TONY Blair, the former prime minister, is set to become a Roman Catholic within weeks, it emerged yesterday.
Mr Blair, currently an Anglican, is expected to be received into the church in a mass at the private chapel of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster.
His wife, Cherie, and four children are Catholics and the family have worshipped together for years.
Scotsman.com News – UK – Blair to join Catholic church ‘in weeks’
An Iraqi government spokesman says Iraq’s cabinet has approved a law that lifts immunity from prosecution for private security firms in Iraq.
The spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said Tuesday the measure will subject all security companies to Iraqi law and will revoke the immunity given to foreign security contractors by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in 2004.
He says the law is being referred to parliament for ratification.
VOA News – Iraq’s Cabinet Approves Lifting Immunity for Security Firms
Let’s begin by reaffirming a basic truth: Satan exists. His demonic minions exist. Scripture and Tradition depict Satan as the supreme evil leader of the fallen angels who seek to disrupt God’s plan of salvation for humanity.
Whatever.
Sometimes Saintly Nick, over at Nick’s Bytes, sent me this comment, including remarks from a friend of his (who shall remain anonymous for reasons that should be obvious). It was in reference to my post of several days ago.
You may find this email I received from a pastor colleague who lives near Holland, MI, the hometown of Erik D. Prince, Blackwater founder, and his family:
“Ultra-rightwing, super rich Republicans and Christians. Eric’s daddy was the founder and owner of an auto parts company and an extremely close friend of James Dobson. Edgar Prince located the Colorado Springs site for Dobson and funded much of the campus.
”Eric’s sister Betsy is married to Rich DeVos, son of Dick DeVos of
Amway notoriety. Betsy is a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party. Substantial amounts from the billion dollar coffers of the Princes, DeVoses and the VanAndels, co-founders of Amway, have gone to the Bush dynasty, and many, many right wing causes.”They are the elect, they have been chosen by God for the riches they have received and they are destined to guide America and protect Israel as they await the return of Jesus, Armageddon, etc. They are on a mission for God.
”They have many buildings named after their families on the campuses of my alma maters, Hope College and Western Theological Seminary. They pretty much own West Michigan and, in fact, they have a lot of power in religious and political circles nationwide.
”If this area wasn’t so darned beautiful, I couldn’t stand to live here.”
There is a simple fact about energy that most people who are uneducated in science simply don’t grasp: fuel is just a way of getting energy from the point where it is collected to the place where it’s going to be used. That is just as true of the liquid hydrogen and oxygen of the space shuttle as it is of a Kalahari Bushman gathering firewood, or of uranium being mined, refined, and trucked to a nuclear reactor.
The !Kung system, however, is many times more efficient than the others. It required no energy apart from sunlight to grow the wood, a little water, some minerals, and the muscle power needed to carry the wood to the communal fire pit, the fuel for which was also gathered on the spot in the form of meat and veggies.
When we begin to speak of turning sunlight into other forms of energy, such as alcohol, things get much less efficient and require a lot more energy — which must also be subtracted from the overall efficiency of the fuel.
Gasoline is the current way that we carry energy around to power most of our cars. It is more efficient for that purpose than running a hose to underground deposits of decayed prehistoric vegetables and dragging it behind the Ferrari wherever we go. We also use it because our cars are heavy and we insist on driving them at high speeds. These both take a great deal more energy, and thus require large amounts in concentrated form.
In the case of ethanol (ethyl alcohol, the drinkin’ stuff), we have — for the purposes of further fattening a bunch of rich folks’ wallets — been duped into accepting, by lack of education and right of approval, a “solution” that is horrendously wasteful of a number of absolutely critical resources, prohibitively expensive economically, and not even as efficient as gasoline for transporting energy. It is the worst possible choice we could have made, in terms of simple science and common sense.
The principles above, by the way, also apply to the production of hydrogen as fuel. Think about it. Trace all the forms of energy back to their source. If you go far enough, you always get back to solar — even with nuclear, which simply uses fuel from a different star, long gone.
Why did the powers that be choose ethanol? You can’t control and profit from the collection of sunlight, the rich folks and friends already owned a lot of land that could be easily converted to production, and they figure the environmental cost will come due in the future, and that they’ll be able to buy their way out of the disasters down the line.
The Bush family, for example, recently bought 70,000 hectares in Uruguay, right on top of South America’s largest aquifer and next door to the only air base outside of Montevideo that’s capable of handling big jets — improved by the US and protected by US Marines. (Oh…you didn’t hear about that? Must have been the Liberal Media’s fault.)
Is it any wonder that our students have been systematically dumbed down in science over the past few decades? Is it any wonder that evolution and cosmology scare the oligarchs to death? We can’t have the common folks knowing too much about the way things work, can we? Made that mistake in the mid-20th Century. Led to all sorts of problems.
Think I’m wrong? Read some basic science while you’re waiting for your next serving of Kool-Aid — or ethanol.
These ideas are not mine. They are the rules I try to live up to when I write, with varied success. I have E. B. White and my freshman English prof at the University of Kentucky, Dr. George Cutler, to thank for them. Do with them as you will.
1. Avoid expressing things in ways that distract the reader from the writing. Try to keep your ego out of the way. If you have something worth saying, your material will take care of itself. Remember that you are initiating a dance with the reader, who is just as important to the performance as you. Strive for clarity. Make the reader comfortable. Continue reading
Boston – It was the first inning of an important game between Oregon State University and arch-rival Stanford University. Jacoby Ellsbury was prowling right field for the Oregon State Beavers. Suddenly, a deep fly ball arced toward the right-center field gap. He bolted toward the ball, diving to make a seemingly miraculous catch before plunging headfirst into the wall.
The ball ended up in his glove on his chest, according to his coach, Pat Casey, but wasn’t ruled a catch. Ellsbury was out cold. When he finally came to a few minutes later, he asked if he could stay in the game. He ended up, instead, with nine stitches.
The incident encapsulates the passion with which Ellsbury tends to play the game. Since being called up from the minor leagues by the Boston Red Sox four weeks ago, the young outfielder has brought a fiber-optic speed to the base paths, a gritty glove in the outfield, and a surprisingly strong bat.
Click here to read the rest of this article.
More than a quarter of all people in the world belong to Eastern religions, which include Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Taoism. These people worship in temples, which are architecturally as diverse as the religions are different from each other. From the ancient ruins of Ankor Wat to the distinctly modern Wat Rong Khun, there are hundreds if not thousands of amazing temples in the world. Here are one man’s choices of the ten most amazing in Asia. 10 Most Amazing Temples in the World
Fresh on the heels of their reality show “Kid Nation,” in which children are sent to perform hard labor on a ranch with no adult supervision, CBS announced today that it was readying a new reality show in which children are sent to the federal detention camp at Guantanamo.
The new program, called “Kid Detention,” is expected to be ready for broadcast in time for November sweeps, with the following promotional slogan: “One detention camp. Forty kids. No lawyers.”
CBS said that filming would begin as soon as forty children are “randomly rounded up.” Read more…
A Protestant minister I know recently lamented that his congregation seemed to be aging. It’s just too hard to keep teenagers in the church, he explained. They fall away, usually around fourteen or fifteen, after which you’re lucky if you see them on Easter and Christmas. “After that, you’ve basically got only three opportunities to get them back—when they get married, when their children get baptized, or when someone in the family dies.”
“But what if your church doesn’t have Easter and Christmas,” I asked, “or if it doesn’t have those marriage, birth, and funeral ceremonies to draw them back in?”
He looked at me a little incredulously, then remembered that I was coming from a Buddhist background. “Well,” he said after a moment. “In that case, I guess you’re screwed.”
NEWTOWN, Pa. – The news reached a few students at the George School last week in an e-mail carrying the subject line “You are kidding!?”
But no one was. The e-mail went on to say that Barbara Dodd Anderson, a 75-year-old graduate living modestly in Fresno, Calif., had given the small Quaker school $128 million, believed to be the largest single gift ever made to a US secondary school.
“At this point, I’d say the year 2030 is not unreasonable” for a summer without sea ice in the Arctic, Serreze says. “Within our lifetimes and certainly within our children’s lifetimes.”
When that occurs, the Arctic Ocean may become a spooky, foggy place, haunted by diminished populations of spectrally thin polar bears clinging to life in residual habitat. “It’s going to be a different world,” Serreze notes. “The observed rates of change have far outstripped what we projected.”
