PopularFX
Home Help Search Login Register
Welcome,Guest. Please login or register.
2024-03-29, 05:28:08
News: Check out the Benches; a place for people to moderate their own thread and document their builds and data.
If you would like your own Bench, please PM an Admin.
Most Benches are visible only to members.

Pages: 1 ... 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 [90] 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100
Author Topic: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk!  (Read 968938 times)

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Border

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border

Borders are geographic boundaries of political entities or legal jurisdictions, such as governments, sovereign states, federated states, and other subnational entities. Borders are established through agreements between political or social entities that control those areas; the creation of these agreements is called boundary delimitation.

Some borders—such as a state's internal administrative border, or inter-state borders within the Schengen Area—are often open and completely unguarded. Other borders are partially or fully controlled, and may be crossed legally only at designated border checkpoints and border zones may be controlled.

Borders may even foster the setting up of buffer zones. A difference has also been established in academic scholarship between border and frontier, the latter denoting a state of mind rather than state boundaries.[1]

Borders

In the past, many borders were not clearly defined lines; instead there were often intervening areas often claimed and fought over by both sides, sometimes called marchlands. A special case in recent times was the neutral zones that were set up along parts of Saudi Arabia's borders with Kuwait and Iraq. (However, these zones no longer exist.)[citation needed]. In modern times, marchlands have been replaced by clearly defined and demarcated borders. For the purposes of border control, airports and seaports are also classed as borders. Most countries have some form of border control to regulate or limit the movement of people, animals, and goods into and out of the country. Under international law, each country is generally permitted to legislate the conditions that have to be met in order to cross its borders, and to prevent people from crossing its borders in violation of those laws.

Some borders require presentation of legal paperwork like passports and visas, or other identity documents, for persons to cross borders. To stay or work within a country's borders aliens (foreign persons) may need special immigration documents or permits; but possession of such documents does not guarantee that the person should be allowed to cross the border.

Moving goods across a border often requires the payment of excise tax, often collected by customs officials. Animals (and occasionally humans) moving across borders may need to go into quarantine to prevent the spread of exotic infectious diseases. Most countries prohibit carrying illegal drugs or endangered animals across their borders. Moving goods, animals, or people illegally across a border, without declaring them or seeking permission, or deliberately evading official inspection, constitutes smuggling. Controls on car liability insurance validity and other formalities may also take place.

In places where smuggling, migration, and infiltration are a problem, many countries fortify borders with fences and barriers, and institute formal border control procedures. But some borders are merely signposted. This is common in countries within the European Schengen Area and on rural sections of the Canada–United States border. Borders may even be completely unmarked, typically in remote or forested regions; such borders are often described as "porous". Migration within territorial borders, and outside of them, represented an old and established pattern of movement in African countries, in seeking work and food, and to maintain ties with kin who had moved across the previously porous borders of their homelands. When the colonial frontiers were drawn, Western countries attempted to obtain a monopoly on the recruitment of labor in many African countries, which altered the practical and institutional context in which the old migration patterns had been followed, and some might argue, are still followed today. The frontiers were particularly porous for the physical movement of migrants, and people living in borderlands easily maintained transnational cultural and social networks.

A border may have been:

    Agreed by the countries on both sides
    Imposed by the country on one side
    Imposed by third parties, e.g. an international conference
    Inherited from a former state, colonial power or aristocratic territory
    Inherited from a former internal border, such as within the former Soviet Union
    Never formally defined.

In addition, a border may be a de facto military ceasefire line.

Classification of borders

Political borders are imposed on the world through human agency.[2] This means that, although a political border may follow a river or mountain range, such a feature does not automatically define the political border, even though it may be a major physical barrier to crossing. Political borders are often classified by whether or not they follow conspicuous physical features on the earth.

Borders that are natural

Natural borders are geographical features that present natural obstacles to communication and transport. Existing political borders are often a formalization of these historical, natural obstacles.

Some geographical features that often constitute natural borders are:

    Oceans: oceans create very costly natural borders. Very few nation-states span more than one continent. Only very large and resource-rich states are able to sustain the costs of governance across oceans for longer periods of time.

    Rivers: some political borders have been formalized along natural borders formed by rivers. Some examples are: the Niagara River (Canada–USA), the Rio Grande (Mexico–USA), the Rhine (France–Germany), and the Mekong (Thailand–Laos). Where a precise line is desired, it is often drawn along the thalweg, the deepest line along the river. In the Hebrew Bible, Moses defined the middle of the river Arnon as the border between Moab and the Israelite tribes settling east of the river Jordan (Deuteronomy 3:16). The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1910 that the boundary between the American states of Maryland and West Virginia is the south bank of the Potomac River.

    Lakes: larger lakes create natural borders. One example is the natural border created by Lake Tanganyika, with DR Congo and Zambia on its west shore and Tanzania and Burundi on the east.

    Forests: denser jungles or forests can create strong natural borders. One example of a natural forest border is the Amazon rainforest, separating Brazil and Bolivia from Peru, Colombia, Venezuela and Guyana.

    Mountain ranges: research on borders suggests that mountains have especially strong effects as natural borders. Many nations in Europe and Asia have had their political borders defined along mountain ranges, often along a drainage divide.

Throughout history, technological advances have reduced the costs of transport and communication across these natural borders. This has reduced the significance of natural borders over time. As a result, political borders that have been formalized more recently — such as those in Africa or Americas — typically conform less to natural borders[citation needed] than very old borders — such as those in Europe or Asia — do.

Geometric borders

Geometric boundaries are formed by straight lines (such as lines of latitude or longitude), or occasionally arcs (Pennsylvania/Delaware) regardless of the physical and cultural features of the area. Political boundaries of this kind can often be found around the states that developed out of colonial holdings, such as in Africa and the Middle East.

Fiat borders

A generalization of the idea of geometric borders is the idea of fiat boundaries, by which is meant any sort of boundary which does not track an underlying bona fide physical discontinuity. Fiat boundaries are typically the product of human demarcation—for example in demarcating electoral districts or postal districts.[3]

Relict borders

A relict border is a former boundary, which may no longer be a legal boundary at all. However, the former presence of the boundary can still be seen in the landscape. For instance, the boundary between East and West Germany is no longer an international boundary, but can still be seen because of historical markers on the landscape and continues to be a cultural and economic division in Germany today.

Maritime borders

A maritime border is a division enclosing an area in the ocean where a nation has exclusive rights over the mineral and biological resources,[4] encompassing maritime features, limits and zones.[5] Maritime borders represent the jurisdictional borders of a maritime nation[6] and are recognized by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Maritime borders exist in the context of territorial waters, contiguous zones, and exclusive economic zones; however, the terminology does not encompass lake or river boundaries, which are considered within the context of land boundaries.

Some maritime borders have remained indeterminate despite efforts to clarify them. This is explained by an array of factors, some of which illustrate regional problems.[7]

Border economics

The presence of borders often fosters certain economic features or anomalies. Wherever two jurisdictions come into contact, special economic opportunities arise for border trade. Smuggling provides a classic case; contrariwise, a border region may flourish on the provision of excise or of import–export services — legal or quasi-legal, corrupt or legitimate. Different regulations on either side of a border may encourage services to position themselves at or near that border: thus the provision of pornography, of prostitution, of alcohol and/or of narcotics may cluster around borders, city limits, county lines, ports and airports. In a more planned and official context, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) often tend to cluster near borders or ports.

Even if the goods are not perceived to be undesirable, states will still seek to document and regulate the cross-border trade in order to collect tariffs and benefit from foreign currency exchange revenues.[8] Thus, there is the concept unofficial trade in goods otherwise legal; for example, the cross-border trade in livestock by pastoralists in the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia sells an estimated $250 to $300 million of livestock to Somalia, Kenya and Djibouti every year unofficially, over 100 times the official estimate.[8]

Human economic traffic across borders (apart from kidnapping) may involve mass commuting between workplaces and residential settlements. The removal of internal barriers to commerce, as in France after the French Revolution or in Europe since the 1940s, de-emphasises border-based economic activity and fosters free trade. Euroregions are similar official structures built around commuting across boundary.

Politics

Political borders have a variety of meanings for those whom they affect. Many borders in the world have checkpoints where border control agents inspect persons and/or goods crossing the boundary.

In much of Europe, controls on persons were abolished by the 1985 Schengen Agreement and subsequent European Union legislation. Since the Treaty of Amsterdam, the competence to pass laws on crossing internal and external borders within the European Union and the associated Schengen Area states (Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein) lies exclusively within the jurisdiction of the European Union, except where states have used a specific right to opt out (United Kingdom and Ireland, which maintain the Common Travel Area amongst themselves).

The United States has notably increased measures taken in border control on the Canada–United States border and the United States–Mexico border during its War on Terrorism (See Shantz 2010). One American writer has said that the 3,600 km (2,200 mi) US-Mexico border is probably "the world's longest boundary between a First World and Third World country".[9]

Historic borders such as the Great Wall of China, the Maginot Line, and Hadrian's Wall have played a great many roles and been marked in different ways. While the stone walls, the Great Wall of China and the Roman Hadrian's Wall in Britain had military functions, the entirety of the Roman borders were very porous, which encouraged Roman economic activity with neighbors.[10] On the other hand, a border like the Maginot Line was entirely military and was meant to prevent any access in what was to be World War II to France by its neighbor, Germany; Germany ended up going around the Maginot Line through Belgium just as it had done in World War I.

Cross-border regions

Macro-regional integration initiatives, such as the European Union and NAFTA, have spurred the establishment of cross-border regions. These are initiatives driven by local or regional authorities, aimed at dealing with local border-transcending problems such as transport and environmental degradation.[11] Many cross-border regions are also active in encouraging intercultural communication and dialogue as well as cross-border economic development strategies.
In Europe, the European Union provides financial support to cross-border regions via its Interreg programme. The Council of Europe has issued the Outline Convention on Transfrontier Co-operation, providing a legal framework for cross-border co-operation even though it is in practice rarely used by Euroregions.

Border studies


There has been a renaissance in the study of borders during the past two decades, partially from creation of a counter narrative to notions of a borderless world that have been advanced as part of globalization theory.[12] Examples of recent initiatives are the Border Regions in Transition network of scholars,[13] the International Boundaries Research Unit at the University of Durham,[14] the Association of Borderlands Studies based in North America,[15] the African Borderlands Research Network (ABORNE) and the founding of smaller border research centres at Nijmegen[16] and Queen's University Belfast.[17]


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Imam tells Muslim migrants to 'breed children' with Europeans to 'conquer their countries' and vows: 'We will trample them underfoot, Allah willing'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3240295/Imam-tells-Muslim-migrants-breed-children-Europeans-conquer-countries-vows-trample-underfoot-Allah-willing.html

    Sheikh Muhammad Ayed gave the speech at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem
    He said Americans, Italians, Germans and French forced to take refugees
    Claims Europe was only welcoming refugees as a source of labour

A top Iman has told Muslims to use the migrant crisis to breed with European citizens and 'conquer their countries'.


Sheikh Muhammad Ayed gave the speech at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem claiming Europe was only welcoming refugees as a new source of labour.

He said Europe was facing a demographic disaster and urged Muslims to have children with westerners so they could 'trample them underfoot, Allah willing.'

'Throughout Europe, all the hearts are enthused with hatred toward Muslims. They wish that we were dead, but they have lost their fertility, so they look for fertility in our midst,' Infowars reports.

'We will give them fertility. We will breed children with them, because we shall conquer their countries.'

In the full video, he said Americans, Italians, Germans and the French will be forced to take refugees.

Italy has the lowest birth rate since 1861 with 8.4 per 1,000 people and much or Europe is following the same trend.

Birth rates are far higher in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, which is where most migrants are coming from.

The notion of using mass migration as a form of stealth jihad is outlined in the Koran, which states, 'And whoever emigrates for the cause of Allah will find on the earth many locations and abundance.'

To move to a new land in order to bring Islam is considered a meritorious act.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
What Is "Hijrah" and Is It a Trojan Horse?

http://network.crcna.org/muslim-ministry/what-hijrah-and-it-trojan-horse

The Islamic calendar contains two small letters which are a bit like the letters BC or AD or CE in the Gregorian calendar. These letters are "A.H" and they stand for the year of the hijrah. All of Islamic time is measured that way and to a strict Muslim this year is 1436 AH [until mid-October] and then 1437 AH thereafter. Now all of this sounds a bit trivial, but it is loaded with meaning.

A bit of history:

In 622 AD, Muhammad and his band of followers who did not have much of any political power moved to a city called Yathrib [now renamed Medina, which in Arabic means the city of the prophet]. Yathrib had a thriving Jewish population who were quite well off. Muhammad moved from his tribe's city of Mecca because he was not accepted in his role as a prophet or leader. In Medina he gained power by multiple methods, some of which changed over time. These included:

    Convincing people of Medina to follow him due to his charismatic leadership
    Convincing other people of Mecca to come over an join him
    Convincing some Jewish people to join him

In a fashion, this was still the non-compulsion stage of expanding his influence. Quickly, however, he realized that strategic alliances, force, and subjugation could achieve his goal of political and religious power much more quickly. This became the compulsion stage of his career and his methods included:

    Expropriation of property
    Forced conversions
    Religious and political domination of all other groups
    Expulsion of those who did not agree with him.

Islamic history is thus dated from the time of the immigration to Medina as it marks the turning point in Islamic history from being in an oppressed minority situation to  becoming the majority in terms of religious, political, and military power. This pattern has repeated itself throughout history.

Fast forward to today

The Islamic doctrine of hijrah or conquest via immigration is alive and well.  In a similar fashion to the movement to Medina, the purpose is to first establish a beach-head, and then slowly gain increasing influence and power, likely in a peaceful way at first, and then more violent later. The goal, as it was in Medina, is not to cooperate and to assimilate to the local customs and culture—although that can be done for a short time in order to gain a critical mass of Muslims—but it is to strategically take over more an more areas of religious and political influence. Recall that the Albanian leader of ISIS said (quoting the example of Abraham from Sura 60:3), "We say to you as Ibrahim said to his father: "Verily we are free from you and whatever you worship besides Allah. We have rejected you, and there has started between us and you hostility and hatred forever, until you believe in Allah alone."  If one looks at areas of London, Amsterdam, Paris and Stockholm, this replay of Islamic history is patently obvious. At present four hijrah tactics are being used to gain control of certain areas:

    Multiplication of Muslims by birth rates
    Multiplication of Muslims by immigration
    Multiplication of Muslim influence via political systems
    Expulsion of non-Muslims from certain areas by numerical and sometimes dominance by force—[think of the effect of documented rape-gangs in areas of Great Britain]

So what does this have to do with refugees?


ISIS has gone on record that it will swamp Europe with refugees. It is doing so and is simply using the playbook of Muhammad at Mediina as very consistently ISIS is living out the adage "What Did Muhammad Do?" If we had a chance to replay history or to re-write history, the Jews of Medina who either were forced to convert to Islam, turned into sex slaves, killed or expelled, might have second thoughts about welcoming the "poor and oppressed and weak" band of followers of Muhammad and him as their leader. It would appear that non-Muslim countries today would need a great deal of discernment as to who is truly "poor and oppressed and weak" and whether or not they have any other agendas.

For reflection:

    A lot of talk of the Syrian refugee crisis does not consider the doctrine of hijrah. Is that wise?

    What might the people of Medina have done differently and lived—not just in subjugation, but in freedom—to tell about it?

    One author has gone on record as calling hijrah "civilization jihad" that is to say, a holy war designed to take over a civilization. Is that logical or pure hysteria?


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Bal·kan·ize

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Balkanize

 or bal·kan·ize (bôl′kə-nīz′)
tr.v. Bal·kan·ized, Bal·kan·iz·ing, Bal·kan·iz·es or bal·kan·ized or bal·kan·iz·ing or bal·kan·iz·es

1.  To divide (a region or territory) into small, often hostile units.

2.  To divide (an organization or system) into small, incompatible units

The New Face Of America

http://www.onlinedigitalpubs.com/article/The+New+Face+Of+America/649650/62244/article.html

Susan Saulny

The number of young Americans who identify themselves as multiracial is soaring. What effect will they have on the country’s racial identity?

 Ask Michelle López-Mullins, a junior at the University of Maryland and the president of the school’s Multiracial and Biracial Student Association, how she marks her race on forms like the census, and she says, “It depends on the day, and it depends on the options.”

López-Mullins, 20, is Chinese and Peruvian on one side and white and American Indian on the other. She’s is part of a generation of young adults of mixed racial backgrounds who are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for decades in favor of a more fluid sense of identity.

 The crop of students moving through college right now includes the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States, and they are only the vanguard: The country is in the midst of a demographic shift driven by both immigration and intermarriage.

 It’s a sea change from how things were 50 years ago: In 1961, mixed-race marriages were illegal in at least 16 states. Then in 1967, those laws were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia ruling. In the years since, interracial marriage among all groups has skyrocketed.

 Today one in seven new marriages is between spouses of different races or ethnicities, according to the Pew Research Center. Multiracial and multiethnic Americans (usually grouped together as “mixed race”) are one of the country’s fastest-growing demographic groups; census estimates from 2009 indicate there are about 7.5 million. And the racial results of the 2010 Census are expected to show the trend continuing or even accelerating.

Transcending Race?

 Laura Wood, 19, a sophomore at the University of Maryland, is half black and half white. “I think it’s really important to acknowledge who you are and everything that makes you that,” she says. “If someone tries to call me black I say, ‘Yes—and white.’ ”

No one knows how the growth of the multiracial population might change the country. Optimists say the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, toward an America free of bigotry and prejudice.

 Pessimists say that a more powerful multiracial presence will lead to more stratification and come at the expense of other minority groups, particularly African-Americans, who could lose influence.

 And some sociologists say that grouping all multiracial people together glosses over differences in circumstances between someone who is, say, black and Latino and someone who is Asian and white. Among interracial couples, white-Asian pairings tend to be better educated and have higher incomes, according to Reynolds Farley at the University of Michigan. And the rates of intermarriage are lowest between blacks and whites, which may be a result of the economic and social distance between them.

 Rainier Spencer, director of the Afro- American Studies program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, thinks there is too much “emotional investment” in the notion of multiracialism as a panacea for the nation’s age-old divisions.

“The mixed-race identity is not a transcendence of race; it’s a new tribe,” he says.

 Americans mostly think of themselves in singular racial terms. Consider President Barack Obama’s answer to the race question on the 2010 Census: Although his mother was white and his father was black, the President checked only one box, black, even though he could have marked both races.

‘One-Drop Rule’

Of course, some portion of the country’s population has been mixed-race since the first white settlers had children with Native Americans. What has changed is how mixedrace Americans are defined and counted.

 A century ago, the nation saw itself in a range of hues: The 1890 Census included categories for racial mixtures such as quadroon (one-fourth black) and octoroon (one-eighth black). And all the censuses from 1850 to 1920, with one exception, included a mulatto category, which was for people who had any perceptible trace of African blood.

 But by the 1930 Census, terms for mixedrace people had disappeared, replaced by the so-called one-drop rule, an antebellum (pre- Civil War) convention that held that anyone with even a bit of African ancestry was black, period. (Similarly, people who were white and Indian were generally counted as American Indian.)

 By the 1970s, Americans were expected to designate themselves as members of one officially recognized racial group: black, white, American Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Korean, or “other,” an option used frequently by people of Hispanic origin. (The census considers “Hispanic” an ethnicity, not a race.)

 The 2000 Census was the first in which Americans were allowed to choose more than one race. The multiracial option came about after years of complaints, mostly by the white mothers of biracial children who objected to their children being allowed to check only one race. In 2000, 7 million people—about 2.4 percent of the population— reported being more than one race.

 According to estimates from the Census Bureau, the mixed-race population has grown by roughly 35 percent since 2000. And many researchers think the census and other surveys undercount the mixed-race population. The 2010 mixed-race statistics are being released a few states at a time over the next few months.

“There could be some big surprises,” says Jeffrey Passel at the Pew Hispanic Center, meaning that the number of mixed-race Americans could be substantially higher than the estimates. “There’s not only less stigma to being in these groups, there’s even positive cachet.”

The faces of mixed-race America are not just visible on college campuses; they’re in politics, business, and sports. And the ethnically ambiguous are especially ubiquitous in movies, television shows, and advertising.

“Advertisers want to make sure they’re reaching everybody,” says Robert Thompson, a professor of media at Syracuse University. “If anybody wants to be inclusive, featuring mutiracial people is one way to appear diverse in a very abbreviated way.”

Not ‘Ozzie and Harriet’

And since so much advertising is aimed at young people, New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott says, featuring multiracial Americans “is a way to say, ‘See, we get it: It’s not Ozzie and Harriet anymore; it’s a different America.’ ”

There are news, social networking, and dating Web sites focusing on the mixedrace audience. There are mixed-race film festivals, conferences, and student groups like the one at the University of Maryland, which offer peer support and activism.

“The No. 1 reason why we exist is to give people who feel like they don’t want to choose a side, that don’t want to label themselves based on other people’s interpretations of who they are, to give them a place, that safe space,” says López-Mullins.

 Not all of the 100 or so members of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association at the University of Maryland are multiracial; the group welcomes anyone.

 At a meeting in the fall, David Banda, who is Hispanic, and Julicia Coleman, who is black and Indian, came just to unwind among supportive listeners. They discussed the frustrations of being an interracial couple, even today, especially back in their hometown, Upper Marlboro, Maryland.

“When we go back home, let’s say for a weekend or to the mall, they see us walking and I get this look, you know, sort of giving me the idea: ‘Why are you with her? You’re not black, so she should be with a black person,’ ” says Banda, 20. “Even some of my friends tell me, ‘Why don’t you date a Hispanic girl?’ ”

Banda and Coleman are thinking about having children someday. “One of the main reasons I joined is to see the struggles mixed people go through,” Banda says, “so we can be prepared when that time comes.”

Kilts and Dashikis

 Despite the growth of the mixed-race population, there are challenges.

 Ian Winchester, a junior who is part Ghanaian, part Scottish-Norwegian, says he has always felt both lucky and torn about being biracial. His Scottish grandfather was keen on dressing him in kilts as a boy. The other side of the family would put him in a dashiki, a brightly colored shirt common in West Africa.

“I do feel empowered being biracial,” he says. “The ability to question your identity— identity in general—is really a gift.”

But, Winchester continues, “I don’t even like to identify myself as a race anymore. My family has been pulling me in two directions about what I am. I just want to be a person.”


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Fifteen Years Later, Physics Journal Concludes All Three WTC Towers Collapsed on 9/11 Due to Controlled Demolition

http://www.globalresearch.ca/fifteen-years-later-physics-journal-concludes-all-three-wtc-towers-collapsed-on-911-due-to-controlled-demolition/5545488

By Jay Syrmopoulos
Global Research, September 13, 2016
The Mind Unleashed 11 September 2016

Over the past 15 years many highly respected academics and experts have come forward to challenge the official narrative on the collapse of the WTC towers forwarded by the U.S. government. The official government position holds that the collapse of all three towers was due to intense heat inside of the buildings.

But a new forensic investigation into the collapse of the three World Trade Center towers on 9/11, published in Europhysics News – a highly respected European physics magazine – claims that “the evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that all three buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition.”

While many in the mainstream have attempted to label anyone questioning the official narrative as “tin foil hat” conspiracy theorist, many highly respected experts have come forward to lampoon the idea that the buildings collapsed due to the intense heat and fires following two terrorist-directed plane crashes.

“Given the far-reaching implications, it is morally imperative that this hypothesis be the subject of a truly scientific and impartial investigation by responsible authorities,” the four physicists conclude in the damning report.

The new study is the work of Steven Jones, former full professor of physics at Brigham Young University, Robert Korol, a professor emeritus of civil engineering at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, Anthony Szamboti, a mechanical design engineer with over 25 years of structural design experience in the aerospace and communications industries and Ted Walter, the director of strategy and development for Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a nonprofit organization that today represents more than 2,500 architects and engineers.

The comprehensive study in Europhysics Magazine directly challenges the official narrative and lends to a growing body of evidence that seriously questions the veracity of the government narrative.

In 2002, the National Institute of Standards and Technology remarked that the case was exceptionally bizarre. There were no other known cases of total structural collapses in high-rise buildings caused by fires and so it is deeply unusual that it should have happened three times in the space of one day, noted NIST.

Official investigations have never been able to thoroughly and coherently explain how this might have happened and various teams tasked with examining the collapse have raised difficult questions about the veracity of the government’s story.

Perhaps most damning of all, the experts claimed that after a thorough forensic analysis of video footage of the building’s collapse, it revealed signs of a controlled implosion. Additionally, Jones has co-authored a number of papers documenting evidence of unreacted nano-thermitic material in the WTC dust.

The authors of the study note that the buildings fell with such speed and symmetry that they there was no other feasible explanation for the sudden collapse at free fall speeds – directly refuting studies that attempted to debunk the idea that the building fell without resistance. These respected experts’ new forensic analysis only adds to the growing movement of people calling for a new and impartial investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center.

Revealing the scope and breadth of public disbelief in the official government narrative surrounding the events of 9/11, even presidential candidate Jill Stein has recently called for a new investigation.

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com

"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."

-- Thomas Jefferson


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
“The mixed-race identity is not a transcendence of race; it’s a new tribe,” he says.

ain't that the truth..


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Abraham

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham

Abraham (Hebrew: אַבְרָהָם, Modern Avraham, Tiberian ʾAḇrāhām, Arabic: إبراهيم Ibrahim), originally Avram or Abram, is the common patriarch of the three Abrahamic religions.[1] In Judaism he is the founding father of the Covenant, the special relationship between the Jewish people and God; in Christianity, he is the prototype of all believers, Jewish or Gentile; and in Islam he is seen as a link in the chain of prophets that begins with Adam and culminates in Muhammad.[2]

The narrative in Genesis revolves around the themes of posterity and land. Abraham is called by God to leave the house of his father Terah and settle in the land originally given to Canaan, but which God now promises to Abraham and his progeny. Various candidates are put forward who might inherit the land after Abraham, but all are dismissed except for Isaac, his son by his half-sister Sarah. Abraham purchases a tomb (the Cave of the Patriarchs) at Hebron to be Sarah's grave, thus establishing his right to the land, and in the second generation his heir Isaac is married to a woman from his own kin, thus ruling the Canaanites out of any inheritance. Abraham later marries Keturah and has six more sons, but on his death, when he is buried beside Sarah, it is Isaac who receives "all Abraham's goods", while the other sons receive only "gifts" (Genesis 25:5–8).[3]

The Abraham story cannot be definitively related to any specific time, and it is widely agreed that the patriarchal age, along with the exodus and the period of the judges, is a late literary construct that does not relate to any period in actual history.[4] A common hypothesis among scholars is that it was composed in the early Persian period (late 6th century BCE) as a result of tensions between Jewish landowners who had stayed in Judah during the Babylonian captivity and traced their right to the land through their "father Abraham", and the returning exiles who based their counter-claim on Moses and the Exodus tradition.[5]

Historicity

In the early and middle 20th century, leading archaeologists such as William F. Albright, and biblical scholars such as Albrecht Alt, believed that the patriarchs and matriarchs were either real individuals or believable composites of people who lived in the "patriarchal age", the 2nd millennium BCE. But, in the 1970s, new arguments concerning Israel's past and the biblical texts challenged these views; these arguments can be found in Thomas L. Thompson's The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (1974), and John Van Seters' Abraham in History and Tradition (1975). Thompson, a literary scholar, based his argument on archaeology and ancient texts. His thesis centered on the lack of compelling evidence that the patriarchs lived in the 2nd millennium BCE, and noted how certain biblical texts reflected first millennium conditions and concerns. Van Seters examined the patriarchal stories and argued that their names, social milieu, and messages strongly suggested that they were Iron Age creations.[6] By the beginning of the 21st century, archaeologists had given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac or Jacob credible historical figures.[7]

Origins of the narrative

Abraham's name is apparently very ancient, as the tradition found in Genesis no longer understands its original meaning (probably "Father is exalted" – the meaning offered in Genesis 17:5, "Father of a multitude", is a popular etymology).[8] The story, like those of the other patriarchs, most likely had a substantial oral prehistory.[9] At some stage the oral traditions became part of the written tradition of the Pentateuch; a majority of scholars believe this stage belongs to the Persian period, roughly 520–320 BCE.[10] The mechanisms by which this came about remain unknown,[11] but there are currently two important hypotheses.[12] The first, called Persian Imperial authorisation, is that the post-Exilic community devised the Torah as a legal basis on which to function within the Persian Imperial system; the second is that Pentateuch was written to provide the criteria for who would belong to the post Exilic Jewish community and to establish the power structures and relative positions of its various groups, notably the priesthood and the lay "elders".[12]

Nevertheless, the completion of the Torah and its elevation to the centre of post-Exilic Judaism was as much or more about combining older texts as writing new ones – the final Pentateuch was based on existing traditions.[13] In Ezekiel 33:24, written during the Exile (i.e., in the first half of the 6th century BCE), Ezekiel, an exile in Babylon, tells how those who remained in Judah are claiming ownership of the land based on inheritance from Abraham; but the prophet tells them they have no claim because they don't observe Torah.[14] Isaiah 63:16 similarly testifies of tension between the people of Judah and the returning post-Exilic Jews (the "gôlâ"), stating that God is the father of Israel and that Israel's history begins with the Exodus and not with Abraham.[15] The conclusion to be inferred from this and similar evidence (e.g., Ezra-Nehemiah), is that the figure of Abraham must have been preeminent among the great landowners of Judah at the time of the Exile and after, serving to support their claims to the land in opposition to those of the returning exiles.[15]

Abraham in religious traditions

Overview

Abraham is given a high position of respect in three major world faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In Judaism he is the founding father of the Covenant, the special relationship between the Jewish people and God – a belief which gives the Jews a unique position as the Chosen People of God. In Christianity, the Apostle Paul taught that Abraham's faith in God – preceding the Mosaic law – made him the prototype of all believers, circumcised and uncircumcised. The Islamic prophet Muhammad claimed Abraham, whose submission to God constituted Islam as a "believer before the fact" and undercut Jewish claims to an exclusive relationship with God and the Covenant.[16]

Judaism

In Jewish tradition, Abraham is called Avraham Avinu (אברהם אבינו), "our father Abraham," signifying that he is both the biological progenitor of the Jews (including converts, according to Jewish tradition), and the father of Judaism, the first Jew.[17] His story is read in the weekly Torah reading portions, predominantly in the parashot: Lech-Lecha (לֶךְ-לְךָ), Vayeira (וַיֵּרָא), Chayei Sarah (חַיֵּי שָׂרָה), and Toledot (תּוֹלְדֹת).

A cryptic story in the Babylonian Talmud states that "On the eve of every Shabbat, Judah the Prince's pupils, Rab Hanina and Rab Hoshaiah, who devoted themselves especially to cosmogony, used to create a delicious calf by means of the Sefer Yetzirah, and ate it on the Sabbath."[18] Mystics[19] assert that the biblical patriarch Abraham used the same method to create the calf prepared for the three angels who foretold Sarah's pregnancy in the biblical account at Genesis 18:7.

Christianity

Abraham does not loom so large in Christianity as he does in Judaism and Islam. It is Jesus as the Jewish Messiah who is central to Christianity, and the idea of a divine Messiah is what separates Christianity from the other two religions.[20] In Romans 4, Abraham's merit is less his obedience to the divine will than his faith in God's ultimate grace; this faith provides him the merit for God having chosen him for the covenant, and the covenant becomes one of faith, not obedience.[21] I

The Roman Catholic Church calls Abraham "our father in Faith" in the Eucharistic prayer of the Roman Canon, recited during the Mass (see Abraham in the Catholic liturgy). He is also commemorated in the calendars of saints of several denominations: on 20 August by the Maronite Church, 28 August in the Coptic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East (with the full office for the latter), and on 9 October by the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. In the introduction to his 15th-century translation of the Golden Legend's account of Abraham, William Caxton noted that this patriarch's life was read in church on Quinquagesima Sunday.[22] He is the patron saint of those in the hospitality industry.[23][page needed] The Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates him as the "Righteous Forefather Abraham", with two feast days in its liturgical calendar. The first time is on 9 October (for those churches which follow the traditional Julian Calendar, 9 October falls on 22 October of the modern Gregorian Calendar), where he is commemorated together with his nephew "Righteous Lot". The other is on the "Sunday of the Forefathers" (two Sundays before Christmas), when he is commemorated together with other ancestors of Jesus. Abraham is also mentioned in the Divine Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great, just before the Anaphora, and Abraham and Sarah are invoked in the prayers said by the priest over a newly married couple.

Islam

Islam regards Abraham as a link in the chain of prophets that begins with Adam and culminates in Muhammad.[2]

Ibrāhīm is mentioned in 35 chapters of the Quran, more often than any other biblical personage apart from Moses.[24] He is called both a hanif (monotheist) and muslim (one who submits),[25] and Muslims regard him as a prophet and patriarch, the archetype of the perfect Muslim, and the revered reformer of the Kaaba in Mecca.[26] Islamic traditions consider Ibrāhīm (Abraham) the first Pioneer of Islam (which is also called millat Ibrahim, the "religion of Abraham"), and that his purpose and mission throughout his life was to proclaim the Oneness of God. In Islam, he is referred to as "Ibrahim Khalilullah", meaning "Abraham the Friend [of Allah]".


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
Group: Experimentalist
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 841


Mysterious September 11 2001 Breakfast Meeting on Capitol Hill

by Michel Chossudovsky

The following text published by Global Research in 2002, provides details on the breakfast meeting hosted by Sen Bob Graham and Rep. Porter Goss on the morning of September 11.

In late August 2001, barely a couple of weeks before 9/11, Senator Bob Graham, Representative Porter Goss and Senator Jon Kyl were in Islamabad for consultations. Meetings were held with President Musharraf and with Pakistan’s military and intelligence brass including the head of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) General Mahmoud Ahmad. An AFP report confirms that the US Congressional delegation also met the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef. At this meeting, which was barely mentioned by the US media, “Zaeef assured the US delegation [on behalf of the Afghan government] that the Taliban would never allow bin Laden to use Afghanistan to launch attacks on the US or any other country.” 1

Note the sequencing of these meetings. Bob Graham and Porter Goss were in Islamabad in late August 2001. The meetings with President Musharraf and the Afghan Ambassador were on the 27th of August, the mission was still in Islamabad on the 30th of August, General Mahmoud Ahmad arrived in Washington on an official visit of consultations barely a few days later (September 4th). During his visit to Washington, General Mahmoud met his counterpart CIA director George Tenet and high ranking officials of the Bush administration.2

9/11 “Follow-up Meeting” on Capitol Hill

On the morning of September 11, the three lawmakers Bob Graham, Porter Goss and Jon Kyl (who were part of the Congressional delegation to Pakistan) were having breakfast on Capitol Hill with General Ahmad, the alleged “money-man” behind the 9-11 hijackers. Also present at this meeting were Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S. Maleeha Lodhi and several members of the Senate and House Intelligence committees were also present. This meeting was described by one press report as a “follow-up meeting” to that held in Pakistan in late August. “On 8/30, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL) ‘was on a mission to learn more about terrorism.’ (…) On 9/11, Graham was back in DC ‘in a follow-up meeting with’ Pakistan intelligence agency chief Mahmud Ahmed and House Intelligence Committee chair Porter Goss (R-FL)” 3 (The Hotline, 1 October 2002):

“When the news [of the attacks on the World Trade Center] came, the two Florida lawmakers who lead the House and Senate intelligence committees were having breakfast with the head of the Pakistani intelligence service. Rep. Porter Goss, R-Sanibel, Sen. Bob Graham and other members of the House Intelligence Committee were talking about terrorism issues with the Pakistani official when a member of Goss’ staff handed a note to Goss, who handed it to Graham. “We were talking about terrorism, specifically terrorism generated from Afghanistan,” Graham said.

(…)

Mahmood Ahmed, director general of Pakistan’s intelligence service, was “very empathetic, sympathetic to the people of the United States,” Graham said.

Goss could not be reached Tuesday [September 11]. He was whisked away with much of the House leadership to an undisclosed “secure location.” Graham, meanwhile, participated in late-afternoon briefings with top officials from the CIA and FBI.” 4

While trivializing the importance of the 9/11 breakfast meeting, The Miami Herald (16 September 2001) confirms that General Ahmad also met Secretary of State Colin Powell in the wake of the 9/11 attacks: “Graham said the Pakistani intelligence official with whom he met, a top general in the government, was forced to stay all week in Washington because of the shutdown of air traffic ‘He was marooned here, and I think that gave Secretary of State Powell and others in the administration a chance to really talk with him’. Graham said.”5

Again the political significance of the personal relationship between General Mahmoud (the alleged “money man” behind 9/11) and Secretary of State Colin Powell is casually dismissed. According to The Miami Herald, the high level meeting between the two men was not planned in advance. It took place on the spur of the moment because of the shut down of air traffic, which prevented General Mahmoud from flying back home to Islamabad on a commercial flight, when in all probability the General and his delegation were traveling on a chartered government plane. With the exception of the Florida press (and Salon.com, 14 September), not a word was mentioned in the US media’s September coverage of 9-11 concerning this mysterious breakfast reunion.

“A Cloak but No Dagger”

Eight months later on the 18th of May, two days after the “BUSH KNEW” headline hit the tabloids, the Washington Post published an article on Porter Goss, entitled: “A Cloak But No Dagger; An Ex-Spy Says He Seeks Solutions, Not Scapegoats for 9/11”. Focusing on his career as a CIA agent, the article largely served to underscore the integrity and commitment of Porter Goss to waging a “war on terrorism”. Yet in an isolated paragraph, the article acknowledges the mysterious 9/11 breakfast meeting with ISI Chief Mahmoud Ahmad, while also confirming that “Ahmad :ran a spy agency notoriously close to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban”:

“Now the main question facing Goss, as he helps steer a joint House-Senate investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks, is why nobody in the far-flung intelligence bureaucracy — 13 agencies spending billions of dollars — paid attention to the enemy among us. Until it was too late.

Goss says he is looking for solutions, not scapegoats. “A lot of nonsense,” he calls this week’s uproar about a CIA briefing that alerted President Bush, five weeks before Sept. 11, that Osama bin Laden’s associates might be planning airline hijackings.

“None of this is news, but it’s all part of the finger-pointing,” Goss declared yesterday in a rare display of pique. “It’s foolishness.” [This statement comes from the man who was having breakfast with the alleged “money-man” behind 9-11 on the morning of September 11]

(…) Goss has repeatedly refused to blame an “intelligence failure” for the terror attacks. As a 10-year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine operations wing, Goss prefers to praise the agency’s “fine work.”

(…)

On the morning of Sept. 11, Goss and Graham were having breakfast with a Pakistani general named Mahmud Ahmed — the soon-to-be-sacked head of Pakistan’s intelligence service. Ahmed ran a spy agency notoriously close to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. 6 (Washington Post, 18 May 2002)

“Putting Two and Two together”

While the Washington Post scores in on the “notoriously close” links between General Ahmad and Osama bin Laden, it fails to dwell on the more important question: what were Rep. Porter Goss and Senator Bob Graham and other members of the Senate and House intelligence committees doing together with the alleged 9/11 “money-man” at breakfast on the morning of 9/11. In other words, the Washington Post report does not go one inch further in begging the real question: Was this mysterious breakfast venue a “political lapse”, an intelligence failure or something far more serious? How come the very same individuals (Goss and Graham) who had developed a personal rapport with General Ahmad, had been entrusted under the joint committee inquiry “to reveal the truth on 9-11.”(see p. )

The media trivialises the breakfast meeting, it presents it as a simple fait divers and fails to “put two and two together”. Neither does it acknowledge the fact, amply documented, that “the money-man” behind the hijackers had been entrusted by the Pakistani government to discuss the precise terms of Pakistan’s “collaboration” in the “war on terrorism” in meetings held behind closed doors at the State department on the 12th and 13th of September. 11 7(See Michel Chossudovsky, op cit)

Smoking Gun

When the “foreknowledge” issue hit the street on May 16th, “Chairman Porter Goss said an existing congressional inquiry has so far found ‘no smoking gun’ that would warrant another inquiry.” 8 This statement points to an obvious “cover-up”. The smoking gun was right there sitting in the plush surroundings of the Congressional breakfast venue on Capitol on the morning of September 11.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/mysterious-september-11-2001-breakfast-meeting-on-capitol-hill/5544262

Ron
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Monotheism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotheism

Monotheism has been defined as the belief in the existence of only one god that created the world, is all-powerful and intervenes in the world.[1][2][3] A broader definition of monotheism is the belief in one god.[4][5][6][7] A distinction may be made between exclusive monotheism, and both inclusive monotheism and pluriform (panentheistic) monotheism which, while recognising various distinct gods, postulate some underlying unity.[8]

Monotheism is distinguished from henotheism, a religious system in which the believer worships one god without denying that others may worship different gods with equal validity, and monolatrism, the recognition of the existence of many gods but with the consistent worship of only one deity.

The broader definition of monotheism characterizes the traditions of Bábism, the Bahá'í Faith, Cao Dai (Caodaiism), Cheondoism (Cheondogyo), Christianity, Deism, Eckankar, Hindu sects such as Shaivism and Vaishnavism, Islam, Judaism, Mandaeism, Rastafari, Seicho no Ie, Sikhism, Tengrism (Tangrism), Tenrikyo (Tenriism), Yazidism, and Zoroastrianism, and elements of pre-monotheistic thought are found in early religions such as Atenism, Ancient Chinese religion, and Yahwism.[9]

Etymology

The word monotheism comes from the Greek μόνος (monos)[10] meaning "single" and θεός (theos)[11] meaning "god".[12] The English term was first used by Henry More (1614–1687).[13]

Origins

Quasi-monotheistic claims of the existence of a universal deity date to the Late Bronze Age, with Akhenaten's Great Hymn to the Aten. A possible inclination towards monotheism emerged during the Vedic period[14] in Iron-Age South Asia. The Rigveda exhibits notions of monism of the Brahman, particularly in the comparatively late tenth book,[15] which is dated to the early Iron Age, e.g. in the Nasadiya sukta. Bonpa Dharma, perhaps from twentieth century BCE,[16] was the first recorded religion to declare that there is one God above all, whom it calls Sangpo Bumtri.[17] However, it does not encourage monotheistic worship of a Sangpo Bumtri or any god for salvation but rather it focuses on karma.

Since the sixth century BCE, Zoroastrians have believed in the supremacy of one God above all: Ahura Mazda as the "Maker of All"[18] and the first being before all others.[19][20][21][22] Nonetheless, Zoroastrianism was not strictly monotheistic[23] because it venerated other yazatas alongside Ahura Mazda. Ancient Hindu theology, meanwhile, was monist, but was not strictly monotheistic in worship because it still maintained the existence of many gods, who were envisioned as aspects of one supreme God, Brahman.[24] Numerous ancient Greek philosophers, including Xenophanes of Colophon and Antisthenes believed in a similar polytheistic monism that came close to monotheism, but fell short.[24] Judaism was the first religion to conceive the notion of a personal monotheistic God within a monist context.[24] The concept of ethical monotheism, which holds that morality stems from God alone and that its laws are unchanging,[25][26] first occurred in Judaism,[27] but is now a core tenet of most modern monotheistic religions, including Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, and Bahá'í Faith.[28]

According to Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition, monotheism was the original religion of humanity; this original religion is sometimes referred to as "the Adamic religion", or, in the terms of Andrew Lang, the "Urreligion". Scholars of religion largely abandoned that view in the 19th century in favour of an evolutionary progression from animism via polytheism to monotheism, but by 1974 this theory was less widely held, and a modified view similar to Lang's became more prominent.[2][need quotation to verify] Austrian anthropologist Wilhelm Schmidt had postulated an Urmonotheismus, "original" or "primitive monotheism" in the 1910s.[29] It was objected[by whom?] that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had grown up in opposition to polytheism as had Greek philosophical monotheism.[2] Karen Armstrong[30] and other authors have written that the concept of monotheism gradually developed through a series of periodic transitions; first came animism, which developed into polytheism, which developed into henotheism, which developed into monolatry, which developed into true monotheism.[31]

Abrahamic religions

While all adherents of the Abrahamic religions consider themselves to be monotheists, Judaism does not consider Christianity to be monotheistic, recognizing only Islam as monotheistic.[32] Islam likewise does not recognize modern-day Christianity as monotheistic, primarily due to the Christian doctrine of Trinity, which Islam argues was not a part of the original monotheistic Christianity as preached by Jesus.[33] Christians, on the other hand, argue that the doctrine of the Trinity is a valid expression of monotheism, citing that the Trinity does not consist of three separate deities, but rather the three persons, who exist consubstantially (as one substance) within a single Godhead.[34][35][36]

Judaism

Judaism is one of the oldest monotheistic religions in the world.[37] God in Judaism is strictly monotheistic,[38] an absolute one, indivisible, and incomparable being who is the ultimate cause of all existence. The Babylonian Talmud references other, "foreign gods" as non-existent entities to whom humans mistakenly ascribe reality and power.[39] One of the best-known statements of Rabbinical Judaism on monotheism is the Second of Maimonides' 13 Principles of faith:

    God, the Cause of all, is one. This does not mean one as in one of a pair, nor one like a species (which encompasses many individuals), nor one as in an object that is made up of many elements, nor as a single simple object that is infinitely divisible. Rather, God is a unity unlike any other possible unity.[40]

Judaism[41] and Islam reject the Christian idea of monotheism. Judaism uses the term shituf to refer to the worship of God in a manner which Judaism does not deem to be monotheistic.

In Ancient Israel

During the 8th century BCE, the worship of YHWH in Israel was in competition with many other cults, described by the Yahwist faction collectively as Baals. The oldest books of the Hebrew Bible reflect this competition, as in the books of Hosea and Nahum, whose authors lament the "apostasy" of the people of Israel, threatening them with the wrath of God if they do not give up their polytheistic cults.[42][43]

Ancient Israelite religion was originally polytheistic;[44] the Israelites worshipped many deities,[45] including El, Baal, Asherah, and Astarte. YHWH was originally the national god of the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah.[46] As time progressed, the henotheistic cult of Yahweh grew increasingly militant in its opposition to the worship of other gods.[44] Later, the reforms of King Josiah imposed a form of strict monolatrism. After the fall of Judah to Babylon, a small circle of priests and scribes gathered around the exiled royal court, where they first developed the concept of YHWH as the sole God of the world.[24]

The Shema


Shema Yisrael ("Hear,
  • Israel") are the first two words of a section of the Torah, and is the title of a prayer that serves as a centerpiece of the morning and evening Jewish prayer services. The first verse encapsulates the monotheistic essence of Judaism: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Hebrew: שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל ה' אֱלֹהֵינוּ ה' אֶחָד‎), found in Deuteronomy 6:4, sometimes alternatively translated as "The LORD is our God, the LORD alone." Observant Jews consider the Shema to be the most important part of the prayer service in Judaism, and its twice-daily recitation as a mitzvah (religious commandment). It is traditional for Jews to say the Shema as their last words, and for parents to teach their children to say it before they go to sleep at night.
Christianity

Among early Christians there was considerable debate over the nature of the Godhead, with some denying the incarnation but not the deity of Jesus (Docetism) and others later calling for an Arian conception of God. Despite at least one earlier local synod rejecting the claim of Arius, this Christological issue was to be one of the items addressed at the First Council of Nicaea.

The First Council of Nicaea, held in Nicaea (in present-day Turkey), convoked by the Roman Emperor Constantine I in 325, was the first ecumenical[47] council of bishops of the Roman Empire, and most significantly resulted in the first uniform Christian doctrine, called the Nicene Creed. With the creation of the creed, a precedent was established for subsequent general ecumenical councils of bishops (synods) to create statements of belief and canons of doctrinal orthodoxy— the intent being to define a common creed for the Church and address heretical ideas.

One purpose of the council was to resolve disagreements in Alexandria over the nature of Jesus in relationship to the Father; in particular, whether Jesus was of the same substance as God the Father or merely of similar substance. All but two bishops took the first position; while Arius' argument failed.

Christian orthodox traditions (Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and most Protestants) follow this decision, which was reaffirmed in 381 at the First Council of Constantinople and reached its full development through the work of the Cappadocian Fathers. They consider God to be a triune entity, called the Trinity, comprising three "persons", God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. These three are described as being "of the same substance" (ὁμοούσιος).

Christians overwhelmingly assert that monotheism is central to the Christian faith, as the Nicene Creed (and others), which gives the orthodox Christian definition of the Trinity, begins: "I believe in one God". From earlier than the times of the Nicene Creed, 325 CE, various Christian figures advocated[48] the triune mystery-nature of God as a normative profession of faith. According to Roger E. Olson and Christopher Hall, through prayer, meditation, study and practice, the Christian community concluded "that God must exist as both a unity and trinity", codifying this in ecumenical council at the end of the 4th century.[49]

Most modern Christians believe the Godhead is triune, meaning that the three persons of the Trinity are in one union in which each person is also wholly God. They also hold to the doctrine of a man-god Christ Jesus as God incarnate. These Christians also do not believe that one of the three divine figures is God alone and the other two are not but that all three are mysteriously God and one. Other Christian religions, including Unitarian Universalism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormonism and others, do not share those views on the Trinity.

Some Christian faiths, such as Mormonism, argue that the Godhead is in fact three separate individuals which include God the Father, His Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost.[50] Each individual having a distinct purpose in the grand existence of human kind.[51] Furthermore, Mormons believe that before the Council of Nicaea, the predominant belief among many early Christians was that the Godhead was three separate individuals. In support of this view, they cite early Christian examples of belief in subordinationism.[52]

Unitarianism is a theological movement, named for its understanding of God as one person, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism.[53]

Islam

In Islam, Allāh (God) is all-powerful and all-knowing, the creator, sustainer, ordainer and judge of the universe.[54][55] God in Islam is strictly singular (tawhid)[56] unique (wahid) and inherently One (ahad), all-merciful and omnipotent.[57] Allāh exists without place[58] and the Qur'an states that "No vision can grasp Him, but His grasp is over all vision. God is above all comprehension, yet is acquainted with all things" (Qur'an 6:103)[55] Allāh is the only God and the same God worshiped in Christianity and Judaism. (29:46).[59]

Islam emerged in the 7th century CE in the context of both Christianity and Judaism, with some thematic elements similar to Gnosticism.[60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67] Islamic belief states that Muhammad did not bring a new religion from God, but is rather the same religion as practiced by Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus and all the other prophets of God.[68] The assertion of Islam is that the message of God had been corrupted, distorted or lost over time and the Quran was sent to Muhammad in order to correct the lost message of the Torah, New Testament and prior scriptures from God.[69]

The Qur'an asserts the existence of a single and absolute truth that transcends the world; a unique and indivisible being who is independent of the creation.[70] The Qur'an rejects binary modes of thinking such as the idea of a duality of God by arguing that both good and evil generate from God's creative act. God is a universal god rather than a local, tribal or parochial one; an absolute who integrates all affirmative values and brooks no evil.[71] Ash'ari theology, which dominated Sunni Islam from the tenth to the nineteenth century, insists on ultimate divine transcendence and holds that divine unity is not accessible to human reason. Ash'arism teaches that human knowledge regarding it is limited to what was has been revealed through the prophets, and on such paradoxes as God's creation of evil, revelation has to accepted bila kayfa (without [asking] how).[72]

Tawhid constitutes the foremost article of the Muslim profession of faith, "There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God.[73] To attribute divinity to a created entity is the only unpardonable sin mentioned in the Qur'an.[71] The entirety of the Islamic teaching rests on the principle of tawhid.[74]

As they traditionally profess a concept of monotheism with a singular person as God, Judaism[41] and Islam reject the Christian idea of monotheism. Judaism uses the term Shituf to refer to non-monotheistic ways of worshiping God. Though Muslims venerate Jesus (Isa in Arabic) as a prophet, they do not accept the doctrine that he was a begotten son of God.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Grand strategy wargame

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_strategy_wargame

A grand strategy wargame is a wargame that places focus on grand strategy: military strategy at the level of movement and use of an entire nation state or empire's resources.

Scope of games

Grand strategy wargames typically focus on a war or series of wars, often over a long period of time. Individual units, even armies, may not be represented; instead, attention is given to theaters of operation. All of the resources of the nations involved may be mobilized as part of a long-term struggle. The simulation typically involves political and economic as well as military conflict. At the most extreme end of this is the branch of strategy games in which the player assumes the role of the government of an entire nation-state and in which not conducting war is a possibility, such as in Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun.

Examples of grand strategy games where military tactics are highly abstracted or eliminated entirely include the board games Risk and Diplomacy. Another example which is slightly more realistic is Axis & Allies, although in it military factors are still highly abstracted. Games such as Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, Empires in Arms, and Empires of the Middle Ages are true wargames, in the sense that military units are specifically represented, and engage in direct combat based on specific military attributes. The Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis,Supreme Ruler Ultimate and Total War series are examples of computer-based grand strategy games.[1]

Gameplay and dynamics


Games use various techniques and features to simulate aspects of national military strategy. Some games simulate industrial production of resources and military units. Others may enable various diplomatic moves and alliances.

For example, the game Axis & Allies utilizes a "price" for producing units, consisting of a quantity of production units allocated each turn and used to "pay" for each unit produced. Some games allow various nations to produce units at a set rate, corresponding to their actual real-world industrial and economic history.

Academic use

Because such games go beyond simple warfare to deal with economics, geography, history and politics they are especially useful in education and studies of international affairs.[2]


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Disguise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disguise

A disguise can be anything which conceals or changes a person's physical appearance, including a wig, glasses, makeup, costume or other items. Camouflage is a type of disguise for people, animals and objects. Hats, glasses, changes in hair style or wigs, plastic surgery, and make-up are also used.

Disguises can be used by criminals and secret agents seeking to avoid identification. A person working for an agency trying to get information might go 'undercover' to get information without being recognised by the public; a celebrity may go 'incognito' in order to avoid unwelcome press attention. In comic books and films, disguises are often used by superheroes, and in science fiction they may be used by aliens. Dressing up in costumes is a Halloween tradition.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Religion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion

Religion is any cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, world views, texts, sanctified places, ethics, or organizations, that relate humanity to the supernatural or transcendental. Religions relate humanity to what anthropologist Clifford Geertz has referred to as a cosmic "order of existence".[1] However, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.[2][3]

Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine,[4] sacred things,[5] faith,[6] a supernatural being or supernatural beings[7] or "some sort of ultimacy and transcendence that will provide norms and power for the rest of life".[8] Religious practices may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of deities), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, public service, or other aspects of human culture. Religions have sacred histories and narratives, which may be preserved in sacred scriptures, and symbols and holy places, that aim mostly to give a meaning to life. Religions may contain symbolic stories, which are sometimes said by followers to be true, that have the side purpose of explaining the origin of life, the Universe and other things. Traditionally, faith, in addition to reason, has been considered a source of religious beliefs.[9] There are an estimated 10,000 distinct religions worldwide,[10] but about 84% of the world's population is affiliated with one of the five largest religions, namely Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or forms of folk religion.[11]

The study of religion encompasses a wide variety of academic disciplines, including theology, comparative religion and social scientific studies. Theories of religion offer various explanations for the origins and workings of religion.

With the onset of the modernisation of and the scientific revolution in the western world, some aspects of religion have cumulatively been criticized. The religiously unaffiliated demographic includes those who do not identify with any particular religion, atheists and agnostics. While the religiously unaffiliated have grown globally, many of the religiously unaffiliated still have various religious beliefs.[12]


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
A grand strategy wargame is a wargame that places focus on grand strategy: military strategy at the level of movement and use of an entire nation state or empire's resources.

aka.. sovereign or faux sovereign foreign policy.

sovereign

Related to sovereign: Sovereign nation, Sovereign wealth funds

sov·er·eign  (sŏv′ər-ĭn, sŏv′rĭn)
n.
1. One that exercises supreme, permanent authority, especially in a nation or other governmental unit, as:
a. A king, queen, or other noble person who serves as chief of state; a ruler or monarch.
b. A national governing council or committee.
2. A nation that governs territory outside its borders.
3. A gold coin formerly used in Great Britain.

Foreign policy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_policy

A country's foreign policy, also called foreign relations or foreign affairs -policy, consists of self-interest strategies chosen by the state to safeguard its national interests and to achieve goals within its international relations milieu. The approaches are strategically employed to interact with other countries. The study of such strategies is called foreign policy analysis. In recent times, due to the deepening level of globalization and transnational activities, the states will also have to interact with non-state actors. The aforementioned interaction is evaluated and monitored in attempts to maximize benefits of multilateral international cooperation. Since the national interests are paramount, foreign policies are designed by the government through high-level decision making processes. National interests accomplishment can occur as a result of peaceful cooperation with other nations, or through exploitation. Usually, creating foreign policy is the job of the head of government and the foreign minister (or equivalent). In some countries the legislature also has considerable effects. Foreign policies of countries have varying rates of change and scopes of intent, which can be affected by factors that change the perceived national interests or even affect the stability of the country itself. The foreign policy of one country can have profound and lasting impact on many other countries and on the course of international relations as a whole, such as the Monroe Doctrine conflicting with the mercantilist policies of 19th-century European countries and the goals of independence of newly formed Central American and South American countries.

History

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle described humans as social animals. Therefore, friendships and relations have existed between humans since the beginning of human interaction. As the organization developed in human affairs, relations between people also organized. Foreign policy thus goes back to primitive times. The inception in human affairs of foreign relations and the need for foreign policy to deal with them is as old as the organization of human life in groups. Before writing, most of these relations were carried out by word of mouth and left little direct archaeological evidence.

The literature from ancient times, the Bible, the Homeric poems, the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, and many others, show an accumulation of experience in dealing with foreigners. Ancient Chinese and Indian writings[which?] give much evidence of thought concerned with the management of relations between peoples in the form of diplomatic correspondence between rulers and officials of different states and within systems of multi-tiered political relations such as the Han dynasty and its subordinate kings, the more powerful of which[which?] conducted their own limited foreign relations as long as those did not interfere with their primary obligations to the central government, treatises by Chanakya and other scholars, and the preserved text of ancient treaties, as well as frequent references by known ancient writers to other, even older sources which have since been lost or remain in fragmentary form only.

Meaning

According to Business Dictionary.com, foreign policy is plan of action adopted by one nation in regards to its diplomatic dealings with other countries. Foreign policy is established as a systemic way to deal with issues that may arise with other countries. In the modern era, no country can afford to live in isolation in this age of interdependence.

20th century


Global wars were fought three times in the twentieth century. Consequently, international relations became a public concern as well as an important field of study and research. After the Second World War and during the 1960s, many researchers[who?] in the U.S. particularly, and from other countries in common, brought forth a wealth of research work and theory. This work was done for international relations and not for foreign policy as such. Gradually, various theories began to grow around the international relations, international systems and international politics but the need for a theory of foreign policy, that is the starting point in each sovereign state, continued to receive negligible attention. The reason was that the states used to keep their foreign policies under official secrecy and it was not considered appropriate for public, as it is considered today, to know about these policies.[citation needed] This iron-bound secrecy is an essential part for the framework of foreign policy formulation.

World War II and its devastation posed a great threat and challenge for humanity which revealed to everyone the importance of international relations. Though foreign policy formulation continued to remain a closely guarded process at the national level, wider access to governmental records and greater public interest provided more data from which academic work placed international relations in a structured framework of political science. Graduate and post-graduate courses developed. Research was encouraged, and gradually, international relations became an academic discipline in universities throughout the world.

The subject of whether or not constructive attempts at involvement by citizens benefits the disciplines of the "art," or whether or not such disciplines as intercultural and interpersonal communications and others may play a significant part in the future of international relations could be a subject for further study by interested individuals/groups and is encouraged at the educational level.

Writers[who?] researching foreign policy in the 20th century were unaware of whether or not agencies who most closely dealt with foreign policy kept logs of statistical experience not unlike the actuarial statistics kept by organizations of the insurance industry assessing the risk and danger involved (e.g. when situation "C" happened before, and subject included instances of "E" and "L", how was it handled and what was the result? When were peaceful and amicable results leading to better relations ever obtained through considered action and what was that action?).

The writers who worked with the foreign policy can be divided in two groups:

    World war writers who treat international politics and foreign policy as an indifferent, single field of study.

    Writers who recognize foreign policy as a source rather than the substance of international politics and bring it under study as a subject.

(The second group restricts its work to foreign policy making.)

The works of second group comes closer to the theory of foreign policy but there is no attempt to formulate a basic theory of foreign policy. Hans Morgenthau’s works on principal elements of foreign policy seem to have covered the most ground.[1]

Need for a general theory of foreign policy


McGowan and Shapiro, in their work on comparative study of foreign policy of different countries, felt that the lack of a basic theory of foreign policy was particularly disabling, and pointed out the harmful effect of the absence of a general theory of foreign policy on the foreign policy literature.

The most fundamental question that arises here is: why do we lack theories of foreign policy? Or why do we need general theory of foreign policy?

The absence of a general theory in this field leads to some serious consequences. Without theory:

    We cannot explain the relationships we discover; we can make predictions only about the foreign policy behavior.

    We will have to depend on luck and educative guesses to come up with worthwhile research hypothesis.

    Research will become an ad-hoc or unplanned research, with no justification provided for the selection of cases—no system and no consistency.

    A field without theory is hardly an area of disciplined scientific inquiry.

    A diplomat will be likely to have a more complex estimate or knowledge of other governments. His or her estimate, however, will certainly be simplistic and heavily influenced by his or her own perceptual blinders, leading to faulty (or biased) policy judgments.

A theoretical framework of foreign policy is needed to analyze the day-to-day interactions in international relations and to compare individual foreign policies. The focus is primarily on the policies of state actors with defined territories and jurisdictional boundaries, and less so on non-state actors, except in the context of how they impact national government decisions and policies. The formal field of study of international relations is itself fairly[clarification needed] recent and a specific subset of international relations such as foreign policy analysis does not receive wide attention as a field of scientific study, as opposed to the widespread use of terms like 'foreign policy' and 'foreign policy expert' in news media and general discussions about government when such experts may have more extensive backgrounds in fields other than foreign policy analysis. The organization Foreign Policy Interrupted recognized the gender disparity in foreign policy expert representation, and is amplifying the number of female voices in foreign policy media coverage. Government officials involved in making foreign policy often perceive risk in giving away information to about their policy making processes and do not discuss the subject, as control of information is itself often a part of foreign policy.

The vast record of empirical data and research is given academic attention to fit it into the framework of a general theory of foreign policy.

The second group of writers has made contributions in its development in many ways:

    Collation of systematic empirical studies with a view to articulating general pro-positions pertaining to state behavior.

    Analysis of foreign policy making with an emphasis on the process itself and the determinants that influence foreign policy.

    Development of a scientific approach to and model for foreign policy analysis such as the rational actor model, domestic-public model, etc.

    Studies undertaken to prepare world order models.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Religion in the United Kingdom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_Kingdom

Religion in the United Kingdom and in the countries that preceded it has been dominated, for over 1,400 years, by various forms of Christianity. Religious affiliations of United Kingdom citizens are recorded by regular surveys, the four major ones being the national decennial census, the Labour Force Survey, the British Social Attitudes survey and the European Social Survey. According to the 2011 Census, Christianity is the major religion, followed by Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism and Buddhism in terms of number of adherents. Among Christians, Anglicans are the most common denomination, followed by the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom. This, and the relatively large number of individuals with nominal or no religious affiliations, has led commentators to variously describe the United Kingdom as a multi-faith and secularised society.

The United Kingdom was formed by the union of previously independent countries in 1707, and consequently most of the largest religious groups do not have UK-wide organisational structures. While some groups have separate structures for the individual countries of the United Kingdom, others have a single structure covering England and Wales or Great Britain. Similarly, due to the relatively recent creation of Northern Ireland in 1921, most major religious groups in Northern Ireland are organised on an all-Ireland basis.

While the United Kingdom as a whole lacks an official religion, the Church of England remains the state church of its largest constituent country, England. The Monarch of the United Kingdom is the Supreme Governor of the Church, and accordingly, only a Protestant may inherit the British throne.

History

Pre-Roman forms of religion in Britain included various forms of ancestor worship and paganism.[3] Little is known about the details of such religions (see British paganism). Forms of Christianity have dominated religious life in what is now the United Kingdom for over 1,400 years. It was introduced by the Romans to what is now England, Wales, and Southern Scotland. The doctrine of Pelagianism, declared heretical in the Council of Carthage (418), originated with a British-born ascetic, Pelagius.

The Anglo-Saxon invasions briefly re-introduced paganism in the 5th and 6th centuries; Christianity was again brought to Great Britain by Catholic Church and Irish-Scottish missionaries in the course of the 7th century (see Anglo-Saxon Christianity).[4] Insular Christianity as it stood between the 6th and 8th centuries retained some idiosyncrasies in terms of liturgy and calendar, but it had been nominally united with Roman Christianity since at least the Synod of Whitby of 664. Still in the Anglo-Saxon period, the archbishops of Canterbury established a tradition of receiving their pallium from Rome to symbolize the authority of the Pope.

The Catholic Church remained the dominant form of Western Christianity in Britain throughout the Middle Ages, but the (Anglican) Church of England became the independent established church in England and Wales in 1534 as a result of the English Reformation.[5] It retains a representation in the UK Parliament and the British monarch is its Supreme Governor.[6]

In Scotland, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, established in a separate Scottish Reformation in the sixteenth century, is recognized as the national church. It is not subject to state control and the British monarch is an ordinary member, required to swear an oath to "maintain and preserve the Protestant Religion and Presbyterian Church Government" upon his or her accession.[7][8]

The adherence to the Catholic Church continued at various levels in different parts of Britain, especially among recusants and in the north of England,[9] but most strongly in Ireland. This would expand in Great Britain, partly due to Irish immigration in the nineteenth century,[10] the Catholic emancipation and the Restoration of the English hierarchy.

Particularly from the mid-seventeenth century, forms of Protestant nonconformity, including Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and, later, Methodists, grew outside of the established church.[11] The (Anglican) Church in Wales was disestablished in 1920 and, as the (Anglican) Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1870 before the partition of Ireland, there is no established church in Northern Ireland.[12]

The Jews in England were expelled in 1290 and only emancipated in the 19th century. British Jews had numbered fewer than 10,000 in 1800 but around 120,000 after 1881 when Russian Jews settled permanently in Britain.[13]

The substantial immigration to the United Kingdom since the 1920s has contributed to the growth of foreign faiths, especially of Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism,[14] Buddhism in the United Kingdom experienced growth partly due to immigration and partly due to conversion (especially when including Secular Buddhism).[15]

As elsewhere in the western world, religious demographics have become part of the discourse on multiculturalism, with Britain variously described as a post-Christian society,[16] as "multi-faith",[17] or as secularised.[18] Scholars have suggested multiple possible reasons for the decline, but have not agreed on their relative importance. Martin Wellings lays out the "classical model" of secularization, while noting that it has been challenged by some scholars.

    The familiar starting-point, a classical model of secularization, argues that religious faith becomes less plausible and religious practice more difficult in advanced industrial and urbanized societies. The breakdown or disruption of traditional communities and norms of behavior; the spread of a scientific world-view diminishing the scope of the supernatural and the role of God; increasing material affluence promoting self-reliance and this-worldly optimism; and greater awareness and toleration of different creeds and ideas, encouraging religious pluralism and eviscerating commitment to a particular faith, all form components of the case for secularization. Applied to the British churches in general by Steve Bruce and to Methodism in particular by Robert Currie, this model traces decline back to the Victorian era and charts in the twentieth century a steady ebbing of the sea of faith.[19][20][21]

Religious affiliations

In the 2011 census, Christianity was the largest religion, stated as their affiliation by 59.5% of respondents.[22][23][25] This figure was found to be 53% in the 2007 Tearfund survey,[56] 42.9 percent in the 2009 British Social Attitudes Survey[53] and 42.98 percent in the EU-funded European Social Survey published in April 2009[40] for those identifying as Christian.

Although there was no UK-wide data in the 2001 or the 2011 census on adherence to individual Christian denominations,[57] Ceri Peach estimated in 2005 that 62% of Christians were Anglican, 13.5% Catholic, 6% Presbyterian and 3.4% Methodist, with small numbers in other Protestant denominations and the Orthodox church.[58] The 2009 British Social Attitudes Survey, which covers Great Britain but not Northern Ireland, indicated that over 50 percent would self-classify as not religious at all, 19.9 percent were part of the Church of England, 9.3% non-denominational Christian, 8.6% Catholic, 2.2% Presbyterian/Church of Scotland, 1.3% Methodist, 0.53% Baptist, 1.17% other Protestant, 0.23% United Reformed Church/Congregational, 0.06% Free Presbyterian, 0.03% Brethren Christian and 0.41% other Christian.[53]

In a 2015 survey conducted by BSA (British Social Attitudes) on religious affiliation; 49% of respondents indicated 'no religion' and 42% indicated they were Christians, while 8% affiliated with non-Christian religions (Islam, Hinduism, Judaism etc.)[59]

The Pew Research Center Western Europe Survey held in August 2017 asked the question "What is your present religion, if any?" with 17% of respondents selcting 'Catholicism', 54% selecting 'Protestantism', and 24% selecting 'Unaffiliated'.

Religions other than Christianity, such as Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Judaism, have established a presence in the United Kingdom, both through immigration and by attracting converts. Others that have done so include the Bahá'í Faith, the Rastafari movement and Neopaganism.

Attendance

Society in the United Kingdom is markedly more secular than it was in the past and the number of churchgoers fell over the second half of the 20th century.[60] The Ipsos MORI poll in 2003 reported that 18% were "a practising member of an organised religion".[48] The Tearfund Survey in 2007 found that only 7% of the population considered themselves as practising Christians. Some 10% attended church weekly and two-thirds had not gone to church in the past year.[56][61] The Tearfund Survey also found that two-thirds of UK adults (66%) or 32.2 million people had no connection with the Church at present (nor with another religion). These people were evenly divided between those who have been in the past but have since left (16 million) and those who have never been in their lives (16.2 million).

A survey in 2002 found Christmas attendance at Anglican churches in England varied between 10.19% of the population in the diocese of Hereford, down to just 2.16% in Manchester.[62] Church attendance at Christmas in some dioceses was up to three times the average for the rest of the year. Overall church attendance at Christmas has been steadily increasing in recent years; a 2005 poll found that 43 per cent expected to attend a church service over the Christmas period, in comparison with 39% and 33% for corresponding polls taken in 2003 and 2001 respectively.[63]

A December 2007 report by Christian Research showed that the services of the Catholic Church had become the best-attended services of Christian denominations in England, with average attendance at Sunday Mass of 861,000, compared to 852,000 attending Anglican services. Attendance at Anglican services had declined by 20% between 2000 and 2006, while attendance at Catholic services, boosted by large-scale immigration from Poland and Lithuania, had declined by only 13%. In Scotland, attendance at Church of Scotland services declined by 19% and attendance at Catholic services fell by 25%.[64] British Social Attitudes Surveys have shown the proportion of those in Great Britain who consider they "belong to" Christianity to have fallen from 66% in 1983 to 43% in 2009.[53]

In 2012 about 6% of the population of the United Kingdom regularly attended church, with the average age of attendees being 51; in contrast, in 1980, 11% had regularly attended, with an average age of 37. It is predicted that by 2020 attendance will be around 4%, with an average age of 56.[60] This decline in church attendance has forced many churches to close down across the United Kingdom, with the Church of England alone closing 1,500 churches between 1969 and 2002. Their fates include dereliction, demolition, and residential, artistic and commercial conversion.[65] In October 2014 weekly attendance at Church of England services dropped below 1 million for the first time. At Christmas 2014, 2.4 million attended. For that year baptisms were 130,000, down 12% since 2004; marriages were 50,000, down 19%; and funerals 146,000, down 29%. The Church estimated that about 1% of churchgoers were lost to death each year; the Church's age profile suggested that attendances would continue to decline.[66]

One study showed that in 2004 at least 930,000 Muslims attended a mosque at least once a week, just outnumbering the 916,000 regular churchgoers in the Church of England.[67] Muslim sources claim the number of practising Muslims is underestimated as nearly all of them pray at home.[68]

Belief

There is a disparity between the figures for those identifying themselves with a particular religion and for those proclaiming a belief in a God:

    In a 2011 YouGov poll, 34% of UK citizens said they believed in a God or gods.[70]

    A Eurobarometer opinion poll in 2010 reported that 37% of UK citizens "believed there is a God", 33% believe there is "some sort of spirit or life force" and 25% answered "I don't believe there is any sort of spirit, God or life force".[71]

    The 2008 European Social Survey suggested that 46.94% of UK citizens never prayed and 18.96% prayed daily.[40]

    A survey in 2007 suggested that 42% of adults resident in the United Kingdom prayed, with one in six praying daily.[72]

Jedi census phenomenon

In the 2001 census, 390,127 individuals (0.7 percent of total respondents) in England and Wales self-identified as followers of the Jedi faith. This Jedi census phenomenon followed an internet campaign that stated, incorrectly, that the Jedi belief system would receive official government recognition as a religion if it received enough support in the census.[73] An email in support of the campaign, quoted by BBC News, invited people to "do it because you love Star Wars ... or just to annoy people".[74] The Office for National Statistics revealed the total figure in a press release entitled "390,000 Jedi there are".[75]

Christianity

The United Kingdom was formed by the union of previously independent states in 1707,[76][77][78] and consequently most of the largest religious groups do not have UK-wide organisational structures. While some groups have separate structures for the individual countries of the United Kingdom, others have a single structure covering England and Wales or Great Britain. Similarly, due to the relatively recent creation of Northern Ireland in 1921, most major religious groups in Northern Ireland are organised on an all-Ireland basis.

Islam

Estimates in 2009 suggested a total of about 2.4 million Muslims over all the United Kingdom.[112][113] According to Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the number of Muslims in Britain could be up to 3 million.[114] The vast majority of Muslims in the United Kingdom live in England and Wales: of 1,591,126 Muslims recorded at the 2001 Census, 1,546,626 were living in England and Wales, where they form 3 per cent of the population; 42,557 were living in Scotland, forming 0.8 per cent of the population;[115] and 1,943 were living in Northern Ireland.[116] Between 2001 and 2009 the Muslim population increased roughly 10 times faster than the rest of society.[117]

Most Muslim immigrants to the United Kingdom came from former colonies. The biggest groups of Muslims are of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian and Arab origins,[118] with the remainder coming from Muslim-dominated areas such as Southwest Asia, Somalia, Malaysia, and Indonesia.[119] During the 18th century, lascars (sailors) who worked for the British East India Company settled in port towns with local wives.[120] These numbered only 24,037 in 1891 but 51,616 on the eve of World War I.[121] Naval cooks, including Sake Dean Mahomet, also came from what is now the Sylhet Division of Bangladesh.[122] From the 1950s onwards, the growing Muslim population has led to a number of notable Mosques being established, including East London Mosque, London Central Mosque, Manchester Central Mosque, London Markaz, and the Baitul Futuh of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. According to Kevin Brice, a researcher at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, thousands convert to Islam annually and there are approximately 100,000 converts to Islam in Britain, where they run two mosques.[123]

According to a Labour Force Survey estimate, the total number of Muslims in Great Britain in 2008 was 2,422,000, around 4 per cent of the total population.[124] Between 2004 and 2008, the Muslim population grew by more than 500,000.[124] In 2010, The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life estimated 2,869,000 Muslims in Great Britain.[125] The largest age-bracket within the British Muslim population were those under the age of 4, at 301,000 in September 2008.[124] The Muslim Council of Britain and the Islamic Forum of Europe are the umbrellas organisations for many local, regional and specialist Islamic organisations in the United Kingdom, although it is disputed how representative this organisation is of British Muslims as a whole.

Judaism

The Jewish Naturalisation Act, enacted in 1753, permitted the naturalisation of foreign Jews, but was repealed the next year. The first graduate from the University of Glasgow who was openly-known to be Jewish was in 1787. Unlike their English contemporaries, Scottish students were not required to take a religious oath. In 1841 Isaac Lyon Goldsmid was made baronet, the first Jew to receive a hereditary title. The first Jewish Lord Mayor of the City of London, Sir David Salomons, was elected in 1855, followed by the 1858 emancipation of the Jews. On 26 July 1858, Lionel de Rothschild was finally allowed to sit in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom when the law restricting the oath of office to Christians was changed. (Benjamin Disraeli, a baptised, teenage convert to Christianity of Jewish parentage, was already an MP at this time and rose to become Prime Minister in 1874.) In 1884 Nathan Mayer Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild became the first Jewish member of the British House of Lords; again Disraeli was already a member.

British Jews number around 300,000 with the United Kingdom having the fifth largest Jewish community worldwide.[126] However, this figure did not include Jews who identified 'by ethnicity only' in England and Wales or Scottish Jews who identified as Jewish by upbringing but held no current religion. A report in August 2007 by University of Manchester historian Dr Yaakov Wise stated that 75 per cent of all births in the Jewish community were to ultra-orthodox, Haredi parents, and that the increase of ultra-orthodox Jewry has led to a significant rise in the proportion of British Jews who are ultra-orthodox.[127]

However various studies suggest that within some Jewish communities and particularly in some strictly Orthodox areas, many residents ignored the voluntary question on religion following the advice of their religious leaders resulting in a serious undercount, therefore it is impossible to give an accurate number on the total UK Jewish population. It may be even more than double the official estimates, heavily powered by the very high birth rate of orthodox families and British people who are Jewish by origin but not religion; as it currently stands, the Jewish as ethnicity section is not documented on the census.[citation needed]

Bahá'í Faith

The Bahá'í Faith in the United Kingdom has a historical connection with the earliest phases of the Bahá'í Faith starting in 1845 and has had a major effect on the development of communities of the religion in far flung nations around the world. It is estimated that between 1951 and 1993, Bahá'ís from the United Kingdom settled in 138 countries.[128]

Religion and politics

Though the main political parties are secular, the formation of the Labour Party was influenced by Christian socialism and by leaders from a nonconformist background, such as Keir Hardie. On the other hand, the Church of England was once nicknamed "the Conservative Party at prayer", though this has changed since the 1980s as the Church has moved to the left of the Conservative Party on social and economic issues.[142]

Some minor parties are explicitly 'religious' in ideology: two 'Christian' parties – the Christian Party and the Christian Peoples Alliance, fielded joint candidates at the 2009 European Parliament elections and increased their share of the vote to come eighth, with 249,493 votes (1.6% of total votes cast), and in London, where the CPA had three councillors,[143] the Christian parties picked up 51,336 votes (2.9% of the vote), up slightly from the 45,038 gained in 2004.[144]

The Church of England is represented in the UK Parliament by 26 bishops (the Lords Spiritual) and the British monarch is a member of the church (required under Article 2 of the Treaty of Union) as well as its Supreme Governor.[145] The Lords Spiritual have seats in the House of Lords and debate government policies affecting the whole of the United Kingdom. The Church of England also has the right to draft legislative measures (related to religious administration) through the General Synod that can then be passed into law by Parliament.[146] The Prime Minister, regardless of personal beliefs, plays a key role in the appointment of Church of England bishops, although in July 2007 Gordon Brown proposed reforms of the Prime Minister's ability to affect Church of England appointments.[147]

Religion and education

Religious education and Collective Worship are compulsory in many state schools in England and Wales by virtue of clauses 69 and 70 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. Clause 71 of the act gives parents the right to withdraw their children from Religious Education and Collective Worship[148] and parents should be informed of their right in accordance with guidelines published by the Department for Education; "a school should ensure parents or carers are informed of this right".[149] The content of the religious education is decided locally by the Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education.

In England and Wales, a significant number of state funded schools are faith schools with the vast majority Christian (mainly either of Church of England or Catholic) though there are also Jewish, Muslim and Sikh faith schools. Faith schools follow the same national curriculum as state schools, though with the added ethos of the host religion. Until 1944 there was no requirement for state schools to provide religious education or worship, although most did so. The Education Act 1944 introduced a requirement for a daily act of collective worship and for religious education but did not define what was allowable under these terms. The act contained provisions to allow parents to withdraw their children from these activities and for teachers to refuse to participate. The Education Reform Act 1988 introduced a further requirement that the majority of collective worship be "wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character".[150] According to a 2003 report from the Office for Standards in Education, a "third of governing bodies do not fulfil their statutory duties adequately, sometimes because of a failure to pursue thoroughly enough such matters as arranging a daily act of collective worship."[151]

In Scotland, the majority of schools are non-denominational, but separate Catholic schools, with an element of control by the Catholic Church, are provided within the state system. The Education (Scotland) Act 1980 imposes a statutory duty on all local authorities to provide religious education and religious observance in Scottish schools. These are currently defined by the Scottish Government's Curriculum for Excellence (2005).[152]

Northern Ireland has a highly segregated education system. 95 per cent of pupils attend either maintained (Catholic) schools or controlled schools, which are open to children of all faiths and none, though in practise most pupils are from the Protestant community.[citation needed]

Religion and prison

Prisoners are given religious freedom and privileges while in prison. This includes access to a chaplain or religious advisor, authorised religious reading materials,[153] ability to change faith, as well as other privileges.[154] Several faith-based outreach programmes provide faith promoting guidance and counselling.[155][156][157]

Every three months, the Ministry of Justice collects data, including religious affiliation, of all UK prisoners and is published as the Offender Management Caseload Statistics.[158] This data is then compiled into reports and published in the House of Commons library.

On 31 March 2015 the prison population of England and Wales was recorded as 49% Christian, 14% Muslim, 2% Buddhist, 2% other religions and 31% no religion.[159]

Religion and the media

The Communications Act 2003 requires certain broadcasters in the United Kingdom to carry a "suitable quantity and range of programmes" dealing with religion and other beliefs, as part of their public service broadcasting.[160] Prominent examples of religious programming include the BBC television programme Songs of Praise, aired on a Sunday evening with an average weekly audience of 2.5 million,[161] and the Thought for the Day slot on BBC Radio 4. Channels also offer documentaries on, or from the perspective of a criticism of organised religion. A significant example is Richard Dawkins' two-part Channel 4 documentary, The Root of all Evil?. Open disbelief of, or even mockery of organised religion, is not regarded as a taboo in the British media, though it has occasionally provoked controversy – for example, the movie Monty Python's Life of Brian,[162] the poem "The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name",[163] and the musical Jerry Springer: The Opera,[164] all of which involved characters based on Jesus, were subject to public outcry and blasphemy allegations, while The Satanic Verses, a novel by British Indian author Salman Rushdie which includes a fantasy sequence about Muhammed, caused global protests including several by British Muslims.[165] British comedy has a history of parody on the subject of religion.[citation needed]

Interfaith dialogue

The Interfaith Network for the United Kingdom encompasses the main faith organisations of the United Kingdom, either directly with denominational important representatives or through joint bodies for these denominations, promotes local interfaith cooperation, promotes understanding between faiths and convenes meetings and conferences where social and religious questions of concern to the different faith communities can be examined together, including meetings of the Network's ‘Faith Communities Consultative Forum’.[167]

Ecumenical friendship and cooperation has gradually developed between Christian denominations and where inter-sect prejudice exists this has via education and employment policy been made a pressing public matter in dealing with its two prominent examples – sectarianism in Glasgow and Northern Ireland – where segregation is declining.

Tolerance and Religious Discrimination

In the early 21st century, the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 made it an offence in England and Wales to incite hatred against a person on the grounds of their religion. The common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were abolished with the coming into effect of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 on 8 July 2008.

2005–2010 polls have shown that public opinion in the United Kingdom generally tends towards a suspicion or outright disapproval of radical or evangelical religiosity, though moderate groups and individuals are rarely subject to less favourable treatment from society or employers.[168]

The Equality Act 2010 prohibits discrimination against people on the basis of religion, in the supply of goods and services and selection for employment, subject to very limited exceptions (such as the right of schools and religious institutions to appoint paid ministers).

Secularism

There is no strict separation of church and state in the United Kingdom. Accordingly, most public officials may display the most common identifiers of a major religion in the course of their duties – for example, turbans. Chaplains are provided in the armed forces (see Royal Army Chaplains' Department, RAF Chaplains Branch) and in prisons.

Although school uniform codes are generally drawn up flexibly enough to accommodate compulsory items of religious dress, some schools have banned wearing the crucifix in a necklace, arguing that to do so is not a requirement of Christianity where they prohibit all other necklaces. Post-adolescence, the wearing of a necklace is permitted in some F.E. colleges who permit religious insignia necklaces on a wider basis, which are without exception permitted at universities.[169]

Some churches have warned that the Equality Act 2010 could force them to go against their faith when hiring staff.[170]

In 2011 two judges of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales upheld previous statements in the country's jurisprudence that the (non-canon) laws of the United Kingdom 'do not include Christianity'. Therefore, a local authority was acting lawfully in denying a Christian married couple the right to foster care because of stated negative views on homosexuality. In terms of the rights recognised "in the case of fostering arrangements at least, the right of homosexuals to equality should take precedence over the right of Christians to manifest their beliefs and moral values."[171]


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Bahá'í Faith

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%AD_Faith

The Bahá'í Faith (Persian: بهائی‎‎ Bahā'i) is a religion teaching the essential worth of all religions, and the unity and equality of all people.[1] Established by Bahá'u'lláh in 1863, it initially grew in the Middle East and now has between 5 and 7 million adherents, known as Bahá'ís, spread out into most of the world's countries and territories, with the highest concentration in Iran.[2][3]

The religion was born in Iran, where it has faced ongoing persecutions since its inception.[4] It grew from the mid-19th century Bábí religion, whose founder taught that God would soon send a prophet in the manner of Jesus or Muhammad.[5] In 1863, after being banished from his native Iran, Bahá'u'lláh announced that he was this prophet. He was further exiled, spending over a decade in the prison city of Akka in the Ottoman province of Syria, in what is now Israel. Following Bahá'u'lláh's death in 1892, leadership of the religion fell to his son `Abdu'l-Bahá (1844-1921), and later his great-grandson Shoghi Effendi (1897-1957). Bahá'ís around the world annually elect local, regional, and national Spiritual Assemblies that govern the affairs of the religion, and every five years the members of all National Spiritual Assemblies elect the Universal House of Justice, the nine-member supreme governing institution of the worldwide Bahá'í community, which sits in Haifa, Israel near the shrine of Báb.

Bahá'í teachings are in some ways similar to other monotheistic faiths: God is considered single and all-powerful. However, Bahá'u'lláh taught that religion is orderly and progressively revealed by one God through Manifestations of God who are the founders of major world religions throughout history; Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad being the most recent in the period before the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh. As such, Bahá'ís regard the major religions as fundamentally unified in purpose, though varied in social practices and interpretations. There is a similar emphasis on the unity of all people, openly rejecting notions of racism and nationalism. At the heart of Bahá'í teachings is the goal of a unified world order that ensures the prosperity of all nations, races, creeds, and classes.[6][7]


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
The first frame of reference is a personal one. I am an Anglo-Saxon Celt by birth and culture and I live in England. I have no religion but instead I have a value system based upon positive morality.

There are no religions that can claim to be moral because they teach faith, not facts.

Nationalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism

Nationalism is a range of political, social, and economic systems characterized by promoting the interests of a particular nation, particularly with the aim of gaining and maintaining self-governance, or full sovereignty, over the group's homeland. The political ideology therefore holds that a nation should govern itself, free from unwanted outside interference, and is linked to the concept of self-determination. Nationalism is further oriented towards developing and maintaining a national identity based on shared characteristics such as culture, language, race, religion, political goals or a belief in a common ancestry.[1][2] Nationalism therefore seeks to preserve the nation's culture. It often also involves a sense of pride in the nation's achievements, and is closely linked to the concept of patriotism. In some cases, nationalism referred to the belief that a nation should be able to control the government and all means of production.[3]

From a political or sociological outlook, there are three main paradigms for understanding the origins and basis of nationalism. The first, known as primordialism or perennialism, sees nationalism as a natural phenomenon. It holds that, although the concept of nationhood may be recent, nations have always existed. The second paradigm is ethnosymbolism, which is a complex perspective seeking to explain nationalism by contextualizing it throughout history as a dynamic, evolutionary phenomenon and by further examining the strength of nationalism as a result of the nation's subjective ties to national symbols imbued with historical meaning. The third and most dominant paradigm is modernism, which sees nationalism as a recent phenomenon that needs the structural conditions of modern society to exist.[4]

There are various definitions for what constitutes a nation, however, which leads to several different strands of nationalism. It can be a belief that citizenship in a state should be limited to one ethnic, cultural, religious, or identity group, or that multinationality in a single state should necessarily comprise the right to express and exercise national identity even by minorities.[5] The adoption of national identity in terms of historical development has commonly been the result of a response by influential groups unsatisfied with traditional identities due to inconsistency between their defined social order and the experience of that social order by its members, resulting in a situation of anomie that nationalists seek to resolve.[6] This anomie results in a society or societies reinterpreting identity, retaining elements that are deemed acceptable and removing elements deemed unacceptable, to create a unified community.[6] This development may be the result of internal structural issues or the result of resentment by an existing group or groups towards other communities, especially foreign powers that are or are deemed to be controlling them.[6] Nationalism means devotion for the nation. It is a sentiment that binds the people together. National symbols and flags, national anthems, national languages, national myths and other symbols of national identity are highly important in nationalism.[7][8][9][10]


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Boundary delimitation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_delimitation

Boundary delimitation (or simply delimitation) is the drawing of boundaries, particularly of electoral precincts, states, counties or other municipalities.[1] In the context of elections, it can be called redistribution and is used to prevent unbalance of population across districts.[1] Unbalanced or discriminatory delimitation is called "gerrymandering."[2] Though there are no internationally agreed processes that guarantee fair delimitation, several organizations, such as the Commonwealth Secretariat, the European Union and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems have proposed guidelines for effective delimitation.

In international law, the related national delimitation is the process of legally establishing the outer limits ("borders") of a state within which full territorial or functional sovereignty is exercised.[3] Occasionally this is used when referring to the maritime boundaries as well, in this case called maritime delimitation.

Democratic delimitation

Methods

Countries delimit electoral districts in different ways.[1] Sometimes these are drawn based on traditional boundaries, sometimes based on the physical characteristics of the region and, often, the lines are drawn based on the social, political and cultural contexts of the area.[1] This may need to be done in any form of electoral system even though it is primarily done for plurality or majority electoral system.[1]

These processes of boundary delimitation can have a variety of legal justifications. Often, because of the powerful effects this process can have on constituencies, the legal framework for delimitation is specified in the constitution of a country.[4] The Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) recommends the following pieces of information be included in this legal framework:[4]

    The frequency of such determination;

    The criteria for such determination;

    The degree of public participation in the process;

    The respective roles of the legislature, judiciary and executive in the process;and

    The ultimate authority for the final determination of the electoral units.

Established democracies

Delimitation is regularly used in the United States and Commonwealth countries. This is called redistricting or redistribution respectively. In these countries non-partisan commissions draw new districts based on the distribution of population according to a census.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
European Union

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union

The European Union (EU) is a political and economic union of 28 member states that are located primarily in Europe. It has an area of 4,475,757 km2 (1,728,099 sq mi), and an estimated population of over 510 million. The EU has developed an internal single market through a standardised system of laws that apply in all member states. EU policies aim to ensure the free movement of people, goods, services, and capital within the internal market,[11] enact legislation in justice and home affairs, and maintain common policies on trade,[12] agriculture,[13] fisheries, and regional development.[14] Within the Schengen Area, passport controls have been abolished.[15] A monetary union was established in 1999 and came into full force in 2002, and is composed of 19 EU member states which use the euro currency.

The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the European Economic Community (EEC), established, respectively, by the 1951 Treaty of Paris and 1957 Treaty of Rome. The original members of what came to be known as the European Communities, were the Inner Six; Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany. The Communities and its successors have grown in size by the accession of new member states and in power by the addition of policy areas to its remit. While no member state has left the EU or its antecedent organisations, the United Kingdom enacted the result of a membership referendum in June 2016 and is currently negotiating its withdrawal. The Maastricht Treaty established the European Union in 1993 and introduced European citizenship.[16] The latest major amendment to the constitutional basis of the EU, the Treaty of Lisbon, came into force in 2009.

The European Union accumulated a higher portion of GDP as a form of foreign aid than any other economic union.[17] Covering 7.3% of the world population,[18] the EU in 2016 generated a nominal gross domestic product (GDP) of 16.477 trillion US dollars, constituting approximately 22.2% of global nominal GDP and 16.9% when measured in terms of purchasing power parity.[19] Additionally, 27 out of 28 EU countries have a very high Human Development Index, according to the United Nations Development Programme. In 2012, the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.[20] Through the Common Foreign and Security Policy, the EU has developed a role in external relations and defence. The union maintains permanent diplomatic missions throughout the world and represents itself at the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the G7, and the G20. Because of its global influence, the European Union has been described as an emerging superpower.[21]

Background

"A day will come when all nations on our continent will form a European brotherhood ... A day will come when we shall see ... the United States of America and the United States of Europe face to face, reaching out for each other across the seas."


Victor Hugo, International Peace Congress, 1849.


Several European States claimed to be the successors (translatio imperii) of the Roman Empire after the fall of Rome in 476: the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire were attempts to resurrect the Empire in the West; while the Russian Tsardom in Eastern Europe claimed to be the Third Rome and inheritor of the Byzantine tradition after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.[22][23]

Ideals of European unity re-emerged during the 19th century after the fall of Napoléon's Empire, in the ideas of Wojciech Jastrzębowski[24], Giuseppe Mazzini or Theodore de Korwin Szymanowski.[25] The term United States of Europe (French: États-Unis d'Europe) was famously used by Victor Hugo during a speech at the International Peace Congress held in Paris in 1849, when he favoured the creation of "a supreme, sovereign senate, which will be to Europe what parliament is to England".[26]

One of the first to imagine of a modern union of the European nations was Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, who wrote the Pan-Europa manifesto in 1923 and founded the Pan-Europa Movement.[27] His ideas influenced Aristide Briand, who gave a speech in favour of a European Union in the League of Nations on 8 September 1929, and who in 1930 wrote a Memorandum on the Organisation of a Regime of European Federal Union for the Government of France[28].

History of the European Union

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_European_Union

The European Union is a geo-political entity covering a large portion of the European continent. It is founded upon numerous treaties and has undergone expansions that have taken it from 6 member states to 28, a majority of the states in Europe.

Apart from the ideas of federation, confederation, or customs union, the original development of the European Union was based on a supranational foundation that would "make war unthinkable and materially impossible"[1][2] and reinforce democracy amongst its members[3] as laid out by Robert Schuman and other leaders in the Schuman Declaration (1950) and the Europe Declaration (1951). This principle was at the heart of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) (1951), the Treaty of Paris (1951), and later the Treaty of Rome (1958) which established the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC). Both the ECSC and EEC were later incorporated into the European Union while the EAEC maintains a distinct legal identity despite sharing members and institutions.

The Maastricht Treaty (1992) created the European Union with its pillars system, including foreign and home affairs alongside the European Community. This in turn led to the creation of the single European currency, the euro (launched 1999). The Maastricht Treaty has been amended by the treaties of Amsterdam (1997), Nice (2001) and Lisbon (2007).


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
The first frame of reference is a personal one. I am an Anglo-Saxon Celt by birth and culture and I live in England.

Let us look at another frame of reference, a fictional one from the past:

Porridge 1973 Season 1 Episode 5


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g4gkBPTMFk

Porridge (1973) s01e05 Episode Script


https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=porridge-1973&episode=s01e05

'Norman Stanley Fletcher, you have pleaded guilty to the charges.
'It is now my duty to pass sentence.
'You are an habitual criminal who accepts arrest and imprisonment as occupational hazards.
'We therefore commit you to the maximum term for these offences.
'You'll go to prison for five years.
' Oh, shshame on it! What's the matter? I dropped a stitch.
OhOW! Is something wrong? The whole flamin' job's wrong! Grown men, sewing fishing nets! Is there anything more demeaning? It's a step up from mail bags.
Oh, yeah? ^ It's ne'er a job.
It's punishment because we've been bad boys.
It's a shame you lost that farm job.
Free eggs every day! What d'ya mean, "free"? More like half-a-dozen! I KNEW you were pilfering eggs! As young McClaren says 'ere, we're all being punished for it.
What chance has a man got, eh? Fletcher, you've been inside long enough to know the score.
It's because you've upset Mr Mackay.
I thought you'd appeal on my behalf.
The Governor's got no time for you.
He's very disappointed.
All right, we know the public wants revenge on them that never had a chance.
You never had a chance, did ya? I'm used to it.
He's being punished, too.
Oh? I spoilt the stinkin' soup.
And for that, he's doing penance? What chance have any of us got? That is not the whole truth.
You spoilt the soup by holding a prison officer's head under it! You tried to drown a prison officer.
It was a vicious, unprovoked attack.
Drowning, eh? He asked for it.
You could have scalded him.
Not with the soup in this nick! It wouldn't burn a baby's bottom! It could poison him.
What sort of soup was it? Mixed vegetable.
Ooh, dear! I bet he was livid, with all them bits of carrot up his nose.
It's not funny, Fletcher! It was a vicious, unprovoked attack.
That is why McClaren is here.
It's equally plain why you are here.
Oh, well, yeah.
I was provoked.
Yes.
He called me a black bastard.
If that were true, you could have gone to the Governor.
He wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
Technically, the facts as stated were not wholly inaccurate.
He is both negroid and illegitimate.
It was the way he said it.
That's enough! Get on with your work.
Work, huh? Knitting string vests for hippos! I bet it don't fit me, when I've finished it.
I wanted it in cerise, really! They know we're not gonna screw up the brave fishermen of England, eh? Too many holes, and they come back a tonne of cod short, don't they? The cost of fish fingers would soar.
Not to mention cod pieces.

Characters of Porridge (TV series)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characters_of_Porridge_(TV_series)

Jim McClaren

Jim McClaren is played by Tony Osoba. McClaren, who claims to have been adopted, is black and from Greenock, Scotland. This led to a string of racist abuse when he first arrived at Slade Prison. Fletch, in reference to his Scottish upbringing, frequently calls him "Jock". Upon arrival, he was an angry young man, and it was left up to Fletcher to calm him down and to curb the abuse he received. A keen football player, he was soon turning out every Saturday afternoon for the inter-wing football matches. He supports Greenock Morton F.C.

Along with Godber and Warren, McClaren is a regular conspirator with Fletch. He is the last of their circle to be released, and Fletcher is seen bidding him farewell in the first episode of Going Straight.

According to a 2003 TV special, Life Beyond the Box, approved by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais but not written by them, thirty years later McClaren is a member of the Scottish Parliament.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Journalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism

Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that impacts society to at least some degree. The word applies to the occupation (professional or not), the methods of gathering information, and the organizing literary styles. Journalistic media include: print, television, radio, Internet, and, in the past, newsreels.

Concepts of the appropriate role for journalism varies between countries. In some nations, the news media is controlled by a government intervention, and is not a fully independent body.[1] In others, the news media is independent from the government but the profit motive is in tension with constitutional protections of freedom of the press. Access to freely available information gathered by independent and competing journalistic enterprises with transparent editorial standards can enable citizens to effectively participate in the political process. In the United States, journalism is protected by the freedom of the press clause in the First Amendment.

The role and status of journalism, along with that of the mass media, has undergone changes over the last two decades with the advent of digital technology and publication of news on the Internet.[2] This has created a shift in the consumption of print media channels, as people increasingly consume news through e-readers, smartphones, and other electronic devices, challenging news organizations to fully monetize their digital wing, as well as improvise on the context in which they publish news in print. Notably, in the American media landscape, newsrooms have reduced their staff and coverage as traditional media channels, such as television, grapple with declining audiences. For instance, between 2007 and 2012, CNN edited its story packages into nearly half of their original time length.[3]

This compactness in coverage has been linked to broad audience attrition, as a large majority of respondents in recent studies show changing preferences in news consumption.[3] The digital era has also ushered in a new kind of journalism in which ordinary citizens play a greater role in the process of news making, with the rise of citizen journalism being possible through the Internet. Using video camera equipped smartphones, active citizens are now enabled to record footage of news events and upload them onto channels like YouTube, which is often discovered and used by mainstream news media outlets. Meanwhile, easy access to news from a variety of online sources, like blogs and other social media, has resulted in readers being able to pick from a wider choice of official and unofficial sources, instead of only from traditional media organizations.

Production

Journalistic conventions vary by country. In the United States, journalism is produced by media organizations or by individuals. Bloggers are often, but not always, journalists. The Federal Trade Commission requires that bloggers who receive free promotional gifts, then write about products, must disclose that they received the products free. This is to eliminate conflicts of interest and protect consumers.[4]

"Fake news" is information distributed which is deliberately not truthful or is produced by unreliable organizations. Fake news is easily spread on social media such as fake news websites. Readers can determine fake news by evaluating whether the news has been published by a credible news organization. In the US, a credible news organization is an incorporated entity; has an editorial board; and has a clear division between editorial and advertising departments. Credible news organizations, or their employees, belong to one or more professional organizations such as the American Society of News Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters & Editors, or the Online News Association. All of these organizations have codes of ethics that members abide by. Many news organizations have their own codes of ethics that guide journalists' professional publications. The New York Times code of standards and ethics[5] is considered particularly rigorous.

When they write stories, journalists are concerned with issues of objectivity and bias. Some types of stories are intended to represent the author's own opinion; other types of stories are intended to be more neutral or balanced. In a physical newspaper, information is organized into sections and it is easy to see which stories are supposed to be opinion and which are supposed to be neutral. Online, many of these distinctions break down. Readers should pay careful attention to headings and other design elements to ensure that they understand the journalist's intent. Opinion pieces generally are written by regular columnists or appear in a section titled "Op-ed." Feature stories, breaking news, and hard news stories are generally not opinion pieces.

According to Robert McChesney, healthy journalism in a democratic country must provide an opinion of people in power and who wish to be in power, must produce the range of opinions and must regard the informational needs of all people.[6]

Many debates center on whether journalists are "supposed" to be "objective" or "neutral." Journalists are people who produce news out of and as part of a particular social context. They are guided by professional codes of ethics and do their best to represent all legitimate points of view.

Forms

There are several different forms of journalism, all with diverse audiences. Journalism is said to serve the role of a "fourth estate", acting as a watchdog on the workings of the government. A single publication (such as a newspaper) contains many forms of journalism, each of which may be presented in different formats. Each section of a newspaper, magazine, or website may cater to different audiences.[7][8]


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Definition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition

A definition is a statement of the meaning of a term (a word, phrase, or other set of symbols).[1] Definitions can be classified into two large categories, intensional definitions (which try to give the essence of a term) and extensional definitions (which proceed by listing the objects that a term describes).[2] Another important category of definitions is the class of ostensive definitions, which convey the meaning of a term by pointing out examples. A term may have many different senses and multiple meanings, and thus require multiple definitions.[3][a]

In mathematics, a definition is used to give a precise meaning to a new term, instead of describing a pre-existing term. Definitions and axioms are the basis on which all of mathematics is constructed.[4]

Basic terminology

In modern usage, a definition is something, typically expressed in words, that attaches a meaning to a word or group of words. The word or group of words that is to be defined is called the definiendum, and the word, group of words, or action that defines it is called the definiens. In the definition "An elephant is a large gray animal native to Asia and Africa", the word "elephant" is the definiendum, and everything after the word "is" is the definiens.[5]

Note that the definiens is not the meaning of the word defined, but is instead something that conveys the same meaning as that word.[5]

There are many sub-types of definitions, often specific to a given field of knowledge or study. These include, among many others, lexical definitions, or the common dictionary definitions of words already in a language; demonstrative definitions, which define something by pointing to an example of it ("This," [said while pointing to a large grey animal], "is an Asian elephant."); and precising definitions, which reduce the vagueness of a word, typically in some special sense ("'Large', among female Asian elephants, is any individual weighing over 5,500 pounds.").[5]

Intensional definitions vs extensional definitions

An intensional definition, also called a connotative definition, specifies the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing being a member of a specific set.[2] Any definition that attempts to set out the essence of something, such as that by genus and differentia, is an intensional definition.

An extensional definition, also called a denotative definition, of a concept or term specifies its extension. It is a list naming every object that is a member of a specific set.[2]

Thus, the "seven deadly sins" can be defined intensionally as those singled out by Pope Gregory I as particularly destructive of the life of grace and charity within a person, thus creating the threat of eternal damnation. An extensional definition would be the list of wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. In contrast, while an intensional definition of "Prime Minister" might be "the most senior minister of a cabinet in the executive branch of government in a parliamentary system", an extensional definition is not possible since it is not known who future prime ministers will be.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
Group: Experimentalist
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 841


Trump’s UN Speech

Paul Craig Roberts

"I listened to part of Trump’s UN speech this morning. I was so embarrassed for him and for my country that I had to turn it off.

I wonder if whoever wrote the deplorable speech intended to embarrass Trump and inadvertently embarrassed America as well, or whether the speechwriter(s) is so imbued with the neoconservative arrogance and hubris of our time that the speechwriter was simply blind to the extraordinary contradictions that stood out like sore thumbs all through the speech.

I am not going to describe all of them, just a couple of examples.

Trump went on at great length about how America respects the sovereignty of every country and the people’s will of every country, and how the US, despite its overwhelming military power, never tries to impose its will on any country. What was the administration thinking, or can it think? What about Yugoslavia/Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Crimea, Ukraine, Venezuela, Honduras, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, just to mention countries in the 21st century that have been subjected to US military attacks, government overthrows, and removals of political leaders who did not conform to US interests?

Is it respect for the sovereignty of countries to force them to support US sanctions against Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela? Is it respect for the sovereignty of countries to impose sanctions on the countries? If this is not imposing Washington’s will on other countries, what is?

Is it respect for other countries to inform them that unless they do as they are told, “we will bomb you into the stone age”?

I heard Trump complain that the UN Human Rights commission had as members countries with the worst human rights records of our time, and I wondered if he was talking about the United States. Clearly, Trump, the speechwriter(s), the State Department, the National Security Council, the US Ambassador to the UN, indeed the entire administration, do not think that the endless slaughter, maiming, orphaning, widowing, and dispossessing of millions of peoples in many countries, producing waves of refugees, comprise human rights violations.

The arrogance conveyed by Trump’s speech is unprecedented.

After assurances that America respects everyone, Trump then made demand after demand and threat after threat against the sovereignty of Iran and North Korea, demanding that the rest of the world back him up.

Neither country is a threat to the US. Unlike the US and Israel, Korea has not been at war since 1953. Iran’s last war was in the 1980s when Iran was attacked by Iraq. Yet both North Korea and Iran are subjected to constant threats from the US. At the UN Trump threatened North Korea with destruction, and Washington is telling more lies about Iran in order to justify military action.

Here is what former Secretary of State Colin Powell says about how carefully Washington thinks about other peoples:

“We thought we knew what would happen in Libya. We thought we knew what would happen in Egypt. We thought we knew what would happen in Iraq, and we guessed wrong. In each one of these countries the thing we have to consider is that there is some structure that’s holding the society together. And as we learned, especially in Libya, when you remove the top and the whole thing falls apart . . . you get chaos.”

That’s what Washington does. It brings chaos to tens of millions of peoples, destroying their lives and the prospects of their countries. This is the behavior that Trump described as American compassion for others. This is what Trump says is respecting others and the sovereignty of their countries. Washington dresses up its crimes against humanity as a “war on terror.” The tens of millions of slaughtered, maimed, and displaced persons are merely “collateral damage.”

This is why the US is considered the greatest threat to peace. International polls show that the world regards the US as a much greater threat to peace than North Korea and Iran. Yet Trump described the US, universally regarded as the greatest threat to the world, as the great protector of peace. Has there ever been a greater disturber of peace?

One wonders if the rest of the world, especially Russia and China, got Washington’s message. Washington’s plan for UN “reform” is a plan to turn the organization into another instrument of US foreign policy, like NATO and the EU. The message that Trump was sent to deliver to the UN is that henceforth the UN is expected to support Washington’s foreign policy agenda. Opponents to Washington’s war policy are to be isolated and lumped together with the bad countries as defined by Washington.

In other words Washington accepts no limits on its unilateralism. This means war for every country that does not accept Washington’s hegemony."

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/09/19/54625/

Ron
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Descent into Barbarism: Trump Makes Virtue Out of War And Genocide at The UN

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47855.htm

 By Finian Cunningham

September 20, 2017 "Information Clearing House" -  It can’t get more outrageous. US President Donald Trump stood in front of the United Nations and openly threatened unilateral war and genocide. It’s a sign of the times that such criminal rhetoric is so casually spouted by the world’s biggest military state.

When American leaders address the UN General Assembly, people are generally used to hearing a litany of falsehoods about world events and narcissistic deceptions over America’s global role.

But when Trump made his debut speech on Tuesday, it marked, in addition to the usual American delusions, an unprecedented embrace of criminal militarism.

The nadir in his 40-minute rant came when Trump said the US would “totally destroy” North Korea – if it threatened America or its allies. The qualifier is a threadbare legal justification. It’s also just a cynical excuse for American aggression.

“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” said Trump. Mocking North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, he added: “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”

    ‘Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime’ – Trump on Kim Jong Un https://t.co/YWHAISNdPopic.twitter.com/qp4lEx1TdG
    — RT (@RT_com) September 19, 2017

Trump also called for forceful confrontation – regime change – against Iran, which he vilified as a “corrupt, murderous dictatorship.” He made similar veiled threats against Venezuela and its “socialist dictator” President Nicolas Maduro.

International war crimes lawyer Christopher Black said Trump’s speech amounted to a stunning self-indictment. The Canadian-based attorney said the American president’s words were a shockingly explicit repudiation of UN principles and international law on several counts.

With regard to North Korea, Black said: “The US president is threatening aggression under the false guise of ‘defense.' By openly stating the US will act alone to use military force is a violation of the United Nations’ Charter. Such unilateral use of military force is also a violation of the Nuremberg principles which condemned Nazi Germany for promulgating similar baseless justifications for its aggression.”

The lawyer also added that Trump’s warning to “totally destroy North Korea is advocating the genocide of an entire people.” Says Black: “Any military response to any attack has to be proportional – just enough to stop the attack. Trump’s stated objective to wipe the North Korean state and its people from the face of the earth is the crime of genocide under international law.”

It should be deeply troubling that the supposed leader of the world’s most powerful country so openly and disgustingly makes a virtue of barbarism. As American writer Tom Feeley succinctly described Trump’s diatribe at the UN: “An ignorant savage who spewed hatred all over the nations of the world.”

No wonder Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping opted to skip Trump’s landmark speech. So too did German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It’s amazing how anyone could sit through such torturous distortions. In a sane world, someone should have slapped handcuffs on Trump and hauled him off to a criminal court.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was also absent. While the North Korean ambassador walked out of the General Assembly chamber as Trump was taking the podium for his address.

When Trump declared his criminal intent toward North Korea there were audible gasps of disquiet among the hundreds of delegates. Several times during Trump’s tirade, the White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was seen covering his face with his hand or shifting uncomfortably in his seat. The body language spoke of shameful “embarrassment” – a word that Trump, ironically, used twice during his address referring disparagingly to others.

Anyone with a normal cognition of recent world events had to have cringed at almost every sentence uttered by Trump. It says something that the few delegates who appeared happy with Trump’s harping included Israel’s premier Benjamin Netanyahu and the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia – two actual rogue states that were unsurprisingly left out of Trump’s harangue.

Even the US media seemed embarrassed by the president’s boorish and bloodcurdling tone.

Pundits on CNN were staggered by Trump’s threats of annihilation toward North Korea. The New York Times called it “a bellicose debut” while the Washington Post said Trump’s “bellicosity and swagger” was “an incoherent mess.” Admittedly, those news outlets have been opposed to Trump’s presidency all the way since his election. But there was a different quality to their reaction to his UN speech - one of aghast disbelief that an American president could be so uncouth and unabashedly criminal in what he was advocating.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif blasted Trump for “ignorant hate speech” which, he said, was unworthy of a considered response.

Zarif is right. The torrent of falsehoods and delusions that Trump verbalized are hardly worth rebutting in detail, so crass were they in their upside-down view of the world. It’s so unhinged, it’s beyond argumentation and reason.

But let’s do a few illustrative choice quotes where irony is dead as a rock.

Trump said: “Rogue regimes represented in this body not only support terrorists but threaten other nations and their own people with the most destructive weapons known to humanity.”

That’s cloying, considering the recent reports of the American CIA allegedly funneling $2.2 billion worth of weapons to terrorist groups in Syria to overthrow the elected government of President Bashar Assad. And considering that Trump in front of 193 nations was threatening North Korea with “total destruction.”

Trump made a dig at Russia and China when he said: “We must reject threats to sovereignty, from the Ukraine to the South China Sea. We must uphold respect for law, respect for borders, and respect for culture, and the peaceful engagement these allow.”

Eh, this sanctimonious advice from the leader of a country that has subverted the sovereignty and borders of more nations than any other in history, including that of Ukraine where Washington violently installed a neo-Nazi regime in February 2014. American aerial bombing of numerous countries simultaneously, including Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, is a curious “respect for borders, sovereignty, and law.”

Trump talks about the “scourge of rogue regimes” without a hint of self-awareness about his own country’s depredations or of its Israeli and Saudi allies. He said: “The scourge of our planet today is a small group of rogue regimes that violate every principle on which the United Nations is based. They respect neither their own citizens nor the sovereign rights of their countries.”

Finally, perhaps the crowning absurdity was this: “The United States of America has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world, and the greatest defenders of sovereignty, security, and prosperity for all.”

Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama and other US presidents were also remarkable for their skill at spouting similar distortions and delusions. In that regard, Trump’s bravura nonsense was more of the same ridiculous “American exceptionalism.”

But setting Trump’s speech apart was his flagrant embrace of criminal militarism as a matter of US foreign policy, and his nauseating invocation of genocide in a war on North Korea.

Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
More Thoughts on Trump’s UN Declaration of War Against Iran and North Korea

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47853.htm

 By Paul Craig Roberts

September 20, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - Trump’s UN speech makes it clear that Trump’s presidency, in terms of his campaign promise to remove Washington from the “policeman of the world” role, exit the Middle East, and repair the damaged relations with Russia, is over. The CIA and the military/security complex are in full control of the US government. Trump has accepted his captivity and his assigned role as the enforcer of Washington’s hegemony over every other country. Washington uber alles is the only foreign policy that Washington pursues.

At the UN Trump actually threatened to wipe North Korea off of the face of the earth. He added to this threat threats against Venezuela (http://stephenlendman.org/2017/09/trump-threatens-venezuela/) and Iran. He demonized these countries as “rogue states,” but it is Washington that is playing that role. Washington has destroyed in whole or part eight countries in the young 21st century and has 3 to 5 more in its crosshairs.

One question is: why did not the UN audience shout Trump down, a man standing before them telling obvious lies? The answer, of course, is money. The US taxpayers pay roughly one-quarter of the UN’s annual budget, leaving the other 130+ countries a light load. Washington is succeeding in driving the world to Armageddon, because the world’s leaders prefer money to truth, to justice, to survival. The UN diplomats see in their cooperation with Washington the opportunity to make money by sharing in the West’s exploitation of their own countries.

Washington, absorbed in its effort to destroy Syria, left it to its Saudi Arabian puppet to destroy Yemen. The Saudi autocracy, a major sponsor with the US of terrorism, has done a good job, thanks to US supplying the weapons and to the US refueling the Saudi attack airplanes. This totally gratuitous war has helped to maximize the profits of the American military/security complex, a collection of evil never before present on the face of the earth. UNICEF reports that one million Yemeni children will be the victims of “American compassion” of which Trump bragged in the CIA’s UN speech.

One wonders if the Russians and Chinese are so absorbed in getting rich like America’s One Percent that they are unaware that they are on the list of countries to be eliminated for not accepting Washington’s hegemony. Really, where was the Russian government when Washington overthrew the Ukranian government? It was at a sports event. And I call Americans insouciant. Where was the Russian government? How could it have not known?

To be frank. The point is this. Unless Russia and China can take out the US, the US will take out Russia and China. The only question is who strikes first. The only way to avoid this is for Russia and China to surrender and accept Washington’s hegemony. This is the firm undeviating path on which the neoconservatives, the CIA, and the military/security complex have set the United States. The entire point of North Korea is US nuclear missiles on China’s border. The entire point of Iran is US nuclear missiles on Russia’s border.

As far as I can ascertain, hardly anyone is aware that Armageddon is just around the corner. There is no protest from the Western presstitutes, a collection of whores. In the US the only protests are against ancient “civil war” statues, which the ignorant rabble say are symbols of black slavery. There is no peace movement and no peace marches. In London the transgendered and the radical feminists are protesting one another, engaging in fist fights in Hyde Park. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4891484/Fists-fly-politically-correct-rally.html No one seems to have any awareness.

In US online propaganda websites such as Americans for Limited Government—funded by who? serving who?—endorse Trump’s destabilizing UN speech as a non-threat to world peace:

“President Trump has provided a cogent and inspiring defense of America and the American constitutional system of governance to the world not as imposition but an example to be followed, while at the same time respecting the sovereignty of other nations. However, the President also made it clear to those nations that threaten humanity with nuclear destruction [which Washington has done to N. Korea and Iran] that the United States will not be held hostage, and continuing down their current paths guarantees their annihilation. While many will focus on Trump’s threat to North Korea and Iran, the real focus of his speech is that it is a call to all nations to embrace their own sovereignty without threatening world peace.”

I have never in my long life read such a misrepresentation of a speech. The United States has become the complete propaganda state. No truth ever emerges.

It is only the US government, which is not a government of the people, that has ever threatened another country with total destruction as Trump did to North Korea in the CIA’s UN speech.

This is a first. It trumps Adolf Hitler. The US has become the 4th Reich. It is doubtful that the world will survive the foreign policy of the United States of America.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   

Group: Professor
Hero Member
*****

Posts: 2502
Everyman decries immorality
Russian special forces repel a US-planned attack in Syria, denounce the USA and issue a stark warning

http://thesaker.is/russian-special-forces-repel-a-us-commanded-attack-in-syria-denounce-the-usa-and-issue-a-stark-warning/

Something rather unprecedented just happened in Syria: US backed “good terrorist” forces attempted a surprise attack against Syrian government forces stationed to the north and northeast of the city of Hama.  What makes this attack unique is that it took place inside a so-called “de-escalation zone” and that it appears that one of the key goals of the attack was to encircle in a pincer-movement and subsequently capture a platoon of Russian military police officers deployed to monitor and enforce the special status of this zone.  The Russian military police forces, composed mainly of soldiers from the Caucasus region, fought against a much larger enemy force and had to call for assistance.  For the first time, at least officially, Russian special operations forces were deployed to rescue and extract their comrades.  At the same time, the Russians sent in a number of close air support aircraft who reportedly killed several hundred “good” terrorists and beat back the attack (Russian sources speak of the destruction of 850 fighters, 11 tanks, three infantry fighting vehicles, 46 armed pickup trucks, five mortars, 20 freighter trucks and 38 ammo supply points; you can see photos of the destroyed personnel and equipment here).  What also makes this event unique is the official reaction of the Russians to this event.

Head of the Main Operations Department at Russia’s General Staff Colonel General Sergei Rudskoi declared that:

    “Despite agreements signed in Astana on September 15, gunmen of Jabhat al-Nusra and joining them units that don’t want to comply with the cessation of hostilities terms, launched a large-scale offensive against positions of government troops north and northeast of Hama in Idlib de-escalation zone from 8 am on September 19 (…) According to available data, the offensive was initiated by American intelligence services to stop a successful advance of government troops east of Deir ez-Zor“.

Today, other Russian officials have added a not-so-veiled threat to this accusation.  The Russian Defense Ministry’s spokesman, Major General Igor Konashenkov has declared that:

    Russia unequivocally told the commanders of US forces in Al Udeid Airbase (Qatar) that it will not tolerate any shelling from the areas where the SDF are stationed (…)  Fire from positions in regions [controlled by the SDF] will be suppressed by all means necessary.

This is unprecedented on many levels.  First, the Russians clearly believe that this attempt to kill or capture a platoon of the Russian military police was planned by the United States.  The fact that they are making this accusation officially shows the degree of irritation felt by the Russians about the duplicity of the Americans.  Second, this is the first time, at least to my knowledge, that Russian Spetsnaz forces had to be sent in to rescue a surrounded Russian subunit.  All Spetsnaz operators survived, but three of them were wounded in the operation (the Russians are not saying how badly).  The close air support by very low flying SU-25 aircraft was obviously coordinated by Spetsnaz forward air controllers and probably saved the day.  In other words, this was a close call and things could have ended much more badly (just imagine what the Takfiri crazies would have done, on video, to any captured Russian serviceman!).  Finally, a US-organized attack on what was supposed to be a “de-confliction” zone combined with an attempt to capture Russian soldiers raises the bar for American duplicity to a totally new level.

The big question now is “do the Russians mean it?” or are they just whining with real determination to hit back if needed.

There are a couple of problems here.  First, objectively, the Russian contingent in Syria is a tiny one if compared to the immense power of CENTCOM, NATO and the ever-present Israelis.  Not only that, but in any US-Russian confrontation, Russia as a country is objectively the weaker side by any measure except a full-out nuclear exchange.  So the Russians are not in a position of force.  Furthermore, for historical and cultural reasons, Russians are much more concerned by the initiation of any incident which could lead to all-out war than the Americans who always fight their wars in somebody else’s country. This might seem paradoxical, but the Russians fear war but they are ready for it.  In contrast to the Russians, the Americans don’t fear war, but neither are they ready for it.  In practical terms this means that an American miscalculation could very well lead to a Russian military response which would stun the Americans and force them to enter an escalatory spiral which nobody would control.

Remember how Hillary promised that she would unilaterally impose a so-called “no-fly” zone over Syria?  She promised not only to deploy US aircraft above Russian forces in Syria, but she also promised that she would force the Russian Aerospace forces out of the Syrian skies.  Thank God, this crazy witch was not elected, but it appears that folks with the same arrogant and,frankly, completely irresponsible point of view are now back in power under Trump.

My fear now is that the incompetent, arrogant, not too bright and generally ignorant commanders at the Pentagon and the CIA will simply ignore clear warning signs coming from the Russians, including the public announcement that the Kremlin has given the authority to use force to protect Russian personnel to the local Russian commanders in Syria.  In plain English, this means that if they are attacked the Russians in Syria do not need to consult with Moscow before using force to protect themselves.  By the way, such rules of engagement are pretty common, there is nothing earth shattering here, but the fact that they were made public is, again, a message to the AngloZionist and the “good” terrorist they use to try to conquer Syria.

This time around we (the world) were lucky.  The Syrians fought hard and the “good” terrorists were probably surprised by the ruthless determination of the Russian military police forces (in reality, mostly Chechen special forces) and of the Spetsnaz operators.  It is one thing to fight Syrian conscripts, quite another to deal with these hardened warriors.  But the next time around the outcome could be different.

The bigger picture is also one which gives me a great deal of concern.  The Syrians, with Iranian, Hezbollah and Russian help, have freed Deir ez-Zor and have crossed the Euphrates river and are moving further East.  In plain English this means that the US and Daesh have lost the war and that the last region of Syrian from which the AngloZionists can hope to partition the country (their current “plan B”) and establish a permanent US military presence is now threatened by the Syrian advance.  The distance between the US forces currently deployed in northeastern Syria and Syrian, Iranian, Hezbollah and Russian forces is becoming shorter and shorter each day.  I can just imagine how, say, Iranian or Hezbollah forces which are already “smelling” the nearby presence of US forces are drooling with hunger for the moment they will finally be able to get their hands on their old and most hated foe.  I feel sincerely sorry for the first US unit to make contact with the Iranians or Hezbollah forces.

Right now the Americans are hiding behind the Kurds, but sooner or later the Iranians or Hezbollah will find them.  As for the Kurds, their situation in Syria is precarious, to put it mildly: they are surrounded on all sides by the Turks, the Syrians and the Iranians and their only more or less stable zone of control is in Iraq.  The Americans understand that perfectly, hence their desperate attempts to stop the Syrians.

This is a very dangerous situation: even though CENTCOM and NATO are by far the “biggest guys on the block”, in Syria the Americans are cornered, their corner is shrinking fast and it remains entirely unclear how this process can be stopped.  Hence the attack on the de-confliction zone we just witnessed.

I hope that eventually the Americans will do what they did in al-Taif and simply pack, declare victory and leave.  That would be the only rational thing to do.  But after listening to Trump at the UN I don’t get the feeling that being rational is at the top of the US priority list.  That’s all rather frightening.

The Saker



---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
Pages: 1 ... 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 [90] 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100
« previous next »


 

Home Help Search Login Register
Theme © PopularFX | Based on PFX Ideas! | Scripts from iScript4u 2024-03-29, 05:28:08