H4CBlog

(YNET NEWS, ISRAEL)  Franciscan archeologists digging in Israel find vials that may have been used by Mary Magdalene to wash Jesus’ feet.

A team of Franciscan archaeologists digging in the biblical town of Magdala in what is now Israel say they have unearthed vials of perfume similar to those that may have been used by the woman said to have washed Jesus’ feet.

The perfumed ointments were found intact at the bottom of a mud-filled swimming pool, alongside hair and make-up objects, the director of the dig conducted by the group Studium Biblicum Franciscanum told the Terrasanta.net religious website.

“If chemical analyses confirm it, these could be perfumes and creams similar to those that Mary Magdalene or the sinner cited in the Gospel used to anoint Christ’s feet,” Father Stefano de Luca, the lead archaeologist, told the website.

Mary Magdalene is cited in the New Testament as a steadfast disciple of Christ from whom seven demons were cast out. She is often considered the sinner who anointed Jesus’ feet.

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By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Jim Rogers, one of the world’s most prominent international investors, on Thursday called most of the largest U.S. banks “totally bankrupt,” and said government efforts to fix the sector are wrongheaded.

Speaking by teleconference at the Reuters Investment Outlook 2009 Summit, the co-founder with George Soros of the Quantum Fund, said the government’s $700 billion rescue package for the sector doesn’t address how banks manage their balance sheets, and instead rewards weaker lenders with new capital.

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NEW YORK TIMES

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said here on Thursday that the Pentagon, which plans to send 20,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, was trying to get thousands of them into the country as soon as next spring, a sign of the seriousness of the threat by the Taliban.

The soldiers were requested by Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top commander in Afghanistan. The first of them, about 3,500 to 4,000 troops from the Third Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, N.Y., are scheduled to arrive in Afghanistan next month.

Mr. Gates said he hoped to deploy an additional two combat brigades by the spring as part of an effort to counter growing violence and chaos in the country. Pentagon officials have said it would take 12 to 18 months to get all 20,000 troops to Afghanistan. The United States currently has some 34,000 troops in the country.

Both Mr. Gates and General McKiernan said Thursday that there would be a “sustained commitment” of American troops in Afghanistan for the next three or four years, although they declined to provide a number.

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JERUSALEM (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Barack Obama plans to offer Israel a strategic pact designed to fend off any nuclear attack on the Jewish state by Iran, an Israeli newspaper reported on Thursday.

Quoting an unnamed American source close to Obama’s administration, the Haaretz daily said Washington would pledge under the proposed “nuclear umbrella” to respond to any Iranian nuclear strike against Israel with a U.S. retaliation in kind.

 
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Russia plans ‘liquidation’ of ministries

Dozens of Christian organizations on the list

Dozens of Christian organizations that have been providing social services, ministry and other help inside Russia are being targeted for “liquidation” by the nation’s Ministry of Justice, according to a new report.

The information comes in a newsletter from a leader with an American Christian organization, Youth With A Mission, who reported he found a declaration recently on the webpage of the Russian Ministry of Justice listing the pending “liquidation” of 56 religious organizations.

The American ministry leader was out of the country and unavailable today, but his wife, contacted by WND, explained the pressure on evangelical groups is coming from a combination of resurging Russian hatred for the West, and pressure from Orthodox churches to ban outside organizations.

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Greek violence spreads across Europe

Suspected anarchist protests which have dogged Greece for the last week spread outside the country today, with mobs causing violent scenes in Italy, Spain, Russia, Denmark and Turkey.

Greek diplomatic missions were vandalised in the attacks, while police, local authority and media representatives were also targeted in what appeared a co-ordinated escalation.

The upsurge took place as protests continued in Greece following the killing last Saturday of Alexandros Grigoropoulos.

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Outstanding.  In addition to being a self-confessed universalist, Mr. Bush now has come out of the closet and admitted that he has “played” the Christian Right all this time.  Nevertheless, God “told him to invade Iraq” and function as a crusader of Western corporate fascism, didn’t you know?

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Bush: Bible ‘probably not’ literally true

Agence France-Presse

Published: Monday December 8, 2008

US President George W. Bush said in an interview Monday that the Bible is “probably not” literally true and that a belief that God created the world is compatible with the theory of evolution.

“I think you can have both,” Bush, who leaves office January 20, told ABC television, adding “You’re getting me way out of my lane here. I’m just a simple president.”

But “evolution is an interesting subject. I happen to believe that evolution doesn’t fully explain the mystery of life,” said the president, an outspoken Christian who often invokes God in his speeches.

“I think that God created the Earth, created the world; I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty and I don’t think it’s incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution,” he told ABC television.

Asked whether the Bible was literally true, Bush replied: “Probably not. No, I’m not a literalist, but I think you can learn a lot from it.”  “The important lesson is ‘God sent a son,’” he said.

Source

(List Courtesy of www.alternativereel.com)

 
#10 - Jean Anouilh

“Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.”

—Jean Anouilh, L’Alouette, 1952

 
#09 - George Orwell

“One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

—George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938

 
#08 - Robert A. Heinlein

“When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, ‘This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,’ the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”

—Robert A. Heinlein, If This Goes On, 1940

 
#07 - Hannah Arendt

“Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.”

—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

 
#06 - Noam Chomsky

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”

—Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, 1997

 
#05 - Gore Vidal

“As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”

—Gore Vidal, Imperial America, 2004

 
#04 - Saul Bellow

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

—Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back, 1976

 
#03 - Charles Mackay

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

—Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841

 
#02 - Joseph Conrad

“He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.”

—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, 1900

 
#01 - Charles Darwin

“It is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, whilst the brain is impressible, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.”

—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871

Top 10 Quotes from Orwell’s 1984

(List courtesy of www.alternativereel.com)

 
#10 - TRAMPLED UPON

“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain.”

 
#09 - THOUGHT POLICE

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

 
#08 - THREE SLOGANS

“From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

 
#07 - HOLLOW

“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

 
#06 - PURE POWER

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

 
#05 - ERRONEOUS THOUGHT

“We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instance of death we cannot permit any deviation . . . we make the brain perfect before we blow it out.”

 
#04 - PERFECT UNITY

“The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face.”

 
#03 - ECSTASY OF FEAR

“A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”

 
#02 - A PICTURE OF THE FUTURE

“We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent there will be no need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

 
#01 - VICTORY

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

God save the USA from Corrupt Chicago-style Politics

Corruption, Crooks, and Crapulosity in Obama’s Hometown

WASHINGTON (AP) - Though Barack Obama isn’t accused of anything (of course not!), the charges against his home-state governor - concerning Obama’s own Senate seat no less - are an unwelcome distraction. And the ultimate fallout is unclear.

As Obama works to set up his new administration and deal with a national economic crisis, suddenly he also is spending time and attention trying to distance himself from Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and charges that the governor was trying to sell the now-vacant Senate post.

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With Antoin “Tony” Rezko’s federal corruption trial looming, Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Tuesday tried to deflect the heat he’s been getting over his former adviser and top fundraiser by pointing out he’s not the only politician who has received help from Rezko.

Blagojevich ticked off a list of elected officials who also have ties to the indicted developer. While not naming them, he made reference to everyone from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to House Speaker Michael Madigan, his political nemesis, and Madigan’s daughter, Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan.

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