- PERSPECTIVE -

- EVERYONE SEEMS NORMAL UNTIL YOU GET TO KNOW THEM! -

My Photo
Name:
Location: London, Canada

Thanks for reading my blog.

Saturday, May 12, 2007

100 most influential people of 2006

Time magazine just released a list of the 100 most influential people of 2006 based on world-wide surveys.

Now call me stupid, or just out of the loop, but a lot of these people I never heard of and others sure don't deserve to be on this list, but what the hell do I know!!

The full list

Artists and Entertainers

Tina Fey - television writer, producer and actress

Youssou N'Dour - musician

Anna Netrebko - soprano opera singer

Justin Timberlake - pop singer

Sacha Baron Cohen - comic actor and writer

Leonardo DiCaprio - actor

Nora Roberts - romance writer

Rick Rubin - music producer

Martin Scorsese - film director

Cate Blanchett - actress

Alber Elbaz - fashion designer

America Ferrera - actress

Simon Fuller - music manager and television presenter

Brian Grazer - producer

John Mayer - musician

David Mitchell - writer

Kate Moss - model

Rosie O'Donnell - actress

Brad Pitt - actor

Shonda Rhimes - screenwriter

Kara Walker - artist

Brian Williams - news anchor

Leaders and Revolutionaries

Queen Elizabeth II

Tzipi Livni - foreign minister and vice president Israel

Peter Akinola - Nigerian archbishop

Liu Qi - Beijing Communist Party secretary

Condoleezza Rice - US Secretary of State

Omar Hassan al-Bashir - leader of Sudan

John Roberts - US chief justice

Sonia Gandhi - leader of Indian Congress party

Raul Castro - defence minister of Cuba

Arnold Schwarzenegger - California governor

David Petraeus - US general

Hillary Clinton - 2008 US presidential candidate

Hu Jintao - President of China

Nancy Pelosi - US speaker of the house

King Abdullah - King of Saudi Arabia

Barack Obama - 2008 US presidential candidate

Michael Bloomburg - businessman

Ayutollah Ali Khamenei - supreme leader of Iran

Pope Benedict XVI - leader of the Catholic Church

Angela Merkel - German chancellor

Osama bin Laden - Saudi terrorist

Heroes and Pioneers

Oprah Winfrey - television presenter

Elizabeth Edwards - attorney and wife of US 2008 presidential candidate

Warren Buffett - businessman

Drew Gilpin Faust - Harvard president

Wesley Autrey - subway hero

Tony Dungy - American football coach

Roger Federer - tennis player

Tyra Banks - model and television presenter

Youk Chhang - director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia

George Clooney - actor

Michael J Fox - actor

Timothy Gittins - army officer

Judith Mackay - doctor

Chien-Ming Wang - baseball player

Maher Arar - software engineer (wrongly accused of terrorism)

Thierry Henry - soccer player

Zeng Jinyan - blogger

Garry Kasparov - chess player and politician

Amr Khaled - accountant and website owner

Scientists and Thinkers

Al Gore - former US vice president and climate change champion

Neil deGrasse Tyson - astrophysicist and author

J Craig Venter - geneticist

Lisa Randall - theoretical physicist

John Mather - astrophysicist and Nobel Prize winner

Elizabeth Blackburn - biologist

Alan Stern - director of Nasa Science Mission Directorate

Tullis Onstott - geophysicist

Svante Pääbo - evolutionary geneticist

Steven Nissen - heart specialist

Richard Dawkins - evolutionary biologist

Chris Anderson - physicist

Paul Allen - co-founder of Microsoft

Monty Jones - developmental plant breeder

Klaus Schwab - founder of World Economic Forum in Davos

Nora Volkow - director of US National Institute of Drug Abuse

Frans de Waal - psychologist, primatologist and ethologist

Douglas Melton - stem cell researcher

Kari Stefansson - neurologist

Builders and Titans

Richard Branson - entrepreneur

Cyril Ramaphosa - union leader

Erik Lie - business analyst

Pony Ma - internet guru

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen - founders of YouTube

Katsuaki Watanabe - environmental car designer

Bernard Arnault - chairman of Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton

Clara Furse - CEO of London Stock Exchange

Ken Lewis - CEO of Bank of America

Lakshmi Mittal - CEO of Arcelor Mittal

Shigeru Miyam - video game designer

Rhonda Byrne - author of self-help books

Steven Cohen - businessman

Steve Jobs - director of Apple

Philip Rosedale - creator of Second Life

Ho Ching - CEO of Temasek

Indra Nooyi - CEO of PepsiCo

Stephen Schwarzman - CEO Blackstone Group

Michael Moritz - internet entrepreneur

Pepe la Pew - cartoon character

Take it for what it's worth, but that's the list, good or bad!

Your humble servant;
Allan W Janssen

Labels: , ,

Anything to declare?

Back in 1997 the Red River at Grand Forks, North Dakota flooded and then worked it's way north until the rising waters hit Winnipeg and caused 1/2 a billion dollars in damage.

Several other disasters have worked their way north over the border in the intervening years including numerous tornados and several hurricanes of which Hurricane Juan, which made landfall in Nova Scotia in 2003, was one of most powerful and damaging storms to ever affect Canada and damage was estimated at 2 billion dollars. (Isn't that more than Nova Scotia is even worth?)

Now comes word that a wildfire in Minnesota has crossed the border with total disregard for Canadian territory, immigration or customs and is threatening vast tracts of Northern Ontario timber.

Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter Mackay has issued a statement that border controls should be immediately strengthened and sent a letter of protest to the U.S. State Department.

He emphasised that these American bred disaster incursions into Canadian Territory, and the widespread damage they have caused, will not be tolerated indefinitely.

No word yet from the U.S. State Department.

Your "live from the front" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Labels: , , ,

Saturday Morning Confusion!

Here's another round-up of strange, bewildering, stupid and confusing stuff that happened in the last week.

The decomposed corpse of a German man was found alone in his bed nearly seven years after his disappearance, police in the western city of Essen said Thursday.

The police said in a statement the man was 59 and unemployed at the time of his death. He most likely died of natural causes on November 30, 2000, the date he received a letter from the Welfare Office found in the apartment, police said.

Next to the dead man's bed police found cigarettes, an open television guide and Deutschemark coins, which came out of circulation after the euro was introduced in 2002.

The man's apartment was in a building with offices and apartments, many of which are now empty.

"No one missed him. No missing person report was ever filed," the police said.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The search for the UP Aerospace payload of experiments and the cremated remains of some 200 people - including "Scotty" of Star Trek fame, as well as pioneering NASA Mercury astronaut, Gordon Cooper - continues within rugged New Mexico mountain landscape.

After a successful blastoff from New Mexico's Spaceport America on April 28th, the UP Aerospace Space Loft XL rocket and its payload nosed into space but failed to achieve orbit.

As part of launch operations, the rocket was tracked by specialists at the neighboring White Sands Missile Range.

While the rocket components parachuted into rough and tumble terrain, repeated searches within the landing zone have come up empty.

Jerry Larson, President of UP Aerospace, has told me that the general location of the rocket hardware is known within some 1,300 feet (400 meters) or so. But given the dense vegetation on the side of the mountain being searched, along with equipment available to the search team, pinpointing the exact locale has proven a tough assignment.

Yet another trip up on the mountain to look for Scotty is slated next week, Larson said.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The City of Montreal has been ordered to pay $20,000 in damages after a judge ruled a drunk janitor had ruined a bar mitzvah, which the city tried to cover up by falsely accusing the bar mitzvah boy of not being Jewish.

"This was a party from hell," said Peter Neumann, referring to his grandson's coming-of-age celebration.

The janitor, who was in charge of the cultural centre in the West Island community of Pierrefonds, was drunk when the 350 guests arrived for the Neumann bar mitzvah, court heard.

He also sexually harassed the female guests, stole the ice from the machine and tried to sell it back to the Neumanns.

But his misdeeds didn't end there: The janitor also refused to put toilet paper in the bathrooms.

When the elevator broke trapping several paraplegic guests, the janitor did nothing.

Neumann said that when one of the musicians had a heart attack, the janitor refused to call 911.

"The drunk janitor reappears," Neumman said. "I say 'What's the address?' He said, 'I don't know.'"

The Neumanns said they asked the city for an apology. Instead, they got a 40-page defence statement that, among other things, accused them of lying about being Jewish.

"To question our faith and our reason for having a bar mitzvah, that was a very, very immoral thing that they did to us," said the boy's grandmother, Marlene Neumann.

The city has since taken full responsibility for the incident and has fired the janitor in question.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Police in India said Friday a father has been arrested and charged with locking his 19-year-old son in a room for 21 days and chaining him for marrying without his consent.

Police said they found Raghu Amin Mollah on Thursday in his father's house near Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal state. Abed Ali Mollah, his father, has been charged with detaining and torturing his son.

"Yes, he was kept in a room locked and chained," police officer Joy Biswas told the Associated Press.

The elder Mollah objected to the marriage of his son to Shahnaz Khatun, 18, because of an ongoing family feud between his family and hers.

Biswas said police rescued the groom after they received a complaint from the bride about her father-in-law.

According to a report in the Hindustan Times, the newlyweds had lived together in the same neighbourhood as children. After falling in love, they eloped and were married in a mosque near Calcutta.

Parents arrange most marriages in rural India, and young people often do not have the opportunity to choose their marriage partners.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If someone telephones to announce you can have a $200 Wal-Mart shopping spree or $200 in gasoline coupons in return for a $3.49 processing charge to be debited directly from your bank account, hang up.

You're being set up via the promise of "something for almost nothing" into authorizing a swindler to help himself to the contents of your bank account.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If someone calls to announce you've failed to appear for jury duty and will be arrested, do not give the caller your personal and financial information in an effort to prove he's sending the gendarmes after the wrong guy. You're being tricked into giving up this information to an identity thief.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in he air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

Also, the easiest verb to conjugate is "to be," unless you're an un-educated low-life, in which case it comes out as "I be," You be," and "He be!"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The term "the whole 9 yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the Pacific.When arming their airplanes on the ground, the .50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it got "the whole 9 yards."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law that stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds. Twenty two with a head!!!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Prowse was the guy in the Darth Vader suit in Star Wars. He spoke all of Vader's lines, and didn't know that he was going to be dubbed over by James Earl Jones until he saw the screening of the movie.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the army for the General Purpose" vehicle, GP.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia, has twice as many bathrooms as is necessary. When it was built in the 1940s, the state of Virginia still had segregation laws requiring separate toilet facilities for blacks and whites.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth II, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And finally this little gem of information to amaze and amuse your friends with - Cat's urine glows under a blacklight.

Your "digging for the truth" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Friday, May 11, 2007

Two for the show!

A couple of quick observations.

I have never been an avid fan of watching sports on TV. I look at sports the same way I look at sex and that is that I would rather do it myself than watch someone else do it!!! However!

When the NHL post season started everyone in the world was joking about how the Ottawa Senators would be the first team out and how did they even make the playoffs to begin with.

Well boys and girls, not only are they still in contention, but it looks like (dare I say it?) they might even be in line for the finals and the Stanley Cup if they keep playing the way they have so far.

Goes to show that you should never count your chickens before they hatch or your Senators before they score.

On a different note we were watching a fight when the Boston Pops broke out in music. Yes, it wasn't a "Night at the Pops," it was a "Fight at the Pops!"

The Boston Pops kicked off its new season with a bang — and perhaps a pow! and a boom! — Wednesday night, after a barroom-type brawl interrupted the music concert.

A knock-down, all-out fight broke out between two men seated in the balcony section of Boston's Symphony Hall, halting a performance of a musical medley from the film Gigi by the orchestra and its special guest, singer-songwriter Ben Folds.

In this video frame grab provided by WHDH-TV7, a fight breaks out in the balcony at Symphony Hall on opening night of the new Boston Pops season on Wednesday.

According to eye-witness reports, the audience was first alerted to the kerfuffle (I love that word) by a loud scream.

At that point, conductor Keith Lockhart reportedly looked up at the balcony but continued to lead the orchestra. He paused, however, when the two brawling men began knocking over chairs and a second, louder scream rang out.

Several local television stations, which had sent cameras to record footage of the season opener, caught the fight on film.

Lockhart briefly stopped the performance as ushers and police officers working security for the concert broke up the fight and escorted the two men — including one whose shirt was torn open in the violent struggle — off the property.


Maestro was not amused!

Your "give em hell" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) www.God-101.com

Labels: , , , ,

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Threat Of Radical Islam In The West

Highlighting the culture of denial in the western media of the threat radical islam poses on the western world.



Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) www.God-101.com

Labels: , , ,

Can This Black Box See Into the Future?

GUEST POST: This article was interesting enough that I am reproducing it here in its entirety with a few of my own comments thrown in for good measure.

I don't know if it's bullshit or not but the concept is interesting.

DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream.

At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment. Encased in metal, it contains at its heart a microchip no more complex than the ones found in modern pocket calculators.

But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.

The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics.

















But, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.

Now, even the doubters are acknowledging that here is a small box with apparently inexplicable powers.

'It's Earth-shattering stuff,' says Dr Roger Nelson, emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the United States, who is heading the research project behind the 'black box' phenomenon.

'We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark.' Dr Nelson's investigations, called the Global Consciousness Project, were originally hosted by Princeton University and are centred on one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time.

Its aim is to detect whether all of humanity shares a single subconscious mind that we can all tap into without realising.

And machines like the Edinburgh black box have thrown up a tantalising possibility: that scientists may have unwittingly discovered a way of predicting the future.

Although many would consider the project's aims to be little more than fools' gold, it has still attracted a roster of 75 respected scientists from 41 different nations.

Researchers from Princeton - where Einstein spent much of his career - work alongside scientists from universities in Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany.

The project is also the most rigorous and longest-running investigation ever into the potential powers of the paranormal.

'Very often paranormal phenomena evaporate if you study them for long enough,' says physicist Dick Bierman of the University of Amsterdam. 'But this is not happening with the Global Consciousness Project. The effect is real. The only dispute is about what it means.'

The project has its roots in the extraordinary work of Professor Robert Jahn of Princeton University during the late 1970s. He was one of the first modern scientists to take paranormal phenomena seriously.

Intrigued by such things as telepathy, telekinesis - the supposed psychic power to move objects without the use of physical force - and extrasensory perception, he was determined to study the phenomena using the most up-to-date technology available.

One of these new technologies was a humble-looking black box known was a Random Event Generator (REG). This used computer technology to generate two numbers - a one and a zero - in a totally random sequence, rather like an electronic coin-flipper.

The pattern of ones and noughts - 'heads' and 'tails' as it were - could then be printed out as a graph.

The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph. Any deviation from this equal number shows up as a gently rising curve.

During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine's usual readings.

He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails.

It was a preposterous idea at the time. The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained.

Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, 'forcing it' to produce unequal numbers of 'heads' or 'tails'.

According to all of the known laws of science, this should not have happened - but it did. And it kept on happening.

Dr Nelson, also working at Princeton University, then extended Prof Jahn's work by taking random number machines to group meditations, which were very popular in America at the time.

Again, the results were eye popping. The groups were collectively able to cause dramatic shifts in the patterns of numbers.

From then on, Dr Nelson was hooked.

Using the Internet, he connected up 40 random event generators from all over the world to his laboratory computer in Princeton.

These ran constantly, day in day out, generating millions of different pieces of data. Most of the time, the resulting graph on his computer looked more or less like a flat line.

But then on September 6, 1997, something quite extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards, recording a sudden and massive shift in the number sequence as his machines around the world started reporting huge deviations from the norm. The day was of historic importance for another reason, too.

For it was the same day that an estimated one billion people around the world watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales at Westminster Abbey.

Dr Nelson was convinced that the two events must be related in some way.

Could he have detected a totally new phenomena? Could the concentrated emotional outpouring of millions of people be able to influence the output of his REGs. If so, how?

Dr Nelson was at a loss to explain it. So, in 1998, he gathered together scientists from all over the world to analyse his findings.

They, too, were stumped and resolved to extend and deepen the work of Prof Jahn and Dr Nelson. The Global Consciousness Project was born.

Since then, the project has expanded massively. A total of 65 Eggs (as the generators have been named) in 41 countries have now been recruited to act as the 'eyes' of the project.

And the results have been startling and inexplicable in equal measure.

For during the course of the experiment, the Eggs have 'sensed' a whole series of major world events as they were happening, from the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia to the Kursk submarine tragedy to America's hung election of 2000.

The Eggs also regularly detect huge global celebrations, such as New Year's Eve.

But the project threw up its greatest enigma on September 11, 2001.

As the world stood still and watched the horror of the terrorist attacks unfold across New York, something strange was happening to the Eggs.


Not only had they registered the attacks as they actually happened, but the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers had begun four hours before the two planes even hit the Twin Towers.

They had, it appeared, detected that an event of historic importance was about to take place before the terrorists had even boarded their fateful flights.

The implications, not least for the West's security services who constantly monitor electronic 'chatter', are clearly enormous.

'I knew then that we had a great deal of work ahead of us,' says Dr Nelson.

What could be happening? Was it a freak occurrence, perhaps?

Apparently not. For in the closing weeks of December last year, the machines went wild once more.

Twenty-four hours later, an earthquake deep beneath the Indian Ocean triggered the tsunami which devastated South-East Asia, and claimed the lives of an estimated quarter of a million people.

So could the Global Consciousness Project really be forecasting the future?

Cynics will quite rightly point out that there is always some global event that could be used to 'explain' the times when the Egg machines behaved erratically.

After all, our world is full of wars, disasters and terrorist outrages, as well as the occasional global celebration. Are the scientists simply trying too hard to detect patterns in their raw data?

The team behind the project insist not. They claim that by using rigorous scientific techniques and powerful mathematics it is possible to exclude any such random connections.

'We're perfectly willing to discover that we've made mistakes,' says Dr Nelson. 'But we haven't been able to find any, and neither has anyone else.

Our data shows clearly that the chances of getting these results by fluke are one million to one against.

That's hugely significant.' But many remain sceptical.

Professor Chris French, a psychologist and noted sceptic at Goldsmiths College in London, says: 'The Global Consciousness Project has generated some very intriguing results that cannot be readily dismissed.

I'm involved in similar work to see if we get the same results. We haven't managed to do so yet but it's only an early experiment. The jury's still out.'

Strange as it may seem, though, there's nothing in the laws of physics that precludes the possibility of foreseeing the future.

It is possible - in theory - that time may not just move forwards but backwards, too. And if time ebbs and flows like the tides in the sea, it might just be possible to foretell major world events. We would, in effect, be remembering things that had taken place in our future.

'There's plenty of evidence that time may run backwards,' says Prof Bierman at the University of Amsterdam.

'And if it's possible for it to happen in physics, then it can happen in our minds, too.' In other words, Prof Bierman believes that we are all capable of looking into the future, if only we could tap into the hidden power of our minds. And there is a tantalising body of evidence to support this theory.

Dr John Hartwell, working at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, was the first to uncover evidence that people could sense the future. In the mid-1970s he hooked people up to hospital scanning machines so that he could study their brainwave patterns.

He began by showing them a sequence of provocative cartoon drawings.

When the pictures were shown, the machines registered the subject's brainwaves as they reacted strongly to the images before them. This was to be expected.

Far less easy to explain was the fact that in many cases, these dramatic patterns began to register a few seconds before each of the pictures were even flashed up.

It was as though Dr Hartwell's case studies were somehow seeing into the future, and detecting when the next shocking image would be shown next.

It was extraordinary - and seemingly inexplicable.

But it was to be another 15 years before anyone else took Dr Hartwell's work further when Dean Radin, a researcher working in America, connected people up to a machine that measured their skin's resistance to electricity.

This is known to fluctuate in tandem with our moods - indeed, it's this principle that underlies many lie detectors.

Radin repeated Dr Hartwell's 'image response' experiments while measuring skin resistance. Again, people began reacting a few seconds before they were shown the provocative pictures. This was clearly impossible, or so he thought, so he kept on repeating the experiments. And he kept getting the same results.

'I didn't believe it either,' says Prof Bierman. 'So I also repeated the experiment myself and got the same results. I was shocked. After this I started to think more deeply about the nature of time.'

To make matters even more intriguing, Prof Bierman says that other mainstream labs have now produced similar results but are yet to go public.

'They don't want to be ridiculed so they won't release their findings,' he says. 'So I'm trying to persuade all of them to release their results at the same time. That would at least spread the ridicule a little more thinly!' If Prof Bierman is right, though, then the experiments are no laughing matter.

They might help provide a solid scientific grounding for such strange phenomena as 'deja vu', intuition and a host of other curiosities that we have all experienced from time to time.

They may also open up a far more interesting possibility - that one day we might be able to enhance psychic powers using machines that can 'tune in' to our subconscious mind, machines like the little black box in Edinburgh.

Just as we have built mechanical engines to replace muscle power, could we one day build a device to enhance and interpret our hidden psychic abilities?

Dr Nelson is optimistic - but not for the short term. 'We may be able to predict that a major world event is going to happen. But we won't know exactly what will happen or where it's going to happen,' he says.

'Put it this way - we haven't yet got a machine we could sell to the CIA.'

But for Dr Nelson, talk of such psychic machines - with the potential to detect global catastrophes or terrorist outrages - is of far less importance than the implications of his work in terms of the human race.

For what his experiments appear to demonstrate is that while we may all operate as individuals, we also appear to share something far, far greater - a global consciousness. Some might call it the mind of God.

'We're taught to be individualistic monsters,' he says. 'We're driven by society to separate ourselves from each other. That's not right.

We may be connected together far more intimately than we realise.'

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) www.God-101.com

Labels: , , , , , ,

Cousin Urk!

Well, it's now official, new DNA evidence supports a theory that all humans alive today share a common ancestry, according to scientists in the U.K.

The research, which compared DNA from aboriginal Australians and Melanesians in New Guinea to DNA patterns linked to early humans, found that both of the modern groups share genetic characteristics that correlate with humans from Africa about 50,000 years ago.

The research, reported in the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, was conducted by researchers at the University of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin University, both in Cambridge, England, who led an international team that reached from Estonia to California.

The theory of the African origins of modern man were previously questioned in some quarters, due to skeletal and tool remains in Australia that differed from evidence elsewhere along the route through South Asia that would have been taken by early migrants.
Some researchers have attributed the differences to the possibility of interbreeding among the early colonists and local Homo erectus species, or a second migration.

The new research shows that no other genetic material was inherited by the Australians or New Guineans studied. The DNA shows that they evolved in relative isolation after the African migration, the scientists said.

From my book, "The Plain Truth About God-101." (What the church doesn't want you to know!)

Australian Aboriginal Cultures have a chain of religious practices virtually unbroken. It extends back over 50,000 years to a time when their ancestors first settled the continent.

It is also a society has remained almost unchanged since the advent of self-awareness.

Totemism and Animism were one of the elementary and first forms of religion and the Australian Aboriginal Religion therefore, is the perfect model for religion in its original form.

Ritual is formal ceremonial behavior used to approach or deal with the supernatural.

Rituals act out or dramatize scenes from the religious and social origins of society - its methodology depicts how its members believe they came to be a distinct people.

Rituals seem to evoke high levels of emotion, and with the worship of God, they re-create the story of how they came to be as a group. The Australian Aborigines found their meaning for life in the stories and songs of their particular tribe.

The answers to questions such as “who am I?” and “where do I belong?” and “what happens after I die?” all were found in their local legends and beliefs.

Their stories and songs related accounts of ancestral beings taking the form of animals, birds, and other creatures during the creation period known as the “Dream-Time.”

The ancestors’ played and active role in the life of each succeeding generation!

Each tribe, (of which there were about 500 in Australia) was led by religious leaders with no political chief or formal government.

They were broken down into hunting groups and family units and these units were vitally important as all members of the tribe were related!

The territory of the tribe was centered on the place where its ancestors had originally settled. It was believed that the spirits of these ancestors remained at the watering place at the center of the territory awaiting re-incarnation.

None of them ever really died, but rather merged with the natural world and so remained a part of the present and of the tribe.

This was one of the plainest and simplest methods of avoiding the pain of death and separation, since the departed had not really gone anywhere!

These myths and rituals, signifying communion with nature, and the past, were known as the “Dreaming” or “Dream-Time.”

They reflected a belief in the continuity of existence and harmony with the world!

They were also a source of inspiration for aboriginal art, including paintings, carved objects, symbolic weapons, and poetic chants. (Similar to the Vedic chants of the Indus Valley Culture thousands of years later.)

For the Aboriginals the “Dream-Time” is the period in which the original ancestors were thought of as heroes and spirits. They took a variety of forms, both animal and human, and created a pattern for the very existence of these people.

It was a great comfort for early people to think that death did not separate them from their loved ones!

The “Dream-Time,” for them, has existed since the beginning of time and the ancestors were still “alive” in the form of spirits that had an impact on the daily lives of the adherents.

Aboriginal people believed that the land was their mother, and their dreaming had answers to life’s mysteries. The forces - the heroes and spirits - of the “Dream-Time” were all the creative ancestors of the tribe and this religion was the very first evidence of a belief in the supernatural amongst modern humans.

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) www.God-101.com

Labels: , , , , , ,

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

And then there was one!

Percy Dwight Wilson, one of two surviving veterans of the First World War, has died at age 106.

The Prime Minister's Office announced Wilson's passing Wednesday afternoon in a statement offering condolences to his family.

"All Canadians, no matter where they live, should not forget him, and the others of his generation, who gave so much for their country," Prime Minister Stephen Harper said.


"The sacrifices made and remarkable bravery displayed by Mr. Wilson and his comrades is a lesson for us all."


Born Feb. 26, 1901, in Vienna, Ont., Wilson was one of more than 600,000 Canadians and Newfoundlanders who joined the military to fight in what was then known as the "war to end all wars."

Newfoundland and Labrador were not part of Confederation until 1949.

About 66,000 Canadians died in the four-year conflict.

After lying about his age to enlist, the then 15-year-old Wilson was deemed too young to fight once he arrived in England and was sent back to Canada. Once back in Canada, he re-enlisted, but the war ended before he was ever sent back to Europe.

At the start of the Second World War, Wilson again tried to re-enlist and this time was told he was too old.

His death leaves only John Babcock, who lives in Spokane, Wash., as the last surviving Canadian to have fought in the 1914-18 war.

This means that out of 600,000 Canadians who served in the Great War, 599,999 have died and there... is..... only...... one........ left!

I sure hope the Government does the right thing and gives Babcock a State Funeral when he too passes away and ends an era.

Your humbled Scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Labels: , , ,

Stupid is as stupid does.

For all the talk about how America is turning religious and that the fundamentalist right is taking over, there are other statistics that paint a different story.

Sixty percent of Americans can't name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50% of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.

Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, isn't laughing. Americans' deep ignorance of world religions — their own, their neighbors' or the combatants in Iraq, Darfur or Kashmir — is dangerous, he says.

His new book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn't, argues that everyone needs to grasp Bible basics, as well as the core beliefs, stories, symbols and heroes of other faiths.

Belief is not his business, says Prothero, who grew up Episcopalian and now says he's a spiritually "confused Christian." He says his argument is for empowered citizenship.

"More and more of our national and international questions are religiously inflected," he says, citing President Bush's speeches laden with biblical references and the furor when the first Muslim member of Congress chose to be sworn in with his right hand on Thomas Jefferson's Quran.

"If you think Sunni and Shia are the same because they're both Muslim, and you've been told Islam is about peace, you won't understand what's happening in Iraq.

If you get into an argument about gay rights or capital punishment and someone claims to quote the Bible or the Quran, do you know it's so?

"If you want to be involved, you need to know what they're saying. We're doomed if we don't understand what motivates the beliefs and behaviors of the rest of the world. We can't outsource this to demagogues, pundits and preachers with a political agenda."

Scholars and theologians who agree with him say Americans' woeful level of religious illiteracy damages more than democracy.

"You're going to make assumptions about people out of ignorance, and they're going to make assumptions about you," says Philip Goff of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University in Indianapolis.

Goff cites a widely circulated claim on the Internet that the Quran foretold American intervention in the Middle East, based on a supposed passage "that simply isn't there. It's an entire argument for war based on religious ignorance."

"We're impoverished by ignorance," says the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, former general secretary of the National Council of Churches. "You can't draw on the resources of faith if you only have an emotional understanding, not a sense of the texts and teachings."

But if people don't know Sodom and Gomorrah were two cities destroyed for their sinful ways, Campbell blames Sunday schools that "trivialized religious education. If we want people to have serious knowledge, we have to get serious about teaching our own faith."

Prothero's solution is to require middle-schools to take a course in world religions and high schools to take one on the Bible. Biblical knowledge also should be melded into history and literature courses where relevant. He wants all college undergrads to take at least one course in religious studies.

He calls for time-pressed adults to sample holy books and history texts. His book includes a 90-page dictionary of key words and concepts from Abraham to Zen. There's also a 15-question quiz — which his students fail every year.

But it's the controversial, though constitutional, push into schools that draws the most attention.

In theory, everyone favors children knowing more. The National Education Association handbook says religious instruction "in doctrines and practices belongs at home or religious institutions," while schools should teach world religions' history, heritage, diversity and influence.

Only 8% of public high schools offer an elective Bible course, according to a study in 2005 by the Bible Literacy Project, which promotes academic Bible study in public schools. The project is supported by Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center, a Washington, D.C., non-profit that promotes free speech.

The study surveyed 1,000 high schools and found that just 36% know Ramadan is the Islamic holy month; 17% said it was the Jewish day of atonement.

Another example of mis-information is the claims made by Creationists. If they had a better understanding of what the bible actually says then they wouldn't by running around claiming the world is only six thousand years old.

Because of their myopic view, they don't understand the subtleties of the bible and how much it is parable and metaphor, but rather choose a simplistic view that the bible is literally true.

Goff says schools are not wholly to blame for religious illiteracy. "There are simply more groups, more players.

Students didn't know Ramadan any better in 1965, but now there are as many Muslims as Jews in America. It's more important to know who's who."

Also today, "there is more emphasis on religious experience as a mark of true religion and less emphasis on doctrine and knowledge of the faith." Still, it's the widely misunderstood 1963 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that may have been the tipping point: It removed devotional Bible reading from the schools but spelled out that it should not have been removed from literature and history.

"The decision clearly states you can't be educated without it, but it scared schools so much they dropped it all," Goff says.

"Schools are terrified of this," says Joy Hakim, author of several U.S. history textbooks. She's in her 70s but remembers well as a Jewish child how she felt like an outsider in schools that pushed Christianity in the curriculum.

But she says the backlash went too far. "Now, you can't use biblical characters or narrative in anything. We've stopped teaching stories. We teach facts, and the characters are lost."

Religion, like the arts, has become an afterthought in an education climate driven by "the fixation on literacy and numeracy — math and reading," says Bob Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a group critical of the standards-based education movement. "If the ways schools, teachers, principals and superintendents are judged all depend on math and reading scores, that's what you're going to teach," he says.

Still, it's a tough tightrope to walk between those who say the Bible can be just another book, albeit a valuable one, and those who say it is inherently devotional.

The First Amendment Center also published a guide to "The Bible and the Public Schools," which praised a ninth-grade world religions course in Modesto, Calif., and cited a study finding students were able to learn about other faiths without altering their own beliefs.
But it also said the class may not be easily replicated and required knowledgeable, unbiased teachers.

Leland Ryken, an English professor at evangelical Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., tested a 2006 textbook, The Bible and Its Influence, underwritten by the Bible Literacy Project. Ryken favors adding classes in the Bible and literature and social studies. But he cautions, "Religious literacy and world religions are not the same as the Bible as literature. It's a much more loaded subject, and I really question if high school students can get much knowledge beyond a sense of the importance of religion."

The Bible and Its Influence has been blasted by conservative Christians such as the Rev. John Hagee, pastor of the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio. Hagee calls it "a masterful work of deception, distortion and outright falsehoods" planting "concepts in the minds of children which are contrary to biblical teaching."

Hagee wrote to the Alabama legislature opposing adoption of the text, citing points such as discussion questions that could lead children away from a belief in God. Example: Asking students to ponder if Adam and Eve got "a fair deal as described in Genesis" would plant the seed that "since God is the author of the deal, God is unfair."

Hagee prefers the Bible itself as a textbook for Bible classes, used with a curriculum created by a group of conservative evangelicals, the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, based in Greensboro, N.C. The council says its curriculum is being offered in more than 300 schools.

Sheila Weber, a spokeswoman for The Bible Literacy project, says their textbook has been revised in the second printing issued last month with the examples cited by Hagee removed. The teachers' edition was reissued in August. The first printing was approved by numerous Christian scholars and seminaries and is already in use in 82 school districts.

Mark Chancey, professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, looked last year at how Texas public school districts taught Bible classes.

His two studies, sponsored by the Texas Freedom Network, a civil liberties group, found only 25 of more than 1,000 districts offered such a class.

"And 22 of them, including several using the Greensboro group's curriculum, were clearly over the line," teaching Christianity as the norm, and the Bible as inspired by God, says Chancey. One teacher even showed students a proselytizing Power Point titled, "God's road map for your life" that was clearly unconstitutional, he says.

The controversies, costs and competing demands in the schools have prompted many to turn instead to character education.

But classes promoting pluralism and tolerance fail on the religious literacy front because they "reduce religion to morality," Prothero says, or they promote a call for universal compassion as if it were the only value that matters.

"We are not all on the same one path to the same one God," he says. "Religions aren't all saying the same thing. That's presumptuous and wrong. They start with different problems, solve the problems in different ways, and they have different goals."

The end result of all this is that if people had a better knowledge of religion they would also be better equipped to figure out what was relevant and what is just window dressing, which is what a great portion of any religion is.

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) www.God-101.com

Labels: , , , ,

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

No Comment

(By the way these two were both dead within a week of this picture being taken. He had a massive heart attack and she pulled a Mamma Cass!)

Labels: , , ,

Hamas 'Mickey Mouse' Wants Islam Takeover

Guest Post by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook

The Hamas Television is using a clone of Disney’s Mickey Mouse to teach children to hate Israel and America, and aspire to Islam’s inevitable and impending world domination.

The squeaky-voiced Mickey Mouse lookalike, Farfur, is the star of a weekly children’s program called Tomorrow’s Pioneers on the official Hamas TV station (Al-Aqsa TV). ]

Farfur and his co-host, a young girl named Saraa’, teach children about such things as the importance of the daily prayers and drinking milk, while taking every opportunity to indoctrinate young viewers with teachings of Islamic supremacy, hatred of Israel and the US and support of "resistance" – the Palestinian euphemism for terror.

Farfur tells children that they must pray in the mosque five times a day until there is “world leadership under Islamic leadership.” The earnest and soft-spoken Saraa’ explains that the nucleus of this world Islamic leadership will be from “all of Palestine,” i.e., including Israel. Farfur refers to Israel as “the oppressive invading Zionist occupation,” which the children must "resist."

In a religious warning that is striking, considering the young age of the target audience, Saraa’ announces that after death, the children will have to answer to Allah for what they did or did not do for the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and for Palestinian prisoners:

“I remind you that Al-Aqsa and the prisoners are a responsibility on our shoulders, and Allah will ask us on Resurrection Day what we gave for their sake.”

The writing in this show is quite sophisticated. Farfur's performance is unquestionably funny and entertaining, as is the character’s comic timing. For example, as he rhymes off a list of world figures, he chirps: “We will win, Bush! We will win, Condoleezza! We will win, Sharon!” Then, without missing a beat, he quips, “Ah, Sharon is dead” (sic), reinforcing his message that the plan for world domination is progressing.

Using a character based on an appealing, world famous and beloved icon like Mickey Mouse to teach Islamic supremacy and resistance as Islamic duty is a powerful and effective way to indoctrinate children.

The effectiveness of this program is heightened by including child viewers, who phone in to the show and recite poems with images of hate and violence; for example, “We will destroy the chair of the despots, so they will taste the flame of death;” and, "Rafah sings ‘Oh, oh.’ Its answer is an AK-47. We who do not know fear, we are the predators of the forest."

It is unclear what screening process, if any, is used in the selection of the poems to be recited. Either the themes are selected by the screeners, which reinforces the hate orientation of the program, or they are the initiative of the children and parents, which demonstrates the great success of the show's hate messages.

Your humble servant;
Allan W Janssen

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) www.God-101.com

(As of Wednesday May 9, the Palestinian Minister of Information has announced that the T.V. station has been ordered to take the program off the air. "Children's programs should be for children and politics has no business being inserted and used as propaganda," he said!)
Glad there are still some sane voices in the Middle-East.

Labels: , , ,

Spy Coins Exposed!

You Americans sure are a suspicious bunch!

The surprise explanation behind the U.S. government's sensational but false warnings about mysterious Canadian spy coins is the harmless poppy quarter, the world's first colourized coin.

They were so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. army contractors travelling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them.

The worried contractors described the coins as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology," said once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails.

The 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy inlaid over a maple leaf. The quarter is identical to coins described as suspicious by the contractors.

The supposed nano-technology actually was a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the colour from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 to commemorate Canada's 117,000 war dead.

"It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or have a power source," wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. "Under high-power microscope, it appeared to be complex, consisting of several layers of clear but different material, with a wire-like mesh suspended on top."

The accounts led to a sensational warning from the U.S. Defence Security Service, an agency of the Defence Department.

The security service said mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors travelled through Canada.


One contractor believed someone had placed two of the quarters in an outer coat pocket after the contractor had emptied the pocket hours earlier. "Coat pockets were empty that morning and I was keeping all of my coins in a plastic bag in my inner coat pocket," the contractor wrote.

Meanwhile, in Canada, senior intelligence officials expressed annoyance with the U.S. spy-coin warnings as they tried to learn more about the oddball claims.

Intelligence and technology experts were flabbergasted by the warning when it was first publicized this year. The warning suggested such transmitters could be used surreptitiously to track the movements of people carrying the coins.

H. Keith Melton, a leading intelligence historian said "I thought the whole thing was preposterous, to think you could tag an individual with a coin and think they wouldn't give it away or spend it."

Your "undercover" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) www.God-101.com

Labels: , ,

Monday, May 07, 2007

Twister!

You heard about the tornado in Kansas, have a look at what it did.

(By the way, if I had the same mindset as some of the religious nuts who want to teach creationism there - I would be saying that this destruction was God's punishment for being so stupid!)



















Your "prophet of doom" scribe;
Allan W Janssen
(Pray for the people there that their suffering is not too great)

Labels: , , ,

Wanna Bet?

If anyone takes issue with anything I say on this blog then feel free to comment or engage me in a discussion on it at any time.

I must warn you though that I am not a procrastinator and also a great Master-Debater! ;-)

Your "self abusing" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Labels: , ,

Sunset on Mars

Labels: ,

Women and the art of negotiation.

Guest Post By Eve Tahmincioglu

Shellye Archambeau knows a lot about how much men and women make in corporate America, having been a top executive for more than two decades, running major businesses at companies such as IBM and Blockbuster.

She definitely noticed a disparity in pay between men and women, but she also noticed something else over the years: Few women she supervised came a knocking on her door demanding more money. The men, on the other hand, were more likely to squawk for a fatter paycheck.

“It started to surprise me that many males on my team would stop by and have a conversation with me about their financial needs and expectations. Throughout my career I only had one woman actually come and talk about her financial needs during raise time. When people came, it was the men,” says Archambeau, who is now CEO of software company MetricStream Inc.

Could it be that women are partly to blame for the persistent pay gap between males and females in the work force? Are many of us lame negotiators, afraid to toot our own horns and bring up the taboo subject of money?

Archambeau thinks so.

“I don’t believe there’s a conspiracy out there with a group of male executives saying, ‘We’re going to pay women less in this company,’” she explains. She believes the squeaky wheels at pay raise time, which are often the men, get a few percentage points more than women who don’t ask for more. Over time, she surmises, those few percentage points contribute to an eventual huge pay gap between the sexes.

Indeed, despite advances by women in the workplace and the apparent attempts by corporations to attract more female employees, the pay gap persists.

And it turns out the chasm begins earlier than we thought.

Late last month, the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation reported that just one year out of college, full-time female employees are already making less than their male counterparts who work in the same field. And it only gets worse from there.

The report found that women earn only 80 percent of what their male colleagues take home a year after they get their diplomas, and 10 years later the number drops to 69 percent. Men were also more likely to be in positions of power and more involved in hiring, firing and supervising. (The researchers took into account parenthood choices and occupation.)

"These employees don’t have a lot of experience and, for the most part, don’t have care-giving obligations, so you’d expect there to be very little difference in the wages of men and women.

But surprisingly, and unfortunately, we find that women already earn less — even when they have the same major and occupation as their male counterparts," says Catherine Hill, director of research for the foundation. "We need to make workplaces more family-friendly, reduce sex segregation in education and in the workplace, and combat discrimination that continues to hold women back in the workplace."

It is impossible to totally disregard discrimination. A recent bias suits proves just that. Morgan Stanley agreed last month to pay $46 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the firm of discriminating against thousands of its female financial advisers by paying them less than men on the payroll.

Whether we like it or not, many employers and society at large still see men as the main breadwinners in the family, says Linda Babcock, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University. “People often see women as the second wage earners, and that’s not an effective strategy for us,” she adds.

But even in the face of all these obstacles, it’s about time women started standing up for themselves. Everyone wants advancement and more money, but some women are not well-versed in the art of negotiations and shy away from the dreaded process with their bosses.

Pink, a women’s business magazine, found that nearly half of 2,400 women surveyed did not ask for a raise, additional benefit or promotion in the past 12 months. And alas, they’re missing out, because 72 percent of those who asked got what they wanted, according to the survey.

Women are just reluctant to talk about money, says Susan Wilson Solovic, author of "The Girls’ Guide to Power and Success." Women are comfortable talking about anything else in their lives, she says. We share the most personal details about our spouses or children, but when it comes to money we just shut up.

“Women are bad about negotiating for money because we are socialized to associate money with greed,” she explains. “We also are taught an ambitious and aggressive desire to accumulate wealth is not feminine.

We grow up believing in the fairy tale that someone will take care of us and we don’t have to worry our pretty little heads about money. Perhaps that is why the majority of people living in poverty in this country are women and children.”

One of the key principles of negotiation is being able to promote one's self, and here women often fall down on the job.

“There is no doubt, women are less inclined to self-promote, and they’re more likely to accept what they’re offered,” says John McKee, a business success coach and author of “21 Ways Women in Management Shoot Themselves in the Foot.”

But acceptance ends up hitting women right in their pocketbooks. If you don’t start pumping up your negotiating skills right out of school, that can cost you big time.

Take the example of a young woman who at age 22 who is offered a $25,000 job but negotiates and gets the offer raised to $30,000. If she gets a 3 percent raise every year, by the time she is 60 her annual salary will be more than $92,000, instead of $77,000 if she had accepted the lower offer. Over that 38-year career she would have made an extra $361,000.

Even with these compelling numbers it will take a lot for most women to don negotiating armor because it runs counter to how we were raised, says Carnegie Mellon’s Babcock, who is also the author of “Women Don’t Ask: Gender and the Negotiation Divide.”

“Our society teaches women not to negotiate. We get these messages from the time that they are born,” she says. “We tell girls to wait for things to be offered and not to rock the boat. We teach boys to go out there and be aggressive, to go after what they want.”

Just check out your local baby sitters.

Leslie Morgan Steiner, mother of three and author of “Mommy Wars: Stay-at-home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families,” says that over the years she’s employed about 30 sitters, mainly girls, and every single time she’s asked them how much they charged their answer was: “whatever you want to pay me.”

Morgan Steiner says she has done her part to help girls get some negotiating teeth by insisting that they come up with a price and coaching them on what to say to other parents. “I want to help them, so I tell them to say, ‘The going rate for a baby sitter is X.’ I try to give them language so after me they’ll be able to say what they charge.”

Girls need training right out of the gate. “If you can’t stand up for yourself as a 12-year-old baby sitter, you’re going to face a lot of problems because you won’t be able to negotiate with an employer, or the man you’re dating, or in so many other situations. I’d love to see negotiation skills taught in elementary school.”

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) www.God-101.com

Labels: , , ,

Who gives a shit!

Well the latest Hollywood gossip is about Felicity.

Felicity Huffman is addressing those rumors that she was drunk on the set of “Georgia Rule”.

She was............ Some!

“OK, it’s a little true. I was drunk a little bit of it, but not a lot,” the “Desperate Housewives” star tells Parade magazine. She wasn’t, she insists, falling down drunk.

I'm certainly glad to hear that since we just can't get enough of all this bullshit that celebrities are doing to keep us entertained and amused.

That last paragraph was strictly said with tongue in cheek since truth be known I couldn't care less what Anna Nicole Smith did while she was alive, what Paris Hilton did to get 45 days in jail, what Tom and Katie are doing, what or who Lindsy Lohan is screwing up now, what Britney Spears is using to grow her hair back, what, or who George Clooney is doing or even what my neighbour George is doing behind those closed curtains at three o'clock in the morning.

This national obsession with the lives of celebrities has grown to unhealthy proportions. Our fixation with the personal business of people in the limelight is an indicator of something seriously wrong with society when we have to live our lives vicariously through other people.

Personally I am going to try and concentrate on the lives of my family and friends and the rest of the world can go to hell in a hand basket for all I care.

Since my wife got sick with Lymphoma it has put a lot into perspective for me and you soon learn what's really important and what isn't.

Your "old philosopher" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Labels: , , , ,

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Sunday Morning Funnies











And finaly, a joke I wrote 30 years ago:
- Why don't blind people like skydiving?
- It scares the shit out of their seeing-eye dog!


<-- This reaction is common for that joke!





Allan

(So this older guy goes to the doctor asking for a prescription for 'Viagra'. The guy asks for a large dose of the *strongest* variety.

The doctor asks why he needs so much. The guy says that two young nymphomaniacs are spending a week at his place.

The doctor fills the prescription.

Later that week, the same guy goes back to the doctor asking for pain killers. The doctor asks 'why, is your dick in that much pain?', 'no', says the guy, 'it's for my wrists - the girls never showed up!' )

Labels: