you said no, then told the cops that person had tried to get you to kill someone and had solid evidence to the fact, that person is going to jail for a long time, if not life.
So I guess to sum things up, yes the people who actually did the killings were responsible for what they did, and as far as I know, none of them went free. But Manson, who directed them, is also responsible for his actions. You think if he'd said to bake them brownies, instead of murder them, those people would still be alive?

For winkler: http://www.videosift.com/video/Gerald-Kein-describes-Waking-Hypnosis

http://www.videosift.com/video/Paul-McKenna-meets-Richard-Bandler

Gerald Green put on a fine show, that between-the-legs dunk with no shoes on was one of the most difficult dunks I've ever seen in that competition. (Also one of the most dangerous to attempt.)

looks a lot like Gerald Scarfe's (of "Pink Floyd's The Wall, fame) style of animation.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Best Brokaw ever! Even better than Dana Carvey's.

1. What's Opera, Doc? (Warner Bros./1957)
2. Duck Amuck (Warner Bros./1953)
3. The Band Concert (Disney/1935)
4. Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century (Warner Bros./1953)
5. One Froggy Evening (Warner Bros./1956)
6. Gertie the Dinosaur (Winsor McCay/1914)
7. Red Hot Riding Hood (MGM/1943)
8. Porky in Wackyland (Warner Bros./1938)
9. Gerald McBoing Boing (UPA]/1951)
10. King-Size Canary (MGM/1947)
11. Three Little Pigs (Disney/1933)
12. Rabbit of Seville (Warner Bros./1950)
13. Steamboat Willie (Disney/1928)
14. The Old Mill (Disney/1937)
15. Bad Luck Blackie (MGM/1949)
16. The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (Warner Bros./1946)
17. Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (Fleischer/1936)
18. The Skeleton Dance (Disney/1929)
19. Snow White (1933 cartoon) (Fleischer/1933)
20. Minnie the Moocher (Fleischer/1932)
21. Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (Warner Bros./1943)
22. Der Fuehrer's Face (Disney/1943)
23. Little Rural Riding Hood (MGM/1949)
24. The Tell-Tale Heart (UPA/1953)
25. The Big Snit (National Film Board of Canada/1985)
26. Brave Little Tailor (Disney/1938)
27. Clock Cleaners (Disney/1937)
28. Northwest Hounded Police (MGM/1946)
29. Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (Disney/1953)
30. Rabbit Seasoning (Warner Bros./1952)
31. The Scarlet Pumpernickel (Warner Bros./1950)
32. The Cat Came Back (National Film Board Of Canada/1988)
33. Superman (Fleischer/1941)
34. You Ought To Be in Pictures (Warner Bros./1940)
35. Ali Baba Bunny (Warner Bros./1957)
36. Feed the Kitty (Warner Bros./1952)
37. Bimbo's Initiation (Fleischer/1931)
38. Bambi Meets Godzilla (International Rocketship/1969)
39. Little Red Riding Rabbit (Warner Bros./1941)
40. Peace on Earth (MGM/1939)
41. Rooty Toot Toot (UPA/1952)
42. The Cat Concerto (MGM/1947)
43. The Barber of Seville (Lantz/1944)
44. The Man Who Planted Trees (National Film Board Of Canada/1987)
45. Book Revue (Warner Bros./1946)
46. Quasi at the Quackadero (Cruikshank/1975)
47. Corny Concerto (Warner Bros./1943)
48. Unicorn in the Garden (UPA/1953)
49. The Dover Boys (Warner Bros./1942)
50. Felix in Hollywood (Sullivan/1923)

-- continued.

One year after the US-instigated coup, President Gerald Ford - in the oval office thanks to some domestic White House "black ops" that garnered unfavorable attention in the imperial homeland (Watergate) - claimed that US actions in installing Pinochet were "in the best interests of the people of Chile and certainly in our own best interests."


Historical Connections

Twenty-eight years to the day after Chile's 9/11, the world witnessed a different, more spectacular form of unimaginable violence, broadcast live on national TV, with different ideological and geo-political parameters. The culprits were almost certainly based in the extremist Islamic terror networks of the Middle East.

There are some interesting, dark connections, however, between these two Nine-Elevens. The US policy of deterring democracy and social justice in the perceived interest of US multinational corporations and world capitalism was hardly restricted to Chile and the official Cold War era (1945-1991). In pursuit of the same basic goals that informed the US/Pinochet coup, the US has supported and in some cases conducted anti-democratic coups against excessively (from a US perspective) "left" governments (any state that proposed to encourage development of its sovereign territory in significant autonomy from the US-dominated world capitalist economic system) in Syria (1949), Iran (1953), Iraq (1963), Indonesia (1965), and Greece (1967). It provided massive economic and military assistance to authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes that suppressed democratic and left opposition and kept their domestic economies open to foreign and especially US corporate penetration and domination. It armed Israel, waged war and enforced a deadly, decade-long sanctions campaign against Iraq, stationed troops indefinitely in the Islamic Holy Land, and provided cover for Israel's prolonged, racist annexation of Palestinian territory. The US funded the Arab far-right, supporting arch-reactionary Islamic extremists like Osama bin Laden, valued as weapons in the same Cold War that provided cover for the US campaign to crush national self-determination, democracy, and social justice in places like Iran, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Chile.

By largely eliminating the left, undercutting democracy, and generally subjecting regional developments to imperial fiat both during and after the official Cold War, the US shrunk the available space for "normal" (Western-style/parliamentary) airing of social, political and related international grievances in the Middle East. This, in turn, brought "blowback" (an internal CIA term for the unintended consequences of secret US foreign policies) from America's imperial periphery to the skies and streets of New York City and Washington DC, where Pinochet's henchmen (part of a CIA-sponsored team of international assassins code-named "Operation Condor") killed a former Allende supporter and his American driver (Olando Letelier and Randy Moffit) in 1976. How darkly appropriate, then, that George W. Bush attempted to put Kissinger, a leading perpetrator in the state-terrorist events of 9/11/73, at the head of a federal commission to investigate US security lapses prior to 9/11/2001, which opened the door for new levels of US and US-sponsored state terrorism.


Worthy and Unworthy 9/11s

Of course, only a tiny percentage of the US population knows about Chile's 9/11, for reasons that go beyond obvious gaps of time, geography, and language. A relevant explanatory text here is the second chapter, titled "Worthy and Unworthy Victims," of Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of The Mass Media (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1988), published as the Cold War was nearing its partial conclusion with the collapse of the Soviet deterrent (itself part of the context for 9/11/2001) to American global ambitions. "A propaganda system," the authors noted, "will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy." Identified with the official US Cold War "enemy" force of socialism or Marxism - really social egalitarianism and national self-determination (still the basic adversaries of US policy in the "post-Cold-War era") - Pinochet's victims have only recently attained a small measure of historical worthiness in dominant US corporate-state media. This slight retrospective legitimacy comes far too long after the terrible facts. It is no match for the worthiness bestowed on the most officially precious victims in US History: the Americans who died on the only 9/11 that matters in a nation that drifts through history in a dangerous fog of selective, top-down remembrance.


Paul Street (pstreet@cul-chicago.org) will speak on "State-Run Media" on Friday, September 26, 2003 at a conference titled "Is Our Media Serving Us?" at Columbia College, Hokin Annex, 623 S. Wabash, Chicago, IL, 12:45 PM.


Appendix: Selected Sources on US Involvement in 9/11/73 and Related Developments in Chile

US Senate, Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1975); United States Congress, Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 94th Congress, 1st Session, November 10, 1975 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1975); William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History (London: Zed, 1986), pp. 232-243; Seymour M. Hersh, "The Price of Power: Kissinger, Nixon, and Chile," Atlantic Monthly, 250 (1982), no. 6, 21-58; Poul Jensen, The Garotte: The United States and Chile, 1970-73 (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1988); Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (New York, NY: Verso, 2001), pp. 55-76; "Why Is the U.S. Mum About Pinochet?," CNN.com (November 25, 1998), available online at http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9 811/25/pinochet.us/; National Security Archives, The Chile Documentation Project (2000-2001), available online at http://www.gwu.edu/~ nsarchiv/latin_america/chile.htm.

An interesting article about Peter Higgs, a humble guy who says:

"Most of what has been attached to my name should not have been," he replies, "but probably the Higgs boson is correctly attached because I was probably the person who drew attention to it most in my papers. However, as far as the mechanism of generating vector boson masses is concerned, I usually write down a whole string of names, starting with Anderson and including Englert and Brout, Gerald Guralnik, Dick Hagen and Tom Kibble, and also Gerard 't Hooft."
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/17/7/6

The physicist in the video, Kim Griest, says the typical theoretical upper bound for mass of higgs boson is around 1 TeV. He, personally thinks around "1000 GeV" is where it should be, "maybe up to 2000 GeV". Yet, Jos Engelen, CERN's chief scientific officer, who's been at CERN since 1971, say's "LEP showed that the Higgs was heavier than 114.4 GeV, and we can also guess its mass from other experiments. Within the Standard Model we know that it is not heavier than 240 GeV at the 95% confidence level." Engelen says that the LHC will only be able to produce pairs of Higgs bosons if the Higgs mass is less than 500 GeV. Hmmm, I remain thoroughly confused
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/17/9/7

The New York Times has a suprisingly good, and lenghty, article about the LHC with nice multimedia:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/science/15cern.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

CERN has a metric shitload of media and info here:
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/
- It kinda bugs me that they have such a strict copyright on their media. Isn't it predominantly publicly funded?

Perspective on collision energies:
The LEP, the predicessor to LHC, prior to going offline in 2000, topped out at --- 104 GeV.
The Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is running at ---------------- 1.96 TeV.
The LHC will initially be capable of colliding beams of protons at an energy of -- 14 TeV.
The abandoned SSC project here in the US would have been capable of --------- 40 TeV.

http://www.videosift.com/video/Not-the-Nine-Oclock-News-Gerald-the-Gorilla

welcome anea.

saw your sift talk post. another suggestion to get you fully into the sift is creating some playlists. have fun

marked NSFW, like these other animated boobs

A bit off subject, but I was watching Gerald Ford's funeral yesterday and couldn't help but notice the similarities at the end of this video.

The Carvey clip (linked below) is the gold standard of Ford tributes. meg had the foresight of the Reaper on that one.

There are not too many other Gerald Ford clips out there that don't involve Squeaky Frome. And I say to hell with Squeaky Frome.