LovingSpirit

Gluttony is the source of all our infirmities and the fountain of all our diseases. As fire extinguished by an excess of fuel, so is the natural health of the body destroyed by an intemperate diet.
Burton

Gluttony kills more than the sword.
Proverb

Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
Peter De Vries
1910-, American Author

Love,
starduster
http://totherow.tripod.com/

When Good Men Do Nothing
by Wayne Greeson

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Edmund Burke)

So much of the history of the struggle between good and evil can be explained by Edmund Burke's observation. Time and again those who profess to be good seem to clearly outnumber those who are evil, yet those who are evil seem to prevail far too often. Seldom is it the numbers that determine the outcome, but whether those who claim to be good men are willing to stand up and fight for what they know to be right. There are numerous examples of this sad and awful scenario being played out over and over again in the scriptures.

They Get Nothing Good Done

When good men do nothing, they get nothing good done. To be good, one must do good. The Lord commands his people to do good (Luke 6:35; Eph. 2:10). Christ "gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works" (Titus 2:14).

In the parable of the talents, Jesus described a man who did nothing. When he received his Lord's money, he "went and digged in the earth, and hid his Lord's money" (Matt. 25:18). When his Lord returned, he returned to the Lord just what he had been given (Matt. 25:25). Notice, the servant did not do any outright evil, such as stealing the money, but then neither did he do anything good. He did nothing and he got nothing good accomplished. Jesus said he was a "wicked and slothful servant" (Matt. 25:26).

Jesus rebuked the church at Laodicea for doing nothing. "I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked" (Rev. 3:15-17).

Too many Christians and too many churches do nothing. They are standing idly by, they are mere spectators. They sit on the sidelines instead of actively participating and working for the good. If good wins, they join in the celebration though they did nothing to produce the victory. If evil wins, they will complain long and loud though their own apathy helped produce the undesirable result.

When Jesus found a fig tree with "nothing thereon, but leaves only" He cursed the tree and "presently the fig tree withered away" (Matt. 21:19). What will He do with those who claim to be good and yet who do nothing? John the baptist warned, "And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire" (Matt. 3:10; John 15:2).

They Help Evil To Triumph

When good men do nothing, evil triumphs. Evil, sin and sinful men must be opposed. God commands those who are good, not just to avoid evil but actively oppose it.

Christians are to not only to "have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but (also) reprove them" (Eph. 5:11). Those who do nothing about sin and evil, help the sin and evil to prevail. One who is silent when there are those around him in sin becomes a partaker with them (Eph. 5:7).

In the days of Elijah, the silence of many had allowed the evil of Ahab and Jezebel to prevail throughout the land of Israel. "And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word" (1 Kings 18:21). The silence of the people spoke volumes of their indecisiveness and inaction. Their failure to stand up, speak up and speak out permitted wicked and evil men to run rampant.

Jesus told of a traveler who was robbed, beaten and left him half dead. The men who did this were wicked and did a very wicked thing. But the Levite and priest allowed this evil to continue unanswered by doing nothing as they each "passed by on the other side" (Luke 10:31-32). Fortunately for the traveler there was one man, a Samaritan, who was willing to stand up for what was right (Luke 10:33-36).

Jesus warned "He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad" (Matt. 12:30). In the fight against evil there is no middle ground, no gray area, no neutrality. Those who are not actively and vigorously fighting against evil are helping evil to triumph.

They Are No Longer Good

When good men do nothing, they are no longer good. Many have the mistaken notion that good is merely the absence of doing that which is wrong. Not so! One is good not merely because he does no evil, but because he is actively working for what is good. "Let him eschew evil, and do good" (1 Pet. 3:11). James explained, "Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin" (James 4:17).

The eldest of Israel, Reuben, knew his brothers' murderous plot against their younger brother Joseph was wrong. He started an attempt to deliver Joseph, but as he hesitated and vacillated, the other brothers sold Joseph into slavery. When Reuben heard what they had done, he realized his failure to act had helped to bring about this evil result.

Instead of correcting his error, Reuben sought to cover his guilt by agreeing with his brothers to lie to their father about Joseph's disappearance (Gen. 37:18-35). Reuben had "good intentions" and he was not even present when Joseph was sold into slavery, but he knew his inaction and absence made him just as guilty as the rest of his wicked brothers. This guilt continued to haunt him through the years (Gen. 42:21-22).

The prophet Obadiah severely condemned the Edomites for doing nothing when evil was befalling their brethren, the Jews. When Jerusalem was invaded by her enemies, the Edomites "stood on the other side" doing nothing but watching the slaughter as spectators. God said by their failure to act and to help their brethren "even thou wast as one of them" (Obad. 11).

Today, there are preachers and Christians who fail and refuse to meet the real foe, refute error and fight the enemy. Instead, they have turned to viciously savaging their own brethren. They are filled with bitterness and hatred and they maliciously attack, slander and misrepresent other Christians and gospel preachers.

Paul warned about such men and behavior among those professing to be Christians, "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another" (Gal. 5:15). Those who engage in such behavior are spiritual cannibals.

While the conduct of these so-called Christians is shameful, what about those supposedly "good" men who do nothing? Those stand on the other side and do nothing but watch as their brothers are being slandered, slaughtered and devoured, they cease being innocent bystanders and idle spectators. Their failure to act not only allows evil to triumph, but makes them just as guilty as the spiritual cannibals they refuse to reprove and rebuke. In God's words, "even thou wast as one of them" (Obad. 11).

Conclusion

"Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap" (Gal. 6:7). Those who fail or refuse to do good in the face of evil are sowing some dangerous seeds. They are doing nothing good as Jesus commanded them to do; they are helping evil to win and have ceased being good and have become partakers of the evil they did nothing to stop.

Do not allow evil to triumph. Do not do sit by and do nothing. Stand up and be counted, speak up against evil and speak out against evil men and their sinful deeds.

Sowing The Seed, Vol. 3, by Wayne Greeson. Twenty full sermon outlines which are ready to preach. Topics include "Wise Advise," "The Abundant Life," "Little Foxes," "Giants and Grasshoppers," "God's Law Of Harvest," and "Have I Become Your Enemy?" (107 pages) (PDF file size: 648k).
Wedding And Funeral Sermons, a collection of wedding and funeral sermons by David Padfield, Wayne Greeson, Harry Lewis, Brian Sullivan, Wayne Walker, Gene Taylor, and Robert Welch (PDF file size: 149k).

http://www.padfield.com/1997/goodmen.html

Love,
starduster
http://totherow.tripod.com/

Immortality

.
Each day is a lifetime lived,

To the immortal soul.

Death at sleep,

Another day to prepare for.

Earthly existence takes it toll on a soul!

Awaken into life once again.

Another life in a day,

Another day in a life,

Immortal until the day no longer breaks in the flesh.

Immortal till time stands still in the spirit,

And bows before God,

Awaiting further instructions.

.
6/6/01 -- Starduster

The Preacher

.
Once there was a man,

who thought he had a plan,

but he only had a small part.

.
The man went on to write,

and to preach with all his might,

but his words fell short of the heart.

.
He asked himself,

Why are these people not heeding my words,

Lord, about your wonderful plan?

.
The Lord replied, "Son, they are,

just give them more time,

and listen to My Words to you, man."

.
"The story you tell,

is a long one as well,

and it takes quite a bit of thought.

.
The readers all listen,

not always with time to respond,

and wonder even if they ought."

.
Stories of gods and angels,

spaceships and beings

watching us from the next level abound,

.
Does this scare you, or make you mad,

that one would take this tact with you

to teach, is it sound?

.
Teach, learn, do, pray,

tell me what to do today,

make the demons go away.

.
Ask as you want to receive,

and pray for what you expect,

and it will come your way.

.
10/24/97 -- Starduster

BTW, comments are always welcome to any of my posts, including these old poems. So don't worry, you won't hurt my feelings. :-)

What It Means to Belong to a Religious Computer Mailing List

.
All we do is sit and type.

And moan and stir and talk and gripe.

At once it seems like a frivolous waste.

Then in comes a "Good Post," written in haste.

.
We teach what we most need to learn.

By this I am surely so dumbly born

And need so much to be taught in here,

That I talk and tell what I want to hear.

.
For the story I tell is an old one you know,

And its telling gets better with age as I grow

Stronger in my beliefs with your instructions,

And more patient and caring with new additions.

.
Spreading the Word is an old pastime

That has been done since time started, and I'm

Just getting started with it, you'll notice,

With each day our religious list brings mail to us.

.
"I'll take the Lord over you any day,"

I say as I await each letter that comes.

Then, as the letter unfolds, another way

To see truth, from your point of view, drums

.
Into my head some more ways to interpret

The unfolding characters that set their pit

To trap me with their logic, and sometimes their wit.

But to tell all, they would surely have a fit!

.
So I tell them what they want to hear,

That they will all go to heaven, near

And someday have no misgivings of heart,

That the life they led was the one they meant to start.

.
Do what you mean, not what you say.

Tell what you know, not what you believe.

Go where you can to spread the Word to all,

And remember to hear it yourself before you fall.

.
9/13/97 -- Starduster

BALANCED

Up and down, in and out, over and under

Day and night, east and west, good and bad.

The Laws of the Universe are written in two's

So easy to see, one for me, one for you.

It's only this way that the wisdom is heard

For there must be two sides, before balance occurs.

The vibrations of one are limited to a degree

But watch as the frequency rises, when you match he and she

Together, male and female, the way it was meant to be.

This is sweet, but don't forget

To know sweet, you must at times sour get.

Just keep moving, my friend, don't dwell on the past

And then you will find true happiness at last.

6/5/80 -- Keith Totherow

From: The New York Times (pg. WK3), May 18, 2008

ONE COUNTRY'S TABLE SCRAPS, ANOTHER COUNTRY'S MEAL

By Andrew Martin

Grocery bills are rising through the roof. Food banks are running
short of donations. And food shortages are causing sporadic riots in
poor countries through the world.

You'd never know it if you saw what was ending up in your landfill. As
it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food -- an
estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according
to a government study -- and it happens at the supermarket, in
restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out
to about a pound of food every day for every American.

Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic
blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don't use. And consumers
toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week's
Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste,
the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4
billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United
States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and
sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.

The study didn't account for the explosion of ready-to-eat foods now
available at supermarkets, from rotisserie chickens to sandwiches and
soups. What do you think happens to that potato salad and meatloaf at
the end of the day?

A more recent study by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated
that Americans generate roughly 30 million tons of food waste each
year, which is about 12 percent of the total waste stream. All but
about 2 percent of that food waste ends up in landfills; by
comparison, 62 percent of yard waste is composted.

The numbers seem all the more staggering now, given the cost of
groceries and the emerging food crisis abroad.

After President Bush said recently that India's burgeoning middle
class was helping to push up food prices by demanding better food,
officials in India complained that not only do Americans eat too much
-- if they slimmed down to the weight of middle-class Indians, said
one, "many people in sub-Saharan Africa would find food on their
plate" -- but they also throw out too much food.

And consider this: the rotting food that ends up in landfills produces
methane, a major source of greenhouse gases.

America's Second Harvest -- The Nation's Food Bank Network, a group of
more than 200 food banks, reports that donations of food are down 9
percent, but the number of people showing up for food has increased 20
percent. The group distributes more than two billion pounds of donated
and recovered food and consumer products each year.

The problem isn't unique to the United States.

In England, a recent study revealed that Britons toss away a third of
the food they purchase, including more than four million whole apples,
1.2 million sausages and 2.8 million tomatoes. In Sweden, families
with small children threw out about a quarter of the food they bought,
a recent study there found.

And most distressing, perhaps, is that in some parts of Africa a
quarter or more of the crops go bad before they can be eaten. A study
presented last week to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable
Development found that the high losses in developing nations "are
mainly due to a lack of technology and infrastructure" as well as
insect infestations, microbial growth, damage and high temperatures
and humidity.

For decades, wasting food has fallen into the category of things that
everyone knows is a bad idea but that few do anything about, sort of
like speeding and reapplying sunscreen. Didn't your mother tell you to
eat all the food on your plate?

Food has long been relatively cheap, and portions were increasingly
huge. With so much news about how fat everyone was getting -- 66
percent of adult Americans are overweight or obese, according to
2003-04 government health survey -- there was a compelling argument to
be made that it was better to toss the leftover deep-dish pizza than
eat it again the next day.

For cafeterias, restaurants and supermarkets, it was just as easy to
toss food that wasn't sold into trash bins than to worry about
somebody getting sick from it. And then filing a lawsuit.

"The path of least resistance is just to chuck it," said Jonathan
Bloom, who started a blog last year called wastedfood.com that tracks
the issue.

Of course, eliminating food waste won't solve the problems of world
hunger and greenhouse-gas pollution. But it could make a dent in this
country and wouldn't require a huge amount of effort or money. The
Department of Agriculture estimated that recovering just 5 percent of
the food that is wasted could feed four million people a day;
recovering 25 percent would feed 20 million people.

The Department of Agriculture said it was updating its figures on food
waste and officials there weren't yet able to say if the problem has
gotten better or worse.

In many major cities, including New York, food rescue organizations do
nearly all the work for cafeterias and restaurants that are willing to
participate. The food generally needs to be covered and in some cases
placed in a freezer. Food rescue groups pick it up. One of them, City
Harvest, collects excess food each day from about 170 establishments
in New York.

"We're not talking about table scraps," said Joel Berg, executive
director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, explaining the
types of wasted food that is edible. "We're talking about a pan of
lasagna that was never served."

For food that isn't edible, a growing number of states and cities are
offering programs to donate it to livestock farmers or to compost it.
In Massachusetts, for instance, the state worked with the grocery
industry to create a program to set aside for composting food that
can't be used by food banks.

"The great part about this is grocers save money on their garbage bill
and they contribute a product to composting," said Kate M. Krebs,
executive director of the National Recycling Coalition, who calls the
wasting of food "the most wrenching issue of our day."

The City of San Francisco is turning food waste from residents and
restaurants into tons of compost a day. The city has structured its
garbage collection system so that it provides incentives for recycling
and composting.

There are also efforts to cut down on the amount of food that people
pile on their plates. A handful of restaurant chains including T.G.I.
Friday's are offering smaller portions. And a growing number of
college cafeterias have eliminated trays, meaning students have to
carry their food to a table rather than loading up a tray.

"It's sort of one of the ideas you read about and think, 'Why didn't I
think of that?' " Mr. Bloom said.

The federal government tried once before, during the Clinton
administration, to get the nation fired up about food waste, but the
effort was discontinued by the Bush administration. The secretary of
agriculture at the time, Dan Glickman, created a program to encourage
food recovery and gleaning, which means collecting leftover crops from
farm fields.

He assigned a member of his staff, Mr. Berg, to oversee the program,
and Mr. Berg spent the next several years encouraging farmers,
schools, hospitals and companies to donate extra crops and food to
feeding charities. A Good Samaritan law was passed by Congress that
protected food donors from liability for donating food and groceries,
spurring more donations.

"We made a dent," said Mr. Berg, now at the New York City hunger
group. "We reduced waste and increased the amount of people being fed.
It wasn't a panacea, but it helped."

With thecurrent food crisis, it seems possible that the issue of food
waste might have more traction this time around.

Mr. Bloom said he was encouraged by the increasing Web chatter about
saving money on food, something that used to be confined to the
"frugal mommy blogs."

"The fundamental thing that I'm fighting against is, 'why should I
care? I paid for it,' " Mr. Bloom said. "The rising prices are really
an answer to that."

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Love,
starduster
http://totherow.tripod.com/

From: The Nation, May 16, 2008

MANUFACTURING A FOOD CRISIS

By Walden Bello

When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last
year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many
analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government
subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to
corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn
prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly
one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand
by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an
intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans,
who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on
US imports in the first place?

The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into
account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the
homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by
"free market" policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early
1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors,
Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service
its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a
multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank
executive board described as "unprecedented thoroughgoing
interventionism" designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations
and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine
identified as barriers to economic efficiency.

Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government
expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures
dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The
contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of
state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price
supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral
liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank
also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers.

This blow to peasant agriculture was followed by an even larger one in
1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect.
Although NAFTA had a fifteen-year phaseout of tariff protection for
agricultural products, including corn, highly subsidized US corn
quickly flooded in, reducing prices by half and plunging the corn
sector into chronic crisis. Largely as a result of this agreement,
Mexico's status as a net food importer has now been firmly
established.

With the shutting down of the state marketing agency for corn,
distribution of US corn imports and Mexican grain has come to be
monopolized by a few transnational traders, like US-owned Cargill and
partly US-owned Maseca, operating on both sides of the border. This
has given them tremendous power to speculate on trade trends, so that
movements in biofuel demand can be manipulated and magnified many
times over. At the same time, monopoly control of domestic trade has
ensured that a rise in international corn prices does not translate
into significantly higher prices paid to small producers.

It has become increasingly difficult for Mexican corn farmers to avoid
the fate of many of their fellow corn cultivators and other
smallholders in sectors such as rice, beef, poultry and pork, who have
gone under because of the advantages conferred by NAFTA on subsidized
US producers. According to a 2003 Carnegie Endowment report, imports
of US agricultural products threw at least 1.3 million farmers out of
work -- many of whom have since found their way to the United States.

Prospects are not good, since the Mexican government continues to be
controlled by neoliberals who are systematically dismantling the
peasant support system, a key legacy of the Mexican Revolution. As
Food First executive director Eric Holt-Gimenez sees it, "It will take
time and effort to recover smallholder capacity, and there does not
appear to be any political will for this -- to say nothing of the fact
that NAFTA would have to be renegotiated."

Creating a Rice Crisis in the Philippines

That the global food crisis stems mainly from free-market
restructuring of agriculture is clearer in the case of rice. Unlike
corn, less than 10 percent of world rice production is traded.
Moreover, there has been no diversion of rice from food consumption to
biofuels. Yet this year alone, prices nearly tripled, from $380 a ton
in January to more than $1,000 in April. Undoubtedly the inflation
stems partly from speculation by wholesaler cartels at a time of
tightening supplies. However, as with Mexico and corn, the big puzzle
is why a number of formerly self-sufficient rice-consuming countries
have become severely dependent on imports.

The Philippines provides a grim example of how neoliberal economic
restructuring transforms a country from a net food exporter to a net
food importer. The Philippines is the world's largest importer of
rice. Manila's desperate effort to secure supplies at any price has
become front-page news, and pictures of soldiers providing security
for rice distribution in poor communities have become emblematic of
the global crisis.

The broad contours of the Philippines story are similar to those of
Mexico. Dictator Ferdinand Marcos was guilty of many crimes and
misdeeds, including failure to follow through on land reform, but one
thing he cannot be accused of is starving the agricultural sector. To
head off peasant discontent, the regime provided farmers with
subsidized fertilizer and seeds, launched credit plans and built rural
infrastructure. When Marcos fled the country in 1986, there were
900,000 metric tons of rice in government warehouses.

Paradoxically, the next few years under the new democratic
dispensation saw the gutting of government investment capacity. As in
Mexico the World Bank and IMF, working on behalf of international
creditors, pressured the Corazon Aquino administration to make
repayment of the $26 billion foreign debt a priority. Aquino
acquiesced, though she was warned by the country's top economists that
the "search for a recovery program that is consistent with a debt
repayment schedule determined by our creditors is a futile one."
Between 1986 and 1993 8 percent to 10 percent of GDP left the
Philippines yearly in debt-service payments -- roughly the same
proportion as in Mexico. Interest payments as a percentage of
expenditures rose from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994;
capital expenditures plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent. In short,
debt servicing became the national budgetary priority.

Spending on agriculture fell by more than half. The World Bank and its
local acolytes were not worried, however, since one purpose of the
belt-tightening was to get the private sector to energize the
countryside. But agricultural capacity quickly eroded. Irrigation
stagnated, and by the end of the 1990s only 17 percent of the
Philippines' road network was paved, compared with 82 percent in
Thailand and 75 percent in Malaysia. Crop yields were generally
anemic, with the average rice yield way below those in China, Vietnam
and Thailand, where governments actively promoted rural production.
The post-Marcos agrarian reform program shriveled, deprived of funding
for support services, which had been the key to successful reforms in
Taiwan and South Korea. As in Mexico Filipino peasants were confronted
with full-scale retreat of the state as provider of comprehensive
support -- a role they had come to depend on.

And the cutback in agricultural programs was followed by trade
liberalization, with the Philippines' 1995 entry into the World Trade
Organization having the same effect as Mexico's joining NAFTA. WTO
membership required the Philippines to eliminate quotas on all
agricultural imports except rice and allow a certain amount of each
commodity to enter at low tariff rates. While the country was allowed
to maintain a quota on rice imports, it nevertheless had to admit the
equivalent of 1 to 4 percent of domestic consumption over the next ten
years. In fact, because of gravely weakened production resulting from
lack of state support, the government imported much more than that to
make up for shortfalls. The massive imports depressed the price of
rice, discouraging farmers and keeping growth in production at a rate
far below that of the country's two top suppliers, Thailand and
Vietnam.

The consequences of the Philippines' joining the WTO barreled through
the rest of its agriculture like a super-typhoon. Swamped by cheap
corn imports -- much of it subsidized US grain -- farmers reduced land
devoted to corn from 3.1 million hectares in 1993 to 2.5 million in
2000. Massive importation of chicken parts nearly killed that
industry, while surges in imports destabilized the poultry, hog and
vegetable industries.

During the 1994 campaign to ratify WTO membership, government
economists, coached by their World Bank handlers, promised that losses
in corn and other traditional crops would be more than compensated for
by the new export industry of "high-value-added" crops like cut
flowers, asparagus and broccoli. Little of this materialized. Nor did
many of the 500,000 agricultural jobs that were supposed to be created
yearly by the magic of the market; instead, agricultural employment
dropped from 11.2 million in 1994 to 10.8 million in 2001.

The one-two punch of IMF-imposed adjustment and WTO-imposed trade
liberalization swiftly transformed a largely self-sufficient
agricultural economy into an import-dependent one as it steadily
marginalized farmers. It was a wrenching process, the pain of which
was captured by a Filipino government negotiator during a WTO session
in Geneva. "Our small producers," he said, "are being slaughtered by
the gross unfairness of the international trading environment."

The Great Transformation

The experience of Mexico and the Philippines was paralleled in one
country after another subjected to the ministrations of the IMF and
the WTO. A study of fourteen countries by the UN's Food and
Agricultural Organization found that the levels of food imports in
1995-98 exceeded those in 1990-94. This was not surprising, since one
of the main goals of the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture was to open up
markets in developing countries so they could absorb surplus
production in the North. As then-US Agriculture Secretary John Block
put it in 1986, "The idea that developing countries should feed
themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better
ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products,
which are available in most cases at lower cost."

What Block did not say was that the lower cost of US products stemmed
from subsidies, which became more massive with each passing year
despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase them out. From
$367 billion in 1995, the total amount of agricultural subsidies
provided by developed-country governments rose to $388 billion in
2004. Since the late 1990s subsidies have accounted for 40 percent of
the value of agricultural production in the European Union and 25
percent in the United States.

The apostles of the free market and the defenders of dumping may seem
to be at different ends of the spectrum, but the policies they
advocate are bringing about the same result: a globalized capitalist
industrial agriculture. Developing countries are being integrated into
a system where export-oriented production of meat and grain is
dominated by large industrial farms like those run by the Thai
multinational CP and where technology is continually upgraded by
advances in genetic engineering from firms like Monsanto. And the
elimination of tariff and nontariff barriers is facilitating a global
agricultural supermarket of elite and middle-class consumers serviced
by grain-trading corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland
and transnational food retailers like the British-owned Tesco and the
French-owned Carrefour.

There is little room for the hundreds of millions of rural and urban
poor in this integrated global market. They are confined to giant
suburban favelas, where they contend with food prices that are often
much higher than the supermarket prices, or to rural reservations,
where they are trapped in marginal agricultural activities and
increasingly vulnerable to hunger. Indeed, within the same country,
famine in the marginalized sector sometimes coexists with prosperity
in the globalized sector.

This is not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or
food security but what Africanist Deborah Bryceson of Oxford calls
"de-peasantization" -- the phasing out of a mode of production to make
the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital
accumulation. This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of
millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic
activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason
displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing
suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233
in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled,
from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005. One estimate is that some 150,000
Indian farmers have taken their lives. Collapse of prices from trade
liberalization and loss of control over seeds to biotech firms is part
of a comprehensive problem, says global justice activist Vandana
Shiva: "Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social,
cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a
'consumer' of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful
global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders
locally."

African Agriculture: From Compliance to Defiance

De-peasantization is at an advanced state in Latin America and Asia.
And if the World Bank has its way, Africa will travel in the same
direction. As Bryceson and her colleagues correctly point out in a
recent article, the World Development Report for 2008, which touches
extensively on agriculture in Africa, is practically a blueprint for
the transformation of the continent's peasant-based agriculture into
large-scale commercial farming. However, as in many other places
today, the Bank's wards are moving from sullen resentment to outright
defiance.

At the time of decolonization, in the 1960s, Africa was actually a net
food exporter. Today the continent imports 25 percent of its food;
almost every country is a net importer. Hunger and famine have become
recurrent phenomena, with the past three years alone seeing food
emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and Southern
and Central Africa.

Agriculture in Africa is in deep crisis, and the causes range from
wars to bad governance, lack of agricultural technology and the spread
of HIV/AIDS. However, as in Mexico and the Philippines, an important
part of the explanation is the phasing out of government controls and
support mechanisms under the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment
programs imposed as the price for assistance in servicing external
debt.

Structural adjustment brought about declining investment, increased
unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption and low
output. Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously
cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced
fertilizer use, lower yields and lower investment. Moreover, reality
refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that withdrawal of the
state would pave the way for the market to dynamize agriculture.
Instead, the private sector, which correctly saw reduced state
expenditures as creating more risk, failed to step into the breach. In
country after country, the departure of the state "crowded out" rather
than "crowded in" private investment. Where private traders did
replace the state, noted an Oxfam report, "they have sometimes done so
on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers," leaving "farmers more
food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable international
aid flows." The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting
that "many of the private firms brought in to replace state
researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists."

The support that African governments were allowed to muster was
channeled by the World Bank toward export agriculture to generate
foreign exchange, which states needed to service debt. But, as in
Ethiopia during the 1980s famine, this led to the dedication of good
land to export crops, with food crops forced into less suitable soil,
thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the World Bank's
encouragement of several economies to focus on the same export crops
often led to overproduction, triggering price collapses in
international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana's
expansion of cocoa production triggered a 48 percent drop in the
international price between 1986 and 1989. In 2002-03 a collapse in
coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.

As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment in Africa was
not simply about underinvestment but state divestment. But there was
one major difference. In Africa the World Bank and IMF micromanaged,
making decisions on how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many
civil servants had to be fired and even, as in the case of Malawi, how
much of the country's grain reserve should be sold and to whom.

Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair EU and US
trade practices. Liberalization allowed subsidized EU beef to drive
many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their
subsidies legitimized by the WTO, US growers offloaded cotton on world
markets at 20 percent to 55 percent of production cost, thereby
bankrupting West and Central African farmers.

According to Oxfam, the number of sub-Saharan Africans living on less
than a dollar a day almost doubled, to 313 million, between 1981 and
2001 -- 46 percent of the whole continent. The role of structural
adjustment in creating poverty was hard to deny. As the World Bank's
chief economist for Africa admitted, "We did not think that the human
costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains
would be so slow in coming."

In 1999 the government of Malawi initiated a program to give each
smallholder family a starter pack of free fertilizers and seeds. The
result was a national surplus of corn. What came after is a story that
should be enshrined as a classic case study of one of the greatest
blunders of neoliberal economics. The World Bank and other aid donors
forced the scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing
that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, output
plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell
off a large portion of its grain reserves to enable the food reserve
agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When
the food crisis turned into a famine in 2001-02, there were hardly any
reserves left. About 1,500 people perished. The IMF was unrepentant;
in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program on
the grounds that "the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to
the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government
interventions in the food and other agricultural markets [are]
crowding out more productive spending."

By the time an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the
government had had enough of World Bank/IMF stupidity. A new president
reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy, enabling 2 million households to
buy it at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The
result: bumper harvests for two years, a million-ton maize surplus and
the country transformed into a supplier of corn to Southern Africa.

Malawi's defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of
heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is
different today, since structural adjustment has been discredited
throughout Africa. Even some donor governments and NGOs that used to
subscribe to it have distanced themselves from the Bank. Perhaps the
motivation is to prevent their influence in the continent from being
further eroded by association with a failed approach and unpopular
institutions when Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to World
Bank, IMF and Western government aid programs.

Food Sovereignty: An Alternative Paradigm?

It is not only defiance from governments like Malawi and dissent from
their erstwhile allies that are undermining the IMF and the World
Bank. Peasant organizations around the world have become increasingly
militant in their resistance to the globalization of industrial
agriculture. Indeed, it is because of pressure from farmers' groups
that the governments of the South have refused to grant wider access
to their agricultural markets and demanded a massive slashing of US
and EU agricultural subsidies, which brought the WTO's Doha Round of
negotiations to a standstill.

Farmers' groups have networked internationally; one of the most
dynamic to emerge is Via Campesina (Peasant's Path). Via not only
seeks to get "WTO out of agriculture" and opposes the paradigm of a
globalized capitalist industrial agriculture; it also proposes an
alternative -- food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means, first of all,
the right of a country to determine its production and consumption of
food and the exemption of agriculture from global trade regimes like
that of the WTO. It also means consolidation of a smallholder-centered
agriculture via protection of the domestic market from low-priced
imports; remunerative prices for farmers and fisherfolk; abolition of
all direct and indirect export subsidies; and the phasing out of
domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture. Via's
platform also calls for an end to the Trade Related Intellectual
Property Rights regime, or TRIPs, which allows corporations to patent
plant seeds; opposes agro-technology based on genetic engineering; and
demands land reform. In contrast to an integrated global monoculture,
Via offers the vision of an international agricultural economy
composed of diverse national agricultural economies trading with one
another but focused primarily on domestic production.

Once regarded as relics of the pre-industrial era, peasants are now
leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture that
would consign them to the dustbin of history. They have become what
Karl Marx described as a politically conscious "class for itself,"
contradicting his predictions about their demise. With the global food
crisis, they are moving to center stage -- and they have allies and
supporters. For as peasants refuse to go gently into that good night
and fight de-peasantization, developments in the twenty-first century
are revealing the panacea of globalized capitalist industrial
agriculture to be a nightmare. With environmental crises multiplying,
the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up and
industrialized agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the
farmers' movement increasingly has relevance not only to peasants but
to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global
capital's vision for organizing production, community and life itself.

==============

Walden Bello is senior analyst at and former executive director of
Focus on the Global South, a research and advocacy institute based at
Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He is the author or co-author of
many books on politics and economic issues in the Philippines and
Asia, including, most recently, Deglobalization (Zed), and recipient
of the 2003 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the "Alternative
Nobel Prize." In March he was named Outstanding Public Scholar for
2008 by the International Studies Association.

Copyright 2008 The Nation

Love,
starduster
http://totherow.tripod.com/

"The Mullahs Are the Generals, and the Mosques are the Military Headquarters and Propaganda Ministries."
-- James DeMeo
11 September 2001

+++++++

We need to be aware of what we're dealing with here. star

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23634809-28737,00.html

Saudis' secret agenda

Richard Kerbaj and Stuart Rintoul | May 03, 2008

THE cheque from the Saudi Government for $360,000 was enclosed in an envelope.
It was a donation, a gift, a part payment to subsidise the construction of a building that would become Sydney's Muslim heartbeat: Lakemba mosque. More than 35 years after Sydney cleric Khalil Shami received the cheque, he insists it came with no strings attached. But while the cheque had no tangible conditions in the form of written instructions or binding contracts, the cleric received a message from his donors several months after depositing it.

"They said: 'Please, can you mention the tragedy of the Palestinian people and what's happened to them in your sermon?"' Shami tells Inquirer. "Which is really a very noble cause, a very noble cause, I couldn't see a negative in their request."

The message Shami received from Riyadh brings into question the influence petro-dollars can have on their recipients, whether the money is bankrolling a religious centre, a clerical allowance or Queensland's Griffith University, which was exposed by The Australian last month for seeking a $1.37 million Saudi grant, of which $100,000 was received, and offering to keep elements of the deal a secret.

The Saudi Government - largely through its embassy - is believed to have funnelled at least $120 million into Australia since the 1970s to propagate hardline Islam, bankroll radical clerics and build mosques, schools and charitable organisations.

But the Saudi cash that has flowed into Australia, that also allegedly has paid the allowance of hardline Canberra cleric Mohammed Swaiti, who has publicly praised jihadists, is dwarfed by the $90 billion Riyadh is believed to have pumped into promoting Islamic fundamentalism internationally.

Security agencies worldwide turned their focus on Saudi funding following allegations that the 19 Muslim terrorists - with 15 Saudi nationals among them - who turned commercial airliners into suicide bombs in the September 11 attacks in 2001 were funded from Riyadh.

Counter-terrorism networks also looked closely at the threat posed by Wahhabism or Salafism, a Saudi-pioneered interpretation of Islam espoused by Osama bin Laden, on radicalising Western Muslim communities.

Last October, US President George W. Bush declared that Saudi Arabia was "co-operating with efforts to combat international terrorism". But his administration is divided on the role Riyadh is playing in the West, as are Western intelligence agencies, including Britain's Scotland Yard and MI5.

Last September, weeks before Bush talked up Saudi Arabia's role in curbing radicalism and terror, his Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, Stuart Levey, accused Riyadh of failing to prosecute terrorism financiers.

"If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia," Levey said. "When the evidence is clear that these individuals have funded terrorist organisations, and knowingly done so, then that should be prosecuted and treated as real terrorism because it is."

Saudi Arabia has argued that it wants to improve its image in the West by using its financial clout to promote interfaith dialogue and moderate, not radical, Islam.

Last November, Riyadh said it had arrested more than 200 suspected al-Qa'ida operatives and several months ago continued its supposed crackdown on terrorism by seizing dozens of men suspected of being linked to bin Laden's network.

But US counter-terrorism analyst Steven Emerson is sceptical. The Washington-based analyst tells Inquirer: "The notion that the Saudis have totally changed their ways and are not disseminating Wahhabist anti-Western literature and propaganda is simply false. The (Saudi) Government has indeed put out some declarations that would give the impression they are interested in interfaith dialogue. But when it comes to reviewing the statements of the clerics, the religious establishment, the educational textbooks, the crackdown on dissidents and the anti-Western propaganda exported by the regime, one can only conclude their efforts to project moderation is an exercise in propaganda."

In Australia, Griffith academic Mohamad Abdalla has defended his decision to seek the grant, saying the money came with no strings attached. But critics, including the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's national security project director Carl Ungerer, say this is naive and the money is part of a Wahhabist "hearts and minds" campaign being waged by the Saudis in the Muslim world.

US-based Middle East expert and author Daniel Pipes says it is wrong to presume that all academics would follow their donor's line merely to keep the stream of funds rolling.

"Academics have a distinct point of view and are not about to be bought and change their point of view for any sum of money," he tells Inquirer. "But they are willing to shape their work and their views. So you can't buy them but you can rent them. So someone who might have been inclined to ask tough questions will do something else. It's subtle. It's not like the Saudis come to town to buy up academics who grovel before them, as was the case with Griffith University."

Last month, Britain's MI5 director-general Jonathan Evans reportedly told his Government that the Saudi Government's multimillion-dollar donations to universities, along with other funds from Muslim organisations in countries such as Pakistan, had led to a "dangerous increase in the spread of extremism in leading university campuses".

His warning came just days after the Higher Education Funding Council for England held a special meeting to confront fears that Saudi donations were unduly influencing universities. Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies revealed that eight British universities, including Cambridge and Oxford, received more than $US465 million from Saudi and Muslim sources since 1995, mainly to fund Islamic study centres.

In 2005, a prominent Saudi businessman, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, was reported by The Washington Post to have donated $20million to Georgetown and Harvard universities in the US for the study of Islam and the Muslim world to promote interfaith dialogue and understanding.

At Scotland Yard, a security expert cautions that one of Islam's five pillars - Zakat - requires Muslims to give alms and that charity is considered virtuous and essential.

But Emerson, best-selling author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, says Saudi Arabia should be allowed to bankroll religious initiatives in the West only when it becomes open to the idea of religious reciprocity. "I think there should be a law requiring religious reciprocity for funding coming from regimes that restrict religious freedom on their soil," he says. "Saudi Arabia does not allow the practice of any other religion, bars the operations of churches, confiscates Bibles ... As such, there should be laws passed by Western governments prohibiting Saudi donations to universities until and unless Saudi Arabia operates a pluralistic religious environment.

"Absent such laws, I believe that universities should be required to register as foreign registered agents - a law we have in the US - that designates the Saudi donors and their recipients as agents of a foreign power.

"That would certainly stigmatise the grant giving and give pause before a university accepts such money."

The most recent insight into the nature of Saudi society came with the release this month of the Human Rights Watch report Perpetual Minors, about the status imposed on women by Riyadh's doctrinaire interpretation of Sura 4, verse 34 of the Koran: "Men are the protectors and maintainers of women because God has given the one more (strength) than the other and because they support them from their means."

The report outlines how adult Saudi women generally must obtain permission from a male guardian to work, travel, study or marry, while being denied the right to make even the most trivial decisions on behalf of their children and being segregated from men under laws enforced by the Orwellian-sounding Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (the religious police).

In 2004, the UN ranked Saudi Arabia 77th of 78 countries for gender empowerment, defined as the ability of women to take part in economic and political life, ahead of Yemen. Australia was eighth, Norway first.

While Saudi Arabia exports its Wahhabi version of Islam to the world, Saudi society groans under the weight of its internal contradictions. The first class of female law students will graduate from King Abdul Aziz University this year, but the Saudi Ministry of Justice prohibits female lawyers from practising. Judges consider women to be lacking in reason and faith, and have refused to allow them to speak in the courtroom because their voices are shameful.

A Saudi labour code, which came into force in 2006, states that all Saudi workers have the right to work without discrimination, but also specifies "women shall work in all fields suitable to their nature".

Literacy among Saudi women and girls over the age of 15 has risen sharply, according to UN reports, from 16.4 per cent in 1970 to 83.3 per cent in 2005 and Saudi women make up 58 per cent of university graduates (most at teachers colleges), but education is dependent on the permission of male guardians, universities are segregated, and women are excluded from disciplines such as engineering, architecture or political science.

Last year, a 19-year-old gang-rape victim was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months' jail for being in a car with an unrelated man when she was attacked by seven men. In 2002, a fire at an elementary school in Mecca resulted in 15 schoolgirls being burned alive because the religious police refused to let them out of the school without headscarfs.

At the University of Melbourne, Richard Pennell, al-Tajir lecturer in Middle Eastern history, describes Saudi society as opaque rather than transparent.

"It doesn't allow research into its social structure by disinterested people; it doesn't allow disinterested comment about its inner workings; its legal system is closed; it is not a particularly easy society to deal with, partly because it is so stressed," he says. "There are so many things under the surface that are threatening to the regime."

But Pennell is sympathetic to the idea of an educational bridge between Western secular societies and Islamic societies. "We should be taking money from a variety of sources because that is how we get a variety of ideas," he says. "Provided you've got the mechanisms in place so that you don't sing to their tune, I don't think you've got a problem."

Love,
starduster
http://totherow.tripod.com/

Hi LovingSpirits,

I can't be sure. Qualified scientists stand on both sides of this issue. If anyone has ever smelled burning oil, or plastic milk jugs, and wondered if this is good, I hope you trusted your instincts and KNEW it was not good. Can all this pollution cause destruction on a global scale? Yes, we've got evidence. Can we be sure of the long term effects? No, not really. Should we be concerned? Absolutely.

Here is another viewpoint by qualified scientists who don't think we are currently experiencing global warming any more than "normal." Right, just what is normal? It depends on what you've learned.

Lest anyone wonders, let me state that I am not as sure of my stand on global warming as those on the poles are. But when the question is asked, should we continue to burn oil, the answer becomes obvious. We will not continue. There is not an infinite supply. Anyone who thinks oil will last longer than 50 years from now just doesn't study enough. The increasing demand will outstrip any increased capability to suck it out of the ground.

Get used to it, people. Oil hasn't been around that long, and it won't be around much longer. Our use of it has nearly destroyed what little biodiversity we had left. Left from all the hits from humans in all of history. Let's face it, we've come a long way to this brink of the abyss we've approached. It didn't happen overnight, and it won't be cured quickly, either. But if Jesus wants us to live through it, we will. If not, well then, bring it on my Savior, let the 2nd Coming begin!

I for one am ready.

Sorry for getting off topic. Here's the article, which I hope will be well taken. I've studied under Dr. DeMeo newsletters for a decade and think he's worth listening to.

"Global Cooling Continues...."

Record snows in upper Midwest, USA
http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2008/03/its_a_record_year_for_snowfall.html
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=731011

+++++

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23411799-7583,00.html

Climate facts to warm to
Christopher Pearson | March 22, 2008

CATASTROPHIC predictions of global warming usually conjure with the notion of a tipping point, a point of no return.

Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.

Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth stillwarming?"
She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."

Duffy: "It's not only that it's not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there's any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it's put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary."

Duffy then turned to the question of how the proponents of the greenhouse gas hypothesis deal with data that doesn't support their case. "People like Kevin Rudd and Ross Garnaut are speaking as though the Earth is still warming at an alarming rate, but what is the argument from the other side? What would people associated with the IPCC say to explain the (temperature) dip?"

Marohasy: "Well, the head of the IPCC has suggested natural factors are compensating for the increasing carbon dioxide levels and I guess, to some extent, that's what sceptics have been saying for some time: that, yes, carbon dioxide will give you some warming but there are a whole lot of other factors that may compensate or that may augment the warming from elevated levels of carbon dioxide.
"There's been a lot of talk about the impact of the sun and that maybe we're going to go through or are entering a period of less intense solar activity and this could be contributing to the current cooling."

Duffy: "Can you tell us about NASA's Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we're now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?"

Marohasy: "That's right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you've got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you're going to get a positive feedback. That's what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite ... (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they're actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you're getting a negative rather than a positive feedback."

Duffy: "The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?"

Marohasy: "That's right ... These findings actually aren't being disputed by the meteorological community. They're having trouble digesting the findings, they're acknowledging the findings, they're acknowledging that the data from NASA's Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they're about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide."

Duffy: "From what you're saying, it sounds like the implications of this could beconsiderable ..."

Marohasy: "That's right, very much so. The policy implications are enormous. The meteorological community at the moment is really just coming to terms with the output from this NASA Aqua satellite and (climate scientist) Roy Spencer's interpretation of them. His work is published, his work is accepted, but I think people are still in shock at this point."

If Marohasy is anywhere near right about the impending collapse of the global warming paradigm, life will suddenly become a whole lot more interesting.

A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.

With catastrophe off the agenda, for most people the fog of millennial gloom will lift, at least until attention turns to the prospect of the next ice age. Among the better educated, the sceptical cast of mind that is the basis of empiricism will once again be back in fashion. The delusion that by recycling and catching public transport we can help save the planet will quickly come to be seen for the childish nonsense it was all along.

The poorest Indians and Chinese will be left in peace to work their way towards prosperity, without being badgered about the size of their carbon footprint, a concept that for most of us will soon be one with Nineveh and Tyre, clean forgotten in six months.

The scores of town planners in Australia building empires out of regulating what can and can't be built on low-lying shorelines will have to come to terms with the fact inundation no longer impends and find something more plausible to do. The same is true of the bureaucrats planning to accommodate "climate refugees".

Penny Wong's climate mega-portfolio will suddenly be as ephemeral as the ministries for the year 2000 that state governments used to entrust to junior ministers. Malcolm Turnbull will have to reinvent himself at vast speed as a climate change sceptic and the Prime Minister will have to kiss goodbye what he likes to call the great moral issue and policy challenge of our times.

It will all be vastly entertaining to watch.

THE Age published an essay with an environmental theme by Ian McEwan on March 8 and its stablemate, The Sydney Morning Herald, also carried a slightly longer version of the same piece.

The Australian's Cut & Paste column two days later reproduced a telling paragraph from the Herald's version, which suggested that McEwan was a climate change sceptic and which The Age had excised. He was expanding on the proposition that "we need not only reliable data but their expression in the rigorous use of statistics".

What The Age decided to spare its readers was the following: "Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment, though they have become extremely rare now. It is tempting to the layman to embrace with enthusiasm the latest bleak scenario because it fits the darkness of our soul, the prevailing cultural pessimism. The imagination, as Wallace Stevens once said, is always at the end of an era. But we should be asking, or expecting others to ask, for the provenance of the data, the assumptions fed into the computer model, the response of the peer review community, and so on. Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue.)"

The missing sentences do not appear anywhere else in The Age's version of the essay. The attribution reads: "Copyright Ian McEwan 2008" and there is no acknowledgment of editing by The Age.

Why did the paper decide to offer its readers McEwan lite? Was he, I wonder, consulted on the matter? And isn't there a nice irony that The Age chose to delete the line about ideologues not being very good at "absorbing inconvenient fact"?
http://www.orgonelab.org/

Love,
starduster
http://totherow.tripod.com/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=526534&in_page_id=1811&ito=1490

North Korea publicly executes 15 starving refugees fleeing to China in desperate search for food

I've gathered a lot of information over the years laying bare the horrible abuses against life and love within the Islamic world, in efforts to warn they are far more dangerous in totality than anything found in the West. But the Communist nations are just as bad, if not worse! Rather than demand everyone genuflect to the bloodthirsty Allah, the Communist delusion declares their own bloodthirsty Glorious Leaders as Gods, to whom people must genuflect as if they were Allah. Genuflecting is an old Saharasian trait, where delusional bloody psychotics think themselves to be up in the clouds, and everyone else low down in the dirt. The worst of them continue to be found within or at the border regions surrounding Saharasia, often mixing their communism with Islamism, and old Nazism (which is socialist at root), totalitarianisms which were all borne and bred in the antisex, antilife mileu of Saharasian warrior-cult armored ideology. Anything which is anti-love and anti-life, they can rationally mix into their existing culture, no matter what the superficial intellectual components -- they can even call themselves "people's republics" as the people are machine-gunned while searching for food. And just like the situation with submission-demanding Islam, we have plenty of people in the West who are in rapture to the Communist Church, quite willing to sell their families and neighbors into slavery if given the opportunity -- all "for the people", of course. Creeping Sharia Law and Creeping Socialism/Communism are diseases afflicting nearly every Western nation, to the detriment of their peoples lives and freedom. The North Koreans seem to epitomize the "pure culture" of the Communist Church today, having gone even further than Mao (if that can be imagined). They are to communism what Saudi Arabia and the Talibans are to Islam. The old Saharasian War-Lord mentality is alive and well, stealing everything into the hands of a powerful few, and viewing anyone not a member of their central dominating Military Caste as expendable garbage. J.D.

Love,
starduster
http://totherow.tripod.com/

Make speeches that stoning of women is a good thing, write articles on the same, get fired by angered infidels who don't believe women should be stoned, then sue for damages as an "offended Muslim", and get a million bucks as compensation for how "unfairly" you were treated by the nasty infidels. After advocating female slavery and murder, you get paid a million bucks for it. Got that? Advocate stoning of women, and the New Kings of the EU (see note at end of post) will pay you big money if the unwashed peasants dare to object. Incredible. J.D.

++++++++

Stoning Women Pays

http://www.aina.org/news/20080213033202.htm

If the practice of stoning (lapidation) exists across the Islamic world-most visibly in Afghanistan, Iran, Nigeria, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates-it speaks much to Western forbearance that this same penalty, though reviled, can make the fortune of one who commends the practice. Consider the case of Hani Ramadan and the state of Geneva.

Hani Ramadan-director of the Islamic Center of Geneva (CIG), grandson to Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, and brother to Islamist superstar Tariq Ramadan-was dismissed from a public teaching post in suburban Geneva in 2003 for publishing a defense of stoning in France's Le Monde. (Brother Tariq, who sought to distance himself from his brother on this point, lamely proposed a "moratorium" on the practice.)

This was not his first brush with the teaching establishment and the civil authorities: Ramadan's colleagues blasted him for tasteless remarks on the place of women in 1996 and 1998; and Hani and brother both were refused passage to France for alleged ties to terror groups (in 1997 and 1996, respectively; Hani was also denied an Egyptian visa in 1999).

But the most recent affaire Ramadan began in the Fall of 2002, when the teacher drafted an opinion editorial on stoning, punitive amputation, and AIDS for the September Bulletin (posted to and since removed from the Islamic Center's website) of the Committee for Respect of Muslim Rights (CRDM).

In it the author (1) claims "the punishment fits the crime: the severed hand for theft, stoning for illicit pleasure. This represents not only retribution, but a form of purification" and deterrence; (2) he demonstrates an odd compassion, writing: "While it's true that stoning is a difficult spectacle [Š], reports reveal that the condemned is not long to suffer: the hail of stones dispatches the individual in the space of several seconds"; (3) and finally, he admits that while AIDS is certainly spread through transfusions of contaminated blood, "only those guilty of deviant comportment expose themselves to contagion."

Also curious were his assertions that "the penalties that govern theft and adultery may only find application in a society respectful of Islamic practice and principle." For example, he writes: "It is forbidden to remove the thief's hand in a state that does not deliver [Š] the means to lead a dignified existence."

An abridged version of the same document appeared shortly thereafter in France's Le Monde (edition dated September 10, 2002), under the title La charia incomprise, or "Misinterpreting Shari'a."

The saga continues as follows:

* October 11, 2002: Geneva's Department of Public Instruction (DIP) suspends Ramadan. The following day, in a reply to researcher Albert Levy (which Le Monde refused to publish) Ramadan asserts that real democracy "will never thrive under Islamic skies."

* February 5, 2003: Ramadan is terminated for reason that his role as Islamic Center chief and statements are "incompatible" and "clearly at odds" with the mission of public education.

* March 15, 2004: An administrative tribunal orders the state to return Ramadan to his post. The state refuses, but offers Ramadan any number of jobs away from children, which Ramadan refuses.

* April 4, 2004: Ramadan again commends stoning, in Geneva's Matin Dimanche: "I'll say it again, that [stoning] concerns not only females, but adulterous males, as well; this should refute the feminist case against me." A new investigation is launched April 8.

* May 2005: The courts again demand the State to return Ramadan to his post. Geneva ignores the request, but agrees to disburse his regular salary ($9,700 per month in today's dollars) to cover the period of his inactivity, and throughout the foreseeable future.

* January 16, 2008: Ramadan agrees to abandon his wish for reappointment, in exchange for two years' salary, or about $230,000.

Geneva admits it made the largest allowable payout, for reason that the state was eager to close the case on "Mr. Stoning." And to sweeten the pot, Geneva further agreed to reimburse his legal costs, of $80,000. Add to this five years' wages, of $633,000, and one describes a settlement of some $1 million. News of Ramadan's reward caused Geneva's Matin to gush: "it pays to praise stoning."

Such are the spoils of "lawfare" (legal wrangling designed to punish opinion). And such are the goals of lawful (or non-violent) radical Islam: to hinder efforts to query the faith, and establish a regime wherein nothing "Islamic" is subject to censure.

The city of Geneva offers guests the spectacle of the Reformation Wall, constructed a century ago. Here one reads the phrase that sings Geneva, the Reformation, and the confidence of the age: Post Tenebras Lux, "After Darkness, Light." It may well be that Ramadan's guiding phrase, as published in a clarifying remark, instead reads: "Human Rights are relative to culture." A phrase that speaks both the diversity we prize and the censure we reject-and testifies to the squishiness of our time.

A wise man remarked: "If all values are relative, then cannibalism is a matter of taste." Another dish, like Ramadan's, we'd do well to return to the kitchen.

By R. John Matthies

FrontPageMagazine.com

R. John Matthies is assistant director of Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. He can be contacted at Matthies@MEForum.org.

Ooops, Clarification on last post... Switzerland not in the EU

While a member to all sorts of mutual agreements with the EU, and
sharing the same general Islamic-appeasement philosophy of most EU
governments, it was inaccurate to state in the last OBRL-News post
that this particular event in Switzerland is an expression of EU
dhimmitude. It is Swiss dhimmitude. Readers can consult the various
other articles at OBRL-News for similar examples of EU, or USA or
Canadian dhimmitude, where Muslims commit outrageous acts or make
violent threats or statements, followed by objections from the
infidels, followed by "offended Muslim" lawsuits, followed by big
money payments to the offended Muslims, and coerced infidel
apologies. J.D.

Love,
starduster
http://totherow.tripod.com/

Gal:5:16: This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.
Gal:5:17: For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.
Gal:5:18: But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law.
(KJV)

This is a good example of why we live by Grace under the New Testament and not under the Law of the Old Testament. Or at least I think it is. :-) Comments, anyone?

Love,
starduster
http://totherow.tripod.com/

Hello Jason. Once again, there is some kind of problem with leaving comments on your blog. It always says, Comment Authentication Failed. I leave comments on other blogs here, but for some reason yours has a glitch. I have tried since I think I read "Joy" Tuesday morning to respond, so I'll just post my comment here, before it dies for lack of attention. lol

Thank you for posting this. It spoke to me this morning as I have already done the deed, given to another the right to take my joy away.

You are so right, and in my mind my thoughts can get the best of me and carry me away. It can happen when you live alone. It is wonderful to rest in God's love, and to remember to do it too and not just think about it.

There are ALWAYS so many blessings to be thankful for, and if I keep my thoughts on that I may better serve the Lord.

Merry Christmas!

Yours because I'm HIS,
star

If we raise our children right, when they get old enough to go to movies by themselves, they will be ok.

If we do not raise our children properly, no amount of censorship will suffice. The key is when they are little. This is the time we should spend nurturing and teaching them, not after they are teenagers. If you wait until they are teenagers to talk to them, you might as well forget it and ask yourself, why did I not care about my children anymore than that?

Don't get me wrong. We still must talk to our teenagers, but if we've waited till then to start, we won't know the language to use to get through to them.

Prv:22:6:
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. (KJV)

I am against censorship in most forms. People, who are not fools, must be allowed to make their own choices. If raised properly, they will. See above Verse.

If children have the proper focus, they won't be so ready to go wrong in the first place. They'll be too busy doing the Lord's work to be easily taken by the devil's minions.

If they want to see a movie we think is bad, we can discuss their reasons with them. Just wanting to see things is not wrong in itself. What intention do they have behind the desire? It is very important to know this.

We must let them learn things on their own, if they are to retain what they learn. Memorizing a life code is not as easy to learn as living the life. They will follow your example, parents, so first of all, you must live the correct life. How many do?

"By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long passed which determined the future." - Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, American writer (1900-1948). Isn't this what Proverbs 22:6 says? I think so, just in different words. It's great to find a more current quote that reflects what the Bible says. Someone is on the right track.

So let your children make their own decisions when they are old enough. They'll still need guidance, sure, but not the kind of guidance that comes in a team of horses hitched to a wagon. It's more like making sure they are pointed in the right direction (by your example), and letting them go then by themselves. You can't live their life for them, and

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --Aristotle

Trust them to make the right decisions. After all, you've taught them to, right?

Hello Jason,

Can't, for some reason, get my comment to post on your blog, so I will post it here.

BTW, loved your second post, too.

Welcome, Jason! Great to have you. I just love your signature line.

I'm yours because I'm His.

Mind if I use it?

star
12-4-07

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/death/mg19626251.800-death-special-the-plan-for-eternal-life.html

Death special: The plan for eternal life
13 October 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Danielle Egan

I'M SITTING in a darkened hall listening to neuroscientist Anders Sandberg describe how to scan ultra-thin sections of brain. First, embed the brain in plastic, then use a camera combined with laser beam and diamond blade to capture images of the tissue as it is sliced.

The method is being developed (in mice, so far) to better understand the architecture of the brain. But Sandberg, who is based at the University of Oxford, has a rather more ambitious aim in mind. For him, this work is merely the first step towards uploading the contents of human brains - memories, emotions and all - onto a computer.

This is the opening session of the ninth annual meeting of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) in Chicago. Sandberg and his fellow transhumanists plan to bypass death by using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), genetic engineering and nanotechnology to radically accelerate human evolution, eventually merging people with machines to make us immortal. This may not be possible yet, the transhumanists reason, but as long as they live long enough - a few decades perhaps - the technology will surely catch up.

To many, these ideas sound seriously scary, and transhumanists have been attacked for jeopardising the future of humanity. What if they ended up creating a race of elite superhumans bent on enslaving the unmodified masses, or unwittingly programmed an army of self-replicating nanobots that would turn us all into grey goo? In 2004, political scientist Francis Fukuyama singled out transhumanism as the world's "most dangerous idea".

Now this small-scale movement aims to go mainstream. WTA membership has risen from 2000 to almost 5000 in the past seven years, and transhumanist student groups have sprung up at university campuses from California to Nairobi. It has attracted a series of wealthy backers, including Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, who recently donated $4 million to the cause, and music producer Charlie Kam, who paid for the Chicago conference. For the first time the organisation has recruited celebrity speakers, such as actor-environmentalist Ed Begley Jr and Star Trek veteran William Shatner.

Other well-known speakers are also on the roster, including AI developer Ben Goertzel, longevity biologist Aubrey de Grey and futurist Ray Kurzweil, the group's unofficial prophet. Kurzweil has recently caused a stir with his best-selling book The Singularity is Near, which explores what happens when our technologies become smarter than us. With transhumanists looking to woo the masses to their cause, I've come to Chicago to find out whether they deserve their dangerous reputation.

Saving humanity

They don't look very threatening, though perhaps not very diverse either. Most WTA members are white, middle-aged men, but WTA secretary and former Buddhist monk James Hughes (see "Essay: The end of death?") hopes to attract a wider range of people by highlighting the organisation's democratic aims. The WTA insists that any new technology is used in a fair and ethical way, he says, with global treaties set up to regulate progress. Some transhumanists campaign for equal access to healthcare and for safeguards on new technology.

AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky also believes the movement is driven by an ethical imperative. He sees creating a superhuman AI as humanity's best chance of solving its problems: "Saying AI will save the world or cure cancer sounds better than saying 'I don't know what's going to happen'." Yudkowsky thinks it is crucial to create a "friendly" super-intelligence before someone creates a malevolent one, purposefully or otherwise. "Sooner or later someone is going to create these technologies," he says. "If a self-improving AI is thrown together in a slapdash fashion, we could be in for big trouble."

The theme of saving humanity continues with presentations on cyborgs, cryonics and raising baby AIs in the virtual world of Second Life, as well as surveillance tactics for weeding out techno-terrorists and a suggested solution for the population explosion: uploading 10 million people onto a 50-cent computer chip. More immediate issues facing humanity, such as poverty, pollution and the devastation of war, tend to get ignored.

I discover the less egalitarian side to the transhumanist community when I meet Marvin Minsky, the 80-year-old originator of artificial neural networks and co-founder of the AI lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Ordinary citizens wouldn't know what to do with eternal life," says Minsky. "The masses don't have any clear-cut goals or purpose." Only scientists, who work on problems that might take decades to solve appreciate the need for extended lifespans, he argues.

He is also staunchly against regulating the development of new technologies. "Scientists shouldn't have ethical responsibility for their inventions, they should be able to do what they want," he says. "You shouldn't ask them to have the same values as other people."

The transhumanist movement has been struggling in recent years with bitter arguments between democrats like Hughes and libertarians like Minsky. Can Kurzweil's keynote speech unite the opposing factions? On the final day of the meeting, the diminutive 59-year-old takes the podium, complete with horn-rimmed glasses, utilitarian blue suit and Mickey Mouse watch. Kurzweil offers a few possible solutions to today's global dilemmas, such as nano-engineered solar panels to free the world from its addiction to fossil fuels. But he is opposed to taxpayer-funded programmes such as universal healthcare as well as any regulation of new technology, and believes that even outright bans will be powerless to control or delay the end of humanity as we know it.

"People sometimes say, 'Are we going to allow transhumanism and artificial intelligence to occur?'" he tells the audience. "Well, I don't recall when we voted that there would be an internet."

Danielle Egan is a science writer based in Vancouver, Canada
From issue 2625 of New Scientist magazine, 13 October 2007, page 46

I have to disagree with Marvin Minsky. Here is a quote to prove my point:
If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith. -- Albert
Einstein (Referring to the fact that his work led to the development of the atomic bomb.)

Love,
starduster
http://totherow.tripod.com/

For Schools, Lottery Payoffs Fall Short
By RON STODGHILL and RON NIXON
Published: October 7, 2007

North Carolina’s game had revenue of about $300 million in its first full year, but officials had expected it to generate $400 million to $500 million.

Last year, North Carolina’s governor, Mike Easley, finally delivered on his promise to start a lottery, making his state the most recent of the 42 states and the District of Columbia to cash in on legalized gambling.

Lotteries Profit, but Do Students?

If some voters in this Bible Belt state frowned on Mr. Easley’s push to bring gambling here, others were persuaded by his argument that North Carolina’s students were missing out on as much as $500 million in aid annually as residents crossed the border to buy lottery tickets elsewhere.

“Our people are playing the lottery,” the governor said in an address two years ago that was a prelude to the creation of the North Carolina Education Lottery. “We just need to decide which schools we should fund, other states’ or ours.”

Pitches like this have become popular among lawmakers who, since states began legalizing lotteries more than 40 years ago, have sold gambling as a savior for cash-starved public schools and other government programs. Lotteries have raised billions of dollars, and of the 42 states that have them, 23 earmark all or some of the money for education.

For years, those states have heard complaints that not enough of their lottery revenue is used for education. Now, a New York Times examination of lottery documents, as well as interviews with lottery administrators and analysts, finds that lotteries accounted for less than 1 percent to 5 percent of the total revenue for K-12 education last year in the states that use this money for schools.

In reality, most of the money raised by lotteries is used simply to sustain the games themselves, including marketing, prizes and vendor commissions. And as lotteries compete for a small number of core players and try to persuade occasional customers to play more, nearly every state has increased, or is considering increasing, the size of its prizes — further shrinking the percentage of each dollar going to education and other programs.

In some states, lottery dollars have merely replaced money for education. Also, states eager for more players are introducing games that emphasize instant gratification and more potentially addictive forms of gambling.

Of course, the question of how much lotteries contribute to education has been around for years. But the debate is particularly timely now that at least 10 states and the District of Columbia are considering privatizing their lotteries, despite assurances decades ago that state involvement would blunt social problems that might emerge from an unregulated expansion of lotteries. These trends fly in the face of marketing campaigns that often emphasize lotteries’ educational benefits, like a South Carolina lottery slogan, “Big Fun, Bright Futures,” or an ad campaign in North Carolina featuring a thank-you note passed through schools and signed “The Students.” The New York Lottery’s Web site includes the tagline, “Raising billions to educate millions.”

Promotions like these have taken root. Surveys and interviews indicate that many Americans in states with lotteries linked to education think their schools are largely supported by lottery funds — so much so that they even mention this when asked to vote for tax increases or bond authorizations to finance their schools.

A Growing Industry

Long a mainstay of American life, lotteries began as raffles in the 1700s to finance the Continental Army, bridges and roads, and Columbia University. But modern lotteries are big businesses, run by streamlined enterprises with managers and consultants from Fortune 500 companies.

State lotteries raised more than $56 billion and returned $17 billion to the state governments last year. They spent more than $460 million last year on advertising, making them one of the nation’s largest marketers. The 197,000 retailers that sell lottery products earned $3.3 billion in commissions in 2006.

Lottery advocates say the games live up to their public mandate. According to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, $234 billion has gone into state coffers since the first modern lottery was started in New Hampshire in 1964.

“Lotteries bring additional money to states that can be used very effectively to fund special projects without raising taxes,” said Charles Strutt, executive director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, a nonprofit group.

But among the states that earmark lottery money for education, lottery dollars accounted for 1 percent or less of the total K-12 education financing (including all state, federal and local revenue) last year in at least five states, including New Jersey. New York had the highest percentage, 5.3 percent.

(Five states — Georgia, Kentucky, New Mexico, South Carolina and Tennessee — direct lottery dollars primarily to college scholarships. North Carolina and Florida also give some money to scholarships.)

At least five states — California, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio and Washington — channel lottery money to higher education as well as elementary and secondary schools. In these states, too, lottery proceeds amount to less than 5 percent of the total education financing.

In at least four states — California, Illinois, Michigan and Texas — lottery dollars as a percentage of K-12 education money has declined or remained flat over the last decade.

In California, for example, the lottery in 1985 accounted for almost 5 percent of all K-12 education dollars. Today, it makes up less than 2 percent, or about $1 billion, of the $54 billion the state spends on in K-12 education, according to the California Budget Project, a nonprofit research group in Sacramento.

The California Department of Education addressed this in its State Fact Book two years ago: “Although the public still perceives the lottery as making a significant difference in the funds available for education,” the book read, “it is a minor source that cannot be expected to provide major improvements in K-12 education.”

Some state lotteries have fallen short of projections. In North Carolina, where officials expected the lottery to generate $400 million to $500 million a year for education, revenue reached just over $300 million in its first full year of operations. In Oklahoma, officials expected schools to receive $52 million last year from the lottery, but the final tally was $15 million less.

Also, the portion of lottery money going to state programs is shrinking. When Missouri passed its lottery in 1985, it required that at least 45 percent of all proceeds go to the state, and the number went as high as 52 percent. Legislators revised the law, and now the state gets about 30 percent of proceeds.

The Times review of documents from all 42 states with lotteries and the District of Columbia found that nearly all have increased payouts and lowered the percentage going to programs. And those that have not changed their payout formulas are considering it.

Lawmakers and lottery officials defend the practices, saying schools and other programs will still benefit from the extra money raised by lotteries.

“Too much of the focus is on percentages,” said Gardner Gurney, acting director of the New York lottery. “My focus is on dollars. You can’t spend percentages.”

In 2000, New York State kept 38 percent of its lottery revenue for education. That share has dropped to 32 percent, but the dollar amount rose from $1.3 billion in 2000 to $2.2 billion last year.

But Jerry McPeak, a Democratic state representative in Oklahoma, said states that have committed to a percentage should not later lower that number.

“I think if you pass a lottery and tell people that a certain proportion of those dollars are going to something like education, then you ought to keep your word,” Mr. McPeak said.

School Budgets in Flux

In some states, lottery dollars are pooled with other funds, making it impossible to determine how much the lottery benefits schools. That is the case in Michigan, Texas and Illinois.

Because legislators in these states decide school budgets well in advance of knowing what lottery revenue will be, lottery money is just another part of the overall budget. If the lottery dollars are below projections, the state makes up the shortfall with money from other sources, or in some cases, simply gives schools less money. If the lottery dollars exceed projections, the state uses some of the money for other programs.

“Legislators merely substitute general revenue funds with lottery dollars so the schools don’t really gain any additional funding,” said O. Homer Erekson, dean of the business school at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, who co-wrote a national study on lottery money and school financing.

States including Georgia, Oklahoma and South Carolina have enacted laws that prohibit substituting lottery dollars for money that would have otherwise gone to education. But such laws have not stopped legislators.

Oklahoma, for example, used lottery money last year for a portion of promised teacher raises that were supposed to come from the general fund. The move provoked an angry response from education officials and some legislators.

In Nebraska, from 2002 through the last fiscal year, legislators diverted lottery dollars from the state’s K-12 education and other programs into the general fund to make up for a shortfall.

“Diverting lottery funds into the general fund was one of many ways to make up for the lost revenues,” said Bruce Snyder, a supervisor in the accounting office at the Nebraska Department of Administrative Services.

Lottery officials say they are unfairly blamed for legislators’ decisions. “Our job is to raise money for the things the legislators want,” said Clint Harris, director of the Minnesota lottery. “We don’t have any control over what happens to the money.”

But Brett McFadden, a budget analyst with the Association of California School Administrators, said: “It makes it harder for us to convince people that they still need to support education.” He added, “They think the lottery is taking care of education. We have to tell them we’re only getting a few sprinkles; we’re not even getting the icing on the cake.”

New Games and Gimmicks

As player interest has flagged, some lotteries have responded with aggressive marketing and new products that critics say can undermine public trust.

In an effort to attract younger customers, several states have introduced video lottery terminals, in which players wager against a computer, and Keno, a bingo-like video game. Critics have labeled both kinds of games “video crack” because of their addictive nature. Fifteen states offer electronic gambling machines, and several more are considering adding them.

This year in Florida, state officials estimated that the state could raise an additional $1 billion from video terminals and $39 million to $241 million from Keno. The report also noted that both games “are considered to be more addictive than traditional lottery games and could contribute to a problem of pathological gambling.”

While introducing Keno in Florida would require legislative approval because of potential problems associated with gambling, Florida officials view the issue through an economic lens.

“We will determine which, of the products legally available to us, fits in fulfilling that mission,” said Jackie Barreiros, a spokeswoman for the Florida lottery.

Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, said many states are also introducing higher-price games, underscoring a Vegas-style rivalry among states for gambling dollars.

California’s contract with its instant ticket vendor, Scientific Games, calls for the introduction of 30 to 45 new games a year. Kansas, Texas and Michigan recently introduced a $50 scratch ticket, the most expensive in the nation.

States are also trying to bolster the number of “core” players, according to interviews with lottery officials in several states. Such players typically represent only 10 percent to 15 percent of all players but account for 80 percent of sales, according to Independent Lottery Research, which does research and marketing for state lotteries.

In North Carolina, Mr. Easley faces a battle in proving that the lottery will be a winner for voters. After its first full year, revenue was 25 percent less than projected, giving critics ammunition in their case that lottery revenue is an unreliable source of money for schools.

The governor declined to be interviewed, but Dan Gerlach, his senior policy adviser for fiscal affairs, said lottery officials had overestimated the market size of rival lotteries in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia when developing the state’s gambling efforts. But Mr. Gerlach said he expected the state to sell millions more tickets in coming months than it did last year.

That is because Mr. Easley recently persuaded his legislature to increase lottery prizes. The move will reduce the percentage of lottery dollars going to education. But North Carolina is choosing a tried and true formula: raising payouts increases customer traffic.

“People like to win big,” Mr. Gerlach said. “Now, the pot is bigger.”

Sacramento (Calif.) Bee, September 15, 2007

EARLY PUBERTY IN GIRLS TROUBLING

By Dorsey Griffith, Bee Medical Writer

American girls are entering puberty at earlier ages, putting them at far greater risk for breast cancer later in life and for all sorts of social and emotional problems well before they reach adulthood.

Girls as young as 8 increasingly are starting to menstruate, develop breasts and grow pubic and underarm hair -- biological milestones that only decades ago typically occurred at 13 or older. African American girls are especially prone to early puberty.

Theories abound as to what is driving the trend, but the exact cause, or causes, is not known. A new report, commissioned by the San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Fund, has gathered heretofore disparate pieces of evidence to he