It’s not exactly Toronto the good anymore, eh?

So what is Toronto becoming?

• MGM wants to build a massive casino on Toronto’s waterfront, preferably turning Ontario Place into a mini Vegas.
• Ashley Madison wants to sponsor Toronto Zoos, as long as they get naming rights
• Dennis Hof looking to expand to Toronto and build a Bunny House
• Giorgio Mammoliti wants to build a dedicated red-light district in Toronto

What is happening to Toronto? It’s simple, Toronto is broke! Year’s ago we talked about the hollowing out of Toronto, forcing families to move to the suburbs, such as Mississauga, Brampton, Markham, Pickering, Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa and farther. I am not saying that this is the reason. The majority of jobs are still in Toronto, however what will Toronto look like in 20 years? Yesterday Rob Ford said “he is all business”, and he will entertain any business idea. I am not sure if Torontonians would have supported Ford Nation if they knew what the vision was for Toronto. This is definitely not in the same scope of David Miller. As a mayor he seemed to have a different vision for the city. The question is what happened to the debate over these ideas? I am starting to hear rumblings of dissatisfied voters in Scarborough and other parts of the city. Sure, I am not taking stock from a large base, but these are individuals who were stark supporters of Rob Ford coming in to clean house.

Toronto Residents: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. 
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”? 
Toronto Residents: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies over Toronto! The Don river and Lake Ontario boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…Mel Lastman rising back to power! Human cooperation, politicians actually working together… mass hysteria!

So will Toronto become the new promised land?

Related articles

• So who really runs the city of Toronto? (thegtapatriot.wordpress.com)
• MGM targets Toronto for ‘spectacular’ casino resort (ctv.ca)
• Game over for Rob Ford in Toronto? (thegtapatriot.com)
• Rob Ford non-commital on Pride (thestar.com)
• Nightlife at Harbourfront could fall victim to whining locals (thestar.com)
• MGM eyes Toronto for sprawling integrated resort and casino (theglobeandmail.com)
• Woodbine location favoured for Toronto ‘entertainment destination’ (theglobeandmail.com)

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Foreclosures and the Credit Crunch in America: Did God Want You to Get That Mortgage?

By David Van Biema

Pulpit Pimps

Has the so-called Prosperity gospel turned its followers into some of the most willing participants — and hence, victims — of the current financial crisis? That’s what a scholar of the fast-growing brand of Pentecostal Christianity believes. While researching a book on black televangelism, says Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, he realized that Prosperity’s central promise — that God will “make a way” for poor people to enjoy the better things in life — had developed an additional, dangerous expression during the subprime-lending boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe “God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house.” The results, he says, “were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers.”

Others think he may be right. Says Anthea Butler, an expert in Pentecostalism at the University of Rochester in New York: “The pastor’s not gonna say, ‘Go down to Wachovia and get a loan,’ but I have heard, ‘Even if you have a poor credit rating, God can still bless you — if you put some faith out there [that is, make a big donation to the church], you’ll get that house or that car or that apartment.’ ” Adds J. Lee Grady, editor of the magazine Charisma: “It definitely goes on, that a preacher might say, ‘If you give this offering, God will give you a house.’ And if they did get the house, people did think that it was an answer to prayer, when in fact it was really bad banking policy.” If so, the situation offers a look at how a native-born faith built partially on American economic optimism entered into a toxic symbiosis with a pathological market.

Although a type of Pentecostalism, Prosperity theology adds a distinctive layer of supernatural positive thinking. Adherents will reap rewards if they prove their faith to God by contributing heavily to their churches, remaining mentally and verbally upbeat and concentrating on divine promises of worldly bounty supposedly strewn throughout the Bible. Critics call it a thinly disguised pastor-enrichment scam. Other experts, like Walton, note that for all its faults, the theology can empower people who have been taught to see themselves as financially or even culturally useless to feel they are “worthy of having more and doing more and being more.” In some cases the philosophy has matured with its practitioners, encouraging good financial habits and entrepreneurship.

But Walton suggests that a decade’s worth of ever easier credit acted like a drug in Prosperity’s bloodstream. “The economic boom ’90s and financial overextensions of the new millennium contributed to the success of the Prosperity message,” he wrote recently. And not positively. “Narratives of how ‘God blessed me with my first house despite my credit’ were common. Sermons declaring ‘It’s your season to overflow’ supplanted messages of economic sobriety,” and “little attention was paid to … the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM to subsidize cars, clothes and vacations.”

With the bubble burst, Walton and Butler assume that Prosperity congregants have taken a disproportionate hit, and they are curious as to how their churches will respond. Butler thinks some of the flashier ministries will shrink along with their congregants’ fortunes. Says Walton: “You would think that the current economic conditions would undercut their theology.” But he predicts they will persevere, since God’s earthly largesse is just as attractive when one is behind the economic eight ball.

A recent publicly posted testimony by a congregant at the Brownsville Assembly of God, near Pensacola, Fla., seems to confirm his intuition. Brownsville is not even a classic Prosperity congregation — it relies more on the anointing of its pastors than on Scriptural promises of God. But the believer’s note to his minister illustrates how magical thinking can prevail even after the mortgage blade has dropped. “Last Sunday,” it read, “You said if anyone needed a miracle to come up. So I did. I was receiving foreclosure papers, so I asked you to anoint a picture of my home and you did and your wife joined with you in prayer as I cried. I went home feeling something good was going to happen. On Friday the 5th of September I got a phone call from my mortgage company and they came up with a new payment for the next 3 months of only $200. My mortgage is usually $1,020. Praise God for his Mercy & Grace.”

And pray that the credit market doesn’t tighten any further.

read more | digg story

Propaganda – Do Americans really believe this stuff or is America just one strange place?

I was sent this clip and could not believe what I was seeing. We have seen some attack ads in the past from the Conservatives, however not to this extreme. I cannot believe that this is really and ad endorsed by the Republicans?  You hope that people do not vote based on propaganda or a political party playing to their religious fears. However, it looks like they continue to. I guess it just works? I heard a radio show on CBC and the guest believed that there should be “an intelligence test” or some type of qualifications for voting (I.e. a slight bit of education…). I doubt that would ever happen, however with only 50-60% of voters even bothering to show up, really what is the point. We fought wars to protect this freedom. One day we will loose our right to be an informed voter and we will say “what the hell happened”.

American Voters

But I digress, this is America and the politics of fear work the best. Based the information I was given, the intent is to slightly imply that Obama is the somehow the anti-Christ. Basing your vote on how you think the Bible is to be interpreted? That says it all! But I guess if you base your thought process on Biblical interpretations who am I to judge? Biblically speaking I guess it was fine for African-Americans to be treated as “less than human” for hundreds of years. Maybe it is fine, Biblically speaking, to eradicate the “savages”? Biblically speaking, as I guess Palin may believe, Russia is “Gog and Magog”, so they are the “bad guys”? Oh, I am forgetting those immigrants who are a threat to out way of living? So much for the ideology of removal of Church and State.

If people are actually believing this propaganda than all I can say is “America is a strange place”. No matter who you vote for, make sure it is grounded in facts. Think about what is best for the country. Remember those who used Christianity or their “faith” as a crutch to do the most hideous of crimes against humanity. Use the mind that God gave you and educate yourself before you make ANY choice. The same applies to Canadians. As the old saying goes, “don’t believe the hype”. God forbid Canada ever gets like this! If it ever does, please get help, get medicated and get educated!

Republican Hypocrisies

To all the believers, this one is for you! Hypocrisies….What’s new, eh?

Mat 7:5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye….

CERN – The World Ends On Wednesday? Not likely? There is simply not enough energy to create a stable Earth threatening Black hole.

CERN - Will possibly be Humanity's Greatest Achievement or....?

The man behind the world’s biggest scientific experiment, which critics claim could cause the end of the world, is a Welsh miner’s son who has admitted blowing things up as a child.

Dr Lyn Evans, who has been dubbed Evans the Atom, will this week switch on a giant particle accelerator designed to unlock the secrets of the Big Bang.

But the 63-year-old physicist revealed yesterday that his passion for science was fuelled by the relatively small bangs he had created with his chemistry set at his council house in Aberdare in the Welsh valleys.

‘I was more interested in chemistry than physics when I was young,’ he said.

‘I had a number of chemistry sets. Like everybody, I used to make explosives. I even blew the fuses of the whole house a few times.’

His interest in physics grew at his boys-only grammar school, where lessons had an added attraction because they were attended by girls bussed in from a nearby school that lacked a physics teacher.

On Wednesday, Dr Evans will fire up the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile-long doughnut-shaped tunnel that will smash sub-atomic particles together at nearly the speed of light.

Built by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the collider lies beneath the French-Swiss border, near the institution’s headquarters in Geneva, at depths ranging from 170ft to 600ft.

The aim of the £4.4billion experiment is to recreate the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang – the birth of the universe – and provide vital clues to the building blocks of life.

It will track the spray of particles thrown out by collisions in a search for the elusive Higgs Boson, a theoretical entity that supposedly lends weight, or mass, to the elementary particles. So important is this mysterious substance that it has been called the ‘God Particle’.

Scientists also hope to shed some light on the invisible material that exists between particles – dubbed ‘dark matter’ as no one knows what it really is – which makes up most of the universe.

Relaxed: Dr Evans – in his shorts at the CERN control centre in Geneva – dismisses the fears of doom-mongers

But a handful of scientists believe that the experiment could create a shower of unstable black holes that could ‘eat’ the planet from within, and they are launching last-ditch efforts to halt it in the courts.

One of them, Professor Otto Rossler, a retired German chemist, said he feared the experiment may create a devastating quasar – a mass of energy fuelled by black holes – inside the Earth.

‘Nothing will happen for at least four years,’ he said. ‘Then someone will spot a light ray coming out of the Indian Ocean during the night and no one will be able to explain it.

‘A few weeks later, we will see a similar beam of particles coming out of the soil on the other side of the planet. Then we will know there is a little quasar inside the planet.’

Prof Rossler said that as the spinning-top-like quasar devoured the world from within, the two jets emanating from it would grow and catastrophes such as earthquakes and tsunamis would occur at the points they emerged from the Earth.

‘The weather will change completely, wiping out life, and very soon the whole planet will be eaten in a magnificent scenario – if you could watch it from the moon. A Biblical Armageddon. Even cloud and fire will form, as it says in the Bible.’

He said that attempts were still being made in the European Court of Human Rights to halt the experiment on the grounds that it violated the right to life. The court has, however, already rejected calls for a temporary delay in the project, and it is unlikely to come to a speedy decision about whether the CERN experiment should be halted for good.

read more | digg story

2008 + 4= 2012 The Mayans were right? Just kidding!

UPDATE – SEPTEMBER 10, 2008: For those who worry, we are still alive! Read information on the CERN test today.

World’s largest particle collider conducts successful test