Toon: ...sinister global plunder is handled at Corporate

New CDC Study on Sexual Assault: Preteen Boys and Adolescent Girls are Most at Risk

DECEMBER 14, 2011 BY HUGO SCHWYZER

The CDC released its latest survey on rape and intimate partner violence today, and the news is troubling. According to the latest government data, nearly 1 in 5 women have been raped or experienced attempted rape by men, while 1 in 4 reported having been beaten by an intimate partner. Linda Degutis, the director of the study told the New York Times that the results were “striking” and “surprising.” “I don’t think we’ve really known that it was this prevalent in the population”, she said.

The study also makes it clear that men can be victims too. 1 in 71 men reported having been raped – many when they were small boys. 1 in 7 had been physically battered by a lover or spouse. Interestingly, for the first time a national survey of male victims of rape distinguished being “forced to penetrate” a male or female abuser from other forms of sexual assault.

And among males it is little boys, not adults or teens, who are at the greatest risk. 28% of male victims reported that they were raped when they were 10 or younger, while only 12% of female victims were sexually assaulted by that age. For boys, the most vulnerable years seem to be between 6-10, while for girls, the most statistically dangerous period of their lives coincides with puberty. This doesn’t mean that preteen girls aren’t victimized; it does mean that the onset of adolescence offers much statisical greater protection for boys than it does for their sisters.

Though men remain the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of rape, the new research makes it more evident than ever that men are also its victims. Despite recent claims about a proliferation of female rapists, the CDC found that “male rape victims and male victims of non-contact unwanted sexual experiences reported predominantly male perpetrators.” Close to 50% of all stalking victimizations that men experienced were also perpetrated by men.

http://goodmenproject.com/good-feed-blog/new-cdc-study-on-sexual-assault/

Man Who Hunted Bin Laden With a Sword Now Jailed on a Gun Charge

By Spencer Ackerman Email Author December 14, 2011 | 2:57 pm | Categories: Bizarro, Terrorists, Guerillas, Pirates


Gary Brooks Faulkner became internationally famous last year after the Greeley, Colo. native packed up a sword and a pistol and went on a one-man hunt for Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Pakistan. But now Faulkner has a new mission: get out of jail.

Since Sept. 1, Faulkner’s home has been the Weld County North Jail Complex in Greeley. The man the media once dubbed the “Rocky Mountain Rambo,” a former guest on The Late Show With David Letterman and The View, is unable to post a $10,000 bond.

And all because Faulkner defended himself.

Faulkner made headlines in June of last year when he was arrested by the Pakistani police in Chitral District carrying a pistol, a knife, night-vision goggles, a night-vision camera, religious literature on Christianity and a samurai sword. When he was questioned after his arrest, Faulkner — who receives dialysis for kidney problems — revealed he was on a solo quest to find and capture Osama bin Laden.

When he was returned to the States, Faulkner enjoyed brief celebrity. But after the Klieg lights cooled — and Navy SEALs finished Faulkner’s job for him — he began spending his days in the more pedestrian pursuit of managing an apartment complex in Greeley owned by his brother, Scott. That is, until the early-morning hours of May 6, according to a Greeley police affidavit exclusively obtained by Danger Room (.pdf), when he was pressed into action once again.

more

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/gary-brooks-faulkner-jail/

How Much Has the F-22 Really Cost?

By David Axe Email Author December 14, 2011 | 5:00 pm | Categories: Air Force

The 196th and final F-22 Raptor has rolled out of Lockheed Martin’s factory in Marietta, Georgia. That means yesterday marked an end to more than 14 years of production for what’s widely considered the most fearsome jet fighter in history. And also one of the costliest.

So what’s the cost? As little as $137 million per jet and as much as $678 million, depending on how and what you count. The thing is, the best way of calculating the F-22′s cost may be the most abstract. But any way you crunch the numbers, the world’s best dogfighter has also been one of the most expensive operational warplanes ever.

Over the years, the Raptor’s cost has been the subject of intense debate in the Pentagon, the White House, Congress and the media. But advocates and critics tend to quote different figures to serve their various agendas. Fans of the twin-engine fighter usually refer to the “flyaway cost” — that is, how much Lockheed charged the government to piece together each Raptor after all development has been paid for. In other words, just construction spending.

By that reckoning, each of the last 60 F-22s set the taxpayer back $137 million, only slightly more than the roughly $110 million apiece Americans pay for a new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — a plane specifically designed to be “affordable,” whatever that means. (All figures are in roughly constant dollars.)


Haters cite “unit cost,” which includes development and production spending divided by the number of jets built. F-22 production and development, including currently approved upgrades, totals $74 billion, resulting in a unit cost of $377 million.


more
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/f-22-real-cost/

‘Arms Race’ Exists Between Snakes and Humans

By ScienceNow December 13, 2011




By Sarah C. P. Williams, ScienceNOW

At sunset on 13 March 1973, a reticulated python (Python reticulatus) slithered into a thatched hut in the Philippines and killed two siblings: a 4-year-old girl and a 3-year-old boy. The third child in the family was saved when his father returned to the hut and killed the reptile with a bolo knife.

That’s one of many observations described in a new analysis of snake attacks on the Agta Negritos, a rural hunter-gatherer culture that thrived in the isolated mountain regions of Luzon island until the 1990s. The new data, based on interviews with Agta adults, reveal that snakes were more than just a rare nuisance to the people. They were prey, predator, and competitor all at once. The complex relationship helps reveal the evolutionary pressures that humans and snakes once put on each other.


“Until these data, most people thought that there was a one-way relationship: snakes occasionally harming people,” says herpetologist Harry Greene of Cornell University, who helped put together the new analysis. “But this is the strongest evidence yet that it’s a much more complicated relationship.”

In 1976, anthropologist Thomas Headland of the Southern Methodist University in Dallas interviewed 120 adult Agta about python attacks. At the time, Headland, who had learned the language of the Agta, was studying their lifestyle of hunting, sleeping in small temporary structures, and living in small kin-related groups. Recently, he teamed up with Greene to analyze the interviews. Of the men interviewed, nearly 26% had been attacked by a snake, and almost all of them had substantial scars from python bites. A traumatic python incident—leading either to a fatality or an injury—occurred every 2 to 3 years from the 1940s to the 1970s. If these numbers on attacks were consistent throughout multiple generations, the researchers concluded, the mortality within the population could have reached more than 8% in earlier days, when iron weapons such as knifes were rare in the Agta population. But Agta Negritos, the interviews revealed, also hunted pythons. Adult snakes are often more than 5 meters long and provide 20 kilograms or more of meat. All Agta men interviewed had killed at least small pythons.

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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/snakes-humans-evolution/#more-89347

NASA Builds Six-Foot Crossbow to Harpoon Comets

By Mark Brown, Wired UK


What’s the best way to take a sample from a violently speeding comet? One that’s doing cartwheels through the cosmos, spewing out chunks of rock and speeding through the solar system at 150,000 miles an hour?

Landing on its surface sounds like risky business, so engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center are working on a harpoon gun that can spear the heart of the comet, collect a sample of subsurface dirt in its tip and reel it back into the hovering craft.
To that end, the Goddard lab now houses a monstrous six-foot-long crossbow, with a bow made from a pair of truck carriage springs, and a string made from a half-inch-thick steel cable. This industrial-strength ballista can generate a level of force up to 1,000 pounds.


The engineers only point the bow towards the floor, for safety reasons. “It could potentially launch test harpoon tips about a mile if it was angled upwards,” said NASA’s Bill Steigerwald in a press release.

The engineers are also building a special arrow, with a collection chamber secreted away inside a hollow tip. “It has to remain reliably open as the tip penetrates the comet’s surface, but then it has to close tightly and detach from the tip so the sample can be pulled back into the spacecraft,” explains Donald Wegel, lead engineer on the project.

more
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/nasa-comet-harpoon/

Toon: That's what, 2-3 week's pay for you people?

Illinois' prepaid tuition program has 30% funding gap, report says

By Ryan Haggerty
Chicago Tribune reporter
10:28 p.m. CST, December 13, 2011

The state's troubled prepaid college tuition program is about 30 percent short of the funding needed to meet its projected obligations, according to a report released this week.

The report, conducted by actuarial consultants Gabriel, Roeder, Smith & Co., shows that the College Illinois program had a deficit of almost $560 million as of March 31.

The program, launched in 1998, allows participants to buy contracts locking in today's prices for future tuition and fees at the state's public colleges. Recently, however, it has been heavily criticized for its investment strategy, slow sales and funding shortfall.

The state Student Assistance Commission, which oversees the program, stopped selling contracts Sept. 30.

more
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-illinois-prepaid-college-tuition-1214-20111214,0,1794529.story

Just like pensions. Just wait until all those parents find out that their 'prepaid' plan only covers 2 years....

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