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Webitz - April 2008

Josef Fritzl

April 30th 2008 10:09
It’s not that long since we had a story from Europe about a bloke who kidnapped a young girl and imprisoned her in a room until she was a teenager.
Now, as though to outdo that story in every respect, we have one about a 73-year-old Austrian man who’s managed to keep his daughter in the cellar for twenty-something years. Not only did he keep her there, he had seven children by her! And at some point he and his wife ‘adopted’ three of them!! And neither of the daughter’s two late teenage children seem to have had the gumption to overpower the old man and deal to him, in order to escape.
The more you read the details, the more you have to ask: is Candid Camera hiding around here somewhere? Didn’t anyone ever think there was something suspicious going on at the house? How come the wife of fifty years turned a blind eye to all this – or are we expected to believe she didn’t know? How did a woman have seven children all without any hospital assistance? She must have been some tough cookie.
“Investigators said Josef Fritzl had not shown remorse. He was under psychiatric care but had not been deemed to be suicidal. His lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, disagreed, saying he was "emotionally broken".”
Why should he be suicidal? If he supposedly hasn’t given a damn for these eight lives over last twenty years, why would he worry about anything now? ‘Emotionally broken?’ Good grief.
On top of all the questions I asked earlier, the authorities have some questions of their own: what happened to all the rubbish the basement dwellers produced? Who fed them all, since Fritzl was often away for weeks over the summer holidays with his male friends – in Thailand. (Where no doubt he was treating the native girls with the same sort of generosity he showed to his daughter.)
How did he install the 300kg steel remote-controlled door (was it a Schlage?) in the basement without help?
It seems to me either the whole thing is a con, or else he had a group of buddies who were just as corrupt as he was, and they sorted the whole thing out between them.
It’ll be interesting to hear the truth.


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Depressing?

April 24th 2008 10:57
I see that Orble has started adding the pictures that bloggers include with their posts onto the home page, and down the side columns. Certainly it brightens up things, and that can’t be bad. I’m sure some of the pictures will attract readers to blogs they wouldn’t normally check out, particularly blogs that feature well-endowed young ladies, like the one that’s at the top of the popular posts list at present.

antidepressants placebos?
Apropos of nothing to do with the above, I also see that there’s a marked increase in articles about whether anti-depressants actually have any effect, or whether they’re merely a form of placebo. Well, if they’re a placebo, they do a pretty good job. Either that or the human mind has an infinite capability for fooling itself. I’ve been a recipient of drug treatment in the form of anti-depressants more than once – it was better than dealing with the panic attacks I was getting in the middle of the night – and I well remember that as soon as I knew I was back on them (I’d had a short course several before for a similar problem) I felt much better, even though officially anti-depressants aren’t supposed to work for a couple of weeks!

But on the distaff side of this debate is the idea that perhaps when young people take anti-depressants they tend more towards suicide than previously. Or is it that the reason they’ve gone onto anti-depressants was because they were having suicidal feelings anyway? It’s a strange debate which obviously hasn’t got sorted out yet. As always, the media gets in on the act before the scientists have even half-developed their theories, let alone proved them.
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Eat less, exercise more.

April 16th 2008 10:26
Eat less, exercise more. Oh, and breathe.

These are basically the only three ways to lose weight. But the first requires discipline, (put that chocolate away now and don’t think of having another bite); the second means you have to stop sitting here blogging; and third? Well, the third is pretty easy – except that the best books talk about really breathing, deeply, madly, passionately. As though you’re life depended on it.

I just came across a site called GodWeb, which, apart from pretty much covering the field in terms of what it can talk about, has a page discussing various Christian diet books and the whole marketing hoopla that goes with them. Weight loss isn’t just good for your health, it’s good for your spiritual health as well. You can be a better Christian if you lose weight. Which of course is plainly nonsense.

Eating less might help you in terms of being less greedy; exercising more might get you out and about and give you time to think and reflect and actually, maybe, even hear God’s voice (as long as you haven’t got something plugged in your earholes). And breathing helps – people who breathe are usually still alive, and while you’re alive there’s still hope for you.

Charles Henderson
Charles Henderson
The page I mentioned is written by one Charles Henderson, a Presbyterian minister and the author of God and Science, a book that’s now (partly) available online in a hypertext version. (It was published in 1986 originally.)

He’s also the executive director of Crosscurrents, a magazine available in various formats including an online version. It focuses mostly on the same two topics as Henderson’s book, though the magazine, of course, is written by a wide range of authors, including Jewish ones.
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Check out my latest blog!

April 12th 2008 08:23
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It is no secret...

April 10th 2008 09:09
Here it comes again: The Secret. Just when you thought all the secrets in the world could have been written about, promoted, and marketed in every possible fashion, along comes yet another book to grab the suckers.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the publishing company who put this book on the shelves is called: Beyond Words Publishing. I think the usual idea behind the expression beyond words is that something’s so outlandish, it’s beyond words


[ Click here to read more ]
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The Reason for Cleaning

April 4th 2008 08:29
Now here’s something odd: looking up air cleaners and God (one of those things I thought I’d do) I found a site where a discussion was going on about a book called The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, by Timothy Keller.

The book doesn’t seem to get much of a reception, if the various reviews of it are anything to go by. One reviewer says Keller falls into the trap of: Trying to address vast issues of good vs. evil, life vs. death, belief vs. doubt in just a few pages using the pre-digested Reader's Digest format.
[ Click here to read more ]
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