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Save the Date: Jesus Is Coming in May!

This time, it's really happening. On May 21 of next year, Jesus Christ shall swoop down from the heavens on a white steed to snatch up all True Believers. That's right — the Rapture is coming! Where do you stand?

People have claimed for centuries that they know when the Rapture is coming, but this time, someone's finally got it right. They even have billboards and bumper stickers to prove it! The billboards are produced by supporters of a Christian network called Family Radio Inc., and they've set up a website to spread the Good Word, WeCanKnow.com. The site serves as a one stop shop for all your proselytizing needs. You can download images to use as billboards, order bumper stickers, and download e-versions of the Bible (perfect for an iPod touch or iPad!). There are 40 billboards in the Nashville, Tennessee area already.

But how do they really know? Because Family Radio's founder, Harold Camping, says so. From The Tennessean:

According to Camping's prediction, the Rapture will happen exactly 7,000 years from the date that God first warned people about the flood. He said the flood happened in 4990 B.C., on what would have been May 21 in the modern calendar. God gave Noah one week of warning. Since one day equals 1,000 years for God, that means there was a 7,000-year interval between the flood and rapture.

Whoa. So, like, in God Years, that means I'm how old? Oh Jesus. I need a drink.

Oh, and just in case you're feeling the urge to scare the crap out of your kids, here's a cartoon from the group with weird Pokémon-ish characters speaking like robots:

And here, we leave you with a passage from the Good Book to mull over:

Revelation 14:14

And I looked, and behold a white cloud, and upon the cloud one sat like unto the Son of man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle.'

May 21, 2011— See you there!

[Images via WeCanKnow.com]

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Another Violent Death in Disney Town

Just last week, a man was found murdered inside his condo in the creepy Disney town, Celebration, Florida. Then early this morning, after shooting at deputies and barricading himself inside his Disney condo, 52-year-old Craig Foushee killed himself. Damn.

According to the AP, authorities say there is no connection between last week's killing of 58-year-old Matteo Patrick Giovanditto and today's incident involving Foushee, which sounds like a case of suicide by cop:

An Osceola County Sheriff's Office report says 52-year-old Craig Foushee barricaded himself in a home in Celebration on Thursday for more than 14 hours. Authorities say he shot at deputies several times. Deputies entered the home early Friday and found him dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. No deputies were injured. Sheriff's spokeswoman Twis Lizasuain says there is no connection between Foushee and Matteo Patrick Giovanditto, who was found slain in a condominium earlier this week.

Celebration, Florida is officially the new Gary, Indiana.

[Image via AP]

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Disney Town Has Its First Murder

You'll always remember your first. Celebration, FL, the creepy town built by Disney in the '90s, has long been a place of eerie, forced quaintness. Well, no longer. They've had their first-ever homicide, just in time for the holidays.

As the AP reports, a 58-year-old resident of the 11,000-person hamlet was murdered in his home over the Thanksgiving weekend, scarring the magic Disney (well, OK, Disney gave up control of the place some years ago) town irrevocably:

Residents of the town five miles south of Walt Disney World woke up Tuesday to the sight of yellow crime-scene tape wrapped around a condo near the Christmas-decorated downtown, where Bing Crosby croons from speakers hidden in the foliage. A 58-year-old neighbor who lived alone with his Chihuahua had been slain over the long Thanksgiving weekend, Osceola County sheriff's deputies said. The community's famous friendliness is what brought investigators Matteo Giovanditto's body: Neighbors hadn't seen the victim for days, so they filed a missing person's report, then went into his condo a day later and found him. A few years ago, a resident joked with a reporter that Celebration would feel like real town when a bike was stolen. Now, it has an unsolved killing on its hands.

So, murder: sad, bad, yes, all that. But Christmas music playing in the trees? SHRIEEEEEEK.

Basically this is going to make the best movie ever. In the end, of course, it'll be the squeakiest and cleanest person in the town who did it, because they were trying to preserve or save something they thought was slipping away, some pure ideal, but of course in the act of trying to save it, they ruined it forever. Tragic, but beautiful.

[via unfriended]

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Former Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, that crony everyone hated several years ago, has enlisted 23 former Cabinet colleagues to help raise money for his endless legal bills. Read their joint letter and contribute here! Or do something else.

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Help Pay Alberto Gonzales' Legal Fees, Everybody

Former Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, that crony everyone hated several years ago, has enlisted 23 former Cabinet colleagues to help raise money for his endless legal bills. Read their joint letter and contribute here! Or do something else.

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Montreal Teacher Caught Giving Kids Test On Penis Size

Ohh dear. A teacher in Montreal has been suspended after giving her eighth graders a multiple-choice test with sexually explicit questions like whether or not "blacks have bigger penises" for a morals and ethics class. How meta of her?

I mean, maybe the test — which "included questions about anal sex, lesbian encounters and penis sizes" — was the test, y'know? Like was the test itself moral? Intriguing.

Or maybe the kids needed some gritty, no-nonsense (well, some nonsense) sex talk. As the Canadian news media reports, they aren't getting any of that in school otherwise:

Two sexologists contacted by QMI were split about the value of the test. Julie Pelletier, a Quebec psychotherapist and sex columnist, said the quiz was "inappropriate for the students of that age group." She says the elimination of sex-ed courses in Quebec has led to teachers taking their own, sometimes ill-advised, initiatives. But sexologist Jocelyn Robert had a different view. She says the teacher has been convicted prematurely and was only telling teens about sexual issues they're already seeing on the internet and talking about in the schoolyard. She says that sexual practices like sodomy and fellatio are not foreign to 13-year-olds. "It's there, it's not anecdotal, it's very known to young people," she told QMI. "They see it wall to wall on the internet. If we don't talk about it, we're sort of putting our heads in the sand."

Oh good. All of sex ed eliminated. Terrific.

[via BullFightsOnAcid, photo via Shutterstock]

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An Irish court has overturned the punishment that a college professor received—mandatory counseling and two years of monitoring—for showing a female colleague a scientific paper entitled "Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time." And rightly so. [Irish Times]

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Fruit Bat Blowjobs Once Again a Safe Topic of Discussion Within the Academy

An Irish court has overturned the punishment that a college professor received—mandatory counseling and two years of monitoring—for showing a female colleague a scientific paper entitled "Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time." And rightly so. [Irish Times]

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John Boehner's Had It With These 'Chickencrap' Democrats

Incoming House Speaker John Boehner isn't happy with House Democrats' tricky plan to force a vote — expected this afternoon — on extending middle-class tax cuts only. You can tell he's mad when he starts calling things "chickencrap."

This afternoon, House Democrats will hold an up or down vote on vote on President Obama's plan to extend tax cuts to income below $250,000, and they've figured out a way to prevent the Republicans from pulling procedural tricks that might sink it — a straight vote on whether or not wealthy people deserve an additional tax break. Today, at his weekly press conference, House Minority Leader John Boehner compared the move to fertilizer.

"I'm trying to catch my breath so I don't refer to this maneuver going on today as chickencrap, alright?' Boehner said. "But this is nonsense."

Brace yourself for some procedural jargon: Dems once believed they were faced with two mixed options for holding this vote. The first was to hold an up-or-down vote under the normal rules. But that would give Republicans the opportunity to introduce what's known as a motion to recommit — a procedural right of the minority that would have allowed them to tack an extension of tax cuts for high-income earners on to the legislation.

The second option — suspending the rules — would have foreclosed on that right, but would have required a two-thirds majority of the House for passage: 290 votes, an impossible hurdle.

But Democrats figured out a way to avoid this. They're attaching their tax cut plan as an amendment to a separate bill [the Airport and Airway Extension Act, to wit]. That legislation already passed the House, and has just been returned from the Senate. The rules say it can't be recommitted. So the GOP's hands are tied.

"The election was month ago," Boehner said. "We're 23 months from the next election and the political games have already started trying to set up the next election."

"To roll this vote out really is just — it's what you think I was going to say anyway." In other words, "chickencrap."

Now, Dems did make an end run around the normal rules — because there was no other way they could get their preferred tax cut plan passed. But this really is the purest way to address the question of who in Congress would say no to tax cuts for everybody unless rich people get an extra cherry on top.

Should be interesting.

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Exciting New Diet Craze: Pee Injections

Have you heard about the thrilling new diet where you inject the urine of pregnant women into your body, with a syringe? One lady lost 43 pounds! Unless it was the accompanying 500-calorie dietary restriction. Nah, probably the pee.

Boston's WCVB-TV did a nifty segment about a local pee diet evangelist who lost weight while injecting herself daily with concentrated pregnant lady pee. She thinks it sped up her metabolism with a hormone called hCG.

More impressive than Sheryl Paloni's 43-lb. weight loss: Using the phrase "the proof is in the pudding" to describe a diet without even a hint of humor.

Anyway, the hCG diet resurfaces every few years, and credible doctors agree that it's hogwash. But don't let the reactionary hoopla make you think the people who do it are all crazy: Some people take a milder route, and forgo daily injections for oral formulas. That is, they drink magic potions made out of pee. The thought of which has rendered me unable to finish lunch, so: Success! [WCVB-TV]

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Look to the gospels, not the pope

Celibate men have had too great a say in sexual ethics, yet there are things in the gospels that can help Christians get it right

Roz Kaveney

Some people, many of whom comment regularly here, would say that I don't have a right to an opinion. My own personal life is too strange, alien – and in the eyes of many of them – deeply sinful for anything I might say about sexual ethics or Christianity to be relevant to other people's concerns. My quite conclusive disillusion with the Christian beliefs I once held – my refusal to regard the New Testament as anything more than a book – should oblige me to butt out of the arguments inside Christianity about what a Christian sexual ethic might be.

For such people, anything I might say is going to be self-serving, perverse and just plain wrong. All I can do is point out to them that we are all supposed, according to those texts, to worry about the beam in our own eye, and not the dust in someone else's. And I have found as much loving kindness and as little selfish cruelty among trans people, lesbians and the kink community as among even the better sort of believer – "to live outside the law you must be honest". And one of the best ways for a kink trans dyke atheist – who may for all I know be going straight to hell – to pay attention to my own behaviour is to read the gospels

You don't have to be a believer to know how many phrases, and the clever thoughts behind them, come straight out of the gospels. Fewer and fewer of us are Christians, and yet we still quote the man Jesus. Many good things in our society come historically from that tradition, even if they could equally well have come from elsewhere: individual conscience, compassion for outsiders and so on. That is why it is shocking and shameful that Christians have been responsible for so much that is cruel and degrading in our culture's sexual ethics.

Part of the problem is that celibate male intellectuals – from Paul and Augustine to the current pope – have had far too great a say in it. A sexual ethic that is concerned to be, at the same time, a useful metaphor for the relationship between God and the institution of the church, or for God and the soul, is not going to make a terribly good fist of talking about actual shagging. Especially if the person talking has little or no experience. A sexual ethics that talks of "the theology of the body" is not going to talk very effectively about blow jobs and safe words.

Yet there are things in the gospels that might help Christians get it – if not right – at least less catastrophically wrong than a lot of churchmen seem to. Some of these things involve very simple and uninterpreted applications of Jesus's words – loving your neighbour as yourself probably does not mean trying to get people executed for gay sex, and yet so many professed Christians in Africa think it does, and far too many Christians in the US and UK either cheer them on, or engage in quiet diplomacy. Did Jesus hand rocks to the mob about to stone a woman caught in adultery? No. Was it quiet diplomacy when Jesus drove moneylenders out of the Temple forecourt? Probably not.

Loving your neighbour as yourself – if you really do it – doesn't really go with rape or sexism, for one thing. A sexual ethic that was about a positive empathic and egalitarian habit of mind, rather than a set of acts you are supposed to avoid, might occasionally be muddle-headed, but it would not be cruel or exploitative.

Saying that there are sorts of love that are sinful in themselves – "an intrinsic moral disorder" – is a good way of chivvying people towards despair. People who despair of themselves are more likely to do terrible, selfish things – and leading people towards that despair is making yourself responsible, in part, for what they do.

Jesus thought some sins important – failure to feed the hungry and heal the sick, of course, but also hypocrisy and its mirror image spiritual pride. Setting an intellectualised standard of morality rather than working with the actual likely behaviour of people, condemning sins to which you are not personally tempted – these have been what my catechism teacher taught me to avoid as occasions of sin. Pastors who set their flocks and themselves a standard that even they cannot keep up with are not only making grubby idiots of themselves, they are leading other people towards hatred and violence. Jesus's angry mockery of the Pharisees was not just a rebuke to a sect – he was talking about the self-serving prig in all of us. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

 

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Lakin's attorney: Conviction 'certain' He's very disappointed in military justice system'

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Lakin's attorney: Conviction 'certain'

'He's very disappointed in military justice system'

By Brian Fitzpatrick © 2010 WorldNetDaily

Lieutenant Colonel Terrence Lakin

WASHINGTON – Lieutenant Colonel Terrence Lakin, a distinguished Army flight surgeon, is "certain" to be convicted of disobeying orders, according to his lawyer, Neil Puckett.

LTC Lakin will go on trial December 14 for refusing to deploy with his unit to Afghanistan. The senior officer questioned the legal validity of his orders because they originate ultimately with President Barack Obama, whose eligibility to serve as commander in chief under article II of the U.S. Constitution remains unproven.

"Based on the evidence available, his conviction is certain," Puckett told WND. "He has no affirmative defense for the offenses he committed."

"There is not much left to do" in defense of his client, Puckett said. Lakin's previous defense counsel, Paul Jensen, already "sought discovery of documents, and to introduce evidence and expert witnesses, but the judge shut down all those efforts."

During a September hearing, Colonel Denise Lind, the judge in the case, censored the last remaining arguments Lakin planned to make in his defense: motive and duty. Lakin had intended to explain his motive for disobeying the order and contend that it was his duty as a good soldier to disobey orders that he believed to be illegal.

Lind also rejected defense requests to call as witnesses Ambassador Alan Keyes and retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney. Keyes was to explain the constitutional issues involved in the case, and McInerney was to talk about the training soldiers receive regarding when they should question and even disobey orders.

Stripped by the court of all possible defenses that might have justified his actions, Lakin has no chance of prevailing at trial.

Lakin had intended, through a court martial, to resolve the nationwide dispute about Obama's eligibility to occupy the Oval Office.

Knowing he was risking imprisonment and dismissal from the service, Lakin deliberately disobeyed his superiors in order to force Obama to produce his birth certificate and documents related to his citizenship status.

Note: A legal-defense fund has been set up for LTC Terry Lakin. Click for information.

His plan was frustrated when Col. Lind declared that Lakin's orders were legitimate, without addressing the underlying eligibility issue, and ruled to limit the scope of the trial to the narrow question of whether Lakin had knowingly disobeyed orders.

"This leaves us with a client who stands accused of missing the movement of an airplane, two failures to obey orders to meet his brigate commander, failure to report to Ft. Campbell, and failure to report to his unit," said Puckett.

"LTC Lakin asked many people to answer his questions about his misgivings about the legitimacy of the president, even the White House. He had a question that a lot of Americans have, a question that hasn't been answered by the legislative branch or by the judicial branch. When he received his orders he had a conscience issue, whether he'd be obeying lawful orders," Puckett explained.

"LTC Lakin is a doctor, not a lawyer," said Puckett. "He thought if he were to ask that question of the military courts, after being rebuffed in all other avenues, he'd get his answer. What he has discovered is that the military justice system cannot produce the answers to those questions. He could not have known, he was given inadequate legal advice. The military justice system is set up to help commanding officers maintain good order and discipline. It can't make victims whole, it can only punish wrongdoers. He's very disappointed in the system."

"We have to proceed without the documents, evidence and witnesses that have been denied to the defense. LTC Lakin is left to speak for himself and defend himself. It's up to him whether he wants to testify in his own defense," said Puckett.

Puckett would not reveal Lakin's decision, or any other details of his defense plans. He predicted that Lakin would end up, at worst, convicted of two violations of orders, be dismissed from the service, and spend a year in confinement.

Once guilt or innocence has been determined by his jurors, the trial will move to a presentencing hearing, when Lakin will have an unfettered opportunity to introduce mitigating evidence that might justify his disobedience in spite of Judge Lind's limitations on the scope of the trial.

"If he were to be convicted, he would have an open microphone to talk to the panel of jurors," said Puckett.

Puckett could not predict whether LTC Lakin plans to deliver an impassioned speech addressing the charges and the Obama eligibility issues.

Supporters are mobilizing in Lakin's defense. The officer has become a cause célèbre on the Internet, and rallies are planned next week in Arizona and at the court martial in Ft. Meade, Maryland.

"Every American should support Lakin," said Arizona organizer Jeff Lichter, a retired high school physical education teacher. "Don't we all have a simple right to ask who our president is? Is he legitimate, is he qualified? That's all Terry is asking. He has every right to ask the question, he asked it for a long time before he went public.

"They're not even going to allow him to put up any evidence, We feel the trial is already rigged, and they're denying him his due process rights, He's been denied access to records in Hawaii. He's been told by Judge Lind that the orders he's refusing to obey came from the Pentagon, not the commander in chief, so his question whether the commander in chief is eligible is irrelevant. It's ridiculous. It's all fixed.

Lichter's rallies will take place at the state offices of Arizona Republican senators John McCain, and Richard Kyl, and U.S. Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz.

"We have 535 congressmen and none are ready to ask for an investigation of this issue? We just want these officials who have not kept their oaths to defend the constitution. They're not doing it.

"Nobody has been able to break what's apparently a cover-up of this issue. We want people to know about this in spite of the media blackout."

Previous stories: Lt. Col. Lakin backers clash over eligibility strategy Battle-scarred judge says Lakin decision ignores Constitution Judge to Lakin: Find another defense General: Obama records 'critical' to 'our republic' Officer's case over Obama's eligibility already tainted? CNN retracts blast against officer challenging Obama CNN places eligibility in primetime spotlight Officer's defense team demanding Obama docs Army accused of threatening to 'Taser' officer Army gags officer challenging Obama eligibility Arraignment set for officer challenging eligibility Eligibility challenger: Bring on the evidence Judges evade Obama birth-certificate query Did Obama even write letter to 'birth hospital'? Eligibility challenger: Army convicted me without trial Army disses officer challenging Obama Call for Obama's resignation cites 'deceit, fraud, dishonesty' Officer to Army: See you in court Call for Obama's resignation cites 'deceit, fraud, dishonesty' Army slams door on Obama details Hearing set for officer challenging eligibility CNN places eligibility in primetime spotlight Army to 'inquire' into charges against Lakin Army charges Lt. Col. Lakin Retired Army general: Lt. Col. Lakin has 'valid point' Approaching apocalypse: Will Obama docs surface? 'Important question about Constitution' Officer challenging Obama 'reassigned' Officer to Obama: Burden of proof must rest with you Officer questioning eligibility faces new threats from Army Army suggests brain scan for eligibility challenger Army 'showdown' at eligibility corral THE FULL STORY: See listing of more than 200 exclusive WND reports on the eligibility issue Read more at www.wnd.com

 

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