Archive for February 2007
Sometimes, The News Is Good
Author JK Rowling has blasted the Scottish Medicines Consortium for its stance against the use of the drug Tysabari on the basis of cost.
Tysabari is used in cases of MS that is resistant to other forms of therapy.The drug costs L15,000 per year ($29, 452 American Dollars)
It’s a wonderful thing when someone uses their celebrity to speak out for social justice but the Ole Wazoo is getting tired of all the well heeled big shots offering little more than a song or a show of indignation in support of those less fortunate.
Ms Rowling, whose Mother died of MS is a pleasant exception having given Britain’s Multiple Sclerosis Society a significant contribution.
Bravo! and a tip of the Ole Wazoo’s fedora to you JK, may many others follow your lead!
The Non-Jewish Jew
Dennis Prager has an excellent article today in the Jewish World Review about the self hating Jews such as Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Noam Chomsky and George Soros. Find out what they have in common.
Chavez Nationalizes Oil Companies in Venezuela
Please send your oil bill to Joe Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Cindy Sheehan. Due to their unwavering support, those retirees and middle class citizens with stock in oil corporations will see their investments plummet.
President Hugo Chavez ordered by decree on Monday the takeover of oil projects run by foreign oil companies in Venezuela’s Orinoco River region.
Chavez had previously announced the government’s intention to take a majority stake by May 1 in four heavy oil-upgrading projects run by British Petroleum PLC, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips Co., Total SA and Statoil ASA.
He said Monday that has decreed a law to proceed with the nationalizations that will see state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, taking at least a 60 percent stake in the projects.
“The privatization of oil in Venezuela has come to an end,” he said on his weekday radio show, “Hello, President.” “This marks the true nationalization of oil in Venezuela.” By May 1, “we will occupy these fields” and have the national flag flying on them, he said.
Thank you Carter, Joe, and Cindy and all the left wing extremists for their support of a truly evil dictatorship. Watch your gas prices go up…and our economy go down.
Politics and Religion Dangerous Partners
Dissident priests is not a phrase heard often except among traditional Catholics when speaking of liberal priests espousing gay marriage, birth control, and encouraging illegal aliens to break federal laws.
Vietnamese police have accused a prominent dissident Catholic priest of disseminating propaganda intended to undermine the communist government, officials and state media said Monday.
Nguyen Van Ly has been moved from his home in the central city of Hue, where he was under virtual house arrest, and taken to a smaller parish outside the city, said Ngo Hoa, vice chairman of the Thua Thien-Hue provincial government.
Authorities say Ly, a member of the Vietnam Progression Party, was plotting with overseas democracy activists to start a new political party called Lac Hong. Vietnam’s communist party does not tolerate challenges to its single-party rule.
Police have not formally charged Ly and are continuing to investigate.
The actions against Ly come as Vietnam and the Vatican are discussing the possibility of establishing diplomatic ties. In a sign of their warming relations, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung visited the Pope last month.
Authorities raided Ly’s home on Feb. 18 and took items including hundreds of documents and five laptop computers, Hoa said. They returned on Feb. 24 and moved Ly to the rural parish in Phong Dien district, where he remains under virtual house arrest.
Ly angered Vietnamese authorities when he gave written testimony in 2001 to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom urging the United States not to ratify a bilateral trade agreement until the communist government improved its human rights record.
Ly has spent more than a decade in prison for his political activism and is one of the best known members of Vietnam’s small dissident community. Humans groups and western politicians say he has been persecuted for his political beliefs.
Hopefully he will be allowed to live.
Catholic Punishment Seen As Child Labor
To paraphrase Chaucer, who said “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” what’s wrong with giving children chores to do as punishment for bad behaviour?
Catholic school principal, Debilyn Janota is under scrutiny for assigning two boys – with time on their hands who decided they would use that time to fight – to scrub the bathroom walls with a toothbrush.
The debate over how a child should be punished while at school is growing in Salem after a questionable form of punishment came to light Friday at Queen of Peace Catholic School in South Salem. The principal was was seen punishing students by using what some call child labor.
Two visitors to the school on Friday say they saw two kindergarteners, both boys, cleaning the base of a wall with a toothbrush. When they asked a staff member about the situation, they say they were told that that is how the principal, Debilyn Janota, deals with punishments at the school, and has for years.
Bud Bunce with Archdiocese of Portland says the Archdiocese and parents of children who attend the school back the principal’s form of punishment.
“The two students were caught fighting, and the principal felt the best way to punish the students was use their excess energy and have them clean base of the wall with a bucket of water and a toothbrush for the betterment of the school, we support that decision” Bunce said.
He says the children were going to pick-up trash on the school campus, but rain changed that to wall cleaning. He added that whenever a student is punished at the school, the parents are notified.
Bunce would not comment on if there had been any complaints in the past about punishments handed out at the school.
He also declined to comment on how long this form of punishment was going on, and if it was going on at other Catholic schools across the state.Oregon Department of Education spokesman Gene Evans says the state of Oregon has no authority over the situation.
Sally Anderson, who lives near the school, says the situation is outrageous. “Someone needs to take a stand and protect those kids, this isn’t the ‘good old days’ when this type of punishment is accepted, in my view this is a form a child abuse and the principal should be fired.”
But another resident, Mark Davis of Salem, says he is fine with the principal decision.
“I’m not Catholic, but I believe that children need some form of discipline other than the standard ‘sit in the corner’ when they do something wrong.”
Christina Johnson said it’s a debate over religious beliefs. “I feel that most religions would frown upon this, while Catholics feel that this is o-k, that is their right, and we should not have a say as to what they should or should not believe is the right form of punishment for their children.”
Some Salem-Keizer public school educators said that if they had used this type of discipline on their students not only would they be fired, but blasted by the public, and the media as well. Janota has been at the school since 1994.
The school has students from kindergarten through grade six, and has a current enrollment of about 158 children.
I wonder what the percentage of misbehaviour incidents the public schools in Salem are compared to the parochial schools?
Hard work never killed anyone and having children do chores, even idle chores such as scrubbing walls with toothbrushes, moving bricks from one side of the yard to ther other, will produce a better behaved, disciplined, stronger, and more respectful adult.
There is a reason why Catholic schools do it better than public schools.
Statistical evidence of the parochial system’s success is striking. James Coleman, a University of Chicago sociologist, has found that Catholic high school students outperform their public school counterparts in reading, vocabulary, mathematics and writing. The dropout rate in Catholic high schools was less than 4%, he discovered, compared with more than 14% in public schools. Black or Hispanic students are three times as likely to graduate in four years as their public school counterparts. Some 83% of the graduates go to college, in contrast to 52% of those from public school.
To some extent such comparisons are unfair. The public systems are required to service, at tremendous cost, students with severe learning disabilities, physical handicaps and discipline problems. In addition, public schools must take everyone, whereas the children in Catholic schools tend to be from families motivated to find them a good education.
Even in the inner cities, Catholic schools have been successful in attracting — and educating — children from poor and minority families willing to bear the cost. The sacrifice is often heavy: high school tuitions can approach $4,000. Nevertheless, minority enrollment in the Catholic system is now 23% of the total, double what it was 20 years ago. “When my son would come home from public school, all he could talk about was who was fighting whom,” recalls Laura Williams, a black Baptist whose three children have attended the Academy of St. Benedict the African on Chicago’s South Side.
How do the Catholic schools do it? Mostly by practicing and preaching old- fashioned stuff: values, discipline, educational rigor and parental accountability, coupled with minimal bureaucracy. “Catholic schools have had to make a virtue out of necessity,” explains Archbishop Francis Schulte of New Orleans. “These institutions have had to think and act creatively for decades to stretch small budgets.”
It adds up to what Coleman calls “social capital,” a combination of qualities that public schools simply can’t match.
Family Phone Planning
“Oh Susie, that’s a cute pink and blue cell phone! Where did you get it?”
“This is my new Planned Parenthood cell phone I received with my renewed prescription of birth control pills! Cell? Get it? It’s not a real phone but a cell phone. ”
“Cool! How do I get one?”
I thought when the voters told the government that they didn’t want to fund abortions, states started to show abortions were decreasing by double digits. The ACLU is in panic mode that abortions are decreasing and petitions to cut funding for pregnancies has been increasing. Teenagers are taking to heart that abstinence works, and the statistics for abortions has lowered.
How’s a extremist, anti-family, anti-social, anti-faith/values organization supposed to fund its multi billion dollar genocide programs if there’s no support from good, decent people?
They can sell phone services and give away free phones!
From Opinion Journal’s Best of the Web:
Working Assets, “a progressive phone company,” offers “The Right Choice That Supports Choice”:
- Planned Parenthood Wireless is a new choice for your cell phone service. By signing up for this service, you will help preserve reproductive rights, and ensure access to comprehensive family planning and medically accurate sex education for women and families around the world. You’ll do something you do every day–talk on your cell phone–and you’ll be helping Planned Parenthood as 10% of all monthly charges goes to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, at no extra cost to you.
Opinion Journal’s editors offer this bit of advice:
“Just make sure you’re prepared to stick with it for the duration of the contract. We hear those early-termination fees can be murder.”
Iran: Supplier of Weapons To The Enemy
One of the largest cache of weapons ever found in Iraq has been found and can be traced back to Iran.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have seized a large weapons cache that includes parts for sophisticated roadside bombs that are believed to originate in Iran, U.S. military investigators said.
Military officials said that the arsenal is one of the biggest found north of the Iraqi capital and contains components for so-called EFPs — explosively formed projectiles that fire a slug of molten metal that can penetrate armored vehicles.The U.S. military has said elite Iranian corps are funneling EFPs to Shiite militias in Iraq for use against American troops.
Earlier this month, U.S. officials showed reporters in Baghdad pieces of EFPs they said were directly traceable to Iran.
Titanic Director Uncovers Jesus’s Family Crypts?
UPDATE: The archaeologist who oversaw the work at the tomb described the theory as ‘nonsense’. Amos Kloner said the names found on the coffins had been found in tombs before, adding: ‘It makes a great story for a TV film, but it’s impossible. ‘Jesus and his relatives were a Galilee family with no ties in Jerusalem. The Talpiot tomb belonged to a middle-class family from the first century.
Who is behind the startling revelations? Would you be surprised to hear Hollywood?
Just in time to take advantage of the Christianity’s most holy feast day, Easter, James Cameron, the director of the award-winning movie Titanic, has finished a 90 minute documentary that will be shown in the coming months around the world.
“… a new documentary, Producer Cameron and his director, Simcha Jacobovici, make the starting claim that Jesus wasn’t resurrected –the cornerstone of Christian faith– and that his burial cave was discovered near Jerusalem.
And, get this, Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene.Let’s go back 27 years, when Israeli construction workers were gouging out the foundations for a new building in the industrial park in the Talpiyot, a Jerusalem suburb. of Jerusalem. The earth gave way, revealing a 2,000 year old cave with 10 stone caskets. Archologists were summoned, and the stone caskets carted away for examination. It took 20 years for experts to decipher the names on the ten tombs. They were: Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua.
Israel’s prominent archeologist Professor Amos Kloner didn’t associate the crypt with the New Testament Jesus. His father, after all, was a humble carpenter who couldn’t afford a luxury crypt for his family. And all were common Jewish names.
But film-makers Cameron and Jacobovici claim to have amassed evidence through DNA tests, archeological evidence and Biblical studies, that the 10 coffins belong to Jesus and his family.
Cameron is holding a New York press conference on Monday at which he will reveal three coffins, supposedly those of Jesus of Nazareth, his mother Mary and Mary Magdalene. News about the film, which will be shown soon on Discovery Channel, Britain’s Channel 4, Canada’s Vision, and Israel’s Channel 8.”
I wonder when the DaVinci Code was published if Cameron was upset that Dan Brown had scooped his discovery or whether Hollywood’s famous producer and director was pleased that Brown set the stage to dismantle the world’s largest Christian Church and largest organized religion’s foundation?
Highways Being Outsourced By NAFTA
Just look at your friendly United States truck driver on the road next to your car and wave adios. In 60 days, our highways will be the road to a better economy for Mexico and more outsourcing for America. Thank the NAFTA – North America Free Trade Agreement signed by Clinton in 2000.
The news that Mexican trucks will be allowed to haul freight deeper into the United States drew an angry reaction Friday from labor leaders, safety advocates and members of Congress.
They said Mexico has substandard trucks and low-paid drivers that will threaten national security, cost thousands of jobs and endanger motorists on the northern side of the Mexican border.
The Bush administration on Thursday announced its plan to have U.S. inspectors oversee Mexican trucking companies that carry cargo across the border.
“This program will make trade with Mexico easier and keep our roads safe at the same time,” Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said Friday. She announced details of the plan to let 100 Mexican trucking companies travel beyond the border area while she was in El Paso, Texas, at the Bridge of the Americas, which connects to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
Said Teamsters President Jim Hoffa: “They are playing a game of Russian roulette on America’s highways.”
Access to all U.S. highways was promised by 2000 under the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, as was access through Mexico for U.S. carriers.
A New World – Amexicanada?
Who is behind the unification of North America without directive or oversight from Congress and the United States voter? The United States, Canada, and Mexico.
If you don’t know anything about this or the Super American Highway being built, it’s time to wake up. Your country is at stake. Contact your local Congressman now!
¡Agradezca le y una extremidad del sombrero a Dave!
Sma' Talk Wi' T 