Not content with inflicting the aural abortion that was Live Aid he is also responsible for this little nobster...
* meant to type 'monster' but this word is apt!
An Hour Of Balearic Beats
54 minutes ago
Friday, 26 March 2010
Extra Music New
Don't forget now that blogger has deleted the blog (and the PROMO ONLY blog - WTF???) that EMN can be found
HERE
HERE
Mulling Rove and Romney in Iowa
President Obama made a surprise visit to an independent bookstore in downtown Iowa City after delivering a speech on health care reform.
"Well, this used to be my favorite place," Obama said as he walked around the store, Prairie Lights.
Obama looked around in pursuit of a couple of books for his daughters, Sasha and Malia.
Along his way he picked up "No Apology" by Mitt Romney and "Courage and Consequence" by Karl Rove.
"What do you think guys?" he asked reporters, holding up a hardback copy in each hand before setting them back down.
Obama disappeared downstairs for a few minutes and emerged with two books: “Journey to the River Sea” by Eva Ibbotson and “The Secret of Zoom” by Lynne Jonell.
He pulled out five $20 bills to pay the cashier and then offered to pick up the book his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, had grabbed: a large Star Wars pop-up book for his six-year-old son, Ethan.
"It's a little expensive, sir,” Gibbs said to his boss as he handed it over. Obama nonetheless forked over the $37.44 for the book.
"I can handle it,” he said. “It’s for keeping his dad away for too many hours a day.”
"I need more books than that, sir,” Gibbs remarked.
Obama thanked the employees.
"You have a wonderful bookstore,” he said, adding that hopefully he’s helping “to make sure everybody has health insurance.”
He then shook a few hands of customers in the store. Someone remarked about the significance of his dropping by the store.
Obama said he hoped so. "It's not every day a president stops by,” he said.
On his way out the door, Obama said the books he purchased for his daughters were “based on recommendations.”
“Of course the question is how they take to them, but I think they’re going to like them,” he said.
"Well, this used to be my favorite place," Obama said as he walked around the store, Prairie Lights.
Obama looked around in pursuit of a couple of books for his daughters, Sasha and Malia.
Along his way he picked up "No Apology" by Mitt Romney and "Courage and Consequence" by Karl Rove.
"What do you think guys?" he asked reporters, holding up a hardback copy in each hand before setting them back down.
Obama disappeared downstairs for a few minutes and emerged with two books: “Journey to the River Sea” by Eva Ibbotson and “The Secret of Zoom” by Lynne Jonell.
He pulled out five $20 bills to pay the cashier and then offered to pick up the book his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, had grabbed: a large Star Wars pop-up book for his six-year-old son, Ethan.
"It's a little expensive, sir,” Gibbs said to his boss as he handed it over. Obama nonetheless forked over the $37.44 for the book.
"I can handle it,” he said. “It’s for keeping his dad away for too many hours a day.”
"I need more books than that, sir,” Gibbs remarked.
Obama thanked the employees.
"You have a wonderful bookstore,” he said, adding that hopefully he’s helping “to make sure everybody has health insurance.”
He then shook a few hands of customers in the store. Someone remarked about the significance of his dropping by the store.
Obama said he hoped so. "It's not every day a president stops by,” he said.
On his way out the door, Obama said the books he purchased for his daughters were “based on recommendations.”
“Of course the question is how they take to them, but I think they’re going to like them,” he said.
The White Buffalo
Saw this LA singer/songwriter play live in the Mojave desert last weekend. Great show. Whiskey soaked...
Radiohead had their Karma police, the UK gets its Christian police.
A Christian policing group which believes that the power of prayer can catch criminals and keep officers safe from harm has been awarded a £10,000 grant from the Home Office to widen its involvement with local church groups.
The Christian Police Association (CPA) wants members of the public to "adopt a cop" by praying for the safety of local officers as they ply their beats. Subjects that the association says congregations should be encouraged to pray for include "helping officers make on-the-spot decisions" and encouraging them to "resist corruption".
The nationwide organisation, which boasts 2,000 members, claims that there is "circumstantial evidence" to suggest that regular prayer sessions can help reduce crime rates and encourage criminals to make a new start to their lives.
...
Don Axcell, a retired Metropolitan Police sergeant who heads the CPA, told Police Review: "We want people to pray for the police, for example in solving crimes or protecting officers. We want to see the Christian community fully interacting with the service. I think it will break down barriers."
Jerome Taylor @'The Independant'
For my own part, I'd rather see that £10,000 backed by empirical evidence. But that's just me.
The Improbable Research blog had this to add:
The 1994 Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to John Hagelin of Maharishi University and The Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, promulgator of peaceful thoughts, for his experimental conclusion that 4,000 trained meditators caused an 18 percent decrease in violent crime in Washington, D.C.
Hagelin reported his results in the paper “Interim Report: Results of the National Demonstration Project to Reduce Violent Crime and Improve Governmental Effectiveness In Washington, D.C., June 7 to July 30, 1993,”
Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, Fairfield, Iowa”.
Other observers noted that the crime rate in DC actually achieved historically high levels during that period.
@Meditation and/or prayer vs. crime
Envious Australia finally gets its own T-Rex!
"Today sees the publication of a paper by Roger Benson and colleagues on the first Australian tyrant dinosaur (Benson et al. 2010). Thanks to this find, we now know that tyrants did, indeed, get deep into the south. The specimen is, unfortunately, not a complete skeleton or even a partial one: it's a single, 30-cm-long pubic bone, currently known only by its catalogue number, NMV P186046 [shown here, image provided by Roger Benson]. It's from the famous Dinosaur Cove site in Victoria, and its detailed anatomy demonstrates it tyrannosauroid identity. Additional clues show whereabouts the specimen lies within the tyrannosauroid radiation."
Australia might finally be getting its own t-rex! Not to brag, but in Canada, we had ours way before: Albertosaurus, discovered in 1884. Better late than never, I guess...
Darren Naish @'ScienceBlogs'
...and I guess the subtlety of this comment is lost on them!
"Juat a little concerned here, now that we've eliminated ACORN, clearly THE #1 source of America's woes over the last 40 years, what can we do next? I read conservative blogs all day and a few months ago I was clearly given the indication that America was being disassembled brick by brick by ACORN's very existence... So now that America's saved, isn't the fight over? Or do we just need to keep inventing new Ultimate Symbols of Evil to focus the base on and achieve the most important thing for us all, a Republican run everything? Clearly the world didn't figure out the last 8 years we ran things how GREAT a Rep world would be, from the great remodeling work we did for free in Iraq, to the strength of our friendship with such paragons of ethical, humane, and above all AMERICAN ideals as Halliburton, Blackwater, Exxon-Mobil, and the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia?"
For the devotional hooligan
Roni Size and acclaimed composer William Goodchild combined their creative forces with the Emerald Ensemble Chamber Orchestra, a Gospel Choir, and Roni's own band, Reprazent, for a unique, one-off performance at Bristol's Colston Hall.
The psychology of homelessness
When you see a blanket-covered body shifting uncomfortably ina doorway, hole-ridden boots protruding at one end, matted hair at the other, what do you think? That we don’t have enough houses? That the person in question should get a job? Do you feel compassion or disgust?
The reality is that the filthy, dirt-poor person you’re looking at may well have been abused or neglected as a child. They’ve no doubt been rejected time and again. They’re almost certainly in bad health, physical and mental, and could be addicted to alcohol, drugs or both. If they’re female, it’s likely they’ve suffered domestic violence.
Until recently, research on homelessness was focused on economic issues and social policy. But gradually psychology and society are waking up to the psychological processes that lead many people to become homeless in the first place. Researchers are trying to pin down how people end up with nothing and how to get them back on their feet. Therapists are listening to homeless people’s stories, equipping them with the skills to cope and move on.
Facebook And Sexually Transmitted Diseases: What You Need To Know
This morning, the Twitterverse was abuzz with mentions of Facebook and syphilis. The Sun published “Sex diseases soaring due to Facebook romps” (according to The Guardian, the original headline was “Facebook spreads syphilis”). So what’s this all about?
Obviously, a website cannot “spread” a sexually transmissible infection (STI) such as syphilis, which is transmitted through vaginal sex, oral sex and anal sex.
Well, apparently a public health official from the NHS commented that young people in the areas most affected by syphilis were 25 per cent more likely to log on to Facebook than young people in other areas of the country. It is also claimed that several of the approximately 30 people in one area who contracted syphilis had met partners through social networking sites, such as Facebook. Unfortunately, it is this notion, thanks to sensationalist journalist practices, that Facebook can spread syphilis that went way more viral than syphilis itself.
Clearly, there could be several other things going on here: maybe these individuals use the computer more often overall, or use a variety of sites to meet people, or else they use all sorts of resources at their disposal to meet people for sex (not just Facebook but also bars, parties, etc). Were these things assessed in the study? It wasn’t mentioned.
Ever since the early days of the internet, various websites have become easy scapegoats for sex-negative claims, such as scary stories about how people meet sex partners through the internet and then bad things happen. However, rarely is the good of the internet mentioned in this regard.
Do websites, especially social networking websites and dating websites and casual sex sites, make it easier for people to find each other for romantic and/or sexual encounters? Of course they do. And this is often a positive thing for those involved and does not always result in STI transmission.
What people often overlook is that these same sites can also make it easier for public health professionals to track a burgeoning epidemic and stop it before it gets out of hand. Before the internet, if you were limited to meeting people at bars, you may have known very little about them if you chose to have a casual sexual encounter with them. Maybe you didn’t even know their first or last name or how to get in touch with them.
However, let’s say you do meet someone through Facebook and then you arrange to meet. A week or two after the encounter, you find that your genitals feel funny or that you have discharge, or maybe you just decide to go in and get tested as you had a new partner recently (good for you for getting tested!). Let’s say that you then find out you have an STI, such as syphilis. Guess what? You can now track down that person, should you choose to (and I hope you do), and let them know that they should get tested for syphilis too.
Facebook and other social networking sites have the potential to make STI partner notification programs that much easier – and that’s a good thing.
Many health departments have partner notification programs, especially for infections such as syphilis, Chlamydia, gonorrhoea and HIV that they are particularly worried about spreading. Often these programs mean that if you test positive for an infection and don’t want to contact your past or present partners yourself, you can give your healthcare provider the contact information of your past/present partner(s) and they will call those people for you. They will NOT give your name but they may say something along the lines of “You have been identified as a possible sexual contact of someone who recently tested positive for (fill in the blank with the STI you tested positive for).” They then often offer STI testing to that individual. Cool, huh?
To me, the bottom line has nothing to do with Facebook. It goes back to the basics.
Get tested for STIs if you are:
- about to have sex with a new partner
- have not been tested since your last new partner
- have had unprotected vaginal sex, anal sex or oral sex with someone whose STI history you do not know
- if you feel you have any other risk factors
- if you think your partner may have had sex with someone else since being with you
- if you just want to know. It doesn’t hurt to get tested for STIs on occasion, even if you are pretty certain that you and your partner are monogamous and not having sex with anyone else.
And let’s not blame Facebook for everything now, shall we?
Debby Herbenick @'Gizmodo'
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