Caribdude, an agonist m8 has posted this, I repost it to get the word out!

---

For some time now we in St. Maarten have been following the efforts of Sean Paton, former BBC reporter and environmental friend, in Bonaire to stop the Scientology 'training ship' Freewinds from dumping it's raw waste water into the ditches and bush lands of Bonaire. For several years now he has been campaigning and posting videos on Youtube on the issue, one of the most recent reports confirmed his predictions and warnings that the practice would contaminate the island's ground water. The fear now is that in the long term, these contaminants will leach through the largely limestone and porous rocks of the island into the sea, last year studies were launched into the possible connections with a die off of spotted moray eels in the coastal waters.

What is truly amazing and astounding is that after Sean reported that wells are now contaminated, the island government of Bonaire have decided to let Freewinds continue the practice for at least another 6 months until a treatment facility can be built. Knowing how slow things move in these Caribbean islands, we have our doubts that this will happen in this time frame. Knowing too how corrupt and self interested most of these island politicians are, I, and many others down this way have some very strong suspicions that Scientology has most likely used it's influence and money to obtain this permission, in fact we believe it has been going on for years. Freewinds, for those who are unfamiliar with the ship, is based in the Caribbean because if it entered US waters it would most likely be seized and condemned because of asbestos.

Scientology as we all know, does not like bad press, so it is our hope that by exposing this story here to all you Agonists, that maybe you can help us give them some. I will be sending this story to Huff, C&L and OGM, but we would really appreciate any help from you all to give it more exposure wherever you can.

Note : It seems that Sean(Paton) removed the two videos, he did inform us that he has been under a great deal of pressure from authorities and that vague threats have been made against him and others. I have reposted them both myself with the expectation they will come after me next to remove them, or request Youtube to, so watch them while you can.

Bonaire-State of emergency Part 1
Bonaire-State of emergency Part 2

---

scientology makes me a sad panda :(

Sean Paul posts:

and my recent favorite, chasing the dragon, which is defined as: Originally in reference to feeding an opium addiction, this can refer to ploughing through any task past the point of diminishing returns, with disregard to one's own health, sanity or well-being.

yup, I can identify with that.

found @ http://glennfriedman.blogspot.com/

HOT DAYS.

It's like late January, early February in Canberra at present.

Life continues to call me onto new endeavours.

After three months leave and a wonderful semester at uni, I was made redundant from the bookshop.

I jumped on jobseek and a home care/nursing agency advert grabbed my immediate attention.

I rocked up for the interview and have begun personal care work.

It's a different pace of life, and personally rewarding.

There is so much suffering in the world in war and famine but the hidden suffering in the suburbs from illness and aging is not exposed much.

I have come full circle in many ways in my life. God is good!

surfacing from study...

re-visited old posts @ agonist:

let me take off my patriarchial hat for a moment, and note that for maybe 50-60,000 years, the womb not the phallus was the predominant cultural metaphor.
Sex therefore served as an icon of the self becoming itself, a very different representational value, relating to erotic desire of divine becoming itself. We are made from stardust and we seek to return to the stars.. We are all neighbours, sharing in the cosmic dance.
The symbol of the womb is not a thrusting, pulsating overwhelming power representation. Rather the womb prefigures the whole human being, a being to be inclusive, embracing, nurturing, intimate - a gentle energy but more overwhelming than the brief pulse of the penis.
The long oppressive history of patriarchal dominance and interference, instilled by male models of philosophy initially and then male led medical practice, debased and decreased a holistic understanding of sexuality that included the female perspective.
As humanity settled into the city lifestyle and war became male dominated, the very idea of neighbour changed.
Today, as in Jesus' day neighbour is someone who lives nearby and implicity has the same value system.
Hence love your enemies became a profound metaphor for early christians. By the middle ages the dictum became personified and thus legitimised warfare between cities/states and countries.
Tolstoy railed against militant nationalism, and used the injunction to love thy enemy as his primary text.
I am continuall amazed by customers who come in and abuse me for stocking books on Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism; truly we have a long way to go in understanding who our neighbour is.

Peter Kreeft writes a reflection as Jesus: So the universe was a womb for humanity, and humanity was a womb for Israel, and Israel was a womb for Mary, and Mary was a womb for me. Thus, Mary is the point of the universe, and I am the point of that point but I have not got the book so cannot check if he is quoting someone else.

turns out the book in question was

Peter Kreeft,The Philosophy of Jesus(South Bend: St. Augustine Press, 2007), 90.

nailed it at last!...

Re-reading Kreeft, I realise with 12 lectures on Pauline literature under my belt, that Kreeft's attempt to write 'The Philosophy of Jesus' was flawed from the start. The gospels are not first hand sources for Jesus' philosophy, rather are edited constructs to re-present his thoughts at the end of the 1stCenturyCE. Ah well I've learnt something...

Well its back to the cold, wet canberra winter, after a very relaxing week in Fiji.

Too many emails whilst I was gone, but one struck a chord, leading me to an interesting poem, that resonates within me:

Deeper cultures called it SPIRIT
pulled from first breath
to a hushed pivot of wingspan, a high point
of recovery over each life, a threshold of faith
in the heart's final treasure, holding its own truth,
its own measure of meaning: urgent, vivid as a myth
or a cave mural: the voice we fell from grace with. . .
it finally happened then: so much splendor went
to waste in us that eternity called collect (imagine,
the richest force in the universe!)
Who knew what to do or say? a pittance of awe
to pay attention with, & we still expected change!
Change came. An age passed, dust settled:
The first were last; a Bell went off
and there came to our senses
only shadows. . .

Michael Masley

Michael, the self styled Artist General and Berkeley street musician is better known for his posters stuck on power poles, but this poem surpasses any of them.

Day 2 of ~123 days leave.

Day 1 started with a sleep in, then time with daughters, and then the d i v o r c e paper arrived. Unexpectedly I was taken out for a wonderful Indian meal by a dear friend, and the pain was numbed by the great meal: perch, potato and spinach, garlic naan and hyderabad lamb mmmmm, and being with a beautiful woman. God always picks me up when I least expect it. Then some computer work, copying over tunes to a friends ipod.

Day 2 another sleep in, then helping out a m8 with some graphical design issues.
Off to university to get my ID card for Semester II - yep I'm returning to the theology study. Daughter time, getting expert at cooking kale/redcabbage boiled in fried cumin!Took advantage of a student deal to grab ultimate office 2007 and wiled away the late evening with some serious newsposting @ agonist.org. I haven't visited Mauberly for a while, I'm glad I did: breaking open Euthyphro and Socrates discussion on piety, the hooting of the unwise owl got me cogitating.

testing out windows 7 and excel 2010
Top 20 countries increase in confirmed swine flu cases:

and using wolframalpha for population figures to produce table of percent of confirmed cases:

This picture keeps entering my consciousness, not sure why but still I'm hoping for a miracle.

Commonsense, statistics and reality all tell me that life has moved on, has changed not ended, but there are no easy explanations.

So I pick up one foot drag it forward and keep moving forward!

I'm taking a leap into the unknown over the next few weeks.

I'll keep on riding the dragon, high or low!

Australia confirms first swine flu case

Australia confirms first swine flu case: "Australia has its first confirmed case of swine flu.
But the NSW woman who arrived in Brisbane on Thursday on flight QF16 from Los Angeles is no longer infectious and had a weak strain of the virus, authorities say.
Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon said the woman, who cannot be identified for privacy reasons, contracted the disease in late April while overseas and had recovered before returning to Australia"

SICK of garlic and wed rine? hic burp

try Oinksip!

It's a real worry! The Australian Department of Health and Ageing has issued a press release that states inter alia that "unlike bird flu, strains of swine influenza do not usually cause illness in humans, and in developed countries like Australia, relatively few people are regularly exposed to pigs."


Sheesh, the issue is that a H1N1 infection is killing people in Mexico, and has also been diagnosed in the USA, whilst closer to home twenty-two students from Auckland's Rangitoto College, may have been infected with the Swine Flu.

Someone at the DHA is blissfully ignorant of what is actually happening.

This nasty may mash up with avian flu components, or may burn itself out...

Latest updates http://agonist.org/topic/bird_flu





Reference: bird flu swine flu agonist H1N1 pandemic WHO

from The Australian

IAN Plimer calls himself an old-fashioned scientist. That means you question what others won't. You marry yourself to the data; you buck the received wisdom and political correctness of your colleagues.

When it comes to climate change, you say: "I was trained to be sceptical."

This is not exactly the view de jour when the great and the good, from Kevin Rudd to 2007 Australian of the Year Tim Flannery and former US vice-president Al Gore, are singing from the same hymn sheet about the hydra-headed menace of global warming.

Australia's top earth scientist has inserted a typically discordant note into the chorus. In his latest book, Heaven and Earth, Plimer sets out the "missing science" of climate change and challenges the assumption that the world's warming is down to human activity.

Far from heating up to dangerous levels, the planet is in a lull in an ice age that began 37million years ago, he says.

True, the climate is changing within these cyclical parameters, but less dramatically than it has at other times in Earth's history and with none of the catastrophic consequences talked up by the doom-and-gloom merchants.

"There is always change going on," he tells Inquirer. "I don't dispute that. The extent and origin of it are another matter."

Plimer puts forward the case, in 485 closely argued pages, that far too much emphasis has been given to the level of atmospheric carbondioxide in the scientific modelling of climate change.

Contrary to what the Prime Minister may say in spruiking the carbon pollution reduction scheme, Plimer's position is that CO2 is not a pollutant but a necessity of life. For a start, it is food for plants. "Global warming and a high CO2 content bring prosperity and lengthen your life ... without CO2 there would be no complex life on Earth," he writes.

While an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide theoretically may contribute to temperature rise, Plimer says there is no evidence to show this and plenty of proof, if you choose to look for it, to the contrary.

He accepts that people can alter the weather: the "urban heat island effect" has proved towns and cities are warmer than thesurrounding countryside, and in Europe there is evidence that weekends tend to be cooler and wetter because of the drop in human activity.

But that is not the same as changing the climate of the planet as a whole; Plimer takes a very long view of the forces at play here.

By his reasoning, climate changes are cyclical and driven by the Earth's position in the galaxy, the sun, wobbles in the planet's orbit, ocean currents and plate tectonics. When he peers back in time, there were periods when atmospheric CO2 was much higher than it is now yet produced no disastrous shift in the climate.

To reduce climate change to the single variable of carbon emissions abandons "all we know about planet Earth, the sun and the cosmos", Plimer says, and that is a leap of faith no self-respecting scientist should take.

"Global warming has become the secular religion of today," he writes in the powerful conclusion to his book. Logic, questioning or contrary data are not permitted. To thumb your nose at the prevailing orthodoxy is to risk being branded a climate-change denier, a scientific knuckle-dragger, or worse. Plimer doesn't let it worry him. "My job is to profess my discipline and, if people don't like that, bad luck," he says.

WE'RE talking in a borrowed office at the back of the printing works where his new book is being packed. Plimer has been here since 6.30am signing copies. It is a cool morning, overcast outside, with rain spitting from the sky. A nice change for dry-as-a-bone Adelaide, his home for the past three years.

If climate change is biting, this is where the hurt could be most acute. When the PM toured the Murray River's dying lower lakes last winter, he said the parched expanse of exposed soilbed, southeast of the city, testified to the reach of global warming.

Adelaide's water supply is in serious trouble. Despite the state Government's insistence that water for households is guaranteed, the boss of the new Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Rob Freeman, blew the whistle this week when he told The Australian there might not be sufficient "carry" water to offset evaporation and seepage losses of moving supplies to the city's reservoirs.

This after a summer where up to 80 Adelaideans died in a record-setting heatwave and 173 Victorians died in the Black Saturday bushfires. Queensland and northern NSW were inundated with the worst flooding in years; a powerful cyclone threatened coastal communities between Townsville and Gladstone but spun out to sea. More frequent and fierce weather-related disasters, wasn't that what the global warmers were predicting?

Plimer agrees people are right to worry about what's next. Nature, however, has always shown a fierce face in Australia and the destructive summer of 2008-09 should be kept in perspective.

"We should be concerned about bushfires, cyclones," he says. "But they are natural disasters and this is a dry continent prone to them. Things come to pass."

Plimer knows a thing or two about taking on powerful interests. He is not a man to be dismissed easily; his impressive academic and publishing record attests to that.

In addition to his day job at the University of Adelaide's school of environmental sciences, he is emeritus professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne and the author of seven books and 120 scholarly papers.

He is Australia's best-known academic geologist and certainly one of the most outspoken. Plimer has never backed away from a fight. In Telling Lies for God, he took on the creationists. When a group of them from Sydney, claiming to have evidence the wreck of Noah's Ark reposed on a mountain in Turkey, sued him for alleged defamation, Plimer hit straight back by mortgaging his house to cross-litigate in the Federal Court.

In part, he alleged that the creationists had breached the Trade Practices Act by engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct. The court disagreed but upheld an aspect of his case over copyright; the German Geological Society made him the first Australian to receive its Leopold von Buch medal.

Plimer went on to win one of Australia's top science awards, the Eureka prize, for his first book on global warming, A Short History of Planet Earth.

Plimer, 62, see parallels with his fight with the Christian fundamentalists. "The creationists were trying to teach a religious fundamentalism dressed up as science ... and they totally changed the nature science," he says.

"The science is now based on consensus, and we have thousands of scientists who have got everything to gain by saying the world is going to end. We have lost the tie to evidence. So I make great comparison ... between the way creationists operate and the way some of the rabid environmentalists and global warmers operate. The parallels are quite similar."

Plimer reserves his sharpest criticism for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has driven the international debate. Very much for the worse, in the professor's judgment. "The IPCC process is related to environmental activism, politics and opportunism," he writes in Heaven and Earth.

Plimer argues that the IPCC is dominated by atmospheric scientists, who in turn are obsessed by carbon dioxide emissions, skewing the process. The problems are compounded by primitive computer modelling. He reviewed five computer predictions of climate made in 2000, underpinning IPCC findings, and found there was no relationship between predicted future temperature and actual measured temperature even during a short period. Ditto for a link between temperature and the atmospheric CO2 content.

"To get a complete view of the planet, you need to have far more than atmospheric scientists on the IPCC," Plimer says. "What they have done is separate the atmosphere from the way the world works ... you need solar physicists, you need cosmologists, you need astronomers, you need geologists, bacterial specialists and on you go ... we don't hear anything about those things from the IPCC."

But what about this ice age business? How does that square with melting polar ice, rising sea levels and 40C summers in northern Europe? Well, taking the last point first, Plimer says none of the temperature variations in the 20th century was outside the range of normal variability. There was alarm in the 1970s that the decreasing temperature was heralding another ice age, he says. After 1976, when temperatures started to rise again, the clamour broke out over the greenhouse effect and global warming. Yet since 1998 temperatures have been falling, to profound scientific silence, he says. "It is not possible to make computer model forecasts of climate change for the year 2040, 2100 or 2300 based on a few decades of data," he says.

The history of the planet is etched in rock, and Plimer says it shows that for half of the past six million years the Earth was warmer than it is now. The ice caps are geologically unusual; people were growing barley and wheat in Greenland 1000 years ago. Ice ages come and go, yet no one knows precisely why. Sea levels rise and fall. It was ever thus, Plimer says. The planet is in a constant state of flux. Why would that dynamic suddenly change?

buy a copy here: Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science

Susan Boyle from 1999 Cry me a river charity CD

hattip sandyd

Fastest rise to fame of anybody ever? 28 million you tube hits when you add up the different tubes.



From emails, blogs, twitters, bbs, newspapers, tv shows, phone texts, Susan Boyle is the name on everyones lips.

24 48 72 96 120 144 168 hours of increasing exposure to the world.

I’ve read countless posts and reports of people moved to tears and joy, revelling in the sound of music sung with such joy regardless of the cynical audience.

It’s a long way to the semi-final, and Susan is having some time-out from the media frenzy.

Time will tell if Susan can be someone to unite people in caring again about all folk, maybe too much too expect of her, but she sure has made some folk take a second look at what is important, and to top it all off she sang one of my all time fav songs. w00t!

A song I love, and a version that brings a tear to the eye and joy to the heart:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY
embedding disabled by request

Without a doubt that is the biggest surprise I have had in three years on this show! HQ version.

Funny how life happens when you least expect it. An email enquiry from a young lady in her first year at uni, about Catholic mens attitudes to women, led me to some googling, and then I re-discovered this post http://graham72.blogspot.com/2007/07/life-is-living-day-today.html

and serendipity or synchronicity gentle reader had me reflecting on this picture:



look at the flow of direction of the surroundings of both Mary and Martha, Jesus is conscious of both women, and there is a balance and equilibrium at work in Vermeers depiction of the scene.

I fail so often to maintain that balance, juggling so many things and not stopping to smell the flowers or to really revel in a wonderful sunset.

hattip Neil for the painting, and kudos to Erin for asking a question, that has far more import for me than she can realise in her tender years.

YAY life is wonderful, and it's almost


and work, meditation, worship and family will all intersect once again. w00t!

Ya just got to love google, the goddess does not always manage to index stuff.

So I wanted to find out who supplied Inform, INFORM, brochures pamphlets etc

no joy

so had to ring around, and finally got the information.

and edited it unto the highest edit to get it to fit without crashing the CSS!

INFORM

original site here inform

in memory of Scott, a kindred spirit.

From zerohedge blogspot hattip tjfxh @ agonist.org

When the data is too depressing whiz over to Dear Planetary Astronomer Mike for some out of this world stuff!

come back and let's try again!

graham waves gently at Cranbourne visitor!

I've been noticing willow trees as i have spent some time off work and travelling around country areas. Willow is renowned both for strength and flexibility, and also possesses the ability to regenerate itself when nearly destroyed.

I guess i feel some affinity that through my life i have chosen and been forced to accept my strengths and weaknesses and found anew flexibility to re-define, re-new and re-generate who I am and how I re-act to life.

_{photo (C) bobcuthillphotography@gmail.com}

Grahams Quick Guide to E-commerce:
Domain Name
A Domain Name is the address that people type into their web browser e.g. www.catholicbookshop.org to access your site. You must register a Domain Name with a Domain Registry. Once you have registered your domain name, you must configure the domain name so that it points to a Web Hosting company. If you have opted to purchase a Shopping Cart that provides hosting as part of the package, you will need to point your domain name to the Shopping Cart's servers.

Web Hosting
Before anyone can see what your company has to offer, you must elect a Web Hosting company to host your website. Everything you see on the Internet is stored on web servers around the world. There are many thousands of companies who provide this service and their prices all vary depending on your requirements.

Types of Websites
Websites come in many different shapes and forms. They can be static or dynamic. They can integrate with databases, or simply display basic information such as contact details and other company (or personal) information. They can be strictly based on your information, or can display links to, and ads for, other websites.

They can also incorporate third-party controls/services such as:
Shopping Cart Facilities
Real-Time Credit Card Processing
Content Management System(s)
Telephone SMSing / calling

Your WebsiteObviously, you will need an actual website to point your domain name to. Depending on your level of programming experience, you can either attempt to create this yourself, or employ a professional web developer to create it for you. In either case, remember that this is a virtual presence of your business and should reflect the quality of your products and organization.

Some suggested sections, which you may wish to include in your website, are;

Home page (the starting point of your website)
Contacts page (the numerous ways you can be contacted, eg. Email address, phone numbers)
About Us page (a general overview of your business)
Products / Services page (outline of your products / services)
Shopping Cart (the area of your website that allows products / services to be purchased.
Shopping Carts

To provide effective eCommerce services to your customers, you will need a Shopping Cart service attached to your website. A Shopping Cart, in its basic form, exposes a list of all your products and provides a facility to purchase them online.
Much like web hosts, Shopping Carts come in various different shapes and forms. Some carts allow you to manage your stock levels and update pictures, while other carts integrate complete Content Management System (CMS) facilities, which allow you to modify how your site looks, manage categories for products, adjust postage levels, set your own payment options and much more. A Shopping Cart can usually also be configured as a complete website, including the sections outlined above, or it can simply be used as an additional 'plug-in' to your existing site.

Shopping Carts basically provide you with the means to setup a complete online shop, with minimal effort or programming knowledge.

Since every Shopping Cart is different, here are some points you should consider when choosing the right Shopping Cart for your business.

Products
The more options you are given for your product, the better. You need to ensure that the software will provide you with the features you need. Such features to consider are Inventory Control, Stock-On-Hand (SOH) Warnings, Sales Reports and ease of use.

If were to adopt a Shopping Cart and then find that it's missing a core ingredient, such as SOH Warnings, you may be missing out on key elements, which are crucial to the automated stock-management environment. It's all about making your life easier.

Images

Pictures of products are one of the most important aspects when trying to sell online. Pictures re-assure customers and give them confidence in knowing exactly what they are paying for.

Shopping Carts should all incorporate images with their products. Desirable features of Image Management in Shopping Carts include (but may not be limited to):

Multiple images per product.

The option of using the same image for multiple products (as opposed to having to upload additional images every time).

Automatic Image-Resizing will save you time in having to adjust images manually, before uploading them to your website.

Straight-forward Image Management.

Postage
Every Shopping Cart tends to have a different method for calculating Postage Rates. Some opt to provide a per-product flat rate, while others give you the option of adding a percentage or flat rate across the board. Some Shopping Carts provide you with fields for product dimensions and calculate the postage "on-the-fly", based on rates from an online source (such as Australia Post). Other Shopping Carts have different methods and some prefer to give you free reign on how you would like to apply postage fees to your products. You should decide what would work best for you before choosing a Shopping Cart for your business. Payment Gateways

Some Shopping Carts only provide Credit Card processing through one particular Payment Gateway. Others will give you multiple options at setup time. You need to compare prices and features before making a decision on this topic. See Section 5 (Real-Time Payments) for more information on Payment Gateways.

Most shopping carts will also provide the option to accept payments by methods other than credit card, such as payment in invoice. If you choose to accept this method, you should be aware that payments are not necessarily in real-time, and to be wary of shipping goods, before payment is received.

Security

Any reputable Shopping Cart should have adequate security measures in place, or information on how best to secure your website if they do not.

If you have an SSL Certificate in place, or if the Shopping Cart provides one, you should check the characteristics of the certificate and make sure it has adequate encryption. You should also ensure that the certificate has not expired. See Section 6 (Secure Sockets Layer Certificates) for more information.

Marketing Tools

Marketing from a Shopping Cart can be of great benefit to your company. Marketing tools can differ greatly in functionality depending on the Shopping Cart you choose.

Tracking customers via Customer Accounts and Newsletters can be extremely useful and will assist in keeping your customers happy. It also helps to remind them that you are still operating. Furthermore, recording useful information from customers allows you target particular audiences (eg. Customers within ACT only; or Customers over the age of 40; etc) and will greatly improve your control over customers' interest in special deals, offers and products.

You should also consider whether or not your chosen Shopping Cart will allow you to add advertising banners and/or AdSense-type advertising on your site - these will assist your income.

Real-Time (Credit Card) PaymentsIn this day and age, Real-Time Payments are the fastest, most useful way to do business over the Internet - and they are quite safe, so long as you read and understand the remainder of this guide.

Real-Time Payments, for the purposes of this guide, are defined as Credit Card purchases made over the Internet. There are several ways of accomplishing this and you must be vigilant when choosing a suitable provider for this kind of service.

A Payment Gateway is a provider of such services. Once again, there are several Payment Gateways, around the world, who offer Real-Time Payment facilities. eWAY is Australia's leading payment gateway.

Once you delve into the realm of Real-Time Payments, you must be aware that security is your greatest concern when passing Credit Card numbers and other sensitive information to your chosen Payment Gateway. This is where Secure Sockets Layer Certificates (SSL) are a necessity.

If you've opted to use a Shopping Cart to sell your products/services online, then you should check what the Third-Party provider can offer you in terms of Real-Time Payments and the security that it demands
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificates
Since you will be passing sensitive information from your website, you will require an SSL Certificate. As mentioned previously, some Shopping Cart solutions will provide SSL as part of their services. If they do not, however, you will need to apply SSL to your website. This also applies if you opt not to use a commerical Shopping Cart solution.

SSL Certificates have an encryption value showed in bits. You should ensure that the certificate you plan on acquiring is of adequate encryption (eg. 128bit, 256bit, etc).

Certificates also have an expiry date and must be renewed at the end of this period. You should not let your certificate expire before you renew it, so as to ensure it does not reflect poorly on your company.

Marketing
Now that you have the necessary information to set up your online business, you will need to start marketing your website. There are a number of ways to do this. Some methods are free and some cost money. The right marketing tool will be different for every company, but there are a few that make your life easy and some that even pay you for advertising for other businesses.

Submit to a Search Engine
There are many good Search Engines in cyber space and you should submit to as many free ones as you can. Depending on the expected revenue of your business, you may choose to pay particular Search Engines (such as Google, or Yahoo!) a sum of money to prioritise your website and essentially make your website appear above the others in search results - unless, of course, they've paid more money than you.

Advertising On Websites
There are a number of ways to advertise on the Internet. You could contact a company you wish to partner with and trade banners (small ads placed on a web page). Perhaps you could also negotiate newsletter content and include your partner's services in yours (and vice-versa). That is entirely up to you and them.

There is another form of advertising on the Internet, which has grown to be quite well known and very simple to use. This form of advertising has been adopted by a number of Internet businesses world-wide and is based on a per-click scheme. Here's how it works: You setup your website and sign-up for the advertising scheme The advertising company finds your website and provides you with links that are appropriate to the content of your website (these links may change on a regular basis) You receive money every time somebody clicks on one or more of these links. Similarly, certain advertising companies will pay you, per-click, to put their banner on your site. Afterall, you're advertising for them - why shouldn't you get paid for it? Two companies who adopt this advertising methodology are Google (AdSense) and ClixGalore Affiliate Network.

_{shamelessly stolen from EWAY}

The emotional roller coast continues: grieving clergy who I have watched grow old and die, young ones with cancer, families dealing with still-births, the agony of Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan and Gaza. The horror of child abuse. The sorrow, disbelief and grief of sudden deaths, and suicides. The pain of cancer. Friends, relatives, customers- it's almost too much at times.

I find solace that friends have the same emotional reaction to me. I'm not alone. And the rejection and abuse is common.

Last Saturday I rang the Peace Bell in Cowra for my friends, my childrens children and world peace.

I'm not getting too excited, but I'm thinking that some special times may lie ahead for me. Otherwise I guess I just hang onto the old adage 'offer it up' I'm increasingly fond of Annie:

From Sydney and New York, filmed on mobile/cell phones.

_{hattip facebook users}

Palestine and Israel War in Gaza @ The Agonist Updates:
Part VI Part V, part IV, part III , part II, part I.

How Does it feel to lose two wars in a row

And People Wonder Why they hate us

Justification

turn coat

Canberra Lunchtime Gaza Protest

On the Jewish Tradition of Just War

I emailed Condaleeza Rice today

Ipologise this

EU_Israel Relations, Israeli politics and the Gaza Strikes

Should Israel talk to Hamas

Gaza as depicted by Al Jazeera

The Jewish community debates the Gaza strikes

Israel uses White phosphorus munitions in defiance of treaty

Israel goes for regime change in Gaza

Damnation indeed

George Kenney on Gaza, Forgiveness and American complicity

An Atrocity in Gaza

Hard to believe I've been a python fan for 35 years. hattip Tina for above

Silent vigil outside the Israeli embassy.

[Anna Blatzer in Palestine]
Gaza Massacres; The Time is Now

Please, everyone, stop what you're doing. This is not just any report
from Palestine, but the worst in my lifetime, the worst in 40 years.

At this moment, Israel is raining bombs down on Gaza, an enclosed tiny area that is home to 1.5 million men, women, and children, most of them innocent civilians. This space is tightly sealed by Israel, which constantly denies Gazans electricity, food, medicine, and the ability to leave. Gaza is one big prison being bombed from above. The death toll is up to 428 in the past 7 days. That's more than the number of Israelis killed in the last 7 years. This is what I would call a massacre.

Yes, more Palestinians killed in 7 days than Israelis in 7 years, and yet no comments from President Bush or President-elect Obama. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice places blame solely on Hamas for holding Gazans "hostage," as if Israel's actions were beyond judgment. Would Rice ever respond to a Palestinian attack on Israelis by blaming the Israeli government for holding its citizens hostage with their army's violence?

I am writing you from Jordan. I arrived the day after the attacks began. The day before they began, my friend and colleague Hannah had asked me to deliver a book of poetry to her friend Summer in Gaza, hoping I'd manage to make it on a Free Gaza boat. Since then, these boats bringing unarmed witnesses to Gaza (http://www.freegaza.org) have been attacked in international waters, and Summer's house has been blown to pieces, her brother almost died under the rubble, and her father desperately needs an operation but the hospitals are overflowing. In every home or shop I enter in Jordan, people are huddled watching the stories unfold: a family killed in their home, a university destroyed, a pharmacy blown to pieces, countless bloody babies screaming or worse, silent.

I wonder if people in the US are also seeing the bodies and faces or, as I fear, only some rubble and angry Gazans. The day after attacks began, Israel's largest newspaper Yediot Aharonot covered almost the entire front page with the words, "500,000 Israelis Under Attack!" In smaller font, one could learn that in addition to 1 Israeli, 225 Palestinians had also been killed. It was surreal.

Consider where you are getting your news, and what is not being told to you. For example, the stated purpose of the attack is to drive out Hamas, i.e. to kill anyone in Hamas and scare the rest into turning against Hamas. Not only does this tactic not work (brutality fosters violence), but it clearly fits the definition of terrorism: unlawful violence intended to frighten or coerce a people or government in order to achieve a political or ideological agenda. Israel is operating as a terrorist state in the true sense of the word.

Hamas is also a terrorist organization by this definition, so it would be easy to simplify the conflict as "an endless cycle of violence" were there no historical context. But there is a context, and there are alternatives: Let us remember that Hamas was elected after an intentional shift away from violence towards a mainstream political agenda. Hamas stopped its attacks and began offering the Palestinian people an alternative to the corruption of Fatah. Hamas was democratically elected and immediately strangled by a US-led boycott, preventing the government from functioning. Hamas continued to hold to its one-sided ceasefire (totaling almost 2 years), meanwhile the US and Israel began to train and arm the opposition government, Fatah, which they preferred.

In response to plans for a coup in Gaza (anti-democratic takeover by the US-supported opposition government), Hamas secured its control (again, democratically-elected whether or not we like them) over Gaza, and continues to offer Israel an indefinite ceasefire--no more violent attacks, period--if Israel simply complies with international law. The Arab League (comprised of 22 Arab nation members) has offered the same. These offers are dismissed by Israel and silenced in the US media. Israel says it has tried everything else, but it has not tried the most obvious: complying with international law and accepting repeated offers for a peaceful resolution.

As events unfold in Gaza neither the media nor the people are silent here in Jordan, where people refuse to go on as if nothing were happening to their brothers and sisters (sometimes literally--more than 60% of Jordan's population is Palestinian refugees). Just one day after attacks began, the king of Jordan gave blood to send to Gaza and inspired hundreds of others to do the same (meanwhile President Bush was on vacation in Texas). Spontaneous demonstrations have erupted at least twice here in the capitol today, and thousands are protesting in various major cities around the Middle East and around the world.

Please, wherever you are, do something. Write a letter to the editor. Get a large group to inundate your congressperson at once. Protest! There are demonstrations being organized around the US. If there isn't one happening near you, then do what I would do: buy a poster-board and large marker and write something on it ("Gazans Are People Too," "Massacre in Gaza: Silence is Complicity," "Our Weapons Are Killing Palestinian Children," or anything you can think of). Go outside and stand on a busy corner with it. Force others to confront the reality. Talk to people, invite them to join you. People around the world are empowered enough to take to the streets; we have no excuse not to. The time is now.

hattip Sean Paul