Imagry of the Human Embryo

• Did you know this photo by Lennart Nilsson was staged? Neither did we, until we read the University of Cambridge's online exhibit, "Making Visible Embryos."
• The University of Cambridge explains:

  Although claiming to show the living fetus, [Lennart] Nilsson actually photographed abortus material obtained from women who terminated their pregnancies under the liberal Swedish law. Working with dead embryos allowed Nilsson to experiment with lighting, background and positions, such as placing the thumb into the fetus' mouth. But the origin of the pictures was rarely mentioned, even by ‘pro-life' activists, who in the 1970s appropriated these icons.

• So, when anti-abortion activists are showing pictures of their "babies" to clinic clients, they're actually using pictures of aborted fetuses.

'nough said.
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Life

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The days are long, but the years are short.
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Will It Never Cease?

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This from McClatchy:

• The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
• A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.
• [In late 2002 and] into 2003 (Emphasis mine; this is very important.), Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."
• "There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.
• "Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."
• Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.
• A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
• In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.
  

Why are those dates in bold important?

If torture was to "keep us safe" (although team-Bush had already let us be attacked on 9/11 despite very specific security memos warning just such an attack was going to take place), then why were the extreme measures not used immediately following the attack 11 September 2001?

Now we know.

The torture was not to keep us safe.

The torture was to give team-Bush an excuse to attack Iraq. When no link between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein was found, and when the yellow cake uranium/aluminum tube fiasco was exposed, team-Bush turned to torture. They did this in a desperate attempt to give themselves cover for their invasion of Iraq.

There seems to be no depth to which they would not sink to give themselves cover for that which they went into office desiring to do.

I am beginning to feel as though I awoke into a country where the Monty Python crew is running our internal security forces--the CIA, the FBI, etc.
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Debtors Prison ?

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Guilty of Being Poor

By Eric Ruder

THE JAILERS of the 19th century--even in the pre-Civil War South--largely abandoned the practice of imprisoning people for falling into debt as counterproductive and ultimately barbaric. In the 1970s and '80s, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that incarcerating people who can't pay fines because of poverty violates the U.S. Constitution. (Emphasis mine.)

Apparently, though, some states and county jails never got the memo. Welcome to the debtors' prisons of the 21st century.

"Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son," the New York Times wrote in an editorial.

"When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments. That is both barbaric and unconstitutional."

The details of Nowlin's case are even more alarming than the Times editorial suggests. Not only was Nowlin under orders to pay a fine stemming from someone else's actions, but she had been laid off from work and lost her home at the time she was ordered to "reimburse" the county for her son's detention.

Despite her inability to pay, she was held in contempt of court and ordered to serve a 30-day sentence. On March 6, three days after she was incarcerated, she was released for one day to work. She also picked up her paycheck, in the amount of $178.53. This, she thought, could be used to pay the $104, and she would be released from jail.

But when she got back to the jail, the sheriff told her to sign her check over to the county--to pay $120 for her own room and board, and $22 for a drug test and booking fee.

Even more absurd, Nowlin requested but was denied a court-appointed lawyer. So because she was too poor to afford a lawyer and denied her constitutional right to have the court provide one for her, she couldn't fight the contempt charge that stemmed from her poverty. And her contempt conviction only added to her poverty, as the fines and fees she was obligated to pay now multiplied.

"Like many people in these desperate economic times, Ms. Nowlin was laid off from work, lost her home and is destitute," said Michael Steinberg, legal director of the Michigan ACLU. "Jailing her because of her poverty is not only unconstitutional, it's unconscionable and a shameful waste of resources. It is not a crime to be poor in this country, and the government must stop resurrecting debtor's prisons from the dustbin of history."

MICHIGAN ISN'T the only place where you can be imprisoned for the crime of involuntary poverty. The same Catch-22 ensnares poor defendants daily in courtrooms across the country.

In 2006, the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) filed a suit on behalf of Ora Lee Hurley, who couldn't get out of prison until she had enough money to pay a $705 fine. But she couldn't pay the fine because she had to pay the Georgia Department of Corrections $600 a month for room and board, and spend $76 a month on public transportation, laundry and food.

She was released five days a week to work at the K&K Soul Food restaurant, where she earned $6.50 an hour, which netted her about $700 a month after taxes. Hurley was trapped in prison for eight months beyond her initial 120-day sentence until the Southern Center intervened. Over the course of her incarceration, she earned about $7,000, but she never had enough at one time to pay off her $705 fine.

"This is a situation where if this woman was able to write a check for the amount of the fine, she would be out of there," Sarah Geraghty, a SCHR lawyer, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution while Hurley was still imprisoned. "And because she can't, she's still in custody. It's as simple as that."

Georgia also lets for-profit probation companies prey on people too poor to pay their traffic violations and court fees. According to a 2008 SCHR report entitled "Profiting from the poor":

In courts around Georgia, people who are charged with misdemeanors and cannot pay their fines that day in court are placed on probation under the supervision of private, for-profit companies until they pay off their fines. On probation, they must pay these companies substantial monthly "supervision fees" that may double or triple the amount that a person of means would pay for the same offense.

For example, a person of means may pay $200 for a traffic ticket on the day of court and be done with it, while a person too poor to pay that day is placed on probation and ends up paying $500 or more for the same offense.

The privatization of misdemeanor probation has placed unprecedented law enforcement authority in the hands of for-profit companies that act essentially as collection agencies. These companies, focused on profit rather than public safety or rehabilitation, are not designed to supervise people or connect them to services and jobs. Rather, they charge exorbitant monthly fees and use the threat of imprisonment and a variety of bullying tactics to squeeze money out of the men and women under their supervision.

For too many poor people convicted of misdemeanors, our state is not living up to the constitutional promise of equal justice under law.

In Gulfport, Miss., the municipal court started a "fine collection task force" to crack down on people who owed fees for misdemeanors. According to the SCHR Web site:

The task force trolled through predominantly African American neighborhoods, rounding up people who had outstanding court fines. After arresting and jailing them, the City of Gulfport processed these people through a court proceeding at which no defense attorney was present or even offered.

Many people were jailed for months after hearings lasting just seconds. While the city collected money, it also packed the jail with hundreds of people who couldn't pay, including people who were sick, physically disabled and/or limited by mental disabilities.

The disregard of the justice system for the rights of poor people to equal protection and due process is cause for outrage. But it shouldn't come as a surprise in an era when the government spends billions bailing out banks while letting foreclosures and unemployment ruin the lives of working people.

We need to build a movement, like the working-class struggles of the 1930s, that can demand an end to the inhuman practice of incarcerating people for no other crime than finding themselves at the bottom of the social ladder.

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Putting government tasks in the hands of corporations that have no other mission than to make money, is NOT a good idea and NEVER has been. As the ranks of the poor, unemployed, homeless (because of foreclosure), down-trodden increase in number, I am not sure we can build enough prisons -- even for-profit prisons.

Why are we not heating the tar and stacking the feathers? This is NOT the country we want..

PTSD: Help from Vets for Vets

"War is the thread that binds, even as it unravels." -- Scott Kesterson, veteran and war reporter

Today we'd like to tell you about an important new project that has the potential to both change the way veterans communicate and to revolutionize the treatment of combat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It's called Not Alone, and this is what it's all about:

Mike Jones was back home for almost a year when he started to wonder why the problems weren't going away. He wondered why he couldn't drive down the road without his heart racing, why he could still hear the echo of chatter on the tactical radio in his head, and why the dreams wouldn't stop. "I can do this," Mike said to himself. "I survived war. I can defeat this."

Yet there he was, angry and bitter a year after his second tour. He was alone. For the first time in his life, something was defeating him. Mike's body and his mind were still on patrol. He just wasn't deployed anymore.

It doesn't have to be like that.

Not Alone is a community, by warriors and spouses and for warriors and spouses, created to help find the new normal after the war. It lets warriors and spouses anonymously talk about their problems through forums, social networking and blogs. Here you can find others that have gone through exactly what you have gone through. And soon you will be able to find expert help here too.

You can help and find help at Not Alone in three ways...

1. Listen to stories of other VoteVets.org members such as Brandon Friedman and Kayla Williams, as they discuss what war is like and what they faced in coming home. Hear how they've begun to rebuild their lives after the devastation of war. Or hear how spouses like Michelle Briggs and Marshele Waddell picked up the pieces after their husbands returned with deep wounds, visible and not.
   
2. Sign up now! Join the community. Find support and be supported in the forums.
   
3. Donate either time or money to tackle the issues that combat stress are placing on our warriors and families today. Rand, in their groundbreaking 2007 study, estimates that over 300,000 families are dealing with combat stress and post-traumatic stress.

Most importantly, you can spread the word. Tell others about Not Alone.

Sincerely,

Brandon Friedman
Vice Chairman, VoteVets.org
Iraq and Afghanistan Veteran

Wind and Weather

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Maxine says, "This time of year, the weather changes more often than a man with a remote."

Within the past 3 weeks we (in nw Oklahoma) have endured 6" or so of snow, wind, sleet, rain, wind, thunder showers, wind, hail the size of grapes that piled up about 4" deep, wind, 20 degree days and 80 degree days, wind, oh, and did I mention wind?

Sure wish I had a wind turbine.

The electric company would owe me money!
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The Worst Thing in the World

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I have been working for a long time now on just how to register my agony from what the Bush administration did to this country when they sanctioned torture. My every attempt to date has been less than satisfactory to me.

Jeff Fecke at Alas, a blog has succeeded where I have failed.

• Once, we prided ourselves on being better than our enemies. It was not just idle boasting; the fact that America did not have the gulag system, did not disappear political enemies, did not torture its citizens or its enemies — these were not just signs that we were good people, but they were part of our national belief in our inherent moral superiority. Americans didn’t torture, we said, because we didn’t need to torture.
• We didn’t condone torture. It wasn’t just wrong; it was un-American.
• But in the past eight years, we now know, America abandoned that once-cherished belief. We stopped being a nation that would never stoop to torture, and started looking for ways to rationalize torture so that we could call it something else.
• And today [16 April 2009] we found out that we used psychological forms of torment.
• But while these memos don’t tell us anything new — well, not exactly — they do remind us of just what the previous administration thought of our national soul.
• There are worse things that can happen to a nation than being attacked. The destruction that occurred on September 11, 2001 was awful, but it was transient; it was an awful moment in time, but it was just a moment in time. But in our reaction to it, our thoughtless invasion of Iraq, our shredding of civil liberties, and our embrace of torture methods perfected by our erstwhile enemies in the U.S.S.R. — by these actions, we lost a bit of what it was to be America. We lost a bit of our soul.
• I will always despise George W. Bush and his cronies for that; they stained the very soul of this nation. May God have mercy on our souls for not stopping them, and may we find the strength to do what must be done to prevent this from happening again — and if that means prosecuting the bastards, that’s what we have to do.

We should have been forewarned. But most of us did not look, did not listen. George Bush always liked torture.

• In 1967, a Yale Daily News article exposed hazing traditions that make the stories of contemporary initiation rites seem like a mere weeklong frat party. "Pledge week at DKE this fall began with a food fight," the article stated, "and ended with a hot branding iron applied to the small of each pledge's back." The article, stating that beatings and hot coat hangers bent in a "D" shape were routine parts of DKE initiation, led to a story in The New York Times a week later, in which President George W. Bush '68, a former DKE president, defended his fraternity's practices.

I read 1984 in my early teen years in the late 1950's. I KNEW that America did not do this. I breathed a sigh of relief upon finishing my trip to Oceana. I was safe. This would never be my country. I was wrong.

And so it seems that no matter whether we just go on or whether we set in motion some sort of justice for those at the top who instituted the torture, we lose. Prosecuting Bush, Cheney, Rice, Gonzales, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Jay Bybee, et al, may make us feel better, but it will never erase the terrible, terrible stain, the very stench of what they did to and in the name of this country.

Don't get me wrong. I yearn for GW to stand before the bar. I crave seeing Cheney, Gonzales, Rich, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Jay Bybee, et al, join him there. I want it to be clear that in this country, truly, no matter how high you sit, you must not injure this country. And they did. I want that made perfectly clear. I want it to never happen again.

However, at the very least, if we are NOT going to prosecute Bush administration members, we SHOULD pardon those soldiers who have already been convicted of actually carrying out the orders from higher ups. Trust me those soldiers never packed for Iraq by putting dog collars and leases into their bags: some one furnished those items and instructed the soldiers in how to use them to humiliate and intimidate the Iraqis.

What a continued, ongoing mess. Sad, sad.
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Has the VA Got a PTSD Treatment for You!

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My God, it just gets worse and worse and worse.

I wrote here and here about the soaring suicide rate among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. But it seems that the VA may be partially responsible for suicides among veterans. At least, among those who seek help.

Martha Rosenberg writes on BuzzFlash that "suicides among Iraq war soldiers [are up] twice that of other wars."

• What does the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs suggest as a treatment for PTSD? ... [Why they prescribe] antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and Celexa (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors/SSRIs) and Cymbalta and Effexor (Serotonin Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitors/SRNIs).
• "We recommend SSRIs as first line medications for PTSD pharmacotherapy in men and women with military-related PTSD," says the VA's National Center for PTSD's Iraq War Clinician Guide, 2nd Edition. "Findings from subsequent large-scale trials with paroxetine [Paxil] have demonstrated that SSRI treatment is clearly effective both for men in general and for combat veterans suffering with PTSD."
• [But] 660 people have killed themselves on SSRIs and SNRIs since 1988, according to published newspaper reports, including at least 17 Iraq war veterans. Many more have attempted suicide and committed felonies, self-harm, police standoffs, murders, murder/suicides and mass murders with high-powered weapons.

At least now we know why they are killing their spouses or significant others.
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'US Army Bans PTSD Diagnosis Over Costs'

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You know, I am really tired of being outraged about my government. But it just goes on and on and on. I am beginning to think that is "their" plan -- wear us out with the outrages until we have no outrage left within us.

I guess that makes our job to maintain our sense of outrage no matter how much we must scrape the bottom of the barrel. I believe, I must believe, that we are up to the task. Stay outraged!

• The US Army has reportedly pressured its medical staff not to diagnose combat veterans, who had fought in Iraq, with post-traumatic stress disorder.
• A Combat veteran, who has been seeking treatment at Fort Carson for a brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, had put a recording device into his pocket and set it on voice-activation in order to capture what the doctor tells him because of his war-damaged memory, Salon magazine reported Wednesday.
• His recording, however, unlocked a dark secret and documented the fact that the US military does not want Iraq veterans to be diagnosed with PTSD-- something that wounded soldiers and their advocates have long suspected.
• The shocking revelation follows remarks made by a retired Army psychiatrist who has recently said that the Army has ordered its medical staff to misdiagnose soldiers suffering from war-related PTSD to reduce their benefits.

• The Army and the Senate Armed Services Committee have refused to investigate the implications. [Emphasis mine. We had better harass the Senate Armed Services Committee about this little matter. At least ask why they won't investigate. The Senate voted for this "war;" they must be held accountable for the human costs. Unfortunately, John McCain is the ranking member. And, heaven help us, Jim Inhofe (OK) is on this committee. ]

But for the veterans, the problem, once more, is at the top. No matter how much some person working the problem wants to do a good job, the "powers that be" are determined only to make themselves look good and keep their lofty positions with all the power that is attached thereto.

Seems we just need to sweep out about the top 3 or 4 tiers of officers (in this case, actual military officers not just corporate officers). Move everybody else up and see if they can do a better job of actually attacking the problem instead of just trying to cover it up.

My God. What a mess. Do you suppose we will ever be able to get things straightened out again?
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"But I Feel Sad for My Country"

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Well, my gentle snowflakes, the results are in. And I just don't know what to say.

On 9/11 as I watched the horror unfold, ashamedly, my first thought was that G W had orchestrated it all as his "Pearl Harbor" moment. I have spent the ensuing years convincing myself, that not even he and his cohorts would do such a thing.

Now, I will have to re-think the whole thing. Sad. Sad.

"Traces of explosives in 9/11 dust, scientists say" by Elaine Jarvik from Deseret News.

• Tiny red and gray chips found in the dust from the collapse of the World Trade Center contain highly explosive materials — proof, according to a former BYU professor, that 9/11 is still a sinister mystery.
• Physicist Steven E. Jones, who retired from Brigham Young University in 2006 after the school recoiled from the controversy surrounding his 9/11 theories, is one of nine authors on a paper published last week in the online, peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal. Also listed as authors are BYU physics professor Jeffrey Farrer and a professor of nanochemistry at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
• For several years, Jones has theorized that pre-positioned explosives, not fires from jet fuel, caused the rapid, symmetrical collapse of the two World Trade Center buildings, plus the collapse of a third building, WTC-7.
• The newest research, according to the journal authors, shows that dust from the collapsing towers contained a "nano-thermite" material that is highly explosive. Although the article draws no conclusions about the source and purpose of the explosives, Jones has previously supported a theory that the collapse of the WTC towers was part of a government conspiracy to ignore warnings about the 9/11 terrorists so that the attack would propel America to wage war against Afghanistan and Iraq.
• The next step, Jones said in a phone interview on Monday, is for someone to investigate "who made the stuff and why it was there."
• A layer of dust lay over parts of Manhattan immediately following the collapse of the towers, and it was samples of this dust that Jones and fellow researchers requested in a 2006 paper, hoping to determine "the whole truth of the events of that day." They eventually tested four samples they received from New Yorkers.
• One sample was from a man who had swept up a handful of dust on the Brooklyn Bridge, where he was walking when the second tower fell. As the journal authors note, "It was, therefore, definitely not contaminated by the steel-cutting or clean-up operations at Ground Zero, which began later. Furthermore, it is not mixed with dust from WTC-7, which fell hours later."
• Another man collected dust in his apartment, about five blocks from the World Trade Center, on the morning of Sept. 12. There was a layer about an inch thick on a stack of folded laundry near an open window.
• Red/gray chips, averaging in size between .2 and 3 mm, were found in all four dust samples. The chips were then analyzed using scanning electron microscopy and other high-tech tools.
• The red layer of the chips, according to the researchers, contains a "highly energetic" form of thermite. While normal thermite (a mixture of finely granulated aluminum and an oxide of metal) can be incendiary, "super thermite" is explosive. He says there is no benign explanation for the thermite in the WTC dust.
• Jones made headlines in 2005 when he argued that the rapid and symmetrical fall of the World Trade Center looked like the result of pre-positioned explosives. He argued that fires alone wouldn't have been hot enough to crumble the buildings; and that even if struck by planes, the towers should have been strong enough to support the weight of the tops as they crumbled — unless they were leveled by explosives.
• Essentially forced to retire, Jones says he is now paying for research out of his own pocket. He likens himself to Galileo and Newton, who stood by their consciences. "I would like to think I could stand up for the truth," he says.
• The dust study vindicates his earlier theories, Jones says, but he has mixed feelings about the implications. "As a young student said to me a while back: 'It's exciting from a scientific point of view, because things are now making sense. But I feel sad for my country.' "

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A Really Neat Idea -- & It Looks Good, Too

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Solar Tree Hits the Streets, and Passes the Test

by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA on 12.27.07

Science & Technology (solar)

It wasn’t the first time we’d seen solar street lights (other examples can be seen here, here and here), but it was probably the most beautiful. When we first saw the solar tree concept by Welsh designer Ross Lovegrove we really were pretty taken aback. It is a gorgeous example of a marriage between form and function. However, often such concepts remain just that – concepts – so we were delighted to hear, via Renewable Energy Access, that the design has now undergone real-world testing on the streets of Vienna, with positive results:

"The solar cells on the tree were able to store enough electricity in spite of receiving no direct solar light for days at a time because of the clouds. They showed that solar trees really are a practical form of street lighting," Christina Werner from Cultural Project Management (Kulturelles Projektmanagement, Vienna) told enewableEnergyAccess.com. She said that the City of Vienna was now in the process of deciding whether to install more solar trees. "We hope that not only the city of Vienna but other cities will see the merits of using renewable energy for street lighting to cut emissions," Christina Werner said. "Someday soon solar trees could well be the main form of street lighting in Europe."

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I think this looks really neat. And it is a really good idea, too -- with already real-world application/usage to prove it more than just a "nice" concept.

Hello, Again

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Well, my gentle snowflakes, I did NOT fall from the face of the earth. No. I did not leave the country. No. I did not fall passionately in love and spend the past week staring longingly into the eyes of my beloved oblivious to all else. No. Much more mundane. I was ill.

We go on.

Maxine says today: "I do a lot of charity work ... that is, if volunteering my opinion counts."

Seems Maxine has been reading the blog -- hope she has been missing me.

Gird your blue-veined loins, folks. The show is about to begin.

Meanwhile, go read Tom Degan.
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