Virgin Mary Appears in Egypt

With perfect timing for the holiday season, the Blessed Virgin has appeared again in Egypt. Video can be found here. Unlike most mothers she resembles a big blob of light.

Wingnut Watch

WorldNetDaily cartoon wingnut Molotov Mitchell argues in support of Uganda's law making homosexuality a capital offense. It's in the Bible. He also has a DVD out titled I'm Not Crazy! Yes You Are.

French Schoolgirls Don Miniskirts In Dress Code Revolt

This blog stands firmly behind the right of French schoolgirls to wear miniskirts.

Report: TEDDY SAVED JFK’s BRAIN:

A shocking treasure trove of Kennedy documents, photos - and even a human brain fragment believed to belong to former president John F. Kennedy - have been found in the attic of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Hyannis Port home. The stunning discovery came when workers recently cleaned out the historic Cape Cod, Mass, house, which originally belonged to Joe and Rose Kennedy, to begin preparations to convert it to a museum.

Update: Apparently the National Enquirer is the source of this story. See here.

"There are some incredible things in the boxes, safes and lock boxes that have been gathering dust for many decades," a longtime family adviser revealed to The ENQUIRER.

One of the most unusual items found in the attic is a tiny fragment of a brain preserved in formaldehyde.

"The family knows that Bobby Kennedy was given part of JFK's brain after his autopsy, and that it was not buried with him," said the family adviser.

Miley Cyrus makes sign of satan

Tesla letter: We have a message from another world

In the summer of 1899, whilst alone in his Colorado Springs laboratory working with his magnifying transmitter, the inimitable Nikola Tesla observed a series of unusual rhythmic signals which he described as 'counting codes'. Having just detected cosmic radio signals for the first time, Tesla immediately believed them to be attempted communications from an intelligent life-form on either Venus or Mars, and later said of the experience, 'The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another'.

Something weird in the sky over Norway

They're saying it might be a Russian missile test. Maybe, and that might explain the spiral but I don't see how it explains the blue beam. More here.

Photo of the Day. Found here.

The top people at Blackwater were CIA managers that ran al-Qaeda as an Agency asset until 9/11

Obama winning race for Anti-Christ

10% of voters say they think Obama is the Anti-Christ with 11% unsure and 8% say the same of Bush with an equal 11% unsure. Some opponents of Obama have pointed to biblical 'proof' to show that Obama is the Anti-Christ but the relatively equivalent number of Americans saying the same of Bush would seem to be an indication folks' saying that is more a way to express that they really don't like a politician than it is rooted in theology

.

Kevin Jennings is Obama's "Safe Schools Czar". He is also the founder and former Executive Director of GLSEN , the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. Anyway GLSEN has a list of recommended books and Gateway Pundit has read some of them and posted the dirty parts, which I'm sure you will want to read although some of them are a little gay. A few samples:

By first grade I was sexually active with many friends. In fact, a small group of us regularly met in the grammar school lavatory to perform fellatio on one another.

My cousin got up from the couch and stood behind me. He lightly brushed the soft fabric of my robe. “Let’s get gay,” he fawned in a mock faggy tone. “Let’s get gay.” He rubbed his huge hands over the thin fabric that separated them from my behind. He pulled up the robe.

We are in second grade now, and Katie still makes me practice Frenching her.

Trig birtherism is alive and well. Photo taken from here. I love trig birtherism. I want it to be true. I must admit I also love Obama birtherism, because it discredits the nuts on the Right. I do not believe either for the simple reason that neither has any positive evidence to support it. Obama has, however, quite a bit of positive evidence to support that he was born in Hawaii while Sarah Palin really has not presented any evidence to support her claim to have given birth to Trig, namely medical records or a birth certificate. Accordingly, trig birtherism must be regarded as the more plausible of the two. Produce the birth certificate!

Tempest in a teapot

Yesterday I recommended a post by conservative Charles Johnson titled Why I Parted Ways With The Right. Although I have been told by a true wingnut that Johnson was never actually a Conservative.

Rick Moran, of the other conservative blog in my links, criticized Johnson in this post Charles Johnson's World:

Charles Johnson, in his wildly exaggerated, hyperbolic, injudicious, ad hominem, unreasonable, and illogical attacks on the right, has abandoned any claim to prudent analysis and temperate understanding, and has instead, joined the ranks of those on the right and left who don’t deserve to be taken seriously by anyone with half a brain.

The whole post is worth reading and he may have a good point here or there, but I was a bit surprised by the criticism as Rick Moran has hardly been uncritical of the Right himself.

Today Moran describes his own conservative apostasy:

I will be able to track the descent of conservatism into a riot of paranoid conspiracies, rigid ideological litmus tests, unreasonable devotion to idiotic personalities, and catalog how conservatives have become a frothing, hate-filled, imprudent gaggle of screeching, populist harpies who reject reason and logic for a crass emotionalism.

Other than that, I see nothing wrong with the right today.

This has been a public service announcement

From the blog Question Everything: The U2 Files: Mayday, 1960

President Eisenhower may have had very good reasons to warn us against the "military-industrial complex."

For some reason this new PETA ad is generating controversy (no doubt its intent). I personally eat animals (if god didn't want us to eat animals, she wouldn't have made them out of meat) but I completely support PETA's right to use attractive, naked women in their ads.

The Family Research Council says that Barack Obama wants to "impose homosexuality" and "silence Christianity". As to the second one, if only it were possible. Just kidding, I love the First Amendment.

Conservative blogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs has a must-read post titled Why I Parted Ways With The Right . Really you must read this.

The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff.

I won’t be going over the cliff with them.

A photo of Lee Harvey Oswald being killed has been used in an advertising campaign. Hitherto, I believe, the Kennedy assassination has been off-limits as advertising fodder. Is it too soon to commercialize the JFK assassination?

A naked women tries to prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from being assassinated outside the Cotton Club

I don't know art but I know what I like.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, talks about the Kennedy assassination

Wilkerson, who was also Chief of Staff to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that President John F. Kennedy stood up to military power in America twice: once during the Bay of Pigs invasion and once during the Cuban Missle Crisis.

According to Wilkerson, JFK "stood up to a very, very aggressive military" and, as a consequence, "we know what happened to John Kennedy."

When pressed by the incredulous interviewer, Mitch Jesserich, on whether he thought there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, Wilkerson said "there are consequences, whether they are direct consquences or indirect consequences, for standing up to corporate and military power in the United States of America."

Wilkerson said that he thinks "the Warren Commission was a complete whitewash. No question in my mind about it..." and that, in his view, disgrunteld Cuban Americans involved in the Bay of Pigs affair and "perhaps some rogue elements within the United States itself" worked together to kill the president in 1963

.

"Intuiting God's beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one's own beliefs."

William Kelly reviews Volume 4 of Douglas Horne's 5- volume new book

Did President John F. Kennedy see a UFO?

This article says he did.

Just a few minutes into the cruise everyone on board the launch (including JFK) were stunned when a disc-shaped object appeared within several hundred feet of their boat. The object was about 60 feet in diameter. The middle was slightly raised and part of a top that was a dull, metallic grayish color. The bottom of the craft was very shiny and hard to look at. There were no noticeable windows or openings. The object seemed noiseless and no signs of obvious propulsion could be seen.

It has also been reported that Kennedy met with UFO contactee George Adamski.

This leads to Adamski's claim that he secretly met with President Kennedy around October 1961 to deliver a message from the “space brothers.” According to Major Pederson, the message contained advise on a world crisis to occur in about a year that was later revealed to be the October 1962 Cuban Missile crisis. If true, the contents of the message may have helped Kennedy develop the right strategy for dealing with a conflict that could easily have escalated into a Third World War. The extraterrestrial message, apparently, also contained an invitation for Kennedy to meet with them in Calfornia.

Senate Report: Rumsfeld let Osama bin Laden get away

Osama bin Laden was "within the grasp" of US forces in late 2001 but escaped because then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected calls for reinforcements, a hard-hitting US Senate report says.

We caught Saddam Hussein. Osama bin Laden walked away.

Cheney for President in 2012? There's crazy and then there's freaking insane.

'Bank Slate: Sarah Palin's Fake Pregnancy

I allege that Sarah Palin, while in office as Governor, faked a pregnancy. She told the public she was pregnant, when she was not. In the final days of her "pregnancy" she wore a fake pregnancy suit, including wearing a fake pregnancy suit to a Republican Governor's Convention.

Interview with an Oswald witness - Patricia Puckett Hall was 11 when she met Lee Harvey Oswald. Read here.

One autumn day in 1963, her two younger brothers got into a scuffle in the front yard where Johnson's grandchildren, who lived six blocks away, spent most of their free time.

A roomer witnessed the roughhousing and stepped in.

Hall, then 11, watched as he sat the boys on the porch, one on each side of him.

"I want to tell you something really important," Hall heard the slender young man say. "I want you to listen. You're brothers. You have to look out for each other."

Then, "don't ever do anything to harm another human being."

James Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable, is interviewed for about an hour here. His book is one of the best on the subject and one of the very few that put the assassination into an historical, political and spiritual perspective.

150 years ago Charles Darwin introduced his "theory of evolution"now accepted by virtually all non-idiots

OpEdNews: THE JFK CASE: WHAT INFORMANTS ARE STILL OUT THERE?

A good article with lots of links.

I just added a new feature to the blog: a random atheism quote generator. It's right under the Atheist Blogroll.I thought they might have kicked me off The Atheist Blogroll because I haven't posted on religion (or nonreligion) lately but they haven't. Then again one atheist blog I visited recently basically tells the reader what she had for breakfast that morning. If you have a blog please consider joining the Atheist Blogroll. They even accept agnostics (although I think they kind of look down on them)because Agnostics do not have a belief in God and so can be considered soft atheists. Not sure about Buddhists. Personally I call myself a nontheist because many atheists rub me the wrong way. Sure I no more believe in the Christian God any more than I believe in Zeus (more of an agnostic on Odin) but I am not going to say that Paul Tillich's "ground of being" does not exist (mainly because I don't know what the hell it is). Many atheist bloggers attack only the worst caricatures of belief, although most believers are like that.

So what do I believe or not believe?

I do not believe in a personal God or an impersonal god either but am not entirely convinced that is not a god that transcends these narrow categories. Perhaps I am talking about God in the Einsteinian sense that Richard Dawkings describes. (And really Richard it wouldn't kill you to read a little theology.)Paul van Buren said that simple, literal theism is false, and qualified literal theism is meaningless or unintelligible, and I am sympathetic to this view, but then don't all the mystics say that god is beyond human understanding and trascends all our narrow categories? I used to be an agostic but that does sound kind of wishy-washy so now I am a proud nontheist.

Given our current scientific understanding there is no reason to believe that there is a life-after-death, and fairly good reason to believe there is not, however given the limited nature of our current level of scientific understanding I do not think the possibility can be completely dismissed. We do not know why the Universe exists or how it came to exist really and "we're working on it" is somewhat unsatisying. Still I refuse to base a theology on ignorance. Someone recently won an atheist contest with the slogan "Faith is no reason." If I kill a rodent I do not believe that it will continue to exist after death, so why should a slightly more advanced mammal? If there is nothing after death, then there is nothing to be afraid of.

The problem with the god hypothesis (and is it really even a hypothesis?--certainly it is not testible) is that it really doesn't explain anything. I cannot explain the Universe, therefore it must have been made out of nothing by some Entity, which actually sounds kind of creepy to me.

Speaking of atheist quotes, however, I like one by Christopher Hitchens: "What can be accepted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." That's from memory but it's close.

Gary Clark was a 21-year-old airman at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana when John Kennedy was killed. His story here.

On Nov. 22, 1963, a Friday, Clark said the room’s quiet was disturbed by the different-sounding ring of a call from NORAD headquarters. He said he watched as a senior director and his staff, seated at a raised dais, listened and verified the phone message using a cryptographic process.

What happened next, he said he’ll never forget: An officer he recalled as Maj. Van Quill “looked around the room and spotted me sitting by myself.”

The officer, he said, called him crisply by name — “Airman Clark report” — and told Clark he was about to learn something very important, and that he was to go around the room and inform everyone else of what he had heard.

Clark said he can still hear those words, “President Kennedy has been assassinated,” and that Van Quill also told him “assassins” had fired from an overpass. Also, Clark said, the officer told him the U.S. government did not believe the killing was an attack by any foreign country.

Sarah Palin makes sign of Satan

November 22 1963, 46th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination and we want our country back

The Kennedy assassination has been the subject of a number of songs. Listen here. I like Lou Reed's "The Day John Kenney Died."

FBI Special Agent Jim Sibert observed the JFK autopsy. Interviewed recently he says "I don't buy the single-bullet theory."

Palin Derangement Syndrome

The left has its birthers as well. The left's birthers, much fewer in number, are focused not on the President but on Sarah Palin. A blog called Palingates still thinks that baby Trig was not Sarah's but her daughter's. Personally I choose to believe this theory until Sarah products the child's birth certificate. Fair is fair.

The same blogger also asks if Sarah Palin had an abortion citing this passage from her book:

When the doctor's bill arrived in our mailbox, it came with a typo. In the box describing the procedure, someone had typed "Abortion". Instead of starting over with a fresh form, they painted it over with a thin layer of Wite-Out, and retyped, "Miscarriage". For some reason it just felt like salt in the wound.

A likely story.

Meanwhile Alaska Report today reports:

Rumor Central: Big story still heading towards the S.S. Palin

A deal-breaker is heading toward the Palins. Can it be stopped? I don't think so. Will it topple the house of cards, all signs say yes. Stay tuned...

Update: Another blogger asks wwwIs there a Trig Truther Story on the Horizon?

I received an e-mail from a very reliable source here in Alaska that there may be a story about to break on Sarah Palin's son Trig. The source received a hand written letter in the mail with the following statements:

Get word to S.P.
Mitt R. paid off
They have photos, copies + signed statement RE: Trig

There is also a rumor that Sarah Palin's underage daughter Willow is pregnant.

The Jim Garrison Tapes. Watch here.

News to me. Back in 1924 the Navy attempted to listen to communications from the planet Mars.

Missouri GOP highlights billboard that calls for Revolution

WingNutDaily: Crazed wingnut and bad actor Pat Boone has a new plan--surrender. His rallying cry: CALL ALL OUR TROOPS HOME – AND NOW In part two he also calls for an end to efforts to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. But we should drop leaflets on them telling them that our religion is better than theirs. Oh, and we should offer a $10 million dollar reward for Osama bin Laden. Boone is apparently unaware of the $25 million dollar reward offered now.

Wingnut Watch

52% of Republicans think that Barack Obama stole the Presidency with the help of ACORN. That's 26% of all Americans who are dangerously deluded. There were Democrats who thought Bush stole the elections of 2000 and 2004 but not as many.

Abraham Bolden, the first black Secret Service agent on the White House detail, had vital information for the Warren Commission. After he attempted to contact the Commission he was set-up and sent to prison. Here his story in his own words here. His compelling first-hand account runs just short of an hour.

Rightwing blogger wants to pray for Obama. To die.

Psalm 109:8 - May his days be few; may another take his office.

Followed by:

Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.

Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.

Republican IT guru Mike Connell's sister says his death was 'Way too convenient'

"If there was foul play that's what makes sense. Mike was a threat to somebody. I'm pretty cynical about government but for lack of a better word I think the Bushes and their cronies are a bit evil but Mike was loyal to them."

CERN: Something May Come Through 'Dimensional Doors'

A top scientist at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) says that the titanic machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific phenomena, or "unknown unknowns" - for instance "an extra dimension".

"Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it," said Sergio Bertolucci, who is Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, briefing reporters including the Reg at CERN HQ earlier this week.

So let me see if I've got this right. They're going to unleash enormous amounts of energy, recreating conditions similar to those of the Big Bang, warping time and space, just to see what will happen? Cool.

John Farmer, Senior Counsel to the 911 Commission: “History should record that whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation’s response to the 9/11 attacks.”

Former former Pentagon intelligence analyst Ted Van Dyk has an interesting article here on the JFK assassination.

As a former Pentagon intelligence analyst, I was delivering a lecture at the Defense Intelligence School to a group of career military officers from all branches of the service. Midway through my lecture, a Navy captain entered the room, moved me aside at the podium, and announced the following: "President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, and Texas Governor Connally all have been shot and killed in Dallas. Stand by for further information."

There were a host of other unanswered questions: The CIA, during the period, was sending supposed "defectors" into the USSR to gather intelligence. Was Oswald one of them? Or was he, in fact, a genuine Soviet asset? As a Marine, he had been stationed at a highly classified facility that monitored CIA spy-plane flights over the Soviet Union.

For whatever it is worth, my best guess is that a rogue CIA/mob group planned and engineered the assassination, setting up Oswald for blame. He was a part of it but, perhaps, only as "the patsy" he said he was.

Update: I made an email inquiry to the author regarding the "defector" program. His reply:

I was an intelligence analyst for 7 1/2 years, mostly as a Reservist,and then assistant to Sen. and VP Humphrey for five years and, later, a State Department official. I had general knowledge during that entire period of a defector program---although no specific knowledge. The Soviets were known to have their own counterpartdefector program, sending agents into the West. There was always deep suspicion when a supposed "important" defector came West. Oswald would have been seen as small fry, both by us and the Soviets, and of no particular importance. It is conceivable that he worked both ways.

John F Kennedy, Dallas Police Department Collection

Was RFK Working with LIFE magazine to "Take Down" LBJ in November of 1963? Did LBJ strike first?

"Beginning in late summer 1963 the magazine, based upon information fed from Bobby Kennedy and the Justice Department, had been developing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker. On publication Johnson would have been finished and off the '64 ticket (reason the material was fed to us) and would probably have been facing prison time. At the time LIFE magazine was arguably the most important general news source in the U.S. The top management of Time, Inc. was closely allied with the USA's various intelligence agencies and we were used...by the Kennedy Justice Department as a conduit to the public...The LBJ/Baker piece was in the final editing stages and was scheduled to break in the issue of the magazine due out the week of November 24 (the magazine would have made it to the newsstands on Nov. 26th or 27th). It had been prepared in relative secrecy by a small special editorial team. On Kennedy's death research files and all numbered copies of the nearly print-ready draft were gathered up by my boss (he had been the top editor on the team) and shredded. The issue that was to expose LBJ instead featured the Zapruder film.

Every conservative in the country today is a proud "Reagan conservative." This interesting post from Pink Flamingos Pink Flamingos shows that many of them didn't have much use for him when he was actually the President.

”Whoever Reagan’s successor is will have a hard time mobilizing these people because Ronald Reagan walked away from them in the end.” --Edwin J. Feulner Jr., president of the Heritage Foundation

Howard Phillips described Reagan as ”fronting as a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda."

Joel Skousen said ”Mr. Reagan is now seen as untrustworthy by many conservatives who believe he has betrayed his own principles in an effort to appease his critics.”

“…Conservatives may not back President Reagan for reelection in 1984 unless he reverses what they consider “almost a stampede to the left” in the White House, New Right leaders said Tuesday."

So actress Christian Serratos (19) from that Twilight movie would rather go naked than wear fur. I'd rather she go naked than wear fur too.

Huffington Post: Aerospace historian Michael Schratt suspects that extraterrestrial technology was utilized at Area 51

Clarion Ledger: FBI Records Show Senator Eastland Linked to the Klan

Nearly a quarter century after U.S. Sen. Jim Eastland's death, Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen still talks about the many jobs he did for the veteran lawmaker.

Former inmate Larry Ellis told the FBI that Killen talked repeatedly of tasks he did for Eastland, quoting Killen as saying, "There was not anything I would not have done for him. He made miracles happen for me. He was and will always be my No. 1 hero."

Killen is serving 60 years in prison following his conviction in 2005 in Neshoba County for orchestrating the Klan's June 21, 1964, killings of three civil rights workers.

Killen, who grew up in neighboring south Neshoba County, said he developed a relationship with Eastland after becoming friends with Leander Perez, an arch-segregationist in Louisiana.

Documents from the Eastland papers at the University of Mississippi show Eastland and Perez shared information on purported communists.

Senator Eastland had other connections as well including meeting with JFK assassination figure Guy Banister. See here.

CBS: Teen Heroin Use --and Deaths --on the Rise

Heroin Is Cheaper than Ever and Pure Enough to Snort, Spurring Tragedies Like the Death of Honor Student Natalie Ciappa

Experts see rise in heroin use

The Hatboro chief said a major problem too nowadays is that the heroin available is purer and thus more potent, which increases the potential for overdose.

"It's a perfect storm when you combine the increased access to prescription pills and the influx of pure heroin," said Fialko, who noted the amount of heroin being exported from Afghanistan is skyrocketing and finding its way in ever purer form to American streets.

There are a lot of stories on rising heroin use in this country. Few make the Afghanistan connection.

Former UK Ambassador describes torture in Uzbekistan

"I'm talking of people being raped with broken bottles," he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. "I'm talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on."

Strippers! This Dallas News story features an interview with Ruby stripper Joyce Gordon aka "Joy Dale".