[Quote:]

A Gallup report released today reveals that more than half of all Americans, rejecting evolution theory and scientific evidence, agree with the statement, “God created man exactly how Bible describes it.”

[..]

Support for this Bible view rises steadily with age: from 43% for those 18 to 29, to 59% for those 65 and older. It declines steadily with education, dropping from 58% for those with high school degrees to a still-substantial 25% with postgraduate degrees.

Newport wraps it up: “Several characteristics correlate with belief in the biblical explanation for the origin of humans. Those with lower levels of education, those who attend church regularly, those who are 65 and older, and those who identify with the Republican Party are more likely to believe that God created humans ‘as is,’ than are those who do not share these characteristics.”

Sounds like a country of dipshits, but I bet many of them had a thought process kinda like “That sounds like the right answer for a religious person, I’m a religious person, yes sure the bible”

[Quote:]

Selling of US stocks by company officers, directors and other insiders last month reached the highest level since just before the bursting of the dotcom bubble, data showed. Thomson Financial said insider selling reached a total of $6.1bn in February, the highest since the $9.1bn record set in February 2000

High levels of insider activity are viewed as indicators of turning points in the market, and many investors incorporate the data into their market analysis.

Mark LoPresti, analyst at Thomson, said the data fitted within historical patterns of spikes in insider activity from January to March. He said a further increase in March could be more meaningful because insider activity had generally decreased during this month.

[Quote:]

I have been aware of nearly all the statistical tricks used by the government since they were implemented. Nonetheless, seeing them collectively described in one article is incredibly sobering. Having said that, there is a bit more “black helicopter” insinuation and fewer data points than I would like to see in an article such as this. However, the main points are the math that most folks need to know, but likely do not.

Once you read it, think about it and understand it, you will see why so many thoughtful people — like Jim Grant, Warren Buffett, Marc Faber, Bill Gross, Fred Hickey and Paul Volcker — have grave concerns about the future of the dollar (due to the macro imbalances that exist today).

[..]

Williams starts by discussing the headline economic data: “Real unemployment right now — figured the way that the average person thinks of unemployment, meaning figured the way it was estimated back during the Great Depression — is running about 12%. Real CPI right now is running at about 8%. And the real GDP probably is in contraction.” (By “real,” he means calculating the data the way they used to be calculated, not as inflation-adjusted.)

[Quote:]

�?аверное, в каждом городе е�?ть заброшенные здани�? или инду�?триальные зоны. Многие не обращают на них внимани�?, некоторые �?пециально обход�?т такие ме�?та �?тороной, но е�?ть люди, которые получают �?�?тетиче�?кое удоволь�?твие от пребывани�? в подобных ме�?тах. �?езабываемое и ни �? чем не �?равнимое впечатление производит взгл�?д �? крыши заброшенного го�?питал�?, хру�?т разбитого �?текла под ногами, тишина нав�?егда замерших механизмов, покинутые людьми цеха заводов, бетонные монолиты, �?оздаваемые кем-то дл�? того, чтобы прино�?ить пользу люд�?м, но не дождавшие�?�? �?воего ча�?а и о�?тавленные на ра�?терзание дожд�?м и ветру. �? где-то неподалеку дым�?т трубы �?лектро�?танций, вращают�?�? роторы генераторов, вырабатывающих �?лектро�?нергию, котора�? ра�?ходит�?�? на �?отни километров по лини�?м �?лектропередач. Или гор�?т факелы нефтеперерабатывающих заводов. �?, может быть, проходит �?тальна�? маги�?траль, по которой ритмично �?туча коле�?ами на �?тыках один за другим проно�?�?т�?�? вереницы ци�?терн и платформ. �?евозможно о�?тать�?�? равнодушным, наблюда�? за �?тими плодами человече�?кого разума, порой гнетущими и вызывающими �?трах.
В о�?нове �?айта лежит иде�? попытать�?�? передать то �?амое на�?троение и �?о�?то�?ние человека, попавшего в �?тот заброшенный мир.

(Beautiful decay pictures of Russia in decline.)

If you want to know more about what makes me tick, read this and this.

(thanks, Maarten!)

[Quote:]

Local blogger BlueNC makes an incredible find.

This is pretty low. A Republican party fundraising letter that pretends to be an official document from the IRS, and then demands that you not destroy the official document and that you respond?

This is fraud, and it’s no better than the people who try to extort money from the elderly or those Nigerian spammers. They’re looking for a few suckers who don’t know any better, and that’s exactly what Senator Dole and the Republican party are doing with this mailer. They’re trying to trick people into donating money to the Republican party at tax time, or else.

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Ion Sancho may be a hero in California, where grateful election officials have verified the ”serious security vulnerabilities” in Diebold voting machines that the Leon County election supervisor uncovered last year.

Sancho is regarded a little differently in Florida.

Florida’s secretary of state’s office disparaged Sancho’s finding, demonstrating considerably more interest in propping up vendors than protecting elections.

California, alarmed by Sancho’s report, dispatched its independent, expert-laden Voting Systems Technology Assessment Advisory Board to conduct its own investigation.

Florida, meanwhile, threatened to sue Sancho.

[..]

California’s follow-up investigation ”absolutely vindicated Sancho’s concerns,” said David Wagner, a University of California computer scientist and a member of the voting machine assessment board. “Our report found all of Ion Sancho’s concerns were valid and, in fact, worse than anyone realized.”

[..]

Wagner noted, instead of getting credit, Sancho has been savaged. One vendor canceled his orders at the last minute, one refused to sell him machines, the third won’t return his phone calls.

Salesmen are suddenly too busy to sell him machines. The state, rather than react to possible collusion, promptly canceled his grant and threatened to sue him for failing to fulfill his official duties.

[Quote:]

Days after the bombing of a Shiite shrine unleashed a wave of retaliatory killings of Sunnis, the leading Shiite party in Iraq’s governing coalition directed the Health Ministry to stop tabulating execution-style shootings, according to a ministry official familiar with the recording of deaths.

[..]

Abductions and killings of Sunni Arab men, usually by gunshots to the back of the head, have occurred with increasing frequency over the past year and are widely blamed on government-allied Shiite religious militias and death squads alleged to be operating from inside the SCIRI-dominated Interior Ministry. In particular, Shiite militias have been accused of abducting and executing large numbers of Sunni men in the days immediately following the Feb. 22 destruction of the Askariya mosque, a revered Shiite shrine in the northern city of Samarra.

[Quote:]

As the Irish government prepares to launch an inquiry into child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, new figures from the Dublin area show that more than 100 priests have been accused of sex abuse.

The report, from the Archdiocese of Dublin, records 350 accusations of abuse against 102 priests since 1940. The number of accusations is likely to grow in the course of the 18-month government inquiry, since the Church has encouraged victims who have never registered complaints to come forward.

[..]

The Church has been criticised in recent years for under-reacting and has faced allegations it is more concerned with protecting itself than full disclosure and tackling the problem head-on. The bishops are now adamant that every possible effort will be made to assist the authorities and to deal properly with any fresh cases. Since almost 3,000 priests worked in Dublin over the last 66 years, the Church’s figures suggest that roughly one in 30 of these has been the subject of allegations.

Imagine working in an environment where, when you look around in the office, for every 30 people you see, one has serious allegations of child abuse on his record..

[Quote:]

French security expert Guillaume Tena has lost an appeal and been fined in a closely watched case which could have widespread ramifications for the way security researchers publish information about flaws in products.

The brouhaha kicked off in 2001 when Tena — who at the time was known by his pseudonym Guillermito — found a number of vulnerabilities in Tegam’s Viguard anti-virus software.

Tena subsequently published his findings without cooperation from Tegam, who elected not to respond to several e-mails from him on the topic. Tegam subsequently accused Tena of violating copyright laws in his writings on the topic because as well as the exploit, he also included extracts from Viaguard’s source code.

Tegam and Tena — who now works for Harvard University in the United States — have been involved in various legal processes since, but the case finally closed on February 21 when Tena lost his appeal against a verdict in Tegam’s favour from a French court in June 2005.

[..]

“Neither [myself] nor Tegam are against full disclosure — I’m actually giving lectures on security and showing attack methods in computer institutes and BlackHat. This was a copyright action, and this is what the judges concluded; not a trial against full disclosure,” said Dotan.

This point is disputed by Tena, who argued that copyright and full disclosure go hand in hand: “If you want to publish an article … you need to make all the information public.… That’s how science works.”

“In my case, I published 65 bytes.… I had to do that in order for other people to verify if what I said was right or wrong,” he said, pointing out that this was a minute proportion of the software. “I naively thought that this would fit into an ‘short citation’ exception, that allows people to cite one or two phrases from a book without being sued,” he added.

Another way to make easy monthly payments…

Alas, Ivor Cutler has died. My bourgeois, boring, repressed little life in 1950′s Britain was transformed by the shaft of surreal light that emanated from Ivor Cutler’s BBC radio performances.
Here’s the BBC story, and here’s a fan site with many audio clips.

(Snif).