She is from Jerusalem and he is from Bethlehem

Iran has one of the only condom factories in the Middle East
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link RW

Best post headline this month

"We anticipate no mea culpa from the president"

"Libby was also one of the original signatories to the statement of principles of the Project for the New American Century.
He also signed on to the September 2000 report of the Project for the New American Century, "Rebuilding America's Defenses." That's the notorious one that mentions how difficult it would be to drastically increase Pentagon spending and to act unilaterally "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."

Matthew Rothschild/Progressive 28.10.05
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link common dreams
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"You've been brutalized, then you start to be brutal."

"Why?"

By distilling her message down to a one-word question Cindy Sheehan has accomplished her mission.
No one in an official position has the integrity, or the freedom, to answer her .
There are people around now answering the question in their various ways, but they're all either marginal or marginalized. Everyone else is afraid to.
The answer is taboo, proscribed, forbidden. You can hint at it, but if you get too close and your audience is too large, you'll pay.
In other news:
The President of Iran is threatening Israel with annihilation.
Israel is targeting terrorists and killing them daily, while Palestinians sporadically kill innocent Israelis.
Never mind that both Israel and the U.S. have threatened to invade Iran, because it may have nuclear weapons which pose a threat to Israel - which has nuclear weapons already, many of them.
Never mind that the Palestinians would be targeting the specific Israeli military officials responsible for the deaths of their own innocents, if they had the technology to do so and an economy to support it.
Never mind that the hatred of Israel in the Islamic world isn't springing full-grown from the hearts of sick men, but is a fire that Israel itself feeds every day, and gloats as it does so.
The news reminds us that Khomeini, when he took power in the 70's after the Shah was deposed and had fled to the U.S., threatened Israel with annihilation also.
But it doesn't remind us that the Shah was placed on the throne of Iran after the overthrow of a democratically elected government, in a coup planned and implemented by the C.I.A., because the Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, had - among other things - nationalized the Iranian oil industry.
Mossadegh was sentenced to three years in prison followed by house arrest for life.
Never mind that Iraq, right next door to Iran, has been invaded and occupied with immense bloodshed and devastation, in a move that much of the world sees as a joint effort by Israel and the U.S. to dominate the region.
It has to appear that Iran has become belligerent and must be put in its place. And it has to appear that there is no cause for that belligerence.
Aggravate the victim until he explodes, then punish him. This is the technique. Because the permission of the public is still necessary, there's still enough opportunity for things to shift away from the planned sequence.
I had a kind of vision the other day, that there would be nuclear war in December, or at least that nuclear weapons would be detonated somewhere.
I've been mulling it over since. It didn't have that "I can predict the weather!" "Look ma! Prophecy-man!" reaching behind it. Just a flag, or a warning light.
And the idea, that there would be something I could do about it, and what would that be?
This.

Google News
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Yahoo News

"Big media today wants to own the faucet, pipeline, water, and the reservoir. The rain clouds come next."

To get a flavor of how consolidated the industry has become, consider this: In 1990, the major broadcast networks--ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox--fully or partially owned just 12.5 percent of the new series they aired. By 2000, it was 56.3 percent. Just two years later, it had surged to 77.5 percent.

Ted Turner/WashingtonMonthly July/August 2004

G8, Africa nil

Geldof, having excluded African artists from the London concert, eventually gave his blessing to "Africa Calling", a hastily arranged concert in Cornwall. The sponsors included Nestle, accused of benefiting from the HIV/Aids epidemic in Africa by selling more milk substitute products; Rio Tinto, the world's largest mining corporation, condemned for alleged human rights and environmental abuses; and Britain's biggest arms manufacturer, BAE Systems - which, according Mike Lewis of the UK's Campaign Against Arms Trade, is "fuelling conflicts across Africa".

Stuart Hodkinson/Red Pepper November 2005
Independent UK 26.10.05

I keep having this urge to hiss "Hail Satan" whenever I see these guys on the TV. In that whisper/shriek the death-metal guys are so fond of. It's cathartic, but I worry the neighbors won't understand, not to mention the Mormon guys on the monitor feed.
I figure with my gimped up leg and all I must be way lower priority than before, so probably they don't run the really insightful crew, just the standard Panopticon bit. So, because of the neighbors, I don't do it all the time. But I do it.
Frist was spieling on "dependence on foreign oil" - his nuanced emphasis. Just that little teensy edge in the voice that says if you're good boys and girls you'll memorize this, because it's going to be on the test.
We're not worried about being dependent on oil, that's not it, no. Foreign oil. There's the dilemma.
Also, in keeping with our recent exposure here of the insidious NASCAR false enthusiasms - this business about Mexicans creeping through the SouthWest desert to steal our jobs?
Same guys, same tune.
It jacks up the rednecks and refocuses their anxieties, and anger, away from the real perps, the guys doing the "sic 'em" on the wetbacks - Chertoff, Frist et al. - and onto a pretty much voiceless and defenseless group of "foreigners".
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And Rosa Parks is gone. Enough progress got made that now most kids think of overt social racism like they think of the highways back then, when they're told there used to be a two or three foot band of trash all up and down the shoulder of the road until the anti-litter laws got passed, and enforced.
Tell 'em families used to drive along flinging their waxed paper and dixie cups out the window and they won't really believe you. It's true though, I was there, I remember, it was like that.
The local paper in a small California town, as late as the mid-sixties, would print the race of soldiers from the nearby Army base when they got arrested for D&D downtown. Not the white guys, just - "Pvt. Luther L. Washington, a Negro, ...". Otherwise it was - "Pvt. James T. Ankleford, arrested on charges of drunk and disorderly..."
That was forty years ago. Couldn't happen today. Too overt.
Rosa Parks did her move fifty years ago.
So who's going to do a Rosa Parks now? And what would it be?
How about some single mom on welfare refusing to take a scornful tone of voice off someone at the store when she uses her food stamp card?
How about a homeless guy refusing to put up with a snotty attitude from someone on a city bus?
Too nuanced, but there it is. It isn't race anymore, it's class.
Kenye West, and all that.
It hasn't been directly addressed by anyone official I've seen.
It's more like wait until the news cycle rolls around again, and we can forget about it.

Israel kills two Palestinians in West Bank
...since the killings of the settlers last week for which Israel has retaliated by restricting Palestinian traffic...
Palestinian officials said Israel had informed them of the second fatality...
...told Reuters Israel had killed one of its members...
Israel withdrew from Gaza last month but still occupies...
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"O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel"
-Traditional Christmas hymn

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It's not the sentiment, it's the linkage. The presentation of a unified body. Israel. With all its resonance and Biblical assertion.
It would sound a little awkward to hear "America killed 5 Iraqis in Ramadi" "America burned the corpses of two Taliban captives". So you don't hear that.
What you do hear is "a video purportedly showing American soldiers burning...".
Or you read "TV footage that purportedly shows US soldiers in Afghanistan burning the..."
Or "...in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba revealed more sexual abuses by the American soldiers there ..."
Not America, American - Americans.
It's deceptive, on the surface the sense of the writing is conveyed, you know what's meant and you just keep reading.
But it makes it sound like the land of Christmas is being attacked, and subconsciously a lot of people respond to what they've read in just that way.
The NASCAR thing was like that - all that hype and stars-and-stripes rah-rah, it gave dumber Americans a rallying point that had all kinds of tangential payoffs.
It pissed off the liberals and environtmentalists, it was a blue-collar sport so allegiance to it was allegiance to class, and it had gasoline running all through it, and it made lots of noise. But it didn't rise up out of the public soul, anymore than George Bush did.
The main push for that unifying and separating logo-saturated entertainment came directly through the media - the same media that with a straight face delivers these phrases that make it sound like Israel is being picked on and wounded by bad people, and only "responding" only "retaliating" for being attacked, never attacking.
The problem is arrogance I think - and a kind of desperation that arrogance makes inevitable - arrogance that underestimates its target audience.
I don't think this was the plan - I don't think it was supposed to fall apart so soon, though I do believe that that was intended eventually.
It's the kind of scam that makes the slide from one polarized stance to its opposite seem like relief and rescue - like positive change. It just wasn't supposed to happen this early.
And it's because they misjudged their audience - because a lot of those blue collar yobs are waking up to the fact that they've been lied to, that they've been asleep, and that some really creepy stuff has been happening while they were out.
So the great war between Good and Evil commences I guess, with team uniforms being sold at discount on the street.
Israel of course being the unmistakable Good. And anything that opposes it being automatically Evil.
It's just that the presence of the supporters and allies and champions - Pat Robertson, Sharon, Falwell, Netanyahu, Dobson, Perle, Bush, Feith, Cheney, Gonzales, so many others - is ugly and cruel and deceptive, which I've always thought were the traditional hallmarks of Evil.

Mr. TAYLOR of Mississippi:

"Mr. Speaker, I would like to speak with deep regret at the continued efforts of the majority to hide from the American people the true nature of the deficit that they have employed; that they have increased more debt in 2 years than in the first 200 years of our Nation. Their answer to that debt is $80 billion of more debt.
I do not think you should dare call yourself fiscal conservatives. I think what you should call yourself are the seeds of destruction for the greatest Nation this world has ever known."

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The new Federal Emergency Management Agency director on Wednesday[28.09.05] praised the prompt response by Mississippi and federal emergency officials to Hurricane Katrina.

"We're so impressed with the state we're using it as a model (for future disasters)," said R. David Paulson, at a news conference in Jackson. "It was something we've not seen in a long time. There was a unified system and the sharing of information."

Reached in Washington, 4th District U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor responded:

"I hope he's not calling it a model when local responders have to loot grocery stores to get their food. ... It's certainly not a model."

[...]
Taylor found it incredulous FEMA officials passed out brochures with the toll-free number to people with no working phones, he said.

"I hope he's not calling that a model. If so, he's as out of touch as the guy he replaced."

[...]
On Wednesday[28.09.05], Gov. Haley Barbour appeared on the CNN program, The Situation Room, where host Wolf Blitzer asked him about Taylor's assessment that FEMA deserved an F-minus for its response.

"That's why they got chocolate and vanilla, Wolf," replied Barbour, who has praised the partnership between state and federal officials.

Jerry Mitchell/Clarion-Ledger 29.09.05
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Taylor says his idea will be a tough sell to skeptical congressmen who will say people should have known better. But Taylor says no one could have known.

"I parked my truck in a place that had never flooded in Bay St. Louis's history. It went four feet under water. So again, I don't consider myself a dummy and I don't think any of these other people that have gone through this are dumb people. We just had something unimaginable happen."

Marcia Hill/WLOX 26.09.05
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He was just another Democratic politician in a GOP-controlled Congress focusing on the issues of the day: Iraq, health care and terrorism.

But since Hurricane Katrina barreled into the state and wiped out a good chunk of his coastal district - including his own Bay St. Louis home of 28 years - the 16-year congressman has transformed into a new breed of public servant.
He is now living with his family in a small home owned by his brother in Hancock County and working out of mobile units since the storm flooded his Gulfport office and ripped off the roof of his Ocean Springs office. A third mobile unit was set up in Bay St. Louis since Katrina also wiped out bridges in the area.
He is part sleuth, part relief worker and part civil engineer. And his phone lines are lit up.

"I wish there was a better way to make the front page of USA Today than to have my house blown down," Taylor said with a laugh. "I was hoping it would be on passing health care for reservists or something."

Julie Goodman/Clarion-Ledger 16.10.05
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To improve communications, DHS is "looking at ways to adapt military and advanced private sector communication technology for emergency use," Chertoff said.

"FEMA must work to replenish its ranks at the senior level with experienced staff," he added.
"I've brought in some experts from the private sector as well as from the military and inside the government to look at FEMA's business practices, to really re-engineer them for the 21st century," Chertoff told the lawmakers. "And, obviously as that study goes forward, that's going to identify additional things that we may need to do."

Chris Strohm/GovExec 21.10.05
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Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., criticized Chertoff's plan to use a "just-in-time" logistics strategy, saying he does not believe it would work during a disaster, especially when roads may not be passable.

"A hurricane is anything but an ideal world," Taylor said. "The aftermath of a nuclear, biological or chemical attack is going to be anything but an ideal world. The roads will not be passable. There will not be electricity. There will not be communications."

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Chertoff's pretending to just be one of the crowd - this is a man who heads the US Department of Homeland Security and he's talking like he just now found out FEMA's one of his responsibilities.
Here's Chertoff on July 13 this year:

"To ensure that our preparedness efforts have focused direction, we intend to consolidate the Department's existing preparedness efforts -- including planning, training, exercising, and funding -- into a single directorate led by an Under Secretary for Preparedness. Going forward, FEMA will be a direct report to the Secretary - but it will now focus on its historic and vital mission of response and recovery. The importance of this latter capacity was illustrated powerfully as Hurricane Dennis made landfall this week."

and a UPI story on Chertoff's restructuring of the DHS, on July 12 this year:

The long-awaited results of the so-called Second Stage Review that Chertoff launched in March are being closely held, but United Press International has spoken to several government officials present at briefings about Wednesday's roll out. All spoke on condition that they not be named or quoted directly, but their accounts of what Chertoff planned to announce tallied closely.
The change that is likely to draw the most attention as the country braces itself for the annual hurricane season is that the department's Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate is being dismantled. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency that currently makes up the bulk of the directorate, will return to being a stand-alone entity within the department, with a director, rather than the current undersecretary, reporting to straight to Chertoff.
But in a move that is likely to draw howls of protest from state and local emergency managers and FEMA's allies on Capitol Hill, the agency is being stripped of its preparedness functions, to concentrate on what some in the department see as its core competencies -- disaster response and recovery.

"It's going to be very difficult to argue the case that it makes sense to spilt up preparedness and response," said one former FEMA official who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivities of his current employer. "It's difficult enough (to plan responses to major disasters) when both those functions are in one place.
It's unclear how separating them will bring them into better sync."

Shaun Waterman/UPI 12.07.05

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FEMA has been under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security since March 1, 2003.
Chertoff has been the Secretary of Homeland Security since March 3, 2005.

Gene Taylor's the most inspiring politician I've seen in a long time.

Wilma is likely to be Mexico's worst weather disaster in history.

Most educated Iraqis want to vote against the constitution.

"The fact that so many scientists think it's likely a truck is heading for us means that the last thing we want to do is..."

Mainstream climate scientists, including Wallace, Steig and Battisti, generally get their research money from the federal government.
"That doesn't make them immune from bias", said Patrick Michaels, one of the most widely quoted global-warming skeptics. "Exaggerating the dangers of climate change can ensure a steady stream of money."
"Global warming competes with cancer and competes with AIDS for a finite amount of money," said Michaels, a University of Virginia climatologist and fellow of the libertarian Cato Institute. "Nobody ever won that fight by saying: My issue isn't important."
Michaels has received more than $165,000 in fuel-industry funding, including money from the coal industry to publish his own climate journal.

Sandi Doughton/seattletimes 11.10.05

Louisiana had its warmest September in 111 years of national records

Apocalypse Then
Winter Soldier DVD release
John Patterson/GuardianUK 14.10.05
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link percevalpress
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A site that calls itself wintersoldier.com is an attempt to hitchike on the phrase and backspin the message. The dishonesty in the name alone undoes any credibility the authors might have been given.
To say "But the mass murder of civilians was never American policy in Vietnam...", as though that somehow refutes what the soldiers were testifying to, is very lame.
That was the point then, and it's the point now. All kinds of terrible inhuman and horrifying things get done, and their effects used to further the aims of those who set up these forays into the unspeakable, then the cut-out short-circuits when the truth starts leaking under the door. What those guys did was bring it home. What the web has made possible in the case of the tip of the iceberg that the Abu Ghraib photos reveal, is those cut-outs don't work so well anymore, there's too much wiring now, too many nodes.
The point was, and is, that "policy" is a flag, a banner, a symbol.
The point was that everything those boys were told they were fighting for, and everything they were told they were fighting against, had been reversed somehow.
It looks like a lawn mower to me.
A rigid handle of good intentions and this horrible bloody chopping whirling nightmare down there in between the wheels.

4,000-year-old noodles

Hurricane Wilma by Tuesday

"In this respect, money is more democratic than talent since even an idiot can aspire to become a rich idiot in a nation ruled by rich idiots..."

James Harrison Channeling Hari Seldon

We Need To Be Told

"If we had all known then what we know now," said the New York Times on 24 August, "the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry."
The admission was saying, in effect, that powerful newspapers, like powerful broadcasting organisations, had betrayed their readers and viewersWith British-supplied Hawk jets and machine-guns, Suharto's army went on to crush the life out of a quarter of the population of East Timor: 200,000 people. Using the same Hawk jets and machine-guns, the same genocidal army is now attempting to crush the life out of the resistance movement in West Papua and protect the Freeport company, which is mining a mountain of copper in the province. (Henry Kissinger is "director emeritus".) Some 100,000 Papuans, 18 per cent of the population, have been killed; yet this British-backed "project", as new Labour likes to say, is almost never reported.
What happened in Indonesia, and continues to happen, is almost a mirror image of the attack on Iraq. Both countries have riches coveted by the west; both had dictators installed by the west to facilitate the passage of their resources; and in both countries, blood-drenched Anglo-American actions have been disguised by propaganda willingly provided by journalists prepared to draw the necessary distinctions between Saddam's regime ("monstrous") and Suharto's ("moderate" and "stable").

John Pilger/New Statesman 17.10.05

"All but a few of the Bushmen living in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve have been forcibly removed from their homes in recent days in what spokesmen for the affected communities said is a final push by the government to end human habitation there after tens of thousands of years.
The First People of the Kalahari, an activist group in Botswana, said that Bushmen villages had been cut off from their main sources of food and water and that outsiders had been prohibited from entering to provide relief for the past six weeks."

WashingtonPost 10.10.05
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"Dozens of Bushmen were evicted yesterday from their ancestral land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana. Police carried out the removals at gunpoint and then set fire to the Bushmen's huts.
A handful of Bushmen have resisted. The police have told them they will be killed, and are following them to prevent them hunting or gathering any food. The local District Commissioner (of the nearby town, Ghanzi) is today inside the reserve overseeing the operation. She told the Bushmen yesterday that the police will stay until every last Bushman is removed.
Information was brought out today by those evicted.

In order to avoid reprisals, Survival will no longer name individual Bushmen. One woman still inside the reserve said yesterday, 'We will not leave our ancestral lands. We will die here. If they steal my land, they just steal my life.'"

Survival International 08.10.05
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BOTSWANA : Bushman child and two adults shot by police 6 Oct 2000

- Bushman child and two adults shot by Botswana police.
- Family walk for days across desert to bring news to outside world.
- Bushmen told that the government does not care if they starve to death.

Three Bushmen, including one child, have been shot and wounded in recent days by Botswana police during incidents designed to intimidate the Bushmen still surviving inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and force them out once and for all.

Survival International 086.10.05
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prior comment on the diamond connection to the Bushman genocide here

"...i wear insect repellent from the moment i wake up until i go to bed at night..."

digging through the night in a futile attempt to reach friends and relatives trapped in the rubble of the collapsed buildings

"I nodded my head and watched the lights smear like colored water on the ceiling. 'Once,' I said, 'when it was Christmastime and I first got my driver's license, I drove around a big town for the first time and I ran every traffic light, thinking it was Christmas lights.'
'I can appreciate that,' he said. 'I come from a small town too. A traffic light wasn't in my vocabulary neither.' Now, he said, sometimes he thought it all was just a bad dream. That somehow he would wake up and it would be nothing but a bad dream. Be back in his own bed in a small town. 'Now, I ain't nothing but sick all the time. I'm almost finished. I know it. I can't perform my craft anymore. I can't weld. I can't hold my arm up to burn a rod anymore.'
[...]
'One leak we had out there was this vessel. I couldn't believe it. They called me out. It was the middle of the night. I couldn't believe it. I just live across the street, so I got all the calls out. I am making eighty, ninety, a hundred hours a week. Year after year. So when I go in, I seen all the lights were flashing. I seen this cloud going north. That vessel had a real nice rust hole. Well, not rust. It was eat out from the chemical. But they didn't want to shut it down. And all I had was a slicker and a face shield to go get into that. I didn't have any kind of face mask, you know, any kind of breathing or fresh air or anything. I got soaked in it. It was EDC [ethylene dichloride]...'
-

An Unreasonable Woman
Wilson is a fourth-generation shrimp-boat captain from Seadrift, Texas, who took on big industrial polluters and won. Her book, An Unreasonable Woman, to be published on Labor Day, is the tale of her journey from "nobody particular" to a leading player in the fight to clean up industry and hold it accountable for the devastation it causes.

Chelsea Green Publishing
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Black smoke billows into the sky after an explosion and fire at the Formosa Plastics plant at Point Comfort on Thursday [06.10.05]. Diane Wilson, an activist and local shrimper who has protested against the company - a campaign that culminated in August 2002, when she chained herself to one of the plant's towers - said a serious incident was bound to happen.
Cappiello and Hanson/HoustonChronicle/CommonDreams
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Interview with Wilson at Pressureworks
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Wilson video at Texas Legacy (realplayer)
transcript
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Wilson interview at Satya
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Wilson interview at DemocracyNow! 11.10.05

"I haven't had a drink in 25 years," Davis said.

Kids In The News:

When our daughter Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza strip on March 16 2003, an immediate impulse was to get her words out to the world. She had been working in Rafah with a nonviolent resistance organization, the International Solidarity Movement, trying to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes and wells. Her emails home had had a powerful impact on our family, making us think about the situation in the Middle East in ways we had never done before. Without a direct connection to Israel and Palestine, we had not understood the devastating nature of the Palestinians' situation. Coming from the US, our allegiance and empathy had always been with the people of Israel.
[...]
Rachel was a real human being. Sometimes, when people idealize her, we feel vulnerable for her. Knowing the complete human being, would they feel the same? Through My Name is Rachel Corrie, people can know a more complete Rachel.
[...]
We recently spent time in the US with members of the family who were behind the wall of the home Rachel stood to protect. For a month we ate, played and traveled with 15-month-old Sama. What future does she have, living in what now amounts to a mass prison in Gaza?

Cindy and Craig Corrie/GuardianUK/CommonDreams 08.10.05
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The typical white family has $80,000 in assets; the average black family about $6,000. It's a wealth gap out of the Middle Ages. Some 46 million can't afford health insurance, 18,000 of whom will die early because of it.
The US, we learn, is 43rd in the world infant mortality rankings. A baby born in Beijing has nearly three times the chance of reaching its first birthday than a baby born in Washington. Those who survive face rotten schools. On reading and math tests for 15-year-olds, America is 24th out of 29 nations.

Dermot Purgavie/DailyMirorUK/CommonDreams 08.10.05
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Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class "to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights," she says. One student "had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb's-down sign with his own hand next to the President's picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster."
According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent. But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.
An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.
"At 1:35, the student came to me and told me that the Secret Service had taken his poster," Jarvis says. "I didn't believe him at first. But they had come into my room when I wasn't there and had taken his poster, which was in a stack with all the others."
She says the student was upset. "He was nervous, he was scared, and his parents were out of town on business," says Jarvis. She, too, had to talk to the Secret Service.

Matthew Rothschild/Progressive/PrisonPlanet 08.10.05
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Annette Bening appeared on the Capitol steps to make an appeal for increased funding for the arts in California's public schools.
"Education and art in our culture should not be treated as a luxury for some, but as an absolute necessity for every one of us and every one of our kids," the actress said Friday.

Yahoo/AP 08.10.05
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The largest group of consumers of internet pornography are youth 12-17...
[...]
As much as parents worry about the video games that their children are playing online, children actually spend significantly more time on pornographic sites today than they do on game sites.

The Porn Standard (google pdf>html)
The Third Way
link Scratchings
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Vehicle Crashes Remain Leading Cause of Teen Deaths
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Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for people ages 1 to 33

Stan now ranks as one of the 30 most deadly hurricanes of all time, with over 1500 deaths caused. Stan will proabably far surpass Katrina as the most deadly hurricane of 2005; Katrina's death toll stood at 1242 at last count, with 1003 of the deaths in Louisiana.

Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog 08.10.05

The existence of the children's jail is largely unknown...

So speak

"Only God knows the pain I am going through."

Maria Otone de Menezes
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a moral and religious obligation

The White House has dismissed as "absurd" allegations made in a BBC TV series that President Bush claimed God told him to invade Iraq.
"He's never made such comments," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

BBCNews 06.10.05
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Trial starts in murder of 'God's banker'
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a revelation from God
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sacked for not being "closer to God"

A lawyer for Mr Santana had no comment on the lawsuit, which was filed in Los Angeles.
Mr Kuhlman, 59, said he was subjected to a "calibration" test by guru Dr Dan.
He alleges that Dr Dan said he was too old to be enlightened and "that the more enlightened a person was, the closer to God he was and the better employee he was".
He also accused Deborah Santana of constantly slurring male employees, hiring only females who had been "calibrated" by Dr Dan.
Mr Kuhlman started as personal assistant to Carlos Santana in 1988, eventually running his licensing division, River of Colors.
He says he was sacked after missing an appointment with Dr Dan.

-
At the name of God, every knee shall bow to the bible
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"God never promised us a smooth ride," he says with a smile.
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How God discouraged Neil from praying too much ... and how a few weeks later Neil had a remarkable dream that changed his life...
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"Their image of God is of concern to me. I see that they portray a very threatening
God. A God that fills people with fear"
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Doing Hard Time For God!
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"I'd have a championship by now if it was God's will."
-

In this day of relativism and "everything goes," how do I show my daughter that Jesus really is The Way?
A. Your daughter's question reveals a heart that desires to understand the truth. You need to encourage her in her quest for understanding.
You can do that by showing her why our beliefs about God are vitally important. It matters what we believe because that's what determines how we live. Reject God altogether, and you're left with no moral accountability and no foundation for any idea of virtue or sin, goodness or evil. If there is no God, those concepts lose meaning.

How Do Christians Know We're Right?
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Focus On Family Founder Looking For Sign From God

The founder of the Colorado Springs-based ministry Focus on the Family said that he's praying for a sign from God that he hasn't made a huge mistake in endorsing the president's choice of Harriet Miers for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
James Dobson said he's anguished about the decision, which he made after getting a special briefing from deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove.
Dobson won't explain why he's suddenly having second thoughts. But he said if Miers ever voted to overturn the Supreme Court's decision legalizing abortion, "The blood of those babies who die will be on my hands to a degree."

BOGUS!!:

a market in transition

More sellers are putting their homes on the market, houses are selling less quickly and prices are no longer increasing as rapidly as they were in the spring, according to local data and interviews with brokers.
In Manhattan, the average sales price fell almost 13 percent in the third quarter from the second quarter, according to a widely followed report to be released today by Miller Samuel, an appraisal firm, and Prudential Douglas Elliman, a real estate firm. The amount of time it took to sell a home was also up 30.4 percent over the same period.
In another sign that the housing market might have reached a peak, executives at big home builders have sold almost $1 billion worth of company stock this year.

David Leonhardt Motoko Rich/NYTimes 04.10.05
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US troops in Paraguay

Paraguay's neighbours are unlikely to take this latest explanation at face value, given the variety of rumours circulating about Washington's possible ulterior motives in the region.
One popular theory is that the deal is an attempt to break up Mercosur, by offering Paraguay its own bilateral free trade agreement in exchange for a US military base.
Others range from US monitoring of Bolivia's natural gas fields to financial interests in the vast freshwater reserves of the Guarani Aquifer.
Some analysts believe a military base could even provide a bridgehead to the wealth of natural resources in Brazil's Amazon Region. US suspicions that the Tri-Border Area of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil is being used as a terrorist training ground have also been mentioned, although claims al-Qaeda is active in the region remain unsubstantiated.

Charlotte Eimer/BBCNews 28.09.05

"...the most brilliant man I have ever met."

The main treatment for influenza is rest and drinking lots of fluids. Controlling the fever, although sometimes difficult, will allow some comfort. Acetaminophen is safest. Never give aspirin to a child with influenza or chickenpox.

Homecare for Influenza

"Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce... And when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate."

- James Garfield 1881

Within weeks of releasing this statement President Garfield was assassinated.

Phil Toler/AxisofLogic

Turkey:"half the children at the country's biggest child psychiatric hospital..."

A holiday weekend in northern Iraq

"It took that long to get it all in."
John Coltrane
"The music itself - vital, transformative, seductive, subversive and often improvised - provided the record that tied each generation to the next. Out of suffering and hardship, we have heard time and again jazz artists rediscover possibility. Such is the power of imagination. And hence, the critical importance of this evening's effort.
When the hurricane struck the Gulf and the floodwaters rose and tore through New Orleans, plunging its remaining population into a carnival of misery, it did not turn the region into a Third World country - as it has been disparagingly implied in the media - it revealed one. It revealed the disaster within the disaster: grueling poverty rose to the surface like a bruise to our skin.
Mother Nature revealed the poverty of a mindset that narrowly views security as a military issue. That is blind to the role of culture in sustaining the mental health and social wellness of people, which is also the basis for economic productivity. Blind to the role of culture in education, through which we are prepared for our responsibilities in a democracy. And hostile to the role of culture in the search for truth."

Danny Glover/Vanguard Public Foundation

Suicide is the biggest cause of death among French young people after road accidents.

Most concerned readers will likely feel an urge to do something about the suicide rate when they read that.
What does that mean?
All you champions of evolution, where are you?
The most powerful Darwinian slection pressure on kids today is random death on the highway.
Why is that?
The automobile industry is the largest business in the US. That's one reason.
The other is that television is raising children now. And it has been for two generations at least. And television is driven by business.