Justice!

On April, The latest catholic stumbling block ,which was unsurprisingly linked to child abuse came to light. An American priest with a record of molesting children had been continually shielded from the public defrocking by the church. As it turns out, One of the people in charge of making this decision was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who is now Pope Benedict XVI. This seems to have been a spark and ignited a huge backlash on the catholic church.




The catholic church has had a lot of scandals,some with no other obvious purpose other than to create controversy . The church has been accused of alleged ties to the Nazi regime, the mafia and other clandestine organizations,It has been alleged to colluding to spark violence in Rwanda, Congo and Nigeria, the church has been known for controversial policies like barring use of condoms in AIDS ridden parts of Africa, and abortions, even in emergency cases. There have also been countless sexual crimes in clergy and you also have to remember that these ethically unacceptable actions or malfeasances are only in this generation of the church. The whole history of the catholic church is full of things like the inquisitions, abuse of authority, holy wars,anti-Semitism e.t.c.



Should the catholic church as a whole face some sort of litigation for their crimes? Can there be steps that can to achieve some sort of justice or some sort of penalty? To try and deter such questionable future actions.Is it possible strike back at the religious catholic society for the wrongdoings it has committed?

Richard Dawkins is planning to have the pope arrested on charges of crimes against humanity when he visits Britain on September of this year, of course this charge is brought on mainly due to the fresh charges of cover-up of child abuse after the 2008 scandal still involving the pope, and the endless litany of scandal after scandal involving the catholic church.Part of Dr. Dawkins task though is to obtain some legal reprieve from the catholic religious society for their collective crimes against humanity.

But some questions do arise.

How can you define a religious society?

A religious society as I see it is a self conscious, and self promoting organism in that the religious institutions that make up a religious society are mainly used to promote theology and to sell its respective religious dogma to the masses.

What is it that people accomplish in religious institutions, what are the detriments associated with these institutions?

There are many reasons that individuals choose to go to church, the mosque or whatever religious institution and/or practice a given religion, but we can derive one general purpose from almost all religious adherents. Each and every person is constantly always in the process of building and rebuilding their lives, or defining and redefining themselves. The church is a recognized temperate for an admirable, good and respectable character. When humans are building themselves, in a process somewhat similar to house construction i.e. brick by brick, many of them use the religious teaching, the religious community and such as building material for their personalities, minds and life outlooks. Like the Cornerstone analogy the Christians use,

Isaiah 28:16
So this is what the Sovereign LORD says:
"See, I lay a stone in Zion,
a tested stone,
a precious cornerstone for a sure foundation;
the one who trusts will never be dismayed.

Many believers of religion decide to use this religious stuff as a central support structure in their lives, buying into the religious society.For example, while the catholic adherents can claim to a lot of progress in the modern age to the catholic order, They are also stuck defining themselves using stuff like catholic sex scandals, inquisitions, torture,murder and genocide from the present, and the past. They either have to confront or ignore these wrongs, while the rest of us can accept their reality much more easier because they don't directly affecting our mindsets.

That is why when any atheist should for some reason choose to go to church, confrontational approaches to beliefs of these religious adherent in the church often becomes very explosive. Its like when you build a stack of cards or a brick structure and some dude just comes and takes a brick or card off the bottom and your structure comes tumbling down.

What can Dr. Dawkins hope to accomplish?

It is highly unlikely that Dr. Dawkins legal manoeuvre succeeds. I do hope that it does at least put the pope in a court or even succeed in assigning legal guilt for crimes of the catholic church on the Vatican, but all we can hope for is that the move puts religious organizations back under legal jurisdiction. Maybe then, in time people will be able to strip the Vatican of its country status, make religious organizations pay taxes and exert more legal oversight on religious matters.

Kiswahili tools

I wanted to do a full article on the blog in Kiswahili. I never get alot of people to talk with in the language and i didn't want all the skills that got drilled into me in primary school and part of high school on composition writing to go to waste.

So I am currently searching on the Interwebz for anything that can help. There have been a number of swahili projects. The most famous undertaking is the Kamusi project for an online kamusi. Then there was the open office project called Jambo .It was supposedly going to be open source revolution for the Kiswahili speaking masses but it has fallen off the radar these days. There has been a swahili packs in Microsoft office, A Swahili reiteration of windows but these commercial products have undoubtedly flopped. Zoho online documents offers swahili spellcheck capabilities but the service is not that good. There is even talk that google documents will have kiswahili settings in the near future. Check out the kiswahili translation of this site


I remember that the Kenya National Examination council not long ago was debating whether to keep the subject on the exams and even though the consensus was to keep it on, There was and still is a lack of real use of the language in professional and commercial circles. It is usually prescient just to use English which is not bad in itself but this might result in unintended marginalization of Kiswahili.

Tribal Politics

Hi. I am trying to explain to my pen pal from America why there is trouble between tribes because of politics. in America they don't have anything like it, its hard for me to tell him. My teacher said to look up info on the internet to help but how can I explain it to him?

Most people have difficulty understanding 3 things in tribal politics.

• They don't understand what a tribe is

• They view the tribe as a simple collective group and cant comprehend the tribe being an independent and self-aware entity

• They don't see any relative worth that can be gained with tribal politics and don't know why these tribes don't just get along

Americans basically have very little understanding of a tribe or even an indigenous group is. They simply haven't had no exposure to them. The Indian American tribes are small obscure groups with that have no real group identities. Most of them come together only to invest in casino's and such.Try and clearly outline the tribe as an entity, it has a culture, has religious structure, has different lifestyles altogether, . A Tribe is a complex communal organism, and the more clearly you can explain this, The better the understanding.

A lot of people don't see any difference between one tribe and another and simply cannot imagine that one given tribe can act independently of its neighbours or political and social environment. To them being in a tribe is like the same thing as being part Irish or like when one of them is 1/24 Jewish or 1/16 Indian. It is a vague and inconsequential tie that at most serves as a feather for your good genes or something, how can such a thing affect daily life?.But in reality, Tribal identity affects family,community and society, Tribal ties affect who you trust, who you marry, who you do business with, How you feel, treat and live with other people, from your tribe or from other tribes. If you are able to impress the weight associated with a tribal identity, it would increase understanding of the tribal environment.

To many people outside Africa, tribal politics simply has very little merit due to the fact that most preconceptions they have of it assumes that most of the tribal bickering is primitive, "Ape with rock" type disagreements,Analogous to children fighting for candy. "If these tribes are trying to do something important, they would cooperate more". This type of statement has some truth but such a picture increases misunderstandings on the tribes and their dynamics. You have to point out that tribal politics is not just useless bickering. You could point to cases like the 2008 election or the Constitution reform or other cases. You don't have to restrict yourself to Kenya, you can use examples from other countries like south Africa Boers and apartheid, you could also use similar analogues from India, Pakistan and other countries out of Africa to show that tribal politics are used to obtain given objectives and can produce real and substantive consequences.

If the people get these three things, They should have a clear picture of tribal politics.

Options

I have had alot of problems with windows XP activation from just updating the RAM on my computer. I had to try dozens or so of activation bypass cracks until one worked, At times i was even shut out of the computer all together.


So, I'm trying to dual boot with ubuntu so that i cant be helpless once windows decides to act up again, but I'm having tons of trouble. No sound, tons of crashing even after updating, On top of all this, I am now in possession of a laptop that has an unrecovarable windows OS, so i have to make linux work on it or else i will be stuck trying to get windows 7 or something.it has now reached the point where I'm just doing google searches to find solutions.How have you guys encounters with Linux been?

Impacts of The Giants

On April 20th, there was an oil rig explosion of the coast of the Louisiana and Alabama.




Oil Spill’s Blow to BP’s Image May Eclipse Costs
Gulf Oil Spill Could Eclipse Exxon Valdez Disaster

The immediate damage of this accident is minimal, as only 11 people are missing and not that much crude has leaked yet. The rig, owned by BP is theorized to have experienced a blowout which somehow caused the Fire that made it collapse. Now the metallic contraption is at the bottom of the ocean spewing about 400,00 gallons of crude into the sea per day.

There have been such two recent incidents in America that have caused a great review in energy policy. First there was a huge mine explosion in Virginia that killed dozens of miners then there was this explosion of oil rig in the gulf coast.This comes just as President Obama just threw his support into offshore drilling . This was obviously a compromise due to the health-care reform for blue-dog democrats so he might not exactly have been singing "Drill baby drill", but it is interesting to see the Mr. Super O squirm as his image takes such a hit . huh. He cut his wall street reform rallying short just to visit an Ethanol plant in Missouri to try and appease the country that he really "digs" new energy.With all sorts of stories going on about how this might be a diabolical plot by the supermajor oil players, i think this topic is going to become a point of conflict in the time to come.

OR

The long term damage of the accident is harder to gauge. Most estimates say that the clean up cost is going to be much higher than the Exxon valdez oil spill. The damage to wildlife and the enviroment is expected to be much higher with the Missisipi river delta and other sensitive costal areas with the oil slicks starting to arrive today on the last day of april.

The April 20 explosion of a BP rig killed 11 people and eventually led to the platform's sinking about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast. But now the ensuing spill threatens 445 species of fish, 45 species of mammals, 32 species of amphibians and reptiles, and 134 species of birds, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries told AOL News. And when the massive oil slick makes landfall in Louisiana on Friday, it will hit 10 wildlife refuges or management areas, such as the Gulf Islands National Seashore.

I went across the bay on Tuesday and i could already see a little bit of oil on the shores and discolouration of the water. I think that the politics, damage and clean up effort will end up affecting very many people on the Gulf coast. I just wish i knew where my phone was so that i could snap some pictures.

Men's right

We all know of the women's rights movement, but what about the men’s rights movement. I for one used didn’t think highly of it. I used to label the movement in the same category as the gay movement and then if i had a misogynistic thought, i would just think about it the way alot of men do and just say "fuck a bitch" but the men’s rights movement does play a role in speaking against some injustices in today's world, for example:

As i have said before, marriage has long been regarded by many as the most important step in relationships. The definition of marriage has been hijacked from a simply forming of a kinship to the highly religious,ecclesiastical injunction, and/or the legal and financial clusterfuck of an entrapment web that has become common-place these days and is alot of the times detrimental to the intimate relationships in question.Even in precolonial time, arranged marriages and concepts like bride price or dowry were common and they had alot of contention involved. However there are a great number of alternatives ranging from simple cohabitation to the infamous ‘friends with benefits” relationships that exist and offer the same things that marriage does without the legal, social and financial implications that marriage does. There are also options like secular legal unions that avoid religious entrapments of church marriage.

Marriage strike is the name given to the phenomenon of males refusing to marry for fear of unfair legislations and financial ramifications of divorce for the male. Men's rights writer matthew weeks has described divorces as 'slavery for men'.the rutgers report — though based on a small sample — found ten prevalent reasons for declining preference for marriage among males. The first three are that they can get sex without marriage; they can enjoy a pseudo-wife through cohabitation; and they want to avoid divorce and its financial risks.

Due to archaic definitions of gender roles, we find a great need for the men’s right movement. The fathers’ rights movement is a very good example of this. In divorces or cases of unwed fathers, we find unjustifiable inequality in legal cases about child custody or child support. In a huge chunk of these cases shared parenting, child support or even best interest for the children is not considered adequately instead the legal prescient is defaultly assumed to be in favor of the females. There are also the cases of parental fraud where the mother of a given child lies about the father for financial reasons. In many jurisdictions around the world, DNA testing is not considered by courts or is unavailable. In many other legal situation, there is quite an unfair pressure against the fathers in the situation.

There are many other causes in employment, education, conscription, social norms e.t.c. That present unfair circumstances for men but a lot of people don’t get to hear about it. This is partially due to an effect called the lace curtain in the media, where people, the media consciously choose to ignore men issues, some theorize that it is due to an evolutionary trait that humanizes women more than men, or maybe it is because feminist firms hold enough lobbying power to redirect attention away from issues they don’t like, maybe it is because people paying attention to this are somehow viewed as gay, but the lace curtain is real since there apparently exists a force that seems to cause media to ignore issues concerning men’s rights.


I mean for example; If you take a look at the picture above, It does look gay as fuck! but the market for lawyers like Mr Sam. is actually on the rise to the ever increasing legal injustice against men 1 2 3. and sadly you will never get to hear about it since there is no appetite for cases in this circle, at least in the media.

In brief, men’s lives count only to the degree they are heroes who perform for us or save us, or villains who disturb our peace. Women’s lives count more for their own sake…a woman’s pain is every talk show.

We so rarely inquire of a man’s grief, we forget it exists. When princess di had her affair, we asked her about her isolation, her depression, her husband’s aloofness; but when prince charles had an affair, we accused him of infidelity.... As a result, billions of women worldwide identified with princess di. Few men had any male fears with which to identify.Hearing women’s internal stories – without hearing men’s – made the world seem unfair to women. Ironically, because we didn’t know men’s stories were being left out, the more we heard from women the more we thought we’d been neglecting women. Soon it became politically incorrect to interrupt her flow. So women’s stories became women’s studies, not to be interrupted by men’s studies.

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Graduates of women’s studies courses soon controlled gender related decisions in almost all large bureaucracies. When an issue about sexual harassment or date rape came up on a college campus, the feminists flooded the committees concerning these decisions, created the agenda, and decided who would be hired as consultants and speakers.

The problem? women with backgrounds in women’s studies were not only uneducated about men, but often saw men as the problem and women as the solution. They had demonized men. If someone spoke up against them, they weren’t just outnumbered, they were labeled sexist. And what we will see in this chapter is how that labeling led to the end of careers in the ‘80s and ‘90s as quickly as being labeled communist ended careers in the 1950s.

The power of feminists to allow only a feminist perspective to be aired (in every field that dealt with gender issues) came to be labeled the "lace curtain."

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How do you know if you’re part of the lace curtain? if you feel more comfortable telling a man-bashing joke than a joke bashing all women. How do you know if you’re in an organization that’s part of the lace curtain? when you tell a man-bashing joke and everyone laughs, then tell a woman-bashing joke and no one laughs.... In some organizations, the censorship starts sooner... We don’t even think of telling the woman-bashing joke!

The lace curtain is less a "woman thing" than a feminist thing. But feminism has made women-as-victim so credible we would sooner think of saving whales than saving males. In this respect, almost all of us contribute to the lace curtain.

But all this is irrelevant to me, whether these sentiments are real or made up, whether these injustices are on the rise or they are decreasing, whether the men's right movement can help or hurt the world does not concern me. The main philosophy i follow is “fuck a bitch”. I generally avoid thinking, feeling, empathizing or concerning myself with anything to do with feminism and such. But you know me, i am slightly misogynist and i might be considered abit sexist so my opinion is not that credible.

What do you guys think? What value does the men's rights hold to you?

MenWeb - Men's Issues: The Lace Curtain

Randomness ~ in religion

Manifest destiny~The painting

The randomness that we are privy to in life is a testament to the actuality that there is no set course, no single or even primary guiding force to decide the way things will happen. Our living history is guided by a sort of mutualistic anarchism inherent in all existence.

There is no single controller of predestination, No one person planning your life or no single force colliding galaxies .We are all pushing buttons ,pulling lever, or performing actions trying to exert some influence in some sort of fashion to some sort of end in our lives, our surroundings and the world in general. We can work every day to prevent global warming through the smallest actions like turning out lights, improve neighborhoods by participating in charitable work, or earn money through the sleaziest of means like shoplifting e.t.c. These are all ways we exercise influence to control our own lives. If you analyze this from a generalistic viewpoint maybe accounting for the actions in a group of people, you might find some things that might indicate that there are forces,ideas or trends that can affect huge amounts of people, you might find locales or subgroups that have been most nearly dominated by singular wills but you will never find any single force being in control of all the buttons, exerting all the influence and directing every facet of an element with total control. You will never really find a specific God influence.

I personally like the idea of God, A perfect entity influencing everything: the world, the community and you the individual to a just,happy and all important destiny that is for some cool,sweet and noble purpose. The God will protect us, control and maintain the universe, give us strength, guidance and love, even look after our tires or at least help us to repair them now that a nail has poked a hole in them. This is a great idea,it appeals to our emotions, minds and corporeal selves. it provides justice, order, plans for the past, present and future things,can make anybody feel good. Many friends and relatives have staked their very lives on this idea, giving away their time, money, minds and freedom to promote it, at a horrendous cost.But I hope they come to realize, it is just an idea, not an reality, not a hidden fact, not even an unclear truth. It is just an idea that appeals to many.