Damnit!
I've switched on a new feature that should keep this under control. Sorry about the bother but... well... it'll prevent bother.
Or, the thoughts of several frustrated intellectuals on Sociology, Gaming, Science, Politics, Science Fiction, Religion, and whatever the hell else strikes their fancy. There is absolutely no reason why you should read this blog. None. Seriously. Go hit your back button. It's up in the upper left-hand corner of your browser... it says "Back." Don't say we didn't warn you.
Robertson scares the living crap out of me, and I used to be a pretty dedicated church youth group and Bible study leading type guy. He is firmly in the wing-nut crowd Brayden is talking about. But unlike Brayden who can just think these guys are funny nut bags, I know people who live their lives based on what guys like this say. When Robertson called for dedicated Christians everywhere to pray for liberal Supreme Court Justices to get sick and die, I know and worked with people who did just that. In fact they organized prayer groups and prayer vigils to achieve that end. Brayden, these guys are not all that funny, and their access to mass media and ability to convince otherwise bright individuals of the rightness of their position is horrifying.
The finding poses a direct challenge to proposed federal and state laws that would compel doctors to tell women having abortions at 20 weeks or later that their fetuses can feel pain and to offer them anesthesia specifically for the fetus.
About 1.3 million abortions a year are performed in the United States, 1.4 percent of them at 21 weeks or later.
Bills requiring that women be warned about fetal pain have been introduced in the House and Senate and in 19 states, and recently passed in Georgia, Arkansas and Minnesota. The bills are supported by many anti-abortion groups. But advocates for abortion rights say the real purpose of the measures is to discourage women from seeking abortions. It is too soon to tell what effect the new laws are having in abortion clinics.
...
The federal legislation, introduced by Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, in 2004 and again this year as the "Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act," says there is "substantial evidence" of "substantial pain to an unborn child" during abortions performed after 20 weeks. The bill includes a script doctors must read to women, offering to deliver anesthesia directly to the fetus and stating, "The Congress of the United States has determined that at this stage of development, an unborn child has the physical structures necessary to experience pain."
Mr. Brownback said he hoped Congress would act on the bill sometime next year. "It is one of the top priorities of the pro-life movement to address this issue," he said.
America’s future has become an Orwellian nightmare of ultra-liberalism. Beginning with the Gore Presidency, the government has become increasingly dominated by liberal extremists.
In 2004, Muslim terrorists stopped viewing the weakened American government as a threat; instead they set their sights on their true enemies, vocal American conservatives. On one dark day, in 2006, many conservative voices went forever silent at the hands of terrorist assassins. Those which survived joined forces and formed a powerful covert conservative organization called “The Freedom of Information League”, aka F.O.I.L.
...
The New York City faction of F.O.I.L. is lead by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy, and Oliver North, each uniquely endowed with special abilities devised by a bio mechanical engineer affectionately nicknamed "Oscar". F.O.I.L. is soon to be joined by a young man named Reagan McGee.
Reagan was born on September 11th, 2001. He is the son of a NYC firefighter whose life was spared by attending his son’s birth. Reagan has grown to manhood in an ultra-liberal educational system: being told, not asked, what to think. With personal determination, which alienates him from his contemporaries, he has chosen the path less traveled…the path to the Right.
[Links Added; Misspellings original]
There was no 'sensitivity training' when bulldozers went into Rafah
Jonathan Steele
Friday August 19, 2005
The Guardian
Contrast the world's overwhelming coverage, especially on television, of the departure of Israeli settlers from Gaza with the minimal reporting of larger and more brutal evictions in previous months.
There was no "sensitivity training" for Israeli troops, no buses to drive the expellees away, no generous deadlines to get ready, no compensation packages for their homes, and no promise of government-subsidised alternative housing when the bulldozers went
into Rafah.
Within sight of the Gush Katif settlements that have been handled with such kid gloves this week, families in Rafah were usually given a maximum of five minutes' warning before their houses, and life savings, were crushed. Many people did not even have time to go upstairs to collect belongings when the barking of loudspeakers
ordered them out, sometimes before dawn. Fleeing with their children in the night, they risked being shot if they turned round or delayed.
As many as 13,350 Palestinians were made homeless in the Gaza Strip in the first 10 months of last year by Israel's giant armour-plated Caterpillar bulldozers - a total that easily exceeds the 8,500 leaving Israeli settlements this week. In Rafah alone, according to figures from the UN relief agency Unrwa, the rate of house demolitions rose from 15 per month in 2002 to 77 per month between January and October 2004.
Parts of Rafah now resemble areas of Kabul or Grozny. Facing Israeli army watchtowers and the concrete wall that runs close to the Gaza Strip's boundary, rows of rubble and ruined homes stretch for hundreds of yards.
The house where I stayed three years ago, which was then one row back from the frontline, has gone. So have three more lines of houses behind it, thanks to Israel's remorseless policy of clearing the zone for "security" reasons even after Ariel Sharon announced his plan to leave Gaza.
Palestinians who visit the ruins or try to use one or two rooms that survived the onslaught risk their lives from Israeli bullets. A warning shot rang out as one homeowner took me on to his roof in broad daylight last month to survey the miserable scene. We quickly came down.
These cruel evictions have of course been reported, and some foreigners who tried to block or record them, such as Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall, and James Miller, paid with their lives alongside scores of murdered local Palestinians. But coverage was never as comprehensive or intense as this week's removals of Israelis. Sharon wanted the world's media to see the protracted agony of the settlers, so as to make the (spurious) point that if it is hard to get 8,500 to leave Gaza, getting 400,000 to withdraw from the West Bank and east Jerusalem will be impossible. However sincere the settlers' grief is at leaving their homes, for the organisers of the retreat it was theatre of the cynical.
The exaggerated focus on the settlement evictions has some benefits. Those who claim, genuinely or dishonestly, that the world's media are biased in favour of Palestinians had their argument collapse this week. TV viewers around the world have also been exposed to the ugly sight of rampant religious fundamentalism.
As they were dragged off, some Israeli zealots had no shame in minimising the Holocaust, absurdly comparing unarmed Israeli police to the Gestapo. Others used racist insults. "Jews do not expel Jews," they shouted, presumably wanting to imply that only non-Jews do it. They apparently did not realise that most people will see the irony in terms of contemporary rather than historical events - "Jews do not expel Jews... Jews expel Arabs."
Perhaps the ugliest part of the Israeli settlers' behaviour was their corruption of youth, with parents instigating their children to wrap themselves in prayer shawls and sob or shriek defiance.
No one who spends time in Gaza's Palestinian communities can avoid being saddened by the ubiquitous focus on the gun, which also diverts children from normal growing up. It appears on graffiti everywhere alongside the names and faces of those who died by violence, in suicide attacks or shot down by Israeli fire. Almost every teenage boy aspires to use a Kalashnikov or hand grenade. At a recent wedding, I saw a dancing mother twirl a rifle in both hands above her head like the baton of a majorette.
Trapped in their Israeli-enforced ghetto, Gazans can at least claim that this pervasive and corrupting militarism is the legacy of a decades-long national resistance movement to defend land that belongs to them. Islam is part of the mix, but religion follows the national flag. For many Israeli settlers in Gaza that dynamic was reversed. Religion was their driving force, and they had no individual or national right to the land on which they built their armed camps.
Israel's worst practices from Gaza are likely to be transferred to the West Bank now. Controls over freedoms in the West Bank have been tightened relentlessly in recent years. More roads were closed. More checkpoints sprang up. Walls and fences were extended, in defiance of the international court of justice's ruling that they are illegal. However, even with this creeping oppression, life in the West Bank is not yet as constricted as it was for those in Gaza.
That will probably change. Sharon - one of whose nicknames, appropriately, is Bulldozer - wants to expand the West Bank settlements and demolish more Palestinian homes around Jerusalem. Unless his strategy of unilateralism is blocked, evictions may reach Rafah-like proportions.
The break-up of the settlements will give those in Gaza freedom to move within their narrow enclave, but this benefit may be outweighed by the West Bank's losses. One of the worst places in Gaza used to be the Abu Houli crossing, a tunnel for Palestinian vehicles that went under the road to the Israeli settlements of Gush Katif. At any moment Israeli Land Rovers or tanks would emerge to block the tunnel, leaving Palestinians stranded on what was the only road linking the north and south of Gaza. Pregnant mothers could not get to hospital. Relatives missed weddings. Students failed to reach their colleges to take exams.
Israel intends to build at least 16 gated crossings in the West Bank. It is one thing to have segregated roads - a step that America's Deep South and apartheid South Africa never reached. But to insist on the right to block even those roads that are allocated to Palestinians is grotesque. The West Bank will be sliced into a series of ghettoes that Israeli forces can isolate at will. Whatever the security
justification, the effect is to impose collective punishment on every Palestinian.
No one should be surprised if, in the face of such injustice, Palestinian anger and resistance grow.
[links added]
The Stowers Institute and Washington University in St. Louis joined forces, pitching the potential benefits and saying that the anti-research forces do not have a monopoly on morality. They hired Fred Steeper, a leading Republican pollster, who said two in three residents in a poll of 600 adults [in Missouri] supported SCNT [a technique for producing stem cells that involves creating embryos] even after being told the opponents' objections. The edge was stronger among Democrats and independents than among Republicans, who favored SCNT 52 to 44 percent.
Contrary to some fears, childhood vaccines do not appear to overwhelm the immune system and make youngsters prone to other infections, according to the largest study to examine the issue.
A Danish study found no increased risk for other infectious diseases among more than 800,000 children who received the standard set of vaccinations.
The findings, published in today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, should be reassuring to parents, the researchers said.
"There has been a lot of speculation about this hypothesis -- that if you have a lot of these vaccinations, this could perhaps overwhelm or weaken the child's immune system," said Anders Hviid of the Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen. "We found no support for that hypothesis."
Nevertheless, concerns have persisted. Skeptics said the new study does not address the biggest concern about vaccines: that they may increase the risk of developmental problems in children, such as autism or ailments caused by the immune system attacking the body, known as autoimmune diseases.
"It's not infectious diseases that parents are concerned about," said Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Vienna. "They are concerned about learning disabilities and autism and asthma and diabetes."
The suit was filed on behalf of Mary Scott Doe, a fictitious embryo produced by in vitro fertilization and then frozen and put into storage. Some of these embryos, which people have decided not to use in attempts to have children, have been donated for use in stem cell research, which involves destroying them.
The lawsuit claims the embryo is a person who should be given equal protection under the Constitution, and her destruction violates her right to freedom from slavery.
In decisions that have upheld the right of women to receive abortions, the Supreme Court has ruled that a woman's right to control her body outweighs the early-stage fetus's rights.
In his appeal of the initial federal case, lawyer R. Martin Palmer argues that Roe v. Wade does not apply in this case because the embryo is in deep freeze and not a mother's womb.
The lawsuit appears to be identical to one filed against the National Institutes of Health and dismissed after the 4th Circuit court determined it had no legal standing. The court said federal funding restrictions placed on embryonic stem cell research by President Bush in 2002 made the case against the NIH moot
[...]
The people who filed the federal lawsuit likely know it is still a moot case, said Joan Samuelson, a member of the committee overseeing the stem cell institute.
"It is just a maneuver to continue to delay our work, which 7 million Californians voted to try to get cures to people" said Samuelson, who has multiple sclerosis.
Conservatism is sweeping the nation, we have a fully functioning alternative media, we're ticked off and ready to avenge Robert Bork ... and Bush nominates [for the Supreme court] a Rorschach blot.
[...]
As I've said before, if a majority of Americans agreed with liberals on abortion, gay marriage, pornography, criminals' rights and property rights — liberals wouldn't need the Supreme Court to give them everything they want through invented "constitutional" rights invisible to everyone but People for the American Way. It's always good to remind voters that Democrats are the party of abortion, sodomy and atheism, and nothing presents an opportunity to do so like a Supreme Court nomination.
Proposition 71, the California bond initiative that created the stem cell institute, was designed to bypass the federal funding restrictions by allocating state funds for the research.
The course's broad statements about the Bible being the blueprint for the nation are askew, said Mr. Haynes of the Freedom Forum, part of a nonpartisan ecumenical group promoting the Bible Literacy Project textbook. "If the Bible is a blueprint for the Constitution," he said, "I guess they haven't read it," referring to the Constitution.
Some of the claims made in the national council's curriculum are laughable, said Mark A. Chancey, professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who spent seven weeks studying the syllabus for the freedom network. Mr. Chancey said he found it "riddled with errors" of facts, dates, definitions and incorrect spellings. It cites supposed NASA findings to suggest that the earth stopped twice in its orbit, in support of the literal truth of the biblical text that the sun stood still in Joshua and II Kings.
"When the type of urban legend that normally circulates by e-mail ends up in a textbook, that's a problem," Mr. Chancey said.
Tracey Kiesling, the national council's national teacher trainer, said the course offered "scientific documentation" on the flood and cites as a scientific authority Carl Baugh, described by Mrs. Kiesling as "an internationally known creation scientist who founded the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Tex."
Indeed, the consequences of destroying a comet may include anything from an asteroid shower to disruption to radio waves.
“I am not a scientist,” Molokhov [Bai's lawyer] says, “but experts say the impact could disrupt the comet’s plasma trail, which could have an effect on satellite communications.”