God values men and women equally, any student here will tell you. It’s just that he’s given them different responsibilities in life: Men make decisions. Women make dinner.

This fall, the internationally known seminary — a century-old training ground for Southern Baptists — began reinforcing those traditional gender roles with college classes in homemaking. The academic program, open only to women, includes lectures on laundering stubborn stains and a lab in baking chocolate-chip cookies.

Philosophical courses such as “Biblical Model for the Home and Family” teach that God expects wives to graciously submit to their husbands’ leadership. A model house, to be completed by next fall, will allow women to get credit toward bachelor’s degrees by learning how to set tables, sew buttons and sustain lively dinnertime conversation.

It all sounds wonderful to sophomore Emily Felts, 19, who signed up as soon as she arrived on campus this fall.

Several relatives have told Felts that she’s selling herself short. They want her to become a lawyer, and she agrees she’d make a good one. But that’s not what she wants to do with her life.

More to the point, it’s not what she believes God wants of her.

“My created purpose as a woman is to be a helper,” Felts said firmly. “This is a college education that I can use.” Los Angeles Times

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

Well no, it didn’t, really. But it should. Don’t get me wrong here. The Armenian genocide was real. Turkey, under the Ottaman empire, was responsible. But for Representative Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) to bring this vote forward at this time is nothing more than a childish political stunt. Yes. I know that Rep. Lantos is a survivor of the Shoah.

I understand the emotional angle here. He’s still wrong.

Rep. Lantos had this to say:

“We have to weigh the desire to express our solidarity with the Armenian people… against the risk that it could cause young men and women in the uniform of the United States armed services to pay an even heavier price than they are currently paying.”

You can read the entire text of House Resolution 106 passed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Lantso, as a PDF.

From the BBC:

Turkey has denounced a vote by a US congressional committee recognising as genocide the 1915-17 mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks.

President Abdullah Gul said the decision was unacceptable and had no validity for Turkey, which has always denied any genocide took place.

The White House said it was very disappointed by the non-binding vote.

It fears Turkey could now limit co-operation in the war on terror and provision of military bases near Iraq.

The genocide bill passed in the House Foreign Affairs Committee by 27 votes to 21 – the first step towards holding a vote in the House of Representatives.

Anyone want to make book over how long it will take for Rep. Lanto to introduce a resolution regarding the genocidal slaughter of American Indians in the Untied States during the 18th and 19th centuries?

As the news cycles here in the United States and Myanmar slips off the front page, the rest of the World continues to pay attention to the Junta’s abuse and oppression. Despite an Internet shut-down and border searches, people are getting their stories out; demanding that we not turn away; that we watch, that we listen, that we understand.

From The Independent:

Monks confined in a room with their own excrement for days, people beaten just for being bystanders at a demonstration, a young woman too traumatised to speak, and screams in the night as Rangoon’s residents hear their neighbours being taken away.

Harrowing accounts smuggled out of Burma reveal how a systematic campaign of physical punishment and psychological terror is being waged by the Burmese security forces as they take revenge on those suspected of involvement in last month’s pro-democracy uprising.

The first-hand accounts describe a campaign hidden from view, but even more sinister and terrifying than the open crackdown in which the regime’s soldiers turned their bullets and batons on unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Rangoon, killing at least 13. At least then, the world was watching.

The hidden crackdown is as methodical as it is brutal. First the monks were targeted, then the thousands of ordinary Burmese who joined the demonstrations, those who even applauded or watched, or those merely suspected of anti-government sympathies.

“There were about 400 of us in one room. No toilets, no buckets, no water for washing. No beds, no blankets, no soap. Nothing,” said a 24-year-old monk who was held for 10 days at the Government Technical Institute, a leafy college in northern Rangoon which is now a prison camp for suspected dissidents. The young man, too frightened to be named, was one of 185 monks taken in a raid on a monastery in the Yankin district of Rangoon on 28 September, two days after government soldiers began attacking street protesters.

“The room was too small for everyone to lie down at once. We took it in turns to sleep. Every night at 8 o’clock we were given a small bowl of rice and a cup of water. But after a few days many of us just couldn’t eat. The smell was so bad.

“Some of the novice monks were under 10 years old, the youngest was just seven. They were stripped of their robes and given prison sarongs. Some were beaten, leaving open, untreated wounds, but no doctors came.”

Please. Don’t turn away.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from The Seventh Telling: The Qabalah of Moshe Katan – A Novel by Mitchell Chefitz.

“Why doesn”t he want them back?”

It was not clear if the question was rhetorical or an answer was expected. Reb Hayim paused, closed his eyes, and swayed gently in his chair. “Imagine this. Imagine you had just built a building for a million dollars and had it fully leased. It was intended to provide income for you and your family for the next fifty years. What if someone came to you the day after it was built and said he”d like to buy the building for from you. He”d give you a million and one dollars. Do you want to sell it to him? Look, you”d make a dollar profit! But that”s not what you want out of it. You chase him away and say, come back in fifty years when the building has lived up to the purpose I created it for.

Today, as I go about my tasks, I’ll think about: The principle of self-unification is simple: when what you do is in congruity with what you believe, and what you believe is the highest of truths, you achieve the most gratifying form of personal productivity and experience the most satisfying form of self-esteem. p. 21.

Borrowing a lesson from their Communist masters in Beijing, the military junta in Burma/Myanmar is rounding up protesters it’s finding in photographs used in print and electronic meda reports of its continuing suppressions of the nation’s democracy movement. From Bangkok the Asia Times reports:

Myanmar is apparently using photos sent to websites, television stations and other media to arrest protesters, while at the same time praising China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown which turned foreign news videos into virtual wanted posters to capture dissidents.

Myanmar security forces have detained over 2,000 people in the wake of last week’s popular unrest and military crackdown. The authorities claim to have already released over 680 of those detained, but there are new reports of continued arrests. “Residents say military trucks patrol neighborhood streets during the night with loudspeakers broadcasting warnings: ‘We have photographs. We are going to make arrests’,” the Thailand-based, Irrawaddy magazine and other news organizations reported on Wednesday.

I looks like China’s newest vassal state is going for the gold.

Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.

1434 Positively Lame

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Exposing “The Secret.”

Since the most recent crackdown in Burma/Myanmar, the forces of freedom and social justice have found an unexpected ally in the person of the First Lady of the United States Laura Bush. After restricting herself to first-ladyesque duties and causes for six years, Laura Bush seems to be everywhere.

She wants the Junta in Burma to step down and allow Democracy to flourish. Now.

How often do we get first ladies issuing ultimatums?

All of this is a good thing. The First Lady is correct in her cause and her support, specially as it influences her husband, is welcomed and important. But why Burma?

The answered is buried in an interview with USAToday:

Bush has quietly promoted Suu Kyi’s cause and democracy in Burma for at least five years. She learned about them from Elsie Walker, a Bush family cousin and human rights advocate for Burma and Tibet.

The first lady’s activism became public last year at the United Nations, when she hosted an international roundtable on Burma. She submitted written testimony last week to the Senate, calling again for the removal of the military government.

While vacationing in Texas in August, Bush watched the Burmese demonstrations on TV and said she was concerned that “there didn’t seem to be a very strong response from other countries.” She said she called Ban to urge U.N. action.

He said Tuesday that he will send envoy Ibrahim Gambari back to the region “as soon as possible.”

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap. On The Writing On The Wal — the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar — Jonathan Rees, Robert Feinman, Peter Sayles and I continue our work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

ONE-MAN SIT-IN EXPLODES IN LOCAL MEDIA… Grandfather David McCarty”s one-man sit-in became, in the words of columnist Byron Crawford, a corporate version of Joe vs. the Volcano, or maybe Appalachian State vs. Michigan. You don”t mess with a man tending the tomatoes in his back yard. Keep reading…

AT THE WALLY PLEX… There are sound stages on Hollywood”s back lots smaller than Bentonvile”s behemoths, so it”s no surprise that budding video talent has been sneaking cameras in at odd hours. And now for the midnight show at the Wally Plex featuring crissybb03. Keep reading…

PROTESTER ENDS WAL-MART SIT-IN… How much can one family be expected to tolerate before it blows a gasket somewhere? That point for the McCarthy family in Lebanon, Kentucky, came this week when David McCarthy sat down in his backyard and refused to budge. Keep reading…

WAL-MART.COM EQUALS FACEBOK…? Watch…

HIGH TECH AND CHEAP CRAP STILL CHEAP CRAP… At the turn of the millennium the claim that Wal-Mart was best known for in the business community (besides selling cheap plastic shit from China) was it”s ability to track and deliver merchandise in a efficient manner that made the competition”s heads spin. Keep reading…

SAVE THE PARK… BUT ONLY AT WAL-MART… Earlier this year, the announcement from The Eagles that it would only sell its latest CD at Wal-Mart caused a great deal of hair pulling in the Rees household. Now comes the announcement that Nintendo will only sell the latest version of Chibi-Robo through Wal-Mart. Keep reading…

POP-TARTS VS. WAL-MART TOASTER PASTRIES… Watch…

WAL-MART PINNED DOWN ON THE BEACHHEAD… General Dwight Eisenhower”s worst fear on 6 June 1944 was that the allied troops landing at Normandy would get pinned down on the beaches and pushed back into the English channel. This is a fear that Wal-Mart is growing to appreciate. Keep reading…

ONLY AT WAL-MART… Yeah, I know. Wal-Mart is not the only place that you can buy a 25-pound bucket of rendered pig fat, but the picture is just too funny. At a whopping 105,000 calories, that”s a food bargain. From Monica at Rural Vegan: Keep reading…

VERDICT ROLLING WEST… Last week a judge in Pennylvania ordered Wal-Mart to pay an additional $62.3 million in damages over a forcing workers to put in time off-the-clock. That decision, according to the Kanasas City Star, is good news for workers in Kansas and Missouri. Keep reading…

WAS SAM RIGHT ABOUT COMPUTERS…? Late last week I wrote about how Wal-Mart”s love affair with Radio Frequency Identification had turned sour. Now it appears that wider cracks are appearing in Wal-Mart”s much vaunted information technology systems. From CIO: Keep reading…

GOOGLE IS BIGGER THAN WAL-MART… OK, so strictly speaking, this isn”t about Wal-Mart, but when I saw the headline this morning it gave me pause. Google is much more than a search engine. The company is a multi-national media giant and what do any of us know about the people who run it? Keep reading…

ONLY MANHATTAN…? NOT THE BRONX TOO… Keep reading…

WAL-MART TURNS ITS BACK ON SCHOOLS… I attended the Warren local school district in southeastern Ohio. We had really good schools because of the property taxes paid by Union Carbide and other large factories in the district. Without those taxes, my experience would have been very different. Keep reading…

A FEW WORDS FROM A FOOL…
Emil Lee, one half of the Motley Fool team writes this morning about how the age of buying customers with everyday low prices has passed and offers advice for how Wal-Mart might regain its lost customer base. Not that Lee Scott is listening. Keep reading…

HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN WAL-MART OFFEND…? Jonathan wrote on Sunday about the case of John Runza, a Wal-Mart employee who has Down Syndrome and suffers from irritable bowel syndrome and diabetes. This morning I found this story about Valerie Armour. Keep reading…

I wrote back on 23 September about the Israeli air strike into Syria to destroy a reported nuclear weapons site. Today the New York Times reports that maybe, well, it wasn’t exactly nuclear, but the administration kind of guess that it could have been or might become one at some undetermined point in the future; they think.

I am really, really getting sick of being played like this. We have to stop bombing places on hunches.

A sharp debate is under way in the Bush administration about the significance of the Israeli intelligence that led to last month”s Israeli strike inside Syria, according to current and former American government officials.

At issue is whether intelligence that Israel presented months ago to the White House – to support claims that Syria had begun early work on what could become a nuclear weapons program with help from North Korea – was conclusive enough to justify military action by Israel and a possible rethinking of American policy toward the two nations.

The debate has fractured along now-familiar fault lines, with Vice President Dick Cheney and conservative hawks in the administration portraying the Israeli intelligence as credible and arguing that it should cause the United States to reconsider its diplomatic overtures to Syria and North Korea.

By contrast, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her allies within the administration have said they do not believe that the intelligence presented so far merits any change in the American diplomatic approach.

“Some people think that it means that the sky is falling,” a senior administration official said. “Others say that they”re not convinced that the real intelligence poses a threat.”

I have to say that as I come close to finishing The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy I want to know exactly who are the and conservative hawks in the administration; who are the Neocons jerking our country around?

This is, in part, an example of sloppy reporting. If we’ve learned anything in the past six years, it is that Dick Cheney is evil, but also that we cannot lay everything in his lap. Because if we do so we might incorrectly assume that getting the vice president out of office might actually fix things.

It won’t. As long as the advisers and aides remain, they will simply shift their influence to whomever is in power.

In this next round of elections, I’m going to be paying a lot more attention to who’s behind the throne and less on who’s sitting there.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from The Seventh Telling: The Qabalah of Moshe Katan – A Novel by Mitchell Chefitz.

Reb Hayim paused and examined the face of each student for questions. When there were none, he continued. “Creation story number two, the rebellion of Eve. Eve sees how far she and Adam have been put into exile, how far they are away from God. She wants to get back. How does she do it? She tries to eat her way back. She eats the fruit of the tree of knowledge [of good and bad], gives Adam some to eat. What does God do? God puts them further into exile. He doesn”t want them back so quick. He boots them out of the Garden of Eden before they can eat from the Tree of Life and cancel out creation. He puts an angel with a sword at the gate to make sure they can”t get back.

Today, as I go about my tasks, I’ll think about: People are incessantly jumping at trivial twigs because they seem urgent but ignoring the camouflaged rattlesnakes that don”t appear to call for immediate action. p. 20.

Listen to Diane Rehm interview President Jimmy Carter about his latest book: Beyond The White House.