Polygraphs tests are built on junk science and their use should be prohibited. There are various other common tools in forensics that are in the same boat, incuding fingerprint analysis, police lineups, bite mark analysis, etc, etc. Many people have been wrongly convicted based on these thanks to the false belief the public holds that they are infallible.

In an article on the middle east I got into trouble for posts which referred to the shared linguistic roots of Arabs and Jews as well as the fact that the biblical story of Noah and the Ark was plagiarized from the Epic of Gilgamesh. My opponent was a Jewish gentleman and the whole exchange was deleted. From that I learned that in the Guardian it's abusive to contradict the Talmud.

It's evidence that governments are winning the PR war against TOR and privacy. They're throwing a lot of money and effort at this and there's hardly any push back. I expect Tor will be outlawed within three years....Given enough time PR firms could convince the public that kittens are the world's most dangerous security risk and must all be exterminated.

Unmentioned is ETA, the Basque terror organization active between 1968 and 2002 that committed 3,300 terror attacks killing 952 people and injuring 3,300. That's 34 years of murders and bombings... Anarchists are still sending letter bombs in Europe, as they did in the United States in the early 1900s. In 1919 they sent 36 dynamite letter bombs to prominent americans and the next year carried out the Wall Street bombing which killed 30 people. Bin Laden and al Qaeda undoubtedly got the idea for attacking the twin towers from Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing. Lots more examples... So no, Islamic radicals did not invent terrorism.

For secure deletion I set apg to create a 10,000 character password and feed it into ccrypt. The results could easily be added to emails, the first 10,000 as the text, the second as the password to encrypt it, causing spies to spend huge effort decrypting to only to get gibberish.

ETA, a separatist Basque separatist organization in NATO ally Spain active 1961 to 2011 committed hundreds of bomb and assassination attacks. Nelson Mandela's group dynamited hydro towers. Still active, Italian anarchists in the early 1900s carried out a series of mail bombings in the US and set off a huge bomb on Wall Street. There was Timothy McVeigh, etc, etc.

It's very old news. In the 1890s criminologist Count Franz von Liszt, (cousin of the composer), made a practice of staging disruptions at his lectures involving actors fighting, sometimes firing a gun. Even forewarned, students gave wildly differing accounts of events in summaries they wrote afterwards. Many experiments since have demonstrated the same results. What is stored in memory is the gist of events. Details are supplied on the fly during recall. We still place a high value on eye witness testimony at trials, which has led to the imprisonment and execution of many innocent people.

First step is to stop letting the media and drug companies define mental illness. People learn the role of depression through TV, movies and articles and find the symptoms within themselves. Once they get caught up in that role their expectations drive their behaviour. The placebo effect is enormously powerful.

My library enables third parties to access users' computers by piggy backing on the library connection, and the search string is included in the url of accessed pages. One of those sharing the connection is google analytics, which can then link the search terms with the IP. At the same time Google drops tracking cookies. The library sees nothing wrong with this arrangement.

"useful link"... Lots of similar stuff on the Ku Klux Klan website and the sites of related groups. If a couple of black guys attacked a KKK rally would that prove that all Blacks are murderers?

"clears the brain of neurotoxic amyloid plaques...". On autopsy, some alzheimers patients have been seen to have had no amyloid plaque while others who had no symptoms of alzheimers had large amounts of amyloid plaque... The brain produces it's own insulin and the high levels of fructose and related sugars in western diets result in Type 3 diabetes. Fructose is to alzheimers now as smoking was to lung cancer in the 20th century... But there's another important contributing factor, which is how the brain creates and maintains memory. Memories that no longer have importance are deleted. When you warehouse elderly people, drug them, take away all decisions and responsibilities and isolate them from their families they have nothing left to care about. Combine social isolation with fructose induced Type 3 diabetes and you have an alzheimers epidemic.

I had a post deleted on The Guardian for having referenced the 4,100 year old Epic of Gilgamesh, a Babylonian text that presents an earlier version of Noah and the Ark than that found in the Talmud, Bible or Koran. It appears that was considered antisemitic.

Many families opt for a warehouse with minimal care, then they never come to see Mum again. And through Power of Attorney the money gets siphoned off leaving nothing to pay the bills. Being sent to a home is like being sent to a Psychiatric hospital, you're locked in, have no rights at all and are pumped so full of drugs you never complain again. I've seen all this happen to friends. Care on any level is big business and the only goal is to siphon off as much money as they can. Most people sent to homes have simply become too weak to defend themselves against their family's greed. You think you're a citizen and protected by the Bill of Rights? Wait til you turn 70.

Hmm. I did say "implies". Valid point, but it's kind of a loose definition. One could say membership in the Tea Party indicates a disorder in function that produces specific signs or symptoms. I was cautioning against the habit we have of plugging in a label to explain complex phenomena. In this case pronouncing the word "disease" is a slack way of dismissing the symptoms of dementia without any futher thought. Humans have a history of such rough sorting, using it as justification for all sorts of monstrous human rights abuses.

Often the elderly are put in homes because their relatives want their money, and distress at being stripped of their freedom and rights is considered proof that they need to be confined. If they've been abandoned by those they care most about and condescended to by all and sundry, they may well exhibit rage. Essentially, we condemn them to solitary confinement.. And... for most people, contact with family is more important that where you left your keys. Women tend to define themselves by family ties, men by their jobs. Take those away, put them in what amounts to concentration camps, force them to take drugs... and they are nothing.