http://www.realitysandwich.com/

Read Daniel Pinchbeck.

Don't ask us to explain... ask the Town of Stettler... we didn't pick these wonders nor call them seven wonders even though there seem to be ten of them(the main street xmas tree is missing from this gallery)...

But the town seems to be doing something good and proper and is on the righteous path judging by the face which has miraculously appeared in each picture.

"If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to
your enemies."
  - Moshe Dayan


"We must think differently, look at things in a different way. Peace
requires a world of new concepts, new definitions."
   - Yitzhak Rabin


Or at least we should familiarize ourselves with existing definitions so
that we will know what the hell we are talking about...
( a little knowledge of history wouldn't hurt either ) right Kevin?     lol

Interesting and somewhat humorous video but like many I would say that Obama is as much a part of the Evil Empire as any he is running against (see the anecdotes in the piece below for a few examples).


Here is a link to a good explanation of a common anarchist position in terms of voting and lesser-evilism if anyone is interested. I use this link instead of the original one at Anarkismo.net because I like the Charlie Chaplin/Great Dictator youtube clip at end of this one:


Nobody for President


Why I Won’t Vote for Obama...
...Or for Hillary, And Certainly Not for McCain, And Not Even For Ralph
http://carnival-of-anarchy.blogspot.com/2008/03/nobody-for-president.html


excerpts:
When pressed, many liberals and social democrats will admit that Obama, like Hillary Clinton, is a candidate of capitalism, militarism, and imperialism. But, they argue, he is far less of an evil than Senator John McCain...


In response, I accept that the Democrats, however evil, are indeed the lesser evil. I only doubt that the greater evil can really be defeated by supporting the lesser evil. After all, liberals, unionists, the African-American community, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the GLBT community, etc., etc., have been supporting the Democrats for decades, generations. And yet the Republicans have moved more to the right, and the Democrats have also moved to the right (but remain just a little bit to the left of the Republicans). Lesser-evilism has not worked very well....


The gains of the thirties labor movement were won mainly through sit-ins in the factories as part of mass strikes. The gains of African-Americans in the fifties and sixties were won through mass civil disobedience and urban uprisings (“riots”). The struggle against the Vietnam war was fought through massive demonstrations, student strikes, and a virtual mutiny in the army.


The gains of most social movements have been won through non-electoral means, not by electing lesser-evil politicians. Independent electoral actions, such as that of Ralph Nader or the Green Party, have never been very useful. If successful (as in some European countries), they will also be corrupted by the pressures of electoralism, money, and the need to administer a giant capitalist government....


~~~ 

}{ 

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/04/12/real-time-with-bill-maher-new-rules-3/

"Whenever a cult leader sets himself up as God's infallible wingman,
here on Earth, lock away the kids. Which is why I'd like to tip off
law enforcement to an even larger child-abusing religious cult. Its
leader also has a compound, and this guy not only operates outside the
bounds of the law, but he used to be a Nazi and he wears funny hats.
That's right, the Pope is coming to America this week and ladies, he's
single!

Now I know what you're thinking: "Bill, you shouldn't be saying that
the Catholic Church is no better than this creepy Texas cult." For
one, altar boys can't even get pregnant. But really, what tripped up
the little cult on the prairie was that they only abused hundreds of
kids, not thousands, all over the world. Cults get raided, religions
get parades. How does the Catholic Church get away with all of their
buggery? Volume, volume, volume!

If you have a few hundred followers, and you let some of them molest
children, they call you a cult leader. If have a billion, they call
you "Pope." It's like, if you can't pay your mortgage, you're a
deadbeat. But if you can't pay a million mortgages, you're BearStearn
and we bail you out. And that is who the Catholic Church is: the
BearStearns of organized pedophilia. Too big, too fat. When the
current pope was in his previous Vatican job as John Paul's Dick
Cheney, he wrote a letter instructing every Catholic bishop to keep
the sex abuse of minors secret until the Statute of Limitations ran
out. And that's the Church's attitude: "We're here, we're queer, get
used to it…"

is it too late for drama gopher to be part of the poll?

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/IGC6VOP7ZAo" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/IGC6VOP7ZAo</a>

I think that the penguin should be the mascot!

The movie Bugsy was playing on TV when I got a link to this story, from a discussion list I am on, in my mailbox...

~~~


Las Vegas' Project CityCenter, the largest private development in the Unites States, was to be 8 acres of shops, casinos, hotels, condos, and theaters. But now it looks like big portions of the project may remain in a state of half-built rubble piles for years to come, due to the current credit crisis in the United States. So what did this shining dream of real estate moguls look like before it turned all Resident Evil: Extinction?


Last week, Deutsche Bank AG, the lender on the Cosmopolitan Project (the piece of this structure that's on the far right), started foreclosure proceedings after developer Ian Bruce Eichner was unable to get more financing for the world's biggest mega-mall. Let that be a lesson to everyone who looks at gleaming architecture renderings and imagines they're seeing the future.
Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty.

His thirst for scapegoats shows how poorly George Bush understands the meaning of Easter

    * Giles Fraser
    * The Guardian,
    * Saturday March 22 2008
   
Somewhere in the Middle East, Jesus Christ is strapped to a bench, his head wrapped in clingfilm. He furiously sucks against the plastic. A hole is pierced, but only so that a filthy rag can be stuffed back into his mouth. He is turned upside down and water slowly poured into the rag. The torturer whispers religious abuse. If you are God, save yourself you fucking idiot. Fighting to pull in oxygen through the increasingly saturated rag, his lungs start to fill up with water. Someone punches him in the stomach.

Perhaps this is how we ought to be re-telling the story of Christ's passion. For ever since the cross became a piece of jewellery, it has been drained of its power to sicken. Even before this the Romans had taken their hated instrument of torture and turned it into the logo of a new religion. Few makeovers can have been so historically significant. The very secular cross was transformed into a sort of club badge for Christians, something to be proud of.

Two weeks ago, the most powerful Christian in the world vetoed a bill that would have made it illegal for the CIA to use waterboarding on detainees. "We need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists," said George Bush in a passable impersonation of Pontius Pilate. "This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe."

Throughout his time in office, the president has frequently been photographed in front of the cross. Yet as his support for torture demonstrates, he has understood little of its meaning. For the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is supremely a moral story about God's identification with victims.

The French anthropologist René Girard is the modern voice that has done most to explain the nature of this moral change. Human societies, he argues, are often held together by scapegoating. From the playground to the boardroom, we pick on the weak, the weird or the different as a way of securing communal solidarity. At times of tension or division, there is nothing quite as uniting as the "discovery" of someone to blame - often someone perfectly innocent. For generations of Europeans, the Jews were cast in the role; in the same way women have been accused of being witches, homosexuals derided as unnatural, and Muslims dismissed as terrorists.

The crucifixion turns this world on its head. For it is the story of a God who deliberately takes the place of the despised and rejected so as to expose the moral degeneracy of a society that purchases its own togetherness at the cost of innocent suffering. The new society he called forth - something he dubbed the kingdom of God - was to be a society without scapegoating, without the blood of the victim. The task of all Christians is to further this kingdom, "on earth as it is in heaven".

Yet, for all his years in office, it is hard to think that President Bush has done anything much to make this kingdom more of a reality. Instead he has given us rendition, so-called specialised interrogation procedures, and the blood of many thousand innocent Iraqis. Given all this, what can it possibly mean for George Bush to call himself a Christian?

Easter is not all about going to heaven. Still less some nasty evangelical death cult where a blood sacrifice must be paid to appease an angry God. The crucifixion reveals human death-dealing at its worst. In contrast, the resurrection offers a new start, the foundation of a very different sort of community that refuses the logic of scapegoating. The kingdom is a place of shocking, almost amoral, inclusion. All are welcome, especially the rejected. At least, that's the theory. Unfortunately, very few of us Christians are any good at it.

· Giles Fraser is the vicar of Putney giles.fraser@btinternet.com

About this article:
This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday March 22 2008 on p41 of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00:03 on March 22 2008.