Remember how back in December, we were all talking about how sad the Megan Meier case was, and how it was awful that there was no way to prosecute her middle-aged harasser, Lori Drew?

[If you need a refresher here's the AP summary. Basically, this insecure girl Megan Meier, 13, met a 16-year-old "boy" on MySpace who turned cruel and pelted her with vicious messages, including one that said the world would be better off without her. Distraught, Megan hanged herself in her closet while her mother was downstairs. It was later revealed that this boy Megan had a crush on was in fact a fiction created online by a classmate's vindictive mother, Lori Drew.]

Well, it looks like there is justice after all.

One in three women in America admits to having an extramarital affair. A new survey done by Cookie Magazine and AOL Body titled "Sex and the American Mom" questioned 30 thousand women about their marriage and sex life. The results of the survey revealed that 34 percent of married women with children have either had, or are currently having an affair. In addition, the study found that 77 percent of the women polled wish they had more sex.

Men have always been stereotyped to be the ones who stray in search of a little action on the side. But now there are actual studies done to prove that women are just as accountable for having affairs. Is cheating inevitable when sex is lacking in a marriage? Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty outright announced to the world that he and his wife don't have sex. Does that make him more inclined to give into extramarital temptations? The Young Turks weigh in on relationships and cheating in the following clip.

Pope Benedict is eager to reach more young people, so he's embracing new technology, including social networking and text messaging.

According to this Reuters article: The Pope will text daily messages of inspiration and hope during the six-day Sydney event while digital prayer walls will be erected at event sites and the church will set up a Catholic social networking Web site akin to a Catholic Facebook.

Wow is he going to get a lot of friend requests. But if he really wants to reach today's kids, he should start talking like them. For his first text, may we suggest: "Jesus luvz u. For realz."

The Canadian Press has an interesting article about JuicyCampus.com, a site on which college students can anonymously post trashy, often malicious gossip about each other:

Free to use and supported by advertising, JuicyCampus is a simple conduit urging users to post gossip and promising them total anonymity. There are threads on campus hook-ups, who's popular and who's overweight . . . Many postings combine the cruelty of a middle school playground, the tight social dynamics of a college campus and the alarming global reach of the Internet.

We're not sure what the big deal is. The site is blocked from Google search, so it's unlikely to affect future job prospects. The main people on there are frat guys and sorority girls obsessed with ranking each others' hotness.

My first volunteer is Rommel Santor or as we call him on the Sift Lucky760. Since Lucky is the blogger and I am merely milking his work, I sent Rommel a $25 gift certificate to Kiva.org so he can try his hand at Microloans.

Turning Foxes Into House Pets by Lucky760

Here is a 3 minute clip from NOVA about the experiment (which has been submitted to the Sift here):

A rather fascinating experiment that was started over half a century ago by geneticists in Siberia (at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk) has yielded some truly awe-inspiring results, including what can be considered indisputable proof of evolution.

The experiment accomplished in foxes what Mother Nature took thousands of years to do with wolves. It began with wild foxes that were captured and kept in captivity. Not surprisingly, most of them were very aggressive toward all humans. The experimenters selected only those which exhibited the least aggression and bred them.

This is essentially how the study continued for generation after generation of breeding over several decades. The foxes were never given much contact with any humans except for brief studies. After selecting 45,000 foxes over 35 generations, some amazing observations were made.

The foxes were not only more tame showing little to no aggression toward humans, the obvious intent of the study, but several physical changes started to happen: coats were no longer camouflaged, but had lots of different colors and even started having patterns in their fur; straight, pointy ears became floppy; legs became shorter; tails were no longer straight and long, but short and curly.

This is clearly reminiscent of the way wolves evolved into such a vast plethora of breeds that vary so greatly from one another, except this evolution occurred in only a few decades rather than the assumed several millennia it took to change wolves into dogs.

Or did the Captain end the debate first here on Newsbloggers?

This will be the fourth time I've blogged about Homeless Vets this week, it's been a silly narrative O'Reilly has been broadcasting, if I give up following it now, I will be doing you all a disservice. You would think an adult with a salary of $9 Million could think of more to do with the valuable airtime he posses to address the real issues. Is he the type of journalist young Americans should listen too? (My lovely girlfriend gave me the O'Reilly children's book recently, as a joke, I found it scary.)

Olbermann references a bridge in New Orleans. Take a look.

Well, I have enough AOL experience to know that this comment section will likely descend into chaos. Many will complain that I am too liberal and many will cry foul because the enclosed video was from Bill's greatest rival, Keith Olbermann. The complaints are always the same, some AOLers will apparently keep complaining until I turn myself into a Neo-Con.

This complaint mess all started after Powerline informed the AOL community I was posting liberal propaganda. This was during my first couple weeks on the job. If they sound familiar, these are also the guys who brought down Dan Rather. Rather was a legend, taking down liberal blogger Jeff Hoard proved to be a piece of cake for them. Here I was, first days at AOL, an idiot, thinking each writer on Newsbloggers were all working together towards a common goal of creating a digital blog about current events and these guys are bashing me daily in front of the hundreds and thousands of potential new readers.

Powerline eventually left AOL, but the Neo-Con mentality remains, muddy every argument - a tie equals a win. I don't mind chaos and flamewars in comment threads, as long as AOLers are happy, I've come to terms with the fact that this blog has been a healthy anger outlet for many. Myself, I have a young mind and it generally only works when inebriated. For the first time I fear my mental health because I spend my days reading endless Neo-Con hate mail.

This is my 500th post here on AOL and I hope to continue with 500 more in the future, It's time this blog either turns a corner or ends its run. This month I am mobilizing a campaign to restore the integrity of this blog here on Newsbloggers, to learn more details about how I plan on making this blog a little bit more peaceful, Email me.

A St. Louis town is contemplating a bill that would ban swearing, drinking contests, table dancing and other typical drunken behavior from bars. City officials claim crowds in downtown St. Charles get a little too rowdy and hard to control after a night out. So to combat the problem, cuss words and dancing might become illegal.

Burning Question Number One:

How will banning filthy language in bars help to control an overly drunk crowd of people? Besides that, isn't it an unnecessary violation of the first amendment to tell people they can't say a four letter word in an adult atmosphere? Saying bad words doesn't harm anyone. They just shouldn't be said in front of young children, or to degrade a race of people. Other than that, anyone should be allowed to say whatever word they wish to say.

Burning Question Number Two:

No table dancing? Really? Table dancing doesn't hurt anyone! In fact, I encourage table dancing! Nothing generates love and happiness in a bar more than a woman moving the beat of great music. In fact, if people want to get on top of a table to express themselves in a drunken rumba, I say kudos to them!

Here's a Thought:

If a crowd of people get too rowdy after a night of drinking, why not limit how much alcohol they can have rather than banning cuss words and dancing? I don't think there should be a three drink maximum. But bartenders should be able to say no to customers when they're getting out of hand. Banning drinking games in bars might actually be a good idea for this particular St. Louis town. Making sure bartenders don't keep giving people drinks while they're falling on the floor from over-intoxication could be another good idea.

Let's focus of real problems people! Free speech and dancing is what makes this country great. Let's not snatch it away from our fun-loving counterparts.

This video below is a shameless plug for another company I work for on the intrawebs. It's called Mahalo.com and it's the brain child of it's founder web guru Jason Calacanis. The idea is quite simple, it's like Google except the search results are provided by humans, rather then algorithms. For example, if you search for Scientist David Attenborough the search result you find was created by myself, basically I spent a day searching Google for the best websites about Attenborough then created a page displaying them. The result is a search page with no spam and quality links.

I feel comfortable posting this shameless plug because I opt out of receiving a paycheck with Mahalo, instead I forward the money I earn to the Wikimedia Foundation. The internet has given me so much, it's only right to give back a little. So head on over and do some test searches (it's still in alpha beta) and let me know what you think.

I personally visit Wikipedia everyday, and I link to it in almost all my blog posts. I have said many times not to take Wikipedia as the gospel, but to use it as a tool for information. Each Wikipedia page will usually cite sources and provide links to the most relevant information about the subject you are researching.

Wikipedia's biggest strength (and biggest flaw) is that anybody can anonymously edit any entry. Recently a new tool was developed where any edit can be traced. And my oh my has the social web been buzzing as major corporations and governments have been outed for "editing" their wiki pages.

Here is a massive, massive list of all the editing parties involved.
Here are some highlights.
BBC Edits George Walker Bush to George Wanker Bush.
CIA caught editing the Iranian Presidents page
Vatican erases Murder facts
DNC Edits the Rush Limbaugh Page
Diebold deletes information from their page
NRA, Chevron, Exxon, DOW all getting in on the act or deleting facts.
Thousands of companies were outed thanks to the new tracking tool, and of course, last but not least...
Fox News Caught Editing...a lot of pages, including their number one critic, Keith Olbermann.

Keith spoke with the senior editor of Wired Magazine about the news. He echoes my thoughts by saying this controversy does nothing more then show the strength of Wikipedia. The Wiki community does a heckuva job catching these edits as soon as they happen and with the release of this new tool corporations and governments will be a little bit more hesitant when editing the website.

Here is a great nature clip to watch on this nice mid-summer day.
This video made it's way to the top of most of the social networks this week, why?
Maybe it's the unexpected smile it brought to the faces of those who watched it?

When you click play you may believe that it's the beginning of a nature snuff film, two long haired hippies standing about 20 meters away from a stalking lion. I'm pretty sure the video is actually a clip from a 1976 documentary titled Christian the Lion. You can learn about the background of this lion thanks to this recent news article from the UK.

Tired of politics? More great Nature clips on the sift.

The Young Turks have been following the insane Bill O'Reilly smear campaign against the Dailykos.com. Turns out our good friend Stephen Colbert has also decided to support Dailykos.com. It's shaping up to be a battle of old media vs new.

This saga has been going on for awhile now (and continues), and the Young Turks already summed up the absurdity. Chalk this one up with the million other acts of douchebaggery that O'Reilly commits each year. I'm starting to believe that sane Americans are now just using the Internet.

I like the Young Turks. They are pissed, and they are trying to do something about it. Kudos fellas.

Enough.

Well, he didn't really "plug" Netscape, but he did mentioned Netscape's name while introducing a story about the Illuminati, giving us the only option to assume Colbert (or his writers) read Netscape.com. This could be a brief shout out to Social Media sites. After all if there is anywhere that truthiness is the logic of choice, it's the mass communities of the Internet.

The beauty of Social Media websites is that every piece of news is thrown into the same forum. So a story about the Illuminati has the same chance of reaching the front page as any mainstream media article. Who decides what stories make the front page are the members of that community.

This Illuminati story did not make the front page -- it only got a few votes -- but it caught the attention of the Colbert report writers. And thus as a member of Netscape, I celebrate. Here is the video.



Yesterday's Conspiracy (The Whitehouse Coup) did however make the front page and directed thousands of curious Netscapers to the BBC. Naturally this erupted a discussion full of truthiness. Feel free to hop on over to Netscape, your AOL Screen Names give you automatic admission. This gives you a free pass to comment and vote on content already on Netscape, and you can submit news that you want to share.

This week is a special week, faithful TayTVers have once again made a wise choice by voting The Hunter S Thompson Tag into the Hall of Champions. After being the runner up in Tag Series XIV, the Hunter S Thompson Tag Archive has come through to win Tag Series XVI. I hunted down a good two hours worth of videos here, and my taytving friend Karen wrote the post, enjoy your lazy Sunday and if you have any HST links to share you can submit them to Netscape or post them in the comments.

Let's begin with a scene from the Movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Hunter S. Thompson began his writing career in 1956 by becoming sports editor of the Elgin Air Force base newspaper in an attempt to avoid more active duty, having signed up for the Air Force on what was basically a whim a week after serving his first (and only) time (although he was arrested, but never convicted many subsequent times in his life) in jail after being charged as an accessory to robbery for having been in a car with the person who actually committed the robbery.

Thompson is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting in which the reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become the central figure of the story itself. Often mixing fact with fiction and using a stylized breakneck stream-of consciousness narrative, perhaps the first, and most famous example of a Gonzo novel is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was further popularized by the 1998 movie of the same name. The release of the film also introduced a new generation to Thompson's writing, and caused his long-lost novel The Rum Diary to be published, along with the first two volumes of his collected letters, which were greeted with critical acclaim.

The Daily Show decided to peek inside the intertubes to get some 2008 election news, here is what they found.

If you thought the Mike Gravel "Rock" campaign video sounded bizarre, here is another one titled "Fire", you can also check out what the Mike Gravel campaign website has to say about the bizarre videos.

Get ready, this certainly is going to be a "youtube election"