Posted 11:06 PM by Blah blah

Religious Zeal Infused Yates' Lives, Testimony Shows (LA Times). News of the weirdos. Turns out Rusty Yates, engineer husband, was just as rigid as his wife Andrea was psycho:
_______________________
The cloistered household in which Andrea Pia Yates drowned her five children was laced with offbeat, even dangerous, religious zeal, according to testimony in Yates' capital murder trial Thursday.

It was a home in which the husband and wife stuck to traditional roles. It was a home in which medicine was frowned upon, school systems were unacceptable and institutional religion was a tool of evil. Doomsday leaflets mailed to the house gave hysterical warnings against demonic influences that threaten young children....

For two years before the Yates children were killed, Holmes had kept a diary chronicling Andrea Yates' condition "in case something bad happens."

"I called her husband crying and sobbing, saying she needs help now," said Holmes. "He'd say, 'I'll look into it.' I'd say, 'She's not going to make it through the weekend.' "

Holmes said Rusty Yates considered child care a woman's responsibility and refused to help his wife tend the children. "I'm not saying he didn't play with them or enjoy them, but as far as care for them, he didn't," Holmes said. "If the kids' faces or hands were dirty, he'd say, 'Wait till your mother comes.' "

Therapist Earline Wilcott counseled Andrea Yates for months in a Christian center. The only time she met Rusty Yates, he quoted from the Bible: Wives must submit to their husbands. "Sense of [Andrea Yates] being overwhelmed and trapped with no alternative," Wilcott jotted in her notes....

The religious tracts apparently wielded a heavy influence over the family's lifestyle. They were written by Michael Woroniecki, a preacher who roams college campuses with a message: "You are going to hell."

During his undergraduate years, Rusty Yates met Woroniecki on the grounds of Auburn University and the two struck up a friendship. They stayed in touch, and the preacher's wife exchanged letters with Andrea Yates.

The leaflets said women have a biblical duty to endure natural childbirth as a "humbling" rite of passage. Andrea Yates gave birth to all five of her children without the aid of medication.

The pamphlets also insisted on the importance of home schooling. While his wife sat catatonic in a mental hospital, Rusty Yates was out house-hunting. He had a stipulation: There had to be space for a home school, which was Andrea Yates' job. "The social interaction the world tells you is so important is exactly what you need to protect your children from," the leaflet reads.

The decision to abandon their first suburban house in favor of a nomadic life in trailer parks came after the birth of the Yates' two eldest children. The family lived for a time in a converted Greyhound bus Rusty Yates bought from the Woronieckis for $37,000. A pregnant Andrea Yates--who had recently miscarried--slept on a couch because she was afraid to climb over the steering wheel into the couple's bed, Holmes said.

[HELLO, Earth to Yates...anyone HOME? Sexist fundamentalist husband + mentally deranged wife = Hell.

Reminds me of one of my worst experiences. One summer I was taking care of disabled people and got this boy, maybe 10 years old. He suffered from a degenerative muscular disease that twisted his skinny legs and caused him constant, agonizing pain. He could neither walk nor stand long and spent most of his time lying in a stretcher. He was in such agony he'd scream throughout the night and keep the other campers and himself awake. I still remember me suffering along with him, sitting next to him massaging his legs night after night. One time I was up with him till 4 am massaging till I collapsed next to him in bed.

What infuriated me the most about him was not just his cruel disease, but his parents' beliefs. His parents were Christian Scientists. (I think this is the most ironic name because this belief has no basis in science!) Their religion strongly believes in faith healing, or healing through prayer alone. (Here's the Skeptic's Dictionary's entry on prayer and faith healing.) Basically his parents refused to go to the doctor and refused to let their son take pain medicine! The church of Christian Science has been sued several times, by the way, in the death of children.

We had to honor their religion. All I could do was massage, grit my teeth, and close my eyes to the boy's cries of pain. Why did a boy have to, for the sake of "freedom of religion," suffer for the whims of his parents? I get this same sense of outrage when I hear about the Yates murders. Bah.]
_______________________
My God. What is the real story behind this? Man ambushed ex-boss, police say (San Jose Mercury News):

"Dr. Tanya Holzmayer, a pioneering scientist, was surprised Wednesday night to find a Domino's Pizza deliveryman at the front door of her Mountain View home. Moments later, a former colleague appeared out of the dark, shot her dead and ran off, police said. Guyang 'Matthew' Huang called his wife in Foster City with the news: I just killed my ex-boss. Now I'm going to kill myself....

Both Holzmayer, 46, and Huang, 38, were highly regarded in genetics.

She was a Russian-born genomic scientist who had co-invented a tool that has helped find hundreds of molecular targets to combat cancer and HIV. He was a brilliant scholar -- scoring 11th out of 230,000 students on his college entrance exams in China -- and an activist who fought for reform in his homeland once he came to the United States to study in 1986."

Geek's Startup Business Experiences (Slashdot):

FreshGroundPepper writes: "A few friends and I are in the process of starting up a new software company. (We are compiling our business plan now) With the vast amount of software/startup experience among the /. crowd, we were wondering what kind of potholes and advice our fellow geeks could lend in the way of generic do's and don'ts in the early stages of the game. I'm not looking for legal advice so much as just any gotchas that others have run into."

From Slopes to Salaries When the Olympics Are Over, Many Athletes See Challenges Finding Jobs (ABCNews): "Sure, a few standout athletes from this year's Olympic Games will likely be able to parlay their medals into endorsement dollars. Figure skating's newest sweetheart, gold medal winner Sarah Hughes, for instance, has already gotten her picture on a Wheaties box and many marketing pundits expect her to garner the lion's share of endorsers' attention this winter. But for the more than 200 other American athletes who competed in the Games, the euphoria of competing in the Olympics will soon come crashing up against the harsh realization that they need to find a job just like the rest of us."