in the u.s. there are roughly 3 million unintended pregnancies...,

engenderhealth |  The unintended pregnancy rate in the United States is significantly higher than in many other developed countries. Currently, about half (51%) of the 6.6 million pregnancies in the United States each year are unintended. Unintended pregnancies among adolescents are particularly high in Texas. Today, Texas teens are less likely than their national peers to use condoms, oral contraceptives, or any other method of contraception during sexual intercourse. Each year, more than 76,000 Texas girls between the ages of 15 and 19 become pregnant, giving the state the third highest teenage pregnancy rate in the United States. Despite these growing numbers, many public schools in Texas teach an abstinence-only curriculum, leaving a large number of teens without the sexual and reproductive health information they desperately need.

EngenderHealth is working to change this. In Travis County, where the teen pregnancy rate exceeds that of the state’s, we work directly with young people between the ages of 14 and 16 who are at a high risk of becoming teen parents. And in both Austin and Dallas, we are partnering with Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas to educate young people about how traditional gender norms and intimate partner violence can influence their risk of pregnancy. Our work in Texas equips teens with the tools they need to make smart decisions about their sexual and reproductive health and to determine their own futures.

what has america come to when its third-world hoochies cain't even sell tail to feed their kids?

dailymail |  The waitresses who were working at a Texas restaurant when a massive gunfight broke out over the weekend are revealing the terror they felt as bullets began to fly.

The women, all employees at Twin Peaks sports bar in Waco, have taken to social media to share stories of hiding in freezers, running in fear and their belief that this tragedy could have possibly been prevented in the first place.

And now, after enduring this horrific scene, they all find themselves unemployed.

'What we went through Sunday was scary as s**t,' wrote Alicia Ortiz on her Facebook page. 

'I wouldn’t want to have gone through it with anyone else. Being in that freezer with y’all made me see how much of a family we really are.'

She also bemoaned the fact that the restaurant has been closed down in the wake of the incident, and what that means for the staff.

'So the whole restaurant needs to be shut down because of bad management? Peoples jobs need to be lost because of bad management?' she wrote

'We are getting the short end of the stick. And people are blaming all of Twin Peaks like we knew what was going to happen.'

Another employee, Sara Violet Parker, seemed to echo Ortiz's comment, writing on her Facebook; 'Twin Peaks is not to blame, my heart is so heavy for all of my friends who were scared for their lives. Now we are worried none of us have jobs, with bills to pay and some have children to provide for.'

waco overseers dealt directly with breastaurant management, not the breastaurant community...,

WaPo |  Two days after nine people were shot and killed at the Twin Peaks restaurant here, Oddissie Garza can’t seem to shake a single, unnerving thought:

“I was supposed to be there,” she told The Washington Post on Tuesday as she lingered on her porch in a solemn mood. “That keeps running through my mind. I was supposed to be right there at the front where all the fighting was.”

Garza, an easygoing 18-year-old with a shock of pink hair, was often the first person customers saw when they walked into Twin Peaks. She began working at the new restaurant in September as a waitress and was promoted to hostess five months later, placing her just past the front door at the restaurant.

“It was my first job and I was nervous in the beginning, but I found out I had a bunch of sisters in plaid,” she said, referring to the servers’ infamous uniform. “After I got pregnant, I kept this job because of the other girls.”

When she thinks about Sunday’s violence she is less concerned with her own safety than the person she would have been carrying with her. Garza is eight months pregnant with a baby boy, a fact that may have saved her life, she said.

After a long shift on her feet Saturday night, Garza’s legs were swelling and she asked a co-worker if they could trade shifts the next morning.

Her co-worker agreed. The next time she heard from anyone at the restaurant was when they were locked in a freezer as gunfire erupted. Garza got a call from her mother saying something — possibly a shooting — had occurred at work. She immediately texted her friends at Twin Peaks, hoping the rumor was some sort of joke.

overseers struggling with their loss of privilege..,

NYTimes |  Early this year, Megan E. Green, a St. Louis alderwoman, met with officials of a local police union to discuss a proposal for a civilian oversight board that would look into accusations of police misconduct. After Ms. Green refused to soften her support for the proposal, the union backed an aggressive mailing campaign against her.

But Ms. Green won her primary with over 70 percent of the vote, and the Board of Aldermen approved the oversight board by a large margin. “All that stuff backfired,” Ms. Green said. “The more they attacked me for it, the more people seemed to rally around me.”

During the urban crime epidemic of the 1970s and ’80s and the sharp decline in crime that began in the 1990s, the unions representing police officers in many cities enjoyed a nearly unassailable political position. Their opposition could cripple political candidates and kill police-reform proposals in gestation.

But amid a rash of high-profile encounters involving allegations of police overreach in New York, Baltimore, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and North Charleston, S.C., the political context in which the police unions have enjoyed a privileged position is rapidly changing. And the unions are struggling to adapt.

“There was a time in this country when elected officials — legislators, chief executives — were willing to contextualize what police do,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and prosecutor who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “And that time is mostly gone.”

clintons can't tell you what they're peddling, but the ex hon.bro.preznit just got the good negroe franchise...,

NYTimes |  In the aftermath of racially charged unrest in places like Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and New York, Mr. Obama came to the Bronx on Monday for the announcement of a new nonprofit organization that is being spun off from his White House initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Staked by more than $80 million in commitments from corporations and other donors, the new group, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, will in effect provide the nucleus for Mr. Obama’s post-presidency, which will begin in January 2017.

“This will remain a mission for me and for Michelle not just for the rest of my presidency but for the rest of my life,” Mr. Obama said. “And the reason is simple,” he added. Referring to some of the youths he had just met, he said: “We see ourselves in these young men. I grew up without a dad. I grew up lost sometimes and adrift, not having a sense of a clear path. The only difference between me and a lot of other young men in this neighborhood and all across the country is that I grew up in an environment that was a little more forgiving.”

Organizers said the new alliance already had financial pledges from companies like American Express, Deloitte, Discovery Communications and News Corporation. The money will be used to help companies address obstacles facing young black and Hispanic men, provide grants to programs for disadvantaged youths, and help communities aid their populations.

Joe Echevarria, a former chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, will lead the alliance, and among those on its leadership team or advisory group are executives at PepsiCo, News Corporation, Sprint, BET and Prudential Group Insurance; former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey; former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; the music star John Legend; the retired athletes Alonzo Mourning, Jerome Bettis and Shaquille O’Neal; and the mayors of Indianapolis, Sacramento and Philadelphia.

The alliance, while nominally independent of the White House, may face some of the same questions confronting former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins another presidential campaign. Some of those donating to the alliance may have interests in government action, and skeptics may wonder whether they are trying to curry favor with the president by contributing.

“The Obama administration will have no role in deciding how donations are screened and what criteria they’ll set at the alliance for donor policies, because it’s an entirely separate entity,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One en route to New York. But he added, “I’m confident that the members of the board are well aware of the president’s commitment to transparency.”

bill o'lielly declares "it's open season on christians and white men...,

TPM |  Fox News host Bill O'Reilly said Monday night that Hillary Clinton has an edge in the 2016 presidential election because white men and Christians are under attack in the U.S.

"Working Americans are still struggling to make money in the marketplace and our traditional American values are under siege nearly everywhere. If you’re a Christian or a white man in the U.S.A., it’s open season on you. Therefore Hillary Clinton has an advantage," he said on "The O'Reilly Factor."

O'Reilly added that he will be "fair" but "tough" to Clinton during the election.

"I don’t think gender matters one bit, and if this war on women business is resurrected, we’ll have something to say about it," he said.

He also warned Clinton against aligning with "smear merchants" like Media Matters.

Watch the clip via Media Matters:

good thing melissa was there to save you bra, bet you cried inconsolably in your pillow...,

wkamaubell |  Quickly Melissa gathered herself and our daughter and we left. Much sooner than we would have wanted to in a perfect world… or even in just a kind of okay world. Melissa talked to your employee. Melissa explained that although we had eaten there twice that day and even though she loved the Elmwood Cafe that we would not be back after the racism that we had just experienced.

That’s when your employee told my wife, “I don’t think it was a race thing.”

Ummm… actually a black man being told to leave a restaurant because the restaurant believes that his presence is harassing four white women and their kids, even though there is literally no evidence to support that is TEXT BOOK racism. It is so old school it has a wing in the racism museum, right between the sit-ins at lunch counters and a southern redneck telling a black man on a business trip, “You ain’t from around here, are ya, boy?” My wife told your employee in no uncertain terms that we ABSOLUTELY knew it WAS a race thing, because we live with this shit everyday. Full disclosure, I heard about this exchange after it happened when we were headed home. While my wife was talking to your employee, I was cooing at my daughter in the car, for two reasons. 1) I love my daughter’s fat cheeks and big hazel eyes. And 2) I knew if I stood over my wife with my 6’4”, 250lb frame that it could very easily be spun that I was standing over your employee, and maybe that I was trying to intimidate her, or even worse that I was getting aggressive. I didn’t want to end up a hashtag. Again, we live with this shit everyday.

And look I understand that on College Avenue in “Berserkeley” that you might get some characters coming through your establishment that you might not want to serve. And it is your right to refuse service. For example, when we had breakfast that morning, there was a white guy with dreadlocks sitting directly across from your doorway spare change-ing everyone who went into and out of your restaurant. And I could understand if a business thought he was bothering people and if that business had asked him to leave. But he was there the entire time we had breakfast, at least an hour, and I didn’t see anyone tell him to, “SCRAM!” But when I stood amicably talking to my wife for a few minutes, it was a different story.

should I reconsider my disdain for the lowly sex-worker?

yahoo |  We already know plenty about Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, by the numbers the worst owner in major professional sports and the target of a torrent of lawsuits regarding his off-court business dealings and conduct. But what about the other alleged voice on the tape? What do we know about V. Stiviano, Sterling's frequent guest at Clippers games?

Her real name is Vivian. Perhaps. Stiviano changed her name from Vanessa Maria Perez in 2010, claiming in court filings that she had not "yet been fully accepted because of my race." She claims to be of both Hispanic and African-American descent."One day I will look back at Instagram & say,'I've been there & I've done that.' I do it all," she says on her Instagram page, billing herself as "Artist,Lover,Writer,Chef,Poet, Stylist, Philanthropist." Of note: a lawsuit filed against her by Sterling's wife (more on this later) names her as "V Stiviano, aka Vanessa Maria Perez, aka Monica Gallegos, aka Maria Monica Perez Gallegos, aka Maria Valdez.”

She's a social-media maven. The popularity of her Instagram page, the source of this latest controversy, has exploded, and now stands at more than 144,000 followers. That makes this a bad time for her website to be simply a parked GoDaddy domain.

She is the target of a lawsuit from Sterling's wife. Most of the information about the 31-year-old Stiviano derives from court papers related to a lawsuit filed by the 80-year-old Sterling's estranged wife Rochelle. The lawsuit, filed in March, claims that Sterling met Stiviano at the Super Bowl in 2010, and that Stiviano “engages in conduct designed to target, befriend, seduce and then entice, cajole, borrow from, cheat and/or receive as gifts transfers of wealth from wealthy older men.” The suit charges that Rochelle Sterling believed the $1.8 million duplex in which Stiviano now resides was being purchased in the Sterlings' names, and that Stiviano has received gifts including four cars (two Bentleys, one Ferrari, and one Range Rover) and about $240,000 in "living expenses." The allegation, then, is that Donald Sterling gave Stiviano about $2 million in community property without Rochelle Sterling's knowledge.

She claims she didn't release the tape to TMZ. Stiviano's attorney, Mac Nehoray, said in a statement that Stiviano "did not release the tape to any news media. Due to the present litigation [from Rochelle Sterling] and its absurd allegations, which Ms. Stiviano vehemently denies, Ms. Stiviano and this office have no comments at this time.”

She hasn't admitted to being Sterling's girlfriend. "Neither Ms. Stiviano, nor this office has ever alleged that Ms. Stiviano is, or ever was, Mr. Sterling's girlfriend," Nehoray said in a statement. Stiviano further countered Rochelle Sterling's claims that she bewitched Sterling, saying in court papers that it was absurd to believe the "feminine wiles of Ms. Stiviano overpowered the iron will of Donald T. Sterling who is well known as one of the most shrewd businessmen in the world." However, she has been listed as a director of the Donald T. Sterling Foundation.

national association for the advancement of certain people been licking and sucking them crusty toes for years...,

IBT | In a tweet Saturday evening, the California state NAACP, said: "As the investigation is in progress, we urge the LA Branch of the NAACP to withdraw Donald Sterling from the honoree list." The president of the California state NAACP, Alice Huffman, said, "Racism is not a footnote of our past but a reality of our present we must confront head on."

Despite Sterling's long history of racism, he has been honored twice previously by the NAACP's Los Angeles chapter. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009, shortly after former Clippers general manager, Elgin Baylor, filed an employment discrimination claim against him. Sterling also received the NAACP Presidents Award in 2008.

The branch's president, Leon Jenkins, attempted in 2009 to explain why the august civil rights group would honor a man many consider a racist. Jenkins began, by telling the Los Angeles Times, that the NAACP's Los Angeles chapter had planned to honor Sterling long before Baylor’s lawsuit. Seeming to sense the inadequacy of that response, Jenkins added the Clippers owner and real estate mogul's years of service to Los Angeles minority community.

“He has a unique history of giving to the children of L.A.,” Jenkins told the Los Angeles Times, then. "We can't speak to the allegations, but what we do know is that for the most part [Sterling] has been very, very kind to the minority youth community."

Sterling is no stranger to racism accusations and has settled several discrimination lawsuits. He settled a lawsuit confidentially in 2005 that accused him of discriminating against black and Hispanic tenants at properties he owned. In another housing discrimination lawsuit in 2009, he paid $2.7 million to settle the claim. Sterling denied wrongdoing and said the settlement wasn't an admission of guilt, according to the L.A. Times.

where's olivia pope when cliven needs her most?

wired |  Chris Cuomo: Are you a racist?

Cliven Bundy: No, I'm not a racist. But I did wonder that. Let me tell you something. I thought about this this morning quite a bit.

CC: Please.

CB: I thought about what Reverend Martin Luther King said. I thought about Rosa Park taking her seat at the front of the bus. Reverend Martin Luther King did not want her to take her seat in the front of the bus. That wasn't what he was talking about. He did not say go to the front of the bus and that's where your seat was. What Reverend King wanted was that she could sit anywhere in the bus and nobody would say anything about it. You and I can sit anywhere in the bus. That's what he wanted. That's what I want. I want her to be able to sit anywhere in the bus and I want to be able to sit by her any where in that bus. That's what he wanted. He didn't want this prejudice thing like the media tried to put on me yesterday. I'm not going to put up with that because that's not what he wanted. that's not what I want. I want to set by her anywhere on that bus and I want anybody to be able to do the same thing. That's what he was after, it's not a prejudice thing, but make us equal.

"I understand that Martin Luther King's message was one of peace and freedom," Cuomo said in reply, adding, "when you suggest that you were wondering if blacks were better off as slaves, that's the opposite of freedom and very offensive to people. I think you probably know that." He probably does not. Bundy continued (once again, emphasis ours): 

I  took this boot off so I wouldn't put my foot in my mouth with the boot on. Let me see if I can say something. Maybe I sinned and maybe I need to ask forgiveness and maybe I don't know what I actually said. But you know when you talk about prejudice, we're talking about not being able to exercise what we think and our feelings. We're not freedom — we don't have freedom to say what we want. If I call — if I say 'negro' or 'black boy' or 'slave,' I'm — If those people cannot take those kind of words and not be offensive, then Martin Luther King hasn't got his job done yet. They should be able to — I should be able to say those things and they shouldn't offend anybody. I didn't mean to offend them.

The pair went on to argue for most of the remainder of the lengthy interview about race, about Bundy's decision to show a dead calf on air, and about the Constitution. The exchange, to be honest, progresses rather quickly from shockingly offensive to the ramblings of an old man out of his depth. We think this snippet sums things up nicely: 

CB: I don't even know how to talk about these ethnic groups.

CC: Then don't.

CB: But I'm going to because I'm interested in those people. I think they should have freedom and liberty.

virgin births on the rise all across the u.s.

care2 | A new population analysis says that a significant number of women from all over the United States are claiming that they have fallen pregnant without having sex. What does this study tell us about these women, and why so many are claiming virgin births?

Researchers at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that a small but significant number of young women (o.5%) are claiming to have fallen pregnant without having sex or IVF fertility treatment.

The analysis, published recently in the British Medical Journal, involved data collected from 7,870 women and girls aged between 15 to 28, as part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (1995-2009). The study is specifically designed to span the time between adolescence into adulthood. Due to its large scale sampling methods, it gives us representative data of the entire U.S. population.

The study involved young women self-reporting on a variety of things, including their history of vaginal intercourse and pregnancy, as well as their knowledge of birth control methods, and their religious affiliation. The data was gathered through regular questionnaires that the young women would fill out on a laptop rather than in a face to face interview (though an assistant was on hand in the room should the women need it).

The subjects’ parents were also quizzed about how much they discussed sex and birth control, and their school’s administration was also asked about what role sex education played in the curriculum.

What the researchers found was that the women who claimed to have fallen pregnant without having sex shared some similarities.

About 31% of the women claiming to have had a virgin pregnancy had signed a chastity pledge, compared to only 15% of the women who admitted to having sex.

What’s more, the 45 self-described virgins who got pregnant and the 36 who later gave birth also said that their parents had rarely talked to them about sex or birth control, if at all.

The study found that the women claiming to be virgin mothers were on average two years younger than their non virgin counterparts (19.3 years as opposed to 21.7 years). Also, around 28% of the virgin mothers had parents who claimed they couldn’t discuss sex and contraception with their daughters because they themselves didn’t have enough knowledge. That’s compared to just 5% among the women who became pregnant and admitted to having sex.

the rot has set in sooooo deep.....,

nydailynews | Chiara de Blasio, the daughter of Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and incoming first lady Chirlane McCray, revealed Tuesday that she has battled depression and substance abuse.

In a five-minute video released the day before Christmas by the de Blasio transition team, the 19-year-old college sophomore detailed her struggles with depression, drugs and alcohol and how she ultimately conquered them.

The disclosure followed months of rumors surrounding the soon-to-be first daughter that the de Blasio camp repeatedly declined to address. By making and releasing the video, the de Blasio family was able to tell the sensitive story on its own terms.

The highly produced video simply features Chiara de Blasio talking as piano-and-string music is heard in the background.

po thangs...,

when try'na impress a skeezer and reckless teabaggery go wrong...,

NYTimes | Mr. Humphries, who was identified on Wednesday by law enforcement colleagues, took the initial complaint from Jill Kelley, a Tampa woman active in local military circles and a personal friend, about anonymous e-mails that accused her of inappropriately flirtatious behavior toward Mr. Petraeus.

The subsequent cyberstalking investigation uncovered an extramarital affair between Mr. Petraeus and Paula Broadwell, his biographer, who agents determined had sent the anonymous e-mails. It also ensnared Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, after F.B.I. agents discovered what a law enforcement official said on Wednesday were sexually explicit e-mail exchanges between him and Ms. Kelley.

A spokesman for Ms. Kelley provided her version of events in two conference calls with reporters on Wednesday. Ms. Kelley’s concern when she took the e-mails to Mr. Humphries was that she feared the sender was “stalking” Mr. Petraeus and General Allen, said the spokesman, who asked not to be identified.

“She asks the agent, ‘What do you make of this?’ ” the spokesman said. “The agent said: ‘This is serious. They seem to know the comings and goings of a couple of generals.’ ”

General Allen himself had received a similar anonymous e-mail message, sent by someone identified as “kelleypatrol,” advising him to stay away from Ms. Kelley. The general forwarded it to Ms. Kelley, and they discussed a concern that someone was cyberstalking them.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said he had asked the Senate to postpone a confirmation hearing for General Allen’s next assignment while the department’s inspector general reviewed his e-mail correspondence with Ms. Kelley, which was discovered by F.B.I. agents investigating her initial complaint.

Pentagon officials said the review covered more than 10,000 pages of documents that included “inappropriate” messages. But associates of General Allen have said that the two exchanged about a dozen e-mails a week since meeting two years ago and that his messages were affectionate but platonic.

A law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, disputed that assertion on Wednesday, saying some messages were clearly sexual. Investigators were confident “the nature of the content warranted passing them on” to the inspector general, the official said.

did a female burro commit suicide?

psychologytoday | Every now and again someone asks me if nonhuman animals (animals) commit suicide. This past weekend I gave two lectures as part of the Collegiate Peaks Forum Series in Buena Vista, Colorado and after I talked about grief and mourning in a wide variety of species (see also) someone in the audience asked me this question. My answer was that there are some good observations of animals seemingly taking their own lives in situations when one might expect a human to take his or her own life. For example, it's been suggested that whales intentionally beach themselves to end their lives, highly stressed elephants step on their trunks or jump over a cliff to end prolonged pain (see also), and cats stressed out by earthquakes kill themselves.

Opinions vary from "yes they do" to "perhaps they do" to "no they don't" (see also). Some say animals don't have the same concept of death that we have and don't know that their lives will end when they do something to stop breathing.

Burro suicide?

After one of my talks in Buena Vista one of the women in the audience, Cathy Manning, told me a very simple but compelling story about a burro who seemed to kill herself. Cathy knew a female burro who gave birth to a baby with a harelip. The infant couldn't be revived and Cathy watched the mother walk into a lake and drown. It's known that various equines including horses and donkeys grieve the loss of others (see and and) so I didn't find this story to be inconsistent with what is known about these highly emotional beings.

I think it's too early to make any definite statements about whether animals commit suicide but this does not mean they don't grieve and mourn the loss of family and friends. What they're thinking when they're deeply sadded when another animal dies isn't clear but it's obvious that a wide variety of animals suffer the loss of family and friends. Cathy's story made me rethink the question if animals commit suicide and I hope this brief story opens the door for some good discussion about thie intriguing possibility. As some of my colleagues and I have stressed, we must pay attention to stories and hope they will stimulate more research in a given area.

female sex-slaves just make sense

Video - Kuwaiti politician on the benefits of having sex slaves.

IBT | A female Kuwaiti politician called for the legalization of the sex slavery, saying it would protect "decent, devout and virile Kuwaiti men" from adultery. It would keep them from the temptation of being seduced by another woman's beauty.

Salwa al Mutairi, a social activist who once ran for parliament, suggested bringing in female prisoners from war-torn countries, as it would be a "better life" for them, and they would not die of starvation.

Mutairi maintains there is "no shame in it and it is not haram (forbidden) under Islamic Sharia law."

To justify her claim, Mutairi cites an 8th century Muslim leader Haroun al-Rashid, who is rumoured to have had 2,000 mistresses.

In a recent visit to Mecca, she asked Muslim religious scholars what the Islamic ruling was on owning sex slaves, and was told that it is NOT haram.

Therefore, Mutairi claims, the ruling was confirmed by 'specialized people of the faith'.

"They said, that's right, the only solution for a decent man who has the means, who is overpowered by desire and who does not want to commit fornication, is to acquire jawari." Jawari is a plural form of the Arabic term 'sex slave'

She explains "For example, in the Chechnyan war, surely there are female Russian captives.

"So go and buy those and sell them here in Kuwait. Better than to have our men engage in forbidden sexual relations."

Mutairi detailed her proposal further, recommending that sex trade offices could operate the same way that recruitment agencies provide housemaids. And to "consider" the woman's feelings, the female prisoner should be at least 15 years old.

According to the politician, free women must be married with a contract, but with concubines, "the man just buys her and that's it."

Her suggestions, which went public via a Youtube video, brought in heavy criticism from fellow Kuwaitis and people around the world.

One person tweeted to Mutairi, "you're a disgrace to women everywhere."

Despite criticism, Mutairi insists, "I don't see any problem in this, no problem at all."

facing factors he can no longer control...,

Video - Part 1 of a long, gassy 9 part Farrakhan-type tirade...,

The Independent | So he will go down fighting. That's what Muammar Gaddafi told us last night, and most Libyans believe him. This will be no smooth flight to Riyadh or a gentle trip to a Red Sea holiday resort. Raddled, cowled in desert gowns, he raved on.

He had not even begun to use bullets against his enemies – a palpable lie – and "any use of force against the authority of the state shall be punished by death", in itself a palpable truth which Libyans knew all too well without the future tense of Gaddafi's threat. On and on and on he ranted. Like everything Gaddafi, it was very impressive – but went on far too long.

He cursed the people of Benghazi who had already liberated their city – "just wait until the police return to restore order", this dessicated man promised without a smile. His enemies were Islamists, the CIA, the British and the "dogs" of the international press. Yes, we are always dogs, aren't we? I was long ago depicted in a Bahraini newspaper cartoon (Crown Prince, please note) as a rabid dog, worthy of liquidation. But like Gaddafi's speeches, that's par for the course. And then came my favourite bit of the whole Gaddafi exegesis last night: HE HADN'T EVEN BEGUN TO USE VIOLENCE YET!

So let's erase all the YouTubes and Facebooks and the shooting and blood and gouged corpses from Benghazi, and pretend it didn't happen. Let's pretend that the refusal to give visas to foreign correspondents has actually prevented us from hearing the truth. Gaddafi's claim that the protesters in Libya – the millions of demonstrators – "want to turn Libya into an Islamic state" is exactly the same nonsense that Mubarak peddled before the end in Egypt, the very same nonsense that Obama and La Clinton have suggested. Indeed, there were times last night when Gaddafi – in his vengefulness, his contempt for Arabs, for his own people – began to sound very like the speeches of Benjamin Netanyahu. Was there some contact between these two rogues, one wondered, that we didn't know about?

In many ways, Gaddafi's ravings were those of an old man, his fantasies about his enemies – "rats who have taken tablets" who included "agents of Bin Laden" – were as disorganised as the scribbled notes on the piece of paper he held in his right hand, let alone the green-covered volume of laws from which he kept quoting. It was not about love. It was about the threat of execution. "Damn those" trying to stir unrest against Libya. It was a plot, an international conspiracy. "Your children are dying – but for what?" He would fight "until the last drop of my blood with the Libyan people is behind me". America was the enemy (much talk of Fallujah), Israel was the enemy, Sadat was an enemy, colonial fascist Italy was the enemy. Among the heroes and friends was Gaddafi's grandfather, "who fell a martyr in 1911" against the Italian enemy.

Dressed in brown burnous and cap and gown, Gaddafi's appearance last night raised some odd questions. Having kept the international media – the "dogs" in question – out of Libya, he allowed the world to observe a crazed nation: YouTube and blogs of terrible violence versus state television pictures of an entirely unhinged dictator justifying what he had either not seen on YouTube or hadn't been shown. And there's an interesting question here: dictators and princes who let the international press into their countries – Messrs Ben Ali/Mubarak/Saleh/Prince Salman – are permitting it to film their own humiliation. Their reward is painful indeed. But sultans like Gaddafi who keep the journos out fare little different.

The hand-held immediacy of the mobile phone, the intimacy of sound and the crack of gunfire are in some ways more compelling than the edited, digital film of the networks. Exactly the same happened in Gaza when the Israelis decided, Gaddafi-like, to keep foreign journalists out of their 2009 bloodletting: the bloggers and YouTubers (and Al Jazeera) simply gave us a reality we didn't normally experience from the "professional" satellite boys. Perhaps, in the end, it takes a dictator with his own monopoly on cameras to tell the truth. "I will die as a martyr," Gaddafi said last night. Almost certainly true.

2045 the year man becomes immortal

Time | Of course, a lot of people think the Singularity is nonsense — a fantasy, wishful thinking, a Silicon Valley version of the Evangelical story of the Rapture, spun by a man who earns his living making outrageous claims and backing them up with pseudoscience. Most of the serious critics focus on the question of whether a computer can truly become intelligent.

The entire field of artificial intelligence, or AI, is devoted to this question. But AI doesn't currently produce the kind of intelligence we associate with humans or even with talking computers in movies — HAL or C3PO or Data. Actual AIs tend to be able to master only one highly specific domain, like interpreting search queries or playing chess. They operate within an extremely specific frame of reference. They don't make conversation at parties. They're intelligent, but only if you define intelligence in a vanishingly narrow way. The kind of intelligence Kurzweil is talking about, which is called strong AI or artificial general intelligence, doesn't exist yet.

Why not? Obviously we're still waiting on all that exponentially growing computing power to get here. But it's also possible that there are things going on in our brains that can't be duplicated electronically no matter how many MIPS you throw at them. The neurochemical architecture that generates the ephemeral chaos we know as human consciousness may just be too complex and analog to replicate in digital silicon. The biologist Dennis Bray was one of the few voices of dissent at last summer's Singularity Summit. "Although biological components act in ways that are comparable to those in electronic circuits," he argued, in a talk titled "What Cells Can Do That Robots Can't," "they are set apart by the huge number of different states they can adopt. Multiple biochemical processes create chemical modifications of protein molecules, further diversified by association with distinct structures at defined locations of a cell. The resulting combinatorial explosion of states endows living systems with an almost infinite capacity to store information regarding past and present conditions and a unique capacity to prepare for future events." That makes the ones and zeros that computers trade in look pretty crude. (See how to live 100 years.)

Underlying the practical challenges are a host of philosophical ones. Suppose we did create a computer that talked and acted in a way that was indistinguishable from a human being — in other words, a computer that could pass the Turing test. (Very loosely speaking, such a computer would be able to pass as human in a blind test.) Would that mean that the computer was sentient, the way a human being is? Or would it just be an extremely sophisticated but essentially mechanical automaton without the mysterious spark of consciousness — a machine with no ghost in it? And how would we know?

Even if you grant that the Singularity is plausible, you're still staring at a thicket of unanswerable questions. If I can scan my consciousness into a computer, am I still me? What are the geopolitics and the socioeconomics of the Singularity? Who decides who gets to be immortal? Who draws the line between sentient and nonsentient? And as we approach immortality, omniscience and omnipotence, will our lives still have meaning? By beating death, will we have lost our essential humanity?