December 2009
17 posts
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“To us a single act of injustice - cheating in business, exploitation of the poor...”
– Abraham Heschel, The Prophets, 5th ed.
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“Mixing the church and state is like mixing ice cream with cow manure. It may...”
– Tony Campolo
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Link: BBC - 'British man said to be mentally ill... →
Ignoring appeals for clemency around the world, the Chinese government has executed Akmal Shaikh for drug smuggling, arguing “amount of heroin he carried was 4030g, enough to cause 26800 deaths.” Though his family has described Shaikh of being mentally ill and unstable, no mental health review was undertaken before the execution. Shaikh was the first EU national to be executed in...
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“The desire to rule is the mother of all heresies.”
– St. John Chrysostom
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Petition for OGG Vorbis support on iPods & iTunes →
OGG Vorbis is an audio compression format (like MP3, AAC, etc.) that is open-source and completely free. By contrast, anyone who uses MP3 and the like to sell their media or media-playing application has to pay royalties to the Fraunhofer Institute. OGG Vorbis also claims to be able to compress to smaller sizes and retain higher quality than MP3.
Applications exist to play .ogg files on the...
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Link: Stone Might Open a Brewery in Europe →
Oh please, please someone in Ireland or the UK submit a proposal. Better yet, someone in Belfast. I will make you a delicious pie.
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Avatar : a review & thoughts on sci-fi
Avatar came to the screens with a lot of hype, and friends told me this would be the film to firmly establish 3D cinema as our movie-going future. I hadn’t seen a 3D movie since a visit to Disney World when I was ten, so I was hoping the 168 daunting minutes of Avatar would be more than a squinting, cross-eyed $237 million Magic Eye with aliens and bullets. And I must say, overall, my...
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Link: Guardian - Charlie Booker on 'raging within... →
“If the Christmas No 1 turns out to be an angry, confrontational rock track that concludes with an explosion of f-words, it’ll be precisely the shot in the arm the charts have been sorely lacking the last few years: something that puts a genuine smile on the face of millions of people; sensitive people, thoughtful people; people alienated by the stifling cloud of grinning mechanical...
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Link: BBC - Rage Against the Machine beat X Factor... →
RATM’s Killing In the Name sold half a million downloads to top the UK’s coveted Christmas single chart for 2009. Yet this felt ‘victory’ over the X Factor’s Christmas chart is hardly a pop music coup d’etat - unlikely to overthrow what music is marketed and how it’s sold (and who owns it). However, it’s about reclaiming a sense of us deciding for...
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Link: Ekklesia Project Blog "A Political... →
Jenny Williams reflects on the accounts of the Visitation and Magnificat in the Gospel of Luke, and on the subversive effects of her quiet act of obedience.
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WatchPeter Adams is at the forefront of inter-faith dialogue in Luton, England, bridging gaps between persons of different faiths and political persuasions in a town that’s quickly becoming one of the most ethnically diverse in the UK. He’s an avid proponent of Christian peacemaking and has been involved in reconciliation in China (apologising for the opium trade and colonialism as an...
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Texas judge tries to give 18 yo 8 years for... →
(Starting on a serious note)
Judge Marisela Saldana of Corpus Christi, Texas has a history of reigning terror on young deviants. This past summer, she sent 19 year old Ralph Mirabal to prison for 8 years on three concurrent vandalism charges after he refused a plea deal that involved joining the army (according to Raw Story). She tried again with Sebastian Perez, convicted of vandalism and...