Mrs Wapiti and my BMW at the highest point in the trip, Monarch Pass
Somewhere along the "Million Dollar Highway"
Also somewhere along the Million Dollar Highway
Bridal veil falls outside of Silverton
Mountain range west of Mancos, Colorado
A 14-year-old girl has been arrested and charged with murder after she allegedly killed her newborn baby in a school bathroom. Baytown, Texas, police said the eighth-grade student submerged the 7 pound infant in a Cedar Bayou Junior School toilet and jammed toilet paper down his throat so he wouldn't cry, the Houston Chronicle reported. Police have been investigating the incident since the baby was found April 2. The baby also suffered blunt trauma to his head and neck, according to a Harris County autopsy.
Non-Orthodox Jewish men are becoming alienated from their faith, a "crisis" that foreshadows a rise in interfaith marriages and secular generations, according to a new study from Brandeis University. The findings, based on 300 interviews, report the rise of female leadership and participation in Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative Judaism has prompted men to opt out of religious activities, in contrast to Orthodox Judaism, which still requires men for traditional worship and family life.
Senator Barack Obama, Governor Bill Richardson, Senator Hillary Clinton and Ruth Harkin stand during the national anthem.
Barack Hussein Obama's photo (that's his real name).....the article said he REFUSED TO NOT ONLY PUT HIS HAND ON HIS HEART DURING THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE, BUT REFUSED TO SAY THE PLEDGE.....how in the hell can a man like this expect to be our next Commander-in-Chief
Stevens warned the ruling would launch new judicial involvement in an issue he said should be left to legislators. "I fear that the district's policy choice may well be just the first of an unknown number of dominoes to be knocked off the table," he wrote.
Gas in central California is right at $4.50 a gallon. Those who are hurt most are the poorer who don't drive Priuses and Civics, but who pull into the rural service station not far away from my home with second- and third-hand SUVs, Crown Victorias, and F-150s. Most are either Hispanic or poor whites. None can afford solar panels, hybrids, or on-demand water heaters. Somewhere, somehow the Republicans, inept as
usual, have not been able to make the argument that they as a whole voted for ANWR, off-shore drilling, tar sands and shale, refineries, clean coal and coal to liquid-not to enrich oil companies or destroy the environment, but to provide accessible energy supplies to the citizenry, while Democrats stopped them all.
It really is a class issue. Democratic elite environmentalists road-blocked all these avenues, each of which might have added a million barrels here, a million there. We're not talking going back to $2 a gallon, but that additional production might have allowed gas to stay at $2.50 a gallon for example. Few Americans realize that the current Democratic leadership (cf. the SF regional proximity of a Boxer, Feinstein, and Pelosi) pretty much reflects the ideology of an upper-class Bay area elite, with ample capital and income, access to mass transit, who really has very little concern in the world for a guy who lives in Parlier and hangs doors up and down the Valley in his 10-year-old Ford 250-truck and trailer.
TOKYO - She is big-busted, petite, very friendly, and she runs on batteries. A Japanese firm has produced a 38 cm (15 inch) tall robotic girlfriend that kisses on command, to go on sale in September for around US$175, with a target market of lonely adult men. Using her infrared sensors and battery power, the diminutive damsel named "EMA" puckers up for nearby human heads, entering what designers call its "love mode".
[A] few days ago, Senator Obama gave a Father's Day speech calling for "responsible fatherhood." He, like President Bush, lays all the blame for rampant fatherlessness on irresponsible fathers who are "acting like boys, not men." Now along comes Gloucester High School to show that the Senator got it only part right. Seventeen girls are expecting babies in this 1,200-student school. None of these girls is older than 16 [note...only one is 16, the remainder are 15]. It now turns out that nearly half these girls have confessed to making a pact to have babies and raise them together-a sad adolescent fantasy if ever there was one.
Senator Obama, this proves my point, that irresponsible fathers are just one part of the problem. Women too are choosing fatherlessness for their children-single mothers by choice, single mothers by semi-choice (if the kid can have a father great, but if not, no big deal), and divorcing mothers who obstruct shared parenting, who move far away, or who obtain false restraining orders against the father. Gloucester High School shows us that both males and females have decided that children having fathers is not nearly as important as adult narcissism-men who can have sex without consequences, and women who can have babies to love them without the bother of a partner.
Gloucester officials and the media are debating all the wrong points, and are neglecting all the important ones. During the school year, the school nurse and a local pediatrician wanted to prescribe contraceptives without parental consent. But the girls wanted to get pregnant, so this would have prevented nothing. Besides, this is a terrible idea; what we need is more parental involvement, not less.
Why did these girls feel so unloved that they needed babies to feel whole? What's going on in their families? Here's my wager: most of these girls are fatherless - the strongest predictor of teenage pregnancy is fatherlessness. Is anyone counseling these girls to adopt out their babies (with the consent of the fathers)? This is the best solution for the babies. There are long waiting lists of loving, fit, middle class parents trying to adopt newborns. Where is the concept of "best interests of the child" when we need it? It will be painful for the girls and boys who have produced these babies, but we all suffer pain when we make a bad mistake, and it will be far less than the chronic pain for girls of single parenting and for boys of crushing child support payments.
Who are the fathers? How old are they? Will the parents of the babies marry, and if not, what role will the fathers be allowed to take in helping to raise the children?
...it reveals how it was not thoughtless right-wing thugs as much as writers and scientists, the intellectual elite, who led the movement. The exhibit is important, accurate but, regrettably, long overdue. It also fails to stress just how much the socialist left initiated and supported the eugenics campaign, not only in Germany but in Britain, the U. S. and the rest of Europe. Playwright George Bernard Shaw, English social democrat leader Sydney Webb and, in Canada, Tommy Douglas were just three influential socialists who called, for example, for the mass sterilization of the handicapped. In his Master's thesis The Problems of the Subnormal Family, the now revered Douglas argued that the mentally and even physically disabled should be sterilized and sent to camps so as not to "infect" the rest of the population. It is deeply significant that few if any of Douglas's left-wing comrades in this country or internationally were surprised or offended by his proposals. Indeed the early fascism of 1920s Italy, while unsavoury and dictatorial, had little connection with social engineering and eugenics. The latter German version of fascism was influenced not by ultra conservatism in southern Europe but, as is made clear in the writings of the Nazi ideologues, by the Marxist left. History is often clouded by fashion and the whims of the victorious. Because some of the most pernicious intellectual criminals of the past century wore red they have escaped condemnation.
Amanda Ireland, who graduated from Gloucester High on June 8, thinks she knows why these girls wanted to get pregnant. Ireland, 18, gave birth her freshman year and says some of her now pregnant schoolmates regularly approached her in the hall, remarking how lucky she was to have a baby. "They're so excited to finally have someone to love them unconditionally," Ireland says. "I try to explain it's hard to feel loved when an infant is screaming to be fed at 3 a.m."
The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. "We're proud to help the mothers stay in school," says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.
Gloucester's elected school committee plans to vote later this summer on whether to provide contraceptives. But that won't do much to solve the issue of teens wanting to get pregnant. Says rising junior Kacia Lowe, who is a classmate of the pactmakers': "No one's offered them a better option."
Myth No. 3: Drugs cause crime.
Truth: The drug war causes the crime.
Few drug users hurt or rob people because they are high.
Most of the crime occurs because the drugs are illegal and available only through a black market. Drug sellers arm themselves and form gangs because they cannot ask the police to protect their persons and property. In turn, some buyers steal to pay the high black-market prices. The government says heroin, cocaine and nicotine are similarly addictive, and about half the people who both smoke cigarettes and use cocaine say smoking is at least as strong an urge. But no one robs convenience stores for Marlboros.
Alcohol prohibition created Al Capone and the Mafia. Drug prohibition is worse. It's corrupting whole countries and financing terrorism.
Her marriage to Galvin, a builder, ended last year after just 16 months, prompted by the £70,000 pay gap between them and their vastly different ambitions. 'The things that I loved about Galvin initially eventually became the things that irritated me,' says Diahanne, who lives in Essex. 'At first I'd envied his laid-back nature. As long as there was money to cover the bills he was happy down the local pub with his mates having a beer. He was content doing the nine to five and wasn't a workaholic like me.
'But eventually it set us at odds. Money gives you choices and, because of the pay gap, those choices were vastly different for each of us. I don't take my earnings for granted, which is why I continue to work very hard but, yes, there were times that I wanted to travel first class or dine in a top restaurant and Galvin didn't feel the same because he didn't have the same disposable income as I did. 'Men are very proud and don't feel comfortable with the idea of their partner being the breadwinner or paying for them all the time. But I'd worked hard and wanted to enjoy the fruits of my labour.
"It's nothing more than Special Operations Command training with local authorities," said Lt. Nathan Potter, with Special Operations Command, which has authority over special forces from all branches of the military. Potter would not say which branch of the military was flying the choppers over Denver. The training has nothing to do with preparations for the Democratic National Convention, which will be held in Denver in August, Potter said. "We've gotten quite a few calls, but it's a training exercise that the DPD is involved in, and there's nothing going on," said a Denver police dispatcher. "The vast majority of people, after we tell them what's going on, they say, 'Oh, OK.' "[emphasis mine]
There were also two reported instances of police officers, dressed as protestors, purposefully instigating clashes. At the 2004 Republican National Convention, the NYPD orchestrated a fake arrest to incite protestors. When a blond man was "arrested," nearby protestors began shouting, "Let him go!" The helmeted police proceeded to push back against the crowd with batons and arrested at least two. In a similar instance, during an April 29, 2005, Critical Mass bike ride in New York, video footage captured a "protestor"-in reality an undercover cop-telling his captor, "I'm on the job," and being subsequently let go.
CHICAGO (AP) - Barack Obama celebrated Father's Day by calling on black fathers, who he said are "missing from too many lives and too many homes," to become active in raising their children. "They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it," the Democratic presidential candidate said Sunday at a largely black church in his hometown. Obama often speaks about the importance of parental involvement. In Washington, he sponsored legislation to get more child support money to children by offering a tax credit for fathers who pay support, more efficient collection and penalties for fathers who don't meet their obligations.
Calf Being Drug Out of the Herd to be "Processed"
Your Host and a 11 Year-Old Boy, Holding Down a Heifer to be Branded After We Just Wrestled Her to the Ground. Although it was mostly adult men doing the wrestling, occasionally teenage boys, a couple of the more daring women, and a girl or two got into the mix
Branding In Progress...
...Sometimes You Get Some Flamage
Authorities said the teens, ages 14 to 16, were attending a sleepover at Long's Lower Makefield home when Honeycutt, a mother of two young children, allegedly had sex with a 14-year-old and performed sex acts with a 15-year-old. Long allegedly watched, listened and instructed the teens not to say anything. In addition to the alleged sexual assault, detectives said Honeycutt exposed her breasts to the teens; open-mouth kissed some of the minors, entered a shower with a juvenile and engaged conversation of a sexual nature. Honeycutt is facing charges of statutory sexual assault, unlawful contact with a minor and other related charges. Long is facing charges of endangering the welfare of children and corruption of minors.
[Regarding Obama], I also thought identifying with a candidate on the basis of race was illiberal. Why then is a 90% or more African-American majority voting for Obama deemed a mere matter of "pride"? And what is so admirable that millions in Africa and the Middle East suddenly inform our journalists abroad that they would change their opinion of American should we elected a person of color, or the son of an African, or somebody who was once a Muslim, or someone with a middle name like Hussein? In other words, why would liberals think it is liberal to favor someone solely on the basis of shared race or religion-a bias that was the traditional enemy of the Enlightenment?
The reality is, men must blame themselves for slowly giving away their rights over the past 50 years. They must stop behaving like cringing, passive, silent, cheap ostriches and become titans of action - before the indefatigable feminists, with their deep Louis Vuitton bags, completely gut men's rights. Men cling to their remaining right - the right to remain silent - and have made it an artform, a self-defeating death wish.
Men make two key mistakes in life: they recruit
merchant maureens and elect gynocrats . A merchant maureen is a woman who drops her anchor into a man's wallet, with his consent. He is silent, out of desperation for sex, and willingly gives her his gold. Most men, whether in private life or politics, just don't have the balls to stand up to merchant maureens.
A gynocrat is a politician who cares only about women's rights - men are invisible and irrelevant. Can you name an American politician who isn't a gynocrat? Didn't think so. Yet, gynocrats hold - and keep - elected office because men, 44% of the electorate, put and keep them there. Accordingly, gynocrats care nothing about men because they have no evidence that men care about themselves.
Men will protest a bad referee call during the Super Bowl, but they won't protest bad laws that strip them of their rights. Men will pay thousands of dollars to purchase widescreen TVs the week before the Super Bowl, but they won't contribute $10 to a lobbyist fighting for their rights to live as protected citizens.
Vincent M.’s mother surrendered him for adoption at birth, and declined to identify his father. The mother had allegedly deliberately concealed the pregnancy and birth from Vincent’s asserted biological father, identified in the opinion as Jorge C., who had relocated out of state and was allegedly expecting mother to join him and continue their relationship. Jorge C. said the mother finally told him about Vincent when the baby was seven months old, and he flew back to California to try and obtain custody.
He appeared at the permanency hearing, claiming paternity. He filed a petition under Welfare and Institutions Code Sec. 388 requesting presumed father status and reunification services. Citing Civil Code Sec. 7004(a)(4), Kriegler said Jorge C. was not a presumed father because he did not receive Vincent into his home and hold the child out as his own.
Relying on In re Zacharia D. (1993) 6 Cal.4th 435—-which held that a man who fails to achieve presumed father status prior to the expiration of the reunification period is not entitled to reunification services unless he can establish, in a Sec. 388 petition, changed circumstances or new evidence demonstrating that the child’s best interest would be promoted by reunification.
Kriegler concluded the trial judge had abused her discretion in disregarding Vincent’s best interests.
The father’s relationship with his children can also be influenced by how different or how alike his style of parenting is to their mother’s. When both parents are similar in terms of setting limits and disciplining the children, then the father isn’t as likely to end up being criticized or shunned. But in cases where the mother continually excuses and tolerates the children’s infantile, aggressive, or inappropriate behavior, then the father can come across as much too uptight, inflexible, or demanding. Especially as teenagers, children in such situations sometimes pull away from their father after the divorce in part because he has higher expectations for them and is willing to discipline and to stand up to them when they are out of line.
The bad news for many divorced fathers is that many mothers abdicate too much power and control to their children - especially if the mother hasn’t remarried and especially if the child is a boy. And sadly, these children often end up less socially mature, less self-reliant, less self-disciplined, and less psychologically well-adjusted than their peers.
Surgeons Remove 16 Steel Washers From Man's 'Nether Region'
Monday, June 02, 2008
An Australian man was operated on in Hornsby Hospital in Berowra Sunday where surgeons removed 16 stainless steel washers from "down under," The Daily Telegraph reports.
One in 30 babies aborted for medical reasons is born alive, a study has found. They lived for an average of 80 minutes - although in some cases foetuses survived for over six hours. Researchers looked at the outcome of 3,189 abortions performed on seriously handicapped foetuses at 20 hospitals between 1995 and 2004. It showed that 102 - or around one in 30 - aborted for reasons such as Down's Syndrome and heart defects, were born alive.
Campaigners said it was likely the Midlands figures were just the tip of the iceberg as the region only accounts for around a tenth of the babies born in the country each year. In addition, the study only looked at babies whose lives were ended because of disability. However, most abortions are carried out on 'healthy' babies for social reasons.
Julia Millington of the pro-life group Alive and Kicking said: "This can't just be happening in the West Midlands. It begs the question of how many healthy babies must be surviving? It would suggest the true figure must be much higher. With live births after abortion occurring in 18 out of the 20 maternity units in the West Midlands alone, it is difficult to comprehend the numbers of babies around the country left fighting for their lives."
Babies born alive after abortion are entitled to medical care. However, anti-abortion campaigners claim that some are so unwanted, they are simply left to die.
The final tally was 3,932 votes in favor of the ordinance and 2,832 against.
Hyperion touted the so-called "green" technology in its proposed energy center, which it claims would be the world's cleanest. The refinery would process 400,000 barrels of tar sands crude from Alberta into low-sulfur gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Supporters argued that tapping into reserves from our neighbor to the north would reduce the nation's dependence on Mideast oil and add badly needed refining capacity in the U.S., where the last all-new refinery was built in 1976.
GG:
Do you believe in sin?
OBAMA:
Yes.
GG:
What is sin?
OBAMA:
Being out of alignment with my values.
Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.
A 13-year-old girl's sexual shenanigans have put a second man behind bars. Morris Williams, 22, told the judge he thought the girl was 18-years-old, but he found out Tuesday that ignorance is not a defense. The judge asked for media not to show 13-year-old Alisha Dean's face in court, but her pictures are all over her MySpace page and they portray a sexy, 19-year-old divorced woman.
"She told me she had just turned 18," Williams said. Williams said Dean picked him up on the street and after a few conversations they had sex. Williams said he never did it again, but Dean has done it before with 24-year-old Darwin Mills. Mills was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dean's father wanted Williams to join Mills there. "One of the reasons for the law is the fact that minors have poor judgment," said Jerry Dean, the girl's father. Dean's family admits Alisha still stays out late and has yet to delete her misleading MySpace page.
Alisha’s public Myspace is now down, but it wasn’t, even when the case went to court yesterday. The suggestive material was enough to make grown women blush. A couple of her videos show the minor child shaking her womanly booty like she’s working the pole. It’s totally believable to me that young men might not realize the girl’s age if she lied about it. Furthermore, Jerry Dean openly admitted that Alisha continues to stay out late and hadn’t deleted the Myspace that listed her as an adult. Even now, her private page says she’s 16 - three years older than she really is.
So what’s the answer? Lori Drew has been charged for essentially lying about her age and identity on a website resulting in harm to Megan Meier. Can’t the same charges be placed on a kid who let men go to jail without telling them her age? What about her parents, who are clearly unwilling to curtail her online and offline activities?
