American exceptional-fat-and-cluelessism

NYT, Filed at 7:49 p.m. EST

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Two lesbian teens at Champlin Park High School have taken the state's largest school district to federal court because they want a judge to force the district to allow them to make a political statement by making a high-profile entrance to a pep fest as a couple on Monday.

Students at the school elected Desiree "Dez" Shelton and Sarah Lindstrom, both 18-year-old seniors, earlier this month as part of the Snow Days Pep Fest Royalty Court. Members of the court have traditionally been put into male-female couples and processed through the field house to a stage while an announcer said a few facts about each couple. The 2011 pep fest is scheduled for Monday afternoon.

A district spokeswoman said the Champlin Park High School principal didn't want the young women to walk in together because he feared they would be teased, but the lawsuit said denying them that opportunity was discrimination and an infringement of their First Amendment rights. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights filed the lawsuit Friday afternoon on their behalf.

Anoka-Hennepin schools spokeswoman Mary Olson said the women said they weren't comfortable walking in with a male student. Principal Michael George was concerned about the reaction of other students to a lesbian couple walking in together, Olson said, so on Friday the district decided the royal court would arrive individually or accompanied by a parent or favorite teacher.

"We believe we have come up with a better practice that is more tolerate and acceptable to all students," Olson said, adding that the traditional method assumed students were heterosexual while the new system makes no assumptions at all.

Sam Wolfe, a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that wasn't good enough. "The intent is really clear," he said. "The district does not want the same-sex couple walking in together."

But, the lawsuit said, walking in together was precisely why Shelton and Lindstrom campaigned to be elected by their peers in the first place. "Their intention was to make a political and public statement about gender roles" and lesbian and gay students, the lawsuit said.

Wolfe noted Shelton and Lindstrom were selected by their fellow students, suggesting the student body may be more comfortable with the teens' sexual orientation than administrators believe.

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OK, let's get this out of the way quickly. I believe Gay Americans and Straight Americans (as well as Bi and TG people) should have exactly the same rights, responsibilities, and protections under law. Since gay and straight people are people, gay and straight people also should be afforded equal respect due every human being. That covers everybody; every sexual majority and minority. Any ideology or doctrine that implies otherwise is not valid. End of discussion.

That being said, at this very moment, a revolution in Egypt is threatening to become a regional cataclysm with global implications (think oil), America is becoming "not America" because a significant number of its citizens no longer want to accept the responsibilities of citizenship ( ~50% voter turnout, reaganism-teapartyism, an entrenched plutocracy attempting to do away with democracy), and use of non-renewable resources to power human society is poisoning the planet.

Do we have the luxury of caring who goes down on whom? Are we Americans inhabiting an alternate universe?

Does inflammatory rhetoric lead to violence? Naaaaah...no proof

NYT today

NAIROBI, Kenya — David Kato knew he was a marked man.

As the most outspoken gay rights advocate in Uganda, a country where homophobia is so severe that Parliament is considering a bill to execute gay people, he had received a stream of death threats, his friends said. A few months ago, a Ugandan newspaper ran an anti-gay diatribe with Mr. Kato’s picture on the front page under a banner urging, “Hang Them.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Kato was beaten to death with a hammer in his rough and tumble neighborhood. Police officials were quick to chalk up the motive to robbery, but the small and increasingly besieged gay community in Uganda suspects otherwise.

“David’s death is a result of the hatred planted in Uganda by U.S Evangelicals in 2009,” said Val Kalende, the chairperson of one of Uganda’s gay rights groups, in a statement. “The Ugandan Government and the so-called U.S Evangelicals must take responsibility for David’s blood.”

Mrs. Kalende was referring to visits in March 2009 by a group of American evangelicals (ed. note: http://exodusinternational.org/), who held rallies and workshops in Uganda discussing how to make gay people straight, how gay men sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” intended to “defeat the marriage-based society.”

The Americans involved said they had no intention of stoking a violent reaction. But the anti-gay bill came shortly thereafter. Some of the Ugandan politicians and preachers who wrote it had attended those sessions and said that they had discussed the legislation with the Americans.

Them damn entitlements...get the governmint out of our lives AND deaths

Social Security?

Interesting concept in present day amerika. The best way to be socially secure is to have a shitload of money and unlimited power. That way, you don't have to care about anything or anyone. -well, I do volunteer work at my church!...I gave at the office!...my children are everything in the world to me!...I voted for Obama you have no idea the problems that caused!...if all the taxes I paid into socialsecurity I could've invested myself, anyway I'll never get my money back and why should I pay for someone else's problems you think everything came easy I worked like a dog and now they tax me to death because some nigger crack whore shits out babies...I WANNA PLAY GOLF I EARNED IT!!!

- OK, don't read this blog entry.

Let's get didactic. Let's return to sophomore year highskool.

Class, how long will a typical American live? Seventy, eighty years? OK, what happens after those seventy, eighty years? Yup, the person dies. What percentage of those people die? no...no...well, it's 100%! Yeah! Now, when those people get to the last ten, fifteen years of their lives, do you think a lot or few of them will be too sick to work?...I know your granddad Joe used to shovel snow when he was 107, and he used to complain that mommom wouldn't hop in the sack with him, but do you think he was typical? I don't know your family?

Hey class, cool it. OK, the fact is, that all those people are going to die, and most of them will be too sick to work. You too when you get to be that age, Missy. Everybody.

Now if you were president of an insurance company, would you want to sell insurance on a risk where everyone dies and most people can't work? That's a real interesting idea Joey, charge real high premiums and then hire lawyers and muscle to keep from paying claims, but I think in most places, that business model would be illegal. Susie? Run the company as a non-profit? That's interesting, too, but...let me explain it like sports so everyone understands. You've got this pro football league. All the teams want to win, because winners get the most money. That's right, Joey, they're rad! Now let's say you have an expansion team, called the Philadelphia Ultimate Quakers. They have a meeting, and decide that what it takes to win, violence, is against their religion, and they don't want to loose...yes Billy, that would be so gay...so they decide to tie all their games. That's right, if the yearly meeting wouldn't come up with the cash, they won't be around next year. Now, what if there was an insurance company that actually is the US Government, and everyone who was an American Citizen paid in premiums, and then everyone was insured against getting old, starving and dying? And everybody got benefits when they needed them, no questions asked?...WHAT? THAT'D BE LIKE TAXES AND YOU CAN'T DO THAT IN AMERICA...NO?...WHAT? (...shit, there's the bell...)...CLASS!!!!

ARE WE NOT MEN?

Did you look into my Cold War history post? A lot of statements aren't consistent!

MKULTRA??

Psychiatrist Dr Ewen Cameron's obit?

To anyone who knew Ewen Cameron intimately, it became obvious that here was a man who was vitally concerned with the well-being of men everywhere. He had a genuine disregard for national barriers, racial variations and religious differences. He had a world perspective on social, economic and political problems and his creed can, I believe, best be described in the world of our own Canadian poet,

F. R. Scott, when he says,

"The World is My Country

The Human Race is My Race

The Spirit of Man is My God

The Future of Man is My Heaven."

Rockefeller?

And if you scratch the surface, The Grateful Dead?

Is it worth pursuing? Dunno...I'm busy reading a music theory book by Paul Hindemith....

I SAY IT'S ALL JUST WIND IN SAILS

AP today

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley told a church crowd just moments into his new administration that those who have not accepted Jesus as their savior are not his brothers and sisters, shocking some critics who questioned Tuesday whether he can be fair to non-Christians.

Speaking to a large crowd Monday at Montgomery's Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church — where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached — Bentley said that "if you're a Christian and you're saved ... it makes you and me brother and sister," according to a report in the Birmingham News.

"Now I will have to say that, if we don't have the same daddy, we're not brothers and sisters," he added, according to the paper. "So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother."

Bentley, 67, a retired dermatologist, had been sworn in earlier Monday.

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Perhaps Gov Bentley (who will not be anyone's sister, no sir) likes to get people really, really, pissed off. I mean to the point of causing spontaneous tracheostomy to occur in people screaming their disapproval. As part of an ongoing research project to accurately define the border between "pissed off" and "ballistic",  I once requested "The Horst Wessel Song" ("The Flag Up High") at a Peter, Paul & Mary concert. I elicited no response from the audience, other than a confused "how does that go?" from the person sitting next to me. This necessitated a re-write of the "Methodology" section of the grant when it came up for renewal.

Perhaps I should submit a business plan to Goldman Sachs to get start-up funding for a chain of Unfriendly Restaurants in Alabama. I plan to have vampire squid on the menu.

click here

EVOLVING UP FROM LITTLE SNAILS

Discussion board, News Journal (Wilmington, DE)

1/18/2011 9:03:57 AM

joe-polucka wrote:
Replying to gleitner:

bearded midget! you are a frik'n redneck

thats an honor comming from a gay communist.


Recommend(1) New Post Reply to this Post Report Abuse

THEY TELL US THAT WE LOST OUR TAILS

I did my undergrad at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois (BA, 1976 Chemistry). I'm told that NU is a good place to get an education nowadays, but is very expensive. When I was there, however, many of the faculty members with whom I interacted had little or no interest in teaching undergraduates. I'll even name names. Faculty who had no interest teaching undergrads included Culver, Heithaus, Beattie, (Biological Sciences), Shriver, Nitzan, Klotz, Van Duyne, (Chemistry), Margoliash, Lorand, Dumas, (Biochemistry/Molecular Biology), Joravsky, (History) Roebuck, (Classics, by then, he was simply reading aloud from his venerable book), and several purveyors of English, Anthropology, and Political Science whose names I no longer recall. My favorite Chinese Restaurant, however, was called the Phoenix Inn, a pleasant memory.

It didn't matter. Useless pseudo-educators at NU provided reading lists, reserve lists, and specific literature. There was a big library. I simply attended lectures taught by real educators and labs where my absence could be noted. I only showed up at time-wasters to turn in bluebooks. I read every word "assigned" to me (and more!) at NU and avoided attending half of my classes. I learned how to educate myself. Grad school, intellectually, was no big deal (PhD 1981, Illinois-UC Chemistry). The skill of self education made my truncated professional career possible and successful.

Don't blame your teachers.

Today, we have broadband internet, and access to knowledge aggregators like EBSCO, MEDLINE, Google, and Thompson. For a motivated individual, this current state of affairs means essentially all of human knowledge is available for study. Who needs motor neurons? Why use this cyber-power to tweet and share pictures of boobs and beer pong?

Here, check this out. This is cold war history...this'll get ya started...

Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A.
By TIM WEINER
Published: March 10, 1999 New York Times

WASHINGTON, March 9 — Sidney Gottlieb, who presided over the Central Intelligence Agency's cold-war efforts to control the human mind and provided the agency poisons to kill Fidel Castro, died on Sunday in Washington, Va. He was 80 and had spent his later years caring for dying patients, trying to run a commune, folk dancing, consciousness-raising and fighting lawsuits from survivors of his secret tests.

Friends and enemies alike say Mr. Gottlieb was a kind of genius, striving to explore the frontiers of the human mind for his country, while searching for religious and spiritual meaning in his life. But he will always be remembered as the Government chemist who dosed Americans with psychedelics in the name of national security, the man who brought LSD to the C.I.A.

In the 1950's and early 1960's, the agency gave mind-altering drugs to hundreds of unsuspecting Americans in an effort to explore the possibilities of controlling human consciousness. Many of the human guinea pigs were mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes -- ''people who could not fight back,'' as one agency officer put it. In one case, a mental patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days.


Wikipaedia entry:
Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 – March 7, 1999) was an American chemist probably best-known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency's mind control program MKULTRA.

Gottlieb was born in the Bronx under the name Joseph Scheider. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. A stutterer from childhood, Gottlieb got a master's degree in speech therapy. He also had a club foot, but this did not stop him from practicing folk dancing, a lifelong passion.

In 1951, Gottlieb joined the Central Intelligence Agency. As a poison expert, he headed the chemical division of the Technical Services Staff (TSS). Gottlieb became known as the "Black Sorcerer" and the "Dirty Trickster." He supervised preparations of lethal poisons and experiments in mind control.

In April 1953 Sidney Gottlieb headed the secret Project MKULTRA which was activated on the order of CIA director Allen Dulles. Gottlieb was known for administration of LSD and other psycho-active drugs to unwitting subjects and for financing psychiatric research and development of "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything." He sponsored physicians such as Ewen Cameron and Harris Isbell in controversial psychiatric research that used unwitting humans as guinea pigs. Many people suffered serious adverse affects consequent of research financed by Gottlieb and the Rockefeller Foundation.

In March 1960, under The Cuban Project, a CIA plan approved by President Eisenhower and under the direction of CIA Directorate for Plans, Richard M. Bissell, Gottlieb came up with ideas to spray Fidel Castro's television studio with LSD and to saturate Castro's shoes with thallium so that the hair of his beard would fall out. Gottlieb also hatched schemes to assassinate Castro, including the use of a poisoned cigar, a poisoned wetsuit, an exploding conch shell, and a poisonous fountain pen.

He also tried to have Iraq's General Abdul Karim Qassim's handkerchief contaminated with botulinum. Less known was an operation within the CIA's Phoenix Program in Vietnam where a team of CIA psychologists performed mind control experiments on NLF suspects being detained at Bien Hoa Prison outside of Saigon.

Gottlieb is said to have played a role in funding investigation into paranormal phenomena, including remote viewing.


...as my Japanese colleague Tochiro used to say, "....ahhhhh....many interesting things....go to library, bye-bye...."

America is waiting for an answer of some kind or another...

Could it be that the "Destroy All Monsters" ethos of the Second Amendment remedy/solution supporters has its origin in Cold War lunacy?

from Wikipedia:

The Sky Scorcher project was proposed by the Convair Division of General Dynamics to the United States Air Force in 1956.[1] The missile was intended to be carried by an advanced, enlarged version of Convair's F-106 Delta Dart interceptor,[2] which had, at the time, not yet entered flight testing even in its baseline form.[3]

Sky Scorcher was a very large missile, which was projected to be capable of carrying a thermonuclear warhead with a yield of two megatons.[2] The oversized warhead would be used against attacking formations of supersonic bombers; it was anticipated that fourteen such initiations, at a distance of approximately 460 miles (740 km) from the bombers' target, would be sufficient to disrupt an attack. A force of eighty of the advanced fighters were proposed for carrying the weapon.[2]

Despite Convair's sales pitch and the anticipated effectiveness of the weapon, the Air Force was unenthusiastic about the concept; aside from the expense of developing the aircraft and weapon, the Sky Scorcher missile also suffered from the fact that the initiation of a multi-megaton warhead would produce significant effects on the ground below the location of the airburst.[2] As a result, the project was abandoned before any significant work was undertaken.[2]

References

   1. Hansen 1995
   2. a b c d e Parsch 2007

Long time since the Times authoritatively broke the Titanic story...

NYT tonight:

Solar Panel Maker Moves Work to China

BEIJING — Aided by at least $43 million in assistance from the government of Massachusetts and an innovative solar energy technology, Evergreen Solar emerged in the last three years as the third-largest maker of solar panels in the United States.

The company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China. Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China. 

Stephanie Mueller, the Energy Department press secretary, said the department was committed to supporting renewable energy. “Through our Loan Program Office we have offered conditional commitments for loan guarantees to 16 clean energy projects totaling nearly $16.5 billion,” she said. “We have finalized and closed half of those loan guarantees, and the program has ramped up significantly over the last year to move projects through the process quickly and efficiently while protecting taxpayer interests.”
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My response to our dedicated guardians of the fourth estate:

Sir:
You and your team quoted  Stephanie Mueller.

She did _not_  address the DOE's  LPO lack of support for photovoltaics. Loan programs 1703 and 1705 indeed funded 16 projects. The following technologies were supported by 14 loans:

nuclear plant
U enrichment
coal plant scrubber raw material
2 concentrating solar power (CSP) technology with storage capability.
battery storage on-grid
flywheel storage 20 MW essentially early stage development
2 geothermal
3 wind
transmission line
smart glass

The _remaining 2 loans_  were to entities involved in photovoltaics.

As you can see, designating some supported projects clean or novel technology is a stretch. Mueller bullshitted you, and you could have "clarified" her statement by spending 30 min on the inet.

Pretty lame reporting.

Next time, I'll charge the NYT a consultant fee.

Jared Lee Loughner

Enough.

I've read reactions that range from inhuman to depraved to evil, and not much in between. The kid has a neurological disease, LIKE ME.

My neurological disease has damaged my motor and autonomic nerves. I can't walk without two people holding me up. My hands and arms are paralyzed. People can't understand me when I talk. My wife feeds me. If you stick me with a pin by surprise, I have a vaso-vagal reaction that terrifies my doctors. It's called Lou Gehrig's disease. No known cause. No cure. Fatal, 100%.

We don't know what nerves are damaged in Jared's neurological disease. We do know the damage makes it impossible to think straight about anything, or act like you're part of this world. It's called schizophrenia. No known cause. No cure. Fatal, 100%.

When Jared and I were 15, we were both healthy. We both played the clarinet. Our girlfriends also played clarinet. Jared's girlfriend was named Kelsey. My girlfriend was named Glenda. All four of us played in our high schools' bands.

enough

uhhh.....blood libel?

NYT this morning:

In her seven-and-a-half minute video, Ms. Palin said that “Especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.”

The term blood libel is generally used to mean the false accusation that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals, in particular the baking of matzos for passover. That false claim was circulated for centuries to incite anti-Semitism and justify violent pogroms against Jews. Ms. Palin’s use of the phrase in her video, which helped make the video rapidly go viral, is attracting criticism, not least because Ms. Giffords, who remains in critical condition in a Tucson hospital, is Jewish.

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Let's analyze this. A quick click to Wikipedia, a reference check, and confirmation at the Holocaust Museum website allows us to use the following quote and references, and confirms NYT veracity.

Blood libel (also blood accusation[1][2]) refers to a false accusation or claim that religious minorities, almost always Jews, murder children to use their blood in certain aspects of their religious rituals and holidays.[1][2] Historically, these claims have–alongside those of well poisoning and host desecration–been a major theme in European persecution of Jews.

1. Gottheil, Richard; Strack, Hermann L.; Jacobs, Joseph (1901-1906). "Blood Accusation" Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1173&letter=B

2. Dundes, Alan, ed (1991). The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0299131142.

What does the Palin statement mean?
Without critical analysis, and taken in the context of the video, the statement appears to be a condemnation of assertions, apparently made by "left wing" "journalists and pundits", that rhetoric from the "right wing" media creates a toxic, confrontational sociopolitical climate that has the potential to incite mentally ill individuals with a propensity for violence to engage in the violent activities expressed, either overtly or covertly, in the rhetoric.

Palin's accusation that "left wing" "journalists and pundits" engage in the "manufacture [of] a blood libel" is curious, when the definition of blood libel is considered.

What does the Palin statement imply?
The implication, or functional meaning, of the statement centers on the use of the term "blood libel". It is possible that Palin and her speech writers were unaware of the history and usage of the term, and meant to accuse "left wing" "journalists and pundits" of engaging in libelous activity. The word "blood" would have a topical, adjectival function, made more effective by recent images of a woman receiving a massive gunshot head wound. It also is possible they were making linear combinations of words, and noted that "libel blood" was meaningless, as were partial anagrams such as "bdloei" or "looeild".

It is possible that Palin and her speech writers were aware of the history and usage of the term, and meant to conflate liberal or progressive ideology with (imagined) Jewish ritual murder, thus making the sociopolitical left, or "liberals" an object of xenophobic hatred. This time-proven political/rhetorical tactic is called "blame everything on da fuckin' Jooozze!"

It is also possible that Palin and her speech writers were aware of the history and usage of the term, and employed it as would a provocateur, hoping to insert Palin into the news cycle. This tactic was used with great success when vaginal photographs of a panty-less Britney Spears were inserted into the news cycle.

Sarah Palin may have considered all three possibilities with the aim of increasing her visceral appeal.

click here

all you've got if you can't read a book

click here first, then listen. then read

The following is a very insightful comment posted on a NYT discussion board today. It moves beyond politics, as well as the vitriolic assholery that passes for sociopolitical discourse today and the non-solvable (due to supersaturation) gun violence problem. The issues raised by the author of this post may lead one to consider the possibility that America could descend into fascism if current trends continue.
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Here's the elephant in the room: most Americans are poorly educated at this point in time, especially anyone under 30. They are most likely to embrace slogans, conspiracy theories, and to look for scapegoats because they are incapable of real participation in a democracy which involves constant pursuit of information and its analysis. Also, because of this lack of skill and preparation to be real contributors to society, they are unemployable in the new world economy and so in their chaotic lives, lack the time, and resources to be self educated even if they wished to be so. Finally, as Nature will have her say, they end up having children, and a whole new generation cannot get a leg up in our rapidly changing (not for the better) society. As we ignore this problem, of course they will be victims of an elite who will both fear them and try to use them and their precious votes to stay in or grasp power in our election cycles. That's where the dumbed down, inflammatory rhetoric comes to the fore. And if a good willed politician tries to communicate what's really good for them, their well tended anger makes them see it as condescension and elitism. A nice "win/win" don't you think? The past 35-40 years in American education is a disgrace compared to what we once had. My 84 year old parents had better educations in high school (one didn't even finish) than people I meet now with Masters' degrees - which I too, have. They had the good common sense to know when they were being HELPED in the Great Depression, rather than thinking they were being insulted; they could sort things out without always using the mirror of personal identity which is all you've got if you can't read a book.

America, this quite serious...is this correct?

This was the voter turnout of our most recent presidential election. It was a critical time; two wars, economic collapse, and socioeconomic polarization similar to that of the time of the Civil War.

Year	Voting-age population	Voter registration	Voter turnout	Turnout of voting-age population (percent)
2008	231,229,580	NA	132,618,580*	56.8%

As you can see, 43.2% of "We, the People" didn't give a shit.

The illustration below passed for political dialogue last midterm election; if you click on it, you will see gunsight images.


This behavior passed for freedom of expression at "Town Hall" meetings during which health care reform was discussed. Click on the image, and note the handgun carried on the man's right thigh. "Water the tree of liberty" refers to a quote from Thomas Jefferson. The complete quote is "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure." (ed. note: water=bloodshed; get it?)


This is what happened to a member of Congress, a Federal judge, a child, and more than a dozen other folks in Pima County, AZ today.

You think this is an aberration? You want to blame someone? Anyone?  It's sarahpalinrushlimbaughglenbeckfoxnewsNRAteabagger's fault? America was founded by two groups of people..Plymouth Pilgrims who sought religious freedom and didn't give a shit about other peoples' freedom, and Jamestown Jerkoffs who wanted to make a quick buck.

intolerance........greed

oh yeah....guns



click here

You can choose your beliefs, but not your facts

LA Times, tonight

Katie and John Powers in West Hartford, CT made the choice not to vaccinate, when they had their first child nine years ago. Neither of their two children, who have not been diagnosed with autism, have received vaccines. Katie Powers said their decision was made after she researched the issue and consulted physicians. The possible autism connection was one of the factors that weighed heavily. Even though the connection seems less likely nine years later, Powers said she probably would make the same choice today.

"I'm skeptical either way," she said. "If I were going to travel internationally, I probably would have made other choices."

When the H1N1 flu virus was at its peak a little more than a year ago, she said, her whole family came down with it — an episode that included 106-degree fevers and 21-day quarantines. It was "scary and exhausting," but at least now they're immune to that strain, she said.

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We Consider Religion

Welcome to the second podcast in the series "Give the Fiddler a Dram".

Religion is a touchy subject nowadays. Don't bring it up in your local shot-n-beer joint if you don't have dental insurance.

I have no agenda. I see religions as an interlocking patchwork of folk traditions, very similar to music. If you've ever been to the Kutztown (PA) folk festival and checked out the barn that houses the quilt competition, you know what I mean...

Podcast Nr 2
We Consider Religion