Success Happy

Daily Motivational Quotes for Success? Hello, just want to ask, where can i find daily motivational success for facebook page...thanks in advance.

Venerable Bede's quotes? Could you possibly fill out this quote for me? I've been searching without success! This is a quote by Venerable Bede: He himself writes, "From the time of my receiving the priesthood, until my fifty-ninth year, I have worked, both for......and that of......, to compile short extracts from the works of the venerable Fathers on Holy Scripture and to comment on their meaning and interpretation. And while I have observed the regular discipline and sung the church services daily in church, my chief.....has always been in study, teaching, and writing." (Venerable Bede) When suggestions were made that he forego some of the monastic requirements for the sake of his studies, he responded, " I well know that .....visit the .......of brethren at the canonical hours. What if they should find me not there......... my brethren? will they not say, ' Where is Bede? Why does he not atend the prescribed hours with his brethren?' During his last days, resting in his sick bed, he suffered greatly and commenting on this to his Brothers, said, "God......the son whom He......." NEvertheless, he continued to dictate his translation of St.John's Gospel to his brother monks. When the Saint was near death, one of his fellow monks said to him that only a small portion of the Gospel remained to be translated, and then asked if it would it be possible for him to continue. He reponded, "It is no......take the pen, sharpen it, and write quickly." The work was completed juz b4 the Holy Father's death. St.Bede's last words were, "Glory to Thee, O God, ....."

YEARBOOK QUOTES!!! WHICH ONE IS THE BEST? it might seem a lot, but its not. please read and tell me which would be best for my yearbook quote!! i need to chose soon! Other suggestions are welcome t is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching. St. Francis of Assisi Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible. St. Francis of Assisi Good, better, best. Never let it rest. 'Til your good is better and your better is best. St. Jerome Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person. Mother Teresa If we want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it. Mother Teresa We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop. Mother Teresa Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together. —Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 20. People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing - that’s why we recommend it daily. —Zig Ziglar 19. Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. —Will Rogers Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance. -Samuel Johnson In any situation, the best thing you can do is the right thing; the next best thing you can do is the wrong thing; the worst thing you can do is nothing. - Theodore Roosevelt DAVID BRINKLEY: A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her. LLOYD JONES: Those who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try nothing and succeed. (adapted) MAYA LIN: To fly, we have to have resistance. VINCE LOMBARDI: Dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price. HUGH MILLER: Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

Why has Bush changed his definition of success in Iraq? See today's quote below? October 12, 2004: Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance. Our goal is to defeat terror by staying on the offensive, destroying the networks, and spreading freedom and liberty. May 2, 2007 Success is not no violence...success is a level of violence where people feel comfortable about living their daily lives, and that's what we're trying to achieve."

What are some of your favorite quotes?? Some of mine are: She changed her hair, painted her nails, and renewed her wardrobe; She changed herself because she wanted to be noticed by the jock that every girl fell for… But while she was doing so, she lost her [ number 1 ] secret admirer. The guy that thought she was perfect when she no make-up, and when she dressed in ripped jeans. The guy that dreamt about being with her, while she dreamt of being with another… Depend on no one because in life there’s a road you take. And one day, that road splits in two. At the end of each road is success, or failure. This isn’t a “guessing game,” it’s a, “You’re the only one that can choose your destiny.” By depending on no one, you make your own decision on you’re life. So choose wisely because either way, there’s no one to blame around you. **Flashback; Turn back in time where you used to sit 4 hours watching the Rugrats. Where you wouldn’t ever leave your house without your nano baby, and when Blues Clues was actually challenging. Rewind back to the times when your favorite shows were Doug, Ren & Stimpy, Pinky and the Brain, AAAAAAAH Real Monsters!, and Rocko’s modern Life. When you watched re-runs of TGIF, Step by Step, Family Matters, Dinosaurs, and Boy Meets World. When you remember reading every series of Goosebumps, or in that case, remember listening to your mom read them as she grew bored and bored and as you grew more excited as to what would happen next. When bringing plastic cartoon lunch boxes to school was pretty much cool, and saying “NOT,” after every sentence was the way to talk. When every argument was settled by rock paper scissors, bubble gum bubble gum in a dish, or daddy had a donkey inky binky bonky. When cops and robbers was a daily activity, and when hide and go seek was put to pause only when it was snack time. The days when we used to actually obey our parents and when the radio was all we depended on for music. When you knew that Kimberly, the pink ranger, and Tommy, the green ranger, were meant to be together. When you always wanted to send in a tape to America's Funniest Home Videos . . . but never taped anything funny…so you gave up. When the Magic School Bus made you think that school buses could fly, and when yo-yos made you popular. When getting married meant buying your crush a Ring Pop, and blabbing some random words behind the dumpster. When reading that little paper in the fortune cookie meant everything to you because it predicted your life. The days when you could tell furbie all your little secrets and expect him to talk back, and when Beanie Babies were the talk of the class. When you got creeped out by "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" And when you knew the Macarena by heart. When you lied to your parents to bring you to McDonalds because you were starving, when really, you wanted to play in the play place. When gas was $0.95 a gallon & Caller ID was a new thing, and when checking out drawing books and "Rainbow Fish" from the library was the cool thing to do. Before we realized all this would eventually disappear we didn’t bother to think of how good things were. Flashback…to the world we live in now. **You think you know who your true friends are? wait till high school & see who's there for you when your ex boyfriend spreads rumors about you. Think you'll never do drugs? Wait till it's right there in front of you & all your "friends" are doing it. Think your tough? Wait till you say the wrong thing to the wrong person-see who backs down first. Think you're smart? Wait till you have an English paper, science project, history test & a 10 minute monologue due tomorrow cause you were absent for 1 day. Think you're cool? wait till you're the only one who doesn't make the sports team, see how cool you are then. you think you're popular? Wait till your parents can't afford the new Hollister jeans everyone has. Think you'll never fall in love? Wait till a guy looks deep in your eyes & says he loves you. Think you'll never get your heart broken? wait till that same guy who said he loved you is holding another girl behind your back. Think you won't have sex? Wait till the guy you think you love says it'll make you closer. Think "nothing's going to happen to you"? Yea wait till you're sitting in a jail cell, wondering how you got caught. Think that you're always going to be your own individual? Well wait till one morning when you look in the mirror & you're just like everybody else. I don't want someone constantly Saying I'm beautiful or hot or sexy. I want someone who will fight with me, Tell me he hates me And acts like he's crying just so I will kiss him. I want someone who will make fun of me, Do things with him, And his friends, And not always do everything I say. I don't want the "perfect guy" to every other girl. I want my perfect guy. The one who is no where near perfect And knows I'm not either, But loves me anyways. Don't base your decisions on the advice of people who don't have to deal with the results. I'm so sick of immaturity, of name calling, of labels, of gossip..of High school. It doesn't make sense any more. & I find myself being nice to people that I rather kill. Always be a first-rate version of yourself instead of second-rate version of somebody else.. Friends are friends, & in some cases, that's all they`ll ever be. If you have to try an convince yourself you don't care about someone- you care about them more than you think. Laugh at stupid jokes. CRY. Get revenge. Apologize. Tell someone how much they really mean to you. Let someone know what they're missing. Laugh till your stomach hurts...live life, because tomorrow's not guaranteed to anyone. SORRY HUN. BUT UNLIKE YOU, I'M NOT A DOORKNOB WHERE EVERYONE GETS A TURN. I'M MORE OF A CASINO. WHERE ONLY THE LUCKY ONES WIN THE JACKPOT. Don`t be flattered that he misses you. He should miss you. You`re deeply missable. However, he`s still the same person who just broke up with you. Remember, the only reason he can miss you is cause he`s choosing, everyday, not to be with you. The world is going to throw us a million reasons why this isn`t gunna work out between us, but I`m armed with the one reason why it will ; I love you Love your enemies just in case your friends turn out to be a bunch of bastards I believe in love at first sight, Hope of a new tomorrows, Second chances, Living with no regrets, Long walks on the beach, & Knowing that everything has a purpose. When she was 4, she wished she could wear makeup, and ::mini skirts:: Now, she wishes she could play in the mud, and sleep with her teddy bear that used to be her best friend… she used to wish for change, and now her wish finally came true, after that she would do anything, to stop everything from diversifying Do anything and everything in life… because there’s gonna come a time when you think back when you were just a kid; When you’re biggest fear was that Santa Claus was gonna give you coal for Christmas. That you’d stick your tooth under our pillow, and t he tooth fairy would forget to leave you a 5 dollar bill…And that it wouldn't cross the Easter Bunny’s mind to leave you a basket of treats. Then you’ll see that you’re only fear you can’t seem to get over is the fear that all those little childhood worries are just gonna be memories… and before you know it, you’d be the one saying, “ Wow, those were the days…” "Sometimes, you gotta teach yourself how to get up from a hard fall... cuz if you call for someone's help... they just might push you back down.... "

What do you think Open border activist I cant remember name in court but can remember name at rallies? On May 20, 2010, Nativo Lopez, President of the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), former MEChA organizer, ousted Santa Ana School Board official, and open-borders advocate made one more in a series of appearances in Los Angeles Superior Court relative to felony charges by the Los Angeles District Attorney of voter fraud and other serious allegations related to registering and voting in Los Angeles while residing in Orange County. Conviction could result in up to three years in prison. His preliminary hearing, now set for July 12, was postponed by Lopez’s repeated refusal to identify himself to the court at each appearance and the decision by Commissioner Kristi Lousteau in March to assign him for mental-competency determination before continuing with criminal proceedings. (http://orangejuicelbog.c/2010/05/nativo-lopez-update/) Nativo did not have any problem identifying himself on May 18 as a leader of the protest at Staples Center against Lakers coach Phil Jackson’s comment that Arizona’s new immigration law is irrelevant to basketball. He was also named as an organizer of the huge May 1, 2010, Los Angeles Immigration March, mirroring a similar event in 2006 when he and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stood shoulder to shoulder in televised news interviews. On its website, the Boston Branch of the International Socialism Organization just announced that Nativo Lopez will speak at its upcoming 2010 conference in Chicago in June and Oakland on July 1, which should allow him time to return for his next appearance in Superior Court and, hopefully, remember his name. (www.bostonsocialism.com) On her current re-election campaign site, Green Party Mayor Gayle McLaughlin of Richmond, CA, www.greenpartywatch.org/tag/nativo-lopez/ shows a photo of Nativo Lopez at her kickoff, speaking not only as the National President of MAPA, but also as National Director of Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana, “…a community service and advocacy organization for Mexican and Latin American immigrants throughout the United States.” But the CA Secretary of State’s site indicates both Lopez’s Los Angeles-based MAPA Mexican American Political Association National and the Santa Ana Hermandad Mexicana Nacional corporations are suspended.http://kepler.sos.ca.gov/cbs.aspx This begs the question whether East-LA-born Larry Lopez (aka Nativo Vigil Lopez), really speaks for Mexican Americans in general, and, more specifically, whether he represents the views of MAPA, a historic, respected Latino political organization that advanced such notable Mexican Americans as former Los Angeles Councilman and later Congressman Edward R. Roybal, into important political and leadership positions. A recent Los Angeles Daily News story, “MAPA’s success leads to its decline,” quotes Jose Sandvoal, president of Young Latino Democrats of San Fernando Valley, describing MAPA as…such an old school Chicano organization…which isn’t very relevant to my generation today.” (Daily News, April 19, 2010) http://www.opposingviews.com/i/nativo-lopez-does-he-speak-for-mapa-and-mexican-americans

WHY ARE MEN HEROS WHEN THEY DO bad things but women when they do good are INSULTED? A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is "sensitive;" or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture—in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers. This Andrea Dworkin quote is 100 percent correct. A lot of evil men are looked at as heros by many people but if a woman has success she is looked at as ugly or a bitch.

Could you correct my homework, please? I´m studying English? I have to write about happiness. --------- “Happiness is something everyone desires but only a few people are able to reach” According to experts happiness is a state of mind or feeling characterized by contentment, love, satisfaction, pleasure, or joy. Most people tend to think that happiness it’s to live a good life being closely related with relationships, social interaction, marital status, employment, health, freedom, optimism, religious, money, proximity to other happy people and so on. And all these things represent positive emotions and positive activities for them so they are happier. Personally I think it is a blunder on our part that we consider happiness and pleasure to be the same. They are not same. Pleasure is a momentary feeling caused by something you did or achieved. However happiness is a more lasting state that it is not dependent on any external factor. How to reach or find happiness- or even if we deserve to– remains a mystery to me. Society reinforces the belief that fulfilment comes from achieving success, wealth, and good relationships. It’s not true. You make your own happiness step by step and doing happiness flows of daily living. All of us should think is more important not to feel unhappy than happy and every day we are exposing ourselves to be unhappy desiring things constantly that very often they are very difficult to achieve or reach. All of us have problems and also we are all afraid of failure in any area of our life. So a good step would be to wrestle with our own fears and desires and open our minds to new things that perhaps we’ve never thought before. If one can stop desiring, if one can take life as it comes, then only one can be free of unhappiness. To conclude I'd like to quote Rabindranath Tagore: “Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it” ------- Thanks in advance

Will Navy SEALs swift-boat Obama over the bin Laden raid? .. Will Navy SEALs swift-boat Obama over the bin Laden raid? By The Week's Editorial Staff | The Week – Tue, May 1, 2012.. . . Email Print ... . . . A backlash is growing to the victory dance over the terrorist's death, fueling concerns that Obama's biggest foreign policy success could be turned against him Many Navy SEALs are not happy that President Obama is "taking the credit for killing Osama bin Laden," says Toby Harnden at Britain's The Daily Mail. Quoting retired and active SEALs, both on the record and off, Harnden makes the case that many SEALs resent Obama for using the group as "ammunition" in his re-election campaign. Some U.S. commentators dismissed the report as a conservative hatchet job, but others aren't so sure, saying Republicans could use the SEALs' alleged complaints to undercut Obama's most visible foreign policy success, much the way the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth decimated John Kerry's image as a decorated war hero in 2004. Is Obama about to be swift-boated?

Anyone know why a young, rather inactive, English Bulldog would need surgery on BOTH knees? my male 1.5 year old english bulldog had a slight limp on the right side; regular vet thought torn ligament, prescribed pain meds and to limit activity for 2 weeks; just went back, took x rays. she said not full tears, but saw some irregularities on the xrays (bone spur & arthritis); referred us to board certified ortho surgeon (the ONLY one within a 4 hour radius apparently). He suggested TPLO surgery over TTA based on the angle of the knee bone (?) and said that BOTH back legs are the same and that we should do both of them ... here are my questions and concerns - TPLO surgery quote was $2,100/knee or $3,600 if both done at same time ... is that safe, doing both at the same time? does it make the recovery harder/longer? ...are those fair rates? Since he's the ONLY board certified surgeon around, I don't have much to compare it to; there's a local doc that used to work at that same clinic who isn't board certified but has done about 10 of these in the last 2 years with "great" success who quoted $1,600 for one and $2,500 for both - He knew quite a bit and said pretty much the exact same things the first doc said. ... how could my lazy, inactive bulldog tear BOTH cruciate ligaments? but only be limping and favoring one leg? ... does it make sense that both legs would have the exact same problem? and again only be favoring the right? ... are there alternatives to any surgery? I've read a lot of "cons" such as never fully recovered, always seemed to still be in pain after the surgery, pain meds are a daily routine now, etc. I obviously want the best for my little guy, but want to make sure it's the best possible option for all of us and have a ton of questions right now. I could ask the vets, but they seem to be fairly set on this being the one and only option... Sorry for the long detail and appreciate any / all answers and advise! Dani - Let me add that it's NOT genetics or bad breeding ... mother, age 3, and grandmother, age 6, are both living with us and have never had any similar type issues. They're both (winning) former show dogs that the breeder gave to us after they retired from the show ring. We've been involved with this breeder for 2.5 years. He's very reputable. Any other answers other than bad genetics, bad breeding or to contact the breeder for a refund? Anything specific to the surgery itself or successful alternatives to the surgery?

Fans of Robert Pattinson only? I'm a huge fan of Robert. I search the internet daily (tmz,Perez Hilton,etc) for news and quotes from him and theres a pattern that I'm starting to see that is worrying me. He appears to be very upset that he can't play his music anymore because someone always records it and puts it on you-tube. He says he doesn't want to be on the new moon soundtrack. He seems upset because he can't go anywhere without being mobbed or followed by papz. He doesn't like fans being obsessed with his hair, clothes, personal life, etc. Is it just me or does it seem that he really HATES being famous? I'm afraid that he's either going to say forget it and quit or he is going to become one of those people who have such a hard time dealing with his success that he resorts to taking drugs to deal with it. He just seems really unhappy with it all. Has anyone else noticed this? Do you think he may do a few more movies and then just stop?

Words of Inspiration? Increase your self esteem and your sense of self worth, read these quotes and reflect on their meaning: - Living: Words of inspiration can inspire you daily read them and speak them often! - self esteem and happiness: Listen to your inner voice and follow them for it is wisdom that knows what is best for you. Talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet. Think only of the best, to work only for the best and expect only the best-you deserve nothing less. Care about the happiness and success of others and offer them all the help and encouragement they need. Forget your past mistakes and focus on your successes encouraging yourself to greater achievements in the future. Always do your best so you can be proud that you gave it your best shot. When you help someone ask nothing in return, you will receive your reward ten times over. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Make the most of each day A bank credits your account each morning with $86,400. It carries over no balance to tomorrow. Every evening you lose the balance you failed to use during the day. > >>> > What would you do? Draw out every cent, of course!!!! Each of us has such a bank. Its name is TIME. Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off what you have failed to invest. If you fail to use the day's deposits, the loss is yours. There is no going back. Invest it so as to improve get from it the utmost in health, happiness, and success! The clock is running. Make the most of life today. To realize the value of ONE YEAR, ask a student who failed a grade. To realize the value of ONE MONTH, ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby. To realize the value of ONE WEEK, ask the editor of a weekly newspaper. To realize the value of ONE HOUR, ask the lovers who are waiting to meet. To realize the value of ONE MINUTE, ask a person who missed the train. To realize the value of ONE SECOND, ask a person who just avoided an accident. Treasure every moment ! Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is mystery. Today is a gift. That's why it's called the present!

POLL: What kind of questions should I ask now? a) lame ones like "What's your favourite colour?" b) stupid ones like "Am I pregnant?" c) annoying ones like "How did I get so great?" d) random ones that just pop into my head e) thought-provoking super-intellectual ones that hurt your brain f) song lyrics and movie quotes that will get reported for no reason g) ones about my daily life, eg "I just scraped my knee; is it time for me to brush my hair?" h) ones about people in P&S i) ones about Yahoo and its various idiosyncrasies j) ones with sexual innuendo in them k) straightforward sexual ones l) flirty ones m) ones I steal off the Yahoo home page about current events n) just ask all the same questions as somebody really popular and leech off their success o) questions about myself so you get to know me better p) weird ones that nobody will get q) raisins or prunes? r) ask people's opinions on various topics s) ones that follow-up on earlier questions t) all my previous deleted/violated questions u) other

Liberals, since you care so much what Europe thinks, what about now? http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100011892/even-the-french-think-barack-obama-is-weak/ It is shameful when the White House is accused of betrayal by close allies in eastern and central Europe, but utterly humiliating when even the Elysee Palace thinks the United States has been transformed from a lion to a lamb in the face of mounting global threats. As The Wall Street Journal reported this morning, French president Nicolas Sarkozy was less than impressed with Barack Obama’s performance last week in the face of the Iranian nuclear crisis. According to the paper, Washington urged Paris to delete key sections of Sarkozy’s UN speech that were critical of Iran and supposedly threatened to undermine Obama’s attempt to project himself as a global peacemaker: “President Sarkozy in particular pushed hard. He had been “frustrated” for months about Mr. Obama’s reluctance to confront Iran, a senior French government official told us, and saw an opportunity to change momentum. But the Administration told the French that it didn’t want to “spoil the image of success” for Mr. Obama’s debut at the U.N. and his homily calling for a world without nuclear weapons, according to the Paris daily Le Monde. So the Iran bombshell was pushed back a day to Pittsburgh, where the G-20 were meeting to discuss economic policy.” “Le Monde’s diplomatic correspondent, Natalie Nougayrède, reports that a draft of Mr. Sarkozy’s speech to the Security Council Thursday included a section on Iran’s latest deception. Forced to scrap that bit, the French President let his frustration show with undiplomatic gusto in his formal remarks, laying into what he called the “dream” of disarmament.” Sarkozy was so annoyed with Obama’s weak-kneed approach that he reportedly told Le Monde that “we live in the real world, not in a virtual one”, a cutting and mocking reference to the US president’s drive for a new arms control treaty. The WSJ quotes him as saying: “President Obama himself has said that he dreams of a world without nuclear weapons. Before our very eyes, two countries are doing exactly the opposite at this very moment. Since 2005, Iran has violated five Security Council Resolutions . . . I support America’s ‘extended hand.’ But what have these proposals for dialogue produced for the international community? Nothing but more enriched uranium and more centrifuges. And last but not least, it has resulted in a statement by Iranian leaders calling for wiping off the map a Member of the United Nations. What are we to do? What conclusions are we to draw? At a certain moment hard facts will force us to make decisions.” I cannot think of a more damning indictment of US global leadership than a French leader urging the president of the United States to show more backbone in confronting the world’s biggest state sponsor of international terrorism, a rogue nation about to acquire nuclear capability. It is highly embarrassing that President Obama is reminded of his leadership responsibilities yet again from across the Atlantic after the debacle over Washington’s appalling surrender to the Russians on missile defence. Barack Obama’s weakness on the world stage will inevitably lead to the decline of America as a superpower. That’s not “smart power” - it’ is a policy of defeat.

This paper is due tomorrow. Please help me edit it! :)? Puritans The Puritans tried to be Godly people. They had some of the right assets to be Godly people, but their judgment and hatred towards others made that impossible. The Puritans believed that no one should worship anything other than God himself. They read The Bible daily and followed some of the practices. They really had the intelligence and correct morals to make themselves a “City Upon a Hill” but they had some very immoral hatred and judgment in their hearts too, which caused them to fall and be looked down upon. The Puritans got tired of all the persecution they were being faced with so they moved to Massachusetts where they hoped to escape New England, in what they believed to be the religious and worldly corruptions of English society. They believed that in England there were too many ungodly people so they decided to leave. They traveled to Massachusetts in hope of finding freedom of religion where they could worship and govern themselves in what they deemed a truly Christian manner (Foner 63.) The Puritans established a Church along with many rules and regulations. The Puritans had some correct approaches to making themselves a “City Upon a Hill.” They made men and women equal, in the fact that women could be a part of the Church and could worship God as well. Men would work on the farm so they could provide for their family and the women would stay home to clean and take care of the children. They established rules in which women were protected from abuse however men had an authority over children and their wives in the house (Foner 66.) Also, the Puritans believed that anyone can interpret and learn from The Bible with the same intelligence as anyone else. They thought that a kid could learn and understand The Bible just as well as a Harvard Graduate. However, they did realize that people who went to school were more intelligent and had more success in life so they created schools for all Puritan communities so everyone could attend school. (Foner 68.) So, the Puritans had established what sounds like a very good community, but there were many flaws. The Puritans believed that everyone had to worship God and God only. If you disobeyed or just even decided not to worship God you would be hung or kicked out of their society (Foner 69.) They were simply hypocrites. They left England because they were tired of the discrimination they were facing in being judged and tired of the “ungodly” people around them. But, they migrate to Massachusetts and then persecute people who don’t worship the Lord. I believe that by moving to Massachusetts they were going against The Bible as they claim they left the “ungodly.” The Bible quotes, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” (Mark 2:17) That translates into saying it’s not people who believe in God who need to hear about Him but the unbelievers. Therefore, I believe the Puritans were going against God’s will for them and turning their backs on what is said in The Bible. That is why the Puritans were destined for failure in starting their own community. They were narrow heading meaning that they only heard and believed what they wanted to hear and believe. It was obvious the Puritans were intimidated by others and were scared of what might come of them if they didn’t leave England. They just wanted to pretend that they could avoid every “bad” person in the world by creating their own community. That’s why they kicked people out of their colony if people didn’t believe or worship God. It’s like during WWII where if in the United States they were believed they were getting bombed they would have children hide under their desks acting as if the desk would protect them. The Puritan leaders moved to Massachusetts because they did not want their followers to believe that they were essentially weak in the fact they couldn’t put up with people who thought differently from them. Yes, the Puritans had a very good and healthy community to begin with in stating that everyone is equal. I agree with that, however, I believe they were required to have a lot of kids so they could grow their community to help protect themselves against any attacks. That’s why I believe their population double every twenty-seven years. The Puritans were afraid of people in general and that’s what set them up for failure from the beginning. The Puritans founding principles were to create a community in which God ruled. They wanted God to be the main priority in their community in hoping that they will be looked on as perfect, as a “City Upon a Hill.” In striving for this goal they created a very strong and healthy community in which they all had correct morals in worshiping God, everyone was seen as equal, and they all had the same beliefs. However, in creating this “perfect” society how do they change they thoughts of people in their community who disagreed with them. They didn’t. They simply killed the ones whom disagreed with them or they kicked them out.

Who agrees per this article Obama is a socialist who is against school choice and for collectivism? http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=304210671922915 Among the alleged lies mentioned in the Obama campaign's 40-page response to author Jerome Corsi's book "Obama Nation" is the claim that when Obama ran for state senator, "instead of stepping aside in deference to (state Sen. Alice) Palmer, Obama decided to fight her for the nomination." The Obama campaign quotes a state representative who said Palmer "pulled her own plug." But as ABC News senior correspondent Jake Tapper notes on his blog, it is Obama who is the truth-challenged one. "This is not a lie, this is true," Tapper says. "Palmer had decided to run for Congress, and Obama was tapped to run to replace her. When Palmer lost in the (U.S. House) primary, she wanted to stay as a state senator. Obama said no. He had every right to do so, but he decided to fight her for the nomination instead of stepping aside in deference to her." According to the Chicago Tribune, Obama operatives flooded into the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners on Jan. 2, 1996, to begin the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of Palmer and three other lesser-known contenders for her Illinois state Senate seat. They kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama's Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot. As the Tribune noted, "The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it." In 1995, Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district's influential liberals at the home of two well-known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former members of the terrorist Weather Underground. "I remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the Senate and running for Congress," says Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care. "(Palmer) identified (Obama) as her successor." It was in 1995 that Palmer decided to pursue the opportunity of an open seat in the U.S. House of Representatives after Mel Reynolds of Illinois' 2nd District resigned due to allegations of sex with an underage campaign volunteer. But Palmer hit a speed bump in November of that year when Jesse Jackson Jr. defeated her in a special election for Reynolds' empty seat. Palmer then refiled to keep her state Senate seat and asked Obama to withdraw. Obama refused. "I liked Alice Palmer a lot," Obama would say later. "I thought she was a good public servant. It (the process by which Obama got Palmer off the ballot) was very awkward. That part of it I wish had played out entirely differently." Who Alice Palmer is and what she believed is the real story here. Ten years earlier she was an executive board member of the U.S. Peace Council, which the FBI identified as a communist front group, an affiliate of the World Peace Council, a Soviet front group. Palmer participated in the World Peace Council's 1983 Prague Assembly, part of the Soviet launch of the nuclear-freeze movement. The only thing it would have frozen was the Soviet Union's military superiority. In June 1986, while editor of the Black Press Review, she wrote an article for the Communist Party USA's newspaper, the People's Daily World, now the People's Weekly World. It detailed her experience attending the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and how impressed she was by the Soviet system. Palmer gushed at the "Soviet plan to provide people with higher wages and better education" and spoke of the efficiency of the Soviets' most recent five-year plan, attributing its success to "central planning." She praised their "comprehensive affirmative action program, which they have stuck to religiously — if I can use the word — since 1917." Palmer also marveled that all Russian citizens were guaranteed a job matching their training and skills, free education, affordable housing and free medical care. Because Soviet school curricula were established at the national level, she said, "there is no second-class 'track' system in the minority-nationality schools as there is in the inferior inner city schools in my hometown, Chicago, and elsewhere in the United States." Obama and Palmer both oppose school choice and vouchers and successful programs like the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships. They prefer the central planning of education as dictated by the teachers unions and the commissars at the National Education Association. When Obama won the Iowa caucuses, Frank Chapman, a member of the U.S. Peace Council Executive Committee, wrote a letter to the People's Weekly World celebrating the victory of Alice Palmer's former protege. "Obama's victory was more than a progressive move," Chapman wrote. "It was a dialectical leap ushering in a new era of str

Players in IPL will get much more money from next season(upto $15million).What do you think about this news? The Indian Premier League (IPL) is all set to scrap the $ 5 million cap on the players' salaries from next season onwards, a move that could see top cricketers earn as much as a whopping $ 15 million (Rs 61 crore approx). The IPL had put a cap of $ five million (just over Rs 20 crore) for the franchises this year to prevent the very rich team owners from splurging too much. But with the inaugural edition turning out to be a major success, the players are set to reap the rewards in the next season. "If we hadn't done that, I can tell you that our players would already be the highest-paid across any sport in the world," IPL chairman and commissioner Lalit Modi was quoted as saying in 'The Daily Telegraph'. "It will happen - if not today, then tomorrow. Because once the franchises have established themselves, it will be a free-for-all," he added. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ DAMN! I am jealous of these cricketers. Why oh why i am not a cricketer? LOL

China tests next-generation rocket engine? (China Daily, Jul 11, 2006)China has successfully test a rocket engine for the proposed new-generation carrier rocket to power future moon landings and manned space flights, Xinhua News Agency reported. Tests of the liquid hydrogen- and kerosene-fueled engine were a "complete success", a spokesperson from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation was quoted as saying. With maximum propulsion of 120 tons, the new engine is three times more powerful than those currently used by China's Long March rockets. The engine will propel a new-generation rocket able to sling heavy satellites and moon exploration equipment into orbit, experts told Xinhua. All indices of the engine are in the normal range during the test-driving of a 120 ton liquid hydrogen and kerosene-fired engine,experts with the Aerospace Propulsion Academy of the corporation said. http://www.zoomchina.com.cn/index.php?/content/view/9017/1/

How can i get my mom to stop watching so much tv? it's on 8..9...sometimes 15 hours a day; she talks about her stresful life, worries; i tell her, i asked you to turn the tv off for two weeks and tell me how you feel; i quote "it's all i have" daily dose of brainwashing and iq numbing please! so watching a bunch of negative situations you can relate to while being emotionally pulled in for that many hours a day when instead she could be doing something productive to help change her mindset; sorry i wish i could elaborate better but it's late, tv's on; i can't sleep; nor can i read my book here; how can i help her wake up to how bad tv really is? i used to be addicted too, then i stopped watching it; after a month i felt refreshed, in a sense i regained my identity, started using my brain instead of pressing the on button on my remote, got into global issues, realised the government doesn't have my best interests in mind etc; i sleep in the living room, and this tv is ALWAYS on, i'm sleeping and it's still on; MORE PROGRAMMING PLEASE.... if none of this makes sense or you think me a loon, look up how tv effects the mind; and then get back to me with your answer, point is my mother won't stop focusing on the negative things on her life, whilst constantly relating to other people's problems and over thinking hers when in reality she doesn't have it all that bad; i've been begging her to shud the tv off, even just for a day - you know what? "what else would i have?" - me"read a book? study something you're interested in? use your brain in some way shape or form instead of letting yourself constantly go into a hypnotised state open to suggestion" *sighs* "what else do i have, i have a hard life i have to worry about living on the streets, all i want is to have a roof over my head" - sorry, what does that have to do with tv? (i didn't say that part) i tell her "that has nothing to do with tv" "it's all i have, i just want to come home and relax" went on about her problems some more, started crying; then goes back to the tv; how do i get her to stop this? i don't need to be brainwashed 10-15 hours a day too; i enjoy having the ability of a fully functional mind; i ask her to quit tv for a month she couldn't see it in the realm of the possible "it's all i have" so i move it down to two weeks *sigh* i'm sorry am i annoying you? 1 day-*no response* it's sickening to see my mom in this pit going nowhere with her life, she WORSHIPS middle class white people but won't admit it; if she really wants success in life why did she drop out of college 3 times and laze about with the tv on? (my mom looks native, but she's only half, had a white father; please no ignorant racist jokes)

Stubborn/Messed up parents Part 2? what I learned off wikipedia- yes I spend all my free time reading about science, history and geography on wikipedia,they would sit down and have hours to chat with me about stuff i've learned. I've even consulted TWO mental health specialists and both of them has told me on numerous occasions that my emotional outbreaks and stuttering AREN'T MY FAULT, and told my parents that they should be more open with me. But they would say that these doctors are not professionals, and that they are wrong (WHAT!!!!)It became so extreme that my uncle moved away with his family without telling us where or giving us a phone number so that "he and his wife and children would not be affected by my parent's maniac personalities." So now, they started to "change", and strive for physical success- more exercising, instead of academic achievement. They've also yelled at me many times and call me "as stubborn as a mule"- (I don't even know why).But since I'm in full AP in high school and don't have a lot of free time, they don't believe me when I've told them that I am not that good physically because ever since I was little, they've only strived for academics and nothing else. I've also quoted many studies saying that the way you raise a children from birth to aadolescenceis most likely their personality later in life, and that it would be extremely difficult for me to change (especially with their closed and stubborn attitude still the same), but they would again say that studies are wrong. THEY JUST DON'T WANT TO ADMIT THAT THEY HAVE BEEN AND STILL ARE, BAD PARENTS! And now, I've been having bouts of uncontrolled anger, and studies show that that is the result of couped up emotions, eespecially with teen hormones over the roof, but my parents would walk away or simply not listen, or threaten to cut my Internet and sell my computer because I wasn't using it for "academic purposes as intended." I've never been able to talk to my parents about ANYHING that relates to my feelings or emotions, and I am having serious sucidal thoughts- my parents don't believe that when I tell them, and they even said that THEY DIDN'T CARE IF I DIED OR NOT SO I SHOULDN'T TRY IT. All my uncles and rest of my relatives have pledged to help me, but even with almost daily confrontations, nothing worked. My parents have even forbidden me to contact an aunt who had a long and loud/screaming confrontation with my father about his ways. My grandparents are planning/prepping for a serious talk with my parents as well, but I've told them not to bother, because if ten years of talks as well as meetings with two different doctors didn't work, nothing would. I am now having servere bouts of depression and don't know what to do. I can't tell guidance or a teacher or else they might have to talk to my parents eventually. I'VE LOST ALL MOTIVATION FOR LIFE AND I JUST WANT TO DIE NOW! HELP! I'VE BEEN SPENDING THE LAST WEEK OF SUMMER VACATION JUST SLEEPING ALL DAY BECAUSE I AM SO DEPRESSED! By the way, part 1 is here: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AgBr2qe5cj6tlrxofzCoVYXty6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20100901083803AAAl5Bc Do I do what I think is best and just ignore him when I think he's being irrational? Or do I just stay meek and opressed under this totalitarian rule of his until college?

I have a job interview for Pinnacle promotions co, any ideas? What kind of a job am i letting myself in for? Are they going to try and scam me into door to door selling? heres a quote from the website: About Us Pinnacle Promotions is a leading below-the-line direct marketing specialist representing an array of clients, on behalf of the Cobra Group, from the FTSE 100 and premier “High Street” brands. The founder of Pinnacle Promotions has seen his business grow from strength to strength and has put this success down to the professionalism, persistency and hard-work that he and his team implement within the organisation on a daily basis.

I don't know what to do...? I have known my best friend since 4th Grade(5 years), and just now it occurred to me how stubborn and ignorant he is. He has been on the losing side of about 5 or 6 arguments between him and my other friends and I, and it seems like he never gives up. Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the fact is that he has pathetic proof, whereas my friends and I have had definite proof from multiple sources, and he still never gives up. For about 6 months now, this has been driving my close group of friends apart, even causing one of my more down-to-earth friends to leave Facebook for an indefinite amount of time (a lot of our arguments started over either one of his posts, or something someone said IRL that he complained about on Facebook.) Another thing is that he complains about EVERYTHING, as well as exaggerates everything he complains about. He has an incredibly comfortable life, but seems to have an oppressive stepmom, who punishes him for everything he does. Now, on the way back from a gaming session at his house, his father told me (Because my friend was not in the car) that he exaggerates his punishments and chores. If his Father, who doesn't talk to him at school, over XBL, Skype, or Facebook, realizes that he exaggerates, why can't my friend, who only denies it, then says that I exaggerate. He was over his brother's House this past week, where he has no rules to follow, and he seemed even slightly arrogant, making statements and doing things that came at the expense of others. He even said that his proof for a smaller argument was that "He said he was right." It also amazes me how he always seems to make the others look bad in an argument. Every time I try to explain why I am upset to him, he turns around and says that he isn't acting like that, and that my friends and I are. You can't argue with him because, and I quote him, He would "Jump off a cliff to prove his point." He pretends not to understand a perfectly logical point, and counters it with a statement that is completely irrelevant to the conversation. In other words, he acts dumb when he knows he is losing. He claims that he doesn't want to argue, but constantly brings up controversial points. He has told my other friends and I to learn to let go of the past(This was after a HUGE argument), but yet he constantly brings up things that I have said in the past, even though I either already apologized for saying it, or told him that I regretted it. In addition, he is the only one who loses his cool when the argument heats up. He is the only one who swears or throws insults at other people. I guess the point I am trying to get across is that he constantly contradicts himself when trying to prove a lost point, he can't stand being proven wrong, and that he doesn't actually know what he is talking about 90% of the time. Finally, if I do give in, he flaunts it in front of me for about a month after, as well as every other minor success he has in his life. If he loses, he acts as depressed and pathetic as he can, mainly because he is an attention wh*re, and tries incredibly hard to get sympathy from whoever he can. After all of this, I have just two questions: One, he says that we are the wrong ones, and, unlike him, I have considered that. Am I the one who is Ignorant and Stubborn, the one who constantly contradicts himself? I don't like being wrong, but when it comes to the point of arguing and possibly winning or being teased by him for a month, I would rather try and win. And two, If it is him that is Ignorant and stubborn: -Should I try to continue our friendship, and avoid all possible arguments(Which is unlikely because he makes about 15-20 stupid statements daily)? -Should I give him a warning and some time to consider what he has done to our friendship(I have tried this before, and it just started another argument)? -Should I let him go easy, trying to sound sympathetic(This will most likely make him "depressed." Not to mention he will talk trash about me to everybody he knows)? -Or should I let him go hard, tell him what he did wrong, and explain to him that he just lost 3 friends(I have 2 other friends that are close to both me and him; this will have the same consequences as letting him go easy)? P.S. The description is a bit harsh. I didn't know how else to describe my predicament. If you could include some guidelines as to what I should say to him when(if) I confront him, that would be great. ~THANKS! Thanks Guys! Already some great answers!!! I really appreciate it!

Is the democratic party the party of hate? After seeing the race baiting, the jealousy towards success, the policies that break up minority families, the trade policies that keep the most impoverished in the world down, the blogs like Daily Kos and mediamatters, the Keith Olbermanns and Janeane Garfalos spewing hate. Hell, even the past presidents calling the American people racists and right wing conspirators. Is the Democratic party the Party of hate? Just to be fair it's a quote I heard a long time ago: The Democrats are the party of hate, the Republicans are the party of fear. I'm thinking there is some truth to that. How about you? Beck's an entertainer, and he's actually a pretty loving guy. You need to watch his show and see for yourselves instead of just reading about him on left wing hate blogs. Limbaugh uses hyperbole and anyone that listens to his show for more than 5 minutes knows he says most things tongue in cheek and to rile up the left wing blogs. He's actually a loving guy too, he raised millions for charity and gives people who call in sounding bummed out brand new cars. He's just a lovable little fluffball. O'Reilly is basically a lib now, he's for whatever president is in power because he's a nationalist, not a conservative. He seems to support the public option, what a ring wing nut, right?

Girls - Do You Think If Your Partner Chooses You Mainly Due To How 'Sexy' You Are, They Would Stay With You...? ...If They Found Someone Sexier? (What I am saying is, maybe we should attract the right spouse, in a different way, if we want a solution to so much abuse of women, where men use them and move on) Here is an interesting quote from "The Freedom Paradox" by Clive Hamilton. It's from a chapter titled "The Decline Of Free Will" - "...the marketing industry daily sends us subliminal messages in support of this attitude - that happiness is to be had by buying this product or that (in other words, through a series of momentary pleasures) and that the good life itself is nothing more than a series of hedonic episodes. Likening relationships to consumer durables, Bauman observes: '...if the pleasure derived is not up to the standard promised and expected or if the novelty wears off together with the joy, there is no reason to stick to the inferior or aged product rather than find another, 'new and improved', in the shop'" Do you believe most people are brainwashed as per above, into jeopardising their own chance for success in a relationship from the very start?

I'm devastated..........? Robbie Williams will not be returning to Take That after all, according to his former bandmate Gary Barlow. Williams was quoted last month as saying a reunion was "looking more likely by the week". But speaking during the recording of Chris Moyles' Quiz Night, Barlow said: "People constantly ask if Robbie will rejoin us but nothing has changed. "We're a happy band right now. Robbie won't be joining." According to the Daily Mirror, Williams said he was in regular He wrote on his blog: "The boys have their thing going on and so do I..." Williams enjoyed major success with Take That during the early 1990s with hit singles including Pray, Everything Changes and Back For Good. But he walked out on the group in 1995 and the band split one year later. Barlow and the other three remaining band members - Howard Donald, Jason Orange and Mark Owen - launched a successful comeback in 2006 with their single Patience reaching No 1. ......But, but, but.....'sobs'! Why? http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Showbiz-News/Take-That-Robbie-Williams-Not-Rejoining-Group-Says-Gary-Barlow-Despite-Rumours/Article/200904215260444?lpos=Showbiz_News_First_Home_Article_Teaser_Region_9&lid=ARTICLE_15260444_Take_That%3A_Robbie_Williams_Not_Rejoining_Group_Says_Gary_Barlow%2C_Despite_Rumours lollipop.....you mean person you! lol J ~~I'll have you know I was a Brosette.... I had the ripped jeans, denim jacket, bottle tops threaded through my doc martin boots...... Shall I sing? "When will I, will I be famous" LOL Happy Easter J...My fellow Brosette xx

~~Character of the Prophet (SAW): Humility~~? Muhammed (peace be upon him) was also a very humble person. He lived humbly all his life and never boasted of his social or political position either before or after his successes in Medinah. Once, on a journey, a few of the companions decided to slaughter a goat for a meal. They divided the work among themselves; one was to slaughter it, another to remove its skin, yet another to do the cooking. Muhammed (peace be upon him) said that he would collect the wood for cooking. His companions said that they would do his work as well. He replied, "I know that you will do it quite willingly but I do not like to have an eminent position in the assembly and Allah also does not like it."' Umar reported Allah's Messenger (peace be upon him) as saying, "Don't exaggerate in praising me as the Christians did in praising Jesus who was raised to the status of Allah's son. I am a servant of Allah; therefore call me a servant and Messenger of Allah." Anas said that Allah's Messenger (peace be upon him) used to visit the sick, accompany funerals, ride donkeys and accept the invitations of slaves. In the battle of Banu Quraydha, he was riding a donkey whose bridle and saddle were made of palm leaves. He also reported that Allah's Messenger (peace be upon him) accepted without hesitation invitations to dinners consisting of mere barley and stale bread. Anas said that the companions of Allah's Messenger (peace be upon him) loved him more than anything in the world, but still they did not stand up when he came in for he disliked it. Again this shows his extreme humility in that he did not like people standing up as they stood up for kings and rulers. Umar said that some one asked A'isha about Allah's Messenger (peace be upon him)'s activities at home. She replied that he did most of the household work like ordinary people. He sewed his clothes, mended his shoes and shirt, milked his goat and swept the house. He shared aate food with the poor and slaves. He visited the sick, even the poorest, in their homes. He sat with the destitute and the needy in such a way that no one could recognise him. When he went to any assembly, he sat wherever he found a place.' He was so humble that he did not like to be hailed by even ordinary reverential titles. Once a man addressed him in these words: "O my Lord! My Lord's son! The best among us and the son of the best among us!" He said, "O people, adopt piety so that Satan may not lead you astray. I am Muhammed, son of Abdullah, servant of Allah and His Messenger. I do not like you to exalt me from the status Allah has given me." When he was entering Makkah as a conquerer, he was not proud or boastful like a worldly conquerer. An expression of humility and gentleness was on his face and he lowered his head in humility so that it touched the saddle of the pack camel.. When his son Ibrahim died, by coincidence there was a solar eclipse on that day. People thought that the heavenly bodies were also sharing in the grief of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him). He at once gathered all the companions in the mosque and addressed them saying, "O people! Know this, that the solar eclipse is one of the signs of Allah. It does not occur because of the birth or death of anyone." Muhammed (peace be upon him) always lived in a humble way and taught his followers to do the same. Many incidents can be quoted to show how humble he was in his ordinary daily life. He lived the life of an ordinary human being and showed by his example how to live humbly even in greatness.

If this "No Fly Zone" resolution was put in place in 2005, why was it still being discussed in the Dem. Debate If this "No Fly Zone" resolution was put in place in 2005, why was it still being discussed in the Dem. Debates recently in 2007? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Boxer In March 2005 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed Boxer's amendment to the Foreign Affairs Reauthorization Bill strongly urging Saudi Arabia to permit women to run for office and vote in all future elections. Boxer is a cosponsor of S. 495, or the Darfur Accountability Act of 2005, which would impose sanctions against perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Darfur. Sanctions under this legislation include imposition of a military no-fly zone in Darfur, a coordinated effort between the U.S. and Sudanese governments to track down and prosecute individuals in Sudan in any way involved with genocide or other war crimes in Darfur, a call for the Sudanese Government to take an active roll in combating Janjaweed forces within its borders, and a policy of sanctions against the Sudanese government, including sanctions that will affect the petroleum sector, and individual members of the Sudanese government whose actions support the crimes of violent militias in Darfur. Khartoum is also where the CIA hunted bin-laden according to the book "Hunting the Jackal" (militarybookclub.com). China's involvement in acquiring oil in areas where it is politically unsavory for the U.S. gives them a strategic advantage in every anti-U.S. country (like Venezuela) in the world. Energy Security (wikipedia.org) becomes of grave concerns as we are 5% of the worlds population, use 25% of the worlds energy and 40% of the worlds petrol products. tim trevathan <trevathantim@yahoo.com> wrote: http://www.gvnews.net/html/Corp/newsfeed.html HOME | ABOUT GVNN | OUR PHILOSOPHY | GVNN IN THE NEWS | REGISTER | CONTACT US HOME | ABOUT GVNN | OUR PHILOSOPHY | GVNN IN THE NEWS | REGISTER | CONTACT US October 25, 2005 Subscribe to GVNN Global News Feed A powerful, real-time news wire delivered directly to subscriber desktops. GVNN News Alerts Hourly or daily updates of select news stories from our editors. World Headlines Global Crisis News Global Op-Ed Global Business Alert Environment Alert Information Tech World Lifestyles Other News Alerts GVNN Impact Reports Daily or weekly news and information reviews moderated by our editors. Global Crisis Impact Global ICT Impact Environment Women's Issues Other Impact Reports Intelligence Reports Weekly or monthly news-based analysis of global trends. Global Crisis Report World Business Report Global Diversity Information Tech Other Intelligence Partnerships Join the fastest growing global network of independent news providers. MediaChannel Globalvision's media issues supersite. Globalvision Independent media production for the new millennium. Op-Ed In Khartoum's Oil Pipelines Flow Blood By Peter Wanbali The Nation KHARTOUM, May 21, 2002 -- Two documents on the Sudan released almost simultaneously last week expose the complexities and contradictions inherent in the search for peace in that country's conflict that has lasted two decades, killed two million people, displaced 4.5 million others and burnt hundreds of billions of dollars. And nowhere is this more dramatic than in the reports' treatment of the role of oil in the war between the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) and its allies, and the Government of Sudan GOS. The first report, Depopulating Sudan's Oil Regions, is written by Diane deGuzman for the European Coalition on Oil in Sudan. It is a searing condemnation of the GOS strategy to strafe civilian populated regions in South Sudan for the express purpose of clearing the regions for oil drilling work to either start or continue. It documents atrocities against the civilians starting from October 2001, when the GOS launched an offensive in the southeast part of Ruweng County, in oil concession Block 2. Although no SPLA troops were on the ground, the report says that the villages between Jukabar and Bal were bombarded from the air, with ground troops moving in to mop up. Many were killed and those lucky to survive now huddle in swampland to the northeast and southeast of the county. Timing too fortuitous to be coincidental Within a month of the clearing up of the region, the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC), comprising Talisman Energy, Chinese National Petroleum Corporation, Petronas Carigali and Sudapet, moved a drilling rig into the area. The timing of the raid and the decision by GNPOC was too fortuitous to be coincidental. The report also documents another raid that by mid-February this year had depopulated the northern part of Block 5A, in Western Upper Nile. The two campaigns by the GOS have displaced an estimated 80,000 people from Ruweng County and another 50,000 from the Western Upper Nile, who are now forced to wander in search of food, safety and shelter. Harrowing quotes from men and women who lost loved ones during the raids make for very sober reading, very much in the vein of two earlier reports: The Scorched Earth by Christian Aid in 2000, and Report of an Investigation into Oil Development, Conflict and Displacement in Western Upper Nile, released mid-last year by Georgette Gagnon and John Ryle. The second report released this month was Sen John C. Danforth's memo to the US President. Mr Danforth was appointed Special Envoy for Peace in the Sudan in late 2000 and this is a report on his mission. Several observations stand out, not least his advice that there should be no more new US-led initiatives. Rather, the US should engage more actively bilaterally in the Sudan and that increased support should be offered to existing initiatives like the Kenya-led IGAD peace process and the Egyptian-led Joint Initiative (with Libya). Sen Danforth details four "tests" of will that he subjected the GOS and the SPLA to, whose results were the basis of his guarded optimism. One was demand for a cease-fire and setting up of a comprehensive relief and rehabilitation programme for the devastated Nuba Mountains region; the second was observing days of tranquillity to allow relief agencies work on programmes to eradicate polio, guinea worm and bovine rinderpest. The third was prevention of intentional, wanton attacks (often by government) against innocent civilians and fourth was a proposal to the GOS to strengthen the effectiveness of its own anti-slavery commission. He claims varying degrees of success in these tests. Although Sen Danforth acknowledges that any movement forward must grapple with the thorny issues of self-determination for South Sudan, governance, religion and oil, his analysis of how oil features in the cauldron is perverse. His suggestion that a formula should be worked out for sharing the oil revenue between the GOS and the SPLA is both bizarre and impracticable. Renewed confidence The oil revenue, about $2 million every day, has given GOS renewed confidence and apart from enabling it increase its fighting efficiency, will soon become a significant cause for the war. For the process of peace to move forward - even with renewed vigour from the US and a boost to the sub-regional initiatives - the oil booty must be made a non-issue in the process. Companies like the GNPOC consortium must be prevailed upon to exercise some moral influence on the government and stop pretending that they do not see or care about what their money is financing in the Sudan. Countries like Kenya should also rethink the ridiculous posturing they are involved in - on the one hand acting as concerned mediators and peace-makers while on the other hand they are key customers buying the oil and financing the war. Ultimately, UN sanctions would be considered against all parties involved even if such penalties have not been great successes in the past. This clearly, is a hard number to push when there is so little moral firepower left for the US to expend - see what it did with Nigeria and Angola even at the height of human rights atrocities in those countries. These two reports do not give cause for hope that south Sudan's long walk out of the swamps and depths of despair it has been forced into will be ending any time soon. © The Nation, 2002. Distributed in partnership with Globalvision News Network (www.gvnews.net). All rights reserved. Featured Stories:

How can I improve this essay? Easy 10 points for Literature major:)? How can I improve this essay to be better( Aware of the part I underlined). How do you think about the title, the voice, the word use. If there is any grammar please fix it. You can copy and paste on Microsoft word and read if you feel read online is frustrating. The topic is about use my own experience to write an essay which include the quote from an essay I read before. 10 points for best evaluate. Please be serious Name:Tram Pham Date: 10/22/2007 Class: English 1100 Different perspectives of Social time Robert Levine and Ellen Wolfe in “Social Time: The Heartbeat of a culture” admit that “ formal ‘clock time’ may be a standard on which the world agrees, but ‘social time’, the heartbeat of society, is something else again”(77). I agree with them because when I compare my own experiences in America to those where I am from, southern part of Vietnam, there is a huge difference concept about time. I was very interested in a point that was raised in the essay that” someone of status is expected to arrive late. Lack of punctuality is a badge of success” (77). I was very amused with this concept because it is the same in my country. In Vietnam, within a company, the boss is often the one who tends to be late for the work days and for the meetings. I know this since my mother is a manager of a cable company. The working hours start at seven. However, she always leaves the house at eight or sometimes even nine o’clock even though the company is only one block away from my house. In contrast, her clerks, secretaries, assistants, and workers will be reprimanded if they are late. For my mother, lateness perhaps is one of the tools to show her power, or perhaps to show that she is a busy and hard working woman. She is the one who arrives latest in her company, but also the last one to leave and the one who goes home with a huge stack of papers. Lateness is not only in the work place but also in school. In elementary and high school, students are expected to arrive early and teachers are expected to arrive on time and sometimes a few minutes later. In all the schools I have attended in Vietnam, students always arrive in class fifteen minutes early. Some schools even require half an hour earlier. Students is demanded to be at school before the class start so that they have time to ask and discuss homework questions with the colleagues or maybe even just skim through the text they had to read in the day before. On the other hand, University student are never on time. One of my friends told me that being late for classes at the university is just so cool because it shows that they are growing up and they have the freedom to do as they like. This perhaps is a bad habit from a Western viewpoint. However, one need to spend years and years in my country’s high school to be able to understand why students are so frustrated about the idea of lateness and earliness. When I arrived in America, I saw a total different view here. Teachers always arrive and leave the class they teach at the schedule time regardless of whether it is in university or high school. I am even more amazed that the bosses here are very on time. Not only is the boss on time, but also the company worker. Lateness in America is something considered to be very rude and wasteful of time. The “social time” in America seems to be synonymous with “clock time”- very accurate and standard. I have a remarkable memory from an American high school when I was an exchange student. The class I attended was very strict about students arriving to class on time. One day, one of my friends, a French guy, arrived in the class one minute past eight. The teacher was pretty upset and said,” You are late”. He argued, “Only one minute.” “That still counts as late,” the teacher replied. This story was one of my first lessons in America: lateness is unacceptable. Later on, I understood more about Americans time sense: Americans are always rushing. Most Americans have a busy life, so they like time to be accurate. The children here learn to be value time and how to work in the most efficient and productive way At first I was much struggled with the sense of time in America and used to feel annoyed. Everything is totally different. Lateness is unacceptable despite status, race, sex, situation, or position. However, little by little, I was being able to accept this new perspective and know how to deal with it. As Robert Levine and Ellen Wolfe believe “Appreciating culture differences in time sense becomes increasingly important as modern communications put more and more people in daily contact”(77), I learned a lot from my experience while I am in the USA. I can now better appreciate the way people look at time both in Vietnam and in America.

plz. help me to write the main idea of this article in the NY Times. in two pages.? November 5, 2006 Where Plan A Left Ahmad Chalabi By DEXTER FILKINS 1. London, August 2006 Many miles away in a more dangerous place the dream is ending badly. The bodies pile up. Good people stream to the borders. Leaders pile money onto planes. The center is giving way. The apartment on South Street in London is an antidote to Baghdad in nearly every respect. Where the Iraqi capital rings with chaos and violence, the sidewalks of Mayfair are quiet enough to hear your own voice above the cars. Baghdad is treeless and tan; the South Street apartment opens onto a private park filled with the lushness of an English garden. Just across the way is the Anglican church where General Eisenhower, stationed here as the commander of Allied forces during the war, came to pray. A maid greets you at the door, an elderly Lebanese woman who doubles as an Arabic teacher for the children. The parlor is neatly appointed and filled with art, most of it European, different from the Baghdad house, where most of it is Iraqi. There is “Sketch of a Woman,” by Lucien Pissarro, the French painter who propagated Impressionism in London; it catches the light nicely. The furniture is expensive, the kind that makes you hesitate to sit down. But the place has a lived-in quality too; family members come and go, clutching bags and calling to one another down the hallways. No one seems the least bit awed by the man of the house, who is dressed in a bespoke suit and carries himself like a monarch, and who, until now, hasn’t spent more than a day at a time here since before the Iraq war began. For Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq is an abstraction again. Once again, his native country is a faraway land ruled by somebody else, a place where other people die. It’s a place to be discussed, rued, plotted over, from a parlor on an expensive Western street. Iraq’s new leaders, the men who excluded Chalabi from the government they formed this spring, still call for advice — several times a day, Chalabi says. He is here in London, his longtime home in exile, temporarily, he says, taking his first vacation in five years. At lunch at a nearby restaurant an hour before, he ordered the sea bass wrapped in a banana leaf. He walks the streets unattended by armed guards. But the interlude, Chalabi says, is just that, a passing thing. His doubters will come back to him; they always have. As ever, he wears a jester’s smile, wide and blank, a mask that has carried him through crises of the first world and the third. Still, a touch of bitterness can creep into Chalabi’s voice, a hint that he has concluded that his time has come and gone. Indeed, even for a man as vain and resilient as Chalabi, his present predicament stands too large to go unacknowledged. Once Iraq’s anointed leader — anointed by the Americans — Chalabi, at age 62, is without a job, spurned by the very colleagues whose ascension he engineered. His benefactors in the White House and in the Pentagon, who once gobbled up whatever half-baked intelligence Chalabi offered, now regard him as undependable and — worse — safely ignored. Chalabi’s life work, an Iraq liberated from Saddam Hussein, a modern and democratic Iraq, is spiraling toward disintegration. Indeed, for many in the West, Chalabi has become the personification of all that has gone wrong in Iraq: the lies, the arrogance, the occupation as disaster. “The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz,” Chalabi says, referring to his erstwhile backer, the former deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. “They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out.” Chalabi still considers Wolfowitz a friend, so he proceeds carefully. America’s big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein’s downfall and let the Iraqis take charge. The Iraqis, not the Americans, should have been allowed to take over immediately — the people who knew the country, who spoke the language and, most important, who could take responsibility for the chaos that was unfolding in the streets. An Iraqi government could have acted harshly, even brutally, to regain control of the place, and the Iraqis would have been without a foreigner to blame. They would have appreciated the firm hand. There would have been no guerrilla insurgency or, if there was, a small one that the new Iraqi government could have ferreted out and crushed on its own. An Iraqi leadership would have brought Moktada al-Sadr, the populist cleric, into the government and house-trained him. The Americans, in all likelihood, could have gone home. They certainly would have been home by now. “We would have taken hold of the country,” Chalabi says. “We would have revitalized the civil service immediately. We would have been able to put together a military force and an intelligence service. There would have been no insurgency. We would have had electricity. The Americans screwed it up.” Chalabi’s notion — that an Iraqi government, as opposed to an American one, could have saved the great experiment — has become one of the arguments put forth by the war’s proponents in the just-beginning debate over who lost Iraq. At best, it’s improbable: Chalabi is essentially arguing that a handful of Iraqi exiles, some of whom had not lived in the country in decades, could have put together a government and quelled the chaos that quickly engulfed the country after Hussein’s regime collapsed. They could have done this, presumably, without an army (which most wanted to dissolve) and without a police force (which was riddled with Baathists). In fact, the Americans considered the idea and dismissed it. (But not, Wolfowitz insists, because of him. His longtime aide, Kevin Kellems, said that Wolfowitz favored turning over power “as rapidly as possible to duly elected Iraqi authorities.”) The Bush administration decided to go to the United Nations and have the American role in Iraq formally described as that of an “occupying power,” a step that no Iraqi, not even the lowliest tea seller, failed to notice. They appointed L. Paul Bremer III as viceroy. Instead of empowering Iraqis, Bremer set up an advisory panel of Iraqis — one that included Chalabi — that had no power at all. The warmth that many ordinary Iraqis felt for the Americans quickly ebbed away. It’s not clear that the Americans had any other choice. But here in his London parlor, Chalabi is now contending that excluding Iraqis was the Americans’ fatal mistake. “It was a puppet show!” Chalabi exclaims again, shifting on the couch. “The worst of all worlds. We were in charge, and we had no power. We were blamed for everything the Americans did, but we couldn’t change any of it.” It’s three and a half years later now. More than 2,800 Americans are dead; more than 3,000 Iraqis die each month. The anarchy seems limitless. In May 2004, American and Iraqi agents even raided Chalabi’s home in Baghdad. He has been denounced by Bremer and by Bush and accused of passing secrets to America’s enemy, Iran. At the heart of the American decision to take over and run Iraq, Chalabi now concludes, lay a basic contempt for Iraqis, himself included. “In Wolfowitz’s mind, you couldn’t trust the Iraqis to run a democracy,” Chalabi says. “ ‘We have to teach them, give them lessons,’ in Wolfowitz’s mind. ‘We have to leave Iraq under our tutelage. The Iraqis are useless. The Iraqis are incompetent.’ “What I didn’t realize,” Chalabi says, “was that the Americans sold us out.” Turkish coffee is served, then tea. I consider Chalabi’s predicament: the Iraqi patrician, confidant of prime ministers and presidents, the M.I.T.- and University of Chicago-trained mathematics professor, owner of a Mayfair flat, complaining of being regarded, by the masters he once manipulated, as a scruffy, shiftless native. “I’ve been a friend of America, and I’ve been its enemy,” he says. “America betrays its friends. It sets them up and betrays them. I’d rather be America’s enemy.” And so he is. Sort of. With Chalabi, it’s hard to be certain, and not just because his motives are so opaque, but because he is never still. He is enigmatic, brilliant, nimble, unreliable, charming, narcissistic, finally elusive. The journey to Mayfair is a long one. What happened to Chalabi? Well, you might ask: What happened to Iraq? 2. Mushkhab, January 2005 The election is coming, and we are heading south. Twenty cars, mostly carrying men with guns. They hang out the windows, pointing their Kalashnikovs at the terrified drivers. Get out of the way or we shoot, and maybe we shoot anyway — that’s the message. But that’s Iraq. We move quickly, weaving, south in the southbound, south in the northbound. Very fast. Unbelievably fast. Drivers veer and career. We go where we want. We’re low on fuel, and a gas station beckons. It is one of the strange and singular facts of Iraqi life that despite sitting atop an ocean of oil, Iraqis must wait hours — often days — for gasoline at the pumps. Lack of refining capacity, smuggling, stealing, insurgent attacks, Soviet subsidies: it’s complicated. On the road outside Salman Pak, the line is perhaps 300 cars long. The Chalabi convoy cuts straight to the front of the line. No one protests. It’s the guns. The Iraqis wait for days, and our effrontery brings no protest. Not a peep. We get our gas and we speed away, guns out the windows. Very fast. An hour later, we arrive at our destination, Mushkhab. It’s a mostly Shiite town about 100 miles south of Baghdad. It is friendly country — to Chalabi, and still, then, to Americans. The whole town — the males, anyway — gathers round. Chalabi stands in the center, dressed in a dark gray Western suit. The Iraqis clap and read poetry; some of it they sing. It’s a tradition, a kind of serenade to the honored guest. “Hey, listen, Bush, we are Iraqis,” the poet says, and everyone is clapping. “We never bow our heads to anyone, and we won’t do it for you. We have tough guys like Chalabi on our side — be careful.” Everyone laughs. We move inside the mudhif, a tall, long, fantastic structure woven of dried river reeds, a kind of pavilion of rattan. The room is laid with hand-woven carpets, and on the walls hang framed yellowed photographs of the leaders of the tribe, Al Fatla, meeting with their British overlords many years ago. A pair of loudspeakers are set up in the front. Chalabi takes a microphone. “My Iraqi brothers, the Americans pushed out Saddam, but they did not liberate our country,” Chalabi tells the group. “We are asking you to participate in this election so that we can have an independent country. This is not just words. The Iraqi people will liberate the country.” He goes on a little more, warming to the Iraqis assembled about him. “On my way here, I saw a huge line of people waiting for gasoline,” Chalabi tells the group. “Some of them were there for two nights, carrying blankets with them. It makes me very sad to see my brothers wait for days to get gas at the station.” Shameless, huh? I thought so, too. Almost a thing of beauty. It was so outrageous I almost wanted to forgive him, as a teacher might her sassy but cleverest boy. And that’s the thing about Chalabi: he’s very difficult to dislike. It may be his secret. It was Chalabi, after all — a foreigner, an Arab — who persuaded the most powerful men and women in the United States to make the liberation of Iraq not merely a priority but an obsession. First in 1998, when Chalabi persuaded Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act (in turn leading to payments to his group, the Iraqi National Congress, exceeding $27 million over the next six years) and then, later, in persuading the Bush administration of the necessity of using force to destroy Saddam Hussein. And when it all went bad, when those nuclear weapons never turned up, the clever child shrugged and smiled. “We are heroes in error,” Chalabi told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Almost with a wink. Lunch is served: a long table heaped with rice and roasted lamb. No seats. Everyone stands, dozens of us, and we dig in with our fingers. After a time, we prepare to leave. The table and the ground around it are littered with rice and lamb bones. We re-form into a convoy and speed toward the holy city of Najaf. By the time we arrive in Najaf, it’s dark. The fighting between American soldiers and the Mahdi Army irregulars laid waste to the city only a few months before, but on this night, Najaf seems remarkably calm. The pilgrim hotels lie in ruins, but the golden dome of the shrine of Imam Ali shimmers under a January moon. Chalabi exits his S.U.V. and strides inside through the 20-foot-high wooden doors. A clutch of Sunni leaders, whom Chalabi has agreed to show around, trail in step. The curiosities intersect: the Sunnis are not Shiites, and this is the holiest of Shiite places, the tomb of the son-in-law of the Holy Prophet and the very heart of the Shiite faith. But they are still Muslims, and they are allowed to pass. As a non-Muslim, I wait outside in the street. More unlikely than the presence of the Sunnis is their tour guide, Chalabi. Or it was unlikely. Not anymore. Chalabi, the Westernized, Western-educated mathematician, has entered his Islamist phase. It’s not terribly convincing. He does not don a turban. He has no beard. He does not pray. He does not, really, even pretend. But as a practical politician — as an exile come home to a strange land getting stranger by the day — Chalabi had to do something. Relations between Chalabi and the Bush administration began to sour almost immediately after the fall of Hussein, when the Americans decided against putting Iraqis — presumably Chalabi — in charge. Bremer considered him an egomaniac. When no W.M.D. turned up, more and more Americans came to blame Chalabi for the war. Chalabi’s association with the Americans grew more disadvantageous by the day. The break came on May 20, 2004, when the Americans, accusing Chalabi of telling the Iranian government that the Americans were eavesdropping on their secret communications, swooped in on his Baghdad compound. American troops sealed off Mansour, the neighborhood where Chalabi lived, while scores of Iraqi and American agents kicked in the compound doors. One of the Iraqis, Chalabi said, put a gun to his head. “Look, I think they tried to kill him,” Richard Perle, the former Pentagon adviser and longtime Chalabi friend, said of the American and Iraqi agents. “I think the raid on his house was intended to result in violence. They had sent 20 or 40 Humvees over there. Chalabi was being protected by a force of about 100 guys with machine guns. It is a miracle that it didn’t result in a massive shootout.” No shots were fired, but the break seemed final. Isolated, Chalabi turned to Islam — and, in particular, to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric and leader of two armed uprisings against the Americans and the Iraqi government. Sadr is an erratic and unpredictable young man who sometimes ends his sermons with apocalyptic visions of the “hidden” 12th imam revealing himself. He is also the most popular man in Iraq. In the anarchy that ensued following the fall of Hussein, Iraqis, once known for their largely secular outlook, ran headlong toward Islam. Religion and anarchy moved together: the worse conditions got in the streets, the more Islamic Iraqis became. In the three and a half years that I have known Chalabi, I never once saw him pray. Or give any indication that he harbored religious beliefs at all. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser and a devout Shiite, told me once that when he and a group of five senior Iraqi politicians visited the Imam Ali shrine in 2004, all of them prayed but Chalabi. While the others knelt, Rubaie said, Chalabi stood quietly with his hands folded in front of him. On this return visit to the Imam Ali shrine, Chalabi and his Sunni colleagues spent 10 minutes inside and exited without saying a thing. But word travels quickly down Najaf’s narrow streets, and by the time our convoy sped back to Baghdad, there were very few people in Najaf who did not know that Chalabi had come. Once, when I asked Chalabi about his flirtation with the Islamists, he answered not in terms of religion but of politics. Moktada, he explained, was not essentially dangerous but merely misunderstood, an outsider who could be coaxed into Iraq’s new democratic order. Chalabi was happy to act as the bridge, and if he benefited politically from his efforts, he was not complaining. “The Americans made a mistake when they excluded Moktada in the beginning,” Chalabi told me. “Our real business is to persuade everybody that Sadr is better inside than outside, and to provide some measure of comfort to the middle class that he is not going to eat them up.” Indeed, Chalabi and Sadr are not as unlikely a pair as they may seem. Musa al-Sadr, the late Iranian-born ayatollah and Moktada’s cousin, presided over Chalabi’s wedding in Beirut in 1971. Chalabi’s wife, Leila, is the daughter of Adel Osseiran, a leader of the Lebanese independence movement. Musa al-Sadr was the founder of Amal, which became the prototypical Shiite party in the Middle East. It seemed like a game, and not one that Chalabi liked to give away. Whenever I asked him about his coziness with Moktada, and how it squared with his own religious beliefs, I usually received a curt retort. For a time, Chalabi — and the Americans — got the better of the deal. Moktada fielded candidates in the January 2005 election, and his militia, though still untamed, fell into line behind its leader. He endorsed something less than an absolute role for Islam in the Iraqi Constitution. By early 2006, parties loyal to Sadr held the largest bloc in the Iraqi Parliament. As for Chalabi, Moktada kept him afloat a little longer. But in siding with the Islamists, Chalabi helped make them stronger than they were, and he threw his weight behind a number of trends that were only then becoming dominant: the Islamization of Iraqi society, the division of Iraq into sectarian cantons. Those trends later spiraled out of control, into the de facto civil war that is unfolding now. Some Iraqis who watched Chalabi then still don’t forgive him — and they think that ultimately, the Islamists got the better of him. “Ahmad’s problem is that Ahmad is usually the smartest man in the room, and he thinks he can control what happens,” I was told by an Iraqi official who worked with Chalabi at the time and who would speak only anonymously. “But these guys don’t care if you have a Ph.D. in math; they’ll kill you. In the end, things went way past the point where Ahmad thought they would ever go. I can’t imagine he wanted that. But he helped start it.” 3. Baghdad, October 2005 Chalabi is standing on the rooftop of his ancestral home in Khadimiya, a heavily Shiite neighborhood known for its shrine. Mansour, the area where he has lived since Hussein’s fall, has slipped into anarchy. The final round of nationwide elections is a couple of months away. For the moment, Chalabi is the deputy prime minister, behind the affable but ineffectual Ibrahim Jaafari. Across the street stand a pair of grain silos built by his father, Abdul Hadi Chalabi. Downstairs, on a wall in the sitting room, there is an old British map dating to the 1920’s, showing Baghdad, which was much smaller than it is now. North of Baghdad, in what was then farmland and what is now Khadimiya, a dot indicates a town. The dot says, “Chalabi.” At the time, Chalabi’s family owned nearly two and a half million acres throughout Iraq. Those vast holdings are reduced to the compound where Chalabi now stands. It’s about 10 acres, including the main house, which a team of workers is renovating, a large swimming pool, a grove of date palms and, in the back, a mudhif. There is a row of garages, decrepit now, where workers once serviced the machinery and trucks that brought the wheat and dates to market. “Imagine,” Chalabi says, turning to me. “And C.I.A. says I have no roots here.” Chalabi spent 45 years in exile. Under the Hashemite monarchy installed by the British after World War I, the ruling class of the new Iraq was largely made up of Sunni Muslims, as it had been under the Ottoman Turks. The Chalabis were part of the small Shiite elite; most of the rest of the Shiite majority formed a vast underclass. The remnants of that Shiite elite now form a sizable slice of the political establishment of post-Saddam Iraq. In addition to Chalabi, there is Adil Abdul Mahdi, the vice president, a Chalabi friend since boyhood; Ayad Allawi, the former president, who is a Chalabi relative by marriage; and Feisal al-Istrabadi, the deputy ambassador to the United Nations in New York. In the 1950’s, Chalabi, Mahdi and Allawi were schoolmates at Baghdad College, an elite Jesuit high school. Even in their class photos, nearly a half-century old, all three men are instantly recognizable: Mahdi, the soft-spoken intellectual; Allawi, the charming bully; and Chalabi, the boy genius in a bow tie. On July 14, 1958, King Faisal II, the British-backed monarch, was deposed and killed; a day later, the prime minister, Nuri al-Said, fled to the home of Chalabi’s sister, Thamina. She dressed Said in an abaya, the head-to-toe gown worn by women. With the army closing in, Thamina Chalabi took Said to the home of Feisal al-Istrabadi’s grandparents. Ahmad Chalabi, then 14, watched his mother and Bibiya al-Istrabadi weep as they pondered the prime minister’s fate. “Three or four hours later, Said was dead,” Chalabi told me. “He shot himself.” Chalabi fled Iraq a few months later, first for Lebanon, then England and then America, where he received a degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. (Dissertation title: “Jacobson Radical of Group Algebras Over Fields Characteristic p.”) He did not return to Baghdad until April 11, 2003. Chalabi’s homecoming, after the U.S. invasion, was not the triumphant return he hoped it would be. What should have been his principal claim to legitimacy — his central role in toppling Saddam — never carried him very far; it became a liability as Iraq descended into chaos. In the new Iraq, Westernized elites carried less and less authority. Power belonged to the clerics and to the populists. And then there was the scandal at Petra Bank in Jordan, the outlines of which every Iraqi, no matter how dimly educated, seemed already to know: that Chalabi had been convicted in absentia for fraud and sentenced to 22 years in prison for embezzling almost $300 million. (Chalabi, who fled Jordan before he could be arrested, has long denied the charges, maintaining that they were cooked up by the Jordanian government under pressure from Saddam Hussein. Last year, the Jordanians signaled that they were willing to pardon Chalabi. But Chalabi insisted on a public apology, which the Jordanians refused to give.) Even the small army of Iraqi exiles that Chalabi had raised before the war never grew to be much more than a personal militia. One poll, conducted in early 2004, showed him to be the least trusted public figure in Iraq — even less trusted than Saddam Hussein. Dexter Filkins The suspicions that ordinary Iraqis harbored about Chalabi were never relieved by his industriousness. As oil minister and deputy prime minister, Chalabi worked night and day, often on the minutiae of Iraq’s oil pipelines and electricity lines or the precise wording, in Arabic and English, of the Iraqi Constitution. I typically went to see Chalabi at night, sometimes at 9 or 10, and usually had to wait an hour or so while he finished with his other visitors. If it was true that Chalabi had returned to Iraq with the expectation of acquiring power, it was not true that he was unwilling to work for it. Chalabi, like all Iraqi political leaders, functioned in conditions of mortal danger at nearly all times. Even when he wanted to walk into his backyard, he had to be followed by armed guards. It’s an exhausting and debilitating way to live. But while many Iraqi exiles either gave up and returned to the West, or now spend as much time outside the country as in, Chalabi stayed in Iraq almost continuously following Hussein’s fall. For all the hard work, his zigging and zagging across the political spectrum frustrated many of the Iraqi elites — his only natural constituency — especially after his flirtation with the Islamists. “I don’t think Chalabi has any credibility left,” Adnan Pachachi, the 83-year-old former foreign minister, told me before the 2005 elections. “He is not acceptable to Iraqis. People don’t like him shifting all the time. This thing with Moktada — it’s ridiculous.” One who remained true was his friend Mahdi, who seemed, perhaps from his boyhood days swimming in the Tigris with Chalabi, to carry a deeper understanding of his old friend. “This is the style of Ahmad,” Mahdi told me just before the elections. “He was a banker. He works a dossier. Each time it’s different — he invests here, he invests there, he invests elsewhere. He has had successes, he has had maybe his failures. I can work with him.” Chalabi never grasped his essential unpopularity. In the first round of elections, in January 2005, Chalabi rode into office as a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition pulled together by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the powerful Shiite religious leader. Nearly every Shiite in Iraq voted for the U.I.A., and a name on its slate all but guaranteed a seat in the Parliament. The leadership of the U.I.A. was sharply Islamist. Nearly a year later, as the December 2005 elections approached, Chalabi veered again, away from the Islamists, away from Moktada. Chalabi publicly chided the Shiite coalition as being too Islamic-minded, declaring he didn’t want to be a member of a government that was planning to transform Iraq into an Islamist state. By that time, of course, Iraq was already quite Islamist anyway. “They’re Islamist, and I don’t want to be part of the sectarian project,” Chalabi told me just before the elections that December. I actually believed him, but given his association with Moktada, it didn’t seem that many other Iraqis would. The reality, anyway, was more complicated. In the weeks before the election, the Shiite alliance offered Chalabi and his supporters 5 seats on its 275-seat slate; Chalabi demanded 10. Some Shiite leaders told me that they had deliberately offered Chalabi a low figure in the hope that he would leave their alliance for good. Mahdi, the vice president, denied that this was true. “For four days I tried to convince him; I even threatened him,” Mahdi told me. “I said, ‘Ahmad, if you leave this room, we will be no more friends.’ I was not serious. I was only threatening.” So Chalabi went his own way. If he had wanted only a seat for himself, he could have taken his place in the Shiite alliance; plenty of other Iraqis did. In going alone, he must have known that he was risking disaster. He went ahead anyway. A few days before the election, I drove up to Chalabi’s compound in Khadimiya for a lunch he was holding for tribal leaders. In much the same fashion as in Mushkhab 11 months before, about 100 sheiks from Sadr City listened to a Chalabi speech before descending on heaps of lamb and rice. One of the sheiks, a man named Sahaeh Masif al-Kindh, approached me as he walked out. “Chalabi didn’t forget us when we were living under Saddam,” al-Kindh told me. “He was Saddam’s biggest enemy. We don’t forget that.” 4. Washington, November 2005 The second round of Iraqi elections is only a few weeks away, and the wheel is turning again. Chalabi, once in favor, then out, is back in. Ostensibly, he has been invited to Washington by Treasury Secretary John Snow to talk about the Iraqi economy. But it’s more than that. He’s going to see Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The allegations that prompted the raid on Chalabi’s compound 18 months before, that he tipped the Iranians to American eavesdropping, are mysteriously forgotten. Indeed, everything seems to have been forgotten. Chalabi is rising on the catastrophe that Iraq has become. The Bush administration is grasping for anyone who might help them. On paper at least, Chalabi has a shot at becoming prime minister. Most of the meetings are private. There is a dinner at the home of Richard Perle for some of Chalabi’s old Washington friends. One of the events, a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, is public. The room is filled. At the end of a speech, Chalabi is asked by someone in the crowd if he would like to apologize for misleading the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Chalabi nods as if he knew the question was coming. “This is an urban myth,” he says. The audience gasps. Chalabi told me later that his role as an intelligence conduit on weapons of mass destruction began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was contacted by the Department of Defense. Not vice versa. “They came to us and asked, ‘Can you help us find something on Saddam?’ ” he said. “We put out feelers.” By that time, the autumn of 2001, Chalabi had a long record of working with the American government in its shadow war against Hussein. Throughout the 1990’s, however, Chalabi demonstrated time and again that he would pursue his own interests, even if they clashed with those of the United States. There was the time in 1995, for instance, when Chalabi, under the employ of the C.I.A. in the Kurdish-controlled city of Erbil, launched an unauthorized attack on Hussein’s army. The attack failed to spark an uprising against Hussein; the Turks sent troops into northern Iraq; the C.I.A. was furious. It was a fiasco. “Very quickly he got out of control,” one retired C.I.A. officer who worked with Chalabi told me. “We didn’t know what he was doing over there. He was trying to provoke a war with Saddam.” Then there was the time, in 1996, when Chalabi interfered with a C.I.A. plot to topple Saddam. I heard the story not from Chalabi but from Perle, the Bush defense adviser and Chalabi friend. As Perle tells it, Chalabi called him in a panic from London, telling him that a C.I.A.-backed plot against Hussein was fatally compromised. The fact that the C.I.A.’s Iraqi front-man for the plot, Ayad Allawi, was a rival of Chalabi’s (as well as his relative) had nothing to do with his concerns, Perle said. As Perle tells it, he quickly telephoned the C.I.A. director at the time, John Deutch, who agreed to meet in downtown Washington. Perle said he spent an hour laying out Chalabi’s worries. “He was obviously concerned,” Perle said of Deutch. The plot went ahead anyway. It was a catastrophe. Hussein arrested as many as 800 people and reportedly executed dozens of high-ranking officers. As a final indignity, Hussein’s men dialed up Allawi’s headquarters in Amman, Jordan, on a C.I.A.-provided communications device they captured from the plotters and left a message: “You might as well pack up and go home.” Some people in the C.I.A. held Chalabi responsible, believing that he had spread word of the plot in order to deny Ayad Allawi the upper hand in the exile movement. “There was abiding suspicion in the agency that Chalabi blew it,” the former C.I.A. agent said. The fallout over the failed coup precipitated the C.I.A.’s decision to break ties with Chalabi. Chalabi dismisses those claims, and some in the C.I.A. from the period back him up. “Chalabi was as true to me as the day was long,” says Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. field agent in northern Iraq. “If Chalabi was going to blow the operation, why would he tell the C.I.A.?” There was the money issue, too. Throughout the 1990’s, as the C.I.A. and Congress funneled millions of dollars to Chalabi’s organization, the Iraqi National Congress, rumors swirled about corruption. One of the skeptics was W. Patrick Lang, a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. In 1995, Lang told me, he was sitting in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, when he overheard a group of Iraqis talking about the money they had received from the American government. “I knew who these guys were, and I heard them speaking Arabic, and it was obviously Iraqi Arabic,” Lang said. “So I went over and sat next to them and listened. So what they were talking about was how to spend the Americans’ money, going on shopping trips, stuff like that. Oh, they were talking about going shopping for jewelry for women, toys for kids. Consumer goods. They were also talking about Las Vegas. ‘We will sneak out of here and go to Las Vegas. We have a lot of money now.’ ” A couple of years later, Lang said, he visited the office of Senator Trent Lott, then the Senate majority leader. After introducing an Arab businessman to Lott, Lang sat in Lott’s anteroom with a number of Capitol Hill staff members who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act, which provided millions of dollars to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. They were praising Chalabi: “They were talking about him, that Chalabi fits into this plan as a very worthwhile, virtuous exemplar of modernization, somebody who could help reform first Iraq and then the Middle East. They were very pleased with themselves.” Lang, an old Middle East hand who had worked in Iraq in the 1980’s, said he was stunned. “You guys need to get out more,” Lang recalls saying at the time. “It’s a fantasy.” Years later, Lang said, many of the same men who were sitting in Lott’s office that day became key players in the Pentagon’s plans for an invasion of Iraq. Which brings us back to Chalabi’s “urban myth”: the notion that he provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration and helped persuade them — or provide the pretext — to invade Iraq. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Chalabi exhorted the audience to turn to Page 108 of the Robb-Silverman report, a recently completed blue-ribbon investigation, which, he said, exonerates him. It does, in a way. The report does not say that Chalabi & Company played an important role in the events leading to the war. It says only that the Bush administration did not rely much on intelligence Chalabi handed over in making the decision to invade. “In fact, overall, C.I.A.’s postwar investigations revealed that I.N.C.-related sources had a minimal impact on prewar assessments,” the report says. This is also Chalabi’s version. In the run-up to war, he says, he provided only three defectors to the American intelligence community. “We did not vouch for any of their information,” Chalabi told me. One of the people whom the I.N.C. made available to American intelligence was Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, who claimed that he had worked on buildings that were used to store biological, nuclear and chemical weapons equipment. Chalabi told me that he made Haideri available to American intelligence at a safe house in Bangkok. He didn’t think much of Haideri or his information, he says, and was astonished to learn later that the information he provided became a pillar of the Americans’ charges against Hussein. “We told them, ‘We don’t know who this guy is,’ ” Chalabi said. “Then the Americans spoke to him and said, ‘This guy is the mother lode.’ Can you believe that on such a basis the United States would go to war? The intelligence community regarded the I.N.C. as useless. Why would the government believe us?” Perle, from his perch on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Advisory Committee Board, backs Chalabi’s version. He was privy to much of the intelligence the administration was collecting on Hussein in the days before the war. He says that American intelligence officials began from the premise that Hussein had never destroyed his stocks of banned weapons and that he had kept his programs alive. American spies were only looking to confirm what they thought they already knew. In any event, Perle said, very little of their information came from Chalabi. “I had all the security clearances,” Perle said. “I was pretty much aware of the people that the I.N.C. was bringing to the table to talk about what they knew. Everything they did came with a disclaimer. To the best of my knowledge, there was no single important fact that was uniquely conveyed to U.S. intelligence by anyone who had been assisted by the I.N.C.” Indeed, Chalabi says, much of the most important evidence that led America to war did not come from the I.N.C.: not the report on the uranium from Niger, and not Curveball, the Iraqi defector who made bogus claims about mobile biological weapons labs. “It’s not our fault,” Chalabi says. But the story doesn’t end there. A second report, released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 2006, reached far more damning conclusions. The report states flatly that Chalabi’s group introduced defectors to American intelligence who directly influenced two key judgments in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which preceded the Senate vote on the Iraq war: that Hussein possessed mobile biological-weapons laboratories and that he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program. The report said that the I.N.C. provided a large volume of flawed intelligence to the United States about Iraq, saying the group “attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.” (Five Republican senators disagreed with the report’s conclusions about the I.N.C.) Chalabi’s denials are unconvincing for another reason. His role in the preparations for war was not just as a source for American intelligence agencies. He was America’s chief public advocate for war, spreading information gathered by his own intelligence network to newspapers, magazines, television programs and Congress. (A New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, was one of Chalabi’s primary conduits; in an e-mail message sent in 2003 that has been widely quoted since, she wrote that Chalabi “has provided most of the front-page exclusives on W.M.D. to our paper” and that the Army unit she was then traveling with was “using Chalabi’s intell and document network for its own W.M.D. work.”) Indeed, the press proved even more gullible than the intelligence experts in the American government. In a June 2002 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee, the I.N.C. listed 108 news articles based on information provided by the group. The list included articles concerning some of the wildest claims about Hussein, including that he had collaborated in the Sept. 11 attacks. David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, offers one of the most compelling explanations for how pivotal Chalabi’s role was in taking America to war. Kay said that while the C.I.A. had long regarded Chalabi with suspicion, disregarding much of what he gave them, Chalabi had succeeded in persuading his more powerful friends in other parts of the government — Vice President Dick Cheney, for instance, and Wolfowitz. The pressure brought by those men, Kay told me, ultimately persuaded George Tenet, director of the C.I.A., that the White House was committed to war and that there was no point in resisting it. “In my judgment, the reason George Tenet and the top of the agency came over to the argument that Iraq had W.M.D. was that they really knew that the vice president and Wolfowitz had come to that conclusion anyway,” Kay said. “They had been getting information from Chalabi for years.” Of Wolfowitz, whom he has known for years, Kay said: “He was a true believer. He thought he had the evidence. That came from the defectors. They came from Chalabi.” Kay said he continued to feel Chalabi’s influence with Wolfowitz even after the invasion, when Kay was leading the team searching for W.M.D. from mid- to late 2003. “Paul, when faced with evidence that we had developed on the ground, would say, Well, Chalabi says this, the I.N.C. says this, why are you not seeing it?” Kellems, the Wolfowitz assistant, disputed Kay’s story, saying that Tenet’s views were shared by officials across the government. “The position taken on weapons was the consensus view of the United States, including of the Clinton administration and other Western intelligence agencies — as well as that of Mr. Kay himself prior to visiting Iraq,” Kellems said. Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in Bush’s first term, adds a final turn to the labyrinth. In the frantic days leading up to Powell’s speech at the United Nations in February 2003, when he laid out the case for war, Wilkerson said he spent many nights sleeping on a couch in George Tenet’s office. During those preparations, Wilkerson told me, Powell insisted that every point he would make at the U.N. had to be supported by at least three independent sources. “We had three or four sources for every item that was substantive in his presentation,” Wilkerson told me in an interview in Washington. “Powell insisted on that. But what I am hearing now, though, is that a lot of these sources sort of tinged and merged back into a single source, and that inevitably that single source seems to be either recommended by, set up by, orchestrated by, introduced by, or whatever, by somebody in the I.N.C.” Wilkerson said that the revelations, some of which he says he has heard from his own friends inside American and European intelligence agencies, have forced him to rethink how America went to war. “I have maintained pretty much the same thing that the president said, ‘Well, we all got fooled, it was lousy intelligence, and no one in the national leadership spun the intelligence,’ ” Wilkerson said. “I am having to revisit that. And that is disturbing to me.” Wilkerson raises a crucial point. Assuming that Chalabi was a source for at least some of the bogus intelligence, we might ask ourselves: so what? Was the American national security apparatus so incompetent that it could be hoodwinked by a handful of shopworn engineers and an Iraqi mathematician to take the country into war? Or is the lesson more disturbing — that Chalabi simply gave the Bush administration what it wanted to hear? “I think Chalabi and the I.N.C. were very shrewd,” Wilkerson said. “I think Chalabi understood what people wanted, and he fed it to them. From everything I’ve heard, no one says he is dumb.” 5. Tehran, November 2005 Amid the debate about Chalabi’s role in taking America to war, one little-noticed phrase in a Senate Intelligence Committee report on W.M.D. offered an important insight into Chalabi’s identity. One of the principal errors made by the Bush administration in relying on Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, the report said, was to disregard conclusions by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency that “the I.N.C. was penetrated by hostile intelligence services,” notably those of Iran. The Iran connection has long been among the most beguiling aspects of Chalabi’s career. Baer, the former C.I.A. operative, recalled sitting in a hotel lobby in Salah al-Din, in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, in 1995 while Chalabi met with the turbaned representatives of Iranian intelligence on the other side of the room. (Baer, as an American, was barred from meeting the Iranians.) Baer says he came to regard Chalabi as an Iranian asset, and still does. “He is basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable,” Baer told me. “All his C.I.A. connections — he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them.” Pat Lang, the D.I.A. agent, holds a similar view: that in Chalabi, the Iranians probably saw someone who could help them achieve their long-sought goal of removing Saddam Hussein. After a time, in Lang’s view, the Iranians may have figured the Americans would leave and that Chalabi would most likely be in charge. Lang insists he is only speculating, but he says it has been clear to the American intelligence community for years that Chalabi has maintained “deep contacts” with Iranian officials. “Here is what I think happened,” Lang said. “Chalabi went and told the guys at the Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Tehran: ‘The Americans are giving me money. I’m their guy. I’m their candidate.’ And I’m sure their eyes lit up. The Iranians would reason that they could use this guy to manipulate the United States to get what they wanted. They would figure that the U.S. would invade. They would figure that we would come and we would go, and if we left Chalabi in charge, who was a good friend of theirs, they would be in good shape.” Lang’s thesis is impossible to prove, and Chalabi denies it. And even if it were true, Chalabi’s role would be difficult to discern: so many different Iranian agencies are thought to be pursuing so many different agendas in Iraq that a single Iranian national interest is difficult to identify. Still, if Lang’s and Baer’s argument is true, it would be the stuff of spy novels: Chalabi, the American-adopted champion of Iraqi democracy, a kind of double agent for one of America’s principal adversaries. In late 2005, I accompanied Chalabi on a trip to Iran, in part to solve the riddle. We drove eastward out of Baghdad, in a convoy as menacing as the one we had ridden in south to Mushkhab earlier in the year. After three hours of weaving and careering, the plains of eastern Iraq halted, and the terrain turned sharply upward into a thick ridge of arid mountains. We had come to Mehran, on one of history’s great fault lines, the historic border between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. As we crossed into Iran, the wreckage and ruin of modern Iraq gave way to swept streets and a tidy border post with shiny bathrooms. Another world. An Iranian cleric approached and shook Chalabi’s hand. Then he said something curious: “We are disappointed to hear that you won’t be staying in the Shiite alliance,” he said. “We were really hoping you’d stay.” The border between Iraq and Iran had, for the moment, disappeared. More curious, though, was the authority that Chalabi seemed to carry in Iran, which, after all, has been accused of assisting Iraqi insurgents and otherwise stirring up chaos there. For starters, Chalabi asked me if I wanted to come along on his Iranian trip only the night before he left — and then procured a visa for me in a single day: a Friday, during the Eid holiday, when the Iranian Embassy was closed. Under ordinary circumstances, an American reporter might wait weeks. Then there was the executive jet. When we arrived at the border, Chalabi ducked into a bathroom and changed out of his camouflage T-shirt and slacks and into a well-tailored blue suit. Then we drove to Ilam, where an 11-seat Fokker jet was idling on the runway of the local airport. We jumped in and took off for Tehran, flying over a dramatic landscape of canyons and ravines. We landed in Iran’s smoggy capital, and within a couple of hours, Chalabi was meeting with the highest officials of the Iranian government. One of them was Ali Larijani, the national security adviser. I interviewed Larijani the next morning. “Our relationship with Mr. Chalabi does not have anything to do with his relationship with the neocons,” he said. His red-rimmed eyes, when I met him at 7 a.m., betrayed a sleepless night. “He is a very constructive and influential figure. He is a very wise man and a very useful person for the future of Iraq.” Then came the meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president. I was with a handful of Iranian reporters who were led into a finely appointed room just outside the president’s office. First came Chalabi, dressed in a tailored suit, beaming. Then Ahmadinejad, wearing a face of childlike bewilderment. He was dressed in imitation leather shoes and bulky white athletic socks, and a suit that looked as if it had come from a Soviet department store. Only a few days before, Ahmadinejad publicly called for the destruction of Israel. He and Chalabi, who is several inches taller, stood together for photos, then retired to a private room. At the time of Chalabi’s visit, Iran and the United States were engaged in a complicated diplomatic dance; the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, had been authorized to open negotiations with the Iranians over their involvement in Iraq. Still, Chalabi insists he carried no note from the Iranians when he flew to Washington the next week. Officially, at least, Iran and the United States never got together. As ever, Chalabi had multiple agendas. One was to learn whether the Iranians would support his candidacy for the prime ministership (the same reason he traveled to the United States). It makes you wonder, in light of the Baer and Lang thesis: was Chalabi telling the Iranians, or asking them for permission? Or making a deal, based on his presumed leverage in the United States? The possibilities seemed endless. Chalabi played it cool. “The fact that Iraq’s neighbor is also a country that is majority Shia is no reason for us to accept any interference in our affairs or to compromise the integrity of Iraq,” he said after his meeting with Ahmadinejad. Richard Perle, Chalabi’s friend, discounted the idea that Chalabi might be a double agent. “Of course Chalabi has a relationship with the Iranians — you have to have a relationship with the Iranians in order to operate there,” Perle said. “The question is what kind of relationship. Is he fooling the Iranians or are the Iranians using him? I think Chalabi has been very shrewd in getting the things he has needed over the years out of the Iranians without giving anything in return.” For all of the skullduggery surrounding the trip to Iran, though, the greatest revelation came later in the day. When the meeting with Ahmadinejad ended, he asked Chalabi if there was anything he could to do to make his stay more comfortable. Chalabi said yes, in fact, there was: would he mind if he, Chalabi, took a tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art? So there we were, in the middle of the Axis of Evil, strolling past one of the finest collections of Western Modern art outside Europe and the United States: Matisse, Kandinsky, Rothko, Gauguin, Pollock, Klee, Van Gogh, five Warhols, seven Picassos and a sprawling garden of sculpture outside. The collection was assembled by Queen Farah, the shah’s wife, with the monarchy’s vast oil wealth. And now, with the mullahs in charge, the museum is largely forgotten. The day we were there, the gallery was all but empty. We had the museum’s enthusiastic English-speaking tour guide all to ourselves. “Thank you, thank you, for coming!” Noreen Motamed exclaimed, clapping her hands. We walked the empty halls. Chalabi moved through the place deliberately, nodding his head, pausing at the Degas and the Pissarro. “Wow,” Chalabi said before Jesus Rafael Soto’s painting “Canada.” “Look at that.” A retinue of Iranian officials walked with us, unmoved by the splendor. Ahmadinejad had stayed behind. For all of the furies that emanate from the halls of the Iranian government, it has taken fine care of Queen Farah’s collection. Indeed, about the only way you would know you were not in a museum in New York or London was the absence of the middle panel from Francis Bacon’s triptych “Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendant,” which depicts two naked men. “It is in the basement, covered,” Motamed said with disappointed eyes. Finally, we came across a pair of paintings by Marc Chagall, the 20th-century Modernist and painter of Jewish life. The display contained no mention of this fact. Chalabi gazed at the Chagalls for a time. Then, with a rueful smile, turned, to no one in particular, and said loudly: “Imagine that. They have two paintings by Marc Chagall in the middle of a museum in Tehran.” The Iranian officials seemed not to hear. 6. Baghdad, December 2005 A winter rain is falling. Chalabi is standing inside a tent in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum of eastern Baghdad. He’s talking about his plans for restoring electricity, boosting oil production and beating the insurgency. People seem to be listening, but without enthusiasm. The violence here, worsening by the day, is washing away the hopes of ordinary Iraqis. Less and less seems possible anymore. People are retreating inward, you can see it in the glaze in their eyes. As Chalabi speaks, I pull aside one of the Iraqis who had been listening. What do you think of him? I ask. “Chalabi good good,” the Iraqi man says in halting English. Whom are you going to vote for? “The Shiite alliance, of course,” the Iraqi answers. “It is the duty of all Shiite people.” When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: “We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn’t even get that many.” He shrugged. But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people he had worked so hard to set free. No amount of deal making or of public relations foot-work, or of endorsements from friends, was able to save him. Chalabi may have helped bring democracy to Iraq, but it was democracy that finished him. He was, in the end, a parlor politician, someone from the world of his father or grandfather, or maybe of Victorian England: a brilliant negotiator and schemer who might settle a country’s problems over a cup of tea. But in Iraq, by late 2005, real power was no longer held by the parlor men, or by politicians at all. It was held by people like Moktada al-Sadr, populist leaders with a militia and a mass following in the street. The election results were a harbinger of the civil war. Iraqis voted almost entirely along sectarian and ethnic lines: Kurds for the big Kurdish parties, Sunnis for the Sunni parties and Shiites for the big Islamist Shiite alliance. Iraqis who tried to run on a secular platform — Chalabi, for instance, and his relative, Allawi, in another party — found themselves abandoned. Just two months later, in February of this year, following the destruction of the Askariya shrine, a holy Shiite temple in Samarra, the civil war began in earnest: Shiite gunmen, who had for years been restrained by the Shiite leadership in the face of the Sunni onslaught, were finally free to retaliate. Chalabi, shut out of the government, claimed that his sin was one of miscalculation. There was some truth to this: in all likelihood, Chalabi did not lose because he had been convicted of stealing millions of dollars from a Jordanian bank. Or because of the rumors swirling around Baghdad that he had looted the treasury. Or even because he was an exile close to the Americans. No: plenty of Westernized Iraqi exiles were elected to Parliament — among them Mowaffak al-Rubaie and Adil Abdul Mahdi — who, like Chalabi, didn’t have local followings and were trailed by similar questions. Practically speaking, Chalabi lost because he had broken from the big cleric-backed Shiite alliance that swept the election. “I had not realized how polarized Iraq had become,” Chalabi told me after the election. He might have gotten a seat in the cabinet, but that didn’t work out, either. That stung: the new Iraqi government is staffed with Chalabi’s old colleagues, many of them members of the exile alliance he once led. Jalal Talabani is president. Adil Abdul Mahdi, his boyhood friend, is vice president. Barham Salih, comrade of many years, is deputy prime minister. His old confidant Zalmay Khalilzad, who played a central role in forming the new government, is the American ambassador. In the end, they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — bring him aboard. “Chalabi really made a mess of things,” said one Iraqi political leader who now occupies a key post in the government. He declined to elaborate. As anticlimactic as was Chalabi’s fall, its real meaning lay in a paradox: democratic politics no longer mattered. For three years, the American-backed enterprise in Iraq rested on the assumption that the exercise of democratic politics would drain away the anger that was driving the violence. Instead of bullets, there would be ballots. But at the culmination of that long process — two constitutions, two elections and a referendum — the violence was worse than ever. It turns out that democratic politics does not stop violence; indeed, the elections, by polarizing Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic communities, may have helped push the country into civil war. Effectively, by the fall of 2006, the overwhelming majority of Iraq had no government at all. It was a failed state. Yes, there were Iraqis — Chalabi’s friends — who went to their jobs every day, toiling dutifully and not so dutifully inside the Green Zone, which every day seemed more and more divorced from the reality outside. In the Red Zone, as the real Iraq is called, Iraq was a nightmarish, apocalyptic place, where gunmen kidnapped children and sometimes killed them, where bodies turned up at the morgue peppered by holes from electric drills and corpses lay uncollected in the streets, along with the trash, for days on end. Ahmad Chalabi devoted his whole adult life to toppling a dictator and achieving power in the place of his birth. He felled the dictator, helping along a reckless gamble that wagered the future of a nation. The gamble failed, a nation imploded and Chalabi never ascended to the throne he so coveted. But in an odd turn of fortune, the throne no longer had anything to offer. 7. London, August 2006 The conversation is wrapping up. The talk turns to the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the machinations of those around him, what the future might hold. Chalabi, in an expansive mood, gets up, goes into a closet and brings out a note that Bob Baer, the C.I.A. agent, scribbled to him in that hotel lobby when the two men plotted a coup many years before. The talk, improbably, turns to memoirs; at the moment, Baer’s, “See No Evil,” was a best seller. I ask Chalabi, who is back on the couch, if it isn’t time that he write his own. He doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Too early!” Chalabi says. “Too early!”

How can I improve this essay? Easy 10 points for Literature major:)? How can I improve this essay to be better( Aware of the part I underlined). How do you think about the title, the voice, the word use. If there is any grammar please fix it. You can copy and paste on Microsoft word and read if you feel read online is frustrating. The topic is about use my own experience to write an essay which include the quote from an essay I read before. 10 points for best evaluate. Please be serious Name:Tram Pham Date: 10/22/2007 Class: English 1100 Different perspectives of Social time Robert Levine and Ellen Wolfe in “Social Time: The Heartbeat of a culture” admit that “ formal ‘clock time’ may be a standard on which the world agrees, but ‘social time’, the heartbeat of society, is something else again”(77). I agree with them because when I compare my own experiences in America to those where I am from, southern part of Vietnam, there is a huge difference concept about time. I was very interested in a point that was raised in the essay that” someone of status is expected to arrive late. Lack of punctuality is a badge of success” (77). I was very amused with this concept because it is the same in my country. In Vietnam, within a company, the boss is often the one who tends to be late for the work days and for the meetings. I know this since my mother is a manager of a cable company. The working hours start at seven. However, she always leaves the house at eight or sometimes even nine o’clock even though the company is only one block away from my house. In contrast, her clerks, secretaries, assistants, and workers will be reprimanded if they are late. For my mother, lateness perhaps is one of the tools to show her power, or perhaps to show that she is a busy and hard working woman. She is the one who arrives latest in her company, but also the last one to leave and the one who goes home with a huge stack of papers. Lateness is not only in the work place but also in school. In elementary and high school, students are expected to arrive early and teachers are expected to arrive on time and sometimes a few minutes later. In all the schools I have attended in Vietnam, students always arrive in class fifteen minutes early. Some schools even require half an hour earlier. Students is demanded to be at school before the class start so that they have time to ask and discuss homework questions with the colleagues or maybe even just skim through the text they had to read in the day before. On the other hand, University student are never on time. One of my friends told me that being late for classes at the university is just so cool because it shows that they are growing up and they have the freedom to do as they like. This perhaps is a bad habit from a Western viewpoint. However, one need to spend years and years in my country’s high school to be able to understand why students are so frustrated about the idea of lateness and earliness. When I arrived in America, I saw a total different view here. Teachers always arrive and leave the class they teach at the schedule time regardless of whether it is in university or high school. I am even more amazed that the bosses here are very on time. Not only is the boss on time, but also the company worker. Lateness in America is something considered to be very rude and wasteful of time. The “social time” in America seems to be synonymous with “clock time”- very accurate and standard. I have a remarkable memory from an American high school when I was an exchange student. The class I attended was very strict about students arriving to class on time. One day, one of my friends, a French guy, arrived in the class one minute past eight. The teacher was pretty upset and said,” You are late”. He argued, “Only one minute.” “That still counts as late,” the teacher replied. This story was one of my first lessons in America: lateness is unacceptable. Later on, I understood more about Americans time sense: Americans are always rushing. Most Americans have a busy life, so they like time to be accurate. The children here learn to be value time and how to work in the most efficient and productive way At first I was much struggled with the sense of time in America and used to feel annoyed. Everything is totally different. Lateness is unacceptable despite status, race, sex, situation, or position. However, little by little, I was being able to accept this new perspective and know how to deal with it. As Robert Levine and Ellen Wolfe believe “Appreciating culture differences in time sense becomes increasingly important as modern communications put more and more people in daily contact”(77), I learned a lot from my experience while I am in the USA. I can now better appreciate the way people look at time both in Vietnam and in America.

How can I improve this essay? Easy 10 points for Literature major:)? How can I improve this essay to be better( Aware of the part I underlined). How do you think about the title, the voice, the word use. If there is any grammar please fix it. You can copy and paste on Microsoft word and read if you feel read online is frustrating. The topic is about use my own experience to write an essay which include the quote from an essay I read before. 10 points for best evaluate. Please be serious Name:Tram Pham Date: 10/22/2007 Class: English 1100 Different perspectives of Social time Robert Levine and Ellen Wolfe in “Social Time: The Heartbeat of a culture” admit that “ formal ‘clock time’ may be a standard on which the world agrees, but ‘social time’, the heartbeat of society, is something else again”(77). I agree with them because when I compare my own experiences in America to those where I am from, southern part of Vietnam, there is a huge difference concept about time. I was very interested in a point that was raised in the essay that” someone of status is expected to arrive late. Lack of punctuality is a badge of success” (77). I was very amused with this concept because it is the same in my country. In Vietnam, within a company, the boss is often the one who tends to be late for the work days and for the meetings. I know this since my mother is a manager of a cable company. The working hours start at seven. However, she always leaves the house at eight or sometimes even nine o’clock even though the company is only one block away from my house. In contrast, her clerks, secretaries, assistants, and workers will be reprimanded if they are late. For my mother, lateness perhaps is one of the tools to show her power, or perhaps to show that she is a busy and hard working woman. She is the one who arrives latest in her company, but also the last one to leave and the one who goes home with a huge stack of papers. Lateness is not only in the work place but also in school. In elementary and high school, students are expected to arrive early and teachers are expected to arrive on time and sometimes a few minutes later. In all the schools I have attended in Vietnam, students always arrive in class fifteen minutes early. Some schools even require half an hour earlier. Students is demanded to be at school before the class start so that they have time to ask and discuss homework questions with the colleagues or maybe even just skim through the text they had to read in the day before. On the other hand, University student are never on time. One of my friends told me that being late for classes at the university is just so cool because it shows that they are growing up and they have the freedom to do as they like. This perhaps is a bad habit from a Western viewpoint. However, one need to spend years and years in my country’s high school to be able to understand why students are so frustrated about the idea of lateness and earliness. When I arrived in America, I saw a total different view here. Teachers always arrive and leave the class they teach at the schedule time regardless of whether it is in university or high school. I am even more amazed that the bosses here are very on time. Not only is the boss on time, but also the company worker. Lateness in America is something considered to be very rude and wasteful of time. The “social time” in America seems to be synonymous with “clock time”- very accurate and standard. I have a remarkable memory from an American high school when I was an exchange student. The class I attended was very strict about students arriving to class on time. One day, one of my friends, a French guy, arrived in the class one minute past eight. The teacher was pretty upset and said,” You are late”. He argued, “Only one minute.” “That still counts as late,” the teacher replied. This story was one of my first lessons in America: lateness is unacceptable. Later on, I understood more about Americans time sense: Americans are always rushing. Most Americans have a busy life, so they like time to be accurate. The children here learn to be value time and how to work in the most efficient and productive way At first I was much struggled with the sense of time in America and used to feel annoyed. Everything is totally different. Lateness is unacceptable despite status, race, sex, situation, or position. However, little by little, I was being able to accept this new perspective and know how to deal with it. As Robert Levine and Ellen Wolfe believe “Appreciating culture differences in time sense becomes increasingly important as modern communications put more and more people in daily contact”(77), I learned a lot from my experience while I am in the USA. I can now better appreciate the way people look at time both in Vietnam and in America.

How Should Deal With Stress and Anxiety ? Stress is life. Stress is anything that causes mental, physical, or spiritual tension. There is no running away from it. All that matters is how you deal with it. This article does not deal with the factors of stress, anxiety, and depression, nor is it a clinical advice. If you feel depressed, you are not alone. It has been estimated that 75 to 90 percent of all visits to primary care physicians in America are for stress-related problems. This is why it is wise to consult a doctor if you are having physical symptoms of stress. However, here are some tips that can help from a spiritual perspective. Torture. Beatings. Loss of property. The death of loved ones. These were just some of the enormous challenges the Muslims of Makkah faced in the seventh century following their acceptance of Islam in fiercely tribal and polytheistic Makkah. Detention. Harassment. Beatings. Discrimination. Loss of Job. Profiling. Hate Crimes. Constant media attention. Surveillance. These are just some of the challenges Muslims in America today face, post-9/11. Like our predecessors in Makkah, we have begun to face great stress, anxiety, and pressure, more than ever in our recent history on this continent, although Muslims who were brought here as slaves faced worse than what we can even imagine. 1. Ask Him. He Listens: DU`A Turn each anxiety, each fear and each concern into a Dua (supplication). Look at it as another reason to submit to God and be in Sajdah (prostration), during which you are closest to Allah. God listens and already knows what is in your heart, but He wants you to ask Him for what you want. The Prophet said: Allah is angry with those who do not ask Him for anything (Tirmidhi). The Prophet once said that in prayer, he would find rest and relief (Nasai). He would also regularly ask for God's forgiveness and remain in prostration during prayer praising God (Tasbeeh) and asking for His forgiveness (Bukhari). Allah wants you to be specific. The Prophet advised us to ask Allah for exactly what we want instead of making vague Duas. Dua is the essence of worship (the Prophet as quoted in Tirmidhi). "Call on your Lord with humility and in private: for Allah loveth not those who trespass beyond bounds. Do not make mischief on the earth, after it hath been set in order, but call on Him with fear. And longing (in your hearts): for the mercy of Allah is (always) near to those who do good" (Quran 7:55-56). 2. Tie your Camel: DO YOUR PART One day Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, noticed a Bedouin leaving his camel without tying it. He asked the Bedouin, "Why don't you tie down your camel?" The Bedouin answered, "I put my trust in Allah." The Prophet then said, "Tie your camel first, then put your trust in Allah" (Tirmidhi). Muslims must never become fatalistic. Although we know only Allah is in control and that He has decreed all things, we are each responsible for making the right choices and doing the right thing in all situations of our lives. We must take action (link to planning articles on SV). We must work to alleviate the hardships we, our families and our communities face. Ask yourself the following questions if you are worried about the state of the world: are you part of the peace movement? Is your Masjid part of the peace movement? Are you part of an interfaith group with an agenda of peace and justice? Are you working with a group fighting discrimination? If your answer is no, it is time that you sat down to plan your share of time and money in finding solutions to the problems you face. "Verily Allah does not change men's condition unless they change their inner selves" (Quran 13: 11). Turn each worry into a Du`a and each Du`a into an action plan. That will show your commitment to your request and will focus your energy in the right direction. 3. Remember that human responsibility is limited While we need to carry out our duty to the best of our abilities, always remember that you don't control the outcome of events. Even the Prophets did not control the outcome of their efforts. Some were successful, others were not. Once you have done your duty, leave the results to Allah. Regardless of the results of your efforts, you will be rewarded for the part you have played. However, never underestimate your abilities. Understand the concept of Barakah (blessings from Allah) and remember that Allah can and Insha Allah will expand them if you are sincerely exerting your energies for the right path. 4. Leave the world behind you FIVE TIMES A DAY Use the five daily prayers as a means to become more Hereafter-oriented and less attached to this temporary world. Start distancing yourself as soon as you hear Adhan, the call to prayer. When you perform Wudu, keep repeating Shahada, the declaration of faith, as water drops slip down your face, hands, arms, and hair. When you stand ready to pray, mentally prepare yourself to leave this world and all of its worries and stresses behind you. Of course, Shaytan will try to distract you during prayer. But whenever this happens, go back and remember Allah. The more you return, the more Allah will reward you for it. Also, make sure your Sajdas (prostrations) are talking Sajdas, in which you are really connecting to God and seeking His Mercy, praising Him, and asking His forgiveness. (link to Sajda article...ramadan page) 5. Seek help through SABR Seek help through Sabr and Salat (Quran 2:45). This instruction from Allah provides us with two critical tools that can ease our worries and pain. Patience and prayer are two oft-neglected stressbusters. Sabr is often translated as patience but it is not just that. It includes self-control, perseverance, endurance, and a focused struggle to achieve one's goal. Unlike patience, which implies resignation, the concept of Sabr includes a duty to remain steadfast to achieve your goals despite all odds. Being patient gives us control in situations where we feel we have little or no control. 'We cannot control what happens to us but we can control our reaction to our circumstances' is the mantra of many modern-day self-help books. Patience helps us keep our mind and attitude towards our difficulties in check. 6. Excuse Me! You are Not Running the World, HE is. It is important to remind ourselves that we don't control all the variables in the world. God does. He is the Wise, the All-Knowing. Sometimes our limited human faculties are not able to comprehend His wisdom behind what happens to us and to others, but knowing that He is in control and that as human beings we submit to His Will, enriches our humanity and enhances our obedience (Uboodiah in Arabic) towards him. Read the story of the encounter of Moses with the mysteries behind God's decision (Quran: 18:60-82). Familiarize yourself with God's 99 Names, which are also known as His Attributes. It is a powerful way of knowing Him. "God-there is no deity save Him, the Ever-Living, the Self-Subsistent Fount of All being. Neither slumber overtakes Him, nor sleep. His is all that is in the heavens and all that is on earth. Who is there that could intercede with Him, unless it be by His leave? He knows all that lies open before men and all that is hidden from them, whereas they cannot attain to aught of His knowledge save that which He wills them to attain. His eternal power overspreads the heavens and the earth, and their upholding wearies Him not. And He alone is truly exalted, tremendous." (Quran 2:255). The Prophet recommended reading this verse, known as Ayat al kursi, after each prayer, Allah's peace and blessings be upon him. Once Ali, may Allah be pleased with him, approached the Prophet during a difficult time and he found the Prophet in Sajda, where he kept repeating "Ya Hayy Ya Qayyum", words which are part of this verse. 7. Birds Don't Carry their Food Allah is al Razzaq (the Provider). "How many are the creatures that carry not their own sustenance? It is Allah Who feeds them and you, for He hears and knows all things (Quran 29:60)." By reminding yourself that He is the Provider, you will remember that getting a job or providing for your family in these economically and politically challenging times, when Muslims are often the last to be hired and the first to be fired, is in God's Hands, not yours. As Allah says in the Quran: "And He provides for him from (sources) he never could imagine. And if anyone puts his trust in Allah, sufficient is (Allah) for him. For Allah will surely accomplish His purpose. Verily, for all things has Allah appointed a due proportion (Quran 65:3). 8. God controls Life and Death If you fear for your physical safety and security, remember that only Allah gives life and takes it back and, that He has appointed the time for it. No one can harm you except if Allah wills. As He says in the Quran: "Wherever you are, death will find you out, even if you are in towers built up strong and high!" (Quran 4:78). 9. Remember that life is short It's easy to get caught up in our own stress and anxiety. However, if we remember that our life is short and temporary, and that the everlasting life is in the Hereafter, this will put our worries in perspective. This belief in the transitory nature of the life of this world reminds us that whatever difficulties, trials, anxieties, and grief we suffer in this world are, Insha Allah, something we will only experience for a short period of time. And more importantly, if we handle these tests with patience, Allah will reward us for it. 10. Do Zikr, Allah, Allah! "... without doubt in the remembrance (Zikr) of Allah do hearts find tranquility" (Quran 13:28). If you commute, use your time in Zikr. Pick any Tasbeeh and do that instead of listening to the radio or reading the newspaper. Maybe you can divide it up between Zikr and planning. Personally, I recite the Tasbeeh of "Subhana Allahe wa be hamdihi, subhan Allahil Azeem" 100 times as I drive. The Prophet taught us these two short phrases which are easy to say but will weigh heavy on our scale of good deeds in the Hereafter. When your heart feels heavy with stress or grief, remember Allah and surround yourself with His Zikr. Zikr refers to all forms of the remembrance of Allah, including Salat, Tasbeeh, Tahmeed, Tahleel, making supplication (Dua), and reading Quran. "And your Lord says: 'Call on Me; I will answer your (prayer)..." (Quran 40:60) By remembering Allah in the way He has taught us to, we are more likely to gain acceptance of our prayers and His Mercy in times of difficulty. We are communicating with the only One Who not only Hears and Knows all, but Who can change our situation and give us the patience to deal with our difficulties. "Remember Me, and I shall remember you; be grateful to Me, and deny Me not" (Quran 2:152). 11. Relying on Allah: Tawakkul When you awaken in the morning, thank Allah for giving you life after that short death called sleep. When you step out of your home, say 'in Your Name Allah, I put my trust in Allah, and there is no power or force except with Allah' (Bismillahi Tawakal to al Allah wa la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah). At night, remember Allah, with His praises on your lips. Once you have established a plan you intend to follow through on to deal with a specific issue or problem in your life, put your trust in the most Wise and the All-Knowing. "When you have taken a decision, put your trust in Allah" (Quran 3: 159). Rely on Allah by constantly remembering Him throughout your day. When you lay down to sleep, remember that sleep is death. That is why one of the recommended supplications before going to sleep is "with Your (Allah's) Name I die and become alive". 12. Connect with other human beings You are not alone. Muslims are not alone. We are not suffering in silence. There are millions of good people who are not Muslim with beautiful hearts and minds. These are people who have supported us, individually and collectively, post-9/11, by checking up on us and making sure we are safe. These are individuals and organizations who have spoken up in defense of Muslims as we endured harassment and discrimination. We must think of them, talk to them, connect with them, and pray for them. Through our connections, we will break the chain of isolation that leads to depression and anxiety. 13. Compare your dining table with that of those who don't have as much as you do The Prophet said: Whenever you see someone better than you in wealth, face or figure, you should look at someone who is inferior to you in these respects (so that you may thank Allah for His blessings) (Bukhari, Muslim). Next time you sit down to eat, eye the table carefully. Check out the selection of food, the quality, the taste, the quantity, and then think of the millions of others who don't have even half as much. The Prophet's Hadith reminds us of this so that we can appreciate and thank God for all that we have. Also remember that the Prophet only encouraged us to compare ourselves to others in two respects: in our Islamic knowledge and level of belief in God (Deen). In these two areas, we should compare ourselves with those who have more than what we do. 14. Say it Loud: Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar: Takbirat & Adhan Find a corner of a lake, go out in the wilderness, or even stand on your lawn at your home and call the Adhan with your heart. While driving, instead of listening to the same news over and over again, say Allahu Akbar as loudly as you can or as softly as you want, based on your mood. Year ago, I remember calling Adhan on a Lake Michigan shore in Chicago after sunset as the water gushed against my knees. I was calling it for myself. There was no one else accept the waves after waves of water with their symphony. It was relaxing and meaningful. Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. 15. Pray in congregation (Jamat) Pray with other people instead of alone. If you can't pray all five prayers in congregation, at least find one or two prayers you can pray with others. If you are away, establish Jamat in your own family. During the Prophet's time, even though the Muslims endured great persecution, including physical beatings, they would sometimes meet on the side of a mountain or valley and tried to pray together. This is a great morale booster. 16. How is your Imam's Dua? Does the Imam at your local mosque make Dua silently or out loud? Ask him to supplicate with the whole congregation. Suggest Duas for him to make. Ask him to make Dua for other people. 17. Work for the Unity of Muslims Bringing Muslims together will not only help the Muslims, but it will also encourage you to focus your energies on something constructive versus zeroing in on and consistently fretting about difficulties you are going through. Invite Muslims from other ethnic groups to your functions. Visit Masjids other than yours in your city. When you meet a Muslim leader, after thanking him for his efforts, ask him what he is doing for Muslim unity. Ask Imams to make Dua for this. These are just small ways you can help yourself and the Muslim community. 18. Sleep the way the Prophet slept End your day on a positive note. Make Wudu, then think of your day. Thank Allah for all the good things you accomplished, like Zikr and Salat. Ask yourself what you did today to bring humanity together and what you did to help Muslims become servants of humanity. For everything positive, say Alhamdu lillah (Praise be to Allah). For everything negative say Astaghfirullah wa atoobo ilayk (I seek Allah's forgiveness and I turn to You [Allah]). Recite the last two chapters of the Quran, thinking and praying as you turn on your right side with your hand below your right cheek, the way the Prophet used to sleep. Then close your day with the name of Allah on your tongue. Insha Allah, you will have a good, restful night. 19. Begin the Day on a Positive Note Get up early. Get up thanking God that He has given you another day. Alhamdu lillahil lazi ahyana bada ma amatana, wa ilaihin Nushoor (Praise be to Allah Who gave us life after death and unto Him will be the return). Invest in an audio tape driven alarm clock so you can get up to the melody of the Quran. Or Let Dawud Wharnsby's joyful notes put you in a good mood. Sing along if you like. Develop your to do list for the day if you didn't do it the night before. Begin with the name of Allah, with Whose name nothing in the heavens or the earth can hurt you. He is the Highest and the Greatest. (Bismillahillazi la yazurru maa ismihi shaiun fil arze wa la fis samae, wahuwal Alee ul Azeem).The Prophet used to say this after every Fajr and Maghrib prayers. 20. Avoid Media Overexposure: Switch from News to Books Don't spend too much time checking out the news on the radio, television or internet. Spend more time reading good books and journals. When you listen to the persistent barrage of bad news, especially relating to Muslims nowadays, you feel not only depressed, but powerless. Cut down media time to reduce your stress and anxiety. It's important to know what's going on but not to an extent that it ruins your day or your mood. (similarly, when you are in a sad mood, refrain from wallowing and listening to sad songs) 21. Pray for Others to Heal Yourself. The Prophet was always concerned about other people, Muslims and non-Muslims, and would regularly pray for them. Praying for others connects you with them and helps you understand their suffering. This in itself has a healing component to it. The Prophet has said that praying for someone who is not present increases love. 22. Make the Quran your Partner Reading and listening to the Quran will help refresh our hearts and our minds. Recite it out loud or in a low voice. Listen to it in the car. When you are praying Nafl or extra prayers, pick it up and use it to recite portions of the Quran you are not as familiar with. Connecting to the Quran means connecting to God. Let it be a means to heal your heart of stress and worries. Invest in different recordings of the Quran and their translations. "O humanity! There has come to you a direction from your Lord and a cure for all [the ills] in men's hearts - and for those who believe, a Guidance and a Mercy" (Quran 10:57). 23. Be thankful to Allah "If you are grateful, I will give you more" (Quran 14:7). Counting our blessings helps us not only be grateful for what we have, but it also reminds us that we are so much better off than millions of others, whether that is in terms of our health, family, financial situation, or other aspects of our life. And being grateful for all we have helps us maintain a positive attitude in the face of worries and challenges we are facing almost daily. 24. Ideals: ONE STEP AT A TIME Ideals are wonderful things to pursue. But do that gradually. Think, prioritize, plan, and move forward. One step at a time. 25. EFFORTS not Results Count in the Eyes of Allah Our success depends on our sincere efforts to the best of our abilities. It is the mercy of Allah that He does not demand results, Alhamdu lillah. He is happy if He finds us making our best sincere effort. Thank you Allah! http://www.imanway.com/en/page.htm

YEARBOOK QUOTES!!! WHICH ONE DO YOU LIKE? thanks? which quote do you like best??? I need as many answers as possible it is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching. St. Francis of Assisi Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible. St. Francis of Assisi Good, better, best. Never let it rest. 'Til your good is better and your better is best. St. Jerome Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person. Mother Teresa If we want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it. Mother Teresa We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop. Mother Teresa Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together. —Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 20. People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing - that’s why we recommend it daily. —Zig Ziglar 19. Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. —Will Rogers Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance. -Samuel Johnson In any situation, the best thing you can do is the right thing; the next best thing you can do is the wrong thing; the worst thing you can do is nothing. - Theodore Roosevelt DAVID BRINKLEY: A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her. LLOYD JONES: Those who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try nothing and succeed. (adapted) MAYA LIN: To fly, we have to have resistance. VINCE LOMBARDI: Dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price. HUGH MILLER: Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

newer horizon demanded in usa politicking. can non natural born + nonbinding resolution senate run pres U S ?