Again, we see another example of how heterosexual -- in other words straight people -- are allowed to raise kids, even if that means molesting them and/or killing them -- all examples I have put up here in recent weeks -- but gay people are not allowed to adopt or raise kids, for no other reason usually but the sheer HOMOPHOBIA of social workers and social agencies. Those few times when we gay people _are_ allowed to adopt children or form ourselves into family units (quite rare, since so many 'Christians' (as they like to think of themselves) refuse to let us do it, and refuse us the right to raise children.
In this instance today, a very sick heterosexual smothered her three kids; I wonder if _she_ will be punished severely, as a gay person who murdered a little child would be? Probably not ...
Mom Accused of Smothering Kids Left Notes By DANIEL CONNOLLY, Associated Press Writer
A mother accused of smothering her three young children left notes that officials say could help determine what led to the killings, and her priest said Sunday that she had expressed "tremendous remorse."
Paula Eleazar Mendez, 43, was in a county jail Sunday after being treated at a hospital for swallowing a toxic substance.
She had collapsed as officers arrived at her southwestern Arkansas home Saturday morning in response to a telephone call from the children's father in New York. Inside the home, the officers found the bodies of the children, ages 6 to 8, lying side by side on a bed, said Chris Brackett, an investigator with the Sevier County Sheriff's Office.
"I do not believe there is any dispute as to who killed these three children, and therefore who will be charged," prosecutor Tom Cooper said. "However, we have not determined at this time the particular homicide charge or punishment we will be seeking."
De Queen Police Chief Richard McKinley said investigators needed a translator to read the notes that were written in Spanish.
A family priest who visited Mendez in a hospital Saturday night described a woman experiencing profound sorrow.
"She has tremendous remorse. She is deeply sorry," the Rev. Salvador Marquez-Munoz said Sunday before entering St. Barbara Catholic Church for Mass. "She asked for our prayers and forgiveness because she is realizing how much she has hurt the community, as well."
He identified the children as 8-year-old Elvis and 6-year-old twins, Samanta and her brother Samuel.
Autopsies were planned to determine whether the children had been poisoned or smothered, as their mother told police, Cooper said. The children's faces were not covered when police found them.
Cooper said an emergency room doctor told him Mendez had not ingested enough of the toxic substance to kill herself. Her arraignment is expected Monday, McKinley said.
In the house's yard Sunday was a seven-foot-wide pile of burned papers. A page in a religion book bore the words "vamos a celebrar" — Spanish for "let's celebrate." A child's handwriting was scrawled in blue ink across some papers, and there were charred letters from a labor union in New York City.
The priest said Mendez, who moved to the United States from Mexico 10 years ago, had lived in New York until last summer, when she moved with her children to De Queen because wanted them to live in a safer environment.
He described her as a quiet, devout woman concerned about her children's welfare. She was not working, and her husband was supporting the family with a job in New York, he said. She and the children never missed Sunday services and attended religious education classes.
Mendez seemed "very loving," said M. Rocio Maya, 29, who attended the Mass and said she had known Mendez for a few months.
"Many times she showed me photos of her children," she said. "She showed me when she was pregnant with each one of them, photos of her husband, of the happy life that they had always lived."
She appeared to have few friends and "didn't go out on the street much," Maya said.
The children's father, Arturo Morales, 37, had planned to move to De Queen once the mortgage was paid on the house there, said Maya's husband, Juan Mosqueda.
Morales was to arrive in De Queen before a funeral was to be set.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.
Discuss this in our IRC Social Issues Forum
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Brain Scans: Coming Soon to a Police Station Near You
Is the last involite santuary of our privacy about to be invaded?
Brain Scans May Be Used As Lie Detectors By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer
Picture this: Your boss is threatening to fire you because he thinks you stole
company property. He doesn't believe your denials. The lawyer suggests you try denying it one more time — in a brain scanner that will show you're telling the truth.
Wacky? Science fiction? It might happen this summer.
Just the other day I lay flat on my back as a scanner probed the tiniest
crevices of my brain and a computer screen asked, "Did you take the watch?"
The lab I was visiting recently reported catching lies with 90 percent accuracy.
And an entrepreneur in Massachusetts is hoping to commercialize the system in
the coming months.
"I'd use it tomorrow in virtually every criminal and civil case on my desk" to
check up on the truthfulness of clients, said attorney Robert Shapiro, best
known for defending O.J. Simpson against murder charges.
Shapiro serves as an adviser to entrepreneur Steven Laken and has a financial
interest in Cephos Corp., which Laken founded to commercialize the
brain-scanning work being done at the Medical University of South Carolina.
That's where I had my brain-scan interrogation. But this lab isn't alone.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have also reported impressive
accuracy through brain-scanning recently. California entrepreneur Joel T.
Huizenga plans to use that work to start offering lie-detecting services in
Philadelphia this July.
His outfit, No Lie MRI Inc., will serve government agencies and "anybody that
wants to demonstrate that they're telling the truth," he said.
Both labs use brain-scanning technology called functional magnetic resonance
imaging, or fMRI. It's a standard tool for studying the brain, but research into
using it to detect lies is still in early stages. Nobody really knows yet
whether it will prove more accurate than polygraphs, which measure things like
blood pressure and breathing rate to look for emotional signals of lying.
But advocates for fMRI say it has the potential to be more accurate, because it
zeros in on the source of lying, the brain, rather than using indirect measures.
So it may someday provide lawyers with something polygraphs can't: legal
evidence of truth-telling that's widely admissible in court. (Courts generally
regard polygraph results as unreliable, and either prohibit such evidence or
allow it only if both sides in a case agree to let it in.)
Laken said he's aiming to offer the fMRI service for use in situations like
libel, slander and fraud where it's one person's word against another, and
perhaps in employee screening by government agencies. Attorneys suggest it would
be more useful in civil than most criminal cases, he said.
Of course, there's no telling where the general approach might lead. A law
review article has discussed the legality of using fMRI to interrogate
foreigners in U.S. custody. Maybe police will use it as an interrogation tool,
too, or perhaps major companies will find it a cheaper than litigation or
arbitration when an employee is accused of stealing something important, other
observers say.
For his part, Shapiro says he'd switch to fMRI from polygraph for screening
certain clients because he figures it would be more reliable and maybe more
credible to law enforcement agencies.
In any case, the idea of using fMRI to detect lies has started a buzz among
scientists, legal experts and ethicists. Many worry about rushing too quickly
from the lab to real-world use. Some caution that it may not work as well in the
real world as the early lab results suggest.
And others worry that it might.
Unlike perusing your mail or tapping your phone, this is "looking inside your
brain," Hank Greely, a law professor who directs the Stanford Center for Law and
the Biosciences, told me a few days before my scan.
It "does seem to me to be a significant change in our ability ... to invade what
has been the last untouchable sanctuary, the contents of your own mind," Greely
said. "It should make us stop and think to what extent we should allow this to
be done."
But Dr. Mark George, the genial neurologist and psychiatrist who let me lie in
his scanner and be grilled by his computer, said he doesn't see a privacy
problem with the technology.
That's because it's impossible to test people without their consent, he said.
Subjects have to cooperate so fully — holding the head still, and reading and
responding to the questions, for example — that they have to agree to the scan.
"It really doesn't read your mind if you don't want your mind to be read," he
said. "If I were wrongly accused and this were available, I'd want my defense
lawyer to help me get this."
So maybe the technology is better termed a "truth confirmer" than lie detector,
he said. Whatever you call it, the technology has produced some eyebrow-raising results. George and his colleagues recently reported that using fMRI data, a computer was able to spot lies in 28 out of 31 volunteers.
I joined an extension of that study. That's why I found myself lying on a narrow
table in George's lab while he and his assistants pulled a barrel-shaped
framework over my head like a rigid hood. As it brushed the tip of my nose and
blotted out the light from the room, I looked straight ahead to see a computer
screen, and camera which would be my interrogator. Then the table eased into the tunnel of the fMRI scanner, a machine the size of a small storage shed. Only my legs stuck out. As I focused on the questions popping up on the computer screen, the scanner roared like a tractor trying to uproot a tree stump.
It was bombarding me with radio waves and a powerful magnetic field to create
detailed images of my brain and detect tiny changes in blood flow in certain
areas. Those changes would indicate those areas were working a bit harder than
usual, and according to research by George and others, that would in turn
indicate I was lying.
Some questions that popped up on that screen were easy: Am I awake, is it 2004,
do I like movies. Others were a little more challenging: Have I ever cheated on
taxes, or gossiped, or deceived a loved one. As instructed, I answered them all
truthfully, pushing the "Yes" button with my thumb or the "No" button with my
index finger.
Then, there it was: "Did you remove a watch from the drawer?"
Just a half-hour or so before, in an adjacent room, I'd been told to remove
either a watch or a ring from a drawer and slip it into a locker with my
briefcase. This was the mock crime that volunteers lied about in George's study.
So I took the watch. As I lay in the scanner I remembered seizing its gold metal
band and nestling it into the locker.
So, the computer was asking, did I take the watch?
No, I replied with a jab of my finger. I didn't steal nuthin.'
I lied again and again. Other questions about the watch popped up seemingly at
random during the interrogation. Is the watch in my locker? Is it in the drawer?
Did I steal it from the drawer?
The same questions came up about the ring, and I told the truth about those.
It would be a different computer's job to figure out which I was lying about,
the watch or the ring. It would compare the way my brain acted when I responded
to those questions versus what my brain did when I responded truthfully to the
other questions. Whichever looked more different from the "truthful" brain
activity would be considered the signature of deceit.
Finally, after answering 160 questions over the course of 16 minutes — actually,
it was 80 questions two times apiece — I was done. The machine returned me to
the bright light of the scanning room.
The computer's verdict? That would take a few days to produce, since it required
a lot of data analysis. I didn't mind waiting. It's not like the result would
help get me fired, or lose a lawsuit, or send me to jail.
Nobody in George's studies faced consequences like that, which is one reason the
lab results may not apply to real-world situations. George has already begun
another study in which volunteers face "a little more jeopardy" from the mock
crime. He declined to describe it because he didn't want prospective volunteers
to hear about it ahead of time. That work is funded by the Department of Defense
Polygraph Institute.
Other questions remain. How would this work on people with brain diseases? Or
people taking medications? How would this work on people outside the 18-to-50
age range included in George's recent work?
How about experienced liars? George hopes eventually to study volunteers from
prisons.
And then there's the matter of the three people who got away with lying in his
recent study. For some reason, the computer failed to identify the object they'd
stolen. George says he doesn't know what went wrong.
But in a real-world situation, he said, the person being questioned would go
through an exercise like the ring-or-watch task as well as being quizzed about
the topic at hand. That way, if the computer failed in the experimental task, it
would be obvious that it couldn't judge the person's truthfulness.
Because of that, George said, he's comfortable with entrepreneur Laken's plans
to introduce the scanning service to lawyers, though just on a limited basis, by
the middle of this year. Lab studies are obviously necessary, he said, but "at a
certain point you really have to start applying and see how it works. And I
think we're getting close."
But Jennifer Vendemia, a University of South Carolina researcher who studies
deception and the brain, said she finds Laken's timetable premature. So little
research has been done on using fMRI for this purpose that it's too soon to make
any judgment about how useful it could be, she said.
Without studies to see how well the technique works in other labs — a standard
procedure in the scientific world — its reliability might be an issue, said Dr.
Sean Spence of the University of Sheffield in England, who also studies fMRI for
detecting deception.
Speaking more generally, ethical and legal experts said they were wary of
quickly using fMRI for spotting lies.
"What's really scary is if we start implementing this before we know how
accurate it really is," Greely said. "People could be sent to jail, people could
be sent to the death penalty, people could lose their jobs."
Greely recently called for pre-marketing approval of lie-detection devices in
general, like the federal government carries out for medications.
Judy Illes, director of Stanford's program in neuroethics, also has concerns:
Could people, including victims of crimes, be coerced into taking an fMRI test?
Could it distinguish accurate memories from muddled ones? Could it detect a
person who's being misleading without actually lying?
Her worries multiply if fMRI evidence starts showing up in the courtroom. For
one thing, unlike the technical data from a polygraph, it can be used to make
brain images that look simple and convincing, belying the complexity of the data
behind them, she said.
"You show a jury a picture with a nice red spot, that can have a very strong
impact in a very rapid way.... We need to understand how juries are going to
respond to that information. Will they be open to complex explanations of what
the images do and do not mean?"
There's also a philosophical argument in case fMRI works all too well. Greely
notes that four Supreme Court justices wrote in 1998 that if polygraphs were
reliable enough to use as evidence, they shouldn't be admitted because they
would usurp the jury's role of determining the truth. With only four votes, that
position doesn't stand as legal precedent, but it's "an interesting straw in the
wind" for how fMRI might be received someday, he said.
It didn't take any jury to find the truth in my case.
"We nabbed ya," George said after sending me the results of my scan. "It wasn't
a close call."
I was ratted out by the three parts of my brain the technique targets. They'd
become more active when I lied about taking the watch than when I truthfully
denied taking the ring.
Those areas are involved in juggling the demands of doing several things at
once, in thinking about oneself, and in stopping oneself from making a natural
response — all things the brain apparently does when it pulls back from blurting
the truth and works up a whopper instead, George said.
Of course, nobody is going to make me or anybody else climb into an fMRI scanner
every time they want a statement verified. The procedure is too cumbersome to be
used so casually, George says.
But he figures that if a perfect lie detector were developed, that practical
consideration might not matter. The mere knowledge that one is available, he
said, might provoke people to clean up their acts.
"My hope," George said, "would be that it might make the world operate a little
bit more openly and honestly."
___
On the Web:
Cephos Corp.: http://www.cephoscorp.com
No Lie MRI, Inc.: http://www.noliemri.com
fMRI information: http://www.radiologyinfo.org/content/functional_mr.htm
Benefit&Risk
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.
Discuss this in our IRC Social Issues Forum
Brain Scans May Be Used As Lie Detectors By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer
Picture this: Your boss is threatening to fire you because he thinks you stole
company property. He doesn't believe your denials. The lawyer suggests you try denying it one more time — in a brain scanner that will show you're telling the truth.
Wacky? Science fiction? It might happen this summer.
Just the other day I lay flat on my back as a scanner probed the tiniest
crevices of my brain and a computer screen asked, "Did you take the watch?"
The lab I was visiting recently reported catching lies with 90 percent accuracy.
And an entrepreneur in Massachusetts is hoping to commercialize the system in
the coming months.
"I'd use it tomorrow in virtually every criminal and civil case on my desk" to
check up on the truthfulness of clients, said attorney Robert Shapiro, best
known for defending O.J. Simpson against murder charges.
Shapiro serves as an adviser to entrepreneur Steven Laken and has a financial
interest in Cephos Corp., which Laken founded to commercialize the
brain-scanning work being done at the Medical University of South Carolina.
That's where I had my brain-scan interrogation. But this lab isn't alone.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have also reported impressive
accuracy through brain-scanning recently. California entrepreneur Joel T.
Huizenga plans to use that work to start offering lie-detecting services in
Philadelphia this July.
His outfit, No Lie MRI Inc., will serve government agencies and "anybody that
wants to demonstrate that they're telling the truth," he said.
Both labs use brain-scanning technology called functional magnetic resonance
imaging, or fMRI. It's a standard tool for studying the brain, but research into
using it to detect lies is still in early stages. Nobody really knows yet
whether it will prove more accurate than polygraphs, which measure things like
blood pressure and breathing rate to look for emotional signals of lying.
But advocates for fMRI say it has the potential to be more accurate, because it
zeros in on the source of lying, the brain, rather than using indirect measures.
So it may someday provide lawyers with something polygraphs can't: legal
evidence of truth-telling that's widely admissible in court. (Courts generally
regard polygraph results as unreliable, and either prohibit such evidence or
allow it only if both sides in a case agree to let it in.)
Laken said he's aiming to offer the fMRI service for use in situations like
libel, slander and fraud where it's one person's word against another, and
perhaps in employee screening by government agencies. Attorneys suggest it would
be more useful in civil than most criminal cases, he said.
Of course, there's no telling where the general approach might lead. A law
review article has discussed the legality of using fMRI to interrogate
foreigners in U.S. custody. Maybe police will use it as an interrogation tool,
too, or perhaps major companies will find it a cheaper than litigation or
arbitration when an employee is accused of stealing something important, other
observers say.
For his part, Shapiro says he'd switch to fMRI from polygraph for screening
certain clients because he figures it would be more reliable and maybe more
credible to law enforcement agencies.
In any case, the idea of using fMRI to detect lies has started a buzz among
scientists, legal experts and ethicists. Many worry about rushing too quickly
from the lab to real-world use. Some caution that it may not work as well in the
real world as the early lab results suggest.
And others worry that it might.
Unlike perusing your mail or tapping your phone, this is "looking inside your
brain," Hank Greely, a law professor who directs the Stanford Center for Law and
the Biosciences, told me a few days before my scan.
It "does seem to me to be a significant change in our ability ... to invade what
has been the last untouchable sanctuary, the contents of your own mind," Greely
said. "It should make us stop and think to what extent we should allow this to
be done."
But Dr. Mark George, the genial neurologist and psychiatrist who let me lie in
his scanner and be grilled by his computer, said he doesn't see a privacy
problem with the technology.
That's because it's impossible to test people without their consent, he said.
Subjects have to cooperate so fully — holding the head still, and reading and
responding to the questions, for example — that they have to agree to the scan.
"It really doesn't read your mind if you don't want your mind to be read," he
said. "If I were wrongly accused and this were available, I'd want my defense
lawyer to help me get this."
So maybe the technology is better termed a "truth confirmer" than lie detector,
he said. Whatever you call it, the technology has produced some eyebrow-raising results. George and his colleagues recently reported that using fMRI data, a computer was able to spot lies in 28 out of 31 volunteers.
I joined an extension of that study. That's why I found myself lying on a narrow
table in George's lab while he and his assistants pulled a barrel-shaped
framework over my head like a rigid hood. As it brushed the tip of my nose and
blotted out the light from the room, I looked straight ahead to see a computer
screen, and camera which would be my interrogator. Then the table eased into the tunnel of the fMRI scanner, a machine the size of a small storage shed. Only my legs stuck out. As I focused on the questions popping up on the computer screen, the scanner roared like a tractor trying to uproot a tree stump.
It was bombarding me with radio waves and a powerful magnetic field to create
detailed images of my brain and detect tiny changes in blood flow in certain
areas. Those changes would indicate those areas were working a bit harder than
usual, and according to research by George and others, that would in turn
indicate I was lying.
Some questions that popped up on that screen were easy: Am I awake, is it 2004,
do I like movies. Others were a little more challenging: Have I ever cheated on
taxes, or gossiped, or deceived a loved one. As instructed, I answered them all
truthfully, pushing the "Yes" button with my thumb or the "No" button with my
index finger.
Then, there it was: "Did you remove a watch from the drawer?"
Just a half-hour or so before, in an adjacent room, I'd been told to remove
either a watch or a ring from a drawer and slip it into a locker with my
briefcase. This was the mock crime that volunteers lied about in George's study.
So I took the watch. As I lay in the scanner I remembered seizing its gold metal
band and nestling it into the locker.
So, the computer was asking, did I take the watch?
No, I replied with a jab of my finger. I didn't steal nuthin.'
I lied again and again. Other questions about the watch popped up seemingly at
random during the interrogation. Is the watch in my locker? Is it in the drawer?
Did I steal it from the drawer?
The same questions came up about the ring, and I told the truth about those.
It would be a different computer's job to figure out which I was lying about,
the watch or the ring. It would compare the way my brain acted when I responded
to those questions versus what my brain did when I responded truthfully to the
other questions. Whichever looked more different from the "truthful" brain
activity would be considered the signature of deceit.
Finally, after answering 160 questions over the course of 16 minutes — actually,
it was 80 questions two times apiece — I was done. The machine returned me to
the bright light of the scanning room.
The computer's verdict? That would take a few days to produce, since it required
a lot of data analysis. I didn't mind waiting. It's not like the result would
help get me fired, or lose a lawsuit, or send me to jail.
Nobody in George's studies faced consequences like that, which is one reason the
lab results may not apply to real-world situations. George has already begun
another study in which volunteers face "a little more jeopardy" from the mock
crime. He declined to describe it because he didn't want prospective volunteers
to hear about it ahead of time. That work is funded by the Department of Defense
Polygraph Institute.
Other questions remain. How would this work on people with brain diseases? Or
people taking medications? How would this work on people outside the 18-to-50
age range included in George's recent work?
How about experienced liars? George hopes eventually to study volunteers from
prisons.
And then there's the matter of the three people who got away with lying in his
recent study. For some reason, the computer failed to identify the object they'd
stolen. George says he doesn't know what went wrong.
But in a real-world situation, he said, the person being questioned would go
through an exercise like the ring-or-watch task as well as being quizzed about
the topic at hand. That way, if the computer failed in the experimental task, it
would be obvious that it couldn't judge the person's truthfulness.
Because of that, George said, he's comfortable with entrepreneur Laken's plans
to introduce the scanning service to lawyers, though just on a limited basis, by
the middle of this year. Lab studies are obviously necessary, he said, but "at a
certain point you really have to start applying and see how it works. And I
think we're getting close."
But Jennifer Vendemia, a University of South Carolina researcher who studies
deception and the brain, said she finds Laken's timetable premature. So little
research has been done on using fMRI for this purpose that it's too soon to make
any judgment about how useful it could be, she said.
Without studies to see how well the technique works in other labs — a standard
procedure in the scientific world — its reliability might be an issue, said Dr.
Sean Spence of the University of Sheffield in England, who also studies fMRI for
detecting deception.
Speaking more generally, ethical and legal experts said they were wary of
quickly using fMRI for spotting lies.
"What's really scary is if we start implementing this before we know how
accurate it really is," Greely said. "People could be sent to jail, people could
be sent to the death penalty, people could lose their jobs."
Greely recently called for pre-marketing approval of lie-detection devices in
general, like the federal government carries out for medications.
Judy Illes, director of Stanford's program in neuroethics, also has concerns:
Could people, including victims of crimes, be coerced into taking an fMRI test?
Could it distinguish accurate memories from muddled ones? Could it detect a
person who's being misleading without actually lying?
Her worries multiply if fMRI evidence starts showing up in the courtroom. For
one thing, unlike the technical data from a polygraph, it can be used to make
brain images that look simple and convincing, belying the complexity of the data
behind them, she said.
"You show a jury a picture with a nice red spot, that can have a very strong
impact in a very rapid way.... We need to understand how juries are going to
respond to that information. Will they be open to complex explanations of what
the images do and do not mean?"
There's also a philosophical argument in case fMRI works all too well. Greely
notes that four Supreme Court justices wrote in 1998 that if polygraphs were
reliable enough to use as evidence, they shouldn't be admitted because they
would usurp the jury's role of determining the truth. With only four votes, that
position doesn't stand as legal precedent, but it's "an interesting straw in the
wind" for how fMRI might be received someday, he said.
It didn't take any jury to find the truth in my case.
"We nabbed ya," George said after sending me the results of my scan. "It wasn't
a close call."
I was ratted out by the three parts of my brain the technique targets. They'd
become more active when I lied about taking the watch than when I truthfully
denied taking the ring.
Those areas are involved in juggling the demands of doing several things at
once, in thinking about oneself, and in stopping oneself from making a natural
response — all things the brain apparently does when it pulls back from blurting
the truth and works up a whopper instead, George said.
Of course, nobody is going to make me or anybody else climb into an fMRI scanner
every time they want a statement verified. The procedure is too cumbersome to be
used so casually, George says.
But he figures that if a perfect lie detector were developed, that practical
consideration might not matter. The mere knowledge that one is available, he
said, might provoke people to clean up their acts.
"My hope," George said, "would be that it might make the world operate a little
bit more openly and honestly."
___
On the Web:
Cephos Corp.: http://www.cephoscorp.com
No Lie MRI, Inc.: http://www.noliemri.com
fMRI information: http://www.radiologyinfo.org/content/functional_mr.htm
Benefit&Risk
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.
Discuss this in our IRC Social Issues Forum
Friday, January 27, 2006
Gore Vidal Talks About President Jonah
Gore Vidal: 'President Jonah'
Date: Friday, January 27 @ 09:58:15 EST
Topic: Commander-In-Thief
Gore Vidal, Truthdig
While contemplating the ill-starred presidency of G.W. Bush, I looked about for some sort of divine analogy. As usual, when in need of enlightenment, I fell upon the Holy Bible, authorized King James version of 1611; turning by chance to the Book of Jonah, I read that Jonah, who, like Bush, chats with God, had suffered a falling-out with the Almighty and thus became a jinx dogged by luck so bad that a cruise liner, thanks to his presence aboard, was about to sink in a storm at sea. Once the crew had determined that Jonah, a passenger, was the jinx, they threw him overboard and--Lo!--the storm abated. The three days and nights he subsequently spent in the belly of a nauseous whale must have seemed like a serious jinx to the digestion-challenged whale, who extruded him much as the decent opinion of mankind has done to Bush.
Originally, God wanted Jonah to give hell to Nineveh, whose people, God noted disdainfully, "cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand," so like the people of Baghdad who cannot fathom what democracy has to do with their destruction by the Cheney-Bush cabal. But the analogy becomes eerily precise when it comes to the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at a time when a President is not only incompetent but plainly jinxed by whatever faith he cringes before. Witness the ongoing screw-up of prescription drugs. Who knows what other disasters are in store for us thanks to the curse he is under? As the sailors fed the original Jonah to a whale, thus lifting the storm that was about to drown them, perhaps we the people can persuade President Jonah to retire to his other Eden in Crawford, Texas, taking his jinx with him. We deserve a rest. Plainly, so does he. Look at Nixon's radiant features after his resignation! One can see former President Jonah in his sumptuous library happily catering to faith-based fans with animated scriptures rooted in The Simpsons.
Not since the glory days of Watergate and Nixon's Luciferian fall has there been so much written about the dogged deceits and creative criminalities of our rulers. We have also come to a point in this dark age where there is not only no hero in view but no alternative road unblocked. We are trapped terribly in a now that few foresaw and even fewer can define, despite a swarm of books and pamphlets like the vast cloud of locusts that dined on China in that 1930s movie The Good Earth.
I have read many of these descriptions of our fallen estate, looking for one that best describes in plain English how we got to this now and where we appear to be headed once our Good Earth has been consumed and only Rapture is left to whisk aloft the Faithful. Meanwhile, the rest of us can learn quite a lot from Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, by Morris Berman, a professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
I must confess that I have a proprietary interest in anyone who refers to the United States as an empire, since I am credited with first putting forward this heretical view in the early 1970s. In fact, so disgusted with me was a book reviewer at Time magazine that as proof of my madness he wrote: "He actually refers to the United States as an empire!" It should be noted that at about the same time Henry Luce, proprietor of Time, was booming on and on about "The American Century." What a difference a word makes!
Berman sets his scene briskly in recent history. "We were already in our twilight phase when Ronald Reagan, with all the insight of an ostrich, declared it to be 'morning in America'; twenty-odd years later, under the 'boy emperor' George W. Bush (as Chalmers Johnson refers to him), we have entered the Dark Ages in earnest, pursuing a short-sighted path that can only accelerate our decline. For what we are now seeing are the obvious characteristics of the West after the fall of Rome: the triumph of religion over reason; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture--a troika that was for Voltaire the central horror of the pre-Enlightenment world; and the political and economic marginalization of our culture.... The British historian Charles Freeman published an extended discussion of the transition that took place during the late Roman empire, the title of which could serve as a capsule summary of our current president: The Closing of the Western Mind. Mr. Bush, God knows, is no Augustine; but Freeman points to the latter as the epitome of a more general process that was underway in the fourth century: namely, 'the gradual subjection of reason to faith and authority.' This is what we are seeing today, and it is a process that no society can undergo and still remain free. Yet it is a process of which administration officials, along with much of the American population, are aggressively proud." In fact, close observers of this odd presidency note that Bush, like his evangelical base, believes he is on a mission from God and that faith trumps empirical evidence. Berman quotes a senior White House adviser who disdains what he calls the "reality-based" community, to which Berman sensibly responds: "If a nation is unable to perceive reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed."
Berman does a brief tour of the American horizon, revealing a cultural Death Valley. In secondary schools where evolution can still be taught, too many teachers are afraid to bring up the subject to their so often unevolved students. "Add to this the pervasive hostility toward science on the part of the current administration (e.g., stem-cell research) and we get a clear picture of the Enlightenment being steadily rolled back. Religion is used to explain terror attacks as part of a cosmic conflict between Good and Evil rather than in terms of political processes.... Manichaeanism rules across the United States. According to a poll taken by Time magazine, 59 percent of Americans believe that John's apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Revelation will be fulfilled, and nearly all of these believe that the faithful will be taken up into heaven in the 'Rapture.'
"Finally, we shouldn't be surprised at the antipathy toward democracy displayed by the Bush administration.... As already noted, fundamentalism and democracy are completely antithetical. The opposite of the Enlightenment, of course, is tribalism, groupthink; and more and more, this is the direction in which the United States is going.... Anthony Lewis, who worked as a columnist for the New York Times for thirty-two years, observes that what has happened in the wake of 9/11 is not just the threatening of the rights of a few detainees, but the undermining of the very foundation of democracy. Detention without trial, denial of access to attorneys, years of interrogation in isolation--these are now standard American practice, and most Americans don't care. Nor did they care about the revelation in July 2004 (reported in Newsweek), that for several months the White House and the Department of Justice had been discussing the feasibility of canceling the upcoming presidential election in the event of a possible terrorist attack." I suspect that the technologically inclined prevailed against that extreme measure on the ground that the newly installed electronic ballot machines could be so calibrated that Bush would win handily no matter what (read Representative John Conyers's report on the rigging of Ohio's vote).
Meanwhile, the indoctrination of the people merrily continues. "In a 'State of the First Amendment Survey' conducted by the University of Connecticut in 2003, 34 percent of Americans polled said the First Amendment 'goes too far'; 46 percent said there was too much freedom of the press; 28 percent felt that newspapers should not be able to publish articles without prior approval of the government; 31 percent wanted public protest of a war to be outlawed during that war; and 50 percent thought the government should have the right to infringe on the religious freedom of 'certain religious groups' in the name of the war on terror."
It is usual in sad reports like Professor Berman's to stop abruptly the litany of what has gone wrong and then declare, hand on heart, that once the people have been informed of what is happening, the truth will set them free and a quarter-billion candles will be lit and the darkness will flee in the presence of so much spontaneous light. But Berman is much too serious for the easy platitude. Instead he tells us that those who might have struck at least a match can no longer do so because shared information about our situation is meager to nonexistent. Would better schools help? Of course, but, according to that joyous bearer of ill tidings, the New York Times, many school districts are now making sobriety tests a regular feature of the school day: apparently opium derivatives are the opiate of our stoned youth. Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans, presumably undrugged, have no idea who our enemies were in World War II. Many college graduates don't know the difference between an argument and an assertion (did their teachers also fail to solve this knotty question?). A travel agent in Arizona is often asked whether or not it is cheaper to take the train rather than fly to Hawaii. Only 12 percent of Americans own a passport. At the time of the 2004 presidential election 42 percent of voters believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. One high school boy, when asked who won the Civil War, replied wearily, "I don't know and I don't care," echoing a busy neocon who confessed proudly: "The American Civil War is as remote to me as the War of the Roses."
We are assured daily by advertisers and/or politicians that we are the richest, most envied people on earth and, apparently, that is why so many awful, ill-groomed people want to blow us up. We live in an impermeable bubble without the sort of information that people living in real countries have access to when it comes to their own reality. But we are not actually people in the eyes of the national ownership. We are simply unreliable consumers comprising an overworked, underpaid labor force not in the best of health: The World Health Organization rates our healthcare system (sic--or sick?) as thirty-seventh-best in the world, far behind even Saudi Arabia, role model for the Texans. Our infant mortality rate is satisfyingly high, precluding a First World educational system. Also, it has not gone unremarked even in our usually information-free media that despite the boost to the profits of such companies as Halliburton, Bush's wars of aggression against small countries of no danger to us have left us well and truly broke. Our annual trade deficit is a half-trillion dollars, which means that we don't produce much of anything the world wants except those wan reports on how popular our entertainment is overseas. Unfortunately, the foreign gross of King Kong, the Edsel of that assembly line, is not yet known. It is rumored that Bollywood--the Indian film business--may soon surpass us! Berman writes, "We have lost our edge in science to Europe.... The US economy is being kept afloat by huge foreign loans ($4 billion a day during 2003). What do you think will happen when America's creditors decide to pull the plug, or when OPEC members begin selling oil in euros instead of dollars?... An International Monetary Fund report of 2004 concluded that the United States was 'careening toward insolvency.' " Meanwhile, China, our favorite big-time future enemy, is the number one for worldwide foreign investments, with France, the bête noire of our apish neocons, in second place.
Well, we still have Kraft cheese and, of course, the death penalty. Berman makes the case that the Bretton-Woods agreement of 1944 institutionalized a system geared toward full employment and the maintenance of a social safety net for society's less fortunate--the so-called welfare or interventionist state. It did this by establishing fixed but flexible exchange rates among world currencies, which were pegged to the US dollar while the dollar, for its part, was pegged to gold. In a word, Bretton-Woods saved capitalism by making it more human. Nixon abandoned the agreement in 1971, which, according to Berman, started huge amounts of capital moving upward from the poor and the middle class to the rich and superrich.
Mr. Berman spares us the happy ending, as, apparently, has history. When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press), upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. "Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?" He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: "How eager you are to be slaves." I often think of that wise emperor when I hear Republican members of Congress extolling the wisdom of Bush. Now that he has been caught illegally wiretapping fellow citizens he has taken to snarling about his powers as "a wartime president," and so, in his own mind, he is above each and every law of the land. Oddly, no one in Congress has pointed out that he may well be a lunatic dreaming that he is another Lincoln, but whatever he is or is not he is no wartime President. There is no war with any other nation...yet. There is no state called terror, an abstract noun like liar. Certainly his illegal unilateral ravaging of Iraq may well seem like a real war for those on both sides unlucky enough to be killed or wounded, but that does not make it a war any more than the appearance of having been elected twice to the presidency does not mean that in due course the people will demand an investigation of those two irregular processes. Although he has done a number of things that under the old republic might have got him impeached, our current system protects him: incumbency-for-life seats have made it possible for a Republican majority in the House not to do its duty and impeach him for his incompetence in handling, say, the natural disaster that befell Louisiana.
The founders thought two-year terms for members of the House was as much democracy as we'd ever need. Therefore, there was no great movement to have some sort of recall legislation in the event that a President wasn't up to his job and so had lost the people's confidence between elections. But in time, as Ecclesiastes would say, all things shall come to pass and so, in a kindly way, a majority of the citizens must persuade him that he will be happier back in Crawford pruning Bushes of the leafy sort while the troops not killed or maimed will settle for simply being alive and in one piece. We may be slaves, but we are not unreasonable.
One way that a majority of citizens can help open the road back to Crawford is by heeding the call of a group called The World Can't Wait. They believe that the agenda for 2006 must not be set by the Bush gang but by the people taking independent mass political action.
On January 31, the night of Bush's next State of the Union address, they have called for people in large cities and small towns all across the country to join in noisy rallies to make the demand that "Bush Step Down" the message of the day. At 9 PM Eastern Standard Time, just as Bush starts to speak, people can make a joyful noise and figuratively drown out his address. Then on the following Saturday, February 4, converge in front of the White House with the same message: Please step down and take your program with you.
Source: Truthdig
http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/20060124_president_jonah/
This article comes from The Smirking Chimp
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com
The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=24593
Date: Friday, January 27 @ 09:58:15 EST
Topic: Commander-In-Thief
Gore Vidal, Truthdig
While contemplating the ill-starred presidency of G.W. Bush, I looked about for some sort of divine analogy. As usual, when in need of enlightenment, I fell upon the Holy Bible, authorized King James version of 1611; turning by chance to the Book of Jonah, I read that Jonah, who, like Bush, chats with God, had suffered a falling-out with the Almighty and thus became a jinx dogged by luck so bad that a cruise liner, thanks to his presence aboard, was about to sink in a storm at sea. Once the crew had determined that Jonah, a passenger, was the jinx, they threw him overboard and--Lo!--the storm abated. The three days and nights he subsequently spent in the belly of a nauseous whale must have seemed like a serious jinx to the digestion-challenged whale, who extruded him much as the decent opinion of mankind has done to Bush.
Originally, God wanted Jonah to give hell to Nineveh, whose people, God noted disdainfully, "cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand," so like the people of Baghdad who cannot fathom what democracy has to do with their destruction by the Cheney-Bush cabal. But the analogy becomes eerily precise when it comes to the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at a time when a President is not only incompetent but plainly jinxed by whatever faith he cringes before. Witness the ongoing screw-up of prescription drugs. Who knows what other disasters are in store for us thanks to the curse he is under? As the sailors fed the original Jonah to a whale, thus lifting the storm that was about to drown them, perhaps we the people can persuade President Jonah to retire to his other Eden in Crawford, Texas, taking his jinx with him. We deserve a rest. Plainly, so does he. Look at Nixon's radiant features after his resignation! One can see former President Jonah in his sumptuous library happily catering to faith-based fans with animated scriptures rooted in The Simpsons.
Not since the glory days of Watergate and Nixon's Luciferian fall has there been so much written about the dogged deceits and creative criminalities of our rulers. We have also come to a point in this dark age where there is not only no hero in view but no alternative road unblocked. We are trapped terribly in a now that few foresaw and even fewer can define, despite a swarm of books and pamphlets like the vast cloud of locusts that dined on China in that 1930s movie The Good Earth.
I have read many of these descriptions of our fallen estate, looking for one that best describes in plain English how we got to this now and where we appear to be headed once our Good Earth has been consumed and only Rapture is left to whisk aloft the Faithful. Meanwhile, the rest of us can learn quite a lot from Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, by Morris Berman, a professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
I must confess that I have a proprietary interest in anyone who refers to the United States as an empire, since I am credited with first putting forward this heretical view in the early 1970s. In fact, so disgusted with me was a book reviewer at Time magazine that as proof of my madness he wrote: "He actually refers to the United States as an empire!" It should be noted that at about the same time Henry Luce, proprietor of Time, was booming on and on about "The American Century." What a difference a word makes!
Berman sets his scene briskly in recent history. "We were already in our twilight phase when Ronald Reagan, with all the insight of an ostrich, declared it to be 'morning in America'; twenty-odd years later, under the 'boy emperor' George W. Bush (as Chalmers Johnson refers to him), we have entered the Dark Ages in earnest, pursuing a short-sighted path that can only accelerate our decline. For what we are now seeing are the obvious characteristics of the West after the fall of Rome: the triumph of religion over reason; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture--a troika that was for Voltaire the central horror of the pre-Enlightenment world; and the political and economic marginalization of our culture.... The British historian Charles Freeman published an extended discussion of the transition that took place during the late Roman empire, the title of which could serve as a capsule summary of our current president: The Closing of the Western Mind. Mr. Bush, God knows, is no Augustine; but Freeman points to the latter as the epitome of a more general process that was underway in the fourth century: namely, 'the gradual subjection of reason to faith and authority.' This is what we are seeing today, and it is a process that no society can undergo and still remain free. Yet it is a process of which administration officials, along with much of the American population, are aggressively proud." In fact, close observers of this odd presidency note that Bush, like his evangelical base, believes he is on a mission from God and that faith trumps empirical evidence. Berman quotes a senior White House adviser who disdains what he calls the "reality-based" community, to which Berman sensibly responds: "If a nation is unable to perceive reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed."
Berman does a brief tour of the American horizon, revealing a cultural Death Valley. In secondary schools where evolution can still be taught, too many teachers are afraid to bring up the subject to their so often unevolved students. "Add to this the pervasive hostility toward science on the part of the current administration (e.g., stem-cell research) and we get a clear picture of the Enlightenment being steadily rolled back. Religion is used to explain terror attacks as part of a cosmic conflict between Good and Evil rather than in terms of political processes.... Manichaeanism rules across the United States. According to a poll taken by Time magazine, 59 percent of Americans believe that John's apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Revelation will be fulfilled, and nearly all of these believe that the faithful will be taken up into heaven in the 'Rapture.'
"Finally, we shouldn't be surprised at the antipathy toward democracy displayed by the Bush administration.... As already noted, fundamentalism and democracy are completely antithetical. The opposite of the Enlightenment, of course, is tribalism, groupthink; and more and more, this is the direction in which the United States is going.... Anthony Lewis, who worked as a columnist for the New York Times for thirty-two years, observes that what has happened in the wake of 9/11 is not just the threatening of the rights of a few detainees, but the undermining of the very foundation of democracy. Detention without trial, denial of access to attorneys, years of interrogation in isolation--these are now standard American practice, and most Americans don't care. Nor did they care about the revelation in July 2004 (reported in Newsweek), that for several months the White House and the Department of Justice had been discussing the feasibility of canceling the upcoming presidential election in the event of a possible terrorist attack." I suspect that the technologically inclined prevailed against that extreme measure on the ground that the newly installed electronic ballot machines could be so calibrated that Bush would win handily no matter what (read Representative John Conyers's report on the rigging of Ohio's vote).
Meanwhile, the indoctrination of the people merrily continues. "In a 'State of the First Amendment Survey' conducted by the University of Connecticut in 2003, 34 percent of Americans polled said the First Amendment 'goes too far'; 46 percent said there was too much freedom of the press; 28 percent felt that newspapers should not be able to publish articles without prior approval of the government; 31 percent wanted public protest of a war to be outlawed during that war; and 50 percent thought the government should have the right to infringe on the religious freedom of 'certain religious groups' in the name of the war on terror."
It is usual in sad reports like Professor Berman's to stop abruptly the litany of what has gone wrong and then declare, hand on heart, that once the people have been informed of what is happening, the truth will set them free and a quarter-billion candles will be lit and the darkness will flee in the presence of so much spontaneous light. But Berman is much too serious for the easy platitude. Instead he tells us that those who might have struck at least a match can no longer do so because shared information about our situation is meager to nonexistent. Would better schools help? Of course, but, according to that joyous bearer of ill tidings, the New York Times, many school districts are now making sobriety tests a regular feature of the school day: apparently opium derivatives are the opiate of our stoned youth. Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans, presumably undrugged, have no idea who our enemies were in World War II. Many college graduates don't know the difference between an argument and an assertion (did their teachers also fail to solve this knotty question?). A travel agent in Arizona is often asked whether or not it is cheaper to take the train rather than fly to Hawaii. Only 12 percent of Americans own a passport. At the time of the 2004 presidential election 42 percent of voters believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. One high school boy, when asked who won the Civil War, replied wearily, "I don't know and I don't care," echoing a busy neocon who confessed proudly: "The American Civil War is as remote to me as the War of the Roses."
We are assured daily by advertisers and/or politicians that we are the richest, most envied people on earth and, apparently, that is why so many awful, ill-groomed people want to blow us up. We live in an impermeable bubble without the sort of information that people living in real countries have access to when it comes to their own reality. But we are not actually people in the eyes of the national ownership. We are simply unreliable consumers comprising an overworked, underpaid labor force not in the best of health: The World Health Organization rates our healthcare system (sic--or sick?) as thirty-seventh-best in the world, far behind even Saudi Arabia, role model for the Texans. Our infant mortality rate is satisfyingly high, precluding a First World educational system. Also, it has not gone unremarked even in our usually information-free media that despite the boost to the profits of such companies as Halliburton, Bush's wars of aggression against small countries of no danger to us have left us well and truly broke. Our annual trade deficit is a half-trillion dollars, which means that we don't produce much of anything the world wants except those wan reports on how popular our entertainment is overseas. Unfortunately, the foreign gross of King Kong, the Edsel of that assembly line, is not yet known. It is rumored that Bollywood--the Indian film business--may soon surpass us! Berman writes, "We have lost our edge in science to Europe.... The US economy is being kept afloat by huge foreign loans ($4 billion a day during 2003). What do you think will happen when America's creditors decide to pull the plug, or when OPEC members begin selling oil in euros instead of dollars?... An International Monetary Fund report of 2004 concluded that the United States was 'careening toward insolvency.' " Meanwhile, China, our favorite big-time future enemy, is the number one for worldwide foreign investments, with France, the bête noire of our apish neocons, in second place.
Well, we still have Kraft cheese and, of course, the death penalty. Berman makes the case that the Bretton-Woods agreement of 1944 institutionalized a system geared toward full employment and the maintenance of a social safety net for society's less fortunate--the so-called welfare or interventionist state. It did this by establishing fixed but flexible exchange rates among world currencies, which were pegged to the US dollar while the dollar, for its part, was pegged to gold. In a word, Bretton-Woods saved capitalism by making it more human. Nixon abandoned the agreement in 1971, which, according to Berman, started huge amounts of capital moving upward from the poor and the middle class to the rich and superrich.
Mr. Berman spares us the happy ending, as, apparently, has history. When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press), upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. "Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?" He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: "How eager you are to be slaves." I often think of that wise emperor when I hear Republican members of Congress extolling the wisdom of Bush. Now that he has been caught illegally wiretapping fellow citizens he has taken to snarling about his powers as "a wartime president," and so, in his own mind, he is above each and every law of the land. Oddly, no one in Congress has pointed out that he may well be a lunatic dreaming that he is another Lincoln, but whatever he is or is not he is no wartime President. There is no war with any other nation...yet. There is no state called terror, an abstract noun like liar. Certainly his illegal unilateral ravaging of Iraq may well seem like a real war for those on both sides unlucky enough to be killed or wounded, but that does not make it a war any more than the appearance of having been elected twice to the presidency does not mean that in due course the people will demand an investigation of those two irregular processes. Although he has done a number of things that under the old republic might have got him impeached, our current system protects him: incumbency-for-life seats have made it possible for a Republican majority in the House not to do its duty and impeach him for his incompetence in handling, say, the natural disaster that befell Louisiana.
The founders thought two-year terms for members of the House was as much democracy as we'd ever need. Therefore, there was no great movement to have some sort of recall legislation in the event that a President wasn't up to his job and so had lost the people's confidence between elections. But in time, as Ecclesiastes would say, all things shall come to pass and so, in a kindly way, a majority of the citizens must persuade him that he will be happier back in Crawford pruning Bushes of the leafy sort while the troops not killed or maimed will settle for simply being alive and in one piece. We may be slaves, but we are not unreasonable.
One way that a majority of citizens can help open the road back to Crawford is by heeding the call of a group called The World Can't Wait. They believe that the agenda for 2006 must not be set by the Bush gang but by the people taking independent mass political action.
On January 31, the night of Bush's next State of the Union address, they have called for people in large cities and small towns all across the country to join in noisy rallies to make the demand that "Bush Step Down" the message of the day. At 9 PM Eastern Standard Time, just as Bush starts to speak, people can make a joyful noise and figuratively drown out his address. Then on the following Saturday, February 4, converge in front of the White House with the same message: Please step down and take your program with you.
Source: Truthdig
http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/20060124_president_jonah/
This article comes from The Smirking Chimp
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com
The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=24593
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Why I Do Not Like Dealing With Red Cross
Red Cross is a homophobic organization, at least where their blood drives are concerned. The local chapter of Red Cross has their quarterly blood drives here in our town, and I have always relied on their advertising that "All are welcome and encouraged to give blood". That message should be corrected to say "All heterosexuals are welcome and encouraged to give blood, but gays can stay away."
I went to a blood drive not long ago here in our town, Independence, KS which is coordinated by their larger office in Wichita, KS. They asked me if I had ever had any homosexual experiences since 1977 -- about thirty years ago. Of course I had to answer 'yes'. So, they said then you cannot give blood. Now, if you stop and think about it, any gay person, even a teenager who had a single gay experience out of curiosity is eliminated. Generally a person would be an older teen if they did anything 'gay' so that person would be minimum of 45-50 years old today. Persons who are likely to be open enough to admit to gay activity would be in the 20-50 year old range today. Ergo, no blood accepted from any person who is gay and open enough and honest enough to mention it, which would be many/most younger gay guys today.
Now, they stated "this is because of HIV/AIDS" and while that may be true, it is only a red herring. A huge, vast number of gay guys were not even yet born when AIDS first became a crisis. Some of us were born by then and by the early 1980's almost too old to be having sex on a regular basis.
I know quite a lot about AIDS/HIV and that although you can 'catch AIDS' from a single unprotected experience, depending on the context and circumstances it is not always very likely. Note I said _SINGLE_ experience, in a _VERY SMALL TOWN_ and the type of experience you chose to get involved in.
Now that is not true for me, I've had zillions of sexual escapades in my life, but but almost none in the past 10-15 years, or that is to say fewer and fewer as the years go on. I do not have AIDS/HIV for which I thank God, it could be me as easily as many of the guys it has happened to. But you see, by the time AIDS got generally well known (early 1980's) I was already too old to have sex on any sort of regular basis, particularly with a younger person who was statistically more likely (by virtue of their bed-hopping antics) to have gotten infected.
And while in the early days of HIV/AIDS (1980's) there was no method known to detect it in the blood, thus could not be tested for, and some blood banks such as a few in California left themselves open and liable for passing along diseased blood (see the book Boys in the Band by Randy Shilts for example) that is NOT the case today. Today, all blood is tested, AIDS/HIV can be ferreted out and is. Red Cross especially tests all blood given to them. So why the special concern over blood from gay guys today? And why single out gay guys rather than sexually promiscuous people in general, whether they be gay or straight?
A whore can 'catch AIDS' from her several tricks ... her heterosexual customers can 'catch AIDS'. So why single out gay men over such a long period of time (I mean, thirty years with _any_ homosexual experience at all is rather extreme. That is unless Red Cross is stating the damnable lie that 'all gay men are promiscuous' and those who have not died from AIDS/HIV very soon will die, etc.
If Red Cross wished to use caution and flag blood from a gay person to particularly look for symptoms of HIV that is understandable, but to flat out deny a gay person the right to give blood simply on the fact that the person was honest enough to say they had been in an occassional gay event sometime in the past thirty years is nothing more than homophobia. Particularly when taken in the context of the person's age and the community in which they live, etc.
And then to attempt to dissuade that person from making a complaint against their homophobia by none the less offering the gay person some free refreshments or whatever promotional trinkets they happen to be giving away to the persons from whom they did accept blood (nice, heterosexual people) adds an insult to it.
I do not not expect Red Cross to be physicians and diagnose the presence of AIDS/HIV but I do expect a modicum of common sense from their workers and not a deliberatly hurtful response to persons who are GLBT. Do they also disqualify black people on the premise that their blood 'may possibly' have that disease which only afflicts black people or do they refuse to accept blood from Jews on account of that disease which only afflicts Jewish men? Then why do that with gay men? Mainly I guess because Red Cross is a homophobic organization. Not only do I not give them my blood (which they claim they do not want anyway) but I have pretty much stopped giving them anything.
I said to the lady at the blood drive here, "Well, I guess people could always lie about it," and her response was "People should not lie" and that is true, they should not and I would suppose there is no young guy white or black who has never lied about a homosexual experience from year's past.
So as long as you lie about your sexual proclivities (be they being gay) you are welcome to give blood to Red Cross, but if you are honest enought to tell them where things are at, they will humiliate you (or at least try to, although I am not humiliated very easily) and discriminate against you.
PAT
I went to a blood drive not long ago here in our town, Independence, KS which is coordinated by their larger office in Wichita, KS. They asked me if I had ever had any homosexual experiences since 1977 -- about thirty years ago. Of course I had to answer 'yes'. So, they said then you cannot give blood. Now, if you stop and think about it, any gay person, even a teenager who had a single gay experience out of curiosity is eliminated. Generally a person would be an older teen if they did anything 'gay' so that person would be minimum of 45-50 years old today. Persons who are likely to be open enough to admit to gay activity would be in the 20-50 year old range today. Ergo, no blood accepted from any person who is gay and open enough and honest enough to mention it, which would be many/most younger gay guys today.
Now, they stated "this is because of HIV/AIDS" and while that may be true, it is only a red herring. A huge, vast number of gay guys were not even yet born when AIDS first became a crisis. Some of us were born by then and by the early 1980's almost too old to be having sex on a regular basis.
I know quite a lot about AIDS/HIV and that although you can 'catch AIDS' from a single unprotected experience, depending on the context and circumstances it is not always very likely. Note I said _SINGLE_ experience, in a _VERY SMALL TOWN_ and the type of experience you chose to get involved in.
Now that is not true for me, I've had zillions of sexual escapades in my life, but but almost none in the past 10-15 years, or that is to say fewer and fewer as the years go on. I do not have AIDS/HIV for which I thank God, it could be me as easily as many of the guys it has happened to. But you see, by the time AIDS got generally well known (early 1980's) I was already too old to have sex on any sort of regular basis, particularly with a younger person who was statistically more likely (by virtue of their bed-hopping antics) to have gotten infected.
And while in the early days of HIV/AIDS (1980's) there was no method known to detect it in the blood, thus could not be tested for, and some blood banks such as a few in California left themselves open and liable for passing along diseased blood (see the book Boys in the Band by Randy Shilts for example) that is NOT the case today. Today, all blood is tested, AIDS/HIV can be ferreted out and is. Red Cross especially tests all blood given to them. So why the special concern over blood from gay guys today? And why single out gay guys rather than sexually promiscuous people in general, whether they be gay or straight?
A whore can 'catch AIDS' from her several tricks ... her heterosexual customers can 'catch AIDS'. So why single out gay men over such a long period of time (I mean, thirty years with _any_ homosexual experience at all is rather extreme. That is unless Red Cross is stating the damnable lie that 'all gay men are promiscuous' and those who have not died from AIDS/HIV very soon will die, etc.
If Red Cross wished to use caution and flag blood from a gay person to particularly look for symptoms of HIV that is understandable, but to flat out deny a gay person the right to give blood simply on the fact that the person was honest enough to say they had been in an occassional gay event sometime in the past thirty years is nothing more than homophobia. Particularly when taken in the context of the person's age and the community in which they live, etc.
And then to attempt to dissuade that person from making a complaint against their homophobia by none the less offering the gay person some free refreshments or whatever promotional trinkets they happen to be giving away to the persons from whom they did accept blood (nice, heterosexual people) adds an insult to it.
I do not not expect Red Cross to be physicians and diagnose the presence of AIDS/HIV but I do expect a modicum of common sense from their workers and not a deliberatly hurtful response to persons who are GLBT. Do they also disqualify black people on the premise that their blood 'may possibly' have that disease which only afflicts black people or do they refuse to accept blood from Jews on account of that disease which only afflicts Jewish men? Then why do that with gay men? Mainly I guess because Red Cross is a homophobic organization. Not only do I not give them my blood (which they claim they do not want anyway) but I have pretty much stopped giving them anything.
I said to the lady at the blood drive here, "Well, I guess people could always lie about it," and her response was "People should not lie" and that is true, they should not and I would suppose there is no young guy white or black who has never lied about a homosexual experience from year's past.
So as long as you lie about your sexual proclivities (be they being gay) you are welcome to give blood to Red Cross, but if you are honest enought to tell them where things are at, they will humiliate you (or at least try to, although I am not humiliated very easily) and discriminate against you.
PAT
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Worst Credit Card Company Ever! First Premier Bank
Although my credit used to be decent, years ago, prior to my Brain Aneurysm, spending three months in a coma (11-28-99 through mid 1-2000) plus a month after that in emergency rehab then about a year and a half in a nursing home after that (I only essentially got back on my feet early in 2002) my credit suffered sort of badly. Then, when you understand that my only income from that point forward was Social Security Disability, you can probably understand why I had to make a lot of changes in my lifestyle, financially.
This meant getting all my old credit accounts eventually paid off, and applying for new credit which I have done with Cap One, Household and a couple of other low spending limit/high cost credit cards. They have all been decent with me, even if sort of expensive on membership fees, 'participation fees', over limit fees and such. Knowing they are very expensive to use, I generally limit myself to the bare necesseties, using them for small purchases in mid-month and generally either paying them off automatically each month when my SSI check arrives, or at least paying a sizeable portion of them. After all, I do not expect to get an American Express card or any card with an open-ended credit limit, etc. Mostly I use my VISA debit card from the local bank, and I have a set routine where when SSI arrives, always on the fourth Wednesday of each month for the previous month's allowance, I have it go direct to my bank, then using my computer I pay the bills automatically. Unless something goes dramatically wrong in the next several hours, by this time tomorrow night the bank will have credited me for the SSI for this month, I will have paid the mortgage, all the utility bills for the month, all my credit cards, etc.
Although I will wake up in the morning, check the bank balance and find my usual thousand-some dollars there for the December payout from SSI, all that money will vanish during the course of the day as the bank pays all my bills. None the less, I am able to 'stay regular' and 'current' on mortgage, utilities, cable and phone, etc.
Now my complaint: for some reason I used my credit card from First Premier Bank of Sioux Falls, SD a Master Card by brand name, to pay my City of Independence water/trash pickup/maintainence bill last month. For some reason, I had been expecting an extra fifty dollars or so for a job I did, it came in and I put it in the bank I use, but it had not gotten credited yet (so was not available on my debit card). The result was it put my First Premier Bank account about $25.00 over limit. Well, okay, so now I know I am going to get an 'overlimit charge' from those pirates. but that's life. I paid the water bill, put the card back in my pocket and quit worrying about it.
On January 18 (but it was mailed January 10) I got an _incredibly snotty_ letter from First Premier Bank telling me my account had been revoked due to its overlimit and delinquent status. Delinquent? Well that's what they said. 'Overlimit' by $25 or so, which mainly came about because on the same billing cycle they charged, in addition to the monthly participation fee, an 'annual fee' to renew me for another year and some other minor fee. In other words, I quit deliberatly charging after I paid my water bill (which admittedly cut it very close to the credit limit) and I intended to not use that card any further this month or until it got paid off, one or the other.
First Premier Bank has since called me twice within the same month and even before the next payment is due on February 6 I think) demanding to know when I was intending to pay their bill. In their snotty letter First Premier hastened to let me know that future purchases would be declined and that if I attempted to use the card it would be confiscated. All that for about $25.00 overdue, no missed payments (just the current payment due) after I had had that card for about a year (never any missed payments, always monthly payments if not in full then in great excess of any 'minimum payment due'.) Their snotty letter was signed by the name "F. Dobson" of their collections department, with a phone number where that person can never be reached. I doubt "F. Dobson" even exists, it is probably just a phone name or alias they use on their collection letters. Those people are all so precious to say the least. I am going to forward a copy of this letter to the Commissioner of Banks in South Dakota, and the consumer affairs people also.
I quite agree that I had lousy credit over two or three years as a result of my hospital stay, and I quite understand that the best I am going to be able to do for now is survive with the shoddy, very expensive credit cards, but something really needs to be done about the phone call habits and letters written by anonymous people at First Premier Bank in Sioux Falls, SD .
This meant getting all my old credit accounts eventually paid off, and applying for new credit which I have done with Cap One, Household and a couple of other low spending limit/high cost credit cards. They have all been decent with me, even if sort of expensive on membership fees, 'participation fees', over limit fees and such. Knowing they are very expensive to use, I generally limit myself to the bare necesseties, using them for small purchases in mid-month and generally either paying them off automatically each month when my SSI check arrives, or at least paying a sizeable portion of them. After all, I do not expect to get an American Express card or any card with an open-ended credit limit, etc. Mostly I use my VISA debit card from the local bank, and I have a set routine where when SSI arrives, always on the fourth Wednesday of each month for the previous month's allowance, I have it go direct to my bank, then using my computer I pay the bills automatically. Unless something goes dramatically wrong in the next several hours, by this time tomorrow night the bank will have credited me for the SSI for this month, I will have paid the mortgage, all the utility bills for the month, all my credit cards, etc.
Although I will wake up in the morning, check the bank balance and find my usual thousand-some dollars there for the December payout from SSI, all that money will vanish during the course of the day as the bank pays all my bills. None the less, I am able to 'stay regular' and 'current' on mortgage, utilities, cable and phone, etc.
Now my complaint: for some reason I used my credit card from First Premier Bank of Sioux Falls, SD a Master Card by brand name, to pay my City of Independence water/trash pickup/maintainence bill last month. For some reason, I had been expecting an extra fifty dollars or so for a job I did, it came in and I put it in the bank I use, but it had not gotten credited yet (so was not available on my debit card). The result was it put my First Premier Bank account about $25.00 over limit. Well, okay, so now I know I am going to get an 'overlimit charge' from those pirates. but that's life. I paid the water bill, put the card back in my pocket and quit worrying about it.
On January 18 (but it was mailed January 10) I got an _incredibly snotty_ letter from First Premier Bank telling me my account had been revoked due to its overlimit and delinquent status. Delinquent? Well that's what they said. 'Overlimit' by $25 or so, which mainly came about because on the same billing cycle they charged, in addition to the monthly participation fee, an 'annual fee' to renew me for another year and some other minor fee. In other words, I quit deliberatly charging after I paid my water bill (which admittedly cut it very close to the credit limit) and I intended to not use that card any further this month or until it got paid off, one or the other.
First Premier Bank has since called me twice within the same month and even before the next payment is due on February 6 I think) demanding to know when I was intending to pay their bill. In their snotty letter First Premier hastened to let me know that future purchases would be declined and that if I attempted to use the card it would be confiscated. All that for about $25.00 overdue, no missed payments (just the current payment due) after I had had that card for about a year (never any missed payments, always monthly payments if not in full then in great excess of any 'minimum payment due'.) Their snotty letter was signed by the name "F. Dobson" of their collections department, with a phone number where that person can never be reached. I doubt "F. Dobson" even exists, it is probably just a phone name or alias they use on their collection letters. Those people are all so precious to say the least. I am going to forward a copy of this letter to the Commissioner of Banks in South Dakota, and the consumer affairs people also.
I quite agree that I had lousy credit over two or three years as a result of my hospital stay, and I quite understand that the best I am going to be able to do for now is survive with the shoddy, very expensive credit cards, but something really needs to be done about the phone call habits and letters written by anonymous people at First Premier Bank in Sioux Falls, SD .
A Helluva Mess For Me All Day
About noon on Monday, an accident occurred, and this blog went bye-bye totally. It had to be reconstructed from scratch, which was all all afternoon/evening affair. I still do not have it back running as I would like, but it is almost there. I must go on to bed -- quite late here, and I am very tired, but will try to get it finished tomorrow.
PAT
Monday, January 23, 2006
For postings prior to January 23
Please look at my earlier blog for now to see original messages from earlier in January, and all of October, November and December, 2005.
Go to ptownson2.blogspot.com
Go to ptownson2.blogspot.com
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