How McDonald's Conquered France
In the battle for France, Jose Bové, the protester who vandalized a McDonald's in 1999 and was then running for president, proved to be no match for Le Big Mac....By 2007, France had become the second-most profitable market in the world for McDonald's, surpassed only by the land that gave the world fast food. Against McDonald's, Bové had lost in a landslide.
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for a limited time with pepper sauce
McDonald's France was sourcing 75 percent of its ingredients domestically, and he felt it was imperative from a PR standpoint to force French farmers, hypocritically applauding Bové, to publicly acknowledge the large volume of business that they were doing with McDo.
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They came, they ate, and they lingered. As Gravier artfully put it, "The French population uses McDonald's in a very French way; it is fast food, but not that fast."...Americans visited McDonald's more often than the French, at all hours of the day, frequently alone, and opted for takeout 70 percent of the time. The French spent more money per visit, came in groups more often than Americans, and did 70 percent of their eating during regular lunch and dinner hours. "We have a food culture in France; eating is not a feeding moment, it is a social moment," Gravier said.
Wow. The freedom fighters in Iran have adopted Michael Jackson's Beat It as a new theme song.
via Gateway Pundit
No doubt a lot of people fantasized about this, but in Germany a group of wealthy pensioners actually did it.
Zimmer frame gang 'tortures advisor' who lost $4 million of their savings.
The pensioners, nicknamed the "Geritol Gang" by German police after an arthritis drug, face up to 15 years in jail if found guilty of subjecting German-American James Amburn to the alleged four-day ordeal.
Two of them are said to have hit him with a Zimmer frame outside his home ..before he was bound with duct tape, bundled into the boot of an Audi A8 and driven 300 mileso a home on the shores of a popular holiday lake in Bavaria.
During his alleged confinement in an unheated cellar, Mr Amburn, 56, claims he was burned with cigarettes, beaten, had two ribs broken, was hit with a chair leg and chained up "like an animal".
Since returning home after four days away sans computer, I'm just catching up on all the news in Iran.
What strikes me most of all is the participation of women in the protests. For a long time, I've believed that positive changes in the Mid East would come from the; they are the most oppressed and have the least to lose.
Under the burkas, chadors, and headscarves, we are seeing young women in jeans, wearing lipstick, with blond and frosted hair, who see their chance for real political change that would change their lives. La Femme Zahra holding hands with her husband Mousavi, tells crowds, "This is the moment to stand."
A young woman, shot to death is now the symbol of the protestors. Neda is now the 'Angel of Iran' and the 'Angel of Freedom'. The mullahs are so afraid of women rising up, they shoot them.
Are the Ayatollahs learning that hell hath no fury like 34 million women scorned, forced out of the workplace, harassed and humiliated by religious police for three decades? I have noticed some of the bravest protesters in Iran have been women, including a few who have been without headscarves and showing a great deal more of their figures than the regime would approve. Roger Cohen of the NY Times has noticed this, too.
.... Iran's women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I've seen them urging less courageous men on. I've seen them get beaten and return to the fray. "Why are you sitting there?" one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. "Get up! Get up!"
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More than 60 percent of Iran's university students are women, but women only make up perhaps 15 percent of the workforce.
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Women left alone with children after the death or desertion of a husband are particularly hard hit in a culture that openly discrimintes in employment. So are those in abusive relationships with fathers or husbands. One of Iran's dirty little secrets is how many women are forced into prostitution. News stories from 2002 reported as many as 300,000 women were engaged in prostitution in greater Tehran. In an area with a population then estimated at 12 million that is close to 5% of the total female population.
Iranian-American journalist Roya Hakakian sat down with ForbesWoman to discuss her native country's current climate and the situation facing women--and men--in Iran today
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Iran has had a robust women's movement for several decades now. But in the late 1990s, a new generation took charge; and in the early 2000s, they managed to organize and unite in ways that women had not since the revolution in 1979. It started as petition movement to collect signatures to ban stoning women to death and has spun out to become the "One Million Signatures Campaign."
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The feminist movement, which has been ongoing in Iran, has now joined the broader public movement against the regime.
So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised to learn that the Basij are targeting women, both young and old.
A brave man speaking the truth, Justice Coleridge
Only marriage can mend broken Britain, says top judge
Marriage should be promoted by the Government to end the 'social anarchy' of family breakdown, a senior judge said last night.
Mr Justice Coleridge accused mothers and fathers who fail to commit to each other of engaging in a game of 'pass the partner' that has left millions of children 'scarred for life'.
In a hard-hitting speech in Parliament, he called for a change of attitude that would attach a 'stigma' to those who destroy family life and said a National Commission should be established to devise solutions for the 'epidemic' of broken homes. --
Condemning the 'endless and futile quest for a perfect relationship', he said many parents were in 'a complete and uncontrolled free-for-all where being true to oneself and one's needs is the only yardstick for controlling behaviour'.
The London Telegraph publishes a column by the same Justice, Family breakdown is now a national tragedy
Recently, I was approached by the BBC, with a view to making a documentary about family breakdown. I suggested the researcher start by spending the day with me in court, to watch a run-of-the-mill High Court case. She was stunned into silence and remained speechless when I told her that within the Royal Courts of Justice, there were 20 or so other judges engaged in similar cases.
Across inner London, well over 100 family courts were dealing with family breakdown that day, in one guise or another. Multiply that across the rest of the country, and you get some feel for the scale of the epidemic.
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I am not suggesting, of course, that all change is bad, or that all relationship breakdowns can be avoided. Genuinely intolerable relationships have to be ended with as little distress as possible. But I fear that the current state of the family represents change for the worse – and those most affected, the children, are not considered in the maelstrom that surrounds them
From the Onion
PALO ALTO, CA—A new report published this week by researchers at Stanford University suggests that Americans spend the vast majority of each day staring at, interacting with, and deriving satisfaction from glowing rectangles.
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According to the report, staring blankly at luminescent rectangles is an increasingly central part of modern life. At work, special information rectangles help men and women silently complete any number of business-related tasks, while entertainment rectangles—larger and louder and often placed inside the home—allow Americans to enter a relaxing trance-like state after a long day of rectangle-gazing.
David Warren, Zahra's Revolution
The recent election was not the cause, but the trigger, of what is suddenly happening on the streets.
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But Mousavi's proposed modest reforms could hardly have excited the students, or the masses following in their train.
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But, cherchez la femme! What made Mousavi the fuse for an explosive force was not himself, but his wife, Zahra Rahnavard. In the course of the election campaign, she ignored Islamist precedent, and took to the hustings on her husband's behalf. This tiny grandmother, wearing regulation chador, but with very loud scarves, has wandered around the country lighting fires.
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She has used her social authority as a grandmother -- pillar of social order -- to turn conventions upside down. Going well beyond her husband's promises, she has demanded an end to discrimination against women, an end to the morality police, an end to supervision of the universities. It is she who has communicated to the students (in every Asian country the vanguard of the elite): "This is the moment to stand!"
More from the London Times
A diminutive 64-year-old grandmother who refuses to be bound by the rigid constraints imposed on women in Iran proved more than a match for the President of the Islamic Republic yesterday.
Zahra Rahnavard had already broken all precedent by actively campaigning for her husband, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a relative moderate who is President Ahmadinejad’s strongest challenger in Friday’s presidential election. Yesterday she went a step further by summoning the domestic and international media to a press conference at which she tore into the President for lying, humiliating women, debasing his office and betraying the principles of the revolution.
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Dr Rahnavard offered further inducements. She promised that her husband, if elected, would appoint women to Cabinet posts for the first time, and name many female deputy ministers and ambassadors. He would end discrimination and ensure that women were no longer treated as second-class citizens. He would release women’s rights activists from prison and abolish the “morality police” who, during Mr Ahmadinejad’s first term, cracked down on women deemed to be dressed inappropriately. She even suggested that women should not be forced to cover their heads.
So How's It Going in Iran? by Michael Leeden with photos from The Big Picture.
But the key element is the people. They are only just beginning to understand the reality of their situation. Virtually none of them imagined that they would be in a revolutionary confrontation with the regime just two days after the electoral circus, and few of them can realize, so soon, that they can actually change the world. I think the Mousavis now understand it (they know that they are either going to win or be destroyed). It remains to be seen if they can instruct and inspire the movement.
Much will depend on their ability to communicate. The regime has been waging a cyberwar against the dissidents, shutting down websites, cell phones, Facebook, and the like. As most people have learned, the basic communiations tool is Twitter, which somehow continues to function. Bigtime Kudos to Twitter, by the way, for postponing its planned maintenance so that the Iranians can continue to Tweet. Would that Google were so solicitous of freedom.
We don’t know who’s going to win. The Iranian people know that they’re on their own; they aren’t going to get any help from us, or the United Nations, or the Europeans. But paradoxically, this lack of support may strengthen their will. There is no cavalry on the horizon. If they are going to prevail, they and their unlikely leaders will have to gut it out by themselves. God be with them.
With increasing frequency, we're seeing Christians being persecuted in the U.K.
One 43-year-old woman wore a gold crucifix around her neck as many Catholics do. She was told at a disciplinary meeting that her job as a phlebotomist under the Gloucestershire NHS Trust was at risk unless she removed the crucifix because they claimed her one-inch crucifix could be used as a weapon or could be a source of infections
She told the Gloucestershire Echo: "I just feel it is so wrong - I have always worn my cross inside my uniform and it means a lot to me. They have told me I can carry it in my pocket but it isn't the same.
"My faith is important to me but I'm not a bible basher and don't push it onto colleagues. Now I have to choose between my job and my faith. It is an awful situation."
Christians risk rejection and discrimination for their faith in the U.K., a study claims
The first poll of Britain's churchgoers, carried out for The Sunday Telegraph, found that thousands of them believe they are being turned down for promotion because of their faith.
One in five said that they had faced opposition at work because of their beliefs.
More than half of them revealed that they had suffered some form of persecution for being a Christian.
The abuse in the marriage made it hard, but the mother, a committed Catholic, made sure her son, only 5, was enrolled in a Catholic school. When the marital abuse led to a nervous breakdown, and the mother was unable to care for her son. Social workers took custody of the boy and placed with a homosexual couple who run the hotel in which they live.
Catholic mother's fury after mental breakdown sees son fostered by gay couple
‘She would prefer a Catholic couple, but if that is not possible, at least a heterosexual one. But social services have given her no choice. She cannot understand how he can be looked after by two men she’s never met.
‘Her belief is that they could encourage him into a lifestyle that is against her religious beliefs.
‘The other day he asked her, “Mummy, are you lesbian or gay?” She had to tell him she was neither.’
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Last night, a leading Catholic lawyer, who asked not to be named, said: ‘I have to ask, would a local authority put a ten-year-old atheist child into a devoutly Catholic home? I think not.
‘Or would it place a ten-year-old hijab-wearing devout Muslim girl with two gay men? Again, I think not.’
That approaching wave of pension debt is bigger than it looks.
The purpose of this site is to provide an overview of the multiple pension crises that are about to drown America's taxpayers.
From the blog, The column that sparked this website: "Land a State Job and Become an Instant Millionaire"
California state government employees have an employer who regularly and by law provides a $40-50,000 contribution to each employee’s pension account — year in and year out — good budget times and bad. (And in bad years they borrow the money!)
The California state government provides a “defined benefit” pension plan to each of its employees. Such “defined benefit” pension plans are far more generous than any 401(k) or defined contribution pension plan available from any other employer in the state! In fact, the plan is so generous that it makes the average state employee a millionaire after only 22 years of work!
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It would require putting $56,889 ($1,251,562/22 years = $56,889) into your 401(k)/IRA or other retirement account every single year during those 22 years! When you work for the state, the state does this for you!
Is the state’s pension plan overly generous? The Sacramento Bee and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger have been whining about it lately — are they jealous? The state’s own Legislative Analyst has determined that California’s pension plan provides nearly twice the benefit of the next highest state.
No wonder California is in so much trouble and going bankrupt. California, the wave of the future.
Are we really on the verge of losing millions of books published before 1985?
Walter Olson on The New Book Banning
It’s hard to believe, but true: under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away, without first subjecting them to testing—at prohibitive expense. Many used-book sellers, consignment stores, Goodwill outlets, and the like have accordingly begun to refuse new donations of pre-1985 volumes, yank existing ones off their shelves, and in some cases discard them en masse.
The problem is the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA), passed by Congress last summer after the panic over lead paint on toys from China. Among its other provisions, CPSIA imposed tough new limits on lead in any products intended for use by children aged 12 or under, and made those limits retroactive: that is, goods manufactured before the law passed cannot be sold on the used market (even in garage sales or on eBay) if they don’t conform.
Why is Congress doing nothing about this?
The American Library Association spent months warning about the law’s implications, but its concerns fell on deaf ears in Congress (which, in this week’s stimulus bill, refused to consider an amendment by Republican senator Jim DeMint to reform CPSIA)
The cost for a library to comply is prohibitive. One librarian estimated that 75% of the books in her children's library are pre 1985. The cost of testing each of them would be more that the entire city budget.
Ace asks Who needs free books or cheap clothes in this economy anyway, right? Or retail jobs, or charity?
Walter Olson at Overlawyered quotes the associate executive director of the American Library Association, ”Either they take all the children’s books off the shelves,” she said, “or they ban children from the library.”
As well as the president and publisher of Random House Children's Books, Chip , “This is a potential calamity like nothing I’ve ever seen. The implications are quite literally unimaginable. …It has to be stopped.”
Ace sums it up.
So, to recap: Henry Waxman and his accomplices (including, we should note, many Republicans,) have managed to pass a bill which, inter alia,
1) requires the destruction or other removal of huge supplies of secondhand clothes, in winter,
2) may or may not preclude libraries from lending huge chunks of their childrens’ collections,
3) effectively removes as-yet-uncalculated amounts of inventory from salability from small- and medium-size businesses, without compensation.
"Everybody's gone. Everybody's gone. Everybody. Their houses are gone. They're all dead in the houses there. Everybody's dead," cried survivor Christopher Harvey as he walked through the town of Kinglake, where most people were killed.
-- One massive bushfire tore through several towns in the southern state of Victoria on Saturday night, destroying everything in its path. Many people died in cars trying to flee and others were killed huddled in their homes, yet some escaped by jumping into swimming pools or farm reservoirs.
The exploding bushfires in Victoria are Australia's worst natural disaster in more than a century. The death toll stands at 181 and will no doubt rise as more bodies are discovered. It is impossible to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster.
One father. a journalist who escaped with his family wrote
They warn you that it comes fast, but the word fast doesn't come anywhere near describing it. It comes at you like a runaway train. One minute you are preparing. The next you are fighting for your home. Then you are fighting for your life.
But it is not minutes that come between; it's more like seconds. The firestorm moves faster than you can think, let alone react.
Police suspect the fires may have been deliberately set.
a source said it appeared the Victorian blazes had been started in accordance with a plan. They appear to have been set in a semi-circle, the individual parts of which would join up to form a huge wall of flame.
Marysville, the 'ground zero' of destruction has been declared "one huge crime scene".
Prime minister Kevin Rudd described the arsonists as 'mass murderers' and has said the arsonists should 'rot in jail'.
One firefighter described the horror and the awful decision to save themselves knowing they were leaving people to die.
"We had people banging on the sides of our tanker begging us to go back to houses where they knew there were people trapped, but we couldn't because if we had, we'd all be dead too," Mr Munday said.
"There were children running down the streets with flames behind them. It was hell. I never want to go back to that place, never.
A graphic of the path of destruction. Photos at The Big Picture.
Many bodies were burned beyond recognition and may never be identified.
One man climbed onto a pub roof to save 400 people
ARMED with only a garden hose, tradie Peter Thorneycroft didn't hesitate before climbing on to the roof of Kinglake's National Park Hotel.
With dozens of children sheltered in the hotel's cool room, he knew it was the only way to put out embers threatening to ignite the building. Despite struggling with an arm injury, the 43-year-old also fought the embers with buckets of water handed up by brave locals.
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"It was like a cyclone, like a tornado," Mr Thorneycroft said yesterday. "The ground was constantly shaking. It was absolutely deafening. It was just complete darkness. I never panic . . . (but) I was s......g myself.
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Eleven years after losing his Kinglake home in a fire, Mr Thorneycroft left his new home to defend the pub. Miraculously the house survived. Wife Jodie, 41, had left the area but kept in constant phone contact during the drama. "Everyone was just in hysterics," she said.
"He just kept going, 'Everyone's dead, everyone's dead' and I just said, 'Shut up and do what you've got to do'."
Greens also get some of the blame
The fire experts said not enough had been done to thin out forest areas that posed a danger to small communities in the heart of the bush. The green lobby is against forests being thinned out because they say clearing bracken, logs and fallen leaves upsets the balance of nature.
In Strathewen, a town ravaged by the fires, resident John Murphy was more terse.
'I was told by the Greenies that I mustn't touch this twig or that stick because a mouse might want to live under it,' he said. 'Well to hell with the mice. People are dead - and so's the mouse.'
One man who lost his mother and brother in the fires criticized the town council's failure to give property owners permission to clean up around their properties in preparation for bushfire season.
We've lost two people in my family because you dickheads won't cut trees down. We wanted trees cut down on the side of the road … and you can't even cut the grass for God's sake."
Millions of animals feared dead
Kangaroos, wombats, native birds and reptiles stood little chance against the swiftly advancing blazes that devastated more than 400,000 hectares in the state of Victoria.
Corpses of dead wallabies and kangaroos still lined roads in the worst-hit areas, with rescue crews were too busy to clear them from sight. There were also reports of birds and bats falling out of the sky during the fires. One turtle was found with its shell fused together.
One koala was saved, now called Survivor Sam. YouTube video here.
Donations to the Victorian bushfire appeal at the Australian Red Cross.
I found this stunning
McDonald's announced at the end of January that it now earns more from sales in Europe — particularly France and Britain—than it does in the United States.
The French also spend more per purchase at McDonald's than anyone else in the world, according to the company's latest financial report.
And the most popular tourist attraction in Europe is ...Euro Disney.
I was stunned at this story. It's hard to fathom such depravity
'Mum' had 80 women raped for suicide missions
A WOMAN suspected of recruiting more than 80 female suicide bombers has confessed to organising their rapes so she could later convince them that martyrdom was the only way to escape the shame.
Samira Jassam, 51, was arrested by Iraqi police and confessed to recruiting the women and orchestrating dozens of attacks.
In a video confession, she explained how she had mentally prepared the women for martyrdom operations, passed them on to terrorists who provided explosives, and then took the bombers to their targets.
"We arrested Samira Jassim, known as 'Um al-Mumenin', the mother of the believers, who was responsible for recruiting 80 women'', Major General Qassim Atta said.
Gateway Pundit has the photograph of this "mother of all believers"
Some of those women were mentally disabled, Down syndrome women that were used to kill dozens in Baghdad.
Michael Leeden writes
This provides us with a particularly ugly picture of the recruitment of the faithful, which did not take place purely as the result of religious indoctrination, and the well-known dehumanization of the targets of the suicide attacks. In this case, the victims are the women themselves, who are first deliberately stripped of their worthiness, humiliated in their own eyes and those of their families, and then offered a bloody “redemption” by the terrorists.
We have known for some time about the seedy side of Islamic terrorism, ranging from the widespread use of drugs to the manipulation of psychologically damaged children. But, for me at least, this is the first account of systematic rape as a recruiting method. It ought to disgust everyone, but it should be especially repulsive to Muslims, for their religion is being cynically used in conjunction with sexist brutality in order to kill their own women as well as their (mostly Muslim) victims.
This story also suggests that the appeal of “martyrdom” is either not all it has been cracked up to be, or is losing its appeal in Iraqi society. Either way, it gives us hope that the terrorists are losing, which is abundantly confirmed by the relentless drop in “martyrdom operations.” But what terrible damage they have inflicted on their own people.
UPDATE: James Taranto makes it clear what's going on.
In any case, assuming the rape story is true, consider the many levels on which this is depraved. A Muslim woman is arranging for Muslim men to rape Muslim women in order to shame those Muslim women into committing suicide for the purpose of murdering other Muslim men, women and children. And all of this is done in the name of Islam.
It's wise to be wary of the pill
According to the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, an alarming rise in male infertility in developed nations is possibly caused by the quantities of synthetic female hormones, particularly estrogen, in the food chain and water. These quantities are directly attributable to increased use of the contraceptive pill and hormone replacement therapy.
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Indeed, according to Canberra Hospital professor Peter Collignon, an opponent of recycling sewage water into the potable supply, estrogen can be more of a problem in recycled water than microbes because it cannot be filtered out and we simply do not know how well it breaks down. Just as the Romans drinking from lead cups unwittingly caused infertility in themselves, perhaps we are seeing after 30 years of contraceptive pill use the long-term effects of introducing artificial estrogen into our wider environment. So you see this is not just a preoccupation of the misogynistic old Vatican.
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The evidence that synthetic hormones can have grotesque environmental effects has actually been around for a long time and it is mounting. As long ago as the 1980s, studies were done in the US which showed the effects of estrogen pollution on wildlife, famously alligators in Florida with deformed genitals.
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There are so many reasons for being wary of the contraceptive pill. Why are we not questioning its prevalence?
The reason is, of course, that it is the sacred cow of the sexual revolution. One imaginative letter writer claimed the Catholic view of the pill was that it was "the great Satan", and actually that is not a bad description. It was marketed as an instrument of sexual freedom, and it has provided that, particularly for men. But one might ask if for women it has been the means of sexual liberation or just a way of turning us into empty vessels for sex? Is it like the sexual revolution itself: a pretty and alluring package that turns out to be - for both sexes - like a series of empty boxes, one inside the other. At the end, there is nothing but an empty box.
It's astonishing when you think of it. If there were any other cause for worldwide male infertility and environmental degradation, people would be up in arms.
Where is the EPA? Where is the UN? Where is the outrage?
Given all the problems we have to face and solve, you would think some people wouldn't be trying to fix what's not broken and, in fact, works amazingly well.
But that is the case, as identity politics worms its way into the world of philanthropy.
Heather MacDonald on Never Enough Beauty, Never Enough Truth
American philanthropy is the envy of the world. ....Americans have evolved a unique civic culture of giving and entrepreneurial problem solving. From 1995 to 2002, charitable donations as a percentage of GDP were nearly six times higher in the United States than in France and 14 times higher than in Germany. In 2007, America’s charitable giving amounted to $306 billion.
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Yet American generosity is under fire. A growing number of activists and politicians argue that foundations should meet diversity targets in their giving and on their staffs. If foundations fail to diversify “voluntarily,” threaten the race, ethnicity, and gender enforcers, they risk legislation requiring them to do so. In other words, the diversity police, having helped bring on the subprime meltdown through mortgage-lending quotas, now want to fix philanthropy. And instead of rebuffing this power grab, the leaders in the field have rolled over and played dead.
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Its spokesmen have embraced the two false premises of the diversity movement: that the skin color and sexual profile of foundation and nonprofit personnel are meaningful performance indicators, and that philanthropic enterprises can be pigeonholed as benefiting this or that particular “diverse” group.
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She goes on to outline how saving the lives of 14,000 New Yorkers, mainly poor, black and Hispanic, is a direct result of the revolution in policing begun under Mayor Guiliani and Police Commissioner Bratton based on a think-tank idea, "Broken windows policing"
No one could have foreseen what the ultimate outcome of the ideas leading up to New York’s crime conquest would be, not even the philanthropists who supported them. Yet that intellectual labor has done more for minority uplift than New York’s multibillion-dollar social-services apparatus ever has—not just by saving lives but by creating the irreducible condition for economic development in the inner city: public safety.
The diversity campaign is oblivious to the complex power of ideas in the world. Those who would direct philanthropy into preconceived channels think that they already know the answers to the world’s problems and need only to appropriate the funding for those answers. But no one can predict how ideas will play out in practice or who will be their beneficiaries. The public good is best served by giving maximum freedom to the creative spirit.
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And in the meantime, don’t imply that the world has too much beauty and knowledge already. It doesn’t. It can always use more.
Now, that a 'Cancer-free' baby is born in London, what will she die of?
The first child in Britain known to have been screened as an embryo to ensure she did not carry a cancer gene was born Friday, a spokesman for University College London told CNN.
Genetic screening allows lab-fertilized embryos to be tested for genes likely to lead to later health problems.
Her embryo was screened in a lab days after conception to check for the BRCA-1 gene, linked to breast and ovarian cancer.
People with the gene are known to have a 50-80 percent chance of developing breast or ovarian cancer in their lifetime.
Not everyone is thrilled with this development.
"This is not a cure for breast cancer," said Josephine Quintavalle, co-founder of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, which describes itself as group that focuses on ethical dilemmas related to reproduction.
What do you think about testing embryos for gene defects?
"This is simply a mechanism for eliminating the birth of anybody (prone to) the disease," she said. "It is basically a search-and-kill mechanism."
She opposes the procedure because embryos found to carry disease-causing genes often are discarded. She says that is essentially murder.
"They will be destroyed," she said. "They will never be allowed to live."
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Quintavalle opposes any form of in-vitro fertilization where embryos are "killed," she said. But she is particularly troubled by the idea of screening an embryo for the BRCA-1 gene because carriers of the gene do not always develop the disease, and the disease is not always fatal.
"The message we are sending is: 'Better off dead than carrying (a gene linked to) breast cancer,'" she said. "We have gone very much down the proverbial slippery slope."
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Eighty five year old Carl Djerassi the Austrian chemist who helped invent the contraceptive pill now says that his co-creation has led to a "demographic catastrophe."
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The Austrian chemist was one of three whose formulation of the synthetic progestogen Norethisterone marked a key step toward the earliest oral contraceptive pill.
Djerassi outlined the "horror scenario" that occurred because of the population imbalance, for which his invention was partly to blame. He said that in most of Europe there was now "no connection at all between sexuality and reproduction." He said: "This divide in Catholic Austria, a country which has on average 1.4 children per family, is now complete."
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The head of Austria's Catholics, Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, told an interviewer that the Vatican had forecast 40 years ago that the pill would lead to a dramatic fall in the birth rate in the west. Schonborn told Austrian TV that when he first read Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical condemning artificial contraception he viewed it negatively as a "cold shower." But he said he had altered his views as, over time, it had proved "prophetic."
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He also pointed to the "devastating ecological effects of the tons of hormones discarded into the environment each year. We have sufficient data to state that one of the causes of masculine infertility in the West is the environmental contamination caused by the products of the 'pill'." Castellvi noted as well that the International Agency for Research on Cancer reported in 2005 that the pill has carcinogenic effects.
An astonishing survey on how Americans feel about abortion.
The survey of 2,341 adults, conducted online December 10-12, also found that laws limiting or regulating abortion enjoyed support as high as 95 percent among those expressing support or opposition to the six kinds of laws examined in the survey:
95 percent favor laws ensuring that abortions be performed only by licensed physicians
88 percent favor informed consent laws (i.e., that require abortion providers to inform women of potential risks to their physical and psychological health and about alternatives to abortion)
76 percent favor laws that protect doctors and nurses from being forced to perform or refer for abortions against their will
73 percent favor laws that require giving parents the chance to be involved in their minor daughter's abortion decision
68 percent favor laws against partial-birth abortion (i.e., aborting a child already partially delivered from the mother), and
63 percent favor laws preventing the use of taxpayer funds for abortions.
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Only 9 percent said abortion should be legal for any reason at any time during pregnancy.
My apologies for not posting. I came down with a mild case of the flu that laid me low following my Christmas Eve dinner for one brother and family, then evening Mass. I collapsed into bed so I could get up early to clean up a huge mess of leftovers and dishes and finish packing before heading out for a noon dinner with my sister at her nursing home, and then on to Logan airport to fly cross-country to visit other two other sisters and two other brothers with their respective spouses and children in Tacoma.
I took perhaps I took undue pride in having accomplished what can only be described as a Christmas family hat trick, in any event, I came down with the worse cold I've had in years. I tried everything - garlic, decongestants, cough drops, Chinese herbs, vitamin C infusions, and honey but the cold still got worse. It's a funny sensation to be feeling so miserable and yet so happy to be with my family and play with little ones. In the end there was not a better place to be sick; I didn't have to do anything or be anywhere but in the snowbound house on an island off Gig Harbor where wonderful meals appeared every night and everyone was happy. There were dogs to walk, a snowy orchard, a steaming hot tub, plenty of books, games to play and my own room to collapse in. While I had brought my laptop, I had no energy for blogging. I did manage to google for cold cures and came the Webutante and A Word or Two About Curing Colds. I took her advice, bought Simply Saline in blue bottle and Zicam gel in a pump container and wouldn't you know, it worked. I started feeling better immediately. Just in time for a New Year's Eve dinner in Tacoma, hugs goodbye and the redeye flight back home.
My flight took literally two years and I arrived in Boston in the bright early morning on New Year's Day, clean and white with newly fallen snow. So I had to dig my car out from snowdrifts at the economy lot and found my windshield cracked straight across from cold and ice to drive home, turn up the heat, make coffee, unpack, do laundry and catch up on emails before I could fall asleep with a heating pad and hot water bottle, thankful for everything.
Happy New Year everyone.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise.
In my end is my beginning.
T.S. Eliot East Coker
A marvelous essay by Christine Rosen, People of the Screen in which she describes two different classes, people of the screen and people of the book.
As he tried to train himself to screen-read—and mastering such reading does require new skills—Bell made an important observation, one often overlooked in the debate over digital texts: the computer screen was not intended to replace the book. Screen reading allows you to read in a “strategic, targeted manner,” searching for particular pieces of information, he notes. And although this style of reading is admittedly empowering, Bell cautions, “You are the master, not some dead author. And that is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master”; you should be the student. “Surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns,” he observes.
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The reason you can’t “screw up” a Dostoevsky novel is that you must first submit yourself to the process of reading it—which means accepting, at some level, the author’s authority to tell you the story. You enter the author’s world on his terms, and in so doing get away from yourself. Yes, you are powerless to change the narrative or the characters, but you become more open to the experiences of others and, importantly, open to the notion that you are not always in control. In the process, you might even become more attuned to the complexities of family life, the vicissitudes of social institutions, and the lasting truths of human nature. The screen, by contrast, tends in the opposite direction. Instead of a reader, you become a user; instead of submitting to an author, you become the master. The screen promotes invulnerability. Whatever setbacks occur (as in a video game) are temporary, fixable, and ultimately overcome. We expect to master the game and move on to the next challenge. This is a lesson in trial and error, and often an entertaining one at that, but it is not a lesson in richer human understanding.
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Such is the end of the tragedy we are now witness to: Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civilization, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress.
What I didn't know. Scientists Opposing the UN/IPCC on Global Warming 12 times the Number of IPCC Scientists,
From the Senate Report The UN global warming conference currently underway in Poland is about to face a serious challenge from over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe who are criticizing the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. Set for release this week, a newly updated U.S. Senate Minority Report features the dissenting voices of over 650 international scientists, many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN. The report has added about 250 scientists (and growing) in 2008 to the over 400 scientists who spoke out in 2007. The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.The U.S. Senate report is the latest evidence of the growing groundswell of scientific opposition rising to challenge the UN and Gore. Scientific meetings are now being dominated by a growing number of skeptical scientists.
I always thought the so-called climate crisis was way, way overblown.
Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” - UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.
“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists,” - Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.
“The models and forecasts of the UN IPCC "are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity.” - Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico
“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” - U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.
“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” – . Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.
“Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined.” - Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh.
“Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense…The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning.” - Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles.
“The [global warming] scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds.” - Award-winning Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata
The last rings truest to me.
I'm all for frugality and for reducing pollution at the source. But why, when the greatest greenhouse gas, accounting for 95% of the greenhouse effect is water vapor are we so worried about carbon dioxide? After all,
UPDATE.
Last week the AP science writer Seth Borenstein reported Obama Left with Little Time to Curb Global Warming.
Scientists called the report "irrational hysteria," "horrifically bad" and "incredibly biased."
"If the issues weren't so serious and the ramifications so profound, I would have to laugh at it," said David Deming, a geology professor at the University of Oklahoma who has been critical of media reporting on the climate change issue.
"The mean global temperature, at least as measured by satellite, is now the same as it was in the year 1980. In the last couple of years sea level has stopped rising. Hurricane and cyclone activity in the northern hemisphere is at a 24-year low and sea ice globally is also the same as it was in 1980."
Deming said the article is further evidence of the media's decision to talk about global warming as fact, despite what he says is a lack of evidence.
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James O'Brien, an emeritus professor at Florida State University who studies climate variability and the oceans, said that global climate change is very important for the country and that Americans need to make sure they have the right answers for policy decisions. But he said he worries that scientists and policymakers are rushing to make changes based on bad science.
"Global climate change is occurring in many places in the world," O'Brien said. "But everything that's attributed to global warming, almost none of it is global warming."
He took issue with the AP article's assertion that melting Arctic ice will cause global sea levels to rise.
"When the Arctic Ocean ice melts, it never raises sea level because floating ice is floating ice, because it's displacing water," O'Brien said. "When the ice melts, sea level actually goes down.
"I call it a fourth grade science experiment. Take a glass, put some ice in it. Put water in it. Mark level where water is. Let it melt. After the ice melts, the sea level didn't go up in your glass of water. It's called the Archimedes Principle."
He called sea level changes a "major scare tactic used by the global warming people."
From Hubble's most amazing photographs from 2008, the sacred images of our time, revealing the wonders of creation.
Photographed on October 27-28, this image of two interacting galaxies in the constellation Cetus some 400 million light-years away is truly awesome.
If you're not following the daily new photo of Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar at The Big Picture, you are missing some extraordinary beautiful images never before seen by humans. Above is the Retina Nebula, a dying star.
From The Star by Gerard Vanderleun
The night sky, now so thin and distant, so seldom really seen, was to them as thick and close as a handful of coal studded with diamonds. They could turn it in their mind's eye even as it turned above them. They reclined on their hill sides, their roofs, or in rooms built for viewing and marking the moon and the stars. They watched it all revolve above them and sang the centuries down. They remembered. They kept records and told tales. They saw beings in the heavens -- gods and animals, giants and insects, all sparking the origins of myth -- and they knew that in some way all was connected to all; as above, so below, "on Earth as it is in Heaven". They studied the patterns of it all and from those repeating patterns fashioned our first science, astrology.
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It is a central tenet of our faith in science that the new will encompass the old in one endless and eternal conservation of sense and sensibility. In this cathedral we worship a database. We can see outward to the edge of what is, and downward into time was to (almost) the moment of Creation. We can see inward into (almost) the mute heart of matter. We have the proven method. We have the hard evidence. We know that nothing is, in time, beyond our knowing. All doubt has been removed. We are the Alpha and Omega. Our science is now as eternal and as deeply grounded in truth as... well, as astrology was in 5 B.C.
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Sages and mystics, Eliot and Clarke, and a host of others have all had their turns with the story of The Star. In the end it remains what it was when it began, a story. The story of a road trip by three astrologers, kings, wise men. A journey by men who saw something special in the heavens and determined to follow it wherever it led, no matter what the cost.
To see something special. To see something beyond yourself and your imaginings. To follow it wherever it leads. To always remain prepared for miracle. That is the inner music of the story of The Star. Like all stories that survive, it is the music of the heart and not of the head, and like the heart, it will endure.
A whole host of common chemicals is feminizing the males of every class of vertebrate species writes Geoffrey Lean in The Independent.
It's official: Men really are the weaker sex
Evolution is being distorted by pollution, which damages genitals and the ability to father offspring, says new study.
The male gender is in danger, with incalculable consequences for both humans and wildlife, startling scientific research from around the world reveals.
The research – to be detailed tomorrow in the most comprehensive report yet published – shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people.
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It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminised genitals.
"This research shows that the basic male tool kit is under threat,"
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Many have been identified as "endocrine disrupters" – or gender-benders – because they interfere with hormones. These include phthalates, used in food wrapping, cosmetics and baby powders among other applications; flame retardants in furniture and electrical goods; PCBs, a now banned group of substances still widespread in food and the environment; and many pesticides.
The report – published by the charity CHEMTrust and drawing on more than 250 scientific studies from around the world – concentrates mainly on wildlife, identifying effects in species ranging from the polar bears of the Arctic to the eland of the South African plains, and from whales in the depths of the oceans to high-flying falcons and eagles.
It concludes: "Males of species from each of the main classes of vertebrate animals (including bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) have been affected by chemicals in the environment. "Feminisation of the males of numerous vertebrate species is now a widespread occurrence.
In Venice, the worst floods in decades brings out Duncan Zurr who says it was his life-long ambition to wake board across St. Mark's Square. Lots more photos there,
I suppose it's the equivalent of skiing down the middle of the Charles River which I did in the blizzard of 1978. Of course, it was frozen over.
Whatever the topic, it flew right out of Lew's head as soon as his lunch companion, in reference to a mutual acquaintance, dropped a bomb on Lew's assumptions about his own privileged life.
You know, Lew, so-and-so was adopted. "Like you."
The words sent a jolt through him.
ADOPTED. LIKE. YOU.
"I tried to keep a poker face," he says. "But I was stunned."
Lew hires a professional genealogist who specializes in tracing the roots of Jewish families.
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Applebaum says when he told Lew about Jack, Lew was "as giddy as a little boy on his birthday. The joy came right through the telephone line."
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This is the bittersweet story of Lew and Jack, two grandfathers in their early 80s who, after a lifetime as strangers, discovered they are brothers.
"The surprise of my life," Lew says, "at my age, to find I have a brother, and he lives six blocks away."
"I've always wanted a brother," adds Jack. "But I don't know what having a brother is."
Polite, considerate, self-controlled, law-abiding, tolerant of all eccentricities, humble and modest are adjectives once used to describe the British not that long ago.
Today, the British are often described as loutish, violent, drunken, sluttish, boastful and brutish.
the young British find themselves hated, feared, and despised throughout Europe, wherever they gather to have what they call “a good time.” They turn entire Greek, Spanish, and Turkish resorts into B-movie Sodoms and Gomorrahs. They cover sidewalks with vomit, rape one another, and indulge in casual drunken violence
Indictable crime has increased 900% since 1950
What happened to the British character?
Theodore Dalrymple explains from the inside what happened to The Quivering Upper Lip.
When my mother arrived in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she found the people admirable, though not without the defects that corresponded to their virtues. By the time she died, two-thirds of a century later, she found them rude, dishonest, and charmless.
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Lack of self-control is just as character-forming as self-control: but it forms a different, and much worse and shallower, character. Further, once self-control becomes neither second nature nor a desired goal, but rather a vice to avoid at all costs, there is no plumbing the depths to which people will sink.
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Two things are worth noting about this shift in national character: it is not the first such shift in British history; and the change is not entirely spontaneous or the result of impersonal social forces.
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The moralization of the British in the first third of the nineteenth century—their transformation from a people lacking self-control into exemplars of restraint—was the product of intellectual and legislative activity. So, too, was the reverse movement.
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Habits become character. Perhaps they shouldn’t, but they do.
It's an essay with horrifying details and not to be missed.
Money is based on trust says Niall Ferguson Confidence in the free market and capitalist institutions is based on trust.
What is money after all but a promise to pay?
Without a foundation in society based on religion or religiously-based ethics, there's no reason to believe that such promises will be kept.
We're in such a mess because Congressmen and bankers abused our trust to satisfy their political agendas or their greed.
Investors' Business Daily takes note of the Pope's remarks to say
What he really said was not clairvoyant, but self-evident: Economic freedom demands ethics.
Of course, we are not without fault as Ed Morrissey writes in Has America learned a lesson about consumption?
the period between the last recession and now has been marked by the unique phenomenon of assets-based consumption. We need a return to income-based consumption, and the transition is going to sting:
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The entire precipice was built on sand, and it’s now turning into quicksand. For some, the lesson will come too late. For the rest of us, it’s a lesson we need to learn for good. Many of us have heard the advice our parents and grandparents learned in hard economic times: Don’t spend beyond your means. Many in the previous couple of generations had a well-deserved skepticism about credit, and they’ve been proven right yet again.
Niall Ferguson was prescient when he started his book to explain the current economic crisis in the span of 4000 years of financial history. (Hat tip to Cat at Brits at their Best.) He saw the liquidity crisis coming.
"The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World" (Niall Ferguson)
Here is Ferguson, Tisch Professor of History at Harvard, speaking with Harry Kriesler at the University of California, Berkely on his new book.
It's wonderful to be able to hear and learn so much on the internet. The good news is that U.S. has a better chance of riding out the crisis than other countries because people around the world believe that the correct response is to put their cash into dollars
I was around when Jim Jones and his 900 followers committed suicide in Guyana by drinking the kool-aid laced with cyanide.
I remember reading as much as I could in trying to understand what I never could.
On the thirtieth anniversary of that terrible day, I read neo's analysis and was surprised to learn what a respected a member of the San Francisco community he was and how many ties he had to local Democratic politicians.
He had been pictured as an evangelical Christian fanatic
On November 17, 1978, Jim Jones was a hero to American leftists. On November 18, 1978, Jones orchestrated the killings of 918 people and strangely morphed in the eyes of American leftists into an evangelical Christian fanatic. An unfortunately well-worn narrative, playing out contemporaneously in Pol Pot's Cambodia, of socialist dreams ending in ghoulish nightmares, then, conveniently shifted to one about the dangers of organized religiom. But as The Nation magazine reported at the time, "The temple was as much a left-wing political crusade as a church. In the course of the 1970s, its social program grew steadily more disaffiliated from what Jim Jones came to regard as 'Fascist America' and drifted rapidly toward outspoken Communist sympathies." So much so that the last will and testament of the Peoples Temple, and its individual members who left notes, bequeathed millions of dollars in assets to the Soviet Union. As Jones expressed to a Soviet diplomat upon upon his visit to Jonestown the month before the smiling suicides took place, "For many years, we have let our sympathies be quite publicly known, that the United States government was not our mother, but that the Soviet Union was our spiritual motherland."
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Jim Jones was an evangelical communist who became a minister to infiltrate the church with the gospel according to Marx and Lenin. He was an atheist missionary bringing his message of socialist redemption to the Christian heathen. "I decided, how can I demonstrate my Marxism?," remembered Jones of his days in 1950s Indiana. "The thought was, infiltrate the church." So in the forms of Pentecostal ritual, Jones smuggled socialism into the minds of true believers--who gradually became true believers of a different sort. Unless one counts his drug-induced bouts with self-messianism, Jones didn't believe in God. Get it--a Peoples Temple. He shocked his parishioners, many of whom certainly did believe in God, by dramatically tossing the Bible onto the ground during a sermon. "Nobody's going to come out of the sky!," an excited Jones had once informed his flock. "There's no heaven up there! We'll have to have heaven down here!"
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A man who killed more African Americans than the Ku Klux Klan was awarded a local Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award and won the plaudits of California lieutenant governor Mervyn Dymally, state assemblyman Willie Brown, radical academic Angela Davis, preacher/politician Jesse Jackson, Black Panther leader Huey Newton, and other African American activists.
Neo reflects on the lessons learned
In the case of the Jonestown inhabitants, they were extreme idealists who had ceded a great deal of autonomy to a leader and a group at the outset. Very few of them had a chance.
This is just one of a series of extraordinary photos of the California fires over at The Big Picture which seems to have taken the place of the newsweeklies in bringing us photographs that explain events in the world that words cannot.
How else could you appreciate the capricious of the wind and fires, consuming this and leaving that one untouched? How do people explain to themselves?
An absolutely brilliant documentary from Australia entitled How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer can be seen in three parts, in streaming video.
I was riveted as I watched a number of scientists gradually discover and unveil the natural law behind networks. From the mathematician who tried to explain why crickets sound together and fireflies synchronize their flashes to this image of the Internet
to the idea of six degrees of separation - that anyone on the planet can be connected in just a few steps of association - played out before us, we see a major scientific breakthrough as the scientists realize the same law can be applied to neurons, proteins, viruses and the spread of disease.
And yes Kevin Bacon makes an appearance. When the trivia game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon came out, Bacon thought he was being made the object of fun. Now he's the founder of Sixdegrees.org, a non-profit calling for social networking with a conscience.
Separating Christianity from Europe's public life leads 'down a blind alley' Pope cautions.
Though our world and environment continue to change, Pope Benedict continued, “the final aim of all our daily efforts, both as individuals and as a community, remains unaltered: the search for the true well-being of the person and the creation of an open and welcoming society attentive to the real needs of everyone.”
"The values and laws, the shared spiritual 'alphabet,' that has made it possible for our peoples to write noble chapters of civil and religious history over the centuries, is a precious heritage that must not be squandered," the Pope added, but rather “augmented with the contribution of modern discoveries in the fields of science technology and communication, which must be placed at the service of the real good of mankind."
The Pontiff continued by emphasizing that if this rich heritage is separated from the public life, it would “mean starting down a blind alley.” He also stressed that “this is why it is necessary to redefine the meaning of secularism, a secularism that highlights the real difference and autonomy between the various elements of society but that also protects their specific competencies, in a context of shared responsibility.”
The phrase our 'shared spiritual alphabet' is especially apt since so many have become illiterate and ignorant of the roots of the civilization that has cradled them.
Take Oxford for example. No more Christmas lights for them. No indeed. Christmas is now banned in Oxford in favor of a 'Winter Light Festival'. Instead of the traditional Christmas lights, there will be a 25 meter high mobile in shape of the solar system.
Muslims and Jews want Christmas back.
Sabir Hussain Mirza, chairman of the Muslim Council of Oxford, said: 'I'm really upset. Christians, Muslims and other religions all look forward to Christmas.'
Rabbi Eli Bracknell of the Jewish Educational Centre said: ' Anything that waters down traditional culture and Christianity is not positive for the British identity. WinterLight includes all festivals but it also conceals them.'
A remarkable article by Michael Lewis called The End in Portfolio.
The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.
photoillustration by Ji Lee
When he wrote Liar's Poker, he thought that there would come a Great Reckoning
when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.
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In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?
One of the true wise men was Steve Eisman
It’s not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria—to believe that most of what’s in the financial news is wrong or distorted, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded—without actually being insane. A handful of people had been inside the black box, understood how it worked, and bet on it blowing up. Whitney rattled off a list with a half-dozen names on it. At the top was Steve Eisman.
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Eisman wasn’t, in short, an analyst with a sunny disposition who expected the best of his fellow financial man and the companies he created. “You have to understand,” Eisman says in his defense, “I did subprime first. I lived with the worst first. These guys lied to infinity. What I learned from that experience was that Wall Street didn’t give a shit what it sold.”
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The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then trying to figure out what they had done. Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA. --
“We have a simple thesis,” Eisman explained. “There is going to be a calamity, and whenever there is a calamity, Merrill is there.” When it came time to bankrupt Orange County with bad advice, Merrill was there. When the internet went bust, Merrill was there. Way back in the 1980s, when the first bond trader was let off his leash and lost hundreds of millions of dollars, Merrill was there to take the hit. That was Eisman’s logic—the logic of Wall Street’s pecking order. Goldman Sachs was the big kid who ran the games in this neighborhood. Merrill Lynch was the little fat kid assigned the least pleasant roles, just happy to be a part of things. The game, as Eisman saw it, was Crack the Whip. He assumed Merrill Lynch had taken its assigned place at the end of the chain.
I'm only surprised that this hasn't happened before.
Suit seeks identities of sperm, egg donors.
A B. C. woman conceived through artificial insemination is fighting for the right to know the identity of her biological father, asking the court to make the identities of anonymous donors available.
The legal battle pits the confidentiality promised to those who donated sperm and eggs used for artificial insemination against the rights of children born from such procedures to know their genetic history.
The rights of the children took a step forward this week when a B. C. court ordered doctors to not destroy any related medical records until the end of the case.
In a class-action lawsuit filed last week on behalf of B. C. residents conceived through the use of anonymous sperm, egg and embryo donations -- known as gamete donation -- journalist Olivia Pratten, who is seeking the identity of her biological father, said learning his identity would "alleviate the psychological distress" of not knowing her origins.
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"The child is the one who lives with choices that were made for them before they were born and who bears the consequences of these adult decisions," she said yesterday from her home in New York. "How many times have I spoken about this and doctors tell me to be happy or be grateful --it infuriates me."
If the researchers at Rice University are successful in concocting a genetically engineered beer to fight heart disease and cancers, then thanks and praise are surely warranted.
What better place than this Buddhist temple built from beer bottles.
It took a million bottles - green Heineken and brown local Chang beer - to build this Buddhist temple.
Most philanthropists are happy to their names embossed on a plaque on a hospital wing. Not Donna Karan, the fashion designer, who is bringing yoga teachers onto the cancer ward.
In One Section of Beth Israel Hospital, Some Patients Are Saying 'Om', not 'Ah'
While other hospitals in New York and across the country have dabbled in yoga, the new Beth Israel project is broader, better financed and more integrated into the medical protocol, and because of Ms. Karan’s concern that it might be dismissed as touchy-feely nonsense, it includes a research component. Ms. Karan hopes to prove that the Urban Zen regime can reduce classic symptoms of cancer and its treatment, like pain, nausea and anxiety (thereby cutting hospital stays and costs) and serve as a model for replication elsewhere.
Why would people of note and accomplishment - lawyers, doctors, clergymen, CEOs, teachers, elected officials among others - claim medals of valor they never earned?
The Chicago Tribune found that of the 333 people in the online edition of Who's Who who claim to have earned one of the nation's most esteemed medals, fully a third can not support their claims with military records.
They then asked why.
The greatest mystery of all is found in the worker termite’s third gut, which is delineated by an intricately structured stomach valve, as unique from species to species as individual snowflakes are and, in its way, just as lovely. The size of a sesame seed, the third gut contains a dense mush of symbiotic microbes. Many of these microbes live nowhere else on Earth; they depend on adult termites to pass them on to the young by means of a “woodshake,” a microbial slurry.
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This microbial mush may be a treasure trove for the human race. Recently, sophisticated genetic sequencing produced an inventory of more than 80,000 genes, spanning some 300 microbial species, from the guts of Costa Rican termites. These findings, published last November in the journal Nature, got a lot of attention, not for the quantity of microorganisms—after all, the human mouth contains 600 species of bacteria—but for their complexity, and in particular for the fact that among them are 500 genes for enzymes able to break down the cellulose in wood and grasses.
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The little biorefineries inside each termite allow the insects to eat up $11 billion in U.S. property every year. But some scientists and policy makers believe they may also make the termite a sort of biotech Rumpelstiltskin, able to spin straw—or grass, or wood by-products—into something much more valuable. Offer a termite this page, and its microbial helpers will break it down into two liters of hydrogen, enough to drive more than six miles in a fuel-cell car. If we could turn wood waste into fuel with even a fraction of the termite’s efficiency, we could run our economy on sawdust, lawn clippings, and old magazines.
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And so the termite may be poised for its moment in the sun. Speaking last year about moving toward a biofuel economy, Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman pointed to the termite-to-tank concept, asserting, “We know this can be done.” Another official called it a promising “transformational discovery.
Responding to consumer demand, Hallmark offers "coming out" cards for homosexuals and now same-sex marriage cards.
The language inside, "Two hearts. One promise" is neutral enough so the card can also work for commitment ceremonies.
This picture released on the occasion of the 100,000 orbit of the Hubble telescope shows us a dazzling image of celestial beauty and renewal,
Hubble peered into a small portion of the Tarantula nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074. The region is a firestorm of raw stellar creation, perhaps triggered by a nearby supernova explosion. It lies about 170,000 light-years away and is one of the most active star-forming regions in our local group of galaxies.
The image reveals dramatic ridges and valleys of dust, serpent-head "pillars of creation," and gaseous filaments glowing fiercely under torrential ultraviolet radiation. The region is on the edge of a dark molecular cloud that is an incubator for the birth of new stars.
The high-energy radiation blazing out from clusters of hot young stars is sculpting the wall of the nebula by slowly eroding it away. Another young cluster may be hidden beneath a circle of brilliant blue gas.
In this approximately 100-light-year-wide fantasy-like landscape, dark towers of dust rise above a glowing wall of gases on the surface of the molecular cloud. The seahorse-shaped pillar at lower, right is approximately 20 light-years long, roughly four times the distance between our sun and the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
The region is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite of our Milky Way galaxy. It is a fascinating laboratory for observing star-formation regions and their evolution. Dwarf galaxies like the Large Magellanic Cloud are considered to be the primitive building blocks of larger galaxies.
Quantum Weirdness is even stranger than they thought and physicists are spooked by faster-than-light information transfer.
The revelations of these scientific discoveries leave me in awe.
I had a wonderful time with my family on the Cape, sunny days all except for one when we all went shopping and I made dinner for all 23 of us. In a couple of weeks, I'll post a photo of all of us taken by a professional photographer.
Time away from the computer brought back a different rhythm to daily life. Now that I'm back, so much has happened in the world, I'm spending a lot of time just catching up on the news.
First the Olympics. I did get to see the marvelous spectacle of the opening ceremonies and parade of nations but not without a nagging discomfort at their cost both human and economic
Simon Jenkins articulated it best in Olympic crack in China's wall.
An Olympic Games must be the most expensive public gesture, in billions of dollars a day, that any nation can undertake in peacetime, a political spectacular masquerading as sport.
The IOC was drawn to China as the one big country to which it still had a quid pro quo to offer: international respectability. The IOC knew that China might be induced to spend huge sums, not by virtue of political reform, but to cloak the absence of such reform.
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The IOC seems to have found in Chinese communism a shared language and nostalgia for the drilled utopianism of the mid-20th century. A large area of old Beijing has been razed and rebuilt with stadiums, office blocks and avenues, monuments to the modernising zeal of the party. Morally emasculated western architects have lined up for work, led by the son of Albert Speer as master planner.
Above all the Chinese have proved that the Olympics are about control. Lose control, as did the world torch tour and its “1,000 jogging policemen”, and you cannot deliver concord and good publicity. Instead, control has required the Chinese to arrest untold hundreds of human rights activists. It has rendered Tibet virtually inaccessible. Anyone concerned with protest, such as the signers of a letter pleading for “an Olympic spirit” in human rights, has been thrown in jail or removed from the capital; 100,000 troops have been brought in to ring the city.
Still, the Olympics always bring stories of courage, determination, persistence, hardship and glory. My favorite so far is the story of Lomong.
Where Once He Was Lost, Now He is Found
For seven years, China has dreamed of orchestrating every detail, athletic and political, of its glorious Opening Ceremonies to the Olympics. Now, one lean 1,500-meter runner from the United States, chosen by his teammates in an act of open defiance, may steal the show. Lopez Lomong, one of the Sudanese "Lost Boys" and a member of the anti-genocide group Team Darfur, has been chosen by his 595 U.S. Olympic teammates to carry our flag on Friday. What, we couldn't find a Tibetan monk on the team?
What a coincidence. Just hours before U.S. team captains met to decide on the flag carrier, Chinese officials rescinded the visa of Joey Cheek, a speedskating gold medalist who carried the U.S. flag at the Closing Ceremonies at the 2006 Winter Games and later co-founded Team Darfur. After that slap at Cheek, U.S. athletes here had almost nothing to say on the topic. One even referred to the subject as "the question they warned us about."
Perhaps they didn't answer individually. But the entire U.S. team gave its answer -- as a group and in capital letters -- with Lomong's selection. You jerk Cheek's visa. We put Lomong in your face. And do it proudly.
Here's the backstory of his foster parents who took in seven lost boys from Sudan, extraordinary people, ordinary Americans.
U.S. Flagbearer found new life in New York foster home.
When he learned he was coming to America, Lomong thought he would have to get a job and support himself. He didn't expect to have such supportive parents.
"I just thought they would just keep me for a little while, but they convinced me that this is your home," he said.
Anthony, 20, is a junior political science major at State University at Buffalo, where he plays soccer. In his first six weeks in America, Anthony went to Disney World, Washington, D.C., and Boston. He surprised the Rogerses when he told them the most amazing thing he had seen in America: "parents."
From Wikipedia's Image of the Day, a collection of images from the Hubble telescope Galaxies Gone Wild.
Born after World War II, but old enough to remember the stories told after, I was deeply impressed in the sense of being marked indelibly with stories of the horrors in the concentration camps in Germany and in the former USSR. Both were vivid examples of what could happen in countries that suppressed religion and religious worship.
The Diary of Anne Frank made vivid what it was like to live in hiding and fear of being discovered and what girl could not deeply identify with the young Anne and wonder how she would have acted in the same situation. Perhaps that why in college, I was most interested in studying Germany, Russia and China, totalitarian governments all. I wanted to understand how that was felt in the daily lives of people. You've heard that they governed through fear. Fear, yes, but more than that. A fear strengthened and potentiated by the breakdown in the web of trust that undergirds a truly civilized country. People are atomized, stripped of what is most personal and human about them. From their personal bonds of blood and affection for family and friends to their relationship with the Divine.
Too often in news stories about post-Soviet Russia, Germany and China, the focus is on political or economic recovery. There's more going on than that, witness Requiem for the Romanovs. From what I read, it was a watershed cultural event that brought to the fore the question that until now have been evaded.
In her weeping, the soloist was not alone. Many of the more than 2,000 people who filled into the concert hall of the largest basilica in Russia, the Church of Christ the Savior, bombed by Stalin and rebuilt in the 1990s, wept openly as they listened and watched the tragedy of the last Romanovs unfold.
The story of the last days of the Romanovs is well known. Czar Nicholas II, embroiled in a terrible war with Germany and Austro-Hungary, decided to abdicate his throne on March 15, 1917. Without a single strong leader, Russia was soon in political turmoil. Out of the turmoil, the tiny but compact and single-minded Bolsheviks emerged as Russia's new rulers toward the end of 1917.
Nicholas and his family were soon placed under house arrest. They gardened, read books, prayed. Then, in the summer of 1918, on the evening of July 17, they were taken to the basement room of their prison, and shot to death. Their bodies were then burned.
Russia had made a clean break with its monarchical, and Christian, past.
The age of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and of anti-Christian state atheism had begun.
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the Requiem is far from a "nostalgic recollection" of the "good old days of the czars."
Instead, it is a searing socio-political critique of the atheism and persecution of religious belief central to Russia's communist regime.
While In the largest basilica in Russia, it was a cultural event not a religious service
"This is why we chose to organize this Requiem Concert. This is not a liturgy, not a Church celebration, but a cultural event. We want to participate in the cultural debate in Russia today, and make our case.
The Russian Orthodox Church was the principal sponsor, supported by two American groups; the orchestra directed by a Russian general and the musicians former members of the armed forces.
Bishop Hilarion concluded tonight's Requiem for the Romanovs with these words: "The horror of a national tragedy could not destroy the hope for a breakthrough to light and the inspired certainty that the triumph of evil would be fleeting, and would be followed by a bright future, by growth in spiritual perfection, by restoration and revival. The heroism of the martyrs of the 20th century contains a reflection of the future Kingdom which is transfiguring everyone and everything to live in peace through Christ."
MIchael Yon, the best reporter in Iraq writes Success in Iraq.
The war continues to abate in Iraq. Violence is still present, but, of course, Iraq was a relatively violent place long before Coalition forces moved in. I would go so far as to say that barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What's left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it's time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.
I wish I could say the same for Afghanistan. But that war we clearly are losing: I am preparing to go there and see the situation for myself. My friends and contacts who have a good understanding of Afghanistan are, to a man, pessimistic about the current situation. Interestingly, however, every one of them believes that Afghanistan can be turned into a success. They all say we need to change our approach, but in the long-term Afghanistan can stand on its own. The sources range from four-stars to civilians from the United States, Great Britain and other places. A couple years ago, some of these sources believed that defeat was imminent in Iraq. They were nearly right about Iraq, although some of them knew far less about Iraq than they do about Afghanistan. But it's clear that hard days are ahead in Afghanistan. We just lost nine of our soldiers in a single firefight, where the enemy entered a base and nearly overran it.
Fred Kagan and others seems to agree there''s a New Reality in Iraq
It is time for Americans to recognize it's a whole new ballgame in Iraq. The civil war is over, American troops are not an "irritant" fueling the unrest, and far from becoming dependent upon us, the Iraqi government and the army show more determination every day to run their country and to protect it. But they continue to want and need our assistance.
While victory in war is never certain until the war is over, the odds are strongly with us for once – provided we do the right thing. That is to stand by our best ally in the war against al Qaeda, and the struggle to contain Iran.
Excuse Me. do You Work Here? No, I Just Need to Fold Clothes
Thousands of neat freaks picked up the habit as clerks at the gap
One in four British children lives with a lone parent - double the figure 20 years ago.
So Father's Day cards have been banned in Scottish schools "for fear of embarrassing classmates who live with single mothers and lesbians.
While local authorities say teachers need to react to the "changing pattern of family life"
Matt O'Connor, founder of campaign group Fathers For Justice, said: "I'm astonished at this. It totally undermines the role and significance of fathers whether they are still with the child's mother or not.
"It also sends out a troubling message to young boys that fathers aren't important."
A torrent of child protection laws in Britain means that a quarter of adults will have to pass the "pedophile" test before being allowed to interact with any children except their own.
The rise in regulation has fueled an atmosphere of suspicion, left adults afraid to intervene or take responsibility and eroded social bonds.
Child protection laws are 'poisoning the relationships between adults and children.
The Institute for the Study of a Civil Society released its new study, Licensed to Hug and says
The dramatic escalation of child protection measures has succeeded in poisoning the relationship between the generations and creating an atmosphere of suspicion that actually increases the risks to children, according to a new study released today by Civitas.
In Licensed to Hug Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, argues that children need to have contact with a range of adult members of the community for their education and socialisation, but 'this form of collaboration, which has traditionally underpinned intergenerational relationships, is now threatened by a regime that insists that adult/child encounters must be mediated through a security check'
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‘The adult qualities of spontaneous compassion and commitment are, we argue, far more effective safeguarding methods than pieces of paper that promote the messages “Keep Out” and “Watch Your Back”.’
A Swedish student at the Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm had a great idea for his final project - the biggest drawing in the world.
Using a GPS device in a briefcase as his pen, and very exact travel directions to DHL, he drew a self-portrait on our planet. You can see how he did it here.
Elaine Davidson, 43 years old, a songwriter who lives in Scotland holds the Guinness World as "most pierced woman" in the world with 5920 piercings as of May 16, 2008. She fears going home to Brazil for fear of being robbed.
"The last time I went to Brazil, I had to wear a face mask because since I have a lot of jewellery [pierced to the skin], I fear being robbed or attacked," Elaine Davidson said from Edinburgh.
She considers feeling pain a motivating factor in her life and says she also walks on beds of nails, fire and bits of glass.
"I like pain, I love pain," she said, explaining that she now wants to exceed 2,000 body piercings.
Davidson has more piercings in her genitalia than in any other part of the body - 500 in all, externally and internally.
"It hurts in the chest as well," she said.
Am I supposed to feel guilty because I eat salads and fruits?
The Silent Scream of the Asparagus
This sounds like a joke but isn't. What it does demonstrate is another way the rights you take for granted can be made subject to a bureaucrat's whim.
What is clear, however, is that Switzerland's enshrining of "plant dignity" is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.
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ts majority view holds that it would if the genetic modification caused plants to "lose their independence"--for example by interfering with their capacity to reproduce.
So much for breeding seedless Clementines or grafting hybrid wine grapes.
Belmont Club on the Plant Rights
Swiss lawyers are elaborating the doctrine of vegetable rights.
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Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out." In short, they are arguing that plants have inherent rights which humans can't transgress. It sounds ridiculous.
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who is really being "empowered" by the Swiss committee's decision? Is it plants? No. It is bureaucrats. The point of vegetable rights isn't to give plants dignity but to transfer yet more individual human freedoms to activists and government officials.
Deciding that individuals had power over themselves and the things around them was central to the development of human freedom -- and human rights
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The point of legally empowering vegetables is not to give standing to a stalk of celery who might suddenly decide to appear in court, but to empower the bureaucrats and activist lawyers who will appear on their behalf. Today we already have spokesmen for Gaia. Tomorrow the lawyers from Brussels will be lawyers for brussels sprouts.
I didn't know what I was going to write about the horrifying , depraved and odious "art" project by the Yale University student. Then I read Siggy's piece on Progressive Art and he says it all so I don't have to.
I'm just going to add a quote from Gerard
People have actually come to believe that labeling something "art" gives it a Get-Out-Of-Condemnation-Free card; that there really is some sort of immutable and unwritten social rule that if I say something is "art," then everyone who says what I am about is depraved, sick, and evil must simply back off. It matters little that time will consign the 'art' of Shvarts to the sewer of works that vanish. What matters is that in her little time here she has already managed to degrade the souls of others just a little more, just a little deeper.
My favorite self-portrait from the Top 10 Self-Portraits of Wired readers.
See them all starting here.
The circus that's going on in Canada would be amusing but for the fact the Canadian right to free speech is being imperiled by kangaroo courts known as Human Rights Commissions where truth is no defense and due process rights don't exist.
Sean Murphy of the Catholic Civil Rights League aptly summed up one notorious case, in which, "a Christian printer is ordered to produce business cards and letterhead for an organization that promotes pro-pedophilia essays, is fined $5,000 for having refused to do so and is left with $40,000 in legal bills for daring to defend himself."
One man who ran a small restaurant was brought up on charges of human rights abuses because he dared ask a guy who was smoking a marijuana cigarette on his doorstep to move away.
Two transexuals are suing a prominent physician because he refused to perform labiaplasty on them on the grounds that he operates on biological females and doesn't have any experience in labiaplasty on men.
Doesn't this seem crazy to you? You may be wondering what human rights have these people violated. Join the crowd.
The columnist Mark Steyn was caught up in the madness being called up before two on the CHRCs. Yesterday the Ontario HRC dropped its investigation against Steyn and Maclean's magazine for printing an except of Steyn's book, America Alone, but not before saying they were guilty of Islamophobia, in what Steyn called a drive by conviction. Freedom of speech and the presumption of innocence? Nah.
One man in particular is using those commissions as his private star chamber. Richard Warman has made a profitable business by suing hapless Canadians for thought crimes, achieving a 100% conviction rate, and pocketing tens of thousands of tax-freedollars in awards from the Canadian human rights commissions where he used to be employed for his 'pain and suffering'. Apparently, he has full access to the HRC investigations and he's perfectly free to use the HRC computers or to hijack the wireless network of a private citizen to pose hate messages on a white supremacist site that apparently wasn't hateful enough. He is so litigious that the province of British Columbia had to pass a special law to stop him from suing libraries who carried books he didn't approve of.
Now, Warman is suing the Canadian bloggers who have been on his case and reported his nefarious shenanigans to the world, no doubt hoping for private settlements offline. Not a chance with these folks
Kate McMillan of small dead animals had the effrontery of linking to allegedly libelous statements of Kathy Shadie who writes at five feet of fury and that's just what she's been, allowing Warman no quarter and no cover for the nasty business he's been engaged in and the nasty piece of work he is. When a Canadian senator, Anne Cools, announced her intention to intervene before the Supreme Court on the question of gay marriage, Warman posted a under pseudonym ( on Richard Lemire's Freedom site already under investigation because of a complaint Warman filed) that Senator Cools was a "n**ger "and a "c**t". This revelation seems to be what sparked the lawsuits against Kate, Kathy, Free Dominion, the National Post and Ezra Levant who has posted all the details of the suit.
Steyn wrote yesterday about Global Warman
It's not possible to take a stand against the Canadian Human Rights Commission without also talking a stand against Richard Warman. He has been the plaintiff on half the Section 13 cases in its entire history and on all the Section 13 cases since 2002. There are 30 million Canadians yet only one of them uses this law, over and over and over again.
Make no mistake. Warman is attempting to censor the free speech of Canadian bloggers by intimidation.
To defend themselves, the bloggers can expect to pay hefty legal fees. Just the threat that some crazy person like Warman will sue them and you can expect other bloggers to begin, if they haven't already, to censor themselves. It's called the chilling effect. If Warman is successful, if the HRCs are successful, we all lose. Not only will Canadians say or write what they think, the pattern will be attempted here in the USA. Free speech has to be defended and it has its costs.
Please consider, especially if you are a blogger, donating to their defense funds. Each of them has a button on the site that you can click to donate even a small amount to show support. Be part of the defense of free speech.
UPDATE:
From blazing cat fur who calls such donations "Save the Canadian Blog Children Fund"
" Free speech is your God-Given Right, it should be theirs too"
These are the British Muslims, now on trial for their conspiracy to detonate liquid explosives on transatlantic passenger flights, "all in the name of Islam."
Airline terror plotters planned bigger 9/11
Their plans were allegedly so advanced that they had drawn up details of specific flights to be targeted and bought the components needed to make hydrogen peroxide bombs disguised as soft drinks such as Lucozade and Oasis.
But they were arrested before they were able to make "a violent and deadly statement of intent that would have truly global impact", a jury was told.
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The alleged bombers had drawn up plans to attack seven Boeing 777, 767 and 763 aircraft, each carrying between 241 and 285 passengers and crew, operated by American Airlines, United Airlines and Air Canada, said Mr Wright.
The next time you have to dump your coffee and want to complain about the new restrictions on carrying liquids on airplanes, remember them and why the restrictions were imposed.
Let's not forget that In Britain, terrorism by Muslim fanatics has been renamed "anti-Islamic activity.
The head of MI5 has warned that 4000 Muslim fanatics are on the loose. Terror attacks, he said, are part of a deliberate campaign by Al Qaeda. Thankfully, they caught these eight.
Thomas Beatie says (s)he has a very stable male identity, but (s)he appears to be a hopelessly confused woman who was artificially inseminated with sperm purchased from a sperm bank.
The proof - (s)he's pregnant.
Men don't get pregnant. This is not a news flash.
(S)he is not a man, despite an operation to remove her breasts and doses of testosterone to grow facial hair. (S)he harbored a desire to have a baby, so (s)he didn't have her reproductive organs removed.
In Oregon, (s)he registered as a man, the state accepted that change and recognized her marriage to another woman.
Their decision to go public, I suspect, may have much to do with wanting to get a contract to write a book and now that they have been on Oprah who is collaborating with People magazine, a contract I'm sure is in the offing.
The sexes and their roles in propagating the species haven't changed; it's just that some people doing it have gotten more odd. Medical technology can do all sorts of wonders to help people solidify their gender confusion, but it can't change reality and the basic laws of nature.
Now people may be willing to call her a 'man' because (s)he insists on it, but (s)he isn't and nothing (s)he says will change that. (S)he's a freak of nature.
I feel sorry for the poor baby born to this couple.
If you want to see more pictures of the "pregnant man" who told Oprah (s)he feared her baby would be killed, click here.
Amazing work by scholars who have deciphered an ancient clay tablet that gives an eyewitness account of the asteroid suspected of destroying Sodom and Gomorrah reported in the London Times.
The asteroid was described as "white stone bowl approaching."
Mark Hempsell, one of the researchers from Bristol University who cracked the tablet’s code, said: “It’s a wonderful piece of observation, an absolutely perfect piece of science.”
He said the size and route of the asteroid meant that it was likely to have crashed into the Austrian Alps at Köfels. As it travelled close to the ground it would have left a trail of destruction from supersonic shock waves and then slammed into the Earth with a cataclysmic impact.
The debate continues on whether desperate people should be allowed to pay people for their organs rather than depend on family members, the unfortunate death of someone unknown or the kindness of strangers, consider the traffic in organs in those countries where transplants are not regulated.
Organ business in Egypt 'worse than slavery'.
"It's the worst kind of business in Egypt. It's worse than slavery," said Queita, who had no comprehensive statistics but said that one Cairo clinic had a waiting list of 1,500 people willing to sell their organs.
"I don't want the poor turned into spare parts for the rich. ... People are coming from all over to buy organs in Egypt. They're mainly Gulf Arabs. If you're a rich man from the Gulf, you go to a private Egyptian hospital that has contacts with organ brokers. Serious cases of poverty in this country are causing an increase in the theft and sale of organs."
These stories always attract me.
Examples cited as proof of cellular memory include a U.S. woman terrified of heights who became a climber and a seven-year-old girl who had nightmares about being killed after being given the heart of a murdered child.
The only case recognised by the scientific community is a 15-year-old Australian girl whose blood type changed following a liver transplant.
By now pretty much everyone has heard that on 1 in 4 teen girls have STD. About half of them have had sex and half of those are infected with a sexually transmitted disease. Sadly, nearly half of the black girls studied have at least one STD while the rates among whites and Mexican-Americans was about 20%.
I can only infer that the toxic rap culture and the absence of fathers has done more to damage the lives of young women than I had imagined. We are all the poorer for it.
Education is not the answer if schools like those in Deerfield, Illinois, require students as young as 14, to read "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes" with its graphic sexuality, profanity and racism. Gay literature in high schools.
Matt Barber, director of cultural issues with Concerned Women for America, said his jaw dropped when he read the book.
"This isn't a First Amendment issue. This is about school officials betraying the community trust. Heads need to roll here. Assigning this racist, pornographic smut to high school kids is nothing short of child abuse," Barber said.
Lora Sue Hauser, executive director of NSSA, complained that the book is replete with profanity, overt racism, an explicit description of a sex act involving Mother Teresa and vivid depictions of sodomy.
"After almost 15 years of school advocacy and reviewing many objectionable books and curricula, I have never seen anything this vulgar and harmful to students," Hauser said.
Juan Williams wrote in Banish the Bling
Have we taken our eyes off the prize? The civil rights movement continues, but the struggle today is not so much in the streets as in the home -- and with our children. ... there is also a far more sinister obstacle facing African American young people today: a culture steeped in bitterness and nihilism, a culture that is a virtual blueprint for failure.
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With 50 percent of Hispanic children and nearly 70 percent of black children born to single women today these young people too often come from fractured families where there is little time for parenting. Their search for identity and a sense of direction is undermined by a twisted popular culture that focuses on the "bling-bling" of fast money associated with famous basketball players, rap artists, drug dealers and the idea that women are at their best when flaunting their sexuality and having babies.
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Cosby asked the chilling question: "What good is Brown " and all the victories of the civil rights era if nobody wants them? A generation after those major civil rights victories, black America is experiencing alarming dropout rates, shocking numbers of children born to single mothers and a frightening acceptance of criminal behavior that has too many black people filling up the jails. Where is the focus on taking advantage of new opportunities to advance and to close the racial gap in educational and economic achievement?
Having grown up in the civil rights era and bought the dream, my greatest disappointment since has been the failure of black leadership who have kept grievance, not hope, alive and expedient. I kept alive the hope that the strong culture of the black churches would present to young men and women an alternative way of life. But I have been shocked and shaken after watching clips of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons, filled as they are with hate towards whites, 'God damn America' and loopy conspiracy theories of the government starting the AIDS virus and inviting the attack on September 11. What has he done for the children?
For all who saw in Barack Obama, the candidate with the promise of finally transcending race, the revelations of the hate-filled sermons of his pastor and spiritual advisor Jeremiah Wright, must come as a blow. It has for me.
So long as political discussion is reduced to identity politics and biological markers of sex and race, the ability to deal with the truly important issues of creating a society where children are encouraged to develop individual responsibility, self-control and concern for others is severely compromised.
So long as the educational establishment teaches every imaginable biological variation of sex and not the emotional, psychological and spiritual consequences of having sex at too young an age, we will children who don't know there is more to sex than the physical act unless their parents or churches tell them about love. They will certainly not find it in the popular culture. Sad. Dispiriting.
Johann Hari: Botox is destroying Hollywood stars' ability to act
For a decade now, Hollywood acting has been slowly, steadily poisoned by a bacterium called Clostridium botulinum. This week, I was watching the hypnotically horrible new Coen brothers movie, No Country For Old Men, and I couldn't shake off the sense there was something different, something thrilling and vivid, about the performances of all the lead actors: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin. It was only after half an hour of awe that I realised what it was. They can all move their faces.
Today, most actors in most movies have deliberately paralysed faces, incapable of registering anything.
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This is, I'm sure, one reason why British actresses have been doing so well at the Oscars for the past 10 years: they haven't been facially paralysed. Helen Mirren, Judi Dench and – this year, in the achingly sad Away From Her – Julie Christie have accepted the potential richness that comes from worry-lines and crows' feet. They use them. They know they suggest depth and richness and life.
This has to be one of the best political videos I have ever seen.
I can't help but think that much of the change desired is to be rid of the stranglehold boomers have held on politics, culture, and education for such a long time.
UC Irvine investigated reports of the destruction of a Holocaust memorial, swastikas defacing campus property, rock throwing at a Jewish student, and the verbal harassment of Jewish students with such statements as " 'slaughter the Jews,' 'dirty Jew,' 'go back to Russia,' 'burn in hell,' and 'f_ _king Jew and concluded they were based on opposition to Israeli policies and were not anti-Semitic provocations.
In the meditation room at Normandale Community College, a public institution in Bloomington, Minnesota, a barrier divides the men's prayer space from the women's prayer space where women are instructed to cover their faces, a schedule for Islam's five daily prayers is posted next to the sign requesting that shoes be removed.
Typewriter Causes Street Closure as No One Knows What They Look Life Any Longer in Sarasota, Florida.
The image I couldn't post on How Are You Fixed for Spit? is this one of the newly-discovered DNA Nebula.
Only last year did we first get a glimpse of this nebula which is 80 light years long and lies near the enormous black hole at the center of our Milky Way.
Mark Morris, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California said
Nobody has ever seen anything like that before in the cosmic realm.
Most nebulae are either spiral galaxies full of stars or formless, amorphous conglomerations of dust and gas—space weather. What we see indicates a high degree of order.
So long, Gideons. For decades, hotels have provided bibles in their guest rooms that they have gotten free from Gideon International. Many hotels are no longer providing bibles in their guest rooms as they have for decades, the edgier ones replacing them with "intimacy kits".
