Home

3-12-98

By Luke Ford

Dennis opened his show with this article from today's (3-12-98) NY Times. He thought it made the case for Stars Wars space defense.

Asteroid Expected to Pass Near Earth in 2028

By MALCOLM W. BROWNE

An asteroid is likely to pass within 30,000 miles of Earth on Oct. 26, 2028, a Thursday, and there is a possibility that it would hit Earth, the international astronomical agency that tallies the orbits of asteroids and comets announced yesterday.

Dr. Brian G. Marsden, director of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, Mass., cautioned in an interview that calculations of the asteroid's progress are approximate and that there is no immediate cause for alarm.

It is impossible to calculate the odds of an impact, Dr. Marsden said. But he appealed to astronomers with large telescopes to measure the asteroid's brightness and size, estimated to be as large as a mile in diameter, and to refine measurements of its orbit.

There is ample evidence that Earth has been frequently bombarded by asteroids and comets, some of which may have contributed to mass extinctions.

Many scientists say they believe that the impact of an asteroid or comet about six miles in diameter on the coast of the Yucatn Peninsula 65 million years ago (releasing some 5 billion times more destructive energy than the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima) contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Next Dennis made fun of this front page NY Times article:

New Report Says Single-Sex Education Is Not a Good Solution

By TAMAR LEWIN

The American Association of University Women, whose 1992 report asserting that public schools shortchange girls led to increased interest in girls' schools and experiments with girls-only math and science classes, now says that single-sex education is not a good solution to the problems of gender equity.

In a new report, "Separated by Sex: A Critical Look at Single-Sex Education for Girls," to be released Thursday, the AAUW found no overall evidence that single-sex education was better for girls than coeducation.

In the last few years, scattered public schools in New York, Virginia, Maine, New Hampshire, Illinois and California have created single-sex classes or all-girls' schools, like the two-year-old Young Women's Leadership Academy in Harlem.

The impetus for most of these efforts came from the national soul-searching caused by the AAUW's original report, which described routine discrimination against girls by teachers, textbooks and male students. Girls and boys begin school with equal skills, the report said, but by high school girls fell behind, particularly in math and science.

Dennis Prager says that boys and girls are wired differently. Girls are more interested in stories, boys in abstract subjects like math and science. Girls are more interested in real people and real life… It is not boys picking on girls, or sexist textbooks, or teachers calling on boys more often.

Prager owns one rooster and seven hens.

Prager says that the main reason that students do well in school is values.

Feminists don't know what they want, says DP. Do they want to be like men or like women? Do they want career success or marriage most?

Prager noted that feminists seem to want girls to be anywhere boys are. There are suits to allow girls into the boys scouts but there are no suits to get boys into the girls scouts.

A caller said that the Japanese have more understanding of these innate difference. Japanese men are allowed to go to massage parlors and prostitutes. Prager thought this was bad. He said Japanese women have a subservient role, not just a different one.

Next caller said that if wives appreciated how much more husbands have to struggle to stay faithful, it would aid fidelity. Prager says that men should get more credit for remaining sexually faithful than women.

A woman said she was going to give her husband more credit, and will stop yelling at him for leaving his clothes on the floor.

Prager was amused by the studies that seek to find biological bases for homosexual behavior, while ignoring the biological bases for different behaviors between the sexes.

A caller said women are able to meet many of their needs for intimacy through the course of an ordinary day through conversation, nonsexual touching, hugs… while men are not allowed by society to do that. Men have to be tough and earn a good living and protect the home. Prager denied this.

Psychologist John Grey, however, the author of the MARS AND VENUS books, points out that men usually need sex to fully open up emotionally and allow them to feel. Men tend to toughen themselves up to get through the workday. Women usually require emotional intimacy before sex, while men usually can only fully achieve it after sex.

At 1:08PM, Prager discussed a couple who used a surrogate mother. She was not given an egg from the future mother nor sperm from the future father, but she was given an anonymous egg and anonymous sperm.

The future parents divorced however before the girl was born and he wanted nothing to do with the kid. A judge sided with him.

Then a Fourth District Court of Appeals overruled the judge. The future parents are the parents. They have responsibilities. JC would never have been born if the future parents had not had an egg implanted in the surrogate mother.

Prager was thrilled with this latest ruling.

He wondered why the couple did not adopt a child? Prager thought it might be the fear that many couples have now that courts will go for blood parents.

In a related story, Newsday:

It started out like any love story, with two people giddy and heady and ready to take on the whole world. "I'm crazy mad in love with you," she said in a message left on his answering machine, he recalled. "I want to have your child." But the children never came, not even after years of fertility treatments.

Now, 10 years after the wedding, Steven and Maureen Kass of Amityville, an ordinary couple who wanted nothing more extraordinary than children, are embroiled in a legal tug-of-war over the most intimate joint property: the minuscule beginnings of five test tube babies, formed of her eggs fertilized by his sperm and frozen for future use. Maureen wants to use the embryos to get pregnant. She is 40, and this may be her only chance to have a child. Steven wants the embryos destroyed. He is 37, he and Maureen have been divorced for five years, and he no longer wants the emotional or financial ties that would come from children with Maureen. He wants to get on with his life.

Prager wondered if kids will now want to search for their anonymous sperm donor or egg donor or surrogate mother?

Who masturbated into a cup for money?

3-10-98 AP:

SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) - A couple who hired a surrogate to carry an artificially conceived baby caused the girl's birth and are as much her parents as they would be if she were born the usual way, a court ruled.

The father of Jaycee Louise Buzzanca, now almost 3, therefore must pay child support to his ex-wife, the 4th District Court of Appeal said Tuesday.

Jaycee was born to a surrogate mother impregnated with egg and sperm from anonymous donors on behalf of John and Louise Buzzanca.

Buzzanca filed for divorce in March 1995, a month before the baby was born. He had argued that he shouldn't be legally responsible for the child because Ms. Buzzanca hadn't adopted her and didn't give birth to her.

A caller said that he found at age 21 he was adopted. He was relieved, because his parents died young, and he did not want their genes. He looked for and found his biological mother and found out that she was a flake.

DP: Why were you not curious about the birth father? This shows that it is all emotional.

Prager told the story about a mother and daughter separated at birth who were reunited forty years later in a tearful moment splashed all over the Israeli press. A couple of weeks later a story appeared that said there had been a mistake, and the mother and daughter were not related.

NEWSDAY:

Was Daughter Snatched? / Test rejects Israeli woman's claim of motherhood

COMBINED NEWS SERVICES

Jerusalem - New genetic tests prove that a California woman is not the daughter of a Yemeni immigrant to Israel whose baby vanished almost 50 years ago, the Health Ministry said yesterday. The women rejected the report.

Two months after a widely publicized "reunion" in an alleged case of baby-snatching, the ministry said the national Forensic Institute had determined without a doubt that Margalit Amosi and Tsila Levine were not mother and daughter. Relying on earlier genetic tests conducted by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the women in August joyously accepted each other as mother and daughter, ending a search that had occupied most of their lives.

They said their tragedy began nearly 50 years ago, when Israeli authorities allegedly snatched babies from Yemeni immigrants and gave them to European-born Jews to raise.

"If it is brought to court, [Levine] is not [Amosi's] daughter," Health Ministry Director-General Gabi Barbash told Israel Radio after receiving the new findings from the Forensic Institute. Levine said she would not be denied her newfound mother. "I invite the entire world to be happy with us, and if someone does not want to participate, I very much ask that they don't bother me," she told Israel's army radio.

"She is my daughter," Amosi told Israel Television, tears welling in her eyes. Levine, speaking from her home in Sacramento, Calif., said Hebrew University had twice conducted genetic tests that proved a biological link between her and Amosi. Dr. Yehuda Hiss, head of the Forensic Institute, said the university's tests were inaccurate and his scientists followed procedures used by the FBI and Britain's Scotland Yard. "Why today should I trust information from the Health Ministry, the same people who fifty years ago knew and oversaw the disappearance of the Yemeni children and those of other communities?" Levine said. "The results are not reliable."

Israelis of Yemeni origin have long claimed authorities took hundreds of infants who were in hospital between 1948 and 1950. The birth mothers said they were told the children had died. Rabbi Menachem Porush, once a political kingpin and of European descent, said in September that baby snatching had occurred. "Large families arrived from Yemen, but we took their children," he said.

The families immigrated as part of Israel's "Operation Magic Carpet," in which more than 50,000 Jews were airlifted to the nascent Jewish state and settled in crowded shantytowns. Porush said those who knew of the abduction-adoptions were social workers and officials of leftist parties who wanted to save the infants from the tough conditions the immigrants faced. A state commission is investigating the cases.

An earlier inquiry in 1994 after six years of work said most of the missing children had died of disease. Levine's adoptive parents are deceased. She married an American and has lived in the United States for 18 years. She said it was time for Israel to end her pain. "The country betrayed me fifty years ago . . . If an injured bird fell on your porch, would you destroy it or would you heal it so that it could return to its flock? Where is my flock?"

A caller accused Prager of misrepresenting a New York Times article that quoted her, about anonymous sperm donation. Prager denies that ethnicity has genes. He says that a child from Hispanic origins is in no way different from a child from Scandinavian origins. DP refused to read the controversial 1994 book THE BELL CURVE, and he refuses to investigate evidence to the contrary of his view, because he believes so strongly that blood aka genes does not matter.

Prager has said on the radio that the one area he is not interested in truth, is in regard to whether there is a genetic aka ethnic aka racial basis to intelligence.

From a recent Jerusalem Post on a related topic:

A sense of euphoria has been wafting through the hallways of the maternity ward in Haifa's Rambam Hospital ever since last week's delivery of twins. The babies were the first in Israel to be born to a woman who has no genetic link to her children - the nation's first surrogate mother.

The delivery, by cesarean section, "was an unbelievably emotional experience," said Dr. Yosef Itskovitz, who headed the Rambam team. "We are all still walking on air."

But what was indeed a significant medical milestone also represents the opening of a Pandora's box of legal, ethical and emotional questions. As reproductive medical science forges ahead, societal attitudes regarding families lag behind. Most of us are still far from being completely comfortable with the reality that a couple's fertilized egg may now be carried inside the womb of a woman who is being paid for the service, a woman who knows that once the baby she has nurtured inside her body is born, her relationship with the infant is formally over.

The sensitivity of the situation was not lost on the medical team at Rambam. Some wept when they took the newborns away from the distressed surrogate mother. She had told her doctors that she did not want to look at them.

Itskovitz admits that, pleased as he is with his breakthrough, and even as he prepares to work with additional couples who have been approved for surrogacy by a government committee - 15 have been given the go-ahead - he still has some reservations about the whole process.

"From a medical point of view, it is just so fantastic to help couples who have been struggling for so long to have children. These are very frustrating cases medically - where we have eggs, sperm, and the woman simply does not have the ability to carry the child," Itskovitz says.

Dennis Prager devoted his third hour to the new book CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD. Prager has not read the book, but what he has learned about it bothers him.

( Gannett News Service )

God exists and talks to people.

Literally.

About five years ago, Neale Donald Walsch says, at a particularly difficult point in his life, the deity began talking to