Obama Speech: ‘A More Perfect Union’

from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod

Oregon Transgender Man Is Five Months Pregnant

Thomas Beatie, a woman who changed her sex and now calls herself a man, is five months pregnant with a baby girl.

The Oregon resident said in an article of “The Advocate”, a national magazine for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender readers, that he went through a sex change but reconstructed only his chest and had testosterone therapy. He kept his female reproductive organs and became pregnant through artificial insemination.

Thomas and his wife Nancy decided to have a baby, but when the latter went through a hysterectomy due to severe endometriosis 20 years ago, they came up with the idea that Thomas should carry their child.

“I stopped taking my bimonthly testosterone injections. It had been roughly eight years since I had my last menstrual cycle, so this wasn’t a decision that I took lightly,” Beatie said in the article.

“My body regulated itself after about four months, and I didn’t have to take any exogenous estrogen, progesterone, or fertility drugs to aid my pregnancy,” he added.

Beatie labeled as “incredible” the experience of carrying the pregnancy for his wife. And it’s not a first for him. Beatie is now at his second pregnancy after he went through an ectopic pregnancy with triplets.

He described his first pregnancy as a “life-threatening event” because it required surgical intervention. Beatie lost all his embryos and his right fallopian tube in the intervention.

He acknowledged the fact that he and his wife are facing the anger of some people who feel offended by their decision. Among those feeling offended by this were doctors, health care professionals, receptionalists, friends and family.

Asked about his identity regarding the fact that his stomach is now growing, Beatie said that he “constantly” remained a man.

“I am so lucky to have such a loving, supportive wife. I will be my daughter’s father, and Nancy will be her mother. We will be a family,” he said. -efluxmedia

Lights Out For One Hour, 8 PM Tonight Could Improve Life on Earth

Houses across the world are switching off their lights for one hour at 8 p.m., on Saturday, March 29, to make a statement about the greatest factor of global warming – coal-fired electricity.

The Earth Hour is a project started last year by the World Wildlife Federation.

“It’s largely symbolic,” said Monica Echeverria, a spokeswoman for the World Wildlife Federation, according to the Los Angeles Times. “The purpose is to keep getting the word out about how important it is to reduce energy and carbon emissions. It’s all about climate change.”

The Earth Hour project aims to make people more aware about the consequences of global warming and make them feel like they are working together as a team, to save the health of our planet. The WWF hopes that the participants will think of changing the light bulbs in their homes with compact fluorescents, which are much more economical and efficient.

The global warming issue is one of the most difficult challenges Earth faces, and it can only be solved if a large number of people work together, trying to change something.

On the project’s website, www.earthhour.org, WWF informs that on March 31 2007, when Earth Hour started in Australia, over 2.2 million Sydney residents and over 2,100 businesses turned off the lights for one hour, resulting in a 10.2 percent energy reduction across the city.

This year, Earth Hour spread all around the globe and 24 important cities in the world are expected to participate in the action on March 29, at 8 p.m. – eflux

I’ll do it. It is good practice so the Earth can turn out all the lights and hide if some evil aliens fly by. “Nope, no one to eat on this planet either. Let’s try that other one.”

Arrest warrant issued for ‘God’

 

A MAGISTRATE has issued an arrest warrant for a man who failed to turn up to court because he is “God” and above the law.

Richard James Howarth was remanded to appear in the Ipswich Magistrate’s Court to answer a string of traffic offences, including four counts of driving with a blood alcohol content more than three times the legal limit.

However, his lawyers said he failed to appear after having earlier informed them he would not talk to them because he is was the almighty and above answering to Queensland laws.

Early this month, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service solicitor Kevin Rose, for Howarth, told the court his client refused his office’s attempts to talk to them.

A court and a mental health expert have already deemed Howarth was mentally fit for trial, but Mr Rose maintained he has obvious mental health issues.

Mr Rose said he did not doubt Howarth genuinely believed he was God. – news.com

One person has already found God guilty of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. In addition to murdering nearly all humans with a great flood, he seems to have done the same thing with the dinosaurs he created, a fact he tried to cover up by not including them in the Bible.

TSA Forces Woman To Remove Nipple Rings For Flight

“The last time that I checked a nipple was not a dangerous weapon,” well-known L.A. attorney Gloria Alred said.

A Texas woman who claims she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.

“I wouldn’t wish this experience upon anyone,” Mandi Hamlin, 37, said at a news conference in Los Angeles. “My experience with TSA was a nightmare I had to endure. No one deserves to be treated this way.”

Hamlin said she was trying to board a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on Feb. 24 when she was scanned by a Transportation Security Administration agent after passing through a larger metal detector without problems.

The female TSA agent used a handheld detector that beeped when it passed in front of Hamlin’s chest, the Dallas-area resident said.

Hamlin said she told the woman that she was wearing nipple piercings. The female agent then called over her male colleagues, one of whom said she would have to remove the body piercings, Hamlin claimed.

Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked if she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewelry was removed, she said.

She was taken behind a curtain and managed to remove one bar-shaped nipple piercing but had trouble with the second, a ring.

“Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her,” said Hamlin’s attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA’s Office of Civil Rights and Liberties. Allred is a well-known Los Angeles lawyer who often represents high-profile claims.

Hamlin showed reporters at the news conference how she took off the second ring by applying pliers to the torso of a mannequin that had a peach-colored bra with the rings on it.

She said she heard male TSA agents snickering as she took out the ring. She was scanned again and was allowed to board even though she still was wearing a belly button ring.

Ancient Petroglyph May be Key to Christmas Legend

This year, Santa can’t wait for Christmas. A small, but dedicated group of rock art preservationists in Utah – the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition, and their allies – are fighting to preserve what may be the original Santa Claus.

Nine Mile Canyon: Located high on the side of a sheer cliff in a rugged place in central Utah, is an ancient petroglyph that dates back over 1,000 years; it has an uncanny resemblance to the modern day Santa, an elf, and his nine reindeer.

A petroglyph is a work of prehistoric Indian rock art that is chiseled or “pecked” into rock, usually into a dark patina surface; the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition and their preservationist friends are seeking to save this ancient petroglyph from destruction.

An industrial gas and oil development in the area is slowly destroying this and thousands of other petroglyphs that call this canyon home.

According to Pam Miller, a trained archaeologist and Chair of the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition, “‘Santa’ is one of more than 10,000 unique petroglyphs and pictographs (prehistoric Indian art painted on rock) found in the canyon that are being obliterated by dust and destroyed by dust-suppressant chemicals (magnesium chloride) that is being sprayed on roads. Additionally, the vibrations of huge trucks, drill rigs, bulldozers, and industrial traffic are also affecting these ancient works of art.”

Bill Bryant, the photographer who managed to photograph “Santa” using a super-telephoto lens said that, “The destruction going on here is tragic. This entire canyon is a national treasure that should be made into a national monument or park.” …

Petro-Canada Resources (USA) is also drilling in the area. Public comments can be submitted electronically and all information can be found on the Nine Mile Coalition web site at: www.ninemilecanyoncoalition.org.

“While the intentions and beliefs of the original artist(s) will never be known, the beauty of rock art is that future generations will continue to be inspired by it,” Miller explained. “Of course this ‘Santa’ interpretation must clearly be seen as ethnocentric by later observers; it is not likely that Santa, the elf, and reindeer were in the mind of the original people making the markings.”

According to Miller, “The only way to save ‘Santa’ and the world-renown rock art of Nine Mile Canyon from destruction is for people to get involved and make their voices heard to BLM and their elected officials across the country. This place needs to be saved for future generations.” – send2press

Science behind the Antarctic ice shelf collapse (2008.03.26)

from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod

Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctic break-up! (2008.03.25)

from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod

$10 Million X Prize Offered for 100-MPG Car

Competition has a way of bringing out the best in people. If there is a gauntlet that you think needs picking up, start by throwing it down. The Automotive X Prize has done just that.In 1919, hotelier Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize for the first nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris, a challenge ultimately met by Charles Lindbergh in 1927. Within months of the flight, aircraft and airfield construction boomed in the U.S.

We’re reminded of this by Mark Goodstein, executive director of the Automotive X Prize. This group plans to award a multimillion-dollar purse to teams that win a series of races in a production-ready vehicle capable of exceeding 100 mpg. The X Prize people hope that a boom in practical, high-mileage cars will surely follow.

The real question might be whether it is possible to build a winning entry for less money than the prize.

In This Contest, 100 mpg Is the Easy Part
The first X Prize was announced in 1995, a $10 million award to the first non-governmental organization to achieve space flight in a reusable craft. It was won on October 4, 2004, by SpaceShipOne, built by Mojave Aerospace Ventures. Now the X Prize group has focused its attention on the need for mainstream, mass-produced cars capable of extraordinary fuel mileage.

While it isn’t terribly hard to build a vehicle that will propel itself 100 miles on only a gallon of gas, the X Prize rules call for a car that can carry four adults and sip gas while traversing all kinds of terrain and negotiating real-world traffic. And the car builder must demonstrate that the vehicle can be profitably offered for sale in volumes of 10,000 units in a form that meets federal crash safety and emissions requirements. If this weren’t enough, the competition really is a race, because the money goes to the fastest car that can do all of these things.

“Achieving 100 mpg? Any bright engineer can go do that,” declares Chris Theodore, vice chairman of ASC Inc., who advised the X Prize committee. “But with the rules of cost and safety and desirability and functionality, it becomes much more challenging. I’m not sure the public appreciates how difficult it is.”

That much is certain, if the X Prize group’s own survey is accurate. The contest organizers conducted a poll and found that 52 percent of Americans believe there is a conspiracy between car manufacturers and oil companies to deprive consumers of technologies that produce high fuel economy.

No souped-up Prius with extra batteries is going to be successful in this contest, says S.M. Shahed, senior research fellow at Honeywell Turbo Technologies. “It will require a huge weight reduction,” he notes. “You can’t simply add more heavy batteries.”

Maintaining safety in lightweight cars will be a challenge, Shahed acknowledges. But it can be met by having the car sacrifice itself to protect the occupants at a lower crash speed than is typical today. “If the price you have to pay for having a 100-mpg car is totaling the car at 25 mph, then I’m willing to pay that price,” he says. -edmunds

Asparagus sauce accused of killing diner + Food Safety Video

WILLIAM Hodgins died just hours after being served up a sauce with fatally high levels of the toxic pathogen bacillus cerus by an award-winning Sydney restaurant, an inquest heard yesterday. A coronial inquest into the death of the 81-year-old heard he had eaten fish of the day with an asparagus cream-based sauce at the Tables restaurant in Pymble on the night of Friday, January 12, 2007.

Tests on the sauce carried out after Mr Hodgins’ death by the Division of Analytical Laboratories found there was a presence of bacillus cereus at at 9.8 million per 10 million parts. Levels of 1.0 million parts per 10 million is toxic, the inquest heard.= The build up of bacteria could have been caused by the sauce being left out on the bench in a 30C kitchen for up to seven hours and possibly reheated and re-refrigerated a number of times over a 48-hour period, the inquest heard.

Tables restaurant owners Daniel Brukarz and Kim De Laive both denied during their evidence to the inquest that the sauce would have been out for any more than four hours. They said it would only have been served to customers that day and possibly for the following days’ lunch. A chef of about 30 years experience, Mr De Laive admitted he had no formal food safety training but said he believed his taste and smell test was enough to ascertain its safety. – news.com

Most people do not understand food safety, but they think they do. I’ve gotten food poisoning before from a cook who left mayonnaise too long at room temperature.