Man still uses film to document his molestation of children while Principal of school allows parents to be kept in the dark.
Mark Berndt, 61,
The mentality of the teaching profession is distilled down into this story.
Parents are fools, children are profit centers, civil rights do not matter as we the teachers and administrators make the rules.
The elementary school teacher told the children it was a game. He lured them into his third-grade classroom, blindfolded them, gagged them and set cockroaches crawling on their faces.
But that is nothing.
He then would feed the blindfolded children semen from a spoon or on a cookie.
Some parents picking up their pre-kindergarteners at the school on Tuesday complained that Miramonte Principal Martin Sandoval at Miramonte Elementary School in South Los Angeles should have notified them when the photos were found.
PARENTS SHUT THE HELL UP. WE ARE CONTINUING TO ALLOW HIM TO DO THIS WHILE WE BUILD A STRONGER CASE…..
Respect Authority dammit!
The cops could have arrested Berndt on misdemeanor charges when the investigation began but chose to build a stronger felony case,
The teacher is not believed to have had contact with children during the investigation period that the stronger case was being built but surveillance of Berndt, “…was routine. It wasn’t 24-7”
(the parents) “concern is why, if the principal knew this in advance, why didn’t he inform us?”
(the parents wanted to know) “How long has he been doing this?”
Miramonte Principal Martin Sandoval at Miramonte Elementary School in South Los Angles did not have a satisfactory explanation.
“If it wasn’t for the film processor, this could still be continuing today,” said Lt. Carlos Marquez of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department. (Well the cops solve very few crimes they almost always have citizens turning in criminals. The cops just handle the paperwork.)
Moving up the age bracket we have Jerry
Who today is getting a list of those that have come forward accusing him of homo-molesting them so he can build a better defense against going to the big butt fuck house.
Too bad this clown was a homo or he could have claimed that it was mass hysteria. Like the Salem witches….
CHEERLEADERS with Tourette’s syndrome. Like a fly buzzing against the window, this weird arrangement of words flitted across the edge of my consciousness last week. I kept thinking I should take a minute to track down the Onion piece from which this kooky phrase surely emanated, but finally committed some desultory Googling, and discovered that the buzzing idea correlated (more or less) to an actual event. A break in the case — and the appearance of two of the girls in a television interview — brought the story to national attention.
One afternoon last October in a small town about 50 miles from Buffalo, a high school cheerleader lay down for a nap, and woke up changed. She had been struck not with Tourette’s but with a host of symptoms that resembled it: facial tics, uncontrollable movement, stuttering, verbal outbursts. Several other schoolmates have been afflicted, for a total of 14 girls. One boy reported symptoms.
Parents, school officials and doctors investigated possible organic causes of this troubling event, and serially ruled out potential suspects, from vaccine reactions to environmental hazards. (Erin Brockovich is looking into possible toxic causes.) The girls continued to suffer, dropped out of school and gave television interviews in which their arms looped around wildly and their voices broke and warbled.
Well, that’s the kind of nutty story that only happens once, or so I briefly thought, until more focused Googling quickly led me to an almost identical episode, this one in 2002, in a high school in rural North Carolina. Once again, a cheerleader was first to manifest the strange symptoms, and once again other girls, some of them cheerleaders, were struck with the same condition.
There are famous cases that closely mimic these strange events. In 1962, in a girls’ school in Tanzania, a laughing epidemic spread to 95 students and lasted for months. In 1965 there was a fainting episode at a girls’ school in Blackburn, England, that landed 85 girls in the hospital. In 1983, when there was a widespread fear of chemical warfare in the West Bank, more than 900 Arab schoolgirls and a few female Israeli soldiers exhibited the symptoms of having been gassed, but doctors found no specific cause for the outbreak.
In all of these cases, the ultimate diagnosis — unpalatable in our post-Freudian age — was good old-fashioned hysteria. In the cheerleader cases, the first girl seems to have suffered from some kind of mental or emotional distress, which she expressed through otherwise unrelated physical symptoms. The other girls — victims of yesteryear’s mass hysteria and today’s mass psychogenic illness, in which the symptoms of hysteria pass from person to person, like contagion — believed the condition to be communicable and “caught” it.
Hysteria is the most retrograde and non-womyn-empowering condition. It’s not supposed to happen anymore (we have Title IX!), but it won’t seem to go away. Both history and myth are filled with stories of girls exhibiting bizarre symptoms around the time of puberty — from Cassandra and her raving, to the girls of the Salem witch trials, to the girls whose households were believed to be the site of poltergeist hauntings, to cheerleaders in New York and North Carolina. Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys.
What no one has been able to determine is why this is so, why it is the cheerleaders and not the linebackers who come down with tics and stuttering. Female adolescence is — universally — an emotionally and psychologically intense period. It is during this time that girls become aware of the emergence of womanhood, with both the great joy and promise that come with it, and also the threat of danger. Much on their minds is their new potential for childbearing, an event that for most of human history has been fraught with physical peril. Furthermore, their emergence as sexual creatures brings with it heady excitement and increased physical vulnerability. They are also sharply aware that soon they will have to leave home forever, and at the very moment when they are most keenly desirous of its comforts and protections.
Most parents of adolescent girls will never have to contend with episodes of hysteria of the kind experienced by the cheerleaders. But anyone with a teenage daughter can attest that this is a time of emotional extremes and high drama, of girls who are one moment affectionate youngsters and the next screaming banshees. “What’s gotten into you?” the perplexed mother in “The Exorcist” wonders about her demonized daughter; it’s a question that the mothers of non-possessed girls often ask during the teenage years.
What girls need during this time is a stable and supportive space in which to work out all of this drama. In many respects a teenage girl’s home is more important to her than at any time since she was a small child. She also needs emotional support and protection from the most corrosive cultural forces that seek to exploit her when she is least able to resist. Most of all she needs some privacy to work to make a way for herself as a strong and confident young woman. The emotional swings of normal female adolescence attest to its intensity, and they are also the reason girls need and deserve more protection during this time of their lives. As a neurologist treating the New York girls said: “These girls will get better. We have to give them time and space.”
Caitlin Flanagan is the author most recently, of “Girl Land.”
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on January 29, 2012, on page SR4 of the New York edition with the headline: Hysteria and the Teenage Girl.
Couples fucked by trusting Phfizer:
Pfizer said on Tuesday it was recalling about 1 million packets of birth control pills in the United States because they may not contain enough contraceptive to prevent pregnancy.
Pfizer said the birth control pills posed no health threat to women but it urged consumers affected by the recall to “begin using a non-hormonal form of contraception immediately.”
The drugmaker said the issue involved 14 lots of Lo/Ovral-28 tablets and 14 lots of Norgestrel and Ethinyl Estradiol tablets.
It said an investigation had found that some blister packs of the oral contraceptive might contain an inexact count of inert or active ingredients in the tablets.
The pills were manufactured by Pfizer and marketed by Akrimax Pharmaceuticals and shipped to warehouses, clinics and retail pharmacies nationwide, the company said.
QUICK MEN
GET YOUR TESTICLES
ONTO THOSE TWEETERS!
Men could soon blast their balls with soundwaves to prevent pregnancy
What if the male version of the birth control pill wasn’t a pill at all? Scientists from the University of North Carolina say a non-oral form of male contraception is on the horizon. According to researchers, all it takes to be effective is a couple blasts of high frequency sound waves…delivered straight to the testicles.
Using ultrasound equipment typically used for physical therapy, a team of researchers led by UNC’s James Tsuruta showed that exposing the testes of rats to two 15-minute “doses” of ultrasonic radiation could reduce sperm counts in the rats to levels that, in humans, would result in infertility. If the effects prove reversible, and the treatment is deemed safe, ultrasonic contraception could soon become a common form of male birth control.
But would anybody actually use it? After all, having blasts of high-frequency sound waves propagate throughout your nether regions sounds pretty, well, intimidating; but preliminary human studies (which were first conducted in the 1970s but, for various reasons, never really saw much more attention until recently), show that the treatment isn’t painful at all. Plus, when you consider the benefits of sound waves over an orally administered pill, ultrasonic ball-blasts actually start to sound pretty attractive.
For one thing, it would be cheap; the equipment used to deliver the doses is already ubiquitous in sports medicine and physical therapy clinics. Plus, there’d be no expensive drugs to synthesize, which also translates to cheaper treatment.
You also wouldn’t have to remember to take a daily pill. When Tsuruta first received funding for his team’s research from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2010, he estimated that doses of ultrasound could be used to provide men with six months of reliable contraception. Of course, that was almost two years ago — before he’d had a chance to see the results of his tests on rats — but even if it only lasted two or three months, a few short visits a year would probably still be preferable to a daily pill for a lot of people.
But plenty of questions about the efficacy and safety of ultrasonic contraception remain, namely: how long does a single treatment last, are the treatment’s effects reversible, do multiple treatments cause any long-term damage, and do the ultrasonic doses have any negative effects on babies themselves?
“It’s a nice idea, but a lot more work is needed,” said University of Sheffield’s Allan Pacey in an interview with BBC News, claiming it was likely that sperm production would recover, but that “sperm might be damaged and any baby might be damaged,” as well.
“The last thing we want is a lingering damage to sperm,” he said. A provisional version of the researchers’ findings are published in Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology.
Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology via BBC.
But no worries just go on vacation: and DIE!
Nevada health officials found Legionella bacteria in water samples at the Luxor in Las Vegas this month after receiving notice that a prior guest at the hotel-casino had died from Legionnaires’ disease.
The public health notice issued by the Southern Nevada Health District on Monday said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alerted the agency to three Luxor guests who were diagnosed with Legionnaires’ disease.
Two cases were reported in spring 2011, but water samples taken at that time didn’t detect the bacteria and both patients recovered. The third case was reported in January — no name or details about the victim were given — and the hotel’s water again was tested. “At this time environmental sampling was positive for Legionella bacteria,” the notice says.
The Luxor took steps to treat the water in the room where the deceased guest stayed within 24 hours of receiving notice, according to media reports. Gordon Absher, vice president of public affairs for MGM Resorts International, which owns the Luxor, says the company is embarking on a voluntary remediation of the entire hotel. The hotel also posted information about the disease on a Web page and has a hotline for guests to call.
Brian Labus, senior epidemiologist at the health district, says the bacteria may grow in shower heads or other water fixtures in hotel rooms that haven’t been used for a while so water doesn’t circulate regularly. “There’s nothing you can do as a guest to prevent it,” he says.
Legionnaires’ disease is a type of pneumonia that can be fatal in 5% to 30% of cases, especially among the elderly and people with respiratory problems. It’s transmitted by breathing in vapor or mist tainted by bacteria, not by person-to-person contact, and the incubation period is 2 to 14 days. Symptoms include high fever, chills, cough and sometimes muscle aches, the health district’s notice says.
Last July, six cases of Legionniares’ disease were reported to the CDC by people who had stayed at the Aria Resort & Casino, which is partly owned by MGM Resorts. All patients were treated and recovered. In that instance, Absher says the hotel sent out 14,000 letters and posted a notice on its website to inform prior guests about the possibility of having been exposed to the bacteria. (A civil lawsuit filed over those cases is pending.)
But don’t worry we can all blame it on Global Warming:
January 31, 2012, 10:04 pm
Climate Researchers Get Their Wall Street Journal Moment
By ANDREW C. REVKINThe Wall Street Journal has just published “Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate,” a rebuttal from a long list of climate researchers criticizing last week’s much-discussed 16-author op-ed article titled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.”
Here’s the opening paragraph of the response and a link to the rest:
Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations. [Read the rest.]
On Wednesday I’ll be posting fresh input from some economists, who — whether one likes it or not — are focused on the arena that will largely decide what does and does not happen in the planet’s atmosphere, oceans and frozen places.
THAT IS UNLESS THERE IS A VOLCANO THAT IS ACTING UP THEN WE MAY WANT A LITTLE WARMING…
New CU-led study may answer long-standing questions about enigmatic Little Ice Age
January 30, 2012 •
Natural Sciences, Environment, Institutes
Discovery & Innovation, Discoveries & Achievements, Research Collaborations, Student Research
A new University of Colorado Boulder-led study appears to answer contentious questions about the onset and cause of Earth’s Little Ice Age, a period of cooling temperatures that began after the Middle Ages and lasted into the late 19th century.
According to the new study, the Little Ice Age began abruptly between A.D. 1275 and 1300, triggered by repeated, explosive volcanism and sustained by a self- perpetuating sea ice-ocean feedback system in the North Atlantic Ocean, according to CU-Boulder Professor Gifford Miller, who led the study. The primary evidence comes from radiocarbon dates from dead vegetation emerging from rapidly melting icecaps on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, combined with ice and sediment core data from the poles and Iceland and from sea ice climate model simulations, said Miller.
While scientific estimates regarding the onset of the Little Ice Age range from the 13th century to the 16th century, there is little consensus, said Miller. There is evidence the Little Ice Age affected places as far away as South America and China, although it was particularly evident in northern Europe. Advancing glaciers in mountain valleys destroyed towns, and famous paintings from the period depict people ice skating on the Thames River in London and canals in the Netherlands, waterways that were ice-free in winter before and after the Little Ice Age.
“The dominant way scientists have defined the Little Ice Age is by the expansion of big valley glaciers in the Alps and in Norway,” said Miller. “But the time it took for European glaciers to advance far enough to demolish villages would have been long after the onset of the cold period,” said Miller, a fellow at CU’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.
Most scientists think the Little Ice Age was caused either by decreased summer solar radiation, erupting volcanoes that cooled the planet by ejecting shiny aerosol particles that reflected sunlight back into space, or a combination of both, said Miller.
The new study suggests that the onset of the Little Ice Age was caused by an unusual, 50-year-long episode of four massive tropical volcanic eruptions. Climate models used in the new study showed that the persistence of cold summers following the eruptions is best explained by a sea ice-ocean feedback system originating in the North Atlantic Ocean.
“This is the first time anyone has clearly identified the specific onset of the cold times marking the start of the Little Ice Age,” said Miller. “We also have provided an understandable climate feedback system that explains how this cold period could be sustained for a long period of time. If the climate system is hit again and again by cold conditions over a relatively short period — in this case, from volcanic eruptions — there appears to be a cumulative cooling effect.”
A paper on the subject is being published Jan. 31 in Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. The paper was authored by scientists and students from CU-Boulder, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, the University of Iceland, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The study was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Icelandic Science Foundation.
As part of the study, Miller and his colleagues radiocarbon-dated roughly 150 samples of dead plant material with roots intact collected from beneath receding ice margins of ice caps on Baffin Island. There was a large cluster of “kill dates” between A.D. 1275 and 1300, indicating the plants had been frozen and engulfed by ice during a relatively sudden event.
Both low-lying and higher altitude plants all died at roughly the same time, indicating the onset of the Little Ice Age on Baffin Island — the fifth largest island in the world — was abrupt. The team saw a second spike in plant kill dates at about A.D. 1450, indicating the quick onset of a second major cooling event.
To broaden the study, the team analyzed sediment cores from a glacial lake linked to the 367-square-mile Langjökull ice cap in the central highlands of Iceland that reaches nearly a mile high. The annual layers in the cores — which can be reliably dated by using tephra deposits from known historic volcanic eruptions on Iceland going back more than 1,000 years — suddenly became thicker in the late 13th century and again in the 15th century due to increased erosion caused by the expansion of the ice cap as the climate cooled, he said.
“That showed us the signal we got from Baffin Island was not just a local signal, it was a North Atlantic signal,” said Miller. “This gave us a great deal more confidence that there was a major perturbation to the Northern Hemisphere climate near the end of the 13th century.” Average summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere did not return to those of the Middle Ages until the 20th century, and the temperatures of the Middle Ages are now exceeded in many areas, he said.
The team used the NCAR-based Community Climate System Model to test the effects of volcanic cooling on Arctic sea ice extent and mass. The model, which simulated various sea ice conditions from about A.D. 1150-1700, showed several large, closely spaced eruptions could have cooled the Northern Hemisphere enough to trigger Arctic sea ice growth.
The models showed sustained cooling from volcanoes would have sent some of the expanding Arctic sea ice down along the eastern coast of Greenland until it eventually melted in the North Atlantic. Since sea ice contains almost no salt, when it melted the surface water became less dense, preventing it from mixing with deeper North Atlantic water. This weakened heat transport back to the Arctic and creating a self-sustaining feedback system on the sea ice long after the effects of the volcanic aerosols subsided, he said.
“Our simulations showed that the volcanic eruptions may have had a profound cooling effect,” says NCAR scientist Bette Otto-Bliesner, a co-author of the study. “The eruptions could have triggered a chain reaction, affecting sea ice and ocean currents in a way that lowered temperatures for centuries.”
The researchers set the solar radiation at a constant level in the climate models, and Miller said the Little Ice Age likely would have occurred without decreased summer solar radiation at the time. “Estimates of the sun’s variability over time are getting smaller, it’s now thought by some scientists to have varied little more in the last millennia than during a standard 11-year solar cycle,” he said.
One of the primary questions pertaining to the Little Ice Age is how unusual the warming of Earth is today, he said. A previous study led by Miller in 2008 on Baffin Island indicated temperatures today are the warmest in at least 2,000 years.
Other co-authors on the paper include CU-Boulder’s Yafang Zhong, Darren Larsen, Kurt Refsnider, Scott Lehman and Chance Anderson, NCAR’s Marika Holland and David Bailey, the University of Iceland’s Áslaug Geirsdóttir, Helgi Bjornsson and Darren Larsen, UC-Irvine’s John Southon and the University of Edinburgh’s Thorvaldur Thordarson. Larsen is doctoral student jointly at CU-Boulder and the University of Iceland.
Contact:
Gifford Miller, 303-492-6962
Gmiller@colorado.edu
Bette Otto-Bliesner, NCAR, 303-497-1723
Jim Scott, CU-Boulder media relations, 303-492-3114
Kate Ramsayer, AGU media relations, 202-777-7524
David Hosansky, NCAR/UCAR media relations, 303-497-8611
Cheryl Dybas, NSF communications, 703-292-7734
BUT FUCK ALL THAT COLD WARM AGW BULLSHIT A BIG ROCK IS WHAT WE SHOULD BE WORRYING ABOUT AS ONE LIKE THIS HAS WIPED OUT ALL LIFE ON THE PLANET MANY TIMES IN THE PAST.
AND WILL DO SO AGAIN IN THE FUTURE….
Eros asteroid makes close approach to Earth
This image is of 433 Eros a near Earth asteroid that made its closest approach to Earth in more than 30 years on Tuesday.
MIAMI –
The first near Earth asteroid ever discovered was 433 Eros back in 1898.
Tuesday January 31st, the asteroid will make history again as it makes its closest approach to Earth since 1975. Its closest approach will be 16.6 million miles away that is roughly 70 times the moon’s average distance from Earth so there is no danger with Euros passing this close.
433 Eros orbits Earth and comes within twenty million miles every 1.76 years.
BUT IF YOU BELIEVE THE TOP RESEARCHER IN THE ORIGINS OF LIFE THE MAGIC OF THE SPRITS WILL PERSEVERE….
Biochemist publishes a paper solving the mystery of life, but no one understands it
Case Western Reserve University biochemist Erik Andrulis has just published a paper about a discovery that goes way beyond the RNA he usually researches. He claims he’s discovered the secret to life itself – and it all has to do with energy-spirit things he calls gyres. His 105-page paper is called “Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life,” and you can download the whole thing for free from the peer-reviewed journal Life. The problem is that even sympathetic readers found the paper incomprehensible and (worse for scientists) untestable.
Photo by James Sugar for National Geographic.
Nevertheless, Case Western decided to send out a press release about the paper to international science news service Eurekalert. In it, they wrote something that sounds a bit like an early script treatment for Avatar:
The earth is alive, asserts a revolutionary scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that purportedly inanimate, non-living objects—for example, planets, water, proteins, and DNA—are animate, that is, alive . . . To test his paradigm, Dr. Andrulis designed bidirectional flow diagrams that both depict and predict the dynamics of energy and matter. While such diagrams may be foreign to some scientists, they are standard reaction notation to chemists, biochemists, and biologists. Dr. Andrulis has used his theory to successfully predict and identify a hidden signature of RNA biogenesis in his laboratory at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He is now applying the gyromodel to unify and explain the evolution and development of human beings.
As people started pondering that incredibly strange assertion, the story picked up speed. Late last week, journalists began buzzing about the bizarre paper that purported to explain all of life using “gyraxioms.”
In a wry article about Andrulis’ work, Ars Technica‘s John Timmer summed the paper up:
The basic idea is that everything, from subatomic particles to living systems, is based on helical systems the author calls “gyres,” which transform matter, energy, and information. These transformations then determine the properties of various natural systems, living and otherwise. What are these gyres? It’s really hard to say; even Andrulis admits that they’re just “a straightforward and non-mathematical core model” (although he seems to think that’s a good thing). Just about everything can be derived from this core model; the author cites “major phenomena including, but not limited to, quantum gravity, phase transitions of water, why living systems are predominantly CHNOPS (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur), homochirality of sugars and amino acids, homeoviscous adaptation, triplet code, and DNA mutations.”
Just in case you get confused, Andrulis includes an enormous glossary, including these choice entries:
Alternagyre: A gyrosystem whose gyrapex is not triquantal
Dextragyre: A right-handed gyre or gyromodel
Focagyre: A gyre that is the focal point of analysis or discussion
Gyradaptor: The gyre singularity-a quantum-that exerts all forces on the gyrosystem
Gyrapex: The relativistically high potential, excited, unstable, learning state of a particle
Gyraxiom: A fact, condition, principle, or rule that constrains and defines the theoretical framework
Gyre: The spacetime shape or path of a particle or group of particles; a quantum
Nobody who’s read the paper seems entirely sure whether it’s a hoax, an eccentric intellectual noodle, or an unfortunate symptom of mental illness. But one thing seems certain: It isn’t science.
Case Western quickly took their press release off the medical school website, though you can still see it on Eurekalert. Ivan Oransky wrote about it on Retraction Watch, noting that he’d asked the medical school’s communications officer Liz Lear why they promoted the paper and then deleted all references to it. Lear said:
We have been evaluating our processes regarding media outreach and elected to remove the release from our website while we assess our policies surrounding promotional communications.
So, it sounds like Lear and her colleagues are still just “assessing” the weirdness of Andrulis’ paper too.
This is one of those K-Pax situations, where you’ll always be left wondering if maybe the guy with the funny glint in his eye might have been right about the aliens. Or the gyradaptors. Then again, maybe he was wrong. I’m not sure which is worse.