"Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the résumé of a Supreme Being. This is the kind of shit you'd expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. And just between you and me, in any decently-run universe, this guy would've been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago. And by the way, I say "this guy", because I firmly believe, looking at these results, that if there is a God, it has to be a man. No woman could or would ever fuck things up like this. So, if there is a God, I think most reasonable people might agree that he's at least incompetent, and maybe, just maybe, doesn't give a shit. Doesn't give a shit, which I admire in a person, and which would explain a lot of these bad results."
― George Carlin

"Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups."
― George Carlin

I'll let you in on a secret: I'm tired of writing about religion. Honest to gods, I'm tired of it. But every damn subject you care to name has been religion-ized by the GOP. Honestly: try to think of something. Odds are, some conservative has appealed to scripture - even teacher's pay, or how employers should treat employees.

Probably, it will turn out that God is against water saving toilets. Surely Jesus had something to say about that.

And completely without surprise is Jesus' retroactive support for plutocracy. Yes, it turns out the champion of the poor really did have a big ole soft spot for the rich. Guess we've been misinterpreting his comment about the difficulties of rich people going to heaven.

I guess it would be unthinkable today for Jesus to even begin his ministry today without corporate sponsorship. Imagine the Sermon on the Mount, brought to you by Monsanto and its genetically engineered fish and loaves.

This is an interview with Shelley Schlender, KGNU radio, Boulder, Colorado. Thank you Shelley for the article, graphics and the interview below. You can learn more about Shelley and her passion for exposing the truth in health at her website, www.meandmydiabetes.com

Ron Rosedale says to keep your cells sensitive to leptin, insulin and other hormones for better health.

He gave this talk at the American Society of Bariatric Physicians (ASBP) meeting Oct 31, 2006. They're medical experts who work to reduce obesity. As part of the 2006 presentations, the ASBP included a special segment that featured low-carb diets, researchers and scientists who are connected to the Nutrition and Metabolism Society. Special thanks to Instatapes for recording this presentation.

SPEAKER'S INTRODUCTION: Dr. Ronald Rosedale is an internationally renowned expert on the biology of aging. He was at the International Conference on Aging Medicine at Rio de Janiero, and the first European Conference on Longevity Medicine and many more. He is the author of The Rosedale Diet: Insulin and its metabolic effects. He will be speaking to us this morning on the detrimental effects of too much protein. Please welcome Dr. Ronald Rosedale.

We might give a different view on protein intake and nutrition and actually health in general. First, you hear a lot about paleolithic nutrition, the idea being that ancient man can tell us how to be healthy. That we need to go back to our ancient roots and eat like they did, and then we'll be healthy. But you have to go back even further and understand what Nature is after. And there are two prime prerogatives of all life, since the beginning of life. And they both involve making more life.

How do you make more life? Reproduce. What do you do to reproduce? You have to eat. You have to eat and reproduce. It's all life does, and we evolved with those dictums.

We can't use Paleolithic Man. We evolved with a diet to not allow a man to live a long healthy life.
Nature does not care about us living a long healthy life, or any life, for that matter. Nature wants "Life" to live.

It's like, you don't care if there's a little cell on your hand that dies, as long as the whole remains. Nature doesn't care if you or I dies, or if all mankind dies. Nature wants life to live. The diet that ancient man grew up with was to maximize reproductive sense. Not necessarily the life of each individual.

We do know, there is a powerful connection between energy stores, reproduction and longevity. Certainly, we know that it takes a lot of energy to make babies. And if there was not a lot of energy around, Nature would put off reproduction, and it is that trick that we want to use. It puts off reproduction by allowing the organism to live longer. It appears that all organisms have genetic mechanisms to delay aging, to delay dying so that the organism can reproduce at a future more opportune time. And generally this is genetically controlled, and it's controlled by the availability of nutrients, whether it's good to reproduce now or put off reproduction into the future.

It's not difficult to understand why most people, including physicians, are convinced that high blood cholesterol is the major cause of heart disease and that elevated cholesterol is due to eating saturated fats.

It's easy to visualize how fatty foods raise blood cholesterol, which, despite being a large inert molecule, somehow precipitates out to infiltrate the inner lining of the coronary arteries, where it forms fatty atheromatous plaques.

These plaques slow the flow of blood and eventually completely obstruct it to cause the death of myocardial tissue. This sequence of events was similar to the gradual buildup of lime and rust in pipes, and the terms coronary occlusion, myocardial infarction and heart attack are still often used as synonyms.

What is hard to believe is that there is no evidence much less proof to support this entrenched lipid theory of coronary atherosclerosis. In point of fact, it has been completely refuted by numerous scientific studies. Consider the following half dozen examples:

Just over one year ago, a magnitude-9 earthquake hit the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan, triggering one of the most destructive tsunamis in a thousand years. The Japanese - the most earthquake-prepared, seismically savvy people on the planet - were caught off-guard by the Tohoku quake's savage power. Over 15,000 people died.

Now scientists are calling attention to a dangerous area on the opposite side of the Ring of Fire, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a fault that runs parallel to the Pacific coast of North America, from northern California to Vancouver Island. This tectonic time bomb is alarmingly similar to Tohoku, capable of generating a megathrust earthquake at or above magnitude 9, and about as close to Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver as the Tohoku fault is to Japan's coast. Decades of geological sleuthing recently established that although it appears quiet, this fault has ripped open again and again, sending vast earthquakes throughout the Pacific Northwest and tsunamis that reach across the Pacific.

What happened in Japan will probably happen in North America. The big question is when.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has foregone a trip to Canada on the grounds that it's "too dangerous," according to a report in Canada's National Post.

Cheney was set to appear at an event in Toronto on April 24, but canceled on grounds that the risk of trouble from protesters was too great.

Cheney's last Canadian appearance in September of 2011 erupted in violence as protesters swarmed the entrance of the private Vancouver club where the former Bush administration official and Iraq War architect was speaking. The protesters rained down verbal abuse on attendees and, in once instance, choked a security guard.

Children in highly developed countries suffer abuse and neglect much more often than is reported by official child-protective agencies, according to the findings of the first in a comprehensive series of reports on child maltreatment, published Dec. 2 in the British medical journal The Lancet.

Based on a review of research conducted on child abuse between 2000 and June of this year, researchers estimate that 4% to 16% of children are physically abused each year in high-income nations, including the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. As many as 15% are neglected, and up to 10% of girls and 5% of boys suffer severe sexual abuse; many more are victims of other sexual injury. Yet researchers say that as few as 1 in 10 of those instances of abuse are actually confirmed by social-service agencies - and that measuring the exact scope of the problem is nearly impossible.

A national syndicate will offer replacement "Doonesbury" comic strips to newspapers that don't want to run a series that uses graphic imagery to lampoon a Texas law requiring women to have an ultrasound before an abortion, executives said Friday.

A handful of newspapers say they won't run next week's series, while several others said the strips will move from the comics to opinion pages or websites only. Many already publish the strip by cartoonist Garry Trudeau, whose sarcastic swipes at society's foibles have a history of giving headaches to newspaper editors, on editorial pages.

"We run 'Doonesbury' on our op-ed page, and this series is an example of why," said David Averill, editorial page editor for the Tulsa World. "Many of our readers will disagree with the political stance the series takes, and some will be offended by the clinical language. I believe, however, that this series of strips is appropriate to the abortion debate and appropriate to our op-ed pages."

US - After years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless. But some questions a woman I know posed during a phone conversation one recent evening gave me pause: "What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to trial? Couldn't we bring the whole system to a halt just like that?"

The woman was Susan Burton, who knows a lot about being processed through the criminal justice system.

Her odyssey began when a Los Angeles police cruiser ran over and killed her 5-year-old son. Consumed with grief and without access to therapy or antidepressant medications, Susan became addicted to crack cocaine. She lived in an impoverished black community under siege in the "war on drugs," and it was but a matter of time before she was arrested and offered the first of many plea deals that left her behind bars for a series of drug-related offenses. Every time she was released, she found herself trapped in an under-caste, subject to legal discrimination in employment and housing.

Fifteen years after her first arrest, Susan was finally admitted to a private drug treatment facility and given a job. After she was clean she dedicated her life to making sure no other woman would suffer what she had been through. Susan now runs five safe homes for formerly incarcerated women in Los Angeles. Her organization, A New Way of Life, supplies a lifeline for women released from prison. But it does much more: it is also helping to start a movement. With groups like All of Us or None, it is organizing formerly incarcerated people and encouraging them to demand restoration of their basic civil and human rights.

Though I was fairly young at the time, I will always remember the moment in the Spring of 1973 when Nixon's Press Secretary, Ron Ziegler, tried to explain away his and his bosses previous lies about the fast-progressing Watergate scandal with the words, "mistakes were made".

If the truth be told, I can't say I have a very clear recollection of actually seeing president's spinmeister say the famous phrase live on TV. Rather, my "memories" of the event are derived almost wholly from the comments Ziegler's words evoked among the adult members of my family.

Particularly memorable were (and are) the derisive hoots of my Aunt Kathleen, a fiercely intelligent women who, I am pretty sure, never voted anything but a straight Republican ticket in the course of her long and eventful life.

Why was Kay, as we called her, so exercised with the chief spokesman of her party's President?

Because his clumsy attempt to have the "chalice" of responsibility "pass from his lips", violated everything she had been taught about how individuals and collective entities engender better futures. She understood quite fundamentally that without reckoning for deeds done, there could be no meaningful move toward moral renewal.

A US soldier shot dead 16 civilians including nine children in southern Kandahar province, Afghan officials said.

One Afghan father who said his children were killed in the shooting spree accused soldiers of later burning the bodies.

The US embassy in Kabul said an American soldier had been detained over the shooting. It added that anti-US reprisals were possible following the killings, which come just weeks after US soldiers burned copies of the Koran at a NATO base, triggering widespread anti-Western protests.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the rampage as "intentional murders" and demanded an explanation from the US. His office said the dead included nine children and three women.

An Afghan minister earlier told Reuters that a lone US soldier had killed up to 16 people when he burst into homes in villages near his base in the middle of the night.

Panjwayi district is about 35 km (22 miles) west of the provincial capital Kandahar city. The district is considered the spiritual home of the Taliban and is believed to be a hive of insurgent activity.