Teaching Iraq the value of Democracy and a 'free press' Bush style, but why should we be surprised. The pay for propaganda has been a part of the Bush Administration in this country as well.
Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles, with headlines such as "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism," since the effort began this year.
The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S. military. The Pentagon has a contract with a small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group, which helps translate and place the stories. The Lincoln Group's Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets.
The military's effort to disseminate propaganda in the Iraqi media is taking place even as U.S. officials are pledging to promote democratic principles, political transparency and freedom of speech in a country emerging from decades of dictatorship and corruption.
Everyone enjoys a good laugh, check out this Amazon review of Richard Dawkins "The Ancestor's Tale" After reading 600 plus pages of discussing 'these matters' this nutjob wonders how to discuss it without referring to the Bible. My favorite line, "We are not animals we are human beings! If life had been evolving for billions of years then surely even animals like goats and squirrels would have turned into humans by now." Oh and the bit about 10 fingers was also priceless.
Ignores vital Facts, November 13, 2005
Reviewer: Jamie Bartlett (London)
Apparently this is a book about the history of humanity and our relationship with our 'animal ancestors'. How it is possible to discuss these matters without invoking Creation I do not know! There is a Good Book on these topics and I think we all know what it is! The Truth is that we came into being after God created Adam and Eve several hundred years ago, and were given dominion over the animals that were created around about the same time. We are not animals we are human beings! If life had been evolving for billions of years then surely even animals like goats and squirrels would have turned into humans by now.
Dawkins presents an objectivist scientific account which is clearly over-reliant on a materialistic conception of life. For example, he argues that 'if we had fewer or more than ten fingers, we'd recognise a different set of numbers as round'. However, it could be the case that early Man decided 10 was a round number and subsequently was given 10 fingers by God.
This lengthy book is just part of the rationalist scientific orthodoxy. For a better read on the origins of life, try the Bible.
Lord May says "Sadly, for many, the response is to retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamentalist unreason" (tip to Carmen)
Fundamentalism is hampering global efforts to tackle climate change, according to Britain's top scientist.
In his final speech as president of the Royal Society, Lord May of Oxford will say scientists must speak out against the climate change "denial lobby".
He will warn core scientific values are "under serious threat from resurgent fundamentalism, West and East".
When people think of fascism, they imagine Rows of goose-stepping storm troopers and puffy-chested dictators. What they don't see is the economic and political process that leads to the nightmare.
Miller in the BAM: "To start off our round-up of recent magazine articles on evolution, consider this profile of Ken Miller from the Brown Alumni Magazine. Much of it will be old news to devotees of the evolution\ID fracas. But the article also conatins some interesting nuggets:
Although Miller, a cell biologist, has been defending evolution in public forums for most of his adult life, in 1997 he become a national figure. That year he appeared with three other evolutionists on Firing Line to debate [William F.] Buckley and three anti-evolutionists. His host sensed Miller was something special. ‘Young man,’ Buckley told a startled Miller after the show, ‘that was the most astonishing performance I’ve ever seen. That was absolutely remarkable.’ The admiration was mutual. ‘I would place him as one of the four or five smartest people I’ve ever met in my life,’ Miller says. ‘But he doesn’t know science. That’s why he was completely out of his depth. Like many brilliant people, he is also capable of profound self-delusion.’
"
There is a conflict between science and religion, and it is zero-sum. Surely it is time that scientists and other intellectuals stopped disguising this fact. Indeed, the incompatibility of reason and faith has been a self-evident feature of human cognition and public discourse for centuries. Either one has good reasons for what one strongly believes, or one does not. People of all creeds naturally recognize the primacy of reasons and resort to reasoning and evidence wherever they can. When rational inquiry supports the creed, it is always championed; when it poses a threat, it is derided. It is only when the evidence for a religious doctrine is thin or nonexistent, or there is compelling evidence against it, that its adherents invoke “faith.” Otherwise, they simply cite the reasons for their beliefs (“The New Testament confirms Old Testament prophecy,” “I saw the face of Jesus in a window,” “We prayed, and our daughter’s cancer went into remission”). Such reasons are generally inadequate, but they are better than no reasons at all. Faith is nothing more than the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail. In a world that has been shattered—utterly—by mutually incompatible religious beliefs . . . in a nation that is growing increasingly beholden to Iron Age conceptions of God, the end of history, the return of Jesus, and the immortality of the soul . . . this lazy partitioning of our discourse into matters of reason and matters of faith is now unconscionable.
The frozen record of the Earth's atmosphere is 3270 metres long and covers the last 650,000 years – 50% longer than before. It was obtained from the tiny air bubbles trapped in a deep ice core from Antarctica.
The tight coupling between temperatures and the greenhouse gas levels revealed by the core matches the predictions from climate models used to forecast future global warming. It also bears some good news: the warm interglacial periods between ice ages can last a long time, contrary to the view that we may already be due for the onset of the next ice age."
WSJ.com - Some Students Find Themselves In Principal's Office Over Blogs: "Others have taken a more aggressive approach. Last month, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Paterson, N.J., banned the students at its 58 elementary schools and five high schools from maintaining personal Web pages on sites like MySpace and Xanga, a blogging service. Marianna Thompson, director of communications for the diocese, said the goal of the ban is to protect students from online predators, as well as to prevent students from harassing or bullying each other. 'An unsupervised blog is an inappropriate use of their time,' she said."
"Human rights abuses in Iraq are now as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record, according to the country's first Prime Minister after the fall of Saddam's regime.
'People are doing the same as [in] Saddam's time and worse,' Ayad Allawi told The Observer. 'It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.'
In a damning and wide-ranging indictment of Iraq's escalating human rights catastrophe, Allawi accused fellow Shias in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centres. The brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police, he said.
My son sent me this link. He writes: Interesting article on what humanism is and is not. Grayling is wrong about Buddhism though. Buddhism posits Karma, which I would call a supernatural process though I admit this is debatable. Some forms of Buddhism include reincarnation over multiple lifetimes, I would say that is a supernatural posit. It is possible to read Buddhism in a supernatural free way though. But Graylings blanket conclusion that Buddhism does not posit the supernatural and therefore is not a religion is mistaken.
A rose might indeed smell as sweet by any other name, but names matter nevertheless, and it especially matters that the terms ‘humanism’ and ‘religion’ should have clear definitions so that temptations to describe the former as a species of the latter can be avoided. Some succumb to such temptation because they would like humanism to be a movement with a credo that would sustain communities of like-minded folk, making it a substitute version of church membership. But humanism is not such a thing, and religion is a quite different thing.
Humanism is a general outlook based on two allied premises, which allow considerable latitude to what follows from them. The premises are, first, that there are no supernatural entities or agencies in the universe, and second, that ethics must be based on facts about human nature and circumstances.
[snip]
But it is a failure of imagination not to see that when people go to art galleries or concerts, enjoy gardening and country walks, or have dinner with friends, they are expressing themselves aesthetically and socially in the same (and arguably better) way as people who come together in church congregations.
[snip]
Religious folk try to turn the tables on people of a humanistic outlook by charging them with ‘faith’ in science and reason. Faith, they seem to have forgotten, is what you have despite facts and reason. The point of the Doubting Thomas story, remember, is that it is more blessed to believe without evidence than with it, as Kierkegaard likewise later insisted with his ‘leap of faith’ doctrine.
No such leaps are required to ‘believe in’ science or reason. Science is always open to challenge and refutation, faith is not; reason must be rigorously tested by its own lights, faith rejoices in unreason. Once again, a humanistic outlook is as far from sharing the characteristics of religion as it can be. By definition, in short, humanism is not religion, any more than religion is or can be a form of humanism.
Boris Johnson MP: Bush and Al-Jazeera: "The Attorney General's ban is ridiculous, untenable, and redolent of guilt. I do not like people to break the Official Secrets Act ... we now have allegations of such severity, against the US President and his motives, that we need to clear them up.
If someone passes me the document within the next few days I will be very happy to publish it in The Spectator, and risk a jail sentence. .. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If we suppress the truth, we forget what we are fighting for"
"'One might also argue,' Vice President Cheney said in a speech on Monday, 'that untruthful charges against the commander in chief have an insidious effect on the war effort.' That would certainly be an ugly and demagogic argument, were one to make it. After all, if untruthful charges against the president hurt the war effort (by undermining public support and soldiers' morale), then those charges will hurt the war effort even more if they happen to be true. So one would be saying in effect that any criticism of the president is essentially treason.
Lest one fear that he might be saying that, Cheney immediately added, 'I'm unwilling to say that' -- 'that' being what he had just said. He generously granted critics the right to criticize (as did the president this week). Then he resumed hurling adjectives like an ape hurling coconuts at unwanted visitors. 'Dishonest.' 'Reprehensible.' 'Corrupt.' 'Shameless.' President Bush and others joined in, all morally outraged that anyone would accuse the administration of misleading us into war by faking a belief that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear and/or chemical and biological weapons.
Interestingly, the administration no longer claims that Hussein actually had such weapons at the time Bush led the country into war in order to eliminate them. 'The flaws in the intelligence are plain enough in hindsight,' Cheney said on Monday. So-called WMD (weapons of mass destruction) were not the only argument for the war, but the administration thought they were a crucial argument at the time. So the administration now concedes that the country went to war on a false premise. Doesn't that mean that the war was a mistake no matter where the false premise came from?"
This is really interesting article and one you shouldn't miss. Is there a natural dualism that makes us prone to belief in an afterlife and what does that mean. The clip is part of Jonathan Miller's Brief History of Disbelief wherein he interviews Pascal Boyer one of the scientists discussed in the article.
Click on the picture to play the video
Quicktime Video 11.3 MB 6'01 Quicktime Required
"The new approach to explaining religion that Boyer and Bloom (and Scott Atran and Justin Barrett and Deborah Kelemen and others) represent does not see religious belief as a corruption of rationality, but rather as an over-extension of some of the very mental mechanisms that underlie and make rationality possible. In other words, rather than religion having emerged to serve a social or other purpose, in this view it is seen as an evolutionary accident. In particular, Bloom uses some developments in child psychology to shed light on the issue of religious beliefs, and it is these that I would like to focus on now. I cannot here go into the details of the experiments which demonstrate this, but it turns out that one of the things which seems hardwired (is not learned by experience) in young infants (before they can even speak), is the distinction between inanimate and animate objects. Infants are clearly able to distinguish physical things from objects which demonstrate intentionality and have psychological characteristics. In other words, things with minds. In Paul Bloom's words, children are 'natural-born dualists' (in the Cartesian sense). It is quite clear that the mental mechanisms that babies use to understand and predict how physical objects will behave are very distinct from the mechanisms they use to understand and predict how psychological agents will behave. This stark separation of the world into minds and non-minds is what, according to Bloom, makes it eventually possible for us to conceive of minds (or souls) without bodies. This explains beliefs in gods, spirits, an afterlife (we continue without bodies), etc. The other thing that babies are very good at, is ascriptions of intentionality. They are very good at reading desires and intentions in animate objects, and this is necessary for them to function socially. Indeed, they are so sensitive to this that they sometimes overshoot and even ascribe goals and desires to inanimate objects. And it is this tendency which eventually makes us animists and creationists."
NATIONAL JOURNAL: Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel (11/22/05): "Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter."
But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair, who said it would provoke a worldwide backlash.
A source said: 'There's no doubt what Bush wanted, and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it.' Al-Jazeera is accused by the US of fuelling the Iraqi insurgency.
The attack would have led to a massacre of innocents on the territory of a key ally, enraged the Middle East and almost certainly have sparked bloody retaliation.
A source said last night: 'The memo is explosive and hugely damaging to Bush.
'He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere. Blair replied that would cause a big problem.
'There's no doubt what Bush wanted to do - and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it.'
A Government official suggested that the Bush threat had been 'humorous, not serious'.
But another source declared: 'Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both men.'"
Well that seems pretty clear. They want a timed withdrawal not much different from what Murtha proposed. This paragraph is notable in its lack of reference to U.S. forces. I think it is clear that attacks against American Troops is not considered terrorism, but rather resistance. So why the hell are we there.
Though resistance is a legitimate right for all people, terrorism does not represent resistance. Therefore, we condemn terrorism and acts of violence, killing and kidnapping targeting Iraqi citizens and humanitarian, civil, government institutions, national resources and houses of worships
Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | Iraqi Leaders Call for Pullout Timetable: "CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Leaders of Iraq's sharply divided Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis called Monday for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces in the country and said Iraq's opposition had a ``legitimate right'' of resistance.
The final communique, hammered out at the end of three days of negotiations at a preparatory reconciliation conference under the auspices of the Arab League, condemned terrorism, but was a clear acknowledgment of the Sunni position that insurgents should not be labeled as terrorists if their operations do not target innocent civilians or institutions designed to provide for the welfare of Iraqi citizens.
The participants in Cairo agreed on ``calling for the withdrawal of foreign troops according to a timetable, through putting in place an immediate national program to rebuild the armed forces ... control the borders and the security situation'' and end terror attacks."
Independent Online Edition > Middle East: "Iraqis face the dire prospect of losing up to $200bn (£116bn) of the wealth of their country if an American-inspired plan to hand over development of its oil reserves to US and British multinationals comes into force next year. A report produced by American and British pressure groups warns Iraq will be caught in an 'old colonial trap' if it allows foreign companies to take a share of its vast energy reserves. The report is certain to reawaken fears that the real purpose of the 2003 war on Iraq was to ensure its oil came under Western control."
IRAQ HAS POSSIBLY EMPLOYED PHOSPHOROUS CHEMICAL WEAPONS AGAINST THE KURDISH POPULATION IN AREAS ALONG THE IRAQI-TURKISH-IRANIAN BORDERS. […]
IN LATE FEBRUARY 1991, FOLLOWING THE COALITION FORCES’ OVERWHELMING VICTORY OVER IRAQ, KURDISH REBELS STEPPED UP THEIR STRUGGLE AGAINST IRAQI FORCES IN NORTHERN IRAQ. DURING THE BRUTAL CRACKDOWN THAT FOLLOWED THE KURDISH UPRISING, IRAQI FORCES LOYAL TO PRESIDENT SADDAM ((HUSSEIN)) MAY HAVE POSSIBLY USED WHITE PHOSPHOROUS (WP) CHEMICAL WEAPONS AGAINST KURDISH REBELS AND THE POPULACE IN ERBIL (GEOCOORD:3412N/04401E) (VICINITY OF IRANIAN BORDER) AND DOHUK (GEOCOORD:3652N/04301E) (VICINITY OF IRAQI BORDER) PROVINCES, IRAQ.
There wasn't any discussion on this yesterday when I linked to it. If you missed it here is a little of the content. Perhaps that will peak your interest. Really you should read the entire piece. Genie In A Bottle
by digby
Nobody is going to as...:
"Nobody is going to ask me who should be hired at The New York Times to replace Judith Miller, but if they did I would say that they should hire the best and most unsung national security reporter in the country --- Jason Vest. If you are unfamiliar with his work, do yourself a favor and have Mr Google look him up. He's a real reporter, not a stenographer, but he also has an impressive interest and grasp of the history of various groups, cabals and individuals who make up the current national security establishment and the Bush administration. And lo and behold, he actually writes about them. This is a huge key to understanding these otherwise inexplicable people and their motives. I highly recommend that you read his pieces wherever they come up and I will continue to bring them to your attention.
Today, he has written a piece on torture for the National Journal that is fascinating because he's spoken to old guard CIA who have had some experience with this stuff in the past. They all agree that the moral dimension is huge, but there are good practical reasons for not doing it as well. These range from the difficulty in getting allies to cooperate because of their distaste for such methods to the fact that the information is unreliable.
But the thing I found most interesting is the observation that it does something quite horrible to the perpetrators as well as the victims:
'If you talk to people who have been tortured, that gives you a pretty good idea not only as to what it does to them, but what it does to the people who do it,' he said. 'One of my main objections to torture is what it does to the guys who actually inflict the torture. It does bad things. I have talked to a bunch of people who had been tortured who, when they talked to me, would tell me things they had not told their torturers, and I would ask, 'Why didn't you tell that to the guys who were torturing you?' They said that their torturers got so involved that they didn't even bother to ask questions.' Ultimately, he said -- echoing Gerber's comments -- 'torture becomes an end unto itself.'
[...]
According to a 30-year CIA veteran currently working for the agency on contract, there is, in fact, some precedent showing that the 'gloves-off' approach works -- but it was hotly debated at the time by those who knew about it, and shouldn't be emulated today. 'I have been privy to some of what's going on now, but when I saw the Post story, I said to myself, 'The agency deserves every bad thing that's going to happen to it if it is doing this again,'' he said. 'In the early 1980s, we did something like this in Lebanon -- technically, the facilities were run by our Christian Maronite allies, but they were really ours, and we had personnel doing the interrogations,' he said. 'I don't know how much violence was used -- it was really more putting people in underground rooms with a bare bulb for a long time, and for a certain kind of privileged person not used to that, that and some slapping around can be effective.
'But here's the important thing: When orders were given for that operation to stand down, some of the people involved wouldn't [emphasis mine --ed]. Disciplinary action was taken, but it brought us back to an argument in the agency that's never been settled, one that crops up and goes away -- do you fight the enemy in the gutter, the same way, or maintain some kind of moral high ground?
View the first 26 minutes of This Divided State about Michael Moore's visit to Utah and the local reaction This will only be available for a few days.
A new species of horned dinosaur that lived during the Late Cretaceous Period, about 76 million years ago, was found in a fossil bed at a prehistoric graveyard in the badlands of Alberta, Canada. (tip to Tracey)
What I Knew Before the Invasion: "In the past week President Bush has twice attacked Democrats for being hypocrites on the Iraq war. '[M]ore than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power,' he said.
The president's attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.
The president has undermined trust. No longer will the members of Congress be entitled to accept his veracity. Caveat emptor has become the word. Every member of Congress is on his or her own to determine the truth.
First let me remind my Christian friends that the Founding Fathers had no Pledge of Allegience, and the Founding Fathers didn't have the slogan "One Nation Under God" on their money. So the question is why did you add it? The answer according to John Kasich is a simple one a slogan on our money gives them conscience. They push their agenda on us 24/7 and if we choose to push back they whine, why are you doing this, we just don't understand. Why don't you go feed someone, why do you make it such a big deal. They whine like two year olds and when they don't get what they want they stomp their little feet.
U.S. forces sealed off a house in the northern city of Mosul where eight suspected al Qaeda members died in a gunfight — some by their own hand to avoid capture. A U.S. official said Sunday that efforts were under way to determine if terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was among the dead.
Donald Rumsfeld appeared on Bob Schieffer's Face the Nation today. During the discussion about John Murtha Rumsfeld pleaded ignorance of Scott McClellan statements etc. "I haven't seen any of these reports. I've been on an airplane flying back from Australia. I just don't know..." Later Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times asked the following,"60% of the American now believe the war in Iraq was not worth fighting. At what point does the lack of support at home affect the war." Rumsfeld replied, "...We have a president that knows the war is worth fighting and it is. and I think that the bulk of the congress reflected that in the vote you didn't see many people Republican or Democrat..." to which Bob Schieffer took this amusing shot at the secretary. "So you got word of that out there in Austrailia. You didn't hear the other part."
The Justice Department has signaled for the first time in recent weeks that prominent members of Congress could be swept up in the corruption investigation of Jack Abramoff, the former Republican superlobbyist who diverted some of his tens of millions of dollars in fees to provide lavish travel, meals and campaign contributions to the lawmakers whose help he needed most.
The investigation by a federal grand jury, which began more than a year ago, has created alarm on Capitol Hill, especially with the announcement Friday of criminal charges against Michael Scanlon, Mr. Abramoff's former lobbying partner and a former top House aide to Representative Tom DeLay.
The charges against Mr. Scanlon identified no lawmakers by name, but a summary of the case released by the Justice Department accused him of being part of a broad conspiracy to provide "things of value, including money, meals, trips and entertainment to federal public officials in return for agreements to perform official acts" - an attempt at bribery, in other words, or something close to it.
Worth a listen they provide both streaming and mp3 download. BBC - Radio 4 In Our Time - Pragmatism: "'A pragmatist ... turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power'. A quote from William James' 1907 treatise Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.
William James, along with John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce, was the founder of an American philosophical movement which flowered during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century and the first twenty years of the twentieth century. It purported that knowledge is only meaningful when coupled with action. Nothing is true or false - it either works or it doesn't. It was a philosophy which was deeply embedded in the reality of life, concerned firstly with the individual's direct experience of the world he inhabited. In essence, practical application was all.
College Makeover - The matrix, revisited. By Steven Pinker: "In sum, general education in science should stimulate a worldview grounded in our best understanding of reality, provide a complement to knowledge in other fields, and equip students with factual analytic resources to enhance their effectiveness as individuals and citizens. The best way to attain these goals, I think, is to develop synoptic courses that are organized around content rather than discipline, and ones that explicitly target the limitations of human cognition."
The Republicans pulled what is charitably called a cheap stunt. They introduced a resolution. The "Hunter" resolution in an attempt to embarrass the Democrats. The claim was that it was what Murtha had proposed, it wasn't since they had removed key language from Murtha's resolution, namely as soon as it's practicable. Murtha had proposed a planned withdrawal beginning immediately the Republicans proposed leaving at first light. During the debate the Republicans tried to leave the impression that they were debating Murtha's resolution when they were really debating the sham Hunter resolution. In this clip the Democrats are trying to make that clear. The outrage comes when the speaker tries to blur the line once again. A little theater of the absurd, but quite entertaining
Click on the picture to play the video
Quicktime Video 3.2MB 2'09 Quicktime Required
Check out the two resolutions in the extended entry.
Here are the resolutions both Murtha's and Hunter's it was Hunter's they were voting on. .
Murtha's resolution:
Whereas Congress and the American People have not been shown clear, measurable progress toward establishment of stable and improving security in Iraq or of a stable and improving economy in Iraq, both of which are essential to "promote the emergence of a democratic government";
Whereas additional stabilization in Iraq by U, S. military forces cannot be achieved without the deployment of hundreds of thousands of additional U S. troops, which in turn cannot be achieved without a military draft;
Whereas more than $277 billion has been appropriated by the United States Congress to prosecute U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan;
Whereas, as of the drafting of this resolution, 2,079 U.S. troops have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom;
Whereas U.S. forces have become the target of the insurgency,
Whereas, according to recent polls, over 80% of the Iraqi people want U.S. forces out of Iraq;
Whereas polls also indicate that 45% of the Iraqi people feel that the attacks on U.S. forces are justified;
Whereas, due to the foregoing, Congress finds it evident that continuing U.S. military action in Iraq is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the people of Iraq, or the Persian Gulf Region, which were cited in Public Law 107-243 as justification for undertaking such action;
Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That:
Section 1. The deployment of United States forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and the forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date.
Section 2. A quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S Marines shall be deployed in the region.
Section 3 The United States of America shall pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy.
And here's the GOP "rewrite":
The GOP version:
RESOLUTION
Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.
Breaking news: Darwin appears in holy frying pan!: "From London comes the astonishing news that the unmistakable image of Charles Darwin has appeared in the bottom of a postdoc’s frying pan. Scientists around the world1 are puzzled about the possible mechanism that might have resulted in the 19th century naturalist’s portrait being deposited on the suface of a cooking utensil."
You sold out. You compromised your integrity. You abandoned the very principles that brought you respect, the principles that brought you fame and the thanks of a grateful nation. Tell me Bob, why did you wait so long? I would have been happy to corrupt you back in '72. I would have made you one of the 'president's men'. I would have given you the access you needed to write your books, to rub shoulders with the rich and powerful. Oh Bob, look at you now, you're mired in a scandal, and at your age there is little time to rehabilitate your reputation. I feel your pain Bob, or I would were I still alive.
Top News Article | Reuters.com: "Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in court filings that the ongoing CIA leak investigation will involve proceedings before a new grand jury, a possible sign he could seek new charges in the case."
What made us human?: "Humans and chimpanzees share at least 98% of their DNA, yet chimps are an endangered species while people have used their superior cognition to transform the face of the Earth. What makes the difference? A new study suggests that evolutionary changes in the regulation of a gene implicated in perception, behavior, and memory may be partly responsible.
Thirty years ago, geneticist Mary-Claire King and biochemist Allan Wilson proposed that changes in how genes are regulated, rather than in the proteins they code for, could explain important differences between chimps and humans (Science, 11 April 1975, p. 107). To test this hypothesis, an international team led by evolutionary biologist Gregory Wray of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, focused on the gene that codes for the protein prodynorphin (PDYN), a precursor to a number of endorphins, opiatelike molecules involved in learning, the experience of pain, and social attachment and bonding. Humans carry one to four copies of a region of DNA that controls the expression of this gene. Human copies had five DNA mutations not seen in the other primates. The team concludes that the pattern is a solid example of natural selection acting on the human lineage after it split from the chimp line from 5 million to 7 million years ago."
NEW YORK - Even upon receiving an honorary medal for lifetime achievement, Norman Mailer took a little heat and gave some right back. The 82-year-old Mailer, cited Wednesday night at the National Book Awards, was introduced by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who praised him as a giant of American letters while reminding the audience of his prickly past.
'I have my own list of objections that I can peruse at my leisure, not least of which is an almost comic obtuseness regarding women,' said Morrison, who then likened Mailer's work to the United States itself, 'generous; impractical; often wrong; always engaged; mindful of, and often amused by, his own power.
'
Mailer, recovering from heart surgery and long plagued by bad knees, hobbled up to the stage, good-naturedly acknowledged his reputation — 'I'm obtuse about women, but also wary of them' — then engaged the real enemy."
Even Charles Krauthammer gets it right once in a while.
Let's be clear. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological 'theory' whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge -- in this case, evolution -- they are to be filled by God. It is a 'theory' that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species but also says that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, 'I think I'll make me a lemur today.' A 'theory' that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science -- that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution -- or behind the motion of the tides or the 'strong force' that holds the atom together?
In order to justify the farce that intelligent design is science, Kansas had to corrupt the very definition of science, dropping the phrase ' natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us,' thus unmistakably implying -- by fiat of definition, no less -- that the supernatural is an integral part of science. This is an insult both to religion and science.
Language Log: Has George W. Bush become more disfluent?: "Obviously, the extent to which uh [0.295]
the Japanese government wants to give reconstruction money to Iraq is up to the Japanese government, and [pause 0.187]
to- to the- and I- as to the- [pause 0.205]
the- the uh deployment of troops, it's up to- [0.421] it's up to the government. [pause 1.237]
's what happens in democracies -- government makes decisions that uh [pause 0.598]
that uh that they're uh capable of living with, and that's [pause 1.966]
that's what we said, ((we)) said, do the best you can do; [pause 0.530]
make up your own mind, it's your decision, not mine. (audio clip)
BBC NEWS | Health | Decaf coffee linked to heart risk: "Dr Robert Superko of the Fuqua Heart Centre in Atlanta, Georgia, who led the research, said: 'Contrary to what people have thought for many years, I believe it's not caffeinated but decaffeinated coffee that might promote heart disease risk factors.'"
Brad Blog has the Video here. Congressman John Murtha - Pennsylvania's 12th Congressional District - Press Releases: "I said over a year ago, and now the military and the Administration agrees, Iraq can not be won ‘militarily.’ I said two years ago, the key to progress in Iraq is to Iraqitize, Internationalize and Energize. I believe the same today. But I have concluded that the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is impeding this progress.
Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists and foreign jihadists. I believe with a U.S. troop redeployment, the Iraqi security forces will be incentivized to take control. A poll recently conducted shows that over 80% of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition troops, and about 45% of the Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified. I believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis.
I believe before the Iraqi elections, scheduled for mid December, the Iraqi people and the emerging government must be put on notice that the United States will immediately redeploy. All of Iraq must know that Iraq is free. Free from United States occupation. I believe this will send a signal to the Sunnis to join the political process for the good of a ‘free’ Iraq.
Guardian Unlimited Books | Top 10s | Sam Jordison: books on cults: "'Literature would be considerably poorer without cults and religious extremists. They've inspired some fine novels and riveting eye-witness accounts as well as producing rainforests' worth of mad, bad and thoroughly dangerous books themselves. Reading all this stuff made researching my book a fascinating and enjoyable experience. Here are 10 of the best I encountered on the way.'
1. Roughing It by Mark Twain
This is one of Mark Twain's more neglected works, but it's one of my favourites. It's an invaluable firsthand account of gold rush-era America written with all the wit and perception you'd expect from such a great writer. His descriptions of the early Mormon church and his time in Salt Lake City are superb. Anyone thinking of joining the Church Of The Latter Day Saints should start here. Then stop. His assessment of the Book Of Mormon is a classic: 'chloroform in print'. . .
Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed.
She handles the complex algorithms of taboo—who's allowed to joke about what, to whom, using what terminology—with instant precision: "Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I'm one of the few people that believe it was the blacks." (The joke exposes not the ancient perfidy of any particular race but the absurdity of blaming entire races for anything.) Her best jokes are thought experiments in the internal logic of political correctness: "I want to get an abortion, but my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving."
If you haven't seen or heard the Sam Harris stump speech the Idea City Conference Links are good ones.
The details still seem sketchy and I suspect we're going to find out a lot more in the next few days. But it now seems that Woodward -- who has long been publicly critical of the Fitzgerald investigation -- has been part of it from the beginning. Literally, the beginning.
From the Post account it appears that Woodward was told of Valerie Plame's identity before any other journalist by an as-yet-unnamed senior administration official who is not Karl Rove or Scooter Libby.
More problematically for Woodward, he didn't tell his own Post editors about any of this until last month and then only after the unnamed senior administration official came forward to Fitzgerald and told him about it. That apparently led Fitzgerald to subpoena Woodward
Woodward claims that he told Post reporter Walter Pincus about it at the time. But Pincus says he has no recollection of such a conversation."
The Blog | John Cusack: On Bush, the Dems, Jon Stewart, Hunter Thompson, Bill Moyers, and King (not Don) | The Huffington Post: "Murder is a crime. Uunless it is done...by a poooollliiicceeeman. Or an ariissssstoocrat -- Joe Strummer
Bush 2. How depressing, corrupt, unlawful and tragically absurd the administration's world view actually is...how low the moral bar has been lowered...and (though I know I'm capable of intellectually lazy notions of collective guilt) how complicit our silence as citizens is...Nixon, a true fiend, looks like a paragon of virtue next to the criminally incompetent robber barons now raiding the present and future."
This makes a point I've been trying to make for a long time and does it well. Scientists have no problem calling the nuts to account when they attack evolution. So why do they have a problem saying there is not evidence for virgin birth or resurrection of the dead. Is there some evidence someone is hiding that supports such super-natural claims. The answer is no, just like there is no evidence for Creationism or the substitute ID.
The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 24, Number 5.
In the course of reporting a book on the scientific canon and pestering hundreds of researchers at the nation's great universities about what they see as the essential vitamins and minerals of literacy in their particular disciplines, I have been hammered into a kind of twinkle-eyed cartoon coma by one recurring message. Whether they are biologists, geologists, physicists, chemists, astronomers, or engineers, virtually all my sources topped their list of what they wish people understood about science with a plug for Darwin's dandy idea. Would you please tell the public, they implored, that evolution is for real? Would you please explain that the evidence for it is overwhelming and that an appreciation of evolution serves as the bedrock of our understanding of all life on this planet?
In other words, the scientists wanted me to do my bit to help fix the terrible little statistic they keep hearing about, the one indicating that many more Americans believe in angels, devils, and poltergeists than in evolution. According to recent polls, about 82 percent are convinced of the reality of heaven (and 63 percent think they're headed there after death); 51 percent believe in ghosts; but only 28 percent are swayed by the theory of evolution.
Scientists think this is terrible—the public's bizarre underappreciation of one of science's great and unshakable discoveries, how we and all we see came to be—and they're right. Yet I can't help feeling tetchy about the limits most of them put on their complaints. You see, they want to augment this particular figure—the number of people who believe in evolution—without bothering to confront a few other salient statistics that pollsters have revealed about America's religious cosmogony. Few scientists, for example, worry about the 77 percent of Americans who insist that Jesus was born to a virgin, an act of parthenogenesis that defies everything we know about mammalian genetics and reproduction. Nor do the researchers wring their hands over the 80 percent who believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the laws of thermodynamics be damned.
No, most scientists are not interested in taking on any of the mighty cornerstones of Christianity. They complain about irrational thinking, they despise creationist "science," they roll their eyes over America's infatuation with astrology, telekinesis, spoon bending, reincarnation, and UFOs, but toward the bulk of the magic acts that have won the imprimatur of inclusion in the Bible, they are tolerant, respectful, big of tent. Indeed, many are quick to point out that the Catholic Church has endorsed the theory of evolution and that it sees no conflict between a belief in God and the divinity of Jesus and the notion of evolution by natural selection. If the pope is buying it, the reason for most Americans' resistance to evolution must have less to do with religion than with a lousy advertising campaign.
So, on the issue of mainstream monotheistic religions and the irrationality behind many of religion's core tenets, scientists often set aside their skewers, their snark, and their impatient demand for proof, and instead don the calming cardigan of a a kiddie-show host on public television. They reassure the public that religion and science are not at odds with one another, but rather that they represent separate "magisteria," in the words of the formerly alive and even more formerly scrappy Stephen Jay Gould. Nobody is going to ask people to give up their faith, their belief in an everlasting soul accompanied by an immortal memory of every soccer game their kids won, every moment they spent playing fetch with the dog. Nobody is going to mock you for your religious beliefs. Well, we might if you base your life decisions on the advice of a Ouija board; but if you want to believe that someday you'll be seated at a celestial banquet with your long-dead father to your right and Jane Austen to your left-and that she'll want to talk to you for another hundred million years or more—that's your private reliquary, and we're not here to jimmy the lock.
Consider the very different treatments accorded two questions presented to Cornell University's "Ask an Astronomer" Web site. To the query, "Do most astronomers believe in God, based on the available evidence?" the astronomer Dave Rothstein replies that, in his opinion, "modern science leaves plenty of room for the existence of God . . . places where people who do believe in God can fit their beliefs in the scientific framework without creating any contradictions." He cites the Big Bang as offering solace to those who want to believe in a Genesis equivalent and the probabilistic realms of quantum mechanics as raising the possibility of "God intervening every time a measurement occurs" before concluding that, ultimately, science can never prove or disprove the existence of a god, and religious belief doesn't—and shouldn't—"have anything to do with scientific reasoning."
How much less velveteen is the response to the reader asking whether astronomers believe in astrology. "No, astronomers do not believe in astrology," snarls Dave Kornreich. "It is considered to be a ludicrous scam. There is no evidence that it works, and plenty of evidence to the contrary." Dr. Kornreich ends his dismissal with the assertion that in science "one does not need a reason not to believe in something." Skepticism is "the default position" and "one requires proof if one is to be convinced of something's existence."
In other words, for horoscope fans, the burden of proof is entirely on them, the poor gullible gits; while for the multitudes who believe that, in one way or another, a divine intelligence guides the path of every leaping lepton, there is no demand for evidence, no skepticism to surmount, no need to worry. You, the religious believer, may well find subtle support for your faith in recent discoveries—that is, if you're willing to upgrade your metaphors and definitions as the latest data demand, seek out new niches of ignorance or ambiguity to fill with the goose down of faith, and accept that, certain passages of the Old Testament notwithstanding, the world is very old, not everything in nature was made in a week, and (can you turn up the mike here, please?) Evolution Happens.
And if you don't find substantiation for your preferred divinity or your most cherished rendering of the afterlife somewhere in the sprawling emporium of science, that's fine, too. No need to lose faith when you were looking in the wrong place to begin with. Science can't tell you whether God exists or where you go when you die. Science cannot definitively rule out the heaven option, with its helium balloons and Breck hair for all. Science in no way wants to be associated with terrifying thoughts, like the possibility that the pericentury of consciousness granted you by the convoluted, gelatinous, and transient organ in your skull just may be the whole story of you-dom. Science isn't arrogant. Science trades in the observable universe and testable hypotheses. Religion gets the midnight panic fêtes. But you've heard about evolution, right?
So why is it that most scientists avoid criticizing religion even as they decry the supernatural mind-set? For starters, some researchers are themselves traditionally devout, keeping a kosher kitchen or taking Communion each Sunday. I admit I'm surprised whenever I encounter a religious scientist. How can a bench-hazed Ph.D., who might in an afternoon deftly purée a colleague's PowerPoint presentation on the nematode genome into so much fish chow, then go home, read in a two-thousand-year-old chronicle, riddled with internal contradictions, of a meta-Nobel discovery like "Resurrection from the Dead," and say, gee, that sounds convincing? Doesn't the good doctor wonder what the control group looked like?
Scientists, however, are a far less religious lot than the American population, and, the higher you go on the cerebro-magisterium, the greater the proportion of atheists, agnostics, and assorted other paganites. According to a 1998 survey published in Nature, only 7 percent of members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences professed a belief in a "personal God." (Interestingly, a slightly higher number, 7.9 percent, claimed to believe in "personal immortality," which may say as much about the robustness of the scientific ego as about anything else.) In other words, more than 90 percent of our elite scientists are unlikely to pray for divine favoritism, no matter how badly they want to beat a competitor to publication. Yet only a flaskful of the faithless have put their nonbelief on record or publicly criticized religion, the notable and voluble exceptions being Richard Dawkins of Oxford University and Daniel Dennett of Tufts University. Nor have Dawkins and Dennett earned much good will among their colleagues for their anticlerical views; one astronomer I spoke with said of Dawkins, "He's a really fine parish preacher of the fire-and-brimstone school, isn't he?"
So, what keeps most scientists quiet about religion? It's probably something close to that trusty old limbic reflex called "an instinct for self-preservation." For centuries, science has survived quite nicely by cultivating an image of reserve and objectivity, of being above religion, politics, business, table manners. Scientists want to be left alone to do their work, dazzle their peers, and hire grad students to wash the glassware. When it comes to extramural combat, scientists choose their crusades cautiously. Going after Uri Geller or the Ra‘lians is risk-free entertainment, easier than making fun of the sociology department. Battling the creationist camp has been a much harder and nastier fight, but those scientists who have taken it on feel they have a direct stake in the debate and are entitled to wage it, since the creationists, and more recently the promoters of "intelligent design" theory, claim to be as scientific in their methodology as are the scientists.
But when a teenager named Darrell Lambert was chucked out of the Boy Scouts for being an atheist, scientists suddenly remembered all those gels they had to run and dark matter they had to chase, and they kept quiet. Lambert had explained the reason why, despite a childhood spent in Bible classes and church youth groups, he had become an atheist. He took biology in ninth grade, and, rather than devoting himself to studying the bra outline of the girl sitting in front of him, he actually learned some biology. And what he learned in biology persuaded him that the Bible was full of . . . short stories. Some good, some inspiring, some even racy, but fiction nonetheless. For his incisive, reasoned, scientific look at life, and for refusing to cook the data and simply lie to the Boy Scouts about his thoughts on God—as some advised him to do—Darrell Lambert should have earned a standing ovation from the entire scientific community. Instead, he had to settle for an interview with Connie Chung, right after a report on the Gambino family.
Scientists have ample cause to feel they must avoid being viewed as irreligious, a prionic life-form bent on destroying the most sacred heifer in America. After all, academic researchers graze on taxpayer pastures. If they pay the slightest attention to the news, they've surely noticed the escalating readiness of conservative politicians and an array of highly motivated religious organizations to interfere with the nation's scientific enterprise—altering the consumer information Web site at the National Cancer Institute to make abortion look like a cause of breast cancer, which it is not, or stuffing scientific advisory panels with anti-abortion "faith healers."
Recently, an obscure little club called the Traditional Values Coalition began combing through descriptions of projects supported by the National Institutes of Health and complaining to sympathetic congressmen about those they deemed morally "rotten," most of them studies of sexual behavior and AIDS prevention. The congressmen in turn launched a series of hearings, calling in institute officials to inquire who in the Cotton-pickin' name of Mather cares about the perversions of Native American homosexuals, to which the researchers replied, um, the studies were approved by a panel of scientific experts, and, gee, the Native American community has been underserved and is having a real problem with AIDS these days. Thus far, the projects have escaped being nullified, but the raw display of pious dentition must surely give fright to even the most rakishly freethinking and comfortably tenured professor. It's one thing to monkey with descriptions of Darwinism in a high-school textbook. But to threaten to take away a peer-reviewed grant! That Dan Dennett; he is something of a pompous leafblower, isn't he?
Yet the result of wincing and capitulating is a fresh round of whacks. Now it's not enough for presidential aspirants to make passing reference to their "faith." Now a reporter from Newsweek sees it as his privilege, if not his duty, to demand of Howard Dean, "Do you see Jesus Christ as the son of God and believe in him as the route to salvation and eternal life?" In my personal fairy tale, Dean, who as a doctor fits somewhere in the phylum Scientificus, might have boomed, "Well, with his views on camels and rich people, he sure wouldn't vote Republican!" or maybe, "No, but I hear he has a Mel Gibson complex." Dr. Dean might have talked about patients of his who suffered strokes and lost the very fabric of themselves and how he has seen the centrality of the brain to the sense of being an individual. He might have expressed doubts that the self survives the brain, but, oh yes, life goes on, life is bigger, stronger, and better endowed than any Bush in a jumpsuit, and we are part of the wild, tumbling river of life, our molecules were the molecules of dinosaurs and before that of stars, and this is not Bulfinch mythology, this is corroborated reality.
Alas for my phantasm of fact, Howard Dean, M.D., had no choice but to chime, oh yes, he certainly sees Jesus as the son of God, though he at least dodged the eternal life clause with a humble mumble about his salvation not being up to him.
I may be an atheist, and I may be impressed that, through the stepwise rigor of science, its Spockian eyebrow of doubt always cocked, we have learned so much about the universe. Yet I recognize that, from there to here, and here to there, funny things are everywhere. Why is there so much dark matter and dark energy in the great Out There, and why couldn't cosmologists have given them different enough names so I could keep them straight? Why is there something rather than nothing, and why is so much of it on my desk? Not to mention the abiding mysteries of e-mail, like why I get exponentially more spam every day, nine-tenths of it invitations to enlarge an appendage I don't have.
I recognize that science doesn't have all the answers and doesn't pretend to, and that's one of the things I love about it. But it has a pretty good notion of what's probable or possible, and virgin births and carpenter rebirths just aren't on the list. Is there a divine intelligence, separate from the universe but somehow in charge of the universe, either in its inception or in twiddling its parameters? No evidence. Is the universe itself God? Is the universe aware of itself? We're here. We're aware. Does that make us God? Will my daughter have to attend a Quaker Friends school now?
I don't believe in life after death, but I'd like to believe in life before death. I'd like to think that one of these days we'll leave superstition and delusional thinking and Jerry Falwell behind. Scientists would like that, too. But for now, they like their grants even more.
Reprinted from The American Scholar 72, no. 2, Spring 2004. (c)Natalie Angier. By permission of the publishers.
Natalie Angier is a science reporter for the New York Times and author of , and . In 1991 she won a Pulitzer Prize for her science reporting.
Just now I heard a sound from the other room. It's the middle of the day and K is at work, so it can't be her. K's cat? Possibly, but this sounded more like footsteps. . .
The search for existential truth may not lend itself to multiple-choice questions. But there are facts in philosophy, as well as midterms and finals (sampled below) to make sure you know them. Yet even in such certainty lies uncertainty. ‘I tell my students that if they can give me a good reason why an answer that I say is the wrong one is actually better than the one that I say is correct, they will get full credit,’ says Prof. Bonnie Steinbock, who teaches ‘Moral Choices’ at the State University of New York, Albany. ‘I also add that this has never happened. But they do have the opportunity to argue the case.’"
This is encouraging. George Will, Cokey Roberts, and Sam Donaldson all identify ID for what it is, an attempt to inject religion into science. George Will was particularly pointed in his comments. My favorite exchange was when Cokey Roberts speaking of ID said, "It's almost embarrassing." and George Will's response was an incredulous, "Almost!"
We have more good news. This Shocker just in. Ricky Santorum flipflops in a good way.
BEAVER FALLS - U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said Saturday that he doesn't believe that intelligent design belongs in the science classroom.
Santorum's comments to The Times are a shift from his position of several years ago, when he wrote in a Washington Times editorial that intelligent design is a "legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in the classroom."
But on Saturday, the Republican said that, "Science leads you where it leads you."
A Romanian prisoner is suing God for failing to save him from the Devil.
The inmate, named as Pavel M in media reports, accused God of 'cheating, abuse and traffic of influence'.
His complaint reads: 'I, the undersigned Pavel M, currently jailed at Timisoara Penitentiary serving a 20 years sentence for murder, request legal action against God, resident in Heaven, and represented here by the Romanian Orthodox Church, for committing the following crimes: cheating, concealment, abuse against people's interest, taking bribe and traffic of influence.'
The inmate argued that his baptism was a contract between him and God who was supposed to keep the Devil away and keep him out of trouble.
He added: 'God even claimed and received from me various goods and prayers in exchange for forgiveness and the promise that I would be rid of problems and have a better life.
'But on the contrary I was left in Devil's hands.'
The complaint was sent to the Timisoara Court of Justice and forwarded to the prosecutor's office.
But prosecutors said it would probably be dropped and they were unable to subpoena God to court.
Man Jumped From Truck Following Argument
November 12th, 2005 @ 9:21pm
(KSL News) Police now say an argument caused a 21-year-old man to jump from a moving truck in South Jordan.
Tyler Poulson was riding with his brothers last night when he became offended by one of them using profanity. Poulson, who recently returned from an LDS mission, threatened to get out of the truck if he continued.
One of the men, not thinking he would, told Poulson to.
Earlier police said the car was going about 35 miles an hour when Poulson opened the door and jumped. He was pronounced dead on scene.
A few years ago, I taught the following lesson in my daughter's kindergarden class and my graduate methods class in the same week. It worked pretty well in both. Anyone who has a kid in kindergarten, some good graduate students, or both, might want to try this. It was especially fun for the instructor.
To start, I hold up some nails and ask 'does everyone likes to eat nails?' The kindergarten kids scream, 'Nooooooo.' The graduate students say 'No,' trying to look cool. I say I'm going to convince them otherwise.
I hand out a little magnet to everyone. I ask the class to figure out what it sticks to and what it doesn't stick to. After a few minutes running around the classroom, the kindergardners figure out that magnets stick to stuff with iron in it, and anything without iron in it doesn't stick. The graduate students sit there looking cool.
From behind the table, I pull out a box of Total Cereal (teaching is just like doing magic tricks, except that you get paid more as a magician). I show them the list of ingredients; 'iron, 100 percent' is on the list. I ask by a show of hands whether this is the same iron as in the nails. 3 of 23 kindergarten kids say 'yes'; 5 of 44 Harvard graduate students say 'yes' (almost the same percent in both classes!)."
By CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY
'Bush Orders Staff to Attend Ethics Briefings; White House Counsel to Give 'Refresher' Course'
- The Washington Post, Nov. 5
GOOD morning, everyone.'
'Good morning, Mr. Bonhoeffer.'
'I hope everyone had an ethical weekend. I thought we'd start this morning with a situational exercise. Karl, suppose a reporter called you and said, 'I will write a very favorable article for my paper and make you look really good if you will tell me a super-duper classified national secret.' What would the correct thing to do be?'
'Tell him, 'Let me get back to you on that?''
(Laughter)
'All right, settle down, everyone. This is no laughing matter. Anyone?'
'I would tell the reporter, 'I could, but that would be wrong.''
'Thank you, Nicole. Technically fine, but can you tell us who in the White House first said that?'
'Bill Clinton?'
'I don't think he ever said that.'
'Eleanor Roosevelt?'
'No. Anyone?'
'Spiro Agnew?'
'You're getting warmer. Karl, please put away your Blackberry. Can you tell us?'
'Richard M. Nixon, 37th president of the United States. Three-hundred-and-one electoral votes to Humphrey's 191.'
'Very good. And what happened to Mr. Nixon?'
'He retired, wrote influential books and became a senior statesman.'
'No, Karl, he resigned. Or didn't you have television and newspapers in Salt Lake City?'
'I went to the Nixon Library on a field trip once. They didn't say anything about any stupid resignation.'
'Let's move on. Now suppose - yes, Mr. Cheney?'
'I have to go. I have a meeting.'
'Please sit down. This is important.'
'So's my meeting.'
'Perhaps you'd like to share with us what it's about?'
'Torture.'
'Thank you. I was planning to talk about that tomorrow, but since you've brought it up, let's talk about it now. Would you give us all an example of when you feel it is ethical to torture someone?'
'If that someone was about to launch an attack on the United States. Or making me late for a meeting. I think that under those clearly defined circumstances, tearing out their fingernails or immersing them in boiling oil would be, yes, a reasonable policy.'
'I'm glad you brought up the subject of oil. Let's suppose there was an energy-related company. And a high government official, say, used to work for it. Now let's say that his country - call it Country A - went to war against Country B. And the energy-related company then got a very lucrative contract to rebuild Country B. Now let's say that the high government official agitated - indeed, pushed - his government to invade Country B in the first place. Do you see any potential conflict there?'
'None at all.'
'Anyone? Yes, Harriet?'
'The vice president is the second most brilliant person I have ever met, and if he says it's O.K. to pull out people's -'
'Harriet, we're not discussing whether someone is smart.'
'Sorry. I withdraw.'
'I'm out of here.'
'Mr. Vice President, class is not over until I - what is it, Karl? I asked you to put away your Blackberry.'
'It's Tim Russert. What if he's calling to reveal the name of another undercover C.I.A. operative?'
'Then you put your hands over your ears and say loudly, 'Not listening! - La la la la la la la!' This is what Aristotle advises in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. Why don't we end there for today? Don't forget the assigned reading. And a few of you still owe me papers!'
"President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.
Neither assertion is wholly accurate."
But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.
"I'm from New York," O'Reilly said on the radio Friday. "There are dozens of people in my neighborhood, on Long Island, who are dead because of 9/11, and you people are telling me you're not going to allow military recruiting out there. Hey, it's serious, and I think you guys need a wake-up call."
OíReilly is upset about the city's proposition discouraging public schools from allowing military recruiters on campus. On his national radio show Tuesday, he said San Francisco should not get a nickel of federal funds.
"And if al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it," he said. "We're going to say, look every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower, go ahead."
Click on the picture to play the video
Quicktime Video 3.5MB 2'20 Quicktime Required Ezra Klein has a word or two to say, and they include the title for this post. Thanks Ezra.
deseretnews.com | Y. professor thinks bombs, not planes, toppled WTC: "The physics of 9/11 — including how fast and symmetrically one of the World Trade Center buildings fell — prove that official explanations of the collapses are wrong, says a Brigham Young University physics professor.
In fact, it's likely that there were 'pre-positioned explosives' in all three buildings at ground zero, says Steven E. Jones.
In a paper posted online Tuesday and accepted for peer-reviewed publication next year, Jones adds his voice to those of previous skeptics, including the authors of the Web site www.wtc7.net, whose research Jones quotes. Jones' article can be found at www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html.
Stuart Johnson, Deseret Morning News
'It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three (WTC) buildings,' BYU physics professor Steven E. Jones says.
Jones, who conducts research in fusion and solar energy at BYU, is calling for an independent, international scientific investigation 'guided not by politicized notions and constraints but rather by observations and calculations.
'It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three buildings and set off after the two plane crashes — which were actually a diversion tactic,' he writes. 'Muslims are (probably) not to blame for bringing down the WTC buildings after all,' Jones writes.
As for speculation about who might have planted the explosives, Jones said, 'I don't usually go there. There's no point in doing that until we do the scientific investigation.'"
There are few that oppose abortion in all cases, and yet many of those consider it murder. The hypocrisy is obvious if not often mentioned.
John Paulos in this interesting article on the subject makes use of a contrary-to-fact exaggeration to illustrate the point and perhaps provoke some further thought on the subject. He begins by relating the often told anecdote about the woman at a posh event being asked by a wealthy man if she would have sex with him for a million dollars. Following a positive response he offers her ten, she is outraged, asking what do you take me for. His response, that's been established we're now just discussing price. He follows with this.
Let's ask ourselves what position opponents of abortion — say on the Supreme Court or elsewhere — might take if two biological facts about the world were to change. The first assumption we'll make is that for some unknown reason — a strange new virus, a hole in the ozone layer, some food additive or poison — women throughout the world suddenly become pregnant with 10 to 20 fetuses at a time. The second assumption is that advances in neonatal technology make it possible for doctors to easily save some or all of these fetuses a few months after conception, but if they don't intervene at this time all the fetuses will die.
Abortion opponents who believe that all fetuses have an absolute right to life would surely opt for some intervention. Otherwise, all the fetuses would die.
Their choice would thus be either to adhere to their absolutist position and be overwhelmed by a population explosion of overwhelming magnitude or else act to save only one or a few of the fetuses. The latter choice would be tantamount to abortion since all the fetuses are viable. It would, nevertheless, take someone very, very doctrinaire to opt to have the birth rate increase, at least initially, by a factor of 10 to 20.
I've found money, porn, and shopping lists in books I've purchased at used bookstores over the years. How about you, what have you discovered that was used as a bookmark?
"You’re reading, reading a book, and when you’re not reading it, you mark your place. Maybe you simply use the book-jacket flap; if it’s a disposable book or you’re just a heathen, you fold the page corner down. But you usually mark the page with a foreign object, anything from a shred of newspaper to a strip of embossed leather someone bought you at Stonehenge. Often you don’t have much of a choice—because you also have a life outside of that reading, a life of rocket-launched inconvenience and impromptu upheaval, you often have to use whatever’s at hand to hold your space. Indeed, if you have children, then you know interruption like Priam knew Greeks hammering at his door for years and are usually rewarded for your endurance with an array of glitter-and-yarn craft-class bookmarks. But where are they now? You have to put that book down because the dog’s tongue is suddenly stuck to the freezer rack, or the urologist’s nurse has just called you in, or you’re suddenly at your stop and so will end up hustling off the train in a wad of shuffling commuters with only your finger inserted into the book’s crevice."
I discovered an error in my quicktime code that caused all the videos to download when PC users accessed the page with IE. I've fixed it. Would a few of you who have PCs try a few of the videos both with Firefox and IE and give me detailed reports of any problems in the comments. I also want to know if you're successful. Some Windows users have reported updating their activex has solved the problem.
If you send me an email about a problem with the site please tell me what operating system as well as what browser you are using.
In the last couple of days, the Republican leaders of Congress have been piously demanding a full investigation into the sources of a Washington Post article about the Central Intelligence Agency's chain of secret prison camps. These same leaders have spent 18 months crushing any serious look at the actual abuse of prisoners at those camps, and at camps run by the American military. And for more than two years, they have expressed no interest in whether the White House leaked the name of a covert C.I.A. operative to punish a critic of the Iraq war.
All religions, including Buddhism, stem from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests. In contrast, science tells us that we are incidental, accidental. Far from being the raison d'ętre of the universe, we appeared through sheer happenstance, and we could vanish in the same way. This is not a comforting viewpoint, but science, unlike religion, seeks truth regardless of how it makes us feel. Buddhism raises radical questions about our inner and outer reality, but it is finally not radical enough to accommodate science's disturbing perspective. The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality can.
A leading campaign group has demanded an urgent inquiry into a report that US troops indiscriminately used a controversial incendiary weapon during the battle for Fallujah. Photographic evidence gathered from the aftermath of the battle suggests that women and children were killed by horrific burns caused by the white phosphorus shells dropped by US forces.
The 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons bans the use of weapons such as napalm and white phosphorus against civilian - but not military - targets. The US did not sign the treaty and has continued to use white phosphorus and an updated version of napalm...
The Pentagon has always admitted it used phosphorus during last year's assault on the city, which US commanders said was an insurgent stronghold. But they claimed they used the brightly burning shells "very sparingly" and only to illuminate combat areas.
But the documentary Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre, broadcast yesterday by the Italian state broadcaster, RAI, suggested the shells were commonly used and killed an unspecified number of civilians. Photographs obtained by RAI from the Studies Centre of Human Rights in Fallujah, show the bodies of dozens of Fallujah residents whose skin has been dissolved or caramelised by the effects of the phosphorus shells. The use of incendiary weapons against civilian targets is banned by treaty.
Kansas, Where "Ignorant" is the New "Educated": "Kansas: People say that it's flat. But to me it seems to be going downhill. (tip to Dan)
Somewhere right now in Kansas, there is a little child who may grow up to be a brilliant scientist. She may make fantastic contributions to science, and future generations may remember her as one of the brightest intellectual lights of her time. But if so, it will be despite the public education that she received in Kansas, because today six dimwits on the state's Board of Education voted to lower the standards for how science is taught.
Needless to say, they don't think they are lowering the standards--to the contrary, they think they are raising them. That's how you can tell they are dimwits.
Supporters of the standards said they will promote academic freedom. 'It gets rid of a lot of dogma that's being taught in the classroom today,' said board member John Bacon, an Olathe Republican.
If George Orwell were alive, I think he'd agree this development is not only good but doubleplusgood. Because just teaching kids the right answers is an unbearable infringement on academic freedom. Just think of the advantages that those Kansas students will have when they go up against their peers from other states and other parts of the world, who only know the accepted facts and theories and think that logical consistency is desirable in science."
Susan Ralston is described as Rove's 'right hand man.' She is also a Filipino American and her involvement in the leaks probe has generated news coverage in the Phillipines. The Philippine News reports today that she will again 'appear before Fitzgerald' concerning a telephone call between Matthew Cooper and Karl Rove on July 11, 2003.
Ralston appears to be a person of critical interest in the investigation, just like her boss Rove....In one of the two appearances before the Special Prosecutor, she and another Rove aide, Israel Hernandez, were asked why Rove’s phone conversation with journalist Cooper was not recorded in the logbook. The response was that Cooper did not dial Rove directly but was switched to his line by the operator.
Dick Cheney, apparently worried about job security, has negotiated a deal with Kimberly-Clark to help market Depend® undergarments. Everyone involved agrees it is a perfect fit. Dick, anxious to get started, said "this is a product I believe in, and one that I personally use. It will be nice working in a job where leaks just don't happen."
For the common reader, "Pride and Prejudice" is a romantic comedy. His or her pleasure comes from the vividness of Austen's characters and how familiar they still seem: it's as if we know Elizabeth and Darcy. On a more literary level, we enjoy Austen's pointed dialogue and admire her expert way with humor. For similar reasons, critics have long called "Pride and Prejudic" a classic - their ultimate (if not well defined) expression of approval.
But for an emerging school of literary criticism known as Literary Darwinism, the novel is significant for different reasons. Just as Charles Darwin studied animals to discover the patterns behind their development, Literary Darwinists read books in search of innate patterns of human behavior: child bearing and rearing, efforts to acquire resources (money, property, influence) and competition and cooperation within families and communities. They say that it's impossible to fully appreciate and understand a literary text unless you keep in mind that humans behave in certain universal ways and do so because those behaviors are hard-wired into us. For them, the most effective and truest works of literature are those that reference or exemplify these basic facts.
note: some with problems with Quicktime 7 have reported that updating ACTIVEX has solved them.
A Danish experiment in testing 'the limits of freedom of speech' has backfired - or succeeded spectacularly - after newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed provoked an outcry.
Thousands of Muslims have taken to the streets in protest at the caricatures, the newspaper that published them has received death threats and two of its cartoonists have been forced into hiding.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen called the cartoons a 'necessary provocation'Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's leading daily, defied Islam's ban on images of the Prophet by printing cartoons by 12 different artists.
In one he is depicted as a sabre-wielding terrorist accompanied by women in burqas, in another his turban appears to be a bomb and in a third he is portrayed as a schoolboy by a blackboard.
The ambassadors of 11 Muslim countries called on Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the prime minister, to take 'necessary steps' against the 'defamation of Islam'.
But Mr Rasmussen, the head of a centre-Right minority coalition dependent for its survival on support from an anti-foreigner party, called the cartoons a 'necessary provocation' and refused to act.
'I will never accept that respect for a religious stance leads to the curtailment of criticism, humour and satire in the press,' he said.
Most television dramas play with the question "what if?" NBC's "West Wing" revels in "if only...."
Sunday's live presidential debate was the quintessence of wishful writing. Two intelligent, principled candidates tossed aside debate rules and went at each other full throttle on live television, debating everything from immigration and energy policy to foreign debt relief.
This is one of the better articles I've read on the topic. Paulos draws an interesting analogy between evolution and free market economies to make his point. I love the irony of using the free market in the analogy, since most fundamentalists are champions of the magic of the market and yet.
The theory of intelligent design, the purportedly more scientific descendant of creation science, rejects Darwin's theory of evolution as being unable to explain the complexity of life. How, ask its supporters, can biological phenomena such as the clotting of blood have arisen just by chance. . .the theory of evolution does explain the evolution of complex biological organisms and phenomena, and the argument from design, which dates from the 18th century, has been decisively refuted. Rehashing the refutation is not my goal. Those who reject evolution are usually immune to such arguments.
Rather, my intention here is to develop some loose analogies between these biological issues and related economic ones and to show that these analogies point to a surprising crossing of political lines. Let me begin by asking how it is that modern free market economies are as complex as they are, boasting amazingly elaborate production, distribution and communication systems? Go into almost any drug store and you can find your favourite candy bar. And what's true at the personal level is true at the industrial level. Somehow there are enough ball bearings and computer chips in just the right places in factories all over the country. The physical infrastructure and communication networks are also marvels of integrated complexity. Fuel supplies are, by and large, where they're needed. Email reaches you in Miami as well as in Milwaukee, not to mention Barcelona and Bangkok.
The natural question, discussed first by Adam Smith and later by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper among others, is who designed this marvel of complexity? Which commissar decreed the number of packets of dental floss for each retail outlet? The answer, of course, is that no economic god designed this system. It emerged and grew by itself. No one argues that all the components of the candy bar distribution system must have been put into place at once, or else there would be no Snickers at the corner store.
Hell yes we're liberals and damn proud of it. A short clip from The West Wing that captures how I feel about being a Liberal. Check here for more on the West Wing Debate
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Sarcasm is so ubiquitous these days, it almost goes unnoticed. But, as David Beckham proved, when he was sent off this week for seemingly clapping a referee who had just booked him, not everyone is a fan. The trick is to use sarcasm intelligently, and sparingly.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Badr Zaman Badr and his brother Abdurrahim Muslim Dost relish writing a good joke that jabs a corrupt politician or distills the sufferings of fellow Afghans. Badr admires the political satires in 'The Canterbury Tales' and 'Gulliver's Travels,' and Dost wrote some wicked lampoons in the 1990s, accusing Afghan mullahs of growing rich while preaching and organizing jihad. So in 2002, when the U.S. military shackled the writers and flew them to Guantanamo among prisoners whom Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared 'the worst of the worst' violent terrorists, the brothers found life imitating farce.
Christian Fundamentalists are more concerned about protecting the virginity of their daughters than saving lives. I wonder where our resident fundamentalist comes down on this one? Is it like he says, they have to 'push their agenda' because we're doomed if they don't. Cervical Cancer Vaccine Gets Injected With a Social Issue
A new vaccine that protects against cervical cancer has set up a clash between health advocates who want to use the shots aggressively to prevent thousands of malignancies and social conservatives who say immunizing teenagers could encourage sexual activity.
Did the question even need to be asked. Does Scarborough really believe that it isn't. His tone, the fact that he raised the question seem to suggest that he does. Unbelievable.
Atheists are undoubtedly the least represented group in America. All one needs to do is ask the question. If a candidate is identified as an atheist do they have any chance at all of being elected?
It's quite possibly the last special interest group to establish a voice in Washington. The Secular Coalition for America has hired Lori Lipman Brown as its congressional lobbyist and national voice. Brown's main job? To educate the public about mistaken notions regarding atheists while making sure religion doesn't get a ringside seat at issue debates.
Brown plans to monitor several issues closely, including stem cell research, access to emergency contraception, physician-assisted suicide, school vouchers and faith-based initiatives. But her first foray into federal lobbying focused on an issue that caught the eye and ire of Brown: an education reauthorization bill that passed last month.
The House reauthorized Head Start with a controversial provision allowing faith-based organizations that run Head Start programs to hire teachers using religious preference as a qualification. Brown calls the provision "religious discrimination" and has joined the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Interfaith Alliance and the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination, among other church-state separation groups, to lobby the Senate to strike out any religion-based hiring provisions.
"When you give my federal tax dollars to a religious institution, you're freeing up other money for religious activities," Brown said.
Fox News repeatedly played up possible finds of imperial clothing, then buried reports discrediting these stories. Months after the naked procession, a poll found that many of those getting most of their news from Fox believed that the emperor had in fact been clothed.
For Americans, Getting Sick Has Its Price Survey Says U.S. Patients Pay More, Get Less Than Those in Other Western Nations
Americans pay more when they get sick than people in other Western nations and get more confused, error-prone treatment, according to the largest survey to compare U.S. health care with other nations.
The survey of nearly 7,000 sick adults in the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and Germany found Americans were the most likely to pay at least $1,000 in out-of-pocket expenses. More than half went without needed care because of cost and more than one-third endured mistakes and disorganized care when they did get treated.
This article does a good job of explaining what's going on. What the indictments really mean, and what my be coming down the road. The bottom line. Fitzgerald was ready to charge Libby and perhaps Cheney with violation of the Espionage Act. If Libby had said he got the information from Cheney and passed it to reporters that is what he would have been charged with. The solution for Cheney and Libby throw dirt in the umpires eye. Lie and say you got it from reporters. Now the prosecutor can't prove intent because you have lied and are sticking to your lie and that explains the obstruction of justice charge. So when the apologists on the right say there is no underlying crime point them to the indictment and this article.
In my last column, I tried to deflate expectations a bit about the likely consequences of the work of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald; to bring them down to the realistic level at which he was likely to proceed. I warned, for instance, that there might not be any indictments, and Fitzgerald might close up shop as the last days of the grand jury's term elapsed. And I was certain he would only indict if he had a patently clear case.
Now, however, one indictment has been issued -- naming Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby as the defendant, and charging false statements, perjury and obstruction of justice. If the indictment is to be believed, the case against Libby is, indeed, a clear one.
Having read the indictment against Libby, I am inclined to believe more will be issued. In fact, I will be stunned if no one else is indicted.
Indeed, when one studies the indictment, and carefully reads the transcript of the press conference, it appears Libby's saga may be only Act Two in a three-act play. And in my view, the person who should be tossing and turning at night, in anticipation of the last act, is the Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney.
Edward O. Wilson
Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published 150 years ago, but evolution by natural selection is still under attack from those wedded to a human-centred or theistic world view. Edward O. Wilson, who was raised a creationist, ponders why this should be, and whether science and religion can ever be reconciled
IT IS surpassingly strange that half of Americans recently polled (2004) not only do not believe in evolution by natural selection but do not believe in evolution at all. Americans are certainly capable of belief, and with rock-like conviction if it originates in religious dogma. In evidence is the 60 per cent that accept the prophecies of the Bible's Book of Revelation as truth, and in yet more evidence is the weight that faith-based positions hold in political life. Most of the religious right opposes the teaching of evolution in public schools, either by an outright ban on the subject or, at the least, by insisting that it be treated as 'only a theory' rather than a 'fact'.
Yet biologists are unanimous in concluding that evolution is a fact. The evidence they and thousands of others have adduced over 150 years falls together in intricate and interlocking detail. The multitudinous examples range from the small changes in DNA sequences observed as they occur in real time to finely graded sequences within larger evolutionary changes in the fossil record. Further, on the basis of comparably strong evidence, natural selection grows ever stronger as the prevailing explanation of evolution.
Many who accept the fact of evolution cannot, however, on religious grounds, accept the operation of blind chance and the absence of divine purpose implicit in natural selection. They support the alternative explanation of intelligent design. The reasoning they offer is not based on evidence but on the lack of it. The formulation of intelligent design is a default argument advanced in support of a non sequitur. It is in essence the following: there are some phenomena that have not yet been explained and that (most importantly) the critics personally cannot imagine being explained; therefore there must be a supernatural designer at work. The designer is seldom specified, but in the canon of intelligent design it is most certainly not Satan and his angels, nor any god or gods conspicuously different from those accepted in the believer's faith."
Most Americans believe someone in the Bush Administration did leak Valerie Plame's name to reporters – even though Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicted no one for doing that. Half of the public describes the matter as something of great importance to the country, and this poll finds low assessments of both the President and the Vice President – with the President's overall approval rating dropping again to its lowest point ever.
A great interview on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Keith asks him about right-wing talking points. I'll be putting up a torrent of the entire interview here , but this is the part I found most interesting.
We have noticed that Valerie Plame Wilson has lived in Washington since 1997. Where she was before that is not disclosed by research facilities at my disposal. But even if she was safe in Washington when the identity of her employer was given out, it does not mean that her outing was without consequence. We do not know what dealings she might have been engaging in which are now interrupted or even made impossible. We do not know whether the countries in which she worked before 1997 could accost her, if she were to visit any of them, confronting her with signed papers that gave untruthful reasons for her previous stay — that she was there only as tourist, or working for a fictitious U.S. company.
The importance of the law against revealing the true professional identity of an agent is advertised by the draconian punishment, under the federal code, for violating it. In the swirl of the Libby affair, one loses sight of the real offense, and it becomes almost inapprehensible what it is that Cheney/Libby/Rove got themselves into. But the sacredness of the law against betraying a clandestine soldier of the republic cannot be slighted.
Living in Utah is always an adventure. On Halloween we never get as many children screaming trick or treat as the neighbors since we are non-mormon and not on the safe list. (unofficial I assume). But the church is decidedly insular so it is not surprising to read in the Salt Lake Tribune, that in order to avoid contact with folk such as my family, some Mormons organize what they call "trunk or treat". Is it ironic then that only reported case of serious trouble was with the Mormons. You bet it is.
Lehi police are investigating an incident in which a vile containing a small amount of cocaine was found among a child's Halloween candy Monday night.
About 300 Lehi residents from three different wards of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gathered for a "trunk and treat" - where children run from car to car gathering candy - in a church parking lot on Traverse Ridge between 6 and 8 p.m., said Lehi City police Sgt. Jeff Swenson.
When I first watched this clip I didn't think it was particularly funny, but in light of this article, I'm not sure. What do you think? Is it funny or not. Alito writing backed privacy, gay rights - The Boston Globe: " As a senior at Princeton University, Samuel A. Alito Jr. chaired an undergraduate task force that recommended the decriminalization of sodomy, accused the CIA and the FBI of invading the privacy of citizens, and said discrimination against gays in hiring ''should be forbidden.'"
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