People of the Keys!

Don Quixote-The Crazy Crusader

First Published January 1973 by David Berg

Don Quixote de la Mancha, the amusing, crazily crusading hero and title character of Miguel de Cervantes' early 17th century literary classic, was a caricatured figure of mingled fun and pathos. This gallivanting knight out of time with his generation was so demented he thought he was still living in the days of ancient chivalry. He rode around gallantly on his old nag, in a patchwork suit of armor, with a pot for a helmet, followed by his fat and fuming faithful "squire," Sancho Panza, riding on a donkey.

Sancho was gravely concerned for his odd master's safety during such ridiculous exploits as challenging windmills (whom Don Quixote thought to be giants) to battle, rescuing fair ladies whom he supposed to be in distress, and residing in an old inn he imagined to be a castle. Dear Quixote was really very noble, goodhearted and well-meaning, though somewhat misguided by his dementia and delusions of grandeur.

The book is now considered a masterpiece and the world's first novel. It has been translated into more languages than any other book in the world except the Bible. Its first English translation was published in 1612, only one year after the world-famed King James Bible. Set in Cervantes' native Spain long after the Crusades were over, Don Quixote revives the crusading spirit, the search for meaning and purpose in life, the nature and reality of truth, the relativity of judgment, and values and innersprings of character. It constantly delves beneath the surface of appearances and experience for a deeper significance and conveys an all-pervading sense of the frailties of humanity.

Don Quixote has even inspired movies, such as The Man of La Mancha and The Adventures of Don Quixote. While viewing the end of the latter on TV, I was suddenly struck by the reaction of Quixote's followers to his return to sanity on his deathbed. A poor young girl asks him sadly, "But how could you have been insane when you were so beautiful, so good and so poetic?"-To which he wanly replies, "I suppose wise madness is better than foolish sanity!" At that, the first few stanzas of the following poem came to me. The rest came later that same night.

He lived in a world of fantasy
Where all were mad but he.
He lived in a world of madness
Where he alone was free!

He lived in a world of madness
Where only he was sane.
He brought them joy and gladness;
They only brought him pain.

Where happiness is madness,
'Tis wisdom in disguise.
Where sanity is sadness,
'Tis folly to be wise.

Oh, give me a world of madness,
If madness is to be glad!
I'd rather be happy in madness,
Than only be sane and sad.

They tell me my goodness is madness;
I should seek after worldly gain!
But I tell them their saneness is sadness,
And it brings to so many such pain.

It's their whole world that's in madness!
'Tis their whole world that's insane!
I'd rather have joy in my gladness
Than their sanity, sorrow and pain.

They live in a world full of madness,
It was he that was really sane.
For our Don Quixote had gladness
In spite of their sorrow and pain.

This world full of violence and madness,
So violent and mad and insane-
Would you rather his joy, or their sadness?
Would you rather his bliss, or their pain?

They like to be rich and be churchy
And wage their cruel wars without end.
Don't let their pollution besmirch me!
I'd far rather heal and to mend.

Yes, I'd rather be happy in Jesus,
Than sane as the Devil and bad.
If it's madness of spirit that frees us,
I'd rather be mad and be glad!

Their world may be sane but temporal-
While mine is unseen but more real!
They call me insane and immoral
In this madness of gladness I feel.

But I say it is they who are crazy,
And it's I who have reality!
It is they who are mad and amaze me,
For mine's for eternity!

It's they who are living in madness! It's they who are really insane!
It's I who have Jesus and gladness,
And I'll have it again and again!

Give me trips in the spirit that thrill me,

And a mind that with visions God blows!
Their world of killing just chills me!
I like living where anything goes!

For only in realms of the spirit
Can you enjoy heavenly scenes.
That heavenly sound, can you hear it?
Do you know what such ecstasy means?

P.S.:
So wee words of wisdom have come from my pen,
Though you think my madness be full to the brim!
For the foolishness of God is wiser than men!
And this world's wisdom is foolishness to Him! (1 Corinthians 1:25; 3:19).

***

WorldNetDaily

No further! Christians draw battle line in culture war

Declaration warns of civil disobedience over life, marriage, religious liberty

Posted: November 23, 2009

By Drew Zahn

Chuck Colson, among other religious leaders, announcing the Manhattan Declaration

Over 150 Orthodox, Catholic and evangelical Christian leaders have signed the Manhattan Declaration, a pledge in defense of life, religious liberty and traditional marriage, a line in the sand of the culture war warning that Christians will resort to civil disobedience if necessary rather than retreat from these three moral principles.

"The Manhattan Declaration is a wake-up call - a call to conscience - for the church," writes Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries and co-author of the declaration. "It is also crystal-clear message to civil authorities that we will not, under any circumstances, stand idly by as our religious freedom comes under assault."

According to ManhattanDeclaration.org, over 47,000 others in the last few days have added their signatures to the list of 152 Christian leaders who have committed to the pledge.

The website states that the declaration calls upon all fellow citizens to join in defending "fundamental truths about justice and the common good," namely:

The sanctity of human life

The dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife

The rights of conscience and religious liberty.

"Inasmuch as these truths are foundational to human dignity and the wellbeing of society, they are inviolable and nonnegotiable," the website states. "Because they are increasingly under assault from powerful forces in our culture, we are compelled today to speak out forcefully in their defense, and to commit ourselves to honoring them fully no matter what pressures are brought upon us and our institutions to abandon or compromise them."

The language of the Manhattan Declaration itself, however, is even more bold:

"We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences to affirm our right - and, more importantly, to embrace our obligation - to speak and act in defense of these truths," the declaration states. "We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence."

At a D.C. press conference last week, Dr. Robert George of Princeton University, one of three leaders who drafted the declaration, affirmed that if laws require Christian doctors and hospitals to perform abortion or euthanasia, if the government demands churches bless homosexual 'marriage' or any other dictates attempt to force Christians to act against their moral convictions, there will be no compromise. Recalling the actions of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. years before, George said there may even be call for Christians to engage in civil disobedience:

"We hope and pray that it does not come to this," George said, "that the impositions on conscience will not require anybody to practice civil disobedience. But if it comes to it, as it came to it for Dr. King on the great issue of racial justice, then we have to be prepared to make sacrifices."

Evangelical leader Chuck Colson, who with Dr. Robert George and Beeson Divinity School Professor Timothy George constituted the document's drafting committee, explained on Fox News network's "Huckabee" the significance of the declaration. Video of his interview with show host and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee can be seen below:

"We've always said that we will never compromise what we believe," Colson said, "but this is the first time that all of us have come together across confessional lines and said, 'We're prepared to pay the price. You cannot cross this line, otherwise we will pay the price - we will suffer if we must to avoid doing evil.'"

"Suffering,' being what?" Huckabee asked.

"'Suffering' being prison, loss of your tax exemption," Colson answered. "We're saying, 'If we're a doctor and we're told to perform an abortion or to refer someone for an abortion, we will refuse.

And if you want to put us in prison, put us in prison.'"

Huckabee followed up by asking, "What about hate crimes?"

"Hate-crimes legislation - we're already seeing what this has done in Europe and done in Canada. Human-rights commissions are hauling pastors in," Colson said. "If someone walks in our church and says, 'You preach a sermon on [homosexuality], we're going to arrest you as a violation of the hate crimes,' then they'll have to arrest us."

Specifically, the text of the Manhattan Declaration declares:

We will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia or any other antilife act

Nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriage or the equivalent

[Nor] refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.

The authors and original signatories of the Manhattan Declaration are now inviting others who will agree to the pledge to sign the declaration as well.

As Colson told Huckabee, "If you continue to assault the family, continue to assault life, continue to assault our liberties, we will ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar's, but under no circumstance will we render to Caesar what is God's. So we have taken a very firm line. We've drawn a line, and we want true Christians to stand up and defend what we believe now."

***

What If Jesus Meant All That Stuff?

By Shane Claiborne, Esquire, November 18, 2009

This radical Christian's ministry for the poor, The Simple Way, has gotten him in some trouble with his fellow Evangelicals. We asked him to address those who don't believe.

To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.

Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.

The other night I headed into downtown Philly for a stroll with some friends from out of town. We walked down to Penn's Landing along the river, where there are street performers, artists, musicians. We passed a great magician who did some pretty sweet tricks like pour change out of his iPhone, and then there was a preacher. He wasn't quite as captivating as the magician. He stood on a box, yelling into a microphone, and beside him was a coffin with a fake dead body inside. He talked about how we are all going to die and go to hell if we don't know Jesus.

Some folks snickered. Some told him to shut up. A couple of teenagers tried to steal the dead body in the coffin. All I could do was think to myself, I want to jump up on a box beside him and yell at the top of my lungs, "God is not a monster."

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.

At one point Gandhi was asked if he was a Christian, and he said, essentially, "I sure love Jesus, but the Christians seem so unlike their Christ." A recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much of that reputation is well deserved. That's the ugly stuff. And that's why I begin by saying that I'm sorry.

Now for the good news. I want to invite you to consider that God really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit really are beautiful things like peace, patience, kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the ugly things that have come to characterize religion, or politics, for that matter. The Bible that I read says that God did not send Jesus to condemn the world but to save it... it was because "God so loved the world." That is the God I know, and I long for others to know.

For those of you who are on a sincere spiritual journey, I hope that you do not reject Christ because of Christians. We have always been a messed-up bunch, and somehow God has survived the embarrassing things we do in His name. At the core of our "Gospel" is the message that Jesus came "not [for] the healthy... but the sick."

God may indeed be evident in a priest, but God is just as likely to be at work through a Samaritan or a prostitute. In fact the Scripture is brimful of God using folks like a lying prostitute named Rahab, an adulterous king named David... at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey. Some say God spoke to Balaam through his ass and has been speaking through asses ever since. So if God should choose to use us, then we should be grateful but not think too highly of ourselves. And if upon meeting someone we think God could never use, we should think again. After all, Jesus says to the religious elite who looked down on everybody else: "The tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom ahead of you." And we wonder what got him killed?

I have a friend in the UK who talks about "dirty theology"--that we have a God who is always using dirt to bring life and healing and redemption, a God who shows up in the most unlikely and scandalous ways. After all, the whole story begins with God reaching down from heaven, picking up some dirt, and breathing life into it. At one point, Jesus takes some mud, spits in it, and wipes it on a blind man's eyes to heal him. (The priests and producers of anointing oil were not happy that day.)

In fact, the entire story of Jesus is about a God who did not just want to stay "out there" but who moves into the neighborhood, a neighborhood where folks said, "Nothing good could come." It is this Jesus who was accused of being a glutton and drunkard and rabble-rouser for hanging out with all of society's rejects, and who died on the imperial cross of Rome reserved for bandits and failed messiahs. This is why the triumph over the cross was a triumph over everything ugly we do to ourselves and to others. It is the final promise that love wins.

It is this Jesus who was born in a smelly manger in the middle of a genocide. That is the God that we are just as likely to find in the streets as in the sanctuary, who can redeem revolutionaries and tax collectors, the oppressed and the oppressors... a God who is saving some of us from the ghettos of poverty, and some of us from the ghettos of wealth.

In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion--I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend if I thought he was going to hell. I said, "I hope not. It will be hard to enjoy heaven without you." If those of us who believe in God do not believe God's grace is big enough to save the whole world... well, we should at least pray that it is.

***

Yeshiva World News

Deputy Defense Minister Envisions a Possible Armageddon

November 24, 2009

Deputy Minister of Defense (Labor) Matan Vilnai, a retired IDF major-general, told the media on Tuesday that he views the next war that Israel will face will engulf the entire nation, not just one of her borders.

Speaking at a northern area ceremony, the deputy minister stated that the strength of the residents of the State of Israel will be put to the test, and the nation's endurance will undoubtedly to some extent determine the outcome of the conflict.

Vilnai's words are well in line with predictions from senior military intelligence assessments, all pointing to a multi-faceted war, one that will involved Hamas along the southern border, Hizbullah along the northern border, and the enemies will be supported on all fronts by Iran and Syria, who play a major role in arming and training Hizbullah and Hamas, working tenaciously towards actualizing Israel's destruction.

Intelligence assessments speak of rockets being launched into the homefront, with recent evaluations of the situation stating that rockets today can easily reach the heart of Tel Aviv, including Ben-Gurion International Airport.

(Yechiel Spira - YWN Israel)

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WorldNetDaily

'2009 first year of global governance'

See 1st president of EU announce the official goal

Posted: November 21, 2009

In accepting his appointment as the first president of the European Union, Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy announced that "global governance" is only way to address the crises that beset the planet.

"We're living through exceptionally difficult times - the financial crisis and its dramatic impact on employment and budgets, the climate crisis which threatens our very survival, a period of anxiety, uncertainty and lack of confidence," he said in his maiden press conference. "Yet these problems can be overcome through a joint effort between our countries. Two-thousand and nine is also the first year of global governance with the establishment of the G20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step toward the global management of our planet."

Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, previously warned the dangers of a U.N. treaty proposal promoted by President Obama would lead to world government. Now, the new leader of the EU has seemingly affirmed that as a goal.

The climate change conference in Copenhagen is scheduled to begin Dec. 7.

The EU summit established under the Lisbon Treaty held a meeting attended by heads of state and government from 29 EU member countries and unanimously chose Van Rompuy as president.

Van Rompuy told reporters after the meeting that he will make EU unity a priority, adding that the most urgent issues are environmental protection and a stable job market.

He will resign as Belgian prime minister and assume the 30-month presidency from Jan. 1 next year.

Former EU Trade Commissioner Catherine Ashton of the United Kingdom was also chosen as the EU's new foreign affairs chief.

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Telegraph.co.uk

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

By James Delingpole Politics

November 20th, 2009

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files - including 1079 emails and 72 documents - you realise just why the boffins at CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be "the greatest in modern science". These alleged emails - supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory - suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

"In an odd way this is cheering news."

But perhaps the most damaging revelations - the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph's MPs' expenses scandal - are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters.

Manipulation of evidence:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next - time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I'll be tempted to beat - the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

......Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back - I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to "contain" the putative "MWP", even if we don't yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back....

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

"This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the "peer-reviewed literature". Obviously, they found a solution to that - take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board...What do others think?"

"I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.""It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I've had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !"

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September - I wrote the story up here as "How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie" - CRU's researchers were exposed as having "cherry-picked" data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. CRU was also the organisation which - in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community - spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that's sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore's Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called "sceptical" view - which is some of us have been expressing for quite some time: see, for example, the chapter entitled 'Barbecue the Polar Bears' in WELCOME TO OBAMALAND: I'VE SEEN YOUR FUTURE AND IT DOESN'T WORK - is now also, thank heaven, the majority view.

Unfortunately, we've a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

But to judge by the way - despite the best efforts of the MSM not to report on it - the CRU scandal is spreading like wildfire across the internet, this shabby story represents a blow to the AGW lobby's credibility from which it is never likely to recover.

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WorldNetDaily

Senator to demand probe of global-warming 'fraud'

'They cooked the science to make this thing look as if it was settled'

Posted: November 24, 2009

By Bob Unruh

The Senate's leading global-warming skeptic says he plans to demand an investigation into the allegedly fraudulent data manipulation unveiled at a highly influential British research center, and another prominent analyst says he's heard enough and there should be prosecutions.

University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit

As WND reported, documents and e-mails retrieved by a computer hacker from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit indicate top climate-change scientists have manipulated data to hide cooling trends and worked together to marginalize scientists with opposing views.

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., a guest on the Washington Times morning radio show, said he knew scientists were "cooking" information years ago. The e-mails, he said, were the proof, and now something needs to be done.

A Washington Times editorial said the content of the e-mails "could end the academic careers of many prominent professors. Academics who have purposely hidden data, destroyed information and doctored their results have committed scientific fraud."

"It is pretty serious," Inhofe said. "And since, you know, Barbara Boxer is the chairman and I'm the ranking member on Environment and Public Works, if nothing happens in the next seven days when we go back into session a week from today that would change this situation, I will call for an investigation.

"This thing is serious," he continued. "You think about the literally millions of dollars that have been thrown away on some of this stuff that they came out with."

Inhofe said he would ask for an investigation into the United Nations and its climate-change committee "on the way they cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not."

Lord Christopher Monckton, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's key science adviser, wrote at Pajamas Media that society should jump directly to prosecutions of those responsible.

He earlier warned that an upcoming global warming summit in Copenhagen is laying the groundwork for a one-world government.

He said the "scientists" delivered a "global warming" fraud.

"I am angry, and so should you be," Monckton said.

"The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the 'global warming' fraud - for fraud is what we now know it to be - tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of e-mails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world's four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant 'global warming' for 15 years - and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years," he wrote.

"In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up," he said.

"Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and 'global warming' profiteers - for that is what they are - have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the U.K. by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled.

"And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists - they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers," Monckton said.

"I have reported them to the U.K.'s Information Commissioner, with a request that he investigate their offenses and, if thought fit, prosecute," he wrote.

'Hide the decline'

One e-mail uncovered at the East Anglia center said: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd (sic) from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

Another expressed internal doubts: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."

Further, an e-mail exchange suggested the suppression of information: "Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re (Assessment Report 4)? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis."

James Delingpole wrote in a London Telegraph column the most damaging revelations from the e-mails and documents indicate climate-change scientists may have "manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause."

"And, perhaps most reprehensibly," Delingpole writes, "a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer-review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with (anthropogenic global warming) can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority."

He cites an e-mail: "This was the danger of always criticizing the skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature.' Obviously, they found a solution to that - take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board. ... What do others think?"

Myron Ebell, of the GlobalWarming.org website where "cooler heads prevail," called the e-mails "shocking."

"It's kind of interesting to learn that petty politics seems to be more prevalent in the scientific community than in the political community," he told WND.

The documents, he said, "raise a huge number of questions about the integrity of a lot of people in the alarmist community."

"What I've seen there is a very strong effort to manage the issue by scientists and not as a scientific issue. It's very improper," he said. "One of the criticisms is that we need scientists to be scientists, and policy can be handled in public debate."

Delingpole observed the world "is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore's Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called 'skeptical' view is now also the majority view."

Phil Jones, head of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, confirmed to Investigate magazine the documents appeared authentic.

Despite the advocacy of a financially vested former vice president, Al Gore, and others, public opinion about whether mankind is causing an ultimately catastrophic rise in global temperatures also is shifting.

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, has urged members of Congress to consider the joint opinion of nearly 32,000 scientists, including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s, who believe humans likely have little or nothing to do with any "global warming."

The Petition Project, launched some 10 years ago when the first few thousand signatures were gathered, has steadily grown without any special effort or campaign.

But in the last few years, and especially because of the release of Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth," the campaign has been reinvigorated.

"Mr. Gore's movie, asserting a 'consensus' and 'settled science' in agreement about human-caused global warming, conveyed the claims about human-caused global warming to ordinary moviegoers and to public-school children, to whom the film was widely distributed. Unfortunately, Mr. Gore's movie contains many very serious incorrect claims which no informed, honest scientist could endorse," project spokesman and founder Art Robinson has told WND.

Robinson, a research professor of chemistry, cofounded the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine with Linus Pauling in 1973, and later cofounded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.

Paul cited the petition results in his statement to Congress.

"Our energy policies must be based upon scientific truth - not fictional movies or self-interested international agendas," Paul said. "They should be based upon the accomplishments of technological free enterprise that have provided our modern civilization, including our energy industries. That free enterprise must not be hindered by bogus claims about imaginary disasters."

The petition states: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

Robinson has warned of serious political and economic consequences of assuming "global warming" results from mankind's actions.

"The campaign to severely ration hydrocarbon energy technology has now been markedly expanded," he said. "In the course of this campaign, many scientifically invalid claims about impending climate emergencies are being made. Simultaneously, proposed political actions to severely reduce hydrocarbon use now threaten the prosperity of Americans and the very existence of hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries," he told WND.

Warned Paul, "Above all, we must never forget our contract with the American people - the Constitution that provides the sole source of legitimacy of our government. That Constitution requires that we preserve the basic human rights of our people - including the right to freely manufacture, use, and sell energy produced by any means they devise - including nuclear, hydrocarbon, solar, wind, or even bicycle generators.

"While it is evident that the human right to produce and use energy does not extend to activities that actually endanger the climate of the Earth upon which we all depend, bogus claims about climate dangers should not be used as a justification to further limit the American people's freedom," Paul said.

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Telegraph.co.uk

Aliens 'already exist on earth', Bulgarian scientists claim

Aliens from outer space are already among us on earth, say Bulgarian government scientists who claim they are already in contact with extraterrestrial life.

Published: 26 Nov 2009

"Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time," Mr Filipov told Bulgarian media. Photo: GETTY IMAGES

Work on deciphering a complex set of symbols sent to them is underway, scientists from the country's Space Research Institute said.

They claim aliens are currently answering 30 questions posed to them.

Lachezar Filipov, deputy director of the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, confirmed the research.

He said the centre's researchers were analysing 150 crop circles from around the world, which they believe answer the questions.

"Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time," Mr Filipov told Bulgarian media.

"They are not hostile towards us, rather, they want to help us but we have not grown enough in order to establish direct contact with them."

Mr Filipov said that even the seat of the Catholic church, the Vatican, had agreed that aliens existed.

He said humans were not going to be able to establish contact with the extraterrestrials through radio waves but through the power of thought.

"The human race was certainly going to have direct contact with the aliens in the next 10 to 15 years," he said.

"Extraterrestrials are critical of the people's amoral behavior referring to the humans' interference in nature's processes."

The publication of the BAS researchers report concerning communicating with aliens comes in the midst of a controversy over the role, feasibility, and reform of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Last week it lead to a heated debate between Bulgaria's Finance Minister, Simeon Djankov, and President Georgi Parvanov.

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What If Jesus Meant All That Stuff?

By Shane Claiborne, Esquire, November 18, 2009

This radical Christian's ministry for the poor, The Simple Way, has gotten him in some trouble with his fellow Evangelicals. We asked him to address those who don't believe.

Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.

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We invite you to write us with any ideas, suggestions, etc. you may have. You are also invited to contact one of our mystics should you feel the need.

Until next week...

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