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Drug rescues memory lost to Alzheimer's disease

Irvine, Calif., July 14, 2009 A drug similar to one used in clinical trials for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis has been found to rescue memory in mice exhibiting Alzheimer's symptoms.

The discovery by UC Irvine scientists offers hope that a new treatment may be on the horizon for people in the early stages of Alzheimer's, the leading cause of elderly dementia afflicting more than 5 million people in the U.S. and for which no cure exists.

The drug, called PMX205, prevented inflamed immune cells from gathering in brain regions with Alzheimer's lesions called amyloid plaques. Cell inflammation in these areas accelerates neuron damage, exacerbating the disease.

"We used a multidisciplinary approach combining an understanding of immunology and neurobiology to uncover a completely different target than other therapies," said Andrea Tenner, lead author of the study that led to the findings and a molecular biology & biochemistry professor at UCI.

Study results are reported in the July 15 edition of the Journal of Immunology.

For 12 weeks, Tenner and colleagues added PMX205 to the drinking water of mice genetically altered to develop age-related Alzheimer's-like symptoms. The treatment occurred at an age when plaques were accumulating in their brains.

Scientists gave the treated mice learning and memory tests and then examined their brains for evidence of the disease. Alzheimer's mice that were not given the drug performed significantly worse on the test than normal mice. But in all but one case the treated Alzheimer's mice performed almost as well as the normal mice. Those with the rescued cognitive ability had more than 50 percent fewer Alzheimer's lesions and inflammatory immune cells than the untreated diseased mice.

PMX53, a similar drug that can be taken orally, passed Phase 1 human clinical trials for safety with no major problems reported. Possible side effects include
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NAACP refuses to take a position on gay marriage; discounts connection between black civil rights and gay civil rights

NAACP refuses to take a position on gay marriage; discounts connection between black civil rights and gay civil rights

by John Aravosis (DC) on 7/12/2009 04:20:00 PM

It's pretty sickening to watch the head of the NAACP, Benjamin Todd Jealous, squirm when asked about the civil rights of gays and lesbians, as he does throughout this interview. I suspect the NAACP leadership is afraid of its own membership on this issue.

You simply do not get to be a real civil rights organization by taking polls on whether or not you're going to get criticized for recognizing the civil rights of other human beings. Would the NAACP have us take polls on whether its membership's civil rights should be recognized and accepted as equal to other civil rights struggles? Just as bad, the NAACP head seems to suggest in this interview that it may take the NAACP decades before they endorse gay marriage. He then goes on to disagree with those who equate gay civil rights with the African-American civil rights struggle (good thing that the head of the NAACP agrees with John McCain about the civil rights of gays and lesbians). Though, while agreeing with John McCain, Mr. Jealous disagrees with Coretta Scott King, who says the civil rights battles are all the same.

Definitely not your daddy's civil rights leaders.

Read More......

Jesus, the World's Most Popular Literary Character

Heretic’s Foundation VII: Jesus, the World’s Most Popular Literary Character

Friday, July 10, 2009
Heretic’s Foundation

By John Hudson
darkladyplayers@aol.com
Special to the Clyde Fitch Report

The Heretic’s Foundation is now ready to address one of our most pressing literary and cultural problems: the figure of Jesus. Atheists are getting more attention nowadays, with an atheist campaign in London to put ads on the sides of buses, while in the U.S., according to the New York Times, atheists are linking up and “liken their strategy to that of the gay-rights movement, which lifted off when closeted members of a scorned minority decided to go public.” It has been a long time in coming.

For the last 2,000 years, expressing disbelief in Jesus has been a heresy that led directly to the torture chamber or the bonfire. Yet, the view that the Gospels are literary texts, and Jesus no more than a literary character, goes back to the philosopher Porphyry in the 3rd century, whose works were suppressed and burnt by the church. In Elizabethan London, the most prominent nonbeliever in Jesus was Christopher Marlowe, one of the most expert literary figures of his age, a man who certainly knew how to distinguish a work of clever, imaginative, Menippean literature from a historical, factual account. Marlowe knew the difference between fact and fiction.

He claimed, for example, that the sacred Gospels were “all of one man’s making”; that, as Thomas Beard recorded, the figure of Jesus was merely a “deceiver” in “vain and idle stories.” Marlowe makes Barabas in The Jew of Malta state that “swine-eating Christians…were never thought upon” until after Titus and Vespasian conquered Jerusalem — in other words, that Christianity itself did not exist before. It is becoming clear in my research that Marlowe was right: the Gospels are not accounts of the life of a historical, Jewish Jesus compiled by his followers 60 years after his death, but Roman literary creations. As one of the most radical strands of New Testament scholarship is showing, the Gospels were devised as war propaganda to trick Messianic Jews into worshipping the Roman Flavian emperors “in disguise.” They were written by the Romans as literary satires of the battles in the Roman-Jewish war (66-73 C.E.) in which the Jews were defeated.

The evidence shows that most of the key events in the “life” of Jesus were satirical; many are elegant literary satires of a military battle in which the Jewish armies had been defeated by the Romans. The Jewish War, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem temple in 70 C.E., devastated the Mediterranean economy and the Romans were anxious to prevent another outbreak of messianiac fervor. To make any economic and civil reconstruction lasting, the Romans needed to offer the Jews alternative stories to distract them from the messianic messages inherent in the Torah, and to persuade them to accept Roman values and worship Caesar.

The Romans’ solution was to create a special kind of postwar propaganda. They called it, in Greek, evangelion, a technical term meaning “good news of military victory,” which is translated into English as “gospel.” The word is, in fact, ironic humor: the Romans were amusing themselves with the notion of making the Jews accept, as the actions of the messiah Jesus, what were literary echoes of the very battles in which they had defeated Jewish armies. A further joke was buried in unmistakable parallels between the life of Jesus and that of Titus: In worshiping Jesus, those Jews who adopted Christianity, as it came to be called, were in proxy hailing the emperor of their conquerors as god, the key strategic Roman objective.

To replace the Torah, this view maintains that the Romans created a literary parody in the Gospel of Matthew and shortly thereafter rewrote it as the versions known as Luke and Mark, modeled respectively on the Aeneid and on Homer. The central literary character of the Gospels, called Jesus (or Joshua), inhabits a plot with various peculiar features. He begins his efforts by the Lake of Galilee. He sends a legion of devils out of a demon-possessed man and into pigs. He offers his flesh to be eaten. He mentions signs of the destruction of Jerusalem. In Gethsemane, a naked man escapes. Jesus is captured at Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. Simon denies knowing him. He is crucified with two other men and only he survives. He is taken down from the cross by a man called Joseph of Arimathea. His disciple, John, survives, but his disciple Simon is sent off to die in Rome. After his death, his disciple Judas dies by eviscerating himself.

Each of these peculiar events has a parallel in the writings of Josephus, our sole record of the military encounters between the Jews and their Roman conquerors — even to the unusual crucifixion in which three men are crucified and a man named Joseph takes one, who survives, down.

There are a dozen such examples which appear in both sets of texts — in the same order — providing statistical evidence that both works were created together as a single literary endeavor in the 80s C.E., thus demonstrating the anti-historicity of the Gospel accounts. Individual parallels have also been detected by half a dozen well known New Testament scholars, but the entire set of them, with all their implications, is summarized in Atwill’s book Caesar’s Messiah, long out of print but now available inexpensively online.

The evidence shows that Marlowe was right: the Gospels are, indeed, vain and idle stories; the figure of Jesus is, indeed, a “deceiver” because the stories in the Gospels are not historical accounts of events that happened in the 30s C.E. On the contrary, they are literary satires of battles and other events fought by Titus and Vespasian in the aforementioned Roman-Jewish war. And so, Jesus was not a historical figure but simply, as Harold Bloom suggested, the world’s best known literary character – a sort of allegorical disguise for Titus, the man who destroyed Jerusalem and became the second Flavian Caesar. Anyone who succumbed and worshipped Jesus would merely be worshipping Caesar in disguise.

Because Marlowe alludes to all this in the allegories in his plays, this was almost certainly the knowledge in the lecture on atheism he gave to the School of the Night, and which provided “more sound reasons” for his non belief than any clergyman had for divinity. Presumably this was also the specific knowledge that got Marlowe killed, and led the author of the Shakespearean plays to conceal aspects of the same knowledge as the deepest allegorical level of the plays, such as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the comic, scathing parodies of the Virgin Mary.

Today, thankfully, this knowledge can be posted to the Internet and even on the sides of buses. Perhaps one day it will even stimulate a new interest in understanding the deepest allegorical meanings of Elizabethan plays.

John Hudson is a strategic consultant who specializes in new industry models and has helped create several telecoms and Internet companies. He has recently been consulting to a leading think tank on the future of the theater industry and is pioneering an innovative Shakespeare theory, as dramaturge to the Dark Lady Players. This Fall he will be Artist in Residence at Eastern Connecticut State University. He has degrees in Theater and Shakespeare, in Management, and in Social Science.

AIDS activists shut down US Capitol rotunda

AIDS activists shut down US Capitol rotunda over Obama reversal on AIDS policy

by John Aravosis (DC) on 7/09/2009 12:35:00 PM

UPDATE: That White House Web site pledge to support repeal of the federal ban on needle exchange? It appears to be gone.

Woah. Joe and I got wind of this last night. (Great picture on the home page of Roll Call.)

A group of 26 AIDS activists chained themselves to each other in the Capitol Rotunda on Thursday morning, startling visitors, shutting down the landmark area and prompting their arrest by Capitol Police.

The group, which was protesting President Barack Obama’s failure to get rid of a ban on funding needle exchange programs, arrived at the Rotunda around 10 a.m.

Candidate Obama said he would help overturn the ban on needle exchange. President Obama reversed himself and banned federal funding for needle exchanges in his budget this year.

The quote from Obama's spokesman is priceless:

Obama, during the primary campaign, pledged his support of needle exchange programs to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS. When he took over the White House, the administration website affirmed: "The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users."

Yet Obama's budget includes language that bans spending federal money on needle-exchange programs.

White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said the administration isn't yet ready to lift the ban - but Obama still supports needle exchange.

"We have not removed the ban in our budget proposal because we want to work with Congress and the American public to build support for this change," he said.

Let's see...

1. The candidate promised to lift the ban.
2. The White House Web site reaffirmed the president's commitment to lifting the ban.
3. The White House Web site no longer reaffirms his commitment to lifting the ban.
4. The president now refuses to lift the ban.
5. The president actually affirmatively makes things worse by administratively supporting defending the ban.
6. The spokesman reiterates the president's support for lifting the ban, some day, once Congress gets around to it.

Sound familiar?

My Interview with Prisca Ouya of Luzimbu Opera

“The Trial”: Prisca Ouya ’s Luzimbu Opera Presents Tragedy and Judgement in the Congo

La MaMa E.T.C. is pleased to announce the presentation of a new opera, sung in African languages, Korean and English, by popular director, actor and choreographer Prisca Ouya, o pening June 18-28, 2009 in New York.

Synopsis of Luzimbu: The Trial

A secret abortion has left Lila, a young Congolese woman, sterile. Her new husband, Minimona, is unhappy with their childless relationship and decides to marry a second wife, Biwa , to bear him children. Biwa quickly produces two children, making her the more “successful” wife by community standards. Lila’s jealousy increases, pushing her to invoke the Goddess of Fertility and make a pact that ultimately will have terrible consequences for both women. Meanwhile, Biwa , still young, is not a responsible mother; she is unwilling to give up partying and drinking with her friends every day. She leaves the care of her two children to her co-spouse Lila. Caring for Biwa 's children only makes Lila crave children of her own even more. One day, while bathing the baby at the river, Lila hears the older child screaming as she falls from a tree. Horrified, Lila's instinctive reaction is to rush to help, but by doing so, she leaves the baby in the water. At the foot of the tree, the child dies, and the baby, left behind, drowns. To avoid facing the wrath of her rival, Lila runs away and finds refuge in a society of outcast women. But the day soon arrives when Biwa finds Lila and asks the community for justice. The outcast elder, Mfumu Nzonzi, agrees to a death-penalty trial on the condition that both women, not just Lila, are to be judged.

At its core, Luzimbu exposes women's hopes and fears and lays bare the consequences of judgments based on traditional morals. Do both of the women share responsibility for the childrens’ deaths? Lila was the one on duty when the children died, but Biwa is their real mother and therefore the one ultimately responsible for their well-being. The outcome of the trial, and what follows afterwards, are based on traditional Congolese morality and a complex spiritual value system overlayed by the often tragic and brutal experiences suffered by the women. Who is judged guilty, and by whom?

The Music and Dance of Luzimbu

Luzimbu is an opera sung in two of the languages of the Congo , Lingala and Lari, with narrative song in Korean and English. The spectacular performances choreographed throughout Luzimbu reflect the duality of its director – they are essentially traditional Congolese dance fused and updated with American modern staging.

Just as the dance is a modern take on Congolese tradition, so is the music of Luzimbu – its powerful rhythms draw from both traditional Congolese and modern Western music. In the hands of master drummers, a hollowed-out log is transformed into an ngoma, a powerful and expressive musical voice that lends power and direction to the dance. In the Congo , the ngoma drum is considered a healing force and certain traditional rhythms are associated with particular life events and rituals. In Luzimbu, the drums evoke the power of tradition while adapting new musical elements into the performance.

Humanitarian Action

Violence against women in the Congo has been at a crisis point for far too long. In keeping with the philosophy of Luzimbu and its director, a portion of the proceeds from the performances will be contributed to two international non-profit organizations:

1. Doctors Without Borders. Doctors Without Borders is an international independent medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, natural disasters, or exclusion from health care in nearly 60 countries. MSF received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. Website: www.msf.org.

2. V-Day. Founded by playwright, performer and activist Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues), V-Day is a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day is a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations. Website: www.vday.org.

The director and cast salute these organizations and encourage our audiences to learn about the crisis in the Congo and do whatever they can to end the violence in the beautiful countries of the region.

About Prisca Ouya

Luzimbu is Prisca Ouya 's second show as a director at LaMaMa. Her first show, Mami Wata, opened in December 2005 and was brought back by popular demand in January 2006. She has performed in numerous shows at LaMaMa under the direction of LaMaMa founder Ellen Stewart, and elsewhere. Ms. Ouya teaches master-level Congolese dance workshops in Hawaii , California and New York . Ms. Ouya is a gifted and spectacular dancer; the professional dance magazine Attitude once described her as having “magic hips.” She is able to fuse traditional African dance and modern Western dance with grace, strength and beauty. The result, as seen in Luzimbu, continues to delight audiences with its expression of powerful femininity. In 2008, Le Maintenant, a major Congolese newspaper, said: “Ms. Ouya is the ambassador of Congolese dramatic art in the U.S.”

Ms. Ouya was born and raised in Paris and has lived in the United States for twelve years. The third of four sisters, Ms. Ouya draws much of her inspiration from the female members of her family. She is also strongly influenced by the ongoing tragedies resulting from the violence in both of the Congos ( Republic of Congo and Democratic Republic of Congo). However, Ms. Ouya was drawn to the script of Luzimbu in some measure because of her desire to show the more positive side of Congolese men than recent media coverage of the war has shown. “Although women in the Congo are victims of rape and sexual mutilation by soldiers and guerilla fighters, and I don’t want to lessen our outrage over these atrocities, I also want people to know that there are good and decent men in the Congo , trying to hold their families together and earn a living. They are not all barbarians.”

Show Times and Ticket Information

Thursday - Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 2:30 pm. $25 / $20 for students and seniors.

The meaning of Neda

The meaning of Neda

By scarce Monday Jun 22, 2009 1:00pm

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Melody Moezzi, a contributor to the Huffington Post, explains the the deep significance of martyrs in Shia culture. In Farsi, they are now saying on the streets of Tehran "Give me the power of Neda."

ENDA, DADT and DOMA have no chance

Top gay in the administration says ENDA, DADT, and DOMA have no chance at this point (and then he lies, to boot)

by John Aravosis (DC) on 6/14/2009 09:24:00 PM

UPDATE: Pam Spaulding is no more than impressed than I with Berry's interview.

John Berry, the openly gay head of the Office of Personnel Management, did an interview today with Kerry Eleveld of the Advocate. It's horrifying. I have to parse it for you. I'm simply astounded that they let him speak publicly, and that he let himself be used like this.

1. Berry suggests that Obama may wait until his second term to do anything on gay rights.

BERRY: Now, I’m not going to pledge -- and nor is the president -- that this is going to be done by some certain date. The pledge and the promise is that, this will be done before the sun sets on this administration – our goal is to have this entire agenda accomplished and enacted into law so that it is secure.

THE ADVOCATE: Does that include a second term? A lot of people have talked about DOMA being pushed back until a second term.

BERRY: I say this in a broad sense -- our goal is to get this done on this administration’s watch.

2. The president does not have the option to oppose existing law, at all, no exceptions, zero, nothing -- Berry claims. That's a flat out lie, as we showed earlier with the essay by former Clinton White House special assistant Richard Socarides. (We also listed four cases where Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton and Bush Jr. all refused to defend existing statutes.)

BERRY: This president took a solemn oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and he does not get to decide and choose which laws he enforces. He has to enforce the laws that have been enacted appropriately and that he has inherited. It would be wrong for me or any of our community to advise him to lie or to shirk his responsibility. He’s doing his job.

That's a flat out lie. The president can ask DOJ to oppose laws in cases where there are important political and social issues at stake. Period. We've proven that they're lying about this, it's no longer debatable.

Oh, and where in the Constitution does it say that the president is required to compare our marriages to incest and pedophilia? We still haven't heard an explanation for that one. Nor have we heard an apology.

3. Did you catch how Berry said, above, that if we asked the president to file a brief opposing DOMA, we'd be asking him to "lie"? (First off, Berry admits that Obama owns the brief - so no more of this, "it was the lawyers" - it's Obama.) Anyway, so asking Obama to oppose DOMA in the brief would be asking him to "lie." What the hell is that supposed to mean? You mean the president was telling the truth when his brief claimed that gay marriage is like incest? He actually believes that? When the president claimed that Loving v. Virginia has nothing to do with our battle for marriage equality, he was saying he really believes that somehow the civil rights battle of African-Americans is different, better, than ours? Obama really believes that it's unfair to ask straight taxpayers to pay for our spousal benefits when we already pay for theirs? Obama thinks DOMA doesn't discriminate against gays? That it doesn't deny us benefits? That it's good for America in these tight budget times?

We're now to believe that Obama actually agrees with the bigoted crap that the White House let the DOJ put in that hateful brief? WTF?

4. We shouldn't be bothering Obama with our pesky complaints, we should be busy rallying votes for overturning DOMA on the Hill:

He has made clear that he stands for the repeal of DOMA. It will be part of this administration’s agenda to accomplish that act. We ought not waste energy and angst attacking him when we should be focusing the energy and effort on getting 218 votes in the house and 60 votes in the Senate, and that’s where we ought to target the energy and the strength of this community and this president is with us, this is our agenda and it’s his agenda.

Yes, we should be lobbying Congress over DOMA. But what about YOU? What do you plan to do about DOMA? All we've heard is that the president still supports repeal, but we haven't heard one thing about him lifting a finger to help? Writing a brief detailing why DOMA is good for the country does not help us convince Congress to repeal it.

5. And best of all, the White House, Berry tells us, thinks we currently have no chance of getting ENDA, DADT or DOMA. Whoopee!

The Advocate: And what about “don’t ask, don’t tell,” is that being pushed back?

Berry: We don’t have the votes to do Hate Crimes right now, we don’t have the votes to do ENDA, how are we going [to get “don’t ask, don’t tell]?

Yes, how are we going to get Don't ask Don't Tell? Clearly the White House doesn't think we stand a chance.

Anybody still think these people are committed to doing something, anything, to help us secure our civil rights?

Armageddon Prophecy

Main Articles - Disaster Prophecy

Written by Armageddon Online Articles

June 04, 2007

2012: The End of the World? The ancient peoples of Mesoamerica were of a vast interconnected empire, filled with rich art, education and destruction. The Maya were one of these tribes. Other than archaeological intrigue why are these people so studied? Their written language was based on pictographs, much like the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Mayan culture was like most other native cultures. The Maya had an understanding of mathematics and understood the value of zero long before its discovery in the Eastern parts of the world. Their understanding of numbers and astronomy gave us the Mayan calendars of the Long and Short Counts. So why does this calendar attract so much attention now? The Mayan calendar ends on the Gregorian calendar date of December 21, 2012, which most people believe is the total end of civilization, as we know it, while others believe it is simply a change of enlightenment in this current time. Many theories have sprung up about this end date, ranging from the laughable, to the religious, to the scientific. There are actually three Mayan calendar systems, the 365-day Solar year, the 260-day Ritual year, and the 5,128 years of the World Time calendar. The Haab or Solar year was broken down into an 18 month plus five days cycle. 18 months of 20 days and the 5 soulless days which were thought to be of ill omen, kind of like 5 days of Friday the 13th. The Tzolkin (zol-KEEN) or Sacred Round was the 260-day ritual calendar was broken down by days, not months. This religious calendar was the basis on how the people, singly and collectively, went on with their day-to-day lives according to destiny. August 11, 3.114 B.C. when the world began in, long count to Gregorian translation. This beginning date was reached by finding a point in future time (December 21 2012) and counting backwards, as theories go, which gives us a 5,126 year span, not including year zero. This is still one year off if year zero is included. The Mayan World calendar is a series of 5,128 years per span. What is the extra year? Were translations wrong somehow, it is quite possible. So what is supposed to happen on this magical date of December 21, 2012? One theory suggests that a Magnetic Field shift will occur around this time, that the calendar was based on pole shifts, which have occurred repetitively throughout the Earths history. The Maya, understanding the time periods between these shifts created their Long count calendar around them and come up with the final date for the next pole shift. But how would they know what to look for to expect another shift? How much time was supposed to pass between these shifts and how did they know it? Was there record passed down to them from long ago recounting a time when there was a prior pole shift so that mathematics could be used to predict the next one to come? Or did the ancients study a form of dendrochronology the study of climate changes by looking at tree rings. Others suggest a much more mythical or religious approach. December 21, 2012 is also the Winter Solstice, and provides us with a view that will not be seen again in any of our lifetimes. The Sun will conjunct the intersection of the Milky Way in the ecliptic, giving us view of the Sacred Tree as called by the Maya, giving us view of the Tree of Life. Both of these scenarios are quite possible, one scientific explanation, and one religious. What we still do not know, and probably will not know is what will happen after this end date until it actually occurs. A new dawn of enlightenment would be a step towards progression, in that mankind would become more aware of their surroundings and the impact that they have on the Earth as well as a higher intelligence and consciousness and a better mindset for helping their fellow man. Perhaps this is the end, when Mother Nature finally decides to shrug off the oppressiveness that has been created by the children and start anew. We may just end up living through another doomsday prophecy, going to work or school as usual, looking back on the prophecies and laughing them off. Peter may have cried wolf too often for our cynical minds.

City21: Multiple Perspectives on Urban Futures

http://city21.info/
This film production is designed to be a unique cinematic journey into the various experimental forms that will influence and shape the 21st Century City.

The underlying quest of the filmmakers is to reframe the conventional and uninspiring visions of the urban future with an unprecedented combination of fresh, invigorating, sustainable, economically viable, and life enhancing concepts.

Below are some of the themes we have explored in an effort to loosen the geometric and economic grip on the urban imagination:

-The Sacred Origins of the City: Arnold Toynbee on the origin of Civilization/City Plans through time.

-Magic Architecture: The intentional eco-community of Damanhur, Italy.

-Utopia Imagination: Poetry and Architecture/The Open City Project
in Ritoque, Chile.

-Regenerative Design: Nature and Architecture, the transformation of
the Biosphere2 Project into Eco-Village design.

-Nation State Energy Independence: The White Gold of the North/Renewable energy in Iceland.

-The City as Memory Theater: mythic design wisdom transmitted through the generations.

-The Creative Green City: The Lighthouse Project in Glasgow.

-Creating Eco-Villages--The Findhorn Experiment in Scotland

-Cities and Time—The Long Now perspective with Stewart Brand

While the filmmakers have been enormously pleased with the success of our previous documentary: Ecological Design: Inventing the Future.
We are convinced that powerfully destructive forces like: over-population, unrelenting urban sprawl, and generic design programs, threaten the promising conceptual breakthrough of recent times.


A debilitating resignation about these pressures, often expressed in jaded phrases like:you cant fight City Hall makes it imperative that alternative and eminently achievable visions of the future be known to as many people as possible. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, otherwise we will get the cities we deserve.

This quest is an example of heuristic filmmaking in search of a magic synthesis that inspires new insights and actions in support of making the World a more livable place for the children of all the species on planet Earth.....
Christopher Zelov

Marriage Equality in the U.S.

The LA Times has a nice interactive map of gay marriage rights by state that shows the many changes that have taken place over the past decade or so. Here's how things stood in 2000:



And here's where things stand today:



The scale represents the range of rights denied or afforded to gay couples, from "constitutional amendment ban[ning] gay marriage and other legal rights for gay couples" (dark red) to "domestic partnership legal" (pale green) to "gay marriage legal" (dark green). You can mouse ove states for details. They also have a timeline depicting the various votes, judicial rulings, and other events that have produced the civil rights hodgepodge depicted on this map.

On the face of it, it looks like there's been a lot of movement both for and against legal recognition for gay marriage; while some states have extended full marriage rights, others have retrenched with constitutional amendments banning the same. But I think it makes sense to see these as two sorts of steps that are actually fundamentally moving in the same direction. After all, prior to 2000 or so, marriage equality wasn't really seen as conceivable - not in the foreseeable future, at any rate. But then - possibly because of a genuine sense of a shifting ground in public sentiment - a bunch of states amended their constitutions. This was a defensive move which anticipated the possibility that gay people might be allowed to marry which, like most changes in social institutions, tended to freak out people with more traditionalist orientations. But even though the effect was that a bunch of anti-equality measures got written into law, this was a symptom of a general progressive movement on the issue of gay marriage.

In retrospect, I think you might even say that the big movement earlier this decade to amend state constitutions to explicitly ban gay marriage actually spurred further progressive movement. Those votes - many of which were orchestrated in an effort to get more people to come out and vote Republican in 2004 and 2006 - raised the profile of the issue, certainly, and perhaps placed a veneer of plausibility on the concept of gay marriage. After all, if it was a concept that had to be fought at the ballot box, it must have been a concept that needed to be taken seriously, right? And with several states approving gay marriage this year, following the high-profile loss of gay marriage rights in California last November, I wonder if all the efforts at thwarting gay marriage have just had the net effect of telescoping the timeline of the spread of marriage equality.

Ventura on The View: If waterboarding is fine, why don’t cops do it?

Ventura on The View: If waterboarding is fine, why don’t cops do it?

Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, making a guest appearance on ABC’s The View, gave co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck a lesson or two about the torture technique known as waterboarding.

Ventura, who underwent a barrage of torture techniques at the military Survival, Evade, Resist and Escape (SERE) school, confirmed for Hasselbeck that waterboarding is torture and not just an “enhanced interrogation technique.”

“If waterboarding is okay, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects to learn what they know?” he asked to a chorus of applause.

“That’s an interesting question,” Hasselbeck said. “I understand that question.”

“If waterboarding is okay, why didn’t we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and [Terry] Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? What’s your answer to that?” he asked. “We only seem to waterboard Muslims.”

“That’s an extremist statement,” said Hasselbeck.

“Aha!” cheered Ventura. “Have we waterboarded anybody else? Name me someone else we’ve waterboarded.”

She could not, instead shifting focus to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) who has been criticized by Republicans for a seeming contradiction in disclosing what she knew about then-President Bush’s torture program, and when.

“They want her out because she lied?” asked Ventura. “Why didn’t they ask for Bush and Cheney to go out when they lied about why we went into Iraq?”

This video is from MSNBC’s News Live, broadcast May 18, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com

Live NASA video feed

NASA TV

Jerusalem News

MESS-TV

John Dean:Rice may have admitted to conspiracy,

Rice may have admitted to conspiracy, former Nixon counsel says

In little-noticed comments Thursday, the former White House counsel for President Richard Nixon John Dean said Thursday that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may have unwittingly admitted to a criminal conspiracy when questioned about torture by a group of student videographers at Stanford.

Rice told students at Stanford that she didn’t authorize torture, she merely forwarded the authorization for it. Dean, who became a poster child for whistleblowing after aiding the prosecution of the Watergate affair, told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann that Rice may have admitted to a criminal conspiracy.

In a video that surfaced Thursday, Rice said, “The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligation, legal obligations under the convention against torture… I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.” (Video of Rice’s comments appears at the bottom of this article.)

Her comments raised eyebrows from online observers, who compared Rice’s answer to that of Richard Nixon’s infamous quip: “When the President does it, that means that it’s not illegal.”

Dean said he found Rice’s comments “surprising” and put her in a legal mire of possible conspiracy.

“She tried to say she didn’t authorize anything, then proceeded to say she did pass orders along to the CIA to engage in torture if it was legal by the standard of the Department of Justice,” Dean said. “This really puts her right in the middle of a common plan, as it’s known in international law, or a conspiracy, as it’s known in American law, and this indeed is a crime. If it indeed happened the way we think it did happen.”

Asked if the comparison between her comments and Nixon’s were fair, Dean said it was “fuzzy.”

“She was obviously trying to extricate herself and keep herself in a safe distance, that she was only operating under some general guidance of the president making things legal,” he said. “So it’s not clear whether this is a full-throated Nixonian-type defense or whether it’s a lot of confusion of the facts and throwing things up there to try to protect herself.”

“These kinds of statements are going to come back and be interesting to any investigator,” he added.

Olbermann asked Dean whether Obama was violating the Geneva Conventions prohibiting torture himself by refusing to prosecute those responsible.

“He is indeed is in violation if the United States does not undertake investigation of this, or ultimately prosecution, if that’s necessary,” Dean asserted. “It’s not only the Geneva Convention, the Convention Against Torture also requires this. There are no exceptions with torture. There are no real things like “torture light.” The world community I think is going to hold the United States responsible, and if we don’t proceed, somebody is going to proceed.”

This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast Apr. 30, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com

This video is from The Young Turks via YouTube, broadcast Apr. 30, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com

Several typographical errors have been corrected in this version.

Anglo American Vaccine Industry Behind Flu

Dr. Horowitz: Anglo-American Vaccine Industry Behind Swine Flu Outbreak

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April 29, 2009

This unprecedented H1N1-H5N1 flu outbreak implicates the Ango-American Vaccine Pipeline, says world leading consumer health protector, Dr. Leonard Horowitz

Consider the skyrocketing stock values of Novavax, Inc., precipitated by dozens of alleged flu deaths in Mexico. Then investigate the leading Anglo-American network of genetic engineers manipulating, mutating, and distributing these viruses. The evidence compels you, for the benefit of public health and safety to seriously consider, even decree, a conspiracy to commit genocide, according to this Harvard trained expert in emerging diseases.

Here, Dr. Horowitz urges an investigation of Dr. James S. Robertson, Englands leading bioengineer of flu viruses for the vaccine industry, and avid promoter of U.S. Government funding for lucrative biodefense contracts, along with collaborators at the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). These suspects helped Novavax, Inc., in Bethesda, Maryland, produce genetically-modified recombinants of the avian, swine, and Spanish flu viruses, H5N1 and H1N1, nearly identical to the unprecedented Mexican virus that is allegedly spreading to the United States at the time of this posting. The outbreak was precisely timed to promote the companys new research and huge vaccine stockpiling contracts.

Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are implicated through collaborations and publications involving private contracts with Novavax, a company that obtains its biosimulars through CDC Influenza Branch director, Ruben O. Donis, and Dr. Rick Bright, previously working with Donis at the CDC, now Novavaxs Vice President of Global Influenza Programs.

Descriptions of this virus is pathognomonic, or diagnostic, of a virus that came from Robertsons circle of friends, Dr. Horowitz charges. No other group in the world takes H5N1 Asian flu infected chickens, brings them to Europe, extracts their DNA, combines their proteins with H1N1 viruses from the 1918 Spanish flu isolate, additionally mixes in swine flu genes from pigs, then reverse engineers them to infect humans. The end product could only have ended up in Mexico via the United States from Britain in care of the CDC. The CDC had to have sent them to Novavax, where Rick Brights team is now implicated in a conspiracy to commit genocide—the mass killing of people for profit.

Walt Whitman H.S. students shout down anti-gay protesters

Walt Whitman H.S. students shout down anti-gay protesters

Muriel Kane Published: Friday April 24, 2009

The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, KS is notorious for its tasteless and frequently nonsensical anti-gay protests. Not only do they picket the funerals of victims of anti-gay hate crimes, but they have been known to protest concerts, football games, and even a hardware store selling Swedish vacuum cleaners. Most recently, they have been busy picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in the Iraq War, believing their deaths to be a judgment on America.

However, the Westboro protesters may have overreached when they attempted to picket Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, MD, named after the nineteenth century poet who many biographers believe to have been either homosexual or bisexual.

According to the Potomac Almanac, "When Whitman sophomore Ryan Hauck first heard about the scheduled protest at Whitman from a friend he thought it was a joke. Then he went online ... and saw just how serious the church is. 'I was just shocked just from the second I heard it and I knew I had to do something,' Hauck said. '[It was] the hatred of the whole thing that shocked me.'"

Hauck was aided by his fellow-sophomore Amar Mukunda, who "set up a Facebook group to generate support for the counter-protest through which more than 600 students have committed to attend. Mukunda said he doesn’t expect that many to show up on Friday, but that he does expect a healthy turnout."

As it happened, the turnout far exceeded Mukunda's expection of "a couple of hundred." The Washington Post reports that "faculty had spun the event into an interdisciplinary lesson. English teachers spent the day teaching Whitman's verse. Social studies teachers led a unit on tolerance. Math teachers fanned through the crowd, attempting a head count."

Although the handful of picketers initially had the street to themselves, that changed dramatically when school was dismissed at 2:10 and five hundred students marched out, chanting the school name alternating with "Go home!"

LGBT group Driving Equality had even set up a "Phelps-a-Thon" webpage, promising, "For every minute the 'God Hates Fags' clan is protesting, we will be collecting donations for the Walt Whitman High School gay/straight alliance. ... You can pledge any amount you chose, whether it be $0.25, $0.50, $1, or even $2 for every minute they protest. ... After the event, we will send Phelps a thank you card, telling him how much money he raised for LGBT equality."

Many of the students in the counter-protest were wearing T-shirts bearing a picture of Whitman and the line, "Let your soul stand cool and composed." However, far more sarcastic commentary on the day's events was provided by blogger Oliver Willis, who had taken note of the upcoming protest when it was first announced in March.

"I gotta say," Willis wrote, "if they’re devoting time and resources to protesting Walt Whitman they must have an insane amount of time on their hands. Leaves of grass, indeed."

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Incredible Shrinking Audience

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Clearly, several dozen delegates at the United Nations anti-racism conference in Geneva, Switzerland, disagreed with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s assessment of Israel as a “racist government” on Monday, and they let their feet do the talking by walking out as Ahmadinejad was still speaking.

CNN via YouTube:

When Fascism Came to America

By William Pfaff

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis, author of “Babbitt” and the first American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, published a novel entitled “It Can’t Happen Here.”

It was written to influence the 1936 presidential election. The enormously popular ex-governor of Louisiana, Sen. Huey Long, “the Kingfish,” who campaigned to “Share the Wealth” with the people, was widely thought to be a threat to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his bid for a second term.

The Lewis novel envisioned someone like Long winning the presidency and installing an American counterpart to the fascist dictatorships already in power in Italy and Germany. Lewis was much influenced by his second wife, Dorothy Thompson, who was one of the most important syndicated political columnists of the 1930s and was greatly concerned about the possibility of populist dictatorship crossing the Atlantic.

Long was not a fascist, although he could have become a dictator. His support was from the poor. Rightist and white-supremacist forces actually formed an armed militia to oppose him, but Long was killed by an assassin, presumably with a family grievance against him, in 1935.

The man who actually opposed Roosevelt in 1936 was Republican Alf Landon of Kansas, a moderate who was defeated by Roosevelt in the greatest presidential landslide in American history. That year, FDR carried all but eight electoral votes. Sinclair Lewis’ fears had been misplaced; “It” didn’t happen here.

In 2004, Philip Roth wrote another novel on the topic. This one was about the arrival of an anti-Semitic and fascist president in the United States in 1940, in the supposed person of the aviator, American anti-war nationalist and isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Roosevelt’s actual opponent in 1940 was the businessman Wendell Willkie, whom he comfortably defeated with 54.7 percent of the popular vote.

Lindbergh never retracted his opposition to U.S. entry into the European war, and following Pearl Harbor President Roosevelt refused ex-Col. Lindbergh’s effort to rejoin the military. Lindbergh found experimental and consultant work in the aviation industry, helped develop the Vought Corsair, the only American fighter in the Pacific war superior to the Japanese Zero, and despite remaining a civilian flew 36 combat missions in the Pacific. Once again, “It” had not happened in the United States.

When “It” did happen was in 2001-2008, in the George W. Bush administration. There was a takeover of the government by a self-willed executive power, unprecedented in American history. The president and vice president acted on a novel and legally unsupported claim to unlimited “wartime” presidential and executive-branch power. The justification was an illegal, undeclared war.

International law and American treaty obligations were defied, as were established American law on the conduct of war and the treatment of prisoners, constitutional protections, and the surveillance of citizens.

All of this occurred without meeting serious, or at least successful, congressional or judicial challenge, with little or no objection from the national press, and all but unanimous support from the national audiovisual media. One needn’t go through all that again.

There were unsuccessful efforts by individuals inside and outside the government to overturn this state of affairs, but in two congressional elections, and in the presidential election of 2004, the electorate endorsed all that had been done. “It,” which Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth had both warned against, proved in fact to be very popular. At least this was so until 2008, when the practical and political consequences of this abandonment of law and history finally alienated the electorate.

All that is familiar. What concerns me in this article is something else. It is the fact that the mass of agents and officials of the government, and the vast majority of the population, passively accepted what was done, and even today disputes whether anyone should be held accountable.

President Obama’s unwillingness to see his first term dominated by the crimes of the Bush administration is comprehensible.

Yet there is a limit. The latest case of the human moral vacuum created and encouraged during the Bush years is so outrageous, perverse, sadistic and nihilistic that it demands attention, for all that it tells us about the rest that has happened. I speak of the ordered, authorized and conscientiously supervised waterboarding of two prisoners 266 times.

The men who authorized, ordered and performed such acts should be hanged. It is as simple as that.

It then would be possible to face the future with a response to the question, “Can It Happen Here?”

Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at www.williampfaff.com.