Genius, pure genius

Did you hear what happen Tuesday night across the whole nation...yes the whole country?

From 5:30-8:30 there was a lot of trouble. Feet were tapping tap, heads were aching and foreheads were sweating. Starbucks was closed!!!

NO!!!!!

Yes it happen.

6 weeks ago, Howard Schultz took over the reins (again) as CEO of Starbucks. Since then, he's been on a mission to return the company to its previous form. Tuesday, every store throughout the nation closed for three hours for "remedial espresso training." Or in Schultz's terms, "to teach, educate and share our love of coffee, and the art of espresso."

I beg to differ. This might be about a better cup of coffee, but there's a lot more to it than that, and it's pretty slick.

Shutting down your operation creates buzz. Apple knows this; they do all their online store updates in the middle of the day, and they bring down their whole site as the rumor sites go ablaze in anticipation. Starbucks knows this, too.

When you tell the world you are shutting down for three hours to learn to excel or to make changes, when things reopen, people want to investigate. They'll want to see if the coffee is better and what new tricks the baristas have up their collective, trendy sleeve.

Even more genius, Biggby coffee was offering free coffee at the same time......

If you aren't on the Biggby coffee bandwagon (you may see it as Beaners) time to get on.

I'm telling you, get on board.....

Click here and add to favorites

The Bride's a Slut. They Call it Progress

The New York Times reports today on a new trend in weddings:

The gown was almost wanton — fluid but curvy with a neckline that plummeted
dangerously. “It makes me feel sexy and beautiful,” said Natasha DaSilva, who
slipped it on for a fitting last week.

Cut away at the rear to reveal a tattoo at the small of her back, the dress suggested a languorous night in the honeymoon suite.

Except that Ms. DaSilva, who will be married on Long Island in
September, plans to wear it at the altar.

“Why not?” she asked. “I want to look back in 20 years and feel like I
looked hot on my wedding day.”

Ms. DaSilva, 26, thinks of herself as adventurous, but not so brash
that she is about to cross a line. Dressing for a wedding as if it were an
after-party is accepted among her family and friends. “For my generation,
looking like a virgin when you marry is completely unappealing, boring even,”
she said. “Who cares about that part anymore?”

Natasha DaSilva, that tattoo just above your butt telegraphs to the world that you're one classy dame. I'm sure your daughters will be so proud of you one day. "Wow, Mom, you really hooched up your wedding, didn't you?" Dreary old me, maybe you do become an old-fogey at 30.

Airplaneseatreclineology

It took me awhile to find this comic, but I finally did so.

Corey's post is what got me thinking about it. I read this comic quite awhile ago but it is very appropos to the conversation.

Read Corey's post, view the comic and have a good laugh. But I would encourage everyone to think about the fact that a comic strip is mocking the jist of the problem with humanity.

If you have more to say on the subject, do so at Corey's blog, he started the conversation, let's keep it going over there.

If you like the comic then I encourage you to check out Pearls Before Swine....it is hilarious stuff. Basically the mouse is an arrogant "know-it-all" who feels the need to tell his "pearls" of wisdom to the pig (who is the only one that will listen to the mouse). Hence "Pearls Before Swine"

And yes it is a direct result of Jesus words in the gospel. But I have found nothing that tells me the author is an Evangelical or Born-Again.

There's more to it, but give it a chance. Good stuff. A lot of pop culture and a look at humanity in the whole....as the above comic.

Here's the website (via comics.com)

Here's some Wikipedia info on the comic strip. Maybe a good place to start to figure things out.

Animal Husbandry

It turns out that a slaughterhouse's cruel practice are behind the massive nationwide recall of beef, the largest in US history.

Officials estimate that about 37 million pounds of the recalled beef went
to school programs, but they believe most of the meat probably has already been
eaten.

"We don't know how much product is out there right now. We don't
think there is a health hazard, but we do have to take action," said Dr. Dick
Raymond, USDA Undersecretary for Food Safety.

Federal Officials suspended operations at Westland/Hallmark after an
undercover video from the Human Society of the United States surfaced showing
crippled and sick animals being shoved with forklifts.

Two former employees were charged Friday. Five felony counts of
animal cruelty and three misdemeanors were filed against a pen manager.
Three misdemeanor counts -- illegal movement of a non-ambulatory animal -- were
filed against an employee who worked under that manager. Both were
fired.

Authorities said the video showed workers kicking, shocking and otherwise
abusing "downer" animals that were apparently too sick or injured to walk into
the slaughterhouse. Some animals had water forced down their throats, San
Bernadino County prosecutor Michael Ramos said.

No charges have been filed against Westland, but an investigation by
federal authorities continues.

About 150 school districts around the nation have stopped using ground beef
from Hallmark Meat Packing Co., which is associated with Westland. Two fast-food
chains, Jack-In-the-Box and In-N-Out, said they would not use beef from
Westland/Hallmark.

Most of the beef was sent to distribution centers in bulk packages. The
USDA said it will work with distributors to determine how much meat
remains.

Federal regulations call for keeping downed cattle out of the food
supply because they may pose a higher risk of contamination from E. coli,
salmonella or mad cow disease since they typically wallow in feces and their
immune systems are often weak.

Watch the undercover video that sparked the recall here. WARNING this is strong stuff. We don't have to or shouldn't wait for Congress or state legislatures to even do anything about this. We can take action now!

STOP BUYING FACTORY FARMED MEAT NOW!!!

Buy from your local farmers.

This website has the most comprehensive national list of meat producers who refuse to allow factory-farming methods. Not just cattle/beef either. We're talking eggs, milk, honey, pork, turkey, etc. Take a look -- here is a link to just the Michigan locales. It's surprising how many exist. And some even ship.

Watch that video and still say you trust the industrial food system to provide healthy meat. This is not the dominion mandate. This is not the husbandry that God commanded us and has given mankind. This is not the husbandry I am working toward handing off to my son one day.

Hard to Believe it has been a YEAR!!!!!!

What more could a kid want!!!

Presents to open, toys litterd everywhere, and a mom and dad addicted to the camera!!!

BTW - Don't worry about the medicine bottle in his hands, it's empty

To pass on the faith, live it...with discernment

I was emailed this link by a buddy of mine who, even though it has a Catholic slant, thought I would greatly appreciate it....I did.

It is an interview with Amy Welborn, who appears to be a pretty big deal in the Catholic blogosphere.

ANYWAY, back to the interview, here is a snippet worth repeating...

The problem is that when you look at Catholic history, the faith has never been passed on predominantly in classroom situations. The faith has been passed on in families and in parishes and in communities. You can have really nice catechetical materials in which you have kids learn about a saint each week and you introduce them to various devotions, but if all of that is absent from parish life, and if all of that is absent from the life of Catholics, which it is for the most part…It's something that any teacher of, particularly, the humanities can sympathize with. Think about the poor teacher trying to teach Shakespeare or Chaucer to kids who go home and are on the Internet for four hours and then are playing video games and doing all kinds of other things. It's not just a religious ed problem; it's a cultural problem. [Emphasis mine]What we are trying to transmit in a classroom setting isn't reinforced culturally.

In the Catholic setting, that means it's not reinforced in most parishes. There's no Catholic life that continually reinforces the Catholic faith. Our churches are bare. Kids don't have the opportunity to study murals and pictures of stained glass and they get bored.

Catholic education is getting better in the classrooms but we haven't grappled with the bigger cultural issue of a community's responsibility to transmit the faith outside the classroom setting.

What's the broader message for people of faith? That passing on the faith to our children is not something we can or should rely entirely on the institutional church (sermons, Sunday school, Christian schools) to do. We have to do it in our homes and in our cultural lives -- and not in the sense of, "Tonight, children, we are going to discuss the doctrine of the Incarnation." The Christian faith has to be woven into the fabric of everyday life, has to be experienced not as an interesting add-on to normal life, but as normal life itself. This is particularly challenging in a culture like ours, where increasingly the only normative belief is that there is no normative belief. But what choice do serious religious believers have?

This is why I'm attracted to the idea of living in some sort of community with other families who share our faith. My kids need to see that it's not just our family that believes and lives by these things -- and they need to see that every day of the week, not just on Sunday.

But there can be problems to that and it was why I am VERY selective on who I include in that community in terms of leadership and influence in my life and that of my family. I'll talk to anyone and let anyone "in" but when it comes to who I am going to listen to and take direction from, who I want to be a role model and someone to follow, sorry but I am judicious and selective.

And ironically, while purusing more of the Catholic website where Amy's interview came from I came across this "essay." It furthered cured the cement work I have laid down for my foundation on life, faith, and community. The author's summation with a number of statistical facts is fascinating and all too revealing, most of them showing that despite the Catholic Church's growing numbers on paper, the content of the Catholic faith in the hearts and minds of its adherents is rapidly changing to something that's Catholic in name only:

A survey in 2005 found that 76 percent of the Catholics of the United States thought someone could be a good Catholic without going to church every Sunday. Other elements of Catholic belief and practice also fared poorly. Three out of four said good Catholics needn't observe the teaching on contraception; two-thirds said the same of having their marriages blessed by the Church and accepting the teaching on divorce and remarriage; 58 percent took the same view of giving time or money to the parish and also of following Church teaching on abortion. These numbers have gone up dramatically since Davidson and his colleagues began collecting them in 1987. And, by 2005, nearly one in four held that a good Catholic needn't believe that Jesus rose bodily from the dead.

In 2003, the researchers tested American Catholics' views on the Catholic Church and other religions. Some results: 86 percent agreed with the statement "If you believe in God, it doesn't really matter which religion you belong to"; 74 percent said yes to "The major world religions are equally good ways of finding ultimate truth"; and 52 percent accepted the proposition, "The Catholic religion has no more spiritual truth than other major religions."

Apparently not all of those highly educated and loyal Catholic Americans measure up too well by the standards of Catholic orthodoxy. I am reminded of the 25-year-old chap, a baptized Catholic with six years of religious education who claimed he went to Mass twice a month. Upon leaving a showing of the movie The Da Vinci Code, he told The New York Times: "The Catholic Church has hidden a lot of things—proof about the actual life of Jesus, about who wrote the Bible. All these people—the famous Luke, Mark, and John—how did they know so much about Jesus' life? If there was a Bible, who created it and how many times has it been changed?"

People who talk as the happy-talkers do about the glories of contemporary American Catholicism aren't crazy. They know what’s going on. But they pass it over lightly because that suits the project of replacing a form of Catholicism they consider moribund with an endlessly evolving religion without norms. In their estimate, a Church like that would better suit the exigencies of post-modern times. Call it Anglicanism with a figurehead pope. (In general, I think, bishops who take the same line don't share that objective—they simply think blarney is good for morale.)

The author concludes by saying that anybody who believes there's a simple solution to this very deep and broad problem is either a liar or a lunatic. But he says any attempt to turn it around must begin with telling the truth:

Jesus tells us, "The truth will make you free" (John 8:32), but today illusion—the illusion that we aren't doing so bad—is choking the life out of the Catholic Church in the United States.

Shaw's critique concerns the US Catholic Church, but it's not hard to read it as a broad indictment of the American way of being Christian. What he's talking about is the evolution of the Christian faith to fit American cultural norms: whether we realize it or not, most contemporary Christians are Moralistic Therapeutic Deists now.

See, this is why I'm not impressed when I read news reports saying that America, unlike godless secular humanist Europe, is still a land of vibrant faith. I suppose it is, in a way, but what is the content of that faith, anyway? What does it mean to tell a pollster that you are a Catholic, or an Evangelical, but in practice do not mean by those terms what they historically mean? What does it mean to report that Christianity is doing well in terms of the numbers of people who call themselves Christians, but to ignore or downplay the qualitative aspect of their belief?

I'm not trying to read anybody out of Christianity, but what I am saying is that as a theological matter, to claim you are a Christian -- a Catholic Christian or a Protestant Christian -- means and has always meant that there are a certain number of irreducable foundational doctrines that one must believe -- doctrines that teach who Jesus is, what He did on the Cross, what Scripture is, what the Church is, what man is, and so forth. See, even a trampoline has a sturdy frame that everything else is attached to. To reject them is to reject the faith itself, in any meaningful sense. Over the course of the past 2,000 years, the churches argued over aspects of those foundational beliefs, which is why the church, sadly, is no longer united. Christians have argued over what it means to be a true Christian, but have not argued over the idea that there was an objective standard by which to define Christianity. What you wouldn't have seen, until the present day, is the widely accepted belief that it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you believe you're Christian. That Christianity has no objective definition, and is primarily defined by subjective emotion.

Why does this matter? For one thing, some of us have this quaint idea, as did every Christian until practically yesterday, that the point of religion is to save souls, and Jesus taught us how to do that. To be crude, humankind was lost, but God intervened in history to send us a guide. Scripture (and, for most Christians throughout history, the Church) is our map out of the wilderness. If we lose the map, we could lose our souls, and the souls of our descendants, whose salvation depends on our passing the map to them in good condition. So much American Christianity has become a matter of forgetting, or denying, that there is any such thing as a map.




Why does it seem the Catholics are getting "it" more and more often?

Gimme some of that New-Old Time Religion

[UPDATE] - I couldn't help it, while looking out my window at the blustery winter Sunday afternoon of single digit temps and below zero wind chills. Watching garbage blow away down the street, tree limbs bend oh so close to breaking and thankful for the ability to burn fossil fuels to stay warm.



Modern man has shucked off most of the restraints of traditional religion. While a majority of people still say they believe in God, or at least in some form of higher being, they have rationalized their belief system so as to owe no real tribute to their ill-defined deity.

No longer are they bound by the sanctions and rules dictated by the old-time religions.

But instead of enjoying their “liberation”, their “freedom” from the inconvenient "thou shalt nots," they're embracing a different sort of puritanism and welcoming equally suffocating restrictions in regard to the new gods of health and the environment.

These new faiths, in practice, are amazingly similar to the old.

They have their own schedule of sins and vices and are just as intolerant and judgmental of those who stray from the path of righteousness. They also will go to extremes to impose their doctrines -- witness New York City's recently-passed law forbidding city hospitals from sending new mothers home with baby formula, to push breast-feeding (it's amazing what news stories catch your fancy when a child is introduced into your life).

Skeptics are demonized as heretics. To question the causes and impact of global warming, for example, is blasphemous, and many in the scientific community are finding the price for expressing doubt is banishment.

The new religions are no more tolerant of non-conformity -- smokers are shunned the way libertines once were. And they are equally instilled with an evangelical zeal to spread the faith. "Fan the flame!!" (or should we say "put out the flame" or........)

Like their predecessors, the obsession of the new religions is controlling the behavior of the flock. The real agenda of the campaign against global warming is to achieve the longstanding goals of environmentalists to force people onto mass-transit, draw them back from far-flung suburbs and minimize their ability to profit from the earth.

The new religions give new interpretations to several of Catholicism's seven deadly sins, including:

• Pride . The vanity of individualism is discouraged as a threat to the collective good. Lifestyle choices must conform to the standards of propriety set by all-knowing spiritual leaders (think Al Gore).
• Gluttony . Consumerism and overconsumption are the great evils. Frugality is a virtue, and piety is attained by the Carteresque measure of living a smaller life, accepting less. Traditional religions reward sacrifice and self-denial with immortality (allbeit heretical in it’s own rite); it's not yet clear how the new faiths will incentivize deprivation.
• Greed. The notion that American ingenuity and productivity entitle this country to a bigger piece of the pie is unholy. We're expected to feel guilty about our prosperity, pressured to give away our wealth.
• Lust. While these new faiths don't meddle so much in your sex life -- nearly any sexual practice is OK, as long as it's "safe" and consensual -- if you hunger for big trucks, big houses, big cigars -- your wages are damnation.

Unfortunately, there is no rabid oppession and acceptance of a separation of church and state to protect non-believers from being pressed into observance as their is with the "Old-Time Religions". Canonical law is written by secular legislatures and enforced by public agents.

An agnostic -- or Mother Earth forbid, an atheist -- living in this new religious environment may find life as uncomfortable as did the “witches” of Salem.

It Would Appear I am back.....

Looks like the Union Pacific lifted the pornography ban with blogspot.com and I can now post and comment. YIPPEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!

My productivity will plummet now at work....

Ok just kidding, sort of.

ANYWAY, may take me a little bit but I'll probably be bringing back the Last 5. But You Tube is banned in all facets (even embedded videos on other websites) so I am going to try and re-vamp it a little.

Who knows.....

I've been spending ALOT more time over at PoliForum and I would imagine that would stay consistent until the General Election is come and gone.

ANYWAY, stay tuned and hopefully MP fires back up with all the controversy, eye-rolling, pot-stirring, absurd, obnoxious, "dogmatic" content you've come to know and love.

CHEERS!!!!

This sounds familiar...

Not sure if you'll ever hear me quote Rush Limbaugh ever again in my life but I read this in a news article and it sounded oddly familiar.

If the Republican Party expands because we have a candidate who's going out trying to attract liberals by being like them, then the party's going to be around but you won't recognize it.

How does Limbuagh pontificating and fire breathing anti-McCain rhetoric sound familiar you ask?

Like this:

If the Church expands because we have Christians going out trying to
attract non-believers by being like them, then the Church's going to be around
but you won't recognize it.

Already pre-ordered it....

And here, if you do not have a PDF reader.

XLII

1. The best team won. I am happy the Giants pulled it out and I really found myself at the end getting nervous and rooting so hard for NY. And the miraclous Eli escape/35 yard heave to some guy named Tyree/who caught it by pinning it to his helmet play IS probably the best Super Bowl play I have ever seen.

2. TV is ruining sports. It really is. The game dragged and dragged last night. I am tired of watching commercials and long commercial breaks are killing the Super Bowl experience for me. Everyone wonders why these games are not usually great? Well how can anyone get into a rhythm when every stoppage in play is a two minute commercial break!!! This has to stop and if you watched the NBA playoffs last year, it was also an issue. And I am a use to have to write essays every year on the Super Bowl commericials because I am Marketing Degree toting Head of the Advertising Team of my church kind of guy. Part for the game in and of itself...sucks.

3. Corey Webster. The much maligned cornerback got beat by Randy Moss on the go-ahead TD for New England in the late stages of the fourth quarter, only to bounce back and make play after play against Moss on the last drive. I was happy for the kid that he dusted himself off, got up, and got the job done the next time. It is a lesson for everyone out there.

4. Fox did a great job on the broadcast. They really did. The super slo-mo shot of David Tyree's catch was incredible. There whole new slo-mo camera technology is awesome actually.

5. Classless move by three classless guys, Bill Belichick, Richard Seymour Cheapshots, and yes, Golden Boy Tom Brady for not staying on the field until the clock hit all zeroes. Sissy move and classless. Brady laughed at Plaxico's prediction earlier in the week and said "we are only gonna score 17 pts"? YES TOM how about 14!!!!! Man up and go shake hands with the guys who pummeled you next time! Especially since your team's motto was you never stop coaching and playing 100% until the clock hits triple zero's. You don't end the game, the officials end the game. You will never by the way hear the Michigan sports writers or fans call out Brady for this. Too much of a man crush by the whole state on this guy. "He went to Michigan so I gotta cheer for him..." So did Amani Toomer???

6. Why in the heck can't the Lions find guys like David Tyree and Ahmad Bradshaw. 6th and 7th round draft picks that are having an impact not only in the NFL but in the SUPER BOWL!!!!! The New York Giants have been to 4 Super Bowls in the last 22 years. 1986, 1990, 2000, and 2007. The 86 and 90 teams were kind of the same team. But in the other Super Bowls, it has been an entirely different cast of characters and teams leaders to get them there. As well as 3 different head coaches and 3 different QB's. As for the Lions?