eBay drops the hammer on magic and the occult
In their 2012 Fall Seller Update, eBay announced that it will ban all sales of magic potions, charms, and spells effective August 30th.
Here’s the list of all the things you’re no longer allowed to buy on eBay:
Advice; spells; curses; hexing; conjuring; magic; prayers; blessing services; magic potions; healing sessions; work from home businesses & information; wholesale lists, and drop shop lists.
NOTE: sorry folks...all conjuring and hexing will need to be done at home. Go out and find your own eye of newt...though, there still is Amazon.com. Lon
Mysterio's Encyclopedia of Magic and Conjuring
The Practitioner's Guide to Wand Magic
The Watkins Dictionary of Magic: Over 3,000 Entries on the World of Magical Formulas, Secret Symbols and the Occult
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Mobile DNA Testing
A 'Who's Your Daddy' van is travelling around New York City, offering men the chance to find out whether they are the father of a child.
The owner and operator of the vehicle, Jared Rosenthal, is selling DNA tests, mostly to those who suspect youngsters may not actually be theirs.
Costing around £200-£300, men just have to give a cheek swab. Then there is a laboratory analysis and the paternity results are available in a couple of days.
Mr Rosenthal told CBS News: "They flag us down, they pull us over, they talk to us.
"Sometimes, because of the nature of the services, they want to be a little more discreet about it, but they do come or they'll call the number."
Mr Rosenthal said he deals with all kinds of strange situations in his line of work.
"We have people that want to get the specimen from their spouse without them knowing about it. We deal with a lot of drama. It's constant drama," he said.
One unidentified man, who was asked why he was taking the DNA test from the travelling truck, said: "I'm paying child support anyways and I would do it anyways. You just want to know."
Mr Rosenthal went on: "There's a lot of difficult situations and tough moments and heartbreak," adding there are happy endings as well.
"There's a lot of good news that we're able to deliver and there's a lot of happy moments."
For example, the test helped a 44-year-old Harlem man find his long-lost 20-year-old daughter.
Mr Rosenthal maintained that his credentials are legitimate and that his business is legal.
He believes he is providing an essential service. "It's not something people talk about, but there is a big need for it," he said. - sky
STK's Paternity Test Kit - INCLUDES ALL LAB FEES and FREE Return Mailer for 99.999% accurate 2-person testing
Hair DNA Paternity Testing Kit
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The Mark of the Beast
A Louisiana elementary school is trying to implement a new program in their cafeteria. But the palm vein scanner is being met with much opposition from Moss Bluff Elementary parents.
"I was very, very mad," said parent Mamie Sonnier. "Disappointed."
Many parents felt that way on Monday after reading a letter sent home with their children from Moss Bluff Elementary School. The letter introduced a new program, the palm vein scanner, to move students through the lunch line at a faster rate. With almost 1,000 students, Principal Charles Caldarera says the system will reduce errors.
"We are so large," said Caldarera. "With an elementary school, they all come through line, and most of them eat here. It would make us more efficient and more accurate. We've had parents complain in the past, because they felt like their children weren't eating, that we assigned them a charge for the day, and they might have been right."
Caldarera says the school is acting on a recommendation from school food service director Patricia Hosemann. But he says the letter gives parents an option.
"We sent this letter home for parents to be aware of it, and to let them know that they can opt out," said Caldarera. "They can opt out and say, hey, I don't want my child involved in it. That's quite alright. It won't make any difference. The children will still be able to eat in the cafeteria."
Sonnier says she's against the palm vein scanner because of her beliefs.
"As a Christian, I've read the Bible, you know go to church and stuff," said Sonnier. "I know where it's going to end up coming to, the mark of the beast. I'm not going to let my kids have that."
Caldarera says a lot of parents agree with her, but he says it's just technology.
"I think a lot of this has to do with religious beliefs," said Caldarera. "I think some people feel it's something with the Bible, mark of the beast. It's technology that is used throughout our lives. Everywhere."
He says the system isn't on campus yet, so students' palms won't be scanned any time soon. But Sonnier says if the program comes to campus, her children aren't participating and won't be around it either.
"I'd probably pull them out of the school, and transfer them to another school," said Sonnier.
Caldarera says they are trying to implement the program as soon as possible, but if you are a parent and don't want your child to participate, you must contact the school by Wednesday. - KPLCTV
Click for video
The Mark of the Beast: The Continuing Story of the Spear of Destiny
The Anti-Christ
Return of the Antichrist: And the New World Order
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The modern-day virgin birth
On November 6 1955, a story appeared on the front page of the Sunday Pictorial that was to double the newspaper’s circulation in a single day. Sporting the headline, “Doctors now say it doesn’t always need a man to make a baby”, the tabloid shouted that virgin births were no myth, and that there was a scientist who could prove it. The rare biological process which would enable this to happen was known as parthenogenesis, the paper informed its readers.
But the Pictorial’s editors didn’t stop there. Halfway down the page appeared three words, in bold block capitals: “Find The Case”. Sensationally, the paper was inviting women to come forward if they believed their daughters were the result of a virgin birth. If any woman’s case was proved correct, by a panel of leading doctors, she and her daughter were set to make medical – indeed, human – history. For the next year, the search for a virgin mother would grip the nation, and the world. The paper’s circulation figures, meanwhile, grew to an unprecedented six million.
One of the readers most intrigued by the invitation was Emmimarie Jones, a housewife in her thirties. Despite the normality of her existence, Emmimarie had a secret. She was convinced her 11-year-old daughter, Monica, was the result of a virgin birth. Monica would have been conceived in the summer of 1944. Her mother was being treated for rheumatism in a women’s hospital in Hanover, in Emmimarie’s native Germany. Emmimarie recovered, but three months later, her weakness returned. When she visited her doctor, he said her unusual tiredness was simply explained – she was pregnant. Emmimarie smiled in disbelief. She knew the facts of life, and she had not been with a man. In fact, at the time she was meant to have conceived, she was confined to the hospital, surrounded by female patients and staff. Emmimarie insisted that she just needed a pick-me-up – some vitamins, perhaps. But the doctor told Emmimarie that she would soon see that he was right.
Six months later, Emmimarie crawled out of the deep underground cellars where she had been sheltering from the Allies’ bombing of Hanover, to have her child. Emmimarie’s home had been flattened during the attacks and, afterwards, she and her baby, Monica, would return to the cellars for another two years. After the war, Emmimarie married a Welsh soldier stationed in Germany, returning with him to England when his service ended. Continue reading at The modern-day virgin birth
The Birth of Christ: Exploding the Myth
Like A Virgin: How Science is Redesigning the Rules of Sex
Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary
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China's Unlivable Cities
China's megalopolises may seem impressive on paper, but they are awful places to live.
In Invisible Cities
the novel by the great Italian writer Italo Calvino, Marco Polo dazzles the emperor of China, Kublai Khan, with 55 stories of cities he has visited, places where "the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells," a city of "zigzag" where the inhabitants "are spared the boredom of following the same streets every day," and another with the option to "sleep, make tools, cook, accumulate gold, disrobe, reign, sell, question oracles." The trick, it turns out, is that Polo's Venice is so richly textured and dense that all his stories are about just one city.A modern European ruler listening to a visitor from China describe the country's fabled rise would be better served with the opposite approach: As the traveler exits a train station, a woman hawks instant noodles and packaged chicken feet from a dingy metal cart, in front of concrete steps emptying out into a square flanked by ramshackle hotels and massed with peasants sitting on artificial cobblestones and chewing watermelon seeds. The air smells of coal. Then the buildings appear: Boxlike structures, so gray as to appear colorless, line the road. If the city is poor, the Bank of China tower will be made with hideous blue glass; if it's wealthy, our traveler will marvel at monstrous prestige projects of glass and copper. The station bisects Shanghai Road or Peace Avenue, which then leads to Yat-sen Street, named for the Republic of China's first president, eventually intersecting with Ancient Building Avenue. Our traveler does not know whether he is in Changsha, Xiamen, or Hefei -- he is in the city Calvino describes as so unremarkable that "only the name of the airport changes." Or, as China's vice minister of construction, Qiu Baoxing, lamented in 2007, "It's like a thousand cities having the same appearance."
Why are Chinese cities so monolithic? The answer lies in the country's fractured history. In the 1930s, China was a failed state: Warlords controlled large swaths of territory, and the Japanese had colonized the northeast. Shanghai was a foreign pleasure den, but life expectancy hovered around 30. Tibetans, Uighurs, and other minorities largely governed themselves. When Mao Zedong unified China in 1949, much of the country was in ruins, and his Communist Party rebuilt it under a unifying theme. Besides promulgating a single language and national laws, they subscribed to the Soviet idea of what a city should be like: wide boulevards, oppressively squat, functional buildings, dormitory-style housing. Cities weren't conceived of as places to live, but as building blocks needed to build a strong and prosperous nation; in other words, they were constructed for the benefit of the party and the country, not the people. Continue reading at Unlivable Cities
Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
Statecraft: The Art, Science, and Illusion of Governing 2.4 Billion People: The Modern State in China and India
Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China's Extraordinary Rise
Clearing the Air: The Health and Economic Damages of Air Pollution in China
