Good morning Mikey, you f*** Jew. Let me be the first to call you a f*** Jew today.’ Michael L. ‘Mikey’ Weinstein shares his hate mail with both friends and strangers the way elderly people show off photos of their grandkids. He has plenty of it to share. For the past four years, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has been doing battle with a Christian subculture that, he believes, is trying to Christianize the U.S. armed forces with the help of a complicit Pentagon brass. He calls it the ‘fundamentalist Christian parachurch-military-corporate-proselytizing complex,’ a mouthful by which he means holy warriors in contempt of the constitutional barrier between church and state. ‘The scary thing about all this,’ Weinstein says, ‘is it’s going on not with the blind eye of the Pentagon but with its full and totally enthusiastic support. And those who are not directly involved are passive about it. As the Talmud says, ‘silence is consent.” You may recall the headlines in January, when a company called Trijicon, the lead supplier of rifle scopes to the U.S. military, was found to have inscribed them with coded references to passages in the New […]
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Athab Jabbar, 70, runs a house of worship, so it tugs at his conscience that his gun-toting guards aren’t licensed by the Iraqi government and that he isn’t properly registered with the central Shiite Muslim religious authorities. When he’s tried to file the paperwork that would bring his small mosque into compliance with Iraqi law, however, the answer is always the same: Only after a new government is formed. For hundreds of thousands of Iraqis such as Jabbar, the delay in seating a new government, which already has lasted nearly three months, has complicated everyday errands and added bureaucratic frustration to lives that are hard enough thanks to persistent violence and the lack of basic utilities. More than 100,000 new state jobs are on hold, and mundane tasks such as obtaining licenses and registering for pensions are backlogged until a new government is seated, Iraqi officials and Baghdad residents said this week. Each day the political infighting drags on, more Iraqis begin to question their participation in the March 7 parliamentary elections, which the Obama administration had counted on to pave the way for an unimpeded withdrawal of U.S. forces by the end […]
ROBERT, La. — The most ambitious bid yet to stop the worst oil spill in U.S. history ended in failure Saturday after BP was unable to overwhelm the gusher of crude with heavy fluids and junk. President Obama called the setback ‘as enraging as it is heartbreaking.’ The oil giant immediately began readying its next attempted fix, using robot submarines to cut the pipe that’s gushing the oil and cap it with funnel-like device, but the only guaranteed solution remains more than two months away. The company determined the ‘top kill’ had failed after it spent three days pumping heavy drilling mud into the crippled well 5,000 feet underwater. It’s the latest in a series of failures to stop the crude that’s fouling marshland and beaches, as estimates of how much oil is leaking grow more dire. The spill is the worst in U.S. history - exceeding even the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster - and has dumped between 18 million and 40 million gallons into the Gulf, according to government estimates. ‘This scares everybody, the fact that we can’t make this well stop flowing, the fact that we haven’t succeeded so far,’ BP PLC Chief Operating […]
The last couple of weeks may be looked back on as a watershed in the development of electric vehicles-a moment when major automakers worldwide put more skin in the game and, just as importantly, consumers signaled they were ready for the electric revolution. Let’s take a look at consumers first. They have turned the all-electric Nissan Leaf into the iPad of the automotive world. The first Leaf has yet to roll off the production lines and already the car is sold out in both the United States and Japan, its first markets. Granted, the 13,000 orders in the U.S. and 6,000 orders in Japan are miniscule for an industry that measures unit sales in the seven figures. But it’s certainly an indication that if you build electric cars, consumers will come. And Carlos Ghosn, the head of Nissan, plans to make a huge bet on electric cars in the future. Ghosn says his company and its European partner, Renault, will have the capacity to make 500,000 electric cars by 2014. That means a $1.7 billion investment in the company’s lithium ion battery plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, and a total investment of $5 billion from 2007 to 2012 […]
In recent months allegations and admissions of child abuse by priests have shaken the Roman Catholic Church to its core, as a continuous stream of cases has surfaced across Western Europe and beyond. Priest gives out Communion Experts say there is no evidence of a link between celibacy and abuse The Vatican has defended itself by suggesting this is a problem that affects society as a whole, and that the Church has now taken steps to deal with it – an approach that has often provoked more anger and frustration among critics who believe it systematically covered up many cases. With allegations still surfacing, there is no conclusive account of the extent of Catholic abuse worldwide or its causes. But current research and expert opinion suggest that men within the Catholic Church may be no more likely than others to abuse, and that the prevalence of abuse by priests has fallen sharply in the last 20-30 years. What has made the crisis stand out are the cover-ups and other alleged shortcomings in the way abuse was dealt with. ‘The real problem is an abuse of authority, the duty of care that pastors have to […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
