June 28, 2004 ? WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that foreign terrorism suspects at a U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba can use the American legal system to challenge their detention, a major defeat for President Bush.
By a 6-3 vote, the justices ruled that American courts do have jurisdiction to consider the claims of the prisoners who say in their lawsuits they are being held illegally in violation of their rights.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Sporting long sideburns, a bushy goatee and black baseball cap, instructor Ralph Echemendia has a class of 15 buttoned-down corporate, academic and military leaders spellbound. The lesson: hacking.
It is an old idea, dating back at least to the ancient Greeks, that the whole of human society can be viewed as a single organism. Many thinkers have noticed the similarity between the roles played by different organizations in society and the functions of organs, systems and circuits in the body. For example, industrial plants extract energy and building blocks from raw materials, just like the digestive system. Roads, railways and waterways transport these products from one part of the system to another one, just like the arteries and veins. Garbage dumps and sewage systems collect waste products, just like the colon and the bladder. The army and police protect the society against invaders and rogue elements, just like the immune system.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether a law outlawing marijuana applies to medical use by two seriously ill California women whose doctors recommended cannabis for their pain.
The high court said it would review a ruling that the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 cannot be applied constitutionally to the manufacture, possession and distribution without charge of marijuana for medical use.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) – For more than 50 years, rancher Waldo Wilcox kept most outsiders off his land and the secret under wraps: a string of ancient Indian settlements so remarkably well-preserved that arrowheads and beads are still lying out in the open.
From The Center for American Progress:
Michael Moore’s new movie, Farenheit 9/11, delves into the relationship between the Bush dynasty and the House of Saud. Follow along with this guide to everything you always wanted to know about the Bush-Saudi connection but were afraid to ask.
Researchers at Microsoft have devised a technique to assimilate the human body as a conduit for consumer electronics. How did Microsoft accomplish this feat? Electrodes attached to body use the skin as a system bus to transmit data and as a conductive medium to distribute power between devices. Microsoft’s desired effect is to cut back on the I/O redundancy that results from when multiple devices attempt to communicate.
Under pressure from medical editors to make data from clinical drug trials public, some pharmaceutical makers are backing the idea of creating a publicly accessible database detailing successes—and failures—of their tests.
BEIJING, June 25 (Xinhuanet)—Japanese electronics giant Toshiba claims to have developed the world’s smallest methanol fuel cell for use in wireless headsets and other wearable electronics devices.
Robert W. “Bob” Bemer, 84, who helped invent the language used by most of the world’s computers to translate text to numbers and who was the first scientist to warn of the Y2K problem, died of cancer June 22 at his home on Possum Kingdom Lake in Texas.
A fossil plankton dating from 65 million years ago helps confirm the theory that a dark winter lasting many thousands of years doomed the dinosaurs, researchers said on Wednesday.
Psychologists from University of Toronto and Harvard University have identified one of the biological bases of creativity
The study in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology says the brains of creative people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment. Other people’s brains might shut out this same information through a process called “latent inhibition” – defined as an animal’s unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs. Through psychological testing, the researchers showed that creative individuals are much more likely to have low levels of latent inhibition.
As reported here last month, on February 6th Dr Humphry Osmond passed away at age 86. His death was not widely reported, and many people even in the entheogen community did not know his name. Perhaps that was because Dr Osmond took the common sense approach to psychedelic use, rather than the evangelic exuberance of Timothy Leary and others in the counter-culture of the 1960s.
Despite the political backlash from several states, the federal government continues to push its nationalized education agenda.
Public education became popular in the 18th century, when Prussian monarchs decided the best way to raise good Prussians was to control their education. Writing for the Action Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, doctoral student Michiel Visser of Oxford states: “Pupils were not primarily supposed to learn reading, writing, arithmetic or anything else, but were meant to become obedient citizens. The history of modern education, then, is a history of social control….”
In this lecture, Aldous Huxley discusses modern techniques by which to control human behavior. He encourages us to think about what would happen if these techniques were abused by unscrupulous people in authority.
Question and Answer Period Audio File
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