There are now about 200,000 homeless vets in the United States, government figures show.

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"We have to recognise that some of the climate supporters have tended to use data that are not by any means proven..."
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"Climate supporters" would be a lot more ludicrous as a descriptive term if its opposite weren't so plausible.
And "pleasing many global warming activists" - sort of like when they stop torturing you, you're pleased.
I am pleased that they have stopped torturing me. Whew. All right.
It's a last-ditch effort on the part of the causative agencies to defend themselves from the rising accusation - "You did this."
Pigs.
The headline's from the SF Chronicle print edition for I think Friday 23.06.
I would have scanned it in but I didn't want to buy the damned thing, so I took a picture of it at the store.

Snippets:

The long lives that some former cannibals enjoy before succumbing to a brain-wasting disease suggest
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...but this is a very difficult moment, and I was aware that was a very difficult moment because when you have to be transferred from a place to another, it's very difficult. And so they told me that I was in a car full of explosive. So if something had been
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Chinese industrial firms earned a combined 629.4 billion yuan ($78.71 billion) in profits in the first five months of 2006, up 25.5 percent from the same period a year earlier
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Ehud Olmert, in his first meeting with Mahmoud Abbas as Israeli prime minister, yesterday told the Palestinian Authority president he regretted the deaths of Palestinian civilians in recent air strikes on the Gaza Strip
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"We have to recognise that some of the climate supporters have tended to use data that are not by any means proven because they believe
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Journalists at the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere are suffering a loss of internet access as a result of censorship programs that routinely filter out blogging sites such as Boing

megan's outlaws:

Jose Tapia, along with a friend, carried out "the largest mass murder in Rhode Island history," according to Providence prosecutors in 1996. Tapia and his buddy intentionally set fire to the home of a family of Guatemalan immigrants. Six people (including four children) died in the flames. (Typically, the criminals were both evil and stupid: Tapia and his friend were trying to torch someone else's home but got confused.) Tapia received a sentence that will make him eligible for parole in 21 years. By contrast, Kyle Lindquist, a 36-year-old excavating contractor and father of three, was busted in 1992 on conspiracy charges of intent to possess and distribute 1000 kilos or more of marijuana. Lindquist got a sentence of 23 years with no possibility of parole. Apparently, conspiring to hustle some weed is worse than burning down a house full of children.
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Soldiers who object to taking part in a military occupation of a foreign country will face life in prison under measures due to be rubber-stamped in the House of Commons on Monday. The little-noticed Armed Forces Bill will have its third reading in the Commons on Monday and left-leaning MPs are alarmed that it will legitimise pre-emptive military strikes.
It will change the definition of desertion to include soldiers who go absent without leave and intend to refuse to take part in a "military occupation of a foreign country or territory".
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While debates on the capital child rape statutes have often been brief and without significant record, the accounts that do exist show a strong belief in the notion that rape is worse than death. In support of Georgia's attempt to apply the death penalty for child rape, State Representative Warren Massey said, "When a child is raped or sodomized, then their life is basically destroyed.... The punishment fits the crime."
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Most, but not all, parents would choose not to have their children killed, whatever the alternative presented.
American public morality is now founded on the principle that nothing - loss of freedom, loss of privacy, loss of the future, etc, - is worse than death. Nothing is worth sacrificing your life to gain. The precise opposite of the New Hampshire state motto, "Live Free or Die".
The national motto now, unspoken but clearly present, is "Do whatever you have to to survive" - no matter how degrading or dehumanizing.
The single greatest killer of children in America is car wrecks. A trivial fact, only important when Britney doesn't strap her son into his car-seat as she flees the predatory lenses of the paparazzi. Strapping your child into a federally-approved car-seat is all you can do about that statistic, and morally it's enough.
The single greatest killer of children in America is car wrecks, and this is acceptable.
American soldiers are killing children in Iraq - with bombs from thousands of feet in the air, and with bullets to the back of the head at close range. This is also acceptable.

"It is the hallowed 'Fallujah' model, intended to bring 'stability' by flattening the city with civilian death and destruction. It is a 'clean' way to victory, one supported by Representative Jack Murtha, who would withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq but continue to engage the 'enemy' from far away and from 15,000 to 30,000 feet above with air power..."

BeauGrosscup/NormanSolomon/CommonDreams

Bush is set to pledge that the United States will respect human rights in his war on terror

"To clarify this further, this entire area has been economically and infastructurally devastated - distrupting and destroying the day to day lives of thousands of Christian and Muslim Palestinians - so that a small number of Israeli citizens can continue to visit a holy site in a city which they have no entitlement to under international law."

Gay-Affirmative Public School Teachers/Curricula May Influence Brain Maturation In Teens

"I am convinced that gay affirming materials are injurious to children and will add to the psychological problems they already have as a normal part of development," said Breiner. "It is wrong to say that homosexuality is a viable alternative to heterosexuality. If teens are to be protected, they must be given the facts about homosexual behavior, not fantasies from the gay community."
Dr. Sander Breiner/Virtue Online

NARTH (National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality)
Gay Activism in the Schools at NARTH

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Episcopal delegates yesterday snubbed Anglican leaders' request to temporarily stop electing openly gay bishops, a vote that further frustrated conservatives in the American church and could hasten a break with Anglicans worldwide.
Phil. Inq.
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"Some at ABC News are obviously hyperventilating over the election of the first female presiding bishop in the Episcopal Church, and that no doubt led them to package this story with a bogus account about women being ordained as Catholic priests. Joan Clark Houk, and seven other women, will hold an 'ordination' ceremony on a boat in Pittsburgh on July 31, but no one save mad feminists will give it any credence. Indeed, this happens every day in the asylum: some actually think they're the pope."
Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights

The actress Elsa Lanchester's mother was kidnapped, in her early 20's, in late 19th c. London, from the home she shared with her lover, Lanchester's father, because they hadn't been married, and were consequently living in sin. By her own father and her own brother.
She was taken to a private asylum and held there for more than a day or two, though less than a month. The idea being she was insane, because she was living with Lanchester's father out of wedlock. This idea was corroborated by medical professionals.
They never did get married, though producing Lanchester and her older brother, and living together into their elder years.
Lanchester's most famous role by far was as the eponymous "Bride of Frankenstein".
In the uncut original she plays Mary Shelley on that dark and stormy night with Byron and Percy, as the tale begins.
She was married to Charles Laughton, whose career and fame far overshadowed hers.
Laughton was a relatively discreet homosexual. Their's was an unusual but loving and long relationship.
Laughton's family was Catholic and there was some conflict, as Lanchester records it, at the time of his death about his antipathy toward Catholicism.
The Wikipedia entry for Lanchester seems to have been written by someone still engaged in that conflict.
She was a founder of the Turnabout Theater in LA. (link to LA Pub. Lib. images)
Photographs of her in her autobiography, "Elsa Lanchester, Herself" make it seem likely she was an alcoholic.
As a young woman, before she married Laughton, Lanchester dined with, on separate occasions, Aleister Crowley the famous Satanist and covert operative, and Theo. Herzl, the public founder of present-day Zionism.
The social morality that made it possible, if not imperative, that Lanchester's grandfather "rescue" her mother by force, against her will, from the awful sin of unsanctioned cohabitation, has altered itself.
But there was never a moment of admission of fault, never any shame - just slow change, an evolution toward more enlightened morality, undirected, uncodified, in stark contrast at its extremes, but unnoticeable in the midst of its progression.
This leaves open the possibilty that there are still pathologies in the public moral code.

Three children killed by A Crucial Vote 'Cut and Run' in Israeli air strike Iraq Debate gets run out of Senate Heats Up 'kills children' Leaving the Left

As Americans woke up this morning and learned of the tragic fates of two American servicemen in Iraq, they saw yet more evidence of the real war that continues there.
An Israeli army spokesman said the air strike had targeted militants wanted for attacks on Israel. The spokesman expressed regret over any civilian casualties but said responsibility lay with the Palestinians for failing to stop the rocket salvoes.
In the United States, the political war over which of the two major political parties will be able to use Iraq as an issue for its electoral advantage in the November midterm election continued to heat up today.
Those who died include a boy and a girl - both about five-years-old - and a 16-year-old girl, Palestinian medical sources say.
Khalil Roka, a cousin of one of the dead children, told the Associated Press news agency he saw a red flash as the car exploded amid a group of children playing.
In his call for a change in strategy, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., declared the Republican plan for Iraq "lie and die."
A spokeswoman for the Israeli army said the attack had targeted members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, a militant group associated with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party.
A candidate who advocates bringing the troops home within a year polls three percentage points better than one who says the US needs a "new direction," but stops short of calling for an exit date.
An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed the strike
A "New Direction for America," you may recall, is the latest slogan unveiled by Democrats last week. But the public wants specifics, not slogans.
Israel says such strikes are necessary to deter militants from firing crude rockets from Gaza.
And as election time approaches, the war is by far the most important issue to the Democratic base.
People in the southern Israeli town of Sderot, frequently hit by Palestinian rockets, went on strike on Tuesday to protest that the government was not doing enough to protect them.
If anyone politicized this issue, John Kerry, with a lot of help from the Democratic caucuses in both houses. For those who find themselves annoyed because the cut-and-run poses from Kerry, Feingold, Kennedy, Boxer, Harkin, and Kennedy make the Republicans look good, they should direct their ire to Kerry and the Freak-Out Five. Congress exists for the debate and resolution of issues, and Kerry initiated the debate with his amendment. The GOP leadership simply gave Kerry what his action demanded - debate and a vote that put everyone in the Senate on record as to whether they would abandon the Iraqis before they could effectively defend themselves.
Witnesses said aircraft fired at least one missile at a car carrying al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades militants in Gaza City. The occupants managed to leap free but a 7-year-old girl and her 5-year-old brother nearby were killed, as was a 16-year-old.
Nine bystanders, most of them minors, were wounded.
After moving to Los Angeles in the early 90s, I watched from the roof of my apartment building as the city burned after the Rodney King verdicts were handed down. I thought what those four cops did to King was shameful. But I didn't hear an uproar from my friends on the Left when rioters rampaged through the city's streets, stealing, looting, and destroying property in the name of "no justice, no peace."
The occupants of the car leapt out before the blast in a crowded street in the Jabaliya refugee camp, witnesses say. Fourteen people were wounded.
What made me leave the Left for good and embrace the Right were their respective reactions to 9/11. While The New York Times doubted that we could succeed in Afghanistan because the Soviets in the '80s hadn't, George W. Bush went directly after the Taliban and Al Qaeda and crushed them in short order. Although many on the Left claim to have backed the President's actions, the self-doubt leading up to it, crystallized my view of the Left as weak and terminally lacking in confidence.
The Israeli military confirmed it had attacked the vehicle.
Iraq is the "Normandy" of the War on Terror. The hope, once Iraq and Afghanistan are more stable, is that the nearly 70 million people in Iran will look at those countires (on it's left and right borders) and say: "Why do these people get to vote, send their women to school, and buy Nikes and we don't?"

Crimes Against Nature:

Part 2 broadcasts Robert Kennedy, Jr. in Who Owns Nature and Turtle Island Film's, Texas Gold, about the most unreasonable women* in Texas, who took on the giants of the petro-chemical industry

LinkTV
Broadcast Times
Saturday, June 24 8:00 PM
Saturday, June 24 11:00 PM
Sunday, June 25 2:00 AM
Sunday, June 25 5:00 AM
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*Diane Wilson

...the computer-generated record from the Kamal Adwan hospital, which documents the blood test of a victim from the beach incident being taken at 5:12 p.m. on June 9. Furthermore, hand-written hospital records log patients from the incident as having been admitted starting at 5:05 p.m. If the records are accurate, based on the time needed to dispatch an ambulance and drive from the hospital to the beach and back, this suggests that the fatal explosion took place at a time when the IDF said it was firing artillery rounds. Both sets of records also directly call into question the account of the IDF that ambulances did not reach the beach until 5:15 p.m. that day.

HRW News 15.Jun.06

After leading Bush's successful campaign, Allbaugh was appointed as head of FEMA, whose internal organization he shook up in order to shrink the agency and its scope. In particular, the Allbaugh FEMA diminished the Clinton administration's organizational emphasis on disaster mitigation in favor of terrorism response.
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Drug traffickers enjoy relative safety in military bases. There is no serious control there. German police cannot work there. However, outside of military bases German law-enforcement is in effect. True, any police can be bought. But the level of corruption in Germany is not as high as, say, in Russia. This is why it is more convenient for Americans to establish distribution centers in other places. I believe that, in time, such centers will move to their military installations in Poznan, Poland, and also in Romania and Bulgaria.

In the wake of 9/11, Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator, has claimed to possess information linking the American 9/11, and much else, to massive drug-trafficking which has corrupted high level U.S. officials. Among other things, she has claimed that the U.S. has never gone after top-level drug traffickers, because:
"this would upset "certain foreign relations."
But it would also expose certain of our elected officials, who have significant connections with high-level drugs- and weapons-smuggling - and thus with the criminal underground, even with the terrorists themselves...

Pravda/aangirfan
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In the last three decades, three important facts have emerged about the international drug traffic. The first is that it is both huge and growing.

Narcotics are estimated to be worth between $500 billion and $1 trillion a year, an amount, according to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in remarks to a United Nations General Assembly session in June 2003, that is greater than the global oil and gas industry, and twice as large as the overall automobile industry.

The second is that it is both worldwide and above all "highly integrated." At global drug summits such as the one in Armenia in 1993, representatives of the Sicilian Mafia, the Brighton Beach Organizatsiya, and Colombian drug lords, have worked out a common modus operandi, with the laundering of dirty money entrusted chiefly to the lawless Russian banks.
The third important fact, undeniable since the 1980 U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, is that governments with global pretensions will avail themselves, in pursuit of their own political ends, of the resources, both financial and political, of the drug traffic.

Peter Dale Scott/Lobster
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Scott at Flashpoint

23:

In this case, that seat was the toilet.

Pro-whaling Mali and Mongolia have consistently voted with Japan in the IWC in its campaign to resume whale hunting.

The Farley Mowat, under the command of Dutch Captain Alex Cornelissen, is preparing to return to the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary in December to once again intervene against illegal Japanese whaling operations. Japan is using their economic muscle to instigate harassment of the Sea Shepherd ship.

Meanwhile, Sea Shepherd has discovered that Japan illegally transships whale meat in and out of Cape Town. "Japan has influence in Cape Town," said Captain Paul Watson. "We have experienced that influence and we have been very disappointed that South African harbor authorities have seen fit to harass people who simply want to save the whales. We have operated the Farley Mowat since 1996 and we have never received the level of harassment that we experienced after intervening against illegal Japanese whaling."

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society/ScoopNZ
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Sea Shepherd News

"We know that the humpback has some sort of special status, even among whales, but we put priority on science rather than politics or emotions."

A Break In The Timeline:

"My son Nick died in Iraq on May 7, 2004. He is buried next to my father, who had died just a year and a half before. That is not the way it's supposed to be.
I'm supposed to go somewhere between my father and my son in the graveyard. Nearby are my proud immigrant grandparents, who died first. That is the way it is supposed to be.
There is a lot else going on that is not the way it is supposed to be. Our leaders are not supposed to lie to us. Yet because George Bush and company told us to beware of weapons of mass destruction and so-called Iraqi involvement in 9/11, my son and the loved ones of 150,000 other grieving souls on both sides lost their lives.
Though I doubted our president's words, I did too little too late.

My son Nick was an independent contractor, not associated with Haliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed-Martin, or the U.S. military.

Nick was arrested by the U.S. military without reason and then illegally detained for thirteen days. While he was in custody, the revelations of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal became public. These revelations ignited the resistance in Iraq and made it impossible for Nick to get home alive.
Once released, Nick was swiftly murdered - on videotape, by a hooded man now believed to have been Abu Musab Zarqawi - in retaliation for the atrocities committed at the Abu Ghraib prison: murders, rapes, and torture of Iraqi citizens.

The president's contribution was to order then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez to rewrite definitions of torture essentially ordering these sins, and he did so with impunity. Though Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says he took responsibility for the resulting atrocities, no consequences were felt by him, but they were by my son and everyone who loved him..."

Michael Berg/CommonDreams 16.Jun.06

A federal judge in Brooklyn has ruled the government can legally detain non-citizens on the sole basis of their religion, race or national origin and then detain them indefinitely.

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You may want to repeat that out loud a few times, just to get the rhythm.
See also:
Nina Bernstein/NYTimes
Zach Haberman/NYPost

No Irony!

Bush creates huge aquatic Eden!