Get the Bacofoil out

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Bad Science - Wi-Fi Wants To Kill Your Children


Won’t somebody, please, think of the children? Three weeks ago I received my favourite email of all time, from a science teacher. “I’ve just had to ask a BBC Panorama film crew not to film in my school or in my class because of the bad science they were trying to carry out,” it began, describing in perfect detail the Panorama which aired this week...Of course you should be vigilant about health risks. I don’t question that there may be some issues worth sober investigation around Wi-Fi safety. But this documentary was the lowest, most misleading scaremongering I have seen in a very long time.




Pinholes

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W

elcome to the annual Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day exhibition. 2311 images by as many different pinhole photographers from 68 countries.

All made without the benefit of a lens and all made on April 29, 2007.

Pinhole photography

is lensless photography. A tiny hole replaces the lens. Light passes through the hole; an image is formed in the camera.

Pinhole cameras are small or large, improvised or designed with great care. Cameras have been made of sea shells, many have been made of oatmeal boxes, coke cans or cookie containers, at least one has been made of a discarded refrigerator. Cameras have been cast in plaster like a face mask, constructed from beautiful hardwoods, built of metal with bellows and a range of multiple pinholes. Station wagons have been used as pinhole cameras – and rooms in large buildings. Basically a pinhole camera is a box, with a tiny hole at one end and film or photographic paper at the other.

Bombs away!

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It's the last hope for neo-cons like John Podhoretz, creating another bogeyman in the image of Saddam including WMDs (not yet available but expected in the shops soon) and then 'freeing' a nation by bombing the fuck out of it.

Still, it is World War lV you know.

 Commentary Online  
The Case for Bombing Iran

Much of the world has greeted Ahmadinejad’s promise to wipe Israel off the map with something close to insouciance. In fact, it could almost be said of the Europeans that they have been more upset by Ahmadinejad’s denial that a Holocaust took place 60 years ago than by his determination to set off one of his own as soon as he acquires the means to do so. In a number of European countries, Holocaust denial is a crime, and the European Union only recently endorsed that position. Yet for all their retrospective remorse over the wholesale slaughter of Jews back then, the Europeans seem no readier to lift a finger to prevent a second Holocaust than they were the first time around.

Not so George W. Bush, a man who knows evil when he sees it and who has demonstrated an unfailingly courageous willingness to endure vilification and contumely in setting his face against it. It now remains to be seen whether this President, battered more mercilessly and with less justification than any other in living memory, and weakened politically by the enemies of his policy in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular, will find it possible to take the only action that can stop Iran from following through on its evil intentions both toward us and toward Israel. As an American and as a Jew, I pray with all my heart that he will.





'Our Maddie'

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‘Maddie’ and the media in Britain AD (After Diana)
Over the past three weeks, the campaign and media coverage around the missing four-year-old Madeleine McCann has continued to seize the public imagination in a way that politics in Britain never does these days. And it has also apparently done what wars cannot any more, by uniting the nation behind a cause.

Few want to question the response to Madeleine’s disappearance, since we are talking about an innocent little girl. Yet, despite my suggestion that we should shut up about ‘Our Maddie’, there is a need to keep questioning the reasons behind this phenomenon, and what it reveals about the British state of mind.

The campaign for ‘Our Maddie’ may indeed be well-intentioned; but it has come to look like an increasingly morbid symptom of a society that is missing something other than a little girl.




UPDATE: It's those fucking baby-eating Moroccans



Mowed down

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Ohio Pensioner Jailed For Shooting Teen Via Dvorak




A pensioner has been jailed for life after he shot dead his teenage neighbour - for walking on his carefully tended lawn. Ohio man Charles Martin, 67, was told he would have to serve 18 years in prison before he could be considered for parole. Killer lay in wait with shotgun Killer lay in wait with shotgun But Clermont County Common Pleas Judge William Walker said he would urge that Martin should never be paroled and should die in jail.

Martin was convicted last month of murdering 15-year-old Larry Mugrage Jr in March 2006. He shot the high school student twice with a shotgun. Martin told the court he was sorry the shooting occurred but said the teenager knew how much Martin cared for his lawn and had deliberately provoked him.



The unreported Iraq air war

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TomDispatch
Tom Engelhardt:

Keep in mind that, however poorly covered these last years, air power has long been the American way of war. After all, it was no mistake that the Iraq war began with a pure show of air power meant to "shock and awe" not just Iraqis but the world. And yet, in recent years in Iraq, the only "bombers" we hear about are of the suicide car or truck variety. This is strange indeed, because nothing should have stopped American journalists from visiting our air bases in the region, from spending time with pilots, or from simply looking up at the evidently crowded skies over their hotels.


The Air War in Iraq Uncovered
Nick Turse

Did the U.S. military use cluster bombs in Iraq in 2006 and then lie about it? Does the U.S. military keep the numbers of rockets and cannon rounds fired from its planes and helicopters secret because more Iraqi civilians have died due to their use than any other type of weaponry?

These are just two of the many unanswered questions related to the largely uncovered air war the U.S. military has been waging in Iraq. What we do know is this: Since the major combat phase of the war ended in April 2003, the U.S. military has dropped at least 59,787 pounds of air-delivered cluster bombs in Iraq -- the very type of weapon that Marc Garlasco, the senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch (HRW) calls, "the single greatest risk civilians face with regard to a current weapon that is in use."

We also know that, according to expert opinion, rockets and cannon fire from U.S. aircraft may account for most U.S. and coalition-attributed Iraqi civilian deaths and that the Pentagon has restocked hundreds of millions of dollars worth of these weapons in recent years.