Here are some of the bad things that can happen to you if you are a fashion designer who dares to use non-anorexic models in your fashion show. Putting “fatties” in her show (woman who were sized 8 – 12) actually got designer MaraJoara blacklisted by Vogue Australia. Here’s coverage…
It appears that the War on Terror is shaping up to be as decisive, efficient and effective as the War on Drugs: “Mission Accomplished since 1933”. The enemy is hard to define, hard to detect, and there is no exit strategy (see bureaucracies, below) in the unlikely case of a declared win.Terror is a state of mind, a reaction to extreme and unexpected negative events. Those Saudis who attacked on 9/11/01 (using materials and training acquired in the U.S.) set off a chain of events that is turning our country into a Police State. This is a win for them.
Here are some signs of a gathering Police State. …
A friend recently handed me a copy of Karen Armstrong’s 2005 Bestseller, The Spiral Staircase.
Armstrong entered the convent in 1962 at the age of 17. These were very difficult years for her, due to the rigid religious dogma that permeated her training. She ultimately renounced her vows at the age of 24. Armstrong has written numerous books on religion since that time, focusing on all of the major monotheistic religions. She makes regular appearances on NPR. The Spiral Staircase was Armstrong’s account of her own struggles with regard to her personal beliefs.
As I read passages of The Spiral Staircase, I was intrigued by my own difficulty of categorizing Armstrong. I wondered why she would cling to traditional notions of worship at the point when, intellectually, she had already reduced “God” to a all-but-abstract principle. Though she seems to be a fence sitter, she’s firmly there. She refuses to allow any atheist or theist knock her off. See, again, how should one describe her? Is she a Christian, a sympathizer of Islam, an agnostic, an atheist, a Buddhist or something else? She admits that she was, at one time in “an agnostic, perhaps an atheist.” (Page 272). Is she now really a freelance monotheist?:
…I usually describe myself, perhaps flippantly, as a freelance monotheist I draw sustenance from all three of the faiths of Abraham. I can’t see any one of them as having the monopoly of truth, any one of them as superior to any of
According to CNN,the Bush administration figured out all it needed to do, to substantially reduce the Iraq monthly death total, was stop counting all of those dead people. You know how the number of deaths dipped sharply for August . . . well, it didn't really happen. Here's how CNN reports…
Dear Mr. President:
Five years ago, you told us you would “bring to justice” the perpetrators of 9/11. Yet today, five years later, the man who is undisputed to have caused the 9/11 attack — Osama bin Laden — remains at large. Instead of making it your mission — and that of the U.S. military — to capture or kill bin Laden, you have wasted America’s resources — and your own — on a wild goose chase in Iraq. In the process, you have needlessly killed or maimed (both physically and emotionally) hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims. We must assume that some of these people — or their spouses, parents, children, friends, etc. — will harbor extreme hatred toward America for this loss.
Indeed, we should not think otherwise given our own extreme reaction to the 9/11 attack. We must also assume that some of these angry people will, in some way, at some point in their lives, support violence against America. Whether it is by strapping a bomb to their chest and blowing up a street market, or merely providing a safe house to someone who does, we cannot tell. But we do know, for certain, that violence begets violence, especially when the violence is perceived as unjust — which is exactly how your invasion of Iraq and many other misguided policies are perceived.
The Bible tells us to love our enemies. This probably does not mean bombing their families and neighbors, perhaps because doing so merely creates …