Controversial sex arousal tests used on young offenders have been permanently halted, following news that a medical technician working in the program has been charged with an unrelated sexual offence.

Mary Polak, the B.C. minister of children and family development, said her ministry learned Thursday that the technician, who was working on contract, was charged earlier this month. The charge is unrelated to his work for the ministry or the youth facility where he was employed, she said…

The tests, carried out by the government-sponsored Youth Forensic Psychiatric Service, involve attaching a “penile plesthysmograph” to adolescent boys’ genitals to measure sexual responses. The youths — aged 12 to 17 — were shown photographs of naked or semi-naked adults, children and infants. The images were accompanied by a story, read out loud, that described coercive or forced intercourse. The test is supposed to determine whether young offenders have gained control of their sexual impulses through treatment, and to predict the likelihood of them reoffending.

Polak said the B.C. Civil Liberties Association notified her of the tests only several days ago, although they have been administered for 20 years…

20 years!?

After instructing staff to look into the testing protocol, she said: “The information provided to me has led me to believe there’s no reason for us to continue such an intrusive practice that is so concerning, when we have other treatments and assessment practices to treat youth individuals in our care…”

The only difference between the Canadian and American versions of the test is that here our loonies would also photograph the juvenile offenders’ aura.

A German student “mooned” a group of Hell’s Angels and hurled a puppy at them before escaping on a stolen bulldozer, police have said.

The man drove up to a Hell’s Angels clubhouse near Munich, wearing only a pair of shorts and carrying a puppy. He dropped his shorts and threw the dog, escaping on a bulldozer from a nearby building site.

He was arrested later at home by police. The 26-year-old is said to have stopped taking depression medication.

After making his getaway on the bulldozer, he had driven so slowly that a 5km tailback built up behind him on the motorway. After driving about 1km, he had abandoned the bulldozer in the middle of the motorway, near Allershausen. He continued his journey by hitchhiking.

“What motivated him to throw a puppy at the Hell’s Angels is currently unclear,” a police spokesman said.

At least the rest of what he did was perfectly understandable.

The Year America Dissolved

It was 2017. Clans were governing America.

The first clans organized around local police forces. The conservatives’ war on crime during the late 20th century and the Bush/Obama war on terror during the first decade of the 21st century had resulted in the police becoming militarized and unaccountable.

As society broke down, the police became warlords. The state police broke apart, and the officers were subsumed into the local forces of their communities. The newly formed tribes expanded to encompass the relatives and friends of the police.

The dollar had collapsed as world reserve currency in 2012 when the worsening economic depression made it clear to Washington’s creditors that the federal budget deficit was too large to be financed except by the printing of money.

With the dollar’s demise, import prices skyrocketed. As Americans were unable to afford foreign-made goods, the transnational corporations that were producing offshore for US markets were bankrupted, further eroding the government’s revenue base.

And then things got really bad. Read the essay to see the rest of our future(?).

Perhaps this should be looked at as a way to boost the economy, providing ‘jobs’ for women who might otherwise be unemployed. Shovel ready projects (if your peccadilloes include women in hard hats), and all that.

I guess some old fogey of a tax payer representative (occasionally our own government) might assume that paying prostitutes on a government contract is not a legitimate business expense. In another world, someone caught doing exactly that would be embarrassed and throw himself on the mercy of the court.

Not these days. The lawyer for the military contractor David H. Brooks argued in court that his client, who spent thousands of our money on prostitutes for his employees, had spent these monies appropriately because, as his lawyer put it, “Mr. Brooks thought such services could motivate his employees and make them more productive.”

Mr. Brooks and his lawyer show an astounding amount of chutzpah. I don’t disagree with the facts: sex is tension reducing, calming, perhaps even good for overall performance especially in high anxiety circumstances. With this in mind, Mr. Brooks could have flown in wives and girlfriends for regular conjugal visits. But maybe Mr. Brooks was more price-conscious than that and wanted to make sure that he could get a cheap fix for his workers—and make them forgive less soothing aspects of their jobs. Mr, Brooks, like many men, considered prostitutes such a commodity that he probably listed them in his business accounts with the paper supplies and other mundane daily products. And I am guessing he was pleased that, given the conditions, he could get them at ground-level prices.

Here’s someone else who tried to claim hookers and pr0n were for medicinal purposes.

And in a vaguely related vein, the Chinese artificial hymen to restore virginity is confusing to Egyptians where the reporter just had to order one.

No Agenda Survey Results

Listen to show by clicking ►

Direct link to show.
Show notes here.
Show forum here.
Donate to show here or here.
Sign up for No Agenda Show Newsletter signup here.

Click below to get in on the No Agenda Coin Challenge

URBAN ninja mums are urging frightened women to take back the streets.

The fear factor, fueled by reports of weekly stabbings and bashings in Melbourne, is feeding a revival of the ancient Japanese art of fighting.

And nunchukkas, sais and staffs are not always the weapon of choice.

“I am a weapon,” black belt ninja Annette Christopherson declares.

At just 150cm tall, the 50-something mum is a force to be reckoned with, without all the brawn.

One Melbourne establishment, the Kevin Hawthorne Ninja School, is training mums and dads – and even kids as young as five – in the art of ninjitsu to protect themselves from street violence, bullying and home invasions.

Senate Republicans blocked a $30-billion plan to help community banks boost lending to small businesses, dealing a blow to President Barack Obama’s election-year battle to reduce unemployment.

Tempers ran high as Democratic leaders failed to muster the 60 votes needed to advance the measure over a Republican filibuster…

Even if the Senate passes the small business lending bill next week, it will be too late to get it to Obama’s desk before mid-September. The House of Representatives, which passed its version of the bill in June, is set to begin a six-week break on Friday. The House will be unable to vote on the version passed by the Senate until then…

Obama has been pushing for passage of the lending measure arguing that getting more capital into the hands of independent community bankers would lead to more small business loans. It is supported by independent bankers and business groups.

Right now, in my neck of the prairie, there is no sector of banking with more energy and activity than small business lending. Every penny made available to community banks would be going straight back out the door into economic stimulus – and to qualified borrowers at that.

The Republican Party could care less.

For non-Flash version, click here.

Today’s Guests:
Joseph Engo, Systems Manager, Mevio
Mark Glaser, Host, PBS MediaShift
Cade Metz, U.S. Editor, The Register

The Topics:
Facebook: 500 Million Served
iPhone Jailbreaks Legalized!
The Rise of Data-Driven Journalism
Yahoo!: Google Goes Big in Japan
Is the Droid Shortage Bogus?

Download this Episode:
iPod/iPhone/PSP: 111MB
Quicktime H.264: 137MB
Windows Media Player: 133MB
Mobile 3GP: 38MB
MP3 (Audio Only): 28MB

Right click and choose “save target as” or “save as” to download videos.

Curiously, the cancer rate is 10 percent higher in the left breast than in the right. This left-side bias holds true for both men and women and it also applies to the skin cancer melanoma.
[...]
The researchers suggest an explanation based on differences in sleeping habits in Japan and Western countries. [...] The futons used for sleeping in Japan are mattresses placed directly on the bedroom floor, in contrast to the elevated box springs and mattress of beds used in the West. A link between bedroom furniture and cancer seems absurd, but this, the researchers say, could the answer.
[...]
In the U.S. bed frames and box springs are made of metal, and the length of a bed is half the wavelength of FM and TV transmissions that have been broadcasting since the late 1940s. In Japan most beds are not made of metal, and the TV broadcast system does not use the 87- to 108-megahertz frequency used in Western countries.

Thus, as we sleep on our coil-spring mattresses, we are in effect sleeping on an antenna that amplifies the intensity of the broadcast FM/TV radiation. Asleep on these antennas, our bodies are exposed to the amplified electromagnetic radiation for a third of our life spans. As we slumber on a metal coil-spring mattress, a wave of electromagnetic radiation envelops our bodies so that the maximum strength of the field develops 75 centimeters above the mattress in the middle of our bodies. When sleeping on the right side, the body’s left side will thereby be exposed to field strength about twice as strong as what the right side absorbs.

So, the new meme is, Futons good, box springs & TVs bad?

“That’s right. Come and get me!”

Marc, perhaps you could interview your squirrel on this development?

A grocery store is committing “wildlife massacre” by selling squirrel meat, campaigners claimed today.

Viva – Vegetarians International Voice for Animals – accused Budgens of supporting a “barbaric and needless cull” of grey squirrels by allowing an independently-owned branch in Crouch End, north London, to sell the meat.

Viva founder Juliet Gellatley said: “‘Culls’ of thousands of grey squirrels by so-called conservation groups to boost populations of red squirrels are irrational, inhumane and destined to fail, so it is very sad that Budgens are allowing profit to be made from wildlife massacre.”

Actress and Viva patron Jenny Seagrove also spoke out against the sales, saying: “It seems that no animal is to be spared falling victim to such companies’ marketing ploys. What gruesome product will be next to grace our food aisles? Blackbird, field mouse or mole?”

Found by Brother Uncle Don

CNet News

It seems like only yesterday that Apple decided it must show Motorola’s new Droid X phone as having more signal problems than the average British railway line.

Would Motorola stand by and let Apple suggest the Droid X had just the same antenna issues as any other cell phone?

Well, a previous Droid X ad had already offered these words: “And most importantly, it comes with a double antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like and use it just about anywhere to make crystal clear calls.”

So who could be surprised that, according to Droid Life, a new Droid X ad has launched, one that tries to mock the iPhone for its sartorial inelegance.

Har!

I watched CBS’s news show last night with Katie Curic so you don’t have to. They spent quite a lot of time marveling at how clean the beaches were and how the skimmer boats had practically nothing to pick up. Showed graphics on how massive oil spill had now shrunk to seemingly insignificant size. Guess the crisis is over. If you can’t trust Katie who in this world can you trust?

“WASHINGTON (AFP) – With BP’s broken well in the Gulf of Mexico finally capped, the focus shifts to the surface clean-up and the question on everyone’s lips is: where is all the oil?”

NEW ORLEANS (Mother Jones) – I don’t know who the fuck these everyones are, but I’m happy to help out them, and ABC, and this AFP reporter writing that due to BP’s stunningly successful skimming and burning efforts, “the real difficulty now is finding any oil to clean up.”

I sent one text message to Bloomberg’s Lizzie O’Leary, who’s standing on Grand Isle, Louisiana, right now, asking how the beach looks. “Lower part past the barrier untouched with globs of oil that washed up last night,” she said. By “untouched,” she means by cleanup crews, and that “barrier” she’s talking about is the one the press isn’t allowed past.
[...]
I can’t even count the number of correspondents down here who’ve pointed out that digging a finger under the surface of supposedly clean sand turns up crude, or the number of cleanup workers who’ve said cleanup efforts are strictly cosmetic, or that no matter what they do the contamination just keeps bubbling up.

It’s BP’s job to whitewash this story and make it easier to indulge the desire to forget about the scope of the devastation, guys. Not the media’s.