To Be Divine--Stephen Fry*

"I think it was Donald Mainstock the great amateur squash player who pointed out how lovely I was. Until that time, I think it was safe to say that I never really had been aware of my own timeless brand of loveliness. But his words smote me because of course you see, I am lovely in a fluffy, moist kind of way, and who would have it otherwise?

I walk, lets be splendid about this, in a lightly accented cloud of gorgeousness that isn't far short of being, quite simply, terrific.

The secret to smooth, almost shiny loveliness of the order of which we're discussing in this simple, frank, creamy, soft way doesn't reside in oils, unguents, balms, ointments, creams, astringents, milks, moisturizers, liniments, lubricants, embrocations, or balsams, to be rather divine for just one noble moment.

It resides, and I mean this in a pink, slightly special way, in one's attitude of mind.

To be gorgeous and high and true and fine and fluffy and moist and sticky and lovely all you have to do is believe that one is gorgeous and high and true and fine and fluffy and moist and sticky and lovely.

And I believe it myself, tremulously at first, then with mounting heat and passion because, stopping off for a second to be super again, I'm so often told it.

That's the secret really."

*add gold and pink glitter and a lavender sachet

Britons and Espionage? My sweet butt.

Iran ‘to try Britons for espionage’

Uzi Mahnaimi, Michael Smith and David Cracknell
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article1563877.ece

FIFTEEN British sailors and marines arrested by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards off the coast of Iraq may be charged with spying.
A website run by associates of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, reported last night that the Britons would be put before a court and indicted.
Referring to them as “insurgents”, the site concluded: “If it is proven that they deliberately entered Iranian territory, they will be charged with espionage. If that is proven, they can expect a very serious penalty since according to Iranian law, espionage is one of the most serious offences.”
The warning followed claims by Iranian officials that the British navy personnel had been taken to Tehran, the capital, to explain their “aggressive action” in entering Iranian waters. British officials insist the servicemen were in Iraqi waters when they were held.

The penalty for espionage in Iran is death. However, similar accusations of spying were made when eight British servicemen were detained in the same area in 2004. They were paraded blindfolded on television but did not appear in court and were freed after three nights in detention.
Iranian student groups called yesterday for the 15 detainees to be held until US forces released five Revolutionary Guards captured in Iraq earlier this year.
Al-Sharq al-Awsat, a Saudi-owned newspaper based in London, quoted an Iranian military source as saying that the aim was to trade the Royal Marines and sailors for these Guards.
The claim was backed by other sources in Tehran. “As soon as the corps’s five members are released, the Britons can go home,” said one source close to the Guards.
He said the tactic had been approved by Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, who warned last week that Tehran would take “illegal actions” if necessary to maintain its right to develop a nuclear programme.
Iran denounced a tightening of sanctions which the United Nations security council was expected to agree last night in protest at Tehran’s insistence on enriching uranium that could be used for nuclear weapons.
Lord Triesman, the Foreign Office minister, met the Iranian ambassador in London yesterday to demand that consular staff be allowed access to the Britons, one of whom is a woman. His intervention came as a senior Iranian general alleged that the Britons had confessed under interrogation to “aggression into Iran’s waters”.
Intelligence sources said any advance order for the arrests was likely to have come from Major-General Yahya Rahim Safavi, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards.
Subhi Sadek, the Guards’ weekly newspaper, warned last weekend that the force had “the ability to capture a bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers and feed them to our fighting cocks”.
Safavi is known to be furious about the recent defections to the West of three senior Guards officers, including a general, and the effect of UN sanctions on his own finances.
A senior Iraqi officer appeared to back Tehran’s claim that the British had entered Iranian waters. “We were informed by Iraqi fishermen after they had returned from sea that there were British gunboats in an area that is out of Iraqi control,” said Brigadier-General Hakim Jassim, who is in charge of Iraq’s territorial waters. “We don’t know why they were there.”
Admiral Sir Alan West, the former head of the Royal Navy, dismissed suggestions that the British boats might have been in Iranian waters. West, who was first sea lord when the previous arrests took place in June 2004, said satellite tracking systems had shown then that the Iranians were lying and the same was certain to be true now.

Lets kick these jerks where it counts. Espionage my foot! Britons have had the right to patrol that water-way for years and years without any problems. If they so much as harm a hair on the head of one of those soldiers, I hope they'll be put down like the pack of rabid dogs that they are.

The thing about progress is...

that our ability to clean up after ourselves equals our ability to pollute. The stone age in New York City is not an attractive prospect for me.

The Year Without Toilet Paper

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Dim Lights, Big City The Conlin-Beavan family experiment requires that lights be low in their Fifth Avenue apartment.

By PENELOPE GREEN
Published: March 22, 2007
DINNER was the usual affair on Thursday night in Apartment 9F in an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue. There was shredded cabbage with fruit-scrap vinegar; mashed parsnips and yellow carrots with local butter and fresh thyme; a terrific frittata; then homemade yogurt with honey and thyme tea, eaten under the greenish flickering light cast by two beeswax candles and a fluorescent bulb.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Michelle Conlin rides her scooter, even in the snow. “Rain is worse,” she said.
A sour odor hovered oh-so-slightly in the air, the faint tang, not wholly unpleasant, that is the mark of the home composter. Isabella Beavan, age 2, staggered around the neo-Modern furniture — the Eames chairs, the brown velvet couch, the Lucite lamps and the steel cafe table upon which dinner was set — her silhouette greatly amplified by her organic cotton diapers in their enormous boiled-wool, snap-front cover.
A visitor avoided the bathroom because she knew she would find no toilet paper there.
Meanwhile, Joseph, the liveried elevator man who works nights in the building, drove his wood-paneled, 1920s-era vehicle up and down its chute, unconcerned that the couple in 9F had not used his services in four months. “I’ve noticed,” Joseph said later with a shrug and no further comment. (He declined to give his last name. “I’ve got enough problems,” he said.)
Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.
Mr. Beavan, who has written one book about the origins of forensic detective work and another about D-Day, said he was ready for a new subject, hoping to tread more lightly on the planet and maybe be an inspiration to others in the process.
Also, he needed a new book project and the No Impact year was the only one of four possibilities his agent thought would sell. This being 2007, Mr. Beavan is showcasing No Impact in a blog (noimpactman.com) laced with links and testimonials from New Environmentalist authorities like treehugger.com. His agent did indeed secure him a book deal, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and he and his family are being tailed by Laura Gabbert, a documentary filmmaker and Ms. Conlin’s best friend.
Why there may be a public appetite for the Conlin-Beavan family doings has a lot to do with the very personal, very urban face of environmentalism these days. Thoreau left home for the woods to make his point (and secure his own book deal); Mr. Beavan and Ms. Conlin and others like them aren’t budging from their bricks-and-mortar, haut-bourgeois nests.
Mr. Beavan looks to groups like the Compacters (sfcompact.blogspot.com), a collection of nonshoppers that began in San Francisco, and the 100 Mile Diet folks (100milediet.org and thetyee.ca), a Vancouver couple who spent a year eating from within 100 miles of their apartment, for tips and inspiration. But there are hundreds of other light-footed, young abstainers with a diarist urge: it is not news that this shopping-averse, carbon-footprint-reducing, city-dwelling generation likes to blog (the paperless, public diary form). They have seen “An Inconvenient Truth”; they would like to tell you how it makes them feel. If Al Gore is their Rachel Carson, blogalogs like Treehugger, grist.org and worldchanging.com are their Whole Earth catalogs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/garden/22impact.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5090&en=e77725051fe1a853&ex=1332216000&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

The thing about progress is...

that our ability to clean up after ourselves equals our ability to pollute. The stone age in New York City is not an attractive prospect for me.

The Year Without Toilet Paper

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Dim Lights, Big City The Conlin-Beavan family experiment requires that lights be low in their Fifth Avenue apartment.

By PENELOPE GREEN
Published: March 22, 2007
DINNER was the usual affair on Thursday night in Apartment 9F in an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue. There was shredded cabbage with fruit-scrap vinegar; mashed parsnips and yellow carrots with local butter and fresh thyme; a terrific frittata; then homemade yogurt with honey and thyme tea, eaten under the greenish flickering light cast by two beeswax candles and a fluorescent bulb.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Michelle Conlin rides her scooter, even in the snow. “Rain is worse,” she said.
A sour odor hovered oh-so-slightly in the air, the faint tang, not wholly unpleasant, that is the mark of the home composter. Isabella Beavan, age 2, staggered around the neo-Modern furniture — the Eames chairs, the brown velvet couch, the Lucite lamps and the steel cafe table upon which dinner was set — her silhouette greatly amplified by her organic cotton diapers in their enormous boiled-wool, snap-front cover.
A visitor avoided the bathroom because she knew she would find no toilet paper there.
Meanwhile, Joseph, the liveried elevator man who works nights in the building, drove his wood-paneled, 1920s-era vehicle up and down its chute, unconcerned that the couple in 9F had not used his services in four months. “I’ve noticed,” Joseph said later with a shrug and no further comment. (He declined to give his last name. “I’ve got enough problems,” he said.)
Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.
Mr. Beavan, who has written one book about the origins of forensic detective work and another about D-Day, said he was ready for a new subject, hoping to tread more lightly on the planet and maybe be an inspiration to others in the process.
Also, he needed a new book project and the No Impact year was the only one of four possibilities his agent thought would sell. This being 2007, Mr. Beavan is showcasing No Impact in a blog (noimpactman.com) laced with links and testimonials from New Environmentalist authorities like treehugger.com. His agent did indeed secure him a book deal, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and he and his family are being tailed by Laura Gabbert, a documentary filmmaker and Ms. Conlin’s best friend.
Why there may be a public appetite for the Conlin-Beavan family doings has a lot to do with the very personal, very urban face of environmentalism these days. Thoreau left home for the woods to make his point (and secure his own book deal); Mr. Beavan and Ms. Conlin and others like them aren’t budging from their bricks-and-mortar, haut-bourgeois nests.
Mr. Beavan looks to groups like the Compacters (sfcompact.blogspot.com), a collection of nonshoppers that began in San Francisco, and the 100 Mile Diet folks (100milediet.org and thetyee.ca), a Vancouver couple who spent a year eating from within 100 miles of their apartment, for tips and inspiration. But there are hundreds of other light-footed, young abstainers with a diarist urge: it is not news that this shopping-averse, carbon-footprint-reducing, city-dwelling generation likes to blog (the paperless, public diary form). They have seen “An Inconvenient Truth”; they would like to tell you how it makes them feel. If Al Gore is their Rachel Carson, blogalogs like Treehugger, grist.org and worldchanging.com are their Whole Earth catalogs.

Heyzeus effing Crisco

This is totally pathetic. We don't even have a nation anymore.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4654936.html

March 23, 2007, 1:05AM

Illegal immigrants allowed at least five strikesBorder-crossings guidelines revealed amid probe into U.S. attorney firings
By SUSAN CARROLL and MICHAEL HEDGESCopyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Documents released in the controversy about eight fired U.S. attorneys show that federal prosecutors in Texas generally have declined to bring criminal charges against illegal immigrants caught crossing the border — until at least their sixth arrest.
A heavily redacted Department of Justice memo from late 2005 disclosed the prosecution guidelines for immigration offenses, numbers the federal government tries to keep classified. DOJ officials would not say Thursday whether it has adjusted the number since the memo was written, citing "law enforcement reasons."
The prosecution guidelines have been a source of frustration for years among the ranks of U.S. Border Patrol agents, said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council. Smugglers can figure out the criteria by trial and error, he said, and can exploit it to avoid prosecution.
"It's devastating on morale," Bonner said. "Our agents are risking their lives out there, and then they're told, 'Sorry, that doesn't meet the criteria.' "
The memo was written in response to DOJ inquiries at five U.S. attorney offices, including Houston, about immigration prosecutions. The others — San Antonio, San Diego, Phoenix and Albuquerque — cover the 2,000-mile border.
The U.S. Attorney's Office in Houston declined to comment.
In a statement, DOJ spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the agency sent 30 prosecutors to districts along the Southwest border in 2006. The added manpower "will permit districts to adjust their guidelines and take in more cases," according to the statement.
The controversy about the guidelines dates back years, but much of the recent unrest centers on a push by some members of Congress for more aggressive immigration prosecutions, particularly involving smuggling cases.
As part of the inquiry into the firing of the U.S. attorneys, the House Judiciary Committee has posted on its Web site thousands of pages of e-mail, memos, reports and testimony.
The documents offer a glimpse into the overburdened federal court and detention systems, which suffer from a "lack of resources and bed space to detain and prosecute every illegal entry violator," the DOJ memo states.
With Border Patrol agents making about 1 million arrests annually, the DOJ is forced to prioritize the most serious offense and repeated offenders, the memo states. The guidelines vary from district to district, depending on issues such as staffing and the local crime level.
In 2005, the Southern District of Texas was the busiest in the country, and sentenced 6,414 defendants, including 4,313 for immigration-related offenses, according to data from the Sentencing Commission included in another memo. The West District of Texas was second, with 5,839 defendants sentenced in 2005, records show.
In late 2005, the Border Patrol cracked down on crossings through a 200-mile zone near Del Rio and pledged to prosecute and jail each illegal immigrant arrested there before being deported, a sharp deviation from normal practice.
susan.carroll@chron.com; michael.hedges@chron.com

About damn time--this is some feminism I can support.

This is great! How long before she's killed by radical fundementalists who have too much at stake to let women run free, I wonder?

It takes real courage in the Muslim world to even suggest that women might not be beaten for real or imagined offenses against their husband. This isn't really about feminism as we know it now, its about basic human rights and decency.

Woman re-interprets Koran with feminist view
Thu Mar 22, 2007 8:25pm ET

By Manuela Badawy
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A new English-language interpretation of the Muslim Holy book the Koran challenges the use of words that feminists say have been used to justify the abuse of Islamic women.
The new version, translated by an Iranian-American, will be published in April and comes after Muslim feminists from around the world gathered in New York last November and vowed to create the first women's council to interpret the Koran and make the religion more friendly toward women.
In the new book, Dr. Laleh Bakhtiar, a former lecturer on Islam at the University of Chicago, challenges the translation of the Arab word "idrib," traditionally translated as "beat," which feminists say has been used to justify abuse of women.


"Why choose to interpret the word as 'to beat' when it can also mean 'to go away'," she writes in the introduction to the new book.
The passage is generally translated: "And as for those women whose illwill you have reason to fear, admonish them; then leave them alone in bed; then beat them; and if thereupon they pay you heed, do not seek to harm them. Behold, God is indeed most high, great!"
Instead, Bakhtiar suggests "Husbands at that point should submit to God, let God handle it -- go away from them and let God work His Will instead of a human being inflicting pain and suffering on another human being in the Name of God."
Some Muslims said the new interpretation strayed from the original. Omar Abu-Namous, imam at the New York Islamic Cultural Center Mosque, questioned Bakhtiar's interpretation. Continued...

of course Omar Abu-Namous Muhammed Omar Osama Muhammed Shahar Jibjab questions the interpretation. He probably LOVES being able to beat up on his daughters and wife. Otherwise, they might pose a threat to his masculinity and *gasp* shame him! Now THAT'S cause for stoning! Maybe these women might be better off keeping the beatings if the alternative is stoning. Yes, I'm kidding. But its the problem that many Muslim women face. Submit and be punished, or don't submit and be punished more severely.

6th Graders decide Global Warming isn't Caused by Humans

Its good to see a teacher interested in teaching children HOW to learn. In practicing debate, these kids are learning a lot (most schools won't allow debate, because it creates an "adversarial" environment in the classroom.) I like very much that the teacher stayed out of it and let the children come to their own conclusion based on the evidence presented. Now why can't higher education be more like this?

Global warming on trialSixth-graders decide that humans aren’t to blame
By Ben Ready The Daily Times-Call

LONGMONT — Humans don’t cause global warming, a jury of sixth graders at Trail Ridge Middle School concluded Thursday after hearing opposing arguments from their peers.
“They’re pretty young for this kind of thinking. They did great,” paleontology teacher Ken Poppe said after the 40-minute “trial” in his classroom.

http://www.longmontfyi.com/Local-Story.asp?ID=15357

Do human beings have a mind?

Since I last talked with you, we've seen the turn of a new year, and three months of Winter. I've been shaken down by US customs, my fiance killed a monster rat, and we're getting married in May. Then we're going to Slovenia. Now for "issues."

Do human beings have a mind? I've been reading Thomas Szasz's book A Lexicon of Lunacy. He suggests that people do not have a mind as far as science is concerned. At first this frightened me. How can all that we see, experience, feel, and understand be the result of a brain hardly more complex in its structure and function than that of an ape? See, that's the problem with psychology. It presumes to address illness that is not of the brain but of the mind...of course science cannot prove the EXISTENCE of a mind, let alone treat its diseases.

I'm not a big fan of evolution as its generally understood. Its a theory, like others. It has some evidence, like others. I just wonder why its the ONLY accepted topic of discussion in schools when it comes to "how did we get here?" Teachers aren't allowed to even direct interested students to sources of information on Creationism and Intelligent Design.

As a Christian, I have one question for proponents of Intelligent Design. When did we get our souls? Did God watch pond scum turn into proto-humans and say that they were good enough and give them souls? Or did He give proto-humans souls and THEN call them good?

Then I had a very frightening thought. I know its impossible, but if a person with no soul walked up to you on the street, would you be able to tell? I think it would present in the eyes. They're the windows to the soul, but if there was no soul to see...what would they look like? Like a corpse's eyes? If the world is dark outside, the windows are still there, but you can't see through them.