Gonzaga Prep Confessions

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  BreAnna Lee thats my girl

  February 17, 2013 at 9:39pm · 2
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  Alysia Blackerby I love Miriam

  February 17, 2013 at 10:03pm · 1

From WhatReallyHappened.com, a short history of the US Govt’s human experimentation:

PUBLIC LAW 95-79 [P.L. 95-79]
TITLE 50, CHAPTER 32, SECTION 1520
“CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE PROGRAM”

“The use of human subjects will be allowed for the testing of chemical and biological agents by the U.S. Department of Defense, accounting to Congressional committees with respect to the experiments and studies.”

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“The Secretary of Defense [may] conduct tests and experiments involving the use of chemical and biological [warfare] agents on civilian populations [within the United States].”

-SOURCE-
Public Law 95-79, Title VIII, Sec. 808, July 30, 1977, 91 Stat. 334. In U.S. Statutes-at-Large, Vol. 91, page 334, you will find Public Law 95-79. Public Law 97-375, title II, Sec. 203(a)(1), Dec. 21, 1982, 96 Stat. 1882. In U.S. Statutes-at-Large, Vol. 96, page 1882, you will find Public Law 97-375.

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DOES OUR GOVERNMENT RESPECT HUMAN LIFE?

The following list comes from declassified documents, news reports, videos, the National Archives, and from the final report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/radiation/

1833): Dr. William Beaumont, an army surgeon physician, pioneers gastric medicine with his study of a patient with a permanently open gunshot wound to the abdomen and writes a human medical experimentation code that asserts the importance of experimental treatments, but also lists requirements stipulating that human subjects must give voluntary, informed consent and be able to end the experiment when they want. Beaumont’s Code lists verbal, rather than just written, consent as permissible (Berdon).

1845: (1845 – 1849) J. Marion Sims, later hailed as the “father of gynecology,” performs medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthesia. These women would usually die of infection soon after surgery. Based on his belief that the movement of newborns’ skull bones during protracted births causes trismus, he also uses a shoemaker’s awl, a pointed tool shoemakers use to make holes in leather, to practice moving the skull bones of babies born to enslaved mothers (Brinker).

1895: New York pediatrician Henry Heiman infects a 4-year-old boy whom he calls “an idiot with chronic epilepsy” with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment (“Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After”).

1896: Dr. Arthur Wentworth turns 29 children at Boston’s Children’s Hospital into human guinea pigs when he performs spinal taps on them, just to test whether the procedure is harmful (Sharav).

1900: A U.S. doctor doing research in the Philippines infects a number of prisoners with the Plague. He continues his research by inducing Beriberi in another 29 prisoners. four test subjects die (Merritte, et al.; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

Under commission from the U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Walter Reed goes to Cuba and uses 22 Spanish immigrant workers to prove that yellow fever is contracted through mosquito bites. Doing so, he introduces the practice of using healthy test subjects, and also the concept of a written contract to confirm informed consent of these subjects. While doing this study, Dr. Reed clearly tells the subjects that, though he will do everything he can to help them, they may die as a result of the experiment. He pays them $100 in gold for their participation, plus $100 extra if they contract yellow fever (Berdon, Sharav).

1906: Harvard professor Dr. Richard Strong infects prisoners in the Philippines with cholera to study the disease; 13 of them die. He compensates survivors with cigars and cigarettes. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors cite this study to justify their own medical experiments (Greger, Sharav).

1907: Indiana passes the world’s first law authorizing the state to force the sterilization of those it deems unfit to reproduce. In Germany, Adolph Hitler is only 18 years old.

1911: Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research publishes data on injecting an inactive syphilis preparation into the skin of 146 hospital patients and normal children in an attempt to develop a skin test for syphilis. Later, in 1913, several of these children’s parents sue Dr. Noguchi for allegedly infecting their children with syphilis (“Reviews and Notes: History of Medicine: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War”).

1913: Medical experimenters “test” 15 children at the children’s home St. Vincent’s House in Philadelphia with tuberculin, resulting in permanent blindness in some of the children. Though the Pennsylvania House of Representatives records the incident, the researchers are not punished for the experiments (“Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After”).

1915: Dr. Joseph Goldberger, under order of the U.S. Public Health Office, produces Pellagra, a debilitating disease that affects the central nervous system, in 12 Mississippi inmates to try to find a cure for the disease. One test subject later says that he had been through “a thousand hells.” In 1935, after millions die from the disease, the director of the U.S Public Health Office would finally admit that officials had known that it was caused by a niacin deficiency for some time, but did nothing about it because it mostly affected poor African-Americans. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors used this study to try to justify their medical experiments on concentration camp inmates (Greger; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

1918: In response to the Germans’ use of chemical weapons during World War I, President Wilson creates the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) as a branch of the U.S. Army. Twenty-four years later, in 1942, the CWS would begin performing mustard gas and lewisite experiments on over 4,000 members of the armed forces (Global Security, Goliszek).

1919: (1919 – 1922) Researchers perform testicular transplant experiments on inmates at San Quentin State Prison in California, inserting the testicles of recently executed inmates and goats into the abdomens and scrotums of living prisoners (Greger).

1925: Margaret Mead publishes “Coming of Age in Samoa”, an account of adolescent life in Samoa apparently devoid of the angst and stress of adolescence in more modern cultures. Liberals seize on this work as proof that by re-engineering the society, man himself can be re-engineered for the better; that environment only is what determines behavior. Being the provenance and justification of the liberal philosophy, Mead is elevated to a cultural heroine.

However, as Freemen pointed out in his critical analysis, Mead erred in using only two young women as her source of information. Samoans love a good joke, they love to “talk story” and during a later investigation by the government in Samoa, the women that Mead had talked to were not shy about admitting they had simply told Mead what Mead clearly wanted to hear, unaware of what Mead would do with the information, and Mead, dearly wishing to hear what she heard, never bothered to speak with any other Samoans. Had she done so, she would have found that Samoan children go through the same growing pains as children everywhere. The most obvious evidence that Mead was wrong was her assumption that Samoans were sexually promiscuous because the Hawaiians of the time were. In fact, the Samoan culture has never been a sexually promiscuous one.

Virtually the entire justification for government intrusion into private lives derived from Mead’s work, and it should hardly come as a surprise that both the liberal and anthropological establishment have reacted to this controversy much as the Catholic Church reacted to Galileo, and even though Mead’s basic conclusion of environment over heredity has been called into question, public policy continues to be shaped by it’s assumption.

1927: Carrie Buck of Charlottesville is legally sterilized against her will at the Virginia Colony Home for the Mentally Infirm. Carrie Buck was the mentally normal daughter of a mentally retarded mother, but under the Virginia law, she was declared potentially capable of having a “less than normal child” after having one normal child (by rape) and was forcibly sterilized.

The settlement of Poe v. Lynchburg Training School and Hospital (same institution, different name) in 1981 brought to an end the Virginia law. It is estimated that as many as 10,000 perfectly normal women were forcibly sterilized for “legal” reasons including alcoholism, prostitution, and criminal behavior in general.

1931: The Puerto Rican Cancer Experiment is undertaken by Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, a pathologist from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations, Rhoads purposely infected his subjects with cancer cells. Thirteen of the subjects died. Though a Puerto Rican doctor later discovers that Rhoads purposely covered up some of details of his experiment , and in spite of Rhoads’ written opinions that the Puerto Rican population should be eradicated, Rhoads went on to establish U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah, and Panama. He later was named to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and was at the heart of the recently revealed radiation experiments on prisoners, hospital patients, and soldiers (Sharav; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.). these are covered in the ACHE report. http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/radiation/

1930s: Seventeen U.S. states have laws permitting forced sterilization. German officials cite those laws as precedent for the forced sterilization of Jews under Nazi rule.

1931 – 1933: Mental patients at Elgin State Hospital in Illinois are injected with radium-266 as an experimental therapy for mental illness (Goliszek).

1932: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study begins. The U.S. Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Ala. diagnoses 400 poor, black sharecroppers with syphilis but never tells them of their illness nor treats them; instead researchers use the men as human guinea pigs to follow the symptoms and progression of the disease. They all eventually die from syphilis and their families are never told that they could have been treated (Goliszek, University of Virginia Health System Health Sciences Library). (The government office supervising the study was the predecessor to today’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC)).

1932: Margaret Sanger. the founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote in “A Plan For Peace” that her aims were, “To give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation [concentration camps] or sterilization”. Between 2000-4000 forced sterilizations per year were taking place in the United States. The following year, when Ernst Rudin established the Nazi system for forced sterilization of those it deemed unfit to reproduce, Rassenhygiene (Race hygiene), he chose as his inspiration and model the writings of William H. Tucker, associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, USA. When Rudin’s forced sterilization of Jews by irradiation with X-rays was revealed, Margaret Sanger refused to denounce him.

1932: Veterans from WW1, made homeless by the stock market crash of 1929, build a tent city near Washington D.C. while they try to collect on a promised combat bonus which the government has failed to pay (a situation the US troops in Bosnia and Iraq can identify with). Rather than pay the money, the government orders US Cavalry to destroy the tent city. The troops attack the camp on horseback with drawn sabers, against unarmed men, woman, & children.

If anyone doubts that our government would use it’s own weapons against it’s own troops, gaze upon this atrocity. These were not deserters. They were honorable soldiers, who had won the World War, been refused their promised pay, made homeless by the government’s economic policies, then cut down.

1934: Leon Whitley, of the American Eugenics Society, receives a letter requesting a copy of his recent book,”The Case for Sterilization”. He mails it off, and soon receives a personal letter of thanks…from Adolph Hitler.

In his letter of thanks for American writer Madison Grant, Hitler declares Grant’s book,”The Great Race” to be his “bible”.

1935: The Pellagra Incident. After millions of individuals die from Pellagra over a span of two decades, the U.S. Public Health Service finally acts to stem the disease. The director of the agency admits it had known for at least 20 years that Pellagra is caused by a niacin deficiency but failed to act since most of the deaths occured within poverty-striken black populations.

1937: Scientists at Cornell University Medical School publish an angina drug study that uses both placebo and blind assessment techniques on human test subjects. They discover that the subjects given the placebo experienced more of an improvement in symptoms than those who were given the actual drug. This is first account of the placebo effect published in the United States (“Placebo Effect”).

1939: In order to test his theory on the roots of stuttering, prominent speech pathologist Dr. Wendell Johnson performs his famous “Monster Experiment” on 22 children at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport. Dr. Johnson and his graduate students put the children under intense psychological pressure, causing them to switch from speaking normally to stuttering heavily. At the time, some of the students reportedly warn Dr. Johnson that, “in the aftermath of World War II, observers might draw comparisons to Nazi experiments on human subjects, which could destroy his career” (Alliance for Human Research Protection).

1941: Dr. William C. Black infects a 12-month-old baby with herpes as part of a medical experiment. At the time, the editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Francis Payton Rous, calls it “an abuse of power, an infringement of the rights of an individual, and not excusable because the illness which followed had implications for science” (Sharav).

1941: An article in a 1941 issue of Archives of Pediatrics describes medical studies of the severe gum disease Vincent’s angina in which doctors transmit the disease from sick children to healthy children with oral swabs (Goliszek).

1941: Drs. Francis and Salk and other researchers at the University of Michigan spray large amounts of wild influenza virus directly into the nasal passages of “volunteers” from mental institutions in Michigan. The test subjects develop influenza within a very short period of time (Meiklejohn).

1941: Researchers give 800 poverty-stricken pregnant women at a Vanderbilt University prenatal clinic “cocktails” including radioactive iron in order to determine the iron requirements of pregnant women (Pacchioli).

1942: The United States creates Fort Detrick, a 92-acre facility, employing nearly 500 scientists working to create biological weapons and develop defensive measures against them. Fort Detrick’s main objectives include investigating whether diseases are transmitted by inhalation, digestion or through skin absorption; of course, these biological warfare experiments heavily relied on the use of human subjects (Goliszek).

1942: U.S. Army and Navy doctors infect 400 prison inmates in Chicago with malaria to study the disease and hopefully develop a treatment for it. The prisoners are told that they are helping the war effort, but not that they are going to be infected with malaria. During Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors later cite this American study to defend their own medical experiments in concentration camps like Auschwitz (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

1942: The Chemical Warfare Service begins mustard gas and lewisite experiments on 4,000 members of the U.S. military. Some test subjects don’t realize they are volunteering for chemical exposure experiments, like 17-year-old Nathan Schnurman, who in 1944 thinks he is only volunteering to test “U.S. Navy summer clothes” (Goliszek). The experiments continue until 1945 and made use of Seventh Day Adventists who chose to become human guinea pigs rather than serve on active duty.

1943: In response to Japan’s full-scale germ warfare program, the U.S. begins research on biological weapons at Fort Detrick, MD.

1943: In order to “study the effect of frigid temperature on mental disorders,” researchers at University of Cincinnati Hospital keep 16 mentally disabled patients in refrigerated cabinets for 120 hours at 30 degrees Fahrenheit (Sharav).

1944: U.S. Navy uses human subjects to test gas masks and clothing. Individuals were locked in a gas chamber and exposed to mustard gas and lewisite.

1944: As part of the Manhattan Project that would eventually create the atomic bomb, researchers inject 4.7 micrograms of plutonium into soldiers at the Oak Ridge facility, 20 miles west of Knoxville, Tenn. (“Manhattan Project: Oak Ridge”).

1944: Captain A. W. Frisch, an experienced microbiologist, begins experiments on four volunteers from the state prison at Dearborn, Mich., inoculating prisoners with hepatitis-infected specimens obtained in North Africa. One prisoner dies; two others develop hepatitis but live; the fourth develops symptoms but does not actually develop the disease (Meiklejohn).

1944: Laboratory workers at the University of Minnesota and University of Chicago inject human test subjects with phosphorus-32 to learn the metabolism of hemoglobin (Goliszek).

1944-1946: In order to quickly develop a cure for malaria — a disease hindering Allied success in World War II — University of Chicago Medical School professor Dr. Alf Alving infects psychotic patients at Illinois State Hospital with the disease through blood transfusions and then experiments malaria cures on them (Sharav).

1944: A captain in the medical corps addresses an April 1944 memo to Col. Stanford Warren, head of the Manhattan Project’s Medical Section, expressing his concerns about atom bomb component fluoride’s central nervous system (CNS) effects and asking for animal research to be done to determine the extent of these effects: “Clinical evidence suggests that uranium hexafluoride may have a rather marked central nervous system effect … It seems most likely that the F [code for fluoride] component rather than the T [code for uranium] is the causative factor … Since work with these compounds is essential, it will be necessary to know in advance what mental effects may occur after exposure.” The following year, the Manhattan Project would begin human-based studies on fluoride’s effects (Griffiths and Bryson).

1944: The Manhattan Project medical team, led by the now infamous University of Rochester radiologist Col. Safford Warren, injects plutonium into patients at the University’s teaching hospital, Strong Memorial (Burton Report).

1945: Continuing the Manhattan Project, researchers inject plutonium into three patients at the University of Chicago’s Billings Hospital (Sharav).

1945: The U.S. State Department, Army intelligence and the CIA begin Operation Paperclip, offering Nazi scientists immunity and secret identities in exchange for work on top-secret government projects on aerodynamics and chemical warfare medicine in the United States (“Project Paperclip”).

1945: Researchers infect 800 prisoners in Atlanta with malaria to study the disease (Sharav).

1945: “Program F” is implemented by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This is the most extensive U.S. study of the health effects of fluoride, which was the key chemical component in atomic bomb production. (Griffiths and Bryson) One of the most toxic chemicals known to man, fluoride, it is found, causes marked adverse effects to the central nervous system but much of the information is squelched in the name of national security because of fear that lawsuits would undermine full-scale production of atomic bombs.

1946: Gen. Douglas MacArthur strikes a secret deal with Japanese physician Dr. Shiro Ishii to turn over 10,000 pages of information gathered from human experimentation in exchange for granting Ishii immunity from prosecution for the horrific experiments he performed on Chinese, Russian and American war prisoners, including performing vivisections on live human beings (Goliszek, Sharav). Male and female test subjects at Chicago’s Argonne National Laboratories are given intravenous injections of arsenic-76 so that researchers can study how the human body absorbs, distributes and excretes arsenic (Goliszek).

1946: Continuing the Newburg study of 1945, the Manhattan Project commissions the University of Rochester to study fluoride’s effects on animals and humans in a project codenamed “Program F.” With the help of the New York State Health Department, Program F researchers secretly collect and analyze blood and tissue samples from Newburg residents. The studies are sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and take place at the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Strong Memorial Hospital (Griffiths and Bryson).

1946 – 1947: University of Rochester researchers inject four male and two female human test subjects with uranium-234 and uranium-235 in dosages ranging from 6.4 to 70.7 micrograms per one kilogram of body weight in order to study how much uranium they could tolerate before their kidneys become damaged (Goliszek).

1946: Six male employees of a Chicago metallurgical laboratory are given water contaminated with plutonium-239 to drink so that researchers can learn how plutonium is absorbed into the digestive tract (Goliszek).

1946: Researchers begin using patients in VA hospitals as test subjects for human medical experiments, cleverly worded as “investigations” or “observations” in medical study reports to avoid negative connotations and bad publicity (Sharav).

1946: The American public finally learns of the biowarfare experiments being done at Fort Detrick from a report released by the War Department (Goliszek).

1946 – 1953: The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission sponsors studies in which researchers from Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and the Boston University School of Medicine feed mentally disabled students at Fernald State School Quaker Oats breakfast cereal spiked with radioactive tracers every morning so that nutritionists can study how preservatives move through the human body and if they block the absorption of vitamins and minerals. Later, MIT researchers conduct the same study at Wrentham State School (Sharav, Goliszek).

1946: Human test subjects are given one to four injections of arsenic-76 at the University of Chicago Department of Medicine. Researchers take tissue biopsies from the subjects before and after the injections (Goliszek).

1947: Col. E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) issues a top-secret document (707075) dated Jan. 8. In it, he writes that “certain radioactive substances are being prepared for intravenous administration to human subjects as a part of the work of the contract” (Goliszek).

1947: A secret AEC document dated April 17 reads, “It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse reaction on public opinion or result in legal suits,” revealing that the U.S. government was aware of the health risks its nuclear tests posed to military personnel conducting the tests or nearby civilians (Goliszek).

1947: The CIA begins studying LSD’s potential as a weapon by using military and civilian test subjects for experiments without their consent or even knowledge. Eventually, these LSD studies will evolve into the MKULTRA program in 1953 (Sharav).

1947: (1947 – 1953) The U.S. Navy begins Project Chatter to identify and test so-called “truth serums,” such as those used by the Soviet Union to interrogate spies. Mescaline and the central nervous system depressant scopolamine are among the many drugs tested on human subjects (Goliszek).

1948: Based on the secret studies performed on Newburgh, N.Y. residents beginning in 1945, Project F researchers publish a report in the August 1948 edition of the Journal of the American Dental Association, detailing fluoride’s health dangers. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) quickly censors it for “national security” reasons (Griffiths and Bryson).

1950: The CIA and later the Office of Scientific Intelligence begin Project Bluebird (renamed Project Artichoke in 1951) in order to find ways to “extract” information from CIA agents, control individuals “through special interrogation techniques,” “enhance memory” and use “unconventional techniques, including hypnosis and drugs” for offensive measures (Goliszek).

Catholic writer Nick Steves, at the Reactivity Place, addresses the unedifying saga of Duke University freshman and A student, Belle Knox, the pseudonym under which the 18 year old daughter of a US army hematologist and devout Catholic, Kevin Weeks, has become notorious.

Belle Knox’s notoriety stems from her work as a star in “barely legal” adult films in California. She filmed porn when she was on break from college. No one knew about the secret life of the freshman sociology and women’s studies major until a fellow student at Duke outed her to their classmates.

The outer himself suffers from a $1000/month porn habit.

Fighting back against a barrage of abuse, threats, and insults from her peers, Knox, a self-styled libertarian Republican and sex-positive feminist, has taken to the national media, with a defense of her career choice and a twitter stream of raw images from it.

No one is exploiting her, she claims, and she finds her “home,” her “art,” and her “joy” in porn.

Just to be clear, the videos in question are both raw and violent, not Playboy shoots.

Her first recorded act is described as a “rape” by her co-star.

This is another story I don’t want to write about, but feel compelled to, especially as “Belle Weeks” is half Indian (her mother is Punjabi).

Both parents are said to be devout Catholics. Her older brother, Paul, and his wife, are engaged in Christian out-reach. She herself worked for Catholic charities, while she was a high school student at Gonzaga Prep.

Nick Steves describes his reaction to the story, as the father of four daughters:

“The Weeks family is devastated, Belle’s Jesuitical protestations notwithstanding. I don’t need a news report to tell me that. The somewhat flexible and fluid boundaries of normal human psychology do not stretch that far. Any father who would not fly into a murderous rage at the pimping of his daughter is profoundly defective. I would. I’d kill the bastard(s) if given the glimmer of a chance and leave not a few permanent stripes on the daughter in question to boot… and I wouldn’t even say I was sorry (‘cept maybe to God). And a sane society would moreover look the other way when these, necessarily rare, acts of vengeance occurred.

Of course we do not live in a sane society— where mere symptoms are treated as pathologies, and genuine pathologies no longer even have names that can be spoken.

What of Miriam Weeks, who claims to “know exactly what” she’s doing? She’s ruined. Oh she’ll enjoy the rush of brain chemicals for a few years more no doubt. Money, attention, big *****. But she’s no idea of the barren, lonely hell she’s cultivated for herself. It is unclear any woman under 30 can truly contemplate it. Certainly not an 18-year old Duke freshman. Biology is the biggest bitch of all, and you think you can just flip her off? Good luck with that.“

Comment:

For the liberal media, and many libertarians, it’s all no big deal.

“Make love, not war,” says Robert Wenzel at Economic Policy Journal, an outlet for many paleo-libertarians.  If the paleos feel that way, imagine the lemming libs.

“Prostitutes are noble.”

That’s the new mantra, replacing the old religious ones. It’s still a mantra, though.

Prostitutes qua prostitutes are not noble, though individuals might well be. They might not be much worse than their fellow man, but their chosen life is certainly worse.

Prostitution is not Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman.”

The average age of prostitutes is around 25.

(The statistic of 12-13 years average age of entry into prostitution seems to be hype or propaganda, even though it appears on apparently sober government websites).

The average prostitute has a past of sexual and physical abuse, a present of sexual disease and drugs, and a future of early death. The average age of death for prostitutes is 34.

That is the feminist empowerment that Belle Knox and her enablers are applauding.

Well, now you know whom to go to when you have the New York prosecutor on your tail  – Daniel Arshack, Devyani Khobragade’s lawyer, who won a dismissal of the charges against his client being pursued by the New York attorney, Preet Bharara, who, until now, has had a perfect score as a prosecutor:

CNN reports:

“New York (CNN) — The Indian diplomat whose arrest sparked a testy exchange between the United States and India won a dismissal of a federal indictment Monday, according to court documents.

Devyani Khobragade was arrested and strip searched by federal agents in New York City in December after federal authorities accused Khobragade of lying on a visa application about how much she paid her housekeeper. She was indicted on January 9 by a federal grand jury on one count of visa fraud and one count of making false statements.

Khobragade then filed a motion to dismiss the charges, claiming she was “cloaked in diplomatic immunity at the time of her arrest,” according to the motion.

The court agreed, stating that Khobragade was “appointed a Counselor to the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations, a position that cloaked her with full diplomatic immunity,” according to court documents. She was appointed to that position on January 8, a day before she was indicted.

“Even if Khobragade had no immunity at the time of her arrest and has none now, her acquisition of immunity during the pendency of proceedings mandates dismissal,” U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin wrote.

“The government may not proceed on an indictment obtained when Khobragade was immune from the jurisdiction of the court,” Scheindlin continued.

Khobragade’s attorney, Daniel Arshack, said in a statement that Khobragade is pleased that “the rule of law has prevailed.”

The Last Psychiatrist explains the lessons that the myth of Narcissus holds for parents: If you want a child who knows himself and can achieve, surround him with mirrors:

“How do you make a child know himself?  You surround him with mirrors. “This is what everyone else sees when you do what you do.  This is who everyone thinks you are.”

You cause him to be tested: this is the kind of person you are, you are good at this but not that. This other person is better than you at this, but not better than you at that.  These are the limits by which you are defined.   Narcissus was never allowed to meet real danger, glory, struggle, honor, success, failure; only artificial versions manipulated by his parents.   He was never allowed to ask, “am I a coward?  Am I a fool?”  To ensure his boring longevity his parents wouldn’t have wanted a definite answer in either direction.

He was allowed to live in a world of speculation, of fantasy, of “someday” and “what if”.   He never had to hear “too bad”, “too little” and “too late.”

When you want a child to become something– you first teach him how to master his impulses, how to live with frustration.  But when a temptation arose Narcissus’s parents either let him have it or hid it from him so he wouldn’t be tempted, so they wouldn’t have to tell him no. They didn’t teach him how to resist temptation, how to deal with lack.  And they most certainly didn’t teach him how NOT to want what he couldn’t have.  They didn’t teach him how to want.

The result was that he stopped having desires and instead desired the feeling of desire.”

H/T to Cheshire I, in the comment section of Patheos for pointing out this gem from Chesterton:

The Song of the Strange Ascetic

If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have praised the purple vine,
My slaves should dig the vineyards,
And I would drink the wine.
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And his slaves grow lean and grey,
That he may drink some tepid milk
Exactly twice a day.

If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have crowned Neaera’s curls,
And filled my life with love affairs,
My house with dancing girls;
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And to lecture rooms is forced,
Where his aunts, who are not married,
Demand to be divorced.

If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have sent my armies forth,
And dragged behind my chariots
The Chieftains of the North.
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And he drives the dreary quill,
To lend the poor that funny cash
That makes them poorer still.

If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have piled my pyre on high,
And in a great red whirlwind
Gone roaring to the sky;
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And a richer man than I:
And they put him in an oven,
Just as if he were a pie.

Now who that runs can read it,
The riddle that I write,
Of why this poor old sinner,
Should sin without delight-
But I, I cannot read it
(Although I run and run),
Of them that do not have the faith,
And will not have the fun.

(G. K. Chesterton – 1913)

From National Garden Clubs Inc.

Protecting Our  World

“The amount of water on Earth now is about the same as it was millions  of years ago.  Water regulates the Earth’s temperature.  It also regulates the temperature of the human  body. Less than 2% of the Earth’s water supply is fresh water.

Of all the earth’s water, 97% is salt water found in oceans and seas.

Only 1% of the earth’s water is available for drinking water.  The remaining 2% is frozen.

The human body is about 75% water.

A person can survive about a month without food, but only 5 to 7 days without water.

Every day in the United States, we drink about 110 million gallons of water.

Landscaping accounts for about half the water used at home.  Showers account for another

18 percent, while toilets use about 20 percent.

Showering and bathing are the largest indoor uses (27%) of water domestically

There are 7.48 gallons in a cubic foot of water.  Therefore, 2000 cubic feet of water is 14,560 gallons.

An acre foot of water is about 326,000 gallons.  One-half acre foot is enough to meet the needs of a typical family for a year.

It takes 3.3 acre feet of water to grow enough food for an average family for a year.

A leaky faucet can waste 100 gallons a day.

If every household in America had a faucet that dripped once each second, 928 million gallons of water a day would leak away.

One flush of the toilet uses 6 ½ gallons of water.

An average family of four uses 881 gallons of water per week just by flushing the toilet.

Avoid flushing the toilet unnecessarily.  Dispose of tissues, insects and other such waste in the trash rather than the toilet.

An average bath requires 37 gallons of water.

The average 5-minute shower takes 15 to 25 gallons water – around 40 gallons are used in 10 minutes.

Take short showers instead of baths.

You use about 5 gallons of water if you leave the water running while brushing your teeth or shaving.

The use of water-saving toilets, showerheads, and faucet aerators can result in a 45% savings in water use.

Each person needs to drink about 2 ½ quarts (80 ounces) of water every day.

Store drinking water in the refrigerator rather than letting the faucet run every time you want a cool glass of water.

You don’t need to buy bottled water for health reasons if your drinking water meets all of the federal, state and local drinking water standards.  Bottled water can cost up to 1000 times more than municipal drinking water.

You can refill an 8-oz. glass of water approximately 15,000 times for the same cost as a six-pack of soda pop.

A dairy cow must drink 4 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of milk.

Run your dishwasher and washing machine only when they are full.

A top-loading clothes washer uses between 40 and 55 gallons of water per load.  Front-loading models use roughly half that amount.

When washing dishes by hand, fill one sink or basin with soapy water.  Quickly rinse under a slow-moving stream from the faucet.

Never put water down the drain when there may be another use for it such as watering a plant or garden, or cleaning.

An automatic dishwasher uses 9 to 12 gallons of water while hand washing dishes can use up to 20 gallons.

Use a bowl of water to clean fruits and vegetables rather than running water over them.  You can reuse this for your houseplants.

If you water your grass and trees more heavily, but less often, this saves water and builds stronger roots.

Water your lawn only when it needs it.  If you step on the grass and it springs back up when you move, it doesn’t need water.  If it stays flat, it does need water.

Water lawns during the early morning hours or evening when temperatures and wind speed are the lowest.  This reduces losses from evaporation.

Running a sprinkler for 2 hours can use up to 500 gallons of water. Up to 90% of water used to sprinkle lawns can be lost to the atmosphere through evaporation

Use a rain catch system (rain barrel) and use natural rain water for watering in the yard

Do not hose down your driveway or sidewalk.  Use a broom to clean leaves and other debris from these areas.  Using a hose to clean a driveway uses about 50 gallons of water every 5 minutes.

When washing a car, use soap and water from a bucket.  Use a hose with a shut-off nozzle for rinsing.  As much as 150 gallons of water can be saved by turning off the hose between rinses.

Public water suppliers process 38 billion gallons of water per day for domestic and public use.

Approximately 1 million miles of pipelines and aqueducts carry water in the United States and Canada.  That’s enough pipe to circle the earth 40 times.

About 800,000 water wells are drilled each year in the United States for domestic, farming, commercial, and water testing purposes.

More than 13 million households get their water from their own private wells and are responsible for

Treating And pumping the water themselves.

Industries released 197 million pounds of toxic chemicals into waterways in 1990.

300 million gallons of water are needed to produce a single day’s supply of U. S. newsprint.

One inch of rainfall drops 7,000 gallons or nearly 30 tons of water on a 60’ by 180’ piece of land.

No drips

A dripping faucet can waste 20 gallons of water a day.  A leaking toilet can use 90,000 gallons of water in a month.  Get out the wrench and change the washers on your sinks and showers, or get new washer less faucets.  Keeping your existing equipment well maintained is probably the easiest and cheapest way to start saving water.
Install new fixtures

New, low-volume or dual flush toilets, low-flow showerheads, water-efficient dishwashers and clothes washing machines can all save a great deal of water and money.  Aerators on yours faucets can significantly reduce water volume; water-saving showerheads can cut the volume of water used down to 1.2 gallons per minute or less.  Splurging on a low-flow toilet could save another 50 to 80 gallons of water a day.  Together, those changes could cut the household’s daily use of water by nearly one-half – saving a considerable amount of water and money.
Cultivate good water habits

All the water that goes down the drain, clean or dirty, ends up mixing with raw sewage, getting contaminated, and meeting the same fate.  Try to stay aware of this precious resource disappearing.  Turn off the water while brushing your teeth or shaving; wash laundry and dishes with full loads; take shorter showers, etc.
Stay off the bottle

By many measures, bottled water is a scam.  Bottled water is not as well regulated as municipal water and often is not even particularly pure.  Much bottled water is just tap water anyway.  Bottled water is more expensive per gallon than gasoline and incurs a huge carbon footprint from it transportation.  The discarded bottles are a blight in the landscape and the landfill.  If you want to carry water with you, use a refillable bottle.
Go beyond the lawn

Naturalize your lawn using locally appropriate plants that are hardy and don’t need a lot of water.  Water in the coolest part of the day to minimize evaporation.  Drip irrigation is a better choice than using a sprinkler system.
Harvest your rainwater

Put a rain barrel on your downspouts and use this water for irrigation.  Rain cisterns come in all shapes and sizes ranging from larger underground systems to smaller, freestanding ones.
Harvest your grey water

Water that has been used at least once but is still clean enough for other jobs is called greywater.  Water from sinks, showers, dishwashers, and clothes washers are the most common household examples.  (Toilet water is often called “blackwater” and needs a different level of treatment before it can be used.)  Greywater can be recycled with practical plumbing systems (such as Aqus) or with simple practices such as emptying the fish tank in the garden instead of the sink.  The bottom line?  One way or another, avoid putting water down the drain when you can use it for something else.
At the car wash

Car washes are often more efficient than home washing and the water is treated rather than letting it go straight into the sewer system.  Check to make sure that they clean and recycle the later.
Keep your eyes open

Report broken pipes, open hydrants, and excessive water waste.  Don’t be shy about pointing out leaks to your friends and family members, either.  They might have turned out the dripping sound a long time ago.
Don’t spike the punch

Water sources have to be protected.  In many closed loop systems like those in cities in the Great Lakes, waste water is returned to the Lake that fresh water comes out of.  Don’t pout chemicals down drains, or flush drugs down toilets; it could come back in diluted form in your water.

Source:  Planet Green – A Discovery Company

National Garden Clubs, Inc., believes it is imperative that we support and undertake proactive initiatives for the protection, conservation and restoration of the quality of the nation’s coastal waters, wetlands, aquifers, watersheds, lakes, rivers and streams, through educational programs, conservation efforts, increased advocacy and partnerships with related government agencies, and state and national grassroots water coalitions.”

–

National Garden Clubs, Inc. Water Conservation Platform

Adopted October 4, 2008

Lila RajivaDecember 25, 2013 at 11:39 PM

Merry Christmas to Bob and Chris Rossini and thanks for much hard work over many years.

I appreciate your allowing me to post, though I have been highly critical of many of your colleagues on my blog.

I also appreciate that you run an open forum and don’t delete comments in totality like some (nameless) libertarian sites, thus rewriting 4 years of history in a rather Stalinist way that calls into question their already questionable integrity.

Lila RajivaJanuary 8, 2014 at 11:56 AM

Well, it is European, but it’s not based in Europe, necessarily.
It’s a private firm devoted to futuristic technologies.
Just trace the connections, folks.

The name is a dead give-away that it’s NOT Japanese.

Reply
Lila RajivaDecember 26, 2013 at 12:01 AM

@Chris Rossini

Have you solved the puzzle of SATOSHI NAKAMOTO?

NWO creation from defense research.

When you figure it out, give me a buzz and we’ll compare notes.
But don’t keep trying to convert your flock.
Some sheep are meant for shearing. Leave them to it.

[Note: This picture isn’t intended to offend Islam or Muslims.]

Zahir Ebrahim analyzes the John Perkins of the world:

“Should the conscionable John Perkins be donating the monetary proceeds of his Confessions to the nations and peoples he helped rape and plunder, in restitution, just as he is now presumably helping them with forensic information on how he covertly did it to them? Selling books on one’s con-game in the name of helping future victims only imputes impure motives to the enterprise: First be highly paid for orchestrating the rape, then get paid again writing about it, while also winning praise and fame in the process! Furthermore, it is interesting to observe another blatant dichotomy in crime and punishment. Adolph Eichmann was the harbinger of cataclysm to some six million Jews for a short span of 3 to 5 years with just the stroke of a pen or the drop of a word, and he was hanged in Jerusalem. Whereas the EHMs are the harbingers – with the same stroke of pen and some button pushing on calculators and fancy spreadsheets – of the continued entrapment of entire nations in inextricable systems of poverty and misery for generations that is no less cataclysmic for these victims. And yet, the EHM walk free among us in suits and ties, sometimes even heading prestigious economic institutions, and of course, nations. As the prime-mover DNA – the ‘legal covers’ – should we do something about this root cause that enables the multi-color-collared crimes against humanity by the emperors? Where else are we seeing such “legal covers”? Would it be pertinent to point to “shock and awe”, “Economic Sanctions”, and the “UN Security Council Resolutions”, to subjugate entire nations? To know right from wrong is indeed not too complex – the Bible has already taught it to us through the Golden Rule “Do unto others as you have others do unto you” – there are few shades of gray for the commonsensical un-hypocrite! Thus I have little sympathy for the cat who goes for Hajj after eating 900 mice! Crimes are not absolved or made less abhorrent by confessionals. Nor its victims restituted by the voice of one’s conscience! Payment still needs to be made in full. Thank you.”