Question: What happens when you video tape a police officer acting improperly?

Answer: You get arrested!

Apparently this was illegal for him to do, yet I was reading a story a couple weeks ago where a man was improperly treated (tortured?) by police officers trying to get him to sign a consent to have his house searched. The wife had set up a tape recorder in this instance, so the whole thing was on tape.

If a cop can't behave properly, he shouldn't be a cop. When someone is charged with a crime for getting evidence of a cop not behaving properly, he shouldn't be arrested for getting proof of it.

Of course I guess this simply goes to show that the only time cops behave is when they are knowingly being recorded. Otherwise you're pretty much screwed, because if secretly recording them is a crime, then there is NOTHING you can damn well do about it without being arrested...

The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works website has an article which states that a recent AP story which says Scientists OK Gore's movie for accuracy is a little distorted.

Apparently 19 scientists were able to give the movie 5 stars for accuracy, out of the 100 contacted, and of thoes 19 only 5 were sighted, leaving every one to guess who the other 14 "scientists" were. Also, none of the sceptical scientists were named either. The result leaves ONLY a biased perspective (if you only focus on one side of a story, you aren't exactly being upfront about it). Instead the story leaves you to trust the AP that the information presented is the only information that matters.

I truly hate the degradation we're seeing in freedom of speech in modern society through things such as political correctness & censorship. John Ziegler has written a book entitled The Death Of Free Speech which, while I haven't personally read it, is pretty much correct. Basically what it boils down to is too many people believe they have a right not to be offended, and there is in fact no such right in this country. And, to be truthfully honest, it offends me that people believe they have this right...

At any rate, the meat of this post.

This story is about a guy who got a parking ticket he felt was unfair. The various ways I've been given tickets in the past, I have to say I believe this guy's story at face value 100%. So when this guy went to pay his ticket, he left a simple message on the comment section of the check...

BULL (expletive) MONEY GRAB

Straight forward, honest, exercising his right to freedom of speech. He obeyed the law & paid his fine in full.

Only problem is now he is being charged with contempt...

The biggest thing I hate about the little "contempt" charge is that it gives judges the ability to fulfill their desires on a whim with no legal recourse against them. One example I can think of was something I saw on TV. A traffic court judge sentenced a man who apparently drove aggressively to 2 days in jail. As the man was escorted out of the court room he walked by the camera and said two words: "Star struck". Immediately the judge held him in contempt and ups his jail time to 5 days. I pretty much agreed with what the man said, and was appalled that judges have the ability to dictate whatever happens in their little room with the power of a theocracy. And they can (and seemingly do) do so for any reason, even if, say the guy is of a different political view point than the judge. And there is not a damn thing anybody can do about it. I was a kid when I saw this, and that judge alone pretty much helped shape my view of the corruptness of our legal system, so I truly hope that judge, wherever he is, is proud of his accomplishment. I just know that since that time, pretty much most of what I've seen of our legal system seems to correlate with this view.

This story states that several students social security numbers were available online, and the school is blaming Google.

Apparently they are claming Google indexed a site that reqiured a username & password. Google says, however, that it cannot index anything password protected.

I, for one, believe Google here, as what most likely occured here was solely the fault of the school. Not only could they fully block Google from indexing the site by PROPERLY password protecting the files in question, but they can also block Google by using what as known as a robots.txt file. Essentially either of thoes two means would have made it impossible for Google to index the information in quesion.

My best guess is that Google's spider followed a link that, if anybody else were to follow, would allow anybody to see the supposedly secure information. So all Google did was expose what was happening here. Most likely if Google hadn't found it, other individuals could and probably would (assuming they hadn't already) have found it themselves. The site would be a secret treasure trove for people who commit identity theft... The question becomes how long has this information been exposed?

Apparently some odd billboards that have been popping up are the result of a
Cartoon Network ad campaign.

There is one near my work that says "my boogers itch." I wondered what the heck they were for.

Space.com has an article which is supposed to show Ten Alien Encounters Debunked

There's a few problems, however, in that they conveniently ignore specific details that make their own debunking humorous. I will go over a few of them:

10: Aliens Helped Build The Pyramids
They hardly touched the subject here. First off they leave out the convenient fact that as of today we could not replicate the building of the pyramids, period. Granted, that doesn't prove aliens did it, but their argument is of a general consensus which doesn't take certain things into detail. There are many things in Egypt which we cannot duplicate today, let alone fully understand how they accomplished the feat. For instance: Imagine carving a room into a gigantic solid rock. Now imagine doing so while getting perfectly flat and perpendicular walls, that he finest instruments determine are perfect. Imagine doing so though a relatively small outside opening as a starting point. I think something such as that would be impossible with the tools of today, so imagine doing it in the stone age... Oh, also keep in mind that the Egyptians never documented how they built the pyramids in the first place...

9: Cattle Mutilations
Their explanation is pretty much without basis. We're not talking about cows that are chewed up here, we are talking about wounds that are made that immediately corterize (almost no blood spillage what-so ever). I don't care which way you cut it, a tooth or claw cannot do this no matter what you do with it, let alone no matter what an animal does with it. Also its commonly seen that the cuts are perfect, something only a professional surgeon would be capable of. Also there are reports of the even occurring in a matter of a few minutes before farmers return to find the mutilation, so whatever it was supposedly eating it ate specific organs of the cow, left all the meat intact, then left after eating those organs, all in a very short time. Finally, and MOST IMPORTANT is the fact that once a mutilated cow is found, for some reason scavengers NEVER try eating the remains. They fully AVOID the animal and it decomposes as opposed to being eaten... So somehow the scavengers that ate very specific organs but left the mean intact also made every other scavenger not want to eat any of the remaining meat.

8: Area 51
Welp, apparently the article has debuked this because they determined Area 51 is and only is a dumping ground for toxic military waste. Oh wait, they didn't determine this to be true, they are simply putting an assumption forward as a possible explanation. So how does a possible alternate explanation debunk another one???

7: Crop Circles
Well, they just may be right on this one to a degree. But there have been a few things to happen in some crop circles that can't be explained by the common hoaxer. Namely: Why in the world after some crop circles after they are "planted" there by humans does the area year after year refuse to grow new crops. There are pictures of some spots where crop circles has formed many years later, and that are has no crops in it. Apparently some how bending a stalk of a crop can somehow effect the soil for years on end...

6: Face on Mars
First off it's interesting to point out that NASA stated after the face was first spotted that they had another picture of the area under different lighting and it looked nothing like a face. They later admitted this little revelation was false, they had no such picture. Later on they got another picture of the face and showed it and it looked like a series of shallow mounds. Interestingly enough, later pictures showed that this photo had been rotated and distorted because the hills were fairly large. Current pictures seems to show some ordinary hills, but only if you're not open minded. Richard Hoagland gave a revelation about the Mars face that he determined before any high resolution photos were taken. This being that after using an advanced algorithm on the original photo, he determined the other half of the face looked not actually like the other half of the head, but rather the head of a lion. This is fully documented before we got any better pictures of the face, as Hoagland gave a presentation to the UN on a prior date than any high resolution images were released. So if you take the current high resolution photo, divide each side in half (the face half & the lion half), then dub them together, you get what looks arguably like a face & what arguably looks like a lion. Further-more what I find MOST interesting is that NASA has never released the images in FULL resolution to the public. There is full documentation of the resolution capabilities of the cameras (it's not secret), an yet the photos that NASA gives us have been reduced in size, and they will NOT give the full resolution photos over. Why would NASA decide the public isn't privy to those photos, do they perhaps show something more??? Another thing this article doesn't address is the 5 sided pyramid near the face. This supposed hill is completely symmetrical, and we know it is both above and below ground based off of a temperature photo. It's probably the most amazingly completely symmetrical natural occurrence in the solar system, assuming of course is it natural... Keep in mind at the same time I've talked about these things of just how old that "hill" would be. So if it is in fact some artificial object, it would be greatly exposed and eroded (as the article states about it being a hill)...

5: Alien Autopsy Film
Yep, they nailed this one. Just an interesting side note (not that it means anything), the perpetrators of the hoax stated someone had the actual video but it had deteriorated when they went to buy it so they simply tried to re-make it. I don't buy that myself, but thought I'd throw it out there.

4: UFOs/Flying Saucers
Welp, they are somewhat right on this one, but also somewhat wrong. Flying Saucers did exist in one form by the time Kenneth Arnold's mis-translation was used. The Nazi's had been trying to develop flying disc type crafts. We have documents today as well as photos of those objects being created & tested. And just because a mis-quote became folklore doesn't mean that the folklore could not in fact have been true in other contexts. An interesting side note, the craft in the Roswell crash (which they address in a later number) was supposedly in fact shaped more like Kenneth Arnold's sighting based off of accounts that have come forward, as opposed to the traditional flying saucer.

3: Alien Implants
They should refer to the work of Dr. Roger Lear. Dr. Lear has removed several supposed alien implants. While none of them were micro chips, one interesting thing to note is that they all are remarkably the same. They appear to be some kind of rock-like material covered in a bio membrane of some kind. They have been removed from all parts of the body. The items seem to be coated in some type of resin-like casting and has magnetic properties. I personally could understand the article explanation if this had been in one or two of the cases, but being that each case seems to show this exact combination of materials seems to indicate either there is some kind of common object that all these people are stepping on or bumping against without realizing it, or there is more going on here than just random objects being lodged in their bodies. On a side note, Dr. Leir's office is actually in a neighboring city of mine, not that this really means anything...

2: Alien Abductions
Careless psychologists are to blame apparently. So every case of an alien abduction experience was apparently surfaced by a careless psychologist. We must have a plethora of careless psychologists out there then, as there would have to be in order to account for ALL these experiences by all these people from all over the world...

1: Roswell Crash
Welp, this is the hardest for me to swallow. If you look at the record for all that happened immediately after Roswell, it's quite a ruckus for a weather balloon, or mogul balloons as is the current story. Last time I checked, it would be pretty hard to cover a field a mile wide with anything the size of a weather balloon or even a "train" of mogul balloons. And the fact that alien stories came out years later is a convenient thing for this article to quote, all be it incorrect, as its the only way they can explain this. The current explanation is these were crash test dummies the military started using a few years after the date of the Roswell crash, and all the witnesses to the crash apparently got their dates mixed up. Never mind the things such as the request for children's coffins. Or the nurses who described strange bodies, then up and left with no warning, then seemingly all died in a plane crash mysteriously a few years later. Then finally a member of one of the most experienced military units in the country not recognizing ANY kind of a balloon, let alone a weather or mogul balloons... Keep in mind even if you're talking mogul, you are still talking about balloons & foil as the bulk of the material. There is also apparently a calculation out there that shows the Roswell crash was "Flight 4" of mogul, and proves this "Flight 4" would positively end up at the Roswell crash site. This has apparently been debunked, as it includes a calculation of the following: 100/12 = 350
If in fact the math did use this equation, I think I would have to lean in the direction of believing this trajectory could have never taken "Flight 4" to the crash site, pretty much eliminating it in my book...


At any rate, I tend to see this pattern a lot. Take a few sparse snipits of information, then discount them (without doing so very scientifically) and call the case closed. If you can fully explain or discredit ALL known facts, you should at the very least take the time to point out the possible flaws in the explanation, otherwise it looks like you are purposely under-informing to get your point across...

You probably already heard this, as it's all over the net, but it bears repeating. A guy called up to cancel his AOL account and he could not get the guy to go though with canceling the account for a long time... The recording speaks louder than text:

Cancling AOL Audio

I've had AOL accounts a few times over the years, I actually used them before AOL gave internet access (AOL was it's own thing). I recently activated an account (to access their own services via my broadband connection) & found the AOL I was using had changed to mainly an interface for accessing the internet, and much of the stuff they used to have isn't really there anymore. I called before the first month ended and told her I wanted to cancel the account, because they didn't have the services I was looking for anymore. She insisted that I had not spent enough time looking for them, and after trying for around 10 minutes to cancel I agreed to have another month free. I spent 20 minutes & found the thing I was looking for, but most all the stuff they used to have had been deleted. So the following month I called to cancel & was able to do so with little issue. I can attest however that the recording above is definitely the norm as opposed to a rare circumstance...

I did find the "I'm just trying to help" sequence in the recording. "Helping me would be canceling the account". Then the guy basically tries to say "No, canceling the account would be one of the worst things to ever happen to you"...

Nice...

I posted earlier about Al Gore's movie borrowing a page from Michael Moore. The article that the following quote comes from pretty much puts it in perspective:

Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention.

According to the article, states that Bob Carter (the person attributed to the quote above) is in fact not one of the few detractors, but rather is the norm of climate studying scientists.

The article further states the scientists that Gore's movie attributes its information to are in fact scientists in fields other than the climate field. In other words, you generally wouldn't go to a marine biologist to find out how clouds are formed... Clouds might cause excess rain or block sunlight, which may effect sea life, but studding the effect of something doesn't give you the cause...

Interestingly enough, sea levels in the Arctic are sinking instead of rising... Does this indicate global colling is occuring?

Again this just goes to show we still don't fully understand how the climate is supposed to work over long time periods. And as I've said I believe what is happeneing to the environment would be happening exactly the same as it is now if humans were not arround. That's not to say that nothing bad can come from what the environment is going though, but I believe what is happening is fully out of our control and has nothing to do with what we're doing...

And again I will point out that though I don't believe humans are causing what's happening today, I do in fact drive a hybrid car and have done so since '02...