~In all the hostile noise directed at me and Le-Le about 'cultism' and Sex Panic and the very Idea of The Temple what gets lost are the real world projects and goals that are the True Purpose of The Temple as clearly outlined in its Mission Statement and in its Long Term Goals.

The quote below is from a Sister who I hope to one day recruit to teach Majick and Ritual in The Sisterhood Trainings. At the very least, I will present her as a 'role model' – which I suspect will both amuse and horrify her – to those who will teach said subjects.

Let her words give you some general idea of the 'tone' of The Sisterhood that I envision.

“The entry of Sol into Leo was palpable. I could hear my heartbeat, and was full of energy.

I think that my objection to intellectualism is pretty simple, though not universally applicable: it is probable that the person will turn out like Woody Allen, so emotionally stunted they find their sexual peers amongst the kiddies. It is probable they will become lost in a maze of self-created bullshit, be morally bankrupt, conceited to the point of waddling about in a Crowley-like fashion despising all inferiors, and psychologically abusive as a sport. But, uncultivated people are no fun either. It is a relief that god does *not* like you better if you're smart. This is probably why they (egoistic heartless mental types) are such a pack of atheists, and *worship their clergy and artists* rather than the invisible flying spaghetti monster of spiritual regeneration: it is rather like sucking the dick that is pointing at the moon, because you can't suck the moon.

My point is that the ego dislikes what it can't control. Your mincing forays into orgies and chemicals aren't fooling anyone you know. You don't do anything you're not trying to 'master'. But guess what! You're still gonna die! All is vanity.

I'm going to be annoyed if you people kill me and then worship an idol of me made of all these insults. Probably you'll publish them as a book of aphorisms and meditate upon an insult once a day. She was a goddess! So we killed her, because she wouldn't sit on the altar otherwise. Spiritual necrophilia ruined christianity - christians would have hated the crap out of that man while he was alive. I guess dead is better; corpses neither reject nor mock; you can pretend whatever you want, that they love the little children, approve of your vicious doings, whatever.

My misanthropy is getting rather finalized and irreversible. I thought spirituality would be, I dunno, more full of wonderment at all the inner beauty. Maybe I'm also too full of cynical snorting for Jesus.”

~Below is the Factiod List from The American Human Development Project.

Health

* The U.S. will spend $230 million on health care in the next hour.

* One in six Americans goes without health insurance (around 47 million people).

* According to the National Academy of Sciences, lack of health insurance results in lost economic value equal to $178 million to $356 million every day, due to the poorer health and earlier deaths of the uninsured.

* The U.S. ranks #24 among the 30 most affluent countries in life expectancy – yet spends more on health care than any other nation.

* The U.S. infant mortality rate is on par with that of Croatia, Cuba, Estonia, and Poland; if the U.S. infant mortality rate were the same as that of top-ranked Sweden, 21,000 more American babies would live to celebrate their first birthdays every year.

* A baby born in Washington, D.C. is almost two-and-a-half times more likely to die before age one than a baby born in Vermont. African American babies are more than twice as likely to die before age one than either white or Latino babies.

* Changes in behavior and the physical and social environment can help avoid about 70 percent of premature deaths.

* Insured adults under sixty-five are 50 percent more likely to have had cancer screenings than the uninsured; early detection saves lives and dramatically lowers treatment costs.

* Premature death by homicide is more than five times higher in the U.S. than the OECD average; 68 percent of U.S. homicides in 2006 were committed with a firearm.

* Nearly a third of all female murder victims were killed by intimate partners (husbands and boyfriends). [my emphasis]

* More than one million Americans are living with HIV.

* One American dies every 90 seconds from obesity-related health problems.

* According to the U.S. Census Bureau, children living in central cities are less likely to play outside than other children; in central cities, 48 percent of Latino children and 39 percent of African American children were kept inside because of parental perceptions of neighborhood danger. Inactivity is considered a major factor in obesity among 66 million young people.

* African American children are two-and-a-half times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma than white children – and five times more likely to die of asthma.

* Suicide is the eleventh-leading cause of death in the U.S. overall, and the third-leading cause of death among children and adolescents. More than 90 percent of those who die by suicide have had mental or substance-abuse disorders.

* One in seventeen Americans (about 6 percent of the population) suffers from severe mental illness.

* More than half of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are related to an inability to pay for illness or injury.

Access to Knowledge

* College graduates can expect, on average, double the lifetime earnings of high school graduates.

* Fourteen percent of the population – some 30 million Americans – lacks the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks like understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals.

* Twelve percent of Americans lack the literacy skills to fill in a job application or payroll form, read a map or bus schedule, or understand labels on food and drugs.

* More than one in five Americans – 22 percent of the population – have “below basic” quantitative skills, making it impossible to balance a checkbook, calculate a tip, or figure out from an advertisement the amount of interest on a loan.

* In 2006, 4.5 million young people ages eighteen to twenty-four were not in school, not working, and had not graduated high school.

* Nearly one in six American children lives in a family whose head didn’t graduate high school.

* School quality is a decisive factor in choosing where to live for many families with school-aged children; in 2003, parents of about one-quarter of all students reported that they had moved to their current neighborhood to enable their children to attend a better school.White children ages one to five are about four times more likely to have been read to in the past week than Hispanic children, and about 50 percent more likely to have been read to than African American children.

* By age three, the children of affluent mothers have vocabularies twice as large as those of the children of low-income mothers.

* Among four-year-olds, 40 percent of children from disadvantaged backgrounds were proficient in number and shape recognition, compared to 87 percent of children from privileged families.

* High quality preschool for disadvantaged children has positive long-term impacts; children who participated in the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project had a 44 percent higher high school graduation rate, had 50 percent fewer teen pregnancies, were 46 percent less likely to have served jail time, and had a 42 percent higher median monthly income than the control group.

* Educational expenditures vary significantly by state; New Jersey and New York spend around $14,000 per pupil, Utah spends less than $6,000 per pupil.

* Schools with high proportions of minority students, poor students, and English-language learners were more likely to hire novice teachers than schools with low proportions of these students. Minority and low-income children are more likely to be taught English, science, and math by an “out-of-field” teacher than are high-income and/or white students.

* African American students are three times more likely than whites to be placed in special education programs, and only half as likely to be placed in gifted programs.

* In 2003, 45 percent of children whose parents had advanced degrees were in gifted classes, compared with 10 percent of children whose parents did not graduate high school. Children whose parents were married and better-off also were more likely to be in gifted classes than children of the never-married or poor.

* Only three-fourths of American public high students graduated on time (within four years) with a regular diploma in 2003-2004.

* College-going rates among high-achieving high school graduates from poor families are about the same as the college-going rates for the lowest-achieving high graduates from affluent families.

* Children whose parents have at least a college degree enter college at more than twice the rate of children whose parents did not graduate high school; disparities in degree attainment are greater still.

Standard of Living

* The richest 20 percent of all U.S. households earned more than half of the nation’s total income in 2006.

* The top 1 percent of U.S. households possesses a full third of America’s wealth.

* Households in the top 10 percent of the income distribution hold more than 71 percent of the country’s wealth, while those in the lowest 60 percent possess just 4 percent.

* Nearly one in five American children lives in poverty, with more than one in thirteen living in extreme poverty.

* The poverty line for a family of four (two adults and two children) is an income of $21,027 before taxes; in 2006, more than 36 million Americans were classified poor by this definition.

* In every racial/ethnic group, men earn more than their female counterparts. [my emphasis]

* In 1980, the average executive earned forty-two times as much as the average factory worker; today, executives earn some four hundred times what factory workers in their industries earn.

* In 2004, median net worth was $140,800 for whites, and $24,900 for nonwhites.

* The real value of the minimum wage has decreased by 40 percent in the past forty years.

Other Domestic Issues

Homelessness

* Over the course of a year, at least 1.35 million children are at some point homeless.

* More families with children are homeless today than at any time since the Great Depression.

Hunger

* The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that on a typical day in November 2005, members of well over half a million households had their normal eating patterns disrupted due to lack of money or other resources.

Criminal Justice

* The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s people – but 24 percent of the world’s prisoners.
* In absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, the U.S. has more prisoners than any other country, including China and Russia.

* From the 1920’s until the 1970’s, the U.S. prison population was stable at about 110 per 100,000, about the same as our peer nations today. But now more than 700 people out of every 100,000 are behind bars.

* African Americans are imprisoned at six to eight times the rate of whites; the rate is much higher for African Americans who do not graduate high school; by age thirty-five, 60 percent of African American high school dropouts will have spent time in prison.

* State and federal prison inmates average just eleven years of schooling.

* About 1,900 people with criminal records are released every day and, according to the Department of Justice, two-thirds of them will eventually end up back in prison.

International Comparisons

* A poor child born in Germany, France, Canada, or one of the Nordic countries has a better chance to join the middle class in adulthood than an American child born into similar circumstances.

* The U.S. ranks second among 177 countries in per-capita income but 12th on human development, according to the global Human Development Index, published annually by the United Nations Development Programme. Each of the 11 countries ahead of the U.S. has a lower per-capita income than the U.S., but all perform better on the health and knowledge dimensions.

* The U.S. infant mortality rate is on par with that of Croatia, Cuba, Estonia, and Poland.

* If the U.S. infant mortality rate were equal to that of first-ranked Sweden, twenty-one thousand more American babies would have lived to celebrate their first birthdays in 2005.

* In 98 countries, new mothers have 14 or more weeks of paid maternity leave. The U.S. has no federally mandated paid maternity leave.

* The United States ranks second in the world in per-capita income (behind Luxembourg), but thirty-fourth in survival of infants to age one.

* The U.S. ranks forty-second in global life expectancy and first among the world’s twenty-five richest countries in the percentage of children living in poverty.

* In the 2006 OECD international assessment of fifteen-year-olds, in math, the U.S. came in twenty-fourth, and in science, the U.S. came in seventeenth.

* The U.S. incarceration rate is five-to-nine times greater than that of our peer nations.

...and pointing these facts out in public debate makes you a godless commie trying to provoke 'class warfare'.

 
( text for linkophobes )

Please vote how you feel about our current representation and how you feel your representative should interact with the community.

"I am a snarky buttplug!"

http://www.veteranstoday.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3282

VA FAILING TO INFORM GUARD AND RESERVISTS RETURNING FROM IRAQ/AFGHANISTAN OF POTENTIAL BENEFITS, NEW IG REPORT SHOWS

Veterans Committee hearing on outreach to Guard and Reserve veterans Wednesday

WASHINGTON, D.C. –U.S. Senator Daniel K. Akaka (D-HI), Chairman of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, today highlighted an investigative report issued by the Department of Veterans Affairs Inspector General (IG), on the efforts of VA to provide transition assistance to veterans returning from service in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Download Full Report

The Inspector General found VA is not meeting its clear legal obligation to inform new veterans of the benefits they may have earned through their service,” said Akaka. “Especially alarming is the finding that Guard and Reserve veterans made up over half of those uninformed, even though they compose only about a quarter of servicemembers deployed.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3281

Between the Lines:  The true story of G.I. Surfers during the Vietnam War

Movie Review:   3 out 4 Stars

By Jannette Angelle

The sun beats down on the beaches of South Vietnam. It’s 1971, and the surfers are out at Cam Ranh Bay ready to break out the boards and hit the waves. You’ll see lieutenants, captains, privates all sporting their swimming trunks soaking up the sunshine. This isn’t your average image of the war in Vietnam, but it’s true. The men fought, the men surfed, and some just stayed home. This is the story of Between the Lines.

A refreshing account of an unconventional Vietnam, Between the Lines offers a new perspective at the veteran experience. Throughout the documentary, the stories of surfers in Vietnam are told directly from the veterans themselves. They tell stories of combat as well as deep sea diving. It’s an interesting take on the Vietnam stories, seeming as though it would be a tale directly from a movie script. However, it’s a true documentary showing how the Vietnam veteran includes men from all facets of life, including surfers.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3280

by Matt Townsend

The Department of Veterans Affairs covers care connected to military service, but if a veteran has private health insurance that can pay for care not connected to a service disability, the VA can bill the insurer. Although the VA has more than doubled its collections from insurers since the mid-1990s, a little-noticed Government Accountability Office report recently found that the VA likely missed out on billions of dollars from insurers because of a disorganized, disjointed accounting system.

The GAO audited 18 of the 153 medical centers in the VA system and found $290 million in unbilled services from documentation, coding and billing errors and other reasons. The GAO also cited more than $1 billion in medical costs that the VA couldn’t give valid reasons for why they weren’t billed. And in a random sampling of 260 bills from across the entire system to third-party insurers, the GAO found that the VA collected only 47 percent of the money. (The GAO also probed VA’s collection methods in 1999 and 2004.)

http://www.veteranstoday.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3279

The Day the White House Burned

The Kings Troop Burn Down Washington DC

On June 12, 1812, the United States of America declared war on Great Britain. There had been a long period of simmering disputes between the nations, including Northwest Territory land disputes, the British impressment of American sailors, and British blockades of American commerce with France during the Napoleanic wars. It was the War of 1812.

In August of 1814, the British landed to the south of Washington, D.C., and marched inland. The only resistance the British Army encountered as they marched towards Washington was the brief Battle of Bladensburg in Maryland, a last ditch attempt to defend the city. Because the organized American Army was well to the north near Canada, only a hastily organized militia was available to defend the capital. For the British, this allowed a quick victory after which they were free to enter the city.

In retaliation for the torching of the Canadian capitol of York (now called Toronto), and to disgrace President Madison, they set fire to the president's residence on August 24, 1814, burning down the White House.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3278

http://www.veteranstoday.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3277

1. FY2009 VA Funding Bill
2. House VA Committee Action
3. VA Outreach Hearing
4. SECDEF Recommends New Guard Chief

1. FY2009 VA Funding Bill: The Senate Appropriations Committee unanimously cleared its version of the 2009 VA Funding Bill. The bill provides $72.7 billion in discretionary funding for military construction and Veterans Affairs. This is about $5 billion more than the current fiscal year, and is in line with the House Appropriations Committee's recommendations. It includes:

• $47.7 billion in total VA discretionary funding.
• $41.1 billion for VA health care.
• $1.2 billion for VA construction projects, nearly double the president's request, and $1.1 billion for hospital maintenance and repairs.
• $84 million more than the president's request for medical and prosthetic research.
• $350 million to help certain higher income Category 8 veterans to begin enrolling in VA.
• $250 million targeted to the care of rural veterans.

The bill now moves to the floor of the Senate for a vote.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3276

Multi-State Agreement on Military K-12 Education Now in Effect

by Colonel Dan

Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner (D) last week signed into law legislation that will help ease educational transitions for military children forced to move from state to state with their servicemember parents. Her signature made Delaware the tenth state to sign onto a multi-state agreement called the Interstate Compact on Educational Opportunity for Military Children. Her signature triggers the launch of the agreement, because a requisite 10 states had to sign onto the compact for it to take effect. Minner officially signed the bill July 9; a ceremonial signing is slated for July 17, according to her office.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3275

Liberty Movement in New Hampshire

by Peter Macdonald

Thomas Jefferson once wrote: "The Basis of our government being the opinion of the People". "one need only look at history to see that the right to a free press is essential for freedom". A free press is not for the purpose to allow a private owned business to print what they want. A free press is a constitutional right because the people's opinion to correct wrongs in government is an essential Basis of our government. A movement a few years ago stated in New Hampshire. People from all over the U.S. moved to New Hampshire for the sole purpose to correct the wrongs in government.

New Hampshire being a small state it was chosen over the others. The group is growing and it is moving in many different directions. I believe the people that take the time to learn about it, they will agree with most of what they are doing. There is a government movement to stop or detract from what they are doing because Liberty movement is a danger to Dem or Rep rule. We the people: is and must remain the foundation of our "Nation".

http://www.veteranstoday.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3274

Today's Local News for Veterans from around the Country

What's Inside:  A Summary  

1. Peake's New Advertising Policy Leads To Suicide Prevention Campaign. 
2. Peake Orders Investigation Into Smoking-Cessation Study.  
3. VA's Ability To Handle Veterans' Mental Health Needs Questioned. 
4. Critics Argue VA 'Not Meeting Needs' Of Families.  
5. Vets Call For Free-Standing Hospital In Colorado.
6. VA Pushing For Better Care For Women Vets.  
7. Military Health System Said To Be Considering Switch To VistA. 
8. Psychotherapists Volunteer To Help Veterans. 
9. Wheelchair Games Athlete Interested In Organizing Local Vets.  
10. DeBakey Buried In Arlington With Military Honors.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3272

Ladies Home Journal Cites Work with Women Veterans 

WASHINGTON -- Dr. Paula Schnurr, deputy executive director for VA’s National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), received the 3rd annual Ladies Home Journal “Health Breakthrough Award” for her work with PTSD and women veterans.

“Dr. Schnurr’s contribution to veterans is an exceptional example of the Department’s commitment to healing those who have borne the battle,” said Secretary of Veterans Affairs Dr. James B. Peake. “Her research was recognized for finding the best therapy among current treatment approaches for PTSD in women.”  

The study led by Schnurr for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) was the largest clinical trial of individual psychotherapy for PTSD ever conducted. The findings led to VA supporting a national training program in “prolonged-exposure therapy,” which had not previously been widely used.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/07/22/open-thread-875/

  Tom Tomorrow: McCain Mania

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/07/22/cl%e2%80%99s-late-nite-music-club-with-weezer/

“Pork and Beans” from Weezer’s latest self-titled album, Weezer.

Internet geeks like me will love this. The video parodies the most popular viral YouTube videos, and actually manages to get the real “internet celebrities” to perform with them.

In case you’re unfamiliar with any of the originals, a diligent YouTuber put together a handy montage. But before you cheat, watch the video and see how many you recognize.