Happy New Year 2006 Everyone & Everything on the 3rd Rock Out from Sol!!!

Largely by random coincidence, this image from space very clearly shows, through fortuitous breaks in the clouds, Africa, the Sahara, Arabia and Madagascar.

Look South from the southern tip of Africa and there's a solid white patch at the bottom which isn't clouds, but where Neffe Ice Cube has just been -- Antarctica!

Vleeptron thinks this view is very fitting, because during the 20th Century, evidence became pretty overwhelming that the Moment When and the Place Where Human Beings first became Human Beings happened in Africa. Much of this evidence comes from Mitochondrial DNA -- a special kind of DNA, every cell has it, that descends exclusively from Mother to Daughter -- and so anthropologists now commonly talk about Eve, the Mother Of Us All, and they believe Eden was in Africa.

(Other common suspects for the Biblical Eden: Iraq between Tigris and Euphrates, also Serendip/Ceylon/Sri Lanka. Much trouble in both Paradises this year.)

From Eden we wandered, by foot and on floating logs (for short trips -- there's a water shortcut to Arabia and thus to Asia) to inhabit all of Eurasia, and very soon our ancient ancestors were in Java/Djawa in modern Indonesia. On the way we changed colors a bit, to experiment with pretty new colors or to blend in with new backgrounds better. Eventually we shivered in Siberia and wandered across the Land Bridge to Alaska and the Americas. Eventually Charles Darwin, the young gentleman naturalist aboard H.M.S. Beagle, would find these wanderers' descendants in Tierra del Fuego.

And waiting for The Beagle on every island in the South Pacific, and in Australia, were ancient peoples who had mastered The Great Voyages, life-and-death voyages from Southeast Asia to every land-sustaining rock in the gigantic Pacific. Many of the Pacific languages, those that survive, are recognizeably alike today.

Every one of these people -- the NASA guy who took this Hasselblad photo of our home from far out in space, Muslim women in Pakistan, Wall Street Republican gazillionaires in limousines (with their young skinny friend Annika), the grocery clerk who sells fresh fruit and snacks to my Nephew Ice Cube in Punta Arenas (Sandy Point), Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire), Chile -- are our Sisters and our Brothers. Or perhaps just truly our cousins, some close, some a bit more distant.

But no potion of Political or Media or Religious-"inspired" Hate can hide it:

As 2005 becomes 2006, or by any calendar's reckoning, all the Human Beings on the Third Rock Out from Sol belong to One Family, The Same Family, Our Family.

When we reach out and Love and Feed them, and wave "Ramadan Kareem!" and "Happy Hannukah!" and "Merry Christmas!" to them, we are Loving and Feeding and waving to our Family.

When we bomb them and kill them and torture them and make their lives more dangerous and more toxic and sicker, we are doing this to our brothers, our sisters, our cousins, our nieces and nephews, our aunts and uncles.

~ ~ ~

The first widely published photograph of The Whole Earth, as seen from New Space in the early 1970s, was cooked up by a fellow named Stewart Brand, who went on to publish the famous Whole Earth Catalog. Wonderful and Exciting Rivers of positive thought and action which sprang from the WEC are still alive and well today.

Brand thought it was extremely important that all Human Beings started looking at the Earth as the only place we know which can support and sustain biological Life (which, no matter how we try to deny it, includes Us).

There may be other Planets -- Vleeptron, Hoon, Yobbo to name just a few -- which could sustain Life, but they're very hard to get to (you have to know the Zeta Beam schedule), and I have received some Comments suggesting that some people don't even believe these faraway planets exist.

They do exist. When the Zeta Beam is working, I spend lots of time there, I keep a modest skinny little piede-a-terre in Ciudad Vleeptron (in the Poortown Parva neighborhood, No. 44 Biederbeckestraat).

Vleeptron has Planetary Free Medical Health Insurance for Everyone (of course our taxes pay for it, but Health and Life are not For Sale to the Highest Bidder).

Vleeptron aspires to a High Standard of Mercy flavored with a Lot of Justice. Nearly all the time, Vleeptron Gives People A Break.

Vleeptron does not Execute people who have done bad things, because that would make us murderers, and blur the destinction between people who do bad things, and Us.

Vleeptron has a prison. There are 91 women and men (and No Children) in it, it resembles a community college dormitory, it was designed and established by a retired prison official from Finland (Mrs. Beasley), mostly the prisoners spend their days and evenings taking education classes and working through their previous problems with alcohol and some other Stuff.

Vleeptron has wonderful live music -- Lieder, jazz, opera, Mozart, Mozart, Mozart, Kurt Weill, Mozart -- did I mention we have Mozart? -- nasty nihilistic Thrash Punque, Quebecoise Acid Country with Emmylou Harris, Mozart, Math Rock, Geoff Muldaur, and Prince's Intergalactic Orchestra, featuring George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic -- every night at about 30 clubs and theaters all over the Dwingeloo-2 Galaxy. Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band (featuring Ryland Cooder) will be putting on a Monster New Year's Show at Xbg's tonight, shows at 21.00, midnight and 03.00.

Vleeptron has 33 Mosques, 33 Synagogues, 33 Christian Churches, 33 Buddhist Temples, 33 Hindu Temples, the Swedenborgian joint, the Great Cathedral to Flying Spaghetti Monster, two Quaker Meetings (they loathe each other but have to pretend they love each other hahaha), and lately a lot of Peanut Butter Worshippers have been meeting on Tuesday nights in borrowed basement rooms. Nobody has punched anybody in the nose over Religion on Vleeptron, Yobbo or Hoon since that thing with Ivan and Snoooooootzuuuu in minus-44,114 A.V. (Some historians think it wasn't over Religion, but over Ivan's Sweetie-Pie, Umaaaaaaaaa.)

Vleeptron has recently received word of Another Life-Sustaining Planet with very similar ideas and customs called ErinLand. Perhaps this year Erin H. will send us some reports of Life in ErinLand. (She too has to spend most of her time on poor Earth, she's got Nose-Wiping of Kids to do, but manages to take short trips to ErinLand now and then.)

This verbiage has gone on too long, so let's wrap it up.

Vleeptron is awfully glad that (almost) everyone's made it to the end of a rather Difficult & Unpleasant year on Earth.

Since Eve (and her boyfriend Otzi) first became Human in Africa (see image), Humans have been remarkable for their resilience and strength in the midst of adversity and trouble.

We also know that since those First Human Moments in Africa, Humans have been kind, generous, even Loving. If you watch too much Fox News Channel or read too many Murdoch publications (Murdoch owns Fox) and don't believe me, Leave A Comment, and I will tell you how we know that our most ancient Human Ancestors have always been Kind, Generous, Loving, particularly to Children.

Vleeptron, speaking through Me, Bob, and the whole Vleeptron family -- Agence-Vleeptron Presse, NGO Vleeptron, The High Non-Junk Science Council of Vleeptron, and the Akira Kurosawa Intergalactic Zeta Beam Drome -- wish all of you still stuck on Earth the most Wonderful, Healthy, Happy, Beautiful and Prosperous 2006.

And we also wish the same for all the Earth's wonderful creatures: The phytoplankton, the Orcas, the Krill, the Beavers, Special Wishes to my friends the Polar Bears in their times of New Peril as the Arctic ice melts. Special Good Wishes to the world's Big Cats and to the Wolves and all Predators who complete and balance the Cycle of Living Creation. (Vleeptron is particularly fond of Owls.)

Happy New Year!
Happy 2006!

What songs do you sing when The Moment Arrives where you are? In English, we sing that old song from Caledonia. (There's probably some sort of Alcoholic Beverage in that Cup o' Kindness. Probably Single Malt Scotch.)

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days of auld lang syne?
And days of auld lang syne, my dear,
And days of auld lang syne.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days of auld lang syne?

We twa hae run aboot the braes
And pu'd the gowans fine.
We've wandered mony a weary foot,
Sin' auld lang syne.

Sin' auld lang syne, my dear,
Sin' auld lang syne,
We've wandered mony a weary foot,
Sin' auld ang syne.

We twa hae sported i' the burn,
From morning sun till dine,
But seas between us braid hae roared
Sin' auld lang syne.

Sin' auld lang syne, my dear,
Sin' auld lang syne.
But seas between us braid hae roared
Sin' auld lang syne.

And ther's a hand, my trusty friend,
And gie's a hand o' thine;
We'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

a Hanukkah Miracle, also Ladino Hip-Hop, also pancakes, latkes, waffles

Gouache by Richard Scarry (1919 - 1994), unknown book.
(Vleeptron has substituted can of Vermont maple syrup
on table for original jar of honey.)

Ladino is to Spanish and Portuguese what Yiddish is to German -- a frozen dialect from many centuries past for Jews. Ladino has flourished in North Africa, Turkey and modern Israel, as well as in some diaspora communities in the Caribbean and South America. It's the language of Sephardi Jews, those of a Spanish and North African origin, many of whose community and family customs are heavily flavored by the customs of their Muslim/Arab hosts.

King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelled all Jews and Muslims from the newly united Spain in 1492 (a busy year for Isabella). I don't know when or if Jews were also expelled from Portugal. Maybe somebody can make me hip.

Latkes are pancakes, usually of shredded potato. (This is Ashkenazi or Deutschim Mitteleuropean or Eastern Euro Jewish cuisine.) Quite yum. And apparently they go swell with Vermont Maple Syrup (dark amber).

==============

hey hi hi shabbat shalom

please send me your complete snail-mail address.

B

=========================

Carissima [despicableteacher],

Okay, have you been a Naughty Girl this year, or have you been a Nice Girl? Because this may be the factor that determines whether you get your Gift From Santa

1. within 1 week
2. within 2 months
3. never

(If 3., some Postal or Customs/Douanes Employee somewhere between Northampton and [extremely fancy and romantic-sounding street address in Lisboa] is going to have a very delicious Christmas, and then burn in Hell forever.)

Or possibly the package will be X-rayed and mistaken for a Terror Thing, and oh what a mess that will be when the Bomb Squad detonates it in a big open field.

Prayer, in Ivrit, Portugues, English and other lingos probably will also assist the successful voyage of your Gift. But after all the multi-national paperwork and the Sticker Shock of the Slow Boat (actually they promised a Slow Airplane) to Lisboa, from now on I am going back to the wonderful world of Cyberspace, where you click [SEND] and 20 seconds later your friend in Kuala Lumpur gets his letter or image or rap music, and almost never any Bureaucrats in the middle.

Meanwhile I advise you to practice this.

America still believes the Metric System is a conspiracy from the Kremlin (actually it's worse, it's a conspiracy from France), so I have assisted your EuroKitchen by converting, but this gentleman insists these are the Finest Pancakes in the Land.

I've added a few comments; I know you lived in the USA, but I don't know if you ever did much American cooking. (It all came from Europe, but we gave a lot of it English names and pretended we invented it here. Well -- we did invent the maize, the Aztecs anyway.)

Plain Griddle Cakes
(pancakes from scratch)

sift:

1 cup (250 ml) flour

He means ordinary white (bleached) American durham wheat flour, but if you do 2/3 white flour with 1/3 unbleached (brown) wheat flower, you'll get a more rustic, earthy "peasant" pancake, tastier, too.

A pancake is not supposed to be light and dainty like a crepe -- but essentially you're making a heavy Grandma crepe or round cake. I don't think semolina flour is good for this recipe.

For Advanced Pancakes -- still just an honest American pancake, but the kind a restaurant would charge you $1.50 each because of their "special secret old-fashioned recipe," you could also put some coarse-ground maize/corn flour into it.

2 teaspoons (10 ml) baking powder
one-quarter teaspoon (1.25 ml) salt (not needed)

beat and add:

one egg (optional)

add:

1 "scant" cup (240 ml) milk

stir gradually to make a smooth batter

add:

1 teaspoon (5 ml) melted butter or oil

Grease a large frying pan with butter, or with an oil with a light taste -- peanut oil rather than olive oil. Olive oil is delicious but might put a strong unwanted taste to the pancakes.

Ladle/scoop small or medium circles of the batter into a hot frying pan. When they bubble, flip the pancakes with a metal flipper to brown the other side. (Diner cooks love to show off and flip each pancake in the air.)

Serve with butter (the heat of the pancakes will melt it) and Vermont maple syrup.

These pancakes are sure to be tasty -- if you're watching your sodium intake, you can make them without salt and baking powder, which also contains sodium (as does milk), and they'll probably still be pretty good. We never add salt to anything, but when we omitted the baking powder the pancakes came out a little bit on the glue-ey side.

Special note: At the time of writing, this recipe was the most searched-for page on this entire site. For some people, using this recipe is the first time they have ever cooked anything from scratch. These pancakes are delicious!

Copyright © 1997-2005 George D. Girton, All Rights Reserved

===================

Oh I'm so anxious to get my parcel. Maybe if Santa brought it , it would have been in safer hands, one can never really trust Postal services. LOL.

Amazingly enough I do make pancakes, it's a huge success in the neighborhood together with waffles.

This year I decided to bake gingerbread men for my students, they are around 50, so I'm still recovering from all the time spent in the kitchen, but they loved it.

It's the nice thing about teaching a language because you can make it so varied, grammar, culture etc, etc.

So last class we had the gingerbread men, Xmas carols, I brought my chanukiah and 6 dreidels and they adored it.

We sang along Rudolph, of course, and Santa Claus is Coming to Town, as well as I Have a Little Dreidel, and Oh Chanukah, Oh Chanukah. I also played some Ladino Chanukah songs whch for them were easy to understand as it's so similar to Portuguese.

Don't you have Skype or Messenger? After so may yrs of knowing each other I'd really lke to hear your voice. And if you have a cam you could show me your pets and I'd show you mine.LOL.

[despicableteacher]

===================

Happy Hannukah! I bought Cynthia some Hannukah Finger Puppets, I can't wait to see what her family makes of that! I don't even know what I make of this.

But I'm writing because a Thought Is Haunting me from your last e-mail ...

Do you have the only Waffle Iron in the Iberian Peninsula?

How do you plug it in? What do your guests think when they see it in your kitchen?

Bob

=================

Hi Bob,

I'm not the only owner of a waffle iron in the peninsula. As a fact,my 2nd flor neighbor bought one after her kids tried my waffles, but they always say mine taste differently hehehehe

[despicableteacher]

==================

Hi Bob!

The fabulous Vermont maple syrup arrived yesterday!

Thanks a million!!!! I am making latkes today for some of my neighbors ( I hope they like it)

Wishing you and family Chag Sameach!!!

I have managed NOT to set fire to the house yet (because of the hanukkah candles).

Check this link I found of a group called Hip Hop Hoodios. It's a video with a very popular
Hanukkah song sung in Ladino, but they sing it in a hip hop version, really funny.

http://www.hoodios.com/video.html

[despicableteacher]

Eureka!

okay okay i found
the Bryn Mawr train station

The pedestrian tunnel underneath Bryn Mawr train station.

A Bryn Mawr Cautionary Tale: L'histoire d'Oh

Click twice. Bryn Mawr is on the SEPTA R5 Line,

it's supposed to have its own train stop, but I can't find it.

Bryn Mawr is a very fine college in the Philadelphia suburbs. (It means Big Hill in Welsh.) A wealthy male Philadelphia physician established it in his will in the 19th century for the advanced education of "Females," and it still educates Females exclusively. If your sister or your daughter goes to Bryn Mawr, she is either very smart or your family is pretty rich. (I don't know if they offer athletic scholarships, but I know a couple of Females of modest means whose soccer/football skills got them The Full Ride at very expensive private colleges.)

Subseqently for the rest of your life, when you tell anyone in North America "I went to Bryn Mawr," the very finest kinds of people smile, and open the door for you, and ask if they can give you a ride somewhere, or walk your dog for you in December, or would you like to come to a party? It's pretty much Free Good Meals for Life if you were graduated from Bryn Mawr. How much better Life gets than that is largely up to the endeavors and determination and Good Judgment of the individual Female.

Initially the rich dead male Philadelphia physician also wished the Females to be inculcated into the belief system of the Society of Friends (the Quakers), but the board of trustees tossed that idea out about ten years after the Rich Male Physician croaked, and Bryn Mawr has been non-denominational ever since. You can worship Peanut Butter or the Flying Spaghetti Monster at Bryn Mawr if you want now.

When I Googled

"Bryn Mawr means"

I expected immediately to get the English translation of the Welsh. Instead I got about 300 blog posts of My Feelings About Being A Student/Alumna of Bryn Mawr College. Clearly Being A Student/Alumna of Bryn Mawr is among the most dimensioned, tapestry-interwoven, colored, flavored, textured and complicated experiences that a Female can possibly have. But it means "Big Hill."

Down at the bottom of www.brynmawr.edu is the continuously updated

Next Bus to Haverford: 2:50
Next Train to Philadelphia: 12:21

Vleeptron is proud to present the first, we hope, in a long series, although Vleeptron hopes this one's the Worst, and all the ones after will be Much Better. Here is this week's Bryn Mawr Adventure.

====================

Newshawk: Keith Brilhart
Pubdate: Thu, 29 Dec 2005
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA)
Copyright: 2005 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc
Contact: inquirer.letters@phillynews.com
Website: http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/340
Author: John Shiffman, Inquirer Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?225 (Students - United States)

FLOUR IN CONDOMS
SENT HER TO JAIL

A College Student Spent 3 Weeks in Jail After a Field Test Said She Was Carrying Drugs. She Filed a Lawsuit.

She was a freshman on an academic scholarship at Bryn Mawr College, preparing to fly home to California for Christmas, sleep-deprived, with questions from a calculus exam still racing through her head.

In the space of a few hours on Dec. 21, 2003, Janet Lee landed in a Philadelphia jail cell, where she would remain for three weeks, held on $500,000 bail and facing 20 years in prison on drug charges.

All over flour found in her luggage.

"I haven't let myself be angry about what happened, because it would tear me apart," Lee said. "I'm not sure I can bear to face it... . I'm amazed at how naive I was."

That naivete, she said, began when screeners at Philadelphia International Airport inspecting her checked luggage found three condoms filled with white powder. Lee laughed and told city police they were filled with flour. It was just part of a phallic gag at a women's college, she told them, a stress-reliever, something to squeeze while studying for exams.

The police didn't find it funny. They told her a field test showed that the powder contained opium and cocaine.

A lab test later proved the substance was flour - and no one now disputes that Lee is innocent, including the prosecutor.

But the case returned to the courts last week as Lee filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against city police. The lawsuit seeks damages for pain and suffering, financial loss, and emotional distress.

Capt. Benjamin Naish, a spokesman for the Police Department, declined to comment, noting that the department rarely comments on litigation. Cathie Abookire, a spokeswoman for the District Attorney's Office, also declined to comment.

Lee's lawsuit seeks to answer a central question: Why did the police field test initially conclude that the white powder contained drugs?

Her lawyers, former prosecutors David Oh and Jeremy Ibrahim, say there are two possibilities: Either the field test was faulty or someone fixed the results.

Ellen Green-Ceisler, who directed the Police Department's Office of Integrity and Accountability from 1997 to 2005, called Lee's case highly unusual. Field tests are rarely wrong.

'Almost Never Happens'

"I've looked at thousands of these cases, and in the context of trained narcotics officers, it almost never happens," she said. "The whole issue will come down to the field test. Was the officer trained? Was the test contaminated?"

Ibrahim said he waited to file the lawsuit until last week, on the eve of the end of the two-year statute of limitations, because Lee needed time to process what happened.

"She was devastated emotionally," Ibrahim said, noting that the event became a minor scandal among her Korean American family and friends. "She lost significant face with this event."

Many records in the case are still confidential, not yet accessible even to Lee's lawyers. What is undisputed is that she was detained at the airport shortly before she was to board a plane to Los Angeles. Court records confirm her arrest and three-week detention on drug charges. Records also confirm why prosecutors dropped the charges.

Lee, who is now a junior comparative-literature major at Bryn Mawr, gave the following account in an interview this week.

Just before she was to board the plane, someone called her name on the public-address system, and she reported to the ticket counter.

An officer told her that she had something in her luggage that shouldn't be there.

"I was like, 'Is it my curling iron? Because it's metal?' He was like, 'No, something else.' "

The officer asked about the white powder in the condoms.

They were filled with flour, she said, and were silly stress-relief contraptions that she had made with classmates as part of a freshman rite of passage in her Main Line dorm.

'It's A Girl Thing'

"I tried to explain that it was a joke, a gag gift for friends. It's a girl thing. I said, 'You squeeze them to reduce stress.' "

Police stared skeptically. They took her to the Southwest Detective Division, where they tested the powder. Lee figured it would be sorted out soon.

"Mostly, I was worried because I had missed my flight, and now I had to make up an excuse to tell my parents."

When the detective returned, he said the powder tested positive for opium. Police returned her to her cell. "I started hyperventilating," Lee recalled. "The detective was very nice, and said he would test again."

The result was the same.

She said that someone came by her cell and read her an arrest warrant, which mentioned amphetamines. Then police fingerprinted and photographed her. She called her father but couldn't quite express herself through her tears and panic.

"A detective gave me a hug because I was crying so hard," she said.

Police put her into a van for the trip to court. She said she overheard talk about "a kilo."

"Up to that point, I still thought it was a joke, that someone was trying to teach me a lesson," she said. "I was telling everyone my story, and no one believed me - except the people locked up inside with me."

Because the amount of powder was so large, Lee faced 20 years in prison. A judge set bail at $500,000. He also mentioned something about cocaine.

"That's when it sunk in that they were serious," she said. "I said, 'I didn't do it. It's flour.' No one listened."

[Vleeptron is in a hurry and can no longer Delete all the paragraph breaks manually.]

At that point, having just finished her finals, she had been up for
four straight days, she said. "I'm the kind of person who can sleep
anywhere or eat anything, but I stopped eating and sleeping," she said.

Later, she hit a bit of luck. A prison guard recognized her from a
Bryn Mawr volunteer job at Overbrook High School and took pity on
her. The guard told Lee that she believed her and that the whole
thing was probably racial. The guard got her a trashy romance novel
to help kill time.

Lee acted tough to protect herself. She did modern-dance moves to
keep limber. Inmates saw this and gossiped: "Everyone thought I knew karate because I'm Asian." She certainly didn't discourage the stereotype.

Inmates saw the high volume of visitors and figured she was
important. Again, she did not discourage the notion. She did not tell
her cell mates that the visitors were actually volunteers from
Catholic churches in Philadelphia who had taken up her cause.

The volunteers helped her hire Oh.

"I believed her story because things just didn't add up," Oh said.
For one thing, Oh said, the field tests were odd because they
detected the presence of not one drug but three.

"People don't mix drugs like that," Oh said.

First, Oh contacted Bryn Mawr and confirmed that Lee's dorm mates
had, in fact, made the condoms together during a pre-exam session
they call a "hall tea."

Then, Oh said, he called Assistant District Attorney Charles Ehrlich,
who agreed to expedite laboratory tests. Ehrlich also agreed to help
seek reduced bail, Oh said. A day after the new test came back and
confirmed that the substance was flour, Lee was released.

She flew home first class.

- 30 -

ssdptalk mailing list
ssdptalk@ssdp.org
http://ssdp.org/mailman/listinfo/ssdptalk

news article archived on: www.mapinc.org

Thromeouttheframefish, also Einführung zu deutschem Alphabet

I Love My Love with a D

Clicking will probably make it bigger.
50 feet = 15.24 meters

back to South America, back to Fruit

View from a webcam at the South Pole,
Wednesday 28 December 2005 21:59:34 (GMT?)

Hola a todos en mi mass email lista,

No I'm not in PA Pennsylvania, I'm back in PA Punta Arenas. We arrived here this morning after a fairly mellow Drake Passage crossing. I didn't receive any sheet burns from the rocking boat while I slept. The whole cruise was a great experience for me. I have been resting some parts of my brain for the last couple of years, and I got to excercise them a fair bit working with the computers and electronics. I'll spend a couple of weeks in Mexico now, then a month in Alaska, and then ready for my next cruise in March.

It's also great to be in PA, there are trees and grass and a hot sun during the day. I took 3 hours this afternoon to buy batteries for the boat, it could have been a 30 minute trip, but my legs needed the stretching. I ate grapes and melon and enjoyed it a lot since we ran out of good fresh fruit a week or so ago.

Well, thank you all for reading my mass emails and sending me news and messages from the real world. Since I am disembarking in a few days, please send any new emails to my ****** address. After Jan. 1, any mail to me on the ship will be bounced back to you. Oh, and if you got a mail bounced back from the mail server in Denver during the last few days, sorry 'bout that. It wasn't my fault, I promise.

Happy New Year all,

-- dan

Dan Elsberg
Marine {Computer/Instrument} Specialist
Antarctic Research/Supply Vessel L.M.Gould

Current Position (Lat +N/-S, Lon +E/-W):

- 53.28, - 67.14

I Wonder As I Wander out under the Sky how Jesus the Savior did come for to Die

Pastel drawing of Langston Hughes

by Winold Reiss

If you're Christmasish and you haven't been bombarded by too much Christmas music this season, here's my favorite Christmas song; I may have posted it last Christmas, too. I find it incredibly haunting and beautiful. The text below says it's of USA Appalachian origin, but it's also traditionally associated with African-Americans in the South.

Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967), the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, titled his autobiography "I Wonder As I Wander" -- his wanderings took him to Africa, Europe and the Soviet Union as he tried to make sense of being black in a world where nearly all political, economic and military superpower was white. Hughes wrote the lyrics to Kurt Weill's melodies in the Broadway musical "Street Scene," and it was one of Weill's most remarkable songwriting collaborations. Hughes recalled that the German exile Weill seemed to transcend culture, race and nationality in his musical understanding.

"on'ry" is a Southern corruption of "ordinary."

Here's a very talented and moving MIDI to Open In A New Window so you can sing along. We were privileged last Christmas to hear it sung in Northampton by a travelling troupe of The Vienna Boys Choir -- half of whom had colds and were sneezing, coughing and blowing their noses; the nature of travelling Show Business among 13-Year-Olds. On CD, I have a startlingly beautiful version by the soprano Kathleen Battle.

I Wonder As I Wander

by John Jacob Niles

I wonder as I wander
Out under the sky
How Jesus the Savior
Did come for to die
For poor on'ry people
Like you and like I
I wonder as I wander
Out under the sky

When Mary birthed Jesus
'Twas in a cow's stall
With wise men and farmers
And shepherds and all
But high from God's heaven
A star's light did fall
And the promise of ages
It then did recall.

If Jesus had wanted
For any wee thing
A star in the sky
Or a bird on the wing
Or all of God's Angels
In heaven to sing
He surely could have it,
'Cause he was the King

================

William L. Simon, ed., Reader’s Digest Merry Christmas Songbook (1981)

John Jacob Niles, the singer and collector of folk songs, said that he based his "I Wonder As I Wander" on a line or two of haunting music that he heard sung by a young girl in a small North Carolina town. He asked her to sing the few notes over and over, paying her a few pennies each time, until he had jotted it all down in his notebook. So close was the finished song to its Appalachian inspiration that Niles is often cited as arranger of the tune rather than its creator. The melody’s minor keg; minor intervals and unfinished cadences, as well as the poem s questioning pensiveness, make this one of the most plaintive of carols.

================

Earthly Delights: Xmas Carols

This carol was collected in Murphy, North Carolina in July 1933 by John Jacob Niles (1892-1980), a leading American folksong collector, who, it is said, paid a young travelling evangelist Annie Morgan 25c an hour to sing it until he had memorized it. Niles published it in his 1934 Songs of the Hill-Folk. It is often referred to as a traditional Appalachian carol, but just how far back it goes is not clear. Some believe it was only a generation old when collected. Its questioning pensiveness and gentle free speech lilt give it, nevertheless, a certain timeless quality.

Von Berlin kommt das C!

From Uwe Bressem, Berlin!

Legs! Ten Legs! Wunderbar!

Next letter: D!

I Love My Love with a B

Copyright © 2005 Robert B. Merkin
All Rights Reserved

These stamps have no numerical denominations because they're "ketchup" stamps. Whenever Postalo Vleeptron raises the rates, everybody's stuck with a shitload of stamps of the old first-class rate. So Vleeptron issues a catch-up stamp coded A or B or C ... and the postal clerk tells you how much that's worth (just enough to ketchup to the new rate). Vleeptron will appreciate your text or image Responses. Next up: C. Please draw or specify your Monster.

1st Day Issue: I Love My Love with an A

Click.

You can e-mail me your response in text form, or as your own stamp (.jpg format preferrred)

* Begin with

I Love My Love with
a(n) [Next Letter in alphabet]
because he's/she's

* a list of all previous Adjectives (must be typed from memory, not from reading the previous list)

* and finally, a new [adjective beginning with Next Letter]

If you want me to make a faux postage stamp of why you Love Your Love, you may also request a particular Monster to express its Love.

The Memorized List of Adjectives is subject to the Vleeptron PizzaQ Honor System. If you stumble and can't remember all the previous Adjectives, Leave A Comment specifying which Letter you screwed up on.

I miss Silvio (now we got Rubber Richie)

When you're as powerful as Silvio Conte, you can wear a Red Sox uniform and not get arrested or have people laugh at you.

Massachusetts is not a State. It's a Commonwealth. (So's Virginia and a couple of other things which most people assume are States, but they're not.)

Silvio Conte is, alas, sadly no longer on This Mortal Plane, he has Moved On, but for a whole bunch of decades he used to be my Congressman. I liked him a lot. We never met. But I loved voting for him.

He was a Republican. But the local Democratic Party kept nominating a long series of Fooles, Clowns, Idiots and Vanity Candidates -- and Silvio was verrrrry hip to the Utopian and Humanitarian and Visionary Impulses of my Neighbors, and everybody liked him. He was for Freedom Of Choice, and a whole bunch of other things you wouldn't expect from a Republican. When Bush I declared the First Short Iraq War, Silvio said "This sucks" (perhaps that's not an exact quote) and voted Against it. Silvio was a Navy veteran from World War II, he served with the Seabees (for "CB" = Construction Branch, they built things).

One day in Congress a whole bunch of Free Money was being given away to Some State University, and Silvio determined that the Money ought properly to go to the University of Massachusetts -- not to the other candidate, which I think was the University of Southern North Dakota @ Hoople.

He made a Very Long and Impassioned Speech in Congress to try to wrest the Free Money from USND@Hoople and bring it home to U-Mass@Amherst. His argument rested on the Hi-Tek Go-Ahead activities at U-Mass@Amherst, which are renowned throughout the Five Planet System, but he described USND@Hoople as "a Cow College."

Eventually his silver-tongued oratory (and his Seniority -- he'd been in Congress since the Spanish-American War) won the day, and U-Mass got the $$$$$$.

That evening, it fell to me, one of a stable of anonymous, harrassed, overworked night copy editors, to edit this thrilling story and write its headline. I'm boring you already, so I will not further bore you with the Algebra of Headlines -- how complicated and hard it used to be to say something relevant about the story in a very constricted small cramped space which some Superior Editor has already forced on the headline-writer.

But I got lucky. The Conte story was the most thrilling story of the night, so it was dummied at the very top of a page, and the hole for the headline went all the way from left to right across the entire page -- an unusually large, liberal and easy headline hole.

But it still required some brains -- Fast Brains, you're on Deadline -- to figure out what kinda crap to put there.

Conte 'Cow College' Comment Clinches Commonwealth Cash

Later I found out he liked that a lot and had the headline framed and hung on his Congressional office wall.

Okay, YOU tell a complicated short story using nothing but words that start with C.

I Love My Love with a[n] [letter] because [he/she]'s [adjective beginning with same letter]

If you have any responses to make to this post, please Leave A Comment.

I Love My Love with an A
because she's Avaricious.

2 new words

l' Academie Vleeptronoise just invented two new words:

foxic (adj.), of or referring to a poisonous, sickening effect on individuals and human communities intentionally caused by the Fox News Channel.

foxin (noun), a poison or disease intentionally injected into the social and political community by the Fox News Channel.

Unfortunately then Vleeptron Googled, and it turns out these words have previously been invented. We found the first citation here.

This month, Fox has got a whole bunch of scorpions crawling around in its underpants about The War Against Christmas. (Maybe you never heard of this War. That's probably because Fox News made it up.) Vleeptron has no Comment to make about this. Watch Bill O'Reilly, if you have a really high tolerance for fascist assholes. Or Leave A Comment.

We would like to express our Disappointment, however, at the way Fox uses The Bill of Rights as toilet paper.

Oh well, only us Junior Geezers remember what happened to Walter Winchell and Senator Joe McCarthy. And Nixon and his Attorney General John Mitchell. The Attorney General went to prison. The Attorney General went to prison. The Attorney General went to prison. Big white rich Republican guy. He went to prison. Hahahaha. And Vice President Spiro Agnew, he pleaded guilty to federal tax felonies and taking cash bribes, he had to resign. And about twenty other officials of the Nixon administration. Prison, they all went to federal felony prison hahahaha.

People gonna get real tired of this scary mean-spirited loud racist torture bully flag up your butt crap pretty quick. People got tired of Mussolini. People got tired of Nixon, he had to leave. Clinton didn't have to leave. Hahahaha. That meiskeit fellated him AND he got to stay!

It's just a fucking imaginary dotted line for Christ's sake!

Click here for larger, more clear / Cliquez ici pour plus grande, plus claire

Okay, Watch This Space for further developments as the Bush Administration of the USA turns the world's longest peaceful, friendly international border into a North American version of Israel's West Bank Barrier or tries to bring back The Berlin Wall.

Or, in the words of the Canadian chanteusse Joni Mitchell:

They paved Paradise
Put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved Paradise
And put up a parking lot.

They took all the trees
And put them in a tree museum
And they charged all the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved Paradise
And put up a parking lot.

Hey farmer farmer
Put away that D.D.T. now
Give me Spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved Paradise
And put up a parking lot.

Late last night
I heard the Screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot.

("Big Yellow Taxi"
Copyright c 1969 Siquomb Publishing Co. BMI)

btw a Snowbird is a Canadian who travels out of Canada for warmer climes during the winter -- very typically, spending the winter in Florida. There are a metric shitload of these, particularly retirees.

====================

The Montreal Gazette (Quebec Canada)
Monday 26 December 2005

NGO Vleeptron sez:
Send a letter to The Gazette
telling them you think
this blows dead rats:
letters@thegazette.canwest.com

No more rubber-stamping
at U.S. Border

by Michelle Lalonde, The Gazette

There was a time when a car full of Canadians would barely have to slow down at the customs booth while crossing the border into the United States.

"Citizenship?" the border guard would yell into the car.

"Canadian," we'd answer one by one, as the guard fixed us each by turn with a bored gaze. Two or three more cursory questions and off we'd drive. No papers requested, no car search, no hassle.

Of course, the border-crossing routine changed radically after the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001. But more recently, U.S.-Canada relations have soured over trade disputes, well-publicized insults, policy criticism and veiled threats that would have been unheard of only a few years ago. There has even been talk in the United States lately of building a wall along the Canada-U.S. border.

And at the same time, anecdotes are surfacing about Canadians being turned back at the border for what seem like frivolous reasons. In some cases, decades-old indiscretions or slightly questionable cargo have served as sufficient reason to turn Canadian travellers back.

Last month, Bob and Diana Hawley of Kenora, Ont., were refused entry at a border crossing at International Falls in Minnesota because they had a tool box in their car.

The Hawleys, snowbirds in their early 70s, were heading to join a group of friends at their Florida condo, as they do every winter. The tool box they had, a small yellow item with normal household tools inside, is the same one they have always brought along in case of car trouble and to do any repairs necessary at their winter home.

Border officials decided the tool box was evidence that Bob Hawley, who wears a knee brace and has trouble walking, was intending to do construction work in the United States.

Also last month, a pair of Quebecers who now live in British Columbia were jailed for more than a week after they tried to cross into Washington state. The two, a middle-age mother and her adult daughter, were turned back because the mother had a 30-year-old conviction for marijuana possession on her record. Then as they were driving back home, the two say, they took a wrong exit from the highway and accidentally ended up in the United States again. They were arrested and spent more than a week in a special Washington prison for suspected Homeland Security breachers.

But U.S. border officials categorically deny that there is any kind of new crackdown on Canadian travellers to the United States.

"Thousands of Canadians cross our northern border every day, and I can tell you there is definitely no situation or new policy whereby we are scrutinizing Canadians more than anybody else," said Ted Woo, chief of public affairs with U.S. Customs and Border Protection field office in Boston.

Michael MacKenzie, spokesperson for the Canadian Snowbird Association, said his members have certainly noticed tighter security and resulting slowdowns in crossing the border since the terrorist attacks in the United States. But he said he is not aware of any new complaints of snowbirds being denied entry for frivolous reasons.

"What we hear about typically is that security is a lot more of a concern and people are being turned away if they don't have all their documents. You used to just be able to show your driver's licence and be on your way. Now you have to bring your passport and airline tickets, and a one-way ticket is not good enough. They want to see return tickets, hotel accommodations, wedding invitations."

Montreal lawyer Michael Stober says Canadian travellers need to be aware that they don't automatically have a right to enter the United States.

"Going into the United States or any foreign country is not your right. It is a very discretionary thing," he said.

And if you are charged with or convicted of a crime in Canada, he notes, you might want to consider staying at home, at least until your record is cleared.

"I tell my clients, if you are charged today with a criminal offence, do not try to step foot into the United States until it's over," he said.

It is possible to have charges removed from police records in Canada with the help of a lawyer if you are acquitted of a criminal charge or convicted but eventually pardoned.

But if you try to cross the border before your Canadian record has been cleared, the border guards might flag your name.

"They might send you back or they might let you in, but they will have that information in their computers forever ... I tell people -- especially young people - with minor convictions, not to go to the United States until they are acquitted or pardoned, and their record is cleared. What if you decide to move to the U.S. later, or you marry a U.S. citizen and you apply for a green card and this pops up? You could be refused entry just because you wanted to go shopping in Plattsburgh."

Bill Anthony, a spokesperson for the Custom and Border Protection agency in Washington, D.C., agrees that a police record will probably cause trouble at the border.

"Our ability to gather information from law enforcement agencies is so good now that I would advise anybody who has a legal problem of any kind to make sure they fix it before they come" to the United States, he said.

But he added once someone has served their sentence, they are usually admitted unless there are other circumstances that raise doubts.

"Normally, when somebody has satisfied their obligation, they are treated like other citizens, so a simple marijuana (possession) arrest 20 years ago should not be reason enough to keep someone out of the country," he said.

But he noted a border agent has to assess a number of factors and make a judgment call about the intentions of the traveller.

He said Canadians should be sure to bring passports and any documentation that backs up the stated reasons for their visit, including conference documents or accommodation arrangements. But he stressed there is no crackdown on Canadian travellers.

"The only reason we might tighten things up at the (Canada-U.S.) border is if there was some kind of specific terrorist threat. We are certainly not trying to keep snowbirds out of our country."

[sidebar]

REASONS
YOU CAN BE
KEPT OUT OF THE U.S.

You are likely to be denied entry into the United States if:

You have been found guilty of crimes of moral turpitude (child molestation, rape, fraud, theft, etc.).

You have been found guilty of a major criminal offence (murder, grand theft, etc.).

You have overstayed a previous visit to the U.S.

You are suspected of having an infectious disease.

You have a physical or mental disorder and the behaviour associated with the disorder poses a threat.

You are known or suspected by U.S. authorities to be a drug abuser or addict.

You have been convicted of a crime related to a controlled substance.

You cannot prove you have sufficient funds to support yourself while in the U.S.

You have been denied entry into the U.S. in the past.

You have multiple criminal convictions (other than purely political offences) and have been sentenced to more than five years in prison.

Exceptions: If you were under 18 years of age when you committed the crime, and your sentence was served more than five years before your attempt to enter the United States, you will usually be admitted.

If you were convicted of a crime and the maximum possible penalty for that crime did not exceed imprisonment for one year, and if your actual sentence was less than six months, you will usually be admitted.

Recourse:

If you have been denied entry into the United States for a reason you believe should not apply or should no longer apply, you can explain the situation in a written letter to:

Customs and Border Protection FOIA/CSU
Room 5.5C
1300 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20229
USA

or contact the U.S. embassy to request a waiver.

For more information, visit www.cbp.gov online.

Leo Wong is absent from Vleeptron without a note from the school nurse

The Vleeptron Ministry of the Census is disappointed to report that Leo Wong is absent without any sufficient explanation or note from the school nurse.

Those who sing God's praises are a dime a dozen, they keep the acoustic guitar industry thriving. Painters, sculptors, writers, poets who focus their skills and energies on God's glory are falling out of the trees.

But in my relatively long-ish experience, Leo Wong is the only human being who directs his/her entire artistic and spiritual energies on glorifying the Name and Word of God through computer programming.

Or maybe there are lots of these, too -- but Leo is the only one I've found with so powerful and rich a skill, talent and Vision.

Leo runs a joint in cyberspace called J4J, or Java For Jesus. Needless to say, he programs and manipulates his electronic palette using the programming language Java. Java is Muy Caliente these days, everybody wants the community college to teach him/her Java, the heck with C++. Java is Hot, Java is Now, Java is exeriencing explosive growth in its popularity, Java is The Future.

The idea behind it, if I got this right, is that Java programs (or applets) love to wander through cyberspace from Alien Operating System to Verkakte Operating System to Clumsy (© Microsoft) Operating System to Different Operating System -- but a Java applet will have no problem running and executing correctly on nearly every computer it encounters. Java is eminently Portable.

Java also I think was Sun Microsystem's Champion to Slay the Evil Microsoft Competitor, VisualBasic. I bought VB, took the shrinkwrap off, stuck the disk in, and holy crap that was scary and ugly and senseless! I never went back THERE again! It was like some kind of radioactive toxic assaultive electronic arcade video game.

This venture into the bowels of computer technology is being written by The World's Oldest BASIC Programmer -- but not the last! QuickBASIC rawks! BASIC will Live Forever!

Beginner's
All-Purpose
Symbolic
Instruction
Code

-- Dartmouth's Precious Gift to Suffering Humanity, which was Screaming in the Darkness for a Way to Control them New-Fangled Computer doohickey things back in the 1960s. The buzz is that there is more BASIC code in the guts of the galaxy's computers than code writ in any other lingo. And when the Seti Thingies finally pop the hood on our far-flung NASA Voyager Probes, they will realize that All The Most Sentient Earth Bio-Units program in BASIC!

Here is an exquisite VLEEPTRON from Leo and J4J -- far more beautiful that this thuggish, vulgar, talentless planet deserves, but it's on permanent display in the Vleeptron Planetary Portrait Gallery ("the Sznuuurvv"), in the Poortown Parva neighborhood of Ciudad Vleeptron.

If anybody sees Leo, the Ministry asks that you tell him to check in and Leave A Comment. Meanwhile, being quite incompetent at computer programming and writing poetry, I Copy and Paste the following, which was written by a fellow who had taken a Vow of Poverty, and so didn't want any compensation, or credit, or protection of his intellectual property. Right? Well, he hasn't been alive for a very long time, and that means I can post it to Vleeptron.

* * *

Two poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins
(1844 - 1889)

Spring and Fall:
to a young child

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

~ ~ ~

The Blessed Virgin compared
to the Air we Breathe

WILD air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that 's fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing's life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life's law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God's infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race --
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess's
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do --
Let all God's glory through,
God's glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.

I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms' self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air.
If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man's beating heart,
Laying, like air's fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn --
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God's and Mary's Son.
Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! nay do but stand
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows.
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft,
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake
His fire, the sun would shake,
A blear and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal,
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy vasty vault.
So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man's mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.
Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God's love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.

more about the waterfalls of the giant Antarctic Iceberg A52: Fresh or Salt?

Ice Cube leaving Palmer Station,
Antarctica, aboard the
R/V Laurence M. Gould.
(Click etc., it gets prettier.)

Ice Cube writes:

This wasn't the best scenery yesterday, but then my mug can't compete with the good views.

We had glass smooth waters and glorious sun leaving Palmer Station, and we went the inside passage between Anvers Island and the Peninsula ... meaning awesome views on both sides of the ship for 6 hours straight. This morning was a 6 am run in the zodiac over to Cape Shireff to pick up a beaker (scientist) and drop off a generator and fresh pillows for the remaining fur seal torturers.

Nice start to another beautiful antarctic day. We'll do xmas eve dinner and secret santa gift exchange tonight, and we're due in to Punta Arenas in 3 more days.

-- dan

=========================

At 06:35 AM 12/22/2005 -0500, Unkie Munkie wrote:

While the bet was yet unsettled,
what theory could account for the
waterfalls on A52 being seawater?
How could seawater get to the top of the
freshwater iceberg? Some sort of
capillary up mechanism?

reading your e-mails I am this far

|--|

from running away to sea.

B

==========================================

The Scientist replies from Antarctic Seas:

The reason people didn't want to believe that the waterfalls were fresh water was because the air temperature hovers right around 0 C and the sun is usually hidden by clouds, so people just couldn't grasp how so much ice could be melting to release that much water. But it's a HUGE iceberg with a HUGE surface area on top.

Capillary action actually does draw seawater up to the surface of sea-ice, but there the top surface may only be centimeters above the water, not 30-40 meters. There are lots of pipes, channels, caves, and crevasses in the icebergs. The thought was that as the berg bobs in the ocean, some of the pipes (if shaped just right) could pump the brine up onto the surface. Sort of like with the blowholes in New Zealand, or other places where the wave action enters long cave tubes in the rock and shoots out the far end like a geiser.

I had my doubts, but I stuck to my guns and voted for fresh. And I licked the sample bottle to make sure before handing it off to the beakers (scientists) to do their official taste test.

You had a previous request about tour ships down here. I haven't found any good info, except for the pretty obvious idea that the smaller the number of passengers, most likely the better the quality of the cruise. Although with the Drake Passage potentially having the wildest seas in the world, maybe there is such a thing as too small.

-- Louie

Dan Elsberg
Marine {Computer/Instrument} Specialist
Antarctic Research/Supply Vessel L.M.Gould

Current Position (Lat +N/-S, Lon +E/-W):

- 55.97, - 64.46

NGO Vleeptron Galactic Incarceration Report

Gulagniks in the Soviet Union play cards.
Drawing from memory by a former
Gulag prisoner, a Hungarian.
From Istvan Toth's website.

He's in the Jailhouse Now

by Jimmie Rodgers (1927)

I had a friend named Ramblin' Bob
Who used to steal gamble and rob
He thought he was the smartest guy in town

But I found out last Monday
That Bob got locked up Sunday
They've got him in the jailhouse way down town

He's in the jailhouse now
he's in the jailhouse now
I told him once or twice
quit playin' cards and shootin' dice
He's in the jailhouse now

Yodel ...

He played a game called poker
pinocle with Dan Yoker
But shooting dice was his greatest game

Now he's downtown in jail
nobody to go his bail
The judge done said that he refused a fine

He's in the jailhouse now
he's in the jailhouse now
I told him once or twice
quit playin' cards and shootin' dice
He's in the jailhouse now

I went out last Tuesday
met a gal named Susie
Told her I was the swellest guy around

We started to spend my money
Then she started to call me honey
We took in every cabaret in town

We're in the jailhouse now
We're in the jailhouse now
I told the judge right to his face
We didn't like to see this place
We're in the jailhouse now

Yodel ...

*********

So the Iraqi government can't run its jails in a humane fashion? Well! There's only one thing to do about that! Let the U.S. military run the jails! We'll show those evil, cruel Iraqis a thing or two about how to run a jail smoothly and humanely! You won't hear any complaints from Iraqi prisoners when the USA's in charge of the jails!

What's sort of odd is that, in theory, you'd think the U.S. government would know a lot about how to imprison human beings. No nation on Earth has had more practice and more experience, no nation on Earth has put more human beings behind bars. Since the Clinton administration, the Land of the Free has been the world's largest prison system, with about 2,300,000 children, women and men behind bars in a prison, a jail, or some other kind of locked detention facility. According to NGO Vleeptron, which monitors such matters on distant planets, one out of every four prisoners on Planet Earth is in an American prison.

The USA won the Gold Medal in 2000 when those sneaky Russians freed 200,000 Gulagniks from their post-Soviet-era Gulag system. (During the Soviet era, the Gulag was officially called the Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps.) The Peoples Republic of China was never a serious contender for Largest Imprisoned Population. So ...

We're Number One!

Recently I've been hearing people -- Americans -- say, "Well, if they're in prison, they must have done something to deserve it."

Well, yes, I guess most of them did something. Being addicted to heroin or cocaine or methamphetamines -- yeah, you deserve to be in prison for that. Those left-wing wackos who think hard-drug addiction might be better grappled with by doctors and medical treatment -- where is their sense of Personal Responsibility? Where is the Personal Accountability? And why are so many of them black and Hispanic? Black people and Hispanics simply MUST stop being so irresponsible!

But for what it's worth, about 53 percent of America's prisoners are non-violent, the worst crimes they were sent to prison for didn't involve a violent act. (Nearly all drug crimes involve an act between two willing adult participants, a market transaction. If undercover cops don't interrupt, both parties leave the transaction happy and smiling.)

Before we get much deeper into this Land of the Free Behind Bars thing ... it's a relatively new phenomenon, now about 30 years old. So ... if you're an American reading this ... please Leave A Comment and answer this question:

Do You Feel Safer
with 2,300,000 Evil People behind bars?

... but if you're from Oversees or Overtrees, Leave A Comment anyway about any aspect of these things. Maybe your weenie sovereign nation intentionally follows policies designed to put very few of its citizens in prison. So ... are you frightened? Is that scary?

Okay, Vleeptron PizzaQ, Google all you want. Which sovereign Earth nation has the SMALLEST percentage of its population behind bars?

Sometimes being in jail is a Good Thing. In May 1902, a nasty-looking big dark cloud gathered and grew above the crater of Mount Pelée, overlooking the port town of St. Pierre on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Then early one morning the gas cloud rolled down the mountain and through St. Pierre. A few days later, sailors on the first ship that entered the harbor discovered the poison cloud had killed the entire population of the town -- 30,000 people.

They found one survivor -- the only prisoner in the town's tiny little jail, a drunk named Louis-Auguste Cyparis.

********

Associated Press
25 December 2005
[Iraq wrap update 8]

U.S.:
No Handover of Jails to Iraq

by Jason Straziuso

The U.S. military will not hand over jails or individual detainees to Iraqi authorities until they demonstrate higher standards of care, an American official said Sunday, two weeks after the discovery of 120 abused Iraqi prisoners.

Meanwhile, bloodshed claimed at least 18 lives across Iraq, including two U.S. and five Iraqi soldiers killed by bombings in Baghdad.

Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said detention facilities in Iraq will be transferred over time to Iraqi officials but they must first show that the rights of detainees are safeguarded and that international law on the treatment of prisoners is being followed.

"A specific timeline for doing this is difficult to project at this stage with so many variables," said Johnson, a military spokesman. "The Iraqis are committed to doing this right and will not rush to failure. The transition will be based on meeting standards, not on a timeline."

He was commenting on a New York Times story Sunday that was the first to report prison facilities wouldn't be handed over until Iraqi officials improved standards.

Prisons have been one of the sore points between the Shiite Muslim majority and Sunni Arabs, a long-dominant minority that saw its power evaporate with Saddam Hussein's ouster. U.S. officials are pushing to heal the rift as a way to weaken support for the Sunni-led insurgency.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said earlier this month that at least 120 abused prisoners had been found inside two jails controlled by Shiite-run Iraqi Interior Ministry.

Sunni Arabs long have complained about abuse and torture by Interior Ministry security forces. Interior Minister Bayan Jabr contends torture allegations have been exaggerated by people who sympathize with insurgents.

Johnson said that in preparation for the eventual handover of prisons, the U.S. Department of Justice is training Iraqi prison guards. About 300 have completed the course, he said.

American authorities suffered their own black eye over mistreatment of prisoners when photographs surfaced early last year showing U.S. soldiers abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison on Baghdad's western outskirts. The scandal led to convictions for nine Army reservists.

In ongoing violence, the U.S. command reported that two American soldiers were killed by bombs Sunday. No other details were immediately released, and it was not clear if they died in the same incident.

A suicide car bomber slammed into two Iraqi army vehicles in central Baghdad, killing five soldiers and wounding seven police and civilians, police Maj. Mohammed Younis said. A second suicide car bomb targeting Iraqi police in Baghdad wounded four officers.

Bombings and gun attacks killed at least 11 more people elsewhere in the capital, Kirkuk, Mosul and Jbala, authorities said.

In Baghdad's Shiite slum of Sadr City, about 1,000 demonstrators rallied to support the governing Shiite religious coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, which took a large lead in preliminary results from the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections.

Those results have been attacked by Sunni Arab and secular Shiite parties, which charge the election was tainted by fraud and other irregularities.

The Alliance, headed by cleric Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, denies there was any fraud and is urging Iraqis to accept the results as it tries to form a "national unity" government drawing people from all communities.

Sunni Arabs staged smaller demonstrations in Fallujah and Baqouba to support demands from Sunni and secular Shiite parties for a rerun of the election.

In Fallujah, a former insurgent stronghold in western Anbar province, local government offices closed to support the protest.

"We decided to have a sit-in today and stop work in government offices to convey our demands for a rerun of elections," said Fallujah's mayor, Dhari al-Arsan.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a member of the Kurdish minority, sought to calm tensions by saying Sunday that all factions will have a role in the new government.

"The government will not be formed without the Sunni Arabs," Talabani told reporters in the northern resort town of Dukan, where he met with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani and the U.S. ambassador to discuss the political situation.

Talabani said there must be a "consensus government that preserves national unity."

He said the rights of the Kurdish people must also be guaranteed.

All of the election complaints demonstrate the difficulty that Iraqi parties will face in forming a government after final election results are released in early January.

About 1,500 complaints have been lodged about the elections, including at least 35 that the Iraqi election commission said could be serious enough to change the results in certain areas.

Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

ah, just cram an extra second in there somewhere

Long-term slow-down of the Earth rotation since 1830
(in red). The pink curve represents the influence
of the fluid core of the Earth.
(© Daniel Gambis, SYRTE --
Observatoire de Paris)

The Washington Post (DC USA)
Monday 26 December 2005
Page A17

Added Ticktock of the Clock
Restarts Time Debate

by Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer

Time marches on, but Earth is falling behind. The solution again this year is to add a "leap second" as 2005 ticks away, so Earth can catch up with the atomic clocks that have defined time since their unerring accuracy trumped the heavens three decades ago.

This will be the first leap second in seven years, and its arrival will be closely watched by physicists and astronomers enmeshed in a prolonged debate over the future of time in a world increasingly dominated by technology.

Some experts think the leap second should be abolished because the periodic, but random, adjustment of time imposes unreasonable and perhaps dangerous disruptions on precision software applications including cell phones, air traffic control and power grids.

Others, however, argue that it would be expensive to adjust satellites, telescopes and other astronomical systems that are hard-wired for the leap second, and besides, people want their watches to be in sync with the heavens.

Nobody knows how disruptive the leap second really is, but researchers hope to find out soon. "We're going to look at what happens this year," said Naval Research Laboratory physicist Ronald Beard. "If there are no significant problems, the whole issue will go away, but I don't expect that to happen."

Leap seconds are an outgrowth of the post-World War II development of increasingly accurate clocks based on the regular vibration, or "resonance," of atoms as they pass through a magnetic field. In 1958 an atomic second was defined as the time it takes for an atom of cesium 133 to tick through 9,192,631,770 cycles.

At that point atomic time and astronomical time are approximately the same, with the traditional astronomical second defined as 1/86,400th of a "mean solar day," the average time between two consecutive noons.

The trouble is that the heavens behave more capriciously than cesium. Also, the length of Earth's day is increasing by about two milliseconds per century because of the tides, whereas today's atomic clocks, unaffected by cosmic events, tick away with an accuracy within one second for every 20 million years.

Because of this discrepancy, atomic time has been pulling ahead of astronomical time for the past 47 years. To fix this, the International Telecommunication Union in 1972 stipulated that "Coordinated Universal Time" [UTC], an atomic time used as the world standard, could not diverge from astronomical time by more than 0.9 seconds.

The adjustment tool was the leap second, to be added or subtracted at the discretion of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, either at the end of June or the end of the year. Beginning in 1972, there have been 21 leap seconds, the last one in 1998.

"Astronomers wanted a time scale that represented the Earth's movement, and the clock community wanted a smooth scale," said physicist Judah Levine of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, who favors eliminating leap seconds. "The compromise has become increasingly difficult to maintain."

The majority of scientists appear to agree that adding leap seconds, up to now an infrequent exercise, is likely to become a twice-a-year experience in about a century as Earth keeps slowing and the unvarying atomic clocks keep ticking away.

And unlike leap years or daylight saving time, software designers cannot plan ahead because leap seconds get added only when they are needed. The current seven-year hiatus is twice as long as any previous gap.

"At some point this will become so annoying that someone will want to change it," said astronomer Dennis McCarthy, retired director of the U.S. Naval Observatory's Directorate on Time and an advocate of abolishing the leap second. "I'm quite confident that people are not going to be happy with multiple leap seconds per year."

So why not get rid of them? Industry could enjoy the regularity of atomic clocks without risking technological collapse on New Year's Eve. And the divergence from solar time would not be more than one or two seconds per year, perhaps two minutes per century.

"The idea that it's going to be midnight in the middle of the afternoon is just nonsense," Levine said.

Others, however, suggest that the hardship caused by leap seconds may be overblown, if not illusory, as experts on both sides of the debate agree that there is little data beyond a few anecdotes to suggest that leap seconds have in the past created havoc in time-sensitive endeavors.

"The case hasn't been made," said University of Virginia astronomer Ken Seidelmann. "All there is is rumor that they're inconvenient, but we've had them for 30-plus years and there's no outcry. I see no reason to get rid of them."

Furthermore, Seidelmann added, astronomers and satellite operators deploy sensitive equipment on the ground and in space on the assumption that the Coordinated Universal Time signal will match up within a second of astronomical time, critical in decisions such as when and how to point solar panels or satellite imagers.

Still, cautioned McCarthy, "we need to make a decision" about the leap second because engineers are designing satellite systems today that "will be used 20 years from now. We need to do them a service so they're not stuck."

In recent years, time mavens opened a discussion about what to do, and a "general consensus" emerged that "the advantage to astronomy was not worth the pain and suffering of leap seconds," Levine said. "It looked like a done deal."

But it wasn't. Earlier this year Britain's Royal Astronomical Society decried a U.S. proposal to abolish the leap second, suggesting that doing so would disrupt not only astronomers but "all who study environmental phenomena related to the rising and setting of the sun."

Last month, a working group of the International Telecommunication Union meeting in Geneva decided to postpone discussions of the U.S. proposal, which would have abandoned leap seconds in 2007 and let Coordinated Universal Time and astronomical time diverge for several hundred years before inserting a "leap hour."

The working group said more time was needed to form a consensus, and suggested that this year's leap second offered a welcome opportunity to determine whether change is necessary.

"There is a philosophical feeling that abolishing the leap second results in greater decoupling of the time scale from rotation of the Earth, and that this is not a good thing," said McCarthy, a drafter of the U.S. proposal. "But we put up with daylight savings time in the United States, and China has one time zone for the entire country. My own feeling is that we all live with departures."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

momentary truce; pilgrims return to Bethlehem on Christmas

A Christian pilgrim touches an icon
of the Virgin Mary and Jesus
in the Church of the Nativity,
traditionally believed to be
the birthplace of Jesus Christ,
in the West Bank town of Bethlehem
on Christmas 2005.
(Reuters photo by Goran Tomasevic)

Reuters
Sunday 25 December 2005 08:30 am US East Coast

Hope in Bethlehem as
Christmas pilgrims return

by Mohammed Assadi

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (Reuters) -- Calls for peace resonated in Bethlehem on Sunday as a lull in violence spurred the biggest influx of Christmas pilgrims in years to the town where Christians believe Jesus was born.

Both Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in messages they were committed to peacemaking in 2006. In Rome, Pope Benedict offered a special prayer for peace in the Holy Land.

In Bethlehem, an intermittent battleground in a five-year old Palestinian uprising, Vatican envoy Michel Sabbah said there was a real opportunity to grasp, with both Israelis and Palestinians due to hold elections early next year.

"A new Israeli and Palestinian political landscape is taking shape," said Sabbah, a Palestinian and Latin Patriarch.

"Leaving all violence, all vengeance, freeing political prisoners and putting the past behind can create a new land in which we can assure security for Israelis ... and give Palestinians liberty and an end to occupation," he said.

Taking advantage of a truce that Palestinian militants have said they will follow to the end of the year, thousands of pilgrims and tourists came to Bethlehem.

Struggling with umbrellas against gusts of icy, pelting rain, they dashed from tour buses to the candle-lit warmth of the grotto in the Church of the Nativity, revered by Christians as the birthplace of Jesus.

"This is where the whole story began," said Giovanni Sacchini, 41, a banker from Milan. "I feel very safe here."

BUSINESS RETURNING

Bethlehem is dependent on tourism, and the town's mayor said he was expecting 30,000 visitors on Saturday and Sunday, far more than any year since a Palestinian uprising began in 2000.

"We hope that the Palestinians and Israelis will have peace and the whole world is waiting for this," said Yves Chaleon, a 62-year-old engineer from Paris.

Israel's army has eased restrictions to allow foreigners as well as Israeli and Palestinian Christians from the West Bank and Gaza to visit the town.

But for the first time, pilgrims taking the road from Jerusalem have to pass through an iron gateway in an eight meter (26 foot) high concrete wall since Israeli completed a section of its West Bank barrier outside Bethlehem.

Israel erected the barrier with the avowed aim of stopping Palestinian suicide bombers. But it has been condemned internationally and Palestinians say it is a land grab that denies them a viable state.

"In our bitter and painful reality, we use this spiritual and religious occasion to send a message of peace to our Israeli neighbours," said Abbas in his Christmas message. He is a Muslim, as are most Palestinians.

Sharon's office said the prime minister also wanted to push for peace. He is standing for re-election in March on a platform of ending conflict with the Palestinians, though they suspect he means to dictate terms.

"We all need (peace) and I intend to make every effort to achieve it," Sharon told Christian leaders.

Although both sides have long said they want peace, there is no sign of early talks. While Bethlehem has escaped violence, bloodshed elsewhere has dimmed hopes that Israel's withdrawal from the occupied Gaza Strip this year can spur peacemaking.

Ushering in his first Christmas as pontiff, Pope Benedict, who has been invited to visit both Israel and Palestinian Territories, made a special appeal for peace in the Holy Land.

"Look, O Lord, upon this corner of the earth, your homeland, which is so very dear to you! Let your light shine upon it! Let it know peace!"

© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.

Reuters journalists are subject to the Reuters Editorial Handbook which requires fair presentation and disclosure of relevant interests.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The Thing (but it's NOT like the Berlin Wall) (or maybe it IS)

The West Bank Barrier, also known as the Separation Wall, seen from the roof of a Catholic kindergarten in the West Bank (Palestinian) section of Bethlehem.

If anyone can explain to me why the Berlin Wall was a human rights atrocity built by a despotic tyranny, whose eventual destruction was a joyful triumph for decent people throughout the world, but This Thing is a valid, lawful and necessary construct of a responsible, humane sovereign power, please Leave A Comment.

(Associated Press photo from 14 March 2005.)

*********

BBC
15 September 2005

Q&A:
What is the
West Bank barrier?

The West Bank barrier has been highly controversial ever since the Israeli government decided to build it in 2002 and it remains a bitter bone of contention after Israel's evacuation of settlements in the Gaza Strip.

The BBC News website answers questions about the plan.

Wall? Fence? What exactly is this structure?

"The Thing," as one commentator has drolly called it, is in fact part-wall, part-fence. Most of its 670-kilometre (420-mile) length is made up of a concrete base with a five-metre-high wire-and-mesh superstructure. Rolls of razor wire and a four-metre-deep ditch are placed on one side. In addition, the structure is fitted with electronic sensors and has an earth-covered "trace road" beside it where footprints of anyone crossing can be seen.

At-a-glance

Parts of the structure consist of an eight-metre-high solid concrete wall, complete with massive watchtowers. The solid section around the Palestinian town of Qalqilya is conceived as a "sniper wall" to prevent gun attacks against Israeli motorists on the nearby Trans-Israel Highway.

There are also sections of wall around Jerusalem -- blocking off Ramallah and Bethlehem and running through the village of Abu Dis.

Work started -- at a cost of $2,000,000 a kilometre -- in June 2002 and contractors have now completed about half of the planned barrier: a long segment on the north-west edge of the West Bank; two sections either side of Jerusalem; and a section in the Jordan Valley.

But construction has been slowed with the Israelis announcing some changes to the route necessitated by legal rulings.

On 20 February 2005 -- the same day it approved the Gaza disengagement plan -- Israel's cabinet approved the current planned route for the barrier, after Israel's Supreme Court ruled the previous route was needlessly disruptive to Palestinians' lives.

The new route runs closer to Israel's boundary with the West Bank -- the Green Line -- than the original one but will still include 6 - 8% of occupied territory in the West Bank on the Israeli side.

Why is Israel building it?

The government says it is essential to prevent Palestinian would-be suicide bombers from entering Israel and attacking Israeli civilians, as has happened many times during the Palestinian intifada.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government was originally reluctant to build the barrier -- which was first championed by the centre-left opposition Labour party.

Right-wing ministers and their hardline supporters were not keen to build any structure which might be construed as a future Israeli-Palestinian border which left Jewish settlements stranded in Palestinian land.

Pro-settlement objections have been largely assuaged by the fact that the structure is not being built on Israel's pre-1967 boundary, but snakes several kilometres into the West Bank to link settlements with Israel.

What are the main objections to the plan?

Israel's critics say the plan epitomises everything that is wrong with Israel's occupation of Palestinian land and its approach to making peace with its Arab neighbours.

The massive structure is part-wall, part-fence

Palestinian land is confiscated to build the barrier; hundreds of Palestinian farmers and traders are cut off from their land and means of economic survival. Most significantly, it creates "facts on the ground" and imposes unilateral solutions which preclude negotiated agreements in the future.

The impact of the plan has been felt acutely in Qalqilya, once known as the West Bank's "fruit basket", which lies within a tight loop in the wall. It is cut off on three sides -- from the farms which supply its markets and the region's second-largest water sources. Access to the 40,000-inhabitant town passes through a single Israeli checkpoint.

Why didn't Israel build the barrier along the old 1967 boundary?

Palestinians say a fence around the entire West Bank might have shown the Israeli government was serious about ending the occupation -- the minimum requirement for a fair resolution of the conflict as far as Palestinians are concerned.

As it is, the Palestinians argue, the current plan looks suspiciously like the precursor to a structure which will hem them into discontiguous "bantustans" on 42% of the West Bank -- something they believe Mr Sharon has been planning all along.

===============
from Wikipedia
(there's more about its Apartheid history in the "bantustan" entry.)

Bantustan refers to any of the territories designated as tribal "homelands" for black South Africans and Namibians during the apartheid era. The term "bantustan" was first used in the late 1940s and was coined from Bantu (meaning "people" in the Bantu languages) and -stan (meaning "land of" in the Persian language, equivalent to the Latin ending -ia and the Germanic -land). It was based on Hindustan, a term used to refer to the land beyond the Indus/Sindhu India. It was a disparaging term used by critics of the apartheid-era government's "homelands" (from Afrikaans tuisland).

The word "bantustan" is often used in a pejorative sense when describing a country or region that lacks any real legitimacy or power, and that sometimes emerges from national or international gerrymandering. It has been used particularly with reference to Israeli policies towards the Palestinian populations of the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
=============

But Israel argues that the fence is purely a security obstacle, definitely not a part of a future border. Israeli officials say there is nothing to prevent the fence from being moved after a negotiated settlement.

Can legal action stand in the way of the barrier?

Court challenges have been made to the barrier both internationally and in Israel itself.

The International Court of Justice ruled against the barrier in July 2004, saying that it breaches international law and should be dismantled. Calling it "tantamount to de facto annexation," the Court said the barrier inhibited Palestinians' right to self-determination.

The court's decision -- which came at the request of the United Nations General Assembly -- is advisory, not binding, and it has been rejected by the Israeli government.

Civil rights groups have meanwhile gone to Israel's Supreme Court questioning the principle of building the barrier on occupied land and the restrictions it imposes on the Palestinians in the West Bank.

This challenge has not succeeded, but more limited challenges have. In June 2004 the Court ruled that a 30-km section of barrier northwest of Jerusalem imposed undue hardship on Palestinians and must be rerouted.

The Supreme Court specifically said Israel had to limit Palestinian suffering, even if that meant accepting some restrictions on its ability to defend itself. It accepted that security was the reason for building the barrier.

A second ruling in September 2005 ordered reconsideration of the route around Alfei Menashe, south of Qalqilya, where several Palestinian villages have been left stranded on the western, "Israeli" side of the fence, devastating the local economy.

On this occasion, the court also rejected the World Court ruling, saying Israel did have the right to build the barrier on occupied West Bank land, but ordering that the route be determined by the army on the basis of security needs.

Where does America stand?

Washington, still keen to keep alive the roadmap peace plan, views the barrier as problematic because of its capacity to poison the atmosphere between the two sides.

In an exchange of letters in April 2004, President George W. Bush outlined US policy in this way:

"As the government of Israel has stated, the barrier being erected by Israel should be a security rather than political barrier, should be temporary rather than permanent and therefore not prejudice any final status issues including final borders, and its route should take into account, consistent with security needs, its impact on Palestinians not engaged in terrorist activities."

What is the UN's position on the barrier?

In late September 2003, the UN issued a report which condemned the barrier as illegal and tantamount to "an unlawful act of annexation."

In his report for the UN Commission on Human Rights, John Dugard, a South African law professor, warned that about 210,000 Palestinians living in the area between the wall and Israel would be cut off from social services, schools and places of work.

"This is likely to lead to a new generation of refugees or internally displaced people," he said.

Israel has dismissed the UN report as "one-sided, highly politicised and biased."

******************

Associated Press
Sunday 11 December 2005

Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem
slams West Bank
separation fence

The top Roman Catholic official in the Holy Land planted an olive tree Sunday on the planned route of Israel's separation barrier in a West Bank village and prayed for the wall's removal, saying it is serves no purpose.

The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah, visited the barrier in the village of Abud that Israel says it needs to keep Palestinian attackers out.

"This position and the confiscation of lands have no reason at all. (The wall) doesn't benefit the security of either Israel or anybody else. Our prayers are for the removal of this physical wall currently under construction and the return of our lands and your lands to you," Sabbah told his audience, a group of some 1,000 protesters and believers who traveled with him to the planned route of the wall.

Sabbah, the first Palestinian to hold the top Roman Catholic position in the Holy Land, has been the patriarch since 1988 and has often had testy relations with Israel. He said last Christmas that the separation barrier has turned Bethlehem into a "prison."

"We share your concerns," Sabbah said Sunday to the people of Abud, but urged them to keep their protests peaceful.

"Our hearts are filled with love, and no hatred for anybody, We want life for ourselves," he said. "This peace will be possible regardless of the obstacles put between the people."

Israeli soldiers stood on the other side of the barbed wire and removed one of the protesters from the scene, averting a clash, witnesses said.

- 30 -

Hard to get there, but lots of people make it anyway, if it's possible. Merry Christmas!

In good times and bad,
the last stop before Bethlehem.
Photo taken by an American pilgrim.

Bethlehem is the Anglicized version of the Hebrew "Bet Lechem" or "House of Bread." Maybe in old times it was a neighborhood of bakers. It's about five miles from Jerusalem, in Israeli-occupied territory in the West Bank.

I'm a Jew, I believe in the right of Israel to be a safe nation for Jews (and for everyone else), but one of my perpetual dismays and angers at the Israeli government has been the difficulties, obstacles and, in some years, the government's complete refusal to allow visitors into Bethlehem. Naturally the Israeli government says it's not their fault, but the fault of Palestinian terrorists.

All over the world, every outrage, every insult, every sacrilege, every denial of human rights, no matter who commits it, is the fault of terrorists. (Rent and watch Terry Gilliam's "Brazil.")

About ten Christmases ago, at a relatively calm political moment, CNN broadcast a long segment from Bethlehem, and among the pilgrims in Manger Square was the American guitarist and composer Carlos Santana. He wasn't playing music. He was just there on Christmas Day like the other pilgrims and tourists to see the place where Jesus was born on Christmas Day.

I have never seen a wider smile on the face of a human being. Bethlehem, usually in the middle of ferocious violence and political tension, apparently has the magical power to infuse human beings with the sense of Peace and Hope. No matter how catastrophically the world spirals down into the Hatred Toilet, being in Bethlehem on Christmas can make human beings believe that someday even the Middle East may return to love, respect, peace and brotherhood.

I want to visit it very badly. I suppose there are other places in the region a Jew should visit first, but since I saw Santana's smile, Bethlehem has been at the top of my list. Jesus was born and died a Jew, he preached about peace/shalom/salaam, and about ethics and morals, I want to see where he was born.

And my Christmas wish is that from this moment on, whenever anyone from anywhere on Earth wants to visit Bethlehem, he or she will not have to dialogue with armed soldiers at a military barrier to get there.

Maybe a dollar road toll, or a dollar entrance ticket -- the money going to maintain the pilgrim areas of Bethlehem, the special religious sites sacred to Christians, Jews and Muslims.

But no more gun barrels to get to Bethlehem. Any Israeli government which puts obstacles on the road to Bethlehem at Christmas should be immediately replaced by a better Israeli government.

* * *

The Associated Press
Saturday 24 December 2005

Christmas spirit returns
to Bethlehem for first time
since violence of 2000

by SARAH EL DEEB Associated Press Writer

BETHLEHEM, West Bank -- Holiday spirit returned to Bethlehem on Saturday for the first time in six years as hundreds of pilgrims from around the world packed the town of Jesus' birth for Christmas Eve celebrations.

More than 30,000 people were expected to flock to Bethlehem in what would be the largest turnout since fighting erupted in September 2000.

Lining the streets on a crisp, windy day, pilgrims gathered in Manger Square near the Church of the Nativity built over the grotto where tradition says Jesus was born to watch a procession of marching bands, bagpipe players and boy scout parades.

Wind blew the hats off boy scouts and police officers and knocked down metal security barriers. Yet the streets remained packed with visitors excited about spending the holiday in one of Christianity's holiest sites.

Israel's summer withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and a sharp drop in violence this year contributed to the joyful atmosphere, which buoyed the spirits of Bethlehem residents and tourists visiting the festively decorated town. Forecasts of a rare snowfall added to the sense of excitement in the air.

"It's really amazing. When you hear about all the conflict between Israel and Palestine, really I was expecting things to be a little bit rougher," said Stephen Ogden, 23, of Knoxville, Tennessee.

In the first years after fighting erupted, an Israeli army siege and high death tolls among Israelis and Palestinians put a damper on Christmas.

Crowds that numbered tens of thousands during the boom years of the mid-1990s dwindled to just a few hundred. Even the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was barred from attending the celebration, confined by Israel to his headquarters in Ramallah. Instead, a black-and-white headdress similar to the one he traditionally wore was draped across the chair he usually occupied.

Last year's Christmas celebration was merrier than those of the previous four years, buoyed by a thaw in relations after Arafat's death. But shopkeepers and hotel owners still lamented the thin crowds, empty hotel rooms and bad weather.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, elected in January to succeed Arafat, planned to join the Bethlehem celebrations and attend Midnight Mass in a church next to the grotto. Tickets to the mass were sold out, and some tourists had a hard time finding hotel accommodations.

"It will go very well. It will be joyful and a very Merry Christmas, especially since the president will join us," said Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh. "There is enough police and security. It will be very peaceful."

Edwina Webster, 53, on a two-week vacation from Hereford, England, overcame her safety concerns to spend Christmas in Bethlehem. "It's awesome here. To come here is very emotional," she said.

Walking out of the grotto under the Church of the Nativity, she was surprised by what she found.

"I expected a little corner with a little barn," she said, after exiting the stone cave. "It's not at all what I imagined," Webster said, looking around the bustling town.

Although the Palestinian Authority never gave Bethlehem the $436,000 promised for Christmas festivities, the municipality got out the lights, bells and Palestinian flags from previous years and used donations to decorate every corner of the town.

Israel eased restrictions at its main checkpoint leading into town, decorating the military structure with posters signed by the Tourism Ministry. "Peace be upon you" and "Visit Bethlehem and Jerusalem and engage for peace" the signs declared. Bethlehem lies on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem.

Yet Israel's massive West Bank barrier cast a shadow on the celebrations. The structure, which snakes along the boundary with the West Bank, has divided Bethlehem and prevented tourists from walking into town on the biblical-era road likely used by Jesus and Mary.

Shops, restaurants and businesses that once thrived remained shuttered, split off from the rest of the town by the 25-foot concrete wall, which Israel built to prevent suicide bombers from reaching its cities.

Ogden and the group of Presbyterians he traveled with made sure to visit the area of the barrier to see what they had read about in the newspapers, and were shocked by what they found.

"We were interested in seeing how the conflict is being played out in the place of Christ's birth," Ogden said. "I don't think anything can quite prepare you for something like that."

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

"America's Army: Operations" -- just violence, no sex

Screenshot from the video game
"America's Army: Operations"
used to promote Army recruiting.
It's rated T for Teen.

Hillary, Yee, Lieberman, etc.: lawmakers protecting kids from imaginary pixel porn and virtual violence

Tic-tac-toe / naughts and crosses video game
on an EDSAC computer with a cathode-ray display;
a Cambridge University doctoral project of A. S. Douglas, 1952.
Porn: 0. Violence: 0. You can play some of the games that ran
on the EDSAC simulator.

The Los Angeles Times (California USA)
Friday 23 December 2005

Judge Halts Limits
on Game Sales to Kids

One civil liberties advocate observes
that the ruling follows a pattern of
"... law passes, gets challenged,
gets struck down.
Rinse, lather, repeat."

by Julie Tamaki and Chris Gaither, Times Staff Writers

A federal ruling that blocks California's ban on the sale of violent video games to children is the latest setback to lawmakers trying to clean up a medium that is increasingly graphic -- and just as popular.

The preliminary injunction granted late Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Ronald M. Whyte delays implementation of a measure that would make it a crime to rent or sell games that "depict serious injury to human beings in a manner that is especially heinous, atrocious or cruel" to people younger than 18.

The law, written by Assemblyman Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) and signed in October by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was to take effect Jan. 1. Whyte, whose courtroom is in San Jose, blocked that until lawyers for the game industry and the state can argue whether the sales ban tramples free-speech rights.

In granting the injunction sought by the Entertainment Software Assn. and the Video Software Dealers Assn., Whyte concluded that the trade groups "are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the act violates the 1st Amendment."

The ruling comes as the $25-billion global game industry faces sharp criticism for sex and violence in some of its titles. Much of the furor has focused on "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," a game that allows players to shoot cops, run over pedestrians and have sex with prostitutes.

Legislative efforts to keep violent games away from minors have faced constitutional challenges as backers try to extend some of the same laws restricting access to pornography to violent material. Courts have been unwilling to endorse that reasoning.

"This is not a surprising result," said Kurt Opsahl, staff attorney with civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It brings into question whether this is really the best use of the state's resources to constantly put up these clearly unconstitutional laws, only to have them challenged and thrown out. It does seem to be one in this series of: law passes, gets challenged, gets struck down. Rinse, lather, repeat."

Game makers noted Thursday that Whyte's decision marked the sixth time that a judge had ruled in their favor on sales bans. Most recently, a similar law in Illinois was blocked this month.

Nevertheless, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) last week joined Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) to introduce a bill to restrict sales to minors. They joined a chorus of critics who say game violence differs from other forms of media violence because games are interactive.

Studies on the effects of video games have been inconclusive or contradictory -- and have provided fodder for both sides.

"The science indicates that the participation and identification with the violence has a greater effect than simply passively watching violence," said Kevin Saunders, a law professor at Michigan State University and author of "Saving Our Children from the First Amendment." "If not now, sooner or later the science will get to the point where courts will recognize it justifies the statutes."

Whyte, however, wrote in his ruling that California lawyers appeared unlikely to be able to prove a causal relationship between violent video games and violent behavior. Even if they could, he added, "it is uncertain that -- the 1st Amendment allows a state to restrict access to violent video games, even for those under 18 years of age."

Schwarzenegger spokesman Vince Sollitto predicted that California would prevail in what he and other state officials warned could be a lengthy court battle over the measure.

"The court will have a full opportunity to understand why the governor and the legislature believe the state has a compelling interest in protecting children from potential harm from exposure to extremely violent video games," Sollitto said.

A spokesman for California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer said the issue ultimately might be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Although video game sales have grown rapidly in recent years, they have cooled considerably in 2005 as game players await a new batch of consoles from Microsoft Corp., Sony Corp. and Nintendo Co. Market researcher NPD this month said November game sales were down 18% from the same period in 2004.

Complaints about violence have existed since the earliest days of video games, but technological advances in recent years have made games more realistic and involved. Game makers counter critics by saying parents should take greater responsibility in determining what games their children are allowed to play.

The industry follows a voluntary rating system administered by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Many retailers refuse to sell "Mature"-rated games to children under 17. In 2004, 16% of computer and video games sold were rated "Mature," 53% were rated "Everyone" and 30% were "Teens."

Yee's law would require exceptionally violent games to carry a label with the number "18." Publishers that fail to mark their games could face fines of $1,000 for each violation, as could retailers that rent or sell such games, if properly labeled, to children.

Game publishers complained that the definitions in Yee's law were too vague and noted that new technology gave parents more control than ever to manage what their children see on screen.

Microsoft's new video game console, Xbox 360, for example, includes a "family setting" feature that allows parents to grant or restrict access to games based on the ESRB rating system.

"Technology will wipe away this issue in the next five years," said Jeff Brown, a spokesman for Electronic Arts Inc., the world's largest independent video game publisher. "The new consoles from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will all have parental controls so that game systems are far beyond television and DVDs in the ability they give to parents to restrict content."

- 30 -

Santorum quits advisory board of losers' lawyers in Intelligent Design case

U.S. Senator Rick Santorum
(Republican of Pennsylvania)

"It is vitally important that the Thomas More Law Center is out there with competent people representing our values, because once we do our job, it goes to the courts, and in many cases, it gets undone."

-- U.S. Senator Rick Santorum
(on website of Thomas More Law Center)

Save this is a cyber-souvenir! It's the page, clicked fresh today, from the website of the Thomas More Law Center, which defended the Dover, Pennsylvania School Board in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the federal lawsuit about Intelligent Design which was just decided Tuesday.

(The Dover School Board lost -- but they won't be appealing the federal decision because Dover's voters kicked them all out of office several months ago.)

The reason it's a valuable souvenir is that U.S. Senator Rick Santorum just announced he's quitting his affiliation with Thomas More, he's leaving its Advisory Board. So as soon as they get around to cleaning up their website, Santorum (the superconservative Republican who equates same-sex marriage with incest and bestiality) won't be here anymore!

Check out these other right-wing nut jobs. And if you ever need good, competent legal representation in a case involving Freedom of Religion or Separation of Church and State -- Vleeptron suggests you DON'T get represented by the Thomas More Law Center.

==========================
http://www.thomasmore.org/advisoryboard.html

(as of 2 am US EST Friday 23 December 2005
==========================

Defending the Religious Freedom of Christians

Restoring Time Honored Family Values

Protecting the Sanctity of Human Life

Advisory Board

Bowie Kuhn, Chairman

Mr. Kuhn was Commissioner of Major League Baseball from 1969-1984. Since then he has been a leader in both the business and Christian community, recognized widely for his defense of the sanctity of human life, and other political and cultural issues important today. He is a graduate of Princeton University with a law degree from the University of Virginia. He has been a board member of Christendom College, New York Medical College, Thomas Aquinas College, Franklin & Marshall College, the Jackie Robinson Foundation, and the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. He is currently a board member of the Ave Maria Foundation.

Jeremiah A. Denton, Rear Admiral USN (Ret.)

Jeremiah A. Denton, Jr. first came to the attention of the American public during a television interview arranged by his North Vietnamese captors in 1966. Expected to give "proper responses" to a journalist's recitation of alleged American war atrocities, Denton responded that he believed in the position of his government and that "I will support it as long as I live." Throughout the interview while responding to questions, Denton blinked his eyes in Morse Code repeatedly spelling out the covert message "TORTURE." His message was the first confirmation that American POWs were being mistreated. Jeremiah Denton was subjected to severe torture during his nearly eight years as a POW. He became the first American military captive to be subjected to four years of solitary confinement. Denton's extraordinary account of endurance and religious faith while imprisoned in Vietnam was told in his 1976 book "When Hell Was in Session."

After his release in 1973, Denton continued his military career ultimately achieving the rank of Rear Admiral. Upon retirement from the Navy, Denton was elected to the U.S. Senate, the first Republican ever elected by the popular vote to represent Alabama. Denton has spoken widely on the need to restore America's founding principles by adopting laws and policies that reflect obedience to the will of God.

U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (PA)

Rick Santorum has served in the United States Senate since January, 1995. Now the third ranking Republican in the Senate, as Conference Chairman, Senator Santorum directs the communications operations of Senate Republicans, and is a high profile spokesman for the party. He is the youngest member of the leadership and the first Pennsylvanian in leadership since Senator Hugh Scott was Republican Leader in the 1970's. Prior to his election to the Senate in 1994, Senator Santorum made his mark in the U.S. House of Representatives as a young Congressman. He was first elected to Congress in 1990 at the age of 32. Senator Santorum and his wife, Karen Garver Santorum of Penn Hills, PA, are the parents of seven children.

Mary Cunningham Agee

Mrs. Agee is the Director of the Nurturing Network and President and Founder of the Semper Charitable Foundation. She also serves as Vice Chairman of the Culture of Life Foundation and Institute and Vice Chairman of the National Council for Adoption. Mrs. Agee serves on the Board and the Executive Committee of Crisis magazine and the Catholic Campaign for America. She also serves on the Board of Directors or Advisory Board of many other prominent organizations including the Cardinal Newman Society, Women Affirming Life, the Susan B. Anthony List, the Aquinas House at Dartmouth College and the National Memorial For the Unborn. Mrs. Agee continues to speak out with courage and conviction in the defense of all human life, the need for humanizing corporate culture, protecting the family and reforming the society at large. Mrs. Agee is an active member of her parish along with her husband, Bill and their two children, Mary Alana and Will.

Ambassador Alan Keyes

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Social and Economic Council, Reagan Administration Official, and twice U.S. Presidential Candidate. He has served as President of Citizens Against Government Waste, and is the Founder and Chairman of the Declaration Foundation. He is the author of 'Our Character, Our Future (1996), and 'Masters of the Dream' (1995). He received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, and has served as Interim President of Alabama A&M University. Dr. Keyes is nationally recognized for his intellectual and articulate defense of human life.

Megan O’Neill Nini

Megan O'Neill Nini is widely known as a former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Michigan's 9th Congressional District. Mrs. Nini served on the White House Advance Office Team under former President George H. W. Bush, as well as on the World Cup Soccer Committee. She has served on the Oakland County Business Roundtable and participates in a number of professional and charitable organizations in Michigan.

Paul Henkels

Mr. Henkels is chairman of Henkels & McCoy, Inc, a worldwide engineering, construction, and maintenance firm. He is a graduate of Haverford College with a B.A. in Engineering. He is a recognized expert in labor relations, and has lectured on Ethics in Business at numerous colleges and universities. He is also co-founder and present chairman of the REACH Alliance (Road to Educational Achievement through Choice), an organization working for school choice in both Pennsylvania and nationwide. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Governors of Temple University Hospital, Lejeune Institute, Vatican Observatory Foundation, Arts & Letters Advisory Council of Notre Dame, and the American College of Louvain University in Belgium. He has been awarded honorary degrees from Chestnut Hill College and St. Charles Borromeo Seminary. He is a Knight of Malta, and was given the Award for Excellence from the Commission for Independent Colleges and Universities.

Richard Campbell

Richard Campbell is a graduate of the University of Denver School of Law. He served as a Special Agent in the FBI and in legal department at United Airlines as the Director of Government Affairs. In 1995, he formed Campbell Bohn Killin Brittan & Ray, LLC, where he currently serves as its managing partner. He has served as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees for St. Joseph’s Hospital, on the executive board of the Boy Scouts of America, as a trustee of both Regis University and the Seeds of Hope Foundation. He has also served as the Chair of the Finance Council for the Archdiocese of Denver and provided legal counsel for World Youth Day. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Police Activities League, Commerce Bank, Project C.U.R.E., and the Smithsonian Institution. He is also the director of Exempla Saint Joseph/Lutheran Hospitals. Mr. Campbell has received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Catholic Lawyers Guild; the Award of Excellence for the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America; Founder of the Society of Jesus; and an Honorary Degree -- Doctorate of Public Service from Regis University.

Thomas More Law Center
24 Frank Lloyd Wright Drive
P.O. Box 393
Ann Arbor, MI 48106
Ph. (734) 827-2001 Fax (734) 930-7160

© 2005, Thomas More Law Center

Uranus: New Rings, New Moons -- and a very active neighborhood

Uranus and its newly discovered rings and moons, Mab and Cupid.
Click for larger, clearer. (NASA image.)

NASA News

Thursday 22 December 2005

Hubble Spies Two New Moons,
Two New Rings Around Uranus

Compiled by Kandy Ringer

NASA via BBSNews - 2005-12-22 -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope photographed a new pair of rings around Uranus and two new, small moons orbiting the planet.

The larger ring is twice the diameter of the planet's previously known rings; the rings are so far from the planet that they are being called Uranus' "second ring system.

One of the new moons shares its orbit with one of the rings. Analysis of the Hubble data also reveals the orbits of Uranus' family of inner moons have changed significantly over the past decade.

"The detection of these new interacting rings and moons will help us better understand how planetary systems are formed and sustained, which is of key importance to NASA's scientific exploration goals," said Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, program scientist for Hubble at NASA Headquarters.

Since dust orbiting Uranus is expected to be depleted by spiraling away, the planet's rings must be continually replenished with fresh material. "The new discoveries demonstrate that Uranus has a youthful and dynamic system of rings and moons," said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute, Baltimore.

Showalter and Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffet Field, Calif., propose that the outermost ring is replenished by a 12-mile-wide newly discovered moon, named Mab, which they first observed using Hubble in 2003.

Meteoroid impacts continually blast dust off the surface of Mab. The dust then spreads out into a ring around Uranus. Mab's ring receives a fresh infusion of dust from each impact. Nature keeps the ring supplied with new dust while older dust spirals away or bangs back into the moon.

Showalter and Lissauer have measured numerous changes to the orbits of Uranus' inner moons since 1994. The moon's motions were derived from earlier Hubble and Voyager observations. "This appears to be a random or chaotic process, where there is a continual exchange of energy and angular momentum between the moons," Lissauer said. His calculations predict moons would begin to collide as often as every few million years, which is extraordinarily short compared to the 4.5 billion year age of the Uranian system.

Showalter and Lissauer believe the discovery of the second ring, which orbits closer to the planet than the outer ring, provides further evidence that collisions affect the evolution of the system. This second ring has no visible body to re-supply it with dust. The ring may be a telltale sign of an unseen belt of bodies a few feet to a few miles in size. Showalter proposes that a previous impact to one of Uranus' moons could have produced the observed debris ring.

Hubble uncovered the rings in August 2004 during a series of 80, four-minute exposures of Uranus. The team later recognized the faint new rings in 24 similar images taken a year earlier. Images from September 2005 reveal the rings even more clearly.

Showalter also found the rings in archival images taken during Voyager 2's flyby of Uranus in 1986. Uranus's first nine rings were discovered in 1977 during observations of the planet's atmosphere. During the Voyager encounters, two other inner rings and 10 moons were discovered. However, no one noticed the outer rings, because they are extremely faint and much farther from the planet than expected. Showalter was able to find them by a careful analysis of nearly 100 Voyager images.

Because the new rings are nearly transparent, they will be easier to see when they tilt edge-on. The new rings will increase in brightness every year as Uranus approaches its equinox, when the sun shines directly over the planet's equator. When it happens in 2007, all of the rings will be tilted edge-on toward Earth and easier to study. These research data will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Science.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. The Institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., Washington. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory.

For images and information about Hubble and this research on the Web, visit: Hubble Site or Hubble News.

a Christmas card from Vleeptron's correspondent near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia!

Dear friends, associates, acquaintance, seniors;

Wishing you a merry christmas for year 2005, may lights brighten eternal happiness to your beautiful soul.

regards.

You cannot have Spartacus greatness when you were not a slave -- Brandon Teoh

hey smoke this shit & you gonna wanna go down to the 7-11 and eat 12 Snickers bars & Milky Way & 3 Musketeers &

Computer-generated "candy torus."
This dewd's got lots more eye candy like this.

The High Non-Junk Science Council of Vleeptron is indebted to coydogsrock, the last human being on Earth still using webtv for e-mail and Internet, for calling our attention to this scientific paper.

* * *

Neuron [scientific journal]
Volume 48, Issue 6, 22 December 2005, Pages 1055-1066

Abstract
Full Text + Links
PDF (749 K)

Access personal subscription to Neuron

doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2005.10.021
How to Cite or Link Using DOI (Opens New Window)
Article

Integration of Endocannabinoid
and Leptin Signaling
in an Appetite-Related
Neural Circuit

Young-Hwan Jo1, 4, Corresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author, Ying-Jiun J. Chen1, Streamson C. Chua, Jr.2, 3, 4, David A. Talmage2, 3 and Lorna W. Role1

1Department of Pathology and Cell Biology in the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, New York 10032
2Department of Pediatrics, Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, New York 10032
3The Institute of Human Nutrition, Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, New York 10032

Received 17 March 2005; revised 22 July 2005; accepted 5 October 2005. Published: December 21, 2005. Available online 21 December 2005.

Summary

Recently developed therapeutics for obesity, targeted against cannabinoid receptors, result in decreased appetite and sustained weight loss. Prior studies have demonstrated CB1 receptors (CB1Rs) and leptin modulation of cannabinoid synthesis in hypothalamic neurons. Here, we show that depolarization of perifornical lateral hypothalamus (LH) neurons elicits a CB1R-mediated suppression of inhibition in local circuits thought to be involved in appetite and "natural reward." The depolarization-induced decrease in inhibitory tone to LH neurons is blocked by leptin. Leptin inhibits voltage-gated calcium channels in LH neurons via the activation of janus kinase 2 (JAK2) and of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK). Leptin-deficient mice are characterized by both an increase in steady-state voltage-gated calcium currents in LH neurons and a CB1R-mediated depolarization-induced suppression of inhibition that is 6-fold longer than that in littermate controls. Our data provide direct electrophysiological support for the involvement of endocannabinoids and leptin as modulators of hypothalamic circuits underlying motivational aspects of feeding behavior.

Corresponding Author Contact InformationPh: 718 430 2987; Fax: 718 430 8557
4 Present address: Division of Endocrinology, Department of Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York 10467.

boredom vs. good chow: life aboard the R/V Laurence M. Gould in the Antarctic Ocean

Click once or twice.

The R/V Laurence M. Gould investigates the giant iceberg A52 in the Antarctic Ocean. (My nephew Ice Cube appears also to have been contaminated by the Postal Art / Mail Art disease.)

Ice Cube writes from the Laurence M.Gould:

===================

This started as an email reply to my friend Sandy who worked for a long time on a NOAA [U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration] surveying vessel in Alaska. She helped make the charts that captains blame when they run aground. I figured it would make a good description of life on board the Gould.

At 01:32 PM 12/9/2005 -0900, Sandy wrote:

Hi Dan

Definitely add me to your list. I'd love to get your tales from your sails. Glad you're enjoying it. The work all day, sleep 4 hours, work all day thing sounds right on the mark with sea science. Do you all have a work out room? Movies? Too many sweets?

See ya,

Sandy

===================================

Gee Sandy, sounds like you've done a stint or two at sea. Last couple weeks have been sleep 8 hours, then work a normal 12 hour shift. Work out room yes. Movies yes.

The sweets situation ... actually the food situation rocks. We haven't run out of mangoes yet, although the clementine orange supply is getting a bit thin. I ate one apple before thinking, what the hell are you eating that for when there's better and more tropical fruit than you've ever seen.

The meals are really good, Tuesdays is burgers and dogs day so that's not so hot, but friday is seafood (crab and crawfish soup, baked salmon, baked cod, fish sticks, calamari rings) Mostly the other days are different, interesting and include enough veggies for the vegetarians and the greedy meat eaters who like veggies too. Salad bar, although iceberg lettuce, includes fresh guac. and chilean aji salsa every few days.

And the sweets, well I have to admit a bit of glutteny the last few days with the homemade doughnuts. Before that was a chilean pastry of alternating layers of filo like pastry and dulce de leche (caramelized sweetened condensed milk). I had mentioned the filo/dulce thing to Luciano on Monday and it was out on the table Wednesday. Cheesecake, birthday cakes, all handmade. But I'm showing some self control, which isn't too hard with the above mentioned mangoes to hoard.

The biggest downside is that you could spend an entire month indoors. And, except for smoking breaks on the back deck, quite a few people do that. Work gets me out some, and I just hang out on deck for the air whenever I can. And anytime somebody suggests grabbing a print off a printer or finding somebody who's not on radio, I head off to do it because I can't stand just sitting and standing there all day (or all midnight to noon shift as it happens to be.) If I move my schedule around a bit, I should be able to get up an hour earlier and take the time to use the
rowing machine or the exercycle.

Speaking of schedules, I generally get up at 11 pm. (We stick to Chilean time, since that's our port of departure, and Palmer station on the Antarctic Peninsula also operates that way. It's 2 hours later than the East Coast of the US, and 6 hours later than home in McCarthy.) Then it's shower, check email in my room, and off to mid-rats. That's midnight rations. Usually that means breakfast foods, and some sort of leftovers from the normal dinner which I sleep through. I finish that up with some fruit, maybe a salad if there is any left, and a bit of dessert.

The other electronics tech. who is getting off of his shift at midnight shows up for his last meal of the day and we have a quick turnover chat to bring me up to speed on what's happening. Then the conversation usually degrades into some sort of drug, sex, scatological, or horror story session. Feels like eating in college dorms. There are three crews of people on board the ship -- the Edison Chouest Offshore (ECO) ship crew (Gringo captain, mates and engineers; Phillipino deck hands and engine room crew; and Chilean crew members working in the kitchen and on deck), the Raytheon technicians and science support folks (that's me and my 5 co-workers), and the scientists (whom the National Science Foundation likes to call grantees to remind them that they are at the NSF's mercy, and we call beakers). The first table in the galley is unofficially for the gringo ECO crew and usually the Raytheon folks eat there.

The next table is usually taken by the beakers. And the Phillipino and Chilean crew members usually snag the farthest table from the food line -- maybe it's a bit of segregation and maybe it's their refuge from having to speak and hear english. I know how tiring speaking a second language all day can be. But nobody flinches or cares if you break rank and sit with someone else to mix it up or practice your Spanish.

After mid rats it's time to start my shift. I stop in to the e-lab (eletronics lab) which includes 5 public use computers, 6 racks of instruments and data logging computers, the e.t. (eletronics tech) computer and workbenches. There I check the E.T. email and the latest schedule of science to be done. Lately there hasn't been anything scheduled until 5 or 6 a.m. so I either play Settlers of Catan (a board game) with the other night owls, or work on some programming projects I've taken on.

We are basically on call the whole time and so, for example, tonight we were asked to deploy a sonar device to map out the base of the iceberg, several hundred meters below the sea surface. That involved three of us using a crane and chain pulleys to lower the BATPOLE into the water and secure it to the side of the ship. (For those of you who got the photo of me in the icy water at Palmer Station, that's what the bracket was for.) The first time deploying that pole it took 5 of us 3 hours and a drill press and grinder to get it in. Now we have it down to under an hour with 3 of us.

The other day someone came in to the galley during breakfast and said we were going to settle a wager which had be going on for a couple of weeks. The first time we were circling the really big berg (A52), there was a waterfall spilling over the side. It was maybe 6 feet wide and flowing probably 200 or 300 gallons a minute. The question was is it fresh water or salt water. Well now when we returned after 10 days away there are 7 waterfalls coming down, one of them is 20 feet wide and raging. So we backed the ship right up to the face of the berg and two other folks and I held a pole out over the stern with a bucket on the end and collected a gallon of water. It's fresh water, in case you were wondering.

I was pretty sure it would be fresh water, but it is an amazing amount of water. The captain had said no photos, bummer cause it was really cool. Too bad we can't actually see the top surface of the berg since it's higher than the bridge. There must be a big lake or loads of drainage streams all over it. But the temperatures are not much over freezing and the sun only shines brightly for a few hours a week. Maybe the salt spray helps melt the ice. I'm going to ask tomorrow if I can climb the meteorological tower to check on the instruments while we're passing one of the lower sides of the berg.

There are also some standard oceanographic measurements we do, like a CTD (Conductivity / Temperature / Depth) cast which involves lowering an instrument package down into the water and taking water samples on the way up, or towing a multiple net system to catch Krill and little fishes (the MOCNESS from my previous e-mails). Throw in a few requests for batteries or help with a computer issue and that's pretty much my work day. Then at noon I eat lunch, chat with folks, grab a movie from the DVD and video library, and watch it in my bunk so I can fall asleep and miss the last 10 minutes. Repeat that 7 days a week until the science is done and we cruise back to Palmer Station and then back across the Drake Passage to port in Punta Arenas (PA). I'll spend 4 days in PA helping the next crew get ready for their cruise, and fly out on New Year's Day.

So mostly it's laid back, some boredom, a few hectic hours or days here and there, some good brain workouts and some (but not quite enough) physical labor. But the long term work schedule is right -- work a month or so at a time, and take a month or so off before flying all the way back to Chile or New Zealand again. Each cruise has a different science mission going on, and a new mix of co-workers. If I work it right, I'll work more in the Alaskan winter (Antarctic summer), and not much at all during the Alaskan summer (except in May and early June during mosquito season). Now I just have to figure out how to sneak the horse, dogs and cat into my carry on.

Hope you all are having a good winter (or summer for Dave G. at South Pole) and have a happy solstice,

-- dan

Dan Elsberg
Marine {Computer/Instrument} Specialist
Antarctic Research/Supply Vessel Laurence M. Gould

Current Position (Lat +N/-S, Lon +E/-W):

- 60.94, - 53.34

one pissed-off judge

Some people put emblems and stickers on their cars that you can see on millions of other cars. Ring of Fire specializes in car emblems, jewelry, etc., that only really contrary non-conformist screwballs want on their cars or their bodies. This one was spotted on a car in Hawaii. It is, of course, the emblem that announces that the driver belongs to the Flying Spaghetti Monster cult.

.pdf is a text and document format which reverses the Internet trend of convenience, ease and accessibility to information, and seeks to make the Web clumsy, unpleasant and difficult to access. I really hate long .pdf documents -- and I'm not too wild about short ones, either -- but the Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American has been kind enough to wrestle with this week's federal decision Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District and pull out all the really tasty jelly beans from Judge John E. Jones III's decision.

Vleeptron has posted several lengthy court decisions, diplomatic treaties, and other such stuff noted for a dialect of English designed to be incomprehensible to everyone except lawyers and diplomats.

The Kitzmiller decision, on the other hand, is remarkable for its Blunt, Short, Clear, Anglo-Saxon writing intended to be perfectly comprehensible to everyone it's aimed at, winners and losers alike. This was one very pissed-off judge. (Don't jump to conclusions -- he's a well-known conservative Republican.)

For those who don't know, the defendants in this case, the elected members of the Dover, Pennsylvania School Board, were kicked out of office by Dover's voters months before this federal judge issued his decision. (Televangelist Pat Robertson suggested this was the Wrong Way To Vote, that it would anger God, and the citizens of Dover could expect some sort of meteorological or seismic retribution a la Gemorrah and Sodom.)

===================

Scientific American website
Tuesday 20 December 2005

BLOG: SCIAM OBSERVATIONS
Opinions, arguments and analyses from the editors of Scientific American

I.D. and Creationism
Threw the Book at 'Em

by John Rennie

John Rennie has been the editor in chief of Scientific American since 1994, and a member of its staff since 1989. His particular interests include evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and the interplay of science, politics and culture.

The decision of Judge John E. Jones III is in on the Dover evolution/I.D. trial (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District), and the ruling clobbers both the school board and the standing of I.D. as powerfully as one might hope. Here's an excerpt from the conclusion of the formal opinion, with emphasis added by me where most delicious.

[Vleeptron has actually removed these emphases and lets the Judge speak for himself.]

================

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board's ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs' scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.

To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

=====================

Bravo to the judge for seeing to the truth of the matter (although, really, anything less would have been a miscarriage of justice). I'll leave it to those with a proper legal understanding to say how widely this federal court decision may serve as precedent in cases arising elsewhere in the country, but there's certainly no ambiguity in the ruling.

Updated: Further spanking of the creationists after the jump.

The more one reads of it, the more that Judge Jones's decision stands as a classic thrashing of the sophistries and falsehoods of I.D. Pages 24-26:

====================

Dr. Haught testified that this argument for the existence of God was advanced early in the 19th century by Reverend Paley and defense expert witnesses Behe and Minnich admitted that their argument for ID based on the "purposeful arrangement of parts" is the same one that Paley made for design.... The only apparent difference between the argument made by Paley and the argument for ID, as expressed by defense expert witnesses Behe and Minnich, is that ID's "official position" does not acknowledge that the designer is God. However, as Dr. Haught testified, anyone familiar with Western religious thought would immediately make the association that the tactically unnamed designer is God, as the description of the designer in Of Pandas and People (hereinafter "Pandas") is a "master intellect," strongly suggesting a supernatural deity as opposed to any intelligent actor known to exist in the natural world.... Moreover, it is notable that both Professors Behe and Minnich admitted their personal view is that the designer is God and Professor Minnich testified that he understands many leading advocates of ID to believe the designer to be God....

Although proponents of the IDM occasionally suggest that the designer could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed by members of the IDM, including Defendants' expert witnesses.... In fact, an explicit concession that the intelligent designer works outside the laws of nature and science and a direct reference to religion is Pandas' rhetorical statement, "what kind of intelligent agent was it [the designer]" and answer: "On its own science cannot answer this question. It must leave it to religion and philosophy."

Pages 27-28:

ID proponents Johnson, William Dembski, and Charles Thaxton, one of the editors of Pandas, situate ID in the Book of John in the New Testament of the Bible, which begins, "In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God."... Dembski has written that ID is a "ground clearing operation" to allow Christianity to receive serious consideration, and "Christ is never an addendum to a scientific theory but always a completion."

Moreover, in turning to Defendants' lead expert, Professor Behe, his testimony at trial indicated that ID is only a scientific, as opposed to a religious, project for him; however, considerable evidence was introduced to refute this claim. Consider, to illustrate, that Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God. [emphasis in judge's original document.]...

====================

And so on. It's an encyclopedic refutation of I.D. as legitimate science, hanging the leaders of the movement with their own testimony and writings. The Dover case is not just a big loss for the neo-creationists as a legal decision. It leaves the reputations of I.D.'s supposedly intellectual, scientific standard-bearers -- Behe and Dembski in particular -- in tatters.

I was RIGHT! I really WAS Marvin Gaye in a Previous Life!

Not my body -- but an accurate depiction of My Soul.
It could happen. See below.

I usually don't tell people this, but when Marvin Gaye died, his soul flew three times around the world looking for a new human body to inhabit. His soul examined every human being on Earth, all six billion of them.

Until the soul of Marvin Gaye found My Body. Then he stopped searching. And he's been living inside me ever since.

Now I don't feel so uncomfortable telling people about it, because Science has finally discovered a scientific foundation for this phenomenon.

~ ~ ~

The Washington Post (DC USA)
Friday 16 December 2005
Page A-1

Scientists Find A DNA Change
That Accounts For White Skin

by Rick Weiss

Scientists said yesterday that they have discovered a tiny genetic mutation that largely explains the first appearance of white skin in humans tens of thousands of years ago, a finding that helps solve one of biology's most enduring mysteries and illuminates one of humanity's greatest sources of strife.

The work suggests that the skin-whitening mutation occurred by chance in a single individual after the first human exodus from Africa, when all people were brown-skinned. That person's offspring apparently thrived as humans moved northward into what is now Europe, helping to give rise to the lightest of the world's races.

Leaders of the study, at Penn State University, warned against interpreting the finding as a discovery of "the race gene." Race is a vaguely defined biological, social and political concept, they noted, and skin color is only part of what race is -- and is not.

In fact, several scientists said, the new work shows just how small a biological difference is reflected by skin color. The newly found mutation involves a change of just one letter of DNA code out of the 3.1 billion letters in the human genome -- the complete instructions for making a human being.

"It's a major finding in a very sensitive area," said Stephen Oppenheimer, an expert in anthropological genetics at Oxford University, who was not involved in the work. "Almost all the differences used to differentiate populations from around the world really are skin deep."

The work raises a raft of new questions -- not least of which is why white skin caught on so thoroughly in northern climes once it arose. Some scientists suggest that lighter skin offered a strong survival advantage for people who migrated out of Africa by boosting their levels of bone-strengthening vitamin D; others have posited that its novelty and showiness simply made it more attractive to those seeking mates.

The work also reveals for the first time that Asians owe their relatively light skin to different mutations. That means that light skin arose independently at least twice in human evolution, in each case affecting populations with the facial and other traits that today are commonly regarded as the hallmarks of Caucasian and Asian races.

Several sociologists and others said they feared that such revelations might wrongly overshadow the prevailing finding of genetics over the past 10 years: that the number of DNA differences between races is tiny compared with the range of genetic diversity found within any single racial group.

Even study leader Keith Cheng said he was at first uncomfortable talking about the new work, fearing that the finding of such a clear genetic difference between people of African and European ancestries might reawaken discredited assertions of other purported inborn differences between races -- the most long-standing and inflammatory of those being intelligence.

"I think human beings are extremely insecure and look to visual cues of sameness to feel better, and people will do bad things to people who look different," Cheng said.

The discovery, described in today's issue of the journal Science, was an unexpected outgrowth of studies Cheng and his colleagues were conducting on inch-long zebra fish, which are popular research tools for geneticists and developmental biologists. Having identified a gene that, when mutated, interferes with its ability to make its characteristic black stripes, the team scanned human DNA databases to see if a similar gene resides in people.

To their surprise, they found virtually identical pigment-building genes in humans, chickens, dogs, cows and many others species, an indication of its biological value.

They got a bigger surprise when they looked in a new database comparing the genomes of four of the world's major racial groups. That showed that whites with northern and western European ancestry have a mutated version of the gene.

Skin color is a reflection of the amount and distribution of the pigment melanin, which in humans protects against damaging ultraviolet rays but in other species is also used for camouflage or other purposes. The mutation that deprives zebra fish of their stripes blocks the creation of a protein whose job is to move charged atoms across cell membranes, an obscure process that is crucial to the accumulation of melanin inside cells.

Humans of European descent, Cheng's team found, bear a slightly different mutation that hobbles the same protein with similar effect. The defect does not affect melanin deposition in other parts of the body, including the hair and eyes, whose tints are under the control of other genes.

A few genes have previously been associated with human pigment disorders -- most notably those that, when mutated, lead to albinism, an extreme form of pigment loss. But the newly found glitch is the first found to play a role in the formation of "normal" white skin. The Penn State team calculates that the gene, known as slc24a5, is responsible for about one-third of the pigment loss that made black skin white. A few other as-yet-unidentified mutated genes apparently account for the rest.

Although precise dating is impossible, several scientists speculated on the basis of its spread and variation that the mutation arose between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago. That would be consistent with research showing that a wave of ancestral humans migrated northward and eastward out of Africa about 50,000 years ago.

Unlike most mutations, this one quickly overwhelmed its ancestral version, at least in Europe, suggesting it had a real benefit. Many scientists suspect that benefit has to do with vitamin D, made in the body with the help of sunlight and critical to proper bone development.

Sun intensity is great enough in equatorial regions that the vitamin can still be made in dark-skinned people despite the ultraviolet shielding effects of melanin. In the north, where sunlight is less intense and cold weather demands that more clothing be worn, melanin's ultraviolet shielding became a liability, the thinking goes.

Today that solar requirement is largely irrelevant because many foods are supplemented with vitamin D.

Some scientists said they suspect that white skin's rapid rise to genetic dominance may also be the product of "sexual selection," a phenomenon of evolutionary biology in which almost any new and showy trait in a healthy individual can become highly prized by those seeking mates, perhaps because it provides evidence of genetic innovativeness.

Cheng and co-worker Victor A. Canfield said their discovery could have practical spinoffs. A gene so crucial to the buildup of melanin in the skin might be a good target for new drugs against melanoma, for example, a cancer of melanin cells in which slc24a5 works overtime.

But they and others agreed that, for better or worse, the finding's most immediate impact may be an escalating debate about the meaning of race.

Recent revelations that all people are more than 99.9 percent genetically identical has proved that race has almost no biological validity. Yet geneticists' claims that race is a phony construct have not rung true to many nonscientists -- and understandably so, said Vivian Ota Wang of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda.

"You may tell people that race isn't real and doesn't matter, but they can't catch a cab," Ota Wang said. "So unless we take that into account it makes us sound crazy."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

federal judge momentarily halts child brainwashing slide to the loopy fundy theocratic right

Reuters
Tuesday 20 December 2005

US judge bans teaching
intelligent design at school

By Jon Hurdle

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) -- A judge on Tuesday barred the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution at a Pennsylvania school, saying in a scathing rebuke to the school board that it violated a constitutional ban on teaching religion in public schools.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge John Jones dealt a blow to Christian conservatives who have been pressing for the teaching of creationism in schools and who played a significant role in the re-election of President George W. Bush.

"Our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in a public school classroom," Jones wrote in a 139-page opinion in the case, brought against the Dover School District.

Jones condemned the "breathtaking inanity" of the policy of the board, all but one of whom have now been ousted by local voters. "Any asserted secular purposes by the Board are a sham and are merely secondary to a religious objective," he said.

Intelligent design holds that some aspects of nature are so complex that they must have been the work of an unnamed creator rather than the result of random natural selection, as argued by Charles Darwin in his 1859 theory of evolution.

Opponents argue it is a thinly disguised version of creationism -- a belief that the world was created by God as described in the Book of Genesis -- which the Supreme Court has ruled may not be taught in public schools.

Jones said the students and teachers of Dover High School "deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."

The school district was sued by a group of 11 parents who claimed teaching intelligent design was unconstitutional and unscientific and had no place in high school biology class.

"VICTORY FOR SCIENCE"

Christy Rehm, one of the plaintiffs, said she was "ecstatic" about the judge's ruling. "This is a victory for education, a victory for science and a victory for science education," she told Reuters.

Richard Thompson, head of the Thomas More Law Centre which represented the defendants, said in a statement: "The founders of this country would be astonished at the thought that this simple curriculum change (was) in violation of the constitution that they drafted."

Asked about the ruling, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the president has said he believed such decisions should be made by local school districts.

"The president has also said that he believes students ought to be exposed to different theories and ideas so that they can fully understand what the debate is about," he said.

The six-week Harrisburg trial, one of the highest-profile court cases on evolution since the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial," was closely watched by Christian conservatives in other states who are planning similar initiatives.

The Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State called the court decision "a significant blow to religious right-led efforts to sneak fundamentalist dogma into public schools under the guise of science."

But Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think-tank that champions intelligent design theory, criticised the ruling.

"The judge thinks intelligent design is a supernatural explanation, but it clearly is not. So the entire decision is predicated on a false perception of intelligent design," Luskin said in a telephone interview.

"This is by no means the end of this issue, legally speaking," said Luskin, adding that the court only has jurisdiction over part of Pennsylvania.

In October 2004, Dover became the first U.S. school district to include intelligent design in science curriculum.

Ninth-grade biology students were presented with a four-paragraph statement saying that evolution is a theory, not a fact, and that there are "gaps" in the theory. The statement invited students to consider other explanations of the origins of life, including intelligent design.

© Reuters 2005. All rights reserved.

world's friendliest neighbors & allies get nasty & ugly

The U.S.A. - Canada Border

Anybody can unleash a superpower arsenal to blast the hell out of Asia, but the Bush Administration and the "Red State" and Fox "News" Channel wave of political sentiment in America have managed to achieve something extraordinary: Relations between the world's coziest, most cordial, friction-free, cooperative, friendly, supportive sovereign neighbors have turned sour, ugly and hostile.

Six years ago, and for about 185 years before that, the relations between Canada and the USA, across a vast east-west border, were practically a model of Utopian courtesy and diplomacy, free of all hint of military hostility stretching back to a failed American invasion of Canada during the War of 1812. Other than anti-smuggling police activities, not a shot has been officially fired over the border in either direction since, and nearly all squabbles of political and economic nature have been settled by diplomats quickly and quietly. Of relationships between Canadians and Americans, the worst they used to get involved jokes about Canadian politeness (and Yankee rudeness and commercial greed).

Canada is the best neighbor and ally America could have ever wished for. When the Allies invaded Western Europe in 1944, the Normandy beach that offered the fiercest and most lethal German resistance was Juno, the beach the Canadian Army assaulted.

And now Americans in our politics and our most popular news media are giving Canada the finger and showing their bare asses to Canada, and thinking this kind of crap will win patriotic American votes and sell newspapers and cable news subscriptions.

Bashing and baiting Canada, making Canadians hate the USA and Americans -- the stupidest, most unecessary, and most baseless American idea of the 21st Century. Transforming our friendly, peaceful border into a Hostile Suspicion Zone -- an idea which will sicken and haunt the American leaders and opinion-makers who cooked it up.

~ ~ ~

The Ottawa Citizen (Ontario Canada)
Tuesday 20 December 2005
Page A1

U.S. senator revives
9/11 myth about Canada

Embassy demands he retract claim
terrorists came from here;
U.S. TV hosts calls us 'retarded'

by Sheldon Alberts

WASHINGTON -- Canadian Ambassador [to the United States] Frank McKenna demanded an apology and retraction from a United States senator who claimed yesterday that the terrorists who struck the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, entered the country from Canada.

Montana Senator Conrad Burns, a Republican, made the charge during a news conference at which he said the "porous" stretch of border between Montana and Alberta is a prime route for drug runners and criminals travelling south from Calgary.

"We have people who farm both sides of the border. So it's very porous," Mr. Burns said, just days after the U.S. House of Representatives voted to consider building fences along the Canadian border. "We've got to remember that the people who first hit us in 9/11 entered this country through Canada."

The accusation brought a quick retort from officials at the Canadian Embassy, who have repeatedly tried to dispel the inaccurate claim that some of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 snuck into the U.S. from Canada. "We are in contact with the senator's office and will be seeking a retraction," said Bernard Etsinger, Mr. McKenna's spokesman.

J.P. Pendleton, a spokesman for Mr. Burns, last night said the senator wanted to speak directly with embassy officials before making any statement.

The accusation comes in the midst of a highly charged election campaign that has seen several clashes between Prime Minister Paul Martin and U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins.

The war of words seems to have soured Canada-U.S. relations, to the point where one conservative U.S. media commentator described Canada last week as "a stalker" and a "retarded cousin."

Mr. McKenna and his predecessor, Michael Kergin, have been bedevilled over the urban legend -- reported in several American newspapers following the 9/11 attacks -- that the hijackers crossed into the country from Canada.

In April, former House of Representatives speaker Newt Gingrich apologized after making the claim on Fox News Channel.

But Mr. Burns' comments come at a particularly sensitive time in Canada-U.S. relations on border security issues. The Bush administration this year announced a plan to require Canadians entering the U.S. to present a passport or other secure document -- an initiative that the [Canadian] federal government says threatens cross-border tourism and trade.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to consider erecting "physical barriers" along the border, as exist along the U.S. border with Mexico. That measure was included in a sweeping immigration bill clearing the way for the construction of an additional 1,100-kilometre-long fence along the Mexican border.

That move came after several recent quarrels between Mr. Martin and Mr. Wilkins over climate change, handguns and softwood lumber. Mr. Wilkins warned Mr. Martin last week to tone down his anti-U.S. rhetoric, or risk hurting bilateral relations. But Mr. Martin was unrepentant, saying he would "not be dictated to" by the United States and his hard line appears to be resonating with some voters.

However, Mr. Martin's comments have, in turn, prompted some Canada-bashing by right-wing media commentators south of the border. In particular, MSNBC host Tucker Carlson let loose a string of anti-Canada rants last week.

"Anybody with any ambition at all, or intelligence, has left Canada and is now living in New York," he said.

"Canada is a sweet country. It is like your retarded cousin you see at Thanksgiving and sort of pat him on the head. You know, he's nice, but you don't take him seriously. That's Canada."

Mr. Carlson also said it's pointless to tell Canada to stop criticizing the United States. "It only eggs them on. Canada is essentially a stalker, stalking the United States, right? Canada has little pictures of us in its bedroom, right?

"It's unrequited love between Canada and the United States. We, meanwhile, don't even know Canada's name. We pay no attention at all," he said.

Douglas MacKinnon, a press secretary to former Republican senator Bob Dole, also recently accused Canada of harbouring terrorists.

"Can Canada really be considered our friend anymore?" he asked in a recent commentary in the right-wing Washington Times newspaper.

"What other question can be asked when the Canadian government not only willingly allows Islamic terrorists into their country, but does nothing to stop them from entering our nation?"

Meanwhile yesterday, Mr. Burns joined several other senators in hailing $1.14 billion in new funding that has been included in an omnibus military-spending bill expected to come to a vote in the Senate this week. The funding, primarily directed at strengthening security along the United States' southern border, includes $120 million U.S. for new border patrol stations and checkpoints, $490 million for new surveillance helicopters and aircraft, and $60 million for new border-patrol vehicles.

"My interest in this is we have 570 miles of Canadian border," Mr. Burns said. "That border is very porous. In fact, a lot of the crossings that operate, say, from sun-up to sundown, when they close, they just stick a cone in the middle of the road that says 'Closed.' "

He said senators have deep concerns because of lax security along "this corridor that comes down from Calgary all the way to Denver."

He called it "the main route to Salt Lake City (for) drug runners and criminals."

Mr. Burns has been a frequent critic of Canada in recent years. He led congressional opposition to re-opening the U.S. border to imports of live cattle from Canada.

Copyright 2005 The Ottawa Citizen

~ ~ ~

The Toronto Star (Ontario Canada)
Tuesday 20 December 2005

Cheap talk in the land of the free

Insults, and just plain ignorance,
fly Canada's way

Surprisingly blunt comments
sparked by chilly relations

by Tim Harper

WASHINGTON -- One South Carolinian view of Canada-U.S. relations came from American Ambassador David Wilkins, wrapped in diplomatic language where warnings mixed with reminders of friendship.

Here's another view:

"Ambassador Wilkins is not trying to dictate to you," says Bob McAlister in his blog Politically Incorrect, published on The State website in the capital of Columbia.

"He is very gently trying to remind you that you and your ungrateful subjects have had your butts saved by the good old U.S. of A. more times than can be counted.

"What do we get in return? Left-wing sermons and nutty ideas.

"You have become socialists. You hate us. You hate everything American."

In case we missed the point, McAlister, a journalist, contributor to broadcasts of the evangelical Focus on the Family and political consultant to U.S. President George W. Bush, tells his readers we're [i.e., Canadians are] "sick."

"Here's to hoping he (Wilkins) keeps his spit polished shoes up their rear ends," he said.

He's not alone.

Oh, they're talking about us down here now.

When the Paul Martin government fell, a regular personality on a National Public Radio quiz show, "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me" guessed he was the prime minister of The Netherlands.

At first, the jokes were mild, corny at best.

"If a government falls in Canada and there's nobody there to hear it, what's with that, eh?" asked Michael Feldman on his NPR [National Public Radio] show, "Whad'Ya Know?"

Jon Stewart tweaked us on The Daily Show, using Toronto-born Samantha Bee to answer the question, "What's a Canada?" and getting her to say 'eh.'

Even before the Canadian election, chilly bilateral relations were sparking some surprisingly blunt talk.

Taking questions following a widely reported October speech, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, referred to comments made by former prime minister Kim Campbell when the two were on a panel together.

"She said, 'we're not anti-American, we're scared; we're scared to death the giant has no head,'" Wilkerson recalled for his Washington audience.

"Well, I could have been very cynical and looked back at Kim and said -- because I have the experience to say it -- 'well, as long as you sit behind our military up there in Canada, don't do a damn thing, eviscerate your own military and continue to look like you're the world's pacifist nation, you're getting what you deserve.'

"That's not what I said to her."

But after Martin went out of his way to criticize the U.S. environmental record at the recent international global warming conference in Montreal, the stakes were upped.

"Canada is a sweet country," conservative commentator Tucker Carlson told his MSNBC audience last week, one of a series of instances cited by Media Matters for America, a non-profit organization which says it documents "conservative misinformation."

"It is like the retarded cousin you see at Thanksgiving and sort of pat him on the head.

Oft-heard myth here says the 9/11 hijackers entered the U.S. from Canada "You know, he's nice, but you don't really take him seriously. That's Canada."

He also referred to Canada as "a stalker" obsessed with the United States, a country which pays it no attention at all in return.

Douglas MacKinnon, a press aide from 1998 to 2003 to Republican senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole of Kansas, told readers of the right-wing Washington Times last week that he was "pained" to ask the question of whether Canada can really be considered Washington's 'friend' any longer.

"That said," he wrote, "what other question can be asked when the Canadian government not only willingly allows Islamic terrorists into their country, but does nothing to stop them from entering our nation?"

And the criticism and misinformation come not only from commentators.

Yesterday Conrad Burns, a third-term Republican senator from Montana, repeated -- without challenge -- the oft-heard myth here that the terrorists who attacked the U.S. in 2001 "entered this country through Canada."

In fact, all [the 9-11 terrorists] had entered the U.S. legally.

Neil Cavuto, a Fox News anchor who has long delighted in poking Canada, asked rhetorically last week whether Canada has "gotten a bit too big for its britches."

Cavuto asked Canadian political analyst Patrice Brunet "whether the Canadian people hate America as much as your politicians seem to?"

Brunet assured him they didn't.

Yesterday, The Washington Post suggested Canadians still feel warmly toward Americans, but are cool to Bush's foreign policy.

"That's about right," said Robert Pastor, director of the Center for North American Studies at Washington's American University.

"Americans feel warmly about Canadians and are cool to Bush's foreign policy, too."

Pastor suggested Canadians not take the talk-show gabbing too seriously.

"You wouldn't want to go to Thanksgiving dinner with Tucker Carlson, anyway," he said.

Not all the attention is derogatory.

Readers of The Hill, a widely read newspaper on Capitol Hill, were given a full-page analysis of the Canadian election by Oxford Analytica, an international consulting firm.

They were told that if Stephen Harper loses again, the Conservative leadership could go to the "more moderate" Peter MacKay and if Martin loses, his job would be chased by prospective Liberal MP Michael Ignatieff or Canadian ambassador to the U.S. Frank McKenna.

It said relations between Martin and Bush reached a "new low" as a result of comments made in Montreal by the Prime Minister, but speculated that a re-elected Martin would appoint either Ignatieff or Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan as the new foreign minister.

"If the Conservatives pull off a major upset," it told Capitol Hill readers, relations with Washington would dramatically improve.

"However, chronic trade disputes would still hinder bilateral relations."

Copyright 2005 The Toronto Star

~ ~ ~

The Star Tribune (Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota USA)
Saturday 17 December 2005

Septuagenarian Canadian
snowbirds can't evade
vigilant U.S. border cops

by Doug Grow, Star Tribune

Those leaky national borders so many people fret about?

Not, apparently, a Minnesota problem -- at least in International Falls, where agents of the United States Customs and Border Protection are cracking down on people who might seem like innocents to the untrained among us.

Take the case of Canadians Bob and Diana Hawley. On Nov. 2, they approached the border as they have for the past 20 years. The Kenora, Ontario, couple was headed to what they consider their winter home, an $850-a-month condo in Panama City, Fla.

The same group of people -- a blend of Americans and Canadians -- has been gathering at the same complex for years.

"We're like family," said Diana Hawley.

The family will be a little smaller this year. The Hawleys were -- gasp! -- attempting to transport a small yellow box of tools across the border. Agents spotted the toolbox and told the couple they were not welcome to enter the United States.

"They said we must be going to Florida to do work," Diana Hawley said. "We tried to tell them that we always carry the toolbox in the car. If there's a breakdown, we might need it. And once we get to Panama City we might want to hang a picture or change a light bulb."

For the first hour of the interrogation, the Hawleys kept thinking this was just a misunderstanding. They have a hard time seeing how they can be confused with construction workers. He's 71, she's 70. He wears a knee brace and doesn't get around so easily.

By the second hour, they knew it was serious.

"And we knew we were in real trouble when they photographed us and fingerprinted us," she said.

Then U.S. officials shipped the Hawleys back to Canada. When they stopped at the customs office on the Canadian side of the border, Diana Hawley got emotional. "The girl at Canadian customs said, 'Why were you refused?' I just started to cry."

The Canadian customs official was stunned. A little yellow toolbox?

Going home was not simple. The Hawleys had to cancel the U.S. health insurance they purchase each year. They had to cancel their reservation at the condo. And on and on.

But, surprisingly, the Hawleys still would like to come back to the U.S. They've written letters to a number of U.S. politicians trying to figure out how they can get their good names back.

"We lay awake at night asking ourselves, 'What did we do wrong?' " she said. "We want our names cleared."

Those efforts so far have been futile.

On Tuesday, the Hawleys received a letter from Mary Delaquis, a Border Protection supervisor.

"... You had been and intended to perform service in the U.S., therefore, you were not eligible to be admitted," she wrote. "The officers were correct."

Mike Miln, a public affairs officer with Border Protection's Seattle office, scoffed at the notion that border agents might have made a mistake. "Our officers make determinations of the facts in front of them," he said.

He did say the Hawleys can reapply for entry by showing up at International Falls again.

Not surprisingly, the hammerin' Hawleys are a little nervous about closing their home and heading to the border with a red flag on their names.

"We think we need our names cleared first," said Diana Hawley. "We don't know what they might find in our car this time."

Doug Grow: dgrow@startribune.com
Copyright 2005 Star Tribune. All rights reserved

Greenpeace TV advertisement about polar bears and Global Warming: It's The Real Thing

check out greenpeace's polar bear add attached to the campaign: http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/global-warming-it-s-the-real

--
Posted by Anonymous to Welcome to Vleeptron! Passport & Visa, please. Retina Scan, News, Weather & Sports at 12/19/2005 12:24:10 PM

=======================

Thanks, Anonymous!

The Dudette or Dude is right! Go here

... then scroll down to see the TV advertisement. It's an animated cartoon -- but it's rather spooky.

Of course what's really happening to polar bears in Arctic waters is a lot spookier.

Bush TV Speech Analysis <-- Hi-Class Political Blog!

Click all you want, I don't know what'll happen.

Vleeptron continues in its modest ambitions to be taken seriously as a Political Blog and an influential world NGO. If you love and admire Vleeptron, please post links to Vleeptron on all the hot sexy political blogs that everybody reads.

Last night The President of the United States gave a live television address to the nation about Iraq. For the next several hours, all the major American television news channels broadcast detailed analyses of the speech, with guest commentators, journalists, retired senior military officers, members of Congress of both major parties, professional national security consultants -- The Usual Suspects, as long as they weren't Iraqi or Muslims or Foreigners. And of course it's still going on on C-Span and Fox. (Novak just got booted from CNN and is headed for Fox.)

President Bush succeeded in one major goal of the speech -- his first prime-time television address to the nation in three years. He didn't want to talk about the revelation that he ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on the electronic communications (phone, e-mail) of American citizens and others originating within the United States without first seeking a warrant from a federal judge as required by the U.S. Constitution (the Fourth Amendment, see below), so he didn't.

He just wanted to talk about the Happy News from Iraq (the parliamentary election), so he did. It wasn't a press conference or an interview with a real journalist, so he didn't have to talk about anything he didn't want to talk about.

The great triumph of his speech is that in the spew of network analyses that followed (not just Fox), adults who are allowed to roam around outside unsupervised spoke as if the President had actually made some sense and said some important foreign policy things worthy of serious consideration.

And now the Analysis from Vleeptron, NGO Vleeptron, and Agence Vleeptron-Presse. [ADVISORY: All News Agencies and Heavy-Duty Political Blogs may quote, with appropriate Credit.]

1. President Bush said absolutely nothing new.

2. American foreign and military policy in the region is a car sliding out of control on sheet ice at 70 miles per hour, and the driver is smiling and telling the passengers that wonderful things are momentarily about to happen to America and the region.

3. He warned against Defeatist Talk. So did Hitler after the Allies invaded continental Europe and started marching east while the Russian Army was marching west in 1944.

4. He said things would get worse if the US withdrew its troops from Iraq. Hahahahahahahaha.

5. He acknowledged that the US intelligence (weapons of mass destruction, Iraqi nuclear weapons, Iraqi assistance to al-Qaeda, etc.) that formed his decision to invade Iraq was completely wrong and erroneous, but said the invasion was a fine decision anyway.

An important dimension of the warrantless domestic wiretaps which Bush ordered is that, for the first time, he's been caught doing something which rises to the level of an impeachable high crime in the on-the-record opinions of a very substantial number of U.S. Senators of Both Major Parties. Immediately following the revelation of the warrantless wiretaps, the U.S. Senate refused to re-authorize the Patriot Act (after the House of Representatives had passed it).

This is a pre-impeachment Test Vote. To be impeached, the House will have to pass articles of impeachment -- and the House is far from politically ready to do this.

But if they do and there's a trial in the Senate, the Senate is clearly bubbling up sufficient bipartisan votes to convict and remove the guy. The principle that is attracting Republicans -- on paper, Bush's loyal supporters in Congress -- to start thinking that's it's time to show this guy the EXIT sign is that No President Is Above The Law. The last guy who thought he was Above The Law had to leave. (Nixon, not Clinton. Clinton didn't have to leave.)

But of course Bush didn't talk about the warrantless domestic wiretaps. He just wanted to share all the wonderful Happy News happening in Iraq with the American people.

Well, it's the classic American political dilemma: Is the guy crazy, is the guy lying, or is the guy incredibly stupid? If you have a fourth possibility, please Leave A Comment.

In previewing the wonderful things soon to flower and blossom in Iraq, Bush painted a portrait of a pro-American Western-style secular parliamentary democracy right there in the middle of Muslim Asia. The fundamentalist America-hating Caliphate would be thwarted, and from the democratic secular seed the US had established with its military Shock and Awe for the overhwelmingly grateful Iraqi people, a movement to demand similar secular democracies will arise and spread through the Muslim world.

Vleeptron would describe this as The Flying Pigs Scenario.

Or maybe The Identical Twin Redheaded Freckled Cheerleaders in Bob's Hot Tub Scenario.

Coming soon, Bush said, to an Asia near you. Watch for it momentarily. Don't do any foolish political thing to thwart this inevitability, like demanding that American troops be brought home quick.

As he grappled with Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson (not known for taking LSD, which was becoming popular at the time) was convinced that if he could just invite Ho Chi Minh to his ranch for a week of down-home Texas-style barbecue and diplomacy, he could offer Ho Chi Minh a huge package of American economic generosity which the President of North Vietnam would immediately accept, the war would end immediately, and an era of friendship, understanding and cooperation between Hanoi and Washington would immediately commence.

There's something about sitting in the Oval Office -- possibly in the air or the water -- that produces bizzare hallucinations about the objective world beyond America's borders. Not to mention a culture of profound presidential isolation. Increasingly, serious analysts are noting that Bush detests hearing Bad News from any of his subordinates. If you want to stay on The Bush White House Team, don't ever upset him with any Bad News. If you know any Bad News, or read any Bad News in the paper that morning, keep your mouth shut about it, let somebody else (who doesn't mind being fired) break it to the Commander-in-Chief.

Basically, it's a rather simple piece of shit. He screwed up by invading Iraq, 2000-plus American soldiers are dead -- most after active military combat ended and victory was declared -- Iraq is erupting into a violent religious/ethnic civil war (which the new US-trained Iraqi military and police are a partisan death squad party to) -- and now the Commander-in-Chief who said Let's Do It! is stuck with the piece of shit, and can't turn it off or shove it back into the toothpaste tube.

Although he can't run for president again, if he tells the American people he screwed up, and accepts an end to the American military presence, no Republican candidate will stand a chance in 2008. (Democrats, who enabled and cooperated with his war decision, won't smell like roses either, but voters will have violently angry thoughts of revenge primarily against the Bush-loving Republicans who rubber-stamped and praised his catastrophe.)

It's the Nixon White House all over again, isolated, out of touch with Reality, paranoid, circling the wagons, breaking serious criminal laws (not just lying about a seedy little blow job), Above The Law, a scandal-linked grand jury subpoena in every morning's mail, angry investigations in the Senate over a broad spectrum of issues which, until Bush, have been universally regared by the body politic as Beyond The Pale, Verboten, Interdit, Not Kosher.

Next Stop: Impeachment.

Also our combat military resources, regular and Reserve/National Guard, are exhausted and overextended, so maybe, just before the Impeachment, Bush and Rumsfeld will bring the draft back, and Rove will call it The Power Freedom Volunteer Patriot Corps.

As you search the Blogosphere for Political Analysis you can Trust, Remember: Of all bloggers, only Vleeptron is old enough to remember any of this crap. The iPod bloggers are much spiffier dressers, and they know who Jessica Simpson is, but they're sooooooooo clueless about history and politics. The iPod People think all this weird crap is Something New. Hahahahaha.

* * *

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Please help these kids -- and help yourself! Vleeptron receives its first cry for help from a refugee camp.

If you Google for "Danani," this sucker is all over the Web, it's the "Brokeback Mountain" and "Narnia" and "King Kong" of scam letters this week. Palm d'Or and Golden Globe Best Scam Letter of 2005.

==================

FROM STANLEY AND LINDA TABOH.
Avenu 12 Rue 47 ABIDJAN
DANANI REFUGEE CAMP, ABIDJAN
REPUBLIC OF COTE-D'IVOIRE
TEL:+225 05398535.
PLEASE FOR SECURITY REASON AND POOR INTERNET HERE, REPLY TO THIS EMAIL ADDRESS (stanleytaboh3@terra.com)

Dear ,

We are Stanley and Linda the children of Late General Malick Taboh the former Director of military inteligence and special acting General Manager of the Sieria Leone Diamond mining coperation( SLDMC ). We are contacting you to seek your good assistance to transfer and invest USD 8.5 million

[ U$ 8,500,000 ]

belonging to our late father which is deposited in a bank here in Abidjan.

This money is revenues from solid minirals and dimonds sales which were under my fathers possession before the civil war broke out. Following the break out of the war, almost all government offices,coperations and parastatals were attacked and vandalized.

The SLDMC was loothed and burnt down to ashes,and diamonds worth millions of dollars was stolen by the rebel military forces who attacked our fathers office, many top government officials and senior army officers were assasinated and our father was a key target because of his very sensitive military possition and appointment in the SLDMC.Regreatably, our father was captured and murdered along with his brother in cool blood during a mid-night rebel shoot-out when our official residence in freetown was armbushed by Fordey Sanko the notorious rebel leader. Our mother sustainded very sever bullet injuries which resulted to her untimely and painful death in a private hospital here in Ivory Coast.

Now we are alone in a totally strange country without parents, relatives or any body to care for us at our tender ages. Before our mother died, she told us that our father deposited some money which he made from diamond sales and contracts in a bank here in Ivory Coast and that we should pray and find a trust worthy foreign business partner who would help us to transfer and invest this money in p rofitable business venture overseas.

She told us to do this quickly so that we can leave Ivory Coast and then settle down abroad. She gave us the bank document to prove the deposit and then told us that our father used my name as the only son to deposit the money in the bank.She told us that this is the reason why we came to Ivory Coast. My mother died after wards. May her spirit rest in perfect peace.

I have gone to the bank to make inquires about this money and I spoke with the Manager of International remittance who assured me that everything is intact and promised to help us transfer this money to my fathers foreign partners bank account as soon as we provide our fathers partners foreign bank account for them. However, the manager is very concerned because of our age. I am 23 years why my younger sister is 19 years and as such advised that we should look for a matured person that will represent me at the bank.

If you are willing to assist us, please let us know immediately so that you will arrange the transfer of the money to your account with the bank.Please note that we will offer you 10% of the total money as compensation for your noble assistance in accodiance
with my mothers advise. I am interested in any profitable commercial venture which you consider very good in your country and you would also get a school for me, my little sister so that we can finish our college education.

Please there is urgent need for the money to be transferred to your account because of the political crises they are having in Cote d'Ivoire now. We are hoping to hear your urgent response so that we can not look for another foreign partner.

Please for security reason and poor internet here reply to the email address(stanleytaboh3@terra.com)

Thank you and may God bless you and your dear family.

Yours sincerely
Stanley and Linda Taboh.

We're going to Pluto soon! Our first trip! Bon Voyage!

Best photos to date of Pluto, taken in May 2005
by the absolutely remarkable Hubble Space Telescope.
But in ten years, we'll have far better snapshots taken
from a probe, New Horizons, which NASA is sending to
Pluto now. Click, they get bigger.

Pluto, the most distant planet from the Sun, and smallest of the nine planets, was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, a 24-year-old underpaid junior astronomer at Lowell Observatory (Arizona) in 1930. Tombaugh died in 1997.

In recent years, controversy over Pluto's status as a planet has arisen, with some astronomers arguing that it is some lesser kind of solar system object.

Vleeptron reassures everyone: It's a planet, ignore the controversy.

What may be unique about Pluto is that it may have joined the Solar System through a process different from the origins of the other planets; due to the odd characteristics of its orbit in relation to the other planets, it may have been a space wanderer drawn into orbit by the gravitational pull of the Sun as it passed near the Sun.

About ten years from now, we may have an answer to that and answers to many other questions about Pluto. We'll even have lots of new questions. And marvelous closeup photographs. And tons of other scientific data. And a new speed record for space travel. (We have to hurry, Pluto's atmosphere is going to start freezing soon and falling as snow.)

Considered as a human activity, this beats the crap out of the War in Iraq, a human endeavor which kills tens of thousands, destroys precious artifacts from the dawn of Eurasian civilization, and adds nothing to the human achievement or experience.

Rather than destruction, violence, loss and hate, this is a Great Voyage of discovery about the Universe; this is a demonstration of the astonishing and the best things human beings, human societies and their institutions are capable of.

Vleeptron vastly approves. Go New Horizons! Good Luck! Bring me back a tacky souvenir! Send me a postcard!

**************

The Washington Post (USA)
Monday 19 December 2005
Page A2

NASA Readies
to Launch Pluto Mission

Fastest Spaceship Ever Will Make
10-Year Trip to Gather Data, Take Photos

by Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer

NASA is making final preparations to launch the fastest spaceship ever made on a 10-year odyssey to Pluto, the scarlet-colored "ice dwarf" that shines brightly in the chill wilderness of deep space nearly 4,000,000,000 miles (6,437,360,000 kilometers) away.

Pluto is the only planet that has never yet had a human-engineered visitor, but if all goes well, New Horizons, a piano-size spacecraft wrapped in thermal blankets, will spend five months in close flyby, taking pictures and gathering data on features such as the planet's atmosphere, its surface geology and its temperature.

"We really expect the mission to be transformational," said New Horizons lead scientist Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado. "This is the capstone of the original visits to the planets. It takes us 4 billion miles away and 4 billion years back in time."

The $700 million mission is the first space expedition aimed specifically at a celestial body beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt, a remote region filled with debris from the creation of the solar system. Pluto is also the solar system's only known "binary planet," orbiting the sun in tandem with a moon, Charon, that is more than half as big as Pluto itself. Two other tiny moons were discovered earlier this year.

NASA plans to launch New Horizons from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida as early as possible during a 29-day window that opens at 1:24 p.m. on 17 January 2006. If liftoff occurs during the first 11 days, the spacecraft will reach Pluto in the summer of 2015. Launching later will result in substantial delays; starting the voyage on Valentine's Day would mean arrival as late as 2020.

"We want to study the atmosphere, but Pluto is moving further away from the sun," said New Horizons mission systems engineer David Kusnierkiewicz of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. "Around 2020 the atmosphere is going to freeze and fall as snow, so we need to get there by then."

Kusnierkiewicz said the launch team has had two rehearsals for what will be the fastest space trip ever taken. It opens with liftoff aboard an Atlas V-551 rocket, NASA's biggest, with five solid rocket boosters strapped to it.

The first stage drops away four minutes and 33 seconds into the flight, and the second stage is gone after 42 minutes. When an added third stage falls away five minutes later, New Horizons will be traveling between 28,000 and 30,000 miles per hour (45,000 and 48,300 kilometers per hour), passing Earth's moon in nine hours. The Apollo astronauts needed three days for the trip.

And unlike space probes that reach their destinations in ever-widening solar orbits, New Horizons is a simple rocket to Pluto, "just taking aim and shooting the gun," Kusnierkiewicz said. If launch occurs before 3 February, the probe will get a gravity assist as it flies by Jupiter, kicking the speed up to 47,000 mph.

For most of the 10-year flight, New Horizons will "hibernate," Kusnierkiewicz said, with only enough electronics lit to keep its insides at room temperature under the exterior thermal blankets.

Electricity will be provided by a thermoelectric generator powered by the heat from radioactive decay of a non-weapons-grade plutonium isotope. With the 200 watts supplied by the generator, New Horizons will operate seven different scientific instruments.

About 12 weeks before New Horizons's arrival at Pluto, the spacecraft's cameras will be able to get pictures better than those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and the data will improve steadily as it approaches the planet.

The spacecraft has no moving parts, so engineers will program it to use 16 hydrazine fuel thrusters to turn the spacecraft so it can point individual instruments at targets, a process Kusnierkiewicz described as "a fairly involved ballet." Communications between Earth and New Horizons will take four hours and 25 minutes.

"We're going to see things we've never even dreamed of," said astronomer Marc Buie, a deep space specialist from Arizona's Lowell Observatory. "Over the years I've used every tool at my disposal to learn about Pluto, but there's absolutely no way from Earth to understand the geologic context -- craters, impact basins and whatever else has happened."

In fact, Pluto remains largely an enigma 75 years after it was discovered. It is an "ice dwarf" composed of water, carbon monoxide, nitrogen, methane ices and rocky material. It is yellowish red in color and bright, probably from the ice, but with darker regions. Pluto is the smallest planet in the solar system, with a diameter two-thirds that of Earth's moon.

When Pluto was discovered, "astronomers thought it was a solar system misfit," Stern said, but since then scientists have estimated there are 500,000 objects with a diameter of at least 60 miles in the Kuiper Belt, making the belt the "largest structure in the solar system," he added. "It turns out that we and Mars and Jupiter are the misfits. Pluto is typical."

But what does that mean? "There are very clearly surface features of some sort, and we have no idea at all what those features are," said astronomer Michael Brown, a Kuiper Belt expert from the California Institute of Technology. "We don't understand this body at all."

Besides taking pictures of Pluto and Charon with three imagers, New Horizons will also analyze Pluto's atmosphere and geology, measure temperatures and space dust, and document the effects of the solar wind as it peels ions from the upper atmosphere.

Brown said Pluto undergoes tremendous temperature changes during a 248-year elliptical orbit that takes it as close as 2.8 billion miles from the sun and as far as 4.6 billion miles. When the temperature gets low enough, scientists suspect, the atmosphere "collapses," with the gas freezing and falling back to the surface. Charon is too small to hold on to an atmosphere, and has none.

Buie said bright surfaces usually mean "there's been some activity down there," perhaps from an atmospheric collapse, while darkness usually means that meteors and other "space weathering" phenomena have pocked the surface enough to dissipate light. Charon is considerably less bright than Pluto.

After New Horizons passes Pluto and Charon, it will almost certainly have enough power left for both the thrusters and the generator to search out and explore at least one other Kuiper Belt object, maybe two.

"We're not even looking yet," Stern said. "Anything I pick now will seem quaint in 10 years. It would be like planning a trip to Paris in 2015 and making a restaurant reservation today."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

we can eat em if we can catch em, protein is protein

ABSOLUTELY click on this one of Antarctic krill!
When you do, the little white dots are plankton, the krill's food.
Krill are the food of baleen whales.

recipe for krill, filched from an Oz guy

Krillion Patties

Krill are tiny sea creatures that swim close to the surface of the sea and drift where the tides of the oceans take them. They are one of the first links in the ocean's food chain. (Krill, I was told, is a Greek word meaning to wander.) My son John brought home about 1 kg (2 lb) of them for me to experiment with -- they were beautifully fresh and had a strong smell of the sea. They make a delicious filling for bread or pastry cases.

2 cups krill
2 tablespoons butter
salt and freshly ground pepper
2 heaped tablespoons flour
2 cups milk celery
1/2 red capsicum (pepper)
1/2 onion
1 small carrot
1 bay leaf
pinch basil
drop tabasco sauce
slices of bread
parsley, chopped
lemon wedges
patty tins (2 dozen)

Wash krill in a fine mesh

canary in the coal mine: drowned polar bears

Click for larger. The Beaufort Force is measured by
the visible white froth of violent waves. Mariners can
find safe harbor; polar bears must swim through seas
of all Beaufort Forces.

Sincerely miserable.

Clearly The Sunday Times of London has been reading Vleeptron, clicked on this morning's post (a filch from Reuters) about polar bears, then clicked on our link to the report on the increasing drownings of polar bears by scientists for the U.S. Minerals Management Service. (Or maybe The Times reporter went to the San Diego, California conference on marine mammals last week.)

Maybe the Kyoto Protocol is boring us and boring the Clinton and the Bush administration, but it's not boring Arctic biologists. For Global Warming, it seems very much as if Polar Bears are The Canary In The Coal Mine.

Inuits who accompanied some of the first successful Euro (Americans and Scandinavians) expeditions to the North Pole were very reluctant to leave solid land -- places like Baffin Island -- and venture off into the floating polar sea ice. Which is necessary, because the North Pole (unlike the South Pole) isn't on solid land, but rather in middle of an ocean full of floating ice. I think I read anecdotes that even the sled dogs knew when they were leaving snow-covered solid land for the ice shelf, and they didn't like it.

But the ice shelf and the floating ice islands are the hunting habitat of the polar bear; that's where the fat-rich seals are. When the adolescent males gather each October/November on the solid land around Churchill Manitoba Canada, they're just waiting for Hudson Bay to freeze and grow its winter ice shelf so they can go hunting seals.

Ironically, the report of the drowned polar bears comes from research conducted in the Beaufort Sea. The Beaufort Sea is an ocean region off the North Slope of Alaska and the adjacent Arctic Ocean coasts of Canada's Yukon and Northwest Territories. But Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort also invented the Beaufort Scale, which measures wind conditions on land or at sea. (He began his 68-year Royal Navy career as a cabin boy.)

If the maritime weather report predicts a Beaufort 10, 11 or 12, stay home, and keep your boat home, too.

But polar bears can't stay home -- or rather, their home is precarious ice shelves, islands and icebergs, and a lot of their hunting and roaming forces them to swim. I said they were remarkable swimmers, and they are. But when seas get monstrously rough -- Beaufort 10, 11 or 12 -- they drown before they can reach the next solid piece of ice which, as the ice melts, is farther and farther away.

Though common to adjacent Labrador, polar bears are not natural to the Canadian island of Newfoundland. But the park ranger at the only verified Viking settlement in the New World, l'Anse aux Meadows, told us that one morning he was awakened in his house trailer by a World's Largest Land Carnivore trying to open the metal container (the trailer) inside which he smelled possible food (the ranger). The ranger explained that Labrador bears sometimes wander onto a large drifting iceberg that bangs up against some part of the Newfoundland coast a couple of weeks later, and then the bear wanders onto Newfoundland to see if there's anything or anyone good to eat. If everybody gets lucky, they dart the bear and give it a free boat or plane trip back to the Labrador ice shelf.

Anyway, this really sucks. And after we finish weeping over the extinction of the Polar Bear ... guess which mammal comes next as the polar ice caps and the glaciers melt?

***********

The Sunday Times (London UK)
Sunday 18 December 2005

Polar bears drown
as ice shelf melts

by Will Iredale

SCIENTISTS have for the first time found evidence that polar bears are drowning because climate change is melting the Arctic ice shelf.

The researchers were startled to find bears having to swim up to 60 miles across open sea to find food. They are being forced into the long voyages because the ice floes from which they feed are melting, becoming smaller and drifting farther apart.

Although polar bears are strong swimmers, they are adapted for swimming close to the shore. Their sea journeys leave them them vulnerable to exhaustion, hypothermia or being swamped by waves.

According to the new research, four bear carcases were found floating in one month in a single patch of sea off the north coast of Alaska, where average summer temperatures have increased by 2-3C degrees since 1950s.

The scientists believe such drownings are becoming widespread across the Arctic, an inevitable consequence of the doubling in the past 20 years of the proportion of polar bears having to swim in open seas.

"Mortalities due to offshore swimming may be a relatively important and unaccounted source of natural mortality given the energetic demands placed on individual bears engaged in long-distance swimming," says the research led by Dr Charles Monnett, marine ecologist at the American government’s Minerals Management Service. "Drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice continues."

The research, presented to a conference on marine mammals in San Diego, California, last week, comes amid evidence of a decline in numbers of the 22,000 polar bears that live in about 20 sites across the Arctic circle.

In Hudson Bay, Canada, the site of the most southerly polar bears, a study by the US Geological Survey (USGS) and the Canadian Wildlife Service to be published next year will show the population fell 22% from 1,194 in 1987 to 935 last year.

New evidence from field researchers working for the World Wildlife Fund in Yakutia, on the northeast coast of Russia, has also shown the region’s first evidence of cannibalism among bears competing for food supplies.

Polar bears live on ice all year round and use it as a platform from which to hunt food and rear their young. They hunt near the edge, where the ice is thinnest, catching seals when they make holes in the ice to breath. They typically eat one seal every four or five days and a single bear can consume 100 pounds [45.5 kilograms] of blubber at one sitting.

As the ice pack retreats north in the summer between June and October, the bears must travel between ice floes to continue hunting in areas such as the shallow water of the continental shelf off the Alaskan coast -- one of the most food-rich areas in the Arctic.

However, last summer the ice cap receded about 200 miles further north than the average of two decades ago, forcing the bears to undertake far longer voyages between floes.

"We know short swims up to 15 miles are no problem, and we know that one or two may have swum up to 100 miles. But that is the extent of their ability, and if they are trying to make such a long swim and they encounter rough seas they could get into trouble," said Steven Amstrup, a research wildlife biologist with the USGS.

The new study, carried out in part of the Beaufort Sea, shows that between 1986 and 2005 just 4% of the bears spotted off the north coast of Alaska were swimming in open waters. Not a single drowning had been documented in the area.

However, last September, when the ice cap had retreated a record 160 miles north of Alaska, 51 bears were spotted, of which 20% were seen in the open sea, swimming as far as 60 miles off shore.

The researchers returned to the vicinity a few days later after a fierce storm and found four dead bears floating in the water. "We estimate that of the order of 40 bears may have been swimming and that many of those probably drowned as a result of rough seas caused by high winds," said the report.

In their search for food, polar bears are also having to roam further south, rummaging in the dustbins of Canadian homes. Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the explorer who has been to the North Pole seven times, said he had noticed a deterioration in the bears’ ice habitat since his first expedition in 1975.

"Each year there was more water than the time before," he said. "We used amphibious sledges for the first time in 1986."

His last expedition was in 2002, when he fell through the ice and lost some of his fingers to frostbite.

- 30 -

outraged wife of hack victim assassinates Wikipedia founder

This week, you have to catch Wikipedia very fast,
or you'll miss cool stuff like this.

As poor Wikipedia takes it repeatedly in the tolchoks for accuracy and reliability this week, Vleeptron would like to point out that The American Paragon of Objective Truth, The New York Times, sat on the story about Bush's warrantless and anti-constitutional wiretaps to spy on Americans for a year. The New York Times had the story for a fucking year but didn't publish.

Why? The Bush White House asked them not to.

So, yeah, The New York Times is accurate. Just a little Slow and Cooperative.

***********

The Times (London UK)
Thursday 15 December 2005

Wikipedia hit by surge
in spoof articles

by Simon Freeman

Wikipedia was yesterday described as being as reliable as the Encyclopaedia Britannica despite a sustained attack from vandals intent on further wrecking its reputation for accuracy.

In an online article published by the respected scientific journal Nature, articles in Wikipedia -- the web-based encyclopaedia created by volunteers -- compared favourably to those in the foremost repository of knowledge in the English language.

This is despite a surge in the number of spoof articles and vandal attacks which have followed the furore over a biographical Wikipedia article linking John Seigenthaler, a respected retired journalist, with the assassinations of both John F and Robert Kennedy.

In one such fake article, it was suggested today that Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's creator, was shot dead at his home by Siegenthaler's wife.

Wikipedia's founder accepts that the site's open and egalitarian nature renders it vulnerable to such attacks, but after the Seigenthaler scandal he promised to tighten up procedures to prevent misleading articles from being published.

A cursory search today suggested that these procedures -- which require contributors to register basic details before posting articles -- were being defeated by a relentless wave of vandals, apparently co-ordinating their assaults from a series of chatrooms dedicated to its demise.

The loss of credibility has caused commentators to question whether Wikipedia is destined to follow the LA Times's doomed experiment in unrestricted internet comment, Wikitorial, which had to be closed down after just two days under a bombardment of pornographic postings.

Today's false report of its founder's murder read:

"At 18:54 EST on December 12, John Seigenthaler's wife, who was infuriated at Wikipedia regarding the recent scandal regarding his role in the Kennedy Assassination, came into the house, where Jim was having dinner. Wearing a mask, he [sic] shot him three times in the head and ran."

A search for the term 'Wikipedia' revealed the one-line entry: "An encyclopedia full of crap."

Subsequent searches revealed: "Although it may seem factual, Wikipedia is largely a web of lies and falsehoods, and it is not to be trusted by any means. Do not use wikipedia as a source for anything; it is worthless."

And later: "Editors are encouraged to uphold a policy of sticking it's head up it's ass; under which notable perspectives are summarised without an attempt to determine an objective truth."

The army of 600 volunteer editors were rapidly updating and amending the falsified entries, but the continued assault highlighted flaws in one of the best-loved and most successful websites.

The embarrassing attacks came despite the survey published in Nature which suggested that errors on Wikipedia appeared to be the exception rather than the rule after the journal used peer review to compare Wikipedia to Britannica.

Based on 42 articles reviewed by experts, the average scientific entry in Wikipedia contained four errors or omissions, while Britannica had three.

Jimmy Wales, who is still very much alive, said: "We’re very pleased with the results and we’re hoping it will focus people’s attention on the overall level of our work, which is pretty good." He said that Wikipedia plans to begin testing a new mechanism for reviewing the accuracy of its articles from next month.

- 30 -

Adam Curry: not really the Al Gore of the iPod

Former MTV VJ Adam Curry doing something
incomprehensible to an iPod, which he claims
he gave birth to, and the other guy didn't.

Okay, Vleeptron admits it: The iPod is the most important invention since fire. Maybe someday we'll buy one. Or maybe we'll get one for Christmas. We asked an Authentic iPod Youth a few weeks ago, and she says you can cram 3000 songs into one of those things.

And now some Good News about Wikipedia. The prestigious science journal Nature says that Wikipedia is about as accurate in explaining the sensible world as the Encyclopedia Brittanica. So there.

And now some more Bad News about Wikipedia. And about the former MTV VJ Adam Curry.

It's really a slimy story. Unbelievably unimportant, beneath trivial, but unbelievably slimy. Ick. Ick. Cooties. Cooties.

If you want to wade deeper into this sludge, there are comments after the CNET story.

******************

CNET
Friday 2 December 2005

Adam Curry gets podbusted

by Daniel Terdiman

Daniel Terdiman covers games,
Net culture and everything in between.

The true genesis of podcasting has always been disputed in one corner of the blogosphere or another. In general, though, the main names that get the lion's share of the credit are former MTV VJ Adam Curry and blogging pioneer Dave Winer.

In general, Curry has been the poster child for the technology, probably because of his high-profile early career. But now, a flap that exploded in the blogosphere is calling Curry to task for how much credit he's been taking for creating podcasting and for how much credit he's been willing to give.

The kerfuffle stems from a controversy over the Wikipedia article about podcasting. Essentially, Curry is accused of anonymously editing out information in the article that discusses some others' roles in the creation of the technology while at the same time pumping up his own role.

In particular, he was said to have entirely deleted sections of the article, which addressed innovations originally talked about by Technorati principal engineer Kevin Marks.

"At the first Harvard BloggerCon conference," in 2003, the original Wikipedia language began, "Kevin Marks demonstrated a script to download RSS enclosures to iTunes and synchronise them onto an iPod, something Adam Curry had been doing with Radio Userland and Applescript."

But then an anonymous user -- who was traced back to Curry via the IP address -- deleted the Marks section.

Today, Curry is attempting to sound contrite.

"I edited out the Marks part previously because I never saw a full front-to-back solution that he was credited for," Curry told CNET News.com. "Once I saw the video of the session where he does demo it, after saying he had spoken to me and I had 'challenged' him to create it, I realized I was in error."

Marks isn't entirely sure he buys Curry's apology, though.

"His explanation is a bit confusing," Marks said, remembering how he had showed Curry the script at BloggerCon that year and the so-called challenge. "For him to later say that he didn't remember, it's probably true. But it was one of those things."

Ah, one of those things. Well, Curry has gotten a gigantic amount of attention for helping to create podcasting. And now he's aware he's going to have to deal with a little backlash for the Wikipedia scandal.

"So I eat crow, but I wasn't doing anything evil or posting that I had 'done it all,' " he said. "Merely participating in the process of Wikipedia to the best of my knowledge. Apparently that's not cool if you were a part of history."

Copyright ©2005 CNET Networks, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The notoriously controversial Kyoto Protocol re global climate change

Great flood of 1824, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Just to get your attention.

Look, you're all Educated Adults (or Educated Children). If the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade didn't scare you, this shouldn't scare you. You can get through this. You can even understand most of it. If you can't, phone your local United Nations office and ask whoever answers the phone some questions.

My pewter didn't have enough memory to copy and paste The Whole Thing, so these are just the first five articles. There's more. Scream to Vleeptron if you want more. Your Comments re Global Warming and Greenhouse Gas Emissions also greatly appreciated.

It's boring now, we admit that.

But you won't think it's boring when the polar ice caps melt and we're all up to our armpits in water.

Before we dive into the incomprehensible Diplomatese, here's Wikipedia on the current US position re Kyoto:

=======================

Position of the United States

The United States of America, although a signatory to the protocol, has neither ratified nor withdrawn from the protocol. The protocol is non-binding over the United States until ratified.

On July 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was to be negotiated, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed by a 95-0 vote, the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". On November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Aware of the Senate's view of the protocol, the Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol for ratification.

The Clinton Administration released an economic analysis in July 1998, prepared by the Council of Economic Advisors, which concluded that with emissions trading among the Annex B/Annex I countries, and participation of key developing countries in the "Clean Development Mechanism" -- which grants the latter business-as-usual emissions rates through 2012 -- the costs of implementing the Kyoto Protocol could be reduced as much as 60% from many estimates. Other economic analyses, however, prepared by the Congressional Budget Office and the Department of Energy Energy Information Administration (EIA), and others, demonstrated a potentially large decline in GDP from implementing the Protocol.

The current President, George W. Bush, has indicated that he does not intend to submit the treaty for ratification, not because he does not support the general idea, but because of the strain he believes the treaty would put on the economy; he emphasizes the uncertainties he asserts are present in the climate change issue Alternet.org. Furthermore, he is not happy with the details of the treaty. For example, he does not support the split between Annex I countries and others. Bush said of the treaty:

This is a challenge that requires a 100 percent effort; ours, and the rest of the world's. The world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases is China. Yet, China was entirely exempted from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. India and Germany are among the top emitters. Yet, India was also exempt from Kyoto. . . . America's unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should not be read by our friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility. To the contrary, my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change. . . . . Our approach must be consistent with the long-term goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

-- Whitehouse.gov
President Bush Discusses Global Climate Change.

========================================
... and now, on with the Kyoto Protocol:
========================================

KYOTO PROTOCOL TO THE UNITED NATIONS
FRAMEWORK CONVENTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE

The Parties to this Protocol,

Being Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, hereinafter referred to as "the Convention",

In pursuit of the ultimate objective of the Convention as stated in its Article 2,

Recalling the provisions of the Convention,

Being guided by Article 3 of the Convention,

Pursuant to the Berlin Mandate adopted by decision 1/CP.1 of the

Conference of the Parties to the Convention at its first session,

Have agreed as follows:

Article 1

For the purposes of this Protocol, the definitions contained in Article 1 of the Convention shall apply. In addition:

1. "Conference of the Parties" means the Conference of the Parties to the Convention.

2. "Convention" means the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted in New York on 9 May 1992.

3. "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" means the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change established in 1988 jointly by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme.

4. "Montreal Protocol" means the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, adopted in Montreal on 16 September 1987 and as subsequently adjusted and amended.

5. "Parties present and voting" means Parties present and casting an affirmative or negative vote.

6. "Party" means, unless the context otherwise indicates, a Party to this Protocol.

7. "Party included in Annex I" means a Party included in Annex I to the Convention, as may be amended, or a Party which has made a notification under Article 4, paragraph 2(g), of the Convention.

Article 2

1. Each Party included in Annex I, in achieving its quantified emission limitation and reduction commitments under Article 3, in order to promote sustainable development, shall:

(a) Implement and/or further elaborate policies and measures in accordance with its national circumstances, such as:

(i) Enhancement of energy efficiency in relevant sectors of the national economy;

(ii) Protection and enhancement of sinks and reservoirs of greenhouse gases not controlled by the Montreal Protocol, taking into account its commitments under relevant international environmental agreements; promotion of sustainable forest management practices, afforestation and reforestation;

(iii) Promotion of sustainable forms of agriculture in light of climate change considerations;

(iv) Research on, and promotion, development and increased use of, new and renewable forms of energy, of carbon dioxide sequestration technologies and of advanced and innovative environmentally sound technologies;

(v) Progressive reduction or phasing out of market imperfections, fiscal incentives, tax and duty exemptions and subsidies in all greenhouse gas emitting sectors that run counter to the objective of the Convention and application of market instruments;

(vi) Encouragement of appropriate reforms in relevant sectors aimed at promoting policies and measures which limit or reduce emissions of greenhouse gases not controlled by the Montreal Protocol;

(vii) Measures to limit and/or reduce emissions of greenhouse gases not controlled by the Montreal Protocol in the transport sector;

(viii) Limitation and/or reduction of methane emissions through recovery and use in waste management, as well as in the production, transport and distribution of energy;

(b) Cooperate with other such Parties to enhance the individual and combined effectiveness of their policies and measures adopted under this Article, pursuant to Article 4, paragraph 2(e)(i), of the Convention. To this end, these Parties shall take steps to share their experience and exchange information on such policies and measures, including developing ways of improving their comparability, transparency and effectiveness. The Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol shall, at its first session or as soon as practicable thereafter, consider ways to facilitate such cooperation, taking into account all relevant information.

2. The Parties included in Annex I shall pursue limitation or reduction of emissions of greenhouse gases not controlled by the Montreal Protocol from aviation and marine bunker fuels, working through the International Civil Aviation Organization and the International Maritime Organization, respectively.

3. The Parties included in Annex I shall strive to implement policies and measures under this Article in such a way as to minimize adverse effects, including the adverse effects of climate change, effects on international trade, and social, environmental and economic impacts on other Parties, especially developing country Parties and in particular those identified in Article 4, paragraphs 8 and 9, of the Convention, taking into account Article 3 of the Convention. The Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol may take further action, as appropriate, to promote the implementation of the provisions of this paragraph.

4. The Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol, if it decides that it would be beneficial to coordinate any of the policies and measures in paragraph 1(a) above, taking into account different national circumstances and potential effects, shall consider ways and means to elaborate the coordination of such policies and measures.

Article 3

1. The Parties included in Annex I shall, individually or jointly, ensure that their aggregate anthropogenic carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of the greenhouse gases listed in Annex A do not exceed their assigned amounts, calculated pursuant to their quantified emission limitation and reduction commitments inscribed in Annex B and in accordance with the provisions of this Article, with a view to reducing their overall emissions of such gases by at least 5 per cent below 1990 levels in the commitment period 2008 to 2012.

2. Each Party included in Annex I shall, by 2005, have made demonstrable progress in achieving its commitments under this Protocol.

3. The net changes in greenhouse gas emissions by sources and removals by sinks resulting from direct human-induced land-use change and forestry activities, limited to afforestation, reforestation and deforestation since 1990, measured as verifiable changes in carbon stocks in each commitment period, shall be used to meet the commitments under this Article of each Party included in Annex I. The greenhouse gas emissions by sources and removals by sinks associated with those activities shall be reported in a transparent and verifiable manner and reviewed in accordance with Articles 7 and 8.

4. Prior to the first session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol, each Party included in Annex I shall provide, for consideration by the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, data to establish its level of carbon stocks in 1990 and to enable an estimate to be made of its changes in carbon stocks in subsequent years. The Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol shall, at its first session or as soon as practicable thereafter, decide upon modalities, rules and guidelines as to how, and which, additional human-induced activities related to changes in greenhouse gas emissions by sources and removals by sinks in the agricultural soils and the land-use change and forestry categories shall be added to, or subtracted from, the assigned amounts for Parties included in Annex I, taking into account uncertainties, transparency in reporting, verifiability, the methodological work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the advice provided by the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice in accordance with Article 5 and the decisions of the Conference of the Parties. Such a decision shall apply in the second and subsequent commitment periods. A Party may choose to apply such a decision on these additional human-induced activities for its first commitment period, provided that these activities have taken place since 1990.

5. The Parties included in Annex I undergoing the process of transition to a market economy whose base year or period was established pursuant to decision 9/CP.2 of the Conference of the Parties at its second session shall use that base year or period for the implementation of their commitments under this Article. Any other Party included in Annex I undergoing the process of transition to a market economy which has not yet submitted its first national communication under Article 12 of the Convention may also notify the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol that it intends to use an historical base year or period other than 1990 for the implementation of its commitments under this Article. The Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol shall decide on the acceptance of such notification.

6. Taking into account Article 4, paragraph 6, of the Convention, in the implementation of their commitments under this Protocol other than those under this Article, a certain degree of flexibility shall be allowed by the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol to the Parties included in Annex I undergoing the process of transition to a market economy.

7. In the first quantified emission limitation and reduction commitment period, from 2008 to 2012, the assigned amount for each Party included in Annex I shall be equal to the percentage inscribed for it in Annex B of its aggregate anthropogenic carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of the greenhouse gases listed in Annex A in 1990, or the base year or period determined in accordance with paragraph 5 above, multiplied by five. Those Parties included in Annex I for whom land-use change and forestry constituted a net source of greenhouse gas emissions in 1990 shall include in their 1990 emissions base year or period the aggregate anthropogenic carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by sources minus removals by sinks in 1990 from land-use change for the purposes of calculating their assigned amount.

8. Any Party included in Annex I may use 1995 as its base year for hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride, for the purposes of the calculation referred to in paragraph 7 above.

9. Commitments for subsequent periods for Parties included in Annex I shall be established in amendments to Annex B to this Protocol, which shall be adopted in accordance with the provisions of Article 21, paragraph 7. The Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol shall initiate the consideration of such commitments at least seven years before the end of the first commitment period referred to in paragraph 1 above.

10. Any emission reduction units, or any part of an assigned amount, which a Party acquires from another Party in accordance with the provisions of Article 6 or of Article 17 shall be added to the assigned amount for the acquiring Party.

11. Any emission reduction units, or any part of an assigned amount, which a Party transfers to another Party in accordance with the provisions of Article 6 or of Article 17 shall be subtracted from the assigned amount for the transferring Party.

12. Any certified emission reductions which a Party acquires from another Party in accordance with the provisions of Article 12 shall be added to the assigned amount for the acquiring Party.

13. If the emissions of a Party included in Annex I in a commitment period are less than its assigned amount under this Article, this difference shall, on request of that Party, be added to the assigned amount for that Party for subsequent commitment periods.

14. Each Party included in Annex I shall strive to implement the commitments mentioned in paragraph 1 above in such a way as to minimize adverse social, environmental and economic impacts on developing country Parties, particularly those identified in Article 4, paragraphs 8 and 9, of the Convention. In line with relevant decisions of the Conference of the Parties on the implementation of those paragraphs, the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol shall, at its first session, consider what actions are necessary to minimize the adverse effects of climate change and/or the impacts of response measures on Parties referred to in those paragraphs. Among the issues to be considered shall be the establishment of funding, insurance and transfer of technology.

Article 4

1. Any Parties included in Annex I that have reached an agreement to fulfil their commitments under Article 3 jointly, shall be deemed to have met those commitments provided that their total combined aggregate anthropogenic carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of the greenhouse gases listed in Annex A do not exceed their assigned amounts calculated pursuant to their quantified emission limitation and reduction commitments inscribed in Annex B and in accordance with the provisions of Article 3. The respective emission level allocated to each of the Parties to the agreement shall be set out in that agreement.

2. The Parties to any such agreement shall notify the secretariat of the terms of the agreement on the date of deposit of their instruments of ratification, acceptance or approval of this Protocol, or accession thereto. The secretariat shall in turn inform the Parties and signatories to the Convention of the terms of the agreement.

3. Any such agreement shall remain in operation for the duration of the commitment period specified in Article 3, paragraph 7.

4. If Parties acting jointly do so in the framework of, and together with, a regional economic integration organization, any alteration in the composition of the organization after adoption of this Protocol shall not affect existing commitments under this Protocol. Any alteration in the composition of the organization shall only apply for the purposes of those commitments under Article 3 that are adopted subsequent to that alteration.

5. In the event of failure by the Parties to such an agreement to achieve their total combined level of emission reductions, each Party to that agreement shall be responsible for its own level of emissions set out in the agreement.

6. If Parties acting jointly do so in the framework of, and together with, a regional economic integration organization which is itself a Party to this Protocol, each member State of that regional economic integration organization individually, and together with the regional economic integration organization acting in accordance with Article 24, shall, in the event of failure to achieve the total combined level of emission reductions, be responsible for its level of emissions as notified in accordance with this Article.

Article 5

1. Each Party included in Annex I shall have in place, no later than one year prior to the start of the first commitment period, a national system for the estimation of anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of all greenhouse gases not controlled by the Montreal Protocol. Guidelines for such national systems, which shall incorporate the methodologies specified in paragraph 2 below, shall be decided upon by the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol at its first session.

2. Methodologies for estimating anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of all greenhouse gases not controlled by the Montreal Protocol shall be those accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and agreed upon by the Conference of the Parties at its third session. Where such methodologies are not used, appropriate adjustments shall be applied according to methodologies agreed upon by the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol at its first session. Based on the work of, inter alia, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and advice provided by the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol shall regularly review and, as appropriate, revise such methodologies and adjustments, taking fully into account any relevant decisions by the Conference of the Parties. Any revision to methodologies or adjustments shall be used only for the purposes of ascertaining compliance with commitments under Article 3 in respect of any commitment period adopted subsequent to that revision.

3. The global warming potentials used to calculate the carbon dioxide equivalence of anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases listed in Annex A shall be those accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and agreed upon by the Conference of the Parties at its third session. Based on the work of, inter alia, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and advice provided by the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol shall regularly review and, as appropriate, revise the global warming potential of each such greenhouse gas, taking fully into account any relevant decisions by the Conference of the Parties. Any revision to a global warming potential shall apply only to commitments under Article 3 in respect of any commitment period adopted subsequent to that revision.

=====================
As we said, there's a bunch more. Scream if you want it.
=====================

"Green Groups" pressure US to address melting ice cap to save polar bears

Polar bear Olinka protects her female cub between her front paws in the Vienna Schoenbrunn zoo, March 11, 2005. Three environmental groups are suing the U.S. government to force consideration of whether polar bears are a threatened species, saying rising global temperatures threaten to kill off the Arctic predators. (Reuters photo by Leonhard Foeger)

This is extremely interesting. Three American environmental advocacy groups are beginning a process which, if successful, will put the screws on the Bush Administration (and whoever comes after) that could use the federal courts to force the U.S. government to address its (notoriously hostile) policies toward Global Warming.

Activities that take place on U.S. territory which endanger the survival of a biological species can be challenged by citizens and nature advocacy groups, and if the challenges and petitions are successful, federal agencies are required by law to take steps to protect the endangered species and the natural habitat that sustains the species.

Although Alaska is part of the polar bear's circumpolar range, this lawsuit is far broader and more ambitious than those in the past. It seeks to make the United States government responsible for its share of responsibility -- through its industrial activities -- for the shrinking of the entire Arctic ice cap, and thus the degradation of the polar bear's circumpolar habitat.

[Vleeptron will try to contact Nephew Ice Cube to get his comments on comparable developments in the Antarctic. In his reports during his expedition, NIC has yet to comment directly on the rate of melt and predicted trends of the Antarctic ice. He has in the past worked on important surveys seeking to establish the rate of shrinking of Alaskan glaciers.]

The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) is the world's largest land predator. Human beings (on foot, unassisted by helicopters -- in decades past, "sportsmen" used to hunt them this way, but the practice is now outlawed) may think they are hunting polar bears, but the polar bear has just as much reason to think he is hunting Homo sapiens, and it often turns out that way. Polar bears think and plan their hunts, are incredible underwater swimmers, fear no other creature, and are so superbly insulated that most of the time their challenge is to keep cool rather than to keep warm. Inuit and circumpolar First Peoples tend to regard the hunting and survival virtues of the polar bear with a respect bordering on worship.

One of the great privileges of my life was to have seen polar bears (adolescent males waiting for Hudson Bay to freeze over so they could hunt seals) in the wild. You should think about going, too.

This story suggests, most miserably, that you might not have forever to have this experience. The melting of the Arctic ice cap will cause enormous difficulties throughout the world, but for sheer tragedy and the failure of human conservation and stewardship of life on this planet, the vanishing of polar bears will be the worst.

From Solcomhouse, a clearing house for global environmental issues:

Polar bears range throughout the Arctic in areas where they can hunt seals at open leads. The five "polar bear nations" where the ice bears are found include the U.S. (Alaska), Canada, Russia, Denmark (Greenland), and Norway.

* * *

Reuters
Saturday 17 December 2005

Green groups sue U.S.
to protect polar bears

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -- Three environmental groups are suing the U.S. government to force consideration of whether polar bears are a threatened species, saying rising global temperatures threaten to kill off the Arctic predators.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Thursday, asks the Interior Department to make an initial ruling on a petition to bestow the broad federal protection of the Endangered Species Act upon polar bears by designating them as "threatened."

An "endangered" species is one that is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Web site. A "threatened" species is likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future, according to the agency.

The lawsuit was filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace, which say the department should have ruled on its petition within 90 days of its filing in February.

If the suit is successful, there will be two more steps, each of which can take up to a year, before polar bears could be officially listed as threatened.

The groups argue that rising global temperatures endangers polar bears by melting the ice floes on which the giant predators prowl and hunt.

Kassie Siegel, climate director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the group's petition on polar bears was bolstered by a report this week from the U.S. Minerals Management Service detailing the deaths of four polar bears that drowned in September 2004.

[VLEEPTRON: The U.S.MMS report on polar bears in the Beaufort Sea is available as a .pdf document.]

"As global warming continues, more bears are going to die. This is very predictable, it's common sense," Siegel said. "Their habitat is sea ice. They don't hunt from land, they don't hunt from water. They can't survive if their habitat disappears."

A spokesman for the Interior Department did not return a call seeking comment.

© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.

The voice in my head is telling me to kill 32,000 people

Click, maybe it gets bigger and
clearer, but I'm not happy about that.

Oh, man,I'm just terribly embarrassed to post this.

First of all, it's stale, from October.

I didn't miss it the first time around. Oh, no. It jumped right out at me.

It sort of stunned me. I didn't really know what to do. I was hoping it was a hallucination and would go away.

Look, I mean, a lot of Vleeptron's readers aren't Americans. So like, if I posted this, I was telling everybody on Earth that my President is a loony.

Well, it still hasn't gone away. And subsequent developments this week have sort of confirmed that my President is a loony.

So anyway, here it is. Make of it what you wish.

Oh. Maybe he was just making a Metaphor. You know, like, God personally isn't really telling me what to do, but I have these faith-based moral ideas, and so I'll make them into a Metaphor -- my Belief in God is shaping the ideas in my heart.

I dunno. What do you think? One problem with that theory is that he's also Dumb As Rocks and doesn't know what a Metaphor is, or how to spell it.

* * *

BBC
Thursday 6 October 2004

God told me to invade Iraq,
Bush tells Palestinian ministers

President George W Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq -- and create a Palestinian State, a new BBC series reveals.

In Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in June 2003.

Nabil Shaath says: "President Bush said to all of us:

'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"

Abu Mazen was at the same meeting and recounts how President Bush told him: "I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state."

The series charts the attempts to bring peace to the Middle East, from President Bill Clinton's peace talks in 1999/2000 to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza last August.

Norma Percy, series producer of The 50 Years War (1998) returns, with producers Mark Anderson and Dan Edge, to tell the inside story of another seven years of crisis.

Presidents and Prime Ministers, their generals and ministers tell what happened behind closed doors as peace talks failed and the intifada exploded.

- 30 -

There's more chat from Heaven. God keeps talking to the guy and telling him what to do.

from a Haaretz (big Israeli newspaper) story by Arnon Regular, off a search on the Haaretz site ... Vleeptron is not absolutely certain of the original date of the story, but it could be Saturday 17 December 05.

According to Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

He's livin' in his own Private Idaho

This week, President Bush gave three lengthy interviews with American television network news anchors -- the most "hardball" Friday's interview with Public Broadcasting's Jim Lehrer, who asks the President a variety of Real Adult Questions about Important Things, an almost unheard-of event in his presidency and in American television news. (You can hear the entire interview here.)

Bush is somewhat desperate to explain his Iraq policies to Americans as his popularity and confidence poll numbers spiral down the toilet.

Yet a distressing number of his answers to Lehrer's tough questions about Iraq and other national security matters were not answers at all, but explanations that, as commander-in-chief, he was constrained from discussing the details of these matters.

In defending his dogged pursuit of Victory in Iraq, he went into a lengthy explanation of his new and somewhat more complicated and subtle definition of Victory.

Vleeptron believes he has plumb lost his cotton-pickin' mind, he done gone 'round the bend, he is a few cans short of a six-pack.

According to Reuters, Australia has about one thousand soldiers in and around Iraq, including 450 troops guarding Japanese engineers in the southern Al Muthanna province.

Here, from Australia, is another view of President Bush's grasp of Reality; but first a Wikipedia introduction to the newspaper, and the article's author.

~ ~ ~

The Australian is a national daily broadsheet newspaper published by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Headquartered in Sydney, but with bureaux around Australia, it was founded in 1964, losing money for nearly thirty years. Its circulation is still quite small, with a weekday circulation of approximately 130,000 and a Saturday circulation of approximately 295,000.

The Australian treads the Murdoch editorial line on most issues: it supports free-trade economic policy, a realpolitik approach to foreign policy, and is particularly in favour of relaxed regulation of the media sector. Unlike its downmarket stablemates, such as The Daily Telegraph and The Herald Sun, the paper adopts a somewhat liberal approach on social issues. It has a particular focus on foreign news, especially in relation to Australia's immediate neighbours in South-East Asia. On Monday it has a liftout focussing on worldwide issues, on Tuesdays an IT liftouts, Wealth and High Education liftouts on Wednesday, Media and Marketing on Thursdays and an expanded sport liftout on Fridays.

. . .

Paul Kelly is a well-known Australian political journalist and historian. He has worked in a variety of roles, and is currently "editor-at-large" for The Australian, Australia's only national broadsheet. He has also written several books on the political events of the 1970s and 1980s. His books about the Australian constitutional crisis of 1975 are regarded by many as the definitive accounts of the crisis.

His books include:

* "The Unmaking of Gough" 1976
Republished as "The Dismissal" 1983

* "The Hawke Ascendancy" 1984

* "The End of Certainty" 1992

~ ~ ~

The Australian
Friday 17 December 2005

Vision divorced
from reality

Paul Kelly, Editor-at-Large

IRAQ has become an American trauma; it has fractured the US military, polarised the political system, exposed a profound US strategic confusion and crippled George W. Bush's presidency.

There are no winners in the US from the Iraq project. The Democrats are split, marginalised by their Bush haters, trapped between the national imperative for the US to succeed and their compulsion to exploit Iraq as Bush's conclusive failure.

The US and Iraq are now chained together, a bizarre and dangerous outcome. This was never Bush's intention: he intended to liberate Iraq, not condemn himself to its politics. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had no plan for post-war Iraq for an excellent reason: the US would not be there. The idea in 2003, when Saddam Hussein fell, that Bush's second term and the integrity of US foreign policy would be determined almost solely by protracted military conflict in Iraq would have been inconceivable.

Kurt Campbell, senior vice-president of Washington's Centre of Strategic and International Studies, says: "At the strategic level the US has already lost much in Iraq. Iraq is not going to be this glistening city on the hill that the neo-cons promised. There will be sectarian violence for years to come. Most of the world sees Iraq as a profound misjudgment by the US. We have lost the high moral ground with issues such as torture. Now we are trying to salvage an acceptable outcome from a war policy that has been absolutely riddled with errors and miscalculations."

Those miscalculations arise from the triumph of vision over reality. For both its proponents and its critics, the Iraq project was not about Iraq but other agendas: about US power, the September 11 attacks, weapons of mass destruction, transforming the Middle East or de-legitimising Bush. Iraq was the playground of too many false dreams.

Divorce from reality has been the theme. In the best book on Iraq, The Assassin's Gate, journalist George Packer tells the story of the 45-minute farewell meeting between Bush and the outgoing boss of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, Jay Garner, at the White House in mid-2003.

Bush, incredibly, never asked Garner what it was actually like in Iraq. "You want to do Iran for the next one?" Bush joked. Getting into the spirit, Garner replied: "No sir, me and the boys are holding out for Cuba." Salvage is the pivotal word now. The US is holding out for the best deal, desperate to minimise the damage in Iraq to its military, its reputation, its strength and its domestic fabric. Bush is running a salvage strategy, though he doesn't use this word. His term is "victory strategy" and in four speeches over the past fortnight he has belatedly tried to revive his authority and outline a "victory" plan based upon a shift in security responsibility from US to Iraqi forces.

The foundation for Bush's exit with honour depends upon the ability of the Iraqi forces, an expectation that never entered the President's head until 2004. Rumsfeld having misread the war followed up by misreading the insurgency. Prominent US strategic analyst Anthony Cordesman, from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, says: "The US failed to treat the Iraqis as partners in the counter-insurgency effort for nearly a year and did not attempt to seriously train and equip Iraqi forces for proactive security and counterinsurgency mission until April 2004."

Iraq needs to be kept in context. It is not another Vietnam, neither on the ground nor in its domestic political dimensions. The only people who think this is a Vietnam replay are the people who don't know or have forgotten Vietnam. The US lost 58,000 dead in Vietnam and the war convulsed US society. There is no comparable sense with the Iraq crisis, despite its gravity.

Bush has ensured that the pain is not shared and that sacrifice is not widespread: it is business as usual with a booming economy, lots of spending, tax cuts and no conscription. War fatalities have just passed 2000. The American people know, of course, that Bush's Iraq calculations have come undone. Their dread is an American quagmire and defeat.

Vietnam, unlike Iraq, was not a war of choice. It was a war that president Lyndon Johnson escalated in 1965 to stop South Vietnam going communist. You can agree or disagree, but there is no doubt that Johnson had a compelling reason. LBJ's personal agony about Vietnam was utterly divorced from Bush's pervasive sense of faith and self-righteousness about Iraq.

I spoke to Bush last week in Washington after his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. He was fit, folksy and joking, asking about John Howard and discussing my interview with him two years ago. "How'd I go?" he grinned. There is a sense that Bush operates within his own reality construct.

Campbell says: "I am 100 per cent certain the President has trouble coming to grips with bad news. Bad news is often kept from him."

Yet unreality is not confined to Bush. The American trauma has infected the left and sections of the Democratic Party. The idea of immediate withdrawal, embraced by the Bush haters, epitomises reality denial. The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, a strong Bush backer, quotes George Orwell that "the quickest way of ending a war is to lose it".

For many of Bush's opponents the solution to the war lies in accepting defeat. Bush looks best when rebutting such critics: they would betray the Iraqis trying to rebuild their nation along with the US troops and their war dead. The Economist has editoralised: "The cost to America of staying in Iraq may be high, but the cost of retreat would be higher. By fleeing, America would not buy itself peace. Driving America out of Iraq would grant militant Islam a huge victory."

Prominent Democrat senator Joe Lieberman wrote in The Wall Street Journal after his fourth visit to Iraq: "It is a war between 27 million Iraqis and roughly 10,000 terrorists."

Much of the US media misreads Bush's options. His worst option is not that of staying in Iraq and taking more casualties; his worst option is a premature withdrawal that triggers a collapse and is seen as an act of betrayal.

There is nothing black or white about Iraq. The absolutism of pro-war neo-cons and anti-war moralists has been reinforcing and misleading. Iraq is marked by contradiction, the US is both a liberator and an occupying force. It is part of the solution and part of the problem. So Bush's new policy is based upon two conflicting imperatives: a recognition that the US must withdraw and decouple Iraq from America, yet a recognition that the US must stay long enough to ensure the insurgency doesn't win and to help those Iraqis ready to risk their lives to create a democratic polity. The game plan over 2006 is a US force reduction from 160,000 to about 100,000.

The Democratic foreign policy elite is confused. Bill Clinton opposes any fixed timetable but wants the US to listen to the new Iraqi government. Richard Holbrooke, former UN ambassador, opposes any quick withdrawal or deadline. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser, wants all troops out by the end of 2006, with Kuwait as a base. The Democrats are trying to oppose Bush on Iraq yet uphold their national security credentials.

Iraq is a template for one of the greatest lost opportunities in US annals. Francis Fukuyama captures its essence, saying that after September 11 "the country would have allowed itself to be led in any of several directions and was prepared to accept substantial risks" but what it wanted "was that the leadership be effective, as indeed it was through the Afghan war and the fall of the Taliban."

Yet the Iraq venture ruined one of the finest policy and political positions ever bequeathed to a US president. Bush had three epic aims: to transform the Middle East, to redefine US foreign policy and to tighten his domestic power. A supporter of the war, prominent US military analyst Eliot Cohen from Johns Hopkins University says that Bush's war decision was "courageous" but laments "the incompetence of the planning for its aftermath, the absence of co-ordinated government policy, the mistakes in choosing the proconsuls to administer the prostate enemy, the unwillingness to admit the severity of the opposition, the failure to provide a large enough or well-enough equipped military to handle the fight over the long haul."

Cohen recalls the Bush administration's initial boast that "the adults are back."

Rumsfeld's survival is explicable only in terms of Bush's incomprehension. As late as May 2003 the Pentagon was planning to have troop numbers below 30,000 within months. Packer's book quotes Rumsfeld's spokesman Larry Di Rita saying in April 2003 that "we don't owe the people of Iraq anything, we're giving them their freedom. That's enough." When the looting began in Baghdad, Rumsfeld famously said "stuff happens". Carrying the banner of democracy, he unleashed a new anarchy. Under Rumsfeld the Iraqi army was abolished and the functioning state, in effect, disappeared.

Bush's future and US hopes in Iraq now depend upon the re-creation of the Iraqi state, a process that took a decisive step this week with the election of a four-year government under the new constitution. The final irony is that the structure and progress of this Iraqi government will largely decide Bush's fate.

- 30 -

cops see racial trouble on Oz beaches this weekend

The Sharks gang guards their turf against their rivals, the Jets. (From "West Side Story," 1961.) Vleeptron continues its policy of not showing real photos of real race riots, because they all look alike, they all suck, and everybody's drunk. This gang was choreographed by Jerome Robbins and costumed by Irene Sharaff.

Reuters
Friday 16 December 2005

Oz cops warn public
not to go to Sydney beaches;
warn of weekend race riots

by Michael Perry

SYDNEY (Reuters) -- Australians were warned on Friday to stay away from beaches in three cities this weekend with police saying they have credible evidence that racial violence was being planned.

Police urged people to avoid Cronulla Beach in Sydney's south, where racial violence first flared last Sunday, as well as eastern suburbs beaches which include Maroubra and Bondi, and beaches in regional coastal cities Wollongong and Newcastle.

"Our latest intelligence tells us that large numbers of people are planning to go to these areas on Sunday to cause riotous behavior," New South Wales state Police Commissioner Ken Moroney said in a statement on Friday.

"I would urge people who do not live in these areas to stay away unless they have a good reason to be there," Moroney said.

"It is my duty to warn the public that these areas have been identified as targets."

Racist text messages and emails have been circulating calling for violence this Sunday -- the one week anniversary of the unrest -- and media reported talk of Lebanese youths calling themselves the "lions of Lebanon" coming from across the country to fight this weekend.

Sydney's racial violence erupted at Cronulla when thousands of people, some yelling racist chants, attacked people of Middle East appearance, saying they were defending their beach from Lebanese youth gangs.

Police said white supremacists incited violence at Cronulla.

Lebanese and Muslim youths retaliated with two nights of violence in several different beachside suburbs.

A major police crackdown restored calm, but a Molotov cocktail was thrown at police, a stockpile of incendiary devices uncovered, and 19 people arrested in Sydney on Thursday night.

Police will launch the biggest security operation since the 2000 Olympics in a bid to halt further racial unrest.

Up to 1,500 police, triple the current number on the beat, will be on the streets on Saturday and 2,000 on Sunday.

"There will be lockdown areas. There will be areas where alcohol can not be consumed or purchased," said NSW Police Minister Carl Scully.

"There will be roadblocks and cars confiscated and people arrested. It will be zero tolerance. We will not put up with any nonsense," Scully told local radio.

A police command center has been established on the same lines as if Sydney faced a "terrorist threat", said Assistant Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione.

"This is a long-term fight to ensure the hooligans, thugs and criminals who want to create trouble and disorder will not win," Morris Iemma, NSW state premier, told reporters.

Arab-Muslim leaders and beachside communities have held "peace talks" and called for an end to the violence. Invitations have been sent to 28 Lebanese leaders to attend the launch of a surfboat at Cronulla Beach on Sunday, while the Cronulla surf lifesavers club has launched a drive for Lebanese membership.

The Australian newspaper reported on Friday that Lebanese youths, calling themselves "the Lions of Lebanon", were talking about heading into Sydney, intent on violence.

"We're expecting about 30 cars and a couple of busloads of Leb, Serb, Italian and Greek lions to punch on with us," said a young Lebanese man in the southern city of Melbourne.

© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.

die Weltschieße

Youse all probably think Bob is just always having the Fun of the Barrel of Monkeys running Planet Vleeptron.

Not so.

First of all, the Zeta Beam is still broken, so Bob is stuck again on Planet Earth, and can't even manage to escape from the USA to holiday or expatriate in Yerp.

(I used to know a guy whose Weltschmerz took the following form: He would go into his backyard late at night with a Boy Scout flashlight, point it directly up into the sky, and blink the flashlight, hoping to attract the attention of a Flying Saucer which might take him away.)

In Reviewing The Current State of the United States and the World, Bob confesses to a very human Sin: Skewed Focus.

Bob used to be a Soldier (a ferocious typist) during another entirely ridiculous, grotesque and interminable American War in Asia (we lost), and so Bob is now a War Veteran, and as they ship the flag-draped coffins of young American soldiers home to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, this fixates Vleeptron's focus obsessively.

These are my neighbors' sons and daughters, now soldiers as I once was, and it is an outrage, with Vietnam to educate us historically well within living memory, that Bush and his cronies have managed to blunder an open parliamentary democracy (with the cheerleading assistance of both major parties) into another grotesque, misbegotten, interminable Asian war.

But I was horrified by the murderous racist genocide of the Vietnamese and Cambodian and Laotian peoples, and I am just as horrified by the murderous racist genocide in Iraq.

These human beings are my sisters and brothers, and most of them did nothing to deserve this "Shock and Awe" punishment from the mightiest military superpower on Earth.

A few days ago, during a rare public Question and Answer session, Bush offhandedly acknowledged that about 30,000 Iraqis have died so far in the Coalition War. (We don't tally their numbers nearly as accurately as we do American and British military deaths.)

One of the goals Bush and Blair bleat about as they pursue their chimerical Victory In Iraq is Regional Stabilization -- the fear that, without the continuing military presence of Western armies, the region -- Syria, Iraq, Iran, the Middle East, Arabia and the Gulf, Pakistan, the Muslim majority states in Central Asia -- will "domino," their Western-friendly or Western-approved sovereign governments will collapse, succumb to the same "terrorism" that the US and UK describe as opposing our will in Iraq. In other words, without our armed presence, Western-friendly governments with some hint of secular democracy might give way to a string of Iran-style anti-Western Islamic theocracies.

Well. Either the region will collapse and destabilize if the US and UK withdraw their troops -- or the region will collapse and destabilize if the US and UK keep their troops in Iraq.

Here's That Other Focus that Western news agencies rarely discuss in detail. What are Iraqis doing to each other right now, and how much of the murder and ethnic cleansing is the result of Western Shock and Awe? What might make it worse? What might diminish it and lead to some possible healing?

The Balkans have made enormous strides toward healing since the devastating wars of the 1990s because nearly every Balkan nation is desperate to join the economic prosperity umbrella of the European Union. They are even, grudgingly, turning their genocidists and war criminals (until now regarded as national heroes) over to the war crimes tribunal in the Hague. That's the price Brussels demands for an invitation to join the peaceful, prosperous parts of Europe.

But there is no comparable Prosperity Zone and Promise in Iraq's region -- and so no internal Iraqi reason to cooperate and pursue political and diplomatic solutions to diminish or end the murderous domestic ethnic and religious strife. There is no Belgian carrot, no Pot of Gold at the end of the Central Asian and Middle Eastern rainbow.

Lacking that, ethnic cleansing and genocide make more sense as Sunni and Shia struggle to get the upper hand, either while Western troops blunder and make targets of themselves, or if they do depart with relative promptness.

The people and nations of Southeast Asia are still experiencing regional destabilization 30 years after the American military adventure in Vietnam ended. At one miserable point, America's anger at its humiliating military defeat at the hands of an agricultural Third-World non-power caused American diplomats to champion Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and denounce Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia, which finally ended Pol Pot's genocide.

In Southeast Asia, American might was far more an agent of Destabilization than a guarantor of regional Stabilization. Despite what Bush and Blair claim as a rational reason for remaining, that dog won't hunt.

Please note carefully that the following is not the perspective of Aljazeera, but the perspective of one of Australia's leading newspapers.

===============================

The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
Thursday 15 December 2005

Insurgents 'shot in arms
and legs, then drowned'

by Paul McGeough, Chief Correspondent in Baghdad

This from the mouth of a 14-year-old boy:

"They tied the legs and hands
of 11 Sunni men and hanged them
off the river bridge -- head-first.
But they still refused to talk,
so Sheik Khadum Shibley shot them
in the arms and legs
and then he cut the ropes."

The schoolboy Munthadar Ishmail Kudair's chilling account of a Shiite village's despatch of suspected Sunni insurgents adds credibility to rising Sunni complaints of a long-delayed but vicious Shiite fight-back after two years of relentless Sunni-backed violence in Iraq.

The summary executions, confirmed by the boy's father and others in the village, come amid anxiety by US and UN officials over widespread reports of rampant torture and killings by freelance death squads and the Shiite militiamen who now dominate Iraq's security forces.

Young Munthadar is disturbingly matter-of-fact as he tells of events that unfolded late last month in Radwania, a small farming community on the Al Ka'ad River, near Baghdad International Airport.

"The insurgents came to kill Sheik Khadum because we would not let them use our lands to launch attacks on the airport.

"We set a trap and captured them. But they wouldn't give the pin numbers to open their mobiles, so he hanged them from the bridge.

"Next morning, they still wouldn't open the mobiles for us to see who their friends were, so the Sheik shot them and then he cut the ropes. One of them had a long beard and Sheik Khadum told him: 'Your beard is dirty -- the best place to clean it is in the river.' "

When the Herald sought confirmation of the boy's account, his father added that a jubilant crowd had gathered, singing Shiite hymns and throwing stones at the dangling men as, one by one, they dropped into the deep.

A Herald researcher who visited Radwania was shown a picture, said to have been taken about half-way through the killings with a mobile phone camera, in which five bodies could be seen hanging from the bridge. Locals refused to part with a copy of the image because they thought it would incriminate the Sheik.

The blood-letting and a campaign of random ethnic-cleansing as hundreds of families -- Sunni and Shiite -- flee communities in which they are in the minority, challenge US hopes that a stable democracy will emerge from today's national elections and President George W. Bush's claim that Iraq can sidestep a civil war that many analysts fear is inevitable.

Most of the civilian casualties in post-invasion Iraq have been Shiite victims of Sunni violence. But in recent months, the Sunni head-count among the thousands processed at city morgues has risen dramatically.

Baghdad's central morgue now routinely returns handcuffs removed from the corpses, many of which show signs of torture, to police headquarters.

Some Iraqi officials have attempted to deny that elements of the predominantly-Shiite security forces are running amok, but others are confirming the suspicion voiced by diplomats, human rights groups and coalition military officers.

The Herald has obtained a gruesome document containing almost 70 images of the victims of torture which last month prompted United Nations officials in Baghdad to warn of an alarming deterioration in law and order.

Prepared by the Muslim Scholars' Association, a Sunni organisation, it focuses on a raid by Iraqi security forces in the mixed Al Hurria district of Baghdad, after which the mutilated bodies of 36 men who had been detained in the early hours of the morning were found dumped near the Iranian border.

There has been no official explanation for the raid in which individual families lost up to four members.

Local Sunnis claimed that the uniformed raiding party wore the distinctive shoulder patches of Brigade Borkan, an entirely Shiite rapid intervention force attached to the Interior Ministry. Borkan means 'volcano'.

And they got short shrift when they took their complaint to the office of Ahmed Chalabi, a deputy prime minister, who told them: "Some of these Sunni communities around Baghdad say it's worse than Saddam.

"I tell you when you say that, you show your ignorance of the suffering of your compatriots. Do you think a Shiite person could go into the office of Saddam's deputy and tell him they were being tortured? They immediately admit that this is not the same."

Precise numbers on the absorption of Shiite militiamen into the security forces are not available, but former members of the private armies of two of the Shiite religious parties are said to have carved up the Baghdad police force according to their turf across the capital. And in recent weeks two illegal detention and torture centres have been exposed in Interior Ministry compounds in Baghdad.

Last year the US occupation authority in Baghdad ordered the disbanding of all private militias, urging instead that their ranks be integrated into the security forces. This has happened but individuals have regrouped within the services, where some of their commanders tolerate or allow the use of vehicles and weapons for illegal raids and extra-judicial killings, according to sources close to the forces.

The biggest and most feared of the Shiite militias is the Iranian-trained and funded Badr Badr Brigade which is attached to the biggest of the Shiite political parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).

In an interview with the Herald its chief, Had Al-Ameri, insisted his 10,000 men had laid down their weapons and that, apart from a unit that had been absorbed into the Interior Ministry, 'only a few' had joined the security forces.

Asked about persistent accusations of human rights abuses, he shrugged his shoulders: "Today we are a political organisation. It is normal for people to talk like this in Iraq -- it's a new democracy."

- 30 -

Radio from Outer Space: Bob Dylan vs. Howard Stern

The Chief Junior Geezer of Vleeptron ain't got no iPod, he ain't got no cell phone (oh, okay, sometimes I borrow S.W.M.B.O.'s -- but I don't download no fancy Eminem ringtones), and I still listen to music using those ancient FM radio and CD technologies. I am like soooooo 1999.

Here's a guy who's light years ahead of me in Hi-Tek. I may have to check this Outer Space Radio stuph out.

===================

Los Angeles Times (California USA)
Wednesday 14 December 2005

Quick Takes

Dylan gets a spot
on satellite radio

Forty years ago Bob Dylan went electric -- next year he goes extraterrestrial. Rock's most celebrated singer-songwriter will host a weekly show for XM Satellite Radio beginning in March, the company announced Tuesday.

Dylan will handpick the music, interview guests, answer listeners' e-mails and "offer regular commentary on music and other topics," according to XM officials.

"Songs and music have always inspired me," Dylan said in a statement. "A lot of my own songs have been played on the radio, but this is the first time I've ever been on the other side of the mike. It'll be as exciting for me as it is for XM."

XM officials say their service has surpassed 5 million subscribers. The brand continues to wrestle with competitor Sirius, which is heavily promoting next month's debut of Howard Stern.

-- Geoff Boucher

Drug Czar's Colombian cocaine hallucination

Peter Brueghel the Elder: The Land of Cocaigne (1562)
The peddler pillaged by apes.
(Click for larger.)

I have absolutely no idea who reads this blog. But whoever you are -- do you know who the Drug Czar is? Do you know what the Office of National Drug Control Policy is? Do you know what he does -- not just the Bush administration Drug Czar, but his predecessors since the Nixon administration?

Here, let Vleeptron toss out a meme: Get rid of the Drug Czar. Thirty years of lies, thirty years of policy toxin, thirty years of failure, thirty years of sickness getting worse in America and all over the world. Make it stop.

* * *

The San Francisco Chronicle (California USA)
Wednesday 7 December 2005

Congressional watchdog
challenges U.S. drug war
in Colombia

by C.J. Schexnayder, Chronicle Foreign Service

Bogota, Colombia -- A U.S. government report to be released next week raises serious questions about the effectiveness of the multibillion-dollar U.S. anti-drug campaign in Colombia, despite moves by the Bush administration to extend the program.

The 52-page report by the Government Accountability Office, an advance copy of which has been obtained by The Chronicle, challenges administration conclusions that the drug interdiction effort known as Plan Colombia -- a five-year program that ends this year -- has reduced the amount of cocaine available in the United States.

The report was skeptical of the statistics the government relied on for its upbeat assessments, calling its information on cocaine production and use problematic. It also said the Office of National Drug Control Policy had failed to fully address previous "recommendations for improving illicit drug data collection and analysis."

On Nov. 9 in Bogota, John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy [commonly referred to as the Drug Czar], said Plan Colombia had been responsible for a substantial increase in the street price of cocaine in the United States and a drop in its quality from Colombia, which supplies an estimated 90 percent of the world's cocaine, and an estimated $65 billion in illegal drugs to the U.S. market.

"There were those who did not believe it was possible to change the availability of cocaine in the United States," Walters said. "What we're announcing today is, there's no question that's happened."

But the GAO, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, specifically criticized those figures, saying that they reflected trends that "could reflect law enforcement patterns rather than drug availability patterns" and that the number of U.S. cocaine users remained constant at about 2 million. "Other sources estimate the number of chronic and occasional cocaine users may be as high as 6 million," the report stated.

The GAO also found the White House assessment of the amount of cocaine entering the United States in 2004 -- 325 metric tons to 675 metric tons -- to be too varied to be "useful for assessing interdiction efforts."

In an interview, David Murray, a special assistant to Walters, downplayed the report. "We have more data and more analysts working on this out of our office than anyone," he said. "We feel we have some of the best information in the world on the issue. We are trying to make sense of a business whose very core element is hiding from plain view."

Since 2000, the United States has poured about $6 billion into Latin America to fund antidrug efforts, more than half of it earmarked for Plan Colombia. Its supporters in Colombia say the program is crucial not only for battling the drug trade but also to combat left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries involved in the nation's four-decade armed conflict that depend on financing from drug profits.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) -- the country's largest rebel group -- raked in as much as $1.3 billion in 2003, of which an estimated 45 percent came from cocaine, according to a report released earlier this year by the Joint Intelligence Command, the Colombian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Council. Plan Colombia "is essential for what we do," said Col. Yamlik Moreno of the National Police's antidrug division. "Without the funding ... we would have to reduce our operations by 90 percent."

The U.S.-Colombia strategy, which targets cocaine production at its source, is aimed at reducing supply and driving up prices and thereby discouraging consumption in the United States. Military aid provided by Washington over the years includes combat helicopters, light weapons ranging from machine guns to rocket launchers and intelligence technology as well as advisers, chemicals and fumigation planes to spray coca fields. Just last month, Walters helped inaugurate a $12 million helicopter hanger just north of Bogota.

Colombian officials also say they are winning the drug war and point to an increase in the fumigation of coca fields and record seizures of cocaine. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says the amount of acreage devoted to coca cultivation has been reduced by more than half in the past five years, to about 200,000 acres from 403,551 acres in 2000, while production has fallen more than 45 percent to 149 metric tons last year.

But critics say that spraying has merely pushed coca production into more remote areas and that statistics do not adequately measure the amount of drug each acre produces.

"These antidrug policies have failed to address the real causes, the real structural reasons that Colombia produces drugs," said Francisco Thoumi, an economist at Rosario University in Bogota who has followed the drug trade for more than three decades. "They confront the problem in a short-term limited way, and there is no reason to believe that will change with a new version of Plan Colombia."

Colombia will send its proposal for an extension of Plan Colombia to the U.S. State Department, as required by international protocol, within the next few months. Walters says he is confident the new plan will be accepted by both countries. "We have been clear we intend to continue this policy," he told The Chronicle.

Congress recently approved $712 million in fiscal year 2005-06 for the Andean Counter Drug Initiative, an antidrug aid package for South America.

Last summer, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., requested the GAO study to review official statistics used to evaluate the program.

Grassley noted that GAO criticism was likely to hurt the administration's push to extend the program, at least at its current funding levels.

"While we want to keep a multi-pronged approach with our efforts in Central and South America, we need to ensure that the money that is being provided, for both military and nonmilitary efforts, is being used effectively," said Grassley in an e-mail message. "Basically, it (GAO report) is saying it is very difficult to prove the policies are affecting the overall drug trade."

In Bogota, government officials remain closemouthed about the follow-up to Plan Colombia. President Alvaro Uribe, who has high approval ratings and is expected to run for re-election next year, has been an enthusiastic supporter of the program. But opposition candidates and even some members of the government have started to voice criticisms, noting the lack of tangible results in contrast to the program's high cost over the past six years.

"Under no circumstances are we saying we do not need the aid or that the aid is not important," said Comptroller-General Antonio Hernandez. "The question we have to ask is if this set of actions, efforts and sacrifices ... requires a different path. We are asking if there is another way of approaching the problem. "

© 2005 San Francisco Chronicle

hurry up and fix the goddam Zeta Beam already, This Planet's A Mess!

Vleeptron's skilled technicians are working
around the clock to fix the Zeta Beam
so we can get off this fucked-up planet.

patfromch schreibt:

The Greater Sydney Area is one of the most rapidly expanding regions I have ever seen. For a contry boy like me this was most fascinating, but it must be every city planner's nightmare.

About ten years ago, rural towns like Camden or Campelltown were about a good hour's drive away from the city center.

Since a new highway and a new tunnel have been built this destance has been reduced to half an hour which of course means easier access to the suburbs. And they are growing like mad. Model homes are cheap, and an artificial suburb can be built with astonishing speed. I've seen it and it's not a pretty sight.

And who wants to live in Sydney anyway ? The Inner city is allright, but quarters like Liverpool, Parramatta or Redfern are not places where you wanna raise kids nowdays.

So they all move to these new artificial suburbs like Mount Annan where even the name is artificial and the first thing that had been built was the Shopping Mall. The Aussies, the Asians and the Muslims.

It was only a matter of time for these riots to break out.

Australia has a huge immigration and therefore rasism problem. The first sparks of hatret were ignitet by Pauline Hanson and her Australia Now party some years ago. she was constantly babbling things like "Australia for Australians" and other populist rubbish. Her political carrer is over, but the mean spirit still iives on.

The unempolyment rate in Australia is around 9 % (I need to check on that), it is not unusual for kids to get off high school and directly on unempolyment, wellfare or medicaid without help from their parents who are busy trying to pay the morgauge for their artificial suburban home. So they get pissed on VB to fuell their anger and blame it on somebody else that they can only find McJobs.

The rest is in the papers.

Oh, and that just for Sydney, just wait 'till I tell you about Alice Springs aka Montgo

========================

Hey! Stop following me around Planet Earth! I went to Sydney! I went to Alice Springs and Uluru! I went to Melbourne and Adelaide! Stop following me!

A long time ago ... to get the best seats on the planet to see Halley's Comet, so you can figure out when I was in Alice.

And I want so much to go again. I found the Australian people to be wonderful, thoughtful, politically sophisticated (they invented the Nuclear Free Pacific movement), as well as adventurous, funny, anti-Puritanical, entertaining, joyful.

They have a rough, miserable, unpleasant history to live down. They were dragged to Australia in chains as (mostly Irish) prisoners. And then a genocide of the First Peoples who'd been there for 10,000 years before the Euros came. And then a century of anti-Asian bigotry after Asians were first imported for cheap labor.

I won't say they've successfully overcome all that. But they're aware of all the ethical and moral dimensions of the worst of their history, and they've grown some ethical giants in Australia -- Dr. Helen (Mary Broinowski) Caldicott, the world's passionate soul trying to warn us of the sickness and doom of nuclear weapons. The organization she founded, Physicians for Social Responsibility, grew into International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.

Pauline Hanson is a temporary pustule of a recurrent racist infection in Australian politics and society. I wish to Christ that when she had her year of political fame and influence, more mainstream professional politicians had spoken out more angrily against the sickness she was pandering to in Australian society. But I think, like most elected politicians everywhere, they wanted to test the wind and see how successful her racist xenophobic ideas were with the voters. That's the tragedy and the tragic legacy of the short-lived Pauline Hanson and her Australia First Party.

Isn't this an attractive invitation from Australia First as Pauline's legacy continues:

=================

Australian Youth And Families
Should Support The Cronulla
Mass Mobilisation On December 11

After months of racial taunts, threats and violence against Australian youth and families in the Cronulla area of Sydney - courtesy of gangs of Middle Eastern youths - a mass reaction has erupted right outside of the rules and forms of normal politics.Tired of being fobbed off by police commanders and local politicians, Australian youth took the matter into their own hands. It is the likely case that on Sunday, December 11, hundreds if not thousands of Australian youth and family people, will occupy the Cronulla beach area as an effective demonstration of solidarity with the victims of anti-Australian race hate and violence.

This demonstration is proper and should be supported by all residents and patriotic people.

The response of the Premier of the State, a man steeped in what is called multiculturalist ideology, was to call for a massive police presence to avert violence between angry Australians and the Middle Eastern gangs. Indeed, the participants should observe restraint and offer self-defence only if attacked. It is the very fact they will appear in great numbers, as living testimony to the rightful method of mass action, which will for this day at least, cow the hatemongers and show this Premier and those who stand with him, they are no longer intimidated by an ideology and policy that is now generally hated and loathed by the Australian people.

All members and friends of Australia First, particularly those in the Sutherland Shire, will participate as individuals in this first great mobilisation of Australians against the terror of multiculturalist ideology and practise in this country's history.

==================

Well, only Vleeptron is free of political slides to the racist right. Only Vleeptron is without racial prejudice, only Vleeptron is overflowing with respect and brotherhood and sisterhood, only Vleeptron has completely decriminalized drugs and adopted the medical model of treatment and harm reduction, and nearly emptied all its prisons.

Unfortunately, the Zeta Beam is broken again this month, so we're all stuck on this fuckin' Third Rock out from Sol. With Pauline and with Haider and Berlusconi and Bush and Blair and the Myanmar military junta and the Singapore hangman and the California executioner who's preparing a lethal injection for Stanley Tookie Williams any moment now.

If Vleeptron can't get new parts for the ZB, the people of Earth are just gonna have to take control of their sovereign nations and make 'em Straighten Up And Fly Right. My guess is ... my sincere best guess based on the wonderful long talks I had with Australians ... is that this skinhead race riot crap is making them profoundly ashamed and embarrassed -- on a level much deeper than just worry that this will queer the next couple of years of tourism.

It's certainly, as they say these days, a Teachable Moment for Australian politics, its spiritual community (nice that the nice Archbishop woke up out of his coma and said something), a call for Australia's Best Souls to offer their leadership.

Or as S.W.M.B.O. is fond of saying:

"Oh, great,
another fucking opportunity
for personal growth."

================

Here from November 2003 un petit bonbon from a Nazi-reeking website:

================

Pauline Hanson Freed - conviction quashed-
Freed Hanson vows to fight injustice

Pauline Hanson vowed to be a champion of the wrongly imprisoned after a court quashed her and One Nation co-founder David Ettridge's convictions for electoral fraud. Queensland Chief Justice Paul de Jersey told a stunned Brisbane courtroom the Court of Appeal had acquitted both Ms Hanson and Mr Ettridge.

They had served 11 weeks in jail [Vleeptron giggles] since a Brisbane District Court jury found them guilty on August 20 and they were sentenced to three years in prison without parole. Ms Hanson and Mr Ettridge embraced soon after their release from prison in Brisbane.

She said she had been astounded by the support she had received while she was inside. "I've had thousands of letters from the public not only from Australia but from Poland, New Zealand, England, America and Canada."

But an appeal court comprising Justice de Jersey, Queensland Court of Appeal president Margaret McMurdo and Supreme Court judge Geoffrey Davies ordered their acquittal.

They will not face a retrial.

The decision was greeted by stunned silence in the courtroom before a single supporter in the public gallery broke into applause.

But the appeal court found the prosecution's case was flawed.

Ms Hanson's sister Judy Smith said outside court she was still angry the former One Nation leader had been jailed in the first place. "Why did it go to trial, that's what I want to know," Mrs Smith said. "The Australian people should be asking please explain. This has cost taxpayers millions of dollars."

One Nation NSW MP David Oldfield, who fell out with Ms Hanson, said he was pleased she and Mr Ettridge had been released and they should seek compensation.

"It was a terrible, terrible scenario they were in jail at all," he said.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/National/story_51512.asp

[don't bother, it's a File Not Found 404]

Ignorance is no excuse. Those who repeat the litany of white guilt hogwash will not stop until they have invalidated Europeans' civil rights and our voice is eradicated. We must oppose them at every opportunity.

===================================

From the always reliable Wikipedia:

===================================

On 20 August 2003, a jury convicted Hanson of electoral fraud and she was sentenced to three years imprisonment by the Supreme Court of Queensland for falsely claiming that 500 support group members were genuine paid up members of One Nation, in order to register it as a political party and apply for electoral funding from the state of Queensland. She was thereby found to have dishonestly obtained two cheques worth AUD$498,637 from Queensland's electoral commission as electoral funds. Justice Wolfe accepted that Hanson had paid back the funding but said electoral processes must not be perverted, and made a finding that Hanson had gained unfair electoral advantage by "misrepresenting" 500 voters. Hanson's initial reaction to the verdict was - "Rubbish, I'm not guilty. It's a joke."

On 6 November 2003, the appeal court quashed and set aside the convictions of both Hanson and Etteridge [2]. The court's unanimous decision was that:

* the (more than) 500 persons on the list in fact were members of the party;

* that even if they had not been, they were clearly at least members of a closely related party, which was sufficient under the Electoral Act 1992 to make the registration legal;

* the failure of the trial judge to refer to this point of law (regarding related parties) in summing up was by itself sufficient to quash the conviction;

* in light of these points there was no need to rule on the appellants many other points of appeal; and

* in view of setting aside this conviction, Hanson's conviction for property fraud (in receiving the cheques from the Electoral Commissioner after registration), being "subsidiary" to this conviction, was automatically overturned.

The court also criticised the public comments made about the case by a number of prominent politicians on both sides of the political spectrum, and also considered that had the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions been better resourced, "the present difficulty may well have been avoided" (in light of accompanying statements about the paucity of Crown evidence, presumably they mean the case would never have been prosecuted).

The justices did not comment on whether Hanson is entitled to be repaid the AUD$498,637 which she had repaid to the Electoral Commissioner.

In January 2004, Hanson announced that she would not return to politics. [3]

Attempted return to politics

On 15 September 2004, Hanson announced that she would be standing as an independent candidate for the seat of Queensland in the Senate in the October 9 election. She declared, "I don't want all the hangers on. I don't want the advisers and everyone else. I want it to be this time Pauline Hanson."

She was ultimately unsuccessful, receiving only 30% of the required quota of primary votes, and didn't pick up enough additional support through preferences.

Appearance on Dancing With The Stars

In late 2004 during her election campaign, Hanson competed in the Australian Reality TV show Dancing With The Stars on the Seven Network. In the show a number of Australian celebrities compete against one another in ballroom dancing. Hanson made it to the final, surprising many in Australian politics and media as she advanced due to audience support in SMS voting, but lost to former Home And Away star Bec Cartwright.

Pride goeth before destruction and an haughty spirit before a fall.

Fooey, the Barcelona footy riot doesn't display

anymore. Here's another one. The home team,
North Korea, lost 2-0 to Iran in March 2005.
This is the disappointed fans surrounding
the Iran team's bus in Pyongyang. (BBC)

On the political chatrooms of Internet Relay Chat -- the Internet's version of AM radio talk/chat/phone-in programs -- Americans and English-speakers, I guess from Canada and the UK, expressed their disgust and dismay against Arab immigrants who were rioting through the slums of French cities in late October and November. The suggestions were thick that these were things white Euros and Christians and English speakers would never do. Caucasian Christians never riot. We are too well-brought-up, we are too civic, we are far too restrained and disciplined and intelligent and law-abiding ever to do anything like that.

Pride goeth before destruction,
and an haughty spirit before a fall.

-- Proverbs 16:18

==========================

The Daily Telegraph (UK)
Monday 12 December 2005

Second night of violence
in Sydney

Scores of youths have driven through beachside suburbs in Sydney smashing windows of stores, homes and apartments, in a second night of race rioting.

[image] Rioting in Sydney / The riots were organised by neo-Nazi groups

The riots first broke out in Cronulla, on Sunday when a mob of 5,000 white men, many of them drunk, attacked men they believed were of Middle Eastern descent. The men were retaliating for the the assault of two volunteer lifeguards by youths of Lebanese descent, although police said there was no apparent racial motive.

Police said the riots were organised by mobile phone text messages and encouraged by neo-Nazi groups.

The violence continued after dark on Monday night when two dozen car loads of youths rampaged through the city chased by hundreds of police vehicles and a helicopter.

Paul Bugden, a spokesman for New South Wales police said that six people had been arrested.

On Sunday, police arrested 16 rioters and said 31 people were injured, including a man who was stabbed in the back by a man they said was "of Arab appearance."

John Howard, the prime minister, called the violence "sickening," but said he did not accept that there was "underlying racism" in Australia.

Anti-Muslim sentiment has grown in the country since the September 11 terror attacks and the Bali bombings in October 2002 in which 202 people, 88 of them Australian, were killed.

Around 300,000 Muslims live in Australia, the majority in lower income suburbs of large cities.

Christian leaders also condemned the violence. Cardinal George Pell, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, said that, "All people of goodwill should reject the extremists in both camps and work together so that this is the end of major disturbances, not the beginning of something worse."

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005

Sober Up And Fly Right

Nat King Cole

Attention iPod People
of Planet Earth

Does this song make any sense to you?

It shouldn't make much sense to me, either, it was a smash hit four years before I existed.

But here's the deal. This song is a dialogue between A Reasonably Straight-Shooting, Honest Person, and a Jive Artist, a dude who just never deals straight with anybody. The Reasonably Straight-Shooting Honest Person has finally had more than enough, gets muy pissed off, and Shares His Feelings with the Jive Artist.

When it was performed by a Big Band, the entire orchestra would shout:

Straighten Up And Fly Right!

And Vleeptron has found an excellent MIDI for you to Open In a New Window so you can sing along.

For openers, the Entire Planet Vleeptron Choir might want to sing it to the Beach Mob in Sydney, Australia, and when you get to the chorus, sing:

Sober Up and Fly Right!

I've been to Australia and Australia has lovely people and Excellent Beer. (I'm quite fond of Red Centre.) But the Excellent Beer ceases to be Excellent after the ninth one.

~ ~ ~

Straighten Up And Fly Right

Words & Music by Nat King Cole & Irving Mills
Recorded by Nat King Cole 1943

A buzzard took a monkey for a ride in the air
The monkey thought that ev'-ry-thing was on the square
The buzzard tried to throw the monkey off of his back
But the monkey grabbed his neck and said:
Now list-en, Jack ...

Straighten up and fly right
Straighten up and fly right
Straighten up and fly right
Cool down, Papa, don't you blow your top

Ain't no use in divin'
What's the use in drivin'?
Straighten up and fly right --
Cool down, Papa, don't you blow your top

The buzzard told the monkey: You are chokin' me
Release your hold and I will set you free
The monkey looked the buzzard right dead in the eye
And said:
Your story's so touchin'
It sounds just like a lie

Straighten up and fly right
Straighten up and fly right
Straighten up and fly right
Cool down, Papa, don't you Blow
Your
Top