Anonymous is taking credit for shutting down Mastercard's web site in retaliation for the credit card network refusing to process donations to Wikileaks. Mastercard says the shutdown isn't affecting transactions, but the BBC is hearing from merchants who say otherwise.
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In an embarrassing effort to be "political" or something, Khloe Kardashian went on George Lopez Tonight (great political forum) and said of the TSA screening process: "They basically are just raping you in public." No, Khloe. No they are not.
She went on to clarify her nuanced feelings about this delicate personal space vs. national security issue:
"The people are so aggressive! It's like, 'Chill out, you didn't find anything on me yet, calm down.' They say, 'OK, I'm going to be patting you down and I'm going to be touching the crease of your ass.' That is so inappropriate!"
Did they, Khloe? Did they really say "ass"? And that was basically the same thing as being publicly raped? Terrific. I'm glad that the low-rent, third-best Kardashian sister has used this issue to get attention in such a garish way.
She's not the only bargain basement celebrity to seek some sort of currency from the whole TSA body scanning thing. Former Baywatch meat model Donna D'errico claims she was subjected to a full-body scan simply because she is attractive, and that agents were laughing and whispering as she went through. Which, if that happened, it is awful and those employees should be fired. If D'errico is just exaggerating for an excuse to bring attention to how pretty she is, well she was fired by the court of public opinion many years ago, so who really cares.
What's important, Khloe Kardashian, is that D'errico didn't go on Lopez Tonight of all places and, as a fun bit of talk-show outrage, compare a clothed body pat at an airport to being raped in public. If it bothered you so much, why didn't you just go through the scanner? I mean, remember?
[NYDN]
Send an email to Richard Lawson, the author of this post, at richardl@gawker.com.
Taking the pulse of preaching
Preaching is alive and well online, and in church the Mystery Worshipper project shows sermons remain significant, too
John Wesley, the preacher who crisscrossed Britain in the 18th century on a never-ending sermon tour, arrived in Deptford in 1739. He was hardly off his horse before he was preaching to a crowd jammed into the local hall.
Predictably, the floor collapsed.
"But two or three days before," Wesley coolly wrote, "a man had filled the vault beneath with hogsheads of tobacco. So that the floor, after sinking a foot or two, rested upon them, and I went on without interruption."
Wesley was a revolutionary preacher who knew how to improvise in a crisis and was unembarrassed by tobacco lending support to the gospel. He took preaching out of the church pulpit, where it had been stuck for centuries, and into the halls, markets, streets and fields – wherever ordinary people would give him a hearing – or pelt him with rotten fruit.
He accidentally recast preaching as an entertainment, which disgusted the clergy of his time but was seized on by the revivalists, huckster preachers and televangelists who followed him in the next two centuries.
Today, Wesley's spiritual heirs are running virtual churches, where you can park your pixelated bottom on a pew in Second Life and watch an avatar dressed as Elvis deliver a sermon in scrolling lines of text. Or slightly less bizarrely, they are physically preaching sermons before large crowds and posting them on YouTube.
Preaching is very much alive and well there, rubbing shoulders with Lady Gaga videos, bungee jumping and Snowball the dancing cockatoo. One 58-minute mega sermon by US evangelical preacher Paul Washer has clocked up 1.5 million views, while shorter "sermon jams", where mashed-up messages are set to hip hop and slideshows, are also clocking up decent hits.
The gaffe-loving spirit of YouTube is never far away, though. Caught on camera was a youth pastor attempting to preach about a Bible character who had "pitched his tents" next to Sodom and Gomorrah. To his own astonishment, the words fell out of his mouth as "pinched his tits" and he almost lost control of the audience.
But how is the traditional, pre-Wesley sermon doing in the churches of real stone and stained glass? Ship of Fools, the online magazine and community, runs a project called the Mystery Worshipper, where volunteer reporters visit Christian churches worldwide, sit in a back pew, complete a 20-point questionnaire and file a first-timer's impression of the service.
They answer the questions that anyone who goes to church really wants to know. How long was the sermon? How hard was the pew? How warm was the welcome? How cold was the coffee? Their answers are by turns critical, appreciative, awed, amused and irreverent. One of the final questions, "Did the service make you glad to be a Christian?" elicits answers ranging from "No, just bored" to "Not half!"
It's clear from the reports that preaching remains a significant event in services, especially in Protestant churches. In 2010, some 20% of Mystery Worshippers homed in on preaching as the one thing they took away from the experience. The average length of the sermon during the year was 17 minutes and 41 seconds: the shortest, two minutes, the longest, a coma-inducing 90.
And the qualities of preaching are what you would expect from any orator: good eye-contact, humour, warmth, solid preparation, spontaneity, conviction, insight, empathy, and not reading too closely from your notes.
It's a sermon, not a lecture. Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles was praised for leaving the pulpit to "walk about in front of the altar as he spoke, looking in all directions so as to include everyone".
That was fine, but too much departure from traditional delivery into flat-out entertainment plays badly. One pastor "came over more like a stand-up act than a preacher", said an unhappy Mystery Worshipper. "Not that I didn't appreciate his message, but in terms of content it was light as air, like the froth on a cappuccino."
Despite the pioneer spirit of their online brethren, offline congregations prefer their preaching as it's always been done: someone stands up and speaks with wit, passion and eloquence and knows "when to make an end", as Martin Luther said. Too much technology can simply get in the way of good local preaching, as one Sunday morning worshipper discovered: "At one point during the sermon, a message flashed up on the jumbo screen: 'Deborah Montgomery to Live the Adventure please.' I wondered just what adventure it was that Deborah was expected to live, but learned later that it's what they call their children's church."
Israeli rabbis' racist decree strikes at the soul of Judaism
Telling Jews not to rent houses to Arabs is religious fascism. So far, the state has failed to intervene
Israeli rabbi Mordechai Nagari signed the religious ruling barring Jews from selling or renting homes to non-Jews. Photograph: Tara Todras-Whitehill/AP
More than 50 of Israel's leading rabbis have issued a religious decree forbidding Jews from renting or selling homes or land to non-Jews – namely, Arabs, migrant workers and African refugees. The letter was signed by rabbis across the country (many of whom are employed by the state as municipal religious leaders) and urged Jews to first warn and then "ostracise" fellow Jews who disobey the edict.
It's just the latest wave in a rising tide of religious fascism.
In Safed, less than two months ago, more than a dozen rabbis urged Jewish landlords to refrain from renting to Arab college students. This summer, a group of Tel Aviv rabbis signed a letter instructing Jews not to rent to "infiltrators" – the state's word for African refugees, most of whom have escaped genocide in Sudan or a brutal dictatorship in Eritrea. Ten estate agents answered the call.
And, in November, the municipality of Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox suburb of Tel Aviv, launched a campaign to rid the area of migrant workers and African refugees. By the end of the month, officials – government employees – were going door to door telling foreigners they had to leave.
The latest move, first publicised on Tuesday on Ynet's Hebrew site, is the largest step that Israel's religious community has taken against non-Jews. And it is, perhaps, the most alarming. Rabbis from all over the country signed the proclamation. And they didn't try to hide their intentions. "We don't need to help Arabs set down roots in Israel," one remarked to Haaretz.
"Racism originated in the Torah," another said.
For argument's sake, let's set aside the fact that the Palestinians had roots here long before the state of Israel existed. Let's pretend that they are "strangers" in this land, as these rabbis would surely claim. And let's turn to the same Torah that this group of rabbis is using as an excuse for racism and incitement. In Exodus, we are commanded not to expel others but to remember our exile in Egypt and to care for the strangers among us.
And, again for argument's sake, I'm going to set aside my many objections to Zionism and go to another root – Herzl, the founding father of the movement. What did he say about non-Jews? In his book Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State, Herzl wrote that "we should accord … honourable protection and equality" to "men of other creeds and different nationalities" because "we have learnt toleration in Europe".
Tuesday's proclamation – an act of state-sanctioned racism – shows that certain Jewish people have forgotten their history.
The decree was an open declaration of war. It's a strike against the soul of Judaism. And if the religious fascists win, what will we be left with? A country that is Jewish in numbers but not in spirit.
It could be argued that those who signed the proclamation – a group of men who are distorting Judaism to the point that I refuse to acknowledge them as rabbis – are extremists, that they don't represent the majority. Even if that is true, it doesn't change the fact that many are government employees. And, so far, the state has done nothing to put them in check.
Israel is handing the reins over to religious fascists – men who say Jews shouldn't rent to Arabs, migrant workers, or African refugees; settlers who build illegally and imperil any hope for peace and Palestinian sovereignty.
It's an ominous sign for the future. What's next? Will they find a way to claim that those of us who speak out, people like me, are no longer Jews? Will we then be subject to religious decrees that ban employers from hiring us and demand that landlords evict us?
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He said the case presents fascinating questions, such as whether the president may order "the assassination of a U.S. citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organization." But he said such questions must "await another day or another (non-judicial) forum."
