Wife says CIA bomber hated U.S.

By SELCAN HACAOGLU, Associated Press Writer Selcan Hacaoglu, Associated Press Writer

ISTANBUL – A Jordanian doctor-turned-suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees at a base in Afghanistan is proudly regarded by his family as a martyr in Islam's holy war against the United States, his wife said Thursday.

Covered in a black Islamic chador, Defne Bayrak, the Turkish wife of bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, lauded her husband's Dec. 30 attack to Turkish journalists in Istanbul.

"I am proud of him, my husband has carried out a great operation in such a war. May God accept his martyrdom," Bayrak told the Dogan news agency.

She later told the state-run Anatolia news agency: "My husband did this against the U.S. invasion."

Possibly the best photo of 2010, although it's a little early yet.

I find it amusing that more than a hundred years have passed since Einstein published his theory - and yet we still believe in the static solidity of this world. After publishing, there was some bewilderment in the daily news business about just what to write about it and what it meant. One newspaper sent a journalist to interview a scientific authority, Arthur Eddington, and it was he who named it "A Theory Of Relativity". Einstein himself named it Invariant Postulates On The Electrodynamics Between Objects In Motion. One example of such electrodynamics is of course that narrow band of the entire spectrum that we call visible light. What we can see with our own eyes. To a great extent, this narrow band is determining our sense of reality: What we can see is real. What we can't see isn't. And if anybody can see anything that isn't there (as in reflecting electrodynamic rays within this narrow band), he or she is dreaming, hallucinating, fantasising, or witnessing a miracle of the Gods. 

G-spot 'may not exist' - The Telegraph

Researchers at King’s College London claim there is no evidence for the existence of the G-spot – supposedly a cluster of internal nerve endings – beyond a woman’s imagination.

“Women may argue that having a G-spot is due to diet or exercise, but in fact it is virtually impossible to find real traits,” said Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology, who coauthored the research.

“This is by far the biggest study ever carried out and it shows fairly conclusively that the idea of a G-spot is subjective.”

They reached their conclusions after a survey of more than 1,800 British women, all of whom were pairs of identical or non-identical twins.

Every 48 years, the bamboo plant flowers, producing massive amounts of avocado-like fruits that will cause the rat population to explode into a massive pest infestation which by the locals of Mizoram, India, is called mautam, the wave. Because of easy access to nutritious food, the rats will breed exponentially, until there are no more bamboo fruits left to feed on, causing the rats to seek elsewhere for food, which means that they will attack and devour all available human crops in the area. Millions of rats will quite literally swarm all over in an unstoppable onslaught of ferocious hunger. Due to the long period of time in between these bamboo flowering events, you will only experience mautam once in your lifetime. And it is indeed every bit as frightful as the stories say, so there is an almost supernatural fear of it in those areas where this is happening. 

Several posts created by Marquis are not in his blog as he is a new user and didn't have a blog until today.  We have compiled his posts on a special page that will automatically update so that you can easily see what you've missed:

http://www.rationalresponders.com/posts/marquis

- RRS Admin Team

What more than anything makes people stupid is that they think they are smart. And the smarter you really are, the more stupid you become if you live under that delusion. Actually, it's not any great advantage to be very talented and highly intelligent. In a manner of speaking, that is, more often than not, like having a supercharged, 800 hp monster of a racing car but no clue about how to drive it. Do we see an accident waiting to happen? Indeed we do. 

What really counts is discipline, as in self discipline, a calm control of own faculties which allows the powers of the afore mentioned racing car to be used in a manner which is appropriate to the power of such a vehicle. Discipline begins with purpose, with having a plan. Consider a child: The child has done something he's not allowed to do and will tell some fanciful story in order to cover up his mistake. As an adult, it's hard to not start laughing at this blatant lie, and it's actually more fun to play along with the outrage in order to see where the story is going. The adult person has a better perspective on life and how things work and is therefore able to spot the story for what it is. 

The reason for suffering is desire, said the Buddha. What is desire? There can be little doubt that a lot of people walk this earth like pent-up knots of desire, frustration and confusion, glazed with fear. Desire which isn't realized creates fantasies, some times secret and dangerous fantasies, which rhymes in a backward chicken-and-egg kind of way with the Buddhistic tenet that the reason for desire is illusion. It is my belief that a lack of spiritual direction in people will create an abstract hole in the soul, it will turn them into a hungry ghost, filled with an insatiable desire for just about anything. Addiction. Food, drugs, religion, sex; anything that they can get their hands on. Of course, being the capitalist society that we are, this is called consumption and lies at the very bottom of the foundations for our economy. Consumers are what makes the world go round nowadays. 

When did your existence begin? What are you? A thing? I am of the mind that it is more accurate to describe a human being as a process which begins with conception and ends with death. But when did you come into the picture? Were you always there, somehow asleep before slowly waking up to find yourself alive in this world as a creature of body and mind? In order to not confront such issues, most people prefer to keep busy with various activities - and if that doesn't do the trick, with more heavy distractions such as drugs and religious hysteria. But at the end of the day, when you're alone and silent, the doubt and the fear comes creeping back. Who are you, really? What is going on out there? 

Of all the human desires, sexuality is by far the most interesting one. Many people, in fact I suspect a majority of all people, approach this dionysian energy in a fearsome manner. Any arena where the ego might lose its illusory sense of being on top of the world creates such a sense of dread. And, as we all know, the mind boggling mine field of potential emotional devastation that is human sexuality drives the frightened little monkeys to all sorts of twisted strategies. 

We like to classify things. It seems like the right thing to do to sort things into neat categories so that we can relate to them with our lazy auto pilot, rather than having to think anew at every new corner of our way. Let's take such a thing as homosexuality, which is probably the most common "deviation" out there. It's really hard for a lot of people to relate to that. Many men already have a troubled relation to their sexuality - in the sense that they are afraid of women and they feel clumsy and awkward around them - so they feel that the last thing they need is having to think of other men as sexual beings as well. And yet they have this ferocious drive inside them, so they seek alternative outlets.