Fleeting sensationsThe evidence is overwhelming that it's infinitely harder to rebuild shattered lives without acknowledging the spiritual dimension of human nature. No, this doesn't mean accepting Jesus as your personal savior. It simply means that, as Alcoholics Anonymous and its many offshoots — including Gamblers Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, etc. — have shown, acknowledgment of a higher power is central to recovery.
According to AA’s own Triennial Survey of its membership (conducted every three years, of course), of 100 people who join AA today, only about five of them will still be there a year from now. In five years, that figure will shrink to a mere 1.6 to 2.6 percent. These figures have remained consistent for decades. Compare this with the figures describing the natural outgrowth of a substance problem: of Americans who say they’ve ever had a substance problem but have since solved that problem, fully 80 percent claim they either outgrew the problem naturally, or buckled down and took care of it on their own, without any outside help whatsoever.
Leading the nitwit parade on this issue are two very strange bedfellows: Barry Lynn, who has made a career out of warning people of imaginary threats to the separation of church and state, and Pat Robertson, who is worried about “opening the floodgates ... of the federal treasury to aberrant groups” like the Church of Scientology, the Unification Church and the Hare Krishnas.
I guess Rev. Pat doesn't know that the Hare Krishnas have provided help to homeless veterans, recovering addicts and prison parolees with the help of government money for close to 20 years.
In Utah, members of the polygamous church have asked the state’s governor to intervene in its fight with Texas authorities over the custody the children.
A letter written by FLDS elder Willie Jessop says Texas officials are rejecting Utah-issued birth certificates and other documents as “fake.”
The letter asks Gov. Jon Huntsman to exercise his executive authority to assist in protecting the civil rights of native Utahns and FLDS members. FLDS parents claim they have been denied their due process by the Texas courts.
“Without your leadership and personal intervention in this matter, the parental rights of every Utah family is at risk,” Jessop wrote.
Huntsman spokeswoman Lisa Roskelly said the governor has been in contact with Jessop and was reviewing his request.
“The significant deterioration in the mortgage, housing and credit markets and the resulting impact on the retail marketplace, particularly the home sector, has overwhelmed the operating and merchandising improvements that we have made over the past two years,” said Robert J. DiNicola, Linens Holding executive chairman, in a statement.
“We are making the strategic decision to use a Chapter 11 filing to proactively address our capital structure and ensure that our stores will remain well stocked while we work through the steps to align the capital structure of the company with the realities of today's business environment,” DiNicola said.
Scarcity markets aren't created overnight. Potential buyers need to be bloodied by repeated experience on both the supply and demand side. Consumers of copper know that for each of the past six years, the copper industry has failed to deliver projected increases in supply.
In 2008 and 2009, according to UBS AG, the industry will fall short again. The bank projects production a shortfall of 800,000 metric tons over those two years.
You can see scarcity economics at work in today's fertilizer market, for example. Potash of Saskatchewan produces potash and nitrogen fertilizers. But with the world short 1.2 million metric tons of potash in 2008 and desperate for nitrogen fertilizer, Potash is seeing its already high margins soar to astounding heights. In announcing its first-quarter earnings, the company projected that margins in 2008 will be roughly 3.5 times as high as in 2007.
Think that’s insane? As long as scarcity economics rules the fertilizer market, there’s a good chance Potash will get its price, and other fertilizer makers will go along for the ride. The global scarcity has made high-cost, government-subsidized producers in India the price setters in the market: If you’ve got to have supply, you'll pay any price, right? That price and not Potash’s production costs are now setting the market price.
Supply contracts for potash for the second half of 2008 are up for negotiation in Japan and India. Japan paid just $120 a ton for potash in its contract for the first half of 2008. China recently signed a long-term contract for $576 a ton. That was a $456-per-ton price jump. And even with that increase, the Chinese didn’t get all the potash they wanted. The country is now looking at a shortfall that some experts peg as high as 40 percent, just when China is trying to increase food production to cut inflation in domestic food prices.
At the Democratic National Convention in Boston (in 2004), law enforcement authorities set up a much-criticized “demonstration zone” outside the heavily secured perimeter of the convention site. Ruling in a case filed only two weeks before the convention, a federal court described the zone — enclosed by concrete barricades, multiple layers of fencing, mesh, and netting, topped with overhead razor wire and located under an old rail line — as a “grim, mean, and oppressive space” comparable to “an internment camp,” and “an offense to the spirit of the First Amendment.”
“Denver has refused to process any applications for parade permits during the DNC, and it has refused to disclose any information about the ‘demonstration zone’ that it plans to set up, ” explained Steven D. Zansberg, an ACLU cooperating attorney who, along with partner Christopher P. Beall at Levine, Sullivan, Koch & Schulz, led the team filing the lawsuit today. “Denver says it is waiting for the Secret Service to decide the outer boundaries of the security perimeter, and the Secret Service says it may not decide until July. If the plaintiffs are forced to wait for these government agencies to act, there will be not be enough time for a court to review unreasonable restrictions on First Amendment activity.”
The court papers filed today refer to two stages of the lawsuit. In the first stage, the plaintiffs are asking the Court to order the Secret Service immediately to provide Denver whatever information the City believes it needs to process applications for parade permits, to determine parade routes, and to finalize and disclose plans for the anticipated demonstration zone. In the second phase, after Denver discloses the plans and its anticipated regulations of First Amendment activity, the Court will be asked to review those restrictions and to prohibit or modify those that unjustifiably infringe on First Amendment rights.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include the ACLU, American Friends Service Committee, American Indian Movement of Colorado, Americans for Safe Access, CODEPINK, Escuela Tlatelolco, Troops Out Now Coalition, Recreate 68, Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center, Citizens for Obama, Tent State University, and United for Peace and Justice. Both ACLU and Recreate 68 have been meeting and corresponding with City officials for a year, in an unsuccessful effort to iron out the City’s plans for marches and for demonstrations near the Convention site.
Several of the plaintiffs, including Recreate 68, Escuela Tlatelolco, and Troops Out Now, have filed timely requests for parade permits, but Denver will not process them and refuses to say when it will begin processing them. Plaintiff Citizens for Obama, created by Damian Sedney, a Vermont resident, has asked for permits for several marches in support of Senator Obama’s nomination. According to the lawsuit, Sedney has prepared a website to advertise the planned marches, but he is holding off until he knows whether or not he will obtain the necessary permit. Every day that goes by without action, the lawsuit asserts, reduces the ability of Sedney and other plaintiffs to recruit supporters and participants to come to Denver and join in their constitutionally protected activities.
The Fish and Wildlife Forensics Lab in Ashland, Ore., estimates that every year up to a half-million birds die in oil and gas waste pits in the Rockies. For comparison, the Exxon Valdez spill killed about a quarter-million birds. At what point will we take a hard look at energy development in the Rockies and figure out how we can do it responsibly? Right now, any calls for moderate development are deemed un-American, and when restrictions are proposed, the industry pouts and threatens to leave.
As detailed in the graphic, Dow has a LOT of polluting history for which to answer.
Buyer Steve Tsengas of Fairport Harbor, Ohio, owns OurPets, a company that sells products to treat dog and cat waste.
Tsengas bought the dung in hopes of motivating his employees and using it as a marketing tool by displaying it at the company's booth at trade shows, he said.
“Poop,” he said, “is a big business in the pet industry.”
In exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars of state aid, Northwest vowed to build an engine facility, maintain three hangars, hire thousands of workers, and keep the hub and headquarters in Minnesota. Most plans fell short or never materialized. Since 1992, more than 6,500 Northwest workers have lost their jobs. …
Northwest executives last week said they'd honor financial agreements with the airport authority and the state. Gov. Tim Pawlenty, though, said he'd consider reworking the bond and loan deals with a newly merged airline.
Krusee carried and passed legislation in 2003 that created something called the “driver responsibility program” to help fund the Texas Mobility Fund. That program included a number of surcharges for driving offenses, including $1,000 for a first conviction of driving while intoxicated.
Tillerson has said he focuses on oil and gas because he expects humans will rely on fossil fuels for many decades.
Congress has been bearing down to do more about global warming. But a little-noticed amendment to last year’s energy bill has hit especially close to home. It requires House members who lease vehicles through their office budgets to drive cars that emit low levels of greenhouse gases.
Among the victims: Texas Republican Joe L. Barton, who will probably have to give up his Chevy Tahoe, despite his protests that it is made in his district. “I guarantee you my district is not upset that I’m driving a Chevy Tahoe,” he said.
The requirement was sought by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.), who figured that if his colleagues were serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and U.S. dependence on foreign oil, they ought to put their foot where their mouth is.
Under the legislation, the Environmental Protection Agency will determine which vehicles lawmakers will be allowed to lease, a list that’s expected before the end of the year. Senators are not allowed to use their office budgets for long-term vehicle leases. Lawmakers can seek mileage reimbursement when they use their own vehicles for congressional business.
The EPA’s list could include vehicles such as the Ford Escape Hybrid, the Mercury Mariner Hybrid and the Prius, which received high scores on the EPA's Green Vehicle Guide. The guide rates vehicles on their greenhouse gas emissions on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being best.
In a partial concession to Congressional pressure, the Bush administration agreed on Wednesday to show the Senate and House Intelligence Committees secret Justice Department legal opinions justifying harsh interrogation techniques that critics call torture.
The decision, announced at a Senate hearing where Democrats sharply criticized the administration’s secrecy on legal questions, did not satisfy other members of Congress who have pushed for the documents for several years, notably Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
A spokesman for the Justice Department said officials were discussing whether to share part or all the opinions with Mr. Leahy’s panel.
At the hearing, a department official, John P. Elwood, disclosed a previously unpublicized method to cloak government activities. Mr. Elwood acknowledged that the administration believed that the president could ignore or modify existing executive orders that he or other presidents have issued without disclosing the new interpretation.
Mr. Elwood, citing a 1980s precedent, said there was nothing new or unusual about such a view.
While physical injuries can be an indicator of abuse, checks by The Dallas Morning News suggested broken bones for 9 percent of a group of rural children is not out of line.
According to the Web site of the Seattle Children's Hospital, about half of all boys and a quarter of all girls break a bone sometime during childhood. In 2001, about 16 percent of youngsters under 20 living on farms suffered an injury – the most common being broken bones, a federal study says.
On the same day, McCain was confronted with an earmark he did consider worthy. During a forum at Lehigh Valley Hospital, he met a woman with ovarian cancer who was treated in a clinical trial funded with $80 million in congressional earmarks.
The hospital was showing off an electronic medical records system that is virtually paper-free.
McCain insisted he was not trying to have it both ways and said that deserving projects can get money through regular channels.
“It’s the process I object to,” he said. “I’m sure that I can give you a list of projects the Mafia funds, and they would probably be good projects. But I can’t give you a justification for the Mafia. I can’t give you a justification for the corruption that's been bred which has sent members of Congress to the federal prison,” he said.
Don Endres, the chief executive of VeraSun and owner of 20 percent of its shares, grew up on a farm in Watertown, S.D., where his father and grandfather raised corn. His brothers are still farmers.
Endres says ethanol plants aren’t to blame for high corn or food prices. He notes that the corn used to make ethanol isn't the kind that people eat anyway. Moreover, he says, ethanol plants like VeraSun's extract the starch in corn for fermentation while producing a dry feed that contains protein and nutrients. Piles of it are collected from industrial dryers at the plant. VeraSun then sells that feed, known as dried distillers grain, back to farmers who raise animals. Much of it goes to Texas, Mexico and China; it accounts for about 15 percent of VeraSun's revenue. When the grain is mixed with inexpensive starch, such as alfalfa, farmers can save money, Endres says.
Finally, he says, yields on corn will continue to increase so that the current acreage will be able to meet both food and fuel demands. His grandfather got 40 bushels to an acre, his father got 80, and his brothers get 160. Someday, Endres says, farms will get 300 bushels an acre.
“From Washington where Lester Brown is sitting, agriculture can’t do enough to satisfy the nation's energy needs and meet all the demands put on it for food and feed,” says Matt Liebman, an agronomist at Iowa State University. “But from agriculture's point of view, (ethanol) enhances market opportunities. So it really depends on your perspective.”
Under John Kennedy, out-of-work Americans who had stopped looking for jobs — even if this was because none could be found — were labeled “discouraged workers” and then excluded from the ranks of the unemployed.
Lyndon Johnson orchestrated a “unified budget” that combined Social Security with the rest of the federal outlays. This innovation allowed the surplus receipts in Social Security to mask the emerging federal deficit.
Richard Nixon created a division between “core” inflation and headline inflation. If the Consumer Price Index was calculated by tracking a bundle of prices, so-called core inflation would simply exclude, because of “volatility,” categories that happened to be troublesome (and thus in the “headlines”). At that time, it was food and energy (as it is now).
Under Ronald Reagan, the Bureau of Labor Statistics decided that housing was overstating the Consumer Price Index and substituted an entirely different “Owner Equivalent Rent” measurement, based on what a homeowner might get for renting his house. This methodology, controversial at the time but still used, sidestepped what was happening in the real world of homeowner costs. Some say that led to the mortgage crisis today.
Under the first President Bush, officials moved to reorient U.S. economic statistical measure away from old industrial-era methodologies toward the emerging services economy and the expanding retail and financial sectors. Skeptics said the underlying goal was to reduce the inflation rate in order to reduce federal payments — from interest on the national debt to cost-of-living outlays for government employees, retirees and Social Security recipients.
Under President Clinton, the convoluted CPI changes proposed under Bush were implemented. And the Clintonites tinkered with the unemployment number, in part, by changing its housing economic sampling, disproportionately eliminating inner city households. That is believed to have reduced black unemployment estimates and eased worsening poverty figures.
“President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said ‘mission accomplished’ for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission,” Perino said Wednesday. "And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year.”
The Dallas-area had the third-lowest annual decline, behind Portland, Ore., down 2 percent, and Seattle, off 2.7 percent.
“Any of the potential shocks that we face could easily slip us into a very, very serious depression,” said Robertson. …
Robertson singles out the “astronomical” trade deficit, the decline of the dollar in favor of the euro and the national debt of $9.3 trillion.
“If they stop lending, we’re gonna have to repay that debt ourselves,” according to Robertson. “We’d have to cut spending, which could cause a depression given the scale. Or we have to raise taxes, which could cause a depression given the scale. Or the United States government would go into default.”
“We’re going to have to do some very serious sacrifice and work in order to correct these problems,” he added.
Maybe Albert Hoffman (pictured at right by Alex Gray) kept having flashbacks to the age of 39. I doubt the chemical compound of LSD itself kept him preserved to 102. Anyway, the man who helped usher in the modern drug age is now dead.“I produced the substance as a medicine. ... It's not my fault if people abused it,” he said.
“As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light.
“It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security.”
Though Dr. Hofmann called LSD “medicine for the soul,” by 2006 his hallucinogenic days were long behind him, he said in the interview that year.
“I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore,"”he said, adding. "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley."
But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In death, he said, “I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that's all.”
Hints of how things began to go awry appeared in ‘The Two-Income Trap,” a 2003 book in which Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi posed this intriguing question: Why could families easily meet their financial obligations in the 1950s and 1960s, when only one parent worked outside the home, yet have great difficulty today, when two-income families are the norm? The answer, they suggest, is that the second incomes fueled a bidding war for housing in better neighborhoods.
It’s easy to see why. Even in the 1950s, one of the highest priorities of most parents was to send their children to the best possible schools. Because the labor market has grown more competitive, this goal now looms even larger. It is no surprise that two-income families would choose to spend much of their extra income on better education. And because the best schools are in the most expensive neighborhoods, the imperative was clear: To gain access to the best possible public school, you had to purchase the most expensive house you could afford.
But what works for any individual family does not work for society as a whole. The problem is that a “good” school is a relative concept: It is one that is better than other schools in the same area. When we all bid for houses in better school districts, we merely bid up the prices of those houses.
(Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s) basic point — that any attack on him is an attack on the African American church and its traditions — is just wrong. In making that argument, he buys into the fraudulent idea of a monolithic, monocultural black America — one with his philosophy and theology at its center. …
The reality of the African American church, of course, is as diverse as the African American community. I grew up in the Methodist church with pastors -- often active on the front lines of the civil rights movement -- whose sermons were rarely exciting enough to elicit more than a muttered "Amen." They were excitement itself, however, compared with the dry lectures delivered by the priest at the Catholic church around the corner. And what I heard every Sunday was nothing at all like the Bible-thumping, hellfire-and-damnation perorations that filled my Baptist friends with the Holy Ghost -- and even less like the spellbinding, singsong, jump-and-shout sermonizing that raised the roofs of Pentecostal sanctuaries across town.
In fact, he said, evolution “is more consistent with belief in a personal god than intelligent design. If God has designed organisms, he has a lot to account for.”
Consider, he said, that at least 20 percent of pregnancies are known to end in spontaneous abortion. If that results from divinely inspired anatomy, Dr. Ayala said, “God is the greatest abortionist of them all.”
Or consider, he said, the “sadism” in parasites that live by devouring their hosts, or the mating habits of insects like female midges, tiny flies that fertilize their eggs by consuming their mates’ genitals, along with all their other parts.
For the midges, Dr. Ayala said, “it makes evolutionary sense. If you are a male and you have mated, the best thing you can do for your genes is to be eaten.” But if God or some other intelligent agent made things this way on purpose, he said, “then he is a sadist, he certainly does odd things and he is a lousy engineer.”
That is also the message of his latest book, “Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion.”
He dismisses the argument that it is only fair to teach both sides of the evolution/creationism controversy. “We don’t teach alchemy along with chemistry,” he said. “We don’t teach witchcraft along with medicine. We don’t teach astrology with astronomy.”
The Supreme Court has never resolved the question of whether a sitting president can be arrested by civilian authorities. Even if he were charged and convicted, many legal experts say he could issue himself a pardon.
However, leaving the presidency in the hands of an self-admitted torture killer is unacceptable. Congress could ask a U.S. Marshal to arrest Bush as part of impeachment charges. But the ultimate outcome — removing him from office a few months before the end of his term — seems woefully inadequate given the nature of the charges. In any case, Democrats have already said that impeachment is “off the table.”
Bush could be extradited to one of the countries where the torture and murders were committed — such as Afghanistan or Cuba. But he could claim immunity as a head of state.
There is, however, a person who could begin holding Bush and the others accountable for their crimes.
She is Cathy L. Lanier, the 39-year-old chief of D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department. Chief Lanier, take note: you have probable cause to arrest a self-confessed serial torturer and mass murderer within the borders of the District of Columbia. He resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Go get him.
History is calling, Chief Lanier. Your city, and your country, needs you.
The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago. His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church. They certainly don't portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Rev. Wright thinks that that's political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn't know me very well. And based on his remarks yesterday, well I might not know him as well as I thought, either.
Now, I've already denounced the comments that had appeared in these previous sermons. As I said, I had not heard them before.
What I had heard was that he had given a performance.
Well, you know, the new pastor — the young pastor, Rev. Otis Moss, is a wonderful young pastor. And as I said, I still very much value the Trinity community. This — I’ll be honest, this obviously has put strains on that relationship, not because of the members or because of Reverend Moss but because this has become such a spectacle.
The lawsuit alleges those states lack adequate laws to ensure wolves are not again eradicated from the region. At least 37 were killed in the last month.
The groups are seeking an immediate court order to restore federal control over the species until the case is resolved.
The average change in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last 600,000 years has been just 22 parts per million by volume, Richard Zeebe said, which means that 22 molecules of carbon dioxide were added to, or removed from, every million molecules of air.
Since the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century, ushering in the widespread human use of fossil fuels, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 100 parts per million.
That means human activities are putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere about 14,000 times as fast as natural processes do, Zeebe said.
And it appears to be speeding up: the U.S. government reported last week that in 2007 alone, atmospheric carbon dioxide increased by 2.4 parts per million.
The natural mechanism will eventually absorb the excess carbon dioxide, Zeebe said, but not for hundreds of thousands of years.
The law “is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting ‘the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,’” Justice John Paul Stevens said in an opinion that was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy.
In dissent, Souter said Indiana’s voter ID law “threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting rights of tens of thousands of the state's citizens.”
“This price spike has not been driven by a bad monsoon or some other weather phenomenon like people might expect,” said Nathan Childs, an economist and expert on the world's rice supply. “The easiest way to explain it is in terms of supply and demand.”
The price of rice began to rise last year when India, Vietnam, China and later Egypt imposed various restrictions on the export of rice.
Each country had its own reasons, but in India and China, Mr. Childs said, the price spike was actually caused by economic prosperity.
As tens of millions of people shifted into the middle class, they began eating less rice and more meat, poultry and dairy products. Rice that used to feed the poor increasingly ended up in the bellies of livestock. Rice supplies dwindled, and prices rose. Government leaders, hoping to keep supplies up and prices low, imposed export bans.
