Midnight, Precisely

Do you listen to the Decemberists?
If you do...do you do so with a dictionary? Because I've found it necessary.
Here's a list of vocab words that Colin Meloy thinks you ought to know:

curlew - any of several shorebirds of the genus Numenius, having a long, slender, downcurved bill, as the common N. arquata, of Europe.

arabesque - a sinuous, spiraling, undulating, or serpentine line or linear motif.

cormorant - any of several voracious, totipalmate seabirds of the family Phalacrocoracidae, as Phalacrocorax carbo, of America, Europe, and Asia, having a long neck and a distensible pouch under the bill for holding captured fish, used in China for catching fish.

Sycorax - witch who is the mother of Caliban in The Tempest by William Shakespeare.

Patagon - The Patagones or Patagonian giants are a mythical race of people, who first began to appear in early European accounts of the then little-known region and coastline of Patagonia. They were supposed to have exceeded at least double normal human height, some accounts giving heights of 12 to 15 feet or more. Tales of these improbable people would take a hold over European concepts of the region for some 250 years, until they were substantially debunked at the end of the 18th century. However, South American legends speak of several giant tribal races, such as the Chancas or Chanak of Peru, which are said to be 7 feet tall on average, and have red hair.

parallax - the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer.

And those are all just from one song.

Apparently Justin Timberlake cheated on Jessica Biel by kissing Kate Hudson.
Dude...can you blame him? I'd kiss Kate Hudson, and I'm straight.

Anderson Cooper? Dreamboat.

Our United States

After reading a book by the Disinformation team titled Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide To Secrets and Lies, it struck me how little I knew about things that everyone in the country should be aware of. So I made a list of things that I believe the average American has no clue about. Keep in mind that I only listed things that can be proved as true. See what surprises you:

1. About one half of Europe (including Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portufal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, & the United Kingdom to be exact) are being governed under a dictatorship. The European Union was created without the people of Europe's support or even knowledge. The officials were not elected. Treaties were made to be changed so they were in accordance with EU policy, and any country that failed to approve such changes were promptly bullied into submission (see: "Vote again, and if you say 'no' this time you'll lose your job." Ask Denmark, they know about it.) When a country joins the EU, they essentially lose status as a country and become a state of the EU (think 'London, Europe). The EU claims otherwise, but when the Freedom Party in Austria, under free and democratic election, created a coalition government with the conservative People's Party, the EU claimed the FP was fascist and sanctioned Austria. Only two-thirds of the member states are needed to vote for banning a country. What this means is that any of the member countries, at any time, can be considered fascist (or threatening in some way to EU policy, which is apparently the only rule that matters) and have its voting rights taken away. The country is still left with obligations such as payments to Brussels and enforcement of EU laws. That country essentially becomes a colony. Think of it this way: you know how in order to pass an amendment to the Constitution, at least two-thirds of each house in Congress must approve it? Well, in America, after that three-fourths of the states must pass it also. Now imagine if we did away with the states' ability to vote on the amendment, and what they were actually voting on was the ability to sanction a state rather than an amendment. Pretty crazy, right? We're sick of all those Mormons in Utah, so let's take away their voting rights.
   On top of all this, the voting system in EU meetings is a joke! Smaller parties have less time to speak in a debate than a larger party. About ten seconds is allowed for each vote, and the list of laws is in French (the EU doesn't have one official language, which makes everything more expensive and time-consuming). The list is only available a few hours before the voting, so a Czech whose French is not so good has got ten seconds to figure out which law they're on, remember what it says, and decide yes or no. Mistakes! Some British politicians who voted 300 times in a two-hour session accidentally agreed to corpus juris, which basically abolished the British criminal justice system, including trial by jury and habeas corpus. Worst of all, if you're absent, your vote is counted as a yes to every motion made.
   And finally, the EU has decided to promote regional and minority languages. Well, that sounds nice, right? Keep people in their sense of individuality...wrong! The reason for this is to divide and conquer. The EU admittedly calls itself a 'Tower of Babel.' And what was the purpose of the Tower of Babel, do you remember? If the learning of other more widely used languages is discouraged, this sets up a sort of wall between these regular citizens and the rest of the world. It will serve to isolate localities and limit opportunities for them in the wider world. They will become easier to control. Wow.
2. The Columbine Sheriff's Department would have you think that Eric Harris and Dylan Kliebold planned and executed the school shooting themselves. This is not true. There were at least three other participants seen helping the two, and witnesses agree that the shooting kept going at least an hour or two after Harris and Kliebold turned the gun on themselves. Randy Brown, a father of a Columbine student, was quoted as saying "They're still lying to us about what happened and withholding information." William Erickson, a retired Chief Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court and chair of the Governor's Columbine Review Commission said "I've never seen such a great effort to withhold evidence that has material relevance to the work of the commission."
3. The US government would have you believe that there are no cases of Mad Cow in our country. Wrong! Some background info: Mad Cow (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) is caused by a special kind of pathogen called a prion. This pathogen is special in that it's nearly indestructible. It is not a living organism, which means it can withstand conditions which kill any other known pathogen. They can survive temperatures upwards of 1100 degrees Fahrenheit, be soaked in radiation, jump species barriers (meaning infect any creature), evade the immune system, and replicate themselves. It's less killable than HIV, and much easier to transmit. The disease works by filling brain tissue with spongy holes, basically turning your noggin into the equivalent of Swiss cheese. When present in humans, it's called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Because the symptoms are so similar, the brain decay is often misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's or other dementia. The government continues to not test possible cases for CJD. It's easy to say there is no problem is you refuse to observe it.
   There are lots of details about which cows have more of a tendency to contract mad cow, but I'll spare you. The basics? A common practice in the US is to feed these more at-risk cows, ground up, to other healthier cows that will later be butchered for sale to the public. So the risk for spreading the disease is through the roof, especially when you consider that around 37 million cows are slaughtered each year, and less than 1000 of them are tested. Add to that the fact that they don't test for it in hospitals, so there are likely blood donors who don't realize they have CJD due to its slow incubation. Tons of drugs are derived from cattle; growth hormones from pituitary glands, adrenaline products, cortisone, insulin, and stomach ulcer treatments to name a few. There are documented cases of CJD infection resulting from pituitary extracts. Vaccines are grown in fetal-calf serum, then injected into nearly every 4-year-old child in the US.
   Obviously, as it is there is absolutely no way to definitively avoid CJD; cow products are everywhere. The only system that would work is detection, and the government is clearly failing in that area, and exclusively ignoring any evidence that this is a serious problem. According to papers, a mysterious "neurological disease" has infected fourteen workers at a Minnesota pork plant recently. And just in the past week in the Indianapolis Star, it was reported that two workers at an Indiana pork plant have the same disease. They won't release the information of which plant, so workers at the very same plant have no idea what risk they are being exposed to. Which means that pork from that plant which has been shipped to grocery stores has not been identified as risky. That's fucked up.
   What's most fucked up is that the World Health Organization set up concrete guidelines to limit the spread of BSE & CJD, and the US is ignoring all four of them. Check out the guidelines here: http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/greger12304.cfm. Take a look at the main page for more stories on why the US sucks at beef.
4. Argument for veganism: No nutrients essential to man or any of his likely predecessors are synthesized by animals (William Harris, M.D.) The human body only needs about 27 grams of protein a day. On an omnivorous diet, the average person consumes about 100 grams of protein a day. Milk is actually a poor source of dietary calcium (so those Got Milk? ads are really just propaganda for the dairy industry). Humans, just like cows, can get all the calcium they need from a plant-based diet. Studies show that foods originating from animal sources make the blood acidic. When this occurs, the blood leeches calcium from the bones to increase alkalinity, which sets your calcium-depleted bones up for osteoporosis. John Robbins explains that the only research that suggests that the consumption of dairy products might be helpful in preventing osteoporosis has been paid for by the National Dairy Council. And fish? Forty-three per cent of salmon, twenty-five per cent of swordfish, and fifty per cent of lake whitefish have PCBs (carcinogenic liquids banned in 1976). Nearly half the fish tested was contaminated by bacteria from human or animal feces.
   Proportion of cancers that are diet-related: 4o%
5. Forget what you think you know about Waco. The Davidians were not a dangerous cult, and they did nothing to provoke the ATF. Every time a peaceful resolution was worked out, the ATF violated the terms of the agreement by doing something outrageously violent (often, destroying part of the building the Davidians were housed in). Bottom line, Koresh and his followers, including many women and children, were purposefully murdered for no reason. The ATF was facing some bad hype and had to go to court soon, and they saw Waco as the ideal situation to spin the facts and create a positive-PR situation for themselves.
6. The list of people against the War on Drugs goes something like this: Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Dan Quayle, George Schultz, Peter Bourne, Ron Paul (at least, he was), Jesse Ventura, much of the NAACP, Walter Cronkite, and several others including former governors and mayors of US states, justices of the supreme court, many presidents of other countries, two former US Attorneys General, several CEOs, tons of professors at Ivy League universities, around a dozen Nobel Laureates, and the conservative economist Milton Friedman.
7. The government knew what was going to happen on September 11th, 2001, and chose to do nothing about it. The amount of evidence is so overwhelming that I'll only bring up a few points. FBI agents have come forward and revealed that they were instructed to do nothing about the information they had received, and were often pulled off assignments when they discovered too much useful information about the attack to come. Several countries who knew of the plans warned us, including Israel, the Philippines, an Iranian detainee in Germany, Russia, and bin Laden himself (who was under surveillance at the time of the attacks.) Schoolchildren whose parents were from middle eastern countries warned their teachers about the oncoming attacks and didn't come to school on the 11th. The code name of the project was known (Bojinka). A Washington Post reporter in the Philippines wrote: "Watching the attacks in New York and Washington unfold on television earlier this month, an investigator here gasped, 'It's Bojinka.' He said later: 'We told the Americans everything about Bojinka. Why didn't they pay attention?'" Important persons in the US, including Salman Rushdie, were warned ahead of time to stay off airlines.
8. The Vatican Bank is pretty much the most corrupt financial institution there ever was.
9. Lastly, the 16th amendment which states that US citizens must pay income tax...was passed illegally. It should not even be in the Constitution. Not a single one of the 38 states that supposedly ratified the amendment as it appears in the Constitution actually did. It didn't even make it through the Senate in Kentucky, and yet Kentucky is on that list. Nothing will probably ever be done about this.