| This Sunday, Turkey, still in the early days of democracy, goes to the polls.
This vote was forced four months ahead of schedule when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s political party (Justice and Development Party, or AKP) failed to get its presidential candidate elected in a parliamentary vote boycotted by the secular opposition. IN Network’s Rody Rodeheaver says while there’s a lot of talk about the future president, there’s a more immediate concern. “The general election is not to elect the president, but it is to elect the members of parliament, 550 of them. Then, once that new government is constituted, then they, in turn, will elect a president.” Tensions are high between the government and secularists, as well as the army, which threatened to take action if the government failed to ensure the separation of religion and state. That’s brought outside watchers to bear on the elections. Turkey is trying to get into the European Union. The land is of huge strategic importance to the European Union, Iran, Iraq and Syria, but there are underlying tensions over which way Turkey’s new government will go. Rodeheaver says, “The prayer here is that the country would not head toward becoming an Islamic state. There have been some tensions because of that and fears that might have been some sort of secret agenda in the original Parliament here, in their choosing of a president.” |
Month: July 2007
Spin-Off
Over the decades, space exploration and research has led to some beneficial spin-offs here on the ground.
| Two crewmen aboard the International Space Station on Thursday prepared for a spacewalk during which more than 1,600 pounds (726 kg) of obsolete gear will be tossed overboard and left to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. |
Well, not beneficial spin-off.
If they can get away with that, can I do something somewhat similar? May I? Please?
I have a microwave and a clothes dryer and a couple of lawnmowers that I don’t want to pay to dump in the landfill. I could just push them over the hill. I’m sure the odds are less than 1:5000 that one of them will land on the road below, and much less that someone down there will get landed on.
DejaRaq
Did we hear similar tales regarding Hussein and Iraq?
| A new survey reveals that 92 percent of the subjects of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s totalitarian government do not believe their nation’s role is positive, and two-thirds would support a “Velvet Revolution” to remove him from power.
The survey, by the Center For the Promotion of Democracy and Human Rights, found that almost six out of 10 Iranians would support a foreign military action for the purpose of taking Ahmadinejad out of the role as dictator. |
President Cheney!
| US President George W. Bush[…]temporarily ceding his powers to Vice President Dick Cheney[…].
Cheney will serve as acting president until such time as Bush[…]is ready to resume his duties[…]. |
- This will be ___ for the anti-Bush folks out there.
- a. gratifying
- b. frightening
- c. insufficient
- d. boring
I Live Here
Our place from space:
Zoomed in more:
So far out in Country Bumpkin Territory that I still depend on dial-up since neither DSL nor cable reach us.
That’s OK.
Maybe sometime I’ll put a message out in one of the pastures. Then I’ll keep checking Google Earth till it shows up.
(Just so you know, I used Paint Shop Pro to label the second photo. Those aren’t messages written on the ground somehow.)
What’s Your Faith Worth?
| A North Korean man will face public execution for the crime of being a Christian if a worldwide effort by an international ministry fails to free him in time.
The Voice of the Martyrs, an organization assisting persecuted Christians around the world, is seeking the release of Son Jong Nam, a former North Korean Army officer turned underground evangelist. For more than a year, Son has been held in a North Korean death row basement jail in Pyongyang. He has been beaten and sentenced to public execution as an example to the North Korean people. |
Threatened Christians Flee The Middle East
| He refused to leave Baghdad, even after the day last year when masked Sunni gunmen forced him and eight co-workers to line up against a wall and said, “Say your prayers.” An Assyrian Christian, Rayid Albert closed his eyes and prayed to Jesus as the killers opened fire. He alone survived, shot seven times. But a month ago a note was left at his front door, warning, “You have three choices: change your religion, leave or pay the jeziya”–a tax on Christians levied by ancient Islamic rulers. It was signed “The Islamic Emirate of Iraq,” a Qaeda pseudonym. That was the day Albert decided to get out immediately. He and the other 10 members of his household are now living as refugees in Kurdistan.
Across the lands of the Bible, Christians like Albert and his family are abandoning their homes. According to the World Council of Churches, the region’s Christian population has plunged from 12 million to 2 million in the past 10 years. […] The flight of Christians out of these areas is similar to the hunt for Jews,” says Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-Italian author and expert on Islam, himself a Muslim. “There is no better example of what will happen if this human tragedy in the Arab-Muslim world is allowed to continue.” Nowhere is the exodus more extreme than in Iraq. |
| Fanatic Islamist relatives of Eman Muhammad el-Sayed, 26, attacked her two days ago while she and her husband were strolling through a local fair in Alexandria. Although police intervened in the street-side fracas, they promptly arrested the victim herself, allegedly to protect her from her Muslim family.
Each day since then, El-Sayed, 26, has been transferred to a security police headquarters in Alexandria, where inside sources confirmed to Compass that she has been subjected to hours of interrogation and severe physical torture. |
Unwilling to Use the Brakes
SUBTITLE: The Amish survive
Humans are an invasive virus, he says:
| Today, escalating human populations have vastly exceeded global carrying capacity and now produce massive quantities of solid, liquid, and gaseous waste. Biological diversity is being threatened by over-exploitation, toxic pollution, agricultural mono-culture, invasive species, competition, habitat destruction, urban sprawl, oceanic acidification, ozone depletion, global warming, and climate change. It’s a runaway train of ecological calamities.
It’s a train that carries all the earth’s species as unwilling passengers with humans as the manically insane engineers unwilling to use the brake pedal. |
Whenever I read stuff like this, I (sorta, but not really) marvel that the writer is still alive.
But he is (or was anyway), and continued writing:
| Humans are presently acting upon this body in the same manner as an invasive virus with the result that we are eroding the ecological immune system.
A virus kills its host and that is exactly what we are doing with our planet’s life support system. We are killing our host the planet Earth. I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the “AIDS of the Earth.†I make no apologies for that statement. Our viral like behaviour can be terminal both to the present biosphere and ourselves. We are both the pathogen and the vector. But we also have the capability of being the anti-virus if only we can recognize the symptoms and address the disease with effective measures of control. |
Amazing. Or maybe I mean weird. No, deceived and deluded is better.
| We need to re-wild the planet.
[…] We should not be living in human communities that enclose tiny preserved ecosystems within them. Human communities should be maintained in small population enclaves within linked wilderness ecosystems. No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas. Communication systems can link the communities. […] We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion. We need to eliminate nationalism and tribalism and become Earthlings. And as Earthlings, we need to recognize that all the other species that live on this planet are also fellow citizens and also Earthlings. |
In addition to the wild stuff, he does say some things that sound sane (at least to me). 😉
| Who should have children? Those who are responsible and completely dedicated to the responsibility which is actually a very small percentage of humans. Being a parent should be a career. Whereas some people are engineers, musicians, or lawyers, others with the desire and the skills can be fathers and mothers. Schools can be eliminated if the professional parent is also the educator of the child. |
Responsible, dedicated, career parents. Home schooling parents. All of them shoes of a perfect fit. (For somebody else?)
However, I don’t think anyone has the right or authority to impose any of that on others.
Oh, and he brings some of my fellow-Anabaptists into the picture:
| We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles. The Amish survive without cars and so can the rest of us. |
So there you are.
8)
PS: I’ve seen some folks quoting him as saying Mennonites instead of Amish. So let me clear up some confusion for them: Amish and Mennonites are different. 😀