text:
package im.vector.activity;

import android.annotation.SuppressLint;
import android.app.Activity;
import android.net.Uri;
import android.view.MotionEvent;
import android.view.View;
import android.widget.ImageView;
import android.widget.TextView;
import android.widget.VideoView;

import androidx.annotation.NonNull;
import androidx.recyclerview.widget.LinearLayoutManager;
import androidx.recyclerview.widget.RecyclerView;

import com.bumptech.glide.Glide;
import com.bumptech.glide.request.RequestOptions;

import org.matrix.androidsdk.core.Log;
import org.matrix.androidsdk.data.RoomMediaMessage;

import java.util.List;

import butterknife.BindView;
import butterknife.OnClick;
import im.vector.R;
import im.vector.adapters.MediaPreviewAdapter;

/**
 * Previews media selected to be send.
 */
public class MediaPreviewerActivity extends MXCActionBarActivity implements MediaPreviewAdapter.EventListener {

    private static final String LOG_TAG = MediaPreviewerActivity.class.getSimpleName();

    //the picture uri if a picture is taken with the camera
    public static final String EXTRA_CAMERA_PICTURE_URI = "EXTRA_CAMERA_PICTURE_URI";
    // the room title (string)
    public static final String EXTRA_ROOM_TITLE = "EXTRA_ROOM_TITLE";

    private RoomMediaMessage mCurrentRoomMediaMessage;

    @BindView(R.id.media_previewer_image_view)
    ImageView mPreviewerImageView;
    @BindView(R.id.media_previewer_video_view)
    VideoView mPreviewerVideoView;
    @BindView(R.id.media_previewer_video_thumbnail)
    ImageView mPreviewerVideoThumbnail;
    @BindView(R.id.media_previewer_list)
    RecyclerView mPreviewerRecyclerView;
    @BindView(R.id.media_previewer_file_name)
    TextView mFileNameView;
    @BindView(R.id.media_previewer_video_play)
    ImageView mPlayCircleView;

    @Override
    public int getLayoutRes() {
        return R.layout.activity_media_previewer;
    }

    @SuppressLint("ClickableViewAccessibility")
    @Override
    public void initUiAndData() {
        if (CommonActivityUtils.shouldRestartApp(this)) {
            Log.d(LOG_TAG, "onCreate : restart the application");
            CommonActivityUtils.restartApp(this);
            return;
        }
        if (CommonActivityUtils.isGoingToSplash(this)) {
            Log.d(LOG_TAG, "onCreate : Going to splash screen");
            return;
        }
        mPreviewerVideoView.setOnTouchListener(new View.OnTouchListener() {
            @Override
            public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
                onVideoPreviewClicked();
                return false;
            }
        });
        mPlayCircleView.setOnTouchListener(new View.OnTouchListener() {
            @Override
            public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
                onVideoPreviewClicked();
                return false;
            }
        });
        configureToolbar();
        final String roomTitle = getIntent().getExtras().getString(EXTRA_ROOM_TITLE);
        getSupportActionBar().setTitle(roomTitle);
        final List<RoomMediaMessage> sharedDataItems = getSharedItems();
        setupRecyclerView(sharedDataItems);
    }

    @OnClick(R.id.media_previewer_send_button)
    public void onClick() {
        setResult(Activity.RESULT_OK, getIntent());
        finish();
    }

    //region MediaPreviewAdapter.EventListener

    @Override
    public void onMediaMessagePreviewClicked(@NonNull final RoomMediaMessage roomMediaMessage) {
        if (roomMediaMessage != mCurrentRoomMediaMessage) {
            mCurrentRoomMediaMessage = roomMediaMessage;
            updatePreview(roomMediaMessage);
        }
    }

    //endregion

    //region Private methods

    private void updatePreview(final RoomMediaMessage roomMediaMessage) {
        mPreviewerVideoView.pause();
        mFileNameView.setText(roomMediaMessage.getFileName(this));
        final String mimeType = roomMediaMessage.getMimeType(this);
        final Uri uri = roomMediaMessage.getUri();

        if (mimeType != null) {
            if (mimeType.startsWith("image")) {
                mPreviewerImageView.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
                mPreviewerVideoView.setVisibility(View.GONE);
                mPreviewerVideoThumbnail.setVisibility(View.GONE);
                mPlayCircleView.setVisibility(View.GONE);
                Glide.with(this)
                        .load(uri)
                        .apply(new RequestOptions().fitCenter())
                        .into(mPreviewerImageView);
            } else if (mimeType.startsWith("video")) {
                mPreviewerImageView.setVisibility(View.GONE);
                mPreviewerVideoView.setVisibility(View.GONE);
                mPreviewerVideoThumbnail.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
                mPlayCircleView.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
                Glide.with(this)
                        .load(uri)
                        .apply(new RequestOptions().fitCenter().frame(0))
                        .into(mPreviewerVideoThumbnail);
                mPreviewerVideoView.setVideoURI(uri);
                mPreviewerVideoView.seekTo(0);
            } else {
                mPreviewerImageView.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
                mPreviewerVideoView.setVisibility(View.GONE);
                mPreviewerVideoThumbnail.setVisibility(View.GONE);
                mPreviewerImageView.setImageResource(R.drawable.filetype_attachment);
            }
        }
    }

    private void setupRecyclerView(@NonNull final List<RoomMediaMessage> sharedDataItems) {
        final LinearLayoutManager linearLayoutManager = new LinearLayoutManager(this, RecyclerView.HORIZONTAL, false);
        mPreviewerRecyclerView.setLayoutManager(linearLayoutManager);
        final MediaPreviewAdapter mediaPreviewAdapter = new MediaPreviewAdapter(sharedDataItems, this);
        mPreviewerRecyclerView.setAdapter(mediaPreviewAdapter);
        final RoomMediaMessage firstRoomMedia = sharedDataItems.get(0);
        updatePreview(firstRoomMedia);
    }

    private List<RoomMediaMessage> getSharedItems() {
        final List<RoomMediaMessage> sharedDataItems = RoomMediaMessage.listRoomMediaMessages(getIntent());
        if (sharedDataItems.isEmpty()) {
            final Uri roomMediaUri = Uri.parse(getIntent().getStringExtra(EXTRA_CAMERA_PICTURE_URI));
            final RoomMediaMessage roomMediaMessage = new RoomMediaMessage(roomMediaUri);
            sharedDataItems.add(roomMediaMessage);
        }
        return sharedDataItems;
    }

    private void onVideoPreviewClicked() {
        if (!mPreviewerVideoView.isPlaying()) {
            mPreviewerVideoView.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
            mPreviewerVideoThumbnail.setVisibility(View.GONE);
            mPlayCircleView.setVisibility(View.GONE);
            mPreviewerVideoView.start();
        } else {
            mPreviewerVideoThumbnail.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
            mPlayCircleView.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
            mPreviewerVideoView.setVisibility(View.GONE);
            mPreviewerVideoView.pause();
        }
    }

    //endregion
}


text:
Jörn Kamphuis (* 1. Dezember 1987 in Nordhorn) ist ein deutscher Moderator und  ehemaliger Mister Germany.

Leben
Kamphuis wuchs in Itterbeck auf, einem kleinen niedersächsischen Ort nahe der niederländischen Grenze. Während und nach seinem Abitur 2007 arbeitete Kamphuis als freier Mitarbeiter für die lokalen Medien seines Heimatlandkreises Grafschaft Bentheim (Ems-Vechte-Welle und Grafschafter Nachrichten). Nach dem Abitur ging er für vier Monate als Animateur nach Griechenland und machte Kleinkunst und Jonglieren. 2008 zog er nach Berlin, um an der Universität Potsdam Sportökonomie zu studieren. Das Studium schloss er 2011 mit dem Bachelor of Arts ab.

Nach dem Studium gründete er zwei Internetplattformen und arbeitete als Tutor am Lehrstuhl Innovationsmanagement und Entrepreneurship an der Universität Potsdam. Seit 2011 ist Kamphuis zudem als Model tätig.

Von 2012 bis 2013 war er bei der Sendung KIKA LIVE Party Check zusammen mit Jana Skudelny Comoderator von Ben Blümel.
Im November 2012 wurde er zum Mister Germany 2013 gewählt (Titel vergeben durch die Miss Germany Corporation).

Film und Fernsehen
Jörn Kamphuis trat in mehreren Fernsehproduktionen als Comoderator und Kandidat auf:

 2012–2013 KiKA LIVE Party Check, Staffel I+II als Comoderator (ZDF, KiKA; Produktion: Minga Media; Regie: Priska Metten)
 2013 Kandidat bei Das perfekte Promi Dinner (VOX)
 2013 Kandidat bei Web vs. Promi (KiKA), 2. Staffel, eine Folge.

Weblinks

  Homepage von Jörn Kamphuis

Einzelnachweise

Geboren 1987
Mann
Fernsehmoderator (Deutschland)
Model
Deutscher
Mister Germany

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Home Music Luke Evans reveals his incredible journey to Hollywood superstardom: EXCLUSIVE
Luke Evans reveals his incredible journey to Hollywood superstardom: EXCLUSIVE
Luke is back in London to promote his upcoming album, At Last. We meet in a London hotel where the star is friendly and frank despite having flown to the US and back twice in the last ten days. But then, he has displayed remarkable grit throughout his fight to the top. After graduating from drama school, he worked solidly throughout his 20s in musicals from Rent and Miss Saigon to the Boy George show Taboo. The Welsh actor had dreamed of London's West End and making it big. But frustration built after he wasn't taken seriously for straight theatre roles, let alone TV. "I couldn't even get seen for an advert", he grimaces. He finally snapped when a new show, Small Change, was announced at the Donmar Theatre and his agent, yet again, couldn't get him an audition.
"It wasn't fair, every door was closed and I knew I could do this. The character was a boy from Cardiff! I wrote a personal card to the casting director and dropped it at the stage door."
It was an extraordinarily bold move, and it paid off: " She called me and three weeks later I got the job that completely changed my life."
Word spread about an exciting talent and agents came specifically to see Luke in the show. "One day I was taken to lunch and dinner, both times at The Ivy, by William Morris and Creative Artists, two of the biggest agencies in Hollywood. It was crazy.
"They were courting me. I'd never experienced that before. In musical theatre, you flog yourself for a shred of attention and you're only as good as your last show. Suddenly I had a manager and I'd never been to LA. Within a year I had my first movie."
At 30, he hit Hollywood in 2010's Clash Of The Titans as Greek god Apollo. "It was bizarre. I was with people like Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes and they were like, 'Where have you sprung from?' I said, 'I've been around but nobody wanted me!'"
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These days things are very different. He's just back from filming series two of Netflix thriller The Alienist in Budapest and stars in new Second World War movie epic Midway.
Previously he's shared equal billing with the likes of Dame Helen Mirren who plays his gangster mother Queenie in the Fast And Furious films, with Jason Statham as his hell-raising brother, Deckard Shaw.
Luke singing on Strictly last Saturday (Image: BBC/Guy Levy)
"I love Jason. On set, everyone is so LA, everything is 'totally awesome'. Then Jason turns up and he's like [does a broad London accent], 'Aw'right, son, wass goin' on? Wass for lunch?' He doesn't let anything change him. He's done extraordinarily well."
Luke is also keen to redefine his career beyond blockbusters with the likes of 2016 mystery movie The Girl On The Train and psychological horror Ma: "I want to explore deeper roles, work on independent films," he says. "It's hard when Hollywood wants you to repeat what works."
That said, vain, preening Gaston in Disney's live-action Beauty And The Beast was impossible to resist. "I told my agent no three times. Then I decided to humanise Gaston, make people like him even as they hate him. It was wonderful. He is a total idiot and quite cruel, but there was a joy to just letting go. It was the only film where the crew was laughing during my scenes."
It introduced a global audience to the fact that Luke can belt out a tune, which he does with gusto on the new album, At Last. Instead of the expected musicals collection, it is a homage to the bombastic tracks that fuelled a young boy's dreams of escape.
READ Mercury Prize shortlist 2019: Dave, Slowthai, the 1975 and more face off for prestigious award
The songs are all 'hairbrush epics' to sing in the mirror, lots of drama and a big finish. A bit like him, perhaps?
"Maybe," he smiles. "I love power ballads and rock epics but I wanted to reimagine them. So I take Cher's If I Could Turn Back Time, which has surprisingly melancholy lyrics, and change it." He burst out laughing: "But it still has drama and a big finish. You're right! I can't help myself."
There are already plans to tour: "We are working out a window for next year. It will definitely happen." Time to bring that voice back to the Valleys.
How does he feel about home these days, as national sentiments rise?
Luke Evans had dreamed of London's West End and making it big (Image: NC)
"People naturally see me as the 'Welsh actor' which is lovely. We're such a small country, but culturally we've done a lot. I'm proud of my heritage. I love the people. But I also feel British and European. I think outside the cities, these issues are somehow less important. Not everybody is talking about Brexit back home. But I will never not feel European even if we are cut away."
Luke delights in astonishing people with his singing but remains perplexed people are surprised by his sexuality. He has never hidden being gay, but nor does he publicise it. Perhaps, I suggest, it is because he plays stereotypically hyper-masculine roles? "I don't know why anyone would be surprised. There are many ways to be gay.
If it's because I make action movies that says more about them than me.
"We are not all the same. All I see is myself, a gay man. There shouldn't be any fuss made about it. I don't feel any part of my career has had anything to do with my sexuality.
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"Nobody should be given or denied a job because of what they do in bed."
Luke with Ian McKellen in The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies (2014) (Image: NC)
Luke in The Three Musketeers (2011) (Image: Rolf Konow)
Early frank admission in interviews gave way to much more carefully vague pieces when the Hollywood machine took hold. Was he advised to 'hide' it? "Never! I never had a problem or lost a job over it. In fact, I think I have a lot of respect in the industry because of how I have carried myself. You can choose to be very vocal and if that is your identity, then great.
"I've always been very private, way before I was famous. That's how I was brought up. That does not mean I'm ashamed or embarrassed.
"But I represent a big part of my community who are private, who carry on with their lives, have families, don't necessarily want to go to bars and clubs. That's OK, too. I'm true to my own self, my own voice."
Family plans still lie ahead in the future, but he is in a new relationship.
"It's still new, but I'm very happy," he smiles. "It's hard to go out with me, I travel and work all the time. But I'm in a really great place right now. I'm able to look after my family. I'm jumping hurdles I was always too scared to face, professionally and personally. I'm doing things I only ever dreamed of. It feels really good."
Luke Evans new album, At Last, is out on November 22
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


When you click out from Pouring Pounds & shop, we get paid from Emirates & we pass most of this money to you!
Emirates is world's largest airline. It was founded in 1985 and owned by Investment Corporation of Dubai.
- Emirates is world's largest airline and operates more than 3000 Flights every week.
- It was founded in 1985 and owned by Investment Corporation of Dubai.
- Emirates being worlds largest airline, operates across its network of over 140 destinations and more than 70 countries.
- Emirates adds some new destinations every year.
- Emirates and flydubai to offer travelers even more connections this year.
- Increased demand sees Emirates resume service to Istanbul's second airport.


text:
Katja Esson
Penelope Pictures
Katja Esson is an Academy Award nominated director, producer. She is a German transplant and after more than 20 years in New York City she is now based in Miami. Her documentary short FERRY TALES garnered awards at prestigious international film festivals, went on to receive an Academy Award-nomination, and premiered on HBO in 2004. Some of her other films, HOLE IN THE SKY - THE SCARS OF 9/11 received the Gold Award at the World Media Festival. SKYDANCER premiered at the Margaret Mead Film Festival and received nominations for best film, director and cinematography at the Shanghai Film and Television Festival in 2011. POETRY OF RESILIENCE awarded Grand Jury Prices at numerous festivals, including a Cinema for Peace Award-nomination at the Berlin Film Festival in 2012. Esson has a longstanding relationship with ARTE. She recently created and directed two highly rated 5-part documentary series BACKROADS USA (2014) and AMERICAN RIVERS (2016). She was awarded the Simons Public Humanities Fellowship at Kansas University and her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian. Her work has been supported by the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts among others. Currently she co-producing WITHOUT A WHISPER with Katstisionni Fox about the influence of Native American Women on the first Suffragettes. She is also in production with RAZING LIBERTY SQUARE, about the demoliton and re-developing of the oldest segregated public housing project in the history of the United States, Liberty Square, Miami.


text:
Raphael Scholl
Historian and philosopher of science
View @raphaelscholl's profile on Twitter
Why trust science?
Temporary change of address
Again, Method!
Science and the English language
Review: Jutta Schickore, "About Method" (University of Chicago Press, 2017)
©2013–2021 Raphael Scholl
Against what method? (Or: Feyerabend in context)
In December 2012 the Blogosphere and Twitterverse became agitated about an opinion piece by Brian Cox and Robin Ince in the New Statesman: Politicians must not elevate mere opinion over science. Cox and Ince were immediately criticized by members of the science studies community such as Rebekkah Higgith and Jack Stilgoe. I don't wish to get into the many issues of this debate, but I have a straightforward point to make about one aspect of it. It concerns the term "scientific method".
Cox and Ince refer to the "scientific method" (without going into much detail) and are taken to task for this. For instance, Higgith writes:
[T]here are many scientific methods and many, when studied in detail, are not particularly methodological.
If Twitter is any indication, mentioning the "scientific method" is considered a sign of naiveté in the science studies scene. Jon Butterworth summarizes this nicely (also in the Guardian) when he says that talking about scientific method is "apparently not the done thing". True! But where in the technical literature do we find the roots of the apparently deeply held belief that there is no such thing as scientific method, or that it is in any case "not particularly methodological"?
My best guess is that the denial of scientific method traces back in some way to Paul Feyerabend's famous Against Method. Popularly associated with the slogan "anything goes", Feyerabend's book used historical cases to argue that a number of mid-20th-century philosophical beliefs about scientific method are wrong, or at least do not hold universally. These include: the belief that there is one single method that regulates all scientific epistemology; the belief that falsification plays a key role in the progress of science; the belief that ad hoc hypotheses are condemned and rarely occur in good science; the belief that replacing theories always have more empirical content than replaced theories.
Without a doubt Feyerabend's book was an important milestone. It pointed out many serious problems with widespread mid-20th-century views of scientific epistemology. But it is important to understand that Feyerabend's argument was more local than his title suggests. The book was not some ingenious, grand reductio argument that showed that no such thing as scientific method can possibly exist. It mostly showed that old proposals of scientific method — then dominant, but now largely abandoned — don't hold water. Since these old conceptions were largely the product of non-naturalistic, ahistorical armchair philosophizing, this should not be too surprising.
So Feyerabend's Against Method does not license sweeping claims against scientific method, and if seen in context it should not give comfort to social constructivists. The best explanation of the massive success of the empirical sciences remains the assumption that its theories have some special relationship with nature. In brief, scientists are great at epistemology! The hard problem, however, is to describe and understand the process. Peter Lipton summarized this nicely in his 2004 Medawar Lecture:
It is one thing to be expert at distinguishing grammatical from ungrammatical strings of words in one's native tongue; it is something quite different to be able to specify the principles by which this discrimination is made. The same applies to science: it is one thing to be a good scientist; it is something quite different to be good at giving a general description of what scientists do. Scientists are not good at the descriptive task. This is no criticism, since their job is to do the science, not to talk about it.
Lipton's next remark is so good as to deserve special emphasis:
Philosophers of science are not very good at describing science either, and this is more embarrassing, since this is their job.
But the difficulty of the task is no indication of its hopelessness. That would be a bit like denying that organisms grow on the grounds that the causes and mechanisms of developmental biology are incompletely understood.
Posted on February 28, 2014 Tags methodology
The proximate–ultimate distinction and evolutionary developmental biology
My new paper with Massimo Pigliucci is now online at Biology & Philosophy: "The proximate–ultimate distinction and evolutionary developmental biology: causal irrelevance versus explanatory abstraction".
Update: Here's the PhilSci Archive version.
Posted on February 19, 2014 Tags new paper


text:
Battle of Okinawa history book revision angers Okinawans
Japanese high school textbooks have eliminated statements that Okinawans were forced by Japanese soldiers to commit suicide during the Battle of Okinawa, rather than be captured.
The order to modify textbooks came from the Education Ministry, and is being called a gross modern day revision of history. More than 94,000 Okinawans died during the three-month closing battle of World War II, with an estimated 25% committing suicide. The battle, referred to as the "typhoon of steel", claimed the lives of more than 200,000 including 12,520 Americans.
Screeners at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology asked the five textbook publishers to change the sections referring to suicides, eliminating any reference to Okinawans having been told to commit suicide. They said the old textbooks provided misunderstandings to students. The new approved verbage states "Mass suicides and killings took place among the residents using hand grenades given them.", deleting reference to the Japanese Army.
Okinawans vehemently disagree. Local Zamami and other Kerama Archipelago natives insist "Our ancestors told us Japanese military told local people women would be raped by the American military soldiers, and men would be run over by tanks, and said it's better to die than be taken prisoner by the Americans." Okinawans recall family members recounting the battle telling them "the Japanese military gave grenades to everybody in Zamami Village, Tokashiki and others." A former Japanese military commander says it didn't happen that way, saying "grenades were very important, and Okinawans couldn't take them without permission, and also village people didn't know how to use them." His comments were found in an American history document about the Battle of Okinawa.
Zamami Village leaders say "History shouldn't be changed by current people. Facts are facts." One leaders says "My house had grenades, and that means the military delivered them to every house for use in suicides."
Okinawans do not want Japan to forget what happened here.
Masahide Ota was one who fought in the battle. He recalls "hand grenades, which were in extremely short supply, were distributed to residents. I heard people say they were told by the military to commit suicide using the grenades rather than becoming captives. Ota, now 82, surrendered four months after the battle ended, joined the ranks of Okinawa historians, and ultimately became Okinawa's governor in the years 1990-1998. Historians note a Japanese wartime slogan pitched heavily on Okinawa was "soldiers and civilians must live and die together."
Sumie Oshiro was a Battle of Okinawa survivor who was told directly by Japanese soldiers to kill themselves rather than be captured. "We tried to kill ourselves many times," she says, "but the grenade we were given by the Japanese Army would not explode."
Ota says "I saw civilians shot by Japanese soldiers when they came out of caves with their hands up to surrender. People were given two grenades. One was to throw at the Americans and one was to use on themselves."


text:
Fraud or truth?
Strange designs found in wheat or corn fields have been discribed as "Crop Circles". Some say these desings are simply someone playing a bad joke, but other believe that it could be a message.....a message from the unknown.
Most scientists have dismissed crop circles as something paranormal, and the majority of them are found to be fake. There are even alot of people who admit to making these odd symbols in fields, they even show how they did it on camera. Take Dave and Doug from the UK. In 1992 they came forward and claimed that they had created hundreds of crop circles over the preceding 15 years using a plank of wood, rope and a baseball cap fitted with a loop of wire to help them walk in a straight line. But there are some researchers that believe some crop cirles come from some unknown force giving us some kind of message, these researcher's also have prof that some crop circles couldn't have been manmade. For one the complexity of some ginuine cirlces are to numerous to have been made by humans. And as most circles have been found in fields some are found in restricted areas, like inside military instillations that have been fenced off very well from the surrounding area.
Other more convincing evidence is the weaving of some crop circles. Researchers have long contended that the plants in genuine circles are weaved together in a particular way when they are flattened. Hoaxers have not been able to duplicate this pattern. The plants are masterfully overlapping each other, and gently spiking into the standing crop in a spoke effect creating the circle. This is an effect that is not achieved by simply stomping on the plants with a board and or a garden roller.
The soil found inside these circles have been excessive dry even after it rains. Also some of the plants inside are'nt supposed to be bent to a 90 degree angle. Most of these plants they found in the circles are like celery sticks and can only be bent to 40 degree angle. Some of the seeds that researchers have collected in from the plants in the circles have produce seeds abnormally smaller than normal plants.
Crop Circles are still under invesigation by some researchers, some believe that there still all just hoaxes and choose to ignore the evidence. But others who really study them believe that it could be the work of extraterrestials, or a message from the earth to warn mankind.
Have you ever wonder what could be causing Crop Circles?


text:
Q: Flutter How to observ UserModel with GetX after 2.8.1 I am using getX for fetching data from Firebase.
I used this one before 2.8 update. It was working.
class UserController extends GetxController {
  final Rx<UserModel> _userModel = UserModel(
    email: '',
    name: '',
    uid: '',
    kullaniciAdi: '',
    bildirim: 0,
    userRole: 0,
  ).obs;

  UserModel get user => _userModel.value;

  set user(UserModel value) => _userModel.value = value;

  void clear() {
    _userModel.value = UserModel(
      email: '',
      name: '',
      uid: '',
      kullaniciAdi: '',
      bildirim: 0,
      userRole: 0,
    );
  }
}

I can observ this with GetX or Obx widget. But now, I can't do that anymore.
Here is my Firebase Database code fetching user codes:
Future getUserFromDB(String uid) async {
    try {
      var userData = await _firestore.collection("customers").doc(uid).get();
      var map = userData.data();
      //debugPrint(map!['email']);
      return UserModel.fromData(userData.data());
    } on FirebaseException catch (e) {
      return e.message;
    }
  }

And this is my UserModel:
class UserModel {
  String? uid;
  String? name;
  String? email;
  int? bildirim;
  int? userRole;
  String? kullaniciAdi;
  String? pphoto;

  UserModel({
    this.uid,
    this.name,
    this.email,
    this.bildirim,
    this.userRole,
    this.kullaniciAdi,
    this.pphoto,
  });

  UserModel.fromData(Map<String, dynamic>? dataMap)
      : uid = dataMap!['id'],
        name = dataMap['name'],
        email = dataMap['email'],
        bildirim = dataMap['bildirim'],
        kullaniciAdi = dataMap['kullaniciAdi'];

  Map<String, dynamic> toData() {
    return {
      'uid': uid,
      'name': name,
      'email': email,
      'userRole': userRole,
      'bildirim': bildirim,
      'kullaniciAdi': kullaniciAdi,
      'pphoto': pphoto,
    };
  }
}

I would like to listen this userModel after fetching data. But whenever I use Obx or GetX widget they returns an error.
Here is GetX widget and error;
GetX<UserController>(
          initState: (_) async {
            Get.find<UserController>().user = await FirebaseDatabase()
                .getUserData(homeController.userVeri!.uid);
          },
          builder: (_) {
            if (_.user.uid != null) {
              return Text(
                _.user.name.toString(),
                style: const TextStyle(
                    color: Colors.white,
                    fontSize: 30,
                    fontWeight: FontWeight.w500),
              );
            } else {
              return const Text("...");
            }
          },
        ),

Error is:

Null check operator used on nulls value

A: It seems to me, that the only possible cause for the error is that you are getting the userVeri!.uid, with a null check(!). Inside the initState builder of your GetX widget.  I would suggest first checking whether the userVeri.uid is not null before requesting their data. What I mean is more like this.
GetX<UserController>(
          initState: (_) async {

           if(homeController.userVeri != null){

            Get.find<UserController>().user = await FirebaseDatabase()
                .getUserData(homeController.userVeri!.uid);
           }
          },
          builder: (_) {
            if (_.user.uid != null && homeController.userVeri != null) {
              return Text(
                _.user.name.toString(),
                style: const TextStyle(
                    color: Colors.white,
                    fontSize: 30,
                    fontWeight: FontWeight.w500),
              );
            } else {
              return const Text("...");
            }
          },
        ),

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


The Peace Puzzle was a great exercise as I examined my life to question what peace meant to me. I discovered my version of peace was an action. Peace to me is working in the garden, sowing a seed with patience and a pledge to give it the best possible start. The image I created for the Peace Puzzle is a representation of sowing a seed with an intention that can connect to many meanings. Using ancestral geometric imagery, I illustrated the strength one mighty seed possesses. The seed with nourishment can reproduce for many generations and this what I strove to convey in this block. Lastly, as an unknown author once said, "Gardening is cheaper than therapy, and you get tomatoes!" So there is that.


At our Milton Keynes Office in Stony Stratford, The Letting People manage and arrange tenancies in properties across a large area covering the Borough of Milton Keynes. So if you have a property to let, or are looking for a new home in the city centre, a new development, a coaching town, or a rural spot, then please contact the Milton Keynes office today on 01908 713000.
Our office in Stony Stratford is easily accessible, being located in the town centre at Telegraph House, 54 High Street, Stony Stratford, Milton Keynes MK11 1AQ and with ALL DAY FREE CAR PARKING in the car park behind us or for up to 2 hours.


text:
The Brexit Chaos Explained. Britain Does Exactly What it Should Do.
by Chris Smit | Sep 18, 2019 | Business
1 The Brexit Chaos; Key Takeaways [4-min read]
2 Cultural Differences Between the UK and Other European Countries
3 Brexit Business Impact
4 Brexit Chaos Day +1 (B-Day +1)
5 The Brexit Chaos is Only a UK Affair
7 Get a Taste of How Chris Presents, Watch his TEDx Talk
8 Book Chris Smit as a Speaker
The Brexit Chaos; Key Takeaways [4-min read]
Some of the key takeaways from this article are:
The UK is doing exactly what it should do from a cultural perspective; Brexit chaos is normal.
The impact of Brexit is real in terms of the negative business impact.
Brexit chaos on B-Day +1 will be enormous.
In the end, it will all be "alright".
Cultural Differences Between the UK and Other European Countries
In order to put the cultural difference in a meaningful perspective, it makes sense to look at how Britain scores on the first four primary dimensions of culture:
Hierarchy Loyalty Goal Orientation Predictability
France 65 75 49 88
Germany 37 65 67 68
The Netherlands 34 81 17 50
Looking at this table you can see the following significant differences between these European countries:
France jumps out with its significantly higher score on this dimension compared to other countries.
With respect to the Brexit chaos, you can see that Prime Minister Boris Johnson didn't get away with simply sending parliament home for a long time so he could force a no-deal ending to the British ordeal and parliament could not oppose him. Several MP's have gone to court to stop Mr. Johnson; Brits will not tolerate being ruled with authority like this (while this could work in France; there the President is inpunable during his presidential term).
This self-correcting mechanism is typical for countries that score low on this dimension.
Even though there are differences across the board in this dimension, all four countries score individualistic. People go for their own agenda first, not for the agenda of the group.
Don't confuse this with the fact that many individuals can have the same "agenda", making it appear as if they are collectivistic. In the Brexit chaos leave-or-stay camps, there are many individuals who have similar "agendas".
Goal-Orientation
Theresa May as well as Boris Johnson promised they would "get the deal done". In other words: achieve the goal. Only Germany scores comparable to the UK. However, the Germans would need a plan to get the deal done. And as we all too well know, the Brits don't; which has led to the current Brexit chaos.
The fact that the Germans need a plan to get things done ("ordnung muss sein") comes from this last dimension, predictability.
The higher the score, the more rules & structure are needed (France has so many rules that, from the outside, it looks chaotic again; read about doing business with France here).
And this is what the rest of Europe doesn't understand: Why did the Brits not have a plan in place before they decided to leave?
Well, according to the British cultural profile (see table above) they don't need one (score on predictability 36). As the Vice-President of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, said "it's like Lance Corporal Jones: 'Don't panic' and then running around like idiots".
It's obvious where he's coming from. Even the Dutch (and France & Germany) would have made some sort of plan before exiting the EU.
So, from a cultural perspective, the Brits are acting perfectly normal. Nothing strange going on. Or to put it in different words, right after the leave group won this Brexit chaos was predictable.
Brexit Business Impact
Even though the Brits are doing (culturally) exactly what they should do, the damage to their business is definitely real. Here's a quote from The Independent website:
Declining manufacturing growth; £44bn-worth of transactions in jeaopardy every day and retailers chiming in to say prices of some foods could rise by 45 per cent, to say it's looking dicey out there is putting it mildly.
Many UK companies leaving the UK, go to the Netherlands. The business climate together with the business-friendly tax system seems to be very attractive for them. This also coincides with the fact that the Dutch score right in the middle of the Predictability dimension.
Below is a list of companies leaving, cutting jobs, moving assets out of the UK, or will otherwise be negatively impacted by a no-deal Brexit:
British Steel
This list is enormous and only lists the bigger companies. No doubt there will be many companies who would like to invest in the UK, but don't do so at this moment because of the uncertain situation.
Brexit Chaos Day +1 (B-Day +1)
So it's there, Brexit without a deal. The no-deal scenario became a reality. What will B-Day +1 look like? Here are some ideas of hopefully unlikely scenarios:
Chaos in the air (because overfly rights haven't been established nor landing rights) and at the airports.
Already there is talk about certain medicines not being available because people are hording their necessary medication. When there's no-deal, this will only get worse. It will also be unclear which medicines will be allowed to be prescribed and/or sold in the UK.
Even the availability of certain, or even a lot of food becomes uncertain. This because there are no import and export agreements nor licences (same as for medicines).
Just like the rest of Europe, the UK is importing it's fuel and gas from other countries. What kind of deals will they have?
The Brexit Chaos is Only a UK Affair
Of course that is not 100% true. Having said that, it seems to be the only thing on the mind of the Britons at this moment. While the rest of Europe has other things to worry about and to deal with, This Brexit chaos is bad for the UK and it's international reputation.
It's costing jobs, money, and more. The interesting thing is, however, that the Brits scold at their previous and current government, but do not seem to be worried too much about the situation. And scolding your goverment and not being worried about the future (because of the low score on Predictibility) are two very different things.
How to summarize the current chaos? Well, let's try:
From a cultural standpoint the Brits are doing nothing strange, funny, or weird; they are perfectly following their cultural profile.
Brexit is real. And so are the negative business and financial repercussions for the UK and to a lesser extent to the rest of Europe and the World.
The scenarios of a no-deal Brexit are horrendous.
Brexit is predominantly a UK affair and to a much lesser extent a European affair.
Eventually, in the end, it will be alright. And when it's not alright, it's not the end yet.
Read here an article on Brexit and business in the UK.
Chris Smit
Chris is passionate about Cultural Differences. He has been helping organizations save time and money when they work Internationally for the last 20+ years. While doing this he had the fortunate opportunity to hold lectures, workshops, and consulting projects on this subject World Wide. It has made him understand his own culture much better and appreciate the differences around the world.
His education is in Organisational Psychology and he has lived in the USA, the Netherlands, and currently lives in Belgium.
Latest posts by Chris Smit (see all)
168 Heather Hansen and the link between language and culture - 23 January 2023
167 Allen Morrison on China - 19 December 2022
166 Douglas Herbert. France24 international commentator - 17 October 2022
Make sure to read at least one more article:
Impact of Brexit on UK Business Twitter 2 LinkedIn 3 Facebook reddit StumbleUpon buffer Gmail Author Recent Posts Chris SmitChris is passionate about Cultural Differences. He...
Doing Business in India Explained and How to do Business in India Twitter LinkedIn Facebook reddit StumbleUpon buffer Gmail Author Recent Posts Chris SmitChris is passionate about Cultural Differences. He has been...
How to use the Cultural Reference Sheet Twitter LinkedIn Facebook reddit StumbleUpon buffer Gmail I have recently added a resource page to Culture Matters (click here to...
Is England Part of Europe and Is Britain Part of Europe? Twitter LinkedIn Facebook reddit StumbleUpon buffer Gmail Author Recent Posts Chris SmitChris is passionate about Cultural Differences. He has been...


text:
Q: RMarkdown - Change Inline Code Color I am using inline code in RMarkdown and I would like all the text that is a result of inline code to be a different color in the document. In this example, I would like heat.colors to be red all over the document. Is there a way to do this?

A: You can do something like:
---
title: ''
output: html_document
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
```

```{css echo=FALSE}
.custom-inline {
  color: red;
  font-weight: 700
}
```
## R Markdown

This is an R Markdown document. Markdown is a simple formatting syntax for authoring HTML, PDF, and MS Word documents. For more details on using R Markdown see <http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com>.

This is inline code: `r sprintf("<span class='custom-inline'>%s</span>", colnames(mtcars)[1])`.

When you click the **Knit** button a document will be generated that includes both content as well as the output of any embedded R code chunks within the document. You can embed an R code chunk like this:

```{r cars}
summary(cars)
```

## Including Plots

You can also embed plots, for example:

### This is more inline code `r sprintf("<span class='custom-inline'>%s</span>", colnames(mtcars)[2])`.

Note that the `echo = FALSE` parameter was added to the code chunk to prevent printing of the R code that generated the plot.

to get:

The default templates do not wrap inline chunks in a classed <span> tag so you have to do it manually. You can make a function to do it, too.

A: Or you can use text_spec in kableExtra. It literarily does the same thing but just a tiny bit more literal. See more here
---
title: ''
output: html_document
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
library(kableExtra)
```

## R Markdown

This is an R Markdown document. Markdown is a simple formatting syntax for authoring HTML, PDF, and MS Word documents. For more details on using R Markdown see <http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com>.

This is inline code: `r text_spec(colnames(mtcars)[1], color = "red")`.

When you click the **Knit** button a document will be generated that includes both content as well as the output of any embedded R code chunks within the document. You can embed an R code chunk like this:

```{r cars}
summary(cars)
```

## Including Plots

You can also embed plots, for example:

### This is more inline code `r text_spec(colnames(mtcars)[2], color = "red")`.

Note that the `echo = FALSE` parameter was added to the code chunk to prevent printing of the R code that generated the plot.


text:
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon
Blade & Soul prequel in the works
By: Matthew Bennett | July 11, 2016
Posted To
Blade & Soul gets a new class
A brand new class is now available in Blade & Soul.
By: Matthew Bennett
Blade & Soul roadmap offers a look at the rest of 2016
Take a look at the new content that Blade & Soul players will be getting throughout the rest of 2016.
Devolver Digital announces online combat RPG Absolver for PC and consoles
Absolver, a new online combat RPG from Devolver Digital, is coming to PC and consoles in 2017.
Blade & Soul's Vengeance Breaks update adds new dungeons and pets
NCSoft has announced that Blade & Soul's next major update will arrive next month, bringing with it new dungeons and pets. The update, ...
Changes being made to Blade & Soul's weapon paths and Gem Hammers
NCSoft has announced that it will be making changes to Blade & Soul's weapon path progression, Gem Hammers, and Gem Sockets in the near ...
Blade & Soul Shattered Empire update adds new dungeons, a new PvP mode, more
NCSoft has pushed live the latest update for Blade & Soul that adds new dungeons, a new 6v6 PvP mode, and more.
NCSoft teases upcoming Blade & Soul content
NCSoft has offered a brief look at some of the new content that will be coming to Blade & Soul in North America and Europe over the next few ...
Blade & Soul officially launches in North America and Europe
NCSoft has officially launched its popular martial arts-focused MMORPG Blade & Soul in North America and Europe. "The launch of Blade ...
Martial arts MMO Blade & Soul heading to North America and Europe this winter
NCsoft has announced that martial arts massively multiplayer online game Blade & Soul is coming to North America and Europe later this year.


If you're pregnant, you've probably already realized that your body is capable of playing all kinds of mischievous tricks on you. Perhaps you've been battling morning sickness, or your skin has broken out and resembles a photo of yourself from eighth grade, or maybe it has you waking up three or four or even five times during the night to use the bathroom. There are all kinds of surprises in store for pregnant women. One not to be overlooked is the dreaded hot flash.
We've all heard about hot flashes – those uncomfortable episodes that leave middle-aged women flushed and sweating as they navigate menopause. Well, here's a little tidbit: they can happen during pregnancy, too. The reason they accompany so many of us during our pregnancies is due to fluctuating hormonal levels. Just like menopause, pregnancy wreaks havoc with our hormones. As our bodies try to balance and regulate these changing levels, we experience the side-effects of that regulation.
Hot flashes are a normal by-product of pregnancy.
1 in 3 women will experience hot flashes at some point during their pregnancy.
There is a 5X increase in hot flashes for pregnant women as opposed to non-pregnant women.
Changing hormone levels increase blood flow that results in "flushing" or a feeling of a flash of heat that comes over us.
Hot flashes can also result in red, splotchy skin usually in the neck, chest and shoulder areas.
Hot flashes often last anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes.
While some women report hot flashes in the first trimester, they are most common in the second and third trimesters.
90% of women report a continuance of hot flashes after delivery, especially in breastfeeding mothers, as their bodies continue to regulate fluctuating hormonal levels.
While hot flashes are basically unavoidable, there are a few things you can do to ease their discomfort.
Dress in thin layers that can be removed as needed.
Wear natural fibers such as cotton, linen, and wool. Synthetics retain heat and can even make you itchy.
Keep your bedroom temperature cool at night while you're sleeping.
Keep a spray bottle of water (perhaps with a squirt of lemon) in your refrigerator and mist your face with the chilled water when you feel a flash coming on.
Employ deep breathing exercises to help control your blood pressure and regulate your body temperature.
Decrease your carbohydrate intake – carbs increase your body temperature.
Eat clean, healthy food frequently to maintain blood sugar levels.
While hot flashes are almost always harmless and don't require immediate medical attention, it's still a good idea to report them to your doctor to rule out any possible underlying conditions. In addition, if you think the extra heat you're feeling may be a fever and not a hot flash, check in with your doctor as soon as possible. In the likely event that what you're experiencing is just your regular, run-of-the-mill hot flash, then try some of the suggestions listed above to make yourself as comfortable as possible and look on the bright side – they're quick, relatively painless, and they, too, will pass.


Great videos need great sound.
Sound is a critical element to any video and so we've developed a great solution to capture speech audio. Unfortunately with so many video recording solutions the audio is only so-so, but our microphone records great audio in almost any environment.
Voices can be heard loud and clear, event at crowded receptions, parties, conferences and more where there is a lot going on in the background.
We use a professional handheld microphone with a proprietary digital connection. Nothing beats a handheld microphone for voice quality in a noisy environment. A digital connection eliminates common audio interference that can occur from cell phones and electricity. We also offer an optional 'clip on' microphone.
It sounds obvious, but if you place SpeechBooth (and it's microphone) in a place where guests can't hear themselves then the audio recording may suffer. Our microphone does a great job handling excess noise, but our recommendation is to choose the location wisely and place SpeechBooth away from obviously loud noises. Just in case, we have a limited ability to 'clean up' audio in editing.


We will be hosting a Cosplay Contest at the 2019 Saluki Con. Information about the contest will be coming soon.
Saluki Con is a family friendly event. We want to emphasize that Cosplay is not consent, so please be respectful to persons in costume and DO NOT TOUCH!
Please read through our costume and weapons regulations below.
Saluki Con is a family friendly event. Please use common sense, be considerate of other attendees and be aware of your surroundings.
Cover your body parts. "No costume" is not a costume. "Paint" and/or "pasties" are not a costume, either. No intentional or unintentional "wardrobe malfunctions" allowed. Please make sure your costume is sturdily constructed; this includes proper undergarments. If your costume is deemed to be too revealing or offensive, you will be asked to cover up or change.
Roller blades, roller skates, and skateboards will not be allowed in the Student Center. Please, no signs offering services or making requests to be hugged or touched. We want everyone to feel comfortable.
Service Animals are allowed, assuming they are wearing the proper identification and you pick up after them. Pets are NOT allowed inside the Student Center.
No functional weapons are allowed at the Student Center.
All costume weapons must be inspected at the entrance.
Projectile costume weapons must be rendered inoperable. Triggers must be peace-tied with zip ties or ribbons. No real firearms (even nonfunctional ones) will be allowed.
If you do not want to have your costume weapons inspected, or if you are not willing to comply with these policies, please do not bring your costume weapons to the Saluki Con.
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation to make the Saluki Con a safe and fun environment for everyone.


On this page are the large array of applications that CAS® Slingers are used in. If you use your CAS® Slinger in an Application not shown, or if you want to send us some pictures of your CAS® Slinger at work Slinging in one of the Applications listed below, please click here, and easily submit any photos or videos that you have showing your CAS® Slinger Slinging!
There is not an application on the planet that a CAS® Slinger could not positively affect!
CAS® Slingers=Flexibility, Efficiency, Savings & Revenue!
We are frequently asked if CAS® Slingers can run Concrete and Asphalt.
CAS® Slingers have revolutionized the way that contractors bid and perform.
CAS® has the only towable industrial reloaders in the industry!
Getting material on the backside of a retaining wall can be quite challenging!
When it comes to new inventive ways to use a CAS® Slinger, we are all in!


text:
Ukraine-IMF talks take longer due to COVID
KYIV, Dec 24 – A International Monetary Fund team needs more time than usually to check the pace of reforms in Ukraine as all meetings are currently held online due to COVID pandemic, an IMF official said.
Vladyslav Rashkovan, IMF alternate executive director, said the team will extend its meetings until after the end of New Year holidays in Ukraine and will take longer than two weeks. The meeting take place online due to travel restrictions amid rising number of COVID cases worldwide.
"Taking into account the upcoming holidays, the mission began on Monday, December 21, worked three days until December 23 and will continue after the end of the New Year holidays," Rashkovan said in a Facebook post.
"On average, the mission lasts full 10-12 working days [a little more than two calendar weeks] However, the remote work format of the mission, as well as the time difference of seven hours between Washington and Kyiv, leave only four-five hours of work for each day instead of eight-ten working hours in Kyiv during an ordinary mission. So, I do not exclude that this mission maybe a little longer," Rashkovan said.
The IMF delayed $1.4 billion in loans since July amid concerns that Ukraine has been delaying reforms and failing to combat corruption.
Ukraine is desperate to renew cooperation with the IMF as the government has been experiencing a financial crunch and resorted to massive borrowing in December to bridge financing gap. The government borrowed more than $3 billion in December alone, in mostly 6-month debt that the government hopes to repay when the IMF resumes lending.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Ukraine may be able to get IMF lending resumed in February or even March in the best case.
The team held meetings with government officials for three days last week, Rashkovan said, adding that the meetings went well.
"The progress of the negotiations is confidential information, so I never publicly comment on it and do not answer how the mission is going. I can only say that all scheduled meetings, both at the highest level and at the expert level, were held in three days and went well," Rashkovan said.
"I hope that soon [in a couple of months] we will be able to organize a conversation between the head of the IMF and the country's leadership in order to express words of mutual gratitude and respect after receiving the next tranche," Rashkovan wrote.
The IMF disbursed $2.1 billion in June after approving $5 billion loan deal to help Ukraine fight coronavirus pandemic. (tl/ez)


text:
Politywonk
Using social, religious, and philosophical approaches to help a struggling world.
How to Get the Real News
June 26, 2018 by Elz Curtiss
Limits to Civility
Two posts in one day! But in these times it is necessary to clarify the boundary line of one's tolerance for people with inhumane views. This lesson comes from my experience 1994-1996, as the UU parish minister in the midst of Dorchester, MA's worst crime wave in ages. It was one of the worst in the nation, and it involved young people killing each other in gang wars.
The Boston Police responded with a community policing program which still gets mentioned as a high spot in policing history. Its foundation, I firmly believe, was the cops were required to live in the city's narrow boundaries. No driving in from quiet suburbs for them. Shootings were on their streets, fights were on the playgrounds their children had to use also. Yes, that was a help.
Also, they. were good people. Mostly, anyway, often enough to make a difference in many cases. They also valued observations and analysis made by human beings, not computers.
Here's what they came up with.
Gangs were found to consist of two layers. At the heart, and in the vanguard, stood people of genuine ill will. These leaders, selling drugs, wielding guns, hanging shoes, wearing bandanas, had no interest in community improvement alternatives or calls for civility. For them, arrest and jail was the answer. Cops drove around with warrants for these people at easy access.
The other layer consisted of folks who felt they had no alternatives for advancement in society, other than up the gang ladder. For these folks, the police urged practical educational support, jobs and job support, sports teams (remember midnight basketball?), and family support through community centers and adequate food and housing for those these young people were trying to support.
The current civility debate seems focused on the former group, fomenters not just of hate, but of cruelty and incapacity for those of whom they wish to make unwitting accomplices. I support this aspect of incivility. It is the other layer my previous post reaches out to.
Posted in Anti-Racism, Bearing Witness, Civil Religion, Doing Denominational History, fundamentalisms, Progressivism, Religion, Religious Diversity, Social Contract, Spiritual Community, Unitarian Universalism, Vermont	| Tagged anti-racism, civil religion, culture wars, cyberbullying, Fall of the Roman Empire, First Amendment, freedom of speech, Interfaith community, justice, ministry, Multiculturalism, politics, Principles, Racism, religious freedom, Social Contract, social justice, Spiritual Discipline, Unitarian Universalism, Unitarian Universalist Association, UU Christian, UU Culture, Vermont | Leave a comment
March 10, 2015 by Elz Curtiss
Thank You, Right Wing Conspiracy
Good morning, lovers of the planet and democracy (yes, we've been watching Thom Hartmann). To listen to Democrat officialdom and their media mouthpieces, you would think our nation faces the biggest crisis since the Civil War whose end we will commemorate next month.
Yeah, you would think that.
But let's think, instead, like Abraham Lincoln. Let's think, instead, like Dr. Martin Luther King. Because what the Right Wing Conspiracy — and yes, there clearly IS such a thing — has given us planet huggers all the tools we need to shut down THEIR favorite project, the Trans-Pacific Pipeline (TPP). Here we have a secretly negotiated international pact to silence local initiatives against despoliation of basic labor and ecological rights. Here we have a legally enforceable regime which makes it illegal for local government to function in support of its human citizens whenever any corporate "person"' — anywhere in the world — claims that local measure violates the corporation fundamental right to maximize profit.
Remember John Adams, and the long-ago "Alien and Sedition Act"? It's back, and it's bigger than ever.
But the trade-deal conveyor belt that is today's federal government has learned it faces rising opposition to such deals. Hence the new device called "Fast Track," which means the Congress only gets to vote a total bill up or down. It cannot revise, advise, or devise any alterations. Technically, this is the same requirement for ratifying a treaty, but because a treaty requires a 2/3 majority for approval, negotiators work with a constant calculation of how to reach such a high number. Fast track happens before you know it, and calls only for simple majorities.
Both parties have sought fast track for some of their deals and opposed fast track for deals negotiated by their opponents. Meanwhile, the international left-right fringe objects to the entire regime of "trust me-hate them" secrecy and obfuscation. Unfortunately for us localists, we cannot see past the tear gas of social issues that the money lobby employs to keep us suspicious of each other instead of against them.
I recently had occasion to look at some newspapers from 1859 and 1860, prior to the election of Abraham Lincoln. Both North and South were already mobilizing troops and issuing statements about top priorities. Lincoln's top priority was different: he intended to conduct his duties in such a way that the Confederacy would fire the first shot. This would allow him rally the North, but it would also prevent the South from claiming they had been invaded. When Sherman marched through Georgia, when Joshua Chamberlain fought through Virginia, the local population was, as the saying goes, "hoisted by their own petard."
It is not my intention that we abandon the injustices perpetrated as racial, gender, and generational bullying Lincoln did not intend to ignore the provocations from the South. But here is a chance to do what the Republicans say they want to do — enforce sound principles of governance, as they have articulated these principles themselves Democratic officialdom protests that these are tools they themselves need when they hold power. But the Dems who espouse these tools only want for themselves a lessened — moderated — version of the same privilege enjoyed by the greedsters. James Carville is wrong and Elizabeth Warren — and the Tea Party –Bill's $25,000 cigars do tie directly to Hillary's secret emails. The average American knows why Hillary is giving expensive speeches instead of eating rubber chicken and shaking hands with folks who made a real financial sacrifice to attend her event — not the price of a book, but wages foregone, babysitter paid extra for a full day.
Not for a moment do I take back my support for just jurisprudence and an end to bullying by frightened former elites. But in a tough fight, you take allies as they present themselves. The last month it has been the GOP right wing sharpening blades that we planet huggers and justice-seekers can now use to kill the TPP.
Posted in Environment, Foreign Policy, Occupy Wall Street, Progressivism, Social Contract, Tea party, Uncategorized, Unitarian Universalism	| Tagged anti-racism, civil religion, Economic justice, Interfaith community, justice, politics, Social Contract, social justice, Tea Party, TPP, Trans-Pacific Pipeline, Unitarian Universalism, UU Culture, Vermont | Leave a comment
August 8, 2014 by Elz Curtiss
Ghosts of Old War Mistakes
We watch a lot of international news in our house, and every day gets more and more alarming. So many horrible things are happening, you don't need me to list them for you. And why do we keep cycling through the same types of outrage? My response is that it's because the US public doesn't understand the patterns of engagement our country keeps choosing between.
I. Copperheads
The first pattern came up during the US Civil War, and it's the part of the war that has gotten the least attention, even on C-Span, where usually nothing is too obscure for a book tour. Well, meet the Copperheads. Lots of folks know that General George McClellan ran for President in 1864 as a peace candidate, but don't understand the iceberg of which he was the tip. Copperheads were Democrats in the North, a tiny minority in the party that dominated the South and mostly seceded when Lincoln won in 1860. Some of them had business interests in the South — meaning supplying or buying from the slavocracy — but many others were the first of the laboring classes displaced by rural changes but not secure in urban factory jobs. Or they were immigrants — many Irish — fearing job competition from freed slaves. While many were supporters of the racist economic regime, many others were just willing to tolerate slavery as their own best economic or personal calculation. The Copperhead movement had nothing to do with pacifism.
Northerners seem to believe that Copperheadism ended at Appomattox, but for Southerners they were part of the Scourge of Reconstruction. Decimated landscapes always attract rapacious investors ready to buy up your debts for less than they're worth but more than you've got. That form of Copperheadism deserves more attention, but it's not what matters in foreign policy, my topic for today. Northern Copperheadism — "peace at any price because war has no benefit to me" — has not only never died out, it has spread like a vicious weed. When negotiations begin, the focus is on appeasement — give the aggressor whatever will get them to stop — but the prime goal stems back to Whiggism, the policy of compromising to prevent the outbreak of hostilities. The two primary goals are to "maintain business as usual" and to prevent a breakdown of known political structures. It's worth noting that this was the party of classical New England Unitarianism.
Most of my friends and family are a contemporary cleaned-up version of Copperhead: by idealizing human nature as "inherently good" they persuade themselves that restoring equality to human transactions — economic, cultural, political — will cause both war and poverty to simply wither away. Everyone will discover the good in everyone else and be satisfied with that knowledge as life's highest and finest reward.
Idealists are people who have not had the experience of interviewing survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime, as I did in 1981-82. A week ago, I would have told you what is happening throughout the Middle East and North Africa resembles the kind of low-grade outrage that characterizes governance in Pakistan. This week, though, it looks like violence has passed a horrible tipping point. Sustained campaigns of bombing and other military violence foster society-wide PTSD, and the worst of those victims can be exploited by individuals who are either themselves completely deranged by abuse, or carrying around an evil they were born with. It might help to read "The Plague" again, by Albert Camus, but you'd do better to look at mass murderers who washed out of the military, who got fired from Postal Service jobs, who underwent years of ridicule and humiliation. These are folks who want revenge, but whose grievance has no bottom and no top.
II. Great War Syndrome
Commentator David Brooks gets a lot of things wrong, but sometimes he's very right. Tonight on The PBS News Hour, he said that our mistake in Syria was forgetting that "It's easier to do the little things early than to do the big things later." The US experience in World War I led to a delusion that we are the exception to this inconvenient truism. Europeans have spent this past week commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of hostilities of which we care nothing, because we entered so much later. And when we went in, the primary reason appears to have been that attacks on shipping were starting to hurt our economic elite. And what were they shipping? Why, munitions, to be sold at shameful profit, and apparently in some cases to both sides. So this was really a variation on Copperheadism — not that one would stay out of war to maintain business and politics as usual, but that one would enter it for the same reason. Sort of like the Confederates, and their apologists remain proud of it.
For Europe, 1914-1918 was "The Great War" because of its casualties and social upheavals, but we called it that because it had elements of excitement and adventure. Remember "The World War One Flying Ace"? Remember "How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm [After They've Seen Paree]?" Josephine Baker, and the African American discovery that the French had other prejudices, and loved American jazz? Let me be the first to say that for far too many Americans, 1918 was also a year of unprecedented death, much of which occurred because global war made our troops into victims and carriers of the lethal Spanish Influenza.
But for those U.S. troops who marched into Paris, who came home relatively unscathed, The Great War message was that our military could anticipate a fairly safe and profitable future assisting good guys who were trying hard but didn't have our advantages. This is what led directly to Iraq in March 2003. "They'll welcome us with open arms." "We'll be done in no time, once we help them establish the democracy they know in their hearts is what they want." That might have been true in 1918 and 1945, but it has nothing to do with the way things are in the Middle East and Northern Africa.
So there we went, deluding ourselves into believing that people everywhere just want to do what we do here (which, might I point out, we are less and less sure we want to continue doing). Some folks say we have to give them guns and pocket-sized constitutions, other folks encourage more economic and educational empowerment. But today's wars aren't happening in Paree, they're not even in Weimar Berlin. This week tells me we might be looking at Kampuchea, in the hellish years before the Vietnamese finally rejected international norms and invaded their neighbor. That invasion, with its puppet government, released the Kampuchean people from agonizing suffering, but Vietnam's primary goal was to stabilize and rationalize a neighboring country whose psychological injuries were starting to threaten the region. For this the Vietnamese suffered tons of excoriating condemnation in, of all places, the United Nations, for having invaded a country whose government had not invited them.
So if I'm right, and the Boka Haram/Islamic State of Iraq type of army really does represent a new form of Khmer Rouge frenzy for annihilation, we on the left need to look at the shadowy ghost of Copperheadism. We do the right thing by confronting conservatives with their own sad Great War Syndrome. Unfortunately, for too much of the planet, these two models have meshed into a foreign policy that lays bare the worst of both of them.
Posted in Anti-Racism, Bearing Witness, Foreign Policy, Humanism, Ministry of History, Spiritual Community, Uncategorized, Unitarian Universalism	| Tagged anti-racism, Foreign Policy, social justice, Unitarian Universalism | Leave a comment
July 22, 2014 by Elz Curtiss
Grappling with an Old Demon
Along with so many others, I watch in horror and disgust as Israeli rockets fall into residential areas their own policies have packed too full of all ages of people and too few resources for said residents. Gazans complain — rightfully — about all the noncombatants being killed, while Israelis object that the homes and lives of combatants and noncombatants are too closely tangled to allow for purely military targeting.
That is not what I'm grappling with. What troubles my conscience is the extent to which the current assaults justify the increase in anti-Jewish rhetoric, violence, and sentiment exhibited all over the world. Talk about tangled targets! Steven Schaama's recent film series on the history of the Jews documented the undeniable fact that Jews all over the world have been targeted for violence and ghettoization. This has happened again and again. When Jews moved to Palestine in recent centuries, they were bowing to the sad reality that this cycle would continue so long as they lived among non-Jews. Indeed, the Holocaust arose in part as a backlash against one of the most successful periods of intermingling and intermarriage, especially and including in Germany. So two steps forward led to miles of horrific and unmendable setbacks.
Nevertheless, some of the rhetoric coming from Israel implies that the violence done to them has become the violence they do to others. Too many statements place Jewish life above all other life — especially Palestinian. Too many statements attempt to erase centuries of Palestinian life in places that Jews claim as if their presence there had not been broken, interrupted, supplanted, abandoned. When Jews place themselves above all others, it is only natural for others to lob shots intended to level things out. When Jews exact individual justice for Jewish miscreants, but collective retribution for crimes against Jews, they pretty much ought to expect the outcry they now receive.
As much as I object to Zionism, it seems not only inevitable but necessary. However, it cannot be allowed to replace the efforts we must all make to combat the cultural infrastructure of anti-Judaism which makes Zionism so desperately inevitable. We Unitarian Universalists talk often about covenants, as if it were something invented by our Puritan forebears, or — even worse — that we ourselves came up with to maintain some recent and beloved community. No, covenant traces back to God's promises to the Israelites. The Jews. Jews, through their cycle of scriptural documents — Torah, Histories, Wisdom, Prophets — have explored more fully and more powerfully than anyone else how hard it is to live in covenant, and yet, how catastrophic to fail.
The Hebrew Bible famously rings with all kinds of explorations of thought — including many challenges to decisions God announces or unfolds.When certain Christians (and not others) appropriated "covenant" for their own particularist purposes, they twisted what had been an ethical formulation into a doctrine of thought control. Unitarian Universalism, with its emphasis on behaviors rather than ideas, along with our informal motto, "To question is the answer," hark back to, carry forward, the Jewish model of covenant.
It would be wrong to practice the Jewish model of covenant in every relationship except the one I have with those who gave it to me. So I don't know how to deal with the current conundrum in the Middle East, except through personal accountability. I will name particular deeds and practices that horrify me, and seek to eradicate them wherever they occur. Sometimes that will be in the Middle East. Just as often, as anyone can attest who watches the news for a solid hour, the outrage will happen elsewhere, and have nothing to do with Jews.
Posted in Anti-Racism, Foreign Policy, Social Contract, Spiritual Community, Uncategorized	| Tagged anti-racism, civil religion, Foreign Policy, Interfaith community, Middle East, social justice, Unitarian Universalism | 2 Comments
June 5, 2014 by Elz Curtiss
Poverty: A Quick call for Venn Diagrams
There's no question that Ta'Nahisi Coates's work at The Atlantic Magazine, on racism and economic injustice, combines solid research and scholarship in multiple academic fields with personal and community experiences and diversities. The resultant conversation, in multiple fora, leads me to wonder if we UUs need to get ourselves a social media small group ministry just to keep up with this unfolding opportunity.
But after a brief attempt at providing UU parish ministry in one of the neighborhoods where longterm poverty shelters in Boston, I can tell you that each family is a tiny Venn diagram of opportunities and challenges, in each case, both short and long-term. While history plays a role, only the most faithful commitment to Process Theology — a belief in constantly shifting, interacting, mutually-transformative micro-elements — will truly unpack every person's best potential or safest landings. At the same time, as evidenced by the statement "A sneeze in Brooklyn impacts a butterfly in Beijing," these micro-elements do have some combinations that endure long enough to gain shape, substance, and location, before disappearing. TNC's genius is capturing both the dynamism and the gravitational pulls which keep reformulating these shapes, substances, and locations.
What endures in these neighborhoods, usually for only one or two generations, is a particular Venn Diagram. Separate elements I observed are:
Above all, mental and physical disabilities, many of them nothing more than learning or developmental disabilities for which we are not equipping families to break out of learned responses from earlier, undiagnosed generations. What I saw in white families — and am experiencing now, as caregiver for a partner with a vicious hereditary disease — is that many disability genes will completely trump so-called "white privilege." Where "white privilege" plays out is when it allows other family members, either in previous or contemporary generations, to help the impacted nuclear group. In non-Caucasian families, lack of these disabilities is the key to advancing over time. Just listen to the protests against "affirmative advancement" as the prioritizing of the allegedly less capable over the allegedly more capable.
Racism against families whose previous generations had fewer opportunities than traumatic oppressions, deprivations, and displacements. A single traumatic event in a healthy family often fails to change a healthy family system, which is why immigrants, refugees, even most African-American families exhibit great capacity to recover and repair themselves. It's also why power-hungry exploiters of racism keep coming back again and again: to disrupt the family system, not just one person. Again, as TNC points out, the assets of previous generations and contemporary relatives make all the difference in withstanding these assaults.
Government commitment to marginal business enterprises, including housing, which serve the radically local lifestyle of people who can't afford cars, can't drive, or only feel comfortable dealing with merchants they know and trust.
Affordable, reliable, preventive, proactive medical and lifestyle supports for families whose disabilities long ago removed the ability to partake of any market system for wellness.
Financial support for family caregivers, whether raising children or assisting the elderly and disabled.
Safe, adequate, community-based policing of the pernicious, pervasive personal crimes — theft, harassment, vandalism — in which local news has no interest, either personal or financial.
There are probably others, but these are the ones that come to my mind in a hurry.
What surprised me was the value of Unitarian Universalism in such an environment. What worked for the neighborhood included a long list of things that many Social Justice UUs disdain:
Critical thinking about discrete individuals, events, situations,
Willingness to observe behaviors rather than run toward the noisiest voices.
insistence that it's best to wait for a full accounting of facts, including from institutional players like banks and cops
A strong message of faith in a loving God or Universe or Whatever, tempered by the humanist right to envision that Whatever in a personal way
Openness to the moment when someone's discovery that there can be an open-minded divinity completely overwhelms the social issue that brought them into the meeting, and a parish-based institutional way to welcome and support that person while helping them deal with more than one element of the Venn Diagram listed above.
I didn't have the strength to maintain a parish ministry in that environment. But what I learned in that setting made it possible for me to embrace a life partner with a major Venn Diagram characteristic.
We'll be getting married on the Solstice, later this month, supported and celebrated by a strong combination of family, friends, neighbors, and faith community. And we're still UUs. It can be done. We are doing it.
Posted in Uncategorized	| Tagged civil religion, reparations, social justice, Unitarian Universalism | 3 Comments
Emerson's Illumination on Luke 10:25-37
"In this refulgent summer" – well, actually, hot as hell, but those first words of his Divinity School Address (DSA) so fully enthrall, after all these years, and summon up that first love experience so many of us felt when we read the DSA for our first time. Yes, figuring a summer must always be refulgent if one is spending it with Emerson, I turned myself yet again to reading his better-known essay "Self-Reliance". It might well be the most beloved thing written by an American since The Declaration of Independence. Over and over, I see it cited by freedom fighters, artists, community activists from parts of the world I never would have expected. It's gotten so familiar that I believe it falls to us, the clergy group to which he belonged, to subject his text to the same types of analysis we apply to scriptures of other religions.
This is not the first time I have started "Self-Reliance," but the first sections always stop me before I get too far. A brief scan of other scholars confirms these negative impressions:
Too masculine, taking no regard of the wife's work to maintain the home while a man is out pursuing his so-called genius;
Too individualistic, dismissing the benefits of covenants embodied in organized religion and traditional family;
Too privileged, overlooking the gift of inherited wealth (from his first wife's premature death) as the foundation of his own opportunity to seek both higher calling and innovative covenants.
Let me start by admitting that I have read relatively little scholarship about the man; he shows up usually as a player in other folks about whom I am reading. And I've participated in countless conversations about him, mostly with other Unitarian Universalist clergy. (By "relatively little" I mean, according to academic standards; for an average person, it has been respectable and consistent.) My main guide into "Self-Reliance," by far, was the late C. Conrad Wright, Professor of American Religious History at the Harvard Divinity School. This is too bad for RWE, because Conrad hated the way Emerson derided pastoral covenants and parish ministry. Secondly, Conrad scorned RWE because at least one parishioner had claimed the man was not capable of meaningful pastoral care when it was needed.
What called me to this effort was the discovery of a moment when RWE, with no public fanfare, exerted himself to support a ministerial and social justice colleague and resolve the parish conflict which threatened that colleague's important station on the Underground Railroad. And, I defy any religion and any congregation to show me a cleric whose pastoral care satisfies every supplicant. Still, Conrad was right on the first point. "Self-Reliance" includes this quote: "I will have no covenants but proximities." What does that mean?
What jumped out at me in this summer's reading is its comment on his era's debate – still relevant today — on Luke 10:25-37, The Parable of the Good Samaritan. As in our own era, traditional institutions of care and order were overwhelmed by changes in both the quantity and quality of population, technology, and economic power. People of all faiths were uniting across congregational lines to form philanthropic societies. These forerunners of today's 501(c)3s attempted to provide services far beyond the reach of traditional Town Meeting arrangements. Some deliberately erased religious, ethnic, or racial divisions to assist folks simply on the basis of need. The Good Samaritan was the guiding passage of Christian scripture, then as now. I doubt I need to summarize it here, for even today, it motivates many folks who otherwise claim no Christian affinity at all.
So why was Reverend Emerson objecting to a culture of Good Samaritans?
"Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold."
Several years ago, I began feeling in this passage less of a rebuttal to The Good Samaritan and more of a contradiction to the assertion of C. Conrad Wright that Emerson had neither heart nor talent for pastoral care. In this paragraph I see a pastoral approach to social justice:
Emerson here rejects the use of categories of need, in favor of seeing everyone as individuals.
He derided the indirect goal of legislative redress, in favor of providing personal assistance.
Even more impersonal, to RWE, was donating to funds for ameliorative relief, rather than personally undertaking a relational empowerment of the object of one's concern.
Reverend Emerson excelled in Christian scholarship, so his rebuttal stood on solid scriptural ground. In Matthew 26:6-10, The Woman Who Anoints Jesus with Oil, the disciples deride a poor woman for selling a precious object to buy oil to place on Jesus. The disciples' criticism is that "She could have given that money to the poor." Jesus dismisses that concern, saying, "The poor you have always with you, but you will not always have me with you. She is preparing my body for burial."
Usually people cite this passage as a cynical excuse to avoid giving money to charitable causes. By no measure could Reverend Emerson be called callous, selfish, insensitive. He provided financial assistance to friends whose eccentric brilliance cast their families into constant poverty. He helped organize and fund radical measures for freeing African-Americans. In so doing, he used a standard he called "The Law of Consciousness." He did not seek covenants of heritage, but assembled kindred spirits into enough cultural presence to form a critical mass that attracted others. The Transcendentalist community at Concord, Massachusetts was the both the tangible evidence of his generosity and the enduring evidence of his method. Find your own genius and then seek others who share it. Indeed the Parable of the Good Samaritan begins with just that criterion: "A man was journeying along the road to Jericho." Emerson might be referring to that phrase – usually such a throwaway line – when he says charity begins not with the suffering of another person, but in choosing one's path in life. It is natural, in concern for that road, to address any crisis affecting a person who shares it with you. It takes courage – for which Emerson openly still prays – to accept the callous consequence of this criterion, which is to overlook the suffering of strangers within what other's consider one's own community.
"Know yourself," is considered the takeaway of "Self-Reliance", just as "Know God" is the catchphrase of "The Divinity School Address". In our pressured era, most of us are wondering how to set criteria for donating our too-few dollars, hours, tears. Emerson's "The Law of Consciousness" says, "Don't ask your television. Don't even get it from your congregational Social Justice network. Do what promotes the calling you follow, and if you know yourself truly, work with concentration, people of all descriptions will happily do it with you. You will naturally help each other, not as charity, but as part of working together toward some difficult dream.
Can personal interests really lay a path to diversity when we live today in such a socially segregated culture? It depends on how we define what we are doing, stepping back from social justice and pursuing what I here call Radical Proximity? The social justice workers of PICO – following on The Highlander Center – have found it useful in what they call the One-on-One technique. And in our house, yesterday, I tried it for myself. Instead of demonstrating in memory of Trayvon Martin, Lynne and I listened on C-Span to a panel of geeky African American social historians talking about the history of medical injustice for African Americans. Later we headed out to a meeting for caregivers like myself to obtain a union. In a room of about twenty, our family of three were the only non-Nepalis; the translator was for us, not for others. These are folks I see in our neighborhood every day, walking, chatting, catching the bus; I sometimes even shop in the local Nepali market. But it was only in sharing our stories, baring our needs, that we quit passing each other and joined on a road to Jericho. Reverend Emerson would be forgiven for gloating, in whatever Heaven he inhabits, when I conclude from this little experiment that focusing selfishly on my own interests guided me toward other covenants and reduced the tensions inherent in unfamiliar proximity.
Posted in Uncategorized	| Tagged Divinity School Address, Emerson, Self-Reliance, social justice | Leave a comment
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Grifton Medina, Bureau of Immigration (BI) Port Operations Division Chief, said that the two women, aged 32 and 38, were former migrant workers. On Thursday, the two women were about to board a flight to Hong Kong when they were intercepted at the departures area of Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 3, Philippine News Agency reported.
BI Commissioner Jaime Morente said the two admitted that they were bound for China to become surrogate mothers as they needed money to support their families. The Filipinas said their China visas were to be processed in Hong Kong.
"They immediately confessed during the interview that they were actually bound for China where their services as surrogate mothers were engaged for a fee of PHP300,000 (US$5,806)," Morente said.
BI-Travel Control and Enforcement Unit Chief Erwin Ortañez said the two Filipinas were recruited as surrogate mothers through a website that invites women who are willing to bear a child for others in exchange for a fee. A similar case occurred last year when 32 women were held in Cambodia for being surrogate mothers in an illegal surrogacy ring supplying services for Chinese clients.
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The two Filipinas were turned over to the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking for further investigation and assistance.


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