Ronnie on Politics

Well, this sure explains a lot about the behavior of some men and women.

Parasite makes men dumb, women sexy

A common parasite can increase a women's attractiveness to the opposite sex but also make men more stupid, an Australian researcher says.

About 40 per cent of the world's population is infected with Toxoplasma gondii, including about eight million Australians.

Human infection generally occurs when people eat raw or undercooked meat that has cysts containing the parasite, or accidentally ingest some of the parasite's eggs excreted by an infected cat.

[...]

"Interestingly, the effect of infection is different between men and women," Dr Boulter writes in the latest issue of Australasian Science magazine.

"Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women.

"On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.

"In short, it can make men behave like alley cats and women behave like sex kittens".

[...]

Read entire article online here.

I wonder how many more laws bush must break before something is done about it.

Statement may allow gov't to open mail

WASHINGTON - A signing statement attached to postal legislation by President Bush last month may have opened the way for the government to open mail without a warrant. The White House denies any change in policy.

The law requires government agents to get warrants to open first-class letters. But when he signed the postal reform act, Bush added a statement saying that his administration would construe that provision "in a manner consistent, to the maximum extent permissible, with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances."

"The signing statement raises serious questions whether he is authorizing opening of mail contrary to the Constitution and to laws enacted by Congress," said Ann Beeson, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.  "What is the purpose of the signing statement if it isn't that?"

Read entire article online here.

This just seems to be business as usual.  The United States has lost the moral high ground.  We are no better then them.

FBI details possible detainee abuse

WASHINGTON - FBI agents documented more than two dozen incidents of possible mistreatment at the Guantanamo Bay military base, including one detainee whose head was wrapped in duct tape for chanting the Quran and another who pulled out his hair after hours in a sweltering room.

Documents released Tuesday by the FBI offered new details about the harsh interrogation practices used by military officials and contractors when questioning so-called enemy combatants.

The reports describe a female guard who detainees said handled their genitals and wiped menstrual blood on their face. Another interrogator reportedly bragged to an FBI agent about dressing as a Catholic priest and "baptizing" a prisoner.

Some military officials and contractors told FBI agents that the interrogation techniques had been approved by the Defense Department, including directly by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Read entire article online here.

Well, I guess I better get busy learning how to speak Aussie since I'll have a test to pass if I want to become a citizen.

Australian lexicon can leave you a few roos loose
By Jonathan Standing Mon Jan 1, 6:01 PM ET

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Summer in Australia wouldn't be complete without a trip to one of the country's famed beaches.

Take your togs or cossies, your esky packed with amber fluid and maybe a dog's eye for a snack. Bend the elbow too much? Stop off for a long black, a short black or a flat white to make sure you don't end up a few kangaroos (roos) loose in the top paddock.

Translation: Take your swimwear and cooler box full of beer and a meat pie to eat. A bit too much to drink? Have a small or large black espresso coffee or a white coffee to make sure you are fully compos mentis when you get home.

Welcome to the Australian vocabulary.

Beyond the stereotyped "G'day" (hello) of souvenir T-shirts and "Crocodile Dundee" movies, are many words rich in tradition that define the Australian identity and give continuity to the variety of voices and experiences that shaped the country's history.

[...]

You should read the entire article online here.

This is all very disturbing to me.  Bush likes to walk all over the US Constitution.

The Bill of Wrongs The 10 most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006.

I love those year-end roundups—ubiquitous annual lists of greatest films and albums and lip glosses and tractors. It's reassuring that all human information can be wrestled into bundles of 10. In that spirit, Slate proudly presents, the top 10 civil liberties nightmares of the year:

Read this article online here.

Well, I kinda think they deserve what happened to them.

Animal sacrifices maim 1,400 in Turkey

ANKARA, Turkey - Over a thousand Turks spent the first day of the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha in emergency wards on Sunday after stabbing themselves or suffering other injuries while sacrificing startled animals.

At least 1,413 people — referred to as "amateur butchers" by the Turkish media — were treated at hospitals across the country, most suffering cuts to their hands and legs, the Anatolia news agency reported.

Four people were severely injured, crushed under the weight of large animals that fell on top of them, the agency reported. Another person was hurt when a crane used to lift an animal tumbled onto him, the agency said.

Three other people suffered heart attacks and died while trying to restrain animals, CNN-Turk television reported.

Read entire article online here.

This is great news for those with type 2 diabetes.  A vegan diet is a great diet for everyone including the animals.

Groundbreaking PCRM Study Shows the Dramatic Impact of a Low-Fat Vegan Diet

More than 20 million Americans have diabetes, a condition that greatly increases the risk of heart problems and other complications. A new study has shown that a low-fat vegan diet treats type 2 diabetes more effectively than a standard diabetes diet and may be more effective than single-agent therapy with oral diabetes drugs. The randomized controlled trial was conducted by doctors and dietitians with PCRM, George Washington University, and the University of Toronto, with funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Diabetes Action Research and Education Foundation.

The study involved 99 individuals in the greater Washington, D.C., area with type 2 diabetes. Half the group was randomly assigned to follow a low-fat vegan diet, with no limits on calories, carbohydrate, or portion sizes. The other study participants were asked to follow a diet based on the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA’s) guidelines, which involves calorie counting and portion control, but allows most foods, including meats and dairy products, in limited amounts. Participants in both groups followed the diet for 22 weeks and received dietary support in the form of cooking demonstrations, tips on following the diet they were on, and group meetings. While participants in both groups improved, the vegan group experienced significantly greater reductions in A1c (a measure of blood sugar levels over a prolonged period), weight, body mass index, waist circumference, and LDL (“bad”) cholesterol.

Read entire article online here.

This study is very interesting.  The same thing applies to other habits like smoking.  The higher the IQ the less chance of becoming a smoker.

Smarter kids eat their greens

CHILDREN with high IQs are more likely to be vegetarians when they grow up, according to new research.

A British study of more them 8000 men and women aged 30 whose IQs had been measured when they were 10, showed that the higher the IQ, the greater the odds of being a vegetarian.

"People who are more intelligent as children, who will obviously keep that intelligence when they are 30, were more likely to say they are vegetarians at that age than those that were less intelligent," said Dr Catherine Gale, an epidemiologist at the University of Southampton in England.

Read entire article online here.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game

Just in time for Christmas, the religious right has released a violent video game in which born-again Christians aim to convert or kill those who don't adhere to their extreme ideology.  The video game, "Left Behind: Eternal Forces," is based on the apocalyptic "Left Behind" novels - written and promoted by religious right leader Tim LaHaye. Despite the violent, intolerant message being marketed to children, Wal-Mart, the nation's #1 video game seller, is selling the "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" video game - just in time for the holidays!

Here is a list of some of the things this game, which has been rated “T” for “Teen” teaches kids:

- involves teenagers in killing non-Christians and Christians who do not convert to your particular form of Christianity (Source: LBET Game Tutorial and game play);

- teaches teenagers that those “seeking peace for all mankind” are with the forces of the Antichrist (Source: Left Behind Games Website FAQs http://www.leftbehindgames.com/pages/faq.htm)

- teaches teens that “activists” are “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” warning teens to particularly beware of them (Source: LBET Game Manual, p. 45)

- teaches teenagers that most musicians are “singing the praises of the antichrist” and that “rock stars” and “pop stars” make “formidable spiritual opponents” (Source: LBET Game Manual, p. 44)

- teaches teens that humanitarian aid workers who are not Christian, including medics, nurses, and doctors, have “had the veil of the antichrist’s deceit pulled over their eyes” and are therefore part of the enemy forces who may be killed (Source: LBET Game Manual, p. 41)

"Left Behind: Eternal Forces" takes place in New York City, shortly after the rapture. Gamers are charged with creating Christian militias who roam the streets of New York City, looking to convert non-believers and killing those who they are unable to draw to their side. In fact, after particularly bloody battles, players must use prayer to recharge their "soul points" that have been diminished by the killing.

Most disturbing is the game's apparent attempt at religious indoctrination - aimed at children and focused on violent, divisive, and hateful scenarios.

The game has outraged progressive and conservative Christians alike, and despite the religious right's typical opposition to violent video games, "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" has not generated any criticism from this group and in fact gained a gleaming review from a Focus on the Family affiliated website this week.

While the religious right apparently has no problem pushing the product this holiday season, America's #1 video game seller should know better.

To learn more about the “Left Behind” series of books visit here and here.

To learn more about “apocalypticism”, which is what this is all about, visit here.

To take action on this issue visit here.

Yes, just let those sinners die. Another shinning example of Christian love.

Faith groups urge cuts to AIDS fund

LAKE FOREST, Calif. -- Some leading Christian conservatives, angry over the Global Fund to Fight AIDS's promotion of condoms and its perceived lack of support for faith-based programs, are pushing Congress to cut US support for the AIDS initiative, which was initiated by President Bush in a Rose Garden ceremony five years ago with a $200 million commitment.

The fund -- whose full name is the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria -- has become one of the pillars of the international effort to fight infectious diseases, growing into a $6.6 billion organization that supports programs in 136 countries.

It is a primary vehicle for the AIDS-fighting efforts of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The only larger HIV and AIDS program in the world is the president's $15 billion, five-year plan.

Read entire article here.

Let's just hope this quack doesn't get elected.

God's Senator: Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback

[...}

Tonight, Bredesen has come to breathe that power into Brownback's presidential campaign. After little more than a decade in Washington, Brownback has managed to position himself at the very center of the Christian conservative uprising that is transforming American politics. Just six years ago, winning the evangelical vote required only a veneer of bland normalcy, nothing more than George Bush's vague assurance that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. Now, Brownback seeks something far more radical: not faith-based politics but faith in place of politics. In his dream America, the one he believes both the Bible and the Constitution promise, the state will simply wither away. In its place will be a country so suffused with God and the free market that the social fabric of the last hundred years -- schools, Social Security, welfare -- will be privatized or simply done away with. There will be no abortions; sex will be confined to heterosexual marriage. Men will lead families, mothers will tend children, and big business and the church will take care of all.

[...]

"I am a seeker," he says. Brownback believes that every spiritual path has its own unique scent, and he wants to inhale them all. When he ran for the House he was a Methodist. By the time he ran for the Senate he was an evangelical. Now he has become a Catholic. He was baptized not in a church but in a chapel tucked between lobbyists' offices on K Street that is run by Opus Dei, the secretive lay order founded by a Catholic priest who advocated "holy coercion" and considered Spanish dictator Francisco Franco an ideal of worldly power. Brownback also studies Torah with an orthodox rabbi from Brooklyn. "Deep," says the rabbi, Nosson Scherman. Lately, Brownback has been reading the Koran, but he doesn't like what he's finding. "There's some difficult material in it with regard to the Christian and the Jew," he tells a Christian radio program, voice husky with regret.

Read entire article here.

This is a bit scary. Hope we never have the chance to find out if it's true.

Small nuclear war could lead to cooldown

SAN FRANCISCO - Some of the scientists who first advanced the controversial "nuclear winter" theory more than two decades ago have come up with another bleak forecast: Even a regional nuclear war would devastate the environment.

Using modern climate and population models, researchers estimated that a small-scale nuclear conflict between two warring nations would cause 3 million to 17 million immediate casualties and lead to a marked cooldown of the planet that could lead to crop failures and further misery.

As dire as the predictions seem, they fall short of nuclear winter. That theory says that smoke and dust from an atomic war between the superpowers would blot out the sun, plunge the Earth into the deep freeze and cause mass starvation, wiping out 90 percent of the Earth's population, or billions of people.

Read the entire article here.

I sure hate to say this about any religious group but Evangelical Christians are a danger to our country and the rest of the world. To learn more about the dangers of Evangelical Christians go here.

Group seeks probe of evangelical military video

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A watchdog group that promotes religious freedom in the U.S. military accused senior officers on Monday using their rank and influence to coerce soldiers and airmen into adopting evangelical Christianity.

Such proselytizing, according to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, has created a core of "radical" Christians within the U.S. armed forces and Pentagon who punish those who do not accept evangelical beliefs by stalling their careers.

"It's egregious beyond the pale," said Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. "We apparently have a radicalized, evangelical Christian Pentagon within the rest of the Pentagon."

Read entire article online here.

See the video here.

Visit the Military Religious Freedom Foundation here.

Pete Geren, a former acting secretary of the Air Force who oversaw the service's response in 2005 to accusations that evangelical Christians were pressuring cadets at the Air Force Academy, also appears in the video.

This is a very interesting article on a subject of great importance.

What's wrong with our food?

E. coli at Taco Bell, Listeria in our Thanksgiving turkey, a report of unprecedented contamination in our chicken. Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," explains why.

Read entire article here.

To learn more about factory farming visit here and here.

To learn more about antibioatic resistance visit here and here.

To learn more about slaughterhouses visit here and here.

Go here to view a PBS special discussing a range of issues surrounding meat production in the US.

You have got to be kidding me. This is so stupid that it's got to be something the bush administration has come up with to draw attention away from something else, like the Iraq war.

EPA may drop lead air pollution limits

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is considering doing away with health standards that cut lead from gasoline, widely regarded as one of the nation's biggest clean-air accomplishments.

Read the entire article here.