Chaotic Earth

A Near-Death Experience to Die For

2010-11-13T02:06:00.000-08:00

Fanny Ruthven Paget

In her 1917 book, How I Know that the Dead Are Alive, Fanny Ruthven Paget offers one of the most vivid and detailed near-death experiences ever recorded. While not clearly stating her illness, one might infer that Paget, a resident of Houston, Texas, suffered from severe pneumonia for several days during 1911.

"All about and above me I could see nothing, but fancy my astonishment if you can, when looking down, I saw my body resting peacefully on the bed, representing what is commonly called a ‘dead person'," Paget recalled. "I could not move my eyes from it; it fascinated me as it lay in the cold whiteness, robed in a gown of lavender silk, with dainty laces and ruffles...The deep blue ‘windows of the soul,' the eyes, were at half mast; the soul being absent the light was gone; the lips slightly parted wore just a suggestion of a smile; the left hand rested lightly on the breast - the engagement ring scintillating as brightly as ever; the right, which no doubt had been lifted unconsciously at the shock of impact, had fallen a little apart from the body and lay, palm upturned. How peaceful it looked!

"Thus every detail of the clay image fastened itself upon my consideration as I viewed it dispassionately, realizing that it was a cast-off garment for which I had no further use. However, I felt a protective kindliness toward it; it had been a faithful servant, executing my every wish and whim and now that I had passed beyond the range of its services, it pleased my fancy to robe it in the white, pearl-be-decked dress, the wearing of which had meant so much to me in quite a different way."

Paget then concerned herself with her fiancé in another town and found herself being propelled by a vibratory sensation to his sleeping body. "As I looked upon him I saw the shadow body more distinctly than the physical. Viewed from the other side of life, the ‘shadow' body seemed the original and the physical the duplicate, the soul the real, the body the unreal. Within and interpenetrating all was a light, which I had not before perceived as being a part of the spiritual anatomy. This light penetrated from within, both the shadow and physical bodies, maintaining through and about the body an aura or illumination which enveloped it; clothing it, as it were, in a magnetized illumination. How wonderful this three-in-one life-manifestation seemed, especially when we generally recognize only the one - the physical!"

More after the jump.

Talking to the Living

Moving closer to her fiancé, Paget attempted to converse with him, but he slept on, even though his soul, which was not sleeping, responded joyously and tried to help her penetrate his physical consciousness as he moaned and turned restlessly in his sleep. After a few moments, he cried out, "Fanny, Fanny," and sat up in bed, wide awake. As he turned on a light and reached for his glasses and a magazine, she tried to communicate, but he did not react to her words. "I am dead, that is why he cannot hear and see me," she thought, further recalling that she felt more alive than she had ever felt. "There was something pitiably painful about being so near one beloved, seeing him plainly and hearing him distinctly, even knowing that he was thinking of me, and yet having him utterly ignore my presence, and above all knowing that he would never recognize me again - never hear my voice no matter how ardently I called, while I was the same in every way minus the physical body."

Then she perceived that her vibratory environment did not harmonize with his. "Mine was the vibration of perpetual motion - his more like a ‘dead sea' into which these vibratory currents ebbed and flowed, and it seemed such an easy matter to move out of the ‘deadness' into the ‘ebb and flow' that I waited and watched a long time before I realized that he would make no effort to do so."

Realizing that she would not be able to penetrate his physical consciousness, she bade him farewell and attempted to move on; however, the vibratory force seemed to restrain her. "Persistently the force held me, as though inviting me to further considerations of earth interests, but I had none. My material possessions were disposed of as I desired; there was no life-work I was leaving incomplete; I had no children, no one depending on me; nothing held me to the earth. My desire had been to go beyond it and now that I had done so, I was well pleased and wanted to go on to the joys I felt awaited me beyond the influence of earth. Yet the force held me, try as I would to pass beyond it, until, instead of struggling against it I tried to understand it - to wrest from it its reason for thus detaining me, feeling that there must be some reason for such marked persistence. Almost instantly the lesson sank into my consciousness and I realized that the long arm of mundane interests can reach into the Beyond and hold its victims within the shadow of earth - pitting its magnetism against the promise of higher things."

She then felt herself moving in an undulating way within the propelling vibration and was suddenly enveloped in oppressive heavy darkness, feeling alone in eternity and waiting in awesome uncertainty. She perceived that the darkness was really within her and could be eliminated only from within. "There were loved ones and many others welcoming me and rejoicing that I was with them." Her spirit guide, who identified himself as Meon, was also there. She now felt light and carefree.

Visiting "Hell"

Meon then told her to follow him, "and with a soft, bluish light playing about and enveloping us, we floated out on the undulating waves of space." As they were propelled by vibratory waves, they encountered a "red darkness" where she found herself among many others. "I was listening, trying to hear what they were saying but the vibrations were evidently not in harmony, so I could not hear distinctly, and after a long time of vain effort I turned to Meon, and asked ‘What place is this?'" explained that they were in a place still very much within earth's magnetism, or spiritual gravitation. Paget asked why the souls were detained there and Meon informed her that some desire it while others were not yet strong enough to progress beyond that point. "Earth interests hold them," he explained.

"There was no bar to their going on but they did not want to; some did not know they could not give up the earth life," Paget related. "In this dark earth-magnetized region disembodied spirits lived the mundane existence much as the psychic lives the spiritual while yet in the mundane - one in progression, the other retrogression. Disembodied spirits living the mundane life do so at the expense of human beings in the earth life, while the mundane person living the spiritual life is obeying the law of evolution and progression."

Paget observed spirits of love and mercy attempting to help those souls stuck in this "hellish" realm, but most of them had not yet acquired "spiritual hearing" and did not respond to the offers of assistance. There were some, however, who heard and struggled up from the vortex. Meon informed her that no soul was irretrievably lost, no matter how many aeons it may remain in the darkness.

Paget began to wonder if this was to be her new abode, but Meon assured her that it was not. "Did not the Christ descend into this place before his ascension?" he addressed her concern.

"Far out beyond the red-fringed darkness I could see light, in which rainbows seemed to play, pale as the dawn, of a gray-weird loveliness, coming and going as though flirting with the darkness, for to embrace it would be to destroy," she continue on. "For delicate beauty it seemed I had never seen anything more fascinating or alluring than this kiss of the dawn and the darkness in the Soul world - it was like kissing death goodbye."

The Dawn World

They passed into what seemed to be another world. Paget called it the "Dawn World," since it seemed that the light began to neutralize the darkness. "There were houses, flowers, trees, everything was so life-like it amazed me. I almost fancied I had returned to earth." The inhabitants conversed with her, but they did not seem to realize that they were in the "after life," as they were not entirely free of earth's magnetism. Paget witnessed some of them going earthward, as though drawn by something of paramount importance. "While there seemed no doubt that these people once inhabited the earth, I saw no one I had ever known in this life. They had possibly progressed there out of the darkness and would go back to help those less fortunate into the higher condition which they had attained."

Meon and Paget vibrated onward in ever increasing light. "So enchanting was this riding on vibratory waves of space in a gentle undulatory way, that I felt like going on forever, and forever, never tiring, never stopping, but after abandoning myself to the witchery of it for some time, I perceived the vibrations changing, merging into a quivering sensation, even more exquisite, and then, as if part of it, my feet came upon something different, something firm and reliable."

She now found herself in a city of light, one of whiteness, boundless in expanse. "It seemed I had reached the limit of my ability to float in space. It seemed that I was heavier than my surroundings in some way. Everywhere were the most exalted souls I had yet seen. Some came forward and greeted us, addressing Meon as though he were one of them, and then, together, we entered into a building immeasurable in space and height, the veritable soul of architectural magnificence. The material had the transparency of glass of a variegated whiteness, into which colors, harmonizing in the most delicate way, were coming and going, ever changing. Electricity seemed to be the power which held it all together, as the electric blue would merge into violet and play incessantly, in a serpentine way, into which almost imperceptible yellowish streams seemed to flow. It was self-illuminated...It seemed that all the wisdom of all the ages was mine as I stood there. Life and death gave up their mysteries, and I no longer wondered but observed as one who understood. The machinery of earth existence was operated and regulated by and through the power of this plane. It was actually in contact with the earth. No happening on earth escaped the observation of the great spirits who seemed to have nothing else to do but watch over the beings of earth, to teach them, to lift them up through darkness, watch over reincarnations, create teachers and place them where they were most needed. With these teachers they were in direct communication at all times and knew exactly what was going on through some form of wireless telegraphy or telephony, perhaps, but they communicated as though there were no distance.

"They seemed to draw the highly evolved souls of earth up to them mentally, and these cooperated consciously, responding unerringly. It was marvelous to watch the process or rather processes, as there were many phases of this supervision. There were coming and going all the time. I saw many go out and disappear into the depths, all rejoicing in their work, the uplifting of humanity. The souls were countless, the space immeasurable, yet there was no confusion - it was system idealized, each recognizing his mission and doing it. Truly, it was the Christ principle manifested, for they were laboring for others, not themselves."

Meon took Paget even higher, where the influence of earth was not felt. A great soul came forward and asked her if she would like to return to earth. She said she would like to return only if she could do good by telling others what she had experienced. The being warned her that many would not believe her and that she might suffer from her efforts, but Paget said she was up for the challenge.

A Life Review

Paget then felt alone with bowed head. She then saw a little light vibrating directly before her. It began shaping itself into something. "It was not unlike a moving picture." She began to see figures and a small girl emerged. She soon realized that the young girl was herself and she was reliving her life on earth. She saw herself reveling in her grand passion, music, which held her in bondage as she grew in the joy and mastery of it. "How the little, white fingers, too small to span an octave, subconsciously caught fragments from the ‘choir invisible' and imprisoned them on the piano!

She saw herself grow through college and into a proud, self-centered woman. There appeared before her three roads, one labeled "Good," one "Evil," and the other, the center, was unlabeled. She found herself on the center road, which had many more people than either of the side roads. "These roads were guarded by invisible creatures, according to the indicated propensities of each, who were always calling to those who traveled in the center, in an endeavor to influence them to more determined tendencies. Ever and anon there were paths leading from the center to the outer roads and from one outer road to the other, showing how easily one can change ones course at will."

Paget then saw the young woman dreaming of becoming a great singer, the compensation being the homage of the world. "I saw her holding to heart in enchanted fancy, as the only thing worth while, the emptiest of all life's coveted cups - Fame." There was no one to remind her that ‘by ambition fell the angels."

The "movie" of her life continued on to the time she came down with a severe case of laryngitis and lost her singing voice. She saw herself cursing God and being enveloped by a shadow-stained covering of materialism. She saw both her parents pass into the spirit world, leaving her alone, fighting the bitter fight. She saw even the most trivial matters in her life review. "Its faithfulness to detail was perfectly marvelous. Nothing was hidden, nothing slurred over. It was all there. I was standing face to face with my earth life just as I had lived it, awaiting its condemnation or justification."

When the life review ended, Meon stood waiting. He told her that the purpose of the review was to build an edifice on the ashes as she returned to earth life.

"Meon and other spirits were hovering about me. I could feel the electrified essence, which had manifested its presence everywhere during my voyage, drawing itself away - letting me go, as it were. Then the burden of physical life was full upon me and what a misfit I was!"

[Source: http://phantomsandmonsters.wetpaint.com/]
[Source: http://metgat.gaia.com/]

Most Bizarre Religions

2010-11-10T17:56:00.000-08:00

1. The Church of Scientology - Scientology is a body of beliefs and related practices created by L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986), starting in 1952, as a successor to his earlier self-help system, Dianetics. Hubbard characterized Scientology as a religion, and in 1953 incorporated the Church of Scientology in Camden, New Jersey.

Scientology teaches that people are immortal spiritual beings who have forgotten their true nature. Its method of spiritual rehabilitation is a type of counseling known as auditing, in which practitioners aim to consciously re-experience painful or traumatic events in their past in order to free themselves of their limiting effects.

The Church of Scientology is one of the most controversial new religious movements to have arisen in the 20th century. It has often been described as a cult that financially defrauds and abuses its members, charging exorbitant fees for its spiritual services. The Church of Scientology has consistently used litigation against such critics, and its aggressiveness in pursuing its foes has been condemned as harassment. Further controversy has focused on Scientology's belief that souls ("thetans") reincarnate and have lived on other planets before living on Earth. Former members say that some of Hubbard's writings on this remote extraterrestrial past, included in confidential Upper Levels, are not revealed to practitioners until they have paid thousands of dollars to the Church of Scientology. Another controversial belief held by Scientologists is that the practice of psychiatry is destructive and abusive and must be abolished.

Beliefs and Practices

Scientology claims that its beliefs and practices are based on rigorous research, and its doctrines are accorded a significance equivalent to that of scientific laws. "Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life", the Church of Scientology says. Conversion is held to be of lesser significance than the practical application of Scientologist methods. Adherents are encouraged to validate the value of the methods they apply through their personal experience. Hubbard himself put it this way: "For a Scientologist, the final test of any knowledge he has gained is, 'did the data and the use of it in life actually improve conditions or didn't it?""

Body and Spirit
Scientology beliefs revolve around the thetan, the individualized expression of the cosmic source, or life force, named after the Greek letter theta (θ). The thetan is the true identity of a person – an intrinsically good, omniscient, non-material core capable of unlimited creativity.

In the primordial past, thetans brought the material universe into being largely for their own pleasure. The universe has no independent reality, but derives its apparent reality from the fact that most thetans agree it exists. Thetans fell from grace when they began to identify with their creation, rather than their original state of spiritual purity. Eventually they lost their memory of their true nature, along with the associated spiritual and creative powers. As a result, thetans came to think of themselves as nothing but embodied beings.

Thetans are reborn time and time again in new bodies through a process called "assumption" which is analogous to reincarnation.

Emotions and the Mind
Scientology presents two major divisions of the mind. The reactive mind is thought to absorb all pain and emotional trauma, while the analytical mind is a rational mechanism which is responsible for consciousness. The reactive mind stores mental images which are not readily available to the analytical (conscious) mind; these are referred to as engrams. Engrams are painful and debilitating; as they accumulate, people move further away from their true identity.[86] To avoid this fate is Scientology's basic goal.[86] Dianetic auditing is one way by which the Scientologist may progress toward the Clear state, winning gradual freedom from the reactive mind's engrams, and acquiring certainty of his or her reality as a thetan.

Scientology uses an emotional classification system called the tone scale. The tone scale is a tool used in counseling; Scientologists maintain that knowing a person's place on the scale makes it easier to predict their actions and assists in bettering their condition.

Survival and Ethics

The Scientology cross has eight corners representing the eight dynamics of life.

Scientology emphasizes the importance of survival, which it subdivides into eight classifications that are referred to as dynamics. An individual's desire to survive is considered to be the first dynamic, while the second dynamic relates to procreation and family. The remaining dynamics encompass wider fields of action, involving groups, mankind, all life, the physical universe, the spirit, and the Supreme Being. The optimum solution to any problem is held to be the one that brings the greatest benefit to the greatest number of dynamics.

Scientology teaches that spiritual progress requires and enables the attainment of high ethical standards. In Scientology, rationality is stressed over morality. Actions are considered ethical if they promote survival across all eight dynamics, thus benefiting the greatest number of people or things possible while harming the fewest.

Space Opera and Confidential Materials
The Church of Scientology holds that at the higher levels of initiation (OT levels) mystical teachings are imparted that may be harmful to unprepared readers. These teachings are kept secret from members who have not reached these levels. The Church states that the secrecy is warranted to keep its materials' use in context, and to protect its members from being exposed to materials they are not yet prepared for.

These are the OT levels, the levels above Clear, whose contents are guarded within Scientology. The OT level teachings include accounts of various cosmic catastrophes that befell the thetans. Hubbard described these early events collectively as space opera.

In the OT levels, Hubbard explains how to reverse the effects of past-life trauma patterns that supposedly extend millions of years into the past. Among these advanced teachings is the story of Xenu (sometimes Xemu), introduced as the tyrant ruler of the "Galactic Confederacy." According to this story, 75 million years ago Xenu brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling Douglas DC-8 airliners, stacked them around volcanoes and detonated hydrogen bombs in the volcanoes. The thetans then clustered together, stuck to the bodies of the living, and continue to do this today. Scientologists at advanced levels place considerable emphasis on isolating body thetans and neutralizing their ill effects.
[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology#The_Church_of_Scientology]

2. The Church of All Worlds - The Church of All Worlds (CAW) is a neopagan religious group whose stated mission is to evolve a network of information, mythology, and experience that provides a context and stimulus for reawakening Gaia and reuniting her children through tribal community dedicated to responsible stewardship and evolving consciousness.

The key founder of CAW is Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, who serves the Church as "Primate", later along with his wife, Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, designated High Priestess. CAW began in 1961 with a group of high school friends. One of these was Richard Lance Christie from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Christie was fascinated by the "self-actualization" concepts of Abraham Maslow, a renowned American psychologist, and after meeting then-Timothy Zell at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, he began experiments in extrasensory perception. CAW was formed in 1962, evolving from a group of friends and lovers who were in part inspired by a fictional religion of the same name in the science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein; the church's mythology includes science fiction to this day. The headquarters are presently in Cotati, California.

CAW's members, called Waterkin, espouse pantheism, but the Church is not a belief-based religion. Members experience Divinity and honor these experiences while also respecting the views of others. They recognize "Gaea," the Earth Mother Goddess and the Father God, as well as the realm of Faeries and the deities of many other pantheons. Many of their ritual celebrations are centered on the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece.
[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_All_Worlds]

Supposedly Zell-Ravenheart has also begun a "Grey School of Wizardry" to teach the art of wizardry to non wizard children. This school is said to have been inspired by the "Hogwarts School" from the Harry Potter series.

3. Nuwaubianism - Nuwaubianism is an umbrella term used to refer to the doctrines and teachings of the followers of Dwight York. The Nuwaubians themselves typically do not use the term. It is not to be found in the works of their teacher Dwight D. York. Instead, they have referred to their teachings by such terms as “Nuwaubu,” “Nuwaupu,” “Wu-Nuwaubu,” “Right Knowledge,” “Sound Right Reasoning,” “Overstanding,” “Factology,” and many other names through the years. The Nuwaubians originated as a Black Muslim group in New York in the 1970s, and have gone through many changes since. Eventually, the group established a headquarters in Putnam County, Georgia in 1993, which they have since abandoned. York is now in prison after having been convicted on money laundering and child molestation charges, but Nuwaubianism endures.

York developed Nuwaubianism by drawing on a wide range of sources which include Theosophy-derived New Age movements such as Astara as well as the Rosicrucians, Freemasonry, the Shriners, the Moorish Science Temple of America, the revisionist Christianity and Islam of the Ahmadiyya Movement founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the numerology of Rashad Khalifa, the ancient astronaut theories of Zecharia Sitchin, Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, J.J. Hurtak’s The Keys of Enoch, the works of Richard Shaver (a proponent of the Hollow Earth theory), David Icke, the UFO mythology of greys and reptilians, the political and legal theories of patriot mythology, modern scientific and pseudoscientific legends like those of Area 51, the Philadelphia Experiment, Project Blue Book, Montauk Project, and MJ-12, popular conspiracy theories such as those about the Illuminati or the Bilderberg Group, and even a paperback on fortune-telling.

“The spell of Leviathan”

Much of the purpose of Nuwaubian doctrine and practice is to counteract what is called “the spell of Leviathan” or “the spell of Kingu.” In Nuwaubian mythology, Leviathan is a god associated with the moon, sex, and spirit — also known as Lucifer, Sin, Set, Thoth, Siva, Hermes, Jehovah, Poseidon, and the biblical serpent.

Nuwaubians believe that the Spell of Leviathan was cast by the devil thousands of years ago to hypnotize Black people into “spiritual ignorance and racial indifference” through such media as the Bible and certain elements of popular culture.

Leviathan has many aliases and hides in many guises, as this example shows:

Sam is short for one of his titles, SamaEl meaning “poison those of EL.” He knows his name. He calls himself Uncle Sam or Dr. Seuss (Zeus) with his famous statement, “Sam I Am, I Am Sam.” This is what they teach the children; not ours however, for they will get right knowledge.

“Right Racism”

Some of Nuwaubian racial doctrine borrows from Moorish Science and the Nation of Islam. York’s racial philosophy explicitly indicates that certain blacks – “Nubians” or “Melanites” – are of a superior race.

Periodically Nuwaubians will claim not to adhere to a racist doctrine, for instance quoting York’s statement: “We accept as fact that no one race of people is better than the other. In fact no one wins the race in racism.”

However, other statements from York and his followers indicate that his philosophy does rank moral worthiness based on race. For instance, in one lecture York said: “White people are the devil. They say the Nuwaubians are not racist – bullcrap! I am. He might not be; that’s his prerogative. I am. White people are devils — always was, always will be.”

White people (sometimes also referred to as “Amorites,” “Hyksos,” “Heka Khasut,” “Canaanites,” “Tamahu,” or “Mankind”) are said in one Nuwaubian myth to have been originally created as a race of killers to serve blacks as a slave army, but this plan went awry:

The Caucasian has not been chosen to lead the world. They lack true emotions in their creation. We never intended them to be peaceful. They were bred to be killers, with low reproduction levels and a short life span. What you call Negroid was to live 1,000 years each and the other humans 120 years. But the warrior seed of Caucasians only 60 years. They were only created to fight other invading races, to protect the God race Negroids. But they went insane, lost control when they were left unattended. They were never to taste blood. They did, and their true nature came out.… Because their reproduction levels were cut short, their sexual organs were made the smallest so that the female of their race will want to breed with Negroids to breed themselves out of existence after 6,000 years. It took 600 years to breed them, part man and part beast.

Other Teachings

Human Origins

It is important to bury the afterbirth so that Satan does not make a clone of the newborn baby.
Aborted fetuses survive and live in sewers where they are forming an army to take over the world.
Each of us has seven clones living in different parts of the world.

Animal Origins

The pig was created by Imhotep and Zoser during the time of Abraham, by grafting cells from the dog, cat and rat together, and was designed to help dispose of leprous corpses.

Anti-Nubian conspiracies

"Haven’t you ever wondered why for the simplest blood tests your doctor needs 4 tubes of blood? Where is all this blood going? The albino man’s ‘blood bank’ is just a sophisticated way of getting all the blood he needs! It is still a form of vampirism."
Alcoholic beverages are made cheaply available to Nubians by the powers that be in order to preserve their blood and organs better "(just like they preserve organs in jars in laboratories)" for later extraction.
Disco was created by the devil to win the souls of the Nubians: "The evil one knows that he can control the music world as long as his agents are within the A & R (Artists and Repertoire, who are responsible for choosing who makes it in the music world) of the well known companies. He cannot evaluate Latin or Black music because he (the evil one) has no soul. He only duplicates it… He had to come up with something to win our souls through his means, and he did it with disco."
There is an underground road connecting New York and London. Furthermore, Alternative 3 is a fact, and Mars is being prepared for the evacuation of Earth’s intellectual and political elite.
"People like the Pope, and Queen of England and various political leaders of various countries and some members of the clergy gather at the major Sabbats to invoke the malevolent one. On each of these occasions a Nubian man is sacrificed."
The Illuminati have nurtured a child, Satan's son, who was born on 6 June 1966 at the Dakota House on 72nd Street in New York to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis of the Rothschild/Kennedy families. The Pope was present at the birth and performed necromantic ceremonies. The child was raised by former U.S. president Richard Nixon and now lives in Belgium, where it is hooked up bodily to a computer called "The Beast 3M" or "3666."

[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuwaubianism]

[Pic: www.oasiscollections.com]

4. Iglesia Maradoniana (Maradonian Church) - was created by fans of the retired Argentine football player Diego Maradona, who they believe to be the best player of all time. It was founded on October 30, 1998 (Maradona's 38th birthday) in the city of Rosario, Argentina but it wasn't until 2001 that they had their first gathering.

It could be seen as a type of syncretism. It's clear that the passion between the different members is what glues them together. As Alejandro Verón, one of the founders tells us "I have a rational religion and that’s the Roman Catholic church, and I have a religion passed on my heart, passion, and that’s Diego Maradona."

Ten Commandments

The ball must not be stained, as D10S has proclaimed;
Love football over all things;
Declare your unconditional love of football;
Defend the colours of Argentina;
Preach the words of "Diego Maradona" all over the world;
Pray in the temples where he preached, and to his sacred mantles;
Do not proclaim the name of Diego in the name of a single club;
Follow the teachings of the Maradonian Church;
Let Diego be your second name, and that of your children;
No ser cabeza de termo y que no se te escape la tortuga. (Don't be a hothead and don't let the turtle escape you.)

Supporters of the Maradonian Church, supposedly from all parts of the world, count the years since Maradona's birth in 1960. It is popular among the followers of this religion, and also among other football fans, to use the neo-Tetragrammaton "D10S" as one of the names of Maradona. D10S is a portmanteau word which fuses Maradona's name (Diego), shirt number (10) and Dios, the Spanish word for God.
[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Maradona]

[Pic: www.pichaus.com]

5. The Church of Euthanasia - The Church of Euthanasia (CoE), is a political organization started by the Reverend Chris Korda in the Boston, Massachusetts area of the United States.

According to the church's website, it is "a non-profit educational foundation devoted to restoring balance between Humans and the remaining species on Earth." According to the church's website, the one commandment is "Thou shalt not procreate". The CoE further asserts four principal pillars:

Suicide
Abortion
Cannibalism ("strictly limited to consumption of the already dead")
Sodomy ("any sexual act not intended for procreation")

Slogans employed by the group include "Save the Planet, Kill Yourself", "Six Billion Humans Can't Be Wrong", and "Eat a Queer Fetus for Jesus", all of which are intended to mix inflammatory issues to unnerve those who oppose abortion and homosexuality.
[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Euthanasia]

6. Jediism - Jediism is a post-modern religious movement based upon the philosophical and spiritual ideas of the Jedi as depicted in Star Wars media.

The Jedi interpret and use the philosophic teachings found in the "Star Wars" stories/films, and other inspirational sources. Not all people who practice Jediism consider it a religious movement; some see it merely as a way of life. In addition to following the examples set in "Star Wars", Jedi practitioners also incorporate such codes as the Code of the Samurai and the Knight's code of Chivalry.
[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Religion]

7. The Church of Ed Wood - First thing that you see when you enter their web site is a pop up that says: “To answer your first question – yes, we’re totally serious.” This religion is registered and official. Woodists at their gatherings always dress up as opposite genre and indulge their desires, because Ed Wood loved transvestites and engaged them in his movies.
[Source: http://www.weirdworm.com/]

What you are about to enter is The Church of Ed Wood.

We are an internet church that practices Woodism. Woodism is a pop-culture-based religion created in 1996 by Reverend Steve Galindo. We follow the late cult director Edward D. Wood Jr., and we look to him as a savior. We at The Church of Ed Wood use Ed and his films to inject spirituality into those who get little fulfillment from more mainstream religions like Christianity. By looking at his films and his life, we learn to lead happy, positive lives. We strive for acceptance of others and of the self.
[Source: http://www.edwood.org/]

[Pic: http://www.hermetic.com/]

8. Apatheism - Apatheism (a portmanteau of apathy and theism/atheism), also known as pragmatic atheism or (critically) as practical atheism, is acting with apathy, disregard, or lack of interest towards belief, or lack of belief in a deity. Apatheism describes the manner of acting towards a belief or lack of a belief in a deity; so applies to both theism and atheism. An apatheist is also someone who is not interested in accepting or denying any claims that gods exist or do not exist. In other words, an apatheist is someone who considers the question of the existence of gods as neither meaningful nor relevant to his or her life.

Apathetic agnosticism (also called pragmatic agnosticism) is the view that thousands of years of debate have neither proven, nor dis-proven, the existence of one or more deities (gods). This view concludes that even if one or more deities exist, they do not appear to be concerned about the fate of humans. Therefore, their existence has little impact on personal human affairs and should be of little theological interest.

Arguments of Brands of Apatheism

Absence of Religious Motivation
Morals are present in human society and do not rely on religion to be a part of the human experience. The existence or nonexistence of a god has no effect on the actions of humans and may actually cause more human suffering than benefit. Apatheists recognize that religion may provide a "comfort" for many people around the world, but apatheists do not need religion to be content with the morality of their lives and therefore live without it, thus "moral apatheism".

Indifference
Also known as the "I'll eat another cookie" philosophy, an indifferent apatheist would say, "Since the existence of God can never be proven, nor can it be disproven, I won't waste my time asking questions to which there are no answers, and just eat another cookie."
Better known as "Indifferentism" in that "Indifferentism is the belief that there is no evidence that one religion or philosophy is superior to another."

"Not In My Power"
Many religions first became popular because of "miracles" or "acts of god". In the Bible, Jesus and his Apostles were seemingly granted powers from God in order to convince followers of his existence. They healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, fed multitudes with a few loaves of bread, walked on water and rose from the dead. Without these acts of God, it is doubtful that anyone would have believed in Christianity. Although it has not been proven if those feats really occurred, if God wanted people to believe in him, he could show off his existence and explain to humans what he wants us to do. Being all powerful, if he truly wanted humans to believe, he could send a divine sign. Since he does not seem to care if humans believe or not, apatheists will not care until he shows them a reason to.

"Agnostic Neutralist"
Individuals who identify as agnostic neutralists may argue that they prefer to be "nonparticipant" in prioritizing theistic or atheistic beliefs and claims. The Agnostic neutralist may argue that it is distinguished from apatheism in that the agnostic neutralist is not necessarily "apathetic" regarding the existence of god, or lacking religious motivation, but instead open to the idea of any or all possibilities, claiming that the existence of god is equally as likely as no god existing on the basis that neither has definitive evidence.

The agnostic neutralist may also argue that agnostic theism is the positive belief in god, while agnostic atheism is the negative or negation-of belief in god, and that since one can effectively have a "neutral" stance to belief itself, they must then be considered neither theist or atheist leaning, but rather neutral as they hold both "sides" equal in their potential to be true.
[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatheism]

9. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Pastafarianism - The Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) is the deity of the parody religion. Created in 2005 by Oregon State physics graduate Bobby Henderson, it was originally intended as a satirical protest against the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to permit the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in public schools. In an open letter sent to the Kansas State Board of Education, Henderson parodied the concept of intelligent design by professing belief in a supernatural creator that closely resembles spaghetti and meatballs. Henderson further called for his "Pastafarian" (a play on Rastafarian) theory of creation to be allotted equal time in science classrooms alongside intelligent design and evolution. He explained that since the intelligent design movement uses ambiguous references to an unspecified "Intelligent Designer", any conceivable entity may fulfill that role, even a Flying Spaghetti Monster. After Henderson published the letter on his website, it rapidly became an Internet phenomenon and a symbol for the case against teaching intelligent design in public schools as well as religion in general.

"I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence". — Bobby Henderson

Pastafarian beliefs —generally satires of creationism—are presented both on Henderson's website, where he is described as a "prophet", and in The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, published by Villiard Press in 2006. The central belief is that an invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. Pirates are revered as the original Pastafarians, and Pastafarians facetiously assert that a steady decline in the number of pirates over the years has resulted in a significant rise in global temperature. Pastafarians celebrate every Friday as a holy day. Other Pastafarian holidays include Ramendan, Pastover, International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and a vaguely defined holiday near Christmas named "Holiday".

The central belief is that an invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe "after drinking heavily". According to these beliefs, the Monster's intoxication was the cause for a flawed Earth. Furthermore, according to Pastafarianism, all evidence for evolution was planted by the Flying Spaghetti Monster in an effort to test Pastafarians' faith—parodying certain biblical literalists. When scientific measurements such as radiocarbon dating are taken, the Flying Spaghetti Monster "is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage". The Pastafarian belief of Heaven contains a beer volcano and a stripper factory. The Pastafarian Hell is similar, except that the beer is stale and the strippers have sexually transmitted diseases.

The Loose Canon

In September 2005, before Henderson had received a grant to write the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a Pastafarian member of the Venganza forums known as Solipsy announced the beginning of a project to collect texts from fellow Pastafarians to compile into the Loose Canon, a Holy Book of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, essentially analogous to the Bible. The book was completed in 2010 and published for free download.

Some excerpts from the Loose Canon include:

“I am the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Thou shalt have no other monsters before Me. (Afterwards is OK; just use protection.) The only Monster who deserves capitalization is Me! Other monsters are false monsters, undeserving of capitalization.”

- Suggestions 1:1

“Since you have done a half-ass job, you will receive half an ass!" The Great Pirate Solomon grabbed his ceremonial scimitar and struck his remaining donkey, cleaving it in two.”

- Slackers 1:51–52

[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastafarians]

[Credit (first 5 religions): http://www.associatedcontent.com]
[Credit (remaining religions): http://www.weirdworm.com]

And here is the rest of it.

7 Famous Curses

2010-11-06T05:39:00.000-07:00

Published by The Editors of Publications International, Ltd. as posted at http://people.howstuffworks.com.

1. James Dean and "Little Bastard"

On September 30, 1955, James Dean was killed when the silver Porsche 550 Spyder he called "Little Bastard" was struck by an oncoming vehicle. Within a year or so of Dean's crash, the car was involved in two more fatal accidents and caused injury to at least six other people. After the accident, the car was purchased by hot-rod designer George Barris.

While getting a tune up, Little Bastard fell on the mechanic's legs and crushed them. Barris later sold the engine and transmission to two doctors who raced cars. While racing against each other, one driver was killed, the other seriously injured. Someone else had purchased the tires, which blew simultaneously, sending the driver to the hospital.

Little Bastard was set to appear in a car show, but a fire broke out in the building the night before the show, destroying every car except Little Bastard, which survived without so much as a smudge. The car was then loaded onto a truck to go back to Salinas, California. The driver lost control en route, was thrown from the cab, and was crushed by the car when it fell off the trailer. In 1960, after being exhibited by the California Highway Patrol, Little Bastard disappeared and hasn't been seen since.
[Pic: hafif.org]

2. The Curse of Tutankhamen's Tomb

In 1922, English explorer Howard Carter, leading an expedition funded by George Herbert, Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, discovered the ancient Egyptian king's tomb and the riches inside. After opening the tomb, however, strange and unpleasant events began to take place in the lives of those involved in the expedition.

Lord Carnarvon's story is the most bizarre. The adventurer apparently died from pneumonia and blood poisoning following complications from a mosquito bite. Allegedly, at the exact moment Carnarvon passed away in Cairo, all the lights in the city mysteriously went out. Carnarvon's dog dropped dead that morning, too. Some point to the foreboding inscription, "Death comes on wings to he who enters the tomb of a pharaoh" as proof that King Tut put a curse on anyone who disturbed his final resting place.

3. "The 27 Club"

If you're a rock star and you're about to turn 27, you might want to consider taking a year off to avoid membership in "The Club." Robert Johnson, an African-American musician, who Eric Clapton called "the most important blues musician who ever lived," played the guitar so well that some said he must have made a deal with the devil. So when he died at 27, folks said it must have been time to pay up.

Since Johnson, a host of musical geniuses have gone to an early grave at age 27. Brian Jones, founding member of the Rolling Stones, died at age 27 in 1969. Then it was both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in 1970 and Jim Morrison the following year. Kurt Cobain joined "The Club" in 1994. All 27 years old. Coincidence? Or were these musical geniuses paying debts, too?
[Pic: http://thechaosofdeath.blogspot.com/]

4. "Da Billy Goat" Curse

In 1945, William "Billy Goat" Sianis brought his pet goat, Murphy, to Wrigley Field to see the fourth game of the 1945 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Detroit Tigers. Sianis and his goat were later ejected from the game, and Sianis reportedly put a curse on the team that day. Ever since, the Cubs have had legendarily bad luck.

Over the years, Cubs fans have experienced agony in repeated late-season collapses when victory seemed imminent. In 1969, 1984, 1989, and 2003, the Cubs were painfully close to advancing to the World Series but couldn't hold the lead. Even those who don't consider themselves Cubs fans blame the hex for the weird and almost comical losses year after year. The Cubs have not won a World Series since 1908 -- no other team in the history of the game has gone as long without a championship.
[Pic: http://www.squidoo.com/]

5. Rasputin and the Romanovs

Rasputin, the self-proclaimed magician and cult leader, wormed his way into the palace of the Romanovs, Russia's ruling family, around the turn of the last century. After getting a little too big for his britches, a few of the Romanovs allegedly decided to have him killed. But he was exceptionally resilient.

Reportedly it took poison, falling down a staircase, and repeated gunshots before Rasputin was finally dead. It's said that Rasputin mumbled a curse from his deathbed, assuring Russia's ruling monarchs that they would all be dead within a year. That did come to pass, as the Romanov family was brutally murdered in a mass execution less than a year later.
[Pic: http://en.wikipedia.org]

"'Harrison will not win this year to be the Great Chief. But he may win next year. If he does...He will not finish his term. He will die in his office.' 'No president has ever died in office,' declared a visitor. 'But Harrison will die I tell you. And when he dies you will remember my brother Tecumseh's death. You think that I have lost my powers. I who caused the sun to darken and Red Men to give up firewater. But I tell you Harrison will die. And after him, every Great Chief chosen every 20 years thereafter will die. And when each one dies, let everyone remember the death of our people.'" - Tecumseh
[Source: http://www.annexed.net/]

6. Tecumseh and the American Presidents

The curse of Tippecanoe, or "Tecumseh's Curse," is a widely held explanation of the fact that from 1840 to 1960, every U.S. president elected (or reelected) every twentieth year has died in office. Popular belief is that Tecumseh administered the curse when William Henry Harrison's troops defeated the Native American leader and his forces at the Battle of Tippecanoe.

William Henry Harrison was elected president in 1840. He caught a cold during his inauguration, which quickly turned into pneumonia. He died April 4, 1841, after only one month in office.
Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 and reelected four years later. Lincoln was assassinated and died April 15, 1865.
James Garfield was elected president in 1880. Charles Guiteau shot him in July 1881. Garfield died several months later, from complications following the gunshot wound.
William McKinley was elected president in 1896 and reelected in 1900. On September 6, 1901, McKinley was shot by Leon F. Czolgosz, who considered the president an "enemy of the people." McKinley died eight days later.
Three years after Warren G. Harding was elected president in 1920, he died suddenly of either a heart attack or stroke while traveling in San Francisco.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president in 1932 and reelected in 1936, 1940, and 1944. His health wasn't great, but he died rather suddenly in 1945, of a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke.
John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960 and assassinated in Dallas three years later.
Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, and though he was shot by an assassin in 1981, he did survive. Some say this broke the curse, which should make George W. Bush happy. At the time of this writing, Bush, who was elected in 2000, is serving his second term in office.

[Pic: http://www.paranormalhaze.com/]

7. The Curse of the Kennedy Family

Okay, so maybe if this family had stayed out of politics and off airplanes, their fate might be different. Regardless, the number of Kennedy family tragedies have led some to believe there must be a curse on the whole bunch.

JFK's brother Joseph, Jr., and sister Kathleen both died in separate plane crashes in 1944 and 1948, respectively.
JFK's other sister, Rosemary, was institutionalized in a mental hospital for years.
John F. Kennedy himself, America's 35th president, was assassinated in 1963 at age 46.
Robert Kennedy, JFK's younger brother, was assassinated in 1968.
Senator Ted Kennedy, JFK's youngest brother, survived a plane crash in 1964. In 1969, he was driving a car that went off a bridge, causing the death of his companion, Mary Jo Kopechne. His presidential goals were pretty much squashed after that.
In 1984, Robert Kennedy's son David died of a drug overdose. Another son, Michael, died in a skiing accident in 1997.
In 1999, JFK, Jr., his wife, and his sister-in-law died when the small plane he was piloting crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.

[Pic: http://www.siblingsupport.org/]
[Source: http://people.howstuffworks.com/]

The Art of Li Wei

2010-11-05T06:44:00.000-07:00

Li Wei (born in 1970, Hubei, China) is a contemporary artist from Beijing, China. His work often depicts him in apparently gravity-defying situations. Wei started off his performance series, 'Mirorring', and later on took off attention with his 'Falls' series which shows the artist with his head and chest embedded into the ground. His work is a mixture of performance art and photography that creates illusions of a sometimes dangerous reality. Li Wei states that these images are not computer montages and works with the help of props such as mirror, metal wires, scaffolding and acrobatics. [Source: Wikipedia]

Li Wei's art is a difficult process. In pieces such as “Lewei Falls to the Ice Hole,” his head is planted and unseen, while his body remains rigid and upright. These photos are shocking and make the viewer puzzle over their achievement. Wei has a knack for creating catalytic art that awes and intrigues people fortunate enough to come across it.

Many of Wei's photos have layered meanings, demonstrating various aspects of Chinese society. In “Li Wei's Body of Art” by Julie Segraves, Wei comments on his “Falls” series, in which he demonstrates the shock of societal progression. He notes: “If you picture someone falling to earth from another planet, there would really be no soft landing, whether the landing were in China or in another part of the world. This feeling of having fallen headfirst into the unknown and of having nothing firm under one's feet is familiar to everyone. One doesn't have to actually fall from another planet to feel that way."

Strange to behold, Li Wei's “Mirror” series is a surreal play on reality with the use of mirrors. Le Wei's head protrudes from a large mirror and it appears as though a human head is floating in a variety of places. Wei hopes to help remind people to view things from a new perspective. This mingling of the real and unreal creates fantastic art.
Li Wei has a message he wants to share: “I want to tell people that NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE,” he succinctly informed Claire O'Neil on NPR.

[Source: http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com]
All photos are courtesy of Li Wei.

More of Li Wei's artworks after the jump.

More at Li Wei Art

Honesty Coffee Shop

2010-11-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

Batanes, Philippines

Honesty Coffee Shop is a one of a kind store located in Ivana, Batanes. What makes this Ivatan store interesting? No one looks after the merchandise so each customer is pretty much free to move inside the store. Everyone is expected to be honest, the store owners trust the people enough to allow them to list the products they bought along with its corresponding price and then leave the payment in a drop box. You can find an interesting sign on the wall that says “This store is too small for dishonest people,”.

[Source: http://outoftownblog.com/batanes-honesty-coffee-shop/]

It is a typical Pinoy Sari-Sari store and Coffee Shop combined. Once you enter the shop, you can sit, relax and have some coffee. Each item has a price tag while some item prices are listed on the wall. The Majority of tourists intentionally drops excessive payment to show their support the owner.

The store is owned by Elena Gabilo, a 73-year old former public school teacher at the Ivana Elementary School. She opened the store in 1995 after her retirement. When the port of Radiwan closed and operations were transferred to San Vicente port, the store sales went down. Since then, she decided to concentrate on farming and helping her husband with their cane vinegar production. She opted to continue the sari-sari store operation but because her presence was needed on the farm she left the store unattended.

Just like a normal Sari-Sari (assorted) stores in most of the unpopulated areas, the store opens from 6am and closed as early as 6pm.

The Qatar Bahrain Causeway

2010-08-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

The Qatar Bahrain Causeway (also referred to as the Qatar Bahrain Friendship Bridge) is a causeway that is to be built between the two Arab states of Qatar and Bahrain. It was announced on the 13th of December 2008 that construction would start in early 2009 and would cost approximately US$2.3 billion to complete. As of June 2010, construction has yet to start, and the Qatar-Bahrain Causeway project is now on hold and the contracting consortium involved with the project is demobilising, according to a source at the Qatar Bahrain Causeway Foundation (QBCF).

Overview

The link between the two countries would be approximately 40 km (25 mi) in length, and would be a dual two-lane road. The link is expected to consist of a number of bridges combined with roads constructed on causeways and will be a natural extension of the King Fahd Causeway that connects Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, thus linking the entire region. These links include 18 km (11 mi) of artificial dikes and 22 km (14 mi) of viaducts and bridges. These bridges would be 40 m (131 ft) in height at places to allow maritime navigation. The eastern-end of the causeway in Qatar will be located at Ras Ashairij, 5 km (3 mi) South of the city of Zubarah. The opposite end of the causeway would link North of Askar in the Kingdom of Bahrain.

Plans for its construction were first made in September 2001, when the Danish consultancy COWI signed a DKK 60 million contract for the first phase of the project with the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Agriculture in Qatar[3]. Together with Sund & Bælt Partner Ltd., DHI Water & Environment and the architects of Dissing Weitling and COWI conducted pre-studies of the link.

As Enrique Iglesias would say it, "Baby I like it"...

[Supplementary textual information credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_Bahrain_Causeway]

Philippine Dictator Ferdinand Marcos' Giant Bust-ed!

2010-08-16T01:34:00.000-07:00

[Picture with caption: Reuters/Erik de Castro]

Read the rest of the entry inside.

An enormous concrete bust commissioned by the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos to immortalise himself has been blown up.

The hollow statue, which juts out of a mountainside in Benguet province, lost its eyes, nose and forehead in the blast, as well as a large chunk of its right cheek.

The identity of the perpetrators remains unclear. Suspects include left-wing activists, members of a local tribe - or possibly looters hunting for one of Marcos' legendary treasure troves.

The bust was built in the early 1980s when Mr Marcos was still in power, but fell into disrepair after he was overthrown in a popular revolt in 1986.

He died in exile three years later.

[Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2612709.stm]

Marcos' Bust Timeline:

Shot in 1998

2002; after the explosion.

2009

[Pictures: http://pinoyunderground.com]

Top 10 Secret Places on Earth

2010-08-16T01:04:00.000-07:00

The world is full of secret and exclusive places that we either don’t know about, or simply couldn’t visit if we wanted to. This list takes a look at ten of the most significant places around the world that are closed to the general public or are virtually impossible for the general public to visit.

10. Mezhgorye

Mezhgorye is a closed town in Russia which is believed to house people working on the highly secret Mount Yamantaw. The town was founded in 1979. Mount Yamantaw stands at 1,640 metres (5,381 ft) and is the highest mountain in the southern Urals. Along with Kosvinsky Mountain (600 km to the north), it is suspected by the United States of being a large secret nuclear facility and/or bunker. Large excavation projects have been observed by U.S. satellite imagery as recently as the late 1990s, during the time of Boris Yeltsin’s pro-Western government after the fall of the Soviet Union. Two garrisons, Beloretsk-15 and Beloretsk-16, were built on top of the facility. Repeated U.S. questions have yielded several different responses from the Russian government regarding Mount Yamantaw. They have said it is a mining site, a repository for Russian treasures, a food storage area, and a bunker for leaders in case of nuclear war.

9. Vatican Secret Archives

This has been mentioned on a previous list – the archives are not secret despite their names. You can view any document you wish. But you cannot enter the archive. You must submit your request for a document and it will be supplied to you. Despite the foolishness of the recent junk from Ron Howard and Dan Brown (Angels and Demons) the documents are all available and there are no copies of suppressed scientific theories or great works that were banned. The only documents you can’t access are those which are not yet 75 years old (in order to protect diplomatic and governmental information). Indexes are available for people who want to see if a document exists in the archives. The Vatican Secret Archives have been estimated to contain 52 miles (84 km) of shelving, and there are 35,000 volumes in the selective catalogue alone.

8. Club 33

Contrary to popular belief, Disneyland has a full liquor license which is used when the place closes down to the general public to accommodate private parties. But there is one place in Disneyland that is always open to sell booze: Club 33. Club 33 is a private club located in the heart of the New Orleans Square section of Disneyland. Officially maintained as a secret feature of the theme park, the entrance of the club is located next to the Blue Bayou Restaurant at “33 Royal Street” with the entrance recognizable by an ornate address plate with the number 33 engraved on it. Fees for joining range from 10 – 30 thousand US dollars and membership comes with a car park. If you want to join the club, you have to go to the end of the fourteen year waiting list.

7. Moscow Metro-2

Metro-2 in Moscow, Russia is a purported secret underground metro system which parallels the public Moscow Metro. The system was built supposedly during (or from) the time of Stalin and codenamed D-6 by the KGB. Russian journalists have reported that the existence of Metro-2 is neither confirmed nor denied by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) or the Moscow Metro administration. The length of Metro-2 is rumored to exceed even that of the “civil” (i.e. public) Metro. (It is said to have 4 lines and lie 50 to 200 m deep. It is said to connect the Kremlin with the FSB headquarters, the government airport at Vnukovo-2, and an underground town at Ramenki, in addition to other locations of national importance. Needless to say, the fact that no one confirms its existence makes it pretty difficult to visit.

6. White’s Gentlemen’s Club

White’s is the most exclusive English gentlemen’s club. It was founded in 1693 by Italian Francesco Bianco (Francis White) to sell the newly discovered hot chocolate but eventually became a typical (but extremely private) gentlemen’s club. The club is famous for its “betting book” in which members make bizarre gambles. The most famous of which is a 3,000 pound bet on which of two raindrops would slide down the window first. So why is this club on the list? Women are excluded completely from membership, so that is half our audience out. Secondly, men who want to join this exclusive club can only do so if invited by a sitting member who has the support of two other members. Unless you are a member of royalty, or are extremely powerful in politics or the arts, you are unlikely to ever see the exclusive White’s invitation.

5. Area 51

I have put this so high on the list because it is the one place most readers are likely to expect to see. Area 51 is a nickname for a military base that is located in the southern portion of Nevada in the western United States, 83 miles (133 km) north-northwest of downtown Las Vegas. Situated at its center, on the southern shore of Groom Lake, is a large secretive military airfield. The base’s primary purpose is to support development
and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems. The intense secrecy surrounding the base, the very existence of which the U.S. government barely acknowledges, has made it the frequent subject of conspiracy theories and a central component to unidentified flying object (UFO) folklore. The sign above states that deadly force can be used if people enter the Area 51 zone.

4. Room 39

Room 39 or Bureau 39 is arguably one of the most secretive organizations in North Korea that seeks ways to obtain foreign currency for Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s Chairman of the National Defense Commission. Room 39 was established in the late 1970s. It has been described as the lynchpin of the North’s so-called “court economy” centered on the dynastic Kim family. It is unknown how the name originated. Very little is known about Room 39 due to the secretive nature surrounding the organization, but it is widely speculated that the organization uses 10 to 20 bank accounts in China and Switzerland for the purposes of counterfeiting, money laundering, and other illicit transactions. It is also alleged that Room 39 is involved in drug smuggling and illicit weapon sales. It is known, however, that the organization has 120 foreign trade companies
under its jurisdiction and is under the direct control of Kim Jong-il. North Korea has denied taking part in any illegal activities. Room 39 is believed to be located inside a ruling Workers’ Party building in Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea.

3. Ise Grand Shrine

The Ise Grand Shrine in Japan (which is actually a series of over 100 shrines) is the most sacred shrine in Japan. It is dedicated to Amaterasu (the Sun goddess) and has been in existence since 4BC. The main shrine is alleged to hold the most important item in Japan’s imperial history: the Naikū (the mirror from Japanese mythology which eventually ended up in the hands of the first emperors). The shrine is demolished and rebuilt every 20 years in keeping with the Shinto idea of death and rebirth (the next rebuilding will be in 2013). This ranks very high on the list of places you will never go because the only person who can enter is the priest or priestess and he must be a member of the Japanese imperial family. So unless we have a Japanese prince or princess reading the site, no one here will ever see anything more than the thatched roof of the Ise Grand Shrine.

2. Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center

This is a place that is not only closed to the public, but it is a place that the public hope to never have to enter! In most “end of the world” films we see these days, there is always a highly classified area where US government officials and a chosen few get to go in the hopes that they can escape the impending doom. The Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center is the real thing. It was set up in the 1950s due to the cold war but continues to operate today. It is a “last hope” area. For obvious reasons its operations are highly classified. It is run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The center is already functioning and even in small local disasters in the US, much of the telecommunications traffic is routed through it.

1. RAF Menwith Hill

RAF Menwith Hill is a British military base with connections to the global ECHELON spy network. The site contains an extensive satellite ground station and is a communications intercept and missile warning site and has been described as the largest electronic monitoring station in the world. The site acts as a ground station for a number of satellites operated by the US National Reconnaissance Office, on behalf of the US National Security Agency, with antennae contained in a large number of highly distinctive white radomes, and is alleged to be an element of the ECHELON system. ECHELON was reportedly created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War in the early 1960s, but since the end of the Cold War it is believed to search also for hints of terrorist plots, drug dealers’ plans, and political and diplomatic intelligence. It has also been involved in reports of commercial espionage and is believed to filter all telephone and radio communications in the nations which host it – an extreme violation of privacy.

[Credit: http://listverse.com/2010/01/06/top-10-places-you-cant-go/]

Hand of Hope

2010-04-25T21:45:00.000-07:00

On Aug. 19, 1999, photographer Michael Clancy shot the "Fetal Hand Grasp" — his picture of a 21-week-old fetus grasping a doctor's finger during innovative surgery to correct spina bifida. Nearly four months later, on Dec. 2, Samuel Armas was "born famous."

The photo, which first appeared in USA Today on Sept. 7, 1999, quickly spread across the globe as proof of development in the womb and was later cited during congressional debates on the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which passed in 2000. - FOX News

The photograph was taken during a pioneering surgical procedure performed on August 19, 1999, to fix the spina bifida lesion of a 21-week-old fetus in the womb. The operation was performed by a surgical team at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The team, Dr. Joseph Bruner and Dr. Noel Tulipan, had been developing a technique for correcting certain fetal problems in mid-pregnancy. Their procedure involved temporarily opening the uterus, draining the amniotic fluid, partially extracting and performing surgery on the tiny fetus, and then restoring the fetus to the uterus back inside the mother.

On March 2, 2003, an exaggerated photo description was proliferated via email:

A picture began circulating in November. It should have been 'The Picture of the Year,' or perhaps, 'Picture of the Decade.' It won't be. In fact, unless you obtained a copy of the US paper which published it, you probably would never have seen it.

The picture is that of a 21-week-old unborn baby named Samuel Alexander Armas, who is being operated on by surgeon named Joseph Bruner.

The baby was diagnosed with spina bifida and would not survive if removed from his mother's womb. Little Samuel's mother, Julie Armas, is an obstetrics nurse in Atlanta . She knew of Dr. Bruner's remarkable surgical procedure. Practicing at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, he performs these special operations while the baby is still in the womb.

During the procedure, the doctor removes the uterus via C-section and makes a small incision to operate on the baby. As Dr.Bruner completed the surgery on Samuel, the little guy reached his tiny, but fully developed hand through the incision and firmly grasped the surgeon's finger. Dr. Bruner was reported as saying that when his finger was grasped, it was the most emotional moment of his life, and that for an instant during the procedure he was just frozen, totally immobile.

The photograph captures this amazing event with perfect clarity. The editors titled the picture, 'Hand of Hope.' The text explaining the picture begins, 'The tiny hand of 21-week- old fetus Samuel Alexander Armas emerges from the mother's uterus to grasp the finger of Dr. Joseph Bruner as if thanking the doctor for the gift of life.'

Little Samuel's mother said they 'wept for days' when they saw the picture. She said, 'The photo reminds us pregnancy isn't about disability or an illness, it's about a little person.' Samuel was born in perfect health, the operation 100 percent successful.

Pass it on. The world needs to see this one!

[Source: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl-handofhope.htm]

Controversy

The picture attracted a lot of attention when it was released, as it was used by opponents of abortion who asserted that that the baby reached through the womb and grabbed the doctor's hand, thus showing signs of life at the 21st week of pregnancy. Indeed the photograph and many of the texts which often accompany it seem to support this view, including the account of the photographer Michael Clancy:

“As a doctor asked me what speed of film I was using, out of the corner of my eye I saw the uterus shake, but no one's hands were near it. It was shaking from within. Suddenly, an entire arm thrust out of the opening, then pulled back until just a little hand was showing. The doctor reached over and lifted the hand, which reacted and squeezed the doctor's finger. As if testing for strength, the doctor shook the tiny fist. Samuel held firm. I took the picture! Wow!

It happened so fast that the nurse standing next to me asked, "What happened?"

"The child reached out," I said.

"Oh. They do that all the time," she responded.
”
— Michael Clancy

However, the surgeon later stated that Samuel and his mother Julie were under anesthesia and could not move.

“ "The baby did not reach out," Dr Bruner said. "The baby was anesthetized. The baby was not aware of what was going on.".

He also stated, “Depending on your political point of view, this is either Samuel Armas reaching out of the uterus and touching the finger of a fellow human, or it’s me pulling his hand out of the uterus … which is what I did.”

[Source + Pic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Armas]

Dagestan Massacre

2010-04-20T23:39:00.000-07:00

WARNING: EXTREMELY GRAPHIC VIDEOS

This video, dated 1999 and filmed in Dagestan, shows the brutal execution of six Russian conscripts at the hands of Chechen rebels lead by Salautdin Temirbulatov.

The Chechen gang led by Temirbulatov, crossed into Dagestan with about 250-500 fighters, the village was protected by 13 lightly armed Russian conscripts. Upon realizing they could not possibly defeat so many enemies, 7 of the conscripts fled and the remaining 6 surrendered after running out of ammunition and being promised of POW status.

Temirbulatov's group was decimated few months after the filming of this video. Each of the Chechens seen in the video have been either captured or killed by Sulim Yamadayev and his forces or by the Spetsnaz. Temirbulatov was arrested on March 20, 2000.

[Source + Videos: http://www.ohlookaforum.com/]

Beheading videos after the jump.
Worst decapitation ever!

The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs

2010-04-19T03:35:00.000-07:00

WARNING: VERY GRAPHIC VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP

The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs: (left to right) Suprunyuck, Hanzha and Sayenko.

The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs (Ukr: Дніпропетровські маніяки, Rus: Днепропетровские Маньяки) is the media epithet for the killers responsible for a string of murders in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in June and July 2007. The case gained additional notoriety because the killers made video recordings of some of the murders, with one of the videos leaking to the Internet. Two 19-year-old locals, Viktor Sayenko (Ukr: Віктор Саєнко, Rus: Виктор Саенко) and Igor Suprunyuck (Ukr: Ігор Супрунюк, Rus: Игорь Супрунюк), were arrested and charged with 21 murders.

A third conspirator, Alexander Hanzha (Ukr: Олександр Ганжа, Rus: Александр Ганжа), was charged with two armed robberies that took place before the murder spree. On February 11, 2009, all three defendants were found guilty. Suprunyuck and Sayenko were sentenced to life imprisonment, while Hanzha received nine years in prison. The lawyers for Suprunyuck and Sayenko launched an appeal, which was dismissed by the Supreme Court of Ukraine in November 2009.

Murders

The first two murders took place late at night on June 25, 2007. The first victim was a 33-year-old local woman named Ekaterina Ilchenko, who was walking home after having tea at her female friend's apartment. According to Sayenko's confession, he and Suprunyuck were "out for a walk". Suprunyuck had a hammer. As Ilchenko walked past, Suprunyuck "spun around" and struck her in the side of the head. Ilchenko's body was found by her mother at 5 AM.

Within an hour of the first murder, the two men attacked their next victim, Roman Tatarevich. He was sleeping on a bench a short walk away from the first murder scene. Tatarevich's head was smashed with blunt objects numerous times, rendering him unrecognizable. The bench he was discovered on was located across the street from the local Public Prosecutor's office.

On July 1, two more victims, Evgeniya Grischenko and Nikolai Serchuk, were found murdered in the nearby town of Novomoskovsk.

On the night of July 6, three more people were murdered in Dnepropetrovsk. The first was Egor Nechvoloda, a recently discharged army recruit, who was bludgeoned while walking home from a night club. His mother found the body in the morning by their apartment building on Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street. Elena Shram, a 28-year-old night guard, was then murdered around the corner on Kosiora Street. According to Sayenko's taped confession, as Shram walked towards them, Suprunyuck struck her with the hammer he had been hiding under his shirt and struck her several more times after she fell down. She had been carrying a bag filled with clothes. The men picked up the bag, used the clothes to clean the hammer, and threw the bag out. Later the same night, the men murdered a woman named Valentina Hanzha (no apparent relation to co-defendant Alexander Hanzha), a mother of three married to a disabled husband.

The next day, July 7, two 14-year-old boys from Podgorodnoye, a nearby village, were attacked in broad daylight as they went fishing. One of the two friends, Andrei Sidyuck, was killed, but the other, Vadim Lyakhov, managed to escape.

Andrei Sidyuck

On July 12, a 48-year-old man named Sergei Yatzenko, disabled by a recent bout with cancer, went missing while riding his Dnepr motorcycle. His body was found four days later, with signs of a savage attack clearly visible even after four days in the summer heat.

Thirteen more murders followed, often with multiple bodies found in the same day. In addition to the earlier sprees, two victims were found every day from July 14 through 16. Victims were seemingly selected at random. Many were vulnerable to attack, including women, children, elderly, vagrants, or people under the influence of alcohol.

Most of the victims were killed using blunt objects, including hammers and steel construction bars. Blows were often directed at the victims' faces, leaving them unrecognizable. Many victims were also mutilated and tortured, and some had their eyes gouged out while they were still alive. One of the victims was a pregnant woman, whose fetus was cut out of her womb. No sexual assaults on any victims were reported.

Some of the victims were also robbed of their cell phones and other valuables, with their possessions pawned to a large network of second-hand shops in the area. However, most victims had their possessions intact.

The murders spanned a large geographical area. In addition to the city of Dnepropetrovsk itself, many took place in the outlying areas of the Dnepropetrovsk Oblast.

Investigation

No official link between the murders was made until the July 7 attack on two boys in Podgorodnoye. Vadim Lyakhov, the survivor, was initially placed under arrest, suspected of murdering his friend. He was reportedly denied access to counsel and beaten by police during questioning. However, it quickly became clear that he was not responsible for his friend's death, and that the murder was connected with the murder spree. Lyakhov cooperated with the investigators to create sketches of the attackers.

Several days later, on July 14, a 45-year-old woman named Natalia Mamarchuk was riding her scooter in the nearby village of Diyovka. As she was passing through a wooded area, two men ran towards her and knocked her down. They then took out a hammer or a pipe and bludgeoned her to death as she lay on the ground. After she stopped moving, the men then jumped on her scooter and drove off. The attack was witnessed from a distance by many locals. They gave chase, but quickly lost sight of the attackers. Two local children also witnessed the attack from up close, hidden in a tent just a few feet away from where Mamarchuk was murdered. They provided a detailed description that matched the one given by Lyakhov. A task force was quickly set up from Kiev, headed by Lead Criminal Investigator Vasily Paskalov. The manhunt soon grew to encompass most of the local law enforcement. Reportedly over 2,000 investigators were working on the case.

The investigation was initially kept secret. No official information about the murders was released, and local people were not warned about possible attacks or provided with descriptions of the suspects. However, rumors of the attacks kept most of the local population home at night. Eventually, the investigators selectively distributed sketches and lists of stolen property to local pawn shops. Stolen property began to appear in the pawn shops of the city's Leninskiy district. The combination of the sketches and located stolen property led quickly to the suspects.

Arrest and Trial

Actual photo of one of the suspect's arrest.

The three suspects were arrested on July 23, 2007. Suprunyuck attempted to sell a mobile phone stolen from one of the victims in a local pawn shop, asking for 150 hryvnia (about US $20). When the phone was turned on to show that it worked, its location was traced by law enforcement agents. Suprunyuck and Sayenko were arrested near the cash register of the shop. Hanzha was arrested at home, reportedly managing to flush other stolen mobile phones down the toilet. The phones were recovered, but all information on them was lost.

The three men were charged with involvement in 29 separate incidents, including 21 murders and 8 more attacks where the victims survived. Suprunyuck was charged with 27 of the cases, including 21 counts of capital murder, 8 armed robberies, and 1 count of animal cruelty. Sayenko was charged with 25 instances, including 18 murders, 5 robberies and 1 count of animal cruelty. Hanzha was charged with two counts of armed robbery, stemming from a March 1, 2007 incident in Dniprodzerzhynsk.

All three confessed quickly, although Suprunyuck later withdrew his confession. Their trial began in June 2008. Suprunyuck pleaded not guilty, while the other two suspects pleaded guilty to all charges. Viktor Chevguz, Suprunyuck's original defense lawyer, dropped out of the case after reportedly being disappointed at failing to have a plea of insanity for his client accepted. Lawyers for the victims' families argued that the level of care taken by the killers during their crime spree meant that they were fully aware of their actions.

Prosecution evidence included bloodstains on the suspects' clothing and video recordings of the murders. The defense denied that the people in the videos were the suspects, claiming serious problems with the investigation, including at least 10 more murders covered up by the prosecution, supposed cover-ups of additional arrests of people with powerful connections who were released without being charged, even naming some of the additional people supposedly involved with the murders.The case was heard by a panel of judges chaired by Judge Ivan Senchenko. The prosecution asked for life imprisonment for Sayenko and Suprunyuck, and 15 years of hard labor for Hanzha. Ukraine has no capital punishment.

Suspects

The three suspects attended school together, and by the eighth grade they had found some common ground. "Me and Igor [Suprunyuck] were both afraid of heights, and we were afraid we'd be beaten up by bullies", Sayenko stated during questioning. Suprunyuck went looking for advice on getting rid of their fears, which led the two boys to stand on a balcony of their 14th floor apartment for hours, hanging over the railing. This reportedly had a positive effect on their fear of heights. Hanzha was reportedly the most squeamish of the three. He had blood phobia, and would even refuse to give a bath to his kitten, afraid he might scald it. Suprunyuck suggested tackling the fears by torturing stray dogs. The boys would capture dogs in a wooded area near their house, hang them from trees, disembowel them, and take pictures standing next to the corpses. Prosecution evidence included many of these photos taken by the underage suspects. Some photos show the boys drawing swastikas and other symbols with animal blood, and giving the Hitler salute. In one photo, Suprunyuck poses sporting a "Hitler moustache". Suprunyuck was born on April 20, the same day as Adolf Hitler, and often made references to the fact.

A long video showing the three torturing a white kitten was shown in court. It takes place in their garage. The suspects fashion a cross out of two wooden boards and nail the kitten to it, then shoot at it with two pistols, placing foam and glue in its mouth in order to muffle the kitten's screams.

When the boys were 17, Suprunyuck beat up a local boy and stole his bike, which he then sold to Sayenko. Both were arrested, but did not go to jail due to their age.

After high school, Hanzha drifted between odd jobs, which included a pastry chef and a construction worker. At the time of the arrest he had been unemployed for some time. Sayenko went to a metallurgy institute part-time and worked as a security guard. Suprunyuck remained officially unemployed, but made a living driving his green Daewoo Lanos as an unlicensed taxi. The car was reportedly a birthday gift from his parents.

Some months before the murder spree began, Suprunyuck - with the help of Sayenko and Hanzha - began picking up passengers and robbing them. A green Daewoo with a taxicab's checkerboard marking was often described as the vehicle used in the murders. According to the suspects' confessions, some of the murder victims were picked up as passengers in Suprunyuck's unlicensed cab. Hanzha reportedly participated in a single incident where two men were robbed, and subsequently declined to take part in any further attacks.

Local media reported that the suspects had wealthy influential parents with ties to local law enforcement. Vladimir Suprunyuck, Igor Suprunyuck's father, in his interview to Segodnya stated that he had been employed at Yuzhmash as a test pilot, often flying with Leonid Kuchma, the future president of Ukraine, and continuing to serve as his personal pilot on domestic flights after Kuchma's rise to power. Local authorities, including deputy interior minister Nikolay Kupyanskiy, initially referred to the supposed influence of the suspects' families, but later denied the assessment, claiming that all three suspects came from poor families. However, Viktor Sayenko was represented in court by his father Igor Sayenko, a lawyer.

Motive

The prosecution did not establish a specific motive behind the killings. Local media reported that the killers had a plan to get rich from the murder videos that they recorded. One of the suspects' girlfriends reported that they were planning to make forty videos of separate murders. This was corroborated by the suspects' former classmate, who claimed that he often heard Suprunyuck was in contact with an unknown "rich foreign website operator" who ordered forty snuff videos, and would pay a large sum of money once they were made. Regional security chief Ivan Stupak rejected the claim that the murders had been committed to make Internet snuff videos, saying that no evidence had come to light during the investigation that supported the claim. Detective Bogdan Vlasenko stated: "We think they were doing it as a hobby, to have a collection of memories when they get old." Deputy interior minister Nikolay Kupyanskiy commented "For these young men, murder was like entertainment or hunting."
At the trial, it emerged that Suprunyuck had collected newspaper cuttings about the case. Some of the photographs of the crimes had captions added, including "The weak must die. The strongest will conquer."

Defense Claims

The legal team defending the suspects consisted of three lawyers, one assigned to each suspect. All three lawyers were originally court-appointed, but after the initial hearings Viktor Sayenko requested to be represented by his father instead of his previous lawyer, who had apparently graduated from law school only two months earlier. The request was granted, leading to a significant delay in the proceedings as Sayenko's father familiarized himself with multiple volumes of evidence. Igor Sayenko became the most prominent figure on the defense side, giving numerous interviews and taking a leading role in the court proceedings.

Hanzha's attorneys based their defense on the fact that he never participated in the murder spree, and was involved only with a single incident four months before the spree began, in which two men were robbed in the nearby town of Dniprodzerzhynsk. Hanzha fully admitted his guilt, hoping for leniency in sentencing.

The defense strategy for the other two suspects was to attack the prosecution on a wide front. Multiple investigators were called to the stand, including the leader of the arrest team and the lead investigator in the case. The defense claimed illegal searches, improperly kept records, and problems during questioning. Igor Sayenko [on the picture beside] raised questions about the videotape of the searches conducted in the suspects' apartments. According to Sayenko, the tape constantly stops and restarts, showing the evidence obtained only after being picked up by investigators, but never the actual moment of discovery. The legal team also denied that the people shown in the murder videos were the suspects, claiming that they are recognized instantly as different individuals.

In an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, a major Russian-language newspaper, Igor Sayenko claimed that a fourth suspect named Danila Kozlov was initially charged with the murders. Tatiana Shram, a sister of victim Elena Shram, also stated in an interview that she saw Kozlov's name mentioned in court documents, and that Kozlov was reportedly aware of the murders, and was with the suspects just before her sister was murdered. Shram further stated that the investigators told her that Kozlov remains free because he "did not murder anyone", and that when her attorney attempted to bring up the matter in court, the judge "asked him to sit down".

Igor Sayenko continued to speculate on the influence of the families of the "real killers", claiming that he conducted interviews with an escaped victim who wanted his identity kept secret out of fear for his life. This unnamed victim claimed that he identified the suspects in his attack, and that two other men were identified and arrested. The suspects were supposedly released an hour later due to pressure from their families, and two of the investigators were fired. Sayenko stated in court that four days before the three suspects were arrested, police caught two men and a woman in the act of committing one of the murders. The suspects attacked the police officers but were arrested and were booked under the names of Sayenko and Suprunyuck, but they were not the men currently on trial. "But now these details are being covered up," Sayenko said in court. "The investigators claim that this did not happen. But there are people, officers in the Militsiya, who on July 19, 2007 received reports that those three were arrested. [...]But, alas, it turned out that the persons arrested had powerful parents. So the information was quickly suppressed, and instead my son and two of his friends were railroaded. I also believe that the girl arrested on that day has since left the country and is now in Germany."

The defense team also claimed that the prosecution was withholding from the court information that exonerated their clients. Igor Sayenko claimed that the police interviewed witnesses and recovered evidence from two additional murders. The suspects had a strong alibi for the time of these murders, and so all information on these crimes was removed from the case.

Viktor Sayenko's defense claimed that he had a "psychological dependence" on Igor Suprunyuck, whom they called the ringleader. They claimed that Suprunyuck repeatedly threatened Sayenko, and that Sayenko feared for his life. Sayenko testified in court, saying that he had been in constant fear of Suprunyuck since 7th grade.

The strategy of the defense team received some support from the victims' families, who were reportedly dissatisfied with the slow-moving legal process as well as an alleged cover-up by the investigators. Some of the victims' relatives stated to the media that they planned to set up an independent organization to monitor the court proceedings. The authorities in Ukraine strongly denied that a fourth person was involved in the killings who could still be at large, and said that rumors of similar crimes taking place since the arrest of the three suspects are unfounded.

Murder Videos & Photographs

Video Transcript:

“Hold on, hold on. Be neater, fuck!” likely saying that to watch out for the blood.
*Laughing*
“Hold on, hold on, hold on, don’t hit him, don’t hit him. Watch him…” the rest of the sentence is indistinct, but he’s likely telling the guy to watch for the blood as he’s zooming in to capture the close up
The following audio is unclear.
[After the screwdriver stabbing]
“What? With what?” as the cameraman responds to the boy who stabs the victim
“What, he’s still alive?” says the guy stabbing the victim
“He’s still moving his arms after I ripped up his intestines” the cameraman muffles indistinctly
“He’s having a fucked up day” says the stabbing guy after he’d stepped on his stomach.
[More muffled talk as he proceeds to stab him in the eyes with the screwdriver]
“Get over here fast. Kill him already.”
“What?” says the stabber
“Kill him already.”
“I already put the hammer back. He’s already dead.”
“I poked out his eyes and he’s still not dead” says the cameraman
“Get the knife” cameraman continues
*Proceeds to bludgeon him then interrupts by saying something indistinct*
“More, more” cameraman telling the other guy to keep bludgeoning him to make sure he’s dead
“Hold on, hold on”
*They start walking back to the car*
More muffled talk from the blond killer
“Wash your hands” cameraman says and tells him to spray cleaning chemical on the hammer
“I’ll hold it”
*Muffled talk from the guy washing the hammer*
*More muffled talk from the guy washing his face and walking back from his car*
“I stuck the screwdriver in his brain” says the camera man
*Muffled talk from the guy washing his hands*
“I got him in the nose from his eye” or something along those lines
“I don’t understand how he was alive? I felt his brain” says the camera man
“I was holding the screw driver like this *muffled/don’t understand*”
Before the video ends the blond guy says “Alright, let’s get a picture”

The suspects' cell phones and personal computers contained multiple video recordings of the murders taking place. One full video was leaked to the Internet, showing the murder of 48-year-old Sergei Yatzenko. He is seen laying on his back in a wooded area, and is struck repeatedly in the face with a hammer held inside a plastic bag. One of the attackers pokes out Yatzenko's eyes, and stabs him in the abdomen with a screwdriver. Yatzenko is then struck with the hammer in order to ensure that he is dead. The attack lasts over four minutes, during which the victim lapses in and out of consciousness. One of the murderers can be seen smiling towards the camera during the video. The murderers walk back to their car, showing that the crime took place only a few feet away from the side of a road, next to their parked car. They discuss the murder calmly, expressing mild surprise that the victim was still breathing after a screwdriver was plunged into his exposed brain. The suspects then wash their hands and the hammer with a water bottle, and begin to laugh. Only two suspects appear to be present in the video, with one always behind the camera.

The suspects were also found in possession of multiple photographs showing them attending funerals of the victims. They can be seen smiling and "flipping off" the coffins and gravestones. Evidence of animal abuse was also shown in court, with the suspects posing alongside mutilated animal corpses.

Prosecution evidence: Sayenko and Suprunyuck with a murdered cat.

The photographic and video evidence was shown in court on October 29, 2008, as part of a larger presentation of over 300 photographs and two videos. The defense objected to the presentation, claiming that the evidence was obtained illegally, and that the subjects shown in the video and the photographs were digitally altered to resemble the suspects. When Suprunyuck and Sayenko were asked if they recognized the people in the photographs, they replied that they did not. Judge Ivan Senchenko responded by stating "You are not blind." Valery Voronyuck, an expert on film and video editing, testified to the court that in his view the video material had not been faked or altered in any way. The court rejected all the objections raised by the defense, and accepted the prosecution's argument that the material was genuine, and showed the suspects in the act of murdering their victims.

The Victim In The Video

The man whose brutal murder is recorded in the leaked video was identified as Sergei Yatzenko from the village of Taromskoye. His murder took place on July 12, 2007, and his body was found on July 16.

Lyudmila
Yatzenko was 48 years old. He had recently been forced into retirement due to a cancerous tumor in his throat. The treatment left him unable to speak for some time, but Yatzenko was unhappy with being unable to work and continued to find odd jobs around the village. He took on small construction projects, fixed cars, weaved baskets, and cooked for his family. He was beginning to regain his voice by the time of the murder. Yatzenko was married and had two sons and one grandchild. He also had a disabled mother whom he looked after.

Yatzenko had another brush with death sixteen years earlier. While working at a farm, he lost control of his tractor and rolled downhill into a river. Instead of jumping out, he stayed in the cabin trying to save his vehicle, and became pinned underwater. By the time he was freed, Yatzenko was clinically dead, but was resuscitated. Doctors called his survival "one in a thousand".

At around 2:30 PM on the day of the murder, he called his wife to let her know he was riding his old Dnepr motorcycle to see his grandchild. He never arrived at his son's house, and his cell phone was turned off by 6 PM. His wife Lyudmila called a friend and walked around the village, afraid that her husband might have fallen ill or had a motorcycle accident. They were unable to locate any signs of him. They were also unable to file a missing person's report, since in the Ukraine a person cannot be declared missing until at least 72 hours after last being seen. The next day, Lyudmila posted photographs of her husband around the village, and enlisted more local help to search the surrounding area. Four days later, a local who saw one of Lyudmila's posters remembered that he had seen an abandoned Dnepr bike in a remote wooded area by a garbage dump. He took Yatzenko's relatives to the scene, where they discovered his mutilated and decomposing body.

The fact that Yatzenko's murder was captured on video was unknown to the public until a court session on October 29, 2008. The unedited video of the murder was shown as part of a large presentation by the prosecution, causing shock in the audience. The court agreed with the prosecution that the video was genuine, that it showed Igor Suprunyuck attacking the victim, and that Viktor Sayenko was the man behind the camera.

The video showing the murder of Sergei Yatzenko was leaked to a shock site based in the United States and dated December 4, 2008. Ekaterina Levchenko, adviser to Ukraine's Minister of the Interior, was critical of the leak, but admitted that control of videos on the Internet was "virtually impossible". Caitlin Moran of The Times watched part of the video and recalled her reaction in her column in January 2009. Parts of the video have become a viral video known as 3Guys1Hammer, a pun on another famous shock video, 2 Girls 1 Cup. Some YouTube users have posted videos recording their reactions while watching the murder video.

Sentencing

On February 11, 2009, the court in Dnepropetrovsk found Igor Suprunyuck and Viktor Sayenko guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced both to life imprisonment. Suprunyuck was found guilty of 21 murders, while Sayenko was found guilty of 18 murders. They also received fifteen years sentences after being found guilty on the robbery charges. Alexander Hanzha, who was not involved in the killings, was found guilty of robbery and sentenced to nine years in prison. All three were also found guilty on the animal cruelty charges. Hanzha said of Suprunyuck and Sayenko: "If I had known the atrocities that they were capable of committing, I would have not gone near them at gunpoint." The judge stated in the verdict that the motive for the crimes had been a desire for "morbid self-affirmation". Referring to the accused, the court noted "the poverty of their emotional world, and their absence of interest in people and moral standards."

Fair use rationale for Dnepropetrovsk maniacs: Photograph showing Igor Suprunyuck posing with a hammer. This photograph was part of the evidence shown in court on October 29, 2008. It was probably taken by Viktor Sayenko, another defendant at the trial for 21 murders. Copyright status unclear, although released into the public domain as a piece of evidence in a criminal trial. It is used to illustrate the phrase "morbid self-affirmation" described by the court as the motive in the case.The court's verdict was several hundred pages long and was read out over a period of two days. The lawyers for Suprunyuck and Sayenko announced their intention to appeal, saying that the authenticity of the photographic and video evidence had not been established beyond reasonable doubt. The claim was dismissed by Edmund Saakian, a lawyer for one of the victims' families, who commented: "In theory a photo can be faked, but to fake a forty minute video would require a studio and a whole year." Larissa Dovgal, a representative of the victims' families, claimed that other perpetrators involved in the crimes could still be at large.

The parents of Igor Suprunyuck and Viktor Sayenko repeated their belief in the innocence of their sons. Vladimir Suprunyuck claimed that Igor had been tortured in order to extract his confession, with the police covering his head and forcing him to inhale cigarette smoke. Speaking at a televised press conference, Vladimir Suprunyuck cited irregularities during the investigation, and said that the case against his son was false. Igor Sayenko claimed that his son had been made a scapegoat, and that the crimes had been committed by the relatives of senior officials. The parents plan to appeal to the Supreme Court of Ukraine and the European Court of Human Rights. The parents of Suprunyuck and Sayenko also argued that the sentence on Alexander Hanzha had been too lenient. An opinion poll conducted in Dnepropetrovsk found that 50.3% of people believed that the sentence was fair, and 48.6% believed that the sentence should have been more severe.

Appeal

On August 18, 2009, the Supreme Court of Ukraine referred the case back to the Dnepropetrovsk regional court of appeal. The move was welcomed by Igor Sayenko, who stated that it was a step towards clearing his son's name. Speaking at a press conference, Igor Sayenko and Vladimir Suprunyuck repeated their belief that the case was based on fabricated evidence. A spokesperson for the prosecutor's office said that the decision to refer the case back to the appeal court was procedural, and that they were confident that the verdict would be upheld. The appeal was scheduled for October 5, 2009. In an interview with the newspaper Novi Most, the mothers of Suprunyuck and Sayenko said that their children were being treated well in prison. It was also reported that Igor Sayenko was considering setting up a website about the case.

On November 24, 2009, the Supreme Court of Ukraine upheld the life sentences passed on Igor Suprunyuck and Viktor Sayenko in February 2009. Alexander Hanzha did not appeal against his nine year sentence.

[Source + Pics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnepropetrovsk_maniacs]
[Video: http://www.ohlookaforum.com/]

The Fatal Consequences of Masturbation

2010-03-06T21:46:00.000-08:00

Back in the year 1844 when medical studies are not as extensive and accurate as it is today and back in the eras when masturbation was highly condemned as the culprit for almost every possible malady, flyers and pamphlets of "educational" awareness are not uncommon in the public areas of medieval times.

This particular extract from a 19th century French Book With No Title is no different as it chronicles the deathly symptoms of excessive masturbation.

[Picture: http://elligirl.livejournal.com/286521.html]
Whatcha say?

Cow Fistula

2010-03-06T20:23:00.000-08:00

Cow Fistula, a scientific breakthrough allowing researchers a closer look inside the cattle's digestive system, literally.

Subjects of the study, the cattles, have been given a hole directly into the ruminant's rumen covered only with a seal called cannula. Agricultural scientists can reach within to examine the process, remove partially digested food than having to collect the cattle's feces, find food alternatives in the feedings and study the cow's internal digestion. With this induction of this aid, further lab investigations can be managed and other problems may be administered like stomach cancer.

There goes our Hole-y Cow!
Additional captures after the jump.

[Pictures: http://www.justsaver.com/cow-fistula-hole-allows-people-to-see-into-the-cows-stomach/]

[Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yEdOmq69nY]

John Barrowman: The Making Of Me

2010-02-21T05:58:00.000-08:00

[Picture: http://www.warrenandderrick.com]

John Barrowman seeks to answer the question: why am I the way I am? In this one-hour special, Barrowman sets out to unearth what the latest scientific research can tell him about the ORIGINS of his HOMOSEXUALITY.

His search for evidence takes him back to his roots to meet family and old friends. He also meets with psychologists and geneticists, compares his DNA to his heterosexual brother's, and conquers his claustrophobia to undergo a brain scan - all in the quest to find out how nature and nurture might have interacted to make him who he is.

Barrowman tells the BBC: "My sexuality has never been deliberately hidden. I'm in a committed relationship with the love of my life, Scott Gill, and he is as much a part of the family as my sister's husband, Kevin, and my brother's wife, Dot. However, just because I'm comfortable with my sexuality doesn't mean that I'm not curious about it and that's one of the reasons I agreed to take this journey to discover the making of me."

[Article source: http://www.bbcamerica.com/content/292/john-barrowman-the-making-of-me.jsp]

Full online streaming of the documentary after the jump.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

[Videos: http://www.dailymotion.com/valeriobuscar]

The 44-Day Ordeal of Junko Furuta

2010-02-20T03:23:00.000-08:00

(Source: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=104786470334)
For the past twenty years, I have never heard of anybody that goes by the name 'Junko Furuta', let alone her gruesome story. It was only after a Facebook group, solely dedicated to her memory, that happened to fumbled upon the 'Suggestions' pane on my Facebook homepage. The title's quite a catch and with a curios interest, I clicked on it and found out her whole shocking experiences; all at a young age of 16 years.

Tortures of unimaginable stretch for 44 days dominated the last days of her existence.

Calling the case as "INHUMANE" is an understatement!

On November 22, 1989:
Junko Furuta was a girl in Japan who was held captive in a house by four boys. There, she was raped countless times, then tortured to death in unimaginable and incomprehensible ways for 44 days. She was 16 years old.

The Crime

In November of 1988, Boy A (then 18), Boy B (Jo Kamisaku, then 17; Kamisaku was a new family name he took after being released from prison), Boy C (then 16) and Boy D (then 17) from Tokyo abducted and held Furuta, a second year high school (grade 11) student from Saitama Prefecture in Misato, for 44 days. They kept her captive in the house owned by the parents of Boy C.

To forestall a manhunt, Boy A coerced Furuta into calling her own parents and telling them that she had run away from home, but was with "a friend" and was not in danger. He also browbeat her into posing as one of the boys' girlfriends when the parents of the house where she was held were around, but when it became clear that the parents would not call the police, he dropped this pretext. Furuta tried to escape several times, begging the parents more than once to help her, but they did nothing, apparently out of fear that Boy A would hurt them. Boy A was at the time a low-level yakuza leader and had bragged that he could use his connections to kill anyone who interfered.

According to their statements at their trial, the four of them raped her, beat her, introduced foreign objects including an iron rod into her vagina, made her drink her own urine and was fed cockroaches, inserted fireworks into her anus, and set them off, forced Furuta to masturbate, cut her nipple with pliers, dropped dumbbells onto her stomach, and burned her with cigarettes and lighters. (One of the burnings was punishment for attempting to call the police.)At one point her injuries were so severe that according to one of the boys it took more than an hour for her to crawl downstairs to use the bathroom. They also related that "possibly a hundred different people" knew that Furuta had been imprisoned there, but it is not clear if this means they visited the house at different times while she was imprisoned there, or themselves either raped or abused her. When the boys refused to let her leave, she begged them on several occasions to "kill (her) and get it over with".

On January 4, 1989, using one of the boys' loss at mah-jongg as a pretext, the four beat her with an iron barbell, poured lighter fluid on her legs, arms, face and stomach, and set her on fire.

She died later that day of shock.

The four boys claimed that they were not aware of how badly injured she was, and that they believed she had been malingering.

The killers hid her corpse in an 55-gallon drum filled with cement; the perpetrators disposed the drum in a tract of reclaimed land in Koto, Tokyo.

Arrest and Punishment

The boys were arrested and tried as adults; but, because of Japanese handling of crimes committed by juveniles, their identities were sealed by the court. However, a weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun reported their real names, claiming "Human rights aren't needed for brutes." Furuta's real name and details about her personal life were reported exhaustively in the media. Kamisaku was judged as a sub leader, at least according to the official trial.

The site where her corpse had been discovered.

The four boys pled guilty to a reduced charge of "committing bodily injury that resulted in death", rather than murder. Boy A's parents sold their house for approximately 50 million yen and paid this as compensation to Furuta's family.

For his participation in the crime, Kamisaku served eight years in a juvenile prison before he was released, in August 1999. In July 2004, he was arrested for assaulting an acquaintance, whom he believed to be luring a girlfriend away from him, and allegedly bragged about his earlier infamy. Kamisaku was sentenced to seven years in prison for the beating.

Junko's parents were dismayed by the sentences received by their daughter's killers, and enjoined a civil suit against the parents of the boy in whose home the crimes were committed. When some of the convictions were overturned on the basis of problematic physical evidence (the semen and pubic hair recovered from the body did not match those of the boys who were arrested), the lawyer handling the civil suit decided there was no case to be made and refused to represent them further. (There is speculation that the evidence may have been contaminated—for example, by unidentified persons who raped Furuta.)

In July 1990 a lower court sentenced the leader to seventeen years in prison. The court sentenced one accomplice to a four to six year term, one accomplice to a three to four year term, and another accomplice to an indefinite five to ten year term. The leader and the first two of the three appealed their rulings. The higher court gave more severe sentences to the three appealing parties. The presiding judge, Ryuji Yanase, said that the court did so because of the nature of the crime, the effect on the victim's family, and the effects of the crime on society. The leader received a twenty year sentence, the second highest possible sentence after life imprisonment. Of the two appealing accomplices, the one that originally got four to six years received a five to nine year term. The other accomplice had his sentence upgraded to a five to seven year term.

44 Days of Extreme Torture

These horrifying things done to Junko Furuta had been collected through the Japanese court trial of the case, and blogs from 1989. They show the pain that Junko Furuta had to endure before she was finally dead. All this had happened to her while she was still alive. They are disturbing, and the truth.

ALL OF THIS HAD HAPPENED.

DAY 1 (November 22, 1988): Kidnapped
Kept captive in house, and posed as one of boy's girlfriend
Raped (over 400 times in total)
Forced to call her parents and tell them she had run away
Starved and malnutritioned
Fed cockroaches to eat and urine to drink
Forced to masturbate
Forced to strip in front of others
Burned with cigarette lighters
Foreign objects inserted into her vagina/anus

DAY 11 (December 1, 1988): Severely beat up countless times
Face held against concrete ground and jumped on
Hands tied to ceiling and body used as a punching bag
Nose filled with so much blood that she can only breath through her mouth
Dumbbells dropped onto her stomach
Vomited when tried to drink water (her stomach couldn't accept it)
Tried to escape and punished by cigarette burning on arms
Flammable liquid poured on her feet and legs, then lit on fire
Bottle inserted into her anus, causing injury

DAY 20 (December10, 1989): Unable to walk properly due to severe leg burns
Beat with bamboo sticks
Fireworks inserted into anus and lit
Hands smashed by weights and fingernails cracked
Beaten with golf club
Cigarettes inserted into vagina
Beaten with iron rods repeatedly
Winter; forced outside to sleep in balcony
Skewers of grilled chicken inserted into her vagina and anus, causing bleeding

DAY 30: Hot wax dripped onto face
Eyelids burned by cigarette lighter
Stabbed with sewing needles in chest area
Left nipple cut and destroyed with pliers
Hot light bulb inserted into her vagina
Heavy bleeding from vagina due to scissors insertion
Unable to urinate properly
Injuries were so severe that it took over an hour for her to crawl downstairs and use the bathroom
Eardrums severely damaged
Extreme reduced brain size

DAY 40: Begged her torturers to "kill her and get it over with"

January 1, 1989: Junko greets the New Years Day alone
Body mutilated
Unable to move from the ground

DAY 44 (January 4, 1989) : The four boys beat her mutilated body with an iron barbell, using a loss at the game of Mah-jongg as a pretext. She is profusely bleeding from her mouth and nose. They put a candle's flame to her face and eyes.

Then, lighter fluid was poured onto her legs, arms, face and stomach, and then lit on fire. This final torture lasted for a time of two hours.

Junko Furuta died later that day, in pain and alone.

Excerpts

"A high-school girl was abducted by four teenaged hooligans while she was on her way to work. They took her to the house of a friend, held her in his bedroom, and for the next forty-five days enacted every imaginable form of abuse on her (and some you wouldn’t want to imagine). They gang-raped her—both with their own bodies and with an assortment of foreign objects—beat her, kicked her, doused her extremities with lighter fluid and set her on fire, and probably did many other things to her that went undocumented by either her tormentors or the police. They mocked her pain. They held her down and dropped barbells on her stomach. This last bit of torture was more than she could withstand, and after going into convulsions she apparently either strangled on her own vomit or simply died from her beatings. When the boys were questioned later about why they didn’t do anything during her seizure, they replied, “We assumed she was faking it.”

"She tried to escape, more than once. The first time, she was caught in the process of making a phone call. The second time, she ran into the parents of the boy who lived there; apparently they had known all along what was gong on. She begged them to help her, but they refused; his friend had criminal connections, and they didn’t want to get into trouble, too. After her death, they taped her arms and legs together, threw her into a 55-gallon drum, filled it with cement, and dumped it in an empty lot. The body wasn’t recovered until almost a year later. The ringleader of the whole incident served eight years in prison and is now a free man."

(Source: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=104786470334)

Actual Autopsies [Videos]

2010-02-04T22:32:00.000-08:00

WARNING: GRAPHIC FOOTAGES

Ever wonder how things go behind closed-door sessions of any post-mortem examinations? Pretty much the answer would be a whooping 'yes'.

"Autopsy means 'see for yourself' (derived from an ancient Greek term, 'autopsia'). It is a special surgical operation, performed by specially-trained physicians, on a dead body. Its purpose is to learn the truth about the person's health during life, and how the person really died." -Ed Friedlander, M.D., Pathologist

And now take an ocular feast, scavenger!

[Source: http://www.youtube.com/user/stefnath83]
More videos inside.

[Source: http://www.youtube.com/user/w1kd]

[Source: http://www.youtube.com/user/NationalGeographic]

10 Bizarre Online Gaming Incidents

2010-01-27T00:19:00.000-08:00

And so it seems; the Earth is not the only chaotic place existing in the universe. Even the Cyberworld of Online Games has got its fair share of chaotic events that violate their own ridiculous rules of e-ethics.

Let's start the roll call of 10 of the most bizarre gaming incidents, shall we? e-Yes.

Girl died playing World of Warcraft and got an online funeral
Gang kidnaps Gunbound MMO high score holder to steal account
Boy saves his sister from a moose attack with skills learned from World of Warcraft
Player of Legends of Mir 3 stabs fellow gamer to death
Dutch teen steals nearly $6,000 worth of virtual furniture
Woman offers sex for ''Warcraft' Gold'
Korean dies after game session
Teenager gets DVT after a whole day with a console
Plague ravage World of Warcraft
Woman was virtually raped in Second Life

[Full credit (+ pictures): http://www.oddee.com/item_96657.aspx]

Full stories inside.

1. Girl died playing World of Warcraft and got online funeral

A young Chinese girl nicknamed "Snowly" died after playing the online game "World of Warcraft" for several continuous days during a national day holiday. Snowly's friends, who share the same game community, said that she was always connected to the Internet.

Several days before Snowly's death, the girl was said to be preparing for a relatively difficult part of the game and had very little rest. She told her friends that she felt very tired. A big online funeral was held for Snowly one week after her death. The Chinese government is now seeking to instate a gaming curfew, limiting sessions to three hours at a time.
[Source: http://arloo.blogspot.com/2005/11/girl-died-playing-world-of-warcraft.html]

2. Gang kidnaps Gunbound MMO High Score Holder to steal Account

In July 2007, a Brazilian gang called "La Firma" kidnapped the top score holder in the licensed MMO, Gunbound in order to get his account and sell it, according to Xinhua.

Gunbound is a very popular light combat/competitive MMO developed by Softnyx from Korea. The game does not allow the exchange of user accounts, but they are traded on the blackmarket for up to $2,700. Apparently, the group tried to steal the unnamed top players account on a number of occasions (perhaps by stealing his password). They successfully trapped the player by using a girl who flirted with him online and enticed him to meet her in an internet cafe in Sao Paulo. She didn't show up, instead, a guy with a gun did and kidnapped the player and forced him to disclose his account information. The gang then offered the account on a website for $8,000. Brazilian Police arrested the gang later.
[Source: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-07/18/content_6392309.htm]

3. Boy saves his sister from a moose attack with skills learned from World of Warcraft

A 12 year-old Norwegian boy saved his sister and himself from a moose attack using skills he picked up in the online role playing game 'World of Warcraft.' Hans Jurgen Olsen and his sister got into a spot of trouble when they encroached on the territory of one of these antlered cold weather staples (otherwise known as a moose). When the beast went on the offensive, Hans knew the first thing he had to do was taunt it so that it would leave his sister alone and she could run to safety. "Taunting" is a move one uses in World of Warcraft to get monsters off of the less-well-armored team members.

Once he was a target, Hans remember another skill he'd picked up at level 30 in 'World of Warcraft' -- he feigned death. The moose lost interest in the inanimate Hans and wandered off into the woods. When he was safely alone Hans ran back home to share his tale of video game-inspired survival.
[Source: http://www.switched.com/2007/12/10/boy-saves-sister-from-moose-attack-with-skills-learned-in-warcra/]

4. Player of Legends of Mir 3 stabs fellow gamer to death

In March 2005, a Chinese man was stabbed to death in a row over a sword in online game Legends of Mir 3. Shanghai gamer Qiu Chengwei killed player Zhu Caoyuan when he discovered he had sold a "dragon sabre" he had been loaned. Mr Chengwei only got the powerful virtual weapon shortly before it was sold for 7,200 yuan (£460). Before the attack Mr Chengwei told the police about the theft but had no response since the police said the weapon was not real property. The online gamer has been given a suspended death sentence for his crime.
[Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4397159.stm]

5. Dutch teen steals nearly $6,000 worth of virtual furniture

A 17-year-old was pinched for burglary in the Netherlands after walking off with $5,900 worth of virtual furniture from Habbo Hotel. Habbo, which attracts more than 6 million users in over 30 countries each month, is comparable to Second Life in that people use the service to create a virtual likeness to inhabit an online world. A lot of real money changes hands in Habbo in order to purchase virtual goods used by people to personalize their online experience. That real money involved is what got the police interested in the theft.

Apparently jealous of other patrons' decor, the suspect swiped their keys, stole the furnishings and stashed them in his own room and the suites held by five accomplices. The virtual thief methods were a little nefarious: he lured Habbo Hotel users into giving up their passwords by creating fake Habbo sites. He was charged with burglary and hacking.
[Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7094764.stm]

6.Woman Offers Sex for 'Warcraft' Gold

In an attempt to make her character stronger in the online game of World of Warcraft, a woman prostituted herself. Needing 5000 gold to purchase an 'Epic Flying Mount,' one of the fastest mounts in the game, she offered anyone, male or female, playing on her server the opportunity to perform a variety of sexual acts in exchange for the in-game currency. In a posting on Craigslist on 4/8/07, the player stated that if someone were to transfer 5000 gold pieces to her account to purchase an epic flying mount, then that person can, "mount," her. It stated that she wanted whoever was going to do this to send her a picture so that she could evaluate the perspective, "John."

The posting player stated that her email was full with messages from people that were interested in taking her up with her offer. In a response that she placed on Craigslist the next day, she scolded the other players for making such a big deal out of all of this. She stated that she was able to get both things that she was looking for. She wanted both a mount for her character, and one for herself.
[Source: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/210451/woman_prostitutes_herself_through_craigslist.html?cat=19]

7. Korean dies after game session

A South Korean man died in 2007 after reportedly playing an online computer game for 50 hours with few breaks. The 28-year-old man collapsed after playing the game Starcraft at an internet cafe in the city of Taegu, according to South Korean authorities.

The man had not slept properly, and had eaten very little during his marathon session, said police. Identified as Lee, he started playing Starcraft and only paused playing to go to the toilet and for short periods of sleep.

The cause of death was heart failure stemming from exhaustion. He was taken to hospital following his collapse, but died shortly after. He had recently been fired from his job because he kept missing work to play computer games.
[Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4137782.stm]

8. Teenager gets DVT after a whole day with a console

[Picture: http://www.radiology.ucsf.edu/ir/deepveinthrombosis]

A boy who spent an entire day kneeling down playing computer games needed hospital treatment for a blood clot in his leg. Dominic Patrick, 14, from Merseyside, developed deep vein thrombosis after a rainy day inside with a games console, a Playstation 3. The potentially dangerous condition was caused because Dominic had his legs tucked under his body.

Dominic noticed something was wrong when, after getting up from playing games all day, he got pins and needles in his legs and one of his calves swelled up. When this failed to go away, his father initially put it down to "growing pains", but eventually took him to a doctor, who diagnosed DVT.
[Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3441237.stm]

9. Plague ravage World of Warcraft

In 2005, Blizzard introduced a new area to its popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft. The boss of the area was able to cast a spell called Corrupted Blood, which was supposed to infect and cause damage to all the players nearby. Contrary to what Blizzard planned, however, the players remained infected even when they returned to their towns, contaminating pretty much everyone around them. The plague spread through the game servers and thousands of players died. Blizzard managed to create quarantine zones within the game, and shortly afterwards it introduced a 'cure' for the infection. Despite the remedies the event created a lot of buzz in online forums and community websites.
[Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4272418.stm]

10. Woman was virtually raped in Second Life

A Belgian user of Second Life was forced, by using a so called “voodoo doll” --a piece of code that takes the form of a regular object as a cup or pen or whatever but in fact gives control of your avatar-- to perform sexually explicit behavior. In theory, a user must give his consent in order for other player to take control of his avatar, but using one of the above mentioned voodoo dolls and some persuasion you can make a user (especially a new one) to give access to his avatar. After the incident, Brussels' public prosecutor asked patrol detectives of the Federal Computer Crime Unit to go on Second Life to investigate the “virtual rape”.
[Source: http://virtuallyblind.com/2007/04/24/open-roundtable-allegations-of-virtual-rape-bring-belgian-police-to-second-life/]

Good thing I don't play online/video games.

Shera Flexy Board TV Ad (Thailand)

2010-01-26T22:19:00.000-08:00

'Til death do us part...or true love never dies?

[Picture: http://www.thaiguidetothailand.com/movies-and-video/thai-commercial-tragic-love/]
[Video: http://www.youtube.com/user/ryoga316]

Easily the funniest / saddest TV commercial of all time!

Triggering your emotional responses; it's amazing how two completely contrasting reactions can both parallel surface, simultaneously. All within the 47-second duration of this one-of-a-kind tragic Thai commercial!

Poor geckos!
And oh, for fuck sakes, get an effing durable ceiling tiles!

Octagon Cage Match Accident [Video]

2010-01-25T23:07:00.000-08:00

The video says it ALL!

October 12, 2003 - Happened at Caesars Nightclub in London during a Cage Rage 4 match between Rob Evans, who had his leg morbidly broken to Ross Pettifer within the first 4 seconds time of the fight, making the latter a runaway winner. This was the injured player's [Rob Evan] first and only fight.

Such a "bone-breaking" video clip! Literally no words to describe it.

This is why you should trust your mom when she says "Drink you milk first." Ouch!
[Video: http://www.youtube.com/user/CreedofExperts]

Albert Fish

2010-01-24T22:03:00.000-08:00

Hamilton Howard "Albert" Fish (May 19, 1870 – January 16, 1936) was an American serial killer. He was also known as the Gray Man, the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire, and The Boogeyman. A child molester and cannibal, he boasted that he had "had children in every state," and at one time put the figure at around 100. However, it is not clear whether he was talking about molestation or cannibalization, less still as to whether he was telling the truth. He was a suspect in at least five murders in his lifetime. Fish confessed to three murders that police were able to trace to a known homicide, and confessed to stabbing at least two other people. He was put on trial for the kidnapping and murder of Grace Budd, and was convicted and executed via electric chair.

[Picture: http://midnightshowing.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/albert-fish-in-sin-he-found-salvation/]

The Letter

Six years later, in November 1934, an anonymous letter was sent to the girl's parents which led the police to Albert Fish. The letter is quoted here, with all of Fish's misspellings and grammatical errors:

Fish's mugshot from 1903

Dear Mrs. Budd. In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong, China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1–3 per pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak—chops—or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girl's behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John staid [sic] there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N.Y. he stole two boys, one 7 and one 11. Took them to his home stripped them naked tied them in a closet. Then burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them – tortured them – to make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 11 year old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was cooked and eaten except the head—bones and guts. He was roasted in the oven (all of his ass), boiled, broiled, fried and stewed. The little boy was next, went the same way. At that time, I was living at 409 E 100 St. near—right side. He told me so often how good human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3, 1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese—strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick – bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.

Mrs. Budd was illiterate and could not read the letter herself, so she had her son read it instead. Fish had told the police, when asked, that it "never even entered his head" to rape the girl, but he later admitted to his attorney that he did have two involuntary ejaculations which was used at trial to make the claim the kidnapping was sexually motivated and thus avoid mention of cannibalism.

WOW. Insanity at its best.

Early Life

He was born as Hamilton Howard Fish in Washington, D.C. on 19 May, 1870, to Randall Fish (1795–1875). He said he had been named after Hamilton Fish, a distant relative. His father was 43 years older than his mother and 75 years old at the time of his birth. Fish was the youngest child and had three living siblings: Walter, Annie, and Edwin Fish. He wished to be called "Albert" after a dead sibling, and to escape the nickname "Ham & Eggs" that he was given at an orphanage in which he spent much of his childhood.

His family had a history of mental illness: his uncle suffered from religious mania, a brother was confined in the state mental hospital, another brother had died of hydrocephalus and his sister had a "mental affliction". Three other close relatives suffered from severe mental illnesses and his mother was believed to suffer frequent aural and/or visual hallucinations. His father was a river boat captain, but by 1870 he was a fertilizer manufacturer. The elder Fish died of a heart attack at the Sixth Street Station of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1875 in Washington, D.C. Fish's mother, who was now forced to find work and not able to care for her son, put him into Saint John's orphanage in Washington where he was frequently stripped naked along with other boys who would then be whipped and beaten in front of each other by teachers. He eventually came to enjoy physical pain and the communal beatings would often cause erections, for which the other orphans teased him.

By 1880, his mother got a government job and was able to look after him. In 1882, at age 12, he began a relationship with a telegraph boy. The youth introduced Fish to such practices as drinking urine and coprophagia. Fish began visiting public baths where he could watch other boys undress, and spent a great portion of his weekends on these visits. Throughout his life he was also a profligate and compulsive writer of obscene letters to women whose names he acquired from classified advertisements and matrimonial agencies.

Adulthood

By 1890, Fish had arrived in New York City, and he said he became a male prostitute. He also said he began raping young boys, a crime he kept committing even after his mother arranged a marriage.

In 1898, Fish was married to a woman nine years his junior. They had six children: Albert, Anna, Gertrude, Eugene, John, and Henry Fish.

Throughout 1898 he worked as a house painter, and he said he continued molesting children, mostly boys under six. He later recounted an incident in which a male lover took him to a waxworks museum, where Fish was fascinated by a bisection of a penis; soon after, he developed a morbid interest in castration. During a relationship with a mentally retarded man, Fish attempted to castrate him after tying him up, but the man's screaming frightened Fish, who fled after leaving him a $10 bill. Fish then increased the frequency of his visits to brothels where he could be whipped and beaten. In 1903 he was arrested for embezzlement and was sentenced to incarceration in Sing Sing.

In January 1917, Fish's wife left him for John Straube, a handyman who boarded with the Fish family, leaving him to look after his children on his own. Following this rejection, Fish began to hear voices; for example, he once wrapped himself up in a carpet, explaining that he was following the instructions of John the Apostle. It was around this time that Fish began deliberately harming himself. He would self-embed needles into his groin, which he normally would remove afterwards, but soon he began to insert them so deeply that they were impossible to take out. Later x-rays revealed that Fish had at least 29 needles lodged in his pelvic region. He also hit himself repeatedly with a nail-studded paddle.

Over a dozen needles Fish self-embedded into his pelvis and perineum.

At the age of 55, Fish began to experience delusions and hallucinations that God commanded him to torture and castrate little boys. Doctors said he suffered from a religious psychosis.

Early attacks and attempted abductions

In 1910, Fish committed what may have been his first attack on a child (Thomas Bedden) in Wilmington, Delaware. Later, he stabbed a mentally challenged boy around 1919 in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. Consistently, many of his intended victims would be either mentally challenged or African Americans, because he believed they would not be missed.
On July 11, 1924, Fish found eight-year-old Beatrice Kiel playing alone on her parents' Staten Island farm. He offered her money to come and help him look for rhubarb in the neighboring fields. She was about to leave the farm when her mother chased Fish away. Fish left, but returned later to the Kiels' barn where he tried to sleep for the night before being discovered by Hans Kiel and told to leave.

Second incarceration

Fish remarried on February 6, 1930, in Waterloo, New York, to a "Mrs. Estella Wilcox" but divorced after only one week. Fish was later arrested in May 1930 for "sending an obscene letter to a woman who answered an advertisement for a maid." He had been sent to the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in 1930 and 1931 for observation, following his arrests.

Grace Budd

On May 25, 1928, Edward Budd put a classified ad in the Sunday edition of the New York World that read: "Young man, 18, wishes position in country. Edward Budd, 406 West 15th Street." On May 28, 1928, Fish, then 58 years old, visited the Budd family in Manhattan, New York City under the pretense of hiring Edward. He introduced himself as Frank Howard, a farmer from Farmingdale, New York. When he arrived, Fish met Budd's younger sister, 10-year-old Grace. Fish promised to hire Budd and said he would send for him in a few days. On his second visit he agreed to hire Budd, then convinced the parents, Delia Flanagan and Albert Budd I, to let Grace accompany him to a birthday party that evening at his sister's home. The elder Albert Budd was a porter for the Equitable Life Assurance Society. Grace had a sister, Beatrice; and two other brothers, Albert Budd II; and George Budd. Grace left with Fish that day, but never came back.

The police arrested Charles Edward Pope on September 5, 1930 as a suspect in the kidnapping. He was a 66-year-old apartment house superintendent, and was accused by his estranged wife. He spent 108 days in jail between his arrest and trial on December 22, 1930. He was found not guilty.

Capture

The letter was delivered in an envelope that had a small hexagonal emblem with the letters "N.Y.P.C.B.A." standing for "New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association". A janitor at the company told police he had taken some of the stationery home but left it at his rooming house at 200 East 52nd Street when he moved out. The landlady of the rooming house said that Fish had checked out of that room a few days earlier. She said that Fish's son sent him money and he had asked her to hold his next check for him. William F. King, the lead investigator, waited outside the room until Fish returned. He agreed to go to the headquarters for questioning, but instead drew a razor blade. King disarmed Fish and took him to police headquarters. Fish made no attempt to deny the Grace Budd murder, saying that he had meant to go to the house to kill Edward Budd, Grace's brother.

Postcapture Discoveries

Billy Gaffney

A child named Billy Gaffney was playing in the hallway outside of his family's apartment in Brooklyn with his friend, Billy Beaton, on February 11, 1927. Both of the boys disappeared, but the friend was soon found on the roof of the apartment house. When asked what happened to Gaffney, Beaton said "the boogey man took him." Initially Peter Kudzinowski was a suspect in the boy's murder. Then, Joseph Meehan, a motorman on a Brooklyn trolley, saw a picture of Fish in the newspaper and identified him as the old man that he saw February 11, 1927, who was trying to quiet a little boy sitting with him on the trolley. The boy was not wearing a jacket and was crying for his mother and was dragged by the man on and off the trolley. Police matched the description of the child to Billy Gaffney. Gaffney's body was never recovered. Gaffney's mother visited Fish in Sing Sing to try to get more details of her son's death. Fish confessed the following:

I brought him to the Riker Ave. dumps. There is a house that stands alone, not far from where I took him. I took the boy there. Stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a piece of dirty rag I picked out of the dump. Then I burned his clothes. Threw his shoes in the dump. Then I walked back and took the trolley to 59 St. at 2 A.M. and walked from there home. Next day about 2 P.M., I took tools, a good heavy cat-of-nine tails. Home made. Short handle. Cut one of my belts in half, slit these halves in six strips about 8 inches long. I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears – nose – slit his mouth from ear to ear. Gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood. I picked up four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones. Then I cut him up. I had a grip with me. I put his nose, ears and a few slices of his belly in the grip. Then I cut him through the middle of his body. Just below the belly button. Then through his legs about 2 inches below his behind. I put this in my grip with a lot of paper. I cut off the head – feet – arms – hands and the legs below the knee. This I put in sacks weighed with stones, tied the ends and threw them into the pools of slimy water you will see all along the road going to North Beach. I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked best. His monkey and pee wees and a nice little fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears – nose – pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good. Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put them in the oven. Then I picked 4 onions and when the meat had roasted about 1/4 hour, I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy. In about 2 hours, it was nice and brown, cooked through. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days. His little monkey was a sweet as a nut, but his pee-wees I could not chew. Threw them in the toilet.

Trial and Execution

The trial of Albert Fish for the premeditated murder of Grace Budd began on March 11, 1935, in White Plains, New York with Frederick P. Close as judge, and Chief Assistant District Attorney, Elbert F. Gallagher, as the prosecuting attorney. James Dempsey was Fish's defense attorney. The trial lasted for 10 days. Fish pleaded insanity, and claimed to have heard voices from God telling him to kill children. Several psychiatrists testified about Fish's sexual fetishes which included coprophilia, urophilia, pedophilia and masochism. Dempsey in his summation noted that Fish was a "psychiatric phenomenon" and that nowhere in legal or medical records was there another individual who possessed so many sexual abnormalities.
The defense's chief expert witness was Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist with a focus on child development who conducted psychiatric examinations for the New York criminal courts. Over two days of testimony, Wertham explained Fish's obsession with religion and specifically his preoccupation with the story of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22:1-24). Wertham said that Fish believed that by similarly "sacrificing" a boy it would be penance for his own sins and that even if the act itself was wrong angels would prevent it if God did not approve. Fish had already attempted the sacrifice once before but had been thwarted when a car drove past. Edward Budd had been the next intended victim but he turned out to be larger than expected so he settled on Grace. Although he knew Grace was female, it is known that Fish perceived her as a boy. Wertham then detailed Fish's cannibalism, which in his mind he associated with communion. The last question Dempsey asked Wertham was 15,000 words long, detailed Fish's life and ended with asking how the doctor considered his mental condition based on this life. Wertham answered "He is insane". Gallagher cross examined Wertham on whether Fish knew the difference between right and wrong. He responded that he did know but that it was a perverted knowledge based on his views of sin, atonement and religion and thus was an "insane knowledge". The defense then called two more psychiatrists who supported Wertham's findings.
The first of four rebuttal witnesses was Dr. Menas Gregory, the former head of the Bellevue psychiatric hospital who had treated Fish in 1930. He testified that Fish was abnormal but sane. Under cross examination, Dempsey asked if coprophilia, urophilia and pedophilia indicated a sane or insane person. Gregory replied that such a person was not "mentally sick" and that these were common perversions that were "socially perfectly alright" and that Fish was "no different from millions of other people", some very prominent and successful, that suffered from the "very same" perversions. The next witness was The Tombs resident doctor, Dr Perry Lichtenstein. Dempsey objected to a doctor with no training in psychiatry testifying on the issue of sanity but justice Close overuled on the grounds that the jury could decide what weight to give a prison doctor. When asked if Fish causing himself pain indicated a mental condition Lichtenstein replied, "That is not masochism" as he was only "punishing himself to get sexual gratification". The next witness, Dr Charles Lambert, testified that coprophilia was a common practice and that religious cannibalism may be psychopathic but "was a matter of taste" and not evidence of a psychosis. The last witness, Dr James Vavasour, repeated Lamberts opinion.
Another defense witness was Mary Nicholas, Fish's 17-year-old stepdaughter. She described how Fish taught her and her brothers and sisters a "game" involving overtones of masochism and child molestation.

The jury found him to be sane and guilty, and the judge ordered the death sentence. After being sentenced, Fish confessed to the murder of eight-year-old Francis X. McDonnell, killed on Staten Island. McDonnell was playing on the front porch of his home near Port Richmond, Staten Island in July 15, 1924. His mother saw an "old man" walk by clenching and unclenching his fists. He walked past without saying anything. Later in the day, the old man was seen again, but this time he was watching McDonnell and his friends play. McDonnell's body was found in the woods near where a neighbor had seen the "old man" taking the boy earlier that afternoon. He had been assaulted and strangled with his suspenders.

Fish arrived in March 1935, and was executed on January 16, 1936, in the electric chair at Sing Sing. He entered the chamber at 11:06 p.m. and was pronounced dead three minutes later. He was buried in the Sing Sing Prison Cemetery. He was recorded to have said that electrocution would be "the supreme thrill of my life". Just before the switch was flipped, he stated "I don't even know why I am here." According to one witness present, it took two jolts before Fish died, creating the rumor that the apparatus was short-circuited by the needles Fish previously inserted into his body.

Many years later, Wertham heavily criticized the prosecution's psychiatric witnesses for making "extraordinary statements under oath" that served to give a "black eye to psychiatry". He maintained that society would have been better served by understanding what made Fish who he was.

Known Victims

Francis X. McDonnell, age 8, July 15, 1924
Billy Gaffney, age 4, February 11, 1927
Grace Budd, age 10, June 3, 1928

Possible Victims

Yetta Abramowitz, age 12, 1927
Mary Ellen O'Connor, age 16, February 15, 1932
Benjamin Collings, age 17, December 15, 1932

[Source (article+pics): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_fish]

Britney Spears - The Singles Collection

2009-11-27T04:43:00.000-08:00

OUT NOW!
(featuring the #1 smash "3")

[Amazon]
[Amazon UK]
[HMV]
[Barnes & Nobles]
[Target]
[BestBuy]
[Digital & Standard Editions: Click here]

Ultimate Fan Box Set: All 29 of Spears' singles including the previously unreleased song “3.” Each single is featured in its own slip sleeve with its original, artwork plus a B-Side or remix for each track. All of the singles are encased in a box with accompanying booklet of images and facts about each single, as well as a DVD featuring nearly all of Spears' music videos in chronological order.

Ultimate Fan Box Set/Digital Deluxe Edition

"...Baby One More Time"
"Autumn Goodbye"
"Sometimes" (Radio Edit)
"I'm So Curious"
"(You Drive Me) Crazy" (The Stop Remix!)
"I'll Never Stop Loving You"
"Born to Make You Happy" (Radio Edit)
"Born to Make You Happy" (Kristian Lundin Bonus Remix)
"From the Bottom of My Broken Heart" (Radio Edit)
"Thinkin' About You"
"Oops!...I Did It Again"
"Deep In My Heart"
"Lucky"
"Heart"
"Stronger"
"Walk On By"
"Don't Let Me Be the Last to Know"
"Don't Let Me Be The Last to Know" (Hex Hector Radio Mix)
"I'm a Slave 4 U"
"Intimidated"
"Overprotected"
"Overprotected" (The Darkchild Remix)
"I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman"
"I Run Away"
"I Love Rock 'N' Roll"
"I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman" (Metro Remix Radio Edit)
"Boys" (The Co-Ed Remix feat. Pharrell Williams)
"Boys" (Album Version)
"Me Against the Music" (feat. Madonna)
"Me Against the Music" (Passengerz vs. the Club Mix)
"Toxic"
"Toxic" (Bloodshy & Avant Intoxicated Remix)
"Everytime"
"Everytime" (Above & Beyond Club Mix)
"Outrageous"
"Outrageous" (Junkie XL's Dancehall Mix)
"My Prerogative"
"My Prerogative" (Armand Van Helden Remix)
"Do Somethin'"
"Do Somethin'" (Thick Vocal Mix)
"Someday (I Will Understand)"
"Mona Lisa"
"Gimme More"
"Gimme More" (Paul Oakenfold Remix)
"Piece of Me"
"Piece of Me" (Boz O Lo Remix)
"Break the Ice"
"Everybody"
"Womanizer"
"Womanizer" (Kaskade Remix)
"Circus"
"Circus" (Tom Neville's Ringleader Remix)
"If U Seek Amy"
"If U Seek Amy" (Crookers Remix)
"Radar"
"Radar" (Bloodshy & Avant Remix)
"3"
"3" (Groove Police Club Mix)

Ultimate Box Set DVD Contents

"...Baby One More Time"
"Sometimes"
"(You Drive Me) Crazy" (The Stop Remix!)
"Born to Make You Happy"
"From the Bottom of My Broken Heart"
"Oops!...I Did It Again"
"Lucky"
"Stronger"
"Don't Let Me Be the Last to Know"
"I'm a Slave 4 U"
"Overprotected" (The Darkchild Remix)
"I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman"
"I Love Rock 'N' Roll"
"Me Against the Music" (featuring Madonna)
"Toxic"
"Everytime"
"My Prerogative"
"Do Somethin'"
"Someday (I Will Understand)"
"Gimme More"
"Piece of Me" (US Version)
"Break the Ice"
"Womanizer"
"Circus"
"If U Seek Amy"
"Radar"
"3" (Only at the Exclusive Edition-Direct To Consumer) (Digital version)

Note: Only three music videos are absent from the physical collection: the album version of "Overprotected", "Boys" and "3". The first two appear on the Greatest Hits: My Prerogative video collection; the music video for "3" was released as a digital download. Along with these absences, the international version of "Piece Of Me", the clip of the unfinished video for "Outrageous" and "I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman" without clips from the film Crossroads are not included on any version released.

[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singles_Collection_(Britney_Spears_album)]

"...get it, get it, get it, uh!" BOW!

SwissMiniGun: World’s Smallest Working Revolver

2009-11-27T04:03:00.000-08:00

The SwissMiniGun, marketed as the world’s smallest working revolver, is only 2.16 inches long, barely the size of a key fob. Yet it can fire specially developed 2.34 calibre ammunition up to 367 feet, at over 275 miles per hour! Despite its harmless appearance, the weapon is no laughing matter.

The SwissMiniGun’s ammunition travels at 399 feet per second; the general threshold for perforating the skin is something traveling at 330 feet per second. Firing at someone’s chest at close range is equivalent to penetrating the body with a thin sharp object; enough to kill instantly if it penetrates the heart.

The SwissMiniGun sells for around US$6000, with an 18-carat gold diamond studded version going for close to US$60,000.

[Source: http://www.prettycoolthings.com/2008/03/08/miniature-gun-packs-a-deadly-wallop/]

"...so just pull the trigger."

[Pictures: http://www.yousaytoo.com/tensionnot/worlds-smallest-revolver/3934]

Eccentric Advertisements & Campaigns

2009-11-03T18:13:00.000-08:00

So when the customary gets obsolete, its best take your ball up to the next level. Just like these ads who took the U-Turn and gone out of the usual advertising but still effective, if not most convincing.

[Source: Pirateview.org/funstuff]

Now, this is how you advertise! Very competent indeed.

Top 10 Horniest Countries

2009-11-03T03:56:00.000-08:00

"Think you get it on as much as a porn star? It may depend on where you live. According to a 2008 Durex sex survey, only 53% of Americans have sex once a week, while 55% of British and 59% of Canadians admit the same. Ouch. So, who is rocking the most beds in the world? Check out our top 10 list of the horniest countries to find out.

We’ve ranked these Top 10 Horniest Countries in line with the same Durex survey rankings. So, the higher a country appears on the list, the more of its citizens are having sex — which means at least once a week. Just to make it on this list of top 10 horniest countries, three-quarters of a country has to be going at it regularly. Embarrassingly, Canada and the U.S. don’t make the cut. The good news: If you want to flee your sex-starved nation for these horny ones, we’ve given you pickup spots where you can start to improve your country’s rank."

No.10 - Mexico

Want to take a sexy siesta? Meet people of the sun and fun in our No. 10 horniest country. Mexicans kick off our list of boot-knocking peoples, and they start from an early age. In fact, in May of 2008 Mexico City’s government distributed 700,000 copies of sex-ed textbooks to deliver to the city’s student population, well aware that the kids would be doing the horizontal tango one way or another. And when it comes to sex south of the border, there’s always a way. While prostitution is generally illegal in Mexico, it is legal in select cities like Tijuana where sex worker zones are set up for your benefit.

Horny hangouts: A huge spring break getaway, Mexico’s resorts often melt into one giant pickup place. Here are some of the more notable places to go in this horny country: In Cancun, check out the popular bars — Senor Frogs, Daddy ‘O and Coco Bongo. In Acapulco try Palladium, a huge disco that overlooks several other bars, there’s also Baby Lobster Bar and Thai Bar, both of which have a reputation for hot girls. Visiting Cabo San Lucas? Then you definitely need to check out Squid Roe, a popular dance bar flowing with tequila. A few other Cabo San Lucas pickup options include The Zoo and Mango deck. If you’re in Puerto Vallarta check out The Zoo (another one) and El Hilo for hot Mexican nights. In Tijuana? Hit up Senor Frogs, Mundo Cafe or Safaris.

Sure, they’re politically neutral, but the Swiss definitely have an opinion about sex.

No.9 - Switzerland

That opinion roughly translates to: “Gimme more.” Apart from their regular bedroom feats, prostitution is also legal in this horny country. Every year 350,000 Swiss pay their own way for pleasure. With this level of commitment it’s no wonder they made our list of top 10 horniest countries.

Horny hangouts: If you’re traveling in Zurich, you’ll want to check out this popular spot, the Hive Bar or even Ba Ba Lu for loud music and a lively crowd that’s sure to make your night one to remember.

No.8 - Spain

In the land of Latin love, sex is a foregone conclusion. Its traditional, sexually charged culture has even gone through a modern update. Recently, it’s been reported that Spanish men have turned to our modern-day Spanish fly, Viagra, to please their ladies longer — even if they are fully capable of the act without the pill. Of course, this little enhancement makes sure they meet their own expectations as well, proving that this is definitely one of the horniest countries around.

Horny hangouts: In Barcelona, visit the seaside club Baja Beach where plenty of women come to see and be seen. Your other bet for hot Spanish nights is Razzmatazz, which is a single club with five different clubs attached to it. Here to party? Ibiza’s got the answer: Just pick a bar, any bar, and you’ll do fine.

No.7 - Malaysia

In public, this country definitely appears conservative. For example, there was a recent controversy over whether sex education should be taught in high school or not — not exactly sexually liberated. However, behind closed doors lies (pun totally intended) the real story: Malaysians are swinging from the bedposts, and loving every minute of it. Occasionally we’ll get a glimpse of it - like when Malaysia’s Minister of Health was forced to step down after his homemade sex tapes made the rounds in January of 2008.

Horny hangouts: In Kuala Lumpur, check out these bars and clubs for a straightforward party: Aloha, Poppy Bar or the Rum Jungle. To “choose your own adventure” visit the Beach Club where there’s a good chance a girl comes at a price, but she’ll be worth every penny.

No.6 - Italy

Many Italians live la dolce vita with sex high on their list of things to do on a daily basis. A poll found that 32% of Italians over 60 years old have sex regularly. It’s unclear if this means seniors are schtupping around the clock or once a week. However, one thing’s clear; their frequency in the sack helped give this country a spot on our list of top 10 horniest countries.

Horny hangouts: Visiting Florence? Check out the Red Garter, a classic American-style bar with an international reputation as a pickup joint. Your second choice should be Moyo, a laid-back club whose volume lets you have a conversation. In Milan, good bets for passionate encounters are Propaganda, a huge nightclub, plus The Shocking Club, a club known for its crazier theme nights. And when in Rome, visit the Drunken Ship, a popular party bar, and don’t forget to do it as the Romans do it.

No. 5 - Poland

For a fairly conservative culture, Poland has earned a steamy reputation as one of the horniest countries out there. Poland has an annual Eroticon festival that showcases the latest and greatest sex toys and mechanisms in the adult industry. Even one of Poland’s politicians was caught in a sex scandal. However, the most obvious evidence of Poland’s hound-dog ways has to be the two Polish women who once held the world gangbang record, which they completed in their home country. Need we explain?

Horny hangouts: If you’re going to Warsaw, you’ll want to visit Organza, a club with a good share of women. Or for variety check out the two-floor bar Zoo; this bar features plenty of space to party or chat up women. Now Krakow: While you’re there go to Cien Klub, described as an institution it’s a big club with lots of girls. Krakow also features Frantic, another two-floor bar and the Goraczka Freak Club, not that kind of “freak,” but a good party place filled with ladies nonetheless.

No.4 - China

The more China’s Cultural Revolution thaws, the more its sexual revolution heats up. Want proof? Just in the past eight years, 5,000 sex shops have opened in Beijing alone. Plus, China even has a SEXPO, where Chinese residents come to check out sex paraphernalia. And with 70% of the world’s sex toys made in China, its horniest country status means that a good deal of their hard work won’t have to go very far.

Horny hangouts: If you’re visiting Shanghai, you need to check out these better-known spots: Bar Rouge, Zapata’s and Windows. If you’re in Beijing, you’ve got a few options: Visit the Sanlitun Lu District, often dubbed “bar street” for all its action. For the tried-and-true joints check out Bar Blu, Suzie Wong and Brown’s, all renowned meat markets. And for your seedier pick you need to head to Maggie’s, a popular nightclub known for its working girls.

No.3 - Russia

Was the Cold War’s biggest secret that the Russians were having more sex than we were? Since the fall of Communism it looks a lot more likely that it actually was. Russian’s libidos are inspiring them to fill tons of new Moscow clubs and bars where hookups are a nightly pastime in this horny country.

Horny hangouts: In Moscow, go to The Hungry Duck, a crazy bar that runs ladies’ nights with male strippers three times a week, then lets men in the door once the strippers are off stage. Sure, nothing is set in stone, but you’d have to try hard to miss this softball pickup pitch. Other Russian hot spots include Night Flight, where you can pick up Russian girls, and Propaganda, which is better-known for housing tourists rather than locals.

No.2 - Brazil

Considering this is the birthplace of the thong, it makes sense that sex is as essential as breathing in Brazil. This horny country’s beaches are filled with gorgeous women and during its annual Carnaval even the most stubborn inhibitions disappear and this destination proves its spot on our top 10 horniest countries list.

Horny hangouts: In Rio, definitely visit the Lapa district. It’s a huge party spot, filled with clubs and gyrating women. Other Rio options include the Nuth Bar, a two-story nightclub notorious as a pickup bar, plus Baronetti or Club Six. Up for more adventure? You can negotiate your price openly at Help.

No. 1 - Greece

This country has a long tradition of sex that dates back to ancient times — these are the guys that brought us pederasty and Sapphic love. With its temperate Mediterranean weather, beaches and tons of islands, Greece’s ingredients make it the No. 1 horniest country in the world.

Horny hangouts: Set aside some time, and plenty of protection, because there are a number of pickup spots throughout the islands and on the mainland. First, in Athens, try out Hoxton in the Gazi district, it’s a trendy bar where backpackers are known to hang out. For the islands, Corfu is renowned for its infamous pickup spot, The Pink Palace. And while on the island of Los, check out these bars: Kahlua, Slammer Bar or the Red Bull Bar. Finally, make sure to check out Mykonos, an island known for its partying. While in Mykonos, visit Paradise Beach club that’s set right on, you guessed it, a beach. Paradise Beach is a big hangout, where clothing has been known to occasionally disappear.

[Source: AskMen.com]
[Pictures: http://thenicole.info/beauty/top-10-horniest-countries/]

Ummm, where's Japan?

Aleister Crowley

2009-10-18T04:26:00.000-07:00

Aleister Crowley (pronounced /ˈkroʊli/) (October 12, 1875 – December 1, 1947), born Edward Alexander Crowley, was an English occultist, writer, mountaineer, poet, yogi, and possibly a spy. He was an influential member of occult organizations, including the Golden Dawn, the A∴A∴, and Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), and is known today for his magical writings, especially The Book of the Law, the central sacred text of Thelema. He gained notoriety during his lifetime, and was denounced in the popular press of the day as "The Wickedest Man In The World."

Crowley was also a chess player, painter, astrologer, hedonist, bisexual, drug experimenter, and social critic.

He's quiet lived a larger-than-life life, seriously.

Early Years + University

Edward Alexander Crowley was born at 30 Clarendon Square in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England, between 11:00pm and midnight on October 12, 1875.

His father, Edward Crowley, was trained as an engineer but, according to Aleister, never worked as one. He did, however, own shares in a lucrative family brewery business, which allowed him to retire before Aleister was born. Through his father's business he was an acquaintance of Aubrey Beardsley. His mother, Emily Bertha Bishop, drew roots from a Devon and Somerset family. Both of his parents were Exclusive Brethren, a more conservative faction of the Plymouth Brethren.

Crowley grew up in a staunch Brethren household and was only allowed to play with children whose families followed the same faith. His father was a preacher, travelling around Britain and producing pamphlets. Daily Bible studies and private tutoring were mainstays in "Alick's" childhood.

On February 29, 1880, a sister, Grace Mary Elizabeth, was born but lived only five hours. Crowley was taken to see the body and in his own words (in the third person):

The incident made a curious impression on him. He did not see why he should be disturbed so uselessly. He couldn't do any good; the child was dead; it was none of his business. This attitude continued through his life. He has never attended any funeral but that of his father, which he did not mind doing, as he felt himself to be the real centre of interest.

On March 5, 1887, his father died of tongue cancer. This was a turning point in Crowley's life, after which he then began to describe his childhood in the first person in his Confessions.

After the death of his father to whom he was close, he drifted from his religious upbringing. His mother's efforts to keep her son in the Christian faith only served to provoke his scepticism. When a child, his rebellious behaviour displeased his mother to such an extent that she would chastise him by calling him "The Beast" (from the Book of Revelation), an epithet that Crowley would later adopt for himself. He objected to the labelling of what he saw as life's most worthwhile and enjoyable activities as "sinful".

In 1895, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, after studying at the public schools Malvern College, Eastbourne College and Tonbridge School. He originally had the intention of reading Moral Sciences (philosophy), but with approval from his personal tutor, he switched to English literature, which was not then a part of the curriculum offered. His three years at Cambridge were happy ones, due in part to coming into the considerable fortune left by his father.

Here he finally broke with the Church of England, internally if not externally:

The Church of England [...] had seemed a narrow tyranny, as detestable as that of the Plymouth Brethren; less logical and more hypocritical. When I discovered that chapel was compulsory I immediately struck back. The junior dean halled me for not attending chapel, which I was certainly not going to do, because it involved early rising. I excused myself on the ground that I had been brought up among the Plymouth Brethren. The dean asked me to come and see him occasionally and discuss the matter, and I had the astonishing impudence to write to him that 'The seed planted by my father, watered by my mother's tears, would prove too hardy a growth to be uprooted even by his eloquence and learning

In December 1896, following an event that he describes in veiled terms, Crowley decided to pursue a path in occultism and mysticism. By the next year, he began reading books by alchemists and mystics, and books on magic. Biographer Lawrence Sutin describes the pivotal New Year's event as a homo-erotic experience (Crowley's first) that brought him what he considered "an encounter with an immanent deity." During the year of 1897, Aleister further came to see worldly pursuits as useless. In October a brief illness triggered considerations of mortality and "the futility of all human endeavour," or at least the futility of the diplomatic career that Crowley had previously considered.

A year later, he published his first book of poetry (Aceldama), and left Cambridge, only to meet Julian L. Baker (Frater D.A.) who introduced him to Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Throughout the period of 1895, he allegedly maintained a vigorous sex life, which was largely conducted with prostitutes and girls he picked up at local pubs and cigar shops, but eventually he took part in same-sex activities in which he played a passive role. During the course of his life, Crowley practised sexual magic rituals with both men and women. Sutin recounts Crowley's relationship with, and lasting feelings for, Herbert Charles Pollitt, whom he met while at Cambridge in 1897. Pollitt did not share his partner's mystical leanings, and Crowley had this to say about ending their relationship:

I told him frankly that I had given my life to religion and that he did not fit into the scheme. I see now how imbecile I was, how hideously wrong and weak it is to reject any part of one's personality.

He would have made any public expressions of "distaste" at a time when British law officially forbade homosexuality. The arrest, conviction and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde took place in Crowley's first year at Cambridge. In the autobiographical preface to Crowley's drama The World's Tragedy, he included two pages on "Sodomy" where he openly admitted his bisexuality and praised sex between men. However, the section was removed from all copies of the book except those given to close friends.

Later, in a January 1929 letter, he wrote:

There have been about four men in my life that I could say I have loved... Call me a bugger if you like, but I don't feel the same way about women. One can always replace a woman in a few days.

While that claim about women conflicts with other statements and actions of Crowley's, it accurately describes his relationships with Pollitt and various working class women during his college years.

Name change

Crowley described his decision to change his name as follows:

"For many years I had loathed being called Alick, partly because of the unpleasant sound and sight of the word, partly because it was the name by which my mother called me. Edward did not seem to suit me and the diminutives Ted or Ned were even less appropriate. Alexander was too long and Sandy suggested tow hair and freckles. I had read in some book or other that the most favourable name for becoming famous was one consisting of a dactyl followed by a spondee, as at the end of a hexameter: like "Jeremy Taylor". Aleister Crowley fulfilled these conditions and Aleister is the Gaelic form of Alexander. To adopt it would satisfy my romantic ideals. The atrocious spelling A-L-E-I-S-T-E-R was suggested as the correct form by Cousin Gregor, who ought to have known better. In any case, A-L-A-I-S-D-A-I-R makes a very bad dactyl. For these reasons I saddled myself with my present nom-de-guerre—I can't say that I feel sure that I facilitated the process of becoming famous. I should doubtless have done so, whatever name I had chosen."

The Golden Dawn

Involved as a young adult in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, he first studied mysticism with and made enemies of William Butler Yeats and Arthur Edward Waite. As in many occult circles of the time, Crowley voiced the view that Waite was a pretentious bore through searing critiques of Waite's writings and editorials of other authors' writings. In his periodical The Equinox, Crowley titled one diatribe, "Wisdom While You Waite", and his note on the passing of Waite bore the title, "Dead Waite".

His friend and former Golden Dawn associate, Allan Bennett, introduced him to Buddhism, while Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, acting leader of the Golden Dawn organization, acted as his early mentor in western magic but would later become his enemy. Several decades after Crowley's participation in the Golden Dawn, Mathers claimed copyright protection over a particular ritual and sued Crowley for infringement after Crowley's public display of the ritual. Both also developed and carried complex Seal of Solomon amulets and talismans.

In 1899, Crowley acquired Boleskine House, in Foyers on the shore of Loch Ness in Scotland.

In a book of fiction, titled Moonchild, Crowley later portrayed Mathers as the primary villain, including him as a character named SRMD, using the abbreviation of Mathers' magical name. Arthur Edward Waite also appeared in Moonchild as a villain named Arthwaite, while Bennett appeared as the silent, monkish Mahathera Phang.

While he did not break with Mathers until 1904, Crowley lost faith in this teacher's abilities soon after the 1900 schism in the Golden Dawn (if not before). Later in the year of that schism, Crowley travelled to Mexico and continued his magical studies in isolation. Crowley's writings suggest that he discovered the word Abrahadabra during this time.

In October 1901, after practicing Raja Yoga for some time, he said he had reached a state he called dhyana—one of many states of unification in thoughts that are described in Magick (Liber ABA). 1902 saw him writing the essay Berashith (the first word of Genesis), in which he gave meditation (or restraint of the mind to a single object) as the means of attaining his goal. The essay describes ceremonial magick as a means of training the will, and of constantly directing one's thoughts to a given object through ritual. In his 1903 essay, Science and Matter, Crowley urged an empirical approach to Buddhist teachings.

In 1903 he married Rose Edith Kelly.

1904 and after

Crowley had a revelatory experience in 1904, while on holiday in Cairo, Egypt,which led to his founding of the Magickal philosophy known as Thelema. Aleister's wife Rose started to behave in an odd way, and this started to lead Aleister to believe that an entity had made contact with her. At her instructions, he performed an invocation of the Egyptian God Horus on March 20 with (he wrote) "great success." According to Crowley, the God told him that a new Aeon for mankind had begun, and that Crowley would serve as its prophet. Rose continued to give information, telling Crowley in detailed terms to await a further revelation. On 8 April and for the following two days at exactly noon he heard a voice, dictating the words of the text, Liber AL vel Legis, or The Book of the Law, which Crowley wrote down. The voice claimed to be that of Aiwass (or Aiwaz) "the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat", or Horus, the god of air, child of Isis and Osiris and The Crowned and Conquering Child of the New Aeon, which was to be announced through his chosen scribe "the prince-priest the Beast".

Portions of the book are in numerical cipher, which Crowley claimed an inability to decode. Thelema explains this by pointing to a warning within the Book of the Law — the speaker supposedly warned that the scribe, Ankh-af-na-khonsu (Aleister Crowley), was never to attempt to decode the ciphers, for to do so would end only in folly. The later-written The Law is For All sees Crowley warning everyone not to discuss the writing amongst fellow critics, for fear that the Revelation would become just another dogmatic religion like Christianity, or Islam. While he declared a "new Equinox of the Gods" in early 1904, supposedly passing on the revelation of March 20 to the then small elite Magickal community, it took about five years for Crowley to fully accept the writing of the Book of the Law and follow its doctrine. Only after countless attempts to test its writings did he come to embrace them as the official doctrine of the New Aeon of Horus. The remainder of his professional and personal careers were spent expanding the new frontiers of scientific illuminism.

Rose and Aleister had a daughter, whom Crowley named Nicole Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith Crowley, in July 1904. This child died in 1906, during the two and a half months when Crowley had left her with Rose (after a family trip through China). They had another daughter, Lola Zaza, in the summer of that year, and Crowley devised a special ritual of thanksgiving for her birth.

He performed a thanksgiving ritual before his first claimed success in what he called the "Abramelin operation", on 9 October 1906. This was his implementation of a magical work described in The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. The events of that year gave the Abramelin book a central role in Crowley's system. He described the primary goal of the "Great Work" using a term from this book: "the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel". An essay in the first number of The Equinox gives several reasons for this choice of names:

1. Because Abramelin's system is so simple and effective.
2. Because since all theories of the universe are absurd it is better to talk in the language of one which is patently absurd, so as to mortify the metaphysical man.
3. Because a child can understand it.

Crowley was notorious in his lifetime — a frequent target of attacks in the tabloid press, which labelled him "The Wickedest Man in the World" to his evident amusement. At one point, he was expelled from Italy after having established a commune, the organization of which was based on his personal philosophies, the Abbey of Thelema, at Cefalù, Sicily.

Aleister and Rose were divorced in 1909.

A∴A∴ and Ordo Templi Orientis

In 1907, Crowley's interest took off again, with two events. The first was the creation of a new magical Order called A∴A∴, and the second was the composition of the Holy Books of Thelema.

In 1910, Crowley performed with members of the A∴A∴ his series of dramatic rites, the Rites of Eleusis.

According to Crowley, in 1912, Theodor Reuss had called on him to address accusations of publishing O.T.O. secrets, which Crowley dismissed, for having never attained the grade in which these secrets were given (IXth Degree). Reuss opened up The Book of Lies and showed Crowley the passage. This sparked a long conversation which led to Crowley assuming the Xth Degree of O.T.O. and becoming Grand Master of the British section of O.T.O. called Mysteria Mystica Maxima.

Spying in America, 1914–1918

Richard B. Spence writes in his 2008 book Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult that Crowley could have been a lifelong agent for British Intelligence. While this may have already been the case during his many travels to Tsarist Russia, Switzerland, Asia, Mexico and North Africa that had started in his student days, he could have been involved with this line of work during his life in America during the First World War, under a cover of being a German propaganda agent and a supporter of Irish independence. Crowley's mission might have been to gather information about the German intelligence network, the Irish independent activists and produce aberrant propaganda, aiming at compromising the German and Irish ideals. As an agent provocateur he could have played some role in provoking the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, thereby bringing the United States closer to active involvement in the war alongside the Allies. He also used German magazines The Fatherland and The International as outlets for his other writings. The question of whether Crowley was a spy has always been subject to debate, but Spence uncovered a document from the US Army's old Military Intelligence Division supporting Crowley's own claim to have been a spy:

Aleister Crowley was an employee of the British Government...in this country on official business of which the British Consul, New York City has full cognizance.

During his time in the U.S., Crowley practiced the task of a Magister Templi in the A∴A∴ as he conceived it, namely interpreting every phenomenon as a particular dealing of "God" with his soul. He began to see various women he met as officers in his ongoing initiation, associating them with priests wearing animal masks in Egyptian ritual. A meditation during his relationship with one such woman (Jeanne Robert Foster) led him to claim the title of Magus, also referring to the system of the A∴A∴.

Two periods of magical experimentation followed. In June 1916, he began the first of these at the New Hampshire cottage of Evangeline Adams, having ghost written most of her two books on astrology. His diaries at first show discontent at the gap between his view of the grade of Magus and his view of himself: "It is no good making up my mind to do anything material; for I have no means. But this would vanish if I could make up my mind." Despite his objections to sacrificing a living animal, he resolved to crucify a frog as part of a rehearsal of the life of Jesus in the Gospels (afterward declaring it his willing familiar), "with the idea...that some supreme violation of all the laws of my being would break down my Karma or dissolve the spell that seems to bind me." Slightly more than a month later, having taken ether (ethyl oxide), he had a vision of the universe from modern scientific cosmology that he frequently referred to in later writings.

Crowley began another period of magical work on an island in the Hudson River after buying large amounts of red paint instead of food. Having painted "Do what thou wilt" on the cliffs at both sides of the island, he received gifts from curious visitors. Here at the island he had visions of seeming past lives, though he refused to endorse any theory of what they meant beyond linking them to his unconscious. Towards the end of his stay, he had a shocking experience he linked to "the Chinese wisdom" which made even Thelema appear insignificant. Nevertheless, he continued in his work. Before leaving the country he formed a sexual and magical relationship with Leah Hirsig, whom he met earlier, and with her help began painting canvases with more creativity and passion.

Abbey of Thelema

Crowley, along with Leah Hirsig, founded the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù (Palermo), Sicily in 1920. The name was borrowed from Rabelais's satire Gargantua, where the "Abbey of Theleme" is described as a sort of anti-monastery where the lives of the inhabitants were "spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure." This idealistic utopia was to be the model of Crowley's commune, while also being a type of magical school, giving it the designation "Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum," The College of the Holy Spirit. The general programme was in line with the A∴A∴ course of training, and included daily adorations to the Sun, a study of Crowley's writings, regular yogic and ritual practices (which were to be recorded), as well as general domestic labour. The object, naturally, was for students to devote themselves to the Great Work of discovering and manifesting their True Wills. Mussolini's Fascist government expelled Crowley from the country at the end of April 1923.

After the Abbey

In February 1924, Crowley visited Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. He did not meet the founder on that occasion, but called Gurdjieff a "tip-top man" in his diary. Crowley privately criticized some of the Institute's practices and teachings, but doubted that what he heard from disciple Pindar reflected the master's true position. Some claim that on a later visit he met Gurdjieff—who firmly repudiated Crowley. Biographer Sutin expresses skepticism, and Gurdjieff's student C.S. Nott tells a different version. Nott perceives Crowley as a black or at least ignorant magician and says his teacher "kept a sharp watch" on the visitor, but mentions no open confrontation.

On August 16, 1929 Crowley married Maria de Miramar, from Nicaragua, while in Leipzig. They separated by 1930, but they were never divorced.

In September, 1930 Crowley visited Lisbon and with the assistance of Fernando Pessoa faked his death at the notorious rock formation, Boca do Inferno (Mouth of Hell). In fact Crowley left the country and enjoyed the newspaper reports of his death - reappearing three weeks later at an exhibition in Berlin.

In 1934, Crowley was declared bankrupt after losing a court case in which he sued the artist Nina Hamnett for calling him a black magician in her 1932 book, Laughing Torso. In addressing the jury, Mr. Justice Swift said:

I have been over forty years engaged in the administration of the law in one capacity or another. I thought that I knew of every conceivable form of wickedness. I thought that everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at one time or another before me. I have learnt in this case that we can always learn something more if we live long enough. I have never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by the man (Crowley) who describes himself to you as the greatest living poet.—Mr. Justice Swift

However, Patricia "Deirdre" MacAlpine approached Crowley on the day of the verdict and offered to bear him a child, whom he named Aleister Atatürk. She sought no mystical or religious role in Crowley's life and rarely saw him after the birth, "an arrangement that suited them both."

During World War II, Ian Fleming and others proposed a disinformation plot in which Crowley would have helped an MI5 agent supply Nazi official Rudolf Hess with faked horoscopes. They could then pass along false information about an alleged pro-German circle in Britain. The government abandoned this plan when Hess flew to Scotland, crashing his plane on the moors near Eaglesham, and was captured. Fleming then suggested using Crowley as an interrogator to determine the influence of astrology on other Nazi leaders, but his superiors rejected this plan. At some point, Fleming also suggested that Britain could use Enochian as a code in order to plant evidence.

Death

Crowley died at Netherwood, a Hastings boarding house on 1 December 1947 at the age of 72. According to one biographer the cause of death was a respiratory infection. He had become addicted to heroin after being prescribed morphine for his asthma and bronchitis many years earlier. He and his last doctor died within 24 hours of each other; newspapers would claim, in differing accounts, that Dr. Thomson had refused to continue his opiate prescription and that Crowley had put a curse on him.

Biographer Lawrence Sutin passes on various stories about Crowley's death and last words. Frieda Harris supposedly reported him saying, "I am perplexed," though she did not see him at the very end. According to John Symonds, a Mr. Rowe witnessed Crowley's death along with a nurse, and reported his last words as "Sometimes I hate myself." Biographer Gerald Suster accepted the version of events he received from a "Mr W.H." who worked at the house, in which Crowley dies pacing in his living room. Supposedly Mr W.H. heard a crash while polishing furniture on the floor below, and entered Crowley's rooms to find him dead on the floor. Patricia "Deirdre" MacAlpine, who visited Crowley with their son and her three other children, denied all this and reports a sudden gust of wind and peal of thunder at the (otherwise quiet) moment of his death. According to MacAlpine, Crowley remained bedridden for the last few days of his life, but was in light spirits and conversational. Readings at the cremation service in nearby Brighton included one of his own works, Hymn to Pan, and newspapers referred to the service as a black mass. Brighton council subsequently resolved to take all the necessary steps to prevent such an incident from occurring again.

Science, magic, and sexuality

Crowley claimed to use a scientific method to study what people at the time called spiritual experiences, making "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion" the catchphrase of his magazine The Equinox. By this he meant that religious experiences should not be taken at face value, but critiqued and experimented with in order to arrive at their underlying mystical or neurological meaning.

In this connection there was also the point that I was anxious to prove that spiritual progress did not depend on religious or moral codes, but was like any other science. Magick would yield its secrets to the infidel and the libertine, just as one does not have to be a churchwarden in order to discover a new kind of orchid. There are, of course, certain virtues necessary to the Magician; but they are of the same order as those which make a successful chemist.

Crowley's magical and initiatory system has amongst its innermost reaches a set of teachings on sex magick. He frequently expressed views about sex that were radical for his time, and published numerous poems and tracts combining pagan religious themes with sexual imagery both heterosexual and homosexual, as well as pederastic. One of his most notorious poetry collections, titled8 "White Stains" (1898), was published in Amsterdam in 1898 and dealt specifically with sexually explicit subject matter. However, most of the hundred copies printed for the initial release were later seized and destroyed by British customs.

Sex magick is the use of the sex act — or the energies, passions or arousal states it evokes — as a point upon which to focus the will or magical desire for effects in the non-sexual world. In the view of Allen Greenfield, Crowley was inspired by Paschal Beverly Randolph, an American Abolitionist, Spiritualist medium, and author of the mid-19th century who wrote (in Eulis!, 1874) of using the "nuptive moment" (orgasm) as the time to make a "prayer" for events to occur.

Crowley often introduced new terminology for spiritual and magickal practices and theory. For example, he termed theurgy "high magick" and thaumaturgy "low magick." In The Book of the Law and The Vision and the Voice, the Aramaic magickal formula Abracadabra was changed to Abrahadabra, which he called the new formula of the Aeon. He also famously spelled magic in the archaic manner, as magick, to differentiate "the true science of the Magi from all its counterfeits."

He urged his students to learn to control their own mental and behavioural habits, to the point of switching political views and personalities at will. For control of speech (symbolised as the unicorn) he recommended to choose a commonly-used word, letter, or pronouns and adjectives of the first person, and avoid using it for a week or more. Should they say the word he instructed them to cut themselves with a blade on each occasion to serve as warning or reminder. Later the student could move on to the "Horse" of action and the "Ox" of thought. (These symbols derive from the cabala of Crowley's book 777.) In this respect Crowley has been a strong influence on post-modern Chaos Magic with the concept of the different Selves, and the idea, and practice, of Belief Shifting. Crowley has also been labeled by some anthropologists as a practitioner of neoshamanism and revivalist of shamanistic philosophies in the early 20th century.

Controversy

Author and Crowley expert Lon Milo Duquette wrote in his 1993 work The Magick of Aleister Crowley that:

"Crowley clothed many of his teachings in the thin veil of sensational titillation. By doing so he assured himself that one, his works would only be appreciated by the few individuals capable of doing so, and two, his works would continue to generate interest and be published by and for the benefit of both his admirers and his enemies long after death. He did not — I repeat not — perform or advocate human sacrifice. He was often guilty, however, of the crime of poor judgment. Like all of us, Crowley had many flaws and shortcomings. The greatest of those, in my opinion, was his inability to understand that everyone else in the world was not as educated and clever as he. It is clear, even in his earliest works, he often took fiendish delight in terrifying those who were either too lazy, too bigoted, or too slow-witted to understand him."

In this vein many of Crowley's more audacious and outright shocking writings were often thinly veiled attempts to communicate methods of sexual magick, often using words like "blood", "death" and "kill" to replace "semen", "ecstacy" and "ejaculation" in the yet puritanical sexual environment of late 19th/early 20th century England. Take for instance the highly repeated quote from his thickly veiled Book Four: "It would be unwise to condemn as irrational the practice of devouring the heart and liver of an adversary while yet warm. For the highest spiritual working one must choose that victim which contains the greatest and purest force; a male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the most satisfactory." Robert Anton Wilson in The Final Secret of the Illuminati (aka Cosmic Trigger Volume One) interpreted the child as a reference to genes in sperm. Crowley added in a footnote to the text on sacrifice, "the intelligence and innocence of that male child are the perfect understanding of the Magician, his one aim, without lust of result."

In the "New Comment" to the Book of the Law, "the Beast 666 adviseth that all children shall be accustomed from infancy to witness every type of sexual act, as also the process of birth, lest falsehood fog, and mystery stupefy, their minds... Politeness has forbidden any direct reference to the subject of sex to secure no happier result than to allow Sigmund Freud and others to prove that our every thought, speech, and gesture, conscious or unconscious, is an indirect reference!"

Drugs

Crowley was a habitual drug user and also maintained a meticulous record of his drug-induced experiences with laudanum, opium, cocaine, hashish, marijuana, alcohol, ether, mescaline and heroin. Allan Bennett, Crowley's mentor, was said to have "instructed Crowley in the magical use of drugs." The Cairo revelation from Aiwass/Aiwaz specifically recommended indulgence in "strange drugs". While in Paris during the 1920s, Crowley experimented with psychedelic substances, specifically Anhalonium lewinii, an obsolete scientific name for the mescaline-bearing cactus peyote. In October 1930, Crowley dined with Aldous Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumours persist that he introduced Huxley to peyote on that occasion.

Crowley developed a drug addiction after a London doctor prescribed heroin for his asthma and bronchitis. His life as an addict influenced his 1922 novel, Diary of a Drug Fiend, but the fiction presented a hopeful outcome of rehabilitation and recovery by means of magical techniques and the exercise of True Will. At the time of his death he was taking heroin on his doctor's prescription.

Racism

Biographer Lawrence Sutin stated that "blatant bigotry is a persistent minor element in Crowley's writings." The book's introduction calls Crowley "a spoiled scion of a wealthy Victorian family who embodied many of the worst John Bull racial and social prejudices of his upper-class contemporaries," Sutin also writes, "Crowley embodied the contradiction that writhed within many Western intellectuals of the time: deeply held racist viewpoints courtesy of their culture, coupled with a fascination with people of colour."

Crowley defended the use of violence against the Chinese, specifically the lower classes. He applied the term "nigger" to Italians (in Diary of a Drug Fiend Book I, Chapter 9) and Indians, and called the Indian theosophist Jiddu Krishnamurti "negroid".

Crowley, according to the biographer, Lawrence Sutin, used racial epithets to bully Victor Neuburg during a sadomasochistic magical working: "Crowley leveled numerous brutal verbal attacks on Neuburg's family and Jewish ancestry". The two became lovers by the end of that year if not before, but "whether or not Crowley and Neuburg had sexual relations during this magical retirement is unclear," according to Sutin.

Crowley's published expressions of antisemitism were disturbing enough to later editors of his works that one of them, Israel Regardie, who had also been a student of Crowley, attempted to suppress them. In 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley (Samuel Weiser, 1975), Regardie, who was Jewish, explained his complete excision of Crowley's antisemitic commentary on the Kabbalah in the sixth unnumbered page of his editorial introduction: "I am...omitting Crowley's Preface to the book. It is a nasty, malicious piece of writing, and does not do justice to the system with which he is dealing."

What Regardie had removed was Crowley's "Preface to Sepher Sephiroth", originally published in Equinox 1:8. Written in 1911, which contained a statement of Crowley's belief in the blood libel against the Jews:

Human sacrifices are today still practised by the Jews of Eastern Europe, as is set forth at length by Sir Richard Burton in the MS. which the wealthy Jews of England have compassed heaven and earth to suppress, and evidenced by the ever-recurring Pogroms against which so senseless an outcry is made by those who live among those degenerate Jews who are at least not cannibals.

Crowley rhetorically asked how a system of value such as Qabala could come from what "the general position of the ethnologist" called "an entirely barbarous race, devoid of any spiritual pursuit," and "polytheists" to boot. As Crowley himself practiced polytheism, some read these remarks as deliberate irony.

Crowley repeated his claim that Jews in Eastern Europe practice ritual child-murder in at least one later work as well, namely the section on mysticism in Book Four or Magick. Here he uses quotation marks for "ritual murder" and for "Christian" children.

An article at The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum makes the following claim while speaking of the previously mentioned remark elsewhere in Magick:

At first glance Crowley seems to be advocating an atrocity, the sacrifice of a child, the bugaboo of witchhunters and anti-Semites everywhere. But in fact he is claiming that the historical legend of child sacrifice, used to persecute so many "witches" and Jews, veils a sexual formula of self-sacrifice. In a secret document of the IX*, the "blood libel" against the Jews -- the story that they celebrate covert rituals employing the blood of sacrificed children -- is taken as a statement that certain sects of the Hassidim possess this secret. The early Christians were accused of such practices by the Roman establishment, and the Gnostic Catholic Church considers this to be evidence of a continuity of the sexual secret from the Gnostics.

Crowley studied and promoted the mystical and magical teachings of some of the same ethnic groups he attacked, in particular Indian yoga, Jewish Kabbalah and goetia, and the Chinese I Ching. Also, in Confessions Chapter 86, as well as a private diary which Lawrence Sutin quotes in Do What Thou Wilt chapter 7, Crowley recorded a memory of a "past life" as the Chinese Taoist writer Ko Hsuan. In another remembered life, Crowley said, he took part in a "Council of Masters" that included many from Asia. He has this to say about the virtues of "Eurasians" and then Jews:

I do not believe that their universally admitted baseness is due to a mixture of blood or the presumable peculiarity of their parents; but that they are forced into vileness by the attitude of both their white and coloured neighbours. A similar case is presented by the Jew, who really does only too often possess the bad qualities for which he is disliked; but they are not proper to his race. No people can show finer specimens of humanity. The Hebrew poets and prophets are sublime. The Jewish soldier is courageous, the Jewish rich man generous. The race possesses imagination, romance, loyalty, probity and humanity in an exceptional degree.

But the Jew has been persecuted so relentlessly that his survival has depended on the development of his worst qualities; avarice, servility, falseness, cunning and the rest. Even the highest-class Eurasians such as Ananda Koomaraswamy suffer acutely from the shame of being considered outcast. The irrationality and injustice of their neighbours heightens the feeling and it breeds the very abominations which the snobbish inhumanity of their fellow-men expects of them.

All these remarks must necessarily be contrasted with Crowley's explicit philosophical instructions in his last book Magick Without Tears. Chapter 73, which is titled "'Monsters', Niggers, Jews, etc," states his essentially individualistic and anti-racialist views:

...you say, "Every man and every woman is a star." does need some attention to the definition of "man" and "woman." What is the position, you say, of "monsters"? And men of "inferior" races, like the Veddah, Hottentot and the Australian Blackfellow? There must be a line somewhere, and will I please draw it? ... Not only does it seem to me the only conceivable way of reconciling this and similar passages with "Every man and every woman is a star." to assert the sovereignty of the individual, and to deny the right-to-exist to "class-consciousness," "crowd-psychology," and so to mob-rule and Lynch-Law, but also the only practicable plan whereby we may each one of us settle down peaceably to mind his own business, to pursue his True Will, and to accomplish the Great Work.

The "Thelemic" philosophical position which he taught in this volume (which is a series of letters of direct personal instruction to a student of Magick) is clearly an anti-racist one. Even in private comments on Mein Kampf, Crowley said that his own preferred "master class" was above all distinctions of race.

Sexism

Biographer Lawrence Sutin stated that Crowley "largely accepted the notion, implicitly embodied in Victorian sexology, of women as secondary social beings in terms of intellect and sensibility." Occult scholar Tim Maroney compares him to other figures and movements of the time and suggests that some others might have shown more respect for women. Another biographer, whilst describing Crowley's misogyny, asserts that in other ways he was pro-feminist who thought women were badly served by the law. He considered abortion to be tantamount to murder and thought little of a society which condoned it, believing that women, when left to choose outside of prevailing social influences, would never want to end a pregnancy.

Crowley stated that women, except "a few rare individuals," care most about having children and will conspire against their husbands if they lack children to whom to devote themselves. In Confessions, Crowley says he learned this from his first marriage. He claimed that their intentions were to force a man to abandon his life's work for their interests. He only found women "tolerable", he wrote, when they served the role of solely helping a man in his life's work. However, he said that they were incapable of actually understanding the nature of this work itself. He also claimed that women did not have individuality and were solely guided by their habits or impulses. In this respect Crowley displayed the conventional attitude to women for a male of his time.

Nevertheless, when he sought what he called the supreme magical-mystical attainment, Crowley asked Leah Hirsig to direct his ordeals, marking the first time since the schism in the Golden Dawn that another person verifiably took charge of his initiation. In the Hierophant section of the Book of Thoth, he interprets a verse from the Book of the Law that speaks of "the woman girt with a sword; she represents the Scarlet Woman in the hierarchy of the new Aeon.(...)This woman represents Venus as she now is in this new aeon; no longer the mere vehicle of her male counterpart, but armed and militant."

In his Commentaries on the Book of the Law, Crowley stated what he considered to be the correct Thelemic position towards women:

We of Thelema say that "Every man and every woman is a star." We do not fool and flatter women; we do not despise and abuse them. To us, a woman is herself, absolute, original, independent, free, self-justified, exactly as a man is.

[Source(article+pics) & elaborate infos on Mr. Crowley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley]

Niagara Falls Frozen

2009-10-09T01:20:00.000-07:00

Allegedly photographed back in 1911, the iconic Niagara Falls abruptly stopped flowing and froze for several hours, much to the amazement of flabbergasted spectators. Although the authenticity of the actual date is stil beingl disputed, it is far more safe to say that March 29th 1848 was the absolute day the Niagara Falls completely run dry.

More pictures:
[Pictures: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_niagara_falls_frozen.htm]

Can I say dry ice?

Help Philippines!

2009-09-29T22:50:00.000-07:00

[Picture: http://filipinobalikbayantv.com/]

Tropical depression "Ondoy" has left the entire epicenter of the Philippines submerged under water after days of heavy rainfalls. Floods has entirely ruled the streets of cities and other close neighboring provinces of Manila, causing havoc and massive destruction to the properties of our fellow Filipinos. Houses brought down. Cars flowed out. It was really a huge torrent of our Mother Nature's wrath!

In spite of the damages that was caused by the superstorm, Filipinos have once again showed the true spirit of bayanihan amidst national calamity. Outpouring support and compassion are seen from the untouched citizens. Even Hollywood stars (Alyssa Milano, Josh Groban, Demi Moore) vented out their concerns for the Filipino survivors via Twitter.

The natural watery distraught was not the matter of consequence, but the cataclysm of the major transition.

Let us help them rebuild their lives by imparting a share of our blessings to these needy people.

AUSTRALIA:

- SYDNEY - you can deliver relief goods to 303/5 Stromboli Strait, Homebush Bay 2127. you can also contact through twitter at @allorange if you want to arrange for a pick up in the city

- MELBOURNE - if you are in the Melbourne CBD area, you can drop relief goods through Coco Quizon’s residence @ 8 Vale St., North Melbourne. You can contact 0458603723 for donations of goods or pledges.

BELGIUM:

- from @SayChiz, they can contact Shiera Catalan at +32485328811 if they want to donate goods for typhoon relief

CANADA:

- TORONTO - pinoys are spearheading efforts to help, visit this website for details.

- WINNIPEG - the Philippine Community Centre of Manitoba here in Winnipeg Canada started to raise money for the victims today

MIDDLE EAST:

- QATAR - you may contact Mr. Delfin Montenegro/Ms.Chat-5203417 for donations/relief goods

- UAE - please get in touch with Pres. Jo, 050-7456452, josepha@perceptgulffz.com for Lingap Kapwa-Ondoy victims. And you can also call Arnold of LBC for free LBC box 0508589065 via UP Alumni Asso.

- DUBAI - you can send clothes and relief goods thru this website.

SINGAPORE:

- dropoff for relief goods is @ airfreight lucky plaza #03-09. can call 62351011, they are open up to 7pm.

- pinoys are mobilizing and gathering donations, visit this forum for more details.

UK:

- you can donate through OXFAM on their official website.

UNITED STATES:

- you can call the ABS-CBN US Helpline at 1-800-5272820 to know how you can help

- HAWAII - Consul Paul Raymund C. Cortes will be on hand to assist in providing necessary info. Contact (808) 595 6316 – to 19, extn, 237. More details on this official website.

- LOS ANGELES - Manila Forwarder Headquarters 4249 Eagle Rock Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90065, or you may also contact Kuu Hilo at (818)395-9207.

- NEW JERSEY - NJ drop off at two places! Sinugba Cafe at 561 Westside Ave. Jersey City, NJ 07304 or Casa Victoria at 691 Newark Ave. Jersey City, NJ 07306-2803. Contact persons are Yves Nibungco at (201)621-3156, or Nick Cordero at (917)476-7855

- NEW YORK - NYC Disaster Relief drop off center @ Pandayan Center 406 W40th St. Between 9th and 10th Aves. NY, NY 10018 or 212.564.6057.

- SAN FRANCISCO - 5750 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94112 For details call 510-750-3036, 209-3499576, 415-239-9576, and also, MANILA BOX USA is now accepting donations and will provide FREE shipping to Manila. 361 Beach Road Burlingame , CA 94010 or call (650)342-2858.

OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD:

- you can donate through the paypal account link on this site.

- the official website of the PHILIPPINE RED CROSS has a complete listing of how you can donate to them.

- the ayala foundation is also accepting your donations through their website.

- you can donate through the kapuso foundation site.

- you can use your credit card to donate via the the abs-cbn foundation.

- donate rice through the UN's World Food Programme through their official website.

OTHER FORMS OF HELP FOR YOU:

NEED TO SEND YOUR DONATIONS? Mail & More, FedEx & Air21 outlets are now accepting donations. For locations please call 8794789 or log to their official site.

PAL IS OFFERING FREE AIRLIFT FOR DONATIONS. for details, click on the PAL website.

[Courtesy of (infos & stuff): http://superbianca.blogspot.com/]

God bless you all!

Seychelles 50-Rupee 'Sex' Note

2009-09-25T01:35:00.000-07:00

1968 - Issued as part of the first and eventually the last series of banknotes of Seychelles with Queen Elizabeth II's portrait on the surface, the controversial 50-Rupee note once contains a quite inappropriate glitch.

Although dominated by a sailing ship at the center and Queen Elizabeth II, the main culprit of the scandal was the two intertwined palm trees to the right of Her Majesty which seem to spell the word 'SEX'. Thus, making the unintentional error a famed controversy.

[Pictures: http://www.artistmike.com/]

Only in Seychelles.

Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol

2009-09-23T00:24:00.000-07:00

WHAT IS LOST ... WILL BE FOUND.

"In this stunning follow-up to the global phenomenon The Da Vinci Code , Dan Brown demonstrates once again why he's is the world's most popular thriller writer. The Lost Symbol is a masterstroke of story-telling --- a deadly race through a real-world labyrinth of codes, secrets, and unseen truths... all under the watchful eye of Brown's most terrifying villain to date. Set within the hidden chambers, tunnels, and temples of Washington DC., The Lost Symbol accelerates through a startling landscape toward an unthinkable finale.

As the story opens, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned unexpectedly to deliver an evening lecture in the U.S. Capitol Building. Within minutes of his arrival, however, the night takes a bizarre turn. A disturbing object --- artfully encoded with five symbols -- is discovered in the Capitol Building. Langdon recognizes the object as an ancient invitation ... one meant to usher its recipient into a long-lost world of esoteric wisdom.

When Langdon's beloved mentor, Peter Solomon --- a prominent Mason and philanthropist -- is brutally kidnapped, Langdon realizes his only hope of saving Peter is to accept his mystical invitation and follow wherever it leads him. Langdon is instantly plunged into a clandestine world of Masonic secrets, hidden history, and never-before-seen locations--- all of which seem to be dragging him toward a single, inconceivable truth.

As the world discovered, in The Da Vince Code and Angels and Demons, Dan Brown's novels are brilliant tapestries of veiled histories, arcane symbols, and enigmatic codes. In this new novel, he again challenges readers with an intelligent lightning-paced story that offers surprises at every turn. The Lost Symbol is exactly what Brown's fans have been waiting for...his most thrilling novel yet. "
[Sypnosis: http://www.thelostsymbol.com/]

Ignore the formulaic storyline.

Neglect the predictable consensual play of the characters.

Behold the riveting mysteries.

The Lost Symbol is the first Langdon novel that got me throbbing and pulsating!

[Order/Read an excerpt: http://www.thelostsymbol.com/]

Sperm Bank in China

2009-09-14T22:28:00.000-07:00

WARNING: NSFW

The spur of sperm demands in China has stirred local medical institutions to collect sperm cells from male donors for women who want artificial insemination. It has also led private clinics and underground medical organizations to penetrate the business, making China a sperm haven and the industry a booming venture.

Donors are paid from 150 yuan to 200 yuan per session and the sperm is sold for at least 250 yuan. A maximum of 5 sperm donations each month is plausible only if he agrees to undergo health check and sex and masturbation abstinence. Last year, a press release was made by the bank debunking the "helping hand" rumors, asserting that "These pictures are completely misleading. We never have female nurses assisting in sperm collection, which is done by the donor himself, alone in a special room."

The Shanghai Sperm Bank is located at Ren Ji Hospital, No 145 Shan Dong Zhong Lu, Building 1, 7th FL, near Fu Zhou Lu.

[Pictures: http://www.buzzfeed.com/reddit/this-is-how-you-donate-sperm-in-china]

However, the pictures are said to be a complete hoax. The images are captured from a Japanese porn movie on Soft on Demand.

[Picture: http://www.shocker.jp/CZ/CZ317B.htm]

Book your flight now!

The Eunuchs

2009-09-14T19:58:00.000-07:00

[Picture: http://dualinity.wippiespace.com/pics/eunuch.jpg]

Wikipedia

"A eunuch is a castrated man, in particular one castrated early enough to have major hormonal consequences; the term usually refers to those castrated in order to perform a specific social function, as was common in many societies of the past. The earliest records for intentional castration to produce eunuchs are from the Sumerian city of Lagash in the twenty first century BC. Over the millennia since, they have performed a wide variety of functions in many different cultures such as: courtiersor equivalent domestics, treble singers, religious specialists, government officials, military commanders, and guardians of women or harem servants. In some translations of ancient texts, individuals identified as eunuchs sometimes historically included men who were impotent with women, as well as those who were celibate.

The English word eunuch is from the Greek eune ("bed") and ekhein ("to keep"), effectively "bed keeper".

Servants or slaves were usually castrated in order to make them safer servants of a royal court where physical access to the ruler could wield great influence. Seemingly lowly domestic functions such as making the ruler's bed, bathing him, cutting his hair, carrying him in his litter or even relaying messages could in theory give a eunuch "the ruler's ear" and impart de facto power on the formally humble but trusted servant. Similar instances are reflected in the humble origins and etymology of many high offices (e.g.,chancellor began as a servant guarding the entrance to an official's study). Eunuchs supposedly did not generally have loyalties to the military, the aristocracy, or to a family of their own (having neither offspring nor in-laws, at the very least), and were thus seen as more trustworthy and less interested in establishing a private 'dynasty'. Because their condition usually lowered their social status, they could also be easily replaced or killed without repercussion. In cultures that had both harems and eunuchs, eunuchs were sometimes used as harem servants (compare the female odalisque) or seraglio guards."
[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch]

Lexicorient

"Castrated human male. In the Middle East the eunuch was castrated for practical reasons, and served in positions where only castrated men were allowed.
The eunuchs were either guards and servants inharems or chamberlains to kings. These were the original positions for the eunuchs, but many succeeded in climbing in social status, and could reach positions like bodyguards, confidential advisers, ministers, even generals and admirals. Many of the advisers under the Ottoman Empire were eunuchs.
The reasons to castrate men entering such positions, are rather obvious: For the eunuchs working in the harems, there was a need for men who could not make the women pregnant. Another reason was that many thought that the eunuch's personality was more favourable for important positions. And also the fact that eunuchs never could have any children made them less threatening for rulers and important people: the eunuchs had no sons who could challenge their own sons' future positions.
There were 3 levels of castration:
1) Removal of both testicles and penis, leaving the man with only a hole for urination.
2) Removal of only testicles before the boy reached puberty, leaving the mature male totally non-sexual.
3) Removal of testicles after puberty, leaving the man with capacity to achieve an erection without ejaculation.
Men or boys who were castrated could either accept castration voluntarily, in order to enter certain attractive positions, or they were men being punished for certain errors or crimes. Additionally, they might be boys sold by their parents, and hence slaves, and therefore under the total will of the owner.
In ancient Egypt, a court officer was called eunuch whether or not he had castration. Most were castrated, hence the use of the term."
[Source: http://lexicorient.com/e.o/eunuch.htm]

The grave desperation of the ancient leaders to secure themselves of selfish assurance has led the unsuspecting gullibles to the deprivation of cathartic privileges. Sad but true, except for the men who volunteered their manhood for castration.

Afghan Star

2009-09-10T23:04:00.000-07:00

Afghanistan's very own Idol has taken the whole nation by storm. Afghan Star, a local franchise of American Idol (but due to the region's religious prohibitions, the Idol was replaced with Star) sets new democratic horizons for its hopeful people. In this part of Middle East where women are restrained from singing, joining a reality show like Afghan Star is not a mere competition for prize, but a dignitary fight for joy, life and freedom.

Documented for film, the movie aims to transcend the double standards of the Islamic stereotypes of Afghanistan. Moreover, Oprah Winfrey featured the documentary in one of her episodes and said that one of the most compelling scenes from the movie was the elimination of a female contestant who valiantly unveiled her face and danced onstage. The brave Muslim ultimately received death threats right after.

"After 30 years of war and Taliban rule, Pop Idol has come to Afghanistan. Millions are watching the TV series 'Afghan Star' and voting their favorite singers by mobile phone. For many this is their encounter with democracy. This timely film follows the dramatic stories of four contestants as they risk all to become the nation's favorite singer. But will they attain the freedom they hope for in this vulnerable and traditional nation?"

[Credit: http://www.afghanstardocumentary.com/]

Freedom for all!

Thailand's Neck Rings

2009-09-10T21:26:00.000-07:00

Worn by the Kayan women of the Karen lineage in Thailand, the neck coils was used to signify the tribe's perception of beauty: an elongated neck.

The neck stretching starts during the early years of the Kayan girls, as young as 5 years, when they are introduced to their first neck ring. Eventually as they grew older, the number of rings around their necks gradually increases at a time, pushing the collar bones and ribs back down to create a longer neck illusion. An ordinary full-grown Kayan woman can carry as much as 20 lbs of metals extending 10"-15" long. Record holds a total 28 brass coils, a far cry from the average limit of 20. That explains why they owned the sobriquet "The Giraffe Women".

[Picture: http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Giraffe-Women-of-the-Neck-Rings-37412.shtml]

Another uncanny representation of beauty.

Albert Einstein Explains E=MC²

2009-09-08T00:44:00.000-07:00

[Video: http://www.youtube.com/user/g33kqu33n]

Albert Einstein explaining his groundbreaking formula in this rare recording.

"It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing. A somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind. Furthermore, the equation is E is equal to MC², in which energy is put equal to mass, multiplied by the square of the velocity of light, showed that very small amounts of mass may be converted into a very large amount of energy and vice versa. The mass and energy were in fact equivalent according to the formula mentioned before. This was demonstrated in Cockcroft and Walton in 1932, experimentally."

- Albert Einstein

[For the audio stream (mp3, wav, au): http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/voice1.htm]