my old neighbor, Molly the Single-Mother Bear

Click to enlarge.

Actually I don't think this is Molly, because Molly was always too smart and crafty to be caught out in the open in broad daylight. I suspect this is Molly's daughter Tiffani, with her own first brood of springtime cubs. 

Like Molly, Tiffani's a single mom. Male bears just want to have their fun, and then desert their families, leaving mom to raise the cubs. Males are pigs.

Bears have recently invaded the dumpsters at Northampton's largest apartment complex, the dumpsters are near the kids' playground, so everybody's nervous about bears. The City Council is now considering passing new regulations about feeding bears. I'm sure the Council will ask the bears to testify and give their opinion of the new regulations.

* * *

The Daily Hampshire Gazette
Northampton, Massachusetts USA
Tuesday 21 June 2011 (Summer Solstice)

Respecting our black bears

by Robert Merkin

Until we moved last year, our backyard neighbor for many years in Northampton was Molly the Single-Mother Bear, and her yearly brood of cubs.

We suspect she was spooked into the secluded wetland center of our block one day, looked around, saw it had everything a mother bear with cubs needs, and set up permanent residence.

Molly was the perfect neighbor. Our American black bear (Ursus americanus) instinctively avoids human contact, and Molly and her cubs were invisible ghosts most of the time. Only locals who enjoy a sunrise walk ever saw Molly and the kids making the rounds of unguarded neighborhood dumpsters, trash cans and bird feeders. By the time the city awoke, Molly had led her cubs back to the hidden wild heart of our block for the rest of the day.

But two or three times a year, usually at sunset, Molly and her family would give us the most spectacular thrill of an in-person parade or nature show. One night for a half-hour she let a half-dozen hushed, astonished neighbors, adults and their bug-eyed kids, watch her train her three cubs in the art of fence-climbing and bird-feeder raiding. Neither neighbors nor bears scared or spooked each other. For this city boy, it was spiritually richer than church. One cub had trouble climbing back over the chain-link fence and wailed piteously, and Molly replied with a mother's annoyed growl. The cub got the message and clambered back over the fence.

I soon learned not to worry about our safety or our cats' safety. During our years with Molly I worried far more about Molly's safety and the safety of her cubs. The scenario I dreaded most was that kids roaming through the wetland wilderness -- their right and rite of childhood -- would molest a cub, Molly would react ferociously, and the police would have no choice but to kill her and orphan her cubs. Police detest this chore.

So I would urge all parents to "bear-proof" their kids by teaching them always to walk (not run) silently away from any bear they encounter, and never to bother, scare or threaten a bear.

A few years ago in a Western national park, a troop of "city boy" scouts encountered a bear cub, and their adult leader urged them to throw rocks at it. They killed it. For the rest of the day the park rangers' radios echoed with anger, disbelief, and sobbing.

I call my old neighbor Molly (and her dopey adolescent son Todd), but Commonwealth bear experts scrupulously do not give names to the bears they affix with tracking collars. So many bears who have wandered into our neighborhoods come to a tragic end that giving them names would make these deaths even harder to endure. Our dedicated bear experts protect their emotions by referring to the bears only by their radio collar codes. But their feelings for these bears grow as deep as our feelings for family members.

There's plenty of room for all Massachusetts bears in our still-extensive deep woods. They don't seek our neighborhoods because they've run out of wilderness. They seek our dumpsters, trash cans, and most of all our bird feeders. Our sloppy and thoughtless habits with discarded food and birdseed guarantee bears a free buffet all year long. In our neighborhoods, they don't even hibernate, because hunger triggers hibernation, and neighborhood bears are never that hungry.

Regardless of what our legislators, lawyers, judges and developers may say, we do not own these creatures. We do not have the right to displace, molest or kill them, or to disrupt the remarkably successful living patterns they took millions of years to evolve.

If they annoy us now and then with strewn trash or a wrecked bird feeder, this is trivial compared to the numbers of bears we kill, molest and harass. They wouldn't be in close proximity to people if we hadn't invited them with our all-year-long free buffet.

Whether we know it or not, we are the bears' stewards, charged always with the responsibility of safeguarding and protecting them. They were here first; we came long after, with a mindset that regarded them as dangerous, delicious, and useful for fur and grease. In recent years, spectacular black-market prices for their organs, believed to have magical medicinal powers, put them at even greater risk from rapacious slaughterers who do not deserve the honorable title of lawful hunters. 

The very best way we can discharge our responsibilities as stewards -- and as parents -- is to teach our children respect and common-sense rules for their neighbor bears. This would promise future generations of adults who take their wildlife stewardship responsibilities seriously. 

Our other chore is to give far more thought to the way we get rid of edible garbage, and, if we must enjoy our birdfeeders, to spend a little more time, money and effort to erect the most bear-proof feeders we can. Very few people understand the harm and danger they invite with inferior birdfeeders placed in easy reach of bears.

There's new bears around our new home, but I miss Molly, dopey Todd, and all his sisters and brothers. They were the best and most amazing neighbors this city boy ever had. Please keep them safe and healthy.

- 30 -

Robert Merkin is a novelist ("Zombie Jamboree," "The South Florida Book of the Dead") who lived in Northampton for thirty years. He and wife Cynthia now live in the woods in a nearby hilltown.

the fraud, scam and victimization of college women athletes / how men's sports programs cheat and lie to sleaze around Title IX

Click photo to enlarge.

It's Sports Time on Vleeptron!
All the Sports from Vleeptron!
We've got the latest Qx'ii scores!
All the games from the Dwingeloo League!
Dogfighting, fish-shooting,
cockfighting too!
Bare-knuckle boxing from 1902!
A fifth of our Sports
all take place in the Zoo!
Get your Sports on Vleeptron!
Get your Sports on Vleeptron!

* * * * *

The New York Times
(USA daily broadsheet)
Monday 25 April 2011

College Teams,
Relying on Deception,
Undermine Gender Equity

by Katie Thomas

Ever since Congress passed the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX, universities have opened their gyms and athletic fields to millions of women who previously did not have chances to play. But as women have surged into a majority on campus in recent years, many institutions have resorted to subterfuge to make it look as if they are offering more spots to women.

This is the first article in a series examining how colleges have approached compliance with Title IX since 1972 and the obstacles to enforcing the law.

At the University of South Florida, more than half of the 71 women on the cross-country roster failed to run a race in 2009. Asked about it, a few laughed and said they did not know they were on the team.

At Marshall University, the women’s tennis coach recently invited three freshmen onto the team even though he knew they were not good enough to practice against his scholarship athletes, let alone compete. They could come to practice whenever they liked, he told them, and would not have to travel with the team.

At Cornell, only when the 34 fencers on the women’s team take off their protective masks at practice does it become clear that 15 of them are men. Texas A&M and Duke are among the elite women’s basketball teams that also take advantage of a federal loophole that allows them to report male practice players as female participants.

Title IX, passed in 1972 at the height of the women’s rights movement, banned sex discrimination in any federally financed education program. It threw into sharp relief the unequal treatment of male and female athletes on college campuses.

Over the next 40 years, the law spawned a cultural transformation: the number of women competing in college sports has soared by more than 500 percent -- to 186,000 a year from fewer than 30,000 in 1972.

But as women have grown to 57 percent of American colleges’ enrollment, athletic programs have increasingly struggled to field a proportional number of female athletes. And instead of pouring money into new women’s teams or trimming the rosters of prized football teams, many colleges are turning to a sleight of hand known as roster management. 

According to a review of public records from more than 20 colleges and universities by The New York Times, and an analysis of federal participation statistics from all 345 institutions in N.C.A.A. [National Collegiate Athletic Association] Division I — the highest level of college sports — many are padding women’s team rosters with underqualified, even unwitting, athletes. They are counting male practice players as women. And they are trimming the rosters of men’s teams.

“Those of us in the business know that universities have been end-running Title IX for a long time, and they do it until they get caught,” said Donna E. Shalala, the president of the University of Miami.

Each year, institutions must report their male and female participation numbers to the Department of Education. And even though the numbers would not be used in a formal investigation, many colleges manipulate them to avoid bringing about one. The embarrassment that comes with a public inquiry or a lawsuit can motivate them to do what it takes to stay under the radar.

Shrinking budgets also spur universities to use these tactics, said Jake Crouthamel, a former Syracuse athletic director. “It’s easier to add more people on a roster than it is to start a new sport,” he said.

Yet football, the pride of many universities and a draw for alumni, rarely faces cuts. The average Division I football team went from 95 players 30 years ago to 111 players in 2009-10.

“Football is the elephant in the whole thing,” Mr. Crouthamel said. “That’s the monster.”

Advocates for men’s teams say roster management hurts their cause as well, because colleges tend to eliminate men’s sports rather than increase women’s sports to reach parity. Officials have also cut the size of men’s teams, compromising their competitiveness.

“I think roster management is almost a cuss word,” said Tommy Bell, the athletic director at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. He wants to restore a men’s track team, he said, but to do so, he must trim men’s spots elsewhere. “I hate doing it,” he said.

According to the most current federal numbers, women make up 53 percent of the student body at Division I institutions yet only 46 percent of all athletes. And that discrepancy does not take into account all the tactics used to boost the numbers artificially.

Roster management came under scrutiny last year when a federal judge ruled that Quinnipiac University in Connecticut had violated Title IX by engaging in several questionable practices, including requiring that women cross-country runners join the indoor and outdoor track teams so they could be counted three times. The judge found earlier that Quinnipiac had been padding women’s rosters by counting players, then cutting them a few weeks later. Quinnipiac athletic officials declined to comment, but in its appeal, the university said the judge’s conclusion that women were required to be on all three teams was not supported by evidence.

Russlynn H. Ali, the assistant education secretary who heads the Office for Civil Rights, which is charged with enforcing Title IX, said the Quinnipiac case was “a check on what some were doing, either knowingly or unwittingly.”

Nancy Hogshead-Makar, an Olympic swimmer and the senior director of advocacy at the Women’s Sports Foundation, said: “The fraud is disheartening. Intercollegiate athletics are rare educational opportunities, subsidized with our tax dollars, which deliver superior lifelong returns on investment. When an athletic department engineers itself to produce only the appearance of fairness, they flout the law and cheat women.”

When One Equals Three

The roots of South Florida’s enormous women’s cross-country team can be traced to 1997, when the university added football.

Universities must demonstrate compliance with Title IX in at least one of three ways: by showing that the number of female athletes is in proportion to overall female enrollment, by demonstrating a history of expanding opportunities for women, or by proving that they are meeting the athletic interests and abilities of their female students.

After South Florida added more than 100 football players, it was out of balance under the first test. Lamar Daniel, a gender-equity consultant, told the university in 2002 that it failed the other two as well. He recommended adding a women’s swimming team and warned that trying to comply with the proportionality option would be difficult because South Florida’s female participation numbers were too low.

But university officials tried anyway. A primary strategy was to expand the women’s running teams. Female runners can be a bonanza because a single athlete can be counted up to three times, as a member of the cross-country and the indoor and outdoor track teams.

In 2002, 21 South Florida women competed in cross-country. By 2008, the number had grown to 75 -- more than quadruple the size of an average Division I cross-country team.

When told of the team’s size, Mr. Daniel, a former investigator for the Office for Civil Rights, said: “Good gracious. That would certainly justify further examination.”

In 2009-10, South Florida reported 71 women on its cross-country team, but race results show only 28 competed in at least one race.

At a recent track meet at South Florida, three female long jumpers who are listed on the cross-country roster said they were not members of that team.

“They have us on cross-country if we want to, like for extra conditioning, but we have fall training, so I don’t,” Tralanda Todd, one of the jumpers, said.

Ms. Ali, the assistant education secretary, said that it was fair to count athletes multiple times, but that “if they didn’t know they were on the team, in all likelihood we would determine that not to be a meaningful participation opportunity.”

Sarah Till, who graduated from South Florida in 2009, was a more extreme case. She said that she quit and returned her track scholarship in her sophomore year, but her name was listed on the rosters of all three squads through her junior year.

“They wanted to keep me on the roster because the more girls they have on the roster, the more positions they have to give for the guys’ teams,” she said, adding that a former assistant coach had told her she would receive running shoes and priority class registration as a reward for staying on the rosters.

After being contacted by The Times, South Florida officials said they would end the practice of listing athletes who do not participate on team rosters. But Bill McGillis, the executive associate athletic director, defended providing “opportunities to women in cross-country in large numbers.”

South Florida is not the only university to open its rosters to women, no matter their skill level. Florida State and Marshall encourage their women’s coaches to accept many walk-ons — generally athletes who were not recruited — while often prohibiting or limiting the same practice on men’s teams.

At Marshall, John Mercer, the women’s tennis coach, added three freshman walk-ons to satisfy the athletic department’s 10-player team minimum. “They’re being nice and trying to help us fill the spots, to help our rosters,” he said. While practices are optional this year, a Marshall official said more will be expected of the walk-ons next year once their class schedules are arranged to accommodate regular practices.

The Office for Civil Rights does not require athletes to compete to be counted. Still, some have questioned why elite Division I programs are opening rosters to underqualified athletes.

Kristen Galles, a lawyer who represents athletes in Title IX lawsuits, said colleges that were committed to gender equity “are going to add new women’s teams, not tell your softball coach to have 30 softball players.”

Men as Women

Division I programs routinely count male players who practice with women’s teams as female participants. According to the Department of Education, they are doing nothing wrong.

David A. Bergeron, the deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Postsecondary Education, said men should be counted on women’s teams if they receive coaching and practice with women.

Texas A&M, which just won the women’s Division I basketball championship, reported 32 players in the 2009-10 academic year, although 14 were men. Cornell included 19 men among the women’s fencing, volleyball and basketball teams in the 2009-10 numbers reported to Bergeron’s office. Yet Cornell counted the five female coxswains for the men’s rowing team as female athletes.

Cornell and Texas A&M officials said they were simply following the rules, odd as they are. “We count who we’re supposed to count,” J. Andrew Noel Jr., Cornell’s athletic director, said.

Todd Kennett, a Cornell men’s rowing coach, said he exploited the loophole. “The women on my team count as women, which allows me to put more men on my roster,” he said, adding that the women were talented coxswains.

Ms. Ali said that universities investigated by her office would never get away with counting men as women, but acknowledged that a formal inquiry is rare.

“I would hope, as someone who cares about these issues, that that data is accurate and that institutions would not try and game it,” she said.

Numbers Up, Bodies Down

Double- and triple-counting women has allowed four dozen Division I universities to mask the fact that they have fewer female athletes. At those institutions, overall participation rates appeared to show that women were gaining ground. But when the duplications were not counted, records show the percentage of women who played for those universities fell.

Oklahoma State reported 35 more female participants in the 2009-10 academic year than in 2003-4, although the number of women actually competing decreased by 12. The number of male athletes increased by 22 during that period. Amy Weeks, an associate athletic director, attributed the decrease in female athletes to natural fluctuation. When universities are found to be noncompliant, the solution does not always satisfy the complainants.

The University of California, Irvine, is among at least five California universities that sponsor women’s indoor track teams despite a mild climate and a dearth of indoor facilities. Those universities do not offer men’s indoor track.

Last year, an investigation by the Office for Civil Rights concluded that Irvine was not complying with Title IX because its indoor track team was essentially a ruse. It competed in just one meet per year and several women on the roster “vigorously stated” that they were not on the team.

Jessie Rogers, 20, filed the complaint after her Irvine swimming team was cut in 2009. “All I wanted was to get that women’s swimming team back,” she said.

That did not happen. Irvine reached an agreement with the Office for Civil Rights to expand its indoor track schedule and to increase its roster.

Irvine officials would say only that they were committed to providing equal opportunities. Ms. Ali said that her office encouraged more meaningful changes but all it could do was force institutions to follow the letter of the law.

Karen Crouse, Griffin Palmer and Marjorie Connelly contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 26, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: College Teams, Relying on Deception, Undermine Gender Equity.

- 30 -

CORRECTED EXPANDED POST about Google's Les Paul guitar and Lawrence Welk / Les, I forgive you for divorcing Mary Ford!

 Click, it gets bigger, 

but you got to go HERE to play music on it.

Quick! Go to the Main Page of Google and see -- and PLAY! -- their homage to Les Paul's 96th Birthday!

(I'm not clever enough to filch it.)

YES I AM CLEVER ENOUGH 

TO FILCH IT!!!

The galaxy-wide popularity of Google's Les Paul Electric Guitar has inspired them to keep running it forever (according to one headline -- well, you know, the definition of "forever" on the Internet is a slightly different one from the one we learned in math class and Sunday School)

HERE!

And when you've finished playing your best riff, there's a little button that will record and save it for you (I think).

And now I would like to say a word about Les Paul.

Les (geboren Lester William Polfuss) is an odd sort of Deity. He invented the Electric Guitar. 

I suspect there are more people today who would microwave Girl Scouts if Les Paul commanded them to than the Thugee Cult of the Death Goddess Khali ever numbered at the height of its popularity.

When I was a real little kid, he and his guitar-playing and singing wife Mary Ford used to have a 15-minute-long TV show (black and white) in which they would play Les' amazing invention, the Electric Guitar, while Mary would play AND sing AND harmonize with herself (because Les also invented multi-track overdubbing).

But the music they played!!!!! (This color is supposed to resemble shit.)

Les & Mary played Holiday Inn Lounge Music so square that it made Lawrence Welk seem like Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. 

The signature theme of the show was "Bye Bye Blues," a pretty uninspired standard from 1930 which Les & Mary turned into a Top 10 AM radio hit in 1952.

The USA was VERY SQUARE in 1952. Eisenhower was president (and Les & Mary performed for him at the White House), Negroes were kept in a condition of about 87% slavery (luckily for Earth, they were permitted to compose and perform music), and all wives would greet their husbands ar the door with a dry martini when Dad came home from work. Mom had stayed home all day attending to Junior and Sis, cooking dinner, doing the laundry ...

There were zero homosexuals or lesbians in the USA. (Except maybe 11 or 12 in Greenwich Village.)

Marihuana, the Satan Weed from Hell which loosened the judgment center of young white Protestant virgins, had not been invented yet. It was at an early stage of research and experimentation by a tiny number of Negro jazz musicians and white Beatniks who wore berets, played bongo drums, and recited non-rhyming poetry in Greenwich Village.

How anyone could invent the Electric Guitar, play it So Wonderfully -- and dedicate himself to a musical repertoire which would have been too square for Kate Smith to sing -- has lifelong mystified me. And yet long before his death, the likes of Eric Clapton, Jimi, and every Rock Guitar God bowed down before Les and kissed his feet.

Les and Mary divorced in 1952, it was apparently a real nasty divorce.

If you really can play a riff on the Google Les Paul and save it somehow, send it to me! (Try not to play "Bye Bye Blues," no Pizza for playing that.)

* * *

Send It To Me
 
by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards 
(performed by The Rolling Stones)
 
oh I think I had enough of your religion
it's tough, it's a state of mind
I don't need it

sending a letter
to my mother
I need some loving
send it to me

I lost my lover
unfaithful lover
I need some money
send it to me

I need consoling
your boy's feeling lonely
describe her for me
send it to me

send it to me
send it to me
send it to me

this is no doctor
no second cousin
that needs some lovin
send it to me

if she can't travel
I can take the mule train
I can take the aeroplane
send it to me
 
yeah and I'm begging you
begging you down on my knees
baby please please

You you got to send it send it send it
send it to me
send her to me
 
send her to me
send her to me
send her to me
 
yeah I'm sending in a letter
to my sister
in Australia
sister Marie

I'm lookin for a woman
she don't got to be beautiful
she has to be lovin
lovin I need
 
ain't got no lover
no sense of cover
I need some loving
send it to me
 
send it to me
send it to me
send it to me
 
she won't have to watch her step
she won't have to relocate
I guarantee 
her personal
security

she don't have to be five foot ten
or a blonde or brunette
she don't have to be no social hostess
send her
 
she might work in a factory
right next door to me
in my fantasy
send her to me
 
send her to me
send her to me
send her to me

she could be Rumanian
could be Bubarian
could be Albanian
she could be Hungarian
she might be Ukrainian
could be Australian
could be the Alien
send her to me

send her to me
send her to me
send her to me

They put me in jail for my deviant ways / two years seven months and sixteen days

speakers: ON

Right-click:  OPEN IN NEW WINDOW

(because you REALLY want to watch this video)watch in FULL SCREEN
Maybe it's just my computer and wifi, but be patient if you get stop-start-stop-start crap. The song and video are much too good to give up in frustration.

I Feel So Good

by Richard Thompson

from the album "Rumour and Sigh" (1991)
Promotional animated video by Capitol/EMI Records
animation team in Taiwan who also animate "The Simpsons"

I feel so good I'm going to break somebody's heart tonight
I feel so good I'm going to take someone apart tonight
They put me in jail for my deviant ways
Two years seven months and sixteen days
Now I'm back on the street in a purple haze

And I feel so good, and I feel so good
Well I feel so good I'm going to break somebody's heart tonight

I feel so good I'm going to make somebody's day tonight
I feel so good I'm going to make somebody pay tonight
I'm old enough to sin but I'm too young to vote
Society's been dragging on the tail of my coat
Now I've got a suitcase full of fifty pound notes
And a half-naked woman with her tongue down my throat

And I feel so good, and I feel so good
Oh I feel so good I'm going to break somebody's heart tonight

They made me pay for the things I've done
Now it's my turn to have all the fun
Well I feel so good I'm going to break somebody's heart tonight

And I feel so good, I feel so good
Well I feel so good I'm going to break somebody's heart tonight
Oh Oh Oh
I feel so good I'm going to break somebody's heart tonight
Hm break somebody's heart
Break somebody's heart
Hm break somebody's heart
Oh break somebody's heart

Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time / You can waste your time on the other rides / This is the nearest to being alive / Oh let me take my chances on the Wall of Death

 Click image to enlarge.

Right-click / Open in New Tab
 
The Wall of Death
by Richard Thompson

Harmony: Christine Collister
Guitar (in shades and hat): Clive Gregson

Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
You can waste your time on the other rides
This is the nearest to being alive
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death

You can go with the crazy people in the Crooked House
You can fly away on the Rocket or spin in the Mouse
The Tunnel Of Love might amuse you
Noah's Ark might confuse you
But let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death

On the Wall Of Death all the world is far from me
On the Wall Of Death it's the nearest to being free

Well you're going nowhere when you ride on the carousel
And maybe you're strong but what's the good of ringing a bell?
The switchback will make you crazy. 
Beware of the bearded lady
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death

Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
Oh let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
You can waste your time on the other rides
This is the nearest to being alive
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death
Let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death

save the child, help yourself too

Good morning to you,how are you doing hope you fine and in perfect order.My names are Lewis Lamptey i am 11 yrs old and i am from DR Congo,i came to Ghana after the murder of my parents 2 mouths ago by hired assasin by someone i don't know,before they got to him in the house he revealed to me that i should come to Ghana with the documents in a small box,if i get a trust worth foreign partner to help me make claim to the fund he deposited in an Escrow account in Unique Trust Bank Ghana.The woman whom i am with now cannot read she is not correct and people around call her crazy woman,and she cannot help me in this matter,i am contacting you to help me as my foreign partner so i can get my life back,go to school and have a family that will care for me,i do know what to do that is why i am contacting you to assist me.

US Representative Walter Jones, of North Carolina's Camp Lejeune/US Marine district says: STOP THE DAMNED AFGHANISTAN WAR / To Republicans, he was a pariah; now he's a prophet and leader

 Click photo to enlarge.

The New York Times
(daily broadsheet USA)
on-line: Monday 6 June 2011
print: Tuesday 7 June 2011

Antiwar Republican Is 

No Longer Party’s Pariah

by James Dao

GREENVILLE, N.C. -- On matters like abortion, military spending and religion, Representative Walter B. Jones seems thoroughly in tune with this conservative, staunchly Republican district in eastern North Carolina, home to the Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune and thousands of military retirees.

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

Walter B. Jones
AGE: 68
EDUCATION: Atlantic Christian College, B.A.
FAMILY: Wife, Joe Anne Jones, and one daughter.
POLITICAL EXPERIENCE: After losing his first race for Congress as a Democrat in 1992, seeking to fill his late father’s seat, he switched parties and won election in a different district in 1994.
FAMILY HISTORY: Eighty-four years after he died, Mr. Jones’s grandfather was awarded a Purple Heart in 2010 for injuries caused by poison gas in World War I.
DOWN TIME: Tennis and grocery shopping for his family.

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

On the issue of war, however, Mr. Jones has defied typecasting. An early critic of the American invasion of Iraq, he has been ostracized by the Republican leadership in Congress. And now he is emerging as a leading advocate for swiftly withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan, a position that has made him, of all things, a liberal hero.

“When you talk about war, political parties don’t matter,” he said in an interview.

But Mr. Jones may no longer be the outlier he was six years ago. Late last month, an amendment intended to accelerate the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan sponsored by Mr. Jones and Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, nearly passed — in part because 26 Republicans broke with their leadership to support it, triple the number who voted for a similar measure last year. Their ranks included at least three freshmen elected with Tea Party support.

Some foreign policy analysts now see Mr. Jones, 68; Representative Ron Paul, Republican of Texas; and a small coterie of Tea Party stalwarts as the leading edge of a conservative movement to rein in American military power — a break from the muscular foreign policy of President George W. Bush.

“They reflect a growing discontent within the Republican Party about the wars and a growing feeling that they don’t want to spend money on them anymore,” said John Isaacs, executive director of the Council for a Livable World, an advocacy group that promotes arms control. “They are military noninterventionists.”

Mr. Jones agreed, saying: “We can’t police the world anymore. We’re not the world power. It’s China. Our economy is in chaos.”

Conversations with voters in Mr. Jones’s district, which embraces much of North Carolina’s Atlantic coastline, suggest that many who were baffled or infuriated by his opposition to the Iraq war in 2005 are liking his views on Afghanistan in 2011.

At a Memorial Day event in Beaufort on May 28, August Braddy, 68, declared that Mr. Jones — who over eight terms has voted with the American Conservative Union more than 80 percent of the time — was too liberal. But on Afghanistan, Mr. Braddy, who was wearing a red Tea Party shirt, said he thought Mr. Jones was right.

“We’re broke; we can’t afford it,” he said. “We did what we went there to do: get Bin Laden.”

Polls suggest that Republican voters are moving in Mr. Jones’s direction. In a New York Times/CBS News poll last month, 43 percent of Republicans said the United States should reduce troop strength in Afghanistan, double the number who said that in November 2009. Some prominent Republicans, including Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Grover Norquist, the antitax champion, have also begun questioning the American mission in Afghanistan.

Still, the vast majority of Republicans in Congress remain supportive of the war. On Mr. Jones’s amendment, 207 Republicans voted no, while 178 Democrats voted in favor. But the amendment failed by just 11 votes, and Mr. Jones believes that by fall, it will pass.

For many of the Republicans who are questioning the war, cost is clearly the driving factor. Mr. Jones makes that case in his district, telling voters that spending $8,000,000,000 a month to prop up what he calls a corrupt government is a waste of money.

“If we’re going to cut programs for children who need milk in the morning, if we’re going to cut programs for seniors who need a sandwich at lunch, if we’re going to cut veterans benefits, then, for God’s sake, let’s bring back our troops from Afghanistan,” he said in Beaufort, to loud applause.

But Mr. Jones’s wrenching odyssey from disciple of Speaker Newt Gingrich to war opponent was far more about personal guilt than budget deficits.

The son of a Democratic congressman, Mr. Jones was elected in the Republican tide of 1994 with the support of a conservative icon, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. He came to be a steadfast supporter of Mr. Gingrich’s small-government agenda.

In 2002, Mr. Jones voted for the resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq. He also persuaded House cafeterias to rename their French fries “freedom fries,” tweaking the French government for opposing the invasion.

But Mr. Jones now says he had misgivings about the vote almost immediately. After he attended his first funeral at Camp Lejeune for a Marine killed just weeks into the invasion, those misgivings grew into pangs of doubt.

He started writing letters to the relatives of every American killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. (He has signed more than 10,370 at last count.) And he began consulting with critics of the invasion, including Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a retired Marine.

“I came to believe we were misled, we were lied to,” Mr. Jones said recently. “The people around Bush manipulated the intelligence.”

In June 2005, he stunned his party establishment by appearing at a news conference with Mr. Paul and Representative Dennis Kucinich, a liberal Ohio Democrat, to call on Mr. Bush to start reducing troop levels in Iraq.

Mr. Jones’s offices were immediately flooded with calls from angry constituents who branded him a traitor and demanded his resignation. He made the cover of Mother Jones magazine in 2006 and drew a tough primary challenge in 2008 from an opponent who called him “a poster boy for the left.” Mr. Jones won handily.

A convert to Roman Catholicism, Mr. Jones says he has not missed a Sunday Mass in nearly 40 years. His faith, he says, caused him to question the war.

“I did not vote my conscience and I sent kids to die, and they didn’t have to go,” he said. “I thank God that he made me feel guilty about my vote on Iraq.”

Afghanistan is different from Iraq, he says, because he believes that the latter invasion was justified. But he has come to believe that the strategy of trying to strengthen the government of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and build that country’s security forces is doomed.

In Beaufort, about 50 miles from Camp Lejeune, several former Marines at the Memorial Day event agreed.

“We’re losing a lot of people there and not seeing anything in return,” said Gregory Barnett, who spent 22 years in the Marine Corps. “Now that we’ve gotten Bin Laden, we’ve been there long enough.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 6, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of the vote on Mr. Jones's troop withdrawal amendment as "last week."

A version of this article appeared in print on June 7, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Republican Who Broke Ranks On War Is an Outcast No More.

- 30 -

Don't eat the salad in Mitteleuropa! / Escherichia coli epidemic in Germany and Austria mystifies investigators

Click image to enlarge.

Der Spiegel ("The Mirror," news magazine, Germany)
Tuesday 31 May 2011

The Epidemic Detectives
The Hunt for the Source 

of Germany's E. Coli Outbreak

by Veronika Hackenbroch, Samiha Shafy and Frank Thadeusz

Germany's E. coli epidemic, which has killed as many as 15 people so far, has alarmed doctors, who have never seen such an aggressive intestinal bacteria before. Epidemiologists are desperately searching for the origin of the deadly bacteria.

The eeriest thing of all, according to Rolf Stahl, is the way patients change. "Their awareness becomes blurred, they have problems finding words and they don't quite know where they are," says Stahl. And then there is this surprising aggressiveness. "We are dealing with a completely new clinical picture," he notes.

Stahl, a 62-year-old kidney specialist, has been the head of the Third Medical Clinic and Polyclinic at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) for almost 18 years. "But none of us doctors has ever experienced anything quite like this," he says. His staff has been working around the clock for the last week or so. "We decide at short notice who can go and get some sleep."

The bacterium that is currently terrifying the country is an enterohemorrhagic strain of the bacterium Escherichia coli (EHEC), a close relative of harmless intestinal bacteria, but one that produces the dangerous Shiga toxin. All it takes is about 100 bacteria -- which isn't much in the world of bacteria, which are normally counted by the millions -- to become infected. After an incubation period of two to 10 days, patients experience watery or bloody diarrhea.

'The Situation Is Deteriorating Dramatically'

But Stahl only sees the most severe cases, those in which EHEC also attacks the blood, kidneys and brain. These patients suffer from a life-threatening complication known as hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS). About 10 days after the diarrhea begins, the red blood cells suddenly disintegrate, blood clotting stops working and the kidneys fail. In many cases patients need dialysis to stay alive.

"The situation is deteriorating dramatically for our patients," says Stahl. "And the worst thing is that we don't know what's causing it."

In Germany, about 60 people a year contract hemolytic-uremic syndrome after being infected with EHEC. Last week, there were as many cases in a single day. According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the national German institution responsible for disease control and prevention, there were 276 HUS patients in German hospitals by Friday.

By Tuesday there were 373 confirmed cases of HUS across Germany. As many as 15 people may have died from EHEC in Germany so far in the current outbreak. Cases have also been reported in Sweden, Denmark, Britain, Austria and the Netherlands. Meanwhile Russia has banned imports of cucumbers, tomatoes and fresh salad from Spain and Germany.

Impressive Detective Work

The story of the outbreak began in Stahl's clinic. When the first patient suspected of having contracted HUS was admitted there on a Wednesday evening two weeks ago, none of the doctors had any idea what they were facing. "We weren't even thinking of EHEC at first," says Stahl, "because it normally only affects children." In adults, on the other hand, HUS can also be caused by genetic defects and autoimmune diseases, or as a side effect of cancer treatment.

By the next day, however, there were suddenly seven or eight cases in the ward, and the laboratory reported that they were all infected with EHEC. Hamburg promptly notified the Robert Koch Institute.

The process that began at that point and reached its preliminary climax at the end of last week with the closing of two vegetable production operations in Spain is an example of impressive epidemiological detective work. It involves close cooperation among vigilant doctors, epidemiologists thinking practically and detail-oriented laboratory scientists.

For the disease control experts at the RKI, it was primarily a matter of addressing two tasks simultaneously and as quickly as possible: to find the contaminated food products and to determine the type of bacterium involved.

Extremely Rare

Helge Karch, the director of the RKI's EHEC consulting laboratory at the Münster University Hospital in western Germany, has devoted almost his entire life as a researcher to EHEC bacteria. "But I've never encountered something like this," he says.

The first stool sample arrived in his lab on Monday. The first cases had already appeared in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia by then.

Karch's staff members began their analysis right away. The result was clear by Wednesday evening: It was the extremely rare serotype O104:H4.

Karch spent a sleepless night in front of his computer. The serotype he had identified was so rare that he had only encountered it once in three decades. But had this bacterium ever triggered an epidemic before?

After searching through a database for medical journals, Karch found only one article under the search term "O104:H4": a case study from Korea. In the Korean case, as in most of the German cases, an adult woman had contracted EHEC, which is completely atypical for EHEC.

Plague DNA

Karch kept himself awake with coffee, and to relax he went for walks with his German shepherd. "Can you imagine what I'm going through?" he wrote in an email to Phillip Tarr at Washington University in St. Louis. His response came at 4:27 a.m.: "Epidemics are for younger men." Tarr, the second major EHEC expert next to Karch, had also never heard of an O104:H4 outbreak.

In the email, Karch speculated over why the disease wasn't happening in children, as is normally the case, but only in adults. And why was the infection striking more people that ever before in Germany -- so many, in fact, that dialysis stations in several hospitals were almost full?

Karch and others speculate that the problem could lie in the pathogen itself. Perhaps the genetic material of this rare bacterium has mutated again, so that its toxin or its bond to the intestinal cells it damages has become stronger. Doctors hope that a complete sequencing of the genome, which is now being performed in Münster, will offer some answers.

On Tuesday, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that Karch had discovered that the O104:H4 bacteria responsible for the current outbreak is a so-called chimera that contains genetic materia from various E. coli bacteria. It also contains DNA sequences from plague bacteria, which makes it particularly pathogenic. There is no risk, however, that it could cause a form of plague, Karch emphasized in remarks to the newspaper.

MORE

Herbert C. Brown / William Lipscomb's modified periodic table of the elements which puts boron in its proper perspective.

Click periodic table of elements to enlarge.

Herbert C. Brown (1912-2004, born Herbert Brovarnik in London, emigrated to USA at age 2, naturalized citizen 1936) won the 1979 Nobel Chemistry Prize for his lifetime of investigation of the chemical element boron. 

 

When he was graduated from the University of Chicago in 1936, he and his fiancee Sarah Baylen were so broke that a used book on boron was all she could afford as a graduation gift. Brown credited that primitive book with his lifetime obsession.

 

William N. Lipscomb (Nobel Chemistry 1976) also obsessed on the chemical bonds of boron and produced this periodic table to reflect boron's paramount importance among all the elements. It hung above the blackboard in Brown's Purdue classroom.