The Pope visits

Traffic Tie-Ups, Disruptions Expected During Visit
D.C. Officials Recommending Patience, Planning
By Lena H. Sun
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 13, 2008; C01

The visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Washington this week could cause major traffic backups and disrupt subway and bus commutes on a scale not seen since the state funeral for former president Ronald Reagan four years ago, transportation officials said....

Yeah, whatever. You know where I think this clueless fuck should be visiting with his cadre of secret service looking dudes? The Arizona desert where pollos die trying to get across the border to make enough to feed their families. Let's see how long those suits last jogging through that heat. That's not to say that Mexicans are not ignoring the Church's cluelessness now:

...Around the world, fertility rates have fallen from an average of 4.95 children per woman in the 1960-1965 period to 2.96 children in the first half of the '90s. ... a 60 percent decline from the mid-1960s.

But fast-growing populations are like speeding locomotives that cannot brake slowly, and even though Mexican birth rates fell dramatically, the population has continued to surge....

Because this:

The Pope and Birth Control: A Crisis in Catholic Authority
Friday, Aug. 09, 1968
ROME has spoken," runs an ancient proverb of the Roman Catholic Church. "The case is closed." No longer true.
Last week Pope Paul VI formally promulgated his encyclical on birth control, which condemns all methods of contraception, except rhythm, as against the will of God.

Really wasn't that long ago.

Funny how he's not visiting Tijuana, he's safer than most Mexicans in that Popemobile of his.

You think he'll be visiting anywhere that they are having food riots?

Food prices, population and failures in family planning

Q&A: Rising world food prices
Page last updated at 10:26 GMT, Friday, 11 April 2008 11:26 UK Page last updated at 10:26 GMT, Friday, 11 April 2008 11:26 UK

The price of wheat, rice and maize have nearly doubled in the past year - and they are not the only foodstuffs trading at a high price on the international commodity market.What are the main causes?

...The first reason why prices are rising is growth in the world's population, which is expected to top nine billion by the middle of the century.

That is an incredible number of mouths to feed and will put pressure on a range of resources, including land, water and oil, as well as food supply...
BBC video on food shortage protests

U.S. Farm subsidies are not moral if you think globally.

On the other hand, we have water problems and the farming practices are lowering our most important aquifer. Should we use up our most precious resource helping along exponential population growth?

50 simple things you can do to save the Earth (#47)
In more than half the developing countries studied by the U.N., population has been growing faster than food supplies.

...Step 2. Think nationally. The U.S., with 5% of the global population, uses about 25% of the world’s fossil fuel resources, and the average American consumes 120 lbs. a day in natural resources. So population stabilization in the U.S. could have a big impact on protecting the environment...

I'm not picking on the Philippines here, the next two links are only an example of how tradition and customs are making progress harder and starvation more frequent.

Arroyo lauded for preventing food riots in RP
Posted on Saturday 12 April 2008
PRESIDENT Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is “appropriately concerned” and “very concerned” over the continued rising prices and low supply of food including rice in the world market, which has already sparked civil disturbance and food riots in 33 countries, an official of the United Nation’s International Fund for Agriculture Development (Ifad) said.

Philippine Fertility Rate Is One of the Highest in Asia: Santa Clara, Segundina and Other Stories
In this predominantly Catholic country, people often pray for divine intervention from Santa Clara (Saint Claire), the patron saint of the childless, for one very specific purpose: to aid fertility and bless them with children.

Bangladesh faces food crisis
Page last updated at 23:02 GMT, Thursday, 10 April 2008 00:02 UK

Birth rate country comparison

Population growth rate by country 2005

List of countries by population growth rate

Of course the neutrality of the Wikipedia page on Overpopulation is disputed. Probably by some bible thumping head-up ass Bush supporter.

Dems Lose Fight on Family Planning Aid
December 17, 2007
by Anne Flaherty
The Associated Press

Abstinence only Sex Ed in the US has been a miserable failure.

Update: We're wasting our precious water on our fucking gas tanks and people are starving? Yikes.

McCain Erases Obama Lead

And the depiction of U.S. citizens as Neanderthal continues.

Cui Bono?



Oh look, it's an old as dirt peroxide blonde pony-tailed Neanderthal. Ain't she a sweetheart?

RepugnantThuglicans....



It's what's for dinner.

10 things you should know about John McCain (but probably don't):

1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has "evolved," yet he's continued to oppose key civil rights laws.1
4 times against it


2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain "will make Cheney look like Gandhi."2
100 years in Iraq
Bomb Iran

3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.
More CCain hypocrisy

4. McCain opposes a woman's right to choose. He said, "I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned."
voting record


5. The Children's Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children. He voted against the children's health care bill last year, then defended Bush's veto of the bill.
CNN article

6. He's one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a "second job" and skip their vacations.
McCain's money CNN

7. Many of McCain's fellow Republican senators say he's too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: "The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He's erratic. He's hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."
teh Google on de temper


8. McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.
teh Google on his lobbyists

9. McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his "spiritual guide," Rod Parsley, believes America's founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a "false religion." McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church "the Antichrist" and a "false cult."
Columbia Journalism Review

10. He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored a 0—yes, zero—from the League of Conservation Voters last year. hoooo-eee, lookit all them NVs (not voting) in his recent environmental votes

John McCain is not who the Washington press corps make him out to be.

Religion sucks #11

Documents: Sect Married Girls at Puberty
By MICHELLE ROBERTS Associated Press Writer
ELDORADO, Texas (AP) - A polygamist compound with hundreds of children was rife with sexual abuse, child welfare officials allege in court documents, with girls spiritually married to much older men as soon as they reached puberty and boys groomed to perpetuate the cycle.

Our British laws are there to protect Muslim women
From The Times
February 14, 2008
Mary Ann Sieghart




Canada: Polygamous Ontario Muslims collecting multiple benefit cheques
12/02/2008: Polygamous Muslims in Ontario receive benefits, although polygamy is officially illegal in Canada. (Toronto Sun)

An abuse of the welfare system by GTA [Greater Toronto Area, ed.] Muslim men allowed to live in polygamous marriages under a controversial Ontario law was met with shock and outrage yesterday.

Polygamists are selfish, stupid, pig-dogs.
There are already enough people on the planet

San Diego

Nice to visit:
Noah's Wonderland series


A little tougher to live in:
San Diego’s Secret Missile-Testing Sites
By Moss Gropen | Published Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Dave Marash: Why I Quit (Al Jazeera)

The veteran newsman says Al Jazeera English’s mission changed
By Brent Cunningham Fri 4 Apr 2008 11:26 AM

hat tip to Danny

I'm not sure if I have a judgement based on this piece, but I'll try to be bit more skeptical when I read Al Jazeera reports in America. I hope this doesn't give the wingnuts more excuses to keep Al Jazeera away from Americans as cable choice. American news sources just don't cover parts of the world. So Al Jazeera screws up when reporting in the US. So what? Big Telecom hasn't been able to control bloggers here yet. If it's happening in America, somebody is blogging about it. It's not like we, as Americans can't ferret out the truth and work around bias, somebody is always screaming biased.

Charlton Heston, Epic Film Star and Voice of N.R.A., Dies at 84

By ROBERT BERKVIST
Published: April 6, 2008

Charlton Heston made a crapload of movies, most of which I studiously avoided because the stepmonster was a fan of his. I only watched The Omega Man in the last couple of years because my friend said it was a good movie. I tried to like it. (update: my friend said he never said that). I saw all the Planet of the Apes movies, but who didn't in the 70's?

Ok, so call me weird, I've been called worse, but the two movies that he was in that had a lasting impact on me were Soylent Green (I was twelve, OK?) and Bowling for Columbine . When I saw Bowling for Columbine I was just discovering how much politics actually affected my life and the Heston scene sort of made me feel sorry for him. I kind of wanted to protect the old geezer from the truth about the whole Reagan Revolution thing.

Ummmmm then again maybe not. Where the hell was his handler?

OK, enough seriousness. Doesn't this blogger just come out and say what we're all thinking?

Heston Dead; Coroner Can't Pry Gun From Cold Dead Hands
Sunday, April 06, 2008

Reading Now

Founding Myths: Stories that Hide our Patriotic Past
by Ray Raphael
The New Press, September, 2004

Frankly, I'm finding it vastly amusing to find out how many of these myths are still in our textbooks. Most second graders hate "Social Studies," (which I think is) a euphemistic term for history. Why? They generally don't verbalize it, but kids aren't stupid, they know bullshit when they see it. They may not have the vocabulary to explain it, but they also know when they are being politically socialized. It's not unique to this country or Western culture, it just happens in school, rather than someplace else.

Managing Iraq's Econoccupation

By Maya Schenwar
t r u t h o u t | Report Friday 04 April 2008
As violence rises again in Iraq, negotiations to institutionalize US economic dominance continue unabated.
(title link, read the whole article, Bremer made a bad situation worse)

This photo caught my eye because I remembered reading a post by Riverbend (can't remember exactly when it was, sometime after the war started, can't find it, blogger search sucks) where she wrote about being afraid of the cooking gas because it wasn't being mixed, or processed or bottled correctly, and gas bottles were blowing up. Looks like it's just being wasted in some places--flared off.


....the newly liberated gas was flared off. This was not the optimum engineering solution. A more elegant approach would be to send the liberated gas through another series of pipes to a natural-gas liquefaction plant, where it could be further refined and then sold. Some plants in Iraq did just that but many did not, for the simple reason that no one had ever gotten around to building the necessary infrastructure. The result, Sam said, was that Iraq burned away at least $10 million worth of gas every day. Indeed, due to its lack of domestic refinery infrastructure, Iraq is a long-time net importer not only of natural gas but also of gasoline, kerosene, fuel oil, and all of the other much-needed products that may be obtained from raw crude. (This is one reason Baghdad has so little electricity, which is generated in most Iraqi power plants by burning fuel oil or natural gas.) Rectifying this problem has proved difficult not only because of the war—and the looting and the years of sanctions—but also because the entire system had been allowed to collapse under Saddam. Every engineer I met in Iraq seemed to have a special loathing for the former dictator simply because he had taken what was, by the standards of the 1970s, a fairly good industrial infrastructure and run it into the ground...

....or how much smuggling goes on, or even how much oil is pumped out of the ground or back into it, because—almost unbelievably—the entire system lacks meters...

Still?

Hmmm, now what was I reading just the other day?

The artist behind the iconic 'running immigrants' image

John Hood, a Navajo and Vietnam vet, has created many works in his job as a Caltrans graphic artist. But the picture of an immigrant family running has resonated far beyond his office cubicle.

By Scott Gold, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 4, 2008
On the fifth floor of Building Two of Caltrans' San Diego compound, a bear of a man with a quiet voice sits in a cubicle straight out of "Dilbert."...



What an interesting man, I thought as I read the article. I'm still startled when I drive by one of the signs he designed. I was reminded of one of my favorite books as I was reading the article.



And yeah, I'm not ignoring the Hillary-has-a-major-conflict-of-interest-thing going on. I read the blogroll links to the right and these guys are on it.

Another KBR Rape Case

...That dawn, naked, covered in blood and feces, bleeding from her anus, she found a US soldier she did not know lying naked in the bed next to her: his gun lay on the floor beside the bed, she could not rouse him and all she could remember of the night before was screaming and screaming as the soldier anally penetrated her while a colleague who worked for defense contractor KBR held her hand--but instead of helping her, as she had hoped, he jammed his penis in her mouth...

Sexual Assault Is a Crime, Not a Labor Dispute, Unless of Course You Work for Halliburton/KBR [VIDEO]

Jamie Leigh Jones Congressional Testimony
posted by Melissa McEwan | Thursday, December 20, 2007


'Tort reform' injustice
By Peggy Garrity
Sunday, March 9, 2008

Justice? These women won't get justice. Justice would be for whoever thought that writing binding arbitration clauses into employees' contracts in a war zone to experience the first paragraph grab up top of this post.

Woman Charged With Stalking John Cusack

Bummer. I'm a Cusack fan, but stalking? Ewwwwww. Anyone that's ever been stalked would never dream of doing that to someone else. I've been stalked and it's terrifying AND enraging.

I've asked for exactly three autographs in my life, only twice was it face to face. Famous people come to San Diego but I usually beat feet if I see them. If I spy paparazzi I'm gone quicker than usual, I don't give a shit who they're stalking, I don't want any part of it.

Some guy almost knocked me on my ass flying out onto the street where I was walking and then repeatedly said "No autographs, no autographs." I looked at my date after we both regained our footing and asked, "Who IS that asshole?" Turns out he was some turd roller on a TV show that they filmed here in San Diego for a while. I never wanted to be famous, and I never wanted to hang around famous people. Name droppers bug the shit out of me. I'm just not interested. I have a friend in LA, but she knows how much I hate the whole LA name dropping thing. I roll my eyes a lot when I go to LA. Actually LA people aren't nearly as bad as people who have to tell me they watched a film being made in their hometown of East Podunk. A million fucking times they gotta tell me how they met so-and-so or blabbity blah. Like I give a shit because I was born and raised in Southern California?

Anyhoo, this article caught my eye because I want to see War Inc. (trailer) Hmmmm, kind of looks like I'll be able to buy or rent it before it's released in theaters.

Justices asked to hear Navy sonar, whales case

Bush administration asks Supreme Court to review ruling that limits use

Reed Saxon / AP

A gray whale dives off the Southern California coast near the Palos Verdes Peninsula on Jan. 16.

Evolution of the whale ear

MARINE MAMMAL AUDITORY SYSTEMS:
A SUMMARY OF AUDIOMETRIC AND ANATOMICAL DATA AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC IMPACTS


Bush administration appeals Navy sonar case to Supreme Court
Joshua Pantesco at 8:50 AM ET
Tuesday, April 01, 2008

The Justice Department petition argues that the decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco jeopardizes the Navy's ability to train sailors and Marines for service in wartime.

Something tells me that the Sooopreme court justices won't be using teh Google search terms that they need to. It'll be all Homeland Security All The Time.

I've heard from more than one sailor that one of the few joys when you're stuck out at sea for what seems like forever is watching the dolphins.

I'm smiling

Rickie Lee Jones - Dat Dere

A Marked Increase In Pregnancy Discrimination Claims

---A Marked Increase In Pregnancy Discrimination Claims and Other Key Developments Illustrate the Continuing Struggle of Pregnant Workers:
Part One in a Two-Part Series of Columns
By JOANNA GROSSMAN Tuesday, Apr. 01, 2008


EEOC statistics show that pregnancy discrimination complaints have increased dramatically in a number of recent years, increased forty percent over the last decade and increased fourteen percent in just the last year. (Charge statistics are available at http://eeoc.gov/stats/pregnanc.html ). Though the birth rate declined over the past decade,pregnancy discrimination charges were among the fastest-growing category of claims with the EEOC. These statistics are consistent with anecdotal reports from women about their experiences of being fired, demoted, or otherwise treated adversely because of pregnancy.


Pregnant man says bearing child a "human" desire (Gee, ya think? Could be why there's almost 7 billion people on the planet.)
Tue Apr 1, 2008 11:42pm BST
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A transgender man who kept his female reproductive organs despite his transformation is now five months pregnant and will appear on Oprah Winfrey's television show, the talk show said on Tuesday.

Um, it's not on her site Anybody see him on the show?

John Hiatt & The Goners - Doll Hospital

Why Is George Still Smiling?

March 20, 2008 1:55 PM

I've liked Robert Scheer since I discovered his work. I do love hearing him rip Tony Blankbrain a new one every week.

That idiotic "what me worry?" look just never leaves the man's visage. Once again, there was our president, presiding over disasters, in part of his making and totally on his watch, grinning with an aplomb that suggested a serious disconnect between his worldview and reality...

...But the president is happy because his legacy issue, the war on terrorism, is intact. No matter that last week the Pentagon was forced to release a report conducted over the last five years that concluded, after surveying 600,000 official Iraqi documents captured by U.S. forces, that there is "no smoking gun" establishing any connection whatsoever between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda

The report was so embarrassing that we taxpayers were not going to be told of its existence, even though the explosive conclusions were declassified, until ABC News forced the administration to post it on the Joint Forces Command Website...

Well I'll be damned, I think I just regained a tad, a smidgen of respect back for ABC news.

Boston Dynamics Big Dog (new video March 2008)

The program is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)
I'm speechless.....

Subrogation my ass

My insurance was told by me that they were paying for something I wasn't receiving. They didn't give a shit. We've already paid in premiums the cash cost of surgery (not elective) that they won't cover.

She's right.