by La Shawn on October 20, 2004
in Faith
For the next few days, this blog will not be updated. I need to retreat, evaluate and determine what God has in mind, if anything, for this blog.
As long as I’m updating everyday, it’s difficult for me to be objective about what I’m doing. Maybe the blog will remain the same. Maybe I’ll make a few cosmetic and/or thematic adjustments. I don’t know, and that’s good. I’ll listen to God, who tells me to:
Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:6-7)
I want that peace, but right now I don’t have it as far as the blog is concerned. I’m not tired of it. I’ve just had doubts lately about why I’m doing this. Am I glorifying God or myself?
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…of John Kerry, I hope! Please, please, please don’t let Kerry win!
I was glad to see one of Kerry’s fellow liberals cutting him down in…the New York Times. Good stuff. According to David Brooks (reg. req.):
John Kerry wasn’t nominated because of his sparkling personality. He wasn’t nominated because of his selfless commitment to causes larger than himself. He was nominated because he’s a fighter. At the end of every campaign he comes out brawling. This was the guy who could take on Bush.
So nobody could imagine how incompetent, crude and over-the-top Kerry has been in this final phase of the campaign. At this point, smart candidates are launching attacks that play up the doubts voters already have about their opponents. Incredibly, Kerry is launching attacks that play up doubts voters have about him. Over the past few days, he has underscored the feeling that he will say or do anything to further his career.
*Laughing and sliding out of chair over both paragraphs* [click to continue…]
I’m sure this is old news by now, but some idiot working for the dinosaur-like NAACP gave a man crack cocaine to fill out 100 voter registration forms in Ohio.
While the dinosaurs are trying to scare people with moronic tales of the return of Jim Crow at the voting booths, they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for John Kerry voters, real or imagined. Real classy.
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by La Shawn on October 19, 2004
in Faith
Have you heard that the Sanhedrin is being re-established? I don’t know what to make of this, so I’ll just report; you decide.
The Sanhedrin was an ancient Jewish judicial and adminstrative body. The council was made up of 71 members, including both Pharisees (believed in the entire Old Testament and resurrection of the dead) and Sadducees (believed only the first 5 books of the OT and didn’t believe in resurrection) and presided over by the chief priest. The Bible depicts the Sanhedrin as delivering Jesus to the Romans for execution: [click to continue…]
I heard about this last week. I don’t know many details, but I do know this: soldiers disobeyed orders. According to Reuters:
U.S. soldiers who staged a mutiny and refused to go on a convoy in Iraq (news – web sites) felt commanders ignored their plight when they complained about the safety and condition of their vehicles, their relatives said on Monday….
Refusal to obey orders, especially in a combat zone, is a serious military offense.
Anxious to squash any suspicion of U.S. troop morale or discipline problems in Iraq, the Army said on Sunday it was investigating the “isolated incident” and preliminary findings indicated the soldiers were worried about maintenance and safety.
Do you think the soliders’ refusal was justified? Why/why not?
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I’m glad I don’t live in Canada. What the U.S. is becoming is bad enough.
Some of you may know this Haroon Siddiqui (reg. req. maybe), described as an “Arab-Canadian”, but I’d never heard of him before yesterday. His column, “Bush Plays God Card” is not exactly a Bush/God-bashing piece, but I don’t think he cares for Bush, God or Americans all that much, which seems to be the case for most mainstream American journalists. He writes:
The most devout president in decades, Bush had expressed such sentiments before but not with such clarity. Which prompts the question: Is he cracking the constitutional wall between church and state? [No such thing. See last paragraph of post.]
I spoke to two American experts and re-read some of the relevant literature.
It used to be that the more industrialized a nation, the less religious. But by the 1980s, religious activism was not confined to Muslims, as assumed after the 1979 Iranian revolution.
“Newly politicized movements were occurring in virtually every major religious tradition,” writes British author Malise Ruthven in his latest book, Fundamentalism. The biggest upsurge was in America, with the rise of the New Christian Right.
As Canadians were moving away from religion, Americans were getting closer to it. (My emphasis)
This section alone is chockfull of interesting tidbits. I don’t know about these so-called American experts, but what exactly is the “Christian Right” and how is its “rise” measured? Perhaps I should find out about the “experts” and read (or read about) the books before I evaluate their credentials.
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I can’t believe we’re negotiating with terrorists. Falluja and all other “hot spots” should have been razed months ago. Get the killers out, then go in and secure the area. We’re still battling and being killed by rag tag murderers. Unbelievable.
I don’t like war, and I want the troops to come home.
Terrorists don’t like George Bush. More from Michelle Malkin.
“Women Fleeing College Under Islamist Threats.”
According to the Washington Times:
Islamist extremists are targeting the city’s universities by threatening and even attacking female students who wear Western-style fashions, setting off bombs on campuses and demanding that classes be segregated by sex.
At least 1,000 of an estimated 3,000 women who want to postpone their studies for fear of violence will be granted leaves of absence, a student affairs official here said….
Pamphlets found on campus declared: “If the boy students don’t separate from the girl students, we will explode the college. Any girl student who does not wear a veil, we will burn her face with chemicals.”
At Mustansiriya University, a bomb exploded earlier this month in the college of sciences, injuring two students, one seriously.
The explosion occurred shortly after pamphlets also appeared on that campus demanding that men and women students be separated and that women abandon Western clothing and cover their heads when in public.
A reader just sent me this link from MSNBC:
A visit to West Virginia by Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry has been put on hold.
Kerry was scheduled to attended services at the Apostolic Christ Cathedral in Guyandotte on Sunday.
West Virginia Senators Robert C. Byrd and Jay Rockefeller were to attend with Kerry.
The church pastor, Reverend E. S. Harper, said they were not welcome if they planned to discuss politics during the service.
The Kerry campaign says the church issue did not affect the decision to cancel the trip. (My emphasis)
There are no words to express how impressed I am with this pastor. Many would tell Kerry the same thing, but it’s still good to see it reported in the media. Read about Kerry and his disrespect for black churches and the word of God here and here.
Katy sent a link to a story that goes into more detail about Kerry’s snub. I guess having to sit through a service and listen to a sermon is that painful for him.
Update: There was a big, fat typo sitting in the first sentence of this post all day. Feel free to call my attention to misspelled words.
Update II: If you haven’t visited Politburo Diktat, you should check it out. Funny stuff, but you have to “get it.”
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Yesterday a friend was practically assaulted by a “homeless” man — a bum — as she was walking to the subway. He was tall and aggressive looking. A few days ago, a man-with-no-house, reeking of liquor, hovering and breathing on me as I added cash to my transit card, mumbled something about a dollar and the hospital.
A few months ago I was in a cafe buying lunch, and a man walked up to me and made small talk. I was polite. I smiled and started talking to him, and out of the blue he asks for money! A tall, healthy-looking, able-bodied man who didn’t smell of alcohol and didn’t appear to be high, was asking for cash.
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by La Shawn on October 15, 2004
in General
According to the BBC:
People charged for having illegal internet sites…will be put on trial soon,” said a judiciary spokesman.
Web journals flourish in Iran where the youthful, reform-hungry population has gone online for news and entertainment.
The popularity of the internet has grown as hardline judges closed about 100 printed publications since 2000….
“We do not know where they are being held. We heard they have been kept in solitary confinement,” a relative is quoted as saying.
Correspondents say Iran has a poor record of press freedom, with more journalists behind bars than in any other Middle Eastern country.
The head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahrudi, announced new laws specifically covering “cyber crimes” on Monday, AFP reported.
According to the law, “anyone who disseminates information aimed at disturbing the public mind through computer systems or telecommunications…would be punished in accordance with the crime of disseminating lies”. (My emphasis)
Not-really-related: Just One Minute blogs about the Bush “Special Olympics” flyer. Western culture, though superior, is obviously on the decline. I don’t know what took me so long to discover Scrappleface. Funny stuff.
by La Shawn on October 15, 2004
in Faith
Update: For non-Bible readers and those otherwise unfamiliar with biblical exegesis (especially those attempting to trackback to this post), I use the term “liberal” in a non-political sense. A “liberal Christian” is one who doesn’t hold to the absolute authority of Scripture and considers it closely tied to social causes. If you want to trackback, please read my comment policy. Links leading to insulting, inane and useless posts will be deleted.
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The problem with liberal theology is that it’s liberal theology. By that I mean loose interpretations of the Bible as opposed to a fundamental belief in the Bible’s inerrancy and infallibility. Liberal theology is empty chatter which seeks to deny man’s spiritual condition and focus instead on social causes.
The Bible is not a book for the materially poor or rich or those with special knowledge. (Clarification: socio-economic status is irrelevant.) It is written for the person who recognizes a Creator in God and salvation through his son Jesus Christ. It is not a manual on how to lobby for government programs or a step-by-step guide on pitting race against race, class against class.
The Bible is the story of God and man, man’s separation and eventual redemption. One cannot read the Old Testament and miss this theme, which is weaved throughout its pages.
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Update III (10/16): Those dignity-stealing Democrats just won’t quit. Check out this New York Post editorial on the DNC frauds and their “minority” props.
Update II: Will someone please define “voter intimidation?”
The voter fraud frauders are gearing up, I see. Does anyone have information on this?
I hear Bill Hobbs has quite an archive on voter fraud issues.
Update (10/15): New York Post:
Republicans ripped into John Kerry yesterday over a stunning new internal manual that advises Democrats to launch “pre-emptive” strikes charging the GOP with voter intimidation — even if none exists.
The “Election Day Manual” — written for Kerry’s Colorado campaign workers — includes a menu of options Democrats can follow next month to claim Republican intimidation, ranging from issuing press releases to organizing minority leaders to denounce the practice.
It was unclear last night whether the manual had been penned by the Kerry campaign or the Democratic National Committee, although questions about it were fielded by the DNC.
Democratic leaders dismissed the charge, insisting the manual was aimed at providing guidance for “preventing and combating” voter intimidation from happening in the first place.
“All of the states received some language on combating and preventing voter intimidation,” said DNC spokesman Jano Cabrera.
In part, the manual reads: “If no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged yet, launch a ‘pre-emptive strike’ (particularly well-suited to states in which these techniques have been tried in the past.).”
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by La Shawn on October 14, 2004
in General
I get a lot of e-mail from people asking me to post information about upcoming events and other items. I’ll try to make “Announcements” a biweekly feature.
Confronting Iraq is a new documentary from Accuaracy in Media and produced by Roger Aronoff (who published one of my columns). From the documentary’s site:
Did the U.S. really act unilaterally, motivated by greed and politics, in an unnecessary war? Or is it a just and necessary war — part of a larger war — against the unrelenting forces of radical Islam? Was Saddam Hussein’s regime bent on developing and proliferating Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or had he destroyed them all after the first Gulf War? Did the Iraqi government have ongoing relations with Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization, al Qaeda, among others, or is this a pretext dreamed up in Crawford Texas to justify going to war? The West is engaged, whether it likes it or not, in a clash of civilizations, in a war it never sought. It is unlike any war in our history.
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Update: You know what? A better title for this post would be “A Girl’s Simple Guide For Avoiding AIDS.” The point is that the guide is simple. Then again, the title could refer to women who have a sense of right and wrong, no matter how complicated the world is.
From an unknown writer:
The first thing the candidates might want to do is find out why so many African-American women are getting AIDS. Naturally, there are several factors. The one getting the most publicity is black men on the “down low” — men living with women but seeing boyfriends on the side.
But that is not the real problem, according to most AIDS organizations. Men coming home from prison is a much bigger deal. Fully 95% of American prisons do not provide condoms. Nonetheless, an estimated 65% of male inmates — even the straight ones — have sex. So much for good behavior. When they get out, they spread the diseases they picked up to women as well as men. So, clearly, we need condoms in prison.
An even bigger problem, says Talata Reeves, director of women’s and family services for New York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis, is that there is still no AIDS prevention tool that a woman can use that does not require the consent of a man. Right now, if a woman suggests a condom, often her partner thinks she doesn’t trust him or that she has been fooling around. But if there were a microbicide — a virus-killing medicine women could use like a spermicide — a lot more women could discreetly protect themselves. Alas, says Reeves, microbicide research has been “woefully underfunded” by an administration more intent on pushing abstinence and marriage.
Too often, notes Reeves, poor women cannot insist on either of those options. “If you don’t have an income and he does, or if you don’t have another way of feeding your children, or if you are an immigrant and undocumented,” it is harder to demand anything — be it condom use or marriage — from a partner.
There are many points in this article to address, but I’ll keep it simple. To women (married or single, all income levels and education) with HIV or currently having relations with HIV-positive men, in case you’re unaware, HIV is spread through the exchange of body fluids. That took two seconds and no tax dollars.
FYI: It is not President Bush’s or his administration’s fault that you have AIDS. Your choices, including some level of reckless behavior, led to your infection. In other words, the fault lies within yourself. Outdated concept, I know, but bear with me.
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