For the longest time adoptees simply couldn’t trace their biological families. They were truly cookoos in the nest. If they even tried adoptees would hit a stone wall in the form of an unyielding bureaucracy.
Now though the laws have been relaxes and both adoptees and their biological parents can search each other out. And that is all too the good.
But for every upside there is also a downside as this poor shmuck who found out that his father was Charles Manson.
A U.S. man given up for adoption at birth has spoken of his anguish at discovering that his long-lost father is notorious serial killer Charles Manson.
Matthew Roberts said: ‘It was like finding out your father is Hitler’.
The 41-year-old DJ made the discovery after tracing his mother and learning she had been raped by Manson during a drug-fuelled orgy nine months before he was born in 1968.
Today is Tu B’Shvat or the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Shvat.
Today is Rosh HaShanah La’Ilanot or the New Year for Trees.
Some customs for the day are the planting of trees(by far and aay the most common!) and eating dried fruits and nuts, especially figs, dates, raisins, carob, and almonds.
Tu B’Shvat is one the four New Years in the Jewish Calendar. That’s right, folks! Count ‘em. Jews don’t make do with just one silly old New Years, they have four! The other three are
a) Rosh HaShana on 1 Tishrei(late September or early October). This is the biggy and is the the day most commonly referred to as the “New Year” Rosh HaShana is the civil new year, and the point at which the calendar year number advances.
b) New Year for Kings on 1 Nissan(late March/early April). The regnal years of Israeli kings start of this date. Nissan is also designated as the first month. Thus the months(and the holidays in them) are listed starting with Nissan.
c) New Year for cattle on 1 Elul(Junish). In the days of the Temple this was an important date for tithing. The law is that cattle(and other tithed items) born before the first of Elul, are considered separately from cattle born after the first of Elul. When the Temple is rebuilt this New Year will regain its importance.
I wanna singa…. I wanna dancea
I see that Omar Khadr is back in the news again or, more accurately, his appeal to Supreme Court is back in the news. In a case of ”If you won’t, we will” and in tough 9-0 judgement the Supreme Court all but ordered the government to repatriate Mr. Khadr.
A link to the judgement itself is here.
Khadr as the leftards see him
Khadr as he is seen on TV
Khadr as the terrorist he is today
I see the PM has finally gotten around to filling the five Senate vacancies that were one of the many reasons given for proroguing Parliament late last year.
I sure took him long enough, though. I suppose he didn’t want to add wood to the fire of the near unanimous condemnation of his prorogation action amongst the punditocracy and Toronto’s chattering classes.
I like all five of these choices. I particularly like the two community activist appointments of Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu, founding President of the Murdered or Missing Persons’ Families’ Association and co-founder of the Le Nid centre, which helps abused women in Val d’Or and Vim Kochhar founder of Canadian Foundation for Physically Disabled Persons and otherwise incredibly involved in the community.
While it is true that with these appointments the Tories gain a plurality in the Senate – 51 Tories, 49 Grits, 2 Progressive Conservatives, 2 Independents, and 1 Non affiliated – they do not have an absolute majority in the 105 seat chamber. A Tory majority of 53 cannot occur until December 11, 2010 with the retirment of Liberal Jean Papointe(assuming the Tories are still in power at that point).
While the plurality will give the Tories committee chairmanships and control of the Senate’s agenda, they cannot guarantee passage of their legislation as the 5 independent senators will hold the balance of power.
The relationship between man and dog goes waaaaaaaaay back deep into prehistory. It is certainly unique in the animal kingdom. Both species benefit from the relationship. At the beginning we both got to eat better and now we provide each other companionship.
BUT as close as dogs are to us, dogs are not human. And dog owners make a serious mistake if they think Rover really is like them.
Take for instance the kiss a dog gives you when you come home. It looks like love, but it could also be hunger. Wolves also lick one another’s mouths, particularly when one wolf returns to the pack. They can use their sense of taste and smell to see if the returnee has caught some prey on its journey. If it did, the licking often prompts it to vomit up some of that kill for the other members of the pack to share. The kiss dogs give us probably evolved from this inspection. “If we happened to spit up whatever we just ate,” says Horowitz, “I don’t think our dogs would be upset at all”
Read the rest. It’s worth the time.
The writer, J.D. Salinger, is dead.
A writer of short stories, J.D. Salinger, wrote only one book, Catcher in the Rye, but what a book.
Arguably the greatest novel of the 2oth century, Catcher, is at one and the same one of the books most frequently banned by small minded would be censors in the US and one of the most popular books taught in the US school system.
It’s definitely time reread about the world according to Holden Caulfield.
I haven’t been following the health care debate that is consuming so much energy in the American political system.
I simply find it difficult to understand why anyone would want to deny health care to their fellow citizens. The overheated rhetoric and the sheer unvarnished vitriol - usually from the right - about death panels(already there btw) and funding abortions and the like combined with the irrational hatred of President Obama has proven to be a toxic mix.
Anyone who thinks that the Americans have got it right has rocks in their head. A cursory look reveals any number of horror stories that curl the hair of anyone who reads them.
Here’s one:
Did you know that in the United States that rape can be a pre existing condition? According to the insurance companies it is.
Christina Turner feared that she might have been sexually assaulted after two men slipped her a knockout drug. She thought she was taking proper precautions when her doctor prescribed a month’s worth of anti-AIDS medicine. Only later did she learn that she had made herself all but uninsurable.
…Turner had let the men buy her drinks at a bar in Fort Lauderdale. The next thing she knew, she said, she was lying on a roadside with cuts and bruises that indicated she had been raped. She never developed an HIV infection. But months later, when she lost her health insurance and sought new coverage, she ran into a problem. Turner, 45, who used to be a health insurance underwriter herself, said the insurance companies examined her health records. Even after she explained the assault, the insurers would not sell her a policy because the HIV medication raised too many health questions. They told her they might reconsider in three or more years if she could prove that she was still AIDS-free.
Here’s another:
In June 2008, Robin Beaton, a retired nurse from Waxahachie, Texas, found out she had breast cancer and needed a double mastectomy. Two days before her surgery, her insurance company, Blue Cross, flagged her chart and told the hospital they wouldn’t allow the procedure to go forward until they finished an examination of five years of her medical history — which could take three months. It turned out that a month before the cancer diagnosis, Beaton had gone to a dermatologist for acne treatment, and Blue Cross incorrectly interpreted a word on her chart to mean that the acne was precancerous.
Not long into the investigation, the insurer canceled her policy. Beaton, they said, had listed her weight incorrectly when she bought it, and had also failed to disclose that she’d once taken medicine for a heart condition — which she hadn’t been taking at the time she filled out the application. By October, thanks to an intervention from her member of Congress, Blue Cross reinstated Beaton’s insurance coverage. But the tumor she had removed had grown 2 centimeters in the meantime, and she had to have her lymph nodes removed as well as her breasts amputated because of the delay.
and another
If you worked for a company that offered insurance, if you carried your family’s insurance, next year your insurer would slap a million dollar surcharge on the company policy for carrying a leukemia patient. The company would get the bill and someone in accounting would question “what is this extra million dollars we are being billed?”
The insurance company would explain to them that the million is for you, and it is yearly, but is, ahem, “fixable.” They will say “as long as she is on your insurance (wink, wink) this charge will be there. So what you have to ask yourself (more wink, wink) is whether this employee is worth a million dollar a year salary on top of what you are already paying her.”
oh… I don’t want to forget this one. If you’re a woman and have irregular periods…. you’re fucked.
But four months after Ruess’s medical crisis(possible ovarian cancer) passed, she faced a financial one. The Insurers Administrative Corporation (IAC), the company in Phoenix that managed Ruess’s health care policy, completed what it says was a routine review of her records and discovered what it called evidence of a preexisting gynecological condition. Because Ruess had not disclosed the symptom on her application, her insurer said she had never been eligible for coverage of gynecological problems. The result: Ruess was on the hook for the cost of her surgery, which, including doctor and hospital bills, amounted to more than $15,000.
Ruess was flabbergasted. “I was, please forgive me for lack of a better term, pissed off,” she says. What IAC called a preexisting condition was a one-time notation in her file regarding “dysfunctional uterine bleeding” that is, irregular periods, a common issue that at some point affects between 10 and 30 percent of women in their reproductive years.
Our system may not be perfect but it beats the American system hands down. And anyone who would deny their neighbour health care coverage is immoral. Period. End of story.
Schmucks to the left of me, schmucks to the right of me.
These orthopedists from Quebec are a bunch of cheap shmucks.
Quebec orthopedists volunteering with the Haitian relief mission want the province to pay them $704 a day.
Twelve Quebec orthopedic specialists are part of the relief mission in the Caribbean country, where as many as 200,000 people were killed two weeks ago in a massive earthquake.
Five of the doctors have requested payment.
According to a letter signed by Jacques Desnoyers, president of the provincial orthopedists association, the doctors expect to be paid a per diem of $704 from the Quebec medicare plan while working in Haiti.
The money doesn’t diminish their volunteer work but is a concrete way for the Quebec government to recognize their contribution, Desnoyers wrote in the letter addressed to Health Minister Yves Bolduc.
Someone needs to explain to these alledgedly smart people the meaning of the word “volunteer”
Volunteering is the practice of people working on behalf of others or a particular cause without payment for their time and services. Volunteering is generally considered an altruistic activity, intended to promote good or improve human quality of life.
The letter goes on to whine that other ‘professionals’ such as rescue specialists etc are getting paid. The letter conveniently ignores the fact that those professionals are there because ‘rescue’ is their career.
What would an event be nowadays without PETA – People of the Ethical Treatment of Animals -interjecting itself somehow.
Whether its pieing Ministers or “Holocaust on a Plate” publicity campaigns, you can always rely on PETA to find the most offensive to interject itself into a discussion. That its tactics fail as spectacularly as those of the fetish fetishists is seemingly beside the point. PETA seems to define success in the number of column inches of publicity it gets after one of its invariably stupid stunts.
As with fetish fetishists, the goal seems not so much to change minds as to energize the base with the illusion of activity and success.
What’s PETA’s latest attempt at publicity whoring? Well Groundhog Day is fast approaching and PETA wants the town fathers of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to replace Punxsutawney Phil with a robot rodent.
An animal rights group wants organizers of Pennsylvania’s Groundhog Day festival to replace Punxsutawney Phil with a robotic stand-in.According to the longtime tradition, if Phil the groundhog sees his shadow on the Feb. 2 unofficial holiday, then there will be six more weeks of winter. If he does not appear to see his shadow, there will be an early spring.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals says it’s unfair to keep the animal in captivity and subject him to the huge crowds and bright lights that accompany tens of thousands of revelers each year in Punxsutawney, a tiny borough about 65 miles (105 kilometres) northeast of Pittsburgh. PETA is suggesting the use of an animatronic model.
But William Deeley, president of the Inner Circle of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, says the animal is “being treated better than the average child in Pennsylvania.” The groundhog is kept in a climate-controlled environment and is inspected annually by the state Department of Agriculture.
Deeley says PETA isn’t interested in Phil from Feb. 2 on, and is looking for publicity
I will start listening to PETA when they start valuing human life at least as much they seem to value animal life. Until that day comes, PETA can sit on it and rotate for all I care.
