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shadeaux63
Keeper of dreams
Posts: 1141
(3/9/05 8:56 am)
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Re: This Just in...again
This is just sad,very sad.But it's going on all across the country.
Monday, March 7, 2005
They're back from Iraq, but are they OK?
Ephrata guard unit loses no lives, but life is different
By M.L. LYKE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
EPHRATA -- A guardsman walks into a local Wal-Mart, freaks, does a 180, and walks back out again. Even after seven months, he can't stand the crowds. Another jerks awake in the middle of the night, holding an imagined gun at his wife's temple.
This is one in an occasional series on soldiers returning from Iraq, their families and communities in Washington. We would like to hear from soldiers and their families on the home front or war front. Call 206-448-8344 or e-mail us
To read some of the previous stories in this series, on such subjects as the struggle of wounded veterans, the challenge to children whose parents are at war and the psychological wounds of post-traumatic stress disorder, click here
"Uh ... honey?" she asks.
The soldiers tear down highways, swerve to avoid trash in the road. The bag that held a Big Mac could now hide a bomb. One still jumps if you touch his neck. Others refuse to sleep in beds. Those who do may awake in a sweat.
They're members of the Ephrata-based 1161st Transportation Company, the close-knit National Guard unit that returned from Iraq seven months ago to a happy little town dolled up in yellow ribbons and townsfolk who breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Everyone in the town knew someone in uniform. The 130 citizen soldiers -- from age 18 to 60 -- were the region's postmen, tractor mechanics, lab technicians, firefighters and weekend warriors called to war.
"There was this sense of something missing when they were gone," says Wes Crago, city administrator of Ephrata, population 6,980. "Now, watching the news, hearing about roadside bombings, there's not the weight, not the burden.
"Our people are back home."
All of them. The unit had no casualties, only three wounded. Driving was extreme-danger duty in Iraq, but the 1161st managed to complete more than 14,000 missions, covering more than 1 million miles.
NOTE: This article has been updated since it was originally published in the newspaper.
Some call it "The Miracle Company." But if no one paid the ultimate price, the deployment still came at a considerable cost.
Although some citizen soldiers have slowly eased back into routines, others still feel like strangers in their own lives seven months after troops touched down.
They landed. And crashed.
National Guard Spc. Keith Bond plays swords with his 2-year-old son, Dylan, in the home of his best friend, Sgt. Jeff Elliott. Bond says, "You have to find out how to love again, how to touch again, how to care again.
"You talk to someone and they say, 'You're fine now, you're home, so everything's good.' You want to say, 'No. It's not good. I'm feeling lost,' " says Spc. Keith Bond, a 31-year-old explosives specialist and father of two.
Some nights he goes to bed not even thinking about Iraq. "Others I lay down and 'Bam!' " The face of a young Iraqi boy who aimed a gun at his truck haunts him. Bond drew a bead on him, almost took the kid out before he realized the gun was a toy. He says it felt like 45 minutes. It was probably 10 seconds. It's still messing with his head.
"What if I had shot that boy?"
How, ask soldiers, do you explain that to civilians? How do you explain anything -- the claustrophobia of being close, the anger that lashes out of nowhere, the desire to hole up?
"For a while I just wanted to sit home and do nothing," says Spc. Steve Hurt, whose son, Tanner, was four days home from the hospital when he left. "I was tired of talking about the war, tired of hearing people ask, 'Did you shoot anybody?' I didn't want anything to do with anybody -- and here I was with a wife who wanted attention, and a 2-year-old son who was walking."
Seven months after his return, Hurt and wife, Michelle, both 26, are still quarreling. "We fight over stupid things, like disciplining Tanner and paying bills," he says. "I wasn't used to having to deal with all this stuff."
The small 1161st unit -- closely tracked by larger National Guard battalions with new waves of soldiers coming home -- could still sniff the gunfire when it arrived in Iraq in May 2003.
The company was one of the first on the ground, one of the most poorly equipped and pulled one of the longest deployments, with two tough extensions. The soldiers -- some call themselves "guinea pigs" -- found out about the last extension from newspapers, a problem higher-ups vowed not to repeat.
"The military has said they hoped to learn by mistakes made with our unit," says Sheila Kelly, wife of Spc. Edward Kelly.
With training and extensions, the unit was gone from families for more than 18 months, finally arriving at Fort Lewis at the end of July. The military had prepped soldiers and spouses on possible reintegration problems. But nothing, some say, could fully prepare them for what was to come.
After the tractor parades, the award ceremonies, the celebrations and chili feeds died down, it was all quiet on the eastern front. In some households, eerily quiet.
Sheila Kelly says her husband locked himself in the bathroom to dress when he first got home. He'd become a smoker. He cursed. He was reclusive. He didn't want to be kissed, hugged -- it felt "suffocating." When she threw a big dinner party, he bolted.
"They say it's like a roller coaster, and sooner or later the ride comes to an end. But it doesn't. There's always another ride that begins," says Sheila Kelly, 41, tears spilling onto her cheeks.
Even after seven months, Spc. Kelly, 42, still craves privacy. "For me the hard part is getting back to the day-to-day, re-establishing my feelings and emotions," says the soldier, a lab technician in civilian life. "It's like you have this little buffer zone around you -- and you don't want to let anyone in."
Kelly doubts he'll ever be "old normal" again.
But who defines "new normal?"
"I keep trying to bring back the old me," says Bond. "I bring him back one day, and the next I have to try to find that person all over again."
One 1161st mother says her son left a boy and came back a man.
Sgt. Jeff Elliott, 35, left a kid at heart, and came back feeling "like a 60-year-old man."
The father of five is one of three Guardsmen in the unit decorated with a Purple Heart. He was wounded in June 2003, when a bomb in a black plastic bag hit the truck he was driving. He was in medical hold at Fort Lewis until last November, undergoing treatment for an injured back and anxiety, with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
He came home with an electronic box on his hip to interrupt pain signals to his back. It flashes like the light on a pursuing cop car. "We've been in hell. After you've been in hell, nothing's ever really the same again," he says.
He can't tolerate crowds and avoids restaurants -- unless his buddy Bond is there to cover his back. Like other soldiers accustomed to strict discipline, he's often impatient with the kids. "It's Daddy wants it done now, and he wants it done right now. If it's not, it pushes his button," says Penny, his wife of 15 years.
Elliott's family wonders what happened to the outgoing baby-faced dad who laughed and joked with the kids, chasing them through the house, rolling around on the floor with them.
This other dad hurts, and he's angry. "There's a mentality in the military that, if you complain you're hurt, you're faking it, you're slacking," says the sergeant. "So 99.1 percent of the time you suck it up, don't complain."
There was plenty to complain about in Iraq in 2003. The unit arrived to no running water, no sanitation, no air conditioning and a sheep camp with blood and feces on the wall for a base. The "guinea pigs" often felt like sitting ducks with no armor for their trucks, and inadequate flak gear for their bodies. Sweltering in 120-degree heat, they steamed when officers in air-conditioned SUVs rolled down their electric windows to bark orders.
For some, serving in Iraq was a matter of pride; for others, a waste of time. "I lost almost two years in my children's lives for something I see as a total waste of time and money and effort," says Spc. Kelly.
For Kory and Melissa Brown, it has been an exercise in togetherness. The husband and wife shipped out together, returned together. Although they couldn't touch or show affection in camp -- they stole a kiss or two -- they shared the same experiences. It's made readjustment simpler.
"She knows where I'm coming from ..." says Kory, 29.
"And he knows where I'm coming from," says Melissa, 28, completing the sentence.
She's a dental hygienist in town, and, like others in the 1161st, found re-entry into the civilian work force challenging. Away almost two years, she was rusty, and it took her several months to get her skill level back. There are still procedures she has to learn again. "I thought I would come back and just jump right into things," she says.
At least she came home to a job. Some soldiers didn't, including Spc. Hurt. He had to quit his old job when his wife moved to Ephrata. He came home from an 18-month deployment to a long, seven-month hunt for work. He applied everywhere and had only two phone calls, he says. "I felt like, after serving the country for 18 months, I come home, and I couldn't even get a job. That got to me.
"I started thinking, 'Maybe they're not hiring me because they know I could be redeployed.' "
Redeployment is a touchy topic in this little town, where remaining yellow ribbons are now faded by sun, frayed by wind.
With guard enlistments falling 30 percent short of recruitment goals, and members of the reserve and guard providing at least 40 percent of personnel in Iraq, the pressure's on. "When soldiers call to ask me what are the chances we'll go back, I tell them 50-50," says Sgt. 1st Class Merle McLain, the 36-year-old readiness manager for the 1161st and father of 3-year-old twins Alex and Sara.
They were 20 months old when the tall sergeant with the booming voice left for Iraq. He missed the "terrible 2s," potty training, his son's bout with pneumonia and emergency surgery. He tried to get home and was denied -- a low point.
Wife, Marcee, 32, who heads family support for the unit, says the kids are still working to reconnect with Dad. They bawled the first time he raised his voice and still run to Mommy for comfort. "The kids have to regain the trust that the parent is going to stay."
Is he?
Mom doesn't like to think about the troops going back.
But, like everyone else in the "Miracle Company" family, she can't help it.
"It's always in the back of my mind," she says softly.
Web extra: In their own words...
* "It's like part of you has been taken away. You have to find out how to love again, how to touch again, how to care again." -- Spc. Keith Bond
* "At first Kevin would just snap. Then he'd be sad. He'd tell me: "Mom, I don't know what's wrong with me." I couldn't do anything. You want to hold them like they're five years old again -- but you can't." -- Barb Kapalo, mother of Spc. Kevin Witte
* "It's overwhelming when you come home. You want to be there, but you don't. It's like a suffocating feeling." -- Spc. Edward Kelly
* "There should be a book, and I could write a section on what NOT to say to your husband when he gets back from Iraq, and what NOT to expect. Don't expect anything." -- Michelle Hurt, wife of Spc. Steve Hurt
* "Our 13-year-old son said, 'I want my OLD dad back, the one who teases me, pickes on me, wrestles with me. The one who's not so serious." -- Penny Elliott, wife of Sgt. Jeff Elliott
* "They're not the same guys. Not at all." -- Angelicque (cq) Bond, wife of Spc. Keith Bond.
* "I try not to watch the news. It makes me feel bad because soldiers are over there dying and our whole company is back home safe. I just wish everything would end." -- Spc. Steve Hurt.
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earthnann
Child of the ancient schools
Posts: 103
(3/9/05 9:36 am)
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Re: This Just in...again
My dad went to Nam when I was 12, so I can relate to this very well. I hope we take better care of our folk from this war than we did during that one.
Wanted to post a positive news story, and here it is. Wish I could go. Scroll down for exquisite pictures:
www.desertusa.com/wildflo/ca.html
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shadeaux63
Keeper of dreams
Posts: 1144
(3/12/05 1:13 pm)
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Re: This Just in...again
Kentucky students victimized by “zero-tolerance” policies
By Naomi Sheehan Groce
11 March 2005
Two instances of overreaction by law enforcement officials highlight the effect of the so-called zero-tolerance policies being applied in Central Kentucky schools. Both incidents involve alleged violence depicted in the creative writing assignments of teenagers.
On Tuesday, February 22, William Poole, an 18-year-old junior at George Rogers Clark High School in Winchester, was charged with terroristic threatening and arrested by local police. Poole’s journal was taken from the home where he lived with his grandmother. While he insisted that it contained only a short story he had written for English class, investigators have characterized it as evidence outlining a violent plot aimed at students, teachers and police.
Police reported that Poole wanted to “recruit a gang to take over the school.” Local detective Berl Perdue stated that the plan involved using weapons. “He didn’t have a gang, but he was attempting to organize one,” he told the Winchester Sun newspaper, adding that no threat had been made against a specific individual.
According to Poole, who spoke with a Lexington television reporter, “My story is based on fiction. It’s a fake story. I made it up. I’ve been working on one of my short stories, [and] the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school overrun by zombies.”
Winchester Police detective Steven Caudill defended the extraordinary arrest. “Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it’s a felony in the state of Kentucky.”
But William Poole, who is being held at Clark County Detention Center, countered, “It didn’t mention nobody who lives in Clark County, didn’t mention [George Rogers Clark High School], didn’t mention no principal or cops, nothing. Half the people at high school know me. They know I’m not that stupid, that crazy.”
Poole’s bond was raised by a local judge on February 24 from $1,000 to $5,000 at the request of the prosecution, who emphasized the seriousness of the charge.
“Terroristic threatening” was made a felony—along with “use of a weapon of mass destruction”—by the Kentucky General Assembly in 2001. The rationale cited in the bill’s provisions was that by reclassifying misdemeanor offenses as state felonies, overpopulated local jails could be given state funding to house prisoners and to expand and fortify facilities. This fiscal justification masks a bizarre legal incongruity: an allegation of a threat can now carry a heavier sentence than an actual crime. For instance, destruction of property carries a 90-day maximum sentence, while merely threatening destruction of property carries a mandatory one-year minimum sentence.
And the statute provides further convenience to law enforcement by nature of its breadth: unlike the similar, misdemeanor charge of menacing, alleged victims of terroristic threatening do not have to be “placed in reasonable apprehension of imminent physical injury” or even have knowledge of a threat. In Poole’s case, he had only to vaguely and fictitiously refer to violence on school grounds in his private journal for the law to come down upon him.
Winchester, like most of Central Kentucky, is an economically depressed and politically polarized area, officially dominated by conservatives and the Christian right. The Clark County school district dropout rate is 8.05 percent, the second highest in the state, and more than 3 percentage points above the National Center for Education Statistics’ estimated national average.
Middle school student taken to psychiatric facility
In another incident last October in nearby Richmond, a 13-year-old was removed from Clark-Moores Middle School by the school’s security guard and taken to a psychiatric care facility after turning in a short story depicting a child contemplating the murder of his parents. Due to a pending court case, names of those involved have been withheld.
The boy’s mother, a nurse and native of China, was called repeatedly by the security guard while on shift at the hospital, but by law was unable to leave her patients. She misunderstood the magnitude of the problem, thinking her son was only being held at school and not at a mental hospital. The guard refused to provide details of what her son had done, stating only that he “took charge” of the situation and demanded that she leave work immediately.
According to the boy’s father, Richmond police trumped up a citation against the student to legitimize his institutionalization, worked with the security guard in transporting and detaining the child without a court order, and refused to allow the parents contact with their son when they arrived at the facility after work. At no point were any papers provided to the parents to sign their consent for admittance or treatment. A police officer standing guard at the door barred the father’s entry and harassed him, calling his wife lazy for not leaving her hospital job at the demand of the security guard.
The boy, who had repeatedly told authorities that his story was meant in irony, was kept in various offices throughout the day and went 10 hours without a meal. He was then transported to a Lexington facility for the night. The following morning, he was evaluated by a doctor and released.
The first installment for medical fees, a bill for $1,500, was sent to the parents in December. The boy’s father sent the bill to the school and began to question administrators about the behavior of the security guard, who had been hired as a hall monitor to conduct locker checks and had no background in law enforcement. The security guard retaliated by filing a neglect complaint against the parents, with the city police and local psychiatric caseworkers lining up behind him.
The boy, last fall an honor roll student, now has a C average and faces failing marks in two subjects. Because of budget cuts, after-school tutoring programs have been canceled, and the parents may have to choose between hiring private tutors and sending the child to live with relatives in another school district.
The “zero-tolerance” policies adopted by many school districts around the country after the 1999 Columbine massacre have resulted in the expulsion and arrest of students for acts ranging from carrying a concealed weapon to writing a violent story.
Violence or the threat of violence in schools is a cause of genuine concern for students, parents and teachers. However, the extraordinary measures utilized by police and school authorities against these two Kentucky students and their families have little to do with countering indications of violent activity and far more to do with intimidating students and creating a general atmosphere of repression.
In America, the political establishment, incapable of responding to social or emotional desperation, sees the solution to every problem as more police repression, a tendency that has been systematically promoted in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11. This response ignores any consideration of the complex combination of factors that underlies these expressions of violence, which in their most extreme have taken the form of school shootings such as the Columbine tragedy.
Moreover, the official response ignores the fact that expressions of truly violent behavior in the schools are, at the most fundamental level, fostered by the brutality of an increasingly polarized and militarized society. As the father of the Richmond middle school student told the WSWS, “Every night, kids see body parts flung all over the TV from the war in Iraq, and then they wonder where all the violence comes from when it comes out at school.”
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shadeaux63
Keeper of dreams
Posts: 1145
(3/12/05 1:25 pm)
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Re: This Just in...again
Second longest-serving House member says he fears for the American democracy
By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor
In an interview with RAW STORY Tuesday, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) detailed concerns on a broad array of issues, including discredited White House reporter Jeff Gannon, remarks by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and voting reform.
In summary, Rep. Conyers expressed concern at what he perceives to be a systematic erosion of due process throughout government. He asserted this departure from the “protection that the government provides people” should be a “wake up call” to those who cherish democracy in the United States.
Rep. Conyers also became the first congressman to weigh in on remarks made by Sen. Lindsey Graham Saturday, in which Graham told Tennessee residents, “We don’t do Lincoln Day Dinners in South Carolina. It’s nothing personal, but it takes awhile to get over things.”
Conyers, Dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Graham was clearly referencing slavery.
“What Senator Graham was saying,” Conyers told RAW STORY, “if we take it [at] face value it seems very clear that it’s referring to the legacy of slavery and second class citizenship that had been the cause of the civil war itself.”
The second longest ranking member of the House (Conyers was elected first in 1964) says he has great concern for America’s future under a presidency he feels has forgotten everyday Americans.
“We’re dealing with a political viewpoint now that is witnessing the steady erosion of the protection that the government provides people in voting, against emergencies, problems in life, unemployment, running out of money, having to go into bankruptcy, or suing in court, where you may be injured far beyond some measly cap of $250,000,” Conyers said.
“It seems like on every front they’re trying to frustrate, obfuscate and make it as difficult as possible for citizens to assert their rights,” he added.
Conyers said he believes the American democracy is struggling under the weight of current policies.
“This should be a wake up call to a lot of people who begin to realize that we’re moving backwards in terms of democracy,” he said. “We’re moving backwards in terms of economic security, we’re having many of our rights taken away that we thought we had in the courts. ”
He asserted that the push for Social Security privatization is merely a “cover” for conservative wrangling.
“I see this 60-day rush of President Bush [is taking] around the country about the privatization of Social Security as a cover for all these terrible things that are happening to our legislative process and our courts,” Conyers stated.
The Michigan Democrat also detailed his call for an investigation into the credentialing of former White House correspondent Jeff Gannon.
“We’re aiming at one piece of information,” Conyers said. “Who in the White House knew that Jeff Gannon was an assumed name, was not a legitimate journalist and was merely a shill for the Administration, for more than two years, nearly three years?
“I am surprised and pleased as many members of the media are looking by in amazement as we look at a person who actually has flouted the very basic fundamentals of our society in terms of gaining access into the White House,” he added.
Does he think the White House is hiding something?
“That’s putting it mildly, my friend,” he quipped.
“It’s very hard to get press credentials to go into the White House,” he explained. “As a matter of fact, you have to reapply every time you go there. And he has been doing this for years. Somebody must know who he really is and we want to know who that somebody is.”
“We want to trace these bread crumbs of facts to what office, what person or persons in the White House have been letting him get through the very strict investigation that they give press people before the let them come into the White House to talk with the President of the United States,” he continued.
“Others are joining in with us because now it’s become clear that agencies of the government are going to stonewall to prevent us from knowing what their relationship with Jeff Gannon really is,” he said.
Conyers spoke at length about new developments in his push for voting reform legislation, his investigation into voting irregularities and Rep. Slaughter’s report released this week which alleged GOP “abuse of power” in the House.
The congressman also addressed his
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continuing drive for voting reform, saying he believes that the GOP leadership of the House will ask the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to quash legislation.
“It is commonly viewed that the leadership may ask him not to hold hearings on election reform since much of the legislation that we created comes out of the debacle of the elections of 2004,” he said. “If so, it would be a great disservice. Voting is the bedrock of a democratic society where the people are supposed to choose their representatives.”
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shadeaux63
Keeper of dreams
Posts: 1147
(3/15/05 5:55 am)
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Re: This Just in...again
This article makes a lot of points about the Christian Rights desire to do away with teaching evolution.It goes WAY beyond just evolution.Some of the pastors quoted in here admit that if they can make headway with THIS issue, they can take down "liberalism".
Battle on Teaching Evolution Sharpens
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 14, 2005; Page A01
WICHITA – Propelled by a polished strategy crafted by activists on America's political right, a battle is intensifying across the nation over how students are taught about the origins of life. Policymakers in 19 states are weighing proposals that question the science of evolution.
The proposals typically stop short of overturning evolution or introducing biblical accounts. Instead, they are calculated pleas to teach what advocates consider gaps in long-accepted Darwinian theory, with many relying on the idea of intelligent design, which posits the central role of a creator.
The growing trend has alarmed scientists and educators who consider it a masked effort to replace science with theology. But 80 years after the Scopes "monkey" trial -- in which a Tennessee man was prosecuted for violating state law by teaching evolution -- it is the anti-evolutionary scientists and Christian activists who say they are the ones being persecuted, by a liberal establishment.
They are acting now because they feel emboldened by the country's conservative currents and by President Bush, who angered many scientists and teachers by declaring that the jury is still out on evolution. Sharing strong convictions, deep pockets and impressive political credentials -- if not always the same goals -- the activists are building a sizable network.
In Seattle, the nonprofit Discovery Institute spends more than $1 million a year for research, polls and media pieces supporting intelligent design. In Fort Lauderdale, Christian evangelist James Kennedy established a Creation Studies Institute. In Virginia, Liberty University is sponsoring the Creation Mega Conference with a Kentucky group called Answers in Genesis, which raised $9 million in 2003.
At the state and local level, from South Carolina to California, these advocates are using lawsuits and school board debates to counter evolutionary theory. Alabama and Georgia legislators recently introduced bills to allow teachers to challenge evolutionary theory in the classroom. Ohio, Minnesota, New Mexico and Ohio have approved new rules allowing that. And a school board member in a Tennessee county wants stickers pasted on textbooks that say evolution remains unproven.
A prominent effort is underway in Kansas, where the state Board of Education intends to revise teaching standards. That would be progress, Southern Baptist minister Terry Fox said, because "most people in Kansas don't think we came from monkeys."
The movement is "steadily growing," said Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, which defends the teaching of evolution. "The energy level is new. The religious right has had an effect nationally. Now, by golly, they want to call in the chits."
Not Science, Politics
Polls show that a large majority of Americans believe God alone created man or had a guiding hand. Advocates invoke the First Amendment and say the current campaigns are partly about respect for those beliefs.
"It's an academic freedom proposal. What we would like to foment is a civil discussion about science. That falls right down the middle of the fairway of American pluralism," said the Discovery Institute's Stephen C. Meyer, who believes evolution alone cannot explain life's unfurling. "We are interested in seeing that spread state by state across the country."
Some evolution opponents are trying to use Bush's No Child Left Behind law, saying it creates an opening for states to set new teaching standards. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a Christian who draws on Discovery Institute material, drafted language accompanying the law that said students should be exposed to "the full range of scientific views that exist."
"Anyone who expresses anything other than the dominant worldview is shunned and booted from the academy," Santorum said in an interview. "My reading of the science is there's a legitimate debate. My feeling is let the debate be had."
Although the new strategy speaks of "teaching the controversy" over evolution, opponents insist the controversy is not scientific, but political. They paint the approach as a disarming subterfuge designed to undermine solid evidence that all living things share a common ancestry.
"The movement is a veneer over a certain theological message. Every one of these groups is now actively engaged in trying to undercut sound science education by criticizing evolution," said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "It is all based on their religious ideology. Even the people who don't specifically mention religion are hard-pressed with a straight face to say who the intelligent designer is if it's not God."
Although many backers of intelligent design oppose the biblical account that God created the world in six days, the Christian right is increasingly mobilized, Baylor University scholar Barry G. Hankins said. He noted the recent hiring by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary of Discovery Institute scholar and prominent intelligent design proponent William A. Dembski.
The seminary said the move, along with the creation of a Center for Science and Theology, was central to developing a "comprehensive Christian worldview."
"As the Christian right has success on a variety of issues, it emboldens them to expand their agenda," Hankins said. "When they have losses . . . it gives them fuel for their fire."
Deferring the Debate
The efforts are not limited to schools. From offices overlooking Puget Sound, Meyer is waging a careful campaign to change the way Americans think about the natural world. The Discovery Institute devotes about 85 percent of its budget to funding scientists, with other money going to public action campaigns.
Discovery Institute raised money for "Unlocking the Mystery of Life," a DVD produced by Illustra Media and shown on PBS stations in major markets. The institute has sponsored opinion polls and underwrites research for books sold in secular and Christian bookstores. Its newest project is to establish a science laboratory.
Meyer said the institute accepts money from such wealthy conservatives as Howard Ahmanson Jr., who once said his goal is "the total integration of biblical law into our lives," and the Maclellan Foundation, which commits itself to "the infallibility of the Scripture."
"We'll take money from anyone who wants to give it to us," Meyer said. "Everyone has motives. Let's acknowledge that and get on with the interesting part."
Meyer said he and Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman devised the compromise strategy in March 2002 when they realized a dispute over intelligent design was complicating efforts to challenge evolution in the classroom. They settled on the current approach that stresses open debate and evolution's ostensible weakness, but does not require students to study design.
The idea was to sow doubt about Darwin and buy time for the 40-plus scientists affiliated with the institute to perfect the theory, Meyer said. Also, by deferring a debate about whether God was the intelligent designer, the strategy avoids the defeats suffered by creationists who tried to oust evolution from the classroom and ran afoul of the Constitution.
"Our goal is to not remove evolution. Good lord, it's incredible how much this is misunderstood," said William Harris, a professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City medical school. "Kids need to understand it, but they need to know the strengths and weaknesses of the data, how much of it is a guess, how much of it is extrapolation."
Harris does not favor teaching intelligent design, although he believes there is more to the story than evolution.
"To say God did not play a role is arrogant," Harris said. "It's far beyond the data."
Harris teamed up with John H. Calvert, a retired corporate lawyer who calls the debate over the origins of life "the most fundamental issue facing the culture." They formed Intelligent Design Network Inc., which draws interested legislators and activists to an annual Darwin, Design and Democracy conference.
The 2001 conference presented its Wedge of Truth award to members of the 1999 Kansas Board of Education that played down evolution and allowed local boards to decide what students would learn. A board elected in 2001 overturned that decision, but a fresh batch of conservatives won office in November, when Bush swamped his Democratic opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), here by 62 to 37 percent.
"The thing that excites me is we really are in a revolution of scientific thought," Calvert said. He described offering advice in such places as Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio and Cobb County, Ga., where a federal court recently halted an attempt to affix a sticker to science textbooks saying evolution is theory, not fact.
'Liberalism Will Die'
Despite some disagreement, Calvert, Harris and the Discovery Institute collectively favor efforts to change state teaching standards. Bypassing the work of a 26-member science standards committee that rejected revisions, the Kansas board's conservative majority recently announced a series of "scientific hearings" to discuss evolution and its critics.
The board's chairman, Steve Abrams, said he is seeking space for students to "critically analyze" the evidence.
That approach appeals to Cindy Duckett, a Wichita mother who believes public school leaves many religious children feeling shut out. Teaching doubts about evolution, she said, is "more inclusive. I think the more options, the better."
"If students only have one thing to consider, one option, that's really more brainwashing," said Duckett, who sent her children to Christian schools because of her frustration. Students should be exposed to the Big Bang, evolution, intelligent design "and, beyond that, any other belief that a kid in class has. It should all be okay."
Fox -- pastor of the largest Southern Baptist church in the Midwest, drawing 6,000 worshipers a week to his Wichita church -- said the compromise is an important tactic. "The strategy this time is not to go for the whole enchilada. We're trying to be a little more subtle," he said.
To fundamentalist Christians, Fox said, the fight to teach God's role in creation is becoming the essential front in America's culture war. The issue is on the agenda at every meeting of pastors he attends. If evolution's boosters can be forced to back down, he said, the Christian right's agenda will advance.
"If you believe God created that baby, it makes it a whole lot harder to get rid of that baby," Fox said. "If you can cause enough doubt on evolution, liberalism will die."
Like Meyer, Fox is glad to make common cause with people who do not entirely agree.
"Creationism's going to be our big battle. We're hoping that Kansas will be the model, and we're in it for the long haul," Fox said. He added that it does not matter "who gets the credit, as long as we win."
Special correspondent Kari Lydersen in Chicago contributed to this report.
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shadeaux63
Keeper of dreams
Posts: 1148
(3/15/05 6:17 am)
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Re: This Just in...again
This is from the South Carolina Times and Democrat newspaper.I wish I could reproduce this in bulk,and send copies to everyone who thinks "privitization" is a good idea.
IN OTHER WORDS: Before Social Security
By BETTY LOU R.TERRY
Few people remember the time before Social Security. And, nobody wants to read about it.
Around the home tables and in the gathering places in the town of Brandon, Vermont, the people discussed that horrid President Roosevelt's latest "New Deal" program. The Social Security Bill passed on Aug. 14, 1935. Employers would have to "kick in" money for their employees' retirement. It would ruin businesses. Everybody knew that only the rich retired to a leisure lifestyle, not farmers, tradesmen, or businessmen.
Those same people seemed to forget that in the case of this town, there was the Town Farm, or another name was The Poor House, paid for by these same people. The Town Farm residents had no homes, families or incomes and were "housed" at the farm. They had the minimal necessities, but no medical care.
The stagecoach inn-like house was a two-story house with an L-extension, where the poor people lived. The front of the house contained the manager's quarters. The poor lived in small, single rooms with a bed, chair and a hook to hang their few belongs. It opened into a large, all-purpose room, where they ate. The women sat around doing handiwork when they weren't helping prepare huge meals for the residents. The men passed the time playing cards at night in that room.
The men had a full schedule working on the farm if they were able. A large barn of beautiful registered Ayrshire brown-and-white cows were milked and fed by the men. The gardens were tended and the wood chopped and brought in for the fires.
These poor people had no homes or relatives and were forced to go to the Town Farm or live in town in the filthy coal bins.
Another program for the poor community was the distribution of flour, sugar, salt, coffee, some cloth and other items these people were financially unable to buy. The goods were housed in my mother's living room for safety and for keeping rodents at bay. Men walked — they couldn't afford cars — to pick up what was absolutely necessary for their families. Each recipient was listed on the annual March Town Report, along with the amount they received. These proud people asked for as little as possible, not to appear greedy.
With President Roosevelt's Social Security plan, the Town Farm was eliminated The property was sold. Down the road, the recipients of the new plan maintained their rural homes and lived frugally, but with pride, and independently. Many would have had to go to the Town Farm had they not had these funds. Grace, Emma, Hazel and others continued to be contributing citizens economically and in the community when they received their Social Security checks. They had the pride of their own homes and managing their own lives.
None of these people who were in the labor force in their youth had any idea of the stock market. They only knew about the crash of l929 and how the farm commodities sold for almost nothing. They would not have been interested in repeating that scenario by investing in the private accounts.
In the last decade, we have seen Wall Street and even local businesses crash. Retirees who thought they were set for the good life in retirement discovered they had no funds.
Most of us are not of the economic persuasion to accumulate great wealth, and the Social Security System is reliable, basic insurance. Reading the predictions of when the Social Security system will go broke is like reading a fairy tale. Former Sen. Fritz Hollings has said that if the Washington politicians would keep their hands out of the fund, the Social Security fund would still be intact. Having used much of it for other programs, the politicians do not want to pay the money back into the fund.
We have a large population, which is living below hand-to-mouth right now, and all the tax credits and investments won't do anything for the eventual poverty of these people if they do not have Social Security checks when they need them.
It would be wonderful if we all had bundles of money stashed away to do all the things we would like. That doesn't seem to be realistic. Social Security gives us dignity, and some money to live, which in the end spurs the economy.
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shadeaux63
Keeper of dreams
Posts: 1149
(3/15/05 6:24 am)
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Re: This Just in...again
This was only one,of many articles I've read in the past 2 days about changes known to be caused by global warming.Parts of the alaskan tundra is becoming swampy as the permafrost melts,ice flows are starting later,and melting earlier,Mt Kilimanjaro is without its icecap for the first time in 11,000 years,and now the Himalayas are going that way,too.
Himalayan glaciers 'melting fast'
Mt Everest
The world's highest mountains hide vast glaciers
Melting glaciers in the Himalayas could lead to water shortages for hundreds of millions of people, the conservation group WWF has warned.
In a report, the WWF says India, China and Nepal could experience floods followed by droughts in coming decades.
The Himalayas contain the largest store of water outside the polar ice caps, and feed seven great Asian rivers.
The group says immediate action against climate change could slow the rate of melting, which is increasing annually.
"The rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers will first increase the volume of water in rivers, causing widespread flooding," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the WWF's Global Climate Change Programme.
"But in a few decades this situation will change and the water level in rivers will decline, meaning massive eco and environmental problems for people in western China, Nepal and northern India."
'Catastrophe'
The glaciers, which regulate the water supply to the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Thanlwin, Yangtze and Yellow rivers, are believed to be retreating at a rate of about 10-15m (33-49ft) each year.
The world faces an economic and development catastrophe if the rate of global warming isn't reduced
Jennifer Morgan, WWF
Hundreds of millions of people throughout China and the Indian subcontinent - most of whom live far from the Himalayas - rely on water supplied from these rivers.
Many live on flood plains highly vulnerable to raised water levels.
And vast numbers of farmers rely on regular irrigation to grow their crops successfully.
The WWF said the potential for disaster in the region should serve to focus the minds of ministers of 20 leading industrialised nations gathering in London for two meetings on climate change.
"Ministers should realise now that the world faces an economic and development catastrophe if the rate of global warming isn't reduced," Ms Morgan said.
Temperatures rising
She added that a study commissioned for the WWF indicated that the temperature of the earth could rise by two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in a little over 20 years.
A Chinese farmer in Qinghai province
Farmers in rural China are dependent on regular irrigation
Allowing global temperatures to rise that far would be "truly dangerous", Ms Morgan said.
Nepal, China and India are already showing signs of climate change, the WWF report says.
Nepal's annual average temperature has risen by 0.06 degrees Celsius, and three snow-fed rivers have shown signs of reduced flows.
Water level in China's Qinghai Plateau wetlands have affected lakes, rivers and swamps, while India's Gangotri glacier is receding by 23 metres each year.
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shadeaux63
Keeper of dreams
Posts: 1151
(3/20/05 7:34 pm)
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Re: This Just in...again
Check out these pics from anti-war protests around the world today,It's awesome.
www.hoffmania.com/blog/20...itize.html
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shadeaux63
Keeper of dreams
Posts: 1152
(3/20/05 7:49 pm)
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Re: This Just in...again
This is from the Raleigh News and Observer,the local paper here-where I live.Scary?you bet,but more common all the time.
Church-state lesson learned
School admits it crossed line
By KRISTIN COLLINS, Staff Writer
A fifth-grader's family is suing the Cumberland County school system because her teacher used a Christian text that preached creationism and encouraged children to proselytize for Jesus.
The suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Raleigh, says that a teacher at Sunnyside Elementary School in Fayetteville assigned students readings that included the lesson "Scents Make Sense."
"God's word tells us about a kind of odor only Christians have ...," the lesson read. "Christians carry forth the fragrance of Christ wherever they go by the way they live; that is, they remind people of Him.
"Could someone find Christ by the scent trail you are leaving behind you?"
EXCERPTS
Excerpts from the A Beka Book texts used in a fifth-grade class at Sunnyside Elementary, a public school in Fayetteville.
A SPECIAL NICHE
"God has a niche for each creature He has created, down to the tiniest microscopic being. He also has a niche for each person He has created. As Christians, we can trust Him to show us our niche in life -- where we fit into His plan for the world and for His kingdom."
SCENTS MAKE SENSE
"God's word tells us about a kind of odor only Christians have. 'For we are unto God a sweet savor of Christ ...' (2 Corinthians 2:15). Paul goes on to say that Christians carry forth the fragrance of Christ wherever they go by the way they live; that is, they remind people of Him.
"Could someone find Christ by the scent trail you are leaving behind you?"
The school system acknowledged in an agreement filed Friday that the allegations were true and pledged not to use those lessons or other religious materials. Once a judge signs that agreement, the school system could face federal criminal penalties for violating it.
"We made a mistake," Cumberland Schools Superintendent Bill Harrison said Friday. "The only thing we can do is make amends and move on."
In November or December, Ashlee Nicole Smith, a school spelling bee champion and president of the Sunnyside Beta Club, showed the scent lesson and one other to her parents, Troy and Mary Jane Smith of Fayetteville. The other lesson said, "God has a niche for each creature He has created, down to the tiniest microscopic being. He also has a niche for each person He has created."
The suit says that when the parents complained to principal Deborah Anderson, she asked, "What's the problem? Don't you and your family go to church?"
Anderson also told the parents she didn't understand their objections, because Ashlee earned perfect scores on the assignments. Anderson then promised that it wouldn't happen again.
In February, it did.
Ashlee came home with a worksheet on which she was marked wrong for answering that "chance" was the reason many animals are colored to match their surroundings. The teacher indicated that the right answer was "God's master design," the suit says.
Harrison said Cumberland schools have a policy, mandated by federal law, that bars teachers from endorsing any religion.
He said that Kristie Griffiths, the teacher, is a visiting faculty member from Australia and did not understand U.S. standards. She bought the text from Christian publisher A Beka Book with her own money, he said.
Harrison said the principal did not take the incident seriously enough and failed to make sure the teacher stopped using the text. He said Anderson sent a memo to all staff asking them to use only board-approved materials but didn't communicate directly with Griffiths.
Anderson declined to comment, and Griffiths could not be reached.
Harrison said he found out about the problem in February, when the Smiths' lawyer sent him a letter, and he made sure that the text is no longer being used. The teacher and the principal are still at Sunnyside, and Harrison wouldn't comment on what discipline they might face.
Jon Sasser, the Raleigh lawyer who represents the Smith family, said the parents filed suit because they wanted to make sure this doesn't happen again. He said the Smiths believe strongly in the separation of church in state.
The Smiths couldn't be reached for comment.
"Ashlee's a fifth-grader, and she realized this was wrong," Sasser said. "This is light years beyond an invocation at a graduation or a moment of silence at a football game. When you're proselytizing fifth-graders, it's way over the top."
And here are some excerpts from the lesson book the teacher was using;
EXCERPTS
Excerpts from the A Beka Book texts used in a fifth-grade class at Sunnyside Elementary, a public school in Fayetteville.
A SPECIAL NICHE
"God has a niche for each creature He has created, down to the tiniest microscopic being. He also has a niche for each person He has created. As Christians, we can trust Him to show us our niche in life -- where we fit into His plan for the world and for His kingdom."
SCENTS MAKE SENSE
"God's word tells us about a kind of odor only Christians have. 'For we are unto God a sweet savor of Christ ...' (2 Corinthians 2:15). Paul goes on to say that Christians carry forth the fragrance of Christ wherever they go by the way they live; that is, they remind people of Him.
"Could someone find Christ by the scent trail you are leaving behind you?"
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shadeaux63
Keeper of dreams
Posts: 1155
(3/24/05 3:12 pm)
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Re: This Just in...again
This was one of the best articles I've read yet about the Terri Shiavo case.It's an Associated Press piece,printed originally in USA Today.
Posted 2/25/2005 3:42 PM Updated 2/26/2005 12:56 PM
Schiavo case highlights eating disorders
TAMPA (AP) — Before she was the severely brain-damaged patient at the center of a legal dispute over whether she should live or die, Terri Schiavo was a young woman who desperately wanted to be thin.
At 26, she was strikingly beautiful with delicate features. But she had spent her childhood and high school years as a chubby and shy girl, standing just 5-foot-3 and weighing 200 pounds at her heaviest.
When she finally lost 65 pounds in her late teens, men started to pay attention — including the man who would become her husband, Michael Schiavo, who was tall and handsome.
But keeping the weight off was a struggle for Terri Schiavo, and years later — after her heart stopped briefly, cutting off oxygen to the brain — a malpractice case brought against a doctor on her behalf would reveal she had been trying to survive on liquids and was making herself throw up after meals. The Schiavos' lawyer said her 1990 collapse was caused by a potassium imbalance brought on by an eating disorder.
It is a cruel twist lost on no one close to the case: A woman who is said to have struggled with an eating disorder is now in the middle of a court battle over whether her feeding tube should be removed so that she can starve to death.
Gary Fox, a lawyer who represented Terri and Michael Schiavo in the malpractice case, said the disease is the "lost lesson" in the Schiavo case.
"While there is no cure for bulimia, there were things that could and should have been done for her that would have controlled it," he said in a recent interview.
Terri Schiavo, 41, is now locked in what some doctors say is a persistent vegetative state, with no hope of recovery. In one of the nation's longest right-to-die disputes, her husband is fighting with her parents to have the feeding tube removed; a court order preventing its removal expires at 5 p.m. Friday.
Like almost every element in the case, whether Schiavo really was bulimic is in dispute. Her father, Robert Schindler, said he does not believe his daughter had an eating disorder and thinks her husband had something to do with her collapse. Michael Schiavo has denied hurting his wife.
During the malpractice case, at least one of Schiavo's friends testified they knew she was bulimic because after meals out, she always immediately excused herself to go to the bathroom. Her husband also knew she had peculiar eating patterns but did not realize they were dangerous, Fox said.
Medical records from the hospital where Schiavo was treated after her collapse note that "she apparently has been trying to keep her weight down with dieting by herself, drinking liquids most of the time during the day and drinking about 10-15 glasses of iced tea."
Fox said that in the months before her collapse, Schiavo went to the doctor because she had stopped menstruating. It was a silent "cry for help," the lawyer said. But the doctor did not take a complete medical history that might have revealed an eating disorder.
The jury put the damages at $6.8 million but reduced the verdict to about $2 million because it felt Schiavo was partly at fault for her collapse.
Fox said Schiavo was a victim of medical negligence, but also a victim of societal pressures to be thin. "She didn't want to go back to where she was from," he said. "This was the only way she could do this in her mind and be able to eat as much as she did."
Eating disorders have long been known to cause heart failure. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, the binge-and-purge cycles of bulimia can lead to chemical imbalances that harm major organs.
David Herzog, a Harvard psychology professor and founder of the Harvard Eating Disorders Center, said medical science is only in the early stages of tracking the long-term effects of eating disorders and there are no good statistics on how many people are killed or permanently disabled. Herzog said that even when someone dies from an eating disorder, medical examiners often do not list it on the death certificate.
Experts say the serious health risks exist long before a victim looks sick. In Schiavo's case, Fox said, she was not excessively thin when she went to the doctor.
Psychologist Doug Bunnell, president of the National Eating Disorders Association, said while he could not comment on the specifics of the Schiavo case, it is often impossible to predict which sufferers are in immediate danger.
"Paint me a picture of an eating disorder — it's an emaciated woman," he said. "But that's not the reality. They don't get down that low. The face of eating disorders is your next-door neighbor's daughter or maybe your own."
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shadeaux63
Keeper of dreams
Posts: 1156
(3/30/05 10:36 am)
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Re: This Just in...again
This is an op-ed piece from an Arizona newspaper.
Ignoring suffering of everyone who isn't Terri Schiavo
Mar. 29, 2005 12:00 AM
There is a con man's technique that politicians sometimes use to manipulate the public and never has it worked better than with Terri Schiavo.
The scheme involves making a very big deal about the plight of a single person to get us to ignore the plight of hundreds, thousands or even millions of others.
Two-bit hustlers use distraction and diversion techniques to lift your wallet or empty your bank account. Political flimflammers use the tragedy of a single family to distract you from the horror they are inflicting upon your friends and neighbors.
And it works. Dozens of e-mails asking (sometimes demanding) me to take up Schiavo's cause were waiting for me Monday after having spent last week on vacation. The megaphone being used by politicians in Washington, D.C., to rant about Schiavo drowns out discussion even in places as far away as Arizona.
And while I heard a lot about Schiavo, I didn't have a single e-mail expressing outrage over an Arizona budget proposal calling for cuts in child-abuse prevention programs and subsidies for the working poor.
Or for a plan not to increase the budget for the state's Child Protective Services. Even though such decisions are certain to condemn some Arizona children to death.
And while President Bush and Congress rushed to intervene in the Schiavo case, saying they were acting to preserve life, they were in no hurry to discuss their proposed cuts to Medicaid, which helps the poor. And they avoided talking about the tens of millions of Americans with no health insurance and how many of them will die for lack of it.
And that's just the beginning. The noise surrounding the Schiavo case overwhelms the misery of the many thousands who will suffer under Congress' latest bankruptcy law revisions.
It will no longer be easy for those who are financially ruined by an illness in the family, which is the majority of bankruptcies filed, to receive the protection they previously had under the law.
Nor would families like Schiavo's be able to collect large medical malpractice settlements under a president and Congress who are working hard to limit the amount of awards for such lawsuits.
Without the money from litigation to pay for their care how many other Terri Schiavos would be condemned to die?
In Florida, where Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, attempted to override the state courts on behalf of Schiavo's parents, I wonder how many citizens know about Bush's plan to eliminate portions of a program that helps gravely ill working people who are out of insurance money.
When Congress passed special legislation to allow the federal courts to get involved in the Schiavo case, the effort was led by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. It turns out that 17 years ago DeLay agreed with family members to not allow doctors to use extraordinary means to extend the life of his father.
With Schiavo, however, DeLay said, "We should investigate every avenue before we take the life from a human being,"
President Bush cut short his vacation to return to Washington and sign the bill because he also felt that every avenue should be explored, even though Schiavo's condition has been unchanged for 15 years.
The purity of their motives might be less in question if they'd said the same thing in March 2003, when diplomats asked the United States to wait 45 more days before invading Iraq. They asked that we explore every avenue before starting a war that would take thousands of lives. The president and his partners in Congress said no.
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shadeaux63
Keeper of dreams
Posts: 1157
(3/31/05 9:12 am)
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Re: This Just in...again
Earth has suffered irreversible damage: study
Humans are damaging the Earth at such an unprecedented rate that the strain on the planet may destroy about two-thirds of its ecosystem services, according to a landmark international study.
The consequences of humans' activities are severe and include: new diseases, sudden changes in water quality, creation of "dead zones" along the coasts, the collapse of fisheries, and shifts in regional climate, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Synthesis Report.
"At the heart of this assessment is a stark warning," said the 45-member board.
"Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted," it said.
The four-year, 2,500-page assessment was drawn up by 1,300 researchers from 95 nations in an effort to inform global policy initiatives.
Scientists warn that about 60 per cent of the ecosystem services that support life on Earth, such as fresh water, air and water regulation and natural hazards, are being destroyed.
The report warns that the consequences of this degradation of the environment will significantly worsen over the next 50 years.
"Any progress achieved in addressing the goals of poverty and hunger eradication, improved health, and environmental protection is unlikely to be sustained if most of the ecosystem services on which humanity relies continue to be degraded," said the study.
The report says humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly in the past 50 years than any other period.
"This was done largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel," a statement said, adding that this resulted in an irreversible loss of life on Earth, with some 10 to 30 per cent of mammal, bird and amphibian species threatened with extinction currently.
The changes in the ecosystem are owing to humans' efforts to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fibre and fuel, the report says.
"More land was converted to agriculture since 1945 than in the 18th and 19th centuries combined," according to the report's authors.
"More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, first made in 1913, ever used on the planet has been used since 1985."
And the current state of affairs is likely to be an obstacle to meeting the Millennium Development Goals agreed to by world leaders at the United Nations in 2000, the report says.
"The over-riding conclusion of this assessment is that it lies within the power of human societies to ease the strains we are putting on the nature services of the planet, while continuing to use them to bring better living standards to all," said the MA board of directors in a statement.
"Achieving this, however, will require radical changes in the way nature is treated at every level of decision-making and new ways of cooperation between government, business and civil society. The warning signs are there for all of us to see. The future now lies in our hands."
In a message launching the reports, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said the environment can only be protected by understanding how it works.
"Only by valuing all our precious natural and human resources can we hope to build a sustainable future," Annan said.
Other warnings:
* Deforestation influences the abundance of human pathogens such as malaria and cholera
* Scientists project there will be progress in eliminating hunger but at rates too slow to halve the number of the hungry by 2015.
* It is the world's poorest people who suffer the most from changes to the ecosystem.
* Only four ecosystem services have been improved in the past half-century. These include: increased crop, livestock and aquaculture production, and increased carbon sequestration for worldwide climate regulation.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment's work was prepared under the supervision of a 45-member board of directors, co-chaired by Dr. Robert Watson, chief scientist of The World Bank, and Dr. A. Hamid Zakri, director of the United Nations University's Institute of Advanced Studies.
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shadeaux63
Keeper of dreams
Posts: 1158
(4/1/05 12:43 am)
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Re: This Just in...again
March 31, 2005
Seymour Hersh: Bush is "Unreachable"
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Gloria R. Lalumia, BuzzFlash Columnist
Seymour Hersh visited New Mexico State University (Las Cruces) on Tuesday, March 29 as part of his speaking tour for his newest book, “Chain of Command: the Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.” He opened his presentation by announcing that he intended to discuss “what’s on my mind” and “where we think we are.” The first thing on his mind was a chilling assessment of George W. Bush.
“The President,” Hersh sighed. “Bush is as absolutely convinced he’s doing the right thing,” just as journalists are who think of themselves as white knights think they are doing the right thing. “Even if we have another thousand body bags, it won’t deter him.”
“This is where he is. He believes he won’t be measured by today, but in 5 or 10 years” in terms of the Mideast. With regard to Iraq, “he thinks it’s going well.” Iran, according to Hersh’s contacts, is “teed up.” “This is his mission,” he continued. “What does it mean?”
And then he delivered the most chilling comments of the evening. “Nothing I write” is likely to influence Bush, he said. “He is unreachable. I can’t reach him. He’s got his own world. This is really unusual and frankly, it scares the hell out of me.”
From this point on, Hersh offered a compendium of the Bush policy failures, misjudgments, and out-of-touch convictions that have fueled his fears.
Iraq
First, Hersh brought the audience of nearly 2,000 up to date on conditions in Iraq. He torpedoed Bush’s rosy assessment of the recent elections. “Everything came to a stop for this election. Satellites were moved over the country. All assets were dragged over. In Afghanistan, where we really have a war going on…those guys stood down for three weeks because the drones which pick up signals were all dragged to Iraq. Nobody knew who they were voting for. If this had happened in Russia during the Cold War, it would have been laughed at.”
Assessing the current situation, Hersh remarked that the Iraqis “can’t agree on what language to speak--it’s zoo time. We’re nowhere, we’re probably not going to win the war; probably, it will be a Balkanized country. The Turks want Kirkuk, the city with oil, and they may invade, they may not. Here it’s spin city. In the European and Mideastern press, there’s a reality that you don’t get over here.”
Hersh described how he thought Bush treats Americans by retelling an old Richard Pryor story in which a man comes home to find his wife in bed with another man. “What you’re seeing isn’t happening,” the husband is told. “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?”
Hersh charged that the American people are not getting a true picture of the status of the war. He reflected on the fact that “there are no embedded reporters now and the bombing continues” even though there are no air defenses. “We don’t know how many sorties are being flown or the tonnage involved because there are no reporters. We do know that Navy pilots are doing most of the flying.” Hersh made a point of saying that many in the military, FBI, and CIA have as much integrity as most academics, and within these institutions “there are people who respect the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody.” The Marine Corps personnel are the most skeptical even as they continue to do most of the heavy lifting. Hersh reports that many are very bitter, but they are loyal to the principle of civilian control and are continuing to do their job, but “they are going through hard times now.”
The bombing of Fallujah, according to Hersh, marked a major escalation of the “very careful urban bombing” campaign. Fallujah is “an incredibly important city in Iraq. It led the resistance against the British, it has mosques, it is a fabled place.” When Fallujah was bombed, an urban bombing planner told Hersh, “Welcome to Stalingrad, we took it block by block.” Hersh said that it was amazing that Fallujah was largely not on the table in America for discussion.”
“The Thinness of the Fabric of Democracy”
How have we as a nation gotten to where we are today? Since the ‘80’s Wolfowitz, Feith, Gingrich and others have been pushing the neo-con idea that by spreading democracy, we can make the world safer for US interests. “It’s as if we’ve been taken over by a cult of 8 or 9 people who decided the road to stop international terrorism led to Baghdad,” according to Hersh. Hersh recalled how General Shinseki, who testified in February 2003 that we would need upwards of 250,000 troops to control Iraq, was denounced by Wolfowitz, because Shinseki’s answers didn’t conform to the neo-con mantra.
“That 8 or 9 people can change so much...Where was the military, the Congress, the press? What has happened raises the question about the thinness of the fabric of democracy.”
These days, said Hersh, we hear about the “insurgency” when in truth, “we’re fighting the Ba’athists, the Sunni, the tribal people. They decided to let us have Baghdad and fight the war on their terms. It’s not an insurgency—that implies that we’ve put in a government and they’re fighting against that government. We haven’t accomplished our objective on that score,” according to Hersh.
The US is fighting cells of 10-15 people and can’t find them because it has no intelligence. So the goal now is to make the people who protect the resistance more afraid of US/Iraqi forces than they are of the resistance so they will turn and provide information. Fallujah had too much press coverage, so now everything is being done “off camera.” Hersh describes the situation once one leaves Baghdad as “cowboys and Indians” since “we control very little.” Hersh noted that Shia cleric Sistani did nothing as Shia Iraqi Guards and Americans took down the Sunni in Fallujah. The same thing is now going on in Ramadi. This long-standing enmity between Shia and Sunni is why, Hersh believes, civil war is probably in Iraq’s future.
“The Chronology”
Hersh then launched into his chronology of how we went from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. Post-9/11, there were voices in the U.S. government that were not pushing the policy of “payback” since some Taliban had been dealing with U.S. oil companies, were largely mercantile and many were not happy with bin Laden. These voices in the government wanted a more nuanced approach. There was also disagreement with Bush’s plans to go into Iraq, but these people were deemed “traitors.” He described how the Bush Administration pressured people to come around to their view. Basically, they exploited human nature. People with experience who disagreed noticed that junior officials supporting the White House got the face time with the President, the meetings, and the big end of the year bonuses. So it was only a matter of time before those who did not favor Bush’s policies, people with kids and mortgages, decided they had to “join the team” to survive. (See the section on the Q & A below for more insights on what people in the government and military have been thinking.)
Bush elected to rout the Taliban, but pulled out the most elite units in early 2002 for redeployment to the Mideast for the coming war in Iraq. Although Bush says we’ve “won” in Afghanistan, “the ‘bad guys’ are still there, the elections have been delayed for a second time, crime is up, they are the largest producers of heroin in the world, and at one point, 700 kids were dying of hypothermia and malnutrition every day” during the hard winter.
Following Bush’s victory show on the carrier in May 2003, the reality of Iraq became clearer. During the invasion, “6,000-12,000 people disappeared overnight. Most elite units had been ready to fight; sandbags and armed soldiers were on every corner.” All the people who ran the bureaucracy of running the country were gone...the people who ran the water, oil ministry and hospitals. Some of the looting was done randomly by Shiites, but most of the government records—real estate, marriage licenses, etc.—were looted and burned systematically. Saddam’s plan was to dismantle the operating units of government and to fight later. To this day, according to Hersh, the “people who didn’t fight are now fighting.”
The August 2003 bombing of the U.N. headquarters and the subsequent attack on the Jordanian Embassy, which Hersh describes as the psyops center for CIA and other espionage, sent a key message: “that the resistance was hitting facilities that would take out other facilities”—in other words, the hitting of key facilities would create a ripple effect, undermining other functions down the line.
At this point, about a year before the Presidential election, Karl Rove got involved. With a desperate need for intelligence, the push was on to squeeze prisoners for information. Hersh said that most of the prisoners “had nothing to do with anything.” Most were caught at roadblocks or any male under 30 was grabbed if he was in the area after an ambush.
At Abu Ghraib, many of the guards were simply traffic police who had been give two weeks of training before being sent to the prison. In September 2003 the abuse of prisoners had begun. The attempts to gain intelligence were based on what Hersh called a “most acute form of torture,” the shaming of prisoners by using pictures of frontal nudity of males and posing prisoners as if they were performing homosexual acts, knowing that if photographs were shown in their communities, this would be death for them. This threat of distribution didn’t get very far because the situation we have today is that we still have no intelligence from inside the resistance or as Hersh puts it, “We don’t know jack.”
From September to December 2003, torture was going on at night and all the top generals were coming in and out of Abu Ghraib. With the release of the Darby CD in January 2004, Rumsfeld appeared before Congress admitting things were “bad” but the extent of the abuse was still secret until Hersh and CBS broke the story open.
“How does Abu Ghraib play out in the real world?”
For the first and only time during his talk, Hersh raised his voice and boomed this question into the mike: “The President, what did he do between January and May? They prosecuted a few low-level kids when these pictures came out. These pictures were a shock to their (Arab) culture, they viewed America as being sexually perverse. When it hits the paper, Bush says ‘I’m against torture.’” But instead of a real investigation, Hersh says all we got were hearings and inquiries about “rules and regulations.” Hersh, in talking to a lot of GIs involved in the abuse, has concluded that soldiers were told “Just don’t kill ‘em, do what you want.”
Hersh recalled how after the My Lai incident in Viet Nam, the mother of a soldier who took part in the massacre told him that “I gave them a good boy, they sent me back a murderer.” Hersh believes the military has a responsibility to the young people they send off to war. He is concerned about the psychic damage of our troops and told one story about a woman back from Iraq who is getting big black tattoos everywhere on her body. Her mother believes that she wants to be in someone else’s skin. Hersh believes that when this is all over, we’ll be hearing things about the war that we won’t want to hear.
Touching on the situation at Guantanamo Bay, Hersh said that of the 600 people there, about half have had nothing to do with terrorism. But, he warns, if they aren’t Al-Qaeda already, they will be. And the government now faces the difficulty that many detainees can’t even be released because they’ve now become more of a threat as a result of their imprisonment than they were before they were sent to Gitmo.
According to his contacts in military/intelligence circles, the debate over whether 9/11 was part of a deep-seated Al-Qaeda presence in the US or was the equivalent of a “pick-up team” has been largely resolved. Most experts have come down on the side of the latter. So, the US will have to come to terms with what we’ve done eventually, and in Hersh’s view, “there’s no good news in this, folks.”
Q & A: Oil and How Our Military/Government Feels about Bush’s Policies
Most of the Q & A was spent on oil and what people in our military and government are thinking about Bush’s policies.
1) A question about oil as Bush’s real reason for the Iraq war was raised:
Hersh said that his best guess is that oil was not “the real thing he wanted to do.” The neo-con mantra, ‘all roads lead to Baghdad’ and ‘democratization,’ the latter concept which goes all the way back to Jean Kirkpatrick, were the major ideas behind the war. Bush couldn’t have sold “democratization” on it’s own, so WMD’s were used as the reason. “If we had known there was no WMD, there would have been no vote.”
Hersh warned that when the price of oil reaches $68-$69 a barrel, this will be the crunch point in terms of real economic decline. If Bush wants to move against Iran, which is pumping about 3.9 barrels a day, he’s heading for trouble. According to Hersh, Iran will scuttle every ship in the Straights of Hormuz and the Malaca Straits in Indonesia. It will take months of dredging and salvaging to approach normalcy.
If oil is Bush’s top priority, “Bush is just not behaving as someone who is managing an oil crisis” and has already been “mismanaging oil in Iraq.”
Hersh passed along a comment he had picked up that illustrates the level of Bush’s awareness. “You could call Wolfowitz a ‘Trotskyite,’ a permanent revolutionary. Wolfowitz would know what you are talking about. But Bush wouldn’t.”
2) A couple of questions touched on opinions in the military/government toward Bush’s policies:
According to Hersh, elite intel groups are troubled by the missions they are being ordered to carry out and they are questioning what they are doing. Hersh said that he is not a “pacifist” because there are people want to hurt us and we need to be able to protect ourselves. But, in Afghanistan, things could have been done differently. Hersh said he wants us to know that those who know the Constitution are very concerned. In particular, Navy Seals are suffering “massive resignations over disillusionment” over Bush’s policies. “Our President chose not to do things in ways that could have avoided this...he had other options available.” Hersh concluded by reiterating that “vast parts of government didn’t believe there were WMD’s” and that Bush’s neo-con policies are “a product of paranoid thinking and the Cold War.”
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
Copyright 2005, Gloria R. Lalumia
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shadeaux63
Keeper of dreams
Posts: 1159
(4/2/05 2:07 pm)
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Re: This Just in...again
BuzzFlash Reader Contribution
April 1, 2005
An Open Letter to President Bush and Congress From Two Americans with Disabilities
Republicans are pulling "the wheelchair out from under the child with muscular dystrophy."
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Anne Lindsay and Rod DeVaul
Dear President Bush, Governor Jeb Bush, Members of the House of Representatives, and Members of the Senate:
Like most Americans, we have been listening intently to your comments about Terry Schiavo and persons with disabilities. We're delighted that you're focusing your attention on disability issues and hope that you will continue to do so. While we have your attention, we thought we would take this opportunity to bring some issues that are pertinent to millions of Americans with disabilities and all of those who could join our ranks any day.
Mr. President, Rep. DeLay, Sen. Frist, Rep. Hastert, Rep. Sensenbrenner and other members of the House and Senate, we are perplexed by the contradictions in your statements and your actions. While you showboat about protecting people with disabilities and America's "most vulnerable" citizens, you simultaneously have tried to cut funding for Medicaid, cut medical benefits & long-term care for veterans, medical services for children, and programs that provide housing for low-income persons with disabilities. These are just some of the inconsistencies over the years that all of you have been in office.
Republican legislators who have been most vocal and central to pushing the "Palm Sunday Compromise" through opposed Sen. Smith's 2006 budget amendment to preserve the Medicaid cuts proposed by President Bush. Fortunately, seven Republican senators who understood what this would mean to people with disabilities and the growing number of Americans with no health coverage bucked you in the Senate. Republican leaders in the House are pushing for even more Medicaid cuts, over double the amount proposed by President Bush. Governor Huckabee said of your attempts to cut health care for the poor and Americans with disabilities, "You don't pull the wheelchair out from under the child with muscular dystrophy." Yet that is exactly what your heartless cuts would do.
Governor Bush, despite all of your grandstanding on behalf of Terry Schaivo, you originally submitted a budget that cut the Medically Needy program that supports 36,000 catastrophically ill Floridians and also called for cuts to prescription coverage for poor citizens who cannot afford to pay for their prescription medications, as well as other proposed cuts to the Florida Medicaid program.
We note that all of you did this while continuing to support tax cuts for the wealthy.
Terry Shiavo's medical care has been supported both by Medicaid and by the malpractice lawsuit she won. Not only have you attempted to cut Medicaid, you sided with insurance companies and against American citizens hurt by malpractice when you forced through limits on malpractice suits. Where would Terry Schiavo be now if she hadn't won that suit? If she was in Texas, where then Governor Bush signed a law allowing the state to withdraw life support against the family's wishes, we suspect this would be a very different kind of debate.
The number of Americans without health coverage grows daily. The Institute of Medicine estimates that lack of health insurance results in approximately 18,000 deaths per year. Where is your outrage there? What are you doing about it? Terry Schiavo is one woman in a tragic situation. Just due to your failure to effectively address the health care crisis in our country, there are 18,000 Americans dead each year, with the number to grow as you wage your battles on Americans with illnesses and disabilities. We are the only industrialized country to deny its citizens health care. Why is that? You proclaim that we are the greatest, richest country in the world -- why is it that we cannot provide this basic service to our citizens? President Bush, since you took office, five million people have lost their health care coverage and yet you continue to side with big business insurance & drug companies. Where is your outrage? Many of the people who have no coverage thanks to your inaction will die. Others will suffer medical events that leave children and adults disabled, some very like Terry Schiavo. What do you intend to do about our health care to prevent all of this from happening?
And at the same time more and more Americans are denied health care you push through bills that are detrimental to our health. While we lose access to health care, we breathe increasingly polluted air, our water is fouled, our greenhouse gases are increasingly uncontrolled, nutritional and other wellness programs for children are under-funded or cut, our gun culture causes thousands of deaths needlessly in this country, and you push to destroy increasing amounts of our country and other countries in the pursuit of polluting oil while you fail to finance alternative energy programs. What will you do about all of the Americans who will become ill due to your anti-environmental programs? Will each of them get the same attention you have poured on Terry Schiavo?
Mr. President, your insistence that our leaders "always err on the side of life" is contrary to your actions in Texas when you signed into law a bill that allows withdrawal of life support against a family's wishes and in America where you have consistently failed to address the true crisis in our country -- the lack of appropriate health care for millions upon millions of our citizens, disabled or not. You proposed a cutback of $60 billion of federal contributions to Medicaid over the next ten years, which James McCartney noted in the Bradenton Herald noted was the "largest cutbacks for any program in [your] budget." People will become disabled and will die due to those cuts, Mr. President. How does that square with your statement that we should "always err on the side of life?"
Sincerely,
Anne Lindsay (NC) and Rod DeVaul (TN)
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
Dr. Lindsay is a medical psychologist and the daughter of former New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay.
Mr. DeVaul is a former metal worker and an American with a disability.
Unless otherwise noted, all original content and headlines are © BuzzFlash.
Contact BuzzFlash for reprint rights.
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shadeaux63
Keeper of dreams
Posts: 1168
(4/20/05 8:40 am)
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Re: This Just in...again
Doctors, Hospitals End Videotaping Births
By ALLISON LINN
SEATTLE (AP) - Dr. John C. Nelson, an obstetrician, understands the desire of some parents to capture the miracle of birth on video. But a few years ago, he put a stop to the practice among his patients for fear the delivery-room footage could someday become Exhibit A in court.
``What once used to be really fun and warm and cozy and so forth is now a potential nail in the coffin from a liability perspective,'' said Nelson, who practices in Salt Lake City and delivered babies until 2003. He is now president of the American Medical Association.
Many doctors and hospitals around the country are clamping down on videotaping in the delivery room out of concern those family videos could be used in malpractice suits.
Nelson acted three or four years ago after the medical center where he practiced urged limits. He said he does not allow families to videotape the birth itself, but they are free to record other events, such as the mother's first moments with her child.
The doctor conceded that it can be difficult to tell excited, expectant parents that they will not be able to capture baby's first wail, or Mom's hard work, on video. But he said, ``The doctor wants to be concerned about the clinical issue in front of him, and not have to worry about how it's going to play on TV.''
Others argue that that is exactly how doctors should be thinking when they deliver a baby or perform other medical procedures.
``If doctors were concerned about liability and frivolous lawsuits, they should welcome videotapes,'' said David Beninger, a lawyer in Seattle. ``A videotape proves what happens and when it happens. There's no more reliance on faded memories.''
Beninger said most people want to record a child's birth for the memories, not the evidence, but those tapes can also come in handy if something goes wrong.
He relied on a personal videotape in a case involving a boy who was born in 1999 and died last May of pneumonia. He argued that medical records inaccurately portrayed the baby as healthy throughout the birth while the videotape showed dire complications.
The family eventually reached a $2 million settlement with Cascade Midwives and Birth Center in Everett. The medical center declined to comment.
The AMA has no guidelines on personal videotaping of deliveries. Alicia Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the American Hospital Association, said some hospitals have come up with policies, but many simply urge the patient to work it out with the doctor.
``Certainly the tendency is to move toward less and less ability to videotape,'' said Larry Veltman, chairman of the professional liability committee for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
In his own practice in Portland, Ore., Veltman allows some videotaping and photography, as long as the family has permission from everyone in the room and agrees to turn off the camera in an emergency.
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Gaia Angel 
ezOP
Posts: 2367
(4/20/05 11:12 am)
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Re: This Just in...again
Witches claim eco-fair ban is discrimination Mar 29 2005
WITCHES in Sutton claim they are being discriminated against after they were refused a stall at an Environmental Fair.
They claim the organisers have banned them on account of their Wicca religion, and that the popular misconception of witchcraft is to blame.
The Children of Artemis, a London-based organisation promoting witchcraft, says ignorance and fear have led to their exclusion from the fair in Carshalton Park.
A spokesman for The Children of Artemis said: "As far we are concerned this is discrimination."
The annual event, organised by the Environmental Fair Collective (EFC), promotes vegetarianism and vegan lifestyles.
It has been held in Carshalton for the past 14 years and attracts thousands of visitors each August.
The EFC says that it has maintained a policy of not inviting faith healers or witchcraft-related stallholders.
A spokesman for the EFC said: "People are allowed to practise whatever religion they like. But we have reserved the right to choose who we want at our fair. "We are not discriminating against them, but we don't feel their stall would be appropriate. We do not want witchcraft."
Croydon-based witch Inbaal, 35, said: "It is shocking and disgusting that religious discrimination is allowed to flourish in the 21st century."
She said that paganism was one of the fastest growing religions in the country and Witchfest, which is held at Croydon's Fairfield each May, attracted tens of thousands of people.
Inbaal said: "The EFC chooses to discriminate against us because they still believe the Christian propaganda of hundreds of years ago."
She said that witches were very dedicated to nature and animals, and thus had a natural affinity with the vegan organisers of the Environmental Fair.
Inbaal added: "They are being wilfully ignorant of the facts about witchcraft."
The spokesman for EFC confirmed that they would not be allowing the Children of Artemis to run a stall.
A spokesman for Sutton Council said that if they received a complaint that racial discrimination had occurred they would investigate it.
source: ICSurrey Online
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Gaia Angel
ezOP
Posts: 2368
(4/20/05 11:15 am)
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Re: This Just in...again
Well Now, Aint this just peachy...why is it more focus is put of Psuedo Pagan Bad apples?
Women Allege Witchcraft Used As Treatment
United Press International
Two women have filed lawsuits claiming a psychologist at an Illinois hospital used witchcraft during treatments and threatened patients.
The lawsuits allege Delnor-Community Hospital did not stop the unorthodox treatments. One seeks more than $50,000 and the other more than $1 million.
Neither is seeking damages from the psychologist, who has not worked at the hospital since January, because of a fear of retribution from the woman, the plaintiffs' attorney told the Arlington Heights (Ill.) Daily Herald. One suit was filed in Kane County, Ill., court and the other in federal court.
One of the plaintiffs alleges while undergoing treatment for a neurological syndrome, she was taught spells and told to divorce her husband. She moved in with the psychologist and allegedly was forced to take care of the house and take nude pictures of the psychologist.
The other suit alleges the psychologist told the patients to strip and commit acts of self-mutilation and join a Wicca coven, the newspaper said.
The newspaper said the accused psychologist did not respond to calls for comment. The hospital said the complaints have been reported to police and state health regulators.
Source: Fox6.com
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Gaia Angel
ezOP
Posts: 2369
(4/20/05 11:18 am)
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Re: This Just in...again
Wiccan Bias Suit Against Va. County Dismissed
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 15, 2005; Page B03
A federal appeals court yesterday upheld the way Chesterfield County conducts the invocation at its Board of Supervisors meetings, dismissing a lawsuit filed by a local Wiccan priestess who said she was excluded from leading the brief prayer.
County officials had told Cynthia Simpson that she could not be on the list of religious leaders allowed to deliver the invocation because it was limited to members of "Judeo-Christian" religions. Backed by civil liberties groups, she filed a federal lawsuit in 2002 alleging that the policy amounted to religious discrimination.
Simpson has said that Wicca -- interchangeable, she said, with witchcraft -- is a peaceful religion that focuses on reverence and respect for the cycles of nature. She said she wanted to offer the prayer to help dispel images of wicked witches on broomsticks.
A federal judge in Richmond backed Simpson, ruling in 2003 that the Chesterfield board was discriminating against minority religions and violating the constitutional mandate for separation of church and state. The judge ordered the county to change the policy to include all faiths or to stop using it altogether.
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit reversed that decision yesterday, ruling that Chesterfield's policy complies with Supreme Court requirements for legislative prayer because it does not advance or disparage any particular religious faith.
The decision by a three-judge panel, written by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, says Chesterfield, a suburban county south of Richmond, has allowed a diverse group of religious leaders to conduct the prayer, including a Muslim imam who was involved in giving an invocation at a board meeting shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Civil liberties groups criticized the decision. "This is a deeply disturbing ruling," said Kent Willis, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, one of two groups that brought the lawsuit.
"The Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors, a governmental entity, is endorsing the Judeo-Christian religious tradition while discriminating against all other religions. This kind of government preference for some religions over others is exactly what our Founding Fathers sought to avoid when they gave us [the] First Amendment," Willis said.
But County Attorney Steven L. Micas said in a statement that he is gratified by the decision. "Chesterfield County's invocation policy was developed shortly after the Supreme Court of the United States established the constitutional ground rules for legislative invocations. Our policy exceeds the inclusiveness standards set by the court," he said.
Staff writer Leef Smith contributed to this report.
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shadeaux63
Keeper of dreams
Posts: 1205
(7/6/05 2:55 pm)
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Re: This Just in...again
World > Terrorism & Security
posted July 5, 2005, updated 12:51 p.m.
Will US be asked to leave key military bases?
Chinese-led regional security group urges US to set timetable for withdrawal of troops.
By Matthew Clark | csmonitor.com
A six-nation security bloc composed of China, Russia, and four former Soviet states has urged the US-led coalition in Afghanistan to set a deadline for withdrawing troops from member states, reports BBC.
Meeting in the Kazakh capital of Astana, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) - which includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, China, and Russia - issued a joint statement saying the active military phase of the Afghan operation was coming to an end and calling on the US-led coalition to agree to a deadline for ending the temporary use of bases and air space in member countries.
There are about 18,000 coalition forces in Afghanistan, and the US has hosted bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan since the anti-Taliban operations began in 2001.
"Considering that the active phase of the military anti-terrorist operation in Afghanistan has finished, member states... consider it essential that the relevant participants in the anti-terrorist coalition set deadlines for the temporary use" of bases in Central Asia, the declaration read.
AFX News, a global news agency, points out that this is the SCO's first meeting since the ouster of Kyrgyz leader Askar Akayev in March and a military crackdown in Uzbekistan in May. AFX also reports that "the leaders also included a clause on the inadmissibility of 'monopolizing or dominating international affairs' – apparently a reference to growing US influence in Central Asia."
Today's declaration echoes a similar one on the '21st century international order' signed by Putin and Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao in Moscow last week.
It follows a string of complaints by leaders such as Uzbek President Islam Karimov suggesting that the West was behind uprisings in three former Soviet republics in the last two years – Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.
"There should be no place for interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states," Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said.
Mr. Karimov said outside forces were threatening to "hijack stability and impose their model of development" on the region.
UzReport.com, Uzbekistan's largest business Internet portal, reports that Secretary-General of the SCO Zhang Deguang said three evils – terrorism, extremism, and separatism – are the main threat to peace and security in the region.
Sergei Prikhodko, an aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, said that Central Asian states will ask US-led forces when they plan to leave Uzbek and Kyrgyz bases, reports MosNews.
The active phase is now being completed and it's important to know when they will go home. ... No one is telling them it should be tomorrow, in a month, in five months or in a year and a half, but it's just straightforward that SCO members know by when the anti-terrorist coalition will leave.
"Speeches at the summit by the leaders of China and Uzbekistan included veiled criticism of Western influence in the region and they follow hawkish comments by Russian officials criticizing attempts by unspecified foreign forces to destabilize Central Asia," according to MosNews.
"Correspondents say the statement appears to reflect increasing concerns that the US is encouraging the overthrow of Central Asia's authoritarian governments," reports BBC.
Radio Free Europe writes "the summit highlights China's continuing efforts to build influence in Central Asia – and gain greater access to its energy resources – by making common cause with Russia and the Central Asian states against militant groups."
Beijing, the major force behind the SCO, has poured more resources into maintaining it than have any of the other member states. And often, Beijing has found itself trying to push the others along in its efforts to develop the SCO into a major regional alliance.
RFE points out that a Kazakh oil pipeline to China with up to 20 million tons capacity is due to be completed by December.
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earthnann
Child of the ancient schools
Posts: 109
(9/26/05 10:02 am)
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Re: This Just in...again
The Eye Between the Storms
by Michael Vickerman, RENEW Wisconsin
Petroleum and Natural Gas Watch, Vol. 4, Number 1
September 21, 2005
On its way toward the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana and Mississippi, Hurricane Katrina cut a swath through a hydrocarbon-rich zone of the Gulf of Mexico, the largest domestic source of petroleum and natural gas. When fully operational, this offshore oil and natural gas complex accounts for about 30% of domestic oil supplies and 20% of domestic natural gas supplies.
Fueled by exceptionally warm waters, this Category 4 storm KO’ed nearly 50 production platforms and four drilling rigs. Extensive damage was reported at 20 platforms and nine drillings rigs. The force of the winds and the waves tore six rigs loose from their moorings and sent them adrift; one rig in Plaquemines Parish was found beached on Alabama’s Dauphin Island. At the storm’s peak, on August 29, more than 90% of the Gulf’s oil extraction capacity and nearly 90% of its natural gas extraction capacity was off-line.
The storm’s devastation extended beyond structures protruding above the water’s surface. Parts of the underwater piping network that collect the raw fuel and carry it to onshore processing facilities need to be rebuilt. Mobilizing all the boats, helicopters, divers, and steel needed to repair this infrastructure will be a monumental undertaking. However, until these pipelines become operational again, many of the undamaged wells will remain idle, with no place to pump the oil to.
Onshore facilities like shipyards and refineries were also hit hard. The Mineral Management Service, which issues daily bulletins tracking Katrina’s impact on the Gulf of Mexico’s hydrocarbon complex, estimates that “35% of shut-in oil is due to onshore infrastructure problems.” The rebuilding effort is bound to be slow and costly, but absolutely necessary as this region is one of the few remaining centers of (real) wealth-production in the nation.
Three weeks have now passed since Katrina landed her roundhouse blows to our energy underbelly, and more than 55% of the region’s oil capacity and about one-third of the natural gas capacity still remain off-line. So far, the reduction in output amounts to about 1.5% of expected U.S. crude oil production this year. Also off-line are four refineries with a combined daily capacity of nearly one million barrels, about 4% of total U.S. refining capacity. Expectations are that these facilities, especially the 400,000 barrel per day Pascagoula unit, are three to six months away from being restarted. In an industry where production volumes lately have averaged between 90 and 95 per cent of capacity, making up a 4% loss shapes up to be an impossible challenge. This is very bad news indeed to a country that was, before Hurricane Katrina, not producing enough gasoline to keep pace with this summer’s driving demands.
In an effort to calm panicky oil markets, the Bush Administration has pledged to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for as much as 30 million barrels of crude oil, an amount the Unites States consumes in 36 hours. Though gasoline prices have fallen 10% from the Labor Day weekend, releasing reserve oil is nothing more than a symbolic gesture when there is no spare capacity available to crack the crude into jet fuel, gasoline and diesel fuel. The nation has no choice but to import greater volumes of gasoline for the duration of this year. Even so, the supply-demand equation looks precarious. Only a nationwide slowdown in driving will keep fuel prices from heading higher. Nothing short of that will suffice.
Katrina’s path took it through the oil-heavy eastern half of the Gulf’s hydrocarbon complex. The natural gas production platforms that populate the western half were spared the flattening winds and 20-foot storm surges visited upon Bay St. Louis and Biloxi. Even so, the accumulated reduction in output so far represents 0.7% of U.S. extraction volumes expected this year. This deceptively puny number spells real trouble for Americans residing in colder climates, for unlike crude oil and its refined products, natural gas cannot be easily shipped across oceans. There are only four operating terminals in the United States where specialized tankers bearing liquefied natural gas (LNG) can offload their contents, and they are operating pretty much at full capacity right now.
Unless natural gas output from the Gulf of Mexico can be revved up to pre-Katrina levels in the next week or two, the likelihood that the United States can scramble its way out of a slow-motion supply squeeze this winter is poor. Earlier this year, several investment banking services that track energy supply-demand trends projected lower output from domestic sources this year. If the monthly production results reported by the Texas Railroad Commission are reliable guides, extraction volumes are already tailing off, compared with previous years’ results. The injection rate of gas into storage for winter use has slowed as well.
When one stops to consider all the factors at play here—a still booming housing sector, more gas-fired power stations on-line (including four new ones in Wisconsin this year), a declining resource base in North America (including Canada and Mexico), and insufficient infrastructure for importing more than 5% of domestic consumption through 2008—it’s not difficult to imagine natural gas prices, now at $12/MMBtu, to ratchet up towards the $20/MMBtu level this winter. And to think that only six months ago one could have bought a January 2006 gas contract for under $7/MMBtu.
The prospects for a rapid recovery became dimmer when a storm named Rita crossed the Florida Keys heading west toward Texas. The abnormally warm waters on which Katrina fed can easily transform Rita into a tempest of similar intensity. For the moment the very best outcome one can expect from Rita’s menacing presence in the gulf is a production interruption that lasts five to seven days followed by a full resumption of extraction activity. But if it strengthens as Katrina did, it is likely to cause even greater damage than Katrina wrought, due to its more westerly track. Texas and its coastal waters, it should be remembered, account for fully one-third of domestic natural gas output. Another hit to Gulf of Mexico hydrocarbon complex and natural gas futures will warp out of orbit.
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Even more amazing than the destructive capacity of these hurricanes is the degree to which we as a nation are totally unprepared for dealing with their aftermath. The default assumption among policymakers is that the U.S. economy will grow in an uninterrupted fashion, and that high quality energy sources will magically appear in time to sustain this expansion. But how can this outcome be guaranteed when the U.S. government cannot control either the actions of foreign countries or the weather? In fact, the country does not appear able to exercise even the slightest hint of discipline or restraint over its own appetite for energy. As the nation’s energy infrastructure contracted relative to the domestic economy, the federal government’s ability to shape our energy future atrophied along with it. All of the planning functions that a healthy government is typically responsible for have been ceded to the marketplace. And the marketplace has one very powerful mechanism for allocating scarce but essential resources to a society’s constituents. It’s called price.
Author’s note: Given Hurricane Rita’s potential to add to the devastation caused by Katrina, I plan to update this article in one to two weeks.
Sources:
Center for Energy Efficiency and Resource Efficiency (CEERT), Risky Diet 2005: Global Energy Resource Adequacy. www.ceert.org
Minerals Management Service (U.S. Department of the Interior)
www.mms.gov/ooc/press/200...0916a.htm. See MMS web site also for daily shut-in statistics reports.
Simmons and Company: Outlook for Natural Gas: 2005 and Beyond
www.simmonsco-intl.com/re...chreports)
“Texas Monthly Oil and Gas Production by Year,” Texas Railroad Commission www.rrc.state.tx.us/divis...con.html),
The Oil Drum: A Community Discussion About Peak Oil. Numerous postings on the web site from August 29 – September 21, 2005.. www.theoildrum.com/
Petroleum and Natural Gas Watch is a RENEW Wisconsin initiative tracking the supply‑demand equation for these fossil fuels, and analyzing its effects on prices, consumption levels, and the development of energy conservation strategies and renewable energy alternatives. For more information on the global and national petroleum and natural gas supply picture, visit "The End of Cheap Oil" section in RENEW Wisconsin's web site: www.renewwisconsin.org
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