California Man Tasered To Death After Running A Stop Sign

Phil Willon writes in the LA Times:

A 43-year-old man died after San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies used a Taser gun to subdue him after a traffic stop, authorities said Wednesday.

A deputy attempted to stop Allen Kephart, a disc jockey and teacher’s assistant from Crest Park, after he allegedly ran a stop sign about 3:15 p.m. Tuesday on California 189 in Blue Jay, said Cindy Bachman, a Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman.

Kephart pulled into a Valero gas station parking lot about a quarter of a mile away, got out of the car and “became combative and uncooperative” with the deputy, Bachman said. Additional deputies arrived to assist, she said.

“The deputy attempted to place him under arrest, at which time he was Tased,” Bachman said. “He became unconscious, and medical aid was immediately provided, CPR.” Kephart was taken to a local hospital, where he was declared dead.

Kephart’s father, a member of the Sheriff’s Department’s volunteer mounted rangers unit for decades, called his son’s death a senseless use of excessive force. The incident happened when his son was returning to the family home after filling up his car with gas in Crestline.

Is Semen An Antidepressant?

Hey guys, I'm leaving NJ to head back home to Oregon in a bit, so I won't be around today, but I thought I'd put up something interesting/funny I found.

Jennifer Abbasi writes in Popular Science:

Back in 2002, psychologists at the State University of New York at Albany published a study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior looking at the potential role of semen in alleviating depression in women. The researchers presented evidence supporting an earlier hypothesis that the hormones in semen have a mood-boosting effect on women. For any woman who has had sex — and enjoyed it — this may not come as a huge surprise.

Cut to this past February. Lazar Greenfield, the incoming president of the American College of Surgeons (ACS), wrote a short Valentine’s Day-themed editorial about mating in Surgery News. In it, he discussed the sex lives of fruit flies, rotifers and humans. He cited the SUNY Albany study before concluding: “So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.” That gift, of course, being semen.

In the 2002 study, 293 college women filled out questionnaires about their sexual histories and took the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), a widely used measure of depression symptoms. Women who always had unprotected sex had significantly lower levels of depression symptoms than those who usually or always used condoms, as well as those who abstained from sex. There was no significant difference in depression between condom users and abstainers, indicating that the physical act of sex itself wasn't the mood-boosting factor.


So basically semen makes woman happy....

Samoa To Jump Forward In Time By One Day

The South Pacific island nation of Samoa, is planning on switching to the west side of the International Date Line. It is hoping to boost it's economy with it's two biggest trading partners, Australia and New Zealand. At the moment, being on the east side of the line, it is 21 hours behind Sydney. The switch on December 29th, will put it to 3 hours ahead, thereby making it easier to trade. Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi said: "In doing business with New Zealand and Australia, we're losing out on two working days a week."

"While it's Friday here, it's Saturday in New Zealand and when we're at church Sunday, they're already conducting business in Sydney and Brisbane."

Samoa is located approximately halfway between New Zealand and Hawaii and has a population of 180,000 people.

Tourettes Bird

Well I just reached 100 followers and since that seems to be a benchmark everyone celebrates, i wanted to say thanks to everyone and here's a little story for you guys. 

I went out today to visit my parents at their house for Mothers Day, and while there my mom told me about this bird who kept coming everyday at random times and tapped his beak on the window. It even woke them up in the morning, going tap tap tap and then fly into the window. then he just stopped couple days ago. And yesterday they found a nest on the ground that used to be in the tree outside the window. 

So I just figured maybe an animal came and broke the nest and the bird flew away or something. But then my stepdad goes "no I have a theory though, that the bird had tourettes".

I said "wait what... did you just say he was a tourettes bird"

"yeah and that's why he was always taping on the window, and flipping out... he probably caused his own nest to tip over"

I couldn't stop laughing, I just kept picturing a bird in his nest with tourettes freaking out all paranoid and the nest falling over.

Synthetic Blood Saves Australian Womans Life.

True Blood, aka the hemoglobin-based oxygen carrier HBOC-201 is, in a word (or two), artificial blood. It delivers oxygen to your squishy organs. And, unlike real blood, it can be stored for years and doesn't require matching blood types.

After years of working pretty well in clinical trials, it's now saved a life for the first the time. The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne brought 33-year-old Tamara Coakley back from a car wreck so brutal it left just a liter of blood in her body. Her spinal cord was almost severed, her lungs collapsed, her skull was fractured, several ribs were broken, as were her cheekbone and an elbow, and her spleen was ruptured. Her religion prevented real blood from being used, so 10 units of True Blood was rushed in and saved her life.

Osama Bin Laden Lived Next Door To CIA, Loved Coke and Pepsi.

It was revealed this week that Osama Bin Laden had been practically neighbors with an undercover multi-million dollar CIA surveillance team that was set up in Abbottabad last summer and stayed until the Navy Seal team took Bin Laden out. Living amongst the locals unknown and unnoticed, the extensive covert team used telegraphic lens, listening equipment and infra-red technology to check possible escape routes. "The CIA's job was to find and fix," an unidentified US official told The Washington Post. "The intelligence work was as complete as it was going to be, and it was the military's turn to finish the target."

Apparently Bin Laden also had a sweet tooth for American soft drinks, two Pakistani aides of bin Laden, who called themselves Akbar and Rashid Khan and owned the compound where Bin Laden was killed, made regular runs to the store. They bought bulk food orders, and equally favored Pepsi and Coke, bying enough food for 10 people, neighbors and a local shopkeeper said.

A Fireball the Size of the Earth, Meteor Shower From Halley's Comet

On May 2nd, amateur astronomer Jan Timmermans of Valkenswaard, The Netherlands captured something spectacular. When the sun rose, he was surprised to see that a fully detached solar prominence at the southwestern edge of the solar disk. A prominence is a large, bright feature extending outwards from the sun. While most prominences are in the shapes of loops connected to the suns surface. This detached "fireball" prominence, the size of the earth, is unique.

The annual Eta Aquariids meteor shower is here again. The Earth is passing through a stream of dusty debris from Halley's Comet. Although visible from mid April to late May each year, it's going to peak between 3:30 am and 5:30 am on Saturday May 7th. The meteors will be appearing near the constellation Aquarius, which is where they get their name. An estimated 10 to 12 meteors per hour will be visible, which should make for a very good show.

Oregon Women Awakens From Surgery With British Accent

Karen Butler, from Madras, OR, was put under for oral surgery a year and half ago, when she woke up, her face swollen and sore, but something else was very different, she had a British accent. Although the pain and swelling went away eventually, the unexplained accent did not. So what happened? It's a phenomena known as foreign accent syndrome, a rare disorder of which only 60 documented cases have been identified worldwide between 1949 and 2009. It is often associated with stroke, multiple sclerosis, migraines and head trauma.

The Guantanamo Bay Wikileaks Files, Grand Jury possibly Investigating Wikileaks

On Sunday April 24th, Wikileaks began publishing 779 secret files of all Guantanamo Bay prisoners. The files included information about the prisoners identity, health assessment, detainee's account of events, capture information, evaluation of detainee's accounts, detainee threat, detainee intelligence value assessment, and enemy combatant status. The UK paper The Telegraph was passed the files and leaked the information in an easy to read database on their website with pictures and nationality of the prisoners as well as time spent in the prison and an easy search system here. The original Wikileak site here.

In wake of the release, the FBI has served a Grand Jury subpoena in Boston to a Cambridge resident with ties to Wikileak, to testify in Alexandria, VA, the site where the Grand Jury has convened to investigate Wikileaks and Julian Assange. Assange had warned before in the past that any attempt to shut the Wikileaks site down or to bring about charges on him would result in the huge release of state and commercial secrets in a so called "insurance file" a 1.4 GB file.

Your Perception of Gravity is Relative

According to a new study, You are able judge how objects will fall when you are upright then when you are on your side. The study took 15 volunteers with laptops and showed computer generated pictures of vases positioned at different angles at the edge of a table and asked which way they'd fall. They were then tested both upright and lying down. The researches found that people were able to judge the fall better when they were upright then when lying down, presumably because we spend most of our time upright and are in our equilibrium.

And our senses do play tricks on us and since our brain perceives gravity's direction through multiple senses, our perception of gravity can be a little well... Off. Stand up hold your right arm out to you side and stand on your right leg with yours eyes open, now do the same with your eyes closed and see how by lacking that extra sensory information, your balance goes off and your brain has tricked you.

More Here

Ron Paul 2012 Run

Rep. Ron Paul announced Last tuesday that he had formed a presidential exploratory committee, a crucial step that will allow the congressman to raise money for his presidential campaign. A May 5th moneybomb, planned to coincide with the first debate, will help Paul decide a full run. In 2008 Paul drew an intense following for being the only anti-iraq war republican candidate, for his ideals of personal freedoms and for his view of the role of limited government. As his popularity on the Internet exploded, Paul drew in some impressive figures, including on November 5th, 2007 raising a record $4 million online in 24 hours, on December 16th, he broke that record raising over $6 million. After the 2008 elections, as we see issues such as the economy, the national debt and role of government head towards the front of everyones mind this year, it seems that Paul's popularity continues to expand. For two consecutive years he has won the CPAC polls, perhaps a sign that indeed revolution is in the air.

I feel sad enough to eat myself, Osama bin laden dead.

A new Zealand man struggling with derp-pression cut off his own finger and cooked it with vegetables than ate them, joining only eight identified such cases of self cannibalization. The 28 year old man amputated and ate his finger without testing for any substance abuse or impaired reality.

In other news, as I'm sure your heard, Osama Bin Laden was killed in a mansion in Abbottabad, Pakistan, outside of the capital Islamabad. Working without Pakastani knowledge or permission, a team of over 9000 navy seals working with the CIA raided his compound using two roflcoptors, to which a firefight ensued with three men and a woman being killed along with Bin Laden. Bin Laden's body was taken into US custody and carried onto a ship heading for guantanamo bay, when Bin Laden found out about the destination he said "fuck this" and jumped off the side into the sea. Ending the war on terror forever... the end...

Life sentence for Hashish

The Oklahoma State Senate passed a bill where converting marijuana into hashish could land you a life sentence in prison. The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (OBNDD) spokesman Mark Woodward said the goal of the bill is to “send a message” that illegal drugs won’t be tolerated in Oklahoma. A first time convinction would be punishable from anywhere from two years to life imprisonment, a second offense would be life imprisonment, and those convicted would not be eligible for suspend sentence or probation.

For those who don't know Hash is a concentrate, it's to marijuana, as a can of frozen OJ is to an orange, it's not more dangerous than marijuana, just more potent than marijuana, so I wonder how the OBNDD will react when they discover Schedule III dronabinol (legal even in Oklahoma) is even more potent than hash?

Royal Family Enforces Media Embargo Against Australia Preventing Nazi Jokes

Think that the Royal Family Is only for show and has no real power, well think again, In order to prevent an Australian comedian from making jokes about Prince Phillip being a Nazi during the royal wedding, the Royals ordered broadcasters in Britain to cut live coverage to Australia's biggest broadcaster ABC if they refused to cancel the satirical commentary that was to be played along side the regular feed. So that's right the Royals still have enough power to enforce media embargoes between Britain and other major countries.

LHC possibly finds 'God Particle'

Rumors are running amuck in the physics community that the the particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, (LHC), a 17 mile atom smasher (the largest in the world) has found a subatomic particle that has long evaded physicist called the Higgs Boson, also known as the 'God Particle.'

The controversial rumor is based on a leaked internal note from physicists from the LHC which is located near Geneva, Switzerland. Although it is not entirely known if the memo is authentic, or what the data in which it refers to might mean, but the note none the less has already created much buzz for what might be an historic moment for physics and the world as a whole.

Middle East Unrest

It's been a tense week in the middle east....

In Yemen where President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been in power for the last 32 years, there's been an agreement for him to step down in return for immunity. Perhaps afraid that he would find himself in a similar situation as Honsi Mubarak, under house arrest and having to answer for himself. The opposition has agreed to the deal although they are still negotiating some details.

In Syria where the past few weeks have seen opposition protest steadily increase, at least 88 people were believed to be killed when security forces opened fire on a massive "great fiday" anti-government protest. President Bashar al-Assad has been in office since the year 2000 and his father, Hafez al-Assad was President for 30 years before him.

Despite United States insistence that it is scaling back operations in Libya, the U.S. is deploying and using it's first armed drone planes. Unarmed drones had already been used prior to locate pro Gadhaffi forces. The first attack using such drones hit near a Gadhaffi compound in Tripoli.

EU to expand Libya operations

As Moammar Gadhafi’s forces shelled Misrata again Tuesday, western involvement in Libya appears to be expanding as Britain said Tuesday it was sending military advisors to help the rebels, while the European Union said it was ready to send up to 1,000 troops in on the ground for humanitarian Assistance at what many feared was an guise for start of ground invasion.

S&P moves us outlook to negative, gold hits new record.

Standard & Poor’s on Monday downgraded the outlook for the United States to negative, as the risk of U.S. Indecision to reach an agreement on the country's financial future Continues.
The S&P said the move signals there’s at least a one-in-three likelihood that it could lower its long-term rating on the United States within two years.

On Monday the Dow Jones tumbled more than 200 points and the dollar fell broadly on news of the word, and gold reached a new record price of $1,496 an ounce.

New Internet ID plan?

At an event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, the Obama administration today moved ahead with plans for Internet ID's.

There’s “no reliable way to verify identity online” at the moment, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said, citing the rising tide of security threats including malware and identity theft that have grown increasingly prevalent over the last few years. “Passwords just won’t cut it here" Officials said the plan would be run by private sector and would not be required of americans.

A 55-page document (PDF) was also released by the White House today adding a few more details to the proposal, which still remains mostly ambiguous among confers of privacy and civil liberties.