“Die, troll, die” goes to court
Prenda Law specializes in online pornography copyright infringement. Why does that make the Internet so mad?
By Andrew Leonard
Salon.com
Mar 4, 2013
Who hasn’t had the urge when reading Internet comments, at least once, to pull out a great big nail-studded mace and start whacking about at the idiots who gibber and froth online? Earlier this morning, when I saw Timothy Lee’s tweet referencing a case in which a law firm was suing some commenters for libel and defamation, my first thought was, I totally get it.
The complaint is worth quoting extensively. (Emphases mine).
Plaintiff files this action seeking monetary damages, injunctive relief and other damages arising from the egregious Internet-based conduct of a number of individuals, whom Plaintiff knows only by the anonymous, salacious, false and libelous comments they have made, and continue to make, about him on the Internet. Shielded by unconventional pseudonyms, [they] belong to a community of Internet “commentators,” fearful of being identified, and have falsely accused the law firm Prenda Law LLC,of which Plaintiff is the sole officer and employee, of, among other things, criminal offenses; want of integrity in the discharge of employment; lack of ability in its profession; and the commission of fornication and adultery….
The Defendants’ defamatory statements are made under the most cowardly of circumstances; plastered over centralized Internet communities and available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. The Defendants have libeled Plaintiff under the disguise of such childish and unsophisticated pseudonyms as “die troll die.” The defamatory statements that they have made about Plaintiff are the type that, if made under the light of day, would prompt loved ones to suggest (or intervene and force) intensive psychological therapy. But sheltered in a cloak of cowardly pseudonyms, emboldened by association [with] others apparently sharing the same affliction, Defendants have continued unabated in their conduct…
I have to say, based solely on the excerpts above, I was feeling Prenda Law’s pain. Nobody likes to be accused of “want of integrity” or “lack of ability” or get called “assclown” on a regular basis. I’ve been there, I know. I still have yet to be charged with the commission of fornication and adultery, but the week has barely gotten started.
Then I did some background research on Prenda.
This marvelous, bizarre story belongs to Timothy Lee, an adjunct fellow at the Cato Institute who covers tech policy for Ars Technica. Lee’s series exploring the saga of what he routinely calls the “porn copyright trolling firm” Prenda Law defies easy description, but makes for riveting, and hilarious, reading.
I present, for example, the lead sentences to two stories Lee wrote in December and January.
Prenda Law, the ethically challenged law firm that specializes in mass pornographic copyright lawsuits, is facing growing pressure to answer questions about allegations of identity theft.
Prenda Law, a copyright litigation firm that has sued thousands of anonymous Internet users for sharing pornographic videos, has sought the dismissal of a California judge after the judge ordered the firm to answer charges that it engaged in identity theft.
The details of Prenda Law’s high jinks are beyond convoluted. If you’re interested, go straight to the source. But basically, Prenda’s primary business appears to be collecting damages from people accused of sharing copyrighted pornography via peer-to-peer sharing networks such as BitTorrent. Personally, I do not doubt that such lurid piracy is rampant. However, the exact methods by which Prenda has gone about this endeavor do not seem to be winning it any friends with judges, or Internet “commentators.”
The identity theft allegations emerged late last year, when a Minnesota man named Alan Cooper told a Minnesota court he suspected Prenda Law named him as the CEO of two litigious offshore holding companies without his permission. Worried about exposing himself to potential liability for the firms’ misconduct, Cooper asked the court to investigate the situation.
Judging by the details in a letter sent by Cooper’s lawyer to the Minnesota court, Cooper has reason to be concerned. And Prenda’s protestations of injury from the mean and nasty Internet ring hollow.
Who knew? In this case, the ranters and ravers might be right.
(Timothy Lee’s report on the lawsuit is here.)
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Silicon Valley Discriminates Against Women, Even If They're Better
Silicon Valley Discriminates Against Women, Even If They're Better
PBS Newshour
March 20, 2013
Paul Solmon
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa discovers that the famed "meritocracy" of Silicon Valley is a myth and that women are systematically discriminated against there, despite the fact that they're more productive, on average, than their male counterparts. He has a plan to change the Valley.
...Vivek Wadhwa: Visit any company in the Valley, and you'll see that it resembles the United Nations. At the Google cafeteria, they always serve Indian, Chinese and Mexican food; hamburgers and hot dogs are nowhere to be found. Indeed, my research team documented that 52 percent of startups in Silicon Valley during the recent tech boom were founded by immigrants -- like me. So I used to call Silicon Valley the world's greatest meritocracy.
This was before I moved to the Valley and my wife pointed out something strange: that practically all of the people at Silicon Valley's big networking events were male. They were mostly white, Indian, or Chinese. Women, blacks and Hispanics were nowhere to be found. When I analyzed company founder data from the Kauffman Foundation, I was shocked to learn that only 3 percent of the tech firms were founded by women. When I looked at the executive teams of the Valley's top tech firms, with a couple of notable exceptions, I couldn't find any women technology heads. Even the management team of Apple didn't have a single woman in it. And I learned that virtually all of Silicon Valley's venture-capital firms are male dominated -- the few women whom you find there are in either marketing or human resources. Indeed, of the 89 venture capitalists on the 2009 TheFunded list of top venture capitalists, only one was a woman.
So I was wrong; this is no meritocracy.
Since then, I have researched this topic in greater depth. When I analyzed data from my own studies on entrepreneurship, I was surprised to learn that there is virtually no difference in motivation between men and women entrepreneurs. Women start companies for the same reasons as men: because they want to build wealth and capitalize on business ideas, like the startup-company culture and are tired of working for others. Women entrepreneurs are as highly educated as their male counterparts, have the same early interest in starting their own business and learn the same valuable lessons from their work experience and from prior successes and failures.
This raised the question: Are women less competent as entrepreneurs than men? Are they not cut out for the rough-and-tumble world of entrepreneurship? The answer turned out to be none of this. An analysis performed by the Kauffman Foundation showed that women are more capital-efficient than men. Babson College's Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that women-led high-tech startups have lower failure rates than those led by men. Other research has shown that venture-backed companies run by women have annual revenues 12 percent higher than those by men and organizations that are the most inclusive of women in top management positions achieve a 35 percent higher return on equity and 34 percent higher total return to shareholders.
Could the education of women be the problem? Not according to data from the National Science Foundation. Girls now match boys in mathematical achievement. In the U.S., 140 women enroll in higher education for every 100 men who do. Women earn more than 50 percent of all bachelor's and master's degrees, and nearly 50 percent of all doctorates. Women participation in business and MBA programs has grown more than five-fold since the 1970s, and the increase in the number of engineering degrees granted to women is almost tenfold.
This shows that there isn't a fundamental problem, and that things are moving in the right direction. I have also interviewed about 300 women in tech over the past three years, and my research team at Stanford University recently completed a survey of more than 500 women founders. We are still analyzing the complex findings (and will likely publish a paper in the summer). At a glance, though, the new research shows a distinct change in attitudes over time. Women are becoming more confident and assertive, and they are helping each other. Men are also beginning to mentor and coach women.
That's not all. Many technologies are now advancing exponentially. We all know how computing is advancing -- our computers get more powerful every year as prices drop. The same is happening in fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, nanomaterials, medicine, and synthetic biology. This is making it possible for small teams to do what was once possible only for governments and large corporations to do: solve big problems. Starting exponential companies requires relatively small amounts of money, and entrepreneurs with cross-disciplinary knowledge and skills have the advantage. This plays to the strengths of women: they are in the catbird seat for the new era of innovation.
To encourage, inspire and educate women to become engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs -- and help solve humanity's grand challenges, I am myself taking advantage of an exponential technology: crowdsourcing. I plan to harness the genius of the crowd to produce a book about women at the frontier of technology. Along with journalist and author Farai Chediya and my lead researcher Neesha Bapat, we are planning to ask hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of women to co-author this book with us. We will presell the book on a crowdfunding site such as Indiegogo and donate all of the profits to fund the tuition of women through the Graduate Studies Program at Singularity University and to support women-led startups coming out of this program. This is a 10-week program designed for leaders who want to build innovative solutions to global grand challenges.
So Silicon Valley may not have been the perfect meritocracy, but there is hope that it will soon be, and that our women may save the world.
Vivek Wadhwa is Vice President of Research and Innovation at Singularity University, a fellow at Stanford Law School, and Director of Research at Duke University. He is also the author of an Economist Book of the Year for 2012--Immigrant Exodus. You can follow him on Twitter: @wadhwa.
This entry is cross-posted on the Rundown -- NewsHour's blog of news and insight.
PBS Newshour
March 20, 2013
Paul Solmon
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa discovers that the famed "meritocracy" of Silicon Valley is a myth and that women are systematically discriminated against there, despite the fact that they're more productive, on average, than their male counterparts. He has a plan to change the Valley.
...Vivek Wadhwa: Visit any company in the Valley, and you'll see that it resembles the United Nations. At the Google cafeteria, they always serve Indian, Chinese and Mexican food; hamburgers and hot dogs are nowhere to be found. Indeed, my research team documented that 52 percent of startups in Silicon Valley during the recent tech boom were founded by immigrants -- like me. So I used to call Silicon Valley the world's greatest meritocracy.
This was before I moved to the Valley and my wife pointed out something strange: that practically all of the people at Silicon Valley's big networking events were male. They were mostly white, Indian, or Chinese. Women, blacks and Hispanics were nowhere to be found. When I analyzed company founder data from the Kauffman Foundation, I was shocked to learn that only 3 percent of the tech firms were founded by women. When I looked at the executive teams of the Valley's top tech firms, with a couple of notable exceptions, I couldn't find any women technology heads. Even the management team of Apple didn't have a single woman in it. And I learned that virtually all of Silicon Valley's venture-capital firms are male dominated -- the few women whom you find there are in either marketing or human resources. Indeed, of the 89 venture capitalists on the 2009 TheFunded list of top venture capitalists, only one was a woman.
So I was wrong; this is no meritocracy.
Since then, I have researched this topic in greater depth. When I analyzed data from my own studies on entrepreneurship, I was surprised to learn that there is virtually no difference in motivation between men and women entrepreneurs. Women start companies for the same reasons as men: because they want to build wealth and capitalize on business ideas, like the startup-company culture and are tired of working for others. Women entrepreneurs are as highly educated as their male counterparts, have the same early interest in starting their own business and learn the same valuable lessons from their work experience and from prior successes and failures.
This raised the question: Are women less competent as entrepreneurs than men? Are they not cut out for the rough-and-tumble world of entrepreneurship? The answer turned out to be none of this. An analysis performed by the Kauffman Foundation showed that women are more capital-efficient than men. Babson College's Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that women-led high-tech startups have lower failure rates than those led by men. Other research has shown that venture-backed companies run by women have annual revenues 12 percent higher than those by men and organizations that are the most inclusive of women in top management positions achieve a 35 percent higher return on equity and 34 percent higher total return to shareholders.
Could the education of women be the problem? Not according to data from the National Science Foundation. Girls now match boys in mathematical achievement. In the U.S., 140 women enroll in higher education for every 100 men who do. Women earn more than 50 percent of all bachelor's and master's degrees, and nearly 50 percent of all doctorates. Women participation in business and MBA programs has grown more than five-fold since the 1970s, and the increase in the number of engineering degrees granted to women is almost tenfold.
This shows that there isn't a fundamental problem, and that things are moving in the right direction. I have also interviewed about 300 women in tech over the past three years, and my research team at Stanford University recently completed a survey of more than 500 women founders. We are still analyzing the complex findings (and will likely publish a paper in the summer). At a glance, though, the new research shows a distinct change in attitudes over time. Women are becoming more confident and assertive, and they are helping each other. Men are also beginning to mentor and coach women.
That's not all. Many technologies are now advancing exponentially. We all know how computing is advancing -- our computers get more powerful every year as prices drop. The same is happening in fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, nanomaterials, medicine, and synthetic biology. This is making it possible for small teams to do what was once possible only for governments and large corporations to do: solve big problems. Starting exponential companies requires relatively small amounts of money, and entrepreneurs with cross-disciplinary knowledge and skills have the advantage. This plays to the strengths of women: they are in the catbird seat for the new era of innovation.
To encourage, inspire and educate women to become engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs -- and help solve humanity's grand challenges, I am myself taking advantage of an exponential technology: crowdsourcing. I plan to harness the genius of the crowd to produce a book about women at the frontier of technology. Along with journalist and author Farai Chediya and my lead researcher Neesha Bapat, we are planning to ask hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of women to co-author this book with us. We will presell the book on a crowdfunding site such as Indiegogo and donate all of the profits to fund the tuition of women through the Graduate Studies Program at Singularity University and to support women-led startups coming out of this program. This is a 10-week program designed for leaders who want to build innovative solutions to global grand challenges.
So Silicon Valley may not have been the perfect meritocracy, but there is hope that it will soon be, and that our women may save the world.
Vivek Wadhwa is Vice President of Research and Innovation at Singularity University, a fellow at Stanford Law School, and Director of Research at Duke University. He is also the author of an Economist Book of the Year for 2012--Immigrant Exodus. You can follow him on Twitter: @wadhwa.
This entry is cross-posted on the Rundown -- NewsHour's blog of news and insight.
One-celled animal is randomly assigned one of seven different sexes
Single-cell Tetrahymena mate
Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
March 26, 2013
With seven different sexes to choose from, the single-celled organism Tetrahymena thermophila determines its biological mating type in a game of molecular chance, new research finds.
Tetrahymena are oval-shaped protozoa that live in freshwater. These microscopic organisms come in seven different "sexes," or mating types. Any Tetrahymena sex can mate with any other mating type except its own.
Even more intriguing to biologists is that it doesn't matter what mating types two Tetrahymena parents are. In fact, their offspring can be any one of the seven. That observation had some strange genetic implications, as parents typically would pass on their own mating-type genes to their progeny.
But even though scientists have known about Tetrahymena's seven mating varieties for 60 years, they have only now discovered how the individuals select their type.
"Finally, we had the resources to get at the molecular basis of it ― to actually discover the mating-type genes, what their sequence is, and how it is that the cells have the potential for many mating types and only end up expressing one ― a random one," study researcher Eduardo Orias, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told LiveScience.
By peering into the Tetrahymena genome, the researchers found the equivalent of a cellular roulette wheel. The organisms have two nuclei apiece. One, the somatic nucleus, contains the DNA that does the daily work of the cell. The other, the germline nucleus, acts like the cells in the ovaries or testes of humans. The DNA in the germline passes along traits to offspring. [Sex Quiz: How Animals Really Do It]
When two Tetrahymena fuse in their version of single-cell sex, they produce a gamete nucleus, which is the protozoan equivalent of a fertilized egg in humans. This fertilization nucleus starts making copies of itself, some of which are destined to become germline nuclei and some of which are somatic.
It is during this step that the mating type is chosen, the researchers found. Each germline nucleus holds an array of incomplete gene pairs ― one for each of the organism's seven sexes. The cell joins and completes one of these gene pairs randomly, thus setting the cell's mating type. The rest of the incomplete gene pairs are thrown out, said the report, released by Orias and his colleagues today (March 26) in the journal PLOS Biology.
"We had no idea what a beautifully organized system this turned out to be," Orias said. "It's very modularly organized and very symmetrical in some ways and very ― to us ― aesthetically exciting."
Having seven mating types, instead of only two, may make it more likely for Tetrahymena to run into a cell they can reproduce with when they meet and greet in a pond, Orias said.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Republican Party chair in Florida avoids trial with guilty plea for theft and money laundering
Corruption in politics? Say it ain't so!
Jim Greer Pleads Guilty To Theft And Money Laundering Before Trial Begins
By MIKE SCHNEIDER
Huff Post
02/11/13
ORLANDO, Fla. — The criminal trial of former Republican Party of Florida chair Jim Greer had promised to be embarrassing for party leaders, rising Republican star Marco Rubio and former Gov. Charlie Crist, who is contemplating a new political future as a Democrat.
But Greer's guilty pleas on Monday to four counts of theft and a single count of money laundering ended the trial before it even started and ensured that some state GOP secrets will remain confidential, at least for the time-being.
"There were a number of people who did not want this trial to go forward and the trial isn't going forward," Damon Chase, Greer's attorney, said after the former chair entered his pleas in court. "Once again, Jim Greer is falling on his sword for a lot of other folks."
Greer, 50, could face a prison sentence of 3 1/2 to 35 years when he is sentenced March 27. Assistant statewide prosecutor Michael Williams wouldn't say how many years prosecutors would seek.
The trial had threatened to expose the underbelly of Florida's dominant political party and its formerly high-spending ways. Party officials took heat three years ago from revelations of excessive spending at restaurants and luxury hotels on party-issued American Express cards by Republican leaders, including Rubio. Testimony about those expenditures had been expected at the trial.
Topics also covered in pretrial depositions included allegations of prostitutes at a state GOP fundraiser in the Bahamas, the drinking habits of Crist and intraparty strife. Some of Florida's most powerful politicians were scheduled as witnesses, including Crist, former U.S. Sen. George LeMieux, former Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum and several state House and state Senate leaders.
Greer's acknowledgment of guilt was what the party wanted all along, party attorney Stephen Dobson said, and they weren't worried about potentially embarrassing testimony at trial.
"There was absolutely no concern. In fact, a lot of people were looking forward to clearing a lot of these allegations that had been made up," Dobson said outside the courtroom. "Today the truth came out."
Greer was vice mayor of the small central Florida town of Oviedo when Crist surprisingly picked him to be the state party chairman after he led local efforts to help Crist get elected governor in 2006. He previously was the president and CEO of a company that provides training to the hospitality industry on how to comply with alcohol laws.
Jim Greer Pleads Guilty To Theft And Money Laundering Before Trial Begins
By MIKE SCHNEIDER
Huff Post
02/11/13
ORLANDO, Fla. — The criminal trial of former Republican Party of Florida chair Jim Greer had promised to be embarrassing for party leaders, rising Republican star Marco Rubio and former Gov. Charlie Crist, who is contemplating a new political future as a Democrat.
But Greer's guilty pleas on Monday to four counts of theft and a single count of money laundering ended the trial before it even started and ensured that some state GOP secrets will remain confidential, at least for the time-being.
"There were a number of people who did not want this trial to go forward and the trial isn't going forward," Damon Chase, Greer's attorney, said after the former chair entered his pleas in court. "Once again, Jim Greer is falling on his sword for a lot of other folks."
Greer, 50, could face a prison sentence of 3 1/2 to 35 years when he is sentenced March 27. Assistant statewide prosecutor Michael Williams wouldn't say how many years prosecutors would seek.
The trial had threatened to expose the underbelly of Florida's dominant political party and its formerly high-spending ways. Party officials took heat three years ago from revelations of excessive spending at restaurants and luxury hotels on party-issued American Express cards by Republican leaders, including Rubio. Testimony about those expenditures had been expected at the trial.
Topics also covered in pretrial depositions included allegations of prostitutes at a state GOP fundraiser in the Bahamas, the drinking habits of Crist and intraparty strife. Some of Florida's most powerful politicians were scheduled as witnesses, including Crist, former U.S. Sen. George LeMieux, former Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum and several state House and state Senate leaders.
Greer's acknowledgment of guilt was what the party wanted all along, party attorney Stephen Dobson said, and they weren't worried about potentially embarrassing testimony at trial.
"There was absolutely no concern. In fact, a lot of people were looking forward to clearing a lot of these allegations that had been made up," Dobson said outside the courtroom. "Today the truth came out."
Greer was vice mayor of the small central Florida town of Oviedo when Crist surprisingly picked him to be the state party chairman after he led local efforts to help Crist get elected governor in 2006. He previously was the president and CEO of a company that provides training to the hospitality industry on how to comply with alcohol laws.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
The world could use a Pope with the moral clarity of former surgeon general C. Everett Koop
Dr. C. Everett Koop understood that right and wrong aren't always clear. Chosen by Ronald Reagan for his conservative beliefs, which he never abandoned, he ended up saving many innocent lives by pushing sex education and condom use, and talking openly about AIDS. He believed his first moral obligation was to protect the health of Americans.
If the next pope is able to think as deeply about right and wrong, it will indeed be a blessing to the world.
The Public's Health Trumped His Beliefs
By STEPHEN MILLER
WSJ
February 25, 2013
He declared war on smoking, helped remove the stigma from AIDS and pioneered the use of the office of surgeon general as a megaphone for addressing Americans about health.
Dr. C. Everett Koop, who died Monday at age 96, was an evangelical Christian who espoused conservative social values. But as the U.S.'s top public-health official, he promoted positions more commonly associated with liberals, such as condom use and sex education.
Nominated for the office by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, Dr. Koop was known as a crusading abortion opponent. In the 1970s, he toured the country presenting the antiabortion film "Whatever Happened to the Human Race?"
The National Organization for Women opposed his nomination. U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) called him "Dr. Kook" and said the doctor was "a man of tremendous intolerance." Dr. Koop himself once told Life magazine, "I think I scare most people."
But conservatives welcomed him, and Republican Sen. Jesse Helms sponsored legislation letting the New York native serve despite being over the position's 64-year-old age limit. During a lengthy confirmation battle, Dr. Koop pledged not to use his office as an antiabortion soapbox.
Despite lacking a background in public health, Dr. Koop kicked off his eight years in office with a report that labeled cigarette smoking "the most important public health issue of our time." He warned of the dangers of secondhand smoke and pushed for a smokeless society.
Commenting on the Newport cigarette "Alive With Pleasure" advertising campaign, he said, "Truth in advertising would demand the slogan 'Dying in Agony' instead." The crusade alienated some of his biggest backers, including Mr. Helms of the tobacco-growing state of North Carolina.
On AIDS, Dr. Koop initially was muzzled by the White House, which kept him off an early AIDS task force and forbade him to make public statements about the newly discovered disease.
In 1986, he issued a frank report on AIDS, urging the use of condoms for "safe sex" and advocating sex education as early as the third grade. When a summary of the report was mailed to 100 million homes, James McFadden of the Ad Hoc Committee in Defense of Life complained, "Here is a guy who looks like an Old Testament prophet—who ever would have imagined that he'd end up selling the gospel of sodomy?"
Dr. Koop disappointed some in 1989 when, as surgeon general, he refused to endorse any conclusion about the psychological effects of abortions. "I had not wavered at all in my pro-life stand," he wrote in his memoir, "Koop." "The real problem, of course, was that too many women have unwanted pregnancies."
Before becoming the nation's chief doctor, Dr. Koop was famed for separating conjoined twins at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where he was surgeon-in-chief for three decades.
Dr. Koop wrote that he aspired to be a surgeon from the time he was a boy, even sneaking into a hospital to watch surgery at age 15 while posing as a medical student. Curious to learn more, he did operations on rabbits and stray cats, with his mother acting as anesthetist. After graduating from Cornell Medical College in 1941, Dr. Koop opted for the then-unusual specialty of pediatric surgery. He developed new techniques for correcting congenital heart defects and underdeveloped esophaguses.
Dr. Koop retired in 1989, before his second term as surgeon general had expired. He helped create the C. Everett Koop Institute at Dartmouth College and the short-lived drkoop.com. In 1995, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
His most lasting legacy was the AIDS battle, where he alienated his original constituency to fulfill what he said was his obligation as a physician. "It is time to put self-defeating attitudes aside and recognize that we are fighting a disease—not people," Dr. Koop said in 1986.
If the next pope is able to think as deeply about right and wrong, it will indeed be a blessing to the world.
The Public's Health Trumped His Beliefs
By STEPHEN MILLER
WSJ
February 25, 2013
He declared war on smoking, helped remove the stigma from AIDS and pioneered the use of the office of surgeon general as a megaphone for addressing Americans about health.
Dr. C. Everett Koop, who died Monday at age 96, was an evangelical Christian who espoused conservative social values. But as the U.S.'s top public-health official, he promoted positions more commonly associated with liberals, such as condom use and sex education.
Nominated for the office by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, Dr. Koop was known as a crusading abortion opponent. In the 1970s, he toured the country presenting the antiabortion film "Whatever Happened to the Human Race?"
The National Organization for Women opposed his nomination. U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) called him "Dr. Kook" and said the doctor was "a man of tremendous intolerance." Dr. Koop himself once told Life magazine, "I think I scare most people."
But conservatives welcomed him, and Republican Sen. Jesse Helms sponsored legislation letting the New York native serve despite being over the position's 64-year-old age limit. During a lengthy confirmation battle, Dr. Koop pledged not to use his office as an antiabortion soapbox.
Despite lacking a background in public health, Dr. Koop kicked off his eight years in office with a report that labeled cigarette smoking "the most important public health issue of our time." He warned of the dangers of secondhand smoke and pushed for a smokeless society.
Commenting on the Newport cigarette "Alive With Pleasure" advertising campaign, he said, "Truth in advertising would demand the slogan 'Dying in Agony' instead." The crusade alienated some of his biggest backers, including Mr. Helms of the tobacco-growing state of North Carolina.
On AIDS, Dr. Koop initially was muzzled by the White House, which kept him off an early AIDS task force and forbade him to make public statements about the newly discovered disease.
In 1986, he issued a frank report on AIDS, urging the use of condoms for "safe sex" and advocating sex education as early as the third grade. When a summary of the report was mailed to 100 million homes, James McFadden of the Ad Hoc Committee in Defense of Life complained, "Here is a guy who looks like an Old Testament prophet—who ever would have imagined that he'd end up selling the gospel of sodomy?"
Dr. Koop disappointed some in 1989 when, as surgeon general, he refused to endorse any conclusion about the psychological effects of abortions. "I had not wavered at all in my pro-life stand," he wrote in his memoir, "Koop." "The real problem, of course, was that too many women have unwanted pregnancies."
Before becoming the nation's chief doctor, Dr. Koop was famed for separating conjoined twins at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where he was surgeon-in-chief for three decades.
Dr. Koop wrote that he aspired to be a surgeon from the time he was a boy, even sneaking into a hospital to watch surgery at age 15 while posing as a medical student. Curious to learn more, he did operations on rabbits and stray cats, with his mother acting as anesthetist. After graduating from Cornell Medical College in 1941, Dr. Koop opted for the then-unusual specialty of pediatric surgery. He developed new techniques for correcting congenital heart defects and underdeveloped esophaguses.
Dr. Koop retired in 1989, before his second term as surgeon general had expired. He helped create the C. Everett Koop Institute at Dartmouth College and the short-lived drkoop.com. In 1995, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
His most lasting legacy was the AIDS battle, where he alienated his original constituency to fulfill what he said was his obligation as a physician. "It is time to put self-defeating attitudes aside and recognize that we are fighting a disease—not people," Dr. Koop said in 1986.
Monday, February 25, 2013
Vatican protects cardinals who hid child molestation, but not those who had sex with adults
I can not fathom why the Catholic Church would be more hostile to gay clergy than to clergy who raped children and protected rapists. If the Church wants to continue to be catholic (small c), I'd suggest it choose a liberal from the Americas as the next pope. Conservatives think they're saving the Church by preventing change, but they're achieving the exact opposite. If they don't watch out, I think we could end up with an American Orthodox Church consisting of people who have lost confidence in Rome.
Vatican shifts tone on cardinals linked to sex scandals
By Jason Horowitz
Washington Post
February 25, 2013
ROME — Before the election of Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican circled the wagons around cardinals ensnared in sex abuse scandals. As the church prepares to pick Benedict’s successor, those embattled cardinals increasingly find themselves under the wagon wheels.
In a wide-ranging news conference on Monday, the Vatican struck a markedly blase tone when asked about the decision by British Cardinal Keith O’Brien not to attend the conclave to elect the next pope. Hours earlier, the Vatican had accepted O’Brien’s immediate resignation over sexual harassment accusations.
Whereas the Vatican made clear in 2005 that disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston was expected to report to the Sistine Chapel, on Monday it said it had nothing to do with O’Brien’s announcement.
In other words, he was on his own.
“The cardinal can say what he wants to say,” the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told a packed briefing room.
“There is a clear shift in rhetoric,” said John Allen, a leading Vatican observer and correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. “In 2005, the Vatican stated that it was a clear duty for cardinals to participate in the conclave. It appears that they are now shifting the burden for making that decision onto the cardinals themselves.”...
Vatican shifts tone on cardinals linked to sex scandals
By Jason Horowitz
Washington Post
February 25, 2013
ROME — Before the election of Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican circled the wagons around cardinals ensnared in sex abuse scandals. As the church prepares to pick Benedict’s successor, those embattled cardinals increasingly find themselves under the wagon wheels.
In a wide-ranging news conference on Monday, the Vatican struck a markedly blase tone when asked about the decision by British Cardinal Keith O’Brien not to attend the conclave to elect the next pope. Hours earlier, the Vatican had accepted O’Brien’s immediate resignation over sexual harassment accusations.
Whereas the Vatican made clear in 2005 that disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston was expected to report to the Sistine Chapel, on Monday it said it had nothing to do with O’Brien’s announcement.
In other words, he was on his own.
“The cardinal can say what he wants to say,” the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told a packed briefing room.
“There is a clear shift in rhetoric,” said John Allen, a leading Vatican observer and correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. “In 2005, the Vatican stated that it was a clear duty for cardinals to participate in the conclave. It appears that they are now shifting the burden for making that decision onto the cardinals themselves.”...
“The Myth of Persecution”: Early Christians weren’t persecuted
A few decades ago, the Catholic Church removed a large number of people from its list of saints. Saint Christopher was a big loss, since so many people were driving around feeling safe because they had a Saint Christopher medal hanging from their rear-view mirrors. It turns out that these "saints," such as Christopher, the ferryman who carried a heavy child on his shoulders, might not have existed at all. Likewise, regarding Judaism, some archaeologists say that small Bedouin camps from thousands of years ago have been found in the Sinai desert, but not a trace of Jews wandering in that desert for forty years. Perhaps the Egypt story is an allegory for the years Jews spent searching for God, and the stories of Christian saints were allegories created to strengthen the resolve of early Christians who were struggling to carry the burden of their new religion.
“The Myth of Persecution”: Early Christians weren’t persecuted
The Romans did not target, hunt or massacre Jesus' followers, says a historian of the early church
By Laura Miller
Salon.com
Feb 24, 2013
In the immediate aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, a modern myth was born. A story went around that one of the two killers asked one of the victims, Cassie Bernall, if she believed in God. Bernall reportedly said “Yes” just before he shot her. Bernall’s mother wrote a memoir, titled “She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall,” a tribute to her daughter’s courageous Christian faith. Then, just as the book was being published, a student who was hiding near Bernall told journalist Dave Cullen that the exchange never happened.
Although Candida Moss’ new book, “The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom,” is about the three centuries following the death of Jesus, she makes a point of citing this modern-day parallel. What Bernall truly said and did in the moments before her death absolutely matters, Moss asserts, if we are going to hold her up as a “martyr.” Yet misconceptions and misrepresentations can creep in so soon. The public can get the story wrong even in this highly mediated and thoroughly reported age — and do so despite the presence among us of living eyewitnesses. So what, then, to make of the third-hand, heavily revised, agenda-laden and anachronistic accounts of Christianity’s original martyrs?
Moss, professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame, challenges some of the most hallowed legends of the religion when she questions what she calls “the Sunday school narrative of a church of martyrs, of Christians huddled in catacombs out of fear, meeting in secret to avoid arrest and mercilessly thrown to lions merely for their religious beliefs.” None of that, she maintains, is true. In the 300 years between the death of Jesus and the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, there were maybe 10 or 12 scattered years during which Christians were singled out for supression by Rome’s imperial authorities, and even then the enforcement of such initiatives was haphazard — lackadaisical in many regions, although harsh in others. “Christians were never,” Moss writes, “the victims of sustained, targeted persecution.”
Much of the middle section of “The Myth of Persecution” is taken up with a close reading of the six “so-called authentic accounts” of the church’s first martyrs. They include Polycarp, a bishop in Smyrna during the second century who was burned at the stake, and Saint Perpetua, a well-born young mother executed in the arena at Carthage with her slave, Felicity, at the beginning of the third century. Moss carefully points out the inconsistencies between these tales and what we know about Roman society, the digs at heresies that didn’t even exist when the martyrs were killed and the references to martyrdom traditions that had yet to be established. There’s surely some kernel of truth to these stories, she explains, as well as to the first substantive history of the church written in 311 by a Palestinian named Eusebius. It’s just that it’s impossible to sort the truth from the colorful inventions, the ax-grinding and the attempts to reinforce the orthodoxies of a later age.
Moss also examines surviving Roman records. She notes that during the only concerted anti-Christian Roman campaign, under the emperor Diocletian between 303 and 306, Christians were expelled from public offices. Their churches, such as the one in Nicomedia, across the street from the imperial palace, were destroyed. Yet, as Moss points out, if the Christians were holding high offices in the first place and had built their church “in the emperor’s own front yard,” they could hardly have been in hiding away in catacombs before Diocletian issued his edicts against them.
This is not to deny that some Christians were executed in horrible ways under conditions we’d consider grotesquely unjust. But it’s important, Moss explains, to distinguish between “persecution” and “prosecution.” The Romans had no desire to support a prison population, so capital punishment was common for many seemingly minor offenses; you could be sentenced to be beaten to death for writing a slanderous song. Moss distinguishes between those cases in which Christians were prosecuted simply for being Christians and those in which they were condemned for engaging in what the Romans considered subversive or treasonous activity. Given the “everyday ideals and social structures” the Romans regarded as essential to the empire, such transgressions might include publicly denying the divine status of the emperor, rejecting military service or refusing to accept the authority of a court. In one of her most fascinating chapters, Moss tries to explain how baffling and annoying the Romans (for whom “pacifism didn’t exist as a concept”) found the Christians — when the Romans thought about them at all...
read more
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
officials displayed outrage over a priest's violation of canon law while doing little for victims of his sexual abuse
Church officials pretended that God cared more about church rules than about the sexual abuse of children. Of course, it was the officials themselves who felt that way. It seems that all hierarchies become corrupt.
Priests' ecclesiastical missteps treated more sternly than abuse
Files detail cases in which L.A. Archdiocese officials displayed outrage over a priest's violation of canon law while doing little for victims of his sexual abuse.
By Victoria Kim, Ashley Powers and Harriet Ryan
Los Angeles Times
February 1, 2013
The archdiocese of Los Angeles learned in the late 1970s that one of its priests had sexually assaulted a 16-year-old boy so violently that he was left bleeding and "in a state of shock." The priest said he was too drunk to remember what happened and officials took no further action.
But two decades later, word reached Cardinal Roger M. Mahony that the same priest was molesting again and improperly performing the sacrament of confession on his victim. The archdiocese sprang to action: It dispatched investigators, interviewed a raft of witnesses and discussed the harshest of all church penalties—not for the abuse but for the violation of church law.
"Given the seriousness of this abuse of the sacrament of penance … it is your responsibility to formally declare the existence of the excommunication and then refer the matter to Rome," one cleric told Mahony in a memo.
The case of Father Jose Ugarte is one of several instances detailed in newly released records in which archdiocese officials displayed outrage over a priest's ecclesiastical missteps while doing little for the victims of his sexual abuse.
The revelations emerged from 12,000 pages of the once-confidential personnel files of more than 100 priests accused of abuse. The archdiocese posted the documents on its website Thursday night, an hour after a Los Angeles judge ended five and a half years of legal wrangling over the release of the files with an order compelling the church to make the documents public within three weeks.
Victims, their lawyers, reporters and members of the public spent hours Friday poring through records that stretched back to the 1940s and provided details about the scope of abuse in church ranks never before seen.
The files also suggested that the attempts to protect abusers from law enforcement extended beyond the L.A. archdiocese to a Catholic order tasked with rehabilitating abusers.
"Once more, we ask you to PLEASE DESTROY THESE PAGES AND ANY OTHER MATERIAL YOU HAVE RECEIVED FROM US," the acting director of the order's treatment program wrote to Mahony in 1988 in a letter detailing therapists' reports about a prolific molester. "This is stated for your own and our legal protection."
The order, the Servants of the Paraclete, closed the New Mexico facility where many Los Angeles priests were sent amid a flood of lawsuits in the mid-1990s. A lawyer for the order declined to comment, but indicated in a 2011 civil court filing that all treatment records were destroyed.
Mahony disregarded the order's advice, and therapy memos are among the most detailed records in the files.
One evaluation recounts how Father Joseph Pina, an East L.A. parish priest, said he was attracted to a victim, an eighth-grade girl, when he saw her in a costume.
"She dressed as Snow White … I had a crush on Snow White, so I started to open myself up to her," he told the psychologist. In a report sent to a top Mahony aide, the psychologist expressed concern the abuse was never reported to authorities.
"All so very sad," Mahony wrote years later after Pina was placed on leave. He was defrocked in 2006.
The limitations of the treatment at the Servants' center are evident in the file. After months of therapy in 1994, Father John Dawson was allowed to leave the facility for a weekend. Among the first things Dawson, who had been accused of plying altar boy victims with pot and beer, did was apply for a job at the Arizona Boys School in Phoenix. Treatment center staff found out only after the school phoned Dawson to arrange an interview. "Had they not called the Villa, it is doubtful that Fr. Dawson would have informed us of that job application and interview," according to a 1994 letter to Mahony's vicar for clergy, Msgr. Timothy Dyer.
In some cases, the behavior that drew the greatest ire of the hierarchy involved breaking church rather than criminal laws. After first learning of Michael Baker's abuse of boys in 1986, church leaders sent the priest to therapy, then returned him to ministry believing his word that he would stay away from children.
Yet in 2000, information that Baker was performing baptisms without permission set off a new level of alarm among the church's top officials. They discussed launching a canonical investigation, and for the first time in Baker's checkered years with the church, officials raised the prospect of contacting police.
They mulled getting a restraining order to keep him away from churches.
"Please proceed — this is very bad!" Mahony scrawled across the bottom of a memo on starting a church investigation into the baptisms. Ultimately, church officials did not seek a restraining order.
Archdiocese officials finally contacted police about Baker's abuse of children when the scandal erupted in 2002.
Priests' ecclesiastical missteps treated more sternly than abuse
Files detail cases in which L.A. Archdiocese officials displayed outrage over a priest's violation of canon law while doing little for victims of his sexual abuse.
By Victoria Kim, Ashley Powers and Harriet Ryan
Los Angeles Times
February 1, 2013
The archdiocese of Los Angeles learned in the late 1970s that one of its priests had sexually assaulted a 16-year-old boy so violently that he was left bleeding and "in a state of shock." The priest said he was too drunk to remember what happened and officials took no further action.
But two decades later, word reached Cardinal Roger M. Mahony that the same priest was molesting again and improperly performing the sacrament of confession on his victim. The archdiocese sprang to action: It dispatched investigators, interviewed a raft of witnesses and discussed the harshest of all church penalties—not for the abuse but for the violation of church law.
"Given the seriousness of this abuse of the sacrament of penance … it is your responsibility to formally declare the existence of the excommunication and then refer the matter to Rome," one cleric told Mahony in a memo.
The case of Father Jose Ugarte is one of several instances detailed in newly released records in which archdiocese officials displayed outrage over a priest's ecclesiastical missteps while doing little for the victims of his sexual abuse.
The revelations emerged from 12,000 pages of the once-confidential personnel files of more than 100 priests accused of abuse. The archdiocese posted the documents on its website Thursday night, an hour after a Los Angeles judge ended five and a half years of legal wrangling over the release of the files with an order compelling the church to make the documents public within three weeks.
Victims, their lawyers, reporters and members of the public spent hours Friday poring through records that stretched back to the 1940s and provided details about the scope of abuse in church ranks never before seen.
The files also suggested that the attempts to protect abusers from law enforcement extended beyond the L.A. archdiocese to a Catholic order tasked with rehabilitating abusers.
"Once more, we ask you to PLEASE DESTROY THESE PAGES AND ANY OTHER MATERIAL YOU HAVE RECEIVED FROM US," the acting director of the order's treatment program wrote to Mahony in 1988 in a letter detailing therapists' reports about a prolific molester. "This is stated for your own and our legal protection."
The order, the Servants of the Paraclete, closed the New Mexico facility where many Los Angeles priests were sent amid a flood of lawsuits in the mid-1990s. A lawyer for the order declined to comment, but indicated in a 2011 civil court filing that all treatment records were destroyed.
Mahony disregarded the order's advice, and therapy memos are among the most detailed records in the files.
One evaluation recounts how Father Joseph Pina, an East L.A. parish priest, said he was attracted to a victim, an eighth-grade girl, when he saw her in a costume.
"She dressed as Snow White … I had a crush on Snow White, so I started to open myself up to her," he told the psychologist. In a report sent to a top Mahony aide, the psychologist expressed concern the abuse was never reported to authorities.
"All so very sad," Mahony wrote years later after Pina was placed on leave. He was defrocked in 2006.
The limitations of the treatment at the Servants' center are evident in the file. After months of therapy in 1994, Father John Dawson was allowed to leave the facility for a weekend. Among the first things Dawson, who had been accused of plying altar boy victims with pot and beer, did was apply for a job at the Arizona Boys School in Phoenix. Treatment center staff found out only after the school phoned Dawson to arrange an interview. "Had they not called the Villa, it is doubtful that Fr. Dawson would have informed us of that job application and interview," according to a 1994 letter to Mahony's vicar for clergy, Msgr. Timothy Dyer.
In some cases, the behavior that drew the greatest ire of the hierarchy involved breaking church rather than criminal laws. After first learning of Michael Baker's abuse of boys in 1986, church leaders sent the priest to therapy, then returned him to ministry believing his word that he would stay away from children.
Yet in 2000, information that Baker was performing baptisms without permission set off a new level of alarm among the church's top officials. They discussed launching a canonical investigation, and for the first time in Baker's checkered years with the church, officials raised the prospect of contacting police.
They mulled getting a restraining order to keep him away from churches.
"Please proceed — this is very bad!" Mahony scrawled across the bottom of a memo on starting a church investigation into the baptisms. Ultimately, church officials did not seek a restraining order.
Archdiocese officials finally contacted police about Baker's abuse of children when the scandal erupted in 2002.
Republican hypocrisy: Senator Pete Dominici was hiding love child as he voted to impeach Clinton
So who's tawdry now?
Domenici acknowledges having son outside marriage
By By JERI CLAUSING
Associated Press
Feb. 20, 2013
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Former Sen. Pete Domenici has disclosed that he fathered a secret child in the 1970s with the 24-year-old daughter of one of his Senate colleagues — a startling revelation for a politician with a reputation as an upstanding family man.
Domenici and Michelle Laxalt sent statements to the Albuquerque Journal that announced the relationship for the first time and identified their son as Nevada attorney Adam Paul Laxalt. They said they decided to go public with their decades-old secret because they believed someone was about to release the information in an attempt to smear Domenici.
"I deeply regret this and am very sorry for my behavior," Domenici, 80, said in his statement. "I hope New Mexicans will view that my accomplishments for my beloved state outweigh my personal transgression."
The Journal reported on the relationship in an article published Wednesday.
Domenici, a Republican, was the longest-serving senator in New Mexico history when he retired in 2008 after six terms. He was known for his unflagging support of the state's national laboratories and military installations, and he became a power broker for his work on the federal budget and energy policy.
Domenici voted for the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton in 1998 after his affair with Monica Lewinsky, but his floor statement focused on the fact that Clinton had lied under oath, noting that the trial "has never been about the President's private sex acts, as tawdry as they have been."
But in the same speech, he cited the value of "truthfulness" and how it's the first pillar of good character. Reached at his home in Washington on Wednesday, Domenici said he had nothing more to say. Domenici and his wife have been married more than 50 years and have eight children...
Domenici acknowledges having son outside marriage
By By JERI CLAUSING
Associated Press
Feb. 20, 2013
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Former Sen. Pete Domenici has disclosed that he fathered a secret child in the 1970s with the 24-year-old daughter of one of his Senate colleagues — a startling revelation for a politician with a reputation as an upstanding family man.
Domenici and Michelle Laxalt sent statements to the Albuquerque Journal that announced the relationship for the first time and identified their son as Nevada attorney Adam Paul Laxalt. They said they decided to go public with their decades-old secret because they believed someone was about to release the information in an attempt to smear Domenici.
"I deeply regret this and am very sorry for my behavior," Domenici, 80, said in his statement. "I hope New Mexicans will view that my accomplishments for my beloved state outweigh my personal transgression."
The Journal reported on the relationship in an article published Wednesday.
Domenici, a Republican, was the longest-serving senator in New Mexico history when he retired in 2008 after six terms. He was known for his unflagging support of the state's national laboratories and military installations, and he became a power broker for his work on the federal budget and energy policy.
Domenici voted for the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton in 1998 after his affair with Monica Lewinsky, but his floor statement focused on the fact that Clinton had lied under oath, noting that the trial "has never been about the President's private sex acts, as tawdry as they have been."
But in the same speech, he cited the value of "truthfulness" and how it's the first pillar of good character. Reached at his home in Washington on Wednesday, Domenici said he had nothing more to say. Domenici and his wife have been married more than 50 years and have eight children...
Pistorius: people around him were NOT grounding him and pulling him back to earth
Oscar Pistorius
We all need feedback. It's a terrible mistake when we get rid of the people we need most: the ones who tell us the truth.
Pistorius' prior police run-ins
February 20, 2013
By Samuel Burke
CNN
During the bail hearing for Oscar Pistorius in Pretoria on Wednesday, a South African police investigator testified about previous run-ins that the double amputee Olympian has had with police.
Detective Hilton Botha said in his testimony that Pistorius had accidentally fired a weapon at a restaurant in January, and alleged that Pistorius persuaded a friend to take responsibility - Pistorius denied those charges.
The investigator also said Pistorius had previously threatened violence in another incident in an altercation over a woman.
In 2009, Botha said he also investigated another incident, in which an unidentified woman had accused Pistorius of assault, but her claim could not be proved and the case was dropped without any charges being filed...
Patta believes these previous incidents were clearly seeds of some trouble.
"There were daemons that were driving this young man, Oscar Pistorius, who we know as a hero in South Africa. And yet there were signs of aggression." Patta said.
"The gun [incident] took place just a couple of weeks ago and that is incontrovertible. The gun was fired in an open public area. Oscar Pistorius disputes that he fired the gun." Patta said. "He says that it was a friend, but people who were with him said he did fired it. It was fired by accident, make no mistake, but the fact that a gun was being played around with in place public in it of itself is horrifying"
That fact that "song and dance" wasn't made about the incident is also indicative of South Africa's attitude toward these incidents, according to Patta. She believes an episode like this, where a gun is fired where an athlete was present, in another country would have provoked a public debate on gun proliferation.
The allegation in 2009 was not tested in a court of law - Oscar Pistorius was not as well known, not even in South Africa, at that time. Pistorius did speak openly about the incident according to Patta, claiming the incident was a misunderstanding, and even eventually no charges were filed.
"That too seems to have been dropped and just pushed under the carpet," Patta said. "And now when one looks back with, of course, the exact science of hindsight, it does seem that there were warning signs that at the very least that Oscar Pistorius displayed a significant amount of aggression and that were not people around him who were grounding him and pulling him back to earth."
Monday, February 11, 2013
Seismic activity reported in area of previous North Korea nuclear tests
Seismic activity reported in area of previous North Korea nuclear tests
By CNN Staff
February 12, 2013
North Korea said Thursday that it plans to carry out a new nuclear test and more long-range rocket launches, all of which it said are a part of a new phase of confrontation with the United States.
"It's a nuclear test," says an analyst
A magnitude 4.9 disturbance takes place in area of previous underground nuclear tests
There is little or no history of natural seismic activity in the area
North Korea said last month it would carry out a third nuclear test
(CNN) -- North Korea appeared to have conducted its third underground nuclear bomb test Tuesday, as the U.S. Geological Survey reported a seismic disturbance centered near the site of the secretive regime's two previous nuclear tests.
The area around the reported epicenter of the magnitude 4.9 disturbance has little or no history of earthquakes or natural seismic hazards, according to U.S. Geological Survey maps. The disturbance took place at a depth of about 1 kilometer, the USGS said.
There were no initial reports concerning the activity on the North's state-run Korean Central News Agency on Tuesday.
"It's a nuclear test," said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. "That magnitude and that location -- it's awfully unlikely it's anything else."
In Washington, a senior administration official said the United States was working to confirm a nuclear test.
The reclusive, Stalinist state announced last month that it planned a new nuclear test and more long-range rocket launches, all of which it said were part of a new phase of confrontation with the United States.
U.S. analysts say North Korea's first bomb test, in October 2006, produced an explosive yield at less than 1 kiloton (1,000 tons) of TNT. A second test in May 2009 is believed to have been about two kilotons, National Intelligence Director James Clapper told a Senate committee in 2012.
By comparison, the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 was a 15-kiloton device.
In May 2012, North Korea said it had amended its constitution to formally proclaim itself a "nuclear state."
The seismic disturbance took place at a time when several East Asian countries, including China, North Korea's major ally, are observing public holidays for the Lunar New Year. It also took place less than 24 hours before President Barack Obama was due to make his State of the Union address.
Pope Benedict XVI resigns due to advanced age
Pope Benedict XVI
The Pope may have resigned, but the men he has made powerful will surely try to elect one of themselves to succeed him. I hope they won't be successful.
Four years ago, I was in a small town in El Salvador, which itself is so small that it is known as the "thumb" of Central America. It is so densely populated that it's hard to find a patch of land without houses. Seven million people live there, with another three million living in the U.S. And yet the local priest rails against birth control. Where does he expect the next generation to live? The apparent solution is to build second stories in family compounds, but few can afford to do that unless they have relatives sending money from the U.S.
Why next pope must open up church and usher in Vatican III
By Paul Donovan
Special to CNN
February 11, 2013
Benedict, 85, announced on Monday, February 11, that he will resign at the end of February "because of advanced age." The last pope to resign was Gregory XII in 1415.
(CNN) -- The announcement of the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI came as a bolt from the blue to the world but not a moment too soon for many Catholics.
The Catholic Church has continued to march backwards under Pope Benedict, seeming at times to be in a state of perpetual denial, whether the issue be that of child abuse, birth control, homosexuality or the role of women.
At the heart of the church there lies a deep chauvinism that seems to have infected the whole edifice.
Women may feel discriminated against in many institutions but few have made it so blatantly clear that the woman's place remains at the kitchen sink as the Catholic Church.
The refusal to enter into a constructive dialogue about the possibility of having female clergy underlines just how male dominated the institution remains.
Rubbing salt in the wounds in Britain has been the creation by Pope Benedict of the Ordinariate. This body facilitates the progress of those Anglicans who predominantly want to leave the Church of England because of the ordination of women into the Catholic Church.
This has seen a succession of married priests coming over, so providing a ready supply of candidates to fill the growing number of vacancies, due to lack of celibate males, in the Catholic Church.
No one at the Vatican seems overly concerned about the contradiction that sees married Anglicans being allowed to join the Catholic Church and minister to the faithful, whilst a man ordained as priest in the Catholic faith who wants to get married has to leave in order to do so.
It is this sort of heaping of contradiction on contradiction that has brought the church to its present position of crisis with people walking away in their droves.
But perhaps the biggest crisis for the Church remains child abuse. It has shaken the whole edifice under the present pontiff's tenure, and no doubt taken its toll on him personally.
Fulsome apologies have been made and actions taken to remedy abuse across the world. However, as cases like that of Cardinal Sean Brady in Ireland prove, many of those now in the positions of authority in the church are the very same who stood by, or worse still, colluded in the cover-up of abuse.
There is no doubt still more to come. The church needs to face up to its responsibilities and show a greater concern for the victims than for protection of the institution at all costs.
The laity feel largely ignored on these matters. They were not consulted over whether they wanted the Ordinariate nor over the recently imposed translation of the mass. A great number of the laity also feel hugely let down by the role of priests in abuse.
Catholics worldwide must hope that the spirit moves the Cardinals when they gather in March to elect a new pope. Many will pray that the new pope is more in the mould of Pope John XXIII, who ushered in the Second Vatican Council that sat for much of the 1960s.
This was a time of hope. Pope John called for the church to open its windows and engage with the world. Vatican II brought forward radical thought on issues from poverty and war to workplace justice and the family. The laity were given a say. Nothing less is required this time around.
Vatican III would have to look at things like the dignity of the human person, empowerment of the laity, the role of women and the sex abuse scandal.
In the case of abuse, change would mean examining those structures of the church that made these things likely in the first place.
Central to this effort must be the role of the priest. The role must change to become that of one among equals. Priests, whether they be men or women, must become more accountable and not act in the authoritarian manner that many who hold the office do today...
Monday, January 28, 2013
Roxanne Rubin tries to prove that voter fraud is easy, but fails and is arrested
Roxanne Rubin, Nevada Republican, Accepts Plea Deal After Committing Voter Fraud
The Huffington Post
By Luke Johnson
01/28/2013
A Nevada Republican arrested for voter fraud in the 2012 election, after claiming she was trying to test the system's integrity, pled guilty and accepted a plea deal Thursday, forcing her to pay almost $2,500 and promise to stay out of trouble.
Roxanne Rubin, 56, a casino worker on the Las Vegas Strip, was arrested on Nov. 3, 2012 after trying to vote twice, once at her poling site in Henderson and then at a second site in Las Vegas. The poll workers at the second site said that she had already voted, but Rubin said that she hadn't and insisted on casting a ballot, which the poll workers refused to allow her to do.
Rubin said that she was trying to show how easy it would be to commit voter fraud with just a signature. "This has always been an issue with me. I just feel the system is flawed," she told the AP Thursday. "If we’re showing ID for everything else, why wouldn’t we show our ID in order to vote?”
Rubin, like many Republicans, claim that the threat from voter fraud -- which is close to non-existent -- is why voter ID laws need to be in place. But Nevada has no voter ID law -- other than for first-time voters who didn't show ID when they registered to vote -- and she was caught anyway.
The prosecutor in the case said he knew of no other voters in Nevada or elsewhere arrested for voter fraud.
Democratic Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller, who has called for a photo ID law, slammed Rubin in a statement. "If Ms. Rubin was trying to demonstrate how easy it is to commit voter fraud, she clearly failed and proved just the opposite," he said...
The Huffington Post
By Luke Johnson
01/28/2013
A Nevada Republican arrested for voter fraud in the 2012 election, after claiming she was trying to test the system's integrity, pled guilty and accepted a plea deal Thursday, forcing her to pay almost $2,500 and promise to stay out of trouble.
Roxanne Rubin, 56, a casino worker on the Las Vegas Strip, was arrested on Nov. 3, 2012 after trying to vote twice, once at her poling site in Henderson and then at a second site in Las Vegas. The poll workers at the second site said that she had already voted, but Rubin said that she hadn't and insisted on casting a ballot, which the poll workers refused to allow her to do.
Rubin said that she was trying to show how easy it would be to commit voter fraud with just a signature. "This has always been an issue with me. I just feel the system is flawed," she told the AP Thursday. "If we’re showing ID for everything else, why wouldn’t we show our ID in order to vote?”
Rubin, like many Republicans, claim that the threat from voter fraud -- which is close to non-existent -- is why voter ID laws need to be in place. But Nevada has no voter ID law -- other than for first-time voters who didn't show ID when they registered to vote -- and she was caught anyway.
The prosecutor in the case said he knew of no other voters in Nevada or elsewhere arrested for voter fraud.
Democratic Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller, who has called for a photo ID law, slammed Rubin in a statement. "If Ms. Rubin was trying to demonstrate how easy it is to commit voter fraud, she clearly failed and proved just the opposite," he said...
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Too important to serve in the military? Republican leaders who claim to be "patriots" compared to Democratic leaders
Getting tired of those Republicans who wrap themselves up in the flag and preach patriotism?
Seeing a pattern here? What does this say?
Link: SCMidnightFlyer.com
Democrats:
* John Kerry: Lt., Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V, Purple Hearts.
* Jimmy Carter: Seven years in the Navy.
* Walter Mondale: Army 1951-1953
* John Glenn: WWII and Korea; six DFCs and Air Medal with 18 Clusters.
* Al Gore: enlisted Aug. 1969; sent to Vietnam Jan. 1971 as an army journalist in 20th Engineer Brigade.
* George McGovern: Silver Star & DFC during WWII.
* Richard Gephardt: Air National Guard, 1965-71.
* David Bonior: Staff Sgt., Air Force 1968-72.
* Tom Daschle: 1st Lt., Air Force SAC 1969-72.
* Bob Kerrey: Lt. j.g. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor, Vietnam. * Daniel Inouye: Army 1943-47; Medal of Honor, WWII.
* Charles Rangel: Staff Sgt., Army 1948-52; Bronze Star, Korea.
* Max Cleland: Captain, Army 1965-68; Silver Star & Bronze Star, Vietnam.
* Ted Kennedy: Army, 1951-53.
* Tom Harkin: Lt., Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve, 1968-74.
* Jack Reed: Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army Reserve 1979-91.
* Fritz Hollings: Army officer in WWII; Bronze Star and seven campaign ribbons.
* Leonard Boswell: Lt. Col., Army 1956-76; Vietnam, DFCs, Bronze Stars, and Soldier's Medal.
* Pete Peterson: Air Force Captain, POW. Purple Heart, Silver Star and Legion of Merit.
* Mike Thompson: Staff sergeant, 173rd Airborne, Purple Heart.
* Bill McBride: Candidate for Fla. Governor. Marine in Vietnam; Bronze Star with Combat V.
* Gray Davis: Army Captain in Vietnam, Bronze Star.
* Pete Stark: Air Force 1955-57 * Chuck Robb: Vietnam
* Howell Heflin: Silver Star
* Bill Clinton: Did not serve. Student deferments. Entered draft but received #311.
* Tom Lantos: Served in Hungarian underground in WWII. Saved by Raoul Wallenberg.
Republicans
and these are the guys sending people to war:
* Jeb Bush: did not serve.
* Karl Rove: did not serve.
* Rick Santorum: did not serve.
* Mitch McConnell: did not serve.
* Dick Cheney: did not serve. Several deferments, the last by marriage.
* George W. Bush: failed to complete his six-year National Guard; got assigned to Alabama so he could campaign for family friend running for U.S. Senate; failed to show up for required medical exam, disappeared from duty.
* Newt Gingrich: did not serve.
* Phil Gramm: did not serve.
* Saxby Chambliss: did not serve. "Bad knee." The man who attacked Max Cleland's patriotism.
* John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments to teach business.
* John McCain: Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross.
* Lindsey Graham: National Guard lawyer.
* Arnold Schwarzenegger: AWOL from Austrian army base.
* Rudy Giuliani: did not serve.
* Richard Perle: did not serve.
* Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve.
* Dennis Hastert: did not serve.
* Tom Delay: did not serve.
* Roy Blunt: did not serve.
* Bill Frist: did not serve.
* Trent Lott: did not serve.
* Vin Weber: did not serve.
* Douglas Feith: did not serve.
* Eliot Abrams: did not serve.
* Richard Shelby: did not serve.
* John Kyl: did not serve.
* Tim Hutchison: did not serve.
* Christopher Cox: did not serve.
* Don Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57) as flight instructor.
* Ronald Reagan: due to poor eyesight, served in a non-combat role making movies.
* B-1 Bob Dornan: Consciously enlisted after fighting was over in Korea.
* Dana Rohrabacher: did not serve.
* John M. McHugh: did not serve.
* JC Watts: did not serve.
* Jack Kemp: did not serve. "Knee problem," although continued in NFL for 8 years.
* Dan Quayle: Journalism unit of the Indiana National Guard.
* George Pataki: did not serve.
* Spencer Abraham: did not serve.
* John Engler: did not serve.
Pundits & Preachers
* Sean Hannity: did not serve.
* Rush Limbaugh: did not serve (4-F with a 'pilonidal cyst.')
* Bill O'Reilly: did not serve.
* Michael Savage: did not serve.
* George Will: did not serve.
* Chris Matthews: did not serve.
* Paul Gigot: did not serve.
* Bill Bennett: did not serve.
* Pat Buchanan: did not serve.
* John Wayne: did not serve.
* Bill Kristol: did not serve.
* Kenneth Starr: did not serve.
* Antonin Scalia: did not serve.
* Clarence Thomas: did not serve.
* Ralph Reed: did not serve.
* Michael Medved: did not serve.
* Charlie Daniels: did not serve.
* Ted Nugent: did not serve. (He only shoots at things that don't shoot back.)
Seeing a pattern here? What does this say?
Link: SCMidnightFlyer.com
Democrats:
* John Kerry: Lt., Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V, Purple Hearts.
* Jimmy Carter: Seven years in the Navy.
* Walter Mondale: Army 1951-1953
* John Glenn: WWII and Korea; six DFCs and Air Medal with 18 Clusters.
* Al Gore: enlisted Aug. 1969; sent to Vietnam Jan. 1971 as an army journalist in 20th Engineer Brigade.
* George McGovern: Silver Star & DFC during WWII.
* Richard Gephardt: Air National Guard, 1965-71.
* David Bonior: Staff Sgt., Air Force 1968-72.
* Tom Daschle: 1st Lt., Air Force SAC 1969-72.
* Bob Kerrey: Lt. j.g. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor, Vietnam. * Daniel Inouye: Army 1943-47; Medal of Honor, WWII.
* Charles Rangel: Staff Sgt., Army 1948-52; Bronze Star, Korea.
* Max Cleland: Captain, Army 1965-68; Silver Star & Bronze Star, Vietnam.
* Ted Kennedy: Army, 1951-53.
* Tom Harkin: Lt., Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve, 1968-74.
* Jack Reed: Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army Reserve 1979-91.
* Fritz Hollings: Army officer in WWII; Bronze Star and seven campaign ribbons.
* Leonard Boswell: Lt. Col., Army 1956-76; Vietnam, DFCs, Bronze Stars, and Soldier's Medal.
* Pete Peterson: Air Force Captain, POW. Purple Heart, Silver Star and Legion of Merit.
* Mike Thompson: Staff sergeant, 173rd Airborne, Purple Heart.
* Bill McBride: Candidate for Fla. Governor. Marine in Vietnam; Bronze Star with Combat V.
* Gray Davis: Army Captain in Vietnam, Bronze Star.
* Pete Stark: Air Force 1955-57 * Chuck Robb: Vietnam
* Howell Heflin: Silver Star
* Bill Clinton: Did not serve. Student deferments. Entered draft but received #311.
* Tom Lantos: Served in Hungarian underground in WWII. Saved by Raoul Wallenberg.
Republicans
and these are the guys sending people to war:
* Jeb Bush: did not serve.
* Karl Rove: did not serve.
* Rick Santorum: did not serve.
* Mitch McConnell: did not serve.
* Dick Cheney: did not serve. Several deferments, the last by marriage.
* George W. Bush: failed to complete his six-year National Guard; got assigned to Alabama so he could campaign for family friend running for U.S. Senate; failed to show up for required medical exam, disappeared from duty.
* Newt Gingrich: did not serve.
* Phil Gramm: did not serve.
* Saxby Chambliss: did not serve. "Bad knee." The man who attacked Max Cleland's patriotism.
* John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments to teach business.
* John McCain: Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross.
* Lindsey Graham: National Guard lawyer.
* Arnold Schwarzenegger: AWOL from Austrian army base.
* Rudy Giuliani: did not serve.
* Richard Perle: did not serve.
* Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve.
* Dennis Hastert: did not serve.
* Tom Delay: did not serve.
* Roy Blunt: did not serve.
* Bill Frist: did not serve.
* Trent Lott: did not serve.
* Vin Weber: did not serve.
* Douglas Feith: did not serve.
* Eliot Abrams: did not serve.
* Richard Shelby: did not serve.
* John Kyl: did not serve.
* Tim Hutchison: did not serve.
* Christopher Cox: did not serve.
* Don Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57) as flight instructor.
* Ronald Reagan: due to poor eyesight, served in a non-combat role making movies.
* B-1 Bob Dornan: Consciously enlisted after fighting was over in Korea.
* Dana Rohrabacher: did not serve.
* John M. McHugh: did not serve.
* JC Watts: did not serve.
* Jack Kemp: did not serve. "Knee problem," although continued in NFL for 8 years.
* Dan Quayle: Journalism unit of the Indiana National Guard.
* George Pataki: did not serve.
* Spencer Abraham: did not serve.
* John Engler: did not serve.
Pundits & Preachers
* Sean Hannity: did not serve.
* Rush Limbaugh: did not serve (4-F with a 'pilonidal cyst.')
* Bill O'Reilly: did not serve.
* Michael Savage: did not serve.
* George Will: did not serve.
* Chris Matthews: did not serve.
* Paul Gigot: did not serve.
* Bill Bennett: did not serve.
* Pat Buchanan: did not serve.
* John Wayne: did not serve.
* Bill Kristol: did not serve.
* Kenneth Starr: did not serve.
* Antonin Scalia: did not serve.
* Clarence Thomas: did not serve.
* Ralph Reed: did not serve.
* Michael Medved: did not serve.
* Charlie Daniels: did not serve.
* Ted Nugent: did not serve. (He only shoots at things that don't shoot back.)
Lawsuit alleges purpose of Scientology is 'taking people's money'
Scientology sounds like the Catholic Church on steroids.
Lawsuit alleges purpose of Scientology is 'taking people's money'
By Erin McClam
NBC News
The Church of Scientology has strayed from principle and devolved into a cash-hungry enterprise that misuses parishioner donations to protect itself from questions and to intimidate its own members, a California couple charged Wednesday.
The couple said in a federal lawsuit that the church had misused about $400,000 of their money, including donations meant for construction projects and for relief from natural disasters.
They also said that church donations had been used to finance a high-priced lifestyle for its leader, David Miscavige.
The lawsuit, filed in Tampa, Fla., by Luis and Rocio Garcia of Irvine, Calif., accuses the church of fraud and breach of contract.
The church said in a statement that it had not been served and could not comment on the lawsuit.
It added: “We can unequivocally state all funds solicited are used for the charitable and religious purposes for which they were donated.”
The Garcias were members of the church for 28 years before leaving in 2010, their lawyer Theodore Babbitt told NBC News.
The church uses “large, high-pressure fundraising drives” as a main source of revenue and has morphed into an organization “whose primary purpose is taking people’s money,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit alleges that the church has used contributions to “stifle inquiries into the Church’s activities and finances, to intimidate members and ex-members” and “to finance the lavish lifestyle of Miscavige.”
Five Scientology organizations are named as defendants.
The lawsuit focuses on a Scientology building in Clearwater, Fla., that Babbitt said remains unopen. The California couple said that the church had accepted more than $200 million in donations in all for the building, known as “Super Power,” and spent less than half on construction.
The lawsuit makes specific charges about how the church misused the Garcias’ money. The couple claimed that they gave $340,000 for the building, in more than a dozen donations between 1998 and 2005, and were made promises that the church did not fulfill.
One of those donations came in August 2005, according to the suit, when the Garcias were asked to give $65,000 for a cross to go on top of the building and were told that contractors were ready to do the work. The cross did not go up for five years, the suit said.
The couple also charged that the church had misspent money meant for eradicating child pornography and helping victims of natural disasters.
The Garcias have spoken out against the church before.
Luis Garcia told the Tampa Bay Times newspaper, for a profile published in 2011, that the church had strayed from the teachings of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and had been “corrupted.”
The church said that it had expelled Garcia, while he maintained that he resigned, according to the newspaper. The paper did not quote the church as giving a reason for the claimed expulsion.
Babbitt said it was the first time his law firm had been involved in legal action against the church.
Perhaps the highest-profile defection from the church has been that of Paul Haggis, the Oscar-winning writer and director of the 2004 movie “Crash.” He belonged to the church for 34 years before leaving in 2009.
Haggis, in an interview last week with the NBC program “Rock Center with Brian Williams,” described the church as a cult and said he was disturbed by allegations of abuse at its highest levels, including violence and involuntary confinement.
Lawsuit alleges purpose of Scientology is 'taking people's money'
By Erin McClam
NBC News
The Church of Scientology has strayed from principle and devolved into a cash-hungry enterprise that misuses parishioner donations to protect itself from questions and to intimidate its own members, a California couple charged Wednesday.
The couple said in a federal lawsuit that the church had misused about $400,000 of their money, including donations meant for construction projects and for relief from natural disasters.
They also said that church donations had been used to finance a high-priced lifestyle for its leader, David Miscavige.
The lawsuit, filed in Tampa, Fla., by Luis and Rocio Garcia of Irvine, Calif., accuses the church of fraud and breach of contract.
The church said in a statement that it had not been served and could not comment on the lawsuit.
It added: “We can unequivocally state all funds solicited are used for the charitable and religious purposes for which they were donated.”
The Garcias were members of the church for 28 years before leaving in 2010, their lawyer Theodore Babbitt told NBC News.
The church uses “large, high-pressure fundraising drives” as a main source of revenue and has morphed into an organization “whose primary purpose is taking people’s money,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit alleges that the church has used contributions to “stifle inquiries into the Church’s activities and finances, to intimidate members and ex-members” and “to finance the lavish lifestyle of Miscavige.”
Five Scientology organizations are named as defendants.
The lawsuit focuses on a Scientology building in Clearwater, Fla., that Babbitt said remains unopen. The California couple said that the church had accepted more than $200 million in donations in all for the building, known as “Super Power,” and spent less than half on construction.
The lawsuit makes specific charges about how the church misused the Garcias’ money. The couple claimed that they gave $340,000 for the building, in more than a dozen donations between 1998 and 2005, and were made promises that the church did not fulfill.
One of those donations came in August 2005, according to the suit, when the Garcias were asked to give $65,000 for a cross to go on top of the building and were told that contractors were ready to do the work. The cross did not go up for five years, the suit said.
The couple also charged that the church had misspent money meant for eradicating child pornography and helping victims of natural disasters.
The Garcias have spoken out against the church before.
Luis Garcia told the Tampa Bay Times newspaper, for a profile published in 2011, that the church had strayed from the teachings of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and had been “corrupted.”
The church said that it had expelled Garcia, while he maintained that he resigned, according to the newspaper. The paper did not quote the church as giving a reason for the claimed expulsion.
Babbitt said it was the first time his law firm had been involved in legal action against the church.
Perhaps the highest-profile defection from the church has been that of Paul Haggis, the Oscar-winning writer and director of the 2004 movie “Crash.” He belonged to the church for 34 years before leaving in 2009.
Haggis, in an interview last week with the NBC program “Rock Center with Brian Williams,” described the church as a cult and said he was disturbed by allegations of abuse at its highest levels, including violence and involuntary confinement.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Godless mom strikes a chord with parents
A CNN iReport essay on raising kids without God draws record-breaking number of comments
January 18th, 2013
By Daphne Sashin
CNN
Deborah Mitchell remembers the time, when her boys were younger, and another mom asked her about her religious beliefs.
Mitchell was raised Catholic but moved away from religion in her early 20s. She told the other mother that she didn’t go to church and didn’t even really believe in God.
Then, she says, the recruiting started.
“She used to call my house and tell me she was praying for me. She’d leave me messages and leave cards in my mailbox with scripture,” Mitchell says. “I do realize that she meant well, but at the same time, I know my views were seen as wrong. I needed to be ‘saved.’”
Mitchell, a mother of two teenagers in Texas who feels “immersed in Christianity,” started a blog about raising her children without religion because she felt frustrated and marginalized. She didn’t want to feel so alone, she says.
This week, she gained a whole new audience and the reassurance that she's not alone. Her essay on CNN iReport, “Why I Raise My Children Without God,” drew 650,000 page views, the second highest for an iReport, and the most comments of any submission on the citizen journalism platform.
It starts:
When my son was around 3 years old, he used to ask me a lot of questions about heaven. Where is it? How do people walk without a body? How will I find you? You know the questions that kids ask.
For over a year, I lied to him and made up stories that I didn’t believe about heaven. Like most parents, I love my child so much that I didn’t want him to be scared. I wanted him to feel safe and loved and full of hope. But the trade-off was that I would have to make stuff up, and I would have to brainwash him into believing stories that didn’t make sense, stories that I didn’t believe either.
Mitchell posted the essay detailing her seven reasons for raising her children without God on CNN iReport because she felt there wasn’t anyone else speaking for women or moms like her. As she sees it, children should learn to do the right things because they will feel better about themselves, not because God is watching. She asks questions like: If there was a good, all-knowing, all-powerful God, why would he allow murders, child abuse and torture?
Lots of people disagreed with her. Tons. They flagged her iReport as inappropriate and criticized CNN for linking to her essay on the CNN.com homepage. But there were plenty of others who wrote thoughtful rebuttals, respectfully disagreeing with Mitchell while not foisting their own beliefs on her. Take, for instance, a Methodist dad, who said faith can be hard to nail down, but “not to avail ourselves of the power of something we don't completely understand is silly.”
Others said Mitchell presented a simplistic view of religion.
“Presentations such as these seem to ignore a substantial percentage of believers - well-educated, compassionate, liberal folk, Christian and non-Christian alike - who, I feel, are able to worship without being blind to the realities of the world, or without lying to their children about their understanding of these complexities,” wrote commenter RMooradian. “I'll be raising my children with God, but I understand those who cannot!”
But Mitchell’s essay also struck a chord with hundreds of like-minded parents raising children in a world where lack of belief puts them in the minority, often even in their own family.
“Thank you for writing this. I agree with everything you say, but I’m not brave enough to tell everyone I know this is how I feel,” a woman who called herself an “agnostic mommy of two in Alabama” posted in the comments. “Thank you for your bravery and letting me know I’m not alone.”
It’s a growing group. One in five Americans is not affiliated with any religion, and that number has grown by 25% in the past five years, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Of that group, 88% said they were not looking for religion, although 68% of the unaffiliated said they believe in God.
Brittany Branyon, an American graduate student and substitute teacher living in Germany, was also compelled to express her thanks to Mitchell. Branyon was raised Southern Baptist in Georgia and Alabama. In high school, when she began to question the theory of creation and befriended gay and lesbian students, she says her mother tried to perform an exorcism.
“She opened all the windows and doors in the house, brought me to the door, held my shoulders and shook me while screaming, ‘Satan, get out of this child!’, ‘Satan, leave this child alone!’.”
After moving away from the South, she and her husband “became more comfortable in our secular ways,” but still take criticism from family members. They are now expecting their first child.
“Though we are elated to welcome our child into the world, we can’t help but dread the religious uproar that is to come from our families,” she wrote in an e-mail.
Such an uproar is familiar to Carol Phillips, a stay-at-home mother in northern Virginia. When she gave birth to her first child, she said her family was shocked that the baby wasn’t baptized. She said her mother-in-law cried and told her the little girl’s soul would not go to heaven.
Then there are the comments from strangers. Last year, Phillips said she and her daughter were at a birthday party when a tornado warning sounded.
“We were all in the basement keeping safe. A little girl was saying baby Jesus will keep us safe. My daughter asked who Jesus was. The rest of the time was spent hearing ‘I'll pray for you sweetie, we can take you to church with us if you want,’” Phillips told CNN.
Commenting on Mitchell’s iReport, Phillips said, “To live out loud and to speak freely about my beliefs brings many clucking tongues. I would think it’s easier to come out as gay than atheist.”... Read more.
January 18th, 2013
By Daphne Sashin
CNN
Deborah Mitchell remembers the time, when her boys were younger, and another mom asked her about her religious beliefs.
Mitchell was raised Catholic but moved away from religion in her early 20s. She told the other mother that she didn’t go to church and didn’t even really believe in God.
Then, she says, the recruiting started.
“She used to call my house and tell me she was praying for me. She’d leave me messages and leave cards in my mailbox with scripture,” Mitchell says. “I do realize that she meant well, but at the same time, I know my views were seen as wrong. I needed to be ‘saved.’”
Mitchell, a mother of two teenagers in Texas who feels “immersed in Christianity,” started a blog about raising her children without religion because she felt frustrated and marginalized. She didn’t want to feel so alone, she says.
This week, she gained a whole new audience and the reassurance that she's not alone. Her essay on CNN iReport, “Why I Raise My Children Without God,” drew 650,000 page views, the second highest for an iReport, and the most comments of any submission on the citizen journalism platform.
It starts:
When my son was around 3 years old, he used to ask me a lot of questions about heaven. Where is it? How do people walk without a body? How will I find you? You know the questions that kids ask.
For over a year, I lied to him and made up stories that I didn’t believe about heaven. Like most parents, I love my child so much that I didn’t want him to be scared. I wanted him to feel safe and loved and full of hope. But the trade-off was that I would have to make stuff up, and I would have to brainwash him into believing stories that didn’t make sense, stories that I didn’t believe either.
Mitchell posted the essay detailing her seven reasons for raising her children without God on CNN iReport because she felt there wasn’t anyone else speaking for women or moms like her. As she sees it, children should learn to do the right things because they will feel better about themselves, not because God is watching. She asks questions like: If there was a good, all-knowing, all-powerful God, why would he allow murders, child abuse and torture?
Lots of people disagreed with her. Tons. They flagged her iReport as inappropriate and criticized CNN for linking to her essay on the CNN.com homepage. But there were plenty of others who wrote thoughtful rebuttals, respectfully disagreeing with Mitchell while not foisting their own beliefs on her. Take, for instance, a Methodist dad, who said faith can be hard to nail down, but “not to avail ourselves of the power of something we don't completely understand is silly.”
Others said Mitchell presented a simplistic view of religion.
“Presentations such as these seem to ignore a substantial percentage of believers - well-educated, compassionate, liberal folk, Christian and non-Christian alike - who, I feel, are able to worship without being blind to the realities of the world, or without lying to their children about their understanding of these complexities,” wrote commenter RMooradian. “I'll be raising my children with God, but I understand those who cannot!”
But Mitchell’s essay also struck a chord with hundreds of like-minded parents raising children in a world where lack of belief puts them in the minority, often even in their own family.
“Thank you for writing this. I agree with everything you say, but I’m not brave enough to tell everyone I know this is how I feel,” a woman who called herself an “agnostic mommy of two in Alabama” posted in the comments. “Thank you for your bravery and letting me know I’m not alone.”
It’s a growing group. One in five Americans is not affiliated with any religion, and that number has grown by 25% in the past five years, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Of that group, 88% said they were not looking for religion, although 68% of the unaffiliated said they believe in God.
Brittany Branyon, an American graduate student and substitute teacher living in Germany, was also compelled to express her thanks to Mitchell. Branyon was raised Southern Baptist in Georgia and Alabama. In high school, when she began to question the theory of creation and befriended gay and lesbian students, she says her mother tried to perform an exorcism.
“She opened all the windows and doors in the house, brought me to the door, held my shoulders and shook me while screaming, ‘Satan, get out of this child!’, ‘Satan, leave this child alone!’.”
After moving away from the South, she and her husband “became more comfortable in our secular ways,” but still take criticism from family members. They are now expecting their first child.
“Though we are elated to welcome our child into the world, we can’t help but dread the religious uproar that is to come from our families,” she wrote in an e-mail.
Such an uproar is familiar to Carol Phillips, a stay-at-home mother in northern Virginia. When she gave birth to her first child, she said her family was shocked that the baby wasn’t baptized. She said her mother-in-law cried and told her the little girl’s soul would not go to heaven.
Then there are the comments from strangers. Last year, Phillips said she and her daughter were at a birthday party when a tornado warning sounded.
“We were all in the basement keeping safe. A little girl was saying baby Jesus will keep us safe. My daughter asked who Jesus was. The rest of the time was spent hearing ‘I'll pray for you sweetie, we can take you to church with us if you want,’” Phillips told CNN.
Commenting on Mitchell’s iReport, Phillips said, “To live out loud and to speak freely about my beliefs brings many clucking tongues. I would think it’s easier to come out as gay than atheist.”... Read more.
OBAMA URGED TO RESIGN OVER BEYONCÉ SCANDAL
by Andy Borowitz
The New Yorker
January 23, 2013
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – A rising chorus of congressional Republicans are calling on President Obama to acknowledge that the pop singer Beyoncé lip-synched during his inaugural festivities on Monday and resign from office, effective immediately.
“By lip-synching the national anthem, Beyoncé has cast a dark cloud over the President’s second term,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky). “The only way President Obama can remove that cloud is by resigning from office at once.”
While many in the media have blamed Beyoncé for the lip-synching controversy, Mr. Paul said, “We must remember that this happened on President Obama’s watch.”
Mr. Paul said that the White House’s refusal to comment on the Beyoncé crisis “only serves the argument that this President has something to hide.”
“If Beyoncé lip-synched the national anthem, how do we know President Obama didn’t lip-sync his oath of office?” he said. “If that’s the case, he’s not legally President. But just to be on the safe side, he should resign anyway.”
Mr. Paul also blasted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her testimony on Benghazi before the Senate today: “Her tactic of answering each and every question we asked her didn’t fool anyone.”
Read more
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Irony of the 2nd Amendment: well-regulated militias were instituted to take guns away from people
The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery
By Thom Hartmann
Truthout
15 January 2013
The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.
In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.
In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.
As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."
It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?" If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains...
By Thom Hartmann
Truthout
15 January 2013
The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.
In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.
In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.
As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."
It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?" If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains...
Monday, January 14, 2013
Hunger Games
Elizabeth Banks in Hunger Games seems a cross between Marie Antoinette and English/American opponents of American rebels.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
James Yeager lost his mind, then he lost his handgun carry permit
Click on the link below if you want to see the videos:
Under the Mountain Bunker
Come for the Apocalypse – stay for the coffee!
James Yeager lost his mind, then he lost his handgun carry permit
Posted on January 12, 2013
State Suspends Permit Of Man In Gun Control Rage Video
In a statement released Friday officials said they had suspended the handgun carry permit of James Yeager, CEO of Tactical Response based on “material likelihood of risk of harm to the public”. [...]
“The number one priority for our department is to ensure the public’s safety. Mr. Yeager’s comments were irresponsible, dangerous, and deserved our immediate attention. Due to our concern, as well as that of law enforcement, his handgun permit was suspended immediately. We have notified Mr. Yeager about the suspension today via e-mail. He will receive an official notification of his suspension through the mail,” Commissioner Bill Gibbons said.
Yeager, CEO of Tactical Response, a company that offers training to civilians in weapons and tactical skills, has multiple certifications with several different types of weapons. Officials with the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security were explicit in stating that the Yeager was not a Department of Safety and Homeland Security certified instructor, nor is his school department certified.
###
MrCensureMoi: Here is Yeager’s original video, which he subsequently pulled from his YouTube channel and replaced — removing the “I’m going to start killing people!” portion (near the end):
Click here
Under the Mountain Bunker
Come for the Apocalypse – stay for the coffee!
James Yeager lost his mind, then he lost his handgun carry permit
Posted on January 12, 2013
State Suspends Permit Of Man In Gun Control Rage Video
In a statement released Friday officials said they had suspended the handgun carry permit of James Yeager, CEO of Tactical Response based on “material likelihood of risk of harm to the public”. [...]
“The number one priority for our department is to ensure the public’s safety. Mr. Yeager’s comments were irresponsible, dangerous, and deserved our immediate attention. Due to our concern, as well as that of law enforcement, his handgun permit was suspended immediately. We have notified Mr. Yeager about the suspension today via e-mail. He will receive an official notification of his suspension through the mail,” Commissioner Bill Gibbons said.
Yeager, CEO of Tactical Response, a company that offers training to civilians in weapons and tactical skills, has multiple certifications with several different types of weapons. Officials with the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security were explicit in stating that the Yeager was not a Department of Safety and Homeland Security certified instructor, nor is his school department certified.
###
MrCensureMoi: Here is Yeager’s original video, which he subsequently pulled from his YouTube channel and replaced — removing the “I’m going to start killing people!” portion (near the end):
Click here
Tuesday, January 01, 2013
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Corporations can't have religious beliefs
Rethinking Hobby Lobby - A Legal Argument Against Corporate Religion
by Grizzard
Daily Kos
Dec 30, 2012
...Hobby Lobby's owners are currently arguing that Hobby Lobby - the corporate entity - should not be required to violate its religious convictions by providing certain forms of contraception in health insurance plans. As I noted in my previous diary, the central problem here is easy to figure out. These people are importing their own religious obligations onto a corporation that is independent of them...
Friday, December 21, 2012
Michele Bachmann denies benefiting from government aid
Michele Bachmann denies benefiting from government aid
As Michele Bachmann kicks off her run for the GOP presidential nomination, she defends herself against allegations surrounding the hundreds of thousands in government funds that went to her family farm and a counseling clinic.
By Richard A. Serrano
LA Times
June 26, 2011
With a new Iowa poll putting her in a dead heat with the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, Rep. Michele Bachmann deflected allegations that she and her family had benefited from government assistance programs and said that hundreds of thousands of dollars to her family farm and a counseling clinic went instead to her employees and her in-laws.
"My husband and I did not get the money," she said, appearing on Sunday news talk shows as she prepared to officially open her campaign in her original hometown of Waterloo, Iowa.
The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday that Bachmann, a congresswoman from Minnesota and "tea party" favorite, portrayed herself as a fiscal conservative while also benefiting from government funds and federal farm subsidies. An examination of her record and finances showed that a counseling clinic run by her husband received nearly $30,000 from the state of Minnesota in the last five years, with part of the money coming from the federal government. And a family farm in Wisconsin, where she is listed as a partner, received some $260,000 in federal subsidies.
Bachmann and her staff declined to talk to about the government assistance for the L.A. Times article. But asked about the issue on "Fox News Sunday," she insisted that she and her husband had not benefited at the expense of federal and state taxpayers.
"First of all," she said, "the money that went to the clinic was actually training money for employees. The clinic did not get the money. And my husband and I did not get the money either. That's mental health training money that went to employees."
As for the farm, she said it belonged to her father-in-law. "It's not my husband and my farm," Bachmann said. "And my husband and I have never gotten a penny of money from the farm."
As the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday, however, in financial disclosure forms, Bachmann reported receiving between $32,503 and $105,000 in income from the farm, at minimum, between 2006 and 2009.
Bachmann also repeated her stance that she was opposed to federal earmarks that sponsored pet projects for politicians back home and said she believed "the states have to build roads and bridges," not the federal government.
But asked whether that was an inconsistency given that her family appeared to be benefiting from government aid, she said the clinic money was spent to train employees when they otherwise would have been there working.
Bachmann also was asked about the farm subsidies on CBS' "Face the Nation." She suggested the public instead should be outraged about a sharp increase in government limousines in the two years since President Obama took office.
She also said she had been a Christian since she was 16 and that God often steered her political course....
As Michele Bachmann kicks off her run for the GOP presidential nomination, she defends herself against allegations surrounding the hundreds of thousands in government funds that went to her family farm and a counseling clinic.
By Richard A. Serrano
LA Times
June 26, 2011
With a new Iowa poll putting her in a dead heat with the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, Rep. Michele Bachmann deflected allegations that she and her family had benefited from government assistance programs and said that hundreds of thousands of dollars to her family farm and a counseling clinic went instead to her employees and her in-laws.
"My husband and I did not get the money," she said, appearing on Sunday news talk shows as she prepared to officially open her campaign in her original hometown of Waterloo, Iowa.
The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday that Bachmann, a congresswoman from Minnesota and "tea party" favorite, portrayed herself as a fiscal conservative while also benefiting from government funds and federal farm subsidies. An examination of her record and finances showed that a counseling clinic run by her husband received nearly $30,000 from the state of Minnesota in the last five years, with part of the money coming from the federal government. And a family farm in Wisconsin, where she is listed as a partner, received some $260,000 in federal subsidies.
Bachmann and her staff declined to talk to about the government assistance for the L.A. Times article. But asked about the issue on "Fox News Sunday," she insisted that she and her husband had not benefited at the expense of federal and state taxpayers.
"First of all," she said, "the money that went to the clinic was actually training money for employees. The clinic did not get the money. And my husband and I did not get the money either. That's mental health training money that went to employees."
As for the farm, she said it belonged to her father-in-law. "It's not my husband and my farm," Bachmann said. "And my husband and I have never gotten a penny of money from the farm."
As the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday, however, in financial disclosure forms, Bachmann reported receiving between $32,503 and $105,000 in income from the farm, at minimum, between 2006 and 2009.
Bachmann also repeated her stance that she was opposed to federal earmarks that sponsored pet projects for politicians back home and said she believed "the states have to build roads and bridges," not the federal government.
But asked whether that was an inconsistency given that her family appeared to be benefiting from government aid, she said the clinic money was spent to train employees when they otherwise would have been there working.
Bachmann also was asked about the farm subsidies on CBS' "Face the Nation." She suggested the public instead should be outraged about a sharp increase in government limousines in the two years since President Obama took office.
She also said she had been a Christian since she was 16 and that God often steered her political course....
Friday, November 30, 2012
Maybe Jeffrey MacDonald was innocent after all
Maybe Jeffrey MacDonald went to California to escape the people who killed his wife and children, NOT because he was guilty.
Maybe Jeffrey MacDonald was innocent after all
In a rare interview, co-counsel Wade Smith reflects on the murder case that's long captured America's imagination
By Lynn Parramore, Alternet
Nov 30, 2012
AlterNet Remember the perceptual illusion where you look at a picture and you’re certain that you see the bust of a young woman? Then, if someone draws your attention to certain details, suddenly the picture transforms into the profile of an old woman. It’s a disorienting trick. You think you know what you’re seeing, but then you aren’t so sure.
The Jeffrey MacDonald murder case is one of the most disturbing in living memory. There are only two possible pictures, both nightmares.
Picture No. 1. Jeffrey MacDonald, a Princeton-educated Green Beret doctor with no history of violence and a sterling record, butchered his pregnant wife and two young daughters using a knife, ice pick and club. Then he injured himself and set up the scene to make the crimes appear to be the work of intruders. He claimed they chanted, “Kill the pigs! … Acid is groovy!” and scrawled the word “PIG” on the wall in his wife’s blood.
Picture No. 2. Jeffrey MacDonald, a bright young man with everything in life to look forward to, lost his wife and children to senseless, horrific violence. A military hearing found charges against him “untrue,” but he was convicted nine years later in a civilian trial. He has been imprisoned for three decades for a crime he did not commit.
Two possibilities: MacDonald is a monster, or he is a victim of terrible injustice. Young woman; old woman.
Until recently, most people saw Picture No. 1. So did I. I grew up in Raleigh, N.C., about an hour from the Fort Bragg army base in Fayetteville where the murders occurred on Feb. 17, 1970, in the middle of the night. I was born in May of that year, and would thus be the same age as the child Colette MacDonald was carrying when her life was snuffed out. In the early ’80s, I whipped through a dog-eared copy of “Fatal Vision,” Joe McGinniss’ sensational true-crime novel about the killings. It was almost as scary as ”Helter Skelter” – the story of the Charles Manson murders in California that are said to have inspired Jeffrey MacDonald in the coverup for his homicidal rampage.
In 1984 I was glued to the TV, like millions of other Americans, watching the popular miniseries based on McGinniss’ book. McGinniss made the murders sound like the work of a diabolical genius, a man who could transform in a moment from a loving father to a homicidal maniac, and again, in the blink of an eye, to a calculating con man. I thought of devils that lurked in human flesh, like in “The Exorcist,” another popular based-on-a true-story-book-turned-movie of the period that floated around our house. When the show was over, I retired to the safety of my bed, safe from unpredictable evils.
A Shifting Picture
McGinniss’ stark rendering of Picture No. 1 stuck in my mind until recently when a friend from North Carolina told me that Errol Morris had published a book suggesting MacDonald was innocent. That got my attention: the Oscar-winning Morris, whose film “The Thin Blue Line” exonerated a Texas man wrongfully convicted for murder, is one of the world’s great documentary filmmakers. He is both a careful researcher and a profound investigator of the human condition.
My friend and I sat around in her backyard, tossing up what facts about the case we could recall. I even laughed at the idea of hippie murderers in North Carolina. Of all places! But then I felt uneasy. “You sure Errol Morris wrote the book?” She was sure.
Soon I was reading Morris’ “A Wilderness of Error,” feeling skeptical and wondering why this reputable man would involve himself in a case that everyone and their mother (including mine) knew the truth about.
But it didn’t take long to realize that something was wrong. Enough somethings to fill the long, solitary chapters of a man’s life unfolding behind prison walls.
Morris researched the MacDonald case for 20 years and knows each labyrinthine turn of its progress through the criminal justice system. Even before bureaucratic stalling and federal machinery overtook the search for truth, things were working against Jeffrey MacDonald. A crime scene was left open to bystander traffic. Inexperienced military police failed to pick up a woman near the house who fit MacDonald’s description. Many think this woman could have been Helena Stoeckley, a drug abuser and professed member of a witchcraft cult who repeatedly confessed to having been at the MacDonald house the night of the murders, but recanted her story whenever she seemed to fear prosecution. Now deceased, she remains a pivotal figure in the case.
As I read Morris’ meticulous examination the evidence, the picture in my mind became less clear. I began to see that Joe McGinniss’ creation of Picture No. 1 might be just that: a creation. Some of the “facts” I thought I knew began to look more like ideas conjured by eager prosecutors and a journalist who had dealt so disingenuously with Jeffrey MacDonald in writing ”Fatal Vision” that he was sued after publication. McGinniss’ publisher settled with MacDonald out of court, after the judge called the author a “con man.” (This story, in its own right, became a famous book about journalistic ethics by Janet Malcolm.)
The story many of us think we know tells that MacDonald’s wounds were superficial. But he had multiple bruises and puncture wounds, and two stab wounds, including one that collapsed his lung — a serious injury that left him falling in and out of consciousness. The popular story says there was no evidence of intruders. But there was, including wax drippings (MacDonald insisted that one of the intruders carried a candle), fibers and hairs that did not belong to the household or family members.
McGinniss drew on pop-sociology to render an image of a psychopathic killer in the guise of the friendly doctor-next-door; the kind we know from endless horror movies. He theorized that diet pills caused MacDonald to fly into a fit of rage. McGinniss had to be creative, because the man’s character never fit the crime. MacDonald had no history of violence or temper. When the initial military hearing was conducted in 1970, no one in his life could be found who had a bad thing to say about him. Psychiatric professionals on both sides pronounced him incapable of having committed the crimes. On the evening of the murders, Jeffrey MacDonald had taken his kids to ride the pony he had bought them, fed them dinner while their mother took a night class, and put them to bed. It didn’t make sense.
But did hippie intruders make sense? Maybe more than I would have thought as a teen. Vietnam-era Fayetteville was not sleepy Raleigh in the 1980s. There was violence. Soldiers’ corpses arrived at Fort Bragg stuffed with heroin. In 1970 America was gripped by the horror of the Manson murders – a fact used against MacDonald because he subscribed to Esquire magazine, which had run a story about the dark side of hippie culture. The Esquire story, for all its salaciousness, touched upon real issues that plagued many communities outside of California. In Fayetteville, an Army town, strong tensions existed between Army types like Jeffrey MacDonald on one side of the war, and hippies and protesters on the other. Helena Stoeckley confessed many times that MacDonald’s willingness to turn heroin addicts in to the police infuriated local drug dealers. She knew this world, and was herself a police informant. According to her, they wanted to teach MacDonald a lesson and rough up his family the night of the killings. But things got out of hand.
In October 1970, following an investigation and hearing, the military dropped its case against MacDonald, and he was honorably discharged from the Army. He moved to California to become the director of emergency medicine at St. Mary’s Medical Center in Long Beach. But an unfortunate thing happened in the following years. MacDonald’s relationship with his father-in-law, originally a staunch supporter, became strained. Freddy Kassab had inserted himself into the 1970 military hearing and made himself the center of a media circus, holding news conferences and firing off letter to members of Congress. He wanted his son-in-law to stay on the East Coast and pursue the killers. Eventually, he turned on the man he had once so ardently defended. Through his aggressive pursuit of the case, MacDonald was indicted.
MacDonald was tried in a civilian court in 1979. Many felt that his acquittal would be a cinch, but much more was to go wrong. The nine-year lag between the murders and the trial is extremely unusual; experts consider such a lag to pose a great danger of wrongful conviction. Appearances didn’t help MacDonald, either. He looked angry on the stand. Worse still, Judge Franklin Dupree seemed to have his mind made up before the trial began. Some said he should never have taken the case because his former son-in-law was the prosecutor in the original Army hearing. Dupree would not admit overwhelming psychiatric testimony in MacDonald’s favor, nor the testimony of witnesses to whom Helena Stoeckley had confessed her involvement. Bernie Segal, a long-haired Jewish lawyer from Philadelphia, took the lead in the case and managed to alienate the entire courtroom. Segal took up nearly all the time in the critical period for closing remarks and left only a few minutes for co-counsel Wade Smith, an eloquent native Carolinian who understood the jury.
One thing about this case is never in doubt no matter who’s talking: If Wade Smith had been able to lead and give his closing remarks, MacDonald would be a free man today.
The list of misfortunes goes on: exculpatory evidence withheld; possible prosecutorial misconduct; and fallible humans who twisted the MacDonald story to fit their own agendas. MacDonald was convicted twice, both in the courtroom and in the all-important court of public opinion, which was sealed by McGinniss’ book and miniseries.
Since 1979, the MacDonald case has continued to trouble those who delve beneath the surface of the media narrative. The social justice movement is now involved; the Innocence Project, a prestigious nationwide network dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted, has worked strenuously for MacDonald’s conviction to be overturned. In a 2011 press release, the Innocence Project stated:
Since MacDonald was convicted of the murders in 1979, considerable evidence of his innocence has come to light. Most recently, retired US Marshall Jimmy Britt came forward with information that another suspect in the case, Helena Stoeckley, admitted to the prosecutor that she was in the house on the night of MacDonald’s murder and that he treated to indict her for first degree murder if she admitted that in court. In addition, DNA testing on evidence that was recovered from the fingernails scrapings of one of the victims and a hair found under another victim did not match MacDonald. Earlier, evidence came to light that a FBI forensic examiner mislead the jury about synthetic hair evidence. MacDonald claimed the hairs were from the wig of one of the murders, but the forensic examiner incorrectly claimed they were from one of the children’s dolls.
None of this has set MacDonald free. By now, many members of the original hearing and 1979 trial are dead, including Judge Dupree. Judge James Fox, a close friend of Dupree’s and quite elderly himself, has taken over and has dismissed appeals. Recently, the 4th District Court of Appeals ordered Fox to consider new evidence, and to examine all the evidence as a whole. On Sept. 17, 2012, in Wilmington, N.C., a crowd of familiar faces assembled for a new hearing. Jeffrey MacDonald, Joe McGinniss, prosecutor James Blackburn (who went to prison himself for defrauding his clients), Wade Smith and others newer to the case gathered once again to testify.
MacDonald now waits to see if the federal judge will vacate his 33-year-old conviction. He could get an answer by the end of this year...
See interview of Wade Smith...
Maybe Jeffrey MacDonald was innocent after all
In a rare interview, co-counsel Wade Smith reflects on the murder case that's long captured America's imagination
By Lynn Parramore, Alternet
Nov 30, 2012
AlterNet Remember the perceptual illusion where you look at a picture and you’re certain that you see the bust of a young woman? Then, if someone draws your attention to certain details, suddenly the picture transforms into the profile of an old woman. It’s a disorienting trick. You think you know what you’re seeing, but then you aren’t so sure.
The Jeffrey MacDonald murder case is one of the most disturbing in living memory. There are only two possible pictures, both nightmares.
Picture No. 1. Jeffrey MacDonald, a Princeton-educated Green Beret doctor with no history of violence and a sterling record, butchered his pregnant wife and two young daughters using a knife, ice pick and club. Then he injured himself and set up the scene to make the crimes appear to be the work of intruders. He claimed they chanted, “Kill the pigs! … Acid is groovy!” and scrawled the word “PIG” on the wall in his wife’s blood.
Picture No. 2. Jeffrey MacDonald, a bright young man with everything in life to look forward to, lost his wife and children to senseless, horrific violence. A military hearing found charges against him “untrue,” but he was convicted nine years later in a civilian trial. He has been imprisoned for three decades for a crime he did not commit.
Two possibilities: MacDonald is a monster, or he is a victim of terrible injustice. Young woman; old woman.
Until recently, most people saw Picture No. 1. So did I. I grew up in Raleigh, N.C., about an hour from the Fort Bragg army base in Fayetteville where the murders occurred on Feb. 17, 1970, in the middle of the night. I was born in May of that year, and would thus be the same age as the child Colette MacDonald was carrying when her life was snuffed out. In the early ’80s, I whipped through a dog-eared copy of “Fatal Vision,” Joe McGinniss’ sensational true-crime novel about the killings. It was almost as scary as ”Helter Skelter” – the story of the Charles Manson murders in California that are said to have inspired Jeffrey MacDonald in the coverup for his homicidal rampage.
In 1984 I was glued to the TV, like millions of other Americans, watching the popular miniseries based on McGinniss’ book. McGinniss made the murders sound like the work of a diabolical genius, a man who could transform in a moment from a loving father to a homicidal maniac, and again, in the blink of an eye, to a calculating con man. I thought of devils that lurked in human flesh, like in “The Exorcist,” another popular based-on-a true-story-book-turned-movie of the period that floated around our house. When the show was over, I retired to the safety of my bed, safe from unpredictable evils.
A Shifting Picture
McGinniss’ stark rendering of Picture No. 1 stuck in my mind until recently when a friend from North Carolina told me that Errol Morris had published a book suggesting MacDonald was innocent. That got my attention: the Oscar-winning Morris, whose film “The Thin Blue Line” exonerated a Texas man wrongfully convicted for murder, is one of the world’s great documentary filmmakers. He is both a careful researcher and a profound investigator of the human condition.
My friend and I sat around in her backyard, tossing up what facts about the case we could recall. I even laughed at the idea of hippie murderers in North Carolina. Of all places! But then I felt uneasy. “You sure Errol Morris wrote the book?” She was sure.
Soon I was reading Morris’ “A Wilderness of Error,” feeling skeptical and wondering why this reputable man would involve himself in a case that everyone and their mother (including mine) knew the truth about.
But it didn’t take long to realize that something was wrong. Enough somethings to fill the long, solitary chapters of a man’s life unfolding behind prison walls.
Morris researched the MacDonald case for 20 years and knows each labyrinthine turn of its progress through the criminal justice system. Even before bureaucratic stalling and federal machinery overtook the search for truth, things were working against Jeffrey MacDonald. A crime scene was left open to bystander traffic. Inexperienced military police failed to pick up a woman near the house who fit MacDonald’s description. Many think this woman could have been Helena Stoeckley, a drug abuser and professed member of a witchcraft cult who repeatedly confessed to having been at the MacDonald house the night of the murders, but recanted her story whenever she seemed to fear prosecution. Now deceased, she remains a pivotal figure in the case.
As I read Morris’ meticulous examination the evidence, the picture in my mind became less clear. I began to see that Joe McGinniss’ creation of Picture No. 1 might be just that: a creation. Some of the “facts” I thought I knew began to look more like ideas conjured by eager prosecutors and a journalist who had dealt so disingenuously with Jeffrey MacDonald in writing ”Fatal Vision” that he was sued after publication. McGinniss’ publisher settled with MacDonald out of court, after the judge called the author a “con man.” (This story, in its own right, became a famous book about journalistic ethics by Janet Malcolm.)
The story many of us think we know tells that MacDonald’s wounds were superficial. But he had multiple bruises and puncture wounds, and two stab wounds, including one that collapsed his lung — a serious injury that left him falling in and out of consciousness. The popular story says there was no evidence of intruders. But there was, including wax drippings (MacDonald insisted that one of the intruders carried a candle), fibers and hairs that did not belong to the household or family members.
McGinniss drew on pop-sociology to render an image of a psychopathic killer in the guise of the friendly doctor-next-door; the kind we know from endless horror movies. He theorized that diet pills caused MacDonald to fly into a fit of rage. McGinniss had to be creative, because the man’s character never fit the crime. MacDonald had no history of violence or temper. When the initial military hearing was conducted in 1970, no one in his life could be found who had a bad thing to say about him. Psychiatric professionals on both sides pronounced him incapable of having committed the crimes. On the evening of the murders, Jeffrey MacDonald had taken his kids to ride the pony he had bought them, fed them dinner while their mother took a night class, and put them to bed. It didn’t make sense.
But did hippie intruders make sense? Maybe more than I would have thought as a teen. Vietnam-era Fayetteville was not sleepy Raleigh in the 1980s. There was violence. Soldiers’ corpses arrived at Fort Bragg stuffed with heroin. In 1970 America was gripped by the horror of the Manson murders – a fact used against MacDonald because he subscribed to Esquire magazine, which had run a story about the dark side of hippie culture. The Esquire story, for all its salaciousness, touched upon real issues that plagued many communities outside of California. In Fayetteville, an Army town, strong tensions existed between Army types like Jeffrey MacDonald on one side of the war, and hippies and protesters on the other. Helena Stoeckley confessed many times that MacDonald’s willingness to turn heroin addicts in to the police infuriated local drug dealers. She knew this world, and was herself a police informant. According to her, they wanted to teach MacDonald a lesson and rough up his family the night of the killings. But things got out of hand.
In October 1970, following an investigation and hearing, the military dropped its case against MacDonald, and he was honorably discharged from the Army. He moved to California to become the director of emergency medicine at St. Mary’s Medical Center in Long Beach. But an unfortunate thing happened in the following years. MacDonald’s relationship with his father-in-law, originally a staunch supporter, became strained. Freddy Kassab had inserted himself into the 1970 military hearing and made himself the center of a media circus, holding news conferences and firing off letter to members of Congress. He wanted his son-in-law to stay on the East Coast and pursue the killers. Eventually, he turned on the man he had once so ardently defended. Through his aggressive pursuit of the case, MacDonald was indicted.
MacDonald was tried in a civilian court in 1979. Many felt that his acquittal would be a cinch, but much more was to go wrong. The nine-year lag between the murders and the trial is extremely unusual; experts consider such a lag to pose a great danger of wrongful conviction. Appearances didn’t help MacDonald, either. He looked angry on the stand. Worse still, Judge Franklin Dupree seemed to have his mind made up before the trial began. Some said he should never have taken the case because his former son-in-law was the prosecutor in the original Army hearing. Dupree would not admit overwhelming psychiatric testimony in MacDonald’s favor, nor the testimony of witnesses to whom Helena Stoeckley had confessed her involvement. Bernie Segal, a long-haired Jewish lawyer from Philadelphia, took the lead in the case and managed to alienate the entire courtroom. Segal took up nearly all the time in the critical period for closing remarks and left only a few minutes for co-counsel Wade Smith, an eloquent native Carolinian who understood the jury.
One thing about this case is never in doubt no matter who’s talking: If Wade Smith had been able to lead and give his closing remarks, MacDonald would be a free man today.
The list of misfortunes goes on: exculpatory evidence withheld; possible prosecutorial misconduct; and fallible humans who twisted the MacDonald story to fit their own agendas. MacDonald was convicted twice, both in the courtroom and in the all-important court of public opinion, which was sealed by McGinniss’ book and miniseries.
Since 1979, the MacDonald case has continued to trouble those who delve beneath the surface of the media narrative. The social justice movement is now involved; the Innocence Project, a prestigious nationwide network dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted, has worked strenuously for MacDonald’s conviction to be overturned. In a 2011 press release, the Innocence Project stated:
Since MacDonald was convicted of the murders in 1979, considerable evidence of his innocence has come to light. Most recently, retired US Marshall Jimmy Britt came forward with information that another suspect in the case, Helena Stoeckley, admitted to the prosecutor that she was in the house on the night of MacDonald’s murder and that he treated to indict her for first degree murder if she admitted that in court. In addition, DNA testing on evidence that was recovered from the fingernails scrapings of one of the victims and a hair found under another victim did not match MacDonald. Earlier, evidence came to light that a FBI forensic examiner mislead the jury about synthetic hair evidence. MacDonald claimed the hairs were from the wig of one of the murders, but the forensic examiner incorrectly claimed they were from one of the children’s dolls.
None of this has set MacDonald free. By now, many members of the original hearing and 1979 trial are dead, including Judge Dupree. Judge James Fox, a close friend of Dupree’s and quite elderly himself, has taken over and has dismissed appeals. Recently, the 4th District Court of Appeals ordered Fox to consider new evidence, and to examine all the evidence as a whole. On Sept. 17, 2012, in Wilmington, N.C., a crowd of familiar faces assembled for a new hearing. Jeffrey MacDonald, Joe McGinniss, prosecutor James Blackburn (who went to prison himself for defrauding his clients), Wade Smith and others newer to the case gathered once again to testify.
MacDonald now waits to see if the federal judge will vacate his 33-year-old conviction. He could get an answer by the end of this year...
See interview of Wade Smith...
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Hillary Clinton is a bigger help to Netanyahu than his pal Romney
Romney’s Republican Disneyland
by Amy Davidson
The New Yorker
November 21, 2012
Has anyone, this week, been seeking out Mitt Romney’s views on the Gaza crisis? Have there been calls to put him on a plane and have him sit down with Benjamin Netanyahu or Mohamed Morsi, and sort things out? Hillary Clinton handled that instead, and we seem to have a ceasefire, while the urgent questions about Romney have been whether that was really him, photographed blurrily, pumping his own gas, or what he and Ann thought of Jacob imprinting on Renesmee in the new “Twilight” movie—which they saw over the weekend—and which vampire coven reminded them most of the Republican primary field. Last month, Romney was talking about the near-psychic bond he had with Netanyahu; that may have been nice for them, but it hardly seems to matter anymore to anyone else. By the time there was a ceasefire deal, on Wednesday, the Romney radar was alive to his trip to Disneyland with his wife and grandchildren, according to reports sourced back to park visitors who tweeted pictures...
by Amy Davidson
The New Yorker
November 21, 2012
Has anyone, this week, been seeking out Mitt Romney’s views on the Gaza crisis? Have there been calls to put him on a plane and have him sit down with Benjamin Netanyahu or Mohamed Morsi, and sort things out? Hillary Clinton handled that instead, and we seem to have a ceasefire, while the urgent questions about Romney have been whether that was really him, photographed blurrily, pumping his own gas, or what he and Ann thought of Jacob imprinting on Renesmee in the new “Twilight” movie—which they saw over the weekend—and which vampire coven reminded them most of the Republican primary field. Last month, Romney was talking about the near-psychic bond he had with Netanyahu; that may have been nice for them, but it hardly seems to matter anymore to anyone else. By the time there was a ceasefire deal, on Wednesday, the Romney radar was alive to his trip to Disneyland with his wife and grandchildren, according to reports sourced back to park visitors who tweeted pictures...
Tuesday, November 06, 2012
Machine turns vote for Obama into one for Romney
Machine turns vote for Obama into one for Romney
Zachary Roth
11/06/2012
A Pennsylvania electronic voting machine has been taken out of service after being captured on video changing a vote for President Obama into one for Mitt Romney, NBC News has confirmed. Republicans have also said machines have turned Romney votes into Obama ones.
The video was first posted on Youtube by user “centralpavoter.” It shows a voter’s finger repeatedly pressing the button for Obama, but a check mark coming up next to Romney’s name:
NBC News confirmed that the machine has been taken off line.
Underneath the video, the user gave an account of what happened:
My wife and I went to the voting booths this morning before work. There were 4 older ladies running the show and 3 voting booths that are similar to a science fair project in how they fold up. They had an oval VOTE logo on top center and a cartridge slot on the left that the volunteers used to start your ballot.
I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
I asked the voters on either side of me if they had any problems and they reported they did not. I then called over a volunteer to have a look at it. She him hawed for a bit then calmly said “It’s nothing to worry about, everything will be OK.” and went back to what she was doing. I then recorded this video.
There is a lot of speculation that the footage is edited. I’m not a video guy, but if it’s possible to prove whether a video has been altered or not, I will GLADLY provide the raw footage to anyone who is willing to do so. The jumping frames are a result of the shitty camera app on my Android phone, nothing more.
Separately, the RNC last week sent a letter (pdf) to elections officials in six other states, including Ohio, Nevada, and Colorado, raising concerns that machines had wrongly counted votes for Romney as ones for Obama, and asking them to address the problem. Late Update, 2:35 pm: A spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State told Mother Jones a machine that showed that problem, likely the same one, is back online after being “recalibrated.”
Zachary Roth
11/06/2012
A Pennsylvania electronic voting machine has been taken out of service after being captured on video changing a vote for President Obama into one for Mitt Romney, NBC News has confirmed. Republicans have also said machines have turned Romney votes into Obama ones.
The video was first posted on Youtube by user “centralpavoter.” It shows a voter’s finger repeatedly pressing the button for Obama, but a check mark coming up next to Romney’s name:
NBC News confirmed that the machine has been taken off line.
Underneath the video, the user gave an account of what happened:
My wife and I went to the voting booths this morning before work. There were 4 older ladies running the show and 3 voting booths that are similar to a science fair project in how they fold up. They had an oval VOTE logo on top center and a cartridge slot on the left that the volunteers used to start your ballot.
I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
I asked the voters on either side of me if they had any problems and they reported they did not. I then called over a volunteer to have a look at it. She him hawed for a bit then calmly said “It’s nothing to worry about, everything will be OK.” and went back to what she was doing. I then recorded this video.
There is a lot of speculation that the footage is edited. I’m not a video guy, but if it’s possible to prove whether a video has been altered or not, I will GLADLY provide the raw footage to anyone who is willing to do so. The jumping frames are a result of the shitty camera app on my Android phone, nothing more.
Separately, the RNC last week sent a letter (pdf) to elections officials in six other states, including Ohio, Nevada, and Colorado, raising concerns that machines had wrongly counted votes for Romney as ones for Obama, and asking them to address the problem. Late Update, 2:35 pm: A spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State told Mother Jones a machine that showed that problem, likely the same one, is back online after being “recalibrated.”
Saturday, November 03, 2012
Nonpartisan Tax Report Withdrawn After G.O.P. Protest
Nonpartisan Tax Report Withdrawn After G.O.P. Protest
By JONATHAN WEISMAN
New York Times
November 1, 2012
WASHINGTON — The Congressional Research Service has withdrawn an economic report that found no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth, a central tenet of conservative economic theory, after Senate Republicans raised concerns about the paper’s findings and wording.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, center, and other Republicans raised concerns with an economic report that questions a central tenet of conservative economic theory.
The decision, made in late September against the advice of the agency’s economic team leadership, drew almost no notice at the time. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, cited the study a week and a half after it was withdrawn in a speech on tax policy at the National Press Club.
But it could actually draw new attention to the report, which questions the premise that lowering the top marginal tax rate stimulates economic growth and job creation.
“This has hues of a banana republic,” Mr. Schumer said. “They didn’t like a report, and instead of rebutting it, they had them take it down.”
Republicans did not say whether they had asked the research service, a nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress, to take the report out of circulation, but they were clear that they protested its tone and findings...
By JONATHAN WEISMAN
New York Times
November 1, 2012
WASHINGTON — The Congressional Research Service has withdrawn an economic report that found no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth, a central tenet of conservative economic theory, after Senate Republicans raised concerns about the paper’s findings and wording.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, center, and other Republicans raised concerns with an economic report that questions a central tenet of conservative economic theory.
The decision, made in late September against the advice of the agency’s economic team leadership, drew almost no notice at the time. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, cited the study a week and a half after it was withdrawn in a speech on tax policy at the National Press Club.
But it could actually draw new attention to the report, which questions the premise that lowering the top marginal tax rate stimulates economic growth and job creation.
“This has hues of a banana republic,” Mr. Schumer said. “They didn’t like a report, and instead of rebutting it, they had them take it down.”
Republicans did not say whether they had asked the research service, a nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress, to take the report out of circulation, but they were clear that they protested its tone and findings...
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