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This is NOT a story from The Onion, I swear.

Founder of Islamic TV station accused of beheading wife

NEW YORK (CNN) — The founder of an Islamic television station in upstate New York aimed at countering Muslim stereotypes has confessed to beheading his wife, authorities said.

Muzzammil Hassan was charged with second-degree murder after police found the decapitated body of his wife, Aasiya Hassan, at the Bridges TV station in the Buffalo suburb of Orchard Park, said Andrew Benz, Orchard Park’s police chief.

Hassan was arrested Thursday.

His wife filed for divorce January 6, and police had responded to several domestic violence calls at the couple’s home, Benz said.

Hassan went directly to the police station after his wife’s death and confessed to killing her, Benz told CNN. Benz declined to give further details.

After watching Zodiac over the weekend, I started Googling and ran across this guy– H. H. Holmes.

Here is an excerpt from his wikipedia article. Warning: graphic descriptions below. I’m not kidding, this is like some shit out of Saw or Hostel or something.

While in Chicago, Holmes came across Dr. E.S. Holton’s drugstore. It was located at the corner of Wallace and 63rd Street, in the neighborhood of Englewood. Holton was suffering from cancer while his wife minded the store. Through his charm, Holmes got a job there and then manipulated her into letting him purchase the store. The agreement was that she could still live in the upstairs apartment even after Holton died. Once Holton died, Holmes murdered Mrs. Holton and told people she was visiting relatives in California. As people started asking more and more when she would be coming back, he elaborated the lie and told them she loved it so much in California that she decided to live there. He then purchased a lot across from the drugstore, where he built his three-story, block-long “Castle”—as it was dubbed by those in the neighborhood.

Holmes opened it as a hotel for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, using the rest of the structure as commercial space. The ground floor of the Castle contained, aside from Holmes’ own relocated drugstore, various shops (one a jeweler, for example), while the upper two floors contained his personal office as well as a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms with doorways that would open to brick walls, oddly angled hallways, stairways to nowhere, doors that could only be opened from the outside, and a host of other strange and labyrinthine constructions. Holmes had repeatedly changed builders during the initial construction of the Castle to ensure that only he fully understood the design of the house he had created, thereby decreasing the chances of any of them reporting it to the police. In addition, according to law at that time, by firing workers every two weeks, he didn’t have to pay them.

Over a period of three years, Holmes selected female victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a condition of employment to take out life insurance policies for which Holmes would pay the premiums but also be the beneficiary), lovers and hotel guests, and would torture and kill them. Some were locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that permitted him to asphyxiate them at any time. Some victims were locked in a huge bank vault near his office; he sat and listened as they screamed, panicked and eventually suffocated. The victims’ bodies went by a secret chute to the basement, where some were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated some of the bodies or placed them in lime pits for destruction. Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a stretching rack, allegedly in order to create a race of giants. Through the connections he had gained in medical school, he was able to sell skeletons and organs with little difficulty. Holmes picked one of the most remote rooms in the Castle to perform hundreds of illegal abortions. Some of his patients died as a result of his abortion procedure, and their corpses were also processed and the skeletons sold.

Very interesting post from craigslist that details some facts about America. Most go without saying but the discussion of each item is thought provoking.

MYTH 1: The US was founded on Christian principles.

TRUTH:

This is incorrect.
The Constitution never once mentions a deity, because the Founding Fathers wanted to keep their new country “religion-neutral.” Our Founding Fathers were an eclectic collection of Atheists, Deists, Christians, Freemasons and Agnostics.

George Washington, the Father of our country, and John Adams (Second President of the USA) CLEARLY stated in the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli: “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion.”

G.W. rarely attended church and instead followed a popular 18th century philosophy called Deism—a Star Wars-esque philosophy that believed in a cosmic energy or big-ass universal “Force.” The dictionary says that Deism is “a system of thought advocating natural religion based on human reason rather than revelation,” that had nothing to do with Christian principles.

James Madison, original mastermind of our Constitution, was an Atheist to the core who loved skewering Christianity. In 1785 he wrote, “What have been [Christianity’s] fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”

Thomas Jefferson, who sat down and authored The Declaration of Independence, rarely missed an opportunity to laugh at Christianity. In a letter to John Adams in 1823, he wrote: “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus…will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

More ammo: In 1814, Tommy J. wrote about the Bible’s Old and New Testaments, “The whole history of these books is so defective and doubtful — evidence that parts have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds.”

In fact, it was President Jefferson himself who first wrote (to a Baptist church group in 1802), “The First Amendment has erected a wall of separation between Church and State.” Therefore, when Jefferson talked about “Nature’s God,” the “Creator” and “divine Providence ” in the Declaration that he wrote, he was being a hippie and referring to a general cosmic energy– not the Christian God.

America is not a Christian nation. Period. Our Constitution derived from the post-Christian Enlightenment values of reason and truth…never from the paranoid yammerings of that otherwise compassionate cult leader who fucking died in the Middle Eastern desert 3000 years ago.

MYTH 2: US Conservatives tend to be patriotic, ethical Americans; liberals tend to hate America and are immoral.

TRUTH:

Liberals aren’t the traitors to America. In fact, conservatives who insist on sending American troops into the Iraqi slaughterhouse to watch some blood-n’-guts “towelhead” ass-kickin’ are the traitors. Most of them could care less about our troops, no more than Mao or Stalin cared about the safety of their own soldiers. In the neocons’ view, these young boys and girls are expendable test dummies. They’re dying for virtually nothing, so that the hicks in the Bush Admin can make good on their campaign promises to their buddies from the petroleum and infrastructure-rebuilding industries. By revving up the Arab threat, these MFs can scream “national security” and “freedom” as smokescreens, while getting their hands on a diminishing resource: Middle Eastern fossil fuels, which power everything from your lightbulbs and computer that you leave on all night, to your stupid gas-guzzler pickup truck.

Pro-war conservatives are the traitors to America. With only 29% of the public approving of Bush’s policies now, it took a full 5 years for America to finally wake up in bed next to this disgusting fact.

Do liberals hate America? No, in fact they care so much about the USA that they fight so aggressively to make it better. They’re not anti-American; they’re just anti-stupidity. Do liberals hate American policies? Sometimes, but only the self-destructive ones that threaten human rights, liberty, democracy, justice, inquiry, excellence and reason– the values that our country was founded upon.

As for conservative moral superiority? Frauds. Think of the child-molesting priests, money-scamming televangelist preachers, Jack Abramoff’s friends in the Bush Admin, gay-hating Jesus lovers, the Christians who beat up the professor who opposed intelligent design, human rights violators like Lynndie England and her Abu Ghraib hick officer pals, Tommy “Scandal-icious” Delay, Scooter “Leaky” Libby, the entire K Street Project meant to hire only Republicans, FEMA’s Michael “Yer doin’ a heckuva job” Brownie, and so on.

Oh and by the way, conservative Red states have a divorce rate 27% higher than the liberal Blue states, the per capita rate of violent crime in Red states is 49 per 100,000 higher than in Blue states, the top 5 states with the highest rates of alcohol abuse are Red states, and the per capita rate of gonorrhea in Red states was 41 per 100,000 higher than in the Blue states. Time to unshelf the antibiotics for our “ethical,” “God-fearing” conservative friends with their “traditional family values.”

MYTH 3. The US has a liberal media.

TRUTH:

This is a paranoid Republican myth.
Reality check: the US media is a mix of liberal, centrist and conservative voices. Also, the US media is largely owned by 10 corporations who frequently push pro-conservative agendas to the American public. Evidence:

1. Even Republican Pat Buchanan confessed, “For heaven sakes, we kid about the liberal media, but every Republican on earth does that.” Neo-conservative pundit Bill Kristol also said, “I admit it: the liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.”

2. A 2005 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that “coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media.” Why? Partly because only four major corporate networks control American TV news– up to 75% of the audience share. The “Big 10″ media conglomerates who control the bulk of the entire US media are: AOL Time Warner, Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, Sony, Bertelsmann, AT&T and Liberty Media. Yes, we have National Public Radio, but compare its public reach to that of Canada’s CBC and the United Kingdom’s BBC.

3. Eighty percent of all US newspapers are owned by corporate chains.

4. Liberals are virtually non-existent on talk radio stations nationwide. Rush and Dr. Laura, eat your hearts out.

5. Conservatives are very well accomodated for across FOX News, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, the New York Post, the American Spectator, the Weekly Standard, the Drudge Report, the National Review, etc. Even so-called “bastions of liberalism,” e.g. the NY Times, MSNBC, WashPost and NPR make a concerted effort to be “fair and balanced” by bringing in right-wing views like those of David Brooks, Joe Scarborough, Tucker Carlson, Charles Krauthammer and Cokie Roberts to have their say in these forums, respectively. This is in stark contrast to FOX News’ claims to unbiased objectivity, which were easily demolished by Robert Greenwald in 2004.

6. Contrary to what some paranoid Republicans claim, most journalists are centrists, not liberals. A representative sample of 141 US journalists and bureau chiefs were asked in 1998, “On social issues, how would you characterize your political orientation?” Answers: Left 30%, Center 57%, Right 9%, Other 5% . Next question, same sample: “On economic issues, how would you characterize your political orientation? ” Answers: Left 11%, Center 64%, Right 19%, Other 5%. Also, look at the total number of think tank citations in major newspapers, radio and TV transcripts: Conservative TTs: 7792, Centrist TTs: 6361, Liberal TTs: 1152.

7. Eric Alterman summarizes a 1999 research study from the academic journal Communications Research: “Four scholars examined the use of the ‘liberal media’ argument and discovered a fourfold increase in the number of Americans telling pollsters that they discerned a liberal bias in their news. But a review of the media’s actual ideological content, collected and coded over a twelve-year period, offered no corroboration whatever for this view.”

MYTH 4. The US doesn’t need improvement compared to other countries; it is the greatest country in the world.

TRUTH:
Wrong again. I’ll only cite the statistics here.

USA Ranking on Adult Literacy Scale: #9
(#1 Sweden and #2 Norway)- OECD

USA Ranking on Healthcare Quality Index: #37
(#1 France and #2 Italy)- World Health Organization 2003

USA Ranking of Student Reading Ability: #12
(#1 Finland and #2 South Korea)- OECD PISA 2003

USA Ranking of Student Problem Solving Ability: #26
(#1 South Korea and #2 Finland)- OECD PISA 2003

USA Ranking on Student Mathematics Ability: # 24
(#1 Hong Kong and #2 Finland)- OECD PISA 2003

USA Ranking of Student Science Ability: #19
(#1 Finland and #2 Japan)- OECD PISA 2003

USA Ranking on Women’s Rights Scale: #17
(#1 Sweden and #2 Norway)- World Economic Forum Report

USA Position on Timeline of Gay Rights Progress: # 6 (1997)
(#1 Sweden 1987 and #2 Norway 1993)- Vexen

USA Ranking on Life Expectancy: #29
(#1 Japan and #2 Hong Kong)- UN Human Development Report 2005

USA Ranking on Journalistic Press Freedom Index: #32
(#1 Finland, Iceland, Norway and the Netherlands tied)- Reporters Without Borders 2005

USA Ranking on Political Corruption Index: #17
(#1 Iceland and #2 Finland)- Transparency International 2005

USA Ranking on Quality of Life Survey: #13
(#1 Ireland and #2 Switzerland)- The Economist Magazine …Wikipedia “Celtic Tiger” if you still have your doubts.

USA Ranking on Environmental Sustainability Index: #45
(#1 Finland and #2 Norway)- Yale University ESI 2005

USA Ranking on Overall Currency Strength: #3 (US Dollar)
(#1 UK pound sterling and #2 European Union euro)- FTSE 2006….the dollar is now a liability, so many banks worldwide have planned to switch to euro

USA Ranking on Infant Mortality Rate: #32
(#1 Sweden and #2 Finland)- Save the Children Report 2006

USA Ranking on Human Development Index (GDP, education, etc.): #10
(#1 Norway and #2 Iceland)- UN Human Development Report 2005

So much for those “socialist” Europeans and those “backward” Asians, hm?
We can do better than this.

Miscellany:
*Only 18% of Americans own passports and bother to travel outside of the US.
* 85% of US soldiers in Iraq believe that they are there to get revenge for 9/11.
* New international student enrollment in US grad schools has decreased by 6%, because of xenophobic post-9/11 US visa restrictions, jacked-up tuition fees and better educational opportunities in the EU and Asia. So no, not everyone wants to come here anymore, because it’s become a land of incredibly limited opportunity, and we’ve lowered our educational standards.

MYTH 5: The US government loves to help other countries.

TRUTH:
This is a myth. The US government tends to be motivated by interests, not humanitarian principles.

Denmark gives the most amount of its GDP (1.01%) to developing countries; Norway gives 0.91%; the Netherlands give 0.79% and so on until the end of list, where the USA sits. Yes, America ranks DEAD LAST in foreign aid at a pathetic 0.1% of its GDP, compared to the other 21 nations listed as developed nations. The idea that the US government is a heroic bunch that runs around the world helping the poor and the disempowered is not backed up by the evidence. We have one of the stingiest governments on earth.

Most Americans believe the US spends 24% of its budget on aid to poor countries; the actual amount is well under a quarter of 1%. Our country also ranks #5 on asylum-seeker acceptance rates (#1 is Denmark and #2 is Canada).

For you self-congratulatory, redneck-inspired conservative fuckwads who will start to say, “B-b-b-but you’re anti-American! M-m-m-moonbat! G-g-g-god bless the USA!” I answer, “Go fuck yourself. We can do better.” Stop blindly believing everything your president tells you. Come back to us only when you start realizing that the $400 billion your president has allocated to his Roman Empire-style military overstretch could be better spent on correcting the sociopolitical and economic problems in the arenas that I’ve listed above.

For you liberal shit-heels who will start to say, “Yeah! Right on!” I answer, “Grow some fucking balls.” That goes for women and the LGBT community too, and don’t call me a sexist either: I’m more than comfortable with being a female, but I believe balls can be useful in situations like these. Instead, stop apologizing for being the “liberal elite,” and start championing un-abashed excellence in everything, not mediocrity. Help your reps and senators take back Congress, and stop dithering while the political tides are turning in your favor right now. The conservatives are terrified now; TAKE advantage of that. And don’t waste time trying to explain rational things to any homophobic Christians, or hyper-patriotic losers who wave and cheapen our American flag only for a self-esteem buzz, or those testosterone-filled, gullible, culturally-ignorant military recruiter robots who lack even a basic intelligence. THEY CANNOT BE REASONED WITH. They don’t understand statistics, elaborate charts, legislative proposals or complicated scientific explanations. Just let them go. Let them go.

In the meantime, stop being SHEEP and get up and do something before some bright and ambitious Chinese, Indian and the European students grow up to be international leaders and make your lazy, self-absorbed kids irrelevant on the world stage.

source: http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/163437715.html

The news of my 20 year high school reunion back on Monday got me to thinking about how we perceive time differently as we age. Then I remembered the song Time by Pink Floyd, 4th cut on Dark Side of the Moon, is about that very topic.

Read the lyrics and think about them. If you’re nearing 40 like me, this song probably means something very different for you now than it did when you were much younger.

Time
(Mason, Waters, Wright, Gilmour)

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun,
but it’s sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time has gone, the song is over,
thought I’d something more to say

Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
When I come home cold and tired
It’s good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells.

This is one of the funniest clips I’ve ever seen. Even funnier if you’re a tech guy and understand all of the stuff he’s doing as he is talking. 10 minutes, but totally worth watching all the way to the end.

Remember — there is no arrange icons by penis.

Today I received word that my 20 year high school reunion is scheduled for Nov. 1st. Certainly it isn’t that time already. There is no way 20 freaking years could have passed since I graduated high school, right? I don’t feel 20 years older than I did back then. I can bring the school, the friends, the feelings, the routine into such crystal clear focus in my mind that it can’t possibly be 20 years ago. It seems simultaneously impossible and deeply shocking that it happened so quickly.

Our perception of time speeds up as we age, the years feel progressively shorter as they tick away. As a consequence, adolescence plays out in an epic high definition sweep, and everything afterward begins to blur. For me, it became noticeable around the time I turned 30 years old. That was back in 2000. Y2K, the big computer panic, the new millennium. Up to that point things seemed to be moving along at a rather orderly pace, and then– woosh. 8 1/2 years have passed in the blink of an eye. The football seasons come and go, birthdays, anniversaries, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, spring, summer, fall, winter like the spaces on a big roulette wheel, spinning round and around.

I don’t think nostalgia is the right word to describe how I feel about my high school years. Nostalgia is a longing for the past, the idealized past. Thinking back, I like to believe I knew how good I had it. I was extremely lucky to have the friends, the relationships and environment I did in high school. Okay, maybe there is a bit of idealization going on with the relationship part, I’m heavily discounting some legendary fights and meltdowns. But on the whole, it was an amazingly good 4 years of my life.

With the reunion coming up, I can’t help but wonder how my old friends view those times we spent together. For instance, I wonder if Mark McCormick remembers the night before our last day of school. We stayed up until 2:00am cramming for Gordon’s Physics 2 final exam the next day. As we were studying, I remember telling Mark that this was it– this was the last time we would ever have to cram for a final in high school, the last test, the last day. What I failed to realize at the time was how poignant a memory it would become, such a simple thing as studying for a test with a friend.

A phenomenally stupid 17-year-old on a church field trip was decapitated by a roller coaster after climbing two different 6-foot tall safety fences at Six Flags over Georgia. Friends say he stood on top of a sign that read “Danger, don’t go in there or you’ll get decapitated by a roller coaster” to boost himself over the barrier.

Police will not release the teen’s name until an autopsy is complete.

Likely cause of death: decapitation by a roller coaster.

Back in the day, 18 years ago or so, I had a 1988 Suzuki GSXR-1100. Custom exhaust, big-bore pistons, oh how I miss that thing. Sure, it nearly killed me once but it was such a blast to ride. Well the bike didn’t nearly kill me, *I* nearly killed myself while riding — fell asleep on it and nearly ran into the back of an 18-wheeler on the way back home after visiting Beth, my ex-fiancee. I got married shortly thereafter and the bike went away. I guess for that reason I equate bikes with youth and freedom and irresponsibility and awesomeness. My biking days are over as I’m too old and slow to trust myself on something that powerful anymore. Which is why I’m living vicariously through my boss.

He has somehow managed to talk his wife into letting him buy a bike. He’s looking at a 2008 Honda CBR1000RR. Top speed around 185mph.

Here’s what 0-185 looks like on a CBR– watch the digital display hit 299kph (185mph) at the 0:44 mark.

Holy shit that’s fast. I must have been out of my mind to ride something even remotely that fast when I was younger.

Then I started thinking. Well, if the CBR looks fast, what about the Hayabusa? From my limited research, it seems that the Busa is the current reigning baddest-ass bike around at the moment. So I dug up this video– 0-220mph on a Busa. Notice he doesn’t get on it until about 50mph, and when he does, the front wheel comes off the ground and doesn’t drop down til around 140.

As best I can tell, that’s 50-100pmh in about 3 seconds, and 50-220mph in about 20 seconds.

o.O

And then I saw this one. Evidently the guy above was dogging it or something, b/c this bike seems a ton faster, going from 80-170mph in about 4 seconds.

wtf. How can something move that fast?