Is Current Events dead?

[RocDoc]

the beginning of something REALLY bad?

Reports: 2 Koreas exchange artillery fire near their disputed western sea border

<sub>HYUNG-JIN KIM

Associated Press Writer

8:05 p.m. CST, January 26, 2010

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North and South Korea exchanged artillery fire along their disputed western sea border on Wednesday, two days after the North designated no-sail zones in the area, the military and news reports said.

North Korea fired several rounds of land-based artillery off its coast, an officer at the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Seoul said. The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of department policy, said no causalities or damage were immediately reported.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency said the South immediately returned fire from a marine base on an island near the sea border. Yonhap, citing an unidentified presidential official, said both Koreas fired into the air.

South Korea's YTN television network carried a similar report on the exchange of fire.

The officer at the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he could not immediately confirm that South Korea returned fire.

The western sea border is a constant source of tension between the two Koreas. Their navies fought a brief gunbattle in November that left one North Korean sailor dead and three others wounded.

In a possible indication it may be preparing to conduct missile tests in the area, North Korea designated two no-sail zones along the sea border on Monday through March 29, including some South Korean-held waters, according to the Defense Ministry. Yonhap said the North's artillery fire landed in North Korean waters.

The disputed sea border was drawn by the U.N. Command at the end of the Korean War and North Korea has repeatedly insisted it should be moved further south. The dispute also led to bloody naval skirmishes in 1999 and 2002.

The two Koreas are still technically at war because the 1950-53 war ended with an armistice, not a formal peace treaty.

Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.</sub>

[RocDoc]

simply 'dozens'?
41 people so far...3 PLUS dozen. interesting how the CNN headline seems to minimize this..

Female suicide bomber kills dozens in Baghdad

February 1, 2010 8:12 a.m. EST

<sub>Baghdad, Iraq (CNN) -- At least 41 people were killed and 106 others wounded Monday in a suicide bombing that targeted Shiite pilgrims in northeastern Baghdad, Iraq's Interior Ministry said.

The female bomber detonated her explosive vest in the middle of a procession of pilgrims in Boob al-Sham, in a predominantly Shiite area of the Iraqi capital, according to an Interior Ministry official.

The detonation took place in a tent set up to search females, according to the Baghdad Operations Command. Three volunteer female searchers were among those killed.

The attack took place amid tight security as thousands of Shiite worshipers are making their way to the holy city of Karbala, south of Baghdad, to mark the Arbaeen -- the end of the 40-day mourning period at the close of Ashura.

Ashura commemorates the martyrdom of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed who was killed in battle in Karbala in 680 A.D. That event helped create the schism between Sunnis and Shiites, the two main Muslim religious movements.

There have been a number of roadside bomb and grenade attacks on pilgrims over the past few days.

Iraqi officials have warned of attacks during the pilgrimage ahead of national elections on March 7.

CNN's Jomana Karadsheh contributed to this report</sub>


a dedicated tent to search their women...another example of this false piety that is represented by muslim womens' 'untouchability' and those friggin' burqua, niquab/najeeb/wEVERtf those coverings are called...taking that false piety and turning it to their tactical advantage.
alright, alright given it does not BEGIN as 'false', but holy shit, you see your own people dying when muslim-style 'exalted' (aka 'feared')womanhood is played for an opportunity to kill...WHY continue on this 'we must wear such things, for it is the will of all*h'. please.
and BULLshit!
understand that the estimated 15% of the HUGE numbers of muslim adherents ARE fundamentalist extremists insisting that the 15th century 'glory days' return. finding ways to defuse their assbackwardness and the imminent danger they represent should be paramount for the modern practicers of peaceful islam, shouldn't it?
or those portraying themselves as 'modern'.
THOSE people need to lobby for a new modern islam like the roman catholic church did in the '60s with John the XXIII...it will never get better otherwise.
this continued butting of heads with their host nations (primarily in europe), those nations within which they are guests, wtf does it prove?
i mean, come on, they can't even have an ID card??
finding a middle ground, just being practical, following somewhat modern convention, HAS to become more important to THEM.

the french are getting horrible shit for the steps they've taken, for their banning of head-coverings, even the simpler ones, in schools, wasn't it?

but their proposed banning of the 'postbox' (and its variants), oh yes, go for it.
one less means of thinking they have this sort of avenue to destruction of the heathens.

[RocDoc]

this first guy seems to have an excellent handle on the motivation here:

<sub>Travelling

From what I can tell, such bombings result from three factors: a) Sunnis feelingly threatened as a minority in an unstable majority Shi'a state, b) a theologically extreme form of Sunnism, sometimes called Wahhabism, that is deeply anti-Shi'a, and c) combine those two factors with a radical jihadi ideology that, like Marxism-Leninism, believes that the ends justify the means, that one can undertake various forms of violence to achieve one's ends.

Although the second two factors undoubtably play a role, I believe the first factor is most important in these cases in Iraq. A more stable state wherein Sunnis feel secure will probably assuage those who may otherwise fall into a radicalism that leads to such sad and ridiculous acts.
12 minutes ago

Guest

Islam is a religion of peace, its a beautiful religion. However, its the extremists of this world that do these evil things that make every Muslim look bad.
25 minutes ago

Guest

When the "Good Muslims" stand up and condemn the acts of a "few Extremists" the rest of us might start to have hope that what you say is true. The numbers are a little scary though. 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide, a conservative estimate of 15% of them fanatical extremists = 195 million extremists!!! I'm not feeling the love and we're never going to feel the love until these "Good Muslims" stand up and demand change from within. Otherwise, this 1,400 year war will rage on and frankly, the West has been treating your side with kid gloves. When the gloves come off I bet we'll see an attitude change.
4 minutes ago


Guest

That is propaganda. In Indonesia, "mainstream" Muslims are telling the Catholic Church that Islam owns the word "Allah," and others better not use it or they will chop off their heads. These people are nuts. ALL OF THEM...
5 minutes ago


Guest

The only way to stop them from staining your name and from staining the whole islamic worlds name, is to go against them in the media. To say LOUD AND CLEAR that those animals are NOT your representatives.
I'm Israeli and I know that there are only few of them. I have close friends who are muslims and I had ever more about ten years ago. Unfortunatelly after every such incident they can't look me in the eyes. This situation is contegious and unconvenient.
Why should it be like this?
5 minutes ago</sub>

....after every such incident they can't look me in the eyes.

it's either because they're converting by degree to the cause, to this bulshit 'jihad' or is it because they're embarassed at the animalistic actions taken by their fellow muslims?

and this isn't a 'choose 'a' or 'b''-question, i feel.

the link:
www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/02/01/iraq.blast/index.html?hpt=T2

[RocDoc]

i got this in a forwarded e-mail this morning, from a good friend of mine in milwaukee...

<sub>On a recent Glenn Beck Show, he had a graph that illustrated the percentage of each past president's cabinet who had worked in the private business sector prior to their appointment to the cabinet.
You know what the private business sector is... a real life business, not a government job.
Here are the percentages discussed by Mr. Beck.

T.. Roosevelt ......... 38%

Taft........................40%

Wilson ................. 52%

Harding.................49%

Coolidge............... 48%

Hoover................... 42%

F. Roosevelt.......... 50%

Truman..................50%

Eisenhower............ 57%

Kennedy............... 30%

Johnson.................47%

Nixon..................... 53%

Ford...................... 42%

Carter.................... 32%

Reagan..................56%

GH Bush................ 51%

Clinton ................. 39%

GW Bush.............. 55%

And the winner of the Chicken Dinner is..............

Obama................. 8% !!!

Yep! That's right! Only Eight Percent!!!..the least by far of the last 19 presidents!! And these people are trying to tell our big corporations how to run their business?
They know what's best for GM...Chrysler.... Wall Street... and you and me?

How can the president of a major nation and society...the one with the most successful economic system in world history...stand and talk about business when he's never worked for one?..

or about jobs when he has never really had one??!

And neither has 92% of his senior staff and closest advisers!

They've spent most of their time in academia, government and/or non-profit jobs....or as "community organizers".....when they should have been in an employment line.</sub>


hmmm, i don't know about academia NOT being a 'job' however...

[RocDoc]

a very interesting way to look at this:

Rethinking 'Roids
Why do we object so vehemently to performance-enhancing drugs anyway?

By Michael Miner

<sub>In last Sunday's Sun-Times, Rick Telander recited Mark McGwire's drug regimen, as reported by the New York Daily News: "one-half cc of testosterone cypionate every three days; one cc testosterone enanthate per week; and the veterinary steroids Equipoise and Winstrol V, one quarter cc every three days, injected into the buttocks, one in one cheek, one in the other." It was to recover his health, McGwire had told Bob Costas. "What a lying, pitiful, self-indulgent, cowardly human McGwire is," wrote Telander.

Telander's explosion was atypical of the press box. A more common response was a finger wag—such as the one McGwire got from Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports, who decreed, "His apology was not enough. His tearful interview with Bob Costas on MLB Network was not enough." Rosenthal said McGwire needs to try again and "get it right."

Telander is so deeply troubled by steroids in sports that he actually wants the baseball writers, who decide who goes into the Hall of Fame, to form a committee to develop standards for the Age of PEDs (performance enhancing drugs). It's an excellent idea, and when he raised it at last year's all-star game he was voted down. Most sportswriters want to preserve the freedom to moralize on an ad hoc basis, unvexed by even their own deep thoughts, let alone anyone else's.

Like Telander, I think sportswriters should caucus. And like Telander, I think that even though mendacity is often flagrant, the question of PEDs is anything but simple. The public has always been elastic about what it's willing to put up with, and today's abhorrence often yields to tomorrow's tolerance. What we cannot condone we long to see, and after we've seen enough of it we wonder what the problem ever was. Ben Johnson's gold medal in the 1988 Olympics was taken away from him three days after he won it, but that made his 9.79-second 100-meter dash no less astonishing to have watched. We wonder what the pristine human body is capable of, but we also wonder what the human body can do pristine or not.

When McGwire busted into the news this month with his modified limited hangout apologetics, I began turning his situation over in my head. About PEDs, among team sports baseball is special, and among baseball players McGwire is special. In McGwire, doping has been uniquely quantified.

Baseball venerates numbers, but only some numbers. For instance, 257 is a number that was inadequately revered. That's how many hits George Sisler stroked for the Saint Louis Browns in 1920, setting a major league record that seemed unassailable until Ichiro Suzuki successfully assailed it with 262 hits in 2004. Sisler had played a 154-game season, while Suzuki would and tie and break Sisler's record in the 160th of Seattle's 162 games. Those eight extra games were a huge SEE—statistics enhancing extension. But no one cared.

Not so with the number 61. In recent years it's passed from veneration to beatification and nearly to canonization, as champions of the one true sport rage against the player who left it in the dust. It's forgotten now, but in his day the saintly Roger Maris was himself regarded as something of a usurper. Maris's Yankees played eight more games in 1961 than Babe Ruth's Yankees had in 1927 and Maris tied and overtook Ruth's old record of 60 homers during those extra games. Maris had none of Ruth's charisma, and until '61 he hadn't distinguished himself as all that remarkable a slugger. His one big year aside, Maris's high-water mark was 39 homers in 1960.

But baseball was 30 years from the era when anomalous numbers would set off alarm bells.

Roger Clemens has been accused of taking steroids by Brian McNamee, the trainer who says he injected him. Nobody in America's press boxes seems to believe Clemens's denials. Their paths crossed in Toronto: Clemens left Boston and signed with the Blue Jays before the 1997 season, and McNamee became their strength and conditioning coach a year later.

The Red Sox had been willing to let Clemens go because after 13 years of exceptional service he was wearing out. He was 33, which is getting up there for a power pitcher, and over the previous four seasons he'd won only 40 games against 39 losses. But in Toronto Clemens miraculously regained his youth. For each of the two seasons he pitched there—McNamee claimed that during the second one he was injecting him with PEDs—he led the American League in victories, earned run average, and strikeouts. Clemens then gave the New York Yankees a few strong seasons, and in 2004 he had an 18-4 record with a 2.98 ERA for Houston. He finally retired after the 2007 season, 11 years after he'd left Boston.

Had Clemens discovered the fountain of youth in the business end of a syringe? Well, what if he had? His numbers after leaving Boston, though remarkable, were nothing baseball hadn't seen before or Clemens hadn't accomplished before (if at a less suspect age). In the Middle Ages disease was held to be God's judgment on the wicked, and the One True Church condemned anyone who presumed to ameliorate those woes as a blasphemer second-guessing the Almighty. Today we assert that Clemens's career should have ended when it was supposed to end at the risk of sounding like medievalists. Instead of calling whatever McNamee offered Clemens PEDs, we might call them what other highly potent drugs are called—strong medicine.

We don't do that—not yet. But Clemens doesn't make us foam at the mouth the way McGwire does. Clemens might have been a cheat but he wasn't a usurper—he didn't unseat an immortal. McGwire is the one baseball player whose use of steroids can be reduced to an indelible, scarlet number: 70. McGwire hit 70 juiced, and no apology—to the Maris family, to the children of America, to all of us—can be enough.

It's hard to tell, from the anguished press, whether McGwire and his cohort Sammy Sosa saved baseball in 1998 or corrupted it. Apparently they did both—no easy feat. Total Major League Baseball attendance in 1993 was 70.3 million, and in 1995—after the dismal 1994 strike that ended the season—merely 50.5 million. It rose to 60.1 million in 1996 and 63.2 million in '97, and maybe it would have kept going up regardless. Maybe baseball didn't actually need to be saved. Nevertheless, 1998 became the year of McGwire and Sosa. Their home run derby (Sosa wound up with 66) thrilled America and sent sportswriters into rhapsodic fits, and total attendance jumped to 70.6 million, the highest in big-league history. In the years to come attendance kept rising, all the way to 79.5 million in 2007. But as fans stormed the turnstiles, McGwire and Sosa turned into the archvillains who'd desecrated the sport.

There are other sports and there are other numbers. Here are some. The starting interior offensive line of the 1961 Chicago Bears weighed an average of 246 pounds. The four-man defensive front weighed 250.5 pounds, the three linebackers 229.3 pounds.

Well, you know what they say about modern nutritional insights. This past season the Bears' starting offensive linemen averaged 308.6 pounds, defensive linemen 283 pounds, and linebackers 240.6 pounds. On the offensive line, where the increase is most dramatic, the '09 Bears were more than 25 percent bulkier than their predecessors (a considerably bigger jump, if you care, than 70 is over 61).

Those nutritional insights have spread far beyond the NFL. When I was in high school back in the Maris era a lineman who tipped the scale at 200 pounds was a great big guy. A pal of mine who was all-conference weighed in at 165—I remember because that's the division he wrestled in.

I was just looking at the 2009 Illinois all-state football team. The interior linemen on offense averaged 285 pounds, the defensive linemen 263.8 pounds.

Football players have gotten a lot bigger, the field hasn't, and the rules are constantly being modified in a losing battle to protect the players against themselves. The NFL is now discovering, from dissections of the brains of dead players, that the concussions that are part of the game are causing lasting and devastating brain damage that has a name: chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Our children are at risk.

Too bad for those children that football has no Mark McGwire. All that extra beef tends to neutralize itself: it's not producing the kind of statistical spikes that make it impossible to pretend the game hasn't been changed by chemistry. So far there's no equivalent of 70 home runs in football.

So it's McGwire who's damned in the press—both for what he's said lately and for what he didn't say back in 2005, when he faced a congressional committee. It's easy for baseball writers to lecture him now that he should have confessed everything then—to tell him that if he only had, then maybe, just maybe, he might get into the Hall of Fame one day. Tell the truth and mommy will think about loving you again. Fearing indictment if he admitted to using steroids, he said he wasn't there to talk about the past. And he didn't.

I wish he'd have come clean. I don't wish he'd apologized. In January 2009, Jack Bauer was hauled before a congressional committee. He looked the senators grilling him about human-rights abuses in the eye and said, "The people I deal with don't care about your rules. All they care about is a result." And he said, "Please do not sit there with that smug look on your face and expect me to regret the decisions I have made. Because, sir, the truth is, I don't."

Mark McGwire should have said, "I juiced up and saved baseball. Do you expect me to say I'm sorry I did? I put everything on the line—my family, my health, my reputation, the Hall of Fame. Baseball was my job and I did my job. Please don't sit there and look smug and tell me I was wrong. You know nothing about baseball. You were never a big leaguer."

McGwire might have gone on to say this: "Players today are bigger and stronger and faster and more skillful than they've ever been before. The level of play has never been higher. If those old-timers some of you get so sentimental about were alive now they'd never see the field. I led baseball into the modern era. If you don't like the era, send it back."

Sportswriters should pretend McGwire looked them in the eye and said this to them. Their response might be as angry as Telander's; it might not. But there would have to be something to it. They would have to compose an argument, not a lecture. v

Care to comment? Find this column and more media coverage at chicagoreader.com/media.

www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/mark-mcgwire-peds-steroids-hall-of-fame-sports-journalism/Content?oid=1361332</sub>

[JACkory]

I just have one thing to ask, and really, this is what it all boils down to:

Is Current Events dead?

[RocDoc]

definitely a philosophical question.

in the main it's what anyone CHOOSES to make it.
or maybe it's what you feel you're capable of contributing to a given news item in the manner of a 'yea' or a 'nay'.

or folks haven't got the time?

or could it just as simply be the messenger?
which would then just be stupid, but jac's put THAT one into words on more than one occasion.

that's a tad overanalyzed, yes - still there's lately been no sense of anyone seeing fit to 'let it blurt' on anything...well, except for jac, but he's always blurting to his own drummer, not the topic.

or rarely.

but - do what ya like.
by all means.

[RocDoc]

gee, who do i know who's an FSU fan?
name's even on the masthead today....

How Dare NFL Teams Question Myron Rolle's Commitment to Football?


4/27/2010 1:15 PM ET By Clay Travis



<sub>FanHouse Writer

On Saturday, the Tennessee Titans drafted Florida State safety Myron Rolle in the sixth round of the NFL Draft with the 207th overall pick.

Rolle, whom you previously knew as the Rhodes Scholar who spent his past season in Oxford studying for a graduate degree in medical anthropology, graduated in 2 1/2 years from Florida State, where he played safety for three years. Then he chose to skip his senior year to take advantage of the Rhodes Scholarship, an honor that only 32 men and women garner every year.

You've probably heard of a few of the alums from the Rhodes, guys like President Bill Clinton and former NBA great Bill Bradley.

What you may have heard and brushed off was this: Multiple NFL teams, scouts and executives questioned Rolle's commitment to football because he made this decision.

Why?

Because the thinking goes -- and we're defining "thinking" broadly here since many of the scouts, coaches and executives making these comments would be pumping gas for a living without football -- that Rolle is too smart, that his priorities in life don't revolve entirely around a pigskin bouncing on a field.

Welcome to the 21st century NFL, where your commitment to the game doesn't get questioned if you fail multiple drug tests, drive drunk or rape a woman. But woe unto you if you have the audacity to graduate early from college and take a year off to pursue a Rhodes Scholarship. Then you're a smart guy, the NFL's own version of the untouchable caste in India. That's why the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, including head coach Raheem Morris, could ask Rolle at the Senior Bowl how it felt to desert his teammates for his senior season.

Rolle's "desertion"?

Accepting the Rhodes Scholarship in Oxford.

If only we could all be so lucky to be deserted by our teammates for this.

Would the Tampa Bay Bucs "brain trust" have asked a player who left college early to play pro football how he felt about deserting his teammates?

Doubtful.

Would the Bucs have asked a player who was caught smoking pot how he felt about letting his teammates down?

Doubtful.

Nope, because Rolle wears the NFL's own scarlet letter, intelligence. And that's just something the NFL can't stand. The league wants their players focused on football or nothing else, barefoot and padded.

Rolle came on our Nashville radio show Monday and in between answering questions about American health care policy, the medical clinic he plans to build in the Bahamas, his love for football, and hanging with President Bill Clinton, he addressed the question of how having his commitment to football questioned made him feel. (Listen to that entire interview here.)

Here's an excerpt:

"I was very surprised. I had anticipated I would get some questions. ... but I didn't expect it to be as big, or as huge of an issue in the whole scheme of the draft process. ...The only thing I can say or try to convey is that I have a lot of options, I do, and I'm very proud I won the Rhodes Scholarship. Medical school will be in my future 15 years from now, Lord willing ... and being a politician is not out out of the question either. But if I have all these options and I still choose to play football, that must mean that I really love it. ... I really do want it, and I have to show it."

That answer isn't good enough for the NFL.

What's more, in an even larger indictment of our society, that answer isn't good enough for football fans, either.

Because think about this for a minute: I haven't read one iota of criticism of NFL teams, scouts, or analysts who questioned Myron Rolle's commitment to the NFL for embracing something larger than football and seeking opportunities outside the game.

We should all be insulted, anyone who has ever played, coached, or watched a football game, that the highest level of the sport devalues intelligence to such a degree that coded language like "commitment" knocks you down several rounds.

Because let's be clear, what NFL people are really saying when they question Rolle's commitment is, he's too intelligent for the game. And personally, I can't tell you how pissed off that makes me. Not that a scout or coach or general manager would say this, but that it would go unchallenged in our society today. That NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who is so intent on protecting the shield, yet won't come out and rip coaches and executives who make these comments about Rolle. Have we really reached a level of NFL football where you get knocked further down the draft board for being a Rhodes Scholar than you do for being arrested?

I think so.

And if we have, doesn't that mean that we've broken the fundamental rule of sports, the rule that I was taught, that you were hopefully taught, and that one day I'll teach my own sons? That rule is simple: Use the ball, don't let the ball use you.

How did kids react when they watched the draft, saw Myron Rolle celebrating, and immediately heard draft analysts discussing his fall down the draft boards because teams questioned his commitment? I'll tell you, kids aren't dumb, they know what that means. That when their coaches preach academics and exploring outside interests, that's really just a shell game. The reality is something different: we want you to care about nothing else at all.

The result?

All too often in American sports today the ball uses the athlete. We see it in the one-and-done rule of the NBA that threatens the very fiber of college basketball. We see it in the number of football players who leave college after four years and test sub-literate on the Wonderlic. How is it possible that someone could stay eligible on a college campus for four years and not have a test score high enough to be employed as a janitor?

And they have a college diploma!

We see it in the NFL, where league owners want dumb players so they can make more money than any other professional sports league while failing to guarantee employment to their players for more than one year at a time. Dumb players equal a dumb union. And a dumb union equals more money.

The NFL doesn't want thinkers, it wants big, dumb idiots who think nothing of the future. It wants to ensure the ball uses them, it's more profitable that way.

Reading, writing and 'rithmetic?

That's for nerds! (Yeah, like the nerds who own the teams.)

Yet, we wonder why so many of these athletes given the opportunity to take advantage of the options presented by their skill with a ball never amount to anything once that ball is taken away from them. We act surprised when athletes flounder post-career .

It's because of this, the same mindset that can question how an athlete can have the audacity to graduate in five semesters of college and pursue a Rhodes Scholarship, yet not question an athlete leaving school early without the ability to read his own professional contract.

Nope, we don't red flag the lack of intelligence.

That means the player is "committed" to his sport. He's committed because he's too damn fool stupid to do anything else.

And then we question the players, like Myron Rolle, who truly use the ball to make something better of themselves.

Even for the most successful sporting careers in the world, 99.9999999 percent of them are over by the time an athlete reaches his early 30's. After all, as my radio show co-host Blaine Bishop constantly says on-air, "You know what the NFL stands for, right? Not For Long."

Then what?

Myron Rolle might be a doctor or a congressman.

Most of the athletes we root for on the field won't be anything else at all.

Just as the NFL prefers.</sub>

[JACkory]

Akashic Records for May 2010
a message from Akashic Records channeled by Jen Eramith MA



What energy and experiences can we expect in May 2010?

The energy this month is like a rusty old weathervane of top of a building. There are several elements in this metaphor that we are going to talk about that help describe the energy this month. One is there is a sense of the way a weather vane can change with any shift of the breeze. That is the way this month is going to feel. It is going to feel like one moment you are facing in a certain direction and you think you can move forward. Then at the next moment it seems as if everything is turned around and you are facing in a different direction. There is a sense that every few hours or every few days, everything will seem to have changed for you throughout the month. Do not get attached to any one particular course or perspective this month. Expect your perspective to change.

A lot of new energies are coming in from different directions in each of your lives. This is a good month for gathering information and being gentle with yourself as you establish a new kind of rhythm in your life. Your particular direction, the next course or the next phase of your life will establish itself more clearly in the months to come. For now, be gentle with yourself. Do not be militant, do not be decisive, do not be vigilant. Let go of those directional forces and more gently take a wide frame view of your life. This is an excellent time to assess where you have been, reestablish where you want to go and look for more information throughout the month. It will come to you from conversations, different people that you meet or people that you know. It will come through changes at work, changes in your neighborhood. Look for change and ask yourself, what is this change telling me about my life, about myself. Anything you see in the news, anything you hear about someone else, just gently ask yourself, "What does this mean for me?" "What is this telling me about my life?" Gather that information, write it down and at the end of the month, take a look at everything you have written through the course of the month. You will see how much you have changed and how many different directions you tried out in your mind. That will help you make a more concrete decision in June and July.

The next element of the weathervane metaphor is that idea of the weathervane being rusty and old. Many of you may feel tired. You may feel weathered. You may feel like you do not have as much energy as you normally do at this time of year. That is okay. The best way to deal with the potential of the month is to take a gentle wide-angle view of your life. You actually do not need to take a lot of action. Of course life demands action and many of you have things on your plate that you need to get accomplished this month so you cannot become completely passive. What you can do is take things slowly. Be methodical and mindful and when you can, take action that leaves room for change later on. If you will do that you will be a lot more comfortable this month. It is a good time to kind of go easy on yourself and others, and do not commit to or engage in a lot of new activities. Move through what you have already committed to with some more gentleness this month.

The third element of the rusty old weathervane is the fact that it is on the top of the building, the top of a house -- that sense that you can get a wide view, a 360 degree view of your life. This is a great time to look back and look forward. It is also a great time to look around at your life. Do an assessment of what you like, what you do not like, what has been working, what has not, who is close to you and who is not. You do not need to make decisions about this, you do not need to make any judgments, just get some perspective. That is the primary potential for the month and that is the best way to work with it.

Are there any important days for us to know about this month?

Yes. May 5 and 6 are especially slow and sluggish. These are good days for you to get a little rest. You might sleep more on these days. There is a feeling that a lot of you are taking bigger energy through your subconscious minds and you are grounding it in your life to be used later. If you think of yourself, like your body and your spirit, your human self, as a cable modem bringing through a signal, you are going to be fully loaded with information.

A lot of information and energy is coming through you right now at a higher level. You are not going to know on the surface what that means. You are not going to know consciously, but you are going to find yourself just needing to just be grounded. You may not have tolerance or patience for additional challenges or commitments on these days. It is an especially dense time - or it will feel like an especially dense time. Take it especially slow and easy on May 5 and 6.

May 9 has a brighter energy. This is a good day for you to pay attention as if the lights have been turned on around you. Look around. This is an excellent day to assess your life. If there is one day you sit down and make a list of everything in your life that you want to deal with in one way or another, this is the day to do it on May 9. Maybe May 10 as well.

May 22 and 23 look like a doorway to opportunities. An opportunity is going to arrive for many of you to make a change or to take some kind of action. The kind of action you have been yearning for and have not been able to take all month. The action you take on these days will be really different than it would have been if you had taken it at the beginning of the month. It is a good time to put into operation some of the things that you have learned throughout the month. Look for decisions to be made, actions to be taken, promises to be made that are kept on May 22 and 23. Go ahead with those actions but make sure you have gathered information throughout the month and that information informs what you do on these days. Be mindful, intentional about it.

Is there anything else the Keepers want to tell us about the month of May 2010?

The Keepers want to tell you that 2010 is a challenging year, but it is also a very freeing year. The year of truth is also challenging to see the truth and deal with it but it is also freeing. The truth can set you free if you are willing to look at it and embrace it. If you think of 2010 as a difficult but liberating year, then think of the month of May as the crux of it all. This is the heart of it. This is when you are in the heart of the truth. When there is so much truth available that you cannot even see it all, it is overwhelming. If you feel overwhelmed this month, do not worry. Do not create a story to validate that feeling of being stuck. Do not start to tell yourself that you are stuck or start to manifest dramas in your life to support that feeling of being stuck. Just be gentle with yourself this month. That is all you need to do. It does not need to be a difficult month. If you are gentle with yourself it can actually be quite sweet. If you try to do things the way you have always done them this month, you are going to find that it is a very challenging and difficult month. You will see people around you creating drama, making up stories about how their lives are going badly or how people are out to get them. They are just struggling to make sense of this very intense feeling of density. Be patient with people as you see them doing this and resist the urge to create drama yourself. Instead, just go slower, be gentle, and let the month pass you by. You are going to have a lot more to work with and it is going to be a lot more clear to you in June.

[RocDoc]

~

<sub>7 children, 1 teacher killed in new China attack

27 mins ago

BEIJING – An attacker hacked seven children and one teacher to death Wednesday and wounded 20 others in a violent rampage at a kindergarten in northwest China's Shaanxi province.

The slaying marked the latest in a string of attacks on schools nationwide and came despite an ordered boost in security at school grounds.

Liu Xiaoming, deputy director of the propaganda department of Hanzhong city where the latest attack occurred, confirmed the deaths and injuries and said the attacker had killed himself afterward.

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100512/ap_on_re_as/as_china_students_attacked</sub>

kindergartners.
fucking great.

[maarts]

May 14, 2010 22:43:55 GMT -5 Matheus said:

Until tonight, I did not realize how psychotic diehard Hillary fans are. I was called a sexist because I don't think Sarah Palin holds a candle to Hillary and that Hillary fans should not support her solely because she's a woman.

Oi. Psychos.

Where was that?