I Never Liked Pluto Anyway...

Well, it is official, Pluto is no longer a planet.

Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.

After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930.

Pluto is now officially a dwarf planet. And not even the largest dwarf planet (that would be UB313). So that's it, screw Pluto, Pluto is gone. Kids in science classes worldwide can now take heart in the fact that they only have to build a crappy model of 8 planets instead of 9.

Next You're Going to Tell Me OJ is Innocent....

There was a breakthrough today in, believe it or not, the Jon Benet Ramsey case.

A former schoolteacher was arrested in Thailand in the slaying of 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey — a surprise breakthrough in a lurid, decade-old murder mystery that had cast a cloud of suspicion over her own parents.

Federal officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, identified the suspect who was arrested Wednesday as John Mark Karr, a 42-year-old American, and one law enforcement official told The Associated Press that Boulder police had tracked him down online.

This is absolutely unreal. Did anyone even seriously believe the police where still working on this? This has made-for-TV movie written all over it (if there hasn't been one already). If this pans out and parents were truly innocent then a lot of people, myself included, are going to have a nice big helping of crow.

Victory for Stupidy in Virginia

"Alternative medicine" is about to take another life in Virginia.

A 16-year-old cancer patient's legal fight ended in victory Wednesday when his family's attorneys and social services officials reached an agreement that would allow him to forgo chemotherapy.
[...]


Last summer, the teen was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymphatic system considered very treatable in its early stages. He was so debilitated by three months of chemotherapy that he declined a second, more intensive round that doctors recommended early this year.

He since has been using an alternative herbal treatment called the Hoxsey method, the sale of which was banned in the United States in 1960.

First off, being the believer in freedom that I am, I fully support the right of this kid and his parents to do something so suicidal as stopping chemotherapy. It's the kids life and his choice. The real villian in this story is the Mexican clinic where he has been "treated" with some sort of herbal remedy or another. Now, as we all know, "alternative medacine" is just a euphamism for "quackery that doesn't work." And, as usual, they are telling this kid that he can be cured through whatever useless procedures they feel like performing.

Some people may want to blame the kid and his family for being stupid. This is obviously true to an extent, but when people are faced with the possibility of death they tend to believe anyone who offers them hope. That is what this clinic is doing. They're preying on the desperate and hopeless. They do not have a cure for cancer, they are frauds and scam artists like the rest of the "alternative medacine" crowd. I hold these people beneath contempt and hope this kid and his family come to their senses before it's too late.

Cease Fire

As I'm sure most of you know, we are mere hours away from the most useless cease fire ever! There are many, many, problems with the cease fire. The major one being that it is really impossible to have a cease fire with a terrorist group. Lots of members of the group operate independently and I don't think the so-called Hezbollah leadership could stop them if they wanted to. Aside for that glaring error, the cease fire also manages not to even remotely solve anything in the first place. It does not require the return of the kidnapped Israeli soldiers (which should have been the first god damn thing on the list), nor does it make any provisions for disarming Hezbollah. The U.N. "peace-keeping" force that will be inserted into southern Lebanon doesn't have the authority to do much of anything. There job is essentially to stand around and watch everything go to shit again. All this cease fire does is buy Hezbollah time to get rearmed and reorganized before they attack Israel again. And you can bet when that happens we will once again have a dramatic outcry about how agressive Israel is being when they respond. I can not fathom why Israel would accept this deal aside from the fact that they obviously need to get themselves a new Prime Minister.

Fake Photos: New York Times Style

More staged photos coming out of Lebanon. This time courtesy of the New York Times. This discovery comes from Gateway Pundit

Here's an image showing would would appear to be a dead body

However, another picture from the same sequence show this man rising from the dead!

Note the shorts on both men. So either the Lebanese are rising from the dead (in which case Israel is pretty screwed), or we once again have deliberately staged photos coming out of Lebanon and swallowed by the supposedly reliable and objective mainstream media.

Fake Reuters Link Round-Up

More doctored photos and false captions have surfaced. Here's the current list:

- Another Fake Reuters Photo from Lebanon
-Extreme Makeover: Beruit Edition
-More False Captions

These are just the ones that have been found in the day since the original fake smoke photos appeared. Expect more to surface during the next few days.

Reuters is Lying to You

Reuters news agency was caught red-handed forging a photo Ynetnews of Israel bombing Lebanon.

A Reuters photograph of smoke rising from buildings in Beirut has been withdrawn after coming under attack by American web logs. The blogs accused Reuters of distorting the photograph to include more smoke and damage.

The photograph showed two very heavy plumes of black smoke billowing from buildings in Beirut after an Air Force attack on the Lebanese capital. Reuters has since withdrawn the photograph from its website, along a message admitting that the image was distorted, and an apology to editors.

And trust in the media continues to plummet. We are long past the point where the media can be trusted to be objective, especially when it comes to Israel. It is one thing to selectively report events, but outright photo forgery is taking it to the a new level. Below are the two photos (the second being the real one):


The first photo was clearly photoshopped so it would look as if more damage had been done. The smoke was clearly "cloned" along with part of a building. This is more evident in this GIF courtesy of Little Green Footballs:

Not only was this a clear forgery, but a forgery so bad that it was discovered by untrained people writing blogs. The only way this could have slipped past the photo editor is if he did not look at it or did not care. We have officially reached the point where blogs written by random people outside the news agencies have greater accuracy than the news agencies themselves. At least the bloggers are up front about their bias...

I Am No Longer With Stupid

Scientists on Germany are working on an anti-stupid pill.

Hans-Hilger Ropers, director at Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, has tested a pill thwarting hyperactivity in certain brain nerve cells, helping stabilise short-term memory and improve attentiveness.

"With mice and fruit flies we were able to eliminate the loss of short-term memory," Ropers, 62, is quoted saying in the German newspaper, which has dubbed it the "world's first anti-stupidity pill."

Finally, there is hope for West Bridgewater High School

Pallywood

I know many of you have probably seen these movies, but they're worth seeing again. With Hezbollah screaming to the high hills that Israel is directly targetting civilians and giving ridiculous body counts, it is good to remember that terrorist organizations are not above staging the news. Since most of the footage the Western media gets is provided by freelance cameramen living in the area, it is not all that difficult to do. Many of these cameramen have no problem filming whatever it is the terrorist group wants filmed. There are already some instances of potential staged news in Lebanon (see here and here).

Aside from completely fake news, there is the problem of blatant lying on Hezbollah's part. This mostly consists of "We weren't firing rockets from [insert place] and the Israelis viciously attack it anyways." By the time anyone has time to prove it wrong, the media has already published it as the truth as moved on. An example of this is the recent controversy over the bombing of Qana. Hezbollah claimed they weren't firing from there and the media reported it as gospel. However, this video, which was just released, shows rockets clearly being fired from within the residential area. I'm sure Hezbollah will claim they were fireworks for the children or something, and the media will again eat it up if they even bother to ask in the first place.

Fat Free

Scientists have developed a vaccine that may one day be used to prevent obesity

US researchers have developed a vaccine which prevents weight gain in rats, offering clues about human treatments.

The vaccine prompts the body to produce antibodies against ghrelin, a hormone that stimulates hunger and weight gain.

Here we have it folks, something that fifty years ago would have been the most useless vaccine ever created. Now it may one day allow people to eat as many Krispy Kremes as they damn well please. Far be it for anyone to change their habits and stop stuffing themselves with food, we can just vaccinate against it. Apparently all of the worlds real diseases have been cured so the researchers had time to work on this.

Hezbollah: Timeline

Here is a timeline of various Hezbollah attacks

July 19, 1982: The president of the American University in Beirut, Davis S. Dodge, is kidnapped. Hezbollah is believed to be behind this and most of the other 30 Westerners kidnapped over the next ten years.

April 18, 1983: Hezbollah attacks the U.S. embassy in Beirut with a car bomb, killing 63 people, 17 of whom were American citizens.

Oct. 23, 1983: The group attacks U.S. Marine barracks with a truck bomb, killing 241 American military personnel stationed in Beirut as part of a peace-keeping force. A separate attack against the French military compound in Beirut kills 58.

Sept. 20, 1984: The group attacks the U.S. embassy annex in Beirut with a car bomb, killing 2 Americans and 22 others.

Click the link for the full timeline. Given this long history of violence, how is it possible that some people deny that Hezbollah are terrorists? Even the European Union has refused to list Hezbollah as a terrorist groups. When is car bombing an embassy not considered terrorism? It is a direct attack on civilians that serves no military purpose. That is essentially the textbook definition of terrorism. I do not know how we can live in the information age and still be surronded by so many "useful idiots."