Month: August 2013
ZoNation (MachoSuace) Defines Feminism, via, The Clintons ~ Hillary-ous Feminism
McCarthyism Against Religious People in the Military
This is from the Baptist Press via Pastor Dean:
SAN ANTONIO (BP) — Due to a perceived slight against homosexuality, Senior Master Sgt. Phillip Monk is in a fight for his career. The Lackland Air Force base first sergeant was told by his commanding officer to clear out his office on Aug. 9. The point of contention reportedly is not about anything Monk said, but what he refused to say.
“It’s all because he didn’t say anything wrong. He thought it,” said Steven Branson, pastor of Village Parkway Baptist Church in San Antonio. Monk, his wife and their three teenage sons faithfully attend services each Sunday the pastor said.
Branson said he has been in touch with Monk since the sergeant told him Sunday (Aug. 11) of the untenable situation. The pastor said Monk feels abandoned by the institution he has served for 19 years. Deployed as a medic, Monk devoted himself to saving the lives of his fellow service men and women, according to his pastor.
“Now I’m in trouble,” Monk told Branson, “and everybody’s leaving me behind.”
At issue is Monk’s refusal to reveal his personal views regarding homosexual marriage to his commanding officer. According to a Fox News report, the commander, a lesbian, asked Monk to report on disciplinary proceedings for an Air Force instructor under investigation for making objectionable comments about homosexual marriage during a training session.
According to Fox News, Monk interviewed the instructor and determined his comments were not intentionally provocative. But some trainees complained. Monk suggested that his commander use the incident as a learning tool about tolerance and diversity, but to no avail.
“Her very first reaction was to say, ‘We need to lop off the head of this guy.’ The commander took the position that his speech was discrimination,” Monk reportedly recounted.
Branson said the commander began to press Monk about his views on the issue.
Fox reported, “She said, ‘Sgt. Monk, I need to know if you can, as my first sergeant, if you can see discrimination if somebody says that they don’t agree with homosexual marriage.'”
Having witnessed the commander’s ire regarding the instructor, Monk declined to answer. He also understood Air Force policy demands silence from homosexual detractors.
“She got angrier and angrier with him,” Branson said. “So he got fired for something she thinks he believes.”
The action will be a mark on an otherwise spotless record. Branson called Monk “pure military” — a real “do-it-by-the-book” serviceman who also happens to be a strong Christian.
…read more at Fox News Insider…
Evolution Vs. God ~ Serious Saturday
Video Description:
Hear expert testimony from leading evolutionary scientists from some of the world’s top universities:
• Peter Nonacs, Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA
• Craig Stanford, Professor, Biological Sciences and Anthropology, USC
• PZ Myers, Associate Professor, Biology, University of Minnesota Morris
• Gail E. Kennedy, Associate Professor, Anthropology, UCLA
A study of the evidence of vestigial organs*, natural selection, the fifth digit, the relevance of the stickleback, Darwin’s finches and Lenski’s bacteria—all under the microscope of the Scientific Method–observable evidence from the minds of experts. Prepare to have your faith shaken.
This is the second of a great series, below was the first release:
* See my paper on this.
Friday Fodder (8-16-2013)
Norway’s Prime Minister Turns Taxi Driver ~ Jens Stoltenberg Drives A Cab
Beer Stabilizer
Closest Engine Company
None Shall Pass!
Best Job Interview Eva!… Oh, Wait
Just making it into the 20th-century… Sorta
Russian Truck Driver ~ Skill Level: Boss
Gotta Love the Irish (Language Warning)
Useful Magic
Baby Bulldog Plays with Butterfly
As Maxwell Smart Would Say, “The Ol’ Switcheroo”
Some “Best of the Web” Vids
Polly Wants Some Breast Milk?
Stuffed Cat Still a Threat
A Twist on Fishing
Panda Hugs
Group Pool Dunk
Car – 1 // Motorcycle – 0
Californians (SNL)
Russian Fly By
John Heffron
NBC Finally Catching On ~ Obama-Care Killing Jobs
Via Michelle Malkin:
WH in Denial ~ Still
(Via GayPatriot) The White House still dismisses the evidence as “anecdotal”, as NBC points out – and despite the growing data on the matter.
NBC delicately uses “unintended consequences” to describe the Obamacare job/hour losses, despite the fact that such losses were foreseen by many.
Via Zero Hedge.
Last month, Jay Carney said that the suggestion that Obamacare is reducing full-time hiring is “belied by the facts,” not unlike Jay Carney usually is.
There have been numerous reports of slashed worker hours due to looming Obama-care regs, and it must be pretty bad because even the networks are starting to catch on. NBC News contacted numerous businesses and others and found that hours are being cut because of Obamacare (video via Weasel Zippers).
That story should come as a surprise only to those who get all their information from network newscasts.
The White House has to stick to their story because they have no other choice:
But the White House, NBC News reports, says that there is no systematic evidence that this is because of Obamacare and dismisses the report as anecdotal.
Maybe President Obama can straighten out the CEO of NBC’s parent company, because they’re playing golf today.
Ball State Would Censor Thomas Jefferson ~ OBEY!
The president of Ball State University is forbidding faculty to endorse intelligent design, the belief that the universe is too complex to have evolved by chance.
President Jo Ann Gora has sent a letter to faculty and staff saying intelligent design is not appropriate material for science courses.
Gora said only humanities or social science courses may discuss topics like intelligent design, as long as professors do not openly support it.
That letter comes after an atheist group complained that the school hired a science professor who wrote a book on intelligent design and another professor was accused of teaching creationism….
A bit more from Evolution News and Views:
Next time someone tells you intelligent design is “based on religion,” you might point him to American Founder Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. As I explain in a special July 4th edition of ID the Future, Jefferson not only believed in intelligent design, he insisted it was based on the plain evidence of nature, not religion.
Ironically, the critics of intelligent design often think they are defending the principles of Jefferson. The National Council for the Social Studies, for example, claims that intelligent design is religion and then cites Jefferson’s famous Letter to the Danbury Baptists calling for a “wall of separation” between church and state. The clear implication is that Thomas Jefferson would agree with them that intelligent design is religion. A writer for Irregular Times goes even further, insisting that “the case of Thomas Jefferson makes it quite clear that there was not a consensus of support among the authors of the Constitution to allow for the mixing of religion and government to support theological doctrines such as intelligent design.”
In reality, Jefferson did not believe that intelligent design was a religious doctrine. In a letter to John Adams on April 11, 1823, he declared:
I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. (emphasis added)
By insisting that his defense of intelligent design was made “without appeal to revelation,” Jefferson clearly was arguing that the idea had a basis other than religion. What was that basis? He went on to explain:
The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms.
In sum, Jefferson believed that empirical data from nature itself proved intelligent design by showing the natural world’s intricate organization from the level of plants and insects all the way up to the revolution of the planets.
Intelligent Design pre-dates even Jesus! [Earthly visit]
“When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence when it embraces everything, including these artifacts themselves and their artificers? Our friend Posidonius as you know has recently made a globe which in its revolution shows the movements of the sun and stars and planets, by day and night, just as they appear in the sky. Now if someone were to take this globe and show it to the people of Britain or Scythia [barbarians at this time] would a single one of those barbarians fail to see that it was the product of a conscious intelligence.”
[….]
But if the structure of the world in all its parts is such that it could not have been better whether in point of utility or beauty, let us consider whether this is the result of chance, or whether on the contrary the parts of the world are in such a condition that they could not possibly have cohered together if they were not controlled by intelligence and by divine providence. If then the products of nature are better than those of art, and if art produces nothing without reason, nature too cannot be deemed to be without reason. When you see a statue or a painting, you recognize the exercise of art; when you observe from a distance the course of a ship, you do not hesitate to assume that its motion is guided by reason and by art; when you look at a sun-dial or a water-clock, you infer that it tells the time by art and not by chance ; how then can it be consistent to suppose that the world, which includes both the works of art in question, the craftsmen who made them, and everything else besides, can be devoid of purpose and of reason? Suppose a traveller to carry into Scythia or Britain the orrery recently constructed by our friend Posidonius, which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the sun, the moon and the five planets that take place in the heavens every twenty-four hours, would any single native doubt that this orrery was the work of a rational being? These thinkers however raise doubts about the world itself from which all things arise and have their being, and debate whether it is the product of chance or necessity of some sort, or of divine reason and intelligence…
Cicero, Nature of the Gods, Translated by H. Rackam, p. 207-209.
Via Russell Grigg, A Brief History of Design:
Cicero (106–43 BC), used this concept in his book De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) to challenge the evolutionary ideas of the philosophers of his day.
The two main schools of philosophy then were Epicureanism and Stoicism. The Epicureans sought happiness through bodily pleasures and freedom from pain and anxiety. The two chief causes of anxiety were fear of the gods and fear of death, so Epicurus sought to nullify both of these by teaching an evolutionary atomic theory.
He denied that there was any purpose in nature, because everything was composed of particles (atoma: atoms), all falling downwards. He said that these sometimes spontaneously “swerved” to coalesce and form bodies — non-living, living, human, and divine. The gods were made of finer atoms than humankind. They did not create the world or have any control over it, so they were not concerned with human affairs, and there was therefore no need for man to fear them. At death, the soul disintegrated and became non-existent, so there was no need to fear death or the prospect of judgment after death.
Cicero used the Stoic character in his book to refute these ideas with arguments from design, aimed to show that the universe is governed by an intelligent designer. He argued that a conscious purpose was needed to express art (e.g. to make a picture or a statue) and so, because nature was more perfect than art, nature showed purpose also. He reasoned that the movement of a ship was guided by skilled intelligence, and a sundial or water clock told the time by design rather than by chance. He said that even the barbarians of Britain or Scythia could not fail to see that a model which showed the movements of the sun, stars and planets was the product of conscious intelligence.
Cicero continued his challenge to the evolutionism of Epicurus by marvelling that anyone could persuade himself that chance collisions of particles could form anything as beautiful as the world. He said that this was on a par with believing that if the letters of the alphabet were thrown on the ground often enough they would spell out the Annals of Ennius.
And he asked: if chance collisions of particles could make a world, why then cannot they build much less difficult objects, like a colonnade, a temple, a house, or a city?
EPA Chief Promises to Bypass Congress in Responding to Global Warming ~ Tyranny
Via Gateway Pundit, see the Washington Times reported:
A Glimpse Into Our Future ~ Re-Education
OneNews Now has this amazingly scary story that reflects where we are headed:
…A lesbian couple filed a formal complaint against “Sweet Cakes by Melissa” in Portland after the owners – Aaron and Melissa Klein – declined on the basis of their Christian faith to provide services for a lesbian “wedding.” A report in a state newspaper says Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries plans to investigate if the business violated a 2007 state law that protects the rights of LGBT people in employment, housing, and public accommodations.
Reacting to that report, Matt Barber, vice president of Liberty Counsel Action, tells OneNewsNow “the thought police are at it again, but now they’ve stepped it up to the next level.”
“We have been saying this all along: that they insist that people who embrace the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic abandon scriptural truth and adopt a worldly, secularist, postmodern view of sex and sexuality or else,” says Barber.
The Oregonian quotes Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian as saying: “The goal is never to shut down a business. The goal is to rehabilitate.”
Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, says in light of that comment Commissioner Avakian should resign immediately.
“To say that this couple needs to be ‘rehabilitated’ for believing and practicing the values on which this nation was founded is entirely beyond the pale,” says the pro-family leader. “This sounds like Stalinist Russia or China under Mao, where those who thought for themselves were forced under government coercion into re-education camps. This is not the America that was given to us by our Founders.”
Barber says the “rehabilitation” remark connotes some kind of ailment, mental illness or physical ailment. “You know, we rehabilitate criminals,” he explains. “Are they saying that Christianity is criminal here and we have to rehabilitate those who embrace the Christian sexual ethic? That’s what this official in Oregon is saying.”
Wildmon wonders what might follow if the bakery owners refuse to be “rehabilitated.”
“What happens if they maintain their faith and their values, and refuse to convert to political correctness?” he asks. “The next logical step would be for the government to shut down their business altogether, which would be an act of Nazi-esque tyranny.”…
Feelings Front-and-Center In Race-Based Claims
The Burning Truth writes well on the recent indecent, and brings us into Blaze’s commentary afterword:
…I’m no fan of Oprah, never have been. Mostly because I know who she really is as a person.
I’ve watched her get away with misleading her audience on a whole host of issues, pretending to be outraged when guests turned out to be frauds, giving away free cars and saddling winners (who had not entered to win) with huge tax bills, refusing to marry because she didn’t want ‘a man’ to get her money, etc., etc.
Now this latest Oprah racism flap has awaken some to what really lies beneath the Harpo. Others are ceasing upon the story to highlight that even rich black people face racism. Of course, there is absolutely no evidence of racism in this story, but that hasn’t stopped the race-baiters (Oprah included) from fanning the flames of hate.
Before we continue, you should know that the person accused of being racist has vehemently denied Oprah’s accusations, and Oprah has apologized.
Certainly, it is possible for a wealthy, famous person to encounter racism. My doubt in this story comes from a distinct lack of anything racial supposedly being said to or about Oprah. So right of the get go, I’m assuming she’s race-baiting.
There is, however, a history of Oprah frivolously crying racism when she doesn’t get her way. You see, Oprah is an elitist, and she’s never hid that from anyone. Her fans were simply ignoring it. She’s a wealthy, famous person who believes her turds don’t stink, and she thinks people should bend over backwards for her. When they don’t … RACISM!
In 2005, Oprah also levied the charge of racism. Why? Because Hermes would let her in the store when they were closed for business. How dare they not give her special treatment!
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey believes she was refused entry to the Hermes shop in Paris, France because she is black, and she is planning to discuss the incident when her TV show resumes later this year.
Here is the commentary by the Blaze’s:
In 2005, Oprah Winfrey accused luxury store Hermes in Paris of turning her away when she stopped in to purchase an expensive watch for singer Tina Turner. A spokesperson for the TV personality later referred to the incident as her “crash moment.”
“Crash” was a 2004 film that centered around the damaging effects of racism. The phrase “crash moment” refers to “situations where a party feels discriminated against on the basis of skin color,” CNN reported in 2005.
The claim is extremely similar to Oprah’s recent claim of discrimination she supposedly experienced at a high-end boutique in Zurich, Switzerland. In that case, she says a sales assistant refused to show her a $38,000 handbag because it was too expensive for her. The sales assistant and the store manager have both strongly denied the allegations.
As it turned out, Oprah and her team arrived at Hermes at around 6:45 p.m. on June 14, 2005, which was about 15 minutes after the store had closed and was setting up a private PR event. A store spokesperson said a security guard informed the star that the store was closed. Oprah was given a card and told to come back the next day.
Surveillance footage of the exchange backed up the store’s account. Oprah apparently wanted the store to allow her to make a quick purchase, but was denied.
The New York Post, citing various sources close to Oprah, reported she was turned away because the store had been “having a problem with North Africans lately.”
A Hermes spokesperson vehemently denied the allegation.
“There was never any discussion of North Africans,” she said. “The story is not true.”
However, Hermes still ended up apologizing to Winfrey for the misunderstanding.
Rare Photo of Lucille Ball (Video also in link of photo)
Water Bottle Help Brighten Peoples Day in the Third World ~ Awesome!
People who live off $2 a day cannot afford the $.50 to have their meager shacks lit up… not to mention the strain on the shoddy electrical grid. This simple invention that started in Brazil and worked its way around the world via the internet is bringing light and saving money for the poorest people in the world.
Read more at THE DAILY NEWS