(Disclaimer- All the normal common sense stuff… Don’t judge individuals based off of their background, don’t hate whole groups of people. Obviously it’s much more complicated than “Jews are smart and good & Muslims are radical and bad”… love all people and use your brain. That being said… these numbers are pretty intense. And the quote at the end totally floored me… Mostly because I believe it is true.)

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000 ONE BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION or 20% of the world’s population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:
Literature:
1988 - Najib Mahfoo

Peace:
1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
1994 - Yaser Arafat:
1990 - Elias James Corey
1999 - Ahmed Zewai

Economics: (zero)

Physics: (zero)

Medicine:
1960 - Peter Brian Meda war
1998 - Ferid Mourad

TOTAL: 7 SEVEN

__________________________

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000 — Only FOURTEEN
MILLION or about 0.02% of the world’s population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:
1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pa sternak
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1976 - Saul Bellow
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 - Elias Canetti
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1991 - Nadine Gor dimer World

Peace:
1911 - Alfred Fried
1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968 - Rene Cassin
1973 - Henry Kissinger
1978 - Menachem20Begin
1986 - Elie Wiesel
1994 - Shimon Peres
1994 - Yitzhak Rabin

Physics:
1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 - Henri Moissan
1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 - Gabriel Lippma nn
1910 - Otto Wallach
1915 - Richard Willstaetter
1918 - Fritz Haber
1921 - Albert Einstein
1922 - Niels Bohr
1925 - James Franck
1925 - Gustav Hertz
1943 - Gustav Stern
1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
1952 - Felix Bloch
1954 - Max Born
1958 - Igor Tamm
1959 - Emilio Segre
1960 - Don ald A. Glaser
1961 - Robert Hofstadter
1961 - Melvin Calvin
1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
1965 - Richard Phil lips Feynman
1965 - Julian Schwinger
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1972 - William Howard Stein
1973 - Brian David Joseph son
1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
1976 - Burton Richter
1977 - Ilya Prigogine
1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
1978 - Peter L Kapitza
1979 - Stephen ; Weinberg
1979 - Sheldon Glashow
1979 - Herbert Charles Brown
1980 - Paul Berg
1980 - Walter Gilbert
1981 - Roald Hoffmann
1982 - Aaron Klug
1985 - Albert A. Hauptman
1985 - Jerome Karle
1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 - Robert Huber
1988 - Leon Lederman
1988 - Melvin Schwartz
1988 - Jack Steinberger
1989 - Sidney Altman
1990 - Jerome Friedman
1992 - Rudolph Marcus
1995 - Martin Perl
2000 - A lan J. Heeger

Economics:
1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
1976 - Mil ton Friedman
1978 - Herb ert A. Simon
1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1987 - Robert M. Solow
1990 - Harry Markowitz
1990 - Merton Miller
1992 - Gary Becker
1993 - Robert Fogel

Medicine:
1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
1908 - Paul Erlich
1914 - Robert Barany
1922 - Otto Meyerhof
1930 - Karl Landsteiner
1931 - Otto Warburg
1936 - Otto Loewi
1944 - Joseph Erlanger
1944 - Herb ert Spencer Gasser
1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
1952 - Selman Abra ham Waksman
1953 - Hans Krebs
1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 - Joshua Lederberg
1959 - Arthur Kornberg
1964 - Konrad Bloch
1965 - Francois Jacob
1965 - Andre Lwoff
1967 - George Wald
1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 - Salvador Luria
1970 - Julius Axelrod
1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
1972 - Gerald Maurice Ed elman
1975 - Howard Martin Temin
1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow
1978 - Daniel Nathans
1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
1984 - Cesar Milstein
1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988 - Gertrude Elion
1989 - Harold Varmus
1991 - Erwin Neher
1991 - Bert Sakmann
1993 - Richard J. Roberts
1993 - Phillip Sharp
1994 - Alfred Gilman
1995 - Edward B. Lewis

TOTAL: 129 ONE HUNDRED TWENTY NINE!

The Jews are NOT putting children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non Muslims!

The Jews don’t hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, or blowthemselves up in German restaurants. There is NOT one single Jew that has destroyed a church.There is NOT a single Jew that protests by killing people.

The Jews don’t traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.

Regardless of your feelings about the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians and Arab neighbors, even if you believe there is more culpability on Israel ’s part, the following two sentences really say it all:

‘If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.’
-Benjamin Netanyahu

I love this cartoonist- Here’s a link to his work:
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/ramirez/ramirez.htm

… And so embarrassed. This is amazing. Watch it!

The Parable of the Talents [NIV version, taken from Matthew 25:14-29]

Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey.

The man who had received the five talents went at once and put his money to work and gained five more. So also, the one with the two talents gained two more. But the man who had received the one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.

After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. The man who had received the five talents brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five talents. See, I have gained five more.’

His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

The man with the two talents also came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with two talents; see, I have gained two more.’

His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

Then the man who had received the one talent came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’

His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.

‘Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents. For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him…’

Note: A talent was worth more than a thousand dollars.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Now clearly Jesus was confused. If only Obama had been around to teach him a thing or two the story would have had a totally different ending.

It would have gone something like this:

“After meeting with them, Jesus took the all the talents from all three men; 10 from the first, 4 from the second, and 1 from the third, which made 15 talents total. He divvied them up and gave each man 5 talents, then sent them on their way.”

If only the Bible had been written P.O. (post Obama), it’d be much more fair.

Including:

-California’s Big Budget Hole
-TARP & the stimulus package (I’ll show you a stimulus package.)
-More on Prop 8

They are just SO exhausting. I’ll wrap them up soon.

Born on January 11, 2009. 8.52 pounds, 20.5 inches.
He’s perfect. I love him & I just might steal him for myself!

I recently watched the Chronicles of Narnia movies again and was moved as much as I was the first time I saw them. There are limitless spiritual parallels woven throughout the fabric of the films but one part was particularly heavy and touching this time around…

It was the scene in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe when Edmund returns after being rescued. Prior to this scene, he had been seduced by the White Witch with enchanted Turkish Delight and had become a traitor, telling her the location of his brother and sisters in hopes of receiving power promised to him by the witch. She immediately enslaved Edmund and set off to find and murder his brother and sisters, knowing that their arrival threatened her own authority in Narnia. (Sidenote: So much like sin to promise us one thing and deliver another, soon leaving us trapped within our own devices.)

Aslan dispatched a small army of centaurs, unicorns, deer and eagles to rescue Edmund from the White Witch. He was taken by the creatures from the clutches of the Witch and brought before Aslan.

This scene above is what took place when Edmund returned. Aslan talked to him alone and though we don’t know what was said, we can tell by Edmund’s posture throughout the scene that he is in a state of repentance. His head is humbly bowed, he clearly knows he has done wrong & that his selfishness nearly cost his siblings their lives, not to mention his own. What really gets me is what happens next.

Aslan walks Edmund over to his brother and sisters, presents him to them and says: “Here is your brother, and there is no need to talk to him about what is past.”

What a beautiful picture of Christ’s forgiveness. Edmund submitted himself to Aslan and Aslan extended forgiveness… forgiveness that we later learn cost Aslan his own life. But it doesn’t end there. He calls his siblings into the forgiveness process and asks them to extend freedom… freedom for Edmund from his past.

I was challenged by this in two ways:

1. I know that Christ has forgiven me and I know it was at a great cost, but even though I know this, do I REALLY live in the fullness of that freedom or do I allow my past to have power over me by continuing to shape my identity?

2. Do I live as Aslan asked the others to? Or do I take anything away from the restoration God offers others by bringing up their past mistakes/wounds?

I know when we have been hurt by someone it can be really hard to move past the pain and let things go– (especially when it comes to those closest to us, such as spouses, because it’s so easy to feel as if we’re entitled to be treated in a certain way) but if God who is perfect can extend a freeing form of forgiveness, who am I to offer any lesser form of it?

I think about the freedom God wants for us… in our marriages and friendships… I pray that that God teaches me to forgive as he does… that the process continues until that which has been forgiven is completely dead & gone, having been nailed to the cross. In this way I won’t take anything away or distract from the gift of redemption that Christ died in order to give us.

(That headline was for Eric, my east coast friend…)

For Christmas this year I got my mom 2 tickets to see Wicked in LA. I bought them months ago to make sure I got them before it leaves Pantages this week. Lucky for me, she chose me to be her date!

The whole production was really beautiful and amazing and just as wonderful as everyone says it is. I am blown away by (and totally jealous of) the talent people have to sing, dance and act, as well as how they can drastically change the scenery right before your eyes on the set without you even realizing that they’re doing it.

We had such a great time. After, we waited to get an autograph from Megan Hilty, who played Glinda for Niya who had gone to see it a couple weeks prior. She was very sweet & gracious. Here is a picture of her with my mom:

I also realized that Eden Espinosa, who played Elphaba (the wicked witch of the west) went to my youth group in junior high. Natalie pointed it out a while back but I didn’t really put 2 and 2 together until I saw her that night. What’s really awesome is that a bunch of us were in choir with her. HA! I can’t carry a note to save my life. But she was amazing… we’d have lock-ins where we all spent the night in the church and she’d sing us to sleep because she had such a beautiful voice. It was amazing to see her perform in such a magnificent production after all these years.