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"Faith-Based Homeland Security" ? - the "Stealth Presidency" To scant media coverage, George W. Bush has signed an executiver order establishing a "Faith-Based" office within the DHC. The Washington Post depicted this as relating mainly to the Katrina relief effort. But is this The Stealth Presidency" ?: Jim Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, "confirmed [ to Esther Kaplan, author of "With God on Their side..." ] that no direct federal grants from his program had gone to a non-Christian religious group" . Prior to 2000, many Christian right groups were on the skids, says Kaplan, but many are now riding high on wave of [ largely unaudited and untracked ] faith based federal and state $. How much ? Bill Berkowitz ventures an asessment. TheocracyWatch has a compendium of all things "Faith Based". Prisons, science, sex ed....
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CSN has been called the Clear Channel of the low power FM's. One of the many broadcasting arms of Calvary Chapel. It owns and operates over 400 stations. Apparently its board, consisting of two members, is about to self destruct. But the story doesn't end there. Its president is being accused of sexual harassment and is also being accused of defaulting on a million dollar loan. The loan came from Calvary Chapel founder and Pastor, Chuck Smith, who has a history with the guy. CSN's president wants the board dissolved but that could be a problem. By some accounts, next in line to head the board is one Pastor Skip Heltzig, who seems to be involved in a bit of a scandal of his own. Church defenders say the troubles are private matters, critics say the movement has a history of covering things up. (Some links are .pdf)
comment posted at 3:08 PM on Mar-7-06
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70 private cars, 50 000 kilos of flowers, 3000 candles, 65 000 yards of fabric. Those are just a few of the figures from the wedding of New York playboy and (wait for it) hotel heir Vikram Chatwal to model Priya Sachdev. Last year, Lakshmi Mittal (the world's third-richest man, according to Forbes) spent over $60 million for his daughter Vanisha's wedding. What kind of wedding does $60 million buy? A song-and-dance by Aishwarya Rai, among other Bollywood luminaries; ceremonies at the Tuileries and Versailles; and top chefs and designers at your beck and call. In 2004, the Sahara Group's Subrata Roy built three mock palaces on the edge of a lake in Uttar Pradesh; his sons' double wedding had 11 000 guests. Mr. Roy's company paid for the weddings of 101 couples (numbers ending in '1' are considered auspicious) who couldn't afford to get married, and also fed 140 000 poor people across the country (all as part of the festivities). All of this sound like idle gossip? The wedding business is huge in India; it's a $10bn business (and growing at 25% annually), and the demand for gold wedding jewelry, according to analysts, "helped lift the metal's price to a 25-year high last month." Appliance retailers offer discounts during weddings season; there are personal loans available for weddings; and there's even an entire mall devoted to weddings. As the Christian Science Monitor notes, the minimum a middle-class Indian family will spend on a wedding is $34 000. (The average American wedding? $26 327.) And who makes up the Indian middle class? "Those making $4,545 to $23,000 a year." More on Indian wedding traditions here.
comment posted at 9:12 PM on Mar-6-06

Tom Parker writes that "State supreme courts may decline to follow bad U.S. Supreme Court precedents.... faithful adherence to the judicial oath requires resistance to [U.S. Supreme Court] activism...." Parker hopes that a lower court's decision against precedent might prevail, either because the U.S. Supreme Court's membership may have changed since the precedent was decided, or just by jamming the docket, "[b]ecause the U.S. Supreme Court can accept only a handful of the petitions it receives...."

So who is this Tom Parker who advocates a massive resistance to Federal Supremacy? A fringe nut? A southern succesionist? Why, he's just an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama.
comment posted at 10:04 PM on Mar-6-06

Corysucks.com is an index of Cory Doctorow’s posts to Boing Boing ranked according to how much they suck. [not via boing boing]
comment posted at 8:22 AM on Mar-5-06

Ascaris lumbricoides. According to estimates, about 1.5 billion people--about a quarter of the earth's population--are hosts to the Ascaris lumbricoides parasitic worm. Ascaris worms can grow to be 18 inches in length, and use their host's windpipe and esophagus to migrate between the small intestine and the lungs. A single human host may support dozen of large worms, which can be contracted by contact with fecal matter, animals, or undercooked pork. Under some circumstances (the worms dislike anesthesia, for example) one or more worms may exit from the mouth (a horrifying image), or the anus (one of the most disgusting images I have ever seen, and not safe for work, obviously). Here, the removal of a worm is caught on video (Realplayer). Too disgusting to post? Almost. But 1.5 billion people have got these in their bodies right now. That's what's grosser than gross.
comment posted at 8:34 AM on Mar-5-06

Ever since someone wrote software to teach geeks to dance, the DDR craze has enjoyed quite a number of spin-offs. Karaoke Revolution got people singing. Donkey Konga is the same thing but for bongo drums. Guitar Hero for the PS2 has gotten rave reviews and while letting you rip some guitar solos. Christian game makers are even cashing in with Dance Praise. But nothing comes close to the coolness of Accordion Hero. Squeeze hard, die young.
comment posted at 8:55 PM on Mar-4-06

...his boyfriend Josh. --beautiful story, made all the more poignant at a time of more and more state constitutional amendments ensuring second-class citizenship, and a Democratic party urging us to just shut up already, but still give.
comment posted at 7:46 PM on Mar-4-06
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Pedaling & Paddling Around America. Swedish adventurer and climber Renata Chlumska is circumnavigating the USA's lower 48 states by bicycle and kayak. She originally planned the trip with her late partner, the great climber Göran Kropp who most famously rode his bike from Sweden to Nepal, climbed Everest, then rode back. After his death, the project was put on hold while Chlumska dealt with US visa regulations. If you are on her route, go out and say hello.
comment posted at 8:38 PM on Mar-2-06

From Foreign Policy, Patriarchy's Big Comeback. Maybe you didn't believe it had been away. But Societies that are today the most secular and the most generous with their underfunded welfare states will be the most prone to religious revivals and a rebirth of the patriarchal family. The absolute population of Europe and Japan may fall dramatically, but the remaining population will, by a process similar to survival of the fittest, be adapted to a new environment in which no one can rely on government to replace the family, and in which a patriarchal God commands family members to suppress their individualism and submit to father.
comment posted at 8:24 PM on Mar-2-06

The New Secular Jihad. Together the Patriot Pastors flanked by warrior Ken Blackwell are fighting an apocalyptic clash between the forces of righteousness and the hordes of hell. "Make sure that when the shootin' starts, all of the enemy is in front of you."
comment posted at 8:54 PM on Mar-2-06

"BREAKING: State-based impeachment moves forward" There's no dedicated link, even, this is so breaking. So that'll have to do : Will Vermont call George W. Bush to account via a little known procedure by which individual US states can initiate an impeachment process against a sitting US president ?
comment posted at 10:02 PM on Mar-1-06

The Other Christian Activists "Any Christian who believes that homosexuality is a more important issue than justice for the poor just hasn't read his Bible straight." - David Hilfiker
"If you are waiting for a religious left to emerge to offset the power of the religious right, it may already be in your own neighborhood at a local church or synagogue." - Ira Chernus
comment posted at 9:45 PM on Mar-1-06

Anti-Hippie Action League
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Ten things evolutionists can do to improve communication. Speaking as a battle-scarred survivor of a few battles over evolution on teh Interweb, I plead guilty to ignorance of a few of these rules. But I wonder, too, what good any of these would do in the grand scheme of things: could we expect Creationists to act as honorably, or as honestly? And what would the Flying Spaghetti Monster think?
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For the women of South Dakota: an abortion manual --building on the history and expertise of Jane, , an underground referral and abortion-providing group in Chicago in the 60s, Molly provides the vital info women in South Dakota (and maybe elsewhere soon) need.
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"My name is Gudo Wafu Nishijima, a Buddist Monk, who is 86 years old, and recently because of my old age, I finished my Buddhist lectures, which were held at many places for many years, and so I decided to open Dogen Sangha Blog, to express the Buddhist thought. It might be very short sentences, but I would like to continue it as far as possible almost every day."

The blog of Zen Master Gudo Wafu Nishijima, founder of Dongen Sangha Buddhist group. Learn from his video, How to Practice Zazen, or read some of Nishijima Roshi's lectures and articles, including the interesting talk, Zazen, A Better Way of Experiencing Pain.
comment posted at 7:58 PM on Feb-25-06

Reasonable people are capable of thinking about complex issues without resorting to simplistic oversimplifications. These two scholarly types discuss what seems obvious but lacks traction amongst most people. What can be done to make these voices heard and more importantly, accepted?
comment posted at 8:32 PM on Feb-24-06

Ohio Senator: Bar adoptions by the GOP ---In response to Ohio Senator Hood's bill to bar adoption by gays and lesbians, one Senator uses humor to counter hate: ...To further lampoon Hood's bill, Hagan wrote in his mock proposal that ``credible research' shows that adopted children raised in Republican households are more at risk for developing ``emotional problems, social stigmas, inflated egos, and alarming lack of tolerance for others they deem different than themselves and an air of overconfidence to mask their insecurities.' However, Hagan admitted that he has no scientific evidence to support the above claims. Just as ``Hood had no scientific evidence' to back his assertion that having gay parents was detrimental to children, Hagan said. ...
comment posted at 8:35 PM on Feb-24-06

The Mr. Hetero contest. by this guy.
comment posted at 8:52 PM on Feb-24-06

The Bull Moose likes the idea of reducing abortions by 95% in 10 years. A group of largely pro-life Democrats have banded together to "put aside the debate on the legality of abortion" and focus on how to greatly reduce the number of abortions in America. Is this an example of Democrats challenging Republicans to put their money where their pro-life principles are? Or, because the initiative "bans late-term abortions and requires parental-notification laws," is this another example of America's continuing drift to the right?
comment posted at 7:19 PM on Feb-17-06

Let's go quail hunting. (flash) Don't drink too much. We all had a good laugh over the Dick Cheney Quail Hunting game (Deadeye Dick sure is quite a shooter), but here you actually get to shoot some quail. (my apologies to PETA and Harry Whittington) Sorry, but this will only waste about five minutes of your time this Friday.
comment posted at 7:31 PM on Feb-17-06

Back when President Bush declared a state of emergency, then did it again, and people were wondering Could Terrorism Result In A Constitutional Dictator? I was reminded of the UN invasion paranoia under Clinton and Senate Report 93-549, written in 1973, which said "Since March 9, 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency." and the question was have we been living in a state of National Emergency for over six decades? Back then it was easy to write off with the tinfoil hat crowd. But it seems throughout the nation's history, presidents have in fact been using executive orders on "emergencies" to circumvent the Constitution's division of power.
comment posted at 7:37 PM on Feb-17-06

Survivorman. An incredible show of one man surviving all alone in some of the harshest conditions for 7 days without a camera crew. He has to not only survive but carry 50 pounds of camera equipment he uses to film the show. Don't be fooled by the 30 minute abbreviated shows being aired on the US Discovery Channel, the good stuff is the meaty hour-long episodes available on The Science Channel.
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The Johari Window was invented by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingram in the 1950s as a model for mapping personality awareness. By describing yourself from a fixed list of adjectives, then asking your friends and colleagues to describe you from the same list, a grid of overlap and difference can be built up. To start, pick the five or six words that you feel best describe you. Your results will be saved, under a name of your choosing, so that you can send your friends and colleagues directly to your Window.
comment posted at 9:30 PM on Feb-15-06

60 "secret" Abu Ghraib photos have been leaked to the Sydney Morning Herald. (Warning, very NSFW and disturbing.) They are thought to be among those viewed in private by U.S. senators following a May, 2004 hearing and "withheld from the public to protect the integrity of military trials and to avoid further inflaming America's enemies."
comment posted at 9:34 PM on Feb-14-06

The Price of Payola and Fake News? 1.6 billion dollars for just 2003-5 alone. The GAO's new report lays it out. That's how much seven federal departments spent from 2003 through the second quarter of 2005 on 343 contracts with public relations firms, advertising agencies, media organizations and individuals, according to a new Government Accountability Office report. ... The new report reveals that federal public relations spending goes far beyond "video news releases." (full report is a PDF download from there) And there's another scandal coming, if Wonkette has it right.
comment posted at 8:18 AM on Feb-14-06

Tayler makes handmade wooden weapons, which he then uses to stage semi-elaborate one man cosplay involving him, his cat & an Australian Shepherd. Archives of previous months stories here.
comment posted at 10:14 PM on Feb-13-06

Remember that really shocking circa-2003 PUMA advertisement that no one would take responsibility for? Its mystery has finally unraveled.
comment posted at 9:53 PM on Feb-10-06

South Dakota House approves sweeping abortion ban Although saying they personally abhor abortion, opponents made several unsuccessful attempts to make exceptions in cases of rape and incest, and to protect pregnant women whose health may be endangered.
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Newsfilter: PBS Station Nixes Show On Terrorism. Following last-minute cries of protest from Muslim leaders last week, a Public Broadcasting Service affiliate in Dallas canceled the premiere of a documentary on the roots of Islamic terrorism.
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