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Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Monday, November 7, 2016
Monday, November 16, 2015
Political Correctness Reigns Supreme In Italy! Peace Would Only Exist If We Talked More! Sick!
Italian Daily Sued for Post-Paris Bombings Headline “Muslim Bastards”
“Like a muddied spring or a polluted fountain is a righteous man who gives way before the wicked.” (Proverbs 25:26)
image: https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/bastardi-islamici-660x330.jpg
(Photo: screenshot / JNi Media)
Journalist Thomas Notarianni, former director of PeaceReporter, sued the newspaper Libero, published in Milan, Italy, this morning, when, in the aftermath of the attacks in Paris, the paper ran the front page headline “Bastardi Islamici” (Muslim Bastards). The complaint was filed against the editor, Maurizio Belpietro, and “all the people to be considered.”
“This hatred is not only dangerous, it’s criminal,” Notarianni posted on his Facebook page. The lawsuit was filed based on Article 403 of the Italian Criminal Code — “insulting a religion by insulting people.” Anyone who publicly insults a religion, through contempt of those who profess it, shall be punished by a fine of €1,000 to €5,000. The law applies a fine ranging from €2,000 to €6,000 to anyone who offends a religious denomination through contempt of a minister.
Belpietro defended himself on Twitter, claiming to have used the term “bastards” in the sense of “illegitimate children.” Or, more precisely, he called “ignorant” the people “who do not know that bastard means illegitimate child.”
Meanwhile, Thomas Notarianni, who nowadays runs the Peaceful Minds Center, on Saturday offered the following as his way of combating ISIS terrorism:
“It’s times like these that we realize the importance of our Peaceful Minds practice. What happened in France is a product of the ego. Our work is to dissolve the ego and then help others do the same. Until we can accomplish this these things will continue as they have for thousands of years. Our hearts and compassion go out to the victims of this egotist blindness. When your grieving is done may you find Peace in your minds and Love in your hearts. With Love and Kindness, Tommy.”
Monday, November 9, 2015
Monday, October 26, 2015
Is Marriage Becoming An Anachronism? Is It Planned?
SOCIETYCOMMENTARY
How the Left Has Sabotaged Marriage and Family
(Photo:iStockphoto)
On June 26, 2015, four of the Supreme Court’s liberals joined Justice Anthony Kennedy in discovering a new right to same-sex marriage in the U.S. Constitution, one thereby imposed upon all 50 states.
In response, of course, liberals were jubilant. Their leader, the one who promised to fundamentally transform America, responded by literally illuminating the nation’s house in rainbow colors.
Americans saw all of that. They saw the pictures of their fundamentally transformed White House; they saw other culture-transformers dancing in the streets joyously rejecting what a great country once called the laws of nature and nature’s God.
What they had just achieved was, obviously, something utterly untried and unprecedented. And yet, if you suggested even a slight pause before redefining something as fundamental as the 2,000-year, unquestioned, Judeo-Christian/Western standard for marriage, which has only ever meant a male-female bond—well, then you were nothing more than a homophobe exuding a noxious stream of hate. You couldn’t possibly have any rational reason for your rancid, puzzling position.
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The Push to Alter Marriage
But one thing that very few Americans saw, including the millions of same-sex marriage supporters who aren’t especially political or ideological, was the quite revealing celebration among some really radical quarters.
Among them, Communist Party USA and its publication, People’s World—successor to the Soviet-funded and directed Daily Worker—were thrilled with what Anthony Kennedy and friends had done.
For communists, this was a stunning victory, the securing of a long-elusive effort to vanquish the fixed marriage model set forth long ago by nature and the Creator. Indeed, if you thought the White House seemed eager to hoist the rainbow colors, you should have seen the American Communist Party.
In fact, the party of the red flag had been waving the rainbow flag before June 26, 2015. Communist Party USA has been pumping the full “LGBT” agenda for several years now.
The day before Kennedy’s landmark opinion came two pieces in People’s World, one titled “Today in Pride Month history: Homosexuals in Holocaust first publicly recognized” and the other titled, “Today in LGBTQ history: Stonewall Inn made historic landmark.” The actual day of the high court’s decision was marked by a lead article titled “Three in a row: SCOTUS upholds marriage equality, Obamacare, Fair Housing Act.” People’s World was grateful for the court’s work across the board.
This intriguing appreciation from American communists is no surprise to those of us who study communism for a living and thus are forced to read websites like People’s World (as well as the homepage of Communist Party USA) as an occupational hazard. We know that one is far more likely to see the rainbow flag at People’s World nowadays than a red flag with a hammer and sickle.
For more on this, see Paul Kengor’s new book, “Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage.”
Really, though, the two flags are, in limited but meaningful ways, fighting for certain shared objectives. For today’s communists, the “LGBT” agenda, especially on marriage, is the hammer and sickle to take down the natural, traditional, biblical, Western/Judeo-Christian model for marriage and family that they have long despised. I’ll here very briefly summarize some of the history.
A History of Subverting Family and Religion
Efforts to fundamentally transform marriage and family have been long at work, but never (until now) accepted and pushed by the mainstream. In the past, these efforts were spearheaded by the most dangerous radicals. For two centuries, leftist extremists made their arguments, from the 1800s to the 1960s, characterized by the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels wrote of the “abolition of the family!” Even then, in 1848, Marx and Engels could call “abolition of the family” an “infamous proposal of the communists.”
“Blessed is he who has no family,” Marx wrote to Engels, at best only partly in jest. Marx’s partner in crime detested family and marriage so much that he refused both. The ideological duo fulminated against the “bourgeois claptrap” of marriage, which was merely a “system of housewives held in common.” Engels was carrying the banner to smash monogamy a century before the 1960s New Left adopted the credo.
Efforts to revolutionize family and marriage continued, from socialist utopians like Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Albert Brisbane to cultural Marxists in the Frankfurt School such as Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich to 20th-century leftists and progressives ranging from the Bolsheviks—Lenin, Trotsky, Alexandra Kollontai—to Margaret Sanger, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and ’60s radicals Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd.
When Tom Hayden and Robert Scheer ran a “Red Family” colony in near Berkeley in the 1960s, they were merely following the footsteps of socialist-utopian colonies in the 1800s in places like Oneida, New York and New Harmony, Indiana.
Were these “ideological colonists” (to borrow an apt description by Pope Francis) supporting same-sex marriage? Of course, not.
No group of radicals, no matter how unhinged, ever contemplated that. The mere fleeting contemplation, the mere momentary notion, the slightest passing fancy of a man legally marrying another man in the 1850s or 1950s would have been scoffed at as incomprehensible. Such proponents would have been deemed certifiably insane.
And yet, that said, among these far-left elements, the cultural Marxists in particular—the Frankfurt School, Georg Lukacs, Willi Munzenberg, Marcuse, Reich, and allies—and their 1960s New Left inheritors, from Kate Millett to Dohrn, Ayers, Rudd, Hayden, Sheer, and others, sought to fundamentally transform the culture through a new kind of (initially) Freudian-based Marxism that obliterated traditional-religious understandings of sexuality, gender, marriage, and family. For them, their cultural revolution would be achieved through a long march through the institutions, especially academia.
It would take a while, but they were enormously patient, diligent, and ultimately successful. This is where the tectonic shift on marriage and family has taken place. Ask anyone who has lived through it and watched it carefully, and he will tell you that same-sex marriage is a product of our modern universities, which educated today’s culture shapers and fundamental transformers in Hollywood, New York, TV, movies, the media, Google, Facebook, the White House, and on and on.
For the far left, same-sex marriage is the Trojan Horse to secure the takedown of marriage it has long wanted, and countless everyday Americans are oblivious to the older, deeper forces at work. And even more delicious for the left, same-sex marriage is serving as a powerful tool in attacking what the extreme left has always hated most: religion.
Today’s advocates of same-sex marriage need to be aware of the quite insidious deeper historical-ideological forces they are unwittingly allied with and aiding and abetting. Sure, that knowledge still will likely not change their minds, and it isn’t going to reverse the Supreme Court decision, but it’s something that a well-informed, thoughtful person should at least be willing to learn about.
Alas, does this mean that same-sex marriage is a communist plot? Is that what I’m saying here? Of course not. Please, liberals, don’t be simpletons. Add some nuance to the discussion. Don’t caricature something that should be taken seriously. It would be logically ridiculous and historically simplistic to say that the commies have given us same-sex marriage. But what I am saying is that a people do not wake up one morning, head to Starbucks, and then walk to the office and casually dismiss multi-millennia’s worth of prior wisdom, experience, and opinion—what G. K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead”—without some busy work by some factions in the years before.
Ground had been plowed to ready this soil. The current state is the end-road of a steady evolution that should not be viewed entirely separate from or totally unrelated to early attacks by the far left. That ideological history matters.
A Historic Shift
A people does not rise up one day in June 2015 and ditch the sacred and natural character of the male-female marital union that served their parents, grandparents, great grandparents, great-great grandparents, great-great-great grandparents, etc. (perhaps I do indeed need to belabor this point, eh?) and the ongoing long line of ancient ancestors who preceded them. All of these relations of ours surely were not mere wild “hate-mongers.”
Yet, if there is one source of clear commonality, from the early 19th to early 21st centuries, it is this: As modern liberalism/progressivism and the Democratic Party have become increasingly secular, often anti-religious, or certainly dismissive of traditional notions of morality, the embrace of same-sex marriage has become possible.
For communists, two centuries ago and still today, that requisite anti-religious secularism has been there all along. Much of the wider American culture, outside of the far left, has also become secular and dismissive of traditional religious teaching on matters like family and marriage. That disregard if not outright rejection of Christian ethics has brought all of these forces full circle in a joint willingness to permanently alter the historic Western/Christian understanding of male-female matrimony.
Take this, for instance, as an illustration: Let’s imagine four people who support redefining marriage via same-sex marriage: The hardcore cultural Marxist professor at “Secular U,” the apolitical soccer mom on Facebook, the gay Episcopal pastor, and the sitcom addict.
They may all come to the “marriage equality” position from entirely different motivations, and otherwise hold little in common ideologically, but they all share one crucial component: Each of them rejects the idea that there is a single, absolute, eternal standard for male-female marriage ordained by nature and nature’s God, and each believes that he can render unto himself the right to abolish any such standard and create his own definitions.
As for communists, they couldn’t care less whatever tags or hashtags or slogans or colors the majority culture uses to redefine marriage and family. To them, the larger objective remains the same: to reject and abolish a traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of marriage and family. They are getting what they’ve long wanted, and they could not have done it without the support of mainstream Americans.
The radical left could never have achieved this ultimate takedown of marriage without the larger public’s acquiescence and assistance. The wider same-sex-marriage-supporting public has been the indispensable handmaiden to the radical left’s ability to at long last alter marriage and family. It has been quite a coup.
Please join us at The Heritage Foundation on Oct. 16, 2015, from 11am to 12pm, for a discussion with author Paul Kengor on his newly released book “Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage.”
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Drone Use In US, NSA Spying, Scandals, IRS Stealing Elections--Isn't America Great!
Watchdog: FBI Has Used Drones Since 2006
September 27, 2013 by UPI - United Press International, Inc.
WASHINGTON– The FBI has tracked U.S. criminal activity with drones since 2006 but has not codified rules to protect privacy rights, a Justice Department watchdog says.
The FBI’s domestic drone use, costing more than $3 million as of May and starting years earlier than previously acknowledged, is also expected to expand to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the 35-page report by the department’s watchdog Office of the Inspector General said.
The ATF has already spent $600,000 to test small unmanned aerial vehicles the FBI uses, the report said.
The unarmed craft, which can weigh up to 55 pounds and fly “in close proximity to a home,” cost about $25 an hour to operate, compared with $650 an hour for a helicopter or other piloted aircraft, the report said.
A drone was used by the FBI during a six-day hostage standoff in Midland City, Ala., in late January and early February, the report said.
In that case, the FBI used a drone with a 9-foot wingspan to watch the entrance to a bunker where 65-year-old Vietnam War-era veteran Jimmy Lee Dykes held a 5-year-old boy hostage.
On the afternoon of Feb. 4, law enforcement agents entered the bunker, killed Dykes and rescued the boy.
The U.S. Marshals Service and Drug Enforcement Administration, which also fall under the Justice Department, purchased and tested the small drones but told auditors they had “no plans to deploy them operationally,” said the inspector general’s report, which can be found at tinyurl.com/UPI-OIG-Drone-Report.
In addition to buying drones for internal use, the Justice Department gave at least $1.2 million to local police departments to purchase the small drones “for reconnaissance, surveillance and crime scene examinations,” the report said.
But in most cases the department appeared not to have properly tracked how the money was spent, the audit found.
From 2004 to May 2013, the Justice Department spent almost $5 million on the unmanned aircraft.
While the drones have helped the FBI in cases such as the Alabama hostage crisis, they raise “unique concerns about privacy and the collection of evidence,” the inspector general’s report said.
Robert Mueller, who retired as FBI director Sept. 4, testified as director before the Senate Judiciary Committee June 19 the bureau employed drones in “a very, very minimal way and very seldom.”
“I will tell you that our footprint is very small,” he said, responding to a question from Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. “We have very few and have limited use, and we’re exploring not only the use but also the necessary guidelines for that use.
“We already have, to a certain extent, a body of law that relates to aerial surveillance and privacy relating to helicopters and small aircraft … which could well be adapted to the use of drones,” Mueller said. “It’s still in its nascent stages … but it’s worthy of debate and perhaps legislation down the road.”
But despite the unique concerns and the FBI’s seven-year use of domestic drones, the bureau hasn’t revised its policies to address drone-surveillance privacy concerns, the auditors said.
Bureau guidelines simply “require that agents request supervisory approval before conducting any aerial surveillance and comply with aviation laws and policies,” the report said.
In a footnote, the report says FBI officials told auditors their Office of the General Council was “conducting a privacy review” tied to drone surveillance.
ATF officials told auditors they “did not believe that there was a need to develop additional privacy protocols” because they didn’t see much practical difference between using drones or piloted aircraft for surveillance, the report said.
The ATF is developing a standard operational checklist to guide how pilots should use drones, the report said.
But the agency watchdogs said a consistent department policy may be needed for the use of small drones, which can secretly hover in areas where people might expect privacy and remain there far longer than a traditional aircraft could.
The inspector general’s office recommended the deputy attorney general’s office consider writing new guidelines across the entire Justice Department to curb improper surveillance by law enforcement drones.
American Civil Liberties Union Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley said the non-profit rights group was “encouraged by the inspector general’s recognition that drones have created a need for privacy policies covering aerial surveillance.”
“We urge the Justice Department to make good on its plans to develop privacy rules that protect Americans from another mass surveillance technology,” Stanley said.
He added Congress should pass legislation introduced by Reps. Ted Poe, R-Texas, and Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., that requires law enforcement to get court approval before deploying drones and explicitly forbids the arming of such craft.
Monday, April 29, 2013
Tebow Let Go By Jets
Today being religious is thought of as a moral defect rather than something to be emulated. So, he bows down and says a prayer. What is wrong with that? We celebrate the touchdown dance but a quiet moment is scorned.
America is losing its way. Being a good citizen, doing the right thing, being religious and being honest are not attributes of a an American citizen. Rather illegal immigrants are praised, convicted criminals are coddled like children, legal gun owners are scorned and made to jump through hoops just to purchase weapons and no longer can two individuals shake hands to make a deal, now it requires pages of legalese. If you trip over your own feet, it is the fault of the sidewalk owner. If you slip in a store, it is obviously the store owner's fault. No one is responsible for their own actions.
Yes, this is a long way away from Tebow, but his situation is a great example of a hard working under talented guy with great leadership abilities who should be honored. He is a winner. So we were very happy to see many of the comments in the New York Times article, below, who blamed the Jets and not Tebow. Maybe things are not as bad as we thought.
Hopefully, he will find anther team which will understand his talent and use it to win. He deserves to find that opportunity.
Conservative Tom
Noisy Courtship, Quiet Breakup: Jets Dump Tebow
Adam Hunger/Reuters
Tim Tebow being sacked during a 2012 preseason game.
By BEN SHPIGEL
Published: April 29, 2013 22 Comments
It was 13 months ago that the Jets welcomed Tim Tebow to the team, introducing him in their spacious field house at a news conference attended by more than 200 members of the news media that snarled traffic around the team’s facility in Florham Park, N.J.
Related
This Land: He’s a Quarterback, He’s a Winner, He’s a TV Draw, He’s a Verb (January 14, 2012)
Riff: Let My Tebow Go(December 16, 2012)
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On Monday the Jets cut Tebow with no pomp, a victim of circumstance. They acknowledged an experiment gone awry with a news release that said, simply, “Jets waive QB Tim Tebow.” There was no mention in that release of Tebow’s statistics with the team, perhaps in part because there were none worth mentioning.
He was more afterthought than asset, more distraction than revelation, a decoy who played a greater role on special teams than behind center. As the Jets’ season unraveled, Tebow, frustrated and misled, emerged as a symbol of the franchise’s recklessness in assembling the roster: for two draft picks and $2.53 million – roughly $1.5 million of which is still owed to Denver – the Jets acquired a cross-cultural phenomenon who played only 77 offensive snaps, rushed 32 times for 102 yards and completed 6 of 8 passes. He did not score a touchdown.
Almost all of the organization’s principals, including the owner Woody Johnson, the former general manager Mike Tannenbaum, Coach Rex Ryan and the deposed offensive coordinator Tony Sparano, played a role in one of the more misguided and myopic moves in franchise history. Tebow joined the Jets on March 21, 2012, as a flawed quarterback at the zenith of his brief N.F.L. career, two months after leading the Denver Broncos to several late victories and an overtime playoff win against Pittsburgh. His arrival spawned many a breathless proclamation, none of which were fulfilled.
Instead of managing the situation so that Tebow, 25, would have an opportunity to evolve into a major contributor, as he had predicted, Ryan watched it devolve into a fiasco, with members of the organization feeling empowered to criticize Tebow anonymously.
Tannenbaum vowed that Tebow would make the Jets’ offense “diverse, more dynamic” and “more difficult for opposing teams to defend,” when instead he made it more predictable – as in, Tebow, on his rare snaps at quarterback, would only run up the middle. That was the domain of Sparano, whose familiarity with the wildcat formation and read-option obscured a lack of imagination and creativity that doomed the Jets’ offense. Johnson would later say that he was only joking when he noted that “you can never have enough Tebow,” but his words loomed over the team all season, especially when the Jets had no Tebow at all.
Tebow, to a degree, is not exempt from culpability. It was he, after all, who chose to accept the trade to the Jets rather than play for Jacksonville, where he was reared. But Tebow could not have predicted what awaited him in New York. The former special-teams coordinator Mike Westhoff, in a memorable radio interview after the season, called the Jets’ mishandling of Tebow “a mess, it was an absolute mess.”
Ever the diplomat, Tebow rarely showed his emotions publicly. He handled questions about the awkward predicament with Mark Sanchez, the starting quarterback, as deftly as the attention he received for being an outspoken Christian. Only toward the end of the season, when he was passed over when Ryan benched Sanchez in favor of the third-stringer Greg McElroy, did Tebow offer a glimpse of the frustration that had been long simmering. He knew then that a departure was inevitable, regardless of Johnson’s claim from October that Tebow would be with the Jets for all three years of his contract. And it was made all the more obvious Friday when the Jets drafted Geno Smith, raising the number of quarterbacks on their roster to six. With a potentially uncomfortable situation in the looming end of the Sanchez era, the Jets finally parted ways with Tebow.
“We have a great deal of respect for Tim Tebow,” Ryan said in a statement. “Unfortunately, things did not work out the way we all had hoped. Tim is an extremely hard worker, evident by the shape he came back in this off-season. We wish him the best moving forward.”
Tebow’s next destination is a topic of intrigue. The Jets showed foresight in wanting to maximize his versatility, by lining him up at tight end, in the slot and at running back, but all Tebow wants is to play quarterback in the N.F.L. If he is unwilling to consider a full-time position switch – and there is no telling whether that would be a prudent move – his options may be limited. No teams were interested when the Jets tried to trade Tebow, who must now clear waivers. Teams have until 4 p.m. Tuesday to register a claim for the most famous backup quarterback in the league.
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22 Comments
and I am being kind
.....................now I can enjoy a game without seeing this fanatic bend down on his knees...................
Then ESPN decided to ram TimTebowTimTebowTimTebowTimTebow down our throats 24 hours a day for two years and he will now be remembered as one of the most annoying sports figures in history. His legacy will be to serve as a symbol of the Jets dysfunction and the ridiculousness of a 24 hour sports news cycle. Great going, ESPN.
PR gimmicks flat don't work on the NFL gridiron, and the Jets owner and managers should have known that.
They also should have known that Tebow, with his sub-standard QB skills, would never contribute to making the Jets better.
answer in 3 words - New York Jets - with braintrust Woody, Rex and a new GM who thinks Geno Smith in 4th round is the answer.
deja vu all over again.
Just-End-The-Season.
However, I really believe SNL should try hard to get Tim Tebow to host next season. Maybe Tim could do a skit in which he plays Jason Sudeikis. Maybe work that Samoan guy from Notre Dame in as well.