I'd never understood how the medieval kings found it so easy to get the common people to hate the Jews in their midst. But if those medieval Jewish leaders were anything like the idiots running the ADL, the ACLU and the Council of Jews, one can see where the idea of persecuting them would have held some appeal.Gilliard would translate the above piece as "those kikes are all Commies and coming to eradicate our Christian way of life."
The problem is that whereas Christians have the benefit of what Paul describes in Ephesians as "the full armor of God" and are equipped to fight back against the super-psycho and his legions, Jews have little more than a promise that they will not be completely destroyed.
So, despite their differences on the Messiah's identity, Jews and Christians are on the same team. There is no great division between them, since God does not break His promises and He will keep those that He has made to both peoples.
(Emphasis mine.)According to Deen Gill, a member of Turning Point Christian Center in Vancouver, Wash., the topic of the region's spiritual vitality was raised by Christian author and international speaker Cindy Jacobs during a visit to Portland in early 2003. Gill said Jacobs spoke about the land in the Northwest being sickly. She also mentioned "ley lines" - a network of energy lines originating at spiritual power centers - that had been placed in a grid over the Seattle area by New Age proponents.
Gill did his own research and found that in 2000 a group called The Geo Group did indeed several years ago create the Seattle Ley Line Project as an art project. On its Web site (www.geo.org), The Geo Group describes itself as "a group of artists, architects, landscape architects and 'dowsers' dedicated to creating environmental art for the purposes of world peace."
Dowsing, or water witching, is an ancient spiritual art in which a person, with the aid of a device such as a divining rod or pendulum, gains unseen information at a distance about a person, creature, object, substance, place or "thing" beyond the limitations of one's five senses and normal thought processes. But many Christians believe that dowsing is an occultic form of divination that is condemned in the Bible and should be avoided.
According to Seattle Ley Line Project administrators, dowsing techniques were used to identify and map the major ley lines and spiritual power centers in and around Seattle, Supposedly, both ley lines and water lines create a field of energy that has an effect on consciousness and how people feel Proponents of this assert that they can feel the effects of the energies just like a person feels the effect of a strong cup of coffee.
It took The Geo Group more than three months to dowse Seattle, and according to members' own testimony, "every dowsing session was preceded by meditation and a specific set of spiritual practices."
Gill notes that the Bible clearly states (Lev. 19, Deut. 18, Isa. 15, II Chr. 33 and Gal. 5) that divination is witchcraft, is unholy and will not be tolerated by a holy God.
"My intent is not to frighten us, but to send an alarm to every Blood-bought believer in the Northwest," says Gill. "We do not have to fear because of localized, occult activity in our area. But we must take authority."
"Ninety percent of churches have no vision or purpose statement," Townsend continued. He said it is vital to church growth for these elements to be identified. He believes a congregation with established goals and an active body will see true spiritual growth. He has seen this happen in other countries such as Colombia where church growth has exploded despite the executions of many Christians. He said miracles are happening daily in other parts of the world because the churches share a common vision.Miracles are happening.....because.....you can't make this stuff up.
Here’s what it comes down to kids. Ronald McDonald doesn’t give a damn about you. Neither does that little minx Wendy or any of the other icons of drivethroughdom. And you know what, they’re not supposed to. They’re businesses doing what businesses do. They don’t love you. They are not going to laugh with you on your birthdays, or hold you when you’re sick and sad. They won’t be with you when you graduate, when your children are born or when you die. You will be with you and your family and friends will be with you. And, if you’re any kind of human being, you will be there for them. And you know what, you and your family and friends are supposed to provide you with nourishment too. That’s right folks, feeding someone is an act of caring. We will always be fed best by those that care, be it ourselves or the aforementioned friends and family.
We are fat and sick and dying because we have handed a basic, fundamental and intimate function of life over to corporations. We choose to value our nourishment so little that we entrust it to strangers. We hand our lives over to big companies and then drag them to court when the deal goes bad. This is insanity.
Feed yourselves.
Feed your loved ones.
And for God’s sake feed your children.
Don’t trust anyone else to do it…not anyone. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t go out to dinner every now and then…that is after all one of the great joys of life…but it isn’t life itself and that’s what I’m talking about.
When this mountain monk [I, Dôgen] was at Tiantong Monastery, the position [of cook] was held by cook Yong, of the same province [as the monastery]. Once, after the midday meal I was passing through the east corridor on my way to the Chaoran room [where my teacher Myôzen was being nursed] when I saw the cook in front of the buddha hall airing mushrooms. He carried a bamboo staff in his hand, but had no hat on his head. The sun was hot, the ground tiles were hot, and sweat streamed over him as he worked diligently to dry the mushrooms. He was suffering a bit. With his backbone bent like a bow and his shaggy eyebrows, he resembled a crane.
I approached and asked the cook his dharma age. He said, "Sixty-eight years." I said, "Why do you not employ postulants or laborers?" He said, "They are not me." I said, "Venerable sir, your attitude is indeed proper, but the sun is so hot; why are you doing this [now]?" The cook said, "What time should I wait for?" I took my leave, but as I walked along the corridor, I began to realize how important an opportunity this position affords.
Monitoring is intended to track the performance of call center operators, but the professional snoops are inadvertently monitoring callers, too. Most callers do not realize that they may be taped even while they are on hold.
It is at these times that monitors hear husbands arguing with their wives, mothers yelling at their children, and dog owners throwing fits at disobedient pets, all when they think no one is listening. Most times, the only way a customer can avoid being recorded is to hang up.
Some privacy advocates worry that monitors, as well as operators, can steal customer passwords and other sensitive data. Thus far, few documented cases of identity theft have been unearthed involving monitors, and most monitoring companies screen their applicants. State wiretapping laws generally do not provide protection against recording of call center conversations (the taped message at the start of the call is in most cases considered an adequate privacy warning).
Fears of identity theft have not slowed the monitoring business. In fact, under tighter scrutiny by regulators, most financial institutions are now taping all their calls....
As more call centers move offshore, companies are starting to outsource the monitoring, too.
Operators who can defuse aggression - a not-insignificant talent - win plaudits. Operators also have to deal with the slow talkers, the lonely chatterers and the absent-minded. At night, the drunks come out.
...in addition to being a pundit, Williams, a leading African-American conservative and Clarence Thomas protege, is a PR specialist with his own firm. Not too long ago, Michael Jackson called him for advice.
...the Center for Science and Culture laid the groundwork years before [the Dover controversy]. The group provides the "scientific" and philosophical arguments to bolster the opponents of evolution in local political struggles.
CSC operates out of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle think tank that's funded in part by savings and loan heir Howard Ahmanson. As Max Blumenthal reported in a 2004 Salon article, Ahmanson spent 20 years on the board of R.J. Rushdoony's Chalcedon Foundation, a theocratic outfit that advocates the replacement of American civil law with biblical law.
Chalcedon supports only one form of "racism": God blesses, nourishes, and honors the Royal Race of the Redeemed, all of those of whatever physical race that have placed their faith and trust in Jesus Christ, and God curses the race of the First Adam, all of those who live in unbelief, rebellion, and works-based righteousness (Rom. 5:12-21). This is the only "racial discrimination" the Bible knows anything about.
It should be noted that Deuteronomy 13:5-18 does not call for the death penalty for unbelief or heresy. It condemns false prophets (vv. 1-5) who seek to lead the people, with signs and wonders, into idolatry. It does condemn individuals who secretly try to start a movement into idolatry (vv. 6-11). It does condemn cities which establish another religion and subvert the law-order of the nation (vv. 13-18), and this condemnation must be enforced by man to turn away the judgment of God (v. 17)." R.J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law, (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1973), pp. 38-39.
...the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels,he U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)
Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.
Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government—the Defense department or CIA—would take responsibility for such an operation. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone.
USULUTAN, El Salvador — Teamsters organizer Jose Gilberto Soto liked to call himself "the voice of the voiceless."
In early November, while standing outside his childhood home here, Soto was silenced — shot in the back by unknown assailants. He died moments later in his sister's arms.
The 49-year-old New Jersey resident had planned to meet the next day with truck drivers from El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua — part of an ambitious, multi-union effort to organize every step of the global shipping system.
The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe in.'' This phrase, with slight variations, recurs through long years in the rhetoric of movements to abolish first African slavery within England, then the Atlantic traffic in African people that England dominated for more than a century and then the institution of slavery in the British Empire, whose populations included hundreds of thousands of slaves. It is an axiom traditionally believed to have been invoked in 1772, in principle if not verbatim, by Lord Mansfield, the judge in Somerset v. Steuart, which Steven M. Wise in ''Though the Heavens May Fall'' calls the ''trial that led to the end of human slavery.'' Somerset was an African who accompanied Steuart, his owner, to England. He escaped, was recaptured and sued successfully for his freedom.["Bury the Chains:
Both Wise and Adam Hochschild
When the British outlawed the exportation of Africans to the colonies for sale in 1807, they had had almost 20 years' notice that the Americans intended to ban the importation of Africans in 1808...
And there were the rebellions in the West Indies, particularly the Haitian rebellion. ... Since Haiti alone produced as much foreign trade at that time as the whole of the 13 colonies of North America, it was potentially a great loss. It belonged to France, but Britain supplied it with slaves, a valuable trade since the slaves were intentionally worked to death -- it was cheaper to replace them than to sustain them -- so the market for Africans was very brisk. Uprisings had long been frequent in the West Indies, but at long last rage in Haiti converged with the tactical brilliance of Toussaint L'Ouverture and others and the slaves seized the island. This part of the story is familiar. But there is more.
First the British and then the French under Napoleon sent huge forces against the Haitians. The British sent a larger army against Haiti than it had dispatched to fight in the American Revolution. And it buried 60 percent of those soldiers in Haiti. The two greatest powers on earth went up against a population of half-starved, desperate people and were utterly defeated. It is no surprise that these two abysmal wars of empire have fallen out of history. One cannot read about them without concluding that the Haitian Africans contributed mightily to making the Caribbean slave system untenable. All in all, in 1807 the prospects of the traffic in human beings were not good. It is perhaps coincidental that in adopting the abolitionist stance Britain was able to seize the moral high ground and attempt (together with the United States) to suppress the slave trade among its economic rivals. Certainly this posture was gallant enough to make a great part of the world forget that Britain was for so long pre-eminent among the despoilers of Africa. ...
Hochschild interprets the success of the British abolitionist movement as a triumph of empathy, a humane response to horrors of which the public only gradually became conscious. His heroes are Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp and the former slave Olaudah Equiano, among others. These men did indeed work patiently and passionately for emancipation...
In fact, the slave trade was at home in a world where the appropriation of lives and the extortion of labor were astonishingly commonplace. Hochschild describes the virtual abductions by which slave ships were manned, and tells how these sailors were subject to flogging and starving, and died in numbers as great as did the abducted Africans they helped to transport. And the British Navy was manned in the same way. None of this was at all exceptional, as it would have to have been if there were indeed a presumption of freedom embedded in English culture, as both books assert. No consensus in support of freedom can be demonstrated. The industrialist Robert Owen, writing in 1813, years after the Mansfield decision, describes the transfer to factories of the children of British paupers by the hundreds, 6-, 7- and 8-year-olds who worked 13 hours a day through seven-year apprenticeships. These little workers died quickly and were replaced by other pauper children. They were not slaves in the strictest sense. The system did resemble Caribbean slavery, however, in that it set a negative value on their well-being.
Most of the pharmacies in China that dispense Western-style medicines have an antiquated, if reassuring, air about them. There are no posters on the walls for brand-name drugs. Candy is not for sale. Photo processing is not available. Druggists work in long white lab coats and surgical hats that could have been salvaged from a World War II hospital ship. Some pharmacies require prescriptions for the most potent drugs, others only an earnest chat with a druggist. Drug orders create paperwork that passes through three or four bureaucratic layers before reaching the solemn cashier, who issues a handwritten receipt.
Such an old-fashioned scene might argue for just how far China trails the United States and other advanced economies, where both science and marketing are seemingly years ahead.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Proclaiming an end to the low-carb diet craze, U.S. weight loss companies are launching a marketing blitz aimed at winning over consumers resolved to shed flab once and for all in the New Year.
As the number of Americans following low-carbohydrate regimens like Atkins and South Beach continues to fall, stalwart diet companies such as Weight Watchers International Inc. (Research) and Jenny Craig Inc. are confident they can regain the upper hand in 2005.
Already, Weight Watchers shares have gained nearly 16 percent in the last 2 months, partly in anticipation of an improved outlook.
Design, Setting, and Participants A single-center randomized trial at an academic medical center in Boston, Mass, of overweight or obese (body mass index: mean, 35; range, 27-42) adults aged 22 to 72 years with known hypertension, dyslipidemia, or fasting hyperglycemia. Participants were enrolled starting July 18, 2000, and randomized to 4 popular diet groups until January 24, 2002....
Results Assuming no change from baseline for participants who discontinued the study, mean (SD) weight loss at 1 year was 2.1 (4.8) kg for Atkins (21 [53%] of 40 participants completed, P = .009), 3.2 (6.0) kg for Zone (26 [65%] of 40 completed, P = .002), 3.0 (4.9) kg for Weight Watchers (26 [65%] of 40 completed, P < .001), and 3.3 (7.3) kg for Ornish (20 [50%] of 40 completed, P = .007). Greater effects were observed in study completers. Each diet significantly reduced the low-density lipoprotein/high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol ratio by approximately 10% (all P<.05), with no significant effects on blood pressure or glucose at 1 year. Amount of weight loss was associated with self-reported dietary adherence level (r = 0.60; P<.001) but not with diet type (r = 0.07; P = .40). For each diet, decreasing levels of total/HDL cholesterol, C-reactive protein, and insulin were significantly associated with weight loss (mean r = 0.36, 0.37, and 0.39, respectively) with no significant difference between diets (P = .48, P = .57, P = .31, respectively).
Over the roughly four centuries of American and proto-American existence, it has also inspired remarkable feats of devotion. You would need some sort of fierce determination to set forth in a puny, broad-beamed, high-pooped, painfully slow, nearly undefended 17th-century ship to cross the uncharted ocean to an unknown, unmapped new world. You would need remarkable determination to push westward into the heartland away from settlement and safety.
Can you be an agnostic or atheist or Buddhist or Muslim and a believing American too? In each case the answer is yes. But to accomplish that feat is harder than most people realize. The Bible is not merely the fertile soil that brought Americanism forth. It is the energy source that makes it live and thrive; that makes believing Americans willing to prescribe freedom, equality, and democracy even for a place like Afghanistan, once regarded as perhaps the remotest region on the face of the globe.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Citing widespread irregularities on Election Day, a handful of House Democrats and one senator objected Thursday to the counting of Ohio's 20 electoral votes, delaying the official certification of the 2004 presidential election results.
The Democrats said they were not trying to overturn President Bush's re-election but want to draw attention to the need for aggressive election reform in the wake of what they said were widespread voter problems.
In a letter to congressional leaders Wednesday, members of the group said they would take the action because a new report by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee found "numerous, serious election irregularities," particularly in Ohio, that led to "a significant disenfranchisement of voters."
The House of Representatives and Senate met Thursday afternoon in a constitutionally mandated session to count the electoral votes. Vice President Dick Cheney, in his role as president of the Senate, presided over the session.
Four years ago, after the disputed election results in Florida, members of the Congressional Black Caucus attempted to block Florida's electoral votes from being counted. In a scene recalled in the movie "Fahrenheit 9/11," lawmaker after lawmaker was gaveled down by Vice President Al Gore because no senator would support the objections, as the law requires.
