From Bay Area NBC:

A measure to legalize marijuana in California has enough signatures to qualify for the November 2010 ballot, advocates say.

The Tax and Regulate Initiative has far more than the nearly 434,000 signatures needed to make the statewide ballot, said Richard Lee, well-known Oakland medical marijuana entrepreneur and the initiative's main backer. Campaign organizers say they will submit more than 650,000 signatures of registered voters next month.

"People were eager to sign," Lee told the Chronicle. "We heard they were ripping the petitions out of people's hands to do it.

"We'll keep our organizers on the street to keep the momentum going strong, but today we're declaring an overwhelming victory."

The proposal would legalize possession of up to one ounce of marijuana for adults 21 and older. Residents could cultivate marijuana gardens up to 25 square feet. City and county governments would determine whether to permit and tax marijuana sales within their boundaries.

County election officials across the state now must validate and count the signatures before the California Secretary of State puts the measure on the ballot .

Lee's group has collected more than 680,000 signatures, about 57% more than the number needed. That should be plenty -- as a rule of thumb, about 30% of signatures on petitions can be expected to be invalidated, according to Steve Smith, a political consultant who has run many California initiative campaigns.

"I'd be very surprised if they don't qualify," Smith told the Los Angeles Times.

A Field Poll conducted in April found that 56 percent of California residents supported legalizing and taxing marijuana to help bridge the state budget deficit. Still, pro-legalization advocates are divided over whether the ballot measure is being pushed too soon.

Marijuana is illegal under federal law. But some legal scholars have argued the U.S. government could do little to make California enforce the federal ban if the drug became legal under state law.

Oakland is ground zero for marijuana legalization in the U.S. It became the first city in the country to pass a cannabis tax during a special election in July. The city is expected generate nearly $300,000 a year from taxes on medical cannabis clubs. Other California cities considering taxing medical marijuana are San Jose, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Sacramento and Los Angeles...

From The Christian Science Monitor: 

Why southern Yemen is pushing for secession

With bleak housing blocks and rusty wrecks for taxis, south Yemen residents pushing for secession say they've been sidelined by the government.

By Michael Horton, 12/15/2009

Listen here.

I saw three ships come sailing in

They said there'd be snow at Christmas -

From the BBC:

A team of archaeologists and scientists says it has, for the first time, found pieces of a burial shroud from the time of Jesus in a tomb in Jerusalem.

The researchers, from Hebrew University and institutions in Canada and the US, said the shroud was very different from the controversial Turin Shroud.

Some people believe the Turin Shroud to have been Christ's burial cloth, but others believe it is a fake.

The newly found cloth has a simpler weave than Turin's, the scientists say.

The body of a man wrapped in fragments of the shroud was found in a tomb dating from the time of Jesus near the Old City of Jerusalem.

The tomb is part of a cemetery called the Field of Blood, where Judas Iscariot is said to have killed himself.

The researchers believe the man was a Jewish high priest or member of the aristocracy who died of leprosy, the earliest proven case.

They say he was wrapped in a cloth made of a simple two-way weave, very different to the complex weave of the Turin Shroud.

The researchers believe that the fragments are typical of the burial cloths used at the time of Jesus.

As a result, they conclude that the Turin Shroud did not originate from 1st Century Jerusalem...

“Something good is going to happen to you!” “God is a good God” and “Expect a miracle.” - Oral Roberts has died.

From Earth Times
The Hague - The Hague has filed charges in 49 cases of corporal punishment of children during Koran lessons, the newspaper De Volkskrant reported Wednesday. Signs of bodily abuse, including bruises and welts, were discovered by the state health service in an unusually large number of 10-year-olds taking the Koran lessons.
Nearly half of the cases involved students at the el-Islam mosque in The Hague. The imam of the mosque denied the accusations and demanded proof to back them up.
The de Volkskrant newspaper reported further that unnamed "sources in the Moroccan community" had confirmed that children are often "beaten hard" during Koran instruction. It was hard to prove the abuse since parents mostly wouldn't dare to speak out against it, the sources said.
The Muslim Social Democratic mayor of the heavily-Muslim Amsterdam district of Slotervaart last summer raised concern over the abuse of children during Koran lessons in the Netherlands. There were signs from all over the country that children "are mistreated in Koran schools and taught to loathe Western society," he said.

If you haven't kept up with the latest Obama Czar scandel breaking at Big Government, this article is a good place to start. I have refrained from posting the pictures of the kits and books this man approved for distribution to our nation's children.

...Yesterday we reported that Barack Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings was promoting a children’s book that detailed first-graders having sex. But, it didn’t stop there. As founder and executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) Jennings approved of and promoted several filthy sex books for children. Scott Baker from Breitbart-TV.com and Co-Host of ‘The B-Cast‘ submitted a shocking report to Gateway Pundit blog back on December 4, 2009. The report detailed the reading list promoted to 7-12 grade students by Kevin Jennings’ GLSEN organization. This material has not been reported in detail at Big Government website.

Remember as you read this that Kevin Jennings is today the nation’s Safe Schools Czar.

Here is what Scott Baker had to say about this vile material being pushed on children.

Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings was the founder, and for many years, Executive Director of an organization called the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). GLSEN started essentially as Jennings’ personal project and grew to become the culmination of his life’s work. And he was chosen by President Obama to be the nation’s Safe Schools Czar primarily because he had founded and led GLSEN (scroll for bio).

GLSEN’s stated mission is to empower gay youth in the schools and to stop harassment by other students. It encourages the formation of Gay Student Alliances and condemns the use of hateful words. GLSEN also strives to influence the educational curriculum to include materials which the group believes will increase tolerance of gay students and decrease bullying. To that end, GLSEN maintains a recommended reading list of books that it claims “furthers our mission to ensure safe schools for all students.” In other words, these are the books that GLSEN’s directors think all kids should be reading: gay kids should read them to raise their self-esteem, and straight kids should read them in order to become more aware and tolerant and stop bullying gay kids. Through GLSEN’s online ordering system, called “GLSEN BookLink,” featured prominently on their Web site, teachers can buy the books to use as required classroom assignments, or students can buy them to read on their own.

According to GLSEN’s own press releases from the period during which its recommended reading list was developed, the organization’s three areas of focus were creating “educational resources, public policy agenda, [and] student organizing programs”; in other words, the reading list (chief among its “educational resources”) was of prime importance in GLSEN’s efforts to influence the American educational system.

The list is divided into three main categories: books recommended for grades K-6; books recommended for grades 7-12; and books for teachers. (The books on the list span all genres: fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, even poetry.)

Out of curiosity to see exactly what kind of books Kevin Jennings and his organization think American students should be reading in school, our team chose a handful at random from the over 100 titles on GLSEN’s grades 7-12 list, and began reading through.

What we discovered shocked us. We were flabbergasted. Rendered speechless.

We were unprepared for what we encountered. Book after book after book contained stories and anecdotes that weren’t merely X-rated and pornographic, but which featured explicit descriptions of sex acts between pre-schoolers; stories that seemed to promote and recommend child-adult sexual relationships; stories of public masturbation, anal sex in restrooms, affairs between students and teachers, five-year-olds playing sex games, semen flying through the air. One memoir even praised becoming a prostitute as a way to increase one’s self-esteem. Above all, the books seemed to have less to do with promoting tolerance than with an unabashed attempt to indoctrinate students into a hyper-sexualized worldview.

We knew that unless we carefully documented what we were reading, the public would have a hard time accepting it. Mere descriptions on our part could not convey the emotional gut reaction one gets when seeing what Kevin Jennings wants kids to read as school assignments. So we began scanning pages from each of the books, and then made exact transcriptions of the relevant passages on each page.

For today’s report we give you another of of GLSEN’s recommended books for 7-12 graders. This one had pictures– see here.

Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform. In one sense, he had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy. Like Pol Pot, he wanted to start from Year Zero: before me, nothing; after me, everything. By their very presence, the raw-concrete-clad rectangular towers that obsessed him canceled out centuries of architecture. Hardly any town or city in Britain (to take just one nation) has not had its composition wrecked by architects and planners inspired by his ideas.

Writings about Le Corbusier often begin with an encomium to his importance, something like: “He was the most important architect of the twentieth century.” Friend and foe would agree with this judgment, but importance is, of course, morally and aesthetically ambiguous. After all, Lenin was one of the most important politicians of the twentieth century, but it was his influence on history, not his merits, that made him so: likewise Le Corbusier.

Yet just as Lenin was revered long after his monstrosity should have been obvious to all, so Le Corbusier continues to be revered. Indeed, there is something of a revival in the adulation. Nicholas Fox Weber has just published an exhaustive and generally laudatory biography, and Phaidon has put out a huge, expensive book lovingly devoted to Le Corbusier’s work. Further, a hagiographic exhibition devoted to Le Corbusier recently ran in London and Rotterdam. In London, the exhibition fittingly took place in a hideous complex of buildings, built in the 1960s, called the Barbican, whose concrete brutalism seems designed to overawe, humiliate, and confuse any human being unfortunate enough to try to find his way in it. The Barbican was not designed by Le Corbusier, but it was surely inspired by his particular style of soulless architecture.

Continue reading here.

Read the report in Le Figaro.

Listen here.

Strange Physical Theory Proved After Nearly 40 Years

Efimov had predicted a quantum-mechanical version of Borromean rings, a symbol that first showed up in Afghan Buddhist art from around the second century. The symbol depicts three rings linked together; if any ring were removed, they would all come apart.

Efimov theorized an analog to the rings using particles: Three particles (such as atoms or protons or even quarks) could be bound together in a stable state, even though any two of them could not bind without the third. The physicist first proposed the idea, based on a mathematical proof, in 1970. Since then, no one has been able to demonstrate the phenomenon in the lab - until recently.

A team of physicists led by Randy Hulet of Rice University in Houston finally achieved the trio of particles, and published their findings in the online journal Science Express.

"It was very exciting, because after 40 years of this prediction being out there, it was finally verified," Hulet told LiveScience.

Hulet presented his work at a meeting in Rome in October that Efimov also attended.

"He gave me a high five after my talk," Hulet recounted. "He was so enthusiastic and so excited to see this prediction become true."

Efimov had calculated that the triplet of bound particles was possible, and that it was repeating: New bound states could be achieved at higher and higher energy levels in an infinite progression. All of the bound states would occur at energy levels that were multiples of 515.

To prove that they had really created the trios, called Efimov trimers, the researchers produced one set of three lithium atoms bound together, and then reproduced it with a binding energy 515 times the first one. (Essentially, binding energy indicates how tightly the particles hold onto one another and how much energy it would take to pull them apart.)

The researchers used a setup called a Feshbach resonance that allowed them to tweak the energy levels of their atoms. They found that when they hit multiples of 515, the particles would bind, but at other energies they wouldn't, proving that the trios really were Efimov trimers.

"It's an amazing effect, really," Hulet said. "A lot of people didn't believe [Efimov] at first. It was a very strange prediction."

The theory is unique because it's a solution to a special case of what's called the "three-body" problem. Scientists have solved the "two-body" problem - that is, they have calculated exactly how two objects should move based on their starting positions, masses and velocities. Scientists can also calculate this scenario for many masses, but a pure solution to the general three-body problem has been elusive.

"Physicists can handle two-body problems quite well, and many-body problems fairly well, but when there are just a few objects, like the three bodies in these Efimov trimers, there are just too many variables," Hulet said.

The Efimov calculation isn't the solution to the general case, but rather a solution to a specific case of three bodies. Thus, discovering a real-life example of three particles fulfilling his prediction is an important step to learning more about few-body physics.

Iraqi Air Force Marks Major Milestones

Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq Public Affairs  

12.16.2009

Watch a Muslim cleric in Toronto here.

Watch and listen, here.

And after you are done watching Azzam al-Tamimi express his horror at the "undemocratic" democracy of Switzerland, with its "undemocratic" referendum, and invoke both his mock-horror of Hitler and his real hatred of "Zionism" (i.e., Jews), that he conspiratorially believes must surely be behind the Swiss vote, and after you are done watching him explain that Muslims have a right to do as they wish in the countries of Europe to which, he says, they fled as "refugees" (but "refugees" from what? from the misrule of Islam, but instead of shunning Islam, they brought Islam with them, and hope to implant it firmly in European soil), and that what really explains the Swiss vote is the terror, all over Europe, that people will convert en masse if they are allowed to discover the truth about Islam.

That hasn't been my experience, as I have been learning more and more about Islam. Has it been yours? 

And for those who might want to refresh their memory about "Dr." Azzam al-Tamimi,  another video of him at a London hate rally, one that Adolf Hitler would have thoroughly enjoyed; can be seen here