Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Brit School Girl Martha Payne School Lunch Blog Ban Lifted

British School Lunch - Cheese Burger Deluxe  £2  
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-1845480

A controversial ban preventing a nine-year-old girl from photographing her school meals has been lifted following a storm of protest on the internet.
Martha Payne, from Argyll, has now recorded more than three million hits on her Never Seconds blog. 
Argyll and Bute Council said press coverage of the blog had led catering staff to fear for their jobs. 
But council leader Roddy McCuish later told the BBC he had instructed senior officials to lift the ban immediately. 
The schoolgirl's father, David Payne, who helped her set up the blog, welcomed the decision.
Martha began publishing photographs of her Lochgilphead Primary School lunches on 30 April.
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Bill Keller wants Bill Donohue’s Job over at the Catholic League?



The Rottweiler’s Rottweiler by Bill Keller, NYT Op-Ed, June 17, 2012

I CAN’T believe I’m saying this, but Bill Donohue is right. Donohue, the chronically peeved president of the Catholic League, and I rarely see eye to eye, but he is right about one very big thing: how to resolve the crisis in Catholicism. My endorsement may horrify him as much as it surprises me. (Small world – strange bedfellows – Bill and Bill)

Donohue, for those of you without cable TV, (yeah that’s you, you poor f*cks on welfare) is the Vatican’s most vociferous American apologist. (I always thought he was Dolan’s exclusive bootlicker) Any time a critic — especially a Catholic critic — casts doubt on the wisdom of the Catholic hierarchy, Donohue fires off a press release attacking the attacker or otherwise changing the subject. Bring up pedophile priests and he’ll talk about pedophile public-school teachers or pedophile Orthodox Jews. That nun who is under a Vatican cloud lately for having written a book with decidedly liberal views on sexuality? Donohue’s response bypassed her arguments and focused on the fact that she sometimes cites Michel Foucault, the creepy French philosopher known as an acolyte of the Marquis de Sade and a darling of the radical left. (Guilt by footnote.) (Them vagina bearers, nuns, read fancy frenchie stuff! How dare they.)
Another ferocious defender of the faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, used to be known as “God’s Rottweiler.” (If the Hague ever gets their hands on him, he will be known as "prisoner 8846295".) Ratzinger is now Pope Benedict XVI, and Bill Donohue is the Rottweiler’s Rottweiler. (A senile old bugger’s blind junkyard dog is still just a senile old bugger’s blind junkyard dog.)
In person, Donohue — a big, 64-year-old Long Island Irishman, divorced father of two grown daughters — has the genial manner of the parish priest he almost became (A wail of Thank Gods from the world’s altar boys!). Instead he digressed to military school (reform school?), the Air Force (the military or prison?), and the sociology faculty of a Catholic college in Pennsylvania (Alabama north). He is more likable one-on-one than his notorious sound bites, which have an Ann Coulterish reductiveness: Hollywood is “controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity.” President Obama “supports selective infanticide.” Progressive Catholics are “termites.” The title of his 2009 book catches the snarly Donohue: “Secular Sabotage: How Liberals Are Destroying Religion and Culture in America.”( blah, blah, blah, blah ) 
I picked up his new book — “Why Catholicism Matters” — expecting another fountain of invective (I didn’t pay for it, it was sent to me). But this is a mellower work, a believer’s portrait of the church he loves, built around the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. It dwells on Catholicism’s estimable contributions to scholarship, Western culture and humanitarianism, while airbrushing those episodes where the church came up short in the cardinal-virtue department. Thus the case of Galileo — who was branded a heretic for endorsing Copernicus’s theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun — does not merit our indignation, since Galileo spent his last years under house arrest (under threat of torture) rather than in a dungeon. “Why Catholicism Matters” gives us the defense counsel’s version of the Crusades (a natural response to Islamic jihad) (and greed to take over the trade ratline to the middle east held but the Eastern Church in Constantinople, which Rome broke away from in 1054 in the Great Schism) and the Inquisition (never mind the torture, secular authorities did the heretic-burning). He sums up the shameful cover-up of predatory priests with that weasel classic, “mistakes were made.” ( and sadly still being made )
By now some readers are wondering Why Donohue Matters ( The Bishops at the USCCB Atlanta annual meeting are embarrassed by him. There looking for a new spokesman.). Indeed, when he took charge of the Catholic League in 1993, Donohue could be dismissed as a conservative blowhard, one of those laymen who was, ahem, more Catholic than the pope. But the official church has moved far enough to the right that Donohue now speaks for its mainstream. (mainstream McMansion Long Island that is)
And what you learn if you listen to the Catholic Church in the plain language of Bill Donohue is that it is not about to change direction. Not in this century. The parishioners who hope for a kinder, more inclusive church, the nuns who are now being rebuked by the Vatican because they have doubts on subjects like gay marriage and the ordination of women — the church’s message to them is: Shut up or go. (Shut up and sign over your real estate holdings dears.)
Face it, even at the high-water mark of contemporary church reform, the Vatican II council, issues like the stained-glass ceiling and intolerance of gays were not really on the table. And that tide was been receding for nearly 50 years. Indeed, the church’s 1960s effort to engage the modern world is now regarded in the current Curia as part of an era of degenerate individualism — Woodstock, Stonewall, Vatican II — that is blamed for all kinds of deviant outcomes, including the scandal of priests who can’t keep it in their cassocks. (Democracy was such a terrible modern mistake, let’s bow to a Catholic King in Rome.)
Donohue notes that roughly a quarter of Americans identify themselves as Catholic (No the church claims numbers beyond reality in that department). He reckons maybe half of those, the more conservative half, attend church regularly and contribute. “They’re the ones who pay the bills,” he said. “Can we afford to ignore the other half? I think we can.” (The Nazis in WWII Germany were the regular church goers and the resistance Christians were too busy to go to church fighting for human rights in Europe) And as for the unsettled religious orders, the nuns and priests who vowed allegiance and now preach dissent, why should the church put up with insubordination? (What dissent? They are not lobotomized. They can’t have any opinions. Wow.)
“Do we have more than a handful of nuns who have totally lost their moorings?” Donohue mused. “Oh, yeah.” (Wow again!)
His point: “Quite frankly I believe, as Pope Benedict the XVIth said just before he became pope, that maybe a smaller church would be a better church.”  (What the hell ever happened to the good shepherd and going out of the way for the lost sheep. Segregated exclusive racist white gated community of God?)
Much as I wish I could encourage the discontented, the Catholics of open minds and open hearts, to stay put and fight the good fight, this is a lost cause. (Yeah we know, the church lasts for centuries or it used to.) Donohue is right (Gag!). Summon your fortitude, and just go. (Fuck you…) If you are not getting the spiritual sustenance you need, if you are uneasy being part of an institution out of step with your conscience — then go (…and your mother). The restive nuns who are planning a field trip to Rome for a bit of dialogue? Be assured, unless you plan to grovel, no one will be listening. Sisters, just go. Bill Donohue will hold the door for you. (Bill is already out the door Bill.  You applying for his job?)
Go where? Well, the history of Christianity is filled with schisms and offshoots. Last spring I attended Sunday Mass at a breakaway church called Spiritus Christi in Rochester, a congregation that describes itself as “Catholic, not Roman Catholic.” Spiritus Christi has a female pastor and began performing gay marriages long before the State of New York legalized them. Mass was packed with as joyous a crowd of worshipers as I have ever seen. I could imagine hundreds of Spiritus Christis — and leave it to the theologians to debate whether the Vatican or these defectors have the stronger claim to being the authentic heirs of St. Peter. (Defectors? Deserters? Wehrmacht terminology?)
This is, admittedly, easy for me to say. I have not spent my life in a religious order, embracing vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. So I called someone who speaks with more authority about what it costs to leave the church. Sister Margie Henninger was expelled from the Order of St. Joseph and excommunicated for affiliating with those not-Roman Catholics in Rochester. She now runs a recovery house for the drug- and alcohol-afflicted (yeah more poor minority f*cks on welfare).
“It was certainly painful, after 42 years,” she told me. “I lost my community. I lost my home. I lost so much. But, God being God, I gained much more.”
At 71, Sister Margie feels deeply Catholic, very much in harmony with her conscience, and happy. And of the Roman church she left behind, she says: “It almost has to completely come apart before something new and beautiful can spring up.”
There are many nuns who hold fast to the church out of genuine devotion. But there are others who stay out of fear — fear that they will grow old alone, fear of penury and homelessness, fear of losing purpose.
Thankfully, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York has offered us one possible remedy for this problem. As Laurie Goodstein documented in The Times recently, when he was archbishop of Milwaukee Dolan authorized payments of up to $20,000 to predator priests if they agreed to leave the clergy without resisting. He described this as “an act of charity.” Bill Donohue calls it “a severance package.” (Now I get it Bill Keller, this whole article has been sarcasm. Right? I am so dumb at times. Mea Culpa.)
I suggest that any long-serving nun who has come to find church teachings incompatible with her conscience should be offered a generous severance. We could call these acts of charity “Dolan Grants.” Surely a church that offers a lifeline to men who brought disgrace on the institution can offer a living stipend to women who brought it honor at great sacrifice. (the floor of hell I hear is paved in “Dolan Grants” LOL)
Great article Bill.  (Sarcasm)


(I read the quote about telling everybody in the Church "to go" first over at the right wing rag Catholic Culture.org pimping that quote out of context etc...whatever.)


Have a nice day.
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Iconic Philly Photo - City Hall Courtyard North Archway Corridor to North Broad Street - 1968


Iconic Philly - Woman in silhouette walking from City Hall (Center Square) Courtyard through North Archway to North Broad Street (14th Street), the main traffic artery of the city. She has just walked passed the "Four Columns of the Continents" directly below the behemoth Clock Tower, symbol of Philadelphia.




















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Christian Vampire Preacher Steve Newlin still Preaching Je$u$ - Amen - True Blood



It is amazing to live long enough and see all the con artist televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Baker, Pat Robertson and the Graham boys, father and son act, get away with so much fraud regarding the real Jesus and hundreds of millions raked in annually from a bunch of dumb rubes in the tent.  

And of course there is that over 50 RC female demographic that continues to fund the bishops and keeps their child rape rings going, that is so disheartening.

I have found the perfect offset recently or comic relief in the televangelist character Steve Newlin on the HBO Vampire soap series True Blood.

In case you never watch, "Tru Blood" is a chemical cocktail, invented by the Japanese, that is a perfect substitute for human blood. As such there is a coming out of the closet and or coffin of vampires trying to mainstream themselves into everyday humanity.

Steve Newlin is an evangelist bent on ridding humanity of the newly uncloseted uncasketed vampire minority. His parents were killed by vampires.  He wants to destroy this struggling minority before they gain full legal recognition in the eyes of the law.  He even runs a paramilitary anti-vampire training group that conducts guerilla warfare on the vampire community.

Now the vampire community is not all innocence and love.  It is all PR as they try to mask centuries of bloodshed and killings that have resourced their particular lifestyle.

Jason "Born Again" Stackhouse
Into Reverend Newlin’s anti-vampire boot camp wanders the aimless soul/stud of Jason Stackhouse, brother of the main character of the show Sookie Stackhouse.  Jason is looking for more than the run of the mill Jesus stuff.  He eventually finds his way into the Rev. Newlin’s wife’s bed but that is Jason, who is rarely not naked, rarely not in coitus in this HBO soap. This all takes place in the south in Louisiana. Where else.

Well the new season for a twist has Rev. Steve Newlin now turned into a Vampire and as an added bonus is out of his sexual closet and hot on the trail of Jason Stackhouse’s usually naked ass.

LMAO


Steve Newlin is a former reverend of the Fellowship of the Sun and recently turned vampire. The son of anti-vampire advocate Theodore Newlin, he initially continued his father's work after the murder of his entire family. He was a fanatic and a firm believer that vampires were 'ungodly creatures' who knew no 'humanity'. However, after becoming a vampire himself, he seems to relish his new undead status, rather joyfully remarking how humans should be treated like cattle. 
Newlin is first presented as somewhat of a well-spoken man with a friendly disposition that, while a little odd at times, is altogether cheerful. However, as the series progresses, we see that most of this is a front for his hatred for what happened to him and his family. He is shown to be unstable and unhinged beneath his amiable facade. As a vampire, this tendency seems even more pronounced.

And worse than all that, Revered Steve Newlin cannot give up his calling to Jesus.

He still has his meal ticket TV ministry and not surprisingly his Jesus is in favor the eternal life of vampires.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…

Etc.


(Warning: Don’t invite any vampires or televangelists into your homes!)


LOL


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The Great White Hope – the Face of American Hate? – George and Shellie Zimmerman of Florida



No doubt the Great White Hope in politics is embodied in a non-empath Mitt Romney and his plastic white burb icon family. 

The fact that "White" will be a minority in America by 2050 is embodied in the White Trailer Trash Couple, “white” George Zimmerman and his sweet lovely wife Shellie both pictured above.

The parallels between the Romneys and the Zimmermans are outstanding.  Non-Empaths of people without empathy to their fellows in community or planet are also in some quarters labeled as socio-paths.

The Romneys and children, grandchildren, show horses and automobile elevators and McPalaces nationwide made a big profit off of tens of thousands of redundant workers tossed into the street.

George and Shellie have made a big profit off the death of a black child, a man in body but not yet a 18 year old legal adult, killed on or near the street of a Florida middle class gated (white ghetto) community.

The Romneys have PR people to paste over the economic bloodshed on their hands.

"Steal a silver teapot and they'll send you up for life. Steal a hundred million and they'll call you sir..."

The Zimmermans do seem a bit too tacky perhaps with their unpolished glee at new found wealth over the killing of Travon Martin.

The calls also reveal a softer side of Zimmerman, and a few details about his life, temperament and marriage. 
Neither he nor his wife say anything angry, ugly or racist. They make no direct reference to Trayvon Martin or to the criminal charge Zimmerman faces. He also does not complain about being in jail or its conditions. 
In a call April 12, the day after his arrest, Zimmerman says he is thrilled by all the money and support his website has generated. 
"Oh, man, that feels good," he tells his wife, "… that there are people in America that care." 
"Yeah they do," she answers. So many tried to log onto his website the day of his arrest, she says, it kept crashing. 
A few moments later, she says, "After all this is over, you're going to be able to have a great life."
"We will," he corrects her. 
In a call April 16, Shellie Zimmerman told her husband he is a "special and amazing role model to people," to which he replied, "I wish, I wish I were." 
The couple also talks about their safety. They make references to a "safety counsel," someone who's apparently giving them advice on how to stay hidden and safe. 
They also discuss how to get Zimmerman safely out of jail. Shellie says one possibility is having someone drive him to an airport parking garage. 
"We could have two cars, we could have two rented cars," George Zimmerman replies. 
As for hiding him inside the vehicle, "Well, I have my hoodie," he chortled, a possible reference to the hooded sweatshirt Trayvon wore the night Zimmerman shot him. 
During one conversation, Zimmerman asks his wife to get a vest for him, herself and O'Mara, a likely reference to bullet-proof vests....
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