Urban renewal | openDemocracy

http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-climate_change_debate/urban_renewal_3672.jsp

From The Page: “The rest of the world thinks the crisis in New Orleans is over and that things are getting back to normal. Or, they are sick of hearing stories about what they perceive as a city inhabited by whiners. I guess I am one of those whiners.

But allow me:

Our water is completely cut off every other day. Hot water tanks empty and shudder and boiling fluid spits from open faucets until lines fill again. The rest of the time water pressure is so low that fire hydrants are all but non-functional. Helicopters with bags are now the main source of fire dousing.

Eighty-five million gallons – the city confirmed the official figure on 19 June – of water are now lost every day through cracked pipes, seeping into the soil. The city is below sea level already, with the water table right at the soil top, so this much additional flow is causing many of the remaining undamaged houses to sink and topple from their foundations and piers.

What water does get through to homes is undrinkable, doctored with so much chlorine to rid it of bacteria that a glass of water is almost literally a glass of bleach.

Bottled-water services are understaffed and overwhelmed by demand for drinkable water, so numerous occasionally dangerous home remedies have been concocted to make tap water palatable.

Electricity is available to only 40% of the city. I am lucky and have access to power at my own home. But even here the juice pops out three-four times a day, causing multiple fires when it surges back on. An incredible commercial museum of irreplaceable Mexican “day of the dead” artifacts, six blocks away, caught fire in just such a surge night before last.

My house, like most others in this neighbourhood, is full of blinking electric clocks. New Orleanians have given up on resetting indicators of time. We know that any reference to the present will just go away again in a few minutes.

Funny, but that’s the way most of us have come to think of the whole experience of living here. Just ignore the fact that progress has gone away, again and again. And again.

No sense knowing what time it is, is it? Not in New Orleans, in any case.

More stoplights have come back, but between lost relief-workers crashing into them, and frequent gangster car chases, at least a quarter of the lights have been re-damaged and still do not work. Half the missing street-signs, one-way signs and stop signs in the city have not been replaced.

An especially frightening phenomenon: the gangs have been switching one-way signs’ directions to confuse both the cops and nearby residents, to keep people out of neighbourhoods where they are marshalling their forces and hiding their loot. There is, if you obey the signs, no way to get into certain blocks of empty houses. And there the Bad Guys congregate, invisible.

They use stolen trucks and SUVs for their commerce, and they prowl rebuilding neighbourhoods at night, looting the same houses three and four times.

They wait for locals to install new appliances or piping, or doors and windows, in their gutted houses. And then, when the residents go back to their temporary homes at night, the looters run free, taking whatever they find.

In the morning the rebuilders return, of course, to find that, once again, they have lost everything.”

Home – Morgellons Research Foundation

http://www.morgellons.org/

From the page: “Most individuals with this disease report disturbing crawling, stinging, and biting sensations, as well as non-healing skin lesions, which are associated with highly unusual structures. These structures can be described as fiber-like or filamentous, and are the most striking feature of this disease. In addition, patients report the presence of seed-like granules and black speck-like material associated with their skin.

Neurological function severely affected

The peripheral nervous system is often affected by this disease, but the most significant element of the infection, appears to be the effect on the central nervous sytem. Nearly all people with this illness report extreme difficulty with mental concentration and short term memory. Mood disorders, such as depression and Bipolar Disorder, are extremely common in this group of patients, affecting well over half of all individuals reporting symptoms of Morgellons Disease. Parents of children with Morgellons disease report that the majority of these children have ADHD, ODD, mood disorders, or autism. It is estimated that 65% of these children have some form of psychiatric illness, and 10% have an autism spectrum disorder.”

Morgellons Disease: Mysterious Scabies And Ecto-Parasites Found Under Human Skin

http://www.safesolutionsinc.com/morgellons.htm

From the page: “A mysterious skin disease is currently spreading across America, and doctors are searching for answers on how to stop the epidemic.

The disease, called Morgellons Disease, is a parasite-like infection that literally makes the infected person’s skin crawl. The disease has already been found in thousands of patients in Florida , Texas and California.”

“Our Declaration of Independence has been copied by emerging nations around the globe, its themes adopted in places many of us have never heard of. Here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights. We the people declared that government is created by the people for their own convenience. Government has no power except those voluntarily granted it by the people. There have been revolutions before and since ours, revolutions that simply exchanged one set of rulers for another. Ours was a philosophical revolution that changed the very concept of government.”

Ronald Reagan, address at Yorktown, October 19, 1981

Science in Society

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/spanish_socialists_want_to_give_apes_human_rights/

From the page: “The Spanish Socialist Party will introduce a bill in the Congress of Deputies calling for “the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings.” The PSOE’s justification is that humans share 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans.

The party will announce its Great Ape Project at a press conference tomorrow. An organization with the same name is seeking a UN declaration on simian rights which would defend ape interests “the same as those of minors and the mentally handicapped of our species.”

According to the Project, “Today only members of the species Homo sapiens are considered part of the community of equals. The chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan are our species’ closest relatives. They possess sufficient mental faculties and emotional life to justify their inclusion in the community of equals.” “

Wesley J. Smith on Transhumanism on National Review Online

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-smith092002.asp

From The Page: “Welcome to the surreal world of “transhumanism,” a nascent and explicitly eugenic philosophy that advocates taking control of human evolution through gene modification. Transhumanism may seem like something posted on the web by a guy who wears a crystal pyramid on his head to keep the CIA from intercepting his thoughts. To the contrary. Transhumanists come from the highest levels of academe. The founder of the movement, Nick Bostrom, is a professor of philosophy at Yale University who recently received a three-year fellowship at Oxford. Other pioneer transhumanists include Professor James Hughes of Trinity College, Hartford, and Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at the School of Medicine, UCLA, and author of the recent book Redesigning Humans.

Transhumanists are breaking the intellectual ground they hope will eventually lead to public acceptance of genetic manipulation — not just to improve health, but to change our very natures. Indeed, Stock expects that within several generations, post-humans will be so diverse they will require artificial help to procreate because their heterodox genetic makeup will be incompatible with natural reproduction.

Transhumanists are biotech absolutists. They claim humans should not merely be allowed to metamorphose themselves through surgery, cybertechnology, and the like, but should have the right to control the destiny of their genes by means of progeny design and fabrication. This could include replacing natural chromosomes with artificial chromosomes, increasing or decreasing the number of chromosomes in offspring or clones, and even — in Hughes’s words — “mixing species boundaries through transgenic technologies.”

ANIMAL RIGHTS AND THE BRAVE NEW WORLD

Transhumanist theory has arisen in the context of a strengthening nexus between the views already popular in bioethics and animal-rights advocacy. This intellectual intertwining is most evident in “personhood theory” — according to which rights come not from simply being human but rather from possessing relevant cognitive capacities. The relativist approach of bioethics, ironically, dovetails nicely with the absolutist view of animal-rights ideology that accepts no moral distinction between humans and “nonhuman animals.” Moreover, both ideologies advance the march toward Brave New World. After all, if the human race is merely another animal herd, then why not eugenically “improve” it through the new technologies of genetic husbandry — as we are beginning to do with pigs and cows?

This is certainly the approach of University of Alabama bioethicist Gregory E. Pence, an enthusiastic proponent of reproductive cloning. In his book Who’s Afraid of Human Cloning? Pence writes, “In some ultimate sense, humans are both nothing more, and as wonderful as, compassionate monkeys.” By “weakening the ethical boundary between non-human and human animals,” he asserts that it will be easier to “do to humans some of the things we think quite sane to do to animals,” beginning with cloning and moving from there to genetic modification.”

St. Petersburg Times

http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=18041

From The Page: “Frozen Brains Awaiting Resurrection Day in StorageBy Dan SheaStaff WriterALABUSHEVO, Moscow Region — Lidia Fedorenko loved life. There were her friends, family and, of course, all the former math students she had taught over the decades.

So when the 79-year-old St. Petersburg native suffered a stroke in September, dying a week later, her grandson, Daniil Fedorenko, knew what to do: freeze her brain.

“She wanted to extend her life by another 200 to 300 years,” Fedorenko said.

Today, Lidia Ivanovna’s brain sits in a metal container in a former schoolhouse in the village of Alabushevo. Her last wish was resurrection. Kriorus, a recently founded cryonics outfit, guards over her cerebral matter and that of a wealthy Moscow businessman’s 60-year-old father, who died of throat cancer in 2002. Kriorus declined to name the deceased man.

“We founded the company because human life is the most important thing there is,” Kriorus’ managing director, Alexei Potapov, explained. “To lose a life without putting up a fight is a crime.”

Potapov and his co-founders say they are Transhumanists, who believe technology can be used to transform human life and postpone death indefinitely. They founded Kriorus, the world’s first cryonics company outside the United States, in 2005 so that they and their family members would have a place to stay until medicine found a way to bring them back to life.“

Episcopal News Service Archives

http://www.dfms.org/3577_76300_ENG_HTM.htm

From the page: “That bloody cross brings new life into this world. Colossians calls Jesus the firstborn of all creation, the firstborn from the dead. That sweaty, bloody, tear-stained labor of the cross bears new life. Our mother Jesus gives birth to a new creation — and you and I are His children. If we’re going to keep on growing into Christ-images for the world around us, we’re going to have to give up fear.”

“Our Mother Jesus” – R. Andrew Newman – National Review Online

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjdkZjg3MzJlM2ZiMzczNDdhYTBiYzYwYWMxYTlmNjE=

From the page: ““Our Mother Jesus”
What has the Episcopal Church become?
By R. Andrew Newman

There remain faithful Christians in the pews of the Episcopal Church, behind the altars, even a handful in miters, but the church itself appears to have left the fold. Does ECUSA remain, in any real sense, a Christian church?

I say this not to shock, not to gloat, not to cast stones, for, in my heart, I suspect I’m as much an Anglican now as before I officially left the denomination nearly eight years ago. It pains me to watch the church morph into something … what, exactly, I’m not sure.

None of this started yesterday; nor in the last decade. And if any doubt remained as to the state of the Church’s soul, if any hope lingered for renewal and reformation within the body, General Convention 2006 should have extinguished hope and doubt alike. The convention, which ended last week in Columbus, Ohio, underscored in the brightest of reds that the Episcopal Church no longer recognizes any authority outside of these triennial conventions.

And I mean no other authority — not the Anglican Communion, not thousands of years of church tradition, not the documents of their own tradition, not even the Bible.

In the Episcopal Church of 2006, no one could be elected presiding bishop who believes otherwise. “But,” I can hear orthodox Christians outside of ECUSA shouting, “this contradicts Scripture!” They won’t hear any argument from me. But, for more than a decade, the exegetical spin from Episcopal pulpits has been consistent: The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah had nothing to do with sex, but rather with their lack of hospitality; St. Paul condemns temple prostitution, not loving, committed same-sex relationships; properly interpreted, then, Scripture presents no impediment to the inclusion and celebration of homosexuality.

If General Convention showed anything, it’s that no longer will there be a need for such creative hermeneutics. Scripture simply isn’t important enough.

At the convention’s closing Eucharist, the new presiding bishop preached, “Colossians calls Jesus the firstborn of all creation, the firstborn from the dead. That sweaty, bloody, tear-stained labor of the cross bears new life. Our mother Jesus gives birth to a new creation – and you and I are His children.”

Our mother Jesus?

Bishop Schori felt no need to cloak her language so as not to scandalize the average Episcopalian. Tossing aside the New Testament, she transgendered the Lord without a qualm in the world — and for all the world to hear.

General Convention in 2003 should have provided evidence enough that the revolution neared its final stage when Scripture would be left behind as an outmoded relic. Attention, however, never strayed far from the fight over homosexuality. While that battle captured headlines, a telling but little-reported vote took place in the House of Bishops.

Bishop Keith Ackerman of the Diocese of Quincy offered a resolution asking the church to affirm “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.”

On the spur of the moment Ackerman hadn’t pulled this notion from his cassock; it’s directly from Anglicanism’s Articles of Religion, intended to insure the primacy of Scripture in the life of the church. In fact, to this day, every deacon, priest, and bishop must declare that he or she believes the Scriptures “contain all things necessary to salvation” in order to be ordained. And yet the resolution was voted down.

Fast forward to 2006: ……..”

US immigration

http://www.workpermit.com/us/us.htm

From the page: “US Immigration

The USA remains one of the most popular countries in the world as an immigration destination. Let us help you on the road to getting your USA visa.The US has over 60 types of non-immigrant (meaning non-permanent) US visas. workpermit.com offers you full US immigration services if you need help, as well as many USA visa guides to get you started if you want to handle your US immigration on your own. The US immigration process can be confusing and bureaucratic, but our experts are here to help.“

Well, thanks a lot ya limey basturds. Solve your own immigration problems by sending them over here, thanks. How would you have liked it if we maybe woulda let the Krauts do their immigrating into your puny fogged up island back during WWII, ya ingrates.