Here’s one article that says the Pope should do more than just saying pedophilia is sinful.

Calling forgiveness “one of the highest virtues taught to us by Jesus,” Pope John Paul II issued a papal decree Monday absolving priest-molested children of all sin.

“Though grave and terrible sins have been committed, our Lord teaches us to turn the other cheek and forgive those who sin against us,” said the pope, reading a prepared statement from a balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square. “That is why, despite the terrible wrongs they have committed, the church must move on and forgive these children for their misdeeds.”

“As Jesus said, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,’” the pope continued. “We must send a clear message to these hundreds—perhaps thousands—of children whose sinful ways have tempted so many of the church’s servants into lustful violation of their holy vows of celibacy. The church forgives them for their transgressions and looks upon them not with intolerance, but compassion.”
[...]
“By forgiving these children, primarily churchgoing boys between the ages of 5 and 15, the pope has shown true Christian kindness,” said Father Thomas O’Malley, a member of the New York archdiocese and one of the many priests implicated in charges of sexual activity with minors. “The pope is saying that, in their own way, these sinful youths are victims, too. Through their absolution, he sends the important message that empathy, contrary to what naysayers and critics in the secular media would have us believe, does have a place in modern Catholicism.”

RFID tags are in many of the products that we already buy today and the promise of RFID in the future is that we may not even have to stop at the register to checkout at the store. In the future, with prolific RFID tags more powerful than what we have today, all we might need to do is walk out the door with our carts and our total would be computed automatically. Today’s RFID technology, however, is prone to hacking, which was demonstrated when researchers were able to clone an RFID passport while driving by it.

Before we can get to the point where store inventories are able to be done in real-time using RFID tags, we need to have cheaper and more efficient methods of producing the tags and the tags need to hold more information and use less power. Researchers at Rice University and Sunchon National University in Korean are working on a joint project using RFID tags that are printed on a roll-to-roll process that uses inks embedded with carbon nanotubes.
[...]
The team is also working on increasing the range that the tags can be read from. Currently the printed tags can only be read from a very close distance to the transmitter. To be useful in inventorying an entire store or warehouse the tags need a range of about 300 meters.

Just imagine when everything you buy, wear, eat, etc. is tagged and can be read from a fifth of a mile away. Then with readers on every street corner like cameras are now, advertisers can flash ads customized to you. Stolen cars can be found instantly since each will have multiple tags. Same with a shoplifter’s items. And, as an added bonus, the police could jump in and protect you from that subversive book you just bought or that Twinkie which could eventually increase your health costs. And those selfish deviants who break every RFID tag they get would stand out like an untagged ghost in need of our help.

You’re always safe with your every move monitored. I can hardly wait!

Time to change the name of the FBI to Facebook Bureau of Investigation?

What’s the only thing better than Mafia Wars on Facebook (which boast 25 million players, reportedly)? Real life Mafia on Facebook.

[...] Apparently the Mafiosi share the same addiction to the world’s top website and largest social network that the rest of us do.

That addiction led to this week’s arrest of mobster Pasquale Manfredi. Manfredi, 33 years-old, was the boss of the notorious ‘Ndrangheta mafia organization from the Calabria region in southern Italy.
[...]
Manfredi reportedly loved Facebook and had over 200 friends. He would regularly log in from his safe house where he was hiding from police and chat with his buddies. He went by the name “Georgie” and logged in, reportedly, using a pre-paid wireless internet thumb-drive. In the end, his frequent chats allowed police to locate his secret hideout and storm it. When the police made their entry, Manfredi reportedly had just been in the middle of an intense Facebooking session. He tried to flee to the rooftop, where he was apprehended.

The Italian authorities are thrilled to finally have the dangerous criminal in custody. They’re also investigating his Facebook friends list to see if it provides clues that would help them track down other fugitive Mafia members.

When children hit puberty, their ability to learn a second language drops, they find it harder to learn their way around a new location and they are worse at detecting errors in cognitive tests.

Why is this? Sheryl Smith and her colleagues at the State University of New York now reckon that all of these behavioural changes could be due to a temporary increase in a chemical receptor that inhibits brain activity in an area responsible for learning.

In 2007, Smith’s team discovered that the number of these receptors soared in mice when they hit puberty, before falling back in adulthood. In their latest study, Smith’s team set about finding out if these receptor changes in mice might lead to impaired learning abilities, rather like those seen in pubescent humans.

The group examined the hippocampus – a region known to be involved in learning – in mouse brains. Sure enough, pubertal mice had seven times as many of the receptors as infant mice. In adulthood, the number of these receptors fell back to an intermediate level. The team was also able to examine individual neurons and could see that the extra receptors were being expressed specifically at “neural projections” – sites within the hippocampus known to be involved in learning. This was further evidence that the increase in receptors might affect learning. Finally, the group measured spatial learning abilities in the mice. The creatures were placed on a rotating platform, on which a stationary section delivered a mild electric shock. After a single shock, the infant mice learnt to dodge the danger zone. The pubertal mice, however, failed to learn to avoid it even after several rounds.

Smith reckons that the same mechanism might underlie the learning deficits teenagers experience in teenagers.

Read the article to find out how this might be reversed.

Click pic to learn how to make your own

Suggestion: make John and Adam cheese heads, then photograph them. It would make a great No Agenda poster.

Despite what the Republicans say, it isn’t for a lot of people, especially if you have insurance companies targeting people who want to, you know, actually use their insurance for anything but a money sink. Not saying a single-payer, government run system would be without problems, but if you’re like the guy in the article, it’s hard to imagine it being worse.

Previously undisclosed records from Mitchell’s case reveal that Fortis had a company policy of targeting policyholders with HIV. A computer program and algorithm targeted every policyholder recently diagnosed with HIV for an automatic fraud investigation, as the company searched for any pretext to revoke their policy. As was the case with Mitchell, their insurance policies often were canceled on erroneous information, the flimsiest of evidence, or for no good reason at all, according to the court documents and interviews with state and federal investigators.

The revelations come at a time when President Barack Obama, in his frantic push to rescue the administration’s health care plan, has stepped up his criticism of insurers. The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote later this week on an overhaul of the health system, which Obama has said is essential to do away with controversial and unpopular industry practices.

Insurance companies have long engaged in the practice of “rescission,” whereby they investigate policyholders shortly after they’ve been diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses. But government regulators and investigators who have overseen the actions of Assurant and other health insurance companies say it is unprecedented for a company to single out people with HIV.
[...]
Their motive, according to the judge, was obvious: “The court finds that Fortis wrongfully elevated its concerns for maximizing profits over the rights and interest of its customer.” In upholding Nettles’ verdict, the South Carolina Supreme Court similarly ruled that “Fortis was motivated to avoid the losses it would undoubtedly incur in supporting Mitchell’s costly medical condition.”

On a vaguely related topic, ever wonder how many doctors and nurses are beaten up by patients?

Looks like a good excuse to put guard stations on every street like this. Or a wall with armed guards. And a moat. With sharks with frickin’ laser beams. And…

A recent increase in border patrol along side streets dividing Derby Line, Vt., and Stanstead, Canada, are causing confusion and animosity between locals and border patrol agents.

The situation came to a head recently when a local man was arrested while walking down a street he said that he has walked down for years without a problem.

“I walked over to Canada on a Saturday night around quarter to nine to get a pizza,” Buzz Roy explained. Roy lives and works in Derby Line. He walked down Church Street to the nearest pizza shop, which happens to be in Canada, and said that to his surprise he was stopped by state police and told that crossing on Church Street is illegal.

“Steam was coming out of my ears from the treatment by the state cop. I felt that he had been misinformed about my ability to enter the country on Church Street. I’ve done it my entire life many many many times,” said Roy.
[...]
He will fight the fine, but said that his story speaks to larger issues. “I firmly believe that to this day … they just make up rules from day to day.” [...] He said people are scared to come here. “They come up over the hill and they don’t realize they’re in the states until they see the American customs, and then they turn around and they get hollered at.”

Right. Cosmic rays. More likely space aliens who want to bring their 2010 antimatter-powered car into the market and need to knock off the competition.

The feds are now examining a rather wild theory — that cosmic radiation may be causing some of Toyota’s electrical issues. The feds received an anonymous tip from an industry source that Toyota’s microprocessors, memory chips and software may be more sensitive to cosmic rays than its competitors, causing increased incidences of malfunctions. Such problems are commonplace with airplanes or spaceships, raising the need for extremely robust electronic designs.
[...]
Electrical interference could help to explain the unintended acceleration afflicting 13 models across Toyota’s lineup, or about 5.6 million vehicles in total. While software and hardware can compensate, to an extent for cosmic interference, cosmic rays can potentially cause the kind of unrepeatable “single event upsets” that could add up to many of the 3,000 complaints against Toyota received by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration since 2000.

William Price, who worked at a jet propulsion laboratory studying extraterrestrial electromagnetic interference (EMI) for 20 years, comments, “[It] occurs virtually anywhere. It doesn’t happen in a certain locale like you would expect in an electromagnetic problem from a radio tower or something else.”

A Toyota spokesperson in a brief comment to Freep.com said that Toyota’s protections against extraterrestrial EMI were “robust against this type of interference” and that its vehicles featured “absolute reliability”.

The kids should be coming out to ‘play’ soon

At Broadway Elementary School here, there is no more sitting around after lunch. No more goofing off with friends. No more doing nothing.

Instead there is Brandi Parker, a $14-an-hour recess coach with a whistle around her neck, corralling children behind bright orange cones to play organized games. There she was the other day, breaking up a renegade game of hopscotch and overruling stragglers’ lame excuses.

They were bored. They had tired feet. They were no good at running.

“I don’t like to play,” protested Esmeilyn Almendarez, 11.

“Why do I have to go through this every day with you?” replied Ms. Parker, waving her back in line. “There’s no choice.”
[...]
Playworks, a California-based nonprofit organization that hired Ms. Parker to run the recess program at Broadway Elementary, began a major expansion in 2008 with an $18 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
[...]
Dr. Romina M. Barros, an assistant clinical professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx who was an author of a widely cited study on the benefits of recess, published last year in the journal Pediatrics, says that children still benefit most from recess when they are let alone to daydream, solve problems, use their imagination to invent their own games and “be free to do what they choose to do.”

Structured recess, Dr. Barros said, simply transplants the rules of the classroom to the playground.

“You still have to pay attention,” she said. “You still have to follow rules. You don’t have that time for your brain to relax.”

You will obey, slave!

Love grousing about cable TV? Then I’ve got a list for you. It comes from industry analyst SNL Kagan, and I came across it via a research note Barclays Capital’s Anthony DiClemente sent out last week. DiClemente was arguing that the bundled approach to cable TV–whereby subscribers get dozens or even hundreds of channels for one big fee, no matter how many networks they actually watch–wasn’t going anywhere for quite some time. If ever.

But if you’re the kind of person who thinks we’re headed for an a la carte model in which programmers compete directly for consumer dollars, you can use this as fodder for your argument. Because you can see just how much you’re paying for stuff you don’t want.

[Click here to view the chart]

Obviously these are wholesale prices, not retail. But this gives you a very good idea of where the money goes–to a lot of channels you likely never, ever, look at.

You’ll find this particularly upsetting if you don’t watch sports. Because sports channels account for about 40 percent of cable fees.

And you’ll also be upset once you realize that the broadcast networks–GE’s (GE) NBC, News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, Disney’s (DIS) ABC and CBS (CBS)–are going to get added to this list over the next year or so. Even though anyone who doesn’t pay for cable gets them for free.

Arriving at Harv’s Metro Car Wash in midtown (Sacramento) Wednesday afternoon were two dark-suited IRS agents demanding payment of delinquent taxes. “They were deadly serious, very aggressive, very condescending,” says Harv’s owner, Aaron Zeff.

The really odd part of this: The letter that was hand-delivered to Zeff’s on-site manager showed the amount of money owed to the feds was … 4 cents.

Inexplicably, penalties and taxes accruing on the debt – stemming from the 2006 tax year – were listed as $202.31, leaving Harv’s with an obligation of $202.35.

Zeff, who also owns local parking lots and is the president of the Midtown Business Association, finds the situation a bit comical.

“It’s hilarious,” he says, “that two people hopped in a car and came down here for just 4 cents. I think (the IRS) may have a problem with priorities.”

Gotta pay down the deficit somehow.