Sexual Diversity and Death Part 1.

Vegans shun sex with carnivores says researcher

Tue Jul 31, 2:20 AM

WELLINGTON (AFP) - They say you are what you eat, and growing numbers of vegans are shunning sex with meat-eaters because they see them as "a graveyard for animals", a New Zealand researcher says.

These vegans not only refuse to eat meat or animal products but refuse to have sexual contact with meat-eaters because their bodies are made up of dead animals, the researcher was reported saying in The Press newspaper on Tuesday.

Annie Potts, co-director of the New Zealand Centre of Human and Animal Studies at New Zealand's Canterbury University, said she coined the term vegansexuals during her research.

She discovered the vegansexuals while interviewing 157 vegetarians and ethical consumers for a study.

"It's a whole new thing -- I have not come across it before," said Potts.

One vegan said while she found non-vegans attractive, but would not want to be physically close to them.

"I would not want to be intimate with someone whose body is literally made up from the bodies of others who have died for their sustenance," she said.

Four dead babies found in Ocean City home

1 hour, 44 minutes ago

By Jon Hurdle

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The remains of four premature babies have been found hidden in garbage bags and a blanket at the home of the owner of a taxi company in Ocean City, Maryland, police said on Monday.

Christy Freeman, 37, has been charged with first- and second-degree murder and manslaughter in connection with the death of one of the babies. Further charges may follow, said Ocean City police spokesman Barry Neeb.

Police found the body of one baby wrapped in a blanket in Freeman's apartment last Thursday after she was admitted to a local hospital with cramps and bleeding, Neeb said.

Doctors at the hospital determined that Freeman had been pregnant but was no longer, prompting police to search her apartment.

At the apartment, police also found a garbage bag hidden in a trunk in Freeman's bedroom. Inside were three smaller plastic bags, two of which contained the remains of two more infants, and a third contained what police said was a placenta.

The next day, the remains of a fourth infant were found in another garbage bag inside a Winnebago motor home parked in Freeman's driveway, according to a police statement.

A medical examiner's report on the ages of the infants and the cause of their deaths is expected this week. "None of them were full-term," Neeb said.

Police are continuing to search Freeman's home and excavate its surroundings in an operation that also involves the FBI.

Freeman has four other children who are believed to be teenagers, Neeb said.

Freeman was at a bail hearing on Monday morning. The case is expected to be referred to a grand jury, Neeb said.

Vaucanson's Paradox

The Artifice is the opposite of the simulation and it is devoid of reality. Isn’t this the purpose of the perverse ritual? The voiding of content for the sake of form, the quality of form in its oscillating duration as the territory of fluid dispersion necessitating the suspension of any symbolic content. Thus, the stupidity of psychoanalytic accounts, for the psyche is only residual to the general programme of these singular aggregates of matter. The fetish and the ritual demarcate a space of life without fiction. The only content of the Phantasm and Artifice is the force of indiscernibility, which would be voided in the concretion of formal properties. They may carry ‘resemblances’ in the Images they produce or feed upon but these have no simulative property let alone a representational one. The Artificial is the territory which is devoid of positive knowledge, the quality of an Image in its monstration not its significance. The Image precedes the sign and its signifiance. There is a general problem of relation with the artifice. Connections are difficult to make, it is detached. As we saw with the case of empathy, an android would look and react like a human being but would never emit the emotion, such a connection is impossible. But emission isn’t enough either, even psychopaths make every display of empathy, and frequently have an acute understanding of the psychology of others, without feeling it. Perhaps, as Celine once said of his father, I know he had feelings and I had feelings too but life isn’t about feelings. Feelings are something which oppose themselves to life as the ultimate simulation. The ambient world has become a second skin for people. They do not even recognize their own stench. The mise en scene of their organism has become invisible, that is the way of the feeling consciousness.

--excerpt from Beyond Love

I became convinced that I had first known him when he was dead, then when he was dying. Passing in front of his door, they gave me this image of him:

“This is a room you’ll be able to have.”

--Maurice Blanchot

Sacred bull Shambo killed by lethal injection

1 hour, 49 minutes ago

LONDON (AFP) - A sacred bull with bovine tuberculosis who sparked a row between a British Hindu temple and the Welsh government over whether he should live or die has finally been killed, officials said Friday.

Shambo, who lived at the Skanda Vale community in Llanpumsaint, west Wales, was put down with a lethal injection Thursday night, a Welsh Assembly spokesman said, following a stand-off between monks, supporters and police over access to the retreat.

Officers had to force protestors -- many of whom had come from abroad after hearing of the six-year-old Fresian's plight -- to back off from its enclosure to allow health officials to take it away.

Monks said their shrine had been desecrated as Shambo was taken away for killing Thursday evening.

Up to 100 Shambo supporters began chanting and praying early Thursday as they locked the gate and blocked the lane to the isolated community with a parked car.

When officials finally got through and the animal was taken away, many called out farewells or wept.

One of the monks, Brother Michael, said a charity in India had offered to take the bullock but the authorities refused.

"How is this acceptable? How can killing be acceptable?" he said Thursday. "Shambo represents the sanctity of life."

Officials say they may still have to take "further action" to prevent TB spreading in the retreat's herd -- raising the possibility that more cattle could be killed.

In a statement, the Welsh government, which is devolved from London, said that further tests had confirmed that TB was "in the herd."

"The Welsh Assembly Government is continuing to consider what other action is now necessary to protect human and animal health in relation to the test results from other animals in the herd," it said.

The row over Shambo's fate dates back to April, when health officials ordered that the animal be killed after testing positive for bovine TB, in line with government regulations.

But the monks and nuns at Skanda Vale said that killing Shambo would be against their religion and launched a court battle to try to save the bull.

Some 20,000 people signed an Internet petition opposing the killing but the Court of Appeal in London ruled Monday that it should go ahead.

The move was justified even though the Hindu community would consider the bull's slaughter to be a sacrilegious act and "a very grave and serious interference with their religious rights," judge Malcolm Pill said.

Ramesh Kallidai, secretary general of the Hindu Forum of Britain, said the slaughter was based on a "subjective and unreliable" test which was sacrilegious and would involve a "grave desecration" of the temple.

"This decision now means that Hindus and other ethnic minorities who wish to observe their faith are second class citizens in the eyes of the law," he said.

He added that the group would now try to meet Environment Secretary Hilary Benn to secure reassurances about the status of other temple animals in Britain following the case.

Shambo became a star on the Internet thanks to a web camera -- nicknamed MooTube -- which allowed fans to track his activities.

Newspapers carried widespread coverage of the story Friday -- The Sun tabloid, the biggest-selling daily, headlined its story "Sham-bulls."

Noname300: Confronted by forgotten hermaphrodites

Computer program can learn baby talk

Wed Jul 25, 9:04 AM

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A computer program that learns to decode sounds from different languages in the same way that a baby does helps to shed new light on how people learn to talk, researchers said on Tuesday.

They said the finding casts doubt on theories that babies are born knowing all the possible sounds in all of the world's languages.

"The debate in language acquisition is around the question of how much specific information about language is hard-wired into the brain of the infant and how much of the knowledge that infants acquire about language is something that can be explained by relatively general purpose learning systems," said James McClelland, a psychology professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

McClelland says his computer program supports the theory that babies systematically sort through sounds until they understand the structure of a language.

"The problem the child confronts is how many categories are there and how should I think about it. We're trying to propose a method that solves that problem," said McClelland, whose work appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Expanding on some existing ideas, he and a team of international researchers developed a computer model that resembles the brain processes a baby uses when learning about speech.

He and colleagues tested their model by exposing it to "training sessions" that consisted of analyzing recorded speech in both English and Japanese between mothers and babies in a lab.

What they found is the computer was able to learn basic vowel sounds right along with baby.

"It learns how many sounds there are. It figures that out," he said in a telephone interview.

And if the computer can do it, he said, a baby can, too.

"In the past, people have tried to argue it wasn't possible for any machine to learn these things, and so it had to be hard-wired (in humans)," he said. "Those arguments, in my view, were not particularly well grounded."

Indian police find 30 bags filled with baby bones

Mon Jul 23, 3:46 AM

BHUBANESWAR, India (Reuters) - Thirty polythene bags stuffed with the body parts of female fetuses and newly born babies have been found in a dry well near a private clinic in the east Indian state of Orissa, police said on Monday.

Police suspect the body parts -- mainly skulls and bones -- were dumped in the well shortly after birth or abortion at the clinic in Nayagarh district, 90 km (55 miles) southwest of the state capital, Bhubaneswar.

The manager of the clinic has been arrested.

"Prima facie seems to indicate female feticide but we can't be sure until forensic examinations are conducted," said B.K. Sharma, Orissa's crime branch inspector-general of police.

Despite laws banning sex determination tests, the killing of female fetuses is still common in India, where the preference for sons runs deep. Infanticide is also practiced in some areas.

Boys are traditionally preferred to girls as breadwinners and because families have to pay huge dowries to marry off daughters.

Police said they searched the well after seven female fetuses, also packed into polythene bags, were found dumped in a deserted area in a nearby village a week ago.

Officials said they believed the two cases were linked and are part of an organized racket involved in female feticide.

The government says around 10 million girls have been killed by their parents -- either before or immediately after birth -- over the past 20 years.

Last month, a doctor was arrested on suspicion of illegally aborting 260 female fetuses after police recovered bones from the septic tank in the basement of his maternity clinic in the outskirts of New Delhi.

Bush has polyps removed in 'routine' colonoscopy

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President George W. Bush Saturday had five polyps removed during a "routine colonoscopy" but the White House said he was in good spirits and had resumed power after a brief handover to Vice President Dick Cheney.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said five polyps were found and removed during the 28-minute procedure, but that "all of them were small" and "none appeared worrisome."

The results will determine the final diagnosis and recommendations for future treatment, the spokesman said.

"It was not a surprise to the doctors" to find the five polyps, Stanzel said.

"They did indicate they were all small, some very small and I would say that is why surveillance ... has become a part of the colorectal cancer screening process," he said, adding that the procedure was scheduled "out of an abundance of caution."

The president was "in good humor and will resume his normal activities at Camp David," he said.


The president ate breakfast, played with his dogs and went for a walk after the procedure, and also planned to go for a bike ride later in the afternoon, Stanzel said.

Bush was sedated during the procedure, in what Stanzel described as "conscious sedation."

"It would be accurate to describe him as 'under' but this was not a general anaesthetic," adding the sedation using propofol has a "rapid awakening effect."

After the procedure, Bush spoke by phone to his wife, Laura, who is in Texas celebrating her mother's birthday, Stanzel added.

Cheney assumed the role of acting president at 7:16 am (1116 GMT) as Bush's colonoscopy began. The procedure concluded at 7:44 am (1144 GMT) and Bush officially resumed power at 9:21 am (1321 GMT).

In all, Cheney was in charge of the country for two hours and five minutes.

Cheney spent that time at his residence on Maryland's eastern shore in what Stanzel described as a "routine Saturday morning ... nothing occurred that required him to take official action as acting president."

It was only the third time in US history that a president made use of the Constitution's transfer of power to a vice president.

The only other times were when Ronald Reagan underwent surgery for colon cancer on July 13, 1985, and when Bush underwent a previous colonoscopy on June 29, 2002, White House officials said.


The 2002 procedure was "preventative," after previous colonoscopies in July 1998 and December 1999 each led to the discovery -- and removal -- of two benign polyps, officials said.

"Absent any symptoms, the president's doctor recommended repeat surveillance in approximately five years. The president has had no symptoms," presidential spokesman Tony Snow told reporters on Friday.

What Heaven is actually like...

Even then their deaths seemed radical, dignified. Television gave lessons in dignity... As a teenager, Michel believed that suffering conferred dignity on a person. Now he had to admit that he had been wrong. What had conferred dignity on people was television.

-- Michelle Houellebecq