This man is at a real rally wearing a shirt advertising a fictional political organization. Google it if you want to find out more. The tongue in cheek mysogeny seems less tongue in cheek when you wear this shirt to a rally that was demographically biased toward white men.

I would love to sit down and have an intelligent conversation with this guy. Martin Luther King was a black man who enjoyed huge popularity when he was most active in a political movement. His detractors used hyperbole about where he stood on the political spectrum. The same thing is being done to Barrack Obama today. Actually any political stance other than conservatism that has a bad name is being attributed to Obama depending on which ones the sign makers know how to spell.

Sunglasses protect our eyes from UV damage. An added benefit is that they can prevent others from seeing into our soul.

The anonymity of ‘Anonymous’ had some advantages with regard to their efforts to gain widespread publicity about the negative aspects of scientology. This same anonymity prevents them from gaining any appreciable degree of trust from the mainstream.

Gillian McKeith is the internationally acclaimed Holistic Nutritionist and presenter of You Are What You Eat hit Channel 4 series that took the nation by storm

She is a little bit extra famous, at least for today, because she had a weird hissy fit on Twitter.

There is no evidence of the debacle on her twitter account except for an easily refutable tweet implicitly denying that it is her twitter account. There is, of course, ample screen caps and links to cached pages.

Here is what happened in chronological order:

• Gillian tells a follower that the account in question is her official twitter account.
• A twitter user named Rachel tweets about an upcoming TV show that is critical of Gillian.
• Gillian finds this tweet, presumably by searching for her name on twitter search. She then proceeds to attack the user for her supposed biases and also to accuse the host of Bad Science of lying.
• The host of Bad Science replies to Gillian with a roundabout accusation of libel.
• Gillian publishes a series of tweets outlining and defending her educational credentials.
• Gillian removes all the potentially embarrassing tweets and adds a tweet suggesting that the account is not actually hers.

As an aside to the drama, the school that granted Gillian a “PhD” is now closed and is the subject of a page on Quackwatch.

Check out the Guardian for more…

The photo you see here doesn’t have anything to do with this post. This blog post is an example of how you can publish content to a blog from 3rd party websites like Flickr. It’s not hard to get set up and it can be very convenient if your subject lends itself to the use of copyright free photographs.

During her ‘heyday’ as a circus fat lady, Celesta Geyer was consuming about 10,000 calories a day. Before joining the circus, she had lead a relatively normal life. She was happily married and employed. She was obese and suffered all the predictable social and health costs that come with that. The decision to join the circus was the result of financial crisis. Her husband lost his job with GM at the onset of the depression.

After a health scarein her late 40s, she began dieting. She restricted her intake to about 800 calories. Over time she lost over 400 pounds. She lived to be over 80.

Ridiculous advertisement to say the least.

One new opportunity for making money online is called Fivver.com and it is marketed as being fun and social. Basically members are free to make several listings advertising tasks that they are willing to do for $5. As an experiment I listed a whole bunch of these gigs. The amount of time and trouble that each task would entail varied quite a bit. Not surprisingly, it was one of the hardest jobs that finally attracted my first (and so far only) sale. I said that I would write a web address or short message on a beautiful island beach for $5. Here is a breakdown of what this involved…

• Waiting 20 minutes for the bus (which does NOT go all the way to the beach)
• Walking 2km to the beach.
• Spending about 35 minutes placing white stones on the sand to spell out the message.
• Documenting the end result with photographs and video.
• Walking ALL THE WAY HOME, about 5km.
• Editing and uploading the video document.

So yeah, that’s a lot of time and effort for $5. Did I mention that the site take $1 off the top? Oh, and did I mention that I have to build up a minimum of $40 before I can request payment from Fivver?

Some drugs are considered allies. Caffeine is a drug and I can only imagine that it gets to sit in on strategy sessions at the White House. I have a favorite anecdote that involves the King of England shutting down coffee houses for a while back in the 1700s. The stimulating effect of this drug was making people think a lot and they were meeting in the places where it was prepared and discussing a lot of ideas that ran counter to the interests of the King. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think people gather together in crack houses to share revolutionary ideas.

Caffeine catalyzed the industrial revolution. I feel like we need some other kind of revolution at this point and maybe part of the process could be help with a new drug of choice for society. I don’t know what it should do and I don’t know how it would do it. It just seems to me that the people who ruin themselves and their surroundings because of a drug are using the wrong one.