Excerpt:

All you want to be is insane
Wishing you were more than just plain
And when you try you try too hard it comes off fake

Many times I wanted to say
Plastic people like you will break
And soon enough it caught up and you went away

And if I
Never see
You Again
It’ll be too soon to make amends

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For all the oldschool people who actually still use chat clients (like ICQ, MSN or AIM): check out Miranda. I have been using it for a couple of years now.

Advantages:

• Very small.
• Needs very little RAM.
• Addon system similar to Firefox: the program offers what is needed, you can get the rest (all the fancy stuff noone really wants, like games) via addons/plugins.
• You can run many chat clients on Miranda at the same time. Look at the screenshot – use see my online contacts for Facebook, ICQ, Gmail and Skype. It works for many more protocols, that means you have all your contacts from all different kinds of programs in ONE chat program. MSN, AIM, JABBER etc. pp. are supported.
• For browser-based protocols like Facebook and Gmail you do not need to have your browser opened.
• It is not green (like ICQ), it is not flashy (like ICQ), and it refrains from regularly doing stuff you very much do not want it to do (yes, you guessed already … like ICQ).
• Unfortunately, Miranda still refuses to do my dishes. But apart from that, it’s a pretty neat tool.

EDIT: No, I did not get money for posting this. Too bad really …

The Devil’s Dictionary was written in the end of the 19th century, and contains definitions of 1.000 words.

And I have the strong feeling that it was authored by a previous incarnation of Terry Pratchett.

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

TURKEY, n. A large bird whose flesh when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude. Incidentally, it is pretty good eating.

VOTE, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

CANNIBAL, n. A gastronome of the old school who preserves the simple tastes and adheres to the natural diet of the pre-pork period.

ARMOR, n. The kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.

SAINT, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.

– Dictionary of the Devil (A-Z)

(Thanks to Solveig – business as usual)

A couple of months ago, the Vatican officially stated that “only 1.5 – 5 per cent of Catholic clergy were involved in child sex abuse”.

Read that again: “only 1.5 – 5 per cent”. Right. I wrote an article about it back then, containing some extremely unpleasant facts.

Yesterday, Malte Welding put together a comprehensive overview I want to share here.

In 1962, an official document was sent to all Catholic bishops, signed by the Pope John XXIII. The Guardian brought a story about this document in 2003, also publishing the document online.

The document was confirmed as genuine by the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. It encourages to “cover up cases of sexual abuse or risk being thrown out of the Church”. The Guardian writes:

“[The document] is called ‘Crimine solicitationies’, which translates as ‘instruction on proceeding in cases of solicitation’. It focuses on sexual abuse initiated as part of the confessional relationship between a priest and a member of his congregation. The instructions outline a policy of ’strictest’ secrecy in dealing with allegations of sexual abuse and threatens those who speak out with excommunication. They also call for the victim to take an oath of secrecy at the time of making a complaint to Church officials.”

Now comes the interesting part: as dailykos.com pointed out in 2005, Cardinal Ratzinger (also known as Benedict XVI – the current pope) is “the author of a May 2001 letter to bishops stating that the ‘Crimine Solicitationies’ law [...] is still in effect”.

The Catholic Church has been systematically abusing children for decades. They have an official document, encouraging clergy to cover abuse up, and “encourage” victims to swear an oath to keep it secret.

And the current pope Ratzinger officially signed a letter that this practise should continue, in the year 2001.

I feel very, very sick. And I am pretty sure that holy Ratzinger and his devout group of bishops have broken international law here, for a couple of decades. Not necessarily by abusing children – but by covering thousands of cases up.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just re-read a very recommendable article about depression (Nettle, 2004), and found some numbers I had not payed attention to before:

“Depression tends to be a recurrent or even chronic disease (Pakriev et al., 2001). Although around 80% of patients respond to treatment, only around 50% of them achieve complete remission, which leaves around 30% or 35% of individuals becoming long-term chronic depressives (Bondolfi, 2002). Amongst those who recover, about 50% relapse within 2 years (Belsher and Costello, 1988). In long-term studies, the rate of continuous freedom from illness is very low; 20% over 20 years (Kiloh et al., 1988), or 11% over 25 years (Brodatyet al., 2001). Even post-partum depression [...] entails an extremely high rate of subsequent non-post-partum psychiatric illness (Robling et al., 2000).

These results taken together have been argued by Brodaty et al. (2001) to necessitate a paradigm shift in thinking about depression, such that it is viewed as a chronic illness, with recurrence of the norm.”

On the other hand, it has been stated repeatedly that depression is overdiagnosed, and that a lot of episodes we see as “diseases” are normal, adaptive responses (e.g. Nesse, 2001) and would vanish after a couple of weeks or months. Maybe pharmaceutical treatment interferes with adaptive responses, and prolongs those episodes of low mood into clinical depression.

I’ll try to find out more about this in my PHD.

• A school in the US equipped students with laptops – and actively spied on them and their families at home using integrated webcams (without their knowledge or consent). Moreover, they were actually stupid enough to discipline a pupil for “improper behavior”, using a photograph of the webcam as evidence. (source)
• Over 200 Russians got sick after a mass in the church St Michael in Irkutsk. The infection was caused by … holy water. (source)
• “Don’t you hate it when you can’t get that pesky alien implant out of your groin? Dr. Roger Leir is here to help.” They are serious about this, by the way: Dr. Leir actually removes alien implants, if you happen to have problems with them. He has lots of “evidence” posted on his website. (source)
• “Harvard professor and noted Google critic Ben Edelmen provided video evidence of the Google toolbar transmitting data back to the Mountain View Chocolate Factory after he chose to disable the application in the browser window he was currently using.” (source)
• Utah passed a bill two days ago, disputing science of climate change, claiming emissions are “essentially harmless”. (source)
• The German cinemas increased their turnover by 22.8% in the year 2009. So much for “internet piracy is killing the movie industry”. On the other hand, it has to be stated that there seems to be a rather sad ongoing trend: small cinemas are closing down, and the big chains are gaining more and more market share. But the same applies to all other stores, e.g. bookstores, so that’s nothing the “pirating” can be blamed for. It’s the way capitalism works, I presume. (source)

Psephology (“Lore of Pebbles”) is the statistical analysis of elections.

– via Basti

In the US, polygraphs (lie detectors) are still widely used by law enforcement – in spite of the fact that they rely on measuring physiological excitement.

“You have not slept and were treated badly for the last 24 hours. We are three bullies in police uniforms, and we are armed. We want to know if you commited a crime. We are screaming at you.
Wait, the polygraph tells me … you are sweating! And your heart is beating fast! You must be guilty!”

This is unbelievable.

In 1988, the “Employee Polygraph Protection Act” was signed. It states that companies must not force (potential) employees to take polygraph tests in order to employ or sack them.
The idea behind this law is not that polygraphy is nonsense, but that employees’ privacy (!!) must be protected.

Again, unbelievable.

(Source: tagesschau.de)