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So, first order of business: some fun tidbits from recent family life. Selah, for a few months now, has been a mimic.
When we lock our car, the horn honks if we hit the button twice. Whenever we do this, Selah tries to make the same sound as the car horn. If we hear a dog barking, Selah will try to mimic the dog.
It s been quite amusing. Apparently this sound-mimicry was a precursor to a language explosion, as she s been shocking us the last few days with the words she attempts to say right after we say them. This has led to a few close calls, such as Selah learning the word sheesh tonight.
Tessa, has become quite a pray-er. The other night at dinner she wanted to pray. Here is a partial list of things she told God she was thankful for: standing on the floor not spilling my drink the very very very pretty sky (incidentally a lot of things have been very very lately) Jesus Christmastime CI (her Cochlear Implant) People making my CI Being very very careful Today, we couldn t quite make out most of what she thanked God for, but we think she said our silly silly family and mommy and daddy yelling (guess we ve got something to work on .
. . ).
Stephen: well, check the picture for updates on me. You can t really tell from the picture, but I ve got highlights in my hair now. It was a (late) anniversary present for Sara, but I don t think she really cares for it.
Last for best: check out the new web album I just put up. The pictures didn t come out the greatest ever, but that s mainly because the girls can t stay still. Sara s also posted an update on Tessa s site.
Peace and Love, Step
A scene from the movie Brokedown Palace which is banned in Thailand My first impressions of Thailand even before I came here weren t that good. While I was traveling in Australia I saw the movie Bangkok Hilton starring Nicole Kidman. I don t remember much of the movie, but what stands out is Kidman going through customs in Thailand carrying someone else s bag.
She is stopped and they find drugs in the bag. It made me paranoid about never ever going to Thailand. I was afraid that someone, maybe the police, would plant drugs in my bag and that I would spend the rest of my life in the notorious Bangkok Hilton.
About two years later, I was backpacking across Asia. My itinerary included lengthy stops in many Asian countries. However, I had only allocated a short stay in Thailand.
I was still paranoid. Of course I ended up staying much longer but that is another story. For the past few months I have been visiting one of my former students in prison in Samut Prakan.
He has been telling me about life in a prison in Thailand which you can read at . I was at first horrified when I saw my student being sentenced to three years in prison. I didn t know how he would survive.
Since I have been in Thailand I have read a number of autobiographies written by foreigners in Thai prisons. They all talked about merciless beatings, gang rape, sadistic guards, murder and a lot more. However, since I have been talking to my student, I have started to see a different kind of prison.
I am not saying he is in a holiday camp as it is certainly a hard life. However, the Klong Dan Central Prison seems to be a model of a modern Thai prison. There are no daily beatings.
The guards aren t sadistic. There are no drugs in the prison. The food isn t even that bad.
I guess things have changed for the better over the years. It is also possible that some of the foreign prisoners exaggerated about their treatment in order to sell more books. Although I have found it a fascinating experience writing these prison life blogs, I don t think anything I have written here will propel a book to the top of the bestseller list.
There are no dramatic incidents. His daily life is quite uneventful. I am not saying that these foreigners lied about everything.
They were, after all, mainly locked up in high security prisons like Bang Kwan. I know I wouldn t survive there. But they have painted a pictured that has tainted the Thai people and given the world an impression that all Thailand s prisons are a hell on earth.
They are what you make of them. In the outside world we have to understand and respect the Thai culture in order to survive. From what I have heard from my student, it is much the same inside.
He said that many of the foreigners don t respect the Thai way of doing things. They want everything done their way and their demands are often unreasonable. This often then leads to tension between the different nationalities and the guards that have to deal with it.
The following account is of an average day in a Thai prison. The interview was done over the period of four weeks. You have been in prison for more than three months and you have probably settled into a routine by now.
Can you give us an idea of what an average day is like? Also, let us know how things changed for you. I was in that first cell for about 2-3 days.
I was then moved to another cell. This one was very crowded. My old school friend, who is a trustee, suggested that I should try to transfer to his cell.
To make the move, I had to bribe someone 10 packets of cigarettes. In prison, cigarettes are worth more than money and we use them to get things done. Once I arrived in the new cell, I then paid another five packets of cigarettes to the cell boss in order to have my own space on the floor.
I don t really have a lot of room. It is about the width of my shoulders and the length of my body. However, I suppose I am fortunate because about 30 people in my cell have to sleep on their side on the bare floor.
My mother sent me a mat to sleep on. We aren t allowed pillows. But, I have a pillowcase which I stuffed with spare clothes.
People start to wake up at about 5.30 a.m.
I roll up my mat and put it in the center of the room. Other people who have any bedding do the same. Some people use the toilet in the cell but the cell boss doesn t allow anyone to make a smell.
Which is understandable. So, most people wait until they are let out to go to the toilets on the ground floor. At first I was really too embarrassed to use the toilets in the cell for the first week or so.
I couldn t go with everybody watching me. But, I got used to it. They say prison changes you.
It really does. At about 6.30 a.
m. the prison guards come to do the head count. We have to sit in rows in the cell and then count off one by one.
At the moment, there are 53 prisoners in our cell which measures only 4 metres by 8 metres. Once the count has finished they let us out. Most people then rush down the stairs for the toilet and the showers.
There is always a long queue. I take my time and wait for my friends. I always do everything with my group at the same time.
Most prisoners have to line up for the five minute shower. However, as I am now a trustee myself, I am allowed to use the water tub to take a bath. For this I splash water all over my body.
Soap myself. Then rinse with more water. I then brush my teeth.
A lot of the prisoners then go to the canteen to eat the government food. I don t usually do this because it isn t always that nice. Around the prison grounds there are places where you can buy food.
For breakfast I sometimes have chicken and rice, or fish cakes or fried pork with rice. A plate of this costs about 25 baht. We use a flat plastic spoon to eat our food.
It is the kind of Chinese spoon that is used to drink the noodle soup. We are not allowed forks for obvious reasons. After we finish eating we wash our own plates and spoons and keep them in a safe place for next time.
We are not allowed to touch money. We can buy coupons with money from our prison tab. It is like a kind of bank account inside the prison.
We cannot set this up by ourselves. A relative on the outside has to do this for us and then pay money into it for us to use. If you don t have any relations then you will have a really hard life.
You need money to pay for nearly everything. There are quite a few people without any relations and I try to help as many as I can. These coupons are only valued for the day.
Unlike outside you cannot get a refund. If I buy 100 baht of coupons I have to use them all up otherwise they are wasted. The final part will be posted tomorrow.
Please visit for the background information about this story. If you can find the time, we would all appreciate it if you can send him a postcard or a new year s card. You can find the address on the above website.
Sat Dec 09, 2006 1:01 pm (GMT -5)Slouching Toward Suicide By Joseph D Hippolito | November 13, 2006 During his visit to Germany, Pope Benedict XVI stunned the world on Sept. 12 by issuing a subtle, discreet yet formidable challenge to Islam - a challenge that drew praise from various observers. The pope s rhetoric, however, contrasts with his failure to confront a more fundamental problem: the Catholic Church s willingness to concede its own worship space to Muslims, without regard for the consequences.
In Europe and the United States, Catholic authorities have encouraged the transformation of Catholic schools and churches into Muslim schools and mosques. One order of friars is helping Italian Muslims build a mosque right next to its monastery. In Belgium, meanwhile, the Catholic bishops let illegal Muslim immigrants live and worship in churches to force the government to grant amnesty.
Those same Catholic authorities would not grant similar concessions to Protestants or Eastern Orthodox, whose theologies are infinitely more similar. Given the violent, anti-Semitic and anti-Western ideology permeating contemporary Islam - as well as decades of massive Muslim immigration to Europe - the implications are obvious. While Western Europe is turning Muslim, its Christian churches are committing suicide, wrote The Brussels Journal s Paul Belien in May.
The Norwegian author Fjordman expressed the situation less dramatically but no less accurately for the same outlet in September: The ideological civil war within the West is not just between secularists and religious people; it runs straight through the Church itself. The Catholic Church s problem has its roots in an ecumenism that borders on syncretism and a sense of compassion that crosses into indulgence. Pope John Paul II set the example by praying in a Damascus mosque during his 2001 trip to the Middle East.
Cardinal Bernard Law, the former archbishop of Boston, followed the late pope s example at a suburban mosque in 2002. As the Boston Globe reported on Nov. 25, 2002, Law removed his shoes.
Then, as the imam chanted the sunset prayers, the bishop knelt with his forehead just inches from the carpet and offered praise to Allah. Afterward, Law partook of the meal that breaks the day-long Ramadan fast. I feel very much at home with my fellow fundamentalists here, Law said, who are convinced that God must be at the center of our lives.
Law s basic attitude appears to be prevailing as Catholicism declines in the West. In Detroit, Our Lady Help of the Christians Catholic Church held its final Mass on Oct. 29.
The Archdiocese of Detroit sold the church s property to the Islamic Center of North Detroit, which plans to convert the complex into a mosque, an Islamic community center and a school for the neighborhood of Bangladeshi immigrants. The archdiocese had leased another one of its properties to Muslims, the Detroit News reported Oct. 27, but did not disclose the location.
The church, built in 1923 for Polish immigrants, was serving just 124 families when it closed. The same month in Italy, the Capuchin Franciscan friars agreed to help the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy (UCOII) build a mosque in Genoa immediately adjacent to one of its monasteries. The order agreed to exchange the land for an abandoned factory that the union had planned to convert into a mosque - and even agreed to build the new mosque s foundation.
One of the deal s most vociferous opponents is Magri Alam, an Egyptian immigrant to Italy who became a conservative journalist and a passionate critic of radical Islam. In the Oct. 16 edition of the Milan daily Corriere della Sera, Alam wrote that the UCOII encourages an extremist version of the Qu ran, where Christians, Jews and Westerners are criminalized, as well as women and other Muslims who don t submit to their rule.
The union s president, Mohammed Nour Dachan, has refused to sign a document in which Muslims pledged to accept Italy s constitution, denounce terrorism and recognize Israel s right to exist. His organization also demands Islamic schools, Islamic banks and clerical supervision of textbooks, as Front Page Magazine reported in its article, How Will Rome Face Mecca? In Glasgow in 2003, Catholic officials approved attempts by Muslims to turn St.
Albert s School into an Islamic institution. More than 90 percent of the school s 360 students were Muslim. We are in favor of Muslim schools, an unidentified church spokesman told Edinburgh s The Scotsman on Nov.
23, 2003. We support faith schools across the board. In the case of St.
Albert s, we see a school in which for 95 percent of the children, the festival of Eid has more significance than Christmas or Easter. It is de facto not a Catholic school. The Catholic Establishment s indulgent sense of compassion manifests itself most powerfully in its attitude toward immigrants.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster in London, demonstrated that attitude in his May 1, 2006 sermon at Westminster Cathedral: In migrants, the Church has always contemplated the image of Christ who said, I was a stranger and you made me welcome (Matthew 25:35). Their condition is, therefore, a challenge to the faith and love of believers who are called on to heal the evils caused by migration and discover the plan God pursues through migration even when there are obvious injustices. God s appeal, made so forcefully in both the Old and the New Testaments, is for fraternity - for there to be new bonds of friendship forged between newcomer and native.
The Church does not approve of illegal immigration But nor can the Church ignore the plight among us of those who are here without legal status We stand in solidarity with you too. The Church, said Pope John Paul II in his migration day message, is the place where illegal immigrants are also recognized and welcomed as brothers and sisters. It is one of the central tasks of Christians - a constant theme of the Old and New Testaments - to offer hospitality to the exile and the stranger, seeing in him and her, the face of Christ.
Faith in the presence of Christ in the migrant leads to a conversion of mind and heart, which leads to a renewed spirit of communion. The Catholic Establishment is so infatuated with creating such a spirit that it refuses to ask immigrants even to show a fundamental respect for others, let alone to assimilate into their new societies and obey the laws. Perhaps this is most true in Belgium, where the bishops encourage illegal Muslim immigrants to take over churches in virtually every diocese.
Since the late 1990 s, Belgium s bishops have turned their churches into immigrant centers as part of a campaign to intimidate the government into granting amnesty. Such a campaign in 2000 forced the government to legalize 50,000 immigrants. In March, Belgian Home Secretary Patrick Dewael granted residency permits to 60 Muslim squatters at St.
Boniface Church in suburban Brussels after all 118 squatters went on a hunger strike. Then came the deluge. By mid-May, more than 30 Catholic churches throughout Belgium were occupied by illegal immigrants, the vast majority of them Muslim.
About 300 Africans occupied Antwerp s Magdalena Chapel; other churches had more than 700 squatters living inside. The squatters also conduct Muslim services in the churches; a banner bearing the word Allah in Arabic hung in Our Lady of Perpetual Succor Church in Brussels. Pictures from the same church showed squatters tents - gifts from Catholic relief agencies - filling floor space in the sanctuary, computer tables standing near the pulpit - and a group of people lighting a fire on the church floor.
Our Lady of Perpetual Succor has not been the only site for such activities. Father Herwig Arts, a conservative author, described the scene at Antwerp s Jesuit chapel for the daily Gazet van Antwerpen in 1998: (Immigrants) removed the tabernacle, (and) installed a television set and radios, depriving us of the opportunity to pray in our own chapel and say Mass. It has upset me very much.
For me, the place has been desecrated. I feel I cannot enter it anymore. Yet the Belgian bishops do not care about such trivia as the desecration of their own worship space.
Everybody is entitled to a good place in our society. Also illegal fugitives, said Monsignor Luc van Looy, the bishop of Ghent. Solidarity cannot be limited to one s own nation, added Cardinal Godfried Danneels, the archbishop of Brussels and Belgium s leading prelate.
As The Brussels Journal reported on May 5, Father Arts was severely criticized for his comments. Today he remains silent, as do all Catholic priests Even the Vatican supports the bishops. Monsignor Karl-Josef Rauber - the Holy See s nuncio, or diplomatic representative, to Belgium - told the leftist daily De Morgen on May 10 that the Church has always sided with the weak.
But public criticism forced Rauber s office to retreat slightly. On May 11, the Brussels daily De Standaard published this quote from Rauber s office: The nuncio cannot interfere in this issue. However, whatever the Belgian bishops say, the nuncio supports them because the bishops are wise men.
Ironically, the nuncio and the bishops are violating official church policy as expressed in paragraph 61 of the 2004 document, Erga Migrantes Caritas Christi (The Love of Christ towards Migrants): To avoid misunderstandings and confusion, and considering the religious diversity that we mutually recognize, and out of respect for sacred places and the religion of the other too, we do not consider it opportune for Christian churches, chapels, places of worship or other places reserved for evangelization and pastoral work to be made available for members of non-Christian religions. Still less should they be used to obtain recognition of demands made on the public authorities. Without papal enforcement through canon law, however, such a policy is merely ink on paper.
Benedict XVI understands that Catholicism is in trouble in Europe, Tom Bethell wrote in the October edition of The American Spectator, but has not yet shown that he has the courage to do anything about it.
Its that time of year to drag the depths of your brain and see if you can actually remember anything that was released before the last three months in an attempt to collate some kind of Best of the Year list. First up, Albums of the Year.
Albums of the Year01 Jeniferever Choose a Bright Morning 02 Thom Yorke The Eraser 03 The Futureheads News Tributes 04 Belle Sebastian The Life Pursuit 05 James Dean Bradfield The Great Western 06 TV On The Radio Return to Cookie Mountain 07 Nicky Wire I Killed the Zeitgeist 08 iLiKETRAiNS Progress Reform 09 Joanna Newsom Ys 10 Cansei De Ser Sexy CSS This year was probably the first year that I really didnt buy any singles unless they came on vinyl. So below is, firstly, a list of my Tracks of the Year. Not all of them were singles but all became available via various mediums this year, mainly the internet.
Secondly is a list of the remixes ive been spinning this year, the songs that I (hope) have been getting the dance floors going.Songs of the Year01 Foals Hummer 02 Foals Two Steps Twice 03 Youthmovie Soundtrack Straetgies The Naughtiest Girl is a Moniter 04 Hope of the States Sing It Out 05 Muse Supermassive Black Hole 06 TV on the Radio Wolf Like Me 07 Tired Irie Like. Gentle Men 08 The Peth Lets Go Fucking Mental 09 MSTRKRFT Easy Love 10 Goose Black Gloves Remixes of the Year01 Robbie Williams Lovelight (Soulwax Ravelight Remix Dub) 02 Klaxons Atlantis to Interzone (Crystal Castles Remix) 03 The Futureheads Fallout (Kosmische) 04 Bloc Party Helicopter (Weird Science Remix feat.
Peaches) 05 Muse Supermassive Black Hole (Phones Control Voltage Mix) 06 Metric Monster Hospital (MSTRKRFT Remix) 07 The Gossip Standing in the Way of Control (Soulwax Remix) 08 Placebo Because I Want You (Ladytron Club Mix) 09 Franz Ferdinand The Fallen (Ruined by Justice) 10 Teah Yeah Yeahs Cheated Hearts (Peaches Remix) UPDATE: Lists Of The Year #2: Ian now available.
Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) The House of Representatives passed legislation that contains about $38 billion in corporate and individual tax breaks, allows expanded oil and gas drilling off U.
S. coasts and prevents a fee cut for doctors who are paid by Medicare.
Rejected by voters and limping off stage, the Republican-led House on Friday passed a sweeping bill reviving expired tax breaks and protecting doctors from a big cut in Medicare payments.
Middle Bucks Institute of Technology students this year will dedicate the house they are building to their teacher who died in September on his way to school.
WASHINGTON The U.S.
House Friday night passed a massive tax bill that makes it possible to continue deducting state sales taxes from this year s federal return.
BATON ROUGE - The House of Representatives could be called upon Sunday to vote on pumping more than $2 billion into the budget. Gov.
Kathleen Blanco had little trouble Saturday getting two administration-friendly committees to approve her package granting pay raises and tax cuts.
U.S.
Rep. Joel Hefley delivered a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives for the last time Thursday, sounding a familiar theme by challenging his colleagues to beef up ethics rules.
A fatal fire at 1517 Foulkrod Street in Frankford claimed the life of an elderly woman Sunday morning.
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