Mark's Views, Perhaps — from behind my eyeballs
| 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[…]. |
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.)
| 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. |
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. 😀
| More than 100 foreign Christians in China have been accused of being involved in illegal activities and have been expelled in just a 90-day period, the biggest assault on the presence of Christianity in China since 1954, according to a new report from the Voice of the Martyrs.
Most of those who have been expelled are from the United States, South Korea, Singapore, Canada, Australia or Israel, and had been working in or visiting Zinjiang, Beijing, Tibet and Shandong, according to the VOM report. A Christian who had worked in Xinjiang for 10 years told a VOM source that more than 60 foreign religious workers, many who had served people in the area for more than 15 years, were expelled from Zinjiang alone. As WND reported a week earlier, officials also are reporting an increase in arrests of Chinese house-church pastors and leaders, who have been accused of being “suspects using evil cults to obstruct the enforcement of the law.” VOM reported that the campaign against Christians is called Typhoon No. 5, and “is part of the Chinese government’s efforts to prevent foreign Christians from engaging in mission activities before the Beijing Olympics in 2008.” Earlier, WND documented reports from VOM, which monitors and publicizes instances of persecution of Christians worldwide, that a Christian was jailed in China for no more than walking near the construction site of a hotel being prepared for the 2008 events. “This is the largest expulsion of foreign missionaries since 1954 when the Chinese Communist government expelled all foreign religious workers after taking power in 1949,” reported a VOM source. “At least five different mission agencies and sources within the Chinese government report that in February, the government launched a massive expulsion campaign against foreign Christians.” |
| An analysis of thousands of skulls shows modern humans originated from a single point in Africa and finally lays to rest the idea of multiple origins, British scientists said on Wednesday.
Most researchers agree that mankind spread out of Africa starting about 50,000 years ago, quickly establishing Stone Age cultures throughout Europe, Asia and Australia. |
Ekklesia is reporting: US Anabaptists come out against depleted uranium weapons
| A resolution against the use of depleted uranium weapons has been issued by the Church of the Brethren General Board. The action from the US Anabaptist came at a meeting held in conjunction with the Church of the Brethren Annual Conference in Cleveland, Ohio.
Declaring the use of depleted uranium weapons to be “a specific and compelling example of the sinfulness of war,” the resolution appeals for a halt to their manufacture…. |
Their headline would be more accurate with Some at the beginning.
I’ve not come out against depleted uranium weapons.
Just like I haven’t come out against any other specific weapon or weapons system.
That doesn’t mean I’m in favor of them.
It just means I don’t take that kind of stance.
I qualify as a US Anabaptist. In fact, I was one of the pioneering conservative Anabaptists on the Web with Anabaptists which I launched in June 1995, as I recall.