Jumbo jets to join the Navy: $2.4 billion in Poseidon aircraft ordered from Boeing

Looks like your average jumbo jet. Acts like a state-of-the-art war machine.

The U.S. Navy has ordered $2.4 billion worth of a new reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft that resembles the plane you might fly on to Cancun for a spring break. On Wednesday, Boeing announced it will produce 16 P-8A Poseidon aircraft for this order.

Ultimately, the Navy plans to purchase 117 of the aircraft, which will replace its P-3C fleet.

The P-3C Orion is a four-engine, anti-submarine/surveillance aircraft that has acted as a maritime patrol plane for about half a century. It has advanced submarine detection sensors, such as directional frequency and ranging sonobuoys and magnetic anomaly detection equipment.

But the Poseidon will boost maritime patrol capabilities even more. It will serve the military as a long-range anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft.

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/02/27/jumbo-jets-to-join-navy-24-billion-in-poseidon-aircraft-ordered-from-boeing/?intcmp=features

Russians Changing Attitudes on Church Attendance, Religious Beliefs

1991 marked the collapse of the former Soviet Union. During the Soviet period many Christian clergy were sent to prison, churches were closed, and professing Christians faced significant persecution.

Surveys from the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project indicate more of Russia’s population has affiliated with Orthodox Christianity. According to an analysis of information gathered between 1991 and 2008, the number of Russian adults who call themselves Orthodox Christian rose from 31 percent to 72 percent. This data was gathered from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). The organization of social scientists in around 50 countries did research that indicated the share of Russia’s population that does not identify with any religion dropped from 61 percent to 18 percent. The ISSP says other religions (Islam, Protestant Christianity and Roman Catholicism) did show an increase in adults, but then plateaued.

ISSP data reveals a return to religion among Russians, but not a corresponding return to church. The ISSP compiled the data in three waves (1991, 1998 and 2008).

According to the Pew Forum, the change might not be limited only to the collapse of the Soviet system. Pew Forum researchers speculate that Russians felt much freer to express religious identities than during the Communist regime. Pew researchers cite the ISSP data that indicates the share of Russians identifying with a religion rose almost as much between 1998 and 2008 as it did from 1991 to 1998.

The ISSP data indicates that in 1991 six-in-ten Russian adults (61 percent) identified as not affiliated with any religion, while an estimated one-third said they were Orthodox Christians. According to the ISSP, by 2008 around seven-in-ten Russians identified themselves as Orthodox Christians while around one-in-five were religiously unaffiliated.

The ISSP data indicates increases in identification with Orthodox Christianity among both younger Russians (up 43 percent among Russians ages 16-49 (and older Russians (up 39 points among Russians ages 50 and older). The ISSP says affiliation with Orthodox Christianity has grown especially among Russian university graduates.

Recent news reports also indicate that the Russian government is becoming more and more allied with the Russian Orthodox Church on many social issues.

During the Cold War, many Western leaders made reference to the Soviet Union as a “godless nation” as it was officially an atheist state.

But as the Washington Times reported last month, the Kremlin and Russian Orthodox Church officials are making the same allegations at the West.

The Washington Times quotes Russian President Vladimir Putin as saying “Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values,” Putin also stated that of these countries are putting policies in place on the same level a multi-child family and same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. Putin calls this “the path to degradation.”

http://juicyecumenism.com/2014/02/23/russians-changing-attitudes-on-church-attendance-religious-beliefs/

Majority of NYC Black Babies Aborted

In 2012, there were more black babies killed by abortion (31,328) in New York City than were born there (24,758), and the black children killed comprised 42.4% of the total number of abortions in the Big Apple, according to a report by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

The report is entitled, Summary of Vital Statistics 2012 The City of New York, Pregnancy Outcomes, and was prepared by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Office of Vital Statistics. (See Pregnancy Outcomes NYC Health 2012.pdf)

Table 1 of the report presents the total number of live births, spontaneous terminations (miscarriages), and induced terminations (abortions) for women in different age brackets between 15 and 49 years of age. The table also breaks that data down by race – Hispanic, Asian and Pacific Islander, Non-Hispanic White, Non-Hispanic Black – and also by borough of residence: Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island.

The numbers show that in 2012, there were 31,328 induced terminations (abortions) among non-Hispanic black women in New York City. That same year, there were 24,758 live births for non-Hispanic black women in New York City. There were 6,570 more abortions than live births of black children.

In total, there were 73,815 abortions, which means the 31,328 black babies aborted comprised 42.4% of the total abortions.

For Hispanic women, there were 22,917 abortions in New York City in 2012, which is 31% of the total abortions.

Black and Hispanic abortions combined, 54,245 babies, is 73% of the total abortions in the Big Apple in 2012.

Margaret Sanger is the founder of the organization that soon enough became Planned Parenthood. The following quote has its leftist defenders who claim that Ms. Sanger's words were taken out of context.

“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

http://www.brutallyhonest.org/brutally_honest/2014/02/racism-ignored-by-the-race-pimps.html

NY Dem Senator Introduces Bill Mandating Parents Take Government-Run Parenting Classes

New York state Sen. Ruben Diaz Jr. introduced a bill that would require parents of elementary school children to attend a minimum of four parent support classes. If parents don't go, 6th graders won't move onto 7th grade.


Leslie Venokur, the co-founder of Big City Moms, called the idea "crazy" and "insane." She said that what is most concerning that the education commissioner and Board of Regents would develop the parenting guidelines. She said the Regents should "stick to what they're good at which is teaching kids and staying away from the parents."





http://nation.foxnews.com/2014/02/21/ny-dem-senator-introduces-bill-mandating-parents-take-government-run-parenting-classes

I Am a Ukrainian

Ukraine's priests provide protest inspiration

They stand defiant before shield-wielding riot police, clutching gilded crosses and inspiring the freedom-seeking masses in Kiev’s Independence Square.

But the clergy of Ukraine are more than leaders of the protest that threatens to split the nation's troubled alliance with Russia. They are a link to Ukraine's historical independence, before the Russian Revolution led to the Soviet occupation that lasted until 1991 but still hovers above like a dark cloud. Amid the escalating violence, priests have been seen defying police, leading civilians safely past them and performing last rites on those killed in the clashes.

“They are there as pastors looking over their flocks,” Roksolana Stojko-Lozynskyj, of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, told FoxNews.com. “Although they are not in [an official] leadership [role], they are well-respected in the community."

Priests have even put up makeshift chapels in tents in the square, where crowds have been estimated in the tens of thousands.

Prior to nearly a century of Soviet domination, Ukraine was a deeply religious nation with historic ties to western Europe.

The strife has brought together Ukraine's major denominations, including the rival Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kiev Patriarchate and Ukrainian Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow, as well as the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox and the Vatican-aligned Ukrainian Greek Catholic churches. The churches released a joint statement last month as unrest percolated in the square.

"There is still a need for political agreement to begin to live heeding the law of God and of man, while respecting the rights and dignity of citizens, and maintaining social cohesion,"



http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/02/21/ukraine-priests-provide-protest-inspiration-proud-link-to-pre-soviet-era/

This Isn’t Your Father’s Democrat Party

50 years of change...





http://moonbattery.com/?p=42450

How TO and How NOT TO Make an Archery Target

Constitutional Atty Says Expansion Of Presidential Power Threatens Liberty

Samick Avante Riser and Samick Privildge Limbs

Samick Avante Riser - yellow


Samick Privildge Limbs

How to make a bow string

Sheldon Gannon of Findit Archery

After Afghanistan

Some wars are lost in a matter of moments, others stretch on indefinitely. The defeat in Afghanistan crept up silently on the national consciousness and even though we are negotiating with the Taliban, the "D" word is hardly used by anyone.

According to Obama, in one of his interminable speeches which all run together and sound the same, there really isn't a war, just a mission, and the old mission is now becoming a new sort of mission, and the missions, all of them, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, have been successful which is why we are wrapping them up, except that we aren't really. And that's about as clear as the message from the big white building with the neatly mowed lawn out front gets, except for the part about how its occupant singlehandedly parachuted into Pakistan, killed Bin Laden, and then stopped off for some curry and a humanitarian award.

Had McCain won in 2008, we would no doubt he hearing a lot about the "D" word and the quagmire in Afghanistan. But the "Q" word doesn't really get mentioned either. No war has been lost. Only a mission is ending. And missions, unlike wars, can be defined in so many creative ways that it's hard to know what to make of them. It's easy to tell when a war has been lost, but a mission can never be lost, only renamed. And renaming is what Obama did to the Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan. Those wars weren't lost; they're only hiding out in the history books under new names and identities.

Wars are usually remembered according to the proclivities of their historians. The history books tend to record the Republican presidents of the last hundred years as either losing wars or winning wars that weren't worth winning. Democrats however usually win every one.

The Korean War and the Vietnam War were not that far in perception at the time, but are worlds apart in the history books. Had John F. Kennedy lived to serve out two terms and then passed on the big chair to his brother, would the history books even record that the United States lost the Vietnam War? Or would it, like Afghanistan, have gone down as a story about a difficult temporary intervention that ended successfully under the leadership of a wise and caring president?

It is difficult to imagine the left's narrative of the last century with such a big and meaty chunk taken out of it. What would have become of Oliver Stone's career without the JFK assassination and the mythology of a cruel and senseless war in Vietnam? Or imagine the last decade if Biden and Gore had managed to talk Clinton into going after Saddam. As entertaining as such speculations might be, renaming missions and tampering with the history books does not alter the outcome of wars.

From the early days, the left had gloated that Afghanistan would become another Vietnam. And like the appointment in Samarra, in attempting to escape that Vietnamness, it repeated many of the follies of Vietnam and few of its triumphs, failing to press the advantage while expending thousands of lives based on abstract theories hatched by the bright boys in Washington and fraudulent books passed on by the wives of generals to their husbands.

We are now in the Afghanistanization stage, hanging around a country for no particular purpose, except that we aren't very good at departures and the men who made this mess still think that Karzai and his crew can make this work if we provide them with some more training and air support without being shot in the back.

And when we have finally left and Karzai's cobbled together government collapses, its ministers absconding to Paris and Pakistan with suitcases full of stolen aid dollars, what comes after the war?


read more: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2014/02/after-afghanistan.html

A Single Cure

Antinomianism and Legalism. They seem like two different maladies. They aren’t.

Both ignore the perfect demands of God’s Law. The legalist ignores the “perfect” part; the antinomian ignores the “demands” part.

Both abuse the Grace of God. The legalist abuses Grace by making Grace contingent on obedience. The antinomian abuses Grace by making Grace a license to sin.

Both have exactly the same result: a sinner who will not hear the perfect demands of the Law, and therefore cannot hear the Gospel’s answer to those perfect demands in the perfect life and death of Jesus.

Understood this way, it is clear that antinomianism isn’t the result of preaching too much Gospel, and legalism isn’t the result of preaching too much Law. Both are the result of not preaching Law and Gospel.

The one and only antidote for both legalism and antinomianism is simple. Preach Law and Gospel.

http://thebarebulb.com/2014/02/06/a-single-cure/

Al Mohler, Dennis Prager & Ross Douthat on Religion and State

“A Catholic, a Jew, and an Evangelical walk onto a stage…”

It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but that was the scene at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville last week. Southern Seminary President Albert Mohler was joined by syndicated talk radio host Dennis Prager in a January 28 discussion moderated by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. In the discussion, entitled “Faith and Freedom in the Public Square,” the three discussed and debated pressing issues facing faithful Christians in an increasingly secularized society, including the state of the “culture wars,” the trajectory of the Religious Left, and the decline in America’s Christian culture.

Douthat begun by summarizing what he believed is the general feeling in the nation’s capital. “The view from Washington right now is that we have entered a kind of ‘post culture war’ era in American politics. And it’s an era where religious conservatism…has mostly lost, is mostly on the retreat.”

Mohler, however, pushed back against the idea that the ‘culture war’ was completely lost, citing a story in The Washington Post that noted that the debate over abortion is the most heated ever since Roe v. Wade. “The culture war is over except where it isn’t,” Mohler qualified, “and still isn’t over where it’s most important.” What has changed, he argued, is a decline in the cultural Christianity ascendant in the postwar period. This cultural Christianity, he claimed, had a “binding moral authority” that has in recent years disappeared. He cited as evidence the increasing number of young adults who claim their religion as “none.”

Prager agreed with Douthat that religious conservatives are on the retreat politically. In general, Prager was much more pessimistic throughout the entire discussion on the state of morality in the United States. “This country is changing. This country is an aberration, that’s my view. Good is aberrant. Evil is normative.”

Prager railed against leftism for its role in this cultural decline, especially religious liberals. “There may be some renaissance of ‘liberal religion,’. which is to me worse than liberal secularism. Because it’s leftism with a cross. Leftism, with a Torah… Leftism has taken over most of my religion, Judaism. In non-Orthodox Judaism… it is more likely that a rabbi would speak about global warming on Yom Kippur, than sin. In fact, global warming is the sin!”

read more at: http://juicyecumenism.com/2014/02/08/dr-al-mohler-and-dennis-prager-discuss-religion-and-state/

The Rebranding of Karl Marx - Intellectual Froglegs 2014 #2

Police Out of Control, Again: Raid Des Moines Home

http://fox2now.com/2014/02/04/raid-filmed-police-in-iowa-terrorize-family/
DES MOINES (WHO) — Members of a Des Moines family say they were terrorized in their own home by Ankeny police.

Sally Prince is afraid to stay in her own home. “I’ve been so traumatized. I don’t sleep at night,” Prince says.

On Thursday, Ankeny police executed a search warrant looking for someone they suspected of using stolen credit cards to buy clothes and electronics.

The whole search was caught on surveillance video.

Ankeny police tell us they knocked first, but the video shows one officer pounding on the side of the house and seconds later, officers use a battering ram to force their way in.

The video also shows an officer destroying a security camera outside the home.

Two people in the house were arrested on unrelated charges, and the family says none of the items listed on the warrant were found.

Prince’s son, Justin Ross, was in the bathroom when police burst in, and he was carrying a gun that he has the legal right to carry. “I stood up, I drew my weapon, I started to get myself together to get out the door, I heard someone in the main room say police. I re-holstered my weapon sat back down and put my hands in my lap,” Ross recalls.

“This is over property purchased with a stolen credit card,” Prince adds. “It doesn’t make any sense to go to such extremes for something that simple.”

Two of the people there had no criminal history. Justin Ross was honorably discharged from the Army recently. The third person does have an arrest record, but the most serious charge was theft and that charge was dismissed.

The family says they would have answered the door if police had just knocked.

Ankeny police executed the warrant in Des Moines because the alleged theft took place in Ankeny, but the suspects live in Des Moines.

Ankeny police say they do not have a written policy governing how search warrants are executed. They’re not commenting further because it’s an ongoing investigation.

By Aaron Brilbeck

Samick Avante, Limbs, and Arrows Review

Some Archery Info:

Instruments for Islamization

As Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan famously said, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.”

Sabatina James is a Pakistani-German apostate from Islam. Below is her analysis of the role played by mosque-building in Western societies, and particularly in Germany.

Many thanks to Oz-Rita for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:



found: http://gatesofvienna.net/2014/02/instruments-for-islamization/

Mass mobs fill pews, lift prayers at NY churches

You've heard of flash mobs? Behold the Mass mob.


Playing off the idea of using social media to summon crowds for parties or mischief, mobs of Buffalo-area Roman Catholics have been filling pews and lifting spirits at some of the city's original, now often sparsely attended, churches.

It works this way: On a given Sunday, participants attend Mass en masse at a church they've picked in an online vote and promoted through Facebook and Twitter. Visitors experience the architecture, heritage and spirit of the aging houses of worship and the churches once again see the numbers they were built for, along with a helpful bump in donations when the collection baskets are passed.

"I call these churches faith enhancers. You can't help but walk in and feel closer to a higher power," said Christopher Byrd, who hatched the idea in Buffalo last fall and has organized two Mass mobs so far, both of which drew hundreds. He's heard from other cities about starting their own.

By CAROLYN THOMPSON
Associated Press

read more at: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_REL_MASS_MOBS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-02-01-14-03-18

They Fought for Freedom