duryodana.com

I don’t understand the hubbub about this case…

to me it typifies the American dream… isn’t this the base faith of America?

shuldn’t these men be held as heros?

Isn’t this what Capitalism is all about?

baffling

A Catholic priest in the US is under arrest and another is on the run after being accused of stealing millions of dollars from their parishioners.

Monsignor John Skehan, 79, was charged with grand theft, as Florida police searched for Father Francis Guinan.

The two men are suspected of stealing a total of $8.6m (£4.6m) from their Palm Beach church and funding a lavish life of property, holidays and gambling.

Source: BBC

I don’t understand how this is stealing either… idiots willingly giving money to prop up the servants of their imaginary friend cannot be conned, since they were conned from the minute they started digging in their trousers looking for spare change…

“a fool and his money are soon parted” isn’t that the saying?

Link: bsalert.com

I’m no Clinton fan… but here Clinton goes apeshit at a Fox News interviewer… 

hilarious!

Link: Google Video

Source: Washington Post

Tolerance: A Two-Way Street

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, September 22, 2006; A17

Religious fanatics, regardless of what name they give their jealous god, invariably have one thing in common: no sense of humor. Particularly about themselves. It’s hard to imagine Torquemada taking a joke well.

Today’s Islamists seem to have not even a sense of irony. They fail to see the richness of the following sequence. The pope makes a reference to a 14th-century Byzantine emperor’s remark about Islam imposing itself by the sword, and to protest this linking of Islam and violence:

· In the West Bank and Gaza, Muslims attack seven churches.

· In London, the ever-dependable radical Anjem Choudary tells demonstrators at Westminster Cathedral that the pope is now condemned to death.

· In Mogadishu, Somali religious leader Abubukar Hassan Malin calls on Muslims to “hunt down” the pope. The pope not being quite at hand, they do the next best thing: shoot dead, execution-style, an Italian nun who worked in a children’s hospital.

“How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I’ll kill you for it” is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge. But of course, refuting is not the point here. The point is intimidation.

First Salman Rushdie. Then the false Newsweek report about Koran-flushing at Guantanamo Bay. Then the Danish cartoons. And now a line from a scholarly disquisition on rationalism and faith given in German at a German university by the pope.

And the intimidation succeeds: politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons; Saturday’s craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely controversial about Islam — this in a culture in which a half-naked pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her latest concert tour.

In today’s world, religious sensitivity is a one-way street. The rules of the road are enforced by Islamic mobs and abjectly followed by Western media, politicians and religious leaders.

The fact is that all three monotheistic religions have in their long histories wielded the sword. The Book of Joshua is knee-deep in blood. The real Hanukkah story, so absurdly twinned (by calendric accident) with the Christian festival of peace, is about a savage insurgency and civil war.

Christianity more than matched that lurid history with the Crusades, an ecumenical blood bath that began with the slaughter of Jews in the Rhineland, a kind of preseason warm-up to the featured massacres to come against the Muslims, with the sacking of the capital of Byzantium (the Fourth Crusade) thrown in for good measure.

And Islam, of course, spread with great speed from Arabia across the Mediterranean and into Europe. It was not all benign persuasion. After all, what were Islamic armies doing at Poitiers in 732 and the gates of Vienna in 1683? Tourism?

However, the inconvenient truth is that after centuries of religious wars, Christendom long ago gave it up. It is a simple and undeniable fact that the violent purveyors of monotheistic religion today are self-proclaimed warriors for Islam who shout “God is great” as they slit the throats of infidels — such as those of the flight crews on Sept. 11, 2001 — and are then celebrated as heroes and martyrs.

Just one month ago, two journalists were kidnapped in Gaza and were released only after their forced conversion to Islam. Where were the protests in the Islamic world at that act — rather than the charge — of forced conversion?

Where is the protest over the constant stream of vilification of Christianity and Judaism issuing from the official newspapers, mosques and religious authorities of Arab nations? When Sheik ‘Atiyyah Saqr issues a fatwa declaring Jews “apes and pigs”? When Sheik Abd al-Aziz Fawzan al-Fawzan, professor of Islamic law, says on Saudi TV that “someone who denies Allah, worships Christ, son of Mary, and claims that God is one-third of a trinity. . . . Don’t you hate the faith of such a polytheist?”

Where are the demonstrations, where are the parliamentary resolutions, where are the demands for retraction when the Mufti Sheik Ali Gum’a incites readers of al-Ahram, the Egyptian government daily, against “the true and hideous face of the blood-suckers . . . who prepare [Passover] matzos from human blood”?

The pope gives offense and the Mujaheddin al-Shura Council in Iraq declares that it “will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose the ‘jizya’ [head] tax; then the only thing acceptable is conversion or the sword.” This to protest the accusation that Islam might be spread by the sword.

As I said. No sense of irony.

Russia: A Marxist Analysis
by Tony Cliff

read it if ever you think Stalinist Russia was in any way indicitive of Communist/Socialist rule…

You can read it online at marxists.org

funny how protestors of a Socialist government all look like skin heads and neo-Nazis…

Source: BBC

CBC News: Suicide bomber kills 4 Canadian soldiers

“The Taliban is a bunch of cowards,” Fraser told reporters in Kandahar. “The Taliban continue to attack this country. They continue to attack the people. They attacked children today. That’s about as cowardly as you can get.” Fraser said the troops had been on patrol and were helping Afghan forces to provide a secure environment so that people could return to their homes after a military operation in the area.

I am NOT pro-military and I am certainly against the US wars…

however, this General is so right…

these taliban, these Al Qaeda are all cowards… they are not men… these are whiny pathetic little boys who are utter cowards…

why would Allah give these school-yard bullies virgins in paradise… they don’t have the dicks to please mice let alone women…

they should all go back to fucking goats and leave the world and REAL men to deal with scum like George Bush…

Again, the wonderful efficacy displayed by the religion of Christ in purifying the morals of pagan Europe has no parallel in Buddhist annals. Wherever the religion of Buddha has prevailed, it has proved singularly inefficient to lift society to a high standard of morality. It has not weaned the people of Tibet and Mongolia from the custom of abandoning the aged, nor the Chinese from the practice of infanticide. Outside the establishment of the order of nuns, it has done next to nothing to raise woman from her state of degradation in Oriental lands. It has shown itself utterly helpless to cope with the moral plagues of humanity. The consentient testimony of witnesses above the suspicion of prejudice establishes the fact that at the present day Buddhist monks are everywhere strikingly deficient in that moral earnestness and exemplary conduct which distinguished the early followers of Buddha. In short, Buddhism is all but dead. In its huge organism the faint pulsations of life are still discernible, but its power of activity is gone. The spread of European civilization over the East will inevitably bring about its extinction.

Source: The Catholic Encyclopedia

Christianity as a whole is a disease… a cancer… a plague of human mediocrity and sickening malevolence…

This petty and vile conclusion to the Catholic definition of Buddism is testament to the end of the church itself and its institution of misogynistic pederastic priesthood…

the quicker the fucking better.

The average Canadian is worth $142,900 — on paper, at least — as rising real estate values offset a rise in personal debt and last spring’s stock market correction, Statistics Canada said Friday.

Source: CBC

Makes me think I should go cash a check for $142,900 at the Bank of Canada…

sheesh  :-(

the Pope is a racist, is intolerant and WAS a Nazi…

of course, he says he was forced into service, but that claim is bankrupt…

Sophie Scholl, her brother and others of the White Rose were German contemporaries of Ratzinger’s and fought the Nazi regime and paid for that resistence with their lives…

Would I have done differently than him… likely not… however, in my defence, I make no claims to be worthy to stand as god’s representative on earth.

that being said, sometimes even Hitler himself spoke the truth.

Popie’s latest faux pas is comical… in his latest speech he quotes Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (1350 – 1425 AD) of the Byzantine Empire:

The emperor’s words were, he said: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

I don’t know if I agree with the totality of that quote… Mohammed brought monotheism and a racial cohesion to a disparate polytheistic society that was eating itself up… which in itself was probably commendable…

However there is truth there as well… Mohammed himself fought and killed in the name of the religion he espoused and after his death his immediate successors spread Islam throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Spain – typically by the sword.

This was no different than Christianity’s spread once it was made the official religion of the Roman Empire… but Jesus himself did not in anyway preach the policies that his followers eventually took… modern “TRUE” christians are appalled at the Crusades, Inquisition and the subjugation of people to the faith.

I say “true” because many modern right-wing Christian freaks would do it all over again… eg. Ann Coulter…

But most now understand that violence is anathema to their faith.

Islam faces a true identity crisis and they MUST address it…

The major stumbling block they face is the lack of cohesion the religion has as a whole… what one Imam declares as Fatwa, another declares as anathema… one group blows themselves up in a crowded marketplace in Baghdad killing scores of innocents and children all in the name of god while another group says that Islam in no way accepts those kinds of actions.

it is becoming more and more apparent that the Islamic world needs to have something like the Nicaean council where they will have to get their house together and declare an orthodoxy…

Orthodoxy as a concept to me is repellent, but maybe every religion must needs achieve that stone cold codification before they can let the strictures ease once again in the future

Islam, as it now stands, is not conducive to modern culture… or, at least, modern culture that is inclusive and accepting… it has issues with general violence, ugly and inhumanely medieval concepts of justice, women’s rights and political understanding as a whole…

Until such time as they can get a grip on exactly what they are themselves then the world is under no obligation to accept any definition supplied by anyone calling themselves Muslim and remarks like bull-dog Ratzinger’s is therefore apt and timely.