text:
An Orthodox Jew Goes Into an LDS Temple…
iWe
One of the great challenges of anyone's life is to be able to understand how other people think. We cannot hope to change this world unless and until we are able to see things from the perspective of others, even – and especially – people who are quite different from ourselves.
I had quite an extraordinary day this week, and I needed to write on it… an old college friend, "Wayne", who is a deeply thoughtful and inquisitive member of the Latter-day Saints* mentioned that the prominent LDS Temple on the DC Beltway has completed renovations and is hosting tours – first for invited guests, and afterward the general public. Thanks to Wayne, we were invited!
What was incredibly serendipitous is that of all the possible tour guides (they start one-hour tours every five minutes), ours was no other than one of the LDS Church's twelve apostles, Elder Gong. Wayne was humbled. I, on the other hand, was delighted; it was a great opportunity for me to learn and connect.
A little background is in order: I was raised in Idaho and Oregon, so I have always known members of the LDS Church. Without exception, up until college every LDS member I ever met was always friendly and lovely to be around. By contrast with my own family (which considered verbal combat to be the noblest of all bloodsports), LDS folks are bland to a fault. But they never – ever – tried to get us to become like them, which always made an impression. I was raised within a single orthodox Jewish family which never properly connected to a community, so we were constantly aware that we were different from everyone we knew. My childhood included other kids asking why I killed Jesus, and certainly people who tried to influence me in a myriad of ways. But not the LDS people. They were the nicest people that we knew.
Wayne explained it to me as follows: according to LDS doctrine, Judaism – Torah Judaism – must be able to stand on its own, and remain a viable faith within itself. They are waiting for the "sons of Levi to offer up an offering in righteousness", which in their minds means observant Jews have to be here, partners with Christians, but with their own distinct role to play. This means that Latter-day Saints are not supposed to actively proselytize among observant Jews (though apparently not everyone who tries to convert people knows it, and they might need a reminder).
The LDS Church see Christianity as an extension of the covenant with Israel to the larger world which is, oddly enough, compatible with Torah Judaism. After all, we do not proselytize at all, but we hope that our actions and words will influence the world in a positive way so that everyone will seek to have a positive relationship with G-d and with each other. In other words, as long as it does not seek to undermine or harm Judaism, then the LDS faith is – from my perspective – a perfectly acceptable religion for the rest of the world. There is no idolatry involved, no worship of images or natural forces, no paganism. And one cannot argue with the results: LDS are the antithesis of a "holy war" kind of faith, and truly practice what they preach. LDS people are deeply, sometimes even a bit creepily, nice. That is no small accomplishment. After all, "Love your neighbor as yourself" is at the core of the Torah, and the LDS do it as well as anyone.
On the drive down, Mrs. iWe and myself had a lengthy conversation with Wayne, walking through what actually goes on in the Temple (to the limits he is allowed to disclose to those who are not within the church). And we were constantly reminded of the differences between Jews and others when it comes to the nature of questions that we ask. I have found, through years of conversations with Jews and others that Jews simply think about things differently: we obsess over details, the "right" ways to do things. This is reflected in the incredibly detailed oral law that helps us understand how to perform the commandments. I'd wager that if you proposed to a typical orthodox Jew that "G-d wants, more than anything, that we meticulously learn and observe His commandments," you would find very broad agreement.
Not so for non-Jews, even (or especially) those who consider their faith to be ultimately sourced from the Torah – all of Christianity. Non-Jewish faiths tend, in my experience, to be more focused on the forest than on the trees – very interested in symbolism, but without any deep reading of text that underpins orthodox Jewish practice.
Actually, I should walk that back, somewhat. Orthodox Judaism's deep reading is into the oral tradition itself – but less so the Torah, the Five Books. Our scholars learn the Torah at a young age, and usually move on to the oral law still while children. As a result, careful textual analysis of the Torah (beyond reading and repeating the words of the commentators) is not common. Most of the mental effort among Jewish scholars – which includes the vast majority of practicing Jews – is devoted to the oral law, to the commentators like Rambam and Rashi, and to very focused understanding of precisely how we are meant to perform the commandments that G-d has given us.
In my own work, I have focused considerably on the Torah itself, seeing in its text endless detail and dimensions that have never been fully explored. I am interested, above all, in studying G-d's words to understand why we have the commandments that we do. I do this because the answers astonish me, and help me see things that nobody else – Jew or Christian – has seen. Which suggests, in turn, that the normal Jewish answer of "G-d wants us to meticulously obey Him in every observance," is not wrong – but it might be incomplete.
[Note: Everything I write in this piece about "how Jews think" is really how I think (though many may share my views): Jews come in a wide range of approaches to Torah and to G-d. My approach is what I understand to be correct, and I try to be as true to the Torah as possible. But please understand that even though I may say "Jews think," that statement is never universally correct.]
All of this background is to help explain my perspective as I walked through the LDS temple, guided by one of their Apostles. Because the LDS are, like all of Christianity, a faith that holds the Torah, the Five Books, to be within their canon. That single text has led to the creation of countless different religious branches, each trying to make sense of the Torah within their own worlds, along with subsequent texts and the yearnings of the human heart.
So, for example, Latter-day Saints trace their Temple to the tabernacle, the mishkan, which the Jews built in the wilderness after leaving Egypt. The mishkan ended up finding a permanent form in the temple of Solomon – which is what the LDS use as inspiration. It surprised me that they did not seem to use the Second Temple of the Jews, the one of the time of Herod and Jesus – perhaps because they see that Temple as already corrupted in some ways.
I have more than a passing interest in the Jewish Temple – I wrote a book on the underlying meaning of its core, the Mishkan. Jews have tried, for millennia, to better understand the function of the Temple. And though most have simply concluded that as long as we perform the commandments, we are doing our job, there has always been at least a quiet curiosity about what each feature and sacrifice is actually supposed to mean – why G-d commanded them in the first place. One answer is broadly accepted because it is in the plain text of the Torah: the Mishkan was created so that G-d can dwell among us, His people. So there is broad acknowledgment that the purpose of the Mishkan and the subsequent temple was always to help bring man and G-d closer to each other.
That much, I think, is an understanding that is shared between Jews and Christians, including Latter-day Saints. But between all of them, only the LDS actually still have temples today! (Conservative and Reform Jews often see their synagogues as 'temples' that negate the need for the original.) Torah Jews want the temple to be rebuilt, though sometimes only in an abstract sense, and with a general unspoken reluctance about animal sacrifices. While most Christians, as I understand it, consider that Jesus fulfilled the purpose of a temple, rendering the actual structure and its practices essentially obsolete.
But LDS take an entirely different tack: they agree with other Christians that Jesus's suffering, death, and resurrection complete the requirement for any of the physical offerings of the Temple, but they believe that a Temple remains important for its role in reconnecting us with G-d. They see the journey of growing to a connection to G-d to be an essential journey. So within their temple, they start with a symbolic birth through baptism, in a stunning baptismal room, with the bath (which looks like an exquisite hot tub, with a viewing gallery) mounted over 12 oxen representing the twelve tribes; an anointing of the body for holiness, the Garden of Eden, the choice of Eve, and onward in a journey of connection with G-d. The goal, as they see it, is to enable every person to be able to connect with G-d. And here's the kicker: it is integral to LDS faith that a key purpose – the "work" – of an LDS believer, is to take each and every person through this process, either in person as an LDS member, or by a living proxy for the dead. Which is why the LDS have the best genealogy databases in the world; they want everyone to have this opportunity – billions of people. They believe that if they could do this for every person who ever lived, then Jesus would return and the world would be fulfilled.
And this is where the deviation from Judaism becomes most prominent (all specific practices aside): LDS are really and truly interested in what happens after death. It is, in a nutshell, an essential purpose of life – to secure eternity for people to be together and with G-d in the afterlife. They believe that to be dead and not connected to G-d or family is excruciating; as a spirit you retain free will – agency – but lack the body that has the means to exercise that agency. So the living have to do it for you. Which means that the living are spending much of their spiritual time thinking about the afterlife.
From my Jewish perspective, it feels alien. The Torah itself is entirely silent on the subject of what happens after death, and the obvious explanation for this is that we are supposed to live in and for this world – not the next. Whatever might happen after we die should not be the motivation for what we do here: our relationship with G-d is tied to what we do. We do know that each person has a divinely-gifted soul – so presumably our souls revert to G-d after our bodies expire – where any number of things might occur. But lacking specific information from the Torah, Judaism is very explicitly about not dwelling on the possibilities. Our jobs are in front of us, now.
But we also know that there was one civilization that was even more obsessed with death than are LDS: the ancient Egyptians poured every ounce of their excess wealth and time into investing in the afterlife: pyramids and all they contained. We often underestimate how long and deep that tradition was: Cleopatra lived closer to the time of the first Pizza Hut than she did to the first pyramid – by almost a thousand years.
And there is nothing in the Torah that is more explicit than the division – the opposition – of Israel to Egypt. In every respect, Egypt is the mirror image of Israel, the paragon of what we are not supposed to be. So the concept of aligning ourselves with a more-Egyptian mindset about the afterlife reflexively pushes this Jew away; it just feels wrong.
There are other, broader, differences as well – differences that the LDS also share with other Christians. The god of Christianity is a father figure, perhaps a king. To Christians, we are G-d's children, with all that entails. This allows us to feel sheltered, secure even though we may not know very much. It is a comforting (if perhaps infantilizing) perspective.
The Judaism of the Torah has a different goal: Though there are elements in the Torah of the Jewish people as G-d's children, in general G-d has created the world for us to be his partner, and even, for those who are married, G-d's spouse. And in any such relationship there is give and take between the partners, and there is a sense of an equilibrium, albeit a dynamic and frightening one. Judaism has enshrined, unlike any other faith I know of, both questioning and challenging G-d. Those questions and challenges are part and parcel of every conversation we have, especially when we are in perilous situations. We never simply throw our hands up and proclaim that whatever spot we are in is "Allah's will," or pray that, "Jesus take the wheel."
This is because we Jews have learned, both from the text and from history, that G-d will not always intervene to save us from peril in this world; it is incumbent upon us to be change agents in our own rights, to take responsibility for the world G-d has given us.
One result is shown through how we were shown marriage at the LDS Temple. They have altars (nice plushy ones) across which a couple can gaze into each other's eyes – and through the mirrors behind them, see an infinity of reflections of the two of them projecting a sense of endless time together. LDS have a ceremony for "sealing" people together, ensuring their connection for eternity. This sealing happens after a person has gone through the spiritual journey and baptism. There is a very distinct sense of "happily ever after," in that room, because couples that are sealed to each other (not everyone chooses this!) are specifically not "till death do us part." Their marriages are eternal, continuing on for an infinite time after death.
Judaism turns this on its head. For us, all of life is a journey, and marriage is a gateway to a maximized relationship with G-d – not the other way around. Without trying to understand another person – one who is quite different from ourselves – then we cannot try to grasp a connection with the divine, who is surely at least as different from people as man are different from women. This ties back to the underlying assumptions: are we children of G-d, or are we G-d's partners? If the latter, then marriage comes first. In the LDS Temple, the baptism precedes marriage.
Then, too, if we are children, then the text can be read simply, with straightforward moral lessons. On the other hand, if the text is shared within a marriage or partnership, then there are endless wrinkles and different perspectives that can be considered.
So the Celestial Room in the Temple, which is an absolutely stunning and glorious gold-and-filigree room that continuously draws the eye upward, is a room that makes you feel like you are in a perfect, quiet space within which we commune with "the still, small voice". It is meant to connect people to a feeling of being connected with G-d, and it is indeed quite an incredible feeling.
My wife made an interesting observation which I shared with the group: that in prayer we seek to hear the "still, small voice," but within Judaism we try to tease that signal out of the ambient environment – not with a complete absence of other sound. For us, G-d is found in communal prayer, and even the quietest parts don't hold a candle to the Celestial Room where I could (and did) literally hear when someone across the room turned their neck with a faint joint-popping sound. If the Celestial Room is like heaven, then heaven is – to me at least – disturbingly uneventful.
Indeed, LDS members do not argue with each other about doctrine, at least in any way that I can discern. There might be something along the lines of, "That is very good. I have also heard it a slightly different way…" But there is nothing at all like the raging arguments that have dominated Jewish scholarship through history. Indeed, all of the Talmud (Mishna and Gemara) is a recorded series of arguments between people. Argumentation is the way in which we figure out what is more correct. And while Judaism wants people to be nice to each other, when it comes to an argument, as long as we are doing it "for the sake of heaven" and not for ego and the desire to be right at all costs, then all bets are basically off. This is antithetical to an LDS worldview. And it might help explain why Jews find G-d amidst a noisy synagogue or Western Wall, while LDS perceive the experience of connecting with Him as a room that is as quiet as anywhere I have ever been.
The entire building has virtually no windows, letting in almost no exterior light. It was disorienting, probably by design: the space is out of normal space, so you have no idea which way is North or South. Though we climbed six flights, I could not have told you at any time which floor we were on. Time does not seem to run along like normal, nor did I feel any impatience – I did not so much as glance at my watch the whole time. We had no idea how long we were there; it was really a timeless place. The architects did an astonishing job; I have never been in another building like it.
The Temple inside was extremely well lit; it was lovely and impressive in every place and in a myriad of ways. Elder Gong asked me for my impression and I demurred, saying that I needed to think on it some more. What I did not say is that, to a Jewish sensibility, the Temple screamed "goyish." I am not quite sure why; it may have been the feeling that somehow, the building is an institution above all else. The building itself lends importance and majesty to a relationship with G-d, but people seem to remain far enough below G-d's level that it seemed to me to block an accessible relationship based on partnership (rather than as nameless children).
Perhaps my reaction was to the insistence that everyone is equal in the eyes of G-d, so everyone has to dress exactly the same (all wearing simple white garments), stripping off their individuality – when I think of the Jewish people as aspiring to quite the opposite goal, each of us trying to connect to G-d in ways that are deeply personal. Indeed, I am quite sure that mankind is not equal in the eyes of G-d: we are commanded to love each other, but it is empirically obvious to me that G-d Himself does not love each person equally (the Torah clearly shows G-d showing specific favor). G-d values us based on our choices, even though we are commanded find value in each person by loving them.
But perhaps the biggest "goyish" flag for me was the color scheme. Gold filigree and a fantastic multi-arch theme were all impressive – but the wall-to-wall carpets were all very light, almost-white colors, colors that no Jew would ever put in their house or place of worship. There is something deeply impractical about white carpets, something that immediately made me know that I was far away from a place that felt like home. I know that sounds silly, but it jumped at me.
Yet a lot of the architecture resonated beautifully. With every detail, the constant desire to look and reach upward was impressive and deeply consonant with Torah imagery. Light came from everywhere; Elder Gong approvingly shared an observation by a CBS film crew: that at most places in the building there are no shadows, not even cast by a person as they walk across a room. In a great many respects, I can see and appreciate LDS as a faith that truly seeks to expand awareness of a covenant relationship with G-d to the entire world, as opposed to the Jewish lighthouse concept – distinct from the world, but as a light unto the nations. And I appreciate that the LDS, as well as more mainstream forms of Christianity, are developments from the Torah even though Christianity was formed, to some extent, in reaction to the Judaism of that age.
Nevertheless, I generally feel that the LDS suffer from having read the Torah too superficially, without careful attention to the symbolism within the text itself, the tensions and themes that have been there, but unearthed, for thousands of years. This is a criticism I would level at Christianity in general, of course, which often seems to stop reading the Torah after Eden (even though neither the expulsion from Eden nor Original Sin are ever mentioned in the Torah again). But my fellow religionists are equally guilty, albeit in a slightly different way. We Jews tend to internalize the versions we teach children, and then go to great lengths to defend those approaches to the text, even to the point of ignoring the words that the text actually uses. The arguments can be quite sophisticated and intricate, but they are built on a foundation of a child's understanding, which is far more handicapped than we need to be.
I sensed the deep enthusiasm LDS practitioners have for living with your loved ones for all eternity in the afterlife; it is very real. And although I adore my loved ones, I admit that even I am taken aback by the concept of eternal coexistence, even in resurrected form; eternity seems like quite a long time, does it not? Indeed, to my understanding, this is both a core attraction of LDS faith, and the reason why some choose to leave it: what if you don't want to be with your spouse or extended family for all eternity?
I spoke with Elder Gong several times on our tour. He was a profoundly impressive man, displaying the kind of inner serenity that I have perceived with other holy men I have known. He was, nevertheless, quietly defensive about the work of the Temples (170 active LDS temples worldwide now), in front of Christians who were not obviously at peace with baptizing the dead. He picked his words quite carefully, as anyone in that position surely must.
LDS baptisms of dead Jews should be an irrelevant curiosity to most Jews (though some see it quite differently than I do). But I understand that among many others in the world, this is a sore subject, to put it mildly. Anti-LDS actions by government in America who have feared and hated the LDS have been outrageous, even tyrannical. In 1890 the Supreme Court upheld the complete dissolution of the LDS Church, and the seizure of its properties. There was clearly an expectation that this would be the end of the LDS, which has manifestly not happened. But many of the institutions that Jews have built in order to keep our educational system strong are absent within the LDS community. There are, apparently, no dedicated LDS schools until you get to college and BYU (and a few affiliates). The Latter-day Saints have consistently and quietly gone about their business, taking the hits and keeping on. I say "quietly," but it has always been clear to me that the location and magnificence of the DC Temple is there to extend a prominent middle finger to a federal government that tried to destroy them time and again.
There are about 16 million LDS at the moment, meaning people alive today who at some time in their lives identified themselves as Latter-day Saints, or whose parents, when they were children, asked for their names to be included on the church's records. Apparently, even among practicing LDS members, as many as 50% of each generation becomes less active or leaves the faith outright. There were only 2 million Latter-day Saints in the world in the 1960s, mostly in Utah. Now the majority live outside the United States (and only about 1/8th in Utah). Latter-Day Saints have many children, but they also proselytize very actively. It is a community that's undergoing constant change, which you might think would be more concerned about holding on to its traditions. Given the growth and turnover it seems likely that only a small fraction of Latter-day Saints worldwide have an LDS grandparent. So Latter-day Saints are still a community of relatively little deep tradition.
When I talked about our visit and this piece with others, they suggested that there is something "cultish" about LDS. I don't see it. Seen from the outside, I think that all non-pagan faiths are somewhere between kinda nuts and outright kooky; for those who do not understand a faith on its own terms, everything that is different must be wrong. And we are all, to some extent, defensive about what we do, so it is understandable, though surely not commendable, that outsiders often label other faiths as cults.
I have written before on how every person has their own G-d, in some way, because our conception of G-d is formed through our own unique relationship with the divine. G-d is formed in our consciousness and lives in our hearts – and since no two people are identical, no two conceptions of G-d are truly identical. Nevertheless, there is enough commonality within a given faith that we can say that we are connected to the same deity, albeit, perhaps, to different aspects of that same proverbial elephant. The G-d of the Jews connects to all Jews in ways that are different, but common enough that we are pretty sure we really share the same G-d.
But it struck me that the further one moves away from the Torah, the more different the deity really is from the G-d of the Torah (the G-d I yearn for). The alien nature of the LDS Temple made my wife and I both realize the gap between the G-d we know, and the G-d that others know. We should take every opportunity to reinforce commonality between all "good" faiths, of course, but whether or not we actually share a deity is very much an open question.
There is a paradox implicit in the LDS faith: their Temple is only for its practitioners (going to the Temple, especially if it is not nearby, may only happen a few times in a typical life – while churchgoing is weekly). What goes on inside is a closely-held secret, and revealing it to outsiders is forbidden. Non-believers are not welcome except, as in this case, where the building is "deconsecrated" so it is not an operational Temple. This is for the LDS Church, which seeks to be essentially a universal faith.
Judaism, on the other hand, does not aspire to be a universal faith. But our temple was meant to attract people to it, even those who are not Jews, and whom we do not even expect to become Jews. "For My house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples." (Isaiah 56:7) It is paradoxical to me that LDS, which seeks to be universal, are exclusive about their practices, while Judaism, which is meant to be only for people who choose that specific kind of relationship with G-d, nevertheless opens its playbook (the practices and sacrifices in the temple) to be available to all the world. Go figure.
It was a most informative and fascinating day!
*"Mormon" is not a welcome moniker, so even though I was raised using it, I am respecting their preference by using "LDS" instead.
This post was promoted to the Main Feed by a Ricochet Editor at the recommendation of Ricochet members. Like this post? Want to comment? Join Ricochet's community of conservatives and be part of the conversation. Join Ricochet for Free.
@SusanQuinn
8:50 AM EDT ⋅ Apr 21, 2022
Everything you've written is consistent with my understanding and experience with LDS. They are lovely people, and their Temples are impressive. A beautiful post.
@MarciN
11:08 AM EDT ⋅ Apr 21, 2022
iWe: My childhood included other kids asking why I killed Jesus,
I am so sorry that Christian people ever said that to you. It is not acceptable to Protestants or Catholics to ever say or even think such things. That's evil masquerading as religion.
My parents were Baptist, and they left the Baptist church and raised their children (my sisters and me) in the Congregational church, and they would have ground us into dust if any of us had ever thought or said anything like that–not that I was ever inclined to think such a thing.
@iWe
MarciN (View Comment):
s'ok. It built character.
Phil Turmel
@PhilTurmel
iWe: To Christians, we are G-d's children, with all that entails
Indeed, but we are also named member's of the Body of Christ, and the Church is also referred to as the Bride of Christ. Many demoninations among the fractured variants of Christianity emphasize one's personal relationship with G-d, much as you describe a partnership. While I understand some of the distinctions from Jewish practice you draw might be well justified in certain company, the larger Christian experience (IMHO) is more intellectually "Jewish" than you might suspect.
iWe: Seen from the outside, I think that all non-pagan faiths are somewhere between kinda nuts and outright kooky; for those who do not understand a faith on its own terms, everything that is different must be wrong. And we are all, to some extent, defensive about what we do, so it is understandable, though surely not commendable, that outsiders often label other faiths as cults.
This observation, so obviously true, is the core of so much conflict. Differing beliefs naturally means one "cult's" members willh think a different "cult's" members are wrong. This turns into "correction by force" when people are unwilling or unable to acknowledge another viewpoint. /:
Dr. Bastiat
@drbastiat
5:52 PM EDT ⋅ Apr 21, 2022
J Climacus
@JClimacus
What a fascinating and insightful post! I don't know much about the LDS myself, apart from the occasional friendly conversation when they show up at my door.
I know your post is about LDS, not Christianity in general, but I imagine you anticipated a bit of pushback on some things you wrote about Christianity, so I won't disappoint.
iWe:
The God of Christianity is the Trinity but, most especially as the name implies, Christ. God the Son become Incarnate, Who suffered and died on the Cross for us, and Whom we are to imitate with the assistance of His Grace. It is true there is comfort in the fact that God has already won the victory for us with His Death and Resurrection, but there is hardly shelter. Christ promises us that if we truly follow Him, we too will face the Cross (perhaps not literally, but in some form of suffering. But also perhaps a literal martyrdom, as tradition says happened to all the Apostles but John). An infantilizing Christianity may be the religion of some televangelists, but it isn't the religion of Sts. Peter and Paul, St. Lawrence, St. Thomas More, or St. John Gabriel Perboyre.
The Judaism of the Torah has a different goal: Though there are elements in the Torah of the Jewish people as G-d's children, in general G-d has created the world for us to be his partner, and even, for those who are married, G-d's spouse. … We never simply throw our hands up and proclaim that whatever spot we are in is "Allah's will," or pray that, "Jesus take the wheel."
Christ died on the Cross not merely to save us for the next world, but to redeem this world, and, ultimately, He promises we will live forever with Him not in Heaven but on this Earth. Christ invites us to redeem the world with Him, and the civilization that answered His call became the greatest "change agent" the world has ever seen. We imitate Christ when, like Him at Gethsemane, we throw up our hands in prayer for God's help – and then with His Grace resolutely face the challenges of this world.
Buckpasser
@Buckpasser
Very good post. As much as I admire many in the LDS, it's still difficult for me to get beyond Joseph Smith and the LDS origins. Was there any mention during your tour of that?
iWe: Without exception, up until college every LDS member I ever met was always friendly and lovely to be around.
That has been my experience as well. Much more pleasant than most other protestant faiths.
davenr321
@davenr321
Buckpasser (View Comment):
Was there mention of the Planet Kolob, the Reformed Egyptian language, reviving polygamy, Meadow Mountain, and the Blood Atonement?
Early folks who did a little digging include, of course, Zane Gray, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They didn't buy it then, I don't buy it now.
I'm seriously challenged regarding Ricochet's civility guidelines when discussing this religion that's less than 200 years old, has no ancient historical record whatsoever in the Americas (it's supposed to), yet claims the right to add to the Bible. And a whole lot of other stuff.
davenr321 (View Comment):
Yeah, it's almost as bad as people who say some dude was stuck in the ground dead and reanimated 2 days later. Or that some crazy guy held his arms out and parted the Red Sea. I'm seriously challenged regarding Ricochet's civility guidelines when discussing this religion that's based on a bunch of silly stories without any archeological record.
Mormons are very polite, peaceful, and law abiding people. Every Mormon I have ever known would bend over backwards to be helpful to strangers. And just how do you know that there is no planet Kolob?
HeavyWater
@HeavyWater
"You should first of all know that the diversity of men in religions and creeds, plus the disagreement in the community of Islam about doctrines, given the multiplicity of methods, is a deep sea in which most men founder and from which only a few are saved. Each group believes that it is the one saved, and 'each faction is happy about its own beliefs.'"
Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) – Classic Islamic Scholar [Path to Sufism, His Deliverance from Error]
"Divine action is almost a good explanation for anything because divine action has literally infinite degrees of freedom and virtually no limitations. Thus, divine action is equally consistent with any possible occurrence and hence unable to explain why any outcome pertains over any other possible outcome. In my view, abductive arguments for belief in God or gods all fail for this reason."
"A genuine first-hand religious experience is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which, in purer days, it drew its own supply of inspriration."
William James – The Varieties of Religious Experience
HeavyWater (View Comment):
For similar reasons I don't believe in Francis Ford Coppola. Directorial action is equally consistent with any possible occurrence in a film and hence unable to explain why any outcome in the film pertains over any other possible outcome. Arguments for belief in film directors all fail for this reason.
J Climacus (View Comment):
Well, I do believe in Francis Ford Coppola because I saw him interviewed and I watched "Apocalypse Now," staring Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen.
However, I tend to doubt that Colonel Kurtz (the character played by Marlon Brando) actually existed outside of the imaginations of those who presented Kurtz to us.
I remember reading that the film, "Apocalypse Now," was filmed in the Philippines, not Vietnam. I think both places, the Philippines and Vietnam actually do exist. I do not subscribe to "hard" Solipsism, the belief that there is no actual real world external to the self.
A few years ago I watched Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Daniel Freitag debate Dr. Michael Brown (an ex-Jew who became a Christian minister) debate whether Jesus is the Messiah.
During the question and answer period, Freitag was asked by a Christian questioner in the audience about the New Testament claims that Jesus rose from the dead.
Freitag said bluntly, "It didn't happen."
That's really the key question. If Jesus didn't rise from the dead, then those who move away from Judaism in favor of Christianity are idolators, aren't they?
12:11 PM EDT ⋅ Apr 23, 2022
Yes. It's all about the Resurrection. If the Resurrection didn't happen, Christianity is a false religion misleading men with a false hope. This point was made by the Apostles themselves. 1 Corinthians 15:17-19: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable."
The Argument from the Unconstrained Nature of Supernaturalistic Explanation
Let's look at Paul's claim that 500 people saw the risen Jesus at the same time. Apologists reject naturalistic explanations for this vision on the grounds that it is not plausible to suppose that 500 people hallucinate the same thing.
The explanation must be supernaturalistic. But the assumption that 500 people cannot hallucinate at the same time is based on an inference from empirical and naturalistic constraints. The claim is that we have no good evidence for such mass hallucinations and we have no reason to think that there is a naturalistic mechanism that could account for that hallucination. To put it another way, we are supposing that it is empirically implausible for such a thing to happen based on what we know of the working of the human mind.
But in assuming such constraints, we are sticking to the constraints of the naturalistic worldview. If we are entitled to abandon those constraints, and appeal instead to possible supernatural forces, then we are no longer entitled to those constraints. If we are going to appeal to the supernatural, then we could just as easily suppose that there is some supernaturally induced mass hallucination as that there is a supernaturally induced bodily resurrection. In other words, once we abandon the constraints of naturalistic explanation, all bets are off. There are innumerable possible supernaturalistic explanations for the resurrection narrative. Maybe its all a divine lie. Maybe it's the product of the devil. We have no reason for favoring one over another.
This post is about the LDS. We shouldn't hijack it for an atheist/Christian debate. If you make this argument in a separate post, we can have a discussion about it.


text:
DeMar DeRozan, Derrick White and LaMarcus Aldridge among 57 finalists for Team USA Olympic squad led by Gregg Popovich
The news comes a day after Popovich announced that he would no longer be with the Spurs moving forward as they work to move him elsewhere.
Credit: Photo by Antonio Morano bit.ly/XR79FT / Special to KENS5.com
Spurs forward DeMar DeRozan is among 44 finalists, including teammates LaMarcus Aldridge and Derrick White, for a spot on Team USA's Olympic roster.
Author: Tom Petrini (KENS 5)
Published: 12:57 PM EST March 11, 2021
Updated: 12:57 PM EST March 11, 2021
SAN ANTONIO — On Thursday, USA Basketball announced that DeMar DeRozan, Derrick White, and LaMarcus Aldridge are among 57 finalists for the 2021 Olympic squad helmed by Spurs coach Gregg Popovich.
The official 12-man roster will be released later in the year, and the delayed 2021 Tokyo Olympics are set to begin days after the NBA Finals end in July.
DeMar and Derrick have been named #USABMNT finalists for the @Tokyo2020 Olympic Games 👏🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/KMcnmOBVHC
— San Antonio Spurs (@spurs) March 11, 2021
Aldridge was notably absent from San Antonio's congratulatory tweet a day after Popovich announced that he would no longer be with the team moving forward as they work to move him elsewhere.
RELATED: Learning to live without LaMarcus Aldridge: Inside a year of growth for the San Antonio Spurs
RELATED: LaMarcus Aldridge and Spurs have agreed to part ways according to Gregg Popovich, will explore trade opportunities
Former Spur Kawhi Leonard is a finalist along with LeBron James, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Anthony Davis, Paul George, Damian Lillard, and a ton of other All Stars.
FINAL: San Antonio Spurs fall to Dallas Mavericks 115-104 after second-half collapse
BIG FUN POD: Questions ahead of the season's second half & a looming trade deadline
Kawhi and Popovich reunited? Leonard wants to go to Olympics

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
VCA Pictures es una productora y distribuidora de cine pornográfico estadounidense. La compañía fue fundada por Russ Hampshire, y fue uno de los mayores estudios durante la denominada 'Edad de Oro del porno'. En 2003 la empresa fue comprada por Hustler Video, una de las compañías del magnate Larry Flynt. VCA mantiene una identidad separada del Holding Larry Flynt Publications.

Películas
Algunas de las películas más notables que VCA ha producido o distribuido son:
 Insatiable
 New Wave Hookers
 The Devil in Miss Jones 2
 The Opening of Misty Beethoven
 Cafe Flesh
 Debbie Does Dallas 3
 Black Throat
 Let Me Tell Ya 'bout Black Chicks
 Britney Rears.

Directores
Algunos de los directores más notables que han trabajado para VCA son:
 Axel Braun
 Gerard Damiano
 Alex deRenzy
 Gregory Dark
 Henri Pachard
 John Leslie
 Paul Thomas
 John Stagliano
 Ben Dover
 Michael Ninn
 Veronica Hart
 Eon McKai
 Nicki Hunter
 Eli Cross.

Estrellas
Algunos de los actores y actrices más notables que han trabajado para VCA son:
 John Holmes
 Eric Ryan
 Jeanna Fine
 Tawny Roberts
 Taylor Rain
 Kylie Ireland
 Ava Vincent
 Chloe
 Mike Horner
 Vicca
 Zak Smith
 Shayla LaVeaux
 Mika Tan
 Kristara Barrington
 Nikki Dial
 Taylor Hayes
 Paul Carrigan
 Brooke Hunter
 Alexandra Nice
 Sydnee Steele
 Joanna Angel
 Nick Harmon
 Scott Styles
 Nikita Gross
 Paul Barresi
 Tristan Mathews
 Karina Clarke

Referencias

Enlaces externos
hustlervideo.com
vcapictures.com
imdb.com - VCA en Internet Movie Database

Estudios pornográficos

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


The first idea for an Eden Dawn tee was born on a rainy Portland day. Having spent all day studying ancient Greek tunics for her Master�s degree Eden was prepping to go out for cocktail hour with her girlfriends. Cozy in her t-shirt and cuffed dark jeans but no where near stylish enough for a night out in the city she wished there was a top that could be comfortable enough for lounging but fabulous enough to wear out. The idea sparked somewhere in the back of her brain behind all the thoughts of Athens and embroidery. Combining her intense love of fashion history with her penchant for comfort Eden Dawn Apparel was officially conceived.
The line was her way to pay homage to the world�s greatest couture designers. Men and women who shaped society as we know it with the raise of a hemline or introducing ready to wear pants into the mainstream. Within a few months the idea would come to fruition with the right garments in wonderful colors, textures and styles. And all would display illustrations from the past.
We absolutely adore Eden Dawn�s clothing line! The line of graphic tee�s, tanks, hoodies, intimates, and skirts is adorned with fashion illustrations that are truly timeless. This is a line that pays homage to the great fashion d esigners and fashion movements of the past, and OC is a show all about fashion, so how can we not draw a connection between the two?
We could easily see Summer lounging around in 1953 tee or the 1949 Dior tee. You could also pair these shirts with a pair of cute white cut-offs for an ultra cute look that would have you covered for spring and summer. For Kaitlin we would pick the Mystery Tank, word of advice on this one though girls, the sizing runs a bit small on this tank, so if you normally wear a small, consider a medium, unless you�re really tiny! The other shirts fit true to size and will not only look adorable on you, but they will also be among some of the most comfy clothing you will ever wear! You can�t really ask for anything more!


The M5 was first shown at the Amsterdam Motor Show in 1984. It is remarkable what a simple letter and number combination has come to signify in such a short period of time. Mention the name and nearly everyone — unless they have been hiding under a rock for the past 28 years — instantly knows what it has come to represent: a seriously fast and adroit road rocket that doubles as a full-on family sedan. Now comes the fifth generation. It is a welcome replacement for the only hiccup in its storied history — the previous model.
The latest M5 is powered by a hellacious 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8. To say it produces prodigious power is an understatement. With the intercooled turbos blowing their not-so-little vanes out, it produces 560 horsepower. Now, that is a big number. The torque, however, is really what grabs the driver's attention — all 500 pound-feet at just 1,500 rpm. This means that, from basically idle to redline, this engine is ready to give the riders a mighty boot in the pants whenever the throttle is prodded with purpose. It also equates to a very fast zero-to-100-kilometres-an-hour run of 4.3 seconds and a blindingly fast 80-to-120-km/h passing time of three seconds flat.
The passing time indicates just how good this engine is in the middle and upper rev ranges — forget to lift and the M5 continues to warp its way well past car-confiscating speeds with alarming alacrity. The hitch, dare I call it such, is that while there is an awesome sense of acceleration, there is very little sensation of speed. This mandates paying particular attention to the speedometer. I set the speed warning to 145 km/h because, even at this speed, the sensation is of travelling at a brisk walking pace!
Perhaps the single biggest improvement is found in the transmission. Gone is the wonky single-clutch automated manual in favour of a delightfully smooth twin-clutch design that snicks up and down the gears with silky precision — no herky-jerky operation here. The nit is that there is no true park mode. One must turn the off engine before the transmission then automatically engages it. It is a pain. One must power off the engine just to get out to access something from the trunk. Why there is no proper park mode mystified me.
the engine set to Efficient and the gearbox in its laid-back position, the M5 drives just like the regular 5 Series, albeit with a little more kick. It is comfortable and loaded to the nines with luxury; every conceivable item is in place up to and including a navigation system and superb sound system.
Switch the mode to Sport and you have a very capable performer, as everything is amped up to emphasize performance — there is better weight in the steering, the damping is firmer and the response from the engine and transmission is much quicker. And, finally, for those hyper days, there's the Sport+ mode. It amplifies everything yet again — firmer steering and suspension while the engine and transmission go into attack mode. The driver can also engage the M Dynamic Mode. This setting dials back the electronic stability control system to the point where the back end will go walkabout with little provocation. For the truly adventurous, the stability control system can be turned off fully — not a wise move unless donuts are the order of the day. The beauty is the Sport/Sport+ modes can be stored in the M1 and M2 buttons on the steering wheel. Now, switching personalities is as simple as pushing a button.
Regardless of the setup chosen, the M5 delivers astounding road manners. It is comfortable and accommodating in the Comfort/ Efficient mode, yet there is very little body roll and the steering has a pleasantly tight feel to it. Opt for the firmer settings and the damping and steering become much crisper without completely killing ride comfort. It comes together such that keeping the M5 on the driver's intended line is remarkably easy in spite of the cornering forces it generates when pushed to the limit. More remarkable is that it does not feel its size. It is a large sedan that weighs 1,990 kilograms — the driver would never know this from the feedback and precision of the drive.
Obviously, having so much power at play mandates beefy brakes. The M5 features trash can-sized rotors and enormous six-piston front calipers — the setup can deliver as much as 1.0 g of stopping power. The better news is that the size and ventilation serve to prevent fade from becoming an issue. Even after leaning on the brakes heavily, the pedal remained crisp and the stopping power as prodigious as the engine's output.
I have always been a diehard M5 fan (last model excepted). The reason boils down to its ability to accommodate a family of five and their luggage in comfort and style. Drop the family off and, at the push of a button, it becomes a track-ready rocket. For the driver with family commitments and the desire to drive a true supercar, few conveyances do it quite as well as the BMW M5.
Transport Canada fuel economy L/100 km 13.2 city, 8.6 hwy.


text:
The Return Fixture Interviews – Mikaela Hunt
Last week we kicked off a series of long form interviews transcribed from The Return Fixture – ITBOTN's National Women's League podcast. The second installment is Helena's insightful chat with Mikaela Hunt, Southern United's captain and inspirational leader. Helena Wiseman: Mikaela Hunt has played in a National Women's League final […]
The Return Fixture Interviews – Annalie Longo
It came through loud and clear in so much of the feedback we received – one of the things listeners loved most about ITBOTN's National Women's League podcast – The Return Fixture – was the interviews. They were in-depth, they elicited insightful and genuine responses, and they probed some of […]
The Return Fixture Episode 3: "This is definitely how football works"
Helena, Ella and Enzo get to grips with round two of the National Women's League season. They review last weekend's matches, make more questionable predictions, and discover that at least one of them is very geographically challenged. Later, Helena catches up with Southern United captain Mikaela Hunt to get her take […]
Estimated reading time: 41 seconds
An interview with Katie Rood
Katie Rood captured the imagination of football fans up and down New Zealand and around the world last year when the Football Fern completed one of the more interesting international transfers you will ever see – from Glenfield Rovers to Juventus. My mixed feelings at the time scarcely need explanation. […]
An interview with Paige Satchell
Paige Satchell has always been right at the top of my 'players I'd love to interview' list. Anyone who follows me on social media, reads my blog posts, or has stood next to me at games where she's in action would probably be well aware that I'm a bit of […]
The Long Read: Unchartered spaces – The Māori Football movement
Phill Parker-Pickering, founder and chairman of Aotearoa Football and head coach of Te Ikaroa Wāhine, was a bit taken aback by the resounding success of last month's Clash of the Cultures series. Two Indigenous Australian teams, Mariya, took on Te Ikaroa Tāne and Te Ikaroa Wāhine. As Enzo reported, Te […]
VAR: A referee's perspective
There's not much that unites football fans apart from our love of the game. We come from diverse ethnic, religious and political backgrounds. We eat different foods, speak different languages, and most importantly of all we support different teams. That's what keeps the game going. Because if we all held […]
An interview with Aaron Scott
When Aaron Scott celebrated his 200th appearance for Melville United, at home against Bay Olympic last season, Chairman Bruce Holloway wrote in the match day programme that "for Melville he has been the ultimate role model. For many years his thicker team mates thought his name was Aaron Manofthematch, so […]
"I made my debut for Waikato FC with them both. I remember my first touch in the National League was a throw-in to Mayney and he just told me "are you serious?" and he hoofed it back out and just stared at me!" – Aaron Scott Prowling the sidelines in […]
Kevin Fallon – Backing The Game
It's mid-March and the Northern Region Football League kicks off in just under a weeks time. ITBOTN was invited, by club captain Hone Fowler, to take in Lotto NRFL Division Two Manukau City AFC's final pre-season game against last years Chatham Cup semi-finalists and NRFL Premier League side Birkenhead United. […]


text:
Malinga ruled out of World T20 with knee niggle
March 18, 2016 by qayam
Bengaluru : Sri Lankan pace spearhead Lasith Malinga has been ruled of the ongoing World Twenty20 after failing to recover substantially from a knee injury that has plagued him since November.
The 32-year-old, who played only one match for his side in the Asia Cup, stepped down from the captaincy when it became apparent he could not guarantee his availability for the full World T20, ESPNcricinfo reported.
Malinga, who is the fourth highest wicket-taker bowler in T20s, has flown back to his home and selectors are expected to name a replacement following practice games in Colombo on Friday.
Defending champions Sri Lanka will next take on West Indies in their group stage match on Sunday. (ANI)
Categories News, Sports Tags Asia Cup, knee injury, Lasith Malinga, Recover, World T20 Post navigation
AIUDF, RJD, JD(U) to form grand alliance against BJP, invite Congress in Assam
World no longer ridicules India of 'Hindu rate of growth': FM


The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have created a universal framework for the private and public sector along with civil society to work towards a common goal. Increasingly, companies are looking to integrate the SDGs into their business strategy. Our 2018 Responsible Business Trends Report, a survey of over 1,500 global business professionals, found that 69% of businesses are integrating the SDGs into their core strategy – an increase of 9% on last year's report and 23% on 2016.
Below are some of the key ideas and tips shared during the webinar discussion.
All four speakers agreed it's essential that companies understand which SDGs are material to the core business both now, and in the next 10-15 years. This requires some future gazing and predicting long-term business focus and needs. Piet Klop gave the example of how PGGM created a framework for future investments around three key themes: fiduciary responsibility (climate); future identity (SDG 3: Health); where they can contribute increased impact (food and water). Future investments are then evaluated against these three themes.
Mario Abreu added the point that the SDGs provide a framework and common language for business that's comparable. It's imperative that they are viewed from a full business perspective, rather than just a sustainability lens.
It's easy to fall into cherry-picking only positive impacts. However, companies need to understand and address their negative impacts against SDGs. James Gomme stated that, by doing so, companies can understand where the contribution and action could lie for the business.
Michael Dickstein raised an important point about it being critical for companies to ensure they carry out the traditional approach of conducting a materiality matrix first. In this case, doing so will ensure they've accounted for all key views and select SDGs that are meaningful and in line with stakeholder expectations.
Gomme highlighted that it's important businesses understand the granularity of the SDG targets. During the webinar he brought attention to SDG3: Good Health. When focussing on the targets within this goal, there's Target 3.6: Reducing road traffic accidents. Gomme outlined that representatives within a mining company might not see a clear linkage with this SDG3, however they will when narrowing on Target 3.6.
Gomme also explained that linking the goals and targets from particular regions with a company's outputs will help enhance its licence to operate and boost its reputation within the region.
During the webinar we asked participants to indicate where they're struggling most when reporting against the SDGs. 63% of the audience selected the option of measuring impacts against the SDGs. Dickstein wasn't surprised by this finding and stated the need for common denominators. Gomme suggested companies look to the SDG Compass for indicators to track impact.
Abreu shared the approach Tetra Pak has taken. The company calculates the status quo of a region – where Tetra Pak hasn't yet had an impact. It then can calculate and report on the consequences of its work in that region, both positive and negative.
Klop stated it's imperative that companies report impact metrics that are achievable, relevant and quantifiable.
A lot of human rights reporting is from a risk perspective. Gomme outlined that, although there isn't an SDG that focusses on human rights, approximately 90% of targets link to existing human rights standards. This presents an opportunity for companies to reframe their human rights work in a positive framework.
SDGwash is a term, similar to greenwash, where companies are making claims with little change and/or substance. Dickstein stated a lot depends on where a company is on its sustainability journey. If a company has engaged its stakeholders, and developed and implemented a strategy that's having measurable impacts – then it is appropriate to communicate proactively against SDGs. However, if a company has just started its impact work then it needs to first identify strategy, targets and understand how to measure its impacts.
Klop stated that transparent communication is crucial. Abreu agreed and stated that as well as being transparent it's essential companies understand that all SDGs are interconnected. Not understanding the interconnectivity runs the risks of ignoring negative impacts. Abreu highlighted that whilst solar panels are innovative (SDG 9) and impact climate (SDG13), they also create waste that impacts land (SDG 14) and water (SDG 15). By having a full understanding and transparent approach, companies can build authenticity and trust.
Gomme echoed this and stated that companies shouldn't be afraid to communicate current positive work that's impacting the SDGs. However, they can't ignore negative impacts and need to communicate where they need to do more.
The above takeaways are from a recent webinar held as part of the build-up to the 13th Annual Sustainability and Reporting Summit. Senior representatives from Abbott, Syngenta, Pirelli, GRI, Allianz, APG Asset Management, IKEA, Shift, Orange, WBCSD and others will share strategies on how to demonstrate resilience through transparent, SDG-focused disclosure. For more information click here.


text:
GENERAL JAMES DOOLITTLE
Name: James Harold Doolittle
Nickname: Jimmy
Born: 12/14/1896 Alameda, CA
Died: 9/27/1993 (age 96) - Pebble Beach, CA
Place of burial: Arlington National Cemetery
Years of Service: 1917 - 1959
He was awarded the Medal of Honor, and was promoted from Colonel to Brigadier General for leading the first carrier-based bomber attack on mainland Japan in 1942. His citation, presented personally by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, reads in part: "With the apparent certainty of being forced to land in enemy territory or perish at sea, Colonel Doolittle personally led a squadron of Army bombers, manned by volunteer crews, in a highly destructive raid on the Japanese mainland."
General Doolittle died in California on September 27, 1993 and was buried in Section 7-A of Arlington National Cemetery, with his high school sweetheart, Josephine Daniels Doolittle (May 24, 1895-December 24, 1988).
Twelfth Air Force, Fifteenth Air Force, Eighth Air Force
Distinguished Service Medal


text:
HomeAIThe Engine Of HPC And Machine Learning
The Engine Of HPC And Machine Learning
February 28, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan AI, Compute, HPC 0
There is no question right now that if you have a big computing job in either high performance computing – the colloquial name for traditional massively parallel simulation and modeling applications – or in machine learning – the set of statistical analysis routines with feedback loops that can do identification and transformation tasks that used to be solely the realm of humans – then an Nvidia GPU accelerator is the engine of choice to run that work at the best efficiency.
It is usually difficult to make such clean proclamations in the IT industry, with so many different kinds of compute available. But Nvidia is in a unique position, and one that it has earned through more than a decade of intense engineering, where it really does not have effective competition in the compute areas where it plays.
Parallel routines written in C, C++, or Fortran were offloaded from CPUs to GPUs in the first place because the CPUs did not have sufficient memory bandwidth to handle these routines. It was convenient, perhaps, that the parallel engine used to produce graphics for games and virtualization could be tweaked so it could do raw compute for simulation and modeling. Intel's "Knights" family of many-core X86 processors, with their own MCDRAM memory and extended DRAM architecture, were created explicitly to bring GPU-like performance to X86 computing, eventually without an offload model with the "Knights Landing" Xeon Phi 7000 processors. Nvidia has iterated fast with its Tesla family of GPU accelerators, and adding new functionality and extreme performance at a pace that Intel has not been able to match with the Knights family, and as good as AMD's "Vega" GPU chips are, they only support half precision and single precision floating point math (which are suitable for machine learning, seismic processing, signal processing, bioinformatics, and certain workloads) and do not have the double precision floating point math that many HPC applications still require.
Neither has anything at all like Nvidia's Tensor Core units.
In fact, no compute engine on the market has the breadth and depth of number crunching that the current "Volta" GV100 GPUs, which were launched last May, offer. There is no safer bet on which to make for running accelerated HPC applications or for going large scale machine learning training and, now, machine learning inference. The Volta processors are probably going to be the motors of choice for accelerated databases, too, but the jury is still out there. (FPGAs have their place here as well.)
From Graphics To General Purpose Compute
The GPU motor has come a long way since the "G80" GPU was launched by Nvidia back in 2006, laying the groundwork for what has evolved into the Volta GPU, arguably them most complex and rich computing engine yet put into the field for parallel processing. This GPU had eight shader cores, each with sixteen processing elements, introducing a much more parallel architecture than prior chips from Nvidia.
Although this is a very simple block diagram by today's standards, the G80 chip was complex for the time. It was implemented in a 90 nanometer process with 686 million transistors and a die size of 480 square millimeters. Actually, this was a two-chip package, with the I/O broken out into a separate and small (about 5 million transistors) device.
The G80 was put into the GeForce 8800 graphics card, and came with this new thing called the Compute Unified Device Architecture programming environment, which allowed for parallel sections of math routines written in C to be offloaded to these special shader processing elements. Eventually a special variant of the GPU chip, called the GT200, was created for the first generation of Tesla T10 GPU accelerator cards and doubled the number of cores to 240 spread them over eight SMs, or 30 cores per SM, and added native double precision floating point math for supporting HPC applications.
But the ball really got rolling with the introduction of the "Fermi" GPU chips in 2010, which had 512 cores, supporting a mix of single precision and double precision floating point math over 32 streaming multiprocessors, or SMs.
Each Fermi GPU core, which was called a CUDA core back then, had a 32-bit integer unit and a 32-bit floating point unit, and importantly offered fused multiply-add operations, which is more efficient than prior multiply-add units that had two, rather than one, rounding step to perform their calculations. The important thing is that on matrix multiplication at double precision, the GF110 Fermi GPU, which weighed in at 3 billion transistors in a 520 square millimeter area die, could do one single precision FMA per clock or one double precision FMA every two clocks, which was 8X the floating point math of the GT200, which had only a meager double precision unit for each SM. With Fermi, the CUDA environment was expanded to support Fortran, Matlab, Python, and Java offloads.
We are going back to the beginning to show just how far GPU computing has come. (If you want to read the details on the "Kepler" GK104 and GK110 GPUs used in the K series of Tesla accelerators, here is a good place to start. You can see our coverage of the "Maxwell" GPUs used in Tesla accelerators from 2015 here, with our drilldown into the "Pascal" P100 GPUs for HPC and machine learning training here and the Pascal P4 and P40 units for machine learning inference there. The level of complexity in the Volta chips, which use a special 12 nanometer FinFET process that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp created specifically for Nvidia to be ahead of the Moore's Law curve, is astounding. The Volta GV100 chip has a staggering 21.1 billion transistors and weighs in at 815 square millimeters in area, a beast of the datacenter as we put it at the launch in May 2017 that is a third bigger than the Pascal GP100 chip.
The block diagram for the GV100 chip is so large and complex that it really can't be published in an effective manner, but here is a go at it:
The Volta GV100 chip is organized into six regions, called GPU processing clusters (GPCs), each with two memory controllers and each with its own texture processing clusters (TPCs) and comprised of a bank of seven SMs. The GigaThread thread scheduling engine spans the whole shebang, which has a total of 84 SMs, adding up to:
5,376 32-bit integer cores
5,376 32-bit floating point cores
2,688 64-bit floating point cores, and
672 Tensor Cores
336 texture units
In the production Tesla V100 card, only 80 of the 84 SMs are activated; this means some of the SMs can be duds and the chip can still be used in production, which obviously increases the yield on the GV100 chips by a proportional amount. The clock speeds on the GV100s used in the NVLink-capable versions of the Tesla V100 cards were cranked up last fall, to 1.53 GHz with GPU Boost on, so the most recent performance numbers for this accelerator have inched up a tiny bit since the May launch last year; the PCI-Express versions are still running slightly slower and deliver slightly lower performance across integer, floating point, and Tensor Core units. The GV100 chip is not yet available in a form aimed at graphics cards or in other variants for Tesla accelerators – we mean akin to the P4 and P40 in the Pascal line, not the geared down versions of the GV100 that are used in the HGX form factor for hyperscalers or the PCI-Express version rather than the top-end SXM2 version that has NVLink support activated.
The capabilities of the seven latest GPUs used in the Tesla accelerator line – two each for Fermi and Kepler, and one each for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta – are shown in the table below, with their chip maximums:
If some of the SMs are inactive, as is the case with the production GV100 chips so far, that proportion of the features drop and so does the performance. If all of the 84 SMs on the GV100 were activated, it would increase the performance by around 5 percent.
The Volta GPU compute engine has a lot going on; the entire kitchen sink of processing units and data sizes are available, including the 8-bit integer (INT8) instructions that came out with special versions of the Pascal chips aimed at machine learning inference, which were kept in the Volta design for compatibility reasons. The new Tensor Core 4x4x4 matrix math engines, which process in FP16 half precision and output in FP32 single precision, provide an amazing jump on machine learning training (about 12X over Pascal) and machine learning inference (about 6X). The question is, how do you keep all of those elements busy, which justifies putting them in there in the first place. No one wants dark silicon, and certainly not at these prices, but that said, everyone wants a compute engine that can do lots of different kinds of work and support various data types and processing methods, too.
"Pascal had this idea of paired operations, which had some constraints," Jonah Alben, senior vice president of GPU engineering at Nvidia, tells The Next Platform. "In Volta, you can think of it as having an INT8 unit, an FP32 unit, an FP64 unit, a Tensor Core unit, and then there is the load/store path. Two of those can be kept full at any given time. In general, we issue one warp per clock, but in a partition there is only 16 elements of each of those things and once we issue to an instruction unit with that one warp per clock, it is now busy for two clocks and during the next clock you can do something else. Most importantly with Volta, you can now keep integer and floating point busy concurrently, whereas with previous designs any sort of addressing math or overhead that you were doing would steal cycles from the floating point."
Another way of saying that is that with the Pascal GP100 GPU, inside of each SM you have two warp schedule partitions, and with the Volta GV100, there are four partitions, two each for floating point and two each for integer, and that gives enough throughput to do both kinds of calculations concurrently.
This is a very big deal, and Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning research at the company, who did a three year stint as a senior researcher at Chinese search engine giant Baidu before returning to Nvidia last fall, explains why this cornucopia of compute matters. Take a deep breath and let Catanzaro explain it in detail: "This is one of the things that I am really excited about because a lot of the future of AI is progressing towards what I would call funky models, in a sense that the memory addressing patterns are structured in more complex ways. When you are writing kernels to try to keep the GPU busy, the indexing math is something that you often have to spend a lot of time with to try to hide. As the access patterns get more interesting, that stuff gets harder to hide. I think the dedicated integer unit on Volta is going to help make it a lot easier to write machine learning kernels, and you will spend a lot less time trying to optimize that stuff away."
Another big feature that is important for deep learning is forward progress guarantees for threads inside the same warp, even if they need to synchronize, which Tesla GPUs have not been able to do before. This, says Catanzaro, is going to enable a lot more interesting algorithms to be written against GPUs. And, he takes the time to tell us why: "A lot of code you could not write before because it could potentially hang the GPU is now possible thanks to the new threading model, especially for some sparser kinds of data analytics workloads. There are a lot of cases where we want to be collaborating between threads in more complicated ways, and Volta has a thread scheduler that can accommodate that. It is amazing to me that we could get more flexibility and more performance per watt. I was really concerned when I had heard that Nvidia was going to change the thread scheduler to be more flexible because I thought it would come at the expense of performance per watt. The reason that the older Pascal scheduler was not as flexible is that you get a lot of energy efficiency by ganging up threads together, and letting the threads be more independent had me worried about energy efficiency. But this actually got better."
The reason it got better was because of the combination of architectural changes and process changes, but Alben says that the majority of the improvements here came from architecture. "This is a very large rewrite of the architecture, and the Tensor Core performance is obviously very large. But even if you look at Volta's FP64, we are looking at 50 percent more performance in the same power budget as Pascal. The Volta SM is obviously a very ambitious design, and there are a lot of new elements in there."
Volta has a completely different instruction set, and it is not just a Pascal GPU with Tensor Core thrown onto it, even if the block diagrams may suggest that in some way.
Don't Forget The Memory
With any compute engine, memory capacity and memory bandwidth are important, and it is clear that Nvidia could add more HBM2 capacity to the Tesla Volta V100 package, and many had expected for the memory to be stacked eight high to double it up to 32 GB per unit. Nvidia had also hoped, many years back, that the Volta stacked memory would yield north of 1 TB/sec of memory bandwidth. As it turns out the Volta V100 package delivers 900 GB/sec of memory bandwidth, compared to the 720 GB/sec delivered with the first rev of HBM2 memory used in the Pascal P100 device. But the actual gap in memory performance is actually larger. On the STREAM Triad memory benchmark test, a Pascal P100 accelerator delivered 76 percent utilization of the peak bandwidth in the 16 GB of HBM memory on the device, or about 547 GB/sec; on the Volta V100 device, the STREAM Triad result was 95 percent of peak bandwidth, or 855 GB/sec. So at peak, the memory bandwidth improvement is only 25 percent, but if you look at sustained memory bandwidth, it is actually a 56 percent improvement.
To put it simply, the peak FP16, FP32, and FP64 performance all increased by about the same amount as the real-world memory bandwidth, which is a kind of balance and one that the HPC crowd could only reasonably expect. We don't know how much of the real estate on the Volta GV100 is used up by the Tensor Core units, but let's assume that it is a lot – enough that instead of 2X the raw performance using floating point units it was kept to only 50 percent more oomph here. That is a big piece of performance to give up, to be sure, but the machine learning training workloads needed a step function improvement, and Nvidia delivered it. And now, the HPC community can start wracking its brains to figure out how to port code from regular FP units to the Tensor Cores. When this is all said and done, future Tesla GPUs might only have Tensor Cores and look a whole lot like Google's TPUs.
It is hard to say for sure, and fun to think about.
In any event, to keep those cores fed from that faster main memory required a complete reworking of the L1 and L2 cache memory on the chips. The L1 cache inside of an SM is four times faster on Volta than it was on Pascal, according to Alben, and it runs at the same speed as the L2 cache memory that is shared by the SMs. That L2 cache has a staggering 14 TB/sec of aggregate bandwidth, and now the L1 cache and shared memory look like a big address space; in the past, the L1 cache was implemented as a kind of scratch pad. But with them being merged, the effect is to make L1 cache look a lot bigger and to reduce the number of cache misses and the amount of programming tricks they need to do to manage data the data because, in effect, the shared L2 memory can look like L1 cache. It is the best of both worlds.
And ultimately, Nvidia split the difference and made a compute engine that was superior at both HPC and machine learning – a tough task indeed. We get the feeling that current and potential customers wish Voltas were more widely available, and less expensive, too. But the affect Volta will have on machine learning will be greater than it has on HPC, at least until HPC codes are rewritten to use Tensor Cores or become hybrid simulation and machine learning applications.
Catanzaro is philosophical and enthusiastic about how Volta will not just support machine learning, but transform it.
"One of the things that is great about machine learning is that it has algorithms and a way of thinking about the world that fits the technology that physics allows us to build now," he explains, and once again, breathe in and listen here. "It is true that with Volta that we are providing an enormous number of new flops, and we are not providing 12X the bandwidth. What do I expect to happen with AI? People are going to try out models that they could not try before because they took a lot more flops. We know how to make our models more compute intensive, and in fact there is a lot of research that suggests that more intensive compute models get better results. Convolutions are in fact so compute intensive, and I expect that we will be seeing more convolutions. If you look at the inception blocks from Google, the things that they did in there were explicitly done to conserve flops at the expect of memory bandwidth. It will be interesting to see how that evolves. My personal expectation is that we are going to see architecture to shift a little bit to take advantage of the flops that we have. To a certain extent, this is like how things evolve, this is Darwinian pressure on the models, the architecture, and the manufacturing processes. We are all trying to make things better. There are certain things that are feasible and there are certain things that are not. In general, communication is always going to be harder to scale than computation. For the HPC people, it has been a long time since we had a byte per flops. We figured out things to do there, and with AI, there is tons of stuff that people will do. But it may shift a bit the way that people design their models."
The Feeds And Speeds
At the moment, there are three Volta variants and five Pascal variants in the Tesla line, and here are the feeds and speeds of these devices:
Items in the table shown in red are estimates made by The Next Platform. The precise feeds and speeds of the HGX-1 variant of the Volta GV100 card that is being adopted by the hyperscale community were not divulged – we expect to see more on this from Microsoft at the Open Compute Summit in March – and we have taken our best stab at what it might look like. We know that it is a 150 watt part, and that Nvidia says that it can deliver about 80 percent of the performance of the current top-end V100 SXM2 unit. As far as we know it has the same 16 GB of memory. The point is, the regular V100 unit delivers maximum performance per GPU, while the HGX-1 variant delivers maximum GPU aggregate performance per rack and maximum performance per watt. (And we also think the HGX-1 version offers lower cost per flops and ints, too, but we will talk about that separately.) Different customers optimize for different things.
We have comparisons of the Nvidia GPUs all the way back through Maxwell and Kepler units, but that cannot fit onto one page. Click here if you want to bust your screen and look at that.
Next up, we will try to figure out the cost, the efficiency, and the bang for the buck of the various Tesla GPU accelerators. This is more black magic than we would like, and particularly so in a high demand environment where supply seems to be constrained a little.
Opening Up The Future "Venado" Grace-Hopper Supercomputer At Los Alamos
May 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan HPC 4
There are many interpretations of the word venado, which means deer or stag in Spanish, and this week it gets another one: A supercomputer based on future Nvidia CPU and GPU compute engines, and quite possibly if Los Alamos National Laboratory can convince Hewlett Packard Enterprise to support InfiniBand interconnects …
China Launches The Inevitable Indigenous GPU
August 25, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan Compute 4
It was absolutely inevitable that China would try to create its own GPU compute engines. It was never a given that it would succeed in only three years. But with the launch of the BR series of products from Biren Technology, there is finally a credible homegrown GPU controlled by …
GPU Engines Are So Strategic China Will Have To Use Its Own
September 1, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan Compute 3
China is the world's second largest economy, it has the world's largest population, and it is only a matter of time before has a world-class technology ecosystem spanning the smallest transistors to the largest hyperscale and HPC systems. It simply has enough money, and enough time, and enough smart people, …


text:
Alicia Keys Weighs In On State Of Sneaker Culture For Women
September 21, 2020 . 1 Comment
Grammy Award winning music creative Alicia Keys checked in with Complex and host Joe La Puma for an episode of "Sneaker Shopping" at Stadium Goods. Keys episode marks the resumption of in-store interviews.
Rocking a pair of Air Jordan 4 sneakers made in collaboration with KAWS artist Brian Donnelly (who personally gifted her the pair), Keys (real name Alicia Cook) was asked about her memories of collaborating with Reebok on a pair of Freestyle Hi aka 5411 sneakers in 2012. She explained, "It was such a classic shoe but it was time for a revamp. I loved the experience. I loved the creative process."
When asked about Jordan's 2018 and 2019 well-received collaborative efforts with Aleali May and Melody Ehsani, Keys lauded their shoes but thinks the industry has a ways to go.
She explained, "I think that the industry is a little behind, It's unfortunate that we have to get all excited because two or three women broke into the space. And it kind of makes me nuts, but of course I love what they're doing. It is an outlet and we have a lot of work to do on a lot of levels."
As to her end-of-show purchase, Keys picked up a pair of Nike SB Dunk Ben & Jerry's "Chunky Dunky" sneakers, purchased for husband, Swizz Beatz (real name Kasseem Dean) for a cool $2,575.53.
During the effort, Keys also discussed her seventh studio album, Alicia, which dropped on September 18, 2020 and is now available on all streaming channels.
Check out Alicia Key's "Sneaker Shopping" episode below.
Entertainment Music Sneakers Aleali May Alicia Keys Complex Dunk Freestyle Hi Joe La Puma Jordan Melody Ehsani Reebok


text:
Отмар Санкт-Галленский () (около 690—16 ноября 759) — христианский подвижник, первый аббат Санкт-Галленского монастыря (719—759). Святой, почитаемый Римско-католической церковью (день памяти — 16 ноября) и православный местнопочитаемый святой (день памяти — 29 ноября) Берлинской и Германской епархии РПЦ МП (с 2006 года).

Жизнеописание

Не сохранилось достоверных сведений о месте и точной дате рождения святого Отмара. Считается, что он появился на свет около 690 года. Его родителями была знатная семья алеманнов.

Рано осиротевшего мальчика определили учиться в соборную школу Кура, после окончания которой его рукоположили в священники и назначили настоятелем церкви святого Флорина. Он показал себя как усердный служитель и слухи о его благочестивой жизни распространились широко по округе.

По ходатайству крупного собственника земли Вальтрама святого Отмара направили восстанавливать обитель, когда-то основанную святым Галлом. На месте обветшавших и полуразрушенных келий через некоторое время, благодаря усиленным трудам Отмара, возник общежительный монастырь, посвящённый святому Галлу (Санкт-Галленский монастырь). В 719 году святой Отмар стал первым аббатом новой обители. Санкт-Галленский монастырь вернул себе славу древнего духовного христианского центра и алеманнская знать делала щедрые пожертвования в монастырскую собственность, включая всё новые участки земли. Таким образом, обновлённый монастырь стал крупным земельным собственником. Но главной была всё-таки духовная монашеская жизнь. Лично Отмар, как игумен, совершил 53 монашеских пострига.

Несмотря на почёт и уважением, оказываемые святому как простолюдинами, так и знатью, сам он вёл исключительно скромный образ жизни, щедро творил милостыню, построил богадельню и специальное отдельное помещение, в котором проживали прокаженные, а сам, по ночам, ухаживал за ними.

После покорения франками алеманнов, монастырь согласился принять покровительство Пипина Короткого и тем самым спасся от разорения. Однако богатство обители смущало окрестных землевладельцев, желавших прибрать собственность монахов к своим рукам. Зная об этом, святой Отмар в 759 году отправился искать защиты у короля франков, но по дороге был схвачен и оклеветан в развращении женщины. Он был приговорён к голодной смерти, но, благодаря ходатайству Гоцберта Эшенцского, казнь была заменена пожизненным заключением на рейнском острове Верд. Там он и скончался 16 ноября этого же года.

Через десять лет выяснилась его невиновность. В этом признался клеветник, некий монах Ламберт, разбитый параличём. Настала очередь с честью возвращать святые мощи в обитель.

Почитание
Почитание святого распространилось после перенесения мощей в Санкт-Галлен. Уже в 830 году диакон Гоцберт составил первое житие святого, а 9 сентября 867 года епископом Констанца Соломоном I была произведена официальная канонизация преподобного Отмара. Мощи святого с тех пор покоятся в специально построенной паломнической церкви его имени. А над местом первого захоронения на острове Верд сооружена часовня. До сих пор паломничество к святому Отмару достаточно широко распространено в Южной Германии и Швейцарии.

Иконография
Святого Отмара принято изображать в священнических одеждах с епископским посохом в руке. Дополнительно он может держать в руке Евангелие, а в качестве специального предмета изображается фляга или бочонок с вином. Последний предмет связан с преданием, согласно которому монахи, отправившиеся переносить мощи святого Отмара с острова Верд в Санкт-Галленский монастырь, взяли с собой в дорогу ёмкость с вином. И в течение всего путешествия она оставалась полной, сколько бы из неё не пили.

Покровительство
Святой Отмар является покровителем приграничных районов Германии, Австрии и Швейцарии. Но более всего Швейцарии, поскольку именно с именем святого связано образование независимого государства. Во-первых, будто бы придворный астролог двора Габсбургов предсказал, что сражение в день накануне празднования святого Отмара принесёт победу австрийской армии, а (во-вторых) некий рыцарь Генрих Хюненберг послал в расположение швейцарцев стрелу, к которой была привязана записка с обозначением военного плана герцога Леопольда и добавлены слова: «Да защитит вас святой Отмар на Моргартене». Действительно, в битве при горе Моргартен в 1315 году победа досталась швейцарской армии.

Существует особое предание, согласно которому святой Отмар покровительствует больным детям, поэтому по старинному обычаю на мощах святого освящают детские одежды и затем больной носит их девять дней.

Примечания

Первоисточники
 Gozbert: Vita S Otmari; um 830
 Walahfrid Strabo: Vita S Otmari; 834/838
 Ratpert: Casus monasterii S Galli

Литература
 Peter Ochsenbein: Das Kloster St. Gallen im Mittelalter; Darmstadt 1999. ISBN 3-8062-1378-X.
 Johannes Duft: Sankt Otmar (Bibliotheca Sangallensis 4), Zürich, 1959.

Ссылки

 Преподобный Отмар Санкт-Галленский
 Otmar (Audomar) von St. Gallen
 Otmar
 Hl. Othmar

Преподобные
Святые Единой Церкви
Католические святые
Родившиеся в VII веке
Христианские святые VIII века
Святые Австрии
Святые Германии
Святые Швейцарии
Аббаты Санкт-Галлена
Аббаты VIII века


Communication is the main theme for rJp!
Our key points are words that begin with "R". "Reach, Rank, Research and Recognize" to name a few. As "Japanese People" will be our focus and Japan will be our stage, and we have selected the name rJp. Our purpose is to introduce Japan to the world and help businesses understand the country and benefits within Japan.
rJp has been helping many foreign companies localizing to Japanese market; especially, in the field of Marketing Communications. Since we are strong at helping small to middle-size companies, we know the needs of companies that have just entered Japan.
Umeda Bldg. 1F 1-1-6 Matsugaya Taitoku, 111-0036 Tokyo.
Hiro has been in the marketing communication field for about 20 years. He has also been a consultant for a US-based communication company until starting rJp Corporation.He graduated from Utah State Univ. Additionally, he studied at Beijing Dying College for one year and half.
© 2015 株式会社アールジェイピー・マーケティングコミュニケーションズ. All Rights Reserved.


Maybelline's latest collaboration isn't an influencer or celebrity deal — it's a product line with Puma.
L'Oréal-owned Maybelline has teamed with the sneaker brand on Puma x Maybelline, a streetwear-inspired collection of five limited-edition makeup products, to be released globally in 35 countries on Feb. 8. In the U.S., the collection will be sold exclusively at Ulta Beauty, launching online in February and rolling out to the retailers' stores on March 17.
Puma x Maybelline consists of five items, including three new products — Smudge-Proof Mascara, Matte + Metallic Duo Eye Stick and Color + Gloss Duo Face Stick. There are also new shades of two existing Maybelline products — SuperStay Matte Ink Liquid Lipstick and Master Chrome Metallic Highlighter.
The high-performance products, inspired by streetwear trends, are long-wearing and made with super-saturated pigment. Product names were given a streetwear-inspired bent — for instance, Warrior Flow, Hustle and Burn, and Knockout.


text:
Polště is a municipality and village in Jindřichův Hradec District in the South Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 100 inhabitants.

Polště lies approximately  south-west of Jindřichův Hradec,  north-east of České Budějovice, and  south of Prague.

References

Villages in Jindřichův Hradec District


text:
The Capital Newsman
All things big four D.C. sports (Redskins, Nationals, Wizards, Capitals)
Wizards Progress Report: Small Forwards
Whereas point guard and shooting guard are crowded positions in some regard — although not as much anymore, with Justin Robinson waived, Chris Chiozza in Brooklyn on a two-way deal, and Garrison Mathews banged up — small forward has been the position where you ask yourself, "Do they really have to play someone?" For a variety of reasons, this group hasn't lived up to its billing. However, there should be hope moving forward.
Isaac Bonga
The Wizards acquired Bonga in the Dwight Howard trade with the Lakers this summer. The 20-year-old German is very new to the game of basketball, so any analysis of him was based on projection. At 6-foot-8 with the ability to handle the ball, he seemed to provide versatility, with the potential to develop into a point forward. If nothing else, he should be able to serve as a defensive presence.
Bonga has played in 31 of the Wizards' 36 games, starting 20 of them. For now, he is a defensive-mind wing player who won't steal shots from the team's top scorers.
Although he's a starter, he's only playing 16.2 minutes per game. He's been an low-volume, efficient shooter (56.9 percent) from two-point range and he's very active defensively (although his basic statistics don't quite back that up), but the Wizards would undoubtedly like to see more from him.
Bonga is raw, but he appears to be trending in the right direction. He's had back-to-back career nights — 15 points on 5-for-6 shooting on Saturday and 10 points and seven rebounds on Monday. If he can keep this up, he'll stay within Scott Brooks' rotation — if not the starting lineup — past this season.
Troy Brown Jr.
Brown spent the vast majority of his rookie season either outside of the Wizards' rotation or in the G League. It was a lost season for him, although there is some value in making him — even as the 15th pick in the draft — climb the ladder.
With that said, there's a reason why Brown has only started 14 of the 33 games he's played this year. Although his skill set makes him a logical sixth or seventh man, his performance has also been spotty. He's averaging 10 points and nearly six rebounds in 25.8 minutes per game, but his production has come in bunches.
Even so, he undeniably has talent. The Wizards' recent matchup against the Celtics is a reminder that he has comparable traits and abilities to Jaylen Brown, a third-overall pick who also had a bumpy start to his career before becoming a force on both ends of the court this season. But none of that matters until D.C.'s Brown delivers on that potential.
He may be doing just that. Through four games this month, he's averaging 16 points and over nine rebounds per game — including double-digit points in all four. Looking even further out, in the 15 games since his 22-point outburst against the vaunted Clippers on Dec. 8, he's averaging just below 14 points and more than six boards per game with at least one steal in all but two of them. If this is a sign of things to come, he might be tapping into the player the Wizards had hoped for when they drafted him.
The outlook isn't so fortunate for Miles. After missing the start of the season while recovering from foot surgery, the 32-year-old wing suited up for 10 games before suffering ligament damage in his left wrist. There's a good chance that he won't return this season, taking away the one three-point threat the Wizards appeared to have at small forward.
With that said, he seems to be in good spirits and is likely sticking around for at least a little while longer — if not all season. He'll be a welcome addition if he ever returns to the court, but his veteran presence is vital on such a young team — not to mention at a position where the other players are both only 20 year old.
In terms of reps, it's doubtful that much will change at small forward. Bonga and Brown did play elevated minutes against Boston — with Admiral Schofield as the only available true power forward — but both will remain well within the rotation when players return to action. However, they might be walking on relatively thin ice in that regard, considering that the young guards have also provided a boost recently.
What their true on-court roles are going forward has yet to be firmly established, though. Both can handle the ball and have the makings of solid defenders at multiple positions. However, neither of them have shot the ball as proficiently from distance as many small forwards do. While that doesn't necessarily have to change, it would help them stay on the court in high-leverage situations, especially considering this team lacks three-point shooting — Isaiah Thomas and Davis Bertans are the only core players that have done it particularly well this season, although an uptick from Bradley Beal is likely.
An improvement in this area is absolutely possible — it's actually fairly common.
Year 1: 34.1%
Justise Winslow
Years 1-2: 25.8%
Pascal Siakam
Year 1: 19%
The key trend is that most of these players — Porter may be the exception — have elevated themselves once they've been embraced as scorers and playmakers — and frankly all-around players on both ends of the court — as opposed to shooters. Letting them do what they do best has made them more successful shooters; success breeds success. If the Wizards can take this approach with Bonga and (in particular) Brown, who knows what might happen?
Stephen Newman	Wizards	Leave a comment January 8, 2020 4 Minutes
Wizards Progress Report: Shooting Guards
Whereas the point guard position is in a state of flux from top to bottom, there is some certainty at shooting guard. The starter isn't a mystery, and the pecking order behind him is also relatively clear.
With that said, the Wizards need more from this group (from multiple perspectives) if they want to separate from the other teams near the bottom of the league standings — which no one outside the organization can definitively say they do want. That process starts at the top — in terms of both players and staff. Continue reading "Wizards Progress Report: Shooting Guards" →
Stephen Newman	Wizards	Leave a comment January 4, 2020 January 6, 2020 4 Minutes
Ron Rivera hire has a chance to change team culture for the better
Ron Rivera gets introduced as head coach of the Washington Redskins. (Brad Mills-USA TODAY Sports)
It's been a rough season all around for the Washington Redskins. The team's dealt with front office ineptitude, a star player that refused to ever play in a Redskins uniform ever again and, of course, just plain bad on-field performances.
It's arguable this was the worst season in franchise history, yet this offseason doesn't feel quite so hopeless.
Continue reading "Ron Rivera hire has a chance to change team culture for the better" →
Robby Fletcher	Uncategorized	Leave a comment January 3, 2020 3 Minutes
Wizards Progress Report: Point Guards
In many respects, point guard was the Wizards' most uncertain position entering the season. Aside from John Wall — who might not even play this year, due to his Achilles injury — Washington didn't retain a single player at the position who ended last season on its roster.
Rather than making a splash, Tommy Sheppard opted to sign a former All-Star to a one-year "buy low" deal, a lifelong backup for two years, an undrafted rookie to a semi-guaranteed deal, and another youngster who has split time between the NBA and the G-League to a two-way contract. Continue reading "Wizards Progress Report: Point Guards" →
Stephen Newman	Wizards	1 Comment January 2, 2020 January 2, 2020 5 Minutes
The definitive ranking of Redskins Dysfunction
With 2019 coming to a close, it's time to reflect on what made this a truly mediocre decade of Washington Redskins football.
Sure, there were good times in the last 10 years, the two division titles stand out the most, but the majority of Redskins fans would agree that the bad times outweigh any positive moments enormously.
And that's why we are here today, to reflect on the moments both on and off the field that were truly a part of this organization's unique brand of dysfunction. While I tried to keep it down to just 10 moments, I'm sure there are plenty that I also missed which just goes to show exactly how bad this organization has been this decade.
So, let's kick off this list in style, and look towards the next decade as a means for hope, and a chance for better days.
Continue reading "The definitive ranking of Redskins Dysfunction" →
Robby Fletcher	Uncategorized	Leave a comment December 30, 2019 13 Minutes
Early impressions from the Capitals' first 20 games of the season
It's been just 20 games into the 2019-20 NHL season, but the Capitals are already shaping up to be a serious Stanley Cup contender after starting their season with a league-best 14–2–4 record.
The team has been on a serious hot streak as of late, securing at least a point in their last 13 contests; their last loss in regulation came against the Avalanche on Oct. 14. Continue reading "Early impressions from the Capitals' first 20 games of the season" →
Robby Fletcher	Capitals	Leave a comment November 15, 2019 December 20, 2019 5 Minutes
The Adventure of Jonny Venters in D.C.
He's already won Comeback Player of the Year once before. If Jonny Venters pitches next year, he should win it again by default.
Venters has already undergone "three and a half" Tommy John surgeries. He also looked like his prime self — one of the most dominant left-handed relievers in baseball — in 2018. The fact that he was even available in late May (when the Nationals signed him to a minor league contract) was largely due to his checkered past health-wise. Continue reading "The Adventure of Jonny Venters in D.C." →
Stephen Newman	Nationals	Leave a comment November 15, 2019 December 20, 2019 1 Minute


My friend, Aldona, has introduced me to some new music from the country she was born in… Lithuania.
One of her favorite artist is Andrius Mamontovas, a Lithuanian rock musician, songwriter, actor, performer and record producer.
So I downloaded his album, Saldi.Juoda.Naktis. I don't understand what he is singing, but I like the sound of the songs.
Thanks, Aldona for sharing your culture and music with me!