We're back: 6-8 May 2016!
1:54 New York is back! The fair will be held from 6-8 May 2016 at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, New York. More information soon.
Looking for an incentive to visit 1:54 NY this year? Or in need of a recapitulation? Watch 1:54 New York 2015 in all its moving glory bellow.


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The New Jewish State in the Levant: A Nuclear Power Led by Fanatics
Israel's colonial democracy has given birth to a potentially more extreme type of 'Jewish state' akin to a more sophisticated and modern version of the 'Islamic state'. But unlike ISIL, which was conceived and defeated by war, Israel is the only nuclear power in the Middle East today.
The fanatics, fascists and far-right fantasists, who won this week's elections in Israel, are about to form the most openly extremist government in the country's history. It will surely include the Jewish state's new rising star, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a radical who spits violence and hates Palestinians in whose support the government will stand.
A majority of religious nationalists and ultra-Orthodox parties in government, the first in Israel's history, would like to transform the Jewish state into a theocracy that lives by halakhah (Jewish law) and finish colonizing the whole of Palestine, come what may. .
But could they? What can they actually do that their predecessors have not already done, in terms of demanding death and destruction, and further expanding the illegal Jewish settlement in Palestine?
Benjamin Netanyahu, who is likely to form and lead the new coalition government, knows from his experience as Israel's longest-serving prime minister that there is a limit to how far Israel can go before it begins to meet fierce Palestinian resistance and Arab. A little more, and Israel could also lose support in Europe and the United States; support that is indispensable to its security and regional standing.
He has previously preferred gradual steps to sweeping moves that could alienate Israel's main backers and its new regional partners. Therefore, Netanyahu may try to curb his partners' drive to annex the occupied West Bank and ethnically cleanse it of its Palestinian inhabitants.
But then again, it is doubtful that he can tame these religious fanatics, knowing full well that they have control over his survival as prime minister; the only guarantee for him to stay out of prison, after being prosecuted for serious charges of corruption.
See also Can France and Germany repair their relationship?
I think the genie is finally out of the bottle.
The elections have opened a Pandora's box that may well lead Israelis to the dark side. They have exposed the fragility of Israel's peculiar liberality as a colonial state and exposed widespread fanaticism among the majority of the electorate after decades of unrestricted military occupation.
The rebellious pronouncements of Netanyahu's outrageous new associates reflect the prevailing beliefs among most of Israel's right-wing parties, including his own Likud, that have ruled the country for decades. But now that they openly boast of Jewish supremacy, it is harder for Netanyahu's hasbara to hide his racism from the rest of the world.
After all, it was Bibi, as Netanyahu is known, who in August brokered the union of two or three small fanatical parties to ensure that they maximize their number of seats and join his future coalition government. They did very well: the Religious Zionist Party won 14 seats. Its lawmakers include Ben-Gvir.
Netanyahu's other two coalition partners, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties Shas and UJT, which are socially regressive and politically fanatical, won 18 seats. Together with the 32 far-right members of Likud, they have a comfortable like-minded majority of 64 seats in the 120-member Knesset.
Emboldened by the new mandate, the ever-smug Netanyahu could skip the incremental strategy he has adopted so far, in favor of a maximalist agenda. Domestically, that could include him trying to control the judiciary and other levers of state, and further marginalizing Israel's Palestinian minority. At the regional level, it could mean annexing occupied territories and bombing Iran's nuclear facilities, at the risk of international backlash and war.
But it will?
Perhaps the answer lies in his recently published autobiography, written with re-election in mind. In this 733-page monstrosity, Bibi: My Story, Netanyahu repeatedly stresses the Iranian nuclear threat to Israel's security and the need to end it once and for all, and insists on marginalizing Palestine to normalize relations with the Arab world.
See also What is happening in Chad?
Like a broken record, he repeatedly dismisses the "centrality of Palestine" in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, and condemns all forms of nuclear diplomacy and any kind of normalization of relations with Iran as naive and reckless.
He makes it clear that he is cheeky Machiavellian; who worships power, hard power, and believes that superior military power is the only way to achieve peace or security. A cruel narcissist, he is ready to do anything to stay in office, including betraying his closest allies and associates.
Like all populists, he is quite delusional and conniving. Although he is the longest-serving prime minister in the state's history, Netanyahu claims in the book that throughout his career, elites, the press, the judiciary and the deep state, even American presidents, have been trying to catch it. .
Bibi, the book, is all about chutzpah: where Netanyahu, the victim of countless conspiracies, tells tantalizing stories about Bibi, the victor and victor over all living enemies, real and imagined. But since the book is riddled with lies, exaggerations, and other mischaracterizations, it's a safe bet that he's also lying about himself and his family, allowing the reader to read between the lines and beyond.
In that way, one can deduce what this tenaciously ambitious political animal represents, but it is difficult to discern who it is; the real from the fictitious, the sacred from the hollow. It's like there's nothing really there; nothing beyond character and carefully packaged clichés.
Lacking any empathy, he won't let anything or anyone get in his way. The experience does not humiliate Netanyahu. On the contrary: with each chapter, he becomes more arrogant and confident, talking about himself walking among the greats, going back and forth between Washington and Moscow, as if he were the prophet of Israel, leader of a superpower, as if he were invincible.
See also Iran's Supreme Leader Breaks Silence On Protests, Blames US
That mood, coupled with his new victory, may well entice Netanyahu to act ever more aggressively in Palestine, and toward Iran and the region, to make Israel reign supreme in the Middle East. As he sees it, America is stupid and President Joe Biden is meek and weak; the Arabs are divided and their leaders are cynical; the European Union is worried about Ukraine and Russia at war; and China is busy with, well, China.
But I have news for Bibi and her "baboons", as the opposition referred to her supporters. Any overreach is a sure mistake that risks major setbacks on the military, political and other fronts. Palestine will always remain a holy symbol of injustice for the Arabs and central to resolving their conflict with Israel, even though some leaders have turned their backs on the Palestinians to appease Washington. And last but not least, arrogance invites disaster; any bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities will only strengthen its regime and lead to a regional war with untold repercussions for Israel, the United States and the Middle East.
Always remember: the higher the ascent, the harder the fall.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


 Move well, balance well, see well. Come join us in exploring ways to improve our dexterity, be able to catch ourselves before we fall, and train our eyes to track the world as it moves around us. In this 6-week course, we will mobilize all the major joints in our body, challenge our vestibular (balance) system, and look at vision in much more depth than letters on a wall.
Week 1: Talk about goals, discuss higher level nervous system function than others teach and start to see what may have been holding us back that we never realized. We will start with some basic jaw mobility, great for any of you with TMJ/sleep issues!
Week 2: Foot and hand mobility, gaze stabilization.
Week 3: Wrists and ankles, eye convergence and divergence.
Week 4: Knees and elbows, eye circles.
Week 5: Hips and shoulders, saccades and smooth pursuits.
Week 6: Neck, Spine and Pelvis.
After this course, you will find that your confidence in movement has greatly increased, allowing you to pursue any type of performance goal. These skills are valuable for all activities and that full-contact sport we call life. Over many years, we have accumulated a great many compensations. Take the time to fix those and watch your potential increase in no time!
3 Pillars of Performance Level 1 runs every week starting Saturday April 27. Cost is $150. Weekly emails with a summary of weekly class curriculum, and drill follow-along videos will be included. Package this with 3 discounted private one hour sessions for $249 ($50 savings, purchased in person). In private sessions we will take the time to refine the drills, answer question, talk more about your own personal goals and lay out your own path forward.


Women trying to do men's work.
She's probably just testing the wheel's reflexes.
Now I know how the ladies feel when I try to do the dishes.
I really want to hear what they are saying.
Oh look it's Camila Cabella and the other chicks.
Hate when my tires get loose and I have to hammer them back onto the rim.


RRSP: In Canada, you have the option to contribute to a TFSA or RRSP. Both have different benefits and it's very unlikely you'll max out both or reach your contribution limits in your 20s and 30s. Vision board we'll get there in our 40s.
Go with the TFSA unless you're making enough you're paying hella tax and/or you don't have tuition credits.


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Driver pleads guilty for killing pedestrian
WILLISTON-- A driver accused of killing a pedestrian who was trying to cross Main Street in downtown Williston late last year has pleaded guilty to negligent homicide.
By Williston Herald
Bryan Wipf, 22, appeared Thursday in court, where he admitted to hitting Lyle Forsberg while he was driving on a suspended license.
In March, Wipf, of Williston, pleaded not guilty to manslaughter, a Class B felony. A trial was set for next week and plans for jury selection were in place, but were canceled after Wipf opted to accept an agreement created by attorneys.
As part of the deal, prosecutors amended the manslaughter charge to negligent homicide, a Class C felony.
Williams County prosecutor Nathan Madden recommended a five-year prison sentence, with three years suspended, and credit for the time Wipf has served in jail since his December arrest. A 30-day sentence for driving with a suspended license is also part of the proposed deal, Madden said.
A sentencing hearing has yet to be scheduled.
Authorities say Wipf was waiting to make a left turn off of Second Street to head north on Main Street when he struck Forsberg, who was crossing Main Street heading east the afternoon of Dec. 22.
Forsberg, 64, suffered internal injuries and died on the way to a Minot hospital.
Related Topics: NORTH DAKOTAACCIDENTS


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Vampire Killing Kit
For Halloween, a bit of news from KOVELS:
Vampires on TV today are lovable, not dangerous, so there seems to be no need for vampire-killing kits. Killing kits were needed when people were threatened by vampires. Kits have been sold at five or more auctions over the last several years. Each kit was assembled, so the contents varied. Prices ranged from $1,000 on eBay years ago, to $12,000 and $20,300 in 2003, to a claimed $35,000 asking price for a kit eBay wouldn't allow. Last year a kit in an American walnut case sold for $14,850. It held stakes, mirrors, a gun with silver bullets, crosses, a Bible, holy water, candles, and garlic.
This Saturday, October 31, 2009, another kit will be auctioned. It's in a rosewood case with mother-of-pearl inlay in the shape of a cross. The required pistol and silver bullets are in a small coffin-shaped case. There are also holy water vials, a prayer book, a cleaver, and a mirror. Wonder how these things protect you from vampires? Hold a mirror in front of a person and if there is no reflection, that person is a vampire. Religious items, garlic, and candle flames scare vampires and chase them away. Silver bullets or a stake through the heart kills vampires. Most vampire kits probably were made after 1897, when the novel "Dracula" was published and made people fear vampires. The kits were made as souvenirs sold at hotels in Europe.
Posted in Vampire Killing Kit
Nice Story About Community Life
GREENPOINT JOURNAL
A Place to Worship, and to Jam, Shop and Feast
By RACHEL GRAVES
The mostly empty pews at the Lutheran Church of the Messiah spoke of a dying congregation. But as the 17 worshipers returned to their seats after communion on a recent Sunday, they faced a more encouraging symbol: guitars, keyboards and drums poking up from the choir loft, hinting at the church's double life.
The instruments belong to two rock bands that, along with many other artists and local food enthusiasts, consider the church in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a secular home.
"It's a great reminder of the duality of the space," said the Rev. Griffin Thomas, pastor of the church, gesturing at the instruments. "The creativity and the art nurtured here make the space more sacred and holy."
The church will mark its 110th anniversary on Sunday, celebrating its founding as one of the first English-speaking Lutheran churches in New York.
Once bustling with 500 parishioners at Sunday services, the church has seen its congregation wane as the neighborhood has changed.
By the time he took over as pastor in 2004, the church was "like a tomb," Pastor Thomas said. "Maybe three hours a week the church was being used out of seven days, and the rest of the time it was just sitting here, completely locked up."
Pastor Thomas thought the lack of activity was bad stewardship of the congregation's main asset, its building. His favorite part of the church was the choir loft, nestled near the vaulted ceiling and rose-tinted because of a pink, violet and green stained-glass window.
Mr. Thomas cleaned out the loft with the idea that perhaps an artist or writer could work there. He advertised it on Craigslist, calling it a "unique space." Instead of the quiet artist he was expecting, a rock band responded to his ad.
The members of the band, Penelope, arrived at 129 Russell Street to meet with Pastor Thomas and were stunned to find a century-old brick church decorated for Christmas, complete with a Nativity scene.
"It was like, 'Say what?' " said Allen Wilcox, who plays synthesizers and bass in the band, now reincarnated as Friends Academy. They were intimidated but intrigued by the hallowed space.
Pastor Thomas was worried about noise, but he agreed to let the band rehearse in the church. Friends Academy also brought in another band.
A neighbor did complain about noise, but even that turned into a positive part of the church's transformation: The neighbor was Brooke O'Harra, a co-founder of the Theater of a Two-Headed Calf. When she learned about the band, she asked if her group could rehearse in the church's humble green basement. Pastor Thomas eagerly agreed.
Soon, other theater groups were giving performances in the basement, and the pastor was also working with the well-known concert organizer Todd Patrick, or Todd P., to put on rock shows there.
Beyond the arts, the church hosts a community-supported agriculture program, allowing customers to buy directly from local farmers. As they pick out their cherry tomatoes and garlic bulbs, they often hear drumming filtering down from the choir loft.
And the help goes both ways: Instead of renting the space, the groups generally donate part of their proceeds.
For the anniversary celebration on Sunday, the worship service will include Bishop Robert A. Rimbo and many of the artists who use the space.
Members of the congregation have accepted the changes with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Norma Dodenhoff, who has attended the church for 75 years, said she initially found it "overwhelming having all of these strangers coming in," but now believed it had worked out well.
Asked about the bands, Mrs. Dodenhoff gets a mischievous smile on her face. "The young men are delightful," she said. "Do I like their music? That's another story."
Pastor Thomas said his main concern was respecting the neighborhood and the church. "I obviously don't want crowd-surfing, mosh-pit, stage-diving kind of people," he said. "I like to have people who appreciate the space and want it to continue going rather than it being disposable."
The scene on a recent Saturday night could not have been more different from Sunday services. The church basement was packed with about 250 hipsters eating soup, listening to live music and voting on which of 14 artists' proposals should receive a grant paid for with participants' $10 and $20 entrance fees, based on a pay-what-you-can model.
The event, Funding Emerging Art With Sustainable Tactics, or Feast, was started by Jeff Hnilicka, an arts administrator who got to know the church and Pastor Thomas by buying his vegetables there. After a night of barely controlled chaos, Mr. Hnilicka handed a bag of cash — $1,200 — to the winners, Elizabeth Knafo and Dylan Gauthier. Their project, Green My Bodega, plans to connect local farms with bodegas.
The church's many uses have expanded Pastor Thomas's pastoral duties considerably: arts impresario, composter, even bouncer, herding beer drinkers who spilled out of the Feast event off the sidewalk. "Not in front of the church," he told them.
Posted in church theater
Crawdaddy Magazine
By an indirect route, I just came upon a mention of an article in Crawdaddy and had a nostalgia smackdown. Vol. 1, No.1, a step up from his Swarthmore mimeos, was published – – or more accurately, assembled – – by Paul Williams in my Cambridge, MA, living room, chez Truesdell.
Posted in Crawdaddy
Avenue Junot . . .
And Montmartre heights
Posted in Montmartre
Could we possibly call a moratorium among intelligent people on the casual use of Nazi this and Hitler that? (Yes, I know about the soup Nazi; I do not totally lack humor) but I'm sure I'm not the only one who cringes at these refs and name-calling in a political context.
<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>
Also this exchange about a Boston Globe book review:
BEHOLD MY FATHER
Posted by David Mehegan March 25, 2008 11:57 AM
I have not read Honor Moore's book, "The Bishop's Daughter," about her father, Episcopal bishop Paul Moore, but did read the excerpt in the March 3 New Yorker. She reveals in some detail her father's lifelong secret (though his family knew) that he had a gay life, in addition to being the married father of several children. On March 17, the magazine published a letter from two of the author's siblings, deploring her act of outing her father, five years after his death.
"Doesn't it matter," wrote Susanna McKean Moore and Paul Moore 3d, "even when someone is dead, that his most fervently held private life, and the unnecessarily explicit details of his marriage, are exposed against his wishes?"
What is the answer to this question? It came up in the case of Anatole Broyard, who kept his African-American family history hidden from the world, even from his children. In that case, Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote the first story — again, in the New Yorker — but Broyard's daughter wrote the book ("One Drop"), and it was her story as much as her father's.
I feel fairly certain that any one of us has things in our pasts, or facts about ourselves, that we might not happily see exposed to the world, even if they aren't deep dark secrets. If we have chosen to keep them to ourselves, how much time are we allowed, after we die, before someone in our family rips the cover off and says, "Well, Pop, you didn't want people to know about this, but now you're dead and my need to tell a story, and be interviewed and go on tour, and earn royalties, is what matters to me"?
If I knew that my father had been ashamed of some things in his own past (and who doesn't have such things?), chances are I would let them die with him, unless there were some wrong that needed to be righted. Even if he had been a famous man, I like to think that I would not treat his hurts as my raw material, to plunder at will.
After a certain length of time, to be sure, history does take precedence — no one deplores the public knowledge of Franklin Roosevelt's marital infidelity or physical disability, though they were kept largely hidden in his lifetime. But it is odd, to me at least, that a member of a family would be the one first to turn a bright light on the hidden truth.
There were two responses; mine is the second:
After reading the NYer's excerpt of "The Bishop's Daughter" by Honor Moore, I was struck, among other things, by the author's first name. Did she truly "Honor" her father? Of course not. She violated his privacy and trust and exposed his secret life to the world against his and her siblings wishes for her own personal gain. Although I have no first hand knowledge of the author's motives, I can't help but think that she is driven by her need to cleanse her feelings of guilt and abandonment. She will have much to answer for if one day she meets him in the afterlife.
Posted by Charles Schwab March 28, 08 03:04 PM
Whoa! That was then, this is now. Only the most benighted among us would argue that same-sex attractions are shameful; the same goes for folks who would be put off by someone's so called black blood.I hope you agree that Bishop Moore did nothing inherently wrong – – social mores forced him into the closet. Anatole Broyard's racial identity was, in some quarters, what you describe as a fact that one "might not happily see exposed to the world." Did you mean then or now?Your purple prose – – "hidden from the world," "rip the cover off," "raw material, to plunder at will" – – lends legitimacy to the idea that being gay or black still carries some stigma. Your innuendo suggests that Honor Moore is some tacky tell-all writer when in fact she's an established and respected literary figure.Of course, some outings are better than others. When Senator Kerry's Jewish roots came to light, they, rightfully, lent him a broader cultural context. But Eugene Robinson had to wear a bulletproof vest the day he became an Episcopal bishop. Your readers would welcome clarification of what, in the realms of race, culture, or sexual orientation, you still consider "deep, dark secrets."Marilyn Richardson
Posted in Honor Moore, language matters
Oct 16 Sesquicentennial of John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry
John Brown of Osawatomie spake on his dying day:
"I will not have to shrive my soul a priest in Slavery's pay.
But let some poor slave-mother whom I have striven to free,
With her children, from the gallows-stair put up a prayer for me!"
John Brown of Osawatomie, they led him out to die;
And lo! a poor slave-nother with her little child pressed nigh.
Then the bold, blue eye grew tender, and the old, harsh face
grew mild.
As he stooped between the jeering ranks and kissed the negro's
child!
The shadow of his stormy life that moment fell apart;
And they who blamed the bloody hand forgave the loving heart.
And they who blessed the guilty means redeemed the good intent,
And round the grisly fighter's hair the martyr's aureole bent.
– – Whittier
This event did not actually happen, Brown was led to the gallows ringed round by soldiers for fear of a rescue attempt.
JOHN BROWN OF OSAWATOMIE
HERE LIES BURIED
BORN AT TORRINGTON, CONNECTICUT
HE EMIGRATED TO KANSAS IN 1855 WHERE HE TOOK AN
ACTIVE PART IN THE CONTEST AGAINST THE PRO-SLAVERY PARTY.
HE GAINED IN AUGUST 1856 A VICTORY AT OSAWATOMIE
OVER A SUPERIOR NUMBER OF MISSOURIANS WHO HAD
INVADED KANSAS (WHENCE HIS SURNAME "OSAWATOMIE")
HE CONCEIVED THE IDEA OF BECOMING THE LIBERATOR OF
THE NEGRO SLAVES IN THE SOUTH AND ON THE NIGHT OF
OCTOBER 16, 1859 AT THE HEAD OF A DEVOTED BAND OF
22 FOLLOWERS HE SEIZED THE UNITED STATES ARSENAL
AT HARPER'S FERRY, VIRGINIA WITH THE VIEW OF ARMING
THE NEGROS WHO MIGHT COME TO HIS FORTIFIED CAMP.
IN THE FIGHT WITH THE UNITED STATES TROOPS AND CIVILIANS
WHICH FOLLOWED HE WAS OVERPOWERED AND TAKEN PRISONER
OCTOBER 18, 1859, HE WAS TRIED BY THE COMMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA
AT CHARLESTOWN, VIRGINIA AND WAS EXECUTED DECEMBER 2, 1859.
HERE LIE BURIED WITH HIM
TWELVE OF HIS FOLLOWERS
WATSON BROWN (SON OF JOHN BROWN) OF NORTH ELBA, N.Y.
OLIVER BROWN (SON OF JOHN BROWN) OF NORTH ELBA, N.Y.
WILLIAM THOMPSON, OF NORTH ELBA, N.Y.
DAUPHIN ADOLPHUS THOMPSON, OF NORTH ELBA, N.Y.
JOHN HENRI KAGI, ADJUTANT
WILLIAM H. LEEMAN, LIEUTENANT
JEREMIAH C. ANDERSON, LIEUTENANT
STEWARD TAYLOR
DANGERFIELD NEWBY, NEGRO
THE ABOVE TEN MEN WERE KILLED AT THE HARPER'S FERRY FIGHT
AARON D. STEVENS, CAPTAIN
ALBERT HAZLETT, LIEUTENANT
THE ABOVE TWO WERE TAKEN PRISONERS AND HANGED MARCH 16, 1860
On the bottom left:
THE FOLLOWING MEN OF
JOHN BROWN'S BAND ESCAPED BUT WERE
CAPTURED AND HANGED DECEMBER 16, 1859.
JOHN E. COOK, CAPTAIN
EDWIN COPPOC, LIEUTENATN
SHIELDS GREEN, NEGRO
JOHN A. COPELAND, NEGRO
On the bottom right:
JOHN BROWN'S BAND ESCAPED.
OWEN BROWN, CAPTAIN (SON OF JOHN BROWN)
FRANCIS JACKSON MERRIAM
CHARLES PLUMMER TIDD, CAPTIAN
BARCLAY COPPOC
OSBORNE P. ANDERSON, NEGRO
JOHN ANDERSON, NEGRO
THIS TABLET ERECTED THROUGH THE EFFORTS OF BYRON R. BREWSTER OF LAKE PLACID, N.Y. 1916
DESIGNED AND CAST BY JNO. WILLIAMS INC. NEW YORK
. . . and of course the famous Horace Pippin painting
Posted in John Brown
"Save your Confederate money boys, the South will rise again"
HAMMOND, La. (AP) — A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have.
Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.
Neither Bardwell nor the couple immediately returned phone calls from The Associated Press. But Bardwell told the Daily Star of Hammond that he was not a racist.
"I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house," Bardwell said. "My main concern is for the children."
Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.
"I don't do interracial marriages because I don't want to put children in a situation they didn't bring on themselves," Bardwell said. "In my heart, I feel the children will later suffer."
If he does an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said.
"I try to treat everyone equally," he said.
Thirty-year-old Beth Humphrey and 32-year-old Terence McKay, both of Hammond, say they will consult the U.S. Justice Department about filing a discrimination complaint.
Humphrey told the newspaper she called Bardwell on Oct. 6 to inquire about getting a marriage license signed. She says Bardwell's wife told her that Bardwell will not sign marriage licenses for interracial couples.
"It is really astonishing and disappointing to see this come up in 2009," said American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana attorney Katie Schwartzman. "The Supreme Court ruled as far back as 1963 that the government cannot tell people who they can and cannot marry."
The ACLU was preparing a letter for the Louisiana Supreme Court, which oversees the state justices of the peace, asking them to investigate Bardwell and see if they can remove him from office, Schwartzman said.
"He knew he was breaking the law, but continued to do it," Schwartzman said.
According to the clerk of court's office, application for a marriage license must be made three days before the ceremony because there is a 72-hour waiting period. The applicants are asked if they have previously been married. If so, they must show how the marriage ended, such as divorce.
Other than that, all they need is a birth certificate and Social Security card.
The license fee is $35, and the license must be signed by a Louisiana minister, justice of the peace or judge. The original is returned to the clerk's office.
© 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Posted in Interracial
Song and Poetry
A fine song; a poem still gathering new verses, and a birthday while on tour . . .
And a masterpiece:


text:
Archives for posts with tag: Zwingli
Make you Perfect
Sermon for Evensong on the 13th Sunday after Trinity, 26th August 2018
Hebrews 13:16-21 – see https://tinyurl.com/y754tzue
'Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant,
Make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is wellpleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ'.
This lovely blessing comes from the letter to the Hebrews, from the end of our second lesson which Len read for us. It's often used at Easter time, and if you are a Methodist, as I used to be, you will be familiar with the blessing as it is the one used at the end of the communion service.
May God make us perfect. It's a really inspiring idea to go out with at the end of the service. May God make us perfect, perfect to do His will. I'm not quite sure how we would put that today: 'perfectly suited' to do it, perhaps.
The modern Bible translation in some of our other services [NRSV Anglicised Edition] says, '.. make you complete in everything good, so that you may do His will..', which isn't so memorable, and I'm not sure that it's any more understandable; because in normal speech today, we don't say we are 'complete' to do something. [I have also put at the beginning a link to Paul Ingram's very useful 'katapi' site, showing the excellent New English Bible translation alongside the Greek original].
We don't talk about being 'complete' people. 'The Compleat Angler' was the title of the famous book by Izaak Walton published in 1653, which subsequently went on to become the name of countless riverside pubs: 'The Complete [sic, 1760] Angler, or, Contemplative Man's Recreation' was the full title of the book. You can get an early edition, a 1760 one, printed 100 years after the original one was published, for the bargain price of £1,500, I see, on the Internet, at biblio.co.uk: but you don't have to pay such a lot, because it looks to be still in print, at much more modest prices.
The book title, The Compleat Angler, is the only use of the word 'complete' to describe a person that has occurred to me. You certainly might say that some thing was complete: my Hoover is complete with all its attachments. The spares kit in the boot of the car is complete. But I, a person, am not normally referred to as 'complete' in that sense. Tom Wolfe wrote a good novel called 'A Man in Full', published in 1998. The description 'in full', 'A Man in Full', has something of the same connotation as 'complete' has in the NRSV Bible.
Thinking about this prompted me to read the passage in the original Greek to see what this intriguing couple of sentences really says. It's very inspiring, particularly at the end of an uplifting service, to feel that, with God's help, we could be perfect. But does it really mean that?
The Greek word, καταρτισαι, is a word which means to 'fully prepare' someone or something, to 'restore' them, to put them in full working order. It's not really the same as 'perfect', though – at least not nowadays.
Clearly the translators of the King James Bible (which is the version Len read from, the one we use for Evensong and Mattins), those three groups of learned scholars, used the word 'perfect' slightly differently from how we would use it today. They actually adopted, nearly word for word, the translation by William Tyndale just under 100 years earlier. Tyndale's two editions, of 1525 and 1535, both used the word 'perfect': they said, '… make you perfect in all good works, to do his will, working in you that which is pleasant in his sight…' In those days 'perfect' had a connotation of being 'apt' or 'well-equipped', as well as of being faultless.
These famous words in the Bible, in Hebrews, first written by Tyndale, link us right back to the time of the Reformation. William Tyndale was martyred because he dared to translate the Bible out of Latin into English. The Reformers, like him, Martin Luther and John Calvin, didn't want there to be any barriers between the people and God in worship.
The idea, that only the priests could understand the words, was something that the Reformers were dead against. 'Hoc est … corpus meum', the Latin for 'This is my body', in the Communion service, became 'hocus pocus'. Hocus pocus – hoc est corpus. That's what the ordinary people tended to think about it. Sacrament had become superstition. I do think that, if we let words just pass by unexamined, we might fall into the same trap.
Article XXIV of the 39 Articles reflects the Reformers' intentions. Thomas Cranmer, who wrote it, was familiar with the work of Martin Luther, and may have met both him and Huldrych Zwingli, the great Zurich reformer. The Article is entitled,
'Article XXIV: Of speaking in the congregation in such a tongue as the people understandeth.
It is a thing plainly repugnant to the word of God, and the custom of the primitive Church, to have publick Prayer in the Church, or to minister the Sacraments in a tongue not understanded of the people.'
You can find Art XXIV on page 621 at the back of your little blue Prayer Book. As a small aside, you can look at the whole Letter to the Hebrews as another angle on the whole theology of priesthood. A lot of the Letter, its main theme, is taken up with discussion of Jesus' position as a priest 'of the order of Melchizedek', which is an idea that only people steeped in the Old Testament, Jews or Jewish converts to Christianity, would understand.
The Jews never referred to God by name. God was the great 'I am', and anyone who met God face-to-face would be destroyed by the sight. Only the prophets and priests of the Temple could encounter God face-to-face and survive. And the Letter to the Hebrews goes into great detail in explaining how Jesus is indeed a true priest, with a direct line to God the Father.
Contrast that with the Reformation, Protestant, idea of the 'priesthood of all believers', (originally espoused by Luther and Calvin, following 1 Peter 2:9, which says, 'But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people…'), the belief that you didn't need a priest to stand between you and God. Any worshipper, any true believer, was his own priest. So in this earliest English translation, adopted by King James' translators, a Greek word which means to prepare or to restore – 'may the God of peace prepare you, make you up to the task' – which I suppose is a bit like being 'complete' in the sense of the 'Compleat Angler', fully qualified, fully prepared, becomes, 'perfect'. Make you perfect.
Perhaps I'm being too finicky about words here. Perhaps we do really know what it is to be made 'perfect in every good work to do his will'. But it's not all down to us whether we are 'perfect'. Whether we have 20-20 spiritual vision or not is a question of grace; God has either blessed us with it or He hasn't. There's another version of the Hebrews blessing which is perhaps a bit closer to our modern way of thinking and expressing what we mean. This is:
'May Christ the Son of God perfect in you the image of his glory
and gladden your hearts with the good news of his kingdom'
'Perfect in you' the image. Make it perfect. Not make you perfect, though. But in Hebrews it is a prayer for you: and it is to make you perfect. Not perfectly formed, necessarily, but perfectly equipped.
So let us pray.
May the God of peace,
that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus,
that great shepherd of the sheep,
through the blood of the everlasting covenant,
Make us perfect in every good work to do his will,
working in us that which is wellpleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ.
Tags 1 Peter 2, 39 Articles, A Man in Full, Article XXIV, Christianity, Compleat Angler, Cranmer, Easter, Evensong, Hebrews, hoc est corpus meum, hocus pocus, Hoover, Izaak Walton, καταρτισαι, Jesus, Jews, John Calvin, King James Bible, Martin Luther, mattins, Melchizedek, Methodist, New English Bible, NRSV, Paul Ingram katapi, Protestant, Reformation, Tom Wolfe, understanded of the people, William Tyndale, Zurich, Zwingli
Billy Goat Gruff
Sermon for Holy Communion on the Feast of Christ the King, 26th November 2017, at St John's, West Hartford, Conn.
[Ezekiel 34.11-16,20-24, Ephesians 1.15-23], Matthew 25.31-46
See http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=378268013 for the readings, and https://sjparish.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Nov-26-Pentecost-25-1030am.pdf for the full service booklet.
It's really kind of you to welcome me back to St John's to preach again. Susan, you have been amazingly gracious. Just when you were getting nicely settled in as Rector, Bill and Hope Eakins dropped in the suggestion that you might want to risk having me, this old Brit, to preach at the church – and just after Thanksgiving as well, when you are all celebrating having got rid of us colonial throw-backs. You're truly kind.
Obviously I have been well briefed. I must stay away from anything too controversial or political. And I can't really do the ancient Greek orator's trick of doing a Philippic: you know, saying loudly, 'I'm not going to say anything about Philip', and then going on to say what an awful person he is. So no Brexit and Trump, then. Sorry.
Instead I want to get to grips with the sheep and the goats. Are you a sheep, or a goat? It's a rigid division. On the right side, the Elysian Fields await you; but if you're Billy Goat Gruff, nothing so nice.
That's the thing I want to explore, with the sheep and the goats: divisions. People divided: divided, because they disagree. They disagree about what is best to do. And then, perhaps, do they have those divisions confirmed, ratified, by the Judge eternal?
At Thanksgiving you are celebrating independence from the colonial power that we were, the young nation standing on its own feet. It was a journey started by the Pilgrim Fathers, Puritans, who found themselves different from, at odds with, divided from, the society they were leaving in England. So I want to look at that division. It stemmed at least in part from the religious ferment and turmoil of the Reformation.
Apart from those things I'm not talking about, the other thing this year that has been of special note, not in our political, but in our spiritual life, has indeed been the Martin Luther 500th anniversary, 500 years since he is said to have posted up 95 points where he was at odds with the Roman Catholic Church, on the church door at Wittenberg in Saxony, which is the event which started the Reformation.
The Reformation led to civil war and persecution: the particularly ghastly thing about it was that the favourite way of getting rid of opponents was to burn them alive at the stake. We often spend time on Good Friday, during the Three Hours, reflecting on the dreadful mechanics of death by crucifixion. Death by burning seems to me to have been equally dreadful. And the penalty was so arbitrary and undeserved.
Think of Thomas Cranmer, the great scholar and Archbishop who created the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, and gave the new Church of England liturgy, forms of worship, which were for the first time in a language that could be 'understanded of the people', as they said, in English instead of Latin, although they were in fact based on, and continued the tradition of, services which in some cases could be traced back to the earliest Church Fathers. But even Cranmer was eventually burned to death, at the hands of the original 'Bloody Mary', Queen Mary, who brought back the Catholic faith for the duration of her reign.
This happened because Cranmer was a Protestant, at a time when it was no longer the right thing to be. We don't know whether he met Martin Luther – some scholars, such as Diarmaid McCulloch, think he might well have done – but he certainly spent time in Zürich with Zwingli and Bucer.
It is fascinating to see how Cranmer reflected the new Reformation ideas, in the way in which he dealt, (in the Book of Common Prayer that he largely authored), with what was happening in the Holy Communion, at the point when the bread and the wine are shared.
The Roman church, the Catholics, believe in what they call 'Transubstantiation', the 'Real Presence' of Jesus' body and blood in the bread and wine of the Holy Communion. Many of the Reformers did not believe in Transubstantiation. For them the bread and the wine were just that, bread and wine; just symbols of a greater thing.
The words in Cranmer's Prayer Book changed, from the 1549 original, where the bread and wine are treated in the Catholic way, as actually being Christ's body and blood, to his revision in 1552, perhaps after he met the other reformers: 'Take and eate this, in remembraunce that Christ dyed for thee, and feede on him in thy hearte by faythe, with thankesgeving' , which means they remain just that, bread and wine, just symbols, until, long after Cranmer's awful death in 1556, in 1662 the final version of the Prayer Book (until the twentieth century revisions, here and in England), the 1662 Book has it all ways: 'The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, broken for thee: Eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving.' In the first bit, the body, the actual body: but then a 'remembrance', a symbol: feeding, but by faith, not literally. Now, you can be anywhere on the Catholic – Protestant spectrum, and find spiritual resonance somewhere in those words, which we will still use, albeit in a slightly different order, in our service today.
But, the point is that, then, people were dying for those differences. Or feeling so alienated by them, that they opted to make a perilous voyage to a largely unknown land, and make a new life – as the Pilgrim Fathers did. It's frankly strange – repugnant, even – to us today to think that the State could mete out the ultimate punishment, death, to a learned theologian such as Cranmer. But it did.
Belief, opinion, learned opinion, was a life-or-death affair. Now we can look back 500 years and shake our heads sagely, regretting how brutal life was then: we're far too rational to let ourselves get into that kind of overreaction.
But I wonder. I promised not to talk about Brexit and Trump. But I will just say that it seems to be true both back home in England, over Brexit, and, dare I say, here, where Pres. Trump is concerned, that a climate has built up recently where people on each side not only feel strongly, very strongly: but they have stopped talking to each other. Certainly at home in the UK, the referendum on Brexit has divided people, divided people in a serious way. Old friends are avoiding each other; families are divided. There's no sense of the old way of managing differences: so that we would say 'Old so-and-so thinks such-and-such: I know he's wrong, but it doesn't matter. We're still the best of friends.' That really doesn't seem to be working any more.
Time was, even recently, when we could disagree about quite serious things, and still be friends; it really was a case of hating the sin and loving the sinner. So what did Jesus the King do? The sheep and the goats are to be separated out, they are to be divided: but not by what they have thought, but what they have done. Jesus wasn't requiring the elect, the people who were saved, the sheep, to subscribe to any particular world view. He was looking for acts of kindness, not manifestos.
'I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.' (Matt.25:35-36).
Hungry; thirsty; a stranger; no clothes; ill; in prison. You can construct all sorts of scenarios, which may well broadly reflect your political outlook, to explain how a person can be in any of those situations – and we might disagree.
Hungry and thirsty because they've made bad 'life choices', perhaps; a stranger, because they live somewhere that I don't go to – and perhaps they don't live the way we do; no clothes, probably not literally, but scruffy, down-at-heel, when – 'if they cared about their appearance… ' You know.
Or they might be refugees, from a poor country. Are they 'genuine refugees', or just 'economic migrants'? That's a question which I suspect you would answer much more sympathetically than many of us Englishmen have been doing. The USA's prosperity is built on the labour of economic migrants – but we are now trying to keep them out.
Or what if you are sick, if you are ill? You know one of the differences between us in England and you is that, I think, we have more restrictive rules about when you can fire people. Basically, our law says that an employer has to show that he has a fair reason for terminating someone's employment, and it is presumed that it was not fair. But a fair reason, in English law, is if you are ill, ill for too long.
That's one where I expect there might be disagreements. You know, on the one hand, you can't run a business if you have to pay a salary for someone who's not there: and on the other, think what it will do to your powers of recovery if, when you are in the depths of illness, you lose your livelihood. What's your point of view? Which side are you on?
Jesus says, when I was in hospital, you came and visited me. Dare we say, you visited me, and didn't bring me any bad news? I hope so. Here in the home of the US insurance industry, of The Hartford and the Aetna, let me dare say it – surely long-term sickness might be covered by an employer's insurance. Or maybe that's too much. I was ill, and you visited me. That's what Jesus said.
I was in prison. You came to me. I was a criminal. I didn't deserve anything. I had done something terrible. But surely there are limits? Some criminals are just beyond the pale. At home, the man called the Moors Murderer, Ian Brady, has died, and there was controversy where his remains should be buried. He killed a number of children, in appalling circumstances. Here, Charles Manson has died. Both of them I have heard called 'evil personified'. But Jesus isn't judging them. Jesus' judgement, separating the sheep and the goats, is not about whether someone has been bad, been a sinner. Jesus would have visited them. He sat down and ate with sinners.
That's the clue. That's how it is with Jesus. Not what you'd think; perhaps not particularly reasonable. But good.
So I suspect that if we acknowledge Christ as King, and as judge eternal, as we are invited to do today, on this festival of Christ the King at the end of Thanksgiving, we may find a way to deal with our differences: even, dare I say, those real, deep differences over Brexit and Trump. Ultimately those differences may not really be that important. Instead we need to think sheep and goats. Acts of kindness, not manifestos.
Tags 1549, 1662, Aetna Insurance, Bloody Mary, Book of Common Prayer, Brexit, Bucer, Calvin, Charles Manson, Christ the King, Christianity, church, Church of England, colonial power, Diarmaid McCulloch, differences, disagreements, Donald Trump, employment law, England, European Union, God, holy communion, hungry, Ian Brady, Jesus, jesus christ, Jesus the King, kindness, last judgement, manifesto, Martin Luther, Moors Murderer, Pilgrim Fathers, prison, Protestants, Puritans, Queen Mary, Reformation, Roman Catholics, sheep and goats, Sin, sinners, Thanksgiving, The Hartford insurance, Thomas Cranmer, transubstantiation, USA, Zurich, Zwingli
The Man with Two Bibles
Sermon for the third Sunday of Epiphany at St Mary's 22nd January 2017
1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23
When President Trump took the oath of allegiance on Friday, according to the report on the radio, he had his tiny hand on two Bibles, one of which was the one which Abraham Lincoln used, and the other was one which his mother had given him. It makes you think that the Bible must mean something to the new president.
Using two Bibles in this way reminds me of a story which I heard about a rich old man who had two Rolls Royces. Somebody once asked him why he needed two. He wasn't a car collector. However, he said, he felt better having two, just in case one broke down. So perhaps Donald Trump needs two Bibles, just in case one breaks down.
'Wait a minute', you will say. One of the things about the Bible is that it is utterly reliable. It's even better than a Rolls-Royce. It doesn't break down. All you need in life is holy scripture, 'sola scriptura', only scripture, in Latin. But different churches say different things here. There are, perhaps, some differences of emphasis.
Today is the Sunday in the middle of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. I must confess that my heart does sink a little bit when I realise that I have to try to say something useful and enlightening about the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, especially when we have a lesson like the one which we had today from St Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. St Paul ticks them off. '… each of you says, 'I belong to Paul', or 'I belong to Apollos', or 'I belong to Cephas', or 'I belong to Christ.' St Paul says, Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptised in the name of Paul?'
Poor old Corinthians. They are always getting ticked off by St Paul. It's one of those points where I have to say – and I think some of you will agree with me – that I feel rather sympathetic to those Corinthians. Why am I an Anglican? Why is somebody else a Methodist? Or for a Wee Free? A Baptist? Or a member of the United Reformed Church, or indeed Roman Catholic? And is this a good thing?
When you read a lesson like the one we've read from 1 Corinthians, It's an 'oh dear' moment. It looks as though, although for hundreds of years, the church has been divided into lots of different denominations, everybody seems to turn a blind eye to these Bible passages which suggest that we should be all one church.
We can trace back the various splits and disagreements which have given rise to the different denominations. For instance the original split between the church in Byzantium and the church in Rome, the orthodox and the Roman Catholics respectively; and then in the time of the Reformation – 500 years ago this year – Martin Luther posting his 95 theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, and starting a movement which split the Western Church into Roman Catholics and Protestants. The Protestants themselves were divided, mainly between those who were Lutherans and those who followed Calvin and Zwingli, the reformed Christians. And there were – there are – Baptists as well!
This isn't going to be a sermon where I try to teach you all about the various differences in theology and the philosophy of religion as it has evolved down the ages; why, for example, the Anglicans and the Roman Catholics have not moved together – after all, Henry VIII was a jolly good Catholic, the only problem being that he had some local difficulty with the Pope.
Apart from that, Henry had no difficulty with the Catholic doctrines, of transubstantiation, according to which the bread and wine in holy communion actually become the body and blood of Christ; and the blueprint or route map of heaven, what happens to people after they die: that their souls go to a place called purgatory, where all the sins are laundered from the souls. Possibly laundry is too nice an image; it is more like the refiner's fire.
Not a nice process, but after that you were ready for your encounter with St Peter at the Pearly Gates. Henry had no difficulty with all of that; but of course Martin Luther did. He was particularly opposed to the Catholic Church's system of indulgences, according to which you could pay in order to shorten your time in purgatory. It was very lucrative for the church but it didn't have any basis in holy scripture.
Martin Luther wanted to strip out all these things that were not in the Bible but which had grown up in the church's tradition. 'Sola scriptura', only scripture, was his motto, his byword. Calvin and Zwingli, on the other hand, as well as relying on scripture, like Luther, did not like the traditional idea of a priest, as someone standing between the believer and God, somehow mediating worship. That Catholic idea was based on the Jewish concept of the priesthood, according to which an ordinary mortal who came into contact with God would die.
The trouble with having a priesthood is that you start to have a hierarchy, 'princes of the church' among the bishops, living in splendour in complete contrast with the simple life enjoined on his disciples by Jesus. In reaction against that, Calvin introduced the idea of the 'priesthood of all believers'. God would meet anyone, directly, face to face in prayer or worship.
Why would you follow one form of theology rather than another? Surely what the Bible says, if you follow what St Paul has written to the Corinthians, is that splitting up into all these different churches is an aberration. Somehow we have all got lost on the way. True believers will all just belong to one church, whatever that is.
At that point, of course, all of you in the pews mentally shift from one foot to another, with your eyes cast down, thinking privately that it's hopeless, after 2,000 years of history and because of the way that all of us have been brought up in different traditions round the world. There is no chance of abolishing all the various denominations in favour of a single unified church, and the idea of having to go to a single church may well fill us with some trepidation.
'Our beliefs are not one-size-fits-all', you will say. You might even say, 'My God is not like your God.' I have always found it rather difficult when people talk about 'my God', because it seems to me that God does not belong to us, but rather that we belong to Him. So saying that something or someone is my God, mine, is nonsense.
In your mind's eye, even if not out loud, you are probably thinking, 'I don't want the churches to be all just like so-and-so down the road. Just think, they might make me wave my arms around or clap in time to a guitar, or have to smell incense!' – or, indeed, whatever it is that you get sniffy about in other churches.
But I think the thing that you need to take into account is the idea that is behind what St Paul is saying to the Corinthians in our lesson today. In effect, it is not what the Corinthians want that matters, it isn't that they must have that great thing, that we celebrate so much in our society today, namely, choice, it isn't that: It isn't up to them, it isn't up to the Corinthians: it's up to Jesus himself.
What would Jesus say about, 'I belong to Apollos' or 'I follow Paul'? Or, I'm a Methodist, I'm a United Reformed? I'm a Roman Catholic, or an Anglican? I'm a high Anglican. I'm a low Anglican. I'm a middle of the road Anglican. I'm an Evangelical (Godfrey will tell you more about that, of course); or I'm an Anglo-Catholic. Every shade and nuance is catered for. What do you think Jesus would think about that?
What St Paul says is, 'Christ did not send me to baptise, but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.' In other words, the key thing is for people to hear the gospel, and in particular to hear about Christ's passion and death and resurrection: to hear about the role of the cross which is at the heart of it.
Provided we get the Gospel, nothing else really matters. I don't think that Jesus would particularly care whether we like a particular church or a particular style of worship or not. The more important thing is that Jesus gets to be believed in by more people. So my feeling is that is that, although there might be moves to get closer to each other in the various denominations, moves such, for example, as ARCIC, the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission, or more recently the conversations between the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the covenant discussions between the Anglicans and Methodists, still, you can give yourself a break; you can smile sweetly at your friends in the other churches, particularly in this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: you can take the opportunity to go and visit each other's churches and worship with them. But you don't have to give up being based at the church you've always gone to, where your friends are.
You definitely can be confident that we all, all of us in Churches Together in Cobham, Oxshott, Stoke D'Abernon and Downside, are united, united in that we believe in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ; so I think we wouldn't get ticked off like the Corinthians were.
Mind you, going back to Donald Trump and his two bibles, as Canon Giles Fraser has written recently in his 'Loose Canon' column in the Guardian [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2017/jan/19/for-donald-trump-faith-has-become-the-perfect-alibi-for-greed], President Trump does go to a different sort of church, different from any of the ones round here, a church called Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in New York, where the minister is, or has been, the Rev Norman Vincent Peale. Mr Peale has published a book called 'The power of positive thinking' and has developed a theology, if you can believe this, of how to be a winner, how to be successful in business. It seems to be a sort of 'prosperity gospel'.To be blessed, in that congregation, means to be rich.
Giles Fraser wrote, 'When Trump was asked what God is to him … he came up with this: "Well, I say God is the ultimate. You know you look at this … here we are on the Pacific Ocean. How did I ever own this? I bought it 15 years ago. I made one of the great deals, they say, ever. I have no more mortgage on it as I will certify and represent to you. And I was able to buy this and make a great deal. That's what I want to do for the country. Make great deals."
Awful, isn't it. And it came from something at least pretending to be a church. Now what that means is something which we ought to be thinking about, especially in this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.
Tags Bible, Book of Common Prayer, Calvin, Cranmer, Donald Trump, Evensong, faith, heaven, Henry VIII, Indulgences, Martin Luther, prosperity gospel, Protestants, Purgatory, Reformation, Rolls-Royce, St Mary's Stoke D'Abernon, transubstantiation, Zwingli
Be Reconciled
Sermon for Evensong for Churches Together on the Third Sunday after Easter, 11th May 2014
Ezra 3:1-13, Ephesians 2:11-22: Be Reconciled
So then you are no longer strangers …, but you are fellow-citizens with the saints and … of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. [Eph. 2:19-20]
Building a temple. Building a church. Being reconciled.
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near, by the blood of Christ.
I want to welcome everyone to the church here at St Mary's. We were excited when you, Godfrey, put your hand up in the Churches Together meeting and volunteered that we here would host the service to remember and celebrate the fellowship and spiritual growth which we enjoyed together in our Lent groups.
Our Lent groups, which were devoted to studying St Paul's letter to the Ephesians, with a strap line which Jeremy Cresswell, in his erudite study notes, identified as 'Be Reconciled'. Obviously St Paul was talking about Jews and non-Jews, at the time of Jesus Christ, whereas in applying this message today – and certainly in the context of our service tonight – we are talking about the different Christian denominations, and how we can be reconciled, brought together in fellowship, so as to become, in unity and diversity at the same time, the body of Christ.
Ezra, the author of our Old Testament lesson, was writing in the sixth century BC following the conquest of the Babylonians, who had destroyed the Temple, by the Persians – King Cyrus followed by King Darius and the three Kings Artaxerxes.
The Persians allowed the Jews to rebuild the Temple, and to have some self-government. But they were very much a minority, surrounded by people who did not necessarily sympathise with them, and who were much more powerful than they were.
Ezra tells the story of the rebuilding of the Temple. But before then, in the passage that we heard tonight, came the restoration of worship, of the One True God. It's a theme throughout the Old Testament – certainly it comes out in Ezra, if you read Ezra and its sister book, Nehemiah – that there was one true God: that also, that one true God had made a covenant with a chosen people, and so the world was divided, divided into God's chosen people and the rest.
It was difficult for the Israelites to maintain their faith, their belief in the one true God, when they had such terrible bad fortune. By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept. .. How shall we sing the Lord's song: in a strange land? (Ps. 137).
The Assyrians conquered the Israelites in 722, and when in 587 BC the southern kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonians, the Temple, which had stood for so long, was razed to the ground. All the precious things in it were taken by the victorious Babylonians. You can read all about these disasters in the Books of Kings and the Books of Chronicles.
It didn't really look as though God's covenant with the Israelites, His covenant with Abraham, was really working. Then the Israelites started to understand that it was God, God Himself, who had caused all the misfortune, and it was because they had not followed God's commandments. But God forgave them, and during the time of the Persians, they were treated much more kindly. Eventually they went about rebuilding the Temple.
Flash forward 600 years to the time of Jesus, and the time of St Paul immediately afterwards, and imagine what a huge step – a huge mental step – St Paul was making when he realised that God was not exclusive in the way that he had been brought up to think He was.
It wasn't the case that there was one God, and that that one God favoured only the Israelites, the Jews. The lesson of Jesus was that God was – God is – a god for all of us. God created the whole world after all. The message of Jesus' appearance is that there is still a covenant between God and His people: but his people are all people, not just one small nation.
That is, of course, a momentous step. Once St Paul had recognised that, it made it possible for the good news of Christ to spread throughout the world, and not just to stay as a minority cult among the Israelites.
So look at this timeline: Ezra, about 500 BC: St Paul, no more than a dozen or so years after the death of Christ, so, let's say, just over 500 years later. And we are just over 2,000 years after that.
But back to the fact that we are tonight in St Mary's. St Mary's is the oldest church in Surrey – it was built originally in 680AD. Indeed, it's a Saxon church: if you look, after the service, at the three little models that are on the shelf over there in the transept, you will see that it was originally a sort of Saxon shed – and then it grew progressively in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries to be the shape of church which it is now.
So if we go back to the timeline – Ezra, 500 BC: St Paul, maybe 40 or 50 AD: St Mary's, just over 500 years later, 680. And our service, written in the 1540s by Archbishop Cranmer – so, about another 5- or 600 years later.
You should know that the Book of Common Prayer, which we're using tonight (it's the little blue book in your pew), actually took 100 years to settle into its final form, but the key bits of it were written by Archbishop Cranmer in the middle 1500s – so, the time of Henry VIII – and we are about 700 years after that. We are joined – reconciled, sort of – with all those Christians before us.
Remember that in the 1540s Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was writing the Book of Common Prayer in the crucible of the Reformation. Martin Luther had nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg: John Calvin had preached in Geneva; Zwingli in Zürich, and of course, Henry VIII; all contributed to a time of theological ferment and disagreement.
We are using words which haven't changed for 700 years. We really are walking in the footsteps of the saints. Because Cranmer didn't just dream up all the words in the services which went into the Book of Common Prayer. He based all the services on his translations, and on his understanding, of even older services which the church had been using before he compiled the Prayer Book in the 1540s.
The BCP was meant to be a prayer book, a service book, for use in common, meaning shared by everyone. Against the background of all the different strands of the Reformation, the BCP was a powerful tool for reconciliation.
So the fact that tonight we are using the BCP, a prayer book written 700 years ago which goes back even earlier in its origins, is, I think, very apt in the context of Churches Together: in the context of our variety, all our different ways of worshipping, in our seven churches.
Just like the time of St Paul. Faithful Christians in Ephesus, in Rome, in Corinth, in Colossae, in Galatia, were all confronting something which was far bigger than they were, and they didn't know what the right answers were.
St Paul talked about it in 1 Corinthians 1:12.
' …. each of you says, 'I belong to Paul', or 'I belong to Apollos', or 'I belong to Cephas', or 'I belong to Christ.'
Which one of these great preachers had it right? Terribly important; once you are confronted by the Revelation, the Good News, that God cares for us, that He sent His only Son: nothing is more important than to respond appropriately.
But, as the Roman poet Terence said, 'Quot homines, tot sententiae' – (for as many as there are people, there are just as many opinions). That's why the message of Ephesians is so very important. Its message of reconciliation, coming together, of agreeing together – even in circumstances where we disagree – is vitally important.
So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.
I pray that that has been your experience in our Lent course – and that it will continue to be: that you will come and share with us here, and we will come and share with you. In our different ways, we will spread the good news of Christ and will receive the good news of Christ; and we will live like people who have seen the Kingdom.
Tags Artaxerxes, Assyrians, Babylon, Book of Common Prayer, Calvin, Churches Together, Cranmer, Cyrus, Darius, Ephesians, Ezra, Geneva, Henry VIII, Jeremy Cresswell, Jesus, Luther, One True God, Persians, Reformation, revelaition, St Mary Stoke D'Abernon, St Paul, Surrey, temple, Terence, Wittenberg, Zurich, Zwingli


text:
package com.example.toidv.rxexample.ui.repo;

import android.os.Bundle;
import android.support.v7.widget.LinearLayoutManager;
import android.support.v7.widget.RecyclerView;
import android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar;
import android.text.TextUtils;

import com.example.toidv.rxexample.R;
import com.example.toidv.rxexample.consts.Consts;
import com.example.toidv.rxexample.data.pojo.Repo;
import com.example.toidv.rxexample.ui.adapter.RepoAdapter;
import com.example.toidv.rxexample.ui.base.BaseActivity;

import javax.inject.Inject;

import butterknife.BindView;
import butterknife.ButterKnife;
import rx.Observable;
import rx.Observer;
import rx.Subscriber;
import rx.android.schedulers.AndroidSchedulers;
import rx.schedulers.Schedulers;

public class ReposActivity extends BaseActivity implements ReposMvpView {
    @BindView(R.id.toolbar)
    Toolbar mToolbar;
    @Inject
    ReposPresenter mReposPresenter;
    @BindView(R.id.recycler_view_favourite)
    RecyclerView mRecyclerView;
    private RepoAdapter mAdapter;
    private String mRepoUrl;

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_home);
        ButterKnife.bind(this);
        setSupportActionBar(mToolbar);

        setupComponent();

        Bundle extras = getIntent().getExtras();
        if (extras != null) {
            mRepoUrl = extras.getString(Consts.REPO_URL);
            String title = extras.getString(Consts.USER_NAME);
            if (!TextUtils.isEmpty(title)) {
                getSupportActionBar().setTitle(title);
            }
        }

        mRecyclerView.setLayoutManager(new LinearLayoutManager(this));
        mAdapter = new RepoAdapter();
        mRecyclerView.setAdapter(mAdapter);
    }

    private void setupComponent() {
        Observable.create(new Observable.OnSubscribe<String>() {
            @Override
            public void call(Subscriber<? super String> subscriber) {
                getActivityComponent().inject(ReposActivity.this);
                mReposPresenter.attachView(ReposActivity.this);
                subscriber.onCompleted();
            }
        })
                .subscribeOn(Schedulers.io())
                .observeOn(AndroidSchedulers.mainThread())
                .subscribe(new Observer<String>() {
                    @Override
                    public void onCompleted() {
                        getRepos(mRepoUrl);
                    }

                    @Override
                    public void onError(Throwable e) {
                        e.printStackTrace();
                    }

                    @Override
                    public void onNext(String s) {

                    }
                });

    }

    private void getRepos(String url) {
        mReposPresenter.getRepos(url);
    }

    @Override
    public void addRepo(Repo repo) {
        mAdapter.addRepo(repo);
    }

    @Override
    protected void onDestroy() {
        if (mReposPresenter != null) {
            mReposPresenter.detachView();
        }
        super.onDestroy();
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
The University of Cincinnati Intellectual Property and Computer Law Journal
Masthead Volume 7, 2021-2022
Masthead Volume 5, 2019 – 2020
Author: UCIPCLJ
The Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act: Concerning the Originality of "Cookie-Cutter" Homes
Leave a comment April 28, 2021 UCIPCLJ
[Emily Feeley, Contributing Member 2020-2021, Intellectual Property and Computer Law Journal]
It should come as no surprise that architectural structures can receive copyright protection, but that has not always been the case. Prior to 1990, there were relatively few protections for architectural works.[1] It was only with the passing of the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act ("AWCPA") that copyright protection extended to protect architectural structures.[2] Presently, architectural works are one of the eight categories of works that are subject to copyright protection under 17 U.S.C.A. § 102(a).[3] Are these protections enough, or is there a need to expand their protection? This blog will look at what types of architectural works are subject to copyright protection, how architectural copyrights are registered, and the feasibility of enforcing the copyright.
Don't Call it a Comeback: The Return of College Football Video Games and the Impact of O'Bannon v. NCAA
[Jacob Conners, Contributing Member 2020-2021, Intellectual Property and Computer Law Journal]
"EA Sports. It's in the game."[1] The famous words in the title sequence of every EA Sports video game have proven untrue for college football players since July 2013, the release date of NCAA Football 14.[2] College football players have not been "in the game" since EA Sports discontinued the video game on September 26, 2013.[3] Cam Weber, the General Manager of American Football at EA Sports, released a statement announcing the discontinuation citing that EA Sports was "stuck in the middle of a dispute between the NCAA and student-athletes who seek compensation for playing college football."[4] Mr. Weber also distinctly pointed out that EA Sports had always followed the rules set forth by the NCAA while also complying with the law.[5] The disputes culminated in the Ninth Circuit Court's decision of O'Bannon v. NCAA.[6] Many blamed Ed O'Bannon and the O'Bannon lawsuit for ending the video game, while others put all the blame on the NCAA.[7] No matter who they blamed, college football and video games fans were thrilled and relieved following the announcement that EA Sports would be bringing back the well-known college football game in early February 2021.[8] The video game's return will show how name, image, and likeness ("NIL") lawsuits have changed the outlook of collegiate athletics. Furthermore, the ever-growing fraction of intellectual property law in NIL becomes more relevant each year with the continual increase in NCAA sports television coverage.[9] Massive television deals have been signed for up to twelve years into the future and have become even more crucial with the lost revenue from the COVID-19 pandemic.[10]
Legislative Review of STRONGER Patents Act of 2019
Leave a comment November 23, 2020 UCIPCLJ
[Morgan Hartgrove, Contributing Member 2020-2021]
The United States has a rich history of innovation and entrepreneurship.[1] The ability and incentive to innovate is partially due to the country's decision to capitalize on the ingenuity of inventors and innovators through strong intellectual property laws.[2] The Constitution of the United States empowers Congress "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."[3] Patents are intended to protect the property right of the inventor and are issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).[4] By issuing a patent, the USPTO grants the right "to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling" the invention in the United States or "importing" the invention into the United States.[5] Under this power, Congress has enacted various laws and reforms relating to obtaining, enforcing, and renewing patents.[6]
How Patents Can Lower Drug Prices: A Policy Review of the Second Look at Drug Patents Act of 2020
Patent and patent rights incentivize creation and innovation. The Constitution empowers Congress "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."[1] However, these protections expire after a certain period of time.[2] In the pharmaceutical industry, in particular, patent rights play an essential role in incentivizing research, design, and innovation for new drugs.[3] Patents protect a drug manufacturer's innovation by establishing a period of exclusivity, and sometimes, manufacturers extend this period of exclusivity by filing multiple or additional patents to cover one product.[4] Some argue patents create a way for manufacturers to maximize profits and prevent competition from generic drugs to enter the market. Others believe the option to extend patent protection is necessary to incentivize drug manufacturers to invest the billions of dollars it takes to create new drugs and bring them to market.[5]
Trump & Twitter Replies: Free Speech in the Social Media Age
Leave a comment July 25, 2020 UCIPCLJ
[Jeremy Lifter, Contributing Member 2019-2020]
Social media is an evolving form of communication. Take for example Twitter, ever since its founding in 2007 Twitter has grown exponentially.[1] It allows users to publish their thoughts on any topic they wish, users can post photos, videos or text and reply to other users. Twitter itself allows users who are members of the site to post "tweets," which are statements limited to 280 characters.[2] These "tweets" can range in subject from anything the users wants to post, users can also post video, pictures or other digital mediums.[3] Users can see "tweets" of people they follow and anyone else who makes their "tweets" public, they can also reply to these "tweets" which creates a threat of the original message and the replies from other users.[4] In addition to its members, the general public has the ability to see others tweets if they choose to make their account public.[5]
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University of Cincinnati College of Law
Attn: IP & Computer Law Journal
2540 Clifton Ave
ucipclj@gmail.com