Losch is the nitpicker.
He'd love to ban the NFL.
Very out of touch.
nvrgnbk
JoinedPosts by nvrgnbk
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30
Preserve the Spirit of the Bethel Family! - Gerrit Losch ... HYPOCRITES!!!
by What-A-Coincidence inspecial talk given by losch to members of the bethel family.
not to be posted on the internet.. preserve the spirit of the bethel family -.
g. losch.
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nvrgnbk
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Christian Unity --- At What Cost?
by hamilcarr inmany leave the wts organisation because they are in search of christian freedom, while others stay within because they're proud of being a part of a group which displays christian unity, even though they often doubt some of the decisions of the gb.
i think it's hard to deny that jws demonstrate a remarkable unity in both doctrinal issues and everyday topics.. what do the concepts "christian unity" (1 cor 1:10) and "christian freedom" (ga 5:13) mean to you and how do they relate to one another?
are these terms not mutually exclusive, hence, is it possible to be really free if you are required to be "fitly united in the same mind and in the same line of thought' (nwt)?.
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nvrgnbk
Unity does not = uniformity!
I think JWs would agree on this.
Yes they would.
In fact, I seem to recall public talk outline dedicated to that concept.
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Obama's Comments on 'Small Town' Voters- Sadly, he nailed it
by nvrgnbk incall him an elitist if you will, but he simply voiced an honest observation.
in rural pa, many people tend to vote based on the fear that the dems will force them to have abortions, confiscate their hunting rifles, burn their bibles, and make interracial gay marriages mandatory for their children.
economic stimulus and improved educational opportunities be damned!.
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nvrgnbk
A wiser man told me long ago... Vote your paycheck... if your broke ...well abotion wont be an issue cause you wont get much Pu$$y... if you dont keep a job ya cant afford a gun... and dont worry about gays cause ya know where your unit goes" Crude sounding but true.
It's the ecomomy stupid. The only truth Bill Clinton ever spoke.
Good advice, Hill.
That's what too many in my area fail to realize.
When I was a member of a trade union I was shocked by how most of my fellow "brothers" were voting Republican for the reasons I mentioned in the OP. They totally disregarded the information about Bush-Cheney's union-busting ways and voted based on irrational fear.
Now they're crying about how weak the unions have become.
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Obama's Comments on 'Small Town' Voters- Sadly, he nailed it
by nvrgnbk incall him an elitist if you will, but he simply voiced an honest observation.
in rural pa, many people tend to vote based on the fear that the dems will force them to have abortions, confiscate their hunting rifles, burn their bibles, and make interracial gay marriages mandatory for their children.
economic stimulus and improved educational opportunities be damned!.
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nvrgnbk
Call him an elitist if you will, but he simply voiced an honest observation. In rural PA, many people tend to vote based on the fear that the Dems will force them to have abortions, confiscate their hunting rifles, burn their Bibles, and make interracial gay marriages mandatory for their children. Economic stimulus and improved educational opportunities be damned!
I know this to be true because I live and work in the center of the state.
Thank Jehovah for Philly and Pittsburgh.
Rivals Criticize Obama for Comments on 'Small Town' Voters
By VOA News
12 April 2008
U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama has come under criticism from his rivals for saying small-town American voters turn to guns and religion out of bitterness with job losses.Barack Obama speaks during a town hall meeting at Great Valley High School in Malvern, Pennsylvania, 9 Apr 2008 Obama made the comment at a private fundraiser in San Francisco last Sunday. The Democratic Party senator's remarks only surfaced in the U.S. media Friday.
Obama's rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Clinton, accused him of "looking down" on voters. She told supporters in Pennsylvania that she does not regard voters in the state as bitter, but rather sees them as "resilient, optimistic and hardworking."
Advisors to Republican Party candidate John McCain accused Obama of being elitist and out of touch with voters.
Obama defended his comments at a campaign rally in Indiana Friday, saying voters are frustrated and angry, because they have seen their economies collapse.
Obama accused McCain of being out of touch with voters, saying the Republican Senator failed to understand the U.S. home mortgage crisis.
Obama also criticized Clinton for voting for a bankruptcy bill supported by credit card companies, saying the measure makes it harder for people to get out of debt.
Some information for this report was provided by AFP, AP and Reuters.
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Deferred prosecution of corporations while jails fill up with John Q.Public
by nvrgnbk inin justice shift, corporate deals replace trialsby eric lichtblau</form>published: april 9, 2008washington in 2005, federal authorities concluded that a monsanto consultant had visited the home of an indonesian official and, with the approval of a senior company executive, handed over an envelope stuffed with hundred-dollar bills.
the money was meant as a bribe to win looser environmental regulations for monsanto's cotton crops, according to a court document.
monsanto was also caught concealing the bribe with fake invoices.. a few years earlier, in the age of enron, these kinds of charges would probably have resulted in a criminal indictment.
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nvrgnbk
In Justice Shift, Corporate Deals Replace Trials By ERIC LICHTBLAU</form> Published: April 9, 2008
WASHINGTON — In 2005, federal authorities concluded that a Monsanto consultant had visited the home of an Indonesian official and, with the approval of a senior company executive, handed over an envelope stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. The money was meant as a bribe to win looser environmental regulations for Monsanto's cotton crops, according to a court document. Monsanto was also caught concealing the bribe with fake invoices.
A few years earlier, in the age of Enron, these kinds of charges would probably have resulted in a criminal indictment. Instead, Monsanto was allowed to pay $1 million and avoid criminal prosecution by entering into a monitoring agreement with the Justice Department.
In a major shift of policy, the Justice Department, once known for taking down giant corporations, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, has put off prosecuting more than 50 companies suspected of wrongdoing over the last three years.
Instead, many companies, from boutique outfits to immense corporations like American Express, have avoided the cost and stigma of defending themselves against criminal charges with a so-called deferred prosecution agreement, which allows the government to collect fines and appoint an outside monitor to impose internal reforms without going through a trial. In many cases, the name of the monitor and the details of the agreement are kept secret.
Deferred prosecutions have become a favorite tool of the Bush administration. But some legal experts now wonder if the policy shift has led companies, in particular financial institutions now under investigation for their roles in the subprime mortgage debacle, to test the limits of corporate anti-fraud laws.
Firms have readily agreed to the deferred prosecutions, said Vikramaditya S. Khanna, a law professor at the University of Michigan who has studied their use, because "clearly it avoids a bigger headache for them."
Some lawyers suggest that companies may be willing to take more risks because they know that, if they are caught, the chances of getting a deferred prosecution are good. "Some companies may bear the risk" of legally questionable business practices if they believe they can cut a deal to defer their prosecution indefinitely, Mr. Khanna said.
Legal experts say the tactic may have sent the wrong signal to corporations — the promise, in effect, of a get-out-of-jail-free card. The growing use of deferred prosecutions also suggests one road map the Justice Department might follow in the subprime mortgage investigations.
Deferred prosecution agreements, or D.P.A.'s, have become controversial because of a medical supply company's agreement to pay up to $52 million to the consulting firm of John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, as an outside monitor to avoid criminal prosecution. That agreement has prompted Congressional inquiries and calls for stricter guidelines.
Defenders of deferred prosecutions say that they have been too harshly criticized lately and that they play a crucial role in allowing the government to secure the cooperation of a company while avoiding the time, expense and uncertainty of a trial. The agreements, government officials say, also avoid the type of companywide havoc seen most acutely in the case of Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that was shuttered in 2002 after being indicted in the Enron scandal. The firm's collapse threw 28,000 employees out of work.
At a Congressional hearing last month, Mr. Ashcroft defended the agreements, saying that they avoided "destroying entire corporations" through criminal indictments. "Prosecutors understand that a corporate indictment can be a corporate death sentence," he said. "A deferred prosecution can avoid the catastrophic collateral consequences and costs that are associated with corporate conviction."
Paul J. McNulty, a former deputy attorney general who put new guidelines in place in 2006 for corporate investigations at the Justice Department, said in an interview, "There's a fundamental misapprehension with D.P.A.'s to think that they're a break for the company."
With the imposition of fines and an outside monitor, "the reality is that for the government, it gets pretty much everything without the difficulty of going forward with an indictment," said Mr. McNulty, who is now in private practice. "I think companies are beginning to wonder whether they ought to fight more, because they are pretty burdensome."
But critics of the agreements question that assertion. Charles Intriago, a former federal prosecutor in Miami who specializes in money-laundering issues, said that huge penalties, like the $65 million fine for American Express Bank International in 2007, were "peanuts" compared with the damage posed by a criminal conviction. The company was accused of failing to enact internal controls to guard against laundering of drug money and other reporting problems.
The agreements were once rare, but their use has skyrocketed in the current administration, with 35 deals last year alone by the Justice Department, lawyers who follow the trend said. Banks, financial service companies and auditors have frequently entered into such agreements, including recent ones involving Merrill Lynch, the Bank of New York, AmSouth Bank, KPMG and others. Beyond financial crimes, deferred agreements have been used in lieu of prosecuting companies — though not individuals — for export control violations, obscenity violations, Medicare and Medicaid fraud, kickbacks and environmental violations.
In general, such agreements result in companies acknowledging wrongdoing by not contesting criminal charges, but without formally admitting guilt. Most agreements end after two or three years with the charges permanently dismissed.
Monsanto, for example, while not admitting guilt, agreed to abstain from further violations of bribery laws. In an e-mail message, Lori Fisher, a spokeswoman, said that Monsanto had cooperated with the Justice Department and fully complied with the agreement, leading to deferred charges being permanently dismissed in early March.
The trend has led to increased speculation about how the Justice Department might use the agreements in investigations against financial companies in the mortgage lending scandal, which has become a top law enforcement priority for the department as the economy has withered.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has 17 open inquiries into accusations of corporate fraud in connection with the subprime scandal, and Neil Power, who leads the bureau's economics crime unit, said in an interview that the number was certain to grow. The F.B.I. has publicly identified only one target — the Doral Financial Corporation, a mortgage company based in Puerto Rico whose former treasurer has already been indicted — but major companies like Countrywide Financial, once the nation's biggest mortgage lender, have also been reported to be under criminal investigation.
Mr. Power said the investigations were a reflection of the "environment of greed" that allowed companies to package mortgages into securities they sold to investors without sufficient documentation of the borrower's ability to repay. One line of criminal inquiry focuses on whether bond companies gave accurate information to investors.
"What we're looking at," he said, "is the fact that they may be performing accounting fraud."
Justice Department officials would not discuss the role that deferred prosecution agreements may play in their ultimate handling of the mortgage investigations. One official said it was "way too early" to begin speculating about such possibilities.
But the prospect already has some experts in the field worried.
Michael McDonald, a former Internal Revenue Service investigator in Miami who is a private consultant and has given seminars on deferred prosecutions, said such deals "should not be on the board" in the subprime mortgage investigations.
"In light of what this did to our economy, people shouldn't just be able to write a check and walk away," Mr. McDonald said. "People should be prosecuted for it and go to jail."
Timothy Dickinson, a lawyer in Washington who was the outside monitor for Monsanto, agreed. Corporate lenders caught up in the mortgage scandals should not assume they will be given the chance for a deferred prosecution, Mr. Dickinson said, and the Justice Department should "insist on a guilty plea" rather than offering a deal.
"It's a tool that will remain to be used by prosecutors in appropriate circumstances, but not every circumstance," he said. "It depends how egregious the conduct is."
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We are fiction(s).
by Narkissos inthis is the truth.
hidden in plain sight.. know thyself.. we were made in the image of god after all.. not only fiction, but also fiction.
biology and fiction.. not basically a "bad" thing to repent from.
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nvrgnbk
Thanks, Narkissos.
As you've often pointed out, we're all the product of our respective cultures.
Tolle, mentioned by purplesofa, and others that subscribe to the concept of awareness that he promotes might suggest that behind the "fiction(s)" that we participate in and that we identify ourselves with (inextricably linked with the cultural influences we've been exposed to) there is a true self, a true essence, an "I Am", free from the duality of the stories in which we we play endless and meaningless roles.
Bien à vous
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nvrgnbk
Friday, 22 June 2007
Salmon Rushdie: Target For Islamic Intolerance
Salman Rushdie: No Knighthood please, I am an Infidel.....
As far as religious tolerance goes, none stands out more prominently than the woes of an eminent writer, Salman Rushdie.
An exemplary writer of Indian origin ( 14 books, numerous awards, including the Booker's Prize for his work, " Midnight's Children"), he is now famous (or notorious, depending on whose side you are on) for authoring the book, "Satanic Verses" in 1988, which was deemed sacrilegious and blasphemous by the rigid Islamic world.
Controversy Behind "Satanic Verses" The controversy that incurred Islamic wrath, it seems, centres on a little-known fact in the Islamic religion:Three pagan goddesses, which was written, according to an Arab historican, Ibn Ishaq (Approx. A.D 700), by Muhammad and incorporated with the Islamic religion. Muhammad himself later revoked the goddesses, claiming he was under the influence of the Devil (When shit happens, always blame the Devil. Its a great coup out).
As Islam is a "religion of peace", Muslims all over the world reacted in the only way they knew: General mayhem and rioting. All over the world, there were protests against Rushdie, and the general reaction was that Rushdie deserved to have his throat slit for outrageous Muslim sentiments.
And lo and behold: India, Rushdie's homeland, became the first to ban the book. Iran's Ayatollah at that time, Khomeini, was so incensed with Rushdies' blasphemous book, that he issued a fatwa (death edict) and a bounty for his life, a charge that still hangs about him like an ignominous plague.At about the same time, the book's Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death in his university. Others, such as Italian translator Ettore Capriolo and publisher William Nygaard, survived assassination attempts.
Rushdie And His Knighthood: A Slight Against Islam?
Almost 20 years on, the fatwa against Rushdie still stands: He still requires maximum security, with his whereabouts known only to a few handful.
As details of Rushdie's impending knighthood granted by the British monarchy emerges, Muslims all over the world are again raving and cursing this literary talent:
1. 2000 people rioted in several cities in Pakistan, calling for Rushdie to be drawn, quartered, and killed in cold blood.
2. Khatami, a Islamic cleric, reminded the secular press that the death sentence still stands :"Awarding him means confronting 1.5 billion Muslims around the world. In Islamic Iran, the revolutionary fatwa ... is still alive and cannot be changed."
Mufti Mohammad Bashir-ud-din, head of Kashmir's Islamic court, agrees that Salman was "liable to be killed for rendering the gravest injury to the sentiments of the Muslims across the world."
Apparently, freedom of speech in the Muslim world doesn't exist. Crude violence, not tolerance, runs amok in the fundamentalist Islamic world.
Islamic Intolerance: A Culture of Murder and & ViolenceAccording to some theists, atheism has reached a new level of "militancy". With the emergence of more vocal atheists (Or anti-theist, in Christopher Hitchen's case) such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the rise of atheism towards a more public consciousness has indeed provide cannon folder for such an accusation.
Yet, there is nothing within this atheistic revolution that rivals Islamic intolerance. From brutally executed Fatwas to the murderous ravings of deranged clerics in turbans, the idea that "Islam is a religion of peace" is so eschewed in the face of Islamic intolerance towards just about everything they don't see fit is just about as logical as waxing lyrical about the Great White Shark tearing a doomed seal into itsy bitsy pieces.
It is not my intention to deride Muslims (I have Muslim friends who are just about as rational as the common masses), but surely religion, as depicted by Islam, is not as peaceful as some moderates claim.It would be interesting to see if the British monarchy would cave in to these barbaric demands. As of writing, Salman's name is still on the honours roll.
It is time for the western world to stop kowtowing to these Islamic fundies and send a strong message to the global community: Religious fundamentalists must adhere to the basics of free speech and secular humanism.http://atheisthaven.blogspot.com/2007/06/salmon-rushdie-target-for-islamic.html
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somebody tell me something interesting,
by Hortensia inanything as long as it has nothing to do with jws.
god, i'm tired of hearing about them.
(yes, yes, i realize this is an anti-jw site, but i don't care.
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nvrgnbk
Actuall, Nvr, it's Friday. Simon can't tell time.
BFD
Well Happy Birthday for Friday then, BFD.
Have a great one!
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somebody tell me something interesting,
by Hortensia inanything as long as it has nothing to do with jws.
god, i'm tired of hearing about them.
(yes, yes, i realize this is an anti-jw site, but i don't care.
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nvrgnbk
Tomorrow is BFD's Birthday!
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WHAT if we're wrong?
by shell69 ini mean, i know i'm bitter.. normally these days quite strong, not feeling so much so much the last few days though.. what i'd give to do the things i was used to.
going doing the weekly shop with my mum, her popping round for a brew in the morning.. a hug from her, just to to know from the way she communicated with me, that she loved me.
i miss her so much.. and what if i'm wrong?.
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nvrgnbk
None of us would have gone through what we have if we didn't know to our deepest core that it's not the truth.
Perhaps you need to read more, to deprogram yourself.
I wish you all the best in your struggle with alcohol, Shell.
I'm sure your kids love you very much.
They're lucky to have you.
Hang in there.
