Every now and then an article comes out which needs no further comment. This is one of them.

I’ve already mentioned the Papal lunacy heating up over exorcisms, but it would appear that Poland is bracing for a demonic invasion, due to the rantings of several professional village idiots.

They even had a convention of village idiots last July, with more than 300 exorcists gathering in Czestochowa, under the fourth International Congress of Exorcists.

Of course there are various recipes for demonic infestation, everything from New Age religions to Internet addiction, or so says Rev. Wieslaw Jankowski, with the Institute for Studies on the Family. One of the worst cases, according to Jankowski, was a woman who asked for a divorce just days after renewing her wedding vows during a marriage counseling session. Oh, the horrors! Only Satan could be responsible for this!

“According to what I could perceive, the devil was present and acting in an obvious way,” he said. “How else can you explain how a wife, in the space of a couple of weeks, could come to hate her own husband, a man who is a good person?”

Maybe because her husband is a worthless prick to her? After all, they were obviously having problems if they were in marriage counseling. Just because someone is forced into renewing their marriage vows for a marriage counseling session, doesn’t mean that there was feeling behind it, nor that there weren’t second thoughts going through her head. If this kind of thing is all these charlatan snake-oil peddlers have to support their loony ideas, then may their god help us all.

Apparently they are “still working” on this poor lass.

Exorcists claim to be careful not to treat those suffering from mental illness, but I think the unfortunate irony of the situation is that no one is being careful to keep those suffering from mental illness from “treating” innocent people.

The “us vs. them” mentality has taken hold. This is to be expected, as police become more and more militarized. SWAT was the first step. The War on Drugs aided and abetted them. Now paramilitary style intervention is the norm.

Ron Paul is scaling down his campaign and has ruled out running as an independent. He’s going to concentrate on his reelection to Congress.

Personally, I’m disappointed. There’s no reason not to try a third party bid, other than to remain mired in the slop of Republican Party sewage. He ran as a Libertarian before, he could just as easily push for an independent label.

If this is all to ensure his seat in Congress, I’m even more disappointed. He’s behaving like your typical politician.

Then again, why tilt at windmills? It has been demonstrated quite clearly that unless you are “mainstream” in thinking - giving vague answers to questions, spouting rhetoric and false promises - you will be ignored. Paul’s support was mostly Net generated, and he set records for campaign money raised accordingly. He took no money from special interest groups, either. You would think that would be an indication of the support he’d receive as a third party candidate. Hell, from the behavior of the press and the format of the debates he’s been allowed to speak in, he already was a third party candidate!

At the end, I’m left confused. At least he hasn’t dropped out of the race yet.

Time will tell what becomes of this. For the meantime, I can’t shake the feeling of being disappointed.

Chunlei Guo at the University of Rochester has come up with a method to alter the surface of any metal to reflect the wavelength of light desired, using a femtosecond discharge of a powerful laser.  The end result, we should be able color any metal to any hue we care to, by altering the metal itself.  Currently only certain hues have been done, but Guo is confident that the entire spectrum lies at our fingertips.

This is a really interesting use of the now ubiquitous laser.  No, it’s not like your pen laser, making a little red dot for your cats to chase, but the principal is no different - concentrating light to emit a coherent beam.  From surgical techniques to metal manipulation, the laser has to go down as one of the most amazing technological developments man has created.

Hide the epileptics and those with Tourette Syndrome, Pope Benedict XVI is on the rampage against Satanism!

According to this Raw Story, Father Gabriele Amorth, senior exorcist of the diocese of Rome, says that Pope is taking the problem of demonic possession very seriously, “setting up exorcism squads to deal with the rampant growth of Satanism.”

Though I haven’t seen any of these modern day witch hunters running around with vials of Holy Water, throwing Eucharist wafers to and fro like a demented Johnny Appleseed to keep the demons at bay, it’s probably just because I avoid wild packs of wandering lunatics as a habit. (I avoided the primary’s yesterday for the same reason.)

Apparently Pope Benedict XVI believes in evil, but cannot believe in evil unless Satan is behind it all. From my perspective, humans are pretty damn good at evil without any pitchfork wielding bogeyman behind the curtains. Perhaps this is how His Holiness is able to reconcile what he was caught up in during WWII with the Hitler Youth? To be fair, he never was a Nazi, but his claims that joining the Hitler Youth was compulsory in 1941 doesn’t match up with the history books. Membership in the Deutsche Jungvolk was compulsory, but he avoid that. Why join the Hitler Youth then? Also, though he deserted the German Army, he didn’t do so until April 1945, when the war was almost over. This guy was the best candidate they had?

In any case, if you’re Catholic and develop a neurological disorder, be prepared to be guided away from professional medical attention at the lieu of medieval ju-ju.

Of course, if you’re Catholic, why the hell are you reading my blog?

Bear in mind that the Church of Global Warming is currently in the process of renaming themselves to the Church of Global Climate Change, so that anything can be blamed on that miserable poison CO2. In any case, Russia could have used a little of the old church and China is battling the “coldest winter in 100 years.”

Lake Paliastomi froze over for the first time in 50 years and temperatures were set to drop as low as 67 F (55 C). As the article states, Georgia is a subtropical climate…

Of course the CGW or CGCC is going to say that one off incidents like these aren’t a data point against the global warming hype. Nevermind that the earth has always been going through an awful lot of climate change over the eons. Never mind that Earth was warming on average in the 19th and 20th centuries, before we started to pump CO2 into the atmosphere.

But anthropogenic global warming is a fact, because the CGW has a consensus, or so they say.

Pray tell, just what is consensus? It is popular opinion, not scientific fact. Science has held many such a consensus which was proven wrong in the end. What we need is hard data.

Proof to me that CO2 and climate have little to do with each other, comes from work from paleoclimatologists, who show us inconvenient facts, such as Carleton University Professor Tim Patterson’s testimony before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development in Canada. (See article.)

“There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth’s temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years.”

Or how about Catherine Brahic’s work in New Scientist (2007-05-17) where she showed in ice core samples the CO2 increase lags behind the temperature by roughly 800 years. Ergo, CO2 cannot possibly cause the temperature change. The same pattern, by studying ice core samples dating back 650,000 years, was confirmed by Holly Fretwell at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC).

The fact of the mater is, that the IPCC is a political organization with a political agenda and though they claim to have a majority of climatologists behind their stance, more and more scientists who have never seen an oil company’s penny are coming out against their position, including some former members of the IPCC.

As for the IPCC itself, the truth came out recently about their position papers, especially the Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.

Even this “consensus” is looking weaker everyday.

Addendum 2008-02-11: Yet another article on a group of Canadian scientists who are convinced that the sun is the driving force in climate and are now seeking additional funding for better sun monitoring systems.

Teams of police officers equipped with submachine guns and bomb-sniffing dogs have become a part of the landscape of post-Sept. 11 New York, patrolling around Wall Street and such landmarks as the Empire State building.

Similar squads are set to begin daily patrols of the busiest sections of the city subways this month, in what officials describe as a first for a U.S. mass transit system.

So begins this article from the Associated Press.

The creeping tyranny which is swallowing this country is starting to bare its teeth. Ask yourself the simple question, “Why do police officers need automatic weapons?”

Submachine guns and machine guns are weapons designed to throw a lot of bullets in the general direction of the target in question, in hope that a bullet or two will hit the desired target, or that the spray of such a weapon will cause an advancing enemy to take shelter and cease their advance. Automatic fire is not fully controlled and highly inaccurate, which is exactly why such weapons are utterly useless in the role of civilian law enforcement!

There is only one reason for law enforcement to carry fully automatic weapons: intimidation.

Welcome to the new Amerika, where it seems everyday we’re closer to picking up where the Soviet Union left off.

Folks, this is going to continue until the People of this nation stand up and declare that we’re not going to be treated like criminals anymore. We’re showing all the signs of the nation’s various police forces stinking with the attitude of “us vs. them”, where the common populace is the enemy. As these Gestapo tactics continue and the tyrannical beast snaps at more and more ordinary citizens, more ordinary citizens are going to be hurt or killed without the slightest residual taint of reasonable cause.

If we continue on this march toward despotic rule, we the People will be eventually forced into making the decision of whether to submit to the Jack boot stomping on our face, or fight back.

Three submarine Internet cables have been cut, leading to a massive outage of Internet connectivity in the Middle East, including the now known exaggerated complete cutoff of all Internet traffic to and from Iran.

One submarine cable being cut is an event for news. Three underwater cables cut within 72 hours of each other, all to the same region, but at different locations? Something is up and it doesn’t smell good. I have a very difficult time believing that this is coincidence.

The potential for this being a strategic, purposeful event to cut off communication with Iran cannot be overlooked. From a military perspective, this could be the sign of a coming attack against Iran.

Time will tell.

Addendum, Feb 2nd: It appears that Iran had partial bandwidth all along and India may be near 80% back by Monday. More here. Still no word as why three cables in two different areas were cut.

As a side note to this all, here is a fascinating article from back in 2001, talking about the NSA’s potential tapping of an undersea fiber run and just how much data transfer between continents is hinged on a few strands of fiber.

It is also interesting to note that Iran started its oil burse on Friday, no longer accepting the US dollar as trade currency. Exaggerated or not, this still smells fishy.

Another article on the incident here.

If you haven’t seen this video yet, it is guaranteed to make you irate and generally disgusted. The woman in question in this video was the victim of an assault, who ends up being (as far as I’m concerned) sexually assaulted by the police and then charge with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after they respond to “help” her.

The story and link to the video can be found at WKYC-TV.

The video shows the poor woman having her clothes forcibly stripped from her body against her will. Nor was Hope Steffey ever given medical help for her injuries from the original assault. The sheriff has the gall to say that her clothes were removed from her for her own safety.

Remind me never to call 9-1-1 for help in Stark county Ohio.