Warm Southern Breeze

Psychiatric Madmen? New manual makes everyone mentally sick.

Warm Southern Breeze — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:59:18 +0000

Perhaps an alternate title for this would be “We’re in it for the money.”

See also another related entry entitled “Mental Health Profession has Mental Health problems.”
—

“We’re all mad here”

Medication misuse is out of control in the US and more psychiatric labelling in DSM-5 will not help.

by Allen Frances | Tuesday, 21 May 2013

That’s the message of the new edition of the bible for American psychiatrists, DSM-5. Diagnostic inflation is about to become hyperinflation.

“We are all mad here” explains the Cat to Alice when she wonders about the strangeness of Wonderland. Well, life is starting to follow art. If people make the mistake of following DSM-5, the new diagnostic manual in psychiatry that was published on Saturday, pretty soon all of us may be labelled mad.

When I worked on the taskforce for DSM-4, we were very concerned about taming diagnostic inflation – but we only partly succeeded. Then four years ago, I became aware of the excessive enthusiasm around all the new diagnoses being proposed for DSM-5, including many that were untested. I hate to rain on anyone’s parade, but I knew this would be disastrous for the millions of people who were likely to be mislabelled, stigmatised and given excessive treatment.

In the US, the “sick” are distinguished from the “well” by the diagnostic and statistical manuals developed by the American Psychiatric Association.

The problem is that definitions of mental disorders are already written too loosely and are applied much too carelessly by clinicians, especially by the GPs who do most of the prescribing of psychiatric drugs.

And things are about to get much worse. Under DSM-5 diagnostic inflation looks set to become hyperinflation and will lead to an even greater glut of unnecessary medication. I would qualify for a bunch of the new labels myself – and you might too.

The grief I felt when my wife died would now be called “major depressive disorder”; forgetfulness in older age “mild neurocognitive disorder”; my gluttony now “binge eating disorder”; and my hyperactivity “attention deficit disorder”. As for my twin grandsons’ temper tantrums, this could be misunderstood as “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder”. And if you have cancer and your doctor thinks you are too worried about it, there’s “somatic symptom disorder.” It goes on, but you get the idea.

About half of Americans already qualify for a mental disorder at some point in their lives and the rates keep skyrocketing, especially among kids. In the past 20 years, the prevalence of autism has increased, childhood bipolar has multiplied 40-fold and attention deficit disorder has tripled.

One consolation: the kids are not suddenly getting much sicker – human nature is pretty stable. But the way we label symptoms follows fickle fashions, changing quickly and arbitrarily. And freely giving out inaccurate diagnoses can lead to grave harms – medication that isn’t needed, stigma, lower self confidence and reduced self expectation.

There are also downstream effects. Many parents were panicked about the alarming rise in rates of autism and fell for the disproven belief that it was caused by vaccination. Trying to avoid a false epidemic of autism caused by nothing more than changed labelling meant they stopped vaccinating their kids and exposed them to the very real measles outbreak that recently occurred.

And medication use is out of control – 20% of Americans regularly use a psychotropic drug; 10% of teenage boys are taking a stimulant for ADHD; 25% of our active duty troops report abuse of a prescribed med; and the US has more deaths from prescription drug overdoses than from street drugs.

In the UK you are protected against the worst effects of diagnostic and drug exuberance. Doctors use ICD-10, the classifications compiled by the World Health Organisation, not DSM-5; they follow prudent guidelines from Nice, which sets the standards for health treatment in the UK; the British-based Cochrane group emphasises evidence-based medicine; GPs do less prescribing; and drug companies exert much less power and cannot advertise directly to consumers as they do in the US.

But the measles outbreak and ADHD rates prove the UK is not out of the woods. Bad ideas from America sometimes have much more influence than they deserve.

My advice is to be an informed consumer. Never accept a diagnosis or a medication after a cursory evaluation. A psychiatric diagnosis can be a turning point in your life – as important as choosing a spouse or a house. Done well, it can lead to life-improving treatment; done poorly it can lead to an inaccurate label and a harmful treatment.

People who have mild and transient symptoms don’t need a diagnosis or treatment. The likelihood is they are visiting the doctor on one of their worst days and will get better on their own. Medication is essential for severe psychiatric problems but does more harm than good for the worries and disappointments of everyday life. Better to trust time, resilience, support and stress reduction.

Allen Frances is the former chair of the task force that developed DSM-4. He has two published books critical of DSM-5: Saving Normal and Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis. This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article published 20 May 2013, 9.11am EST as
“Under new psychiatric guidebook we might all be labelled mad”.

www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/were_all_mad

Filed under: - Do you feel like we do, Dr. Who?, - Lost In Space: TOTALLY Discombobulated, - Read 'em and weep: The Daily News Tagged: Allen Frances, American Psychiatric Association, APA, conversation, diagnoses, Diagnosis, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DO, doctor, DSM, DSM-5, DSM5, health, inflation, label, MD, medicine, mental, Mental disorder, mental health, Mercator, money, pharma, physician, problems, psych, psychiatry, psycho, sick, sickly, sicko, unhealthy, United States, USA, weird

Mental Health Profession has Mental Health problems

Warm Southern Breeze — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:55:41 +0000

“How hard is it to criticize an organization that seriously thinks that it’s okay to call “Internet Use Disorder” a mental illness? They’re going to take shot after shot. And the response will be ineffectual and weak. They’ll bob and weave, talk about the “living document,” and unleash their line of bullshit.”

For more than two years, author and psychotherapist Gary Greenberg has embedded himself in the war that broke out over the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the DSM—the American Psychiatric Association’s compendium of mental illnesses and what Greenberg calls “the book of woe.”

Since its debut in 1952, the book has been frequently revised, and with each revision, the “official” view on which psychological problems constitute mental illness. Homosexuality, for instance, was a mental illness until 1973, and Asperger’s gained recognition in 1994 only to see its status challenged nearly twenty years later. Each revision has created controversy, but the DSM-5, the newest iteration, has shaken psychiatry to its foundations. The APA has taken fire from patients, mental health practitioners, and former members for extending the reach of psychiatry into daily life by encouraging doctors to diagnose more illnesses and prescribe more therapies—often medications whose efficacy is unknown and whose side effects are severe. Critics—including Greenberg—argue that the APA should not have the naming rights to psychological pain or to the hundreds of millions of dollars the organization earns, especially when even the DSM’s staunchest defenders acknowledge that the disorders listed in the book are not real illnesses.

Greenberg’s account of the history behind the DSM, which has grown from pamphlet-sized to encyclopedic since it was first published, and his behind-the-scenes reporting of the deeply flawed process by which the DSM-5 has been revised, is both riveting and disturbing. Anyone who has received a diagnosis of mental disorder, filed a claim with an insurer, or just wondered whether daily troubles qualify as true illness should know how the DSM turns suffering into a commodity, and the APA into its own biggest beneficiary. Invaluable and informative, The Book of Woe is bound to spark intense debate among expert and casual readers alike.

http://j.mp/12vPoHk

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/the-real-problems-with-psychiatry/275371/

The Real Problems With Psychiatry

A psychotherapist contends that the DSM, psychiatry’s “bible” that defines all mental illness, is not scientific but a product of unscrupulous politics and bureaucracy.

Hope Reese May 2 2013, 9:08 AM ET

On May 22, the American Psychiatric Association will release the fifth Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5. It classifies psychiatric diagnoses and the criteria required to meet them. Gary Greenberg, one of the book’s biggest critics, claims these disorders aren’t real — they’re invented. Author of Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease and contributor to The New Yorker, Mother Jones, The New York Times and other publications, Greenberg is a practicing psychotherapist. The Book of Woe: The Making of the DSM-5 and the Unmaking of Psychiatry is his exposé of the business behind the creation of the new manual.

Can you talk about how the first DSM, published in 1952, was conceived?

One of the reasons was to count people. The first collections of diagnoses were called the “statistical manual,” not the “diagnostic and statistical manual.” There were also parochial reasons. As the rest of medicine became oriented toward diagnosing illnesses by seeking their causes in biochemistry, in the late 19th, early 20th century, the claim to authority of any medical specialty hinged on its ability to diagnose suffering. To say “okay, your sore throat and fever are strep throat.” But psychiatry was unable to do that and was in danger of being discredited. As early as 1886, prominent psychiatrists worried that they would be left behind, or written out of the medical kingdom. For reasons not entirely clear, the government turned to the American Medico-Psychological Association, (later the American Psychiatric Association, or APA), to tell them how many mentally ill people were out there. The APA used it as an opportunity to establish its credibility.

How has the DSM evolved to become seen as the “authoritative medical guide to all of mental suffering”?

The credibility of psychiatry is tied to its nosology. What developed over time is the number of diagnoses, and, more importantly, the method by which diagnostic categories are established.

You’re a practicing psychotherapist. Can you define “mental illness”?

No. Nobody can.

The DSM lists “disorders.” How are disorders different from diseases or illnesses?

The difference between disease and disorder is an attempt on the part of psychiatry to evade the problem they’re presented with. Disease is a kind of suffering that’s caused by a bio-chemical pathology. Something that can be discovered and targeted with magic bullets. But in many cases our suffering can’t be diagnosed that way. Psychiatry was in a crisis in the 1970s over questions like “what is a mental illness?” and “what mental illnesses exist?” One of the first things they did was try to finesse the problem that no mental illness met that definition of a disease. They had yet to identify what the pathogen was, what the disease process consisted of, and how to cure it. So they created a category called “disorder.” It’s a rhetorical device. It’s saying “it’s sort of like a disease,” but not calling it a disease because all the other doctors will jump down their throats asking, “where’s your blood test?” The reason there haven’t been any sensible findings tying genetics or any kind of molecular biology to DSM categories is not only that our instruments are crude, but also that the DSM categories aren’t real. It’s like using a map of the moon to find your way around Russia.

So would you say that these terms — disorder, disease, illness — are just different names for the same concept?

I would. Psychiatrists wouldn’t. Well, psychiatrists would say it sometimes but wouldn’t say it other times. They will say it when it comes to claiming that they belong squarely in the field of medicine. But if you press them and ask if these disorders exist in the same way that cancer and diabetes exist, they’ll say no. It’s not that there are no biological correlates to any mental suffering — of course there are. But the specificity and sensitivity that we require to distinguish pneumonia from lung cancer, even that kind of distinction, it just doesn’t exist.

What are the most common misconceptions about the scientific nature of diseases such as depression?

I guarantee you that in the course of our conversation a doctor is telling a patient, “you have a chemical imbalance — that’s why you’re depressed. Take Prozac.” Despite the fact that every doctor who knows anything knows that there is no biochemical imbalance that causes depression, and most doctors understand that a diagnosis of depression doesn’t really tell you anything other than what you already knew, that doesn’t stop them from saying it.

Research on the brain is still in its infancy. Do you think we will ever know enough about the brain to prove that certain psychiatric diagnoses have a direct biological cause?

I’d be willing to bet everything that whenever it happens, whatever we find out about the brain and mental suffering is not going to map, at all, onto the DSM categories. Let’s say we can elucidate the entire structure of a given kind of mental suffering. We’re not going to be able to say, “here’s Major Depressive Disorder, and here’s what it looks like in the brain.” If there’s any success, it will involve a whole remapping of the terrain of mental disorders. And psychiatry may very likely take very small findings and trump them up into something they aren’t. But the most honest outcome would be to go back to the old days and just look at symptoms. They might get good at elucidating the circuitry of fear or anxiety or these kinds of things.

What is the difference between a disorder and distress that is a normal occurrence in our lives?

That distinction is made by a clinician, whether it’s a family doctor or a psychiatrist or whoever. But nobody knows exactly how to make that determination. There are no established thresholds. Even if you could imagine how that would work, it would have to be a subjective analysis of the extent to which the person’s functioning is impaired. How are you going to measure that? Doctors are supposed to measure “clinical significance.” What’s that? For many people, the fact that someone shows up in their office is clinical significance. I’m not going to say that’s wrong, but it’s not scientific. And there’s a conflict of interest — if I don’t determine clinical significance, I don’t get paid.

You say one of the issues with taking these categories too seriously is that it eliminates the moral aspect behind certain behaviors.

It’s our characteristic way of chalking up what we think is “evil” to what we think of as mental disease. Our gut reaction is always “that was really sick. Those guys in Boston — they were really sick.” But how do we know? Unless you decide in advance that anybody who does anything heinous is sick. This society is very wary of using the term “evil.” But I firmly believe there is such a thing as evil. It’s circular — thinking that anybody who commits suicide is depressed; anybody who goes into a school with a loaded gun and shoots people must have a mental illness. There’s a certain kind of comfort in that, but there’s no indication for it, particularly because we don’t know what mental illness is.

How do diagnoses affect people?

One of the overlooked ways is that diagnoses can change people’s lives for the better. Asperger’s Syndrome is probably the most successful psychiatric disorder ever in this respect. It created a community. It gave people whose primary symptom was isolation a way to belong and provided resources to those who were diagnosed. It can also have bad effects. A depression diagnosis gives people an identity formed around having a disease that we know doesn’t exist, and how that can divert resources from where they might be needed. Imagine how much less depression there would be if people weren’t worried about tuition, health care, and retirement. Those are all things that aren’t provided by Prozac.

What are the dangers of over-diagnosing a population? Are false positives worse than false negatives?

I believe that false positives, people who are diagnosed because there’s a diagnosis for them and they show up in a doctor’s office, is a much bigger problem. It changes people’s identities, it encourages the use of drugs whose side effects and long-term effects are unknown, and main effects are poorly understood.

In 1850, doctor Samuel Cartwright invented “drapetomania” — a disease causing slaves to run away. How do social and historical context affect our understanding of mental illness?

Cartwright was a slaveholder’s doctor from New Orleans — he believed in the inferiority of what he called the “African races.” He believed that abolitionism was based on a misguided notion that black people and white people were essentially equal. He thought that the desire for freedom in a black person was pathological because black people were born to be enslaved. To aspire to freedom was a betrayal of their nature, a disease. He invented “drapetomania,” the impulse to run away from slavery. Assuming there wasn’t horrible cruelty being inflicted on the slaves, they were “sick.” He came up with a few diagnostic criteria and presented it to his colleagues.

So we corrected our notion of what counts as a “disease.” Is there a modern equivalent?

Homosexuality is the most obvious example. Until 1973, it was listed as a disease. It’s very easy to see what’s wrong with “drapetomania,” but it’s easier to see the balancing act involved in saying homosexuality is or isn’t a disease — how something has to shift in society. The people who called homosexuality a disease weren’t necessarily bigots or homophobes — they were just trying to understand people who wanted to love people of their own sex. Disease is a way to understand difference that includes compassion. What has to shift is the idea that same-sex love is acceptable. Once that idea is there, it doesn’t make sense to call homosexuality a disease.

Who was involved in the creation of the DSM-5?

The American Psychiatric Association owns the DSM. They aren’t only responsible for it: they own it, sell it, and license it. The DSM is created by a group of committees. It’s a bureaucratic process. In place of scientific findings, the DSM uses expert consensus to determine what mental disorders exist and how you can recognize them. Disorders come into the book the same way a law becomes part of the book of statutes. People suggest it, discuss it, and vote on it. Homosexuality was deleted from the DSM by a referendum. A straight up vote: yes or no. It’s not always that explicit, and the votes are not public. In the case of the DSM-5, committee members were forbidden to talk about it, so we’ll never really know what the deliberations were. They all signed non-disclosure agreements.

What are the important changes made in the new DSM, and how will they affect patients?

It’s going to cause a lot of trouble when Asperger’s Syndrome disappears. It may cause some trouble when the bereavement exclusion disappears. That’s a good example of why the APA’s going to be in trouble. It was so unnecessary, so stupid. They’ve made the absurd statement that they know the difference, two weeks after someone’s wife dies, whether that person is “depressed,” or just “in mourning.” Come on! Who are these guys?

The APA released a series of drafts of the DSM-5 before publication. Why?

They solicited public input, to their great credit. But they never said what they were doing with it. They said “we got this number of responses” but not what the responses were. How they influenced the process, if at all. The other problem with the drafts is that they deleted them. The history of how these things developed will be difficult to trace unless you happened to make copies of the website, which was in explicit violation of the APA’s copyright. They also tried to prevent people from using the draft criteria in any kind of academic paper — an unprecedented move. They demanded that anybody who wanted to use the criteria would have to seek and obtain their permission for academic publication. Nobody’s ever done that. There were a couple of high profile, embarrassing studies that were conducted with the draft criteria, and once that happened, the APA asserted copyright over the draft criteria.

The APA considers the DSM-5 a “living document.” What do you think they mean by this?

It’s one of those rhetorical flourishes that, if you dig into it, you realize is a real problem. There’s a difference between a constitution and a book of medical diagnoses. It’s not entirely clear what they mean by “living document,” but it appears that they want to update as evidence comes in. That’s not a bad idea — they don’t want to go through one of these massive, expensive, embarrassing overhauls of the diagnostic manual every five or ten or fifteen years, they want to update as they go. But in the meantime, people are getting diagnosed, drugs are getting developed and prescribed, research is being done, and nobody knows to what extent things will get revised as time goes on. The APA is trying to say it’s always in flux. But if that’s the case, why should we let it have so much power?

Can you talk about that? What does the DSM has power over?

To get an indication from the FDA, a drug company has to tie its drug to a DSM disorder. You can’t just develop a drug for anxiety. You have to develop the drug for Generalized Anxiety Disorder or Major Depressive Disorder. You can’t just ask for special services for a student who is awkward. You have to get special services for a student with autism. In court, mental illnesses come from the DSM. If you want insurance to pay for your therapy, you have to be diagnosed with a mental illness. Whatever future contact you have with the health care system will be affected by the fact that a mental illness is in your dossier. If you call it a living document, what happens to all the people who are diagnosed with Asperger’s when that’s thrown out? Will it be chaotic? Maybe.

Al Frances chaired the task force for the DSM-IV and has become one of the biggest critics of the DSM-5. What do you think of his arguments?

We agree that the DSM does not capture real illnesses, that it’s a set of constructs. We disagree over what that means. He believes that that doesn’t matter to the overall enterprise of psychiatry and its authority to diagnose and treat our mental illnesses. I believe it constitutes a flaw at the foundation of psychiatry. If they don’t have real diseases, they don’t belong in real medicine. Al’s attack is overdone. I think he’s really trying to keep scrutiny off of the whole DSM enterprise. That’s why he’s been so adamant that you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater — he believes that the DSM-IV, for all of its flaws, its still worthwhile. I disagree.

Frances also worries that your criticisms are anti-psychiatry.

It’s the universal paranoia of psychiatry that everybody who disagrees with them is pathological. You can’t disagree with a psychiatrist without getting a diagnosis. I’ve been writing critically about psychiatry for ten years and I’ve always encountered that. Psychiatry is a defensive profession. They have a lot to protect and they know their weakness. To repel criticism in the strongest way possible, from their point of view, you diagnose the critic.

Can you talk about the intersection between psychiatry and psychology? How does the DSM relate to both fields?

Psychiatry’s in charge of the DSM. Psychologists and other mental health professionals use the DSM. But psychiatrists have the power and money. I’m critical of the mental health professions in general, including my own practice. But the APA has appropriated this business to themselves. They guard it jealousy, they protect it with ruthless tactics, and yes, they take a disproportionate amount of the heat for this thing, but it’s their baby. They make hundreds of millions of dollars off of this deal.

Violence and Mental Illness in Middletown, Connecticut

Will the APA lose credibility?

Of course it will. The DSM-5 will come out on May 22 and people will take their pot shots at it — like shooting fish in a barrel. I had to be convinced to write this book, though. How hard is it to criticize an organization that seriously thinks that it’s okay to call “Internet Use Disorder” a mental illness? They’re going to take shot after shot. And the response will be ineffectual and weak. They’ll bob and weave, talk about the “living document,” and unleash their line of bullshit.

Is there a solution?

The solution is to take the thing away from them. The APA owns these diagnoses. I didn’t ask permission because I don’t care — let them sue me. But if anyone wants to put diagnostic criteria into this book, they have to pay the APA. That’s absurd. And if you add the vacuousness of the document and the incompetence with which the revision was carried out — take the damn thing away from them.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/the-real-problems-with-psychiatry/275371/

Filed under: - Business... None of yours, - Do you feel like we do, Dr. Who?, - Read 'em and weep: The Daily News

Adolphus Busch IV Resigns From NRA

Warm Southern Breeze — Tue, 21 May 2013 02:13:36 +0000

“It disturbs me greatly to see this rigid new direction of the NRA.
As a starting point, one only has to ask why
the NRA reversed its original position on background checks.
Was it not the NRA position to support background checks when
Mr. LaPierre himself stated in 1999 that NRA saw checks as “reasonable”?”

-Adolphus A. Busch, IV – heir to the Busch family brewing fortune

Adolphus Busch IV Resigns From NRA

http://fox2now.com/2013/04/18/adolphus-busch-resigns-from-nra/

Filed under: - Did they REALLY say that?, - Read 'em and weep: The Daily News Tagged: Adolphus Busch, Background check, firearms, GOP, guns, idiot, killers, LaPierre, legislation, Magazine (firearms), National Rifle Association, NRA, nutjobs, Original position, Second Amendment, Wayne LaPierre, whacko

Roll Tide! Alabama Man is FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist

Warm Southern Breeze — Tue, 21 May 2013 01:28:10 +0000

Roll Tide!

Alabama man makes FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List.

Omar Shafik Hammami, an American-born U.S. citizen, is Southern Baptist, from Daphne, AL, and aligned with the Somali Islamist militant group al-Shabaab.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/14/us/most-wanted-terrorists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Mansoor_Al-Amriki

4.1

Filed under: - Uncategorized Tagged: Alabama, assatashakur, Citizenship in the United States, FBI, FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Most Wanted Terrorist List, Nicaragua, Roll Tide, United States

Alabama Legislature OK’d tax money for private schools. Now Governor Bentley backpedals.

Warm Southern Breeze — Tue, 21 May 2013 01:09:53 +0000

The Texas State Legislature doesn’t think public tax dollar$ should go to private schools.

But Alabama’s State Legislature just OK’d & Governor Bentley signed the Alabama Accountability Act of 2013 (HB 84), aka the School Flexibility Bill, aka the Private School Voucher Act.

http://educationblog.dallasnews.com/2013/04/house-votes-to-bar-state-funding-for-private-school-vouchers.html/

Filed under: - Lost In Space: TOTALLY Discombobulated, - Politics... that "dirty" little "game" that first begins in the home., - Read 'em and weep: The Daily News, - Transfer: How do we get THERE from HERE? (Add a 'T'.) Tagged: Alabama, Alabama Legislature, Associated Press, Bentley, children, education, government, HB 84, law, legislature, money, Montgomery Alabama, people, poor, poverty, Private school, rich, Robert Bentley, Robert J. Bentley, sick, state, Tax credit, taxes, Texas, Texas Legislature, TX, wealthy

Flickr revamped w 1TB of FREE storage!

Warm Southern Breeze — Mon, 20 May 2013 21:38:20 +0000

Flickr gets revamp — with 1 TB of storage space free — and Yahoo gets new NYC office

By Laura Hazard Owen

20 May 2013

Summary:More news from Yahoo on Monday: The company is revamping photo-sharing service Flickr and is also opening a New York office.

Yahoo’s already had a busy Monday, what with that little $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition, but the company had a few more announcements to make at a press conference Monday afternoon in New York. It’s revamping its photo-sharing service Flickr , which has largely been left to languish since Yahoo acquired it in 2005. “We want to make Flickr awesome again,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said.

Flickr is getting three big updates. All users will get 1 terabyte of photo storage for free. The photo service’s interface is also being redesigned to focus on full-resolution photos, rather than words and links. And, in addition to the iOS app Flickr launched last December, there will now be an Android app.

The location of the press conference — a hotel in Times Square — became clear as Mayer announced that Yahoo has taken out a lease for office space at 229 West 43rd Street — the old New York Times building — and will be moving all 500 of its New York-based employees there.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg took the stage to say the move reflects “what a big player New York has become in the tech industry,” with Yahoo becoming “one of the largest tech presences in the city.” He noted that Tumblr is a “New York-grown company” and that NYC was the first city government to have its own Tumblr.

“Twenty years ago, if you looked out the window, there were plenty of yahoos in Times Square,” he said. “Now the Yahoos here will make an honest living … and help us grow and make our economy stronger.”

—

http://gigaom.com/2013/05/20/flickr-gets-revamp-with-1-tb-of-storage-space-free-and-yahoo-gets-new-nyc-office/

Filed under: - Even MORE Uncategorized! Tagged: Flickr, Marissa Mayer, Michael Bloomberg, New York, New York City, Times Square, Tumblr, Yahoo

Criticizing the President: This one’s on Obama

Warm Southern Breeze — Mon, 20 May 2013 19:35:22 +0000

This OpEd is probably some of the best, and most genuinely warranted criticism of President Obama which I’ve yet read.

As late former president Theodore Roosevelt wrote:
“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.* Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.”

-Theodore Roosevelt’s OpEd Column entitled “Sedition, A Free Press and Personal Rule” published May 7, 1918 in the Kansas City Star

*Roosevelt’s sharp criticism of President Wilson‘s leadership during World War I led the Post Office to warn that the Star that such views might cost the paper its second-class mailing privileges.

—

Obama A Big Hypocrite? Ask Legal Schnauzer, Roger Shuler

By Joan Brunwasser (about the author) Permalink
Life Arts 5/18/2013 at 22:24:54

My guest today is Legal Schnauzer, Roger Shuler. Welcome back to OpEdNews, Roger.

JB: Your recent piece The President Paints Himself Into An Ethical Corner By Voicing Outrage Over Evolving Scandal At The IRS is pretty scathing. What’s got you so upset?

RS: In early January 2009, just a few days before he took office, President-Elect Obama said he intended to “look forward, as opposed to looking backwards” on apparent crimes under the Bush administration. As president, Obama seems to have followed through on that pledge because his Justice Department has failed to review political prosecutions such as the one involving former Governor Don Siegelman in Alabama, where I live.

Political prosecutions, of course, were just of one of many improper acts on the justice front during the Bush years–torture, warrantless wiretapping, firings of U.S. attorneys were among the others. In essence, Obama issued a decree that no one would be held accountable for those acts.

Obama’s “look forward” statement made no sense at the time, and it makes even less sense now, coming after he expressed outrage the other day over disclosures about the IRS targeting conservative groups for political reasons. Obama said in a news conference that he would not “tolerate” such actions, that wrongdoers must be held “accountable,” and the problem must be “fixed.”

But his inaction toward the DOJ shows that he will tolerate the targeting of political opponents, that he will not hold individuals accountable for such actions, and he will not take steps to fix the problem. Obama was uttering empty words at his press conference about the IRS. Many of us expect that from a Republican chief executive; we should demand better from a Democrat.

JB: For readers unfamiliar with the Siegelman case, Roger, can you give us a brief overview of what happened and why anyone outside of Alabama should care? It didn’t happen under Obama’s watch so how can he be blamed?

RS: Don Siegelman was a Democratic governor in a deep-red state, a state where Karl Rove has a strong power base. Siegelman accepted a campaign donation from a businessman named Richard Scrushy, and then appointed Scrushy to a health-care regulatory board–a board on which Scrushy had served under three previous governors.

The standard for a bribery conviction in the campaign-donation context is that the prosecution must prove an “explicit agreement” in a something-for-something deal (known in legalese as a “quid pro quo.”) No evidence at trial pointed to such an unlawful deal, and the federal judge presiding over the case (a George W. Bush appointee named Mark Fuller) gave incorrect jury instructions that did not include the “explicit agreement” requirement. He allowed the jury to infer that such a deal took place, and that is contrary to established law under U.S. Supreme Court precedent in a case styled McCormick v. U.S.

Largely because of the bogus jury instructions, Siegelman and Scrushy were convicted of a “crime” that does not even exist under the law. Also, the bribery charges were brought almost one full year after the five-year statute of limitations had expired. So even if Siegelman and Scrushy had committed gross acts of bribery–which they did not–the case, by law, could not even lawfully go to a jury. When you add apparent misconduct involving the judge, prosecutors, and jurors . . . well, you can see why many of us call the Siegelman case the most notorious political prosecution in American history.

Obama deserves blame for several reasons: (1) His solicitor general (current SCOTUS Justice Elena Kagan) argued against Supreme Court review in the Siegelman case; (2) Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, has done little or nothing to investigate abuses under the Bush DOJ, which include dozens of cases like Siegelman’s, where Democrats were targeted on weak or nonexistent evidence; (3) The president has almost absolute power to issue pardons, and he has done nothing so far in the Siegelman case. The former governor has been in a federal prison at Oakdale, LA, since last Sept. 11.

Don Siegelman by Constantine Report

JB: The president isn’t expected to be on top of every case, is he? Has anyone taken up Siegelman’s cause?

RS: I don’t think anyone expects the president personally to be involved in such matters. But his justice department certainly has the duty to ensure that our courts operate under the law, that we don’t deprive innocent people of liberty–and that was the No. 1 concern U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) voiced in his questioning Wednesday of Eric Holder.

Many people have taken up the Siegelman cause, in one form or another. More than 100 former state attorneys general have stated that the case was a grave injustice. Dana Siegelman, the former governor’s daughter, is the driving force behind a Web site (free-don.org) that is pressing for a presidential pardon.

Richard Scrushy has completed a six-year term in prison, and he has spoken out in two recent interviews. Also, Scrushy has a pending appeal before the U.S. Eleventh Circuit, and Siegelman has a motion for a new trial that has been sitting before trial judge Mark Fuller for months, with no action. Finally, a number of journalists–Scott Horton, Andrew Kreig, you and I, plus several others–have kept the issue before the public. A lot is going on, across many fronts.

JB: This has all been going on for a very long time, Roger. The case has set a terrible precedent from any point of view. How does it put us all at risk? And any sign that progress is being made?

RS: It puts any politician who accepts campaign contributions at risk, especially if he later appoints a donor to any position–board member, ambassador, etc. The Siegelman ruling allows a jury to “infer” that an illegal quid pro quo was involved, and that should be frightening for all Americans. It also puts any campaign donor at risk; in fact, Richard Scrushy spent almost six years in federal prison because he contributed to a Siegelman campaign an accepted appointment to a board he already had served on for years–and Scrushy has stated publicly that he didn’t even want to serve on the board anymore; he was tired of attending the meetings.

In a broader sense, it puts all Americans at risk if they ever go into court for any reason–a divorce, a car accident, an estate matter, you name it. The big lesson from the Siegelman case is this: Our courts cannot be trusted to apply the law correctly and equally to all citizens. Our 14th Amendment rights to due process (a disinterested tribunal, etc.) and equal protection mean nothing.

And most chilling of all, if a trial court screws up your case, you cannot have any faith that appellate courts will get it right. Because of the 11th Circuit’s ruling on Siegelman, we now have bad law here in our circuit (Florida, Georgia, Alabama) that clearly conflicts with U.S. Supreme Court precedent in McCormick. One of the fundamental roles of our appellate system is to ensure that kind of thing does not happen. That’s why SCOTUS was profoundly wrong to deny review on the Siegelman case. It caused bad case law to remain on the books.

I don’t believe progress will be made until the Obama DOJ grows a spine and initiates an investigation of the Siegelman case and other Bush-era political prosecutions. Pardoning Don Siegelman would be a positive step. But we cannot allow such manipulation of our justice apparatus to remain unaddressed. If Obama leaves office with these issues still hanging, he has been a failure, in my view.

Also, this could wind up at Obama’s doorstep someday. He has appointed any number of large donors to ambassadorships and such. Once he’s out of office, a Republican DOJ could claim that appointments involved “inferred quid pro quos,” and Obama and those donors could be at huge risk. The president ignores this issue at his own peril.

More importantly, it imperils the Democrat Party. Are candidates and donors going to get involved if they know they might wind up in federal prison for engaging in standard political behavior? The Siegelman case already has had a chilling effect here in Alabama. Many statewide offices no longer attract a serious Democratic candidate. If political prosecutions are allowed to stand, look for that trend to spread to other states.

JB: Why aren’t the Super PACs concerned about this? With Citizens United, they can now make unlimited infusions of cash into our political system. Since most of the Super PACs are fueled by Republican millionaires and billionaires, shouldn’t Republicans be concerned here? Couldn’t their big donors [aka Super PAC sponsors] also get swept up in this? t’s a non-partisan, all-purpose concern, isn’t it?

RS: Yes, it should be a bipartisan concern. And many of the 100-plus former state attorneys general who have spoken up against the Siegelman prosecution are Republicans. If we wind up with a corrupt Democratic appointee as attorney general–or a Democratic equivalent of Karl Rove (God forbid!) as a White House advisor–then, yes, the shoe could wind up on the other foot. That modern Republicans tend not to speak up about Rove’s abuses indicates the GOP has lost any moral center it might have once had–and that is not good for our country.

I’m not an expert on how Super PACs work, so I’m not sure if this is a big concern for them or not. The federal-funds bribery law, which was applied in the Siegelman case, tends to be applied mainly to cases where an individual donor makes a campaign gift and then receives an apparent benefit of some sort, such as appointment to a board or government position. The PACs might help provide cover for the sources of these big donations. It’s also possible that many big donors don’t want a political appointment, they just want favorable treatment for their particular industry or corporation. The indirect nature of such benefits might take them beyond the scope of federal-funds bribery law.

JB: A sobering picture to be sure. Anything to add before we wrap this up, Roger?

RS: I would encourage your readers to stay on top of any new developments. Siegelman has appealed denial of his Motion for a New Trial, and that has been hanging for almost a year. Scrushy has an appeal before the Eleventh Circuit, seeking discovery that he and his lawyers believe would prove corruption in how the case was handled. Plus U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) grilled Eric Holder on Wednesday at the House Judiciary Committee hearing about the Siegelman case–and Holder mostly danced around the issues. It is a sobering picture at the moment, but there are slivers of possible sunlight on the horizon.

JB: Speaking of Scrushy, since being released from prison, didn’t he mention something about how he was asked to perjure himself about Siegelman in order to make the government’s case for them?

RS: Yes, Scrushy said that in an interview with San Francisco radio host Peter B. Collins and with HuffPost Live –and I reported on both interviews at my blog, Legal Schnauzer. Scrushy said that government investigators told him they would let him out of the case in exchange for certain testimony against Siegelman. The testimony they wanted, Scrushy said, was not true, and he refused to make false statements under oath. Because of his refusal, feds kept him in the case, and a bogus conviction caused Scrushy to spend almost six years in federal prison. That is the hideous reality of our so-called “justice” system.

JB: A little too Orwellian for my taste, Roger. Thanks so much for talking with me again. We’ll look forward to updates on this as they become available.

RS: You’re welcome.

***

Was AG Eric Holder Mistaken, Misleading, Or Evasive In His Answers To Congress About Siegelman Case? , Roger Shuler, 5/16/12

some of my other interviews with Roger:

Exclusive Interview with Legal Schnauzer’s Roger Shuler , 5/3/09

Interview with Legal Schnauzer’s Roger Shuler, Part Two , 5/4/09

Roger Shuler on Recent Supreme Court Decision , 2/1/10

Roger Shuler Muses on Justice Department’s Odd Priorities , 2/9/13

If you’d like to know more about the Siegelman case :

My series on Don:

Chipping Away at the Siegelman Case with Paul Benton Weeks (Two parts: 5/23/09, 5/25/09)

Caught in the Crosshairs: Former Governor Don Siegelman Talks with OpEdNews (Three parts: 8/16, 8/17, 8/18/09)

Collateral Damage: Interview with Dana Siegelman 7/27/09

More Collateral Damage from the Siegelman Case — Talking with DOJ Whistleblower, Tamarah Grimes (Two parts: 10/8/09, 10/9/09)

Catching Up with Gov. Don Siegelman 11/12/09

Andrew Kreig on Bernie Kerik and Don Siegelman: What They Have in Common and Why We Should Care 2/22/10

Take Action:

Free Don website

Sign Dana Siegelman’s petition to free her dad

More sources, a sampling:

Scott Horton, The Pork Barrel World of Judge Mark Fuller

Andrew Kreig, Siegelman Deserves New Trial Because of Judge’s ‘Grudge,’ Evidence Shows

Larisa Alexandrovna, Scary Politics in Alabama: How the GOP Framed Gov. Don Siegelman

Roger Shuler, Siegelman Judge Committed Fraud on the Court

John McTiernan’s documentary, The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove

60 Minutes video clip on Siegelman case 2/24/08

—

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-A-Big-Hypocrite-Ask-by-Joan-Brunwasser-130518-174.html

Filed under: - Business... None of yours, - Politics... that "dirty" little "game" that first begins in the home., - Read 'em and weep: The Daily News Tagged: A Free Press, Alabama, apeal, appeal, Atlanta, Barack Obama, Democrat, Don Siegelman, Elena Kagan, Free Press, George W. Bush, GOP, injury, IRS, justice, Kansas City Star, Karl Rove, law, legal, miscarriage, Obama, OpEdNews, politics, Post Office, prosecution, Republican, Richard M. Scrushy, Richard Scrushy, Roosevelt, scandal, SCOTUS, Siegelman, Theodore Roosevelt, United States, Woodrow Wilson, World War

Help Wanted: Wal-Mart Door Greeter

Warm Southern Breeze — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:47:50 +0000

One of my fine friends had recently commented about the speed of thought. I was reminded of a recent story, apropos to his remark.

It seems one of the local Wal-Marts had an opening for a Door Greeter job. The store manager published the help wanted notice & after receiving numerous applications, culled the job seekers to four.

Having thoroughly examined the applications, reviewed their resumes, and wanting to be as efficient as possible, he decided to conduct a group interview of the four sharpest candidates.

Because he wanted to see how they could think of their feet, he decided to ask them each a question and judge their response.

Turning to the first candidate, he said, “Young lady, what’s the fastest thing you can think of?”

She quickly replied saying, “A blink.”

“That’s good,” said the manager in response. “A blink is much less than a second, and the Scripture says Christ will come in the twinkling of an eye. That’s good.”

Turning to the second candidate, he asked the same question. “What’s the quickest thing you can think of?”

The man responded saying, “A thought.”

The manager said “That’s good! Thoughts are fleeting things. They’re here one moment and gone the next. That’s very good.”

Then turning to the third candidate, a college student, he posed the same question. “What’s the fastest thing you can think of?”

Without hesitation, the young lady replied, “The speed of light.”

“That’s excellent! At 186,000 miles per second, we don’t know anything faster than the speed of light. That’s very good!”

At this point, the manager thought to himself that he’d picked some excellently qualified candidates, and was thoroughly satisfied with their responses.

Turning then, to the fourth and final candidate he paused briefly as he sized him up.

He was a very hillbilly backwoods looking character, although his application and resume were among the four strongest.

The manager then said to the final candidate, “What’s the fastest thing you can think of?”

Without a moment’s hesitation, and in a very twangy tone of voice, the hayseed-appearing candidate said, “Diarrhea.”

“Diarrhea?,” said the manger in quizzical reply.

Mustering all he could do to keep from laughing out loud, he asked, “Why do you say ‘diarrhea’?”

Not skipping a beat, the hayseed hillbilly replied in a very pronounced twang, “Well… the other day, I had some Chinese food, and about midnight, before I could blink, think, or turn on the light, I’d done messed myself.”

Filed under: - Lost In Space: TOTALLY Discombobulated, - Transfer: How do we get THERE from HERE? (Add a 'T'.) Tagged: Albert Einstein, American Express, AT&T, business, Christ, college, Faster-than-light, graduate, hillbilly, humor, IBM, joke, light, man, Miguel Alcubierre, NASA, scat, scatalogical, Speed of light, Starbucks, Wal Mart, Walmart, Warp Drive, woman

Research: Lowering BAC to .05 will NOT reduce traffic deaths

Warm Southern Breeze — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:23:31 +0000

We’re now hearing the drumbeat to lower the BAC (Blood Alcohol Content) for DUI (Driving Under the Influence) from 0.08 to 0.05.

However, research by the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) shows in 2008, the MAJORITY of drivers involved in fatal crashes in ALL 50 states had 0% BAC.

Put another way, in the MAJORITY of ALL traffic fatalities in ALL 50 states, the drivers were TOTALLY SOBER.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The MAJORITY of ALL traffic fatalities in ALL 50 states were from TOTALLY SOBER drivers.

The finding, “Traffic Fatalities by State and the Highest Driver or Motorcycle Rider BAC in the Crash, 2008″ is in Table 4, on page 6.

The report – Traffic Safety Facts 2008 Data, Alcohol-Impaired Driving – may be read here: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811155.PDF. Alternatively, that report – Traffic Safety Facts 2008 Data, Alcohol-Impaired Driving – may be downloaded from this blog, as well.

Consider, for example, the following traffic fatality rates for SOBER drivers were the following in the listed states:

Alabama 62%
Arkansas 65%
California 65%
Florida 65%
Iowa 73%
Kansas 59%
Maine 70%
Montana 54%
Utah 80%
National average 63%.

It is clear that the fatality rate for SOBER drivers is EXCEEDINGLY higher than for alcohol impaired drivers.

Further, that same research shows that of those drivers who were alcohol-impaired, and where fatalities occurred, the majority of them had a BAC over 0.16 – exactly TWICE the legal limit.

“In 2008, 7,378 (57%) of the drivers involved in fatal crashes who had been drinking had a BAC of .15 or greater.”

“… and 57 percent (7,378) had BAC levels at or above .15. The most frequently recorded BAC level among drinking drivers in fatal crashes was .16. The most frequently recorded BAC level among drinking drivers in fatal crashes was .16.”

Ref: ibid, page 5

As well, neither MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), AAA (American Automobile Association) nor the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety are supporting this effort. That alone should speak volumes.

So guess what?

Lowering BAC to .05 won’t save lives.

THINK, PEOPLE… THINK!

Filed under: - Lost In Space: TOTALLY Discombobulated, - Read 'em and weep: The Daily News Tagged: BAC, Blood alcohol content, crash, death, Device driver, Driving under the influence, DUI, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, National Transportation Safety Board, NHTSA, Road traffic safety, sober, sobriety, Traffic collision, United States, wreck

How much does Huntsville Hospital charge for procedures? You’d be surprised!

Warm Southern Breeze — Sat, 11 May 2013 18:52:00 +0000

Thanks to a newly introduced aspect of ObamaCare, hospitals are now mandated to publicly show how much they charge for procedures.

Aren’t you glad?

I mean really… who goes to a grocery store or gas station and doesn’t know how much they’ll pay?

Part of market-based competition includes knowing what other competitors are doing, and basing decisions upon several factors, one of which is cost. For many years, hospitals and the delivery of healthcare have been an utter mystery to many – if not most – Americans. Those days are coming to a close, thanks in part to provisions in ObamaCare.

For the purpose of illustration, let’s pretend you have chest pain, and are admitted to Huntsville Hospital. How much will they charge ? How much will they charge any Health Insurance? How much will you have to pay out of pocket?

What about if you have a fainting spell? What about if you have hip replacement surgery? Open heart surgery? Pneumonia? Bronchitis & Asthma? A Seizure? COPD? A sudden Heart Attack? Trouble swallowing or digesting your food? Kidney or Urinary Tract Infection?

Until now, that’s all been a mystery.

No more.

Here’s a breakdown of nine common diagnoses – without major complications – and how much some hospitals in & around North Alabama charge:

By visiting this link – https://data.cms.gov/Medicare/Inpatient-Prospective-Payment-System-IPPS-Provider/97k6-zzx3 – you can look up the Top 100 most common diagnoses for hospitalizations, and compare costs with other hospitals.

You may also be interested in reading “Q: Why do hospitals charge $75 for aspirin? A: Because they can!“

NOTE: “High Blood Pressure” is the diagnosis “Hypertension,” while “Fainting” is the diagnosis “Syncope,” and “COPD” is “Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.”

Hospital (Abbreviation) *Diagnosis*	Average Charges Made by Hospital	Medicare Pays Hospital Location
Pneumonia
Huntsville Hospital (HHSYS)	$16,081.73	$4,352.35 – Huntsville, AL
Crestwood Medical Center (CMC)	$25,605.14	$4,558.08 – Huntsville, AL
Athens-Limestone Hospital (ALH)	$7,773.39	$4,306.61 – Athens, AL
Decatur General (DG)	$4,788.10	$3,887.95 – Decatur, AL
Parkway Medical Center (PMC)	$23,440.51	$4,570.54 – Decatur, AL
Highlands Medical Center (HMC)	$8,786.56	$4,089.67 – Scottsboro, AL
Marshall Medical Center North (MMCN)	$7,877.75	$3,688.44 – Guntersville, AL
Lincoln Medical Center (LMC)	$8,990.60	$4,269.96 – Fayetteville, TN

High Blood Pressure
HHSYS	$19,585.35	$4,491.75
CMC	$16,752.41	$3,453.41

Diabetes
HHSYS	$22,960.15	$5,296.15
CMC	$37,862.53	$4,423.53
DG	$6,116.28	$4,523.83
PMC	$24,239.15	$4,663.23
HMC	$9,579.67	$4,836.92

Chest Pain
HHSYS	$21,093.73	$3,927.16
CMC	$22,905.24	$2,889.29
ALH	$7,006.38	$3,292.08
DG	$8,700.79	$3,259.95
PMC	$23,505.03	$3,350.40

Urinary Tract Infection
HHSYS	$19,439.94	$4,739.96
CMC	$23,656.61	$4,054.04
ALH	$10,473.50	$4,556.86
DG	$6,863.14	$4,266.63
PMC	$20,813.35	$5,207.00
HMC	$8,919.03	$4,443.33
MMCN	$7,452.95	$4,041.22
LMC	$8,207.67	$4,652.85

Seizures
HHSYS	$22,734.52	$5,466.14
CMC	$27,548.24	$4,003.81

Fainting
HHSYS	$19,559.39	$4,446.88
CMC	$24,907.86	$3,773.46
ALH	$10,603.28	$4,289.00
DG	$8,581.45	$4,070.75
PMC	$21,049.44	$4,031.37
MMCN	$9,337.85	$3,698.44

Cellulitis
HHSYS	$22,472.35	$5,224.07
CMC	$28,472.57	$4,444.76
ALH	$13,191.33	$4,889.94
DG	$5,736.45	$4,587.79
PMC	$24,236.18	$5,515.55
HMC	$9,179.39	$4,833.85
MMCN	$12,739.62	$4,525.30

COPD
HHSYS	$17,818.94	$4,977.65
CMC	$22,154.93	$3,791.83
ALH	$9,246.28	$4,397.53
DG	$5,515.03	$4,192.03
PMC	$24,451.68	$4,474.00
HMC	$8,933.08	$4,101.38
MMCN	$10,807.47	$3,873.37
LMC	$8,088.17	$4,316.27

Filed under: - Business... None of yours, - Do you feel like we do, Dr. Who?, - My Hometown is the sweetest place I know Tagged: Alabama, Antiques and Collectibles, breathing, business, cheap, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, comparison, COPD, cost, cost comparison, cost effective, Crestwood Medical Center, Decatur, DO, doctors, expense, expnsive, fainting, healing, health, Health care reform, healthcare, heart, high blood pressure, hospital, HTN, Huntsville, Huntsville Alabama, Huntsville Hospital, Huntsville Hospital System, hypertension, inexpensive, infection, lungs, MD, Medflight, north Alabama, nurses, Ontario, pass out, passed out, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, physicians, RN, shopping, syncope, treatment, uncomplicated, United States, Urinary Tract Infection, UTI, WHNT-TV

China hacks Army’s Redstone Arsenal computers in Huntsville, Alabama, steals military secrets

Warm Southern Breeze — Sat, 04 May 2013 01:31:29 +0000

Among defense contractors, QinetiQ North America (QQ/) is known for spy-world connections and an eye- popping product line. Its contributions to national security include secret satellites, drones, and software used by U.S. special forces in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Former CIA Director George Tenet was a director of the company from 2006 to 2008 and former Pentagon spy chief Stephen Cambone headed a major division. Its U.K. parent was created as a spinoff of a government weapons laboratory that inspired Q’s lab in Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers, a connection QinetiQ (pronounced kin-EH-tic) still touts.

QinetiQ’s espionage expertise didn’t keep Chinese cyber- spies from outwitting the company. In a three-year operation, hackers linked to China’s military infiltrated QinetiQ’s computers and compromised most if not all of the company’s research. At one point, they logged into the company’s network by taking advantage of a security flaw identified months earlier and never fixed.

“We found traces of the intruders in many of their divisions and across most of their product lines,” said Christopher Day, until February a senior vice president for Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ)’s Terremark security division, which was hired twice by QinetiQ to investigate the break-ins. “There was virtually no place we looked where we didn’t find them.”

CyberPillage

QinetiQ was only one target in a broader cyberpillage. Beginning at least as early as 2007, Chinese computer spies raided the databanks of almost every major U.S. defense contractor and made off with some of the country’s most closely guarded technological secrets, according to two former Pentagon officials who asked not to be named because damage assessments of the incidents remain classified.

A person walks past a 12-story building alleged in a report by the Internet security firm Mandiant as the home of a Chinese military-led hacking group after the firm reportedly traced a host of cyber attacks to the building in Shanghai’s northern suburb of Gaoqiao. Photographer: Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images

As the White House moves to confront China over its theft of U.S. technology through hacking, policy makers are faced with the question of how much damage has already been done. During their multiyear assault on defense contractors, the spies stole several terabytes — equal to hundreds of millions of pages –of documents and data on weapons programs, dwarfing in sheer quantity any theft of Cold War secrets. The QinetiQ hack may have compromised information vital to national security, such as the deployment and capabilities of the combat helicopter fleet.

“The line forms to the left when it comes to defense contractors that have been hacked,” said James Lewis, a senior fellow in cybersecurity at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “The damage has been significant.”

Systems Hacked

A few of the attacks have become public, including the 2007 theft from Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT) of technology related to the F- 35, the most advanced U.S. fighter jet. Intelligence officials say the damage is far more extensive than the limited public accounting suggests, and that China-based hackers have acquired data on a large number of major weapons systems and many minor ones. One former intelligence official described internal Pentagon discussions over whether another Lockheed Martin fighter jet, the F-22 Raptor, could safely be deployed in combat, because several subcontractors had been hacked.

Slideshow: Top Ten Hacking Countries

In 2007-2008, the Pentagon gave secret briefings to about 30 defense companies alerting them to the aggressive spying effort and providing data to help defend against it, according to a person familiar with the process. The person did not know whether QinetiQ received the classified intelligence.

141 Attacks

Hackers in China Compromise U.S. Defense Secrets

Investigators eventually identified the Shanghai-based hackers that broke into QinetiQ as a crack team, nicknamed the Comment Crew by security experts, which has also hit major corporations and political figures, including the 2008 presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain. At least one other Chinese hacking team also may have been involved, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

In a Feb. 18 report, Mandiant, an Alexandria, Virginia- based security firm, attributed 141 major cyberattacks to the Comment Crew without naming the targets. Mandiant identified the Comment Crew as the People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398, which is similar in some respects to the U.S. National Security Agency. Mandiant’s report prompted Tom Donilon, President Obama’s national security adviser, to call on China to stop the hacking of U.S. companies.

The spying on QinetiQ and other defense contractors appears aimed at helping China leapfrog the U.S.’s technologically- advanced military, foregoing years of research and development that would have cost billions of dollars, according to Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA.

China’s military may also have stolen programming code and design details that it could use to disable some of the most sophisticated U.S. weaponry.

‘Major Embarrassment’

The lengthy spying operation on QinetiQ jeopardized the company’s sensitive technology involving drones, satellites, the U.S. Army’s combat helicopter fleet, and military robotics, both already-deployed systems and those still in development, according to internal investigations. Jennifer Pickett, a spokesman for QinetiQ, declined to comment as part of a general policy not to discuss security measures.

“God forbid we get into a conflict with China but if we did we could face a major embarrassment, where we try out all these sophisticated weapons systems and they don’t work,” said Richard Clarke, former special adviser to President George W. Bush on cybersecurity.

May 1 (Bloomberg) — Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, talks about the outlook for technology companies, the impact of the Internet on foreign policy and development of technological infrastructure. Cohen, co-author of the book, “The New Digital Age,” speaks with Erik Schatzker and Scarlet Fu on Bloomberg Television’s “Market Makers.” (Source: Bloomberg) / 9:51

The spies’ trail at QinetiQ begins in late 2007, and so do the company’s mistakes. QinetiQ’s travails are documented in hundreds of unvarnished e-mails and dozens of reports that were never meant to be public, part of a cache that was leaked in 2011 by the group Anonymous after it hacked HBGary Inc., a Sacramento-based computer security firm hired by QinetiQ the previous year.

Team Outmaneuvered

The e-mails and reports are authentic, according to former HBGary executives and Day. Day agreed to an interview limited to the investigation’s findings because the documents had already become public.

By reviewing the documents with security experts and interviewing more than a dozen people familiar with the QinetiQ breaches, Bloomberg News reconstructed how the hackers outmaneuvered QinetiQ’s internal security team and at least five companies brought in to help salvage the situation.

Headquartered in a glass-and-steel office tower in McLean, Virginia, QinetiQ’s U.S. subsidiary is a boutique arms maker, less than one-tenth the size of industry giants like Lockheed or Northrop Grumman Corp. (NOC) It has specialized in fields expected to grow as the rest of the Pentagon budget shrinks, including drones, robotics, software and high-speed computing. A 2012 want ad for QinetiQ’s Albuquerque facility solicited a programmer to work on a “satellite-based global monitoring system” and limited candidates to those with top secret clearances only.

Stolen Data

In December 2007, an agent from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service contacted the company’s small security team and notified them that two people working in McLean were losing confidential data from their laptop computers, according to an internal report. The agency had stumbled upon the stolen data as part of another investigation and the alert was a courtesy.

The San Diego-based agent didn’t provide the identity of the hackers, who had been tracked by U.S. intelligence since at least 2002, or the crucial — but classified — fact that they were hitting other defense contractors. The company wouldn’t find out who its attackers were for two more years.

QinetiQ put strict limits on the investigation.

“They just felt like it was this limited little thing, like they’d picked up some virus,” said Brian Dykstra, a forensics expert based in Columbia, Maryland, which QinetiQ hired to conduct the investigation.

Four Days

Dykstra was given only four days to complete his work. He said the company didn’t give him the time or data necessary to determine whether more employees had been successfully targeted, a standard precaution. In his final report, Dykstra warned that QinetiQ “is likely not seeing the full extent” of the intrusion.

A man walks past a QinetiQ Group Plc modular advanced armed robotic system at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s North America 2011 exhibition in Washington, D.C. Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg

Evidence surfaced almost immediately that he was right, as the attacks continued. On Jan. 7, 2008, NASA alerted the company that hackers had tried to infiltrate the space agency from one of QinetiQ’s computers.

QinetiQ treated a series of attacks over the next several months as isolated incidents. The hackers followed a more meticulous strategy: In the first 2 1/2 years, they gathered more than 13,000 internal passwords and raided servers that could give them detailed information about the company and how it was organized — data they would use to devastating effect.

Security Holes

More investigations uncovered more security holes. In 2008, a security team found that QinetiQ’s internal corporate network could be accessed from a Waltham, Massachusetts, parking lot using an unsecured Wi-Fi connection. The same investigation discovered that Russian hackers had been stealing secrets from QinetiQ for more than 2 1/2 years through a secretary’s computer, which they had rigged to send the data directly to a server in the Russian Federation, according to an internal investigation.

QinetiQ’s executives in the meantime fretted about rising costs.

“You could spend all your resources chasing such things as this,” William Ribich, the former president of QinetiQ’s Technology Solutions Group, said in an interview in January. Ribich, who retired in November 2009, shortly after the discovery of a major data theft, said he needed to balance the uncertain risk that the hackers could use what they stole against a growing shopping list of security products and consulting fees.

‘Move On’

“You finally have to reach a point where you say ’let’s move on,’” he said.

China’s hackers in fact zeroed in first on Ribich’s division, based in Waltham, and specifically on QinetiQ’s drone and robotics technology. Internal reports leaked by Anonymous chronicle a breach at TSG in February 2008, followed by another attempt in March of that year. By 2009, the hackers had almost complete control over TSG’s computers, the documents show.

Over one stretch in 2009, the spies spent 251 days raiding at least 151 machines, including laptops and servers, cataloging TSG’s source code and engineering data. The hackers dribbled data out of the network in small packets to avoid detection, managing to get away with 20 gigabytes before they were finally stopped, according to an internal damage assessment.

The stolen cache included highly sensitive military technology and was equivalent in size to 1.3 million pages of documents or more than 3.3 million pages of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Secrets ‘Gone’

“All their code and trade secrets are gone,” Phil Wallisch, senior security engineer at HBGary, wrote in an e-mail after being briefed on the loss by the company.

It was about to get much worse.

While QinetiQ’s team tripped from crisis to crisis, the hackers honed their skills. They were next spotted in March 2010, after signing on with the stolen password of a network administrator based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Darren Back.

The hackers logged on through the company’s remote access system, just like any employee. It was a trick they were able to use only because QinetiQ didn’t employ two-factor authentication, a simple device that generates a unique code employees enter, along with their usual password, anytime they work from home.

The problem had been spotted months earlier in a security review. Mandiant, which worked on several TSG breaches and performed the test, recommended a relatively inexpensive fix. The advice was ignored, according to a person familiar with the report.

Digital Secrets

In four days of furious activity, the hackers rifled at least 14 servers, taking particular interest in the company’s Pittsburgh location, which specialized in advanced robotics design. The Comment Group also used Back’s password to raid the computer of QinetiQ’s Huntsville, Alabama-based technology control officer, which contained an inventory of highly sensitive weapons-systems technology and source code throughout the company. The spies had got their hands on a map to all of QinetiQ’s digital secrets.

They also had begun to broaden their attack. As evidence mounted that the hackers had moved to divisions beyond TSG, QinetiQ hired two outside firms in April 2010 — Terremark (TMRK) and a relatively new start up called HBGary, headed by Greg Hoglund, a former hacker turned security expert.

Glitches Surfaced

HBGary installed specialized software on more than 1,900 computers, then scanned the machines for snippets of malicious code. Glitches surfaced almost immediately. The software wouldn’t load on at least a third of the computers, and even where it did, it missed some that the hackers’ spyware was known to have infected, according to internal HBGary e-mails.

Matthew Anglin, an information-security principal at QinetiQ, whose job was to coordinate the two investigations, fretted that he had no idea what was happening in his own network. He complained that the expensive outside experts didn’t seem to have a handle on what was going on, and wasted time tracing innocuous if unauthorized software.

The consultants also squabbled. HBGary complained in one report that Terremark was withholding vital information. Terremark countered that it appeared the hackers knew HBGary was hunting them and were using its technology to delete evidence of their presence on machines.

“They think we tipped off the attackers,” Wallisch, HBGary’s principal investigator on the project, wrote in an e- mail.

Every Corner

The security teams found evidence that the hackers had burrowed into almost every corner of QinetiQ’s U.S. operations, including production facilities and engineering labs in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Long Beach, Mississippi, Huntsville, Alabama and Albuquerque, New Mexico, where QinetiQ engineers work on satellite-based espionage, among other projects.

By the middle of June 2010, after weeks of intense work, the investigators believed they had cleaned QinetiQ’s networks and began wrapping up.

The calm lasted a little more than two months. In early September, the FBI called QinetiQ with evidence that the defense contractor was again losing data, according to e-mails and a person involved in the probe. Anglin messaged both HBGary and Terremark, asking how quickly their teams could return.

Within hours of their arrival, the investigators again began finding malicious software, or malware, in computers throughout the company’s North American divisions. Some of it had been there since 2009.

Software Deleted

It began to dawn on the security teams that the hackers had established a near permanent presence in the defense contractor’s computers, mining new information almost as soon as it was written onto hard drives. “Oh yeah…they are f’d,” Wallisch wrote to Hoglund in September.

Investigators also had to contend with frustrated QinetiQ employees. Upset about how much computer power the HBGary detection software was consuming, workers began deleting it from their computers with the approval of the company’s information technology staff.

As the hunt continued, more clues surfaced about what secrets the spies were after. The hunters’ digital footprints were found on the computers of QinetiQ’s chief operating officer, a division vice president and dozens of engineers and software architects, including several with classified clearances.

Military Robots

Among the victims was a specialist in the embedded software on microchips that control the company’s military robots, which would help in China’s own robot-building program, said Noel Sharkey, a drones and robotics expert at Britain’s Sheffield University. The PLA unveiled a bomb disposal robot in April 2012 similar to QinetiQ’s Dragon Runner.

A QinetiQ Group PLC operator controls a Dragon Runner robot. The People’s Liberation Army unveiled a bomb disposal robot in April 2012 similar to QinetiQ’s Dragon Runner. / QinetiQ Group PLC via Bloomberg

The chip architecture could also help China test ways to take over or defeat U.S. robots or aerial drones, Sharkey said.

“You could set them up in a simulation board and hack into them,” he said. “That’s standard stuff.”

The spies also took an interest in engineers working on an innovative maintenance program for the Army’s combat helicopter fleet. They targeted at least 17 people working on what’s known as Condition Based Maintenance, which uses on-board sensors to collect data on Apache and Blackhawk helicopters deployed around the world, according to experts familiar with the program.

The CBM databases contain highly sensitive information including the aircrafts’ individual PIN numbers, and could have provided the hackers with a view of the deployment, performance, flight hours, durability and other critical information of every U.S. combat helicopter from Alaska to Afghanistan, according to Abdel Bayoumi, who heads the Condition Based Maintenance Center at the University of South Carolina.

Redstone Arsenal

The hackers also may have used QinetiQ to break into the Army’s Redstone Arsenal through a network shared with QinetiQ’s engineers in nearby Huntsville. A breach of the base, home of the Army’s Aviation and Missile Command, was linked by military investigators back to QinetiQ, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

It wasn’t the only time the hackers used the same back-door approach to federal computers. The same person said that as recently as last year, federal agents were looking into a breach at a QinetiQ cybersecurity unit, which they suspected Chinese hackers were using in attacks against government targets.

The security lapses at QinetiQ led to investigations by several federal agencies, including the FBI, Pentagon, and Naval Criminal Investigative Service, according to two people involved, who didn’t know the final outcome of the probes.

State Department

The State Department, which has the power to revoke QinetiQ’s charter to handle restricted military technology if it finds negligence, has yet to take any action against the company. Two former federal law enforcement officials said that, despite its authority, the State Department lacks the computer forensics expertise to evaluate the losses and neither could recall department involvement in several major data theft investigations.

“In this case it looks like years go by without seeing any learning curve and that’s what’s scary,” said Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “The company is responsible for its own failures, but the government is responsible for the inadequacy of its response.”

QinetiQ’s U.S. operations are overseen by a proxy board that includes Riley Mixson, the Navy’s former air-warfare chief. The board was briefed several times about the hacking and the investigations. In a brief telephone interview, Mixson said that “everything was duly reported” and then hung up the phone. Tenet declined to comment.

Probe Impact

The investigations didn’t affect the company’s ability to win government contracts, even to provide cyber-security services to federal agencies.

In a three-year operation, hackers linked to China’s military infiltrated QinetiQ Group PLC’s computers and compromised most if not all of the company’s research. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

In May 2012, QinetiQ received a $4.7 million cybersecurity contract from the U.S. Transportation Department, which includes protection of the country’s critical transport infrastructure.

“When it comes to cyber security QinetiQ couldn’t grab their ass with both hands, so it cracks me up that they won,” Bob Slapnik, vice president at HBGary, wrote after QinetiQ received a grant from the Pentagon in 2010 to advise it on ways to counter cyberespionage.

In the fall of 2010, Terremark sent a report to Anglin concluding that QinetiQ had been targeted by the Comment Crew since 2007 and that the hackers had been operating continuously in their networks since at least 2009. The report was part of the trove of documents leaked by Anonymous.

Complete Control

In that time, the hackers had gained almost complete control over the company’s network. They had operated unhindered for months-long stretches and they had implanted multiple, hidden communications channels to extract data. Privately, the investigators concluded that the spies had gotten everything they wanted from QinetiQ’s computers.

“My feeling is that if an attacker has been in your environment for years, your data is gone,” Wallisch wrote in an e-mail to a colleague in December 2010, a few weeks before HBGary itself was hacked and the record stops.

“Everything about your business is known, cataloged, analyzed, by your enemy,” Wallisch wrote. “I don’t feel a sense of urgency anymore.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Michael Riley in Washington at michaelriley@bloomberg.net; Ben Elgin in San Francisco at belgin@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Daniel Golden at dlgolden@bloomberg.net

—

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-01/china-cyberspies-outwit-u-s-stealing-military-secrets.html

Filed under: - Business... None of yours, - My Hometown is the sweetest place I know, - Politics... that "dirty" little "game" that first begins in the home., - Read 'em and weep: The Daily News Tagged: Alabama, AMCOM, Army, Aviation and Missile Command, Barack Obama, Center for Strategic and International Studies, China, CIA, computers, cyber war, Defense contractor, Erik Schatzker, espionage, FBI, George Tenet, George W. Bush, hack, hackers, hacking, HSV, Huntsville, Lockheed Martin, military, NASA, National Security Agency, NSA, Qinetiq, Redstone Arsenal, RSA, secrets, spy, Stephen Cambone, United States, Verizon Communications, war

Athanasius the Great, Doctor of the Church, Father of Orthodoxy, and Defender of the Faith

Warm Southern Breeze — Fri, 03 May 2013 00:17:11 +0000

Today marks the feast day celebrating the life of Athanasius – Saint, Doctor of the Church, Father of Orthodoxy, Defender of the Faith and “Father of The Canon” – who is highly respected not only within the Catholic Church, but in all of Christendom not just because he defended orthodox Christianity (then in its infancy) against what is described as the greatest greatest crisis of faith ever to befall the Church, the Arian Heresy, but because in the process, he was also the first to effectively elucidate the nature of the Trinity. “Athanasius contra mundum” – Latin, meaning “Athanasius against the world” – was the hallmark phrase noting his dedication to Apostolic tradition during the First Council of Nicaea.

When I converted, I took two patrons: First, Saint Athanasius the Great, and Second, John Henry Newman (now Blessed John Henry Newman).

{NOTE: The tradition of taking a saint’s name in baptism began in Germany and France during the Middle Ages. The custom spread throughout the church, with the exception of Ireland until after the Norman invasion in 1066 (11th century), were at first, it was considered an irreverence. However, a baptismal saint becomes a special and personal patron, protecting the person who bears his or her name. It was expected that the baptized eventually learn the story of their patron saints, model themselves after them, and seek their intercession for guidance and protection. Taking a particular saint as a patron and model of one’s own personal faith might seem somewhat out of character for modern believers, because the saints lived in different times. However, their lives continue to testify that a a baptized person can walk with the mystery of God and thrive in faith. Their lives tell how the Good News of the Gospel can be lived in a practical way. This doesn’t mean that people of today should copy saints in some external way, but rather, that the saints’ lives can be a stimulus and source of inspiration toward one’s personal efforts to follow the way of Jesus in our own time, situations and culture.}

Simply put, Arianism taught that Jesus was created “a son of God” and therefore was not fully divine, but only partially. And as it seems today, increasingly, Arianism had become more a political ideology, rather than a religious movement. At the time, Theology was a topic which most deeply engaged men’s thoughts, and the Arian controversy interested all classes of people. Indeed, the heretical propositions of Arianism made rapid inroads into popular thinking because they were publicized in the form of songs set to popular tunes, were chanted in forums, and carried by sailors from port to port.

Complicating matters was that simultaneously, Plato’s philosophy of hierarchy known as “First Cause” commingled with Christian theology and in part gave rise to what later became known Arianism, so named for it’s most renown promoter Arius, a priest of the church of Baucalis in Alexandria, Egypt, where Athanasius, who was then a bishop in the Church, was born, and resided. Athanasius had received secular, philosophical, and theological education & training at Alexandria, specifically his theological learning was in the renown Catechetical School of Alexandria, where he was taught by those who later became Martyrs of the last great pagan Roman persecution of the Church.

Arius began to teach that Jesus, though more than man, was not eternal God, that he was created in time by the Eternal Father, and could therefore be described only figuratively as the Son of God. The Cappadocians vehemently argued against Arianism for its inequality among the divine Persons.

Athanasius, as Archbishop of Alexandria, in his Epistle in Defence of the Nicene Definition, wrote “”of the substance” and “one in substance,” and that “the Son of God is neither creature or work, nor in the number of things generated, but that the Word is an offspring from the substance of the Father.”"
In his letter to the Church as Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius wrote, “You are the ones who are happy; you who remain within the Church by your Faith, who hold firmly to the foundations of the Faith which has come down to you from Apostolic Tradition. And if an execrable jealousy has tried to shake it on a number of occasions, it has not succeeded. They are the ones who have broken away from it in the present crisis. No one, ever, will prevail against your Faith, beloved Brothers. And we believe that God will give us our churches back some day.”

Shortly after the matter had been resolved, and some years after Athansius’ death, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus – who resided in Cappadocia, and later became a priest, bishop and then Archbishop of Constantinople – in his work “On St. Basil” (paragraph 30) wrote of Arianism that, “This was the disease of Arius, who gave his name to the madness, and who threw into confusion and brought to ruin a great part of the Church. Without honoring the Father, he dishonored what proceeded from Him by maintaining unequal degrees in the Godhead. But we recognize one glory of the Father, the equality of the Only-begotten, and one glory of the Son, the equality of the Holy Spirit. And we believe that to subordinate anything of the Three is to destroy the whole.”

Renown modern convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism, Blessed John Henry Newman, wrote that Athanasius was a “principal instrument, after the Apostles, by which the sacred truths of Christianity have been conveyed and secured to the world.”

Here is the:
Athanasian Creed
Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith, except a man keep whole and integral, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. Now the Catholic Faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity. Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the substance. For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost.
But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one, the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal. For such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost.
The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, the Holy Ghost uncreated; the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible; the Father eternal, the Son eternal, the Holy Ghost eternal. And yet, there are not three eternals, but one eternal. As also there are not three uncreated, nor three incomprehensibles; but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible.

So likewise the Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty, and the Holy Ghost Almighty. And yet there are not three Almighties, but one Almighty.

So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet there are not three Gods, but one God.

So likewise, the Father is Lord, the Son is Lord, and the Holy Ghost is Lord. And yet there are not three Lords, but one Lord.

For, as we are compelled by the Christian verity to acknowledge every Person by Himself to be God and Lord; so we are forbidden by the Catholic religion to say there be three Gods or three Lords. The Father is made by none, neither created nor begotten. The Son is of the Father, not made, nor created, but begotten. The Holy Ghost is of the Father, and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.

So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts. And in this Trinity none is before or after the other. None is greater or less than another, but the whole three Persons are co-equal and co-eternal together.
So that in all things, as is aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped. He therefore that will be saved, must thus think of the Trinity.

Furthermore it is necessary unto eternal salvation that he believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. For the right faith is, that we believe and confess, that our Lord Jesus Christ is God and man. God of the substance of the Father, begotten before the world; and Man of the substance of His Mother, born into the world. Perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Godhead as touching His Manhood. Who, although He be God, and Man, yet He is not two, but one Christ. One altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of Person. For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ. Who suffered for our salvation, descended into hell, rose again the third day from the dead. He ascended into heaven; He sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. At Whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies, and shall give account for their works. And they that have done good shall go into everlasting life, and they that have done evil, into everlasting fire.

This, then, is the Catholic Faith, which except a man believe faithfully and firmly, he cannot be saved.

Here is the:
Nicene Creed

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly man.

Various heresies (all which remain in one form, or another in various Prostestant denominations to this day) in his time included:
• Ebionism – taught that Jesus is just a man and not divine.

• Adoptionism – taught that Jesus was human, but he became the Son of God by Adoption.

• Docetism – taught that Jesus is not human at all. He is completely divine. The word Docetism comes from the Greek, dokein = “to seem”). The Docetists said Jesus just ‘seemed’ to be human.

• Arianism – taught that Jesus is related to God as his son, but he is not fully divine. Arius was a presbyter in the church of Alexandria. His teachings were an attempt to defend the transcendence of God. In the end, Arius had to conclude that Jesus Christ the Son of God was a demi-god–and therefore a created being. The argument focussed on two Greek words: homoousias, the Son is of the same essence as the Father, and homoiousias, the Son is of similar essence as the Father. The Nicene creed uses the word first word “homoousias” meaning one of substance with the Father, and so we say today, “Consubstantial with the Father.”

• Apollinarianism – taught that the Word (which was a perfect divine nature) assumed a human body in Jesus, and thus replaced his human soul and mind. Apollinaris, the Bishop of Laodicea, proposed this idea in answer to Arius.

• Nestorianism – Nestorius was the Bishop of Constantinople (A.D. 428). He did not like the term for the Virgin Mary”Theotokos” because he said it implied that the baby in Mary’s womb had only one nature, divine nature. He proposed the use of the term “Christokos“, Christ-bearer, to better emphasize the unity of the two natures of Jesus. Cyril of Alexandria countered by saying that God Himself had entered the womb of Mary; therefore she was “Theotokos“. The Concil of Rome in 430 condemned Nestorianism.

• Monophysitism – taught that the Lord’s humanity was totally absorbed by His divinity, and thus denied the orthodox view of Christ having two natures in one being.

One of Athanasius’ writings – Athanasius: On the Incarnation (De Incarnatione Verbi Dei) a translation by Sister Penelope Lawson, of the Anglican Community of St. Mary the Virgin in Wantage, England, was originally published with a byline that reads only “Translated and edited by A Religious of C.S.M.V.” The Introduction is by C. S. Lewis.) – may be read here:
http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/history/ath-inc.htm

—

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/athanasius

Filed under: - Faith, Religion, Goodness - What is the Soul of a man?, - Uncategorized II Tagged: Alexandria, Alexandria Athanasius, Apostolic Tradition, Arianism, Athanasius, Catholic, Catholic Church, Christianity, faith, God, heresy, Holy Ghost, Jesus, John Henry Newman, Orthodoxy, Protestant, religion, Roman Catholic, Roman Catholic theology, theology, tradition, Trinity

Climate change benefits English wine growers now producing high quality sparkling wine

Warm Southern Breeze — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 02:53:53 +0000

British winemakers credit climate change for boom in bubbly sales

By Anthony Faiola, Published: April 28, 2013

CUCKMERE VALLEY, England — Blessed with soil similar to France’s Champagne region, vineyards in England nevertheless produced decades of low-grade goop that caused nary a Frenchman to tremble. But a Great British fizz boom is underway, with winemakers crediting climate change for the warmer weather that has seemed to improve their bubbly.

Sparkling wine undergoes an early fermentation process at the Ridgeview Wine Estate in East Sussex, England. Warmer summers are producing wines competitive with some from France.
- GRAHAM BARCLAY/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Increasingly hospitable temperatures have helped transplanted champagne grapes such as chardonnay and pinot noir thrive in the microclimates of southern England, touching off a wine rush by investors banking on climate change. Once considered an oxymoron, fine English sparkling wine is now retailing for champagne prices of $45 to $70 a pop. In recent years, dozens of vineyards have sprouted in Britain’s burgeoning wine country, with at least one traditional French champagne maker doing the once-unthinkable — scooping up land to make sparkling wine in England.

British bubblies have bested global rivals in international competitions and were served in lieu of champagne at last year’s Diamond Jubilee celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s 60th year on the throne. A small but growing export market has found English sparkling wine on store shelves and restaurant menus in Japan, Hong Kong, the United States and Australia.

Temperatures here are about 1¹ / ₂degrees warmer than they were four decades ago, significantly improving harvests. Many climatic variables affect wine grapes. But by at least one measure — average temperatures during the grape-growing season, which are now routinely above 55 degrees here — southern England is beginning to look more like the Champagne region of years ago.

“Think of what French champagne was like in the 1970s,” Mark Driver said as he gazed out at the newly planted vineyard he is building within scenic eyeshot of the English Channel. “That’s what England is producing now.”

The global wine business is fast becoming a bellwether for scientists monitoring the ability of industry to adapt to climate change. Winemakers and agricultural experts say warmer, shorter growing seasons are affecting the characteristics of some well-known wines and challenging celebrated grape regions.

In Italy and Spain, vineyards are seeking higher altitudes to cope with greater sugar and alcohol levels from ever more sun-drenched grapes. In France, slightly higher temperatures are accelerating annual harvests, forcing wine producers in some areas to grow more natural canopy, reduce pruning and, in extreme cases, phase out more fragile varieties of grapes.

The English, meanwhile, are adding their names to the expanding global wine list of colder-climate producers. In 2011, Wine Spectator magazine added a Patagonian malbec to its top 100 wines, and the cool-climate vineyards of New York’s Finger Lakes are gaining attention for world-class Rieslings.

Some experts contend that more warmer-season vintages have largely meant a broader range of better wines from most growing regions, old and new. “From warmer weather, I think what you’re seeing is a change in character in some wines rather than one of quality at this point,” said Dana Nigro, senior editor at Wine Spectator. “We are seeing fewer and fewer mediocre wines.”

—

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/english-sparkling-wines-challenging-rivals/2013/04/28/422681b2-acdc-11e2-9493-2ff3bf26c4b4_story.html

Filed under: - Business... None of yours, - Even MORE Uncategorized! Tagged: agriculture, Australia, beverage, Boston, Britain, bubbly, business, Champagne, climate, Climate change, England, English Channel, enterprise, entrepreneurship, export, farm, farming, France, grapes, Hong Kong, import, international, Pinot Noir, Russia, Sparkling wine, trade, United States, vineyard, vino, vintage, viticulture, wine, Wine Spectator

Sparsebundle problems with Apple’s Time Machine & Time Capsule? Here’s an easy fix!

Warm Southern Breeze — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 01:30:38 +0000

Time Capsule offers automatic backup for your Mac. And it’s a full-featured 802.11n Wi-Fi base station with simultaneous dual-band support in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands simultaneously. It delivers great performance and range. And it’s easy to set up from your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, or Mac.

If you’re like me, enjoying the benefits of Apple’s Time Capsule and Time Machine are among the best, of the many wonderful things Apple has done with computer programming.

However, like all things electronic, or computing, not everything always works 100% properly, 100% of the time.

And, while Apple’s OSX is as good, robust and simple an operating system as it is, it’s not without problems.

One of the problems that occurs is with TimeCapsule’s sparsebundles.

The sparsebundle is the name given to the disk image file that is the backup.

Instead of a single big file, a sparse bundle is a bundle (directory) containing a number of smaller files called bands, each in the order of 8 MB in size. This means even though to the end user the sparse bundle appears as a single file, it is composed of smaller files. When the content of the image changes, one or more band files is changed, created, or deleted. This allows backup software (such as Time Machine) to operate more efficiently. You may use a tool such as rsync to keep your disk image(s) consistent across various systems.

Sometimes, however, for some reason, the sparsebundle becomes corrupted, and when the Time Machine attempts to perform a backup, an error message displays that “The backup disk image “/Volumes/Time Capsule/XXXXXX 1.sparsebundle” is already in use.” In this case “XXXXXX” is the name of your Time Capsule.

Again, the problem is that the backup cannot and will not occur, because to the system, it appears as if the sparsebundle is being used, when in fact, it is not.

There have been several workarounds posited, which included varying levels of difficulty, including accessing root level user privileges by command line interfacing with terminal commands. For those unfamiliar with terminal commands, that approach can be frustrating.

As is the case with OSX, many solutions to issues that inevitably arise can be, and often are simple. The following solution meets that criteria.
How to resolve the following time capsule error message:
The backup disk image “/Volumes/Data/XXXX’s Computer.sparsebundle” is already in use.

If you are running Mountain Lion, try this:

1.) Open AirPort Utility (If you are using Mountain Lion (OSX 10.8.3), this will be AirPort Utility 6.0 or Higher.)
2.) Select your Time Capsule
3.) Click “Edit”
4.) Select the “Disks” Tab (located furthest RIGHT)
5.) Deselect “Enable File Sharing“
6.) Click “Update” & let the Time Capsule Re-Boot
7.) Go Back into AirPort Utility as before and re-select “Enable File Sharing” and let it Re-Boot again.

This should fix the problem.

If you are not running Mountain Lion, this advice should work (http://pondini.org/TM/C12.html).

The main thing is to reset users.

Here’s Apple’s tutorial on how to set up Time Machine. https://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/#timemachinebasics

Filed under: - Even MORE Uncategorized! Tagged: airport, AirPort Utility, Apple, Articles, Backup, Computer file, Cougar, Digital Living Network Alliance, Disk image, easy, File sharing, fix, Freeware, iOS, Mac OS X, Macintosh, Mountain Lion, Netgear, OSX, solution, Time Capsule, Time Machine, USB, USB flash drive, utilities, Wi-Fi

Would President Obama privatize TVA & Kill the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg?

Warm Southern Breeze — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 15:46:06 +0000

Shoals: Privatizing TVA is ‘a bad idea’

By Mike Goens
Managing Editor
Matt McKean/TimesDaily
4/21/13

Anglers fish below thousands of feet of power lines that run from TVA’s Wheeler Dam turbine systems. Those from the Shoals who work closely with the Tennessee Valley Authority said the federal agency should not be turned over to private companies. Matt McKean/TimesDaily

If President Barack Obama needs help orchestrating an effort to privatize TVA, he shouldn’t expect much support from the Shoals.

Those from the Shoals who work closely with the Tennessee Valley Authority said the federal agency should not be turned over to private companies. They fear a privately owned TVA will lead to higher electricity rates, job cuts, more flooding problems and navigational issues on the Tennessee River and other waterways under TVA’s jurisdiction.

“The first questions you need to ask are what’s the gain for government and what would be gained by the community,” said Steve Hargrove, manager of Sheffield Utilities. “If the purpose is to make things better and there is reason to think it’s possible, I would be the first one interested in sitting at the table and talking about it. I just don’t see advantages of privatizing at this time.”

Obama brought the issue to the table through his 2014 budget proposal, which was released last week. He said selling TVA should be explored as a means to increase revenue by as much as $25 billion, money that could reduce the federal deficit and pay for other government services.

Hargrove has a unique perspective to the debate, having worked at TVA for 33 years before retiring as plant manager at Colbert Fossil Plant. He became manager of Sheffield Utilities in December.

His department purchases electricity from TVA and provides power to about 19,000 customers in Colbert County.

“I am a believer in the private sector, but I would fear their mission would be different than TVA’s,” Hargrove said. “The mission of TVA is not to make profit, and the mission of the private sector is to make a profit. They have to answer to a board that wants to maximize profits. When your primary goal is to make a profit, that becomes a higher goal than helping the community.

“TVA has had its problems, and bad decisions have been made, but its mission is good and they are an established part of the communities.”

Hargrove said residential rates for TVA customers in the Southeast are among the lowest 25 percent in the country and are about one-third of the rates charged in the Northeast and West. He said a private company would likely have to charge more to make a profit.

Rates TVA charges customers in the seven-state region it covers do not include costs added by power distributors such as Florence, Tuscumbia and Sheffield utilities that also must pay for infrastructure improvements and maintenance.

Muscle Shoals Mayor David Bradford said he doesn’t see the benefits of privatizing TVA. He said the agency doesn’t receive federal appropriations.

“Where would the savings come from?” Bradford asked. “I could see more harm than good (by privatizing). I would be against it for several reasons.

“For the purpose TVA was created, which was to provide reliable and low-cost power, they continue to do so. They do so much more than produce electricity, though. They offer so much to our area and the region through economic development, flood control and land management.”

Bradford said TVA has been a partner with the Shoals on numerous economic development projects and played a role in the community luring companies such as SCA Tissue, North American Lighting and Navistar.

Florence Mayor Mickey Haddock said TVA has through the years been good to the city. Like others, he said services provided by the agency are important to the area’s quality of life.

“In some respects, TVA can be difficult to deal with when you talk about land uses and some other issues, but overall TVA has been wonderful for our area,” he said. “They provide good electricity rates, the in-lieu-of-taxes program helps area entities, river management is huge for our area, and they’ve been good economic development partners. The positives very much outweigh any negatives in their land use policies.

“I just don’t think it’s the right thing to do.”

Haddock said he doesn’t see any positives from privatizing TVA. He also worries what would happen to TVA employees.

TVA, which was formed by a congressional act 80 years ago, has 2,619 employees in Alabama, including 1,500 at Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant near Athens. Colbert Fossil Plant has 250 workers and dozens of others work for TVA in other capacities.

Almost 5,000 TVA retirees live in Alabama, agency officials said.

Tuscumbia Mayor Bill Shoemaker said the area would be losing an asset if TVA was turned over to private companies. He said he has worked closely with TVA officials through the years while working with the Alabama Department of Transportation and now as mayor.

“It’s been my experience that they have some good thinkers who have been willing to help resolve a problem,” Shoemaker said. “They have helped feed the world through their fertilizer research, they do an excellent job of providing a stable energy supply, they manage the waterways and they have helped us recruit industry. They have been a friend to the Tennessee Valley.”

He said more research must be done before considering privatizing TVA.

“It’s too early to make any conclusions,” Shoemaker said. “How would privatizing TVA help anyone? What private company would be willing to write off a $25 billion debt? There are too many questions that need answering. I would be against jumping into something that we don’t know what the end result might be.”

Hargrove said he is concerned how the process of privatizing TVA would work.

“TVA has a lot of assets, and will they allow private companies to cherry-pick what they buy?” he said. “What happens to and who takes care of the assets that companies don’t buy?

“There’s just too many unanswered questions. I would want all of those questions (answered) before considering selling anything.”

Mike Goens can be reached at 256-740-5740 or Mike.Goens@TimesDaily.com.

—

What do you think?

Filed under: - Business... None of yours, - Did they REALLY say that?, - My Hometown is the sweetest place I know, - Politics... that "dirty" little "game" that first begins in the home. Tagged: Alabama Department of Transportation, austerity, Barack Obama, Bill Shoemaker, Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant, business, Chattanooga, David Bradford, Democrats, electricity, enterprise, FDR, governance, government, Great Depression, Great Recession, holidays, hydroelectric, Knoxville, money, policy, poll, power, privatize, Public utility, rates, Republicans, Revenue, sell, Taxation, taxes, Tennesse Valley Authority, Tennessee, Tennessee Valley, Tennessee Valley Authority, TVA, utility, Wheeler Dam, Wilson Dam

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, MD: Is Philadelphia’s horrific murder trial overshadowed?

Warm Southern Breeze — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 03:09:39 +0000

In an earlier entry entitled “They kill babies… and women, too. West Philadelpia MD indicted on 8 counts murder” posted on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 I wrote in part that “The atrocities of this ONE incident make Nazi madman “scientist” Josef Mengele and madman/mass-murderer Jeffrey Dahmer almost pale by comparison. Body parts and bodies in freezers and refrigerators, corpse mutilation… all in the “City of Brotherly Love.”“

Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s murder trial will be starting it’s sixth week, and with testimony such as:
Defense attorney Jack McMahon (heatedly): “After Digoxen and having its neck cut, you’re telling the jury that you saw the baby moving?”
Kareema Cross, 28-year-old employee from 2005 to 2009: “Yes, it was.”
- it doesn’t look good for the former physician, or for his untrained, unlicensed staff.

The indictment against him may be downloaded and read here:
http://www.phila.gov/districtattorney/pdfs/grandjurywomensmedical.pdf

—

Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s Trial Should Be a Front-Page Story

The dead babies. The exploited women. The racism. The numerous governmental failures. It is thoroughly newsworthy.

By Conor Friedersdorf

Please note: This post contains graphic descriptions and imagery.

A procedure room at the Women’s Medical Society. / Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office

The grand jury report in the case of Kermit Gosnell, 72, is among the most horrifying I’ve read. “This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors,” it states. “The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels – and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths.”Charged with seven counts of first-degree murder, Gosnell is now standing trial in a Philadelphia courtroom. An NBC affiliate’s coverage includes testimony as grisly as you’d expect. “An unlicensed medical school graduate delivered graphic testimony about the chaos at a Philadelphia clinic where he helped perform late-term abortions,” the channel reports. “Stephen Massof described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, ‘literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.’ He testified that at times, when women were given medicine to speed up their deliveries, ‘it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.’”One former employee described hearing a baby screaming after it was delivered during an abortion procedure. “I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” she testified. Said the Philadelphia Inquirer in its coverage, “Prosecutors have cited the dozens of jars of severed baby feet as an example of Gosnell’s idiosyncratic and illegal practice of providing abortions for cash to poor women pregnant longer than the 24-week cutoff for legal abortions in Pennsylvania.”

Until Thursday, I wasn’t aware of this story. It has generated sparse coverage in the national media, and while it’s been mentioned in RSS feeds to which I subscribe, I skip past most news items. I still consume a tremendous amount of journalism. Yet had I been asked at a trivia night about the identity of Kermit Gosnell, I would’ve been stumped and helplessly guessed a green Muppet. Then I saw Kirsten Power’s USA Today column. She makes a powerful, persuasive case that the Gosnell trial ought to be getting a lot more attention in the national press than it is getting.

The media criticism angle interests me. But I agree that the story has been undercovered, and I happen to be a working journalist, so I’ll begin by telling the rest of the story for its own sake. Only then will I explain why I think it deserves more coverage than it has gotten, although it ought to be self-evident by the time I’m done distilling the grand jury’s allegations. Grand juries aren’t infallible. This version of events hasn’t been proven in a court of law. But journalists routinely treat accounts given by police, prosecutors and grand juries as at least plausible if not proven. Try to decide, as you hear the state’s side of the case, whether you think it is credible, and if so, whether the possibility that some or all this happened demands massive journalistic scrutiny.

* * *

On February 18, 2010, the FBI raided the “Women’s Medical Society,” entering its offices about 8:30 p.m. Agents expected to find evidence that it was illegally selling prescription drugs. On entering, they quickly realized something else was amiss. In the grand jury report’s telling, “There was blood on the floor. A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with blood-stained blankets. All the women had been sedated by unlicensed staff.” Authorities had also learned about the patient that died at the facility several months prior.Public health officials inspected the surgery rooms. “Instruments were not sterile,” the grand jury states. “Equipment was rusty and outdated. Oxygen equipment was covered with dust, and had not been inspected. The same corroded suction tubing used for abortions was the only tubing available for oral airways if assistance for breathing was needed. There was no functioning resuscitation or even monitoring equipment, except for a single blood pressure cuff.” Upon further inspection, “the search team discovered fetal remains haphazardly stored throughout the clinic – in bags, milk jugs, orange juice cartons, and even in cat-food containers.”And “Gosnell admitted to Detective Wood that at least 10 to 20 percent of the fetuses were probably older than 24 weeks in gestation – even though Pennsylvania law prohibits abortions after 24 weeks. In some instances, surgical incisions had been made at the base of the fetal skulls.” Gosnell’s medical license was quickly suspended. 18 days later, The Department of Health filed papers to start the process of closing the clinic. The district attorney submitted the case to the grand jury on May 4, 2010. Testimony was taken from 58 witnesses. Evidence was examined.

In Pennsylvania, most doctors won’t perform abortions after the 20th week, many for health reasons, others for moral reasons. Abortions after 24 weeks are illegal. Until 2009, Gosnell reportedly performed mostly first and second trimester abortions. But his clinic had come to develop a bad reputation, and could attract only women who couldn’t get an abortion elsewhere, former employees have said. “Steven Massof estimated that in 40 percent of the second-trimester abortions performed by Gosnell, the fetuses were beyond 24 weeks gestational age,” the grand jury states. “Latosha Lewis testified that Gosnell performed procedures over 24 weeks ‘too much to count,’ and ones up to 26 weeks ‘very often.’ …in the last few years, she testified, Gosnell increasingly saw out-of-state referrals, which were all second-trimester, or beyond. By these estimates, Gosnell performed at least four or five illegal abortions every week.”

The grand jury report includes an image of a particularly extreme case (the caption is theirs, not mine):

That photo pertains to an unusual case, in that the mother had to seek help at a hospital after the abortion she sought at Gosnell’s office went awry. The grand jury report summarizes a more typical late-term abortion, as conducted at the clinic, concluding with the following passage:

When you perform late-term “abortions” by inducing labor, you get babies. Live, breathing, squirming babies. By 24 weeks, most babies born prematurely will survive if they receive appropriate medical care. But that was not what the Women’s Medical Society was about. Gosnell had a simple solution for the unwanted babies he delivered: he killed them. He didn’t call it that. He called it “ensuring fetal demise.” The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that “snipping.”

Over the years, there were hundreds of “snippings.” Sometimes, if Gosnell was unavailable, the “snipping” was done by one of his fake doctors, or even by one of the administrative staff.

But all the employees of the Women’s Medical Society knew. Everyone there acted as if it wasn’t murder at all. Most of these acts cannot be prosecuted, because Gosnell destroyed the files. Among the relatively few cases that could be specifically documented, one was Baby Boy A. His 17-year-old mother was almost 30 weeks pregnant — seven and a half months — when labor was induced. An employee estimated his birth weight as approaching six pounds. He was breathing and moving when Gosnell severed his spine and put the body in a plastic shoebox for disposal. The doctor joked that this baby was so big he could “walk me to the bus stop.” Another, Baby Boy B, whose body was found at the clinic frozen in a one-gallon spring-water bottle, was at least 28 weeks of gestational age when he was killed. Baby C was moving and breathing for 20 minutes before an assistant came in and cut the spinal cord, just the way she had seen Gosnell do it so many times. And these were not even the worst cases.

Abuse of Women Patients
What little media coverage there’s been in the case has understandably focused on the murder allegations. The grand jury report also makes clear how horrific Women’s Medical Society was for the patients.

The unsanitary conditions were just the beginning.

One woman “was left lying in place for hours after Gosnell tore her cervix and colon while trying, unsuccessfully, to extract the fetus,” the report states. Another patient, 19, “was held for several hours after Gosnell punctured her uterus. As a result of the delay, she fell into shock from blood loss, and had to undergo a hysterectomy.” A third patient “went into convulsions during an abortion, fell off the procedure table, and hit her head on the floor. Gosnell wouldn’t call an ambulance, and wouldn’t let the woman’s companion leave the building so that he could call an ambulance.”

Often times, women given drugs to induce labor delivered before the doctor even arrived at work.

Said one former employee:

If… a baby was about to come out, I would take the woman to the bathroom, they would sit on the toilet and basically the baby would fall out and it would be in the toilet and I would be rubbing her back and trying to calm her down for two, three, four hours until Dr. Gosnell comes.

She would not move.

One patient died:

She was a 41-year-old, refugee who had recently come to the United States from a resettlement camp in Nepal. When she arrived at the clinic, Gosnell, as usual, was not there. Office workers had her sign various forms that she could not read, and then began doping her up. She received repeated unmonitored, unrecorded intravenous injections of Demerol, a sedative seldom used in recent years because of its dangers. Gosnell liked it because it was cheap. After several hours, Mrs. Mongar simply stopped breathing. When employees finally noticed, Gosnell was called in and briefl y attempted to give CPR. He couldn’t use the defibrillator (it was broken); nor did he administer emergency medications that might have restarted her heart. After further crucial delay, paramedics finally arrived, but Mrs.Mongar was probably brain dead before they were even called. In the meantime, the clinic staff hooked up machinery and rearranged her body to make it look like they had been in the midst of a routine, safe abortion procedure.

Even then, there might have been some slim hope of reviving Mrs. Mongar. The paramedics were able to generate a weak pulse. But, because of the cluttered hallways and the padlocked emergency door, it took them over twenty minutes just to find a way to get her out of the building. Doctors at the hospital managed to keep her heart beating, but they never knew what they were trying to treat, because Gosnell and his staff lied about how much anesthesia they had given, and who had given it. By that point, there was no way to restore any neurological activity. Life support was removed the next day. Karnamaya Mongar was pronounced dead.

Another provocative detail: A former employee testified “that white patients often did not have to wait in the same dirty rooms as black and Asian clients. Instead, Gosnell would escort them up the back steps to the only clean office — O’Neill’s — and he would turn on the TV for them. Mrs. Mongar, she said, would have been treated ‘no different from the rest of the Africans and Asians.’”

Said the employee:

Like if a girl — the black population was — African population was big here. So he didn’t mind you medicating your African American girls, your Indian girl, but if you had a white girl from the suburbs, oh, you better not medicate her. You better wait until he go in and talk to her first. And one day I said something to him and he was like, that’s the way of the world. Huh?

And he brushed it off and that was it.

Anesthesia was frequently dispensed by employees who were neither legally permitted nor trained to do it, including a 15-year-old high school student who worked at the clinic, the report states.

Most employees did as they were told, but one objected:

Marcella Stanley Choung, who told us that her “training” for anesthesia consisted of a 15-minute description by Gosnell and reading a chart he had posted in a cabinet. She was so uncomfortable medicating patients, she said, that she “didn’t sleep at night.” She knew that if she made even a small error, “I can kill this lady, and I’m not jail material.” One night in 2002, when she found herself alone with 15 patients, she refused Gosnell’s directives to medicate them. She made an excuse, went to her car, and drove away, never to return. Choung immediately filed a complaint with the Department of State, but the department never acted on it.

The Failure to Stop It
That brings us to a subject you’ve perhaps been wondering about: How on earth did this go on for so long without anyone stopping it? The grand jury delved into that very question in their report. I’m going to excerpt it at length, because it bears directly on the question that will concern us afterward: has this story gotten an appropriate amount of attention from the news media?

Here is the grand jury on oversight failures:

Pennsylvania is not a third-world country. There were several oversight agencies
that stumbled upon and should have shut down Kermit Gosnell long ago. But none of them did…

The first line of defense was the Pennsylvania Department of Health. The department’s job is to audit hospitals and outpatient medical facilities, like Gosnell’s, to make sure that they follow the rules and provide safe care. The department had contact with the Women’s Medical Society dating back to 1979, when it first issued approval to open an abortion clinic. It did not conduct another site review until 1989, ten years later. Numerous violations were already apparent, but Gosnell got a pass when he promised to fix them. Site reviews in 1992 and 1993 also noted various violations, but again failed to ensure they were corrected.

But at least the department had been doing something up to that point, however ineffectual. After 1993, even that pro form a effort came to an end. Not because of administrative ennui, although there had been plenty. Instead, the Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all… The only exception to this live-and-let-die policy was supposed to be for complaints dumped directly on the department’s doorstep. Those, at least, would be investigated. Except that there were complaints about Gosnell, repeatedly. Several different attorneys, representing women injured by Gosnell, contacted the department. A doctor from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia hand-delivered a complaint, advising the department that numerous patients he had referred for abortions came back from Gosnell with the same venereal disease. The medical examiner of Delaware County informed the department that Gosnell had performed an illegal abortion on a 14-year-old girl carrying a 30-week-old baby. And the department received official notice that a woman named Karnamaya Mongar had died at Gosnell’s hands.

Yet not one of these alarm bells — not even Mrs. Mongar’s death — prompted the department to look at Gosnell or the Women’s Medical Society… But even this total abdication by the Department of Health might not have been fatal. Another agency with authority in the health field, the Pennsylvania Department of State, could have stopped Gosnell single-handedly.

The Department of State, through its Board of Medicine, licenses and oversees individual physicians… Almost a decade ago, a former employee of Gosnell presented the Board of Medicine with a complaint that laid out the whole scope of his operation: the unclean, unsterile conditions; the unlicensed workers; the unsupervised sedation; the underage abortion patients; even the over-prescribing of pain pills with high resale value on the street. The department assigned an investigator, whose investigation consisted primarily of an offsite interview with Gosnell. The investigator never inspected the facility, questioned other employees, or reviewed any records. Department attorneys chose to accept this incomplete investigation, and dismissed the complaint as unconfirmed.

Shortly thereafter the department received an even more disturbing report — about a woman, years before Karnamaya Mongar, who died of sepsis after Gosnell perforated her uterus. The woman was 22 years old. A civil suit against Gosnell was settled for almost a million dollars, and the insurance company forwarded the information to the department. That report should have been all the confirmation needed for the complaint from the former employee that was already in the department’s possession. Instead, the department attorneys dismissed this complaint too… The same thing happened at least twice more: the department received complaints about lawsuits against Gosnell, but dismissed them as meaningless…

Philadelphia health department employees regularly visited the Women’s Medical Society to retrieve blood samples for testing purposes, but never noticed, or more likely never bothered to report, that anything was amiss. Another employee inspected the clinic in response to a complaint that dead fetuses were being stored in paper bags in the employees’ lunch refrigerator. The inspection confirmed numerous violations… But no follow-up was ever done… A health department representative also came to the clinic as part of a citywide vaccination program. She promptly discovered that Gosnell was scamming the program; she was the only employee, city or state, who actually tried to do something about the appalling things she saw there. By asking questions and poking around, she was able to file detailed reports identifying many of the most egregious elements of Gosnell’s practice. It should have been enough to stop him. But instead her reports went into a black hole, weeks before Karnamaya Mongar walked into the Woman’s Medical Society.

…And it wasn’t just government agencies that did nothing. The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and its subsidiary, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, are in the same neighborhood as Gosnell’s office. State law requires hospitals to report complications from abortions. A decade ago, a Gosnell patient died at HUP after a botched abortion, and the hospital apparently filed the necessary report. But the victims kept coming in. At least three other Gosnell patients were brought to Penn facilities for emergency surgery; emergency room personnel said they have treated many others as well. And at least one additional woman was hospitalized there after Gosnell had begun a flagrantly illegal abortion of a 29-week-old fetus. Yet, other than the one initial report, Penn could find not a single case in which it complied with its legal duty to alert authorities to the danger. Not even when a second woman turned up virtually dead…

So too with the National Abortion Federation.

NAF is an association of abortion providers that upholds the strict est health and legal standards for its members. Gosnell, bizarrely, applied for admission shortly after Karnamaya Mongar’s death. Despite his various efforts to fool her, the evaluator from NAF readily noted that records were not properly kept, that risks were not explained, that patients were not monitored, that equipment was not available, that anesthesia was misused. It was the worst abortion clinic she had ever inspected. Of course, she rejected Gosnell’s application. She just never told anyone in authority about all the horrible, dangerous things she had seen.

The conclusion drawn at the end of the section is provocative. “Bureaucratic inertia is not exactly news. We understand that,” it states. “But we think this was something more. We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion.”

A Front-Page Story
Says Kirsten Powers in her USA Today op-ed, “Let me state the obvious. This should be front page news. When Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke, there was non-stop media hysteria. The venerable NBC Nightly News’ Brian Williams intoned, ‘A firestorm of outrage from women after a crude tirade from Rush Limbaugh,’ as he teased a segment on the brouhaha. Yet, accusations of babies having their heads severed — a major human rights story if there ever was one — doesn’t make the cut.”

Inducing live births and subsequently severing the heads of the babies is indeed a horrific story that merits significant attention. Strange as it seems to say it, however, that understates the case.

For this isn’t solely a story about babies having their heads severed, though it is that. It is also a story about a place where, according to the grand jury, women were sent to give birth into toilets; where a doctor casually spread gonorrhea and chlamydiae to unsuspecting women through the reuse of cheap, disposable instruments; an office where a 15-year-old administered anesthesia; an office where former workers admit to playing games when giving patients powerful narcotics; an office where white women were attended to by a doctor and black women were pawned off on clueless untrained staffers. Any single one of those things would itself make for a blockbuster news story. Is it even conceivable that an optometrist who attended to his white patients in a clean office while an intern took care of the black patients in a filthy room wouldn’t make national headlines?

But it isn’t even solely a story of a rogue clinic that’s awful in all sorts of sensational ways either. Multiple local and state agencies are implicated in an oversight failure that is epic in proportions! If I were a city editor for any Philadelphia newspaper the grand jury report would suggest a dozen major investigative projects I could undertake if I had the staff to support them. And I probably wouldn’t have the staff. But there is so much fodder for additional reporting.

There is, finally, the fact that abortion, one of the most hotly contested, polarizing debates in the country, is at the center of this case. It arguably informs the abortion debate in any number of ways, and has numerous plausible implications for abortion policy, including the oversight and regulation of clinics, the appropriateness of late-term abortions, the penalties for failing to report abuses, the statute of limitations for killings like those with which Gosnell is charged, whether staff should be legally culpable for the bad behavior of doctors under whom they work…

There’s just no end to it.

To sum up, this story has numerous elements any one of which would normally make it a major story. And setting aside conventions, which are flawed, this ought to be a big story on the merits.

The news value is undeniable.

Why isn’t it being covered more? I’ve got my theories. But rather than offer them at the end of an already lengthy item, I’d like to survey some of the editors and writers making coverage decisions.

—

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.By the same author: “14 Theories for Why Kermit Gosnell’s Case Didn’t Get More Media Attention“

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/print/2013/04/why-dr-kermit-gosnells-trial-should-be-a-front-page-story/274944/

—

Why Kermit Gosnell hasn’t been on Page One

By Melinda Henneberger, Updated: April 15, 2013

News outlets have been struggling to explain why until now there’s been so little coverage of the murder trial of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortion doctor accused of delivering live, screaming children and then beheading them.

The Post and other mainstream news outfits are on the story now, belatedly, so maybe critics like me shouldn’t act like the mother who, when you do call her, spends half the conversation asking why you haven’t called.

But, why wasn’t more written sooner? One colleague viewed Gosnell’s alleged atrocities as a local crime story, though I can’t think of another mass murder, with hundreds of victims, that we ever saw that way. Another said it was just too lurid, though that didn’t keep us from covering Jeffrey Dahmer, or that aspiring cannibal at the NYPD.

Yet another said it’s because the rest of the country doesn’t care about Philadelphia — that one was especially creative, I thought. And a friend argued that any “blackout” boiled down to the usual lack of media interest in the low-income community Gosnell “served.” (While he routinely turned poor, black patients over to assistants who lacked even a high school education, according to court testimony, the white patients he seated separately, and treated himself.)

I say we didn’t write more because the only abortion story most outlets ever cover in the news pages is every single threat or perceived threat to abortion rights. In fact, that is so fixed a view of what constitutes coverage of that issue that it’s genuinely hard, I think, for many journalists to see a story outside that paradigm as news. That’s not so much a conscious decision as a reflex, but the effect is one-sided coverage.

Now, I assign plenty of “rights under threat” stories myself, for She the People, and see them as perfectly valid. But we in the news business do cover the extremism of some who oppose abortion rights — attempts to run after pregnant women with transvaginal probes, for example — far more than we do the extremism of some who favor abortion rights, as per the Planned Parenthood’s Alisa LaPolt Snow, who said recently that when a baby somehow survives an abortion, it’s up to the woman, her family and her doctor to decide that child’s fate.

Two years ago, I wrote about the good doctor Gosnell’s “pro-choice enablers,” for Politics Daily:

“The ultimate non-partisan body – a criminal grand jury – has supplied us with the graphic, 261-page horror story of Kermit Gosnell, M.D., who stands accused of butchering seven babies – yes, after they were born alive — and fatally doping a refugee from Nepal with Demerol in a clinic that smelled of cat urine, where the furniture was stained with blood and the doctor kept a collection of severed baby feet. As often as possible, the report says, Gosnell induced labor for women so pregnant that, as he joked on one occasion, the baby was so big he could “walk me to the bus stop.” Then, hundreds of times over the years, he slit their little necks, according to the grand jury report:

[He] regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels – and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.

And the kicker? This nightmare facility had not been inspected in 17 years – other than by someone from the National Abortion Federation, whom he actually invited there. For whatever reason, Gosnell applied for NAF membership two days after the death of the 41-year-old Nepalese woman, Karnamaya Mongar. Even on a day when the place had been scrubbed and spiffed up for the visit, the NAF investigator found it disgusting and rejected Gosnell’s application for membership. But despite noting many outright illegalities, including a padlocked emergency exit in a part of the clinic where women were left alone overnight, the grand jury report notes that the NAF inspector did not report any of these violations to authorities.”

My point, then and now, is that I am a big fan of regulation; wasn’t it the loosening of regs in the financial world that led to the meltdown of ’08 and in the oil industry to the BP spill of ’10? Those who normally agree with me about the need for oversight, though, make an exception when it comes to the abortion industry, which they feel should be self-regulating even when what that gets us is the likes of Kermit Gosnell.

The counter-argument, then and now, is that it’s the restriction of abortion rights that creates such shady operators, though there are other clinics in Philadelphia — and if his practice was restricted in any way over the years, I can’t see how.

Which “side” was Dr. Frankenstein to Dr. Gosnell? Well, there’s no mystery about where Gosnell could have gotten the idea that his youngest victims weren’t human, or entitled to any protection under the law. There aren’t just two sides, though, but a whole continuum of points of view, from those who see several cells as a legal person to those who insist that even a baby who could walk Kermit Gosnell to the bus stop is only a person if his mom says so.

Gosnell himself seemed confused, when he was charged with so many counts of murder, as to how that could be. Because even at that point, he didn’t appear to see the children he’s accused of beheading as people.

Planned Parenthood’s Snow was similarly obtuse, either willfully or out of habit, in testifying against a Florida bill that would have required medical care for babies who survive abortions. “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion,” she was asked, “what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?”

Her answer was a familiar one: “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family and the physician.”

Though it pains me to say so, that’s the same stand Barack Obama effectively took when he voted against a similar Illinois bill — even after the addition of a “neutrality clause” spelling out that the bill would have no bearing on the legal status of the (you say fetus, I say unborn child) at any point prior to delivery, and thus could not be used to outlaw abortion.

Recently, MSNBC host Melissa Harris mocked those who see a fertilized egg as a fully human person: “I get,” she said, “that that’s a particular kind of faith claim that’s not associated with science.”

But I wish she and those who agree with her also got this: To insist that a baby born at 30 weeks, as one of Gosnell’s victims was, only qualifies as a person if his mom decides to keep him is also “a particular kind of faith claim that’s not associated with science.”

Melinda Henneberger is a Post politics writer and anchors She the People. Follow her on Twitter at @MelindaDC.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/04/15/why-kermit-gosnell-hasnt-been-on-page-one/?print=1

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A Jury of Your Peers

How conservatives used Twitter to goad the media into covering the trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell.

By David Weigel|Posted Monday, April 15, 2013, at 8:38 PM

It started with a Twitpic. By April 11, the PhillyBurbs.com columnist J.D. Mullane had spent weeks watching the trial of abortionist and accused murderer Kermit Gosnell. Mullane had tweeted links to Gosnell trial updates from LifeSiteNews.com, and links that suggested a biased media was ignoring the trial—“Guns and babies: A tale of two massacres.” He’d sparred with pro-choice tweeters. “What went into Gosnell’s red waste bags was no different that what goes in the waste at any Planned Parenthood clinic,” he’d said to another suburban columnist.

“What happens at Planned Parenthood clinic is legal, safe,” said the columnist, Kate Fratti.

“It’s not safe for the children snuffed,” said Mullane.

Pro-life activists march during the March for Life January 25, 2013 in Washington, DC.
Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

On April 11, Mullane covered the trial in person and noticed the rows of empty media seats. They were largely empty. “It was just so striking to me,” he said. “I took out my iPhone and snapped a picture, only intending to use it in my weekly column.” Mullane retweeted the photo a few more times, with different captions, because it had been packed into a snowball. Kirsten Powers, a Fox News commentator who usually reports from the left, published a USA Today column on the “blackout.”

Troy Newman, president of the Kansas-based Operation Rescue, had been on the phone for “five or ten minutes” with two other pro-lifers, launching a campaign to “Break the Gosnell Media Blackout.” People who wanted the media at the trial would tweet the accused’s last name—#Gosnell—to get it trending, preferably attached to some facts about the trial. The severed feet in jars. The urine stench in the unclean facilities. The “raining fetuses and blood.” It was, said Newman, “a perfect case that makes the point I’ve been making for 20 years.” A Facebook page set out the rules, and the mission:

Can you imagine the media reaction if the case were reversed and it was a pro-lifer on trial for 7 counts of 1st degree murder? Exactly. We are going to make “new media” work on behalf of Kermit Gosnell’s innocent, helpless victims. The mainstream media is acting like nothing is happening, however—if we unite & spread the word far enough, we can FORCE the media to cover this horrific story.

It worked. An estimated 106,000 #Gosnell tweets later, on April 15, Mullane reported that major networks and newspapers had sent their reporters to cover the trial—Fox News, the New York Times, the Washington Post. Hours later, after bombs went off in the last leg of the Boston Marathon, hopes of pushing this to “the front page” waned. But in between the Twitpic and the breaking news, there’s a lesson about how conservatives can use social media—and only social media—to move the press.

Why did it take social media? Conservatives’ own tools weren’t working. Operation Rescue had dispatched its own reporters to the trial—chiefly Cheryl Sullenger, a policy adviser to the group who spent two years in prison conspiring to blow up the Alavarado Medical Center. (She’s since apologized.) Starting in March, Sullenger was filing reports from inside Gosnell’s Philadelphia trial, with photos, one of a baby so large that Gosnell joked it “could have walked to the bus stop.”

It didn’t cross over. There were scattered media reports on the trial, and plenty of Philadelphia-area coverage. Some magazines—Slate included—had covered the Gosnell case two years earlier, when a grand jury report of remarkable, grisly detail was put out by the city. But there was no camera in the courtroom, and news organizations didn’t feel any pressure to cover the story.

Thus: Twitter. The single most effective campaign to goad the media into Gosnell coverage came from Mollie Hemingway, a press critic for the blog GetReligion. Hemingway did not wait for reporters or editors to comment on the story; she didn’t email them and wait for comment. “Inspired by Kirsten Powers’ USA Today column,” she tweeted at them, then recorded the unanswered tweets for readers, starting the experiment with Associated Press social issues reporter David Crary. “His favorite stories deal with homosexuality,” wrote Hemingway, “but he also gives some love to abortion-related stories.” Just not to Gosnell.

This was a warm-up: Hemingway found a reporter who could personify that photo of the empty court benches. She tweeted at Sarah Kliff, the health care policy reporter for the Washington Post’s WonkBlog subsite.

WaPo health policy reporter @SarahKliff has 80+ site hits on Akin/Fluke/Komen and zero on Gosnell? Would love an explanation.

Kliff tweeted back:

Hi Molly – I cover policy for the Washington Post, not local crime, hence why I wrote about all the policy issues you mention.

It was exactly the wrong response. Hemingway’s item about the exchange was shared or liked on Facebook 68,000 times—nearly seven times more than the #Gosnell campaign page, which was operating independently of all this. By Friday morning Kliff’s tweet was prima facie evidence for conservatives that the media was spiking the story; one site offered a “tip line” for any reporters whose papers spiked Gosnell coverage. By Friday afternoon, the Post was regretting that “we didn’t send a reporter sooner” to the trial. By Monday, Kliff was in full mea culpa mode: “When I described the case of abortion provider Kermit Gosnell on Twitter last week as a local crime story, I was clearly wrong.”

Why did this work so well? Not long ago, the preferred method of browbeating the media into covering a story was “melting the phones,” or deluging a reporter with emails. Why were tweets and Twitpics so much better equipped to turn on the shame-rays?

Easy: It’s completely public. It’s a limiting medium, too, one that limits a reporter’s response to 140 characters. That’s excruciating for a member of the fourth estate; I once ticked off a longform magazine writer and got a five-paragraph email demanding that I tweak one sentence describing his article. There’s no real entry fee to Twitter, no difference between the user with 40 followers, the media critic with a question, or the TV anchor who wonders where this hashtag came from. Almost every factor that elevated the #Gosnell story was present for the Trayvon Martin story. That’s not comparing the facts of the cases; that’s just saying, the hashtag knows no mercy.

Neither does the news cycle. By Monday afternoon, the media trend-spotters who’d rediscovered Gosnell were combing Twitter for Boston Marathon survivors and witnesses. In the Philadelphia courtroom, surrounded—maybe temporarily—by the national press, Mullane was eyed warily by a bailiff.

“ ‘Anybody who is seen taking pictures, we are taking the phone and throwing it in the toilet,’ ” said the bailiff, according to Mullane. “ ‘You’re never getting it again.’ That’s one reason, maybe, that TV isn’t interested in the story.”

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/04/kermit_gosnell_abortion_trial_conservatives_took_to_twitter_to_shame_mainstream.html

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The Atlantic

14 Theories for Why Kermit Gosnell’s Case Didn’t Get More Media Attention

Conor Friedersdorf Apr 15 2013, 7:10 AM ET

Associated Press

A police care is seen posted outside the the Women’s Medical Society in Philadelphia, Thursday, Jan. 20, 2011. Abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, who catered to minorities, immigrants and poor women at the Women’s Medical Society, was charged Wednesday Jan. 19, 2011, with eight counts of murder in the deaths of a patient and seven babies who were born alive and then killed with scissors, prosecutors said Wednesday. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
The “clinic” or location of “practice” where Dr. Kermit Gosnell, MD butchered women and babies.

The trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the abortionist charged with killing babies and neglecting women in his care, is now national news. There’s no bigger story on the web. Anderson Cooper covered it thoroughly Friday on CNN. The Washington Post‘s executive editor pledged to send a reporter to file dispatches from the Philadelphia courtroom. My contribution, “Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s Trial Should Be a Front-Page Story,” distilled the Philadelphia grand jury report and argued that those horrific, detailed allegations are thoroughly newsworthy by any reasonable standard. That premise is now conventional wisdom. The trial is likely to remain national news.

My article didn’t speculate about why the story didn’t play bigger in the national media prior to late last week. I didn’t want that debate to overshadow Gosnell’s actions or the failure to stop him.

But the debate about coverage is important and fascinating.

Journalists, news junkies, and casual news consumers are all offering theories of what drives the media. Wildly divergent theories. And every last one amounts to a fellow member of our polity saying, “This is my notion of how America’s primary means of civic communication works.”

There is, of course, no single explanation for why any news story unfolds one way instead of another. “The media” is an abstraction. It encompasses TV, radio, print, and digital; editors, reporters, and bloggers; the Drudge Report, The New Yorker, USA Today, and Feministing. Many of the factors that shape how a story is covered are seemingly random or just plain undiscoverable. But it’s possible to refine our understanding of factors that did and didn’t shape coverage.* With that in mind, let’s scrutinize some of the wildly divergent theories of American media.

Keep in mind that my inclusion of a theory doesn’t necessarily mean that I endorse it.

1) Matt Frost’s Unified Theory

One side sees the Gosnell case, thinks: “abortion is an atrocity.” Other side says, “abortion is too unsafe.” The “center” just can’t look.

– Matt Frost (@mattfrost) April 12, 2013

This theory accounts for the fact that social conservatives and progressive feminists both wrote about the story more than “mainstream” outlets.

For late-term abortion opponents, what more powerful demonstration of its brutality than an abortionist who severs the spines of already delivered babies? If you think the culture surrounding abortion destroys respect for human life, what would bolster your belief more than the fact that multiple employees willingly assisted Gosnell? And for progressive feminists, who worry that restricting abortion causes women to seek out horrific black-market procedures at great risk to their lives, what better confirmation than hundreds of women paying to receive treatment from a man whose office was filled with severed baby feet, blood spattered blankets, and cat feces?

Folks in the mushy middle are there precisely because they’re persuaded by arguments from both sides, but are uncomfortable adopting the final position of either. This is true on the rare occasions when they think about the abortion debate. But the Gosnell case doesn’t even permit us to think abstractly. The babies with severed spines and the immigrant woman dead from a botched abortion are both right there, described by the grand jury report in brutal detail. It makes sense, if social conservatives and progressive feminists both think their world views are vindicated by this case, that abortion “centrists” would find it particularly awful to fully confront.

And for what? Many centrists aren’t sure that whatever position they’ve calibrated is correct. They worry advocating for it would make them feel culpable for the inevitable babies or women hurt as a result. (If the king of a benevolent monarchy emailed to say that he’d implement in detail whatever abortion policies I suggested as soon as I wrote back, my first impulse would be to close my laptop, wrap it in duct tape, motor out to the deepest part of the Pacific and drop it overboard.)

Writing about this is uncomfortable and unpleasant for everyone. But if you’re confident in the lesson to take from this case and believe some specific change to abortion policy would definitely improve the world, of course you’d feel that covering it is less uncomfortable and more rewarding. Notably, this theory implies that most mainstream-media reporters aren’t die-hard abortion-rights advocates. If they were, they’d have reacted like some progressive feminists, proceeding as if this case clearly demonstrates the need for, say, publicly funded, safer, legal abortions. Instead, this theory implies that the Gosnell case makes the average journalist feel conflicted. In my experience, most journalists, like most people, are deeply conflicted about abortion. Media capitals like New York and D.C. are also places where being conflicted about expanding abortion rights is more socially comfortable than being conflicted about restricting them.

2) The Poor, Black Victims Theory

This theory holds that sparse coverage shouldn’t surprise us, despite the sensationalistic details of the Gosnell case, because horrific things happen to poor black people in urban areas all the time, and the press ignores them. Why should this be different? This theory is at odds with the counter-theory that the liberal media typically obsesses over stories about poor, black victims, at least when they’re subjected to blatant racism like the women in the Gosnell case. Sparse coverage, despite the provocative racial angle, proves a media coverup, according to the counter-theory.

Setting aside the conclusions, neither premise is completely wrong.

Horrific things do happen in poor, minority neighborhoods all the time without anyone in the press (or elsewhere) seeming to care. Newspapers cover rich neighborhoods better than poor ones, in part because that’s where a disproportionate number of subscribers live. Journalists are surrounded by educated, comfortably middle-class people. When they get a story tip from a friend, neighbor, or acquaintance, it is seldom a poor person. Blacks are underrepresented in newsrooms.

At the same time, direct evidence of racism sometimes fuels viral stories. If a doctor in Newport Beach gave white women botox in a sanitary office, but treated black women in a room filled with blood and cat feces, killing one of them through malpractice, would that be national news? I think so. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all if the racial angle in the Gosnell case had made it go viral.

I don’t know how to reconcile a news media that routinely and unapologetically ignores black kidnap victims while making a fetish of blue-eyed, blond-haired kidnap victims and that regards racial justice as an editorial imperative that explicitly shapes numerous stories, except to say that it’s complicated. There are both blind spots that touch on race and class, and a desire among journalists to be champions of racial and class justice. The results are often unpredictable.

3) We Treat Newborn Deaths As If They Don’t Matter As Much As Kid Deaths

This theory holds that if a pediatrician had killed seven 5-year-olds at the request of their mothers, it would be the story of the year. But because the Gosnell’s victims were voiceless babies (or because the culture of abortion makes us think killing babies, however awful, is also different, or because wanting to kill newborns is more common), his case wasn’t the story of the year.

4) The Covering-Abortion-Is-Miserable Theory

It goes beyond the unpleasantness-of-subject-matter and personal conflictedness. Writing about abortion, like writing about the Israel-Palestine conflict, guarantees (a) extreme abuse from readers no matter where you come down; (b) extreme, tedious scrutiny of every word you write; (c) certain knowledge that personal friends and family members will find themselves in strong, emotional disagreement with you; (d) the discouraging impression that no fact or argument presented will change anyone’s mind; (e) the accusation that you are complicit in something even worse than what Hitler did, or else that you hate women and want to control their bodies, or both.

There’s also the feeling that, by raising the subject, you’re bringing out the very worst in some people. The way they behave to one another in comments and characterize people on the other side of the debate over email is unsettling. Perhaps there’s a journalistic analogue of deliberately avoiding abortion at dinner parties, even ones where political debate is valued and encouraged.

5) The Gag Order Matters

This theory points out that the judge in the Gosnell case imposed a gag order on all involved. It is almost certainly true that doing so had some effect on the amount of news generated from the case.

6) Politicians Drive Political News

News items are often pegged to national politicians speaking out. If Tea Party senators or the Congressional Black Caucus or President Obama or John McCain and Lindsay Graham had really wanted to make the Gosnell case a big story, they could have. But no elected official was behaving in the way that they do when they want to make a piece of news into a big political story.

7) Journalists Live in a Pro-Choice Bubble

As articulated by Dave Weigel of Slate, political journalists “are, generally, pro-choice. Twice, in D.C., I’ve caused a friend to literally leave a conversation and freeze me out for a day or so because I suggested that the Stupak Amendment and the Hyde Amendment made sense. There is a bubble. Horror stories of abortionists are less likely to permeate that bubble than, say, a story about a right-wing pundit attacking an abortionist who then claims to have gotten death threats … a reporter in the bubble is less likely to be compelled by the news of an arrested abortionist.”

Says Erick Erickson, “networks focus on the things people along the coast are interested in and not what people along the American river valleys are talking about. In churches, local restaurants, and small town hair salons a lot of people across the country are talking about the terrible trial of Kermit Gosnell in Pennsylvania. It’s just not the people who interact with those who produce the news in New York City.”

8) The Media Has a Bias Against Graphic Descriptions and Imagery

After I filed my Gosnell story, an editor sagely added a warning I should’ve thought to include myself: “Please note: This post contains graphic descriptions and imagery.” Conveying the reality of this story demanded words and images more graphic than any newspaper or magazine typically includes. For that reason, journalists (or producers) who relied on, say, an Associated Press or New York Times dispatch understandably underestimated its newsworthiness. Once producers, editors, and reporters started reading the grand jury report, as conservative and progressive bloggers had, they finally realized, “Whoa, the newspaper stories really didn’t do this justice. The most graphic bits in them weren’t just cherry-picking the most sensational parts. If anything, they left out numerous gruesome details and extremely uncomfortable angles.”

Newspapers almost certainly weren’t sanitizing the story just because it was about abortion. They sanitize everything. Have you ever seen the dead body of a child killed in American drone strikes? Or what a cafe in Israel looks like after a suicide bomber attacks? How much blood do you see in the photographs curated by your local daily from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? If you saw all the wire photos you’d get a much different impression of modern war. And if the CBS Evening News aired a Gosnell story while you were eating you’d probably have turned it off. (That is one reason why dinner-hour news shows don’t air certain gruesome stories.)

9) Pro-Choice Journalists Are Willfully Ignoring the Story to Avoid Giving an Advantage to Pro-Lifers

Folks in the pro-life community earnestly believe this theory. My interactions with journalists have never given me reason to think that any significant number would ignore what they knew to be a newsworthy story for blatantly political reasons. Admittedly, I’ve interacted with a small subset of all journalists, and the very nature of this theory is that it cannot be definitively proven or disproved. But it seems to me that, for example, David Shaw’s “Abortion Bias Seeps Into The News” offers a much more plausible account of how ideological bias might creep into newsroom behavior. I do not know if his account was correct in 1990 when published or if it is correct now.

10) Ideological Bias Distorts the Crusades Journalists Are Willing to Embark Upon

This theory is advanced by Ross Douthat in his New York Times column. As he sees it, outlets that aspire to “objective” news coverage are pursuing two different goals that are in tension with one another: on one hand, they try to report and write every story in a fair, balanced, non-partisan manner; on the other hand, they believe a core duty of journalists is “fighting for the powerless against the powerful and leading America toward enlightenment.” On culture war issues, “an official journalistic commitment to neutrality coexists with the obvious ideological thrust of a thousand specific editorial choices,” Douthat writes. “What kinds of questions are asked of which politicians; which stories get wall-to-wall coverage and which ones end up buried; which side is portrayed as aggressors and which side as the aggrieved party, and on and on and on.” As the sparse coverage of the Gosnell trial suggests, he continues, “the problem here isn’t that American journalists are too quick to go on crusades. Rather, it’s that the press’s ideological blinders limit the kinds of crusades mainstream outlets are willing to entertain.”

In comments, a reader retorted, “When it comes to human rights, there is only one right side. When it comes to women’s rights, which after all are human rights, there is only one right side. When it comes to abortion, there is only one right side (it’s the side that says women are people and have the right to bodily autonomy). The story of Kermit Gosnell, the abortion provider you mentioned, isn’t about abortion per se. It’s about the lack of access to safe abortion in this country. It’s about how substandard health care *is* the standard in poor areas. But it is NOT about the morality of abortion.” If enough decision-makers in the media agree with that perspective (an impossible question to answer), coverage of the Gosnell case was affected by it. Douthat is certainly correct that there is no such thing as strict neutrality when editorial decisions must be made about what to cover, how much coverage to extend, and which stories merit efforts to “start a larger conversation.” There aren’t clearly articulated, consistent standards for any of those judgment calls, and I’m not sure that it would be possible to create them.

11) The Case Doesn’t Map onto a Specific Legislative Debate

Writing in The Daily Beast, Josh Dzieza argues, “When Trayvon Martin (to use the standard comparison) went from local to national story, it was partly because there was a debate over stand-your-ground laws and whether his killing constituted murder or self defense. There’s no such dispute here. The question isn’t whether what Gosnell is accused of doing should be illegal: he’s on trial because it clearly is. Gosnell could become a useful pro-life bogeyman, but it’s not clear what policies the antiabortion movement would use his case to push for.” Meanwhile, he adds, abortion rights activists are both wary of passing more abortion clinic regulations (lest access decrease) and mortified by the regulatory failures that enabled Gosnell.

Perhaps there’s something to the notion that neither side in the abortion debate could use the Gosnell case as a clear cut argument for passing a specific piece of legislation they’re currently prioritizing. The fact that much of what he did was already illegal changes the political implications of the case. And political implications often drive coverage more than a story’s importance.

12) Conservatives Are Engaged in a “Work the Refs” Hustle

Kevin Drum makes the case by reviewing coverage in The Washington Times:

On March 18, they ran an AP dispatch about the start of the trial. Since then, they haven’t published a single additional piece. However, they have published the following:

March 27: An op-ed by Christopher Harper about the media’s “shameful” silence concerning the Gosnell case.

April 8: A news story about the “media blackout” of the Gosnell trial for “political reasons.”

April 11: An editorial deploring the fact that “this grim story was not something for the morning papers or the evening news, at least not for those reading the ‘mainstream’ newspapers or watching ABC, CBS or NBC.”

April 11: A news story reporting that conservative House members “took to the floor to denounce what they call a ‘national media cover-up’ of the sensational case.”

April 12: A news story reporting that “conservatives and other pro-life advocates who are upset with the lack of coverage of the case are taking to social media sites in droves.”

April 13: A weekly news recap headlined, “Abortion doctor on trial, but media not interested.”

April 14: An op-ed about our “undistinguished press corps,” listing all their recent shortcomings. “Most egregious of all, though, has been the lack of coverage on the ‘House of Horror’ trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell.”

And that brings us to today. Adding it all up, we have a grand total of one story about the trial itself and seven stories complaining that other media outlets aren’t covering the trial. It’s pretty obvious what the priorities are here.

There are, as I’ve mentioned, conservative outlets like National Review that have always treated the Gosnell story as if it’s important. Certain writers, like Mark Steyn, don’t fit Drum’s theory. But there are definitely outlets and writers who gave Gosnell less coverage than, say, the New York Times, and are now expressing outrage at the lack of coverage. Media Matters accuses the New York Post of doing this. Said Paul Mirengoff in an April 12, 2013 post at Powerline:

I don’t believe we have commented on the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. I guess that’s because, although some, if not all, of us at Power Line are pro-life (I haven’t taken a full survey), none of us has the abortion beat. Or maybe it’s because we have had nothing of particular interest to add to the discussion of this gruesome affair, in which a child screamed after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure, the spinal cords of babies were snipped, and fetuses “rained” (in the words of one witness). Power Line does, however, handle the media beat. Therefore, we should at least note the lack of coverage the Gosnell trial has received.

Movement conservatives spend a lot more time covering “the media beat” than the abortion beat. Or any other beat, for that matter. Would this story have attracted more attention sooner if, rather than writing media-bias columns, conservatives just kept rendering details of the grand jury report? Hard to say. My account of the grand jury report was widely shared on social media. And writing it didn’t require a travel budget or “mainstream media” pixie dust. The whole thing is online.

13) Horrific as It Is, This Case Doesn’t Speak to Anything Larger About Abortion

This theory runs through a lot of left-of-center commentary. Way back in 2011, for example, when William Saletan used the Gosnell case as a vehicle to discuss late-term abortion generally, a writer at Feministing argued doing so was inappropriate because “If this doctor delivered these infants, live infants that were breathing and then killed them? Let’s make something clear: That is not abortion.”

She continued:

Only 1.5% of abortions occur after 21 weeks of pregnancy. And what do you think the overwhelming majority of those cases are? Women who might die if they don’t have one. Fetuses who wouldn’t survive outside of the womb. Fetuses with such extreme abnormalities that they’d suffer during what would be a very brief time on this earth. The fact that people assume women actually want to have an abortion in the third trimester is beyond me — not to mention unbelievably offensive to the women who have had to make these very difficult decisions.

If I can interject here, if you want to understand why the debate over the media coverage of Gosnell is so polarized, it’s important to remember that some people, like the writer above, emphatically believe Gosnell is an aberration that says nothing larger about abortion in America. And other people, like Peter Wehner, emphatically believe that what he calls the “lethal logic” employed by Gosnell cannot be entirely disconnected from policy debate over abortion.

He cites this exchange in which a lobbyist representing the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates speaks to Florida legislators:

I’d actually love to see the Feministing writer and Wehner debate the question.

14) Lots of Horrific Stories Don’t Get Covered

Here’s a list of children who have been killed in drone attacks approved by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. How many of their stories have you read about? Could you say how many kids we’ve killed in Pakistan and Yemen? I have theories about why those dead kids haven’t ever been treated as a major national story. What’s certain is that neither liberal media bias nor pro-choice bias are among the reasons … which may or may not tell us anything about Gosnell coverage.

****

This is, by no means, an exhaustive list of theories. In fact, you’ll most likely find more in the comments. The only conclusions I’ll offer are these: If you think any one theory completely explains how this case has been covered, you’re almost certainly wrong. (Personally, I find it plausible that parts of almost all of these theories and many more affected coverage.) And like the abortion debate itself, the debate over Gosnell coverage has earnest, smart, well-meaning people on all sides. If you think otherwise, you haven’t engaged enough people with the perspective you’re demonizing. The abortion debate can’t be avoided. Part of its unpleasantness can.Be good to one another in comments.

__
*To avoid confusion, let’s be explicit about what that coverage actually entailed. Prior to late last week, the Gosnell trial generated significant local coverage within metropolitan Philadelphia. As for outlets outside Philly, there was coverage back in 2011 from Katha Pollitt in The Nation, Lori Adelman at NBC’s The Grio, Will Saletan in Slate on three separate occasions, the Associated Press, NPR, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Rich Lowry in National Review, the editors of that publication, Mark Steyn on various occasions, Joseph Bottum of The Weekly Standard, niche sites dedicated to feminism, abortion rights, and anti-abortion advocacy, and others I’m missing. After 2011, the next time that multiple prominent outlets covered the subject was in March 2013 when the trial started. Here’s the New York Times story noting that news. It ran on page A17 of the New York edition. That rundown shows there wasn’t a mainstream media “blackout” or a literal conspiracy to keep the case secret. At the same time, many outlets failed to cover the story, and most outlets that covered it didn’t give it the depth or prominent play that I’ve argued it deserved.

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http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/14-theories-for-why-kermit-gosnells-case-didnt-get-more-media-attention/274966/

Filed under: - Faith, Religion, Goodness - What is the Soul of a man?, - Read 'em and weep: The Daily News Tagged: abortion, Associated Press, Cheryl Sullenger, crime, David Weigel, district attorney, Gosnell, Grand Jury, Jack McMahon, Jeffrey Dahmer, Josef Mengele, Kermit Gosnell, Kirsten Powers, murder, New York Times, news, NY Times, NYTimes, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly, Pregnancy, Troy Newman, twitter, United States, USA TODAY, Washington Post

Alabama Republican Introduces Bill to Eliminate Overtime Pay

Warm Southern Breeze — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:05:44 +0000

I wouldn’t have believed it had I not read it for myself from the official Congressional website.

U.S. Representative Martha Roby, a Republican from Alabama’s 2d Congressional District has introduced H.R. 1406, officially named the “Working Families Flexibility Act of 2013″ which would END the requirement of the Fair Labor Standards Act for employers to pay Time-and-a-Half to employees for every hour worked over 40 in one week.

http://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/1406

The Congressional Budget Office has reported on the bill, and in part wrote that:

“H.R. 1406 would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to provide compensatory time for employees in the private sector. In lieu of overtime pay, employees could receive compensatory time off at a rate not less than one and one-half hours for each hour of employment for which overtime pay would otherwise have been required. Such compensatory time could be provided only in accordance with a collective bargaining agreement or with the consent of affected employees. The changes would be effective for five years after enactment of the bill.”

The CBO’s full report of the one page document may be downloaded here:
(https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/hr1406.pdf)

Mrs. Roby’s act, H.R. 1406, would be, according to the CBO report, “revenue neutral.” In other words, it would NOT affect the cost or performance of the federal government, or of state or local governments, nor would it impose any costs upon them. In fact, the report states:

“Enacting H.R. 1406 would not affect direct spending or revenues; therefore, pay-as-you-go procedures do not apply. Implementing the bill also would not affect spending subject to appropriation. H.R. 1406 contains no intergovernmental or private-sector mandates as defined in the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act and would impose no costs on state, local, or tribal governments.”

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/44100

Note to the reader: Contained in this entry are Links to these topics on the Wikipedia site: Fair Labor Standards Act, Unfunded Mandates Reform Act, Congressional Budget Office, compensatory time, Martha Roby, U.S. House of Representatives, Alabama, Wikipedia, Alabama’s 2d Congressional District, Mises Institute, child labor, collective bargaining agreement, and collective bargaining.

This is a blatant effort to eliminate employees legal rights and protections.

In my opinion, Mrs. Roby and the exceeding majority of her GOP cohorts are radicals who are Hell-bent upon destroying every hard-gained law that protects American employees from abuses by their employers. It wouldn’t surprise me to continue to see efforts to whittle away at Labor Laws, including those forbidding Child Labor. This is such a shocking development that I am incensed beyond imagination. It would not surprise me in the least to continue seeing such efforts by Republicans to chip away at Employees Rights, up to and including prohibitions on Child Labor.

Ideologically, of course, the action proposed by this bill is in keeping with the radicalized wing of the GOP, which has been hijacked and co-opted by the TEA Party movement, which is nothing more than a thinly disguised Libertarian in Republican’s clothes. Those are the types who also align themselves with the Utopian, ivory-towered, theoretical visions of the Mises Institute, which is headquartered in Auburn, Alabama. For those who may not be aware, the Mises Institute teaches that government should not exist, but that instead of government, free enterprise should rule mankind. Their theoretical vision for “free markets” cannot work, because it supposes a perfect world.

Concerning H.R. 1406 introduced by Mrs. Roby, it is also a hypocritical bill, because “compensatory time could be provided only in accordance with a collective bargaining agreement or with the consent of affected employees,” and as is well known, Republicans are at increasing odds with Labor Unions and Organized Labor, and continue seeking to enact laws that strip away protections granted by collective bargaining agreements, which themselves are virtually non-existent in so-called “Right to Work” states, which in large part are in the Southeast. The term itself – Right to Work – is a misnomer, because in those states, an employee has NO RIGHT to work, and can be fired for any reason. Your hair is curly? You’re fired. Your eyes are blue? You’re fired. The “Right to Work” states are also called “Employment At Will” states, which is an attempt at “rebranding” the issue, as if it empowers the employee, when in fact, it does not.

Philosophically, H.R. 1406 is an effort to return to the “bad old days” in which deaths in unsafe working conditions were common throughout the United States; in which Child Labor was common; in which employers did not have to pay their employees any wages, and often changed their rates of pay – to reduce it – without the employees’ knowledge or consent, and more.

It is, in essence, very much like the story told in the Exodus account, in which the Hebrew children suffered oppression in their labors at the hands of Pharaoh, who at last, told them that they were to “make more bricks, but could not use hay.” And surprisingly, it’s not a new message. Today, we say “Do more with less.” In that historical narrative, in return, Moses delivered a message to Pharaoh from the Almighty to “Let my people go.”

Official Portrait of Martha Roby, Republican Representative from Alabama’s 2d Congressional District, on Monday, October, 10, 2011, in Washington, D.C. – Photo by Shealah Craighead

In the modern scenario, people are already not being paid enough to survive, CEO’s, BIG BUSINESS and the über-wealthy are paying lobbyists to curry favor with Congress to lower tax rates upon the very wealthy or eliminate corporate income tax, and like modern-day pirates, they hide their vast accumulated wealth in tropical island paradise tax havens such as the Antilles, Bermuda, Caymans, Seychelles and more. It’s theft by deception, pure and simple.

In turn, government oppresses the employees by making or eliminating laws that would empower or favor employees over the denizen hoards of corporate lawyers protecting their Big Business employers, and they’re made to believe they’re free, but that somehow, when the weak are made strong, it is the “liberal Democrats” and Nancy Pelosi who are behind every effort to undermine their way of life.

Martha Roby’s bill – H.R. 1406 – would render employees powerless against their employers who in turn could legally refuse to pay them for mandatory overtime. Don’t like those terms? Don’t like working here? Tough. You’re free to leave. After all, this is an “employment at will state.”

Is this the scenario you want for yourself or your children?

What do you think?

Filed under: - Lost In Space: TOTALLY Discombobulated, - Politics... that "dirty" little "game" that first begins in the home. Tagged: Alabama, cheat, child labor, compensation, Congressional Budget Office, deception, Egypt, employees, Fair Labor Standards Act, family, GOP, governance, government, Hewlett-Packard, industrialist, labor, law, Let my people go., liars, management, Martha Roby, Moses, offshore, offshoring, overtime, overtime pay, pay, Pharaoh, policy, poll, radical, rate, Republican, Right to Work, Robber Baron, Robber Barons, Roby, Southen Poverty Law Center, steal, taxes, Tea Party movement, theft, theives, Time-and-a-half, unfriendly, United States, United States House of Representatives, unjust, weasel, Wikipedia

Boston Marathon Bombing Attracts Internet Crazies

Warm Southern Breeze — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:19:47 +0000

Examine the photo below, and the question posed in it.

And then, ponder my composed response below it.

Herman Cain, ever the GOP’s insane pizza presidential candidate, has yet again demonstrated his lunacy.

Naw… give ‘em pizza!

But, on a slightly more serious note… that question is patently ludicrous and absurd upon it’s face. It’s akin to a Straw Man Fallacy.

Why?

Amidst a crowd of people, (presumably) two men walk, (allegedly) with backpacks containing IEDs. In full view of all present, they place those bomb-laden backpacks in the midst of that same crowd of people, depart, and the bombs later detonate.

What I’d like to know is this:
How would arming every single person present have prevented that from happening?

Is the writer suggesting the use of vigilante justice?

And yet, more than anything, this asinine site with its equally deranged authors only serves to demonstrate the preposterousness of their thinking. Which makes me all the more glad that the political aspirations of Herman Cain – a liar and adulterer, among other his dubious distinctions – were resoundingly defeated by the exposure of his puerile thinking.

—

More details at the following URL:

http://www.caintv.com/just-wondering-wouldnt-it-be-g

Filed under: - Did they REALLY say that?, - Lost In Space: TOTALLY Discombobulated Tagged: Backpack, Boston, Boston Marathon, fallacy, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Flickr, Herman Cain, Improvised explosive device, lunacy, Middle East, photograph, Reddit, Straw man, Straw Man Fallacy

Tracking Data: HPV Vaccine has lowered Genital Warts

Warm Southern Breeze — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 03:18:39 +0000

GET THE VACCINE FOR YOURSELF & YOUR CHILDREN!

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Genital Wart Decline Tracked to HPV Vaccine

By Charles Bankhead, Staff Writer, MedPage Today

Published: April 18, 2013

Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco

The incidence of genital warts declined by more than 90% in adolescent and teenage girls in the first 4 to 5 years after introduction of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in Australia.
Note that the reductions in wart incidence among girls and women were accompanied by 50% to 80% decreases in the incidence of genital warts among heterosexual boys and young men although no decline in wart frequency was seen in heterosexual women or men older than 30.

The incidence of genital warts declined by more than 90% in adolescent and teenage girls in the first 4 to 5 years after introduction of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in Australia, investigators reported.

Genital warts occurred more than 70% less often among women 21 to 30, as compared with the 3 to 4 years before the vaccine became available. The reductions in wart incidence among girls and women were accompanied by 50% to 80% decreases in the incidence of genital warts among heterosexual boys and young men.

No decline in wart frequency was seen in heterosexual women or men older than 30, Basil Donovan, MD, of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, and co-authors reported online in BMJ.

“In 2011 no genital wart diagnoses were made among 235 women under 21 years of age who reported prior human papillomavirus vaccination,” the authors noted. “The significant declines in the proportion of young women found to have genital warts and the absence of genital warts in vaccinated women in 2011 suggests that the human papillomavirus vaccine has high efficacy outside the trial setting. Large declines in diagnoses of genital warts in heterosexual men are probably due to herd immunity.”

The study provided a glimpse of the impact of HPV vaccination in a real-world community setting as opposed to a clinical trial.

“It actually generated data consistent with what we hoped and predicted would happen,” said Greg Poland, MD, of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “It showed in a large study that [the vaccine] worked and it worked fabulously.”

It is probable that the results are readily applicable to the U.S. and other countries that have introduced HPV vaccination, he added. In particular, the results should reassure girls, young women, and parents that the vaccine is safe, effective, and does not promote promiscuity, which has been a concern to some people.

Poland was not involved in the study.

In 2007 Australia implemented one of the first nationwide HPV vaccination programs for girls and young women. The nationally funded program provides free vaccination to girls 12 to 13 in schools, and a vaccination “catch-up” program from 2007 to 2009 offered vaccinations to girls 13 to 18 and women 18 to 26.

The vaccination program included a surveillance network to monitor the effect of the vaccine on the incidence of genital warts in patients seen at sexual health services clinics. The first report from the program, 2 years after its implementation, showed a 59% reduction in wart incidence among vaccine-eligible women 12 to 26 and a 39% decrease in heterosexual men of the same age.

Donovan and colleagues updated the population effects of the vaccination program for 2007 to 2011.

From 2004 to 2011, 85,770 native-born Australians made initial visits to eight sexual health services. Evaluations showed that 7,686 (9.0%) of the patients had new diagnoses of genital warts (2,394 women and 5,292 men). From 2004 to 2007 the proportion of women with genital warts increased from 8.9% to 9.6% and then decreased to 2.7% by 2011. Among men, the rate declined from 12.8% to 11.7% during the first years, followed by a decrease to 7.4% by 2011.

The largest decline in genital-wart incidence occurred among women younger than 21. From a peak of 11.5% in 2007, the incidence of genital warts decreased to 0.85% by 2011, representing a reduction of 92.6% (P<0.001). Among women 21 to 30, the incidence of genital warts declined slightly from 12.5% in 2004 to 11.3% in 2007 before falling to 3.1% by 2011, a 72.6% decrease (P<0.001). The incidence did not decline significantly among women older than 30.

Rates of genital warts among heterosexual men seen at the sexual health services facilities increased by 68% (7.2% to 12.1%) from 2004 to 2007 (P<0.01) but declined by 82.8% to a low of 2.2% in 2011 (P<0.001). The incidence not changed significantly over time among men 21 to 30 or those older than 30.

Authors of a related editorial said the study showed a “remarkable reduction” in genital warts among women younger than 21 and predicted that “near eradication of genital warts in young Australian women will probably have a major impact on the costs of sexual healthcare.”

“It remains to be seen whether we will see similar dramatic reductions in HPV-16 and HPV-18 associated diseases, such as cervical cancer, vulval cancer, other anogenital cancers, and head and neck tumors as a result of national vaccination programs,” wrote Simon Barton, MD, of the Chelsea and Westminster Foundation Trust in London, and Colm O’Mahony, MD, of the Countess of Chester Trust in Chester, England.

“This is likely given the reported evidence of the vaccines. It is hoped that future vaccines will protect against other HPV types, such as types 31 and 45, which are also involved in the genesis of genital cancer. Countries should carefully explore whether it is economically feasible to vaccinate young men.”

The study was supported by CSL Biotherapies.

Donovan disclosed relationships with CSL Biotherapies, Sanofi Pasteur, and Merck. Co-authors disclosed relationships with CSL Biotherapies, Sanofi Pasteur MSD, Merck, and the Australian advisory board for the Gardasil HPV vaccine.

Barton and O’Mahony disclosed relationships with GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Pasteur MSD.

Primary source: BMJ
Source reference:
Ali H, et al “Genital warts in young Australians five years into national human papillomavirus vaccination program: National surveillance data” BMJ 2013; DOI: 10.1136/bjm.f2032.

Additional source: BMJ
Source reference:
Barton S, O’Mahony C “HPV vaccination — Reaping the rewards of the appliance of science” BMJ 2013; DOI: 10.1136/bmj.f2184.

—
http://www.medpagetoday.com/InfectiousDisease/STDs/38567

Filed under: - Do you feel like we do, Dr. Who?, - Read 'em and weep: The Daily News Tagged: Australia, BMJ, Genital wart, GlaxoSmithKline, HPV, HPV vaccine, Human papillomavirus, Mayo Clinic, University of New South Wales

Georgia Wine Exportation Increases

Warm Southern Breeze — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:45:08 +0000

While this story is about the nation known as Georgia, given the numerous convoluted and antiquated laws governing beverage alcohol in the Southern United States, it could very well be Georgia… Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, or Arkansas.

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Something Old, Something New: Georgian Wines Adapt To Changing Market

April 17, 2013

by Glenn Kates

KISISKHEVI, Georgia — Seven years ago, Burkhard Schuchmann, a retired German railroad executive, arrived for the first time in this lush region, where the snow-capped Caucasian mountains cast a long shadow over the grapevines that line the low-lying fields.It was 2006 and Russia had recently imposed a crippling embargo on Georgian wine.Schuchmann decided to open a winery nevertheless.

“To see it from today’s point of view, Georgians can be lucky that the embargo came,” Schuchmann says. “Because then they were forced to [focus on] quality and to think about marketing. There was no need before.”

After mostly “satisfactory” inspections by Russia’s consumer-rights agency in February and March, Georgian wines will soon be sold in Russia again. But Russians, perhaps expecting the sweet, syrupy taste of years past, may be surprised by the changing nature of Georgian vintage.

Burkhard Schuchmann opened a winery in Georgia because he thought he could compete outside of Russia by modernizing the industry.

In 2005, Georgia exported 80 percent of its wine to Russia. But in the seven years since the embargo, Georgian winemakers, frantically seeking to appeal to Western markets, have dramatically shifted their technique, changing both the processing and the taste portfolio of the wine.

At the same time, in Russia, with inexpensive Georgian wines absent from the market, imports from France, Italy, and Spain have made impressive gains. Now a vastly changed, more expensive wine is about to enter a more diverse market than the one it left.

Four generations of the Nikolaishvili family have made wine in Kakheti.

Schuchmann, who hired a third-generation Georgian winemaker to create his products, has invested about $10 million and exports mostly to Europe and Central Asia. He says he came to Georgia because he believed that the alluring grape varieties, combined with the region’s long history of viticulture, could make its wine competitive in previously unexplored markets.

Bigger But Maybe Not Better

A few miles up the road from the German entrepreneur’s winery, Nikoloz Nikolaishvili manages the family vines that were first set by his great grandparents over a century before Schuchmann arrived.

He has also made changes — not in the quality of the wine, which he insists has always been premium, but in his processing methods. About five years ago he bought a European style crusher, which unlike the Georgian one, separates the grapes from their bunches.

“When there comes a demand, there comes a need to do something,” he says.

Burkhard Schuchmann’s wine-processing plant.

Real demand for his wine has only materialized in the last decade. In Soviet times, when the sale of wine for private profit was forbidden, only family and friends could enjoy the fermented fruit of the Nikolaishvili family’s labor.

There are hundreds of varieties of grapes in Georgia, but the Soviet Union’s alcohol authority restricted wine harvests in the country to fewer than 20 sorts. Forced, like other industries, to meet quota demands, the quality suffered. And the methods of production were, say people here, no more Georgian than they were European.

Nonetheless, Georgian wine was largely viewed as superior to the mainstream Moldovan and Russian options. When the Soviet Union collapsed, wines from Georgia remained popular and there was little incentive to update the processing methods. By 2005, 80 percent of Georgian wine exports went to Russia.

A Resurrection Of Sorts

In 2006, two years before the Russia-Georgia War but amid increasing political tensions, Russia banned imports of Georgian wine, citing sanitary violations. The decision was widely seen as politically motivated, but there was also widespread acknowledgment that much of the wine being shipped to Russia did have unnatural additives.

“In Russia we were selling everything,” Otar Sharashenidze, a manager at Vino Underground, an upscale organic wine cellar in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, explains. “If there was a sign on the label that it was wine, they just sold it; it didn’t matter if it was good wine or bad wine, they were selling it.”

The embargo, somewhat paradoxically, both accelerated the adoption of modern European methods and contributed to a resurgence of ancient Georgian means of viticulture dating as far back as six millennia.

In the old style, the grapes are mashed together with their bunches and placed in a “qvevri,” or clay barrel, where they are manually pressed and turned for 10-12 days. They are then sealed and stored for at least a year before being bottled. The process creates a thicker, typically drier wine, or, as one Kakheti guide called it, a “manly” flavor.

Large wineries, like Schuchmann’s, which currently produces 30 percent of its wine in qvevris, are hoping the unique style can set it apart from other European vintages. Nikolaishvili’s family splits production between qvevris and European oak barrels.

‘Buy Or Don’t Buy’

According to Artur Sarkisyan, director of the Union of Sommelier and Experts of Russia, neither the rejuvenated Georgian standard nor the European processed wine will suffice to give Georgian wine the preferred place in the Russian market that it once enjoyed.

According to Sarkisyan, who participated in the Russian inspections of Georgia’s wines, the market has become more sophisticated in recent years.

Bottles of wine at the CHELTI winery in Kvareli before their shipment to Russia.

“There’s just a certain nostalgia for Georgian wine,” Sarkisyan says. “Because of this nostalgia, when the wine first enters the market people will buy it, but they’ll find that the price won’t be less than 300 to 400 rubles for a bottle. That’s already in the category of wines from Chile, Italy, and Australia. So people will have a choice — buy or don’t buy Georgian wine.”

Combined imports to Russia from France, Italy, and Spain have risen from 11 percent in 2006 to 50 percent in 2011, according to the Union of Oenologists and Winemakers of Russia. Perhaps as a precursor to the fate of Georgian vintage, Moldovan wine, which was banned in 2006 and then reinstated, has suffered serious losses in market share.

Russia began considering an end to the embargo shortly after Bidzina Ivanishvili battled his way into the prime minister’s seat, defeating the party of President Mikhail Saakashvili, who has had a bitter relationship with Moscow. Ivanishvili has talked of improving the relationship with Moscow and has promoted resumption of trade as important to strengthening the Georgian economy.

Russian thirst for Georgian wine still appears strong. Schuchmann said that at a major wine fair in Germany more than half of inquiries came from Russian distributors. And Sharashenidze, the Tbilisi manager, said Russians are his best customers — buying bottles to take home by the dozen — despite the absence of the sweet stuff they may have remembered from years past.

‘We’ve Survived’

The Georgian wine industry, though, has learned to survive without Russia. Although overall exports dropped sharply from a high of $81 million in 2005, they have risen since. In 2012, according to the Georgian Wine Association, exports reached $65 million, a 19 percent increase over the previous year.

Schuchmann’s winery in Kisiskhevi has been shortlisted for permission to export to Russia. But he says this will constitute a minority of his sales.

“That’s wonderful with Russia,” Schuchmann says, “but not more than roughly 25 percent of my production will go to Russia, because I don’t want to make the same mistake as they did in the past — to become dependent on one market.”

When asked about the end of the embargo, Nikolaishvili, his nieces and nephews playing among the grapevines that they may tend one day, is stoic.

“We’ve already had several years to turn away and toss out our dependence on Russia and we’ve survived,” Nikolaishvili says.

Filed under: - Business... None of yours, - Read 'em and weep: The Daily News Tagged: agriculture, Alcohol, Arkansas, beverage, Bidzina Ivanishvili, booze, bottle, business, drink, enterprise, entrepreneur, Europe, export, farming, food, Georgia, Georgian wine, government, history, import, industry, investment, liquor, marketing, money, Moscow, regulation, rural, rural life, Russia, Schuchmann, Southern United States, Soviet Union, Tbilisi, tradition, wine