Pradeep
Storage? I am Storage!
I would like the test to be redone, expect this time the fishtank should be sitting on top of the unit, and a shot fired upward at an angle, going in from the side and exiting the top.
Something Random
- Thread starter ddrueding
- Start date
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
I got an AARP membership card in the mail today. I guess the retired people are getting a little more aggressive in their recruiting these days.
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
Well, you said you have some white hairs...
Howell
Storage? I am Storage!
CougTek said:
And...well...you buy a lot of classical art music. You probably go on some mailing list. hehe.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
I know about Junkbusters, which keeps me off lots of lists. Particularly helpful when I don't want the catalog from that place where I ordered that Transsexual Midget Donkey porno.
mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
You beat me. I got one when I was 35.Mercutio said:
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Didn't write this, but I found it. It's a fun little read.
Dear President Bush,
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's law. I
have learned a great deal from you and try to share that knowledge
with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the
homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus
18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements
of God's Laws and how to follow them:
1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and
female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend
of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not to Canadians.
Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in
Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair
price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in
her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is,
how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a
pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors.
They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus
35:2 clearly states that he should be put to death. Am I morally
obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?
6. A friend of mine feels that, even though eating shellfish is an
abomination (Lev. 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than
homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there "degrees"
of abomination?
7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I
have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading
glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room
here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair
around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.
19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes
me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two
different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing
garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester
blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really
necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town
together to stone them (Lev. 24:10-16)? Couldn't we just burn them to
death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep
with their in-laws (Lev. 20:14)?
I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy
considerable expertise in such matters, so I am confident you can
help.
Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.
Your Christian friend,
St. John Ashcroft
The Big Book of Nonsense & Lies:
In Genesis 3:16 god punishes all women, innocent or not, with painful childbirth and subjugation to men.
In Genesis 7:4 god has a bad day at the office, thus decides to drown innocent babies, and animals both wild and domestic.
In Exodus 4:11 god boasts about making people handicapped.
In Exodus 4:23 god resorts to hostage taking and terrorism in order to get his own way. He does this via threatening a baby. Soon, he is slaughtering little babies all across Egypt.
In Exodus 9:19-20 god slaughters Egyptian cattle. Sometimes, cow tipping just isn't enough.
In Exodus 9:29-30 god kills off innocent babies, and whatever cows he missed earlier.
In Exodus 20:17 god tells us not to free another's slaves. Abolitionists beware!!
In Exodus 32:27-28 god tells the sons to slaughter their neighbors: 3,000 men are slain.
In Leviticus 19:20-22 god demands that raping a slave woman is punishable by scourging the victim. The rapist is to be forgiven.
In Leviticus 25:44-46 god tells his followers to make slaves of their neighbors.
In Leviticus 27:3-7 god helpfully provides a pricing guide. According to this guide, as a male between the ages of 18 and 60 years (the most expensive category), I am worth approximately US$25. How much are you worth to god?
In Numbers 14:18 god's idea of justice is explained: little children are to be punished for their great-great grandparents transgressions.
In Numbers 31:1-54 god tells his followers to commit genocide, "sparing" only the virgin girls, who are to be raped. Even god gets some "unspared" virgins.
In Numbers 33:4 god kills of another batch of Egyptian babies. Abortion is a sin because...?
In Deuteronomy 2:33-36 god demands genocide again. No mention of virgin girls this time, unless these children are raped to death...
In Deuteronomy 7:2 god demands more genocide from his followers.
In Deuteronomy 13:12-16 god demands new and improved genocide, now including cattle. Oh, wait, we've had that before. Damn cows.
In Deuteronomy 32:21-26 god glories in being a psychotic terrorist. Don't miss the atrocities of Deuteronomy 28, either!
In Joshua 6:18-19 the omnipotent creator is short of cash, again.
In Joshua 8:22-26 god demands more genocide, plus some more slavery as detailed in Joshua 9:21-27, but this time, in Joshua 10:10-11, we get slaughter and a chase scene!! Go, god!!
In Joshua 10:28-32 god demands still more genocide.
In Joshua 11:6-17 god still demands more genocide. There are more exceptions to "Thou shalt not kill" than there are to a rich man's tax code.
In Judges 1:2-7. god's takes a break from genocide, has his followers kill "only" 10,000 people, but at least they get to torture and mutilate somebody by cutting off both thumbs and big toes!
In Judges 1:12-13 Caleb offers his daughter as prize to anyone who conquers the City of Debir. The girl's cousin wins the contest, thus the prize.
In Judges 1:17-19 god gets back to good, ol' regular genocide. Killing innocent people is serious work!!
In Judges 2:14 god has a temper-tantrum and sells Israel into slavery.
In Judges 3:28-29 & 4:15-16 god reverts to, you guessed it, genocide.
In Judges 5:30 god hands out a damsel or two to each of his rapist soldiers. Booty Call!!
In Judges 10:17 god gets angry at Israel, again, and sells them into slavery, again.
In Judges 12:6 god slays 42,000 innocent people because someone with a speech impediment mispronounces the word "shibboleth". I'll bet you thought the word "lisp" was cruel jest.
In Judges 15:4-8 a "righteous" Samson captures 300 foxes, ties their tails together, and sets them on fire. Abusing animals is almost as righteous as killing babies, apparently.
In Judges 19:22-30, after taking in a traveling Levite, the host offers his virgin daughter and his guest's concubine to a mob of perverts (who want to have sex with his guest). The mob refuses the daughter, but accepts the concubine and they "abuse her all night." The next morning she crawls back to the doorstep and dies. The Levite mounts her dead body on an ass and takes her home. Then he chops her body up into twelve pieces and sends them to each of the twelve tribes of Israel.
In Judges 21:7-23 in order to find wives for the Benjamites, who were unwilling to use their own daughters, the other tribes attacked and killed all occupants of a city except for the young virgins. These virgins were then given to the Benjamites as "wives".
In 1 Samuel 2:10 if god doesn't like you he will send a thunderstorm to break your body into little pieces. In 1 Samuel 2:31-34, if god really doesn't like you, he will cut off your arm, consume your eyes, grieve your heart, and slay your sons & grandfathers. In 1 Samuel 5:6, 9, and 12 we learn that if god really, really doesn't like you, he will give you hemorrhoids in your "secret parts".
In 1 Samuel 5:11 god wipes out another city.
In 1 Samuel 15:2-3 god demands more genocide, this time as punishment for some no doubt petty transgression committed hundreds of years previously by the forefathers of these innocent people.
In 1 Samuel 15:7-34 god goads Saul into torturing & slaying his prisoner, a King.
In Matthew 5:17 Jesus strongly approves of the law & the prophets. He hasn't the slightest objection to the cruelties of the Old Testament.
In Matthew 8:21 Jesus shows no compassion for the bereaved, saying to a man who had just lost his father: "Let the dead bury the dead."
In Matthew 8:32 Jesus abuses animals by sending some devils into a herd of pigs, causing the pigs to run off a cliff & drown in the sea below. The acorn does not fall far from the tree. Was there a local shortage of Egyptian cows? Moo!
In Matthew 10:15 Jesus becomes a terrorist, and threatens genocide against cities.
In Matthew 10:28 Jesus tries to scare people by telling them that his dad can beat up their dad.
In Matthew 11:20-24 Jesus threatens more cities.
In Matthew 12:47-49 "Mister Family Values" himself (Jesus) is disrespectful to his mother and rude to his brothers.
In Matthew 13:41-42 Jesus threatens to send his angels against any who offend him, and send them straight to hell. Love, peace, tolerance, and forgiveness are beneath him, apparently.
In Matthew 15:4-7 Jesus commits hypocrisy by demanding all others to honor their parents. "Sorry about being rude back in Matthew 12, Mom."
In Matthew 18:8-9 Jesus advocates self-mutilation, but for others, not him. He's perfect, thank you.
In Matthew 18:25 Jesus advocates slavery.
In Matthew 25:29 Jesus proposes a system of economy where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
In Mark 5:12-13 Jesus spooks 2,000 pigs, causing them to jump of a cliff and drown in the sea. Is this evidence of more animal abuse, or is the story from Matthew 8:32 getting better with each telling?
In Mark 6:11 Jesus resorts to threatening cities again. Die, innocent babies, Die!!
In Mark 7:9-13 Jesus criticizes people for not killing their children, as they should have, according to Old Testament law. The same law Jesus broke when he was disrespectful to his Mother in Matthew 12:47-49.
In Mark 10:29-30 Jesus will reward men who abandon their wives and children.
In Mark 11:13-14 Jesus kills a fig tree for not bearing fruit, even though it was out of season. Apparently, "Mister Perfect" wasn't much of an agronomist, or ethicist.
In Luke 8:20-21 Jesus is disrespectful to his mother and rude to his brothers, again. Or still?
In Luke 8:27-37 Jesus heals a naked man who was possessed by many devils by sending the devils into a herd of pigs, causing them to run off a cliff and drown in the sea. This messy, cruel, and expensive (for the owners of the pigs) treatment did not favorably impress the local residents, and Jesus was asked to leave. This story does get better with each telling!!
In Luke 10:10-15 Jesus terrorizes entire cities, claiming they will be violently destroyed and the inhabitants "thrust down to hell" for not "receiving" his disciples. No doubt these people preferred their pigs.
In Luke 12:46-47 Jesus likens god to a sadistic, diabolical slave-owner, who will beat you "with many stripes".
In Luke 14:26 Jesus decides that it is not enough for men to abandon their families; they must actively hate them, too. Where is the love??
In Luke 16:17 Jesus declares that all the vicious, irrational laws of the Old Testament are binding forever.
In Luke 17:27 Jesus talks about Noah, neatly demonstrating his own ignorance of science, history, and justice.
In John 2:4 Jesus is, again, rude to his mother. She seems so nice, too.
In John 5:14 Jesus stupidly announces that god handicaps people as just punishment for their sins.
In John 7:8-10 Jesus lies to his family about attending a feast.
In Acts 5:1-10 Peter, with god's help, kills a man who sold his possessions, but did not fork over all of the earnings. Why is the omnipotent creator always short of cash?
In Acts 13:48 we learn that only pre-ordained people would be allowed in heaven. So much for freewill...
Dear President Bush,
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's law. I
have learned a great deal from you and try to share that knowledge
with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the
homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus
18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements
of God's Laws and how to follow them:
1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and
female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend
of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not to Canadians.
Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in
Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair
price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in
her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is,
how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a
pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors.
They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus
35:2 clearly states that he should be put to death. Am I morally
obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?
6. A friend of mine feels that, even though eating shellfish is an
abomination (Lev. 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than
homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there "degrees"
of abomination?
7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I
have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading
glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room
here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair
around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.
19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes
me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two
different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing
garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester
blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really
necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town
together to stone them (Lev. 24:10-16)? Couldn't we just burn them to
death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep
with their in-laws (Lev. 20:14)?
I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy
considerable expertise in such matters, so I am confident you can
help.
Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.
Your Christian friend,
St. John Ashcroft
The Big Book of Nonsense & Lies:
In Genesis 3:16 god punishes all women, innocent or not, with painful childbirth and subjugation to men.
In Genesis 7:4 god has a bad day at the office, thus decides to drown innocent babies, and animals both wild and domestic.
In Exodus 4:11 god boasts about making people handicapped.
In Exodus 4:23 god resorts to hostage taking and terrorism in order to get his own way. He does this via threatening a baby. Soon, he is slaughtering little babies all across Egypt.
In Exodus 9:19-20 god slaughters Egyptian cattle. Sometimes, cow tipping just isn't enough.
In Exodus 9:29-30 god kills off innocent babies, and whatever cows he missed earlier.
In Exodus 20:17 god tells us not to free another's slaves. Abolitionists beware!!
In Exodus 32:27-28 god tells the sons to slaughter their neighbors: 3,000 men are slain.
In Leviticus 19:20-22 god demands that raping a slave woman is punishable by scourging the victim. The rapist is to be forgiven.
In Leviticus 25:44-46 god tells his followers to make slaves of their neighbors.
In Leviticus 27:3-7 god helpfully provides a pricing guide. According to this guide, as a male between the ages of 18 and 60 years (the most expensive category), I am worth approximately US$25. How much are you worth to god?
In Numbers 14:18 god's idea of justice is explained: little children are to be punished for their great-great grandparents transgressions.
In Numbers 31:1-54 god tells his followers to commit genocide, "sparing" only the virgin girls, who are to be raped. Even god gets some "unspared" virgins.
In Numbers 33:4 god kills of another batch of Egyptian babies. Abortion is a sin because...?
In Deuteronomy 2:33-36 god demands genocide again. No mention of virgin girls this time, unless these children are raped to death...
In Deuteronomy 7:2 god demands more genocide from his followers.
In Deuteronomy 13:12-16 god demands new and improved genocide, now including cattle. Oh, wait, we've had that before. Damn cows.
In Deuteronomy 32:21-26 god glories in being a psychotic terrorist. Don't miss the atrocities of Deuteronomy 28, either!
In Joshua 6:18-19 the omnipotent creator is short of cash, again.
In Joshua 8:22-26 god demands more genocide, plus some more slavery as detailed in Joshua 9:21-27, but this time, in Joshua 10:10-11, we get slaughter and a chase scene!! Go, god!!
In Joshua 10:28-32 god demands still more genocide.
In Joshua 11:6-17 god still demands more genocide. There are more exceptions to "Thou shalt not kill" than there are to a rich man's tax code.
In Judges 1:2-7. god's takes a break from genocide, has his followers kill "only" 10,000 people, but at least they get to torture and mutilate somebody by cutting off both thumbs and big toes!
In Judges 1:12-13 Caleb offers his daughter as prize to anyone who conquers the City of Debir. The girl's cousin wins the contest, thus the prize.
In Judges 1:17-19 god gets back to good, ol' regular genocide. Killing innocent people is serious work!!
In Judges 2:14 god has a temper-tantrum and sells Israel into slavery.
In Judges 3:28-29 & 4:15-16 god reverts to, you guessed it, genocide.
In Judges 5:30 god hands out a damsel or two to each of his rapist soldiers. Booty Call!!
In Judges 10:17 god gets angry at Israel, again, and sells them into slavery, again.
In Judges 12:6 god slays 42,000 innocent people because someone with a speech impediment mispronounces the word "shibboleth". I'll bet you thought the word "lisp" was cruel jest.
In Judges 15:4-8 a "righteous" Samson captures 300 foxes, ties their tails together, and sets them on fire. Abusing animals is almost as righteous as killing babies, apparently.
In Judges 19:22-30, after taking in a traveling Levite, the host offers his virgin daughter and his guest's concubine to a mob of perverts (who want to have sex with his guest). The mob refuses the daughter, but accepts the concubine and they "abuse her all night." The next morning she crawls back to the doorstep and dies. The Levite mounts her dead body on an ass and takes her home. Then he chops her body up into twelve pieces and sends them to each of the twelve tribes of Israel.
In Judges 21:7-23 in order to find wives for the Benjamites, who were unwilling to use their own daughters, the other tribes attacked and killed all occupants of a city except for the young virgins. These virgins were then given to the Benjamites as "wives".
In 1 Samuel 2:10 if god doesn't like you he will send a thunderstorm to break your body into little pieces. In 1 Samuel 2:31-34, if god really doesn't like you, he will cut off your arm, consume your eyes, grieve your heart, and slay your sons & grandfathers. In 1 Samuel 5:6, 9, and 12 we learn that if god really, really doesn't like you, he will give you hemorrhoids in your "secret parts".
In 1 Samuel 5:11 god wipes out another city.
In 1 Samuel 15:2-3 god demands more genocide, this time as punishment for some no doubt petty transgression committed hundreds of years previously by the forefathers of these innocent people.
In 1 Samuel 15:7-34 god goads Saul into torturing & slaying his prisoner, a King.
In Matthew 5:17 Jesus strongly approves of the law & the prophets. He hasn't the slightest objection to the cruelties of the Old Testament.
In Matthew 8:21 Jesus shows no compassion for the bereaved, saying to a man who had just lost his father: "Let the dead bury the dead."
In Matthew 8:32 Jesus abuses animals by sending some devils into a herd of pigs, causing the pigs to run off a cliff & drown in the sea below. The acorn does not fall far from the tree. Was there a local shortage of Egyptian cows? Moo!
In Matthew 10:15 Jesus becomes a terrorist, and threatens genocide against cities.
In Matthew 10:28 Jesus tries to scare people by telling them that his dad can beat up their dad.
In Matthew 11:20-24 Jesus threatens more cities.
In Matthew 12:47-49 "Mister Family Values" himself (Jesus) is disrespectful to his mother and rude to his brothers.
In Matthew 13:41-42 Jesus threatens to send his angels against any who offend him, and send them straight to hell. Love, peace, tolerance, and forgiveness are beneath him, apparently.
In Matthew 15:4-7 Jesus commits hypocrisy by demanding all others to honor their parents. "Sorry about being rude back in Matthew 12, Mom."
In Matthew 18:8-9 Jesus advocates self-mutilation, but for others, not him. He's perfect, thank you.
In Matthew 18:25 Jesus advocates slavery.
In Matthew 25:29 Jesus proposes a system of economy where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
In Mark 5:12-13 Jesus spooks 2,000 pigs, causing them to jump of a cliff and drown in the sea. Is this evidence of more animal abuse, or is the story from Matthew 8:32 getting better with each telling?
In Mark 6:11 Jesus resorts to threatening cities again. Die, innocent babies, Die!!
In Mark 7:9-13 Jesus criticizes people for not killing their children, as they should have, according to Old Testament law. The same law Jesus broke when he was disrespectful to his Mother in Matthew 12:47-49.
In Mark 10:29-30 Jesus will reward men who abandon their wives and children.
In Mark 11:13-14 Jesus kills a fig tree for not bearing fruit, even though it was out of season. Apparently, "Mister Perfect" wasn't much of an agronomist, or ethicist.
In Luke 8:20-21 Jesus is disrespectful to his mother and rude to his brothers, again. Or still?
In Luke 8:27-37 Jesus heals a naked man who was possessed by many devils by sending the devils into a herd of pigs, causing them to run off a cliff and drown in the sea. This messy, cruel, and expensive (for the owners of the pigs) treatment did not favorably impress the local residents, and Jesus was asked to leave. This story does get better with each telling!!
In Luke 10:10-15 Jesus terrorizes entire cities, claiming they will be violently destroyed and the inhabitants "thrust down to hell" for not "receiving" his disciples. No doubt these people preferred their pigs.
In Luke 12:46-47 Jesus likens god to a sadistic, diabolical slave-owner, who will beat you "with many stripes".
In Luke 14:26 Jesus decides that it is not enough for men to abandon their families; they must actively hate them, too. Where is the love??
In Luke 16:17 Jesus declares that all the vicious, irrational laws of the Old Testament are binding forever.
In Luke 17:27 Jesus talks about Noah, neatly demonstrating his own ignorance of science, history, and justice.
In John 2:4 Jesus is, again, rude to his mother. She seems so nice, too.
In John 5:14 Jesus stupidly announces that god handicaps people as just punishment for their sins.
In John 7:8-10 Jesus lies to his family about attending a feast.
In Acts 5:1-10 Peter, with god's help, kills a man who sold his possessions, but did not fork over all of the earnings. Why is the omnipotent creator always short of cash?
In Acts 13:48 we learn that only pre-ordained people would be allowed in heaven. So much for freewill...
Sol
Storage is cool
As much as I'd agree that the Bible is totally full of it I'd have to question some of those references. Maybe it's just the versions of the Bible I was looking at (I'm sure a fair few little mistakes have been cleaned up over the years in more modern translations) but the ones about Jesus dis'ing his parents just don't seem actually offensive. (Although it wouldn't take too much thinking to find Jesus commiting a sin or two in the Bible so it probably doesn't much matter which ones he commits)
Also I'm pretty sure the RRP on slaves didn't take inflation into account (Although admitedly God neither mentions indexing or publishes any subsequent price lists so I guess the omission isn't really the authors).
Also I'm pretty sure the RRP on slaves didn't take inflation into account (Although admitedly God neither mentions indexing or publishes any subsequent price lists so I guess the omission isn't really the authors).
ddrueding
Fixture
My new home fileserver :mrgrn:
TBs of data without redundancy? Am I crazy? Nope; it's mirrored to the other server
TBs of data without redundancy? Am I crazy? Nope; it's mirrored to the other server
ddrueding
Fixture
How overbuilding can save you from stupidity:
After sticking the server in the server room (attic) last night and queueing up a batch of XviDs, I remembere this morning that I hadn't hooked up all the chassis fans. So I head up there only to discover that not only are all the chassis fans disconnected, but one of the fans in the TruePower 500 isn't spinning and the CPU fan is disconnected! The only fans running were the 92mm in the Supermicro enclosures and the inside 80mm on the PS. This machine was run in this state with an 80F ambiant at 100% load for 12 hours!
After sticking the server in the server room (attic) last night and queueing up a batch of XviDs, I remembere this morning that I hadn't hooked up all the chassis fans. So I head up there only to discover that not only are all the chassis fans disconnected, but one of the fans in the TruePower 500 isn't spinning and the CPU fan is disconnected! The only fans running were the 92mm in the Supermicro enclosures and the inside 80mm on the PS. This machine was run in this state with an 80F ambiant at 100% load for 12 hours!
Howell
Storage? I am Storage!
Sol said:
It's just a joke Sol. Don't take it too seriously.
Sol
Storage is cool
Yeah I realise that it's a joke, but apart from a couple of overstated references it's also pretty much all true. I think the impact of that is greatly reduced by having those references in there. It gives the people who believe in that crap a way (apart from outright denial) to keep thinking that thier beliefs are not ridiculous, and the sooner they realise that they are, the better off the world will be.
Religion is a serious problem that affects everyone, it just so happens that the only acceptable solution is to laugh at it until people get the point. (Not that I think this will work in the short term, the denial factor is too strong, but at least it's amusing to try)
Religion is a serious problem that affects everyone, it just so happens that the only acceptable solution is to laugh at it until people get the point. (Not that I think this will work in the short term, the denial factor is too strong, but at least it's amusing to try)
timwhit
Hairy Aussie
Groltz
My demeaning user rank is
ddrueding
Fixture
Well, If I had any money to begin with, I won't any more. This is my new toy.
A 24-foot long Ultralight Displacement sailboat (ULDB). She should be very, very fast
A 24-foot long Ultralight Displacement sailboat (ULDB). She should be very, very fast
ddrueding
Fixture
Pradeep
Storage? I am Storage!
Nice toy
What are you towing it with? And I guess the other question, have you been sailing before?
What are you towing it with? And I guess the other question, have you been sailing before?
ddrueding
Fixture
Pradeep said:Nice toy
What are you towing it with? And I guess the other question, have you been sailing before?
I've been towing it with a 2006 Toyota Tacoma TRD, but tomorrow I get to tow it with a Porsche Cayenne
It's a bit big for my Golf to handle, I may end up buying a Mitsu Evo to pull it around with.
I used to race professionally, though I haven't been out at all in 7 years. My g/f used to teach sailing in the Baltic.
paugie
Storage is cool
It's a good thing, I don't have any money to buy even a yard of sail material. My wife won't get on a boat that large (small). :lol:
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Relating to timwhit's interest in "American Theocracy", here's an article from today's Salon.com:
"Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism"
Across the United States, religious activists are organizing to establish an American theocracy. A frightening look inside the growing right-wing movement.
By Michelle Goldberg
May. 12, 2006 | A teenage modern dance troupe dressed all in black took their places on the stage of the First Baptist Church of Pleasant Grove, a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. Two dancers, donning black overcoats, crossed their arms menacingly. As a Christian pop ballad swelled on the speakers, a boy wearing judicial robes walked out. Holding a Ten Commandments tablet that seemed to be made of cardboard, he was playing former Alabama Supreme Court justice Roy Moore. The trench-coated thugs approached him, miming a violent rebuke and forcing him to the other end of the stage, sans Commandments.
There, a cluster of dancers impersonating liberal activists waved signs with slogans like "No Moore!" and "Keep God Out!! No God in Court." The boy Moore danced a harangue, first lurching toward his tormentors and then cringing back in outrage before breaking through their line to lunge for his monument. But the dancers in trench coats -- agents of atheism -- got hold of it first and took it away, leaving him abject on the floor. As the song's uplifting chorus played -- "After you've done all you can, you just stand" -- a dancer in a white robe, playing either an angel or God himself, came forward and helped the Moore character to his feet.
The performance ended to enthusiastic applause from a crowd that included many Alabama judges and politicians, as well as Roy Moore himself, a gaunt man with a courtly manner and the wrath of Leviticus in his eyes. Moore has become a hero to those determined to remake the United States into an explicitly Christian nation. That reconstructionist dream lies at the red-hot center of our current culture wars, investing the symbolic fight over the Ten Commandments -- a fight whose outcome seems irrelevant to most peoples' lives -- with an apocalyptic urgency.
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On November 13, 2003, Moore was removed from his position as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court after he defied a judge's order to remove the 2.6-ton Ten Commandments monument he'd installed in the Montgomery judicial building. On the coasts, he seemed a ridiculous figure, the latest in a line of grotesque Southern anachronisms. After all, Moore is a man who, in a 2002 court decision awarding custody of three children to their allegedly abusive father over their lesbian mother, called homosexuality "abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature's God upon which this Nation and our laws are predicated," and argued, "The State carries the power of the sword, that is, the power to prohibit conduct with physical penalties, such as confinement and even execution. It must use that power to prevent the subversion of children toward this lifestyle, to not encourage a criminal lifestyle." He's a man who writes rhyming poetry decrying the teaching of evolution and who fought against the Alabama ballot measure to remove segregationist language from the state constitution.
To the growing Christian nationalist movement, though, Roy Moore is a martyr, cut down by secular tyranny for daring to assert God's truth.
It's a role he seems to love. The battle that cost Moore his job wasn't his first Ten Commandments fight. In 1995, the ACLU sued Moore, then a county circuit judge, for hanging a Ten Commandments plaque in his courtroom and leading juries in prayer. As Matt Labash recalled in an adulatory Weekly Standard article, "The conflict's natural drama was compounded when the governor, Fob James, announced that he would deploy the National Guard, state troopers, and the Alabama and Auburn football teams to keep Moore's tablets on the wall."
That case reached an ambiguous conclusion in 1998, when the state supreme court threw out the lawsuit on technical grounds. By then, Moore had become a star of the right. Televangelist D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries raised more than $100,000 for his legal defense fund, and Moore spoke at a series of rallies that drew thousands. His right-wing fame helped catapult him to victory in the 2000 race for chief justice of the state supreme court.
Moore installed his massive Ten Commandments monument on August 1, 2001, and from the beginning, he and his allies used it to stir up the Christian nationalist faithful. He gave videographers from Coral Ridge Ministries exclusive access to the courthouse on the night the monument was mounted, and on October 14, D. James Kennedy started hawking a $19 video about Moore's brave, covert installation on his television show.
As the controversy over the statue ignited, Moore's fame grew. At rallies across the country, he summoned the faithful to an ideal that sounded very much like theocracy. "For forty years we have wandered like the children of Israel," he told a crowd of three thousand supporters in Tennessee. "In homes and schools across our land, it's time for Christians to take a stand. This is not a nation established on the principles of Buddha or Hinduism. Our faith is not Islam. What we follow is not the Koran but the Bible.This is a Christian nation."
By the time he was removed as chief justice, Moore had sparked a movement, and his monument was an icon. In the days before officials came to cart the Commandments away, hundreds flocked to Montgomery to rally on the courtroom steps. Some slept there and imagined themselves the nucleus of a new civil rights movement.
Thomas Bowman, a bearded Christian folk singer from Kentucky who wears a knit Rasta hat, wrote an anthem called "Montgomery Fire" celebrating the demonstrations: "We had love in our hearts that no man could ever remove / but with the whole world we watched as they hauled the Commandments away." When I met him a year later at First Baptist, he referred to the protesters, romantically, as the "ragamuffin warriors" fighting for God against the atheist state. During the controversy, he said, he'd felt the Lord's call, and driven six and a half hours from Louisville. In Montgomery, he met others like him, who'd felt compelled to take a stand against secularism.
"The opposing side, the anti-God side, the do-whatever-you-want side, the judicial side, just kept pushing and pushing and pushing for the last forty years," Bowman said. "They keep moving that line back." Finally, he said, God called on Christians to defend themselves.
After the Commandments were removed, a group of retired military men from Texas who called themselves American Veterans in Domestic Defense spent months taking the monument -- now affectionately called "Roy’s Rock" -- on tour all over the country, holding more than 150 viewings and rallies in churches, at state capitols, even in Wal-Mart parking lots. Moore also found powerful supporters in statehouses and in Congress who proposed laws to radically restrict the power of federal courts to enforce the separation of church and state. In solidarity, another Alabama judge, Ashley McKathan, had the Ten Commandments embroidered onto his robe. Christian homeschool catalogues offered copies of a video titled "Roy Moore’s Message to America." When Moore suggested he might run for Alabama governor, state polls showed him with a double-digit lead.
A few days before Bush's second inauguration, The New York Times carried a story headlined "Warning from a Student of Democracy's Collapse" about Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany, professor emeritus of history at Columbia, and scholar of fascism. It quoted a speech he had given in Germany that drew parallels between Nazism and the American religious right. "Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics," he was quoted saying of prewar Germany, "but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured [Hitler's] success, notably in Protestant areas."
It's not surprising that Stern is alarmed. Reading his forty-five-year-old book "The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology," I shivered at its contemporary resonance. "The ideologists of the conservative revolution superimposed a vision of national redemption upon their dissatisfaction with liberal culture and with the loss of authoritative faith," he wrote in the introduction. "They posed as the true champions of nationalism, and berated the socialists for their internationalism, and the liberals for their pacifism and their indifference to national greatness."
Fascism isn't imminent in America. But its language and aesthetics are distressingly common among Christian nationalists. History professor Roger Griffin described the "mobilizing vision" of fascist movements as "the national community rising Phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it" (his italics). The Ten Commandments has become a potent symbol of this dreamed-for resurrection on the American right.
True, our homegrown quasi-fascists often appear so absurd as to seem harmless. Take, for example, American Veterans in Domestic Defense, the organization that took the Ten Commandments on tour. The group says it exists to "neutralize the destructiveness" of America's "domestic enemies," which include "biased liberal, socialist news media," "the ACLU," and "the conspiracy of an immoral film industry." To do this, it aims to recruit former military men. "AVIDD reminds all American Veterans that you took an oath to defend the United States against all enemies, 'both foreign and domestic,'" its Web site says. "In your military capacity, you were called upon to defend the United States against foreign enemies. AVIDD now calls upon you to continue to fulfill your oath and help us defend this nation on the political front, against equally dangerous domestic enemies."
According to Jim Cabaniss, the seventy-two-year-old Korean War veteran who founded AVIDD, the group now has thirty-three chapters across the country. It's entirely likely that some of these chapters just represent one or two men, and as of 2005, AVIDD didn't seem large enough to be much of a danger to anyone.
Still, it's worth noting that thousands of Americans nationwide have flocked to rallies at which military men don uniforms and pledge to seize the reins of power in America on behalf of Christianity. In many places, local religious leaders and politicians lend their support to AVIDD's cause. And at least some of the people at these rallies speak with seething resentment about the tyranny of Jews over America's Christian majority.
"People who call themselves Jews represent maybe 2 or 3 percent of our people," Cabaniss told me after a January 2005 rally in Austin. "Christians represent a huge percent, and we don't believe that a small percentage should destroy the values of the larger percentage."
I asked Cabaniss, a thin, white-haired man who wore a suit with a red, white, and blue tie and a U.S. Army baseball cap, whether he was saying that American Jews have too much power. "It appears that way," he replied. "They're a driving force behind trying to take everything to do with Christianity out of our system. That's the part that makes us very upset."
Ed Hamilton, who'd come to the rally from San Antonio, interjected, "There are very wealthy Jews in high places, and they have significant control over a lot of financial matters and some political matters. They have disproportionate amount of influence in our financial structure."
We were standing outside the Texas Capitol building on a sunny Saturday morning. A few hundred people from across the state had turned out for the rally, which began at 10 a.m. Three or four men in military uniforms sat with their wives on chairs at the top of the Capitol steps. Next to them sat an old man dressed as Uncle Sam in a tall Stars and Stripes top hat, a red, white, and blue suit, and a pointy white beard. Four other men supported tall, coffin-shaped signs labeled with the names of objectionable Supreme Court rulings.
The crowd was full of teenagers who'd come on church buses and families with young children. A white-bearded man in a leather biker vest dragged a ten-foot-tall cedar crucifix painted red, white, and blue. One woman wore a T-shirt with a photograph of Moore's monument. Another held a handwritten sign saying:
Ban Judges
Not God
God Rules
Rick Scarborough, one of the headline speakers, called for a "million Roy Moores" who will "stand up, speak up, and refuse to give up." A former football player at Stephen F. Austin State University, Scarborough is a thick man with white hair, black eyebrows, and a surprisingly high voice. In recent years, he's positioned himself as a comer in the Christian nationalist movement, riding church/state controversies to ever higher prominence. In 2002, he left his post as pastor of Pearland First Baptist Church -- where he had mobilized members of his flock in that Houston suburb to try to take over the city council and school board -- to form Vision America, a group dedicated to organizing "patriot pastors" for political action. The same year, Jerry Falwell christened him as one of the new leaders of the Christian right. The courts that martyred Moore are Scarborough's bête noire, and as 2005 progressed, he emerged as one of most vehement right-wing denunciators of the federal judiciary.
Also speaking was John Eidsmoe, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force who wore full military dress. A professor at Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, a Christian school in Montgomery, Alabama, Eidsmoe has authored a number of Christian nationalist books including "Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers," which argues that Calvinism inspired America's founding document. He's a proponent of a Confederate doctrine called interposition, which holds that states have the right to reject federal government mandates they deem unconstitutional. "Implementation of the doctrine may be peaceable, as by resolution, remonstrance or legislation, or may proceed ultimately to nullification with forcible resistance," he wrote in a manifesto titled "A Call to Stand with Chief Justice Roy Moore."
When the speeches were finished, the four black-coffin signs were knocked down and four white doves were released from behind them, to awed gasps and cheers from the crowd. Moore's monument sat on the back of a flatbed truck parked several yards away. An American flag flew on one side. On the other was a flag with a fierce-looking eagle perched upon a bloody cross.
Roy Moore and Rick Scarborough are Baptists, D. James Kennedy is a fundamentalist Presbyterian, and John Eidsmoe is a Lutheran. All of them, however, have been shaped by dominion theology, which asserts that, in preparation for the second coming of Christ, godly men have the responsibility to take over every aspect of society.
Dominion theology comes out of Christian Reconstructionism, a fundamentalist creed that was propagated by the late Rousas John (R. J.) Rushdoony and his son-in-law, Gary North. Born in New York City in 1916 to Armenian immigrants who had recently fled the genocide in Turkey, Rushdoony was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and spent over eight years as a Presbyterian missionary to Native Americans in Nevada. He was a prolific writer, churning out dense tomes advocating the abolition of public schools and social services and the replacement of civil law with biblical law. White-bearded and wizardly, Rushdoony had the look of an Old Testament patriarch and the harsh vision to match -- he called for the death penalty for gay people, blasphemers, and unchaste women, among other sinners. Democracy, he wrote, is a heresy and "the great love of the failures and cowards of life."
Reconstructionism is a postmillennial theology, meaning its followers believe Jesus won't return until after Christians establish a thousand year reign on earth. While other Christians wait for the messiah, Reconstructionists want to build the kingdom themselves. Most American evangelicals, on the other hand, are premillennialists. They believe (with some variations) that at the time of Christ's return, Christians will be gathered up to heaven, missing the tribulations endured by unbelievers. In the past, this belief led to a certain apathy -- why worry if the world is about to end and you'll be safe from the carnage?
Since the 1970s, though, in tandem with the rise of the religious right, premillennialism has been politicized. A crucial figure in this process was the seminal evangelical writer Francis Schaeffer, an American who founded L'Abri, a Christian community in the Swiss Alps where religious intellectuals gathered to talk and study. As early as the 1960s, Schaeffer was reading Rushdoony and holding seminars on his work. Schaeffer went on to write a series of highly influential books elucidating the idea of the Christian worldview. A Christian Manifesto, published in 1981, described modern history as a contest between the Christian worldview and the materialist one, saying, "These two world views stand as totals in complete antithesis to each other in content and also in their natural results -- including sociological and government results, and specifically including law."
Schaeffer was not a theocrat, but he drew on Reconstructionist ideas of America as an originally Christian nation. In "A Christian Manifesto," he warned against wrapping Christianity in the American flag, but added, "None of this, however, changes the fact that the United States was founded upon a Christian consensus, nor that we today should bring Judeo-Christian principles into play in regard to government." Schaeffer was one of the first evangelical leaders to get deeply involved in the fight against abortion, and he advocated civil disobedience and the possible use of force to stop it. "It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God's Law it abrogates its authority," he wrote.
Tim LaHaye, who is most famous for putting a Tom Clancy gloss on premillennialist theology in the Left Behind thrillers that he co-writes with Jerry Jenkins, was heavily influenced by Schaeffer, to whom he dedicated his book "The Battle for the Mind." That book married Schaeffer's theories to a conspiratorial view of history and politics, arguing, "Most people today do not realize what humanism really is and how it is destroying our culture, families, country -- and, one day, the entire world. Most of the evils in the world today can be traced to humanism, which has taken over our government, the UN, education, TV, and most of the other influential things of life.
"We must remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders," LaHaye wrote.
As premillennialists grew to embrace the goal of dominion, they made alliances with Reconstructionists. In 1984, Jay Grimstead, a disciple of Francis Schaeffer, brought important pre- and post-millennialists together to form the Coalition on Revival (COR) in order to lay a blueprint for taking over American life. Tim LaHaye was an original member of COR's steering committee, along with Rushdoony, North, creationist Duane Gish, D. James Kennedy, and the Reverend Donald Wildmon of the influential American Family Association.
Between 1984 and 1986, COR developed seventeen "worldview" documents, which elucidate the "Christian" position on most aspects of life. Just as political Islam is often called Islamism to differentiate the fascist political doctrine from the faith, the ideology laid out in these papers could be called Christianism. The documents outline a complete political program, with a "biblically correct" position on issues like taxes (God favors a flat rate), public schools (generally frowned upon), and the media and the arts ("We deny that any pornography and other blasphemy are permissible as art or 'free speech'").
In a 1988 letter to supporters, Grimstead announced the completion of a high school curriculum "using the COR Worldview Documents as textbooks." Since then, there's been a proliferation of schools, books, and seminars devoted to inculcating the correct Christian worldview in students and activists. Charles Colson accepts one hundred people annually into his yearlong "worldview training" courses, which include meetings in Washington, D.C., online seminars, "mentoring," and several hours of homework each week. "The program will be heavily weighted towards how to think," Colson's Web site says. It's intended for those who work in churches, media, law, government, and education, and who can thus teach others to think the same way.
Those who don't have a year to spare can attend one of more than a dozen Worldview Weekend conferences held every year in churches nationwide. Popular speakers include the revisionist Christian nationalist historian David Barton, David Limbaugh (Rush's born-again brother), and evangelical former sitcom star Kirk Cameron. In 2003, Tom DeLay was a featured speaker at a Worldview Weekend at Rick Scarborough's former church in Pearland, Texas. He told the crowd, "Only Christianity offers a comprehensive worldview that covers all areas of life and thought, every aspect of creation. Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world. Only Christianity."
Speaking to outsiders, most Christian nationalists say they're simply responding to anti-Christian persecution. They say that secularism is itself a religion, one unfairly imposed on them. They say they're the victims in the culture wars. But Christian nationalist ideologues don't want equality, they want dominance. In his book "The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action," George Grant, former executive director of D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries, wrote:
"Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ -- to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.
But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice.
It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.
It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.
It is dominion we are after.
World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less...
Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land -- of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ."
"Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism"
Across the United States, religious activists are organizing to establish an American theocracy. A frightening look inside the growing right-wing movement.
By Michelle Goldberg
May. 12, 2006 | A teenage modern dance troupe dressed all in black took their places on the stage of the First Baptist Church of Pleasant Grove, a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. Two dancers, donning black overcoats, crossed their arms menacingly. As a Christian pop ballad swelled on the speakers, a boy wearing judicial robes walked out. Holding a Ten Commandments tablet that seemed to be made of cardboard, he was playing former Alabama Supreme Court justice Roy Moore. The trench-coated thugs approached him, miming a violent rebuke and forcing him to the other end of the stage, sans Commandments.
There, a cluster of dancers impersonating liberal activists waved signs with slogans like "No Moore!" and "Keep God Out!! No God in Court." The boy Moore danced a harangue, first lurching toward his tormentors and then cringing back in outrage before breaking through their line to lunge for his monument. But the dancers in trench coats -- agents of atheism -- got hold of it first and took it away, leaving him abject on the floor. As the song's uplifting chorus played -- "After you've done all you can, you just stand" -- a dancer in a white robe, playing either an angel or God himself, came forward and helped the Moore character to his feet.
The performance ended to enthusiastic applause from a crowd that included many Alabama judges and politicians, as well as Roy Moore himself, a gaunt man with a courtly manner and the wrath of Leviticus in his eyes. Moore has become a hero to those determined to remake the United States into an explicitly Christian nation. That reconstructionist dream lies at the red-hot center of our current culture wars, investing the symbolic fight over the Ten Commandments -- a fight whose outcome seems irrelevant to most peoples' lives -- with an apocalyptic urgency.
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On November 13, 2003, Moore was removed from his position as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court after he defied a judge's order to remove the 2.6-ton Ten Commandments monument he'd installed in the Montgomery judicial building. On the coasts, he seemed a ridiculous figure, the latest in a line of grotesque Southern anachronisms. After all, Moore is a man who, in a 2002 court decision awarding custody of three children to their allegedly abusive father over their lesbian mother, called homosexuality "abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature's God upon which this Nation and our laws are predicated," and argued, "The State carries the power of the sword, that is, the power to prohibit conduct with physical penalties, such as confinement and even execution. It must use that power to prevent the subversion of children toward this lifestyle, to not encourage a criminal lifestyle." He's a man who writes rhyming poetry decrying the teaching of evolution and who fought against the Alabama ballot measure to remove segregationist language from the state constitution.
To the growing Christian nationalist movement, though, Roy Moore is a martyr, cut down by secular tyranny for daring to assert God's truth.
It's a role he seems to love. The battle that cost Moore his job wasn't his first Ten Commandments fight. In 1995, the ACLU sued Moore, then a county circuit judge, for hanging a Ten Commandments plaque in his courtroom and leading juries in prayer. As Matt Labash recalled in an adulatory Weekly Standard article, "The conflict's natural drama was compounded when the governor, Fob James, announced that he would deploy the National Guard, state troopers, and the Alabama and Auburn football teams to keep Moore's tablets on the wall."
That case reached an ambiguous conclusion in 1998, when the state supreme court threw out the lawsuit on technical grounds. By then, Moore had become a star of the right. Televangelist D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries raised more than $100,000 for his legal defense fund, and Moore spoke at a series of rallies that drew thousands. His right-wing fame helped catapult him to victory in the 2000 race for chief justice of the state supreme court.
Moore installed his massive Ten Commandments monument on August 1, 2001, and from the beginning, he and his allies used it to stir up the Christian nationalist faithful. He gave videographers from Coral Ridge Ministries exclusive access to the courthouse on the night the monument was mounted, and on October 14, D. James Kennedy started hawking a $19 video about Moore's brave, covert installation on his television show.
As the controversy over the statue ignited, Moore's fame grew. At rallies across the country, he summoned the faithful to an ideal that sounded very much like theocracy. "For forty years we have wandered like the children of Israel," he told a crowd of three thousand supporters in Tennessee. "In homes and schools across our land, it's time for Christians to take a stand. This is not a nation established on the principles of Buddha or Hinduism. Our faith is not Islam. What we follow is not the Koran but the Bible.This is a Christian nation."
By the time he was removed as chief justice, Moore had sparked a movement, and his monument was an icon. In the days before officials came to cart the Commandments away, hundreds flocked to Montgomery to rally on the courtroom steps. Some slept there and imagined themselves the nucleus of a new civil rights movement.
Thomas Bowman, a bearded Christian folk singer from Kentucky who wears a knit Rasta hat, wrote an anthem called "Montgomery Fire" celebrating the demonstrations: "We had love in our hearts that no man could ever remove / but with the whole world we watched as they hauled the Commandments away." When I met him a year later at First Baptist, he referred to the protesters, romantically, as the "ragamuffin warriors" fighting for God against the atheist state. During the controversy, he said, he'd felt the Lord's call, and driven six and a half hours from Louisville. In Montgomery, he met others like him, who'd felt compelled to take a stand against secularism.
"The opposing side, the anti-God side, the do-whatever-you-want side, the judicial side, just kept pushing and pushing and pushing for the last forty years," Bowman said. "They keep moving that line back." Finally, he said, God called on Christians to defend themselves.
After the Commandments were removed, a group of retired military men from Texas who called themselves American Veterans in Domestic Defense spent months taking the monument -- now affectionately called "Roy’s Rock" -- on tour all over the country, holding more than 150 viewings and rallies in churches, at state capitols, even in Wal-Mart parking lots. Moore also found powerful supporters in statehouses and in Congress who proposed laws to radically restrict the power of federal courts to enforce the separation of church and state. In solidarity, another Alabama judge, Ashley McKathan, had the Ten Commandments embroidered onto his robe. Christian homeschool catalogues offered copies of a video titled "Roy Moore’s Message to America." When Moore suggested he might run for Alabama governor, state polls showed him with a double-digit lead.
A few days before Bush's second inauguration, The New York Times carried a story headlined "Warning from a Student of Democracy's Collapse" about Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany, professor emeritus of history at Columbia, and scholar of fascism. It quoted a speech he had given in Germany that drew parallels between Nazism and the American religious right. "Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics," he was quoted saying of prewar Germany, "but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured [Hitler's] success, notably in Protestant areas."
It's not surprising that Stern is alarmed. Reading his forty-five-year-old book "The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology," I shivered at its contemporary resonance. "The ideologists of the conservative revolution superimposed a vision of national redemption upon their dissatisfaction with liberal culture and with the loss of authoritative faith," he wrote in the introduction. "They posed as the true champions of nationalism, and berated the socialists for their internationalism, and the liberals for their pacifism and their indifference to national greatness."
Fascism isn't imminent in America. But its language and aesthetics are distressingly common among Christian nationalists. History professor Roger Griffin described the "mobilizing vision" of fascist movements as "the national community rising Phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it" (his italics). The Ten Commandments has become a potent symbol of this dreamed-for resurrection on the American right.
True, our homegrown quasi-fascists often appear so absurd as to seem harmless. Take, for example, American Veterans in Domestic Defense, the organization that took the Ten Commandments on tour. The group says it exists to "neutralize the destructiveness" of America's "domestic enemies," which include "biased liberal, socialist news media," "the ACLU," and "the conspiracy of an immoral film industry." To do this, it aims to recruit former military men. "AVIDD reminds all American Veterans that you took an oath to defend the United States against all enemies, 'both foreign and domestic,'" its Web site says. "In your military capacity, you were called upon to defend the United States against foreign enemies. AVIDD now calls upon you to continue to fulfill your oath and help us defend this nation on the political front, against equally dangerous domestic enemies."
According to Jim Cabaniss, the seventy-two-year-old Korean War veteran who founded AVIDD, the group now has thirty-three chapters across the country. It's entirely likely that some of these chapters just represent one or two men, and as of 2005, AVIDD didn't seem large enough to be much of a danger to anyone.
Still, it's worth noting that thousands of Americans nationwide have flocked to rallies at which military men don uniforms and pledge to seize the reins of power in America on behalf of Christianity. In many places, local religious leaders and politicians lend their support to AVIDD's cause. And at least some of the people at these rallies speak with seething resentment about the tyranny of Jews over America's Christian majority.
"People who call themselves Jews represent maybe 2 or 3 percent of our people," Cabaniss told me after a January 2005 rally in Austin. "Christians represent a huge percent, and we don't believe that a small percentage should destroy the values of the larger percentage."
I asked Cabaniss, a thin, white-haired man who wore a suit with a red, white, and blue tie and a U.S. Army baseball cap, whether he was saying that American Jews have too much power. "It appears that way," he replied. "They're a driving force behind trying to take everything to do with Christianity out of our system. That's the part that makes us very upset."
Ed Hamilton, who'd come to the rally from San Antonio, interjected, "There are very wealthy Jews in high places, and they have significant control over a lot of financial matters and some political matters. They have disproportionate amount of influence in our financial structure."
We were standing outside the Texas Capitol building on a sunny Saturday morning. A few hundred people from across the state had turned out for the rally, which began at 10 a.m. Three or four men in military uniforms sat with their wives on chairs at the top of the Capitol steps. Next to them sat an old man dressed as Uncle Sam in a tall Stars and Stripes top hat, a red, white, and blue suit, and a pointy white beard. Four other men supported tall, coffin-shaped signs labeled with the names of objectionable Supreme Court rulings.
The crowd was full of teenagers who'd come on church buses and families with young children. A white-bearded man in a leather biker vest dragged a ten-foot-tall cedar crucifix painted red, white, and blue. One woman wore a T-shirt with a photograph of Moore's monument. Another held a handwritten sign saying:
Ban Judges
Not God
God Rules
Rick Scarborough, one of the headline speakers, called for a "million Roy Moores" who will "stand up, speak up, and refuse to give up." A former football player at Stephen F. Austin State University, Scarborough is a thick man with white hair, black eyebrows, and a surprisingly high voice. In recent years, he's positioned himself as a comer in the Christian nationalist movement, riding church/state controversies to ever higher prominence. In 2002, he left his post as pastor of Pearland First Baptist Church -- where he had mobilized members of his flock in that Houston suburb to try to take over the city council and school board -- to form Vision America, a group dedicated to organizing "patriot pastors" for political action. The same year, Jerry Falwell christened him as one of the new leaders of the Christian right. The courts that martyred Moore are Scarborough's bête noire, and as 2005 progressed, he emerged as one of most vehement right-wing denunciators of the federal judiciary.
Also speaking was John Eidsmoe, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force who wore full military dress. A professor at Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, a Christian school in Montgomery, Alabama, Eidsmoe has authored a number of Christian nationalist books including "Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers," which argues that Calvinism inspired America's founding document. He's a proponent of a Confederate doctrine called interposition, which holds that states have the right to reject federal government mandates they deem unconstitutional. "Implementation of the doctrine may be peaceable, as by resolution, remonstrance or legislation, or may proceed ultimately to nullification with forcible resistance," he wrote in a manifesto titled "A Call to Stand with Chief Justice Roy Moore."
When the speeches were finished, the four black-coffin signs were knocked down and four white doves were released from behind them, to awed gasps and cheers from the crowd. Moore's monument sat on the back of a flatbed truck parked several yards away. An American flag flew on one side. On the other was a flag with a fierce-looking eagle perched upon a bloody cross.
Roy Moore and Rick Scarborough are Baptists, D. James Kennedy is a fundamentalist Presbyterian, and John Eidsmoe is a Lutheran. All of them, however, have been shaped by dominion theology, which asserts that, in preparation for the second coming of Christ, godly men have the responsibility to take over every aspect of society.
Dominion theology comes out of Christian Reconstructionism, a fundamentalist creed that was propagated by the late Rousas John (R. J.) Rushdoony and his son-in-law, Gary North. Born in New York City in 1916 to Armenian immigrants who had recently fled the genocide in Turkey, Rushdoony was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and spent over eight years as a Presbyterian missionary to Native Americans in Nevada. He was a prolific writer, churning out dense tomes advocating the abolition of public schools and social services and the replacement of civil law with biblical law. White-bearded and wizardly, Rushdoony had the look of an Old Testament patriarch and the harsh vision to match -- he called for the death penalty for gay people, blasphemers, and unchaste women, among other sinners. Democracy, he wrote, is a heresy and "the great love of the failures and cowards of life."
Reconstructionism is a postmillennial theology, meaning its followers believe Jesus won't return until after Christians establish a thousand year reign on earth. While other Christians wait for the messiah, Reconstructionists want to build the kingdom themselves. Most American evangelicals, on the other hand, are premillennialists. They believe (with some variations) that at the time of Christ's return, Christians will be gathered up to heaven, missing the tribulations endured by unbelievers. In the past, this belief led to a certain apathy -- why worry if the world is about to end and you'll be safe from the carnage?
Since the 1970s, though, in tandem with the rise of the religious right, premillennialism has been politicized. A crucial figure in this process was the seminal evangelical writer Francis Schaeffer, an American who founded L'Abri, a Christian community in the Swiss Alps where religious intellectuals gathered to talk and study. As early as the 1960s, Schaeffer was reading Rushdoony and holding seminars on his work. Schaeffer went on to write a series of highly influential books elucidating the idea of the Christian worldview. A Christian Manifesto, published in 1981, described modern history as a contest between the Christian worldview and the materialist one, saying, "These two world views stand as totals in complete antithesis to each other in content and also in their natural results -- including sociological and government results, and specifically including law."
Schaeffer was not a theocrat, but he drew on Reconstructionist ideas of America as an originally Christian nation. In "A Christian Manifesto," he warned against wrapping Christianity in the American flag, but added, "None of this, however, changes the fact that the United States was founded upon a Christian consensus, nor that we today should bring Judeo-Christian principles into play in regard to government." Schaeffer was one of the first evangelical leaders to get deeply involved in the fight against abortion, and he advocated civil disobedience and the possible use of force to stop it. "It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God's Law it abrogates its authority," he wrote.
Tim LaHaye, who is most famous for putting a Tom Clancy gloss on premillennialist theology in the Left Behind thrillers that he co-writes with Jerry Jenkins, was heavily influenced by Schaeffer, to whom he dedicated his book "The Battle for the Mind." That book married Schaeffer's theories to a conspiratorial view of history and politics, arguing, "Most people today do not realize what humanism really is and how it is destroying our culture, families, country -- and, one day, the entire world. Most of the evils in the world today can be traced to humanism, which has taken over our government, the UN, education, TV, and most of the other influential things of life.
"We must remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders," LaHaye wrote.
As premillennialists grew to embrace the goal of dominion, they made alliances with Reconstructionists. In 1984, Jay Grimstead, a disciple of Francis Schaeffer, brought important pre- and post-millennialists together to form the Coalition on Revival (COR) in order to lay a blueprint for taking over American life. Tim LaHaye was an original member of COR's steering committee, along with Rushdoony, North, creationist Duane Gish, D. James Kennedy, and the Reverend Donald Wildmon of the influential American Family Association.
Between 1984 and 1986, COR developed seventeen "worldview" documents, which elucidate the "Christian" position on most aspects of life. Just as political Islam is often called Islamism to differentiate the fascist political doctrine from the faith, the ideology laid out in these papers could be called Christianism. The documents outline a complete political program, with a "biblically correct" position on issues like taxes (God favors a flat rate), public schools (generally frowned upon), and the media and the arts ("We deny that any pornography and other blasphemy are permissible as art or 'free speech'").
In a 1988 letter to supporters, Grimstead announced the completion of a high school curriculum "using the COR Worldview Documents as textbooks." Since then, there's been a proliferation of schools, books, and seminars devoted to inculcating the correct Christian worldview in students and activists. Charles Colson accepts one hundred people annually into his yearlong "worldview training" courses, which include meetings in Washington, D.C., online seminars, "mentoring," and several hours of homework each week. "The program will be heavily weighted towards how to think," Colson's Web site says. It's intended for those who work in churches, media, law, government, and education, and who can thus teach others to think the same way.
Those who don't have a year to spare can attend one of more than a dozen Worldview Weekend conferences held every year in churches nationwide. Popular speakers include the revisionist Christian nationalist historian David Barton, David Limbaugh (Rush's born-again brother), and evangelical former sitcom star Kirk Cameron. In 2003, Tom DeLay was a featured speaker at a Worldview Weekend at Rick Scarborough's former church in Pearland, Texas. He told the crowd, "Only Christianity offers a comprehensive worldview that covers all areas of life and thought, every aspect of creation. Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world. Only Christianity."
Speaking to outsiders, most Christian nationalists say they're simply responding to anti-Christian persecution. They say that secularism is itself a religion, one unfairly imposed on them. They say they're the victims in the culture wars. But Christian nationalist ideologues don't want equality, they want dominance. In his book "The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action," George Grant, former executive director of D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries, wrote:
"Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ -- to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.
But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice.
It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.
It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.
It is dominion we are after.
World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less...
Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land -- of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ."
ddrueding
Fixture
The author of that article was on "Fresh Aire" on NPR today. Really nice interview. True and very, very scary.
Warning, boasting to follow:
Start:
Jan 6th, 2006
234 Lb's
38 waist
Could never run a mile (ever)
Today:
May 12th, 2006
215Lb's
34ish waist
Mile in 10:18 (roughly 6MPh)
15% uphill grade for 35 minutes @ 3.3MPh
In roughly 4 months I've lost 19 LB's and I feel really great (except all the blisters on my feet). 15 more Lb's to go by september and I've made my major goal.
Start:
Jan 6th, 2006
234 Lb's
38 waist
Could never run a mile (ever)
Today:
May 12th, 2006
215Lb's
34ish waist
Mile in 10:18 (roughly 6MPh)
15% uphill grade for 35 minutes @ 3.3MPh
In roughly 4 months I've lost 19 LB's and I feel really great (except all the blisters on my feet). 15 more Lb's to go by september and I've made my major goal.
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
Wow, that's awesome Doug. I remember a photo of yourself that you posted a while ago and, not to offend you but, it's hard to believe you've made it to just 34" waist by now. Shit, I'm 33" waist.
How can you be just 34" and weight 215lbs without being a very muscular guy? I'm 190lbs and I'm all muscles. Can big bones make up for that much weight? How tall are you? 6'3"?
Anyway, great result.
How can you be just 34" and weight 215lbs without being a very muscular guy? I'm 190lbs and I'm all muscles. Can big bones make up for that much weight? How tall are you? 6'3"?
Anyway, great result.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Some guys carry weight differently. When I was 16 and weighed 230lbs, I had a 38 inch waist. When I was 19, was lifting weights and stuff, and weighed about 185, I had a 38 inch waist, still. Now I'm about 265 and have a 44 inch waist.
In other words, no matter what I do, I am going to have a big belly.
In other words, no matter what I do, I am going to have a big belly.
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
I am glad to learn that you are almost back to your "normal" weight. Losing 65lbs in less than two years is very good too.
How fast can you run a mile? ;-)
How fast can you run a mile? ;-)
ddrueding
Fixture
Very nice results Doug. I'd consider myself only slightly out of shape and I'm an even 200lbs with a 34" waist.
I can't even remember the last time I wore a size 34 waist. I don't exactly think of my waist as huge (if anything it's about average imho). My weight is mostly in my gut. I'm 6"1 if that matter at all, and I'm not all muscle. My highest weight was about 255 about 2 years ago. I came down to the 230's just by changing my diet. Now I've done that and physical exercise...seems to work better.
Once I drop more of my weight I'll get back into lifting...but for now I'll just do cardio.
My highest weight was about 255 about 2 years ago. I came down to the 230's just by changing my diet. Now I've done that and physical exercise...seems to work better.Once I drop more of my weight I'll get back into lifting...but for now I'll just do cardio.
ddrueding
Fixture
That's really awesome, at that height you don't have much to go at all. I only have 2 inches on you
paugie
Storage is cool
I don't know about there, but here, there have been a few deaths and probably some maimings due to liposuction.
Just thinking of the documentaries I accidentally watched on the subject makes my hair stand on end.
Just thinking of the documentaries I accidentally watched on the subject makes my hair stand on end.
timwhit
Hairy Aussie
I think you will see even more progress if you start lifting now. Having more muscle will increase your metabolism. Your weight probably won't drop if you start lifting, but you will have less fat %, which is what you want in order to be healthier.
Keep running too though, cardio is important for you heart.
Keep running too though, cardio is important for you heart.
timwhit
Hairy Aussie
In regards to Mercutio's post a few up.
If you think that is interesting you should really read American Theocracy. I am about 3/4 done and with each page I become more scared. Too bad I don't speak German or I would move there.
If you think that is interesting you should really read American Theocracy. I am about 3/4 done and with each page I become more scared. Too bad I don't speak German or I would move there.
ddrueding
Fixture
Confession:
I just purchsed a WD hard drive from a retail store.
SATA 200GB with 8MB Cache - $140
Irony:
It's a need-in-now replacement for a Samsung 250GB SP2504C unit :eekers:
This new drive has a really irritating whistle to it.
More on the failure in a Computing thread....
I just purchsed a WD hard drive from a retail store.
SATA 200GB with 8MB Cache - $140
Irony:
It's a need-in-now replacement for a Samsung 250GB SP2504C unit :eekers:
This new drive has a really irritating whistle to it.
More on the failure in a Computing thread....
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
A 200Gigger for 140...U$? That's a rip-off! We sell 250GB drives for 105$CAD. And we make a good profit on them. So 140U$ for a smaller drive... You've been robbed.
ddrueding
Fixture
No doubt, but the price is irrelevant if you need a drive in 15 minutes
ddrueding
Fixture
Too many nested OSes!
My XP Pro machine, RDCed (DSL->T1) to Server 2003 at client site, RDCed (Fiber point-to-point) to another Server 2003 running VMWare, VMWare console connected to another Server 2003 instance I'm in the process of setting up!
I have 4 start buttons visible right now!
My XP Pro machine, RDCed (DSL->T1) to Server 2003 at client site, RDCed (Fiber point-to-point) to another Server 2003 running VMWare, VMWare console connected to another Server 2003 instance I'm in the process of setting up!
I have 4 start buttons visible right now!