Extremists don't respect the religion of others

Ours isn’t the only government with radicals who want to bring down religion (see stories about HHS vs. Catholics). Look at what Islamist extremists were doing to priceless Buddhist statues in the Maldives earlier this week.

During the coup that ousted President Mohamed Nasheed on Tuesday, scenes of violence resulted in the wanton destruction of historical treasures. Considered as a mark of idolatry by Islamic salafists, statues and monuments were destroyed by extremists blamed for the toppling of Nasheed.

The Maldives’ National Museum was the scene of the destruction, as a group of five men deliberately targeted artefact's from the Maldives pre-Islamic era, destroying Buddhist relics.

Read more:

Primo dierum omnium, hymn of St. Gregory

First of All Days

Hail, day! whereon the One in Three
First formed the earth by sure decree,
The day its Maker rose again,
And vanquished death, and burst our chain.

Away with sleep and slothful ease!
We raise our hearts and bend our knees,
And early seek the Lord of all,
Obedient to the Prophet’s call:

That he may hearken to our prayer,
Stretch forth his strong right arm to spare,
And, every past offence forgiven,
Restore us to our home in heaven.

Assembled here this holy day,
This holiest hour we raise the lay;
And, O, that he to whom we sing,
May now reward our offering!

O Father of unclouded light,
keep us this day as in Thy sight,
in word and deed that we may be
from every touch of evil free.

That this our body's mortal frame
may know no sins, and fear no shame,
nor fire hereafter be the end
of passions which our bosoms rend.

Redeemer of the world, we pray
that Thou wouldst wash our sins away,
and give us, of Thy boundless grace,
the blessings of the heavenly place.

That we, thence exiled by our sin,
hereafter may be welcomed in:
that blessed time awaiting now,
with hymns of glory here we bow.

Most Holy Father, hear our cry,
Through Jesus Christ our Lord most High
Who, with the Holy Ghost and thee
Doth live and reign eternally.

This hymn is attributed to Pope St. Gregory the Great (540-604) and there is good reason to think he may have written it. The ancient preface to St. Columban's Altus prosator describes the arrival of St. Gregory's messengers from Rome bearing gifts and a set of hymns for the Liturgy of the Hours. In turn, St. Columban sent a set of hymns he had composed to St. Gregory. There has been considerable debate of late as to whether St. Gregory really did write the hymn or if he simply sent what was current in Rome at the time. Considerable evidence can be put forth for both positions.

Martin Luther and his namesake

Martin Luther perhaps never saw an elephant, but he was very familiar with donkeys. He said that the old Adam is "the obstinate donkey, fixing for a fight," against whom the new man wages "constant battle."

When Michael King, Sr. a Baptist minister changed his name to Martin Luther King after the great reformer, his son Michael Jr. also changed his name and became Martin Luther King, Jr. They were Republicans. His friends and family continued to call him Mike.

Democrats were so oppressive to blacks in the South, using lynching to terrorize, they instituted the "Jim Crow" laws and resegregated the schools. In order to vote at all, many blacks became Republicans. The push for civil rights was done by the Republican party in the 40s and 50s, and was fought tooth and nail by the likes of powerful Democrats like Lyndon Johnson, LBJ. But when it became an opportunity to put them under the control of government, LBJ changed his tune with the Civil Rights Act, a Republican cause, and his "War on Poverty."

This lesson on black history will probably not be taught in the public schools this month.

Do the homeless need a home? Guest blogger Edward J. Shannon

Mr. Shannon is a residential architect from Waterloo, Iowa. For those of you outside the architectural field, that means his specialty is designing homes. You may see some photos of his work at this web site. He is a Christian with a heart for those less fortunate. He has given a lot of thought and time to the problems of the homeless, and like me thinks the problem is much bigger than a warm bed and a secure roof. I appreciate his willingness to be a guest blogger.
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I don't believe homelessness is an architectural problem, but a social one. I serve in churches and ministries that have homeless populations. I have seen first hand that many "choose" to be homeless. It doesn't sound rational to clear thinking people, but mental illness, addictions, and broken families can foster this.

I used to drop my boys off (at their mother's) in Palatine at 5 pm on Sundays. I would be heading back to Winnetka on Palatine Road and would usually see a homeless man in Arlington Heights walking west bound. I would turn around and give him a ride to a church in Palatine that had a PADS program [Providing Advocacy, Dignity, and Shelter Crisis Services, usually in church buildings of the Chicago area]. His name was Emory. He walked with a bad limp and it just pained me to see him walking a 3.5 mile trek. On our short drives, I began to get to know Emory a little. I asked, "What happened?" He explained to me that he had a college degree and was once married. His marriage fell apart and he lost his job (that happened to me, too) and could never "pick himself up". As such, he went down the slippery slope of becoming homeless. I asked if he had family in the area (this is key, I believe). He told me he had a sister on the South Side of Chicago. I asked why he didn't move in with her and try to get up on his feet. He shied away from my questions, saying he didn't want to impose; they didn't get along well, etc.

Where are the families? If I found myself in that predicament, I am confident I could move in with a family member or close friend. In the 1930s depression years, many were unemployed, yet many families lived together. This doesn't happen with this demographic, and I have seen stories, like Emory's, time and time again.

I don't think any amount of free housing will solve this problem. Housing is not the problem. It is a symptom of the problem. These people need family support. They need counseling and (often times) addictions intervention. Architects will not solve this problem, nor should we. I know a few, like Donald Macdonald of San Francisco, and the "Mad Houser's of Atlanta, have tried. I commend them for their efforts, but wonder if they have actually produced tangible results.

I'm in agreement with Mr. Shannon on most points, however, even family support can do little for the mentally ill and addicted. Most have been burned out, and have had to go to a "tough love" stance in order to help their family member. In the Columbus area I think we all remember the viral video of Ted Williams, the homeless man with the fabulous voice who got national attention, job offers, money, and was even on the Dr. Phil show who paid for him to enter rehab (he had already regressed since the video went viral). Talent, money, education, a voice that God gives very few, and family support were not lacking. He is an alcoholic. He has been in rehab several times since all the fame.

Also, and this too is counter intuitive for non-believers and even many Christians, helping the homeless and especially more personally by turning around and picking up Emory, gave Mr. Shannon an opportunity to meet Jesus face to face. This is made clear in Matthew 25. Mr. Shannon has experienced God's love in his own life, and he is sharing that love with others.

A book I won't read--Mimi's tale of a handsome lie

"Mimi Alford’s belated tell-all, Once Upon a Secret, should be assigned in women’s-studies classes as an illustration of the power imbalances in employer-employee sexual liaisons, especially those involving commanders-in-chief and their interns. . .

. . . Within her first week as an intern, JFK’s friend and procurer Dave Powers invited her to a midday swim with the president and some of the gals from the secretarial pool. At the end of the day, the rising sophomore at Massachusetts’ Wheaton College was invited to a get-together in the family residence. She was plied with daiquiris, then the president peeled her away from the group with an invitation to a private tour of the residence.

Alford lost her virginity on the fashionably elegant Mrs. Kennedy’s bed. “I wouldn’t describe what happened that night as making love,” Alford writes. “But I wouldn’t call it nonconsensual, either.” "

He never kissed her she says, but required her to perform oral sex on Powers (it was his job to find her an abortion doctor if needed) while he watched and asked for baby brother Teddy.

A handsome lie

Washington Post comments

Rock Center interview

I'm just so very sorry that I ever wept tears over that man in 1963.

HHS Mandate vs. God's people

"The LORD frustrates the counsel of the nations; He thwarts the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of His heart from generation to generation. Happy is the nation whose God is Yahweh--the people He has chosen to be His own possession!" Ps 33:10-12

I love that word "thwarts." All those consonants smothering and beating up on one little old vowel. One can make a difference in this world. You can even rearrange the letters and find other words, "tsar start that war" (HHS tsar Kathleen Sibelius). Today demand to be given back the religious freedoms our founders intended and wrote into the Bill of Rights, and not just this latest dust-up. The erosion didn't start in January 2009! Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg doesn't appreciate our Constitutional liberties, but we do.

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Newsy on Obama's mandate

Here's how Newsy describes itself: "Newsy is multi-source, multi-platform video news. It’s the only video news service that allows users to compare bias by highlighting nuances in reporting. Through short professionally produced videos for mobile devices and the web, Newsy provides context with convenience - making you smarter, faster."

I haven't quite figured out how Newsy works, and any compromise discussed in the opening seconds isn't actually happening. It's all calculated to not offend voters (on the left), with those of us who still believe in the first amendment left out in the cold.

Free at last--from pain--guest blogger

A former colleague of mine comments on my comments on Dr. Blumenthal's 2 part series on HITECH which appeared in December in the New England Journal of Medicine. I was concerned about a number of issues, including the rush to push it through and the shaky privacy issues, but here's an alternate view of how advances in digitized health records mandated by PPACA could benefit the patient. She is now pain free after surgery and it has given her back her life, but some of her experiences in getting there were extremely unpleasant.

I thought this was an excellent article evaluating the benefits and challenges of bringing one part of American health care into the 21st century. I recommend we all read the full Blumenthal article. It's short and accessible. I took away something very different from it. It left me hopeful that things might change for the better.

Although we all rightly are concerned with the privacy of our health care data, as the article mentions, paper data is not secure either. But online data does present more challenges because no system is un-hackable. However, that's not a good excuse to stay in the 19th century forever.

My doctor's office automated their records and system a few years ago, making him an early adopter. There was slow down in the first 6 weeks, they told me, but then it got VERY efficient. When I go in now, it is faster, he knows exactly which tests are due and he prints out any prescriptions right from his laptop or faxes it directly to the pharmacy. He spends time talking to me, not flipping through paper files looking for previous test results, which are all on his laptop. I love it. He does too. After the initial few weeks of learning the new system, everyone in his office is fluent in it and very efficient.

None of these systems are developed from scratch in each doctor's office. They are turnkey systems with training provided. So the analogy of creating LCS from scratch isn't comparable.

Here's my example of why I think a state-of-the-art health care information system is desirable. Before my second hip surgery, I was in a wheelchair and in excruciating pain. I realized I couldn't keep working unless I got "real" painkillers. So I was referred to an OSU-affiliated pain clinic.

The biggest fear that pain clinics have is that patients will game the system, get painkillers from multiple doctors and sell them on the black market. This does happen. But I didn't realize that this fear made some pain clinics abuse their patients.

The waiting room was NOT filled with 20-somethings in black leather strung out on illegal drugs. It was filled with about 30 moaning elderly middle-class men and women, some in wheelchairs, some with canes or walkers, most were accompanied by worried relatives. One women was in such pain, she passed out during the wait. The office staff wouldn't help her. She said: "They do that to get sympathy so we'll give them drugs."

Her husband, who was almost shouting, had to be calmed down by other patients and we all demanded someone come out and help her into the bathroom to put cold water on her face, since not of us was strong enough to help her out of her wheelchair. They begrudgingly helped this "potential" drug abuser.

When it was my turn to be seen, the questions the doctor asked had to do with whether I was being seen by another doctor and if I was getting drugs from them too. If it had been said for my benefit to make sure I didn't overdose on a combination of things, it would have been appropriate. But it wasn't. It was an interrogation that implied I was a drug addict trying to cheat the system. I had never been treated so nastily by a doctor and I was really surprised. But pain clinics act this way because there is NO WAY TO CHECK RECORDS TO SEE IF OTHER DOCTORS are also handing out prescriptions. Finally, the doctor said he'd give me a prescription, if I passed the drug test, which was required of everyone.

So I went to the drug testing clinic he mandated. I had to be there in 20 minutes (or it was invalid), so I wouldn't have time to get a "clean" sample elsewhere. If you've never had a drug test (some states want all welfare recipients to pay for one themselves, before they can sign up for benefits), it isn't as easy as you might think.

A same-sex attendant accompanies you into a bathroom and watches you. You pee in a cup while someone watches your hands to make sure you don't substitute another sample. It was not handicap-friendly. The commode was on a platform in a small room with nothing I could hold on to easily. Because of my hips, it was excruciatingly painful. It was humiliating. I thought of the women in their 70s and 80s in the waiting room of the clinic who had to do this. It made me angry at our backward system.

The clinic said the test was a nominal cost, like $30. (Just like states say the charge will be nominal for welfare recipients, who must pay for the drug test themselves.) Turns out it was $250. I refused to pay that much and after weeks of arguing over paperwork, the price was changed.

Had there been a centralized health information system in place, this entire traumatic episode would not have been necessary. The pain clinic could have pulled up my x-rays, seen the bone-on-bone hips, seen I had no other prescriptions, and prescribed an appropriate painkiller. Instead, they were ruled by fear and lack of information. The prescription they gave me was inadequate; the surgeon said he didn't know how I managed the pain with only what the clinic prescribed me.

I, and all those suffering people, would have gotten better, cheaper, less humiliating care. The people who REALLY are gaming the system might be caught faster and punished. The insurance companies and we might have saved a small amount of time and money, but multiplied by millions of people resulted in huge savings, if there had been an investment by the government to create a unified medical information infrastructure.

I'm afraid of abuse of medical information. But that won't keep me from wanting to have a modern medical information system to allow better care, better tracing of public health concerns (like food poisonings from unknown sources), better tracking of outcomes using different types of procedures, and brings us closer to the care provided by other industrialized nations.

Do you know where you should move if you are a Type 1 diabetic? FRANCE. Because they have proven the slower speed of their dialysis treatment provides better patient outcomes and longer life. U.S. hospitals don't have a system to track outcomes, unless they do a special (costly) research study, because we don't have any medical information infrastructure. So we do what the insurance companies will pay for, which is the faster version, which results in more deaths for US diabetics than in other industrialized countries overall.

I went to my doctor years ago with what could have been either food poisoning (after eating at a new restaurant) or a flu bug. I asked him if other people in the area were coming in with similar symptoms, in case it was food poisoning. His answer: we don't have any way of knowing. They would have gone to different doctors and no information is shared. How's that for public health? We have to wait for multiple people to die to find out if there is a public health issue in an area, because deaths are reported.

I know I'm not going to convince anyone who, like the clinic doctor, is guided primarily by fear of abuse. But I believe shared medical information is vital to us as a country and as individuals. Everything can be abused. That clinic was so afraid of abuse that they were abusing people in a different way, by treating everyone as a criminal. They provided expensive, inadequate care. They had no way to track the outcome of the treatments they prescribed or even if their patients lived or died.

The only follow-up I ever received from the pain clinic was a post card a few years later saying they moved to a new address. We deserve better health care than this.

This is certainly an eye-opener, however, if patients can be abused in such a manner with face to face, 21st century care, I can hardly see EHR improving on that!

Abbott and Costello discuss unemployment

Unemployed vs. Out of Work from Abbott & Costello's Point of View.
COSTELLO: I want to talk about the unemployment rate in America .

ABBOTT: Good Subject. Terrible Times. It's 9%.

COSTELLO: That many people are out of work?

ABBOTT: No, that's 16%.

COSTELLO: You just said 9%.

ABBOTT: 9% Unemployed.

COSTELLO: Right 9% out of work.

ABBOTT: No, that's 16%.

COSTELLO: Okay, so it's 16% unemployed.

ABBOTT: No, that's 9%...

COSTELLO: WAIT A MINUTE. Is it 9% or 16%?

ABBOTT: 9% are unemployed. 16% are out of work.

COSTELLO: IF you are out of work you are unemployed.

ABBOTT: No, you can't count the "Out of Work" as the unemployed. You have to look for work to be unemployed.

COSTELLO: BUT THEY ARE OUT OF WORK!!!

ABBOTT: No, you miss my point.

COSTELLO: What point?

ABBOTT: Someone who doesn't look for work, can't be counted with those who look for work. It wouldn't be fair.

COSTELLO: To who?

ABBOTT: The unemployed.

COSTELLO: But they are ALL out of work.

ABBOTT: No, the unemployed are actively looking for work... Those who are out of work stopped looking. They gave up. And, if you give up, you are no longer in the ranks of the unemployed.

COSTELLO: So if you're off the unemployment roles, that would count as less unemployment?

ABBOTT: Unemployment would go down. Absolutely!

COSTELLO: The unemployment just goes down because you don't look for work?

ABBOTT: Absolutely it goes down. That's how you get to 9%. Otherwise, it would be 16%. You don't want to read about 16% unemployment do ya?

COSTELLO: That would be frightening.

ABBOTT: Absolutely.

COSTELLO: Wait, I got a question for you. That means they're two ways to bring down the unemployment number?

ABBOTT: Two ways is correct.

COSTELLO: Unemployment can go down if someone gets a job?

ABBOTT: Correct.

COSTELLO: And unemployment can also go down if you stop looking for a job?

ABBOTT: Bingo.

COSTELLO: So there are two ways to bring unemployment down, and the easier of the two is to just stop looking for work.

ABBOTT: Now you're thinking like an economist.

COSTELLO: I don't even know what I just said.

Pro-abortion people hysterical over plans to save babies

This is just terrible. There are babies escaping the abortionists! "Lawmakers across the nation pursued a record number of reproductive health and rights-related provisions in 2011, a new report from the Guttmacher Institute finds, enacting 135 measures in 36 states — “an increase from the 89 enacted in 2010 and the 77 enacted in 2009.” Sixty-eight percent of the provisions — 92 in 24 states — restricted access to abortion services."

Well, not so much. An outright ban on abortion was rejected by voters, and some other states banned abortion after 20 weeks (probably because of viability issues and unlike the President they didn't want to let the baby die flopping around like a fish out of water).

And Oh the Horror--a waiting period to think it through!!! The most egregious being 72 hours and counseling.

Ultrasound requirement! Whoa! That's positively medieval in it's cruelty. Imagine showing a woman an ultrasound of her baby.

States can't charge the abortions back to the tax payers through insurance coverage of employees. Oh, that's mean. How unfair--of course, the woman can get coverage if she pays for it--but the tragedy here to the pro-death people are that everyone isn't forced to pay for other people's abortions.

And stricter standards for abortion clinics. Now that's really hurtful, isn't it?

But it make the above chart just . . . almost go off the chart.

Breast Cancer and Planned Parenthood goons

Breast cancer isn’t the biggest killer of women—I think heart disease is. But the point about what has been happening between Susan G. Komen and Planned Parenthood is politics, how women (and some men) are manipulated by the media in cahoots with big pharma and the government, and if you wish to broaden the range of the net, how powerful non-profits like Komen and Planned Parenthood have become.

I believe someday in the future, citizens and historians alike will be scratching their heads wondering why people of the late 20th century couldn’t figure out that if women began taking powerful hormones as teen-agers (sex education in schools and hormones for 12 year olds) it just might have an affect not only on their children, but their grandchildren and great grands through the cellular level. They might even by then decide there’s a connection to autism spectrum, allergies, hyperactivity, etc. and all those conditions we never saw in our classmates when I was growing up. Health officials of 20-50 years from now will be as puzzled as we are now when we wonder how the industrialists and farmers couldn’t know that the filth, manure and chemicals they poured into the water would be affecting people down stream because waterways are a living organism.

If poverty researchers and social workers of the future are smarter than the ones of today, they might even look at the soaring statistics for out of wedlock babies which parallels the increased use of contraceptives by unmarried teenagers and its relationship to poverty and low income. Although that’s almost too much to hope for.

The breast cancer industry, like the poverty industry, has some big players. And don't you forget it if you value your knee caps.

Full employment at Planned Parenthood guaranteed

The illegitimacy rate for births among teenage girls hovered around five to seven percent for decades, until about 1960. Between 1960 and 1970, it doubled as the birth control pill helped usher in the 'Sexual Revolution.' After 1970, the teenage illegitimacy rate literally exploded as comprehensive sex education programs and school-based clinics were introduced. Currently, the illegitimacy rate among teenage girls is about forty percent.

Link

Have you ever wondered about how contraceptives are developed and tested?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the abortifacient Norplant, [developed by the Population Council] for public use on December 10, 1990. Norplant was formally introduced to the American public in February 1991.

As of December 2004, about one and a half million North American women had used Norplant. More than 50,000 of these women have brought more than 200 lawsuits, including 70 class-action suits, against Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories.

The Population Council with roots in the eugenics movement (like Planned Parenthood) is headquartered in NY, but has 18 offices in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and does work in more than 60 countries. It employs more than 500 people from 33 countries ($74 million budget). It develops abortifacients and contraceptives (Norplant, Jadelle, IUDs, Mirena) and tests them on third world women before bringing them home to us as "safe and effective." Even so there are many law suits pending because these chemicals can really mess up a woman's body for years. Population Council was established and funded by the Rockefellers. http://popcouncil.org/who/leadership.asp

I've always wondered how they round up a group of sample women who've just had sexual intercourse, then take the drug to be tested from the researcher, then take a test to see if an embryo has implanted, then compared to women who took a placebo or nothing (how much did they know?). Same with AIDS research.

Anyone know how you procure women for research like that? What job title do the people have who go out and find them? “Randy round-up,” “Rustlers for research,” “Corral and collect.” I read a lot of medical literature. That's never been explained.

Look. New drugs have to be tested on a mammal somewhere along the line--either animals or poor people. This could be why strong links are showing up between contraceptives and breast cancer and abortion and breast cancer.

Bill Clinton and the fight to save Social Security

Bill Clinton had planned to reform Social Security with private accounts and Medicare with vouchers. What happened? Monica Lewinsky. "Left wing Democrats in Congress threatened to throw him under the bus in the impeachment proceedings unless he completely dropped the reform ideas they regarded as
heresy. Unfortunately for the country, he obliged." John Goodman reports at Health Blog.

Clinton was serious. He had his Treasury Department draw up detailed plans. In fact, when Pat Moynihan, the colorful intellectual senator from New York, was appointed by President George W. Bush to co-chair the Social Security reform commission, the first thing he did was ask the Treasury to send him the Clinton-era planning documents so that the commission could continue where Clinton’s policy team left off.

Now think about the motives of the Democrat left here. Private plans for retirement--same thing as Bush wanted--something all of us with half a brain have been doing for years even if covered by SS; vouchers for Medicare--isn't that what Federal employees have--choices? Wouldn't that have cut down on waste and fraud by increasing competition? So what would be the problem? Democrats can't stand the word choices, unless it's killing an unborn child--then they're all for it. It would have cut into their power over the people. Democrats just have to have the power, because then they control the votes.

Why is Obama offending so many voters?

Answer is becoming clear: So he can create chaos and have an excuse to call off the elections. The Occupiers probably won't have the stamina or desire to stick it out--but the Catholics might. They'll be peaceful, just like the Tea Party or the 9/12 groups, but that won't matter. To the leftists like Pelosi, they are "terrorists." So if they do take to the streets, Obama can seize control. Very clever, and right out of Saul Alinsky's little guide book and Bill Ayers coaching.

The battle over the Obama administration’s contraception mandate continues to heat up. On Monday, Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, made some bold proclamations regarding just how hard the Catholic Church plans to fight the government’s requirement that religious-affiliated schools and organizations cover contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs.

“Never before, unprecedented in American history, for the federal government to line up against the Roman Catholic Church,” said Donohue. “This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets.”

Here, Donohue is calling for Catholics and supporters of religious freedom to join in peaceful protest against the mandate. Similar action (peaceful marches and events) has been taken in New York City, where religious groups have converged to fight a local ban on the use of public schools for worship.

Upon reading the news this morning, Glenn said that “every alarm bell in me went off.”
“Because something is not right here. There’s no way this President can lose the Catholic vote.”
Glenn said that President Obama relies heavily on the Hispanic voting bloc for support, the majority of whom are Catholic. There were also many members of the Catholic clergy who helped lobby for ObamaCare to pass just a few years ago. Glenn said that the Catholic community believes in social justice, but that a segment of them believe that government should play a role in bringing it to fruition rather than relying on individual charity. Those that follow the more progressive philosophy sided with Obama on ObamaCare, not now he has turned against them.

Glenn Beck radio show, Feb. 7, 2012

Save our Country

Dog and Pony Show--a Supreme and a McFaul guy

Ruth Bader Ginsberg tells Egypt our Constitution is old and shouldn't be their model--after all, in the U.S. the citizen is higher than the government and the Constitution is actually written to protect the citizen from the government. Plus, and she didn't say this or even think it, if you have our Constitution, people will be always crossing your borders attempting to get away from their own governments.

Wrote [John] Hayward of Ginsburg’s advice: “The last thing an Egyptian populace struggling for freedom from the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood needs to hear is a paean from a fashionable liberal about ultramodern state charters that enshrine the use of compulsive force in the service of leftist ‘positive rights,’ such as the right not to be offended.” He added that “the more fervent Muslims trying to turn Egypt into a theocracy are very good at becoming offended, and they love the notion of using compulsive force to remove the objects of their ire.” Link

U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul tells NPR that President Obama's policy when it comes to Russia is that we're "going to support what we like to call universal values" and "not American values." The Senate confirmed McFaul as ambassador on December 17, 2011.

Title inflation at The Ohio State University

From recent announcements at The Ohio State University:

On April 29, 2011, Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee and Executive Vice President and Provost Joseph A. Alutto recommended the appointment of Bernadette M. Melnyk, PhD, RN, CPNP/PMHNP, FNAP, FANN, (Dean and Distinguished Foundation Professor in Nursing at Arizona State University's College of Nursing Health Innovation) as Dean of the College of Nursing and Associate Vice President for Health Promotion and Chief Wellness Officer. Subject to approval by the Board of Trustees, her appointment will be effective on September 15, 2011.

"Dr. Melnyk's role as Ohio State's chief wellness officer is, I believe, the first such position at a university and sends a strong signal about our commitment and proactive approach to ensuring a healthy workforce and student body," Provost Alutto said.

But not to be outdone, the OSU Medical Center then had to have a VP of Care Coordination and Health Promotion.

On February 4, Ohio State announced that Larry Lewellen, current Vice President for Human Resources, will be joining The Ohio State University Medical Center as Vice President of Care Coordination and Health Promotion. Subject to approval by the Board of Trustees, his new appointment will be effective March 1.

Hard to know how the salaries inflate with the number and complexity of the titles.

Some people still think homelessness is a housing problem

In order to provide work for architects, this fellow writes at an architectural forum: "I would suggest that the AIA Housing KC develop a National Housing Policy that says, in effect, that it should be a right for every citizen in the United States to go to bed each night in a safe, secure and weather tight environment. In other words, we need to eliminate homelessness from our nation's vocabulary."

Substance abuse is often a cause of homelessness. Addictive disorders disrupt relationships with family and friends and often cause people to lose their jobs. For people who are already struggling to pay their bills, the onset or exacerbation of an addiction may cause them to lose their housing. A 2008 survey by the United States Conference of Mayors asked 25 cities for their top three causes of homelessness. Substance abuse was the single largest cause of homelessness for single adults (reported by 68% of cities). Substance abuse was also mentioned by 12% of cities as one of the top three causes of homelessness for families. According to Didenko and Pankratz (2007), two-thirds of homeless people report that drugs and/or alcohol were a major reason for their becoming homeless.
In many ["some" would be a better word choice, nb] situations, however, substance abuse is a result of homelessness rather than a cause. Link

Further more, a tiny percentage of the homeless are chronically homeless.

5% of the nearly 2 million homeless people reported by the USHUD in 2009 categorized as chronically homeless, nearly all people living without a home for more than a month have family problems and some kind of disability, including drug or alcohol addiction or mental illness. Based on the 2009 HUD Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, Link

So unless the architects have found some sort of super-human solution to drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness and chronic family problems, they need to look elsewhere for a solution to their own employment problems.

Occupiers continue to challenge our freedoms

"An Allegheny County Common Pleas Court judge has issued a supplemental order compelling the county sheriff to oust all Occupy Pittsburgh protesters and tents from Mellon Green.

Judge Christine Ward had previously given the protesters three days to vacate the space. The deadline passed this morning at 11:15 a.m. as protesters continued to gather and about a dozen tents remained.

But Sheriff William Mullen said he would not have his deputies enforce it until they got a specific order to do so, which came this afternoon."

About 6,500 occupiers have been arrested across the country since last fall. How does that compare with the awful, terrible terrorist-bent Tea Party? It was reported that an Oakland, California couple who'd been active in the community and helping poor people were strangled to death by their teen-age son--who'd been skipping school lately to hang out with the Occupy Oakland crowd. Well, isn't that what Bill Ayers advised radicals back in the 60s. He was a spoiled rich kid, too. Your remember good old Bill--he helped with the Obama campaign last time around.

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