
HAM and bacon should be cut from our diets to avoid the risk of bowel cancer, a landmark study has shown.
HAM and bacon should be cut from our diets to avoid the risk of bowel cancer, a landmark study has shown.
One of the accused masterminds of the 2004 Madrid terror bombings was acquitted of all charges today by a Spanish court in the culmination to a politically divisive trial over Europe's worst Islamic militant terror attack.They have him boasting of his perfidity and they let him walk scot free. Dear God.
Rabei Osman, a 35-year-old Egyptian, allegedly bragged during a wiretapped phone conversation that the attacks, which killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,800, were his idea. Twenty-eight people were charged in the attacks.
Europe mostly tolerates those whom it fears.To coin a phrase, indeed.
G. I. Joe is now a Brussels-based outfit that stands for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, an international co-ed force of operatives who use hi-tech equipment to battle Cobra, an evil organization headed by a double-crossing Scottish arms dealer.
Unfortunately, the impression has been created by many Muslim leaders that Islam seeks to control all aspects of individuals' lives and does not shrink from using secular power to achieve its aim. We are all well aware of extreme examples in recent history, such as Afghanistan under the benighted Taliban regime. Until that fear is laid to rest, it is quite rational for the rest of us to fear Islam's political ambitions - which is one reason why the word "Islamophobia" is so stupid. A phobia is an irrational fear, but secular Westerners actually have perfectly rational reasons to be at least wary of Islam.
The question is not about kings and popes (though it is certainly relevant to the temporal ambitions of the current pope). It is about how religionists of any stripe can reassure the rest of us that they will not use the coercive power of the state to impose their contentious (and, let's face it, usually miserable) moral doctrines, should they come to command an electoral majority.The matter of "miserable moral doctrines" aside, this is only half true. Yes, it is a question of reassurance, but not, as any competent theologian will tell you, that the church will be dangerous if it is backed by the power of the state. It is rather theat the state will be dangerous if it is backed by the awesome power of the church in the hands of fallible human beings. Hence the reason why most Christians reject theocracy and why even in the high-water time of the Catholic church the Pope only ruled his temporal realms as an earthly prince equal with his fellows.
Take another rationalistic explanation of the rise of Christendom. It is common enough to find another critic saying, 'Christianity did not really rise at all; that is, it did not merely rise from below; it was imposed from above. It is an example of the power of the executive, especially in despotic states. The Empire was really an Empire; that is, it was really ruled by the Emperor. One of the Emperors happened to become a Christian. He might just as well have become a Mithraist or a Jew or a Fire-Worshipper; it was common in the decline of the Empire for eminent and educated people to adopt these eccentric eastern cults. But when he adopted it it became the official religion of the Roman Empire; and when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it became as strong, as universal and as invincible as the Roman Empire. It has only remained in the world as a relic of that Empire; or, as many have put it, it is but the ghost of Caesar still hovering over Rome.' This also is a very ordinary line taken in the criticism of orthodoxy, to say that it was only officialdoms that ever made it orthodoxy. And here again we can call on the heretics to refute it.A small point, but an important one.
The whole great history of the Arian heresy might have been invented to explode this idea. It is a very interesting history often repeated in this connection; and the upshot of it is in so far as there ever was a merely official religion, it actually died because it was merely an official religion; and what destroyed it was the real religion. Arius advanced a version of Christianity which moved, more or less vaguely, in the direction of what we should call Unitarianism; thought was not the same, for it gave to Christ a curious intermediary position between the divine and human. The point is that it seemed to many more reasonable and less fanatical; and among these were many of the educated class in a sort of reaction against the first romance of conversion. Arians were a sort of moderates and a sort of modernists. And it was felt that after the first squabbles this was the final form of rationalized, religion into which civilization might well settle down. It was accepted by Divus Caesar himself and became the official orthodoxy; the generals and military princes drawn from the new barbarian powers of the north, full of the future, supported it strongly. But the sequel is still more important. Exactly as a modern man might pass through Unitarianism to complete agnosticism, so the greatest of the Arian emperors ultimately shed the last and thinnest pretense of Christianity; he abandoned even Arius and returned to Apollo. He was a Caesar of the Caesars; a soldier, a scholar, a man of large ambitions and ideals; another of the philosopher kings. It seemed to him as if at his signal the sun rose again. The oracles began to speak like birds beginning to sing at. dawn; paganism was itself again; the gods returned. It seemed the end of that strange interlude of an alien superstition. And indeed it was the end of it, so far as there was a mere interlude of mere superstition. It was the end of it, in so far as it was the fad of an emperor or the fashion of a generation. If there really was something that began with Constantine, then it ended with Julian.
THE Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.I guess that's what they really meant by the New Soviet Man.
Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.
According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."
I was evacuated during the fires, and all I have to say is that the last few days have been awful.I can imagine. Though why he was being force-fed laxatives remains a mystery.
French Intellectuals Accuse Dutch of “Unacceptable Cowardice”
The deputy mayor of the Indian capital Delhi has died a day after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys.
The sculpture is intended to reflect the romance of past train travel.
So, who are this lot? A load of raving Jihadi imams? No, its the Tory party's Conservative Muslim Forum.
It's like walking into the Carlton Club in 1943 and seeing Von Ribbentrop propping up the bar.
Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we should have people standing in the corners of our rooms.
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People did not want to comb their hair to answer the telephone.
Moroccan-Dutch residents of Slotervaart complained to reporters they were "sick and tired" of continuous "negative news reports" about fellow Moroccan-Dutch, adding they felt increasingly stigmatized."Sick and tired" of "negative news reports"? Here is a small suggestion for what it is worth: Maybe the "Moroccan-Dutch" of indeterminate religion would stop being "stigmatised" if they stopped brutally murdering filmmakers, forswore attacking police officers, and refrained from rioting in the streets when one of their co-indeterminate-religionists is brought to justice.
If you are not responsible for your actions, then you will not be given responsibility.
A new study says that obese people are not responsible for their condition and the British government "pledged to draw up a strategy to address the issue."
That's about as ominous a promise as "we're here to help." Translated this means that the overweight will be "helped" the same way smokers were by being hounded from pillar to post until they are beaten into submission.
If I were a gay rights activist I would be very worried at this edict. If a supposedly involuntary, yet unhealthy "lifestyle" can be persecuted out of existence because it has been declared a thoughtcrime by the Party is momentarily unpopular, then homosexuals, and the rest of us, might be enjoying but a brief Indian summer before a very hard winter.
Still one could argue Vilks should have known better because of what happened in Denmark in 2005, when a cartoonist's depictions of the prophet sparked violent protests in the Muslim world and prompted death threats against that cartoonist's life.Translation: How dare Mr. Vilks refuse to act the good dhimmi and draw the wrath of the Faithful upon his head. Remember what happened to the Danes!
The hope was that the conference would produce a synthesis of Marxist and Khomeinist ideologies and highlight what the Iranian leader has labeled "the divine aspect of revolutionary war." But the event itself proved rather embarrassing.
Today, communism has been consigned to the garbage can of history as foreseen by Imam Khomeini. Thus progressists everywhere must accept the leadership of our religious, pro-justice movement.
In a recent Internet bulletin, Father John Hayes of St Mary's Church, Hornchurch, East London commented on the case of Shabina Begum, the Muslim girl who recently went to court over her demand to attend school in full veil. According to reports,
Hayes had said in his Internet bulletin, after hearing an interview with Shabina Begum, that it was never possible to convince anyone by argument in matters of religion.
Hayes said, “My point was that you have to demonstrate what it means to be Christian through your actions."
The result of this? A visit from the thoughtpolice constabulary investigating a possible thoughtcrime an allegation of incitement of racial hatred.
This initiative was brought forth solely by Bluff’s without ever consulting the MSA or Muslim students. If this was a deliberate accommodation, it’s kind of offensive in giving us the food in a manner unsuitable to us.Translation: That's what appeasement gets you.
(T)he people (of Cuba) you see today tell you that even if they should disappear from the face if the earth because an atomic war is unleashed in their names... they will feel completely happy and fulfilled.
David Pryce-Jones made the point that, in persisting with his lurid accusations, Mohammed Fayed revealed how little he understands Britain: He’s lived there for years, it’s been good to him, he owns Harrod’s and the Paris Ritz and various other baubles. No big deal. He’s one of many, many beneficiaries of Western openness to “the other.” And yet he’s convinced himself that Buckingham Palace is so consumed by “Islamophobia” that the Queen’s husband dialed M, and M called in Moneypenny, and Moneypenny faxed 007, and a week later the princess and her Islamostud are dead.
Reality is more humdrum: In multiculti Britain, everyone was indifferent to Di’s Muslim lover. Could have been a Hindu, could have been a Buddhist. Who cares? But instead Mr Fayed has retreated into the paranoia and victim mentality that stunts so much of the Muslim world. A while back, I was in Jordan, and a wealthy Saudi told me that the Iraq war was part of a continuous western assault on Islam that includes the British Royal Family’s assassination of Dodi Fayed. And so, in a London courtroom, a freak one-off celebrity death becomes just another snapshot of the big geopolitical picture.