Posts Tagged ‘New Year’

News & Submissions 12/30/2010

Thursday, December 30th, 2010

Dark future for wrong psychics
There are many things to dislike about end-of-year celebrations — the pressure to make New Year’s Eve memorable, the shameful amounts of money wasted on fireworks, drunken renditions of Auld Lang Syne. But perhaps the most annoying tradition is the value placed on predictions made by psychics.

According to a 2009 Neilsen poll, 49 per cent of Australians believe in psychic powers, despite — it must be pointed out — a distinct lack of supporting evidence.

However, as 2010 draws to a close, we have a unique chance to put some of these beliefs to the test by reflecting on the accuracy of psychic predictions made at the start of the year. After all, the rest of us face performance reviews at this time of the year, so why not critically appraise clairvoyants as well? Read full story from haroldsun.com

January, New Year and the Compitalia
For many people, after the December festivities January comes as a quite a gloomy anti-climax. However, Classical Pagans (i.e. those following a Roman/Greek pantheon) perceive the world with somewhat different eyes.

Subsequent to the festivities of Yuletide and the Midwinter Solstice, or Christmas – if one subscribes to the more recent Christian ethos, we swiftly arrive at the start of another contemporary year. I accentuate the word ‘contemporary’ because calendars have so frequently changed over the centuries.

The bucolic, pre-Christian, Celtic land dwellers regarded the period we now call Halloween (originally Samhain) as the end of summer and commencement of winter. It marked the start of the New Year.

When we disregard the ‘man-made’ calendar and take a long look at nature’s moods, this old agricultural method of time calculation begins to make a great deal of sense. Read full story from ufodigest

Secular Coalition Calls for Email Campaign to Mayor-Elect Gray
December 29, 2010 (Washington, D.C.) – The Secular Coalition for America (SCA) is calling for an email campaign by all D.C. residents to let Mayor-Elect Vincent Gray know that discrimination in any form, for any reason is unacceptable.

CLICK HERE TO SEND A MESSAGE TO MAYOR-ELECT VINCENT GRAY.

The efforts come one day after SCA went public with the decision from the mayor-elect’s transition team to exclude a secular representative for atheists, agnostics, humanists, and other nontheistic Washington, D.C. residents at his first official inaugural event—an ecumenical service entitled “One City … Praying Together” at 8 a.m. Sunday, January 2, 2011. Read full story from richarddawkins.com

Seven arrested for killing man over witchcraft
Seven people were arrested at Thabine village outside Tzaneen on Thursday after a man accused of practising witchcraft was stoned to death, Limpopo police said. Read full story from thenewaga.co.za

Man banished from Busia village over witchcraft
RESIDENTS of Buwhera village in Buyanga sub-county in Busia district have banished a man from their village for allegedly practicing witchcraft.

Robert Barasa, 24, was banished from the village after a meeting held at Buwhera on Tuesday. Karim Sityabude, who is field operations chief of the Uganda traditional healers Busia Chapter, was present at the meeting. Read full story from newvision.co.ug

Yes, Virginia, Hellenes Have Christmas Traditions
Two decades ago, Ann Landers did a column about how various cultures celebrate Christmas. Halfway down her list was this gem: “If you are Greek Orthodox, your sect celebrates Christmas on January 7.” Several people wrote back that 1) the Orthodox church is not a sect — it is the original church from which the Catholic one split after the Schism of 1054 and 2) only the so-called Old Believers track Christmas by the Julian calendar.

I was reminded of this when I was leaving work a week ago, and a colleague asked, “Should I wish you Merry Christmas? I heard you Greeks don’t celebrate it like we do.” As those who read my posts know, I’m an atheist who misses many of my culture’s old customs, particularly those that thrum with pagan echoes. So I’m going to put my tour guide’s hat briefly on, and tell you what we Hellenes do around the time of the winter solstice. Read full story from huffingtonpost.com

Need a Job? Losing Your House? Who Says Hoodoo Can’t Help?
Jennifer Forness, a 39-year-old in Groton, Conn., felt her life falling apart earlier this year. Her husband announced he wanted a divorce. She lost her job as a store clerk. She developed health problems from the stress.

Then one night she discovered a website selling products for hoodoo—an ancient belief system based on spells, potions, balms and curses that slaves developed long ago in the Deep South. Ms. Forness ordered several items and instructions for performing certain rituals. She also had a telephone session with a hoodoo “doctor” who specializes in employment matters. Read full story from wsj.com

Forecasters keep eye on looming ‘Solar Max’
PARIS, France — The coming year will be an important one for space weather as the Sun pulls out of a trough of low activity and heads into a long-awaited and possibly destructive period of turbulence.

Many people may be surprised to learn that the Sun, rather than burn with faultless consistency, goes through moments of calm and tempest.

But two centuries of observing sunspots — dark, relatively cool marks on the solar face linked to mighty magnetic forces — have revealed that our star follows a roughly 11-year cycle of behaviour.

The latest cycle began in 1996 and for reasons which are unclear has taken longer than expected to end.

Now, though, there are more and more signs that the Sun is shaking off its torpor and building towards “Solar Max,” or the cycle’s climax, say experts. Read full story from google.com

Christ In Woman’s Chest X-ray (source abc news)

News & Submissions 12/27/2010

Monday, December 27th, 2010

Strange & Fun New Year Food Customs
Only a day away from Christmas, which means it’s only days left until the end of the year. This also means there are only days left to accomplish those 2010 resolutions! To start the New Year on the right foot, many will be out celebrating and setting the tone for the next year. There’s no better way to do that than with food, holiday traditions, and great company. Many people around the world agree and so here’s a round up of the strangest New Year food customs from around the world. Read full story from planetgreen.com

The art on the cave walls at Chauvet continues to thrill
Imagine, for one moment, that first shock of recognition when the creatures of the cave wall at Chauvet in the Gorges de L’Ardeche were exposed to artificial illumination and human consciousness for the first time in thousands of years.

The date is December 18, 1994. Here is Jean-Marie Chauvet, the archaeologist who discovered the caves, recalling the impact of those long-forgotten dream images: “Time was abolished, as if the tens of thousands of years that separated us from the producers of these paintings no longer existed. Deeply impressed, we were weighed down by the feeling that we were not alone; the artists’ souls and spirits surrounded us. We thought we could feel their presence; we were disturbing them.” Read full story from thenational.ae

Hitler’s Triumph of the Will & Christ
Do Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther and Christ really have anything in common? Consider the story of Hitler’s battle against Luther over the soul of Germany. This event reveals the political side of religion in Hitler’s Germany, found in the Nazis and their propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1934), placed against Luther’s greatest work—Bondage of the Will (1525). Hitler sought to move Germany beyond indomitable Luther and his Bible by sheer humanistic effort. Here was a politician trying to advance his cause by undermining traditional religion, which still occurs today, perhaps more than ever. Read full source from canadafreepress.com

Ft. Leavenworth’s military bloggers react to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal
The student blog of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, is a great way to find out how soldiers really feel about life in the military.

Naturally, Congress’ repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the military’s stale stance forbidding gays to serve openly, has inspired discussion. Some are all for it, others against, and still others seem to have missed the point entirely. Read full story from pitch.com

Did It All Happen in the 1980s?
Technoccult uses Google’s new Ngram Viewer, which searches for trends among various corpus of books Google has scanned, to track a seeming explosion of interest in the occult and “magick” in the mid-1980s. So I decided to do my own search, and compare the terms “Wicca”, “Paganism”, and “Magick.” Read full story from wildhunt.org

New Year’s Resolution: I will believe in free will
In the wee hours of this morning my eyes popped open, and I spent the next half hour trying to figure out what to write about in this column. After careful, albeit groggy deliberation, I decided to go with free will, both because of the tie-in to New Year’s resolutions and because some high-profile scientists have been questioning whether free will exists.

One is the neuroscientist Sam Harris. His new book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press, 2010), which I critiqued in a previous post, has a section titled “The Illusion of Free Will”. Harris argued that “no account of causality leaves room for free will.” He cited experiments in which magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) “predicts” that a subject is going to do something—on the basis of activity in the subject’s brain—up to 10 seconds before the subject consciously decides to do it. Read full story from scientificamerican.com

Did global warming stop in 1998, 1995, 2002, 2007, 2010?
A common claim, made by those who deny man made global warming, is that the Earth has been cooling recently. 1998 was the first year claimed by ‘skeptics’ for “Global Cooling”. Then 1995 followed by 2002. ‘Skeptics’ have also emphasized the year 2007-2008 and most recently the last half of 2010.

NASA and climate scientists throughout the world have said, however, that the years starting since 1998 have been the hottest in all recorded temperature history. Do these claims sound confusing and contradictory? Has the Earth been cooling, lately?

To find out whether there is actually a “cooling trend” it is important to consider all of these claims as a whole, since they follow the same pattern. In making these claims, ‘skeptics’ take short periods of time, usually about 10 years or less, out of context (“Cherry picked.”) from 30 years of evidence; the minimum needed to make a valid judgment. Read full story from skepticalscience.com

Year in Review: Top Stories of March 2010
As the year 2010 draws to a close, it’s a good time to reflect on some of the top stories we’ve seen here at About Pagan/Wiccan. There were archaeological discoveries, tales of religious discrimination, news stories about church/state separation issues, and more. Let’s take a look at some of the most significant stories of 2010, and see what happened in March. Read full story from Patti’s Paganism / Wicca Blog

Rare earth metals mine is key to US control over hi-tech future
It’s a deep pit in the Mojave desert. But it could hold the key to America challenging China’s technological domination of the 21st century.

At the bottom of the vast site, beneath 6 metres (20ft) of bright emerald-green water, runs a rich seam of ores that are hardly household names but are rapidly emerging as the building blocks of the hi-tech future.

The mine is the largest known deposit of rare earth elements outside China. Eight years ago, it was shut down in a tacit admission that the US was ceding the market to China. Now, the owners have secured final approval to restart operations, and hope to begin production soon. Read full story from guardian.co.uk

Leopard attacks villagers in India (source itnnews)

Mysterious creature found in Nelson County (source wave3)