Boko Haram Decalres "War" On Christians In Nigeria

From 07 March 2012.

Nigeria Is Literally On The Verge Of Civil War (& Collapse) As Boko Haram Increases Attacks On Christians In Nigeria. Multiculturalism Really Doesn't Work.

- Militant Islamist group Boko Haram has declared “war” on Christians in Nigeria, saying that they are planning coordinated attacks to “eradicate Christians from certain parts of the country”.

A spokesman for the group, which has stepped up its violent campaign against Christians in the North since Christmas, said on Sunday (4 March): We will create so much effort to end the Christian presence in our push to have a proper Islamic state that the Christians won’t be able to stay
Boko Haram’s actions over recent months indicate that this is no idle threat.

Following a series of attacks on churches and other targets in five states over Christmas that left more than 40 people dead, the group on New Year’s Day issued a three-day deadline for Christians to leave the North. Unrelenting attacks have ensued, including the bombing of a number of churches as well as attacks on individual Christians.

Most recently, on 26 February, a suicide bomber drove a car into the grounds of the Church of Christ headquarters in Jos. The vehicle exploded three metres from the church building; two women and an 18-month-old child were killed, and around 50 people were injured.

The violence is having the intended effect of driving Christians from the North. Nearly 95 per cent of the Christians have left Yobe State, where 20 churches have been torched and many lives have been lost.
Some are heading to the mainly Christian South, while others are crossing the border into Cameroon. The mass migration is precipitating a major humanitarian and spiritual crisis in Nigeria; Northern Christians who have been forced to leave behind their homes and jobs are in great need, while, as the Christian presence diminishes, the Church is being wiped off the map in the North.

Boko Haram has killed around 1,000 people since 2009 in its bloody campaign to establish an Islamic state in Northern Nigeria. As well as attacking Christians, the group targets police, security forces and politicians, and also Muslim leaders who oppose its agenda. Over 300 people have been killed so far this year.
The government has been trying to curtail Boko Haram’s activities, deploying military units across the country, and arresting and killing a number of members in recent weeks. But, issuing the latest threat, the group’s spokesman said that the government “cannot be prepared for what is to come”.

Source Article

Obama Frees 8 States From "No Child" Education-Testing Rules.

From Bloomberg News. 29/5/2012

- President Barack Obama freed eight states from provisions of the No Child Left Behind education- testing law after they pledged to turn around low-performing schools and tie teacher evaluations to student achievement.

Connecticut, Delaware, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island received waivers from the law, enacted under former President George W. Bush. In all, 19 states have now have been granted permission to sidestep the statute in exchange for agreeing to elements of the Obama administration’s education agenda.

Obama has pledged to change the 10-year-old No Child Left Behind Law, saying its focus on standardized-testing dumbs down teaching, narrows school curriculums & labels even high- achieving schools as failing.

“States must show they are protecting children in order to get flexibility,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement. “These states met that bar.”

The states obtaining waivers would be exempt from the requirement that all students pass achievement tests by 2014 & make progress toward that goal each year, or risk losing federal funding. Under No Child Left Behind, each state establishes its own proficiency tests & determines what constitutes passing.

In a conference call with reporters, Duncan said he still prefers that Congress reach a bipartisan agreement to rewrite the law something it has been unable to do for five years.

Almost half of U.S. public schools are considered failing under the No Child Left Behind law, according to a report in December by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based nonpartisan research group. The administration has cited the failure rate as a reason to offer states & local school authorities more flexibility.

Obama previously excused 11 other states from the law: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

Connecticut promised to increase the number of schools held accountable for the lagging performance of black and Hispanic students, as well as those with disabilities and those who speak English as a second language or come from low-income families. Fighting that “achievement gap” was a major focus of No Child Left Behind.

Source Article

Spongebob Quote - Plankton.

Some Motivation For Your Monday Or Any Day Of The Week.

(*Image found through a search engine. Image is not mine)

Dharun Ravi Sentenced To 30 Days In Jail & Fined $10,000 For Phony Hate Crime.

This Is An Up Date From The Dharun Ravi Hate Crime Hearing On The Death Of A Rutgers University Student.

From ABC News:

Former Rutgers student Dharun Ravi was sentenced to 30 days in jail by a New Jersey judge today for spying on his roommate's gay tryst. Ravi's freshman roommate Tyler Clementi committed suicide days later.
"I do not believe he hated Tyler Clementi," Judge Glenn Berman told the court. "He had no reason to, but I do believe he acted out of colossal insensitivity."

Ravi, 20, must report to Middlesex Adult Correctional Center on May 31 at 9 a.m. for his 30 day jail term. He was also sentenced to three years probation, ordered to complete 300 hours of community service and attend counseling programs for cyber-bullying and alternative lifestyles.

He must also pay a $10,000 assessment to the probation department in increments of $300 per month beginning Aug. 1. The money will go to victims of bias crimes. The judge recommended that Ravi, who was born in India and is here on a green card, not be deported.

"I heard this jury say, 'guilty' 288 times--24 questions, 12 jurors. That's the multiplication," Berman said. "I haven't heard you apologize once."

Berman also berated Ravi by saying that most defendants stand when a judge speaks to them, but told him, "Keep your seat." The judge called Ravi's pre-sentencing letter "unimpressive."
Ravi, who was expected to make a statement to the packed New Brunswick, N.J. courtroom, declined to speak before the sentence was read.

The prosecution, which sought a significant prison term, indicated it will appeal the judge's sentence.

Read The Full Story Here

Related - Not Being Gay Is Now A Crime

RIAA To Sue LimeWire For $75 Trillion.

The music industry wants LimeWire to pay up to $75 trillion in damages after losing a copyright infringement claim. That's right . . . $75 trillion. Manhattan federal Judge Kimba Wood has labeled this request "absurd."

You're telling me. To put that number into perspective (I bet a lot of you didn't even know "trillion" was a real number), the U.S. GDP is around 14 trillion -- less than one fifth of what the music industry is requesting. Heck, the GDP of the entire world is between 59 and 62 trillion. That's right, the music industry wants LimeWire to pay more money than exists in the entire world.

Popular file-sharing service LimeWire was shut down last October, after Judge Wood found them liable for copyright infringement in May 2010.

According to Law.com, the RIAA and the 13 record companies that are suing LimeWire for copyright infringement have demanded damages ranging from $400 billion to $75 trillion, and have claimed that Section 504(c)(1) of the Copyright Act allow them to request damages for each instance of infringement where two or more parties were liable. In other words, the RIAA thinks it should be entitled to damages not only for the individual works, but for every time that work was infringed (i.e. downloaded by another user).
At the moment, about 11,000 songs have been identified as "infringed" material, and each song has probably been downloaded thousands of times. The RIAA thinks it should be compensated for each individual download.

Judge Wood disagrees. In a 14-page ruling (PDF), Judge Wood said that the music industry is entitled only to a "single statutory damage award from Defendants per work infringed," for several reasons, including "Absurd Result." According to the document, the "Plaintiffs' position on statutory damages also offends the 'canon that we should avoid endorsing statutory interpretations that would lead to absurd results.'"

The document goes on to read: "As it stands now, Defendants face a damage award that 'could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, if not over a billion dollars.'"

Judge Wood also points out that "if one multiplies the maximum statutory damage award ($150,000) by approximately 10,000 post-1972 works, Defendants face a potential award of over a billion dollars in statutory damages alone. If Plaintiffs were able to pursue a statutory damage theory predicated on the number of direct infringers per work, Defendants' damages could reach into the trillions. As Defendants note, Plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is 'more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877.'"

This "absurd results" clause isn't anything new, Judge Wood points out. She mentions the 2010 Arista Records LLC v. Usenet.com, Inc. case, in which Arista Records requested the court calculate the damages by multiplying the maximum amount of damages ($150,000) by the number of infringements (878), or $131,700,000. The court found the defendants liable for $6,585,000, by multiplying the number of infringements by $7,500.

Unfortunately, this still isn't great news for LimeWire -- while Judge Wood says the music industry is entitled to only a single statutory damage award per infringed work, there are still 11,000 works. That means LimeWire could still be liable for damages in excess of one billion.

 - Source Article

Overpopulation Exposed.

Ever Wonder If The Earth Is Overpopulated As Everyone Keeps Saying That It Is? Well These Videos Should Help Explain It For You -

Related - The Dangerous Myth Of Over Population

19 Things That All High School Students Should Be Told Before They Go To College.

Don't you wish that someone had told you the truth before you went to college?  Don't you wish that someone had told you that college has become a giant money making scam that is designed to drain as much money out of students and parents as possible?  Yes, college can be a profitable endeavor if you pick your field of study wisely, if you can get someone else to pay for at least some of it and if you can actually get a good job in that field when you graduate.  But most high school students are never told to weigh the pros and the cons before they run off to college.  The typical high school student is simply told to get into the "best school" that he or she can and to take out whatever loans are "necessary" to pay for that education.  Our high school students are assured that those student loans will be paid back easily once they get "good jobs" following graduation.  But the truth is that there are some other things that high school students should be told before they go off to college as well.  They should be told that student loan debt can cripple them financially for decades.  They should be told that the quality of education at most U.S. colleges and universities is a total joke.  They should be told that most college graduates do not get a "good job" once they graduate these days.  They should be told that after they receive their diplomas they are likely to end up flat broke, waiting tables and living with their parents.

If we would just be honest with our high school students ahead of time, it would save many of them a whole lot of pain later.

Higher education is not necessarily a bad thing.  But these days when it comes to higher education the goal should be to get as much for your money as you possibly can.  You don't want to end up spending four years of your life and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a degree in "art history" or "political science".
If you are going to get a college degree, choose a field that will actually advance your career and try to spend as little as you can.  Unless you have wealthy parents who can pay for it all, the goal should be to make as big of a profit on your education as possible.
Unfortunately, most young Americans are not told the truth and they end up falling for the scam and many of them end up as debt slaves for decades.

The following are 19 things that all high school students should be told before they go to college....

#1 A college education has become insanely expensive.  Over the past 30 years, the cost of college tuition in the United States has tripled.  One father down in Texas says that he will spend a total of about 1.5 million dollars on college expenses for his five daughters before it is all said and done.

#2 As costs have risen, so has student borrowing.  Sadly, U.S. college students are now borrowing about twice as much money as they did a decade ago after adjusting for inflation.

#3 Unless you have a wealthy parent, there are some schools that should be avoided like the plague.  In the United States today, there are dozens of schools where tuition, room and board total more than $50,000 a year, and only a handful of those schools provide a top notch education.

#4 Our parents and our grandparents paid far less for their college educations than we do today.  Back in 1952, a full year of tuition at Harvard was only $600. Today, it is over $35,000.

#5 The college textbook industry has become a gigantic money making scam.  It is now common for many college textbooks to be priced well above $100, and overall the cost of college textbooks has tripled over the past decade.

#6 At the end of your education, your diploma will likely come with a debt burden which will hang around your neck for many years to come.  In 2010, the average student loan debt burden at graduation was $25,250.

#7 Student loan debt is one of the greatest debt bubbles the U.S. has ever seen.  In fact, student loan debt in America has grown by 511 percent since 1999.

#8 Americans now owe more on their student loans than they do on their credit cards.  In fact, the total amount of student loan debt in the United States recently surpassed the one trillion dollar mark.

#9 People that pursue advanced degrees can pile up absolutely enormous amounts of student loan debt.  According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, approximately 167,000 Americans currently have more than $200,000 of student loan debt.

#10 The student loan default rate in the U.S. is rising to unprecedented heights.  In fact, the student loan default rate has nearly doubled since 2005.

#11 All over America, websites are connecting young college students desperate for college cash with "sugar daddies" that are willing to make a "contribution" to college education in exchange for some "companionship".  The following is from a Huffington Post article about this disturbing trend....

On a Sunday morning in late May, Taylor left her Harlem apartment and boarded a train for Greenwich, Conn. She planned on spending the day with a man she had met online, but not in person.
Taylor, a 22-year-old student at Hunter College, had confided in her roommate about the trip and they agreed to swap text messages during the day to make sure she was safe.
Once in Greenwich, a man who appeared significantly older than his advertised age of 42 greeted Taylor at the train station and then drove her to the largest house she had ever seen. He changed into his swimming trunks, she put on a skimpy bathing suit, and then, by the side of his pool, she rubbed sunscreen into the folds of his sagging back -- bracing herself to endure an afternoon of sex with someone she suspected was actually about 30 years her senior.

#12 Once you start college, there is a very good chance that you will not finish.  Federal statistics reveal that only 36 percent of the full-time students who began college in 2001 received a bachelor's degree within four years.

#13 At most U.S. colleges and universities, the quality of the education that you will receive is rather poor.  Just check out some numbers about the quality of college education in the United States from an article that appeared in USA Today....
-"After two years in college, 45% of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36% showed little change."
-"Students also spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago"
-"35% of students report spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone."
-"50% said they never took a class in a typical semester where they wrote more than 20 pages"
-"32% never took a course in a typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per week."

#14 The good news is that you will have more free time in college than you have ever had before.  One survey found that U.S. college students spend 24% of their time sleeping, 51% of their time socializing and 7% of their time studying.

#15 You are probably not going to be able to find a good job when you graduate.  Last year, a staggering 53 percent of all U.S. college graduates under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed.

#16 After you leave college, you are much more likely to get a crappy job than you are to get a good paying professional job.  The following is an excerpt from a recent CNBC article....

In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).

#17 If you think that you will be able to "beat the odds" and land the job of your dreams once you graduate from college, perhaps you should consider these numbers....
-In the United States today, approximately 365,000 cashiers have college degrees.
-In the United States today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.
-In the United States today, there are more than 100,000 janitors that have college degrees.

#18 College does a very poor job of preparing people for the "real world".  In fact, one poll found that 70% of all college graduates wish that they had spent more time preparing for the "real world" while they were still in school.

#19 Once you graduate from college, there is a really good chance that you will be moving back home with Mom and Dad.  One recent poll discovered that 29 percent of all Americans in the 25 to 34 year old age bracket are still living with their parents.

So what do you think about the state of college education in America?

- Source Article

Maine Named Most Peaceful State In America.

 From Yahoo News - (24 April 2012)

Maine is the most peaceful state in America & Louisiana the least, according to rankings by an Australian think tank called the Institute for Economics and Peace.

The rankings are based on the prevalence of violent crimes, homicides, police employees, size of the prison population and small arms availability.

Overall, 2011 was the most peaceful year the United States has experienced in 20 years. Homicides and violent crimes both dropped by more than 3 percent last year, while the murder rate has plummeted a staggering 50 percent since 1991, when the survey first started. However, prison violence which is not counted in the report has risen dramatically as the number of people behind bars has also grown. (The United States has a higher percentage of its population incarcerated than any other country.) Almost half of all forcible rapes occur in prison.

Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota & Utah were the top five most peaceful states. Louisiana was the least peaceful, followed by Tennessee, Nevada, Florida and Arizona.

The Cambridge-Newton-Framingham area of Massachusetts ranked as the most peaceful metro area, while Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn was ranked the least peaceful.

The report found that out of dozens of environmental, economic and health factors, the percentage of children living in two-parent families was the factor most correlated to peacefulness. The more children living in single-parent families, the less peaceful a state was. Poverty was also a strong indicator. None of the top 10 most peaceful states had a poverty ranking that cracked 10 percent.

The report estimates that the average taxpayer pays $3,257 per year on violence and violence containment, while the total economic cost is $460 billion. The cost of violence includes the health costs of victims of violent crimes and homicides, incarceration costs and other factors.

New York, California & Michigan showed the biggest improvement in peacefulness from 1991, while Montana, North Dakota & South Dakota showed the biggest swing away from peacefulness over the same period.

- Source Article

Apologizing For The Crusades.

From Contender Ministries (2002)

Most of you have probably heard the media, at one time or another, make the claim that it was during the Crusades that Christians and Muslims met for the first time on the battlefield. You’ve heard it explained that the tragedy of the Crusades waged by Christians on innocent Muslims has resulted in the hatred and wars we see today between Islam and the West. But, did you know that Islam was the victor in those wars? Did you know that the Crusades were a delayed response to Islam’s conquest of nearly two-thirds of the Christian world? Did you know that Islam was waging Jihad on Christians for 4 centuries before Christians finally fought back in the 11th century? If the media is so eager to point out the admittedly violent acts of the Crusaders, shouldn’t they also be willing to point out the jihad waged by Muslims that led to those wars?

From the time of Muhammad, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword, and their declared goal was always the complete conquest of Europe for Islam. When Muhammad began his fight against the non-believer in the 7th century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. It spanned the entire Mediterranean and Middle East. After Muhammad’s death, Muslims continued their Jihad against Christianity with fierce determination, and their mission was largely successful. By the 8th Century, the Muslims had conquered Palestine, Syria, Egypt, all of North Africa, and Spain. By the 11th Century they had conquered Asia Minor and almost all of the old Roman Empire. Christianity was headed for extinction. It wasn’t until this point in history that the emperor in Constantinople sent word to Europe asking for help from fellow Christians. The crusades began as a desperate attempt to save Christianity from total annihilation by Islam. The aggressor of the medieval world was Islam, not Christianity as our anti-Christian, liberal friends would have us believe.

The Crusades are often portrayed by the uninformed or politically motivated as a mission by the Christians to loot, plunder and convert Muslims to Christianity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Scholars have discovered through historical records and the charters of the Crusaders that the majority of Crusaders were wealthy men with their own land in Europe. They gave up everything they had to go on what they considered a holy mission and, more often than not, came back with nothing. Nor was their mission one of colonialism. They fought to restore Jerusalem and Christian lands from the hands of Muslim Jihadists who had themselves pillaged, plundered, and conquered.

The Crusaders mission was never to convert Muslims. It was to defeat and defend against them. When the crusaders did win a territory, Muslims were always allowed to keep their religion and usually their land and property. The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem always had a larger Muslim population than it did Catholic. Any later attempts to convert Muslims were by peaceful means, not by force. This cannot be said of the Muslim invaders. Conversion to Islam was forced by penalty of death in many cases, and when it wasn’t, Christians were forced to live as second-class citizens and pay the Jizya, a tax required of non-believers.

It’s interesting that the Islamic terrorists we are fighting today would use the crusades as a propaganda tool. After all, they won those wars. The crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries were largely unsuccessful. By 1291, the Muslim forces had succeeded in killing or ejecting the last of the Crusaders, thus erasing the Crusader kingdom from the map. Christians were never again able to gain back their land in the region until the 19th century. If the memory of the Crusades causes such anguish and anger for Muslims today, why is it that it doesn’t cause the same kind of anger for Christians? Why is the Christian response to invasion and conquest demonized, while Islam’s jihad against Christianity is often glorified? Going by this logic, when the World Trade Center towers fell, we should have apologized for the anger the crusades caused and promised to let them have New York should they invade.

The media would lead you to believe that the Crusaders crushed the Islamic world and left them in the dust. In fact the crusades failed. It was capitalism, the enlightenment, and the financial successes of the west that left the Islamic world behind. The Muslim threat was neutralized economically. The Muslim world was not oppressed, humiliated, defeated, or permanently offended by Christian Crusaders. We all need to realize that, had the Crusaders not finally attempted a defense, the world we know today would not exist. Christianity as we know it would not exist. Respect for women, democracy, freedom of religion would not exist. Those who are demanding that we now apologize to the Islamic world for the crusades, are either woefully uninformed, or are so anti-American they must resort to revisionist history to support their position. Either way, they don’t recognize that the ground they now stand on in the war on terror is not that dissimilar to that of the Crusaders who fought for their right to exist in a world where Islamic terrorism ran rampant.

- Source Article

If I wanted America To Fail.

Get On The Revolution.

I'm A Boy Public Servic Anouncement

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*I Do Not Own This Pic*

"Cinco de Mayo" Plenty of Beer, Little History.

Today (5 May 2012) Marks "Cinco de Mayo" A Day Filled With All Things Mexico, From Beer, Sombreros, etc. But To Many People Many Do Not Understand The Origins & The Significance Of This Day.

From The Associated Press:

Here’s what Cinco de Mayo has become in the U.S.: a celebration of all things Mexican, from mariachi music to sombreros, marked by schools, politicians and companies selling everything from beans to beer.
And here’s what Cinco de Mayo is not, despite all the signs in bar windows inviting revelers to drink: It’s not Mexico’s Independence Day, and it’s barely marked in Mexico, except in the state of Puebla, where the holiday is rooted in a complicated and short-lived 1862 military victory over the French.

The holiday has spread from the American Southwest, even though most are unaware of its original ties to the U.S. Civil War, abolition and promotion of civil rights for blacks.

Often mistaken for Mexican Independence Day (that’s Sept. 16), Cinco de Mayo commemorates the 1862 Battle of Puebla between the victorious ragtag army of largely Mexican Indian soldiers against the invading French forces of Napoleon III. Mexican Americans, during the Chicano Movement of the 1970s, adopted the holiday for its David vs. Goliath storyline as motivation for civil rights struggles in Texas and California.
Over the years, the holiday has been adopted by beer companies as a way to penetrate the growing Latino market, even as the historical origins of the holiday remain largely forgotten.

David Hayes-Bautista, a professor of medicine and health services at UCLA and author of the newly released “El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition,” said the holiday’s history in the U.S. goes back to the Gold Rush when thousands of immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America came to California during the Civil War.

According to Spanish-language newspapers at the time, this first group of multinational Latinos on U.S. soil identified with the Union Army’s fight against the Confederacy and often wrote pieces about the evils of slavery. Hayes-Bautista said these Latino immigrants were concerned about the Union’s lack of progress and Napoleon III’s interests in helping the South.

“It wasn’t until the news came about the Battle of Puebla that they got the good news they wanted,” said Hayes-Bautista. “Since Napoleon III was linked to the Confederacy, they saw the victory as the first sign that their side could win.”

They didn’t, of course, at least not for a few years. French forces took over Mexico after the Battle of Puebla, and installed Habsburg Archduke Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico. He was captured by Mexican forces five years later and put to death.

But in the years that followed, Latinos in California and the U.S. Northwest celebrated Cinco de Mayo with parades of people dressed in Civil War uniforms and gave speeches about the significance of the Battle of Puebla in the larger struggle for abolition, said Hayes-Bautista.

The Cinco de Mayo-Civil War link remained until the Mexican Revolution, which sparked another wave of Mexican immigration to the U.S. Those immigrants had no connection to Cinco de Mayo—except that U.S. Latinos celebrated it.

“That’s when it became about David vs. Goliath, Indians beating a European force, and it took on a new meaning,” said Hayes-Bautista. “The Civil War ties disappeared.”

( Source Article )

Being Britsh.

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*Image not mine no infringement intended*