Archive > April 2003
Six members of Congress live in a million-dollar Capitol Hill townhouse that is subsidized by a secretive religious organization, tax records show. The lawmakers, all of whom are Christian, pay low rent to live in the stately red brick, three-story house on C Street, two blocks from the Capitol. It is maintained by a group, alternately known as the ”Fellowship” and the ”Foundation,” that brings together world leaders and elected officials through religion. The Fellowship is host of receptions, luncheons and prayer meetings on the first two floors of the house, which is registered with the IRS as a church. The six lawmakers – U.S. Reps. Zach Wamp, R-Chattanooga; Bart Stupak, D-Mich.; Jim DeMint, R-S.C.; and Mike Doyle, D-Pa.; and U.S. Sens. John Ensign, R-Nev.; and Sam Brownback, R-Kan. – live in private rooms upstairs. Rent is $600 a month, DeMint said. ”Our goal is singular – and that is to hope that we can assist them in better understandings of the teachings of Christ, and applying it to their jobs,” said Richard Carver, a member of the Fellowship’s board of directors. He served as an assistant secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan administration. The house, valued at $1.1 million, is owned by the C Street Center, a sister organization of the Fellowship. It received more than $145,000 in Fellowship grants between 1997 and 2000, according to IRS records – including $96,400 in 1998 for reducing debt.
Thanks to The Tennessean for the above information.
At dawn on April 19, 1993, and throughout the morning, tanks rammed holes in the main building and pumped (in the FBI’s words) “massive amounts” of CS gas into the building, despite knowing that inside were more than a dozen children. The tanks demolished parts of the compound and created tunnels for the wind to blow through. The buildings at this point were saturated with inflammable CS gas and spilled kerosene. Around midday two U.S. military pyrotechnic devices were fired into the main building, igniting a fire which (because of the holes in the walls allowing the wind to gust through) spread rapidly through the complex of buildings and became an inferno. 74 men, women and children died, including twelve children younger than five years of age. Fire trucks were prevented by the FBI from approaching the inferno. After the compound had burned down the BATF flag was hoisted aloft to signify ‘victory’. Subsequently the burned-out ruin was razed in an attempt to remove all evidence of this premeditated murder of innocent civilians by agents of the U.S. government.
Investigating the mysterious ‘lost’ Steganographia manuscript by Johannes Trithemius
Human, Plus. Jocelyne Wildenstein, Amanda Lepore, Pete Burns, Genesis P-Orridge.
Every now and then I read the claim that Christians believe the world was created in the year 4004 BC. After a small amount of research, I have found that this claim was made by the Anglican archbishop of Armagh Ireland and Primate of All Ireland James Ussher (1581-1656). Quote: Contrary to popular misconception, Ussher did not simply count up years by following who begat whom in the Book of Genesis. Rather, he undertook a careful, critical synthesis of historical documents including Biblical, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean sources, knowledge of the calendrical systems of antiquity, Roman history, and any ancient documentary sources he could get acquire and verify (then as now the lucrative traffic in antiquities lead to numerous counterfeits in circulation). His scholarship was impeccible, and the end of that scholarship was not so much to fix the date of Creation (although that was the one result we remember), but rather to compile as complete and historically correct a chronology of human history as the documentary evidence would allow. It is well to remember that in the 17th century this was a topic of great scholarly interest, as it is now. Ussher was instrumental in putting this endeavor on a sound scholarly basis, as well as for exposing numerous counterfeit documents.
This monkey man would ask Primate Ussher about the calandar of the Jews, which he surely had access to, or the calendar of the Chinese, which he may not have access to. These calendars would not match his date, yet the apologist quoted above claims he used ‘any documentary sources he could get, aquire and verify.’ So I’ll stick with my sense that establishing a beginning of the Universe in 4004, even in the 17th Century, is dumb.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
What do you do on Easter monday?
Strange bedfellows or a natual couple? Cato Institute, meet some Texas homos.
Once again, something invented in the United States has been copied and improved upon in Japan.
What sort of books does Scholastic distribute in Canada? Could that sort of book be distributed in the United States?
http://www.portlandgasprices.com/
Yes, just gas prices, just in the Portland/Vancouver area. Cheapest: $1.55. Highest: $1.99.
Congressman José E. Serrano (D – NY) is responsible for House of Representatives Joint Resolution 11 [HJRES 11 IH], currently under discussion: “Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the twenty-second article of amendment, thereby removing the limitation on the number of terms an individual may serve as President.”
Severed Heads is a band I enjoy quite a bit. There is a mailing list for the band, which I have been on and off of several times. It seems one can now read (and download?) many thousands of messages from this mailing list, arranged by year and month. Good grief.
AmphetaDesk is a free, cross platform, open-sourced, syndicated news aggregator – it obediently sits on your desktop, downloads the latest news that interests you, and displays them in a quick and easy to use (and customizable!) webpage. With thousands of channels available, AmphetaDesk can shave hours off your day – and you’ll look smart to all your friends! Egotism never had it better!
Die Junkerhaus.
Thomas R. DeGregori writes: “In spite of the array of benefits that the world has derived from science (and technology), its critics denounce it by a number of pejoratives, such as “logophallocentric,” which have little meaning except to the critics. Instead of science, we are offered postmodernist nostrums about the equivalence of various forms of inquiry such as holism, deep ecology, or “local knowledge.” No “privileged” status is to be given to science and the scientific method.
“Modern science is admittedly reductionist in many ways. The inquiry into cell structure that went on for three centuries, climaxing with the double helix discovery, was reductionist, analyzing ever-smaller units and using chemistry or physics to understand life processes. This does not mean, however, that there was ever a prevailing view that all life should be understood entirely by physics or chemistry. Studying organisms at the molecular level has never precluded studying them at higher levels and integrating those higher levels into a truly holistic understanding. But so-called holistic theories that are not founded on a base of reductionist facts are illusions and evaporate on any close examination. However aesthetically satisfying and politically correct such “holistic” theories may be, they lack the problem-solving capability that is the legacy of modern science and technology.”
