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On the chests of the men had been scrawled an Arabic phrase that translates as "Ali Baba - Thief."

A military officer states that the men are thieves, and that this technique will be used again.

No word yet from the newly liberated Iraqi people about some of them being summarily found guilty of theft, forced at gunpoint to strip, having a racist phrase written on their bodies, and then made to walk naked in public. No doubt the Arab/Muslim world is impressed by this display of "democracy," "freedom," "due process," and "no cruel or unusual punishment."

We wonder if the soldiers will be using this technique on their comrades who stole $13.1 million in Iraq. Or the journalists who looted Iraq's art. [more]

"In spite of strong skepticism and criticism on the part of the world scientific community, Clonaid, in collaboration with the research team of a well known University found living cells inside the bone marrow of the body of child who had been buried for 4 months."

"Clonaid's team is proud of the first 5 healthy babies born thanks to its cutting edge technology and new pregnancies are now under way which will include the cloning of the dead child which living cells were retrieved from his corpse last week."

"Dr Boisselier owes her determination of finding living cells on a dead body to the teachings of His Holiness Rael...who has been asking the raelian members to preserve a piece of their bone after their death."

Also see:

• Court documents show Clonaid has only two employees.

Raph Koster: The future of gaming isn't flashy graphics and blowing up elves,
it's average people connecting with each other.

We built a social software oriented game and run an alpha that we eventually
had to shut down -- it was so significant to peoples' lives that when we shut it
down, people all over the world logged in at the same time to cry together

MORE >>

In the old days, the good guys wore white. Now Hollywood's villains are turning pale, and real-life albinos are crying foul as movies like The Matrix: Reloaded arrive with a fresh supply of pigment-challenged bad guys.

The silver-clad, dreadlocked Matrix villains known as The Twins are the latest Hollywood incarnations of pale-skinned people as evil incarnate, said Dr. Vail Reese, a San Francisco dermatologist and creator of skinema.com, a cheeky website that examines skin disorders in film.

“Current Good Manufacturing Practice in Manufacturing, Packing, or Holding Dietary Ingredients and Dietary Supplements" (CGMP) is a proposed FDA rule which would impose strict standards of manufacturing on the nutritional supplement industry.

"The standards put forth in this document are so severe that they exceed those imposed upon the pharmaceutical companies, which are Goliaths with virtually unlimited resources in comparison to nutritional companies...the added burden would at least triple the price.

"There can be little doubt that the proposed rule would level most small businesses (which comprise most of the industry). Far fewer companies would survive, and these would tend to be the largest and most conservative, resulting in significantly less competition and far less innovation. CGMP would ensure not only a rollback of complex products, but also hinder or halt the development of new products.

"The FDA would have the right to conduct unrestricted inspections of nutritional companies at their discretion and could, for subjective reasons, shut down companies that are in their political beacon...the FDA’s solution to 'good manufacturing' is nothing less than the imposition of arbitrary and undefined powers enabling it to exercise repression of all with whom it disagrees."

"American Psycho, it pretty much sums up what's going on," said Scott Matthews, a clerk at Toronto's Exile where the shirt also has sold out several times in the last two weeks. The $10-decal, which can be ironed onto an array of clothing items, officially became the shop's hottest seller when Susan Sarandon sauntered in and bought one, he said.

via Geisha Asobi Blog

TELEPORT is a multidimensional transport system powered by a network of consciousness exploration units, or trips.

there are 18 trips, equally divided across six series.

each series is charged by a different guiding shape.

each trip involves a different manipulation of the guiding shape's energy.

learn more about individual trips in the trips section.
If you don't get it, you're probably not a Traveller. ;-)

Was the arid Lincoln County region actually visited by inhabitants of another world? If so, why has the government refused to admit it? And could it be true, as some now claim, that many modern-day technical advancements--from lasers to fiber optics, integrated circuit chips to Velcro--have evolved from scientific examination and reverse engineering studies of a now hidden spacecraft?

Thus it continues, an unexplained event that has turned into an industry. What happened or didn't happen 56 years ago has lured 1.3 million to the International UFO Museum and Research Center since it opened in 1992. A guided tour of the desolate "crash site" is now available. Then, there was the long-lost film of the "autopsy" of one of the Roswell aliens that was shown on television worldwide before being discounted as fake, and a stream of new books and articles that continues to flow. Clearly, the public loves the mystery. According to a recent poll, a large percentage of the U.S. population continues to believe something unworldly occurred that July on the Foster Ranch.

We here at The Rockall Times are concerned that Coalition forces have as yet failed to uncover any significant weapons of mass destruction in post-war Iraq. The chilling conclusion is that these weapons — so convincingly presented as the justification for war by the allies — must still be at large. The question is: where?

And this is where you can help. Move you mouse over the map to get on-the-spot analysis. If you see anything suspicious, report it immediately to the relevant authorities. And remember, kiddies' lives and the credibility of the Coalition are at stake here — we must act before it is too late...

CrimethInc. began in the mid-1990's. I can't report on the original goals of all the participants, but I can trace my own initial intentions to a discussion among some friends about the revolutionary organization Winston joins in Orwell's 1984. The idea came up that it was actually a branch of the government... and from there, we began to consider what the opposite kind of organization would be (one that purported to be a part of the culture industry that rules today, while secretly undermining it), and how to form one. The irony, the margin-walking between contradictions, both were intrinsic to CrimethInc. from the beginning... and honestly, I can tell you no better now than I could have then whether we are just indulging reactionary desires by forming yet another "revolutionary organization," or heroically helping humanity to evolve past the despoticism of such a thing by detourning/deconstructing the idea of the revolutionary organization.

Two tigers at the San Franciso zoo are scared of a painting of another tiger. Are they scared of the image of the tiger- or just adept art critics with a keen,discriminating eye? I know I have a similar reaction to some art....

" Yoikes! That painting sucks!"

Review
A 22-year-old ex-lead singer of a punk rock band writes a novel about a bunch of misfits who aspire to rock stardom. But don't roll your eyes and toss it towards the college crowd just yet: Joey Goebel's The Anomalies (MacAdam/Cage, $22) is amusing without being manic or insipid, and the five oddball musicians are, well, more than the sum of their quirks.

Band leader Luster raves and mumbles poetically as he restocks the beer stand at the race park, which is enough to get any large black man stereotyped, never mind that he lives in the ghetto with a horde of violent, crack-dealing brothers. But Luster, along with Opal (80 and sex-crazed), Ember (adorably eight and masochistic), Ray (a presumably gay Iraqi immigrant) and Aurora (a gorgeous and Satanic yet frigid teen), conspire to explode the stereotypes and make the "humanoids" in their small town, if not the galaxy, realize that normalcy is the uninspired state of being.

Goebel, whose face graces the book's front cover, is pretty small-town himself, in stereotypical ways: a youth spent leading his friends' punk band on stage in the Midwest, earning a B.A. in English, writing for anthologies. His band, The Mullets, sang funny offbeat songs about high school traumas, and their record label's Web site indicates a predilection towards pants-lowering during performances. It's not the debate team, but it's not as new and earth shattering as it probably seemed at the time.

But like Luster and his band, Goebel rises beyond the near-banality of his resume (you're not surprised to hear about the screenplays he's got lurking in a drawer somewhere) on the strength of his voice and his insight. He writes with intelligent and genuine wit, not just anti-establishment ranting, and manages fully to realize each of the band members. He earns points, too, for persistence, being one of those novelists who was rejected by many agents before striking off on his own to be rejected in many slush piles before finding a home at MacAdam/Cage. Presumably those screenplays or that second novel in progress will have smoother rides.

In Goebel's world--and in our own, too, though less demonstrably so--to be satisfied with the routines of life is to be bound by artlessness. Luster's crew are radiantly dissatisfied with the status quo, and struggle against it, whether that means accosting mocking strangers in a chain restaurant or performing an interpretative dance of Dante's Inferno at a strip club. As The Anomalies rises to a sort of fame, Goebel ensures that we the conventional realize, if not our predictability, then at least the necessity of heeding the unpredictable--the uncommon, in those we might otherwise dismiss as misfits, quirks, oddballs. Rock on

The lovely Miss Camille Rose Garcia paints drippy, dark, lusciously macabre painting of strange creatures having adventures. Like Candyland gone to hell, her CreepCakes Bakery series is a visual treat, painted in halloween colors.

The Matrix and Schizophrenia

In the first Matrix, Neo is given a choice between a blue and a red pill, with one promising to unfurl his world as a lie, a hoax. Like Neo, the rebel warrior of The Matrix trilogy, millions of people are a pill away from horrific hallucinations, altered realities, fantastical realms. They live in cities of corpses that have just forgotten to stop moving; they are being hunted down by the CIA and the Freemasons; the planet is about to tumble away from their feet and leave them drifting in the frozen blackness of deep space.

The Matrix isn't a science fiction trilogy about posthuman machines enslaving our bodies, it's about the tyranny of neurochemistry. Thomas Anderson is a schizophrenic, and his adventures as Neo, savior of us all, are fever dreams.

by Camille Paglia

• Eclipse by Politics
  
• Cults Ancient and Modern
  
• New Messiahs and Cultural Polarization
  
• Transcendentalism and Asian Religion
  
• American Strains of Asian Religion in the Twentieth Century
  
• Hinduism and 1960s Music
  
• Psychedelic Drugs
  
• Mysticism and Social Change
  
• The Rise of New Age
  
• Conclusion

French Guard
I'm French! Why do think I have this outrageous
accent, you silly king-a?!


What Monty Python Character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Submitted for your approval, by the author himself. Mr. Brennan sent us this at the end of a most interesting and salubrious correspondence.
Author's note: Gothic Fiction -- 4500 words

T. Casey Brennan's story is interesting and remarkable. He was a successful cartoonist, dabbled, from an entrepreneurial perspective, in the occult with the publishing of a fanciful book of magick based upon Crowley's Liber AL, or the Book of The Law. As you will find, reading through the Conjurella material is not unlike a trip through Wonderland. And I say this, not in a negative sense, but from the point of view of a reader being introduced to the material for the first time. While it may be read purely as entertainment, it is also a testament to the power of the privileged in our society. Those who have access to governmental and private power zones unrealized by the average citizen. It is also a look inside the world of mind control, divided consciousness, and the evil than men do to ensure societal control is the prerogative of the few.

A distributed computing project called Grub, which harnesses individual users' spare computing power and internet bandwidth, began cataloguing millions of web pages this week.

The project's home page says that in the last 24 hours over 36 million web pages have been catalogued by Grub software installed by users on about 1000 personal computers around the globe.

An article from Switzerland-based Current Concerns on rave drugs used as chemical weapons:

"Most of the JNLWD [Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate] team's weapon candidates are controlled substances in most countries. Some are widely used legitimate pharmaceuticals that are also drugs of abuse, such as Valium and opiates. The Pentagon team advocates more research into the weapons potential of convulsants (which provoke seizures) and 'club drugs', the generally illegal substances used by some at 'rave' and dance clubs. Among those in the military spotlight are ketamine ('Special K'), GHB (Gamma-hydroxybutrate, 'liquid ecstasy'), and Rohypnol ('Roofies'). The latter two in particular are called 'date rape drugs' because of incidences of their use on victims of sexual and other crimes...

The term "Easter Egg", as we use it here, means any amusing tidbit that creators hid in their creations. They could be in computer software, movies, music, art, books, or even your watch. There are thousands of them, and they can be quite entertaining, if you know where to look. A couple of our favorites are the "Spy Hunter"-like game in Microsoft Excel 2000 and the "Wacky Search Menu" in Internet Explorer 5. This site will help you discover Easter Eggs in the things you see and use everyday, and let you share Easter Eggs you discover with the rest of the world.

Are there limits to what humanity should know, and what experiments should be conducted? Is it possible that particle colliders could destroy the entire universe by producing an exotic, limitlessly voracious strangelet?And how many of us have stayed awake nights worrying about the oddly named "Gray Goo" scenario? Or the by now too familiar Frankenfood debate?

These fears, and others, did not sit well with Royal Society Astronomer Sir Martin Rees, so he decided to take the unusual (for a scientist) step of writing a book arguing for risk-based restrictions and public oversight of scientific research.

The question therefore arises, what kind of risk is unacceptable? Who should make that decision? And what is your favorite end-of-the-world scenario? | Via plastic

Here’s a question: what if the Wachowski brothers’ 1999 film The Matrix was not just an entertaining piece of sf-action-adventure hokum. What if, instead, it is all true? Imagine it as a message sent via the medium of the Matrix itself (Hollywood cinema) from someplace outside the Matrix, to wake us up to our human condition, to alert us all to the fact ‘that we are slaves’. If so, then we are not living the lives we thought we were living; we are instead inhabiting a virtual reality composed by oppressive machine-intelligences. What if this were literally true? How would it appear to us? Well, clearly, it would appear exactly as our lives presently appear to us. Unless we get ‘unplugged’, unless we become enlightened, we cannot see past the illusion that has been created for us.

What should we do in this circumstance? Should we collaborate with the machines and not rock the boat? Or should we fight, free ourselves and eventually free everybody else? Clearly, says The Matrix Warrior, this latter. This is a book that proceeds from the assumption that the situation described in The Matrix is real, and tells you where to go from there.

Another: Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix

This thought-provoking examination of The Matrix explores the technological challenges, religious symbolism, and philosophical dilemmas the film presents. Essays by renowned scientists, technologists, philosophers, scholars, social commentators, and science fiction authors provide engaging and provocative perspectives. Explored in a highly accessible fashion are issues such as the future of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. The symbolism hidden throughout The Matrix and a few glitches in the film are revealed. Discussions include "Finding God in The Matrix," "The Reality Paradox in The Matrix," and "Was Cypher Right?: Why We Stay in Our Matrix." The fascinating issues posed by the film are handled in an intelligent but nonacademic fashion. Link to Slashdot Article with more links.

Also see: Our former articles on more "Matrix Philosophy"

How to live in a simulation.

Are you living in a computer simulation?

We're living in a Matrix...possibly.

Hi. Normally I wouldn't introduce myself to a group of lovely strangers by handing them a newspaper clipping, but this is in today's paper so I'm really excited about it...

In the Land of the Hip, a Little Bit of Wholesome
By SARAH SCHMIDT

It was a Friday night at CB's 313 Gallery, a small bar and performance space on the Bowery at Bleecker Street in the East Village. About 50 young artists and musicians sporting ironic T-shirts and thrift-shop clothes were deep in thought - heads down, colored pencils poised, eyes focused on the sheets of paper they'd been given.

The Velvet Underground played on the sound system and waitresses brought fresh rounds of Guinness, but no one even looked up, so intent were they on their task. A young man wearing a bright red suit handed newcomers their assignments - I Peter 2:16, II Kings 16:15, Matthew 18:22 - and everyone got down to the business at hand: illustrating Bible stories.

The drawings are destined for the Flaming Fire Illustrated Bible, an Internet database and a multivolume book that, if all goes well, will contain individual illustrations of all 36,665 verses of the King James Bible, along with portions of the Apocrypha commonly included in Roman Catholic Bibles. Patrick and Kate Hambrecht, who live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and moved from Nebraska six years ago, conceived the plan.

"The idea in a nutshell is to get as large a collection of visual commentary on the Bible as possible, to allow people to interact with the Bible in a creative, personal way," says Mr. Hambrecht, 29, a freelance event planner and the son of a Baptist minister.

How do the hip, disaffected residents of Williamsburg and the East Village react to this wholesome project?

"It's been surprising and very cool when we ask our artist friends to contribute and they say, 'Oh, yeah, I wanna do Jude,' or 'Oh, yeah, I have just the thing in mind,' '' said Ms. Hambrecht, 28, a copy editor at Jane magazine, who was raised Catholic but describes herself as an "aspiring Baptist.'' "It turns out that everyone has a favorite Bible story.''

Mr. Hambrecht added, "Believe it or not, there is a huge number of artists who'd rather be doing something instead of just sitting around drinking beer in some loft, or at least they'd rather be drawing Bible pictures while they're sitting around drinking beer in some loft."

But, he recalled, "We did have one snooty guy dressed in black with spiky hair come up to us once and say, 'I am zee Antichrist,' and I was like 'Great, then you can draw one of the verses about the Antichrist.' But he wasn't interested."

The idea for the project came from Mr. Hambrecht, a voluble, energetic comic book fanatic who often wears red and can talk a blue streak about everything from Christianity to Carl Jung. He enlisted the help of his petite and soft-spoken wife, and the two then asked a friend, Adam Mayer, to design and build the database.

Last fall, the couple began spreading the word through e-mail, Bible art parties and personal appearances at arts events around the city. Volunteers either do a drawing on the spot or send a scanned image to the online database, at www.flamingfire.com/bible.html.

So far, the Hambrechts have collected illustrations of more than 600 verses from about 130 artists. If and when completed, the multivolume book, which is being designed and produced by a city publisher called Kaboom! Press, would be many feet thick.

The contributions range from rudimentary line drawings to elaborately detailed pen-and-ink illustrations by professional artists; they vary greatly, too, in how literally they interpret the verses. Andrea Stevenson, a sculptor for the American Museum of Natural History and the volunteer artist for Matthew 5:38 ("An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth"), did a black-and-white line drawing of two pairs of men, one pair plucking out each other's eyes and the other pair using pliers to yank out each other's teeth.

For Luke 2:19 ("But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart''), a retired voiceover actress from Los Angeles named Ione Citrin drew a soft, blue-toned illustration of Mary with the Infant Jesus gazing heavenward.

Ms. Hambrecht, who describes herself as "a terrible artist," decided to learn one simple goat drawing and then create variations of it to cover the numerous goat-related verses of the Bible. "Goats were constantly being sacrificed in the Old Testament," she said.

At CB's Gallery that Friday night, Dean Radinovsky, a painter from Woodside, Queens, nursed a beer and worked on his ink drawing of John 12:3, in which the sister of Lazarus wipes Jesus' feet with her hair.

"It's really cool to be put on the spot and asked to come up with an image like this," said Mr. Radinovsky, adding that while he is "spiritually independent," he likes the use of the Bible as artistic inspiration. "There are tons of powerful images like this in the Bible,'' he said. "Western art is very much indebted to Christian imagery and by extension, I am very much indebted to Christian imagery."

Jody Kivort, a freelance photographer from Fort Greene, Brooklyn, happily drank a Red Stripe beer as he worked on his drawing.

"I went to another one of their parties in Williamsburg and it was a pretty intense scene,'' he said. "Everyone was, like, super-intense, but I ended up drawing a lawn mower or something. I guess I'm not that familiar with the Bible since I'm a Jew, but I just think it's a good idea to get everyone together to draw like this."

Esao Andrews, a Williamsburg artist who creates illustrations for skateboards, also played down the religious aspect of the work. "Drawing these verses is fun,'' he said, "and I think most people are just into that."

The Hambrechts, who are planning a children's version of their illustrated Bible and who also run a religious zine at godmagazine.org, say the project is not aimed at pushing the Baptist denomination or even Christianity in general. As Mr. Hambrecht put it, "It's still a good way to encourage people to read a great work of literature and an incredible spiritual testament. You can take it from wherever you're coming from."

Electric eels can f*ck you up. They are recorded put out as much as 600-1000 volts per jolt. A torpedo ray can put out a charge 60 volts and 50 amps. No land or air organism uses such bioelectric weapons. That's pretty groovy.
So don't do this:

See more

www.inflatablechurch.com

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- A British designer has made what he says is the world's first inflatable church -- a gray plastic building with a blow-up organ, pulpit, altar, Gothic arches and fake stained glass windows.

The church, which stands 47 feet high to the tip of its steeple, could revolutionize the Anglican Church, suffering from dwindling attendance for years. Vicars could carry it around with them on the back of a truck and set it up on patches of grass or in village squares for impromptu services.

Using a technique developed at Microsoft's UK research lab in Cambridge, gamers could soon play action games in the more familiar surroundings of their own house or garden.

Researchers have rigged up an omni-directional camera which captures images at a 360 degree angle. The pictures can then be transferred to a computer to allow people to take a virtual tour through the environment captured.