July 2008
41 posts
Catholic church rejects three "ordained" priests →
The Archdiocese of Boston issued a statement decrying the ceremony, noting that the Vatican has long banned women from entering the priesthood.
“Catholics who attempt to confer a sacred order on a woman, and the women who attempt to receive a sacred order, are by their own actions separating themselves from the church,” the archdiocese said.
“A woman has to be intelligent, have charm, a sense of humor, and be kind....”
– Catherine Deneuve
“Right now (what a word, now, what a dumb lie) I was able to sit quietly on the...”
– Cortazar
Synthetic pot and the 1960s military →
In the 1960s, retired US Army colonel James S. Ketchum led efforts to develop a nonlethal incapacitating agent as a weapon for a “war without death.” Along with LSD, they experimented with synthetic cannabis, apparently similar in effect to hash oil but much stronger. Alternet published a great profile of Ketchum who paints a vivid picture of those strange daze with the Us Army...
Squid Autopsy →
Scientists discover underwater secrets as they dissect a huge squid found off the Australian coast.
A fishermen explains how it was pulled out of the sea, before Mark Norman, squid expert from the Museum of Victoria, talks about the weighing and dissection.
Cunniligus in North Korea →
What is an Epic Battle? →
Walking through the thick, dense woods where the battle was fought, John Hennessey, a historian with the National Park Service, says the most intense fighting began on May 3, 1863.
“On that morning, in about six hours of fighting, about 18,000 men would fall, either killed or wounded. If you do the math, that comes to about one man every second.”
“The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you...”
– Kurt Vonnegut, How to Write With Style
“What’s the alternative — the National Public Radio model? It’s possible that...”
– Timothy Egan, from http://bit.ly/3Iggir
Watchhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/blackandwhitelife/
WatchFollowing the successful Supreme Court ruling in Rasul v. Bush which allowed detainees to make habeas corpus arguments over the legality of their detention, Khadr’s grandmother Fatmah Elsamnah, acting as next friend, filed an civil suit against the United States on Khadr’s behalf on July 2, 2004 challenging his detention.
The suit was named O.K. v. George W. Bush since Khadr was still...
Spontaneous and Stimultaneous Language →
Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN; Spanish Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua, Portuguese Idioma de Signos Nicaragüense) is a signed language spontaneously developed by deaf children in a number of schools in western Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. It is of particular interest to the linguists who study it, because it offers a unique opportunity to study what they believe to be the birth of a new...
Catalogue of Coersion →
A Senate committee recently unearthed a 1957 chart cataloguing the coercive interrogation methods used by the Chinese Communists during the Korean War to extract false confessions from American troops. It turns out that military trainers at Guantanamo borrowed it for tutorials on how to bring physical pressures to bear in interrogations.
“Politics are not widely considered a legitimate source of amusement in Hollywood, where the borrowed rhetoric by which political ideas are reduced to choices between the good (equality is good) and the bad (genocide is bad) tends to make even the most casual political small talk resemble a rally. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” someone said to me at dinner not...
“There is a magnetics of eroticism in the west, due to the hardness of Western...”
– Camille Paglia
“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes...”
– Barack Obama
Amon Tobin - Four Ton Mantis
“Politics are not widely considered a legitimate source of amusement in...”
– Joan Didion
“I’m suffused with / pleasure in an instant, when I think / how I’ve...”
– Tomaz Salamun
