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Thanks! Usually I would be eating but I had to give up meat to lower my cholesterol or else...........

And the U.S. is using that as a reason to go after that oil! Same for Africa! Get everybody fighting against each other then rob them blind.

Off topic but.....

Can you get grass fed beef in the USA?

High cholesterol has become a bigger problem in societies where we feed our cattle on corn. It may taste better, and the cattle grows bigger, faster, but grass fed cattle have a different chemical composition.

I can't remember the details, but when I was dieting for fights, I still needed the protein and lived off tuna, turkey and lean beefburgers. Cholesterol was a worry and came across an article about the grass/corn fed cattle debate.

Maybe a little research into it might help c.j?

Thanks man! I'm just gonna get some rest today.

Yeah you can but they feed these cows not only grass but hay and whatever hormones they can to make them bigger and grow faster. Same for chicken, turkey, fish and veggies too. Now I do know of a movement for growing what they call "organic" fruits and veggies not using chemicals and hormones which by the way is making girls develop before they suppose to and making boys grow ever slighly......BREASTS! Some women call them "man boobs"! They do grow farm raised fish and they do have lean beef and pork but from what I understand all meat may have cholesterol naturally. I can check it though.

[quote] At a Theater Near You ...
by Thomas L. Friedman
Reposted from the NYTimes

I knew something was up when I couldn't get a cab. Then there were sirens and helicopters whirring overhead. I stopped a passerby to ask what was going on. He said something about a car bomb outside a disco six blocks from my hotel. A few hours later, I finally found a taxi. The driver warned me that it was nearly impossible to get across town. Another bomb had been uncovered in a car park. Next day, more news: a suicide bomber had driven his Jeep into an airport and jumped out, his body on fire, screaming "Allah! Allah!"

Where was I? Baghdad? Kabul? Tel Aviv? No, I was in England. But it could have been anywhere. The Middle East: Now playing at a theater near you.

But this movie gets more confusing every time you watch it. When you watched it on 9/11 it was about America's presence in the heart of Arabia. And when you watched it on 7/7 it was about unemployed and alienated Muslim youth in Britain. In Jordan not long ago it was about a wedding at a Western hotel. In Morocco recently it was about an Internet cafe. And two days ago in Yemen it was about seven Spanish tourists who were killed when a suicide bomber drove into them at a local tourist site. Wasn't Spain the country that quit Iraq to get its people out of the line of fire?

Because these incidents are scattered, we're growing numb to just how crazy they are. In the past few years, hundreds of Muslims have committed suicide amid innocent civilians ? without making any concrete political demands and without generating any vigorous, sustained condemnation in the Muslim world.

Two trends are at work here: humiliation and atomization. Islam's self-identity is that it is the most perfect and complete expression of God's monotheistic message, and the Koran is God's last and most perfect word. To put it another way, young Muslims are raised on the view that Islam is God 3.0. Christianity is God 2.0. Judaism is God 1.0. And Hinduism and all others are God 0.0.

One of the factors driving Muslim males, particularly educated ones, into these acts of extreme, expressive violence is that while they were taught that they have the most perfect and complete operating system, every day they're confronted with the reality that people living by God 2.0., God 1.0 and God 0.0 are generally living much more prosperously, powerfully and democratically than those living under Islam. This creates a real dissonance and humiliation. How could this be? Who did this to us? The Crusaders! The Jews! The West! It can never be something that they failed to learn, adapt to or build. This humiliation produces a lashing out.

In the old days, you needed a terror infrastructure with bases in Beirut or Afghanistan to lash out in a big way. Not anymore. Now all you need is the virtual Afghanistan ? the Internet and a few cellphones ? to recruit, indoctrinate, plan and execute. Hence, the atomization ? little terror groups sprouting everywhere. Everyone now has a starter kit.

Gen. Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, recently noted in a speech that during the cold war "the enemy was easy to find, but hard to finish," because the Soviet Union was so big and powerful. "Intelligence was important" back then, he added, "but it was overshadowed by the need for sheer firepower."

In today's war against terrorist groups, said General Hayden, "it's just the opposite. Our enemy is easy to finish, but hard to find. Today, we are looking for individuals or small groups planning suicide bombings, running violent Jihadist Web sites, sending foreign fighters into Iraq."

I'd go one step further. The Soviet Union was easy to find and hard to kill, but once it died, it was dead forever. It had no regenerative power because it had no popular base. The terrorists of Iraq or London are hard to find, easy to kill, but very difficult to eliminate. New recruits just keep sprouting.

Of course, not all Muslims are terrorists. But it's been widely noted that virtually all suicide terrorists today are Muslims. Angry Norwegians aren't doing this ? nor are starving Africans or unemployed Mexicans. Muslims have got to understand that a death cult has taken root in the bosom of their religion, feeding off it like a cancerous tumor.

This cancer is erasing basic norms of civilization. In Iraq, we've seen suicide bombers blow up funerals and schools. In England, seven out of the eight people detained in the latest plot are Muslim doctors or medical students. Doctors plotting mass murder? Could that be? If Muslim leaders don't remove this cancer ? and only they can ? it will spread, tainting innocent Muslims and poisoning their relations with each other and the world. [/quote]

I get the feeling that if they start preaching peace they may have a price on their head. I'm talking about the ones in those places where terrorism is most rampant right now.

SS wrote:'.....a suicide bomber had driven his Jeep into an airport and jumped out, his body on fire, screaming "Allah! Allah!"

A new eyewitness report says he was actually shouting 'Fuck, that hurts. Is there a doctor in the airport?'

LOL!!! Yeah I'm pretty sure he's layin' up in the hospital thinking "I knew I shoulda poured that gas in the back seat"!

[quote] For Muslim Extremists, Religion Matters
by Irshad Manji, The New Republic
Thanks to Richard Prins for the link.

Reposted from:


This week, two very different Brits had their say about the latest terrorist plots in their country. Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the nation that "we have got to separate those great moderate members of our community from a few extremists who wish to practice violence and inflict maximum loss of life in the interests of a perversion of their religion." By contrast, a former jihadist from Manchester wrote that the "real engine of our violence" is "Islamic theology." Months ago, this young man informed me that as a militant he raised most of his war chest not from obscenely rich Saudis, but from middle-class Muslim dentists living in the United Kingdom. There's sobering lesson here for the new prime minister.

So far, those arrested in connection to the car bombs are, by and large, medical professionals. The seeming paradox of the privileged seeking to avenge grievance has many champions of compassion scratching their heads. Aren't Muslim martyrs supposed to be poor, disenfranchised, and resentful about both?

We should have been stripped of that breezy simplification by now. The September 11 hijackers came from means. Mohamed Atta, their ringleader, earned an engineering degree. He then moved to the West, pursuing his post-graduate studies in Germany. No servile goat-herder, that one. In 2003, I interviewed Mohammad Al Hindi, the political leader of Islamic Jihad in Gaza. A physician himself, Dr. Al Hindi explained the difference between suicide and martyrdom. "Suicide is done out of despair," the good doctor diagnosed. "But most of our martyrs today were very successful in their earthly lives."

In short, it's not what the material world fails to deliver that drives suicide bombers. It's something else. And, time and again, the very people committing these acts have articulated what that something else is: their religion.

Consider Mohammad Sidique Khan, the teaching assistant who masterminded the July 7, 2005 transit bombings in London. In a taped testimony, Khan railed against British foreign policy. But before bringing up Western imperialism, he emphasized that "Islam is our religion" and "the Prophet is our role model." Khan gave priority to God, not to Iraq.

Now take Mohammed Bouyeri, the Dutch-born Moroccan Muslim who murdered Amsterdam film director Theo van Gogh. Bouyeri pumped several bullets into van Gogh's body. Knowing that multiple shots would finish off his victim, why didn't Bouyeri stop there? Why did he pull out a blade to decapitate van Gogh?

Again, we must confront religious symbolism. The blade is an implement associated with seventh-century tribal conflict. Wielding it as a sword becomes a tribute to the founding moment of Islam. Even the note stabbed into van Gogh's corpse, although written in Dutch, had the unmistakable rhythms of Arabic poetry. Let's credit Bouyeri with honesty: At his trial he proudly acknowledged acting from "religious conviction."

Despite integrating Muslims far more adroitly than most of Europe, North America isn't immune. Last year in Toronto, police nabbed 17 young Muslim men allegedly plotting to blow up Canada's parliament buildings and behead the prime minister. They called their campaign "Operation Badr," a reference to the Battle of Badr, the first decisive military triumph achieved by the Prophet Mohammed. Clearly, the Toronto 17 drew inspiration from religious history.

For people with big hearts and good will, this has to be uncomfortable to hear. But they can take solace that the law-and-order types have a hard time with it, too. After rounding up the Toronto suspects, police held a press conference and didn't once mention Islam or Muslims. At their second press conference, police boasted about avoiding those words. If the guardians of public safety intended their silence to be a form of sensitivity, they instead accomplished a form of artistry, airbrushing the role that religion plays in the violence carried out under its banner.

They're in fine company: Moderate Muslims do the same. While the vast majority of Muslims aren't extremists, a more important distinction must start being made--the distinction between moderate Muslims and reform-minded ones.

Moderate Muslims denounce violence in the name of Islam but deny that Islam has anything to do with it. By their denial, moderates abandon the ground of theological interpretation to those with malignant intentions--effectively telling would-be terrorists that they can get away with abuses of power because mainstream Muslims won't challenge the fanatics with bold, competing interpretations. To do so would be admit that religion is a factor. Moderate Muslims can't go there.

Reform-minded Muslims say it's time to admit that Islam's scripture and history are being exploited. They argue for re-interpretation precisely to put the would-be terrorists on notice that their monopoly is over. Re-interpreting doesn't mean re-writing. It means re-thinking words and practices that already exist--removing them from a seventh-century tribal time warp and introducing them to a twenty first-century pluralistic context.

Un-Islamic? God no. The Koran contains three times as many verses calling on Muslims to think, analyze, and reflect than passages that dictate what's absolutely right or wrong. In that sense, reform-minded Muslims are as authentic as moderates, and quite possibly more constructive.

IRSHAD MANJI is a senior fellow with the European Foundation for Democracy, the creator of the PBS documentary "Faith Without Fear," and the author of The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith.[/quote]