Someone at Daily Kos takes a look at media coverage of the church shooting and digs up some interesting details about the Christian group that Murray was most involved with, Youth with a Mission:
The Cult Awareness Network national office in Chicago had several letters on file concerning YWAM. One such letter by Nancy Brown dated March of 1984 from Itheca, New York stated “that Ywam has many elements of a destructive cult”. A major issue cited was “the authoritarian control by the elders”. Allegedly YWAM depicted the “world” as “Satanic”. Members were told that “Satan comes into an idle mind” and were advised “Whenever you have a spare moment memorize. Elders gave out cards with Bible verses to carry and use”.
And:
Denver station KMGH reports that many people at the Colorado Springs church have similar connections: “There is a Youth With A Mission office on the New Life Church campus, and many members of New Life have completed the YWAM’s school and discipleship programs. They have also worked together in local evangelical outreach programs.”
So here’s what seems to have happened: a particularly loony Christian group filled a mentally ill kid’s head with terrifying non-sense and he ended up killing some people, and now the conservative media want blame secularism for it. Well, it makes as much sense as Christianity does in the first place, I suppose.
Full Story: Daily Kos.
“In 2004, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved a radiofrequency identification (RFID) device that is implanted under the skin of the upper arm of patients and that stores the patient’s medical identifier. A debate in this week’s PLoS Medicine discusses the pros and cons of patients getting fitted with such an RFID chip. When a scanner is passed over the RFID device, the identifier is displayed on the screen of an RFID reader. An authorized health professional can then use the identifier to access the patient’s clinical information, which is stored in a separate, secure database.
In the PLoS Medicine debate, Mark Levine, Chair of the Council of Ethical and Judicial Affairs at the American Medical Association (Chicago, IL, USA), argues that such devices have the potential “to make significant advances in the effectiveness, efficiency, and safety of medical care by improving patient identification, promoting patient safety, and expediting access to patients’ medical records.” Yet, as with all new technologies, he says, “their adoption must be tempered by attention to potential unintended consequences.” Ethical concerns regarding the use of RFID devices arise, he says, from issues pertaining to informed consent, the privacy and accessibility of stored information, and the purposes for which the transmitted data will be used. Because of the risks of unintended consequences, the implantation of RFID devices “merits a healthy dose of skepticism,” argue Ben Adida (Children’s Hospital Informatics Program, Boston, MA, USA) and colleagues. If such devices become widely deployed, say Adida and colleagues, they may provide an incentive for both well and ill-intentioned parties to set up readers for these ‘license plates for people.’ A store owner, for example, might set up a reader to track frequent customers, linking the unique identifier to the customer record upon first purchase. Law enforcement might leverage RFID as a means of ubiquitous surveillance. At the very least, say the authors, the informed consent process must “transparently convey the significant societal side effects of RFID devices.”
via PLoS Journal
Henry Darger (April 12[?], 1892-April 13, 1973) was a reclusive American writer and artist who worked as a janitor in Chicago, Illinois.[1] He has become famous for his posthumously discovered 15,145-page fantasy manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, along with several hundred drawings and watercolor paintings illustrating the story.[2] Darger’s work has become one of the most celebrated examples of outsider art.
Henry Darger Wikipedia entry.
Henry Darger gallery with several large scans.
Torrent of Henry Darger documentary: The Realms of the Unreal.
(Thanks Bill!)
In true Viking style we offer you this week a scoop 40 years in the making. Field correspondant Tom LaPorte brings us a 23 minute interview he held with anarchist, guerrilla clown, and stand-up revolutionary Abbie Hoffman back in 1969 during the Chicago 7 Conspiracy Trials.
We split the interview into 5 pieces, give listen and then comment upon each section. Topics range from the binding of Bobby Seale, the trial of the press, the meaninglessness of reform, and the future of judicial law in America.
Almost 40 years after the interview, Hoffman’s words still buzz with relevance and hum with an electrical current vital to today’s political climate.
Who will be the conduit for these words tomorrow?
Download it from the Viking Youth.
I’m leaving tomorrow and won’t be back until next month. Melissa Gira the Sacred Whore will be blogging until I get back. Melissa’s a “priestess, artist, writer, multimedia whore, BDSM professional, peepshow girlie, post-pornmongerer.”
Tomorrow I’m heading down south to visit some friends at the University of Wyoming, and will be in NYC from the 15th until the 22nd and Chicago from the 23rd until the 30th. Drop me a line if you’re in the area.
I’m missing Burning Man this year so I can go to New York and Chicago. But I’ll be at this year’s Earth Dance in New York.
So everyone going to LVX23 and everyone else going to Burning Man: have a good time for me, and I’ll see ya’ll on the playa next year.
I’m flying to Austin for work on Wednesday July 28th and staying until August 1st. Any readers in the Austin area want to meetup?
I’m also going to be in New York and Chicago for week each sometime in the second half of September, most likely.
Real audio of a Chicago public access radio show exploring the sexuality of Chicago architecture.
Link (via PLANetizen).
An interesting thing about Meetup, a web site for organizing local interest groups, is that it ranks cities by number of people signed up for certain meets.
Burning Man City: Seattle
Body Modifcation City: Toronto, ON (# 2 is Tel Aviv)
Discordian City: Seattle
Magickal City: Charlotte, NC
Smart mob City: Denver
Coffee City: Chicago (Seattle was only # 6)
Comics City: New York
Dumpster Diving City: New York
Straight Edge City: Providence, RI
Pagan Parenting City: St. Louis, MO
Amiga City: Tel Aviv
Newly Single City: Toronto, ON
X-Men City: London (with a whopping 2 members)
Japanese Pop City: Houston
EFF City: Austin
Nanotech City: Minneapolis
What’s big, city by city?
Tel Aviv: Pagan
Rio: Linux
Moscow: Britney Spears
Perth: Goth
Madrid: Russell Crowe
Cairo: Knitting
Stockholm: Body Modification
Prague: Vampire (not the game apparently…)
New Delhi: Sex and the City
Islamabad, Pakistan: Gilmore Girls
There was a time when the name R.U. Sirius was synonymous with cyberculture. His seminal magazine Mondo 2000 predated Wired, and was even more enthusiastic in its wow-gosh sexification of the new geek order. Articles predicting a slick future of nanotech parties and smart drugs were mixed in with batches of fearful predictions of terrorism, economic collapse, draconian copyright enforcement, increased surveillance and invasive advertising. But Sirius didn’t stop there: After the collapse of Mondo, he went on to write for magazines like 21C, Salon and Disinformation, and edited Getting It. He created the Revolution Party, a non-ideological anti-authoritarian political organization (“If even the alternative parties like Libertarian and Green seem a bit rigid to you, consider joining us”), and campaigned for Presidency of the United States. His latest project, The Thresher, is a political magazine.
But The Thresher is a print magazine. Sirius hardly goes online anymore, except for research. The truth is, the Godfather of GeekChic has moved on.
Read the rest of this entry »
A more reliable source than the below Ananova story on the AI computer reports that
scientists in Chicago have created a cyborg. According to the story: “Researchers in Chicago have built a cyborg, a half-living, half-robot creature which connects the brain of an eel-like fish to a computer and is capable of moving towards lights.”
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