A docu-style investigation of our fascination with the gun, from the perspective of the hip-hop generation. The 2003 shooting death of Toronto community-centre worker Kempton Howard put the spotlight on hip hop’s fixation with guns. Media and police soon blamed rap music and its tales of gang life on bullet-ridden US streets for the rising use of firearms in Canadian crime. Were these songs artful accounts of a terrible truth, or a self-fulfilling prophecy? Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce have interviewed many of the major players in the hip-hop world. As publishers of an award-winning magazine of urban culture, they’d watched rap music become a scapegoat for society’s much older and widely spread fascination with guns. What follows is their international adventure to deconstruct modern gun culture in all its manifestations. Bascunan and Pearce seek out hip-hop artists, illegal gun runners, firearms aficionados and manufacturers, museum curators, academics, politicians, video-game creators, activists, victims of gun violence and the family and friends left behind. Somewhere between Fast Food Nation, No Logo and a Michael Moore documentary, featuring sly sidebar material and original artwork, Enter the Babylon System is part outrageous journalistic pursuit and part passionate cri de coeur for sanity in the face of a society’s obsession.

Exploring key historical events as well as the day-to-day life of the ancient Babylonians. A comprehensive guide to one of history's most profound civilizations.

Every year around three-quarters of a million people die (directly or indirectly) as a result of gun violence, with most deaths occurring in the poorest, yet also most highly weaponized parts of the world. Firearm proliferation -- 875 million global firearms -- is a direct contributor to both regional conflicts and to crime. This book attempts to understand the inter-related dynamics of supply and demand which are weaponizing the world. Now over ten years after Peter Squires’s Gun Culture or Gun Control?, the issues pertaining to gun violence and gun control have developed dramatically. With Gun Crime in Global Contexts, Peter Squires offers a cutting-edge account of contemporary developments in the politics of gun crime and the social and theoretical issues that surround the problem. This book contains: an innovative political analysis of neo-liberal globalization and weapon proliferation; an overview of recent gun control debates and gang strategies in the UK; an updated analysis of US gun politics: self-defence, race and the ‘culture war’; a critical analysis of US school and rampage shootings, how they have impacted the gun debate and how different societies have responded to mass shootings; an examination of the UN's development of an Arms Trade Treaty (2001--13); a discussion of weapon trafficking; discussions about youth gangs around the world, including those in Brazil, Kenya, West Africa, Mexico and South Africa. With its interdisciplinary perspective and global reach, this book will be important reading for academics and students interested in youth and gang crime, violent crime and comparative criminal justice, as well as peace and security studies and international relations.

What happens to our pop culture when it meets another culture head-on—especially one that, according to some, is completely at odds with our own? In The Sheikh’s Batmobile, pop culture commentator Richard Poplak sets out on an unusual two-year odyssey. His mission is to see what becomes of his and America’s obsessions—pop songs and sitcoms, Hollywood movies and shoot-'em-up video games, muscle cars and punk music—when they make their way into the Muslim world. Over the course of his journey, Poplak gets body-slammed by WWE fans in Afghanistan, hangs out with hip-hop artists in Palestine, headbangs to heavy metal in Cairo, discovers a world of extreme makeovers in Beirut, bowls with the chief of police in small-town Kazakhstan, and encounters a mysterious Texan who builds rocket-propelled Batmobiles for a clientele of sheikhs. With uproarious humor and keen cultural insight, Poplak asks some vital questions: How is American pop culture consumed and reinterpreted in the Islamic world? What does that say about how we are viewed by young Muslims? And can Homer Simpson bridge the divisions that are tearing our world apart?

This generation's philosophy is often hostile to our Christian values. Dare to be a world changer, and discover a new passion to engage rather than escape the culture.

Meet a man forced to live in a fast changing and godless society. He faced fears about the future, concern for his safety, and the discouragement of world that seemed to be falling apart at warp speed. Sound familiar? His name was Daniel, and with the power of hope, humility, and wisdom, he not only thrived, he changed an empire while he was at it. Though he lived thousands of years ago, he has a much to teach us today. Even in Babylon, God Is in Control In Thriving in Babylon, Larry Osborne explores the “adult” story of Daniel to help us not only survive – but actually thrive in an increasingly godless culture. Here Pastor Osborne looks at: - Why panic and despair are never from God- What true optimism looks like- How humility disarms even our greatest of enemies- Why respect causes even those who will have nothing to do with God to listen- How wisdom can snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat For those who know Jesus and understand the full implications of the cross, the resurrection, and the promises of Jesus, everything changes – not only in us, but also in our world.

Project Apostasy: The Development and Propagation of the Trinitarian Doctrine is Satan's story. Spurred by his inordinate beauty and consumate pride, he rebelled against his Creator. Undeterred by his categorical defeat, he launched the most blasphemous doctrine to ever invade the Christian Church. Through his evil minions, the Babylonian king Nimrod and his mother-wife Semiramis, Satan developed the Trinitarian Doctrine which was spread worldwide by the Babylonian Mysteries, taken up by the Romish Church, who has been its most ardent disseminator since the 4th century AD. Through the ages this doctrine has become the darling of orthodox Christianity and is taught as fact when there is no evidence of it in the Scriptures. Nevertheless, it has affected millions by keeping them in abject spiritual darkness. A.W. Tozer, in his book The Knowledge of the Holy, on page 6, observes, "The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him." He further states, "Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous." Project Apostasy and the Holy Trinity challenges the reader to search out the truth behind the development of the Trinitarian Doctrine. It behooves us to emulate the Bereans who searched the Scriptures daily seeking the truth. It is time that we returned to the Gospel the Apostles first delivered. Jesus quoted the Shema as his creed. "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one God." And in John 17: 3 he declared His Father as "the only true God." This is pure monotheism as opposed to the orthodox Trinitarian concept of three-in-one. We should, rather, take up the creed of Jesus and the Apostles and cease from our idolatrous worship of a triune God, a concept never taught in the pages of the Bible.

An important center of dancehall reggae performance, sound clashes are contests between rival sound systems: groups of emcees, tune selectors, and sound engineers. In World Clash 1999, held in Brooklyn, Mighty Crown, a Japanese sound system and the only non-Jamaican competitor, stunned the international dancehall community by winning the event. In 2002, the Japanese dancer Junko Kudo became the first non-Jamaican to win Jamaica’s National Dancehall Queen Contest. High-profile victories such as these affirmed and invigorated Japan’s enthusiasm for dancehall reggae. In Babylon East, the anthropologist Marvin D. Sterling traces the history of the Japanese embrace of dancehall reggae and other elements of Jamaican culture, including Rastafari, roots reggae, and dub music. Sterling provides a nuanced ethnographic analysis of the ways that many Japanese involved in reggae as musicians and dancers, and those deeply engaged with Rastafari as a spiritual practice, seek to reimagine their lives through Jamaican culture. He considers Japanese performances and representations of Jamaican culture in clubs, competitions, and festivals; on websites; and in song lyrics, music videos, reggae magazines, travel writing, and fiction. He illuminates issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class as he discusses topics ranging from the cultural capital that Japanese dancehall artists amass by immersing themselves in dancehall culture in Jamaica, New York, and England, to the use of Rastafari as a means of critiquing class difference, consumerism, and the colonial pasts of the West and Japan. Encompassing the reactions of Jamaica’s artists to Japanese appropriations of Jamaican culture, as well as the relative positions of Jamaica and Japan in the world economy, Babylon East is a rare ethnographic account of Afro-Asian cultural exchange and global discourses of blackness beyond the African diaspora.

From Genesis to Revelation, the name Babylon has come up, again and again, all throughout the Holy Scriptures. In this book, we will discover just what Mystery Babylon was, how it survived, and what it has become today. We'll discover just how the true enemy of the Christian church is this Babylonian system of old. We'll discover how systems that began in a Babylon so long ago survived, and flourished, to currently manipulate many processes in our world today. This book also provides an outlet for little-known or otherwise suppressed interpretations of the earliest stories of the Bible. No, this is not a "politically correct" attempt to water down that which was commonplace in biblical wording for thousands of years, nor is it an attempt to contradict what the Bible says; quite the opposite. This book upholds the Scriptures. We value the Bible for the original words and content contained therein. The problem with Biblical interpretation lies in the variety of meanings contained within the original Hebrew, as well as the flawed attempts of human beings to correctly translate it into other languages. My hope and prayer is that once you have an understanding of who Mystery Babylon is you will be better able to prepare yourself for what lies ahead.