Dalam buku berjudul, "Menyelamatkan Kota-kota Islam (Islamic Cities and Conversation)" karya Jim Antoniou mengajak pembaca untuk menggembara dan menelusuri ke kota-kota kuno Islam yang membentang dari Barat hingga ke Timur.

Ia menyatakan bahwa keluarga Islam terdiri dari keluarga batih (extended) dan bukan model keluarga nukleus seperti lazimnya keluarga Barat. Bentuk rumah dan keluarga batih Islam berupa sebuah halaman yang di dalamnya terdapat kamar dengan pintu-pintu yang menghadap ke halaman yang merupakan inti dari suatu kehidupan keluarga. Konsekuensi dari sistem batih ini adalah pola kehidupan sosial penghuninya mempengaruhi kegiatan yang dilakukan oleh kelompok-kelompok secara terpisah. Suatu kegiatan kelompok memerlukan suatu ruangan khusus bagi laki-laki dan tamu. Kelompok lain memerlukan ruangan yang dikhususkan bagi wanita dan kegiatan kehidupan keluarga.

Namun, setelah pengaruh metodologi perencanaan kota yang berasal dari pihak asing (barat), model keluarga seperti itu menahan pembangunan di sebuah lingkungan perkotaan yang modern. Bahkan, metodolgi perencanaan kota pun sebenarnya tidak cocok dengan karakter penghuni kota Islami, misalnya dalam hal sistem kepemilikan tanah, konsep-konsep dan rancang bangun rumah dan peruntukkan yang tidak sesuai dengan sifat penduduk kota yang tradisional.

***

Bagaimana dengan konsep model rumah Islami saat ini? Menurutku jauh berbeda dengan model keluarga batih, padahal model batih yang sesuai dengan kita. Tapi, bila model batih ini diwujudkan sepertinya harus dengan luasan tanah yang lumayan besar. Bagaimana pendapat teman-teman? Sebenarnya, bagaimana konsep rumah Islami yang sesuai pada saat ini?

UPDATE!

The Law and Your Privacy
As you may have seen in the news, YouTube received a court order to produce viewing data from our database, including usernames and IP addresses. In order to protect our community's privacy, we strongly opposed this motion when Viacom and others filed it.

The court felt differently and ordered us to produce the data. Viacom said that they need general viewing information to determine the proportion of views on YouTube of copyright infringing content vs. non-infringing content.

Of course, we have to follow legal process. But since IP addresses and usernames aren't necessary to determine general viewing practices, our lawyers have asked their lawyers to let us remove that information before we hand over the data they're seeking. (You should know, IP addresses identify a computer, not the person using it. It's not possible to determine your identity solely based on your IP address. Rather, an IP address can reveal what geographic area you're connecting from, or which Internet service provider you're using.)

Why do we keep this information in the first place? It helps us personalize the YouTube experience, getting you closer to the videos you most want to watch. We have many features on the site that help users discover and share compelling content, and we're improving the video experience through recommendations, related videos, and personalized directories that help you find meaningful videos.

We'll continue to fight for your right to share and broadcast your work. The court did impose some encouraging limits -- they agreed with us that Viacom should not have access to private videos or our search technology. Also, the information we provide will be designated highly confidential under court order and only Viacom's outside counsel and experts will have access to it.

Legal matters aside, our focus remains on providing you with the best possible YouTube experience and we continue to be committed to protecting your privacy. Every day, millions of creative people from around the world are posting new, original content. You, our community, are creating the YouTube experience now and tomorrow.

Sincerely,
The YouTube Team

Google Hands Over Data
IS Google tuning into Yahoo/China

Leave a comment on the You Tube blog

RECAP

!Una pinta de nieve por una pinta de sangre!  Los Caballeros de Colon van a patricionar un solicitud para donar sangre el día Domingo, 27 de Julio, de9am - 2pm en Reid Hall.  Para alistarse llame a Silvia o Tim Mullane alteléfono 623 979-8924.  Gracias por su participación en ayudarnos.

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.

“The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” The Finding provided for a whole new range of activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political opposition is strong, he said.

Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.

The request for funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003. The Administration downplayed the significance of the N.I.E., and, while saying that it was committed to diplomacy, continued to emphasize that urgent action was essential to counter the Iranian nuclear threat. President Bush questioned the N.I.E.’s conclusions, and senior national-security officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made similar statements. (So did Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee.) Meanwhile, the Administration also revived charges that the Iranian leadership has been involved in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq: both directly, by dispatching commando units into Iraq, and indirectly, by supplying materials used for roadside bombs and other lethal goods. (There have been questions about the accuracy of the claims; the Times, among others, has reported that “significant uncertainties remain about the extent of that involvement.”)

Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White House’s concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about whether a military strike is the right solution. Some Pentagon officials believe, as they have let Congress and the media know, that bombing Iran is not a viable response to the nuclear-proliferation issue, and that more diplomacy is necessary.

A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization.)

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were “pushing back very hard” against White House pressure to undertake a military strike against Iran, the person familiar with the Finding told me. Similarly, a Pentagon consultant who is involved in the war on terror said that “at least ten senior flag and general officers, including combatant commanders”—the four-star officers who direct military operations around the world—“have weighed in on that issue.”

The most outspoken of those officers is Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was the head of U.S. Central Command, and thus in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March, Fallon resigned under pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations about an armed attack on Iran. For example, late last year he told the Financial Times that the “real objective” of U.S. policy was to change the Iranians’ behavior, and that “attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice.”

Admiral Fallon acknowledged, when I spoke to him in June, that he had heard that there were people in the White House who were upset by his public statements. “Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”

When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”

The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. “The oversight process has not kept pace—it’s been coöpted” by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”

Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had concerns about the possibility that their understanding of what the new operations entail differs from the White House’s. One issue has to do with a reference in the Finding, the person familiar with it recalled, to potential defensive lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran. (In early May, the journalist Andrew Cockburn published elements of the Finding in Counterpunch, a newsletter and online magazine.)

The language was inserted into the Finding at the urging of the C.I.A., a former senior intelligence official said. The covert operations set forth in the Finding essentially run parallel to those of a secret military task force, now operating in Iran, that is under the control of JSOC. Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference. But the borders between operations are not always clear: in Iran, C.I.A. agents and regional assets have the language skills and the local knowledge to make contacts for the JSOC operatives, and have been working with them to direct personnel, matériel, and money into Iran from an obscure base in western Afghanistan. As a result, Congress has been given only a partial view of how the money it authorized may be used. One of JSOC’s task-force missions, the pursuit of “high-value targets,” was not directly addressed in the Finding. There is a growing realization among some legislators that the Bush Administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing.

“This is a big deal,” the person familiar with the Finding said. “The C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they were able to circumvent congressional oversight. Everything is justified in terms of fighting the global war on terror.” He added, “The Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a shade of gray”—between operations that had to be briefed to the senior congressional leadership and those which did not—“but now it’s a shade of mush.”

“The agency says we’re not going to get in the position of helping to kill people without a Finding,” the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the legal threat confronting some agency operatives for their involvement in the rendition and alleged torture of suspects in the war on terror. “This drove the military people up the wall,” he said. As far as the C.I.A. was concerned, the former senior intelligence official said, “the over-all authorization includes killing, but it’s not as though that’s what they’re setting out to do. It’s about gathering information, enlisting support.” The Finding sent to Congress was a compromise, providing legal cover for the C.I.A. while referring to the use of lethal force in ambiguous terms.

The defensive-lethal language led some Democrats, according to congressional sources familiar with their views, to call in the director of the C.I.A., Air Force General Michael V. Hayden, for a special briefing. Hayden reassured the legislators that the language did nothing more than provide authority for Special Forces operatives on the ground in Iran to shoot their way out if they faced capture or harm.

The legislators were far from convinced. One congressman subsequently wrote a personal letter to President Bush insisting that “no lethal action, period” had been authorized within Iran’s borders. As of June, he had received no answer.

Members of Congress have expressed skepticism in the past about the information provided by the White House. On March 15, 2005, David Obey, then the ranking Democrat on the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee, announced that he was putting aside an amendment that he had intended to offer that day, and that would have cut off all funding for national-intelligence programs unless the President agreed to keep Congress fully informed about clandestine military activities undertaken in the war on terror. He had changed his mind, he said, because the White House promised better coöperation. “The Executive Branch understands that we are not trying to dictate what they do,” he said in a floor speech at the time. “We are simply trying to see to it that what they do is consistent with American values and will not get the country in trouble.”

Obey declined to comment on the specifics of the operations in Iran, but he did tell me that the White House reneged on its promise to consult more fully with Congress. He said, “I suspect there’s something going on, but I don’t know what to believe. Cheney has always wanted to go after Iran, and if he had more time he’d find a way to do it. We still don’t get enough information from the agencies, and I have very little confidence that they give us information on the edge.”

None of the four Democrats in the Gang of Eight—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes—would comment on the Finding, with some noting that it was highly classified. An aide to one member of the Democratic leadership responded, on his behalf, by pointing to the limitations of the Gang of Eight process. The notification of a Finding, the aide said, “is just that—notification, and not a sign-off on activities. Proper oversight of ongoing intelligence activities is done by fully briefing the members of the intelligence committee.” However, Congress does have the means to challenge the White House once it has been sent a Finding. It has the power to withhold funding for any government operation. The members of the House and Senate Democratic leadership who have access to the Finding can also, if they choose to do so, and if they have shared concerns, come up with ways to exert their influence on Administration policy. (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said, “As a rule, we don’t comment one way or the other on allegations of covert activities or purported findings.” The White House also declined to comment.)

A member of the House Appropriations Committee acknowledged that, even with a Democratic victory in November, “it will take another year before we get the intelligence activities under control.” He went on, “We control the money and they can’t do anything without the money. Money is what it’s all about. But I’m very leery of this Administration.” He added, “This Administration has been so secretive.”

One irony of Admiral Fallon’s departure is that he was, in many areas, in agreement with President Bush on the threat posed by Iran. They had a good working relationship, Fallon told me, and, when he ran CENTCOM, were in regular communication. On March 4th, a week before his resignation, Fallon testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying that he was “encouraged” about the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regarding the role played by Iran’s leaders, he said, “They’ve been absolutely unhelpful, very damaging, and I absolutely don’t condone any of their activities. And I have yet to see anything since I’ve been in this job in the way of a public action by Iran that’s been at all helpful in this region.”

Fallon made it clear in our conversations that he considered it inappropriate to comment publicly about the President, the Vice-President, or Special Operations. But he said he had heard that people in the White House had been “struggling” with his views on Iran. “When I arrived at CENTCOM, the Iranians were funding every entity inside Iraq. It was in their interest to get us out, and so they decided to kill as many Americans as they could. And why not? They didn’t know who’d come out ahead, but they wanted us out. I decided that I couldn’t resolve the situation in Iraq without the neighborhood. To get this problem in Iraq solved, we had to somehow involve Iran and Syria. I had to work the neighborhood.”

Fallon told me that his focus had been not on the Iranian nuclear issue, or on regime change there, but on “putting out the fires in Iraq.” There were constant discussions in Washington and in the field about how to engage Iran and, on the subject of the bombing option, Fallon said, he believed that “it would happen only if the Iranians did something stupid.”

Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallon’s defenders is retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the President’s “czar” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he’s known to be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,” Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) “He was charged with coming up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his A.O.”—area of operations. “That was not happening,” Sheehan said. “When Fallon tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him out.”

The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, known as Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the President to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put in charge of all aspects of military operations, including joint training and logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with other echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the White House and the uniformed military.

“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”

Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”

The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”

In recent months, according to the Iranian media, there has been a surge in violence in Iran; it is impossible at this early stage, however, to credit JSOC or C.I.A. activities, or to assess their impact on the Iranian leadership. The Iranian press reports are being carefully monitored by retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who has taught strategy at the National War College and now conducts war games centered on Iran for the federal government, think tanks, and universities. The Iranian press “is very open in describing the killings going on inside the country,” Gardiner said. It is, he said, “a controlled press, which makes it more important that it publishes these things. We begin to see inside the government.” He added, “Hardly a day goes by now we don’t see a clash somewhere. There were three or four incidents over a recent weekend, and the Iranians are even naming the Revolutionary Guard officers who have been killed.”

Earlier this year, a militant Ahwazi group claimed to have assassinated a Revolutionary Guard colonel, and the Iranian government acknowledged that an explosion in a cultural center in Shiraz, in the southern part of the country, which killed at least twelve people and injured more than two hundred, had been a terrorist act and not, as it earlier insisted, an accident. It could not be learned whether there has been American involvement in any specific incident in Iran, but, according to Gardiner, the Iranians have begun publicly blaming the U.S., Great Britain, and, more recently, the C.I.A. for some incidents. The agency was involved in a coup in Iran in 1953, and its support for the unpopular regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi—who was overthrown in 1979—was condemned for years by the ruling mullahs in Tehran, to great effect. “This is the ultimate for the Iranians—to blame the C.I.A.,” Gardiner said. “This is new, and it’s an escalation—a ratcheting up of tensions. It rallies support for the regime and shows the people that there is a continuing threat from the ‘Great Satan.’ ” In Gardiner’s view, the violence, rather than weakening Iran’s religious government, may generate support for it.

Many of the activities may be being carried out by dissidents in Iran, and not by Americans in the field. One problem with “passing money” (to use the term of the person familiar with the Finding) in a covert setting is that it is hard to control where the money goes and whom it benefits. Nonetheless, the former senior intelligence official said, “We’ve got exposure, because of the transfer of our weapons and our communications gear. The Iranians will be able to make the argument that the opposition was inspired by the Americans. How many times have we tried this without asking the right questions? Is the risk worth it?” One possible consequence of these operations would be a violent Iranian crackdown on one of the dissident groups, which could give the Bush Administration a reason to intervene.

A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.”

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.

The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.

The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts—and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”

The Kurdish party, PJAK, which has also been reported to be covertly supported by the United States, has been operating against Iran from bases in northern Iraq for at least three years. (Iran, like Iraq and Turkey, has a Kurdish minority, and PJAK and other groups have sought self-rule in territory that is now part of each of those countries.) In recent weeks, according to Sam Gardiner, the military strategist, there has been a marked increase in the number of PJAK armed engagements with Iranians and terrorist attacks on Iranian targets. In early June, the news agency Fars reported that a dozen PJAK members and four Iranian border guards were killed in a clash near the Iraq border; a similar attack in May killed three Revolutionary Guards and nine PJAK fighters. PJAK has also subjected Turkey, a member of NATO, to repeated terrorist attacks, and reports of American support for the group have been a source of friction between the two governments.

Gardiner also mentioned a trip that the Iraqi , made to Tehran in June. After his return, Maliki announced that his government would ban any contact between foreigners and the M.E.K.—a slap at the U.S.’s dealings with the group. Maliki declared that Iraq was not willing to be a staging ground for covert operations against other countries. This was a sign, Gardiner said, of “Maliki’s increasingly choosing the interests of Iraq over the interests of the United States.” In terms of U.S. allegations of Iranian involvement in the killing of American soldiers, he said, “Maliki was unwilling to play the blame-Iran game.” Gardiner added that Pakistan had just agreed to turn over a Jundallah leader to the Iranian government. America’s covert operations, he said, “seem to be harming relations with the governments of both Iraq and Pakistan and could well be strengthening the connection between Tehran and Baghdad.”

The White House’s reliance on questionable operatives, and on plans involving possible lethal action inside Iran, has created anger as well as anxiety within the Special Operations and intelligence communities. JSOC’s operations in Iran are believed to be modelled on a program that has, with some success, used surrogates to target the Taliban leadership in the tribal territories of Waziristan, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But the situations in Waziristan and Iran are not comparable.

In Waziristan, “the program works because it’s small and smart guys are running it,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “It’s being executed by professionals. The N.S.A., the C.I.A., and the D.I.A.”—the Defense Intelligence Agency—“are right in there with the Special Forces and Pakistani intelligence, and they’re dealing with serious bad guys.” He added, “We have to be really careful in calling in the missiles. We have to hit certain houses at certain times. The people on the ground are watching through binoculars a few hundred yards away and calling specific locations, in latitude and longitude. We keep the Predator loitering until the targets go into a house, and we have to make sure our guys are far enough away so they don’t get hit.” One of the most prominent victims of the program, the former official said, was Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior Taliban commander, who was killed on January 31st, reportedly in a missile strike that also killed eleven other people.

A dispatch published on March 26th by the Washington Post reported on the increasing number of successful strikes against Taliban and other insurgent units in Pakistan’s tribal areas. A follow-up article noted that, in response, the Taliban had killed “dozens of people” suspected of providing information to the United States and its allies on the whereabouts of Taliban leaders. Many of the victims were thought to be American spies, and their executions—a beheading, in one case—were videotaped and distributed by DVD as a warning to others.

It is not simple to replicate the program in Iran. “Everybody’s arguing about the high-value-target list,” the former senior intelligence official said. “The Special Ops guys are pissed off because Cheney’s office set up priorities for categories of targets, and now he’s getting impatient and applying pressure for results. But it takes a long time to get the right guys in place.”

The Pentagon consultant told me, “We’ve had wonderful results in the Horn of Africa with the use of surrogates and false flags—basic counterintelligence and counter-insurgency tactics. And we’re beginning to tie them in knots in Afghanistan. But the White House is going to kill the program if they use it to go after Iran. It’s one thing to engage in selective strikes and assassinations in Waziristan and another in Iran. The White House believes that one size fits all, but the legal issues surrounding extrajudicial killings in Waziristan are less of a problem because Al Qaeda and the Taliban cross the border into Afghanistan and back again, often with U.S. and NATO forces in hot pursuit. The situation is not nearly as clear in the Iranian case. All the considerations—judicial, strategic, and political—are different in Iran.”

He added, “There is huge opposition inside the intelligence community to the idea of waging a covert war inside Iran, and using Baluchis and Ahwazis as surrogates. The leaders of our Special Operations community all have remarkable physical courage, but they are less likely to voice their opposition to policy. Iran is not Waziristan.”

A Gallup poll taken last November, before the N.I.E. was made public, found that seventy-three per cent of those surveyed thought that the United States should use economic action and diplomacy to stop Iran’s nuclear program, while only eighteen per cent favored direct military action. Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to endorse a military strike. Weariness with the war in Iraq has undoubtedly affected the public’s tolerance for an attack on Iran. This mood could change quickly, however. The potential for escalation became clear in early January, when five Iranian patrol boats, believed to be under the command of the Revolutionary Guard, made a series of aggressive moves toward three Navy warships sailing through the Strait of Hormuz. Initial reports of the incident made public by the Pentagon press office said that the Iranians had transmitted threats, over ship-to-ship radio, to “explode” the American ships. At a White House news conference, the President, on the day he left for an eight-day trip to the Middle East, called the incident “provocative” and “dangerous,” and there was, very briefly, a sense of crisis and of outrage at Iran. “TWO MINUTES FROM WAR” was the headline in one British newspaper.

The crisis was quickly defused by Vice-Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of U.S. naval forces in the region. No warning shots were fired, the Admiral told the Pentagon press corps on January 7th, via teleconference from his headquarters, in Bahrain. “Yes, it’s more serious than we have seen, but, to put it in context, we do interact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their Navy regularly,” Cosgriff said. “I didn’t get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats.”

Admiral Cosgriff’s caution was well founded: within a week, the Pentagon acknowledged that it could not positively identify the Iranian boats as the source of the ominous radio transmission, and press reports suggested that it had instead come from a prankster long known for sending fake messages in the region. Nonetheless, Cosgriff’s demeanor angered Cheney, according to the former senior intelligence official. But a lesson was learned in the incident: The public had supported the idea of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S. didn’t do more. The former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.

In June, President Bush went on a farewell tour of Europe. He had tea with Queen Elizabeth II and dinner with Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, the President and First Lady of France. The serious business was conducted out of sight, and involved a series of meetings on a new diplomatic effort to persuade the Iranians to halt their uranium-enrichment program. (Iran argues that its enrichment program is for civilian purposes and is legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.) Secretary of State Rice had been involved with developing a new package of incentives. But the Administration’s essential negotiating position seemed unchanged: talks could not take place until Iran halted the program. The Iranians have repeatedly and categorically rejected that precondition, leaving the diplomatic situation in a stalemate; they have not yet formally responded to the new incentives.

The continuing impasse alarms many observers. Joschka Fischer, the former German Foreign Minister, recently wrote in a syndicated column that it may not “be possible to freeze the Iranian nuclear program for the duration of the negotiations to avoid a military confrontation before they are completed. Should this newest attempt fail, things will soon get serious. Deadly serious.” When I spoke to him last week, Fischer, who has extensive contacts in the diplomatic community, said that the latest European approach includes a new element: the willingness of the U.S. and the Europeans to accept something less than a complete cessation of enrichment as an intermediate step. “The proposal says that the Iranians must stop manufacturing new centrifuges and the other side will stop all further sanction activities in the U.N. Security Council,” Fischer said, although Iran would still have to freeze its enrichment activities when formal negotiations begin. “This could be acceptable to the Iranians—if they have good will.”

The big question, Fischer added, is in Washington. “I think the Americans are deeply divided on the issue of what to do about Iran,” he said. “Some officials are concerned about the fallout from a military attack and others think an attack is unavoidable. I know the Europeans, but I have no idea where the Americans will end up on this issue.”

There is another complication: American Presidential politics. Barack Obama has said that, if elected, he would begin talks with Iran with no “self-defeating” preconditions (although only after diplomatic groundwork had been laid). That position has been vigorously criticized by John McCain. The Washington Post recently quoted Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign’s national-security director, as stating that McCain supports the White House’s position, and that the program be suspended before talks begin. What Obama is proposing, Scheunemann said, “is unilateral cowboy summitry.”

Scheunemann, who is known as a neoconservative, is also the McCain campaign’s most important channel of communication with the White House. He is a friend of David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. I have heard differing accounts of Scheunemann’s influence with McCain; though some close to the McCain campaign talk about him as a possible national-security adviser, others say he is someone who isn’t taken seriously while “telling Cheney and others what they want to hear,” as a senior McCain adviser put it.

It is not known whether McCain, who is the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been formally briefed on the operations in Iran. At the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, in June, Obama repeated his plea for “tough and principled diplomacy.” But he also said, along with McCain, that he would keep the threat of military action against Iran on the table.

2) O CARA DA INFORMÁTICA come. Parece inacreditável, mas é verdade. O CARA DA INFORMÁTICA também precisa se alimentar e tem hora para isso;

3) CARA DA INFORMÁTICA pode ter família. Essa é a mais incrível de todas: Mesmo sendo um CARA DA INFORMÁTICA, a pessoa precisa descansar no final de semana para poder dar atenção à família, aos amigos e a si próprio, sem pensar ou falar em informática, impostos, formulários, concertos e demonstrações, manutenção, vírus e etc.;

4) CARA DA INFORMÁTICA, como qualquer cidadão, precisa de dinheiro. Por essa você não esperava né? É surpreendente, mas o CARA DA INFORMÁTICA também paga impostos, compra comida, precisa de combustível, roupas e sapatos, e ainda consome "LEXOTAN" para conseguir relaxar. Não peça aquilo pelo que não pode pagar ao CARA DA INFORMÁTICA;

5) Ler, estudar também é trabalho. E trabalho sério. Pode parar de rir. Não é piada. Quando um CARA DA INFORMÁTICA está concentrado num livro ou publicação especializada ele está se aprimorando como profissional, logo trabalhando;

6) De uma vez por todas, vale reforçar: O CARA DA INFORMÁTICA não é vidente, não joga tarô e nem tem bola de cristal, pois se você achou isto demita-o e contrate um PARANORMAL OU DETETIVE. Ele precisa planejar, se organizar e assim ter condições de fazer um bom trabalho, seja de que tamanho for. Prazos são essenciais e não um luxo. Se você quer um milagre, ore bastante, faça jejum, e deixe o pobre do CARA DA INFORMÁTICA em paz.

7) Em reuniões de amigos ou festas de família, o CARA DA INFORMÁTICA deixa de ser o CARA DA INFORMÁTICA e reassume seu posto de amigo ou parente, exatamente como era antes dele ingressar nesta profissão. Não peça conselhos, dicas. ele tem direito de se divertir.

8) Não existe apenas um 'levantamentozinho' , uma 'pesquisazinha' , nem um 'resuminho', um 'programinha pra controlar minha loja', um 'probleminha que a maquina não liga', um 'sisteminha' , uma 'passadinha rápida(ALIAS CONTA-SE DE ONDE SAÍMOS E ATÉ CHEGARMOS)', pois esqueça os 'inha e os inho (programinha, sisteminha, olhadinha, )' pois OS CARAS DA INFORMÁTICA não resolvem este tipo de problema. Levantamentos, pesquisas e resumos são frutos de análises cuidadosas e requerem atenção, dedicação. Esses tópicos podem parecer inconcebíveis a uma boa parte da população, mas servem para tornar a vida do CARA DA INFORMÁTICA mais  suportável.

9) Quanto ao uso do celular: celular é ferramenta de trabalho. Por favor, ligue, apenas, quando necessário. Fora do horário de expediente, mesmo que você ainda duvide, o CARA DA INFORMÁTICA pode estar fazendo algumas coisas que você nem pensou que ele fazia como dormir ou namorar, por exemplo;

10) Pedir a mesma coisa várias vezes não faz o CARA DA INFORMÁTICA trabalhar mais rápido. Solicite, depois aguarde o prazo dado pelo CARA DA INFORMÁTICA;

11) Quando o horário de trabalho do período da manhã vai até 12h, não significa que você pode ligar às 11h58min. Se você pretendia cometer essa gafe, vá e ligue após o horário do almoço (relembre o item 2). O mesmo vale para a parte da tarde: ligue no dia seguinte;

12) Quando CARA DA INFORMÁTICA estiver apresentando um projeto, por favor, não fique bombardeando com milhares de perguntas durante o atendimento. Isso tira a concentração, além de torrar a paciência. ATENÇÃO: Evite perguntas que não tenham relação com o projeto, tipo como.. vocês entendem é claro..;

13) O CARA DA INFORMÁTICA não inventa problemas, não muda versão de WINDOWS, não tem relação com vírus, NÃO É CULPADO PELO MAL USO DE EQUIPAMENTOS, INTERNET E AFINS. Não reclame! O CARA DA INFORMATICA com certeza fez o possível para você pagar menos. Se quer EMENDAR, EMENDE, mas antes demita o CARA DA INFORMÁTICA e contrate um QUEBRA GALHO;

14) Os CARAS DA INFORMÁTICA não são os criadores dos ditados 'o barato sai caro' e 'quem paga mal paga em dobro'. Mas eles concordam. ;

15) E, finalmente, o CARA DA INFORMÁTICA também é filho de deus e não filho disso que você pensou.

16) Agora, depois de aprender sobre O CARA DA INFORMATICA, repasse aos seus amigos,afinal, essas verdades precisam chegar a todos. O CARA DA INFORMÁTICA agradece.

17) Não pergunte para O CARA DA INFORMÁTICA uma sugestão de computador BOM e BARATO para você comprar. Não existe computador BOM e BARATO. Ou é uma coisa, ou é outra.

Raí Silva

-------------

Recebi este texto por um e-mail do Neson Y.

The US Archives has a fascinating web site with high-resolution images of the actual parchment Declaration of Independence and the history that led up to its writing.

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

. . .

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

(picture credit: taken at the Jefferson Memorial during Nancy's and my DC trip to visit Cal and Joni in 2001)

Sharing the 4th of July with your kids

  By Gary Drevitch

1. Our Flag

The next time you're with your child and you see an American flag, point it out. Explain that it stands for our whole country and that it's one way we tell the world who we are as a people. It also shows we're connected to each other as Americans -- we're on the same team. Because our flag is special, we treat it with respect.

At home, look at a flag together and point out that each part has a meaning. The 50 stars stand for our 50 states. The 13 stripes stand for the original 13 British colonies, whose citizens decided in 1776 that they wanted to govern themselves rather than be ruled by a king.

2. Our Pledge

If your child is in school, she may have recited the Pledge of Allegiance, but like many other kids her age, she might not understand exactly what she's saying.

Explain that the pledge is simply a promise. We're giving our word that we'll be loyal (allegiance) to our country, which the flag stands for, because it's a place where we can decide who our leaders will be (republic), where everyone sticks together (indivisible), and where our goal is for people to be free (liberty) and treated fairly by others (justice).

Ask your child to guess whether most countries have a pledge of allegiance of their own. (Most don't.) We, as Americans, decided to create one to remind ourselves of our special freedoms. Written in 1892, the pledge was first recited during a celebration to mark the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage to America.

3. Our National Anthem

If your child watches the Summer Olympics with you, he's likely to hear at least one rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Explain that it's our country's song and that we sing it to show that we are proud to be American. To signal our respect, we usually stand while singing it.

Then share the story behind the anthem: A young poet and lawyer named Francis Scott Key wrote the words during the War of 1812. After British ships bombarded a fort in Baltimore during a fierce battle, Key saw our flag still flying, proudly waving. It meant that we still had our freedoms and that we had defended our young country. Ask your child what the image of a flag waving means to him.

4. Our Independence Day

You don't have to wait until the July 4 festivities to explain what the fun is about. July 4 is our country's birthday. It marks the day in 1776 that a group of determined patriots declared our independence -- that no other country could rule us.

To do this was extremely dangerous. Back then, our ruler was the king of England, and he had one of the most powerful militaries in the world. To rebel against the king was to risk your life. Still, the king's laws were harsh and unfair, so American patriots battled for the freedom to govern themselves. In 1783, the Americans won the fight, which we call the Revolutionary War.For older kids, explain that Americans gave their reasons for rebelling in the Declaration of Independence -- one of our country's most important documents. In it, Thomas Jefferson wrote that all people are entitled to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

 More on the 4th of July !

4th of July Food Handling Tips

 Fun Fourth of July facts

4th of July Facts and Safety Tips for Your Pets

Worst Chain Breakfast Diet-Busters & Satisfying Swaps

 Hungry Girl is here with the 411 on some flab-inducing breakfasts, and recipe swaps that slash calories and fat FAST!

Attack of the 1,210-Calorie Veggie Omelette!

At IHOP, you might think ordering the spinach and mushroom omelette is a good idea -- but this egg disaster has a shocking 1,210 calories (eeeks!). Instead, try HG's Ginormous Oven-Baked Omelette-- you can have a giant piece of our protein-packed omelette for just 140 calories and 3g fat! An added bonus? You can make it the night before and then simply heat 'n' eat in the AM! 

79-Grams-of-Fat French Toast!

Even if you're DYING for French toast, avoid Denny's Fabulous French Toast Platter at all costs. This freaky breakfast plate will cost you 1,261 calories and 79g fat! Instead of feasting on this diet dud, try HG's Cinnamonlicious French Toast. It has just 170 calories and 1g fat. And if you crave the sausage links and bacon slices this platter comes with, go for Morningstar Farms' Sausage Links (2 links = 80 calories and 3g fat) and Jennie-O's Extra Lean Turkey Bacon (2 slices = 40 calories and 1g fat). Then finish it off with sugar-free pancake syrup!  

Morning Muffin Mayhem!

McDonald's regular Egg McMuffin has 300 calories and 12g fat. For a tiny little muffin? And if you slip up and order the one with sausage, you'll be gobbling up 450 calories and 27g fat. YIKES!! Try HG's Egga Muffin instead, for only 165 calories and 1.5g fat. 

600-Calorie B-Fast Sandwich Alert!

Subway may be known for its low-fat sub menu, but think twice before grabbing the sandwich chain's 6-inch Chipotle Steak and Cheese Breakfast Omelet Sandwich. That meaty monstrosity has 600 calories and 32 grams of fat! If you wanna go Southwestern, you'd be way better off with HG's Bueno Breakfast Burrito, with only 170 calories and 5g fat.

Slam Don't! (Denny's 1,040-Calorie Dud!)

So you're starving ... and you order up Denny's Lumberjack Slam with hash browns. (The thing already includes pancakes, ham, bacon, sausage, AND eggs!) How can we say this politely -- BAD IDEA!!! This massive morning mistake is loaded with 1,040 calories and 53g fat! If you crave a little bit of everything, why not whip up our Super Duper Veggie Scramble (only 150 calories and 5g fat), HG's Very Blueberry Pancakes (201 calories and 2g fat), and our Butternut Hash Browns (85 calories and 1g fat)? ALL of that would cost you only 436 calories and 8g fat -- that's less than HALF the calories and EIGHTY FIVE percent less fat than Denny's Lumberjack disaster!

Hungry For More?

Check out Hungry Girl: Recipes and Survival Strategies for Guilt-Free Eating in the Real World. The book's a New York Times Best Seller, and it's packed with 165 super-easy and delicious recipes, survival guides for eating out, and so much more!

For a daily dose of guilt-free tips, tricks, food finds, recipes and more, visit hungry-girl.com and sign up for free daily emails!

1. Single Payer Health Care will be back on the table.

2. The Wasteful, Bloated and Secretive Military Budget will be brought back to the forefront of the American People's minds.

3. Renewable Energy and American Jobs back on the front burner.

4. Persecution Protection From Corporate and Political Criminals will be spotlighted. This includes: Net Neutrality, Telcom Spying and the outrageous lies that put the American and Iraqis People in harms way, destroyed the US economy and our children's future.

McCain and Obama have taken all these issues off the table.

Hold Obama's feet to the fire.
He's up for sale, it's you or the big corporations who will get his attention.
Help Nader get ballot access and into the debates.
Spread the word and tell the pollsters you're voting for Nader/Gonzalez!

All Nader needs is 10% and it's a done deal!
Shoot for 20%!

votenader

For the love of God, please someone tell me how to fix it, fix it, fix it.

Since we've opened the MediSpa, I have become much more educated on our skin.  I'm now educated to the point of being scared of the sun.  Yes, I'd heard and read a lot about how bad tanning is and how we should wear sunscreen, but to be honest, I didn't really want to know the truth.  I'm a sun-lover from way back.  Each summer, my friends and I would see who could be the darkest, the most tan.  I continued to tan through my 20s and even into my 30s.  I love to be tan!  As someone once said, "tan fat is better than white fat".  Funny but pretty true!  Now, I use self-tanners.  The ones that I use the most are made by L'Oreal and Jergens.  They are not expensive and for my skin-type, work very well.

Since it's not too realistic to stay completely out of the sun, wear a broad spectrum sunscreen every day.  Even if you're not deliberately in the sun, you are still going to be exposed to harmful rays.  The following info is from the AAD or American Academy of Dermatology.

The sun produces both visible and invisible rays. The invisible rays, known as ultraviolet A (UVA) and ultraviolet B (UVB), cause most of the problems, including suntan, sunburn, and sun damage. There is no "safe" ultraviolet (UV) light, and there is no such thing as a safe tan.

Sun protection helps prevent skin damage, wrinkles, and reduces the risk of developing skin cancer. Newer broad-spectrum sunscreens contain products to block both UVA and UVB rays. Sunscreen should be reapplied at least every two hours to work. The American Academy of Dermatology recommends that you seek shade when possible. Avoid sunbathing, wear a wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses and protective clothing.

A typical white tee shirt has an SPF of 3. Colorless dyes are available as laundry products which increase the SPF of fabrics to an SPF of 30. If you must be in the sun, use a broad-spectrum sunscreen with a sun protection factor (SPF) of at least 15, even on cloudy days. Sunscreens, however, are not perfect. Because some ultraviolet light may still get through sunscreens, they should not be used as a way of prolonging sun exposure.

Sunscreens that block UVB rays are composed of some or all of the following chemicals: padimate O, homosalate, octyl methoxycinnamate, benzophenone, octyl salicylate, phenylbenzimidazole sulfonic acid, and octocrylene. Broad-spectrum sunscreens add oxybenzone or avobenzone (Parsol 1789) to block UVA rays. Mexoryl is a chemical that blocks UVA; its broad-spectrum characteristics allow sunscreens to be made with very high SPF factors. Physical sunscreens/blocks or chemical-free sunscreens contain titanium dioxide and/or zinc oxide, which reflect UVA and UVB and are especially useful for people allergic to chemical sunscreens.

When I think of the many times that the kids have been outside and unprotected, I could just kick myself.  The sun that they are exposed to today will be the sun damage and possible cancer they will have to endure when they are my age (or younger).

I hope this info is useful and that I could enlighten you somewhat on my first "FYI Wednesday".

Happy 4th to everyone!  God Bless You and This Great Country We Live In!!!

That would be a full 10 weeks without a single drag (or desire for one) from a cigarette. 

I thought I had better put an update here, since I actually do often hear the question, "How's the no smoking thing going?"

I have found out that many people who know me find it amazing that I quit.  No, not because I am amazing, but because I was a long-time, regular (not exactly heavy, since I smoked less than a pack-a-day) smoker.  I mean, my first cigarettes were at the age of 11 (ya, eleven, I didn't miss any numbers, George) and before I left public school I was a regular smoker.  That was back when kids could purchase cigarettes because, one;  parents were expected to take care of their children and two; kids usually bought them for their parents or whomever else, so that they could use  the change to buy candy and ammunition and stuff like that.

In high school, say about the time I was sixteen, I would smoke three or four Du Maurier Regular Fliptops (60 to 80 cigarettes) a day.  The thing is, I chain smoked back then - and even though I didn't skip classess, I somehow found the time to puff away three or four packs!

When I got to London, to go to Fanshawe, I was a little over a pack each day.  Benson & Hedges Gold.  After a few years, when I met My Lovely Wife, I had 'downgraded' to Benson & Hedges Deluxe Ultra Light (aka, B&H Red Stripe) and smoked those for about 18 years.

The funny thing is, I was worried that being around smokers would make me want to smoke, or give me a "contact rush" that might induce me to want to smoke.  In fact, though, I get nauseated when I smell it.  LOL, sadly, from the time I was little - perhaps even birth (shut up, George) - I have been quite allergic to cigarette smoke.  Always made me sick as a kid, and plugged my sinuses, made me dizzy.  SMOKING stopped that (over stimulated, maybe?) but for almost 30 years I have had headaches:  Migraines, Sinusitis, Stress headaches that were almost literally crippling.  Except for the flu during the last 10 days, I have not had a headache at all.  Stopping smoking has brought that nausea, plugged sinuses etc. back.

*note:  I completely lost my train of thought, so rather than ramble on or rant, I am gonna just stop there, for now.  LOL

• Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Northwest Omaha.  They have damage to their building from the last storm that swept through Omaha.
• Members of our congregation who are recovering from operations.
• Those traveling during the 4th of July weekend.

Through 16 years of practice, Bruce says he has never – not once – seen a request for Ritalin coming from an adult, intact, two-parent home in which the father is employed and the children are theirs by birth or adoption. Not once.

"We need religion as a guide.

We need it because we are imperfect, and

our government needs the church,

because only those humble enough to admit

they’re sinners can bring to democracy t

he tolerance it requires in order to survive."

– President Ronald Reagan

Abdur Ra'oof Khaleel Museum

Tele#: 58 487 5677

Al Mathaf St. - Hayy Al Andalus 

Four homes with more than 10,000 artifacts. 

Features:

• The House of Saudi 'Arabian Legacy (replicas of traditional Saudi houses).
• Islamic Legacy House
• General Legacy Exhibition and more...

Entrance fee: 20 SAR  

Saturday to Thursday

Day Hours: 9AM - 12 Noon 

Night Hours: 5PM - 9PM 

I've been a fan of Samsung cellphones for many years now.  Their new marketing scheme is great.

Not that charging stations are a total rarity at airports, but Samsung is giving a nod to the little guy by adding a new fleet of 'em at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Unlike some alternatives, Sammy's stations deliver juice to cellphones, laptops and all manners of other gadgets gratis, which -- let's be honest -- is exactly how it should be. 22 new stations will be installed at MSP and ready for use prior to July 4th, so feel free to drain your lappie right on down prior to landing / connecting in the great state of Minnesota.

Over the past 2 1/2 years Lauren has recieved many, many(too many?) medals as a top three and one time (in the AAU National Junior Olympics )a Copper medal for the Long Jump. I have to say by far her favorite most meaningful to date medals were her Gold,Silver and Copper (4th place)medals she received at the AAU JO's in 2007. She was very proud wearing them on the airplane home from Tennessee's. Medals are an important part of tradition in winning as well as a goal to reach for.But is it really the medal or the accompanying activity or time, that we are most proud.

I say it depends...At our "A" meets the kids recieve top three medals routinely ,but I have observed  athletes often times have lost the value of the medal and it "specialness"

Most times the athlete doesn't even recieve them until a week or more after the meet and by then they just don't care all that much. I think  because we give them out to freely....(Sometimes just showing up gets an athlete a medal almost.) I would love to see the monies spent on medals through out the season saved and given in the form of a team  prize or something like that. Saving the actual medal distribution for the big meets  placing more value on the accomplishment. Here in California ,that would be L.A. Jets Invitational and Phoenix Invitationals for starters. This month many youth athletes will be loking to take home their own medals and my little athlete is no different.She is very excited about the Junior Olympics (both of them) and we are in preparation to make that happen in a big way.Time will tell.  Check out what our American athletes have to look forward to.

USATF Youth Nationals Medals 

 Yesterdays trials were great, read about it here at Teamstrannon Blogs On! Get a close up of just who might take home some GOLD this year.

Olympic Medals and Anthems

There's really nothing that can, in principle, stand above the medal ceremony of the Olympics. There's been scandal and political bickering to mar the Games in the past, and there almost certainly will be again in the future, but in its purest form, the Games are about coming together in celebration of unity and human potential. They are the original games from which all others spawned and we would do well to remember that they are just that: Games. Win or lose, what is important is the honor and effort given in the act of playing. The Games ought to show that beneath our physical and ideological differences, we are capable of great beauty, strength, and respect. And at the end of it all, those who shine most brightly carry home the pride of their nation with the playing of their anthem for the rest of the world to hear. May this always be the best in sports.

For sure this track season our US Olympic Team is looking to not only pick up  some gold medals, but watch the American flag rise and hear the the National Anthem play. The first step on this most pretigious journey began this weekend for American track and field athletes. Check your local listings for times and channels.

Beijing Olympic Medals 

    After a global competition resulting in 265 proposals from all over the world, the Beijing Olympic Committee unveiled the XXIX Olympiad medals on the occasion of the 500-day countdown to the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games

Each medal sports the Beijing Olympics logo inlaid with Chinese jade. It's the first time jade of this caliber will be used for an Olympic medal making them the most expensive Olympic medals in history.

The medals are designed with inspiration from "bi", China's ancient jade piece inscribed with dragon pattern. The medals, made of gold and jade, symbolize nobility and virtue and are embodiment of traditional Chinese values of ethics and honor.

The IOC has strict stipulation on the Olympic medals' material, identification, weight, size and drawing. The medals for the champion and the runner-up are made of pure silver, and the champion's medal must be plated with gold weighing not less than six grams each.

Beijing Medals Obverse Side 

On their obverse side, the medals adopt the standard design prescribed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) -- a drawing that represents the winged goddess of victory Nike and Panathinaikos Arena.

Medal Facts

On the reverse side (the backs) China has placed jade in the forefront, extolling its historic stone in three colors. All three jade pieces are "Pi" disc carvings, China's most sacred symbol. Left is pale green jade, center is pure white nephrite, and right is a darker green nephrite.

About the Medals 

Jade, a precious stone known in China as the "royal gem," will be featured prominently, marking the first time the mineral is used in Olympic medals.

All three versions will have the same design, but a white jade will go into the gold medals, a darker shade into the silver medals, and a green jade into the bronze medals. The circle band of jade, visible on the back side, will surround a metal centerpiece engraved with the Beijing Games emblem over the Beijing 2008 logo and Olympic rings.

The front of the medals are plated completely gold, silver or bronze and contain the traditional design engraved on all Olympic medals -- Nike, the winged goddess of victory, and Panathinaikos Arena.

The design was inspired from "bi," which is a flat jade disc containing a circular hole in the center and features an engraved dragon design. It came from a group at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, which won a contest that received 265 submissions from 25 countries.

This was the first time the Olympic medals design was opened to a public competition.

The average medal weighs about five ounces, but these will be slightly heavier and larger. They are 70mm in diameter and 6mm thick.

On the top edge of the medals are interlocking dragons to form the loop hole for the medal ribbon, which will be a red strap with cloud designs, the Olympic rings, and the Beijing 2008 logo.

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Until Next Time