Pro-Lifers disagree with Cheney on marriage, but. . .

they applaud the doctors, technology and his own bravery in getting a new heart.  Nasty people on the internet were complaining that Cheney was too old for a heart transplant (actually, what they really mean is he is a Republican).  I’m 72, and although I think that’s probably too old to run for President (first term), it’s not too old for a heart transplant.  And those nasties might change their minds if he were their father, brother or husband—or indeed, if it were their hearts that needed a replacement.  He waited 20 months; but there have been amazing changes even in that time.  Read the article.

How to ruin a beautiful view

Few people think of visual environment.  I saw this article in ENR Midwest Digital Wire. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501363_162-57406874/feds-5-states-to-push-for-great-lakes-wind-farms/

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - The Obama administration and five states have agreed to speed up approval of offshore wind farms in the Great Lakes.

There are no wind turbines in the lakes at present. Proposals have met fierce opposition from people worried the structures would ruin views and harm the environment.

Under the deal, federal and state agencies will develop a plan to speed regulatory review of proposed offshore wind farms. Officials say the projects would have to meet safety and environmental standards.

States that signed the deal include Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania.

Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin declined.

Hacktivism

From Technewsworld an article on hacktivism by Sam Glines.

“Hacktivism is the new, hip thing; it has become a hobby for people with higher-than-average computer knowledge. The movement is led by an elite few who have a deep, lifelong knowledge of computers, and it includes senior Fortune 100 corporate executives and highly placed governmental employees, as well as the ranks of the unemployed.

The elite world of hacktivism is at the center of the Internet's Dark Side. While governmental agencies are looking for the individuals responsible for various acts of hacktivism, they struggle with using their tried-and-true methods to move up the food chain to identify hacktivist leaders. What is not well understood is that these layers cannot be penetrated by the standard law enforcement methods that were once effective in collapsing organized crime groups.

Hacktivism exists because the Internet is an open society that has no boundaries in which normal legal process can be applied without taking significant and draconian action, like direct control of the systems that keep the Internet alive. The traditional legal requirements for evidence are hampered by the very void in which the elites live. “

You might be anti-Semitic if . . .

If you judge a Jewish state by standards that you apply to no one else; if your neck veins bulge when you denounce Zionists but you’ve done no more than cluck “well, yes, very bad about Darfur”;
if there is nothing Hamas can do that you won’t blame ‘in the final analysis’ on Israelis;
if your sneer at the Zionists doesn’t sound a whole lot different from American neoconservative sneers at leftists;
then you should not be surprised if you are criticized, fiercely so, by people who are serious about a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians and who won’t let you get away with a self-exonerating formula—“I am anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic”—to prevent scrutiny. If you are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic, then don’t use the categories, allusions, and smug hiss that are all too familiar to any student of prejudice.

Please read the entire article at Dissent—it’s from 2008, but not much has changed.  http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=987

Americans stalking health

Today Americans will stalk the aisles of a natural foods store for the freshest and least contaminated produce, they will worry about power lines and microwave ovens, but will pour strange
chemicals and hormones into their own or their daughters' bodies in the name of either destroying an embryo before it implants or blocking the natural path of an egg.

As a former academic medical librarian well acquainted with the research and publication route of scientific literature, I can assure you NO ONE will ever receive a federal grant to investigate the increase in obesity, autism, allergies, depression, thyroid cancer and early stroke and heart attack in women since the 1960s rush to birth control pills--and if it has been investigated through non-governmental funding, it will never make it into peer-reviewed journals. The "reproductive health" industry is far more powerful and well funded than the tobacco lobby. And it has killed far more people--over 52 million. 

If nothing else, researchers should at least be looking at our water supply with 41 million women taking extra hormones and chemicals that when they are excreted from the body, are flushed into our water supplies where they can’t be filtered out.

The increase in breast cancer caused by abortion and
contraception, however, is not denied, and the increase in abortions caused by the increased availability (vending machines, drug stores, Wal-Mart, etc.) of contraceptive hormones, chemicals and tools to insert in the body cavity or apply to the skin was again confirmed in 2011 in the journal Contraception.

Please watch this video--even if you don't buy the book,
you'll learn a lot. Librarians are 223:1 liberal to conservative, so I'm quite sure you won't find it in a public library.
http://www.ignatius.com/Products/AEAP-H/adam-and-eve-after-the-pill.aspx

Not everyone can pass secrets publicly like the President

“The Obama administration has told the Russian government that it is concerned about the harassment of U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, who suggested this week that his phone and e-mail account may have been hacked, allowing journalists from state-controlled television to track him.

McFaul, who took up his post in January, noted on his Twitter account that a crew from NTV seems to be aware of his every move, including meetings that have not been publicly announced.”

As noted in the Washington Post

Stats for the past week

Visits Total since 2003............... 450,514

Average per Day ................ 177

Average Visit Length .......... 2:15

This Week .................... 1,239

Page Views Total since 2003........... 660,500

Average per Day ................ 310

Average per Visit .............. 1.8

This Week .................... 2,172

That about sums it up

"So, in one week, Mr. Obama got caught whispering promises to our enemy, incited a race war, raised serious questions about his understanding of the Constitution, and then got smacked down over his proposed budget that was so wildly reckless that even Democrats in Congress could not support it."

Charles Hurt

Trying out Windows Live Writer

I’ve been having such a battle with the new(ish) template for my blog (long script, hesitation, etc.) I thought I’d try Live Writer (have no idea what it does). 

 

Then I’ll add a recent photo (last Saturday), then I’ll hit publish.

Something I'd never thought of

"The next time that you wash dishes by hand, here's an experiment I'd like you to try. Stop up the sink over which you hot rinse the dishes, and then at the end of the wash cycle, measure how much water is in there. I'll bet it's more than you thought you were using, because when it runs down the drain, you don't see it. How many gallons did you end up with?

I'm suggesting this experiment because, unbelievably, newer, efficient dishwashers use as little as five gallons of water for the entire dishwasher load. On the other hand, says the American Water Works Association, when you wash dishes by hand, the average person uses 20 gallons of water. Now maybe this figure comes from those that leave the tap on as they're washing and aren't conservative with water the way you are. But I'll bet that it would be a challenge for you to hand wash an entire day's worth of dishes using five gallons only-for the dipping, washing and rinsing."

I wonder if the writer factored in the energy to build and create the dishwasher? But it's good to know the new ones are so efficient. Mine isn't very old (a Maytag), but it's a piece of junk and will soon need to be replaced.

Link to Recyclebank

Research defines groups to watch--has anyone been left out?

To define the ideological motivations, LaFree and Bersani used START’s Profiles of Perpetrators of Terrorism—United States (Miller, Smarick and Simone, 2011), which briefly describes ideological motivations as:

Extreme Right-Wing: groups that believe that one’s personal and/or national “way of life” is under attack and is either already lost or that the threat is imminent (for some the threat is from a specific ethnic, racial, or religious group), and believe in the need to be prepared for an attack either by participating in paramilitary preparations and training or survivalism. Groups may also be fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation), anti-global, suspicious of centralized federal authority, reverent of individual liberty, and believe in conspiracy theories that involve grave threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty.

Extreme Left-Wing: groups that want to bring about change through violent revolution rather than through established political processes. This category also includes secular left-wing groups that rely heavily on terrorism to overthrow the capitalist system and either establish “a dictatorship of the proletariat” (Marxist-Leninists) or, much more rarely, a decentralized, non-hierarchical political system (anarchists).

Religious: groups that seek to smite the purported enemies of God and other evildoers, impose strict religious tenets or laws on society (fundamentalists), forcibly insert religion into the political sphere (e.g., those who seek to politicize religion, such as Christian Reconstructionists and Islamists), and/or bring about Armageddon (apocalyptic millenarian cults; 2010: 17). For example, Jewish Direct Action, Mormon extremist, Jamaat-al-Fuqra, and Covenant, Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) are included in this category.

Ethno-Nationalist/Separatist: regionally concentrated groups with a history of organized political autonomy with their own state, traditional ruler, or regional government, who are committed to gaining or regaining political independence through any means and who have supported political movements for autonomy at some time since 1945.

Single Issue: groups or individuals that obsessively focus on very specific or narrowly-defined causes (e.g., anti-abortion, anti-Catholic, anti-nuclear, anti-Castro). This category includes groups from all sides of the political spectrum.

It's interesting that people who advocate the killing of the low-income and black if they are still in the womb, are not on the government watch list. Anyone in the age range of 60s or 70s complains of loss of "a way of life," and is not thrilled with Agenda 21 or China holding our debt. Are they dangerous? Islamic members of the military who advocate for their religion and then shoot up a military base, missed the filter of terrorist cells. If ones' beliefs are universal and international in orientation, or if one advocates peaceful revolution through fundamental change, or if the group can stand in front of mainstream media cameras and call for vigilanteism, START funded research will probably not notice them.

How refreshing!

"Our ministry is financially sound so we ask that only those who can afford to contribute to do so. Without your donations we will remain. What your donations do is move us more rapidly towards our goals of reaching more people in more ways with the hope that all Christians will join us in prayer in whatever way possible.

We will except donations, but we ask that you first take care of yourself, your family, and people who need your help in your own parish. If you have taken care of yourself and your family and have contributed locally and still feel you are fortunate to have “left overs” then we welcome your contributions."

This is at the tab "Want to help" at Divine Office--Liturgy of the Hours, a very peaceful way to begin, middle or end your day, with just the words of scripture, silence and a recorded hymn. Because I'm an early riser, often if I want to hear an entire podcast for morning, I have to the previous day.

From Russia with love

From Russia, John Quincy Adams wrote to his son:

"St. Petersburg, Sept, 1811

My dear Son,

In your letter of the 18th January, you mentioned that you read to your aunt a chapter in the Bible...every evening. This information gave me real pleasure...

So great is my veneration for the Bible, and so strong my belief, that when duly read and meditated on, it is of all books in the world, that which contributes most to make men good, wise, and happy-that the earlier my children begin to read it...the more lively and confident will be my hopes that they will prove useful citizens of their country."

"You must soon come to the age when you must govern yourself. You have already come to that age in many respects; you know the difference between right and wrong, and you know some of your duties....It is in the Bible, you must learn them all, and from the Bible you must practice them...

Those duties are to God, to your fellow creatures, and to yourself. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, with all thy soul and with all thy mind and with all thy strength, and thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments, Jesus Christ expressly says, 'hang all the law and the prophets.' ...

The Bible contains the revelation of the will of God...It is an invaluable and inexhaustible mine of knowledge and virtue."

This correspondence was published after his death as Letters of John Quincy Adams to his son on the Bible and its Teachings (Auburn, NY: Derby, Miller & Co, 1848).

As retold at American Minute with Bill Federer for March 27, 2012. The entire book has been scanned and is available through Google.

How to kill a Down Syndrome baby

Selected questions from the National Abortion Federation, an organization that continues to mourn the murder of Dr. George Tiller at its website, an active abortionist who was killed while ushering in his church. Murder, whether of the unborn or the (Although they also on their webpage talk about President Bush, so maybe they are just living in the past?)

Q. Is abortion legal?
A. Yes. Abortion is legal in the United States and Canada.

Q. Can my parents force me to have an abortion?
A. No. However, some states have laws that require a minor to involve her parents in the decision to have an abortion.

Q. Do I need permission from my husband or partner to have an abortion? Will my provider contact him?
A. No. The Supreme Court has ruled that requiring a spouse's consent in order to have an abortion is unconstitutional. You may decide to tell your husband or partner, but the clinic will not contact him.

Q. Does Medicaid or other state-assisted health insurance cover the cost of an abortion?
A. Medicaid is only required to cover abortion in cases of rape, incest, or life endangerment. However, some states do cover abortion as part of their Medicaid policies.

Q. Is it possible for an undocumented citizen to have an abortion in the United States or Canada?
A. Yes. The provider will require proof of identity, but your citizenship is irrelevant. Immigration Services will not be notified.

Q. Is there a difference between the morning-after pill and the abortion pill?
A. Yes. The morning-after pill (also known as Emergency Contraception, EC, Preven, or Plan B) prevents pregnancy and does not cause an abortion. It prevents fertilization of an egg or attachment of a fertilized egg to the uterine wall. The abortion pill (also known as RU-486, medical abortion, Mifeprex®, or mifepristone) terminates an already established pregnancy when used in combination with another medication.

Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Our next book club selection is “Wait till next year; a memoir” by Doris Kearns Goodwin the story of a young girl growing up in the 1950s and loving baseball. I’m not very far into the book, and although I think I know where this religious memory will go as she ages out of innocence and trust, I thought this passage very charming, and so different from my own “believer’s baptism” on Palm Sunday 1950 and 6 weeks of instruction on Sunday afternoon for an hour or so with Rev. Statler.

“Sister Marian introduced us to the text familiar to generations of Catholic schoolchildren: the blue-covered Baltimore Catechism with a silver Mary embossed on a constellation of silver stars. The catechism was organized around a series of questions and answers we had to memorize word for word to help us understand the meaning of what Christ had taught and, ultimately, to understand Christ Himself. “Who made us? God made us.” “Who is God? God is the Supreme Being who made all things.” “Why did God make us? God made us to show happiness in Heaven.” Although it was learned by rote, there was something uniquely satisfying about reciting questions we had to memorize, both the questions and the answers. No matter how many questions we had to memorize, each question had a proper answer. The Catholic world was a stable place with an unambiguous line of authority and an absolute knowledge of right and wrong.

We learned to distinguish venial sins, which displeased our Lord, from the far more serious mortal sins, which took away the life of the soul. We memorized the three things that made a sin mortal: the thought or deed had to be grievously wrong; the sinner had to know it was grievously wrong; and the sinner had to consent fully to it. Clearly, King Herod had committed a mortal sin when, intending to kill the Messiah, he killed all the boys in Judea who were two years old or less. Lest we feel too far removed from such a horrendous deed, we were told that those who committed venial sins without remorse when they were young would grow up to commit much larger sins, losing their souls in the same way that Herod did.” pp. 90-91, hardcover edition

My goodness! That’s more than I know today about the Baltimore Catechism, or even Luther’s Small Catechism. I’ve never understood the difference between mortal and venial sins before. But ratcheting up venial to mortal because of lack of remorse does sound serious to me today--although in 1950 I’m not so sure I would have understood as well as she did. It sounds a lot like our own criminal justice system, doesn’t it? Awareness and remorse. But then, I only had a few hours of instruction, and I’m not sure we even covered sin! As well written as this is, and as intense as she was (she goes on to write about baptizing her dolls in case the need ever came up, having been instructed that Catholics could do this for an unbaptized, dying person), there’s no indication in this charming story of what she believes today--only what she was taught then. At least not by page 91.

Is this treason? Or just Obama giving away the farm

Obama was overheard on a microphone delivering a secret message to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev regarding the US missile defense. What is Obama up to, and what does his secret message mean for allies like Israel? Is Obama about to hang Europe out to dry? Is this message treasonous? Do our allies feel as betrayed as we do? Admits all he needs to do to sell us down the river is get reelected. Or maybe he means, then I'll be king for life, when he says his "last election."

A very damning video

Zimbabwean marriages in the Diaspora suffer the same problems as others

When men can't be the head of the household, what country they're from doesn't make a lot of difference. The marriage struggles regardless.

"The evidence suggests that a “dependent” husband lacks the authority to make major decisions within the family. Migration to Britain has catapulted some women from the confines of the domestic sphere into the public sphere of work. While women have moved significantly into the public sphere, men have moved to a lesser degree into the private sphere, a process that has shaken up men’s authority in the household. As Tonderai Ncube noted from his own experience: “Now she is going to work and she is getting £5 an hour and I am getting £5 an hour and now there is nothing I can tell her.”23 In this case, his primary breadwinner role had become less relevant and he was no longer the sole authority. His position within the marriage was thus becoming increasingly insecure. Moreover, he thought that the UK government had also usurped his power to maintain and control his children and family by giving them state benefits, which are directly paid to his wife: “So the government is the hero of my family. What would I say, that’s the end of the story.” Hence, men’s authority and power as head of the family, previously derived from having access to economic resources and through kinship relations, has been contested and weakened."

Regendering the household

Obama keeping campaign promise to kill coal industry

So Ohio is suffering. Congress dumped his crap and trade plan, so he'll just regulate instead, by-passing the representative form of government that has 3 branches. He sees himself as a monarch, not an elected official.

The mining industry criticized the rule. “Requiring coal-based power plants to meet an emissions standard based on natural gas technology is a policy overtly calculated to destroy a significant portion of America’s electricity supply,” said Hal Quinn, chief executive of the National Mining Assn. “This proposal is the latest convoy in EPA’s regulatory train wreck that is rolling across America, crushing jobs and arresting our economic recovery at every stop. It is not an 'all of the above' energy strategy.”

Article from LA Times

This isn't just a Catholic thing

Yes, there really is a war against women, and it isn't being waged from the Right. It's called the Sexual Revolution; women have been badly damaged and society has been permanently changed.

"In severing sex from procreation, humankind set into motion forces that have by now shaped and reshaped almost every aspect of life in the Western world. Families are smaller, birthrates have dropped, divorce and out-of-wedlock births have soared. Demography has now even started to work against the modern welfare state, which has become harder to sustain as fewer children have been produced to replace aging parents.

The sexual revolution has transformed economics, culture and law. Witness this week's Supreme Court case, in which the question at hand is whether an individual's Social Security survivor benefits belong to children conceived with his sperm months after he died.

Even on the religious playing field, this isn't just a Catholic thing. Christian teaching against artificial contraception dates back to the earliest Church fathers confronting pagan Rome. Christians remained united on that teaching until relatively recently—1930, to be exact, which is the year that the Anglican Communion made its first, carefully circumscribed exceptions to the rule. Orthodox Jews, Mormons and some traditionalist Protestants have also pondered the issue and ended up proscribing or limiting contraception in different circumstances."

Mary Eberstadt in the Wall Street Journal, March 24

What Obamacare forces on the state Medicaid programs

The amicus brief by Cato--states can't opt out, but still have to send money to Washington. Tim Sandefur of the Pacific Legal Foundation explains some of the implications of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion. Obamacare forces more people on to Medicaid. States will lose all the federal money if they don't comply. "Your money or your life," is not exactly a fair trade. The demands exceed the constitutional powers of the federal government.



Four free market advocacy groups filed a 39-page amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that the individual mandate in President Obama’s health care reform law is unconstitutional.

If the PPACA is upheld swelling insurance coverage by 32 million (leaving 18 million still uninsured, according to NEJM), they will be pushed onto the 2/3 of physicians who currently accept Medicaid patients. Then the government will have to force physicians, and costs will increase. People already don't like this legislation, so if the court backs the President, it could doom his reelection.

Obamacare shell game:

HHS has now finalized a rule requiring insurance plans operating in states that permit elective abortion coverage in their exchanges to segregate premium costs into two separate pools: one to cover abortion services and another to cover all other benefits. That abortion surcharge, which must be at least $1 a month, must be paid with private dollars by every enrollee in plans that cover elective abortion. The affordability tax credits, according to the Obama Administration, can then be used to subsidize other non-abortion-related benefits coverage for eligible enrollees.

With this shell game in place, the Obama Administration has attempted to declare itself free from accusations of using taxpayer funds for abortion. Nevertheless, this new rule will force all enrollees in plans that cover elective abortion to pay the abortion surcharge with private funds—or drop out of the plan entirely and hope a comparable one exists in the state exchange without abortion coverage. In some states, there will be options; in others, there will be few or none.

Moreover, under the rules finalized last week, insurance companies that provide abortion coverage are required only to disclose the abortion surcharge at the time of enrollment. It is possible that many individuals who would otherwise object to paying for coverage of abortion will not even be aware of the surcharge on their insurance, since the rule requires the premium not to be itemized and the required disclosure at the time of enrollment may be as little as a single sentence in a massive plan document. New rules for the shell game