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tosh's Josh



Last Updated: 11/17/2009

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Gender: Male
Status: Married
Age: 36
Sign: Sagittarius

City: CHEYENNE
State: WYOMING
Country: US
Signup Date: 10/24/2005

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Wednesday, August 22, 2007 

Current mood:  geeky
Category: Religion and Philosophy
Currently listening:
immersion : three
By Steve Roach
Release date: 16 July, 2007
7:10 PM 
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Monday, August 20, 2007 

Current mood:  irritated
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Baptist Seminary Offers Homemaking Course

Please note that this program is offered to women only. I find this appalling. This is a backstep in womens rights, all on a religious premis. This falls into America is "going to hell" because the divorce rate is up and the family is breaking down.The president of the seminary says in the interview: "In that we are primarily talking about the Biblical backgrounds for the making of a home. We are talking about relationships to husbands and to children."If the Bible is so "right" why is it that atheists and agnostics have one of the lowest divorce rates?

From a 1999 Bama Research Group poll:

11% of all American adults are divorced
25% of all American adults have had at least one divorce


27% of born-again Christians have had at least one divorce
24% of all non-born-again Christians have been divorced


21% of atheists have been divorced
21% of Catholics and Lutherans have been divorced
24% of Mormons have been divorced
25% of mainstream Protestants have been divorced
29% of Baptists have been divorced
24% of nondenominational, independent Protestants have been divorced


27% of people in the South and Midwest have been divorced
26% of people in the West have been divorced
19% of people in the Northwest and Northeast have been divorced

Please note that the highest rate of divorce is Baptist. LOL.

The man works and the woman keeps a home is such an outdated practice. Old fashioned stereotype rolls are not going to keep a marriage together. Honesty, open communication, and an honest commitment to one another is.

5:25 PM 
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Monday, August 20, 2007 

Current mood:  amused
Category: Religion and Philosophy
Currently listening:
Come Away with Me
By Norah Jones
Release date: 26 February, 2002
3:47 PM 
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Friday, August 17, 2007 

Current mood:  grumpy
Category: Pets and Animals
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Amazon.com Under Fire for Sticking with Animal Fighters

August 8, 2007

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cockfighting magazines  
©The HSUS  
Magazines sold by Amazon.com promote cockfighting.  

In recent months, the nation awakened to a gruesome and pervasive practice—animal fighting. Members of Congress, corporate leaders and the public cried out against dogfighting. And Louisiana and New Mexico enacted laws this year to outlaw cockfighting—the last two states to join the fold.

Online retail giant Amazon.com is now beginning to face the same kind of scrutiny reserved for cockfighters and dogfighters. The company is the only online retailer of subscriptions to animal fighting magazines in the United States.

Do the Right Thing

In July 2005, The HSUS delivered a letter to Amazon.com CEO Jeffrey Bezos, informing him of the magazines on his company's website. After alerting Amazon.com to the advertisements for illegal items in the magazines, The HSUS requested their removal. The request was met with stony silence. (In contrast, a similar HSUS action alerting Korean Air Lines and Continental Airlines of the illegality of their shipments of "gamefowl" resulted in the end to bird shipments.)

After giving Amazon.com a year to mull over its complicity in this illegal animal cruelty, The HSUS again contacted the company, this time informing its corporate general counsel of The HSUS's intent to file a civil action against the company for its illegal sales of The Feathered Warrior and The Gamecock.

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Amazon.Cruel?

Tell Amazon.com what you think about their continued sales of magazines that promote cruel cockfighting.

To the Courts

When Amazon.com again refused to budge, The HSUS filed a lawsuit against Amazon.com, as well as the publishers of The Feathered Warrior and The Gamecock, in District of Columbia Superior Court on February 8, 2007. The lawsuit said this: the federal Animal Welfare Act expressly and specifically prohibits use of the U.S. mail service for "promoting" or "in any other manner furthering" animal fighting.

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In a typical cockfight, sharp blades are fastened to the chickens' legs to make injuries worse.  

Under fire from a media and public intolerant of animal cruelty, Amazon.com defended its inaction, citing freedom of speech issues. But the defense is meritless.

The First Amendment does not protect criminal solicitations for the illegal purchase and sale of fighting animals and weapons, which is the driving purpose of these animal fighting materials.

Magazines Promote Illegal Activities

If there is any doubt that The Feathered Warrior and The Gamecock exist to promote and further illegal animal fighting, one need only glance through their pages to find hundreds of advertisements for cockfighting knives, cockfighting pits and the so-called "gamest cocks alive."

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Gamecock magazine for sale on Amazon.com March 30, 2007. The screen included a link to The Feathered Warrior.

Illustrating this point further, the December 2006 issue of The Gamecock featured a full-page advertisement for the sale of the "Sally Gap" cockfighting pit in Kentucky. When an HSUS investigator responded to the ad by phone, he was told that this was one of the largest cockfighting pits in the region. The seller also gave exact directions to the pit and assured the investigator that anyone who bought the pit would have nothing to worry about from the local sheriff.

The words of the Sally Gap's owner proved true. In February 2007, just before filing the lawsuit against Amazon.com, an HSUS investigator visited the Sally Gap pit while a cockfighting derby was in full force. Amid dead and dying birds was a crowd of 500 people, including children, calling out bets on which birds would live or die. The roosters had metal weapons attached to their legs for maximum bloody effect.

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  From the video "Unleashed."
  Amazon.com thinks people have a right to profit from videos of dog fights staged solely for the purpose of selling the videos. 
Solicitations for Cruelty

The Sally Gap investigation provides unmistakable proof that Amazon's animal fighting materials are far more than an exchange of ideas; they are active solicitations for violent criminal activity. Their express purpose is to promote and further illegal animal fighting. Every time Amazon.com sells a subscription to The Feathered Warrior or The Gamecock, it violates federal law.

Amazon's inaction has been puzzling. In 2007, Amazon.com removed a dogfighting video from its website, in recognition of a federal law that prohibits profiting from depictions of animal cruelty. Amazon.com has pulled several titles from its website based solely on their offensiveness.

With public pressure mounting on animal fighting, Amazon can't afford not to act on the magazines. The alternative is placing themselves in the corner with animal fighting cruelty.

..> ..>

Related Links

Cockfighting Fact Sheet

HSUS Sues Amazon.com over Animal Fighting Videos and Magazines

Amazon.com Faces Lawsuit for Illegal Cockfighting Magazines

"Hood Fights II" Down for the Count

In Re: The HSUS, et al. (cockfighting magazines)

The HSUS v. Amazon.com, Inc., et al. (Animal fighting materials)

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9:48 PM 
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Wednesday, August 15, 2007 

Current mood:  amused
Category: Religion and Philosophy
3:23 PM 
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Monday, August 13, 2007 

Current mood:  calm
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

Tosh, April and I went and saw Stardust Friday night. It wasn't a bad movie all in all, well worth watching. I was a bit dissapointed at how far the movie deviated from the book. Now I know that a movies is seldom going to follow a book exactly, but one would expect a shorter novel to be more closely followed than a longer one.

Sometimes by reading the book first I'm dissapointed in a movie, sometimes not. In this case I think my disapointment had to do with th fact that Neil Gaiman did not write the screen play. 

On the other hand they showed a trailer for Beowulf and it looks good. It's screen play was written by Gaiman, at least in part.

Currently reading:
City Of The Dead
By Brian Keene
Release date: May, 2005
4:33 PM 
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Tuesday, August 07, 2007 

Current mood:  cheerful
Category: Pets and Animals

Now dogs can have their revenge. For only 10.99 + s/h your dog can have a go at Vick. According to the seller it is able even to last with a pit bull, I wonder how long it would last with Binky...

9:20 PM 
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Monday, August 06, 2007 

Current mood:  content
Category: Life

So today Tosh calls me and say she's mad at me. I was a bit confused at this as I don't remember doing anything to make her mad. It turns out that while going through some paint last night I had left a jar of silver glitter accessable to the cats.

They had to have discovered this jar after I had left for work, because I didn't see any glitter about on my way out. Apparently the glitter ended up from one end of the house to the other. Sushi more than likely is the ultimate culperate. As much as I would have been upset, and as glad as I am that Tosh is cleaning the mess, I wish I could have seen it.

I guess that's how the glitter sprinkles.

Currently reading:
Dune Messiah (Dune Chronicles, Book 2)
By Frank Herbert
Release date: 15 July, 1987
6:45 AM 
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Friday, August 03, 2007 

Current mood:  amused
Shamed scientist's 'breakthrough'
 
A scientist who faked his research may have actually made a groundbreaking advance - without even realising it.

South Korean Woo Suk Hwang became famous after claiming to have extracted the world's first stem cells from a cloned embryo.

It emerged he had lied about his work, and the source of the cells.

But analysis in the journal Cell Stem Cell reveals he may have produced stem cells from human eggs alone - potentially even more useful.

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I've always promoted the idea that efforts should be made to produce embryos from human eggs
Professor Azim Surani, Cambridge University

The Hwang episode, uncovered in 2005, is one of the most notorious scientific scandals of recent times.

His work at Seoul National University earned him the status of national hero, and even led to his face appearing on a set of commemorative stamps.

Unethical eggs

Hwang said that he had created cloned human embryos by placing the nucleus from the cell to be cloned into a "hollowed out" human egg, then managed to extract stem cells from the resulting embryos.

Scientists are excited about the potential of stem cells because they are the body's "master cells", with the potential to become any cell type in the body, perhaps replacing those lost through ageing or disease.

However, it later became clear that he had used eggs from young female researchers at his laboratory to create the embryos, itself a major ethical breach - and that the resulting stem cells did not come from cloned embryos.

With his research discredited, he was dismissed from his post at the university, and charged with fraud and embezzlement.

The latest twist came from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in the US, who looked closely at his data, and found the cells were actually from a different type of embryo.

'Virgin birth'

Researchers said that the distinct "genetic fingerprint" of the stem cells means they may be the first in the world to be extracted from embryos produced by the so-called "virgin birth" method, or parthenogenesis.

This happens when eggs are stimulated into becoming embryos without ever being fertilised by sperm, and has been achieved in animals.

However, before Hwang, no one had managed to produce a human embryo using parthenogenesis which lived long enough to allow the extraction of viable stem cells.

Dr George Daley, who led the analysis, told the BBC's Science In Action programme: "Unfortunately at the time they published their work they did not know what they had done so they had mistakenly isolated these parthenogenic embryonic stem cells, and yet misrepresented them as true clones.

"In fact they had produced the world's first patient-specific embryonic stem cell, and that is very valuable.

"Scientists interested in modelling complex diseases would like to be able to move a patient's own cells into a petri dish in their embryonic form."

'More useful'

Professor Azim Surani, from the University of Cambridge, has carried out years of experiments to produce parthenogenetic stem cells from mice.

He said Hwang had probably inadvertently stimulated the human eggs to begin dividing while trying to produce cloned embryos.

Professor Surani said Hwang's unwitting step forward might actually prove more useful than efforts to clone human embryos, which he had claimed fraudulently.

"I've always promoted the idea that efforts should be made to produce embryos from human eggs - it is far less ethically challenging, and the efficiency of these cell lines is likely to be higher than those produced from cloned embryos," he said.

However, scientists do not know how significant the lack of contribution from the father's DNA will be.

From: BBC News

 

My thought on the matter is that if Hwang had actually been acting as a scientist and recording his results and iterpreting the data he would have realized his real discovery. Instead he faked his results to make a name for himself, which ironically he would have with the real results from his experiments.

Hind sight is always 20-20.

9:03 PM 
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Wednesday, August 01, 2007 

Current mood:  blank
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Yesterday the plant I work for began its annual charity campaign. To encourage pledges, those pledging a certain amount are entered into a drawing for a new car. I find it a sad state of affairs that incentives have to be offered for people to give to a good cause. Imagine how much more charities could do if they didn't have to offer a "free" t-shirt or "free" coffee mug, or what ever. Imagine how much more these charities could do with out expending the extra capital for "gifts."

I know that some of these "gifts" or "prizes" are donated for the purpose of  incentives, but if these companies can afford to make such donations, why  can't they just support the charity with money. For instance the car that can be won in this instance is valued at $20,000. I know a donation of $20,000 would help any charity.

It is often said that the United States is a Christian nation or that it's foundations lie in religion. Poppy-cock. I don't see an inkling of people living as Jesus directed. Materialism is rampant in direct opposition to Jesus' words.

"Jesus answered, If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.'" Matthew 19:21 and repeated in Luke "When Jesus heard this, he said to him, You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.'" Luke 18:22 or "If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth." 1 John 3:17-18

We can go into the Old Testament too. "He who despises his neighbor sins, but blessed is he who is kind to the needy." Proverbs 14:21, "He who is kind to the poor lends to the LORD, and he will reward him for what he has done." Proverbs 19:17 or "'He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. Is that not what it means to know me?" declares the LORD." Jeremiah 22:16, among many others.

Other religion too promotes giving. Islam: Give to the near of kin his due, and also to the needy and the wayfarers.(Quran 17:26) [Though it stresses giving in moderation: Do not keep your hand fastened to your neck nor outspread it, altogether widespread, for you will be left sitting rebuked, destitute. (17:29)]

Dana, the practice of giving is a foundation of Buddhism.

Yet we still need incentives to give…

 

On more strike against religion.

May be we need a lesson in altruism from chimpanzees.

9:11 PM 
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