prozakistan

Chuck Ripka is a moneylender -- that is to say, a mortgage banker -- and his institution, the Riverview Community Bank in Otsego, Minn., is a way station for Christ. When he's not approving mortgages, or rather especially when he is, Ripka lays his hands on customers and colleagues, bows his head and prays: ''Lord, I pray that you will bring Matt and Jaimie the best buyer for their house so that they have the money to purchase the new home they feel called to. And I pray, Lord, that you grant me the wisdom to give them the best advice to meet their financial needs.

....'The Lord told me you would call, Russell,'' he said in our first conversation. Through me, he would get a chance to spread the Word. ....So, the first thing to know about Chuck Ripka is that he says Jesus talks to him -- actually speaks to him, calling him ''Chuck.'' Ripka is 45, a father of five and grandfather of two who has been married to his high-school sweetheart for 25 years. He has a compact build and pinprick eyes; he talks in a soft, rapid monotone. He once fasted for 40 days and 40 nights, just as Jesus did in the wilderness. He says he has performed more than 60 faith healings in the bank and has ''saved'' another 60 people on bank premises. Knowing him at first only via telephone, and listening to his talk of visions and voices and Satan and ecstatic healings, I began to think of him as potentially unbalanced.

....He worked odd jobs after high school and was born again when he was 21, during an Amway meeting. Shortly after, Jesus began talking to him. ''I used to assume that all Christians heard God the way I do,'' he said. ''But I realized over time that a lot of people don't hear, or they don't recognize, his voice. They think, Are these my thoughts or God's?''

....''The Lord told me in 2000 that Duane Kropuenske and I were supposed to begin a new bank,'' Ripka said.

....Praying with customers is one thing Riverview has become known for. Gloria Oshima, a teller, was hired because of her previous experience at the nearby First National Bank of Elk River, but her faith, which she describes as ''bold,'' was also apparent in the job interview. ''When Gloria came applying for a job, I had a vision of her praying with customers,'' Ripka says. Referring to the bank's drive-up window, Oshima says: ''The Holy Spirit speaks to me when certain people drive up. A young lady pulled up one day. I looked at her, and she had tears in her eyes. I said: 'Are you O.K.? Would you mind if I prayed for you?' She said O.K. I said, 'Inside the bank, or right here?' She said, 'This is fine here.' So we prayed. I asked the Lord to remove the hurts within her and bless her day. She came again later, into the lobby this time, and she said, 'I'm doing so good, and I just wanted to thank you for your prayers.'''

Considering that many bank customers -- those seeking loans, say, or involved in bankruptcy -- are at a vulnerable moment in their lives, some may see this as preying on the weak. But the people at Riverview say they are only doing their jobs -- their real jobs. They seem to have realized that they are in a unique position not only to offer comfort to people who are going through difficult times but also to zoom in on lost souls. Nemerov says that none of the bankrupt or overdrawn customers she has offered to pray with have ever said no, and she is confident she knows why: ''Their hearts are already broken down and ready for it.''

....When I first visited the bank, I discovered that besides the chance to spread the Word via this magazine, there was one other thing Ripka wanted from me in exchange for his participation in the article: my soul. He had invited two other marketplace pastors -- a dentist and the owner of a dental laboratory -- to join us in his office. Shortly after we sat down, they began to pray.


They prayed for me, for my family, for this article, for the Lord to guide my pen, for The New York Times, for the media in general, for secular society. Then they pulled out a vial and began anointing me with oil -- a practice from early Judaism and Christianity that some Christians today have revived -- and prayed for me all over again. As a result, I can report that having people pray over you feels just fine, like getting praise and a shoulder massage and an offer of help all in one. And as a small personal reflection on the central issue of this article, I'm also prepared to impart how it feels to have a banker, a dentist and a businessman pray for your immortal soul in a bank. It feels weird.

(Faith at Work, by RUSSELL SHORTO, October 31, 2004

Lisa Johnson made the same trip I did. But while it has taken me a month to get from Boston she and her husband drove down in just three days. It was 1980, she was 28 and he had landed a job in the booming oil industry in Midland.

"I thought I was coming for one year," she says. "That was the agreement. All the way through Texas I was fine. But when I came into town and saw all the oil tanks I just started crying. It was pretty ugly and you could smell the oil."

If you cannot find a way to love oil - the industry that produces it, the environment that it scars and the money that it makes - then you will probably never find a way to love Midland.

Rising from the West Texas desert like a small Gulf state, your entrance to the town is flanked by restless, bobbing, pumping jacks and vast shrubland pockmarked with derricks.

Along with Odessa, it's poorer, even uglier sister city 16 miles away, Midland sits in the heart of the Permian Basin - a 1000-mile platform of sediment and salt with a slab of rock on top that is home to one fifth of the country's oil reserves. Between them they boast more than 2,000 firms involved in the oil and gas industry.

And according to United States president, George Bush, if you don't find a way to appreciate Midland then you will struggle to find a way to appreciate him.

"I don't know what percentage of me is Midland," he once said in an interview, "but I would say people, if they want to understand me, need to understand Midland and the attitude of Midland."

The percentage matters. Mr Bush was not born here but in New Haven, Connecticut. Nor does he live here now. When he is not in Washington DC, his home is 330 miles away on a ranch in Crawford, also in Texas.

In fact, his relationship to Midland is quite episodic. He came here as a two-year-old, attended the Sam Houston elementary school and then San Jacinto junior high (both state schools). He returned 16 years later in 1975 and married a local woman, Laura Welch. In 1987 he left to help his father on his presidential campaign and has only returned to campaign and visit friends and in-laws.

"He was viewed as an outsider," says Jim Brown, a geologist who did business with Mr Bush in the 80s. "Midland has embraced him as a native son now because he was governor of Texas and now he's president. But back then, to the few people who knew who he was, he was just a rich Yankee kid."

His Democratic challenger, John Kerry, has a stronger claim to Boston, where he has lived and worked since he returned from the Vietnam war. But while Mr Kerry holds Boston at arms length, lamenting the fact that he "moved around a lot" as a child, Mr Bush holds Midland in a bear hug.

He has written the city into his personal story as though its mores were seared into his soul. "There's a West Texas populist streak in me and it irritates me when people come out to Midland and look at my friends with the utmost disdain," he told Texas Monthly. When he dies, he says, he wants to be buried in Midland.

To his critics these are just more examples of Mr Bush's bid to shed his blueblood background. In 1978 the Democrat Kent Hance inflicted the only electoral defeat Mr Bush has ever suffered, largely by portraying him as a carpet-bagging, Ivy League Yankee.

Mr Bush learned his lesson well. But Mr Bush certainly has an emotional claim to the place. Midland is where Mr Bush found a wife, God and gave up the bottle.

In 1969 the cultural geographer DW Meinig described Midland as "the purest example of white Anglo Saxon Protestant culture in Texas". One of the last cities in the country to desegregate its elementary schools, today it is almost 40% black and Hispanic.

But while the colour of the inhabitants may have changed, many of its customs have not. On Friday nights thousands pack the local Grande stadium for high school football. On Sunday mornings they go to church. It's a no-nonsense place where, during the 80s, business was often concluded on a handshake. "People here are generally friendly," says John Nute, who runs a cafe in Wall Street. "But there's an edge to that. One of the first questions you're asked when you come here is, what church do you go to? If you're answer is one they don't like then you never see them again."

Oil and money may dominate, but one in eight of the city lives in poverty, most of them quite literally on the wrong side of the rail tracks. "I doubt he even knew those places existed," says Midge Erskine, who knew Laura Bush's mother. "It's a very segregated town. Over the years the town's ambivalent self-regard has been reflected in its changing slogans. They have included: "Midland: In the Middle of Somewhere"; "Midland: Most Ambitious City Between the Oceans"; and recently, "The Sky's The Limit" - a slogan from the 70s when the oil prices were so high that loan officers needed permission to turn you down - has been revived after Mr Bush said it encapsulated the Midland he knew. It's not difficult to see why Mr Bush would want to mythologise both the town and himself in this way.

What is more baffling is that he has managed to get away with it, given that Midland was the site of his most conspicuous failures to date.

He set up an oil business, Arbusto, which failed. He ran to represent the area in Congress and lost. By all accounts he had plenty of chances, did not work hard and never succeeded at anything much. "He used to come into meetings still hung over and you'd see him fall asleep," says Mr Brown. "Then when it was over he'd kind of jolt up and walk out with his team."

But the nature of each setback and the manner in which he recovered are themselves revealing. Mr Bush is no self-made man. His father arrived in the early 50s and used the finance capital from his family to make millions.

When Mr Bush arrived as a young man, 20 years later, his father was a former Congressman and ambassador, soon to become the vice-president. And in Midland connections are everything. "If a Harvard MBA came to Midland without connections he wouldn't be able to raise the kind of money Bush did," says Mr Rosen.

But while connections could provide Mr Bush with the money he needed it was not enough to guarantee him success. His father's picture hangs in the Petroleum Museum's hall of fame, but his will not be there any time soon.

Mr Brown says Mr Bush's plans were flawed because they were based on "poor science". But the firm Mr Brown worked for invested in the projects anyway.

"It was a way of funnelling money to the Bushes without looking like it. His expertise was socialising."

What is most remarkable about Mr Bush's relationship with Midland is that, despite the fact the he achieved so little, drank so much, lost an election and a lot of other people's money, pretty much everybody liked him.

"You never walked away from George Bush thinking he was a rotten individual," says Mr Brown. "You thought he was your friend, your pal, your chum."

In other words Midlanders liked him, not because of what he had achieved, but regardless of what he had not achieved. On Tuesday we will see if America will feel the same way.

The town that learned to love George Bush, October 30, 2004, The Guardian

...at night, alone, beneath the howling moon, in the silence of the night...

I hate my job at the wharf where I work as a fishmonger. My job is the reason I never get laid. Because of the major economic decline, the wharf can't afford to provide it's fishmongers with new rubber gloves. I spend 9 hours a day, from 4 am to 2 pm scaling, gutting, and filleting cods, smelt, mackerel, bonita, and sea bass with gloves that have holes all over. I smell like fish all day, every day, nomatter how much cologne I spray on. When I go to the local bar, women just sneer at me when I walk by. I am a hard working man who doesn't deserve this kind of discrimination, nomatter what I smell like. But I know how to counter act their reaction. I walk straight to the jukebox and play five Eddie Money songs in a row. I know that gets the women horny. And when they see that it's me who chose the songs, they know I'm not an average shmuck.

The only problem is that women don't wanna come back to my humble, fish smelling, boat house on the pier. They are too judgmental. It's not about material things. It's about who has a good heart, and being nice nomatter who is mean to you. We all have to love each other, be kind to each other, and trust each other. We all bleed red, so we are all brothers and sisters. Just keep praying for all those mean people out there who are mean to people like me.

Now, read along as I sing for peace.

Kumbaya mi lord, Kumbaya.
Kumbaya mi lord, Kumbaya.
Kumbaya mi lord, Kumbaya.
Oh, Lord, Kumbaya.

Someone's singing mi Lord, Kumbaya.
Someone's singing mi lord, Kumbaya.
Someone's singing mi Lord, Kumbaya.
Oh, lord. Kumbaya.

someone's praying mi lord, Kumbaya.
someone's praying mi lord, kumbaya.
someone's praying mi lord, Kumbaya.
Oh lord, someone's praying, kumbaya.

(It's ok to cry. Cry if you'd like. Just let it flow like a beautiful river:)

someone's being mean to me, mi lord. Kumbaya.
someone's doing bad things, mi lord, Kumbaya.
Someone has bad thoughts, mi lord, Kumbaya.
Oh lord, someone did something bad mi lord, Kumbaya.

Can you get me laid, mi lord? Kumbaya.
Can you help me get paid more than I do, mi lord? Kumbaya.
Will you make me a smooth talking stud, mi lord? kumbaya.
Oh, lord, will you put a spell on every woman that I want to have sex with, mi lord? Kumbaya.

Ah. That was nice. Now let's all take a deep breath, exhale all the negetive vibes that bombard us everyday, and smile like we've completed a 12 step, self help program that cost 500 dollars to tell us we have major issues but after the course, they will all disappear, even they don't. I know. I took a 12 step program and graduated with flying colors. It was called, PSE (personal self evaluation). I found out that I was an unmotivated, depressed, uncreative, discontent, unhappy, negative thinking, self hating, fear loving, excuse making, no vision having, self doubting, unattractive, unhealthy, unintelligent, ignorant, couped up in a box, governed by my own limitations, world hating, God blaming, blasphemy thinking, unproductive, selfish, non listening, displacing self hatred onto others, inconsiderate, truculent, cynical, unaproachable, over reacting, ejaculating dick head spewing my negativity into the world. It was quite a revelation. I never thought I was any of that. But they pointed it out in a jiffy. 3 days later, five hundred dollars broker, I came out with a fresh perspective on life. Now I love people, I listen to people, I sympathize with people and I got myself a job at the wharf as a fishmonger. As much as I hate life, the program taught me to remember the five hundred dollars I spent and forget reality.
(day after yesterday)

suppose i were to be an animal
what would i be, seriously?
a snake, cold and ruthless?
a cat, quiet and cunning?
perhaps an owl, nocturnal and wise?
or maybe a gecko, able to cut its tail off to get away. (An Empty Shell of Existance: suppose i were to be an animal)

Star dust found deep beneath the Pacific Ocean has led German scientists to speculate that a supernova explosion 3 million years ago might possibly have helped bring about human evolution. Gunther Korschinek and colleagues at the Technical University of Munich in Germany reported on Wednesday they found debris from an exploding supernova that could have changed the climate on Earth around the time that humanity's ancestors first began to walk. Depending on how far away the supernova was, it might have caused an increase in cosmic rays for about 300,000 years that in turn could have heated up the Earth, they wrote in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters.

The timing of the star explosion coincides with a change in the climate in Africa, when drier conditions caused forests to retreat and the savannah to emerge. Anthropologists and other experts believe this change brought early hominids out of the trees, forcing them to walk upright. The most famous pre-human, a skeleton nicknamed "Lucy," dates back just about 3 million years. Lucy and her Australopithecus afarensis kin would have walked upright.

Korschinek's team was the first, five years ago, to find real matter from a star on Earth, in Pacific sediments. This time they looked for star dust at a site much deeper, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean near the equator and away from land roughly south of the Hawaiian islands. There, 15,750 feet below the surface, they found a layer of iron-60, stable layers under the sea that are easy to date. This one can be dated to about 2.8 million years ago, they said. Iron-60 is an isotope or chemical variant of iron that is rare on Earth and which scientists believe is unlikely to have come from anything other than a supernova.
It has a decay rate or half-life of about 1.5 million years, which can help pinpoint when the star exploded, sending out not only solid matter in the form of iron and other elements, but cosmic rays.... "The African climate shifted toward more arid conditions about 2.8 million years ago," they wrote, adding, "some of the major events in early hominid evolution appear to be coeval with the African climate changes." (Ancient Star Dust May Point to Human Origins-Study, Reuters, 27 October 2004)

On Jan 14, 2004, my 31st birthday, I handed in my resignation to Goldman Sachs. I did not want to be a programmer anymore. I had had enough. Nothing against GS in particular...well, not quite, but lets go with that. But mostly, I grew a pair of balls. I had decided to chuck a decent salary, a secure job, a daily commute, a cubicle and a career in software, to finally do my own thing - make movies! (Beginnings of a journey)

Aubrey and Lindsay were already sitting in Lindsay's gold sedan when I got over to Ruth B. "We're waiting for Lindsay's new partner, Alexandra," announced Aubrey as I slid Lindsay's junk - a tennis racket, two nearly empty water bottles, a metal fork, a plastic spoon, and a stuffed troll - off my seat. "Do you know who that is?" "Umm...Alex is tall and blonde, I think." "Okay, well she's ten minutes late already," grumbled Aubrey, and honked Lindsay's horn twice. Alex ended up being twenty minutes late, and I spent the time making small talk and listening to Aubrey say things like, "Ooo, I hate that girl! She needs to have her head bashed into the wall!" and other such fun things in a bit more detailed terms. When Alexandra finally showed up, she was with two other girls from GS, Jessica and Karen, in tow. "Hey, is it okay if they come along too?" Four of us crushed into the backseat, and the car smelled of spearmint and sweat. (The College Confessions of Rachel Nicole)


Before the wars, a group of scientists and doctors had been trying to make a human that could fly. Taking ideas and genes from birds, bats and insects, they tried for many years but while they were able to lighten the bone structure and elongate the arms, the "wings" never worked or even came close.

While working on improving the eyesight and hearing, they accidentally stumbled on a gene that affected the brain, combining telepathy and levitation and allowing limited flight. While they were perfecting this process and adapting it to the progress already made, the war started.

It is now more than 300 years later. Legionlure is a small community (300-ish) of humans who live in a series of caves and rugged stone dwellings located on a large plateau close to a mile above sea level on the side of Legion Mountain. The only access to Legionlure is a small trail leading up the side of the mountain, the last 3,000 yards have been carved in the cliff face. Legion Mtn. is part of a chain of six peaks stretching east to west. Scrubwhistle is the peak to the west of Legion and begins the chain. Two peaks to the east of Legion is the only other named peak, The Rogue.

The native inhabitants of Legoinlure are tall humans (males average 7’ 6" and the woman 6’) who have the ability to fly. Their flight is about twice the speed of their running gait. They have different suits to aid in gliding (for long flights), fighting and research, but their flight is a mental ability that surfaces about the same time the child learns to walk. They have some ancient technology, but survive mostly on the crops, herbs and fungus grown in the valley below and in several huge greenhouse-like caverns in the mountain. They are happy in their seclusion, but have some "venturers" who have chosen to become traders and interact with other communities for goods and rarities. (Oh, To Fly Again)

Somethings are just not meant to be... I totally depend on God to guide and direct my paths.. I know sometimes I jump ahead, probably alot of times. Something was revealed to me last night that changed my current life style, so now I must start over.... I am somewhat stunned or somewhat shocked but I know that God has it under control...I am relieved in some sence of my obligations, I think I knew deep down that the risk involved were more than I orginally expected. In closing, God Bless those in the medical field, especially EMT's and Paramedics, and God Bless each and everyone of you!! Thanks for your advice Jazz!! (The Life of ME

I'm ready to take a shovel to the back of my mother-in-law's head. Two days before the wedding is not the time to say things like, "I just don't know how this is going to work," and then start listing the many glaring holes in our not-so-carefully laid reception plans. Seriously, she couldn't have addressed these issues two months ago when the plans were being made? (Long Days)