Blinded by Science – Page 11

About Bloody Time

Published on January 2, 2007

I’d love to see more of these kind of lawsuits this coming year. let’s put the charlatans to proof.

Tele-evangelist sued over ‘God can heal’ claim

Ed Pilkington in New York
Tuesday January 2, 2007
The Guardian

Darlene Bishop, a tele-evangelist with a nationwide following, does not do things by half. When she and her husband Lawrence erected a statue of Jesus on the grounds of their mega church in Monroe, Ohio, they made it 62 feet high.

No less gargantuan are her claims about the power of prayer to overcome illness. Through a series of sermons, books and a television show, Sisters, broadcast on religious satellite channels throughout the US and abroad, she preaches that God has the power to heal even the most deadly diseases, including cancer.

But the contention is now the subject of a court action. Four of Mrs Bishop’s relatives are suing her over her claim that God cured their father – her brother – of throat cancer. He died of the disease 18 months ago.

In her book Your Life Follows Your Words, Mrs Bishop tells how she overcame her breast cancer through prayer, and how her brother was also cured. There is no mention of his death in the book, which she says is due to the fact that it was published at a time when he had been in remission for more than a year.

But the volume is still on sale through her website (price $15) under the blurb: “How God healed her of breast cancer and her brother healed from throat cancer”.

Mrs Bishop’s brother, Darrell “Wayne” Perry, was an accomplished songwriter whose work has been performed by big names in country music such as Tim McGraw, and by the Backstreet Boys. For a year before his death in May 2005, aged 55, he was cared for by his sister.

His children, Bryan, Justin, Olivia and Christian, have issued a lawsuit for wrongful death against Mrs Bishop because they claim she persuaded Perry to stop chemotherapy and rely instead on God’s healing. They contend in legal depositions that at the moment Mrs Bishop and her brother were touring the country preaching about the miracle of his recovery, they were both aware that he had been advised by doctors that his illness was terminal.

In a separate legal action to be heard on Friday they also accuse Mrs Bishop of probate irregularities and of mishandling her brother’s estate. “I am the oldest son of Wayne Perry”, Bryan has written, “and I think it’s a damn shame that we have to spend our money fighting our aunt.”

In her blog, Mrs Bishop dismisses the allegations as “complete lies”, insisting she would never tell anyone to refuse medical help. “I encouraged him to listen to the doctors, but he refused surgery.”

There is no sign of Mrs Bishop falling on her sword. The motto of her church, founded in 1978, is: “Because Emmanuel lives, I expect victory every time.”

Start As You Mean To Go On

Published on December 19, 2006

Begin the new year right with a spiffy clean PC: Donna at the The Silence of Our Friends has a handy guide up to getting rid of viruses, malware and spyware:

Sunday, December 17, 2006
Tips to Troubleshoot Your Computer & Keep It Clean

I figure it couldn’t hurt to tell people what I learned messing around with the computer all day yesterday.

First, when we were getting the blue screen of death our computer would shut down and start back up, but since the fatal error happened each time within a minute or so of start up, it was a vicious cycle. The worst part is that I couldn’t read what the error was in the bsod, not that I was sure I could understand that gibberish anyway, but you know. Anyway, I found out that Windows XP is set up to automatically restart when there is an error like that. If you need it to stop so that you can read the error, then you right click ‘my computer’ (Usually under the start menu but also can be on the desktop), then click ‘properties’, then click the ‘advanced’ tab, then the ‘settings’ button next to start up and recovery, in there clear the box next to ‘automatically restart’. Now you can read the bsod. There was a line in mine that said: C:\windows\system32:lzx32.sys So I went online and looked up lzx32.sys and found out it is a rootkit trojan with many names but the one I needed to know was backdoor.rustock.b since there is a program made specially to get rid of it, and damn I could have saved myself alot of time yesterday if I knew that.

If your computer is getting the bsod too fast to do this, then it might help to start your computer in safe mode. In safe mode it starts with the minimum drivers so that all your programs aren’t loading, and hopefully whatever is causing the error won’t load. When you start your computer click F8 repeatedly before windows starts, there should be a screen that you can use the arrow keys to start in safe mode.

The other thing I learned is that some of these viruses and trojans find good hiding places in your computer to self replicate. You need to clean out your temp files and cache at the very least. Windows makes a program especially for this; go to start>programs>accessories>system tools>disk cleanup. Even if you aren’t having problems with your PC it wouldn’t hurt to use this once in awhile since your computer will run faster the less crap it has on it.

One last thing, these viruses and trojans will hide in system restore, that’s right, your computer saves a copy of them in there. That’s why it didn’t help for me to use system restore on our computer. So if you find that using it didn’t help, then you will have to shut it off so that when your virus scan runs it will get all of it. The bad part, if you shut it off you lose all your restore points, but if they have viruses in there they aren’t worth saving anyway. To shut it off right click ‘my computer>properties>system restore and mark the box to turn it off.

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Some antivirus programs are very good, the same with the programs to find spyware, but none of them are perfect. So the best thing to do is use several, what one misses the next one might get, or the next, or the next. I only have one antivirus program on my computer, but when there are problems I use the free online scans too, I also have three spyware/malware/adware scanners, a firewall, and a program that warns me when new programs are being added to my computer. And, um, er, they are all free. Yes everything I use to protect my computer is free, because I’m cheap, and you’d think the free stuff is crap compared to the programs you pay for…BUT YOU’D BE WRONG! Free is good all around. So if you don’t already have an antivirus program on your computer, get one! Here’s a few to choose from:

[…]

Full post and list of useful AV links

And while we’re on the subject of cleaning up computers, can I make a plea for people not to clear the cache and the deleted files, without first checking with the person whose Windows profile you’re in ? That strikes me as one of the most bad-mannered things one could do with a pc and analagous to clearing out the contents of someone’s handbag into the bin without asking.

There wasn’t anything essential in there, but there might’ve been – it’s the principle of the bloody thing that matters.

Am I still peeved? How ever did you guess?

Read more: PC, Spyware, Malware, AV

Friday Lifeform Blogging

Published on December 15, 2006

I know I should be blogging about more important things, like the horrible Ipswich murders, or cash for peerages or Iraq or the fact that Palestine is going to blow, but this may just be the coolest thing ever.

Imortant as those things are they’re just ephemeral human concerns compared to this:

Fish dance on sulphur cauldrons
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News, San Francisco

These fish thrive in conditions that would kill most other fish.

Scientists have witnessed the extreme lifestyle of tonguefish that like to skip across pools of molten sulphur.

The animals – a type of flatfish – were filmed on three expeditions to undersea volcanoes in the western Pacific.

Huge numbers were seen to congregate around the sulphur ponds which well up from beneath the seafloor.

Researchers from the University of Victoria, Canada, are trying to work out how the creatures survive in such a hostile environment.

“There are a lot of toxic heavy metals coming out of these active volcanoes,” explained Dr John Dower, a fisheries oceanographer.

“As a visual spectacle, it’s like something from another planet Dr Alex Rogers, ZSL”

“The water is very warm, and it can be very acidic, the pH can be as low as two like sulphuric acid,” he told BBC News.”And yet here we’ve got a group that has not previously been seen in this type of environment and they’re doing very well – they’re actually thriving.”

The fish have been studied with remotely operated submersibles, including the Jason II vehicle this year.

Noaa’s arc

The area of interest is the Mariana Arc, a 1,200km chain of volcanic seamounts and islands between Guam and Japan.

It hosts a number of hydrothermal vents – rock systems that draw water through cracks in the seafloor, heat it to temperatures which can be well above 100C, load it with dissolved metals and other chemicals, and then eject the hot fluid back into the ocean.

More..

This really is the most astonishing thing. It makes the possibility of life elsewhere in our solar sytem so much more likely – and these incredible little fish are not the only gobsmackingly interesting vent fauna they’ve found in the Marianas.

Which reminds me, I must go and feed our neighbour’s goldfish. She’s in Vienna for Christmas and I’m playing nanny to a couple of shubunkins and a small corydoras catfish. It may well pay longterm to be to nice to our finny friends. If reports are correct, they’re likely to inherit the planet.

Read more: Science, Marine Biology, Vent fauna

The Planet’s Fucked, But We’re Allright, Jack

Published on October 27, 2006

We all know now that the planet is on an inexorable slide to climate chaos, but some special people are planning on running away. The World Wildlife Fund , via the BBC:

The planet’s natural resources are being consumed faster than they can be replaced, according to the WWF. If current trends continue two planets would be needed by 2050 to meet humanity’s demands.

[…]

Countries are shown in proportion to the amount of natural resources they consume.

Humanity’s demand for resources is now outstripping supply by about 25%, as the growth of our ecological footprint shows. Meanwhile the health of the planet’s ecosystems, measured by the living planet index, is falling, at “a rate unprecedented in human history,” according to the WWF.

No wonder the neocons, the Nietzschians, the Randians and the warhawks like Instapundit are so keen on the idea of transhumanism. In the transhumanist ideal the enhanced elect, the ubermenschen, will inherit the earth, and then when that’s bled dry, the other planets. That’s the general idea put in very simplistic terms; unfortunately the plans only seem to have room for Americans – the rest of us untermenschen can go hang, or rather drown or starve. I suppose someone has to be the Morlocks in this narrative and it’s us non-rich-white-males.

This all sounds rather bizarre but actual US government policy bears it out. The US is currently attempting to militarise all of near-earth space and to claim the other solar planets as their own, using their own warped version of ‘manifest destiny’ for justification. You can bet your ass the transhumanists’ll be on that like white on rice. Humanity ( but only of a certain type) uber alles and fuck the universe. They’re entitled.

US stakes claim on space

New policy just slightly territorial

By Lucy Sherriff Published Thursday 19th October 2006 13:06 GMT

The US has claimed “dibs” on the Universe with its new space policy. The document, signed by President Bush, was released on a Friday, just before a long weekend in the States. This, in itself has caused a bit of a stir, but not more so than the tone and content of the document.

In it, the US government allocates itself rights to access and use space without anyone else getting in its way. It also sets security at the heart of the space agenda, frequently citing its right to use space as part of its national defence.

Significantly, however, it does not commit to restrict, or even to join talks about restricting the development of space-based weapons. This is despite a UN vote last year in which 160 nations voted in favour of such talks.

The rapacious gluttons* have fucked over one ecological system irreparably, now it’s on to the next and screw the rest of us left to face the dangerous death throes of a dying planet. That’s why the Right don’t care what damage they do. They think they have an escape hatch when it all goes to shit.

* I”m one too. I live in Northern Europe, so I can hardly exempt myself from the description.

UPDATE: here’s something we can do at least. Make your own solar panel for less than 150 euro.