Topping up the European population with 50 million African immigrants
MORE than 50 million African workers are to be invited to Europe in a far-reaching secretive migration deal, the Daily Express can reveal today.
A controversial taxpayer-funded "job centre" opened in Mali this week is just the first step towards promoting "free movement of people in Africa and the EU".
Brussels economists claim Britain and other EU states will "need" 56 million immigrant workers between them by 2050 to make up for the "demographic decline" due to falling birth rates and rising death rates across Europe.
[ There are too many people in the world, and while Europeans limit their births (usually for decadent reasons rather than environmentalist) they are replaced by other races. Better that Europeans had kept their numbers and cut aid to the Africans. Now they have effectively adopted Africans in place of their own kind. ]
nationalist on 10.12.08 @ 09:27 AM CST [more..]
Usury is a sin
Let us make no bones about it. This financial crisis is a major spiritual crisis. It is the crisis of a society that worships at the temples of consumption, and that has isolated and often abandoned millions of consumers now trapped on a treadmill of debt. It is the crisis of a society that values the capital gains of the rentier more highly than the rights of people to a home, or an education or health. It is the crisis of a society that idolises money above love, community, wellbeing and the sustainability of our planet. And it is a crisis, in my view, for faith organisations that have effectively colluded in this idolatry, by tolerating the sin of usury.
I define usury as the exalting of money values over human and environmental values; of creating money at no cost and lending at rates of interest intended to accumulate reserves of unearned income. Of reaping that which one did not sow.
Christians began to dilute the sin of usury as far back as the 1500s. John Eck, supported by the Fugger banking family, in his book Tractates contractu quinque de centum (1515), defended 5% as an acceptable rate of interest as long as the borrower and lender mutually agreed to the loan. Martin Luther took exception to this laxity, and raged that "heathen were able, by the light of reason, to conclude that a usurer is a double-dyed thief and murderer. We Christians, however, hold them in such honour that we fairly worship them for the sake of their money ... Meanwhile, we hang the small thieves ... Little thieves are put in the stocks, great thieves go flaunting in gold and silk."
[ The Bible has been interpreted in such a way as to allow usury. Had paganism prevailed this would have been far less likely - but many Christians like this author and Martin Luther know that allowing usury amounts to giving money lenders the opportunity to acquire everything of value in the world, without earning it - the ultimate conjuring trick. ]
nationalist on 10.12.08 @ 03:22 AM CST [more..]
The Pornification Of A Generation
The idea for a book about porn culture came to Kevin Scott the day his daughter decided she absolutely had to have a Bratz-doll pony. For months, the 5-year-old had begged him for a Bratz doll - clad in spike heels, fishnets and miniskirt, enormous puppy-dog eyes protruding from her oversized head. Her sexy look seemed a little too sexy for a preschooler, so he and his wife bought her a different doll, which she was happy with. Except that a few months later, Bratz came out with Bratz Babyz. "If Bratz had looked like Barbie hookers, these looked like baby hookers," Scott says. Again, he convinced his daughter that My Little Pony was just as cool - and for a moment, the conversation ended. Until, of course, the Bratz came out with Bratz Ponyz. And then, says Scott, an English professor at a small college in Georgia, "I realized porn culture and I were in a death match for my daughter's soul."
In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn't take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives. Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.
But it isn't just sex that Scott is worried about. He's more interested in how we, as a culture, often mimic the most raunchy, degrading parts of it - many of which, he says, come directly from pornography. In "The Porning of America" (Beacon), which he has written with colleague Carmine Sarracino, a professor of American literature, the duo argue that, through Bratz dolls and beyond, the influence of porn on mainstream culture is affecting our self perceptions and behavior - in everything from fashion to body image to how we conceptualize our sexuality.
[ This pornification throws our whole society into turmoil. No one can be sure what the effects will be. Excessive porn tends to actually make sex boring in many cases and, added to the fact that it makes it harder to form relationships and maintain them for a number of reasons, this shows that one effect would be to reduce the number of couples with children and the birth rate generally. In some ways perhaps porn is less threatening when so common it no longer has any illicit thrill. But then again it just becomes another fashion/beauty phenomenon where women (and men) feel the need for plastic surgery to try and look like a Bratz doll or gay idol. It screws people for commercial ends. Meanwhile the mental health issues are an added cost. One question is: will the rise of Islam sweep this away? ]
nationalist on 10.12.08 @ 03:10 AM CST [more..]