341

YOU ARE RULE 8(a)!

You are Rule 8, the most laid back of all the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. While your forefather in the Federal Rules may have been a stickler for details and particularity, you have clearly rebelled by being pleasant and easy-going. Rule 8 only requires that a plaintiff provide a short and plain statement of a claim on which a court can grant relief. While there is much to be lauded in your approach, your good nature sometimes gets you in trouble, and you often have to rely on your good friend, Rule 56, to bail you out.
Which Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Ruth and student

340

i went to bed at 10:30 last night. when i woke up this morning at 5:30, when the alarm clock went off, i looked over to the other side of the bed and moe wasn’t there. it’s not too uncommon for her to fall asleep in the recliner, so i got up and went into the living room to wake her up, but she wasn’t there either. now i’m starting to panic. i called her, but there was no response, so i looked out the front door to see if she had already left for work – which i was certain she hadn’t, but she wasn’t anywhere else, but the car was still in the driveway. now i’m really starting to panic. i called out her name again… and she responded??? from the bedroom???????? i went back to the bedroom and she was wondering why i was banging around and yelling… BLOWN HEAD GASKET!! apparently she went to bed, in the bedroom, shortly after i did last night, around 11:00 or so. normally i wake up when she comes to bed, but in spite of the fact that i apparently turned off the light, which is on my side of the bed, i didn’t wake up. i still don’t know why she wasn’t there when i woke up, because she said she hadn’t moved…

now i’m back home after taking moe to work, shipping out a package for hybrid elephant and getting the oil changed in the car, feeling like i didn’t get any sleep at all, and i find out that coretta scott king died last night, and alito has been confirmed as a supreme court justice… wonderful… now that the king legacy is dead, they figure that they can do anything they want… next they’re going to be overturning roe v. wade, demanding paternal consent for abortions and who knows what else that’s totally in opposition to everything upon which this country was founded…

Senate confirms Alito to the Supreme Court
Tuesday, January 31, 2006

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Senate confirmed Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court on Tuesday by a vote of 58-42, a day after an attempt by some Democratic senators to block his nomination fizzled.

Alito, who will be the court’s 110th justice, will be sworn into office across the street from the Capitol at the Supreme Court, just hours before President Bush’s State of the Union address. He will then join Chief Justice John Roberts in the House chamber for Tuesday night’s speech.

Judge Alito will be ceremonially sworn into office Wednesday in the East Room of the White House.

Alito watched the Senate vote from the Roosevelt Room of the White House with President Bush and his wife, Martha-Ann Bomgardner.

Only one of the Senate’s 55 Republicans voted against Alito’s confirmation — Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, a moderate facing re-election this fall in an overwhelmingly Democratic state.

The four Democrats who broke party ranks and voted for Alito are Sens. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Kent Conrad of North Dakota. All four of the states represented by the senators were carried by Bush in both 2000 and 2004.

Alito’s supporters in the Senate, as expected, cleared the final roadblock Monday when senators, by a vote of 72-25, decided to cut off debate and proceed to a final vote, rebuffing an attempt by a cadre of liberal senators to talk the nomination to death.

The vote easily exceeded the 60 votes needed to pass the motion.

In the end, only 24 of the chamber’s 44 Democrats went along with the filibuster, a maneuver allowed under Senate rules to block a vote by extending debate indefinitely. It was also supported by the chamber’s lone independent, Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont.

Arguing against cutting off debate, Sen. John Kerry — who spearheaded the filibuster effort with his fellow Massachusetts Democrat, Sen. Ted Kennedy — said Alito’s record during his 15 years on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has given “the extreme right wing unbelievable public cause for celebration.”

“That just about tells you what you need to know,” Kerry said. “The vote today is whether or not we will take a stand against ideological court-packing.”

But Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said the move to cut off debate fulfilled a “very straightforward principle — a nominee with the support of a majority of senators deserves a fair up-or-down vote.”

“The sword of the filibuster has been sheathed because we are placing principle before politics, and results before rhetoric,” Frist said.

The motion to cut off debate drew the support of 53 Republicans and 19 Democrats, including all 14 senators who signed on to an agreement last year that ended a series of Democratic filibusters of Bush’s judicial nominations.

The so-called Gang of 14 included seven Democrats and seven Republicans.

The Democrats agreed not to support judicial filibusters except under “extraordinary circumstances,” which would be up to each senator to define. In return, the GOP members agreed not to support any attempt by Republican leaders to change Senate rules to permanently end the practice.

Among the 24 Democrats who supported the filibuster were five senators being mentioned as possible 2008 White House contenders — Kerry, who lost to Bush in 2004; Hillary Clinton of New York; Evan Bayh of Indiana; Russ Feingold of Wisconsin; and Joe Biden of Delaware.

The Senate’s top two Democrats, Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, also supported the Kerry-Kennedy filibuster effort.

Alito, 55, replaces retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate swing vote and the first woman appointed to the high court.


if it weren’t tuesday, i would swear that it was monday… 8/

338

Fnord?

Fnord is evaporated herbal tea without the herbs.

Fnord is that funny feeling you get when you reach for the
Snickers bar and come back holding a slurpee.

Fnord is the 43 1/3rd state, next to Wyoming.
Fnord is this really, really tall mountain.
Fnord is the reason boxes of condoms carry twelve instead of ten.

Fnord is the blue stripes in the road that never get painted.
Fnord is place where those socks vanish off to in the laundry.
Fnord is an arcade game like Pacman without the little dots.
Fnord is a little pufflike cloud you see at 5pm.

Fnord is the tool the dentist uses on unruly patients.
Fnord is the blank paper that cassette labels are printed on.
Fnord is where the buses hide at night.
Fnord is the empty pages at the end of the book.

Fnord is the screw that falls from the car for no reason.
Fnord is why Burger King uses paper instead of foam.
Fnord is the little green pebble in your shoe.
Fnord is the orange print in the yellow pages.

Fnord is a pickle without the bumps.
Fnord is why ducks eat trees.
Fnord is toast without bread.
Fnord is a venetian blind without the slats.

Fnord is the lint in the navel of the mites that eat the lint in the navel of the mites that eat the lint in Fnord’s navel.

Fnord is an apostrophe on drugs.
Fnord is the bucket where they keep the unused serifs for H*lvetica.
Fnord is the gunk that sticks to the inside of your car’s fenders.
Fnord is the source of all the zero bits in your computer.

Fnord is the echo of silence.
Fnord is the parsley on the plate of life.
Fnord is the sales tax on happiness.
Fnord is the preposition at the end of sixpence.

Fnord is the feeling in your brain when you hold your breath too long.
Fnord is the reason latent homosexuals stay latent.

Fnord is the donut hole.
Fnord is the whole donut.

Fnord is an annoying series of email messages.
Fnord is the color only blind people can see.

Fnord is the serial number on a box of cereal.

Fnord is the Universe with decreasing entropy.
Fnord is a naked woman with herpes simplex 428.
Fnord is the yin without yang.
Fnord is a pyrotumescent retrograde onyx obelisk.

Fnord is why lisp has so many parentheses.
Fnord is the the four-leaf clover with a missing leaf.

Fnord is double-jointed and has a cubic spline.
Fnord never sleeps.
Fnord is the “een” in baleen whale.

Fnord is neither a particle nor a wave.

Fnord is the space in between the pixels on your screen.

Fnord is the guy that writes the Infiniti ads.
Fnord is the nut in peanut butter and jelly.
Fnord is an antebellum flagellum fella.

Fnord is a sentient vacuum cleaner.

Fnord is the smallest number greater than zero.
Fnord lives in the empty space above a decimal point.

Fnord is the odd-colored scale on a dragon’s back.
Fnord is the redundant coin slot on arcade games.
Fnord was last seen in Omaha, Nebraska.

Fnord is the founding father of the phrase “founding father”.
Fnord is the last bit of sand you can’t get out of your shoe.
Fnord is Jesus’s speech advisor.
Fnord keeps a spare eyebrow in his pocket.
Fnord invented the green hubcap.
Fnord is why doctors ask you to cough.

Fnord is the “ooo” in varooom of race cars.
Fnord uses two bathtubs at once.

I cannot escape them
No matter how I try
They wait for me everywhere
I cannot pass them by.

Driving down the street
I see “Jesus Is Lord”
And then immediately after
I hear the word “FNORD!”

Innocuous sayings and parables
And on the evening news
I hear the word “FNORD!”
And suddenly I’m confused

I sit alone in my room
And I’m feeling rather bored
I turn on the tube and guess what
I hear the word “FNORD!”

“Don’t see the fnords and they won’t eat you”
That’s what I’ve heard the wisemen say
But I can’t get away from those beasties
There’s just no fucking way.


If cat poop is so toxic to pregnant women, why aren’t there more birth defects? Can cat poop cause schizophrenia?

Dear Cecil:
Two related questions: As a cat owner, I’ve been a little concerned recently about rumors that cat poop can cause schizophrenic behavior in people who are overexposed to the waste. How much truth is in this–and if there is any truth to it, what amount can possibly count as overexposure? I’m also bothered by the supposed risk to pregnant women that changing the litter box can cause–not so much to them as to the fetus, through bacteria and whatnot. If that’s really true, then with a third of all Americans owning cats, why don’t we see higher rates of these dreadful birth defects? Certainly some of these women must get pregnant sometime, and I doubt they all know the dangers posed to them by cleaning up what Puss left behind. What gives?
–Onnie in Baltimore

Cecil replies:

Buckle up, friend. This one’s bizarre.

While you’re surely right that not everyone has gotten the word, the medical profession and hopefully most women of childbearing age know that if you’re pregnant you don’t want to get near cat feces. The problem is the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii, for which cats are the principal host. The microscopic parasites reproduce in the cat’s gut, the eggs are excreted, and by a process I’m not about to describe the critters wind up in your brain and muscles, where they create tiny cysts, leading to a condition known as toxoplasmosis. Unpromising as this sounds, the symptoms of toxoplasmosis are generally mild to nonexistent in adults, which is good, because roughly a third of all humans are infected, with the rate in some tropical countries approaching 100 percent.

For some, though, things are less benign. If a woman initially becomes infected while pregnant, there’s a fair chance the T. gondii will migrate across the placenta to her unborn child, with ghastly results ranging from cerebral palsy, seizures, and mental retardation to death. Women infected prior to pregnancy don’t run the same risk, which no doubt explains why we haven’t seen an epidemic of toxo-induced birth defects–the parasite’s ubiquitousness confers a sort of immunity. I’ve seen no research suggesting there’s a threshold exposure below which there’s no danger, and in my opinion it’d be foolish to assume there is one. Besides, you’ll never get a better excuse to make somebody else clean the litter box.

Here’s where things get strange. While the link between toxoplasmosis and birth defects has long been recognized, scientists now suspect that T. gondii may cause schizophrenia too. That in itself represents a major change in thinking–till recently the assumption, based on twin studies and the like, has been that schizophrenia is transmitted genetically. No way, scoffers say: schizophrenia is so profoundly disabling that sufferers tend not to reproduce. Germs are a likelier candidate. Studies typically have found T. gondii antibodies occurring in schizophrenics at twice the rate seen in control groups.

But get this. Forty-five percent of schizophrenics tested positive in one study for both T. gondii and D-lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD. To quote a recent paper: “These results support the hypothesis that T. gondii may cause schizophrenia and may do so by producing or triggering the production of an hallucinogenic chemical” (“Genes, Germs, and Schizophrenia,” Ledgerwood et al, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 2003). Mindful that rodents are often an intermediate host for the parasite, the authors go on to say, “Production of such a compound may have been favored by natural selection because an infected, hallucinating rodent would be more easily captured by a cat.” In other words, schizophrenia in humans may be a side effect of T. gondii’s attempt to set cats up with a steady supply of tripping mice, the better to ensure its own reproductive success. Told you this was bizarre.

A word of caution: our authors’ impressive theoretical edifice is built on some pretty thin evidence. It’s simplistic to say T. gondii works by triggering the production of LSD–among other problems with the idea, acid mainly gives rise to visual hallucinations, whereas the delusions of schizophrenics are primarily auditory (e.g., hearing voices). No doubt genetics plays some role in schizophrenia, if only by establishing a predisposition to the condition. Still, even without the hallucinogen angle, this is a promising line of research. If germs are in fact a cause of schizophrenia, which afflicts more than two million Americans, there’s a better chance we’ll be able to come up with a method of prevention if not a cure.

–CECIL ADAMS


BLUE

BLUES are motivated by INTIMACY, seek opportunities to genuinely connect with others, and need to be appreciated. They do everything with quality and are devoted and loyal friends and employers/employees. Whatever or whomever they commit to are their sole (and soul) focus. They love to serve and will give freely of themselves in order to nurture others lives.

BLUES, however, do need to be understood. They have distinct preferences and occasionally the somewhat controlling (but always fair) personality of a confident leader. Their code of ethics is remarkably strong and they expect others to live honest, committed lives as well. They enjoy sharing meaningful moments in conversation as well as remembering special life events (i.e., birthdays and anniversaries). BLUES are dependable, thoughtful, nurturing, and can also be self-righteous, a bit worry-prone, and emotionally intense. They are like sainted pit-bulls who never let go of something once they are committed. When you deal with a BLUE, be sincere, make an effort to truly understand them, and truly appreciate them.

What Color Are You?

337

Bush’s Blatant Attempt to Obstruct and End the Abramoff Investigation

At some point, it all becomes unbelievable.

President George W. Bush has not made many moves more unethical than offering Noel L. Hillman, the Abramoff prosecutor, a federal judgeship. Hillman has apparently been talking with Bush’s representatives since last year, and on last Thursday, he publicly announced he was accepting the appointment.

Let me make this perfectly clear.

At the same time that Mr. Hillman was conducting a grand jury and submitting evidence aimed at Bush’s allies and perhaps Bush himself, he was meeting with Bush, who was, in effect, offering him a bribe.

Mr. Hillman, Bush is saying, leave the job, let me put someone else in your stead, someone I want. Forget, says Mr. Bush, that you have been in charge of the investigation for two years, that you have been involved on a day-to-day basis, and that your leaving seriously impedes the investigation.

All this had been kept quiet until Thursday, January 26, 2006. Neither the Bush administration nor Mr. Hillman thought it appropriate to let anyone know what was going on until the deal was done. Secrecy, the modus operandi of this administration, kept the information from the public.

President Richard Nixon was the last one who tried something like this, but he didn’t get away with it. In 1971, he invited a California federal trial judge, Matthew Byrne, then sitting on the criminal prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg for his release of the Pentagon Papers, to Nixon’s San Clemente home, to offer Byrne the job of heading the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Byrne accepted the invitation. A limousine sent by Nixon picked Byrne up after the court. The next morning, at 7am, John Ehrlichman sent a limousine to Byrne to get his answer.

Neither Nixon nor Byrne nor Ehrlichman released information about any of the meetings. But secrecy, the modus operandi of that administration, did not work.

That day, the story leaked. Leonard Weinglass, one of the attorneys for the defense, virtually cross-examined the judge in the courtroom. The judge confirmed the meetings and then turned down the job.

Byrne then denied a recusal motion, continuing with the case. Byrne, then totally aware of his impropriety, ultimately dismissed the case, in part, because of the storm created by his secret Nixon meetings.

Both Matthew Byrne and Noel Hillman have good reputations. Byrne recognized that he was offered a bribe and turned it down.

I do not personally know Mr. Hillman. Thus far, his public actions seem to warrant only applause. But Hillman’s boss is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Neither has said a word about the offer and its acceptance. The public is entitled to know more.

But Bush is getting away with it. There’s been very little press coverage. Alito, Hamas, Iraq, and Oprah Winfrey have buried the story.

The Democrats should insist on the appointment of a special prosecutor to fill Mr. Hillman’s position. Attorney General Gonzales should not be permitted to designate Hillman’s successor.

This, unlike the botched up Alito hearings, is a war we can win. We should not let Bush appoint his own person, someone like Harriet Miers, Samuel Alito, or the man Bush’s father said was the best person qualified for a Supreme Court seat, Clarence Thomas.

It is nearly impossible to have faith in any of America’s governing personnel or institutions. This administration’s total disregard for law and ethics continues to shock even though we thought we were by now unshockable.


but according to my democratically elected, democratic congressional representative, there is enough of a question about whether his actions are impeachable or not that “more investigations” are necessary before we jail this bastard…

big surprise… Majority in U.S. Say Bush Presidency Is a Failure, Poll Finds

Jan. 26 (Bloomberg) — A majority of Americans said the presidency of George W. Bush has been a failure and that they would be more likely to vote for congressional candidates who oppose him, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.

Fifty-two percent of adults said Bush’s administration since 2001 has been a failure, down from 55 percent in October. Fifty- eight percent described his second term as a failure. At the same point in former President Bill Clinton’s presidency, 70 percent of those surveyed by Gallup said they considered it a success and 20 percent a failure.

In a poll conducted in January of 2002, after Bush was president for one year, 83 percent of those surveyed said his presidency was a success.

In the new poll, conducted Jan. 20-22, fifty-one percent of those surveyed said they would be more likely to vote for congressional candidates who do not support Bush’s policies.

The percentage of Americans who called Bush ‘honest and trustworthy’ fell 7 percentage points in the last year to 49 percent, the poll found.

The new poll also found that 62 percent of Americans said they are ‘dissatisfied’ with ‘the way things are going’ in the U.S., unchanged from a December survey. The percentage of ‘dissatisfied’ Americans reached its peak in October of 2005 when 68 percent of those surveyed agreed.

The survey interviewed 1,006 U.S. adults and has a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points. For the questions about whether Bush’s presidency is a success, about 500 U.S. adults were surveyed and the margin for error is plus or minus 5 percentage points.


if that’s the case then why isn’t there more action towards getting him out of office and into a jail uniform? 8/


by the way, in a typical republican move, they moved up the vote for alito’s confirmation from tomorrow to today but didn’t tell anyone in hopes that the democrats won’t get behind a filibuster. i heard about the possibility on friday, and sure enough, today it’s announced.

CALL OR FAX YOUR CONGRESSIONAL
REPRESENTATIVE NOW!

tomorrow is too late!


ACLU sues Homeland Security for arresting, spying on vegans who protested ham

The American Civil Liberties Union today filed a federal lawsuit in Atlanta on behalf of two vegan protesters who were subjected to imprisonment, arrest and harassment by Homeland Security officials.

The lawsuit stems from a Dec. 2003 incident, when vegans Caitlin Childs and Christopher Freeman were protesting on public property outside a Honey Baked Ham store in Georgia’s DeKalb County.

After the protest, the duo noticed they were being watched and photographed by a man in an unmarked car. They approached the car and wrote down the make, model, color and license plate number on a piece of paper. They then noticed the unmarked car was following them.

According to the ACLU suit, the car contained both a uniformed police officer and an undercover detective, later identified as Homeland Security Detective D.A. Gorman. The two pulled in behind Childs and Freeman and ordered them to exit their car.

Gorman then demanded that she turn over the piece of paper on which she had copied his license tag number. Childs refused to hand the paper over, and was handcuffed.

She was searched a male officer, despite her request to be searched only by a female officer, the ACLU says.

Both Childs and Freeman were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Police confiscated the piece of paper and Childs’ house keys. Both were released from custody, but neither the piece of paper nor the keys were returned. The county has not pursued a criminal case.

To view the surveillance photos taken by Homeland Security, go to http://www.aclu.org/spyfiles/honeyham/1.html.

More from the ACLU’s release:

“All across the country, the ACLU is uncovering information about Americans engaged in peaceful protest being spied on by Homeland Security, the FBI and local police,” said Debbie Seagraves, Executive Director of the ACLU of Georgia. “It is deeply disturbing that the government would use resources intended to protect national security to instead spy on innocent Americans who do nothing more than express their opinions on social and political issues.”

The ACLU argues that by stopping and detaining Childs and Freeman for no legal reason and then refusing to tell them why they had been pulled over, Detective Gorman and the DeKalb County Police Department deprived them of their right to be secure in their person and to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. The officials’ actions violated the First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the federal and state constitutions, charged the ACLU.

“People of this country need to realize that our basic human rights are being whittled away on a daily basis,” Freeman said. “I hope this case brings to light the fact that anyone can come under government security and pay the price.”

In addition to the lawsuit, the ACLU has filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on behalf of Childs and Freeman to uncover any surveillance files kept on the activists by Homeland Security or other law enforcement agencies. ACLU affiliates in 15 other states have filed similar requests with the FBI on behalf of more than 100 groups and individuals, as part of a nationwide effort to expose unlawful domestic spying.

Last month, the ACLU of Michigan obtained an FBI report summarizing a meeting that was intended to keep local, state and federal law enforcement agencies apprised of planned protests and activities by various groups and individuals. Among the groups discussed at the meeting were an affirmative action advocacy group and a peace and justice group.

The ACLU launched its national “Spy Files” effort last year in response to widespread complaints from students and political activists who said they were questioned by FBI agents in the months leading up to the political conventions. The FOIA requests seek two kinds of information: 1) the actual FBI files of groups and individuals targeted for speaking out or practicing their faith; and, 2) information about how the practices and funding structure of joint task forces between the FBI and local police may be encouraging rampant and unwarranted spying.


no, it’s not the war on vegetarians, it’s the war on terrorists… this just goes right along with bush and his unwarranted domestic wiretaps, and it’s another reason why we need to revolt and oust these people from power… and people think it’s dangerous for me to wear a button that says "I Am A Terrorist!"… 8/

336

Hybrid Elephant report:
i’ve been somewhat more than usually busy the past couple of weeks. i got an order for two ardhanarisvara murtis (why two i will probably never know, but what the hell, right?), and an order for a narada sivalingam, which i had to send out for and which should be arriving tomorrow or tuesday, and another order for a whole bunch of different fragrances from sarathi, and an order for auroshikha cedar, and an order for a whole bunch (like six 80-stick boxes) of bharath darshan, which i have to send out for tomorrow. i’m also working with ezra on his “Bald Man” t-shirts, and i’ve got more html maintenance to do for chris. on top of everything else, i’m making 100 buttons for Drunk Puppet Night (which opens in portland in 3 weeks) if i could just be this busy all the time, i wouldn’t need to look for another job.

335

i recently wrote to my congressional representative, adam smith, d-wa, and this was his reply…


Thank you for contacting me in regards to President Bush’s authorization of a National Security Agency (NSA) program to conduct domestic wiretaps without judicial oversight. I appreciate hearing from you on this critical issue.

I share your concerns about the legality of President Bush’s authorization of domestic surveillance. As you may know, President Bush authorized the NSA to conduct domestic wiretaps on U.S. citizens shortly after September 11, 2001. Under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), surveillance requires a warrant from a special FISA court or the authorization of the Attorney General which must then be reported to the court within 72 hours. It appears that the President authorized the NSA to conduct domestic surveillance without going through those critical checks. Like you, I am very concerned about these revelations, and am doing everything I can to make sure this is fully investigated.1

I have joined my colleagues in sending several letters citing our concerns and requesting investigations and actions to be taken to bring this program tolight. These include a letter to the Inspectors General of the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense, as well as the Government Accountability Office (GAO), calling for them to contuct immediate investigations. My colleagues and I also sent a letter to the leadership of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence calling for immediate investigations.2

I also joinced Congressman John Conyers (D-Mi) in sending a letter to President Bush expressing our concern about the apparent illegality of this program and urging the President to propose to Congress any legislative changes that may be needed so that Congress can excersise its Constitutiona authority to oversee the Executive Branch’s actions. Specifically, the letter requests that the President submit legislative changes to the Congress and disclose to Congress information about the program such as how many people have been monitored under this authority and for what reasons.3

I am also a co-sponsor of H.Res. 643 introduced by Congressman John Conyers (D-Mi). This resolution of inquiry directs the Attorney General to submit to the House of Representatives all documents relating to the NSA’s warrantless electronic surveillance of telephone conversations and electronic communications of U.S. persons. This important measure would allow the House to scrutinize the Attorney General’s legal advice and justification for the wiretapping program.

Due to questions of legality surrounding the authorization of the NSA program, many have raised the question of whether or not the President has committed an impeachable offense. Certainly, impeachment cannot be ruled out as a possibility should it become clear that the President or other members of the Adminmistration have committed impeachable offenses.4 However,5 before considering such an option, much more would have to be known about the President’s authorization of the NSA program.6 Impeachment is a very serious step to take,7 and I strongly believe that it is something that should only be undertaken in a deliberate and thoughtful manner.8 That is why we must have robust congressional oversight and investigations as soon as possible.9 At this time, I am not yet ready to prejudge the outcome of any investigation by suggesting impeachment must be a component in the proceedings. There is still much to be learned about how this program has been used.10

As you know, impeachment involves the legislative branch of our government bringing accusations against officials such as cabinet members, judges and the President. The power to impeach resides solely with the House of Representatives; the power to try an impeachment case resides solely with the Senate. The Chief Justice of the United States presides over the inquiry in case of impeachment of the President. Impeachable acts cited in the Constitution are “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

One of the most difficult questions raised by this Constitutional provision is: What are high crimes and misdemeanors? The conclusion reached by most scholars11 is that clear criminal law violations represent impeachable offenses, whereas misconduct that is not necessarily criminal but undermines the integrity of the office (such as disregard of constitutional responsibilities) may rise to the level of an impeachable offense.12 Partly because of this, impeachment has taken place infrequently. By making impeachment difficult, the Constitution guards against the intrusion of the legislature into the business of the judiciary and executive brances. It also ensures that impeachmenmt remains primarily a legal, or judicial, procedure, rather than a political process.

I hope that I have sufficiently explained my position on these important issues.13 Once again, thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. Please be assured that i’ll keep pushing for thorough investigations so that Congress can exercise its oversight on this serious matter. If you have any further questions, comments, or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact me again.

Sincerely,

Adam Smith
Member of Congress


Translation:

  1. i wish you people would stop bothering me and go away.
  2. i’m tired from all this letter-writing… let me sit and catch my breath for a minute…
  3. he might have learned something that i can use to be able to stay in office, so i don’t want to discount anything without “investigating” further.
  4. let me see… president getting a blow job, that’s an impeachable offense. president lying, deliberately misleading, flagrantly violating national and international law, and admitting it… we’ll have to think about that.
  5. nope… not impeachable offense… sorry.
  6. see note #3.
  7. and i have a 2:00 tee time…
  8. so we’ll think about it and we’ll let you know what we come up with… eventually… if we feel like it.
  9. more investigations… you would think that bush’s admitting that he broke the law would be enough, but no… there have to be more investigations…
  10. see note #3.
  11. any statistic that starts out with “‘most’ something” cannot be proven.
  12. president getting a blowjob, impeachable offense. president lying, intentionally misleading, flagrantly violating national and international law and admitting it, not impeachable offense.
  13. i might just be able to make that 2:00 tee off…

and this is a democrat, supposedly the “opposition” party in congress at this time… my solution? depopulate the country. it’s a lost cause. the administration has been corrupt for so long that it’s what people expect now. they don’t see that the foundations upon which this country was built are being taken away, piece by piece. if you don’t leave now, tomorrow may be too late.

AAARRGGHH! VEGETABLE SACRIFICE CANCELLED!

DON’T go to the vegetable sacrifice today… the pass is closed due to avalanche control work, and they’re turning people around at edgewick road, which is one or two exits *west* of eXit-38…

once again, the vegetable sacrifice is CANCELLED for today, however it will be rescheduled before october, so if you have a suggestion for when (springtime would be good if you want it to be at eXit-38) write to me and we’ll work something out.

TINA CHOPP IS GOD!
PRAISE HER OR DIE!!

332

The Church of Tina Chopp proudly announces a

PUBLIC RITUAL VEGETABLE SACRIFICE

In Honour of Tinite New Year
Saturday, 28 January, 2006
at HIGH Noon

the place is the usual spot, eXit-38, at the Change Creek Bridge. map here –
http://snurl.com/hrue

questions and/or carpool arrangements, contact The Church –
[email protected]

for those of you who haven’t been to a Ritual Vegetable Sacrifice before, full
details can be found here –
http://www.ebeneezer.org/ritual/vegetable/public.html

we hope to see you there!

331

Drunk Puppet Night #6

Monkeywrench Puppet Labs is proud to present the 6th annual

DRUNK PUPPET NIGHT

In Portland’s Winningstad Theatre
17th & 18th February
1111 SW Broadway (at Main St.)
8:00 pm, $15 (21+ only)

In Seattle’s Columbia City Theatre
24th & 25th February, 3rd, 4th, 10th & 11th March
4619 Rainier Ave. S.
8:30 pm, $15 (21+ only)

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delocator dot net is an online database of coffee houses that are independently owned and not under the watchful thumb of starbucks or any of the other transnational coffee corporations… and there’s one by my house which i didn’t know about before finding it on delocator. help them grow!

Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie or Shielded Cap… take your pick… although the first link contains a very specific warning about businesses like the one represented in the second link (although it’s definitely more fashionable), so beware…

thanks to for this one…


Political bias affects brain activity, study finds
Democrats and Republicans both adept at ignoring facts, brain scans show

Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.

And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that’s contrary to their point of view.

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects’ brains were monitored while they pondered.

The results were announced today.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."

Bias on both sides
The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Westen said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.

The tests involved pairs of statements by the candidates, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, that clearly contradicted each other. The test subjects were asked to consider and rate the discrepancy. Then they were presented with another statement that might explain away the contradiction. The scenario was repeated several times for each candidate.

A brain-scan technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate.

"The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data," Westen said.

Other relatively neutral candidates were introduced into the mix, such as the actor Tom Hanks. Importantly, both the Democrats and Republicans reacted to the contradictions of these characters in the same manner.

The findings could prove useful beyond the campaign trail.

"Everyone from executives and judges to scientists and politicians may reason to emotionally biased judgments when they have a vested interest in how to interpret ‘the facts,’" Westen said.

The researchers will present the findings Saturday at the Annual Conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.


thanks to for this one…
Defending Spy Program, General Reveals Shaky Grip on 4th Amendment
By E&P Staff
January 23, 2006 10:05 PM ET

NEW YORK The former national director of the National Security Agency, in an appearance today before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., today, appeared to be unfamiliar with the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution when pressed by a reporter with Knight Ridder’s Washington office — despite his claims that he was actually something of an expert on it.

General Michael Hayden, principal deputy director of National Intelligence with the Office of National Intelligence, talked with reporters about the current controversy surrounding the National Security Agency’s warrantless monitoring of communications of suspected al Qaeda terrorists. Hayden has been in this position since last April, but was NSA director when the NSA monitoring program began in 2001.

As the last journalist to get in a question, Jonathan Landay, a well-regarded investigative reporter for Knight Ridder, noted that Gen. Hayden repeatedly referred to the Fourth Amendment’s search standard of "reasonableness" without mentioning that it also demands "probable cause." Hayden seemed to deny that the amendment included any such thing, or was simply ignoring it.

Here is the exchange, along with the entire Fourth Amendment at the end.

***

QUESTION: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I’d like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I’m no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American’s right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use —

GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually — the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But the —

GEN. HAYDEN: That’s what it says.

QUESTION: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.

GEN. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But does it not say probable —

GEN. HAYDEN: No. The amendment says —

QUESTION: The court standard, the legal standard —

GEN. HAYDEN: — unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: The legal standard is probable cause, General. You used the terms just a few minutes ago, "We reasonably believe." And a FISA court, my understanding is, would not give you a warrant if you went before them and say "we reasonably believe"; you have to go to the FISA court, or the attorney general has to go to the FISA court and say, "we have probable cause."

And so what many people believe — and I’d like you to respond to this — is that what you’ve actually done is crafted a detour around the FISA court by creating a new standard of "reasonably believe" in place of probable cause because the FISA court will not give you a warrant based on reasonable belief, you have to show probable cause. Could you respond to that, please?

GEN. HAYDEN: Sure. I didn’t craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order. All right? The attorney general has averred to the lawfulness of the order.

Just to be very clear — and believe me, if there’s any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it’s the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you’ve raised to me — and I’m not a lawyer, and don’t want to become one — what you’ve raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is "reasonable." And we believe — I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we’re doing is reasonable.

***

Here’s the Fourth Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

A new Gallup poll released Monday showed that 51% of Americans said the administration was wrong to intercept conversations involving a party inside the U.S. without a warrant. In response to another question, 58% said they support the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the program.


i’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, especially since even the government isn’t exactly sure about what rights they are stealing from us…

When they took the fourth amendment,
     I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment,
     I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment,
     I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun.
Now they’ve taken the first amendment,
     and I can say nothing about it.

but at the same time…


Bush: Bin Laden Should Be Taken Seriously

FORT MEADE, Md. – President Bush, defending the government’s secret surveillance program, said Wednesday that Americans should take Osama bin Laden seriously when he says he’s going to attack again.

"When he says he’s going to hurt the American people again, or try to, he means it," Bush told reporters after visiting the top-secret National Security Agency where the surveillance program is based. "I take it seriously, and the people of NSA take it seriously."

It was Bush’s first comment about bin Laden since the al-Qaida leader warned in a tape aired last week that his fighters are preparing new attacks in the United States. Bin Laden offered a truce, without specifying the conditions, and the White House responded that the United States would never negotiate with the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bush’s NSA visit was part of an aggressive administration effort to defend the surveillance program. Experts and lawmakers from both parties have questioned whether it’s legal for the government to listen to conversations in the United States without a warrant, which the administration could get through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Four leading Democratic senators wrote Bush Wednesday saying they support efforts to do everything possible within the law to combat terrorism, but that the NSA program is an "apparent violation of federal law."

"If you or officials in your administration believe that FISA, or any law, does not give you enough authority to combat terrorism, you should propose changes in the law to Congress," wrote Sens. Harry Reid, Edward Kennedy, Richard Durbin and Russ Feingold. "You may not simply disregard the law."

Reporters traveling with the president were only allowed to see a few minutes of Bush’s NSA tour, as he walked through the high-tech Threat Operations Center where intelligence experts monitor Internet traffic. He spoke to reporters from a podium set up in a hallway after completing his tour, but did not take questions.

In keeping with the NSA’s secrecy, reporters were required to leave their cell phones, pagers, laptops and wireless e-mail devices outside the complex. The White House negotiated so that the journalists could bring in cameras and video equipment, but they were allowed only to take photos of the president, not the inside or outside of the facility itself.

Bush said the NSA program is limited to communications between the United States and people overseas who are linked to al-Qaida. He said it has helped prevent terrorist attacks and save American lives, although the government has not given any specifics.

Bush urged that people "listen to the words of Osama bin Laden and take him seriously."

His critics say the law requires him to get permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to eavesdrop on communications involving Americans.

"Obviously, I support tracking down terrorists," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said in a speech Wednesday. "I think that’s our obligation. But I think it can be done in a lawful way."

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the administration should have asked Congress to change the law if it wanted additional surveillance powers.

"Instead, a top lawyer in the Bush administration did just the opposite," Leahy said Wednesday, circulating 2002 testimony from a Justice Department official who said the administration had no position on a bill that would have made it easier to get warrants from the FISA court.

Bush said he had the legal right to do whatever he could to prevent further attacks and that the NSA program "is fully consistent with our nation’s laws and Constitution."

"I’ll continue to reauthorize this program for so long as our country faces a continuing threat from al-Qaida and related groups," Bush said.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said he’s eager to learn more. Asked on NBC’s "Today" show, if Bush broke the law, McCain replied: "I don’t know. I want to be perfectly clear. I don’t know the answer."


Attorney general sues under anti-spyware law
New York company is accused of deception

By TODD BISHOP AND JOHN COOK
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERS

Washington’s attorney general has filed his first lawsuit under the state’s new anti-spyware law — alleging that a New York company’s software claiming to rid personal computers of spyware actually deposits a nefarious program instead.

The suit, which was filed Tuesday against Secure Computer LLC of White Plains, N.Y., alleges that the company’s spyware-scanning software falsely labels ordinary Windows system keys as spyware to induce computer users to pay $49.95 for the company’s Spyware Cleaner program. That program doesn’t actually clean spyware from the PC but rather modifies the computer’s security settings, the suit alleges.

Attorney General Rob McKenna is expected to announce the suit at a news conference today in Seattle along with Nancy Anderson, deputy general counsel from Microsoft Corp., which also has filed suit against Secure Computer.

"This lawsuit is intended to send a message to spyware perpetrators and to hucksters who market phony products that play on the public fear of spyware," McKenna said Tuesday night. He called the alleged tactics, especially the changing of security settings, "quite startling."

Microsoft’s lawsuit was prompted in part by complaints from the company’s customers, Anderson said. At the same time, online promotions for the Spyware Cleaner program allegedly capitalized on the company’s name, with phrases such as "Microsoft spyware cleaner" and "Microsoft anti-spyware."

Anderson described the case as an "important milestone in making sure consumers understand that they will be protected if they are preyed upon by deceptive practices." Microsoft previously cited the state’s anti-spyware law in a separate lawsuit against an unnamed defendant.

The law, which was enacted last year, made it illegal to illicitly install software on someone else’s computer to modify settings, collect information or perform other deceptive acts.

Both suits also make claims under anti-spam laws, alleging deceptive practices in e-mails used to promote the product. McKenna’s suit names defendants including Paul E. Burke, Secure Computer’s president, who didn’t return a message left on his phone in New York.

The suit alleges that Secure Computer, Burke and another defendant, Gary T. Preston of Jamaica, N.Y., made more than $100,000 by selling Spyware Cleaner through a network of affiliates. The suit, which also names some of those affiliates, asks the court to enjoin the defendants from deceptive practices and assess financial penalties.

Ben Edelman, an expert who has testified in anti-spyware suits, said he was familiar with Secure Computer and its tactics. He described it as "a deplorable practice" that "takes advantage of users in their moment of weakness." Edelman said there are other companies engaged in similar practices.

According to the attorney general’s suit, the defendants marketed the Spyware Cleaner product to computer users through pop-up advertisements and e-mails that told them their machines had been infected with spyware. The pop-up messages, which mimicked the appearance of Microsoft security boxes and used the Redmond company’s trademarked font, then asked users to perform a computer scan.

The messages were designed to alarm computer users, with one reading: "Warning — Your computer may be infected with harmful spyware programs," the suit says. Those consumers who followed through with the scan were then told that they had spyware on their computers.

"Deceived into believing that dangerous spyware is on their computer and there is no time to waste, the user is induced to purchase Spyware Cleaner," the suit says.


Washington State’s Anti-Spyware Statute in case there was any question about this…


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In light of recent events, to confustibulate federal examiners, I hereby propose a National Google Child Porn and Al Qaeda Day. (I already Googled Al Qaeda once just to check my spelling. Look, I am a terrorist!)

I arbitrarily propose noon on January 31st as a good time to do this, so that in case the feds ever do get their grubby hands on Google’s (our) data, they find a nice fat spike of activity that will keep them federal investigators tied up with useless searches for years to come!

Pass the word! Noon on January 31st is National Google Child Porn and Al Qaeda Day!

and for those of you who wonder what time zone, who the hell cares… a spike will be a lot more significant the longer it goes on… 8)

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Unfathomed Dangers in PATRIOT Act Reauthorization
by Paul Craig Roberts

A provision in the “PATRIOT Act” creates a new federal police force with the power to violate the Bill of Rights. You might think that this cannot be true, as you have not read about it in newspapers or heard it discussed by talking heads on TV.

Go to House Report 109-333 USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 and check it out for yourself. Sec. 605 reads:

“There is hereby created and established a permanent police force, to be known as the ‘United States Secret Service Uniformed Division.'”

This new federal police force is “subject to the supervision of the Secretary of Homeland Security.”

The new police are empowered to “make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony.”

The new police are assigned a variety of jurisdictions, including “an event designated under section 3056(e) of title 18 as a special event of national significance” (SENS).

“A special event of national significance” is neither defined nor does it require the presence of a “protected person” such as the president in order to trigger it. Thus, the administration, and perhaps the police themselves, can place the SENS designation on any event. Once a SENS designation is placed on an event, the new federal police are empowered to keep out and arrest people at their discretion.

The language conveys enormous discretionary and arbitrary powers. What is “an offense against the United States”? What are “reasonable grounds”?

You can bet the Alito/Roberts court will rule that it is whatever the executive branch says.

The obvious purpose of the act is to prevent demonstrations at Bush/Cheney events. However, nothing in the language limits the police powers from being used only in this way. Like every law in the U.S., this law also will be expansively interpreted and abused. It has dire implications for freedom of association and First Amendment rights. We can take for granted that the new federal police will be used to suppress dissent and to break up opposition. The Brownshirts are now arming themselves with a Gestapo.

Many naïve Americans will write to me to explain that this new provision in the reauthorization of the “PATRIOT Act” is necessary to protect the president and other high officials from terrorists or from harm at the hands of angry demonstrators: “No one else will have anything to fear.” Some will accuse me of being an alarmist, and others will say that it is unpatriotic to doubt the law’s good intentions.

Americans will write such nonsense despite the fact that the president and foreign dignitaries are already provided superb protection by the Secret Service. The naïve will not comprehend that the president cannot be endangered by demonstrators at SENS at which the president is not present. For many Americans, the light refuses to turn on.

In Nazi Germany, did no one but Jews have anything to fear from the Gestapo?

By Stalin’s time, Lenin and Trotsky had eliminated all members of the “oppressor class,” but that did not stop Stalin from sending millions of “enemies of the people” to the Gulag.

It is extremely difficult to hold even local police forces accountable. Who is going to hold accountable a federal police protected by Homeland Security and the president?


US Secret Service Uniformed Division and National Special Security Events – it’s not just scare tactics. at this rate it won’t be long until we have our own, modern version of the gestapo and schutzstaffel… 8/


Impeachment hearings: The White House prepares for the worst

The Bush administration is bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress.

“A coalition in Congress is being formed to support impeachment,” an administration source said.

Sources said a prelude to the impeachment process could begin with hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee in February. They said the hearings would focus on the secret electronic surveillance program and whether Mr. Bush violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Administration sources said the charges are expected to include false reports to Congress as well as Mr. Bush’s authorization of the National Security Agency to engage in electronic surveillance inside the United States without a court warrant. This included the monitoring of overseas telephone calls and e-mail traffic to and from people living in the United States without requisite permission from a secret court.

Sources said the probe to determine whether the president violated the law will include Republicans, but that they may not be aware they could be helping to lay the groundwork for a Democratic impeachment campaign against Mr. Bush.

“Our arithmetic shows that a majority of the committee could vote against the president,” the source said. “If we work hard, there could be a tie.”

The law limits the government surveillance to no more than 72 hours without a court warrant. The president, citing his constitutional war powers, has pledged to continue wiretaps without a warrant.

The hearings would be accompanied by several lawsuits against the administration connected to the surveillance program. At the same time, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that demands information about the NSA spying.

Sen. Arlen Specter, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman and Pennsylvania Republican, has acknowledged that the hearings could conclude with a vote of whether Mr. Bush violated the law. Mr. Specter, a critic of the administration’s surveillance program, stressed that, although he would not seek it, impeachment is a possible outcome.

“Impeachment is a remedy,” Mr. Specter said on Jan. 15. “After impeachment, you could have a criminal prosecution. But the principal remedy under our society is to pay a political price.”

Mr. Specter and other senior members of the committee have been told by legal constitutional experts that Mr. Bush did not have the authority to authorize unlimited secret electronic surveillance. Another leading Republican who has rejected the administration’s argument is Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas.

On Jan. 16, former Vice President Al Gore set the tone for impeachment hearings against Mr. Bush by accusing the president of lying to the American people. Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 election to Mr. Bush, accused the president of “indifference” to the Constitution and urged a serious congressional investigation. He said the administration decided to break the law after Congress refused to change the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

“A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government,” Mr. Gore said.

“I call upon members of Congress in both parties to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution,” he said. “Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of American government that you are supposed to be under the constitution of our country.”

Impeachment proponents in Congress have been bolstered by a memorandum by the Congressional Research Service on Jan. 6. CRS, which is the research arm of Congress, asserted in a report by national security specialist Alfred Cumming that the amended 1947 law requires the president to keep all members of the House and Senate intelligence committees “fully and currently informed” of a domestic surveillance effort. It was the second CRS report in less than a month that questioned the administration’s domestic surveillance program.

The latest CRS report said Mr. Bush should have briefed the intelligence committees in the House and Senate. The report said covert programs must be reported to House and Senate leaders as well as the chairs of the intelligence panels, termed the “Gang of Eight.”

Administration sources said Mr. Bush would wage a vigorous defense of electronic surveillance and other controversial measures enacted after 9/11. They said the president would begin with pressure on Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Bush would then point to security measures taken by the former administration of President Bill Clinton.

“The argument is that the American people will never forgive any public official who knowingly hurts national security,” an administration source said. “We will tell the American people that while we have done everything we can to protect them, our policies are being endangered by a hypocritical Congress.”


College Sophomore Stumps President Bush

Q: My name is Tiffany Cooper. I’m a sophomore here at Kansas State and I was just wanting to get your comments about education. Recently 12.7 billion dollars was cut from education. I was just wondering how is that supposed to help our futures?

Bush: Education budget was cut — say it again. What was cut?

Q: 12.7 billion dollars was cut from education. I’m wanting to know how is that supposed to help our futures?

Bush: At the federal level?

Q: Yes.

Bush: I don’t think we’ve actually — for higher education? Student loans?

Q: Yes, student loans.

Bush: Actually, I think what we did was reform the student loan program. We are not cutting money out of it. In other words, people aren’t going to be cut off the program. We’re just making sure it works better as part of the reconciliation package I think she’s talking about? Yeah — It is a form of the program to make sure it functions better. In other words, we’re not taking people off student loans. We’re saving money in the student loan program because it’s inefficient. So I think the thing to look at is whether or not there will be fewer people getting student loans. I don’t think so.

<reality>
Student Loans: On Dec. 21, 2005, the Senate passed $12.7 billion in cuts to education programs — “the largest cut in student college loan programs in history.” Vice President Cheney cast the deciding vote in favor of the cuts. The bill also fixed the interest rate on student loans at 6.8 percent, “even if commercial rates are lower.” Despite Bush’s claims, students will be left off the program.
</reality>

Secondly, on Pell Grants, we are actually expanding the number of Pell grants through our budget. Great question. The key on education is to make sure that we stay focused on how do we stay competitive into the 21st century, and I plan on doing some talking about math and science and engineering programs so that people who graduate out of college will have the skills necessary to compete in this competitive world. But I think i’m right on this. I will check when I get back to Washington, but thank you for your question.

<reality>
Pell Grants: Pell Grants have been frozen or cut since 2002; they are now stuck at a maximum of $4,050. In his 2000 election campaign, President Bush promised to increase the maximum Pell Grant amount to $5,100. “From 2004 to 2005, 24,000 students lost their Pell grants, according to a report pre-pared by the Congressional Research Service. This was the first drop in the number of students receiving the grants in several years; the number had been growing steadily since 1999.”
</reality>


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the car is close enough that they left it up to us whether they fix it or they total it… but we apparently only had “gap insurance” for the first year, and it just recently expired, so if we total it, they will just give us a check for what it’s worth now, not the total replacement cost, so we decided to fix it… but that was before we discovered that if the body shop goes over the estimate by more than a few hundred dollars (which is likely), the insurance company suddenly decides that it’s a total loss and automatically issues us a check for what it’s worth now, with no further questions asked. either way, it looks like we’re going to end up with a car, and if the insurance company give us a check instead, then we’ll not only end up with a far less expensive, but equally functional car, but we will also have enough money to fix our leaky roof and/or buy a shed, so it’s not all bad news.

i did some web design work for chris in exchange for all the acupuncture treatments he’s been giving me, but unfortunately, without totally redesigning his entire site, i won’t be able to get it to validate, because the previous “web designer” put everything in <table background=…>s and <font …>s rather than using css… <grumble><mutter>

i recently made a comment in the community that brought awareness of , the author of Schlock Mercenary, who also apparently looks (or at least looked) a good deal like me, while at the same time being about as different from me as you can get…


Woman Becomes Quadruple Amputee After Giving Birth

ORLANDO, Fla. — A Sanford mother says she will never be able to hold her newborn because an Orlando hospital performed a life-altering surgery and, she claims, the hospital refuses to explain why they left her as a multiple amputee.

The woman filed a complaint against Orlando Regional Healthcare Systems, she said, because they won’t tell her exactly what happened. The hospital maintains the woman wants to know information that would violate other patients’ rights.

Claudia Mejia gave birth eight and a half months ago at Orlando Regional South Seminole. She was transported to Orlando Regional Medical Center in Orlando where her arms and legs were amputated. She was told she had streptococcus, a flesh eating bacteria, and toxic shock syndrome, but no further explanation was given.

The hospital, in a letter, wrote that if she wanted to find out exactly what happened, she would have to sue them.

“I want to know what happened. I went to deliver my baby and I came out like this,” Mejia said.

Mejia said after she gave birth to Mathew last spring, she was kept in the hospital with complications. Twelve days after giving birth at Orlando Regional South Seminole hospital, she was transported to Orlando Regional Medical Center where she became a quadruple amputee. Now she can not care for or hold her baby.

“Yeah, I want to pick him up. He wants me to pick him up. I can’t. I want to, but I can’t,” she said. “Woke up from surgery and I had no arms and no legs. No one told me anything. My arms and legs were just gone.”

Her 7-year-old son, Jorge, asks his mother over and over what happened to her. Neither she nor her husband has the answer.

“I love her, so I’ll always stick with her and take it a day at a time myself,” said her husband, Tim Edwards.

The couple wants to know how she caught streptococcus, during labor or after. She doesn’t know. She knows she didn’t leave the hospital the same.

“And why, I want to know why this happened,” she said.

Her attorney, Judy Hyman wrote ORHS a letter saying, according to the Florida statute, “The Patients Right To Know About Adverse Medical Incidents Act,” the hospital must give her the records.

“When the statute is named ‘Patients Right To Know,’ I don’t know how it could be clearer,” Hyman said.

The hospital’s lawyers wrote back, “Ms. Mejia’s request may require legal resolution.” In other words, according to their interpretation of the law, Mejia has to sue them to get information about herself.

That’s the sticking point, the interpretation of the Patients Right To Know act, a constitutional amendment Florida voters passed a little more than a year ago.

Mejia’s other attorney, E. Clay Parker, said the hospital is not following the law

“We were forced to file this and ask a judge to interpret the constitutional amendment and do right,” Parker said.

Mejia hopes the right thing is done. She said not knowing exactly why it happened is unbearable. She only hopes she’ll be able to soon answer her little boy’s question, ‘What happened?’

“He told me everyday, ‘What happened,’ and I don’t have any answers for that,” she said.

ORMC said Mejia is requesting information on if there were other patients or someone on her floor with the streptococcus. They said, if they release that to her, that would be a violation of other patients’ rights.


325

Bush Calls Surveillance Legal, Necessary

By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer

MANHATTAN, Kan. – President Bush pushed back Monday at critics of his once-secret domestic spying effort, saying it should be termed a “terrorist surveillance program” and contending it has the backing of legal experts, key lawmakers and the Supreme Court.

Several members of Congress from both parties have questioned whether the warrantless snooping is legal. That is because it bypasses a special federal court that, by law, must authorize eavesdropping on Americans and because the president provided limited notification to only a few lawmakers.

“It’s amazing that people say to me, ‘Well, he’s just breaking the law.’ If I wanted to break the law, why was I briefing Congress?” asked Bush. One of those who had been informed, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., was sitting behind Bush during his appearance at Kansas State University.

Bush’s remarks were part of an aggressive administration campaign to defend the four-year-old program as a crucial and legal terror-fighting tool. The White House is trying to sell its side of the story before the Senate Judiciary Committee opens hearings on it in two weeks.

Back in Washington, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former National Security Agency director who is now the government’s No. 2 intelligence official, contended the surveillance was narrowly targeted. He acknowledged that the program established a lower legal standard to eavesdrop on terror-related communications than a surveillance law implemented in 1978.

Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, government officials had to prove to a secretive intelligence court that there was “probable cause” to believe that a person was tied to terrorism. Bush’s program allows senior NSA officials to approve surveillance when there was “reason to believe” the call may involve al-Qaida and its affiliates.

Hayden maintained that the work was within the law. “The constitutional standard is reasonable. … I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we are doing is reasonable,” he said at the National Press Club.

Hayden also rejected suggestions that the NSA rank-and-file had problems with the electronic monitoring, saying that the agency’s independent watchdog told him Friday that “not a single employee” had registered a concern with that office about the program.

Democrats countered that many important questions remain.

“We can be strong and operate under the rule of law,” said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. “These are not mutually exclusive principles — they are the principles upon which our nation was founded.”

In his remarks, Bush said that allowing the NSA to monitor the international phone calls and e-mails of Americans with suspected ties to terrorists can hardly be considered “domestic spying.”

“It’s what I would call a terrorist surveillance program,” Bush said at Kansas State. “If they’re making a phone call in the United States, it seems like to me we want to know why.”

He said he “had all kinds of lawyers review the process” to ensure it didn’t violate civil liberties or the law.

And he insisted that a recent Supreme Court decision backs his contention that he had the authority to order the program through a resolution Congress passed after the 2001 terrorist attacks that lets him use force in the anti-terror fight.

PAY ATTENTION PEOPLE – THIS IS YOUR GOVERNMENT TRYING TO TALK YOU OUT OF THE RIGHTS THAT ARE RIGHTFULLY YOURS!

“I’m not a lawyer, but I can tell you what it means: It means Congress gave me the authority to use necessary force to protect the American people, but it didn’t prescribe the tactics,” Bush said.

um… WRONG!!

Bush and Hayden sought to paint the program as vital to national security. “Had this program been in effect prior to 9/11, it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the al-Qaida operatives in the United States,” Hayden said.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is to deliver a speech on the program Tuesday. And Bush was going to NSA headquarters outside Washington on Wednesday.

Last week, Gonzales sent congressional leaders a 42-page legal defense of the program. Vice President Dick Cheney defended it in New York last Thursday and briefed congressional leaders at the White House on Friday.

Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, meanwhile, has put Democrats on notice that the White House regards the issue as a political winner for Republicans in this year’s congressional elections.

Bush’s nearly two-hour appearance at Kansas State wasn’t all serious. Returning to a more casual format that he has used throughout his presidency to sell his policies, he fielded questions that ranged from Iran’s geopolitical ambitions to the sort of advice he gets from his wife, Laura.


um… WRONG!!

324

i got an order for 2 ardhanarishvara murtis, but because of a mismatch in the html code for the web site, the person only paid $50, instead of the $64 that the web site says. of course the first thing i did when i realised it was to adjust the html code, but it’s too late for this order. i’m just going to eat the $14, and i’ve already made sure it won’t happen again… i guess this is a lesson i had to learn.

they were supposed to have an estimate ready on the car on friday, but it didn’t happen, so now they’re shooting for monday. the car is only worth $17k, and there’s approximately $13.5k worth of damage, but it’s close enough that they aren’t going to say whether they’re going to total it or fix it without some more hassle.

323

today is moe’s 29th birthday… i originally met her in physical reality when she was 19, soon to be 20 – i had known her as “josie” online for about 4 years before that, but there was never any inkling that we would be married and spend the rest of our lives together, or even a hint of online “romance” before we met in meatspace. we’re going to have dinner with a bunch of moe’s friends at maneki later on… happy birthday moe! 8)

322

they decided that the estimate to fix the car wouldn’t happen until today. if they decide to fix it, then they’ll already have it taken apart, and if they decide to total it, we’re going to end up with an equivalent car in either of the two situations that we’ll end up in, so the stress is off, somewhat… but nobody’s 100% sure of anything yet, because it’s apparently that close.

i got an order for a narmada sivalingam yesterday. i got a huge order about a week ago… $125 worth of murtis, a rudraksha mala and one package of incense, for good measure. hopefully UPS will show up today, because i called it in on thursday of last week, and it was sent out on friday of last week, and then i can get this huge order taken care of. i’ve got an acupuncture appointment this afternoon. i’m probably going to go to howling league with moe this evening.

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‘Bin Laden tape’ warns of attacks

Arabic TV station al-Jazeera has broadcast an audio tape it says is by the al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden.

In it, the speaker says new attacks on the US are being planned, but offers a “long-term truce” to the Americans.

CIA analysts have concluded the voice on the tape was that of Bin Laden, making it the first time he has been heard from since December 2004.

However, other analysts familiar with Bin Laden’s voice are divided as to whether the voice really is his.

The US quickly rejected the truce offer made on the tape.

“We do not negotiate with terrorists. We put them out of business,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

The speaker on the tape said the reason there had not been an attack in the US since 11 September 2001 was not because of superior US security, but because the group had been engaged in activities in Iraq – and because operations in the US “need preparations”.

“The operations are happening in Baghdad and you will see them here at home the minute they are through (with preparations), with God’s permission,” he said.

US officials have said they believe Bin Laden hiding in a mountainous area on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

There is no clear indication of when the tape was recorded.

Last month, al-Jazeera aired a videotape it said dated back to September, showing al-Qaeda’s deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

In it, Zawahiri declared that, despite a prolonged absence and rumours about ill-health or possible injury, Bin Laden was alive.

Truce offer

Despite the warning of renewed attacks, the speaker also offered the US the chance of a long-term truce in light of the fact that US public opinion polls showed growing opposition to the war in Iraq.

“We have no objection to responding to this with a long-term truce based on fair conditions,” the speaker said.

“We do not mind offering you a truce that is fair and long-term… so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan… there is no shame in this solution because it prevents wasting of billions of dollars.

“Your president is misinterpreting public opinion polls which show that the vast majority of you support the withdrawal of your forces from Iraq.”

Bin Laden made Europe a similar truce offer following the Madrid train bombings of March 2004.

Correspondents say it is an attempt to frighten the public and drive a wedge between them and their governments, which say it is necessary to stay to distance in Iraq, not pull out troops.

The BBC’s Justin Webb in Washington says that in the US the immediate political effect of the tape will probably be to boost support for President George W Bush.


now i have no idea whether this is a “for-real” recording of bin laden or not, but the transcript of the tape sounds like a person who is more reasonable than we’ve been lead to believe. that it’s fabricated is extremely likely, especially considering that there was news that the immediate response to this was to say that we should reinstate the “patriot” act… we’ll just have to wait and see whether bush is lying again… 8/


Bin-Laden tape

My message to you is about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the way to end it.

I had not intended to speak to you about this issue, because, for us, this issue is already decided on: diamonds cut diamonds.

Praise be to God, our conditions are always improving and becoming better, while your conditions are to the contrary of this.

However, what prompted me to speak are the repeated fallacies of your President Bush in his comment on the outcome of the US opinion polls, which indicated that the overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of the forces from Iraq, but he objected to this desire and said that the withdrawal of troops would send a wrong message to the enemy.

Bush said: It is better to fight them on their ground than they fighting us on our ground.

In my response to these fallacies, I say: The war in Iraq is raging, and the operations in Afghanistan are on the rise in our favour, praise be to God.

The Pentagon figures indicate the rise in the number of your dead and wounded, let alone the huge material losses, and let alone the collapse of the morale of the soldiers there and the increase in the suicide cases among them.

So, just imagine the state of psychological breakdown that afflicts the soldier while collecting the remnants of his comrades’ dead bodies after they hit mines, which torn them. Following such situation, the soldier becomes between two fires. If he refuses to go out of his military barracks for patrols, he will face the penalties of the Vietnam butcher, and if he goes out, he will face the danger of mines.

So, he is between two bitter situations, something which puts him under psychological pressure – fear, humiliation, and coercion. Moreover, his people are careless about him. So, he has no choice but to commit suicide.

What you hear about him and his suicide is a strong message to you, which he wrote with his blood and soul while pain and bitterness eat him up so that you would save what you can save from this hell. However, the solution is in your hand if you care about them.

The news of our brother mujahideen, however, is different from what is published by the Pentagon.

This news indicates that what is carried by the news media does not exceed what is actually taking place on the ground. What increases doubts on the information of the White House’s administration is its targeting of the news media, which carry some facts about the real situation.

Documents have recently showed that the butcher of freedom in the world [US President Bush] had planned to bomb the head office of al-Jazeera Space Channel in the state of Qatar after he bombed its offices in Kabul and Baghdad, although despite its defects, it is [Al-Jazeera] one of your creations.

Jihad is continuing, praise be to God, despite all the repressive measures the US army and its agents take to the point where there is no significant difference between these crimes and those of Saddam.

These crimes include the raping of women and taking them hostage instead of their husbands. There is no power but in God.

The torturing of men has reached the point of using chemical acids and electric drills in their joints. If they become desperate with them, they put the drill on their heads until death.

If you like, read the humanitarian reports on the atrocities and crimes in the prisons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

I say that despite all the barbaric methods, they have failed to ease resistance, and the number of mujahideen, praise be to God, is increasing.

In fact, reports indicate that the defeat and devastating failure of the ill-omened plan of the four – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz – and the announcement of this defeat and working it out, is only a matter of time, which is to some extent linked to the awareness of the American people of the magnitude of this tragedy.

The wise ones know that Bush has no plan to achieve his alleged victory in Iraq.

If you compare the small number of the dead when Bush made that false and stupid show-like announcement from an aircraft carrier on the end of the major operations, to many times as much as this number of the killed and injured, who fell in the minor operations, you will know the truth in what I am saying, and that Bush and his administration do not have neither the desire nor the will to withdraw from Iraq for their own dubious reasons.

To go back to where I started, I say that the results of the poll satisfy sane people and that Bush’s objection to them is false.

Reality testifies that the war against America and its allies has not remained confined to Iraq, as he claims.

In fact, Iraq has become a point of attraction and recruitment of qualified resources.

On the other hand, the mujahideen, praise be to God, have managed to breach all the security measures adopted by the unjust nations of the coalition time and again.

The evidence of this is the bombings you have seen in the capitals of the most important European countries of this aggressive coalition.

As for the delay in carrying out similar operations in America, this was not due to failure to breach your security measures.

Operations are under preparation, and you will see them on your own ground once they are finished, God willing.

Based on the above, we see that Bush’s argument is false. However, the argument that he avoided, which is the substance of the results of opinion polls on withdrawing the troops, is that it is better not to fight the Muslims on their land and for them not to fight us on our land.

We do not object to a long-term truce with you on the basis of fair conditions that we respect.

We are a nation, for which God has disallowed treachery and lying.

In this truce, both parties will enjoy security and stability and we will build Iraq and Afghanistan, which were destroyed by the war.

There is no defect in this solution other than preventing the flow of hundreds of billions to the influential people and war merchants in America, who supported Bush’s election campaign with billions of dollars.

Hence, we can understand the insistence of Bush and his gang to continue the war.

If you have a genuine will to achieve security and peace, we have already answered you.

If Bush declines but to continue lying and practicing injustice [against us], it is useful for you to read the book of “The Rogue State”, the introduction of which reads: If I were a president, I would halt the operations against the United States.

First, I will extend my apologies to the widows, orphans, and the persons who were tortured. Afterwards, I will announce that the US interference in the world’s countries has ended for ever.

Finally, I would like to tell you that the war is for you or for us to win. If we win it, it means your defeat and disgrace forever as the wind blows in this direction with God’s help.

If you win it, you should read the history. We are a nation that does not tolerate injustice and seek revenge forever.

Days and nights will not go by until we take revenge as we did on 11 September, God willing, and until your minds are exhausted and your lives become miserable and things turn [for the worse], which you detest.

As for us, we do not have anything to lose. The swimmer in the sea does not fear rain. You have occupied our land, defiled our honour, violated our dignity, shed our blood, ransacked our money, demolished our houses, rendered us homeless, and tampered with our security. We will treat you in the same way.

You tried to deny us the decent life, but you cannot deny us a decent death. Refraining from performing jihad, which is sanctioned by our religion, is an appalling sin. The best way of death for us is under the shadows of swords.

Do not be deluded by your power and modern weapons. Although they win some battles, they lose the war. Patience and steadfastness are better than them. What is important is the outcome.

We have been tolerant for 10 years in fighting the Soviet Union with our few weapons and we managed to drain their economy.

They became history, with God’s help.

You should learn lessons from that. We will remain patient in fighting you, God willing, until the one whose time has come dies first. We will not escape the fight as long as we hold our weapons in our hands.

I swear not to die but a free man even if I taste the bitterness of death. I fear to be humiliated or betrayed.

Peace be upon those who follow guidance.


No Child Left Behind Allows Pentagon Access to High School Students’ Private Records
PG County Students, Principals, Teachers Angered by Military Intrusion

By Vincent J. Swanson

Under the No Child Left Behind education law pushed through Congress by President Bush, the Pentagon now requires that high schools nationwide turn over student’s private information for military recruitment purposes, or face education funding cuts.

The lawmakers who drafted the legislation, which was a centerpiece to then Texas Governor George Bush’s election campaign, buried the recruitment language deep within the many layered 680-page law. Once the bill became law on January 8, 2002, high school administrators were surprised by the requirement, and some in Prince George’s County are unclear as to why the Department of Defense and the Department of Education worked together to mandate the requirement.

“I’m still not sure why this was required by law, or why the Department of Education was in on this,” Monica Goldson said, principal at Frederick Douglass High School in Upper Marlboro. “What’s the catch? Why would the Department of Education care about recruiting kids for the military? It almost seems like the ‘No Child Left Behind’ law means that the Pentagon doesn’t want to leave any child left behind for military service.”

According to the canonical 680-page law legislation that was believed to be purely of an educational purpose the Department of Defense has the authority to access student’s private records for military recruitment purposes. The provision reads, “each local educational agency receiving assistance under this Act shall provide, on a request made by military recruiters or an institution of higher education, access to secondary school student names, addresses, and telephone listings.”

The law also notes that students may opt-out of the Pentagon’s right to access their files, but only after they receive notice from the child’s parents stating that the information remains private. Some view the requirements as “financial blackmail” and are angered by the “reverse order of things” regarding the parental notification procedure. School administrators also fear that they could be labeled as unpatriotic and face education funding cuts, so they reluctantly comply with the requirements. In essence, the military can access student records at will, unless they hear otherwise, and according to some, the opt-out policy is a disingenuous stunt

“It doesn’t make sense the way the opt-out process works,” Goldson said. “Under the law, the military has the upper hand, because the vast majority of students and parents are unaware of the [recruitment requirement] in the first place, which gives the Pentagon the ultimate power over our student’s private information.”

The new military recruitment provision appears contentious for many reasons. Firstly, when the bill became public law schools were unaware that the Department of Defense placed the requirement in the law’s language, creating a polarizing environment for some county principals and teachers.

“This is a suspicious piece of legislation,” Andrew Pruski said, a history teacher and advisor for the student government at Frederick Douglass High School in Upper Marlboro. “I teach my students about the Soviet Union and [Joseph] Stalin’s abuse of power in the 1940’s and 1950’s during the Cold War. We openly discuss Nazi Germany, [Soviet] Russia, and other anti-democratic governments in world history and how those governments impact societies,” Pruski explained. “My students have been asking me, ‘How far is [American] government going to go?’ in terms of this military recruitment snooping, the war in Iraq, and other anti-democratic actions taken these last few years.”

The constitutionality of the military’s right to student files under No Child Left Behind has also been a contentious issue. The recruitment section of the law surprised Robert V. Percival, a constitutional law professor at the University of Maryland Law School in Baltimore. “The constitutionality claim could be challenged,” Percival said. He pointed to three areas of law that could potentially undermine military access to student records, including the Commerce Clause, Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, the 10th Amendment, and case law South Dakota vs. Dole. He also noted a fourth and poignant point that could challenge the military provision, which is the 1974 Buckley Amendment, also known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

“The [No Child Left Behind Act and the military recruitment section] shows an inconsistency with Congress and its role over the rights of children, their families, and the right to privacy regarding education under the Buckley Amendment passed in 1974,” Percival explained. “The Buckley Amendment gave students power over their records, such as transcripts, standardized test scores, and other private information, including their addresses and names.”

The Buckley Amendment, named after U.S. Republican Senator James Buckley of New York, was designed to ensure that student records would not be disclosed to others without the consent of the student or the student’s parents. The Buckley Amendment has been broadly implemented since its passage to cover “virtually all student-connected records not just academic records.”

David S. Bogen, professor of law at University of Maryland Law School in Baltimore, said that Congress can place “conditions on expenditures” when funding projects, but was concerned about the military’s new legal claim to private records. “I’m shocked by this,” Bogen said. He also voiced concern about the “chilling effects” such regulations would have on speech rights under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

“Schools are for school for education not the military,” Martina Jones said, SBMT Member and Parliamentarian of the Student Government Association of Frederick Douglass High School in Upper Marlboro. Jones and other student government officials met to discuss the No Child Left Behind last Friday on campus, explaining that military recruiters routinely call them at home coining them as “military telemarketers” who continually bother them during dinner, or Spam their e-mail accounts with recruitment pitches. The student roundtable was also quick to point out that even though Congress passed the anti-telemarketing law last year, they were confused as to why military recruiters can continue to call them, blocking their caller ID with a “WIT 2001” message, a practice made illegal by the “Do-Not-Call” law.

“I have no idea how they got my e-mail or my phone number,” Amber Brown said, secretary of student government. “I try not to be rude to them when they call, but I’m firm, and just like telemarketers, I tell them I’m not interested.” Brown explained that she has no interest in joining the military and resents the phone calls and e-mails. “Me and my family don’t have any interests in the military. We use our minds…we’re more creative,” the high school senior said.

Students were also perplexed on how the military gained access to their SAT scores without their consent, a practice illegal under federal law. “A recruiter once called me and said that with my high test scores, that I would be a great military candidate,” Jones said. “How did they know my SAT score?” Jones explained. “How are they accessing my scores without me knowing about it?”

The Frederick Douglass students also theorized that once recruiters learn of their SAT scores, they specifically target students who have low-test scores, whereas students with higher test scores are called less frequently. “I’ve never got a call from the Army,” Jones said. “We have a theory that the military targets the kids with lower scores and continues to call them, hoping that they will sign-up for military duty,” she said. “They know that the students with lower grades and test scores have fewer opportunities, so [the military] preys on them,” Jones added. “Isn’t that leaving children behind?”


also:
Give Me Liberty or Let Me Think About It – What the wiretapping debate says about freedom.
The Impeachment of George W. Bush
Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Before 9/11
1972 Supreme Court precedent against warrantless wiretapping! – what’s it gonna take, folks? he broke the law! at the very least he should be removed from office, and he should be in jail!!

320

this is what having a camera on your cell phone is good for… i went over 155,555 miles on tuesday, while i was headed eastbound on highway 18 just west of auburn, and if it weren’t for the fact that i have a camera on my cell phone, it would be just another mile… 155555

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The Potion Maker
przxqglium is an opaque, acidic lavender liquid leeched from the belly of an ostrich.
Mix with przxqgl! Username:
Yet another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern

Want to find out what pizza you and I can share? Put your name in the box next to mine and click the button to find out!

przxqgl’s Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 10
Average number of words per sentence: 23.66
Average number of syllables per word: 1.42
Total words in sample: 4756
Analyze your journal! Username:
Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern

aaarrrrgghhh! which, according to their notation, is a3r4g2h3… for whatever it’s worth…


now this raises all kinds of questions… was she a smoker before her encounter with the dog? if so, why was she chosen for this procedure, especially since they had already determined that she was at risk for suicide? if not, was the woman who was the face donor a smoker? this could also be part of gender reassignment, if you wanted to take it that far: having the face of a donor of the opposite sex… i wonder about the ethics of such a procedure, whether it is cross gender or not, but… bizarre!


Face Transplant Patient Smokes Again

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE, AP Medical Writer

TUCSON, Ariz. – The world’s first face transplant recipient is using her new lips to take up smoking again, which doctors fear could interfere with her healing and raise the risk of tissue rejection.

“It is a problem,” Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard, who led the team that performed the pioneering transplant in France on Nov. 27, acknowledged on Wednesday.

The woman’s French surgeons made their first scientific presentation on the partial face transplant at a medical conference here this week.

The news about her smoking came even as American surgeons said that they were growing more comfortable with the French doctors’ decision to try the operation and that they hoped to offer such transplants to more patients.

The 38-year-old Frenchwoman received a new nose, chin and lips from a brain-dead donor after being mauled by her dog last spring. The woman has been identified only as Isabelle because of French privacy laws.

The woman suffered a tissue-rejection episode last month but is now doing well, her doctors said. However, they said she has resumed smoking, which besides being bad in general for health is especially a problem after surgery because it impairs circulation to tissues and could raise the risk of rejection.

Some doctors have questioned the woman’s psychological fitness for the operation because of reports that she had taken sleeping pills in a possible suicide attempt when the dog attack occurred — an allegation Dubernard repeatedly has denied.

He said she received extensive psychiatric evaluation and counseling before the operation.

Some American doctors at the conference said it is time to stop debating whether the French operation was ethical or wise and focus now on making such transplants as safe and widely available as possible.

“Face transplants can be done and should be done,” said Dr. Warren Breidenbach, the surgeon who did the first hand transplant in the United States, at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, in 1999.

Another Louisville transplant expert, Dr. Suzanne Ildstad, said: “A number of us here are interested in making this a widespread procedure available to the public. It’s the future, and could benefit millions of people.”

Problems with other novel types of transplants surfaced at the medical conference.

Doctors have been encouraged that success rates were roughly 90 percent among the 24 hand transplants performed to date, but a Chinese surgeon surprised the conference by reporting that up to half of the nine or so patients in his country have since rejected the new organs because they couldn’t afford immune-suppressing drugs.

One patient even asked to have the new hand amputated after the one-year period during which the hospital provided free medication ended, said Dr. Guoxian Pei, chief of orthopedics at Nanfang Hospital at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China.

Dr. Frederic Schuind, a surgeon at Erasme Hospital in Brussels, Belgium, revealed that a hand transplant recipient in his country had made “a mild suicide attempt.” The patient had been deemed psychologically stable enough to undergo the operation even though he had attempted suicide as a teenager.

The incidents prompted several surgeons to say that no such transplants should be done unless surgeons first make sure patients are psychologically healthy and prepared to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives.

“We need to alter the risk-benefit balance” before hand or face transplants are done more commonly, said Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, chief of plastic surgery at the University of Pittsburgh.

317

ouch!
ouch!

the estimate on the car won’t be ready until thursday, because when the insurance adjuster looked at it, he decided that they would have to completely dissasemble the damaged part of the car – which is the entire passenger side – to determine exactly what needs to be replaced… apparently it’s close enough to the line that they want to be absolutely sure, before they total it. another interesting fact: when i dropped it off at the shop, the guy asked me if it was an ’05 or an ’04, and i said i wasn’t sure and called moe… meanwhile he went out to look at the car, and came back and said it was an ’04 at almost exactly the same time that moe was telling me it was an ’05… that we paid for an ’05… so i wonder if it was really a leftover ’04 that they were selling at the ’05 price to naive buyers who didn’t know any better… 8/

bottom line, we can’t afford the rental car, so i’m taking it back.

316

from the seattle cacophony yahoo group, this interesting post by pox:

Just wanted to mention that March 14th (3/14) is Pi Day, and for yet another year it will go officially unrecognized at the State and Federal levels.

I’m sure we’re all outraged by the public’s complacence, and the MSM’s refusal to cover pi and other circle-related issues. Someone needs to take a stand. If not now, when? If not we or us, then who or whom?

Imagine hundreds of vampires with hula-hoops, marching through Westlake with round signs, distributing Smartees and old hubcaps, getting our vital message to the people, refusing to let Americans ignore the relationship between diameter and circumference any longer!

If there’s a nearby synagogue, we could just combine our march with the celebration of Purim, which is the same day. I’m sure the Jews won’t mind. I hear they respect geometry as much as anyone.

Ethos. Civics. Math. Yeah.

to which i responded:

i thought Pi Day was 22 july (22/7)…

to which pox responded back:

Heretic.

so now i’m a heretic in the cacophony group… i can’t decide whether that’s a good thing or not…

315

ouch!
ouch!

moe and the dogs are okay, thank ganesha, but the car has definitely seen better days. we won’t have an estimate until at least tomorrow, but the guy said that he thought it was a total loss. in spite of the fact that our insurance is paying $16 a day towards a rental car, we still might not be able to afford a rental car, because the rental agency wants to charge us $38 a day for their cheapest car. if our car is totalled, then we’re going to return the rental car right away and buy a new car, but if they decide to fix our car i’m not sure what’s going to happen, especially since drunk puppet night and the moisture festival are both coming up soon…

speaking of which, in the process of cleaning out the car, i found a couple pictures from the moisture festival last year. we’re beginning to gear up for drunk puppet night, which starts in portland this year, on the 17th and 18th of february. as i sort of expected, we’re having a grand total of one rehearsal as a group before we start, and we’re rehearsing in seattle before we start in portland, so there will be no tech rehearsal at all. i don’t even know for sure where it will be in portland, although i sort of hope it will be where it was last year (i just checked – it will be!), because that will mean that the tech stuff will be split, and i’ll only have to worry about the sound. the following three weekends, which will be the last weekend in february and the first two weekends in march, drunk puppet night will be held at the columbia city theater.

313

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Przxqgl!

  1. Przxqgl is physically incapable of sticking his tongue out.
  2. Przxqgl is the smallest of Jupiter’s many moons!
  3. Przxqgl has a memory span of three seconds!
  4. The liquid inside przxqgl can be used as a substitute for blood plasma.
  5. Przxqgl is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature!
  6. Przxqgl cannot swim.
  7. Originally, przxqgl could not fly.
  8. The Aztec Indians of Mexico believed przxqgl would protect them from physical harm, and so warriors used him to decorate their battle shields!
  9. The horns of przxqgl are made entirely from hair.
  10. Michelangelo finished his great statue of przxqgl in 1504, after eighteen months work.
I am interested in – do tell me about

moe just called from denver… 8)

312

moe gets home from orlando at 10:00 tonight, which will be approximately 1:00 am tomorrow according to her internal clock. tomorrow morning, we’re going to a dog agility trial with magick and zorah… we’ve got to be there at 7:00 am… i’m thinking moe intentionally did this to deal with jet lag, but at the same time, i wonder how much sleep she’s going to get. i get so confused when i’m dealing with transcontinental flights… she just called, and they’re boarding in orlando now, but according to her schedule, she’s not supposed to leave until 5:30 pm… now i know that her clock is 3 hours behind mine, but it’s still really confusing, and i have to think about it several times before i’ve got it straight… and then it’s exactly the same routine the next time i have to deal with it. i blame my brain injury, although there’s a good chance i would have had exactly the same problems before the injury.

i went and got water today, but on the way home, one of the bottles spilled about a gallon on the floor of the van, filling my shoe. i had to stop at a light, turn around and right two of the bottles – the other one didn’t spill at all. fortunately the light was still red when i turned back around, but there were some annoying pre-teenagers in a bible-camp bus that were waving and showing “honk for jeezis” signs. if i could, i would have told them that jeezis was a leprauchan, but unfortunately there was no way for me to do so.

there’s a bit of good news… apple has finally gone intel, which means that macs are soon going to be orders of magnitude less expensive, and/or you’ll be able to run mac os on a machine that you built out of spare parts, like my current linux machine. now all i’ve got to do is come up with a way to make the money for one or the other and i’m all set… of course, there’s always the option of installing mac os on the linux box, but then i’d have to convert everything, and, while i’m sure it’s possible and even relatively easy, at this point the other option sounds a lot better to me… i’m a geek, after all…

311

Bush could bypass new torture ban
Waiver right is reserved

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | January 4, 2006

WASHINGTON — When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief.

After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a “signing statement” — an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law — declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.

“The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President . . . as Commander in Chief,” Bush wrote, adding that this approach “will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.”

Some legal specialists said yesterday that the president’s signing statement, which was posted on the White House website but had gone unnoticed over the New Year’s weekend, raises serious questions about whether he intends to follow the law.

A senior administration official, who spoke to a Globe reporter about the statement on condition of anonymity because he is not an official spokesman, said the president intended to reserve the right to use harsher methods in special situations involving national security.

“We are not going to ignore this law,” the official said, noting that Bush, when signing laws, routinely issues signing statements saying he will construe them consistent with his own constitutional authority. “We consider it a valid statute. We consider ourselves bound by the prohibition on cruel, unusual, and degrading treatment.”

But, the official said, a situation could arise in which Bush may have to waive the law’s restrictions to carry out his responsibilities to protect national security. He cited as an example a “ticking time bomb” scenario, in which a detainee is believed to have information that could prevent a planned terrorist attack.

“Of course the president has the obligation to follow this law, [but] he also has the obligation to defend and protect the country as the commander in chief, and he will have to square those two responsibilities in each case,” the official added. “We are not expecting that those two responsibilities will come into conflict, but it’s possible that they will.”

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said that the signing statement means that Bush believes he can still authorize harsh interrogation tactics when he sees fit.

“The signing statement is saying ‘I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it’s important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me,’ ” he said. “They don’t want to come out and say it directly because it doesn’t sound very nice, but it’s unmistakable to anyone who has been following what’s going on.”

Golove and other legal specialists compared the signing statement to Bush’s decision, revealed last month, to bypass a 1978 law forbidding domestic wiretapping without a warrant. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans’ international phone calls and e-mails without a court order starting after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The president and his aides argued that the Constitution gives the commander in chief the authority to bypass the 1978 law when necessary to protect national security. They also argued that Congress implicitly endorsed that power when it authorized the use of force against the perpetrators of the attacks.

Legal academics and human rights organizations said Bush’s signing statement and his stance on the wiretapping law are part of a larger agenda that claims exclusive control of war-related matters for the executive branch and holds that any involvement by Congress or the courts should be minimal.

Vice President Dick Cheney recently told reporters, ”I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it. . . . I would argue that the actions that we’ve taken are totally appropriate and consistent with the constitutional authority of the president.”

Since the 2001 attacks, the administration has also asserted the power to bypass domestic and international laws in deciding how to detain prisoners captured in the Afghanistan war. It also has claimed the power to hold any US citizen Bush designates an ”enemy combatant” without charges or access to an attorney.

And in 2002, the administration drafted a secret legal memo holding that Bush could authorize interrogators to violate antitorture laws when necessary to protect national security. After the memo was leaked to the press, the administration eliminated the language from a subsequent version, but it never repudiated the idea that Bush could authorize officials to ignore a law.

The issue heated up again in January 2005. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales disclosed during his confirmation hearing that the administration believed that antitorture laws and treaties did not restrict interrogators at overseas prisons because the Constitution does not apply abroad.

In response, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, filed an amendment to a Defense Department bill explicitly saying that that the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees in US custody is illegal regardless of where they are held.

McCain’s office did not return calls seeking comment yesterday.

The White House tried hard to kill the McCain amendment. Cheney lobbied Congress to exempt the CIA from any interrogation limits, and Bush threatened to veto the bill, arguing that the executive branch has exclusive authority over war policy.

But after veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress approved it, Bush called a press conference with McCain, praised the measure, and said he would accept it.

Legal specialists said the president’s signing statement called into question his comments at the press conference.

“The whole point of the McCain Amendment was to close every loophole,” said Marty Lederman, a Georgetown University law professor who served in the Justice Department from 1997 to 2002. “The president has re-opened the loophole by asserting the constitutional authority to act in violation of the statute where it would assist in the war on terrorism.”

Elisa Massimino, Washington director for Human Rights Watch, called Bush’s signing statement an “in-your-face affront” to both McCain and to Congress.

“The basic civics lesson that there are three co-equal branches of government that provide checks and balances on each other is being fundamentally rejected by this executive branch,” she said.

“Congress is trying to flex its muscle to provide those checks [on detainee abuse], and it’s being told through the signing statement that it’s impotent. It’s quite a radical view.”


Pentagon Report Set Framework For Use of Torture
Maher Arar: Chronology of events
U.S. Exporting ‘Tools of Torture,’
FBI Considers Torture as Suspects Stay Silent

i’m shocked that it would come to this… it’s definitely time to start searching for another country to call home…


now everybody already knows this, but this is the guy who claims to be the source for the original new york times article that set off the whole thing…


NSA Whistleblower Alleges Illegal Spying
Former Employee Admits to Being a Source for The New York Times

By BRIAN ROSS

Jan 10, 2006 — Russell Tice, a longtime insider at the National Security Agency, is now a whistleblower the agency would like to keep quiet.

For 20 years, Tice worked in the shadows as he helped the United States spy on other people’s conversations around the world.

“I specialized in what’s called special access programs,” Tice said of his job. “We called them ‘black world’ programs and operations.”

But now, Tice tells ABC News that some of those secret “black world” operations run by the NSA were operated in ways that he believes violated the law. He is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the NSA in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists.

“The mentality was we need to get these guys, and we’re going to do whatever it takes to get them,” he said.

Tracking Calls
Tice says the technology exists to track and sort through every domestic and international phone call as they are switched through centers, such as one in New York, and to search for key words or phrases that a terrorist might use.

“If you picked the word ‘jihad’ out of a conversation,” Tice said, “the technology exists that you focus in on that conversation, and you pull it out of the system for processing.”

According to Tice, intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect’s phone number to hundreds or even thousands more.

Tice Admits Being a Source for The New York Times
President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.

But Tice disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.

“That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum,” Tice said.

The same day The New York Times broke the story of the NSA eavesdropping without warrants, Tice surfaced as a whistleblower in the agency. He told ABC News that he was a source for the Times’ reporters. But Tice maintains that his conscience is clear.

“As far as I’m concerned, as long as I don’t say anything that’s classified, I’m not worried,” he said. “We need to clean up the intelligence community. We’ve had abuses, and they need to be addressed.”

The NSA revoked Tice’s security clearance in May of last year based on what it called psychological concerns and later dismissed him. Tice calls that bunk and says that’s the way the NSA deals with troublemakers and whistleblowers. Today the NSA said it had “no information to provide.”

310

Hebrew U. Researchers Find Cannabis Can Strengthen Bones
21:46 Jan 05, ’06 / 5 Tevet 5766
By Ezra HaLevi

Researchers at Hebrew University have found that extracts from the cannabis plant can help strengthen human bones, preventing osteoporosis, according to an Israel21c report.

An article on the Hebrew University research appeared this week in the prestigious American PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.) journal. The research team, headed by Prof. Itai Bab, worked in Hebrew University’s bone laboratory.

Substances produced mainly in the brain, called endocannabinoids, are made of fatty acids and exist in the bone and elsewhere. The substances bind to and activate two receptors – CB1 in the nervous system and CB2 in the immune system.

A high number of CB2-receptors were found in the bones of the mice and shown to be essential in preserving normal bone density. Mice lacking those receptors were shown to develop osteoporosis as they age.

Osteoporosis, a common ailment in the Western world, can lead to easily broken bones and disabilities.

The study shows that plants such as cannabis, which contain substances that activate CB2 receptors, can be used as a basis of drugs to help those suffering from osteoporosis. The researchers have developed a synthetic compound called HU-308 which succeeds in combatting osteoporosis in mice.

Though the cannabis plant is known mostly for marijuana, which comes from the flowers of the female plants, the extracts have no psychoactive side effects.

309

YOU
1. Name:
2. Date of birth:
3. Where you live:
4. What makes you happy:
5. Currently listening/the last thing you listened to:
6. Do you read my journal?:
7. If yes, what makes it especially good or bad?:
8. An interesting fact about you:
9. Are you in love/do you have a crush at the moment?:
10. Favourite place to spend time:
11. Favourite lyric:
12. The best time of the year:

RECOMMEND
1. A film:
2. A book:
3. A band, a song, or album:

PLUS
1. One thing you like about me:
2. Two things you like about yourself:
3. Look at my friends-list and tell what you like about one of our mutual friends:
4. Put this in your journal so that I can tell you what I like about you.

308

a symbol of dire distress

The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.
THE FLAG CODE, Title 36, U.S.C., Chapter 10, § 176 (a).
As amended by P.L. 344, 94th Congress, approved July 7, 1976.

I am posting this on my LiveJournal in opposition to The Patriot Act, which represents an extreme danger to the life, property and liberty of all persons living in the United States.

GRR!

i got an order on 22 december which i wasn’t immediately able to fill, but everything had already been ordered and i was expecting it around 15 january, so i wrote to the person, who has an email address at aol dot com, and gave them four options for what i could do.

> 1) send you what we can and wait for the rest
> 2) wait for the rest and send it all when it comes
> 3) refund your order
> 4) other, suggested by you.

i never heard back from them, so i chose option 2, since that’s what i would have wanted myself.

i got email from the same person, only at a different email address than the first one, a couple of days ago, asking where his order was. i responded again, to both addresses, saying that i had responded once already, and giving them the same options as before, only now i said that it would probably be shipping out some time in the coming week.

today i got an email the subject of which was “First Request for Information About Buyer Complaint: Case ID #PP-133-474-425” from paypal. apparently he hasn’t been getting the emails i have sent, and now is threatening my ability to do business because of it. at the same time, his package is sitting here on my desk, all wrapped and ready to ship out tomorrow. instead of sending it normal priority mail, now i have to overnight it to him, and then hope that he has enough knowledge of internet to cancel his complaint with paypal, because the only other option is for me to refund his money, and i’m not particularly inclined to do that when the problem is not mine, and i have lived up to what i said i was going to do.

EDIT: i’m going to do the only thing that makes sense, which is i’m going to overnight the package to him, with a tracking number, and then i’m going to get on paypal and resolve the dispute myself, by saying that i’ve already shipped it with the tracking number as proof…

but it’s still annoying… 8/

306

finally, after almost 3 solid days of work, i think i’ve got my entire livejournal tagged… and here are the tags!

305

i’ve got to say this, in spite of the fact that it’s been said in various ways already, but BUSH IS A TOTAL FUCKING IDIOT!!!

Create an e-annoyance, go to jail

By Declan McCullagh
Published: January 9, 2006, 4:00 AM PST

Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.

It’s no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

In other words, it’s OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.

This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

“The use of the word ‘annoy’ is particularly problematic,” says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “What’s annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else.”

Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called “Preventing Cyberstalking.” It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet “without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy.”

To grease the rails for this idea, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and the section’s other sponsors slipped it into an unrelated, must-pass bill to fund the Department of Justice. The plan: to make it politically infeasible for politicians to oppose the measure.

The tactic worked. The bill cleared the House of Representatives by voice vote, and the Senate unanimously approved it Dec. 16.

There’s an interesting side note. An earlier version that the House approved in September had radically different wording. It was reasonable by comparison, and criminalized only using an “interactive computer service” to cause someone “substantial emotional harm.”

That kind of prohibition might make sense. But why should merely annoying someone be illegal?

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to set up a Web site or write something incendiary without telling everyone exactly who you are.

Think about it: A woman fired by a manager who demanded sexual favors wants to blog about it without divulging her full name. An aspiring pundit hopes to set up the next Suck.com. A frustrated citizen wants to send e-mail describing corruption in local government without worrying about reprisals.

In each of those three cases, someone’s probably going to be annoyed. That’s enough to make the action a crime. (The Justice Department won’t file charges in every case, of course, but trusting prosecutorial discretion is hardly reassuring.)

Clinton Fein, a San Francisco resident who runs the Annoy.com site, says a feature permitting visitors to send obnoxious and profane postcards through e-mail could be imperiled.

“Who decides what’s annoying? That’s the ultimate question,” Fein said. He added: “If you send an annoying message via the United States Post Office, do you have to reveal your identity?”

Fein once sued to overturn part of the Communications Decency Act that outlawed transmitting indecent material “with intent to annoy.” But the courts ruled the law applied only to obscene material, so Annoy.com didn’t have to worry.

“I’m certainly not going to close the site down,” Fein said on Friday. “I would fight it on First Amendment grounds.”

He’s right. Our esteemed politicians can’t seem to grasp this simple point, but the First Amendment protects our right to write something that annoys someone else.

It even shields our right to do it anonymously. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas defended this principle magnificently in a 1995 case involving an Ohio woman who was punished for distributing anonymous political pamphlets.

If President Bush truly believed in the principle of limited government (it is in his official bio), he’d realize that the law he signed cannot be squared with the Constitution he swore to uphold.

And then he’d repeat what President Clinton did a decade ago when he felt compelled to sign a massive telecommunications law. Clinton realized that the section of the law punishing abortion-related material on the Internet was unconstitutional, and he directed the Justice Department not to enforce it.

Bush has the chance to show his respect for what he calls Americans’ personal freedoms. Now we’ll see if the president rises to the occasion.


When they took the fourth amendment,
     I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment,
     I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment,
     I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun.
Now they’ve taken the first amendment,
     and I can say nothing about it.

unfortunately, this is now the case…

now what this means, for me, (apart from the fact that this is a clear violation of my first amendment rights) is that i have to take down the pages on The Church of Tina Chopp that detail our long, involved, and very amusing interaction with An Evil Anti-Tinite Whose Name We Dare Not Mention (because of previous interactions with her which were annoying, and possibly somewhat more than that as well), because she can now say that the existence of said pages are an annoyance to her, despite the fact that she’s the one who started the whole thing to begin with! furthermore, it’s remotely possible that she, or someone like her, will say that The Church of Tina Chopp, by it’s mere existence, annoys them (after all, that’s one of the most salient features of the organisation), and we will have to take the whole site offline!

SOMEBODY NEEDS TO ASSSASINATE THIS ASS, NOW!!
before he turns this country into a modern version of Nazi Germany!!!

projects like The Free Network Project are essential at this time, but i’m serious… somebody really needs to look into the possibility of going apeshit on his ass with a semiautomatic!


U.S. limits commitment to global warming solutions at Canadian conference

Highlight:
At an environmental conference in Canada that brought together 189 countries, the United States, represented by Chief U.S. climate negotiator Harlan Watson, refused to make pledges to fight global warming past the year 2012, angering many European countries and activist organizations.

Summary:

  • The United States ruled out making extra pledges to fight global warming beyond 2012 on Tuesday, angering environmentalists who accused Washington of blocking a 189-nation conference in Canada.
  • “The United States is opposed to any such discussions,” Watson told a news conference of Canadian proposals to launch talks under the U.N.’s climate convention about new actions to combat global warming beyond 2012.
  • Environmentalists accused Washington of doing too little to fight a rise in temperatures from human activities that could lead to more storms, expanding deserts and worse floods, and could raise sea levels by up to three feet (one meter) by 2100.
  • “The failure of the United States to be willing to discuss future action here is the real issue,” he said, predicting Washington will only join a global pact after Bush leaves office.
  • Bush pulled out in 2001 of the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol, under which about 40 industrial nations have to cut greenhouse gas emissions by about 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.
  • At Montreal, Kyoto backers plan to launch talks, likely to last several years, on new commitments beyond 2012.
  • Bush branded Kyoto too costly and said it wrongly excluded poor countries.
  • Many also hope to start wider parallel talks among all countries, including the United States and developing nations such as China and India, on new ways to fight climate change.
  • She said that new tougher measures were urgently needed to combat rising temperatures.
  • And British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a speech earlier on Tuesday that he believed that all major economies would sign up for a binding accord to succeed Kyoto.
  • But Watson reiterated that Washington had no plans to adopt Kyoto-style caps on emissions and rejected environmentalists’ predictions that the U.S. was dooming the conference to failure.

now we’ve been over this before… global warming is a fact! it’s not just some scare tactic that has been created by “environmentalists,” scientists and hippy-tree-huggers to get us to pay attention to them, it has been proven… DESPITE WHAT SHRUB AND CRONIES WANT US TO BELIEVE, and if we’re going to do something about it other than IMMANENTIZE THE ESCHATON (which is apparently what the dominionists want to do), we’re going to have to make plans for a lot longer in the future than 2012… have i mentioned recently that it has become necessary to

ASSSASINATE THIS ASS, NOW!!
before he turns this planet into a deserted wasteland!!!


Orwell could have a case against Bush
Presidential pronouncements may too-closely reflect a familiar literary style
Tuesday, January 3, 2006

By Steve Young

Lawyers for the estate of George Orwell have announced their intention to sue President Bush for plagiarism.

“We have long believed that this administration has stolen much of its policy from Mr. Orwell’s writings,” said attorney Will Bilyalotz. “Expressly, ‘1984’ and ‘Animal Farm.’ In some cases, like the illegal surveillance of its own citizens, this administration has lifted the passages word for word from ‘1984.’ Just changing the year doesn’t protect the president from copyright laws.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, while refusing to comment directly because of the “ongoing investigation,” reminded reporters that the Patriot Act had given the president the power to suspend copyright laws and, anyway, “No one can own words.”

Legal experts believe proving copyright infringement will not be easy. “Even if he is guilty, the president’s propensity for adapting Mr. Orwell’s ‘1984’ newspeak is so effortless, as if he made up the words himself,” said law professor Sue Yu Atdropohat. “Illegal borrowing of words or even fictional characters from published works has a high threshold of proof. The producers of the film ‘Being There’ have had their lawsuit against the Bush campaign tied up in court since 2000. After all, one man’s outright theft of ideas is another man’s malapropos.”

“Personally, I think this so-called intelligentsia is just jealous,” said Newt Gingrich. “Orwell could have only dreamed of great terms like ‘defeatist’ and ‘evil-doer.'”

Bilyalotz differs. “The president’s comments like, ‘This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table,’ is plain and simple, Mr. Orwell’s ‘doublethink’ (the power to hold two completely contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accept both of them).”

The president has regularly pointed out that he will do whatever it takes to defeat terrorism, and that those who want to hamstring his ability to steal written material are only aiding the enemy. “9/11 has made us look at our plagiarism in a different way,” said the president. “As long as I am president or king, the American people expect me to do everything in my power under our laws and Constitution to protect them and their civil liberties. And if that takes dissolving the Constitution, then so be it.”

“It was Mr. Orwell in ‘1984’ who first came up with ‘Victory Mansions’ and industrial-grade ‘Victory Gin.’ Now the president calls his book, a ‘National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.’ The president doesn’t go 10 seconds without using the word ‘victory.’ One doesn’t have to be a math whiz to put two and two together. Our greatest concern is not that the president uses Mr. Orwell’s words,” Bilyalotz said, “but that he’s actually using ‘1984’ as a governmental guidebook, and I’m afraid the president hasn’t read how it ends.”

In his weekly radio address, Bush said the “Spy on US” program has been reviewed regularly by the nation’s top legal authorities and Fox talk-show hosts, targeting only those people with “a clear link to these terrorist networks, which include Al-Jazeera and CNN.”

“Freedom is in its last throes,” Vice President Dick Cheney said. “First, they take away torture, now they want to take away spying on our own citizens. What’s next to go, Fox News?”

The revelation of the unauthorized bugging has delayed renewal of the Patriot Act, which includes a provision giving President Bush monarchial powers. “Not only will it make this country safer,” explained the president, “but it will ordain either Jenna or Barb as the country’s first queen without the risk of voter fraud or expensive campaigns.”

“This country is ready for a female queen,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “and we can’t take the chance that the next election could turn out to be a mushroom cloud.”

In other Patriot Act news, the White House has asked historians to remove Ben Franklin’s quote, “They that give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” from history books. “It’s wordy and confusing,” Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said. “And one thing this country doesn’t need in its fight against terrorism is more confusing words. At least that’s what we feel here in the Ministry of Truth.”


now i’ve been saying essentially the same thing ever since 9/11 but until now, nobody has been listening… hopefully people are starting to get the idea…

Fear destroys what bin Laden could not
ROBERT STEINBACK

One wonders if Osama bin Laden didn’t win after all. He ruined the America that existed on 9/11. But he had help.

If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden’s attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution — and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it — I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled.

Had anyone said our president would invade a country and kill 30,000 of its people claiming a threat that never, in fact, existed, then admit he would have invaded even if he had known there was no threat — and expect America to be pleased by this — I would have thought our nation’s sensibilities and honor had been eviscerated.

If I had been informed that our nation’s leaders would embrace torture as a legitimate tool of warfare, hold prisoners for years without charges and operate secret prisons overseas — and call such procedures necessary for the nation’s security — I would have laughed at the folly of protecting human rights by destroying them.

If someone had predicted the president’s staff would out a CIA agent as revenge against a critic, defy a law against domestic propaganda by bankrolling supposedly independent journalists and commentators, and ridicule a 37-year Marine Corps veteran for questioning U.S. military policy — and that the populace would be more interested in whether Angelina is about to make Brad a daddy — I would have called the prediction an absurd fantasy.

That’s no America I know, I would have argued. We’re too strong, and we’ve been through too much, to be led down such a twisted path.

What is there to say now?

All of these things have happened. And yet a large portion of this country appears more concerned that saying ”Happy Holidays” could be a disguised attack on Christianity.

I evidently have a lot poorer insight regarding America’s character than I once believed, because I would have expected such actions to provoke — speaking metaphorically now — mobs with pitchforks and torches at the White House gate. I would have expected proud defiance of anyone who would suggest that a mere terrorist threat could send this country into spasms of despair and fright so profound that we’d follow a leader who considers the law a nuisance and perfidy a privilege.

Never would I have expected this nation — which emerged stronger from a civil war and a civil rights movement, won two world wars, endured the Depression, recovered from a disastrous campaign in Southeast Asia and still managed to lead the world in the principles of liberty — would cower behind anyone just for promising to “protect us.”

President Bush recently confirmed that he has authorized wiretaps against U.S. citizens on at least 30 occasions and said he’ll continue doing it. His justification? He, as president — or is that king? — has a right to disregard any law, constitutional tenet or congressional mandate to protect the American people.

Is that America’s highest goal — preventing another terrorist attack? Are there no principles of law and liberty more important than this? Who would have remembered Patrick Henry had he written, “What’s wrong with giving up a little liberty if it protects me from death?”

Bush would have us excuse his administration’s excesses in deference to the ”war on terror” — a war, it should be pointed out, that can never end. Terrorism is a tactic, an eventuality, not an opposition army or rogue nation. If we caught every person guilty of a terrorist act, we still wouldn’t know where tomorrow’s first-time terrorist will strike. Fighting terrorism is a bit like fighting infection — even when it’s beaten, you must continue the fight or it will strike again.

Are we agreeing, then, to give the king unfettered privilege to defy the law forever? It’s time for every member of Congress to weigh in: Do they believe the president is above the law, or bound by it?

Bush stokes our fears, implying that the only alternative to doing things his extralegal way is to sit by fitfully waiting for terrorists to harm us. We are neither weak nor helpless. A proud, confident republic can hunt down its enemies without trampling legitimate human and constitutional rights.

Ultimately, our best defense against attack — any attack, of any sort — is holding fast and fearlessly to the ideals upon which this nation was built. Bush clearly doesn’t understand or respect that. Do we?


answer… NO!

Global IQ: 1950-2050

plummeting IQ

Doesn’t it seem like the world is getting dumber with every passing year? Well, maybe it is!

In IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Lynn and Vanhanen[1] report large differences, amounting to more than two standard deviations, in the mean IQ of the populations of different countries around the world, and find that these mean population IQ scores correlate more strongly with economic development as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and long term economic growth than any other single factor.

It has been widely observed that the birthrate of countries tends to fall as they become more wealthy. Most countries in Western Europe now have birthrates below the replacement rate; in the absence of immigration, their populations can be expected to fall in the future.

Putting these two pieces of information together, one might expect that since low IQ countries tend to be less wealthy, they should also be expected to have higher birthrates than countries with high IQ. If population IQ and wealth remain constant, the average IQ of the world should then fall over time, since a larger portion of population growth will occur in low IQ countries. There are a lot of assumptions going into this conclusion, starting out with what IQ measures and what, if anything, it means. See the “Quarrels, Questions, and Answers” section below for discussion of some of these issues.

Year Population×109 Mean IQ
1950 2.55 91.64
1975 4.08 90.80
2000 6.07 89.20
2025 7.82 87.81
2050 9.06 86.32

The animation above shows the global histogram of IQ and global mean IQ for the hundred year period from 1950 through 2050. Mean population IQ is taken from Lynn and Vanhanen’s[1] figures and yearly population estimates for each country from the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base 2003[3]. Taking these figures at face value, we find that world population and mean IQ evolve at 25 year intervals over the century as given in the table at the right.

Methodology
The mean IQ of 185 countries, measured and estimated in Lynn and Vanhanen[1], were taken as the invariant IQ of each country over the 1950-2050 time period. (The figures are given in terms of countries existing as of the year 2000. For countries which came into being in the preceding 50 years due to decolonisation, breakup of the Soviet Union, etc., years prior to independence refer to the territory with borders identical to the present-day country. The list of countries includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, considered in some sense provinces of China, but with large populations, well measured demographically, and economic performance distinctly different from that of the People’s Republic; and Puerto Rico, a United States territory with different demographics than the parent country. The remaining 182 countries include all independent countries with populations greater than 50,000 with the exception of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for which no data were available due to the conflict throughout most of the 1990s.)

The 100 year population history and forecast for the 185 countries with measured or estimated mean IQ was obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base 2003[3], using the mid-year population estimate or projection for each year.

For each year in the hundred year period, each country’s estimated population for that year was apportioned into bins of 5 IQ points using a normal distribution with the mean IQ for the country from Lynn and Vanhanen and the 15 point standard deviation defined for IQ scores. These country histogram bins were summed to create a global histogram for each year. Global mean IQ was computed by an average of country IQs weighted by their population.

Quarrels, Questions, and Answers

Don’t differing IQ figures for various countries simply measure cultural bias in the tests?

This is a possibility, and in certain cases undoubtedly plays a factor. Yet tests carefully designed to exclude cultural bias (for example, spatial relationship tests based entirely on pictures, memorisation of digit sequences, and pure eye-hand reaction time) produce results comparable to those of traditional IQ tests. Further, if IQ tests embody cultural biases of the largely U.K. and U.S. creators of the tests, it’s odd that populations of East Asian countries, with a variety of very different cultures, all test higher than those of the test makers.

Won’t economic development reduce the rate of population growth in the low-IQ countries?

Future population estimates for countries in the Census Bureau database already take this into account. These are, of course, consensus estimates which do not take into effect such impossible-to-forecast circumstances as environmental crises, plague, bad asteroid days, or, on the other hand, technological breakthroughs which accelerate economic development in third world countries. Looking 50 years ahead, only rapid demographic shifts in the near term will have much impact on the figures for 2050, since the parents of adults of that year are already mostly alive today.

Lynn and Vanhanen only actually have IQ data for 81 countries and they’ve estimated the rest. How reliable are those estimates?

I don’t know. In most cases their estimates were made by averaging known IQs of adjacent countries with similar demographic mix. In the few cases of countries with ethnically diverse populations, they estimated IQ based on a weighted average of IQs of the country of origin of each group. They tested this process by using it to estimate IQ of several countries with known IQ and the results correspond well with the measured IQs of those countries. Still, one should bear in mind that 56% of the country IQ figures are estimated, and not based on any actual in-country measurement at all.

And those 81 countries they have IQ data for–there seem to be an awful lot of fudge factors used in computing the numbers they cite in the tables. How trustworthy are they?

Fudge factors? Indeed. . . . More than 25 pages are devoted to explaining the “adjustments”, “corrections”, “calibrations”, and “weightings” which go into that table of 81 numbers. The state of the raw data is more or less hideous. There is no regular, standardised measurement of IQ in nations of the world. One is forced to use sporadic studies, published at widely spaced intervals, using a variety of tests with more or less cultural bias, on populations which may exhibit a variety of selection effects. (For example, if you only test high school children in a country where 75% of children do not attend high school, you can’t expect your results to be representative of the population as a whole.) Still, if you want to do this research, you have work with the data at hand.

If population mean IQ indeed correlates strongly with economic performance, then measuring IQ figures for developing countries and studying ways to increase IQ could play an important rôle in development assistance. A UNESCO program to regularly measure IQ of, say, 16 year olds in all countries could provide hard data and, potentially, by permitting assessment of the effectiveness of programs such as nutrition aid for mothers and infants, educational initiatives, etc., do a world of good. Alas, this entire topic is so politically radioactive there is little likelihood of this ever happening.

You’re assuming the mean IQ of countries won’t change over the hundred year period. How valid is that assumption?

Apart from the Flynn effect (discussed below), which doesn’t seem to have much effect on the relative IQs of countries, in cases where the data are available, national mean IQ does not seem to have varied much over the last 50 years. As long as the population makeup and general circumstances of a country don’t change, it’s reasonable to expect the mean IQ for a given country to remain much the same over the next 50 years. Population migration, however, can have substantial effects and is not taken into account in these data. The Census Bureau population estimates include migration, but the assumption of constant mean IQ may be invalid when the population of a given country consists of a large fraction of immigrants from regions with different mean IQ. This is particularly the case for Western Europe, where the indigenous population has fertility below the replacement rate, and the population includes an increasing proportion of immigrants predominantly from regions with lower mean IQ. To the extent immigrants have more children per family than the original population, the effect is magnified. Whether immigrant populations converge toward the original IQ of their new country as they assimilate is an open question. In all, since most present day and anticipated future population migration is from lower IQ to higher IQ countries, assuming constant IQ probably biases the global mean forecasts toward the high end.

Won’t the Flynn effect compensate for the downward demographic shift in IQ?

The Flynn effect is an undisputed yet enigmatic aspect of IQ testing. Shortly after the first IQ tests were standardised, it was observed that the scores of those taking them tended to rise from year to year, as much as 15 points (one standard deviation) per generation. To maintain a mean score of 100 for the population on which IQ tests were standardised, test makers were forced to make their tests increasingly difficult over the years. In other words, to get the same IQ score as your father, you must perform equally well on a substantially tougher test than he took.

If, for whatever reason, everybody were getting smarter, this would be wonderful news indeed. But a glance at the numbers shows that something very curious must be going on here. If IQ were, in fact, rising at a rate of 15 points per generation then, if the mean IQ of today is 100, that of our grandparents’ generation would have been about 70–generally considered the threshold of mental retardation. Clearly, anybody who’s spent time with their grandparents and other folks of that generation knows that’s utter nonsense.

The literature and music of a century or more ago is clearly not the work of marginally retarded minds, and its abundance indicates those who wrote it were not rare exceptions in a generally dull population. Consider genius in the past. Most people considered geniuses have IQs in the vicinity of 150, or 3 1/3 standard deviations above the mean IQ of 100. In a population with a mean IQ of 100, individuals with IQs of 150 occur with a frequency of about one in 2300 people–they’re rare, but every medium-sized town has one or more, and even a small country with a population of one million has more than 425 such geniuses.

Now, in a population with a mean IQ of 70, which naïve interpretation of the Flynn effect would deem our grandparents to have had, genius-level IQs of 150 would be 5 1/3 standard deviations above the mean and occur, on average, in only one out of 20,396,324 people. If we take the Flynn effect as 3 IQ points per decade, then we’d expect a mean IQ of 70 around the year 1900. In 1900, the world population was about 1.7 thousand million, which would imply there were only 80 people with genius-level IQs in the entire world of 1900. The merest glance at the history of that era will reveal how ridiculous a supposition this is.

Adults, whatever their opinion may be of “what’s the matter with kids today”, are most unlikely to cite “they’re just too doggone smart!” So, the Flynn effect is a conundrum: a wide variety of tests which agree with one another and reliably predict outcomes we identify with “intelligence” all indicate that the general population is becoming more intelligent at an almost dizzying rate, while other evidence for this (for example, individuals with Einstein-calibre intelligence being almost 10,000 times more common than a hundred years ago) is notably absent. There is no shortage of hypotheses for what’s going on, but little evidence to support any of them. Flynn himself believes that IQ tests measure test-taking and problem-solving ability, not genuine intelligence, and that this has risen over time as more and more children receive compulsory education and are subjected to ever more tests. Improved nutrition over the 20th century is often cited as a factor, as well as the introduction of egalitarian welfare state systems in developed countries tending to reduce poverty. But all of these are factors which one would expect to eventually reach a plateau, and that doesn’t seem to have happened, at least so far.

This isn’t a document about the Flynn effect (although it risks becoming one unless I wind this up rather soon), and since no solution to this long-standing puzzle is at hand, one can only speculate on what it really means. Since correction for the Flynn effect is substantial in Lynn and Vanhanen’s national IQ estimates, and can be expected to strongly influence IQ scores published in the future, it is essential one bear it in mind in any analysis of population intelligence trends.

IQ scores are normalised for a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15 in the populations for which they were originally developed. Is the standard deviation the same in populations with higher or lower mean IQ?

I don’t know. This is a fascinating question about which I have found no research whatsoever. Absent any information to the contrary, in computing the global IQ histogram in the charts at the top of this document, I assume a standard deviation of 15 points regardless of the mean. Note that this assumption only affects the shape of the histogram; the global mean is independent of the variance of individual country populations.

References
Data Sources for this Page

  1. Lynn, Richard and Tatu Vanhanen.
    IQ and the Wealth of Nations.
    Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
    ISBN 0-275-97510-X.
  2. Lynn, Richard and Tatu Vanhanen.
    Intelligence and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations“.
    2000-2002.
  3. U.S. Census Bureau.
    International Data Base 2003.
  4. U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
    The World Factbook 2003.

IQ Phenomenology: The Flynn Effect

  1. Neisser, Ulric, ed.
    The Rising Curve: Long-Term Gains in IQ and Related Measures.
    Washington: American Psychological Association, 1998.
    ISBN 1-55798-503-0.
  2. Flynn, J. R.
    “The Mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932 to 1978”,
    Psychological Bull. 95, 29 (1984).
  3. Flynn, J. R.
    “Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure”,
    Psychological Bull. 101, 171 (1987).
  4. Flynn, J. R.
    “IQ gains over time”, in Sternberg, Robert J.. ed.
    Encyclopedia of Human Intelligence.
    New York: Macmillan, 1994.
    ISBN 0-028-97407-7.
    (pp. 617-623)

“IQ Exists and Matters” Arguments

  1. Herrnstein, Richard J. and Charles Murray.
    The Bell Curve.
    New York: The Free Press, [1994] 1996.
    ISBN 0-684-82429-9.
  2. Jensen, Arthur R.
    The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability.
    Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.
    ISBN 0-275-96103-6.
  3. Rushton, J. Philippe.
    Race, Intelligence, and the Brain: The Errors and Omissions of the `Revised’ Edition of S. J. Gould’s
    The Mismeasure of Man (1996)
    “,
    Person. individ. Diff. 23, 169 (1997).

“IQ Doesn’t Exist and/or Matter” Arguments

  1. Gould, Stephen Jay.
    The Mismeasure of Man.
    New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
    ISBN 0-393-31425-1.
  2. Devlin, Bernie et al., eds.
    Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve.
    New York: Copernicus, 1997.
    ISBN 0-387-94986-0.
  3. Fraser, Steven.
    The Bell Curve Wars.
    New York: Basic Books, 1995.
    ISBN 0-465-00693-0.

Economic Development and Population Trends

  1. Todd, Emmanuel.
    Après l’Empire.
    Paris: Gallimard, 2002.
    ISBN 2-07-076710-8.
    English translation:
    After the Empire.
    New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
    ISBN 0-231-13102-X.

303

this post is a long list of links that i’ve collected over the past two years or so, and saved because i thought i’d be able to classify them somehow. i haven’t had anywhere else to put them, so they’re going here.

Swearsaurus – How to insult, swear, and curse in 170 languages! – just what everyone needs!

Your Age In Days – another thing that everyone needs to know…

Kentucky Mountain Bible College Has A New Phone Number! – their old phone number was 666-5000, and every good kentucky bible college needs a phone number that doesn’t invoke satan…

Build your own Klingon disruptor from The Register (my favourite news source)… “An ex-US Navy engineer … for the price of $500… has built a ‘gun’ … can disable almost any piece of electronic equipment from 20 feet away.” “He claims to have built another machine capable of crashing computers, and cars from a distance of 100 feet. That one cost him less than $300.” whee!

Bullets Screen Saver for Windows – if you use windoesn’t, this is definitely the screen saver for you… if you don’t, then it’s an amusing look at how the other half deals with their computer crashing all the time.

along the same lines, there are The top ten reasons Eternal Damnation is better than Windows Software Development – as i said, these are links that i’ve collected over the past year or so, and these two obviously came from when i was working for a windoesn’t development group somewhere.

To Foo or Not Tofu… foo, bar, baz, qux, quux, corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, thud. this goes along with Metasyntactic Variables and RFC 3092, and needs no further explanation. if you can’t figure it out, be thankful you’re not a geek.

The Nit Picker’s Guide to the Lord of the Rings – which is why i will never enjoy the movie version anywhere near as much as i enjoyed the books.

yahoo spyware!! – do i need to say anything more?

Badvertising on the Net – which is another link that i found while working for a windows development group… and an idea which, if i were a windoesn’t user, would probably be high on my list of things i need to do.

RFID-Zapper – make friends and influence people at a local mall near you… just don’t get caught, ’cause the people that put RFID tags on things are pretty protective of their stuff… and, for the moment, it is still their stuff…

Omantel Services Domain Name Registration – yes, here is how you get a domain name with a .om TLD…

Time Surfer for Mac OsX – now this is a bizarre bit of coincidence here… i found this, i don’t know, probably a year and a half or two years ago, and didn’t do anything with it, and eventually forgot that i had the link. then, last year at the oregon country fair, i sat down to rest one afternoon and noticed this thing sitting on the hay bale behind me, with a sticky-note attached to it that said “free – for YOU!”, so i picked it up. it was a small square, green package that looked as if it might be a book or something, closed with a zipper, but when i opened it, it was clear that i wasn’t going to be able to make any sense of it where i was, so i zipped it back up and brought it home with me, where i could examine it in detail without having to worry about losing the many little parts that were contained inside. it said “DREAMSPELL – The Journey of Timeship Earth 2013” and contained inside were everything one would need to fortell the future using the ancient mayan calendar… or something like that, i couldn’t figure it out, because the book was written in a teensy font and went on and on and on and on without getting to very much of a point at all. apparently the book contains the basics for reading the mayan calendar, and the other stuff is for using the mayan calendar to fortell the future, or something like that. anyway, i was going through my list of links the other day, and found this one which says “Time Surfer is a unique program for discovering the cyclic interwoven timing frequencies of the Mayan Long Count, Tzokin, Haab and the Dreamspell Calendars.” perhaps the time is right for me to look into this again, especially since the program is free…

302

The Church of Tina Chopp proudly announces a

PUBLIC RITUAL VEGETABLE SACRIFICE

In Honour of Tinite New Year
Saturday, 28 January, 2006
at HIGH Noon

the place is the usual spot, eXit-38, at the Change Creek Bridge. map here

questions and/or carpool arrangements, contact The Church

for those of you who haven’t been to a Ritual Vegetable Sacrifice before, full
details can be found here

we hope to see you there!

The 300 Most Common Words In The English Language

the of and a to in is you that it he for was on are as with his they at be this from I have or by one had not but what all were when we there can an your which their said if do will each about how up out them then she many some so these would other into has more her two like him see time could no make than first been its who now people my made over did down only way find use may water long little very after words called just where most know get through back much before go good new write our used me man too any day same right look think also around another came come work three word must because does part even place well such here take why things help put years different away again off went old number great tell men say small every found still between name should Mr home big give air line set own under read last never us left end along while might next sound below saw something thought both few those always looked show large often together asked house don’t world going want school important until 1 form food keep children feet land side without boy once animals life enough took sometimes four head above kind began almost live page got earth need far hand high year mother light parts country father let night following 2 picture being study second eyes soon times story boys since white days ever paper hard near sentence better best across during today others however sure means knew it’s try told young miles sun ways thing whole hear example heard several change answer room sea against top turned 3 learn point city play toward five using himself usually

Source: The American Heritage Word Frequency Book by John B. Carroll, Peter Davies, and Barry Richman (Houghton Mifflin, 1971, ISBN 0-395-13570-2).

(this is the first night that moe is in orlando, and i can’t sleep… can you tell?)

300

i discovered this a while ago, but i just got around to checking it out, and it does, indeed, do what they say… first, make a high quality, high contrast scan of the 2D barcode on your driver’s license (according to the site, currently 39 states use 2D barcodes on driver’s licenses, but NC, GA, UT, IL, KY, and older licences from MN are currently non-decodeable for one reason or another) that’s between 1000 and 2000 pixels wide, and between 500kb – 1.5mb, and upload it here and you get to find out how the cops know so much about you after such a short period of time…

except that my license has the information from before we moved, which is why they put “please notify the DOL within 10 days of a change of address” warning on the back…

also, i just had to include a link to everlasting blort

299

Religious right says Barbie is secretly promoting “bisexuality”
by John in DC – 1/02/2006 02:56:00 PM

Tinky Winky, Lenny the shark, and SpongeBob SquarePants move on over. The next child icon caught promoting the homosexual agenda is none other than BARBIE!!

Here is a list of known Toon homosexuals to date:

The religious right is now attacking Barbie for promoting “gender confusion.” According to the men at the Concerned Women for America, Barbie is urging kids to go bi:

“This is directed at children aged four to eight… that’s a really young age to be directing something along the lines of bisexuality.”

Yes, Barbie is making four year olds want to have sex with other four year olds of the same gender. And the Concerned Men would prefer that children have sex with four year olds of the opposite gender, I guess.

What’s really going on here is that the religious right has been attacking Mattel for months, just like they went after Ford and Microsoft and Allstate and Kraft and every other major American company. This is just another way for them to attack Mattel and get Mattel to do something bigoted to make amends.

But claiming that Barbie is promoting bisexuality to four year olds, that’s just whacked.

PS They also attack Barbie for not being a good Christian because good Christian girls only want to serve the Lord, get married, stay at home and have kids. I’m not making this up. I guess if you’re a woman (or a doll) who wants a career, then you’re a dyke.


Bush’s drinking and drug use must be investigated
By DOUG THOMPSON
Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue
Jan 3, 2006, 00:00

It is my belief that President George W. Bush is drinking again. Even worse, he may be mixing alcohol and anti-depressants — a dangerous combination for anyone, let alone the so-called leader of the free world.

No, I don’t have any proof of this, just random events and comments from those who work in and around the Bush administration and who tell me the President has acted in ways that suggest the use of alcohol and drugs. I’m a recovering alcoholic (sober 11 years, six months and 24 days) and I’ve run across a lot of relapsed drinkers who show the same symptoms as the President, including:

  • Blacking out while watching television alone;
  • Slurred speech and stammering responses to simple questions;
  • Anger and hostility in front of staff members;
  • Unexplained bruises on his face;
  • Trouble remembering recent events or comments.

During his trip to Mongolia last November, Bush openly sampled the local drink Airag, which is fermented milk with an alcohol content ranging from three to twelve percent. In other words, booze.

This was the same trip where Bush tried to evade reporters’ question by attempting to walk out a locked door and then turned sheepishly to the cameras and said he was “jet-lagged.” Some at the event said his stride was unsteady and his speech slurred.

“According to reports, President Bush may be drinking again,” David Letterman said in a late-night monologue. “And I thought, “Well, why not? He’s got everybody else drinking.”

Rumors that Bush was hitting the bottle surfaced in Washington two years ago. Sources told us the President was using anti-depressants in 2004 and we reported the story. The same sources told us last year he was drinking again and we reported it in August. The National Enquirer also ran a front page story on it but no mainstream media outlet picked up on the story.

On August 27 of last year, the Houston Chronicle reported on a party at Bush’s ranch, noting that:

Nothing the president said could be quoted, but it’s rare that reporters get uninterrupted access to him for 90 minutes, particularly when beer is served. Bush, who gave up drinking years ago, drank a non-alcoholic Buckler.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, we are warned to stay away from so-called “non-alcoholic” beers or “near beer” as it is called. The brew does, in fact, contain some alcohol and can trigger a renewed desire for more.

The November issue of the Journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, cites a study by team of California scientists who report that just the smell of non-alcoholic beer may be enough to trigger cravings and a subsequent relapse among certain alcoholics.

In my original articles about Bush’s bouts with anger and depression, I quoted Dr. Justin Frank, a George Washington University psychiatrist and author of the book: Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President.

“Two questions that the press seems particularly determined to ignore have hung silently in the air since before Bush took office,” Dr. Frank says. “Is he still drinking? And if not, is he impaired by all the years he did spend drinking? Both questions need to be addressed in any serious assessment of his psychological state.”

Dr. Frank’s analysis of the President, which is based on watching and reading and not actual treatment of Bush, agrees with those who have told me the President is also taking anti-depressants.

“In writing about Bush’s halting appearance in a press conference just before the start of the Iraq War, Washington Post media critic Tom Shales speculated that ‘the president may have been ever so slightly medicated,’” he said.

Dr. Frank explains Bush’s behavior as all-to-typical of an alcoholic who is still in denial:

“The pattern of blame and denial, which recovering alcoholics work so hard to break, seems to be ingrained in the alcoholic personality; it’s rarely limited to his or her drinking,” he adds. “The habit of placing blame and denying responsibility is so prevalent in George W. Bush’s personal history that it is apparently triggered by even the mildest threat.”

None of this, of course, proves Bush is drinking again or taking anti-depressants. The only evidence we have of Bush drinking is the sampling of a local, alcohol-based drink in Mongolia and his consumption of so-called non-alcoholic beer at a party in Crawford, Texas.

But my instincts tell me he is doing both alcohol and drugs and I believe as both a journalist and a recovering alcoholic that he needs to prove to Americans that he is not attempting to govern while under the influence.

Blogger Mark Kleiman, writing in The Reality Based Community, notes:

Moreover, with rare exceptions (e.g., the John Tower affair) the press seems very reluctant to mention heavy drinking by officials, even when it’s widely known. Ted Kennedy’s drinking gets an occasional mention, but I’d bet that most of Pat Moynihan’s constiuents never knew their brilliant senator faced a permanent battle with the bottle. If Gary Hart’s drinking problem has ever made the newspapers, I’ve missed it, though his behavior in the Donna Rice affair made it pretty obvious. Those in the know understood that the frequent media references to Bill Weld’s “laziness” as Governor of Massachusetts referred to his persistent difficulty in keeping himself vertical after lunch, but again the voters didn’t. Even foreign leaders get the same delicate treatment: Boris Yeltsin’s “erratic” behavior was in fact quite regular and predictable, once vodka was entered into the equation.

Kleiman is right about Moynihan’s drinking. You could find the Senator at Capitol Hill watering holes most any night, lunching in many different directions at once while slurping down his drinks. A number of members of Congress are notorious drunks but their antics are almost never reported by the press unless they get nailed for DUI or caught frolicking nude in the Tidal Basin.

As a journalist, it is my duty to raise questions about the fitness of any elected leader. One may argue over whether or not it is proper to print speculation but, in this case, I believe it is justified.

I’m doing my job. I just wish the so-called “mainstream” media would do theirs.


Born On The Wrong Planet
Tuesday, January 03, 2006

I first suspected I was on the wrong planet round about May 1979 when Margaret Thatcher got elected as prime minister of Great Britain. The election of a more-or-less fascist leader by a more-or-less working class electorate struck me as a form of collective insanity. My fears about the planet were confirmed a year and a half later, when a third-rate B-movie actor in the obvious primary stages of senility got elected as president of the most powerful country in the world.

I was three weeks short of 17 when Thatcher got elected, so my alienation at the time was put down to the raging of hormones; and I was told I would ‘get over it’ and that it was ‘just a stage’ I was going through. Nobody told me that I was alienated because I was, in fact, an alien; that were it not for a cosmic accident two thousand years ago I would have been born on a more beautiful, more peaceful planet than The Earth. This was something I did not come to understand until many years later.

My planet is called Urf, and it’s about 100 billion miles away from Earth, on a different plane of existence: a lighter, happier, more-evolved plane. If you had a big enough telescope you would be able to see it’s mirror incarnation in this plane, and you would assume it’s uninhabitted, as it is coal black, surrounded by dense poisonous gasses. It was once inhabited by many species, including thinking biped, ape-like creatures who quickly learned how to dominate and subjugate the others. They were cleverer than the Earth-humans and became technologically advanced much quicker. You see, there was no dark age on Urf. The Urfians did not suffer from the debilitating effects of religion, as it had never occurred to the first primitive tribes to invent a god. You see, the planet Urf benefited from tectonic stability, so there were no volcanoes or earthquakes. And as it’s sun was less powerful, but nearer, the weather patterns were much kinder. The whole planet basked in late Spring-like temperatures, year round, making for a temperate, warm, fertile planet. There were no storms, no hurricanes, no droughts. The Urfian bipeds didn’t even have to deal with serious predators. The largest carnivorous beast on Urf was a creature called a pratwat, a bit like a pig, but with the teeth of a dog. It could take out an Urfian biped, with some effort, if necessary, but two bipeds with stout sticks could easily whip it’s ass. On Urf there was nothing for the Urfian biped to fear, so there was no need for a god. That’s not to say that they couldn’t have used some celestial guidance, because they most certainly could. Despite living on a fertile planet and having no real needs, like the first Earth humans, they were still spiritually backwards, like all creatures on all the planets on this particular plane of existence. You see, the energy vibration levels on this particular plane of existence are slow and almost treacly compared to the plane I was supposed to be born on, so it is harder to connect with the celestial energy of The One. Therefore the Urfians, like all Earthlings, like every creature on this plane of existence are all, without exception, spiritually stupid. No matter how evolved they are technologically, they are still, essentially, blind. They are incapable of recognising The One, of realising they are a part of The One. And so, they act out their individual roles, believing they are all separate from each other. They are incapable of seeing the finer energies that connect us all: seeing only the dense matter that is their physical bodies. Being blinded by this illusion of separation, the Urfian, like the Earthling, was essentially a self-serving creature. So, just like on Earth, on Urf there was a self-serving acquisitiveness which drove the Urfian; and they were as prone to folly as the Earthlings. They very quickly destroyed their planet, much quicker than the Earthlings are currently doing; and now the planet Urf is a burned out cinder. At least, that’s the way it is on this plane of existence.

Maybe you do not believe that there are more than three-dimensions because of your limited perceptions. The Urfians on this plane of existence also did not believe there were more than three-dimensions until the very end, when they developed the technology to rip through the fabric of their limited reality into another plane of existence, scorching their already seriously damaged planet with a sudden surge of raw celestial energy, wiping out every living being on their planet in the blinking of an eye. Urf, on this plane of existence, was wiped out just over 2,000 years ago; and serious damage was done to the veils that separate the different planes of existence. One day soon, quantum physicists on this planet will discover the multi-dimensional nature of the universe; and the scientists, presidents, generals and company directors will conspire to conquer the vast green planet that is The Earth, but on a fresher, more vibrant plane of existence. And should they use the same technology as their Urfian counterparts, they will succeed only in turning the Earth on this plane into a black, uninhabitable cinder.

Earthlings on this plane of existence, like the Urfians before them, have always suspected that there was something better around them which they could not see. In their very DNA is the knowledge that there are higher planes of existence; and imprinted in the soul is a yearning to transcend this limited, dirty plane of existence. Primitive Earthlings knew this yearning only too well, as their lives were simple, uncluttered and rooted in nature; and the gods that they invented and the religions and mythologies they dreamt up were a melange of their fears and wishes. The paradise which is a central pivot of all religions is the picture of a higher plane of existence imprinted in the mind of the primitive Earthling. It is this vision of heaven that spurs Earthlings on to self-improvement. It is an urge, an urgency, imprinted in every creature’s DNA. But that urge is very often re-routed because of emotional and spiritual stupidity and an inability to comprehend the presence of The One. In these particularly stupid and desperate times the transcendental urge can be sublimated easily by the likes of daemonic entities that incarnate into the almost vacant bodies of advertising executives and marketing directors: so the collective urge to become self-aware in order to reincarnate is tapped into and re-wired by misleading messages played out perpetually through the mass media. Most Earthlings, being stupid and devoid of true discrimination, are incredibly susceptible to these messages. Their desire for things they don’t need is immense. They are constantly dreaming about owning a bigger house, a faster car, a better television, a more powerful computer, a newer kitchen, more fashionable clothes etc; and they are constantly conspiring to find the wherewithal to purchase these goodies. They happily sell out their youthful principles to climb the greasy pole that is a career and increase their buying power. So they buy and buy and buy; and this flurry of purchasing is like a white noise that drowns out the wee, small voice that is true consciousness; the wee small voice which urges them to be good humans, to improve themselves, to reach upwards and magnetise themselves towards the light, so that upon death they are pulled upwards, out of this plane of existence to the next level.

It is cosmic law that you go to where you are drawn; and although the general flow is upwards, as spirits we can still go backwards. Earthlings on this plane can, upon death, be sucked back down to a lower plane of existence. Those who are so avaricious that they will, without conscience, happily destroy the lives of others in order to achieve their own material advancement are drawn back down to an elemental plane of existence after they die. The religious concept of Hell, just like the concept of Heaven, is very much based on the dreams and visions of primitive Earthlings, who, despite their simplicity, were wiser and more connected than those who live in this era of white noise and consumer goodies. These dreams and visions, in which they could see the higher plane that they imagined was paradise, also delivered to them frightening images of the lower, elemental plane.

Just as those on this plane of existence can be drawn back down to the elemental plane, so can those on the level above this one be drawn back down to this one. There are many things about this plane of existence that attract those who exist on the higher plane. Despite their knowledge and wisdom, and despite the peace and happiness enjoyed by all, many higher beings are attracted to this plane of existence. There is a physicality to this plane of existence that is very alluring. Higher beings do not have physical bodies as we understand them. Their ‘bodies’ are made of energy, and everyone’s energy is interconnected. Therefore the simple, physical pleasures that we enjoy are not available to higher beings. They don’t need to eat or drink or excrete waste products. They don’t need to breathe. They don’t even need a sense of smell. And as they do not procreate, they have no genitals. They do not enjoy the consolations that those on the lower planes enjoy. Many of the creatures in the higher plane, especially during their first incarnation, miss the sheer sensuality of the lower realms… and those that cannot tear themselves away from this illusion of yearning become utterly fixated with the lower realms. So much so, that some of them return in spirit bodies, just to observe the lower creatures enjoying the crass pleasures of their dense bodies. You have heard of angels, no doubt? These are not, as you suppose, messengers of God, but bewildered souls from a higher plane. To your eyes they shimmer or have haloes, for they are made of light… but their light is not as bright as those who remain in the higher plane. As soon as they visit the lower realms their bodies start to vibrate at lower energy levels and the light in them fades. Those who remain for a long time lose their shine altogether; and when they pass away, are reincarnated in a lower plane. It is usually lust for sex or fleshy sensuality that is these higher creatures’ undoing. You may even have seen or felt one near you at the height of coitus. They love to watch you all fucking, and they yearn to be inside you as you experience that brief bright love for another. Sometimes they even jump into your bodies as you orgasm, so that they can feel what you are feeling; even though the sheer denseness of your bodies asphyxiates to them; even though this process exhausts and debilitates them; even though they are cast out of your bodies after a mere few minutes. You may have experienced the strange, fleeting pleasure of being entered by one of these etheric voyeurs. The exchange of energy is intense, for you will have sucked up some of their light, just as they have sucked up some of your darkness. For hours or even days afterwards you will be walking on air. Sometimes even, you will fall in love.

Urfians are particularly prone to reincarnating on the lower plane. Because of the untimely destruction of our planet on the lower realm and because of the holes torn in the very fabric of reality, it is easier for us than for any other creature on any other planet to visit the lower realms. The death of our planet filled the higher beings with a strange melancholy, an almost intangible yearning for the lower realm. We were haunted by spectral apparitions of Urf as it had been, and for over 2,000 years, we have felt seized by the desire to visit the lower plane. So dangerous are the holes in reality, even beings from the plane that is above ours are drawn to the physical realm. Jesus was from this highest realm. So were many other prophets and messiahs. They surrendered to incarnation on the physical plane because they were overcome with compassion for the suffering of those who existed there.

As there were no beings on the burnt out planet that was the Urf of the lower realm, the Urfians would visit the nearest inhabited planet. Your planet. It is not by accident that your planet is called The Earth. It was named so by one of your kind who believed he’d had a vision of an angel, but in actuality had only had an encounter with an etheric Urfian tourist.

Just over two thousand years ago when the terrestrial Urfians destroyed their planet and tore holes in reality’s raiment the terrestrial planet Earth was swarming with Urfian etheric tourists. It was a crazy time for the terrestrial Earthlings: angels were seen everywhere and miracles were commonplace. The planet was teeming with beings from both the higher and the highest realms. During the first few centuries of the Christian calendar, the terrestrial planet Earth was like a holiday theme park for the Urfians; and they paid the price of their curiosity by being magnetised, and upon their death in the etheric, being reincarnated on Earth. Reincarnation on Earth soon cured the Urfians of their attraction to the place. One cycle of life on that miserable planet was usually enough to convince them that they should stick to their own realm. After about five centuries, Urfian visitations more or less ceased on Earth; and as a consequence, the nascent spirituality of the Earthlings withered away. A new dark age was ushered in. The angels disappeared; and dark forces ate away at the soul of The Earth’s religious institutions. For the next twelve hundred or so years, no Urfian set foot on the planet Earth, although, from time to time, observation parties would travel there, surrounded by protective shields of light, so that none of the Earth’s magnetic energy could touch them and effect an unwanted reincarnation. Then, some time in the mid-Eighteenth century the Urfian observation teams noticed disturbing changes on The Earth. The Earthlings, finally freed from the yoke of a religion that was rotten to the core, had begun to develop technologically. The invention of the steam engine sent alarm bells ringing all over etheric Urf. The Urfians were suddenly woken up to the fact that the Earthlings, despite their bumbling superstitious minds, might well develop technologically as the Urfians had done before them. Knowing the damage that the Urfians themselves had done to the fabric of reality, they were afraid that the Earthlings might develop sufficient technological skills to blast their way through to another level of reality, maybe even opening up doors to the lower realms, which would wreak havoc with the cosmos… or worse, the veils between all the realms would disintegrate and daemonic entities from the lowest realm would invade the very highest realm, which, on a cosmic level, would be like a super-volcano exploding, throwing up a giant ash cloud, and blanking out the sun. It would be the spiritual equivalent of an ice age, in which hell indeed would freeze over.

The etheric Urfians, guided by Urfian super-souls from the highest realm, knew what they had to do. They had to sacrifice themselves to try to prevent the possible destruction of the universe. Each etheric Urfian had to do a tour of duty on The Earth. One terrestrial Earth incarnation, with the specific purpose of subverting the Earthlings’ relentless drive towards technological advancement and the almost inevitable destruction of their planet. This plan was put into action at the tail end of the nineteenth century. Initially, a million etheric Urfians were dispatched to the terrestrial plane, arriving one by one on the Earth, at three minute intervals, travelling slowly, almost imperceptibly through the Earth’s atmosphere and gradually becoming cloaked in the dark magnetic muck that surrounds the Earth, camouflaging themselves, so that they would be entirely invisible to the Earthlings’ naked eyes. Although invisible, the relatively sudden presence of a million etheric beings on Earth was felt in many other ways. It is no coincidence that the late Victorians were morbidly obsessed with sex. They could feel the eyes of etheric beings upon them as they coupled; and in their ignorance, were certain that God was watching them… and judging them.

The sudden presence of so many invisible etheric Urfians on the terrestrial plane put considerable strain on the cosmos, causing tears in the veils that separate the realities. These tears nearly precipitated the events that the Urfians most feared, for they allowed a leakage of daemonic souls into the terrestrial plane. Daemonic souls are, in general, incredibly stupid, so it is rare that they find doorways into the terrestrial plane, but when they do, they wreak havoc. They instantly incarnate in human form by invading the nearest new-born and gobbling up their souls. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the result of the lowest of daemons incarnating on the terrestrial plane.

Once the etheric Urfians incarnated in terrestrial form the rips between the daemonic and the terrestrial sealed up and no more daemons got through. The first daemon incarnates – many of them ordinary, horrible, not-so-powerful citizens – mated with the terrestrial population and caused hideous mutations in the gene pool, which spawned bastard children like Margaret Thatcher and George Bush, who then, in an attempt to fortify the daemon gene, mated with other half-daemons, creating hideous abortions like Mark Thatcher and George Bush Junior. Osama Bin Laden likewise is a half-daemonic abortion. As was Uday Hussain and Baby Doc Duvalier. These daemonic abortions are way more evil than their parents, but fortunately they are very often a lot more stupid, and rarely get into positions of real power. The few that do, like Tony Blair, have a highly evolved and sophisticated conniving gene. Others, like the mental defective, George Bush Jr, have been more-or-less enthroned, as the acceptable, user-friendly figure-head of a daemonic cartel.

After the Urfians became aware of the damage that had been done by their mass exodus to Earth they slowed things down considerably; and with careful monitoring, worked out the optimum number of etheric beings that the terrestrial Earth could bear without damage. Throughout the twentieth century, at any given point in time, there have been just over 100,000 etheric Urfians on the planet Earth. Given that an etheric Urfian can survive for only six months in the poisonous atmosphere of the Earth, a total of twenty million Urfians have incarnated on the Earth in human form.

You would think that twenty million relatively highly evolved souls would have had a totally transformative effect on the terrestrial planet Earth, but sadly that has not been the case. You see, as they were incarnating on a strange planet, they lost all the reference points, which would normally trigger the deeply buried memories of their previous incarnations. The terrestrial planet Earth bore no relationship to the etheric planet Urf, unlike the etheric Earth, which was a lighter, brighter mirror of its terrestrial counterpart. When the Urfians incarnated on the terrestrial Earth, it was like their hard-drives were wiped clean. They completely forgot their previous existence and their purpose. All they had to go on was a feeling that they didn’t belong… and this feeling of not belonging was the motor that drove them on the road to self-discovery. Many incarnate Urfians eventually unravelled some degree of self-knowledge or self-awareness. Some even came to understand something of the nature of their purpose on Earth. Few ever truly realised that they had voluntarily incarnated on the terrestrial planet Earth from the etheric planet Urf, with the specific intention of waking up the Earthlings who were sleepwalking towards their own extinction… and possibly the extinction of the known universe. Despite that, they were driven by feelings, ideas, visions and dreams to subvert the Earthlings’ overwhelming desire to subjugate everything they could for their own ends. The Urfians infiltrated every strata of society and their desire for peace, love and understanding infected the Earthlings like a benign cancer. Without the presence of the Urfians the Earthlings would have managed to destroy the Earth by the year 2000, as Earthling prophets of old had previously predicted. Urfians are responsible for slowing down the march of technology and accelerating the spiritual awakening of the terrestrial Earthling race. They have worked tirelessly, if blindly, towards this end. During the first half of the century they worked slowly and painstakingly in the fields of art, literature, philosophy and politics to try to subvert the status quo of the Earthlings. In the second half of the century – after the unbelievable horrors of the 2nd World War – the Urfians were driven to use less subtle strategies. They infiltrated the light entertainment industries and in less than twenty years took almost complete control. It was Urfians who first mass-manufactured and distributed mind-altering drugs like LSD and Ecstasy. It was Urfians that were in the forefront of all the various hippie and new age movements. It was Urfians that founded pressure groups like the Greenpeace, Amnesty International and CND. It was Urfians that were at the forefront of the feminist movement. It was Urfians that spearheaded campaigns for civil rights and liberties for oppressed minorities. It was Urfians who campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty. It was Urfians who invented the birth control pill. It was Urfians who campaigned against censorship… and barely a one of them knew that they hailed from Urf. The common thread that bound them was a desire to make the Earth a better place.

At present there are approximately fifteen million Urfian souls currently incarnated in Earthling flesh (five million of the early pioneers have now served their tours of duty and are once again enjoying the delights of life on the etheric Urf). Of these fifteen million, few have come to the full realisation of their origins. Only a handful remember that they are from Urf. They work towards the Earth’s greater good because of some inner compulsion they do not quite understand. They work with dedication and vision, but rarely to their fullest potential. If they could be re-awakened to realise who they are and what their mission is they would truly be a force to be reckoned with. If they could open up their etheric eyes and revitalise their spiritual powers they would be able to defeat the daemonic forces that have taken control of the governments and multinational corporations. If they could connect together at an energetic level their power would be twenty times what it is now. If they could realise that they are part of The One they would be able to help the Earthlings learn that they too are part of The One. If they could help the Earthlings realise their true natures all the outposts of the evil empire would crumble: for it is their unwitting participation and cooperation with the system that keeps the wheels of evil turning.

Amongst the fifteen million, more than 75 percent are almost completely asleep. Not only do they have no clue about their origins, they are devoid of even the faintest urge to carry out their mission to improve the Earthlings and the Earth. They are, for all intents and purposes, Earthlings. The only thing that separates them from their Earth cousins is a nagging sense that they don’t belong. They feel different from others. Many feel entirely alienated from their peers, often suffering from attendant mental and emotional stress that Earthling doctors diagnose as mental illness. Others may find some sort of tentative foothold in human society, by choosing to work in fields that are not highly valued by Earthlings and therefore are less competitive, less aggressive environments. There is a very high per capita ratio of unconscious Urfians in the lower ranks of the caring professions. The arts also attract great numbers of Urfians, especially the least attractive, least financially rewarding art forms, like poetry. Few Urfians ever succeed in their chosen professions, not even in poetry. They do not have the determination, the drive or the ruthlessness that is necessary to rise far above the huddled masses. Ted Hughes, for example, was pure Earthling stock, whereas his wife, Sylvia Plath – who only really became truly famous after her suicide – was half Urfian.

There are nearly twelve million Urfians out there sleepwalking through their lives. They are like an army with no guns, no uniforms. They have the potential to help defeat the daemonic forces that have insinuated their way into positions of power on this planet. They have the potential to help awaken Earthlings to their true nature and prevent the destruction of the Earth… and possibly the universe itself. But they have not yet realised this potential.

(If you have read this message and it speaks to you, possibly you are an Urfian too. If you suspect you might be, now is the time to act, to work to prevent the Earth’s destruction. Channel your talents and abilities to help reawaken other unconscious Urfians: give them your love and support; nurture them. Use every means possible to open up Earthling’s eyes: subvert their thinking wherever possible; and where necessary, infiltrate the heart of the daemonic empire and destroy their systems from within. Remember, use only peaceful means; for evil only begets evil and will ultimately make the daemonic empire stronger…. act now, for time is quickly running out!)

Disclaimer: this may not be a work of fiction.

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hey, check this out… type “baby jesus” into google, and click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button…

also, a very important announcement concerning International Kermit Hands Day.


Mooning deemed ‘disgusting’ but legal in Md.
Man who exposed his buttocks during an argument walks free
By Ernesto Londoo
The Washington Post
Updated: 9:59 a.m. ET Jan. 4, 2006

WASHINGTON – Acquitting a Germantown man who exposed his buttocks during an argument with a neighbor, a Montgomery County Circuit Court judge ruled yesterday that mooning, while distasteful, is not illegal in Maryland.

“If exposure of half of the buttock constituted indecent exposure, any woman wearing a thong at the beach at Ocean City would be guilty,” Judge John W. Debelius III said after the bench trial, reversing the ruling of a District Court judge.

Debelius made clear his disdain for the defendant, calling the alleged act “disgusting” and “demeaning.” The outcome could have been different, he suggested, if the man had been on trial for “being a jerk.”

The case arose from a June 7 argument between the defendant, Raymond Hugh McNealy, 44, and a neighbor, Nanette Vonfeldt. Vonfeldt pressed charges against McNealy after he allegedly yelled and, according to Vonfeldt, threatened to “blow up my building” as she and her 8-year-old daughter walked out of their apartment, in the 20200 block of Shipley Terrace in Germantown.

“Then, for whatever reason, in full view of my daughter, he mooned us,” Vonfeldt wrote in a court document. The two had a long-standing feud over issues before their homeowners association, which held a heated meeting the night before, McNealy’s attorneys said. McNealy wanted Vonfeldt off the association’s board, his attorneys said.

The case went to trial Sept. 12 before Montgomery District Court Judge Eugene Wolfe, who ruled against the defendant. Indecent exposure in Maryland is punishable by as much as three years in prison and a $1,000 fine.

Victory for ‘beachgoers and plumbers’
McNealy’s attorneys appealed the verdict, arguing that indecent exposure in Maryland constitutes the willful public display of a person’s “private parts” — which, they argued, do not include a person’s buttocks.

Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Dan Barnett said the indecent exposure law in Maryland is ambiguous.

“In our minds, this was not a bathing suit scenario,” said Barnett, who supervises Montgomery County prosecutors who handle cases in District Court. “This was a grown man exposing himself to an 8-year-old girl.”

Defense attorneys cited a 1983 case of a woman who was arrested after protesting in front of the U.S. Supreme Court wearing nothing but a cardboard sign that covered the front of her body. The D.C. Court of Appeals ruled in 1986 that indecent exposure is limited to a person’s genitals.

James Maxwell, one of McNealy’s attorneys, said yesterday’s ruling should “bring comfort to all beachgoers and plumbers” in the state.


one of the following graphics is an actual result from my taking the quiz. the other two are bogus. can you tell which one?

take the psi-q psychic test yourself

take the psi-q psychic test yourself

take the psi-q psychic test yourself


Your Social Dysfunction:
Paranoid

You show pervasive and unwarranted suspiciousness, and mistrust of others. You are overly sensitive and prone to jealousy.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Please note that we aren’t, nor do we claim to be, psychologists. This quiz is for fun and entertainment only.


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so i’m researching how to market Hybrid Elephant better than i have been (which is not at all), and i discovered, or, rather, i rediscovered that Hybrid Elephant has a web stats program already installed on the web server, so i decided to have a look. the last time i checked the stats was in november 2003(!), shortly after my injury. since then Hybrid Elephant has been averaging somewhere between 35,000 and 75.000 hits per month, or around 6,000 hits per week (the week of 6 november, 2005 had almost 35,000 hits!), and the weeks starting 11 december, 2005 had an average of 7,500 hits per week! my busiest day is usually tuesday, and the busiest hour of the busiest day is usually 12:00 pm, the most recent of which had 14,172 requests for pages. the large majority of hits (34.56%) come from the .net TLD, followed by 30.93% from the .com TLD, 16.12% from “unresolved numerical addresses”(?), and 2.74% from the .edu TLD… i’ve gotten 10,230 hits from the .uk TLD, 13,601 from the .hr TLD (croatia!), and i’ve even had 332 hits from the .arpa TLD… and i’ve gotten 1 hit each from andorra, macedonia, lichtenstein and cote d’ivoire… strangely enough, though, the most frequently requested directory is the objects directory (probably the murtis or the pipes, which i’ve gotten a bunch of emails about), and the incense directory comes in a disappointing #4… i’m pretty sure i’ll be able to make some use out of this information. what remains to be seen.

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happy new year everyone…

moe is going to orlando for a week. she’s attending some veterinary conference and taking some continuing education workshops, but she’s not taking me, because i’ve got to stay at home and take care of the pets.

i finally bought some beading needles, and made a sivalingam necklace. there are more to be made (i’ve got 9 more sivalingams) and i hope to be able to sell them on Hybrid Elephant

i joined the jew’s harp guild, which i didn’t even know existed before reading ‘s post about starting a LJ community for jew’s harpers… i’ve been playing the jew’s harp for 35 years, and i didn’t even know it existed… not only that, but they’re located in cove, which is near bay city, a place that moe and i have been through a few times in the past few years.

St. Gordy of Boenghytte proposed a public ritual vegetable sacrifice some time soon, and i suggested that he nominate some weekend day as “Tinite New Year” with the specific purpose of holding another public ritual vegetable sacrifice on that day. now i’ve got to wait until he actually does it. hopefully it will be some time before october…


“It’s pretty stunning that, rather than focus on whether the president broke his oath of office and broke federal law, they are going after the whistleblowers.”
     – Anthony D. Romero, executive director, ACLU, on the Justice Department probe of the leak of the warrantless eavesdropping


2005 was the year that the president of the United States declared proudly that he had broken the law repeatedly and with full intention, that he had the power to do so whenever he wanted to, and that he would continue to do so whenever he determined it to be desirable. This declaration was met with basic approval from much of the beltway chattering classes, prominent libertarian bloggers, and just about every small government conservative.

The issue is simple: Bush has declared that one man has the right to make the law whenever, in his determination, national security warrants it. While even I can understand the necessity of broad executive powers in emergency situations, we aren’t anywhere close to being in one of those. If Bush decides that personally shooting dissident bloggers or pesky journalists in the head is in fact necessary for national security, then no one can object. The fact that he has not, as far as we know, done any such thing does not matter in the slightest. By conferring dictatorial authority on himself Bush has declared that this is, in fact, a dictatorship even if he hasn’t (yet) bothered using such authorities to the fullest of his claimed ability.

It’s a mystery why Russert and the gang can giggle over their little roundtables, essentially ignoring what amounts to a military coup by our own president. He’s asserted the authority of commander in chief over the entire country, and not just the military to which the constitution grants him such authority. Yes, we hope and generally assume that this temper tantrum by our boy king will pass in 3 years, that the his overreach will not have long lasting effects, that the crisis will pass.

2005 was the year the president declared he was the law, and few of our elite opinion makers and shapers bothered to notice, or care.

     –Atrios


well, i guess i’ll accept it… especially since there really is no founder for hinduism… but at the same time, i took the quiz 3 times, and i only got Buddha twice. the other time i got Jesus, and i simply couldn’t put up with that…

Siddhartha Gautama
You two would probably really get along!
Founder of Buddhism
“All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?”
My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

other other
You scored higher than 99% on Intuitive
other other
You scored higher than 57% on Structured
other other
You scored higher than 57% on Mildness
other other
You scored higher than 0% on Traditional

Link: The Religion Founder You Resemble Test written by Stinkbot.

295

the leap second that was in between 3:59:59 pm, pst, and 4:00:00 pm, pst, came and went without fanfare, but it was there… don’t ask me why.

hybrid elephant inventory is done. this year i purchased $1,255.83 worth of stuff for sale at the hybrid elephant web site.

the enlightened rantings of a brain damaged freak