Early Tuesday, a group of people dragged the woman, believed to be in her late teens to early 20s, to a dumping ground outside the city of Mount Hagen. They stripped her naked, bound her hands and legs, stuffed a cloth in her mouth, tied her to a log and set her on fire, Kauba said.
The story is ultimately about ignorant, superstitious twonks that accuse and then burn women for witchcraft. Over 50 in the last year,
Charming place.
So I’m reading the BBC website, and I happen to spy an article entitled “Nigeria bikers’ vegetable helmets”- How can you not read an article like that?
First, it turns out that the helmets are made of pumpkins and it is partially in response to the new law requiring motorcycle helmets, and it is mostly about motorcycle taxis.
Why is it on this website?
Stories have also appeared in the local papers highlighting passengers’ fears that the helmets could be used by motorcyclists to cast spells on their clients, making it easy for them to be robbed.
“Some people can put juju inside the helmets and when they are worn the victim can either lose consciousness or be struck dumb,” passenger Kolawole Aremu told the Daily Trust newspaper.
The darkness is everywhere.
It seems the god-squad have had a revelation: Mass media can influence people’s opinion. (Gasp! Oooooo ahhhhh!)
The “Symposium on Science Fiction and Christian Filmmaking” will focus on the theology of Science Fiction, analyzing how the worldview conveyed through Sci-Fi films has shaped cultural priorities.
“Sci-Fi movies of the last fifty years have provided America with more than Hollywood entertainment,” Phillips remarked. “The popular genre has been responsible for persuading American thrill-and-chill-seekers that fictional speculation is reality — especially in regard to the creation of the universe, life on earth, and the ‘certainty’ of extraterrestrial life.”
The Symposium will examine this remarkable transformation of fiction into perceived “fact” and explore ways Christian filmmakers can reestablish responsibility in the genre and more carefully and truthfully examine the topics of Creation, time and eternity, the human soul, and the grand potential of science and technology.
This just seems like something that a whole lot of mocking or at the very least jokes about Scientology, but, I’m going to take the high road here (It must be the cold medicine) and instead just state the obvious:
Although, as defined in a modern context, is rather broad and has expanded beyond its original scope, Science Fiction has always had, at its core the concept of speculative writing based on science. Do I have to even write more? It isn’t religious fiction, it’s science fiction.
If they want to promote religious fiction they should go film the bible, write a new testament (worked for the Mormons), or just start from scratch (Scientology.)
Quote from the Christian News Wire . (They have their own news wire? What could possible be news? “Day 721,240, Still no sign of Jesus.”)
Sometimes you have to applaud someone when they come out and make a completely honest and factual pronouncement:
Here’s a victory for common sense. Pity it didn’t happen in the US.
Mohammed Ahmed, who worked in a warehouse, said the job was against his Islamic beliefs.
The 32-year-old, of Upper Dale Road, Normanton, also accused Tesco of victimisation and harassment during a three-day employment tribunal in Birmingham.
His job at the supermarket giant’s Lichfield depot involved the transportation of various goods, including alcoholic drinks, on fork-lift trucks.
Further, part of his argument was…
Mr Ahmed told the tribunal that he was not made aware he would be required to handle alcohol when he started the job, a claim denied by Tesco.
He also said he had not visited any of Derby’s three Tesco stores and was unaware alcohol was served by the shop. He admitted, however, that he had been to Sainsbury’s, Asda and Lidl stores.
…all of which carry alcohol.
Further, he argues that it is against his faith to handle alcohol. It’s been quite a few years since I read the qur’an, but I’m pretty sure I recall that it is unacceptable to consume alcohol, not handle it.
This is just another example of someone trying to push their nonsense on the general population for their own benefit. Luckily, sometimes the good guys win.
I don’t care, even if it is Halloween, when the local stations desperately troll around to find a good “haunting”story it just makes a bigger mockery of television news than it already was.
ABC-15 Reports that valley radio station KDKB is haunted.
For their “investigation” of this hard-hitting news story, they brought in Lori McDonald, CGH (“Certified Ghost Hunter”) a self-proclaimed skeptic of the case to investigate. It should be no surprise that (shock!) it turns out that it’s a “real” ghost. (Detected with a camera, a thermometer and a dowsing rods)
ABC 15 also recorded scenes at the station with mysterious grey lines in them. They’d like people to sound off in the comments. Please, let’s give them some feedback.
By the way, check out that home-study, CD-based Certified Ghost Hunter study program - only $400! (And at the bottom of the page, as if to give a big wink wink to everyone purchasing their certification course program, they have an add for “Phony Diploma.” I wonder if there’s a lesson to be learned there?
It’s videos like these that make you want to put up a website to fight the darkness…
I pity this woman’s husband, if he votes for <CORN PONE ACCENT>Oh-Bah-Ma</CORN PONE ACCENT>, she’s probably going to sit on him. The Lord can’t save him from the laws of gravity - he’s a goner!
Hat tip to the Friendly Atheist for spotting this one. Looks like this one is going viral… let’s hope I can help push it along.
At least this isn’t my tax money at work.
SECRET documents have revealed the MoD have been studying the paranormal and other unexplained scientific phenomenon for use in the war against terror. The newly released files show that just after 9/11, the Ministry of Defence conducted a research project into psychics - with the possibility they could be used to locate terrorist cells. [From Revealed: How the Government studied the paranormal for use in war on terror - The Daily Record]
That, in this day, people who control public money could still be investing in this bullshit amazes me!
OK, let’s say for a moment that, during the cold war, credible intelligence reached the west that the Soviet Union was investing in research into psychic powers. The military ramifications if psychic powers turned out to be true are awful to contemplate. In that respect, wacky though it may sound, there’s a legitimate defense reason for investigating the possibilities.
However, once that was shown (yet again) to be completely baseless, this needs to be dropped. That someone has started it again in the wake of 9/11 in criminal abuse of tax money.
It’s so far wrong that I almost wonder if the reporting isn’t as accurate as it could be… So, what is the Daily Record’s record?
There are days when it seems the world is positively brimming with conspiracy nuts.
There are garden-variety ones and then there are the “superstars” such as David Icke, Richard Hoagland and Stanton Friedman. Are the sincere nuts, or cynical exploiters of uncritical sincere nuts? I have to say, I cannot imagine how some of these people say what they say with a straight face, and therefore tend to classify them as the later, but I may be given them too much credit.
None of them, surely, produce as a copious a quantity of drivel as Alex Jones. Alex Jones spews out 4 hours of nonsense on his radio program every stinking night! Whether he’s a real loony or an exploiter, I have to give him credit that he can maintain that stream of consciousness for hours each day.
Jones first came to my attention some years ago on a documentary series by Jon Ronson called “Secret Rulers of the World”. Jones attempted to infiltrate the Bohemian Grove, an annual get together of the movers and shakers of the world - some, Jones included, would say the secret ruling elite who are trying to implement a genetics and control program to eliminate 90% of the worlds population.
(The fact that they’ve been ruling the world since the 1800’s and the population has constantly gone up, I suppose, speaks to the efficiency of their plans.)
In any case, Jones infiltrates the (admittedly weird) goings on at the Bohemian Grove, and captures footage of what he classifies as a mock human sacrifice to a great, all-seeing owl deity. (That tape is available at Jones’ website. ) Jones is firmly in the camp that this “elite” group engineered 9/11 and the War on Terror (Take away our freedoms to implement their “final solution”), Global Warming (SO that everyone will have to track their carbon footprint, this giving the ruling elite a way to track us and help implement their final solution) and charitable organizations that combat diseases such as cancer and diabetes. (Yes, all that money give actually goes into their research to make these diseases worse, to help implement their final solution.) The evacuation of New Orleans due to hurricane Gustav? Yep, that’s them again, this time as an exercise in crowd control when the time comes for rounding everyone up for their final solution…
See a pattern?
However, despite being the survivalist, anti-New World Order’s (NWO) best spokesman, he doesn’t seem to advocate armed rebellion against the tyrannical forces trying to to dumb-down and eradicate the middle class. Why not? He claims to be afraid that they’ll unleash their neutron bombs on our own cities if they revolt. At least that what he claims a British Ministry of Defence 10-year plan outlines.
You might think that it took me a while to weed through all this material, in fact, I got all that from just 1 hour of one night’s worth of his radio program. Talk about being all over the board!
His program has got plenty of paid advertising, although much of it is for his own websites, there’s still a lot for survivalist food companies and places that sell fraudulent medical devices and treatments. I guess if you were an advertiser and you wanted a gullible audience, this would be the place to go.
More on Jones - and the others, later.
Light of reason for the week, on why people should refrain from using phrases like Darwinian evolution.
In short, Darwin did more in one lifetime than most of us could hope to accomplish in two. But his giantism has had an odd and problematic consequence. It’s a tendency for everyone to refer back to him. “Why Darwin was wrong about X”; “Was Darwin wrong about Y?”; “What Darwin didn’t know about Z” — these are common headlines in newspapers and magazines, in both the biological and the general literature. Then there are the words: Darwinism (sometimes used with the prefix “neo”), Darwinist (ditto), Darwinian.
Why is this a problem? Because it’s all grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn’t changed much in the 149 years since the publication of the “Origin.” [From Lets Get Rid of Darwinism - Olivia Judson - Evolution - Opinion - New York Times Blog]
Of course, it would be remiss not to point out that most people who use words like Darwinism are creationist crackpots, and I’ve always felt that when someone uses that term it places them in exactly the same category as the people refer to a car as a “horseless carriage.”