Grad School: It seemed better than getting a real job.

Let’s impeach the president for lying
And leading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door
He’s the man who hired all the criminals
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
And bend the facts to fit with their new stories
Of why we have to send our men to war

Let’s impeach the president for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones
What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees
Would New Orleans have been safer that way
Sheltered by our government’s protection
Or was someone just not home that day?

Let’s impeach the president
For hijacking our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into colors
And still leaving black people neglected
Thank god he’s racking down on steroids
Since he sold his old baseball team
There’s lot of people looking at big trouble
But of course the president is clean

Thank God

George: Condi! Nice to see you. What's happening?

Condi: Sir, I have the report here about the new leader of China.

George: Great. Lay it on me.

Condi: Hu is the new leader of China.

George: That's what I want to know.

Condi: That's what I'm telling you.

George: That's what I'm asking you Who is the new leader of China?

Condi: Yes.

George: I mean the fellow's name.

Condi: Hu.

George: The guy in China.

Condi: Hu.

George: The new leader of China.

Condi: Hu.

George: The main man in China!

Condi: Hu is leading China.

George: Now whaddya' asking me for?

Condi: I'm telling you, Hu is leading China.

George: Well, I'm asking you. Who is leading China?

Condi: That's the man's name.

George: That's who's name?

Condi: Yes.

George: Will you, or will you not, tell me the name of the new leader of China?

Condi: Yes, sir.

George: Yassir? Yassir Arafat is in China? I thought he's dead in the Middle East.

Condi: That's correct.

George: Then who is in China?

Condi: Yes, sir.

George: Yassir is in China?

Condi: No, sir.

George: Then who is?

Condi: Yes, sir.

George: Yassir?

Condi: No, sir.

George: Look Condi. I need to know the name of the new leader of China. Get me the Secretary General of the U.N. on the phone.

Condi: Kofi?

George: No, thanks.

Condi: You want Kofi?

George: No.

Condi: You don't want Kofi.

George: No. But now that you mention it, I could use a glass of milk. And then get me the U.N.

Condi: Yes, sir.

George: Not Yassir! The guy at the U.N.

Condi: Kofi?

George: Milk! Will you please make the call?

Condi: And call who?

George: Who is the guy at the U.N?

Condi: Hu is the guy in China

George: Will you stay out of China?!

Condi: Yes, sir.

George: And stay out of the Middle East! Just get me the guy at the U.N.

Condi: Kofi.

George: All right! With cream and two sugars.

If you're pro-choice, you love abortion.
Abortion is bad for women's health.
Making abortion illegal is the best way to prevent abortions.

If you're pro-choice, you hate children.
Contraception = free license for sexual promiscuity.
Abortions only occur to free-wheeling, sexaholic women (not mothers with children).
Pro-choicers are not good religious people.

When I was preparing to defend my dissertation in 1988, Professor Bormann included in his advice for me the warning that I should accept, even welcome criticism because only mediocre work had no response. [my emphasis]

It's the family-planning movement that reduced poverty by half in America and opened the doors to college, careers and the work force to women. And birth control allowed men and women to marry when they wanted to, not when they had to, Page says.

It's the so-called pro-life movement that opposes things like family medical leave, day-care subsidies and insurance coverage for family planning that allow people to have the families they desire. And it's the movement's opposition to emergency contraception that increases the number of the very-late-term abortions it rails against by setting up an obstacle course of restrictions and outright assaults on birth control.

"Not one pro-life organization in the U.S. supports contraception to reduce abortion," Page told me. "It's the pro-choice movement that's actually working to reduce abortion."

There can be no common ground, the No Room [for Contraception] folks objected, insisting that no "artificial contraception" of any kind can be effective in preventing abortion.

And, just recently when Page was debating Jim Sedlak of the American Life League, she asked him about the sweeping South Dakota abortion ban. His response? It isn't a perfect law. If it were a perfect law, it would ban contraception, too, he said.

Also, Page suggests we ask ourselves why one of the biggest supposedly pro-family groups in the country, Concerned Women for America, doesn't offer maternity leave to its employees. If having and cherishing babies is its foremost agenda, why wouldn't that group?

Mike Seaver: Let me ask you a question -- who do you know who isn't saved? [extra gravitas] Your sister? Your brother? Your mom? Your dad? Your good friend? Your child?

Now, think of their terrible fate if they DIE without Christ!

The Beauty of a Broken Spirit - Atheism: Never again do you need to be intimidated by an atheist. Learn how to prove God's existence and effectively witness to these so-called "intellectuals." (my emphasis)

it has ridges,
it's made with "a non-slip surface,"
the contents "don't squirt in your face,"
it "gracefully sits in the human hand, "
it "has a pointed top for ease of entry,"
it's "just the right shape for the human mouth,"
and "it's even curved toward the face to make the process that much easier."
[these are ACTUAL lines from the video! Ah, sweet irony.]

I love this picture -- maybe it's the juxtapositioning of the rubber ducky in a baptismal font? Then again, I think it's the duck's expression.

As two senators on opposite sides of the abortion debate, we recognize that one side will not suddenly convince the other to drop its deeply held beliefs. And we believe that, while disagreeing, we can work together to find common ground. We believe that it is necessary for all Americans to join together and embrace policies that will reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, decrease abortions and improve access to women's health care.

There is no question that the rate of unintended pregnancy is too high in the United States.

Half of the 6 million pregnancies each year in this country are unintended, and nearly half of these unplanned pregnancies end in abortion. It doesn't have to be this way.

Most of these unintended pregnancies -- and the resulting abortions -- can be prevented if we eliminate the barriers that prevent women from having access to affordable and effective contraception.

[The plan] makes family-planning services more accessible to low-income women. It improves awareness and understanding of emergency contraception, a poorly understood yet highly effective form of contraception.

It ensures that government-funded sex education programs provide medically accurate information about contraception.

It also ends insurance discrimination against women. Right now, many policies cover Viagra, but not prescription contraceptives. That is wrong, and our legislation will change it.

We agree that it makes the most sense to prevent unintended pregnancies in the first place -- and we believe we should also fund programs that support women who choose to carry their pregnancies to term and raise healthy children.

Senator Ted Kennedy: [about the high presence of US troops in Iraq] Right now, the Iraqis are using the troops as a crutch, and we need to decrease our presence.

Stewart: When you break someone's leg, shouldn't you have to be the crutch for awhile?

Place: da Coopers' living room -- 1403 Avenue D North (map)
Time: 7ish. I say "ish" because it's highly doubtful we'll start on time. We'll probably be too busy talking about Family Guy or some other amusing distraction.

About Stalin's shuttered churches, and those in China today: Such suppression of religion was supposedly justified by Karl Marx's statement that "religion is the opium of the people." Marx said that back in 1844, when opium and opium derivatives were the only effective painkillers anyone could take. Marx himself had taken them. He was grateful for the temporary relief they had given him.

He was simply noticing, and surely not condemning, the fact that religion could also be comforting to those in economic and social distress. It was a casual truism, not a dictum. (12)

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

I would also like the comment on the objections to the book that have been made. The remark "offensive to Christians" amazes me — why are some Christians so quick to see themselves in this mirror?

... Two last thoughts. First, I put nothing into my book that human beings have not already done. It's not a pretty picture, but it's our picture, or part of it. Second, if you see a person heading toward a huge hole in the ground, is it not a friendly act to warn him?

Vintage French Picture, originally uploaded by Sherlock77.

I love looking at old pictures, and imagining the stories behind the image. I once bought a used book just because it had old train ticket stubs and postcards stuffed inside it, as bookmarks.

There's a great collection of vintage shots here -- perfect for distracting. (some are just amazing)

One after another, students, labor activists and environmentalists blasted Coke's international human rights record. Many focused on Colombia, where Coke has been accused of conspiring with paramilitary death squads to torture and kill union activists. Others highlighted India, where Coke has allegedly polluted and depleted water supplies. Still others called the company to task for causing obesity through aggressive marketing to children.

In the past two years the Coke campaign has grown into the largest anticorporate movement since the campaign against Nike for sweatshop abuses. Around the world, dozens of unions and more than twenty universities have banned Coke from their facilities, while activists have dogged the company from World Cup events in London to the Winter Olympics in Torino. More than just the re-emergence of the corporate boycott, however, the fight against Coke is a leap forward in international cooperation. Coke, with its red-and-white swoosh recognizable everywhere from Beijing to Baghdad, is perhaps the quintessential symbol of the US-dominated global economy. The fight to hold it accountable has, in turn, broadly connected issues across continents to become a truly globalized grassroots movement.

The subtitle of his book is "A Natural History of Four Meals," which is Pollan's way of describing his exploration of four types of food that eventually terminate in some kind of human meal: food that he himself grew and hunted; organic or "alternative" food (found at farmer's markets); industrial-organic foods (much of the stock at Whole Foods); and industrial, or processed, food (the snack or cereal aisles at Safeway). Through this series of "food detective stories," the author found things to cheer and things to fear about the ethical, biological and ecological ramifications of the American way of eating.

Michael Pollan: To read the newspaper over the last couple of years is to read one story after another that makes you wonder if the way you've been eating all these years is such a good idea -- for yourself or the planet or the animals.

Just reading the coverage of mad cow disease was an incredible educational experience. For example, we read that you've got to stop feeding cows to cows. It's like, "What? We've been feeding cows to cows?" And we've got to tighten up those rules about feeding chicken litter to cows. "We've been feeding chicken crap to cows?"

Pollan: [Advertisers are] creating in your minds an image of a farm very much like the ones in the books you read as children -- with a diversity of happy animals wandering around the farmyard. It's very cleverly designed, but unfortunately like a lot of pastoral forms of art, it's based on illusions. Not entirely, but if you go to the farm depicted on those labels, you find that in fact, things look a little bit different. Organic milk might be coming from a dry organic feedlot where 500 cows are milling around and never get to eat a blade of grass. I have a feeling that's not what the consumer thinks they're getting.

... Free-range chickens -- I did go visit a large organic chicken producer here in California, and if you look at their label, there's a farmstead with a little silo and a farm house and a farmyard and chickens running around, but if you go to the farm, the chickens are grown in these huge barracks as long as a football field. They're indoors, there are 20,000 of them in a house, and running along this barrack is what looks like a little front lawn -- mowed, maybe 15 or 20 feet deep.

There's a little door at either side of the barrack where, theoretically, chickens could step outside and take the air. But they don't. One reason is that the doors are closed until the chickens are about five weeks old. The farmers -- if you can use that word, the managers -- are concerned that the chickens might catch their death of cold or pick up a germ, so they don't open the doors until the chickens are five weeks old.

You have to get out of the supermarket, basically. The supermarket is not going to support this world in the long run, I don't think. But the supermarket is not the only place to buy your food. There are very many good alternatives -- the farmers' market being the most obvious. But also CSAs -- which stands for community-supported agriculture -- where you essentially join a farm and every week you get a box of produce. People are buying really good grass-fed meat over the Internet.

...

But all of us are going to take this to different degrees. I don't think it's all or nothing. I still go to the Safeway. I still stop at Whole Foods every now and then. And many people don't have the time or inclination to put any more work into it, and so maybe Whole Foods is fine, and maybe they've got a lot of money, because Whole Foods is really expensive. And that helps. The kind of farming that Whole Foods supports is better than conventional farming.

All I'm suggesting is that you can take it to the next step if you want. And the next step is incredibly rewarding, because the quality of the food is so high, and the kind of stewardship going on is very impressive.

But like I said, it's not all or nothing. We have three food votes every day -- that's more votes than we have in most other aspects of our lives. And if you used one of them in a way that supported a change -- an alternative food chain, that's a big accomplishment. That's enough to create these alternatives and make them more accessible and probably cheaper as well, as more people use them. You can go whole hog or just dip your toes in, but either way, I think it's a very important food vote you have.

• The Eat Well Guide -- a website where you can enter your zip/postal code, and find local farms for produce and meats. I typed in my postal code and got 6 results -- 3 farmers for meat and dairy, and 3 stores to buy these products. Pretty cool.

• CHEP: Child Hunger and Education Program of Saskatoon, makers of the Good Food Box -- this is a program I've heard long about, but never participated in. This program allows you to buy boxes of various locally grown fruits and vegetables for reduced prices. According to their latest newsletter, you can also start buying organically grown, grass fed beef. I really need to start participating in this community activity.

Everybody has thoughts (T) and feelings (F) but some pay more attention to their thoughts than to their feelings while others pay more attention to their feelings than to their thoughts. Those who attend mainly to their thoughts are said to govern themselves with their head, their concepts and percepts being their guides to action. In contrast, those who pay more attention to their feelings are said to follow their heart, which means that much of what they do is based on emotion or desire.

If we use a distinction made by the great pragmatist William James, some people are more "tough-minded" and others more "tender-minded." But if we note the words Myers used in her type portraits, we see that her distinction is between those who can be called "tough-minded" and those who can be called "friendly."

John Eudes pointed out my difficulties with "nuanced responses." The problem, he said, is not that your feelings are totally illegitmate. In fact, you might have a good reason to feel rejected. But the problem is that your response has no proportion to the nature of the event. In fact, the people you felt rejected by really don't mean that much to you. But little rejections like these open up a huge chasm, and you plunge right into it all the way to the bottom.

You feel totally rejected, unloved, left alone, and something like a "blind rage" starts developing th