The Oracle of Delphi

Hon. John Collier : Priestess of Delphi (1891)

In the painting, “Priestess of Delphi” by The Honorable John Collier, a priestess - the Pythia - is depicted in a trance state, seated over a fissure in the rock through which vapors rise from the underground stream. In her left hand is a sprig of laurel - in Greek mythology, Apollo’s sacred tree - and in the other hand a bowl meant to hold some of the water from the stream containing the gases.

Image via marinni and Uncertain Times.  More information from Wikipedia:

Apollo spoke through his oracle: the sibyl or priestess of the oracle at Delphi was known as the Pythia; she had to be an older woman of blameless life chosen from among the peasants of the area. She sat on a tripod seat over an opening in the earth. When Apollo slew Python, its body fell into this fissure, according to legend, and fumes arose from its decomposing body. Intoxicated by the vapors, the sibyl would fall into a trance, allowing Apollo to possess her spirit. In this state she prophesied. It has been postulated that a gas high in ethylene, known to produce violent trances, came out of this opening, though this theory remains debatable.  While in a trance the Pythia "raved" – probably a form of ecstatic speech – and her ravings were "translated" by the priests of the temple into elegant hexameters. People consulted the Delphic oracle on everything from important matters of public policy to personal affairs. The oracle could not be consulted during the winter months, for this was traditionally the time when Apollo would live among the Hyperboreans. Dionysus would inhabit the temple during his absence.

This is how Congress works...

The Senate Armed Services Committee prohibits its staff and presidential appointees requiring Senate confirmation from owning stocks or bonds in 48,096 companies that have Defense Department contracts. But the senators who sit on the influential panel are allowed to own any assets they want. And they have owned millions in interests in these firms...

The prohibition is representative of how members of Congress set strict rules on investing for others in sensitive posts in the corporate world and government while allowing themselves to manage their finances however they please...

Nineteen of the 28 senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee held assets in companies that do business with the Pentagon between 2004 and last year, according to an analysis of financial disclosure forms by The Washington Post. Those holdings were worth a total of $3.8 million to $10.2 million...

Ethics laws allow senators to hold stocks in industries they oversee. They also may push and vote for programs that could improve the bottom lines of companies in which they own stock. They are precluded, however, from taking official actions that could boost their personal wealth if they are the sole beneficiaries...

During a closed-door hearing held before the 1961 confirmations of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and other presidential appointees, some committee members said it was time to address the differing standards. "We have got to go the whole way and put the same rules on ourselves that we put on these people in the government," said Sen. Stuart Symington (D-Mo.), according to a transcript of the hearing...

"When you pass a law like that, you will have the greatest mass resignation that the world has ever seen," said Sen. Prescott Bush (R-Conn.), whose son and grandson were both president. "For heaven's sake, if you want to bring together a lot of people that do not have any touch with reality in this country to make the laws, God help the United States, in my judgment."

The matter never came to a vote, and the exemption continued.

More at the Washington Post link.

We've been flocked!

During last week's snowstorm here in Madison, this pink flamingo appeared on our front lawn.  She was accompanied by a plate of Christmas cookies and a note explaining that we had been "flocked."  An elaborate lawn ornament in her prime, the flamingo was now being repurposed as a neighborhood break-the-gloom-of-winter activity. 

The instructions accompanying her indicated that within 2-3 days we were to add a decoration and assist her in migrating to someone else's lawn.  We added a necklace of Christmas tree ornaments and helped her fly to a neighbor, who added two more flamingoes and in the dead of night moved her to someone's front yard on a different street.  She has two more weeks of travelling ahead of her before she ends up back on the originator's lawn.

Tonight is the winter solstice, which marks only the beginning of winter.  One wonders what's yet to come...

December 31.  The flamingo (now dubbed "Flo") has been returned to her home of origin, now laden with a purse, glasses, a scarf, and a variety of seasonal ornaments. 

A Qur'an "etched in Saddam Hussein's blood"

Over the course of two painstaking years in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had sat regularly with a nurse and an Islamic calligrapher; the former drawing 27 litres of his blood and the latter using it as a macabre ink to transcribe a Qur'an. But since the fall of Baghdad, almost eight years ago, it has stayed largely out of sight - locked away behind three vaulted doors.

The very existence of this item is creating some ethical dilemmas for Iraqi authorities, discussed at the Guardian link.

"It was wrong to do what he did, to write it in blood," says Sheikh Samarrai. "It is haraam [forbidden]."

Antique phalliform bottle

Title :  Bouteille en forme de phallus

Description :  16e siècle (?) Collection "Erotica"

Photo Credit :  (C) RMN / Franck Raux

 

A 16th century glass art work from the Musée National du Moyen Âge - Thermes de Cluny.  Their collection also includes a female-genitalia-shaped glass cup.

You are being monitored

Here are some excerpts from a thought-provoking article at the Washington Post.  This one is part of a series called Top Secret America - "a project two years in the making that describes the huge security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Today’s story is about those efforts at the local level, including law enforcement and homeland security agencies in every state and thousands of communities."

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.  The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.

Other democracies - Britain and Israel, to name two - are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny...

"The old view that 'if we fight the terrorists abroad, we won't have to fight them here' is just that - the old view," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told police and firefighters recently...

The total cost of the localized system is also hard to gauge. The DHS has given $31 billion in grants since 2003 to state and local governments for homeland security and to improve their ability to find and protect against terrorists, including $3.8 billion in 2010. At least four other federal departments also contribute to local efforts. But the bulk of the spending every year comes from state and local budgets that are too disparately recorded to aggregate into an overall total...

Napolitano has taken her "See Something, Say Something" campaign far beyond the traffic signs that ask drivers coming into the nation's capital for "Terror Tips" and to "Report Suspicious Activity."  She recently enlisted the help of Wal-Mart, Amtrak, major sports leagues, hotel chains and metro riders. In her speeches, she compares the undertaking to the Cold War fight against communists...

Now, instead of having to decide which license plate numbers to type into a computer console in the patrol car, an officer can simply drive around, and the automatic license plate reader on his hood captures the numbers on every vehicle nearby. If the officer pulls over a driver, instead of having to wait 20 minutes for someone back at the office to manually check records, he can use a hand-held device to instantly call up a mug shot, a Social Security number, the status of the driver's license and any outstanding warrants...

At the same time that the FBI is expanding its West Virginia database, it is building a vast repository controlled by people who work in a top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington. This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor...

As of December, there were 161,948 suspicious activity files in the classified Guardian database, mostly leads from FBI headquarters and state field offices. Two years ago, the bureau set up an unclassified section of the database so state and local agencies could send in suspicious incident reports and review those submitted by their counterparts in other states. Some 890 state and local agencies have sent in 7,197 reports so far...

And in Pennsylvania this year, a local contractor hired to write intelligence bulletins filled them with information about lawful meetings as varied as Pennsylvania Tea Party Patriots Coalition gatherings, antiwar protests and an event at which environmental activists dressed up as Santa Claus and handed out coal-filled stockings...

Since there hasn't been a solid terrorism case in Memphis yet, the equipment's greatest value has been to help drive down city crime. Where the mobile surveillance cameras are set up, criminals scatter, said Lt. Mark Rewalt, who, on a recent Saturday night, scanned the city from an altitude of 1,000 feet.

Flying in a police helicopter, Rewalt pointed out some of the cameras the DHS has funded. They are all over the city, in mall parking lots, in housing projects, at popular street hang-outs. "Cameras are what's happening now," he marveled...

There are eight pages of text at the WaPo link, and from there you can access previous stories in the series.

Another severed foot washes ashore in Washington

The remains of a human foot still encased in a shoe was found washed ashore near Tacoma about a week ago, raising to 10 the tally of feet found on Pacific Northwest beaches since 2007.

On Dec. 5, a man walking along the shore spotted the foot and called police. The foot has not been identified yet, but police believe it belonged to a juvenile or small adult.

"Our best guess someone in their mid-to-late teens," Tacoma Police spokesman Mark Fulghum said. The shoe, a boys' size 6 "Ozark Trail" hiking boot, was sold in Walmart Stores in 2004 and 2005.

Further details at the Vancouver Sun.

"Even pigeons go to heaven"

An animated short nominated for the Academy Award in 2007.

An old man, Moulin, has cut off the world and lives a miserly existence on his own.  One day he climbs a pile of books so he can reach a bottle of spirits and the stack collapses.  Fortunately a priest arrives to stop his fall but notices that the old man has brought something else to the ground as well as the bottle - a red sock containing all his savings.

The priest promises Moulin salvation if he signs over the money.  He has a device which will ensure his entry in to heacen but the old man wants to see more proof....

A cute story, but what impressed me was the quality of the animation.

Via Kuriositas.

Offered without comment

Found at Criggo.

Sudanese woman publicly flogged

Some version of the disturbing clip, which seems to have been filmed with the knowledge of the officers, were reportedly removed from YouTube, but dozens of copies remain on the video-sharing site. One copy, which has been viewed nearly half a million times, was edited to add English subtitles, and some music. (Warning: the images in the video are graphic and may upset many viewers.)

As the [Reuters] explained, “Floggings carried out under Islamic law are almost a daily punishment in Sudan for crimes ranging from drinking alcohol to adultery. But vague laws on women’s dress and behavior are implemented inconsistently.”

Via The Lede at the NYT.

Flower mantis

Photo via zumbi.  Another example at the Telegraph.  Further reading via Wikipedia.

"Christmas tree" made from books

800 books.  Seven feet tall.  Lighted from the inside.  Created by Juniper Books.  Via Neatorama.

Gull swallows plastic bag

Found at Wanderin' Weeta, who found it at Clean Seas and Beaches.

For related material, see the "Death by Plastic" photographs of bird carcasses on Midway Island, Werner Herzog's video "I wish you had created me so that I could die," and the sickening video here of a Romanian river.

Crash blossom headline

Via Criggo.  Other examples of crash blossoms here.

No amygdalae = no fear

SM is a woman without fear. She doesn’t feel it. She has been held at knifepoint without a tinge of panic. She’ll happily handle live snakes and spiders, even though she claims not to like them. She can sit through reels of upsetting footage without a single start. And all because a pair of almond-shaped structures in her brain – amygdalae – have been destroyed.

Ralph Adolphs, Antonio Damasio and Daniel Tranel at the University of Iowa have been working with SM for over a decade. She is a 44-year old mother-of-three, who suffers from a rare genetic condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease, which has caused parts of her brain to harden and waste away. This creeping damage has completely destroyed her amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing emotion (white arrows in the diagram below). She’s one of the few people who shows such a striking pattern of damage...

She lives in a poor area “replete with crime, drugs and danger”. As Feinstein writes, “she has been held up at knife point and at gun point, she was once physically accosted by a woman twice her size, she was nearly killed in an act of domestic violence, and on more than one occasion she has been explicitly threatened with death.” But in most of these situations, she didn’t act with urgency or desperation, something that police reports have corroborated.

It’s not that she doesn’t understand the concept of fear; after all, she knew that other people might be scared by the films she saw. However, she has a lot of problems with detecting danger. In a previous study, the team showed that she has no personal bubble. She’ll happily stand a foot away from complete strangers, far closer than most people would be comfortable with (even though, again, she understands the concept of personal space). It’s no surprise that she gets herself into a lot of difficult situations...

Even SM’s case doesn’t imply that the amygdala is the brain’s fear centre. Feinstein thinks that it’s more of a “broker”, going between parts of the brain that sense things in the environment, and those in the brainstem that initiate fearful actions. Damage to the amygdala breaks the chain between seeing something scary and acting on it...

“[SM]’s behaviour, time and time again, leads her back to the very situations she should be avoiding, highlighting the indispensable role that the amygdala plays in promoting survival by compelling the organism away from danger. Indeed, it appears that without the amygdala, the evolutionary value of fear is lost.”

More at Not Exactly Rocket Science.