Bilingualism delays onset of dementia: "Researchers said the extra effort involved in using more than one language appeared to boost blood supply to the brain and ensure nerve connections remained healthy—two factors thought to help fight off dementia."
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that a willingness to use multiple languages also enhances one's grasp of each one.
Shut up.
Love,
Shakespeare's Sister
P.S. One person pointing out that another person who has no children is unlikely to be personally affected by a foreign policy the sustainability of which would inevitably require a draft is not unfeminist. Using the fact that both of those people are women to score political points is.
The Pentagon has found another use for National Security Letters, which at this point should rightly be regarded as the intelligence-gathering equivalent of the presidential signing statement—a stroke of the pen to magically turn dubiously ethical and formerly prohibited actions into perfectly legal maneuvers, with no legislation, no oversight, and no knowledge of the American people required.
The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.Call me crazy, but this seems to be part of a pattern, where words and phrases like "national security letters," "database," and "secret" keep popping up, and it's all questionably legal or outright illegal but "an accident."
…Pentagon officials said they used [national security letters to gain access to financial records] to follow up on a variety of intelligence tips or leads. While they would not provide details about specific cases, military intelligence officials with knowledge of them said the military had issued the letters to collect financial records regarding a government contractor with unexplained wealth, for example, and a chaplain at Guantánamo Bay erroneously suspected of aiding prisoners at the facility.
…[E]ven when the initial suspicions are unproven, the documents have intelligence value, military officials say. In the next year, they plan to incorporate the records into a database at the Counterintelligence Field Activity office at the Pentagon to track possible threats against the military, Pentagon officials said. Like others interviewed, they would speak only on the condition of anonymity.
Military intelligence officers have sent letters in up to 500 investigations over the last five years, two officials estimated. The number of letters is likely to be well into the thousands, the officials said, because a single case often generates letters to multiple financial institutions.
The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.In other words, not only is there no oversight at all; there's also no legal recourse against them. They were specifically designed to be a tool of a police state, so we should not be remotely surprised that they are now being used by the military to do domestic law enforcement—but we should certainly be outraged and alarmed.
Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.
..."The beef with the NSLs is that they don't have even a pretense of judicial or impartial scrutiny," said former representative Robert L. Barr Jr. (Ga.), who finds himself allied with the American Civil Liberties Union after a career as prosecutor, CIA analyst and conservative GOP stalwart. "There's no checks and balances whatever on them. It is simply some bureaucrat's decision that they want information, and they can basically just go and get it."
"The House approved legislation Friday requiring the government to negotiate with drug companies over the price of medicines for Medicare participants. …The vote was 255-170, mostly along party lines. The idea behind the bill is using the sheer size of the Medicare program to generate steeper discounts than private insurance plans can muster. …'If this bill is presented to the president, he will veto it,' [White House press secretary Tony Snow] said Friday."
Worst. President. Ever.
Though Nancy Pelosi's womb is very busy, August reminds us it's not, as Ben Shapiro would have us believe, remotely the most used womb in "the history of politics."
Mary - Nazareth, 1 A.D. Mary quite likely altered political actions for the remainder of human history when she gave birth to her son Jesus, considered by a vast majority of the world's population to be the son of God and/or God itself. As if the ramifications of Mary's womb's action were not enough with that act, it is believe by those adhering to the religious authority of Jesus that Mary was a virgin at the time of his birth. Should this be true- and many believe so- then Mary's womb truly is one of immense physical and political power.I urgently recommend reading the rest of August's list of Prominent uses of wombs in the history of politics. Highly edifying.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes sees the light. You may remember that in December he was calling for more troops to be sent to Iraq, but he's had a change of heart and mind. I wish we could say the same for our president, but he still hasn't learned it's better to admit you were wrong than pretend you're always right, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
The passphrase is: Adam Carolla is a shitstreak on the underpants of humanity.
Friday Blogrollin' will return next week, and I'll see if I can get the lazy twosome to pose for some pictures for Friday Cat Blogging here in a bit...
Recommended: Amie Newman's second part of Life Support for Feminist Health Care. Discussion re: Part One can be found here.
You know how I hate Adam Carolla? Well, now I fucking hate him—the difference being: had I seen him on the street before, I would have ignored him. Now I'd kick him square in the goulies. Twice.
From a recap of his daily radio show via Transadvocate Blog:
7:53 TRANNY OR FATTY?Having not heard the radio show in question, I can only imagine it went something like this:
Today’s hypothetical question is a simple one, and it’s one that the show has actually covered before. Would heterosexual men rather sleep with a post-op transsexual, or a fat woman? Sadly, Adam has to note, the last time they talked about this, it skewed largely in favor of the transsexuals.
The Pentagon has eliminated active-duty service limits for reservists, but this has nothing to do with the President's plan to pull more troops out of his ass.
Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters the change in reserve policy would have been made anyway because active-duty troops already were getting too little time between their combat tours.Sure.
The US Embassy in Athens was hit by a rocket early this morning, causing no injuries and minor damage.
The small anti-tank missile narrowly missed the large blue-and-white U.S. seal on the embassy's facade and pierced the building above the front entrance shortly before 6 a.m. It damaged a bathroom on the third floor near the ambassador's office and shattered windows in nearby buildings.Greek officials are suggesting it's the work of a domestic terrorist group comprised of "far-left Greek militants." Greece has a history with such groups, but none have been active there in a decade. Assuming this was a leftist Greek group, I don't think it's hard to understand why they would, of all places, attack the US Embassy—and separatism ain't it.
…The 2.36-inch rocket, which police said was a weapon probably fired from a Russian-made launcher, struck a large marble beam on the third floor of the embassy, just above and to the left of the seal. It shattered a window and landed near some toilets.
The Pentagon has received a report on the attack but no request for any action, a military official said in Washington. There is no reason to believe that it was al-Qaida-related, but rather involves a separatist group, said the official, who is not authorized to speak on the subject and requested anonymity.
Our new Secretary of Defense did not tell the House Armed Services Committee in Congressional testimony yesterday "I'm no expert on Iraq" and "I'm no expert on military matters."
Yes. Yes he did.
One of my co-workers is originally from Mexico. Yesterday, much to our extreme delight, she told a couple of us in the office that her brother (who still lives in Mexico) is a Lucha Libre.
Words cannot begin to describe how amazingly cool that is.
So, Shakers... what's the coolest thing you've heard all week?
"No woman in the history of politics has used her womb like Nancy Pelosi." — Harvard Law School student and conservative misogynist douchebag Ben Shapiro, who obviously doesn't understand that use of the womb is an important part of generating the radical gay agenda that is shot out of feminazi cooters, so of course she has to use her womb a lot. Duh.
I'm sort of breaking the Feminazi Cooter League's code of secrecy to do this, but let me just illustrate how the process works, to clear up any confusion:
Bleh. Not that I really give a crap who they put in charge of their bullshit operation. Pam sums it up nicely: "Ford is right up the DLC alley, a real wet dream for CEO Al From. Ford, in his close loss to Bob Corker, had no problem kneeling before the right wing, carrying business cards with the Ten Commandments on back, and bleating his head off about the evils of the NJ marriage equality ruling."
Wev.
