ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

A human rights group's report about conditions at the U.S. military's prison at Guantanamo Bay is "absurd," President Bush told reporters TuesdayThe Amnesty International report, released last week, said prisoners at the U.S. Navy base had been mistreated and called for the prison to be shut down. The president, addressing a news conference at the White House, said the Amnesty document was an "absurd report." "It's absurd. It's an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world," Bush said of the report, which compared Guantanamo to a Soviet-era gulag. He said the Amnesty allegations were based on interviews with detainees, who hated America and were trained to lie.

On March 27, 2003, Rumsfeld said:

We know that it's a repressive regime…Anyone who has read Amnesty International or any of the human rights organizations about how the regime of Saddam Hussein treats his people…

The next day, Rumsfeld even cited his "careful reading" of Amnesty:

…[I]t seems to me a careful reading of Amnesty International or the record of Saddam Hussein, having used chemical weapons on his own people as well as his neighbors, and the viciousness of that regime, which is well known and documented by human rights organizations, ought not to be surprised.

And on April 1, 2003, Rumsfeld said once again:

[I]f you read the various human rights groups and Amnesty International's description of what they know has gone on, it's not a happy picture.

W. Mark Felt, who retired from the FBI after rising to its second most senior position, has identified himself as the "Deep Throat" source quoted by The Washington Post to break the Watergate scandal that led to President Nixon's resignation, Vanity Fair magazine said Tuesday

Discrimination is one big reason, because men have traditionally made the rules to suit themselves and keep out women. But if you think that leveling the playing field would eliminate gender disparities, consider an unintentional experiment conducted in the Scrabble world, which is hardly a hostile environment for women.

For a quarter-century, women have outnumbered men at Scrabble clubs and tournaments in America, but a woman has won the national championship only once, and all the world champions have been men. Among the world's 50 top-ranked players, typically about 45 are men.
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The guys who memorize these lists have a hard time explaining their passion. But the evolutionary roots of it seem clear to anthropologists like Helen Fisher of Rutgers University.

"Evolution has selected for men with a taste for risking everything to get to the top of the hierarchy," she said, "because those males get more reproductive opportunities, not only among primates but also among human beings. Women don't get as big a reproductive payoff by reaching the top. They're just as competitive with themselves - they want to do a good job just as much as men do - but men want to be more competitive with others."

Evolutionary psychologists see two kinds of payoffs that traditionally went (and often still go) to victorious men. Women have long been drawn to men at the top of a hierarchy (a clan leader, Donald Trump) who have the resources to support children.

And when women pursued what's called a short-term reproductive strategy - a quick fling - then presumably evolution favored the woman who was attracted to a man with good genes, as manifest either in his looks or in some display of prowess. If the theory's right and the unconscious urges persist in women, you can begin to understand why some women wait in hotel lobbies looking for rock stars.

If the theory's right...

After Danica Patrick placed 4th yesterday in the Indy 500, Robby Gordon stepped up to be the whining crying baby.
Robby Gordon accused Danica Patrick of having an unfair advantage in the Indianapolis 500 and said yesterday he will not compete in the race again unless the field is equalized.

Gordon, a former open-wheel driver now in NASCAR, contends that Patrick is at an advantage over the rest of the competitors because she only weighs 100 pounds. Because all the cars weigh the same, Patrick's is lighter on the race track.

"The lighter the car, the faster it goes," Gordon said. "Do the math. Put her in the car at her weight, then put me or Tony Stewart in the car at 200 pounds and our car is at least 100 pounds heavier.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Touched The Face Of God


"Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed and joined the trembling mirth of sun-split clouds
– and done 100 things you have not dreamed of
– wheeled and soared and swung high in the sunlit silence.

Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept hills with easy grace,
Where never lark, or even eagle flew;

And, while with silent, lifting mind, I trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God!"

The information age elite exercises artful dominion of the means of production, the education system. The median family income of a Harvard student is $150,000. According to the Educational Testing Service, only 3 percent of freshmen at the top 146 colleges come from the poorest quarter of the population. The educated class ostentatiously offers financial aid to poor students who attend these colleges and then rigs the admission criteria to ensure that only a small, co-optable portion of them can get in.

The educated class reaps the benefits of the modern economy - seizing for itself most of the income gains of the past decades - and then ruthlessly exploits its position to ensure the continued dominance of its class.

The only antidote [to feeling that wars are prevalent] is to look at long-term trends instead of daily horrors. For a really long-term trend, consider that of 59 skeletons found in a Stone Age graveyard, at least 24 died from violence. Or that a quarter of the male population died fighting in some pre-agricultural societies.

In the 20th century, despite two world wars, humans had less than a 2 percent chance of dying in war or a mass killing, according to John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State. Today the risk is lower still - about a quarter the chance of dying in a car accident.

I mention these numbers not to minimize today's tragedies. I plan to be at a parade on Monday honoring the soldiers who have fallen, especially the more than 1,600 in Iraq. But I will also be thinking about the Progress Paradox and the origin of Memorial Day.

It started after the Civil War as Decoration Day, an occasion for widows wearing red poppies to decorate graves and memorials in virtually every town. If a war of that scale happened now, there would be nearly five million graves to tend. Sixteen-hundred is still too many, but if the trend continues, Memorial Day may eventually become a memory itself.

The point of Shrub's "revolution" seems to be this: Get yourself a token parliament, hold a few rigged elections, make a few noises about rights for women, and you, too, can be in good graces with Uncle Sam and Big Oil. Playing host to a few American military bases doesn't hurt, either.

"For paving the streets, it's a lot of lighting,'' said resident Nick Porrovecchio, 48, motioning to a team of workmen setting up Hollywood-style floodlights on the street to bathe the gubernatorial podium in a soft glow.

Porrovecchio and his business partner, Joe Greco, said that at about 7 a.m. they became fascinated watching "10 city workers standing around for a few hours putting on new vests,'' all in preparation for the big moment with Schwarzenegger.

But their street, he noted, didn't even have a hole to pave over until Thursday morning.

"They just dug it out,'' Porrovecchio said, shrugging. "There was a crack. But they dug out the whole road this morning.''

David Vossbrink, director of communications for San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales, who was in Washington, D.C., Thursday lobbying for more federal funding for BART, said the city paid the road crew and the extra security costs associated with the governor's visit -- as it would for any visiting dignitary.

Schwarzenegger's office "contacted us several days ago for a suitable area'' to depict his distribution of transportation funding, Vossbrink said. The neighborhood was chosen because "city workers were already in the area" doing repaving and resurfacing, which he said often requires peeling off old pavement and digging up roads to lay down new asphalt.

In this case, Vossbrink said, the governor's event involved "not exactly filling a pothole, but it represented the pothole aspect'' of the transportation funding measure.

In this case, Vossbrink said, the governor's event involved "not exactly filling a pothole, but it represented the pothole aspect'' of the transportation funding measure.

...Tom Noe, a private coin dealer and Republican donor who led the coin investment. Democrats have alleged that Noe was awarded the state's business in return for campaign contributions to Republicans, who control most of state government.

Officials do not know what assets are missing or where those items are supposed to be, bureau spokesman Jeremy Jackson said. Investigators had gone into Noe's coin shop under a court order issued Thursday morning, but weren't able to remove coins from their cases to inspect them and verify authenticity, Jackson said.

The bureau had made $15.3 million from the investments while Noe has collected about $3.8 million in commission. His shop outside Toledo had one of the two largest coin caches in the collection.

The plan to scale back women's service was shot down by opposition ranging from the Secretary of the Army to the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as Democrats and some members of Hunter's own party. "At a time when our armed forces are overstretched, we shouldn't be turning away people who want to serve their country," Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher, a Democrat from California, told the Los Angles Times. "Invoking the names of two female soldiers captured by Iraqi insurgents and later freed, she added, 'This step is a slap in the face to the Jessica Lynches and Shoshana Johnsons of our military, who served our nation ably and nobly.'"

Of course, there's a pragmatic reason as well as a patriotic one for letting women continue to serve on the dangerous streets of Baghdad and beyond. Considering the extreme lengths that military recruiters have been going to get soldiers signed up, it's no wonder that the Pentagon doesn't want to diss women willing to give their all.

An Indianapolis father is appealing a Marion County judge's unusual order that prohibits him and his ex-wife from exposing their child to "non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals."

The parents practice Wicca, a contemporary pagan religion that emphasizes a balance in nature and reverence for the earth.

Cale J. Bradford, chief judge of the Marion Superior Court, kept the unusual provision in the couple's divorce decree last year over their fierce objections, court records show. The order does not define a mainstream religion.

Bradford refused to remove the provision after the 9-year-old boy's outraged parents, Thomas E. Jones Jr. and his ex-wife, Tammie U. Bristol, protested last fall.

Through a court spokeswoman, Bradford said Wednesday he could not discuss the pending legal dispute.

The parents' Wiccan beliefs came to Bradford's attention in a confidential report prepared by the Domestic Relations Counseling Bureau, which provides recommendations to the court on child custody and visitation rights. Jones' son attends a local Catholic school.

"There is a discrepancy between Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones' lifestyle and the belief system adhered to by the parochial school. . . . Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones display little insight into the confusion these divergent belief systems will have upon (the boy) as he ages," the bureau said in its report.

Owen has voted against a woman's right to choose in every abortion-related opinion. Owen is often referred to as an Enron or Halliburton appointee who, as a justice on the Texas Supreme Court, consistently ruled for business and against consumers and women's rights, and tried to weaken discrimination protections in employment.

"Will saving women's lives, women's rights, and civil rights ever be considered such an extraordinary circumstance [that would allow Democratic filibustering]?," asked Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority. "If the record of Priscilla Owen and two other anti-women's rights, anti-civil rights nominees who will not be filibustered under the deal are to be the standard, then these rights are in grave peril."

NIGHTLIGHT CHRISTIAN ADOPTIONS WAS INTRODUCED BY PRESIDENT BUSH AT MAY 24, 2005, 2:10pm EST PRESS CONFERENCE ON STEM CELL RESEARCH. HE SPOKE OF THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE AND THAT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A "SPARE EMBRYO."TWENTY ONE OF OUR SNOWFLAKES CHILDREN JOINED HIM IN ORDER TO PUT A FACE TO THESE EMBRYOS UNDER DISCUSSION.

CHECK YOUR LOCAL NEWS STATIONS FOR COVERAGE!

Finally, an option that makes sense! When your embryos were created, you knew that life had begun. When your embryos were implanted in you and you became pregnant, you prayed that your long wait for a child was nearly over. Like all pregnant women, you were probably filled with excitement - and apprehension - but, knowing that the baby's fate was in God's hands, you were ready.

Now that you have finished building your family, or have decided that embryo implantation is no longer in your plans, you are confronted with even more difficult decisions.

What will you do with the embryos that remain frozen? Destroy the embryos?... Donate them for research?...Donate the embryos for implantation?

There seems to be something missing in these choices. These embryos are your pre-born children and you want them to have a chance to be born. But, you also want some control over their destiny.

The number of embryos a genetic family has will determine the number of embryos a family receives. Some genetic families may have twenty embryos; other families may only have two embryos. The adopting family adopts all of the embryos that the genetic family has. In any event, every adoptive family adopts a minimum of six embryos with which to begin their transfer process. Because our goal is for the adoptive family to have enough embryos for a chance at a pregnancy, they may be matched with two genetic families to achieve this goal.
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Will Snowflakes work with a genetic family that has only one or two frozen embryos? And if so, will you support a process where the adopting family would receive embryos from multiple genetic parents?

Yes. Snowflakes provides at least 6 embryos to each adoptive family and will match an adopting family with 2 genetic families to achieve that number. The adopting family would have to agree to work with small numbers and possibly mix embryos in utero.

How did the agency decide on the number six?

The number six is based on the statistical success of embryo transfer from frozen embryos. The statistical reports from various clinics suggest a 50% success rate in thawing and 30% success rate in implantation. Therefore, if half of the six embryos survive thawing (resulting in three embryos transferred) the subsequent implantation rate of 30% would suggest that potentially one child would be born from the transfer of those three embryos. The statistics give us a starting point. There is no guarantee that a child will be born from every six embryos nor can there be a promise that multiples are not born. Based on these statistics, we have set six to be the number of embryos a family adopts.

Frozen embryo adoption offers hope to microscopic Americans

It's nothing illegal -- no ballot stuffing necessary, even at the most liberal colleges. First you find a nonpartisan campus group to sponsor the election, so you can't be accused of cheating. Next, volunteer to organize the thing. College students are lazy, and they'll probably let you. Always keep in mind that a rigged mock election is all about location, location, location.

"Can anyone tell me," asks Gourley, a veteran mock electioneer, "why you don't want the polling place in the cafeteria?"

Stephen, a shy antiabortion activist sitting toward the rear of the class, raises his hand: "Because you want to suppress the vote?"

"Stephen has the right answer!" Gourley exclaims, tossing Stephen his prize, a copy of Robert Bork's "Slouching Toward Gomorrah."

The students, strait-laced kids from good colleges, seem unconvinced. The lesson -- that with sufficient organization, the act of voting becomes less a basic right than a tactical maneuver -- doesn't sit easy with some students at first. Gourley, a charismatic senior from South Dakota and the treasurer of the College Republican National Committee, assures them: "This is not anti-democracy. This is not shady. Just put [the polling place] somewhere where you might have to put a little bit of effort into voting." The rest, Gourley explains, is just a matter of turnout.

When the state or national candidate you're backing wins by a suitably large margin, as he or she surely will, have the nonpartisan group that sponsored the election sign off on your prewritten celebratory press release and send it statewide. Reporters will almost certainly ignore it, but after a dozen similar victories, they'll start dashing off articles about the youth phenomenon behind your candidate's campaign -- or better yet, just start plagiarizing your press releases.

"Everyone knows that for certain breeds of dogs it is customary to cut their tails short when they are a few weeks old," begins Blackwell's lecture to us on the importance of releasing negative information on your opponent incrementally. "Every time you clip the puppy's tail it hurts. It hurts. You might traumatize the puppy for life."

"The moral is that if it's your tail that's being clipped, you want it clipped once," concludes Blackwell. "But if you get a chance to clip your opponent's tail, clip that puppy as often as you can."

The poll also indicated Americans might want a change in Congress, with 47 percent of all respondents saying the country would be better off if Democrats were in control, compared with 36 percent who favored Republicans. Nine percent picked "neither."

Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

Nightfall, Sep. 11, 2001. Thousands of innocents have just been slaughtered in a terrorist attack. Three things happen in rapid succession: the left rises to support a president they doubt because the crisis demands unity, the right decides to use the atrocity to further its own claims and Jerry Falwell states that the slaughter of innocents was God's punishment for the ACLU, pagans and feminists. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the American conservatism.

I'm leaving the right -- more precisely, the American wingnut right and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the slathering maws of self-styled Christianists -- people who once championed Christ's love towards oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways America has deserved this horrible catastrophe

Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept at not taking the measure of the left's mounting incoherence. To face it directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately, first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror.

Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s. I became adept at seeing the mounting left as incoherent. To face the left's message directly posed the danger that I would have to see the right's message accurately, and to describe it so, first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to Ward Churchill, Noam Chomsky, Molly Ivins and all the Usual Suspects the right so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror.

I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.

In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking "subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).

Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school speaking English like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson countered that the time was not yet right to "level the playing field." Why not? Because "drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can't do that."

When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who believe "I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich spoke up for gender- focused feminists who "would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is misguided."

I smile when friends tell me I've "moved left". I laugh out loud at what now passes for conservative on the main lines of the wingnut right.

In the name of "religion", U.S. Senators threaten to discipline judges who are not Christian activists, U.S. Representatives propose bills that would make it unconstitutional for the Supreme Court to rule on any law that is explicitly based on the word of God, and our elected representatives wish to provide pharmacists the rights to decide which patients can receive their medications quickly and conveniently and which cannot.

Wait, it gets better. The state of Kansas is proposing to redefine science so that all mythology and religion can be included under that label, just for the purpose of teaching creationism in high school science classes.

When Wendy McElroy, a self-styled ifeminists, finds the most serious problem in feminism to be the unfair treatment of men, her sisters in The Concerned Women of America agree and appoint a man to be their representative. And Ann Coulter finds her own sex naturally less intelligent.

A pregnant student who was banned from graduation at her Roman Catholic high school announced her own name and walked across the stage anyway at the close of the program.

Alysha Cosby's decision prompted cheers and applause Tuesday from many of her fellow seniors at St. Jude Educational Institute.

But her mother and aunt were escorted out of the church by police after Cosby headed back to her seat.
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The father of Cosby's child, also a senior at the school, was allowed to participate in graduation.

Meanwhile, evangelical Protestants are pulling closer to their mainline counterparts in class and education. As late as 1965, for example, a white mainline Protestant was two and a half times as likely to have a college degree as a white evangelical, according to an analysis by Prof. Corwin E. Smidt, a political scientist at Calvin College, an evangelical institution in Grand Rapids, Mich. But by 2000, a mainline Protestant was only 65 percent more likely to have the same degree. And since 1985, the percentage of incoming freshmen at highly selective private universities who said they were born-again also rose by half, to 11 or 12 percent each year from 7.3 percent, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.

To many evangelical Christians, the reason for their increasing worldly success and cultural influence is obvious: God's will at work.
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As the denomination grew, Assemblies preachers began speaking not only of heavenly rewards but also of the material blessings God might provide in this world. The notion was controversial in some evangelical circles but became widespread nonetheless, and it made the Assemblies' faith more compatible with an upwardly mobile middle class.

By the 1970's, Assemblies churches were sprouting up in affluent suburbs across the country. Recent surveys by Margaret Poloma, a historian at the University of Akron in Ohio, found Assemblies members more educated and better off than the general public.

As they flourished, evangelical entrepreneurs and strivers built a distinctly evangelical business culture of prayer meetings, self-help books and business associations. In some cities outside the Northeast, evangelical business owners list their names in Christian yellow pages.
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"God has always used wealthy people to help the church," Mr. Havens said. He pointed out that in the Bible, rich believers helped support the apostles, just as donors to the Christian Union are investing strategically in the Ivy League today.

The Office of Public Health and Science (OPHS) of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) announces the availability of funds for FY 2005 and requests applications for grants for public awareness campaigns on embryo adoption. The OPHS is under the direction of the Assistant Secretary for
Health (ASH), who serves as the Senior Advisor on public health and science issues to the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The Office serves as the focal point for leadership and coordination across the Department in public health and science; provides direction to program offices within OPHS; and provides advice and counsel on public health and science issues to the Secretary. The increasing success of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) has resulted in a situation in which an infertile couple typically creates several embryos through in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
During IVF treatments, couples may produce many embryos in an attempt to conceive with several being cryopreserved (frozen) for future use. If a couple conceives without using all of the stored embryos, they may choose to have the remaining unused embryos donated for adoption allowing other infertile couples the experience of pregnancy and birth. Embryo adoption is a relatively new process in which individuals who have extra frozen embryos agree to release the embryos for transfer to the uterus of another woman, either known or anonymous to the donor(s) for the purpose of the recipient(s) attempting to bear a child and be that child's parent.