February 4, 2007 is International Save Pluto Day!
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
More stuff from Britain.
UPI: Long African presence found in Britain
Leicester, England - A University of Leicester study has provided the first genetic evidence of a long-lived African presence within Britain.
The Wellcome Trust-funded research has confirmed Africans have lived among "indigenous" British people for centuries, with their descendants, living across the United Kingdom today, unaware of their black ancestry.
The researchers, led by Professor Mark Jobling, found one third of men with an unusual Yorkshire surname carry a rare Y chromosome type previously found only among people of West African origin.
The discovery came after doctoral student Turi King found the rare Y chromosome type, known as hgA1, in one individual, Mr. X., while studying the association between surnames and the Y chromosome, both inherited from father to son. Mr. X, a white Caucasian living in Leicester, was unaware of having any African ancestors.
"This study shows that what it means to be British is complicated and always has been," said Jobling. "Human migration history is clearly very complex, particularly for an island nation such as ours, and this study further debunks the idea that there are simple and distinct populations or 'races'."
The study appears in the European Journal of Human Genetics.
AFP: Five arrested in Britain under anti-terror laws
Five men have been arrested in dawn raids in Britain under anti-terrorism laws, including two British Pakistanis.
Baltimore Jewish Times: Britain's Jewish Radio Wants To Expand
A Jewish voice for Britain is waiting to have that voice certified by the government. Shalom FM, the sole station in Britain that offers all-Jewish programming, is awaiting an answer to its second application for a full-time community broadcasting license. A previous bid was rejected.
I wonder if he went to them cap in hand...
AP: Romania Wants Britain to Lift Worker Cap
Romanian President Traian Basescu asked Britain's deputy prime minister, John Prescott, to lift restrictions on the number of Romanians who can work in Britain, the president's office said Wednesday.
International Herald Tribune: Nymex drops 'open outcry' exchange in Britain
London - Nymex, the commodity exchange giant, has finally abandoned its ill-fated plan to set up an open outcry trading floor in Britain.
The exchange has quietly applied for a "derecognition of exchange" with London regulators, said traders in London.
Exchanges that physically trade in London are required to certify that they are "recognized investment exchanges" with the Financial Services Authority.
With the withdrawal, Nymex's presence in London reverts to a marketing office, a far cry from the ambitious British expansion plans that it undertook less than two years ago to create an open outcry system, whereby traders or stockbrokers meet to buy and sell securities, using hand and verbal signals.
AFP: Brothers crowned Britain's fish and chip shop kings
A fish and chip shop run by two brothers has battered the competition to be crowned the best in Britain, where the takeaway favourite is the traditional national dish.
Perfidious Albion Update.
CNN.com: Catholics fight gay adoption rules
Because they must. Because no one else will.
London - Britain's leading cardinal said on Tuesday the Catholic church may be forced to close down its adoption agencies if the government insists they consider placing children with gay couples.
Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair urging him to exempt Catholic adoption agencies from new anti-discrimination legislation, or risk reducing the chances for some 4,000 children across Britain waiting to be adopted.
He said the Catholic church in England and Wales, which he leads, would have "serious difficulty" adhering to the law which is due to come into effect in April and which outlaws discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.
"We believe it would be unreasonable, unnecessary and unjust discrimination against Catholics for the government to insist that if they wish to continue to work with local authorities, Catholic adoption agencies must act against the teaching of the Church and their own consciences," the cardinal wrote.
Amen.
He said it would be "an unnecessary tragedy if legislation forced the closure of these adoption services."
Homosexual Christian lobbyists accused the cardinal of bowing to pressure from the Vatican and making threats.
"Jumbo shrimp". "Billionaire populist". Et cetera.
"The Vatican is raising the pressure here in its war against gay people," Reverend Martin Reynolds, spokesman for the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, said.
Sick bastard.
"We are horrified that the Catholic church appears to be holding the government to ransom. They are obviously not putting the best interest of these children first." (Now that's funny. - F.G.) The Equality Act outlaws discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities and services on the basis of sexual orientation.
Considering all the medical and psychological pathologies caused and/or spread by buggery, you'd think the law would prohibit sodomites from going anywhere near kids.
What's that? You say it used to? What's up with that?
Charles Falconer, a member of Blair's cabinet, said it was difficult to see how exemptions could be granted.
"If we take the view as a society that we should not discriminate against people who are homosexual, you cannot give exclusions to people on the grounds that their religion or their race says 'we don't agree with that.'" he told BBC radio.
"We have committed ourselves to anti-discrimination law ... and it is extremely difficult to see how you can be excused ... on the grounds of religion."
Moron.
The 12 Catholic adoption agencies in England and Wales handle around a third of voluntary sector adoptions.
Pray for the children of Great Britain, kiddies. They will need it.
If some sodomites are willing to become priests just to get at altar boys,...
Dumbass businesses fire citizen soldiers.
Michelle Malkin finds the stories that rile decent folks.
Nurse deployed, then fired
By Michelle Malkin · January 24, 2007 09:33 AM
Debra Muhl, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, is a military nurse who has served in combat zones for 30 years. She works for Sutter Health, a health care provider in the Bay Area, as administrative director of the joint cardiac program
Or rather, she used to work for Sutter Health.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, she was fired last June just two days after letting her supervisor know that she was being sent to Iraq. Now, she has filed a federal lawsuit and it promises to be a very interesting case:
A military nurse who has served in combat zones for 30 years today sued her civilian employer, Sutter Health, alleging the company violated federal law by firing her after she told her supervisor she was being deployed to Iraq.
The federal lawsuit, filed in San Francisco, accuses Sutter Health of violating the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994
-- USERRA -- by firing Debra Muhl, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, in June 2006...
...Muhl, 56, said she worked at Sutter from 2002 to 2006, most recently as administrative director of the joint cardiac program. She was called up to active duty status several times during that period, including in March 2003 for 10 months and twice in 2005 for military training.
In her complaint, Muhl alleges that her supervisor, Richard Gray, the cardiac program's medical director, found her deployments frustrating, at one point instructing her to file a complaint with Congress seeking to get out of the military. As a compromise, Muhl said, she requested a transfer to a unit with fewer deployments.
Nevertheless, in late December 2005, she learned she would be going back to Iraq for several months. Gray was visibly angry by the news, Muhl said, and two days later called her into his office."You had news for me on Tuesday, now I have news for you," Muhl recalled Gray saying. "You will not have a job when you return from the desert."
Due to time constraints, we now move to further action.
A recent USA Today highlighted other reservists facing similar problems with employers:
The number of reservists and National Guard members who say they have been reassigned, lost benefits or been fired from civilian jobs after returning from
duty has increased by more than 70% over the past six years.
The sharp spike in complaints brought to the U.S. Labor Department reflects the extensive use of part-time soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the largest call up of reserves since the 1950-53 Korean War.
About 500,000 of the 850,000 reservists and National Guard members eligible for duty have been mobilized since late 2001, said Maj. Rob Palmer, spokesman for a Pentagon office that tries to resolve job disputes.
Not all have been treated well by their employers when they return home.
After the 1991 Gulf War, "I was welcomed home with ticker tape," said Marc Garcia, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves. "This time, I get the door slammed in my face."
Garcia, a member of the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, has been called up twice since Sept. 11, 2001, once for Afghanistan and the last time for stateside duty.
Garcia, 44, had been a supervisor in the Miami office of the security bureau. When he returned to work early last month, he was given a desk job in Washington with no clear responsibilities, he said.
Last month, a judge in Atlanta ruled that the State Department violated Garcia's rights under a 1994 law, which requires employers to give returning reservists their old jobs or equivalent positions. The law was passed to address employment problems faced by veterans returning from the 1991 Gulf War.
The Labor Department said it handled 1,548 complaints from returning service members in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, up from 895 in the year that ended Sept. 30, 2001. About a third of the cases are resolved in favor of employees, the department said.
Sobran discourses on chicks and power.
(Note: The link above will take you to Joe's current on-line column. The archive is here. Not all of his past columns are available in the archive.)
The Elevation of Nancy Pelosi
Last week history was made. A woman, Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, was chosen speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and anyone within hearing distance of a television set heard the word historic hundreds of times. To listen to the media hype, you’d have thought it was the most exciting event since Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic, and that millions of people must be lining the streets of New York to give Mrs. Pelosi a roaring ticker-tape parade.
Mrs. Pelosi herself spoke of her selection as a great triumph for women, as if she had just overcome tremendous odds to break the “marble ceiling.” An unprecedented human achievement!
Maybe I just live in a dull neighborhood, but nobody I ran into seemed to find it the least bit exciting. In fact, nobody even mentioned it.
Of course much depends on whether you consider acquiring political power a great accomplishment. Frankly, I’d be more impressed if a woman became heavyweight boxing champion.
Me too.
Seeking a historical parallel, my mind raced back nearly a quarter of a century, to 1984, when the media went into similar throes as the Democrats chose a woman to be their vice-presidential candidate. Her name, as every student of history knows, was Geraldine Ferraro. Then too the word historic was used with abandon.
The parallels don’t end there. Ferraro was a woman, a Democrat, Italian-American, and Catholic. So is Pelosi. One more little thing: Ferraro was outspokenly pro-abortion. So is Pelosi. All this is more than mere coincidence.
Nope.
If either one of them had expressed opposition to abortion, it goes without saying that the Democrats wouldn’t have exalted her. This throws an interesting light on the historic achievements of women. In today’s America, there are few constraints on how far a woman can rise, so long as she is a Democrat, a professed Catholic, and a proponent of abortion.
Sick but true.
Pelosi does have one advantage over Ferraro. She was the daughter of the mayor of Baltimore, so, despite her self-dramatization, it’s not as if she had to struggle to overcome her humble origins. This isn’t exactly a Horatio Alger story.
If, as is not improbable, a woman finds a cure for cancer, nobody will be very surprised. There will be nothing marvelous about it. It won’t be hailed as a great “woman’s achievement.” It will be the sort of thing we have come to take for granted.
The liberal creed holds that women and minorities never have a nice day. The victim act should have been retired long ago, but it has persisted long past the point of satiety. Indeed it’s refreshing to read old political debates, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with their nearly total freedom from grievance and resentment.
Though the self-conscious victims among us talk as if they have been excluded from constitutional protection, the original Constitution (including the Bill of Rights) says nothing about race or sex. It speaks of “persons.” Much nonsense is spoken about it by people who don’t stop to reflect on what that word implies.
Women have been elected and appointed to public office, including Congress, for a century or so now. Why is so much fuss being made about a very minor political milestone today?
Presumably Geraldine Ferraro is still alive somewhere or other, but for an epoch-making figure she is curiously obscure. Her 1984 campaign was of course a flop, soon enmeshed in her and her husband’s shady business associations, leading her to complain that she was, yes, a victim — of anti-Italian stereotyping. (Old-timers may recall her laments about what happens to people whose names end in vowels.) It became hilarious when her own husband got into trouble with the law.
Heehee. Some times, there really are mob ties, kiddies.
So you’ll pardon me if I don’t join the celebration over history’s latest development. Events of great historical importance don’t always make headlines the day they occur. When another Italian Catholic unexpectedly found land between Western Europe and the Orient, it took a while for the full significance to dawn on other Europeans.
In those days, of course, the technique of hype was still in a primitive state. Today it is so far advanced that many Americans actually believe that something of consequence happened last week.
Battling the invaders.
From Drudge:
Officials catch 761 illegals in Los Angeles...
From 14 countries, including Mexico, Honduras, Ukraine, India, Japan, Poland and Trinidad...
BALTIMORE: Aliens ask wrong people in van about work...
But Michelle Malkin knows better.
The coming amnesty disaster
By Michelle Malkin · January 24, 2007 11:00 AM
Well, I see the news about the pre-State of the Union immigration raids--intended to soften up conservative opposition to the coming illegal alien amnesty--is getting big play. Misleading play.
The top-left corner headline this morning at Drudge reads "Officials catch 761 illegals in Los Angeles."
But click through to the LA Daily News story and you'll find out--as I noted yesterday--that of the 761 "caught," 423 were already in jail when they were supposedly "swept" off the streets:
Between 75 and 150 officers participated in the raids. Los Angeles County logged 169 arrests, the most of any county, Hayes said. He said 338 illegal immigrants
were arrested primarily at their homes and apartments. The other 423 were identified in area jails since Jan. 17 and were expected to be deported after serving their sentences.
So, they finally got around to asking criminals in the jails what their immigration status is. And then they turned around and announced they had "caught" those 423 illegal aliens in order to bill the raids as among the "largest ever."
Another politically-timed enforcement gesture.
And now we inch closer to the coming amnesty disaster.
The state of the borders, green card process and entrance system for visitors and tourists? Porous. Chaotic. Understaffed. And overwhelmed.
But no matter. Mouthing his same old, bogus platitudes about the need to allow "undocumented workers" to do the job Americans won't do (never mind all those Americans who immediately lined up to apply for those meatpacking jobs after the December raids), Bush wants to pile millions of new "guest worker" illegal alien applicants onto the teetering homeland security bureaucracy.
The results will be disastrous. What President Bush didn't mention in the State of the Union address is that every part of the current legal immigrant applicant machinery that would be tasked with implementing the "guest worker" illegal alien amnesty is backlogged and broken.
Last November, congressional investigators reported that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had lost track of 111,000 files in 14 of the agency's busiest district offices and processed as many as 30,000 citizenship applications last year without the required files. Poof! I have heard first-hand from adjudicators in Texas and southern California who have piles of files in backrooms that have yet to be read. The application backlog remains in the millions. Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Susan Collins, R-Maine, called for a Government Accountability Office review that uncovered at least one case in which an applicant with ties to the terrorist group Hezbollah was granted citizenship without a check of his primary file.
"It only takes one missing file of somebody with links to a terrorist organization to become an American citizen," Grassley, who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, noted in The Washington Post. "We can't afford to be handing out citizenship with blinders on."
Or legal status. Multiply that by several million in the case of Bush's guest worker program. Can you spell d-i-s-a-s-t-e-r?
The FBI's background check backlog for legal immigrant applicants stands at a reported 100,000 files, which have been waiting for action for a year or longer. At least they didn't shred them all (uh, as far as we know) -- which is what federal contractors did at the immigration center in Laguna Niguel, Calif., over the last several years. To rid itself of a 90,000-document backlog, supervisors ordered workers to destroy passports, birth certificates, approval notices, change of address forms, diplomas and money orders. Then they reported that they had reduced the backlog to zero. Poof!
Michael Cutler, a veteran of the immigration bureaucracy who worked as a senior special agent at the former INS, says working at the agency is like the comedy scene out of "I Love Lucy" where Ethel and Lucy -- overwhelmed at a candy factory by an out-of-control conveyor belt -- try eating the candy bars and stuffing them down their dresses to stay on top of the flood:
"The situation is reminiscent of what happens to beleaguered adjudicators at the USCIS every day, and it is not the least bit funny. The adjudicators cannot eat
the applications, nor can they stuff them down their clothes. In order to get good evaluations, they need to move these applications as quickly as possible. The easiest way to do this is to approve them. Needless to say, this means that fraud-laden applications are often not detected and aliens receive a wide variety of benefits, including United States citizenship to which they would not be entitled if the relevant facts were known. As more aliens get away with committing fraud, the 'word' spreads through the communities and more aliens are emboldened to commit fraud, further eroding any integrity that might have still remained in the process. To make things worse, when an application is denied, the alien is virtually assured that no special agent will be looking for him to seek his removal from the United States."
We are incapable of imposing order and handling the current crush of legal immigrant applicants in a fair and timely way. You want "comprehensive immigration reform"? Start with border control, reliable adjudications, consistent interior enforcement, and efficient and effective deportation policies. And don't pretend that piling on is going to fix a damned thing.
Fyodor's Real Poetry Corner.
Greetings, younger
and unknown generation! I won't
see your powerful later growth,
when you will outgrow my acquaintances
and hide their old heads
from the eye of a passer-by. But may my great-grandson
hear your charming whisper, when,
returning from a party with friends,
full of happy and pleasing thoughts,
he passes by you in the darkness of the night,
and remembers me.
from Pushkin's Mikhailovskoye Revisited
Senator Token Update.
Ol' Big Ears blows some Democrass religious hokum smoke up Robin Roberts' skirt.
GMA Interview: Obama Wants to Change Voter 'Perception' of Dems on Social Issues
Posted by Mark Finkelstein on June 29, 2006 - 08:26.
Do you know the joke about the guy who goes to the doctor and is informed he needs an operation that would cost $25,000? When he asks if there are any cheaper alternatives, the doc responds, "well, for $75, I can touch up your X-rays."
That's Barack Obama's approach to healing the Dems' affliction when it comes to dealing with religious conservatives on social issues. He's not looking to change the substance, only the appearance.
In introducing Obama, GMA's Robin Roberts did describe him as "one of the Democrats' rising stars." But I think that might be some kind of required FCC label, so we'll cut Robin slack. Particularly so in light of the very probing question with which she ultimately hit Obama, and the telling response she elicited.
The topic was the Dems' uneasy relationship with religion and religious voters, and the speech Obama gave yesterday exhorting Democrats to "compete for the support of evangelicals and other churchgoing Americans."
Frankly, I expected Roberts to accord kid-MSM glove treatment to Obama. But after some nice chit chat, she landed this blow:
"We saw, of course, in the last presidential election moral values very much on the minds of voters who went to the polls. But it's also, when evangelicals talk about the way Democrats traditionally vote, when it comes to gay rights and abortion. So it's not so much the family values that you talk about, but about how Democrats vote. Does there have to be a change there?"
Bada-boom!
Obama: "There are going to be differences and issues and not all these issues that touch on religious faith are easily resolved. I mean, the fact of the matter is that there are going to be contentious debates around abortion and gay marriage and that's part of our democratic process. My simple point is to make sure that we don't get so locked into a particular perception about how one party or the other thinks that we miss the enormous complexity and diversity of religious views across the country."
Translation: "When it comes to social issues, we Democrats are going to keep voting like the liberals we are. But we have to figure out a way to change the religious voters' perception of what we're up to."
Give Barack high marks for candor, however unintentional, and kudos to Robin for cutting to the chase.
Finkelstein lives in the liberal haven of Ithaca, NY, where he hosts the award-winning public-access TV show 'Right Angle.' Contact him at mark@gunhill.net
When asked whether his lack of foreign policy experience would hurt him, Senator Token said he did indeed have such experience since he has lived overseas and majored in international relations.
Other skills he picked up in college that will help if he becomes president:
1) Rolling a blunt
2) Tapping a keg
3) Picking up chicks
4) Coercing money out of working adults
The Obamanauts anticipated this kerfuffle a month ago:
The other part of (Dick) Morris' statement that needs to be clarified is his assertion that Obama has no foreign policy experience - completely ignoring the fact that not only has he served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the past two years, he also majored in political science with a specialization in international relations at Columbia University.
"It's O.D.- Licious!"
AP: Jimi Hendrix-inspired energy drink irks some fans
Calabasas, CA - A new energy drink doesn't promise to give you the juice to play guitar like Jimi Hendrix, but it does hope to give you a "Liquid Experience."
Beverage Concepts says its nonalcoholic "Liquid Experience" drinks, named for Hendrix's breakthrough album, "Are You Experienced?" will debut in April.
The concept is irking some Hendrix fans, many of whom still consider him the greatest guitarist of all time.
"To see his image and the beautiful feelings it has created during my lifetime cheapened by base advertising ... is very disappointing to me," said bassist Michael Balzary, better known as Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The image of Hendrix, who died in 1970 from a drug overdose in London, has been licensed for products including baby clothing, an air freshener, lava lamp and a Christmas ornament. Portions of royalties have gone to several educational causes, including the United Negro College Fund, said Bruce Kuhlman, director of licensing and brand development for Authentic Hendrix, the Seattle-based company that controls use of Hendrix's name and images.
Old rockers never die, they just make money for other fools.
Beverage Concepts Chief Executive Josh Glass said his company would honor Hendrix's memory by donating some of the profit from the Liquid Experience to an unidentified music education foundation.
Duke False Accusation Case Update.
AP: Ex-Duke prosecutor faces new ethics charges
Raleigh, NC - The state bar has added ethics charges to a complaint filed against the prosecutor who brought sexual assault charges against three Duke lacrosse players, accusing him of withholding DNA evidence and making misleading statements to the court.
The new charges by the North Carolina State Bar against Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong were announced Wednesday and could lead to his removal from the state bar, according to a copy of the updated complaint.
Nifong's office arranged for a private lab to conduct DNA testing as part of the investigation into allegations three men raped a 28-year-old woman hired to perform as a stripper at a party thrown by the lacrosse team last March.
Those tests uncovered genetic material from several men on the woman's underwear and body, but none from any lacrosse player.
The bar complaint alleges those results weren't released to defense lawyers in a timely fashion and that Nifong repeatedly said in court he had turned over all evidence that would potentially benefit the defense.
Nifong's actions constitute a "systematic abuse of prosecutorial discretion ... prejudicial to the administration of justice," the complaint read.
Nifong was to appear with his attorney at a procedural conference Wednesday morning to discuss scheduling and other administrative details of the ethics complaint.
Last month, the bar charged Nifong with violating four rules of professional conduct by making misleading and inflammatory comments about the athletes under suspicion. Citing the conflict of interest created by the ethics charges, Nifong asked the state attorney general's office to take over the lacrosse case.
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About Me
- TheChurchMilitant
- First of all, the word is SEX, not GENDER. If you are ever tempted to use the word GENDER, don't. The word is SEX! SEX! SEX! SEX! For example: "My sex is male." is correct. "My gender is male." means nothing. Look it up. What kind of sick neo-Puritan nonsense is this? Idiot left-fascists, get your blood-soaked paws off the English language. Hence I am choosing "male" under protest.