Better run faster -- Dystopia is gaining on us!

• Alpine melt reveals clues to Neolithic life. Artefacts predate Oetzi.
• Treasure hunter finds 11th century gold ring with rare black diamond.
• Hundreds of Bigfoot sightings are reported every year in Southern California. Researcher believes bullet wounds are giving Bigfoot a bad attitude towards stupid humans.
• 'Yowie Man' is on the hunt again in desolate area of Australia.
• Boffins say largest near-Earth asteroids come mostly from the asteroid belt's innermost edge.
• Aussie has answer to save Earth from asteroid attack.
• Petabyte database to track near-Earth objects.
• Generations of stars pose for family portrait.
• Oz could tap geothermal energy from its naturally radioactive hot rocks.
• Potential treatment for drug addiction also leads to rapid weight loss and reduced food intake.
• Using viruses to build self-assembled nanoscale batteries.
• Intel demos shape-shifting robots, sending sane journalists screaming for the exits.
• 'Clever as kids': Chemical nanobrains play noughts and crosses.
• Nearly half a million people are employed in 'virtual sweatshops' earning points and goods in online games to sell over the internet.
• Emerging double standard: While we risk arrest for pointing our cameras at them, they can photograph us when, where and how they like.
• Google in hot water again over invasive Street View photos that ignore private roads and 'No Trespassing' signs.
• Are 9-11 no-planers a cointelpro operation? Either that, or they're just willfully ignoring all the eyewitness accounts.
• Activists cry foul as federal agency declares 'new phenomenon' downed WTC 7. Richard Gage, founder of Architects & Engineers for 9-11 Truth and a member of the American Institute of Architects, doesn't believe a word of the theory.
• Hackers crack FEMA's telephone system, and rack up $12,000 in calls to the Middle East and Asia.
• Anatomy of an insidious malware scam: The evil genius of XP Antivirus.
• Death of patriotism: How nations are threatened by the global super-elite.
• Totalitarianism: It can happen here. Sheldon S Wolin's Democracy, Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism is available at Amazon US & UK.
• Aboriginal kids count without numbers.
• Elephants can count -- in fact, they can discriminate among similar quantities with greater accuracy than humans.
• The 10,000 years that the descendants of grey wolves have spent evolving alongside humans have had a remarkable effect on dog cognition.
• Pheromones detected that warn creatures of impending danger.
• If Bruce Wayne fancied a cat, he'd go bonkers over Yoda.
• You're one-third daffodil, and a host of other useless but fascinating facts.

Quote of the Day:

Democracy is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs.
...
No working man or ordinary farmer or shopkeeper helped to write the Constitution.
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The American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it. Democratic advance proved to be slow, uphill, forever incomplete. The republic existed for three-quarters of a century before formal slavery was ended; another hundred years before black Americans were assured of their voting rights. Only in the twentieth century were women guaranteed the vote and trade unions the right to bargain collectively. In none of these instances has victory been complete: women still lack full equality, racism persists, and the destruction of the remnants of trade unions remains a goal of corporate strategies. Far from being innate, democracy in America has gone against the grain, against the very forms by which the political and economic power of the country has been and continues to be ordered.

Sheldon S. Wolin, in Democracy, Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Amazon US & UK). For more, see Chalmers Johnson's review.